AFTER MORE than 30 years, the incident remains etched in his memory. En route by bus from his hometown of Mallet, La., to the Society of the Divine Word seminary in Techny, Ill., the young man was ready for a meal by the time the travelers stopped around midnight at a station along the way.
He doesn't remember what state it was, though it really doesn't matter. It could have happened anywhere. “We were all hungry, and we went in to get some food,” he recalled. “We were told we couldn't eat there, to get back on the bus.”
With no other restaurant at the station, the young man was forced to go hungry. He continued on to the seminary undeterred and was eventually ordained a priest. Today Auxiliary Bishop Curtis Guillory of Galveston-Houston is one of the few blacks in the American hierarchy. Racism may be less blatant today than it was that night in the 60s for Bishop Guillory, but it is still a day-to-day reality, as the recent Texaco controversy and the burning of black churches in the South have so vividly shown.
The Church, both in America and universally, has long condemned racism as evil and a sin, while at the same time acknowledging that it still exists within its walls. In its most recent attempt to heal the wounds, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops' (NCCB) Committee on African-American Catholics and the United States Catholic Conference's (USCC) Office of Research have released Keep Your Hand on the Plow: The African-American Presence in the Catholic Church, a 124-page book that Bishop Guillory said is meant to serve as an inspiration to those working in ministry to African-Americans; to sensitize people to the problem of racism in society and the Church; and to provide models of ministries that work.
In an introduction, Bishop Guillory called the book “a poignant reminder that African-American Catholics expect a future in this Church, even though much of their history bespeaks a time when the Church overlooked this mission, their efforts and their unique gifts.”
He calls the Church to examine seriously racism, urging Catholic universities and colleges to expand their research on African-American culture, and Catholic schools and parish adult education courses to enlarge their curricula with African-American studies.
In an interview with the Register, Bishop Guillory, chairman of the bishops' Committee on African-American Catholics, said cultural education begins in the family, but that it must also come from schools.
“I get a little disappointed when we only do the cultural thing during Black History Month or Cinco de Mayo,” he said. “It has to be ongoing. If you have understanding, then you can build trust. If you have trust, you can build community and have respect for people's dignity.”
Bishop Guillory pointed to a sense of hope, love of family and a spirit of joy as gifts that blacks bring to the Church and from which other ethnic groups can benefit. “The African-American community, because of racism and poverty, has suffered a great deal, so there has been that experience of the Cross,” he said. “But through the cross comes joy, and that is manifested in celebration.”
Often, because many parishes are homogeneous in terms of ethnicity, European Americans “are not aware of the everyday struggle” of black Catholics, he said. “What's essential is that person-to-person contact, that dialogue,” according to Bishop Guillory.
Without that, and with the preponderance of television news reports on crime in the inner city, “one can easily conclude, and I think many do, that all crimes are committed by African-Americans, and all African-Americans have a criminal instinct.”
Bishop Guillory said the Texaco scandal—in which the oil giant agreed to pay more than $115 million in damages to settle a class-action suit charging the corporation with racial bias—proves that racism is alive and well. The company agreed to settle after tapes that caught top company officials using racial slurs became public.
Despite the Texaco scandal and similar charges at other companies, Bishop Guillory sees hope. “I want to stress that we've made a lot of progress,” he said. “This is the moment of the Church, not just the Catholic Church but the Church in general. With the burning of the black churches, part of the aftermath of that is that a lot of other churches from different ethnic groups have come together to rebuild them. At other times, they have let those whose churches were burned use their church. To me, that is a symbol of progress, but we have to sustain the effort, not just when there's a crisis.”
Hilbert Stanley, executive director of the National Black Catholic Congress (NBCC) in Baltimore, said a lack of black leadership in the Church is a key reason for continuing problems of racism.
“If our leaders don't understand and appreciate the history and culture of people, they can't be truly effective. That's evident in the Catholic Church and in society,” Stanley said. “In our country there are more than 300 bishops and, right now, only 11 of them are African-Americans. And while we are a minority in the Catholic Church, if we're serious about evangelization in the African-American community we need more African-American bishops, priests and Sisters.”
Ironically, while Stanley and Bishop Guillory call for dialogue and leadership, two African-American bishops (both ordinaries of their dioceses) declined requests to be interviewed for this story. Athird black bishop did not return repeated phone calls.
That's not to say that there is no leadership among African-American Catholics. One place it can be found is at St. Charles Borromeo parish in Harlem. Featured in Keep Your Hand on the Plow as “A New York Success Story,” the church and school at St. Charles have been a haven for the area's poor African-American population for decades.
St. Charles' pastor, Msgr. Wallace Harris, told the Register that racism in the Church is “subtle and unconscious.”
“I don't think it's any worse than the general society, but we have people who inadvertently judge racially,” he said.
He said people automatically expect the parish's Masses to be “lively” and to feature Gospel music. Visitors to the school, which regularly sends graduates into high school honors programs, “make remarks that they can't get over how clean the kids are and how clean the school is,” Msgr. Harris said.
St. Charles School has long included African-American culture in its curriculum, especially in religious education. “We make it known to them that there are saints of color…” he said. “It's not that, in dealing with saints, you have to laud it over other saints. But we have to make it very clear that the universality, the catholicity, of the Church has always included people of color.”
Father Federico Britto, pastor of St. Ignatius of Loyola parish in Philadelphia, also believes in stressing the gifts African-Americans bring to the Church. “Everything we do is Afrocentric,” he said. “We implement Afrocentricity in education, religious liturgies, school assemblies, plays.”
The American Church, he said, needs to be more “sensitive culturally.”
“Not that blacks are asking for a different Church, but just to allow blacks to be more expressive with their culture in church. Blacks have many gifts to offer the Church and all we ask is that the Church listen to the gifts that we have, and not be afraid. I think the Church is still cautious.”
Dennis Poust is based in Austin, Texas.
----- EXCERPT: Letters ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dennis Poust ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: World Council of Churches Chief Counts on Roman Participation DATE: 01/05/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 5, 1997 ----- BODY:THE CALL for radical structural reform on the heels of financial woes—it's a common scenario these days for the aging international institutions set up in the wake of World War II. The United Nations is in the throes of it. And so, increasingly, is the world's largest ecumenical organization, the Geneva-based World Council of Churches (WCC).
Under the leadership of Rev. Konrad Raiser, general secretary of the organization since 1993, the WCC has embarked on a top-to-bottom review of its identity, vision and structure in the lead-up to its 50th anniversary in 1998. The radical restructuring, under discussion since 1989, is outlined in a draft proposal entitled Towards a Common Understanding and Vision of the World Council of Churches (CUV) sent to the WCC's 330 member Churches this fall. The organizational shake-up includes possible provisions for a new ecumenical forum that might allow for the participation of the Roman Catholic Church and some evangelical and Pentecostal bodies that have declined full membership in the past.
Currently, the Catholic Church has observer status in the general assembly, the organization's governing body, and participates in the WCC's Faith and Order Commission—its main theological arm—and, in conjunction with the Holy See's Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, sends representatives to several other WCC working groups.
The WCC has its origins in three early 20th century Protestant movements—Life and Work, Faith and Order and the International Missionary Council—two of which merged in 1948 at the constituting Assembly of the WCC in Amsterdam, to be joined by the missionary council at the WCC's general assembly in New Delhi in 1961.
The WCC was formed initially to forge unity among Protestant denominations, especially in the foreign mission field. With the entry of Eastern Orthodox Churches and, eventually, the Roman Catholic Church into the broader ecumenical movement in the 60s, the WCC became one of the foremost international forums for dialogue and common action among Christians. By the 70s, it had also earned a reputation as a promoter of fashionable left-wing causes, a development that lost it the support of some evangelical and Pentecostal groups.
Raiser, who spoke to the Register by telephone from Geneva, stressed the vital importance of finding ways to increase the level of Catholic involvement in the Protestant and Eastern Orthodox-dominated WCC.
“For us [in the WCC] this is one of the essential testing points for the whole process: Will we, in the future, find a way for the Catholic Church to participate? We're sure that there can be no viable future for the ecumenical movement as a whole without Roman Catholic and WCC cooperation,” he said.
Raiser asserted that the WCC “is still the most widely representative Church body that exists today, embracing a very significant part of world Christianity.” Nevertheless, he said, “the absence of the Roman Catholic Church and some of the Evangelical Churches” is certainly felt. “Any new [WCC] model which would not facilitate the integration or full participation of the Roman Catholic Church would have failed its purpose,” he said.
The secretary general's most controversial organizational proposal to date is a suggestion that the WCC's general assembly, which takes place every seven years and is the organization's highest policy-making organ, be discontinued in favor of a new “global forum of Churches and ecumenical organizations” which would include the Catholic Church, of which the WCC would be one among many members.
The forum, conceivably, could also accommodate international Christian communions of Churches such as the Lutheran World Federation, the Anglican communion or the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. Such international bodies cannot become WCC members under the current constitution.
The WCC's complex constitutional structure has from the beginning played a role in the Catholic Church's decision not to seek membership in the organization, Brother Jeffrey Gros FSC, associate director of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) told the Register.
“There's no real theological problem,” he declared. “As early as 1972, the [Holy See] said that theology was not the reason for not signing on as full members of the WCC.” Size is the main thing, Brother Gros pointed out. “We're larger than all the other Churches in the WCC. If we were a full member, with the current structure, the smaller Churches would not have the influence they have had in WCC deliberations.”
“From our point of view, [in the current set-up] collaboration is just a more advantageous context for participation than membership,” said Brother Gros. The ecumenist noted that Pope John Paul II has praised the work of the WCC on several occasions, especially in his 1995 encyclical on ecumenism, Ut Unum Sint.
While some of Raiser's proposals facilitating fuller Catholic participation in the WCC have been warmly received in Rome, the same cannot be said for the secretary general's speculations about the future shape of ecumenism itself. Raiser has called it a “paradigm shift,” a reordering of the ecumenical agenda.
As he put it in an address during his first official visit to the Vatican last year: “The challenge of a future under the threat of a growing fragmentation and violence, of a de facto apartheid between rich and poor, and of progressive degradation of the whole ecosphere is such that it should lead to an urgent reordering of the ecumenical agenda.”
“The jubilee values of reconciliation and forgiveness, of repentance and metanoia [conversion], of restitution and reconstruction should inspire us to close the books over our past [theological] struggles and to concentrate all our energies on addressing together the life and survival issues of today and tomorrow in the light of the Gospel of Christ. It is this spirit which should characterize and which should energize all our ecumenical efforts towards the year 2000.…”
It should be noted that Raiser's views on ecumenism do not necessarily represent the official views of the WCC.
Cardinal Edward Cassidy, president of the Pontifical Council on Christian Unity, in a talk in New York last fall, commented on Raiser's position: “The difficulties encountered in the various theological dialogues have led to some ecumenical circles opting for a less demanding goal for the ecumenical movement than that which has been widely accepted in the past, namely, unity in faith, ministry and sacramental life.” Cassidy complained that the secretary general's approach threatens to dismiss historic theological issues “as negative elements in the ecumenical search” and concentrate instead on questions of justice and peace and the protection of the environment.
‘The challenge of a future under the threat of a growing fragmentation and violence, of a de facto apartheid between rich and poor … is such that it should lead to an urgent rendering of the ecumenical agenda.’
This, the cardinal pointed out, is not the vision of the Catholic Church, which, in the words of Ut Unum Sint, urges that the “ultimate goal of the ecumenical movement is to reestablish full unity among all the baptized.”
But if broadening the WCC's base is one motive for the organization's intensive soul-searching, financial woes are also fueling the review. In a hard-hitting report to the WCC's Central Committee last September, Raiser told his colleagues that, as a result of a combination of unwise investments, lack of support from member churches and a weak dollar, the organization's income was no longer sufficient to maintain its present level of activities. “To regain financial viability,” Raiser told the committee, the WCC would have to implement draconian changes before its next general assembly slated for Harare, Zimbabwe in 1998. Mirroring the difficulties of other international organizations like the United Nations, the WCC not only has a need for structural reform and down-sizing, but member contributions to the organization's coffers have been on a steady decline since the early 90s. For example, more than half of the member Churches failed to contribute anything to the organization's day-to-day operations in 1994 and 1995, including the Russian Orthodox Church and the National Baptist Convention, USA, two of the organization's largest member denominations.
Raiser predicted that traditional income from Church bodies would decline further and indicated that no substantial increases could be foreseen. Meanwhile the WCC continues to run up large budget deficits: an estimated $7 million in 1996, and another estimated $3.5 million for 1997.
Raiser warned that the WCC had “probably reached the end of a road that began some 30 years ago.” Although ecumenical activity had expanded enormously since the 60s, he said, the expectations, habits and institutional arrangements “into which we have comfortably settled during this period are rapidly becoming barriers [in] the way.”
Some ecumenical observers, however, have speculated that the woes of the WCC, coupled with the reopening of ecumenical divides over gender issues like women's ordination, point at century's end not to an expanding ecumenical movement, but perhaps to a stalled one.
It's more than that the movement for ecumenism is in a period of stagnation,” said Father Thomas Rausch SJ, professor and chair of the Department of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. “What we're finding is that there are intractable [theological] differences, after all.” Father Rausch spent a year at the WCC's Ecumenical Center at Boissey, Switzerland in 1983, and is an expert on the organization's work.
“The ordination of women is one of the intractable issues,” Father Rausch told the Register. “Unless there's a consensus on that issue between Catholics and Orthodox on the one hand and many Protestants on the other, I don't see the possibility of moving forward ecumenically anytime soon.”
“Nevertheless,” Father Rausch said, “the WCC has performed a wonderful function, providing a forum for discussion and sharing. It's an enormous achievement.”
When asked whether he thought the ecumenical movement had reached an impasse, Raiser was circumspect. “It's difficult to make general statements,” he said. “There are places where things continue with great dynamism, where many of the traditional lines of separation have been overcome.” Other situations, however, he characterized as “stepping backwards.”… “The focus of ecumenical hopes has been sidelined.”
In general, Raiser saw a growing tendency in the larger Churches to retreat into defending traditional positions. “Today people seem overwhelmed by change. Therefore, they're defensive, fearful. We certainly see it on the Roman Catholic side.”
If Father Rausch sees women's ordination as the intractable ecumenical issue, for Raiser, it's papal primacy. The WCC secretary general, along with Eastern Orthodoxy's Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, was asked earlier this year by a Polish Catholic newspaper to respond in print to John Paul II's recent invitation for input from other Christian leaders on how papal primacy might be exercised as a “service of unity.”
Raiser responded by urging, among other actions, that a general council of the whole Church be summoned in the new century to consider the question—a proposal he's advanced in other contexts as well.
What the Pope expressed in Ut Unum Sint, Raiser told the Register, concerned common reflection on different ways to exercise the ministry of papal primacy. “But that begs the question,” he declared. “The issue is not only the different ways of exercising his office, but the rationale behind papal primacy itself. That's still very difficult for me to get hold of. Unless we can come to an understanding there,” said Raiser, “adaptations in practice won't help much.”
Nevertheless, Raiser is not overly pessimistic about either the future of ecumenism or the prognosis for the WCC's reform efforts. “I would like the WCC to be recognized and to serve as a vital link in a network of ecumenical relations between Churches,” he said. “Not so much to do high visibility programs, but facilitating here, advising the Churches there, initiating action on this front—always with the interest of helping the Churches make best use of their resources.”
“For me, that's the catholicity of the Church at work,” declared Raiser. “Not a book affirmation, but a reality that shows mutual accountability and confirmation.”
Gabriel Meyer is based in Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Gabriel Meyer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: High Court, 24 Years After Roe, Again Holds Life in the Balance DATE: 01/05/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 5, 1997 ----- BODY:TWO CASES—Compassion in Dying v. Washington and Quill v. Vacco—scheduled for oral argument before the Supreme Court on Jan. 8 could result in a landmark ruling on physician assisted suicide, observers say.
“We think this will be the Roe v. Wade of euthanasia,” said Walter Weber, an attorney with the American Center for Law and Justice, a Washington-based conservative legal defense group that wrote an amicus or friend of the court brief that argues that states can outlaw assisted suicide.
Weber and other opponents of a right-to-die hope the court will not issue a sweeping ruling that would legalize physician assisted suicide in the country, as Roe v.Wade did for abortion in 1973. Such a ruling would sharply limit voters' abilities to shape euthanasia-related laws in the states.
“Whatever they rule will have wide implications,” said Mark Chopko, general counsel for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, which also filed an amicus brief. “For them to rule that there's a broad, unlimited right to choose death.… I just don't see that.”
While there's a remote chance the Supreme Court will throw out the cases because the two people who sued for the right-to-die are already dead, most observers think the justices will hear the cases. With Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Steven Breyer relatively new to the bench and Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O'Connor and David Souter forming a swing vote on abortion-related issues—which bear some similarities to the right-to-die cases—few observers were willing in the weeks leading up to the hearings to predict how the Supreme Court will rule.
Lawrence Tribe, the Harvard University Law professor who is representing the right-to-die groups in the two cases, filed a 50-page brief that Richard Doerflinger, the associate director for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) pro-life directorate, called “forcefully argued, but pretty incoherent.” Tribe, according to Doerflinger, wrote that terminally ill people represent a special group of humans who deserve the right to kill themselves.
“That puts them in a second class ghetto,” said Doerflinger. “The dynamics of the suicide of the terminally ill are thought of as fundamentally different” from that of able-bodied people. “When someone [able bodied] wants to commit suicide, it's considered a mental problem, but when a terminally ill person wants to die, it's considered a rational decision.” Such reasoning, Doerflinger argued, only reveals society's prejudice against the terminally ill and the value of their lives.
He added that a right-to-die law would have to impose an “arbitrary” term that defines terminal illness. “If it means people who are 50 percent or more likely to die within six months, then you're dealing with some people who will be alive for years.” If it's people who are 90 percent or more likely to die within that time frame, he said, “almost all will be dead the next day.”
Carl Anderson, vice president for public policy with the Knights of Columbus in Washington, said that two lower courts came to the same conclusions in both cases by using different logic. The 9th Circuit Court ruled in its Compassion in Dying decision that Washington state's law against assisted suicide was unconstitutional because the court ruled that, like abortion, assisted suicide is an “intimate and personal choice,” he said.
The Center for Reproductive Law and Policy in New York wrote an amicus brief favoring physician-assisted suicide, while asserting, however, that there are significant differences between the rights to abortion and euthanasia. “There are issues of bodily integrity and autonomy as well as participation in society and the life of the world” that make unborn children fundamentally different from terminally ill people, said Kathryn Kolbert, as attorney with the organization.
In the Quill case, according to Anderson, the 2nd Circuit argued that just as New York residents can reject treatment to hasten death, to deny them the means to hasten death would be unlawful. To the 2nd Circuit Court, said Anderson, denying terminally ill people the right to suicide is a violation of the Constitution's equal protection clause. The Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men's organization with 1.5 million members, filed a joint amicus brief on the cases along with the National Catholic Office for Persons with Disabilities.
Most major medical organizations, including the American Medical Association, filed amicus briefs arguing that the Supreme Court should uphold states' laws banning assisted suicide, according to Dan Avila, an attorney with the Indianapolis-based National Legal Center for the Medically Dependent and Disabled. Several Protestant religious groups filed briefs opposing euthanasia, and two Orthodox Jewish organizations also filed briefs opposing physician assisted suicide.
But numerous groups supporting physician-assisted suicide—including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Council for Secular Humanism, the Hemlock Society, and the Unitarian Universalists—also filed friend of the court briefs, said Avila.
Should the Supreme Court rule that physician-assisted suicide is a legal right, then it would take at least one or two decades of judicial decisions to clarify that right, according to Anderson. He predicted that more jurisprudence would come about from such a decision than has been produced in the wake of the Roe v. Wade decision.
Even more ominous than the threat of legal ambiguity and the stain on the Supreme Court's reputation, would be the threat such a ruling would pose for the most powerless in American society, opponents of assisted suicide say. Paraphrasing fellow Catholic Alan Keyes, a radio show host and former ambassador who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1996, attorney Weber said: “People will begin to ask, ‘When is grandma gonna do the right thing?”’ and commit suicide.
“Opening the door to [physician-assisted suicide] would bring substantial economic and social pressure on the disabled and elderly” to kill themselves because other people would consider them burdens, said Weber. He predicted such an outcome if the justices engage in “hand wringing and anguished questions about what to do about ending the suffering of the mentally handicapped and terminally ill,” during their questioning of Tribe scheduled for Jan. 8.
Racial minorities and the handicapped might also be “shortchanged and put at risk by pressure on the medical and health care system,” since they are typically underserved by health insurance, said Anderson. He predicted that a Supreme Court ruling favoring physician-assisted suicide could open the floodgates to third-party decision making to hasten the deaths of mentally incompetent people.
The late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin filed a brief with the Supreme Court arguing that he had a compelling interest in the case not only as a pastor but as a terminally ill man. “He showed the value of living life and giving life,” said the NCCB's Doerflinger.
“People who are terminally ill do the most important work of all. Everything is stripped away from them,” Doerflinger added. “They face the big human questions [such as] the ultimate existence of God, the meaning of life and relationships with other people. Many people are unprepared to face these issues because they haven't dealt with them during their lives. They need support from other people,” rather than the tacit consent that they should kill themselves.
To show its support for the terminally ill and other groups that would be adversely affected by a decision favoring euthanasia, the National Catholic Office for Persons with Disabilities is sponsoring a vigil at 10 a.m. on Jan. 8, on the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington. The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the two cases by June.
William Murray is based in Kensington, Md.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: William Murray ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Inculturation is the Word for Asian Church DATE: 01/05/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 5, 1997 ----- BODY:ZEALOUS MISSIONARIES urging non-Christians to forsake their faith to escape eternal doom are a thing of the past in Asia. These days, inculturation and interreligious dialogue are more typical concerns for the Asian Church. Major Church meetings there tend to end with calls for more harmony with other creeds and greater sensitivity toward native cultures.
“We've looked down on other religions as agents of evil,” said Bishop John Manat of Ratchaburi in Thailand, head of the Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs Office of the Asian Bishops' Conference (FABC). “We need to educate our own bishops, priests and others in this respect. Religion and faith should not separate us. Because we built walls, we have lived separately for centuries.”
Summing up the small steps achieved in the more than 25 years of interreligious dialogue by the FABC, Bishop Manat told the Register that “we have to look for the Kingdom of God which comprises all religions. There are still obstacles within the Church. And though some cracks have developed in the old thinking, the wall has yet to fall.”
Understanding and promoting mutual trust with other creeds has been one of the prime concerns of the FABC, which includes 17 national episcopal conferences. The FABC's Office of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs has sponsored several series of dialogues under the Bishops' Institute for Religious Affairs (BIRA). The initial sessions were meant to train Church leaders—including bishops—to conduct effective dialogue within the Vatican II framework.
Prior to the last meeting, held under the banner theme of “Christians in Dialogue with Confucius thought and Taoist Spirituality” in April in Taiwan, BIRA had brought together Muslims and Christians in Muslim-majority Pakistan. An earlier meeting with Buddhists took place in Thailand, where Buddhism is almost a state religion; and the venue for the dialogue with Hindus in Oct. 1995 was India, a nation of more than 700 million Hindus.
When FABC launched the interreligious dialogue process, Bishop Deogracias Iniguez of the Diocese of Iba in the Philippines said that “others were skeptical of our efforts. The BIRA series was looked down upon as a ploy to convert others.”
“We have succeeded in changing that cynicism,” he added. “Christianity is no longer considered a conquering religion, but we have a long way to go.”
Indeed, the situation of the Church in Asia is unique. The number of priestly vocations in Asia doubled between 1970 and 1994, from 10,074 to 23,943, according to the Vatican's latest Statistical Yearbook of the Church. Asia also has the most promising ratio for seminarians, with 25.07 for every 10,000 Catholics—compared to 16.65 in Oceania and 10.27 for Europe. The worldwide figure is 10.77. But Christianity has only a nominal presence— 2.83 percent of the population— on the Asian continent, which accounts for more than two-thirds of the world's population. The Philippines, which includes 55 million Catholics among its 66 million people, is the exception.
‘We need to educate our own bishops, priests and others in this respect. Religion and faith should not separate us. Because we built walls, we have lived separately for centuries.’
A year ago, in an attempt to deal realistically with the Church's minority position in Asia, the FABC's Theological Advisory Commission urged Asian Churches to counter “situations that threaten and contradict harmony.” Calling for a theology of harmony “from below” in solidarity with the Asian reality, the Asian Theological Commission noted that Churches in the continent posed a challenge to harmony because of their past failures to assimilate local cultures and traditions.
The colonization of the Philippines, including the imposition of a 16th century-European way of living, was thought of as an almost integral part of the task of evangelization, said Ferdinand Dagmang, professor of Christian Ethics and Popular Religion at Maryhill School of Theology in Quezon City, the Philippines. The dominant Roman Catholic symbols, rituals and practices were expected to supplant native beliefs and practices.
As a result, even in the Philippines, where Christians constitute nearly 90 percent of the population, Christianity is often considered a religion of “foreigners.” In marked contrast, the dominant religions in other Asian countries— Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism and Islam—are intimately linked with their cultures and woven into their national history. “Only through an inculturated liturgy will the people of Asia recognize [Jesus] as bread is broken in their midst,” 14 leading liturgical experts in Asia declared after the first meeting of Asian Liturgy Forum (ALF) under FABC last spring.
In its discussion of what was referred to as the “relevant and deeply pastoral problem of inculturating the liturgy in Asia,” the forum concluded that the transplantation of a liturgy “made it difficult for [Asians] to experience the depth of the Christian mystery and [that] their participation in worship became in many ways superficial.” If Vatican II's call for liturgical renewal is to become a reality in Asia, the ALF final statement noted, Churches in Asia need to assimilate the local culture.
Arguing that “inculturation is the manifestation of the urge to proclaim the Gospel to the nations,” the statement said that “only through a meaningful encounter between the Gospel and the culture can the unfolding of the Mystery take place” in Asia.
Salesian Father Paul Puthanangady, an ALF member, stressed that “inculturation is something that Rome itself urges. It was Vatican II that boosted the growing inculturation awareness.” Father Puthanangady, who heads the Indian bishops' preparatory Committee for Jubilee 2000, cited the Congregation of Divine Liturgy's “Instructions on Inculturation of Liturgy” to demonstrate the Holy See's support for the Asian Church's attempts to render itself relevant to the local culture.
Wherever inculturation has taken place, after proper instruction and periodic scrutiny by Church authorities, the people have accepted it whole-heartedly, he said. When, for example, the Syro Malabar Church in south India decided to celebrate Qurbana (Mass) in the local Malayalam language instead of in Syriac—which is unfamiliar to most of the local people—in late 1960s, there were apprehensions. But the switch to their mother tongue in the end encouraged the faithful to become more active participants in the Mass.
In response to criticism that inculturation sometimes undermines the authority of the Holy See, Father T.K. John SJ, a noted Indology professor at the Jesuit Theologate in New Delhi, said that “inculturation does not and should not mean deviation from the faith or challenging the authority of the universal church.”
Diluting the faith becomes a problem “when over-enthusiasm leads to neglect of the necessary link between the adopted symbol or ritual to Church teaching,” he added. “Each Asian country has its own cultural milieu, and faith should not standardize culture. Christianity should be interpreted to the people in their cultural environment, without deviating from the faith. This is certainly a difficult path, one on which we have to proceed carefully.”
Anto Akkara is based in New Delhi.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Anto Akkara ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Taking on Dr. Kevorkian Proved Costly For Prosecuting Attorney: 'I Enforce the Law' DATE: 01/05/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 5, 1997 ----- BODY:From 1988 through 1996, Richard Thompson served as prosecuting attorney for Oakland County, Mich. He achieved a conviction rate of approximately 98 percent, while major crime in the county of more than 1 million people declined by 32 percent during his tenure. Nevertheless, Thompson lost his bid for a third term in a recent primary. Election polls showed that his three attempted prosecutions of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the retired pathologist who has “assisted” at more than 40 suicides, played a key role in his defeat.
As Thompson leaves office, a 20-count criminal case is pending against Kevorkian in Oakland County for assisting suicides and other alleged crimes. Even if Thompson's successor, Dave Gorcyca, decides to drop the charges, a criminal case in Michigan's Ionia County is also pending. The information purportedly shows that a person whose death the county's medical examiner's office had ruled to have occurred by natural causes, may have actually been an assisted suicide attended by Kevorkian.
Richard Thompson graduated from the University of Michigan. After serving as a captain with U.S. Army Intelligence, he graduated from Wayne State University Law School. Following a stint as an associate attorney with a firm in Detroit, he became a partner in his own firm in 1968.
In 1973, Thompson began a 24-year career in law enforcement when he became the chief assistant prosecutor of Oakland County. Thompson, whose term ended Dec. 31, spoke with the Register recently.
Register: Can you tie your loss in the primary directly to the Kevorkian prosecutions?
Thompson:After I lost, a local newspaper released the result of a poll. They found that even though a majority of people thought that my performance as a prosecutor was “excellent” or “very good,” 44 percent said they voted for my opponent because of my prosecutions of Kevorkian.
My opponent (David Gorcyca) said that nine out of 10 of his supporters were supporting him to protest my prosecutions of Kevorkian. In Oakland County, where Kevorkian lives, the public opinion polls have shown consistently that the majority— 60 percent—of the people support physician-assisted suicide. Seventy-five percent of the public here in Oakland County thought he should never be prosecuted for it.
That was what I was up against, but I knew that already. My political consultants told me to stay away from Kevorkian. But he kept dropping bodies at medical establishments after assisting in suicides, and I had to do my job. The common law in Michigan holds that assisted suicide is murder.
Has the Catholic Church's stand on euthanasia and assisted suicide had any bearing on your attempts to prosecute Kevorkian?
The Catholic Church has taken the strongest stand [against euthanasia], and I have been deeply influenced by two of John Paul II's encyclicals— Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life) and Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth).
When a secular journalist starts asking about Kevorkian, the first question is always: “What is your religion?” They want to say: “You're going after Kevorkian because of your religious beliefs.”
This is the first time in 24 years in the prosecutor's office that people are asking me about my religion. I prosecute murder cases, and murder is covered by the Ten Commandments, and theft cases are covered by the Ten Commandments. But the press has never connected those two.
All at once, because of the issue of assisted suicide, they think that the Kevorkian prosecutions must be a religious action. Not true. As a prosecutor, I must enforce the laws, and that's what I do. There is a law in Michigan that prohibits assisted suicide.
Geoffrey Fieger, Kevorkian's attorney, has exhausted every appellate remedy that he's had to try to overturn that law, and he's failed. He went all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court, but they upheld that there's a law against assisted suicide. He appealed to the United States Supreme Court, and they refused to hear it. He's tried a petition drive, and he couldn't get enough signatures to overturn the law. He went to the state legislature, and they have refused to legalize euthanasia.
The religious dimension comes into play when you stay true to your convictions and your oath of office. You don't fold every time there's a political opinion poll out there that suggests otherwise.
In Evangelium Vitae, the Pope says that political leaders shouldn't ignore what they know is right merely to satisfy the temporary majority. What I would be doing is substituting the majority's judgment for my oath of office—you can never do that.
I spoke at a law class at The Catholic University of America a couple of months ago. They introduced me by saying that “St. Thomas More, when he disagreed with the public and refused to compromise, got his head chopped off. The only thing that happened to Dick Thompson is that he lost an election.” I can always say, “It's not too bad, I still have my head!”
Are you a member of any denomination?
Allow me to give you a long answer. I was baptized in the Armenian Apostolic Church. However, when I was growing up, I didn't really attend that church. I attended a Baptist Sunday school until I was 14. Later on in life, I didn't attend that church that often anymore. However, I was married in the Catholic Church. We have three sons, and two of them are attending a Catholic school.
Why do people in Oakland County support Kevorkian?
It's a very pro-choice county, even though it's Republican. It sort of reflects, in general terms, the sentiment of a lot of folks that there should be legalized physician-assisted suicide. The media has really assisted Kevorkian in his advocacy. Every time Kevorkian assisted in a death, they would tout him as an angel of mercy. They would paint a very sympathetic picture of Kevorkian as being very compassionate. There was a lot of immediate emotional sympathy. The media has played a dominant role in developing and framing the issue.
Why do you think that Kevorkian holds such contempt for the law?
My feeling is that Kevorkian, all his life, has been a failure as a pathologist. He never really treated live patients. He's had a total fascination with death, ever since he was a medical student. While he was working in a hospital during his residency, he used to take the midnight shift because he thought more people died during that shift. He had a standing order that whenever someone died, he wanted to be notified immediately, so that he could go to the room and look into the patient's eyes and see what they looked like at the moment of death.
He's been involved in some bizarre experiments. He's transfused blood from cadavers into live patients. He was always right on the edge, and he couldn't keep a job in regular hospitals. He retired and decided he was going to change the practice of medicine.
For a while, he merely talked about it. But when he assisted in the death of Janet Adkins in 1990, there was an outpouring of public support, while the press supported him, too. He became emboldened. He's basically stated that he doesn't care what the law is or what the U.S. Supreme Court does. He's going to assist in killing people. He has a total disdain for the law.
At this point in his life, this man who was a failure has become an international celebrity. He's gotten the support; his lawyer is very flamboyant and good at personally attacking anyone who opposes Kevorkian. Fieger has viciously attacked Cardinal Adam Maida of Detroit, Gov. John Engler and the United States Supreme Court. He attacks any public figure who dares to stand in their way. It hasn't worked on me, but it has taken its toll. If you throw enough mud, some of it is going to stick in the public arena. I've been taking slings and arrows for six years while prosecuting him.
How do Fieger and Kevorkian support themselves?
Fieger is a very successful medical malpractice lawyer. Kevorkian was basically living off social security, but Fieger has given him a home in a nice part of the county, and he's better off now than he's ever been.
The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments on two landmark assisted suicide lower court rulings, Jan. 8. How do you think they'll rule?
They've learned their lesson from Roe v. Wade. If they could take that back, they would. Historically, there has never been legalization of assisted suicide. A majority of states have had laws against it since their foundings.
The American Medical Association, which represents 290,000 doctors, wrote an amicus brief that strongly opposes any legalization of physician-assisted suicide on the basis that it would destroy the fundamental trust between physician and patient. It would also destroy the physician's chief goal—to heal.
Catholics, the Lutherans and the Southern Baptists have joined in a brief against it. There have been several briefs from all areas of American culture that have opposed legalizing physician-assisted suicide.
I don't think the justices will find any basis in the law to support it. I think they're going to realize, as they apparently have with regard to Roe v. Wade, that this is an argument they should leave to the political branches of government, rather than eliminating the argument by saying assisted suicide is a constitutional right.
The court has been severely injured by the Roe v. Wade decision. They thought they'd end the debate on abortion, but 24 years later, the issue is hotter than ever. The court has lost part of its legitimacy because of it. If they find a new right here, the right of private killing— because that's what physician-assisted suicide would be—then the court might lose totally its legitimacy in our society.
What will happen, then, if the Supreme Court leaves it up to the states, as you're predicting?
When more people are informed about it, I think they'd turn it down. We saw that in California and in the state of Washington on referendums. When both sides were able to get a fair hearing and make their case, voters turned it down, even though polls showed that a majority of people supported physician-assisted suicide.
Why is there such support for euthanasia?
My view is that the support is pretty superficial, because most people haven't gone beyond the slogan stage. They haven't thought about what the ramifications would be if we accepted physician-assisted suicide. They look at it in slogans—death with dignity; patient autonomy; free choice; alleviating suffering. We're a compassionate people, and they feel this is a compassionate thing to do. They haven't studied history. Nazi Germany killed millions of people on the basis of a similar argument: that some lives aren't worthy of being lived.
I have an article that shocks people. I tell them it's from the front page of The New York Times, and I read from this article that we're going to eliminate the suffering of incurable people by assisting them in their deaths, and that two doctors would have to make this determination.
Most people think this story is about Kevorkian. The date of the report, however, is Oct. 8, 1933. The headline is “Nazis Plan to Kill People Who Are Suffering Incurable Diseases,” and “German Religious Groups Oppose Same.” We're repeating history.
Do you sense that the elderly generally oppose or support physician-assisted suicide?
A lot of elderly people are afraid. Take the Netherlands, which has accepted physician-assisted suicide. A majority of elderly people in the Netherlands worry that they're going to be killed against their will. Some of them are carrying cards on their person, saying they don't want to be candidates for physician-assisted suicide.
Because of that the elderly are afraid to go to hospitals, to see a doctor, or to even tell their own families that they're ill. Slowly, the right to physician-assisted suicide is becoming a duty. The older you get, the more concerned you get that society is determining the quality of life based on utility. Are you still a productive citizen?
Because of managed health care and the rationing of health care, the elderly will be the group to whom we will say: “You've already had a full life, and your life expectancy is long.” They're going to be manipulated, through the withholding of treatment, to opt for assisted suicide.
Even more scared than the elderly are the disabled. They know there's an undercurrent of discrimination in all of this. When disabled persons—say a quadriplegic— says they're going to commit suicide, we all understand why. But if it's someone whose body is apparently fully functioning, we all say: “Oh, what a tragedy. You can't do that.”
Underneath it all is a silent message that the disabled are not as human as the rest of us. The Catholic Church teaches that all life is intrinsically valuable. We can't make distinctions. But that's what's going to happen if we legalize euthanasia, as we begin, saying “this life is OK,” but “this life is not so good.”
Do you think many doctors support Kevorkian?
Individual doctors generally oppose what Kevorkian does, even though they might think of a couple of patients who might have been better off dead.
They don't think Kevorkian is a doctor, in the true sense of the word. He's been a pathologist and has never treated patients. He doesn't know anything special about the illnesses that he's killing people for, or about depression. He can't even evaluate someone as to whether they're depressed, and yet he's making decisions about whether people should live or die. The vast majority of doctors don't support him. There's a false compassion to Kevorkian. He thinks it's an expression of compassion to kill those who are suffering. True compassion means helping bear someone's suffering and doing everything you can to give them a meaningful life, whether they have an hour to live or a year.
The medical profession has to change, and doctors realize that. They've fallen down on the job, in giving compassionate care to people they know they can't cure. In the past, when they realized they couldn't cure someone, they'd turn their backs on them. But their medical responsibilities don't end there. They should take care of those persons and make them comfortable. They have to become more aware of pain management controls. The Hospice movement could be very important in this area. The vast majority—95 to 100 percent—of people who want to die are depressed. Take away their depression, their desire to die goes away also. One way you can take away their depression is to take away their physical pain. Virtually 100 percent of pain can be controlled. That's an area a lot of doctors need to educate themselves in.
Who do you see leading the charge against assisted suicide?
I think it's going to be the disabled who will be most involved. At an early court hearing, Kevorkian said— and I'm paraphrasing—that the disabled, by voluntarily terminating their lives, would enhance public life and morals. He's made a direct attack on the disabled. They also realize that, based on history, they will be the targets.
—William Murray
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: William Murray ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Pope's Week DATE: 01/05/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 5, 1997 ----- BODY:Dec. 18 - Dec. 22
UNITED TO CHRIST IN SUFFERING
At Wednesday's general audience, John Paul II said that in the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, the prophet Simeon announces to Mary her sharing in Jesus'suffering, that “will lead the Blessed Virgin to understand more deeply the mystery of her Son.”
The Messiah is “‘a sign of contradiction,’ destined to encounter strong opposition from his contemporaries. But Simeon joins the vision of Mary's soul pierced by a sword to Christ's suffering, thus associating the Mother to the painful fate of the Son.… This motherly suffering will reach its culmination in the passion, when it will unite with the Son in the redeeming sacrifice.”
“Simeon's prophecy is followed by the encounter with the prophetess [Anna].… The prophetic faith and wisdom of the old woman who, ‘serving God night and day,’keeps hope in the Messiah alive with fasting and prayer, offer the Holy Family a further impulse to place their hope in the God of Israel. At such a special moment, [Anna's] behavior is for Mary and Joseph like a sign from the Lord, a message of illumined faith and persevering service.”
The Pope concluded by recalling that “after Simeon's prophecy, Mary unites her life in an intense and mysterious way to Christ's sorrowful mission: She will cooperate faithfully with her Son to save of the human race.”
‘STRONG MOMENTS’ OF 1996
John Paul II met Saturday morning in the Clementine Hall with members of the Roman Curia for the traditional exchange of Christmas greetings and reviewed the principal events in the life of the Church in 1996.
The Pope spoke of the just-initiated three-year preparation period for the Great Jubilee and said that the first year “must be one of growth in our love for Christ, to whom we must give an ever clearer and more coherent witness. I hear in me the strong echo of the question that Christ asked Peter. ‘Do you love me?’ This is a question that fills me with a great sense of responsibility. I would like to redirect this to you, who help me daily in the care of the entire Church.”
The Holy Father recalled that one of the “strong moments” of this year was the publication of the postsynodal apostolic exhortation Vita Consacrata, which is part of a trilogy together with Christifideles Laici and Pastores Dabo Vobis.
He explained that “in the lay life Christ is glorified as the foundation from which all of created reality draws its value and meaning. In the lives of consecrated persons, who dedicate themselves to him with ‘an undivided heart,’in taking on the evangelical counsels, he is contemplated as the eschatological end to which everyone aims. In the priestly ministry … he is revealed as the Good Shepherd, who never ceases caring for the People acquired with his blood.”
Later, he referred to the 50th anniversary of his priestly ordination: “In the affection which the entire Church showed me, accentuated by the circumstance of my hospital stay, I not only saw regard for me personally, but also the esteem that the Christian community cultivates for the priestly ministry.”
“The Church,” added the Pope, “has continued this year to walk along the path of ecumenism, with the ardent desire of full unity along all believers. I recall in this regard the visits of the Catholicos-Supreme Patriarch of all Armenians Karekin I, and of the Archbishop of Canterbury George Leonard Carey.
The FAO World Food Summit, which took place in Rome this past November, “wished to call everyone's attention to the ‘scandal’ of hunger and malnutrition, which still strikes one person in five throughout the world.… In this regard, the pontifical council Cor Unum has recently published a document on Hunger in the World.”
“Several populations are afflicted by the tragedy of ethnic and nationalistic conflicts which casts numerous innocents into desperation and death.” Even if “significant progress was made this year … in solving the problem of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in the meantime a drama of disturbing proportions is taking place in central Africa. The Church wants to be the voice for those who have none, and asks all who have power and responsibility not to back away from this dramatic emergency.”
John Paul II concluded by assuring the members of the Roman Curia that he knows that “you draw your deepest motivation from God himself, whose inexhaustible source of grace nourishes your love for the Church. Precisely such motives are the secret behind curial work, even though it has the inevitable weight of bureaucratic aspects, never losing its Gospel inspiration and a great human warmth.”
BECOME ‘BUILDERS OF PEACE’
The Holy Father received a small representation of the boys and girls of Italian Catholic Action Saturday for their annual Christmas visit and told them: “This year, in thinking of the forthcoming World Peace Day, I entrust you with the duty of living and spreading pardon, thus becoming builders of peace.”
“The Son of God has loved us who have offended him” continued the Holy Father. “We too must wish well to those who offended us, and thus win over evil with good. Hate the sin, but love the sinner: this is the path to peace, the path the Lord teaches us, starting with the mystery of his birth.”
IN THE NAME OF JESUS
At Sunday's Angelus the Pope explained to the faithful gathered in St. Peter's Square the meaning of the name of Jesus, which “evokes his identity and mission as Savior” and “means ‘God saves.’”
“But this name,” he continued, “in the supreme sacrifice of Golgotha, shone as the name of life, in which the grace of reconciliation and peace is offered by God to all men. In this name, the Church finds all its goodness, invokes it ceaselessly, proclaims it with an ever new ardor.”
The Pope said that “Jesus himself indicates to us the saving power of his name, giving us this consoling certainty: ‘Whatever you ask of the Father, he will give you in my name.'thus whoever invokes with faith the name of Jesus can have an experience similar to the one described by the evangelist Luke, when he writes that the people sought to touch Jesus, ‘for power came forth from him and healed them all.’”
“Let us learn to repeat with love the Holy Name of Jesus,” he concluded, “especially during this first year of the three-year preparatory period for the Great Jubilee of 2000! As we all know, 1997 is dedicated to reflection on Christ and repeating the name of Jesus with devoted love, putting it at the center of our prayer, especially liturgical prayer, we will make the apostle Paul's instruction our own: ‘That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth.’” (VIS)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: New Year's Resolution DATE: 01/05/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 5, 1997 ----- BODY:Certain rituals mark the arrival of every new year. Critics deliver their “best of” and “worst of” lists, appraising the previous year's films, books, television, theater, sporting events, and so on. These days, even websites come under the scrutiny of the pundits. A new year also marks the time when most of us turn a critic's eye on our own lives. We reflect on goals attained, certainly, but most of us spend more time mulling over our failings. The nearly universal practice of this self-evaluation probably makes it less painful—misery loves company—and with a clean slate, ambitious goals can be set again and taken on with a renewed sense of hope.
Apart from the usual taking stock at year's end—and the subsequent pledges to eat better and exercise more, to be more patient with children and spouses, to watch less TV and read better books, to develop a richer prayer life—the dawn of 1997 seems to call for something more. As the end of the millennium comes barreling down upon us, some are beginning to get a sense of being ill-prepared for the truly wondrous event awaiting us just around the bend: the 2,000th anniversary of Christianity. Nearly two years ago, John Paul II, in recognizing the need to thoroughly prepare, issued his apostolic letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente as a sort of guide to getting ready for the Jubilee. The first phase, which he defined as the ante-preparatory stage, ended last week with the closing of 1996.
Since the November 1994 release of the letter, a significant amount of attention has been paid to Jubilee issues. Most of it though has centered on material concerns. Stories addressing the controversial designs of new churches being built for the celebration or the logistics of handling the onslaught of pilgrims expected to converge on Rome and on the Holy Land have appeared in secular and religious newspapers and magazines. Though the media gravitates to such stories of “impending disaster” spiced with a sampling of finger-pointing, there have also been reports that feature high points related to the Jubilee year, most recently Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's invitation to John Paul to kick off the celebrations with a visit to the Holy Land at Christmas 1999.
Less has been written about the spiritual preparations for the Jubilee, though that, of course, is the essence of the Pope's apostolic letter. The second phase of his plan, which began with the arrival of 1997 and carries through to the dawning of the millennium, is built on a Trinitarian theme with each year dedicated to reflection on one person of the Triune God. 1997 is given to contemplation and a new appreciation of Jesus Christ. Reflecting on Jesus throughout the year, and especially as we draw up our New Year's goals—fiercely important to us, but ultimately a grain of sand in the grand scheme—makes perfect sense. As John Paul wrote in Tertio: “Jesus Christ is the new beginning of everything. In him all things come into their own; they are taken up and given back to the Creator from whom they first came.”
Appropriate as it is at the personal level, a Christ-centered year seems even more urgent scaled-up to the societal level and beyond. On the brink of the millennium, the world is badly in need of renewal. Terrorism, fratricide, child labor, starvation, slavery and the other tragedies that have marked mankind's history remain with us. Purely human solutions to these problems have failed us unfailingly. The Church too has had a hard going of it, torn from without by those critical of its role in the world, and from within by members convinced that fashioning a Church that neatly conforms to their personal vision is the solution to all its human problems.
So where is Christ in all this, and where to begin a reflection on him that will give rise to our sorely needed renewal? In his most recent book, A View from the Ridge: The Testimony of a Twentieth-Century Christian, Australian author Morris West offers a good starting point in a brief reflection on the Word made Flesh: “Our Lord did not invent the codex of canon law,” he writes. “He did not dictate the Summa of Thomas Aquinas. He sat upon a hillside, perched himself in a rocking boat just off the beach. He spoke in the synagogues and in the houses of the people. The images he used were simplest images of rural life: flowers and sheep and grain and weed growing among wheat. He taught his followers to acknowledge the unknown God as ‘Father.’I have felt very often that we Christians have divided ourselves because we have tried to elaborate too much upon the majestic simplicity of the message given to us.”
A return to that simple message and to what John Paul calls “a deep desire for conversion and personal renewal” fueled by “intense prayer and solidarity with one's neighbor,” promises to awaken hope in world-weary journeyers as they ready themselves for the great Jubilee year.
—LM
----- EXCERPT: Editorial ----- EXTENDED BODY: LM ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Change of Heart Still Needs Spiritual Sustenance DATE: 01/05/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 5, 1997 ----- BODY:EVERYONE HAS a conscience, but if you don't use it, you'd lose it—at least, that's the assumption behind the romantic comedy hit Jerry Maguire. Jerry (Tom Cruise) is a hyperactive, hot-shot agent at Sports Management International (SMI), fielding 264 phone calls a day as he represents 73 big-bucks clients. But the money-grubbing, impersonal way he does business has made him hate himself.
His first twinge of conscience is provoked during a visit to a hockey player-client who's been hospitalized after skating with an injury in order to earn a bonus. When the player's young son pleads with Jerry to make his father stop risking his life for extra money, the agent masks his greed with a smooth string of lies. The kid responds by flipping him the finger.
Jerry is troubled, and late one night, in a luxury hotel room, he suffers “a breakdown or a breakthrough.” Almost as therapy, he whacks out a 27-page mission statement for his agency entitled, The Things We Think and Do Not Say: The Future of Our Business, and distributes it to all his SMI associates. An impassioned plea for a return to morality in the selling of big-league sports, it's at first greeted with praise. But, upon reflection, SMI decides the difference in their approaches is too great and fires him.
Their cruelly chosen messenger is Jerry's former protégé, Bob Sugar (Jerry Mohr), who fast-talks almost all of Jerry's former clients into deserting him and staying with the agency. “It's not show friends, it's show business,” Sugar cracks.
The one exception is Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.), an African-American wide receiver in the last year of his contract with the NFL's Arizona Cardinals. Short for his position, unappreciated, and with a big chip on his shoulder, Tidwell seems almost more trouble than he's worth. His favorite expression is: “Show me the Money!” But Jerry's only way back into the big time is to renegotiate the player's next contract into the eight-figure range—an uphill battle.
Jerry's determined to run his own operation according to the principles outlined in his idealistic manifesto, but none of his former high-flying colleagues will risk joining him. However, a low-level, mousy accountant, Dorothy Boyd (Renee Zellweger) is inspired by Jerry's moral vision and is willing to make the leap of faith. She and Jerry set up shop in Jerry's apartment.
Jerry's beautiful blonde fiancée, Avery Bishop (Kelly Preston) sees things differently. A tart-tongued, fast-track publicist, she despises losers. They soon break up. Jerry's attempt to reinvent himself as a moral person seems to have brought him nothing but trouble. His only consolation is Dorothy, who's always ready to offer him “a soft shoulder to cry on.” A 26-year-old widow with a young son, Ray (Jonathan Lipnicki), she lives with her older psychologist sister Laurel (Bonnie Hunt), whose specialty is divorced women's therapy groups.
Dorothy falls for Jerry almost immediately. “You had me at hello,” she later remarks. Jerry's feelings towards her, while appreciative, are less intense. During his bachelor days, he was characterized as a man who couldn't stand either to be alone or to be intimate. Where he is emotionally scattered, she is centered and in touch with her feelings, and once they work through the ambiguities of an employer-employee relationship, a romance of sorts blossoms. And when Jerry and Ray become instant buddies, a family unit is formed.
Tidwell remains Jerry's only client, so money is tight. To cut back on overhead, Dorothy wants to quit Jerry's operation and take a job elsewhere. Unable to face being alone, Jerry proposes marriage, and they quickly tie the knot.
Jerry and Tidwell have developed a stormy relationship with a different set of expectations of each other, conditioned perhaps by their differing racial backgrounds. Whenever the decibel level gets high, Jerry assumes they're fighting, but Tidwell thinks they're just beginning to communicate.
Tidwell, who was raised by a single mom, suggests Jerry treat Dorothy with openness and honesty. In turn, Jerry tells the wide receiver to fix his attitude problem if he wants to pull down the big money. Neither wants to listen to the other's advice. Jerry's marriage turns sour, and he and Dorothy separate.
Then Tidwell surprises everyone with a change in attitude and some fancy playing. Jerry is able to use this to get him the sweet deal he's always wanted. But the victory means nothing to him unless he can share it so he and Dorothy reunite. The movie ends with Jerry back on top.
The message seems to be that sometimes good guys come in first and can get the girl as well. It's all too easy, but the happy ending isn't the problem. After all, it's a Hollywood romantic comedy, and the genre has certain rules. The movie's weakness is that writer-director Cameron Crowe (Singles and Fast Times at Ridgmont High) wants to show the awakening of a moral sensibility without any spiritual component to the experience.
Jerry seems never to have been exposed to our Judeo-Christian heritage. Its standards offer him little guidance in moments of trouble. As a consequence, the movie doesn't associate conscience with ethical choices, the heart of any moral code. Instead Crow links morality almost exclusively to emotional honesty and the ability to connect with another person. These are good qualities, to be sure, but it's a very new-age approach. It's almost as if the character flaws of Jerry and his peers could be eradicated by extensive touchy-feely therapy. Religion and philosophy appear to have nothing to offer.
In this, Jerry Maguire is a product of its time. It skillfully zeroes in on the malaise many of us feel. But its solutions remain part of the problem. Without recourse to a transcendent set of moral values, well-intentioned people like Jerry and Dorothy will eventually be compromised and confused by the relativism that surrounds them. Their emotions may become enriched by the lifestyle changes the movie promotes, but the rest of their lives will still lack meaning.
John Prizer is based in Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Wise Men Still Seek Him DATE: 01/05/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 5, 1997 ----- BODY:By BRIAN MULLADYOP
WISE MEN still seek him. Aristotle says that men first began to seek wisdom in philosophy after being wonder-struck at the world experienced with their senses. Man has a natural desire to know the truth.
This desire for knowledge can only be stilled in the direct vision of God in heaven. “The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 27). This desire of knowledge was also satisfied through the giving of the law to the Jews on Mount Sinai. The Gentiles search for God and are led to him through nature. “Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (Rom 1, 20).
At Epiphany, we celebrate the fact that the wise and powerful among the Gentiles come now to know the Redeemer, the King of the Jews, through nature. This was to fulfill the prophecy of Balaam, who had announced that “a star shall come forth out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel (Nm 24, 17). The word “epiphany” means manifestation. Christ is manifested to the Jews through the angels because it was through the angels that God revealed the Old Law. He is manifested to the Gentiles through their study of nature and the heavens because it is through nature and the heavens that the pagan philosophers came to know the truth.
The Magi were mysterious figures in the ancient world. They were natural philosophers, which today would also mean that they were scientists. Hailing from a priestly tribe of the Medes, they also represent natural religion. They also apparently belonged to the upper class because they brought costly gifts. The Magi represent the rich, the powerful and the wise among the pagans.
They observe a new star in the heavens. This is an external sign that shows that faith does need preambles; faith and reason do not contradict each other. Faith is not based on myths or fables or mere projections of the human mind. The star, which is brighter than others in the heavens, is a “motive of credibility” for the Gentiles. The “preaching of the heavens” (Gregory the Great, Sermons, XXXIV) evangelizes the Magi. The star points to a new knowledge that, though it is not contradictory to reason, cannot be attained by reason. Because the Magi are rightly disposed within, the external light of the star becomes an interior light— the light of faith. They are led by an external light, but they are also led by their inner faith. The rays of truth touched their minds and enlightened them with divine knowledge. They set out on the road led by their faith, which for them was “by no means a blind impulse of the mind” (Catechism, 156).
Their faith, which was “a light of revelation for the Gentiles” (Lk 2, 32), led them to Israel. Though they were Gentiles, they identified the source of the light, the creator of the world, with the King of the Jews. They naturally sought him in the city of the King of the Jews, Jerusalem. The Jewish wise men and king interpret the prophecies correctly for the natural scientists as to the place of the birth of the Messiah. Yet, because they did not understand that the kingdom of Christ was one of holiness, grace, truth, justice, love and peace, the star does not lead them. There is no faith in their hearts to connect them with the light of the star.
The star leads the Magi to Bethlehem where they find Jesus with Mary. They prostrate themselves before him. The powerful, rich and wise of the earth acknowledge that grace is true power, wealth and wisdom. What a great example for the learned and clever in this age! Science and reason prostrate before faith as its handmaidens. The Magi's knowledge is not concerned with the power of manipulation, but with the truth of receiving the gift of divine life.
Their gifts mystically show the fullness of revelation about the Child. Gold to show he is a king of hearts, frankincense to show He is God, myrrh to show he will give us grace through his death. The star of believing should lead the wise men of each age to find in Him the completion of their hearts' wonder at the nature of the world. “O Herod, wicked foe, why fear that Christ the Lord approaches near, he does not take your earthly sway, who heavenly kingdoms gives away” (Divine office: hymn for Epiphany).
Father Mullady is a professor of theology at Holy Apostles Seminary, Cromwell, Conn.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Father Mullady ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Letters DATE: 01/05/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 5, 1997 ----- BODY:Legislator's Other Side
The Oct. 27 edition of the Register carried an article stating that Rep. Ed Pastor (D-Ariz.) recently made a lot of noise at a rally in Washington, protesting the treatment of immigrants (“Latino Marchers Push for Protection of Rights”). Pastor's concern for immigrants is limited only to those who are already born. He consistently votes against any proposed legislation destined to protect the unborn. His most recent action of this nature was a vote to sustain President Clinton's veto of the Partial-birth Abortion Ban Act.
Urban Kapler
Phoenix, Arizona
Rich Commentaries
We were overjoyed to see, once again, the Sunday Mass commentary (Next Sunday at Mass) by Father Peter John Cameron in the Register.
We take this opportunity to thank him for enriching our faith, not only by his commentaries but also through his many writings, especially those pertaining to the Blessed Mother. May God continue to bless him in all his endeavors. We are ever so grateful for his love of Jesus, Mary and Holy Mother Church.
Mr. and Mrs. Richard Deja
New York, New York
Bridges for Democracy
What a wonderful editorial (“Bridge to the 21st Century”) in the Nov. 3-9 Register. Yes the Catholic wisdom so prevalent in years past in France and Germany must build the bridge if our democracy is to last.
Your summary and analysis of the talk by Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, the Archbishop of Paris, were lucid and right on target. His theme of the motto of the French Revolution—liberty, equality and fraternity—is what we need. Any two of these can degenerate into slavery without the third being active and present.
Thanks again for your newspaper and your intrepid editorials.
Patrick Donohoe
Annapolis, Maryland
Science Lite
This letter is in response to the article entitled “Pontifical Science Academy Banks on Stellar Cast” by Gabriel Meyer in the Dec. 1-7 Register.
The article boasts of the four U.S. appointees to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, listing their educational and professional research backgrounds, but unfortunately little or no evidence is cited to lend support to the Pope's recent statement on evolutionary theories that supposedly account for the biological origins of life.
The closest the report comes to any kind of explanation regarding evolution is the quotation from Dr. Paul Berg: “If you look at the whole picture, there are versions of organisms that are inefficient, these fall away, and we do move finally in a kind of stepwise process.” Is the man talking about macro-evolution, changing from one species to another (which has never yet been proven), or is he talking about small lateral variation changes within a species (micro-evolution)? The other three scientists lend no support toward the theory in this article.
Then there is the statement by Dr. Joseph Murray who does not say anything supporting or refuting evolution but instead comments on the disappointment he has about the Church's teaching on artificial insemination. He said: “Some Church leaders will come down hard on artificial insemination as if we scientists are playing God. We aren't. We're just working with the tools God gave us.” What kind of logic is this? I wonder if some abortionists say the same thing about their tools of the trade. At any rate, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states that artificial insemination is morally wrong.
In summary, the whole article is heavy on personality backgrounds but very light on any kind of hard scientific substance. We need to hear some good solid claims supporting the Pope's statement on evolution.
Phil Drietz
Redwood Falls, Minnesota
Weak Defense
I read with interest Father Robert Imbelli's plea for “Common Ground” (“‘Common Ground’ as Communion—A Witness for the Defense,” Dec. 22- 28). It heartens me to learn that this pastoral initiative invites participants to center more deeply on Christ, the Church and divine worship. What his essay lacks, however, is any reference to “the living Magisterium of the Church” (Donum Veritatis, 21). It's grace, we are told, “seeks to ensure that the people of God remain in the truth which sets free” (DV, 20).
Romanus Cessario OP
Brighton, Massachusetts
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----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Restoring the Queen of Sciences to a Place of Honor DATE: 01/05/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 5, 1997 ----- BODY:By PETER STRAVINSKAS
Father Peter Stravinskas addressed the Cardinal Newman Society's conference on “John Paul II and Catholic Higher Education,” Oct. 19, 1996, in Arlington, Va. (Excerpted)
From the Enlightenment forward, one of the problems theology has had to face is a warped understanding of its nature, so that it has been confused with opinion, superstition, sentiment or ideology. Theology, however, is a science like any other, for it is what Karl Rahner calls “methodical reflection.” That is, there is a body of knowledge and a procedure proper to it, by which an individual may apprehend it. Furthermore, while theology is “done” within the context of faith, it presupposes rationality, whereby we realize that while faith and reason are intimately connected, they are nonetheless distinct.
St. Thomas Aquinas gave classical expression to all this in his Summa. Allow me to summarize his analysis. The Angelic Doctor explains that not all sciences have to be based on “self-evident principles” gained solely from natural intelligence; rather, not a few depend on “higher sciences” as we see optics leaning on geometrical principles or harmony on arithmetical ones. “The teaching of God is such a science,” he declares. “It is based on premises known by the light of a higher science, namely God's own knowledge of himself shared with the blessed in heaven.” Because this is God's “own knowledge of himself,” it is superior to any other form of knowledge; that should not be taken as a negative judgment on other types of knowledge. In point of fact, Aquinas goes on to observe that these “subordinate” sources of data, with which “human reason is more at home,” are actually quite useful to lead human reason “towards what transcends reason.” Notice: He does not say “towards what contradicts reason” because nothing of faith can ever be in opposition to reason—but certain elements can certainly be beyond it.
This notion demands humility among those who practice both the science of theology and the other sciences alike; that is, the theologian must see the value in other disciplines, even as the practitioner of the other sciences must recognize their limitations. What St. Thomas is envisioning here is a kind of symbiotic union between faith and reason.…
THE PLACE OF THEOLOGY IN THE CHURCH
Having come to some appreciation of theology, we must now ask ourselves the place it occupies in the Church. If it is true that theology is that science which enables believers to give a rational, realistic explanation of their faith, in keeping with the injunction of the First Epistle of Peter (cf. 3, 15), then every Christian is called upon to be a theologian in some sense of the word. But theology, in the fullest and most professional sense, is essential to the whole Church's articulation of her faith, and this demands the full-time commitment of individuals who are carefully formed and informed. Cardinal Ratzinger underscored this in his 1990 “Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian,” when he wrote: “Theology has importance for the Church in every age so that it can respond to the plan of God ‘Who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth’ (1 Tm 2, 4). In times of great spiritual and cultural change, theology is all the more important.”…
For theology to be successful, the object of the discipline must be clear: the pursuit of truth. And that calls for gifts of the intellect, to be sure, but also gifts of the spirit and especially the Holy Spirit. Which obviously means that a theologian must be a person of prayer. Furthermore, since theology is a science, the theologian must utilize the methodology proper to his discipline, which is best summarized in the famous dictum of St. Anselm—fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding). Cardinal Ratzinger, in a most felicitous phrase, urges the theologian to “allow his gaze to be purified by faith.”
As a professional scholar, the theologian has the right to what has been dubbed by the academic community as “freedom of research.” However, the Holy See's “Instruction” does not hesitate to caution the theologian of the need to be sure that in the process of research “no element has intruded that is foreign to the methodology corresponding to the object under study.” Essential elements of theological research are acceptance of divine Revelation and attentive listening to the voice of the Magisterium. “To eliminate them,” we read, “would mean to cease doing theology.”
The relationship between the theological community and the Church's Magisterium should be characterized by a collaborative spirit and reciprocity. The work of clarifying and systematizing the teaching of Revelation is gladly given by bishops to those whose training and disposition make them best suited for this task. This collaboration is seen most clearly when a bishop confers upon a theologian a canonical mandate to teach in the name of the Church. Upon accepting that mission, the theologian indicates his willingness to be of service to God's Word and Christ's Church by “making the profession of faith and taking the oath of fidelity.”…
The Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith recalls for us that “this [academic] freedom does not indicate at all freedom with regard to the truth but signifies the free self-determination of the person in conformity with his moral obligation to accept the truth.” Beyond that, “one cannot then appeal to these rights of man in order to oppose the interventions of the Magisterium.” “Such behavior,” we are told, “fails to recognize the nature and mission of the Church which has received from the Lord the task to proclaim the truth of salvation to all men.”…
THE PLACE OF THEOLOGY WITHIN THE UNIVERSITY
At any rate, we are now brought face to face with the specific question placed before us today—how theology is indeed the soul of the university. This will require us to take a look at how theology and philosophy are related to each other and to examine the relationship between theology and the other disciplines.
It would seem that already in the 12th century some people were questioning the suitability of theology as a distinct science, for St. Thomas handles that question in his Summa: “Whether, besides philosophy, any further doctrine is required?” To no one's amazement, he replies in the affirmative: “… in order that the salvation of men might be brought about more fitly and more surely, it was necessary that they should be taught divine truths by divine revelation. It was therefore necessary that, besides philosophical science built up by reason, there should be a sacred science learned through revelation.” Eight centuries later, Karl Rahner devoted an entire entry in his Sacramentum Mundi to the relationship between philosophy and theology. He aptly points out that, given Vatican I's setting forth the difference between the two, Catholic theology does “not merely tolerate philosophy but actually calls for it.” Hence, we are not talking about a kind of peaceful co-existence but of the concrete need of one for the other. To those who think that theology can be omitted from philosophical inquiry, Rahner directs a most poignant reminder: “… philosophy, on principle, can exclude nothing from its critical questioning. It cannot omit the phenomenon of the Christian Faith without giving up its claim to be universal and hence ceasing to be itself.… All philosophy is in fact carried on unconsciously either in faith or unbelief.” Why? Because there is no such thing as “one who is neutral with regard to grace.”
If this is true, then it stands to reason that theology as much as philosophy belongs in a university curriculum—of any university (not just one which operates under religious auspices) which desires to be all-inclusive of the various sciences which lead men to the truth. Even Thomas Jefferson the Deist, who is championed as the great proponent of an absolutist view of the separation of Church and state, insisted that his University, founded in this same State of Virginia where we find ourselves today, would include a department of theology—if for no other reason than to provide the full spectrum of human thought.…
Not only do the secular disciplines need theology, theology needs them. Way back in the second century, Tertullian thought he was asking a rhetorical question when he demanded, “What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens?” By which, he meant that theology could surely go her own way with nary a connection to philosophy or any other secular field. The Church, however, never bought Tertullian's point of view on this; the proof of this assertion can be located in the historical fact that in the very midst of what has been dubbed “the age of faith,” the Church began the university system. There is a connectedness and interdependence between and among the various branches of knowledge, human and divine.
When theologians desire to go their own way in blissful isolation from the rest of truth-seekers, they exhibit the same kind of classical hubris that we find so reprehensible among rabid secularists. So, yes, theology can overstep its bounds, and history gives us ample, embarrassing examples of this. More prelates and theologians need to have the humility and wisdom of a Cardinal Baronius who, during the Galileo controversy, treated as a truism the line: “The Scriptures tell us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.” Pope John Paul II—the professor of philosophy as well as the chief teacher of Divine Revelation in God's Church—has situated himself firmly within the Baronius camp.…
Who should be “doing theology” in a Catholic university, and under what conditions? You will remember that at the beginning of this paper, I noted that the theologian needed to be holy—or at least seeking holiness. This must be underscored at this point in our considerations. One cannot profess to speak about the all-holy God without being in a relationship with Him. The Byzantine liturgy, at the invitation to Holy Communion, has the priest proclaim, “Hagia hagiois” (Holy things for the holy). Without any mental gymnastics, I think we can honestly apply that line to theologians and their work on behalf of the People of God.…
And granting that the theologian is a believer in the transcendent, that is not enough. After all, St. James tell us that “even the demons believe but tremble” (2, 19). No, the theologian must also be part of the Church or, as I am fond of phrasing it, that person must “love the Church,” relating not to an impersonal institution but to one whom St. Paul would have us regard as both the Bride of Christ (Eph 5, 22-33) and our Mother (Gal 4, 26). Furthermore, such an individual must give evidence of attempting to live the truth of Christ. Never should Christ's denunciation of certain of the religious leaders of His own day be able to be said of those who teach theology in our Catholic institutions of higher learning: “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses seat; so practice and observe whatever they tell you, but not what they do; for they preach, but they do not practice” (Mt 23, 2f).
Rightly, then, does the Code of Canon Law stipulate: “In Catholic universities it is the duty of the competent statutory authority to ensure that there be appointed teachers who are not only qualified in scientific and pedagogical expertise, but are also outstanding in their integrity of doctrine and uprightness of life” (c. 810).…
Because those who teach theology in Catholic universities are believers who love Christ and His Church; because they are committed to the truth as Christ's Holy Spirit preserves it in His Church; because they are intent on using their vocation to achieve their own salvation and to aid in that of others; for all these reasons, they will never react defensively or hostilely to the engagement of the Church's bishops in this whole scheme of things. As Pope John Paul noted in Ex Corde Ecclesiae, bishops “should be seen not as external agents but as participants in the life of the Catholic university” (n. 28). That is so because revelation is an integral aspect of “doing” Catholic theology, and the principal guardians and transmitters of Revelation are the bishops. Therefore, theologians that fail to accept that fact of life have failed to understand Catholic theology and do not use the methodology proper to their science. Which is to say that, on that score, they fail as Catholic theologians.
But more than a century before the present Holy Father, Cardinal Newman—that great advocate of academic freedom—was capable of stating in the strongest language: “Hence, a direct and active jurisdiction of the Church over [a Catholic university] and in it is necessary, lest it should become the rival of the Church with the community at large in those theological matters to which the Church is exclusively committed.”…
When I was a boy, we were told that theology was deemed “the queen of the sciences.” Today, both within secular academia and the ecclesiastical scene, theology often has a hard time claiming little more than serfdom. Largely, however, it is the fault of many of her own. We need to help her regain her former dignity. That will only happen when she is re-oriented toward the King. May that be the goal toward which we all work, and may we all live long enough to re-enter that Promised Land where theology will once more reign as Queen.
Father Stravinskas is editor of The Catholic Answer and provost of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in Mt. Pocono, Pa.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Father Stravinskas ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Ins and Outs of Hospital Mergers, or: How Canon Law Watches Over Vital Interests DATE: 01/05/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 5, 1997 ----- BODY:By BISHOP JOHN MEYERS
Bishop John Meyers of Peoria, Ill., Delivered the following address Nov. 9 at a meeting of the Catholic Medical Association in Scottsdale, Ariz. (Excerpted)
MY FIRST area of concern is perhaps the largest and the one most in need of urgent attention: the on-going evolution of healthcare delivery and the apparently necessary alignment of free-standing healthcare facilities with other such entities in collaborative efforts to provide a full range of services. The partnering that is now in frantic progress is bringing Catholic hospitals into a wide variety of relationships with Other Catholic and non-Catholic providers. Each of these partnerships is almost as unique as snowflakes. However, all of them involve the raising of the question of the relationship between ownership, sponsorship and control. These are canonical realities of concern to both those directly engaged in the apostolate and to the bishops in whose jurisdiction these entities exist.
There are several canonical concerns of great magnitude regarding the alteration of these three fundamental realities all of which revolve around the resultant “identity” of the newly aligned entity. Let me share some [stipulations] of the Code of Canon Law regarding the Church's worldly possessions. The Church owns property for one of three reasons: the worship of God, the housing of the Church's ministers and for works of apostolic charity. Catholic identity is bestowed upon an apostolate by a canonically recognized individual (usually a corporate person) known as a public juridic person. Apublic juridic person can be a diocese, parish, religious institute (such as an order of nuns), etc. If this public juridic person is a diocese or an order, one or more individuals are designated to represent the interests and authority of the public juridic person on the governing bodies of a given apostolate. These representatives are called “canonical stewards.” It should be noted that in the case of hospitals owned by religious orders, for example, the order itself is the public juridic person, certain individual Sisters who serve on boards of trustees are designated as cannonical stewards and the hospital itself is an incorporated apostolate of the public juridic person. It has no Catholic identity of itself apart from the sponsorship of the public juridic person. “Sponsorship,” then, is the relationship between the public juridic person and its incorporated apostolate (hospital) by which the apostolate enjoys Catholic identity. Sponsorship takes concrete form through “ownership” and “control.”…
In the United States, “control” is exercised by reserving fundamental governing powers to the canonical stewards by means of whom the public juridic person stands as the sole member of the corporation of the incorporated apostolate. These reserved powers include the determination of the mission and philosophy of the incorporated apostolate, the sole right to alienate the property, naming of the board of directors and the CEO of the facility, and the like—all this beyond the control of the board of trustees. In this way, the public juridic person, fundamentally responsible for fidelity to the faith obligations of the incorporated apostolate, has ultimate and final say in the most basic characteristics of the apostolate.
We say, however, that everyone in the Church has a boss. Not even the public juridic persons of the religious orders have the last word. The Church is very solicitous with regard to her property inasmuch as generous people of good will have given it in good faith to the patrimony of the Church to be used in a certain way. Alienation of any property owned by the Church in excess of $3 million requires both consultation with the local bishop and the permission of the Holy See.
Today's healthcare scenario is characterized by “merger-mania.” Often, in non-Catholic merger negotiations, the main concern is who will be CEO and who will be the chairman of the board. The Church's questions would be totally other. The Church is “mission-driven,” not “margin-driven.” My concern is this: In any given proposal of partnering (especially with non-Catholic providers) how can we make sure that authentic and credible Catholic identity is maintained? The Church is clearly contributing to the common good through the provision of health care and she does so in imitation of Christ and in obedience to his command to heal and to teach.…
[I'm also concerned] about the impact of managed care on the very heart of the art of medicine: the professional-patient relationship. Financial constraints, HMO expectations, government regulations and the all-pervading threat of malpractice litigation are turning “visits to the doctor” into “studies in constitutional law.” Is this what you envisioned when you first decided to study medicine? Is it a blessing from on high that managed care leans in the direction of “not treating” and discourages overuse of the health care system? Isn't this the same complaint we had about purely symptomatic medicine that had an inherent preference to treat the stroke, but not pay for the blood pressure medicine that would have prevented it? It is my concern that while over-emphasis on technology will continue to de-personalize the professional-patient relationship, managed care will continue this trajectory by replacing the human drama of sickness and care with a contractual arrangement between a person with damaged parts and the technician that fixes them.
[Then there is] the whole spiritual aspect of illness. The drama of human suffering is precisely that: a human problem. We practical Americans are prone to a total misunderstanding of this. We ask questions about human problems as if they were purely medical or legal issues. That is, we de-personalizewhat is really going on by asking questions only about the medical or legal aspects of the larger human reality of the problem. As a result, we answer a human problem with a medical solution. Inconvenient pregnancy? Solution: abortion (or contraception). Human suffering? Medical solution: suicide.
The Holy Father wrote a pastoral letter entitled On the Christian Meaning of Suffering in 1984. In it he taught that the riddle of suffering is precisely a theological and spiritual question, and can be answered only from a context as broad as the theological and spiritual. The medical and legal contexts, important as they are, are inherently insufficient to address this larger concern. Again, concern about the spiritual aspect of illness is multi-faceted. Given the increasingly short stays patients have in the hospital, they have less time to process their experience in the hospital setting—where at least now there is general respect for pastoral care departments. But even with the marvels of day-surgery, the removal of a gall bladder or cataracts is vastly more significant than filling a tooth. My concern is that the human drama goes unaddressed and is pushed to the side in the wake of clinical efficiency (itself a blessing). Being a doctor is more than being a technician. It is a vocation of presence in the midst of human suffering and offering comfort as well as biological expertise.
Catholic healthcare must remain the treasured ministry that it is by adapting prudently, bravely and confidently.
My final concern can be stated very simply; is there any place for Catholic hospitals and healthcare providers in the future?… I would emphatically say that wherever humanity is, there the Church belongs. The Lord sent his disciples to “all the nations” not just with sacristy duties, but with the Gospel—addressed to every human being about his or her whole being. Humans are persons created “to the image of God,” whose very potential to live as a child of God imparts a radical, inalienable and inviolable dignity with natural rights to life, to liberty and to the pursuit of happiness. Inherent to the Gospel and its message of God's love that creates human dignity is the social nature of the human being, recognized by the whole classical philosophical tradition from the Greeks to modern and contemporary non-revisionists.…
My concern about the spiritual aspect of illness and its potentially dropping through the cracks as acute care treats sicker patients more quickly actually points out a needed piece in the structure of healthcare we can help to create. We all know of patients who are discharged to home situations that are less than ideal for recuperation. Perhaps patients live alone and need medication every four hours. Perhaps other family members are themselves elderly or otherwise unable to assist in a loved one's care. Here, I fully agree with Cardinal Law of Boston who sees a golden opportunity for parishes to step in and help through the creation of parish-based low-tech, high-touch step down/recuperation assistance. This would entail a combination of home care and nurse visitor. Parishes are already geographical realities containing enormous human potential and pastoral assistance and sensitivity. It is Cardinal Law's thought that parish-based healthcare outreach can be for our time as dramatic and important a creation as were the Catholic parochial schools of nearly two centuries ago by St. Elizabeth Ann Seton. While this does not exhaustively treat the question of the spiritual process of suffering, its novelty and potential render it deserving of serious thought.
My … concern about the impact of managed care on the professional-patient relation (and consequently on the fundamental understanding of the practice of medicine) is best addressed by enshrining in medical schools the raison d'être of the clinical practice of medicine: to help people in their illness as much as possible and to respect the privacy of one's patients. It must be within this confidential forum that the truth is told about a patient's condition and medical possibilities (despite the rules of silence about certain treatment modalities that HMOs and other insurers may insist upon). One must follow the Lord's counsel to be as cunning as serpents while as innocent as doves.…
It is the responsibility of the Catholic sponsor to seek out other Catholic providers with which to align before any consideration of non-Catholic involvement. Believe it or not, there is mystifying reluctance to do this in areas, particularly large metropolitan areas, where there are many Catholic providers.
Secondly, in any such proposal of reconfiguration and alignment, if there is no other potential Catholic partner, a thorough investigation of the possibility of acquisition of non-Catholic partners should be made. Third, I would not permit in my diocese any alignment, merger or sale of Catholic healthcare facilities or services to for-profit, investor-owned companies. The National Coalition on Catholic Health Care Ministry has clearly pointed out that such a proposal would involve cooperation with operative philosophies and undertakings incompatible with our operative assumptions, motives and goals. Fourthly, the structuring of any partnership must adhere strictly to the traditional teaching on the principles of cooperation. On this point there are several things that need to be said:
√ I am not in favor of any outright alienation of Church property nor the closure of any aspect of the healthcare mission of the Church. Too often, one hears of the closure of a Catholic hospital or the absorption of a Catholic healthcare system by a non-Catholic group.
As I said, never, under any circumstances, should our hospitals be sold to for-profits.
√ Nor would I easily accept the idea of selling the property to a non-Catholic Holding Company even if it promises to let the Catholic facility operate according to the ERDs. It still constitutes alienation, and despite covenants and contracts, it is no longer “Catholic” because ownership, sponsorship and ultimate control are lost.
√ I would not even approve “virtual alienation” by which the deed to the hospital remains with the Religious sponsor but “control” of the mission is given to a deeply penetrating management corporation.…
In light of all the above, as bishop of Peoria, I have mandated for my diocese a protocol by which Catholic sponsors of healthcare within my diocese must consult with me and my relevant vicars at the beginning, in the course of and at the conclusion of their deliberations with potential partners. Also mandated is a formal structure of ongoing evaluation of past decisions and actions by meetings at regular intervals between representatives of Catholic healthcare sponsors and me or my vicar.
Our healthcare ministry is too precious to lose. And in the words of the Holy Father, “it remains one of our most vital apostolates.” In these times, characterized by fundamental shifts both in the structure of healthcare and cultural shifts in society, Catholic healthcare must remain the treasured ministry that it is by adapting prudently, bravely and confidently—and always in ways that are absolutely faithful to the teaching of Christ and his Church: Our mission is to follow him in his concern for the “least of the brethren.” America hungers for his presence. We must be confident of the leaven we can be with his grace. America will be better served, not by our abdication of this role, not by our allowance of this patrimony to fission out of existence by inaction or despair of being able to remain faithful in hardships, but by a meeting of the present challenges with the serenity, peace and joy that come from confidence in the Lord's presence to our needs, assistance in our projects and blessing on the works of our hands. It's is he who gives life to our deeds.
Perhaps here we find the fundamentally “Catholic moment” for our society, for civilization itself. At the end of this the bloodiest of all centuries, hemorrhaging from war, genocide, wild social projects that sacrifice men for the sake of humanity, current proposals to legalize euthanasia and, of course the torrents of blood spilled in abortion, perhaps this is the Church's hour to focus the world's eyes on a billion corpses and say: Be not afraid! Christ is the way, and the truth and the life. Choose life, not death!
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Bishop John Meyers ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: A Pilgrim's Journal DATE: 01/05/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 5, 1997 ----- BODY:THE OLDEST cathedral in the New World is located in the heart of Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic. It offers daily Mass at 5:00 p.m. I attended it twice during a recent trip to the island country. The same six people were there both times.
In Iguey, the most religious region in the Dominican Republic, there is a well-known shrine to the Blessed Virgin. I traveled there, hoping to see some faith in action. I arrived at 12:15, Sunday afternoon. The shrine was packed. I was elated.
A priest at the lectern was telling the story of Our Lady's miraculous appearance there in the 1600s. At 12:30, he finished his talk and announced that Mass would follow immediately. The shrine soon emptied except for a handful of people.
I arrived in the Dominican Republic three days ahead of a group from Food for the Poor. The Florida-based charity was visiting the Caribbean island country for the first time to assess the best ways to help the needy. I had wanted to get the flavor of Dominican culture, especially the faith life, before the others joined me.
A little more than 500 years after Christopher Columbus encountered the island that became home to the first Catholic churches, schools, universities, civil and ecclesiastical governments in the Americas, the local Church appears to be dwindling away.
The Food for the Poor group visited one desperately poor area after another. In the Dominican Republic, the infant mortality rate is 30 for every 1,000 live births. There is only one medical doctor for every 934 residents. Only 45 percent of the rural population have access to clean drinking water.
The lack of spiritual nourishment is equally dire. The Food for the Poor group visited a parish priest who said he is responsible for more than 210,000 people, the average priest-to-faithful ratio in the Dominican Republic. Some 626 priests serve 6,952,000 Dominican Catholics. The country's total population, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, is 7,610,000.
But a new religious congregation is one sign of hope amidst the island's material and spiritual aridness. Sister Lucia de Pozo, the dedicated young foundress of Las Hermanas del Amor Trinitario (Sisters of Trinitarian Adoration), and her Sisters, serve the poor of Santo Domingo's Mata San Juan. Her congregation is contemplative during the week and active on the weekends. Sister Lucia's beaming face masks the suffering she has seen working among her impoverished countrymen and women. But her intense love for the Church and the Pope sustain her.
The Sisters oversee the running of a two-room school that has few desks and no library or study room. They also hold intensive workshops to train women in domestic skills and men in trade skills. Sister Lucia's ultimate dream is to have a catechetical center to train catechists to evangelize the people, since there is no parish and the area's some 20,000 inhabitants have no way to get to a church. Apriest comes once a month to celebrate the sacraments—Mass, baptisms, marriages, etc.
Food for the Poor supports the school by donating industrial sewing machines for the women's vocational training class and providing food for a daily lunch program for 500 students. The organization is also providing desks, blackboards and other educational material for the primary school students.
Though many groups are working to meet the day-to-day needs of the world's poor, far fewer are dedicated to answering Pope John Paul II's universal call for the new evangelization. But Sister Lucia and her sisters are among them. They understand how deep faith nourishes hearts in mysterious ways. And as much as they strive to bring material aid to some of the poorest people in the world, the sisters'primary focus is helping them to make their pilgrimage through life with at least a minimum of human dignity. Their message hinges on teaching the people to know and love Jesus Christ so that, one day, they will share in his eternal glory.
For more information, write Food for the Poor, Dept. 14197, 550 Southwest 12th Ave., Deerfield Beach, FL 33442.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jay Schwarz ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Next Sunday at Mass DATE: 01/05/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 5, 1997 ----- BODY:Take Me to the River
by PETER JOHN CAMERON OP
Jan. 12, 1997
The Baptism of the Lord
Mk 1, 7-11
WHEN THE evangelist goes out of his way to give us special details in the lean Gospel of Mark, we do well to pay attention. The shortness of Mark's Gospel can be deceiving. Its brevity might tempt us to think that it is less important or comprehensive than the other Gospels. However, the poetic economy Mark employs in narrating the life of Christ calls us to be particularly heedful of its contents.
In five short verses today, Mark tells us so much. Jesus proves the authenticity of John's prophetic preaching by appearing on the scene: “One more powerful than I is to come after me.” But the question arises: If Jesus is more powerful than John, then why does Jesus lower himself actually to turn to the Baptizer to be baptized? This action recounted in Mark's Gospel—which does not contain an Infancy Narrative—is the way Jesus identifies with all human beings in their weakness, humility and need.
Coming to John to be baptized is the first thing Jesus does in the Gospel of Mark. Although he remains supremely more powerful than John or any other human person, the initial impression Jesus wants us to have of him is that he is one of us. He is like us in the way we depend upon each other. Although himself sinless, Jesus is not afraid to be identified with sinners. He docilely approaches the baptismal pool of the Jordan to show us just how approachable he is.
But Jesus does not merely want to assure us of the genuineness of his humanity. He also honors us by drawing us into the glory of his divinity. Immediately on coming up out of the water, “a voice came from the heavens: ‘You are my beloved Son. On you my favor rests.’” What could have remained a private pronouncement to Jesus becomes a public revelation for all those gathered together to confess their sins.
We celebrate the baptism of the Lord to remember how the Father overtly acknowledges Jesus before the world: Jesus is God's “beloved,” his “Son,” and the bearer of his divine “favor.” All those who hear this divine voice in a spirit of true repentance can be certain that what God confides from the heavens becomes the source of our confidence on earth. The Father who acclaims Jesus as his beloved and favored child longs for us to share in that same status. If we come to Jesus to undergo the baptism of his Passion, as Jesus comes to John, then the Father's voice of joy and delight will resound in our lives as well.
The baptism of John prepares God's people for the coming of the Messiah, “who will baptize you in the Holy Spirit.” Christ's baptism in the Jordan, which prefigures his death and Resurrection, awakens our hope to the glory to be revealed in us. The baptism by John disposes us to be receptive of Jesus’presence, while the baptism by Jesus imparts to us the very life of God. If we are not with Jesus at his earthly baptism, we might never believe he has the power to minister the eternal one.
Father Cameron is a professor of homiletics at St. Joseph Seminary, Yonkers, N.Y.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Father Cameron ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: On the Mean Streets of Las Vegas, Making a Living Can Be Moral Liability DATE: 01/05/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 5, 1997 ----- BODY:LAS VEGAS—It's an age-old story. Immigrant comes to the big city in search of a job. He finds one, but only after a great deal of struggle. It's less noble than the work he had in mind.
It's a story that describes the situation of tens of thousands of Latin American immigrants who come to the country's gambling capital, one of the fastest growing cities in the nation. Since many have a limited command of English, are poorly educated, and have few contacts, they're forced to take less than dignified work, often eking out a living distributing pornographic materials.
The immigrants, most of whom are Catholic, say they'd rather not work passing out the booklets that list information about local prostitutes and strippers, but they are unable to find other work. In Vegas, there are more than 100 sidewalk distributors working on any given night. The vast majority of them are Latinos, even though they only account for 11 percent of the town's general population, according to the most recent figures from the city's Chamber of Commerce.
“I don't want to beg,” said Ruben, a 50-year old Mexican immigrant. He began work two years ago and makes $5 per hour passing out a booklet that features pictures of topless women that includes their phone numbers. The booklets standard offer is a nude striptease dance, but services beyond stripping are “negotiable,” according to one of the escort company's phone operators. Prostitution is legal in a county an hour's drive away from here.
Ruben, a legal alien, has worked as a casino porter, but has made ends meet by occasionally passing out the porno booklets. He said he regularly attends Sunday Mass at one of the three Spanish services offered in the city. When asked if he sees a contradiction between his worship and his work, he responded in Spanish: “If it's legal, I can pass it out on the street.”
“Look at these five people,” he said, pointing to his fellow sidewalk distributors from competing companies. “They all work hard, they don't smoke, and they don't cause problems.”
Another distributor, Jose, a 55-year-old Catholic from Mexico, came to the United States three months ago and expects to go back soon. Although friendly, Jose had to cut the conversation short. His Salvadoran boss is interested in rapid distribution and doesn't like him speaking with people on the sidewalks.
Eduardo, a 20-something Guatemalan with five earrings in his right ear and a withered left hand, had saved enough from his $65 per eight-hour workday salary that he can afford to go back home for Christmas.
Luis, a young Salvadoran working up the sidewalk from Eduardo, put it simply: “If you don't work, you don't eat.” He'd rather work in a hotel, where he said unions help to protect the employees' benefits. On his fourth day of work he remembers seeing two employees of a rival company get browbeaten by a beefy bleached-blond man.
“That's not my book!” he yelled at the distributors of a competing company's booklet. He then scolded his young employees for not positioning themselves in front of rival companies to get the first shot at the thousands of convention-goers and tourists making their way back to hotels on “the strip.”
The sidewalk distributors also get hassled by passersby. “Repent!” sneered a man with a white fedora as he pointed his arm out to Jose, as if to stiff-arm him. Only a handful of those walking by actually take the materials.
The sidewalk distributors huddle in groups in front of construction sites and vacant lots near the strip, because the city's gambling barons expelled them from the sidewalks in front of the casinos. In trying to appeal to vacationing families, local merchants have passed ordinances banning distribution of the booklets in front of their buildings. Even with their living distributors relegated to the fringes, the pornographic booklets are hard for visitors to miss. Stacks of them wait in the free newspaper boxes that line the city's sidewalks.
William Murray is based in Kensington, Md. He recently visited Las Vegas.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: William Murray ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Handicapped to Court: 'We Want to Live' DATE: 01/19/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 19-25, 1997 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON, D.C.—With signs and banners and much shouted advice, people with disabilities told the Supreme Court Jan. 6 that “We're not dead yet!” and “We want to live!”
While the court heard oral arguments in two cases that could lead to approval of physician-assisted suicide, protesters outside the court said people with disabilities are already dying from neglect, despair, and pressures to sign “do not resuscitate” orders. “You can't get into a hospital without signing those damn things,” Lucy Gwin told scores of demonstrators in wheelchairs and on crutches. “That ain't right. People are dyin'of this right now. There's a rage for death on the land, and we are the targets.”
Gwin, editor of a disability community magazine called Mouth, suggested that assisted suicide, if legalized, will be used to solve cost problems in health care. “We're too expensive to [keep alive],” she said, but then added, “everybody is too expensive to live.… We got five corporate CEOs who are not too expensive to live, eh? And the rest of us are all gonna die?”
“This is not gonna happen,” she continued. “We're not gonna let them do this to us.” Referring to doctors who have already helped disabled or dying people commit suicide, she added, “I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna die for Jack Kevorkian or Tim Quill.… We will not go quietly.… You're not gonna herd us off one at a time quietly in little rooms. We're gonna be loud about this, because we want to live!”
The demonstration outside the court was organized by Not Dead Yet, a new disability-rights group. Bundled up against the winter cold, the protesters held signs proclaiming “Endangered Species,” “We Are the Target,” “Quiero Vivir” and “Hitler Would Be Proud.”
Supporters of assisted suicide said the “Not Dead Yet” protesters didn't understand the cases the Supreme Court was hearing. “I think they are very sadly misinformed and misguided,” said Roy Torcaso of Wheaton, Md., who had joined a band of Hemlock Society counter-demonstrators. They carried a large Hemlock banner and signs declaring: “We Support Physician Aid-in-Dying.”
The cases before the court, from New York and Washington State, deal with assisted suicide for the terminally ill. Torcaso said mentally-competent persons with “incurable disease”—and great pain that a doctor can't relieve—should have a right to medically-assisted suicide so they won't “botch a do-it-yourself job.”
Pat Belcher of Washington, D.C., a spokesman for the Hemlock demonstrators, said Not Dead Yet protesters had “been manipulated by the Catholic Church” and “filled with propaganda that allegedly doctors will now start killing them willy-nilly.”
Mary Jane Owen, executive director of the National Catholic Office for Persons With Disabilities, said the idea that Catholics controlled the demonstration was “absolutely ludicrous.” But Owen, who is blind and a wheelchair-user, spoke at the “Not Dead Yet” rally and recruited other Catholics to attend it. She remarked that “I am a convert—and in large part because of the Church's stand on life. I wanted to be part of a community that wanted me to live.”
Belcher told the Register: “We seniors, particularly, would like to die with dignity at a time of our choosing when life has become insupportable. If we are terminally ill and in a very undignified state, we do not wish to be in an alien hospital with tubes and so forth coming at us.” He said he believes that “legislation can be so framed that the doctors cannot abuse their privileges and arbitrarily kill people.”
Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, addressing the “Not Dead Yet” rally, said that approving doctor-assisted suicide, would “put us on a very slippery slope—which, indeed, to me looks like a precipice.” He said that assisted suicide would lead “to involuntary euthanasia—just as it has in the Netherlands.” Koop called assisted suicide “the most important and dangerous issue on the American agenda” and “a very real threat to disabled Americans.”
Meanwhile, Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe tried to convince the nine justices inside the court that there's a constitutional “liberty interest … when facing imminent and inevitable death, not to be forced by the government to endure a degree of pain and suffering that one can relieve only by being completely unconscious.”
Tribe and attorney Kathryn Tucker, who also argued for doctor-assisted suicide, had rough sledding inside the court, according to a hearing transcript published in The Washington Post. Even justices thought likely to be sympathetic to their cause asked tough questions.
Lawyers warn against reading too much into such questions, since justices often play the devil's advocate. Still, many foes of assisted suicide were optimistic after the court hearing. “I was somewhat encouraged by the drift of questioning,” Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston told the Register. The cardinal, who heads the Catholic bishops'pro-life committee, stressed the need for better pain control for the dying. He said it's “a particular task for Catholic health care … to show, indeed, how do you die with dignity.We are for that—not for murdering people, but for letting people die with dignity, compassion and love surrounding them.”
Addressing assisted-suicide supporters after the hearing Professor Tribe said the issue “is not a foregone conclusion for a good many of the justices,” but didn't look or sound confident about his side's chances.
Andrew Batavia, a Miami lawyer who wrote a pro-assisted suicide brief, told the group not to be “misled” by the “Not Dead Yet” demonstration. Speaking from his wheelchair, Batavia said there's a “very loud, vocal minority of people with disabilities who are very scared.” While conceding that they “have some legitimate concerns,” he said most people with disabilities support “the right to assisted suicide.”
Whichever way the court goes, the debate over assisted suicide may last a long time. While the court could say that states may ban assisted suicide, that's not the same as saying that they must.
In 1994, Oregon voters approved a law allowing assisted suicide for the dying; but that law is on hold while under court challenge. Since the Oregon vote, said Richard Doerflinger of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, efforts to legalize assisted suicide have failed in every state where proposed. Doerflinger called the “Not Dead Yet” rally “a real watershed” showing that “many, many disability-rights activists have come to see this issue as their own.”
Mary Meehan is based in Rockville, Md.
Should Congress Step in?
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Could Congress step in and ban physician-assisted suicide? “Yes, they could,” said National Right to Life Committee general counsel James Bopp Jr. That “should be considered,” he insisted in a Jan. 7 interview, if there's a serious prospect of states legitimizing the practice. (Oregon did legalize it in a 1994 referendum, but a federal judge found the Oregon law unconstitutional. His decision is on appeal.)
Conservative Republicans in Congress tend to resist further expansion of federal power. Bopp said, however, that “many conservatives recognize that, while they want a limited government, there are legitimate roles for government”—and “the principal role is protecting life.”
But Rep. Charles Canady (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee on the constitution, said last September that he doubted a federal ban would “move forward” in Congress because of “complicated constitutional issues.” Canady, an opponent of assisted suicide, suggested that he and others should instead “continue fighting in the courts” and try to ban the use of federal funds for assisted suicide or euthanasia.
On Jan. 8, the day the Supreme Court heard two cases on physician-assisted suicide, Sen. John Ashcroft (R-Mo.) and Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) announced they'll introduce an anti-funding bill.
According to a description of the bill provided by Sen. Ashcroft's office, however, the bill will not limit withholding or withdrawal “of nutrition or hydration.” Evangelium Vitae states “… when death is clearly imminent and inevitable, one can in conscience ‘refuse forms of treatment that would only secure a precarious and burdensome prolongation of life, so long as the normal care due to the sick person in similar cases is not interrupted’” (65.2). Normal care includes at least nutrition and hydration.
—Mary Meehan
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mary Meehan ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Some Question Panel's Ability to Tackle Religious Persecution DATE: 01/19/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 19-25, 1997 ----- BODY:IN JANUARY 1996, Pope John Paul II called religious persecution “an intolerable and unjustifiable violation … of the most fundamental human freedom, that of practicing one's faith openly, which for human beings is their reason for living.”
A year later, religious leaders, human rights activists and scholars are preparing for the first meeting in Washington, D.C. of the State Department Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad. The 20-member committee was formed last fall and immediately drew kudos as well as questions about how much leverage it will have to fight against religious intolerance.
Persecution abroad ranges from the selling of Christians into chattel slavery in the Sudan to China's history of imprisoning Catholics active in the “underground” Church who professes loyalty to the Pope. The cases of torture and killing of people for their faith include such tragedies as the kidnapping and murder of seven Trappist monks in Algeria last March. Another problem area is Vietnam, where the government reserves the right to appoint Catholic bishops and Buddhist abbots.
John Shattuck, State Department assistant secretary for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, who will chair the committee, said the panel's primary goals include, “fostering greater dialogue between religious communities and the U.S. government, increasing the flow of information to the U.S. government concerning the conditions of religious minorities facing persecution around the world, and informing interested groups and individuals about the U.S. government's efforts to address issues of religious persecution and religious freedom.”
But some observers wonder if the advisory committee has the power to affect change. Supporters point out that there are some strong players on the panel. Among those appointed by former Secretary of State Warren Christopher: Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, of Newark, N.J., and chairman of the U.S. Catholic Conference's (USCC) International Policy Committee; Bishop Ricardo Ramirez of Las Cruces, N.M.; Dr. Don Argue, president of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) and Nina Shea, director of the Puebla Program at Freedom House, a New York-based human rights group. Other committee members represent the Jewish, Muslim and Bahai faiths.
Panelists will serve two year-terms and will meet several times annually. The committee is expected to hold its first meeting by February, said Alexandra Arriaga, a State Department staff member and executive secretary of the panel. No agenda has been set for the meeting yet.
Still, some people concerned with religious persecution issues worry that the panel format might not be the most efficacious way to address the problem. Even some who agreed to serve—including Argue and Shea, whose organization monitors religious liberty around the world—believe a special adviser to the president would be more effective. Despite their concerns, they are willing to give the committee a chance.
“We [hope to] see the issue of religious persecution become a priority for the U.S. government,” said Argue. The NAE's approach “is to give the Clinton administration a chance to show its concern,” said Rev. Richard Cizik, NAE policy analyst. He said the association will continue to use as a tool its Statement of Conscience on Worldwide Religious Persecution that was released one year ago.
But some critics, including Dr. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, are reportedly skeptical that a panel tied to the State Department will be able to function independently and effectively. Land did not respond to requests for an interview. But Michael Horowitz, a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, willingly expressed his concerns. “The people on the committee are well-meaning, caring people of good will, so it's even more insulting. It's like the old joke: If you want to duck a problem, appoint a committee,” he said.
Horowitz called for stronger measures, noting that the 1980s'Campaign for Soviet Jewry resulted in U.S. pressure to allow Jews to emigrate to Israel. “What we did was confront the evil. We did it with the support of the Christian community,” he said. Horowitz, who is Jewish, said the fight against the persecution of Christians “is a way to say ‘thank you.’”
Shea said threats to religious freedom come from the ideological intolerance found primarily in communist countries.
Horowitz and others said Shea would have been an ideal special adviser. Shea did not comment on that recommendation, but said, “I would have preferred an adviser. The committee does not represent all points of view. There are already complaints that there is not a Native American point of view. We'll never satisfy everyone. [The committee is] the best possibility we've ever had, so we'll act in good faith.”
The USCC has thus far stayed out of the committee versus adviser debate. “We are less concerned with the procedural issues than the substantive issues,” said John Carr, who directs the USCC's Department of Social Development and World Peace in Washington, D.C. Carr said the conference concentrates on remedying the U.S. government's “woefully inadequate” response to the issues of religious freedom and persecution. “Time will tell,” he said of the committee's ability to effect change, but added that Archbishop McCarrick's and Bishop Ramirez's presence on the panel is a hopeful sign.
Bishop Ramirez has declined comment until after the committee begins meeting. Archbishop McCarrick was in Israel when contacted by the Register, but Michael Hurley, Newark archdiocesan spokesman, said the prelate is gearing up for the committee's work, adding that “for years, (Archbishop McCarrick) has been closely involved in the monitoring of human rights and religious persecution worldwide.” Hurley said the archbishop has negotiated with Fidel Castro, assisted in getting families out of Russia and “jogged the conscience of the U.S. government when it came to Bosnia.” Archbishop McCarrick was also a strong advocate for bringing Catholics, Muslims and Serbian Orthodox together for dialogue in 1992 in the former Yugoslavia.
“He brings a great deal of knowledge, compassion and idealism to the committee,” said Hurley. “He is very practical. He knows it's not just dialogue.” Hurley said the archbishop hoped to “push for the U.S. and the Church to have a very strong voice in meeting religious persecution head on.”
Shea, who also brings a solid background of fighting religious persecution to the committee, was most recently involved in the case of an American woman jailed in Vietnam last fall for distributing religious tapes and pens with crosses on them. The U.S. State Department treated the detainment of Man Thi Jones as a criminal case, said Shea. But she and other religious freedom advocates maintain the arrest amounted to a human rights violation. Jones was released last month after paying a $1,000 fine for disseminating religious material and for starting a charity without government permission.
Shea said threats to religious freedom come from the ideological intolerance found primarily in communist countries including China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea and Cuba. Militant Islamist movements are also persecuting Christians in the Sudan, Pakistan, Arabia, Egypt and Algeria, she said.
In the quest for religious liberty, the USCC has placed China, the Middle East and the Sudan on its high priority list, said Carr. The conference opposes Most Favored Nation status for China until human rights conditions are corrected, reported Jesuit Father Drew Christiansen, director of the USCC's Office of International Justice and Peace.
Father Christiansen said USCC strategies include letter writing campaigns and recruiting business people to educate their Chinese counter-parts about Church concerns. Interreligious dialogue, he added, is essential to establishing a unified front to religious persecution. He said that in Eastern Europe, an agreement between Catholics and Orthodox has led to a decrease in tensions in regions affiliated with the Moscow patriarchate.
When the committee meets, Shea and Argue are likely to reiterate proposals to change Immigration and Natural Services policy to make granting of religious asylum easier. Shea said other actions could be taken to ensure religious freedom. “Every opportunity should be exploited. We might envision a noisy protest or boycott,” she said.
Committee members also plan to continue fighting for religious freedom outside the confines of the panel. “If [the committee] doesn't work, we won't let this die,” said Argue.
Horowitz also projected action in the year ahead. “It could be a run-away committee,” he said, “running away from the State Department. Whatever happens in the committee, this movement has to raise the stakes.” He also anticipated “real legislative proposals” from the 105th Congress, but declined to elaborate on what those might be.
Committee members will also work to remove an old obstacle that Shea called “secular myopia.” “The Western elite is so used to thinking of Christians as persecutors, not the persecuted,” she said. “We're all part of the body of Christ. We're compelled to help people abroad.”
Liz Swain is based in San Diego, Calif.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Liz Swain ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Dr. Nathanson's Stirring Odyssey Continues to Inspire DATE: 01/19/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 19-25, 1997 ----- BODY:ADMITTEDLY, HE's carrying heavy moral baggage. But at 70, Dr. Bernard Nathanson is beginning life anew as a Catholic.
If personal history says anything, one can rest assured that Nathanson, who was baptized by New York Cardinal John O'Connor at St. Patrick's Cathedral last month, will not elect to become a Catholic of the lukewarm variety. The physician has shown that he rarely does anything half way.
Not only was he in favor of legal abortion, but in the early 70s, Nathanson, an obstetrician and gynecologist, oversaw some 75,000 abortions and was a founder of the organization that later became the National Abortion Rights Action League. In 1979, convinced by scientific evidence that abortion was wrong, he wrote a book called Aborting America. It was part exposé of the abortion industry and part personal confession. He later produced The Silent Scream, a video depicting the sonogram of a live abortion, which riled abortion-rights advocates and rallied pro-lifers in the mid-80s.
Today, the former self-described Jewish atheist is a member of the Catholic Church he once fought so vociferously. He became a Catholic, he said in an interview from his office on Manhattan's swank Upper East Side, largely for personal reasons that transcend the abortion issue. “I finally recognized that time is running out [on my life],” said Nathanson, the famous horn-rimmed glasses perched on a face that appears much younger than his 70 years.
The walls of his office between Lexington and Park Avenues feature photos of the famous, including former President Ronald Reagan, Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II, and the not-so-famous, including hundreds of pictures of babies he has delivered. On one wall is a Doonesbury cartoon featuring a blistering satirical attack on The Silent Scream, an indication that he can accept criticism with good humor. Even so, he acknowledges that he has rarely felt comfortable in life, despite his own professional success.
Catholicism, he said, provides “the relief of existential angst” that he has felt much of his life and “the knowledge that I am not alone on a cooling rock in a vacant universe.” A child of the enlightenment, he was raised by secularized Canadian Jews who encouraged his professional and intellectual achievements. But, “we were left without the mystery,” he said.
Perhaps most telling, he said the Church offers the promise of forgiveness. “The moral baggage that I carry into the next world would have been unbearable without it.”
That baggage, he said, includes his well-publicized involvement in abortions. But it also includes personal struggles, including three divorces and a difficult relationship with his adult son. “My personal life has not been a paradigm of virtue. My major problem was my pride and vanity. I felt it was weighing me down and interfering with virtually everything of consequence,” he said
Nathanson's recent book, The Hand of God (Regnery Press) details his religious conversion and includes a frank description of his life, including impregnating two women to whom he was not married. In one case, he personally performed an abortion that ended the life of his own unborn child.
In the circles he travels, he acknowledged, conversion from secularism to Catholicism is a rarity. While he has heard no expressions of disrespect for his decision, there is, he's sure, puzzlement about his decision. “People tend to be very wary and tiptoe very gingerly around me, because I've [gone through] conversions which are inexplicable in normative terms. I guess they just stop and say, ‘there goes Nathanson again.’” But, he has concluded, “each of us has to look after our own souls.”
He emphasized that his baptism is not intended as a slight against Judaism. “I will always be Jewish. I will leave nothing behind,” he said, noting that he can still speak decent Yiddish. But, he added, his Jewish heritage largely consisted of an ethnic identity, not an observant religious practice.
Nathanson's road to the Church began about five years ago during extended discussions with Father John McCloskey, an Opus Dei priest who lives in a community near Princeton University. The conversion was set into motion by the physician's scholarly interest in morality and religious questions. Then it grew deeper. “It has moved by grace over time, from intellectual curiosity to something more personal in his case,” said McCloskey. “A lot of what I did was as a facilitator, opening up the treasures of Catholicism to him.”
The priest encouraged Nathanson to read, including a book by Dr. Karl Stern called The Pillar of Fire. Dr. Stern, a professor of psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal, was, ironically “the best teacher I ever had,” recalled Nathanson, a McGill graduate. At the time he attended McGill, he had no idea that his Jewish professor had converted to Catholicism. He saw the book as a sign leading him to the Church.
Another sign was his impression of Catholic pro-lifers he had met through years of speaking at conferences. “I wondered how those people could be so loving for a constituency from whom they would never get a thanks,” he said.
Today, Nathanson is both optimistic and pessimistic about the problem of abortion in this country. Apossible solution, first outlined in Aborting America, would be the adoption of fetuses while they are still in the womb by placing them with host mothers who would agree to bring them to term. “It may be technologically feasible soon,” he said, noting, however, that that proposal is “a solution, not an answer.”
He said that the argument over late term ‘partial-birth abortions’ is really a discussion of infanticide.
He said that the argument over late term “partial-birth abortions” is really a discussion of infanticide, although the term is rarely used. “It's almost too much to bear that we find ourselves down so far as to find that acceptable,” he said. “Violence, pornography, and capital punishment also contribute to society's malaise,” he said. “It's all the same primary tumor. There are all kinds of issues that will have to be addressed eventually.”
For much of the past two years, he has spent time reflecting on many of these issues as a doctoral student in bioethics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. He gave up his medical practice and dropped everything to pursue his interest in moral concerns surrounding medical issues. “I felt I had to do it. It was like my becoming a Catholic,” he said.
One of his classes featured The Eclipse of Reason, a video produced by Nathanson that strongly states his pro-life views. He expected that students might be repelled by it; he was surprised to find that his colleagues said that the video caused them to look at the abortion issue in a new way.
When it came to medical issues, his professors at Vanderbilt often called upon him for expert advice. Just a few weeks after his baptism, he received his doctorate from Vanderbilt. He is unsure about what he wants to do next.
“The world is not waiting for another Park Avenue gynecologist,” he said. “Maybe (I'm moving to) a bigger canvas infused with religious belief.… Maybe I'll be of more use to the moral community,” he said, noting that he may have a greater impact now that he is a Christian. It's something he feels that he has been called to for a long time.
Asked about how he felt after his baptism, he said there were no great spiritual revelations or mystical feelings. “It was a speed bump, not a jolt. I've been running towards Jesus Christ all my life,” he said. Then he quickly corrected himself so as not to make the impression that the journey has been along a straight and narrow path. “I've been running away from him or towards him,” he said.
Peter Feuerherd is based in New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Peter Feuerherd ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Much Credit for Guatemalan Peace Goes to Church DATE: 01/19/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 19-25, 1997 ----- BODY:A WEEK after signing the peace agreement that ended Guatemala's 36-year-old civil war—and that, for the time being, ended all armed conflict in Central America—former guerrilla leader Jorge Rosals surprised almost everybody when he unveiled his future plans: “I would not like to create a left-wing party, but a broad-based political movement that could include socialists and Christians.”
Coming from Rosals, who only a month before had led the Marxist guerrilla National Revolutionary Union of Guatemala (URNG) as “Commander Carlos Gonzales,” the conciliatory gesture seemed almost unbelievable. But after years of effort to end the civil war that left 150,000 dead, 50,000 missing and cost the economically fragile country of 10.5 million inhabitants $20 billion, a process of genuine reconciliation is a dire necessity.
The guerrilla movement in Guatemala dates back to the early 1960s, when a group of disillusioned army soldiers created the Rebel Movement November 13(MR-13). The MR-13 failed in its goal to force the resignation of then-President Miguel Ydigoras, but it inspired three other Marxist groups—the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP), the Guatemalan Workers' Party (PGT) and the Revolutionary Organization of the People in Arms (ORPA). The movements eventually teamed up, becoming the URNG in 1982.
Unlike other revolutionary movements in Central America, such as the Farabundo Marti of El Salvador or the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the URNG never came close to toppling the government. It did, however, achieve broad support in rural areas and staged successful military strikes against government forces.
The guerrillas high moment came early, in 1968, before the formation of the URNG, when they killed Vice-Minister of Defense Ernesto Molina. But a series of military defeats and internal power struggles often put them on the defensive. Analysts today agree that the succession of the military governments of Gens. Lucas Garcia, Efrain Rios Montt and Oscar Humberto Mejia, which regularly violated human rights, created a hospitable environment in rural areas for the rebels' frequent strikes against the state.
Then, in 1988, Vinicio Cerezo—the first democratically-elected president in three decades—inaugurated the peace process by inviting the URNG to a first round of informal dialogue in Madrid, Spain. But steady steps toward peace didn't begin until two years later when the rising number of victims and economic damage led the government to initiate the first official face-to-face dialogue with the rebels in Oslo, Norway. The meeting was described by one of the participants as “just yelling at each other across the table.”
Another attempt at dialogue, in January 1993, also became a finger-pointing session, convincing both sides that an impartial mediator was badly needed. They agreed it should be the Catholic Church. By coincidence, the primary representatives— Jose Ascensio for the government, and Rodrigo Asturias for the URNG—were once friends and classmates at a Catholic school. Another key player, Bishop Rodolfo Quezada Toruno of Zacapa and Santo Cristo de Esquipulas, already had built a reputation for his skill in building agreement in a country shaken by tensions between guerrilla groups, paramilitary forces and numerous political parties. He was popularly known as “Monsenor Dialogo” (Msgr. Dialogue).
Appointed as head of the Commission for National Reconciliation, Bishop Quezada Toruno brokered a cease-fire agreement with the guerrillas, while the government accepted the creation of a Truth Commission that would investigate human right violations. Both sides agreed to Ramiro de Leon Carpio, a respected lawyer, as overseer of the commission's work.
But in October 1993, the lawyer proposed a peace agreement that was unequivocally rejected by the URNG, bringing the talks nearly to a halt. “This cannot be a showdown of strength, this must be a serious [journey] toward dialogue, for the good of our people,” Bishop Quezada Toruno said in a strongly-worded message at the time. Soon after, he played his strongest card: He quit as head of the commission.
From then on, Church involvement in the negotiations became indirect, but at the same time it became more efficient. Bishop Quezada Toruno moved more freely from side to side, while the bishops' conference, mostly through Archbishop Prospero Penados del Barrio, of Guatemala City, increased public pressure, either congratulating each advancement or denouncing counter-productive moves by either side.
The rocky dialogue process finally bore fruit when, following a new schedule proposed by the bishops' conference, both sides agreed to start new face-to-face conversations in February 1995, this time under the auspices of the United Nations.
Alvaro Arzu, who in January 1996 became the country's fourth democratically-elected president in succession, carefully followed the agenda set by the United Nations with the support of the bishops' conference. Finally, the peace agreement was signed last Dec. 29.
The accord has three stages. The first, which will conclude April 15, calls for the government to provide all URNG members with legal documents. It also says that an official institution should be established to pay reparation to all Guatemalans who suffered human rights violations at the hands of the army. Programs for land and education reform are also to be discussed. The guerrillas, for their part, will turn in their weapons and disband all their military units.
The second stage, which lasts until the end of the year, requires the government to begin investing in housing and healthcare. It will be required to invest at least 1.5 percent of the national budget to improve the living conditions of Guatemala's Indian population.
The third and final stage will conclude in the year 2000. According to the agreement, the government must then have achieved the social reforms launched this year, assimilated the former guerrilla members into society, reduced the role of the army to matters of national defense and applied the “Law of Reconciliation.”
The reconciliation provision is the most controversial element of the treaty. Critics claim that its ambiguous language provides a loophole of impunity for all those, especially army officers, who violated human rights during the war years. “I don't like the amnesty law,” said Rigoberto Menchu, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for her efforts to help the country's indigenous peoples. “To prove we have a credible system of justice, we have to know the truth.”
Apart from overcoming skepticism in a country jaded by 36 years of fighting, observers say another formidable task will be raising the money—estimated at $3.6 billion—to implement plans set out in the peace accord.
Bishop Quezada Toruno said the accord could be stronger, but he is nonetheless hopeful about it. “The agreement is still weak [when it comes to] social issues, such as land reform, but the important thing here is that more than 350 items have been discussed and accepted. This shows the good will of both sides and also the desire of the people for a final peace,” he said.
“Msgr. Dialogue” acknowledged that the peace agreement includes 95 percent of the proposals made by the Guatemalan bishops'conference, but he insists that “peace has been a national achievement and no group can claim it as its own victory.”
For Bishop Quezada Toruno the peace agreement is definitive, “because I see a new mentality both in the former guerrillas as well as in the military.” He noted that there is still a long way before reconciliation will be fully achieved. “The worst heritage of these 36 years of war is [the rise of] a culture of violence in which many believe that killing is the best way to solve problems or [address] differences,” said the bishop. “I think that the main task of the Church now will be to [help a spirit of] reconciliation become a new mentality, a new culture.”
Alejandro Bermudez is based in Lima, Peru.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Alejandro Bermudez ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Pro-life Democrat, Mark Shields Doesn't Flinch DATE: 01/19/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 19-25, 1997 ----- BODY:Mark Shields, 59, is a veteran of many political campaigns. A native of Weymouth, Mass., and an alumnus of the University of Notre Dame, Shields worked for Sen. Robert Kennedy (D-N.Y.) in the Nebraska, Oregon and California (where he was assassinated) presidential primaries of 1968. He has held leadership positions in political campaigns in 38 states, including that of Ohio Gov. John Gilligan, who won in 1970. Shields also directed Sen. Edmund Muskie's (D-Maine) run for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination.
In 1979, he turned to newspaper and television journalism. After a two-year stint as a political editorial writer and columnist for The Washington Post, Shields started writing a syndicated column—which has run now for 15 years—and began appearing on NBC and CBS News. He appears as principal analyst, with Paul Gigot, on the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour and as moderator on CNN's program, Capital Gang.
Shields and his wife recently celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary. They have a 24-year-old daughter who has taught at an inner city Catholic boys'school in Boston.
One of the county's most prominent pro-life Democrats, Shields recently spoke with the Register at his Washington office.
Register: How did you arrive at your pro-life position?
Shields: I hope that my Catholic teaching and faith have influenced and shaped my public attitudes and personal philosophy in a preference for the poor; economic and social justice; and support for civil rights. It's a part of a whole: I can't say I came to my pro-life position separately from other Catholic teaching.
I always felt the case made by Cardinal Bernardin for the “seamless garment;” was persuasive and totally consistent with the economic and social teachings of the Church. His death is an enormous loss for the Church and the country. I wish I could say there was an epiphany in arriving at my pro-life stance. “There I was waiting for the Metro (subway train) late at night and had this remarkable insight,” but I can't. I've been writing more lately about how pro-choice became the dominant position in the Democratic party and how the prolife argument has been stifled.
Pennsylvania Gov. Robert Casey being prevented from addressing the Democratic Convention in 1992, for example?
I couldn't believe that the governor of one of the biggest states was denied the chance to speak. At first, they said it was because he hadn't endorsed Clinton, but they allowed the Republican pro-choice woman who ran against Casey in 1990 a chance to speak at their convention.
I remember managing Sargeant Shriver's campaign in 1972 (as George McGovern's running mate) and Casey showing up in Pennsylvania, where he was solicitor general. We were about to have our heads handed back to us in the election in every state. When you're working in a campaign that's doing so poorly, you remember the people who showed up because everyone else had bizarre excuses for why they couldn't be there. “Gee, I'd love to be with you, but my nephew's graduating from driving school.” Bob Casey's loyalty and fidelity to the Democratic Party is long established. The fact that he was deprived of a chance to speak was offensive to me.
Do you think the country is pro-life or pro-choice?
It's not unique to me, but there's the insight that America is pro-choice but antiabortion. When you ask Americans “what about a woman who consults with her conscience, her confessor and her physician who faces a difficult, painful choice— should that be illegal?” They say “no.” But when you ask them what they think about abortion, they say “I hate it.” So there's this enormous ambivalence about the issue.
There's no question that the advocates of legalized abortion have been, for the most part, more comfortable dealing with the media. They have access to the media, by virtue of their educational, social and economic backgrounds. They've been able to frame the debate. As long as the debate is about who is deciding, it favors the prochoice side. When it shifts to what is being decided, then the pro-life position becomes a lot stronger and more persuasive.
Was that the case with partial-birth abortion?
Yes. What was being decided on was so much like a baby that the act itself was so gruesome to so many people that it became a horrendous act. It is an issue that goes without being debated in most upperincome, upscale circles. The assumption is that you're pro-choice because you believe in women's rights, as opposed to robbing them of their opportunity.
They've also made their arguments to a very friendly audience in the media. The editor of political newsletter, a very smart Republican, said that on the press's part, there's a tendency to overanalyze the election results when a pro-choice candidate wins. If the pro-life candidate wins, they tend to ignore it and act like his being a pro-life candidate didn't play a role in the victory.
There's no diabolical conspiracy; it's more like the military service issue: People at Washington dinner parties don't know people who are serving in the military, just like they don't know pro-lifers. It's easy to caricature the other side when you don't know them.
Do any examples of that kind of caricaturing come to mind?
When the Webster v. Casey decision by the Supreme Court came down, the bias showed itself. On Nightline, they had Faye Waddleton, the president of Planned Parenthood representing the pro-choice side, and Randall Terry, the leader of Operation Rescue, for the pro-life side. Here's this drop-dead, gorgeous black woman who speaks like Winston Churchill, and there's Randall Terry. Everyone puts a face to a movement—we all do—by whom we quote. Wouldn't you rather have Helen Alvare, the U.S. bishops' pro-life spokeswoman, speak than Randall Terry? I sure would.
It's the messenger, not the message.
What is your sense of where the partial-birth abortion ban issue will go from here?
The Democrats don't want sustaining the president's partial birth abortion to be a centerpiece of the 1996 election. Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) in late November said that he was going to push for legislation that would severely limit, circumscribe and define when partial birth abortion would be allowed, a move he feels 100 senators could support. I think that's an overly optimistic perspective on his part.
At some point, the pragmatic nature of Americans wins out. We are not a terribly ideological people, we are more pragmatic, with certain guiding principles. Our politics is not narrowly ideological, with a farmer's party, a religious party and a green party. We have two broadly-based parties. There's no question that partial-birth abortion is very unpopular with the population at large. If there's a follow-up campaign on it, it will be a losing issue for the Democrats.
What are your thoughts on the death penalty?
It's interesting to look at the public attitudes over the past 30 years. In 1963, three out of four Americans who where polled said they trusted the federal government to do what was right all of the time or most of the time. Ten years later, after President Lyndon Baines Johnson, Vietnam, Spiro Agnew and Watergate, the number went down to 49 percent of Americans. Athird of those who professed to trust the government changed their mind.
By 1983, it had dropped to 26 percent of Americans. Now, it's about one in five Americans who trust the federal government to do what is right all of the time or most of the time.
Part of the optimism and confidence many Americans had in the federal government apparently has to do with the death penalty. In 1963, a majority of Americans opposed the death penalty. Now, they overwhelmingly support it. Random acts of impersonal and threatening violence have contributed.
Some credit has to go to local television news, which loves to lead off the 11 o'clock news with the latest grisly murder. Crack cocaine and drugs have increased the level of violence in the inner cities. Cardinal Bernardin's message opposing the death penalty, to me, was admirable and courageous.
What should we look for in the next few years politically?
It's a pretty dismal time, frankly. (The '96 election) was a dismal campaign. Hubert Humphrey once said that the great thing about running for president is that you have a chance to tell people what's really important. It was a chance that was blown by Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. It was a very tactical race. Clinton positioned himself effectively against the excesses of the Gingrich-led Republican Congress. He became the remainder man, as it were, of reasonableness, protecting government legitimately. He was helped by the excesses of the other side, there's no question. And Dole never made the case for why we should change.
The issues went undebated. We've done a marvelous job of eliminating poverty among people older than 65 in this country. There are very few places in America where you can go today and not see widows having a nice lunch. We've extended the life expectancy through universal health coverage … those are great achievements. We're saying that if you make it to 65, you've got something to look forward to. But what about kids?
The tension in our political system right now is what I call the Protestant versus Catholic tension. Protestantism—and I don't mean any disrespect—is a more individualistic ethic. If you're a good person in your own right and are individually kind to the people around you, then you've fulfilled your mission. Whereas the [Catholic] sense of community is that we're all responsible for the good of the community; and that's also how we're judged.
How do you resolve that tension?
That's the struggle. It's a philosophical struggle as well. You can see it in America's history—the struggle between individualism and the responsibilities to the community. America is a nation that needs big dreams and big ambitions, and we don't have any right now. The '96 campaign was not one of big dreams or big ambitions. In fairness to the leadership we have, it's tough—when only 28 percent of the people have confidence in the federal government— to launch a bold initiative. But the campaign that just passed was an opportunity lost.
There are good reasons to be suspicious of government, but there are a lot of things we should be proud of. Contributing to the suspicion, I think, is a divided government. For most of a quarter century, we had the Republicans dominating the White House and Democrats controlling Capitol Hill. The two parties didn't simply attack each other—which is fine—they also attacked that branch of government that the other party controlled. As a result, there was no celebration, no acknowledgment of our successes.
Can you give an example?
Take the environment. In 25 years, we have gone from a point where three-quarters of the nation's rivers and lakes were unswimmable and unfishable to one where three-quarters are swimmable and fishable. We saved the Great Lakes.
We removed 98 percent of the lead from the air, despite the direst warnings of our good friends in management and labor in Detroit that it was going to kill the automobile industry. Those stories go untold.
We have the greatest public university system in the world: Wisconsin, Michigan, California, Texas, Virginia. It's an amazing achievement. We started to build it in the middle of the Civil War—signed by Abraham Lincoln—at a time when only one-half of 1 percent of Americans had been to college.
The confidence required to do something about the problems that remain central to our society only comes from acknowledgment that we've succeeded in the past.
—William Murray
----- EXCERPT: Defense of the unborn 'is part of' Catholic social teaching ----- EXTENDED BODY: William Murray ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Physician-Assisted Suicide Rejected in New AMA Survey DATE: 01/19/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 19-25, 1997 ----- BODY:CHICAGO—When given all the facts about physician-assisted suicide and such alternatives as hospice care and natural death, Americans by a 5-to-1 margin said they would choose the alternatives if terminally ill, according to a new American Medical Association survey.
Titled End-of-Life Care Survey, the report was released in Chicago Jan. 6, just two days before the U.S. Supreme Court was to hear oral arguments in two widely publicized physician-assisted suicide cases.
“This survey reinforces our belief that, once informed of their available options and rights at the end of life, most patients would opt for comfort care and natural death,” said Dr. Nancy Dickey, chairwoman of the AMAboard, in releasing the study.
“The notion that a terminal or advanced chronic illness is a sentence to a horrible, painful death is simply not true,” noted Dickey, who said the survey highlighted a critical need for public education on the issue.
“Through hospice care, providing adequate pain medication and encouraging advance care planning to clarify patients'wishes for end-of-life care, physicians can offer patients a dignified death with quality, autonomy and value,” she added.
The telephone survey was conducted for the AMA by the Global Strategy Group of New York, which used a random digitdial method to interview 1,000 adults nationwide Dec. 9-11. The survey has a sampling error of plus or minus 3.1 percent.
Before asking certain questions, interviewers read explanations of the terms physician-assisted suicide, euthanasia and hospice care. The survey showed, generally, that 52 percent of Americans approve—and 35 percent disapprove—of “intentionally ending a patient's life in cases of unrelievable suffering or expected suffering from a terminal illness.” The other 13 percent remain undecided.
In this response, there were differences by gender and age. More men—56 percent of them compared to 48 percent of women—said they approve of physician-assisted suicide, while 47 percent of those older than 55 said they disapprove.
However, general support for physician-assisted suicide weakened significantly when respondents were given more information about other end-of-life options and about how euthanasia, including euthanasia not requested, and physicianassisted suicide are practiced in the Netherlands.
For example, after hearing a description of hospice or palliative care, only 13 percent of respondents said they would opt for physician-assisted suicide if terminally ill. Forty percent said they would choose hospice or palliative care and 33 percent would opt for natural death without medical assistance, providing the 5-to-1 margin.
Also, only 13 percent of those surveyed actually knew how physician-assisted suicide currently is practiced in the Netherlands: that it is illegal but not prosecuted if done according to certain standards. The rest either did not know Dutch law or were mistaken about it.
In the Netherlands, assisted suicide and euthanasia are criminal offenses, but a law allows doctors to carry out those activities if they meet criteria established by the government.
When respondents were questioned about a policy—based on Dutch data—“that resulted in physicians openly performing assisted suicide or euthanasia to about 2 percent of all people who die and around 1 percent of people who die were given euthanasia they did not request,” 64 percent said they disapproved of such a policy, while 24 percent approved and 12 percent did not know or did not answer.
Regarding terminology, 83 percent of respondents reported familiarity with the terms physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia, while only 65 percent said they are familiar with the terms hospice or palliative care.
When asked about existing rights, 84 percent of those surveyed said they know U.S. patients can refuse any medical treatment, even treatment to keep them alive. But 43 percent did not know it is legally and medically possible in the United States to give patients medicine to control pain that might unintentionally contribute to their deaths. According to Evangelium Vitae, “… it is licit to relieve pain by narcotics, even when the result is decreased consciousness and a shortening of life, ‘if no other means exist, and if, in the given circumstances, this does not prevent the carrying out of other religious and moral duties’” (65.3).
In evaluating the data, Global Strategy's Jefrey Pollock said, “The average American wants to see the laws we already have for respecting a patient's right to refuse treatment and obtain comfort care used more effectively.”
The AMA, a voluntary organization for physicians, is in the midst of an educational campaign for its members, other health care professionals and patients concerning end-of-life care options.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “Everyone is responsible for his own life before God who has given it to him. It is God who remains the sovereign Master of life. We are obliged to accept life gratefully and preserve it for his honor and the salvation of our souls. We are stewards, not owners, of the life God
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Culture of Life DATE: 01/19/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 19-25, 1997 ----- BODY:BEGINNING the back page of this issue, the Register inaugurates a new feature, “the Culture of Life.” Therein, we will attempt to heed Pope John Paul II's call, issued most forcefully in Evangelium Vitae, to build up the “culture of life” as the paper chronicles the life of the Church and the world. Most obviously, but by no means exclusively, this will involve coverage of the pro-life movement, as it marks nearly a quarter century after Roe v Wade and readies itself for a possibly even tougher struggle ahead now that the push for the legalization of assisted-suicide has reached the Supreme Court. No matter how the Justices decide in the end, the battle has only begun. Even if, as some preliminary indications suggest, they balk at creating a constitutional “right to die,” the matter will revert to state legislatures. The High Court will also consider the fine points of abortion clinic protests this term.
However, the “culture of life,” in the broadest sense of the term, includes a full range of issues, in fact, all spheres of human activity and their bearing on the fundamental well-being of men and women. A“culture of life” will be characteristic of a “civilization of love,” another key papal concept and one that, perhaps, better describes the Church's ambition, for which all of us—Catholic or not—are responsible. Areview of the news provides ample illustrations of what such a “civilization of love” should and should not look like:
In the Holy Land, Israelis and Palestinians experienced a happy turn of events after more than six months of growing uncertainty about the peace process and concern about the possibility of full-scale violence. Prodded on by Jordan's King Hussein and the United States, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who may just turn out to be more astute negotiator than stubborn hawk—and Palestinian Yasir Arafat appeared poised, at press time, to sign an agreement on the partial withdrawal of Israeli troops from the West Bank city of Hebron. The arrangement would recognize the depth of religious feeling that attaches both Jews and Muslims to the city.
In separate news, a recent poll (see p. 4) revealed that 45 percent of Israeli Jews are in principle willing to cede parts of Jerusalem to Palestinian control. And Netanyahu also indicated that Israel could tolerate self-government for the Palestinians, provided such an entity could wield no military power and pose a threat to the Jewish state. An unnamed Israeli source told The Wall Street Journal that the Israelis would even consider the creation of a Palestinian state, “as long as it is not called a ‘state’ right away.”
In an other “life” realm, Latin American government representatives met late last year in Bolivia to hammer out an economic policy for the continent that would heed environmental concerns. The summit's document struck a balance between regulation and the free market, arriving at a formula with which Catholic social teaching could not disagree: “[W]e cannot attend basic needs without sound and dynamic economies. Free trade and increased economic integration provide an opportunity to improve the condition of laborers, make the economy more efficient and protect the environment,” the statement read.
On the labor front, there was a call for balance, too. An international delegation of top union officials recently traveled to Rome for meetings with Vatican officials, including the Pope. They praised the Church for its contributions to the betterment of workers around the world, shielding them, when possible, from the harsher dimensions of the free market. However, Msgr. Diarmuid Martin, the number two man at the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, reminded the officials that unions, in their zeal, risk neglecting the needs of unemployed or under-employed workers and being too bent on improving the livelihood of their members. He also urged them to consider labor issues in the context of human rights generally, including the right to life.
Bosnia, where the “culture of death” sustained a reign of terror for four long years, is still confronted with President Slobodan Milosevich in neighboring Serbia, the instigator of many of the atrocities. It is to be hoped that the international community, with the European powers leading the way, will do everything legally in their power to ensure that genuine democrats rather than another band of nationalists step forward once the strongman goes down.
Finally, there is a sticking point for some when it comes to another aspect of the “culture of death”: the embrace by so many Americans of the death penalty. The Pope has made clear his vehement opposition to capital punishment. He has suggested that the rationale for the state to kill perpetrators— that allowing them to live would pose a threat to free society—is no longer applicable, given the modern prison system. Dare we say it? The Church holds to a consistent ethic of life as the foundation of a “culture of life,” the pursuit of which these pages will humbly report.
—JK
----- EXCERPT: EDITORIAL ----- EXTENDED BODY: JK ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: For Once, Pro-Choicers Get Bashed at the Movies DATE: 01/19/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 19-25, 1997 ----- BODY:A BORTION ON demand is one of the core values of our secular media class, so it's astonishing to find a theatrical feature like Citizen Ruth that aspires to treat the subject even-handedly. Most mass entertainment products are knee-jerk pro-choice.
Citizen Ruth's director Alexander Payne and screenwriter Jim Taylor have fashioned a fast-paced, plague-on-both-your-houses social comedy in the style of classic Hollywood satirists like Billy Wilder (Ace in the Hole) and Preston Sturges (Hail the Conquering Hero). Ruth Stoops (Laura Dern) has been busted 16 times for glue-sniffing and placed in chemical dependency programs for treatment six times. Chronically unemployed, she whines about “being in a bad place” and promises “to get her life together” soon. She's lost custody of her four children, and when she's jailed for overdosing in the convenience store parking lot of a small Midwestern town, she's found to be pregnant once again.
The judge, tired of repeat offenders like Ruth, defines her “hazardous vapor inhalation” as felony child endangerment because of her pregnancy and threatens her with a long jail sentence. But, privately, he offers to drop the charges if she'll get an abortion.
Although conflicted, Ruth's willing to agree to the deal when the local chapter of Baby-savers, a national pro-life organization, posts her bail, and a born-again Christian couple, Gail and Norm Stoney (May Kay Place and Kurtwood Smith), takes her into their home, determined to reform her.
Like most mainstream-media portrayals of pro-life Christians, the Stoney family is crudely caricatured as a bunch of selfrighteous hypocrites. But the familiarity of the stereotypes doesn't make them any less offensive. The Stoneys are depicted as more concerned with exploiting Ruth as a symbol for their cause than responding to her individual needs. Norm secretly lusts after Ruth, and the Stoneys'teenage daughter is shown sneaking out to do drugs with her boyfriend behind her pious parents' backs.
However, most of the movie's satirical barbs are directed at the family's lower-middle-class lifestyle and aspirations (Norm works as clerk in a hardware store). Their pro-life beliefs are presented as an extension of their tacky tastes in clothes, furniture and hair-styles. It all has the feel of a kind of cultural class warfare—a pair of well-educated, upper-middle-class filmmakers smugly looking down their noses at their less refined, social inferiors.
But amazingly enough, Citizen Ruth also allows the pro-life side to make its case in some detail, arguing that the fetus is a living thing and that aborting it is murder. Ruth is shown to be visibly shaken after watching a documentary on the medical realities of abortion.
She is on the verge of deciding to have her baby when the Stoneys'pre-adolescent son tries to stop her clandestine glue-sniffing. Furious at the interruption, she smacks the kid around a few times. His mother freaks out and sends Ruth away with Diane Singler (Swoosie Kurtz), another member of her group.
Diane turns out to be an undercover agent for a militant pro-abortion group, and she spirits Ruth off to a farm where she lives communally with her lesbian lover (Kelly Preston), some other fanatic activists and a one-legged, Vietnam-vet biker named Harlan (M.C. Gainey) who provides security for the local abortion clinic.
Diane and her cohorts are satirized as savagely as the pro-lifers. They are also shown as eager to exploit Ruth for their cause, completely ignoring her as an individual and indoctrinating her with radical feminist propaganda. They even try to get Ruth to join them in singing pagan hymns of praise to the moon goddess. The filmmakers underline the hypocrisy of Diane's belief that the message of “a woman's right to choose” will be best served if Ruth aborts her baby.
This sharp-edged caricature of the feminists has more bite than the movie's equally vicious depiction of the pro-lifers because it's so unexpected. The pro-abortion cause is rarely attacked this brutally in the mainstream media. Both sides are shown as trying to outdo the other in venality. The pro-lifers offer Ruth $15,000 to have the baby—a kind of bribe. The prochoice biker, Harlan, promises to match that with $15,000 from his pending Agent-Orange settlement. Baby-savers up the ante to $30,000.
As the publicity surrounding the incident goes national, the smarmy head of the national pro-life organization (Burt Reynolds) arrives to take charge. The cold, calculating leader of a big-bucks pro-abortion group (Tippi Hedren) soon follows to do likewise. Both are more concerned with their media images than with poor Ruth.
At this point the movie cops out. The focus is shifted away from the morality of abortion to Ruth's empowerment as an individual. The young woman has an accidental miscarriage that she hides from both sides. She then cleverly manipulates things to wring the maximum financial advantage for herself out of the situation. In this, the filmmakers applaud her. From their perspective she has at last taken responsibility for her life and gotten the better of those trying to exploit her. The message seems to be that the pursuit of personal freedom is the highest value in our culture.
The problem is that once the young woman becomes pregnant it's not only her rights and freedom that are at stake. As a living being, her unborn baby also must be taken into account, and this the movie refuses to do. The viewer never gets the sense that two lives are now involved, not just one. Each of the story's twists and turns is presented exclusively in terms of its impact on Ruth.
Abortion is an issue on which it's impossible to have it both ways, and Citizen Ruth finally buys into the prochoice position with its emphasis on unfettered individualism. But the profound doubts expressed about the tactics and intentions of pro-abortion activists are perhaps a small sign of hope. The movement's moral flaws have finally become apparent to some of its natural sympathizers, even in Hollywood.
John Prizer is based in Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: commentary -------- TITLE: Real Love Often Means Just Saying 'No' DATE: 01/19/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 19-25, 1997 ----- BODY:Dubious Conceptions: The Politics of Teenage Pregnancy by Kristen Luker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996, 283 pp., $24.95)
IT WAS only a few years ago when, locked in curfew combat with a daughter experiencing the “frightful fourteens” (the “terrible twos” times 7), I decided that teenage logic can be an oxymoron. It was only later that my daughter admitted that she not only understood my concerns but also appreciated my strong stand against staying out all night as really a sign of caring.
I thought about this incident as I read Kristen Luker's new book, Dubious Conceptions: the Politics of Teenage Pregnancy. Luker, a professor of sociology and law at the University of California at Berkeley, explores the topic of teenage pregnancy and concludes that “[t]he short answer to why teenagers get pregnant and especially to why they continue those pregnancies is that a fairly substantial number of them just don't believe what adults tell them, be it about sex, contraception, marriage or babies.” To effect a change in teen behavior, she suggests that adults must learn to understand the new world “with its radically new circumstances” our teens live in.
Not surprisingly, Luker considers more contraceptive use, more access to abortion and more sex education as the best solutions to the problem of teen pregnancy. Parental involvement seems to be considered helpful only if the parents support all these options.
Luker admits bewilderment about the large numbers of “babies having babies” despite the availability of contraception and abortion and has several of these young mothers tell their stories. The stories are invariably poignant but rarely illuminative and lead to Luker's new contribution to the controversy: Teen pregnancy is a symptom rather than a cause of poverty. Thus, she maintains, cuts in social welfare programs will cause further misery rather than a change in behavior. “Early child-bearing,” she pronounces, “would decrease if poor teenagers had better schools and safer neighborhoods, and if their mothers and fathers had decent jobs so that teens could afford the luxury of being children for a while longer.”
As the parent of two teens myself (as well as an 11- year-old taking notes on the other two), I was disappointed but not surprised that Luker sees the solutions to the problem of teen pregnancy as political rather than personal. I was also disappointed to see that she only tackled this problem at its endpoint—pregnancy—rather than at the source of the problem: teenage sexual activity.
For many sociologists like Luker, the vast increase in sexual activity among teens is a just a fact. Preventing pregnancy and disease are the only problems considered amenable to intervention. The development of character, particularly the postponing of immediate pleasure for a higher purpose, is considered too moralistic for teens in today's culture. At best, teens are told to wait “until you are ready” at some vague point in the future but not necessarily until marriage. At worst, teens are told that having sex is a natural part of growing up and nothing to feel guilty about as long as the sex is “responsible,” i.e. protection is used against pregnancy and disease.
Like many parents, I too have been counseled to give my son condoms and my daughter the Pill “before it's too late.” But I look on my role as reinforcing that small voice of conscience in my children that threatens to be drowned out by our sex-saturated culture as well as by their own hormones. There is no pill for the soul and no condom for the heart.
Books like Dubious Conceptions ultimately fail because the contraceptive mentality and social welfare programs they aggressively promote fail to either satisfy or ennoble. There is a thirst for truth and ideals among the young that is impossible to slake with statistics, polls or social programs.
As a Catholic, I have found not only the words of the Gospel but also the blending of both happiness and celibacy in virtually all of the priests and nuns I have known to be powerful counterpoints to the current culture. I have made sure my children have regular contact with both. The prophetic words of Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae have inspired me in both single and married life and I try to impart this wisdom to my own teens. Human love is both a mystery and a gift. To reduce this to mere sex does a real disservice to all of us, no matter what stage of life we may be in currently.
But will teens listen? As I have found, teenagers tend to fight with parents on everything: curfews, clothes, friends, and of course sex. They want to make their own decisions and even their own mistakes. But disagreements are testing grounds, not failures. And, as I have found, teens secretly appreciate adults who care enough not to give up.
In the end, exhaustive sociological studies like Dubious Conceptions will remain popular but it does not take a Ph.D. to recognize that real love often means just saying “No.”
Nancy Valko, R.N. is based in St. Louis, Mo.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Nancy Guilfoy Valko ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 01/19/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 19-25, 1997 ----- BODY:‘Catholic’ Pro-Choicers
Peter Feuerherd's article (“Pro-lifers Still Reading Election Tea Leaves”) in the Dec. 22-28, 1996 Register extensively cites positions of Catholics for a Free Choice as if it is were a legitimate voice of Roman Catholics in the United States on the issue of abortion. The reporter should have known better.
Frances Kissling, the president of Catholics for a Free Choice, has repeatedly and publicly expressed contempt for the Magisterium of the Church. Given this stance, and her admission that she never attends Mass, calls her Catholicism into question.
Indeed, it is questionable whether she is even president of a recognizable organization: Catholics for a Free Choice is not a membership organization in the sense of the National Right to Life organization. It has virtually no members, merely serving as a useful front organization through which money and press releases can be funneled from pro-abortion organizations and other enemies of orthodox Christianity. And the secular press in America seems willing to quote any self-proclaimed Catholic leader to make a pro-abortion position seem reasonable even to Roman Catholics.
Tony Delserone
Owings Mills, Maryland
Christmas Minus Christ
How can we possibly restore morality to this country if the television network writers continue to vilify and ridicule religion?
A recent NBC Tuesday evening sitcom offered a good example of how television and movies have encouraged people to look at church-going as “not cool.” In a scene between husband and wife, the wife asked: “Honey, with the kids away for the holidays, we ought to do something meaningful for Christmas.” The husband, looking puzzled, replied: “You mean you want to drag me to church.” “No,” replied the wife, “I meant that perhaps we could take Mr. So-and-so on a buggy ride around the park.” To the writers of sitcoms, a ride around the park is “meaningful.” Going to church is not.
Al Restivo
La Canada Flintridge, California
Biblical Truth
It is unfortunate that most Christians, including most Catholics, don't have the advantage of balanced articles such as Gabriel Meyer's on the work of biblicists such as the Jesus seminar and Q project (“Jesus Seminar, Q Scholars True to Holiday Form,” Dec. 29, 1996). That puts them at the mercy of our culture, which automatically elevates scientists and scholars to authority figures, and of the major media, such as Time and Newsweek, that never miss a chance to publicize anything that sheds doubt on traditional Christianity. They get the drumbeat of dissonance between the Church's Magisterium of Revelation and the new, popularized competition—the magisterium of historical scholarship.
In the long run, the Church has nothing to fear from honest scholarship and science. Truth is one. Ultimately what is believed from those who handed it on and what is known through scholarly digging will converge. In the short run, the table is tilted toward the trumpeted findings of dishonest scholarship. Honest biblical scholarship must be bound by the creeds and open to the possibility that the evangelists portrayed Jesus accurately and that the Church is what she has always claimed to be. Judging from Meyer's article, it appears clear that the Jesus Seminar and Q guys don't seem to meet that test. Yet they go about “just doing their jobs,” eroding beliefs because they start from the premises that Christ could not be God, or the Bible inspired. Time and Newsweek trumpet every innovative hypothesis. And the little ones—that's most of us—caught between who to believe, grow more confused. On the brighter side, if the Q guys are right, we'll be able to whip through the Creed in nothing flat.
Burman Skrable
Fairfax, Virginia
Beautiful Gift
Star of the Nativity by Joseph Brodsky (Dec. 22- 28) was a beautiful gift to your readers. Apromise of more poetry to come, I hope.
Kathleen Gunton Deal
Orange, California
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: New Year's Resolution:'Spiritual Ecumenism' DATE: 01/19/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 19-25, 1997 ----- BODY:The great Jubilee of the birth of Christ and the onset of Christianity's third millennium that we will celebrate a scant three years from now will undoubtedly be a joyous event. But, as Pope John Paul II has cautioned in his apostolic letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente and elsewhere, the year 2000 is also an occasion for sober reflection and repentance.
Nowhere is that spirit of sobriety more appropriate than in the area of ecumenism. With a Week of Prayer for Christian Unity upon us once again (Jan. 18-25), where does the search for Christian reunion find itself at century's end?
It's not that there haven't been some remarkable developments in recent decades—beginning with Vatican II, which launched with such promise and optimism the latest worldwide push for unity among the followers of Christ.
However significant recent ecumenical gains are—the last 30 years' harvest of theological accords on some of Christianity's most contentious issues, for example—these have to be balanced by a number of sobering realizations.
Prayer eases the divisions
For one thing, the second millennium of Christianity, for all its achievements, has been an age marked by unprecedented divisions and rifts in the Body of Christ: the split between Christian East and West, the troubled heritage of the Crusades; the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation; the Inquisition; the wars of religion—to name but a few of the major developments that continue to shape the Church as she moves across a new millennial frontier.
It's safe to say that unraveling the fractious heritage of the past 1,000 years will require more than a few accords worked out by ecumenical scholars—however remarkable these efforts have been, and are. What's more, at century's end, even the ecumenical “successes” of the past 30 years, with some exceptions, seem stalled. Large international interfaith forums like the World Council of Churches find themselves faced with financial crises and institutional uncertainty. Promising dialogues such as the Roman Catholic-Eastern Orthodox deliberations have slowed over issues like papal primacy and the role of the Eastern Catholic Churches, while once-fruitful Catholic-Anglican discussions have log-jammed on the Anglican decision to ordain women to the priesthood.
It's not necessarily a bleak picture, but it is one that begs for a return to first principles. And there's no principle more fundamental to any Christian endeavor than prayer, which is at the heart of a kind of ecumenical endeavor we don't hear much about these days: “spiritual ecumenism.”
Fostered in the early years of the century, principally in Europe, and influential in Catholic circles right up to the time of Vatican II, spiritual ecumenism, in the words of one of its main proponents, Father Paul Couturier (1881-1953), is an ecumenism based on common prayer, charity, friendship, mutual forgiveness and humility. For Couturier, the search for spiritual unity must undergird, and, indeed, precede unity on a doctrinal or hierarchical level.
Far more than a program, Couturier saw such efforts as nothing less than a mystical participation in Jesus' so-called High Priestly Prayer that closes the Last Supper discourses in John:
“… I ask not only on behalf of these [disciples], but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word,” Jesus prays, “that they all may be one as you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be one in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one” (17, 20-22).
In fact, Couturier's vision had a great deal to do with the spread of the so-called Unity Octave, now called the Week of Prayer for the Unity of all Christians, commemorated on the days between the feasts of the Chair of Peter (Jan. 18) and the Conversion of St. Paul (Jan. 25).
It's not too much to say that the ecumenical vigor of the past generation may well have its roots in the quiet movements of prayer for unity that were spearheaded by this tireless French priest and a vast network of hidden spiritual associates.
The idea of the Unity Octave itself goes back to an American Episcopalian clergyman, Father Paul Wattson (1863-1540), an ardent champion of the return of the Anglican Churches to Rome. He founded a religious community, the Society of the Atonement, to work and pray for this end. In 1908, Wattson organized the first Prayer of Unity Octave. Ayear later, he and his community were received into the Roman Catholic Church. The promotion of the Unity Octave became his life's work, an effort crowned with success when Pope Benedict XV approved its use worldwide in 1916.
Couturier's monastic allies
Couturier met his calling in the context of pastoral work with Russian Orthodox refugees in Lyon in the aftermath of the Russian revolution. After a visit to the Belgian monastery of Amay-sur-Meuse, founded at the request of Pope Pius XI in 1925 for the purpose of promoting unity between Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches, Couturier adopted the cause of the Unity Octave—but with a significant change of emphasis.
For Wattson, prayer for unity meant praying for separated Christian Churches to return to Rome. What Couturier saw— surely, a radical vision for the 1930s—was that all Christians needed to learn to pray together for unity after the model of Christ's own prayer. It's a sentiment that today finds an echo in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
“Concern for achieving unity involves the whole Church, faithful and clergy alike. But we must realize that this holy objective—the reconciliation of all Christians in the unity of the one and only Church of Christ—transcends human powers and gifts. That is why we place all our hope in the prayer of Christ for the Church.…” (822).
Not surprisingly, Couturier found the greatest response to his plea for prayer and sacrifice for Christian unity in the monastic world.
In this regard, the Italian Cistercian nuns of Grottaferrata deserve special mention. Led by a pioneering abbess, Mother Pia Gullini, the small contemplative community allied itself with Couturier's aims in the late 1930s. But the community did more than pray for Christian unity. In a gesture that would raise eyebrows today, several of the Trappistine Sisters offered their lives to God, including the willingness to die, that the will of God might be done in all Christians.
Victim souls
Legitimate questions can, of course, be raised about the notion of “victim souls.” We're more sensitive today to the theological shortcomings of such ideas, and even the abuses to which such practices can give rise. Nevertheless, Pope John Paul II's 1963 beatification of Sister Maria Gabriella Sagghedu, a 24-year-old Grottaferrata Sister who died of tuberculosis in 1938, a year after offering her life for unity, highlights the uncomfortable fact that, as the Pope put it, “[in order to] foster the spiritual life and promote great ideals, one must be ready to pay the price personally.”
Is it an accident that, in the wake of Sister Maria Gabriella's death, many European Catholics, coming to pray at her tomb, adopted the cause of Christian unity, or that among these pilgrims were Protestants Roger Schultz and Max Thurian, who founded the ecumenical monastery of Taize?
Who knows? But with a century of unprecedented ecumenical advance behind us, it's worth recalling that, as Vatican II's Decree on Ecumenism states, “there can be no ecumenism worthy of the name without interior conversion. For it is from newness of attitudes of mind, from self-denial and unstinted love that desires of unity take their rise and develop in a mature way.… This change of heart and holiness of life, along with public and private prayer for the unity of Christians, should be regarded as the soul of the ecumenical movement.…”
Gabriel Meyer, a Register Contributing Editor, is based in Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Gabriel Meyer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: A Call to Arms DATE: 01/19/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 19-25, 1997 ----- BODY:EACH JANUARY we usher in a new year with so much hope and celebration and the sense that maybe things are finally going to improve.
Last year, however, did not allow for a great deal of optimism as the horror of war, bloodshed and suffering continued sporadically in several corners of the globe. The dignity of life was again under attack in this country, specifically with the failure to overturn the veto of the partial-birth abortion ban. And people of every faith were saddened by the passing of one of the true spiritual leaders of the century, Chicago's Joseph Cardinal Bernardin. War and violence seem to be always in our midst, but the Bernardins of this world don't pass our way very often.
Still, at the dawn of a new year that brings us closer to the threshold of another century, our sense of hope and belief in the future has to be more tenacious and stubborn than at any other time in the past.
It is perhaps a cliché to point out that, at the beginning of 1997, the world is rushing by more rapidly than ever before with its dizzying advances in technology, the Internet, medical research and bold new breakthroughs in both space and weaponry. Unfortunately, on the downside, there are spiraling numbers of poor, homeless, hungry, abused and all those who cannot stay afloat in society, in one way or another, around the world.
In the popular perception of things, it's always business as usual for the rich and poor in America. We do our best, we insist, but we can't change the world and besides, the poor, we reason, as the good book says, will always be with us.
As cop-outs go, that may be one of the more insidious, and weakest. If the poor are indeed “with us,” that doesn't mean we can stop trying to help them. If anything, the time has come for more organizations and individuals in this country to be making a greater effort.
We can no longer blithely decide that an extra dollar in the collection basket will take care of it all; or that Catholic Charities or the Red Cross will resolve the problems. Rather, every person and every group has to do much more—to take it up another notch, throw away the old campaigns and pledges—and not slide back into the fallacy that if a response was good enough in 1996 or 1986 or 1936, it should be good enough in the new year. Whatever worked 10 or 20 years ago will not work today.
For that reason, the Knights of Malta voted at their last board meeting to broaden our efforts—wider than ever before in our history—to reach the poor. We are increasing, as much as possible, the number of area chairpersons and committees around the country so that the bishops of every diocese can have easy access to the Knights as a committed extension of the Church in society.
But neither the Knights of Malta nor Catholic Charities nor any other organization can do it alone. Every parish and every parish society must commit themselves aggressively to doing more. Every local organization and community group must set wider agendas with specific goals. And individual Catholics should no longer have the luxury of simply shrugging off the problems with glib rationalizations.
The poor are always with us. The same sentence can be rephrased without losing one bit of truth. We are, all of us, with the poor. And, in the purest sense of the Gospel, and Christ's vision of his Church and his people, we, too, are the poor.
William Flynn is president of the American Association of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: William Flynn ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Venerable Tradition Unlocks 'Love that Never Ends' DATE: 01/19/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 19-25, 1997 ----- BODY:The Love That Never Ends: A Key to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, by J. Augustine DiNoia OP, Gabriel O'Donnell OP, Romanus Cessario OP, Peter John Cameron OP (Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor Publishing, 1996, 156 pp., $11.95)
IF THE promulgation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church may be called a “media event,” its moment—though somewhat longer than 15 minutes—has passed. However, the real work of interiorizing the doctrine of the Catechism has hardly begun. For some, this process of deepening our understanding, and appreciation for the Catechism is the foremost item on the agenda for the new millennium. Important instruments of this interiorization process are books that digest and comment upon the Catechism, serving a variety of audiences. Several have already appeared. The Love That Never Ends is one of the most recent.
The four authors are Dominican priests with impressive credentials. Father O'Donnell is a former professor of liturgy at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Philadelphia; Father Cessario is a professor of systematic theology at St. John's Seminary, Brighton, Mass.; Father Cameron teaches homiletics at St. Joseph's Seminary, Yonkers, N.Y.; Father DiNoia is executive director of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) Committee on Doctrine. They describe their work as a “key” to the Catechism, which aims to provide a central or overarching concept that connects and, as it were, “opens up,” all the teachings of the Catechism.
The book's introduction states: “The object of this book is to display the organic unity that underlies the Catechism's presentation of the Christian faith. Each of the four pillars of the Catechism, despite their distinctive contents, is about a single mystery.” The authors present the mystery of “the love that never ends” as the Catechism's key-concept, in the belief that “to share in the unending love of the triune God is the destiny of every human person in Christ.”
The Love That Never Ends is written in short chapters, most of them four or five pages, which makes the book highly accessible. For the most part, chapters follow the sequence of the Catechism, whose corresponding paragraph numbers are given throughout. The presentation is lively and down-to-earth. The authors are at their best when using analogy—an important tool of their great Dominican predecessor, St. Thomas Aquinas—to show that the things of our everyday experience can help us understand much about the things of God. For example, there is an analogy between the sacraments and the natural experiences of life, such as birth, death, nourishment, and healing. The Eucharist, for example, is discussed in vivid language, which brings home the fact that going to Mass and taking Communion is no mere obligation, but a vital necessity for the development of an authentic life of faith: “When my body and blood encounters the body and blood of Christ in Holy Communion something happens. In this meeting, this communion, my relationship with Christ grows, develops, and increases. As a consequence I am freed from venial sin and preserved from future mortal sin. Holy Communion weans me from my attachment to sin and intensifies my attachment to the things of God, indeed my attachment to God himself. The Eucharist plunges me more deeply into the life of Christ, head and members. I am more deeply committed to the Church. And those whom Christ loved and preferred, the poor, become the object of my special concern. In this communion I become one with all those who are in Christ.”
The authors also appreciate the role of the liturgy as both an expression of and a reflection on doctrine. Echoing the Catechism's reverence for the Church Fathers, they feature a range of citations from Doctors and other patristic writers.
The first several chapters clearly bear out the book's organic approach to its subject. The following passage, explaining the Catechism's teaching on the Resurrection is a case in point: “Trinitarian counion is personal communion. In grace, created persons are drawn into the communion of the uncreated Persons of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It is fundamental to the consummation of the divine plan that we continue in eternal life as the identifiable, albeit transfigured and glorified, persons we are now. The significance of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body lies here.”
In dealing with the practical matter of morality, the book features a lively presentation of virtues and habits, presenting the pursuit of the moral life as a “craft” that Catholics may take delight in. The chapters on prayer succeed in presenting a straightforward theoretical basis for an often enigmatic subject. Overall, the book has a healthy Marian dimension. There's even a separate chapter on the Mother of God: “The Spirituality of the Hail Mary.” Another is devoted to the “Our Father,” although not everyone will be comfortable with the fact that the petitions are presented in reverse.
While many will no doubt profit from reading The Love That Never Ends, it is not clear whether books of this kind are effectively connecting with the wider audience of average Catholics. Concepts like “nature,” “sacrament,” “grace,” “communion,” as found in The Love That Never Ends assume a basic knowledge on the part of the reader. Does the average Catholic, living and working in a world dominated by scientific and Enlightenment-based concepts, possess the conceptual framework necessary to grasp the essence of a religion, which is still, when all is said and done, expressed in Aristotelian-Thomistic terms? Given the dubious record of postconciliar education—religious as well as academic— we can't assume anything. For the Catechism to be appropriated by more of the faithful, it may be necessary to start from scratch by explaining such basic distinctions as subjective-objective; natural-supernatural; physical reality-spiritual reality; truthof experience-truth of faith. The Dominicans, banking on a splendid and solid intellectual tradition, are in a better position than most to do the job.
The object of this book is to convey, writes Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston in his foreword, that “[t]he Christian faith teaches a single truth.” “The unity of faith,” he continues, “is neither a vague idea nor an abstract ideal; it is a living reality.” The authors themselves put it thus: “If we are to understand and use the Catechism properly, we must see the person of Christ at its heart. The Catechism aims to put us in touch with Jesus Christ.… No created good—whether material or personal—can satisfy hearts that were made to enjoy the love that never ends. The Catechism summons us never to settle for less.”
Brother Clement Kennedy is a monk at Prince of Peace Abbey, Oceanside, Calif.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Clement Kennedy OSB ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Congress the Poorer Without Pro-life Voice DATE: 01/19/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 19-25, 1997 ----- BODY:THIS CATHOLIC congresswoman, who's spoken out longer and more forcefully than any other for the pro-life position, is leaving the House of Representatives.
For 14 years, Barbara Vucanovich (R-Nev.), the first woman elected to federal office in her state, represented the second district, which covers all of Nevada except for downtown Las Vegas. Next month, Jim Gibbons, a Republican, who won her seat in November, takes office. He beat Vucanovich's daughter, Patty Cafferata, in the September primary.
Despite her retirement and the recent defeat of Rep. Bob Dornan (R-Calif.), another leading pro-life legislator, Vucanovich is optimistic about the prospects for the cause on Capitol Hill. Pro-life leaders Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) and Chris Smith (R-N.J.) “are not going away,” she says, adding that there are now “more pro-life members than before,” in Congress.
Nonetheless, the retiring congresswoman expresses dismay at the fact that nearly 60 percent of Catholic voters supported Clinton in last month's election. “I'm amazed that Catholics can support any politician who can support partialbirth abortion” or is “pro-choice,” she says. “Most of the Catholics I've known are compassionate and caring and have aligned themselves with working people.”
While in office, Vucanovich spoke out on the abortion issue, both in her state and on the House floor. She recalls serving in Congress with Democratic and Republican women who voted pro-life, but who never addressed the issue publicly. The 1994 elections brought several pro-life Republican women to Congress including Rep. Linda Smith (R-Wash.) and Rep. Helen Chenoweth (R-Idaho) who have been more like Vucanovich in not being afraid to talk about the issue.
Vucanovich said she's proud of her accomplishments on Capitol Hill, “not so much for passing legislation as for preventing bills” from being made law. During all but two years of her time in Congress, Republicans were the minority party, so she had to “play defense.”
In 1995, after “six or seven” years of work, a Source Tax repeal she sponsored passed Congress. The measure bars states from collecting tax from pensioners who move to other states. She also prevented the government from dumping nuclear waste at the Yucca Mountain in Nevada in 1995.
She opposed reform of the 1872 mining law, which she predicted would “devastate Western mining and destroy Nevada jobs.” She also opposed a Clinton-sponsored tax on gambling and worked to influence federal water policy through forming the Western Water Caucus in 1995.
Despite being a pro-life Catholic, Vucanovich doesn't have any qualms about living in and promoting a state that is home to so-called “Sin City,” and where regulated prostitution is legal in some parts.
Speaking about gambling, she said “it's a business in our state” and “there are downsides to legal as well as the illegal variety.” Legalized gambling in Nevada has brought an increase in crime, she acknowledges, but added that her “biggest concern is Indian gaming,” on reservations where Native American tribes don't pay any tax on their revenue and do not report to an overseer. “It took us 100 years to establish a gaming board and commission,” in Nevada, and it “made sure that licensees are honest.” While the Mafia is widely credited with building up Las Vegas, organized crime families are said to operate more on the fringes of the city these days, with the casinos and hotels owned by publicly-traded companies.
The retiring congresswoman says she believes House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) has gotten a bum rap in the media. “He's not the inflexible, arrogant man the press portrays him as,” she says. “For years, he's tried to get moderates and conservatives to work together. He's a very capable guy in getting provincially-minded people to work together.”
During her last term in Congress, she was part of the Republican leadership, and Gingrich named her to chair “Corrections Day,” a process that allows Congress to rescind laws and regulations that don't work well by using a simplified legislative process that only requires 60 percent of the House to pass.
Despite being a pro-life Catholic, Vucanovich doesn't have any qualms about living in ‘Sin City.’
Vucanovich, 75, lives in Reno, Nev., and has five children, 15 grandchildren and three great grandchildren. In 1949, she left New York for Nevada to start life anew after a marriage of nine years failed. The state was just experiencing an economic boom after legalizing gambling in 1931, which was done in part to get over the Great Depression. Today, gaming and tourism are the state's principal industries, with gold mining and ranching following next.
Even though she came from a strongly Democratic family, she began volunteering for Republican candidates the year after arriving in Nevada. In 1964, she ran Paul Laxault's race for the Senate, but he lost by 84 votes. That same year, her second husband died, and she was left with five children. Despite that setback, she became a franchise owner in 1964 for the Evelyn Wood Speed Reading Co. and continued in that business for four years.
“My biggest problem was getting credit,” she told the Register during a recent phone interview from her Washington office. “I even had to say to one of my bankers, ‘if you don't give me credit, I'll take you to court.’ No one had an idea that you could go out on your own,” and launch a business, especially as a widowed mother of five.
In 1965, she married George Vucanovich, her husband of more than three decades. Three years later she launched her own travel agency, which she ran for six years before selling it to pursue a career in politics. In 1974, Sen. Paul Laxault named her his district representative for the northern part of the state. She held that post until 1982, when she won her seat in Congress.
A year later she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Despite surgery and recovery, Vucanovich never missed a vote on Capitol Hill. She worked to expand Medicare and Medicaid coverage for breast cancer that covers annual mammograms and for prostate cancer.
Vucanovich says her health is “excellent,” and that she decided to retire from Congress to work for the state as a private citizen.
William Murray is based in Kensington, Md.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: William Murray ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Quietly, but Steadily, Eugenics Is Making a Comeback DATE: 01/19/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 19-25, 1997 ----- BODY:EUGENICS, AN ideology suppressed after World War II, is making a strong comeback if a series of recent national and international bioethics meetings in San Francisco is any indication.
Bioethics, a relatively new academic discipline, drew more than 600 scholars late last year to joint meetings of the American Association of Bioethics (AAB) and the International Association of Bioethics (IAB). President Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory Commission also scheduled a meeting to coincide with the six-day gatherings. Bioethicists from around the world presented more than 400 papers on such topics as physician-assisted suicide, genetic engineering, expanding healthcare to include human-rights advocacy, and abuses in human research.
A major topic was the renewal of eugenics, an effort to improve the human race by controlling reproduction patterns. The presidents of the two sponsoring associations, Professor Daniel Wilder of the IAB and Professor Dan Brock of the AAB, said that they are working together on a book promoting eugenics. Wilder stressed that they had no intention of returning to the horrors of Nazi Germany's master race program. But his co-author used the phrase “life not worth living” repeatedly, and insisted that eugenics must sometimes include coercion, when parents do not take responsibility for preventing the conception and birth of severely disabled children.
The difference between eugenics today and eugenics in Germany, Wilder said, is that the German program was controlled by the government, not by interested individuals. George Annas, a bioethicist from Boston University, summarized the difference neatly during a meeting at the Holocaust Museum: “They wanted a perfect race; we want a perfect baby.”
The renewed interest in eugenics is global. Dr. Hyadukai Sakamoto, of Keio University in Japan, discussed “Artificial Evolution: A New Eugenics.” Sakamoto argued that Western ideas about human rights should not be allowed to interfere with the pursuit of human happiness. He said that people today are adopting an “Asian mentality [in which] the idea of human dignity is relatively weak.” Opposition to genetic engineering is linked to the Western notion of human rights, he added, arguing that “in the Tiananmen Square affair, the European type of fundamental human right was violated in the name of the Chinese people's total welfare.” By contrast, Asian communitarianism “might admit a new sort of communitarianism—even the idea of some new type of eugenics—that has long been rejected in the Western world [that] denounces the violation of human rights.” In Confucian ethics, Sakamoto said, “harmony and social benevolence [are] superior to [individual] human rights.”
Dr. Ren-Zong Qiu, of the Chinese Academy of Social Science in Beijing, was less effusive about eugenics, denying that it figures into his government's population policies. He said that a section in a recent law was mistranslated last year, giving a false impression; it should have been labeled “women's health,” not “eugenics,” since the law is designed to help women have healthy children, he said. The official also repeated the Chinese government's contention that widely reported instances of coercive abortion and sterilization are just isolated abuses at the local level.
In a talk entitled “Playing the Nazi Card,” Professor Jonathan Glover from Oxford University argued that comparing today's drift into eugenics and euthanasia to the grave evils of Nazism is inaccurate. He criticized an unnamed Australian bishop who decried euthanasia “because the Nazis did it.” Glover did not expand on the bishop's statement or refer to any of the extensive arguments put forth by the Church; he seemed to assume the “Nazi card” was the sum total of the Church's objections. The current eugenics and euthanasia movements are different from the German movements in “obvious” ways, he said. The German programs included systematic racism and also a carefully cultivated “emotional hardness,” which made atrocities common, according to Glover. He said neither of these elements are present today.
The president's bioethics commission took a day out from the conference for their meeting. At this session, they invited members of other national commissions to advise them on how their work may be effective, how the members may become visible and build public support. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the meeting was the absence of any reference to religion in the United States. A French commissioner explained how they are careful to solicit the views of their major denominations: “Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims and Marxists.” The president of Mexico's bioethics commission, Dr. Manuel Velasco-Suarez, spoke out against human embryo research, reflecting the views of the Catholic Church, but he was the only person to do so openly. Several people approached him to express support—but did so in private.
John Cavanaugh-O'Keefe is director of public policy for the American Life League.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Cavanaugh-O'Keefe ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Firebrand MD Blazes Trail for Natural Family Planning DATE: 01/19/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 19-25, 1997 ----- BODY:THE DAY Pope Paul VI died—Aug. 6, 1978—an idea was born in the minds of Dr. Thomas Hilgers and his wife Susan. They made a decision that would change their lives and impact thousands of American Catholics.
Hilgers, then a 35-year-old professor at the Creighton University Medical School, launched an educational and research institute in Omaha, Neb., specializing in reproductive medicine. He envisioned an institute that would never break from Catholic teaching—least of all from Paul VI's groundbreaking 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae, that reaffirmed the Church's support for natural family planning (NFP) and its rejection of artificial birth control.
It wasn't until 1985 that the St. Paul, Minn., native was finally able to open the doors of the Pope Paul VI Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction, which he lovingly calls it the “Miracle on Mercy Road” after its location. Hilgers had approached Creighton and a local Catholic hospital, but both rejected his idea of incorporating his center within their organizations. He had to go it alone.
“There is so little support for this work; and many people associated with it are unwilling to pay” to make it flourish, he told the Register during a recent phone interview from his Omaha office. Hilgers, a specialist in fertility treatment, said that his wife and he have tithed more than half of their income earned from treating 10,000 patients, teaching and other jobs during the past 10 years. Both are members of the Pontifical Council for the Family.
Hilgers's hard-nosed personality has won him his share of enemies—some of them former close associates—but many admire his work. The 53- year-old father of five acknowledges that he rubs some people the wrong way. “For a young OB/GYN, I'm not the most easy person to work with,” he allows, adding that, as a diabetic, “I'm a pain in the rear.”
Admirers defend Hilgers. “I'm sure it must be difficult to do research, see patients and raise money,” said Steve Koob, founder of One More Soul, a Dayton, Ohio-based group that promotes the idea that “children are a blessing from the Lord.”
“Those are three skills that few people have,” said Koob, whose group is publishing a directory of pro-life doctors, with an emphasis on OB/GYNs and family practitioners who follow Humanae Vitae's mandates. Hilgers also counts Archbishop Elden Curtiss of Omaha among his supporters.
During the past five years, Hilgers has trained 70 doctors in an NFP program he developed, known as the Creighton Model, which is a modified version of the Billings Ovulation Method. Many in NFP circles regard Hilgers's method as more complex than the one developed by John and Lynn Billings of Australia. The third major NFP system, the Sympto-Thermal Method, introduced by John Kippley of the Cincinnati, Ohio-based Couple to Couple League (CCL), is believed by many to be the easiest to follow.
While a number of NFP teachers report bickering between some adherents of the three different groups, Hilgers dismissed such talk. “If a diocese decides to standardize one or another method, of course we're going to make a presentation” to change their minds. But Hilgers said he hasn't argued with teachers of other NFP models for 25 years, although he has written scientific research papers that have criticized both the Billings and Sympto-Thermal Methods.
Hilgers and his followers pride themselves on the rigorous training that Creighton Method teachers undergo. Most of the doctors receive six months of training, while health care professionals and other practitioners usually complete a year-long course of studies. “You can't become a Creighton Model teacher in a weekend class or in a four-month training,” explained Hilgers. “The volume of knowledge you have to know as an allied health professional” doesn't allow such shortcuts, he added. “Hair-care professionals go to classes for a year in the evenings. We should take NFP just as seriously.”
While Hilgers set up a model through which certified practitioners—usually health care professionals—could earn money seeing patients who want to practice NFP, the Couple to Couple League encourages non-professional couples to enroll in its less rigorous training program. CCL instructors are usually volunteers who charge only for the cost of materials, said Kippley.
The Pope Paul VI Institute runs five certification programs and has trained almost 700 NFP practitioners in Africa, Canada, Europe, Mexico and the United States. Hilgers has also launched 50 Catholic hospital-based NFP programs in 25 states, in addition to conducting a fiveday non-certification programs on NFP for Catholic priests.
Far from being a dead letter, Humanae Vitae appears to be attracting more notice from a younger crowd. “We're seeing younger physicians and priests come here,” said Hilgers. “The people of my generation tended to reject NFP because they associate it with the rhythm method, which wasn't very scientific or systematic,” he said. “Younger people don't have that hangup and are very open,” about mastering NFP and practicing it.
Despite an upturn in support for the encyclical's teachings, surveys have shown that more than 80 percent of Catholic couples use artificial birth control. Rather than blame them, Hilgers takes Church leadership to task for “the profound silence that's been born from dissent” from Humanae Vitae.
Hilgers readily admits that his institution's main weakness is its financial security, and he's in the midst of a $2.75 million capital campaign to eliminate debt and build an endowment. The first phase of the campaign netted more than $400,000 in donations from 630 individual donors, which exceeded Hilgers' targets. He is currently approaching companies and foundations.
If the institute reaches its fundraising goals, Hilgers plans to open up an international studies center as well as a national training center; he also hopes to revive its intern program. “The work is too important not to expand it,” he explained.
William Murray is based in Kensington, Md.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: William Murray ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: American Shows Targeted By British-TV Watchdogs DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:LONDON—In America, parents often fear for what their children might see on television.
Across the Atlantic, it's worse. Britain's newest free television station, Channel 5, is airing movies that are rated “18” in theaters there — the equivalent of the American “X.”
“We have been accused of showing soft porn,” said a spokesman for the channel. “These are not soft porn; they are erotic dramas. Anybody who thinks they are has never seen a soft porn film.”
Catholic activists disagree, and say that movies like mmanuelle and The Happy Hooker have no place on channels as accessible as America's network TV.
“They are turning our living rooms into red-light zones,” said John Beyer, who heads Britain's leading viewers organization.
Jim McDonnell, a consultor to the Pontifical Council For Social Communications and director of the Catholic Communications Center, the media training center funded by the English and Welsh Bishops'Conference, is calling on Catholics to make their voice heard.
“If viewers do not protest, then a change for the worse will happen,” he warned. “It is up to ordinary people to phone and complain.”
That outcry has already had an effect. Britain's Broadcasting Standards Commission, citing complaints, issued a report castigating Channel 5 for broadcasting erotic material “for its own sake, especially its regular screenings of two U.S. imported series, Compromising Situations and Hot Line. ... In the commission's judgments the point of those programs was clearly erotic.”
The station defends itself both by calling the programs “dramas” and by arguing that, after 9 p.m. — the so-called watershed hour in Britain — anything goes.
The report disagrees.
“The commission acknowledges the arguments put forward by Channel 5 about the time of transmission of these programs and the warnings that had been provided,” it said. “Nevertheless, in the commission's view, the inclusion for its own sake, of erotic material in a free-to-air television service is a steep change in the use of sex on British television and begins to erode the other difference, which research indicates that viewers themselves wish to see, between what is available on open access channels and that which is available through pay services.”
Beyer, director of the National Viewers and Listeners Association, said that Channel 5 also has aired documentary series such as Sex and Shopping, which showed clips from European and U.S. porn films as part of its reportage on prostitution.
“I don't believe this is really what people want in their living rooms,” Beyer contended. “I think people want excellent drama and good films they don't want to be experiencing a strip club or a brothel in their own families.”
McDonnell said that by showing such material, even in a news format, “Channel 5 is pushing back the boundaries of public acceptability and my sympathy” is with the standards commission, he said. “People will keep trying to push the boundaries, but the question for society is how far we are prepared to change in relation to the kind of material to be shown.”
‘I don't believe this is really what people want in their living rooms ... I think people want excellent drama and good films they don't want to be experiencing a strip club or a brothel in their own families.’
The standards commission report is sympathetic to that argument.
“The commission also considers that [the questionable shows'] inclusion in mainstream television runs the risk of encouraging both the amount of such material and the erosion of standards generally,” said the report.
In a letter to The Times of London, Channel 5's chief executive David Elstein said, “The [standards commission] is anachronistic and patronizing in seeking to challenge the right of free-to-air viewers to watch what would be perfectly acceptable on pay television and what would probably earn a 15 certificate if submitted to the British Board of Film Classification for classification.”
Said Beyer, “In the last 15 years our standards have been falling. The head of Channel 5 seems to assume that everybody likes this kind of material simply because very few people write to protest and complain about it. This does not signify public approval. ... There is very little public debate about these sort of issues.”
He added, “We have excellent costume dramas such as the BBC's Pride and Prejudice which are admired the world over and these show that you can have quality programs which are not sexually explicit and attract good ratings.”
Elstein also accused the Standards Commission of “simply seeking to assert its own aesthetic judgment over the clearly stated preferences of Channel 5 viewers.”
He added, “The time has come for a genuine public debate — not the conversations of the chattering classes or debate by focus group it has to be far wider than that; we need a referendum.”
The commission has planned no such action. It pledged to keep the issues under close review, adding, “The commission wishes to remind broadcasters that gratuitous scenes of violent or coercive sex are unacceptable.”
Both sides feel confident that they would prevail if the issue were brought before the public. A Channel 5 spokesman said viewers like the show, and generally “people do not think there is too much sex on television.”
McDonnell said he considers the matter a challenge to Catholics in the pew.
Catholics must do all they can to prevent Channel 5 programming from continuing to undermine standards, he said. “We as a Church consistently try to uphold and support those people who are trying to uphold public standards.”
Paul Burnell writes from Manchester, England.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Paul Burnell ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Identity Crisis on Campuses? DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:DALLAS—Not everyone at the University of Dallas knows how to pray the rosary. Some students carouse more than they ought and a few even roll their eyes at all the talk of ecclesial authority.
But many students do pray in their dormitories, and they go to Mass regularly. They know that in classes and other places on campus they will hear the official Church view of the world.
“The theology programs here are a nice change,” said Rachel Deeken, a sophomore from Springfield, Mo., who had never before had Catholic schooling. “It's nice to see a lot of the teachers at daily Mass. I really like the ... general attitude here.”
There is little dispute that since the Second Vatican Council, Catholic colleges have come more to resemble secular colleges, in everything from academics to student life and composition of faculty.
The trend has been strong enough to inspire the founding of new schools to buck the secularization trend and to offer an explicitly and unapologetically Catholic education. These post-counciliar colleges include Thomas Aquinas in California, Christendom in Virginia, and Magdalen in New Hampshire.
While arguments about what makes a college Catholic have raged for decades, the University of Dallas and a few other institutions of higher learning that predate Vatican II have quietly retained standards and practices that leave little doubt about their Catholic identity.
“We try to do it in all aspects of the university,” said Glen Thurow, dean of the Texas liberal arts school, which has almost 3,000 students. Founded in 1956 in response to the Protestant culture of north Texas, the university saw itself as a Catholic stronghold from the start. That view remains.
Everyone in the theology department is Catholic. Christian writers like Dante, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas are a major part of classes in literature and philosophy. Science faculty acknowledge that learning about the universe around us supports rather than negates the idea of God.
“We try to hire faculty members who regard their Catholicity as important and regard the teaching magisterium of the Church as something that should be paid attention to and given proper respect,” said Thurow. “All of our faculty members in theology have felt free to explore, knowing there is a big difference in looking at things that are part of Church teaching that might be laid out and properly examined and calling out the newspaper and saying the pope is utterly wrong.”
Thurow admitted that, when it comes to sex and drinking, students are less disciplined than in the 1950s. But he added the university does what it can to “create an atmosphere that will guide students in the right way.”
T-shirts and Cybersermons
At Assumption College in Worcester, Mass., students walk around campus wearing T-shirts that say “Wake up to the 7 a.m. Mass.” The message refers not only to the early Sunday worship but the clean living that tends to go with it. With 2,200 students, Assumption requires a heavy load of theology and philosophy courses and has a centrally located, unmistakably Catholic chapel.
In October, 300 of the school's athletes packed the chapel and received medals of St. Sebastian, the patron saint of athletes.
On the college Web site, an Assumptionist priest visiting the Holy Land sends frequent reflections on faith called “God-OnLine.” Assumptionists, who founded the school in 1904, make up a third of the college's board of trustees, which also includes Worcester Bishop Daniel Reilly. That makeup is unusually religious by modern standards.
“We are not a parish and not a retreat house and we are not a seminary, but our motto is ‘Until Christ be formed in you,’” said Thomas Plough, president of Assumption. “We have been fairly autonomous, but have not given up the mission. The search for truth does not negate the fact that there is a source of all truth.”
In its philosophy-of-curriculum statement, the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, speaks of a “dynamic orthodoxy” in which all knowledge is viewed strictly in relationship to Christian truths. The university is divided into “households” of six or a dozen students who pray together and encourage each other in the faith.
The Catholic University of America (CUA) in Washington, D.C., the nation's only institution of higher learning with a papal charter, is reaffirming its identity via a new leader.
“My hopes for the future are simple: that The Catholic University of America will see, once again, its responsibility as the national university of the Church in the United States — to be what its name proclaims,” explains Vincentian Father David O'Connell, president of the 6,000-student school since last fall. “I envision an institution that is of the highest academic caliber while also being true to its identity and mission without compromise or condition.”
The Highest Science
St. John's and Niagara universities both reject New York state funding to avoid compromising their Catholicity. Father O'Connell, who held administrative posts at both schools, explained that what makes a university Catholic is the same as what makes an individual Catholic: faithfulness to the Gospel and Church teachings, commitment to the dignity of human life, commitment to service, and commitment to a spiritual life.
To be “Catholic,” theology must be presented “as a science in communion with the church,” Father O'Connell said. Not all leaders of colleges with Catholic connections want to do quite what Dallas, Assumption, and CUA are doing.
In his apostolic constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae Pope John Paul II had the highest praise for theology. But he also said, “Every Catholic university feels responsible to contribute concretely to the progress of the society within which it works: for example it will be capable of searching for ways to make university education accessible to all those who are able to benefit from it, especially the poor or members of minority groups who customarily have been deprived of it. A Catholic university also has the responsibility, to the degree that it is able, to help to promote the development of the emerging nations” (No. 32).
Community Service
In the past five years, most colleges have started paying more attention to their Catholic identity. A study of 25 Catholic colleges released this month at the University of Dayton shows that schools have “become much more concerned with their mission and maintaining the Catholic character.”
Many Catholic colleges and universities have hired religious to keep an eye on mission and Catholic identity.
For four years, Irish Christian Brother Jack Mostyn has led such an effort at Iona College in New Rochelle, 25 miles north of New York. “Students like what we do here,” said Brother Mostyn. “They say, ‘This Catholic stuff you teach is clear and unambiguous.’”
Brother Mostyn believes that the strong community service program at Iona is a hallmark of a Catholic identity on the rise. Students travel to help at an Indian reservation, in Appalachian towns and on the streets of Manhattan. Brother Mostyn called it an “anthropological theology,” a discipline that helps students learn about “the overpowering presence of God in everyday life.”
Holy Cross Sister Rose Anne Schultz, vice president for mission at St. Mary's College, a womens school in South Bend, Ind., travels the country helping colleges develop plans for fine-tuning their Catholic identity. She tells campus leaders that the real identity test is how students, faculty and staff live out Catholic values.
“How this is integrated throughout the institution is a challenge,” says Sister Schultz. “I think we have done pretty well so far at St. Mary's. You find that everyone has to have a share in this or it won't quite work.”
Some analysts are cautious about the emphasis on community service, and wonder why more attention isn't paid to ensuring a Catholic perspective in classroom material and the composition of the faculty.
They cite another passage from Ex Corde Ecclesiae, in which the Pope writes, “One consequence of [a Catholic university's] essential relationship to the Church is that the institutional fidelity of the university to the Christian message includes a recognition of and adherence to the teaching authority of the Church in matters of faith and morals. Catholic members of the university community are also called to a personal fidelity to the Church with all that this implies. Non-Catholic members are required to respect the Catholic character of the university, while the university in turn respects their religious liberty” (No. 27).
They worry that many Catholic colleges are giving up their identity in a bid to be more like secular schools. That trend began in 1967, says Patrick Reilly of the Cardinal Newman Society. That is when a number of Catholic college presidents convened in Wisconsin and wrote what has become known as the Land of Lakes document.
The statement voiced a desire to take Catholic colleges from second-class status to a level of respect on a par with the Ivy League. The document, while insisting on a strong Catholic identity, asserted that excellence was possible only if the colleges were free from external authority.
“When you cut strings from the institutional church, you start to drift,” says Reilly. “Catholicism has been squeezed into a theology program that does not inform other activities on campus.”
Setting theology in its proper place atop the hierarchy of knowledge would have other good effects, such as tempering students' unwise forays into sex, alcohol, and drugs, Reilly predicts.
Community service and diversity are noble goals of a college, but do not make a school Catholic, argues commentator James Hitchcock. “It would be rather insulting to a secular university to say, as some Catholics do, that we are sensitive to injustice and you folks are not,” says Hitchcock, himself a professor of history at the Jesuits' St. Louis University.
Ed Langlois writes from Portland, Oregon.
----- EXCERPT: Register looks at 10 Catholic Colleges ----- EXTENDED BODY: Ed Langlois ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Abstinence On the Rise Among U.S. Teen-agers DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON—Abstinence, not contraceptive use, is responsible for a decline in teen pregnancies and birthrates, according to a new study.
The study, done by the Consortium of State Physicians Resource Councils, shows that the birthrate for young females has declined while the number of both young males and females using abstinence has increased.
In addition, the growing use of condoms, which has been promoted by so-called safe-sex advocates, has actually boosted out-of-wedlock birth rates. Between 1988 and 1995, birthrates of sexually active teen-agers increased 29% at a time when condom use soared by 33%.
Rep. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who also is a practicing physician, told reporters at a press conference Feb. 10, “When Congress decided in 1996 to allocate $250 to promote sexual abstinence until marriage, the sex education establishment derided that policy, stating that teens needed training in condom use to prevent pregnancy. This report debunks that theory and lands on the side of abstinence.”
The report, “The Declines in Adolescent Pregnancy, Abortion and Birth Rates in the 1990s: What Factors are Responsible?”, was written by 11 physicians and commissioned by a network of 13 state organizations which represent more than 2,000 physicians.
Among the surprising data: The number of teen-age males practicing abstinence soared from 39% in 1990 to 51% in 1997. Female abstinence increased slightly, to 52.3% from 52% during the same period.
As a result, the birthrate for females between the ages of 15 and 19 decreased from 62.1 births to 54.7 births per thousand between 1991 and 1997. The abortion rate within this group also declined from 18.8 in 1990 to 13.5 per 1,000 females in 1995.
Among the physicians who participated in the study and attended the news conference were Dr. John Diggs of the Massachusetts Physicians Resource Council. He said, “Our report challenges the consensus of government funded health agencies that contraceptive training and the increased availability of condoms for teens must play a central role in the prevention of pregnancy.
“The findings of our report show that the safe sex approach to teen sexuality is a failure and not at all safe.”
One of his colleagues, Dr. Joanna Mohn of the New Jersey Physicians Resource Council, added, “The implications of this research to public health policy are far reaching. Abstinence, not ‘safe sex,’ has proven to be the successful teen health message.”
In addition to the pregnancy issue, the physicians addressed the matter of disease.
“Abstinence is the best defense against the growing sexually transmitted disease epidemic in this country,” Rep. Coburn said. “Condoms give virtually no protection against the most common sexually transmitted disease, human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes almost all forms of cervical cancer.
“Nearly 15 million Americans will contract an STD [sexually transmitted disease] this year alone. Approximately two-thirds of these new cases will occur in people under 25 years of age.”
Another congressman from Oklahoma, Ernest Istook, championed abstinence for preventing teen pregnancies and reducing sexually transmitted diseases. But he added, “It's also the right thing morally,” a position which resonates with Catholic and many other Christian leaders.
The Catholic Church's teaching on sexual abstinence until marriage is clear. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (No. 2348) notes: “All the baptized are called to chastity. The Christian has ‘put on Christ,’ the model for all chastity.
“All Christ's faithful are called to lead a chaste life in keeping with their particular states of life. At the moment of his Baptism, the Christian is pledged to lead his affective life in chastity.”
Consistent with this teaching, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops has continued to emphasize chastity education through its Office of Pro-Life Activities. According to Theresa Notare of that office, William Cardinal Keeler of Baltimore sent a letter to all bishops Feb. 12. He is the chairman of the bishops'pro-life efforts.
The letter, the latest in a series of initiatives on the subject, disseminated Nine Tips to Help Faith Leaders and Their Communities Address Teen Pregnancy, a short report from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. In addition, Cardinal Keeler also announced that a Catholic chastity curriculum guide will be distributed by the bishops in the spring.
There are, of course, a number of state, local and privately-funded chastity programs which have been successful. Among those cited at the news conference were True Love Waits, established by the Baptist Sunday School Board; the Michigan Abstinence Partnership, supported by Gov. John Engler; Best Friends, geared toward junior high school girls in Washington, D.C.; and an effective community program in Denmark, South Carolina.
Best Friends, headed by Elyane Bennett, wife of former U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett, encourages a comprehensive program which bolsters the self-image of largely inner-city girls. Those who have participated in the program have only a 10% rate of sexual activity as contrasted to 37% for its peer group in District of Columbia public schools.
The success of these and other private and local programs encouraged Congress to enact a five-year, $250 million abstinence education program in 1996. Part of the welfare-reform bill, this block grant allocates federal funds to states ranging from $69,855 per year for Utah and Vermont to $5.8 million to California.
Yet, organizations such as Planned Parenthood and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States have been critical of the program. So, too, have been officials of the administering agency, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and some state health officials.
As a result, New Hampshire and California turned down abstinence education money last year, and a number of states diverted money to unrelated uses.
Peter Brandt, head of a watchdog group called the National Coalition for Abstinence Education, told the Register last October, “There has been a concerted attempt by some in the public health establishment to water down, and in some cases to even violate, the intent of the law.”
The Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the House Commerce Committee held a hearing on this subject last fall. Brandt was one of those testifying, noting that only 16 or 17 states “have embraced the intent of the law.” Ten states, he reported, adopted regulations which attack the law's intent, 21 diluted the law, and two were not participating
Brandt told the Register, Feb. 10, that although a few more states have come around, problems persist. He expects that the same subcommittee will again investigate this year and “come back with more teeth” in the law.
For Brandt, the problem here is simple: “It's money, it's power, and it's ideology. They [abstinence opponents] know that abstinence works. This is not about kids, it's about power and money.
“If abstinence education is effective, it challenges a multibillion-dollar industry which only exists because kids are sexually active.”
One of the leaders of the social conservatives in the House, Rep. Joseph Pitts (R-Pa.), told the Register, I'm a strong supporter of abstinence education. We ought to make the appropriations permanent. It works.”
Agreeing that “we have bureaucrats who are undermining the whole intent of the law,” he supports further oversight hearings. He also is looking to include abstinence education in a broad-based program, the Women and Children's Resources Act, which he will soon introduce.
This law, based on a model he helped enact in Pennsylvania, would allocate $85 million annually to reimburse crisis pregnancy centers, maternity homes, and adoption agencies. Reimbursable services would include pregnancy testing, health care and guidance, abstinence education, and referrals for assistance in a variety of areas.
Although he supports federal abstinence programs, Rep. Coburn told the Register, “Washington isn't going to solve this” problem of teen sexual permissiveness and pregnancy. Pitts' new legislation would be one way to help give money back to the states for this purpose. Such activity at the state and at the local, church, and family level — Coburn and other activists suggest — will be essential is further encouraging abstinence.
Joseph Esposito writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: Physicians unveil study's positive results ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Esposito ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: 'Homosexual Marriage': Arguments Are Shaky DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:The ongoing debates over the legalization of “homosexual marriage” inevitably lead to a very basic question: Does marriage require a man and a woman?
It would seem to be an easy question. The Second Vatican Council speaks of marriage as a “whole manner and communion of life” which includes both mutual love and openness to new life (Gaudium et Spes, 51).
Part III
Since procreation requires a man and a woman, this teaching has an obvious application to the question of “homosexual marriage.”
On Jan. 21, in an address to the Roman Rota, Pope John Paul II stated that homosexual unions cannot be marriages “above all because of the objective impossibility of being fruitful in the transmission of life, according to the plan inscribed by God in the very structure of the human being.” (The Rota is the Holy See's ordinary court of appeals especially known for handling cases involving the validity of marriages.)
The Holy Father added that homosexual unions could not be “marriages” because “there is an absence of those interpersonal complementary dimensions which the Creator willed.”
While this teaching on marriage is natural enough within the Church, it faces a tougher audience in the rough-and-tumble of public debate in America today. Below are three arguments offered by supporters of “homosexual marriage,” and the counterarguments that Catholics could offer.
1) ‘Marriage is just a convention’
This argument says that “marriage” is simply something made up by society. Because there is no enduring truth about marriage, the argument goes, a society is free to legally redefine it.
This argument makes a big assumption: that marriage is just a convention. There are, of course, aspects of marriage and marriage law that vary from culture to culture. But in response, it can be noted that in every society there are men and women, different yet designed for one another. In every culture, these opposite-sex couples come together and form families.
2) ‘Marriage is a right’
The second argument says that because each citizen has a constitutional right to marry, to exclude homosexuals from legal marriage violates the Constitution.
This argument begs the question, however. If marriage is whatever society says it is, then presumably anybody can marry anybody. But if marriage by definition requires a man and a woman, two homosexuals cannot marry, and no homosexual is “excluded” from marriage.
The right to marry is not the same thing as redefining marriage in order to have a right to it.
3) ‘Marriage will help homosexuals’
The third argument is that marriage would reduce promiscuity among homosexuals. This argument assumes that “marriage” is just a tool of social engineering.
The issue of promiscuity among homosexuals and heterosexuals is a serious one. But marriage is an institution that requires a man and a woman, it is not simply a “policy” that government can “reform” in order to solve social problems.
These arguments in favor of “homosexual marriage” share the view that there is no transcendent truth about marriage, other than vague appeals to “love” and “commitment.” By contrast, the arguments in favor of heterosexual marriage acknowledge that there is a truth that transcends mankind.
Indeed, this is the real divide between those who support or oppose “homosexual marriage.” It is not first of all a disagreement about the morality homosexuality. It is a difference about the existence of truth.
Perhaps that explains why elected officials have consistently reaffirmed marriage. They recognize that an understanding among people of what marriage really is. They also understand that to tinker with that definition is to invite disaster, socially and politically. Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act overwhelmingly, and in every state but one that has passed a marriage recognition law, the margin of support has been higher than 70%.
Catholics who agree that the word “marriage” means something enduring share with their fellow citizens some basic, obvious, and yet now vigorously disputed assumptions.
They assume that men and women are equal, yet biologically and psychologically different. They assume that these differences complement each other in important ways.
They assume that together, men and women form a unique community, and that one of the central tasks of this community is having and raising children.
They assume that this community called “marriage” is indispensable to a healthy society.
They assume that any attempt to “redefine” marriage by law is absurd; tyrannical, because it will bypass the democratic process if done solely in the courts; and unwise, because it will create a state-sanctioned message that all sexual relationships are morally and legally equivalent.
Citizens who agree with these assumptions may find that the best time to influence the ongoing debate is now. How they can do so, will be the topic of the next and final installment of this series.
David Coolidge writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: David Coolidge ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Pope's Homeland a Model For Christian-Muslim Ties DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:WARSAW, Poland—At 43, Selim Chazbijewicz speaks and acts like any Catholic Pole.
He alternates his time between a family home in Gdansk's smart Oliwa surburb, and a pedagogy institute in nearby Olsztyn where he lectures in political science.
But Chazbijewicz isn't quite an average Pole.
For one thing, he's a leading member of Poland's Union of Tartars, and a direct descendant of the fierce Turkic tribes who invaded Eastern Europe in the late Middle Ages. For another, he's a Muslim imam, or prayer leader, who worships not in Oliwa's stately 16th Century cathedral but in the local mosque.
Built with Saudi funding in 1990, a year after the collapse of communist rule, the Oliwa mosque has room for 200, and gets around half that at regular prayer meetings. Besides Tartars, they include Arab, Turkish, and Asian visitors who've come to the Baltic city for studies or business, or out of curiosity to see a community that's been living here barely observed for centuries.
This June, all of that could change. For Pope John Paul II has accepted an invitation to meet and pray with Chazbijewicz and other Muslims during his eighth visit to Poland.
“After 600 years of living among Catholics, we wanted to acknowledge our gratitude to the Church for fostering such a tolerant attitude to Muslims here,” the imam explained. “But this meeting will have great symbolic meaning for followers of Islam everywhere, by showing it's possible for Christians and Muslims to live peacefully together and engage in religious dialogue.”
Poland's seven registered Muslim associations currently total 20,000 members, of whom around a quarter are Tartars like Chazbijewicz.
Unlike their co-religionists in Western Europe, who are mostly products of postwar immigration, Muslims have lived here since the 14th century invasions, making them indigenous, like the hard-pressed Muslims of Bosnia.
Polish Muslims helped defend their adopted country during periods of war and occupation, and had their own National Army battalions until as late as 1939. Today, though they've lost their language, they've kept their faith intact. But attempts to find militant Islamic recruits here have failed.
In June 1997, when Europe's first Catholic-Muslim Joint Council was set up in Poland, its statutes committed it to “overcome stereotypes caused by ignorance” by “maintaining the theological sovereignty of both faiths.” It's hoped the council will be expanded to take in Muslims from Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and other countries, many of whom are expected to visit Poland for the meeting with John Paul II.
“Although the Pope usually sees Muslim leaders when visiting Islamic countries, he hasn't done so in Europe, despite the presence of large Muslim communities,” explained Bishop Wladyslaw Miziolek, a member of the ecumenical council of Poland's Catholic Church. “Poland's small Muslim population has always lived here harmoniously, preserving its religion but accepting local culture. As such, it provides an example of interreligious coexistence.”
5,000 Mosques in Russia
Examples of coexistence are increasingly needed. As in the West, Islam has proliferated in Eastern Europe since the collapse of communism, underlining its place as the world's fastest growing religion.
When Russia's first Muslim university opened at Kazan in Tatarstan last September, it marked another milestone in Islam's steady expansion. With a population of just half a million, the autonomous region already boasts 800 Muslim councils and several hundred mosques, almost all of them built since 1991.
Beyond Tartarstan, Russia's 20 million Sunni Muslims are mostly concentrated in the Caucasus, and had their faith recognized as an “inseparable part” of the national heritage under Russia's 1997 religious law.
Islamic Sharia law was made binding in Chechnya at the beginning of February. But Muslims operate over 5,000 mosques nationwide in Russia, including five in Moscow.
Ukraine's 240 Muslim associations have 40,000 members in the capital Kiev alone, while in the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, steps have been taken to re-establish traditional Muslim ascendancies.
In Turkmenistan, Muslims already make up 80% of an ex-Soviet population of 3.7 million. The world's largest mosque is being constructed in the capital, Ashchabad.
4 Million in France
In Western Europe too, Islam has expanded rapidly in the past two decades from the Middle East and North Africa, whose combined population, put at 240 million in 1993, is forecast to double to 500 million by the year 2025.
Out of a total West European Muslim population of 15 million, France's 4 million Muslims make up about 6.8% of its inhabitants, while Germany's 2 million-member minority runs 2,000 mosques, compared to a mere handful before World War II.
The neighboring Netherlands hosts 450,000 Muslims and 500 mosques, while the opening of the latest of Rome's five mosques in 1995 was attended by 650,000 Muslims from Italy, where adherents of Islam easily outnumber all other mainstream non-Catholic denominations.
Britain's 3 million-strong Muslim population grew annually by 32,000 in 1992-4, at a time when membership of the established Anglican Church was falling each year by 14,000. Practicing Muslims are widely expected to outnumber practicing Christians by the year 2000 in Britain, where strict religious and social Islamic customs are reviving rather than declining among local-born Muslims.
Western Europe's largest mosque is currently being constructed with Saudi funding in Belgium, where a Brussels-based Islamic Center openly describes its aim as the “Islamicisation of European nations.”
Yet at the same time, complaints of harassment and discrimination are growing among Europe's Muslims.
In a 1996 brochure, the London-based Calamus Foundation charged that “Islamophobia” had “replaced anti-semitism as the acceptable face of prejudice in Western discourse,” and said Islam had “succeeded communism as the enemy in the minds of many Western politicians and commentators.”
Many Muslims agree.
Rising Tensions
In mid-July, the European Parliament voted down calls for a common policy against “religious fundamentalism.”
But Chalid Duran, an editor of the London-based quarterly, Trans Islam, thinks European governments have made a mistake in failing to support Muslim moderates against hard-line Islamic ideologists who are committed to destroying Western society.
“Islamists believe the rich Europeans, like Americans, have become decadent and lost their will to struggle,” Duran said. “European countries should be doing more to support Muslim liberals as a defense against Islamic attacks. Their failure to do so means non-Islamist Muslims enjoy little respect.”
Besides the former Soviet Union, other East European countries have Muslim minorities too, ranging from a still-unrecognized minority of 20,000 in the Czech Republic, where the first mosque opened at Brno in July, to larger groups in predominantly Orthodox Bulgaria and Romania.
In Warsaw, Bishop Wladyslaw Miziolek thinks the Polish model of “assimilation combined with distinctiveness” is what the Catholic Church should be encouraging everywhere.
“There's no doubt we face a Muslim problem — fundamentalists are saying Europe has abandoned its faith and should belong to them,” the Bishop told the Register. “But we can live well together if we allow each culture to display its distinctive features and ensure the millennium becomes a time of dialogue — not just between Christians but between religions.”
That's a view likely to be echoed by responsible spiritual leaders on both sides.
In May, a top-level Catholic-Islamic commission was inaugurated at the Vatican, co-chaired by Francis Cardinal Arinze, chairman of the Papal Council for Interreligious Dialogue, and Sheikh Fawzi Fadel Zifzaf, the head of the Committee for Dialogue with Monotheistic Religions at Egypt's Al-Azhar University.
But efforts will be needed by local church leaders too if initiatives like this are to bear fruit.
‘A Religion of Peace’
Hasan Eissan, a psychology professor at Cairo University, thinks Western opinion has been sidetracked for too long by the provocative words and deeds of Islamic politicians.
“The West should realize Islam is a religion of peace, just like Christianity, and that the fanatics have no claim to represent it,” Eissan told the Register. “A humanitarian Islam, far from threatening Europe, can enrich it with new values. But it won't be possible to avoid conflicts without a gigantic effort of dialogue between forces of moderation acting to build bridges.”
Chalid Duran agrees. He sees a growing gap between Islamic militants, who view Europe as an enemy to be destroyed, and religious Muslims who believe Europe merely offers fertile conditions for peacefully expanding their faith.
In January, Germany's Catholic bishops said their country's 700,000 Muslim children should have the same right as Christians to receive religious lessons at state schools.
“A commitment to values with roots in religion has great importance for society,” the Bishops' statement added. “A state which is guided by principles of freedom and neutrality in views of the world cannot answer questions about God and eternal life. But nor should any government abandon religious lessons at public schools — it should have various religious communities as its partners in this area.”
Should Catholics and Muslims be co-operating more closely to defend the presence of faith and the sacred in European life?
If so, Bishop Miziolek thinks the Pope's June meeting with Muslims will confirm the Catholic Church's wish for closer contacts.
“The Pope will recall our common roots in the ancient tradition of Abraham, as well as in Jesus, who is seen by Muslims as a prophet, though not as the Son of God,” the bishop added. “At a time when powerful circles are showing conflicting attitudes and dispositions, an event like this could succeed in altering the climate of opinion.”
During a record 13-day pilgrimage, John Paul II will take in 16 dioceses and 21 towns, as well as beat-ifying 108 martyrs and making his first-ever address to a national parliament.
But the meeting with Muslims will have a special poignancy too.
Selim Chazbijewicz hopes it will take place in his Oliwa mosque. He traces his Tartar family back 500 years in Poland. And though he hasn't had a chance to make the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, he had no trouble obtaining theological training to be an imam, since his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were also imams before him.
Though living in Europe's most Catholic country, Chazbijewicz says Polish Muslims encounter few problems. He believes the planned meeting with the Pope will have a significance well beyond Poland's borders.
“We are self-governing and independent of foreign groups, so no one can interfere in our decisions,” Chazbijewicz told the Register on Feb. 10.
“We have always been open to others, and are determined to stay that way, doing what we can to prove there's an honored place for Muslims in Europe.”
Jonathan Luxmoore writes from Warsaw, Poland.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jonathan Luxmoore ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Anna Manahan DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:Anna Manahan won a Tony Award for her Broadway performance in The Beauty Queen of Leenane, which closes March 14. But she treasures another possession more. “This is worth more to me than four Tonys,” she said, showing a rosary from the Holy Land. She says her faith is central to her life and theater critics have commented on her honesty, strength of character, and compassion. Recently she spoke to Register correspondent Deirdre McNamara.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Inperson -------- TITLE: Even on Broadway, Faith Can Thrive DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:McNamara: You're known to be a devout Catholic. How important is your faith to you?
Manahan: My faith has sustained me through all the vicissitudes of my life. I have never done anything but act, and I could not have worked as hard as I did to support myself — and sometimes my family — without my faith.
What drew you to the theater and the sometimes nomadic life of a performer?
I was born to a theatrical family in Waterford, Ireland, and studied with the celebrated Abbey actress, Ria Mooney, founder of the original Gaiety School of Acting. I met Milo O'Shea there who became a life long friend and with whom I later created the BBC series “Me Mammy.”
That was a hilarious series, but even as your career was blossoming in Ireland and producers in London beginning to seek you out. But then the momentum stopped.
I was widowed before the trousseau was fully unpacked. We were on tour in Egypt with Edwards/MacLiammoir productions and my husband, CoIm O'Kelly, contracted polio and died. It was very sudden.
That must have been difficult to cope with.
It was the hardest thing I have ever done or will do in my life. When I returned to Ireland, my mother took me to Tramore, Co. Waterford which is beside the sea and where I spent much of my childhood. My mother would come down every week and we would go down to the sea. She never said a word, all day. We would sit there and watch the sea coming in and going out.
The sound of the sea is very soothing, a panacea for many ills. That was one of the most healing periods in my life. There is something therapeutic about the sea — it evokes a sense of eternity. My mother was the daughter of a sailor — my grandfather was torpedoed by the Germans — and she had this intense love of the sea. She is a very communicative person, and loves to chat, but I got to know the depth of her character through the silences. There's a time in everyone's life when you get to see you parents not as parents, but as people who have coped with life, with their own dreams and what they've put aside for you and my respect for my mother soared at that time. She was a woman of faith and prayer.
How does your relationship with the Lord inform your daily life and outlook?
A very important agent who wanted to manage me said there are people who want to be stars, and others who want to be good actors and communicate with the audience. That interests me. Naturally I like to do good plays and get good reviews —that's part of the territory, but the life outside of the business I'm not interested in and never was — my career has thrived without it and that should be an example that it can.
Life is about people, and I always believe that the Almighty, known among actors as “The Management,” will not ask me if I were a good or bad actress. I think he'll ask me if I got on with people, did I care about them.
I remember being worried about some whoppers I did in my life, and a Dominican priest said, “Will you for goodness sake forget about them — He's forgotten about them years ago! I suddenly had a vision of God saying, “Oh not again, Anna! For goodness sake would somebody shut her up...” I came out of the confessional roaring with laughter — He must have a sense of humor to put up with us....
Your dreams of a family were shattered by your husband's premature death, but you are known for your outstanding maternal roles both on stage and off. How did you become such a natural mother?
A man I met in the audience was praising me highly. I stopped him and said, “...when I meet a woman who has reared a passel of children I say to myself, ‘What have I done to compare with that?’” and he said, “... in the dark, you've reached out and put your arms around us.” There are different ways of being a mother; there are wonderful women who work as nuns, nurses, social workers, and single [women] who look after their families. Raising children is one expression of motherhood; looking after people and caring for them is another. I've looked after an awful lot of people. It is in my nature to do it, so it must [be] part of my mission.
You have been described as a person who raises others up or, as one journalist put it, “Anna asks how you are and waits to hear the answer.” What, in your opinion, inspired that comment?
When I meet someone for the first time I ask them to tell me about themselves. There's a lot of loneliness in big cities — Mother Teresa said she saw more loneliness in the United States than in all the streets of Calcutta... Despite all this richness and consumerism, people aren't connecting....when I see the huge amount of advertising on television I just want to get sick. It's terrible that while there's a starving of the spirit, we're being bombarded with “...buy this gadget, that food.” Yet, if everyone shared there would be no hunger in the world. I just can't believe the slaughter in recent years of children, of families, of refugees. Life has become very cheap and it [stems] from abortion and euthanasia.
Those are astonishing statements of courage. Theater today is intensely conformist in the “politically correct” sense. Aren't you concerned that those statements. Is there a chance you might lose precious opportunities?
I am so pleased to be a member of the Catholic Church. It is one of the few voices in the world that speaks out strongly against abortion and euthanasia. If I wasn't [born] Catholic, I would join the Church because of its stand on these issues alone.
Thank God there are people standing up and being counted. I believe our present Holy Father is terribly unpopular in some quarters because he “won't give in.” But in the name of the Most High what is the Holy Father to do? He's stands by the Gospel and defends the unborn. It's 1999 and they want him to go by the popular trend, but he can't and he won't. History will justify him. He's been so instrumental in bringing Jews and Christians together and the quality and content of his encyclicals are extraordinary. He's a most remarkable Pope and will be remembered as one of the greatest ever.
Have you ever met the Holy Father in person?
I'd love to meet him — but with all the traveling, I've yet to go to Rome.
Many traditional Irish Catholics are still struggling with Vatican II. Were the changes difficult for you?
Vatican II inspired many movements. People came together to pray and [also] all sorts help is being offered now — for example bereavement counseling — that they didn't have when I lost Colin. Cardinal O'Connor has asked the clergy to bring divorced Catholics along, back to the sacraments. He had an article in a New York Catholic paper that was very moving. Of course, he has his critics too, but I'm not interested in them. I draw my own conclusions.
Mag Folan, the character you play in
Yes, she's horrendous! A lot of the characters I play are very srong. Irish actor, Tony Doyle, once remarked that he'd “...never work with that one. She must be a terrible so and so...” “She's not,” the director responded. “She's a lovely woman.” “She can't be,” insisted Tony, “and play those terrible parts so convincingly...”
People like Mag Folan are truly fascinating. Without looking for sympathy, one can show the vulnerability of the character. What fascinates me when I look at or read about someone who's truly evil is that I get a flashback to when they were a baby and wonder, “How did that happen?” There must be some trauma along the road. When I talk about my wonderful parents I think of how lucky I was and my heart bleeds for children raised in uncaring atmospheres to criminality, drug, or sexual abuse.
Ireland has undergone enormous social and economic changes. A substantial number of Irish mothers work outside the home now and there's a strong pro-abortion, anti-family feminist movement over there. Do you have any thoughts on those changes?
I have always [worked] and was on a panel and asked if I agreed with women being mothers and wives and working. I give the answer now that I gave then. It's very hard, as men have always known, to be the breadwinner. If you have to work, whether it be through financial necessity as often it is, or emotional necessity, then I would say that before you marry and have children think about that seriously because, you will be taking on two jobs. If you think you are capable of doing [both] or organizing it, then do it — who am I to say otherwise. I am a working woman. [I have been] all my life.
I think most women are frustrated and torn. Very often a woman when she goes out to work takes on a second job, along with the cooking, cleaning, and shopping. [Then], if she has children she can become a nervous wreck and the family goes on the shoals. The ideal thing is that when a baby is born, it's better to stay home until the child goes to school and [then to start] working during those hours. The most wonderful thing in my childhood was to come home from school and know my mammy was there. It was the first thing we'd do — there were six of us — open the door and call out for her. For too many children nowadays the shopping mall has become the family home.
Speaking of home, you've been touring the world for two years now. Do you ever get homesick?
I long to see my new house in Waterford. But wherever I am, whether it's Ballyjamesduff or Broadway, I give my all and people have been so wonderful in America. New York is a sort of second home for me, I love the diversity, the energy and the Mass is always a “home.” But I do miss my wonderful family and friends in Ireland. God bless them.
Deirdre McNamara writes from New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Deirdre McNamara ----- KEYWORD: Inperson -------- TITLE: U.S. Notes & Quotes DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:George and Abe Were Not Bill
“Bill's in Good Company ... Top Contenders for a Rushmore of Cheaters,” said the New York Daily News. “Cases of Presidential Philandering Are Hardly Exceptional,” said Newsday, in an article that pointed to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln — America's most revered presidents — as culprits.
Olasky did acknowledge some evidence that Washington and Lincoln had amorous, but not sexual, proclivities in their youth, but said both were models of marital fidelity.
He added, “Washington could not tell a lie when marital vows and legal oaths were involved,” and pointed out that Washington stayed true to his wife, Martha, for 41 years — despite eight years spent at war.
Lincoln always “put out the fires of his terrible passion,” as his law partner is quoted saying. Olasky recounted one incident where a friend sent a prostitute to him whom Lincoln was able to refuse. Later, when he was married, he stayed true to his wife through 23 years of marriage, even though she is considered mentally unstable by some and “once chased her husband down a Springfield street with a knife,” said Olasky.
Protestants Toughen Marriage Standards
In Florida, the problem is worse. There, three out of five marriages end in divorce, said Gov. Jeb Bush, a Catholic, according to the report. He has endorsed a “community marriage policy” that would link clergy of different faiths together in a common effort to save marriage.
“Clergy who endorse a marriage policy agree to establish minimum standards for a couple about to wed. The requirements can be modified by any religious community,” said the paper.
The plan has been adopted by 100 cities across the nation, and is the brainchild of Mike McManus, founder of the successful Marriage Savers program, said the article. McManus cites statistics that he says show that in counties that adopted the marriage policy in 1995, divorces have fallen about 35%.
But the paper quoted one skeptic: family issues author David Blankenhorn said “these claims just cry out for outside evaluation from accredited scholars.” He added that he admires McManus' work and supports the program.
Some Evangelicals Reject Contraception
In November the magazine published an article suggesting that Christians should avoid the pill. One reader agreed in a recent letter to the editor.
“Bravo for your challenge to Christian couples. ... We hear many messages about trusting God in the arena of finances, healing ... etc., but encouragement to trust God in the area of family planning is either rare or nonexistent” in evangelical churches, she wrote.
“My husband and I were led to relinguish birth control to God's control almost seven years ago, and God has added two precious babies to our family in that time. But I still grieve over the children we missed out on in earlier years because we followed the example of the world and Christians deceived by the world, rather than searching out God's heart on the matter.
“We also wonder if the lack of major progress for the pro-life movement isn't rooted in the contraceptive mentality. Evangelicals say that children are a gift from God, and yet in our own way (contraception) we also reject those gifts. The ‘slippery slope’ of devaluing human life did not begin with abortion; it began when the masses — including Christians — accepted Margaret Sanger's anti-child and pro-birth control philosophies.” Sanger founded Planned Parenthood.
----- EXCERPT: From selected publications ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: World Notes & Quotes DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:Irish President's Ecumenism
THE IRISH TIMES, Feb. 11—Irish President Mary McAleese called for a new inter-religious global ethic to lay down guidelines for human behavior - “to create the conditions for a sustainable world order,” reported Paddy Agnew.
McAleese made her comments in a series of speeches in Florence during a trip to Italy that will culminate with an audience with Pope John Paul II.
McAleese also cautioned that ecumenism should not be taken to mean the lowest common religious denominator but rather a unity that respected diversity.
Meanwhile, Britain's The Universe Catholic newspaper reported that McAleese will conform to papal etiquette during her visit with the Pope and wear the traditional full-length black dress with sleeves and a black veil. “This protocol was ignored by former President Mary Robinson in 1996 who met Pope John Paul in a green coat-dress,” reported the paper.
Australian Archbishop Tackles Liturgical Abuses
THE COURIER-MAIL, Feb. 11—Australians' widespread use of general absolution in place of individual confession has prompted Brisbane Archbishop John Bathersby to assign more than 50 lay people to monitor liturgical practices in Catholic parishes over Lent and Easter.
Andrew Shaw, director of the effort, said the campaign is “very painful” in the short-term. “But long-term it's making the Catholic Church here in Brisbane wake up to the fact that what's going on is not in accord with the mind of the Holy Father,” he told reporter Wayne Smith.
Archbishop Bathersby ordered a stop to general absolution in a recent meeting with the 230 priests of the archdiocese.
General absolution can only be used with the specific permission of the bishop or under extreme circumstances, such as an army chaplain giving general absolution to troops before they go into battle.
“Some [priests] have openly said they will defy the Church and the archbishop,” Brazier said.
----- EXCERPT: From selected publications ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Vatican Notes & Quotes DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:Pope Invited to Fatima
Reuters also said, “The Pope, who is known for his devotion to the Virgin, last visited Fatima in 1991 when he came to give thanks for having survived an assassination attempt in Rome 10 years previously.
“He was shot and wounded by the Turkish gunman Ali Agca and attributed his survival to the divine intervention by the Virgin.”
Meanwhile a British Catholic newspaper, The Universe, reported Jan. 31, that Fatima supporters were expecting that sometime during 1999 Rome would approve the beatification of the two Fatima visionaries who have died, Francisco and Jacinta. A miraculous cure of a woman bedridden for 22 years with spinal paralysis has been attributed to the intercession of Jacinta, though the Vatican has not yet ruled on its authenticity.
The third visionary, Lucia, is 91 years old and lives as a Carmelite nun at Coimbra, Portugal.
Must Catholics Oppose the Death Penalty?
Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 7—When he was in St. Louis, the Pope made “one of his most forceful efforts at ‘closing the door’ on the death penalty,” said Anthony Cardinal Bevilacqua, according to a report in the Inquirer. The paper investigated whether the Pope's position could become a litmus test of Catholics’ faithfulness to Church teaching.
In St. Louis, John Paul insisted that punishment “even in the case of one who has done great evil” should be limited to other methods than the death penalty.
The Pope's campaign for change caught greater public notice when Gov. Mel Carnahan of Missouri heeded his appeal to “have mercy on Mr. Mease.” In a move that could hurt him politically, the governor commuted the death sentence of triple murder Darrell Mease to life in prison without parole.
Does this mean that Catholics must oppose the death penalty? Cardinal Bevilacqua responded that “it will take time for people's attitudes to change,” and that the Church is in “a period of catechesis.” The report quoted him saying, “I do not think that, at the present time, to support the death penalty” means that a person is not Catholic.
The Inquirer pointed out that Church doctrine, as stated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church allows for state execution but only in “cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity,” which the document says may be practically nonexistent in modern societies.
----- EXCERPT: From selected publications ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Post-Impeachment Blues? DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:In the aftermath of the Clinton scandal, there are many causes for pessimism. One of the greatest problems with the Clinton scandal all along has been the likelihood that it would lower standards for Americans. In the week just before the Senate's deliberations on the fate of Bill Clinton came to an end, the press foresaw that he would be exonerated, and began to predict what would happen next.
When the nation's chief law enforcement officer abuses the law, the law's authority is weakened. When the president misuses the Oval Office without personal consequence, every office in the land is made more vulnerable. And when good character is considered unnecessary in a president, ordinary citizens will hardly think it necessary for themselves. When you also consider his enduring popularity, things can look hopeless.
The way to find hope despite this catastrophe is to follow the example of the Holy Father. He sees the greater problem of our times: the culture of death, and still finds hope. In his letter about the
The Pope is calling for a direct reversal of the situation in our 20th century, a time like the one William Butler Yeats described when he wrote: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
In this context, instead of complaining about Clinton's ceaseless efforts to win and use power, we would do better to imitate his untiring work — and use the results for good.
The saints certainly were his match. St. Paul endured imprisonment, calumny, and betrayal to evangelize the Roman world. He was faithful to his call, and his work sowed the seeds of Western Civilization as we know it. St. Patrick struggled indefatigably in his confrontation with pagan Ireland. His adopted country gave the world centuries of missionaries as a result. Mother Teresa let nothing and no one get in the way of her service to the poor — and set an example the world cannot ignore.
Catholics, with God's grace, can work to change the world according to Christ's standards just as effectively as Bill Clinton pursued his goals. Consider his career:
Of course Clinton cannot, in the end, be praised for his ambition simply because it was effective. Mere ambition has no worth on its own. Only where personal ambition is magnanimous enough to embrace the good of the community at large is it truly worthwhile.
A model of such magnanimity is George Washington, whose birthday we celebrate this week. He provides us with a sterling example of dedication and effectiveness. He consciously formed his character from childhood, when a French Catholic manual called
Washington shows us what happens when a magnanimous heart is matched with high ambition. Something as great as America comes into being.
When we add prayer, grace, and the Holy Spirit to the equation, surely something even greater will result. Something as great as a new springtime of Christian life, with all that entails.
----- EXCERPT: EDITORIAL ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: St. John Fisher Comes of Age DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:by St. John Fisher In modern English, with an introduction
by Anne Barbeau Gardiner
(Ignatius Press, 1998; 284 pp., $14.95)
Meditation on the seven penitential Psalms was long a part of Catholic piety, especially suitable for penitential seasons. In fact, daily recitation of these seven Psalms was part of Galileo's punishment from the Holy Office. (His niece, a nun, was later allowed to pray the psalms in his stead.) The seven Psalms were also popular material for homilists in Galileo's time and before, and some of the great preachers of the day devoted considerable attention to them.
These Psalms are divinely inspired confessions of sin, moving the sinner to make his own the words of King David: peccavi Domino (I have sinned against the Lord). This new printing of St. John Fisher's masterful sermons on the Psalms may well encourage readers to pray them, perhaps at the end of the day (one for each day of the week), or even as a Lenten practice. Praying the Psalms during Lent is an excellent way to deepen the penitential character of common Lenten practices such as fasting and almsgiving.
This reprinting also serves to reintroduce St. John Fisher to contemporary readers. Fisher shares a feast day with St. Thomas More, June 22, the date on which Fisher was martyred in 1535 for resisting Henry VIII's break with Rome. In this century we have become accustomed to courageous bishops standing up to tyrants — for example, just last year Cardinal Stepinac (d. 1962) of Croatia was beatified as a martyr under communism.
Yet in his time Fisher was the only English bishop to defy Henry VIII, understanding himself to be following in the footsteps of his namesake, John the Baptist, in defending the indissolubility of marriage. Fisher was not only a bishop, but a leading scholar, man of letters, chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and confessor to Lady Margaret Beaufort, the saintly grandmother of Henry VIII. Alas, he remains as ignored today as St. Thomas More is celebrated.
This volume presents in modern English Fisher's sermons on Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143. (In some versions of the Bible those after Psalm 6 are numbered one number smaller: 31, 37, etc.) The best-known are 51, the Miserere, and 130, the De profundis. The former appears every Friday in the Liturgy of the Hours, and the latter is traditionally recited when praying for the dead. Together with the other five, they comprise the seven penitential Psalms.
Anne Barbeau Gardiner has rendered Fisher's English (he wrote before Shakespeare) into felicitous modern English, while not sacrificing the elegance of the older, elevated style. Her introduction briefly outlines Fisher's life, describing him as “a virtual one-man counter-reformation in England,” first against Luther and then against Henry VIII.
She makes a contribution to the continuing project of correcting anti-Catholic history, arguing that the popularity of Fisher's sermons, reprinted seven times between 1508 and 1529, “evinced a high measure of spiritual receptivity and showed that genuine faith and devotion were far more alive than usually claimed by defenders of the Protestant Reformation.”
The sermons are of high literary quality, devotionally and theologically rich. His graceful combination of systematic argument and literary devices makes his prose useful both for study and spiritual reading. Notwithstanding either devotional fervor or theological argument, it is Fisher's transparent holiness that gives the work its true radiance.
While Fisher focuses on conversion, contrition, and the need for penance (sacramental and otherwise) in the spiritual life, his reflections are wide-ranging. He preaches at some length on the Virgin Mary (Psalm 37), and his sermon on Psalm 129 interweaves a brilliant exegesis of Jonah with a detailed description of the process by which we entertain sin, consent to it, revel in it, boast of it, and finally are ruled by it. There is no mincing of words about the horror of sin and our culpability. He dwells upon the wretchedness of sin in order to move his listeners to “tears of contrition,” directing them to the “cleansing power of Christ's Blood.”
No recommendation can replace a sample of Fisher at his best. In a splendid passage of his sermon on Psalm 50, the scholar-bishop vividly “measures” the mercy of God, mixing Latin and English, and weaving together verses from other Psalms:
“Truly, the mercy of our most mighty and blessed Lord is great, so great that it has all measures of greatness. Of its greatness in height it is written, Domine, usque ad celos misericordia tua, Lord, your mercy extends and reaches up to the heavens (Ps 56:11). It is also great in depth, for it reaches down to the lowest hell. The prophet says, misericordia tua magna est super me, et eruisti animam meam ex inferno inferiori, Lord, your mercy is great over me and you have delivered me from the lowest and deepest hell (Ps 85:13). It is broad, for it occupies and spans all the world, the same prophet saying, misericordia Domini plena est terra, the earth is full of the mercy of our Lord (Ps 32:5). It lacks no length, for also by the same prophet it is spoken: misericordia eius ab eterno, et usque in eternum super timentes eum, the mercy of God is without end on those who fear him (Ps 102:17).
“Therefore since the mercy of God is so high, so deep, so broad, and so long, who can say or think it is little? Who will not call it great by all measures of greatness? Then, everyone who wants to acquaint himself with this mercy can say, miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam, Lord, have mercy on me according to thy great mercy.”
That passage should serve to whet the appetite for Fisher's works, which themselves scale the heights of erudition, explore the depths of the soul, embrace the breadth of the Church's tradition, and preach the lengths to which God will go to save sinners. Here and elsewhere St. John Fisher moves us to confess peccavi Domino, secure in the knowledge that the prayer, Miserere mei, Deus never goes unheard.
Raymond de Souza is a seminarian of the Archdiocese of Kingston, Ontario.
----- EXCERPT: BOOK REVIEW ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond De Souza ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: What Sexuality Means for Singles DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:by Mary Beth Bonacci
(Crisis, February 1999)
Mary Beth Bonacci, Catholic speaker and author, writes: “Even theology seems to conspire against single people. (Note I say ‘seems.’ God would-n't really do that to us.) I'm currently teaching a class at my own parish on the theology of John Paul II. In our discussion of the theology of the body ... with its emphasis on the beauty of married love, the language of human sexuality, and the centrality of the family, the single people in the class are adamantly asking where exactly they fit in.
“But, ironically, it is in that same theology of the body that those single people are finding the key to a deeper understanding of their own vocation.
“The theology of the body, at its deepest level, is about the one true human vocation — the vocation to love. Man is created in the image and likeness of God. That image and likeness is reflected, in its deepest way, in our capacity and desire to give ourselves in authentic love. All creation is a gift to us from a God who personifies love. ... True happiness is only found in recognizing the image and likeness of God in others, and reacting accordingly by seeking what is truly best for them. The creation of our very bodies, as male and female, reflects our capacity to give ourselves, body and soul, to another human person. God's favorite act, the creation of new human life, is accomplished through the love of a man and a woman. The resulting family is a ‘communion of persons,’ a school of love in which each member lives not just for self but by looking out for what is best for all.
“That capacity to give of oneself is by no means limited to the complete self-surrender of marriage. We're all called ... to love — to recognize the image and likeness of God in every human person and to respond accordingly. ... In order to do that, we must live within a community of persons. ... The family is the prototype of the communion of persons, where each member (supposedly) loves and looks out for the others. Religious communities also constitute a communion of persons, where each person (supposedly) contributes to the welfare of the community, and each looks out for and loves the others.
“So what is the communion of persons for those of us who are single? Many of us live alone. ... We may have coworkers, but those people go home to their own families at the end of the day. Who is there to show an interest in our day-to-day lives, to share our problems and our triumphs? Most importantly, who is there for us to love and to give ourselves to?
“The answer for all too many single people is ‘no one.’And, unfortunately ... [i]f a person is frustrating a legitimate need to give of himself, what more obvious outlet could he find than engaging in sexual activity? ... [T]he underlying truth is that most unmarried sexual activity in this world is motivated by a futile attempt to stave off the loneliness caused by the frustrated need to give and receive authentic human love.
“Single people absolutely need a communion of persons. We need friends — not just acquaintances or coworkers or people who invite us over to dinner once a month. ... Catholic singles who work for your average high-tech company ... need to seek out these kinds of friendships, and Catholic parishes ... need to offer single adults good, solid support in their faith. Many, having grown up in the confusing years just after Vatican II, have significant gaps in their own faith formation. They're spiritually hungry, looking to fill the ‘God-shaped hole'in their lives. ... When we offer them substance, those who crave substance will stay. And they will find each other.
“There is another kind of community that is vitally important to Catholic singles: the community of Catholic families. ... I'm not talking about ‘invite a single person to dinner.’ I'm talking about really, honestly making single friends a part of your family, creating an atmosphere where they truly feel comfortable in your home.
“Many find themselves working for faceless corporations in jobs they see as insignificant. ... God's job for them is to be a witness to Christ in that environment ... simply by bringing their Christian values to the workplace. When they conduct business ethically, when they treat each and every person with the respect due to one who is made in the image and likeness of God, they are bearing witness to Christ.”
A condensed version, in the words of the original author, of an article selected by the Register from the nation's top journals.
----- EXCERPT: ARTICLE DIGEST ----- EXTENDED BODY: Ellen Wilson Fielding ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:Child Pornography
Regarding the article concerning the Canadian judge who decided the possession of child pornography should not be a crime (Register, Jan. 31 -Feb. 6): There were a lot of conflicting opinions about the relationship between child pornography and the possible resulting sexual aggression against children. While the opponents of this ruling very rightfully aired their serious concerns about the connection, only Archbishop Adam Exner and the quotations from the Holy Father really touched upon another danger, one whose connection with this ruling is direct and not subject to debate — exploitation.
Consider the simple law of supply and demand. Now that Judge Shaw has okayed its possession, the creators of child pornography are in a much more comfortable position, and, knowing their customers can now live without fear of legal repercussion, the supply must be increased to meet the new demand this ruling is likely to spawn. That means more children are going to be lured, coerced, or deceived into this pit.
Someone should question the judge about his stance on that practice. If he is against it, why has he chosen to directly encourage it? If even one more child is exploited in this way because of his ruling, directly or indirectly, Judge Shaw should be held criminally accountable.
Daniel Benson Roswell, Georgia
‘Safe, Legal, and Rare’?
Lies, euphemisms, deceit, fraud, etc. On January 22, 1973, Norma McCorvey became known as Jane Roe and [later] Sandra Cano became known as Mary Doe. There are markers at the National Monument for the Unborn which state in part: “I publicly recant my involvement in the tragedy of abortion ... Norma McCorvey"; and “The Doe v. Bolton case is based on deceit and fraud ... Sandra Cano.”
Abortion has never been found in the Constitution. Justice Douglas claims a right to privacy is in the emanations (vapors) from the penumbra (shadow) of the 14th Amendment. Millions of deaths are caused by illusions the Justices found lurking in the shadows. The shadows are not the Constitution. A shadow is a distortion of the object casting the shadow. Let's put light on the Constitution and get rid of these deadly shadows.
ProChoice is a euphemism and doublespeak. It is a way to claim that they are against abortion yet stridently work for the right to kill children in their mother's womb. They are dishonest with themselves.
We have a President who claims abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” By its definition, intent, and purpose abortion is never safe for the youngest involved. It is not safe for the mother either. Should intentional killing of our posterity be legal? Are millions of intentional deaths annually “rare”?
Henry Honigfort Chesterfield, Missouri
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Henry Honigfort ----- KEYWORD: Opinion -------- TITLE: So What Are Catholics to Do After the Trial? DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:Many commentators thought the House managers did a good job “connecting the dots” during the closing arguments of President Clinton's trial. The managers skillfully pieced together witness testimony into a coherent case that the president obstructed justice. Defenders of the president see only isolated events involving Monica, Betty, and Vernon, events lacking a pattern, and therefore no case against Clinton.
The Senate set the scene for a final vote on impeachment that will not be satisfying because not enough people “connected the dots.” Lack of political will or moral courage by many senators reflects and reinforces a culture uncomfortable with determining “what is truth,” and then defending it. This case is an episode in the on-going cultural creep toward cynicism.
Prosecutors and senators are not the only people who need to make connections where important principles are at stake. Catholic laity, who see the trampling of truths they thought were commonly held, need to rise in their defense. They need to “connect the dots” between their Catholic identity and their role as citizens. In a culture that sees truth as malleable, a strong and vocal Catholic citizenry would make a positive contribution to renewing a basic element of our common life.
The fourteen-month exercise in political theater now at an end leaves us with questions about the quality and character of our leaders and about the formation of the consciences of the young about matters of truth. It should also raise questions for Catholic laity about their own involvement in the controversies in the public square. Are we content to be oblivious to the questions and arguments involved in this impeachment trial? How many of us are among the 37% who read nothing about impeachment in the past year? Do we still think the bishops alone should deal with questions that affect national life?
Or do we see a connection between our commitment to the Gospel of Life and our lives as citizens?
Living in a household with Robert Bork, one cannot ignore questions about the direction in which our country is slouching. My husband has been involved in the public debates on impeachment, defending constitutional principles where they were being ignored. We even had the TV cameras in our living room.
We have to exert ourselves to be better-informed Catholics and better-informed citizens in order to be part of the renewal of our society.
I have been impressed with his diligence in studying the issues, which he already understood very well, and in writing to defend the law and its roots in the Constitution and in truth. Even an expert can always learn more. It's time for all of us to summon up more courage for defending the truth.
We cannot all be experts on the complicated questions of constitutional law, but do we have a responsibility to try to understand these questions? The answer is “yes.” Our common sense, life experience, and basic moral reasoning can take us a long way toward understanding questions that affect the common good, not only about the character of our leaders but about issues such as abortion, educational choice, and better healthcare for the poor.
This unique Senate trial has revealed again the nature of public debate today. Instead of straightforward honest argument we heard evasive language and ethical gymnastics similar to that found in the abortion debates. As Catholics we can find our way through this maze by holding on to the principles of Catholic social teaching given by the Pope and the bishops. We have to exert ourselves to be better-informed Catholics and better-informed citizens in order to be part of the renewal of our society. We now have a serious moral obligation to “connect the dots” between our life as citizens and our life as Catholics. That is the only way can we bring the Gospel of Life into public debate and reaffirm that truth is crucial to public life.
As Catholic citizens we are not imposing our views on others; we are defending the principles on which our country was founded: respect for the rights of each person and acceptance of the moral law placed in our hearts by God. In the present cultural climate it takes courage to insist that these principles are not out of date or irrelevant and that we, as Catholics, have the right, indeed the obligation, to defend them. We are, as the bishops have said, missionaries to our own society that has had great economic success but is losing its moral moorings.
When principles are trashed in our culture there should be Catholic groups speaking out and taking action to give the country pause. The response might be, “We have never heard this argument before. Who are these people? Maybe they are right.” That would be an excellent start.
Mary Ellen Bork, a board member of the Catholic Campaign for America and the Institute for Religion in Democracy, writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mary Ellen Bork ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Vatican Takes on U.N. Population Forum DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:On Feb. 10, Monsignor Frank Dewane made the following remarks to the U.N. Population Forum in The Hague as a representative of the Holy See. The meeting has been dubbed “Cairo + 5” because it follows the 1994 Population Conference in Egypt.
The Holy See takes this opportunity to thank the organizers of the Forum for the invitation and the Dutch Government for its kind hospitality.
Cairo's Legacy
The International Conference on Population and Development marked an important moment in the world's understanding of the interrelationship between population and development. For the first time the linkage between population and development was the focus of consideration. All forms of coercion in the implementation of population policies were rejected. The family was recognized as the fundamental unit of society based on marriage and entitled to comprehensive support and protection. Strong impetus was given to the improvement of the status of women throughout the world, particularly with regard to their health, and their full and equal participation in development. The expanding phenomenon of migration was considered along with its impact on development. There were many insights into these and other issues, and the Holy See was able to join in supporting the outcome of the Cairo conference with partial consensus.
In the five years since Cairo, the world has attempted to move from insights and visions to reality. In this context, the Holy See continues to insist that human beings are at the center of concerns for development. The dignity of the human person must be respected in all its aspects. As the Cairo Document states, this is to be done with full respect for the various religious and ethical values and cultural background of each woman and man. Following this statement, Principle One of the Cairo Document states that everyone has the right to life.
Vatican's Priorities
In the follow-up process, the Holy See calls for a priority treatment of the issues regarding development and insists on two important components: education and the reduction of poverty. However, the disproportion between the funds allocated for reproductive health and those allocated for the elimination of widespread endemic diseases or for education is noted. The Holy See underlines that true development can never be reduced to a merely physical dimension. Sexual and reproductive health must be integrated within an overall concern for the education and well-being of the total person. The ability of a woman to make decisions is not dependent on the reduction of her fertility but on the level of her education.
The role of the family, the basic unit of society, founded on marriage, is forcefully reaffirmed by the Holy See. The family is entitled to comprehensive protection and support, and its rights are to be safeguarded. The context for the exercise of sexual expression by men and women and for their responsibility concerning human reproduction is the family. The Holy See continues to reject an individualistic concept of sexuality, at times evidenced in the Cairo Document and identified by the Holy Father in his letter to the Heads of State prior to the Cairo Conference.
Linked closely to the rights of the family is the issue of education for young people in matters pertaining to sexuality and reproduction. The rights and duties of parents cannot be ignored in this regard since this responsibility lies in the first place with them. The State must encourage this duty and not seek to override the rights and responsibilities of parents while at the same time invoking an argument supposedly based on rights.
As a phenomenon, migration must be the concern of all states and not only receiving countries. The responsibility of the international community to extend protection and assistance becomes ever more challenging. Migration is closely related to the issue of development and to that of population. The specific commitment to guarantee protection for the family unit of migrants in regular situations needs greater attention.
Camouflaged Abortion
The Cairo Document states that in no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family planning. In this context, the present practice of “emergency contraception” and use of the RU-486 pill cannot be considered applications of family planning and even less as the exercise of an alleged reproductive right. These abortive practices, camouflaged by means of contraception, are clearly contrary to national legislative systems which grant legal protection and safeguards to life from the moment of conception. Further, there can be no surreptitious recognition of a right to abortion through policies aimed at creating new categories of personal rights or including health services which protect women's lives by making possible “safe abortion.” The Cairo Document clearly noted, from the very outset, the sovereign right of each country with regard to the Document's recommendations.
The ‘Inflation’ of Rights
The Holy See continues to deplore recourse to sterilization by the exertion of various types of pressure on patients or by seeking to disguise this type of intervention, often undertaken due to quotas with regard to fertility. This is raw coercion and the denial of an individual's true rights. In such cases, the commitment to eliminate poverty could be confused with that of eliminating the poor.
At a time when a sort of inflation of rights is sometimes to be observed, it is desirable to point out that rights will languish if, at the same time, the obligations and responsibilities of each and everyone, in other words the moral dimension of human rights, are not more clearly perceived.
The aging of the world's population merits immediately attention, particularly in light of recent revisions of the demographic estimates released by the UN Population Division. The change in the proportions between those who are economically active and those who are dependent has created strains on pension and health-care services. This trend will likely continue. Governments should provide more resources to address this issue.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Monsignor Frank Dewane is an observer of the Holy See to the United Nations.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Monsignor Frank Dewane ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Scripture Already Knew What Science is Now Discovering DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:Recently almost 170 bishops from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines met for a week to study “Addiction and Compulsive Behaviors.” The program was organized for them by the National Catholic Bioethics Center with a very generous grant from the Knights of Columbus.
The conference was, in many ways, an embodiment of the teaching of the Pope's latest encyclical, Faith and Reason. In that encyclical, the Holy Father explained why the Church has always taught that reason and faith are compatible, religion and science complementary. The Church has never shied away from the findings of science. How could she? Ultimately all truth has but one source, God himself. At this conference the bishops welcomed the findings of the Director of the Behavioral Psychopharmacology Research Laboratory at Harvard just as they did the reflections of a Polish Dominican priest teaching moral theology at the Angelicum University in Rome.
The bishops are called by Christ to bring his liberating redemption to all people. In carrying out that task, the bishops must address the needs of the whole person, both body and soul. This is why the Church has not only preached the Gospel, but has also lived it by ministering to the physical and bodily needs of all people. After all, one cannot pray well when wracked with pain or tormented by a desire for drugs.
Medical science has made tremendous strides in learning about addiction. It was long thought that alcoholism and drug addiction were the result simply of a weakness of the will. Now scientific instruments allow researchers to take pictures of the activity within the brain itself that results from the use of different drugs. Researchers have come to see that these addictions are destroyers of the brain. Drugs actually change the way the brain works. If somebody has given up cocaine, for example, merely looking at a picture of the drug can trigger the brain to bring about changes in the body that are associated with the use of the drug. Again — this occurs simply by looking at a picture!
As researchers, physicians, and psychiatrists presented scientific findings on the nature of addiction to the bishops, one cannot help think of the timeless wisdom of our Faith which has long addressed these human realities quite accurately without benefit of electroencephalograms or positron emission tomography. As the bishops watched pictures of the brain being lit up and darkened by drug use, and heard about the ways the brain was actually changed, trapping the individual in bondage to an intolerable craving, the words of St. Paul came to mind:
“For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want. In doing what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells in me. ... Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:15-17, 24).
Regrettably some who are in the throes of addiction are never delivered from it. Even if a drug addict, a tobacco addict, or an alcoholic has been free of the drug for months, perhaps years, the sight of a street corner, the smell of a match, or the sound of ice in a glass can trigger once again an intense desire for the drug.
But long before researchers warned addicts of what are known as “cues” triggering a desire for destructive behavior, Christians knew of the dangers. As one inspired writer of Scripture put it: “Be sober, be vigilant, for your adversary, the devil, as a roaring lion, prowls about seeking someone to devour. Resist him steadfast in the faith” (1 Pet. 8-9).
The Catholic spiritual and moral tradition has known how to deal with those struggling against addictions and compulsive behaviors. We are warned time and again by the spiritual writers against placing ourselves in near occasions of sin. Indeed, our tradition has taught that it can be a sin simply to place ourselves in an occasion of sin, in a situation of temptation.
It is good to know that so many of our bishops are willing to take time to learn about recent findings in medicine and the life sciences so that they can more effectively reach out to those who suffer. Our bishops have always been ready to use science to help them bring the healing touch of Jesus Christ to those in need, a touch which can heal both body and soul. But the most reassuring fact of all to us Catholics is that the touch of Christ will provide spiritual healing even if, God forbid, the body remains diseased or enslaved.
Dr. John Haas is director of the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Boston.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Haas ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: When 'Dry' is Better DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:The epidemic of drinking on college campuses has fueled more than its share of jokes in recent years.
This month it turned deadly.
A student at Southwest Texas State who had drunk himself unconscious was bludgeoned to death at a party where beer was plentiful and available to underage students, according to a report Feb. 9 in the Austin American-Statesman.
Another student was hospitalized for acute blood poisoning, the paper added. The next day, it reported that the chief suspect in the assault apparently had killed himself because of the incident. He was a 21-year-old student who witnesses said was involved in a fight at the party.
The incident is a harsh example of the growing problems linked to campus drinking, which yearly claim 30 student lives, according to a recent Harvard University study.
College drinking often seems to start out innocent, and often among “good kids.” The victim of the bludgeoning, for instance, was remembered for his “faith in Jesus and love of other people.” But the volatile mix of youth and alcohol can quickly lead to other problems, including violence, drunken driving, “date rape,” and emotional distress, as well as poor academic performance and job-related difficulties.
One student who found out the downside of drinking was Danielle Acunto. A junior at The Catholic University of America (CUA), she was passed over for a resident assistant's job because of alcohol use.
“I'm not against drinking, but it's not something I want to poison my body with anymore,” she said. “I stopped drinking because I didn't know my limitations until I was told by others I had passed them.”
After cutting out alcohol, Acunto turned herself around and became president of the Residence Association. While admitting that drinking at CUA will likely continue, she said she wants to see it in a controlled situation. “Then, you'll have sober people looking after everyone else, and it has to help,” she said.
Catholic colleges like hers have developed a number of policies and procedures to alert students to the dangers of overconsumption. Residence assistants and other students are trained to spot the symptoms of heavy drinkers and take measures to help such persons.
Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio is often cited as a success story in this regard. The campus once known chiefly for its parties is now known for its Catholic life.
Randy Cirner, dean of students, said the school discourages alcohol consumption in several ways: “It's set down in our student handbook, and there's no alcohol served at any student function.”
Cirner also pointed out that incoming students in the fall semester participate in programs that emphasize the university's stand on heavy or regular drinking. If a student is underage and is caught drinking, he or she is referred to a residential director, who has the authority to issue a warning or sanction.
“We consider alcohol abuse, particularly by underage students, a major violation of the student code,” Cirner said.
A student receiving two violations in one semester is suspended for the following semester. If that student is caught again after being readmitted, he or she is expelled.
“We don't condone drinking,” Cirner said, “but we know it takes place. However, we probably have less of a problem than state schools, because we have a ‘pure culture’ that says drinking only leads to other problems, such as sex, pregnancy, and other serious issues.”
“I stopped drinking because I didn't know my limitations until I was told by others I had passed them.”
Providing alternatives to drinking is a step some Catholic colleges have taken to lessen the temptation to imbibe. St. Mary's University of Minnesota, in Winona, has what it calls a Baccus Group. It meets in a campus building where no beer, wine, or hard alcohol is ever served. Instead, students drink “mocktails,” or engage in other non-drinking activities, including sumo wrestling.
“Several of our students commented to me that we should provide a place where they can drink responsibly,” said Sharon Goo, vice president of student development. “Others said there is no way alcohol should even be brought onto our campus. While we do have a few students with serious drinking problems, most of our students who do drink, do so in moderation, and only occasionally.”
St. Mary's is not a “dry” campus, but underage students are not allowed to drink at all. Those age 21 or over can bring alcohol into their dorm rooms but cannot consume it anywhere else.
Underage drinkers tend to develop drinking problems, Goo said. “They either wise up or are asked to leave,” she said.
But more than policies, peer pressure can often be a more powerful force. “A roommate can really be a motivating factor,” Goo said, “because he or she becomes sick of the other roommate coming home drunk and vomiting all over the place.”
Marc Scott, president of student government at Steubenville, agreed. He said peer pressure is evident at his school, and he has seen many students cut off beer or alcohol to another student who has had a few too many.
“Our resident assistants are very alert to drinking problems,” he said, “but friends of the drinking student are equally alert.”
Scott, who attended an East Coast state school in his freshman year before transferring, said the difference between the two universities regarding alcohol consumption is “like night and day.” He added that if students in a group go out and know there will be drinking, they always first designate a non-drinking driver.
Moderation in the use of alcohol is called for by the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
It states: “The virtue of temperance disposes us to avoid every kind of excess: the abuse of food, alcohol, tobacco, or medicine” (No. 2290). It also addresses the issue of drug use, in No. 2291: “The use of drugs inflicts very grave damage on human health and life. Their use, except on strictly therapeutic grounds, is a grave offense.”
Vincentian Fr. David O'Connell, president of CUA, said the issue of alcohol use and abuse among undergraduates nationwide has reached alarming proportions. He said students and their peer groups “must be encouraged and supported in their efforts to combat the problem among themselves.”
Fr. O'Connell is actively involved in seeking to curb drinking on his campus. In January, he met with two large student groups to discuss the problem and was impressed by their willingness to “lead the charge against student abuse of alcohol.”
Fr. Robert Friday, also of CUA, said the school has hired a director of wellness, Kelly Long, to focus on the problem of alcohol consumption. “We're an urban campus, and students have access to any number of places that serve alcohol,” he said. “Catholics have never been prohibitionists, but our students need to respect the law that prohibits underage drinking.”
Long, upon arriving on the CUA campus, put together a task force on alcohol use, comprising faculty, staff, and students. At the end of this academic year, she and other task force members will report to Fr. Friday on the services available or needed to keep alcohol consumption under control.
One Catholic school that does not allow drinking on campus is Magdalen College in Warner, New Hampshire. With just 70 students, admissions director Paul Sullivan said, it is much easier to monitor drinking.
“In our American culture, which promotes pleasure at all cost, we teach our students to be responsible in every aspect of their lives,” he explained. “Our students here are close and form really good friendships. So, they are willing to forsake alcohol.”
Magdalen students can drink off campus, but cannot come back on campus inebriated. Penalties depend on the severity of the offense, Sullivan added, though drinking is not a major problem at the school.
At the University of San Francisco (USF), a Jesuit-run school, Carmen Jordan-Cox, vice president of student affairs, said that when she arrived 12 years ago, there was “a lot” of alcohol use. “We're now less ‘wet’ than we used to be,” she added.
Of the more than 8,000 students at USF, only about 1,500 live on campus — where the Grog has served beer to 21-year-old students throughout much of the university's history. The university is strict in its monitoring of resident students and their drinking and takes action when incidents occur, especially among freshmen away from home for the first time.
“I or others will have a heart-to-heart talk with a freshman who has a drinking problem,” she said. “We had one young man ... who had such a problem. With our counseling, he turned himself around and graduated.”
Jordan-Cox said she perceives a lack of communication within many families today. She said in many homes there is a serious role-model problem, and students come to the university patterning themselves after what they have learned at home.
“We have to be very careful about the signals we send our children,” she said. “Whatever a child sees his or her parents doing is seen as being OK. That can include excessive drinking. Responsibility for our actions must be taught by parents, not by a college.”
Jim Malerba writes from Hamden, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: Catholic campuses wrestling with problem drinking ----- EXTENDED BODY: James Malerba ----- KEYWORD: Education -------- TITLE: Marian Museum is Fatima-Bound DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:What can I do?” James Williamson asked himself while on pilgrimage over 35 years ago in Pontevedra, Spain.
He stood near the spot where Jesus had appeared in 1925 to Sister Lucia, the Fatima visionary, and asked the young postulant what was being done to promote devotion to his Mother.
Williamson's desire quickly turned to an inspired solution for how he could help make the Blessed Virgin better known and loved: expose people to Our Lady's myriad titles and images, and explain their origins and spiritual significance.
“The thought came to me immediately, right in the convent garden: ‘I can collect her statues and share them with others to spread devotion to Mary,’” says Williamson, still surprised by the notion.
The simple impulse that was received on that day in Pontevedra has grown to become the Marian Museum, a collection of some 500 statues of Mary from around the world. The museum's temporary location is Williamson's own Brooklyn, N.Y., brownstone house, where he offers tours to about 800 visitors each year.
Twice, Brooklyn Bishop Thomas Daily has blessed the little museum, and the late Bishop Constantine Luna said Mass there in his role as international president of the Blue Army, the Marian organization inspired by the Fatima apparitions. And New York's Public Broadcasting Service station featured the museum in an arts program earlier this year.
Despite its growing reputation, the building's small size prevents growth, and its urban location with limited parking is inconvenient for visitors.
That will all change dramatically within the next two years.
With the help of private funds, the museum will move to bigger quarters in a location that will bring Williamson and his work full circle.
Just as the original inspiration for the museum took place in a locale special for Sister Lucia, the Marian Museum will see its full flowering in the environs of Fatima itself. Williamson said he has received reports that Sister Lucia's Carmelite community is “thrilled” by the move.
As for the museum's present content, there is Our Lady of Fatima, Our Lady of Lourdes and all of the other well-known images of Mary. There is also Our Lady of Akita, Japan, Our Lady of the Rockies in Montana, and Our Lady of Walsingham from England.
Besides her familiar and official titles such as Our Lady of Hope, of Sorrows, of Grace, and of the Rosary, Mary also has many less-known but regionally or nationally popular titles such as Our Lady of Tears (Ecuador) and Our Lady of Conquest (New Mexico).
Some images present her in elaborate robes as heaven's queen. Others depict her in simple dress and apron, reflecting her role as wife and mother in Nazareth.
After years of collecting material, Williamson, now in his 70s, began to realize his goal in June 1987. “After my wife died,” he explains, “the museum took my whole house over” — officially, it might be noted. The state of New York recognizes it as a museum, and the American Association of Museums in Washington counts it a member.
A carpenter by trade, Williamson fashioned the display cases for the public viewing. He points out that the statues have not been collected for their artistic merit. “Here I want to tell about Our Lady,” he emphasizes. “My sole purpose is to bring people to Mary, and she brings them to Jesus.”
Williamson also acts as enthusiastic Marian tour guide, relating the history and devotion associated with the images. Head of Brooklyn's Blue Army chapter for the last two decades, Williamson relies on his encyclopedic knowledge of the Blessed Mother to talk about her messages and the favors linked to her intercession.
He often clarifies important points of Marian history, doctrine, and piety. At the statues of Our Lady of Fatima and Our Lady of Pompeii, he reminds visitors that these are popular titles while the official title for both is Our Lady of the Rosary, connecting Mary to the important practice of prayer and meditation. Cuba's Our Lady of Cobre and Our Lady of Luxembourg are both officially known as Our Lady of Charity, associating her more directly with the evangelical imperative to “love one another.”
Place names play a big role in the 3,600 titles of Mary catalogued by Williamson, from the more recognizable Our Lady of Guadalupe to the nearly obscure Our Lady of Kalotazeg, of Balsam, and of Fetal. These last two are Portuguese. “There are more than 600 titles for Mary just in Portugal,” he says.
Visitors learn Fetal commemorates a 12th-century apparition just five minutes from Fatima. As Our Lady of Balsam, where Moors had turned a convent into a fortress, Mary appeared among soldiers trying to recapture the building. They succeeded after the Virgin helped to tend to their wounds. Today, it is a place of pilgrimage for engaged couples.
As for Our Lady of Kalotazeg, she's dressed in native Hungarian costume. When, centuries ago, invading barbarians were destroying churches and statues, people saved their Madonnas by dressing Mary as a doll to fool the invaders.
Closer to home, Mary is even honored in the museum's Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn as Our Lady of the Narrows. As depicted in her statue at Xaverian High School, Mary looks out on the Narrows, where ships sail between Brooklyn and Staten Island into New York Bay. She holds a ship in her right hand. The more familiar Our Lady of Good Voyage blesses with her right hand and cradles a ship in her left.
The Narrows image contained in the museum is unusual—the 2-foot-high mold of the Xaverian original. “They said the mold would last three months,” Williamson says with a twinkle. “Now it's more than 30 years old.”
Interesting explanations and unusual titles abound for the statues. Our Lady of the Tears commemorates an Ecuadorean miracle witnessed by many children. Our Lady of the “O” originated in 14th century Spain from a popular Mass with an antiphon beginning, “O Mary.”
Our Lady of the Household radiates domestic tranquillity, showing Mary feeding birds while the Child Jesus holds her apron and looks fondly up to her.
A number of the statues are hand made and clothed, such as the unusual wayside Our Lady of the Straw Chapel: Mary wears an ornate, embroidered dress and lace headpiece, while the Child Jesus appears in elaborate kingly clothing.
One recent addition includes the larger-than-life-sized Our Lady of the Blessed Eucharist, with a white rose on Mary's exposed heart.
Our Lady of the Three Hail Marys is an all-encompassing image. Mary stands on a cloud; around her, three cherubs happily display Ave Maria banners; crowning her from above are God the Father with Jesus holding his cross and the Holy Spirit in a burst of radiance.
The stories behind the images weave tightly together to form an intricate pattern of Mary's admirable qualities and maternal concern for her children. Visitors swiftly realize that whether the many statues displayed here are from Bolivia, Holland, Lebanon, the Philippines; whether plaster, metal, wood, terra cotta, or marble, it is the same Mary, our Blessed Mother.
Offered free on a reservation-only basis, the tours of the museum will continue at least through this year.
----- EXCERPT: Devoted founder of a Brooklyn facility has a rendezvous in Portugal ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORD: Travel -------- TITLE: The New Location Will Be a Dream Come True DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:The Marian Museum which is moving to Fatima will feel right at home.
The museum's move from its current home in New York to Portugal will give its collection of Marian images and statues far greater exposure to pilgrims from around the world.
When the idea of assembling the collection first came to Jim Williamson, he thought of Fatima as a site but dismissed the idea as an impossible dream for a working tradesman from Brooklyn.
During the long search for a new, permanent site, he explored offers of land, buildings, or both, ranging from California to Virginia. Numerous leads fell short for one reason or another.
That is, until Fatima was again proposed in early 1998, this time by John Haffert, a co-founder of the Blue Army. Haffert offered his friend two buildings he owned in the city of Ourem, 10 minutes away from the Fatima shrine.
“Everything fell into place swiftly after that; it was providential,” says Williamson. The deal was done by November, complete with blessings from civil and religious authorities.
The project is on a fast track. The two original buildings are being renovated, two others are slated for construction, and dedication ceremonies are scheduled for next year in May and August. The site includes room for additional building.
In addition to comfortably displaying most of the statues simultaneously, the new spaces will allow for related paintings and other exhibits. Christmas créches from around the world will also be displayed.
“I know that this museum belongs here,” Williamson says, referring to the new site. “It's going to be unique, certainly in Europe, and maybe in the entire world.”
Plans also call for two chapels where 5,000 relics of saints reaching back to the apostles will be displayed for veneration. Recently commissioned portraits depicting the 33 doctors of the Church will be highlighted in one of the chapels.
The Portuguese government has promised to donate adjacent land for further construction, and cable car service is planned between the museum and the Castle of Fatima, a fortress and government center dating back to the time of Christ. (Register Staff)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Travel -------- TITLE: Dracula with a Twist DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:Nowadays when most people think of horror films, gorefests like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer come to mind. It's difficult to remember the genre hasn't always been synonymous with excessive blood and gore.
Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horrors, is one of the great classics of the silent era. Unlike its modern counterparts, it finds ways to evoke an atmosphere of terror and menace without resorting to sex and violence. First released in 1922, it also avoids some of the genre's most melodramatic clichès like giving vampires oversized fangs and high-fashion capes.
German director F.W. Murnau (The Last Laugh and Sunrise) and screenwriter Henrik Galeen freely adapted English writer Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, Dracula, which originated the characters that have inspired most modern works about vampires. They moved the action to Bremen, Germany, renamed the characters, and made key plot changes, in hopes of avoiding the payment of royalties. Stoker's widow, Florence, sued anyway and won, obtaining a court order to have all copies of the film destroyed. Fortunately, some bootleg prints survive.
Despite the filmmakers' dishonest intentions, the result is a visual poem of purity, beauty, and grace. The story is simply told through a series of static, black-and-white compositions which skillfully use light and shadow to sustain their mood. Most of the scenes are shot on location with attention to naturalistic detail.
There are no carefully designed, expressionistic sets such as those found in other German masterpieces of the period like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Metropolis. In contrast to much contemporary product, the movie is driven by character development, not special effects, and the difference between good and evil, once defined, is never blurred.
Hutter (Gustav Von Wangenheim) is a happily married real estate agent in Bremen who's sent by his boss, Block (Alexander Granach), to the Carpathian Mountains in Transylvania to close a deal with the wealthy Count Orlok (Max Schreck). The young man innocently sees the voyage as a good business opportunity and a chance for some exotic travel. But Block appears to have some ulterior purpose as he rummages through papers covered with occult symbols when no one is looking. Only Hutter's sweet-tempered wife, Ellen (Greta Schroeder), has a premonition of danger.
In Transylvania the peasants recoil at the mention of Orlok's name and refuse to take Hutter up to the castle door. The count himself resembles a cadaverous rodent, with long bulbous ears, a bald skull, a hook nose, bulging eyes, and birdlike talons for hands. He has an aura of pestilence and death. One morning Hutter awakes with a strange mark on his neck which he at first ignores.
The count is attracted to a picture of Ellen kept in a locket worn by her husband. Soon thereafter she has nightmares and begins sleepwalking. The filmmakers establish a mysterious psychic connection between Ellen back in Germany and Hutter and Orlok in Transylvania. One night when the count approaches her husband with bad intentions, she cries out a warning, and Orlok turns away.
Hutter becomes fearful and escapes from the castle but falls ill. Unlike most versions of the Dracula story, Nosferatu doesn't have all the vampire's victims die or turn into vampires themselves, and the count's drinking of blood doesn't make him any younger or healthier.
Eventually, Hutter recovers and returns home. Orlok follows by ship with a coffin filled with rats where he sleeps during the day. All the vessel's crew “sicken and die.”
After the ship arrives in Bremen, there's an outbreak of the plague from the rats Orlok has brought with him. Block loses control, crying, “the master approaches,” and “blood is life.” The townsfolk blame Block for the pestilence and try to stone him.
Orlok takes up residence across from Ellen and Hutter. Realizing that the town is doomed as long as the count lives, she decides to utilize the mysterious connection between them and sacrifice herself. When she learns that a vampire dies in the daylight, she lures Orlok into her house one night and keeps him there until dawn by allowing him to nibble on her neck. The sun's morning rays make him literally evaporate. She herself dies soon thereafter.
The movie's many striking images linger in the mind's eye: Ellen reading Hutter's letters alone at the beach surrounded by graves marked by crosses; Orlok's deathship gliding into Bremen harbor at night; the count carrying his coffin on his shoulders through the town's deserted streets; and the angry townspeople stoning Block as he flees across the rooftops.
Nosferatu is a unique rendition of this much-told tale which dramatizes the power of sacrifice. The vampire isn't killed in the usual fashion by a wooden stake driven through his heart. Instead his evil power is terminated by the selfless act of a woman described as “pure in heart.”
John Prizer currently writes from Paris.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORD: Arts & Culture -------- TITLE: Videos on Release DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:Into Thin Air: Death on Everest
This film is based on Into Thin Air, journalist Jon Krakauer's non-fiction best seller that recounted a 1996 disaster on Mount Everest. Krakauer had been assigned by Outside magazine to accompany a party of climbers in an assault on Everest and chronicle his experiences. The catch was that most of the climbers were inexperienced mountaineers. Many had paid tens of thousands to be escorted up the world's highest peak. But Everest is unforgiving even to the moneyed, and the mountain killed several of them and their guides after a series of unwise decisions. Into Thin Air: Death on Everest has a fascinating tale to tell about arrogance and hubris, but the film's technical quality interferes with its clarity. The background music makes it hard to hear essential dialogue, and the editing is too rushed on occasions, making the story hard to follow.
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Merlin
Hallmark Entertainment has long specialized in producing television specials fit for the whole family. One of its most successful recent efforts was the miniseries Merlin. This lavish tale about the wizard of the Arthurian legends proved so successful it was released on videotape. Merlin is an absorbing tale, proving once again how rich and evocative the Arthurian cycle is even for this generation of technology-minded people. The miniseries is filled with special effects that do justice to the power of Merlin and other creatures that inhabit his world. These include Queen Mab (Natasha Richardson), the enchantress who constructs Merlin (Sam Niell), and Frick (Martin Short), her elfish aide-de-camp. Mab and Frick try to draw Merlin into the old, dark, pagan ways, but he's intrigued by the light of the new Christian world. Merlin tries to support the triumph of the good, but he's afflicted by the evil and the weakness that lies within humans. Although Merlin puts a spin on the Arthurian legends that might disturb some purists, it provides enough intrigue and entertainment to keep most watching happily.
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Skiing — Warren Miller's Snowriders II
For years, winter enthusiasts would see fliers posted at local sports shops advertising an upcoming screening of one of Warren Miller's compilations of hot-dog skiing. They would gather in small crowds on uncomfortable chairs and watch footage of jaw-dropping aerial stunts amid gorgeous winter scenery. Some audiences even had a chance to query Miller himself, an outdoorsman who had turned his passion for skiing into a filmmaking avocation. Well, Miller has gone big-time. He now produces full-length movies of amazing footage. His latest is Skiing — Warren Miller's Snowriders II, and it certainly offers more of the spectacular feats that made Miller famous. The video highlights stunning skiing in locales as diverse as New Zealand's Mount Cook, British Columbia's Whistler, Switzerland's Alps, Alaska's Mount McKinley, and Kazakhstan's public slope. It also shows such oddities as mountain bicycling over snow cornices and kayaking down snow chutes. The video is a head-shaking look at the lengths that some people will go to in their sometimes reckless search for thrills. V:0 L:0 N:0 S:0
Still Breathing
Several generations of the men in a San Antonio family have had one, special ability. Somehow they have been given the power to see in their dreams the face of their future wife. Fletcher (Brendan Fraser) is the latest member of the family to experience the phenomenon. This strapping but gentle young man is finding his life as a musician and street entertainer complicated by mysterious visions of his future love. Finally, Fletcher receives one strong image saying, “Formosa.” He thinks it means his beloved is living in Taiwan, and he books a flight for the island nation. When he reaches Los Angeles on a stopover, Fletcher discovers that Formosa is the name of a restaurant. He ventures there and discovers the face that has been haunting his dreams. It belongs to Rosalind (Joanna Going), a sophisticated artist who has been unhappy in love, leaving her deeply cynical about men. Slowly, Fletcher charms Rosalind. She tries to withstand him because she doesn't trust her heart or her true nature. Still Breathing is a slight, almost whimsical film, but it has a haunting quality and a sense of the romantic that stays with viewers long after it's over.
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— Loretta Seyer
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Loretta Seyer ----- KEYWORD: Arts & Culture -------- TITLE: Before the Wedding Bells Ring Out DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.— Statistics say that for every new marriage celebrated in the United States this year, there will be one divorce.
That's hardly an encouraging statistic for the thousands of engaged couples across the country who are in the final stages of planning their spring and summer weddings. But marriage preparation experts see two possible remedies.
One cure, for those meant to be married, can be to reintroduce them to their faith, making it a more vital part of their lives.
“For many of the couples who attend Catholic pre-marriage programs, the experience can be a turning point, whether they have drifted away from their faith just a little, or even for those who are far out to sea,” said Mary Hasson, who designed a marriage preparation course in Bethesda, Maryland.
“Each person, each couple is in a different place in terms of their openness to God,” she continued. “A good program should be designed to break down their barriers and get rid of their stereotypes and caricatures of Church teaching.
“Its goal shouldn't be just to make sure that each couple hears an accurate summary of the Church's teachings, but rather to move each person one step closer to Christ.”
A second remedy is a powerful pre-marriage program that can help a couple to decide not to marry in the first place.
“We have two or three couples on most weekends who either postpone or cancel their weddings — and those are really our success stories,” said Kathy Conway of Engaged Encounter in Colorado Springs, Colorado. “And we have couples who have been married before who come to the Engaged Encounter weekend and say, ‘If we would have done this the first time around, we may never have divorced.’”
Last year, the Center for Applied Research on the Apostolate at Georgetown University completed a study of Catholic Engaged Encounter, a nationwide marriage preparation ministry.
Most of the studies done about marital stability and religious practice all across the board tend to show a correlation between the two...
It found that the encounters did “a superb job” in helping couples prepare for marriage. A year after attending an Encounter, nine out of 10 newlywed couples said “the weekend was a valuable experience which brought them closer to their spouse and to God, and that it taught them important skills,” the study reported.
‘Beginning of the sacrament’
The idea behind Engaged Encounter is to make these couples take a pause from planning the wedding to spend time seriously planning the marriage.
“The wedding is just the beginning of the sacrament,” Father Bill Carmody, pastor of Corpus Christi parish in Colorado Springs, recently told a dozen couples gathered for an Encounter weekend. “Spouses are sacraments to each other. They are the presence of God to each other.”
For over 20 years, Engaged Encounter has been offering weekend pre-marriage retreats in dioceses across the country where lead couples and clergy take them through a series of topics about the sacramental nature and vocation of marriage. But the couples themselves do most of the work. They are required to discuss privately with each other topics such as living as a Christian family, sexuality (including natural family planning), finances, decision-making, and balancing work, and family.
“There are many other programs in Catholic parishes that we looked at that were so secular, where they didn't talk about marriage being a sacrament, or about God being part of your marriage, and there was no priest or religious present,” commented Kevin Conway, who along with his wife, Kathy, form a veteran Encounter lead couple at Corpus Christi parish in Colorado Springs.
“Promoting the idea of marriage as a sacrament is what Engaged Encounter does well,” he said.
Hasson, the marriage preparation expert who works at the Center for Family Development in Bethesda, agreed.
She said that nurturing this spiritual dimension is the key. “We need to convince them first of all that it matters what the Church has to say to them about marriage. ... That the happiness that all of them are looking for in marriage will be elusive unless they are open to Christ in their lives.”
Georgetown marriage prep experts acknowledge that couples seeking marriage in the Catholic Church probably have an edge over the rest of the population when it comes to making the relationship last over the long haul. Even those couples who are only marginally committed to the Church at the time of their wedding may grow in their devotion as their marriage matures.
“Most of the studies done about marital stability and religious practice all across the board tend to show a correlation between the two,” said Richard McCord, executive director of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Marriage and the Family. “People spending time focusing on the spiritual dimension of marriage, all of this has a positive effect on marital stability.”
‘Three to Get Married’
Another marriage preparation program that has had very positive reviews is the Three to Get Married program. It was designed in 1994 for use in the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., and the Diocese of Arlington, Va., in part to meet their marriage preparation requirements.
Three to Get Married also uses presentations followed by directed questionnaires that the couples work through with each other. It takes place over two consecutive weekends — a hefty time commitment for many working professionals.
Even so, “couples are usually pleased and surprised at their exit attitude when they fill out the evaluation at the end of the weekend,” said Mary Jean Mallory, a board member at the Bethesda family center who helped to develop the program.
Three to Get Married refers to the necessity of making God a partner in marriage and “slowly introduces Catholic doctrine through a series of presentations,” Mallory explained. This is due to the large number of non-Catholics at every weekend.
“I would say that 75% of our clientele are mixed marriages. And the one who is Catholic doesn't practice much. Over half are cohabiting. These are basically people who have been away from the faith for a while,” Mallory said.
Hasson acknowledged that “while Church teachings haven't changed, the people coming into the programs are in radically different places from those in prior generations.
“They come to our program after having heard a steady drumbeat for 20 years telling them that individual fulfillment matters most, even at the expense of spouse or children, or that self-sacrifice is a sign of low self-esteem; that the Church has a Third World view of women, and that marriage hinders a woman's self-fulfillment; that sex is about pleasure without commitment, and that children are a hindrance to personal freedom and must be carefully planned to minimize disruption of personal goals.”
Engaged Encounter deals with many of the same lifestyle challenges to the teachings of the Church with their couples.
The Georgetown survey found that among their respondents who attended Encounter weekends “almost half (44%) were cohabiting before marriage, only about half (47%) attend Mass regularly, and more than one-third (35%) were entering mixed marriages.”
Given the successful track record of Three to Get Married, Encounter, and several other Catholic pre-marriage programs, it might be expected that couples would line up to attend. Not so, in Mallory's experience.
“Most of the couples who sign up do so because everything else that is shorter is full already,” she said.
Catholic pre-marriage programs strive to achieve a balance between the practical and the spiritual topics they need to cover which are important to newlyweds. Each couple who attends brings with them very different life experiences.
“I wish they would have spent a lot more time talking about finances; that's such a big issue in marriage,” said Walter, who recently attended an Engaged Encounter weekend in Colorado Springs with his fiancèe, Chelley. They requested that their last names not be used in this story.
Chelley took issue with the week-end's presentation on decision-making: “They told us that we need to work out some kind of agreement about every major decision. ... Walter and I are older than most of these other couples, and I have the maturity to defer to him on issues where he might know more about it than I do.”
At Three to Get Married workshops, the toughest subject to broach with their couples is natural family planning, Mallory said.
She said that their audience is usually so skeptical about its effectiveness that they lead with the medical considerations and the scientific information about natural family planning, as presented by a Catholic obstetrician-gynecologist.
“What we have found is that couples are so adamantly opposed to it ... contracepting is a normal part of their relationship already,” Mallory said.
“We also have a witness talk, presented by a couple who have six children, whose first three were the result of contraceptive failures,” said Mallory.
The Legionaries of Christ have been involved with Three to Get Married from the beginning. “The priest is vital to the entire weekend.” Mallory told the Register. “Because we had a priest available for personal consultations, we have had a couple of women convert from Protestantism and a few couples who were cohabiting separate until their wedding.
“One of the priests who works with us on the weekends tells the couples, ‘If you don't have a relationship with Christ, the rest of this is a shot in the dark.’”
Molly Mulqueen writes from Colorado Springs, Colorado.
----- EXCERPT: Catholic programs aim to save marriages, in time ----- EXTENDED BODY: Molly Mulqueen ----- KEYWORD: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: The Gospel Of Life DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:As Congressmen promote legislation on Capitol Hill endorsing euthanasia (see story below), it is important to put the problems of the aging in perspective. In Evangelium Vitae Pope John Paul II speaks on the value of suffering.
Threats which are no less serious hang over the incurably ill and the dying. In a social and cultural context which makes it more difficult to face and accept suffering, the temptation becomes all the greater to resolve the problem of suffering by eliminating it at the root, by hastening death so that it occurs at the moment considered most suitable.
Various considerations usually contribute to such a decision, all of which converge in the same terrible outcome. In the sick person the sense of anguish, of severe discomfort, and even of desperation brought on by intense and prolonged suffering can be a decisive factor. Such a situation can threaten the already fragile equilibrium of an individual's personal and family life, with the result that, on the one hand, the sick person, despite the help of increasingly effective medical and social assistance, risks feeling overwhelmed by his or her own frailty; and on the other hand, those close to the sick person can be moved by an understandable even if misplaced compassion. All this is aggravated by a cultural climate which fails to perceive any meaning or value in suffering, but rather considers suffering the epitome of evil, to be eliminated at all costs. This is especially the case in the absence of a religious outlook which could help to provide a positive understanding of the mystery of suffering.
On a more general level, there exists in contemporary culture a certain Promethean attitude which leads people to think that they can control life and death by taking the decisions about them into their own hands. What really happens in this case is that the individual is overcome and crushed by a death deprived of any prospect of meaning or hope. We see a tragic expression of all this in the spread of euthanasia — disguised and surreptitious, or practised openly and even legally. As well as for reasons of a misguided pity at the sight of the patient's suffering, euthanasia is sometimes justified by the utilitarian motive of avoiding costs which bring no return and which weigh heavily on society. Thus it is proposed to eliminate malformed babies, the severely handicapped, the disabled, the elderly, especially when they are not self-sufficient, and the terminally ill. Nor can we remain silent in the face of other more furtive, but no less serious and real, forms of euthanasia. These could occur for example when, in order to increase the availability of organs for transplants, organs are removed without respecting objective and adequate criteria which verify the death of the donor. (15)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: ProLife ProFile: Fertility Program Brings Hope in Ireland DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:GALWAY, Ireland—For couples unable to conceive a child, Dr. Phil Boyle is a godsend.
He uses a method, developed with other Catholic physicians, to overcome infertility that is consistent with Church teaching and is a bona fide scientific breakthrough.
“We had completely given up hope, but when I heard about Boyle's treatment I thought it might be the answer,” said Gabrielle Tims of Sligo, in the West of Ireland. “Now we are over the moon.”
She and her husband, Denys, had been trying to conceive for eight years before they met Boyle, an Irish doctor using pro-life fertility treatment methods developed in the United States. Since Boyle opened his clinic in the West of Ireland just over a year ago, he has helped 43 couples to conceive. The sixth and seventh babies born under the program came in November, in the form of twins to a couple who asked for anonymity.
Boyle said he is the only medical doctor in Ireland offering natural family planning “NaPro” technology.
The technology was developed by Dr. Thomas Hilgers at the Pope Paul VI Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction in Omaha, Nebraska. Hilgers improved on the 1960s breakthroughs made by Australian Drs. John and Evelyn Billings in their ovulation method of family planning.
By taking measurements of cervical mucus and hormone levels in the bloodstream, doctors using NaPro technology can very accurately estimate those few days in a month when a woman is fertile. Blood testing is now so sophisticated that it can also measure subtle abnormalities in hormone levels, which can then be compensated for by using hormonal injections.
In the United States, Hilgers is claiming a 50% success rate in helping previously infertile couples to conceive and go to full term. Boyle doesn't have access to some of the surgical techniques available at the Paul VI Institute, so he reckons his success rate is less.
“I have only been offering the treatment for just over a year, so it is too early to give a statistical success rate,” he said. “Seven children have been born so far. But, in all, 43 couples have successfully conceived thanks to this method. The success rate at present is above 20, and perhaps 30%.”
Dr. Declan Egan, director of University Hospital Galway's fertility unit, acknowledged that the NaPro method is particularly effective for treating infertility caused by ovulation problems. He speculated that if Boyle only treated couples with ovulation problems, his success rate could be as high as 80%.
“His success rate is diluted because he sees all kinds of patients,” Egan said, “but he won't get good results with hormonal treatment for people with ‘immuno’ or mechanical difficulties.”
Ireland's oldest maternity hospital, the Rotunda, operates an in vitro fertilization (IVF) program for infertile couples which has a success rate of about 25%. IVF is contrary to Catholic teaching, however, whereas the NaPro method was developed in line with Catholic teaching. In addition, NaPro does not require invasive surgery and costs less than most other infertility treatments.
The Timses call their 9-week-old daughter, Dionne, their “miracle baby.” Denys, originally from San Francisco, and Gabrielle, originally from Switzerland, said they had tried to conceive for over eight years.
Boyle says the NaPro method of hormonal treatment should be tried by “practically any infertile couple whose problems are not caused by a blockage of the fallopian tubes or a low sperm count.”
“Those who it can most help are those couples who can't have babies, but who are told they are perfectly healthy,” he said. “The NaPro method can measure subtle differences in hormone levels in a way not available to other techniques.”
Boyle was studying to be a general practitioner in Ireland when he met a Canadian anesthetist, Teresa McKenna, who was teaching the NaPro method to people who wanted to use it for natural family planning. “She told me it could be used for treating infertility and I found it very interesting. It fitted in with my way of thinking and kind of sat with me. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to study it, so I went off to the United States and the Creighton Medical School in Nebraska.”
Boyle said he is “amazed” at how well the system works, once a hormonal problem is detected and treated. Those couples who do conceive do so within less than three months, he added.
One woman who had been trying to have a child for several years and had four miscarriages credited Boyle medical care with enabling her to have a baby.
“People would make comments that really hurt,” recalled the woman, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Teresa. “People didn't realize what it was like, and it was putting the marriage under pressure. I felt I was a real failure. If my husband had gone off with someone else because he had a child with her, I would have understood. That is how bad it was.
“I had had my fourth miscarriage when Boyle came into the hospital to talk to me. Leaving the hospital for the first time I felt there was hope, before that there was despair. My daughter, Rita, was born on Feb. 20 last year and she has changed my life.”
Boyle said he is the only general practitioner offering NaPro treatment to infertile couples in Ireland. He added, however, that there are 10 people teaching the method to couples who want to avoid conception.
This method of natural family planning has many benefits over other birth control systems, said the doctor. For example, there is no risk of the side effects associated with the contraceptive pill. But Boyle believes that natural family planning also builds strong marriages and healthy families, because it involves mutual respect and responsibility.
Pope John Paul II wrote about these benefits in his apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio. In the text, he speaks of the “natural rhythms of the cycle,” a reference to the sophisticated natural family planning techniques, which are based on biological signs, not calendar dates.
He wrote, “In the light of the experience of many couples and of the data provided by the different human sciences, theological reflection is able to perceive and is called to study further the difference, both anthropological and moral, between contraception and recourse to the rhythm of the cycle: It is a difference which is much wider and deeper than is usually thought, one which involves in the final analysis two irreconcilable concepts of the human person and of human sexuality.
“The choice of the natural rhythms involves accepting the cycle of the person, that is, the woman, and thereby accepting dialogue, reciprocal respect, shared responsibility and self-control. To accept the cycle and to enter into dialogue means to recognize both the spiritual and corporal character of conjugal communion and to live personal love with its requirement of fidelity. In this context the couple comes to experience how conjugal communion is enriched with those values of tenderness and affection which constitute the inner soul of human sexuality in its physical dimension also.
“In this way sexuality is respected and promoted in its truly and fully human dimension and is never ‘used’ as an ‘object’ that, by breaking the personal unity of soul and body, strikes at God's creation itself at the level of the deepest interaction of nature and person” (No. 32).
Cian Molloy writes from Dublin, Ireland.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Cian Molloy ----- KEYWORD: Culture Of Life -------- -------- TITLE: End-of-Life-Care Looms As Issue in Congress DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON—Congress is expected to debate whether or not to block Oregon's assisted-suicide law again this year, but the discussions have opened with emphasis on related issues — pain management and end-of-life care.
The aim, said pro-assisted suicide Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) is to change the terms of this year's assisted-suicide debate. “I want us to be in a position to define what this debate is about in this session of Congress,” Wyden said. “Last session, we were essentially playing defense.”
Wyden said he expects by early March to introduce legislation he calls the Conquering Pain Act of 1999. Pro-assisted suicide Rep. Darlene Hooley (D-OR) will introduce companion legislation in the House.
In addition, Hooley expects to introduce legislation next week with pro-assisted suicide Reps. Sander Levin (DMI) and Jim Greenwood (R-PA) supposedly designed to improve aspects of end-of-life care, such as patients' ability to specify what medical care they wish to receive.
Still unclear, however, is what, if any, effect the pain management and end-of-life care legislation will have on a renewal of attempts to block Oregon's Death With Dignity Act that legalized assisted suicide.
The Judiciary committees of both the House and Senate approved pro-life legislation last year that would have blocked the Oregon law, but the proposals stalled, failing to reach the floor of either chamber for a vote.
Wyden has been circulating drafts of his pain management legislation to members of Congress and health care groups for comments. Most notably, Wyden has been working with pro-life Sen. Don Nickles, R-Okla., the assistant majority leader. Last year, Nickles led the Senate effort to block the Oregon law, and Wyden vowed to stop him.
Wyden said he and Nickles have had several conversations about the pain management bill since late last year. Nickles has made no commitments, but Wyden said he hopes the bill “will be appealing to him.” Wyden would not comment on whether Nickles would renew his attempts to block the Oregon law.
Nickles' office also would not discuss his plans, but a spokesman, Brook Simmons, said, “Sen. Nickles believes good pain care and good palliative care policies will go a long way toward addressing the issue of assisted suicide.”
Wyden declined to release a copy of the pain management draft but said it would have the federal government develop and operate a pain management program, making information on pain care widely available. The proposal also would create six pain management centers at academic institutions across the country, pay for demonstration projects and increase reimbursement for pain care in assisted-living facilities and in-home hospice patients.
(Pro-Life Infonet)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Culture of Life -------- -------- TITLE: Did You Know? DATE: 02/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 21-27, 1999 ----- BODY:As Congressmen promote legislation on Capitol Hill endorsing euthanasia (see Lifenotes), it is important to put the problems of the aging in perspective. In Evangelium Vitae Pope John Paul II speaks on the value of suffering.
Threats which are no less serious hang over the incurably ill and the dying. In a social and cultural context which makes it more difficult to face and accept suffering, the temptation becomes all the greater to resolve the problem of suffering by eliminating it at the root, by hastening death so that it occurs at the moment considered most suitable.
Various considerations usually contribute to such a decision, all of which converge in the same terrible outcome. In the sick person the sense of anguish, of severe discomfort, and even of desperation brought on by intense and prolonged suffering can be a decisive factor. Such a situation can threaten the already fragile equilibrium of an individual's personal and family life, with the result that, on the one hand, the sick person, despite the help of increasingly effective medical and social assistance, risks feeling overwhelmed by his or her own frailty; and on the other hand, those close to the sick person can be moved by an understandable even if misplaced compassion. All this is aggravated by a cultural climate which fails to perceive any meaning or value in suffering, but rather considers suffering the epitome of evil, to be eliminated at all costs. This is especially the case in the absence of a religious outlook which could help to provide a positive understanding of the mystery of suffering.
On a more general level, there exists in contemporary culture a certain Promethean attitude which leads people to think that they can control life and death by taking the decisions about them into their own hands. What really happens in this case is that the individual is overcome and crushed by a death deprived of any prospect of meaning or hope. We see a tragic expression of all this in the spread of euthanasia — disguised and surreptitious, or practised openly and even legally. As well as for reasons of a misguided pity at the sight of the patient's suffering, euthanasia is sometimes justified by the utilitarian motive of avoiding costs which bring no return and which weigh heavily on society. Thus it is proposed to eliminate malformed babies, the severely handicapped, the disabled, the elderly, especially when they are not self-sufficient, and the terminally ill. Nor can we remain silent in the face of other more furtive, but no less serious and real, forms of euthanasia. These could occur for example when, in order to increase the availability of organs for transplants, organs are removed without respecting objective and adequate criteria which verify the death of the donor. (15)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: John Paul II Calls Anti-Semitism an 'Offense Against God' DATE: 11/16/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 16-22, 1997 ----- BODY:Scholars address painful past in search of ‘reconciliation, esteem, and respect’ between Catholics and Jews
VATICAN CITY—“Christians who surrender to anti-Judaism offend God and the Church itself.” This was the central message of the international conference entitled “Roots of Anti-Judaism in Christianity” recently held at the Vatican.
Pope John Paul II invited conference participants to take a “lucid look at the past, in order to arrive at a purification of memory.” He affirmed the Church's absolute condemnation of anti-Semitism, and of every type of genocide, while emphasizing that, for Christians, the genocide ordered by Hitler was particularly deplorable because Jesus, in his human origins, was of Jewish ancestry.
The fact that Jesus was a Jew, John Paul II explained, is not an incidental fact, but a “mystery,” and a part of “God's plan for salvation.” Thus, according to John Paul II, the Shoah was characterized not only by the moral wickedness of every genocide, but by the “abomination of a hatred that was an attack against God's plan for salvation in history. For this hatred, even the Church must respond.”
The Pontiff called together 60 Christian theologians and historians in order to examine the origins of anti-Judaism in Christian history. The conference, which took place Oct. 30-Nov. 1, was held behind closed doors to encourage an honest exchange between scholars, according to Vatican officials.
In a statement, the Vatican said that the conference, sponsored by the Theology-History Commission of the Jubilee 2000 Committee, “aimed to get beyond the misunderstandings and the divisions of the past” to “look to the future with serenity and hope.” Re-examining the past, it added, would offer a “correct orientation to the life of the faithful” and promote “reconciliation, esteem, and respect” between Jews and Catholics.
The Vatican explained that the conference is to be considered “a stage in a long journey” toward a new understanding between Jews and Catholics. It is also meant to be a contribution to the Catholic Church's long-awaited final document on anti-Semitism, which has been in preparation since 1987, and which many Jewish leaders hope will offer a solemn mea culpa.
“In the Christian world,” said Pope John Paul II, “several erroneous interpretations of the New Testament regarding the Jews and their alleged guilt have circulated for too long, generating sentiments of hostility. This hostility has contributed to assuage many consciences. Consequently, when the wave of persecutions inspired by a pagan antiSemitism, which was also essentially anti-Christian, spread throughout Europe, there were Christians who did everything in their power to save the persecuted, but the spiritual resistance of many others was not what humanity had the right to expect from the disciples of Christ.”
According to the final conference document issued by the Vatican, “the first step toward conversion is a loyal recognition of the facts.… Knowing how to forgive, as well as how to ask for and accept forgiveness is a condition that contributes to freedom.”
Just before the conference began, the Vatican declared that a re-examination of Church history in a penitential light requires that the end of the 20th century coincide with “the end of anti-Judaism, anti-Semitism, and racial hatred—sins that contributed to creating an atmosphere that made the Holocaust possible.”
The Vatican conference continued Pope John Paul II's emphasis on the Church's examining past episodes of intolerance and violence “perpetrated in the name of faith,” in preparation for the Great Jubilee of the year 2000.
In addressing visiting clergy from England and Wales last month, the Pontiff reaffirmed the goals put forth in his 1994 apostolic letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente (As the Third Millennium Draws Near) by declaring that the voyage toward the year 2000 “should take the form of a genuine pursuit of conversion and reconciliation by purifying ourselves of past errors and instances of infidelity, inconsistency, and slowness to act.”
In opening remarks to participants, Cardinal Roger Etchagaray, president of the preparatory Committee for the Great Jubilee, said that the conference would be a theological examination of the ageold controversy regarding the relationships between Christians and Jews, which must prepare the Catholic Church to celebrate the Jubilee with a renewed mentality toward its older brothers in the faith of Abraham.
Cardinal Etchagaray explained that the conference would emphasize anti-Judaism rather than anti-Semitism, in order to stress “the study of religious motivations, which, since they touch consciences, are much more meaningful than simple racial or political motivations.”
Father Georges Cottier, president of the conference organizing committee, told participants that anti-Judaism refers to the prejudices and pseudo-theological affirmations that have long circulated among Christian populations and have served as a pretext for unjustifiable oppressions which Jews have suffered in the course of history.
According to Father Cottier, “such prejudices have suffocated in many the capacity for an evangelical reaction when anti-Semitism, which was of a pagan and anti-Christian nature, spread throughout Europe.”
The theologian said only Christian scholars were invited because “this is an internal matter that we as Christians are called to reflect upon.”
The Vatican conference comes at a time when Catholic leaders in France, Germany, and Poland have apologized for their Churches'refusal to more forcefully condemn anti-Semitism and teachings that fostered hatred toward the Jewish people.
An examination of the Church's anti-Judaism is no easy task, since the relationship between Christians and Jews has been fraught with misunderstandings and divisions since the time of the Gospels.
The first Pope to condemn antiSemitism was Pius XI, who was preparing an encyclical against all forms of racism when he died in 1939. The encyclical, however, died with him. His successor, Pius XII, though criticized in recent decades for not more actively condemning Nazism, was actually honored at the end of WWII by the chief rabbi of Jerusalem, and blessed by Jewish refugees “for his lifesaving efforts on behalf of the Jews during the Nazi occupation of Italy.” Upon his death he was praised for the same reasons by Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir before the United Nations.
Still, it wasn't until Vatican II (1962-1965) that the seminal declaration Nostra Aetate (In Our Age) repudiated the centuries-old doctrine that blamed Jews for the death of Christ, thus marking a turning point in the relationship between Jews and Catholics.
When John Paul II was elected Pope, the fact that he came from Poland, a country of often ferocious antiSemitism, was cause for consternation among Jews. This was a country where, in 1938, Cardinal August Hlond matter-of-factly claimed that “it is a fact that Jews fight against the Church … and that they are swindlers, usurers, and exploiters.”
During those same years, however, the young Karol Wojtyla, who became Pope John Paul II, lost many Jewish friends at the hands of the Nazis. The Pontiff reminded the world of this fact in 1979 when he prayed at Auschwitz.
On April 13, 1986, John Paul II became the first Pope to enter a synagogue. It was at that historic moment in the synagogue of Rome that the Holy Father called Jews “our elder brothers.” Eight years later the Vatican, under John Paul II, established diplomatic relations with Israel.
The Rome vicariate's recent decision to choose Jewish-American architect Richard Meier to design the cathedral that will symbolize the Great Jubilee was viewed by many as yet another important overture to Judaism.
Elio Toaff, chief rabbi of Rome, which is home to one of the world's oldest Jewish communities, praised the Pontiff's words at the recent conference as a turning point: “If what the Pope said were to be truly accepted and practiced by all Christians, I believe it would be a giant leap forward in contributing to an understanding between Judaism and Christianity.”
Rabbi David Rosen, Jerusalem-based co-liaison to the Vatican for the Anti-Defamation League, said the Pontiff's words are “very important, but not yet sufficient. The Church must go further in examining its responsibilities for anti-Semitism and its role during the Holocaust.”
Franco Pavoncello, commissioner for culture of the Jewish community of Rome as well as professor of political science at Rome's John Cabot University, believes that the conference took a step in the right direction but that a serious problem still exists.
“Pope John Paul II's efforts toward reconciliation are certainly commendable,” Pavoncello told the Register. “However, the idea that this conference is merely the first stage in a long journey is cause for concern. As Jews, we ask ourselves where this journey will end. Is this theological debate about Judaism being part of God's plan for salvation simply an attempt to bring Judaism into the sphere of Christianity—a type of faith imperialism?”
“A fundamental contradiction exists,” explained Pavoncello. “Christianity is not a theological problem for Jews. On the other hand, the idea that a savior came to the Jews and they did not pay heed continues to be a theological problem for Christians. This is the sore from which the blood of antiSemitism flows. Paradoxically, Christianity's attempt to solve this problem by saying that we are all part of the same plan for salvation might just rekindle rather than abate anti-Semitism.”
According to Pavoncello, a crucial challenge for Catholics is to try to move beyond the theological problem represented by Judaism.
“Instead of continuing to re-elaborate and justify the fundamental difference between Christianity and Judaism,” he explains, “a much better act of contrition would be to simply accept that difference and let it be.”
John Paul II's willingness to address the Church's past transgressions has not been welcomed universally. The most outspoken has been Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, archbishop of Bologna, who has said that “expecting the Church to ask for forgiveness for the past is ridiculous.”
In a recent pastoral letter, the cardinal wrote that “the Church has no sins, because it is the total Christ: the head of the Church is the Son of God and nothing of a morally deplorable nature can be attributed to him. However, the Church can and must share in the sentiments of regret and pain for the personal transgressions of its members.”
If the past is any indicator, John Paul II will continue to chart the best course for the Church as he sees it, despite criticisms that he's gone too far in his over-tures—or not gone far enough.
Berenice Cocciolillo is based in Rome.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Berenice Cocciolillo ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: From Parish to Tribunals - and Maybe to Rome: An Annulment Application Makes the Rounds DATE: 11/16/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 16-22, 1997 ----- BODY:IN ORDER FOR an annulment to take effect in the Church, it must be declared by a Church court, known as a tribunal, acting in accord with canon law. Annulments are not granted by pastors or diocesan family life offices or as part of pre-Cana classes. Civil annulments, which are sometimes granted on the same or similar grounds as canonical annulments, are insufficient under Church law to establish the canonical invalidity of an impugned marriage because of important differences in the way state law on marriage reads as compared to canon law. Civil divorces, of course, are entirely insufficient to allow parties to contract new marriages in the Church.
Although all annulment cases must be heard by a diocesan tribunal, most cases begin as an informal interview in a parish office. Anyone interested in obtaining a declaration of nullity describes in his or her own words what happened in the marriage and states the present marital status of the involved parties. In almost all cases, the potential petitioner will be given a set of forms, known technically as a libellus but more often called an application, to complete and return, usually to the parish, but occasionally directly to the diocesan tribunal.
In addition to providing basic information such as date and place of wedding, etc., petitioners are asked to describe in as much detail as possible what the youth and upbringing of both parties was like, how the couple met, and how they interacted prior to the wedding. They will be asked to provide information on the wedding itself, what the early period of the marriage was like, how things progressed or deteriorated during the marriage, and eventually how it ended. They will also be asked to propose the names of people who could serve as witnesses in the case.
This information should be as complete and as accurate as possible. It will provide the foundation of the petitioner's case before the tribunal, and he or she will be asked to swear or affirm the truthfulness of the assertions contained therein. In many cases, a tribunal interview will follow upon these original written declarations. Curiously, though, many people still labor under the mis-impression that completing the parish-based paperwork and returning it to the pastor or the tribunal is all that is required to obtain an annulment. They are mistaken. Annulment cases require significantly more work, as will become apparent below.
Upon receiving the libellus at the tribunal, the file is first examined for the presence of necessary supporting documents such as marriage certificates and divorce decrees. One very important issue requiring examination at this early stage of the process is “jurisdiction,” i.e., the canonical authority of the tribunal to hear the particular case submitted to it. Not every tribunal is canonically authorized to hear every annulment case submitted to it.
In general, questions of jurisdiction will be handled by tribunal personnel trained in such matters, but as a rule, any diocese or archdiocese in which the wedding took place, and any diocese or archdiocese in which the respondent (the other spouse) currently has canonical domicile (basically, residence), can accept an annulment petition. Thus there is always at least one, and often two, diocesan tribunals, known respectively as the forum of contract and the forum of respondent, which are eligible to hear an annulment case.
Oftentimes, however, a third tribunal, known as the forum of the petitioner, can hear a case. This is an important procedural change that the Vatican first authorized for the United States in 1970, but which Pope John Paul II made applicable throughout the world as part of the 1983 Code of Canon Law. Briefly, it allows a petitioner to file an annulment case in the diocese in which he or she currently lives regardless of where the wedding took place and regardless of where the respondent lives. This obviously makes it much easier for people who have moved, as so many do, to file their cases in a convenient locale.
‘Friendly’Tribunals?
Unlike forum of contract and forum of respondent cases, however, not every request to hear a case in the forum of petitioner must be accepted, and the opinion (though not, strictly speaking, the consent) of respondents in such situations is sought before proceeding. While modern canon law is somewhat more flexible in providing a tribunal with the authority to hear a specific annulment case, the idea that petitioners are free to “shop around” for “friendly” tribunals is nonsense.
Once the libellus is accepted and jurisdiction over a case is established, the tribunal then begins the process of citing the respondent and seeking his or her input via an affidavit or by means of a tribunal interview. The witnesses named by the petitioner and those named by the respondent, if there are any, are also cited and asked to relate what they know about the case. Sometimes, the tribunal might also seek the opinion of medical, psychological, or psychiatric experts regarding the condition of the parties at the time of the wedding.
It is very important, of course, that respondents, Catholic or otherwise, be notified of the annulment petition and be invited to take an active part in the case. Admittedly, the Church's tribunal system does not have the means to compel respondent participation in cases, and many respondents choose to ignore communications from a Church court. Some refuse their cooperation deliberately, thinking thereby to derail the process and prevent the annulment. But canon law, like every other legal system, allows a case to proceed in the face of one's contumacious absence. Respondents who simply don't care what the tribunal does are better advised simply to make that observation in a note to the tribunal, though even here the tribunal must still inform them of their canonical rights and eventually the outcome of the case.
Inside Annulments Part II of V
Under canon law, both petitioners and respondents have the basic right to know upon what grounds their annulment case is being heard and what evidence is being used to verify or reject the petition. That is not quite the same thing, however, as saying that the parties have the right to know everything submitted to the tribunal. Both canon law and common sense recognize the authority of tribunals to withhold certain information from the parties when, for example, such information is irrelevant to the canonical questions being addressed in the case, or where such information threatens harm to the parties or to third persons.
In every situation, of course, one's fundamental right of effective participation in a case must be respected, and in a special way the rights of respondents merit safe-guarding. At the same time, it is easy to see how quickly annulment cases could, without some authority to regulate access to information, degenerate into an arena for rehashing the strife and rancor that mark so many divorces, to no one's benefit.
Tribunals are, moreover, very familiar with the problems sometimes encountered in trying to locate ex-spouses or key witnesses who have been gone for many years. They also deal often with situations in which on-going harassment and sometimes even violence marked a failed marriage. Petitioners should not hesitate to explain these situations to the tribunal when filing their cases in order to get advice on what they and the tribunal can do in particular situations. Finally, although most annulment cases are heard without the need for canonical advocates, both petitioners and respondents have the right to use canon lawyers in their cases.
Canon law prefers, and for a long time required, that cases concerning possible matrimonial nullity be heard by a panel of three degreed judges appointed by the bishop. It now permits, however, annulment cases to be heard by a single qualified judge and many dioceses have made use of this authorization in the face of heavy case loads. All of the regular canons on grounds for nullity, burdens of proof, and various procedural requirements still apply in sole-judge cases. Academically-qualified lay persons can serve as judges on tribunals in association with clerical judges, and all persons who work in any way on annulment cases are bound to confidentiality.
Agent of Accuracy
Interestingly, each annulment case requires the presence of an independent official known as the defender of the bond (DOB). It is the task of the DOB, who must be degreed in canon law, to raise every reasonable argument against declaring nullity in a particular case. The DOB performs his or her task without regard for the preferences of the parties, even when both petitioner and respondent would like to see the marriage declared null. The DOB should be regarded not as an obstacle to hearing of annulment cases, but rather as an agent helping to ensure that the decisions reached in such cases are as accurate as possible.
If following the investigation of the facts and a careful consideration of the law, the diocesan tribunal hearing the case, known as the tribunal of “first instance,” concludes that the marriage in question has been proven null it issues a decision or “sentence” to that effect and notifies both parties of the result. Either party may appeal the results, if they desire.
Even if neither party disagrees with the outcome, however, and even if the DOB, who also has the right of appeal in “affirmative” cases, agrees with the result, all cases in which the nullity of marriage is declared are automatically appealed to an appellate tribunal known as “second instance.” No annulment case is considered effective unless and until it receives two affirmative sentences, that is, until two tribunals agree that a marriage has been proven null.
The tribunal of second instance is usually another diocesan tribunal approved for service by the Vatican. It is the duty of this appellate tribunal to review the original case and, if everything appears to be in order, to confirm the decision of first instance. If the second instance tribunal does not ratify the first decision, however, it can, depending on circumstances, rehear the case itself, return it to first instance for reconsideration, or immediately issue a negative sentence, in which case, the annulment granted by first instance does not become effective.
Of course, even after the second instance tribunal has issued its conclusion, both parties have the right of appeal to Rome, although obviously petitioners tend to appeal cases that have been denied by the local tribunal, and respondents tend to appeal cases that have been granted. Besides the right of appeal, the parties to any canonical case can ask that their case be transferred to Rome prior to a final decision at the local level, but such requests do not interrupt the hearing of the case at the diocesan level unless and until Rome says otherwise.
Dr. Edward Peters is a matrimonial judge with the Tribunal of the Diocese of San Diego. His 100 Answers to Your Questions on Annulments (Basilica Press, and Simon & Schuster; 1997), is available at Catholic books stores or through Canticle Communications, 1-800-859-8415.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Edward Peters ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Inside the Synod for America: A Play-by-Play Guide DATE: 11/16/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 16-22, 1997 ----- BODY:Economic disparity, inculturation, and liturgical renewal top agenda of the month-long gathering of bishops that begins today
VATICAN CITY—Every effective CEO convokes periodic meetings with his top advisers to analyze company performance and plot a course for the future. In a similar way, in the dawning light of the third Christian Millennium, Pope John Paul II has scheduled a series of synods with bishops from around the world to reflect on the Church's current needs and her continuing work of evangelization.
Three years ago the bishops of Africa came to Rome; now the Eternal City is hosting the Americans. In the spring of 1998 the Asian episcopate will meet to discuss “Jesus Christ the Savior and His Mission of Love and Service in Asia,” followed next fall by the Oceanic episcopate, whose theme will be: “Jesus Christ and the Peoples of Oceania— Walking His Way, Telling His Truth, Living His Life.” Then in the spring of 1999 the European bishops will meet for a second time (their first synod took place in 1991) to speak about “Jesus Christ Alive in His Church, Source of Hope for Europe.” The last synod, planned for fall 1999, will involve the universal Church in discussing: “The Bishop: Servant of the Gospel of Jesus Christ for the Hope of the World.”
The more than 240 participants in the Special Assembly for America have prepared comments on the Instrumentum laboris (working document), entitled “Encounter with the Living Jesus Christ: the Way to Conversion, Communion, and Solidarity in America,” and Nov. 16 begin their month-long meeting with the present successor of St. Peter.
Drawing from the abundant responses to the lineamenta (a preliminary agenda, complete with questionnaire) to the 24 American episcopal conferences., a pre-synodal committee drew up the Instrumentum laboris, a diagnosis of the problems afflicting the Church in the Americas today.
Cardinal Jan Schotte, the general secretary for the Synod of Bishops, gives a panoramic view of the entire Synod in a preface to the document. In the introduction, attention is focused on the Synod topic and on the three fundamental characteristics that define the religious identity of America: common Christian roots, the vitality of a young Church, and cultural pluralism.
Part I, entitled “Encounter with the Living Jesus Christ,” treats the principles to be followed to ensure the announcement of the complete truth about the mystery of Christ, and discusses the subject of the relation between the gospel and culture (the dominant characteristics of the contemporary culture, the indigenous and Afro-American cultures, the culture of the immigrant people, popular piety, education, and the media).
Part II, on conversion, develops the concept of conversion to Jesus Christ, presenting from the point of view of all America the contrasting elements of both the church and the world.
Part III, focusing on communion, looks to communion in Jesus Christ as the basis and goal of evangelization. It also introduces within the context of Vatican II's ecclesiology of communion the difficulties in living communion in the Church, and evaluates the situation of the Catholic Church in the religious context of the continent.
Part IV treats the subject of solidarity, calling attention to the awareness in conscience of solidarity in all America and the use that the Church makes of her social doctrine to respond to the great challenges of contemporary society on the continent (poverty, international debt, the culture of death, etc.).
The document ends with a brief conclusion which takes up anew the synod topic in the context of the new evangelization on the threshold of the third millennium, invoking the patronage of the Virgin Mary, our Lady of Guadalupe, in the task of announcing the living Jesus Christ, the way to conversion, communion, and solidarity in the hemisphere.
The first and subsequent sessions, to be held in the Paul VI audience hall on the south side of St. Peter's Basilica, will begin with the Synod president announcing the theme of the day and inviting the general rapporteur to explain briefly the session's topic, previously prepared and distributed in written form to those present. The assembly will then divide into smaller discussion groups according to languages. Afterwards, a spokesman from each group will present the conclusions of the discussion to the entire assembly.
Further discussion in the plenary assembly will consist only in voicing objections, and if more analysis is deemed necessary a special commission will be named to carry it out. Once the secretaries have made the appropriate modifications, all the members will vote individually using the Latin placet, non placet option. When the majority has approved each individual point, the final text will be submitted to the Pope. These documents have often served as the basis for the post-synodal exhortations that the Pope offers to the Church and the world.
Topics currently on the agenda include: the coordination of efforts between certain ecclesial movements and the diocesan pastoral structures, liturgical renewal, inculturation, economic poverty, and Latin America's international debt. In his apostolic letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente, Pope John Paul II has already asked for the cancellation of this debt in honor of the Great Jubilee of the year 2000.
Of the many points included in the working document, perhaps the one most likely to receive widespread publicity is the great economic disparity within the Americas. Paragraphs 34-36 describe the current situation, beginning with the recognition that the majority of America's population is Catholic: 63.3%, according to the 1995 Statistical Yearbook of the Church. (In the northern hemisphere the percentage is 23.8%, while in the southern hemisphere it soars to 88.1%.)
Though largely united in the one Catholic faith, American standards of living are worlds apart. For example, dividing the gross national product among all the citizens of the United States yields roughly $23,000 per capita, while Mexican and Brazilian counterparts muster barely a tenth of that. The average life expectancy also varies: most North Americans will outlive Mexicans by five years and Brazilians by 10.
Some members of the Church have responded to this real disparity by promoting what is often referred to as liberation theology, a political ideology disguised as Catholic theology, which actually contradicts the social doctrine of the Church. The issue ultimately transcends mere economics and material well-being and touches the realm of the human spirit, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger explained in his recently published interview with Peter Seewald entitled Salt of the Earth (not yet available in English).
Disillusioned with the empty promises of liberation theology and stripped of the substantial consolation and warmth proper to true religion, the cardinal points out that many of the Catholic faithful wander unknowingly into any number of anti-Catholic sects, hoping to find what they no longer receive from their politicized pastors. Besides leaving the Church, many of these end up bouncing from sect to sect in a perpetual search for solid spiritual food, a pilgrimage that often leads to their abandoning religion altogether.
In the same interview, Cardinal Ratzinger also commented on the problems specific to North America, claiming that in the midst of so many difficulties he perceives a budding resurgence of the religious spirit. This hope should encourage the Catholic faithful in America to reflect seriously on the Instrumentum laboris, as well as to keep the synod in their prayers, asking the Virgin of Guadalupe, on whose feast day the Synod will end, to guide these shepherds, so that they may lead the American flock (extending all the way from Ellesmere Island in northern Canada to the Island of Horns in southern Chile) towards an ever deeper encounter with the living Jesus Christ.
Brother Stephen Fichter is a seminarian studying theology in Rome.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Stephen Fichter LC ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Coming to Understand Our Mysterious Elder Brothers DATE: 11/16/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 16-22, 1997 ----- BODY:Father Marcel Dubois deciphers the complex Christian-Jewish relationship
Father Marcel Dubois, an expert on Christian-Jewish relations who makes his home in the Holy Land, recently met with Joop Koopman in Jerusalem. The Dominican priest reflected on political tensions in Israel, as well as the Vatican's efforts to engage the Jewish community in interreligious dialogue.
Koopman: Violence continues to disturb the Holy Land. While terrorist acts are almost universally condemned, Israeli policies under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are also blamed for the continued crisis. How does the political situation affect your work of examining the mystery of the Jewish people and their relationship with the Church?
Father Dubois: There is no doubt that some of the actions of the Israeli government have damaged the beauty of the Jewish image, the Jewish likeness of God. The benevolence toward Jewish suffering throughout history remains. However, there is little doubt that the conservative government is hurting the Jewish cause some.
The crisis goes beyond the political. Jewish consciousness in Israel is broken up; there is no unanimity. The religious dimension of Jewish life here has been falsified as it has been used for strictly political purposes. Paradoxically, the prime minister has availed himself of the country's religious parties, but he himself is not religious. All these contradictions make for an unhealthy situation.
The Israeli government has invited the Pope to visit the Holy Land as soon as possible, in conjunction with the Jubilee Year 2000. Palestinian officials have protested that such a visit would lend legitimacy to the Israeli policies with regard to Jerusalem and their claim of exclusive sovereignty over the city. What is your opinion on this?
I would not want to be in charge of protocol for such a visit. The significance of such a trip would be ambiguous at best. The Pope would have to meet with Israelis, Palestinians, Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Muslims, Jews—but which kind of Jews, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform? The only way it could be done, I suppose, is that the Pontiff would arrive by helicopter—without traversing any particular territory—say Mass, and leave again. That would not be useful, though.
Regardless of whether John Paul II will visit Israel or not, he certainly is a friend of the Jews, having made the fostering of Catholic-Jewish relations and mutual understanding a key element in his pontificate. That also has been the heart of your work among the Jewish people. You have often spoken of the “Christic dimension” of Judaism, of the Jewish people. Do you have only faithful, practicing Jews in mind or all Jews?
It is not my job to judge whether someone is faithful or not. For starters, I must pay close attention, which is something many Christian pilgrims coming here don't do. We have to be mindful of the teleology of the Jewish people—no matter what, a Jew is a member of the Jewish people, a member of the people chosen by God to prepare for the coming of the Messiah and to promote his word in the world. Hence, I must consider the existence of the Jews as a sacrament of the presence of God in Israel.
Regardless of whether individual Jews are practicing or not?
Indeed. That requires a great deal of silence and respect on our part, as well as compassion, and sadness—but, of course, those faithful to the Torah have a special place. For Christians, Jesus mediates between God and my heart; the Torah is there for the Jews. I can deplore the fact that when Jews pray, they do not mention Christ or acknowledge his presence. But, in light of my own Christian faith, I can say that they still address the Father through the Son, but without being aware of it.
That would be hard to make explicit in dialogue with the Jews; it would turn them away.
Of course, we have to remain silent, or risk closing their hearts. I am becoming more and more convinced that the most realistic way of being present as Christians among the Jewish people is to remain silent—or to encourage their faithfulness to their tradition. From this point of view, the best witness of the Church in this country are the monastic communities, precisely because they are contemplative.
Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah last spring spoke of the need for authentic dialogue with the Jewish people, calling on his own people and, it seemed, the Muslim community at large, to show a greater willingness in this regard. Though the archbishop is often critical of Israeli policies, his talk appeared to signal a softening of his position.
The patriarch is very open-minded. Don't forget the following: The language of the Palestinian Christian community is Arabic and since Arabic is the language of the Koran, the cultural milieu of the Christian Arab community is Muslim. Hence, Church leaders must tread gingerly in dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and not appear to be choosing sides.
But is real dialogue possible then?
The true encounter called for at the moment is not dialogue. It requires, first of all, an objective mutual knowledge and respect for the identity and faithfulness of the potential dialogue partners. This process requires a deep silence and in-depth study. Atrue encounter means recognizing that the “other” does not want to be considered as an object. Two kinds of faithfulness—Jewish and Christian—can respect each other.
How does Jewish faithfulness relate to Christian faithfulness?
The monastic vocation is an icon of sanctity within the Church. I would use the same definition for a people called by God to listen to his word, to meditate on it, day and night, and to realize it in daily life. That is the function of the Jewish people in the Bible and still today and that is also the function of monks and nuns in the Church, who, as it were, represent the continuity of the vocation of Israel, as they live out a dimension of Christianity which is a heritage of Israel.
It would seem, then, that even the non-practicing Jew upholds something of this heritage, just by virtue of being?
Faithfulness involves both consciousness of a certain identity and knowledge of the Torah. To admit that one shares the Jewish identity can be a first step, to accept to belong to a mysterious community with a very mysterious vocation that is so important for the world. That already is a kind of faithfulness.
That is clearly different for non-Jews, who, to be elected, too, must be baptized.
That election, indeed, is not inscribed in their nature, if you will. But there is an analogy, as in baptism we, too, join the people of Israel.
What about Muslims? They do not seem to fit this model of “chosen-ness” in the same way at all.
I am not an expert on Islam, but the relationship between Israel and the Church is central and exemplary for all other interreligious relationships. There is a purity in the link between the Jews and the Church. The relationship between Muslims and Jesus involves different sources, a different soil. There is something in the purity of the link between Israel and the Church which is exemplary for the link between Muslims and Jesus, which, nevertheless, can never be seen on the same level. We must think, though, of the calling of the Jewish people and their response to it as a model for all religions.
You have said in the past that a healthy relationship between Jews and Catholics, between Jews and Christians, is vital for the good of the world. Please explain your position.
Consider God's mysterious proposal, his promise of salvation, as revealed in the Bible, in the New Testament, and how it is experienced in the history of Israel and the Church. It is clear that God wants to unite all the world in one people. But here we have two communities, who each pretend to be that people—the people of Israel and the Church, which even has referred to herself as “the new Israel,” which was clearly a mistake. Here we have Israel ordered by law, according to the flesh, and Israel announced by the New Testament, followers of Christ. The two side by side are a mystery, an unfathomable mystery.
Again, it calls for mutual respect.
For Jews it is important to see the Church as a mysterious relative—a Church, like the people of Israel, that is faithful and aware of its vocation— and to consider the sanctity of Christ. For Christians, it is important to consider the Christic dynamism of the Jewish people. Faithfulness itself speaks of Christ. In this faithfulness of the Jews [to their divine calling, to their election] there is something which is already Christian.
And this would not be true for the faithful Buddhist?
There are degrees of proximity [to Christ]. And Judaism is at the center, along with the Church. But all of humanity is drawn to the center. In Christ, God has given divine value to human life, to every authentic—and I underline authentic—human feeling and action, each discovery, art, friendship, love, and suffering. All this has received new value in the beauty of Christ.
In the love of a mother for her child we see an image of God's tenderness for his creatures. But especially every human suffering—through the power of the cross and Christ's victory—has been given a sacramental value. It is not a sacrament like the seven sacraments we know, but we will be amazed when we enter the kingdom of paradise to find huge crowds of people who have never heard of Christ, or met him, but who will recognize that we are all saved by the sacrament of the Cross, and the suffering and death of Jesus.
It depends on how people suffer, whether they accept it.
Indeed, whether they suffer with open-mindedness and without selfishness or bitterness. If we look at the world in this light, everything changes. That is the fruit of the Incarnation—God has visited all dimensions of human feelings.
What about the suffering of the Jews, who appear to be singled out in a particular way.
It is not easy to speak of the sacramental value of suffering before the Jews, who exemplify in many respects the tragedy of human suffering. Still, their suffering, too, receives its mysterious value from the cross of Christ.
Still, that wouldn't justify, for example, the controversial cross at Auschwitz?
No, not at all. All of these truths require an ocean of silence. We must be prepared to recognize Jewish faithfulness. The closest to the mystery of Christ are the people of his people. We are called to look at the Jewish people as Jesus himself looks at his people.
The Vatican is due to publish a document and discuss the Church's role during World War II and the holocaust. How important will that text be?
Very important, of course. Christians must understand the mystery of Jewish suffering. Jews, for their part, must accept other people pondering [and to an extent] participating in this suffering. For the Jews, there is the temptation of self-sufficiency, selfishness, and the notion that this suffering is a purely Jewish affair, a stance made worse, of course, by the fact that Christians were often to blame for Jewish pain.
Just as there must be a contemplation of the mystery of the Jewish people, and justice and kindness toward them, the Jews are challenged to contemplate the mystery of the cross.
—Joop Koopman
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Formation Needed to Combat 'Widespread De-Christianization,' Pope Says DATE: 11/16/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 16-22, 1997 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY—“A widely diffused de-Christianization” in today's world makes it “essential for the faithful to … live their baptism, their vocation, and their Christian responsibility,” Pope John Paul II told members and consultants of the Pontifical Council for the Laity in an Oct. 30 audience. The curial office, instituted 30 years ago by Pope Paul VI, was gathered in plenary assembly Oct. 27-31 in Rome.
Opening the week-long meeting, the laity office's head, Archbishop J. Francis Stafford, said the dicastery is “a sign of and a service to the historical movement of the promotion of the laity, fruit of the Church's renewed self-awareness as mystery of communion and fruit of the pressing missionary responsibility of our time.”
The American archbishop explained that the Council assists the Pope's pastoral work of spreading “consciousness of the baptismal dignity of the lay faithful, for their co-responsibility in the edification of the Church, and for their participation in its mission, rendering Christian testimony in every situation, environment, and culture, towards the construction of a more human society.”
For this plenary assembly, the Council's 30 members—including 26 lay people—and another dozen consultants and experts came from all around the world to reflect on the theme “Being Christians on the Threshold of the Third Millennium.” The meeting falls in the year of preparation for the Jubilee consecrated to Jesus Christ by the Pope in the 1994 apostolic letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente (As the Third Millennium Draws Near), and to a “rediscovery of baptism as foundation of Christian existence.”
“We are responding to the Holy Father's call to focus upon Christ in this year,” Archbishop Stafford told the Register, “but to focus upon Christ as that mystery of Christ is revealed to us in the foundational sacrament which the Second Vatican Council called the ‘door’ to all the other life of the Church—that is, the mystery of baptism.”
“It is no exaggeration,” says the Pope in his 1988 apostolic exhortation Christifideles Laici (The Lay Members of Christ's Faithful People), “to say that the entire existence of the lay faithful has as its purpose to lead a person to a knowledge of the radical newness of the Christian life that comes from baptism, the sacrament of faith, so that this knowledge can help that person live the responsibilities which arise from the vocation received from God.”
In the same document, the Pope recalls the admonition of his predecessor, Pope St. Leo the Great: “Acknowledge, O Christian, your dignity!”
“It is a dignity,” John Paul II adds, “which brings demands.… ‘Upon all the lay faithful, then, rests the exalted duty of working to assure that each day the divine plan of salvation is further extended to every person, of every era, in every part of the earth.’”
Repeating his call at the lay assembly, the Pope, himself once a consultant to the curial body, said all Christians must deepen their “consciousness of the gift received in baptism and the responsibilities which are derived from it.”
The Pope highlighted trends that add an urgency to that appeal. Two phenomena that “more than ever” need to be “analyzed attentively,” he said, are the growing number of non-baptized people, even in “regions which for centuries have been of Christian tradition”; and the number of baptized who tend to “forget that they have become, by received grace, ‘new creatures.’”
It is therefore necessary, he said, to “revive the missionary spirit” of the Church in providing programs of “Christian initiation for the numerous youth and adults who are asking for baptism” and to begin a process of “renewal of Christian formation for those who have distanced themselves from the faith they have received.”
The question of education “to the faith and in the faith” is of utmost importance, the Pope said, “in an epoch when the ability to transmit the faith in continuity with tradition seems to have lost its vigor.”
Archbishop Stafford told the Register that “the crisis of our time, which is a very ancient crisis going back centuries, is the break between Sunday and the rest of the week, the break between nature and grace, the break between everyday work and faith. But as some of our members from the East have pointed out, crisis also offers opportunity. The challenge is for us to unfold a theology that makes sense in the life of the everyday layman from Monday through Saturday.”
“It is up to laypeople to help us,” the prelate said. “Is Christ revealed to you, and to your brothers and sisters working in the everyday world…? Does Christ make sense to them? If he doesn't, why doesn't he make sense? And if he does make sense, in what area does he make sense?”
Part of the solution involves identifying people who do “manifest Jesus Christ in their everyday lives,” he said. Following the call of the Vatican II, Pope John Paul has energetically promoted the canonization of lay saints.
“The entire people of God, and the lay faithful in particular, can find at this moment new models for holiness and new witnesses of heroic virtue lived in the ordinary everyday circumstances of human existence,” said the Pope in his landmark document on lay people.
But there are other models as well. “I think that in some ways the pattern or the model of post-modern Catholic laypersons,” Archbishop Stafford told the Register, “would be a person like the [17th-century French] scientist [Blaise] Pascal, who was the father of mathematics, one of the first in understanding the challenge of a non-Copernican world and the loneliness of man in that world. And yet still at bottom he affirmed the God and Father of Jesus Christ as the fire of immense free love. And that was revealed in [Pascal's] everyday life as a mathematician, scientist, and lay theologian.”
Despite evidence of “widespread de-Christianization,” the Pope also indicated “signs of hope.” In the first place, he recalled World Youth Days, especially the most recent one this summer in Paris.
He pointed out the “desire for a more human and true life” and “need for meaning and an ideal” vigorously expressed by youth; sentiments that are “stronger and more vivacious than the nihilistic conformism which seems to invade many spirits.”
The Pope also underlined “the process of affirmation of the true dignity of women,” which “has met the active sympathy of the Church, because the ‘feminine genius’continues to enrich the Christian community and society.”
Lastly, he praised the “admirable commitment of numerous lay people” to various human, social, and charitable activities and who put themselves “at the service of the common good in political, cultural, and economic institutions.”
New lay movements, like World Youth Days and Catholic Action, have sprung up in the Church since the Vatican Council. Archbishop Stafford, who was archbishop of Denver for the World Youth Day there in 1993, said he interpreted this as an answer to Pope John XXIII's prayer that through Vatican II, which he opened, the Church would enjoy a “new Pentecost.”
“I think the manifestation of that is the new ecclesial movements and their various charisms,” said the archbishop.
“The Church, especially the parish and the diocese, has to be more open to the charism of the Spirit,” he told the Register. “Most of these new movements within the Church are basically an out-stocking of the institutional character of the Church and are basically charismatic in their evolution and origin. So we have to help the Western Church, at least, to be open to the charismatic element,” he said.
The Pope has consecrated 1998 in the three-year preparation for the Jubilee to the Holy Spirit. The Laity Council will consequently be taking a closer look next year at the work of the Holy Spirit in lay movements, Archbishop Stafford said.
“The future of our Church,” he told the Register, “is going to be increasingly in need of the insight of the Catholic layperson who is living out, as the Second Vatican Council says, the “secular character” of their Christian vocation. We must listen closely to the unfolding of their experience in the marketplace. It is only by listening to them that we will eventually overcome this chronic, centuries-old division between faith and the everyday life.”
As John Paul II said, “The whole Church is counting on an ever more active commitment on the part of the faithful in every outpost of the world.”
John Norton is based in Rome.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Norton ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: In Cleveland, School Voucher Proponents Have Proof of Their Promises DATE: 11/16/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 16-22, 1997 ----- BODY:Choice in education philosophy gains support as courts continue examining questions of constitutionality
ONCE AGAIN a large city with a troubled public school system is looking to parental choice through vouchers to help some students attain quality educations. The House of Representatives approved a District of Columbia spending bill Oct. 9 that gives poor children federal subsidies for private school tuition; the bill faces a battle in the Senate and will likely require a compromise. This action comes in the wake of impressive success with voucher programs in Milwaukee and Cleveland.
The Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program, a pilot in its second year, still faces the question of the constitutionality of its vouchers. The Franklin County Common Pleas Court ruled the Cleveland program constitutional in July, 1996; the decision was reversed in May, 1997, by the 10th District Court of Appeals in Franklin County. The courts decided not to implement the latest decision pending further scrutiny.
While the constitutionality of vouchers continues to be examined in Ohio courts, the number of students whose elementary education is subsidized by vouchers in the second year of Cleveland's program has increased: 1996 saw 53 private schools involved, 34 of which are Catholic. Scholarships were granted to 1,994 children; the parents of 1,073 of them chose Catholic schools. Schools this year opened with 57 of them accepting vouchers and an additional 1,006 students on scholarship.
Paralleling the growth of Cleveland's program, support across the nation for the idea of parental choice also has grown. In a random telephone poll conducted in 1997 by Gallup, 48% of Americans interviewed favored “allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at government expense.” Four years earlier the same question polled in the same fashion garnered just half of the support.
Evangelicals for Social Action (ESA), a group known for their progressive stance on public policy, has come out in favor of vouchers. In a statement, the ESA cited the positive results to date in both the Milwaukee and the Cleveland programs as reason to explore the concept as a “matter of justice and equal opportunity.”
Cleveland's voucher program follows specific procedures. Scholarships of $2,250 are granted to students in kindergarten through grade three. There are criteria for residency and financial need; the average income of families currently receiving vouchers is $6,597. Selection is made by lottery of those qualified since desire for the program far exceeds its funding, vouchers are made out to the parents or guardians of the students; parents choose the private school their child will attend. Not all students whose parents place them in Catholic schools are Catholic.
At a hearing held in Cleveland by a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives in September, educators involved in the Cleveland program expressed their strong belief in the effectiveness of that program. Among the many reasons for their faith in the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program given: schools are safe and free from violence and disorder, thus teachers have more teaching time; standardized test scores are rising; classrooms are appropriately disciplined; parents are empowered because of their heightened involvement in a school they chose. Christine Keller, former administrator at one of Cleveland's private schools, said that because parents pay tuition in addition to the voucher, they have a feeling of ownership regarding the school's successes and challenges. She added that there is virtually no bureaucracy; innovations in programs and teaching methods happen in timely fashion.
Those who oppose Cleveland's pilot program cite problems with separation of Church and state, the siphoning of educational dollars away from the public schools, hidden costs for transportation, auxiliary services, and administration. They contend that the increase in academic performance of students in the program is more a function of smaller class sizes and less student diversity than of the program itself.
There are implications for Catholic elementary schools if vouchers clear the courts. Those schools presently doing a good job are likely to fill to capacity. Increase in student numbers brings greater diversity in academic ability and values. If the voucher amount covers the entire cost of educating a pupil, elementary budgets might include more money for teachers' salaries, which are usually far below those of their counterparts in public education, and more money for programs and supplies. Opportunities for the Church to serve the poor will increase. With government money will come some level of regulation.
The convergence of the current crisis in public education with an expansion of voucher programs has the potential to forge a level of cooperation between public and Catholic education unprecedented in the history of both. It will take both systems working effectively to provide a sound education for all God's children.
Edna Dierker is based in Union-town, Ohio.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Edna Dierker ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Save the Children DATE: 11/16/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 16-22, 1997 ----- BODY:Following is the text of Archbishop Renato Martino's Oct. 30 presentation before the general assembly of the United Nations in New York on the “Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Children.” The archbishop is apostolic nuncio and permanent observer to the United Nations.
Throughout the world, the Catholic Church is one of the major providers of aid and care for children. The Holy See is therefore pleased to be able to participate in this discussion of … the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Children.
It is inconceivable that any child would grow up with the dream of becoming a prostitute, a drug addict, or a child soldier. It is just as inconceivable that a child would ever dream of being separated from his or her family, forced to labor in conditions that are harmful or exploitive, being sexually, physically or psychologically abused, or dying as a result of armed conflict. No child would ever hope for such a life, but this is the tragic reality that confronts too many children in the world. For them, life is not a dream but a nightmare. In fact, 650 million of the world's children “are living in conditions of almost unimaginable suffering and want.” An estimated 2 million are involved in prostitution, and over 230 million children throughout the world are working in situations that place them at risk from hazardous and intolerable forms of labor. How many more die each week from malnutrition and disease, from a lack of the basic elements of life such as clean water and sanitation, or from the ravages of drug abuse and life on the street?
Clearly many of the problems facing the world require long-term and difficult solutions. However, it is high time that the problems and difficulties that threaten children be addressed effectively. The international community must demonstrate the resolve not only to seek out the causes of these violations of the rights and dignity of children, but also to bring itself to implement the solutions which we know exist and which will work.
Whenever we confront situations which involve a violation of rights, we are faced with an unjustifiable domination of the strong over the weak, of the “haves” over the “have nots.” It is because children are some of the weakest and most defenseless in our society that they become frequent victims of the abuses of human rights in many forms. For this reason, even before policies to rectify such abuses are considered and proposed, we must first have a clear understanding that children are the bearers of rights precisely because they are human persons. As such they have a claim to our respect and they share fully in human dignity as do all human beings from conception until natural death.
My delegation is convinced that the solutions to abuses against the rights of children must be rooted in the family. That basic unit of society is the natural and primary locus where children develop an understanding of themselves and of the world. It is undeniably clear that where there are strong family ties, the children grow to have greater personal stability, less vulnerability of all kinds, and a more effective enjoyment of the natural rights which are theirs, including the right to life itself and the right to education. Further, it is in the context of the family that children find those who most willingly and effectively afford them protection from the many threats which life can present. For this reason, great care must be taken to assist parents in all circumstances so that they are enabled to exercise their rights, duties, and responsibilities in caring for and rearing their children.
This reality was eloquently captured by Secretary General Kofi Annan in his message issued last May on the Observance of the International Day of Families. He said, “From Bosnia and Herzegovina to Zaire, we have seen how conflicts assault the very foundation of society—families. Whether it is fathers sent off to war never perhaps to return, or mothers left defenseless before advancing armies, or children made orphans by massive dislocations and refugee movements—the ruins of war are the ruins of families.” And he continued, “We must restore the sacredness of the family as a bedrock of humane values everywhere, in peace as well as in war. The future of peace and prosperity that we seek for all the world's people needs a foundation of tolerance, security, equality, and justice. That foundation is the family. It is only by protecting families, from famine as well as from fragmentation, that they can prosper and contribute to the family of nations that is the United Nations.”
The Holy See is convinced that the abuse of the rights of children, including exploitation and neglect of all kinds must be addressed and brought to an end. In the words of His Holiness Pope John Paul II, “There cannot and must not be abandoned children, nor children without families, nor street children. There cannot be and must not be children used by adults for immoral purposes, for drug trafficking, for petty and large crimes, for practicing vices. There cannot be and must not be children in reformatories and correctional institutions where they do not have true upbringing.… [T]here cannot be and must not be children who are assassinated, eliminated under the pretext of crime prevention, marked for death.”
In strengthening and protecting the family and the role of parents, we protect the world's children from many of these threats and evils, and we provide them with a real cause for hope in their future.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: A Turkish Novelist Faces West DATE: 11/16/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 16-22, 1997 ----- BODY:In The New Life, Ohran Pamuk addresses the strangeness of writing Western-style novels to explain the non-Western Turks to themselves
“IREAD A book one day and my whole life was changed,” begins The New Life, the postmodern Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk's latest work. “Even on the first page I was so affected by the book's intensity I felt my body sever itself and pull away from the chair where I sat reading the book that lay before me on the table.”
If this awakens echoes of the conversion of St. Augustine—reading the New Testament when a child's voice drifted over his garden wall saying, “Take up and read”—that was intended. Or if the reader remembers Dante's Renaissance account of conversion in La Vita Nuova, that too was intended. Reading and rebirth have been intertwined in Western civilization since the Apostle Paul first wrote to the Thessalonians.
The problem is—as Pamuk well knows—that Turkish culture has never fit comfortably within Western civilization. It did not fit in those late medieval days when the Ottoman Turks took Constantinople in 1453 and made all of Europe tremble. Nor has it fit in more recent times since the young Turk leader Kemal Ataturk, seeking a solution to “the Sick Man of Europe” that was the late Ottoman Empire, imposed in 1923 the radically secularized regime that created modern Turkey and has virtually outlawed any religion ever since.
Even the writing of novels is an essentially European activity, borrowed by other cultures as much as the telephone or the voting booth, and born in Europe from a fundamentally Christian experience of the power of reading a book. With the Koran, Islam has its own written scripture—scripture that recognizes the significance of reading when it identifies Christians and Jews as “People of the Book.” But it was only with the Bible in the West that reading—and by extension, writing— became invested with the kind of spiritual gravity that might lead one to begin “a new life.”
Pamuk is the author of two previous postmodernesque novels, The White Castle and The Black Book. Both of these, upon their translation from Turkish into European languages, led many critics to make extravagant comparisons with such major figures as Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Salman Rushdie. Many even suggested the likelihood of eventual recognition from the Nobel Prize committee that is always on the hunt for major authors from outside the West. But The New Life may be his most telling work, for in it Pamuk at last faces up to the strangeness of his activity of writing Western-style novels to explain the non-Western Turks to themselves.
The narrator of Pamuk's tale is Osman, a 22-year-old Turkish student, whose sudden discovery of an unnamed book tears him away from school into a new life. Searching for the book's meaning, he falls in love with an architectural student, Janan—who, with her lover, Mehmet, has also become a reader of the book. Such readers are in danger, Mehmet warns just before he is apparently shot and disappears together with Janan. Pursuing somehow both his new life and Janan, Osman takes to the road, busing across Turkey, stopping only to take another bus in no particular direction, hoping that buses will lead him to the book's meaning and Janan.
Reading and rebirth have been intertwined in Western civilization since the Apostle Paul first wrote to the Thessalonians.
After he emerges unhurt from a collision, he begins to think bus wrecks may hold the clues he seeks, and it is in fact at a crash site that he finds Janan, who joins him in riding buses across Turkey. And at a third crash site an injured young woman reveals herself as a reader of the book. She asks Osman and Janan to impersonate her and her lover, going to stop a mysterious “Dr. Fine,” the man behind the attacks on readers of the book.
Fine turns out to be an extremely wealthy man whose son, after reading the book, turned against him and subsequently died in yet another bus crash. In revenge Fine has vowed to destroy the book and all its readers. It was one of Fine's agents who shot Mehmet, who is discovered now to have survived. Furthermore, another agent murdered Uncle Rifki, a friend of the narrator's family who is, perhaps, the author of the book.
Leaving Janan behind to rest, Osman sets out to find Mehmet—and discovers him alive and well, living contentedly in a small village under the narrator's own name. In fury at his refusal to come back to Janan, Osman shoots down this impostor and returns to Fine, only to find that Janan has disappeared yet again. Finally stripped of hope, he turns his tired steps back home to school and his mother. Janan, he learns years later, lives in Germany with a doctor who read the book but somehow managed not to suffer from it. Now 35, Osman is left with a quiet, injured, and empty life.
The novel might have ended here, a strange little story about love and the illusions of youth, significant mostly for its close observations of rural Turkish life. But in its final pages, Pamuk puts his novel through a weird kaleidoscope of postmodernesque changes as we discover the impossible fact that the book we have just been reading is itself the book that changed Osman's life, and Pamuk the author is also Osman the participant—somehow magically both inside and outside the novel.
Such postmodern inversions are not to every-one's taste, and they in many ways damage The New Life. But if the reader considers the strangeness of the activity at which Pamuk spends his life—forcing a Western-style novel to explain a non-Western country that has for nearly 75 years forced an exaggerated Western-style secularism on its unwilling and primarily Islamic people—then these postmodern posturing of the author, as both inside and outside his work, emerge as the most profound aspects of the book. For the Catholic reader, they are even more important, revealing what Pamuk himself must recognize: that the very significance of a book—any book—derives ultimately from the experience of conversion-by-reading promised in that one book on which the entire West is founded.
J. Bottum, associate editor of the journal First Things, is based in New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: J. Bottum ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Case for Rejecting 'Pizza Love' DATE: 11/16/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 16-22, 1997 ----- BODY:IN HER second book, Real Love: The Ultimate Dating, Marriage & Sex Question Book, Mary Beth Bonacci answers questions on chastity, marriage, and the real meaning of sex. Her humorous style and easy-going manner combined with solid quotations from the Catechism of the Catholic Church make for an effective presentation.
The author can't say enough good about chastity. To her, it holds the answer to the real meaning of sexual relations. Chastity is not mere abstinence, though. Abstinence means a person will not engage in sex, putting the entire burden on him or her. Chastity is a philosophy for life, which holds that sex is a language best spoken in the bond and bed of marriage. Unlike abstinence, chastity is made possible through prayer and help from God.
The author distinguishes real love from “pizza love.” Pizza love demands instant gratification—as in I want my sex now, period. Whereas chastity looks at what is best for both people in their lives. She also points out that sex isn't love in of itself and makes it clear that having sex won't make someone fall in love.
The format of the book is a compilation of questions answered, and there are many questions concerning feelings of regret over sexual licentiousness. Chastity doesn't depend on virginity, she contends, assuring her readers that Christ forgives all who seek his forgiveness. Accept the forgiveness he offers and move on, she wisely advises. She goes on to say that once chastity is accepted, the virtue grows with practice. Bonacci also makes it clear that chastity does not minimize the natural language of sex that God gave us—it just puts that language in its proper setting.
Real Love covers most aspects of human sexuality, tackling such issues as homosexuality, abortion, infidelity, and living together before marriage. The author also explodes the so-called safe sex myth with facts and humor. For instance, when asked, “Why do you think that wearing a condom is a bad thing?,” she responds, “I don't think wearing a condom is a bad thing. Go ahead—wear a condom if you'd like. Wear two or three. Just don't engage in sex.” She also includes a sexual disease index that lists the symptoms of many sexually transmitted diseases.
As a speaker specializing in youth issues, Bonacci encounters a lot of thoughtful questions from teenagers. So much so that she devotes an entire chapter to teen specific issues. But the book is useful for anyone interested in a sound take on everything from unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases to dealing with hardened and hurt hearts from spoiled relationships. Real Love reinforces the Church's view of sexuality and what it means to share the gift of sexuality in a loving marriage.
Raul Acosta is based in Colorado Springs, Colo.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raulacosta ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Letters DATE: 11/16/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 16-22, 1997 ----- BODY:‘Green’ Catholics
I would like to make some comments in reference to your article titled “Despite Growing Environmental Threats, ‘Green’ Catholics Remain Few in Number” (Nov. 2-8). This article measures the activism of Catholics against the “environmental justice” movement only. I find this to be a poor measure of what Catholics are doing in this area.
I am an environmental engineer with a multinational company. I can think of many in San Diego who are also environmental engineers with major corporations that are also Catholic. We work for these companies, and in our work we bring our beliefs and convictions. We sponsor programs in our companies that directly affect the environment. We educate the employees by announcements and training programs through these companies. We have been CCD teachers together and have answered questions from our students. We work with the city, state, and federal governments by providing comments and testimony on legislation.
For example, I spent more than a year on the San Diego mayor's committee for strategic water supply. Some of us have been to other countries on environmental programs. In this category, I was on the Citizens Ambassador Program to Russia, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine in 1993, the first group from this program to go to these countries.
Environmental justice is only one aspect of stew-ardship of the earth. We must start to focus on sustainability of our resources—air, water, and materials—and on sustainability of our economy, employment, culture, and freedom.
Anne Bamford
‘Always Our Children’
With one exception, I think Father Harvey's critique of the bishop's statement on homosexuality (“‘Always Our Children’: A Critique,” Oct. 19-25) clearly carries the day. The one exception would be the question of the orientation itself. I don't think the bishops can be faulted for coming down on the innate or given side with regard to homosexuality. Without clear scientific evidence showing the possibility of orientation change, which does not exist, the logical presumption is that the homosexual condition is something innate.
On every other point and most especially with regard to chastity, Father Harvey is right on. I am especially upset with the bishops'reference to the objective mortal sin of the young in this predicament as “experimentation.” What could pierce the heart of our Savior more than impurity among the young? Nothing!
It is also necessary for the bishops to make clear that there is only one type of sexuality in God's created design and that is heterosexuality. The fact that God allows homosexuality to exist has to do with his permissive will and to the reality of the effects of Original Sin.
Does this mean that the homosexual person is someone less valued in God's eyes? Of course not! Although God does deny to the person with an unchangeable homosexual condition the possibility of sexual love between man and woman in marriage, they are not denied the greatest love of all. A homosexual person who picks up his or her cross and embraces celibacy will experience the love of God a hundredfold.
What other cross can be so completely turned around?
Paul Trouve Montague, New Jersey
Rating USCC Ratings
We would both like to commend you for the excellence and quality both in content and layout of the Register, our favorite newspaper. We have only one complaint, namely your regular printing of “Film Clips” by the U.S. Catholic Conference Office for Film and Broadcasting.
In your Oct. 26-Nov. 1 edition, the USCC office remarks that several of the movies therein rated contain scenes with “brief” or “some” nudity, “numerous sexual situations,” “comic treatment of adultery,” “many perverse sexual references,” and “implied sexual encounters.” The USCC rates all these films as either A-III—adults or A-IV—adults, with reservations.
The Office claims that A-IV rated films are “problematic,” but not “morally offensive in themselves.” This is an insult to our Catholic sensitivities and also to our plain common sense. Our Lord, who warned that even deliberate lustful thoughts are gravely sinful, would surely consider “comic treatment of adultery” as an offense against God.
If only the USCC would have the moral courage to rate such films as 0—morally offensive, maybe today's Catholic youth and young adults would not be so confused in moral matters. But apparently the USCC office itself is confused morally. And to a certain extent we as future Catholic parents feel the failure of the USCC in this matter contributes to the general decline of morality in the Church and in contemporary secular society.
We are not prudish, we are two young university students ages 22 and 32, who enjoy good movies, the theater, and even a lot of modern music. We appreciate tasteful and respectful nudity even in religious art—such as one sees in the Vatican—but “perverse sexual references” and “comic treatment of adultery” are clearly offensive to us.
Two questions we would pose to the USCC office: Would you invite our Lord to watch a film with you that intended the audience to laugh at adultery? What do you believe our Lord would think about such a movie?
Samuel and Melissa Sinner
Lincoln, Nebraska
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: The Partial-Birth Abortion Debate: ADisturbing Look Behind the Scenes DATE: 11/16/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 16-22, 1997 ----- BODY:The struggle to ban partial-birth abortions has gone on much longer than it should. So many people have read about so many rounds of congressional voting and presidential action that it's no surprise they're asking: What more do we need to do to pass this bill? And when?
These are good and timely questions as we near the end of the 105th Congress. At the moment, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act has passed both House and Senate. In the House, it passed by more than the two-thirds majority necessary to override a presidential veto. The Senate passed it by 64 to 36 votes, three short of the number required to override a veto. The president vetoed the bill Oct. 10, and override votes in the House and Senate will take place likely in 1998.
To understand what's really at stake in the upcoming House and Senate votes, and how to approach them, a little background on the state-of-play is quite useful. It is not, by and large, a pretty story.
Beginning in 1995, one specter haunted the pro-life movement's efforts: Five women who claimed that, but for their partial-birth abortions, they would have either died, or been unable to bear any future children. President Clinton used these women's stories to great effect at a veto ceremony and any time he felt the need to justify his opposition to the ban.
However, hundreds of ob-gyns and specialists in high risk pregnancies came forward to declare that the women's medical scenarios made no sense. None of the conditions they cited, or any other fetal or maternal condition one could name, require a doctor to kill the child in order to remove him or her from the mother, let alone kill them in the gruesome manner of a partial-birth abortion. The doctors even formed a group: The Physicians' Ad hoc Coalition for Truth (PHACT). Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop echoed them. But the president wouldn't budge.
The AMA said partial-birth abortion was ‘not good medicine.’
Fast forward to 1997. The PHACT doctors were pressing their case with other doctors and with the American Medical Association (AMA). The latter is officially pro-legal abortion. After suggesting a few clarifying changes in the bill, the AMA endorsed the ban on partial-birth abortions. They said the procedure was “not good medicine” and that they were unable to find any situation in which this procedure would be the “only appropriate alternative.”
Reason triumphed, but only for a moment. In the second round of voting to pass the bill, the Senate fell three short of the votes needed to override a promised presidential veto—and, as promised, the president vetoed it for a second time.
It was a veto with a difference, though. In the inimitable words of The New York Times: “President Clinton waited until a time when few people were watching— late on a recent Friday, at the start of the holiest Jewish holiday—to veto [this] legislation” (Oct. 21).
Skipping over the ugly fact that President Clinton's written veto came immediately after his written commemoration of National Children's Day—another aspect of his veto message stands out. Subtly but surely, the president was sliding off the medical argument into a legal one.
He now claims that Roe v. Wade requires every abortion law to have a “health” of the mother exception, and the partial-birth bill does not. This, of course, ignores that the Supreme Court, in Roe, explicitly did not consider the constitutionality of the Texas law prohibiting killing a child in the process of delivery. That law is still on the Texas books today.
The president's reliance on Roe signals a major sea change in pro-abortion argumentation. Since the AMA's decision to endorse the ban, the women claiming a health necessity for the partial-birth procedure have disappeared from the public relations materials of the major pro-abortion groups. They are no longer found in the company of the Planned Parenthood lobbyist going door to door in Senate office buildings. It is a change that the media has little noticed, though they previously covered these women's stories to the advantage of the pro-abortion position.
In one of the recently released White House tapes, President Clinton makes his case for preserving partial-birth abortion by portraying the entire matter as a cynical political affair cooked up by Republicans to do what they're “very good at, which is to try to find ways to divide the American people.”
The president goes on to misstate the reasons for which partial-birth abortions are performed, by his account, 13,000 times a year on hydrocephalic children. He also portrays Catholics as led by the nose and internally divided on this matter. After all, he claims, three of the women at his veto ceremony were pro-life and Catholic. (Two of the women actually claimed this.)
Finally, he “reasons” that the whole matter must be politically timed since no one had thought about “these kids” during the prior 23 years of legal abortion. (The invention of the partial-birth procedure was publicized beginning in 1992; a bill to ban it was introduced in 1993).
In short, it's not likely that this debate will grow any more pleasant. But if each one of us is willing to put on our tall boots and walk a little further in the mud, and to write just one more letter to our senators, final success is only three votes away.
Helen Alvaré is director of planning and information in the office of the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Awash in the Toxic Sea of Celebrity DATE: 11/16/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 16-22, 1997 ----- BODY:An examination of society's obsession with celebrity reveals hidden opportunities to further the Church's timeless Gospel of Life
Every culture must choose its cult. As nature abhors a vacuum, so too a culture will not tolerate emptiness at its core. Cult, taken from the Latin cultus, means a system of worship, often religious, or the honoring of persons or institutions. Every culture has at its center a cult that animates its arts, education, entertainment, journalism, and even its philosophy.
Christians take culture seriously. “All human activity takes places within a culture and interacts with culture,” writes Pope John Paul II. “At the heart of every culture lies the attitude man takes to the greatest mystery: the mystery of God” (Centesimus Annus 51,24).
Christians have an obligation to evangelize every culture, to reaffirm in it what is good and to root out what is not. The task of fulfilling the divine mandate of preaching the gospel to all nations—i.e., all cultures—requires Christians to know what the reigning cults of a particular culture are, and how those cults reflect the answer those peoples have given to the mystery of God. The task of re-evangelizing the culture in North America requires that diagnosis to begin at home.
Our Celebrity Culture
This task is particularly difficult today as one particular cult has taken hold of our public life. The cult of celebrity is not the only cult in our culture, but it is a powerful one that makes the gospel more difficult to hear. Our celebrity culture is the enemy of serious thought and enduring truths. It reduces to objects the people it celebrates, and exalts glamour and image over substance. In its promotion of a consumer mentality, it is not unrelated to the culture of death.
A recent story, superficially about religion, reflects that our contemporary popular culture prefers to worship at the altar of celebrity. Brad Pitt stars in the current film Seven Years in Tibet. He did not spend even seven months there, and he is not an expert on Tibetan politics or history. Yet he is often asked to comment upon the China-Tibet issue. “Why ask me? I am just an actor,” he responds.
Brad Pitt's common sense notwithstanding, Time magazine—not always a reliable source of news but an unerring barometer of the fashions of the day—devoted a cover story to the movie, Tibet, and the “rise” of Buddhism in America. Time reports that Buddhism counts among its American converts Tina Turner (a pop singer), Steven Seagal (an actor), Richard Gere (another actor), and Phil Jackson (coach of the Chicago Bulls basketball team).
Were these four chosen because of their philosophical or theological insights, which might shed light on the truths found in Buddhism? Of course not. Time was quite straightforward about why these were found worthy of note: they are celebrities. When religious news is presented according to the standards of celebrity, it is an indication that the celebrity cult is harming our critical judgment.
Time is only a junior player in the celebrity industry; its sister publication, People magazine, sells millions of copies covering celebrities always, everywhere, and exhaustively. The parade of celebrities on television talk shows begins at sunrise and does not end until well after sunset. The desire for celebrities—to see them, to hear them, to touch them—drives a vast news and entertainment culture of which the supermarket tabloids are only a small part. Celebrity biographies and autobiographies about even the most inconsequential figures fill the bookstores. An ever-increasing number of television “news” programs are devoted to the kind of gossip about the rich and famous formerly reserved to pool halls and beauty parlors.
The cult of celebrity treats its celebrated ones not as true heroes but as objects. Heroes are proposed for admiration and emulation. Celebrities are objects offered for our consumption. Respectable magazines would just as soon put Madonna on the cover as the Blessed Virgin Mary. It matters not whether the subject is worthy or unworthy; it is required only that she be famous.
Indeed, it is not a human subject that is being portrayed at all, but an object to be used. It is an injustice to them, but it also damages us, whether as passive participants or even as willing consumers. The cult of celebrity makes us complicit in the reducing of real men and women to objects of amusement. It is very difficult to look upon the celebrities splashed across the checkout-stand news-racks and not think of them as just another thing to be tossed into the shopping cart. Christians who know that it is wrong to treat a person as a mere object—which gives rise to lust in sexual matters and exploitation in economics—face a constant source of temptation in the cultural air we breathe. The culture of celebrity is hostile to Christian virtue.
The late Diana, Princess of Wales, was the queen of the celebrity culture because she was the prettiest object of them all. She was hailed for bringing glamour into a royal family more often thought of as dowdy, stuffy, and rigid. Yet glamour does not coexist easily with the virtues that undergird a monarchy, or any long-standing social institution: stability, discretion, loyalty, and farsightedness. The designs of Providence are inscrutable, but there was a lesson in the image of the 97-year-old Queen Mother coming to mourn the princess 60 years her junior. The celebrity culture still produces posters of James Dean, but it was Jimmy Stewart who lived more than his three score and 10.
Enduring Truth vs. Novelty
Glamour is evanescent and so the appetite for it is insatiable. The resulting hunger is hostile to enduring institutions and truths. The purpose of a family and a Church is not to tantalize with something new, but to reassure with what is always valid. By definition, what families and the Church do cannot be glamorous. A teenager may learn how to dress or speak from his celebrity idols, but the glamorous set will not teach him to be home before curfew or to get up early to go to Mass. The celebrity culture can create an image, but it cannot build character.
Education in enduring truth cannot compete in a culture where the standard of evaluation is novelty. General Motors ran an advertising campaign aimed at young people a few years back with the tag line, “This is not your father's Oldsmobile.” Fair enough; our fathers' cars are inconsequential. The faith of our fathers is not.
In a culture where there is nothing worse than being yesterday's news, Christianity is hard-pressed to compete with the newest idea. To paraphrase Chesterton, most new ideas are just old errors tarted up. Costumes are always alluring, and the frivolity, superficiality, and constant distractions of the celebrity culture ensure that we do not look too closely at the error's new clothes.
The triumph of image over substance in our culture suffocates serious thought and shortens our collective attention span. The license the celebrity culture gives any famous person to hold forth on any topic whatsoever requires of us a willingness to suspend our critical judgment. Elizabeth Taylor, the poster girl for polyandry, becomes a spokeswoman for AIDS, a disease almost wholly preventable by monogamous sexual behavior. To live with such grotesquerie requires us to suspend our reason and to refrain from speaking the truth.
The surest sign that the cult of celebrity prefers to avoid reality is its near total neglect of God. He who is most real is neglected in the pursuit of objects and images that are only pale reflections and imitations. The celebrity culture wallows in every kind of sin, scandal, and crime, but is oblivious to any concept of right and wrong. The ability of so many of our cultural grandees to speak continuously of suffering, tragedy, grief, and death, with nary a mention of God, indicates a culture in full flight from reality.
Celebrity and Death
There is a strange symbiosis between the cult of celebrity and the culture of death. To treat a person as an object for use or consumption is a hallmark of the culture of death. The cult of celebrity consumes its own, and yet it cannot bear death. The death of one its standard-bearers sends it into a frenzy of confusion and denial as it is deprived of its objects of worship.
The celebrity culture fancies itself as celebrating vitality, so it can only deal with death by transforming it into something that it is not, i.e., a celebration of life. And so we hear about “legacies” and “living on” and “lessons to be learned.” Many a contemporary funeral is indistinguishable from a testimonial dinner, except that the recipient of the lifetime achievement award arrives in a box. The culture of celebrity can deliver a fine eulogy, but is inclined to forget the death.
Our culture fools itself about death because death is the great leveler that lays waste to celebrity and tabloid-reader alike, exposing the folly of living vicariously through the exalted. It is high irony that so many want to live through those who so often die young. Elton John sang a song about one beautiful young blonde who lived in the fast lane and met a violent death, and was able to re-use it for another before his copyright expired. Tragic death becomes a hit song, and the cult forgets the former and revels in the latter.
But a culture that cannot face the reality of death is unable to understand the purpose of life. It is salutary for Christians to remind the celebrity culture—and ourselves, who are not immune to its seduction—that neither riches nor fame nor beauty nor youth can delay the most important moment in life: the day of judgment. Sic transit gloria mundi.
The Gospel of Life's Appeal
The great orgy of coverage occasioned by celebrity deaths is perhaps an opportunity for evangelism. Faced with the great mystery of death, it is opportune for Christians to speak of the mystery of God. There can be no better time to proclaim the gospel of life than to the grieving who require reassurance that the loss of life is worth grieving over. The cult of celebrity has nothing to say about death, so it ignores it. At the heart of the Christian story is defeat of death and the triumph of life, and that has not only been known, but lived by Christians for two millennia.
Against the cults of our day, the Church proposes to Christians the cult of the saints. The liturgy never ceases to point to the “celebrities” of the Christian world: patriarchs, prophets, apostles, martyrs, confessors, virgins, holy men and women of all kinds. In the early period of Christianity evangelists often appealed to ancestor-worshipping pagans to channel this aspiration into proper veneration of the saints. It was a powerful example of faith illuminating culture, replacing the old corrupt cult with the new. Saints are famous to be sure, but the saints point beyond themselves to what is true and real and permanent. Celebrities obscure all that by standing in front of it all, and pointing to nothing other than themselves.
The Church finds in every culture the semina Verbi, the seeds of the Word. The celebrity culture is so toxic that those seeds find little room to grow, and yet there remains the fundamentally good desire to celebrate those who are worthy of being celebrated. It is a noble Christian service to point out those who are truly worthy, and those who are not.
Raymond de Souza is a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Kingston, Ontario.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Hippocratic Oath: Legacy of the Pro-life Patriarch DATE: 11/16/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 16-22, 1997 ----- BODY:One of the giants of the pro-life movement, Dr. Joseph Stanton of Boston, Mass., died recently. He was a graduate of Yale Medical School, a fellow of the American College of Physicians, and a clinical professor of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. He and his wife Mary had 11 children. Those who knew Dr. Stanton often referred to him as “the patriarch of the pro-life movement.”
Even before the infamous 1973 Supreme Court rulings that struck down all the anti-abortion laws in the states throughout our country, Dr. Stanton saw, and shuddered at, the prospect of physician healers being transformed into killers through growing societal pressures. He was a physician who was shaken to the very core of his professional being at the thought of fellow members of his healing profession advocating the killing of the helpless unborn and the violation of the moral and physical integrity of women in distress. It was incomprehensible to him that those trained in the healing arts would use the skills that they had gained to kill.
In 1970 “Dr. Joe” established the “Value of Life Committee” and for almost 30 years used his medical knowledge and his remarkably eloquent rhetorical skills to defend the defenseless.
I could not possibly add anything of significance to the magnificent tributes that have already been paid to this man. Even while he lived he was honored by presidents, congressmen, prelates, and, most significantly for him, the “common folk” who struggled alongside him in the pro-life trenches. I was privileged to know him personally for only one year, the last of his earthly life. He had long been a cherished friend of the Pope John Center for the Study of Ethics in Health Care, a national Catholic bioethics center based in Boston. He was an indefatigable collaborator in its work, regularly sending in articles and clippings that the Center's ethicists found invaluable in their work. As soon as I met him I was enlisted in his army. No questions asked—just put to work!
The doctor spoke often of how sick at heart he was over the moral corruption of much of the medical profession that had occurred in our century. Without a moral compass there is no medical profession, there are only those skilled in the techniques of the curative or the killing arts.
As a young man graduating from Yale Medical School he would have recited the Hippocratic Oath, swearing that he would “give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel, and in like manner … not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion.”
Dr. Stanton became convinced that the return of the Hippocratic Oath would be critical to save the medical profession from growing moral corruption. In a great collaborative effort he updated the oath and had its text copyrighted by the Value of Life Committee. It appeared formally in 1995, the same week as the Pope's monumental encyclical, Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life).
Dr. Stanton and his collaborators drew profound encouragement for their project from the Pope's words: “[Life's] deepest inspiration and strongest support lie in the intrinsic and undeniable ethical dimension of the health-care profession, something already recognized by the still relevant Hippocratic Oath, which requires every doctor to commit himself to absolute respect for human life and its sacredness. (EV 89).
Shortly before his death Dr. Stanton transferred to the Pope John Center the copyright to the Restatement of the Hippocratic Oath. He also commissioned a Benedictine monk to render the oath in beautiful handwritten calligraphy.
In September a conference against physician-assisted suicide was held in Portland, Oregon that had been organized and co-sponsored by the Pope John Center, the archdiocese, and the University of Portland. The prolifers in Oregon were struggling mightily to bring about a repeal of the referendum that had legalized physician-assisted suicide, and to do so before it could go into effect. I was also going to be addressing the Catholic Physicians Guild in Portland, and took copies of the Oath to help in the effort against physician-assisted suicide by appealing to a 2,400-year-old medical tradition against killing.
We rejoice in the witness and deeds of such a pro-life warrior as Dr. Joseph Stanton and derive comfort and encouragement knowing that he continues his tireless efforts on behalf of the unborn, the dying, the weak and the vulnerable, now through his all-the-more-efficacious prayers before his Father's throne in heaven. Requiescat in pace.
John Haas is president of the Pope John Center for the Study of Ethics in Health Care in Boston, Mass.
Copies of the Restatement of the Hippocratic Oath, suitable for framing, may be purchased through the Pope John Center, 159 Washington St., Boston, MA 02135; 617-787-1900
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: 'What I Saw that Day Shouldn't Be Allowed in this Country' DATE: 11/16/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 16-22, 1997 ----- BODY:Why ob-gyn nurse Brenda Pratt Shafer changed her mind about ‘a woman's right to choose’
Brenda Pratt Shafer stood in the delivery room as her first grandchild was born last summer, overcome with joy.
But at the baby's birth, “it all came flooding back,” she says of the haunting three days in September 1993 when she assisted at Dr. Martin Haskell's Dayton, Ohio, abortion clinic.
Pratt Shafer, 40, coos lovingly at her granddaughter, then says that “whenever the baby startles, it's that same move-ment”—arms outstretched, tiny fists and toes clenching and unclenching, the movement Pratt Shafer saw the babies make as Haskell plunged scissors into each of their skulls before their brains were extracted, so their collapsed head could be delivered through the birth canal.
She once asked a doctor if he could hypnotize her to make these horrific images disappear.
Haskell and the now-deceased Dr. James Mc-Mann pioneered the notorious procedure known as partial-birth abortion, a procedure Pratt Shafer became alltoo-familiar with. “I watched the abortions,” she says, “because he wanted me to help. He was having trouble keeping nurses.”
When the nursing agency where Pratt Shafer was registered asked her to take the job at Haskell's clinic, she was looking forward to the assignment. She agreed to work there for three days before leaving to get married. If things worked out, she thought, she would return to work there after her honeymoon.
Although she'd never seen an abortion, she “bought into all the lies about how a woman has a right to choose.”
As a single mom raising a son and two daughters, she had always told her girls if they became pregnant, she would make them get an abortion—until she worked at the abortion clinic.
“During that first day, I started seeing things,” she says, “and I thought something's not right here. I was getting mad at the women. I was supposed to be comforting them, but their attitudes—they were laughing and joking, like they were just having a fingernail clipped. Then others were very, very depressed and cried the whole time.”
“I really wanted to grab one of the little feet and say, ‘Look what you just did.’ The biggest lie that I thought myself was the babies were dead (before being aborted). I look back now and think, what would have killed them?”
She recognized the truth her second day on the job. “[Haskell] used the ultrasound during a dilation and extraction (abortion),” she says, explaining that abortion-ists use the sonogram to make certain they only pull out the baby and “not a piece of the uterus.”
Pratt Shafer saw what she thought was the baby's heartbeat on the ultrasound monitor. Stunned, she asked Haskell what she was seeing.
“He says, ‘Oh, that's the heartbeat,’” she says, adding, “You could see the baby move around while he ripped off her leg.”
The third day, she witnessed three partial-birth abortions (see sidebar).
After that, Pratt Shafer never returned to the clinic.
“When you look life and death right in the face like that, it does something to you,” she says. “I loved being an ob-gyn nurse, but to see that little baby brought out and murdered before my eyes was too much.”
Shortly thereafter, Pratt Shafer's younger daughter, now 18, and her stepdaughter, now 17, were doing a report on abortion for a school project, so Pratt Shafer stopped by the local crisis pregnancy center to get some pictures for them.
While there, she mentioned that she had worked with Haskell, and the counselors told her there was a bill in congress to outlaw the partial-birth abortion procedure she'd witnessed. With her permission, they passed her name and number to Douglas Johnson at the National Right to Life Committee in Washington, D.C.
“He asked me to come to D.C. to give some interviews, talk to senators,” says Pratt Shafer, who'd never even voted in her life. “Doug told me I was putting myself into the line of fire and to think long and hard about it.”
So she and her husband, who attend the Church of Christ in Centerville, Ohio, talked and prayed.
She knew what she had to do. She went to Washington. And she kept returning, 20 times that first year.
“I was devoted to it,” she says, not realizing what a commitment it would entail.
Initially, former Congresswoman Patricia Shroeder (D-Colo.) and her associates strove to discredit Pratt Shafer, saying she'd never worked for Haskell. Then, they said Pratt Shafer had misrepresented what she saw.
“Alot of people out there say I didn't see what I saw,” Pratt Shafer responds. “Believe me, I saw it and I've had a lot of nightmares. This is one way of healing, of trying to get over this, and teach people the truth about what really does go on. I wish I hadn't seen what I saw, in a way, because it was very terrifying. What I saw that day shouldn't be allowed in this country.”
Pratt Shafer began speaking all over the country, taking extensive time off her job as a home health nurse. Eventually, with bankruptcy looming, she and her husband realized she would have to start charging for her appearances.
She remains in great demand as the battle over partial-birth abortion heats up once again.
Oct. 8, Congress sent Clinton a bill that would make it a crime for doctors to perform the late-term abortion. Two days later, Clinton, as promised, vetoed the bill, which had passed the House with more than the two-thirds majority needed to override the veto.
Twice the Senate has passed the bill, most recently on May 20 of this year, when three more votes were needed to override the veto. The bill's chief sponsor, Rep. Charles Canady (R-Fla.), does not expect a vote to override the veto until 1998.
Pratt Shafer urges people to write their senators, thanking the ones who voted to ban the procedure and urging the others to override Clinton's veto.
“I've met almost every single senator and congressman,” she says, “and they say people never thank them for [voting for the ban]. That's important to keep their votes, because they could change their minds.”
She points out that Democratic Sens. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York initially voted to keep the procedure, but later changed their vote “because of the pressure people put on them.”
She also asks people to tell others about partial-birth abortion, “because one person can make a difference,” she says.
Spreading the awful truth about partial-birth abortion has not been easy. “Since committing to do this, it's been a spiritual warfare,” she says. In addition to a death threat and verbal attacks, she has faced the tragedy of her brother's suicide, which came the same day she learned her oldest daughter was pregnant. The young woman has since married and given birth to Pratt Shafer's first grandchild, but the experience, she says, showed her that God has a sense of humor.
“People always threw it in my face that I didn't know what I'd do if one of my daughters was pregnant,” she says. “The devil tries to knock me down, I get up, dust the seat of my pants off, and I get [going].”
God, she says, is protecting her. “My kids have told me that if something happens to me, they'll pick up the cross and carry it for me—and they would.”
To order a videotape of Pratt Shafer's story, Inches From Life, call 1-800-296-2336.
Tracy Moran is based in San Diego, Calif.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tracy Moran ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Account of a Tragedy DATE: 11/16/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 16-22, 1997 ----- BODY:Following are excerpts of Brenda Pratt Shafer's presentation to National Right to Life Committee's NRLC '96. Before witnessing three “partial-birth” abortions while working at a Dayton, Ohio, abortion facility, Pratt Shafer, a registered nurse, considered herself “pro-choice.” She is now an outspoken pro-life crusader.
Editor's note: The testimony below contains graphic descriptions of the partial-birth abortion procedure.
… This one particular lady didn't want the abortion. She had this Down syndrome baby; she was unmarried; her boyfriend didn't want the baby, and her parents didn't want the baby. She cried the whole [time] she was in there. So we did her first to get her over with. We brought her in, prepped her, started an [intravenous] of Valium to calm her down. We did not use a general anesthesia and knock her out.… We brought the ultrasound machine in and hooked it up to her stomach.…
I could see the baby. I could see the heartbeat. And the doctor wanted me to stand right beside him, because he wanted me to see everything there was about partial-birth abortion. So, I stood there. He went in guided by ultrasound. He took a pair of forceps and went in and turned the baby because it wasn't in this position at the time. He found a foot and he pulled the baby's foot down through the birth canal, bringing it down, and grabbed another foot and literally started pulling the baby out—breech position—feet first. And he kept pulling it down and I'm seeing this baby come, pulled out of the mommy, his butt, his chest, and then he delivered both these arms. And the lady's in stirrups, just like you have a baby or just like you're having an ob-gyn examination. And the baby, the only thing that was supporting the baby was the doctor was holding it in his two fingers, holding the neck in to where the head was just inside the mommy.
And the baby was kicking his feet, hanging there, moving his little fingers and his little arms. I couldn't believe—I don't know what I thought killed it (before the abortion procedure) in those three days, but he was moving, and I kept watching that baby move. And I kept thinking to myself, this isn't happening and I thought I was going to pass out. And I kept telling myself I'm a professional, I can handle this, you know, this is right, this is supposed to be, and I'm supposed to be able to handle this, I'm a nurse. He then took a pair of scissors and jammed them in the back of the baby's head. And the baby jerked out, like a static reflex, like a baby does if you throw him up a little bit and they jump. And then the baby was real rigid. He then opened up the scissors to make a hole. He took a high-powered suction machine with a catheter and stuck it in that hole and suctioned the baby's brains out. And the baby went completely limp.
And I have seen that in my mind a thousand or more times, of that baby, watching the life just drain out of it. And like I said before, I've seen babies die in my hands. I've had people die in my hands. But it wasn't anything like seeing that vision of watching it. And I almost threw up all over the floor. I was literally just breathing and saying “don't throw up, don't throw up, you're gonna be embarrassed if you do this.” So I tried not to.
He pulled the head out, he cut the umbilical cord and threw it in a pan, and delivered the placenta and threw it in the same pan, he covered it up and took it out. Well, this mommy wanted to see her baby. And the doctor told us ahead of time, he said, “Try to discourage her from seeing the baby.” He doesn't like that. But she had the right to see it. So they cleaned it up, and we cleaned her up, and we walked her out of the operating room, and took her to a room and handed her baby.
… She held that baby in her arms and she screamed and prayed to God … to forgive her, and for that baby to forgive her, and she held it and rocked it, and told him that she loved him. And I looked in that baby's face, and he had the most perfect, angelic face I've ever seen, and I just kept thinking he's an angel now, he's in heaven. And I couldn't take it. In all the years I've been a nurse, I lost it. And I pardoned myself and excused myself and I ran to the bathroom and I cried and I prayed.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: A Season of Celebration DATE: 11/16/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 16-22, 1997 ----- BODY:THERE IS SOMETHING irresistible about Christmas. It is a holiday that unites and celebrates disparate cultures in a unique way. The birth of Christ brings an epiphany, we are all united as the children of God. This year, the Register previews many of the cultural events taking place around the country, on stage and on television, to mark this special season of joy. (Be sure to check specific program information against local listings.)
The Nutcracker
It is called “America's favorite Christmas fantasy.” Indeed, there is no more popular holiday performance than The Nutcracker. To the great George Balanchine this “is a ballet about Christmas … for children and for adults who are children at heart.”
The story is taken from the classic E.T.A. Hoffman tale in which the young Marie Stahlbaum is given a nutcracker doll on Christmas eve by her mysterious godfather, Herr Drosselmeier. That night, Marie finds herself in a strange world governed by Drosselmeier. As toys, furniture, and the Christmas tree mysteriously grow, mice creep out of the shadows to haunt her.
At Marie's bidding, the nutcracker, who has been transformed into a live soldier, battles the mice and conquers the Mouse King, a creature with seven heads.
After Marie helps the nutcracker defeat the mice, she faints and the nutcracker takes her to a snowy forest. Marie and the prince, guided by a brilliant star, are brought to the Land of Sweets, where an enchanting spectacle awaits them.
Certainly there is a great mythical dimension to The Nutcracker. Indeed some find biblical allusions as well. For Balanchine it is a “serious thing wrapped in a fairy tale.”
The work was the result of a collaboration between Maries Petipa, the French-born choreographer and architect of Russian ballet, and the great composer Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky.
It was originally presented by the Russian Imperial Ballet at the Maryinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. Incredibly that Dec. 17, 1892 performance was panned by critics, but young George Balanchine, who was cast as the Nutcracker Prince at 15, thought differently. To Balanchine, The Nutcracker was Tchaikovsky's masterpiece.
Many years later, when Balanchine had become known as the world's master of classical ballet, The Nutcracker was the first full-length work he choreographed for the New York City Ballet.
The Nutcracker premiered in New York Feb. 2, 1954 as the most lavish production ever staged by the Ballet. The production became even more elaborate in 1964, when the company moved to its grander and more technically-sophisticated quarters at the new Lincoln Center.
Some of the production's statistics are staggering. The famed Christmas tree weighs more than one-ton and grows from a height of 12 feet to 40 feet. It requires dozens of bushels of paper-confetti to create the on-stage snow storm. From the host of incredible costumes, the most elaborate is Mother Ginger's, which is nine feet wide, weighs almost 85 pounds and requires three handlers to lower it by a pulley over the dancer's head. The grand finale uses more light than any other New York City Ballet production to date, close to a quarter-million watts.
In the early days, the New York City Ballet went on tour to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and Washington D.C. Today more than 200 communities across the country are performing their own production of The Nutcracker each season.
Handel's Messiah
Certainly there is no grander Choral music for Christmas than George Frideric Handel's Messiah. After hearing this baroque oratorio, you may find it impossible to read a verse like Isaiah 9, 6 and not be swept up by Handel's melodic exuberance: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.”
Handel composed the entire score in an inspired frenzy, completing it in just a few weeks. Yet, despite its venerable age and hasty composition, it possesses a timeless and unparalleled power.
The Messiah made its premiere in Dublin in 1724. Yet various arias went through constant transformations as Handel sought to accommodate them to the talents of available singers. By 1750 The Messiah became an annual feature on the London musical scene. Today we have Martin Josman of the National Choral Council to thank for helping to popularize The Messiah sing-ins.
The Germanic Handel picked up the Romanesque style oratorio during his years in Italy. He brought the form to its zenith with The Messiah and gave the oratorio cachet for all of Europe.
The baroque style was often identified with the Catholic counter-reformation and was soon to be criticized by the more puritanical segments as “distorted by a profusion of unnatural ornamentation.”
Yet the Protestant aristocracy loved it. In fact, King George I of England became Handel's major patron. For the aristocracy, Handel composed regal music to accompany river cruises and private fireworks.
While much of his music evokes the private grandeur of courtly excess, today the popular Messiah sing-in has become a strangely egalitarian event. The opera stars may take the solo arias, but the chorus belongs to the audience. Some come with their own scores, others purchase them at the door. Some community choirs buy blocks of seats, others are filled by the Brooklyn cabby with the booming baritone or the shy librarian who only sings in the shower. But all come, ready for the thrill of “letting it loose” on The Messiah with a full symphony.
In The Messiah, we come before the Lord with one voice. It is easy to accept the secularist dogma that faith should be a private affair. We can forget that we are required to make a public proclamation of that faith. Who would have thought that Symphony Hall could be such a place. The Messiah proves that our prayers need not always be private and silent.
If you want to share in the glory, put down that digitally-enhanced, Dolby surround-sound walkman and be a part of some real surround-sound at a Messiah sing-in. Share the joy of Christ's birth at Symphony Hall.
Other productions
Another seasonal favorite is the performance of the Christmas Oratorios of Johann Sebastian Bach. Although they were originally written as a Christmas gift for the Saxon royal family in 1773, these festive cantatas were given to the people of Leipzig the following season in six sections performed between Christmas Day and the Epiphany. This season they can again be heard from Boston to San Francisco.
Many cities are offering far more than just a traditional classical repertoire. Some of the wonderfully eclectic programs include The Black Nativity (Langston Hughes). Cleveland's Jelliffe Theatre combines this presentation of electrifying gospel music with stunning modern dance.
Certainly one is hard pressed to find a more joyful celebration than Fiesta in Mexico-Feliz Navidad in Los Angeles. Through a rich tapestry of song, color, and dance, the Ballet Folklorico del Pacifico explores the rich origins and significance of Mexico's Christmas traditions.
The Rockettes'Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall is one of the most surprising holiday traditions. We all expected the Rockettes' precision high-stepping as toy soldiers, but many are pleasantly surprised to find a very dramatic and indeed, spectacular, nativity scene, appointed with palm trees, live camels, and a flock of real sheep!
Here is a sampling of Christmas programs from cities around the country:
The Sounds of Christmas Coast to Coast
Festival of Nine Lessons & Carols Glenn Memorial Auditorium Atlanta, Ga. Dec. 5
U.S. Air Force Band Christmas Concert Meyerhoff Symphony Hall Baltimore, Md. Dec. 2
Festival Chorus Boston Conservatory Boston, Mass. Dec. 10 (free admission)
Christmas Oratorio (Bach) Boston Conservatory Boston, Mass. Dec. 18, 21
A Procession of Carols Old South Church Boston, Mass. Dec. 19
Christmas Concerto (Bach) Symphony Orchestra Symphony Hall, Detroit, Mich., Dec. 4
Christmas Oratorio (Bach), New England Conservatory Jordan Hall, Boston, Mass, Dec. 18
Vienna Boys Choir, New England Conservatory-Jordan Hall, Boston, Mass., Dec. 13
A Medieval Christmas Celebration, The Newberry Library, Chicago, Ill., Dec. 10
Legends of St. Nicholas, Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, Ill., Dec. 12
An Old World Christmas, Immanuel Lutheran Church, Evanston, Chicago, Ill, Dec. 13
Holiday Brass & Choral (baroque), St. Michael's Church Old Town, Chicago, Ill., Dec. 19
Black Nativity-Langston Hughes, Jelliffe Theatre, Cleveland, Ohio, Nov. 28-Jan. 4
Holiday Rainbow Brass Quartet, Severance's Reinberger Chamber Hall, Cleveland, Ohio, Dec. 6
Pops Concert 3: Christmas Pops, Detroit Symphony Hall, Detroit, Mich., Dec. 11–14
Home For The Holidays, Jones Hall for the Performing Arts, Houston, Teaxs, Dec. 11–14
Feliz Navidad-Ballet Folklorico, Luckman Fine Arts Complex, Los Angeles, Calif., Dec. 13–14
Bobby Rodriguez Latin Jazz Christmas, Luckman Fine Arts Complex, Los Angeles, Calif., Dec. 21
Home For The Holidays, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles, Calif., Dec. 14
Holiday Favorites- Moore By Four, Minnesota Orchestra Hall, Minneapolis, Minn., Dec. 5
Christmas at Doc's (Severinsen), Minnesota Orchestra Hall, Minneapolis, Minn., Dec. 19
Elijah (Mendelssohn), New York Philharmonic, New York City, Dec. 4, 6, 9
The Colors of Christmas, Carnegie Hall, New York City, Dec. 2
New York Pops with the Boys Choir of Harlem, Carnegie Hall, New York City, Dec. 5–6
New York String Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, New York City, Dec. 24
P.D.Q. Bach with Professor Peter Schickele, Carnegie Hall, New York City, Dec. 27 & 29
Vienna Boys Choir Carnegie Hall, New York City, Dec. 14 Holidays with the Boys Choir of Harlem, Avery Fisher Hall, New York City, Dec. 20
Holiday Brass, Avery Fisher Hall, New York City, Dec. 27 Rockefeller Christmas Spectacular, Radio City Music Hall, New York City Nov. 6- Jan. 24
Cathedral Choir and Harp & String Quintet, St. Patrick's Cathedral, Our Lady's Chapel, New York City, Dec. 11
Echo-Flute and Guitar, St. Patrick's Cathedral, Our Lady's Chapel, New York City, Dec. 11
City Singing at Christmas (Choral), St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York City, Dec. 18
The Tallis Scholars (Bach Festival), Church of the Holy Trinity, Philadelphia, Pa., Dec. 7
Mechem: Seven Joys of Christmas, First Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, Pa., Dec. 5 & 7
Christmas Concert, Philadelphia Orchestra Academy of Music, Philadelphia, Pa., Dec. 7–8
AFeast of Carols: Mendelssohn Club, Church of Holy Trinity, Philadelphia, Pa., Dec. 13–14
A Colonial Holiday, Church of the Holy Trinity, Philadelphia, Pa., Dec. 19
Puer Natus Est: Piffaro, St. Paul's Episcopal Church Philadelphia, Pa., Dec. 19–21
Christmas on Logan Square, St. Clement's Church, Philadelphia, Pa., Dec. 20
The Other Christmas (Rincon Dance), City College Theater, San Diego, Calif., Dec. 18–21
Deck the Hall (Children), Davis Symphony Hall, San Francisco, Calif., Dec. 6
Brass and Organ Christmas, Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, Calif., Dec. 7
Christmas at Grace Cathedral, Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, Calif., Dec. 13–21
Christmas Cantatas (Bach), First Congregational Church, San Francisco, Calif., Dec. 5
The Gift of the Magi:, San Francisco Conservatory, Hellman Hall, San Francisco, Calif., Dec. 7
Candlelight Christmas, San Francisco Symphony, Davis Hall, San Francisco, Calif., Dec. 7
AChanticleer Christmas, Chanticleer, St. Ignatius Church, San Francisco, Calif., Dec. 13
Colors of Christmas, San Francisco Symphony, Davis Hall, San Francisco, Calif., Dec. 16–18
Christmas Pipe Dreams, San Francisco Symphony, Davis Hall, San Francisco, Calif., Dec. 20
Vienna Boys Choir, First Presbyterian Church, Seattle, Wash., Dec. 9
Christmas Concert (Jazz), Georgetown Univ. Performing Arts, Washington, D.C., Dec. 5
Christmas Revels George Washington Univ. Lisner Auditorium, Washington, D.C., Dec. 6
Christmas Oratorio (Bach), City Christian Church, Washington, D.C., Dec. 7
The Joy of Christmas, National Cathedral, Washington, D.C., Dec. 13–14
Choral Arts Society of Washington, Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C., Dec. 14–21
Ballet
Although Tchaikovsky's score to The Nutcracker is 105 years old, its sweeping melodies and lavish stagings offer children a very accessible introduction to classical music and dance. This season, you can once again be enchanted by Marie's fantastic adventure with the Nutcracker prince in almost every major city in the country.
If you find that the ticket prices would deplete your “stocking-stuffer” account, you may want to check out the video. The New York City Ballet version, with George Balanchine's famed choreography, features Macaulay Culkin and narration by Kevin Kline.
A Christmas Carol
Many regional theaters are looking to classic tales for popular new holiday adaptations. Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol seems to be a favorite across the country. New York City's production has become so huge that it has to be performed in the cavernous Madison Square Garden. Its 350 feet of Victorian scenery, which surround the audience, is the largest set ever mounted in the city. This year, Hal Linden and Roddy McDowell will alternate playing Ebenezer Scrooge.
Of course, many cinematic versions are lining your video store shelves and will be rebroadcast on the small screen throughout the season. My favorite is still the1938 black and white version from MGM with Reginald Owen and Gene Lockhart.
Regional Theater & Film
This Year, companies like Cleveland's Bolton Theatre and San Diego's Frizt Theatre are offering musical renditions of the cinematic classic It's a Wonderful Life. It is curious that the film It's a Wonderful Life (RKO 1946) wasn't more of a box office success when it was first released. It has in the past two decades, however, become one of the most beloved and most watched films ever made.
It is here that director-screenwriter Frank Cappra's Catholic sensibilities of grace, redemption, and the dynamic presence of the spiritual world are most fully realized. As our world loses a sense of direction, the desperate figure of George Bailey looms all the more poignant and his redemption all the more inspiring.
The full schedule slated for both the regional companies indicates their confidence that they can translate these elements onto the musical stage. Of course, the film version, with Jimmy Stewart, Donna Reed, and Lionel Barrymore, can be found in virtually every self-respecting video store.
In Chicago, The Christmas Schooner is quickly becoming something of a holiday tradition. This musical tells the true story of the sailors who brought the Tannenbaum across the icy waters of Lake Michigan to 19th-century Chicago.
Other typical regional theater offerings include productions in Cleveland and Boston of A Child's Christmas in Wales, which is based on the classic by Dylan Thomas and offers a nostalgic look at Christmas through a child's eyes, and The Skinflint which is a musical comedy adaptation of Moliere's play, The Miser and is making its world premiere in St. Louis.
A Joyful Noise from PBS
Luckily some of the best Christmas cheer is quite close to your own hearth. PBS has the cultural lion's share on TV these days. Here they are:
The majestic Washington (D.C.) National Cathedral is the sight for Denyce Graves-A Cathedral Christmas. The acclaimed mezzo-soprano will be joined by the 100 voice Cathedral Choral Society, The Cathedral Boys Choir and the Cathedral Festival Orchestra. The special will feature traditional music like the Ave Maria as well as contemporary carols like Christmas Once More.
For more of a down-home feel, catch A Nitty Gritty Christmas with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. In the past 30 years the group has become one of America's best-loved acoustic pop bands. Guests include three-time country music female vocalist award-winner Kathy Mattea, folk diva Nanci Griffith and the angelic-voiced Aaron Neville. Country-jazz violinist Vassar Clements and John McEuen also join the circle of friends.
Acelebration of Ireland's cultural and religious heritage can be enjoyed on Faith of Our Fathers. Recorded at the Point Theatre in Dublin, this special features the Irish Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus, tenor Frank Patterson, soprano Regina Nathan, the voices of the Monks of Glenstal Abby and two exciting young singers, Iarla ÓLionáird and RÓs Ní Dhubháin. The anthems chosen represent the gems of religious music heard in Ireland over many generations.
Dublin's Point Theatre is the sight of yet another Christmas special, Perry Como's Irish Christmas. Special guests include the popular Irish singer “Twink”; Ireland's most famous marching band, the Artane Boys Band; the Chorus of the Glasnevin Musical Society; the boys of the Palestrina Choir; and the RTE Concert Orchestra.
In André Rieu: The Christmas I Love, the famed Dutch conductor and violinist combines holiday storytelling with his own music. Moving from a cozy log-cabin setting to a concert hall with the Johann Stauss Orchestra, Rieu plays holiday favorites including Ave Maria, White Christmas, Sleighride, and Silent Night.
Best-selling author of Care of the Soul and Soulmates returns to PBS in The Soul of Christmas: ACeltic Music Celebration with Thomas Moore. He is joined by Johnny Cunningham and his Celtic Ensemble, country favorite Kathy Mattea and actor Martin Sheen. Moore conceived the special to help viewers redis-cover the heart and soul of the holiday that he describes as “an ancient mystery that evokes an enchanting and haunting truth about the nature of things.”
Classical and gospel audiences join conductor Harvey Feider in Atlanta Symphony Gospel Christmas. The Grammy award-winning Orchestra performs with the 225-voice All-Atlanta Chorus and the Pointer Sisters to create a rafters-rattling toe-tapping night of gospel.
Immediately following, you can catch Carols from Atlanta: The 70th Anniversary Morehouse-Spelman Christmas Carol Concert. Classic carols, spirituals and African folk hymns highlight this one-hour concert special featuring the combined glee clubs of Atlanta's Morehouse College and Spelmen College. This annual event has been a high point of Atlanta's holiday season since 1926.
Cincinnati Pops Holiday with Erich Kunzel and Mel Tormé features an exuberant mix of traditional carols, popular favorites, children's voices, and dancing. Also featured are Indiana University's 120-member Singing Hoosiers Choir and the Children's chorus of the Cincinnati School for the Creative and Performing Arts.
In Christmas at St. Olaf, the world renowned choir of Minnesota's St. Olaf College raise 450 voices with the 100 member orchestra to bring you familiar Yuletide carols and Scandinavian songs sung in their original language. The annual St. Olaf Christmas Festival dates back to 1903 and was named by TheNew York Times“one of the top-10 Christmas events in the United States not to be missed.”
Conductor Dr. Nathan Carter will present Carols from Atlanta: The Morgan Choir: ASilver Celebration. This inspiring program, which has received three regional Emmy awards, offers a diverse musical selection including the choral movement Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Ezekiel Saw De Wheel, and more contemporary hymns, including The Lord Be Praised and Precious Lord.
Ringing in more Christmas cheer on New Year's Eve, PBS offers An Ode to Joy: The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. Zdenek Macal conducts Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Opus 125, Choral, featuring renowned soloists Gabriela Benackova, soprano; Marietta Simpson, mezzo-soprano; Gary Lakes, tenor; Paul Plishka, bass; and the Westminster Symphonic Choir.
If you miss the Vienna Boys Choir on their U.S. tour this season, you can catch them in their 500th anniversary season from their home town in Great Performances From Vienna: the New Year's Concert 1998. Zubin Mehta will conduct the Vienna Philharmonic in the majestic Musikverein Hall performing a selection of beloved Strauss waltzes.
Treasures on the Small Screen
On ABC LeAnn Rimes will star in the drama Holiday in Your Heart. CBS offers The Christmas Box, which is based upon the novel by Richard Paul Evans about a young woman's struggle during one holiday season to regain her father's affection. NBC presents Christmas in Washington, a family variety special to enjoy with the nation's first family.
Unfortunately, the networks seem to be cutting back on much of their Christmas programming. While CBS still holds onto the more secular children's animated specials like Frosty the Snowman, the buzz is that the more spiritual classics like The Grinch that Stole Christmas or the more overtly religious specials like The Little Drummer Boy have seen their last days on the major networks.
These classics can, however, be found in an increasing number of video-stores nationwide. Perhaps these gems are best enjoyed without commercial bombardment anyway. Happily, Charlie Brown will still be directing his nativity pageant on CBS this season.
Your video stores can also provide some surprising holiday treasures like the charming, yet rarely seen, animated classic Madeline's Christmas. This is Ludwig Bemelman's tale of a young girl's holiday adventure in a Parisian convent school.
CCC of America produces some wonderfully entertaining animated specials for kids on the lives of the saints, including Nicholas, the Boy who Became Santa. It is a charming story told in a Christ-centered context. You can't find it in the video stores, however. You have to order directly at 1-800-506-6333. They are now offering a Christmas special for $9.99.
In New York City, the hottest tickets in town are to midnight Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral, which are gone months in advance. But you don't need a ticket to join Pope John Paul II beneath Michelangelo's vaulting dome for midnight Mass from Vatican City. Each year NBC broadcasts the Mass late on Christmas Eve. One senses the awesome universality of the Church when all the countries of the world who receive this broadcast are listed. The Mass is the world's most widely broadcast event.
Also be sure to check out EWTN listings, as Mother Angelica's network promises to offer an abundance of fine Christmas programs.
Christmas on the Networks
Christmas Miracle, ABC Special, ABC, Dec. (TBA, check local listings)
A Charlie Brown Christmas, CBS Special, CBS Dec. 3, 8:00 p.m.
Holiday in Your Heart, ABC Sunday Night Movie, ABC Dec. 14, 9:00 p.m. EST
Christmas in Washington, NBC Special, NBC, Dec. 19, 10:00 p.m. EST
The Christmas Box, CBS TV movie, CBS, Dec. 25, 9:00 p.m.
Midnight Mass,, St. Peter's Basilica, NBC, Dec. 24 (TBA, check local listings)
Stephen Hopkins is based in New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Stephen Hopkins ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Catechism with Lights, Bells, and Whistles DATE: 11/16/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 16-22, 1997 ----- BODY:Divinity Religious Product's computer games make learning the Catholic faith fun
CATHOLIC LEADERS around the world have taken steps in recent years to ensure that a healthy Church ushers in the coming celebration of 2,000 years of Christianity. In 1992, Pope John Paul II released the first universal Catechism in more than 400 years and throughout his pontificate has called for a re-catechizing of Catholics everywhere. The U.S. bishops, for their part, have stressed the importance of finding new ways to engage youth and young adults with the age-old truths of the Catholic faith.
As the Pope and the bishops lay the groundwork, Divinity Religious Products, a small, like-minded company in Southern California, is working hard to make those goals a reality. The company's approach to the challenges mirrors the basic philosophy shared by almost all effective educators: It's crucial to make the material to be learned enjoyable.
Divinity has done just that in the games it has created based on the Catechism and on the Bible. The six-year-old company has also taken the extra step of submitting its products for ecclesiastical review and all have received the Church's imprimatur (let it be printed) and nihil obstat, indicating its freedom from doctrinal or moral error.
“We've taken material from the new Catechism and The New American Bible and made it more reachable and more fun to learn for lay people ages seven and up,” says Michael McKay, a theologian and vice-president of Divinity. “We're helping to build people's religious vocabularies.”
The company has produced two popular board games—the Catholic Family Bible Game and Divinity, the Catholic Catechism Learning System— and the Catholic Quiz series of question and answer flip books for grades one through nine.
It's Divinity's latest game, however, Catholic Challenge, that is attracting the most attention and stands to revolutionize the way people reinforce knowledge of their faith. Catholic Challenge marries questions drawn from the Catechism and Scripture with the latest advances in multi-media to create an exciting game for play on computers.
“It's our answer to the fast-paced video culture,” says McKay. “People are coming to depend on their Macs and PCs for everything from surfing the Web to information on balancing their checkbooks. Now they'll have the chance to use computers to increase knowledge of their faith in an entertaining way.”
Catholic Challenge brings the Catechism to life on the computer screen. Like the four sections of the 800-page document, questions for the game fall into four areas—Believe, Celebrate, Live, and Pray. Bold graphics, a ticking timer, cheers and jeers from a phantom audience, and other effects give it the multi-media feel computer games depend on to engage demanding audiences in the '90s. Game settings can easily be customized, allowing kids to compete against adults and novices against theologians.
“The colors, the tumbling dice, the bells and whistles, all make it really fun to play,” says Darren Hogan.
A 27-year-old New Haven, Conn. area fund-raiser, Hogan says he's not a game player by nature but has nonetheless become a Catholic Challenge aficionado.
“I usually prefer to read or take a walk, but I'm interested in my faith and this is a way to test what you know and to learn more. The game is fast and informative and you have to concentrate if you don't want to get tripped up on the really tricky questions.”
Hogan sees Catholic Challenge not only as a good game, but as a useful tool to further the new evangelization that Pope John Paul II has urged to prepare for the coming Jubilee year of Christianity.
“If you have people over, it's a lot more comfortable to play a game than to just start talking about your faith,” he says. “Besides, it's less intimidating for everybody when you have the questions being posed by a computer.”
And Catholic Challenge really does seem to get friends and families who play examining and talking about their faith.
“I thought the game was a good idea,” says Fritz Heinzen, a 40-year-old father of three, “but when I heard that it was supposed to promote discussion, I was a little skeptical. When you land on a square that presents you with a moral dilemma, before you know it you're talking about these profound ideas in the middle of the game.”
The Heinzens, who are big game players according to Fritz, sometimes play as often as three times a week. But Fritz likes the fact that his eight-year-old daughter, Katie, often plays on her own.
“Any kid who owns a computer can play this game” he says, adding that he's often surprised to see how much his oldest daughter, who attends Holy Spirit School in northern Virginia, knows.
“The game reinforces what she's already learned and prepares her for what she's going to learn,” he says.
By the time Katie hits fifth grade, the second grader might just get a chance to show her chops in competition. In conjunction with William H. Sadlier, Inc., a leader in the Catholic education business for 465 years, Divinity recently launched a “Religion Bee,” based on questions from Catholic Challenge and the Catholic Quiz series.
The pilot contest, held this spring in Orange, Calif., included nearly 400 fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth-graders from across the diocese.
“It was a great teaching moment to have students take the study booklets home to prepare with their parents,” said Ruth Bradley, director of the diocesan Office for Religious Education. “It was an opportunity to get them talking about their faith.”
In a “Family Feud” style contest, four-person teams in two age groups—a fifth-sixth grade team from Serra School and a seventh-eighth grade team from San Francisco Solano Parish, both in Rancho Santa Margarita, Ca.— won top honors and passes to nearby Disneyland for their efforts. Now, with the success of that first “Religion Bee,” Divinity and Sadlier are working with other dioceses to put on contests in the coming school year.
“We plan to take it national and then international,” says Divinity CEO Lee Leichtag, who already has made inroads with the company's games in Mexico and Italy.
“Imagine it—an international ‘Religion Bee.’” Leichtag has the air of a dreamer when speaking of the company's future plans. But the 76-year-old self-made millionaire also has the resources and acumen to pull it off.
Though not particularly religious, Leichtag, who was born Jewish, was driven by the belief that the answer to society's many problems—drug abuse, teen pregnancy, violent crime, etc.—just might be found in religion.
“My dream was to do something for kids and parents, to bring families closer together,” he says. “And what better way than to get them to sit down together and deal with moral questions that prepare you to do good in the world. I hope and believe these games can help do that.”
Leichtag knows the games aren't a cure-all for society's woes. Neither are they a one-stop solution to religious education.
“Faith is obviously more than a cognitive experience and facts are just one part of it,” says the Diocese of Orange's Bradley. “But Catholic Challenge reinforces knowledge of the facts and can bring families together in their faith development.”
It's just that element that led Sadlier, probably the best known supplier of Catholic textbooks and other religious goods, to team-up with Divinity.
“Our products always have a family component and their games are so well done that they're generating excitement and interest everywhere our reps take them across the country,” says Sister Christine Kresho CSJ, Sadlier's director of marketing.
Catholic Challenge is the kind of product that sells itself, she says. “At conventions and conferences where we've shown it, people sit down to play and they don't want to leave until they can purchase it,” she adds.
Later this year Divinity plans to release a second computer game, this one based strictly on the Bible. But getting their games out to the Catholic community at large is the greatest challenge now facing the company.
“As good as our products might be, there's no established retail system,” says Leichtag. “There are no footprints, but we're ready to be pioneers.”
Whatever it takes, Leichtag says, he's ready to go the distance.
Stephen Lorenz is based in New Haven, Conn.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Stephen Lorenz ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: 'And on This Rock' DATE: 11/16/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 16-22, 1997 ----- BODY:Two books that cover just about everything you want to know about the papacy
TWO BOOKS about the papacy have appeared recently that theologians, catechists, and apologists should have on their shelves. The first is Father J. Michael Miller's The Shepherd and the Rock: Origins, Development and Mission of the Papacy, published by Our Sunday Visitor.
Father Miller's work is a virtual contemporary summa on the Petrine office. It covers the biblical roots of the papacy, the historical development of the Petrine ministry, a systematic exposition of the theology of the papal office, and an overview of administrative aspects of the papacy, such as the Roman curia, papal elections, and papal politics.
Though a faithful priest of the Church, Father Miller is no fundamentalist or ultramontanist. He intelligently grapples with contemporary issues of papal authority, collegiality, and curial reform. He doesn't regard the papacy as a divine monarchy, with other bishops mere agents of the Pope, but he does firmly uphold the hierarchical nature of the Church, as outlined in Vatican II's dogmatic constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium.
An acute problem among Catholics today, with our heightened sense of democracy and collegiality, is the relationship between the papacy and “particular Churches” (dioceses). Often the papal office is regarded by critics as at best a mere external link uniting the various dioceses into a universal federation of sorts. Yet as the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith's document, Some Aspects of the Church Understood as Communion, makes clear, the papacy is not extrinsic to the essence of the particular Church or in opposition to its legitimate autonomy. Rather, the papacy is a basic element of it. Father Miller makes this same point:
“The universal Church is embodied in particular Churches which are united to one another by bonds of communion. Because of the mutual interiority of the local Church and the universal Church, the ministry of Peter entrusted to the bishop of Rome touches the life of particular Churches as an office interior to them. It is present and active in the local Churches from within. Thus, only those Churches which accept this ministry are in full communion with one another in the Catholic Church. Communion with the successor is a constitutive element of every particular Church in the koinonia. When this relationship is missing in a local Church, even if the episcopacy and Eucharist are present, the bonds of communion with the whole Church are necessarily imperfect.”
The papacy, then, is no mere “also ran.” It is part of the very structure which Christ willed his Church to have. Indeed, the papal office is essential to the unity of the Church; it is “the visible center of the communion of the Churches and the steward of their unity,” as Father Miller writes.
Protestant, Orthodox, and dissident Catholic critics sometimes posit a tension, if not an outright opposition, between the papal office and Christ himself, as head of the Church. In reality, it is precisely by his close identification with Jesus that the Pope is “Vicar of Christ.” This title is not meant to suggest that the Pope “takes the place of Christ” in the sense of taking from Christ what rightly belongs only to him. Rather, the Pope is the “Vicar of Christ” as an icon of Christ to the whole Church and to the world. The papacy has, to use an expression from Pope Paul VI, an almost sacramental function of being the means by which Christ the great shepherd pastors the whole Church. This, then, is not a mere personal exaltation of a man. Father Miller writes:
“The Pope, of course, is not a replacement for an otherwise absent Christ. Like all the baptized, he represents Christ to the world. He does so according to the particular mission he has received as chief shepherd of the universal Church. Far from being a title of pretension, the designation ‘vicar of Christ’ makes great demands on the Pope to bring Christ's presence to others.”
Father Miller's superb overview of the papacy painstakingly demonstrates the divine origins of papal office, its Spirit-guided development throughout Church history, and its contemporary structure and ministry to the unity and fidelity of the universal Church today.
The second “must have” work on the papacy is Jesus, Peter and the Keys: A Scriptural Handbook on the Papacy (Queenship Publishing Company), by Scott Butler, Norman Dahlgren, and David Hess. This book is a compilation of arguments and texts supporting Catholic teaching on the papacy. The first half covers the biblical case for the papacy; the second the historical argument for the same.
Jesus, Peter and the Keys tackles both traditional Protestant and Orthodox objections to the papal office. For example, it is often claimed by Protestant and Orthodox scholars that the “rock” referred to by Christ in the famous Petrine passage of Matthew 16, 18-19 is not Peter, as the Catholic Church has held. The argument centers on the transition, in the original Greek text, from petros and petra. Jesus said to Peter, “You are petros [Peter, rock] and upon this petra [rock] I will build my Church.”
The claim is that because of the slight variation between petros and petra, we must conclude that Christ referred to two entirely different things here: on the one hand, to Peter or Petros, on the other to the rock or petra on which the Church will be built. The former is a masculine word; the latter a feminine one. The rock or petra on which the Church is built has been variously interpreted by Protestant and Orthodox scholars as Peter's faith, his act of professing his faith or Christ himself.
Recently, ecumenical dialogue has lead to greater objectivity by some exegetes regarding Matthew 16, 18. The authors of Jesus, Peter and the Keys cite numerous renowned Protestant and Orthodox scholars who acknowledge that the difference between petra and petros is merely one of gender: an otherwise feminine noun, petra (rock) is changed to a masculine form, petros, when it becomes a name for a man, Peter. The play on words is retained in the Aramaic form of kepha (rock), which is probably the language in which Christ originally uttered the words, and which is where we get the name Cephas (a transliterated form of the Aramaic kepha) for Peter.
The bottom-line: many prominent Protestant and Orthodox scholars agree that, contrary to what some anti-Catholics claim, Peter is the rock upon which Christ promised to build his Church. Of course, these scholars don't draw from this that the Pope is the successor of Peter and the vicar of Christ. They reject the papal office on other grounds. Even so, by demonstrating how even non-Catholic Christian scholars agree about Peter's identity as the rock in Matthew 16, 18, Jesus, Peter and the Keys, contributes to the on-going discussion.
The historical section of the book is also potent. The claim is often made that there is scant evidence for the papacy in the early Christian centuries or that the Fathers of the Church, while granting a certain preeminence of honor for the bishop of Rome, denied he exercised any divinely bestowed universal authority in the Church. Even a curious reading of Jesus, Peter and the Keys refutes these claims. The book shows how (1) the early popes claimed a universal authority and (2) how the early Church Fathers recognized this claim. And all of this by direct quotes from the relevant primary sources.
Avaluable element of the book's layout is the list of 234 important questions about the papacy that the authors pose, the answers to which are marked off in the text by number. In that respect, the book resembles a sort of scholarly catechism on the papal office.
The book's only major drawback is with so much material being presented, the reader may hardly know where to begin. A bit more synthesis and summarization would have been helpful. In any event, anyone who claims there is scant or no evidence for the papacy in the Bible or the early centuries of the Church has not read and considered the mass of evidence compiled in this volume.
Mark Brumley is managing editor of The Catholic Faith magazine.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mark Brumley ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: A Soul Man's Guide To Living Well DATE: 11/16/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 16-22, 1997 ----- BODY:Thomas Moore offers advice for enriching life: some of it good, some loopy
THE RE-ENCHANTMENT of Everyday Life, by Thomas Moore, falls roughly into the category: “spirituality for self-improvement.” It is third in a trilogy that began with his very successful Care of The Soul (1992), followed by Soul Mates.
In the bookstore Moore's works are found in the pop-psychology section, and though, no doubt, much could be said about his innovative approach and contributions to the self-help genre, it is his attempt to re-introduce and re-vitalize the concept of “soul” that gives his work broader implications for the religion-minded.
To put Moore's notions of “soul” in proper context, we probably have to go back to the 17th century and the philosopher Rene Descartes, who introduced a belief in the separation of mind and body as distinct metaphysical substances, thus overturning the classical Aristotelian-Thomistic view of the soul as the form of the body, where “form” and “matter” were considered as two complementary aspects of one thing.
Descartes' separation, however innocuous it appeared at first, in the course of several centuries of development has grown to an almost unbridgeable chasm, with “mind” on one side creating a radically subjective empire for itself, while “body” on the other is diminished to the slave-status of occupied territory.
“Ideas have consequences,” and Descartes' idea is at root responsible for many of the unhealthy strains—call them “neuroses”—now afflicting the Western mind. (See John Paul II's comments on Descartes in Crossing the Threshold of Hope.) Cut to the present and enter the psycho-professionals, Thomas Moore being one of them, whose study and practice are directly concerned with the unhealthy side of the Western psyche.
At some point an insightful few of them must have realized that mind-body dualism was one major cause of people's psychological problems, but how to go about correcting it? For to use the psychoanalytical tools forged in the tradition of Descartes would amount to asking people to try to think their way out of problems caused by their way of thinking.
The impasse could only be breached by first getting around Descartes, which Thomas Moore has done by looking back even further than the 17th century, back to the 15th century, to the Italian Renaissance and the concept of “soul” expounded in the various writings of Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), who, if I may be forgiven for stating the obvious, was truly a Renaissance man.
Of course, to get around Descartes, Moore could have looked back even further, to the scholastics of the Middle Ages, but there he would have found a concept of soul very precisely defined and integrated into a highly-developed system of dogma and morality, i.e., religion. Reading The Re-Enchantment of Daily Life, one sees that Moore is much more comfortable with the Renaissance, whose humanism embraced the imaginative paganism of classical Greece and whose pre-scientific curiosity brought magic up a notch to alchemy, both of which Moore endorses and both of which have marketing appeal to New Age audiences.
“‘Soul’ is not a thing, but a quality or dimension of experiencing life and ourselves. It has to do with depth, value, relatedness, heart, and personal substance. I do not use the word here as an object of religious belief or as something to do with immortality” (Care of the Soul).
Moore's concept of “soul” comes across better when using the adjective “soulful” as applied to music or poetry. Where his second book, Soul Mates, examined soul in human relationships, his third book, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, attempts to bring it into the realm of culture.
Thomas Moore was raised Catholic and lived in a monastic religious order for 12 years; he now is married and has two children. He has degrees in theology, musicology, philosophy, and has taught religion and psychology, as well as having worked as a psycho-therapist. His prescriptions for bringing soul into daily life, which, again, may be seen as ways of re-integrating mind and body to overcome Cartesian dualism, start with an appreciation for nature: for water, trees, rocks, and material things in general as having qualities and values independent of utilitarian exploitation.
He then looks at the home and other human habitats and offers suggestions for making them more enchanting. Subsequent chapters deal with politics, art, the psyche, stories, the sacred, ritual. His vision pretty much encompasses an entire world-view, as did the Renaissance men he admires.
He has many worthwhile things to say: on resisting the secularization of culture, the need for silence—especially in churches, for having children around, for cultivating a more imaginative way of life and for trying to see the sacred in the things around us. Unfortunately, he also has many loopy things to say: about amulets, astrology, and the “little people.”
He seems to be a sort of syncretist-pantheist and when he speaks of putting “magic” into life, he is using the word in a literal more than figurative sense. But then again, since he advocates an imaginative rather than rational approach, he may intend that magic, earth-spirits, etc., be regarded as real only in the sense of being real objects of the imagination. The reader will, at times, feel he is being taken on a post-modern moon walk.
Without overlooking the heterodoxy of Moore's system, one can sympathize with his overall thrust toward integrating mind and body. At this point in time, Catholicism needs to entail more than just being able to walk around with a mind full of true propositions. The word must become flesh in a consistent culture that recognizes its connections—and responsibilities—to the entirety of creation. The trick to doing this, though, is not with magic, as Moore would have it, but with the sacramentalism embodied in the person of Jesus Christ and expressed in his body the Church.
Brother Clement Kennedy is a Benedictine monk at Prince of Peace Abbey, Oceanside, Calif.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Clement Kennedy OSB ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: OLittle Town of Bethlehem DATE: 11/16/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 16-22, 1997 ----- BODY:Christ's birthplace has changed in 2,000 years, but it isn't hard for pilgrims to imagine its holy past
BETHLEHEM—Nearly 2,000 years after Jesus Christ was born in the sleepy town of Bethlehem, visitors with a sense of adventure and a day or two to spare can get a glimpse of the kind of life Jesus must have lived.
Beyond the tourist shops that line Manger Square, the town of Bethlehem is a living, breathing place with shops, markets, and even a handful of shepherds. Although a great deal has changed during the past two millennia, Bethlehem remains a traditional Middle Eastern town populated by traditional people.
Located just six miles south of Jerusalem, Bethlehem is the point where cultures meet and sometimes collide. It is here, just at the outskirts of the town, where Israel relinquishes control to the Palestinian Authority, which is now in control of virtually all Palestinian towns and cities.
Despite occasional flare-ups between Israelis and Palestinians, who man their respective checkpoints into and out of the town, the journey to Bethelehem is both safe and simple.
Cherished by Christians as the birthplace of Jesus, Bethlehem is also revered by Jews and Muslims. Entering Bethlehem, you pass the tomb of Rachel. According to the Bible, Rachel, the wife of the patriarch Jacob, was buried in Bethlehem after she died in childbirth. Each year, thousands of infertile women flock to the tomb to pray.
The Book of Ruth states that Bethlehem, which means “house of bread” in Hebrew, is the place where Ruth and Boaz fell in love. Ruth's great-grandson, King David, was born in Bethlehem. Mary and Joseph—and thus Jesus, in his earthly origins—were descendants of David.
Although the population of Bethlehem and its suburbs is today predominantly Muslim—most of its Christians have emigrated—the town still bears testimony to its rich Christian heritage.
Almost 1,700 years old, the Church of the Nativity is the embodiment of Bethlehem's history. More than anywhere else, it was here that generation upon generation of rulers made their lasting mark.
Originally built by Helena, the mother of the emperor Constantine, in the fourth century, the present church was rebuilt by the Byzantine emperor Justinian, and refurbished by the Crusaders 600 years later. Justinian's square doorway and an arched Crusader doorway constructed to protect the Christian community are preserved in the facade.
The building, which is believed to be the oldest standing church in the Holy Land, has, like Christianity itself, survived many conquests. Tradition has it that the Persians, who invaded Palestine in 614, spared the church because a painting they found depicted the Magi dressed as Persians. The Muslims, who arrived soon after, massacred Christians and destroyed their monasteries, but allowed the Church of the Nativity to stand.
The arrival of the Crusaders in 1099 strengthened the beleaguered Christian community, and on Christmas Day 1100, Baldwin, the first king of the Latin kingdom, was crowned in Bethlehem. The situation deteriorated after 1291, when the Crusaders were driven out by the Muslims. Although Christians were able to retain a foothold in the town, their position remained precarious under the Turks, who invaded in 1517. Under Turkish rule, however, the town began to grow and modernize, a process that continued under the rule of the British, the Israelis, and now the Palestinians.
Today, every altar, stone, and wooden beam bears witness to history: Remnants of a fourth-century mosaic floor are sheltered by two long columns of sixth-century pillars, holding up a sturdy oak roof built with funds from England's Edward IV in the 14th century.
Visited year-round, the church and surrounding sites, such as the Milk Grotto (the cave where Mary nursed the infant Jesus) assume an air of anticipation at Christmastime, when tens of thousands of worshipers flock to Bethlehem.
A few weeks before Christmas, the municipality hangs Christmas lights all around Manger Square, and local merchants place large wooden Nativity scenes in front of their shops. The wooden carvings, which have been produced by Bethlehem's Christian families for generations, are exported all over the world. For a demonstration, visit the Holy Land Arts Museum on Milk Grotto Street.
The town, which is always filled with the smells of fresh pita bread and frying falafel balls (fried chick peas), is filled with the wonderful aroma of mahmoul and kakibjuwa, two types of sweet cakes available only at Christmas.
The day before Christmas, the Latin patriarch (local archbishop) travels from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, stopping first at Rachel's Tomb, and then at Manger Square. Joined by the faithful and local leaders, he enters the Church of the Nativity and then proceeds to the Catholic Church of St. Catherine (a wing of the larger church), and to the Grotto of the Nativity down below. At midnight, the patriarch celebrates Christmas Mass in St. Catherine's.
During that day, visitors and locals are treated to folklore shows and the music of visiting choirs. Those who cannot enter the churches—which can accommodate no more than 2,000 worshippers—assemble in Manger Square for midnight Mass, which is broadcast live via loudspeakers.
Anyone wishing to avoid the crowds should follow the example of Bethlehem's local families: go to Mass at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., when the tour buses have departed.
Christmas Day finds most of the stores closed, enabling the town's large extended families to celebrate the day together. Take the opportunity to stroll through the quiet alleyways and to stare out at the sloping terraced hills that Mary and Joseph once saw.
You may spot “Baba Noel,” the Bethlehem version of Santa Claus, delivering gifts, as is the custom here. And if you are patient, and very lucky, you might even see a shepherd in the distance, herding his flock.
Michele Chabin, the Register's Middle East correspondent, is based in Jerusalem.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Michele Chabin ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Tips for Christmas Visitors to Bethlehem DATE: 11/16/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 16-22, 1997 ----- BODY:BETHLEHEM—Bring warm clothes and a collapsible umbrella as well as one or two summer outfits. The weather in December can be highly unpredictable, and varies between regions, so layered clothing is your best bet.
Prior to leaving home, make a list of family, community, and church members who would like to be remembered with a special prayer.
Keep some small change in your pocket, to give as a donation at holy sites.
If your bus is stopped at a security checkpoint, don't be alarmed. These security checks are routine, and for your protection.
Report any suspicious object (an unidentified tote bag, for example) to your tour guide or a security guard. Do not attempt to examine or move the object yourself. As Israelis say, “It's probably nothing, but what if it's something?”
—Michele Chabin
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Michele Chabin ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Hollywood Classics Keep Alive True Spirit of Christmas DATE: 11/16/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 16-22, 1997 ----- BODY:EACH YEAR the Christmas lights on West Los Angeles streets are turned on a few days earlier. This gradual expansion of the holiday season isn't driven by spiritual concerns. Merchants are eager to get the public buying as soon as possible since their profit margins increasingly depend on big Christmas spending.
The health of the local economy is judged by how well the various stores are doing in comparison to previous years. Newspapers and TV news shows monitor these developments closely so commercial factors are on everyone's mind while we shop.
As we get closer to Christmas eve, store crowds become larger and traffic jams more frequent. All this brouhaha makes it difficult to remember why we celebrate Christmas. Our Lord's birth and the genuine spirit of giving can be lost in the frantic rushing around.
Once upon a time Hollywood regularly produced movies that concerned themselves with these issues, and a trip to the video store or a viewing of the right classic on light-night TV can help us resist the materialism that has corrupted this holy season.
The original Miracle on 34th Street (1947) tackles the subject head on. Macy's department store in Manhattan hires as Santa Claus an old man from a retirement home who calls himself Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwen). When shoppers can't find what they're looking for on the premises, he recommends other establishments that might carry the merchandise.
At first Macy's officials try to make him change his ways, but the old man is adamant.
“That's what I've been fighting against for years,” he declares. “The way they commercialize Christmas.”
Eventually Mr. Macy himself backs Kris Kringle because his open-minded generosity attracts more customers to the store. The old man isn't satisfied, though. He insists he's really Santa, and this is even more threatening to store executives.
Susie Walker (Natalie Wood), the six-year-old daughter of the woman who hired him, has been brought up not to believe in “superstitions,” like Santa Claus. However, Kris Kringle's sweet nature wins over the little girl, and her mother (Maureen O'Hara) wants him fired.
The store psychologist goes after the old man with a vindictiveness Mrs. Walker never intended, and has him committed to a mental hospital. When steps are taken to make this institutionalization permanent, Walker's lawyer-boyfriend (John Payne) undertakes his defense. At issue in court is whether or not there is a Santa Claus, and if so, is this old man he?
Director George Seaton and coscreenwriter Valentine Davies handle each twist and turn of the plot with skill and charm, and in the end you'll probably find yourself agreeing with Kris Kringle that “Christmas is a frame of mind” and “faith is believing things that common sense tells you not to.”
Miracle on 34th Street has been re-made for television and recently as a feature, but neither has the power of the original. The Bishop's Wife (1947), based on Robert Nathan's novel, was also recently redone as The Preacher's Wife with equally unsuccessful results. In the original, Episcopalian Bishop Henry Brougham (David Niven) is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The stress of raising money for a new cathedral has done him in, leaving his work and his relationship with his wife seemingly without meaning.
In answer to desperate prayers, a suave angel named Dudley (Cary Grant) appears, but the bishop has trouble believing he's genuine. The prelate's wife, Julia (Loretta Young), is impressed by the angel's kind way of dealing with her friends. She observes how he raises the spirits of the cynical Professor Wuthridge (Monty Woolley) who has lost his faith in God and humanity. Soon Julia's spending time with Dudley that she used to spend with her husband. As an angel, it would never occur to Dudley to get physical, but it's clear the attraction is mutual.
In one of the film's most enjoyable moments, the two go ice-skating, and Dudley's ability to create little miracles enables them to glide around the pond with the free-wheeling skill of accomplished professionals. Predictably, the bishop is jealous and tries to kick the angel out of his household.
The prelate's personal and professional problems all come to a head on Christmas eve, and Dudley must work hard to bail him out. Director Henry Roster and screenwriters Robert Sherwood and Leonardo Bercovici alternate between laughter and pathos as the holiday season becomes a time of true celebration for all the movie's characters.
It's A Wonderful Life (1946) is perhaps the most outstanding of all the classics that attempts to dramatize the Christmas spirit. When the movie begins, we hear everyone in the small town of Bedford Falls praying for George Bailey (James Stewart). It's Christmas eve, and the hard-working banker is thinking about killing himself. The supplications of his family and friends are heard, and an angel is sent to rescue him.
In preparation for his mission, the angel is shown all the important events in George's life up until that moment. George's father ran a bank that loaned money to ordinary citizens at affordable rates. His nemesis was the greedy millionaire, Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore), who wanted to keep the townsfolk poor and propertyless so he could better exploit them.
Because the needs of the bank's clientele always came before profits, the business was always on the verge of collapse. When George's father dies, he is forced to cancel his plans for college and go to work in the bank to keep the institution afloat.
The young man marries his long-time sweetheart, Mary (Donna Reed), and the two save for a long honeymoon abroad. On the day they're scheduled to leave, however, there's a run on the bank, and George is forced to use the money saved for the trip to bail out the business. Because of his dedication, most of Bedford Falls's working class realize their version of the American dream and acquire their own homes.
One Christmas eve George discovers a shortfall between the bank's assets and cash in hand. When he goes to Potter for help though, the old miser threatens to have him arrested.
Director Frank Capra and screenwriters Albert Hackett, Frances Goodrich, Jo Sworling, and Phillip Van Doren Stern don't pull their punches as George begins to unravel. He loses his temper frequently, lashing out unfairly at family and coworkers.
In order to prevent George from committing suicide, the angel gives him “a chance to see what the world would have been like” if he had never been born. When this fantasy is presented to him, George observes that most of the towns-folk live in slums owned by Potter instead of owning their own homes.
“Where are the houses?” George asks. “You weren't there to build them,” the angel replies.
The town supports itself as a center of gambling, strip joints, pawn shops, and unsavory bars. The warm community feeling that George experienced has been replaced by a cold, desperate hostility. His wife is an old-maid librarian, and his mother a bitter shrew running a boarding house.
“You see, you had a wonderful life,” the angel tells him.
“Please God, let me live again,” George tearfully asks.
Like the other two movies under discussion, It's A Wonderful Life demonstrates the power of goodness to change lives and the difference each individual can make if he tries. These are suitable Christmas lessons to keep in our hearts as we plunge into the hurly-burly of last-minute shopping.
John Prizer, the Register's art and culture correspondent, is based in Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: In Rome, America Synod Is in Full Swing DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY—A Special Synod of Bishops for America has now passed the halfway mark, tackling issues that have traditionally divided the American continents.
Representatives from North, Central, and South America, plus the Caribbean, have been presenting concerns of the Church in their particular countries. What is emerging from more than two weeks of discussion, however, is a common vision and a pastoral commitment that transcend national boundaries.
Synod father Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk of Cincinnati, Ohio, told the Register that many participants have come to the realization there is more that unites them than they first thought.
“All the local Churches in the Western Hemisphere are relatively young,” he said, listing historical roots shared by the more than two dozen Synod countries. Colonizers founded each of the American nations. In every one, conflict has erupted between settlers and the indigenous people. In most countries, slavery has been an issue, and from northern Canada to Tierra del Fuego, there was a Christian dimension to the establishment of each American nation.
“That's a lot to have in common,” Archbishop Pilarczyk said. “And I have to say, many of us had never thought of it in those terms.”
He said that in naming the month-long Synod “the Special Assembly for America,” instead of “for the Americas,” Pope John Paul II has given the local Churches an important teaching.
“In choosing to gather this group of bishops, the Pope is saying: ‘You ought to get together more and think a little more in the same direction,’” the archbishop said.
The Synod, which continues in the Vatican through Dec. 12, has entered its final phase. The bishops are now working in small groups divided along linguistic—not geographical—lines. Their task is to draft recommendations based on presentations made during the initial weeks of general assembly meetings.
Synod fathers will eventually vote on these proposals and present them to Pope John Paul II. In the past, he has used synod recommendations as the basis for a post-synodal document or exhortation. In addition, the bishops will release their own Synod Message to the World before they head home from Rome.
Archbishop Pilarczyk, who has taken part in three other synods, said listening to scores of speeches day-after-day can be a daunting task.
But “talk can be very important, very informative, and very nourishing,” he said.
An Ecclesial Speech-fest
Talk they certainly have. In fact, the Synod for America could perhaps best be described as a high-level “ecclesial speech-fest.” The first two weeks alone included 18 general sessions during which more than 250 bishops, papally appointed observers, and experts aired their views—in total, some 50 hours of individual speeches—and Pope John Paul II was present for all of it.
“I've been impressed,” Archbishop Pilarczyk said of the Pope's stamina. “I'm 63 years old and I can tell you, I've slept through a lot more speeches than the Pope has!”
He noted that Pope John Paul II obviously enjoys spending time with the Synod participants.
“He's having groups of bishops in for meals—sometimes twice a day,” the prelate said. “My perception is, the Pope is energized by this sort of event and by talking to bishops.”
Just as in the opening week of the Synod, the burden of international debt and the economic divide between the North and South dominated the litany of social ills during week two.
Archbishop Samuel Carter, retired archbishop of Kingstown, Jamaica, said the debt burden was a main reason why 180 million people were living in poverty in the Caribbean and Latin America.
“When children go hungry or die from preventable disease, when more money is spent on debt service than on health care or education, then the cost of debt in human terms is unjustified,” he said.
Bishop Guido Brena Lopez of Ica, Peru, proposed the establishment of an international organization for the redistribution of resources and foodstuffs, to help right the balance of consumption in the North and South. He also joined the list of bishops who called for outright forgiveness, or at least partial reduction, of the foreign debt that burdens Latin America.
Venezuelan Archbishop Ramon Perez Morales of Maracaibo agreed, saying the external debt was becoming the “eternal debt” in his region.
Women and the Laity
The role of women in the Church also emerged as an important theme, even if the Synod's preliminary 42-page working paper devoted scant space to the subject.
Bishop Gerald Wiesner of Prince George, British Columbia said Church leaders must have the courage to examine practices that have ignored the concerns of women or contributed to their alienation.
“Jesus treated women with openness, welcoming them into his company. We can do no less,” he said.
Auxiliary Bishop Manuel Eguiguren Galarraga of El Beni, Bolivia, called for Church attention to the rights of women, especially in Latin America.
He reminded the bishops: “Women have been the primary transmitters of the faith for generations and were the first catechists of us who are participating in this Synod.”
The central role of the laity was also a key topic discussed—coming less than two weeks after a new Vatican document warned about a blurring of distinctions between the roles of priests and lay men and women.
Father John Corriveau OFM Cap., the superior general of the Capuchin Franciscan order, said bishops need to gather the laity, organize them, and encourage them to go out into the world with the Gospel message.
“Without any confusion of roles, the laity must be accepted as equal dialogue partners and as collaborators in ministry in the Church,” he said.
Sulpician Father Emilius Goulet, secretary-general of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the priest shortage has helped lay people become more aware of their responsibilities in the Church. At the same time, overcoming the so-called vocations crisis is tied to reaffirming the identity and indispensable role of the priest.
Archbishop William Levada of San Francisco, Calif., said catechesis must be the “engine” of the new evangelization “in order to provide the lay faithful with a comprehensive understanding of their faith to allow them to embrace Christ's mission of transforming the world with confidence.”
The archbishop, who was instrumental in the process of publishing the Catechism of the Catholic Church, said the book is a valuable instrument for preparing lay people for their mission.
The concerns of families were the focus of a speech by Canadian Archbishop Francis Spence of Kingston, Ontario.
“We ask this Synod to send a message of hope to all families, to explore ways to encourage families to take up the task of family ministry and to promote the vocation of fatherhood as central to the well-being of families,” he said.
“Many children of single-parent families have limited or no contact with their fathers—a situation with far-reaching and harmful consequences,” Archbishop Spence said. He also said single heads of families, the divorced and cohabiting couples all need understanding and evangelization.
So far, Pope John Paul II hasn't commented on what the bishops are saying. This is not uncommon however, as he traditionally uses the post-synodal apostolic exhortation to make public his remarks after studying a synod's conclusions.
A Consultative Mood
Archbishop Pilarczyk said that in the flurry of synod activity, participants would do well to remind themselves they have been called to Rome to take part in an assembly that's merely consultative.
“Synods are discussion groups. The final outcome is not legislation, it's not a decision, it's not even a document,” he said. “The final outcome is a series of propositions that's left behind for the Pope to use if he chooses in preparing some kind of teaching document about the Synod's theme.”
“It's not an efficient way of doing business,” Archbishop Pilarczyk added, “but you have to realize at every moment, we are not here to do business. We are here to talk, to discuss, to learn from one another and to help each other learn. From that point of view, I think this Synod for America has been quite successful.”
Stephen Banyra is based in Rome.
----- EXCERPT: As month-long 'ecclesial speech-fest' enters its final phase, bishops prepare to send recommendations to John Paul II ----- EXTENDED BODY: Stephen Banyra ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Guadalupe Basilica Highlights Ties Between Rome and Americas DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:ROME—The early morning traveler these days along Rome's Via Aurelia, passing by the walls of the Vatican, might catch a glimpse of the red and purple-sashed Synod fathers on their way into the day's assembly. The month-long Synod for America is in full swing, gathering cardinals, bishops, monsignors, priests, and lay experts from the Americas and around the world.
A few minutes and a few miles farther along Via Aurelia, the observant traveler, passing by Our Lady of Guadalupe basilica, would also spot another group bundled up against the morning chill, dashing across cobblestones. But this time it's the parish's daily Mass-goers, heading into church.
Our traveler may be too occupied dodging Rome's survival-of-the fittest traffic to reflect on whether there is any connection between the two. But that plain little modern church just passed is an important link between the Americas and Rome.
“Your parish dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe,” Pope John Paul II told parishioners in a 1980 visit, “is like a living witness of the tie, which here in Rome at the center of the Church, we wish to always maintain with the Church of the distant American continent.”
Our Lady of Guadalupe is the patroness of the Americas. And there are other official ties, too. The church in Via Aurelia has been named the national church of Mexico, and more broadly, of Latin America, and is the titular church of the Cardinal Archbishop of Guadalajara. Hundreds of pilgrims from Latin America stop in every year to pray.
Even from a distance, the church has an appearance unique in Rome. The geometric brick patterns with alternating shades of color are more reminiscent of a Spanish mission church in Mexico.
And in fact, though designed by the Italian architect Mazzocca, stone was put on stone with money from Mexico. Some of the building materials also have Mexican origins—the onyx windows, for instance. Instead of the traditional stained glass, the windows are translucent rock, one centimeter thick. At night, lights inside the church send rays through the stone's chocolatey-swirls. And for mid-morning Mass, the windows soften and warm the sunlight filtering through.
The rose window on the front of the church, also onyx, frames a mosaic of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Stepping into the church entryway, tell-tale signs of parish life fill the notice board: The final figures of a special collection for Italy's earthquake victims; announcements for pilgrimages; Mass times, of course; and a reminder of the church's American connection—a notice posted for parish-sponsored English lessons.
It is said that visiting the church on one of his rare journeys to a Roman parish, Pope John XXIII passed through the large wooden doors and throwing wide his expressive Italian hands, looked around and said, “Now this is beautiful!”
Any tourist to Rome can testify that a day of visiting churches in the eternal city carries the risk of a cultural overload: baroque gold ornaments, cosmatesque stone patterned floors, famous statues, centuries-old paintings and mosaics. There is so much to see, and too much to absorb.
In this setting, Our Lady of Guadalupe is visitor-friendly. The clean architectural lines carry one's gaze to the altar and the dark-blue mosaic apse surrounding the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
The simple shape and design follows closely the ancient “basilica” style of church. But closer inspection reveals distinctly modern innovations to the classic model. The pillars lining the aisle are topped with an inverted tripod, breaking off horizontally once the legs reach the ceiling. It adds a crispness to the look and takes the weight off the upper part of the church.
In a city where some churches are almost 2,000 years old, Our Lady of Guadalupe is very, very modern. Construction began in the mid-1950s after Pope Pius XII urged the superior general of the Legionaries of Christ to build a church in Rome's periphery, next to the order's general house. Forty years ago, that section of Via Aurelia was empty of buildings, very much outside Rome.
The Pontiff foresaw the city would expand outwards, and that the number of churches on the outskirts would be insufficient to serve the spiritual needs of the new inhabitants. Today, that part of the Via Aurelia hums with traffic and activity, serving as a major artery between the city's heart and the Italian highway network.
The parish is now one of 328 in Rome and is home to some 6,000 parishioners. It prides itself on certain unique characteristics, one of which is being the only parish in Rome (and the world?) where the parish bulletin is delivered by hand, door to door.
The church was consecrated and inaugurated in 1958, at the dawn of Pope John XXIII's pontificate. The first major event was the Pope's visit, not long after he opened the Second Vatican Council in 1962. He prayed there for the Council's success and crowned the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
The image of our Lady is the best possible replica of the image left on the peasant Juan Diego's tunic near Mexico City in 1531. AMexican artist duplicated the mysterious picture, even using ayate cloth, the same type as Juan Diego wore.
The frame around the picture is the only highly-worked ornate dressing to the church. It is done in three metals: from the edge moving in there is a border of bronze, then silver, and then gold. But the gold, as one would-be thief found to his chagrin, is only gold-plating on silver. The burglar was so disappointed he left his 20-foot ladder behind.
In the sacristy, which wraps around the apse, there are several official looking documents, written in Latin and bearing Pope John Paul's personal signature and seal. One announces the conferring of the honorary title of “basilica,” indicating a privileged position based on a church's religious or historical importance. There are two types of basilicas: the four “major” basilicas in Rome, and many “minor” basilicas, named by the Pope, in Rome and around the world.
The document reveals another of the church's links to the American continent, this time by blood. There the new basilica is officially referred to as “Our Lady of Guadalupe and St. Phillip, Martyr.” Who is this St. Phillip? Felipe de Jesus, the first Mexican martyr, was one of St. Paul Miki's companions, crucified near Nagasaki, Japan in 1597.
The church is linked to more modern blood, too. John Paul II assigned the basilica in 1991 to the Cardinal Archbishop of Guadalajara, Juan Jesus Ocampo Posadas, as his titular seat. Cardinal Posadas was assassinated less than five years ago. The title has passed to his successor, Cardinal Norberto Carrera Rivera Sandoval, who is here in Rome for the Synod.
Less than two miles from Our Lady of Guadalupe basilica, America's bishops are at work in the Vatican Synod Hall, charting a course for the new millennium. And the Pope's words to them and his prayer at the Synod's opening still echo: “To you, Mary, Mother of hope, beloved and venerated in many shrines throughout the whole American Continent, we entrust this synodal assembly. Help the Christians of America be vigilant witnesses of the Gospel in order to be awake and ready on that great and mysterious day, when Christ comes … to judge the living and the dead!”
John Norton is based in Rome.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Norton ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: U.N. Population Policies Under Scrutiny by Catholic Group DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:NEW YORK—After spending 15 years in Missouri as a salesman, Austin Ruse decided he wanted to “do something for God.”
Two years later, after a stint writing and editing for Catholic publications, he heard about a new pro-life, United Nations monitoring organization, the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (CFHRI), and immediately realized that he had found his calling.
“It was as if I heard a bell clearly ringing and I answered,” the deputy director of the three-month-old CFHRI said in a recent interview. “We are here to monitor, report upon, and try to affect population control initiatives coming out of the United Nations. This is one of the biggest places to advance our pro-life, pro-family cause.”
The institute, a non-profit, non-governmental agency not officially recognized by the United Nations, set up headquarters in August in U.N. Plaza and began making waves.
The institute's two full-time employees and six volunteers— operating out of a cramped two-room suite—wasted no time leveling criticism against a number of U.N. organizations and other related agencies such as UNICEF (United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund), for what the institute calls a disregard for the family.
“We support the legitimate efforts of the United Nations,” Ruse said. “We are pro-U.N., but in its founding documents it's difficult to find anywhere some of the radical things coming out of the organization in recent years. In the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights the basic building block of any society is the family.”
After gaining support from the Holy See as well as pro-life congressmen such as Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), the institute has taken issue with UNICEF for the “very aggressive position they have taken in Third World countries in regard to contraception,” Ruse said.
“A year ago, the Vatican took their symbolic donation out of UNICEF for those reasons and it caused quite a stir,” he said. CFHRI reminded the press, Catholic parents, and others of the Vatican's action and urged people to think twice before contributing to UNICEF's traditional Halloween collection.
But Charles Lyons, the president of the U.S. Committee for UNICEF said that his organization's family planning policy is rooted in safe motherhood and responsible parenthood, not abortion or providing contraceptives.
“What was frustrating and damaging to us was that it was construed by the Holy See that our policy regarding family planning had changed, and they cited allegations of policy violations at the individual country level,” he said. “We are a decentralized organization working in 140 countries. This is not to excuse anyone for not following policy, but is conceivable that someone might have perceived that an individual UNICEF organization was not following policy. If that is the case we would be concerned and would track that down.”
Lyons said that the “symbol” of the Vatican's $2,000 yearly contribution led to the immunization of children and, in some cases, the cessation of hostilities in some parts of the world to reach those children.
“We very much value and want the partnership of the Church,” he said. “We have had very open lines to the Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations and must and will continue to discuss our different perceptions and any reports of violations in the hope of working together with the Vatican again.”
What had caused more controversy, however, is the CFHRI's allegations that several U.N. agencies, such as the High Commission for Refugees (HCR) and the U.N. Population Fund have collaborated on a field manual for relief workers in emergency situations that “explicitly promotes contraception and surgical and chemical abortions,” said Ruse.
“The manual, yet to be released, would make the promotion of these procedures mandatory with no conscience clause,” he said. “We, along with Congressman Smith and the Holy See received a very detailed briefing on this from a confidential informant and were preparing to go public with it.”
Ruse declined to name his informant, other than saying it was someone “on the inside.” He did say that the informant has since told the institute that the agencies preparing the manual will delete the mandatory abortion section.
Officials from the Population Fund, UNICEF, and the HCR denied all of the institute's charges and responded angrily to the new organization.
“We do not provide abortions in refugee camps, nor do we have any plans to do so,” HCR spokeswoman Marie Okabe wrote in a press release responding to the institute's allegations. “In fact, the United Nations does not provide support for abortions or abortion-related activities anywhere in the world.”
The manual in question is the outcome of The International Agency Symposium of Reproductive Health in Refugee Situations, which took place in June 1995. At the symposium, about 50 governmental and non-governmental institutions agreed that the international community must care for the reproductive health needs of refugees, displaced persons and others in conflict, wrote Okabe.
The manual's principles concerning all reproductive health activities reads as follows: “Reproductive health care should be available in all situations and be based on refugees, particularly women's needs and expressed demands, with full respect for the various religious and ethical values and cultural backgrounds of the refugees, in conformity with universally recognized human rights.”
Alex Marshell, the U.N. Population Fund chief of media services called the institute's allegations a “complete mis-statement.”
“The only thing worse than being a refugee is being a pregnant refugee,” he said. “If possible, woman who don't want to be pregnant should not be pregnant. This is part of an agenda [by pro-life groups such as CFHRI] that is really trying to deprive women of family planning. It has nothing to do with abortions.”
Ruse, however, said that the promotion of family planning and population control by world bodies were only “euphemisms for abortion.”
“It is a good thing that international agencies bring food, clothing, shelter, and medicine to the suffering people of the world,” he said. “But those hands that feed and clothe should not also be bringing death in the form of contraception and abortion.”
Ruse said that the institute was formed out of the sense among pro-life and pro-family groups around the world who regularly monitor U.N. international conferences that there was no permanent “watcher group” for their cause.
“We are the creature of the desire of a larger pro-family world to have a place to meet and work on these issues every day,” he said.
More than 5,000 people around the world make contributions to the institute. A website and regular mailing list are expected soon, said Ruse. The institute already issues a weekly bulletin of population control issues being discussed at the United Nations.
“We have hit the ground running,” Ruse said. “It's easy to be busy at the U.N., because there is so much going on.”
Dan Szczesny is based in Princeton, N.J.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Szczesny ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Pope John Medical Ethics Center Heads North to Boston DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:BOSTON—The Pope John Center for the Study of Ethics in Health Care moved recently to the campus of St. Elizabeth's Medical Center in Boston. Like a medieval mendicant (they have Dominican and Franciscan friars on staff), the Center has been on the road since its foundation in St. Louis, Mo., in 1972. In 1985, the Center relocated to the Boston area with the enthusiastic support of the local archbishop, Cardinal Bernard Law, taking up residence in Braintree, Mass.
Last month, the Center moved to Boston and the grounds of St. Elizabeth's.
Dr. John Haas, president of the Center, thinks that the move signals new opportunities for the Catholic medical-ethical think tank.
“We will be involved with physicians, nurses, hospital administrators, those in allied fields, as well as clergy, seminarians, and students,” he said. “Since St. Elizabeth's is a teaching facility of Tufts University School of Medicine, we should have greater involvement with the medical community.”
Former John Cardinal Krol Professor of Moral Theology at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Philadelphia, Haas has been president of the Pope John Center since August 1996. He sees John Paul II's 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life) as the marching orders for the work of the Center.
“It is simply the strongest papal affirmation of the dignity of the person that has been delivered in our century,” he notes, adding “it has galvanized my own approach to the Church's teachings on the life issues.”
A Mission of Education
With the explosion of new technologies within the medical field that appeared to challenge Catholic teaching—especially those related to so-called “artificial reproduction”—one might conclude that the Pope John Center was an idea waiting to be born.
In 1976, the Center began publishing a monthly commentary, Ethics and Medics, to inform physicians, hospital administrators, clergy, teachers, and hospital chaplains about bioethical issues from the Catholic perspective. Recent issues have addressed topics such as: chemical castration of sex-offenders; retrieval of sperm from dead males; making health care decisions for others, and the Church's pastoral teaching on the Sacrament of Anointing. Today the publication reaches more than 25,000 readers, and is a principal means by which the work of Center is known.
Father Germain Kopaczynski OFM Conv., director of education at the Center and one of five staff ethicists, stresses the role that the Center plays as a Catholic research facility, yet one with an influence in non-sectarian medical circles.
“I tell my interns and students here that we are following the charge of Boethius, 'to join faith and reason,” that good morals is good medicine.”
At present, three interns are taking courses at the Center; two are Harvard Divinity students, while the third is seeking background in the fundamentals of Western ethics. The Center serves as an accredited field education site for students enrolled at Harvard Divinity School and other member schools of the Boston Theological Institute.
The strong emphasis on research and education, however, is complemented by a growing activist orientation to the Center's work. In March, Father Albert Moraczewski OP, former president of the Pope John Center and Distinguished Scholar in Residence, presented testimony before the Clinton Administration's National Bioethics Advisory Commission on the Catholic response to cloning. Later, Haas appeared before the Senate Sub-Committee on Health and Public Safety and criticized the language of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission's report on cloning, calling it “terribly ambiguous.” Haas urged the Commission “to broaden its opposition to engendering human life for any research or experimental purposes.”
More recently, the Pope John Center co-sponsored a conference in Portland, Ore., on physician-assisted suicide. Working in conjunction with the Archdiocese of Portland and the University of Portland, the Center came into the national spotlight as Oregon considered a referendum question on physician-assisted suicide in the November elections. (By a 60% to 40% margin, voters refused to repeal a 1994 state law that legalized the practice.) Archbishop Francis George of Chicago, a board member of the Pope John Center, was one of the participants, as was Dr. Edmund Pellegrino, founder of the Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
The need to bring the teachings of the Magisterium to bear in the political and social area was underscored by those at the Center. Father Kopaczynski spoke about the dread possibilities of a “Kevorkianizing” of America.
“Every time I hear about a person with multiple sclerosis in Michigan, I get nervous,” said the Franciscan.
Haas is no less convinced that an anti-life struggle is going on.
“Despite the consistency of the Magisterium in opposing contraception, we see women ingesting all sorts of harmful chemicals … treating their fertility as a kind of infection.”
Assisting the Episcopacy
Along with the outreach to chaplains, priests, and teachers of moral theology, the Center has had a collaborative role with the U.S. bishops. Since 1981, the Center has conducted annual medical-moral workshops in Dallas, Texas, for all the bishops of the United States, Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. Hundreds attend each year. The presence of the ordinary of a diocese at any one of these workshops may signal a trend in which the bishop, as “teacher in his diocese” begins to exert a more central role.
Medical-moral issues are not of merely esoteric interest, but concern life-and-death issues that the bishop, as chief shepherd, must confront. These workshops are closely related to the Center's Diocesan Affiliation Program, which was inaugurated in 1979. More than 80 of the 200 U.S. dioceses and archdioceses receive the benefit of the Center's expertise.
Although well known by its Ethics & Medics commentary, the Pope John Center is also the largest publisher of books on medical ethics from a Catholic perspective. Recent volumes include commentaries on papal encyclicals, the moral use of fetal tissue, abortion, and the relationship between Catholic teaching and the secular society. The Center has published such Catholic authors as Father Benedict Ashley OP, Russell Hittinger, Father Servais Pinckaers OP, Ralph McInerny, William May, and Peter Kreeft. Father Ashley's Theologies of the Body is a renowned omnibus perspective on Catholic moral theology and the philosophical methodology that underlies the teachings of the Church.
While strong societal currents favor abortion, and physician-assisted suicide seems to gain a bigger lobby each day, the work of the Center proceeds apace. Joseph Ford, director of public relations, is up to the challenge.
“The young people we talk to—high school, college, and university students—seem quite disposed to the Church's teachings on the life issues, especially when those teachings are presented fully and cogently with conviction.”
For more information contact The Pope John Center for the Study of Ethics in Health Care, 159 Washington St., Boston, MA 02135; 617-787-1900; Internet: www.pjcenter.org.
James Sullivan is based in Southport, Conn.
----- EXCERPT: John Paul II's Evangelium Vitae guides the respected center's education work with doctors, nurses, administrators, and others ----- EXTENDED BODY: James Sullivan ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Welfare-to-Work: Churches Play Central Role in Transformation of Lives DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON—Federal welfare reform has only been in effect since August 1996, but states across America have been experimenting with their own welfare-to-work programs for years. Yet, throughout the country, no local government can make the claim made by the previously obscure jurisdiction of Ottawa County, Mich.
In September, Ottawa County became a national welfare-to-work case study when it became the first county to place all its welfare recipients into full-time private-sector jobs.
Part of a pilot program for Michigan's innovative “Project Zero,” Ottawa County has utilized many local churches, including two Catholic parishes, to help mentor welfare recipients as they make the transition from lives of dependence to independence. Project Zero is a comprehensive state government welfare-reform initiative introduced by six Michigan counties in July 1996.
The latest in a long line of welfare reforms initiated by Republican Gov. John Engler, Project Zero is designed to get all able-bodied welfare recipients into private-sector unsubsidized jobs. Part of the strategy for Project Zero is to eliminate barriers to employment and self-sufficiency. In Ottawa County, one of six target counties, that means the state has engaged in special efforts to provide related services that help former welfare recipients adjust to life on the job. The state provides child care for welfare mothers entering the workforce, and has contracted with KanDu Industries, a locally-based private firm, to provide job training and work-readiness services. In addition, federal grants were used to develop Life Services System, a local transportation network for county residents.
Ottawa County is a remote conservative county of more than 210,000 people located on the lower west side of Michigan's “lower peninsula” along Lake Michigan. The county would seem to be a good candidate for welfare to work success. The county has a thriving economy, with unemployment running at 2.7% (well below the national average of just less than 5%, and the Michigan state average of 3.9%). Many companies are growing fast, especially in furniture making, food processing, and auto parts. Less than 1% percent of its citizens receive public assistance, compared with nearly 4% nationally.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, the county has no large urban areas—there are no precincts that can be called pockets of poverty as we see in major cities today. With a growing private sector, many companies are finding the traditional labor pool is dwindling. Accordingly, many employers are willing to broaden their hiring practices to access a new workforce of former welfare recipients.
But even with sufficient jobs available, difficulties with child care and transportation might have foiled the success of welfare to work. So Ottawa and other Michigan counties are working with Church organizations to provide individual mentoring services to welfare recipients as they enter the job market. Ottawa County, using state support, has entered into a contract with Good Samaritan Ministries to oversee Church participation in mentoring programs with welfare recipients who sign up. Good Samaritan is affiliated with Love INC (Love In the Name of Christ), a group of non-profit Christian ministries that works with the poor. Good Samaritan has a $99,000 contract to coordinate the countywide mentoring program.
“We find that when people move off welfare, small events can turn into catastrophes,” said Margarete Gravina, a spokesperson for the Michigan Family Independence Agency (formerly the Department of Social Services), which coordinates Project Zero. “A baby-sitter would be sick or the car would break down, and people were quitting their jobs. The mentors at our Churches help people work through these problems and allow them to stay on the job.”
While Ottawa County has few Catholic parishes (only two of the 25 participating churches are Catholic), the efforts of churches there show the impact that individual churches can have in the lives of welfare recipients who want to work but need special assistance. Most of the churches involved are Dutch reform, Christian reform, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Assembly of God. As Project Zero expands to other counties with larger Catholic populations, Michigan officials expect to work more closely with a greater number of Catholic parishes throughout the state.
Our Lady of the Lake and St. Francis, both in Holland, Mich., are the two Catholic churches that have been most involved in the mentoring program.
“We have received great support from these Catholic churches,” said Brian Telfor, director of relational ministries at Good Samaritan. “They have been very helpful right from the beginning of the program.”
All welfare recipients in Ottawa County have the option of signing up for mentoring services, and since last July more than 150 have done so. Each of these people is referred to a participating church. The church works with Good Samaritan to develop mentoring teams of four to six people at the church who will work with a welfare family. The teams are expected to provide, according to program materials, friendship and moral support, assistance with transportation, budgeting, housing, household expenses, child care, and where appropriate, GED training.
“They help with finding a day care provider or helping to get the car fixed,” said Gravina. “They might help with job search or interview skills. These things seem routine, but they can have a major impact.”
The teams are asked to have some form of contact with the welfare family at least once a week. Sometimes the contact is a quick phone call, and other times it could be going out for lunch or dinner or a visit to the home.
“The team works with the family to find a level of contact that works for everyone,” said Telfor.
The mentoring makes no bones about the fact that it is completely church-based, but outright proselytizing is prohibited.
“We make it very clear that we are Christians, but there is no mandatory church attendance or anything like that,” said Telfor. “We have to walk a fine line.”
He did say that there is a spiritual aspect to the relationship between a mentoring team and a welfare family. “As the relationship develops, there will often be discussion about why the Church is involved and the mission of the Church. Often a family might want to find out more about the Church and might even begin attending services on their own.”
At the Catholic parishes, the mentoring teams have been actively involved with former welfare recipients as well as with people who are now off welfare but who are struggling to move from a minimum wage job to one that pays more.
“We are working with families to help them get their feet on the ground,” said Sister Pat Lamb, who coordinates mentoring for St. Francis and Our Lady of the Lake. “Sometimes that means helping them get off welfare, and sometimes it means helping them get a better job.”
Mentoring teams are involved in the full range of issues, but Sister Lamb has found that welfare families need a great deal of assistance simply setting and sticking to a monthly budget. “We try to teach them how to manage their money so that they are not always struggling,” she said. Six parishioners at the two churches have been trained as budget counselors through Good Samaritan.
“Just giving out money was not helping these people,” said Sister Lamb in discussing the recent welfare changes in Michigan and elsewhere. “We need to help them develop their full potential as human beings. That is the only way they are going to live a fuller and more productive life.”
“We have to live the Gospel. We have to reach out to those in need and help them so that they can become independent again.”
Michael Barbera is based in Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Michael Barbera ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Bishop John Myers DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:Current Posts: Bishop of Peoria, Ill.; board of governors, Pope John Center for the Study of Ethics in Healthcare, Boston, Mass.; NCCB's Canonical Affairs Committee; various other bishops’ committees.
Background: Born in Ottawa, Ill., 1941, the oldest of seven children; educated in Rome at North American College and Gregorian University; ordained in 1966; earned doctorate in canon law from The Catholic University of America in Washington, 1977; consecrated bishop Sept. 3, 1987; coadjutor bishop of Peoria until acceding to that diocese's See, Jan. 23, 1990.
Episcopal motto: “Let the mystery of the Church shine forth.”
----- EXCERPT: Inperson ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Embracing the Future with Faith and Hope DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:Bishop John Myers of Peoria, Ill. spoke with the Register's editor, Larry Montali, last month at the U.S. bishops national meeting in Washington about Nothing Sacred; The Promise Keepers; Always Our Children, the controversial document on homosexuality; why he became a priest; and a host of other topics.
Montali: What do you consider the top three issues facing the American Church today?
Bishop Myers: My own pastoral instinct or insight is that the most fundamental problem is always that of faith and conversion to Jesus Christ—so I keep trying to call myself and other people to a deeper relationship to Jesus Christ, especially in the Blessed Sacrament. That's the number one issue.
Flowing from that are the many issues centered around the dignity of the human person. That takes on the pro-life issues, but also issues of sexual relations and everything along that line. Number three would probably be an effective concern for the poor and the marginalized. That is something the Church needs to address profoundly in the future. With Centesimus Annus, the Holy Father has led us to a more comprehensive and deeper and creative understanding of how society is at the service of human beings.
Some Catholic thinkers and others believe our society has been damaged by an overemphasis on rights language that makes individual freedom and choice the greatest goods. That notion is so fiercely protected that when an idea such as the sanctity of life comes up against an individual's right to choose-whether we're talking about abortion or euthanasia, etc.-choice wins hands down. What is the best way to approach that misplacement of priorities?
One of the first things we do is to look at the nature of love, which is at the heart of Christianity. Love is truly focusing on the other, and focusing on the gift of self rather than taking and drawing things to oneself. As the Holy Father said clearly in Evangelium Vitae, it is not just a matter of choice, it is a matter of correct choice—proper choice, moral choice— choosing the truly human good.
That is something we need to under score, and we do that by calling people out of their subjectiveness, because choice is rooted in the very subjective self-preoccupied, self-fulfillment culture in which we live. Preaching the Gospel in a way that emphasizes genuine love and genuine service is a way to help people move beyond that.
In 1990 you wrote a pastoral letter on the Eucharist. Not long after a poll revealed that only about 30% of Catholics in this country believe in the Real Presence. How do you remedy that?
Part of the issue of surveys is who counts as Catholic, but I think there is some waning of faith in the Eucharist. [Belief in it] is contrary to the culture…. Also, some theologians have taught in a way that can weaken people's faith. So having 40 hours devotions and … exposition and benediction with the Blessed Sacrament [is important]. There are many devotional ways that we can call people back to the Eucharist, and that deepen our faith. For example, just by the mere fact of coming to adore and worship the Lord in the sacrament.
[In my pastoral letter I wrote about] the eucharistic sacrifice of love. We very seldom hear, at least for a while we did not hear, about the Eucharist as a sacrifice. For some reason this whole notion of sacrifice—of enduring pain or suffering for the sake of the Lord and in union with the Lord—just simply disappeared from our catechesis for a couple of decades. I think part of our preaching the Gospel is expressing the fact that love can involve pain and suffering and that we do that lovingly, not grudgingly.
In the pastoral, I referred to St. Maximilian Kolbe's death [at Auschwitz]. In considering his death, which he embraced with joy, it dawned on me more completely that Jesus was not dragged kicking and screaming to the cross the way some of us might have been, but that he embraced it; he did it out of love.
I think we call people in a difficult marriage, in all situations or other crises in life, to endure that with love. And it is precisely at the Mass that we can join the Lord in this suffering and obedient love that enriches and deepens our life. [The Mass] is the greatest possible counter to the civilization of self in which we live.
In recent years we've seen prelates deal in different ways with dissenting Catholics in U.S. dioceses. What do you believe is the best approach for bishops to take in dealing with dissent?
I think you should be loving, clear, and firm. From the very beginning I have made it clear that our Catholic schools need to be crisply and clearly Catholic. This is not a time for bringing in disparate opinions, although you have to deal honestly with all the questions that people come to you with—not in an ambivalent way, but in a way that stands squarely with the Church.
I make it clear that this is what is expected, and anyone who represents me in the diocese—in my teaching office—must teach in conformity with the Catholic Church, with the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and that has consequences.
Without going into great detail, there is a group in the diocese that tends to bring in people who are not in the fullest possible communion with the Church. Well, they don't use Church property, parish halls, churches; they are not welcome in the properties owned by the Church because they are not promoting the Church and they will not be sponsored by it in any way.
Your approach seems a sort of “middle ground” between the idea of either excommunicating or just turning a blind eye.
I would never ignore it. I would take it on very directly. [Vatican II] and the Code of Canon Law also encourage us not to use penalties except in extreme cases.
Now, I don't object to people who decide there is an extreme case and use it. The Holy Father has not excommunicated people, but he has withdrawn their recognition as Catholic theologians and so have other bishops. There are ways of [handling a problem] that don't involve exactly excommunication, but you can be clear and insure that the people are not being misled.
I think that is a negative limit, being conscious that the people are not being misled or confused. What I have as a goal for myself, my priests, and the teachers and catechists is a presentation of the richness of the Catholic faith with enthusiasm, because that's what our faith is. It isn't enough for a teacher not to teach error; they need to embrace the faith with enthusiasm and share that excitement with the people they are teaching.
A while back you wrote a pastoral letter on fatherhood. What are your thoughts on the Promise Keepers and some of the specifically Catholic men's movements that are springing up?
As I said in my letter on fathers and fatherhood, men have not felt affirmed, and because of the many challenges going on in our culture, from a variety of sources, they can be confused and even insecure in their roles as husbands and fathers. We need to go back into our faith to see the example of Jesus as a man who shared his relationship with God the Father with us; to see St. Joseph as a model; and then to affirm them in caring for their wives and their children in a very manly way, and let them know their spirituality will flow out of the very fact that they are male human beings.
The Promise Keepers have some wonderful aspects because it calls people to conversion to Christ, to fidelity, from their very name—to keep their word; to be men of their word.
What about for Catholic men?
It is not easy to simply integrate it into a Catholic approach. The Promise Keepers, being very true to who they are—this isn't really a criticism—would take a different view of the Church and the sacraments; would have different views than we do perhaps, on the permanence of marriage, on the morality of sexual matters within marriage.
There are a lot of things that could be different from the Catholic faith—so I understand why Catholic movements are springing up in different dioceses around the country and, in fact, there is one [beginning] in the Diocese of Peoria.
What about the criticism from the National Organization for Women that the Promise Keepers and other men's movements are trying to put women down and re-establishing the hierarchy in the family, etc.?
I do not believe that. To affirm the authentic role of husband and father in the family is one of the great things that we can do. Women and children can only benefit by men who are faithful and who happily assume their proper role and responsibility with a marriage and family.
In the bishops’ discussion in Washington about holy days of obligation and abstaining from meat on Fridays as an absolute discipline, there seems to be a tension between trying to reestablish things that build a distinguishable Catholic culture versus the idea of trying to make it easier to be a Catholic. What are your thoughts on that?
I think a culture is something which is vast—that many different elements are incorporated into a culture.
I am told, although I haven't been back in Peoria yet, that on the front page of the Peoria Journal Star, a secular paper, which isn't especially pro-Catholic, is a headline about the bishops proposing meatless Fridays. And Cardinal [Adam] Maida shared [a similar] experience when it was announced before he left in Detroit. I think people are excited about things that are identifiably Catholic.
The other things that we are talking about, however—benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, the rosary, other prayers that people can carry with them through the day—are very important. If we are “contemplatives” in the middle of the world because we pray—many times during the course of the day—I think that we can keep our spiritual poise or spiritual balance in the midst of a very secularized culture.
I am excited about these possibilities. I don't know exactly how it will be articulated. I don't think it will be articulated—say the Friday abstinence as simply “meatless Fridays,” instead of a real call to abstain from meat and also to prayer and penance and have it be a penitential day—[in order that] it that flows from the heart and not simply from a law. That's what we need, though, and that would be part of our conversion to the Lord.
But should it be a suggestion or an absolute requirement?
I think it will be somewhere in between. I just read over the Code of Canon Law on these matters last evening, and it is beautifully stated. It already is a law, by the way, in the universal law of the Church that we are expected to abstain from meat on Fridays throughout the year. It has been modified in our country by the bishops—and the bishops can re-modify that, which, I think, is what we might do.
Speaking of Catholic culture, have you seen the program
I have not.
Not having seen it, do you have any general thoughts on the controversy it's generated?
I just know that if we had a good program on what the life of a priest was really like, that would be wonderful. I know that television tends to do things superficially, especially when it comes to matters of the faith and of the Church.
It would be very difficult to do an accurate portrayal of the life of a priest. Whether or not this particular program does it I don't know … and I have no particular interest in seeing it because I don't have high expectations.
In the debate about
I have heard that—even here with the bishops. I have heard some of them say, “Well, you know, there's really some good stuff in it.”
When you're talking about the arts it can get tricky. You wonder, does something have to be perfect before it can be seen as valuable?
No it doesn't have to be. There are great Catholic novelists who have written of flawed priests and flawed religious, and yet, in examining the human condition—and people caught up in the human condition—they speak of the beauty of God's love, and of God's forgiveness, and God's action in human life.
Clearly, if we want Catholic culture, we are going to have to have great Catholic art and it isn't going to be plaster models. Whether [Nothing Sacred] is it I don't know, but in principle I am not opposed to that kind of program, and I think it could really call people to love the Church more.
Some bishops are uncomfortable with aspects of
First of all the conference is in the process of re-organization and one of the questions is precisely this one. I don't think we can blame people—people “out there” or even people in the media—for not getting it clear. We have different levels [in which we teach] and a committee statement is kind of the lowest level document that emanates from the conference of bishops.
We need to clarify that because even if it is just two bishops that get together as a sub-committee and say something, it comes out in the headlines as “Catholic bishops say”….
The distinctions are lost.
Yes, and they always will be, so I think we need to be smarter about that. The [Always Our Children] document that has been a matter of some discussion is, in my own opinion, not awful. It has some very glib features about it and I think it has been very helpful for some people. I would have done some things in a clearer way and perhaps I would have modified it to some degree.
I think we need to say a couple of things, when we are dealing with homosexual people and with those who love them and support them: We have a terminological problem [in expressing that] it isn't supposed to be that way in God's plan. Now that comes across as a disordered thing. Well we don't need to use that terminology if it upsets people.
The second thing, which I don't know that we acknowledge sufficiently in this document, is that parents have a right to worry that if their children choose this lifestyle they will be hurt. They will suffer—both spiritually and emotionally—and I don't know if we acknowledged that clearly enough. [Parents] have a right to worry about their children and to be deeply concerned because the people who make this choice and live in a way that is contrary to God's plan for human beings are going to suffer; it's going to hurt.
There has also been the criticism that the document is too vague when it encourages parents to seek out support groups. Critics say it should have been more specific about spelling out what groups are in line with Church teaching, since so many are not.
I think we have to be very careful on those matters and we have to just trust at this point that parents who approach the Church, approach priests or other people representing the Church will be wise enough and shrewd enough to realize that not everything is the same out there.
Might there be an addendum to the document or some sort of clarification?
I don't think that will happen—this was a very focused document to a certain group of people—but it wouldn't surprise me if over the next couple of years there is a much broader study and then some kind of more comprehensive presentation—I don't know what form it would take—about homosexuality and the homosexual movement in our country.
How much do you think you are a product of the times in which you were ordained?
I'm not quite certain. I came from a small town, a small Catholic parish in central Illinois. My mother was an Irish Catholic—still is—and I had a very Catholic upbringing, but not with Catholic school. We did not have those things available. But my brothers and I served at [Mass]. We were all involved in both the local school and Church activities, but I don't know that we were an excessively religious family. We weren't one of those families always hanging around the Church.
I was a seminarian in Rome during at least the first three sessions of the [Second Vatican] Council and saw theologians and bishops interacting—at the North American College, and all around Rome. It was an exciting time.
When I was a young priest, because I was promoting the Council and was considered a liberal for promoting it, I would say, “Oh, no I'm not; I'm really quite traditional in my understanding of Church, but this is what the Church has asked us to do.”
I always opposed the excesses, from the very beginning. I saw the excesses starting to happen, even during the Council, and never agreed with that. I have always been a big backer of the Second Vatican Council, but, I think, in a stable way. So I have gone from having been accused of being a liberal when I was a young priest to being accused of other things now and I think I have always stood for the same thing. The culture has changed.
Am I a product? Oh sure, and in ways that I am sure I don't understand. In my ordination class, over half of the priests left the priesthood, so obviously that has had to have some bearing, and that is true of the years say from 1966 to 1969; a lot of the people who were ordained priests lost their balance and many left, and some who stayed are wounded—that is just a difficulty that we have had to deal with. Each person has to cope with the circumstances of his or her own life, and that's what it happened to be for us.
What books or films have been inspirational for you, or influential on your thinking? Earlier, you mentioned some of the great Catholic novels.
I like science fiction for relaxation and fun. I have read it since I was in eighth grade. Some of the books that I read recently that I have found moving are Father Elijah and Strangers and Sojourners [both by Michael O'Brien] and one that has been a best seller, Cold Mountain[by Charles Frazier].
I have heard great things about
Both of them are beautifully written and about flawed people, but with deep human values, and of course in Strangers they were coming to deep faith and living deep faith. That's beautiful. And these are not perfect people or plaster models of people, but real people.
I enjoy that kind of reading and always have. I remember, I think probably as a college student years ago, I was moved by A Canticle for Leibowitz[by Walter Miller], which combined a little bit of science fiction with a profound religious message. I have always enjoyed reading things like that.
What about films?
Well the great kind of quasi-Christian films, The Robe and things like that when I was young, but one of the most moving films I have ever seen—I still can't see it without being very moved—is To Kill a Mockingbird. I think it is one of the great films of all times.
How did you discern your call to the priesthood?
It was a long and difficult process. I was confirmed in eighth grade and during high school I occasionally had the thought that God might want me to be a priest.
The question—and maybe it's because I came from another era, but I think it's really because my parents are really such wonderful and generous people—for me was never “How am I going to be happy?” or “How am I going to be fulfilled?” When we ask the question that way we are already off base; that's not where vocations come from. “What does God want me to do? What is God inviting me to do?”
By the time I was a sophomore in college, at Morris College in Dubuque, Iowa, I thought, “This isn't going to go away…. God keeps after me,” so I entered the seminary department at the college and was still active on the debate team and things like that, but increasingly—not automatically but increasingly—during my final three years in college I decided that God was really asking me to do this. So the bishop sent me to Rome, and I was secure in my vocation and always have been—although I didn't become a priest expecting to be happy. I never even thought of that especially, but rather this is what God wants me to do, and this has been a gloriously happy life.
Not that there aren't difficult periods or days, but I think when I talk with young people about vocations and even as we promote vocations in our own diocese, we ask the boys and young men to say a very simple prayer: “Lord, help me to want to be what you want me to be.” A prayer that your will be conformed to the will of God—and that really is at the basis of spiritual life and of vocation.
And happiness and fulfillment, ultimately.
It happens, but that is not what you're seeking.
Do you have any specific projects for the future?
I'm working on a new pastoral about the particular Church—or the diocese—and its relationship to the Universal Church. Sometimes we get the impression that people don't even know what a diocese is. [Some don't understand that] it's not just an administrative unit of the Church, nor is it free and independent to do what it wants. In the diocese, the Universal Church takes expression in all the elements. Major elements of the Universal Church need to be present in a diocese.
Finally, what do you see that Catholics in this country can be hopeful about?
I am very hopeful. The struggles of the past 30 years have, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and also the pontificate of this great Pope, produced the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Evangelium Vitae, and Christi Fideles Laici, so that we have clearly articulated, in a fulsome way, our faith, and our faith as it applies to specific problems. That is a profound gift.
In our country, Cardinal [Bernard] Law [of Boston] helped us understand this week that, while the culture of death is growing and is appalling and frightening, we have in our country the strongest pro-life movement in the world. You will just not find another pro-life movement like we have. That is a gift that has grown out of adversity.
I see so many signs of new religious communities and renewed religious communities in the Church. I see young Catholics wanting the faith in a very clear way and wanting to embrace it not just theoretically but in the way they live. I see many, many signs of renewed faith in the Eucharist—parishes having periods of eucharistic adoration. There are people seeking spiritual direction, just many signs of vitality in our Church so that I am filled with hope for the future.
The Holy Spirit is preparing something wonderful for us. I don't know what it is exactly, but it will lead us to the Lord and will bring changes, I think, even beyond our expectations.
—Larry Montali
----- EXCERPT: Bishop John Myers discusses the challenges of the culture, dealing with dissent, and what lies ahead for the Church ----- EXTENDED BODY: Larry Montali ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: U.S. Notes & Quotes DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:Is Catholicism Grounds for Firing?
“As a devout Catholic, Kathy Pielech believes Christmas marks the birth of Christ. She believes it is a day for spiritual reflection.
“She also believes her faith shouldn't cost her a job,” begins the USA Today article from Nov. 21, entitled “Employers Struggle with Religious Issues.”
“Pielech, of East Taunton, Mass., says that's what happened in 1992 when she wouldn't work Christmas at the Raynham-Taunton Greyhound Park in Raynham, Mass.
“‘Shame on anybody who thinks it's not important to protect our liberties,’ says Pielech, who works at the Massachusetts State Treasury and filed a lawsuit against the track. ‘It's like you can't be religious without being a nut.’”
The article cited how some companies respond to problems when employee religious practices, including days off, prayer at work, and displaying religious artifacts and dress, come into conflict with their work, For example, Lucent Technologies, a New Jersey telecommunications equipment manufacturer, has a policy barring religious harassment. Xerox offers workers two days off they can use for religious or “personal” days.
A 1996 Society for Human Resource Management survey found roughly one in four responding managers had received complaints about religious employees getting special treatment, according to the article. The article cited several lawsuits that are testing the limits of religion in the workplace.
Christine Wilson sued US West Communications for religious discrimination because, she says, she was fired for wearing to work a pro-life button showing an unborn child.
John Kalwitz, an Orthodox Jew, sued the Indiana Department of Transportation for firing him when he refused to work on the Sabbath.
Lule Said sued Northeast Security in Massachusetts for religious harassment when his employer would not allow him to pray during breaks.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: World Notes & Quotes DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:Mexican Angels
It is an odd sentiment to see expressed in the Los Angeles Times: “[A]ngels are an impressive notion, particularly as defined by the Catholic Church.”
These words, in an article by Kristine McKenna published Sunday, Nov. 23 was just one of several musings about the modern meaning of angels provoked by a recent art exhibit.
Artworks depicting angels by 15 Mexican artists are making their debut in Los Angeles, at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, in a display called, “Archangels in the Latin Tradition: Contemporary Interpretations.”
The Catholicism of the artists was made a central theme of the article, prompting the following explanation of the way the Faith understands angels—an explanation that is not strictly doctrinal: “For those who don't attend church, it probably comes as news that archangels are a particular type of angel. Above the archangel is an even more elevated species of angel, who resides so high in the heavenly hierarchy as to be almost unknowable by man. Below the archangels one finds guardian angels, military angels, seraphim, fallen angels, cherubim, the dominations, powers, virtues, and principalities—it's a complex family tree.
“Archangels are said to be intermediaries between mankind and God. There are usually seven of them, and the most frequently depicted is Michael, who protects Christians at the hour of their death.
“Next in popularity is Gabriel, who protects small children, announces our good works to God and is usually depicted holding a lily representing purity. Then there's Raphael, who dresses as a pilgrim, carries a fish and a traveler's staff and is the patron of travelers and protector against monsters. The four remaining archangels vary from one religion to the next—and this is where interpretations can become extreme.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Vatican Notes & Quotes DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:China-Vatican Relations as Seen by China
In Asiaweek, Ye Xiaowen, director of the State Council's Religious Affairs Bureau in China answered questions about the persecution of religion in his country.
“His answers are unlikely to appease Beijing's critics,” the Nov. 28th dated publication points out, in what surely is an understatement.
The magazine's question, “What is the status of the Roman Catholic Church in China today?” is answered: “China has only one Catholic Church represented by the Chinese Catholic Church and the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association. As for those so-called bishops secretly named by the Vatican in the early 1980s behind the backs of the Chinese government, the Chinese Church, and the Association, they are illegal. The Chinese Church and the Association have made great efforts to win over those people, and some have recognized the virtue of abiding by national laws. The very few who engage in all sorts of illegal activities under the banner of Catholicism can expect to be prosecuted.”
“Do you see any reconciliation,” the magazine asked, “between the Chinese Catholic Church and the Association and those Catholics loyal to Rome?”
Ye was quoted answering, “China wishes to develop relations with the Vatican under two basic premises. First, the Chinese government as the sole legitimate government of Taiwan must be recognized. Second, religion cannot be used as a pretext for interfering in China's internal affairs. Only through improved relations on a state level can we talk further about religious questions. If the Vatican abides by these two premises, relations can progress quickly. Otherwise, they will remain difficult.”
Iran and Vatican: Same Conclusion, Different Reasons
Two millennia ago, St. Joseph fled with Mary and Jesus to Egypt as Herod massacred the innocents. After 58 tourists were massacred at the Hatshepsut Temple in Egypt, tourists will have a hard time returning to the land that the Holy Family once saw as a refuge.
MSNBC-TV News reported that the consequences of the massacre have been many: despite enhanced security, many tours are being canceled and tourists have been fleeing the area in droves.
But one unlikely consequence, according to the article was that, “The state radio of Islamic Iran and the Pope found themselves in rare agreement on Tuesday in condemning Monday's slaughter by Muslim Militants.
“But while the head of the Roman Catholic Church urged all believers to shun violence, Tehran radio focused on the potential loss of sympathy for Arab and Islamic causes.”
It quoted Tehran radio saying, “The spread of this sinister phenomenon has served the interests of domineering and profit seeking foreigners who have used the turmoil in the region to extend their influence.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Annulment Granted? Expect More than a Simple 'Yes' or 'No' DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:Every annulment case ends one of three ways. First, the invalidity of the impugned marriage might be proved and canonical nullity declared. Canon lawyers call these cases “affirmatives” because the doubt about the validity of the marriage was answered in the affirmative. Other people might refer, somewhat misleadingly, to the annulment as being “granted.”
Conversely, the case might not be proven and, since marriages are presumed valid until proven otherwise, invalidity is not declared. Canon lawyers call these “negatives.” Others say the annulment was “denied” or “rejected.”
Finally, some annulment cases might result in neither an affirmative nor a negative sentence. This possibility will be discussed below. First, let's focus on annulment cases which end in a decision.
Negative Decisions
If nullity is not declared, that means the parties to the impugned marriage, despite a subsequent divorce, and despite perhaps the passage of many years since the marriage was “over,” are still held to the bond of that marriage. They are not free to contract marriage in the Church during the lifetime of the ex-spouse. A negative decision does not mean, however, that the impugned marriage was proven valid, any more than a “not guilty” verdict means that someone accused of a crime was found “innocent.”
A negative decision simply means that, in the case before it, the tribunal could not reach moral certainty about the invalidity of the marriage. Therefore it ruled in accord with the favor of the law, which presumes the validity of marriage.
Moreover, in cases that deal with one's status in the Church, there is no rule in canon law against what Americans would call “double jeopardy.” Therefore, it is possible for the same marriage to be impugned at a later time with, possibly, different results. Such cases are unusual, but they do occur. In the meantime, the parties to an annulment case which is decided in the negative should regard themselves as still married in the eyes of the Church and, to the extent they are able, conduct themselves in accord with that status.
Affirmative Decisions
If, on the other hand, the nullity of the marriage is declared, and provided that this affirmative decision has been ratified by the appellate tribunal, then the Church does not consider either party bound by the putative marriage. Hence both parties are free of the marriage bond which would have prevented them from entering a future marriage in the Church. In many annulment cases that is the end of the matter, and the parties are then free to contract marriage in the Church.
In some cases, however, even though the annulment has been granted, either or both of the parties to the marriage proven null are prevented from entering another marriage in the Church until certain matters are adequately addressed. In such cases, a vetitum or prohibition is placed on either or both parties. Let's take an example.
If drug or alcohol addiction was sufficient to have prevented either or both parties from consenting to marriage, as the Church understands and proclaims it, and an annulment of a first marriage was granted, then there is little reason not to expect that the same factors, if they remain unaddressed, will destroy either or both parties’ attempts at a second marriage, and a third, and so on. In such cases, the tribunal has the authority to impose a vetitum, or prohibition, against a future marriage. The prohibition lasts until, in this example, the substance-abuse issues are adequately dealt with—for example, in a rehabilitation program.
Prohibitions are an aid in stemming the tide of marriages doomed before they start. But for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this series, their effectiveness is often limited. Furthermore, prohibitions are rarely applied to persons who have not already been through the tribunal system. And canon law presently makes it very difficult for pastors and even bishops to toughen marriage preparation standards.
Meanwhile, those laboring under a prohibition need only contact the tribunal to learn how the vetitum can be lifted. In any event, they should see the prohibition as an occasion to face some difficult, but usually ultimately remediable, personal issues.
A Word of Caution
Besides a vetitum, however, which prohibits marriage in the Church until the prohibition is removed, a tribunal might place what is called a monitum, or admonition, on either or both parties to a marriage declared null. A monitum(Latin for “warning”) is a serious recommendation that the person give careful attention to various issues which the tribunal found in the course of investigating the earlier attempt at marriage. A monitum does not prevent one from contracting marriage in the Church, but rather serves as a cautionary reminder that some things in a person's history or behavior cause concern in regard to marriage. Again, let's consider an example.
Suppose a man had married a woman whom he had met only a few days before. The marriage ended in divorce for reasons related to the wife's instability, and indeed, the marriage was declared null by the Church though no grounds for nullity were identified on the man's side. In such a case, the tribunal would have no basis upon which to prohibit the man from entering marriage in the Church. But obviously there is still reason to question his prudence because he committed to the marriage on such short notice. In a case like this, the tribunal might impose a monitum on the man, advising him against repeating such precipitous behavior in the future.
Cases without Decision
Having looked at the effects of those annulment cases which result in a decision, whether affirmative or negative, some attention should be given to those cases which do not result in a decision by the tribunal. This can happen in a couple of different ways.
First, canon law, like every legal system, allows people who file lawsuits to change their mind and to drop their case. Some petitioners do this in annulment cases. Their reasons vary. Perhaps their intended marriage in the Church, which precipitated the desire to obtain a declaration of nullity in the first place, has been called off. Or perhaps they have decided, rightly or wrongly, that this is not a good time to ask certain persons to be witnesses in an annulment case.
The formal withdrawal of a case by a petitioner is called “renunciation.” Persons considering renouncing their cases should contact the tribunal for instruction on the proper way to proceed in order to prevent the loss of various procedural rights.
Another way in which an annulment case might never reach the decision stage is called abatement. Once again canon law, like every legal system, prefers not to adjudicate cases which are not formally withdrawn, but in which it is clear that both parties have lost interest. Therefore, under certain circumstances, annulment cases in which the parties have failed to participate for at least six months are subject to abatement.
As is true for renunciation, cases that abate, or stall, usually may be reopened at a later date. But confusion about intention can arise in abatement cases and, therefore, the parties to an annulment case should avoid letting their cases abate without contacting the tribunal in advance. In particular, respondents should be aware of extended inactivity on their part, lest their silence be taken not as conformity to abatement, but as a stubborn refusal to participate in the case—a fact that can be held against them.
Sometimes, the tribunal itself will suggest to a petitioner that he or she renounce the case or at least allow it to abate. This suggestion, when it is made, is often the tribunal's way of saying that the case is weak and, if a decision is forced, it is likely to be negative. The choice remains the petitioner's, of course, and some prefer to accept a negative decision if only to be able to appeal the case to a higher tribunal.
Of course, the tribunal is under no obligation to make an abatement suggestion. Indeed, in cases which canonically deserve negative sentences, some critics have urged American tribunals to avoid abatements. A higher proportion of negative sentences, they argue, would demonstrate the tribunal's commitment to the permanence of Christian marriage. Maybe, maybe not.
No matter how such a practice might play in the press, it may not be wise for a tribunal to use its precious resources this way—especially when so many other people with provable annulment cases are awaiting decisions in order to establish their true canonical status in the Church. First of all, it may not be wise because a negative sentence only declares what the law already presumes anyway: that the marriage was valid. And second, a negative sentence remains subject to reopening in a variety of ways, and thus to a future claim on the tribunal's resources.
Of course, it is possible that mere tribunal back-log, and not abatement or opposition, explain the months of silence which some people experience in their annulment cases. If one has questions about the length of time since hearing from the tribunal, it is a good idea to address a short note or letter to the tribunal inquiring about the status of the case. Phone calls to the tribunal, however, usually cannot be answered on the spot. They interrupt the heavy workload of the tribunal, and they do not preserve one's procedural rights. And in cases that are renounced by the petitioner, or that abate because of petitioner's failure to participate, respondents should know that they can, if they wish, file an annulment case in their own name.
An Unexpected Fruit
One final but very important point should be noted in discussing the effects of annulments. This point applies if the annulment is denied or granted—although it's a little easier to see in cases which are granted.
It is this: Often the parties to an annulment case achieve a certain perspective on their earlier failed marriage, and from this vantage point they can understand themselves and their lives in a more complete way. One person in an annulment case put it to me this way: “My divorce never answered any of my questions about why my marriage failed. The annulment case did.”
As long as the Church's juridic norms on annulments are faithfully followed by those involved in a case, one should not be surprised when, through such a process, the merciful hand of Christ reaches out and touches men and women with his healing Truth.
Dr. Edward Peters is a matrimonial judge with the Tribunal of the Diocese of San Diego. His“100 Answers to Your Questions on Annulments” (Basilica Press/Simon & Schuster, 1997), is available at Catholic bookstores.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Edward Peters ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: As the Centuries Pass, Our Lady of Guadalupe Retains Her Hold on a People DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:The moving story of our Blessed Mother's 16th-century appearance to a humble Mexican peasant still inspires the faithful more than 450 years after the event. What is commonly known of the occurrence is that the Mother of Christ was seen at the hillside of Tepeyac by (now Blessed) Juan Diego, who, in turn, informed the local ordinary, Bishop Juan de Zumarraga, of her request that a chapel be built in her honor. When Juan Diego unfurled his tilma, or cloak, a colorful image of Our Lady of Guadalupe was observed imprinted on it.
The inherent meaning of this apparition is little realized, however. Mary showed herself not just to Juan Diego, but to the entire people of Mexico—a land conquered by the Spaniards just a decade earlier. Historians agree that the vision of the Madonna helped to lay the foundation for a massive conversion to Catholicism on the part of the natives.
Mary brought unity to the various groups in Mexico during that era. For the diverse peoples and cultures in our neighbor to the south, she became a unifying factor as they marched forward in their bid to form a cohesive nation.
Today, Catholics of North, Central, and South America are linked, thanks to Our Lady of Guadalupe. This unity was made manifest by Pope Pius XII when, in 1945, he designated Our Lady of Guadalupe as Patroness of the Americas.
Currently, selected bishops, priests, consecrated religious, and laity are meeting as part of the Special Synod of Bishops for America. In the Synod's official Instrumentum laboris (working paper), several ways to renew the Church are offered: to use the media more effectively to communicate the Gospel message; to improve catechesis; to foster deeper respect for the local believers’ “popular piety” (devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe is specifically mentioned); to ensure that Church-sponsored education is authentically “Catholic.”
The goal of the bishops seems clear: to foster the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to each person living in the Americas, resulting in a more visible unity between Catholics of those nations. That the two continents afford a land of infinite variety is unmistakable: wealth and poverty, spiritual fervor and laxity coexist. It is apparent that the bishops of this territory believe it crucial that the unity symbolized by Our Lady of Guadalupe—the Mother of the banker in New York, the housewife in Panama, and the farmer in Chile—be more realized and practiced.
Undoubtedly, much work remains to accomplish this ambition, but the Virgin of Guadalupe offers her powerful intercession to this much-needed project. It is noteworthy that the bishops will close their gathering Dec. 12, the feast of our Lady of Guadalupe.
In saluting Our Lady of Guadalupe, Pope Pius XII—not unlike the bishops of the Americas today—said, “Hail, O Virgin of Guadalupe, Empress of America! Keep forever under your powerful patronage the purity and integrity of our holy faith on the entire American continent.”
Virgin of Guadalupe, mother of unity, pray for us!
Father Charles Mangan is a priest of the Diocese of Sioux Falls, S.D.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Charles Mangan ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: GUEST EDITORIAL DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:Two groups seem certain to be disappointed by Pope John Paul II's January 1998 pastoral visit to Cuba.
The first group includes those Latin American liberation theologians who have forgotten nothing and learned nothing since the 1980s. Their hope is that the Holy Father will repent of the “sins” he committed in Nicaragua in 1983, and will make Cuba the occasion to thunder against capitalist exploitation and the marginalization of the Latin American “periphery” by the North American “core.”
The Pope surely disapproves of exploitation. And he hopes that all of Latin America will be brought into what his 1991 social encyclical Centesimus Annus (On the 100th anniversary of Rerum Novarum) describes as a circle of productivity and exchange. But Karol Wojtyla has too much experience of communist regimes to buy Fidel Castro's claim that the catastrophe of Cuba's economy today is primarily the result of the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba. The embargo is a legitimate subject for reasonable debate. That Cuba's current poverty is primarily the result of idiotic communist economics (and the collapse of Cuba's former welfare paymaster, the Soviet Union) is not.
So the liberation theologians will be disappointed, once again.
As will those who are thinking about the Pope's January visit on the model of his epic pilgrimage to Poland in June 1979—nine days that changed the course of history and set in motion the dynamics that led to communism's fall. The Holy Father's trip to Cuba will most assuredly be dramatic, but Cuba in 1998 and Poland in 1979 are not analogous.
By 1979, the Polish regime had zero credibility, and a mass opposition movement, based on a vibrant Church that was the historic repository of national identity, was waiting to be ignited. in Cuba today, there is no widespread opposition movement (the regime's opponents having been murdered or exiled); 40 years of propaganda have created a situation in which the regime, despite its self-evident failures, still enjoys a measure of credibility; and the Church, while growing and becoming more assertive, is in a minority position. Put all this together, and the expectation that the Pope will launch a Cuban resistance movement similar to Solidarity seems certain to be frustrated.
What changes would mark the Pope's visit as a success?
The Cuban Church is eager to have the assistance of Latin American priests as it expands its ministry. The regime now denies visas to many such priests. Changing that would be one indicator of success.
The Cuban Church now receives humanitarian aid (such as medicines and foodstuffs) from abroad, but it is not permitted to distribute that aid; the regime reserves that for itself, for reasons of social control. A change of policy, such that the Church could both receive and distribute aid, would be a major improvement.
The Cuban Church has not had access to the mass media since Castro's revolution. The Church would like to make itself known to Cuban society through the media, and gaining such access during the papal visit and afterward would be a significant step forward.
Then there is the question of political prisoners—about 900 remain. The Church wants these people released and it wants the government to permit their families to emigrate, if they so choose. Emptying Castro's jails of political prisoners would mark another success for the papal visit.
No one has a clear window into the Cuban future, but the facts on the ground suggest that a long period of transition is likely. John Paul II's visit to Cuba is a pastoral pilgrimage, not a political tour. His goal is to preach the Gospel and to strengthen the Cuban Church so that it can be of service to Cuban society as it is reintegrated into the life of this hemisphere—however long that takes, and in whatever form that takes.
The analogy to Poland in 1979 works in one respect, as one tries to imagine the public impact of the Holy Father's Cuban journey. In Poland, the sheer experience of being part of a self-organizing, non-governmental, mass meeting had an incalculable impact on the psychology of a people who had been told for 40 years that they were incompetent to organize themselves. That, too, could happen in Cuba. And the rest, as they say, would be history.
George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----- TITLE: After the Apocalypse: Real Life Stories DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:Conceived Without Sin and Strangers and Sojourners are two novels which don't seem to have very much in common. But there's a similarity between them that goes beyond the fact that they are both 1997 releases in the fledgling Catholic fiction market. For one thing, both are the second novels of previously best-selling Catholic authors.
Both of the first novels (MacFarlane's Pierced By A Sword and O'Brien's Father Elijah) were apocalyptic fiction. Both of the second novels change to more realistic plots. And from the new forward of the recently-revised edition of Pierced By A Sword, it seems as though the two authors have become friends.
Strangers and Sojourners, although purportedly in the same series “Children of the Last Days,” is quite different from its predecessor, Father Elijah. Elijah was an adventure-suspense novel with Vatican plots, worldwide conspiracies, murders, intrigue, and drama. Strangers is a “bad sequel” in that its plot is not at all in the same vein. Folks who pick it up expecting the same fast-developing movement of Elijah will be disappointed.
That said, Strangers is a much better book than Elijah. Elijah was marred by some patchy plotting and abrupt swings in style while Strangers is far more consistent. The plot's “slow” pace fits O'Brien's semi-poetic style much better. And where Elijah tended to require serious suspension of belief, Strangers has the feel of real life at its grittiest.
The book starts out ominously with a seance atop the hill of the White Horse in England, where nineteenth-century mediums channel the spirit of Merlin in the presence of a terrified girl child. Despite this supernaturalist beginning, the book then descends to the plane of the ordinary and remains there for almost the entire story.
It is the story of Anne Ashton, the child of the first chapter, who grows into an atheistic freethinking writer whose ideals lead her first to the battlefields of World War I, and then to the bushlands of Canada. The story grows compelling after Anne marries the Irish mystical peasant-poet Stephen Delaney, whose beauty of physique and soul attract her, even though she doesn't understand them.
The book presents a moving account of a decade-long marriage, full of mutual distrust and attraction. Its bittersweet tragedy is about two people who refuse to continue growing in their relationship and what that costs them and their children. Intimacy is a lesson that takes a lifetime to learn. Strangers is almost a fictional meditation on the heart of the sacrament of marriage. It's a worthwhile read with an ending that will leave the reader poised for the next installment of the series.
Conceived Without Sin is written in the breezy contemporary style of the “beach novel.” It centers around the day-to-day life of an odd threesome—a Catholic recovering alcoholic UPS driver, a homely but talented computer entrepreneur who is an atheist, and an Italian girl stuck in a dead-end job. Buzz, Sam, and Donna become friends in an odd way and share movies, trips to the beach, and personal crises. As often happens in real life, the serious faith of Buzz and Donna doesn't apparently affect their successful unbelieving friend. He gets all the breaks, and they get all the suffering—or so it seems.
The small circle of friends widens to include Mark Johnson, an FBI man whose marriage is on the rocks, and Ellen James, a sultry blonde beauty from the right side of town. The plot meanders along for a while, then takes several unexpected and fast-driving twists and finishes with a riveting, tear-jerking climax.
Buzz, the overweight movie buff whose vocal Catholicism is the catalyst for a friendship in the first place, is a mixture of Chestertonian mystic ordinariness and Flannery O'Connor grit. He's seemingly overflowing with ebullient faith that provides all the answers, but his problems are the ones that too many people face today—divorce, addiction, and a heavy depression that doesn't seem to lift despite prayer and daily Mass. But Buzz's faith sustains him more than he himself even realizes, and the book shows that God is faithful even in failure.
Strangers and Conceived are two very different novels that will probably appeal to different kinds of people. Conceived is a quick and enjoyable read. Strangers is slower and meatier. But both books are fairly good in their genres. They demonstrate how much variety can be found even between writers who are co-religionists and good friends.
Regina Doman is based in Front Royal, Va.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Regina Doman ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: When God Inhabited the Literary Universe DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:“NOBODY ARGUES about God today,” Alfred Kazin observes in his latest book, God and the American Writer. “Among the intellectual leaders of American society today a deeply personal belief in God is tolerated as harmlessly personal, like a taste in food or loyalty to the Red Sox.”
Kazin (On Native Grounds) was the leading literary critic of the generation that retired about 20 years ago, and his learned overview of America's intellectual tradition seems beyond the reach of most present-day academics. Agiant when compared to the aggressively secularist, politically-correct pygmies that now dominate our elite campuses, he thinks it essential to understand the place of God in the imaginative life of our country even though he himself isn't in active practice of any particular faith.
Beginning with Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman, through T.S. Eliot and William Faulkner, God and the American Writer analyzes the personal struggles of a dozen of our greatest writers as they try to come to terms with the Almighty. Examining the specifics of these intense interior battles reminds one of the deeply Protestant nature of our culture. John Calvin is the great influence here, whether positive or negative, not St. Thomas Aquinas.
Kazin focuses on the Civil War and the debate over slavery as the defining moments of our moral and religious history.
“The Bible was still an essential personal resource for this generation of Americans,” he notes. “There had been great religious ‘awakenings’ before the Civil War but never afterward would Americans North and South feel that they had been living Scripture.” Both sides believed that God regularly intervened in their lives and sat in judgment on each individual creature's actions.
Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling book of the 19th century except for the Bible. This passionate novel made the often abstract, legalistic debate about slavery concrete in the person of her loving hero, Uncle Tom, who's killed for refusing to beat his fellow slaves.
Unlike most of the writers Kazin reviews, Stowe was a practicing Christian and conceived the book as part of her religious commitment. Its success made her the conscience of her time. As Abraham Lincoln put it, “This is the little lady who brought about the great big war.”
In his 1865 inaugural address Lincoln declared that he was speaking God's own truth when he characterized slavery as an offense against the Almighty and described the war as God's punishment of those who had profited from its evils.
Walt Whitman was obsessed with religion but changed its meaning in a way that would typify the modern era.
“He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came,” he proclaimed.
Our nation's history and God's plan were seen as intertwined. As president, Lincoln also felt himself responsible before God for how he guided the country in the resolution of this divisive social and moral issue.
This was the high point in our nation's consciousness of our collective relationship to God.
“The crass triumphalism in which the war ended for the North, plus the intoxication of riches, the emergence of a scientific culture, and the settling of the West, abetted the erosion of religious sentiment among writers and scholars,” Kazin observes.
The poet Walt Whitman was obsessed with religion but changed its meaning in a way that would typify the modern era. In Song of Myself, he proclaims: “As God comes a loving bedfellow and sleeps by my side all night and close on the peep of day.”
Whitman's primary emphasis, however, was on the divine that dwells within each of us. He saw humans as gods when they use this perception to recognize all things as one. His Passage to India argues that: “Nature and man shall be diffused no more. The true son of God shall absolutely fuse them.”
Whitman's religion was more pantheistic than Christian. He had little use for a personal God, the Church, or its teachings. Instead he exalted the writer as a kind of priest.
“Trinitas divine shall be gloriously accomplish'd and compacted by the true son of God, the poet….”
In effect, Whitman believed that poetry would rescue religion by replacing it. Like many American writers that followed, he had more faith in the regenerative power of unlimited personal freedom than in God.
T.S. Eliot is one of the few who swam against this tide. Although raised a Unitarian, he believed that one could not call oneself Christian unless one believed in the Incarnation. In Dry Salvages he wrote of this mystery: “Here the impossible union of spheres of existence is actual.”
An Anglican convert, Eliot also valued the Church as an institution and saw orthodoxy as a necessary moral guide in a time of increasing barbarism.
“The world is trying the experiment to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail … the faith must be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the world from suicide,” he wrote in Thoughts After Lambeth.
Kazin doesn't fully share Eliot's pessimistic intuitions of what lies ahead. Though he does suggest that the literary output of the last few generations has been less meaningful than that of its predecessors because it no longer considers our relationship with God a meaningful issue. Man wrestling alone with his problems in a universe entirely of his own creation is a pitiable spectacle, producing inevitably the cynicism and despair with which most contemporary artists and intellectuals seem to be afflicted.
John Prizer, the Register's arts & culture correspondent, is based in Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:Liberation Theology
I can appreciate someone (Letters, Nov. 2-8) being disconcerted by a seeming endorsement of liberation theology by the Father General of the Society of Jesus.
In the book Salt of the Earth, an interview with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger by Peter Seewald (Ignatius), the cardinal, having been asked to evaluate the way his Congregation dealt with liberation theology, says in part, “Today there is wide recognition that our instructions were necessary and went in the right direction. An outstanding example of the positive impulses that our instructions gave is the career of Gustavo Gutierrez, who is regarded as the creator of liberation theology. We entered into dialogue with him—which I in part also carried on personally—and came to an ever greater agreement. That helped us to understand him, and he, on the other hand, saw the one-sidedness of his work and then really developed it further in the direction of a suitable form of liberation theology that really had a future. Of course there are also points of conflict that couldn't be settled.”
Apparently there are various forms of liberation theology, some more acceptable than others.
Marie Hughes Santa Rosa, California
Catholicism on Campus
Regarding the Georgetown students press conference (photo Nov. 16-22), the alleged deficiency of classroom crucifixes prompting students to campaign for their placement in 60% of Georgetown University's classrooms should come as no surprise.
Georgetown has been preeminent in attempting to be indistinguishable from its secular counterparts and in doing so finding it necessary to be at least morally neutral. Case in point: In the early 1980s this nominally Catholic university announced that the sign of the cross would no longer be used in classes or at public events. The rationale was that so many students and faculty were not Catholic, that in respect for them specifically Catholic prayers should not be used. This capitulation to diversity is the possible root to the gradual degrading of the crucifix, the most significant sign of the Christian—Catholic faith.
Georgetown's Catholic identity was challenged in 1991 by the then newly formed Ignatian Society following university officials'decision in February to recognize G.U. Choice—an abortion-rights group— as a student club eligible for university benefits. Responsibility for maintaining and strengthening Catholic identity—of which religious symbols play a part—rests primarily with the university itself
Georgetown's chaplain is quoted as saying: “religious symbolism is a complex issue” as Georgetown is both “Catholic and interfaith.” How about Catholic or Interfaith. We can't have it both ways. Trying to do so puts us into the “lukewarm” mode that Jesus so strongly condemned.
Catholic universities can be surprisingly good places to lose one's faith; and elitists masquerading as egalitarians are supplanting objective reality with moral relativism. An external authority, such as the Church, is necessary to determine which institutions may legitimately call themselves Catholic.
If it's true that Catholic and other Church-based education is built around the central reality of God and true that it is increasingly difficult to recruit faculty with a solid grounding in Catholic teaching, then it seems even more relevant that the crucifix be present in these classrooms to remind us of Jesus'words: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself” (Jn 12, 32).
Aubert Lemrise
Peru, Illinois
Edith Stein
The article on the philosopher-saint, Edith Stein, (“The Lady in Dark Clothes Loved Philosophy,” Nov. 9-16) was the best I have read. It showed a depth of understanding the development of the searching mind of the Jewish philosopher.
This article should be put in the hands of our young people now attending secular colleges and universities. It would be a challenge to them to seek the truth instead of the fictions of the present time.
Father Victor Donovan CP West Hartford, Connecticut
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----------- TITLE: The Ripple Effect of a Turkey Lovingly Prepared DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations bring out the best gifts of most women. I remember how easy my mother made it look—cooking, baking, and shopping days and weeks in advance. She never complained about balancing care of children and the extra work involved in creating a feast.
Today that balancing act seems more arduous. Some women feel put upon, harassed and unappreciated. Others, who feel harried but basically happy, will pull together the ingredients of relatively glitch-free reunions of family and friends. This season raises with particular clarity the question of the importance of a woman's work within the family. Is it worth all the effort?
The planning, cooking, baking, and shopping can be in themselves useful and pleasurable activities that are also immediately beneficial. (My husband, Judge Bork, would be surprised to hear that shopping is the least bit “pleasurable.”) The motivation for preparing a family's traditional meal is more than just planning a party. Most of us do that all the time. But a woman with a Biblical outlook sees that, on these holidays especially, her connection with her family and friends is more than an arbitrary or sentimental matter. She is at the heart of the home—she is the heart of the home—by a divine arrangement of life.
Her lifegiving capacity for motherhood, whether she has children or not, has endowed her with a capacity for “nurturing,” which is the desire and the ability to attend to the needs of every individual person. The Pope calls this “the genius of women”—a felicitous phrase. We express this genius in thoughtfulness, a caring attitude of practical compassion. (Remembering who likes dark meat and who does not care for squash or cranberries.)
There is a tendency today to think that domestic tasks are mundane, a waste of time and energy when you could be doing something more “interesting” or “important.” Drudgery is thought an oppression. Lost is the idea of a woman's vocation and that the goal of all these efforts is to create an environment that enhances life. Modern culture sees women more as individuals with choices than as women who nurture life in all its aspects. For women who have forgotten their special “genius” this season must be a time of stress when it could be a time of genuine satisfaction with work well done.
When women add faith to attentiveness to the person, we have something of splendor. The woman who plans her Christmas list so as to mail to out of town relatives on time, is careful not to give grandmother the same gift again, considers the new interests of a teen-age nephew, and plans Thanksgiving dinner just the way the family wants it, is engaged in the self-giving love that brings life and joy to those around her. This is a creative act, permeated by grace and lasting good for the souls and bodies of the family. By considering the attitudes, feelings, and tastes of each person we make them feel loved and noticed. As the Book of Proverbs says, “Her children rise up and call her blessed.”
A woman who develops this attitude brings benefits to herself, her family, and society. She benefits by having a large scope for the expression of love. Her life is circular, like the spokes radiating outward from the hub of a wheel—reaching out to spouse, children, family, friends, and through them to society. She notices people and connects with them at home and in professional life. Blessed Edith Stein, the Carmelite who died at Auschwitz, called a woman's capacity to attend to the whole person a “maternal attitude” which suited her well for professions dealing directly with people such as education, medicine, and administration.
The family benefits by a general sense of well-being and some degree of harmony, even happiness. The spouse and children feel that they are noticed and affirmed, with all their individual strengths and weaknesses. In this environment, children grow and flourish, learning what it is to be a human person.
Even society benefits from the simple tasks of preparing for Thanksgiving and Christmas. This wider dimension of a woman's work may not be so apparent but it is very real. Families that have attentive mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and sisters will have an abundance of loving communication, imagination, and just plain fun often found in the simplest things. The family experiences first-hand the attitudes that make for cooperation, responsibility, self-control, and solidarity among citizens and countries.
So, as she sits down with the family to turkey and all the trimmings, wipes up one more spill, and listens to the recital of what Johnny got for Christmas, the woman of faith knows that there is much more at stake. Civilization has advanced a bit more, persons big and small have been loved, and there is a little more “culture of life.”
Mary Ellen Bork, a board member of the Catholic Campaign for America and the Institute for Religion in Democracy, is based in Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mary Ellen ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: The Ultimate Litmus Test DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:The death penalty movement recently rolled through Massachusetts with the momentum of a high-speed freight train.
Fueled by three gruesome and callous murders, the death penalty had a full head of steam as it roared through the legislature, passing both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Since each had passed different versions, the bill went to compromise committee. There it failed to pass when it returned to the House, ending in a tie and derailing ten feet in front of the station.
Massachusetts is considered one of the most liberal states in America. The struggle over the death penalty, and its continual refusal to disappear from American politics, underscores the complex currents that form the composite of American culture. In this particular chapter, the media and the Catholic Church occupy uncomfortable and undue roles, though each for different reasons.
In the case of the media, the struggle over the death penalty highlights not only the media's influence in social-political events, but their fundamental inability to grasp that influence. With the Catholic Church, the opposite has become true: despite clear Church teaching on capital punishment, Catholics at all levels choose vengeance over faith, outrage over evangelization.
A Crusade for Death
Ten-year-old Jeffrey Curley was walking home from a friend's house when he was lured into a car with promises of recovering the young boy's stolen bicycle. He was sexually abused, murdered, weighted and thrown into a river. His parents grieved day after agonizing day as first one river and then another was dredged to recover the body. (His confessed abductors could not remember accurately.)
The Curleys’ incomprehensible loss gripped parents across the state, and before long, the Curleys themselves became the rallying point for reinstating the death penalty in Massachusetts. Jeffrey's mother appeared on TV and in the newspapers to tell everyone that her lobbying for the death penalty was due to what Jeffrey would have wanted. Victimized and traumatized she was not only inconsolable, she was also untouchable: nobody bothered asking why a ten-year-old Catholic boy should wish for the death penalty.
The Curleys’ pastor, caught in a bind between administering to the grief-stricken parents, and upholding Church teaching, tried valiantly to assert the Church's position on capital punishment in a manner that would not seem to confront the Curleys. He was a fleeting glimpse in a media frenzy, a side-bar on a slow day, and a voice in the wilderness.
The Curleys’ private hell was willingly turned into a public pulpit by a sensation-seeking media which knows that tragedies ultimately increase profits by expanding the audience. When the Curleys began lobbying for the death penalty, the media was there to follow, seeing an opportunity to keep the Curley story in the headlines, and generating new headlines under the death penalty banner.
The Media: Follower or Leader?
What the media so fundamentally fails to comprehend (willingly or otherwise) is that they create the very venue for public opinion and pressure that they supposedly report. Ultimately, the Curleys speaking to this representative or that politician is of very little social scope—it is a meeting between a few individuals, conducted in an office behind a closed door. Under the guise of reporting such meetings, and opening those doors, the media becomes the means by which the scope of the event is broadened on a mass scale.
The pages of the press, and the images and sound-bites on the screen, generate, galvanize, and exert the public pressure that is supposedly only being reported. The media claim they are only reflecting the sentiments of the larger public, and thereby fail to acknowledge their role in creating a public out of basically isolated individuals who, without the media, would be so disconnected from each other, and so lacking in information as to be unable to create such a social entity as “public pressure.”
This is not to say that the media intentionally influence society. Indeed, the Boston Globe's coverage showed how little intentionality has to do with the manner in which the media exercise their influence.
A more or less liberal paper, the Globe's opposition to the death penalty was not difficult to see, despite sound efforts at “balance” and “objectivity”—the operative buzzwords of the secular press. In the end, however, the Globe did not so much persuade against the death penalty as it convinced people of its inevitability.
Day after day the Globe reported on the crushing momentum of the death penalty movement and the galvanizing effects of recent murders. The implied narrative that the Globe imposed on events insisted that no opposition could stop the public outcry for the death penalty and that nothing could get in the way of what Jeffrey Curley would have wanted. The narrative almost became social reality. The first house bill saw representative Donna FournierCuomo—personally opposed to the death penalty on moral grounds—bow to the “will of the people” and vote for its passage.
Indeed, in an ironic twist on media influence, the compromise bill failed when one law-maker changed his mind and voted against the death penalty. The reason he cited: the impact of another media event, the Louise Woodward au pair trial.
Catholic Convictions
The Catholic Church, conversely, wishes it could have exercised more influence in the process. As the death penalty bill went forward, Boston's Cardinal Law wrote a letter explaining the Church's teaching on capital punishment, and had it read at every parish in the archdiocese.
For several, the Church's teaching went unheeded as the Catholic acting-governor Paul Cellucci sought nothing more than to be seen as the man who delivered on restoring the death penalty to a state made famous for Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian immigrants who were executed in 1927.
The death penalty cuts across American Catholicism like no other issue, exposing the harmful ideological divisions that prevent dialogue and threaten unity. Liberal social-justice-oriented Catholics are staunch opponents of the death penalty. But they have been slow to embrace, for example, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger who has been busy ensuring that the Pope's position on the death penalty—a de facto opposition in modern societies—will be loud and clear. Likewise, the passionate energy that conservative lay Catholics usually express in living and defending Church teaching is strikingly silent in the Massachusetts struggle.
The Pope's teaching on capital punishment, however, is clear, despite the difficulty many have accepting it, and despite our unwillingness as a society to act on it. Like much of the Pope's teaching, it is sophisticated, subtle, and global. Aless practiced thinker could have simply concluded that capital punishment is always wrong, but that too easily assumes the social structures of modern cultures. The Pope also takes into consideration the existence, vitality, and viability of non-modern, tribal cultures and their social structures. In such cultures the ability of society to permanently remove harmful members from the community is severely compromised or completely nonexistent.
The Pope's teaching, therefore, prevents us from negatively judging those societies, more than it proscribes capital punishment for them. Further, it reaffirms the gospel value of protecting the weakest in the community, which is threatened when a society is fundamentally unable to remove violent individuals.
Capital Punishment & Faith
The absence of ardent lay support for Church teaching on the death penalty provides a fundamental opportunity to learn about faith and faith experiences. As individuals it is easy to succumb to the temptation of vengeance, or to believe that heinous murderers are animals not deserving of forgiveness. The Church, however, teaches us that it is precisely in the midst of such temptations that we must have faith in the message of the Gospels, the example of Jesus, and the teachings of the Church. An “eye for an eye” may make sense, but the Bible repeatedly asserts that the ways of man are not the ways of God. Further, the Church teaches us that following Christ does not allow us to deny the humanity of murderers, even though murderers themselves have denied the humanity of their victims.
The death penalty makes clear how difficult living an adult faith can be. There may well be no tangible, visible reward for following Church teaching with respect to capital punishment: crime may not go down, callous and perverted disregard for human life may continue, or even increase. Living an adult faith, however, is not about being compensated for doing the right thing or for making sacrifices. Living an adult faith is about acting on the message of the Gospels in the hope that doing so creates a ripple in the pond that may one day contribute to building the kingdom.
Capital punishment is the ultimate litmus test of our belief in the Church's consistent pro-life ethic. It is not so difficult to stand up for the unborn and the dying—each are so vulnerable. Standing up for the guilty, however, challenges the limits of our faith. Looking into the eyes of some killers it is easy to see an animal who deserves to be destroyed.
Church teaching, however, is aimed at getting us to see that this impulse is wrong: that no one forfeits their humanity completely, that none are beyond God's forgiveness and mercy. Moreover, the message of the Gospels is that we will never build the kingdom by giving into the temptation to take life. Precisely what we must have faith in is the transforming potential of offering the possibility of forgiveness to the most heinous.
Vincent Rocchio PhD, is assistant professor of communications at Bradford College in Bradford, Mass.
----- EXCERPT: It isn't so difficult to stand up for the unborn and the dying-both are so vulnerable. But what about the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes. Can we bring ourselves to spare their lives? ----- EXTENDED BODY: Vincent Rocchio ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: History Repeats Itself and Other Reasons to Revisit the Past DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:At a recent lecture on the Book of Revelation, a disappointed gentleman objected when I pleaded ignorance regarding whether these are the end times or not. I explained that control of the end times is a management decision. God is management and I am in sales. My role is to preach the Gospel, and live it. Our Lord will handle the concluding scene just fine without any attempts by me to direct things.
The disappointed and peeved gentleman continued, “But don't you think these are the worst times in history? How can things get any worse?”
At that point I realized that a wider historical perspective would benefit him, so I suggested that 1938-1944 was far more bleak because of Hitler, Tojo, and Stalin. Things would have to get far worse before these could be considered the worst times in history.
Since that lecture, I have continued to reflect on the importance of history. Learning from the past is a gift developed by human beings better than by any other animal. Not only can our minds remember more data than other animals, but they can research the past with a drive to understand it and an ability to sift its evidence that far outstrips the most clever primate. At the same time, humans forget much of the past and even choose to neglect much of what they know. Without this part of the process, how can a person learn to accommodate the new experiences that life affords?
The same process occurs within the Church. The nature of the liturgy is remembering the past: knowing the Sacred Scriptures, which record the history of God's relationship to Israel and the Church; celebrating the sacraments, whose actions and words recall the past. Church history records the saints, scoundrels, and turning points of the Christian past. However, our Christian ancestors’ assumptions and vocabulary are too frequently portrayed as the model of backwardness, patriarchy, closed-mindedness, triumphalism, and other trappings.
The medieval Church is particularly the target of such criticism because of the Inquisition, witch trials, Thomism, and so on. This negative view of Church history often enough has its roots in a belief in social evolution and a triumphalism of the present. If evolution is true, then the present state of society must be our highest point to date.
The task for such a believer is to read the signs of the times for cultural advancement and further its development on the cutting edge of evolution. Of course, such a focus on the signs of the times may induce the reader to accept them at face value and buy whatever the signs are selling. That is where history helps.
Christian history offers a vantage point from which to observe the present precisely because it suggests premises different from modernity. As fish in water who are unaware of their liquid environment until they are caught and pulled into the air, modern people of every age are unable to assess their times without examining the past. Everyone can learn a variety of lessons from the past, lessons that might even correct the assumptions of the present.
First, historical research might show that commonplace claims about the alleged folly of the past are not even factual. Medieval theologians did not argue about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, as a recent science column in The New York Times alleged. This was a reductio ad absurdvm argument advanced by Protestant reformers who were critical of the scholastics.
The Inquisition did not execute 9 million women as witches just to keep control of women, as certain feminists allege; Europe had a population of 25 million people, half of whom were men. The execution of three-quarters of the women, with no appreciable decline in the rest of the population, would be impossible. These and many other truisms can be ferreted out and corrected by historical research.
A second use for historical research is to learn from the great Christians of the past. The saints are marvelous models of the love of God and neighbor, of commitment to the truth of the faith, and of heroism in the face of sometimes horrifying adversity. Furthermore, well-written lives of the saints are excellent and enjoyable resources for learning about Church history.
Finally, knowledge of the history of the Church is an antidote to the concern of the gentleman at my lecture on Revelation. Given today's scandals, it may be cheering to know that St. Peter Canisius wrote to St. Ignatius of Loyola that he felt blessed to find even one or two priests in any Rhineland city who were not living in open concubinage. Given the vocation shortage today, we might find courage to realize that it is the third such decline in vocations—the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution were also periods of vocation decline.
Perhaps more importantly, it is important to know that God our Lord raised up saints like Ignatius of Loyola, Peter Canisius, Philip Neri, Teresa of Avila, and a host of others at the time of the Reformation. After the French Revolution, hundreds of new orders of men and women began. Not only did they replace the lost vocations, but they set out upon the Church's greatest period of foreign mission work and conversion of nations.
Instead of despairing for our times, let us look to the past, pay attention to God's faithfulness in granting new saints in every age, and ask God to use us for his work here and now.
Jesuit Father Mitch Pacwa is a noted writer and speaker on Scripture, the New Age, and other topics.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mitch Pacwa ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: At Institute, Prayer Counts as Much as Intellectual Rigor DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:SOMETHING WAS MISSING for Tim Vineyard. A successful Dallas lawyer, husband and father, Vineyard nevertheless felt a void in his life. That is, until he found a unique theology program at the University of Dallas that made him realize what he'd been looking for.
A lifelong Catholic, Vineyard had received standard religious studies as a child and had always attended Mass. But, like most Catholics, his education in the faith stopped there. Pursuing his master's degree at the Institute for Religious and Pastoral Studies at the Irving, Texas, “was like unlocking a treasure for me,” he said.
“I've gained a tremendous appreciation for the Roman Catholic Church,” he said. “There's a historic basis for what it says and believes and there were a lot of people involved in helping to formulate Church doctrine, and I think that was inspired. It makes a lot of sense to me now.”
Founded in 1987, the institute combines the study of orthodox Catholic theology with spiritual formation. It has graduated 140 students, most of them lay people. Currently there are 170 students in the program, including campuses in San Diego, Portland, Ore., Tulsa, Okla., Minneapolis/St. Paul, Orlando, and Gulfport, Miss. The program's expansion has been largely a response to diocesan requests, according to Douglas Bushman, the director of the program.
The demand is hardly surprising, in view of the fact that the number of lay ministers serving Catholic parishes has risen to more than 25,000—up 5,000 from just six years ago. That figure was reported to the U.S. bishops at their annual meeting in Washington, D.C., Nov. 9 by Msgr. Philip Murnion, director of the New York-based National Pastoral Life Research Center. While that is undoubtedly related to the declining vocations to the priesthood and religious life, those at the University of Dallas institute say the vocation shortage is irrelevant to the need for the laity to become educated in the faith.
“Even if we had all of the priests we could use, in order to respond to what the Second Vatican Council calls the laity to, we would still need as many people, if not more, getting Catholic education as adults,” said Marcellino D'Ambrosio, assistant professor of pastoral theology.
Most of the students in the University of Dallas program work for the Church in some capacity. It is intended to train lay people for leadership positions in their parishes, parochial schools, or dioceses, Bushman said.
Students tend to be principals, directors of religious education, youth ministers, or involved in some other parish ministry. Many work in diocesan offices of social ministry or on liturgical committees. A number even serve in hospital chaplain offices.
“You can name it, we've got a student,” Bushman said. The student body, which is 62% female, ranges in age from 23 to the mid-70s and spans every economic class, Bushman said. Most of the students work full-time and have families, so courses are offered one weekend a month over a 10-month period. Students must complete 36 credit hours to graduate, which usually takes three years.
A key facet of the program (consistent with the rest of the university philosophy) is the study of primary orthodox sources, such as the Bible, the writings of Pope John Paul II, as well as the early fathers of the Church, the documents of Vatican Council II, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the Code of Canon Law.
“Since Catholic tradition is embodied in these documents, what better way of forming our students than in light of the texts themselves, so they can make judgments for themselves,” Bushman said. “We give them a working knowledge of Catholic tradition so they can bring that knowledge to bear in the real pastoral challenges they face.
“That's why there's a real strong emphasis on spiritual formation. The fundamental service that everyone is called to make in the Church is a life of holiness. There's nothing more important to know than what holiness is, how people become holy and what the signs of authentic holiness are.”
That spiritual dimension, according to D'Ambrosio, is another distinguishing characteristic of the program.
“Prayer and a relationship with the Lord come first,” the professor said. “Everything we do is based in prayer. The spirit of our theology is not corrosive to faith. Many people have found in studying academic theology that their faith level has been lowered, and that's unfortunate.”
This could be true, D'Ambrosio adds, even in orthodox theology because of the tendency to over-intellectualize faith and “relating to God merely through abstractions and ideas.”
“Our courses,” he said, “are integrated with a spirit of prayer and oriented toward growth in holiness.”
D'Ambrosio, who believes that the Church up until now has not sufficiently focused its energy on adult religious education, said that understanding that the institute is one of “pastoral theology” is important to understanding its mission. The courses are taught with a pastoral perspective, he explained, geared at answering “the real questions that people are asking in the parishes of America.”
He added, “What people are getting is intellectually substantial but everything is meant to have a practical application.”
Bushman noted the importance of providing people in parish leadership with a strong grounding in the truths of the faith. “We believe that doctrine makes a difference,” he said. “The source and light for effective pastoral action can be found in the doctrine of Christ.”
It has made a difference for Tim Vineyard. When he entered the program, he said, “I felt like I had some holes in my knowledge of the Catholic faith.”
Now he added, he has a good understanding of what Church doctrine is and how it is formulated, as well as a better understanding of the Catechism, the concept of the Trinity, the liturgy, and the Old Testament. With his new-found knowledge he hopes to soon teach an adult education course in his parish.
“It's quite a commitment but it sure is worth it when it's done,” he said.
Dennis Poust, the Register's National Affairs Correspondent, is based in Austin, Texas.
----- EXCERPT: Texas-based program has satellite campuses across the nation ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dennis Poust ----- KEYWORDS: Education ----- TITLE: In Contemplative Immersion, a Reckoning With the God of Revelation DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:Imagine a study group in your diocese informally discussing saints. Someone will probably mention Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, or another of the saints known for having profoundly deep experiences of God.
Murmurs of admiration would be expressed, but before long and almost for sure someone will remark, “God doesn't give this depth of prayer to everyone—he gives his gifts as he chooses and to whom he chooses. And he has not given mystical prayer to me.”
This, of course, seems to take the speaker—and the many who would agree with his analysis—off the hook. Almost everyone in the pews on Sunday morning assumes without question that a deep contemplative prayer life is not meant for them. In doing so, however, they are not reckoning with the real God of revelation.
God is radical, but not in the sense of novelty for novelty's sake. He is tender and loving, no doubt, but he is always total in his commands and invitations. I have never found a single text in Scripture where he operates in fractions. He always pays us the compliment of asking for everything. The greatest commandment is a whole love for God, emphasized four times in one sentence (Lk 10, 27). We are to be completely— not just mostly—detached from selfish clingings. We are to be perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect. In community—whether in marriage or rectory or convent—we are to be of one mind, not simply polite, cordial, and friendly (Lk 14, 33; Mt 5, 48; Jn 17, 23).
Prayer, likewise, is to be total. Regularity and fidelity are fine, but they are not enough. Our communion with the indwelling Trinity is to become a deep immersion—so deep that we are to taste and experience the divine goodness. This is no mere emotion. Our hearts and our flesh are to tingle and thrill in absorptions that he gives when we are purified sufficiently. Again, no simple self-induced sentiment. The eye of our mind is to be “always on the Lord,” (Ps 25) a depth of prayer that can be received only from him. These thoughts and others like them are called, in Psalm 27, the “one thing,” that is, the most important activity in anyone's life.
This, of course, will make sense to anyone who takes theism seriously. Even dry and difficult purifying contemplation is a burning pursuit, nothing halfhearted. That is, the God of revelation has nothing to do with the wimpy idea that deep experiences of him are for a select few only. His biblical word is addressed to everyone. And the Church's liturgy places that word on all lips.
A deep contemplative prayer life is the quenching of our endless thirst here on earth, and most completely in the beatific vision in risen body hereafter.
The whole Catholic theological tradition—with the exception of a small group a few centuries ago—from patristic literature through medieval giants such as Sts. Bernard, Bonaventure, and Thomas, up to the best we have on the subject of contemplation, Sts. Teresa and John of the Cross, are of the same mind: everyone, in all states of life, is called to the heights of contemplative prayer. Vatican Council II speaks of this prayer approximately 80 times in its documents—surely the Holy Spirit is making a point. Four of those times deep mystical prayer is clearly assumed to be meant for everyone.
Last week we considered our human thirst, our profound need for the infinite, the divine invitation to come and drink from the Fountain. The alternative is, we noted, an inevitable idol worship, for everyone must kneel to something; everyone does bend the knee to something or someone. Adeep contemplative prayer life is the quenching of our endless thirst here on earth, and most completely in the beatific vision in risen body hereafter. This solution to our human hungers is intrinsically wrapped up in the much discussed universal call to holiness so underlined in our last ecumenical council. This we shall discuss in our last two articles.
For now we shall briefly sketch a few responses to an obvious question: What is the relevance of contemplation for ordinary lay men and women? First of all, deep prayer prompts us to give up gladly our petty clingings that prevent us from living the Gospel totally, for people in love happily surrender anything that impedes closeness to the beloved. Hence, the contemplative person gradually learns to put himself last, grinds no axes, minds his own business, rises above petty annoyances, sheds vanity, lives frugally, and loves warmly.
Deepening prayer bestows a fresh appreciation for and enjoyment of the splendors of creation, so that contemplatives become much more sensitive to beauty, both created and uncreated. The saint enjoys the world far more than the sinner—even though the latter thinks the situation to be quite the opposite.
Christic contemplation feeds our deepest hungers for truth, love, joy, beauty and celebration, and thus it enriches the person even to the point of heroic love, which we'll address next week. Needless to say, prayerful depth gives us something to say to the world that good people hunger for and seldom hear. Apostolic effectiveness profoundly increases as does selfless love in marriage, convent, and rectory.
As icing on the cake, contemplative immersion in the Trinity slowly brings about a happiness that cannot be described. If anyone thinks I am exaggerating, let him read the lives of the saints. Better yet, let him become one.
Marist Father Thomas Dubay is a well-known author and lecturer.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Thomas Dubay SM ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- ITLE: A Fairy Tale for Kooky Adults DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:THE LOSS OF a loved one can upend a person's emotional life and make him or her susceptible to all kinds of psychological manipulation. Most English families during World War I had at least one member die in the trenches, and many became prey to the claims of various spiritualists who promised direct communication with the dead.
Fairy Tale: A True Story is set in 1917 in London and Yorkshire and based on actual events attributable in part to the unstable cultural climate created by the war's horrors. Ten-year-old Frances Griffith (Elizabeth Earl) has recently arrived in England from Africa. Her mother passed away several years earlier, and her father, serving with the British army in France, has been officially declared “missing,” which the young girl takes to mean “presumed dead.”
At London's Duke of York Theatre, Frances is able to escape her troubles by watching a production of Peter Pan, and when the play's hero asks, “Do you believe in fairies,” all the children yell back, “Yes.” Then Peter magically flies across the stage. Frances is impressed.
She is currently living in the country with her Aunt Polly Wright (Phoebe Nicholls), Polly's husband Arthur (Paul McGann) and their 12-year-old daughter Elsie (Florence Hoath). This warm, welcoming family has recently lost to illness their young son, Joseph, and Polly seems inconsolable.
Elsie shares with Frances her dead brother's secret: that there are fairies living in the brook near their house. The younger girl is only too ready to believe. The cousins sneak off and discover tiny creatures in medieval costumes who transport themselves by flapping their delicate, white wings.
The young girls secretly borrow a camera belonging to Elsie's father and snap pictures of the fairies. When he develops the photographs, the tiny creatures are clearly visible in them, presenting incontrovertible evidence of their existence.
Still overwhelmed with grief, Elsie's mother approaches the then-popular Theosophical Society in hopes of contacting her dead son. After she shows the photos of the fairies to the group's leader, Edward Gardner (Bill Nighy), however, he sees an opportunity to advance his cause.
Theosophists believe in several forms of spirit life with which they claim humans can communicate. These include fairies and angels. If the existence of one species of ethereal being can be scientifically proven, the public will be more likely to buy the rest of their message.
The bumbling Gardner takes the girls’ proof of the theosophists’ version of the spirit world to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Peter O'Toole), who discarded the rationalism of his famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, for the kooky world of mediums and clairvoyants after the death of his own son at the front. The celebrated author accepts the girls’ photos as authentic. “Strand” magazine publishes his account of their findings, and even though false names are used, the true identities of the principals are uncovered. The early-20th century equivalent of a media circus soon congregates on the Wrights’ doorstep.
The famous magician and contortionist, Harry Houdini (Harvey Keitel), is a long-time friend of Conan Doyle. After investigating the girls’ claims, he remains skeptical, but most of the public eventually sides with Conan Doyle.
Director Charles Sturridge (Where Angels Fear to Tread) and screenwriter Ernie Contreras establish the actual existence of the fairies early on and never waver. The audience is meant to believe in them as completely as the girls do. But there is one problem. The whole thing is false. Some 60 years after the incident the real-life Frances and Elsie admitted they had made it all up. The fairies never existed.
The movie takes an established fantasy genre and pushes it in a direction sympathetic to New Age thinking.
Such tampering with facts is common in movie making, particularly in subjects dealing with fantasy. But why do the filmmakers insist on the authenticity of the fairies, even to the point of labeling it a “true story” in the title? Much of the movie plays like a goofy commercial for theosophy. Its belief in fairies is pitted against Houdini's skepticism, and the audience winds up rooting for the theosophists.
The Theosophical Society was founded in 1875 by Madame Helena Blavatsy who propagated a seven-level hierarchy of beings and claimed contact with spiritual guides from all religions throughout the ages. Her group also pursued much pseudo-scientific examination of “thoughtforms,” “the mental body,” “astral projection,” “auras” and other such occult phenomena.
In 1884 two members of Blavatsky's inner circle claimed they conspired with her to fake communications with the spirit world, but this seemed to have had little effect on the group's popularity. In addition to Conan Doyle, its famous followers included the British Prime Minister William Gladstone, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Thomas Edison, and U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace.
Even though theosophy's popularity has declined in the 80 years since the original incident, its thinking has had an important influence on many contemporary practitioners of New Age spirituality, especially those who believe in channeling.
“Some entities identified by theosophists have attained the status of public-domain spirits,” notes New Age expert Michael Brown—and New Age adherents pride themselves on communicating with them. Theosophist ideas about auras and other occult notions are also currently widespread.
It would be unreasonable and slightly paranoid to suspect the makers of Fairy Tale: A True Story of being party to a theosophist or New Age conspiracy. The decision to present a well-documented hoax as absolute truth is probably nothing more than an error in artistic judgment. Nevertheless, the movie does take an established fantasy genre and push it in a direction sympathetic to New Age thinking. This creative choice is most likely the result of an unconscious sympathy with certain fashionable cultural trends rather than an attempt to push a specific spiritual message. But if the filmmakers had been more honest about the girls’ fabrications, the movie would have become a cautionary tale about the exploitation of grieving families by spiritualists instead of a children's story about the magic of fairies.
There are, no doubt, many excellent, harmless tales about tiny creatures with wings that would suitable for children today, but because of its intellectual dishonesty, Fairy Tale: A True Story isn't one of them.
The USCC classification of Fairy Tale: A True Story is A-II, adults and adolescents. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is PG.
John Prizer, the Register's art & culture correspondent, is based in Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: The not-so-innocent story of little winged creatures in Post-WWI England ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----- TITLE: Film Clips DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:Puerile comedy in which British comic Rowan Atkinson plays a bumbling British museum guard entrusted to deliver a priceless painting to a Los Angeles gallery—with predictable results. Directed by Mel Smith, the slapstick antics of Atkinson's nearly wordless character occasionally amuse, but usually fall flat. Brief drunkenness, nude pin-up photo, some toilet humor, and a streak of profanity. The USCC classification is AIII. The film is rated PG-13.
Updated and uninspired remake of 1973's The Day of the Jackal this time around teams FBI agent Sidney Poitier with temporarily paroled IRA gunman Richard Gere to prevent a major assassination by a notorious terrorist (Bruce Willis). As directed by Michael Caton-Jones, the action formula moves efficiently forward but never achieves the level of gripping suspense of its predecessor. Some gory violence, intermittent rough language, and occasional profanity. The USCC classification is A-IV. The film is rated R.
When a rural Canadian town is devastated by a tragic schoolbus accident, a big-city lawyer (Ian Holm) arrives to represent those whose children were killed or injured, but his pursuit of the facts in the case comes to divide the community until the testimony of a teen (Sarah Polley) injured in the accident destroys the basis of the lawyer's suit. Writer-director Atom Egoyan parallels the lawyer's own sense of loss over his drug-addicted daughter with the bereavement of the town's residents and their tangled relationships with their children and each other as the community struggles to bring closure to their grief. Stylized violence, sexual situations, brief nudity, and occasional rough language. The USCC classification is A-III. The film is rated R.
Mindless sci-fi fantasy about teen-age recruits (notably Casper Van Dien and Denise Richards) fighting to save Earth and their militaristic society from an invasion of giant bugs. Directed by Paul Verhoevan, the sophomoric story of teen romance and military bloodlust is a tiresome special-effects bore. Excessive violence, a sexual encounter, nudity, coarse language, and a sexual expletive. The USCC classification is O. The film is rated R.
Lovely rendering of Henry James's 1902 novel in which a young Englishwoman (Helena Bonham Carter) urges her impoverished lover (Linus Roache) to court the dying American heiress (Alison Elliott) they have befriended in hopes she will leave him her fortune. Under Iain Softley's astute direction, the myriad ways of the human heart delicately unfold in this fine character study. A few sexual encounters and brief nudity. The USCC classification is A-III. The film is rated R.
Appealing animated musical about the czar's youngest daughter (voice of Meg Ryan) who survives the Bolshevik Revolution to grow up in an orphanage with only faint memories of her family, then meets a handsome con man (voice of John Cusack) who takes her to Paris where her one surviving relative lives. Directors Don Bluth and Gary Goldman turn history into a fairy tale with the enchantment of lush animation and spirited musical numbers. The USCC classification is A-I. The film is rated G.
Grim sci-fi sequel finds Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) revived aboard a spaceship and teamed with a mysterious stranger (Winona Ryder) to rid the vehicle of rampaging aliens. Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet's mildly suspenseful thriller uses the stale aliens-on-the-loose premise mainly for grotesque combinations of incubating monsters grafted onto deformed human body parts. Recurring gory violence, some profanity, and frequent rough language. The USCC classification is A-III. The film is rated R.
Weak remake of 1961's The Absent-Minded Professor has a distracted professor (Robin Williams) leaving his college president bride (Marcia Gay Harden) at the altar while inventing flying rubber to save their debt-ridden college. Director Les Mayfield flubs it with an excess of jokey special effects at the expense of story and characterization. Frequent slapstick violence and fleeting sexual innuendo. The USCC is A-II. The film is rated PG.
----- EXCERPT: A sampling of capsule reviews of movies from the U.S. Catholic Conference (USCC) Office for Film and Broadcasting: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----- TITLE: Christian Music without the ClichÈs DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:JARS OF CLAY aren't exactly an overnight sensation, but the band's four Gen-X members come close: Their 1995 self-titled debut has sold 1.5 million copies, the best-selling debut in Christian music history.
“It's always been one surprise after another,” says Dan Haseltine, singer and lyricist for the band, whose new CD, Much Afraid, was released in September and has already been certified gold for sales exceeding 500,000 copies.
“We started out in college writing songs basically for us and a few of our friends,” he says. “Now we're starting to do international touring in Singapore, Australia, and Japan. We're kind of going, ‘Whoa!’ We never expected our music to get beyond the four walls of our dorm room.”
But things have gone far beyond Greenville College in Illinois, where three of the four Jars members majored in contemporary Christian music before their ship came in.
Last year they performed 300 concert dates, including a few as the opening act for rock superstar Sting; Flood, the break-out single from their first CD, was in regular rotation on cable music stations MTV and VH-1. Their version of David Bowie's Heroes played while the final credits ran on last year's action flick Long Kiss Good-bye. And they've received generally positive coverage from secular publications like Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, and Spin.
The band's vast appeal may be because the Christianity espoused in Much Afraid isn't the triumphalistic, victorious variety heard in most modern Christian music. Instead, the CD, which is named after the main character in Hannah Hurnard's 1955 allegory, Hinds Feet on High Places, portrays believers as weak and vulnerable.
Songs like Frail and Weighed Down help explain why the band took its name from the Apostle Paul's Second Letter to the Corinthians: “We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us,” wrote Paul.
“We're trying to deal realistically with what people are going through in society today,” says Haseltine.
“There is that triumph where Jesus did rise from the dead and conquered death and sin. So there is triumph there. But in the world we live in, all that a lot of people hear about is triumph, and that you become a Christian and all your problems are solved. That's very far from the truth.
“We try to paint the other picture. Humanity is a frail thing. There are a lot of heartbreaks and different things you encounter. In the midst of that, you can find hope. But that doesn't mean you won't have struggles.”
Also contributing to the success of Jars of Clay are memorable melodies, tight vocal harmonies, and a creative mix of folk, pop, and alternative rock elements. And on Much Afraid, part of which was recorded in London, they add layers of Beatles-style arrangements to the mix.
“Steve, our guitarist, is a Beatles fanatic,” says Haseltine. “Plus, there's kind of a resurgence of British pop … and I'm sure that's had an influence on our writing.”
But most intriguing is Jars's win-some way of expressing their faith without clichÈs or inside-the-Bible-beltway lingo.
“The topics we deal with are universal in many ways,” says Haseltine. “And we're not only singing to Christians, so why would I want to write a song that uses all this language that only Christians would understand? That would be shooting ourselves in the foot.”
But he's quick to add the band has no “agenda.”
“An artist spends most of life in a prison tainted by his experience. Ours is tainted by our experience of being in church and being Christian. Hopefully, people who hear us are going to go, ‘Wow! That was a good song!’ And we hope some people get some hope out of our music. Anything else is great.”
Jars's mix of conviction and creativity also has endeared them to believers who have otherwise turned a deaf ear to most Christian music. Nina Williams, a spokeswoman for the band's Nashville-based Essential label, estimates that two-thirds of the band's sales are in Christian retail outlets.
Meanwhile Amy Grant, the pioneering Christian singer who single-handedly took contemporary Christian music out of the gospel ghetto, sells the majority of her albums in mainstream outlets.
Grant's pop-folk Behind the Eyes, the 15th and latest CD in her 20-year, 20 million sales career, was released about the same time as Jars’ Much Afraid. But Behind the Eyes doesn't mention Jesus, and has consistently outsold Much Afraid in mainstream stores. Jars of Clay, who sing about Jesus with a capital “J,” out-sell Grant in Christian bookstores.
Like Grant, the members of Jars of Clay have experienced the loneliness that comes from building bridges to those outside Christian circles. For example, one Christian fan posted this panicked message at the band's web site (www.jarsofclay.com): “I have heard a rumor that Jars of Clay has played in venues where alcohol and drugs have been abundant. Is this true? Please, someone, confirm/deny this story!”
The band also has heard from angry non-believers who bought a Jars CD and were upset that something they thought was so cool turned out to be, gulp, Christian!
Says Haseltine, “A lot of agendas get thrown at a band when you call it Christian.”
Steve Rabey writes for Religion News Service.
----- EXCERPT: Conviction and creativity win followers for Jars of Clay ----- EXTENDED BODY: Steve Rabey ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Liturgical Art Is a Sacred Business DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:“OH, WOW” is a common reaction for first-time visitors to the chapel of the Benedictine Sisters at St. Scholastica Priory in Chicago. A few years ago, it was more like “Oh, dear.”
The chapel's frescoes, painted in 1938, were cracked and fading. The cluttered room was haphazardly designed. And at least one sister turned an ankle stepping down one of the three levels in the chapel.
Enter artist Joseph Ramirez, who studied at the prestigious School of the Art Institute in Chicago, toured Europe filling notebooks with sketches of inspiring Church art, and dedicated himself to restoring “beauty and grandeur” to liturgical art. Ramirez and a colleague spent nearly five years restoring the chapel's frescoes after luckily finding cans of the original paint, soldered shut in the basement since 1950. Ramirez also made an altar and tabernacle, designed a chair (the Benedictines stained and varnished 200 of them for the chapel), and redesigned the chapel's floor plan.
No more turned ankles, no more sensory overload, no more hapless design. And, after “Oh, wow,” the impulse is to surrender to prayer and peace. Religious art has done its job.
“It's very peaceful,” says Sister Rita Nowak, who headed the chapel restoration. “Before it was so busy you didn't know where to rest your eyes.”
But churches or chapels as beautiful as St. Scholastica are uncommon. Too often, art inside churches and chapels is second-rate. Communities of believers are settling for substandard statues, paintings, altars, tabernacles, crucifixes, and lights.
The principles of liturgical art that should guide churches are found in Environment and Art in Catholic Worship, approved by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in 1978. The document stresses quality and appropriateness. “Quality means love and care in the making of something, honesty and genuineness with any materials used, and the artist's special gifts in producing a harmonious whole, a well-crafted work,” the document says. Appropriateness means art that bears the weight of mystery, awe, reverence and wonder of the liturgy. And it means art that serves the liturgy.
Execution of the document's principles has been “uneven,” said Jesuit Father Jerry Overbeck, the university liturgist at Loyola University of Chicago, who also teaches the art of liturgy.
Churches make mistakes of appropriateness. The chair of the priest, meant to be in a presiding position, is sometimes too remote or too dominating. Or the baptismal font is not located in an area that invites full congregational participation.
Sometimes churches fail in terms of quality by choosing art that does not blend in. Or they opt for an ornate look, deciding upon inexpensive art that looks cheap or creates a sense of clutter through poor design. Other churches, trying for simplicity, end up with plainness.
The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, a 1963 Vatican II document, said that the objective of sacred art is “that all things set apart for use in divine worship should be truly worthy, becoming, and beautiful, signs and symbols of heavenly realities.” But liturgical art often is a sign of human imperfection, a symbol of unresolved tensions within a parish.
Jesuit Father Eugene Geinzer, a sculptor and architect who chairs the fine arts department at Loyola University of Chicago, says: “Most parishes are torn between the authenticity of the original liturgical space and the current requirements of good liturgy.”
Sometimes it's a matter of long-time parishioners resisting any change to the church. Or a pastor may be reluctant to completely modernize because a major art piece was donated by a family still in the parish. Also to blame is the tendency of parishes to make decisions by committees, whose members may not have the artistic experience or ability to find the best art for their needs.
Religious sensibilities have changed, too. Call it the “McDonaldization” factor, says Father Geinzer. Paradoxically, Americans, who worship individualism, make choices that tend to be bland and derivative. Inspiring art is bypassed in favor of the tried and true—and often uninspiring.
The secular culture of the United States is not conducive to brilliant religious art, said Father Overbeck. “Our sensibilities don't reflect a focus on God. We don't bump into God very often in our culture,” he said. “Nike says image is everything. That's the antithesis of the Christian message.”
Within parishes, factions competing along gender, race, and ideological lines also undermine liturgical art. And then there is the cost factor. First-class sacred art can carry a heavy price tag. Many parishes, embarking on a church project, hear the words from Scripture: “This money could have been used for the poor.”
Even proponents of the highest quality liturgical art concede there is no pat answer to the money question. “I've been struck by the beauty of churches done simply and elegantly, not ostentatiously,” says Father Geinzer. “These churches are very clear and pure, prayerful and direct.”
The Benedictine sisters in Chicago kept costs down by doing some of the work themselves, such as rehanging the chapel doors and framing and mounting the stations of the cross. An anonymous donor paid for the restoration of the frescoes. The sisters themselves thoroughly discussed the money issue.
“A lot of people don't realize what good art does for the soul,” says Sister Nowak. “I think it's [more] important to have two good works of art that cost quite a bit than to have lots of mediocre stuff.”
The importance of excellent sacred art is best explained by metaphor, says Father Geinzer. “If you want to express your love for your wife, what's important is the quality of the message—the words you use, the gifts you give her,” he says. Or if you're giving a citation to a student for a great performance, what's important is the quality of the paper. The quality of the material indicates the quality of the communication. “I say to my students: ‘Faith has to have a face.’”
Ramirez has been putting a better face on chapels and churches since 1988, when he founded Axis Mundi art studio. He works with six local and five international artisans, including woodworkers, silversmiths and painters.
Being a liturgical artist is more than a job for Ramirez. He reads theology and spends time at a monastery in the desert in New Mexico. He has deepened his own spirituality while creating liturgical art, he says.
While Ramirez restored the Benedictine chapel, the sisters continued to use it, singing their prayers as he perched above on his scaffold. The sisters befriended him, and he joined them in their dining room for meals. Environment and Art in Catholic Worship calls for “winning back to the service of the Church professional people whose places have long since been taken by ‘commercial'producers, or volunteers who do not have the appropriate qualifications.” Count Ramirez as one who has been won back. He says he longs for a return to the days when the finest art was religious art, and he sees his studio as emulating the Renaissance and Medieval workshops that produced great Church art.
Jay Copp is based in Chicago.
----- EXCERPT: Chicago artist Joe Ramirez knows image isn't everything, but he understands that great art leads to great worship ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jay Copp ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----- TITLE: The Perfect Place for Our Lady DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:With the town of Bethlehem next door and the community of Nazareth only a short distance away, the city of Allentown, Pa., seems an appropriate home for the National Shrine Centre of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mother of the Americas.
More than 40 dioceses applied to have this memorial chapel within their boundaries, but March 19, 1974, the feast of St. Joseph, the honor went to the relatively new Allentown diocese. The shrine was established in the Church of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, approximately 2,500 miles from the basilica in Mexico City where Juan Diego's tilma is displayed.
Allentown sits right at the crossroads of several major highways leading to each compass point. It's easily reached from Philadelphia by Route 309 to Route 22E, or from New York City via Route 95 to 78 to 22W. Both are less than a 100-mile drive. (Different exits from both directions lead to Tilghman Street. The shrine is located just off Tilghman, on Ridge Avenue.) But there is more to the story of the National Shrine Centre of Our Lady of Guadalupe than easy accessibility. Many threads weave together to form a strong picture of the shrine's presence here.
When Mary appeared to Juan Diego in 1531, no formal country boundaries had yet been established.
Mary told Juan Diego that she was his mother, the mother of all who lived united in this land, and the mother of all mankind. When the Allentown church was dedicated in 1857, recent European immigrants of many nationalities united in worship at Immaculate Conception because it was the first and only Catholic church in the city. In fact, these people learned to live side by side in what was then considered the only “Catholic” part of town.
Because the church was in the Diocese of Philadelphia in the 1850s, its founder happened to be St. John Neumann. As bishop, he had been to Rome for the Dec. 8, 1854 proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Samuel McGovern, lay director of the shrine since its inception, says that St. John Neumann held the book for Pius X as he proclaimed the Marian dogma.
Significantly, the Immaculate Conception ties strongly into the history of the Guadalupe apparitions. Mary first appeared to Juan Diego on Dec. 9—the former date for the feast of the Immaculate
Conception (before it was changed to Dec. 8). Also, when Bishop Zumarraga saw the image on the tilma, his first response was that it was the Immaculate. Just days later, when Mary also appeared to Juan Diego's uncle, Juan Bernadino, she identified herself as “the perfect and perpetual Virgin Mary,” and the one who “crushes the head of the feathered serpent,” connecting herself with the woman identified in Revelation 12, 1.
Reminders of Mary are constant in the church. The shrine occupies the left side altar and may be readily seen from every pew because the present gothic church, dating from 1900, was designed so that no pillar obstructed anyone's view of services.
The image of Our Lady of Guadalupe displayed as the shrine's focal point is considered by many as the finest reproduction of the original on the tilma in Mexico City. The full-sized image is actually a photograph taken by an American after a rarely-permitted private photo-taking opportunity. McGovern explains that the man was known to the bishops on the shrine selection committee, and he brought the image to the Allentown church two weeks before the dedication of the shrine.
In addition to the shrine altar, Mary is everywhere in this place dedicated to her. As people walk up the aisles or sit in any pew, her life surrounds them. The tall, stained glass windows imported from Germany for this stone church that replaced the original are beautifully detailed Marian scenes. They highlight events in our Lady's life, beginning with the Immaculate Conception, which happens to be the window nearest the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Others that follow are Mary with her parents, her presentation, her marriage to Joseph, the Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, Jesus’ presentation, the flight into Egypt, the finding in the Temple, family life in Nazareth, the marriage feast at Cana, the death of St. Joseph, Pentecost, and her Coronation.
The 16th and final window shows the Sacred Heart with St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, who was considered a Celt with Gaelic roots by the Irish instrumental in building this church.
McGovern, who grew up in the parish, remembers that every time his grandmother, Alice Donohue, took him to Mass in pre-shrine days, she would bless herself, look at the ceiling, and say, “God have mercy on Kathy Devers's soul.” When he asked her why she did that, she explained that Devers's likeness was a reminder directly above— not once, but a dozen times. The woman's face was the model for all the angels connected with the three huge, mural-like paintings that line the flat central portion of the vaulted ceiling. The parishioners modeled their faces for the scenes of the Annunciation, the Assumption, and the Coronation— painted by Michael O'Donnell, a young local artist, from 1923 to 1925.
To accommodate all the travelers coming to celebrate the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe at the shrine, the feast is held on the Sunday before Dec. 12. (This year, Dec. 7.) The full day begins with exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, and includes a presentation on Our Lady of Guadalupe, confession, rosary, Mass (usually celebrated by a bishop), and the procession of a tilma filled with hundreds of flowers that are blessed and then given to pilgrims to bring to the sick.
Of course, Our Lady of Guadalupe is patroness of the pro-life movement in a special way. After she appeared, the Aztec practice of human sacrifice ended. McGovern reminds people that this shrine is a place of pilgrimage to make reparation for abortion and to pray for a swift end to abortion.
Those staying in the area can find many name motels and hotels off nearby highways 22 and 78, as well as an array of eateries. Among area attractions is the Liberty Bell Shrine in the church where it was hidden during the American Revolution. Not far to the north is the Pocono Mountains area. A few miles south, in Bally, is Blessed Sacrament Church, with a museum. Built in 1741, it's considered the oldest standing Catholic church in the original colonies.
It's fitting then that this area should be home to the national shrine commemorating Mary's oldest apparition in the Americas.
Joseph Pronechen is based in Trumbull, Conn.
----- EXCERPT: Allentown, Pa.near Bethlehem and Nazareth-is home to the Mother of the Americas ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: On the Border: Preview of the Church to Come? DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY—It's the place where two worlds meet: where North America confronts Latin America.
The bishop of the Diocese of Brownsville, Texas says “only the Church can bring together these two worlds.” And he offers his diocese along the Rio Grande as a model of what the Church in America might become.
“I have lived on the border between Mexico and the United States all my life as priest and bishop,” Bishop Raymundo PeÃ’a told the Register during the Special Synod of Bishops for America. “It's a border where the economies of the Third World and the First World meet and intermingle.”
Bishop PeÃ’a said “close collegial collaboration” had sprung up between the border Churches in Mexico and the United States.
“The river that divides our nations does not divide our families or our particular churches,” he said. “We are one people of God, called to live in communion.”
To remove obstacles that may limit this communion, he said the bishops of Texas and the Mexican states that border Texas had begun meeting for pastoral reflection and planning—a process he called “ecclesial globalization.”
“The globalization of the economy has promoted the world of business to cross that river,” Bishop PeÃ’a said. Similarly the Church must look beyond national borders to fulfill the mission of Christ to “go and make disciples of all the nations” (Mt 28, 19), he added.
To promote effective Catholic evangelization along the border, he said the region's bishops had established a Texas-Mexico Border Commission.
“We consider our border dioceses as twin Churches,” Bishop PeÃ’a said, “sharing pastoral projects, celebrations, and diocesan resources.”
Despite the miles that separate nations, he said America is becoming smaller every day.
“Globalization—economically, socially, and environmentally— challenges us to an ecclesial globalization if we are to respond to the signs of the times,” he said. “We can say that for the Church, there is no south or north, no First or Third Worlds, no border or frontier that divides us.”
—Stephen Banyra
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Stephen Banyra ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Are Your Health Care Dollars Funding the Culture of Death? DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:ALTHOUGH AMERICAN Catholics rarely scrutinize their health insurance choices, three Catholic laymen are making the argument that they should. These choices play a key role in any response to Pope John Paul II's call to build a “culture of life,” according to Michael O'Dea and Robert Mylod of ValuSure Corporation, and Robert de Marcellus of the Association for Family Finances in America (AFFA).
“It is time Catholics examined the slippery slope down which health care in America is evolving,” says O'Dea, an insurance executive from Detroit.
“It is clear that the insurance dollars of Catholics are funding abortions, sterilizations, in vitro fertilizations, abortifacent contraceptives, and unnecessary diagnostic procedures that can lead to abortions,” O'Dea continued. “Yet major companies that fund health care use the premiums of Catholics without giving them any choice about how their money will be used.”
O'Dea learned about the health care industry as a health care executive for a Fortune 500 company. He and his wife founded two crisis pregnancy centers in the Archdiocese of Detroit. Through his work, O'Dea came to believe that “the medical profession and the majority of health insurance carriers impose abortion coverage on employers and employees alike.”
When O'Dea met Robert Mylod, he was retiring as CEO and chairman of Michigan National Bank. Mylod had decided to “stay in the business community and do God's work” as a focus for his retirement. Mylod is also chairman of the Michigan chapter of the Catholic Campaign for America.
O'Dea said that when they met, Mylod told him that “he was interested in transforming the culture by reallocating capital in support of the family and away from secular trends that—either subtly or not—sought to undermine it.”
Robert de Marcellus, Catholic layman and AFFA president, joined O'Dea and Mylod in their drive to design a solution. AFFA is a non-profit organization whose object is to better economic conditions for families.
The three discovered that, despite laws that protected the conscience of the insured, employers and health care providers were being misled by a variety of parties with vested interests: lawyers, consultants, Health and Human Services officials, and state and federal medical professionals. They were led to believe their plans were required to provide abortion services.
“No HMO or other participant in a federal program should be required to provide abortion beyond the confines of the Hyde Amendment,” said O'Dea. The Hyde Amendment allows abortion funding in federal programs only in the case of rape, or incest, or to save the life of the mother.
O'Dea continued: “And no self-insured employer should be under any pressure to provide abortion for any reason, based on the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA).”
O'Dea and Mylod say that not only moral secular laws are being ignored; that economic justice issues are involved as well.
“We felt it was time Americans realized that the money spent on health insurance premiums, even though paid by their employer or their taxes, is their money,” said O'Dea.
Mylod said the principle of subsidiarity, as described by Pope John Paul II in Centesimus Annus, is being violated because individuals and institutions are not being allowed their conscientious choice in determining how their premiums are being spent. Subsidiarity is the principle that, in justice, the lowest level—in this case, the insureds—have the right to make such fundamental decisions.
The voices of these three were not the only ones raised to implore Catholics to examine their consciences about health care.
Before he died in 1996, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin issued a requirement for Catholic hospitals to use in evaluating all joint ventures and affiliations.
The cardinal's protocol for the Archdiocese of Chicago stated that any joint venture or other business arrangement that would place the Catholic vision of health care at serious risk would not be approved. Failure to abide by the protocol could result in the archdiocese withdrawing recognition of the institution as Catholic. Cardinal Bernardin himself received care in his last days from the University of Loyola Medical Center, a Catholic facility.
In Indiana a merger between a Catholic and a secular hospital plunged the two facilities and the diocese into controversy recently. When St. Elizabeth Hospital teamed up with Home Hospital in Lafayette, spokesper-sons rushed to assure Catholics that their hospital would not provide reproductive and sterilization services, while admitting those services would still be available at Home Hospital.
The hastily issued assurance, coming with a promise that St. Elizabeth's would not “in any way share in the revenue … of that project” did little to assure that diocese's Catholics.
“You can't say, ‘No, we don't provide abortion services, but if you want one, go up the street to the other hospital we own half of and have one,’” said Joseph Mackey, a Catholic of Lafayette.
If the mergers of Catholic and secular hospitals are under fire, at least there is a clear choice for Catholic institutions not to enter into these partnerships. According to Mylod, O'Dea, and de Marcellus, health insurance is another matter. Rarely are Catholics given a choice by either their company or their health insurance provider.”
“Catholics can be contributing money to support pregnancy crisis centers, or Natural Family Planning classes,” O'Dea said, “but their insurance premiums will still be going towards funding abortions and sterilizations without their knowledge.”
Mylod agrees. “Complex as they are, many plans glaze over the eyes of even the most diligent executive. Yet these plans provide the financial fuel for a major portion of the 1.5 million abortions performed every year.”
“You will find heath care plans that say they exclude ‘voluntary’ or ‘elective’ abortions. This gives Catholics a nice, safe feeling, but it is not the case,” says O'Dea. “Unless terms like ‘voluntary abortion” are clearly defined in the plan, the mentality is that they will give whatever health care to the mother they consider to be in her best interest, including an elective abortion.”
Although market forces usually drive industries toward providing more choices and better information to the consumer, these forces have not held sway in the health care industry.
According to Mylod, “Health care grew quickly to now absorb about 15% to 19% of the GNP. Yet it is the only industry I know of where the consumer is not informed about what is going on. The industry has found a way to make the consumer's choices without the consumer being aware of it.”
O'Dea, Mylod, and de Marcellus were able to design a solution for groups of insured that are most vulnerable: sole-proprietorships and small businesses. They have raised capital among pro-life and pro-family supporters to found ValuSure, a health-care insurance consulting company that builds pro-life health programs with Golden Rule Insurance Company or the Medical Savings Insurance Company. Both companies decline to fund abortions, sterilizations, and other procedures objectionable to Catholics.
ValuSure draws upon provisions in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act passed by the U.S. Congress in 1996. This act authorized the creation of family and individual tax-free medical savings accounts (MSAs), which work much like an Individual Retirement Annuity (IRA). Contributions of up to $ 3,375 per family per year are tax-deferred for the life of the plan. MSAs allow the insured to choose their health care provider, and allow funds not used in medical expenses for that year to go into tax-deferred savings.
The Medical Savings Account strategy has built-in limitations. Congress capped the number of accounts at 750,000 total. There is a window of time defined by the Act that requires qualified entry into a Medical Savings Account Plan by December of 2001. Finally, only the self-employed or businesses with 50 or fewer employees are eligible for MSAs.
Some advantages of MSA-based health care plans are that they restore the principle of subsidiarity by allowing the insured to choose the goods and services he is purchasing; they also restore capital to families by allowing tax-deferral and the accumulation of savings.
But most importantly, they give back to Catholics the power to say “no” to plans that offer them health care coverage with one hand while, with the other, extort from them support for a culture of death.
Kate Ernsting is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
----- EXCERPT: Probably. The founders of a Detroit-based life-minded consulting company explain why and what they're doing about it. ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kate Ernsting ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: 'You Are Not Really Gay' DATE: 12/7/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 7-13, 1997 ----- BODY:Joseph Nicolosi Ph.D. is the founder and clinical director of the Thomas Aquinas Psychological Clinic, which is devoted primarily to the treatment of homosexuals. He is also the executive director of the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH).
Nicolosi received his doctorate in clinical psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology in Los Angeles and is a licensed clinical psychologist. He is a member of the American Psychological Association, the California State Psychological Association, and the Society of Catholic Social Scientists.
Nicolosi has written two books— Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality and Healing Homosexuality: Case Stories of Reparative Therapy. He is a Catholic and an outspoken advocate of the efficacy of reparative therapy for homosexuals, having positively treated more than 400 homosexuals in 13 years of practice. The following interview, conducted by Karen Walker, is reprinted from the Nov. 30 issue of Catholic Twin Circle.
Walker: What is reparative therapy?
Nicolosi: The word “reparative” implies reparation. It's a psychoanalytic term that means the behavior of homosexuality is an attempt to repair something that is missing within the person.
We believe that same-sex affectional needs—such as attention, affection, and approval—are what's missing in the homosexual. He desires to have male connectedness, to feel belonging and acceptance from another man, which is a part of masculinity—to be loved [in a healthy way] by a man.
He did not get these from his father, for whatever reason. The male homosexual extends the alienation he felt from his father to all other males.
I tell all my clients: “You are not really gay. You are a heterosexual with a problem, with a developmental deficit.”
They are relieved, always, because now they are not apart from everyone else.
Reparative therapy gets its foundation from the natural law.
How did you get involved in the treatment of homosexuals?
There was absolutely no information or discussion during my training program on the cause and treatment of homosexuality. It was just one of those politically incorrect things that nobody talked about.
But, as I started doing the work, I saw a disproportionately high number of individuals who were unhappy with their homosexuality, and I began to notice certain trends. The primary trend I noticed was that they all had a deep hurt or grievance toward their father, a disappointment in the early father-son relationship.
I've treated more than 400 men over a 13-year period. Today, I see between 35 and 40 clients a week, and 95% of them are men who are dealing with unwanted homosexuality.
Is anyone else doing reparative therapy for homosexuals?
Absolutely. There are psychotherapists around the country who do reparative therapy. One of NARTH's functions is to provide a nationwide referral list of therapists for anybody who is interested.
What is NARTH?
NARTH was formed primarily as a response to the gay agenda in the American Psychiatric and Psychological (APA) associations.
Gay activists within the APAs wanted to make the treatment of homosexuality unethical. They wanted the APAs to say that the only acceptable therapy was to affirm their gay identity.
NARTH was formed to provide support to therapists who want to do this work (reparative therapy), who want to assist people in overcoming their homosexuality and to defend the right of clients to receive this treatment.
Our current membership is about 700.
In 1972, the diagnostic guidebook for therapists was changed so that homosexuality was no longer classified as a mental illness. More recently, media attention has been given to an APA resolution. Would you explain this resolution?
In 1992, the American Psychological Association was picketed by people who didn't want to be gay. They wanted reparative therapy to remain available.
On the other hand, pro-gay groups had been lobbying to make reparative therapy unethical on the grounds that they claimed it doesn't work and it does damage, hoping that the APA would vote to totally discredit reparative therapy. But the pro-gay lobbyists were not successful.
Basically, what the APA resolution did was to reiterate its guidelines for all psychotherapy, emphasizing that people should not be coerced, people should not be manipulated into therapy, and that they have to give full consent. This is true for any therapy.
So the resolution, we think, won't really have much practical impact.
Is there any evidence that reparative therapy works?
We can make reference to over 300 professionally published studies that have shown reparative therapy to bring about change. You can go back in the literature and find such studies back in the 1920s.
Besides that, NARTH has just completed its own two-year research project. We have more than 860 individuals who say that they have experienced varying degrees of sexual reorientation change and over 200 licensed psychotherapists who say they have participated in the successful treatment of homosexuality.
There's lots of information, but it's being politically covered up.
Would you comment on the seven-part series on homosexuality that came out earlier this year in
Basically, it was an extensive review of the entire question of homosexuality—historically, culturally, the Church's response to it, the moral issue, the ethical issue, and what is homosexuality.
I thought it was a very good document—very fair, very scientifically and morally grounded, theologically grounded. It made reference to my writings very generously, which gave me the assurance that my work is in keeping with Catholic theology.
I think there is a real battle going on in the Catholic Church today. The Vatican documents are very solid and very sound. And at the bottom of the hierarchy of the Church you have the orthodox laity who see very clearly that homosexuality is not a God-given condition.
But I think that in between, especially in the United States, you have a lot of progay ministries that promote the idea that gay is normal and natural for some people. I think that's a very serious mistake.
I really believe that the principles of reparative therapy are in keeping with the principles of Catholic theology and certainly with Christian anthropology.
Christian anthropology says that we are all heterosexual in our nature. What's happening is that there is a slow erosion of that and a subtle introduction of a gay anthropology.
The gay anthropology says that God made two kinds of people—heterosexual and homosexual—and that for this population of homosexuals, same-sex attractions are normal and natural. I think that's a serious problem.
How is Catholic academia handling this?
I can tell you about my own experience.
I just came back from Notre Dame University. There was a great deal of resistance on the part of the faculty and some gay activist students to having me speak to the student body. In fact, the head of the counseling department— who is a priest, by the way—wrote a one-page disclaimer saying that “I think nothing good can come of Dr. Nicolosi's presentation.”
I pointed out to the audience: “How can you say this? There may be someone in the audience tonight who doesn't want to have these feelings, who wants to overcome it, and this might be exactly what they're looking for. This might have given them some answers, some hope for the first time in their life, so how can you say that?”
The student body reacted very positively. Alot of students told me that what I said made sense of what they thought intuitively.
What is the reaction of the Church in America?
What I think is going on in the Catholic Church in America, especially at the [clergy] level, is that we have become so sensitized to protecting the sentiments and feelings of one minority, namely gays, that we are forsaking the needs and wants of another population, namely the non-gay homosexual—the person who wants to change, who may be having homosexual feelings but who does not want to assume the gay identity. I think the Catholic Church is really neglecting them.
The Protestant Churches are doing much more to actively support the ministry of the homosexual who wants to overcome his homosexuality.
It's pathetic to think that only 10% of the dioceses in this country have an orthodox ministry to homosexuals, which is called Courage. There should be one in every parish.
But some dioceses say they are addressing this issue, for example in Los Angeles and Chicago, by setting up gay ministries.
No, they are not. I think they are making a terrible mistake, even in the title of their ministry.
The Los Angeles archdiocese calls it The Office of Gay and Lesbian Ministry, and in Chicago it's called AGLO (Archdiocesan Gay-Lesbian Outreach). They are using the political term “gay.”
Why do you think this approach is so wrong-headed?
It's wrong-headed, first of all, because many gay priests are running these organizations. They tend to be the ones who are most interested in these particular kinds of ministries. They have their own personal agenda, which is to soften the Church's teachings to accommodate gays.
I don't believe you can be gay and Catholic. Gay ministry tries to elevate homosexual attractions to the level of normal, using the argument of celibacy to make the two attractions equal. It's an incredible sleight of hand.
I'm still amazed at how Catholic priests are either not seeing the implications of the gay ministry or are seeing it and being silent about it.
True ministry brings people into the fold; it shows they are, at core, the same. But the gay ministry talks about gay gifts and gay spirituality—all divisive, separatist concepts that drive people apart and not together.
Why do you think a person cannot be gay and Catholic, especially if he or she remains celibate?
It's a contradiction in ideology.
You can be homosexual and Catholic, which is to say: “I have these attractions and these feelings, but I know that they're wrong. Whether it be biological or psychological, I see it as a disorder.”
But, when you say “gay,” you say: “This is what's normal and natural for me. I may have to be celibate, but my same-sex attractions are normal and natural for me.”
That's a very important distinction. [Catholic] doctrine tells us very clearly that the homosexual component within the person is an intrinsic disorder. It doesn't mean that the person is in a state of sin, but it is an intrinsic disorder.
So the use of the word “gay” implies that a same-sex attraction is normal?
Exactly. The label of “gay” implies: “This is who I am. God made me this way.” From that, we go to the next step of “gay spirituality,” which says that gayness is a gift.
I think that's another big mistake. If there are any gifts that come from homosexuality, the gifts come from a person countering his homosexuality. They don't come from the homosexuality itself.
I mean if there are any spiritual or psychological gifts that comes from alcoholism, it doesn't come from the alcoholic condition, it comes from your efforts to heal and to understand yourself to overcome your alcoholism.
It's not the disorder itself that's a gift; it's my bearing it as a cross that's a gift.
We're not hearing that in gay spirituality. This is an important point. It's my orthodox Christian, Catholic response to my inclination toward sin that will give me my gift, not the homosexuality itself.
Thomas Aquinas says very simply that good does not come out of evil; it's how we respond to the evil that brings good.
Given your years of experience and research, do you think anyone is born gay?
No.
Why not?
Because anyone who knows anything about genetics knows that a specific gene is for a specific trait. For example, there's a gene for blue eyes or left-handedness.
Something as complicated as homosexuality could not come from a single gene.
For example, you can't say a person has a good basketball-playing gene. You could say that someone has a height gene, or an eye-hand coordination gene, or an aggressive gene, which all make you a better basketball player. But, there's not a single basketball-playing gene.
Homosexuality is too complex a set of behaviors. There's no such thing as a sexual-preference gene.
At best, we can say that there might be what we call a temperamental predisposition. We see repeatedly the classic triadic relationship—a distant, detached father; an over-involved mother; and a temperamentally introverted, sensitive son.
A boy with a more extroverted temperament would have some difficulties with such a family structure, but he would be less likely to be homosexual.
Do you want to add anything else to this discussion?
Yes, the American Public Philosophy Association in Washington, D.C., held a wonderful two-day conference at Georgetown University, called Homosexuality in the American Public Life.
Again, the president of Georgetown University dismissed it as unimportant.
But it was the first two-day conference with 23 top-quality national speakers who spoke about homosexuality in the non-gay-affirming way. It presented how we are being manipulated by the media and by many of the cultural leaders—unfortunately, including members of the Church—to accept homosexuality as normal and natural. It also presented reasons why we do not accept it as normal and natural.
The responses were from the sociological area, educational area, cultural area, psychological area, and the religious area. More than 400 attended, including Orthodox Jews, priests, and a wide variety of people interested in the subject of homosexuality in the public life.
Have you ever had a gay activist change his behavior?
Yes. I helped one man who had participated in 800 to 1,000 sexual contacts.
Today, the man is married, has a daughter, and runs a Christian bookstore. The first year of therapy he had three contacts, the next year he had one contact, and in the last four years he has had no contacts.
He is not a Catholic, but his Protestant pastor supported him and met with him for coffee every Sunday night. His entire Church knew and even helped pay for his psychotherapy.
Now I speak to him once every six weeks just to check in and see how he's doing. He's doing fine. He's happily married.
—Karen Walker
----- EXCERPT: Dr. Joseph Nicolosi challenges the notion that homosexuality is genetic-and has the results to prove it ----- EXTENDED BODY: Karen Walker ----- KEYWORDS: The Culture oF Life -------- TITLE: Pro-lifers Still Reading Election Tea Leaves DATE: 12/22/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Dec. 22-28, 1996 ----- BODY:ACCORDING to conventional wisdom, 1996 was the year the prolife cause stopped mattering.
After taking office in 1992, providing proof positive that he was no friend to pro-lifers, President Clinton rescinded a number of anti-abortion executive orders supported by his two Republican predecessors. The trend culminated in Clinton's spring 1996 veto on the ban that would have outlawed partial-birth abortion, a procedure that even made many pro-choice advocates uncomfortable. Then, in September, as election time drew near, the U.S. cardinals, backed by millions of Catholics who had sent postcards to Congress, took the unprecedented action of petitioning lawmakers, in person, on the steps of the Capitol to override the veto. The pro-life movement seemed to hold a strong position.
Pro-lifers dominated the Republican platform process and were significant players in the nomination of Bob Dole, who told the Catholic Press Association convention last May that Clinton's veto of the partial-birth abortion ban “pushed the limits of decency too far.” That portion of the Dole speech—followed by a swift rebuke from Clinton—made the news that evening.
But Dole rarely brought up the issue again, focusing instead on appealing to Catholic voters by supporting school vouchers. Dole and his running mate, Jack Kemp—clearly uncomfortable with the issue altogether— declined to press the issue of partial-birth abortion during any of the presidential and vice-presidential debates.
Still, Dole's anti-abortion stance won him the opportunity for favorable photo-ops with Cardinal John O'Connor of New York and Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua of Philadelphia. Cardinal O'Connor, host of the famous Al Smith Dinner, pointedly declined to have an invitation issued for the political affair to Clinton, instead opting to have only the vicepresidential candidates appear. On the eve of the vote, retired Archbishop Philip Hannan of New Orleans publicly declared that a vote for Clinton this year would be a sin.
But to pro-lifers’ dismay, Clinton coasted to a nine-point popular vote victory over Dole, and an Electoral College landslide that included a win in Archbishop Hannan's home state of Louisiana, while polls showed that nearly 60 percent of Catholics voted for the incumbent. All indicators seemed to suggest that pro-life politics had hit a dead end.
But critics of this perspective cite their own poll data. They argue that, far from being a liability for the Republican ticket, pro-lifers continue to be one of the party's important interest groups. By appearing to back away from the issue and declining the opportunity to embrace enthusiastically his party's formal pro-life platform, Dole actually hurt his chances, they argue. The results of congressional elections, in which pro-choice Republicans fared poorly while pro-lifers won some key victories, proves that the pro-life view can still galvanize voters, the argument goes.
Mark Shields, a national columnist and TV commentator, noted that a Los Angeles Times exit poll indicated that 9 percent of all voters named abortion as one of the two top issues which went into their voting decision. Of those voters, 60 percent chose Dole. “That qualifies as a mini-landslide,” said Shields, who added that, “[o]n Nov. 5, abortion was quite relevant to 8.3 million American voters, and Bob Dole carried them over Bill Clinton by nearly 2.5 million votes.”
Women Voters
A Wirthlin Worldwide Poll sponsored by the National Right to Life Committee echoed the results. That poll indicated that about 12 percent of voters considered abortion to be a decisive issue in deciding for whom they would vote. In the Wirthlin survey, of those who identified abortion as one of the two most important issues, 45 percent voted for Dole, while only 35 percent voted for Clinton. The pattern held for women voters who considered abortion an important issue in their votes. These statistics prompted pro-life activists to argue that abortion did not contribute to Dole's indisputable gender-gap problems, which led women to voting overwhelmingly Democratic this year.
That polling data is not a surprise to Rick Hinshaw, director of Family Ministry for the Diocese of Rockville Centre, N.Y., and an adjunct political science professor at Dowling College on Long Island. “That's consistent. We've seen that over the years,” Hinshaw, who is responsible for pro-life activities sponsored by the Long Island-based diocese, told the Register. According to Hinshaw, the polling data indicates that “[i]t's not a political minus to be pro-life. But it's limited in its appeal.” The problem for pro-lifers, said Hinshaw, is that only a relatively small minority—12 percent according to the Los Angeles Times poll—consider abortion to be an issue which can have an impact on their vote.
Still, pro-life activists took heart from this year's congressional races. Candidates who followed the formula used by some popular Republicans in the past few years in some regions of the country—opposition to high taxes and support for legal abortion, the position articulated by Govs. George Pataki (N.Y.) and Christine Todd Whitman (N.J.)—were defeated. Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate embracing such a stance this year were drubbed in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island. This year, noted Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard Magazine, “economically conservative and socially liberal Republicans took a beating.”
But Frances Kissling, president of “Catholics for a Free Choice,” a group supportive of keeping abortion legal, is not impressed with the idea that the poll data indicates strong support for candidates who oppose abortion. “Big deal. Awhole lot of good it did them,” she told the Register. The poll results and the election results, she said, indicated that a strong position against abortion “is a minority position in many ways.” She added that the abortion issue was not a major concern to Catholics or to voters in general. “I don't think it was an issue for most people. Most people don't vote on a single issue,” she said.
She acknowledged, however, that those voters who are concerned about abortion constitute enough of the electorate to make an impact on elections. “Elections are won and lost on such numbers,” she said, “but one cannot translate that to broad-based values.” This year, she said, “the bishops over-emphasized the abortion issue” at the expense of other concerns, such as their opposition to the new welfare reform plan endorsed by Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress; an issue which did not generate a large postcard lobbying campaign.
While formal polling may find it difficult to discover, the Republicans’ widelypublicized “gender gap” problem—in which women voted for Clinton in large numbers—may in part be due to a perceived insensitivity to women's issues among Republicans, including abortion, said Kissling, whose own organization has been criticized for existing only on paper—lacking a grassroots membership.
Despite bishops getting involved in the pro-life issue this election year, observers agreed that it is hard to galvanize anything resembling “the Catholic vote.” Clinton appealed to Catholics by promising to uphold social programs such as Social Security and Medicare, a position popular in the Northeast and industrial Midwest, as well as in retirement havens such as Florida. His support for largely symbolic issues such as school uniforms and hints in one televised debate that he could support modified school choice programs, distanced him from the liberal stances of previous Democratic candidates who had lost Catholic support.
Dole Camp
Republican efforts to curb immigration may have backfired, as more new immigrants cast their votes for Democrats this year. Conservative pro-life Congressman Bob Dornan lost by a small margin to Loretta Sanchez after his Orange County, Calif., district became a predominately Hispanic area in the past few years.
“I don't think there is a monolithic Catholic vote,” noted Hinshaw, who said “there's a lot of Catholics who don't really vote as Catholics. They may vote as union members or as business owners.”
Pro-life activists have shunned the Dole camp since Election Day, charging that the Republican Party never really embraced them to begin with. Maggie Gallagher, writing in The New York Post, commented that “Dole's failure to highlight his pro-life stance may have cost him votes. Astudy by the Polling Co. cited by Gallagher indicated that those voters who generally oppose abortion—but who say it should be allowed in cases of rape, incest or to protect the life of the mother—split their votes evenly between Clinton and Dole.
A stronger articulation of the issue, according to Gallagher, could have pushed more of these largely middle-of-the-road voters into the Republican camp this year. “Dole never really made the strong case on the issue,” said Hinshaw. “When candidates take a position and stick to it, people respect it. But when they seem apologetic for their position they turn off middleground voters.”
While rejecting the mainstream press's verdict on the pro-life vote, Hinshaw agreed that pro-lifers still have a long way to go. He hopes for an increase in the numbers of voters who seriously consider abortion as an issue and are willing to support incremental steps to curtail it. Pro-lifers, he concluded, have to view their cause as “a protracted struggle which first has to be educational. We are going to have to lead the politicians. They are not going to lead us.”
Peter Feuerherd is based in New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Peter Feuerherd ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: In Los Angeles, Kentucky and Tijuana, Church Lives the Christmas Spirit DATE: 12/22/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Dec. 22-28, 1996 ----- BODY:A trio of Catholic Christmas stories from across the Tijuana, Mexico border, to inner-city Los Angeles and out to northeast Kentucky's coal mountains. Catholics are called to serve the poor, be they black and urban, brown and illegal, or rural and white.
FATHER KEN DEASY can count, among his many gifts, empathy and a knack for inspirational homilies. About a year ago, the 42-year-old priest moved from St. Monica's Catholic Church near the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica, Calif., to become pastor of St. Agatha's in central Los Angeles, where palm trees give way to tenement buildings and liquor stores.
A large parish nationally known for its outreach to Catholic young adults, St. Monica's has had prominent patrons—actors Kelsey Grammer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Martin Sheen and Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan. St. Agatha's, by contrast, remains small and financially poor. Women there had been praying for a pastor to pull them out of what some called a spiritual slump.
With Father Deasy's arrival, it seems their prayers were heard. Instead of the requisite slam on the commercialism of the holy season, his take on the Christmas frenzy is that it's great. In an Advent homily, he said: “We are doing things for others. That's why the malls are packed. What is so wrong with that?”
Two subtle developments at the parish seem worth noting at Christmas. First, there is race—it's not a problem at the parish, but it's still a major issue in a polarized city. Four decades ago, St. Agatha's was a mostly white parish. Now it is largely made up of Latinos and African-Americans.
Father Deasy brought something new to this ethnic mix. Given a charisma that earned him a following from prior assignments at mostly white, suburban parishes, he has begun to attract Caucasians to St. Agatha's. The 10:00 a.m. Sunday gospel Mass now finds Catholics of all colors who greet each other and shake hands warmly. Parishioners say newcomers mean the more the merrier.
“You feel very welcome—here you just feel like that's really true,” said John Carlin, a 33-year-old, single, white sports-marketing executive from L.A.'s affluent west side. “If this church was, like, an hour away, I'd still go to it.” 10:00 a.m. Sunday gospel Mass now finds Catholics of all colors who greet each other and shake hands warmly. Parishioners say of newcomers, “the more the merrier.”
“You feel very welcome—here you just feel like that's really true,” said John Carlin, a 33-yearold, single, white sports-marketing executive from L.A.'s affluent west side. “If this church was, like, an hour away, I'd still go to it.”
The other Father Deasy-inspired development is his urging the veteran parishioners of St. Agatha's to give newcomers the greeting: “We're just glad to see you here—however you got here.”
Joanne Lombard, is a 45-year-old black mother of three, is a choir member and parish volunteer. Her husband, Los Angeles County Fire Department Captain Herbert Lombard, has been attending St. Agatha's for 40 of his 50 years. “We were always active in the parish, but it now seems we live here,” he said. “We always have a good Christmas here because we love each other.”
Like the welcoming faces at St. Agatha's, an unconditional hospitality is the hallmark of Casa del Migrante in Tijuana, Mexico.
The “house of the migrants” is run by the Scalabrinian Fathers and Brothers, an order founded in 1887 by Italian Bishop Giovanni Battista Scalabrini. Numbering some 700 priests and Brothers in 26 countries, the order dedicates itself specifically to helping immigrants, refugees and migrant workers. In Tijuana, the Scalabrinians serve Mexican and Central American immigrants who have gravitated to the border town with thoughts of crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
Tijuana's Colonia Postal section is poor. It features bumpy, unpaved city roads, ramshackle houses and gangs with attendant stabbings and shakedowns. Streets don't have street signs. Mangy dogs roam without collars.
Next to a parish, so lacking in space that its Saturday catechism courses are conducted in the church's front pews, sits the blue, four-story house for migrants. Men can stay there up to two weeks and get free food, showers, soap and a bunk bed in rooms that sleep as many as 12. The Casa can handle 150 to 220 migrants a day. A smaller, separate facility helps traveling women and children.
The Scalabrinians do not advocate illegal border crossings. They employ social workers to teach men about the potential hardships of life in the United States, making sure they understand that the streets there aren't paved with gold. Some return home to Guadalajara or Mexico City, frustrated. Others stay in Tijuana. Still others make the crossing.
Scalabrinian Brother Gioacchino Campese, 29, counsels the men. He loves the Gospel of Matthew's take on the Cannanite woman (Mt 15, 21-28) because, he said, “it's about people who are strangers.” Wearing a Charlotte Hornets cap and a Houston Rockets T-shirt, Brother Campese, an Italian, said the Casa hosts weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meetings as well as discussions on human rights and regular liturgies.
For Christmas, celebrations begin in earnest with observance of La Posada, the nine-day Church celebration of the journey of Joseph and Mary's search for shelter. On Dec. 21, men from the Casa were scheduled to go to the Tijuana side of the border, light candles and join in song with people on the San Diego side. It's called La Posada sin fronteras, or “without borders.”
There's a tall ornamented tree in the migrant house's center patio; Christmas for the men will also include gifts and traditional Mexican dishes—all an attempt to make Christmas away from home as homey and gentle as possible.
Christmas is so vital to Mexican families that some dads who make the journey north, cross the border, find a job and then return home to be with their families for the holiday. “They will risk crossing the border again to go back to their families for Christmas,” Brother Campese said. “That is how important it is to Mexican families.”
On the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, Catholics are sparse. Remote diocesan parishes here are staffed by the Glenmary Home Missioners. The order—which numbers about 100 priests, Brothers and Sisters—was founded during the Depression to staff Catholic outposts from Texas to Mississippi and up through the Appalachian Mountain region.
The small Kentucky towns of Grayson and Vanceburg are pure Glenmary country. In Vanceburg, Holy Redeemer parish serves 35 families with a single Sunday Mass at 9:00 a.m. In the next county there's Grayson, home to Sts. John and Elizabeth Catholic Church, with some 60 families and one Sunday Mass at 11:30 a.m. Due south, in Elliott County, there are two nuns, five Catholic families and no parish or mission at all. The faithful must drive to Grayson for Mass and the sacraments.
Glenmary Father Bruce Brylinski, 41, shuttles between the Grayson parish, where he is pastor, and Holy Redeemer, where he serves as sacramental minister. ASister works there as pastoral administrator. Each Sunday, he first says Mass in Vanceburg, then drives back to Grayson for the 11:30 service. In both places, women dominate the pews, he said. “Culturally, women seem to carry the parish membership,” said Father Brylinski in a telephone interview.
The Glenmary Missioners and their flocks participate in Project Merry Christmas, an interdenominational effort to collect children's toys, clothing and food baskets for the benefit of local needy families of all creeds. While good will can come in waves around Christmas, Father Brylinski said he teaches his parishioners that “there are 12 months, and January and February are more severe months and when March comes around, heating bills come in.”
“It's a reminder of the Nativity being a gentle presence of God,” Father Brylinski said, adding that non-Catholics show up at Christmas services.“People will come out because it's Christmas eve. There's kind of a fascination, a connection to the past.”
Sts. John and Elizabeth Church in Grayson lost two families this year to out-of-state job transfers. Such a change comes as a blow to a small community. But Father Brylinski said this Christmas also will be a time of growth—the formal acknowledgment of several students entering the catechumenate, preparing themselves for Easter conversion.
David Finnigan is based in Los Angeles
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: David Finnigan ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Money, Stealth Gain Rev. Moon Foothold in Latin America DATE: 12/22/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Dec. 22-28, 1996 ----- BODY:AYEAR-and-a-half ago, authorities in Argentina and Uruguay thought their country's Catholic bishops were overreacting when they issued warnings about the growth in the region of the controversial “Church of the Unification” founded by Korean leader Sun Myung Moon.
Both episcopates had responded to an alert from the Latin American Bishops’ Council (CELAM) in early 1995. CELAM also called on Father Leonidas Ortiz Lozada, a Colombian priest who is a specialist in sects to analyze Moon's doctrine and strategy.
The conclusion of Father Ortiz's report, distributed by CELAM to all the episcopates in Latin America, was that Moon was targeting Latin America, especially the southern region, as a new area of expansion for the sect.
The surprising presence of former U.S. President George Bush at the inauguration of Moon's daily newspaper Noticias del Mundo—a Spanish sisterpublication of The Washington Times— has been the latest in a series of moves that seem to validate Father Ortiz's suspicions.
The sect first established a presence in Latin America 15 years ago, but Moon put down firmer roots in 1994, when, in a single move, he purchased the Uruguayan daily Ultimas Noticias, a chain of hotels and a bank. The move made the sect one of the most powerful economic groups in small and politically stable Uruguay. Afew months later, the sect added a ship-building company to its growing empire.
Moon followed the Uruguay purchases by moving to investment-starved Argentina, where he was welcomed in person by President Carlos Menem. The Korean leader purchased a huge ranch in the northern province of Corrientes, announcing that he intended to make it his permanent residence.
When he revealed plans for further heavy investments, including the first daily newspaper to be published for all of South America, several Argentinean Catholic groups, already alerted by CELAM's warning, started monitoring Moon's operations more closely. Moon then decided to move his principal base back to Montevideo—Uruguay's capital city—where religious freedom legislation gives him more room for maneuvering.
Moon's religious aims are tied to political, economic and cultural goals, according to Father Ortiz. “Moon believes that he is the new Messiah, chosen by God to fulfill Christ's alleged failure to bring all humanity together under one single religion…. Moon envisions the world unified under one single family, in which he and his wife will be recognized as the divine parents,” the Colombian priest explained.
Moon's ‘front' organizations have not escaped controversy.
Moon has created several “front” organizations to foster this “single family” in Latin America. The Asociacion para la Unidad Latinoamericana—Association for Latin American Unity (AULA)—and the Confederacion de Asociaciones para la Unidad de las Sociedades de America—Confederation of Associations for the Unity of Societies in America (CAUSA)—are among them. These associations invite influential Latin American politicians, news paper editors, diplomats and high ranking army officers to three- or four-day gatherings in luxurious hotels in Uruguay or Argentina, supposedly to discuss Latin American unity. Huge photographs of AULA and CAUSA leaders with Pope John Paul II, taken during a general audience in December 1985, are regularly displayed at the gatherings.
But Moon's “front” organizations have not escaped controversy. When they were starting up in the early 90s, CAUSAmembers were accused by local human rights organizations of involvement in the illegal arms trade and of supporting anti-democracy factions among the armed forces of Chile, Argentina and Paraguay.
Last August, Mexican Congressman Carlos Guzman, president of the small Partido Autentico de la Revolucion Mexicana (Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution), sparked new controversy when he denounced the sect following Moon's offer to “buy” his party. The Korean leader ensured Guzman of a heightened presence for his party in Mexico, which Moon sees as a prime region for expansion.
At a meeting intended to discuss the region's unity that drew parliamentary representatives from different Latin American countries, Moon delegates offered to pay the expenses of small political parties in exchange for decision-making power within the organizations, according to Guzman.
“I don't know how many of them have accepted, but we consider the proposition an intolerable intervention of a foreign power in Mexican politics,” he said.
The latest controversy in Montevideo involving the “Church of the Unification”—also known as “The Church of the Holy Spirit” in Latin American countries—occurred when another of Moon's front organizations, the Federacion de Familias para la Paz Mundial (Federation of Families for World Peace) sponsored a meeting of 600 female leaders of pro-family organizations in mid-November, the majority of whom were unaware of the sect's involvement.
Forty-two of the participants signed a letter denouncing “pressure and manipulation” and requested that a Catholic priest make it public after the women had left Montevideo. The letter said that “we have been deceived and manipulated in an open attempt to indoctrinate us with Moon's ideas.”
The document sparked the first official reaction against Moon, both from the Uruguayan government and the country's Church. A government spokesman said politely that “we expect the followers of the ‘Church of the Unification’ to behave according to our laws, which are fully respectful of personal freedom.”
In less measured tones, Uruguayan Catholic bishops issued a public statement, charging that the Church of the Unification and all its front organizations “are not neutral in religious matters and cannot be considered a Christian faith for inclusion in ecumenical dialogue…. Instead, they deny our Christian faith, because all their claims of universal love and unity are based exclusively on the peculiar ideas of Mr. Moon, who claims to be the true Messiah.” They also warned that Moon “uses economic power to manipulate the real needs of the people, especially the young who are affected by poverty, unemployment, family disintegration and lack of ideals.”
Defying the bishops’ criticism, Moon has made it clear that Uruguay, a country with a small economy and less pronounced Catholic influence, has become his stronghold in Latin America. In fact, just a week after the release of the bishops’ document, Moon launched a training program for 4,200 Japanese missionary women who literally invaded Montevideo, a city of a little more than 1 million inhabitants.
The training program, which was also inaugurated by former President Bush, was intended to prepare the Japanese missionaries to evangelize throughout the Americas—including in the United States and Canada. The goal of the missionaries will be to persuade people to belong to the “big family” of the “new Messiah,”—Sun Myung Moon.
Alejandro Bermudez is based in Lima, Peru
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Alejandro Bermudez ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Jesus Seminar, Q Scholars True to Holiday Form DATE: 12/22/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Dec. 22-28, 1996 ----- BODY:CATHOLICS HAVE become accustomed by now to seeing Jesus and Mary looking out at them from the glossy covers of Time and Newsweekas they stand in holiday checkout lines at markets and malls.
Any elation at seeing the objects of their faith celebrated in the reigning secular journals is quickly dispelled, however, by perusing the contents of the articles. It's become a holiday tradition: the twice yearly updates at Christmas and Easter on the latest findings of revisionist Scripture scholars who are eager to inform us, once again, that there was no virgin birth or magi coming to adore the Christ child, no crucifixion, resurrection or atonement. All are second century legends surrounding the historical figure of Jesus about whom—when all is said and done—very little can be known.
This Christmas is no exception. Among the season's entries: the cover story of the December issue of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly is entitled “The Search for a No-Frills Jesus.” The story reports on the latest doings of the so-called Jesus Seminar and the architects of the Claremont School of Theology's Q Project.
The Jesus Seminar, headquartered in California and founded by author Robert Funk, is a group of New Testament scholars and historians that has gained notoriety in recent years for denying the historical reliability of much of the material in the Gospels. Its ever-changing roster of participating scholars, drawn from the liberal wing of the Scriptural academy, assemble periodically and vote town-meetingstyle— usually in the negative—on whether Jesus said or did specific things traditionally ascribed to him in the New Testament.
A contra Jesus Seminar summit was held last April in Yonkers, N.Y., involving Catholic, Protestant and Jewish Scripture scholars, to counter public impressions given by the group that their assertions represented a consensus among a majority of scholars and that their conclusions were based on new evidence that had come to light.
But what is the evidence on which the Jesus Seminar and other revisionist scholars base their claims?
The International Q Project, founded by scholar James Robinson, and made up principally of Robinson's students and associates, is headquartered at the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, a Claremont Graduate School-affiliated research center in Southern California. Unlike the flashy Jesus Seminar, the Q Project has put in 15 years of painstaking work trying to reconstruct a hypothetical “document” called Q that, they believe, constitutes the oldest literary witness to Jesus of Nazareth and that undergirds the texts of two of the four Gospels.
Many scholars—and not only those associated with the new revisionists— believe that a single literary source, Q (short for Quelle, the German for “source”), accounts for the numerous parallel passages found in Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark. Contained in Q, or at least in the passages for which Q is the hypothetical source, are many of the teachings of Jesus that Christians treasure most, including the Lord's Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount.
More than any other single factor, Q research fuels the ongoing debate about the historical Jesus and many of the more radical views of groups like the Jesus Seminar. Under the sponsorship of the International Q Project, the first of a proposed 30-volume reconstruction of this hypothetical source—the roughly 235 parallel verses in Luke and Matthew— was published last spring by the Belgian firm Peeters under the series title Documenta Q.
For Q scholars like Jon Asgeirsson, associate director of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity in Claremont, “the [Q] collection of sayings of Jesus precede accounts of his passion in terms of age, thus giving them an authenticity and immediacy that the Gospels’ narratives lack.”
In practice, that means that Q's Jesus—a purveyor of wisdom sayings, devoid of virgin birth, crucifixion and resurrection, in fact, of much biographical data at all—is the only reliable starting point for a quest for the historical man.
Professor Luke Timothy Johnson, a leading critic of the Q partisans, is not impressed. The Robert W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at the Candler School of Theology at Atlanta's Emory University and author of The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels (Harper & Row, 1996), calls it “faux history.”
“What the Q people are doing,” he told the Register, “is not history based on ordinary verifiable data, but rather a kind of paper chase in which literary compositions are excavated to purportedly reveal layers of texts that, in turn, point to stages in community development. There are just no controls. If you arrange the pieces slightly differently, you get a different history.”
“The very existence of Q as something more than a purely descriptive phrase for material found in Matthew and Luke but not in Mark is open to the most serious questions,” said Johnson. “It's a kind of historical thinking gone mad.”
But it's the agenda he senses behind the research that disturbs Johnson most. “The recovery of an earlier form of the ‘Jesus movement’ is used by some of [the Claremont scholars] as leverage against traditional Christianity,” he charged. “For them, Jesus is a faculty lounge lizard. The myth of God's involvement with humanity in the flesh and Jesus as the revelation of God's intimacy—an intimacy that calls humanity to empty itself out in service to others—all that is Christian ‘myth,'to be dismissed.… That's why I'm willing to enter into this battle: What's at stake is our hide,” said Johnson.
Not surprisingly, Burton Mack, a professor emeritus of New Testament at the School of Theology at Claremont, and a Q scholar in his own right, sees it differently. “I resent these imputations,” he told the Register. “That assumes that no one is interested in Christian origins unless he has some kind of personal agenda. That's not the point.” Mack is the author of a 1993 work The Lost Gospel that contains his own controversial rendition of Q suggesting that Jesus may have had philosophical similarities with the Cynic movement.
“I'm merely an historian of religion doing my job,” he said. “I'm interested in a Jesus who's historically plausible in order to rediscover what the makers of early Christianity were all about.”
As to charges that he's merely creating a Jesus in the image of his own liberal Christianity, Mack counters “That doesn't take me seriously.” “Of course, I see the Gospels as myth-making,” he admits, “but that's not to get rid of them, or to dismiss them, but rather to discover anew what the early Christians were really trying to tell us.”
Mack defends his research by pointing out that the more historians find out about the New Testament period, “the more we've become aware that there wasn't one form of early Christianity, but various ‘Christianities,’ movements and communities. What [Q research] is telling us about,” he said, “is a specific kind of Jesus movement that wasn't Pauline Christianity.”
Mack and the Claremont school notwithstanding, Q scholarship is hardly a new development. The notion of an underlying source text behind the socalled Synoptic Gospels goes back to 19th century German form criticism and was a particularly important aspect of the work of the 20th century Lutheran biblical scholar Rudolf Bultmann. Some form of documentary theory undergirds much mainstream Catholic as well as Protestant biblical scholarship today.
“I think what's going on is a legitimate scholarly enterprise,” commented George Martin, a Catholic writer on biblical subjects and former editor of God's Word Today, a popular monthly magazine on Scripture. “But then you're going to get good reconstructions and bad reconstructions,” he told the Register. Most mainline scholars would say that Matthew and Luke are drawing on some third source, he said. “But, after all, we don't have a copy of whatever it is, and, therefore, the more detailed or speculative the reconstruction is, the more tenuous it all becomes—especially when you're getting to the point of trying to imagine who the authors or the community were behind a hypothetical text…. You can't afford to make a reconstruction into a substitute gospel,” he said.
For Johnson, the critical issue behind the whole debate is not so much scholarly as pastoral:
“In an attempt to remove the ‘otherness’ of Jesus, late 20th century academicians discover a Jesus who looks very much like them: multicultural, inclusive and equalitarian. Culturally, it's all very comfortable. But this avoids the Jesus who gives his life for God and others. In an age of narcissism and self-actualization, the crucified Jesus is truly counter-cultural.
“This search for a revised Jesus is neither bold nor brave,” he insisted. “It's cultural capitulation, a flight from the real Jesus who calls us to discipleship.”
Gabriel Meyer is based in Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Gabriel Meyer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Affirmative Action Returns To Spotlight with Vengeance DATE: 12/22/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Dec. 22-28, 1996 ----- BODY:THIS YEAR'S race for control of Congress and the White House dominated the news for months across the country. But in one state the national election had to share the spotlight with what was perhaps the most closely-watched ballot initiative in American history. When voters went to the polls and reelected Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress, Californians voted in overwhelming numbers for Proposition 209.
This ballot question, also known as the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), seeks to eliminate the use of race and sex preferences as mandated by government affirmative action programs statewide. Despite a massive spending campaign that opposed the initiative, the measure passed with more than 54 percent of the vote.
Although CCRI was embraced early in the year by Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, he did not focus on the issue until the waning days of the campaign. The issue never became a major issue in the race for the White House. (Bill Clinton, an opponent of CCRI, likewise did not spend much time talking about affirmative action.)
Even without the white heat of a presidential campaign, CCRI generated plenty of sparks. Although the effort was lead by a black businessman, Ward Connerly (a member of the State University Board of Regents), opponents seized on a public appearance by former KIansman David Duke in support of Proposition 209 to try to make the Louisiana white supremacist the face of CCRI. Abattle of the airwaves ensued, with many opponents of CCRI charging supporters with racism. Supporters, meanwhile, scrambled to defend themselves and their initiative.
Through all this bombast, the voice of the Catholic Church remained firm. Cardinal Roger Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles, was a strong opponent of CCRI, and he spoke out again and again on behalf of government affirmative action policies. But he never contributed to the rancor and personalized rhetoric that characterized the CCRI debate.
“The temptation of the current debate regarding the future of affirmative action is to adopt the view of those who claim that the fight against economic, social, and racial discrimination has been fully successful and who press for the surrender of protections won after a long and bitter battle,” he said on June 8, 1993, early on in the affirmative action debate. “Successes we can claim have been real but limited, and were achieved only because of vigilance and determination. Only vigilance and determination will ensure that we do not regress.
On Sept. 3, 1996, the cardinal formally declared his opposition to Proposition 209. He urged Catholics to take a hard look at the goals of affirmative action, and to remember the common good: “Voters should demand a more intelligent level of discourse on the issues we face. In turn, we have the responsibility to search beyond the prepackaged political messages shaped by polling data and focus groups and marketed to the public as substantive information. Where political campaigns have traded substance for soundbites, we must reclaim the political process and place it within a moral context. Our challenge is to recover the moral principles which will strengthen our nation. A commitment to embodying solidarity and the common good should be at the foundation of those principles.”
The common good, in turn, will become more evident as solidarity breaks down the walls of injustice that divide us, he added. “As this occurs, the conditions will be created where the human potential of each person is given the opportunity to be realized.”
The cardinal made great efforts to educate Catholics about CCRI, and tried repeatedly to place CCRI in the context of the Church's social teachings, said one of his top aides.
“The Church cannot escape taking a strong position on an issue with such profound moral consequences,” said Father Gregory Coiro OFM Cap., director of media relations for the archdiocese. “Many Catholics are still woefully to embodying solidarity and the common good should be at the foundation of those principles.”
The common good, in turn, will become more evident as solidarity breaks down the walls of injustice that divide us, he added. “As this occurs, the conditions will be created where the human potential of each person is given the opportunity to be realized.”
The cardinal made great efforts to educate Catholics about CCRI, and tried repeatedly to place CCRI in the context of the Church's social teachings, said one of his top aides.
“The Church cannot escape taking a strong position on an issue with such profound moral consequences,” said Father Gregory Coiro OFM Cap., director of media relations for the archdiocese. “Many Catholics are still woefully unfamiliar with the Church's social teachings on issues like these. There is a tremendous need for greater education. The bishops here in California have tried for years to use their teaching position to discuss public policy issues, and certainly Cardinal Mahony fits into that tradition.”
We need a more civil and constructive discussion if we can continue to move to a colorblind society.”
“Cardinal Mahony showed that the Church can offer a different voice, one that is less political and ideological,” said John Carr, director of social development and world peace at the U.S. Catholic Conference (USCC). “The Church is more focused on the dignity of the human person and the common good.” At the federal level, the USCC has been a strong supporter of “judiciously-administered” affirmative action programs.
Despite Cardinal Mahony's efforts, Californians passed CCRI. Almost immediately, however, the law was challenged in court by a variety of groups. A federal judge in San Francisco ordered that the law not be implemented until the courts can rule on opponents'claims that CCRI violates the “equal protection of the law” provisions of the 14th Amendment.
This legal action, coupled with a renewed push to sharply limit affirmative action programs in the states and a potential effort to do the same thing in Congress, could well mean that Catholics across the country will be grappling with this issue for months and even years to come. Many states are considering legislation on affirmative action this year, and some are looking at the possibility of a CCRI-style state referendum. Oh the federal level, Republicans are preparing to reintroduce legislation, sponsored last year by then-Sen. Dole, to do away with many of Washington's setaside and preference programs.
According to one prominent Catholic legislator, many Catholics learned a healthy self-reliance that leads them to oppose affirmative action. There is a hard-working, self-reliant drive among many ethnic Catholics that you have to make it on your own,” said Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), a Long Island Catholic and a product of Catholic schools as well as a leading opponent of affirmative action. “That comes from our own life experience more than it does from Church teaching. In Catholic schools, we were taught that it was up to us to succeed. No one owed us anything. If we did not have our homework, it was our own fault. If we did poorly on a test, it was our own fault. We could not blame anyone else.”
“That is the way many Catholics were raised,” he said. “We learned a kind of cultural Catholicism by growing up in a Catholic home and attending Catholic schools in a Catholic neighborhood. That kind of attitude of self-reliance stays with you all your life, and it is the reason why many Catholics are opposed to affirmative action policies that benefit one group at the expense of another.”
“I think the bishops are out of touch with ordinary Catholics on this issue,” he added. “Most Catholics are aware of Catholic teaching, and most Catholics have tremendous sympathy for those who have been discriminated against because we know the history of anti Catholic discrimination. But I do not know where in Catholic teaching it says that we need quotas, set-asides, and special preferences based on race and sex.”
“Many Catholics are conflicted about these issues,” said Father Coiro. “Most Catholics will say that they are opposed to reverse discrimination, but they have not done a thorough moral analysis of what that means. Too often, there is a knee-jerk reaction on certain issues, and people may vote their ideology even when it conflicts with the Church's teachings.”
“Of course, Catholics like all Americans are in favor of a color-blind society,” said Carr. “But we are not there yet. We need a more civil and constructive discussion [before] we can continue to move to a colorblind society.”
“For too long, this debate has been focused on individual rights versus group rights,” he added. “We need to focus more on the common good, and we need to find a way to work together to better use the talents of all our people.”
“All of us realize that many affirmative action programs need to be reformed,” said Father Coiro, “But some people believe that simply because we say that everyone is equal, then that automatically makes it so. The problem with Proposition 209 is that it disbands affirmative action but leaves nothing in its place to deal with the problems that still exist.”
Michael Barbera is based in Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Michael Barbera ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: These Days, Potential Converts Can Access the Virtual Church on the Net, But Real Deal Still Happens at Mass DATE: 12/22/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Dec. 22-28, 1996 ----- BODY:THE INTERNET has been called everything from “the encyclopedia of the now” to “an open sewer.” There's cause for these extremes, but an aspect that receives little attention is the Net's role in evangelization. In the September 1996 issue of This Rock, a Catholic apologetics magazine, a man from New Zealand writes: “I am a recent convert. My own conversion took place on and through the Internet with the aid of some wonderful Catholic people.” Some of those people are staff members at Catholic Answers, the largest lay-run Catholic apologetics organization in the United States and publisher of This Rock.
Founded more than a decade ago by Karl Keating, the San Diego-based outfit operates with a staff of 10 whose work mostly revolves around supplying accurate information about the Catholic faith to all comers, many of them potential converts. Catholic Answers has kept pace with the new forms of electronic communication: It now offers a large variety of apologeticaI tracts at a web site (www.catholic.com) which receives thousands of “hits” each month.
Staff-member James Akin, 31, a former philosophy teacher and himself a convert to Catholicism, counts a 100 MHz lap-top computer with 500 Mb hard-drive among his favorite tools for evangelization. He conducts a good part of his work on the Internet, trading messages with several dozen people who are pondering the idea of converting. Lately he has been helping two Baptist pastors who hope to enter the Church this Easter and who have asked him to act as sponsor. “There is one up in the Los Angeles area who has just resigned from his congregation. He's bringing about 12 people who have decided to convert with him,” says Akin.
“The Internet mirrors real life,” says Akin, adding that the population's general level of interest in religion is reflected in the thousands of religion-oriented web sites, numerous “chat rooms,” e-mail discussion groups, a “use net” discussion group, even an Internet Relay Chat channel devoted to Catholicism (#catholic) that features real-time “live” interaction takes place.
An Internet conversion may begin with “web surfing,” with a potential convert typing the subject word “Catholic” into one of the major search engines. This generates a list of web sites one can visit and browse to satisfy initial curiosity. Many of these sites have “hyperlinks,” or cross-references; sooner or later, anyone seriously interested in converting will probably come across the Catholic Answers web site. After reading the material there, the potential convert may take the next step. That's where Akin comes in.
“Several times a week I get an e-mail message in my box from someone saying that they are looking at becoming Catholic, but would like some more information about some topic,” says Akin, who then sends a return e-mail that often starts a dialogue. “Most people I deal with,” he continues, “especially if I have exchanged more than one or two emails, end up converting.” He does not attribute the success to his personal abilities but to the truth of the arguments. The process from start to finish may be a few months or a few years.
“I get lots of questions about Mary,” Akin says. “How do you explain the ‘brethren’ of the Lord mentioned in the Bible?” is a frequent query. Others ask about the basis for the Church's teaching on Mary's assumption into heaven, or the Immaculate Conception. Akin also fields questions on Purgatory and papal infallibility. Questions on moral issues, he notes, more typically come from confused or fallen-away Catholics than from non-Catholics. The strangest question he recalls fielding was, “How do you tie the monk's knot?” probably referring to the rope cinctum worn by friars. “Even if I knew the answer,” Akin says, “I don't think I could have explained it by computer.”
What is the next step of an “on-line” conversion? Akin once received the following e-mail message: “Yes, send me more information about joining the Catholic Church. Is this something I can do by computer?” Well, not exactly—not yet. After a potential converts have expressed a desire to enter the Church, Akin directs them to contact a priest.
Sometimes he may try to grease the skids by contacting a priest in the person's area and explaining the situation. From there, the conversion process follows conventional avenues. Akin notes, however, that there are still potential stumbling blocks on the way. One of the biggest of these, is that many RCIA programs require all converts, regardless of previous background, to complete the same lengthy and highly rudimentary catechesis of the Christian faith. Akin describes this as “very off-putting” to converts who are already catechized in other Christian Churches. He notes, however, that the U.S. bishops have asked that catechesis for converts henceforth be geared to their level of knowledge of Christianity.
While Catholic Answers staff already have their hands full simply responding to the large number of inquiries they receive, there's a temptation to take a more proactive approach to Internet evangelizing by sending out thousands of unsolicited messages to e-mail boxes exists. Akin, however, dismisses the idea: “That is called ‘spamming’ and is very bad ‘netiquette.’ It's like electric junk mail.”
Still, the Internet stands to evolve as a major tool for evangelization. Says Akin, “it's hard to see the specific way it's going to happen, but you know it's going to be big.” Looking at human history as divided into eras of the spoken word, the written word, and the printed word, he observes: “Now we are at the dawn of the era of the electronic word. Each time there has been a revolution in communications technology it has provided vast new potentials—and vast new dangers—for the transmission of God's Word in the world.”
Brother Clement Kennedy is a monk at Prince of Peace Abbey, Oceanside, Calif.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Clement Kennedy OSB ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Why Evangelization Begins With Personal Conversion DATE: 12/22/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Dec. 22-28, 1996 ----- BODY:Q & A
FATHER CARL Tenhundfeld is president of the National Council for Catholic Evangelization (NCCE), director of the Office of Evangelization for the Diocese of Galveston-Houston, Texas, and pastor of All Saints Church in Houston, a bilingual parish.
The NCCE was established by the U.S. bishops in 1982 in response to Pope Paul VI's apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Nuntiandi (On Evangelization in the Modern World), which states that “evangelizing all people constitutes the essential mission of the Church.” Father Tenhundfeld spoke with the Register recently.
Father Tenhundfeld: Evangelization impacts every level of life. It can occur in the hospital when a baby is born; in a funeral home when someone has passed on to life eternal; and at every stage of life in between. Many people have been doing good works in their families, communities and parishes without realizing they are evangelizing. They think evangelizing means knocking on doors and preaching. In reality, to evangelize means that I accept that the Lord Jesus has invited me into his life and has called me through baptism to share the good news of what is happening in my life. I can do this at home, at work or wherever.
Vatican II gave a huge impetus to evangelization. Why did the Catholic Church not place more emphasis on it before the council?
Prior to Vatican II, the Church looked at evangelization in terms of missionary work in Africa, Asia, or places where the faith was not known. Then the Church began to think of the entire world as a venue for evangelization. Vatican II emphasized each Christian's baptismal role—our right and obligation to spread the faith.
Can you the assess progress made in Catholic evangelization in the United States?
The bishops welcomed Pope Paul VI's document, Evangelii Nuntiandi, but it took time to filter down. In the United States, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) gathered clergy and laity from throughout the country to explore ways of implementing Pope Paul VI's document. This led to the creation in 1983 of the National Council for Catholic Evangelization, which has been one of the primary forces in promoting evangelization in dioceses, parishes and organizations throughout the country.
How does Catholic evangelization differ from the efforts of other denominations?
Catholics are familiar with members of Baptist Churches who consider their call to accept the Lord Jesus as their Savior as a biblical, one-time call. To Catholics, this invitation is not extended once, but repeated many times—in baptism, the Eucharist, confirmation, matrimony and holy orders. The sacraments are repeated calls to reconversion. The Protestants' commitment to Jesus happens on a personal level. The Catholic relationship with God also calls them into the community of the Church and to participation in the Eucharist. The Word is very important, but the Eucharist is crucial as a sign that we are the body of Christ.
Pope Paul VI listed several methods of evangelization: witness of life, preaching, liturgy, catechetics, mass media, personal contact, sacraments. Which methods are most successful in the United States today?
All of these methods are effective; which ones are more successful depends on the parish. Pope Paul VI stated that evangelization means not only giving witness in life, but also proclaiming Jesus as Savior. This can take place in a personal conversation, in a parish, diocese, conference, outreach programs, or on a national level such as in 1992 when we celebrated the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Christianity in the Western Hemisphere.
Pope Paul VI credits base communities loyal to the Church as both “beneficiaries of evangelization and potential evangelizers.” Are small-faith communities growing in the United States?
They are growing. Some people are reluctant to come back to the Church in a large-group setting at Sunday Mass. Those who have been away for a long time feel more comfortable in joining friends or neighbors at someone's home, where they gather to discuss religion and have fellowship. But these groups are evangelizing communities only if they share the Good News of Jesus outside their group. Small-faith communities will be one of the refreshing experiences of evangelization as the Church enters the third millennium.
What are the greatest obstacles to evangelization in this country?
The greatest obstacle is the unwillingness of Catholics to focus their lives on the prism of evangelization by sharing the Good News of Jesus’ action in their lives. There's lethargy among the clergy, lack of funds, and the stubborn notion that evangelization is a Protestant practice.
Are more U.S. adults entering or leaving the Catholic Church? Why?
It's been noted that Jesus said: “Feed my sheep,” not “count my sheep.” In this country we are too concerned about numbers. On any Easter Vigil Mass between 300,000 and 400,000 people come into the Catholic Church. But a large number of Catholics have left the Church or have ceased practicing their faith. The largest group of U.S. Catholics is in the 20-35 year-old age bracket—however, the largest number of inactive Catholics is also found in this group.
In people's conversion experience, there are upward and downward trends. Some Catholics become active during various stages of their lives. They interact with the Church during marriage, the birth of a child, baptism, or first communion. The sacraments are opportunities for reconversion in their lives.
What draws Christians and non-Christians to the Catholic faith?
Christians are probably drawn because of the Catholic Church's sacramentality. Non-Catholic Christians have a strong love and understanding of the Scriptures and music in their churches. But, according to psychologist Carl Jung, people need symbols in their lives. All our rituals, sacramental signs and symbols are tremendous attractions. We use water, bread, wine and incense in our rituals.
What leads Catholics to stop practicing their faith or to join other denominations?
We live in a very mobile society. With frequent job changes and people moving from one city to another, there is a sense of rootlessness, a lack of a sense of community. If you haven't gone to church for a while, it's just as easy to put it off. Some feel they are not being fed. Others feel preaching in their parish isn't up to snuff; liturgies are mechanical. Another factor is marriage and divorce. Annulments take a long time, maybe a year, to process. We live in a now society, and many Catholics are unwilling to wait that long. When they are invited to join other denominations, they are not given a list of rules and regulations; they are welcomed and accepted as they are.
How can Catholics who consider their faith life private be encouraged to share more of themselves with others?
Some people get uptight when asked to talk about their faith, but at some time in their lives, they will express their faith in Jesus Christ—without realizing they are evangelizing. The Jesus story began when he interacted with Matthew, Mark, Mary Magdalene, the woman at the well, the leper, the beggar. That interaction was written down. Today Jesus is still interacting with you and me. Once he interacts with us, our story becomes a continuation of the Gospel stories.
—Joyce Carr
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joyce Carr ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Venite Adoremus! Venite Adoremus! DATE: 12/22/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Dec. 22-28, 1996 ----- BODY:JESUS WAS a true baby. He was conceived in a fully supernatural way, but from the time he left his mother's womb, we must suppose he acted like all babies, in every respect. Christmas is the feast of the birth of the Son of God who yawns, burps, cries and even giggles as only a newborn can. It is the union of divine transcendence and human ordinariness, though neither the nature of Christ's Godhead nor his humanity were lost in the process. In many cases, even those who rarely go to Mass celebrate Christmas. We all long to be reborn and transcend our weaknesses: lack of trust, emotional starvation, some kind of upheaval, or maybe just loneliness. Christmas spells new beginnings. We are creatures always trying to begin again, as Gerard Manley Hopkins once put it.
We can celebrate the beginning of our salvation by getting in touch with our innate woundedness. We can fix a car, but we cannot repair our human nature. For that, we need to turn to this babe and let him heal us in the Church once called “a hospital” by Pope John XXIII. However, we must realize that God will not give us the perfect human community on earth. We have to learn to accept and live with imperfection everywhere, even as we aim for excellence. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us: “… [Our human nature] is wounded in the natural powers proper to it: subject to ignorance, suffering, and the dominion of death; and inclined to sin—an inclination to evil that is called ‘concupiscence.' Baptism, by imparting the life of Christ's grace, erases original sin and turns the baptized back toward God, but the consequences for nature, weakened and inclined to evil, persist in man and summon him to a spiritual battle” (405).
On Christmas day, the Lord gives us the grace to show mercy to ourselves and neighbors. The doctrine of original sin, far from being pessimistic, is a call to ask for and accept God's merciful love and learn ourselves to love in that manner. The Catechism teaches: “Only the light of divine Revelation clarifies the reality of sin and particularly of the sin committed at mankind's origins. Without the knowledge Revelation gives us of God, we cannot recognize sin clearly and are tempted to explain it as merely a developmental flaw, a psychological weakness, a mistake, or the necessary consequence of an inadequate social structure, etc. Only in the knowledge of God's plan for man can we grasp that sin is an abuse of the freedom that God gives to created persons so that they are capable of loving him and loving one another” (387).
At Christmas we discover that God is not aloof. He wants to be intimate with us, and not merely as dependent children, but as collaborators who help him redeem individuals and communities. But it all began with Jesus'birth, the birth of the dream that mankind can be freed in order to be perfected. At Christmas, we celebrate our chance at re-birth from sin. Venite adoremus! Venite adoremus!
Father Cole is a friar of the Western Dominican Province.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: BASIL COLE OP ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Welcome to Immigrants Captured On Film Aims to Change Minds DATE: 12/22/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Dec. 22-28, 1996 ----- BODY:The Catholic Church in American was primarily an immigrant Church in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Irish, Italian and Polish newcomers found in their faith and its institutions a safe haven, from which they could build their lives in an often inhospitable land.
In the past two decades America has been experiencing a similar wave of immigration, but with one important difference—most of those currently arriving on our shores are non-European people of color. This creates special problems. The current political climate of diminished economic expectations tends to be hostile to immigrants. To remedy the situation, the United States Catholic Conference (USCC) is following Pope John Paul II's lead in searching for new ways for the Church to help them.
Who Are My Sisters and Brothers: Understanding and Welcoming Immigrants and Refugees is a 30-minute video produced by Journey Films for the USCC's Office for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Refugees. It focuses on three parishes that have successfully opened their arms to the newcomers. Each provides a different model for other communities to learn from. Not intended for broadcast use, the video is meant to be primarily an educational and organizational tool.
Father Tom Wenski, pastor of Notre Dame d'Haiti in Miami, Fla., describes his parishioners as “people who refuse to die.” They “aren't here to fail,” he says. “They're here to succeed.” Having fled a vicious political tyranny back home, most undertook a perilous sea journey, arriving here with few possessions.
Accompanied by rumors of health problems, the Haitians have been among the least popular of the current wave of immigrants. Lacking the clout of the Cubans who've come to dominate Miami, they never can forget they are “foreigners in a foreign land,” Father Wenski points out. “But at least on Sunday they can feel at home,” when Mass is celebrated together in their native Creole tongue.
In his 17 years at Notre Dame d'Haiti, Father Wenski has gone beyond ministering to his flock's purely spiritual needs. The parish has also become an efficient community services center, providing daycare, classes in English, employment leads and legal assistance.
Father Wenski, himself the descendant of recent Polish immigrants, and he speaks movingly of how this background helps him identify with the Haitians. “Our grandparents made America great because it was our grandparents that dug the coal and dug the canals and staffed the factories,” he says. “In the same way these new immigrants will also contribute to making America great.”
Most of the parishioners at St. Willebrord's in Green Bay, Wisc., are middle class and of Dutch descent. The local meat-packing industry has long been a magnet for immigrant labor, so five years ago the parish sought to reach out and include these newlyarrived Catholics of a different class and ethnic background as part of their community. “They had nowhere to celebrate the sacraments,” says St. Willebrord's pastor, Father Ken De Groot.
Because the majority of the newcomers were Hispanic, Father De Groot took a field trip to Mexico to better understand the immigrant's culture. His anglo parishioners also put some of their own skills to use; retired school teachers have volunteered to instruct Hispanic workers in English.
Catholic politicians like Pat Buchanan have loudly opposed the use of immigrant labor in workplaces like meat-packing plants, arguing that they take jobs away from native-born Americans and drive down wages. However, Father De Groot and his staff are firm in their defense of the newcomers. “We never ask them if they are legal or illegal, documented or undocumented,” he says.
Sister Melanie Maczka, Father De Groot's pastoral associate, adds that none of her charges have come to this country for the welfare checks and that undocumented workers pay taxes like everyone else even though they may never get to share fully in the benefits.
But whatever the unintended political or legal implications, St. Willebrord's is practicing Christian charity. There's no mistaking the joy in the faces of the newcomers as they celebrate Mass in Spanish or watch the baptisms of their children.
Refugees present Catholics with a different kind of challenge. St. Mary's in Greensboro, N.C., was founded by the Vincentian Fathers more than 60 years ago to serve a small African-American community that was experiencing discrimination. Several years ago it changed its mission and decided to take in refugees from Vietnam and Africa who, unlike most immigrants, had left their native lands involuntarily.
At first, some of the African-Americans who had grown up at St. Mary's resented the newcomers, but the creation of a multi-cultural parish council, currently headed by a Nigerian doctor, helped identify problems. As an example of their newly discovered diversity, the present director of community services is a Vietnamese montagnard who spent four years in a communist re-education camp.
In an effort to bring his multi-ethnic flock together, the parish's anglo pastor, Father Frank McGuire, once asked his charges to write about their pain and seal it in an envelope. All the envelopes were then burned in a public ceremony, and a pole erected on the ashes that proclaims “peace” in 15 languages, a fitting symbol of the parish's new mission.
Father McGuire describes a typical Vietnamese montagnard family of 10, arriving at the parish with only two suitcases. “Inside will be all religious articles. No clothes, no books, but statues of and images of the saints and the Lord,” he says. “They ask me to bless those images and it's very humbling. These people have nothing but their faith.”
In a time of great economic change and insecurity, many Catholics may be lukewarm to the call to action issued by Who Are My Sisters and Brothers. The USCC, however, is committed to what the bishops believe is prophetic witness in reminding the American Church of its immigrant heritage and of its continuing mission to help the stranger among us.
For more information, please contact the Office for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Refugees at 3211 Fourth St., NE, Washington, DC 20017-1194; Tel: (202) 541-3000
John Prizer is based in Los Angeles
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 12/22/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Dec. 22-28, 1996 ----- BODY:Teaching Torture
This is in reply to Capt. Kevin McIver's letter to the editor (“School of the Americas”) in the Sept. 29 issue of the Register. Capt. McIver is Public Relations Officer for the U.S. Army School of the Americas.
In my naiveté I wanted to believe him but I have since learned his statements are not true. Areport published in TheWashington Post, Sept. 22, 1996, stated that “the U.S. Department of Defense has admitted training Latin American military leaders in the arts of torture, execution, blackmail and other forms of coercion from 1982-1991.”
Capt. McIver mentions “human rights” throughout his letter. These are brutal soldiers who come to Fort Benning and they are returned brutal soldiers with added training in torture and assassinations. The local people fear them: Aknock on the door at any time could mean abduction, torture and killing.
He says a small percentage have been accused of these crimes—that is, the small percentage who have been caught. That democracy has returned to Latin America is another one of his points. Is being ruled by a dictator who is kept in power by the military an example of democratic rule?
Why should our government be involved in such negative and murderous activity? Peace and justice and democracy are not promoted by such training. It's time for a congressional investigation and a closing of the School of the Americas.
Ruth O'Loughlin
Wooster, Ohio
Simply Hate
In the 1930s our family lived in an Irish Catholic neighborhood. As a pre-school child, I learned about anti-Semitism. Older girls (wearing their Catholic school uniforms) would chase us. They would call us “Christ killers” or worse. Their parents weren't much better.
My parents listened to Father Coughlin's radio broadcasts because they knew the neighbors who cursed at them were also listening. Probably like a black family watching a cross burning down the street, knowing their neighbors were under the white robes and hoods.
This Easter will mark my 15th year as a Catholic. I've learned about love and forgiveness through the Church, but I still can't understand centuries of Jewish hatred by Catholics and other Christians. When calling us “Christ killers,” didn't they understand that, in the garden, when Jesus wanted to let the cup pass by him, God wanted to express his love for us through the injustice and terror of the Cross. God wanted to show his closeness to us in our pain and separation and failure. The power of the resurrection is our unending hope in the midst of failure and death.
Ultra conservatives pine for the beautiful Latin Mass with its three mea culpas, but all the words and actions during that Mass didn't make Catholics better people. Father Coughlin spoke words of hate—period.
Dorothy Kushner
Orange, California
Not Contraception
An article (“British Church Leaders Hail New NFP Device”) in the Nov. 10-16 Register tells about a new natural family planning device that has gone on sale in England, called “Persona.” Twice in the article, Persona is compared with “other contraceptives.” This inaccuracy could lead to confusion. Natural family planning is not contraception. It involves some abstinence while contraception does the exact opposite.
Dorothy Stathis
Victoria, Texas
Cohabitation
I write to commend you for the article “At Long Last, Young Adults Get Serious Attention” by David Finnigan in your Nov. 10-16 issue. The article deals with “Sons and Daughters of the Light: APastoral Plan” that was approved by the bishops at their November meeting.
As a member of the steering committee for the writing of the pastoral plan, I also want to point out that a quotation attributed to me in the article is not accurate. It reads: “If you just take the issue of cohabitation and zero in on that, you're going up a one way street that's a dead end.” In response to Finnigan's question about cohabitation, I pointed out that the pastoral plan does not deal specifically with that issue but that it supposes and supports the teaching of the Church. Secondly, and more importantly, I pointed out that if the issue of cohabitation is raised in the context of marriage preparation, the priest or pastoral minister would need to sensitively present the authentic teaching of the Church to the couple.
Father Charles Hagan
Representative for Higher Education and Campus
Ministry
The United States Catholic Conference
Washington, D.C.
Roman Catholics?
Your Dec. 1-7 issue of the Register has me wondering why someone like Bill Murray, obviously uninformed as to why Congressman Robert Dornan (RCalif.) lost his bid for re-election, was given space for his comments (“A Leading Pro-Life Congressman Receives a Rude Awakening”).
To claim that the bishops identified abortion as the most important moral issue today is wrong. They placed welfare concerns first of all, with abortion mentioned hardly at all. American Catholics were led to believe that a continuance of big government was of greater importance than putting an end to the destruction of innocent human life.
If the words of Pope John Paul had been heeded, as they should have been, the outcome of the 1996 election would have been different; Dornan would have been reelected. I doubt that we should be called Roman Catholics when our leadership appears to ignore the Pope's leadership in matters of faith and morals.
Joan Herman
Albuquerque, New Mexico
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Clearing Advent's Final Hurdle DATE: 12/22/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Dec. 22-28, 1996 ----- BODY:The final days of the Advent season put us in the close company of the Blessed Virgin Mary. As we prepare again for the birth of her Only Son, the Virgin Mother of God becomes our special companion, sharing with us her anticipation for the Birth of Christ. Since we join in Mary's expectancy, there should be no fear that the glorious promises that Isaiah heard—“Comfort, give comfort to my people” (Is 40, 1)—will not find their fulfillment in us. Divine comfort or consolation springs from our willing conformity to God's providence for us. The Christian people recognize in Mary's fiat, “Let it be done to me according to thy word,” the first expression of their own transforming surrender to God's holy will. As the “New Eve,” Mary can speak for us all.
Advent marks out a time for special graces. We sometimes call them the “graces of the Advent season.” In this unseasonal springtime, we wait for a green shoot to come out of the stumps of our old selves. The Church encourages this expectancy both in her liturgy and through special Advent practices. In one Advent Gospel, Jesus assures us that “it is not part of your heavenly Father's plan that a single one of these little ones shall ever come to grief” (Mt 18, 14). Sinful disorder spells grief, depriving the human creature of the order and truth established by the Creator, and further, of the dignity that God communicates to every person. Because they respect the order of creation and embody the truth about human conduct, the gifts and virtues bring us comfort, thereby ensuring that our lives manifest the dignity that becomes every human person.
Consider the simple example of prayer. Personal prayer is not an optional feature of one's daily schedule. Because we are God's creatures, we owe Him the service of our reverence, expressed in prayers of adoration, petition, intercession and thanksgiving. When we reflect on the Advent promises, we further realize that communication with God, besides establishing a right relationship between Creator and creatures, also initiates a conversation between a child and his Father. Every prayer is made in the name of Jesus. For it is the Incarnate Son who makes it possible for us to address God in the familiar terms that we use every day—“Our Father.” Prayer imposes an obligation, but it also expresses filial boldness, the sense of assuredness that children learn from parents who provide reasonably for their wants. In other words, prayer brings comfort. The sinful neglect of prayer, on the other hand, introduces disorder into our lives to the extent that we become self-reliant and even rebellious toward a Creator who provides lavishly for his creatures and bestows graces even more abundantly on his children. Not to pray means to live a disordered and untruthful life, a life deprived of the dignity that results from conversing with God.
What is true about prayer applies to every virtue of the Christian life. None of them are optional. So we rejoice when we learn that the virtues belong firstly and preeminently to Christ. We rejoice all the more when he tells us that all of the virtues and the gifts are destined to flow into those who are members of his Body. Because we often neglect these gifts and virtues, we are encouraged to receive the sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation during the Advent season.
Advent purple signals a time for penance, but Advent sorrow is a joyful discipline. During Advent, we ask for the grace to be formed again into the perfect image of the Only Son. Because we believe that this transforming work is even now active in the Church of faith and sacraments, we pray for the grace to enter more deeply into the “hidden” mystery of God's love. Kings and prophets longed for this gift from God, but it was reserved for us. Advent is a time for transformation.
Since the beginning of his pontificate, John Paul II has asked us to live the last years of the millennium as a “New Advent.” He wants the Church to renew her faith in the transforming power of Christ's love. The call is addressed to priests in a special way. Asacramental consecration commits the priest to preach the transformation of grace without hesitancy or equivocation. For this task, “a spirit of counsel and of strength, a spirit of knowledge and of fear of the Lord” is given to each one of these “other Christs.”
But the priest, and indeed any Christian believer, will take up the cause of the new evangelization only to the extent that he has first experienced the miracle in himself. In order for this to happen, theories, no matter how well-recommended they come, disappoint. Instead, we need persons. And we return to the person of Mary, who stands at the center of Advent waiting.
This year's solemnity of the Immaculate Conception was observed Dec. 9 to accommodate the Second Sunday of Advent. No one can enter into the joy for which Advent prepares us without pondering the mystery of Mary's Immaculate Conception. When we speak about development of doctrine, we do not mean that the Church changes or invents revealed truth. Rather, the development of doctrine allows the Church to show us more clearly the significance of a mystery for the life of the Church. This is especially the case when we consider the Marian doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption.
The bull Ineffabilis Deus, which proclaims that Mary is immaculately conceived, dates only from 1854. Why did God allow so much time to elapse before confirming the Immaculate Conception as a truth of the Catholic faith? In my view, it has something to do with the nature of spiritual combat in the modern world. Christians of earlier periods surely struggled to resist the allure of sin. But our age creates special obstacles to pursuing the universal call to holiness. In a world where the burden of sin leads people to pursue every kind of extreme, even to plotting their own destruction, we need to embrace the one person against whom the devil's blackmail— the psychological burden of our sins— holds no power. She is Mary Immaculate.
Christmas celebrates Christ's complete victory over sin, which appears firstly and preeminently in the woman who makes the Incarnation possible. Mary, then, appears like the Morning Star, announcing the advent of her Son. The preparations for the Great Jubilee have begun: The new year belongs to Christ, the Incarnate Word, who restores to fallen man the order, truth and dignity that God graciously communicated to Blessed Mary—so that we might see in her, beforehand, the great mystery of our salvation fulfilled.
Father Cessario is a professor of systematic theology at St. John's Seminary, Brighton, Mass.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Romanus Cessario OP ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: On 4,000 Years of Love & War in the Holy City DATE: 12/22/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Dec. 22-28, 1996 ----- BODY:Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths, by Karen Armstrong (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996, 471 pp., $30)
Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai once wrote that “Jerusalem is a place where everyone remembers that he has forgotten something.” Karen Armstrong's newest work, an encyclopedic romp through 4,000 years of the city's history, is an often poignant illustration of just how true that observation is.
The status of Jerusalem, holy city for Jews, Christians and Muslims, remains one of the most stubborn of the world's geopolitical dilemmas. Despite the efforts of some of the world's best minds, five Middle Eastern wars in the last 50 years that, to varying degrees, had wresting control of Jerusalem as a central aim.
Israeli sovereignty over the whole of Jerusalem—the Jewish western side and Palestinian dominated East Jerusalem—the result of the Six Day War of 1967, is merely the latest historical attempt to reconfigure a city that houses the holy sites of three monotheistic religions and the dreams of more than half the human race.
One of the virtues of Armstrong's historical overview of Jerusalem's many rulers is to demonstrate why today's total Israeli sovereignty (the eastern Arab portion, including the Old City, has been annexed since 1981) may not be the long-term solution for this most coveted city. International controversy over the Israeli-sponsored Jerusalem 3000 celebrations this year and the recent Palestinian uproar over the opening of an archaeological tunnel near the Dome of the Rock shows that, despite 30 years of Israeli control, ethnic and religious passions remain as volatile, and as destabilizing, as ever.
In thorough, workmanlike prose, Armstrong takes us on a fact-filled tour of a city with precious few natural assets—it is isolated, far from trade routes, its rocky terrain is inhospitable to agriculture. Nevertheless, the city has been loved as perhaps no other single site on earth—loved nearly to death as its record of being “the world's most destroyed city” suggests.
The Babylonians depopulated the city in the sixth century BC. The Romans leveled it entirely in 135 AD, and even renamed it in order to remove every trace of Jerusalem's Jewish heritage. Zoroastrian Persians swept through the Holy Land in 614 and wiped Byzantine Jerusalem off the map. Three hundred years later the Fatimid Caliph Hakim burned the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Christianity's holiest site, to the ground—an act that spurred the papacy to call for Crusades “to free Jerusalem from the infidel.” The Crusaders, in turn, after slaughtering most of the city's Jews and Muslims in 1099, spent a century reconverting every religious site to Christian use, only to lose the city to Muslim armies in 1187. Ottoman Turks let it sink into a Levantine backwater for 400 years until Europe “rediscovered” Jerusalem in the 19th century while competing Jewish and Arab claims to the city, set the stage for the Israeli-Arab conflict that has occupied so much of the 20th century.
Armstrong's account of this tortured history deserves good marks for her understanding of Jewish and Muslim historical sensibilities. She doesn't fare as well with her own tradition. The author is a former Religious and her writing on Byzantine and Crusader Jerusalem sometimes grates on the reader's nerves with its tendency to adopt a “superior” tone when chronicling the deeds of her own historical forebears. And, as in her other encyclopedic treatment AHistory of God, she does not always resist the generalist's temptation to oversimplify or to make sweeping assessments that do not do justice to the facts. However, she does have an eye for the arresting anecdote.
Among any reader's favorites would have to be her account of a 12th century Muslim diplomat who paid regular visits to the Crusader-period Knights Templar ensconced in what used to be the site of the ancient Jewish temple and what is today the El-Aksa mosque. “A cultured, affable man, Usamah was bemused by the Franks. He admired their physical courage but was appalled by their primitive medicine, their disrespectful treatment of women, and their religious intolerance…. He had made friends with the Templars in Jerusalem, and whenever he visited them in the Aqsa they put a little oratory at his disposal. One day when he was praying, facing Mecca, a Frank rushed into the room, lifted Usamah into the air and turned him forcibly toward the east: ‘This is the way to pray!' he exclaimed. The Templars hurried in and took the man away, [mortified], but as soon as their backs were turned, the same thing happened again.”
The tale is not only entertaining, but instructive as well. For as Armstrong relates, the city has fared best in those brief periods when it's rulers abandoned attempts to commandeer the city for their own purposes and, instead, focused on weaving into a workable human environment the three very different religious claims that, whatever the difficulties, determine the unalterable reality that is Jerusalem.
Each of the three communities—Jewish, Christian and Muslim—has seen its “Jerusalem” destroyed, its history apparently obliterated by one or more of its rivals, and “facts on the ground” created to prevent its return. And yet, against all odds, Muslims won back the city against the “invincible” Crusaders. Long-persecuted Christian communities have survived every attempt to marginalize them and Jews, repeatedly exiled from the city of David, have come back to Zion—never to he separated from it again.
As Armstrong writes: “… the long tragic history of Jerusalem shows [that] nothing is permanent or guaranteed. The societies that have lasted the longest in the holy city have been the ones that were prepared for some kind of tolerance and coexistence…. That, rather than a sterile and deadly struggle for sovereignty, must be the way to celebrate Jerusalem's sanctity today.”
There have been dozens of solutions proposed through the decades for governing the future city of peace: corpus separatum—some sort of special international status for the Old City and the other holy places; continued Israeli rule with autonomy for Palestinian districts; one city under joint Palestinian-Israeli supervision; two linked municipalities. But, as Armstrong emphasizes, what must undergird any potential settlement is a fundamental change in attitude toward the city itself—its history as well as its inhabitants—a change that moves beyond maximalist (and exclusionary) slogans like “Jerusalem is Arab,” and “One Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish people.”
Palestinian leader Faisal Husseini put it this way in a speech delivered in May, 1995: “I dream of the day when a Palestinian will say ‘Our Jerusalem'and will mean Palestinians and Israelis, and an Israeli will say ‘Our Jerusalem’ and will mean Israelis and Palestinians.”
Gabriel Meyer is based in Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Gabriel Meyer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: 'Common Ground' as Communion--A Witness for the Defense DATE: 12/22/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Dec. 22-28, 1996 ----- BODY:AVERY DULLES SJ, who for 40 years has been one of the Catholic Church's most respected and prolific theologians, recently delivered the McGinley lecture at Fordham University under the title, The Travails of Dialogue. Extensive excerpts from the lecture appeared in the Register (“Context of Christian Proclamation Sets Parameters of Dialogue,” Dec. 8-14).
In his presentation, Father Dulles refers prominently to a statement drawn up by the National Pastoral Life Center in New York and released in August by the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago. That statement, Called to Be Catholic: Church in a Time of Peril, provides the basis for the Catholic “Common Ground” initiative, launched by the cardinal as a pastoral response to the alarming and debilitating climate of polarization that characterizes some areas of Church life in the United States today. The statement offers an analysis of the present situation, indicates concrete issues of pastoral concern, proposes guidelines for addressing challenges and differences, and invites to discernment and response.
And response has been forthcoming! Called to Be Catholic has clearly touched a nerve of recognition in many, eliciting from them expressions of gratitude for the guidance it offers and for the hope it represents. At the same time it has also drawn some serious criticism, not least from a number of American cardinals who fear that the statement and the initiative it has inaugurated may compromise the demands of Catholic unity and even, unwittingly, contribute to the very polarization it decries by seeming to legitimize dissent from authoritative Church teaching.
Father Dulles now adds his own nuanced assessment to the discussion, if not by way of direct critique, then by posing considered cautions. Significantly, he concedes that his difficulty with the statement lies not so much with what is actually said, but what it seems “to imply,” particularly within “the current atmosphere.” Thus a major part of Father Dulles's remarks offers what might be termed a “contextual analysis” of contemporary American society, referring, above all, to theoretical academic discussions concerning dialogue among world religions and issues of political philosophy.
In both these areas Father Dulles detects an appeal to “dialogue” that, in effect, promotes a “relativistic pluralism” of beliefs and a consequent reduction of the role of religion to private preference with no import or bearing upon the public realm. For, if truth claims are ruled out of court, then there are no grounds for adjudicating among positions and mutual tolerance of private preferences becomes the sole governing value. Within such an intellectual and cultural climate, the statement's appeal for “a renewed spirit of civility, dialogue, generosity, and broad and serious consultation” can actually appear to countenance compromise and accommodation even to the “dissolution” of defining truths of the faith.
The Incarnation of the Word both enables and requires the ongoing dialogue
Further, such attitudes inevitably spread from the rarefied heights of academia to pews and parish councils, promoting “a privatized Church” in which individual conscience is elevated above authoritative teaching and the awesome reality of God's pilgrim people is reduced to disparate individuals wandering disconnectedly through a cafeteria line.
As one of the supporters of the statement and a member of the committee formed by Cardinal Bernardin to oversee the Catholic “Common Ground” initiative, I cannot but be grateful for the cautions advanced by so eminent a thinker as Father Dulles. They also provide an opportunity for me to offer a personal perspective upon the statement. I find it important, at the outset, to note that its title is Called to Be Catholic. Hence, it is not in the first instance a “call to dialogue,” but rather an appeal to appropriate the gift that is Catholic Christianity. When the statement mentions “dialogue,” it is as a means to a greater end, not as an end unto itself.
Moreover, the statement sounds a call and challenge whose purpose and thrust is primarily pastoral. It is concerned about polarization and centrifugal forces within the Church precisely because these represent a threat to the catholicity of the Church and an impediment to effective evangelization and pastoral ministry. Of the several issues highlighted by the statement by way of concrete example, few directly involve doctrinal issues, while all are explicitly pastoral in nature.
Before being a call to dialogue, then, Called to Be Catholic is a call to discernment and conversion: to “examine our situation with fresh eyes, open minds, and changed hearts” (phrases thrice repeated in a relatively brief document). And the goal of such discernment and of any dialogue it may promote is “to understand for ourselves and articulate for our world the meaning of discipleship of Jesus Christ.”
It's important to underline this Christocentric focus of the statement. The “common ground” it envisages is not some neutral meeting place, but a place of encounter with Jesus Christ within the community of disciples. The statement confesses early and explicitly that this common ground is “centered on faith in Jesus” and “marked by accountability to the living Catholic tradition.” Further, in a sentence that has been much remarked upon, it insists that “Jesus Christ, present in Scripture and sacrament, is central to all that we do: he must always be the measure and not what is measured.” Hardly, I would think, a word of consolation to proponents of “relativistic pluralism.”
If the contemporary climate indeed tends to privatize religious belief and to divorce it from any effective role in the public realm, the statement takes issue with such a view, both implicitly and explicitly. Implicitly in that the polarization it decries often prevents Catholics from making the full resources of their tradition available to the social and political life of the nation. Explicitly in that it willingly “embraces the demands that the Gospel poses for our public life and social structures as well as for our private lives and personal relations.” One would hardly expect less from a statement that reflects the leadership of Cardinal Bernardin, the passionate and eloquent advocate of a consistent ethic of life in both the ecclesial and the political orders.
Ultimately, the “common ground” to which Called to Be Catholic aspires is not the sterile lowest common denominator modus vivendi some seem to fear, but the fecund common life of ecclesial communion, the New Testament koinonia, enabled by God and realized in the Church which, our statement unabashedly affirms, is “a chosen people, a mysterious communion, a foreshadowing of the Kingdom, a spiritual family.” Nowhere is this communion more palpable than in liturgical celebration, “the space created by praise and worship … the common worship of God through Jesus Christ in the communion of the Holy Spirit.” Here, especially, common ground is revealed to be holy ground. And from this common ground of worship the community of disciples is sent forth for mission and service: preaching and teaching, reconciling and healing, denouncing injustice and even risking the travails of dialogue—all in hope of renewing all things in Christ.
Towards the end of his lecture, Father Dulles appeals to the particularity of Christian revelation and its source in “the divine Word which is one and eternal.” And he adds: “In a sense, therefore, Christianity is mono-logic.” But, as we prepare to celebrate the birth of the Messiah, I would venture to expand his insight. For the eternal Word has become truly incarnate, assuming human flesh and entering into human history and culture. This admirabile commercium, this wondrous exchange, unites God and man in intimate and loving dialogue. The Incarnation of the Word both enables and requires the ongoing dialogue that is the Church's tradition as, in words ever ancient and ever new, it meditates upon and mediates to the world the inexhaustible riches of Christ who is Emmanuel: God with us.
Father Imbelli, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, is associate professor of theology at Boston College.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Robert Imbelli ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: 'Holy Family, Blessed Trinity' DATE: 12/22/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Dec. 22-28, 1996 ----- BODY:Dec. 29, 1996
Feast of the Holy Family
Lk 2, 22-40
JESUS’ FIRST experience of humanity does not take place in solitude or isolation—like Adam in the garden of Eden. Rather, the New Adam's Incarnate encounter with the world happens within the embrace of his particular human family. The Church honors the Holy Family today to emphasize the function of the family in our own human development and growth; to stress the role of the Holy Family in deepening our relationship with God; and to remind us how the Holy Family serves as an enduring icon of that external exchange of love that is the Blessed Trinity.
The Gospel shows us the Holy Family doing three things that manifest their holiness and that invite us to emulate them. We first meet them worshipping in the temple. The life of the Holy Family is formed by devout faith, marked by prayer and sacrifice. Their communal act of consecration reveals how we can discover our true human dignity and worth in the sacrifices our family makes in faith. The piety a child demonstrates towards his parents becomes the foundation for a lifetime of reverence toward God. In the same way, children who witness their parents worshipping God are blessed with the ability to understand and believe in the truth of God's love for them—for children identify the way God loves them with that first love they experience from their parents.
We also see the Holy Family together, accepting suffering in their life. For Simeon, the Holy Family is the fulfillment of a long-held hope. When he takes the child Jesus in his arms, he also happily accepts the reality of his own death, blessed with the assurance that the “light and glory” of God has appeared in Jesus. The hope the Holy Family gives to Simeon has a price though: Jesus will be opposed and Mary “will be pierced with a sword.” “The thoughts of many hearts may be laid bare” only through the suffering of the Holy Family. However, the trust, commitment, selflessness, and confidence they manifest give them the assurance and strength they need to fulfill God's will with courage. The peace of that family grants us the profound understanding we need to see how God uses suffering to fulfill his divine Providence. The sense of security of the family equips us to confront and overcome the insecurity of our own lives.
The Holy Family's love is not inward and exclusive. It reaches out to the world, beginning with the prophetess Anna, who “gave thanks to God and talked about the child to all.” Just as the love of the Holy Family transformed all “who looked forward to the deliverance of Jerusalem,” so does the charity and outreach of every family rooted in Christ upbuild and perfect human society. The goodness experienced within the family achieves its perfection as it is zealously and generously directed toward the common good of all.
The model of the Holy Family assures us that every Christian family is called to be a community and place of grace where we too can grow in size, strength, and wisdom. As we enter into the faith, hope, and love of the Holy Family, we come to share more in the very holiness of the Blessed Trinity.
Father Cameron is a professor of homiletics at St. Joseph Seminary, Yonkers, N.Y.
----- EXCERPT: Next Sunday at Mass ----- EXTENDED BODY: Peter John Cameron OP ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Poll Reveals Active Catholics Are 'Highly Committed' DATE: 12/29/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 29, 1996-January 4, 1997 ----- BODY:WHILE THE MEDIA focuses on women's ordination, a married priesthood, sexual politics and the rifts these issues cause between the Left and the Right in the Church, most American Catholics—at least those regularly found in the pews—are more concerned with making sense of their faith in their daily lives, according to a book-length survey due out next spring by a Purdue University sociologist.
“If you look at the people who are in the pews, you will see a group of rather highly-committed people who are trying to make sense of their faith, day by day, in their daily lives,” said James Davidson, the sociology professor and chief author of the Catholic Pluralism Project, a three-year study and data collection based on telephone interviews with 1,058 U.S. Catholics.
The study, tentatively titled Catholic Faith and Morals: Unity and Diversity in Today's Church, is scheduled to be published by Our Sunday Visitor Publishing. Central to the survey was a deliberate attempt to focus not on America's 60 million Catholics as a whole, but on the smaller population of active faithful registered in—and volunteering at—their parishes. Most opinion polls, which are specifically commissioned by activist groups seeking data to lobby Church officials, survey Catholics as a whole. But the majority of Americans who call themselves Catholic are not affiliated with a parish.
“Most national surveys combine those two groups and talk about American Catholics in general,” Davidson said. “By including people who are not actively participating in the Church, they give an image of Catholics as being far more in disagreement with the teachings of the Church than what active Catholics experience in their daily parish life.”
Funded in part by the Lilly Endowment, the Davidson survey found that more than 60 percent of Catholics questioned say the Church should place more emphasis on traditional teachings; that there is something special and unique to Catholicism; that they cannot imagine themselves being anything other than Catholic; that helping those in need is important to their faith; that they are not offended by the Church using terms like “men” and “brothers” to describe all of humanity. Eighty-nine percent said the Church has given them “a solid moral foundation.”
On issues like Church teaching on homosexuality, abortion, pre-marital sex and birth control, Davidson said he found Catholics in the pews “far more in compliance [with official Church teaching] than non-active Catholics.”
But most media attention and mainstream surveys focus on inactive Catholics' dissent. “The left is Call to Action, the right is Mother Angelica,” said Davidson, who attends St. Thomas Aquinas Church in West Lafayette, lnd. “By and large these are highly informed, highly motivated groups, representing extreme points of view. And statistically they represent a rather small percentage of all Catholics. Most Catholics tend to fall somewhere in the middle.”
Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Curry of the Los Angeles archdiocese agrees. “I do think that what gets the news, which is either the far left or the far right, represents a very small minority of Catholics. But both sides get a disproportionate amount of the news,” he said. “The vast majority of Catholics—I think people we see every day—primarily are concerned with what goes on in their own families, and their own parishes.”
That would include Rebecca Duberow. At 48, she is a Salt Lake City mother of three, married for 25 years, selling real estate, and teaching biology part-time at the city's only Catholic high school. She said Church strength can be found, for example, in its commitment to life in all forms. Active in a large city parish, she said a prior stint as a religion teacher made her ask herself “what I truly believed and what I could teach. And I think the older I get and the more I learn about the Church, the more I appreciate it.”
Duberow's responses are typical of the point of view that surfaced among Catholics interviewed by Davidson and his team of 18 lay people and religious. As Davidson's team was working last spring, Father Thomas Rausch, a Jesuit theologian at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, gave a talk at the Los Angeles Archdiocese's Religious Education Congress, which attracts 20,000 catechists each year. In his lecture, Father Rausch's comments paralleled the survey findings being discovered at Purdue. “The most important way to change the Church is to be involved in the life of the Church,” he said. “The most important thing is to continue to work for the life of the Church.”
Because of the upcoming book's target market of diocesan and parish leaders, its focus is clearly on those in the pews. “We're looking at parishioners. Most of the national studies, if they ask ‘Are you a Catholic?’ people say yes or no,” said Kathleen Weigert, who worked on the survey and is an associate director for academic affairs and research at the Notre Dame University's Center for Social Concerns. “But the surveys never ask ‘What does being Catholic mean? Are you, for example, affiliated with a parish?’”
The Purdue data found that based on ethnic groupings, European-American Catholics of Italian, French and Polish heritage scored higher on the survey's traditional beliefs and practice index than Irish-American and African-American Catholics. The data showed that Hispanic Catholics are slightly more traditional than French and Italian heritage Catholics. Asian-American Catholics were the most traditional of all, according to index figures.
Among generations, the survey found that those who went to Catholics schools in the 50s and 60s and then came of age after Vatican II are less institutional than older Catholics. The post-Vatican II generation are even less institutional in outlook—but more spiritual—with the survey finding them less inclined to describe the Church as an essential component of their faith. “I am more spiritual walking in the woods than I am walking down the main aisle of [a] church,” one participant said.
The areas of greatest unity and consensus among Catholics concern the core doctrines of Catholicism, Davidson said. The Incarnation, the Resurrection, Mary as the Mother of God, and the Nicene Creed “are areas where Catholics are in greatest agreement,” he said. “You would-n't know that by listening to the speeches at Call to Action or by the Religious Right. That's where the unity is. But it tends to go unnoticed.”
“The Pope and the people are not quarreling about the Incarnation,” he said. “Once you have that kind of consensus, then I think that allows people of good faith to quarrel and argue vehemently over other issues and to view those disagreements as family problems.”
David Finnigan is based in Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: David Finnigan ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: African-Americans, Hispanics Move to Bridge Bitter Divide DATE: 12/29/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 29, 1996-January 4, 1997 ----- BODY:FIRES IN the streets of Miami seven years ago prompted Josie Poitier to seek a solution to the ethnic and racial tension corroding Miami's Liberty City neighborhood. “It was very hard. The tension was there. You went through the streets and there were fires everywhere and people who wanted to throw bottles at you,” said Poitier.
It was in the aftermath of three days of riots in 1989 sparked by the shooting of an African American by a Hispanic police officer that prompted her to find answers. She invited Hispanics, African Americans and others to meet in her home on Good Friday. She only wanted them to break bread and talk. That tradition has expanded, and this year Poitier expects about 150 people to join the annual celebration, which has since moved to her parish, Holy Redeemer Church. The initiative is meant “to bridge the gap in the community where people weren't getting together,” said Poitier, who's African-American and serves as community affairs representative for Miami's police department.
Several national efforts are also trying to bring Hispanics and African-Americans closer together. Roberto Pina, coordinator for the dialogue that has been dubbed “Building Bridges in Black and Brown,” said: “If both of the communities just learned about each other, there would be a kind of solidarity there. So when issues come up, we won't be fighting over ‘we want that, we want this.’”
The U.S. bishops addressed relations between the communities in their recent pastoral, Reconciled Through Christ, which was drawn up by Hispanic and African-American prelates. The letter emphasizes the “common roots” between the two cultures, said Bishop Agustin Roman, an auxiliary of the Miami archdiocese, and one of the letter's authors. “This is a beautiful work, the fruit of two years of dialogue,” the bishop said.
Coadjutor Bishop Roberto Gonzalez of Corpus Christi, Texas, chairman of the bishops' Committee on Hispanic Affairs, and Auxiliary Bishop Curtis Guillory of Galveston-Houston, chairman of the Committee on African-American Catholics, in a preface express their hope that the statement would “promote a sense of togetherness, a source of joy and inspiration, and a sense of responsibility for each other.”
But can such well-meaning efforts heal the often-bitter divisions between the communities? No matter what, it will be a huge challenge to reconcile the country's approximately 20 million Hispanic Catholics and their approximately 3 million African-American counterparts.
The situation in Miami is instructive. Even eight years after the last outburst of violence, tensions remain. The city was hit by a Hispanic boycott of black business in the early 1990s, and divisions were again brought to light during 1995 hearings by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights: blacks felt left out; hispanics believed they were being discriminated against; and whites were fleeing the city. More recently, African-Americans were incensed at losing a seat on the city council to a Hispanic, with one local paper calling it a “power grab.”
“There's a lot of feeling in this community,” said Oblate Father Richard Sudlik, pastor of Holy Redeemer, which is predominantly African-American. “I'm sure when you start to talk to folks, they feel they're getting the short end of the stick.”
Los Angeles has also had its share of conflict, and dialogue there between Hispanics and African-Americans has been tough, said Deacon Luis Velasquez, assistant director for Hispanic ministries for the archdiocese. “I don't think there exists the sense of community that is necessary among Christians.” One major complaint from the black community is that Hispanics are taking their jobs, he said. The divisions between blacks and Hispanics is partially attributable to each “living pretty much in isolated circumstances,” said Beverly Carroll, executive director for the U.S. bishops'secretariat for African-American Catholics.
“Even in integrated neighborhoods there can be a lack of a shared sense of history,” said Pina, who is on staff at the Mexican-American Cultural Center in San Antonio. “I was born on the east side of San Antonio, which is primarily black,” he said. “We were a pocket” of Hispanics. So he learned to speak English using black slang, and went to school with black students. It wasn't until later that he learned about that community's struggle in the civil rights movement. He believes progress in relations would come more easily if the communities knew more about each other's history.
An added complication of the relationship is the question of cultural identity. The bishops' pastoral makes note of this, citing the 1990 census: “a substantial number of Hispanic people identify themselves as racially black.” Ella Simmons, an African-American ministry director in the Diocese of St. Augustine, Fla., has had to lengthen the name of her office from “Black Ministries” to “Black, African, Caribbean and Native American Ministry.”
Where do black Hispanics, such as those from the Dominican Republic, fit into the black experience in Miami? asked Pina. “And how do they get along in the community, and why is it so much easier for them here than for Mexican Americans in the South?”
Such difficult questions fuel the dialogue, promoters say. The fact that both blacks and Hispanics have experienced economic hardship and discrimination is not completely disadvantageous according to the bishops. That common ground furthers their sense of “the necessity to pull each other up,” said the USCC's Carroll. “When they talk about [its effect on] poverty, they talk about African Americans and Hispanics.”
The two groups are focused on many of the same issues: voter registration, housing, education, substance abuse, strengthening families. “Blacks and Hispanics tend to share views on some thorny political issues,” said Velasquez. In California, many African-Americans voted along with Hispanics against Proposition 187—the measure to bar education and some health care to families of illegal aliens—as well as Proposition 209, that would end affirmative action in colleges, he said. And Hispanics can learn from the black experience, according to Pina, who noted that Hispanics “are 10 years behind” in the area of jobs and civil rights.
The bishops, and others, blame many of the perceived differences between blacks and Hispanics on the media. The bishops' pastoral calls it the “roaring wind,” that, “eager to report human conflict, overstates our disputes.”
“Our violence is what always makes news,” said Pina. But through dialogue, the groups are able to realize, “how we're hurting each other by being pitted against each other.”
The safest place for the encounter between the communities, many agree, is in the Church. Pastoral and other observers suggest the process can begin with the groups jointly sharing their holidays. In Chicago, St. Basil/Visitation Parish—an African-American and Hispanic Parish, celebrates both Posadas—the Hispanic nine-day celebration before Christmas—and Kwanzaa—the African American “first fruits” holiday following Christmas—said its pastor, Father Brian Walker. People from both groups attend each other's celebrations, he said. “We really do quite well together.”
Christopher Martinez is based in Miami, Fla.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Christopher Martinez ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Canada's Aboriginals Seek Missionary Mea Culpa, Too DATE: 12/29/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 29, 1996-January 4, 1997 ----- BODY:OTTAWA, Canada—The scent of burning sweetgrass drifted through the auditorium as Ovide Mercredi, Canada's top Indian leader, stood before the microphone with tears in his eyes.
Reconciliation does not only involve forgiveness,” he told the hushed crowd of about a thousand natives, Church leaders and government officials before him. “It's about atonement, it's about justice, it's about correcting mistakes that have been made and setting things straight.”
Those words were spoken at a December 1995 meeting. But a year later, little headway has been made in setting things straight for the country's 800,000 natives, many of whom live in Third World conditions. The reason, according to observers: Five centuries of paternalism and attempted assimilation are hard to undo.
Broken treaties, theft of aboriginal lands, impoverishment and disempowerment are among the ghosts of the past that continue to haunt Canada's natives, most of whom live on reservations.
But a key to the reconciliation sought by Mercredi and other natives may be found in the long-awaited report issued last November by a specially appointed federal government commission. For Father Doug Crosby, general secretary of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, the report marks a “prophetic moment” in Canadian history.
The federal inquiry conducted by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples cost $58 million, making it the most expensive in Canadian history. It sought to answer a question that seemed simple enough: What are the foundations of a fair and honorable relationship between aboriginal and non-aboriginal Canadians? The process took the commission a full five years, hearings from coast to coast and more than 400 recommendations to answer.
“The legacy of Canada's treatment of aboriginal people is one of waste,” claimed the seven commissioners in their five-volume, 3,500-page report. “Wasted potential, wasted money, wasted lives.” The legacy could be measured in statistic after statistic, they said: “In the rates of suicide; of substance abuse; of incarceration; of unemployment; of welfare dependence; of low educational attainment; of poor health and poor housing.”
Successive federal governments were not alone in creating the legacy. The Roman Catholic, Anglican, United and Presbyterian Churches helped carry out the governments'policy of assimilation in the Church-run Indian residential schools. But the attempts failed, and aboriginal culture and identity remain as strong as ever.
While the Churches have publicly apologized and launched their own “healing” programs with native groups, the federal government refuses to accept responsibility for abuses at the schools. In recent years, hundreds of the estimated 150,000 former students have come forward with stories of physical and sexual abuse. They want apologies and compensation. The government argues that the Churches were contracted to do the job, but the Churches say it was the government that set policy and provided direction.
Catholic religious orders ran 60 percent of the residential schools, which opened in the late 1800s. Their number peaked in 1946 at 76, 45 of which were linked to the Catholic Church. Most of the schools were closed in the 1960s.
The commission's failure to call for an apology by the federal government is a glaring omission in an otherwise comprehensive report, say critics, especially since the commission itself had acknowledged that the residential school system was the Canadian institution that “caused the greatest damage to the traditional aboriginal family.”
“Children as young as 6 years old were removed from their families for 10 months of the year or longer,” it said. “They were forbidden to speak the only languages they knew and taught to reject their homes, their heritage and, by extension, themselves.”
Commissioners agree that the “terrible facts” need to be recognized and call for a public inquiry into the schools. “Only by such recognition and repudiation can a start be made on a very different future,” they say.
But many fear an inquiry will only give the government an excuse not to take action on the report's recommendations. Gerald Kelly, coordinator of the National Catholic Working Group on Residential Schools, says an inquiry could prompt the government to “stay out of the process of healing and reconciliation for another number of years.”
Lauded by natives and the major Churches, the commission's 440 proposals are aimed at forging a new relationship between aboriginals and non-aboriginals. But the price may be too high for most Canadians: an increase of up to $2 billion a year in the current annual spending of approximately $5 billion. The extra money would be earmarked for improved housing, health and employment for aboriginals.
At a time of spending cutbacks, however, more money for natives is not a priority. Indian Affairs Minister Ron Irwin has said the money spent on the commission, set up by the previous government, would have been better spent on much-needed aboriginal housing.
The government also showed its indifference to commissioners by thwarting their attempt to release the long-awaited report in several stages in a bid to keep aboriginal issues in the public eye. Instead, the government decided to deposit the entire 13-pound report on the doorstep of Canadians at one time.
Officials'cool reaction to the report leaves Church and aboriginal groups fearing the feds will either shelve the report entirely or not implement its major recommendations. “This is not a time to drift with the tide, it's a time to set a new course,” said Father Crosby. Added Ed Bianchi, coordinator of the Aboriginal Rights Coalition, established by the major Churches: “This report deserves serious attention.”
But the public is split on the issue. A poll taken after the report's release showed that 51 percent of Canadians believe Indian self-government will bring no changes in living conditions on reservations or will make them even worse.
However, Indian leader Mercredi urged the government not to ignore the report. “This is your last chance,” he said. The report provides “the best chance in this century to offer hope to the aboriginal people.”
But the federal government has apparently chosen to ignore Mercredi and his organization. Even while the commission was preparing its report, the government was busy negotiating land and resource claims with local Indian groups on a piecemeal basis, which fracture relations among many of the 600 Indian bands and their national voice, the Assembly of First Nations.
The Churches, however, through their Aboriginal Rights Coalition, continue to lobby in support of aboriginal self-government and other key recommendations of the report. “Our hope is that this report will help us identify the concrete steps that Canadians can take to ensure a more secure and healthy future for aboriginal communities,” said Dr. Alexandra Johnston, president of the Canadian Council of Churches.
Added Crosby of the Catholic bishops'conference: “We are committed to working in solidarity with aboriginal peoples. That commitment is grounded in the Gospel's demand for justice and action.”
But the Churches may have to speak often and loudly from now on just to keep the report from drifting into obscurity. As a prominent political scientist recently observed: “It seems to me it's fallen off the end of the earth.”
For Mercredi and his people, the royal commission has paved the way for a process of the reconciliation and healing they say is long overdue. Supported by the Churches, it's a door they hope to keep open.
Art Babych is based in Ottawa.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Art Babych ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Alleged 'Sacred Relics' Raise Doubts DATE: 12/29/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 29, 1996-January 4, 1997 ----- BODY:BETHLEHEM—The pitch seems to be everywhere this Christmas season: For as little as $59.95 (plus postage and handling) you, too, can own a piece of the place where Jesus was born.
In reverential tones, actor Ricardo Montalban describes a filigreed cross, centered with a stone that he says “witnessed” the birth of Jesus.
The offers have been broadcast in more than 35 countries, from the United States to Argentina and the Philippines. They have been seen on the Fox network, the Discovery Channel, VH-1, local television affiliates and on Pat Robertson's 700 Club. Print advertisements have appeared in such publications as Catholic Digest, Biblical Archaeology Review, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of New York and these pages as well.
More than 400,000 of these “sacred relics” have been sold—complete with documents that purport to their archaeo-logical authenticity—since the campaign began in Christmas 1994, promoters say.
But the mayor of Bethlehem and authorities of the Greek Orthodox Church, which is the official custodian of the Cave of the Nativity, are crying foul. “I think people must know the truth … this is no, no, no, not from the cave where Christ was born,” said Bethlehem Mayor Elias Freij.
Greek Orthodox officials are also adamant that the Cave of the Nativity has never been touched and that stones from this holy site would never be offered for sale. Archbishop Spyridon, head of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, expressed dismay at the marketing campaign.
“The Prince of Peace, whose birth we celebrate in goodwill and love, reminded his followers to beware of ‘wolves in sheep's clothing,’ who, like the Pharisees, scribes and hypocrites, forgot the prophetic commandment to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with our God,” Archbishop Spyridon said in a statement from New York Dec. 13.
Promoters of the California-based Nativity Stones Collection insist that their critics are quibbling over semantics. The stones, they say, came from a common wall between the Cave of the Nativity and the adjacent St. Jerome's Cave, as well as from a nearby passageway under the Church of the Nativity.
The stones were “taken from a place not more than 10 feet away” from the star that marks the place where Christians believe Mary gave birth to Jesus, said Diane Keith, of Pacoima, Calif. Keith's father, Stanley Slotkin, an amateur archaeologist, claims to have collected the stones in 1963. “It's all the same thing,” Keith said, referring to the adjoining caves, which are located beneath Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity.
But the printed advertisements explicitly claim that the stones were taken from the Cave of the Nativity: “In 1963, renovations were made to the Cave of the Nativity in Bethlehem— the recognized birthplace of Jesus Christ,” the advertisements say. “The mayor of Bethlehem approved the shipment of excavated stones from the cave to the United States. Documented by both the mayor and the Israel Museum, these sacred relics have been in safekeeping for many years. Now you can share these relics through the Nativity Cross.”
In Bethlehem, current Mayor Freij denies that the stones came from the Cave of the Nativity. And officials at Jerusalem's Israel Museum, whose signatures are on the Nativity Collection documents, profess ignorance of the entire affair. “I really don't remember” (signing the documents), said Yael Israeli, chief curator of the Israel Museum, adding that the museum has never dealt with any excavations at or near the Church of the Nativity. Bethlehem, which was controlled by Jordan in 1963, is today administered by Palestinian authorities. “The whole thing seems very strange to me, very fishy,” she said.
The site of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem has traditionally been recognized as the birthplace of Jesus since the early fourth century, although archaeologists note that there is no hard evidence to confirm this. For centuries, nations and religious groups have jostled for control of the site.
Today, a large church complex sits on top of a network of several caves, including the Cave of the Nativity, considered by many Christians as the birthplace of Jesus, and caves where St. Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin 400 years after the birth of Jesus, lived and was buried.
According to Keith, her father, founder of the Abbey Rents party and medical supply rental company, visited Bethlehem in 1963, when Mayor Elias Bandak invited him to watch the expansion of the cave network at the Church of the Nativity site. Slotkin expressed interest in the stones that were being removed during the construction and reportedly Bandak offered them to Slotkin. In 1964, Keith said, about a ton of stone was shipped to her father, who kept it in a vault, occasionally giving stones to friends, to the sick, or donating them to charities for fund raising.
Slotkin, now 92, wanted the stones to be “distributed around the world to those who would benefit and to the faithful,” Keith said. So she and other family members hired a designer to create the cross and other pieces now for sale. They also arranged for a portion of the proceeds to be donated toward the upkeep of the holy site. In other countries, Keith said, distributors are asked to give a portion to local charities.
The crosses have been a source of great joy for those who own them, Keith said. The infomercials include testimonials from people who said they have been healed or experienced other miracles after receiving the cross or praying with it. “Wearing the cross gives you a sense … that you're being protected … that you are in the hands of Christ,” said one woman identified as Harriet Baker.
Freij, a Palestinian Christian, has been mayor of Bethlehem since 1972 and is minister of tourism and archaeology for the Palestinian Authority. Freij has acknowledged that the Nativity stones could have been removed during the 1963 excavation of St. Jerome's Cave, which is adjacent to the Cave of the Nativity. “There were renovations in St. Jerome's Cave and certainly stones were taken out, but that does not mean the stone came from the place where the Lord was born,” Freij said.
Each Nativity Cross comes with a “certificate of authenticity” from the Rev. George Bandak, identified as a “priest of the Church of the Nativity” in Bethlehem and an official-sounding “collector's certificate” that states the shipment of stones was “certified by both the Mayor of Bethlehem and the Israel Museum of Jerusalem.”
Responding to requests for further documents, the vendors send copies of a 1964 letter from former Mayor Bandak confirming shipment of “a quantity of rocks” removed from “the St. Jerome Cave which is adjoining the Cave of Nativity … and which belongs to the same rocky mass”; and a 1987 letter from the Israel Museum confirming that the “excavated rocky mass” from “the renovation of St. Jerome's Cave and the adjoining Cave of the Nativity” was shipped to Slotkin in 1964.
But the documentation is not authoritative. The former mayor is now dead. And Greek Orthodox officials say the priest, whose relationship to the church or mayor could not be confirmed, had no authority to authenticate artifacts from the cave. Only the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem has such authority.
Despite the criticism, Diane Keith is adamant that the stones are authentic. “These are not stones picked up somewhere in Bethlehem…. These are from the very wall of the Cave of the Nativity,” she said.
But the Rev. Sylvester Berberis of New York, a priest assigned to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem from 1969 until 1975, asserted that the Cave of the Nativity “has never been touched.” Roman Catholics, who oversee the Cave of St. Jerome, agree. “The renovation (of St. Jerome's Cave) expanded the caves,” but there has “never been” renovation work done in the “real grotto” of the Nativity, said Frederick Munz, director of the Franciscan Study House in Jerusalem.
It may be semantics, but in a region where major international disputes break out over which religious groups have responsibility to sweep the floors of holy sites, even semantics have important political and theological implications.
Semantics aside, Mayor Freij expressed dismay at the worldwide advertising campaign for the Nativity jewelry. “The former mayor never knew this would be used for commercial purposes,” he said. Freij confirmed that the city of Bethlehem received $20,000 in 1995 from the sale of the crosses designated for upkeep of the shrine. Another $5,000 was given to a Greek Orthodox charity. But because the holy site is well-maintained by religious organizations, Freij received permission from Keith to use the money “to help poor people.” Keith denied that selling the cross is a commercial venture. “We're not making money on this,” she said, adding that “it's given so much joy and happiness to people.”
The Nativity Cross sales campaign has created discomfort for some publications and broadcast organizations that have run ads or participated in promotional campaigns for the jewelry.
Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review, said the fact that the ad ran in the November/December 1996 issue of his magazine does not mean the publication has approved or endorsed it. “There's no doubt that people over the millenia have been moved by relics of one kind or another. People like something that connects,” Shanks said. But he added his magazine generally discourages people from collecting antiquities “because of the possibility they could be taking the wrong thing or feeding the looters.”
When Montalban appeared as a guest on Pat Robertson's 700 Club Dec. 5, the actor presented the host with a Nativity Cross necklace. Robertson's co-host, Terry Meeuwsen, told viewers they could receive information about purchasing a necklace by calling the 700 Club's general number.
Christian Broadcasting Network spokeswoman Patty Silverman emphasized that it was not an endorsement, but part of a regular “courtesy” given to guests who want to promote a book, CD or other product. “Pat [Robertson] referred to it as something symbolic, that's all,” Silverman said.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kim Lawton and Elaine Fletcher ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Pope's Week DATE: 12/29/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 29, 1996-January 4, 1997 ----- BODY:WORLD MEETING OF FAMILIES 1997
Thursday the Pope received the bishops who are presidents of the Latin American Episcopal Commissions for the Family, who are participating in a meeting in the Vatican to prepare the 2nd World Meeting with Families, which is scheduled to be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Oct. 4-5, 1997.
The meeting is sponsored by the Pontifical Council for the Family. The Holy Father pointed out that “in our time, it is essential to deepen the personal commitment with which each person must contribute to enriching this primary and vital cell of society. We must not forget, in the general plans for ecclesial activity, that the family is the first and principal path of the Church.”
John Paul II praised “the initiatives which tend toward making all petitions with legislative or governmental responsibilities … respect, aid and promote the family as a necessary and fundamental good for all of society. The future of humanity and of Latin America certainly passes through the family.”
“In recent years,” he continued, “we have witnessed with vivid concern the emergence of a systematic challenge against the family, which casts doubt on its perennial values…. With the pretext of taking care of and protecting the family and all families, people forget that there is a model wanted and blessed by God. The specific character of men and women's conjugal surrender is denied, undervaluing this indissoluble commitment. Likewise, there is an attempt, at times, to introduce other forms of couples'unions, contrary to God's initial project for the human race.”
“In effect, marriage or conjugal commitment between a man and a woman, in mutual surrender and in the transmission of life, are primary values of society, which civil legislation cannot ignore or fight against. For this reason, the Church and its Pastors must not remain indifferent in the face of certain attempts at substantial changes that affect family structure.”
COMMON DECLARATION
His Holiness John Paul II, Bishop of Rome and Pope of the Catholic Church, and His Holiness Karekin I, Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of all Armenians, signed a Common declaration in the Vatican following their meeting Friday morning. Following are excerpts from the original English-language text:
“Pope John Paul II and Catholicos Karekin I recognize the deep spiritual communion which already unites them and the bishops, clergy and lay faithful of their Churches … [that] finds its roots in the common faith in the Holy and life-giving Trinity proclaimed by the Apostles and transmitted down the centuries…. They rejoice in the fact that recent developments of ecumenical relations and theological discussions carried out in the spirit of Christian love and fellowship have dispelled many misunderstandings inherited from the controversies and dissensions of the past.”
“They particularly welcome the great advance that their Churches have registered in their common search for unity in Christ, the Word of God made flesh. Perfect God as to His divinity, perfect man as to His humanity, His divinity is united to His humanity in the Person of the Only-begotten Son of God, in a union which is real, perfect, without confusion, without alteration, without division, without any form of separation.
“The reality of this common faith in Jesus Christ and in the same succession of apostolic ministry has at times been obscured or ignored. Linguistic, cultural and political factors have immensely contributed towards the theological divergences that have found expression in their terminology of formulating their doctrines. His Holiness John Paul II and His Holiness Karekin I have expressed their determined conviction that because of the fundamental common faith in God and in Jesus Christ, the controversies and unhappy divisions which sometimes have followed upon the divergent ways in expressing it, as a result of the present declaration, should not continue to influence the life and witness of the Church today.”
“The communion already existing between the two Churches and the hope for and commitment to recovery of full communion between them should become factors of motivation for further contact….”
“Pope John Paul II and Catholicos Karekin I give their blessing and pastoral support to the further development of existing contacts and to new manifestations of that dialogue of charity….”
“Such a dialogue is particularly imperative in these present times when the Churches are faced with new challenges to their witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ arising out of the rapidly changing situations in the modern world so deeply affected by an extreme secularistic and secularizing pace of life and culture.” “They appeal to their clergy and laity to carry out more actively and effectively their full cooperation in all fields of “diaconia” (service), and to become agents of reconciliation, peace and justice, struggling for the true recognition of human rights and dedicating themselves to the support of all those who are suffering and are in spiritual and material need throughout the world.
“John Paul II and Karekin I express a particular pastoral concern for the Armenian people … those living in their historic motherland where freedom and independence were once more recovered … those living in Nagorno Karabagh in need of permanent peace, and those who live in a state of world-wide diaspora. Amid upheavals and tragedies, especially during this century, these people have remained faithful to the apostolic faith…. As they approach the 17th centenary of the official establishment of the Church in Armenia, may they receive the special blessings of the Triune God for peace with justice and for a renewed dedication to witnessing faithfully to the Lord Jesus Christ.”
PARISH VISIT
At 9 a.m. Sunday the Pope visited the Roman parish of Our Lady of Valme, and at the beginning of the Mass's homily noted that this third Sunday of Advent, called “Gaudete,” “exhorts us to be happy because Christmas draws near.”
John Paul II assured the parishioners that he knew of “your commitment in putting the Mass and Eucharistic adoration at the center of all parish life, as well as the care that you put into liturgical celebrations and devotion to Mary, the Mother of God and Mother of the Church, who encourages you. I know with how much faith you cultivate cordial adhesion to the Successor of Peter, to your pastors, making an effort to grow in fraternal charity, and in the ardent desire to take the Gospel of Christ, the only savior of humanity, to everyone.”
“All of your pastoral efforts,” he continued, “are inserted completely in the citizens' mission…. My wish is that the Good News of Christ may enter every home and help families to rediscover that only in Christ is man's salvation found.”
ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST, BLESSING OF BAMBINELLI
At the Sunday Angelus, recited from his study window overlooking St. Peter's Square, Pope John Paul evoked the figure of St. John the Baptist, calling him “an austere man, ‘a voice crying in the desert,’ sacrificed by those in power for having told the truth without reticence, and profoundly current.”
“John's Gospel presents him to us as ‘the witness to the light,’” said the Pope. “The light he points to is not only a moral truth, it is the person of Christ, who does not hesitate to say of himself: ‘I am the light of the world.’”
“Yes,” he stated, “Christ is light because, in his divine identity, he reveals the face of the Father. But he also is [light] because, a man like us, similar in all things except sin, he reveals man to himself. Unfortunately sin has obscured in us the capacity to know and follow the light of truth…. With the Incarnation, the Word of God came to bring man to full light.”
Following these meditations, the Holy Father, as is customary at this time of year, blessed the “bambinelli,” the statues of the Child Jesus that Rome's children brought to St. Peter's Square. “I repeat with joy this gesture,” he said, greeting children from Rome and throughout the world, “which has an aura of family and simplicity, that simplicity with which St. Francis of Assisi taught contemplation of the mystery of the birth of the Savior.”
PAPAL APPOINTMENT
On Monday the Holy Father nominated Msgrs. Pierre Calime, of the Diocese of Autun, France, and James Dillenburg, of the Diocese of Green Bay, Wis., as consultors of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant Peoples. (VIS)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Papal Nuncio Meets with Serb President DATE: 12/29/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 29, 1996-January 4, 1997 ----- BODY:ROME—The Vatican has begun mediation efforts in Serbia aimed at ensuring a peaceful solution to the unrest in the region. Spanish-born Archbishop Santos Abril, the papal ambassador, was received earlier this month in Belgrade by President Slobodan Milosevic to discuss solutions to the country's multitude of problems.
No outsiders took part in the meeting, but sources close to Milosevic said the nuncio spoke very candidly, indicating how some presidential decisions, including declaring the elections null, were seen inside the country and in the international community as abuses of power. Archbishop Abril recalled that the opposition has chosen the path of peace and that the international community wants Milosevic to resolve the tense situation with those same means.
Presently, the Church's greatest concern is the possibility of an outbreak of conflict in Serbia and Macedonia and the fear that the Dayton peace agreement will be broken. “It is impossible to know what might happen, but I am praying that it will not come to bloodshed,” Archbishop Franc Perko of Belgrade said. “This would be inevitable if the Dayton agreements were broken and if, as a result, Bosnia were divided.”
Archbishop Santos Abril told the Register that Milosevic has two possibilities of action: “The first, and I consider it very unlikely, is the use of force by using the police who are on his side. However, there would be a great danger of civil war. The other possibility is to find an agreement with the opposition. This is the easiest solution, in part because the West is pressing in this direction. The West wants to keep Milosevic in power because it sees in the Serbian leader a guarantee for respecting the peace agreements for Bosnia.” (J. Colina Diez)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Europe DATE: 12/29/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 29, 1996-January 4, 1997 ----- BODY:GOOD NEWS: Just before Christmas, Germany and the Czech Republic made some mutual amends. The Czechs apologized for the violent expulsion of Sudeten Germans at the end of World War II. Germany, for its part, expressed regret for its invasion of then-Czechoslovakia in 1938. An ugly chapter in European history more or less closed, this symbolic handshake between nations marks a bright spot in an otherwise bleak winter season. Even as Germany and France have made remarkable strides in forging a genuine working relationship based on economic, cultural and even military ties—German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President Jacques Chirac ended the year by jointly signing off on a single European currency—so much remains to be done to address, in the words of Daniel Tarschys, secretary-general of the Council of Europe, the “horrors that we Europeans have consigned to collective oblivion.”
Writing in the International Herald Tribune, Tarschys believes that ignoring misdeeds of the past puts the future of a harmonious community of European peoples at grave risk. Televised images of the brutal war in Chechnya, he says, horrified the nations of Eastern and Central Europe, which only relatively recently escaped the yoke of Soviet domination. Sad to say, the atrocities committed in Bosnia and throughout the former Yugoslavia fell short of moving the Western European powers to action. Along with other accused war criminals, Serb President Slobodan Milosovic, his co-responsibility for the bloodshed beyond question, is still at liberty. He has been busy rigging elections in a bid to cling to power. Ironically, many of his opponents among the student movement, far from calling for democracy and pluralism, exhibit a frightening brand of ethnic chauvinism. How can Serbia's neighbors be expected to sit idly by?
Recently reviewing a book on the persecution of the Jews at the hands of Nazi Germany, Father Richard John Neuhaus noted that “the Holocaust is our only culturally available icon of absolute evil.” Reporting that he has since been inundated with letters complaining that so many others have suffered as well, he makes it clear that with “culturally available” he means that all agree on the facts (save for extremists). Clearly, Europe must learn to hold up a range of “icons of evil” for all its people to see.
Armenians seek recognition of their suffering under Turkish rule; the whole truth of ethnic cleansing, rape and a host of other brutalities in the former Yugoslavia must also be brought to light, and punishment meted out to the perpetrators. Romanians must learn to be kinder hosts for their country's ethnic Hungarians. Poles must come to terms with their once dominating kingdom's mistreatment of Ukraine. The Swiss are called to admit their role in making profits of looted Jewish property. France and Germany must learn to be hospitable to their guest workers. The British made grave errors in Ireland, including the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians; Irish militants resorted to terror, which can never be justified, no matter how noble the ultimate goal of whatever liberation movement. French- and Flemish-speaking Belgians must learn to accept one another. All Europeans should treat Gypsies and all minorities with respect.
On a lesser scale, Dutch youth must learn to embrace their German neighbors and let go of stubborn stereotypes born out of their parents' and grandparents'war experiences. And the French must overcome their xenophobia, which was most recently on display when French officials, media and workers expressed outrage that a Korean company, promising investments and jobs, might gain control over a domestic company. This is but a sampling, of course, of wrongs to be righted, as all Europeans must learn to see beyond the confines of national frontiers—as well as cultural, social, economic, and political dividing lines—that are bound for obsolescence one way or another, either by brutal force, impersonal market mechanisms or free choice. In the '30s, Spanish philosopher and historian Jose Ortega y Gasset warned that the individual nations of Europe can be likened to birds in a cage, desperate but unable to spread their wings. Europeans, eager to shake off spiritual cobwebs, hanker for living space in the broadest sense of the phrase.
Last summer, Pope John Paul II, speaking in Berlin's Olympic Stadium, the very site where Adolf Hitler was idolized at mass rallies, called Germans and, by extension, all Europeans, to be mindful of their responsibilities toward the weaker members of society.. The Church, John Paul has made abundantly clear, is preparing to acknowledge the mistakes of its past, ad intra and ad extra, in order to begin the third millennium with a clean slate. Its soul-searching can act as a beacon for the European community of peoples.
—JK
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Editorial -------- TITLE: The Perennial American Pastime DATE: 12/29/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 29, 1996-January 4, 1997 ----- BODY:AMERICAN CULTURE is, by temperament, Puritan, even at times like the present when its core values seem detached from religious faith. The way we act out certain kinds of public moral conflicts is deeply influenced by the thinking of our 17th-century Protestant forefathers. Most of us are loath to acknowledge this fact because, in the popular imagination, the Puritans'complex legacy is usually boiled down to crudely caricatured sexual repression.
The recently released movie of Arthur Miller's classic play, The Crucible, takes a wider view. The original was written in 1953 during the anti-communist fervor of McCarthyism, and it effectively dramatizes the connections between the political excesses of that period and the 1692 Salem, Mass. witch-hunt. In his introduction to the play, Miller identifies the link between the two eras as “the handing over of conscience to another … the notion that conscience was no longer a private matter but one of state administration … and the realization that with conscience goes the person, the soul immortal and the ‘name.’”
This transaction was possible during Puritan times because the settlers believed that in a just society the precepts of religion and law were identical. In the 50s that mind-set was created by Cold War fears of an imminent communist takeover.
Miller himself had gone to prison for his silence before a congressional committee about his relationship to the communist party and his refusal to “name the names” of those who might have been similarly involved. He has written recently in The New Yorker about what he sees as the parallels between his experience and 17th-century Puritanism. In both cases, the authorities “could get you hanged unless you confessed to having had contact with the devil. The best proof of your sincerity was your naming of others whom you had seen in the devil's company.”
Working with British director Nicholas Hytner (The Madness of King George), Miller has successfully opened his play. The movie begins with a sequence that occurred offstage in the original. Adozen or so teenage village girls gather at night in the woods for a voodoo-like ritual supervised by Tituba (Charlayne Woodard), the black Barbadian slave of the local minister. Most of the participants ask for help in securing the love of eligible young males, but the minister's orphaned niece, Abigail Williams (Winona Ryder), ups the ante by wringing a chicken's neck and smearing its blood on her face as she wishes for the death of Elizabeth Proctor, the wife of her former employer.
The minister, Reverend Parris (Bruce Davison), stumbles upon the girls just as they've begun to take off their clothes and dance. Salem, like all 17-century Puritan communities, believes itself caught up in the continuing spiritual warfare between God and the devil so this incident looks suspicious, and an expert in witchcraft, Reverend Hale (Rob Campbell), is called in to investigate.
Fearful of punishment, the girls, led by Abigail, claim the devil made them dance in the woods. And, to point the finger of blame elsewhere, they offer up the names of fellow villagers whom they claim were working with the devil against them. These innocent townsfolk then stand accused as witches, and the only way they can save themselves from the scaffold is by confessing and implicating others, which many of them do.
The sudden sense of power goes to the girls' heads, and they use the allegations to settle old scores. Certain large landowners also manipulate the accusations of witchcraft to eliminate rivals. As the charges and counter-charges multiply, Salem becomes possessed by a kind of mass hysteria in which no one seems safe from suspicion.
Only one person takes a firm stand against the madness—Abigail's former employer, the farmer John Proctor (Daniel Day-Lewis). But he has something different to hide. The emotional frigidity of his wife Elizabeth (Joan Allen) drove him into a secret affair with Abigail while she was working on his farm. Elizabeth's suspicions were aroused, and the young girl was fired.
In revenge, Abigail sees to it that Elizabeth is charged with witchcraft. But the teenager is still in love with John and tries to protect him from the accusations, hoping to win him back after Elizabeth is eliminated. We empathize with John in his guilt over the adulterous affair, and when he and Elizabeth are unjustly brought to trial, the love rekindled between them is deeply moving.
Judge Danforth (Paul Scofield), from Boston, is brought in to preside over the trials. His aura of rectitude and erudition offers hope. But his first priority, rather than justice, turns out to be the preservation of the civic and religious institutions in which he serves. This corruption of moral and judicial authority appears even more evil than the young girls' lies or the accused villagers'false confessions. So manifestly unjust are his verdicts that even Reverend Hale, himself a proven witch-hunter, argues against them. Eventually 20 innocent people, including the Proctors, are hung.
The Crucible is Miller's allegorical response to what he perceives to have been the evils of McCarthyism. And although the present times throw up moral challenges radically different from the 1950s, there still seems to be a potent set of issues which evoke our culture's witch-hunting instincts. The excesses of the so-called religious right and the left's crusade for political correctness on college campuses both have a Puritan cast to them, as does the hysteria surrounding child sexual abuse trials and certain allegations of sexual harassment, when the accusers'militant self-righteousness combines with public paranio.
In this context, Miller's plea for reason, mercy and tolerance in the resolution of public moral conflicts seems as relevant today as it did 43 years ago when The Crucible was first performed.
John Prizer is based in Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Liberal Religion & a Failure of Nerve DATE: 12/29/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 29, 1996-January 4, 1997 ----- BODY:Religion and Public Life: A Dilemma for Democracy, by Ronald Thiemann. (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1996, 186 pp., $55 cloth, $17.95 paper)
IN Religion and Public Life Ronald Thiemann, dean of the Harvard Divinity School, makes a reasoned, civil case for allowing religion into the public square. That's the problem, though. Religious voices are acceptable in the public debate, Thiemann implies, provided they are as well-mannered as his own. And well-mannered religious voices no doubt should be heard. But is that enough?
I got some unexpected insight on that several years ago, when I found myself taking part in a discussion of religion and media (organized by a former Catholic priest) at a prestigious East Coast think tank. The discussants were journalists, academicians and religious types.
After hearing a fair amount of high-toned twaddle, I decided to say what I thought. Anti-Catholicism in the media remains a problem, I said, but since Vatican II it has become more sophisticated and subtle than it used to be, rewarding “good” Catholics and punishing “bad” ones.
As a case in point I took the op-ed page of The New York Times, then regularly graced by the pro-choice Catholic feminist Anna Quindlen. With some regularity, I pointed out, Quindlen used her column to air her differences with Pope John Paul II and New York's Cardinal John O'Connor on abortion and sexual morality.
Fair enough. But likewise as a matter of fairness, I asked, would the Times regularly offer the hospitality of its op-ed page to Cardinal O'Connor or, if not to him, to someone who thought about these matters pretty much as he and the Pope did? The question seemed to answer itself. “And,” I concluded, “that's the problem.”
As I remarked later, I felt like a man who'd told a dirty story at a tea party. One woman, who had worked for the Times until recently, and who said she used to be Catholic, was particularly vexed. She chewed me out at considerable length—mainly for insufficient sympathy to Anna Quindlen—then made this memorable statement: “Our secular society has certain needs and priorities of its own. And it will satisfy those needs and act on those priorities. And if people like you don't like it— that's your problem.”
Talk about epiphanies! Thiemann's book has a lot to recommend it. For example, his deconstructing of Mario Cuomo's overrated 1984 Notre Dame speech on abortion, conscience and the role of the Catholic politician is a classic. Thiemann writes: “[Cuomo] seems content to accept a teaching in his private or personal behavior but to disregard in his public or political behavior. But since this teaching asserts that abortion is the taking of innocent life, it is difficult to imagine that a morally sensitive person could accept that moral verdict in the private realm but somehow disregard it in the public realm.” Exactly.
The author's view of Supreme Court First Amendment adjudication during the last half-century also is praiseworthy. Church-state “separation” is outmoded, he contends. Judges should go back to Madison and grasp the point that both of the religion clauses—no establishment, free exercise—are directed to guaranteeing religious liberty.
Finally, though, the book's central argument embodies a debilitating loss of nerve, typical of liberal religion. As the price of letting religion take part in public debate, it prescribes that religion lose its bite. Thiemann writes: “People of faith should function in a democratic society as ‘connected critics’…. Connected critics engage in a form of ‘immanent’ criticism that is available only to those who are fully engaged in the very enterprise being criticized.”
And where, one might ask, does that leave the pre-Civil War abolitionists, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, the religious opponents of the Vietnam War, the less mannerly elements of the pro-life movement? Connected critics sound like terrific dialogue partners. They do not sound much like prophets.
To be sure, prophets can be abrasive and fanatical— even dangerous. They make people nervous. They threaten the established order. They come across as crackpots and cranks. Sometimes they deserve to be locked up. But restricting the religious voices allowed in the public debate to those that speak in acceptably modulated tones subverts the crucial role of religion as radical critic—very different from a “connected” critic—of liberal democracy itself. Thiemann absolutizes liberal democracy, and that has a religious name: idolatry.
Ultimately the question is whether God should sit in judgment on Caesar or Caesar on God. Religion in Public Life takes it for granted that in this best of all possible political systems—liberal democracy—it is Caesar who does the judging.
Russell Shaw is based in Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Russell Shaw ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: No Time to Whine DATE: 12/29/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 29, 1996-January 4, 1997 ----- BODY:Spare me the bureaucracy, please (“At Long Last, Young Adults Get Serious Attention,” Nov. 10-16). I'm a married young adult Catholic approaching my mid-30s and have yet to wake up weeping because the Church isn't paying me enough attention. To be blunt about it, I assert that the problem with many of our young adults is that they want the Church to stroke their egos and provide them some kind of play room, BYOB.
Somewhere in Ecclesiastes, Qoheleth says something along the line of giving your youth to the Lord. With so much work to be done in the Church, I can't fathom that anybody is feeling left out. After 16 years of participating in or leading some parish or Church-related non-profit ministry, I'm taking early semi-retirement. I've very often found myself among the youngest ones working side by side with wonderful people who are old enough to be my parents or grandparents. And along with them, I've always wondered where all the other young folks are.
The Church has plenty of places for young adults. For example, I'm one of the younger members of the international Lay Missionaries of Charity. We need more young people. And something very impressive is the extraordinary degree of commitment and sacrifice that my lay peers in institutes like Opus Dei and Focolare make on a daily basis.
If subduing the earth and filling it permits you extra time to share and your parish can't keep you busy, don't go looking for a pizza party—call me. I know plenty of people who need you—to work and pray with them. Just give of yourself. You'll be surprised how many of your own needs will be met without you even asking. What's more, Jesus wears the most unexpected faces.
Daniel Johnson
Forest Park, Illinois
Evolution
In reference to your story on the Pope's thoughts on evolution (“Pope's Nod to Evolution Deals Creationism Setback,” Nov. 3-9), I'd like to make a couple of points: I believe Gabriel Meyer is biased in favor of evolution; and the Pope has most probably been fed pseudo-science propaganda from the pro-evolution camp.
Meyer's article includes in its title the words “Evolution” and “Creationism.” This is biased reporting. I believed in evolution all through my youth and college years, right up to about 40 years of age when I was shown some of the scientific evidence for creation and the concept of a relatively young universe. Since, I have researched and read many articles on this subject. One thing I've learned is when an author on this subject starts with the words “evolution” and “creationism,” you can bet you're in for a pro-evolution biased report. The author makes the judgment that evolution is science and therefore calls it evolution, not “evolutionism” but he calls creation “creationism” because he believes it to be non-scientific.
The Pope is quoted as saying that “[t]oday … new knowledge leads to the recognition that the theory of evolution is more than a hypothesis. There was evidence in the fact that several scientific disciplines had come up with evidence of evolution independent of one another.” The Pope's charism of infallibility does not extend to matters of secular science, however, and just what are these new evidences or knowledge and in what disciplines do they occur? Nothing is said about this.
I'd like to quote another Pope, Pius XII, from his encyclical Humani Generis: “Some imprudently and indiscreetly hold that evolution—which has not been fully proved even in the domain of natural sciences— explains the origin of all things.” His statement was true back in 1950 and is even more true in 1996. Advances in science are increasingly showing that the universe and life were created by intelligent design and not by the randomness of evolution. My challenge to the Register is to come up with some concrete evidence of evolution. All that has been done in Meyer's article was to give evolutionism an air of respectability while avoiding any attempt at searching for truth.
Phil Drietz
Redwood Falls, Minnesota
Humani Generis, while warning of the conflict between philosophical materialism inherent in a certain approach to evolution and Christian faith, the encyclical does not rule out the possibility of some form of evolution. Pope John Paul II merely reiterates this point of view, while, in also noting that there is more than one theory of evolution. The Church can abide with any theory, says the Pope, which, while explaining some of the mechanics of the development of the species, does not contradict Christian belief in “the ontological leap” between lower forms of life and men and women created in God's image. In short, there is no need to be alarmed.
—The Editors
Mary's Role in Redemption
I would like to second the concern of Al Radison (“Mary As Co-Redeemer?” in Letters, Nov. 17-23) about the possibility of a new Marian doctrine. I find the “co” term to be problematic. I also don't feel the Vatican II term “people of God” should be used since it was the Council itself that necessitated this proposed doctrine. Vatican II did not give Mary her proper due. I would favor a doctrine that addressed Mary as “Maternal Intercessor and Mediatrix of all graces.” The rationale for the doctrine is that there is one Redeemer and one Mediator—Jesus Christ. This is the teaching of the Catholic Church. Perhaps there is a bit more to this teaching, an enrichment if you will, that cannot be found in a very literal interpretation of Scripture.
Mary is not a co-Redeemer or a co-Mediator; she does not stand beside her Son in the work of redemption. Mary stands off to the side in humility as one who needed redemption as we all do. But the graces of Christ are reflected through her as a prism and they take on a softer light (blue and white). In the same sense, prayers to Christ always go through Mary and take on a mother's plea. The doctrine itself can be inferred from Scripture just as the doctrine of the Trinity is inferred from Scripture and not directly taught.
Paul Trouve Montague, New Jersey
----- EXCERPT: Letters ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: 'In the Beginning Was the Word' - the Word of God DATE: 12/29/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 29, 1996-January 4, 1997 ----- BODY:Father Servais Pinckaers OP, professor emeritus of moral theology at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, delivered a lecture June 20, 1996, on the occasion of his retirement from the institution, where he had taught since 1973. Register readers are familiar with his writing on the Our Father, which was featured in early 1995 in the context of the new Catechism of the Catholic Church. His farewell address is excerpted below.
If we consult the textbooks of moral theology used in the past four centuries, we note that their scriptural foundation has been reduced to the Decalogue, which, moreover, has been reformulated for the use of diocesan catechisms and [has come to be] interpreted as constituting a code of obligations and prohibitions imposed by the law of God. This moral teaching has certainly not been false—it remains fundamental—but, obviously, its contact with Scripture has been reduced considerably. As a result, the moral domain has been limited to obligations alone. Please allow this variation on a comparison found in the Gospel: When one forces the New Testament through the sieve of the negative precepts of the Decalogue, one risks capturing the gnat but losing the camel. Moralists limit their interest to a few Gospel verses, or those texts from St. Paul that correspond to the Decalogue, such as the prohibition of divorce (Mt 5, 31-32; 19, 9). It is up to spiritual writers or exegetes to study the rest of the New Testament—as if it did not contain any teaching that is specifically moral.
This deficiency has been all the more harmful because this concept of morality corresponds to the spirit of the times. It harmonizes with modern philosophy, by virtue of which the more or less categorical imperative has become the characteristic mode of moral teaching. This explains why exegetes themselves, influenced by this concept of moral theology, have not paid much attention to Scriptural texts that are not strictly imperatives, classifying them instead as simple spiritual exhortations…. They have been overlooking the major texts on morality found in the Word of God. …
The Sermon on the Mount
The first and most obvious of these texts is the Sermon on the Mount as recorded in St. Matthew 5-7, with its parallel in St. Luke 6, 17ff. Clearly, the evangelist wanted to give us … a summary of Jesus'teaching on the justice to which He called His disciples, a set of rules that they were to follow in life and action. We are dealing, therefore, with one of the chief Gospel sources of moral theology. St. Augustine shows his perfect understanding of this in his “Commentary on the Sermon of the Lord on the Mount.” For St. Thomas, the Lord's discourse belongs to the New Law, in a parallel of the Decalogue, being the expression of the Old Law. Both Doctors saw in the beatitudes Christ's answer to the question of happiness, the inquiry that underlies morality as it did all ancient thought….
We can also call upon a more recent witness, Henri Bergson, who describes the Sermon as presenting an “open” morality, in contrast to the “closed” morality imposed on society by obligations. “The morality of the Gospel is essentially that of the open soul,” he writes in The Two Sources. The philosopher stresses the essential difference between these two types of morality: The one is static, motionless, like a momentary pause in the course of progress; the other expresses movement and progress itself. Fittingly, it often uses the language of paradox, as in the precept of turning the other cheek.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church has happily filled in the gap left in moral theology by the absence of the Sermon of the Lord by returning the latter to its rightful position in fundamental moral theology, under the aegis of the “evangelical law” (No. 1965-1970). It is significant, however, that in the thematic index of the Catechism, whether in French, Italian, German, Dutch or English, there is no reference to the “Sermon on the Mount.” This surprising omission shows that this vital text has not yet fully retrieved its place among our moral categories.
After the sermon, which is attributed to the direct authority of Christ, the New Testament offers us several texts devoted to apostolic paraclesis. Paraclesis, used 38 times by St. Paul and appearing 108 times in the New Testament, is a technical term that introduces a moral teaching, as in Romans 12, 1: “I appeal to you therefore, brethren, (parakalÙ oun humas) by the mercies of God”….
However, such texts have been neglected because they are considered to be a minor genre of simple exhortations added to ethical imperatives, relating to spirituality rather than morality. Yet, paraclesis seems to signal the specific form of primitive Christian moral teaching, which moved beyond the teaching of the Law—that operates through commands and prohibitions—toward an approach better suited to the growth of charity and the virtues under the impulse of the Holy Spirit. It is again a matter of that passage from a static to a dynamic morality, as Bergson noted. According to the custom in the synagogues, later adopted in Christian liturgical gatherings (Acts 13, 15), paraclesis, or a word of encouragement from the prophets, teachers and most especially from the apostles, was addressed to the faithful not in the imperative mode, as one would command servants, but by way of exhortation, as one speaks to brothers or friends. Jesus'words reported by St. John come to mind: “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (Jn 15, 15). An exhortation, in this sense, is an encouragement given to brethren whom the Spirit has enlightened concerning the designs of God, and whom charity renders capable of taking initiatives. On St. Paul's lips, paraclesis is the word of an older brother or a father, addressing the communities he has founded….
How, then, should the moral theologian—and every thinking Christian—read Scripture, in order to draw moral teaching from it?….
Where moral theology is concerned, our ordinary method of reading is often too narrow and restrictive. I am referring to the way we may search the Scriptures for texts that formulate commands and prohibitions, and then take these to be expressions of the divine will. This view of Scripture is materialistic. Divine law is seen as something imposed upon us from the outside; the Word of God is thus reduced to a legal text, a collection of general and impersonal norms. It is no longer truly a Word engendering a relationship between persons. Happily, few texts of the Bible lend themselves to this method. The Sermon of the Lord is particularly resistant to any kind of codification whatsoever. For this reason, it cannot be incorporated in moral systems of obligation….
Viewing the beatitudes in Matthew as mapping our Christian journey to the Kingdom of heaven, St. Augustine comes up with an original interpretation of the beatitude of the meek. After his own conversion from pride to humility—to the following of Christ in the way of the first beatitude—he looks at meekness in relation to Scripture and explains it as docility. Meekness also includes a conversion. It does not allow us to judge Scripture from the lofty height of our own ideas, or according to our feelings, but inclines us rather to judge ourselves according to the Word of God— whether this Word accuses us and reveals our sins … or whether some passages seem incomprehensible to us and spur us on to seek further for the truth they contain.
“It is piety that we need then, so that we will be meek and not contradict the divine Scripture when it clearly confounds some vice of ours, or if, when a passage is not clear to us, we think we know better and can judge better. On the contrary, we ought to think and believe that whatever is written therein, even if the meaning is hidden from us, is better and truer than anything we could know of ourselves.” (De Doctrina christiana, Bk. II, VII, 9)….
What will our attitude be toward Scripture, and in particular toward the Gospel? Shall we set ourselves up as judges, depending on our own knowledge, or shall we let ourselves be judged by Scripture and meekly allow ourselves to be guided?
Augustine began by judging Scripture. He admitted that he “barked fiercely against the holy writings” that he did not understand, and which, among other reasons, he disdained because of their lack of stylistic elegance. He was one of those of whom the psalmist says, “What right have you to recite my statutes, or take my covenant on your lips? For you hate discipline, and you cast my words behind you” (Ps 50, 16-17). We may not be carrying our aggressiveness this far, but many of us also feel tempted to judge Scripture according to our own criteria, our exegetical, philosophical or theological knowledge, or simply our opinions and preferences. In an echo of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, isn't it characteristic of the modern spirit to assume the right to judge everything and to refuse to be judged by anyone or anything else? Isn't the sum and substance of rationalism contained in the affirmation of reason's supremacy in judging truth, and in the rejection of any mystery that claims to transcend it?
If we adopt such an attitude toward Scripture, if we set ourselves up as its judges, it will without doubt remain a closed book for us. Even though we may esteem it, we treat it as one more book in our study among others, a collection of historical documents from a far distant past. It will remain a text subjected to the scrutiny of specialists, a subject for the discussion of scholars. It will never become truly a word that touches us in the present and illumines our lives. It will never be a guiding light for our actions, a source and inspiration for moral theology.
To escape this impasse, we need the courage to embark, with the help of Augustine and many others, upon the path of docility to Scripture, as if we were back in school again, listening to it with the freshness of children. Let us return to our question once more: How can the Gospel become a Word of life and action for us?
Intimacy of the heart
I am incapable of having you hear and understand the unique Word of God, unless he speaks to you, to us, directly, through the word of the Gospel, as he alone knows how to do, with a voice echoing, beyond human words, in the intimacy of the heart. It may be that he will speak with the force of thunder, as in his conversations with Moses on Sinai, or with the lightness of a whispering breeze, as in his encounter with Elijah (1 Kgs 19), or again as the Good Shepherd calling his sheep, one by one, by names known to him alone.
This was precisely the Word for which Augustine and his mother Monica yearned in their last conversation together at Ostia. “… If to any the tumult of the flesh were hushed, hushed the images of earth, and waters, and air, hushed also the pole of heaven, yea, the very soul be hushed to herself, and by not thinking on self surmount self, hushed all dreams and imaginary revelations, every tongue and every sign … and if he alone should speak … that we may hear his Word, not through sound of thunder, nor in the dark riddle of a similitude, but might hear him whom in these things we love, might hear his very self without these….” (Conf., Bk. IX, 25).
We must silence all the clamor and ideas that fill our minds and learn to listen to him with our hearts, with a longing to discover the precious truth that his Word contains. This is how St. John is understood: “In the beginning was the Word, the Word of God….” The Word of God is our spiritual origin and it has the initiative. It calls to us, illumines, judges and leads us. That is why it is the principle source of theology and Christian exegesis. But the Word cannot penetrate us and bear fruit unless we give it a welcome, and meekly surrender to it with the docility of faith….
One after the other, each in its own way, the eight beatitudes promise us happiness and prompt us to desire it with all our hearts. But then, immediately, they overturn our ideas and challenge us. For how can it be that the poor and afflicted are happy? Don't we think exactly the opposite? The shock is all the more powerful in that this message comes to us not in the serene atmosphere of a conversation or a conference as if it were some general teaching. When God addresses us it is usually in the painful context of poverty, sickness or failure, in the consciousness of sin, or, in the midst of trials of all kinds. He does so in a very personal manner, as best expressed by St. Luke: “Blessed are you poor … woe to you that are rich….”
Then the decisive question is put to us, revealing the heart of the Gospel truth: “Do you have the courage to believe that for you, too, poverty, humility, meekness and suffering open up the road to happiness, to the Kingdom?” The word “believe” takes on its full meaning here: It means the adherence of mind and heart to the word and person of Another, who leads us into the luminous obscurity of his mystery, the mystery of the Cross. It is here that a choice is made between the violence of refusal, of rebellion and the docility of the faith….
Beyond the historical truth of documents from the past, the Word touches us in the here and now of our personal life, placing itself at the very root of our actions. It gives us access to a future ready to be born and evolve from the moment we consent to him who speaks to us “as friend speaks to friend.” The moral teaching does not derive from any external constraint—it proceeds from the inner Word that reveals God's plan for us. At the same time it infuses us with the strength to follow this plan, a strength issuing from the mysterious but sure presence of the one whom we recognize in the hidden depths of our conscience.
This penetrating intuition led St. Thomas to define the New Law as an interior law. Contrary to the common opinion of his time, the Angelic Doctor dared to affirm that this law did not consist of a written text, not even that of the Gospel, but that it drew its essence and took its power from the grace of the Holy Spirit received through faith in Christ—and operating through charity, through the love of Christ poured into hearts…. Thomas took up the teaching of Augustine: “What are the laws of God inscribed in the hearts of the faithful, if not the very presenceof the Holy Spirit?” (Ia IIae, qu. 106, a. 1)….
There is yet one more important question to ask: If the Word of God and the New Law are interior and spiritual, what function shall we attribute to the letter, the texts of Scripture, the Sermon of the Lord and the moral catechesis of the epistles, as well as to Church teaching that has transmitted them to us, featuring all its interpretations and applications? All this doctrine surely comes to us externally, through the Bible and Church documents, such as the Catechism and the recent encyclicals, Veritatis Splendor and Evangelium Vitae.
The teaching of St. Thomas on the New Law enables us to put things into focus. The texts of Scripture and of the Church are secondary elements, instruments which the Holy Spirit has formed—either directly, by way of inspiration, or through the mediation of the successors of the Apostles—in order to communicate the Word of God to us who have need of words and books in order to reach the truth. These are the normal means for putting us in contact with the Spirit. They contribute to our moral formation, practice of spiritual discernment, and discovery of the ways of God….
‘Ask, and you shall receive’
We need to know how to use these instruments, however, if we wish to profit by them. The definition of the New Law holds up two main criteria that place us under the impulse of the Spirit. In order to penetrate these texts and grasp their essence, the first condition is to read them with faith in Christ, who makes us discern beneath the letter the very person of the Lord speaking to us, as the countenance of Christ appears through the texts as our model. Through faith and the work of the Spirit, these texts become truly real for us, as if they had been written for us. However, in order to obtain this light of the Spirit, the Gospel warns us to become first of all like little ones, however learned we may be, and to persevere in prayer, which is essential to the theological method: “Ask, and you shall receive, … knock, and it will be opened to you.”
The second criterion is charity. This was St. Augustine's general hermeneutic and catechetical principle: All of Scripture should be interpreted as a Word destined to teach us the love of God and neighbor, as revealed to us in Christ, and to foster its growth in us (De catechizandis rudibus, Ch. III, 6-8). This is the heart of the evangelical Law and moral theology….
This is a way of reading Scripture that in no wise prevents a historical and positive approach; it may even favor it. However, it gives our reading a spiritual penetration that carries us beyond the purely scientific or human level of reading to the Scriptural level, formed by the very Word of the living God.
There is one last criterion taught us by the Lord himself at the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount. All reading of Scripture, especially of its moral catechesis, will be without profit to us unless we put its teaching into practice, thereby building on the rock of the Word of God rather than the sand of human words. This criterion is all the more important since by practice we acquire experience, and this gives us a kind of knowledge richer than any science learned from books. It is a knowledge by way of connaturality, proceeding from charity and forming wisdom—the gift of the Spirit who engenders all theology.
Translated from the French by Sister Mary Thomas Noble OP.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Servais Pinckaers Op ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Musical Joys of the Christmas Season - Bach, Handel, Corelli DATE: 12/29/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 29, 1996-January 4, 1997 ----- BODY:OF ALL the seasons and holidays in our Western culture, Christmas has become a source of inspiration for many musical composers and performing artists, both vocal and instrumental, secular and religious. During this festive season celebrating the birth of Christ, the rediscovery and enjoyment of baroque Christmas music is a rich experience. Its style and form surrounds this music with an aura of dignity that gives it a special mystique.
What is baroque music? In Portuguese, barrocomeans “oddly shaped pearls.” Accordingly, the music of the baroque period is irregular, diverse and contradictory in moods and styles. There are three mainstreams of baroque Christmas music: the vocal and accompanied melody, the instrumental or orchestral form and the organ music for church use. Within each of these forms is a diversity of operatic arias, cantatas, oratorios, organ preludes and Christmas carols. The earliest manifestations of baroque music occurred in Italy; and from there it crossed the borders to France, England and Germany.
The Christmas carol is believed to have been “invented” in the small town of Grecia, near Assisi where St. Francis built the first Christmas crib in his church. He then urged the community to sing nativity songs and to dance around the crib. Subsequent Christmas carols have been kept alive through the centuries, as most of them have been handed down from one generation to the next. French and Italian carols often have a pastoral character. In Naples, shepherds would come down from the hills at Christmas time, piping their tunes in the streets before the image of the Madonna and Child.
Arcangelo Corelli, the “archangel of the violin,” composed his best music for Christmas night. His works have warmth and beauty and does not lose its power to evoke peace and joy in the listener. For example, the bagpipe melody and lilting rhythm of his pastorale give a tonal description of the birth of Christ and the angels hovering over Bethlehem. Other Italian composers who wrote Christmas baroque music were Giuseppi Torelli, Francesco Manfredi and Pietro Locatelli. Many music publishers and recording studios have revived the works of Alessandro Scarlatti, father of the equally famous Domenico. Scarlatti's Pastoral Cantata for voices, harpsichord and string orchestra is a magnificent fabric of sound, set to a poem written by Cardinal Pietro Ottobani of Rome. It was first performed on Christmas eve in 1695 at the apostolic palace. The music describes the birth of Christ and concludes with a call to the shepherds to hasten to the manger and salute the newborn Child with their bagpipes.
The joy and spontaneity of French baroque music are exemplified in the series of Noelsby Claude Daquin composed for violins, flutes, oboes and harpsichord. These carols captivated the hearts of the people of Paris. The most famous of these are the Noel en Trio et en Dialogue and the Noel en Musette. In England, the poetic beauty of Henry Purcell's Behold, I Bring Glad Tidings is enhanced by the chorus and string instruments. Here, the relation between melody and harmony is stunning in its simplicity and charm.
Many people today still enjoy listening to oratorios. The oratorio is a dramatized biblical text for singers and orchestra but unlike opera; without scenery, costumes and dramatic action. It was first performed at the end of the 16th century in the San Girolamo della Carita Church in Rome. St. Philip Neri, founder of the Congregation of the Oratorians, had music written for popular stories in the Bible. These were performed after his sermons during the weekly services. Hence, the musical performances came to be known as oratorio, after the congregation in which they were presented.
The most popular oratorio is the Messiah by George Frederic Handel. He wrote his masterpiece in 1742, at a time when his career was going downhill. Several of his operas were not well received by the public. His creditors were pressing upon him and financial ruin was evident. In an outburst of energy and inspiration, he composed the Messiah in 24 days. When the music score was completed, Handel is said to have exclaimed in rapture: “I think God has visited me!”
The famous Pastoral Symphony, the solo He shall feed my flock, and the powerful Hallelujah Chorus are perennial favorites. The world premiere of the Messiah took place at the Music Hall in Fishamble Street, Dublin on April 13, 1742. The story goes that at the English premiere in London in March 1743, King George II was so moved by the majesty of the Hallelujah Chorusthat he rose from his seat and remained standing during its entire rendition. The audience followed the king. Since then, it has been customary for audiences not only to rise during the performance of this chorus but even to join in the singing. Handel's oratorio was addressed to a popular audience and received an immediate response and rousing welcome. It has also embraced the whole world.
Unlike Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach did not enjoy universal acclaim during his lifetime. He spent most of his career as a Church composer and cantor at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, Germany, where he wrote one cantata for each Sunday of the year. The Christmas Cantata has a lullaby-like melody and expresses the spirit of faith, hope and love that is associated with the season. For example, the popular Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring has an Advent theme of longing for the coming of the Messiah. It is among Bach's remarkable works. It reveals the strength and simplicity of his Christian faith. Musically, it has a wealth of aesthetics and harmony that rise and swell and burst into life. The same thing can be said of his other works. Bach wrote Advent-Christmas chorale preludes for the organ. These organ preludes are still popular in Catholic and Protestant churches. ABach festival this season would not be complete without the well-loved Christmas Oratorio. Bach composed the Christmas Oratorio in 1734. It consists of six cantatas intended to be performed on six different days between Christmas and Epiphany. In this monumental work, Bach shows his noble vision of the mystery of Christmas, the season of light, life and love. The pastoral mood of the music shows the composer's ability to paint lights, shadows and colors through sound.
Christmas baroque music is inextricably intertwined with the 17th and 18th centuries. But it has timelessness appeal. For Handel, Bach and for many Church composers, the ultimate aim of all music is none else than tribute to the glory of God, and the recreation of mind and heart in contemplation.
Sister Maria Agnes Karasig OP, is a free lance writer and a Dominican contemplative nun based in Summit, N.J.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mariaagnes Karasig Op ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Next Sunday at Mass DATE: 12/29/1996 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 29, 1996-January 4, 1997 ----- BODY:Jan. 5, 1997 The Epiphany of the Lord Mt 2, 1-12
THE MYSTERYof the Epiphany-which means “manifestation”-begins by manifesting something about ourselves. Like the “astrologers” in today's Gospel, it is not enough for us merely to know that Jesus is alive and living in the world as a human being. That information alone does not satisfy us. The Epiphany manifests our deepest, God-given desire to enter into the presence of Jesus. Our passive knowledge of the Incarnation comes to perfection in our active, personal experience of that miracle.
The astrologers manifest to us the sanctified way to respond to the gift of Christmas. It begins by putting Jesus first and making union with him their main priority. If the astrologers had been totally self-absorbed, pre-occupied with their own affairs and ambitions, they never would have “observed his star at its rising.” Instead, their alertness and sensitivity moves them to leave their lives behind for a while and follow the star. It is as if the astrologers already realize that their old life was devoid of meaning as they personally embrace the Incarnate Christ who reveals the very meaning of human existence to men and women.
This experience cannot happen simply in our thoughts, desires, and imaginings. Rather, like the magi, we must actually see Jesus. What the Lord manifests to us on the Epiphany must become the new focus of our life. And the star provides the light to gain that sight.
However, being in the presence of Jesus elicits something special from us. As the infant Jesus is presented to the astrologers by Mary his Mother, they are moved to worship. As they report to King Herod and all Jerusalem, this is their main motivation, purpose, and goal: they “have come to pay him homage.” Matthew informs us that, at this news, they all “became greatly disturbed.” The homage of the astrologers threatened their own security, authority and sense of self-importance; sometimes our own reluctance to pray and to stand humbly before God is tainted with these same fears.
The magi manifest to us the true glory and joy of humbly adoring God. As so many great sacred artists have depicted, the act of physical prostration puts the magi on the same level of Jesus in the arms of Mary. Ironically, our own humble worship spiritually puts us there as well. It disposes us to receive the justifying graces and the love of friendship that come to us from Jesus through Mary. As we spiritually offer our own gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, we in turn receive the benefits of Christ's divinity, priest-hood, and self-sacrifice as symbolized by the gifts.
Finally, the sacred encounter with the Holy Family changes the astrologers. They leave the house transformed. Mystically enlightened by God, the wise men go home “by another route.” That new route is The Way, Jesus, who in the Epiphany gives our life new direction, meaning and value. The Epiphany enables us to see in ourselves the beauty and goodness of God, which we are called to respond to with the fervent love that characterizes the new way of our life.
Father Cameron is a professor of homiletics at St. Joseph Seminary, Yonkers, N.Y.
----- EXCERPT: The Mystical Transformation of the Magi ----- EXTENDED BODY: Peter John Cameron Op ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Peace by Springtime? Irish Are Still Hopeful DATE: 01/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:DUBLIN, Ireland—If all goes according to the plan set out by the Dublin and London governments, in May this year the two governments will sign an agreement with the main political parties in Northern Ireland that will finally end the conflict between unionists and nationalists. Since the Northern Irish “troubles” began in 1968, more than 3,000 people have died in the violence.
Presently, the proposed agreement remains a very big “if.” Unionists believe they are losing out to nationalists in negotiations and there are many contentious issues yet to be addressed. Among them: the release of political prisoners, the reform of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), and a solution to annual parades of Protestants through Catholic neighborhoods.
Unionists, also known as Loyalists, support continued British rule, while Nationalists, also known as Republicans, seek an end to British rule and the creation of a united Ireland. The political differences between the two are exacerbated by the fact that they are linked so closely to religious identity, with unionists being predominantly Protestant and nationalists being predominantly Catholic.
Before the newly elected British government would allow Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), to enter the peace talks, the government insisted that the IRA would have to declare a cease-fire. In August 1994, the IRA did just that in the hope of entering talks with the previous British government lead by John Major of the Conservative Party. But Major's minority government relied on the support of Unionist politicians for its survival and the Unionist veto delayed both the peace talks and the early release of prisoners.
The prisoner issue is seen by many as crucial, for both Loyalist and Nationalist prisoners play a major role in their organizations' leadership and the decisions to call their respective cease-fires. After 16 months with no sign of a start to negotiations, the IRA resumed their campaign of violence in February 1996.
When the Labor government was elected with a massive landslide last spring, the Unionists' votes were no longer needed, and Labor leader Tony Blair showed much more flexibility in dealing with nationalists. For example, Scotland now has its own tax-raising assembly, and Wales has partial devolution.
Last summer, after being given an ultimatum—declare a cease-fire within five weeks or the talks will start without you—the IRA ended military activity. At first, unionists were unwilling to enter talks with “men who had blood on their hands,” but when they were also told negotiations would start with or without them, the three main Unionist parties—the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), and the Ulster Democratic Party (UDP)—entered the negotiating rooms at Stormont Castle. UUP leader David Trimble said he was doing so “not to negotiate with the IRA, but to confront them.”
Since then the talks have proceeded in fits and starts with Unionists willing to talk to all parties except Sinn Fein. They were dealt a body blow shortly before Christmas though, when the Dublin government announced the early release of Republican prisoners who had been transferred to the republic from Britain.
Unionists said it was a sign that “everything is going the Republicans way” and David Ervine, leader of the PUP, the political wing of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), the largest and most active Loyalist terror group. Ervine said he was reconsidering his party's participation in the Stormont negotiations. On the day before the prisoners were released, he had had a meeting with Irish governments and no mention had been made of the forthcoming release of prisoners. He said the Dublin government's lack of consultation with Unionists, showed “lack of respect” and “contempt” for both Ervine personally and the unionist population in general.
Slighting Ervine was a major mistake by the Dublin government, said Jesuit Father Brian Lennon, who has played a “behind the scenes” role in establishing the current peace talks.
“The peace process needs to be built on respect, confidence, and understanding, where each side [is coming from a common ground]. Confidence building measures are needed,” said the priest. “The Unionists attending a confidential meeting needed to have been informed before the Irish government went public on the release of prisoners. It's a serious breakdown in relations. The Loyalists have been put in difficulties and things look very [bad].”
Paroled for the holidays, UVF prisoners cast a shadow over the Christmas festivities when they announced they were reconsidering their cease-fire, which has held since 1994.
Then, only two days after Christmas, a leading Loyalist, Billy Wright, was assassinated inside the Maze prison. Wright, known as “King Rat” for his role in sectarian attacks against Catholics, was leader of the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF), a small but active terrorist group that has not declared a cease-fire and doesn't recognize the current peace talks. He was shot by members of the Irish Nationalist Liberation Army, a Nationalist splinter group that also refuses to recognize the peace process.
The assassination immediately provoked rioting and an LVF tit-for-tat gun attack in Dungannon Dec. 28 that lead to the death of a Nationalist who had served a prison sentence for murder. More seriously, the UVF say that if evidence is found that the IRA assisted the INLA in Wright's killing, it will take that into account in its deliberations about ending its cease-fire.
“We hope that this is nothing more than unionists ‘saber rattling,’” said Father John McManus, spokesman for the Down and Connor archdiocese. “There is a fair bit of time until the talks resume [Jan. 12].”
He believes the current difficulties are a distraction from the many important issues that have to be faced in the peace process, among them the parades issue, which is regarded by RUC chief constable Ronnie Flanagan as “the most contentious” in Northern Ireland. Each year, in the period between Easter Monday and the end of September more than 2,000 parades are staged by three Protestant fraternities—the Orange Order, the Apprentice Boys, and the Royal Black Preceptory. The vast majority of these parades go off peacefully. But about half-a-dozen that pass through Catholic areas are bitterly resented by residents who see them as displays of Protestant triumphalism.
Recently, the British government set up an Independent Parades Commission to take decisions about controversial parades out of the hands of the RUC, but Father Lennon and many other Catholic priests see that as merely the tip of the iceberg. They believe there must be a wholesale reform of the RUC before they will be accepted as a police force by the Nationalist community.
“The number one problem in Northern Ireland is the lack of an impartial police force. The RUC are seen as defenders of a Protestant ascendancy,” says Msgr. Denis Faul, who points out that Catholics make up only 8% of the RUC's 13,000 police officers. More troubling, a recent internal survey by the RUC of political and religious discrimination within its ranks found that more than a quarter of its Catholic officers suffered sectarian harassment from their colleagues.
At present, the Northern Ireland Police Authority is trying to recruit more Catholics into the RUC to reduce the imbalance, but more serious steps are needed, said Father Lennon.
“In a peace-time situation, it is estimated that the RUC would need, at the very most, 8,000 officers instead of the 13,000 it has now. The authority's approach is to reduce the force and increase the intake of Catholics. I find it difficult to believe that will bring about sufficient change in short enough a period of time. It won't help with the problems in the senior ranks and middle management, you are going to have to take in police personnel from other forces and restructure.”
Father Lennon said the need for reform in the higher ranks was highlighted by inquiry into the murder of a Catholic, Robert Hamill, outside a dance club in Portadown last May. Originally, the RUC issued a statement saying Hamill had died in a fight between two gangs, one Nationalist and one Loyalist. Some weeks later, after issuing a second similar statement, the RUC in Portadown acknowledged that Hamill had been innocently going about his business when he was set upon by a large group of Loyalist thugs.
“That case highlights the lack of confidence in the police force,” said Father Lennon. “Those RUC statements were issued with the full knowledge of its middle management.”
Whether or not there is major police reform, Msgr. Faul believes the “troubles” are coming to a natural end. He said: “These types of revolutions last for a generation, about 25 years, when the hard men start thinking ‘I am still alive, I am not in jail, I have a 25-year-old son and I don't want him to die for Ireland.’ I don't think there is much of a kick left in [the IRA]. It is the Loyalists who are more dangerous. If they think the Republicans are getting things, they will start assassinations.”
Bishop Seamus Hegarty of Derry is more optimistic though—despite the fact that some Catholics in Derry rioted after an Apprentice Boy parade was allowed by the RUC to proceed. Bishop Hegarty told the REGISTER that “the rioting was devastating to businesses in the town and was corrosive to the morale of the people who had hoped the peace was beginning to hold. It has brought home to people the fragility of the process so far.”
“In my Christmas eve homily, I make a distinction between ‘peace lovers’ and ‘peace makers,’” the bishop continued. “In the beatitudes, Our Lord says to bless those who are peace makers. In the longer term, there is a sense of cautious hope and optimism that the peace process at a wider level will succeed.”
Cian Molloy writes from Dublin.
----- EXCERPT: But fallout from a prison assassination further complicates an already delicate process ----- EXTENDED BODY: Cian Molloy ----- KEYWORDS: NEWS -------- TITLE: President Mary McAleese's Quirky Catholicism DATE: 01/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:DUBLIN, Ireland—“Thank God, we are not fighting over transubstantiation,” said the late Cardinal William Conway frequently during the early days of the Northern Ireland “troubles” between Catholics and Protestants almost 30 years ago.
One wonders what the former archbishop of Armagh would think of the latest “ecumenical” gesture by the Republic of Ireland's new President Mary McAleese, the first person born in Northern Ireland to hold that office (See related story, page 5).
As an active lay Catholic, McAleese is regarded with suspicion by many Protestants in Northern Ireland. She re-instituted adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at her official residence, Aras an Uachtaran, after taking office. Her commitment to the Church led to her being named the only woman member of the Catholic bishops' delegation to the New Ireland Forum in 1984. More recently, she has found less favor with the hierarchy because of her public support for the ordination of women and the end to the celibacy rule. McAleese has also been less than staunch in her stand on abortion, though she says she personally opposes it.
Her inaugural speech in November won praise from Archbishop Desmond Connell of Dublin after she called on all to “dedicate ourselves to the task of creating a wonderful gift to the Child of Bethlehem, whose 2,000th birthday we will soon celebrate—the gift of an island where difference is celebrated with joyful curiosity and generous respect, and where each may grasp his neighbors' hand as friend.”
Within weeks, however, McAleese was being criticized by Churchmen, including Archbishop Connell, after she received Communion at an Anglican eucharistic service at Christ Church Cathedral Sunday Dec. 7. McAleese, who is well versed in theology, knows that canon law prohibits Catholics from taking bread and wine from Anglican ministers, yet at the same time she knew it would be a popular move.
Newspaper opinion polls show that a sizable majority in the republic believe she was right to break the rules. Since, her example has been followed by the American ambassador to Ireland, Jean Kennedy-Smith, who has also taken bread and wine at Christ Church Cathedral.
Many commentators believe McAleese has done more harm than good by highlighting religious differences.
“She has put the Catholic Church and the Church of Ireland at loggerheads for the first time in living memory,” said David Quinn, editor of The Irish Catholic. “The Irish president's role is supposed to be non-controversial and she has broken that rule.”
—Cian Molloy
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Cian Molloy ----- KEYWORDS: NEWS -------- TITLE: Homosexual Adoption Ruling Rankles Family Groups DATE: 01/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:AUSTIN, Texas—A New Jersey court decision affirming a settlement that allowed two homosexual men to jointly adopt a two-year-old boy has come under sharp attack by conservative, pro-family groups. Catholic response, however, has been restrained and has focused on the broader issue of the redefining of the American family, rather than on the individual case of little Adam Holden Galluccio.
One prominent Catholic expert on adoption issues said the case should serve as a “call to action” for married couples, who are desperately needed to adopt sick or special-needs children.
The New Jersey settlement—which was affirmed by a state court Dec. 16 and resulted in the state agreeing to change its policy regarding adoption by homosexuals—was a landmark for the country. While most states allow homosexuals to adopt children, and some have even allowed joint adoptions in individual cases, New Jersey became the first state to explicitly mandate that gay couples be treated as full equals with heterosexual couples in adoption cases. Previously, New Jersey's laws were similar to most other states—homosexuals could be considered as adoptive parents, but they had to go through the process as individuals, rather than as couples.
“To adopt a child who needs a home is a generous act in itself,” said William May, the Michael J. McGivney professor of moral theol partners on the same level as heterosexual marriages,” Fournier said. “There's no question about that. It's part of a strategic effort by a portion of the homosexual community, and that's wrong. It's not only morally wrong but it's bad public policy and it's not good for children, who deserve the best environment. The statistics are clear: The best environment is a stable, two-parent, marriage-based home.”
Fournier said the case is another effort to redefine marriage and the family. “In a sense, we need to get beyond this case and move on to the bigger question,” he said.
The traditional definition of a family is a mother, father, and children, Fournier noted. There is room for divergences such as single parents and orphans, he said, “but we don't redefine the institution which the Church teaches is the first vital cell of society.”
Lost in the victory cheers of homosexual activists and the concerned cries of pro-family activists, is perhaps the most important issue, namely the shortage of willing adoptive parents for children with special needs.
Nationwide, there are about 500,000 children in foster care. Many are HIV-positive or have been victims of physical and sexual abuse, according to Maureen Hogan, executive director of Adopt a Special Kid (AASK) and a consultant to the Catholic Alliance on adoption and children's issues.
“These kids need more—not less—structure, support, and role modeling. But until we have 500,000 traditional ‘mom and dad’ families, then difficult choices are going to have to be made,” Hogan said.
The New Jersey adoption, Hogan said, should serve as “a call to action” for those who are concerned about its implications.
“There aren't enough parents to take these children—period. At a time when many people would not take children with HIV, the gay community stepped forward,” she said. “If we had enough parents to take these kids, this wouldn't be an issue.”
AASK places children with special needs for adoption throughout the country and maintains a national database of children and families. Founded by Bob and Dorothy DeBolt, it originally focused on placing war refugees and disabled children.
“As abortion became more available, the number of kids with birth defects has dropped. Over the last 15 or 20 years, as the foster care system in this country has exploded, we have focused on placing children who have been abused and neglected,” Hogan explained.
“Our great frustration is that while many families are willing to go overseas to adopt a child, often with special needs and at great expense, we have thousands of children in this country who need homes.”
Hogan agrees with those who criticize the New Jersey case on the grounds that married families are the best environment for children. But looking at statistics showing that 70% of children raised in foster care end up in jail, 50% become homeless and less than 5% graduate from college, she has a challenge for those same critics.
“For every person who criticizes this,” she said, “they really need to be thinking, ‘Is this something I can do myself?’”
Dennis Poust writes from Austin, Texas.
----- EXCERPT: But one Catholic expert says New Jersey case is a 'call to action' for married couples ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dennis Poust ----- KEYWORDS: NEWS -------- TITLE: 'Souls on Ice': With Frozen Embryo Technology, Life's Sanctity Is Lost DATE: 01/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:NEW YORK—A new form of “adoption” is not only unethical, it may run afoul of anti-slavery laws, said a prominent moral theologian.
The children in the adoption are frozen embryos and couples have been paying bargain rates—less than $3,000—to have one or more of these new human beings implanted in the woman's womb. In keeping with the commercial aspect the couple gets to pick the pedigree of the embryo from profile charts of the “parents,” in this case the egg and sperm donors.
Although the fee charged may not be written up as the sale of embryos by the doctors, the whole procedure sounds very much like a traffic in human persons, said Msgr. William Smith, one of the nation's leading moral theologians and a professor at St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers, N.Y.
“It's against the law to buy and sell human beings. That was settled in this country after the Civil War,” he said in an interview with the REGISTER. “But I'm not surprised this is happening in our culture. People think that they can do what they want as long as they can pay for it. As a people we have been generally against the sale of organs, but this leap frogs that whole issue.”
This brave new world of “souls on ice” is well under way, and a leader in the market is Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City, affiliated with Ivy League Columbia University. It is not the first time the medical facility has entered a potentially lucrative form of bio-technology. It was one of a handful of centers around the country chosen to test the abortion drug RU-486 for U.S. consumption. The Federal Drug Administration is expected to approve the deadly drug concoction next year.
The difference between this new form of fertility procedure, or “adoption,” and the more familiar practice of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and implantation is that in the latter case a couple seeking the implantation of an embryo starts from scratch, so to speak, using their own sperm and eggs or those of carefully screened donors. The adoption method is a direct outgrowth of this IVF practice. The fertilized eggs that are not implanted in IVF are frozen and stored. These “pre-mades” are then chosen by couples for implantation. The term “adoption,” used euphemistically by fertility professionals, is not far off the mark since the couple receives an already living, albeit formerly frozen, human being.
The Church's stand on the issue is clear, though ignored, by the bio-pioneers. The first step, in vitro fertilization, is illicit, said the Church, and each subsequent step is also illicit in itself as well as wrong as part of the process.
The definitive document of bio technologies, Donum Vitae, published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in 1987, was prescient in scope, addressing issues that were not much debated at the time, and laying down a firm standard for judging technologies. The procreation of new human life must be the result of an exclusive conjugal act between husband and wife, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which draws upon the CDF document:
“Techniques that entail the dissociation of husband and wife, by the intrusion of a person other than the couple (donation of sperm or ovum, surrogate uterus) are gravely immoral. These techniques … infringe the child's right to be born of a father and mother known to him and bound to each other by marriage.… Techniques involving only the married couple … dissociate the sexual act from the procreative act” and places technology above concerns about the origin and destiny of human persons (2376-2377).
The frozen embryo procedure raises a host of legal questions, as well. Experts say no federal or state laws directly regulate the freezing of embryos or their “adoption.”
“Many aspects are involved,” said John Margand, a New York medical malpractice lawyer and board member of the Legal Center for the Defense of Life.
“There's family law, covering the custody of the child and possible siblings who are children of the biological parents [the egg and sperm donors], and the fact that the biological mother is different from the birth mother. There is contract law [covering] what agreements have been made between donors and clinics, and clinics and the ‘adopting’ couple. Then there is property law, which involves a whole different set of rules. Who owns the embryo? That's just the legal aspect, without even considering the morality of the practice.”
Embryo adoption “is another bizarre application of technology, which underlines the truth of Cardinal [Joseph] Ratzinger's remarks” said Msgr. Smith, referring to the statement last year by the prefect of the CDF about the moral status of frozen embryos. “He said that we are condemning them to an absurd fate and there is no perfectly satisfactory solution to the problem. The whole arena of in vitro fertilization is a path we should not have gone down in the first place.”
The same point is made by Clarke Forsythe, attorney and president of the Chicago-based Americans United for Life, which develops strategies for litigation and legislation in the areas of abortion and euthanasia.
“The problems start with the creation of excess embryos. You don't need to freeze them if you don't make them,” he said. “They are human beings, offspring of human beings, and individual members of our species, and by and large they are mistreated—frozen, stored, discarded, abandoned, allowed to die.”
A crisis hit England last year when the government announced that it would cut off money for storing embryos. Some suggested destroying the embryos, arguing that they were “potential” lives. Others argued for letting the embryos thaw and die. Others said the only moral thing to do was to find women to accept the embryos into their wombs. Many well-intentioned female pro-lifers offered to rescue the embryos and bring them to term.
Msgr. Smith said that the Church was almost forced out of the debate from the beginning with its prohibition of each procedure: in vitro fertilization, the freezing of embryos, and their implantation. This sounded irrelevant to both those on the cutting edge of technology and others who sought the “compassionate” way.
Msgr. Smith's own opinion is that the best course of action in this difficult situation was to allow the embryos to die.
They would die anyway if kept refrigerated long enough, and keeping them alive through refrigeration certainly qualifies as “extraordinary” means that the Church teaches do not have to be used to keep a person alive, he states, adding that removing embryos from extraordinary life support is preferable to violating the moral law by implanting them in a woman's womb.
The Church's teaching on the sanctity of life however, is not likely to guide physicians like Mark Sauer, who heads Columbia-Presbyterian's infertility clinic and is developing a growing market for “adoptions.” Since the “pre-made” embryo costs only $2,750, as opposed to the more than $16,000 that IVF and implantation could run, in his own eyes he is making an expensive procedure affordable for couples of lesser means.
In a New York Times story, Sauer said he freezes embryos for later “adoption” only after an infertile woman who has contracted for implantation changes her mind. The fertile female donor at that point has multiple ova and, Sauer said, “it would be a waste of eggs not to retrieve them.”
He takes the donor's eggs and unites them with sperm from a sperm bank. The resulting embryos are frozen and made available for adoption.
Not only are the new embryos placed in a precarious position, the female egg donors also go through a potentially dangerous hormone treatment. A drug injected to stimulate their ovaries sometimes does the job too well and pushes up estrogen to crisis levels, with attendant fluid retention. The Times article reported that egg donors, in severe cases, have had kidney failure and, in rare cases, have died.
These tragic incidents have not stopped the infertility doctors, nor have they been cause for regulation or legislation. The infertility business, much like the abortion industry, goes largely untouched by restrictions. This has led pro-life activists to direct efforts on this new front.
“This is just another reason to keep up the pressure on Columbia-Presbyterian,” said Christopher Slattery, director of Expectant Mother Care in New York, which yearly counsels more than 1,000 abortion-bound women in two centers.
He has organized a dozen rallies outside the medical facility and leafleted the Columbia University homecoming football game this fall in protest of the RU-486 testing.
“They are basically in the baby killing business and now are entering the baby selling business, and they'll do whichever makes more money,” Slattery said of the medical center. “It's sad that the medical and scientific community has been silent about these new atrocities against human life.”
Brian Caulfield writes from New York.
----- EXCERPT: Moral theologians decry procedure as 'buying and selling' of human beings ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian Caulfield ----- KEYWORDS: NEWS -------- TITLE: Catholic Persecution in Communist Russia Chronicled in Landmark Book DATE: 01/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:WARSAW, Poland—The head of Russia's Catholic Church has welcomed a book documenting the cases of hundreds of Catholics killed or jailed under communist rule.
However, a leading Russian lay Catholic warned that further work was unlikely to be allowed on Soviet secret police archives, adding that the author had already been barred from continuing her “unique research.”
“This is the first compilation of its kind, and its publication is a good development,” said Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, the Moscow-based apostolic administrator for European Russia's 300,000 Catholics.
“It contains plenty of historical material. And although the documentation is far from complete, it provides a lot of new information.”
The Russian-language book, In Your Wounds Hide Me, detailing the fate of 317 Catholic priests and laypeople, was published for the first time in a limited Moscow edition during 1996.
Its author, Irina Osipova, a member of the Moscow-based Memorial Research Organization, said she had studied interrogation and trial minutes, as well as NKVD (paramilitary police) reports from as far afield as Krasnojarsk, Archangel, and Vorkuta.
The book, whose title is taken from the Anima Christi prayer of St. Ignatius Loyola, documents the imprisonment or execution of three dozen Latin Catholic priests and nuns, after the first wave of Church arrests in 1923. These included Archbishop Jan Cieplak of Mogilev, who was later granted a reprieve from a death sentence, and his vicar-general, Father Constatin Budkiewicz, who was executed on Easter night. Among those arrested, only a single Dominican nun, Sister Nura Zolkina, was released in 1927.
Besides its exarch, Father Leonid Fiodorov, the founder-members of Russia's Eastern-rite Greek Catholic Church, including Dominican Mother Anna Abrikosov, all also died following long prison terms under the rule of dictator Joseph Stalin.
Describing conditions on the White Sea's Solovetsky Islands, where most Catholic clergy were imprisoned in the late 1920s and 1930s, Osipova says 23 priests were locked in a 40-square-foot cell, and forced to sleep “like sardines.”
Although 17 Polish priests were repatriated in exchange for captured Soviet agents in 1932, their places had already been taken by 35 Ukrainian priests, who were sent to the Islands in 1930 on charges of “spying for Poland and the Vatican” and “anti-Soviet agitation.”
The book records that several priests, including Fathers Josip Paul, Adam Belendir, and Aleksi Kappes, were arrested after going into hiding to escape a 1929-31 crackdown on the Volga region's ethnic German Catholic minority.
Of these, Father Kappes later broke down during NKVD interrogations and named alleged accomplices in a supposed German spy ring.
However, a 1937 NKVD report said he had continued “systematic agitation” while imprisoned on the Solovetsky Islands, and had “attracted counter-revolutionary elements” while performing illegal prison Masses.
The remains of Fathers Paul, Belendir, and Kappes were identified this summer in a mass grave of Solovetsky Island prisoners at Sandormoch, north of St. Petersburg.
At least 32 priests, including 12 ethnic Poles and 11 Germans, were brought from the White Sea and shot through the back of the head at the site Oct. 27-Nov. 4, 1937.
An ecumenical memorial service for the two-acre grave's 1,111 victims, who also included a Georgian Catholic bishop, Shio Batmalashvili, a Catholic nun and four Russian Orthodox bishops and archbishops, was staged by Christian, Jewish, and Muslim clergy Oct. 27.
The Sandormoch grave is one of dozens exhumed since the collapse of communist rule. The latest, containing approximately 15,000 bodies, was unearthed in Ukraine's Volyn region Oct. 30.
In a REGISTER interview, Archbishop Kondrusiewicz said he had recently set up a “martyrology commission” to study Soviet atrocities against the Catholic Church, adding that a book of Catholic memoirs, covering events in the St. Petersburg region, was expected to be published in early 1998.
“Such work is only at the beginning, and we still lack the people and resources needed for a full-scale search for material,” the archbishop said.
“But the commission is attempting to act, despite the obstacles and problems.”
However, a lay member of Russia's Dominican order, Ivan Vladimirovitch, said he believed it was “a kind of miracle” that Irina Osipova's book had been published, and predicted that Catholic researchers would not be allowed further access to former NKVD and KGB archives.
“Uniquely, Osipova was permitted to obtain charge-sheets and protocols from the Stalinist era, and has produced an objective and truthful book,” Vladimirovitch added.
“But she hasn't been allowed to print all the information she wanted to, and wasn't permitted to name her informants.”
Vladimirovitch said the Russian authorities had allowed Osipova to consult the archives, at the written request of Archbishop Kondrusiewicz, as a “gesture” following Russia's opening of ties with the Vatican in the early 1990s.
However, he added that the author had had “conflicts” with former KGB officials since her book's publication, and had not been allowed back.
“Although Russian law theoretically gives Catholics access to police records, Osipova is the only person who was actually allowed to act on this,” Vladimirovitch told the REGISTER.
“The laws are now being tightened anyway, and state bureaucracy given a new lease of life, as people idealize the Soviet period and yearn for its stability. So this opportunity won't be repeated.”
Among other cases documented in In Your Wounds Hide Me, several Jesuit priests, including the Slovak Father Jan Kelner-Brinsko and a Pole, Father Jerzy Moskwa, were shot in the early 1940s after volunteering to work in Russia for the Vatican's Commission for Eastern Churches.
A U.S. Jesuit included in the book, Father Walter Ciszak, spent more than 20 years in Soviet labor camps after volunteering to work as an undercover priest in the Urals. He has been recommended for beatification by Russia's Catholic Church.
Osipova says close prison friendships were often formed between Catholic and Orthodox priests, some of whom secretly celebrated Mass together.
A Dominican priest, Father Sergei Soloviev, the nephew of celebrated Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900), was arrested after negotiating the Catholic Church's possible reception of Russian Orthodox priests who opposed Metropolitan Sergei Stragorodsky's controversial loyalty declaration to the Soviet regime in 1927.
A leading Russian Orthodox preacher, Archbishop Varfolomei Remov, claimed to have joined the Catholic Church during later interrogation by the NKVD.
Archbishop Remov, who was known for his friendship with Bishop Pius Neveu, the Catholic Church's Moscow-based leader, confessed to charges of leading a “terrorist organization” during his NKVD interrogation and was shot in 1935.
Asked about a possible message for the present-day, Archbishop Kondrusiewicz said he believed closer “Catholic-Orthodox cooperation” in uncovering Christian communist-era sufferings was possible but unlikely.
“Cases like this remind us that when times are hard everyone becomes a brother to his neighbor,” the archbishop said.
“But I don't expect this part of the book's message be will heeded in a way which leads to closer ecumenical ties today.”
According to Osipova's book, the last major trial of Catholics in 1948 resulted in seven surviving nuns from Mother Abrikosov's Dominican order being jailed or sent to gulags.
Although several imprisoned or exiled Catholics were granted amnesty in 1956, occasional Masses at two legally functioning churches in Moscow and St. Petersburg became the only public Catholic activities in Russia until the 1980s.
A 1995 Russian government commission said more than 200,000 mostly Orthodox priests and nuns were killed. Many others were imprisoned or deported in Stalinist purges, in the greatest persecution in Christian history.
The commission confirmed that many Christian clergy were crucified on church doors by communist “terror squads” or doused in water and left to freeze in winter.
Russian school textbooks say 20 million Soviet and East European citizens perished in communist-era labor camps, while around 15 million more died in mass executions, deportations, and officially orchestrated “terror famines.”
Jonathan Luxmoore, the REGISTER's Eastern Europe correspondent, writes from Warsaw.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jonathan Luxmoore ----- KEYWORDS: NEWS -------- TITLE: Padre Pio Advances on the Road to Sainthood DATE: 01/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:ROME—Padre Pio, the Capuchin friar whose famed holiness and supernatural gifts still draw thousands every year to the southern Italian town where he lived, took another step towards sainthood last month, when Pope John Paul II declared him “venerable.”
With the so-called Decree of Heroic Virtues pronounced Dec. 18, the Pope attested that Padre Pio, who died almost 30 years ago, had lived an exemplary life of Christian virtue and was worthy to be venerated by Catholics. Full beatification is expected by the end of 1998.
The news drew an enthusiastic reaction at the friary of Our Lady of Grace, where Padre Pio died in 1968 after 50 years within its walls.
“Our hearts are full of joy because finally Padre Pio has the title venerable,” Father Livio Di Matteo, the friary's superior, said the day of the announcement. “We praise the Lord and hope that within a short time Padre Pio will achieve full beatification.”
For this to happen Vatican experts have to be convinced that a genuine miracle has taken place since the Capuchin's death thanks to his heavenly intercession. This is not expected to be a problem.
“Every day here at San Giovanni we receive reports of prodigious acts of grace,” said Father Gerardo Di Flumeri, vice-postulator of Padre Pio's beatification cause, in a recent interview.
A medical panel working for the Congregation for the Causes of Saints is already assessing several cases of miraculous healing that took place after people prayed to the friar for divine assistance in their suffering.
Furthermore, Pope John Paul is believed to be convinced of the friar's saintliness. When Karol Wojtyla was still the bishop of Krakow, before becoming Pope, he asked Padre Pio to intercede for a friend, the Polish psychiatrist Wanda Poltawska, diagnosed with cancer of the throat. The woman was miraculously cured in 11 days. It is also said that Padre Pio foretold Karol Wojtyla's elevation to the See of St. Peter.
No precise date has been set for Padre Pio's beatification but Bishop Riccardo Ruotolo, director of the Opera di Padre Pio (the hospital and other public facilities built by the friar), says he hopes it will be in the autumn.
“What we'd like is for the beatification to fall in the month of September, when we'll be celebrating the 30th anniversary of Padre Pio's death.”
Padre Pio, baptized Francesco Forgione, was born in the southern Italian town of Pietrelcina May 25, 1887. He was ordained in 1910, and when he was 31-years-old, he reportedly received the stigma-ta—marks on his hands, feet, and side similar to those suffered by the crucified Christ.
‘Padre Pio exercised all the Christian virtues to a heroic decree. This is why he should be a saint.’
According to Catholic tradition the stigmata is bestowed on especially holy people. A famous case was St. Francis of Assisi, the founder of Padre Pio's order.
Padre Pio retained the wounds for 50 years until his death Sept. 23, 1968.
According to witnesses, within a day of his death the wounds had vanished without trace. This fact, along with the accusations during his lifetime that they were self-inflicted, meant that for a long time the Vatican was skeptical about the friar's authenticity.
Despite past doubts about the stigmata, they're not the reason why Padre Pio is on course for sainthood. Says Bishop Ruotolo: “His holiness isn't in the stigmata, the visions or the miracles. Padre Pio exercised all the Christian virtues to a heroic decree. This is why he should be a saint.
“I believe Padre Pio stands out from other saints in his love for his brothers, the poor and ill, in his poverty and detachment from worldly goods, and above all in his identification with the crucified Christ. Meditating the passion of Christ, Padre Pio identified with him to an extraordinary degree. This is why the stigmata caused him to suffer so much on Fridays when his meditation of cross and Calvary was deeper than on the other days.”
Bishop Ruotolos' words about Padre Pio are hardly controversial these days. But in the 1920s they would have cast him in a dubious light. In 1923 the Sant' Uffizio (now the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) issued its first decree against Padre Pio, saying there was nothing supernatural about him and that the faithful should “act accordingly.” He was prohibited from celebrating Mass in public. Padre Pio was condemned again in 1926, and in 1931 he was even forbidden from hearing confessions. He was deprived of all the faculties of priesthood save the right to celebrate Mass alone in the private chapel of the Capuchin friary.
According to Bishop Ruotolo, the 11 years Padre Pio spent deprived of priestly powers were simply the time needed for the Holy See to decide whether he was to be trusted or not.
“Padre Pio caused a certain confusion in Sant' Uffizio because it received letters and files against him from both priests and lay people with serious—and false—accusations. And so the Congregation had to investigate to find out whether the accusations were true or false.”
It's easy to see why Vatican officials were skeptical. If the reports are to be believed, Padre Pio was making the blind see and the lame walk for 30 years before he died. And many other peculiar abilities and qualities are attributed to him as well. Quite apart from the stigmata, his body itself was a mystery. He hardly ate enough to sustain a baby, he hardly slept and he often had fevers so high (120 degrees) that nurses had to use horse thermometers to take his temperature.
Then there was the flowery fragrance that was said to emanate from his body. Some likened it to the smell of violets, others to a mix of roses and cyclamen. It was supposed to signal his presence, be it physical or spiritual, and some say they have smelt it since his death, at moments when they believe his influence was at work. He was also credited with bilocation, or the ability to be in two places at once, and being able to predict the future and read people's minds.
Some of the strangest tales about Padre Pio deal with his apparently frequent encounters with Satan himself. If you go to the friary of Santa Maria della Grazie (Our Lady of Grace), and look into his cell, you can still see the bloodstains on the cushion that was placed under his head after the devil allegedly beat him one night. The story, which was originally told by the friars themselves, has since become part of Padre Pio's legend.
Apparently, one night in July 1964, at about 10:00 p.m., the friars heard a terrible crash coming from his cell. When they opened the door they found him dumped on the floor having been apparently thrown from his bed. His forehead had been split so deeply that a doctor had to be summoned to stitch it. His eyes were blackened and his whole upper body, front and back, was covered with bruises. So badly was he beaten he couldn't say Mass for several days.
Stories such as these, together with the picturesque stigmata, have created such a myth around the figure of Padre Pio that nearly 30 years after his death his name draws more than million people to San Giovanni Rotondo every year. Inevitably a Padre Pio industry has also grown up, and on the piazza just below the friary where he lived, you can buy all manner of artifacts bearing his name and image: Padre Pio calendars, key rings, scarves, and pencil sharpeners. One leading Italian daily recently even offered people “the voice of Padre Pio,” free on cassette with every copy bought.
The Capuchin's fame is also spread by the clutch of Internet web sites devoted to him and by the 2,187 Padre Pio prayer groups that exist around the world, in places as far-flung as Hawaii, Sri Lanka, and Ethiopia.
Martin Penner writes from Rome.
----- EXCERPT: Thirty years after his death, the famed--and one-time controversial--Italian friar maintains a massive following ----- EXTENDED BODY: Martin Penner ----- KEYWORDS: NEWS -------- TITLE: A Catholic Witness for the New Global Culture DATE: 01/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:Energized by the recent Synod for America, an Argentinean archbishop discusses the historic possibilities awaiting the Universal Church
Archbishop Stanislao Esteban Karlic, 70, of Parana, Argentina, one of the two special secretaries for the Special Synod of Bishops for America was elected to a 15-member committee that will help John Paul II draft the post-synodal apostolic exhortation.
He spoke with REGISTER Latin America correspondent Alejandro Bermudez in Rome at the conclusion of the Synod.
Bermudez: How would you evaluate the Synod?
Archbishop Karlic: From the point of view of the contents, it will provide the region, together with the Holy Father's apostolic exhortation, with fundamental guidelines to foster the New Evangelization from a continental perspective. But, I would like to highlight the Synod as an event—an occasion that has its own value, even had it not concluded with a series of proposals.
We have had the opportunity to experience a deep sense of communion that has grown among the bishops from all America, thus providing the foundations to build fraternity and solidarity that, because of real cultural differences and social barriers, is not easy. Today, I think that even the most skeptical regard the idea of Church unity on the continent as both possible and important.
Why is it so important?
Because communion and unity are, for Catholics, a mystery and a reality of faith. Today, in an ever more globalized culture, we have to make this unity real in our lives if we want to respond to the historic opportunity the Pope has unveiled: to become the forerunners of the global culture by experiencing and witnessing the “Catholicity,” that is to say the universality of our Church. From this Synod on, we are encouraged, as bishops, to become protagonists of this process. This idea, this concept, has been assimilated and internalized by most of my fellow bishops, if not all. Most of us are going back to our dioceses and to our nations with the conviction that we have to start this process as soon as possible.
Have the bishops discussed concrete means to make this project real?
It has been said several times that this Synod was not convoked for theological speculations or to write another catechism, but to discuss practical pastoral means to carry on the New Evangelization requested by the Pope. The meaning of “practical” for the Church must not be confused or evaluated by the pragmatist standards of our secularist culture, for which “practical” means evident, immediate, tangible, even spectacular achievements.
This is not the case when we talk of changes according to the Gospel. Of course, the changes requested by the Pope imply a new solidarity between north and south that must be concrete in economic and social dimensions. But in order to achieve this, the Catholic Church must work in the only thing that will guarantee real, long-lasting changes—the change of mentalities and hearts in people.
In this field, the sacred field of the human person, changes are very slow. For this effort, which we are ready to start, clear ideas and a strong conviction are needed.
Do you think bishops are coming out of the Synod with these two elements—clear ideas and strong convictions?
I believe so. As one of the secretaries of the Special Assembly for America I have been blessed with an exceptional opportunity of probing the thoughts and the feelings of many, I would even say most, of my brother bishops. I can say that most of them are seriously convinced that this program is possible. This Synod has been determined in creating this conviction.
Was consensus achieved because controversial issues were systematically avoided or because there was real agreement even in points that are usually matter of conflict among bishops?
There was no attempt to avoid potentially controversial issues. Each issue was judged and evaluated not according to the enthusiasm or timidity with which it was presented by a synodal father, but by its capacity to be integrated into the objective, which was to design pastoral guidelines for the New Evangelization. That was basically the horizon, the mind set and, somehow, the filter for the issues.
Everything that was helpful for the New Evangelization was highlighted. This consensus on the criteria for choosing the issues was, I believe, both the secret of the Synod's success as well as its first fruit. This also showed that we don't need to wait for the creation of new structures in order to achieve communion in practical things. This is rather new for us.
What other important things do you consider as innovations?
Well, the radical change of language, which also conveys a change of mentality that is in process. We [South American Bishops] are now starting to speak of America instead of Latin America, while “America” for bishops in the United States does not mean only the United States, as it has done.
This is not only a change of language, as I said. It also means to start thinking globally, as a continent, not only as a country or region. It also means that challenges have to be selected, not giving an artificial dimension to problems that are only local or regional, no matter how big they may look. Other issues, on the contrary, are global. This is the case with migration, for example.
Migrants are moving not only from Mexico to the United States. They are also moving in great numbers from Paraguay to Argentina, from Peru to Chile, or from Guatemala to Mexico. They all pose the same challenges: a group that must be welcomed in the country they are moving to, a group that is in a potential situation to be separated from their cultural values, a group that requires a special ministry that at this time is not being properly provided.
Another important consensus is the increasing spirit of a missionary commitment ad gentes—that is to say, aimed to bring the Gospel to other continents. Countries like Canada, the United States, and Colombia have had this tradition, but most of the other countries have not and now are trying to share, even from their own poverty of human resources.
During the Synod we have determined that America as a whole, as one Church, has a special responsibility regarding Asia and the Pacific, since the biggest population is there and since it has become the axis of the new process of globalization.
We are also convinced that the north-south dialogue is possible, at least from the perspective of the Catholic Church. If we foster this dialogue until it becomes a deep communion, then we will be able to become a strong testimony, even a model, for a better understanding at a secular level among the nations of the region.
What has been the most important issue highlighted by the Synod?
I believe it is the centrality of the mystery of Jesus Christ, son of God. All the other proposals and pastoral conclusions sprout from this truth. In fact, from this mystery, we believe we are all brothers and sisters, we believe we have the same dignity and that everything has been created for the well-being and happiness of all. This means that because someone owns some of the goods created by God, the possession of this good is not an end in itself, but it has been created for the happiness of all.
America, as a continent, has been created for the well-being of all Americans. Can you see all the human rights, all the social consequences that come out of this statement? This means that it is because of our faith that we demand the right for a person to have a job or the opportunity to raise a family with basic securities.
The term ‘globalization’ was used frequently during the Synod. Is there anything new in the bishops' thinking about this phenomenon?
Definitely. Bishops now have a less ambiguous stand toward it. We believe that the global culture is a great opportunity to apply the Catholic, universal nature of the Church by bringing the Gospel to all peoples. But at the same time it conveys several challenges: it opens the opportunity for the powerful to have more possibilities to apply an almost unlimited power.
This makes particularly urgent the need to defend the rights of the individual, the particular groups and cultures, because the global culture can also become a threat. Globalization is, in short a great opportunity, but also a risk, because we can be harmed by the secularist dynamic it conveys. In this manner, the role of the laity is not only important, but decisive. In fact, lay people who are deeply involved in the process have to be the front-runners of the New Evangelization. They can achieve, in this particular respect, what other members of the Church cannot.
That is why the Synod highlighted the need to recover the importance of the social doctrine of the Church as well as the evangelization of political, economic, and cultural leaders. Catholic universities are very important as well. They should become Catholic think tanks where major problems are analyzed and confronted from a Catholic perspective.
Did the Synod reach any common conclusions regarding normally divisive issues such as birth control or capital punishment?
These issues were mentioned, but in their true proportion, respecting the main theme, which is the New Evangelization of America. There can be different opinions, but the Gospel is always the Gospel, and its interpretation depends not on the opinion, feelings, or desires of the individual, but on one, unified Magisterium. That, basically, is what it means to be a Catholic. So the great challenge here is to apply the Gospel to the reality of America.
Most of our problems are in the human mind. There are several ideas, even among Catholics, that do not belong to the criteria that Jesus Christ came to share with us as a gift of love. This is where our task begins. If men and women are renewed by the transformation of their minds, as St. Paul describes, then understanding the most complicated issues and applying of the most demanding teachings of Jesus simply flow as a consequence.
Take, for instance, the several social issues pending in America. What would happen if a truly Christian entrepreneur requested the bishops to articulate a more socially sensitive business policy? What would happen if we request Christian politicians in the United States to be more tolerant with the rights of immigrants who look for a better future there?
As I said, it is a very slow change, but the only way we can expect the Gospel to become real is to make it real in human minds, in human hearts, in the human person as a whole. It does not mean to forget or delay social issues to an indefinite time in the future. It just means to do first things first.
How do the bishops plan to achieve this transformation?
That goes back to the problem of testimony, which I think has been somewhat underesimated by many in the Church in recent decades. I certainly believe in the effectiveness of pastoral techniques and programs, in the use of modern means, and even advanced technologies. The evangelization of culture, the “New Areopagus” mentioned by the Holy Father in his encyclical Remptoris Missio (The Mission of the Redeemer, 1990) stress their importance. But they are basically instruments.
The means or the medium can heavily influence the message, but it never replaces the message. Just try to compare the apostolic effectiveness of someone like Pope John Paul or Mother Teresa. Hasn't the secret of their success been the intense, transparent way they witnessed Christ to all the world? That is what I mean. In other words, with more saints we would have fewer problems.
In pursuit of a growing conscienceness in all America, what role do you see for Latin America?
I would rather talk about my own country, Argentina. I hope and pray that it becomes a front-runner in fostering communion and solidarity with all the neighboring nations and also a testimony of unity at a continental level. This is something that must be achieved at all levels. MERCOSUR [the common market among Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay] is, for example, a good initiative in this regard that can be a model and even set the pace for the region.
We bishops are determined to contribute to such unity from our own pastoral perspective at least. As a matter of fact, bishops of Chile and Argentina have signed a common statement appealing to our nations and governments to find a final solution to the controversy of the so-called Continental Ice, which is the only border dispute pending.
At a continental level, just as the fifth National Mexican Missionary Congress turned years ago into the first Latin American Missionary Congress, we expect the sixth Latin American Missionary Congress, scheduled for 1999 in my Archdiocese of Parana, will become the first Pan-American, or simply “American” missionary congress. That could be a concrete contribution to fostering a common missionary spirit at the continental level.
—Alejandro Bermudez
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Alejandro Bermudez ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: U.S. Notes & Quotes DATE: 01/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:Denver, Technology and the Church
A Vatican-sponsored summit on “The New Technologies and the Human Person” will be held March 26-28 in Denver.
At the conference, “top Roman Catholic officials will gather … to wrestle with the weighty issue of communication technology's impact on religion,” according to the Denver Business Journal (Dec. 22, 1997).
Why Denver?
“Denver was a natural site for such an event,” according to Francis Maier, chancellor of the Archdiocese of Denver. Bishops worldwide think fondly of the city since 1993's World Youth Day, staged at Cherry Creek Reservoir and officiated by Pope John Paul II.
“Probably most important, though, is Denver's status as a hub of telecommunications and computer technology because of companies such as Tele-Communications Inc., Jones Intercable Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., and Sun Microsystems Inc. ‘We have tremendous resources along those lines, unrivaled by virtually anyplace in the country…’ Maier said.”
Speakers at the Pontifical Council for Social Communications-affiliated conference include: computer industry analyst Esther Dyson; Charles Geschke, president of Adobe Systems Inc.; Greg Liptak, president of Jones International Networks; James Bailey, “futurist and author”; Steve Schovee, OneCom founder and president of the venture capital fund Telecom Partners; and Ted Henderson, industry researcher at investment banking firm Janco Partners.
Martin Luther King Jr.'s Niece Criticizes Disney
Alveda King, daughter of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s brother, the Rev. Alfred King, is a political activist, like her uncle. But unlike some members of her famous family, she opposes abortion and affirmative action and favors school vouchers, according to The Washington Times, (Dec. 19).
In fact, her views are so unpopular in the family that Dexter King, president of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center, refused to comment on her—even though she is a member of the Center's board of advisors.
King for America, an organization that Alveda King founded, has taken on many foes, but none so formidable as the Walt Disney Co. “As a mother, I relied on Disney,” she was quoted saying. “It was always a safe haven.”
She changed her mind first because of the content of recent cartoons but then her group, “expressed concern about Disney departing from family values,” she said.
King for America met early in the summer with Disney Senior Vice President John Cooke.
“[W]e talked about Ellen with them and Nothing Sacred was coming up. I said ‘John, I feel betrayed.’”
The paper also noted that King takes offense at those who draw parallels between race and homosexuality, as if the two were equivalent.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: NEWS -------- TITLE: Vatican Notes & Quotes DATE: 01/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:Performing for the Pope
In one of the most widely reported Christmas gifts of 1997, B.B. King handed over his guitar, Lucille, to the Pope.
Many who saw the [Dec. 18] Reuters report were greeted by the surprising line, “The Pontiff's meeting with B.B. King comes after he met folk-rock idol Bob Dylan at a concert in September. The Roman Catholic Church once branded rock music a child of the devil.”
The paper cited no documentary source for the startling claim that will come as a surprise to those familiar with the Church. The Church does not ascribe demonic origins to human creations, and had far weightier matters on its mind at the end of World War II and during the years leading up to Vatican II than the emerging musical form.
Meanwhile Gloria Estefan—whose 1995 performance at the Vatican escaped Reuter's attention—has turned down an invitation to sing before Pope John Paul II in Cuba Jan. 21-25, according to the Miami Herald (Dec. 20).
The decision was explained by her husband and manager, Emilio Estefan. “We will never sing in Cuba while Fidel Castro's regime exists.… The day Gloria sings in Cuba, she will do so because Cuba is free—and we trust this will happen soon.”
The decision was no surprise. According to the report, “[d]uring a concert in Puerto Rico some months ago, Gloria Estefan said ‘as much as I love the Pope, I won't sing in Cuba while Fidel is there.’”
Nonetheless, the Estefans support the papal visit, according to the article. “That visit can bring faith to Cuba,” said Emilio Estefan.
At her 1995 Vatican concert, Gloria Estefan is quoted saying, “Holy Father, I ask for your prayers, so the doors to freedom may open in my native country and throughout the world.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Opening of Father McGivney's Sainthood Cause a Proud Moment for Knights of Columbus DATE: 01/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:There's never been a U.S.-born saint, but last month, Father Michael McGivney, founder of the Knights of Columbus, joined a select group who may someday achieve that honor. The first official steps toward his canonization were taken at the chancery office in the Archdiocese of Hartford, Conn.
Archbishop Daniel Cronin initiated the official investigation into the life and works of Father McGivney, born into the archdiocese in 1852. McGivney grew up to serve as curate in one parish while pastor of another. He's most remembered for founding the Knights of Columbus, which would become one of the largest societies of Catholic laymen in the world.
“We've been working on a low-key basis on this since the 1970s,” said Supreme Knight Virgil Dechant, who heads the nearly 1.6 million member society. Practical steps began about five years ago and led to the naming of Dominican Father Gabriel O'Donnell OP, who now resides at St. Mary's Church, New Haven, Conn., as postulator for the cause (see accompanying article). Father McGivney began his first assignment at that very parish on Christmas, 1877.
Shortly after founding the K of C, Father McGivney explained its goals in a letter to diocesan clergy: “to prevent our people from entering Secret Societies by offering them the same if not better advantages…to unite the men of Faith…that we may thereby gain strength to aid each other in time of sick-ness…to provide for decent burial, and to render pecuniary assistance to the families of deceased members.”
Upon his death in 1890, at the age of 38, that first K of C society, established in the basement of St. Mary's Church in New Haven, and called the San Salvador Council, had grown to 57 councils. Today, more than 11,000 councils have been established throughout the world, primarily in the United States, Canada, the Philippines, Mexico, Central America, and Caribbean countries.
The Knights actively support Catholic causes and the Catholic faith in the spirit of defending the Faith in a gentlemanly manner, as Father McGivney himself did in the midst of the anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant bigotry of his day. The K of C insurance company currently controls assets of $6 billion, and last year, the organization donated more than $105 million to charitable causes.
Father McGivney probably never expected such successes from the Knights. He was focused on the more immediate concern of meeting the needs of people within a society which was hard on both the working classes and immigrants. It was a society where illness was rife and working conditions were hazardous, where many of its bread-winners died in industrial accidents, leaving young widows and orphans destitute.
“He actually understood instinctively as a young priest the social (justice) teachings of the Church,” Archbishop Cronin told the REGISTER. “That was his priestly heart.”
He described Father McGivney as a man “ahead of his times.” The archbishop said the priest provided “social welfare long before the welfare system” and was a “holy person instituting a holy cause.”
Father McGivney was the eldest of 13 children, six of whom died in infancy or early childhood. He understood, firsthand, the hardships facing the working class in the 19th century industrial city of Waterbury, Conn., where he was born. At age 13, due to the financial circumstances of his family, he left school and went to work as a spoon-maker in a brass factory.
He was 16 when he began to attend the seminary, first in St. Hyacinthe's in Canada, then in Niagara, N.Y., and later in Montreal, Canada. His studies were interrupted by the death of his father. A few years later, he resumed studies at St. Mary's Seminary, Baltimore, and was ordained at the Cathedral (and Basilica) of the Assumption. He celebrated his first Mass on Christmas Eve at the Immaculate Conception in Waterbury. As curate at St. Mary's, New Haven, Father McGivney faced anti-Catholic sentiment because of the church's location in the prominent neighborhood. An 1879 New York TImes article entitled “An Unprofitable Church,” and subtitled “How an Aristocratic Avenue was Blemished by a Roman Catholic Edifice” underscored public feeling about the parish.
But McGivney didn't retreat. He suggested Columbus as the patron of an organization which could join both the Catholic and American heritage.
After seven years, he was transferred to St. Thomas Church in Thomaston, a smaller industrial town north of Waterbury. He was Supreme Chaplain and active member of the K of C until his death from pneumonia and tuberculosis.
Spontaneous popular devotion to him began at once and has grown over the past 50 years. On March 29, 1982, centenary of the founding of the K of C, he was reinterred at St. Mary's Church in a polished granite sarcophagus.
In the proceedings to follow, Father O'Donnell reminded that the “crucial thing is whether God performs a miracle to show his approval.” To be named Blessed, or to be canonized, “is not the ‘logical’ outcome. Unless God manifests his approbation, it's not going anywhere…it really doesn't depend upon us—it depends upon God at the end.”
Archbishop Cronin stressed that Father McGivney “can really be a model for the young men considering priesthood,” especially considering the hard times he endured in the 19th century.
Bishop Thomas Daily, current Supreme Chaplain of the K of C and bishop of the Diocese of Brooklyn, said that whether the sainthood process ends in McGivney's canonization, the very opening of the cause was a proud moment for Knights around the world.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: NEWS -------- TITLE: Depending on Christ, Knights of Columbus Founder Pushed Past Obstacles DATE: 01/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:Father Michael McGivney died 107 years ago. Retrieving his spirit and spirituality from the scant records of the past is not easy, nor is the task anywhere near complete. But witness accounts from the late 19th century provide an emerging spiritual profile and clues to his inner life and the fruit of his apostolic activity.
Michael McGivney was a man of his times—the son of Irish immigrant parents in a part of the country charged with anti-Catholic sentiment. He also knew the meaning of deprivation and poverty. The effects of alcoholism and domestic violence in the immigrant community were inescapable, and the young McGivney knew firsthand the disastrous consequences of poor working conditions and unfair labor practices upon families.
Such cultural conditions produced in him a heart sensitive to the sufferings and misery of others. As a youngster in a good Catholic home he discovered his strength came from the bonds of faith and love that knit his family together, prepared each of them for life in the world, and kept them close to the Church of Christ.
Early in his teens the desire to spend himself for others and draw them to Christ became a vocation to the priesthood. Though never physically robust, his sensitive nature and priestly heart led him to pour himself out, often beyond the limits of his health, in providing for the spiritual and material needs of those committed to his care.
The historical record of Father McGivney is slim but consistent. All witnesses describe him as priestly, before all else he was a priest, and he is always cited for his consistent concern for and availability to the young people of his parish. Though he carried out all of his sacramental and pastoral duties with care, and identified with his parishioners in their sufferings and struggles, it was betterment of young Catholics that so preoccupied Father McGivney throughout his entire life.
The founding of the Knights of Columbus when he was just 29-years-old is the great monument to his pastoral vision and concern. He was determined to form a brotherhood for young Catholic working and professional men that would support them in their faith, provide for the care of their families, especially those affected by their father's sudden or untimely death, and channel the charity of their time and service to the needs of the less fortunate and the works of the Church.
The phenomenal success and growth of the Knights of Columbus did not come without the price of exhausting research and preparations, delicate relationships between officers and members, skillful molding of the spirit and organization of the earliest members of the order and constancy in the face of the opposition and criticism that came from other priests.
Father McGivney the priest; Father McGivney the apostle to the young—these were expressions of his deep attachment to the eternal high priest, Jesus Christ. To speak of him as priestly, even in the most adverse of situations, is to say that he was always Christ-like. He signs one of his few extant letters, “In the Sacred Heart.” The source of his patience, his endurance, and his inexhaustible charity was the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Nineteenth-century Catholic piety was centered on the Sacred Heart and the McGivney family would have been no exception. All of the priestliness and charity of Michael McGivney found its source in Christ and was an attempt to draw others into that circle of love that exists between Christ and his Church. Michael McGivney was in love with Jesus Christ and his Church and spent his short life on earth finding new ways to express that love and to share it with others.
The few photographs we have of him suggest that Father McGivney was somewhat retiring in disposition. Some have seen in him a certain severity. But the record is clear that Father McGivney, God's servant and priest, was friendly and open, had a delightful sense of humor, and drew the young of the parish to himself with unfailing magnetism.
We have evidence of a broad range of his relationships and ministries. He had lots of priest friends and was devoted to visiting the sick and elderly in their homes. It was his work with the young, however, that was most noteworthy. As any priest, he wanted the men and women of his parish to be good Catholics, but he wanted them to enjoy life at the same time. He celebrated Mass for them and preached his sermons. He heard their confessions and lent a willing ear to their difficulties and struggles. He outdid himself, however, in preparing entertainment plays, fairs, any wholesome fun that would bring joy and a bit of diversion in a world where there was little leisure and even less money to provide an easier life.
One of the most famous of Father McGivney's spiritual friends was Chip Smith, an Irish lad condemned to death for the drunken murder of a policeman. The young curate at St. Mary's devoted himself to the spiritual welfare of young Smith, visiting him daily in the New Haven, Conn., jail, arranging a Mass to be celebrated there before his death, complete with choir to provide the music, and walked with him to the gallows. The priest and the condemned man embraced and Smith expressed his gratitude for the priestly guidance and support that made it possible for him to face death with courage and tranquillity. In the end it was the devoted priest who lifted the burden of sorrow from the young man's shoulders. Father McGivney was long afterwards affected by that encounter.
It was from his roles as priest and apostle to the young that Father McGivney came to be an apostle for Christian families. His convictions about the sanctity of family life and its importance for Church and society came from his own experience of what the loss of a parent can mean or the chaos that results when Christian ideals do not reign in the home.
His program for the formation of strong Christian families can be found in the fraternal order of the Knights of Columbus. A knight is a man of courage, duty, and honor. A Knight of Columbus is a Catholic, a man of faith, who accepts the responsibilities of his vocation with courage and honor. He depends upon God and his brother Knights to fulfill the duties of his state in life. He is called to be a better husband and father because he is a Knight of Columbus. For Father McGivney the Knights of Columbus were as much a program for spiritual formation as a benevolent society that cares for the widow and orphan. Membership in the Knights of Columbus is not meant to take a man from his home, but to prepare him to go to his family strengthened in his relationship with Jesus Christ and renewed in his resolve to spend himself for others as Christ did.
Father McGivney was priest and apostle and we pray that one day we will be able to add one more title—canonized saint.
Dominican Father O'Donnell, postulator for Father McGivney's sainthood cause, writes from the late priest's home parish, St. Mary's in New Haven, Conn.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Gabriel O'Donnell OP ----- KEYWORDS: NEWS -------- TITLE: Dancing with Death DATE: 01/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:In America death has gone from being a taboo topic of discussion and an event hidden from relatives and children (this attitude toward the topic had its own problems), to becoming a choice—a personal liberty. It has even become a freedom we want to exercise not just in our own lives, but also in the lives of others: the pre-born, the newborn, the physically disabled, the aged, the terminally ill, the comatose, the severely depressed, the mentally impaired, organ donors nearing death, and so on. We have come to believe that we have the absolute right concerning who is to live and who is to die—and we don't want anyone contravening our decision.
Why should anyone contravene our decision? This is the question raised in refutation of the pro-life movement by those who laud the libertine license that masquerades in our land as freedom. The answer to that question is that the right to choose does not stand on its own: every time that “right” is chosen someone kills someone else, and killing a person is wrong. This basic truth has not merely been forgotten in America; its opposite is being openly affirmed.
One strong push in this direction came with the publication of Derek Humphrey's 1981 book, Let Me Die Before I Wake. Humphrey, who is cofounder and president of the Hemlock Society, brought euthanasia before the American public in a popular and accessible way. By the time his second book, Final Exit, was released in 1991, America was highly receptive to its message and prescriptions.
In the latter book Humphrey provided detailed information on how individuals can end their own lives by either killing themselves or having someone else do it for them. Final Exit sold more than half-a-million copies in hardback, and remained the number one nonfiction hardback on The New York Times best seller list for nearly five months.
Perhaps the book's most significant endorsement came via a positive review in the American Journal of Law and Medicine. It touted Final Exit as “an important indictment of medical practice, legal judgment, and of the culture at large, for failing to find a way to protect people against unwanted suffering and lingering death in the company of strangers. This book deserves extensive publicity and consideration for what it means to respect people's choices about dying.”
Keith Fournier
That endorsement is a perfect example of what is called verbal engineering. Changes in society and people's behavior is usually preceded by verbal changes and changes in the presentation of an issue by the mass media. I have long been convinced that such verbal engineering will be the downfall of our society.
In the above endorsement, doctors and lawyers have been “indicted” for not finding a way to “protect” those who suffer. But clearly implied by the word “protect” is the killing of people who suffer. Killing is described by words that are meant to express concern for the suffering, and those who genuinely express such concern are “indicted” as if they were criminals.
The results of this sort of verbal engineering have appeared in many ways. In St. Louis, Mo., for example, authorities have documented 11 cases in the past five years where the book Final Exit or copies of its pages were found near the bodies of people who followed its precise steps to bring an end to their lives. Nine of those 11 people were not terminally ill. Most suffered depression, one had hypertension, and another complained of severe pain, ringing in his ears, and poor eyesight.
The fact that these otherwise healthy people killed themselves through reading this book manifests clearly that “care” and “protection” is not what results from the “right to die movement.” No matter how much this movement claims to care for the terminally ill, it doesn't.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church enunciates a basic principle that the sick, the weak, and the handicapped deserve a special respect, they need to be helped to lead lives as normal as possible (cf. 2276). The Catechism also points out that “[i]ntentional euthanasia, whatever its forms or motives, is gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person and to the respect due to the living God his Creator” (2324). The reason euthanasia is murder and the reason it violates the dignity of the human person is because one person kills another person, and this is always wrong.
We must continually speak the truth that to kill another person is wrong, and it is particularly heinous when that person is someone for whom we are called to have care and concern for. Those of us involved with the pro-life movement need to speak about this issue with clarity, because the verbal engineers are hard at work attempting to expand the culture of death by gaining a popular consensus for their view through the type of language described above.
Recall the words of Pope John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life): “Everyone's conscience rightly rejects those crimes against humanity of which our century has had such sad experience. But would these crimes cease to be crimes if, instead of being committed by unscrupulous tyrants, they were legitimated by popular consensus?” (70).
They would in fact be worse crimes, because the suffering of those killed by their own doctors and relatives—at the time they most need care and love—would be muffled under the cold indifference of a world whose conscience will have been numbed to the longing of the human heart to have its life respected by others.
Keith Fournier is a lawyer, president of Catholic Alliance, and a permanent deacon.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Keith Fournier ----- KEYWORDS: NEWS -------- TITLE: William F. Buckley Jr.'s Faith of the Heart DATE: 01/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:Kingsley Amis wrote of the television production of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited that it ought to have been subtitled: “How I Lived in a Big House and Found God.” Amis was put off by Waugh's juxtaposition of the high life and Catholicism.
Similar things have been said about William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley has to date produced—in addition to an almost 50-year stream of articles, columns, novels, and television programs—no fewer than six autobiographical books celebrating his ideas, his magazine National Review, his famous friends, his sailing, his travels, his music, and the assorted adventures of a charmed life lived at full speed.
Since birth Buckley has been blessed with an abundance of wealth and talent, and has been remarkably successful in all things, whether masterminding the political resurgence of American conservatives, sailing the high seas, or writing spy novels. And Buckley has been blessed with a deep Christian faith.
His latest book, Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith, celebrates his life-long affair with Christianity. It is deeply personal and ultimately edifying, for it tells in a simple and straightforward way the centrality of faith in one man's life, a man who, moreover, is the very epitome of the peripatetic man of affairs often thought beyond such superstitions.
It is reported that Ayn Rand once said to Buckley, “You are too intelligent to believe in God.” Buckley knows better. Faith is perhaps a greater gift to the intellectual than it is to the peasant, for faith is a great equalizer: “The illiterate who believes and is sustained by his faith is as airborne as Thomas Aquinas after completing his Questions,” writes the very literate Buckley.
The septuagenarian is here serene and self-assured, a happy Catholic who is grateful for the consolations of his faith. He has never apologized for his family or his fortune or his philosophy, and he is not about to begin apologizing for his faith. But neither does he argue for it.
“I have never sought to console in explicitly Christian terms,” he writes, “anyone who wasn't, so to speak, already a communicant.”
And so he has written an idiosyncratic book that is wide-ranging in the topics it treats, selected only because “they need meet no higher entrance qualification than that [they] engaged my attention.” Aware that a collection of musings on things religious may not be engaging to anyone else, Buckley asks the reader to “hear me out, and see how the words of others have greatly consoled me and instructed me.” And in due course we hear from many of those whom Buckley has read, or befriended, or both, and the reader's patience is rewarded.
It is not immediately clear why Buckley wrote this book, for in it there is little that he has not said before; indeed several of the chapters are reproduced substantially from material stretching back 30 years—including the magnificent epilogue on his mother's faith, to whose memory the book has been dedicated. This book emerges from a sense of obligation; a feeling that a believer who writes so much ought at some point to write of his belief.
Buckley recounts an Anatole France story that he considers “unrivaled in devotional literature.” France writes of a monk, new to his monastery, who disconsolately watches his brethren display their great talents in homage to Our Lady: singing hymns, reciting poetry, and playing instruments. The novice has no such talent, his only skills being those of the juggler—his livelihood before entering religion. One night after all the monks are asleep, the novice takes his sack of mallets and balls and clubs and, creeping out of the dormitory and into the empty chapel, juggles for Our Lady.
Buckley acknowledges that “my arguments are imperfectly done [and] have been used time and again in other quarters; I have only to contribute this, that the mix here is my own, for better or worse.” So he writes about his faith, even as the novice juggles for Our Lady or the little drummer boy plays for the baby Jesus.
“If I could juggle,” he confesses, “I'd do so for Our Lady. In fact, I have here endeavored to do my act for her.”
Buckley's book then is something quite rare among religious books penned by personages famous for their work in other fields. He is not assailing, though there are a few choice passages surveying what has become of Christian schools in America, concluding that his old school could be truthfully renamed the “Millbrook School for Pagan Boys and Girls.” Neither is he arguing, though he reproduces a classic argument on the faith between Msgr. Ronald Knox and the aggressively anti-Catholic Sir Arthur Lunn—which ended with the former receiving the latter into the Church. Nor is Buckley questioning, though he asks tough questions (and includes the replies) of a forum of his convert friends, comprising an all-star cast of conservative Catholic converts including Fathers Richard John Neuhaus and George Rutler. (They are asked, and answer, the big question: Why did you convert? The answers are moving.)
Faith is perhaps a greater gift to the intellectual than it is to the peasant, for faith is a great equalizer…
No, what Buckley is doing in this book is primarily believing, and inviting the reader to embrace the beautiful risk of belief. It is truly an autobiography of faith, and more than that, an act of piety—an act of filial piety, the dutiful son writing for his mother, and Our Mother.
Buckley surveys the difficult questions, beginning with the development of doctrine, the reconciliation of free will with God's foreknowledge, the existence of evil, miracles, the historicity of Jesus and the resurrection, the doctrine of hell, corruption in the Church, and the interpretation of Scripture, before moving on to the current controversies about sex: contraception, women's ordination, clerical celibacy, and divorce.
His conclusions will not alarm the orthodox reader, but on most questions, even when furnished the material from his interlocutors, Buckley shies away from the heavy theological justifications for difficult positions. He prefers to trust and believe in a God in whom he knows inconsistencies are impossible, even if he knows not how. Buckley does not employ the Questions of St.
Thomas; he prefers the route of the simple man who believes and is sustained by belief.
Buckley is in typical form on the question of contraception.
“My own incomplete understanding of the natural law balks at the central affirmation of Humanae Vitae,” he writes, “even as I'd of course counsel dutiful compliance with it.”
He has read Janet Smith for the Magisterium and Father Richard McCormick for the dissent. He thinks Father McCormick's position is an “exercise in intellectual freedom—but also an invitation to contumacy.”
And how does a Catholic intellectual decide when faced with a conflict between his opinion and the teaching of the Church? Buckley is straightforward. “The answer, for a Catholic, has got to be: the position taken by the Pope, as spokesman for the Magisterium.” He does not understand but accepts. The Catholic cannot be asked to do more.
On that matter Buckley himself has evolved. In response to Pope John XXIII's 1961 encyclical about the Church, Mater et Magistra (Mother and Teacher), Buckley wrote a National Review article entitled “Mater Si, Magistra No.” Later, after John Paul II's Centesimus Annus (On the Hundredth Year, 1991), he penned, again for National Review, “Mater et Magistra After All.”
Buckley's faith is primarily a matter of the heart, not the head. The best parts of the book are Buckley practicing his faith: at a Jesuit boarding school, at Lourdes, in his parish, as a godfather, at the ordination of his nephew to the priesthood. The sense is conveyed that Buckley's faith now is not very different from his faith a half-century ago, when as a teenager he arrived for a private audience with Pope Pius XII with his left arm weighed down by 30 rosaries he had brought along to be blessed.
If there is a sad note in the book it is that the Church today is not what it was in the days of Pius XII. Buckley welcomes Vatican II and its opening to the modern world, but he concludes that the changes wrought in Catholic life have been disastrous. He writes convincingly that the abandonment of Friday abstinence from meat deprived Catholics of a “weekly reminder that a Catholic Christian was, at least nominally, just that—someone who accepted the Church's rules.”
He reproduces in large part a scorching essay that he wrote thirty years ago against the liturgical reforms, except that now he is less scorching. He laments the changes, and professes himself “vexed” on the whole question. As a lover of Latin and good English, both of which were banished from the new Mass, Buckley is resigned to be disconsolate, and writes that he is happy that the next liturgical event conducted for his benefit will be his funeral, at which he will be happily dead.
Buckley the senior citizen has mellowed, as a comparison of his comments on the liturgy then and now illustrate. But he is not melancholy. There is much joy in his pages. Joy in friends (we get a chapter on Malcolm Muggeridge), joy in his family (we meet several members of the Buckley clan), and yes, the Buckleyesque joy in words. (No Catholic vocabulary should be without “afflatus”: a divine impulse; or “thaumaturgical”: concerning the working of miracles.) But above all there is the joy of a long life lived with undiminished zest, animated by faith in Christ, and secure in the Church that he loves.
Raymond de Souza is a seminarian for the archdiocese of Kingston, Ontario.
----- EXCERPT: Too intelligent to believe in God? He knows bette ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond De Souz ----- KEYWORDS: NEWS -------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 01/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:Laity & Priesthood
The REGISTER's excellent article on the new Instruction on Certain Questions Regarding the Collaboration of the Non-Ordained Faithful in the Sacred Ministry of Priests (“Role of Laity Spelled Out by Vatican,” Nov. 30-Dec. 6), neglected to mention the provision of the document that will have the most dramatic impact on American parish life: It orders the end of the habitual use of extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist at Sunday (and daily) Mass.
After stating that extraordinary ministers may be used “at Eucharistic celebrations at which there are particularly large numbers of the faithful and which would be excessively prolonged because of an insufficient number of ordained ministers to distribute Holy Communion,” the document declares that one of the three “practices [that] are to be avoided and eliminated where such have emerged in particular Churches” is “the habitual use of extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion at Mass, thus arbitrarily extending the concept of a great number of the faithful” (Practical Provisions, article 8).
This provision (and the others in the document), if implemented, will go a long way towards dispelling the neoclericalism of the priests who tell the laity that they are not really participating in the Mass unless they are greeters, lectors, or extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist.
Jeff Ziegler
Steubenville, Ohio
‘Not Really Gay’
I will give Dr. Nicolosi (“You Are Not Really Gay,” Dec. 7-13) the benefit of the doubt and assume that he sincerely wants to make people's lives better by “repairing” their homosexuality. But let me share one person's story.
Thirty years ago, after extensive psychotherapy, I considered myself “cured” from my homosexual impulses, and I met and married a wonderful woman, with whom I had a son. We had frequent and enjoyable sex, and during our entire time together I did not have a single homosexual encounter.
Then after eight years of marriage, one morning on the way to work I aimed the steering wheel at the concrete abutment of a bridge crossing over the express-way, released my seat belt, and floored the accelerator. I swerved at the last minute, but I got the message.
To make a long story short, a few years later I had become the first president of the Lesbian and Gay Parents Coalition International, which now numbers over a thousand members.
I had also become what no therapist was able to make me, a truly loving person—happy, healthy, outgoing. Eventually I even returned to the Church, although not in a way that Dr. Nicolosi would approve of.
Over the years I have heard many, many stories like mine, of men and women who were “cured” enough to marry and live as outwardly cheerful heterosexuals for many years, fooling themselves, their spouses, their clergy, and maybe even their therapists.
Here's a suggestion for Dr. Nicolosi: Why not limit your treatment to lesbians and gay men who can prove that they somehow escaped the overwhelming and unrelenting hatred, condemnation, disgust, and scorn still heaped on them even today by family, Church, and society. If they can really demonstrate that they are not being pressured from outside, but that the desire to change really does come from within, then work with them.
But as for the vast majority of us, please—as a real act of Christian charity—leave us alone.
Al Luongo
New York, New York
Catholic Culture
This morning I read in the REGISTER a paragraph, “Clearly, if we want Catholic culture, we are going to have great Catholic art and it isn't going to be plaster models.”
Bishop Myers of Peoria said that (Inperson interview with Bishop Myers, Dec. 7-13). And if you think art will contribute to a Catholic culture, I ask you to think what art has done for the cultures of the world. All the art in Rome, Paris, London, and Vienna didn't create a culture that stopped World War II. In fact, the War was started by a “nobrainer” painter who somehow thought he had a “divine right” of some kind.
After the great Depression, Joseph Schlarman, then bishop of Peoria, redid St. Mary's Cathedral into a showcase of liturgical art: rose window, Lady Chapel, and all. Schlarman died Nov. 10, 1951 (Bishop Myers was only 10 years old then). The next dignitary thought the Lady Chapel was too dark so he sent a painter in who painted and covered the black, red, and gold with a light pastel, even the pews. Then there was plenty of light, but where did the “art” go? It certainly would have been cheaper for everyone if the first curator had used “plaster of Paris.”
If we really want a true Catholic culture we have to eliminate the “spirit of the world” as far as that is possible. What is the “world”? Those who seek sensual, intellectual, and artistic pleasures of this life. The “world” despises and considers secondary the things of the supernatural. The spirit of the world conflicts with the spirit of Christ. Ask St. Bernard of Clairvaux.
Perhaps a new time is coming into the life of the Church. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said in the July issue of Inside the Vatican, “Perhaps we must abandon the ideas of national or mass Churches. It is likely that there lies before us a different epoch in the history of the Church, a new epoch in which Christianity in the situation of the mustard seed in tiny groups apparently without influence which nevertheless live intensely bearing witness against evil and bringing good into the world. I see a great movement of this type already underway.”
Stuart Michael Karl
Santa Maria, California
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Child Care: A Wary Eye on the Government's Helping Hand DATE: 01/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:Government interest in promoting better child care looks, at first glance, like a wonderful idea. We all know that as women increasingly enter the work place and opt for careers outside the home, families are strained and children are given inadequate attention. Surely we can do more to help families stay intact and to raise the next generation, not only with physical health, but with sound values.
Government, we are told, offers the obvious solution— but it is a solution we ought to be wary of. Robert Woodson said of government programs that address other social problems, “The helping hand strikes again.”
We have learned to our sorrow that in such fields as education, health, and welfare benefits, with government help comes government control, and often such control is ham-handed and insensitive. At times, it does more harm than good.
“Experts,” as we have learned from experience of them in primary and secondary schools, are all too likely to think they know better than parents what children need and what values ought to be taught. However, those values are all too likely to be in conflict with the values parents try to teach in the home. The real question is: while respecting parental authority, what would help and support families in the increasingly arduous tasks of caring for their children?
Recent studies show that affordable child care is available. At an Oct. 23 White House conference on child care, First Lady Hillary Clinton claimed the country faces a “silent crisis” because so many parents are unable to find affordable or adequate child care. Pointing to military child care programs run by the Department of Defense, she and the President propose that the military work with civilian child care providers to plan model programs and training. The President has asked the military to research the idea and draw up a report. That is the Clintons' idea of a “partnership” between the national government, state, and county authorities.
But more federal regulation will make it difficult for good private caregivers to continue. Religious centers, informal neighborhood arrangements, and even grandmothers, may not qualify as “government-approved” care givers. For children to be in centers where “Heather has Two Mommies” is all too likely to be the approved approach. Parents would have to battle such lessons at home.
Our real crisis is the denial of the true needs of children: the time and attention of parents. We tend to relieve our guilt by efficiently doling out the time we spend with children, designating it “quality time.” Children do not live efficiently. They need time to discover how things work and who they are. There is no substitute for the interaction of parents with their children when they are young.
The most important aspect of a child's development results not from how many stories they hear or how many activities stimulate their brain, but from long periods of time spent with one or two loving persons with whom the child develops a trusting relationship. A child in daycare is exposed to many handlers because of a high staff turnover. Each caregiver may be attentive and loving (or they may not), but they cannot substitute for the security a child receives through a sustained parental relationship.
The “crisis” is not so much in child care as in the family. Along with all the centrifugal forces pulling the family apart is the tendency in our culture for parents to spend less time with their children. Each member of the family tends to be seen as a unit with an individual agenda instead of one member of a unity of persons sharing a life together.
Before we initiate more regulation of daycare, we need to study exactly what daycare accomplishes. It is a complex question that has not been adequately addressed. It would be unfortunate if we mistook even the best child care as a substitute for the attention that parents give their children. Welfare mothers and at-risk families need reliable daycare. Families that are stable also need, at times, to rely on child care. But as Diane Fisher, a clinical psychologist pointed out recently, the worst-case scenarios should not drive policies that could develop into models for the future for all of us.
Ideally, children are raised not by money, government programs, or villages, but by two loving parents. Parents themselves should contribute to shaping government policies that assist parents in spending more time with their children. There is no better way to ensure the positive development of children and, hence, of our nation's future.
Mary Ellen Bork, a board member of the Catholic Campaign for America and the Institute for Religion in Democracy, writes from Washington D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: NEWS -------- TITLE: Do Not Be Afraid to Cross the Threshold of Hope DATE: 01/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:Last of three parts
The missionary efforts of the Church must be fostered. This Synod for America has been for all of us a reminder of the gifts we have shared through the evangelizing efforts of previous generations, of the gifts given by the sending Churches and the gifts they have been given in return by the receiving Churches. The New Evangelization envisages a continued exchange of gifts with many ways of collaboration between our local Churches in the common work of sharing the Gospel. Priests and other missionaries from the North continue to be needed in the South and elsewhere. At the same time, the Church in the South has intensified its efforts to send missionaries to the North and to other lands. They come to minister to their people and proclaim the Gospel to all. This missionary exchange is at the heart of the New Evangelization to which the Holy Father has so often called the whole Church. “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach good news!” (Rom 10, 15).
The Communications Culture
The media of social communications play an increasingly influential role in the life of society and the Church. They are creating a “new culture.” As the Holy Father has said, this “new culture” arises not only from the content of these means of communications “but from the very fact that there exist new ways of communicating with new languages, new techniques, and a new psychology” (Redemptoris Missio, 37). The Church needs to continue the development of her own use of these means in service of the Gospel. Her dedicated corps of professionals in communications can serve as the leaven which influences those in a field of endeavor often unmindful of religious values to reconsider their values for the sake of society. St. Paul writes in Romans, “And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher?” (Rom 10, 14). And indeed we must learn to preach in the new language to which so many have become accustomed through the contemporary means of mass communications.
Consequently, the New Evangelization requires cultures that are open to faith in God where believers can contribute to society. For the most part, we in America enjoy the blessings of religious liberty. Still, as the Church lives out the Gospel, in proclaiming the kingdom of God, in advocating justice for the poor, and in defending human life and dignity, she faces many obstacles. In some places, despite legal protection of the Church, bishops, priests, deacons, delegates of the Word, consecrated and lay people are penalized and slandered, intimidated and even slain for their Gospel defense of the poor. In still other places, a new, aggressive secularism would deny a voice to people of faith in the public arena and demean the enormous contribution of the Church to public life. Accordingly, we appeal to the faithful in public life and to people of good will who have influence on public opinion to stand with us in defense of the Gospel of Life against abortion and euthanasia. We also call on them to stand with us against anti-religious prejudice, and to support the contributions of the Church and other communities of faith to the common good, which will be fully realized when we reach the Father's house.
Do Not Be Afraid
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, we have described the joys and sorrows, the hopes and the needs of America. In the face of all the pain and suffering in the world, shall we lose heart and become discouraged? In the power of the Holy Spirit, we say to you: Jesus Christ has overcome the world. He has sent His Holy Spirit among us to make all things new again; indeed, in the words of Holy Scripture, to renew the face of the earth. This then is our simple message: Jesus Christ is Lord! His resurrection fills us with hope; his presence on our journey fills us with courage. We say to you, as the Holy Father tells us all so often: Do not be afraid. The Lord is with you on the way, go forth to meet him.
In the final part of their concluding message from the Nov. 16-Dec.12 Special Assembly of the Synod for America, the bishops urge solidarity with the poor and declare that wars, conflicts, and the arms races have no place on God's earth.
And where shall we meet him? We can find him dwelling within us if only we will open our hearts to the challenge of his love (cf. Jn 14, 23). We can find him in our neighbor, especially in the poor and the hungry and those in want (cf. Mt 25, 40). We can meet him personally whenever two or three of us gather together in his name (cf. Mt 18, 20). We can discover him in his Word (cf. Jn 1, 1) and in the wonder of his world (cf. Rom 1, 20). We encounter him in the sacraments, especially in the Sacrament of Reconciliation which is the sacrament of his mercy (cf. Jn 20, 21-23). Most perfectly we encounter him in the Eucharist where he wills to feed us with his own Body and Blood (cf. Jn 6, 51 ff). In a word, Jesus desires to be present with us always. Let each of us follow the admonition of the Letter to the Hebrews: “And let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith…” (Heb 12, 2).
Walking With Christ
If we come to this encounter with the risen Jesus, as did Mary Magdalene and the Apostles after the resurrection, we shall find ourselves changed. We shall accept the call to conversion, to a change of life, to a new beginning in grace. This change of heart will not only touch our individual lives, but it will challenge our society, the Church herself, us as pastors, and all the world to turn from hesitant and wary steps to walk in joy with Jesus on the road to ever lasting life. This conversion will touch the lives of the rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak. It will remind the politicians of their responsibility to foster the common good; and it will challenge the economists to find a way to solve the material inequalities of our societies.
If we come with courage to this personal encounter with Jesus Christ, we shall find there an irresistible call to communion, modeled and patterned by the inner communion of the Most Blessed Trinity. In the power of the Holy Spirit, the divine source of communion, we shall find ourselves drawn to a deeper relationship of love and cooperation among ourselves as individuals and in the communities of which we are a part. The fervent call to that communion will bring closer together the local Churches of the north and the south in an increasing cooperation among the episcopal conferences and among the Catholic Churches of different rites. The same longing for communion will draw us and our Christian brothers and sisters of America closer to the unity which the Lord has willed. We have greatly appreciated the presence among us during this Synod of fraternal delegates from your Churches and ecclesial communities. In ways still unrecognized this same concern will guide us in the way of love to a greater sense of family with other religious communities, especially with the Jews, who are our elder brothers and sisters in faith.
Advancing the Kingdom in America
Ultimately, the personal encounter with Jesus Christ leads to solidarity, which is a requirement of charity, as it must be practiced in human relationships today. Solidarity in its completeness is the sharing of what we are, what we believe, and what we have. Jesus is the perfect example of this as he “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” (Phil 2, 6). Solidarity impels us to look out for each other as brothers and sisters, even as Jesus looks out for us. It calls us to love each other and to share with each other. It reaches from the personal charity we owe the poor neighbor in our community to the call of the Holy Father to solidarity with the poor of the world in preparation for the celebration of the Great Jubilee. In the light of solidarity, wars, conflicts, and the arms races have no place on this planet created by a loving God.
This is the message of the Special Synod for America. It is a message that calls on each of us to continue to work together to advance the kingdom of God among the nations of America. Perhaps we can summarize our message in the words of the Holy Father: Do not be afraid to cross the threshold of hope. There we shall all meet the Lord, the living Jesus Christ, who is our hope and our salvation.
Confidently, then, we place this message in the hands of Mary, the Mother of God. In every country, she is hailed as Queen and Lady, and Mother too. In a special way, we, the Church in America, hail her under the title of Our Lady of Guadalupe. There, almost at the very beginning of the first evangelization of America, she showed herself to an Indian son of this land as the Mother of the poor. May she, the Star of the first and New Evangelization, guide our message to your hearts so that under her direction we may all truly meet Jesus, the Son of the Living God, who leads us with love and the power of his grace into the third millennium of his coming and into eternal life itself.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: NEWS -------- TITLE: Christianity, Fully Lived, Elevates Life from Tragedy to Triumph DATE: 01/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:Most Christians would agree, however reluctantly, with Thomas à Kempis's affirmation that “a good man always finds reason enough for mourning and weeping.” Leafing through the morning paper with its tales of abductions, wars, natural catastrophes, terrorism, pedophilia, and other sundry horrors, one might be tempted to conclude that perhaps a pessimist is, after all, nothing other than a well-informed optimist. Long ago the earth was christened a “vale of tears,” and to date no one has produced compelling evidence to the contrary.
While Christians readily acknowledge this reality, they don't stop here. The tidings of Christianity, the “Good News” (eu-angelion), are not tidings of sadness but of profound joy. The angels' announcement to the shepherds—“I bring you good news of great joy for all the people”—reveals the true kernel of Christianity. Years ago the noted theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote that the message of Christianity “is not incidentally a message of joy as well as being many other things: it is quite simply joy.”
Not all accept this, of course. Christians, and Catholics in particular, have often been accused of propagating a negative vision of life and earthly realities. Strict moral rules, it is said, coupled with talk of penance, the cross, and final judgment, rob Christians of spontaneity and joy (though, curiously enough, there was no great outpouring of joy when preachers abandoned these topics a generation ago). In Salt of the Earth, the recent book-length interview with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, his disenchanted interviewer, Peter Seewald, raises these same shopworn criticisms. “Many think that the Christian-Catholic religion is the expression of a pessimistic world view,” states Seewald, and he adds that “the truth about man and God often seems sad and hard.” Cardinal Ratzinger, whom critics love to characterize as being himself an inveterate pessimist, responds that quite the contrary is true. “The basic element of Christianity,” the cardinal counters, “is joy.”
The joy Cardinal Ratzinger speaks of has little in common with the superficial glee that masquerades under the same name. Far from expressing interior joy, such mirth often veils inner desperation and angst. The deeper joy that Christianity proposes, his eminence notes, “comes from the fact that there is great love, and that is the essential message of faith. You are unswervingly loved.”
Joy, at least of the more profound and lasting sort, seems to be in ever shorter supply. At year-end, amidst the seasonal festivities of Christmas and New Year, talk of joy abounds. Glasses are raised and dutifully drained to the proposal of a Happy New Year for all, to the accompanying din of music, chatter, and much general merrymaking. It must be remembered, however, that this time of year also witnesses a peak in suicides and general depression as people are overwhelmed by the grim realization that their real situations represent a painful contrast to the happy sentiments that bubble forth from their lips.
In the face of life's trials Christianity offers more than a quick fix; it offers substantial hope. This hope doesn't overlook the cross, but it does transcend it. As the Apostle reminds us, “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Rom 8, 18).
This is why Christianity “lite” just doesn't cut it. Simply telling people “Don't worry, be happy” rings of falsehood and romanticism. “In the world you will have tribulation,” our Lord cautioned his disciples, “but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (Jn 16, 33). Tribulation and joy are not mutually exclusive. Joy becomes possible not through the negation of suffering, but when suffering itself is given meaning and value. The Viennese psychologist Victor Frankl was wont to quote Friedrich Nietzsche as saying that “a man can endure almost any how if only he has a why.” In Auschwitz, in the very bosom of Nazism's inferno, Frankl discovered the possibility of salvation. This became the why that allowed him to survive the most dreadful of hows.
Returning to Kempis's claim, perhaps we could say that though there is indeed reason enough for mourning, Christians enjoy the privilege and even bear a responsibility to rejoice. Paul's injunction still resounds: “Rejoice in the Lord always. I say it again, Rejoice!” (Phil 4, 4). Our world needs to hear once again the joyful tidings that “today, in the City of David, a savior has been born to you, who is Christ the Lord.” It needs to contemplate this joy lived out by men and women convinced that the final victory has been won, that night is far spent and day is at hand.
The New Year brings with it new challenges and opportunities, as well as uncertainties and even fears. These elements come together to form a tapestry, a backdrop to the stage where life's drama is played out. It is here, in the concrete circumstances of every day, where Christians live out their vocation to joy and hope. “Amid all the fear that characterizes our time,” Von Balthasar wrote, “we Christians are summoned to live in joy and communicate joy.” Our generous, faith-filled response to that summons is what transforms the drama of life from tragedy to triumph.
Father Thomas Williams is rector of the general directorate of the Legionaries of Christ in Rome.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: NEWS -------- TITLE: Beyond Debate and Argument, an Invitation to Embrace Faith Awaits DATE: 01/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:William F. Buckley's Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith (Doubleday) (see review, page 8) is a testament of one man's faith and an invitation to go beyond propositions, beyond argument, beyond debate, to embrace faith. Faith is the first of the theological virtues, without which the others—hope and love—are impossible. Faith is the beginning of the spiritual life and the end: it is by our faith that we are saved. Even our good works are a witness to our faith, as St. James declares (2, 18). And yet many Catholics, if asked to explain why they believe what they believe, would be stumped.
Buckley's book is not a work of theology, but it points in the right direction. It is not because things seem reasonable to us that we believe, but because we trust in God and in his Church, that what they teach is true and reasonable even if we cannot understand how. Any other approach is nothing but an “invitation to contumacy” writes Buckley. Contumacy, dissent, pride, disobedience, or Protestantism— call it what you will, but it is not the virtue of faith as understood in the Catholic tradition.
Two Ways to Truth
The object of faith is the truth. There are two ways by which man can assent to the truth of a proposition. Either he can proceed by way of logic or he can accept truth on the authority of another who vouches for its truthfulness.
The discovery of truth on the basis of argument is superior to its acceptance on the basis of authority, as it allows man to see the truth for himself and assent to it on his own initiative, so to speak. When accepting truth by authority, man is not able to see the truth for himself, and can only assent to that truth because he accepts the authority of its source.
Man on his own initiative, therefore, will be unable to assent to the body of truths proclaimed by the Church as essential to the faith. Indeed, assent to such truths is called faith precisely because they are, for the most part, impossible to demonstrate by the use of reason alone. For example, no amount of reasoning can produce assent to the truth that “God is three and God is one” or that “manhood was taken by the Son.” Belief in the Trinity can only come because man wills to believe on the authority of God and his Church. St. Thomas Aquinas explains the process: “The act of believing [faith] is an act of the intellect assenting to the Divine truth at the command of the will moved by the grace of God…” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 155).
If man's intellect alone is not capable of assenting to the truths of faith, then it must assent to them by command of the will. Why does the will so command? The will commands the intellect to assent because it is moved
by God to trust in him, and therefore to accept what he reveals as true. The act of faith then is supernatural, as it originates in God who acts upon the will (cf. CCC, 153). God touches the will of man, and if he responds to that grace— which the will is always free to reject— then his will commands assent because the truth has as its guarantor the One who is Truth itself.
Truth Beyond Reason
It is the design of Providence that man should come to knowledge of God not through his reason alone, which in any case is too limited for the task, but through contact with God himself. Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum, said St. Ambrose. “Not by the rules of logic did it please God to save his people,” taught the holy bishop, reminding Christians that faith is found by way of the baptismal font and not through lofty studies.
Once man decides to accept the gift of faith and accept all that God reveals because God reveals it, he needs to know what to assent to. The justification for faith is the authority of God, referred to technically as the formal object of faith. But as for the particulars of what exactly is to be assented to— the material object of faith—there needs to be some method by which it is determined that this has been revealed by God to be true, while that has not. God himself teaches which is which, expressing himself through his Church (CCC, 85-86; 171). The authority of God expressed in this way is referred to as the teaching authority of the Church, or the Magisterium (from the Latin magister, teacher).
If a believer rejects the Magisterium's role of teaching definitively about what is of the faith, his only alternative is to create another standard of his own choosing. At the very least, to choose such a standard cannot be justified on the grounds of the authority of God, as it has been chosen by man himself. Moreover, any alternate standard is arbitrary—the enemy of reason and, therefore, the enemy of the act of intellect called faith—and in practice doomed to uncertainty.
Why a Magisterium?
Assenting to all that God reveals without an authority to determine what he has revealed is impossible. Faith requires a Magisterium, however constructed. Failing the Magisterium of the Church, the believer is left only with the magisterium of himself for determining what is revealed truth and what is not. But it is impossible for someone to be his own teacher. To base faith in God's revelation on the abilities of man is a project doomed to failure. Yet it does have the attraction of boosting the self-esteem by substituting oneself for God as the formal object of faith: “I believe X because I determine that X is to be believed.”
The Christian is not free to maintain a belief in Christ while simultaneously rejecting the Church that Christ founded by word and deed. Cardinal Newman, who before converting to Catholicism immersed himself in the controversies about the Church's authority to teach in the name of Christ, explained the relation in his beautiful hymn of faith:
And I hold in veneration, For the love of Him alone, Holy Church as His creation, And her teachings as His own. —J.H. Newman (Firmly I believe and truly)
Once it is accepted that man must assent to the truths of faith on the authority of God and of his Church (for the love of him alone, not for any human reason) then there can be no question of partial assent. To follow St. Thomas's structure: If God moves man to trust him by grace; if man cooperates with that grace and accepts in principle all that is revealed by God; if the teacher of that revelation is known to be God himself in his Church; and if all alternate teachers cannot be from God; then on what grounds can a believer reject any truth taught by the Church as having been revealed by God? There are no such grounds.
Faith: An Organic Whole
Christ often speaks of faith using the metaphor of the seed. The metaphor is apt here, for it speaks to the necessity of accepting all of the truths of faith. A gardener can decide to plant a seed, or not to plant a seed, but he cannot decide to plant only parts of the seed. Over time the seed grows, Deo volente, into a flower so beautiful that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed so splendidly. Yet when the seed is planted the flower cannot be seen—that must be taken on faith. And when that flower is growing, the gardener cannot decide that he wants the stem, but not the roots, or the leaves without the buds, or the rose without the thorns. If he tries to preserve one while suppressing the other, he will kill it all. His only choice is to nurture the flower whole and complete, or to uproot it altogether. So too it is with faith. Either it flowers whole or withers under division. Faith is an organic whole. To divide it in order to reject some of its parts is to kill it.
In the Catholic Church we are presented with the great flower of truth, which we are invited to embrace in faith. We are always free to accept it or reject it. But there can be no middle ground, for faith is about the God who is truth, and with God, there is only for or against.
Raymond de Souza is a seminarian for the archdiocese of Kingston, Ontario.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond de Souza ----- KEYWORDS: NEWS -------- TITLE: Ecclesiastical Degrees Unite International Church DATE: 01/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:Though many American Catholics may never have heard of the so-called “pontifical” or “ecclesiastical” degrees annually awarded at a dozen of our institutions of higher education, these Church-sponsored academic degrees have had—and continue to have—a considerable impact on the formation of America's clergy.
Ecclesiastical degrees are the degrees many U.S. bishops want their seminarians to earn for the priesthood. Seminaries often prefer that faculty members have ecclesiastical degrees rather than other theological degrees. And finally—because of guidelines issued for all pontifical universities and faculties by Pope Pius XI in 1931— those who earn an ecclesiastical degree in the U.S. share a rich academic common ground with those who earn the same degrees in Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America.
In the eyes of the universal Church, an ecclesiastical degree truly is a “catholic” degree, a degree which transcends national and cultural boundaries.
According to the Annuario Pontificio, an annual compendium of Church data, there are several U.S. Catholic institutions which have “ecclesiastical” faculties or departments. They are: The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.; St. Mary's Seminary and University School of Theology in Baltimore; St. Mary of the Lake Faculty of Theology at Mundelein in Illinois; the Weston School of Theology in Cambridge, Mass.; the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, Calif.; St. Michael's Institute at the Jesuit School of Philosophy and Letters in Spokane, Wash.; the Pontifical Faculty of Theology of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C.; the Marian Library and the U.S. Branch of the Pontifical Theological Faculty of the Marianum at the University of Dayton in Ohio, and the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family in Washington, D.C.
In most of these universities with ecclesiastical departments, the degrees offered are the STB (Bachelor of Sacred Theology), the STL (Licentiate of Sacred Theology), or the STD (Doctorate of Sacred Theology). Other ecclesiastical degrees are awarded in canon law, in philosophy, and in several other fields.
Today, at the Catholic University of America, Father James Wiseman, OSB, the current Chairman of the Theology department, believes that the ecclesiastical degree programs are extremely solid academically. And they still are very much in demand. He sees practically no change in the numbers of students enrolled in their ecclesiastical programs over the last decade.
“It looks to me as though it has held steady,” said Father Wiseman. At full strength, he added, Catholic University has an “ecclesiastical” faculty of about 21 and a student population of about 200. Even the bachelor's degree, the STB, has rigorous standards, he said. But it takes some explaining to make sense out of the way “Church” degrees work.
“This is technically a graduate degree. You can't enter the program without a BA,” he said, agreeing that the term “Bachelor of Sacred Theology” is misleading. While an MA (Master of Arts) degree in Theology would usually mean 30 credit hours, the STB requires 69. Many seminarians work toward an STB because the degree requirements basically approximate the courses they need for ordination. And, according to Father Wiseman, the requirements for this bachelor's program are fairly rigid and leave little room for electives.
The STB student, Father Wiseman pointed out, must have had an Old and a New Testament course as prerequisites. “Once enrolled, the student must take Latin, a seminar on dissertation methodology, an Introduction to the History and Method of Theology, Foundations in Christian Moral Life, Introduction to Canon Law, Introduction to Patristics, one or two courses in Christian Spirituality, Church History, five courses in Systematic Theology, two courses in Sacramental Theology, three courses in Moral Theology and five courses in Scripture.”
“So, there's a lot more work here,” said Father Wiseman, comparing the MA with the STB degrees. “It's a more thorough degree.”
Ecclesiastical degrees may not always have carried the prestige they have today. When Pope Pius XI issued the apostolic constitution, Deus Scientiarum Dominus in 1931, new guidelines went out to pontifical universities and faculties. Pius XI, it's said, wanted to raise the level of studies in theology, philosophy, law, and history. But he also wanted to stress the importance of newer fields, such as the biblical sciences, ascetical and mystical theology, archaeology, Christian art, and sacred music.
The Catholic University and other American institutions offering ecclesiastical degrees have only a few lay people in their programs. Unless a layperson hopes to teach in a seminary, the extra coursework required for the STB won't help secure a position in theology.
“Most people won't be willing to invest the extra time,” agreed Father Leo Lefebure, the Dean of the Ecclesiastical Faculty at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary at Mundelein. “The American graduate system is out of sync with this ecclesiastical degree program. To get an STB means three years of work, but it's called a bachelor's degree. It seems like it's less than a Master's degree. And most universities would look at an STL as roughly equivalent to a Master's degree.”
And so, at Mundelein, as at the other institutions, candidates for the priesthood or priests are often pursuing ecclesiastical degrees. At Mundelein, only the STB and the STL are offered. “There are usually about a dozen students in the STB program,” reported Father Lefebure.
“In the Licentiate program, we're specialized in Sacred Theology with a focus on Christology, Trinitarian Theology, and Theological Anthropology,” he added. “This is a three-year program. For students in the seminary, the Licentiate program would begin in their fourth year and continue for one year after ordination.”
But there's a persistent problem plaguing the Licentiate program at Mundelein. And it has nothing to do with the students or the coursework.
“Many bishops are not willing to allow the students to stay to complete the degree because of personnel needs and the shortage of priests,” said Father Lefebure. “Often a bishop might feel more of a pressing need for an associate pastor than for someone with advanced training.” And in other cases, he said, some bishops send their young priests back to complete the degrees after several years of parish work.
But at the Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus, Ohio, the young priests leaving the seminary carry away a different kind of ecclesiastical connection. No ecclesiastical degrees are awarded at this seminary, explained Msgr. Thomas Olmstead, rector and president of the Josephinum.
“The degrees we award are given through the accreditation of the Association of Theological Schools of the United States and Canada,” he said. “But we are the only pontifical seminary outside of Italy. The nuncio of the Holy Father to America, Archbishop Agostino Cacciavillan, is our chancellor. He appoints all of our full-time faculty.” The president himself is appointed directly by the Vatican Office for Catholic Education.
Josephinum graduates are just as well prepared for priesthood, Msgr. Olmstead insists, acknowledging that ecclesiastical degrees are a great gift to the Church.
Founded in 1888 as a high school seminary for orphaned boys who wanted to study for the priesthood, the Josephinum was the first seminary in America requiring graduates to be fluent in German, English, and in Latin, the language of the Church. Taking note of the seminary's high academic standards and the missionary needs of the German immigrants to America, the Holy Father named it as a pontifical seminary four years later.
Today, seminary students at the Josephinum continue to meet rigorous academic standards including the mastery of several languages. And to meet the needs of a growing Hispanic Catholic population, seminarians must study Spanish. “We also offer Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, and French,” Msgr. Olmstead said.
Msgr. Olmstead likes to remind Josephinum students that the word “pontifical” really means “bridge-builder” from the Latin words “pons” (bridge) and “facere” (to build). “We really see bridge-building as a very important thing today, both in terms of promoting ecumenism and dealing with polarities within the Church.
“But, as a pontifical seminary, we do see that we have a special identity and mission to foster love for the Church which Peter shepherds and to have a greater appreciation for the role of the Holy Father in the Church,” he said.
And in a very real sense, ecclesiastical degrees, whether awarded in Washington D.C. or in Rome, in Mexico City or in Budapest, are one more expression of unity and teaching authority for which the Holy Father is a most visible and viable symbol.
“It puts us in the international community of Catholic scholarship,” Catholic University's Father Wiseman believes. “It gives us certain ties with all of those (pontifical) Roman universities, you know—the Gregorian, the Angelicum. They offer these degrees too. It puts us in a family that's international.”
Catherine Odell writes from South Bend, Indiana.
----- EXCERPT: About a dozen U.S. universities offer the degrees which 'transcend national and cultural boundaries' ----- EXTENDED BODY: Catherine Odell ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: A Shrine to Our Lady in the Land of Theme Parks DATE: 01/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:Orlando! It's top of the list when it comes to favorite tourist destinations. A million visitors a year can't be wrong. But as holiday-minded folks zip from one theme park to another, they may not realize that Mary's newest shrine in the United States is right in their midst. It's also one of the largest.
The shrine of Mary, Queen of the Universe, is only two hours by car from the first and oldest sanctuary in the country, Our Lady of La Leche in St. Augustine.
Located on Vineland Avenue, Mary, Queen of the Universe is visible as you motor along nearby Interstate 4, a major route stretching between Florida's east and west coasts. However, the property's border of trees when fully grown into a thick screen, will provide shield from the traffic in the near future and allow for even greater tranquillity.
Pilgrims find Mary, Queen of the Universe Shrine easily. During Holy Week and Easter last year, more than 36,000 worshippers attended the Masses. Some of the Masses attracted more than 4,000 to the church already built with a capacity to seat 2,000 with standing room for an additional 1,500.
“Every Easter is a phenomenon,” marvels Father F. Joseph Harte, director and founder of the shrine. At the height of the season, between January and Easter, pews are often full—a hopeful sign that faith isn't left at home once vacation time arrives.
Father Harte began his ministry for tourists in 1975 while pastor of the Holy Family Catholic Church. He traveled from hotel to hotel, bringing the sacraments. But something permanent had to be built as the area developed.
“What do you do with a city of people that changes all the time?” he asked. His answer: Build a shrine, since, “ it's not a parish church” but “a place of devotion” that is “open to the whole world. It's a place where people come to pray.” The universality is directly reflected in the shrine's name.
The vision for the shrine was in place from the beginning, with the blessing and support of the local bishop. As the project evolved, the concrete results surpassed any plans imagined.
“It was envisioned to be beautiful; it wasn't envisioned to be as beautiful as it turned out,” says Father Harte. “You see, the Lord does his own work.…”
True to the original plan, the shrine encompasses the intended peace and tranquillity in the midst of theme park activity. And the grounds, as far as possible, said Father Harte, reflect the glory of God. Fountains on either side of the bridge that leads to the church add to the serenity.
“Devotion to Mary helped build this shrine,” the priest continues, adding that as Queen of the Universe, the Virgin “brings together all people and places of the world into one community under God”—another reason for honoring her in this shrine. The four-year-old church is modeled on the Basilica of Constantine, the first Christian church in Rome, now the site of St. Peter's. Although the design is close in style and size to the original, the white stucco exterior and tile roofs are also comfortably in keeping with Florida architectural sensibilities.
The interior is both open and bright. The narthex itself has a capacity for 1,000 people and the architectural details are beautifully symbolic. There is the sweeping wooden arch-way representing the gateway typical of all ancient cities. Here, of course, people are entering the City of God.
The large mahogany and multi-marbled holy water fountain stands in front of it, while polished granite rings on the floor circle out, like waters rippling toward the nave and altar.
There are two prominent images of Christ on either side of the interior. The life-size figure of the crucified Christ over the altar presents Jesus with a tranquil face at the moment he commends his spirit to the Father. As people turn to leave, they see the victorious Christ, carved from linden wood, coming from the cloth wrappings and the tomb.
In the open sanctuary with its Portuguese rose marble, there is a white ash altar with bronze legs. The centered tabernacle is highly polished rare Brazilian wood. Materials from different countries are also joined together in a simple and symbolic beauty.
Of the 16 Magnificat windows which line both aisles, 15 depict the mysteries of the rosary, and like visitors to the shrine, the glass has come from all over the world. The century-old Judson Studios in Pasadena, Calif., began work on the windows in 1983.
Here too, the old and the new are brought together for the glory of God, such as in the stations of the cross both inspiring and magnificent, which are finely detailed, mid-19th century oil paintings by a Belgian artist. The sanctuary lamp with angels was sculpted in Holland more than 100 years ago.
Each day devotions begin with Holy Mass, usually offered in Our Lady of Guadalupe chapel off the narthex. Abeautiful Italian mosaic of Mary under this title that was recently completed in Rome has been installed.
Perpetual Adoration takes place daily in a chapel behind the main altar. As Father Harte stresses: “The mark of every shrine to Our Lady is devotion to the Eucharist.” And confessions also take place each day, giving many of the tourists who come the opportunity for reconciliation.
Outdoors, the Mother and Child chapel portrays the images of Mary with a young Jesus in a playful mood. On the opposite side of the church is the Rosary Garden with its statue of Our Lady, which was made in 1875 and previously was kept in a convent in Holland. During the two World Wars, many people prayed before the statue for peace. Also in the garden, an oak tree and a pine tree called the “marriage trees” grow together in the same spot—their roots intertwined, a natural symbol of people living in peace and interdependence.
Last month, a new museum of religious art opened next to the gift shop. The center piece is a painting of the Immaculate Conception by Murillo. Father Harte hopes to get displays fromthe Vatican for people who can't visit Rome. He sees the entire shrine as a “work of art” and developed that way architecturally so as to “inspire minds and hearts to God. That's what the shrine is all about.”
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Conn.
----- EXCERPT: Mary, Queen of the Universe, in Orlando, Fla. is a beacon for sun-seeking tourists ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: How Hollywood Hates Those Lawyers DATE: 01/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:Francis Ford Coppola's Rainmaker is slick entertainment with a big political agenda
Hollywood is beating up on lawyers this season, making them look like the sleaziest bunch of professionals around. The Devil's Advocate gave us a high-powered, Manhattan firm whose senior partner was Satan, and now there's The Rainmaker, based on John Grisham's best-selling novel. It plunges us into the ethically murky world of insurance claims and ambulance-chasers. True to Grisham's proven formula, it's the big guys who're the most corrupt, and justice is served by inexperienced but honest small-time attorneys.
Acclaimed writer-director Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather series) adds a humorous tone to the book, skillfully engaging our sympathy for the underdogs and amping up our hatred for the rich, powerful villains. But hidden among the laughter and the suspense is a strong political agenda about insurance companies and the legal profession.
Rudy Baylor (Matt Damon) is a recent law-school graduate waiting to take his bar exam in Memphis, Tenn. He's hired by the affluent, disreputable defense attorney, Bruiser Stone (Mickey Rourke), who has underworld ties and interests in strip joints.
The young man's salary will be determined by the volume of business he brings in. He's placed under the wing of Deck Shifflet (Danny DeVito), a so-called “paralawyer” who's failed his bar exam six times but knows how to recruit clients off their sick beds.
Rudy brings two cases of his own to the firm. The first is the estate of the eccentric Miss Birdie (Teresa Wright), who wants to cut her ungrateful children out of her will and leave everything to a televangelist. Rudy rents a room from the elderly lady and works weekends as a yardboy to keep the rent down.
His other case has greater potential, a poor, white-trash family who is suing the billion-dollar Great Benefit Company because it denied its claim for a bone-marrow transplant for their only son, Donny Ray (John Whitworth). Donny suffers from leukemia. Donny Ray's father (Red West), who was injured in Korea, isn't much help. He spends most of his time sitting and drinking in an abandoned car in the backyard. But his wife, Dot (Mary Kay Place), is certain she's been victimized and works hard with Rudy on the case.
Bruiser gets into trouble with the Feds over a money-laundering operation and disappears, leaving Rudy and Deck on their own to go up against a platoon of high-priced corporate lawyers. Great Benefit's senior attorney is the experienced, super-smooth John Drummond (Jon Voight), and the odds against the little guys winning seem long indeed. Rudy is barely familiar with courtroom procedure, and despite a sympathetic trial judge (Danny Glover) he's outmaneuvered almost every step of the way.
There is nothing that Drummond doesn't stoop to, including bugging Rudy's office. Fortunately, Deck enjoys operating at Drummond's level and out-maneuvers him on some of his shadiest ploys.
The love interest is Rudy's involvement with an abused woman, Kelly Riker (Claire Danes), whom he met while searching for clients at the hospital. Her husband, Cliff (Andrew Shue), likes to beat her up with an aluminum baseball bat. Rudy eventually persuades Kelly to stand up for her rights, but the overwrought melodrama that follows belongs in a different movie. The film-maker treats the subject in a straight-ahead, obvious manner, with none of the brilliant invention used in his telling of the rest of the story.
Meanwhile, Donny Ray dies, and this spurs Rudy to believe that more is at stake than making a quick buck. He puts the head of Great Benefit (Roy Scheider) on the stand and springs a surprise witness to bolster his client's claims.
The Rainmaker keeps its viewers wondering as to the outcome until the very last moment and then sweetens the experience with a few surprises. But the film's portrait of defense attorneys is seriously flawed. The movie suggests that corporations are almost always in the wrong, and that those who sue them are justified in cutting corners because of the greater evil which big business represents.
In one of his pleas to the jury, Rudy argues that Great Benefit's dirty tricks show the reason the country needs government-subsidized health insurance and that tort reform would hurt little people like them and the dead Johnny Ray. This is overstating the case. During its fight for federally backed health care, even the Clinton administration's most ardent supporters never claimed that the legislation should be enacted because of the pervasive criminality of insurance companies.
Tort reform, with caps on the amount of money a plaintiff can collect, was one of the hot-button issues of the 1994 Republican Revolution and its Contract with America. Conservatives argue that huge claims often awarded to plaintiffs greatly inflate the cost of doing business for the companies involved, and that such expenses are usually passed on to the consumer through higher prices. The Rainmaker fails to highlight these points.
Furthermore, you'd never guess from the film that most trial lawyers are much more affluent and powerful than Rudy and Deck and that their lobbying association is one of the best financed and heaviest hitting operations in the political arena, with great influence in the Democratic Party. They worked with the Clinton administration to defeat tort reform in Congress despite the measure's wide support
The Rainmaker is a slick, enjoyable piece of entertainment. But its makers use comic plot twists and big, heart-tugging moments to disguise a controversial message which the general public might otherwise be unwilling to accept.
The USCC classification of The Rainmaker is A-III: adults. The Motion Picture Association of America Rating is PG-13.
REGISTER arts & culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: NEWS -------- TITLE: Ecumenism Takes Root in the Trenches DATE: 01/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:The common goal of fighting abortion after the Supreme Court's tragic 1973 decisions on abortions produced an unexpected fruit—cooperation between people of different faiths
One of the greatest triumphs of the pro-life movement was unplanned—the fruit of an accidental union that pro-lifers embraced and brought to birth. Fighting abortion gave a new unity to Christians. Pro-lifers did not talk about ecumenism so much as practice it.
During the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church affirmed the ecumenical movement, and gave new impetus to the effort to heal ancient divisions. In the 35 years since that Council, diocesan offices throughout the world have worked on various cooperative projects bringing together, if not uniting, Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants.
Commissions have explored the Apostles' Creed, the Filioque fight, the faith vs. works controversy. There have been pulpit exchanges between Churches. Perhaps the laity had a more effective approach, though: Catholics and Protestants worked together to protect pre-born babies, prayed together, and went to jail together.
In 1973, when the Supreme Court issued two abortion decisions that struck down laws protecting children in 50 states, most of the people who were already organized and ready to fight were Catholics. Catholics had a national structure that made it possible to start organizing, and many were veterans of battles regarding contraception in the 1960s. They also knew well that if the movement was labeled “Catholic,” it would face a much tougher battle—and babies would pay the price. Protestants were welcome.
Catholics had a history of activism in the labor movement and the civil rights movement, and they had been disproportionately represented in the peace movement. Those movements were not labeled Catholic; opponents did not score points by linking Rev. Martin Luther King to the Vatican.
In the fight against contraception, though, a major tactic of the population control crowd was whipping up anti-Catholic sentiment. If the same thing happened in the abortion fight, the results could be equally disastrous. Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a pro-abortion strategist in the 1960s later turned pro-life, has described at length how he and his allies decided to go after the Catholic Church, focusing on the hierarchy.
So Catholics were pleased when Protestants organized to save lives. The Christian Action Council (CAC) was a major Protestant initiative, and early supporters included Rev. Billy Graham. In the 1970s, CAC worked closely with the National Right to Life Committee and other pro-life groups on education, legislation and politics. Catholics and Protestants could cooperate in this as well as in any public endeavor.
In 1980, Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop, prominent evangelical Protestant leaders, galvanized Churches with a pro-life book and film entitled Whatever Happened to the Human Race? Millions of people came into the pro-life movement, bringing new ideas and great determination. On the streets in front of abortion clinics, thousands of people had a new experience of the unity of Christianity. Catholics came and prayed the rosary; evangelicals came and read Scripture. Often, they knew different songs, so they would stay apart. In fact, they were increasingly conscious of each other's deep commitment to the Lord and to his children.
During confrontations at abortion clinics, the issues are clear and success is easy to measure. Pro-lifers have succeeded when a child lives and there is peace between the mother and the child. There have been many thousands of successes. There have also been millions of failures, though, and failure to save a life, however common, never gets easy. Heartbreak is a daily event.
As a result, the activists watching other Christians were deeply edified again and again by the serious, long-lasting commitment of people of other faiths. The work of the Holy Spirit was not a distant idea; it could be observed. People kept working and saved lives, or they burned out and went home. It was not possible to overlook God's action in people's lives.
On the streets, music plays an important role, helping pro-lifers to stay focused in prayer and also helping to calm emotions for everyone. After a person has prayed and sung with another in the presence of death, there is no way to go back to being strangers. You may not understand the other's faith completely, and may be ready and willing to argue about many important things, but you have seen and can testify to their deep love for the Lord. You have an undeniable shared experience.
When Catholics and evangelicals were arrested and went to jail together, they prayed together, and lived with one other under tough conditions for extended periods of time. There were differences: evangelicals would take the initiative to open conversations about the Lord and to preach the Gospel, while Catholics were more likely to let their actions speak for themselves.
The Catholics in jail knew Scripture, but not as well as the evangelicals. Many Catholics learned from their companions to love Scripture even more. On the other hand, many evangelicals noted that the Catholics came to all the Protestant Bible studies and times of prayer and praise, and then continued with their own devotions. The Catholics prayed more. They saw each other's strengths in ways that were impossible to ignore.
One couple that met during the long series of rescues in Atlanta struggled with the rosary. They wanted to pray together, but the Catholic woman wanted to pray the rosary and the Protestant man did not. They found a compromise: He said the scriptural part, up to the name “Jesus” in the Hail Mary. She said the rest.
The ecumenical movement at the official level concerns doctrine, and generally brings Catholics together with people from the Churches that have a hierarchy, including the Anglican and Lutheran Churches. The ecumenism of the pro-life movement concerns active love, and the links forged in suffering are between Catholics and the other people on the streets, evangelical Protestants. It wasn't planned, but it is a nation-wide work of the Lord, healing deep divisions. In the midst of the bloodshed, Christians learned to love each other.
John Cavanaugh-O'Keefe, a veteran pro-life researcher, author, and lecturer, is director of public policy for American Life League.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Cavanaugh-O'Keefe ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: One Woman's Convictions of Steel DATE: 01/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:The prospect of time in jail hasn't distracted Joan Andrews Bell from her mission to save the unborn
Joan Andrews Bell is prepared to go to prison before she stops pro-life activities. But the mother of two said she would “rather die than compromise my faith and my love for the children.”
Bell has been arrested more than 200 times for civil disobedience at abortion mills in this country and overseas. It led to approximately five years in prison with almost two of those in solitary confinement.
Her recent sentence included three years' probation and an order not to participate in further rescues. But she refused to obey saying it would violate her conscience.
“It's a great privilege to stand up for the pre-born and truth. The whole thing comes down to trusting God and trying to do his will.”
Protests against abortion date back to Jan. 22, 1973 when the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion.
“It was like a great darkness descended on me and our country,” said Bell, who first heard about rescuing in 1979.
The latest charge against her is tied to a 1985 rescue attempt and arrest for trespassing in Pittsburgh. “We shut the place down that day,” recalled Doris Grady, a mother of two and member of Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Shady Side, an area of Pittsburgh, Pa. Grady was on the 13-member team with Bell and they wanted to shut down the Women's Health Services, the third largest abortion provider in the country.
“To sit in front of the door would not help,” Grady said. “We would have been dragged away in minutes.”
So, the team went inside the clinic and locked themselves into six rooms. The police were able to pick the locks, but Bell used a table to barricade herself in until police busted down the door. Grady later explained how “for the first time I felt like I was doing something to end abortion even for a day. Everything else seemed futile-writing letters, picketing…” The team was charged with criminal trespassing. Despite receiving two years' probation, Grady participated at another rescue three months later.
The following year Bell was arrested during a rescue in Pensacola, Fla., and sentenced to two years in a maximum security prison in Broward County. She received clemency and officials transferred her to Pittsburgh in Oct. 1988, where Judge Raymond Novak gave her a three-year probation period and ordered her not to participate in further rescues. She refused, filed an appeal and lost. Her current sentencing date is Jan. 15. Novak could imprison her for contempt of court and failure to comply.
“I hope they don't put me in jail. I have a young family,” Bell stated. But she also has her convictions. Abiding by the probation agreement would mean compromising her beliefs as she would be forced to stop participating in rescues.
“God saved us,” she explained. “The greatest rescue of all time [was] his death on the cross.”
What may happen to Bell is incomprehensible in a democratic society, according to Father Benedict Groeschel CFR. “The facts of the case show that this woman was treated the way people were treated in Soviet Russia in communism times.”
Bell's attorney in the case, Tom Charles, said “she has been challenging the abortion law for years.… Her fight is with abortion and the law, not the courts or the judge.”
The judge in the case, Raymond Novak, is a former Catholic priest.
“He has done what he believes is fair,” said Charles. “He understands that Joan is a person of principle.”
“It is a travesty of justice,” added Keith Fournier, president of Catholic Alliance. “It's a wake up call for all of us that a woman who spent all of her life saving children would go to jail.” Fournier is also an attorney and founder of the American Center for Law and Justice. “If anyone is criminal it is not Joan Andrews Bell,” he said. “It's the people who are killing children.”
Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, recently awarded the Poverello Medal—named after St. Francis of Assisi—to Bell and her husband Chris at the campus in Ohio. It was the school's fiftieth anniversary celebration and a public reminder of the cost involved in pro-life rescues.
“Chris and Joan have had a tremendous impact on the pro-life movement in the United States,” said Father Michael Scanlan TOR, president of the university.
“The university awards the medal to organizations and individuals who exemplify the ideals of St. Francis,” said school spokesman Brian O'Neel. Past recipients include Mother Teresa of Calcutta and Charles Colson.
Bell said the Franciscan University had shown great support for the unborn and for Operation Rescue. Speaking about the award, she said, “we're very humbled by it.”
Chris Bell became involved in pro-life work after being on staff with Covenant House in New York. “I saw homeless women and children with no place to go,” he says.
Bell heard about an empty convent that belonged to a church in Hoboken, N.J. Father Groeschel helped secure the building and start the program. Since then they've acquired four additional homes in Spring Valley, N.Y., Staten Island, the Bronx, and Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Another home is being started in Norwalk, Conn., with the assistance of the international Catholic lay organization, the Knights of Malta.
Good Counsel has helped nearly 2,500 women with shelter, workshops, baby-sitters, and educational assistance. Their hot line alone receives 2000 calls a year.
The Bells have a five-year-old daughter named Mary Louise. They're also in the process of adopting Emiliano, who is nine years old and handicapped.
“I don't know what I'd do if I didn't have my faith,” says Joan. “It's much more difficult (in jail) when you have little children.”
Public opinion may help sway opinion in the sentencing phase. Case officials encourage respectful letters. Correspondence to Judge Novak should be addressed to: Allegheny Court House, Grant St., Pittsburgh, PA 15219.
Pro-life leaders are also planning a rally in Pittsburgh for Bell on Jan. 14. For information, call Kathy O'Keefe at (201) 795-0637. Pregnant mothers can also find emergency assistance at Good Counsel, 800-723-8331.
Clay Renick writes from Martinez, Ga.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Clay Renick ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Even at a Distance, Catholic Hospitals' 'Cooperation with Evil' Disturbs Some Ethicists DATE: 01/11/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 11-17, 1998 ----- BODY:DETROIT—Care Choices, owned by the country's fourth-largest Catholic health care system, faces an ethical dilemma about whether it enables abortions or not.
Of course, they don't provide abortions directly. None of parent company Mercy Health Services' 39 hospitals or dozens of clinics will abort a baby or provide contraceptive devices. But the Michigan-based Care Choices will contract with another insurance company when an employer requires that family planning be a covered benefit.
“It may not be something everyone enjoys,” said Steve Shivinsky, Mercy's associate vice president for corporate communications. “But it's a fact of life that we have to provide certain services through a third party.”
The solution Mercy arranged is as follows: an employer will send its premium to an independent entity (usually a bank), which will then channel the funds. Most of the money will go to Care Choices for the bulk of the health care offered: check-ups, operations, x-rays, vaccinations, etc. The rest will be sent to another health insurance company contracted by Mercy to provide abortion and other “family planning” services.
“It's a practice found in any Catholic HMO [Health Maintenance Organization] because sometimes it is the only way to obtain a contract from employers,” said Shivinsky.
According to Sister Jean DeBlois, vice president for mission services for Catholic Health Association, “The reality is that when Catholic HMOs do contracting for managed care, most organizations try to eliminate reproductive services from the deal,” she said. “Some are not as successful as others. That's the reality of doing business today in the marketplace.”
Sister DeBlois said that generally, the Catholic organization states that these services are unacceptable and would prefer not to have any dealings with them. If that doesn't work, they take the next step to preserve their integrity from an ethical standpoint by distancing themselves legally and financially as far as possible from the offensive procedures. “Sometimes,” she added, “that's the best they can achieve.”
The United Autoworkers, for instance, requires that any health insurance company it deals with cover family planning, said Shivinsky. “If we can't contract with autoworkers in Detroit we don't have a health plan. If we want to have a viable product, we have to maintain that while providing a moral framework that the sisters can approve.”
Sister Gretchen Elliott, president of the regional community of the Sisters of Mercy that owns the health care network, called the matter a “delicate ethical decision.” Without subcontracting reproductive services out, the contracts with Detroit-area corporations and unions would have been “seriously at risk,” she said, adding that “life is lived in gray areas” and “we take the ethical and moral principles very seriously.”
The ethical and moral principles involved have been treated by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in a document called Ethical and Religious Directives. The document particularly treats questions involving the beginning and end of life. It also deals with permissible and impermissible forms of cooperation with secular institutions.
One important aspect of the Catholic approach to cooperation, as embodied in the Directives, is the distinction between material and formal cooperation in evil. Formal cooperation in evil occurs when someone intentionally helps another person do wrong. Material cooperation helps another person do wrong but without intending the evil. (See sidebar “Formal vs. Material”)
In December 1994, Bishop John Myers of Peoria, Ill., also issued guidelines for his own diocese about affiliations of Catholic health care institutions with other groups. His statement referred to the bishops' directives, and for Catholic institutions he clearly stated, “Material cooperation with abortion is completely prohibited.”
Bishop Myers' directives also illustrate how the Catholic approach has its most fundamental basis in the dignity of the human person: “The growth of healthcare as a purely ‘for profit’ enterprise is a recent and worrisome phenomenon. Healthcare is not a business, but a profession of service to the human person.”
Even though the Catholic teaching about formal and material cooperation in evil is well established, there is still disagreement about its application in today's healthcare world.
Father Richard McCormick, a professor of Christian ethics at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Ind., said that a Catholic health organization clearly cannot provide abortions or birth control. However, sub-contracting such services may not be wrong. He reasons that a company or a union will easily find another HMO to provide them, but that the other HMO probably will not counsel women to keep their babies.
“It could be defended,” said the priest. “Where abortion is concerned, if you provide counseling services, you may be in the business of saving lives.”
However, many ethicists and moral theologians including Msgr. William Smith, professor of moral theology at St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers, N.Y. say that even though some of these types of arrangements are not specifically prohibited in the bishops' directives, “the principles [for disallowing them] are certainly clear enough.”
Catholic Health organizations talk of preserving Catholic identity and viability, but what they are doing falls into an “unacceptable zone” between formal cooperation with evil and material cooperation, said Msgr. Smith. For instance, a nurse may take care of a patient before or after an abortion, but must not participate in it, he said. HMOs like Care Choices, are “horses of a different color” because it is not the individual but the institution that sets the policy.
“It's an odd thing,” Msgr. Smith said. “They're saying that just by doing something that the Church teaches, they lose money. They are comparing moral evil with financial loss.”
HMOs like Care Choices may not be running the abortion money through their cash registers, he added, “but you have to wonder how they avoid scandal.”
Franciscan Father Germain Kopaczynski, director of education at the Boston-based Pope John Center for the Study of Ethics in Health Care says Catholic hospitals in all their activities must be certain they are not cooperating in evil. Catholic health care companies should not be involved in setting up companies that provide abortion or contraception or that make linkages to them, he added.
“They say they're a Catholic health care agency and cannot do abortions, but with winks and nods they say ‘this is how you get around it,’” he said. “It's very problematic from a moral point of view.”
Too many Catholic health services feel pressured by the marketplace and, with the excuse that they cannot compete in the marketplace, align themselves with deep pockets, said Father Kopaczynski. Instead, the companies should draw a line, inform potential customers that they stand with the Church, and be prepared to lose some business because of that stand. “It's not an easy task to come up with an arrangement to satisfy what the Catholic Church is teaching and fiscal realities,” Father Kopaczynski acknowledged.
Germain Grisez, professor of medical ethics at Mount St. Mary's College and Seminary in Emmitsburg, Md., likened some agreements between Catholic hospitals and outside contractors to a Mafia deal.
“If I contract with a Mafia hitman because I am reluctant to do the murder myself, it does not matter how reluctant I am, because I am intending that someone be killed,” said Grisez, author of the book Difficult Moral Questions. “If the Catholic entity says we don't want to do sterilization procedures or do abortions, but arranges that someone else does it, the Catholic entity is enabling that the thing be done.”
Of course, the Catholic HMO does not desire the abortion as a Mafia boss desires a murder, but it facilitates it just the same, he explained.
Grisez called it a “form of cooperation” that makes the health service a responsible partner in the abortion. It's even problematic when a Catholic hospital gets too closely involved with another entity in which unethical things are being done, for instance, an HMO that offers abortion at another facility.
To compete in the modern marketplace, Catholic hospitals and health maintenance organizations are faced with issues of cooperation that did not exist a generation ago, particularly in partnerships with for-profit institutions.
Dr. John Haas, president of the Pope John Center for the Study of Ethics in Health Care, said, “One problem in assessing whether a Catholic facility or organization is collaborating too closely with others who are involved in evil is that we no longer have a sense of moral revulsion toward some of those evil acts because they have come to be so broadly accepted in society. That is certainly the case with contraception, and acts of mutilation such as tubal ligations.
“Regrettably,” he said, “it is coming to be the case even with abortion.”
Lisa Pevtzow is based in Skokie, Ill.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Lisa Pevtzow ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: New Religious Groups Flourish In Eastern Europe DATE: 01/11/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 11-17, 1998 ----- BODY:WARSAW, Poland—When a certain Bogdan Kacmajor was given a 16-month suspended jail sentence Dec. 18, the obscure case had legal implications for religious freedom in Poland.
Kacmajor, a former faith-healer, heads an “independent state” in eastern Poland called Niebo (Heaven). He proclaims himself “the Holy Spirit's only representative on earth,” and says he can cure the lame and even bring back the dead.
The case was brought to court in Lubartow by Kacmajor's ex-wife. She accused him of kidnapping their 14-year-old son, Dawid, and detaining him at the Niebo headquarters. When Kacmajor received his sentence, it wasn't for religious heresy, but for the more mundane offense of flouting a court order depriving him of parental rights.
Cases like this are new to Poland, where at least 95% of citizens claim membership in the Catholic Church. But they're set to become increasingly common, as attempts are made to control the wave of exotic religious groups who have found their way here since the fall of communism.
Two weeks before the Niebo judgment, Poland's “Chaitani Mission Institute for Knowledge of Identity” sued the Catholic leader of a Church-based family defense group who had accused it of abusing drugs and breaking up families.
The “Mission” objected to being branded a sect, claiming the term “injured religious feelings.” The Catholic leader's own son, a Chaitani member, testified against her. He told the court he didn't understand Catholicism, and had joined the group in his last year at school after coming under “psychic pressure” from parents who “smoked, ate meat, and drank alcohol.”
Buddhists, Moonies, Satanists, etc.
The Chaitani Mission, active since 1990, is one of six registered Hindu groups in Poland, which is also home to 11 legally recognized Buddhist sects and seven Muslim organizations, as well as 81 non-Catholic Christian or quasi-Christian denominations.
The largest are Poland's Orthodox and Lutheran Churches, with 570,000 and 92,000 members each. But other mainstream denominations are dwarfed by the Jehovah's Witnesses, whose 10% annual expansion has so far brought in up to 250,000 Polish adepts.
Besides 45 legally registered non-Christian faiths, the California-based New Age movement gained 150,000 Polish followers in 18 months and has screened films on state television.
The “Moonie” Reunification Church has several hundred trained missionaries in Poland, and was allowed to stage a Warsaw rally when its leader was refused entry to Western Europe. The Rosicrucians have two communities in the western city of Wroclaw alone. The Hare Krishnas have five and run their own Warsaw school.
Reports have persisted since the 1980s of a Satanist movement in Poland, which is widely blamed for a spree of church and cemetery desecrations.
In early 1997, Catholic leaders protested the commercial publication of a “Satanists' bible.” In August of last year, a Satanist leader was charged in Biala Podlasie with forcing two teenagers to commit suicide.
The Polish government's Confessions Office requires no more than an address, doctrinal summary and 15 Polish signatures to grant registering religious groups full Church privileges, including the right to broadcast, teach in state schools, accumulate property, and avoid tax.
There are plans to raise the threshold to 100 signatures. But for now, Polish regulations are the most permissive in Europe.
“Converts to alternative religions under communist rule tended to belong to poorer social and professional categories,” said Edward Ciupak, a Polish sociology professor. “But today's trends are more complex. Post-communist changes haven't provided the anticipated chances. Many young people especially have succumbed to a sense of hopelessness which sects can easily exploit.”
Up to a third of the several thousand non-traditional religious groups known to be active in the rest of Eastern Europe are estimated to spread apocalyptic teachings, raising fears for the social and cultural fabric of the region's tense post-communist population.
In Russia, researchers say non-traditional groups have mostly attracted former atheists, searching for new forms of identity after the disintegration of Soviet society.
Moscow alone was home in the mid-1990s to more than 420 registered religious associations. Among these, the Moonies were helping train State school teachers, while the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo cult was proved to have had contacts with government officials.
In neighboring Ukraine, the White Brotherhood movement numbered 144,000 when its leaders were arrested in 1993 for inciting mass suicides. Its leaders, now at large again, believe a third of the world's population will disappear into a crevasse in a coming enactment of St. John the Divine's prophecy.
In distant Kazakhstan, the Jehovah's Witnesses held their first mass rally last August, while Lithuania's Catholic bishops warned their country was being “overrun” in a 1994 pastoral letter.
Outside the ex-Soviet Union, at least 60 new religious groups were active in the Czech Republic by the mid-1990s. In Bulgaria, 70% of mental patients were reported suffering illnesses connected with religious experiences. Social researchers said activities by at least 300 new groups had generated hostility to Bulgaria's mainstream Churches and contributed to a decline in Christian observances.
Many Catholic dioceses in Eastern Europe now run information centers on sect activities. Yet effective responses have proved elusive.
At a meeting in Hungary last October, co-sponsored by the Vatican and Geneva-based World Council of Churches, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant representatives from 16 countries said they planned to table “practical recommendations” for government action.
Some governments have already responded. Among recent incidents, the German government introduced curbs on Scientologists in early 1997, while Jehovah's Witnesses also face legal restrictions in Austria and Bulgaria. Yet measures in this direction have proved controversial.
Russia's new “Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations,” enacted in September, says religious groups “enjoy legal protection” even if not officially registered. But it requires them to have government confirmation of 15 years' legal activity before conducting religious activities or claiming full rights.
The law allows “foreign religious groups” to open a “representative body” in Russia. But it states, bluntly and ambiguously, that they “may not engage in liturgical or religious activities.” Long-present religious minorities, including Catholics, could face serious repression from January 2000, when the new law's two-year deadline for registration expires.
Ironically, some politicians are demanding similar curbs in Poland—including a minimum time scale for gaining rights, and a tighter distinction between “traditional” and “non-traditional” faiths.
But putting this into practice could prove difficult. In Hungary, where at least 30 new groups have gained full Church rights since 1989, a 1995 Media Law sparked vigorous objections by granting new religious groups equal rights with mainstream Churches.
But conservative parliamentarians have failed in past attempts to raise the registration requirement from 100 to 10,000 signatures. At least one new group, the Community of Faith, enjoys close links with Hungary's co-governing Alliance of Free Democrats.
“Protestant Churches feel the dangers even more than Catholics, since the sects attract followers from traditional Churches,” the Hungarian Church's chief spokesman, Father Laszlo Lukacs, told the REGISTER.
“Suggesting legal restrictions and measures is not in our Church's competence. But here too the whole phenomenon is very pressing.”
Classifying New Groups
One key problem concerns definitions. In a 1996 reference book, Bishop Zygmunt Pawlowicz, a Polish auxiliary, defined a sect as a “group or religious movement separated from a religion or confessional group, which cut itself off from one of the Churches or religious communities, accepting its own doctrinal and cultic principles and organizational structure.”
But Bishop Pawlowicz included in his category groups such as Adventists, who are recognized by other Churches as valid ecumenical partners. Not everyone agrees sects can be defined this way.
Another problem is posed by varying government policies. Whereas Poland requires just 15 signatures for registration, neighboring Slovakia stipulates 20,000, and has so far barred all but 15 historic Churches from claiming rights.
The Anglican Church, the world's third largest, has had members in Poland since the 18th Century. But it took weeks to muster just 15 Polish founding signatures when it reapplied for legal status in 1995, half a century after its last priest fled the German invasion. Had the requirement been like Slovakia's, it would have stood no chance of registering.
Meanwhile, though traditional religious affiliations have been cited in shaping government policies, these often bear no relation to reality. Communist-era repression not only suppressed religious affiliations downwards: it also profoundly altered the respective strengths of mainstream Churches.
Yet a 1990 UN report on Albania, where all religion was savagely suppressed under communism, claimed Albanian citizens were still “70% Muslim, 20% Orthodox, and 10% Catholic.”
Even in 1997, a U.S. Congressional official, Karen Lord, claimed in a report to the Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to see virtually a 100% religious breakdown in the secularized ex-Soviet republics of Central Asia and the Caucasus.
In Russia, surveys suggest practicing Orthodox believers currently amount to no more than 10% of the population, calling into question the Orthodox Church's legal claim to special “national status.”
Though 30 million Orthodox baptisms were recorded in the years following Russia's 1988 Christian Millennium—reaching 50,000 monthly in Moscow alone—the return to the Church petered out after 1992. High figures for declared religiousness since then almost certainly reflect an interest in the supernatural and paranormal, rather than any mass commitment to Orthodoxy.
Problems also occur when it comes to identifying “new religious groups”. Although the main expansion of such groups in Poland occurred after 1989, Muslim communities have lived in the country since the medieval Tartar invasions, while Lutherans and Calvinists played a key role in Polish culture from the 16th century.
A total of 14 non-Catholic Churches, from Methodists to Pentecostalists, are recognized as historically Polish under special laws. Meanwhile, the Jehovah's Witnesses claim to have been active in Poland since the 1880s, and Scientologists since the 1950s.
Most of the 34 religious groups registered in Poland in the 1980s predated the communist period. Of the approximately 90 groups registered since then, many were active earlier and merely came into the open with the return of democracy.
Against this background, some observers doubt whether legal curbs will stop the new groups. Instead, as in Russia's case, they could merely risk fresh injustices—especially if larger Churches are given a say in determining the rights of smaller ones.
In Western countries, laws and democratic procedures provide a screening process, which allows genuinely fraudulent or subversive sects to be isolated and monitored without intruding on the rights of others.
Once stable laws and procedures are established in Eastern Europe too, conflicts of tradition versus innovation, authority versus pluralism, will safely resolve themselves.
In a special 1997 report commissioned for the 54-nation OSCE, an international panel of experts said the disparaging use of terms such as “sect” had fueled discrimination and intolerance, and urged governments to exercise extreme caution in demarcating the boundaries of state intervention in religious life.
“History, tradition and differing cultures and social situations have a profound influence on the way the institutions of religious freedom are understood,” added the panel, which included U.S. and European academics, Russian and Bulgarian Orthodox representatives, and a founder of the London-based Muslim Calamus Foundation.
“Constitutional provisions vary from country to country, and may proscribe state action in one country that would be perfectly permissible in another.”
Professor Ciupak, the Polish sociologist, agrees on the need for maximum caution. In a mid-1990s European Values Study, two-thirds of Europeans called themselves religious, while only 5% claimed to be atheists. There have been signs across the continent that religiousness is growing rather than receding. And though surveys suggest it tends to be hidden and takes non-traditional forms, it's enough to call in question the very concept of “secularization.”
Why Sects Are Growing
Ciupak thinks larger Churches are mistaken in assuming modern society is increasingly non-religious, and should instead find ways of responding to a new culture and psychology of “post-materialism.” He believes the spread of new religious groups reflects the Churches' failure to do this, as well as their complacency in assuming institutional strength is what counts.
At least 80% of Polish sect members come from Catholic families, the professor estimates. Many were previously active in Catholic renewal movements, but found their religious needs unsatisfied.
“What's attractive about most sects is that they offer full, equal participation in rituals, as well as more varied forms of self-expression,” the professor said.
“Of course, priests can also talk about love and community from the pulpit. But these things sound completely different when heard from a young person on the street.”
Bogdan Kacmajor's “Niebo” group is listed as a “destructive sect” in Bishop Pawlowicz's book, alongside Satanists, Scientologists and Moonies. But telling fact from fiction is sometimes hard.
It took Kacmajor's ex-wife four years to track down their missing son, who was spotted last February when police came with a doctor to examine the group's children. Kacmajor insists the 14-year-old stayed on in Lubartow of his own free will, but isn't sure if he'll appeal his sentence.
“Since I now have my passport, which they took away from me during the case, I've decided to make a voyage abroad,” was all the former faith-healer was prepared to tell journalists.
Jonathan Luxmoore writes from Warsaw, Poland.
----- EXCERPT: Church and governments struggle for best response to post-communist reality ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jonathan Luxmoore ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Headline-making Abortion Method Not So New DATE: 01/11/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 11-17, 1998 ----- BODY:NEW YORK—An abortion method that made headlines just before Christmas and is being promoted by Planned Parenthood as an innovation that allows doctors to perform abortions only days after conception is not all that new, according to Dr. Bernard Nathanson.
A pioneer in the abortion industry before converting to the pro-life camp, Nathanson said he used a similar method in 1969 and taught other doctors to do so before they abandoned such early abortions because of the high risk of complications. Even the addition of modern ultrasound imaging, which seeks to locate the gestational sac that holds the newly conceived child, does not make early abortion significantly safer, he told the REGISTER.
Dr. Bernard Nathanson calls ‘manual vacuum aspiration’ a ploy to divert attention from partial-birth abortion
Planned Parenthood's recent fanfare about the early method, called “manual vacuum aspiration,” is little more than a public relations ploy to divert attention from the country's growing distaste for late-term abortions, Nathanson said. The number of “pro-choice” members of Congress who voted for bans on the so-called “partial-birth abortion” procedure has caused a desperate effort among abortion advocates to reassure politicians and the public that abortion can now be done before a woman even misses her first menstrual period, he said.
A statement by Dr. Michael Burnhill, Planned Parenthood's vice president for medical affairs, seems to support Nathanson's claim.
“With these very early abortions, we're talking about a whole gestational sac that's the size of a match stick head. It's nobody's picture of a little baby sucking its thumb,” Burnhill recently told The New York Times.
Whether done early or late, Catholic ethicists point out, the direct and intentional killing of life in the womb is always wrong.
The Vatican responded quickly last month to reports of the abortion method. Bishop Elio Sgreccia, vice president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, stated that early abortion threatens “to anesthetize consciences” by killing new life that can hardly be seen or felt. Although the technique may appear to be another form of contraception that can save a woman from the pain of abortion, the bishop said, “these are authentic abortions.”
“It's the same sin. The gravity of the act remains the same,” said Father John Bonnici, head of the Family Life-Respect Life Office for the New York archdiocese. “What is unfortunate is that the ease of this procedure makes it seem that everything will be all right. But it's still a decision to destroy one's own child.”
Admitting that the technique may seem to blur the line between abortion and contraception, Judie Brown, president of American Life League, said that this is an opportunity to educate the public that many contraceptives are actually abortifacients. The “pill” and intrauterine devices (IUDs) can be dangerous not only to women, she noted, and they can cause abortion at very early stages by making the uterine wall hostile to implantation of a days-old embryo.
She added, “The contraceptive mentality grows into an abortion, anti-life conception. The pro-life movement has failed to stress this to its great detriment. Planned Parenthood has just shown us why this has been a grave mistake.”
The early-abortion method, available so far in only two dozen Planned Parenthood facilities across the country, uses ultrasound to locate the tiny gestational sac and a hand-held syringe that is inserted through the birth canal into the uterus to remove the sac and surrounding material. When the extracted material is placed in water, the spongy sac floats to the surface and the abortion is verified. The entire procedure takes a few minutes.
Abortion advocates have stated that the hand-held syringe avoids the noise of the suction machine used in later abortions and is popular at facilities in developing countries, where access to electricity may be limited.
Dr. Jerry Edwards, medical director at Planned Parenthood who developed the early-abortion method with ultrasound, claims to have performed 2,400 such procedures since 1994. He states that complications previously associated with early abortion have not been found and predicts a new age in the abortion industry, as more women gain knowledge of the advantages of the procedure.
Nathanson disagrees. Recalling his own experience with early abortions, he said that Planned Parenthood is “exhuming a ghost.”
“We did this in 1969 and called it menstrual extraction. The one added feature is that today they use ultrasound to locate the gestational sac.”
Although ultrasound is effective in locating the developing child four weeks after conception, at earlier stages, he warned, “it can be tricky and misleading.”
There is enough gray area in the method to give most physicians pause even today, just as he and fellow abortionists shied away from menstrual extraction in the 1960s to develop more efficient methods of surgical abortion, Nathanson said.
“Medically, the problems are very much the same” with or without ultrasound. “My own feeling is that most abortionists are not going to change their methods because it's much safer to do surgical abortions at six to eight weeks' gestation.”
A prime example of the faulty information being promulgated by abortion advocates was seen in a New York Times article last month about the “new” early method. The article made much of the fact that the extracted uterine contents are floated to isolate the gestational sac. If the sac is not detected, the possibility exists that there is no pregnancy or the procedure failed to abort the tiny pre-born baby.
“When I ran a clinic in New York, it was considered absolutely necessary for every abortion doctor to do that,” said Nathanson. “We told every doctor that up to 12 weeks' gestation, they had to float the tissue to make sure they'd got it all. Otherwise, the woman could go home thinking she had an abortion and she's still pregnant.”
The new focus on early-term abortions does highlight one fact, Nathanson pointed out: Even abortion supporters have to admit that life begins at conception. If an abortion can be performed eight days after conception, then a living being must be present. Every doctor and scientist knows when life begins but they are willing to change their terminology to fit a political cause, he said.
He urged pro-life advocates not to fall into the false language of their opponents, as happened in the fight against partial-birth abortion. Pro-life strategists made a mistake in describing what is truly infanticide in terms of abortion. According to obstetrical textbooks, any expulsion of the child from the womb after the 20th week of gestation is not an abortion; it is a “pre-term delivery,” said Nathanson.
“The true technical description of what we call partial-birth abortion is ‘pre-term delivery culminating with an act of infanticide,’” he said. “When we bring in the word ‘abortion’ we play into the hands of the other side because it gives them the opportunity to talk about ‘choice’ and Roe v. Wade. If we would consistently call the procedure what it really is, infanticide, there would be few supporters.”
The early abortion technique is not new, he stressed, and pro-life forces should not attack it as though it were. It's the same old abortion in new technical clothing.
Brian Caulfield writes from New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian Caulfield ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Despite Objections, Virginia School District and Church Volunteers Forge a Warm Relationship DATE: 01/11/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 11-17, 1998 ----- BODY:PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY, Va.—In an apparently unprecedented move, a county school system in Virginia has invited ministers and Church volunteers into the schools, despite the objections of First Amendment groups.
Church volunteers in Prince William County provide a broad spectrum of services, including mentoring and tutoring for students, clothing for poor students, and after-school day care for parents who cannot afford private day care.
“The only commandment is ‘Thou Shall Not Proselytize,’” Edward Kelly, district superintendent of schools, told the REGISTER.
About two-thirds of the district's schools have found one or more Church partners, after Kelly announced to principals last spring that they should forge such alliances. There are 66 schools in the district, with more than 50,000 public school students in the county.
Prince William County, largely composed of bedroom communities, is about an hour's drive southwest of Washington. The public school dropout rate was 3.9% in 1996-97, according to the Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia.
Composite test scores for county public school students have continually been above the 62nd percentile since 1987, with the 50th percentile being the national average.
Despite the good scores, the school system is like many others. It's composed primarily of middle-class, dual-income, and single-parent families that have long commutes, as well as a growing number of poor minority families that qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches, according to Kelly.
“Every school needs assistance,” he said. When Kelly introduced the program last April, he reminded the principals of their pleas for more help—so they should participate in the program. None of the administrators opposes the program, Kelly said, and each is expected to pursue Churches to encourage them to send members into the schools.
Catholic, Baptist, and Presbyterian Churches are involved, as well as nondenominational Churches and a Jewish congregation, according to Kelly. Muslims from the county's mosque have attended meetings, and Kelly has formally invited them to participate, but they haven't yet stepped forward, he said.
“Schools are an integral part of the community,” said Kelly. “They need support, and everyone needs to be involved.”
The program has raised concerns, however, among those concerned that some schools may give the impression that they favor certain Churches. Kelly should have invited business and civic groups, according to Kent Willis, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Virginia chapter, who raised his concerns in an interview with a local newspaper.
Kelly responded that he has invited business and civic groups to become more involved in schools, but he extended the special invitation to Church groups because they seemed more willing to spend time with students, rather than just donate money.
Businesses in many cases have only been invited to give money to meet particular needs, which has stifled fuller participation such as volunteering, he said.
A handful of volunteers from St. Francis of Assisi Parish in Triangle, Va., has been mentoring and tutoring students at three local schools since September, according to Father Bob Menard OFM, the associate pastor.
The parish's elementary school has about 350 students, but most of the 1,750 families that go to the Church send their children to public schools, according to the priest, so parishioners want to help at the elementary, middle, and high schools they've selected.
The Franciscan-run parish draws heavily from employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigations, and U.S. Marine Corps, because of its proximity to Quantico, Va., where all three groups either train or station personnel.
Kelly, a parishioner at St. Francis, is a “fairly courageous man, committed to the effort in the community of integrating youth into the real world,” said Father Menard.
The risk in inviting Church volunteers into the public schools is that some may use the occasion to proselytize, while others may see the invitation as a violation of the historical separation in the United States of Church and state, which dictates that the state may not favor the establishment of a particular religion, the Franciscan said.
While one school has written a covenant that sets guidelines for volunteer participation, the school system is in the process of developing a set of rules to govern the activities, Kelly said.
With the school year at the half-way mark, it's still difficult to assess the success of the program in Prince William County, according to Kelly.
“You're not measuring student performance, drop out rates,” or other quantifiable factors, he said. He also stated that within two years, he may authorize a program survey.
Kelly said some students have told volunteers they appreciate the opportunity of speaking with an adult especially since time spent with parents at home is often limited. He has not received any complaints about volunteers. Volunteering in schools is “a quiet issue.” There's a lot of involvement, but very little fanfare, he said.
“I'm surprised by the amount of attention it's gotten,” said Kelly of the spotlight cast on the program both by Church-state separationists and religious observers.
Although other public schools around the country have formed partnerships with Churches, Kelly's district-wide mandate to the county schools is unprecedented, Deborah Bailey, a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University's Teachers College in Washington, told The Washington Post.
The program “naturally grew” out of the county's school-based management program, which dictates that schools write plans and develop support for them within their students' communities, according to Kelly.
The superintendent approached the Ministerial Alliance, an ecumenical organization with two groups in the county, for their prayers and involvement following a racial incident that occurred in a county school two years ago. In approaching them to help diffuse a difficult situation, “they felt appreciative of the confidence,” showed in them, he said.
Since then, Kelly has enlisted the ministers to help improve the county school system, appealing to their desire to serve the community.
Father Menard said Alliance members have since set up “listening posts,” in neighborhoods where families can speak with them about concerns regarding students who are either at risk of dropping out or have already dropped out of school and want to go back. The ministers bring back the information to school officials to help them make decisions.
In response to requests from parents in one high-crime neighborhood, Alliance members are pressuring the school board—whose members appointed Kelly as superintendent—to assign a school bus to the neighborhood, since some students fear the daily trek to school, according to Father Menard.
In his subsequent meetings with the members, some told Kelly that they did not feel welcome in the county schools, which led to his launching the program last spring.
The volunteer program is a challenge to Church groups, according to Father Menard. “It challenges our own willingness to respect each other's differences, while at the same time collaborating and working on our common values and commitment to serve.”
William Murray writes from Kensington, Md.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: William Murray ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Petersham, Mass., The Perfect Spot For a Vocation DATE: 01/11/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 11-17, 1998 ----- BODY:PETERSHAM, Mass.—On the surface, there's nothing unusual about this small town in Central Massachusetts. It's a quiet place of 1,100 residents, the kind of place people picture when they think of “postcard New England.” But there is something unusual about the place. It's home to 90 priests, monks, and nuns who belong to five religious communities—that's more than 8% of the town's inhabitants. By spring, incoming candidates will increase the number another percentage point.
Geographically the state's third-largest town, Petersham's territory is largely composed of private and public land preserves and the Quabbin Reservoir, Massachusetts's largest body of water.
Though fertile ground for vocations, there was no grand design that led the communities to settle here. In 1951 the Sisters of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary established Maria Assumpta Academy, a private girls' school. In 1985, four contemplative communities—Maronite monks, Benedictine monks, Benedictine nuns, and the Monks of Adoration—settled in, none of them with knowledge of the others' plans.
American Mount Athos?
Why Petersham? It's simply the type of quiet locale that the religious were seeking to live in solitude and detachment.
“There was no plan to set up a Mount Athos,” explains Father Anselm, superior of the Benedictine monks, referring to the Grecian monastic mecca. The acreage was simply the most suitable property for the communities' needs.
All five communities are orthodox in their practices, loyal to the Holy See, and cooperative with one another. That's where the similarities cease, though. Diverse indeed are the 1,500-year-old Rule of St. Benedict; the Maronite's Divine Liturgy (or Mass), which, dating from the fifth century Antiochene Church, is the oldest and most unchanged Catholic rite; and the technological journeys made into cyberspace by the Monks of Adoration.
Not the “usual” Benedictine arrangement, St. Mary's Monastery and St. Scholastica's Priory are located on either side of their newly built church. The “twin communities” join in the celebration of daily Mass and chanting the Divine Office.
“Each [community] is different,” says Mother Mary Clare, founder and prioress of St. Scholastica's Priory. “God's call takes all different forms. The reasons you stay are different from the reasons you came.”
She says that some are attracted by the liturgy, the lifestyle, the inner joy, or something as simple as the habit.
“For God all means are good,” she says, but that “obviously isn't going to make a lifetime commitment. It deepens and develops.”
Those reflecting on the spark for their own or others' vocations rarely cite any grand or glorious sign that figured into their call. Abbot William, founder and superior of the Maronite community at Most Holy Trinity Monastery, looks back to the influence of “the good Sisters of Notre Dame,” who taught him in school. Another Maronite monk, who humbly declined to be identified, credits an advertisement in the REGISTER for leading him to the community. Considering a vocation with the Benedictine order, he made a retreat with the Maronites, but had no thoughts of joining them.
“What drew me here was contemplation and adoration of the Eucharist,” he stresses. A month after his retreat, he returned—permanently. Eight years have since passed, and the monk is now a priest. He explains that the other eight men in the community came by word-of-mouth from across the country for the same reasons: “All wanted contemplative, monastic life with adoration of the Eucharist”—the charism of the community. The Maronite's growth was such that they recently established a second community. Holy Nativity Monastery in Bethlehem, S.D., founded in 1993, currently is home to five monks.
A Simple Call
Father Anselm, a Benedictine of St. Mary's Monastery—founded by a Maronite priest, says there is nothing unusual about the life or calling of a monastic religious. “We're all quite ordinary, really,” he says, citing the postulancy of a 64-year-old former Lutheran minister as the community's most unlikely prospect.
The priest, who hails from the Benedictine motherhouse, Pluscarden Abbey in Scotland, believes many have vocations to the religious life, it's just “a matter of people finding the right place.” Father Anselm says he first considered a vocation at age 12. He learned of monastic life at 16, visited a few monasteries, and found one that attracted him.
“It was all very straightforward,” he says of his calling. The monk suggested it was the same mild prodding of God with other vocations as well.
“It's incomprehensible, but very simple,” he stresses. “It's God's choice. He let's them know. When things get complicated it's a sign of a human mind.” An authentic vocation should produce joy rather than anxiety as “an invitation from Christ to follow him in a particular way.”
Though he entered after graduating high school, he notes that most people come to religious life a bit older and more mature. “I hope that will change,” he says. “I do believe in younger vocations.”
St. Mary's community has seven members. “We'd like to be a little larger,” says Father Anselm, but “we like to have a sense that the Lord has taken a hand in guiding people here. And we feel more confident of that if we don't advertise.”
Mother Mary Clare quotes a French abbot in saying “‘Providence has a way of sending vocations.’ We've never advertised. We've never had to. They just come.”
“On the average we get one inquiry a week. Priests recommend [us]; people come here on retreat.”
Four candidates will soon join the 12 nuns at the priory.
Father Thomas Sullivan, secretary to Worcester Bishop Daniel Reilly, notes that whatever the Benedictines are doing to promote vocations “is very admirable. They're very cordial, very orthodox, and very authentic,” he says, and “their beautiful new chapel certainly inspires.”
High-Tech Monks
Inquiries to the Monks of Adoration often come by way of their website, where the community promotes vocations and evangelizes.
“The Internet is opening things up,” notes Brother John Raymond, author of the recently published Catholics on the Internet. Though he and Brother Craig Driscoll are the only members of this new contemplative order, which follows the rule of St. Augustine, the community will double in size soon, welcoming candidates from Chicago and Los Angeles.
Always active in the Church, Brother Craig felt God's call to religious life after high school. “It was difficult to find a community of men totally dedicated to the Holy Eucharist, like so many communities of nuns.”
With the encouragement and a recommendation from Cardinal Augustin Mayer OSB, however, he received permission from (then) Bishop Timothy Harrington of Worcester to found the order and the community.
“What got me going in the right direction was coffee and donuts,” says Brother John. At a church social, he learned of study groups and a retreat that set him on a path to the realization of his calling—responding to a two-year-old vocation ad.
“I always felt the Lord's call,” says the monk. “I read the Bible and wanted to live these things we should be doing.”
Nearby, the Sisters of the Assumption have the greatest number of religious in Petersham with 60 members in the community at Assumption residence, a home to senior sisters and infirmary patients.
Powerhouse of Prayer
“The powerhouse of prayer, we call it,” says archivist Sister Marie. Though Maria Assumpta Academy is closed, for many years it was well-known and popular in the Worcester diocese. Sister Marie, a former student, entered a short teaching stint in the order's boarding school in Canada.
“We admired and loved our teachers,” she says, stressing the role of good models that are so often a key factor in vocations. “They seemed very happy.”
In promoting vocations, Sister Marie emphasizes, “We don't exert pressure. It's an invitation to come and spend an evening with us.… God is the one who calls.”
Does the loss of property taxes cool the town's local government to hosting so many religious communities? David Boeri, one of Petersham's three-member board of selectman, seems to think not.
“It's like being close to electrical power lines,” he suggests. “There is an effect even if you don't participate. They provide a positive energy field for the town.”
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Conn.
----- EXCERPT: New England town is home to five religious communities ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Evangelizing Communities: A New Image for U.S. Parishes? DATE: 01/11/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 11-17, 1998 ----- BODY:Archbishop Francis George OMI
Chicago Archbishop Francis George played an important role in the recently completed Synod of Bishops for America. He is also among a smaller panel of Synod Fathers assisting Pope John Paul in drafting a post-synodal apostolic exhortation.
The archbishop spoke with REGISTER correspondent Stephen Banyra in the Vatican at the conclusion of the Synod.
Banyra: The Special Synod of Bishops for America was a landmark gathering—bringing together nearly 300 cardinals, bishops, and other participants, for a month. How would you assess the meeting?
Archbishop George: The assessment is still provisional because we'll have to see what the Holy Father gives us as a post-synodal apostolic exhortation, which will be a guide for our vision and for our action in the future as we go into the next millennium.
Nevertheless, the most important assessment is that the bishops leave Rome knowing one another better across all the countries in the western hemisphere and determined to cooperate more closely in the future. The particular areas of cooperation are outlined in many of the Synod propositions but I'm sure others will come along as we begin to work more closely together.
Your brother bishops elected you to the post-synodal council and to assist Pope John Paul II in the preparation of his post-synodal exhortation. What impact do you think that forthcoming document will have on the Church throughout the hemisphere?
One task of the post-synodal council is to help the Holy Father create that document by going through the many interventions and all the papers that have created the content of our Synod discussion, in order to digest it in some form he can use—to save him time basically. And that document will have effect only if, in fact, it is well known.
Sometimes these very beautiful post-synodal apostolic exhortations have less effect than they ought to have because they're not incorporated into the pastoral vision of the dioceses. However, given the fact that many bishops from throughout the hemisphere have been present for this Synod, I would hope that whatever document comes out will have an impact pastorally.
We're at the crossroads of the third Christian millennium. At this time, how would you judge the “health” of the Church in the United States and what is the greatest challenge facing the Church for the new century?
One of the most interesting things to come out of this Synod is the relativization of national boundaries. The Church now speaks more easily of cultures than she does of nations. Sometimes that concept hasn't had a chance to sink into the mental paradigms—even of the bishops. So the Church in the United States is very different depending on the region and the cultures of people who are Catholic.
Nonetheless, there are a few things that could be said. However, fewer than the media generally permit. The media have a paradigm for the Church: that it's a conversation between conservatives and liberals, defined as individualists and authoritarians. That's a very partial conversation. It's part of the whole, but it's a very small part of it.
The challenges of the Church and the health of the Church in the United States are determined by how she conforms to the mission that Christ left her. By those standards, I think things are very promising because the whole concept of evangelization, which was so prominent in this Synod, is also now taking hold in the dioceses that are preparing for the new millennium. Some dioceses are doing better at this than others. I think there is a renewal of life in the parishes, which are always the most vital parts of the American Church, precisely to the extent that they are beginning to see themselves as evangelizing communities. That's a new concept for the Church in the United States. If it takes hold, it will be a way to escape the prism that has shaped our life together (for the last 25 years, anyway)—the kind of prism given to us in most of the media and even in Catholic periodicals.
You've had to address racial tension in Chicago. How would you describe race relations within the United States?
I'd be slow to make a general statement about race relations in the United States. One weakness, however, of the whole conversation around race in the United States is that it makes very little reference to class.
Americans are generally uneasy with class analysis since it's Marxist, but in fact it tells us something and I think it has to be brought into the discussion on race since many actions interpreted as “prejudiced” are, in fact, acts that will defend personal property—sometimes a house for example, which is the major life investment for people of modest means. Its value is something that they won't negotiate.
So the issue is complicated by economics and by class divisions more than the conversation generally permits. It's easier just to talk about attitudes and about education, therefore, as the response. In the United States, the response to everything is “more education,” as if information of itself could change hearts.
In Chicago, I think the discussion hasn't gone very far—it hasn't really probed the depths of what we're dealing with. Nor has the Church, which is perhaps less used to calling its people to conversion than it should be, really faced the fact that there is hatred for people who are different—particularly people of different races—in the hearts of many people. Nevertheless, that alone doesn't explain many of the phenomena that crop up under that rubric “racism.”
Do minorities feel they're a part of the Church in the United States? Why don't we have more Black, Hispanic, and Asian bishops, priests, religious?
Well, who's the minority? Everybody in the United States is a minority in a sense. Catholics are a minority in the United States—it does not matter the color of your skin.
Why aren't there people from other groups? There are quite a few Asians particularly because of the Filipinos and now the Vietnamese. I'd say, proportionately, there are more Asian minorities in the Catholic Church than there are in the society as a whole.
Among African-Americans, since historically they were slaves in the South, they adopted the Christianity of their masters who were mostly Protestants. So they have been overwhelmingly Protestant. Still, there are about 2 million out of some 20 million—almost 10% of African Americans are Catholic. And we would hope that would increase, because the kind of secularization of good Protestants that we see among good Catholics is the same.
Secularized Christians, whether Protestant or Catholic, have to be called again to acknowledge Jesus as Lord and accept the Gospel discipline into their lives. I think the field for evangelizing is as rich and ripe among African-Americans as it is among any other kind of Americans. So we'll have to see what the future holds. We've begun to talk about that in Chicago already: “What should the Church's presence be among African-Americans?”
You have come to your post in Chicago as a religious, thus bringing a whole tradition of prayer, of the Divine Office, and of community life. Does this have any impact on your ministry in the archdiocese?
I'm not sure that religious are automatically any holier than, for example, diocesan priests who are also obliged to prayer and to the hours. Traditionally, the ministry, particularly in parishes, has shaped even the spiritual life of diocesan priests, whereas a rule has shaped the life of religious. But religious in pastoral work are as much shaped by ministry as are their diocesan priest brothers.
My own work has been very much shaped by my pastoral ministry as bishop. I think perhaps the missionary dimension of my own religious family, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate [OMI], gives me a kind of vision that is somewhat different from the average Chicago parish priest. Still, it's very hard to generalize about Chicago priests. They're as different as any other group.
I would hope, however, that some of the experiences I bring from living outside of Chicago for almost 40 years will help me both appreciate what is there and perhaps change the vision somewhat.
Would you care to make a final comment?
I think all of us are very grateful to the Holy Father for bringing us together for this Special Synod for America. And particularly, for emphasizing the need for the synods of the various continents to prepare for a new springtime for the Gospel—the new millennium of Christianity that we'll be celebrating in a few years.
The more we do this, the more this “sinks in” as a moment of renewal, a moment of encounter, changing the page on the calendar isn't so important. Yet the encounter with Jesus Christ will change many things.
—Stephen Banyra
Archbishop Francis George OMI
Current Posts: Archbishop of Chicago, Ill.; chancellor of The Catholic Church Extension Society and of University of St. Mary of the Lake, Mundelein, Ill.; member of U.S. bishops' committee to Oversee the Use of the Catechism; various other bishops' committees and advisory positions.
Background: Born Jan. 16, 1937; entered Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate in 1957; ordained to priesthood in 1963. Appointed bishop of Yakima, Wash., in 1990; made archbishop of Portland, Ore., in 1996; appointed archbishop of Chicago in 1997.
Notable: Holds a STD (doctor of sacred theology) in ecclesiology from the Pontifical University Urbanian, Rome, and a PhD in American philosophy from Tulane University, New Orleans, La.
----- EXCERPT: Chicago's Archbishop Francis George sees evangelization as a way out of the conservative-liberal mindset in the Church ----- EXTENDED BODY: Stephen Banyra ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: U.S. Notes & Quotes DATE: 01/11/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 11-17, 1998 ----- BODY:How to Raise Money in a Hurry
“A Church is a good place for a miracle. Especially during the Christmas season,” begins the Jan. 1 Chicago Sun-Times Report.
“Holy Family Roman Catholic Church is celebrating the seventh anniversary of a nationwide appeal to save the building. The city's second-oldest church had fallen into ruin in December 1990, and teetered near demolition.
“The appeal has raised $3.9 million since 1990, allowing the church to do major structural repairs and restore the delicate stenciling, artwork, and statues.
“This week, church officials remembered the frigid Christmas of 1990 when the Jesuits announced plans to demolish the structure unless $1 million could be raised to save it.
“‘The Holy Family Preservation Society organized a five-night prayer vigil on the steps of the shuttered church in bitter December cold,’ said [Father] George Lane, the society's founding board member. ‘We had seven candles out in front,’ hastily begged from a local restaurant.
“‘With prayers and publicity, the appeal went out to the world,’ [Father] Lane said. ‘The money poured in. We received $300,000 in three days. We made the deadline with $11,000 to spare.’
“Several thousand people attended an open house on the feast of the Holy Family Dec. 30, 1990, each with a story to tell about the church, each bringing a check or cash.
“We had so much money in the rectory that night, we had to have the police,” Father Lane said.
Funeral Mass for Chris Farley
Cable TV's E! News reported the funeral rites Dec. 23 for Chris Farley, a comedian who became famous on Saturday Night Live and in slapstick movies.
“Today, in his hometown, SNL alumni Dan Akroyd, Chris Rock, and Al Franken sat in pews at Our Lady Queen of Peace Roman Catholic church to say good-bye to the burly, boisterous performer.
“A program handed out at the service featured a photo of Farley and a poem, The Clown's Prayer, according to wire reports.”
The report, by Joal Ryan, quoted an 18 year-old who attended the wake, where he saw John Goodman, George Wendt, and SNL creator Lorne Michaels.
“It's a really sad scene,” the observer is quoted saying. “All these people who make you laugh on TV, to see 'em crying. It's really different.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Formal vs. Material DATE: 01/11/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 11-17, 1998 ----- BODY:Along-standing distinction in Catholic moral teaching holds that there is a fundamental difference between “formal” and “material” cooperation with the evil acts of other people.
Formal cooperation in evil is always wrong. It occurs when someone intentionally helps another person carry out a sinful act. For example, a doctor who prescribes contraceptives intends that his patient use them, and thus cooperates formally in the patient's acts.
Material cooperation in evil occurs when a person's actions unintentionally help another person do something wrong. It is sometimes morally acceptable and sometimes not, depending on how closely related it is to evil.
For example, someone who delivers telephone books does not intend that anyone use them to make a call to arrange an abortion. This kind of “material cooperation” in evil is not morally wrong because it is far enough from the eventual wrongdoing to be classified as “remote.”
Other kinds of material cooperation may be too closely related to evil to be permissible. Catholic teaching calls these actions “proximate” material cooperation. For example, a nurse who works in an abortion operating room, even if she does not agree with what the doctor is doing, is too closely related to the evil to be permitted to continue in her job.
Another occasion when material cooperation is not morally acceptable is when it gives scandal. That is, a cooperating action that is only remotely related to evil is still not permissible if it tends to encourage others to do wrong.
Catholic teaching also holds that whenever people are involved in permissible material cooperation in evil they still need a sufficient reason for their cooperation. And they need a stronger reason the closer their cooperation is to evil. For example, while the participation of a nurse in an abortion is too closely linked to evil to be permissible, the work of a nurse in abortion aftercare may not be. If a person had a strong reason, perhaps the inability to find another job, this kind of work could be permissible. A parking lot attendant at the same hospital would need a still less serious reason.
Deciding when a particular action of material cooperation is too proximate to evil to be permissible requires sound judgment.
In the past, theological clarifications of cooperation in evil have been primarily developed to help individuals decide how to act in difficult situations. In today's healthcare arena, the questions of cooperation have also become issues for Catholic institutions. To complicate matters, the theological distinctions developed for individuals do not always cover the questions that arise.
For instance, when a Catholic institution contracts with another health care institution its contracts are public and stable and have a different impact than the private actions of individuals. Thus when establishing policy for Catholic healthcare institutions the National Conference of Catholic Bishops says: “Catholic health care institutions are not to provide abortion services, even based upon the principle of material cooperation. … In this context, Catholic health care institutions need to be concerned about the danger of scandal in any association with abortion providers.” (Ethical and Religious Directives)
—Gerry Rauch
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Gerry Rauch ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: World Notes & Quotes DATE: 01/11/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 11-17, 1998 ----- BODY:Australian Embryos to be Destroyed
On New Years day, 1998, hundreds of frozen embryos, some up to 13 years old, which would otherwise be able to develop, became vulnerable to destruction due to a new law in Australia, according to the Melbourne daily newspaper The Age.
“Marilyn Hogben has been dreading New Year's Day since the arrival of a letter from a Melbourne IVF [in vitro fertilization] clinic telling her the time had come to decide the fate of her frozen embryos.
“She thinks of the five of them, the legacy of 18 months unsuccessful IVF treatment in 1991, as potential brothers and sisters for her five-year-old daughter. But, at 44, she feels too old to have another baby and she and her husband opted to have their embryos destroyed.
“Although Hogben knows discarding the embryos is, in her situation, logical [according to the article], she has been alternating between guilt and grief as the year drew to an end.
“I'm not willing to give away one of our daughter's brothers or sisters. I'm willing to discard them, but not to donate them,” she says.
The article quotes Hogben as saying that she realizes this “sounds selfish.”
Couples that do not seek an extension on the storage of their embryos will cause them to be destroyed.
According to the article, “[t]he Catholic Church denounces it as a ‘monstrous practice.’…”
In Melbourne, the “Infertility Treatment Authority” has extended the timeline to March 31 as they try to track down couples whose embryos are affected by the law.
“Counselor Kay Oke … says [couples] should have had the right long ago to dispose of their embryos,” according to the article.
She is quoted saying, “For many couples, hearing from us five years later has made it so much more painful. Every day I get six to seven phone calls from people very distressed about what to do.”
She estimates that more than 30 couples who have not responded have moved or changed phone numbers but that the rest of the 100 “have got letters and just can't pick up the phone,” to decide the fate of their progeny.
Serving Despite Bureaucracy
Those activists who find government regulations a barrier to their apostolate can learn a lesson from one group that has it worse. The Florida charity Caritas has achieved remarkable success serving Cuba despite that country's communist regime, according to the Dec. 31 Miami Herald.
The Catholic organization “Caritas Cuba and other Church organizations have emerged in recent years to help patch the holes in Cuba's unraveling safety net, providing powdered milk to the elderly, free medicine to the ill, and food and other help to prisoners' families.
“Cuba declared official atheism three years after the 1959 revolution, but in 1992 it began eliminating restrictions on worship.”
Anita Snow's article continues, “But the government regulations often make charity work difficult, forcing Caritas Cuba to navigate bureaucratic channels and sensitive politics to get food and medicine to the needy.”
The secret? “‘Dialogue with the government has been instrumental,’ said Rolando Suarez, Caritas Cuba's director.
“Wayne Smith, former head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, said Caritas Cuba performed a minor miracle in late 1996 when it persuaded the government to accept most of the aid that Cuban exiles in Miami sent to victims of Hurricane Lili.
“Caritas knows how to operate within a difficult system to get things done,” Smith said.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Vatican Notes & Quotes DATE: 01/11/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 11-17, 1998 ----- BODY:The Jubilee in Rome
As the Holy Father, Pope John Paul II has set an ambitious goal of evangelization and preparation for the Jubilee Year 2000 for the whole Church. As bishop of Rome, Reuters reported Dec. 31, he has a more practical problem: the number of churches available to accommodate pilgrims.
The event “is expected to attract perhaps history's biggest pilgrimage to Rome, and the Pope has in the past urged [Catholics] to give money to help build more churches for the event.
“The Italian capital has nearly 1,000 Roman Catholic churches but most of them are near the center of the city. The new churches the Pope wants built would be in the outskirts.”
His message to his local Church, which he gives each year at the Te Deum vespers in the Jesuit Church of St. Ignatius of Loyola, did not confine itself to the physical churches, however.
“We are invited to look to the future, to prepare the ground for this city's evangelization in view of the third millennium,” he is quoted saying.
Rome's Disneyland?
Plans are under way to build a theme park in Rome in time for the jubilee celebrations, according to The Washington Post.
Jan. 2, the paper reported that “a grandiose project to reconstruct the Eternal City by meticulously copying its ancient forums, palaces, and arenas is taking shape in Italy's Umbria region.…
“The $250 million project is slated to include a historical theme park, where visitors can don togas, listen to orations, and watch chariot races at the Circus Maximus or gladiator contests at the Coliseum. Planners say the park, about 45 miles north of the modern-day city, also would serve as a set for movie and television productions set in ancient Rome in which toga-clad tourists would double as extras.
“Rome architect Luigi Pellegrin, who is designing the site, said he believes tourists would benefit from visiting a re-creation of ancient Rome, especially when coupled with a tour of the actual ruins. ‘What you get from an experience in the Forum is wonderful,’ he said.”
The theme park would likely be named “Roma Vetus, Latin for “ancient Rome.” It would include temples, basilicas, squares, and palaces, all at three-quarter scale. Italian media have scoffed at the plans, already well underway, calling it “our Disneyland,” according to the article.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: GUEST EDITORIAL DATE: 01/11/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 11-17, 1998 ----- BODY:Ratzinger Revisited
It's the media variant on bait-and-switch advertising. First, you caricature a controversial personality. Then, when the evidence becomes overwhelming that the caricature is false, you announce with due solemnity that the person in question has “changed.” Being the Fourth Estate means never having to say you're sorry.
The public image of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for 15 years, is a pristine example of this process at work.
First there was the ruthless Panzerkardinal, brought from Munich to Rome to crush theological dissent and enforce doctrinal purity through methods reminiscent of the Inquisition. (If there has ever been a story about Cardinal Ratzinger or his congregation that didn't invoke the specter of the Inquisition, I haven't seen it.) Now, we are told, the cardinal has mellowed and has suddenly become open, approachable, and sympathetic to those struggling with belief.
Not even his most implacable enemies have ever questioned Cardinal Ratzinger's erudition: his encyclopedic knowledge of theology; his command of biblical, patristic, scholastic, and contemporary sources; his elegance as a thinker and writer. If Salt of the Earth (Ignatius Press), the recently released book-length interview with him by German journalist Peter Seewald, an agnostic, corrects the caricature of the Panzerkardinal, well, I suppose we should be grateful. But that doesn't make it any less a caricature.
In any event, Salt of the Earth is a most interesting read. The book's optic is, in some respects, very Teutonic-intellectual: ideas really have consequences; the madnesses of the intellectuals lead to cultural collapse; the German intellectual world is the reference point for the life of the mind. The cardinal also worries about the institutional life of German Catholicism, which he finds too rich, too bureaucratic, too smug—at the expense of evangelism and genuine charity.
All of which is interesting (and not without instructive parallels for Americans). But it's when he casts his net wider that the cardinal is most engaging. Among the sharp-edged insights of Salt of the Earth:
ı Freedom is God's vulnerability, embodied by the cross.
ı True Church reform is always along the lines of “simpler, purer,” and is usually led by movements. The Benedictine reform saved classical culture; Francis and Dominic led us beyond the ossifications of medieval Christendom. The new movements in the Church today are leading us into an uncharted future; the test of their sundry charisms is whether they lead us to a simpler, purer Christian witness.
ı The “separation of Church and state” began with the Church. When Christianity refused to sacralize politics, it laid the cultural groundwork for what Jefferson and Madison would institutionalize, hundreds of years later.
ı Today's “canon” of “issues” (contraception, abortion, celibacy, divorce, women's ordination) is too introverted. Moreover, liberalization as the fix for these neuralgic questions has been falsified by the mainline Protestant experience. Thus the “canon” will fade in time. (And then what will The New York Times write about, one wonders?)
ı “How many ways are there to God? As many as there are people.”
ı Liberation theology had one important insight: The Bible belongs to the people, not the exegetes guild.
ı Liturgy “lives from what is unmanipulable.” Liturgical science isn't automotive design, and its task is not to come up with new models every year. Rather, the work of the liturgy is to “make man capable of the mystery,” to introduce us to the feast of God's bounty and love.
ı Celebrant-centered, rather than mystery-centered, liturgy is one dynamic in the agitation about women's ordination. Why should only one sort of person be the center of the action? A good question, but a false context.
The cardinal thinks of the future in terms of a “minority Church” that is no longer the “form of life of a whole society”—a different angle of vision than the Pope, who speaks regularly of the 21st century as a “springtime for the Gospel.” The two views are not contradictory, but the cardinal's is based on his experience of an intact Catholic culture—Bavaria—imploding, while the jury remains out on what will happen to Polish Catholicism and Polish culture as Poland re-enters Western history.
Salt of the Earth is an invitation to enter into conversation with a great mind and a great Christian spirit. I suggest you accept.
George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: George Weigel ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Prepping for the Second Coming DATE: 01/11/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 11-17, 1998 ----- BODY:by Ralph Martin
(Ignatius Press, 1997, 178 pp., $11.95)
The Late Great Planet Earth was a bestseller in the 1970s. Its thesis: biblical prophecies could be correlated to daily, world events. Careful analysis of these prophecies, argued author Hal Lindsey, revealed that the Second Coming of Christ was just around the corner.
The crux of Lindsey's argument was the re-establishment of the nation of Israel in 1948. He saw this as the fulfillment of Jesus' statement that Jerusalem would be “trodden down by the Gentiles until the time of the Gentiles is fulfilled” (Lk 21, 24). When Christ said, “This generation will not pass away until all these things come to pass” (Lk 21, 32), he meant, according to Lindsey, the generation that saw the re-establishment of Israel. “All these things” were the events preceding the Second Coming. Thus, he concluded, within a generation of 1948—which he calculated as 40 years in biblical terms—Christ would return.
Fifty years after Israel's re-establishment and almost 30 after Late Great Planet Earth hit the bookstores, the Lord still hasn't returned. Not that that has slowed up speculation. As we approach the magic year 2000, “end times” commotion is likely to reach fever pitch. Lindsey himself still expects the imminent return of Christ, readjusting his prophetic scenario here and there to account for—to date at least—what amounts to a divine no-show. And he's been joined by scads of other “last days” forecasters prognosticating the “end.”
Catholic renewal leader Ralph Martin isn't one of them. His book, Is Jesus Coming Soon?, is a balanced, truly Catholic perspective on a subject as overemphasized in Evangelical circles as it is probably neglected among most Catholics.
Martin is not shy about the fact that the Second Coming is about judgment. That's why Jesus warned people to be prepared for it, he writes. What death is to us as individuals, the Second Coming is to humanity as a whole: time to meet our Maker. Whether Jesus will return in our era “to judge the living and the dead,” as the Apostles' Creed says, is, in that sense, irrelevant. All of us will encounter him within a lifetime anyhow—our own.
Even so, the Bible and the Church both teach the doctrine of the Second Coming (called the Parousia or “coming” in Greek), so it is legitimate to ask, “What will it be like?” Martin refrains from going into too many details. His principle: as the prophecies of Christ's first coming were an unanticipated blend of literal and figurative fulfillment that made it hard to map out a precise scenario ahead of time, so too with the Second Coming. Those who try are as likely to go astray as people did the first time around.
Still, the big question everyone wants answered is, “When will it occur?” Martin sticks to the plain words of Jesus: “No one knows the day or hour.” Believers should be alert and not grow indifferent to the Lord's return. But neither should they buy into fanciful end times schemes and claims to have figured it all out. (A radio preacher, confronted with Jesus' comment that “No man knows the hour or the day,” once replied, “Yes, but he didn't say anything about the month and the year.”)
Martin is not, however, completely disinterested in signs of the end; he takes the Bible and the Church's interpretative tradition seriously. He identifies two events which the Bible seems to say must occur before the Second Coming: the conversion of the Jews (based on Rom 11, 15. 23, 25-26) and the universal proclamation of the Gospel (Mt 24, 14). Other proximate signs of the Final Days include a general social disorder among nations, confusion and upheaval in the Church (apostasy and infidelity), and the rise of an antichrist (a single focus of Satan's activity in the world).
Does Israel's re-establishment in 1948 herald the end? Martin doesn't rule it out. It may be a proximate sign of the Second Coming, he writes, but we can't be sure.
The same can be said of other possible indicators: various Marian apparitions warning of tribulation to come and calling for repentance; the Holy Spirit's charismatic activity among believers today; a new evangelization taking the Gospel to the world; dissent, confusion, and apostasy among Christians; and turmoil in the world at large. Prudence is needed to interpret these “signs.” There may yet come a time when even more “signs” of the Second Coming are present—perhaps in the distant future. People then will look back on today's end times zeal as we do the eschatological fervor around the year 1000.
Martin accomplishes two seemingly contradictory things. He awakens readers to the prospect of the Second Coming, while admonishing us against falling off the eschatological deep end. Sound advice as we approach the third Christian millennium.
Mark Brumley, managing editor of Catholic Dossier and The Catholic Faith magazines, writes from Napa, California.
----- EXCERPT: Worried about the End Times? Here's some sober-headed advice ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mark Brumley ----- KEYWORDS: Books -------- TITLE: Straightforward Orthodoxy from Bishop Bruskewitz DATE: 01/11/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 11-17, 1998 ----- BODY:by Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz
(Ignatius Press, 1997, 421pp., $14.95)
One day in the spring of 1996 I received a call from a network TV magazine show. Would I be willing to be interviewed about the situation in Lincoln, Neb.? Specifically, would I say something in defense of Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz?
Lincoln and its bishop were big news just then. Bishop Bruskewitz had announced that Catholics who belonged to specific organizations opposed to Church teaching (e.g., Planned Parenthood, Catholics for a Free Choice, Call to Action, traditionalist groups that repudiate Vatican Council II, the Masons) would be excommunicated if they remained members after a certain date. The aim was to bring them back to their senses and put an end to public scandal.
That touched off a furor. There had been isolated cases of bishops excommunicating people over the years, but nothing quite like this. Was Bishop Bruskewitz setting a trend? Would there be open rebellion? Would the heavens fall? Even network TVnews, habitually dismissive of religion, had awakened from its secularist slumber and become interested.
Yes, I told the producer at the other end of the line, I would do the show. I didn't feel it was my business to voice either approval or disapproval of what the bishop had done. But I had no problem saying he'd faced up to real problems in the Church—dissidence and disloyalty on the part of some of her nominal members—and acted reasonably.
A few days later a camera crew showed up and shot some footage at my office. And a few days after that, on a business trip to New York, the network put me up in a Manhattan hotel suite (Heaven only knows how much that cost!), and another crew plus the producer spent the better part of a morning shooting the actual interview there.
I thought it went pretty well. On the way out even the cameraman spontaneously remarked, “It's a relief to hear somebody talk sense for a change.”
The afternoon of the day when the program was to air, the producer phoned me again.
“We had to drop your interview at the last minute because of length,” she said. “No hard feelings?”
I shrugged it off and went home.
I almost never watch television, and I didn't watch this time. One of my kids did. I asked her later how it went.
“They talked to the bishop,” she reported, “and then they talked to a half-dozen people who said he was wrong.”
That's show biz.
Whatever this anecdote may or may not prove, it surely illustrates an obvious fact: Bishop Bruskewitz didn't get a whole lot of support from the secular side for what he did. But what about the Church? Some Catholics plainly were appalled by the events in Lincoln; others just as plainly delighted: “Why don't the other bishops do the same?” they demanded.
The answer to that is obvious. Some bishops think the bishop of Lincoln was off base—and some even said so publicly at the time, more or less. Others who in principle might perhaps be inclined to emulate Bishop Bruskewitz wouldn't dream of trying the same bold tactic. One reason is that they know all too well that their own priests would torpedo them if they did.
Consider a much larger midwestern diocese where a group of senior pastors recently sent their new archbishop a letter—in due course leaked to the press—instructing him in no uncertain terms to back off on the enforcement of liturgical rules they'd grown comfortable violating.
Thanks largely to the policies pursued over the years by its bishops, Lincoln in fact is one of the handful of dioceses in the United States where the diocesan clergy would back their bishop in doing what Bishop Bruskewitz did. And the bishop himself? He appears to be thriving these days, thank you, a hero with orthodox Catholics nationwide.
One indication of this celebrity is the book at hand, AShepherd Speaks. It appears to be a collection of columns presumably first published in the Lincoln diocesan newspaper. (But shame on Ignatius Press for requiring readers to figure that out for themselves. This is the kind of information a publisher might be expected to pass along.)
Grouped in five sections (Our Trinitarian Faith, The Church, The Liturgical Year, The Sacraments, Living the Christian Mystery), these short articles cover a wide gamut of Catholic doctrine and practice. They are clearly and simply written and present a resolutely—and refreshingly—orthodox point of view. The impression comes through strongly of a past-orally engaged bishop who loves the Church and her teaching and likes nothing better than telling his people about both.
One looks in vain here for an analysis of the events in Lincoln in the spring of 1996. But there is at least the hint of an explanation in a column entitled “Dare To Be Different” dated January of that year.
“Can a Catholic be an oxymoron?” Bishop Bruskewitz asks. (An oxymoron, he explains, is a contradiction in terms—a square circle or something like that.) He goes on:
“A Catholic who embraces the false beliefs and evil morals that seem to penetrate a large sector of our contemporary culture is, in a real sense, an oxymoron.
“Among oxymoronic Catholics would have to be included those who claim membership in intrinsically evil organizations, such as the Freemasons and their associated groups, Planned Parenthood, and so on. These people would also have to include those who associate with schismatic groups, such as the socalled Society of Saint Pius X.
“Other oxymorons would be cowardly politicians who might claim to be Catholics but yet vote for and foster baby-killing, under the euphemism of ‘prochoice,’ and perhaps even those Catholic citizens who vote for pro-abortion politicians.
“There are times and places when we must share in our common humanity the concerns and values of the world around us. There are other times when we must flee from them, oppose them with all our strength, and dare to be different.”
Not very sophisticated, you say? Certainly not. The bishop merely happens to be right.
Russell Shaw writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Russell Shaw ----- KEYWORDS: Books -------- TITLE: Letters DATE: 01/11/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 11-17, 1998 ----- BODY:Jars of Clay
Thank you for publishing Steve Rabey's article about the contemporary Christian music group Jars of Clay (“Christian Music Without the ClichÈs,” Dec. 7-l3). The Catholic media, as a whole, should probably devote more attention to this genre of music, which the secular media largely ignores. Unfortunately, most Catholics I know are unaware that this type of music exists. Contemporary Christian music has great potential to positively affect our youth, and I will spare no expense making sure that my children have access to as much of it as they want.
Thomas Infurna
Scarsdale, New York
Nicolosi Responds
Mr. Al Luongo's letter (“Not Really Gay,” Jan. 4-10, REGISTER) states that he experienced eight years of a completely happy marriage and then abruptly wanted to “hit the center divider.”
Hearing this, I would have to question whether during the course of therapy, he had truly come to an understanding of his homosexual feelings. Had he simply learned to repress his unmet male love needs—or had he genuinely understood their origins, and then learned to meet those needs in a healthy manner?
When my own clients terminate therapy, I advise the following:
• After leaving therapy, they must take responsibility to put into practice the insights and techniques they have learned during the course of treatment;
• They must continue to maintain intimate, satisfying, non erotic male friendships;
• They must keep communication open with their wives;
• They must maintain an honest relationship with their spiritual director and/or confessor;
• They must be careful to monitor their stress levels remembering that anxiety and depression make them especially vulnerable to a recurrence of homosexual temptations;
• They must remain continually honest with themselves about their feelings.
The National Association of Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) recently completed a survey of more than 850 individuals and 200 therapists and counselors specifically seeking out individuals who claim to have made a degree of sexual-orientation change, and the therapists who have counseled them. Among the findings: Before counseling or therapy, 68% of the respondents perceived themselves as exclusively or almost entirely homosexual. After treatment, only 13% so perceived themselves. Thirty percent had had homosexual sex “very often” before treatment, while only 1% did so afterwards. The respondents to this study told us that counseling greatly raised their self-acceptance, self-esteem, self-understanding, emotional stability, and maturity.
Clearly, a major orientation shift will not be achieved by everyone; and some remaining degree of struggle may persist over the client's lifetime—as with alcoholics, overeaters, and clients struggling with self-esteem issues. Also, it is to be expected that some clients will change their minds and decide to go back to a gay lifestyle.
A female respondent to NARTH's survey said, “I never expected this much recovery. My relationships with men have greatly improved—I am able to relate sexually to men in a way I never was before. I'm learning to leave behind the familiar protective emotions of contempt, arrogance, pseudo—self-sufficiency, anger, and self-indulgence, and practice the emotions of love instead.”
Said a male respondent, “Change is extremely difficult and requires total commitment. But I have broken the terrible power that sexuality had over me for so long. I haven't been this light and happy since I was a child. People can and do change, and become free.”
As for Mr. Luongo's suggestion that I only work with clients who are genuinely motivated to change, indeed that goes without saying. The work of reparative therapy would never be possible under any other circumstances.
Joseph Nicolosi PhD
National Assn. of Research and
Therapy of Homosexuality
Encino, California
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Don't Label Pro-Lifers 'Single Issue' Activists DATE: 01/11/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 11-17, 1998 ----- BODY:Jan. 22, 1998 marks the 25th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that allowed abortion on demand to happen in the United States—Roe v. Wade.
The numbers are grim: more than 39 million aborted pre-born lives and God knows how many maimed, haunted, or even dead women. (Only God knows because, apparently, few states care enough about how women fare after abortion to make such reporting mandatory.) It's overwhelming, really. Enough to inspire millions of Americans of every age, sex, and background to get up off their couches and become real activists.
For this Herculean effort, we are regularly thanked and praised—by each other. But among our detractors, and even among some who agree with us in principle, we often earn the dreaded label of “single issue” citizens.
Anyone who really cares to know us, would soon know better. We could not possibly be “single issue” in the way they mean, given that the abortion license Roe unleashed is, by definition, never about abortion alone. It is always also about women, motherhood, children, and sex, not to mention the question of authority over life and death.
This is evident from the Roe opinion itself, as well as from the ensuing world it helped create.
Many know that Roe found a woman's “right” to terminate the life within her, in the Constitution's so-called “privacy right.” (A right itself nowhere explicitly mentioned in our Constitution, but discerned from its penumbras and emanations). Few, however, remember how the Roe Court “reasoned” exactly that abortion had to be included within such a privacy right.
Put simply, the Court decided that pregnancy and child-rearing were such overwhelming burdens for women, most especially when they were unwanted, that women simply had to have a right to avoid them with certainty—killing is a certainty—whenever they wanted to. That opinion spoke volumes about women, children, motherhood and authority about life and death.
The Court assumed that women are born more burdened than men—a reasoning akin to the old sexist argument that women are lesser than men because of their fertility. It viewed children through the lens of burden. It cast motherhood in a sour light. And it decided that human beings have the final authority about life and death. (True, the Court claimed that it made no findings on when life begins. But, when its clerks burned the midnight oil to research abortion in ancient Greece, they also undoubtedly stumbled across the literature showing the overwhelming consensus of scientists and doctors that human life begins at conception).
The most significant Supreme Court abortion opinion after Roe, 1992's Casey v. Planned Parenthood, spoke accurately—and chillingly—about the relationship between abortion and sex. The Court, observing society 19 years after Roe, concluded that people had come to “order” their sex lives with abortion in mind.
Said the Court: “[F]or two decades of economic and social developments, people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.”
This finding, in turn, became part of the Casey Court's rationale for maintaining legal abortion: abortion is the guarantor of the sexual revolution-definitively separating procreation from sex. What the Court did, in fact, was to put its seal of approval on the worsening phenomenon of non-marital, uncommitted sex, with predictable results—more than 80% of abortion clients are single women.
The pro-life movement has spent the last 25 years in the company of women and families who have considered abortion or who have had one. Today, the movement sponsors more than 3,300 crisis pregnancy centers and more than 100 programs across the country for women or men who are suffering post-abortion grief.
Pro-life activists are familiar with the situations, the pressures and the pathologies that lead women to the clinic door—and to substance abuse, self-loathing, or even suicide afterwards. They have formed networks in parishes and communities to support women, children, and families. We have grown up with those most intimately involved in our nation's abortion problem, and shared life with them. These experiences send us back to the trenches ever more convinced that legal abortion must be stopped.
It is not with a single issue mentality, therefore, that we have worked, or that we persevere. It is with a wisdom developed in solidarity with the complex lives of those we have met and served.
Helen AlvarÈ is director of planning and information for the NCCB's Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Helen AlvarÈ ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: In the Splendid Company of Doctors DATE: 01/11/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 11-17, 1998 ----- BODY:Augustine, Ambrose, and Aquinas. John Chrysostom and Gregory Nazianzen. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and ThÈrËse of Lisieux. Along with 25 other saints, they make up the select group recognized by the Church as doctors.
How did they get the honor? Simply by illuminating the mysteries of the faith and offering timeless prescriptions for sick souls in need of divine medicine.
One of the great works of the baroque adorning St. Peter's Basilica in Rome is the Cattedra Petri, or Chair of St. Peter, designed and executed by Bernini to complement his magnificent baldachin over the main altar. Upon entering the nave, a visitor sees the Cattedra at a distance back in the apse, framed by the huge ornate pillars of the baldachin. Only after proceeding around the altar does the view open out onto the unique splendor of Bernini's vision for the Cattedra: the Holy Spirit in clouds of majesty hovering above the seat, which from below is supported by four imposing figures, each 16 feet high, four doctors of the Church.
Baroque art, as an instrument of the counter-Reformation, usually gets right to the point. The Chair of Peter of course represents the ongoing teaching office of the successors of Peter. The doctors of the Church are set as cornerstones to that office and seem also both to carry it along and to stand guard around it, with the Holy Spirit above providing illumination to the whole. The specific doctors represented in the work are: Augustine and Ambrose, John Chrysostom and Gregory Nazianzen. The two doctors of the Western Church, Augustine and Ambrose, are wearing their episcopal miters; the two who represent the Eastern Church are not. (Therein is conveyed an unsubtle message about the primacy of the Western See, intended for the refractory Eastern Church.)
Marks of a Doctor
What goes into the making of these doctors of the Church? The article on them in the New Catholic Encyclopedia states that there are three basic requirements: “great sanctity, eminent learning, and proclamation as a doctor of the Church by a pope or ecumenical council.” Though one can safely assume that the latter condition is fulfilled largely in view of the two former, a deeper appreciation for the raison d'etre behind the doctors of the Church comes from a passage of the homily given recently by Pope John Paul II on the occasion of St. ThÈrËse of Lisieux's being named a doctor:
“When the Magisterium proclaims someone a doctor of the Church, it intends to point out to all the faithful, particularly to those who perform in the Church the fundamental service of preaching or who undertake the delicate task of theological teaching and research, that the doctrine professed and proclaimed by a certain person can be a reference point, not only because it conforms to revealed truth, but also because it sheds new light on the mysteries of the faith, a deeper understanding of Christ's mystery.…” Vatican II's Lumen Gentium, for its part, teaches us that God himself ‘speaks to us’ through his saints. “It is for this reason that the spiritual experience of the saints has a special value for deepening our knowledge of divine mysteries, which remain ever greater than our thoughts, and not by chance does the Church choose only saints to be distinguished with the title of doctor.”
Intellectual Fence Walking
In mentioning that the doctrine of the doctors can serve as a “reference point” for further studies, the Pope alludes also to one of the more important roles the doctors can play. For it is not only by their teaching, but also by the witness of their lives that the doctors provide a reference point on the delicate question of how to gauge the proper place for the intellect in the overall balance of a Christian scheme of life. As with so many aspects of the human situation, the Church has tried through the centuries to stay the middle course between anti-intellectualism on the one side, exemplified in ancient times by Tertullian's famous remark, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” and in later times by the anti-rationalism of some of the Protestant reformers, and on the other side in an intellectual elitism that was present early on as an element of gnosticism and is with us today in the dissent of professional theologians. The Church puts before us as examples men and women who used their intellects correctly, for the glory of Almighty God and in service to the Mystical Body. To what extent this right use of intellect is a cause or an effect of their sanctity is debatable but cannot be known by us here on earth.
Doctors of the Soul
The insistence that doctors be persons of great sanctity, whose testimony of spiritual experience—as in the case of St. ThÈrËse—can be more important than their having a major corpus of writings, highlights a fundamental difference in the approach to knowledge of the things of God and the things of this world. One could look at the considerable contrast between doctors of the Church, proclaimed by a pope, and secular doctors of philosophy, who more or less earn their titles by personal effort.
How is it that the great men of science and the influential thinkers today need only possess intellectual virtue and not great moral virtue? That in fact, one of the marks of scientific knowledge is that it is objective, or independent of the personal subject with all his or her moral qualities. This characteristic is especially manifest in the requirement that the results of scientific experiments be “repeatable,” that is, that anyone, regardless of moral character, could get the same data and arrive at the same conclusions.
It seems that in seeking knowledge of the things of this world, man's intellect probes and prods, so often rudely. We dissect hapless animals with razors and pins. We accelerate atoms to the near speed of light, steer them head-on into each other, so that the carnage of their collisions yields a feast of scientific data on subatomic particles. And in all these investigations, violent or not, man acts according to his nature, made in the image and likeness of God.
Just as part of God's great glory is the knowledge he has of himself, seen in the Word through which the world was created, so a part of the glory of man's nature is to use his intellect to unlock the secrets of this created world. Those who do this by profession are often called “doctors” and little is cared if they be proud, petty, or petulant. Occasionally, one of these doctors may even stumble into knowledge of the greatest secret of them all: that the things of this world contain hints about the God who made them. Though such knowledge is always open to the intellect unaided by grace, it is precisely here, in discerning the hidden meaning of it all, that man's moral weakness, his pride and prejudices, can veil the piercing gaze of his intellect.
Von Balthasar's ‘Catholica’
This great secret is the mystery of what Hans Urs von Balthasar called the “Catholica,” a term coined to express the universal totality of things as they stand in relation to God and to the mystery of the redemption won by Christ, something far broader than “religion,” broader still than “Catholic” (understood as one expression of religion among others). It captures our belief that under the surface of every natural reality there is a deeper meaning. An effort to extend and deepen knowledge of the “Catholica,” then, is what we find in the doctors of the Church.
The means of pursuing this appear quite different from those of worldly knowledge because we are speaking of a knowledge that is given in love by God as a self-revelation to those who love him. It is a knowledge of persons in a relationship who reveal more about themselves the more they come to trust each other in love. Our Lord said, “To every one who has will more be given; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away” (Lk 19, 26).
The verse applies also to those who pursue knowledge of the things of God. The little they may have at the outset fosters a degree of love, which spawns a desire for more knowledge of the Beloved, which can be granted as the soul in love makes herself more conformable to further influx of divine knowledge. Thus love and knowledge seem as two climbers in a race for the peak, who in vying for the lead spur each other on to greater heights. It need hardly be said that the great lovers of God, those who have most striven to conform themselves to the divine model, are the persons the Church recognizes as “saints.” Perhaps this goes some way to explain why “eminent sanctity” is one of the requirements for being a doctor of the Church.
Accidental Theologians
Looking at a list of the doctors of the Church, one is struck by how few are actually theologians in the technical sense of the term, that is, persons who deliberately went about attempting to expand the body of theological knowledge. Of these, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas stand out, followed by Bonaventure, Albert the Great, Anselm, and perhaps a few more. Others seem more to be theologians by default, who happened to have had incumbent upon them the duty of clarifying doctrine, usually in the face of some heresy. Athanasius, Leo the Great, Basil, and Gregory Nazianzen fall into this category.
But the majority of the doctors' contributions to the “Catholica” are of a pastoral nature, for an understanding of whose breadth an ancient axiom may be invoked: “Whatever is received, is received according to the mode of the recipient” (so sonorous in the Latin that it begs restatement: Quidquid recipitur per modum recipientis recipitur), which here implies that a multiplicity of expressions are needed to communicate the “Catholica” to the variety of audiences in the diversity of their congenitally and culturally conditioned capacities.
Thus, doctors of Church often are writers of catechisms, as was Cyril of Jerusalem and Peter Canisius, who wrote three catechisms that were translated into 15 languages and went through more than 200 printings in the saint's lifetime. For a different audience, Gregory the Great wrote his Pastoral Care, a handbook for bishops. His Morals on the Book of Job was the seminal work for medieval monastic culture, as is noted by Jean Leclercq in his classic The Love of Learning and the Desire for God. Likewise, the writings of St. Francis de Sales are more pastoral than theological, opening to a lay audience the riches of the Devotio moderna spirituality. Finally, contributing by works of pure spirituality are the great Carmelites, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, now joined by their sister, ThÈrËse of Lisieux.
In touching upon the Carmelites, we may note that it seems serendipitous that in English the first thing we think of when we hear “doctor” is a medical doctor. For the meaning applies fittingly to doctors of the Church, especially in the case of those concerned primarily with spirituality, who as it were, write prescriptions to sick souls in need of divine medicine. The Little Way of ThÈrËse is a common-sense regimen for everybody, which when followed whole-heartedly leads certainly to spiritual health, possibly to great sanctity, and for this ThÈrËse certainly deserves her place in heaven and on earth in the splendid company of the doctors of the Church.
Brother Clement Kennedy, a Benedictine monk, writes from the Prince of Peace Abbey in Oceanside, Calif.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Clement Kennedy OSB ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Inner-Child Need Nurturing? Here's Just the Program for You DATE: 01/11/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 11-17, 1998 ----- BODY:A few weeks ago I was privileged to attend the confirmation of a young lawyer entering the Catholic Church. The ceremony took place at an early-morning weekday Mass. The new convert was happy—as was his wife, who is already Catholic.
The good news is that there is a steady stream of converts these days. And converts make great Catholics. They take the faith seriously and want to spread it. It is no accident that the cutting-edge of Catholic evangelization right now is the work of fervent converts, many of them former evangelicals.
There is, however, some bad news. There could be even more converts, except that some who want to enter the Church run into serious roadblocks when they check into their local RCIA program.
Take my lawyer friend. His entrance into the Catholic faith was actually delayed a few years because of a RCIA program. He joined the program thinking that he would learn about Catholicism. Instead of doctrine, however, he got something else: non-directive group psychotherapy.
During the several weeks that he attended the sessions, he learned a lot about getting in touch with his “feelings” and precious little about the Catholic faith. Abusy and intelligent corporate lawyer, he had neither the time nor the inclination to sit through endless evenings devoted to dredging up everyone's private emotions.
On the few occasions when a Catholic dogma was actually mentioned, the tone was hesitant and provisional. “Doctrine,” my friend told me, “seemed to be an after-thought.” The message was that the truths of the faith are not so important as everyone's feelings about them.
After a few weeks of this nonsense, my friend concluded that he was not meant to be Catholic and quit the program. It was only a fortuitous meeting with a Catholic who takes the faith seriously that got him into the Church a year or so later.
Don't get me wrong. Feelings are important, and it may be that adult catechism in the pre-Vatican II days was exceedingly rote and mechanical. A good RCIA program should address the whole person, and feelings are part of our animal make-up. Faith should never be reduced to a memory drill.
Many RCIA programs have ricocheted to the other extreme, however. The “therapeutic” has triumphed to the point of obliterating doctrine. The locus of infallibility has shifted from the Magisterium to the catechumen's private whims and emotions.
This is not what Christ had in mind when he told the Apostles to go out and evangelize. Christ founded a teaching Church, not a California-style human potential movement. And the truths he entrusted to the Apostles have to be clearly stated to anyone entering the Church.
Some RCIA directors give the impression that they would have counseled Christ against all those hard sayings in the sixth chapter of John's Gospel. After all, the doctrine of the Real Presence hurt the feelings of many disciples, who ceased to follow him. The Christ of the eucharistic discourse is definitely not the model for what passes for RCIA in many parishes.
The role model instead seems to be Carl Rogers. Rogers was the psychologist who turned “self-esteem” into a national religion. Having endured a harsh Protestant upbringing, Rogers came to the conclusion that the three enemies of personal development are religion, tradition, and authority.
In the Rogerian universe, truth is held hostage to feelings. If a truth makes you feel bad, then too bad for that truth. In Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong, psychologist William Kilpatrick documents the disastrous effect of school programs based on Rogers's theories. But these theories remain the paradigm. It seems that in American education—and many RCIA programs—nothing succeeds like failure.
People like my lawyer friend are looking for something more important than self-esteem. They are looking for the truth. (The two actually go together.) Yes, their feelings are important and ought to be addressed. But feelings are not the final court of appeal. We are creatures endowed with a will and intellect. A strong person, whether Catholic or not, thinks and does many things which he knows are right, regardless of what his “feelings” may tell him.
RCIA programs are not the only casualty of the therapeutic culture's invasion of the Catholic Church. Whole orders of religious have been decimated. A spotlight ought to be turned on this problem.
George Sim Johnston is a Catholic writer based in New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: George Sim Johnston ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Catholic Universities in Crisis DATE: 01/11/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 11-17, 1998 ----- BODY:When John Henry Newman was named rector of the Catholic University of Ireland it was tantamount to being appointed emperor of Wonderland. No such university existed. It was still but a dream. The lectures that Newman gave in Dublin during 1852, which form the first part of The Idea of a University, sought to define the desired institution. Newman's major point of reference was Oxford, where he had spent the formative years of his life, but of course Oxford had not come about as the result of a series of lectures or by episcopal fiat. The origins of Oxford are obscure precisely because it was not an invented institution.
Of course Newman was not interested in fashioning the idea of a university ex nihilo. He was guided by his own institution and by the history out of which it and the other medieval universities arose. This explains what he had to say about the relation between the university and Catholicism.
There is a similar assumption in Pope John Paul II's 1990 apostolic constitution on Catholic universities, Ex Corde Ecclesiae: “Born from the heart of the Church, a Catholic university is located in that course of tradition which may be traced back to the very origin of the university as an institution.”
There is but one explicit citation of Newman in this document, but his spirit pervades it. Cor ad cor loquitur?
There are, it should be noted, two quite different ways of discussing the question of the Catholic university.
One might take as regulative what universities have become at the end of the second millennium in the United States and appraise our universities in the light of those criteria. Since institutions of higher learning, whatever their origin, either are or have become secular with religious faith relegated to off-campus status, it will seem a contradiction in terms to try to put together such a university and religious faith.
This is the problem Martha Nussbaum faced in her recent book Cultivating Humanity. The university is by definition secular and this makes religious colleges and universities anomalous. They can be permitted only on condition that they accept the secular model as normative. Brigham Young University might find this logically impossible, but Nussbaum thinks Notre Dame is somehow managing to square the circle.
A second way to consider the Catholic university is historically. The formal education of the young that took place in the fourth century B.C. moved from the market place and banquet table to the Academy and Lyceum, which might be thought of as the precursors of the university. But it is not until the thirteenth century that universities in the proper sense can be found. And then suddenly they are everywhere, spread across the map of Europe. Eventually they would migrate to the new world thanks to Spanish, and in one notable instance, to French, missionaries. The university was from the beginning a Catholic institution. From the historical perspective, accordingly, the question becomes, “How did universities cease to be Catholic?”
There have been several recent studies of the way in which universities founded under Protestant auspices in this country have ended by being almost completely secular, their religious origins lost in the dim forgotten past. On such campuses, it would be amusing, puzzling, or irritating to have it suggested that religious faith should play an integral role in the cultivation of the mind and imagination. Nussbaum's approving look at Notre Dame assumes that the premier Catholic university in the United States is in the same trajectory.
There is a very easy test for finding which of these two approaches is actually being taken. If the faith is regarded as a positive advantage in the search for truth, the approach is that of Newman and John Paul II. If religious belief is considered a problem that might interfere with academic freedom and make an institution somehow less of a university, the approach is the secular one.
Many Catholic colleges and universities are engaged in prolonged institutional self-examination as to what they are. All too often, what bills itself as the first approach, turns out to be one more instance of the second. Too many Catholic universities dread being thought of as really different from their secular counterparts. This dread is the source of the countless small betrayals that gradually make it all but impossible for a university to be anything other than secular.
The institutions which today resist the relevance of John Paul II's Ex Corde Ecclesiae, and the thus far ineffective efforts of the bishops to implement it, must find Newman's Idea of a University equally foreign to their efforts. This is a shame. The present generation has not been a very successful custodian of the Catholic heritage. The widespread and culpable illiteracy concerning basic tenets of the faith is intimately connected to the confusion as to the Catholic character of our universities.
The full understanding of the university found in Newman and John Paul II requires that revealed truth not only form part of the truth studied but that it occupy a predominant place. A university without theology, Newman points out, is not concerned with all the truth available. He also warns us that theology practiced independently of the teaching Church runs the risk of setting itself up as her rival. How prescient he was. It is ironic that the declaration of independence from the Magisterium that characterizes theologians in our universities has gone hand in hand with the loss of Catholic identity on the part of these institutions. But this was inevitable.
If theology is only something some people in universities do, it will of course be what they say it is. And since they say it is different things, and ours is an age of tolerance, any substantively regulative definition of the discipline disappears. Catholicism is merely one “faith tradition” among many and can claim no hegemony in the university. This Pickwickian sense of tolerance spreads to the whole institution.
One of the things that the Nussbaum volume clearly promotes is this: The “principle of tolerance” must be applied within the Catholic university and, when it is, it becomes intolerant either to make or implement a Catholic appraisal. It is a feature of modernity that it renders religious faith private, not public. Now we are witnessing the demand that faith be privatized within the Catholic institution on the assumption that it would be unfair to non-Catholics to keep the Catholic character of our universities.
Note that this demand is not made by hostile critics, outsiders, foes of the faith. This is the attitude of the willing accomplices within the walls who rush to manacle and muzzle themselves in the interests of “academic freedom.” If they were ashamed of the faith they could not act differently.
What Newman and John Paul II call for is the robust faith that sees the Catholic character of the university as its proudest boast. Faith is the best thing that ever happened to the human intellect. It is the bulwark of reason, the abiding conviction that there is truth and that it can be grasped by the human mind.
This is not mere theory. Ask yourself who at the present time, other than the Catholic Church, comes to the defense of reason in both the practical and theoretical orders? Moral relativists and stylish nihilists know who their enemy is. Their enemy is the friend of reason.
The modern university is in crisis. When Catholic universities regain their vigor and confidence they will be able to come to the rescue of the secular universities and help them breathe new life into their Latin mottos—Dominus Illuminatio Mea; Veritas; etc.—mottos that are now a judgment on them.
The motto of my own university invokes the patronage of the Mother of God: Vita, dulcedo, spes. May it not become a judgment on us.
Ralph McInerny is director of the Jacques Maritain Center at the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Ind., and editor of Catholic Dossier.
----- EXCERPT: Can truth find its way back to campus? ----- EXTENDED BODY: Ralph McInerny ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: In Boston, a Taste of Miraculous Lourdes DATE: 01/11/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 11-17, 1998 ----- BODY:“A Lourdes in the Land of the Pilgrims” is how a New York City newspaper, at the turn of the century, described the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Word spread quickly about the miracles at the church just a short distance from the center of Boston.
In 1883, a girl named Grace Hanley, crippled by an accident, was healed after both she and her family had made several novenas at the shrine. Her case received widespread attention. Her father, a well-known Civil War general, had taken her to many doctors, but not had any success treating the girl.
The case was only one of many and it wasn't long before Mission Church—as it was also popularly known—began a blessing of the sick on Wednesdays. The tradition continues to this day. Naturally, alongside the cures and answers to prayers, came the crowds.
Shortly afterwards, the Wednesday novena to Our Lady of Perpetual Help started. At one time the eight services, under the longtime direction of Father Joseph Manton CSsR, attracted up to 20,000 people. Although the number of services today has been reduced to five, the novena continues to attract the crowds and the 93-year-old priest continues to lead one of the five.
The church was first opened in 1871 despite the fact that it didn't serve any particular parish. The Redemptorists built it as part of their missionary program to serve the many German immigrants who lived and worked in the Roxbury section of Boston—hence the name, Mission Church. That same year, the picture of Our Lady of Perpetual Help was enthroned above the altar.
With the growing numbers of people attending the shrine, the small structure had to be replaced and after just seven years, the present stone neo-Gothic church was built on Mission Hill. With its 215 feet high twin towers, the church could easily be seen from Old North Church across the city, where lanterns once signaled the start of Paul Revere's famous ride.
Today, the journey to the church from Boston Common in the city center is just more than two miles along Tremont Street, but vigilance is called for as the street crosses into the Roxbury section. At this point, Tremont no longer continues on a straight route but veers to the right. However, the towering steeples remain the unmistakable landmarks in a neighborhood which has grown up around the church.
It was Dec. 8, 1954, the last day of the Marian year that Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church was dedicated as a basilica—the only basilica in New England. The interior is certainly majestic enough to bear the title, with its high dome and, within it, the even higher cupola. But more importantly, the venerable beauty lifts the mind and heart into the realms of the spiritual.
Murals added during renovations have served to enhance the original heavenly artistry, many of which are near the main altar of white Carrara marble, surrounded by its elaborately carved tabernacles, spires, and shrine-like upper portion of Our Lady of Sorrows. This statue, surrounded by bas relief angels, was thought to bear the closest resemblance to Our Lady since Our Lady of Perpetual Help, also a sorrowful mother, is presented only in painting. There are also more than 200 other statues and images of angels in the basilica. Saints abound too, and tell of the magnificent heavenly story.
To either side of the main altar are the Gothic-Romanesque altars of the Sacred Heart and St. Joseph. The Sacred Heart is resplendent in elaborate mosaics, with the same form used for St. Joseph, who, in this image, seems to have a strong resemblance to his foster Son.
Beneath the St. Joseph altar is a glass coffin of a Roman soldier. Although the figure within is wax, the coffin contains relics of St. Nazarius, a Roman soldier baptized by Peter's first successor, St. Linus.
In the right transept is the Purgatorian altar, or altar of the faithful departed, with its detailed scenes in mosaic while in the half dome, God the Father, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus as the Triumphant Lamb, watch angels on the chapel walls escort people from Purgatory toward the heavenly New Jerusalem.
The spacious left transept houses the altar of the Holy Family.
But it is the altar of Our Lady of Perpetual Help which is the outstanding masterpiece. The icon itself is enthroned in a golden frame, ornate with rays. A dazzling gold mosaic surrounds Our Lady and glistens in the half-dome above her, where two angels hold a gold star and a banner proclaiming, Ave Maria.
Marble angels stand in awe before the altar and icon, while the rows of flickering vigil lights by the railings offer petitioners' prayers.
Two “vases” filled with neatly arranged crutches and canes stand on either side of the altar—reminders of the many cures granted at this shrine. A plaque on one vase reads, “Miss Grace Hanley cured Aug. 18, 1883.”
The story of redemption and restoration to health through Mary's intercession continues in the dome and cupola. In the center is the victorious Christ the Redeemer (the symbol of the Redemptorists), and just below him, Mary, Queen of Heaven surrounded by images of petitioning crowds. There is the person in a wheelchair, and the picture of the mother who is holding out her children to Jesus and Mary. There are also the Redemptorist saints: Alphonsus Liguori, Clement Hofbauer, Gerard Magella, and John Neumann.
One scene featuring three priests and a nun is unique in that two of the people pictured are still alive. One of those, Father Edward McDonough is pictured wearing his red stole emblazoned with the Holy Spirit. The Redemptorist priest has conducted monthly healing services for more than 22 years, often before a full basilica that holds 2,000 people.
The historic basilica still contains original stained glass windows, and houses a finely tuned Hutchings Organ built in Boston and installed in 1897. One of the first pipe organs to use electronic action, it was restored and rededicated in September, with a series of concerts now scheduled to run throughout its centennial anniversary.
After taking in the Shrine and Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, visitors will find an abundance of other stops worth making in historic Boston, one of the nation's oldest cities. The city itself saw the beginnings of the American Revolution; there is also the old North Church, Old South Meeting Hall, Old State House, Revere House, Granary Burying Grounds, (highly overrated Quincy Market), and Freedom Trail. The list is endless. The New England Aquarium and the Museum of Science are among the major attractions for adults and children alike.
Economy-minded visitors will find it worthwhile to find lodging outside the downtown area. There is a wide variety of motels and hotels within a short driving distance, in suburbs such as Woburn, Natick, and Framingham.
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Conn.
----- EXCERPT: Our Lady of Perpetual Help is a worthwhile spiritual detour for visitors to the historic city ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: The Wages of Modern War DATE: 01/11/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 11-17, 1998 ----- BODY:The genocidal ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia was one of this century's worst crimes against humanity. The primary, though not exclusive, perpetrators were Serbs who murdered Muslims and Catholic Croatians en masse. Its horrors are well dramatized by the siege of Sarajevo, which was the lengthiest in contemporary history until it ended in 1995.
The city's inhabitants were once a seemingly happy mixture of that country's three major ethnic groups. But Serb attacks destroyed this multi-cultural experiment. In Welcome to Sarajevo, one of the victims pleads to the world: “Everyone must know we're dying.” The sad truth is that most people in this country did know of the conditions of Sarajevo but did nothing until thousands of people had been slaughtered.
British director Michael Winter-bottom and screenwriter Frank Cottral Boyce have freely adapted Michael Nicholson's book, Natasha's Story, to pose the hard moral question of how each of us should respond when confronted by such events. The mix of fictional drama, re-creations, and documentary footage evokes the reality of Sarajevo under attack and the way its terrors affected a variety of participants and observers. The human element of the tragedy is vividly presented; the causes of the war and the various political strategies involved are only touched upon.
The movie opens with a joyous scene of a bride and her bridesmaids preparing for a wedding. Everything seems normal until the lights go off, which the bride's mother fixes by manually operating a makeshift generator.
As the wedding party gaily makes its way to the church, there's a burst of sniper fire, and the bride's mother is hit. Everyone scurries for cover, leaving the wounded woman alone in the street.
Out of nowhere a flock of vulture-like journalists descend to cold-bloodedly film the incident for their home stations. A British team consisting of reporter Michael Henderson (Stephen Diliane), cameraman Greg (James Naisbitt), and producer Jane Carson (Kerry Pox) shelter themselves safely on the sidelines as they do their work. A show-boating American TV personality, Flynn (Woody Harrelson), breaks away from the pack and helps the church's altar boy rescue the woman.
“That stinks,” a fellow journalist taunts Flynn. “Back home no one's heard of Sarajevo, but they've all heard of me,” Flynn replies. This mixture of heroics and cynicism sets the movie's tone as the filmmakers take us on a tour of a contemporary version of Dante's Inferno.
Henderson is the opposite of the self-promoting Flynn. The humorless, workaholic Brit considers himself the model of professionalism. He thinks Flynn has violated the journalist's code of objectivity. “We're not here to help,” he tells his colleagues. “We're here to report.”
His investigations on the front lines bring him to the Ljubica Ivezic orphanage where the ranks of parentless kids from before the war have been augmented by children who've lost their families during the fighting. At first Henderson sees it as a good story he can string out over several days. But as he intones on camera that these orphans must be evacuated before they're killed, he begins to believe his own reporting and gets emotionally involved.
Nina (Marisa Tomei), a volunteer American aid worker, organizes a convoy of orphans to be evacuated from the city to safety abroad. She persuades Henderson and his cameraman to travel with her, giving her organization highly desirable publicity and the journalists a scoop.
All the children in the caravan must have sponsors in another country. A haunted looking ten-year old, Emira (Emira Nusevic), has bonded with Henderson and feels betrayed when he's unable to bring her with him. Dropping all pretense of objectivity, the Brit agrees to smuggle the girl out with the convoy and take her to live with his wife and children in England. This gratuitous act of mercy risks his and others' lives as he breaks international law in the process.
Against all odds Henderson succeeds. But then Emira's mother, who had abandoned her as a baby, surfaces in Sarajevo and wants her back. The journalist must now return to the war zone and persuade the woman to sign papers allowing him to adopt the child.
The filmmakers carefully work against the sentimentality inherent in the premise. As Henderson's involvement with Emira deepens, the movie counterpoints the scenes of personal melodrama with realistic footage of the siege. Its images capture both the absurdity and dangers of the situation.
Henderson lives in a Holiday Inn with almost no electricity and where the restaurant's waiters double as gangsters in the black market. While the Brit struggles with his conscience over whether to help Emira, he passes up the bigger and more horrifying story of Serb concentration camps which a freelancer breaks and sells to his network.
The most chilling scene takes place on the orphans' convoy where Serbian soldiers, looking like rejects from a heavy metal rock band, board the bus and almost randomly pull kids off it whom they believe are Muslim. The fear in the children's eyes contrasts with the callous, humorous banter of the Serbs.
History rarely consists of the kind of heroics found in Hollywood movies. For people like Yugoslavia's Muslims and Croats, it seems like a meatgrinder which crushes people without reason. Welcome to Sarajevo shows us how in this environment the small acts of decency which journalists like Henderson and Flynn exhibit often result from mixed motives. By such means the goodness in human nature is never extinguished despite the atrocities.
The filmmakers want to make sure the world never forgets what happened during the siege, and their work has succeeded in making a contribution to that end. The audience experiences both the horror of killing and the few brave gestures of compassion in a way that sticks in the memory for some time after.
The USCC classification of Welcome to Sarajevo is A-III: adults. The film is rated R by Motion Picture Association of America.
John Prizer, the REGISTER's Art & Culture correspondent, writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: With melodrama and documentary footage, Welcome to Sarajevo produces an affecting portrait of one of this century's darkest events ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: FILM clips DATE: 01/11/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 11-17, 1998 ----- BODY:Derivative sea adventure tracking the attempt to rescue a U.S. nuclear submarine that has sunk in waters inhabited by mysterious, benign alien creatures. Writer-director James Cameron drowns the fantasy in a sea of dopey interpersonal distractions and technological razzle-dazzle. Intense underwater action with drownings, resuscitations, and locker room language. The USCC classification is A-III. The film is rated PG-13. (FoxVideo, $14.98)
Convincing dramatization of Nicholas Monsarrat's World War II novel about the captain (Jack Hawkins) of a British convoy escort battling U-boats in the Atlantic until the ship is torpedoed and he finishes the war in command of a corvette guarding convoys bound for the Russian port of Murmansk. Director Charles Frend calls up a sense of realism by filming the action in semidocumentary style, but what makes the picture memorable is its understated story of a conscientious captain, a sensible crew made up mostly of civilian conscripts and their courage in facing the enemy as well as the perils of the sea. Wartime violence. The USCC classification is A-I. (Republic, $9.98)
When the boiler in an aging ocean liner blows, the captain (George Sanders) delays evacuating the sinking vessel while his chief engineer tries to contain the damage. Writer-director Andrew Stone's so-so disaster movie centers on the plight of a trapped woman (Dorothy Malone) whose husband (Robert Stack) gets heroic help from one of the crew (Woody Strode). Much menace, including a terrified child. The USCC classification is A-I. (MGM/UA, $19.98)
Massive tidal wave overturns an ocean liner, leaving just enough survivors to exemplify every stereotype and clichÈ expected by disaster movie fans. Gene Hackman plays a liberal minister leading his instant flock of Hollywood stars to the deepest part of the hull where there is an air pocket and chance of escape. Ronald Neame directs the mushy but occasionally gripping tale for viewers seeking escapist fare. Stylized violence, a few sexual references, and some profanity. The USCC classification is A-III. The film is rated PG. (CBS-Fox, $19.98)
Failed action melodrama with Jason Robards and Richard Jordan in a story about attempts by American and Russian soldiers of fortune to recover rare minerals from the sunken luxury liner. Director Jerry Jameson's lackluster underwater adventure is unbelievably lethargic and muddleheaded. Menacing situations. The USCC classification is A-II. The film is rated PG. (CBS-Fox, $29.98)
Vivid British dramatization of the tragic end to the 1912 maiden voyage of the Titanic, the so-called unsinkable luxury liner, after it hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic and went down with some 1,400 victims, leaving only 705 survivors. Directed by Roy Ward Baker from Eric Ambler's adaptation of Walter Lord's book, the story of the voyage is told through numerous vignettes of the passengers, both famous and ordinary, with one of the ship's officers (Kenneth More) providing some narrative continuity, especially during the scenes of panic, confusion, and resignation aboard the sinking vessel whose end moves viewers with its sense of human loss. Menacing situations mixed with uplifting ones. The USCC classification is A-I. (Paramount, $19.95)
Uneven dramatization of the 1912 sinking of the “unsinkable” title liner bogs down in the shipboard strife between a rich dandy (Clifton Webb) and his estranged wife (Barbara Stanwyck), though it achieves tragic proportions after the liner's hull is ripped open by an iceberg. Director Jean Negulesco spends most of the movie developing characters who only become compelling in their varied reactions to the ship's disaster and lack of lifeboats for all the passengers. Marital discord and life-threatening situations. The USCC classification is A-II. (FoxVideo, $19.98)
Ponderous screen version of Meredith Willson's stage musical about a Colorado backwoods tomboy (Debbie Reynolds) who, after a stint singing in a frontier bar, marries a rich miner (Harve Presnell) but is snubbed by Denver society until she is accepted by European nobility and survives the Titanic. Director Charles Walters tries to keep the narrative bright and light-hearted but Molly's elitist hankerings never square with her free-spirited, egalitarian manner, a central flaw compounded by lackluster songs and flat-footed production numbers. Some romantic complications, sexual innuendo, and occasional crude language. The USCC classification is A-II. (MGM/UA, $19.98)
USCC Office of Film and Broadcasting Classification Guide
A-I — general patronage
A-II — adults and adolescents
A-III — adults
A-IV — adults, with reservations (This classification designates problematic films that, while not morally offensive in themselves, require caution and some analysis and explanation as a safeguard against wrong interpretations and false conclusions.)
O — morally offensive.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: A Haunting Future Foretold DATE: 01/11/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 11-17, 1998 ----- BODY:The habit of sin blinds the intellect, declared the Second Vatican Council in Gaudium et Spes. Nowhere is the truth of this insight more obvious than in social attitudes toward killing after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Pro-lifers predicted then that abortion would lead to euthanasia and infanticide, and were mocked. Today it's obvious that they were right.
Euthanasia, or killing the elderly and disabled when judged that death would be better than life for them, is a subject of debate throughout the country. The people of Oregon voted to permit the practice two years ago, and despite the arguments presented by Catholics and other opponents, ratified their decision in another ballot—60% to 40%—last November.
What matters far more than the law though, is the actual practice. Veritas est in re, iam non in schemate, wrote Thomas Aquinas: “Truth is in the thing, not in the theory.” The pertinent “thing” here is that Michigan juries have refused to convict Jack Kevorkian, the retired pathologist turned angry doctor-assisted-suicide zealot who has helped people die in his rusty van. His acquittals mean that whatever the law says is irrelevant: professionals who kill their patients will not be punished.
Life's Beginning & End
The arguments about killing the suffering or elderly are more complicated than the arguments about killing preborn babies. With abortion, the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” draws a bright line. It is possible—and common—for proponents of abortion to pretend the line is blurry, asking when life begins.
The question is obviously nonsensical though, since everyone uses the same moment—conception—as a point of reference. Instead the debate now centers on how many days after fertilization implantation takes place, how many weeks after fertilization all organs are present, or how many months after fertilization does the developing baby become sentient. The pro-life assertion is simple: the individual's life begins at the beginning, not two weeks or six months later. Anyone who wants to find it can see the bright line.
In sharp contrast, euthanasia debates begin in an area that really is gray. It is wrong to end life, but morally permissible to let death occur naturally. The problem is that some measures are ambiguous, such as the use of pain killers. We are morally required to use “ordinary” means to protect life, but we are not required to use “extraordinary” means. The line between the two is not always clear. Not infrequently, the moral distinctions that matter turn on intent: Is it your intent to bring comfort or to hasten death?
There is a little-noted but devastating carry-over from the abortion debate into the euthanasia debate. In the abortion debate, pro-lifers worked hard to frame their position in secular language, available to everyone in a pluralistic society. Pro-lifers did not ignore the dimension of faith, but did not make it the basis of their arguments.
That approach may have made sense with abortion, but it is crippling with euthanasia. The commitment to secularized argumentation means that everyone quietly accepts the assumption that death is the end of life. When Jack Kevorkian offers to end a client's pain by killing her, there is a flurry of concern about palliative care, and about whether assisting suicides is the proper role for the medical profession. The very practical question, “Does palliative care work?” is left aside because it has religious overtones.
In fact, suicide may not end one's pain at all—it may prolong it forever. There is no logical or experiential basis for the belief that death is a reliable method to end suffering. Who says that death ends your pain? This critical question was never part of the assisted-suicide debate in Oregon, jury deliberations in Michigan, or any public discussion in the nation. Habits formed during the abortion debate leave us hesitant to talk about heaven and hell, salvation or redemption, even at the end of life when these are the most pressing and practical questions.
A Breath Short of Infanticide
Within a year after the Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions were announced, the link to infanticide was made. Oct. 4, 1973, an abortionist in Boston committed an act of murder, but whether it was an abortion or infanticide was debatable.
Kenneth Edelin attempted to abort a pre-born child, 24 weeks old, by saline poisoning. That failed, so he cut open the mother's uterus and removed the child, who died at some point in the process. He was tried in 1975 for manslaughter and convicted, but the verdict was later reversed.
The question before the court was not whether Edelin killed a large pre-born child, or whether he had done it deliberately—he admitted that. The question was whether the child took a breath before dying. If the child died without taking a breath, then Edelin's act was abortion, and under the 1973 decisions he could not be prosecuted. If the child gulped air before dying, the act was infanticide, and he could be convicted of a crime.
This line between the “service” of abortion and the crime of infanticide is measurable, and can be maintained. But what sensible person can defend the distinction as morally significant?
The abortion establishment did not run for cover during the episode, or claim that Edelin's act was an exception. Instead, Edelin was honored by the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), which made him chairman of their medical advisory committee. He later became chairman of the board for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
The debates of the past three years regarding a procedure called “partial-birth abortion” bring us back to 1973. If a child's legs and torso and arms are outside the mother's body, but the head is still inside, when the abortionist reaches inside, cuts open the back of the child's head and empties it, and then removes the deflated skull, is that abortion or infanticide? How can anyone argue that killing the child before fully delivering it makes the procedure acceptable? It's like justifying cannibalism by introducing forks.
The nation was shocked when a teenager gave birth in a rest room during her prom, discarded the baby, and then returned to the dance. It was horrifying. Perhaps she just failed to see the moral distinctions between discarding a baby moments before birth or moments after. To be fair to her, Nobel Prize winners have also failed to understand the distinctions.
One of Dostoyevski's characters asserted that if there is no God, then everything is acceptable. The same is true of a decision to kill children. The intellect is blinded, and we can't see clearly until we've repented of our sins.
John Cavanaugh-O'Keefe, a veteran pro-life researcher, author, and lecturer, is the director of public policy for American Life League.
----- EXCERPT: When Roe v. Wade was handed down a quarter of a century ago, pro-lifers predicted our current struggle against euthanasia and partial-birth abortion ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Cavanaugh-O'Keefe ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: The Bottom Line: Managed Care's Unhealthy Preoccupation DATE: 01/11/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 11-17, 1998 ----- BODY:Catholics from a wide variety of professional backgrounds are expressing serious concern with the “corporatization” of medical care that has occurred in the United States during the last 20 years. Many now believe that so-called managed health care not only jeopardizes patient medical treatment but also undermines core Catholic ethical principles. Taking Christ's words “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do unto me” as its slogan, the Minnesota-based Moscati Institute was founded in 1991 to counteract such treatment and return the practice of medicine to its ethical roots.
“Managed care has to do with population, not with individuals,” explains 30-year nursing veteran and Institute founder, Marianne Fightlin. “In a managed care plan you don't get treated, you get managed. Managed care has nothing to do with care. It has to do with profit and who gets it.
“I don't think most of the hierarchy understands that managed care is about rationing,” Fightlin continues, “and rationing is the link between genuine medical treatment of the individual [regardless of gender or age] and euthanasia.”
Fightlin named the organization for Giuseppe Maria Alfonso Moscati, a distinguished Italian lay physician and devout Catholic, who taught and practiced medicine earlier this century and was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1987. He lived in an era when his country was saturated with liberal socialism and Catholic ideals were not popular. Although Moscati was only 45 when he died, Pope John Paul II proclaimed him a role model for physicians and others in the medical profession.
“His greatness came in his recognition that all of his work was as an instrument of Christ,” explains Fightlin. “He saw that medicine is first of all a gift, a vocation, a calling, and that we are there to help our brothers. He saw Christ in each person he treated and took care of the sick the way Mother Teresa took care of the poorest of the poor. As a professor, he would tell his students that their patients were created in the image of God and therefore very special. Because he aspired to the core beliefs of a Catholic physician, he is the image of what we're trying to restore.”
To date, the Moscati Institute advisory board includes three prelates: Bishop Raymond Burke of LaCrosse, Wis.; Bishop Roger Schweitz OMI of Duluth, Minn.; and Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Neb. Additional board members include William Bentley Ball, a nationally known constitutional lawyer; Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons; Msgr. William Smith of St. Joseph Seminary (Dunwoodie) in Yonkers, N.Y.; and a hand-selected group of canon lawyers, journalists, theologians, physicians, and nurses.
“There's no question about the need [for this organization],” says Donna Steichen, a Catholic journalist and author of the book Ungodly Rage. “Everybody in the medical field is aware that HMOs have reduced the level of medical care, just as things like abortion and euthanasia have reduced, if not destroyed, the respect for the sacredness of the human individual. We can all see that the recovery has to start somewhere. The Moscati Institute is a beginning.”
For Catholic medical professionals in each diocese around the country, the Institute plans to offer retreats, days of recollection, White Masses (liturgies for medical professionals) and seminars to promote genuine Catholic teachings and ethics, especially as such teaching relates to current medical practices. Additional conferences on viable alternatives to managed care are also planned for the public at large, as well as encouragement for Catholic insurance providers and actuaries to further develop such options.
In addition, the Institute plans to set up a toll-free telephone number for anyone seeking a Catholic perspective on various medical issues, such as the definition of ordinary and extraordinary means of preserving life, what to do in a case of medical negligence or maltreatment, and referral information to set up a medical savings account.
“This organization is more important than ever for today because of the way life is trifled with so easily,” says Father Alfred Kunz, a canon lawyer and former head of the matrimonial tribunal for the Diocese of Madison, Wis.
“We need a clearing house for questions that have to do with the protection of life and the ethical means to protect [it],” adds the priest, who is now pastor of St. Michael's Parish in Dane, Wis. He believes the toll-free number will help protect people from unknowingly making decisions that are opposed to the sanctity of life. Many times, people who seek professional advice are being told that something is a routine procedure, when it could in fact be unethical, he said.
Father Kunz says the toll-free phone lines would be staffed by people versed in moral theology and up-to-date on the latest medical procedures. The Moscati Institute plans to be an outside source by which people can investigate or confirm such information.
Adding a further cause for concern, Father Kunz warns: “Just because a hospital goes under the name Catholic, certainly does not necessarily mean that all of the medical procedures are moral.”
Dr. John Brennan, a Milwaukeebased ob-gyn, who has been practicing medicine for more than 27 years, and a former president of the Catholic Medical Association, agrees: “I'm afraid that there are disadvantages to managed medical care, both for the patient and for the doctor. [It's] called the best medicine for the least cost, and that's a fault because you don't get the best medicine for the least cost. With the loss of nuns [in Catholic hospitals], we lost charitable hospitals.
“Now it's hospitals for profit. That's a step in the wrong direction—lay people making profits out of medical care when the nuns were giving their lives for charity in medical care. The nuns certainly wanted to break even, but they weren't looking for profits [at the expense of inappropriate or inadequate medical treatment].”
In addition, Brennan notes that many Catholic hospitals are merging with non-Catholic hospitals and, in the process, often abandon their adherence to Catholic ethical principles, such as refusing to perform abortions, offer contraceptives, sterilizations, in vitro fertilization, or euthanasia procedures.
Adds Fightlin: “Catholic hospitals feel that they can't survive without government money, but the government money is what produces onerous regulations.”
In sum, The Moscati Institute offers a resource to train health care professionals to incorporate genuine Catholic medical ethics in their practice, to regain focus on the individual patient rather than the bottom line corporate dollar in assessing medical treatment, and to continue to develop viable alternatives to managed medical care.
Karen Walker writes from Corona del Mar, Calif.
Work of a Catholic Hospital?
“I haven't recovered from the shock of St. John's Catholic Hospital here in Oxnard, [Calif.] starving a patient to death a few years ago,” says Catholic journalist Donna Steichen, citing an incident that was widely publicized in local newspapers in Southern California. “He was a young patient who had been severely injured in an accident and had been in a coma for a long time. At the request of his mother, they removed his food and water.… But that's not what a Catholic hospital is supposed to be doing.”
Robert Helmueller, whose wife and daughter are both registered nurses and on the Moscati advisory board, found himself caught in a similar situation. With his wife and daughter out of town, he was left to be the decision-maker when his 93-year-old mother-in-law sought unexpected treatment at a Catholic hospital in the Midwest. Although she went in to treat a broken leg, she was kept overnight and by the following afternoon became unresponsive.
The treating physician informed Helmueller that she had suffered a stroke and asked if he wanted the hospital to use “extraordinary means” to keep her alive. Helmueller refused, unaware at the time that a subsequent examination of the medical charts would reveal that she had been over-medicated.
Two days later, Helmueller requested her transfer to a hospice, where she would receive appropriate care for her continued unresponsive condition. But before the transfer, the medical staff injected her with a massive dose of Delantin. She died before the transfer could even take place.
“What happened to my mother-in-law five years ago alarmed [my wife and daughter] that there are other people who are being killed the same way. If you happen to be over 65 years of age—look out when you go to the hospital [even a so-called Catholic hospital],” warns Helmueller.
—Karen Walker
----- EXCERPT: The Moscati Institute wants patients--not business--to be medicine's top priority ----- EXTENDED BODY: Karen Walker ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Food and Water: 'Extraordinary Treatment' of the Dying? DATE: 01/11/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 11-17, 1998 ----- BODY:Food, water, and oxygen are not “treatment”—they are fundamental medical care and they are basic human rights. Just as a basic right (to life) was discarded for an artificially manufactured “right” (to privacy) to impose abortion, now another genuine basic right (to food and water) is being jettisoned in order to impose another phony “right” (to die).
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “Whatever its motives and means, direct euthanasia consists in putting an end to the lives of handicapped, sick, or dying persons. It is morally unacceptable. Thus an act or omission which, of itself or by intention, causes death in order to eliminate suffering constitutes a murder gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person and to the respect due to the living God, his Creator. The error of judgment into which one can fall in good faith does not change the nature of this murderous act, which must always be forbidden and excluded” (2277).
Bishop James McHugh of Camden, N.J. in his 1991 pastoral letter Death and Dying Issues said: “Food and water does not cure the PVS [Persistent Vegetative State] patient; it maintains life. It does not cause suffering for the patient nor is it considered exceptional or experimental medical technology. If the nutrition is discontinued then the patient will die because a new cause of death has been introduced, that is, from a deliberately intended deprivation of nourishment, or in common language, from starvation.”
No person should be deprived of food and water as long as they can do him good. However, if their provision causes significant pain or discomfort in the very last stages of life when inevitable death is truly imminent—then it may be permissible to withdraw them to avoid pain and suffering.
Therefore, if a stomach tube is causing a person pain, and the person is near death, nutrition would not be doing him any good, and it would be permissible to remove the stomach tube.
In all cases of withdrawal of nutrition and hydration, two conditions must be met:
ı The current form of feeding causes significant pain or is contraindicated; and
ı The person is so close to death that further nutrition will do him no good, and he will die naturally before the resultant hunger and thirst cause significant pain.
According to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee for Pro-Life Activities' 1992 statement Nutrition and Hydration: Moral and Pastoral Responsibilities: “The harsh reality is that some who propose withdrawal of nutrition and hydration from certain patients do directly intend to bring about a patient's death, and would even prefer a change in the law to allow for what they see as more ‘quick and painless’ means to cause death. In other words, nutrition and hydration (whether orally administered or medically assisted) are sometimes withdrawn not because a patient is dying, but precisely because a patient is not dying (or not dying quickly) and someone believes it would be better if he or she did, generally because the patient is perceived as having an unacceptably low ‘quality of life’ or as imposing burdens on others.”
Source: The Facts of Life: An Authoritative Guide to Life and Family Issues, by Brian Clowes PhD (Human Life International, Front Royal, Va.). Reprinted with permission.
----- EXCERPT: FACTS of life ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Will Texas Execute Karla Faye Tucker? DATE: 01/18/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 18-24, 1998 ----- BODY:AUSTIN, Texas—Texas is experiencing a phenomenon that is about as rare as a snowstorm in Laredo—a widespread outcry about a pending execution. And for a change, the Texas Catholic Conference isn't a lone voice in the Lone Star State.
During the past 20 years, Texas has established a well-earned reputation as a sort of mecca for capital punishment. The state leads the nation with 144 executions since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Last year alone, 37 convicted killers were put to death—a full 50% of all the executions in the country and the highest one-year total by any state in this era.
Texas has permitted the execution of men who are mentally retarded or mentally ill, and in 1997 gave a lethal injection to a man who was almost surely innocent of the crime for which he was convicted. None of these cases, however, has garnered the same attention as that of Houston pickax killer Karla Faye Tucker.
If the state goes through with the scheduled Feb. 3 lethal injection, Tucker would be the first Texas woman to receive the death penalty since 1863. Her gender is undoubtedly a factor in the sympathy she has garnered. Texas Monthly editor Gregory Curtis went so far as to write in the October issue of the magazine that “the fact that Texas has not executed a woman for 134 years means that it is something that we as a culture do not sanction in our hearts. There must be reasons, good reasons, that we can sense but cannot articulate.”
Nevertheless, those appealing to Gov. George W. Bush and the state Board of Pardons and Paroles to commute Tucker's sentence do not cite her gender but her remarkable—and by all accounts genuine—Christian conversion, her repentance for the crime and the extenuating circumstances of her life experience leading up to the murders she admits to committing.
“We're against all executions and [Tucker's] seems to be one where there's plenty of reason not to take her life,” said Brother Richard Daly CSC, executive director of the Texas Catholic Conference. “By all accounts, this is a person who has radically transformed her life. All kinds of people, including a sibling of one of the victims, have asked for clemency. It's another reason why we ought to have life without parole as an option for juries.”
Tucker has confessed to her role in a grisly 1983 double murder and even testified against her former boyfriend who helped her kill Jerry Lynn Dean and Deborah Thornton while they slept in their bed.
“Fourteen and a half years ago, I placed no value on human life, even my own. I just flat didn't care,” Tucker told Reuters in a recent prison interview. “But now there is love in me that could spread out to this whole world 10 times and more.”
To fully appreciate the depth of Tucker's apparent conversion, it is necessary to recount her life and the horrible crime that landed her on death row.
With her mother's approval and cooperation, Tucker began using drugs at age eight, and was shooting heroin by age 10. Like her mother, she turned to prostitution to support her habit after dropping out of school in the seventh grade.
When she was 23, after a three-day binge of drug and alcohol consumption, she and her boyfriend, Daniel Ryan Garrett (who has since died of natural causes in prison), broke into Dean's home to steal motorcycle parts. Finding Dean sleeping in his bed with Thornton, the intruders used a hammer and pickax to slay them. When police found the victims, the pickax was still embedded in the woman's torso.
Later, a police wiretap caught Tucker bragging that she experienced pleasure each time she swung the pickax.
While in prison, Tucker became a born-again Christian, married her former prison minister, received her high school equivalency diploma, and began a prison-based ministry aimed at preventing young people from becoming hardened criminals.
Her supporters now include one of the detectives who built the case against her, a prosecutor who helped convict her, a juror who sat on the trial, and a sister of one of the victims. Also in her corner is the Rev. Pat Robertson, the founder of the Christian Coalition, who is not opposed to the death penalty.
Brother Daly has written to both Bush and the Board of Pardons and Paroles (which must recommend the commutation of a death sentence to the governor before he can act) asking that her life be spared. In his three years in office, Bush has never sought a commutation, and no death sentence has been commuted in Texas since capital punishment was reinstated.
The Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty was to hold a Jan. 16 rally outside the state Capitol in Austin to appeal to Bush, a possible presidential contender in 2000, whose decision either way has the potential for sharp criticism from political foes.
If he commutes the sentence, it will surely be noted that Tucker is a white woman while the overwhelming majority of those on death row are black or Hispanic. He also stands to be called soft on crime. If he allows the execution to be carried out, he could be viewed as a heartless governor who stood by while a repentant, Christian woman was killed.
“It's not the fact that she's a woman that interests me,” said Mary Berwick, a member of the coalition's board and the organizer of the rally. “Karla Faye herself and her attorneys will say it's not because she is a woman [that her sentence should be commuted] but because she is a key witness to the possibility of total conversion. She has tried, in her years of incarceration, to make amends within the limits that she can in the prison system.”
Berwick, who is also on the board of Pax Christi Texas, added, “Those of us who live here are tired of the reputation Texas has as the death penalty capital of the world.”
Sensing that public opinion may actually become a factor in whether or not Tucker dies, Berwick said the rally would not focus on the question of the death penalty itself.
“We are well aware that there are people who feel [convicted Oklahoma City bomber] Timothy McVeigh should fry for what he did but are against this one particular execution,” she said.
Pope John Paul II's 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life) included the Church's strongest language against the practice to date.
The Pope acknowledged that public authority must redress the violation of personal and social rights by imposing on the offender adequate punishment for the crime. That punishment, he wrote, should not include the death penalty except in cases “when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society.”
He added, “Today, however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.”
The 21 bishops of Texas's 14 dioceses released a statement last Oct. 18 calling for the abolition of the state's death penalty. “We sympathize with the profound pain of the victims of brutal crimes, nevertheless, we believe that the compassionate example of Christ calls us to respect the God-given image found even in hardened criminals,” they wrote.
The U.S. bishops issued its most comprehensive statement against the death penalty in 1980, saying, “We believe that in the conditions of contemporary American society, the legitimate purposes of punishment do not justify the imposition of the death penalty.”
Dan Misleh, policy adviser on criminal justice for the U.S. Catholic Conference, told the Register that the Tucker case illustrates an important component of the bishops' statement.
“One of the points the bishops make is that God's grace works in every life, even those who have committed horrible crimes,” he said. “It proves people can change. We ought to allow that to happen rather than eliminate the possibility through execution.”
Even as he works to have her life spared, Brother Daly at the Texas Catholic Conference acknowledges that some good can come out of the case even if the state goes through with the execution.
“There's a great irony in the Tucker case,” he said. “If they would execute her, it might have the effect of turning more people against the death penalty. If you can visualize … that last scene in Dead Man Walking, but with a woman being executed, that would be pretty powerful. Her death might do more to end the death-penalty attitude in Texas than anything we've done up till now.”
Dennis Poust writes from Austin, Texas.
----- EXCERPT: State's Catholic Conference and a host of others fight for the life of a reformed killer who's scheduled to die Feb. 3 ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dennis Poust ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Scrutinizing the World in '98: Pope Finds Reason for Hope and Concern DATE: 01/18/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 18-24, 1998 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY—Pope John Paul II told diplomats he hopes his trip to communist Cuba this week will help the island nation's citizens achieve a “more just and united” homeland.
In his annual “State of the World” address to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See, the Pope said he hoped the first-ever papal visit to Cuba will give him an opportunity to strengthen “not only the courageous Catholics of that country but also all their fellow citizens” in realizing their legitimate aspirations.
The nearly 40-minute speech Jan. 10 in the Vatican marked the Pope's yearly review of successes and setbacks around the globe. He delivered it in French to representatives of more than 165 countries that have diplomatic ties with the Holy See.
The Pontiff's comments on Cuba were the first in which he has spoken so specifically about what he believes his historic trip Jan. 21—25 may achieve.
The Vatican hopes the landmark visit will lead to genuine dialogue between communist authorities and the Catholic Church and to greater religious, personal, and political freedoms for Cubans. It has welcomed some recent openings by Cuban leader Fidel Castro, but views them as “one-off gestures” connected to the visit and is seeking permanent concessions.
In December, the Cuban government granted a public holiday for Christmas for the first time in 28 years. Castro also held his first formal meeting for 12 years with the island's Catholic hierarchy, led by the archbishop of Havana, Cardinal Jaime Ortega.
The Pope's annual “world review” generally is considered to be among his most important speeches of the year. It is followed closely in ambassadorial circles because it suggests a blueprint of the Holy See's diplomatic initiatives for the new year.
In this year's address, Pope John Paul II also turned his thoughts to another communist regime, China, saying he was hoping for “the establishment of more friendly relations with the Holy See” to help believers there.
“This would enable Chinese Catholics to live their faith fully inserted into the communion of the whole Church as she approaches the Great Jubilee,” he said.
The government-controlled Patriotic Catholic Church does not acknowledge the supremacy of the Holy See, forcing Roman Catholics in China to worship clandestinely. Clergy loyal to the Pope risk arrest and imprisonment.
Speaking of other Asian concerns, the Pope turned his attention to economics, calling for “serious reflection on the morality of the economic and financial markets” currently in turmoil. He said the region needs “greater sensitivity to social justice,” noting that those most affected by the recent collapse of Asia's tiger economies are the countries' ordinary citizens.
PEACE BUILDING EFFORTS
Yet all was not bleak in his new year's review—Pope John Paul II praised initiatives for dialogue in Northern Ireland and the two Koreas and the “more or less relative peace” holding in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
“We cannot but encourage the resumption of dialogue between the parties that for so many years have been opposed to one another in Northern Ireland,” he said. “May all parties have the courage to persevere in order to overcome present perils, there, as in other regions of Europe.”
As for Bosnia, the Pope urged the international community to help the return of refugees to their homes and to ensure respect for the fundamental rights of the three ethnic communities that make up the country. He said these are “preconditions necessary for the vitality of the country,” adding that his “unforgettable pastoral visit to Sarajevo last spring” made him even more clearly aware of this.
The Pope also applauded peace talks being held in Geneva between North and South Korea. The discussions aimed at formally ending the 1950-53 Korean War, he said, could “considerably reduce tension in the whole region.”
In addition, the John Paul hailed the international treaty banning anti-personnel land mines, signed by more than 120 nations last month in Ottawa. The Vatican, he said, was preparing to ratify the accord soon.
The land mine treaty and several environmental issues discussed by the world community during the past year showed an “increase of sensitivity,” the Pope said, to humanity's role as “stewards of creation.” He said this also corresponded to the conviction that “true happiness can only come about when we work with one another, not against one another.”
TROUBLE SPOTS
First on the Pope's list of “crisis spots” was Algeria. He pulled no punches in denouncing ongoing massacres, reportedly by Islamic extremists, which this month alone have left more than 1,000 people dead.
“We see a whole country held hostage to inhuman violence that no political, far less religious motivation, could legitimize,” the Pope said in one of the speech's most forceful passages.
He told Algerian Islamic fundamentalists bluntly: “I insist on repeating clearly to all once again that no one may kill in God's name: this is to misuse the divine name and to blaspheme.”
Muslim rebels in Algeria have led a six-year insurgency in a bid to topple the country's military-backed government. The Pope called for “people of good will, in that country and elsewhere,” to support those who believe in dialogue.
The 77-year-old Pontiff, now in the 20th year of his history-making reign, was also unequivocal in his condemnation of the United Nations embargo against Iraq. He branded the sanctions, imposed on Iraq after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait, as “pitiless.”
“I must call upon the consciences of those who, in Iraq and elsewhere, put political, economic, or strategic considerations before the fundamental good of the people and I ask them to show compassion.”
Reiterating his strong calls against the use of embargoes as weapons, he said: “The weak and the innocent cannot pay for mistakes for which they are not responsible.”
He prayed that Iraq would be able “to regain its dignity [and] experience normal development….”
John Paul also warned that Middle East peace “is practically at a standstill” and vowed that the Holy See would keep up efforts at dialogue with all sides.
“My thoughts turn at this time to all those—Israelis and Palestinians—who in recent years had hoped that justice, security, peace, and a normal everyday life would finally dawn on this holy land,” he said. “The Holy See maintains a constant concern for this part of the world and it conducts its activity in accordance with the principles that have always guided it.”
Pope John Paul II said he prays daily that Jerusalem, together with Bethlehem and Nazareth, will become “a place of justice and peace where Jews, Christians, and Muslims will finally be able to walk together before God.”
Turning his attention to Africa, the Pope urged a sense of self-reliance so that Africans “not rely on outside assistance for everything.”
John Paul called for solidarity among the continent's leaders to foster peace and development. He drew special attention to the plight of those in Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Congo Republic—where brutal ethnic conflict has resulted in millions of refugees and displaced persons, and widespread disease.
“If violent attainment of power becomes the norm,” the Pope said, “if insistence on ethnic considerations continues to override all other concerns, if democratic representation is systematically put aside, if corruption and the arms trade continue to rage, then Africa will never experience peace or development, and future generations will mercilessly judge these pages of African history.”
SANCTITY OF LIFE
Pope John Paul II's final appeal was for respect around the globe for the dignity of human life.
“When the handicapped and the elderly are seen as an encumbrance,” he said, when children to be born are seen as an intrusion into people's lives, then abortion and euthanasia “rapidly come to be seen as acceptable solutions.”
He also had strong words for societies grappling with how to handle genetic engineering and other new scientific frontiers: “When man runs the risk of being regarded as an object that can be manipulated or made subject to one's will, when one no longer sees the image of God in man … then anything is possible, and barbarism is not far away.”
The Pontiff concluded his discourse with a prayer for peace in 1998: “May Almighty God help each of us to forge new paths where people may meet and walk together. This is the prayer that I raise to God each day for the whole of humanity, that it may be ever more worthy of this name.”
Stephen Banyra writes from Rome.
----- EXCERPT: In a sweeping 40-minute address, John Paul II delivers strong words on everything from the Algerian massacres to genetic engineering ----- EXTENDED BODY: Stephen Banyra ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: In Holy Land, Ramadan Can Strengthen Community Ties or Bring Fear DATE: 01/18/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 18-24, 1998 ----- BODY:JERUSALEM—In the Armenian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, the shops and restaurants are adorned with Christmas trees and decorations well into the month of January. For the Eastern Rite Armenians, the Latin Catholic celebrations of Jesus' Nativity are only a prelude to their own Christmas festivities, which began Jan. 18.
Despite the festive Christmas mood that permeates the district at this time of year, it is another religious tradition—the Muslim holy month of Ramadan—that is occupying their thoughts today. Since Ramadan began in late December, the Christians of the Holy Land have consciously avoided eating, drinking, or smoking around Muslim friends and associates.
During Ramadan, the majority of the world's 1 billion Muslims do not eat, drink, smoke, or engage in sexual relations between sunrise and sunset. Abstaining from worldly comforts, the Koran (the Muslim holy book) says, is one of the paths to spiritual enlightenment and empathy for the less fortunate.
One of the five Pillars of Faith, or holy commandments, of Islam (along with faith, prayer, charity, and Haj, or pilgrimage to Mecca), Ramadan is the holiest month of the Muslim calendar. This year, it falls during the month of January.
Aware of Ramadan's importance to even secular Muslims, non-Muslims make a point of being considerate to adherents, not only out of respect but to avoid conflict.
“No one would bother me if I ate outside, but I'd get some nasty looks,” says a Russian Orthodox teenager winding his way through the Christian Quarter of the Old City, a neighborhood that, despite its name, is now predominantly Muslim. “Why insult or antagonize people when you don't have to?”
He adds that both his parents and teachers urged him to be “sensitive” to the needs of his Muslim friends. “When you think about it, it's not nice to flaunt your food or a cigarette in front of someone who can't have one. I'm not going to fast myself—I'm a Christian—but I don't have to tempt people by being insensitive.”
In such strictly Islamic countries as Iran and Saudi Arabia, violating the rules of Ramadan is a punishable offense, and non-Muslims dare not eat or smoke in public. Although Jordan and Syria also ban such activities in public, offenders are rarely prosecuted. There are no such laws in the Holy Land, but Christians and Jews try to be considerate of Muslim sensibilities, all the same.
On rare occasions, such consideration may have meant the difference between life and death. Rafael Yisraeli, a professor of Islam and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, notes that Middle Eastern countries have witnessed “occasional outbursts of violence” during Ramadan.
“In 1981 there was a popular Muslim outburst against the Copts during Ramadan. Sometimes these attacks are aided by the governmental regime, sometimes not. Growing up as a Jew in Morocco, I can say that all Jews were frightened during Ramadan.”
According to Israeli police and military sources, there is no increase in the number of violent incidents between Muslims and non-Muslims during the holy month.
“There is certainly the potential for more friction during this period, but it hasn't translated into violence or any other kinds of incidents,” says a military source who spoke on condition of anonymity.
If anything, says the source, Ramadan is a time of unparalleled cooperation between Jews and Arabs.
“We've instructed our soldiers serving [in the West Bank or predominantly Muslim East Jerusalem] to refrain from eating, drinking, or smoking around Muslims, and that's true in our joint patrols [of Israeli and Palestinian soldiers who together patrol Palestinian areas].”
To further diffuse tensions, the Israeli Army this year allowed 20,000 Muslim residents of the West Bank to enter Israel for Ramadan prayers without first undergoing a security check. Approximately 200,000 Muslims flocked to Jerusalem's al-Aksa mosque—Islam's third holiest site—on the first Friday of Ramadan.
“Last year we learned that much of the friction and frustration occurs at security checkpoints into Israel. This year we allowed many people in on good faith,” the military source said.
The Catholic Church in the Holy Land also makes an effort to reach out to Muslims during the Islamic holy month.
Archbishop Lutfi Laham, the patriarchal vicar of the Greek Catholic Patriarchate in Jerusalem, notes that Ramadan is a time of goodwill between Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land. “There is no tension—just the opposite,” he says.
In addition to delivering traditional Ramadan greetings from the Vatican, members of the local Church, many of whom are Arabs, happily accept invitations to after-fast meals from their Muslim brethren.
“At the end of Ramadan there's a three-day feast called Id el Fitre, which we attend personally, just as Muslims join us during Christmas and Easter celebrations,” the prelate says.
Archbishop Laham stresses that such good relations are a necessary component to living in the Middle East.
“It's a normal thing. When you're a minority, you must respect the feelings of others. I tell Christians to respect others' feelings and to not eat on the street during Ramadan, just as we don't drive on the Jewish fast day of Yom Kippur.”
Except for Islamic extremists, who have no tolerance for what they view as “infidels,” many Muslims welcome Christian, even Jewish friends in the lively meals that cap the daily fasts.
Despite their many differences, adherents of all three religions have some points in common. Muslims believe that Mohammed received his first revelation from God through the Angel Gabriel 1,400 years ago. Muslims trace their roots back to the patriarch Abraham, and their three prophets are directly descended from Abraham's sons: Mohammed, from the eldest, Ishmael; and Moses and Jesus, from Isaac. Islam views Jesus as a major prophet, not as the Son of God.
Although most Muslims are content to live their lives and to allow others to go about theirs as they see fit, Ramadan is traditionally a time embraced by extremists. For this minority, religious tolerance is anathema.
In the Old City of Jerusalem, one Armenian Christian in his 20s says he is afraid to eat in the Arab marketplace during the holy month, for fear of being harassed or worse.
“Several years ago some Muslim boys beat me up for eating a sandwich in the shuk [market]. I learned my lesson, believe me. But I'm not a Muslim, so why should I be forced to practice another religion against my will?”
While no one can deny that isolated incidents between Muslims and Christians do occur during Ramadan, most of the Christians interviewed said that relations between the two communities are generally friendly.
“Some of the sweetest [Muslims] I know can be very unpleasant, even to customers, after they've fasted all day during Ramadan,” says a Christian ceramist from the Old City. “I know Muslims who get upset at Christians just for carrying a six-pack of beer. Fortunately, most of the Muslims I know aren't fanatics. They're normal people, like you and me.”
Register Middle East Correspondent Michele Chabin writes from Jerusalem.
----- EXCERPT: Christians and Jews tread lightly during Muslim holy days ----- EXTENDED BODY: Michele Chabin ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Despite Some Pitfalls, Catholic Web Sites Offer a World to On-line Users DATE: 01/18/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 18-24, 1998 ----- BODY:COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO.—Catholics are making their presence known in cyberspace. Web surfers who type the word “Catholic” into an Internet search engine will find in excess of 200,000 URL listings (websites) devoted to various aspects of the faith. Many dioceses, religious communities, Catholic colleges and universities, publications, parishes, and apologists maintain websites—even the Vatican has one. “On-line,” one can find everything from six different translations of the Bible (with concordances), to the latest research on the Shroud of Turin, to the writings of the Fathers and doctors of the Church, to the Pope's weekly schedule and speeches.
The trouble is that not all of these sites support the magisterial teachings of the Church, and sometimes it is difficult to know what to expect judging from a website's address title. Computer users might search through a long list of sites before finding a doctrinally sound presentation of the material they seek.
For example: who could know that http://www.jesus-is-lord.com/ contains bitter anti-Catholic diatribes from several fallen-away Catholics, including one who calls the Pope “the Roman monster,” a “weirdo” and an “antichrist”? Or that http://www.catholicism.org/ contains the work of a religious community of men, The Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, who reject Vatican II's teaching about the possibility of salvation outside the Church?
The full range of doctrinal extremes that surround the Church is present in cyberspace.
John Bicknell, a software designer for a major telecommunications corporation in Colorado, is an expert on Catholic Internet sites. He has found a wealth of Church documents on-line, many of them cross-referenced and linked to other complimentary topics, but he has also come across a good deal of information that has a “negative impact” on the faith.
Bicknell said that he feels the dissenting information on both sides of the spectrum that is available on the Internet “does the Church harm from within and from without.”
“This hurts us from within when a Catholic not well-schooled on the documents of the faith … could see some legitimacy in these movements and be seduced by them. It is so easy to become confused,” he said. “And this hurts us from without when a non-Catholic making an inquiry sees this and believes that this is the official position of the Church.”
He advocates a rating system of Internet sites to make it very clear to computer users which sites really do represent the official teachings of the Church.
“There probably should be some kind of registry or review committee for these sites. Maybe it would not be as formal a process as an imprimatur, but it might help,” Bicknell offered.
The sheer number of sites, and the fact that their contents can be changed on a daily basis, makes an undertaking of this kind daunting. In addition, in the secular world of cyberspace, any mandatory system of rating web sites according to content is at the center of a heated debate concerning First Amendment rights.
Benedictine Brother Mary Aquinas Woodworth, a member of the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, agrees that a formal review process is untenable. Brother Mary Aquinas and his religious confreres in the New Mexico community have a business known as “the scriptorium@christdesert,” which designs web pages for other institutions.
“The only way to provide lists of soundly Catholic sites is for bishops' conferences and diocesan and parish web sites to provide links to sites that they like and that are sound,” Brother Mary Aquinas said. “Some simple principles could be drawn up to help pastors make such decisions.”
In the meantime, some new books on the market can help browsers wade through the overwhelming selection of Catholic materials on the Internet and clue users in to their content. Catholics on the Internet by Brother John Raymond of the Monks of Adoration of Petersham, Mass., recently published by Prima, is on sale in religious and secular bookstores throughout the country.
“One of the things that got me to write this book was the number of Catholics that didn't even know there were Catholic sites on the [Inter]net. There are so many of them, I thought somebody should sort them out,” Brother Raymond said. “When you go into a restaurant, you don't know what to eat until you look at a menu.”
The monk, who had a professional background in computer science before becoming a religious 11 years ago, describes his book as “more than just a yellow pages.”
“I offer the information to get people going: how to buy a computer, how to get onto the Internet, etc. You don't have to be computer literate to have fun with this,” Brother Raymond said.
The monk also included information for those who want to use their computers as evangelizing tools by developing their own websites. His book contains the Holy Father's homily on the Church and the computer culture.
“The Catholic faith is so appealing that presenting it clearly will bring converts to the Church,” Brother Raymond stated. “The Internet can most definitely be an evangelizing tool.”
Brother Mary Aquinas said that electronic media can benefit the propagation of the faith in unique ways, because it can effectively convey the “intimacy of love” to the computer user.
“Broadcast media is not intimate—it's one to millions. But the digital media will allow communications to be one to one, very intimate, and on this level, the faith can have life. It's a whole new opportunity for the faith, a gift from God that could bring a new advent to the Church in the new millennium,” he said.
A case in point: Spiritual direction via the Internet is increasing in popularity due to the give-and-take possible on interactive sites that allow the computer user to make comments or ask questions online. At several sites, priests communicate with people and offer spiritual advice. One such site is specifically for fallen-away Catholics who are interested in coming back to the Church, and for whom the anonymity of the Internet is a comfortable venue for discussion.
The Internet may be the ultimate resource for cultivating a prayer network that spans the country, and even the world. Brother Raymond, who also writes a prayer column for Catholic Twin Circle, receives eight to 10 electronic mail requests for prayers per day. He always honors the requests, but often advises the people who contact him to seek the personal guidance of a priest as well.
Brother Raymond cautioned that, although it is an unequaled tool for communication among the faithful, the Internet cannot replace face-to-face contact with a priest, or people gathering together to worship.
“Advising people about sacraments and receiving sacraments are two different things. All my theology training stressed that the sacraments are a personal kind of thing. It's a meeting with the Lord Jesus. That can't take place over the Internet or on the phone,” Brother Raymond said.
The Internet is becoming more complex than just designing attractive and informational Web pages, though. The technology is constantly moving ahead, and Brother Mary Aquinas hopes that the Church will keep pace.
He is developing a new project—an ambitious spin-off of the scriptorium@christdesert. The new enterprise, called “nextScribe” (the participants in the project are known as “the Scribes of St. Peter”), is an attempt to build original new media of superior technical and creative quality, similar to that of Walt Disney Studios and Steven Speilberg's Dreamworks Productions.
“NextScribe is an attempt to be certain that this power of intimacy in the digital media will be used not just to create a society of people of commerce, but to elicit fully-rounded people … people who are the fullness of love in God's image,” Brother Mary Aquinas said.
Molly Mulqueen writes from Colorado Springs, Colo.
Solidly Catholic Sites at a Glance
Here are some of the “experts'” favorite Catholic Internet sites, that include doctrinally sound information:
Brother John Raymond's “Top 20 Picks of Catholic Homepages” from his book, Catholics on the Internet (For Internet addresses to these sites, visit the website for Brother Raymond's community at http://www.rc.net/org/monks):
√ The Vatican Homepage
√ Catholic Connect!
√ The Catholic Information Network (CIN)
√ Catholic Online
√ Eternal Word Television Network
√ University of St. Thomas—Archbishop Ireland Memorial Library
√ Christus Rex et Redemptor Mundi
√ New Advent Catholic Website
√ Catholicity
√ Catholic Information Center on the Internet™ (CICI)
√ Catholic Answers
√ The Catechism of the Catholic Church
√ The Catholic Calendar Page
√ The Ultimate Pro-Life Resource List
√ St. Patrick's Parish, Dublin, Ireland
√ Saints Lives
√ Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land
√ The Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist
√ The Mary Page
√ Office for Vocations, Archdiocese of Los Angeles
John Bicknell's six favorite websites for apologetics and Scripture study:
√ Catholic Insight (http://www.gat.net/~catholic/index.htm)
√ Biblical Evidence for Catholicism (http://ic.net/~erasmus/)
√ Catholic Apologetics (http://pw2.netcom.com~matt1618/index.html)
√ Bible Gateway (http://bible.gospelcom.net/bible?)
√ The Holy Bible (http://www.cybercomm.net/~dcon/drbible.html)
√ Nazareth Resource Library (http://www.cin.org/users/james/index.htm)
Brother Mary Aquinas Woodworth's “nextScribe” studios has a website: www.nextscribe.org
—Molly Mulqueen
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Molly Mulqueen ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Issuing a Call to Holiness Worldwide DATE: 01/18/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 18-24, 1998 ----- BODY:Archbishop Theodore McCarrick
The U.S. bishops hope Pope John Paul II's upcoming visit to Cuba will lead to changes in the United States' three-decades-old trade embargo against the communist-ruled island. Washington's policy toward Cuba must be “rethought” says Newark, N.J. Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, head of the bishops' committee on foreign policy. The prelate believes John Paul II's trip to the impoverished island nation will bring about a new springtime for the Church there. At the conclusion of the recent Synod of Bishops for America, Archbishop McCarrick spoke with Register correspondent Stephen Banyra about the Synod, Cuba, and other concerns.
Banyra: The Special Synod of Bishops for America has been a landmark gathering. Yet some participants have described it as a “no surprises synod.” What's your assessment?
Archbishop McCarrick: I think it was a “no surprises synod” because we all had seen the Instrumentum Laboris [working document] and the Line-amenta [preparatory document] and we had been talking to each other for a while. And, we think we know many problems—certainly not all—but many problems that are facing the Church in the new world. Therefore, it was no surprise that all of these were presented by the Synod Fathers and by those who were helping us to get a total picture.
It was an important synod. Maybe the most important thing of it was that we have become ever more conscious that there is one America and that we are not going to solve the problems of one part of America without involving the other parts. I think our brothers and sisters from the south have learned that, and we in the United States and Canada are learning that, too. All the Synod participants rejoice that Pope John Paul II called us together as one America.
Your brother bishops have elected you to the post-synod council that will assist the Pope in preparing his post-synodal apostolic exhortation. What impact might that document have on the Church throughout the western hemisphere?
Of course, we will approach helping the Holy Father prepare the document with great hope and with great confidence. We will be trying to assist him in suggesting themes, in taking the propositions that were voted on and presenting them as building blocks of the exhortation that he will write.
Yet we come to it with the understanding that this is not just the Holy Father's document; this is a document that the Lord is looking to create. This is something where the Holy Spirit is going to be involved and will guide Pope John Paul II and will be speaking to him, and whispering to him, and shouting loudly to him.
I believe this document will be a call: a call to holiness, a call to unity, a call to service for the Church in the new world. So I approach the document, with whatever small part I may have in helping it, with great enthusiasm. I really think we have a chance here to make this a Magna Carta for the Church in the third millennium.
We're at the crossroads of the third Christian millennium. Taking stock of the Church in the United States, how would you assess her “health” and what is the greatest challenge facing her for the new century?
I think basically the Church in the United States is healthy. It is alive. It is well. There are areas where it is stronger than others. There are areas where we must work harder to make sure we are reaching the poor, where we must work harder to make sure we are reaching young people, where we must work harder to make sure that we're taking care of those who need help. There are many things that we have to do.
However, more than anything else, the Church in the United States has to proclaim the Gospel of the Lord Jesus and that is the greatest challenge. The commercials of the television are the Gospel of today, unfortunately, and they are not the Good News of Jesus Christ. They are often the words of selfishness—often of a search for the material things that have no real meaning in our lives.
So the Church has to call forth its people to a holiness of life, to the cross and resurrection, to the fact that the world has been saved—it's been redeemed by Jesus Christ. We're living in a world that is already the kingdom. The kingdom has come. The kingdom is with us. Our people don't recognize that. We bishops don't always live that way.
That's what we have to do. That's the message. I think we must find how to respond to the loud voice of the world and make even more intelligible and more audible in our society the voice of the Lord Jesus which comes to us through the Gospel, through the Church, and through all the wonderful things that the Lord is challenging us to do.
As head of the U.S. bishops' committee on foreign policy, do you think the bishops' voice has much impact on Washington politics?
That depends on the subject. If it is something where our government is indecisive or is trying to form a policy, then our voice can be very strong. If it is something where our government has unfortunately taken a stand that is very opposed to what we stand for, then it is more difficult—then you have to work with the Congress, and you have to try forming a coalition with those who are like-minded. This happens often in questions that involve morality, that involve ethics, that involve justice for our people.
In some areas, we have been very successful: in working to change migration legislation, in working to get our government to take a second look at the anti-personnel land mine situation.
We're not always totally successful—we don't always make the outcome be the one we would like. Nevertheless, the fact that there are 60 million Catholics in the United States does make us heard as does the fact that we have positions that make sense because they are based on solid moral and evangelical values. Therefore, it's not just us but it's also many like-minded people looking to these principles we try to foster in the positions that we take.
Pope John Paul II travels to Cuba Jan. 21. What impact might he have on the communist-ruled island? Might the Pope's trip also have an impact on U.S. policy toward Cuba?
What I think will happen in Cuba is that the Church will find its persona again. The Church in Cuba has suffered over the years. Recently, there has been some change, and I think that the Church today is less harassed—not totally without harassment, absolutely—but certainly less harassed than it was 20 or even 10 years ago.
I think the presence of the Holy Father will give vitality, strength, confidence, and hope to our Catholic people and to the bishops who have really been heroes and men of great courage in trying to serve and lead the Church.
I think that the Church will benefit from the visit of the Holy Father, and when the Church benefits, everybody benefits. I pray that this will be a good moment for all the people of Cuba.
With regard to our own government, of course, the Catholic Church in the United States has been very critical of the U.S. embargo because we feel it ends up only hurting the poor people. That is a terrible thing because there's already so much suffering, there's so much sickness, there's a lack of medicine, there's a lack of important foodstuffs—many children are sick because of it.
We feel that the embargo has to be looked at again and has to be rethought and reconfigured to allow humanitarian assistance to get into Cuba. I'm hoping after the Holy Father's visit to Cuba, our government will take another look at what is happening there and will make some major changes in the United States' policy toward Cuba.
The Chinese government has invited you to travel to China as a religious representative, together with a Protestant and Jewish delegate. What can you tell us about the trip and what are your hopes for it?
The three of us whom they have invited have not made any public statement. The Chinese government has made this very historic gesture: it's the first time since 1950 that they have officially invited religious leaders.
I'm looking forward to the visit, to understanding the reality of China, and to visiting as many of the Chinese people—especially Christians and other believers—as I can. Hopefully, because of the visit, there will be a greater understanding on all parts of the value and the great gifts that religion gives to every country.
Do the United States bishops agree that the Clinton Administration's policy of “engagement” with China is better for promoting religious freedom and human rights than a policy of “isolationism?”
You ask about the position of the U.S. bishops; there are some 300 of us and we each have our own opinion. Yet—as the one who has some responsibility for our international policy—I always believe it's better to talk. I believe you gain nothing by putting up a wall between people. There is always a value in conversation and in dialogue and I'm committed to that always.
—Stephen Banyra
Archbishop Theodore McCarrick
Personal: Age 67; native of New York City; ordained for the Archdiocese of New York at age 27; formerly president of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, auxiliary bishop of New York, and bishop of Metuchen, N.J.; appointed fourth archbishop of Newark by Pope John Paul in 1977.
Background: Chairman of NCCB's International Policy Committee; former chairman of bishops' Committee on Migration; member of the Pontifical Commission for the Pastoral care of Migrants and Tourists; represented the U.S. State Department as an official observer for the Helsinki Accords; has visited Cuba, Poland, Romania, Russia, Vietnam, the Philippines, South Korea, the former Yugoslavia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Rwanda, and Burundi.
----- EXCERPT: The U.S. bishops' head of foreign policy talks about Cuba and China, and about the necessity of staying focused on the Gospel ----- EXTENDED BODY: Stephen Banyra ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: U.S. Notes & Quotes DATE: 01/18/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 18-24, 1998 ----- BODY:Welfare Alternatives: An Open Field for ‘Militant’ Apostolate
One of the underlying assumptions of those who would reform the welfare system is that Churches and other neighborhood-based organizations should address poverty, not the federal government. Pope John Paul II even applies this “principle of subsidiarity” to “the Welfare State” in his encyclical Centesimus Annus, arguing that only those closest to the needy can give them loving, human service.
But, now that reductions in federal welfare spending have begun, will the Churches pick up the slack?
“Where … are the Churches?” Rev. Brant Copeland of the First Presbyterian Church of Tallahassee, Fla., is quoted asking. “Where are the Christian business people who complained to their legislators about welfare moms on the public dole?”
His question, and some possible answers, were explored in the St. Petersburg Times Dec. 27, 1997.
“Some religious leaders resent the government's assumption that local churches must step in where government is backing out,” according to the article.
“Few have taken advantage of the ‘Charitable Choice’ provision in the new law that enables Churches to get federal money to start programs of their own. Many others think only in terms of traditional Church roles: soup kitchens, holiday food baskets, or missionary work with the poor overseas. Most seem to be waiting and watching for successful models to lead the way.”
The article quotes Doug Jameson, Florida's secretary of labor and employment security, saying, “We're looking to see a lot more…. We want to see Churches become active, militant, [and] do things they've never done before.”
One response was suggested by the Catholic Bishops of Charlotte and Raleigh, N.C., who issued a pastoral letter on welfare reform calling on parishioners to offer “more than prayer and donations,” in order to allow the Church to help former welfare recipients return to working life, according to the article. Another response is being made by Amy Sherman's United Presbyterian Urban Ministry in Charlottesville, Va. Careful research led her Church to start a “hybrid based on other successful programs,” according to the article.
“Under Trinity Presbyterian's ‘neighborhood adoption’ approach, the congregation pours money, time, and effort into a particular nearby low-income community. They act as mentors,” helping people get and keep jobs—and budget their salaries.
The article quotes Sherman saying “Government can do a lot of things, but government can't give you time and love.”
Personally Opposed, But …
Boisterous New York Post columnist Ray Kerrison's Jan. 6 column gave his opinion of Geraldine Ferraro's decision to challenge fellow New Yorker Al D'Amato's U.S. Senate seat.
As usual, Mr. Kerrison was not inexpressive. He wrote that, in her press conference announcing her decision to seek the Democratic Party nomination, Mrs. Ferraro, “was emphatic on two issues—abortion and the environment:
‘Equality means an unwavering defense of a woman's right to choose,’ and ‘As we enter the 21st century, we must all be riverkeepers.’”
“That's her philosophy in a nutshell. It's important to keep the Hudson River clean, but so what if 1.2 million unborn babies are slaughtered every year. How sad. How infinitely pathetic.”
“At the end of the opening round, the candidate was asked whether, as a Catholic, she was troubled that her support for abortion and the death penalty put her at odds with her Church.”
“‘Yes, it troubles me,’ she said, picking her words carefully.”
“‘In 1978, when I was first elected to Congress, I used to say that if I ever became pregnant, I would not have an abortion. I would have the child because I'm a Catholic, but I would not impose my religious views on others. I still say, I will not….’
“How disingenuous,” commented Kerrison. “That's like saying, ‘Personally, I'm opposed to slavery, but if you want to own a black person, that's your business and I'm not going to impose my religious views on you.’”
“The Ferraro cop-out has been used by legions of former pro-life advocates—Mario Cuomo, Jesse Jackson, Richard Gephardt, Peter Vallone, Al Gore, to name a few—who all switched to advance their careers in the Democratic Party.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: World Notes & Quotes DATE: 01/18/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 18-24, 1998 ----- BODY:Ireland's ‘Men in Black’
Time magazine reported on Ireland's shortage of priests—and an innovative ad campaign the Archdiocese of Dublin is hoping will help reverse recent trends.
“Recruitment of men into the priesthood in Ireland has dropped dramatically in recent years,” according to the Dec. 15 edition of the magazine.
“At Dublin's Clonliffe College, enrollment fell from 68 young men between 1973 and '76 to only 18 in a similar three-year period ending in '96. And for those entering the class of '97, the registration book remained blank; not one person answered the call.
“In response to this dearth of new priests, the Archdiocese of Dublin, overseer of 1 million Catholic souls, has turned, appropriately, to cinematic images. A new Church-sponsored advertising campaign uses posters to ask simply: Who are the Men in Black? The question refers not to the action heroes of Men in Black, the recent celluloid flick staring Tommy Lee Jones, but to the men in the celluloid collars in pulpits on Sundays.
“The advertising campaign was followed up with an information day at Clonliffe College last month. About 100 people turned up for tea, biscuits, and a talk from director of vocations, Father Derek Smyth. He told the 60 young men among the crowd: ‘Trust what's going on inside yourselves. It's real, it's important. Take it seriously. It may be the most important decision for others in this diocese.’”
Ironically, while much of the Time's article repeats old, demonstrably false charges that celibacy is the cause of a lack of vocations, the only young Irishman considering the priesthood who is quoted in the article seems to accept celibacy matter-of-factly.
“I don't think I'd enter with the hope that the celibacy rule will be changed five or ten years down the road. This is for life. I have a girlfriend, and that's something I'll have to talk through. I think and hope I can resolve that matter.”
Christmas Conquers All
As Christmas day congregations were listening to St. John's proclamation that Christ's “light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it,” a BBC report was showing that in many places around the world, the truth of those words was clearer this Christmas than it has been in a long while.
Quietly, Christmas has been conquering communist and non-Christian countries. In China: “Christmas … seems to be taking root, where the government has been running a campaign to promote the country's own traditions,” as a counter-measure.
Under its communist government, “Christianity is only legal under the auspices of state-approved organizations in China.
“Nonetheless, at Sunday markets, thousands of shoppers—mostly teenagers or children with their parents—browse at stalls selling hundreds of Christmas cards.”
In Beijing, “Last year, an estimated 30,000 people attended one Catholic church—100 times the normal worshippers.”
One Chinese priest attributed Christmas's popularity to merchandise marketing that emphasizes the non-religious trappings of the season. He is quoted saying, “But, from the commercial dimension, they are getting more interested in Christmas. Maybe this is an approach to the truth. Who knows?”
In Japan: This country with “a knack for copying and improving other countries' good ideas is also adopting Christmas. Not much religion is involved, but there is lots of music and eating. Jingle Bells is now an important part of December and children learn the song in Japanese at school with other Christmas tunes.”
In Cuba: “Christmas celebrations were abolished by the communist government in the 1960s to avoid disrupting the sugar harvest.
“The public holiday, which has only been reinstated by President Castro for this year, is young Cubans' first experience of Christmas and many adults remain ignorant of its meaning.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: In 1997, Great Strides for School Choice DATE: 01/18/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 18-24, 1998 ----- BODY:According to the Virgil Blum Center for Parental Freedom in Education, 1997 was a banner year for advancing the cause of school choice. In fact, the organization describes it as “probably [their] most fruitful year.”
Named for Jesuit Father Virgil Blum (1913-1990), the Blum Center, founded in 1992 by Dr. Quentin Quade, collects, synthesizes, and disseminates information on school choice. Father Blum founded the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and the Citizens for Educational Freedom, and was renowned as a pioneer in the movement for parental choice in educational financing.
Two states saw “definitive legislative successes” in giving parents more educational freedom this year. Arizona's Gov. Fife Symington signed a bill April 7 that allows donors to private and religious school tuition organizations to receive tax credits of up to $500, and also applies the credits for up to $200 for activity fees at public schools. The law goes into effect this month.
On June 26, Minnesota's legislature passed a bill providing limited expansion of school choice to all Minnesota parents. It extends the state's tax deduction for educational expenses, already covering tuition, fees, textbooks, instructional materials, and transport costs, to include personal computer, tutoring, and summer school and camp costs. It also increases the deduction from $650 to $1,625 per child for grades K-6 and from $1,000 to $2,500 for grades 7-12. Additionally, the bill provides for a refundable tax credit of $1,000 per child (maximum of $2,000 per family) for families with incomes below $33,500, which may be used for all the deductible expenses except tuition.
With these laws, five states— Arizona, Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin—have now “completed the legislative enactment of school choice.” Meanwhile, the Illinois legislature passed a bill allowing families who have spent at least $250 on public, private, or parochial school expenses, to claim one-fourth of the expenses in a refundable tax credit of up to $500 per family. So far, Gov. Jim Edgar has not indicated whether or not he will sign the bill.
Also, a 1997 Iowa state budget provision that would have doubled Iowa's tax credit for private school tuition from $100 to $200 remains eligible for debate this year. In Florida, a bill creating pilot school choice scholarships in specified counties won approval by the legislature's education committees. Legislation has been drafted in New Hampshire to let school districts vote to reimburse parents for public, private, parochial, and home schooling tuition costs.
Gov. Gary Johnson of New Mexico announced a broad educational reform program on Nov. 5, including school choice, saying he wants to “let the [educational] money follow the child.” While details remain pending, his goal is comprehensive school choice for all the state's children by 2002, through scholarships phased in over five years, which could be used at any school—public, private, or parochial. He expects the school choice reform to achieve better educational standards, greater accountability, and competition among schools. “With this initiative, Gov. Johnson joins the ranks of gubernatorial leaders of the school choice effort such as Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, Arne Carlson of Minnesota, and George Voinovich of Ohio,” according to Blum Center literature.
In addition, 1997 saw school choice legislation introduced in several states. California's Gov. Pete Wilson reintroduced a voucher bill that would let students in poorly performing public schools use “opportunity scholarships” at private schools. A similar bill, involving $5,500 scholarships, was sponsored in the Pennsylvania House. A bill was introduced in Delaware creating annual state scholarships, with a maximum value of $2,700, to defray private school tuition expenses.
Rep. Kay O'Connor of Kansas introduced a bill that the Blum Center deems “a model for school choice advocates.” O'Connor proposes a statewide program, phased in over six years, which would allow all K-12 students to attend the public, private, or parochial school of their choice, using phased-in vouchers rising in the sixth year to 100% of the state's per-pupil expense for grades 9-12 students.
In Maryland, a bill was introduced that would provide a tuition tax credit of up to $1,000 for private and parochial schools. New York saw a bill introduced to phase in tuition vouchers over three years, beginning with the poorest students. A bill was introduced in Utah providing state income tax credits of up to $2,000 per year per child for students in nonpublic schools.
Apart from a committee hearing in Maryland, no action was taken on any of these bills. But in Texas, a bill that would have given students in poorly performing public schools tuition vouchers for use at private or parochial schools made it through the education committees of both houses (without the choice aspect in the Senate). The Blum Center argues that this reflects a growing support for school choice in Texas.
In Colorado, papers have been filed for a 1998 ballot initiative to let Colorado citizens vote on creating a comprehensive voucher system. A Detroit group plans to gather signatures to put a constitutional amendment allowing use of tax money for private school tuition on Michigan's 1998 ballot.
There were some state-level legislative defeats. Louisiana's Senate education committee defeated a proposal for vouchers for non-public schools. Although the Missouri Senate approved a tax bill amendment that would have given tax deductions to parents with children in nonpublic high schools, a House-Senate conference later dropped it.
While educational freedom suffered setbacks in state-level court actions, resistance was strong, and the state supreme courts will be reviewing the cases. Cleveland's Scholarship Program was ruled unconstitutional by the Ohio District Court of Appeals, as providing “direct and substantial non-neutral government aid to sectarian schools,” but the case reached Ohio's Supreme Court, which decided unanimously in July to let the program continue in the 1997-98 school year pending their decision on the case's merits.
Superior Court Judge Alden Byron of Rutland County, Vt., ruled that it is unconstitutional for the Chittenden school district to cover tuition costs for children attending religious schools in the area. The Chittenden school board appealed the case to the Vermont Supreme Court. In Wisconsin, Dane County Circuit Judge Paul Higginbotham ruled that the state constitution forbids expanding Milwaukee's Parental Choice Program to religious schools. Although the Wisconsin Court of Appeals upheld the decision, the dissenting opinion was vigorous, and Wisconsin's Supreme Court has agreed to review the case.
In 1997, Congress considered, but didn't pass, two bills to promote educational freedom nationally. One, the “Helping Empower Low-Income Parents” (HELP) bill, would have allowed school districts, with their state's approval, to use Title VI omnibus block grant money to fund vouchers for low-income students, usable at any public or nonpublic school. The other, Sen. Paul Coverdell's “A+ Education Savings Account” bill, would have let families put up to $2,500 after-tax dollars a year into a savings account earning tax-free interest for K-12 education expenses, including nonpublic school tuition. Undaunted by a successful filibuster, Coverdell said that “come February 1998, this bill will be back before us, and we will ultimately secure passage of it.”
All in all, the Blum Center observed, 1997's developments “provide a clear impression of gathering momentum helping the process of parental liberation.”
John Attarian writes from Ann Arbor, Mich.
----- EXCERPT: Citing legislative and court victories around the country, the Blum Center for Parental Freedom in Education says movement is gathering momentum ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Attarian ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: PERSPECTIVE DATE: 01/18/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 18-24, 1998 ----- BODY:The 20th century will not end without one more anniversary to remind us that this era of extraordinary progress is also darkened by the shadows of unimaginable tragedy. Jan. 22, 1998, marks the 25th anniversary of our Supreme Court's rulings in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. Because of those decisions, more than 35 million children have been killed, and reasons used to justify abortion are now extended to excuse infanticide. Today babies are being killed in the very process of delivery by a procedure called partial-birth abortion. Many mothers have lost their lives in abortion clinics, and countless others survive with physical, emotional, or spiritual scars. Fathers and grandparents also suffer grief for a child they never met.
What was once seen as an act of desperation—the killing of one's own child—is now fiercely defended as a good and promoted as a right. Even worse, a deadly blindness has come over our land, preventing many persons of goodwill from recognizing the right of innocent human lives to respect, acceptance, and help. Claims of privacy and an ethic of unlimited individualism have been used to undermine government's responsibility to protect life. Legalized violence has spread through our society like a cancer. The powerless of all ages are threatened….
To all our fellow citizens we say: Abortion is an assault on human dignity, an act of violence against both mother and child and the whole human family. Legal protection for unborn human life must be restored in our nation. As the Second Vatican Council also reminded us: “Whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia, or willful self-destruction … all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed. They poison human society, but they do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are a supreme dishonor to the Creator” (Gaudium et Spes, 27).
We recall what is best in our common national heritage: Human beings, simply because they are human, must be recognized as persons with fundamental human rights. Our nation fought a terrible civil war because the practice of slavery was finally recognized to be inconsistent with our national ethos enunciated in the Declaration of Independence: All are endowed by their Creator with the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Slavery is repugnant because it treats human beings as property to be disposed of at the will of another. It was morally absurd then to say: “I am personally opposed to owning slaves and would never own any myself, but I can't force my moral views on others. It is not the government's task to legislate morality. It is a personal choice.” It is just as morally repugnant to say the same about abortion today. Our nation stands in judgment now, as it did more than a century ago: Are we to be a nation that honors its commitments to the right to life, or not? And if not, then just what does our nation stand for?
No one has spoken more eloquently about the sacred value of human life than has our Holy Father, Pope John Paul II. It is he who reminds us that all who are “sincerely open to truth and goodness can, by the light of reason and the hidden action of grace, come to recognize in the natural law written in the heart (cf. Rm 2:14-15) the sacred value of human life from its very beginning until its end, and can affirm the right of every human being to have this primary good respected to the highest degree. Upon the recognition of this right, every human community and the political community itself are founded” (Evangelium Vitae, 2).
We see in our culture an ongoing conflict between good and evil, a conflict between life and death. As we strive to assure peace and justice, too often it is forgotten that the common good can only be served when the right to life, the right on which all other inalienable rights of the individual rest and from which they develop, is acknowledged and defended (cf. Evangelium Vitae, 101).
In spite of the relentless propaganda in favor of abortion, most Americans have not become fully insensitive to the killing of children so weak that they cannot cry for help. Indeed, the 1973 abortion decisions set in motion the broadest grassroots movement this nation has ever seen. Our debt to those who serve the pro-life cause is immeasurable. They are the witnesses and bearers of our nation's most noble aspirations. In a special way, through the national debate on partial-birth abortion, they have focused the attention of Americans on the plight of the child….
To our fellow Catholics, we ask you to do even more for life. Reach out to women who are pregnant and in need of help, to families struggling with financial or emotional difficulties. Stand by those who wish to choose life with the witness of solidarity, hope, and service. Catholic families should be living symbols of our conviction that life is always, always a gift from God. Teach your children to respect human life from conception to natural death. Pray as a family for an end to this evil that destroys the weakest of the weak, the poorest of the poor….
Excerpted from Light and Shadows: The Nation 25 Years After Roe vs. Wade, by the U.S. bishops.
----- EXCERPT: Light and Shadows ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Story of the Dead Sea Scrolls DATE: 01/18/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 18-24, 1998 ----- BODY:by Geza Vermes
(Allen Lane-The Penguin Press, 1997, 648 pp., $39.95)
Last year marked the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd, Mohammed edh-Dhib, entered a cave into which he threw a rock and broke a pottery jar containing an ancient scroll. Though he made only a few dollars by selling the manuscripts, he was instrumental in initiating a new period of biblical studies. Now, after 50 years, Geza Vermes has published a translation for a general audience of the complete set of scrolls and legible fragments.
Vermes's first translation, in 1962, primarily contained the available texts from Cave One. His new and greatly enlarged volume includes information about the earliest discoveries in addition to the texts released in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, where most of the scroll material had been kept from public and scholarly view.
The introduction tells the story of the discovery of the scrolls between 1947 and 1956, plus some of the more recently found pottery shards (ostraca) with writing on them. Though told in many other books, few accounts are as complete as Vermes's. Equally important is the history of “the academic scandal par excellence of the 20th century,” where he describes the history of the scrolls' scholarship.
However, Vermes, who was personally involved in many of the events and personalities behind this story, tells a straightforward and sometimes sad tale of scholarly delay in the publication of the scrolls, their translation, and critical analysis. Unlike some of the ridiculous popular stories about Vatican or Israeli intrigue, he recounts the more prosaic situation of human foibles. Young scholars assigned to the task by the kindly Dominican Father Roland de Vaux, were not driven firmly enough to produce translations and critical editions. The Six Day War of June 1967 saw the transfer of many scrolls from the Jordanians (and a Bethlehem dealer who hid one scroll in a shoe box) to the Israelis. Other scholars from Europe and America joined the enterprise, but held texts for their graduate students to publish in dissertations that rarely were published.
Hershel Shanks, the editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review, began an international campaign to publish the scrolls, which eventually motivated the Huntington Library to publish photographs of all the scrolls' materials, now available to the public in book form. Vermes's contribution to this story is worthwhile, given the rumors and turmoil these events sparked.
The author's introduction includes well-informed treatments of common Dead Sea Scrolls controversies: Did the Essenes live at the ruins on the small Qumran plateau? Did they write the scrolls and hide them in the nearby caves? He masterfully integrates particularly sectarian scrolls, such as the Community Rule, the Temple Scroll, and the War Scroll to answer these questions. Multiple texts and fragments are newly available to readers, though specialists may find them more useful.
In addition, he offers a balanced presentation of the relationship between the scrolls and Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism. While carefully pointing out the differences between the Qumran writings and the New Testament, he shows many points of contact, e.g., terms describing the leadership (overseers at Qumran translate into episkopoi or bishops in the New Testament). The structure of the community's leadership may relate to some Christian structures (the role of the three disciples closest to Jesus Christ and the role of the twelve). Ideas about hating the enemies (“the sons of darkness”) may relate to Christ's teaching against hating one's enemies. These are not new insights, but they are useful to have in this volume of complete translations.
Similarly, these texts provide important insights into the differences and similarities between the Essenes and Rabbinic Judaism. Of course, familiarity with the Mishnah, Talmud, and other Rabbinic literature is useful for appreciating this aspect of the Qumran materials.
Another important element in Dead Sea Scroll research is the discovery of Scripture texts at Qumran. Prior to 1947, the oldest Hebrew copy of the Bible had been a 10th-century A.D. manuscript. At Qumran, part of every Hebrew book of the Old Testament, except the Book of Esther, has been found, providing textual critics with manuscripts one thousand years older than the previously known manuscripts.
In addition, two Hebrew fragments of Sirach (one at Qumran and another at Massada), plus an Aramaic section of Tobit, have helped scholars understand the texts of those two Deuterocanonical books and suggest some possibilities for their place in first-century Judaism in Palestine.
Vermes points out that variations within the Qumran sectarian and biblical scrolls indicate a certain fluid state to the texts. Though appreciation for these technical points of textual criticism is impossible in a translation, having the Qumran Bible texts and Bible commentaries may still be useful to the general reader.
As valuable as Vermes's ample introduction may be, nothing is as useful as reading the texts themselves. Familiarity with the vocabulary, ideas and forms of speech at Qumran offers some tremendous insights into the world from which Christianity came. Readers of these ancient documents may ask, “Why did Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism continue to grow while the Qumran sect died out? What distinctive elements in each movement contributed to the demise of one and the attraction to the others in the ancient and modern worlds?”
Although the translation of the texts and introduction will not end all disputes and questions regarding the Qumran scrolls and their writers, Vermes's collection and translation at least allow many more people to enter a discussion from which they have been excluded for much of the past 50 years.
Jesuit Father Mitch Pacwa is a professor at the Institute for Religious and Pastoral Studies, University of Dallas.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mitch Pacwa SJ ----- KEYWORDS: Books -------- TITLE: Nixon's Rules to Rule By DATE: 01/18/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 18-24, 1998 ----- BODY:by James Humes
(Scribner, 1997, 192 pp., $20)
In the Bible, the Decalogue or Ten Commandments (cf. Ex 20:1-17; Dt 5:6-21), are primarily concerned with apodictic law, not legal judgments. As such, they function as normative guidelines for human behavior rather than as juridical judgments applicable only in specific legal cases. In contemporary understanding, the word referred to connotes the ability to exercise power or authority, more or less independent of any moral implication.
It is of great interest that former President Richard Nixon (1969-74) had developed rules and regulations related to the use of power in the secular world. Nixon never labeled these rules his 10 commandments. That was the work of James Humes, a Nixon family friend, speech writer to four presidents, and author of Confessions of a White House Ghostwriter, and The Wit and Wisdom of Winston Churchill.
On Humes's 60th birthday, Ed and Tricia Nixon Cox gave the author a laminated card they found in a drawer at the Nixon home in Saddle River, N.J., after the former president's death. An introductory paragraph on the card summarizes Nixon's geopolitical perspective: “A president needs a global view, a sense of proportion and a keen sense of the possible. He needs to know how power operates and he must have the will to use it.”
In Nixon's Ten Commandments of Statecraft: His Guiding Principles of Leadership and Negotiation, Humes gives a distillation of the president's experience conducting foreign policy. Except for the 10th commandment (Never Lose Faith), none of the others is expressly concerned with religion or morality—and even the last can be interpreted as never losing faith in oneself or one's cause.
In these rules, there is an almost Machiavellian (or, more correctly, a Metternichian, or even Kissingerian) approach to using power to obtain one's ends. Humes allows each of the 10 commandments of statecraft its own chapter. Each chapter is divided into two main sections. The first section contains an illustration of the particular commandment under review from Nixon's political career. The second section of each chapter offers an example that either reinforces the rule under discussion or provides an example of the commandment's violation. The second examples are taken from a wide variety of historical instances.
Illustrating the first commandment, “Always be prepared to negotiate, but never negotiate without being prepared,” Humes employs Nixon's extemporaneous debate with Krushchev during the famous Kitchen Debate in Moscow in which then Vice-President Nixon outdebated the Communist Party chief. The second section discusses British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's preparations for meeting President Franklin D. Roosevelt in August 1941 on the U.S. cruiser Augusta. Churchill's extensive preparation down to the smallest detail (e.g., choosing FDR's favorite hymn and psalms for worship services) would go a long way to making American intervention in World War II more acceptable to the American people.
Nixon's third commandment, “Always remember that convenants should be openly agreed to, but privately negotiated,” is illustrated by the various extremely subtle signals that the United States and China exchanged through various foreign emissaries climaxing with Henry Kissinger's stomachache that got him out of Pakistan into China without being followed by any journalists prior to Nixon's visit in February 1972.
Even though they are not directly religious, Nixon's commandments, especially the later ones, challenge us—as they challenged Nixon—to see a connection between ourselves and other people, and between ourselves and what we acknowledge as divine. This connection, in our Christian faith, is not based on the exercise of power, but on love. Perhaps one can see why during the Prayer of the Faithful at Mass, we often pray that our political leaders exercise their ministry of service to all peoples. Living out our Christian faith in whatever vocation we are called to not only challenges us but also enables us to leave the world a better place. Sadly, Nixon did not always practice what he preached.
Father Pius Murray CSS, is a professor of Old Testament and library director at Pope John XXIII National Seminary in Weston, Mass.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Pius Murray CSS ----- KEYWORDS: Books -------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 01/18/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 18-24, 1998 ----- BODY:Popes and Anti-Semitism
“John Paul II Calls Anti-Semitism an ‘Offense Against God’” (Nov. 16-22) was a fine article, but contained a factual error.
The statement that Pope Pius XI was the first Pope to condemn anti-Semitism is clearly false. Pope Gregory the Great, who reigned from 590 AD to 604 AD, found it necessary to protect the Jews from persecution and loss of legal rights at the hands of the anti-Semites of that era.
I believe it is essential to point out that the Church has condemned anti-Semitism throughout history and not just in this century.
Joseph Simon
Richland Center, Wisconsin
Getting Richer
We ought not to be surprised by your report (“In the Giving Game, the Rich Give but the Poor Don't Gain,” Dec. 21-27) that some colleges and universities, are among those which have benefited the most from the increased giving by the wealthy, while the truly needy have languished with scarcely any increase at all in the amounts given them.
After all, the colleges and universities have the means to hire professionals who know well how to coerce contributions from their patrons by humiliating those who do not give, or do not give as generously as others. Is there anyone who does not receive annually a booklet from his alma mater in which are published the names of the donors to it, classification based upon the relative size of the gift, so that those who do not give will be humiliated that their classmates and fellow alumni find their names conspicuously absent?
Those who allow themselves to be coerced by these tactics ought to ponder Jesus' advice concerning almsgiving: “Therefore, when thou givest alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and streets, in order that they may be honored of men. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward” (Mt 6:2).
George Barrett Johns
Spring Grove, Pennsylvania
Capitalism and Cuba
I read the recent article on Cuba (“Marxist Makeover: Avoiding a Capitalist Invasion of Cuba,” Dec. 7-13) with interest. I also had access to a more complete version of the Vatican report on this subject that I believe merits comment. It shows that the liberals of this world, and some of our bishops, won't let go of their naive economic ideologies.
The terrible failure of the communist system in Cuba forces them to admit change is needed. However, a later paragraph gave away their agenda; they still believe in socialism. It says the Cubans need a free market “but make sure its mechanisms remain controlled by the state.”
Let's look at a few of the inconsistencies in their thinking. One prelate wants us to charge less for our goods and pay more for theirs. Ask anyone in business how long he or any company and its employees would last using this approach. Another Church official said “the Cuban economy will need huge investments of capital.” Where does he suppose it will originate? Surprise! It will come from the savings, investments, and profits made in capitalistic countries.
We also read that they feel “the Cubans have a basically nonconsumerist society.” Let's be honest, this is not by choice, it is because their wretched socialistic system has no goods for them to buy and their citizens have no money to pay for them. Does anyone think that Cubans don't want better clothes, more food, a new bicycle, a nicer home, etc.?
As has been said before, “Capitalism may not be the perfect economic system, but it is better than all the others.” The sooner our Church leaders learn this the better we all will be.
Fred Holt
Englewood, Florida
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Peace Corps Volunteers Could Do With Some Growing Up DATE: 01/18/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 18-24, 1998 ----- BODY:Two years ago, the naysayers predicted it was bad news for the Peace Corps when Clinton appointed his friend and communications director, Mark Gearan, 41, to head the agency. At the time, it seemed like just another political payoff for a F.O.B.—“Friend of Bill.” The baby-faced Gearan had no special preference for the agency and no experience as a humanitarian. But now it seems to have paid off.
President Bill Clinton announced earlier this month that he will ask Congress to add $48 million to their budget—the biggest increase in the agency's funding in more than three decades. It will boost their $222 million budget by more than 21%. But, before the agency spends more of America's pocket money, it's time to point out there is room for improvement.
The program is the brainchild of John F. Kennedy, who first mentioned the idea in a 1960 presidential campaign speech. He challenged Americans to give two years of their lives to help people in developing countries.
One of Kennedy's first acts as president was to appoint his brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, to study the feasibility of such an agency. In August of 1961, the president hosted a send-off in the Rose Garden for the first group of Peace Corps volunteers, departing for service in Ghana.
In the years since, Peace Corps workers have risen to high posts. The mission of the Peace Corps, according to the 1961 Congressional legislation that authorized the agency, is to “promote world peace and friendship” by providing skilled American workers to underdeveloped countries.
President Kennedy stated in his inaugural address: “To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves.”
But how is that goal best served? Until now, the Peace Corps has recruited heavily at American universities. For example, Harvard University has been the fourth-largest provider of volunteers, sending 1,996 alumni.
The minimum age requirement for applicants is 18. There is no maximum age, and, in fact, some volunteers have been well into their 80s when they joined.
In recent years, the number of retired volunteers has increased—their participation has raised the average volunteer age to almost 30—but the ranks of the corps continue to be dominated by young people with no “real world” work experience.
And, the Peace Corps continues to focus much of its recruitment efforts on students. In the last three years, the agency has been working to increase participation in its Master's International Program, helping graduate students to earn credit for overseas service.
When I was 23, way back in 1982, I volunteered with a private organization, working on a project to develop a newspaper in Liberia, West Africa. While I was there, I spent much of my free time with Peace Corps members, all fresh out of college.
I've seen the corps at work, and I have this to report—most of the volunteers had the best of intentions. They wanted to improve the lives of the poor, and were willing to sacrifice their own comfort to do it. In addition to being good-will ambassadors for the United States, they were good friends to me.
But, through the years, I've come to believe that the taxpayers of America would be better served by raising the minimum age requirement for Peace Corps service and giving the much-sought-after positions to people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. They would have a greater level of work experience to share, bring a higher level of maturity to the job, and increase the effectiveness of the Corps.
Finding mid-career volunteers would require winning support from America's Fortune 500 companies, who might be persuaded to make a pledge to re-hire volunteers when they return from their two-year stint and give other corporate benefits.
After all, this is the age when every company, from Bill Blass to Revlon, wants to look like a do-gooder.
The United Nations has a volunteer program similar to the Peace Corps, but they require applicants to have several years of work experience, and a minimum age of 25.
It might be time for the Peace Corps follow suit. It might be time for America's most-beloved government agency to grow up.
Kathleen Howley is a Boston-based journalist.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kathleen Howley ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: An Urgent Reminder for a Missionary Church DATE: 01/18/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 18-24, 1998 ----- BODY:The shepherds of the Judean hills were rough and simple men. But perhaps only in their simplicity could they hear the message which drove them urgently toward Bethlehem. They received the words of the angel with joy—and without fear. They acted on the revelation of God with faith, and that faith led them to Mary and Joseph and the child. When they had found him, they understood, and they made known the message they had been told about this child. And all who heard them were amazed.
Today, in our lifetimes, we must hurry in the footsteps of these shepherds. We should beg God for the grace to be amazed and astonished as we draw close to the manger, because the truth of this child is beyond anything we could hope for, or expect. We should beg God for the grace to be simple and pure of heart, as they were; to radiate the excitement and joy of their discovery, as they did. Let us behold the Messiah. Let us adore him. Let us be overcome with amazement and go in haste to make known to the whole world all that has been revealed to us about this child.
Ponder what he has done for us. He frees us from the slavery of sin and the fear of death. He comforts us. He encourages us. He teaches us. He walks with us in our sufferings. He fills us with hope. He offers us life—eternal life— free, without charge or obligation. Far from violating our freedom, he restores it, dignifies it with his own incarnate holiness, and then adds immeasurably to it with his victory over death on our behalf, won by dying for our sins on the cross and then rising from the grave. He gives us his Spirit, who breathes new life into our hearts and enables us to love one another— even our enemies and persecutors—as he loves us.
Let us go over to Bethlehem to see this child. And then let us proclaim him to the world.
Stranger in a Strange Land
The beauty of these Gospel passages from Luke, announced at Midnight Mass and Christmas Mass at Dawn, fills me with joy and a tremendous trust in God's love for all of us. Each of us can say with Mary that, “the Mighty One has done great things for me” (Lk 1:49). I thank God every day, but on this Christmas Eve especially, that he sent his only son for me and for you, whom I treasure as my family in faith. It is easy to understand why God loves the people of northern Colorado, and the clergy and women and men religious who serve them. I arrived here in April as a “stranger in a strange land”; but you welcomed me as a brother, encouraged me, surrounded me with generosity, humor, good counsel and support, and took me into your hearts. Now you are also in my heart, and at the center of my daily thoughts, work and prayer. What a grace it is— unexpected; overwhelming at first; but now such a blessing for me—that God called me to be your servant.
A ‘Good Loneliness’ in Rome
Brothers and sisters, the weeks I spent in Rome this fall for the Holy Father's Special Assembly for America taught me a great deal. It was a time of “good loneliness.” In my eagerness to be back home in Colorado among you, I reflected often and deeply on how much good work has already been accomplished by the Church in northern Colorado, and how many outstanding people in our parishes work selflessly for the Gospel. I also thought and prayed about the very many things that remain to be done—and how pressingly we need to do them.
But in working with my brother bishops and the Holy Father, and in walking the streets of Rome, so rich in the witness of centuries of martyrs and saints, I came again and again to the simple truth that what we are called to accomplish first and foremost is not projects or plans or programs, but the preaching of Jesus Christ, in season and out of season. If we do that well, everything else will follow, for the Church Jesus founded on the first apostles is a missionary Church. Without each of us responding to Christ's call to be evangelizers, the Church loses her identity. Where the Church ceases to be missionary, she ceases to be herself.
Missionary, Not Executive
I return from Rome absolutely convinced that the Church must dedicate the fullness of her resources to a new evangelization (cf. Redemptoris Missio, 3). This means all my resources as archbishop, all the resources of the pastoral center and its staff, and the full commitment of our parishes, our schools and all the faithful. My task as bishop is not primarily to be a manager or an executive—though sound stewardship of our resources is obviously vital—but a pastor and a missionary. So too, the people, clergy and religious of our local Church share the missionary task Jesus gave us all, to “make disciples of all nations” (Mt 28:19). If we love him, we must share him with others—compellingly, persuasively, with all our ingenuity and passion.
That is because the good news of Jesus Christ is decisive: Souls depend on it; all creation depends on it. Jesus alone, and no other, is the answer to humankind's longing for God. His Gospel must be announced, heard, received in faith and retold. It is meant for all people; in fact, evangelization is the sign of a living faith. It is never completed. And all of us—including bishops; and perhaps sometimes especially bishops—have an ongoing need to hear the Good News.
In Rome, many of my brother bishops voiced this same hunger to recover a radical missionary zeal within the Church. By “radical,” I mean oriented toward the root, for the times in which we live leave no room for the lukewarm. Zeal cannot be delegated. But it can be shared, and when shared, it multiplies like a spreading fire. This is God's will for his Church in every time and place, and especially today on the threshold of the third Christian millennium. This is God's will for me as archbishop, and God's will for all who are baptized. Radical missionary zeal is the fruit of conversion, a gift of the Holy Spirit. Let us take to heart the first words of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark: “This is the time of fulfillment. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the Gospel” (Mk 1:15). Likewise, on the first Pentecost, Peter said, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Ac 2:38).
Handbook: The Bible
This passionate missionary zeal must be at the core of our life in Christ. All of our pastoral plans and activities, every budget, every hiring decision, indeed every one of our institutional structures, must be reviewed and revised in light of this primary mission of the Church. Our handbook for mission effectiveness is not modern organizational theory, valuable as that may be. Rather, it is the Word of God.
If we sincerely wish to prepare the Church for the third millennium, we should turn first to the Acts of the Apostles. That is what we must become again.
As I write this pastoral letter, the Church has begun her second year of immediate preparation for the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000, as outlined in the apostolic letter of Pope John Paul II, As the Third Millennium Draws Near (Tertio Millennio Adveniente)….
Jubilee is not merely a calendar date. It is much more than that. It is a holy year of conversion, forgiveness and renewal rooted in Hebrew Scripture and celebrated by the Church throughout her history—but never more urgently or significantly than in 2000. Jubilee is the manifestation and celebration of joy which God pours into the hearts of those who believe the Good News and trust his promises. It is a joy to be shared by all people and with every nation. It is the joy which filled John the Baptist in the womb of his mother, Elizabeth; the joy of Mary's heart as she sang her Magnificat; the joy the shepherds experienced as they beheld the child in the manger and told everyone of the angel's message; the joy of Simeon as he encountered the child who fulfills God's promise of salvation. It is the joy of the man blind from birth who receives his sight from Jesus; the joy of Mary Magdalen meeting her Rabboni in the garden of the resurrection; and the joy of the travelers on the road to Emmaus who recognize the Risen Lord in the breaking of the bread.
Jubilee is Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, and the Return of the Lord in Glory. Jubilee is Eucharist—the fullness of Word and sacrament, worship in Spirit and in truth….
It is my hope that in addition to pilgrimages and gatherings of Jubilee celebration [within the archdicoese], various lectures, seminars and courses of study on critical documents of Vatican II, the work of Pope John Paul II, and other materials relevant to the Jubilee will be made available to the general public.
But our Jubilee preparations will neither succeed nor fail at the archdiocesan level. They can only bear fruit if they are lived by our people, clergy and Religious at the parish level. Therefore, in whatever we do to answer the Holy Father's call—no matter how elaborate or simple—we must never misunderstand our Jubilee preparations as just another program or another pastoral burden. The new millennium should be a new encounter with the person of Jesus Christ; it is he whose birth it marks.
In that light, I ask pastors of the archdiocese to open their parishes to all which the Holy Spirit desires. New ecclesial movements and charisms are works of the Holy Spirit and signs of Jubilee; it is my hope that pastors will welcome these groups and movements so that our people, families and parishes may blaze with the fire of the new evangelization.
Radical missionary zeal is radical availability to the Holy Spirit. This is the foundation of Jubilee. This is the faith and witness of the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of the New Advent. She is the perfect disciple, the model of every virtue. She is our guide star to the Jubilee….
Excerpted from a pastoral letter issued Dec. 24, 1997, Vigil of the Solemnity of the Nativity of Our Lord.
----- EXCERPT: The Archbishop of Denver's powerful exhortation to his flock has relevance for all American Catholics as we rush toward the Great Jubilee Year ----- EXTENDED BODY: Charles Chaput OFM Cap. ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Human Cloning: An Entrepreneur's Sordid Dream DATE: 01/18/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 18-24, 1998 ----- BODY:What may be the next significant product for consumption? Cloned human beings.
It should come as no surprise. At least not in the United States, where every aspect of our culture seems increasingly to be driven by commercialism—or consumerism—as John Paul II would put it.
A Chicago physicist recently announced his plans for opening a for-profit clinic to enable childless couples to clone themselves. It could become a real money-maker for him, since the demands for assistance in overcoming infertility become stronger all the time. In 1988 about 5% of the women who wanted to have babies could not. That figure had doubled by 1995.
The one law that seems universally acknowledged in the United States—the law of supply and demand—would almost guarantee the idea's success.
Richard Seed, the entrepreneur in question, is a pioneer in “reproductive technologies.” More than a decade ago he reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association the successful transfer of a fertilized egg from a fertile woman to an infertile one. He is confident he can succeed in cloning a human being and has set for himself the goal of being open for business within 18 months. No human being has ever yet been cloned, but attempts are being made.
If Dr. Seed is successful in setting up his “clinic,” a married couple could become parents of clones of themselves. The children would not be “their” children and would carry the traits of their isolated, individuated selves; they would not be the embodiment of their mutual love, the enfleshed union of their marital union. Such actions would more feed a dangerous narcissism than contribute to deepening the common love of husband and wife.
In such a scenario, homosexuals would soon be offering to pay to have themselves “reproduced” without the benefit of— or, in their minds, interference from—members of the opposite sex. At the turn of the century, homosexuality was referred to as sexual inversion. In being erotically attracted to members of one's own sex, one loved another person like oneself. There was fundamentally no turning outward to another person radically different from oneself (that is, the opposite sex), but rather a turning in on oneself, a kind of self love. In cloning themselves, homosexuals would reach a previously unimagined “inversion” as they bestowed affection and tenderness on—a clone of themselves.
Virtually all cultures, no matter how primitive, have had consanguinity laws, that is, one may not marry or have sexual relations with close blood relatives. There was virtually an instinctual awareness that such “breeding practices” would be very unhealthy for the species. They were right, of course. And they were right without ever having heard of genetics.
Whether it occurred in isolated mountain villages or among the most noble or royal families, in-breeding resulted in a weakening of the gene pool with the births of children suffering a range of abnormalities from mental impairment to hemophilia. As one scholar, Dr. E. Furton puts it, “diversity of genetic material is nature's safeguard against disease and biological disaster.” It is apparently part of God's plan that “opposites attract.” Yet cloning would be the ultimate in “in-breeding.”
The prospect of a burgeoning U.S. business in human cloning is certainly disconcerting. It would signal yet another dehumanizing of human life, which is increasingly characteristic of our society. Children would not arise out of a mutual act of self-giving by a husband and wife in love. Rather they would be “manufactured” to suit the desires of individuals.
Some may find comfort and reassurance in the fact that President Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory Commission called human cloning “morally unacceptable” and proposed laws against it. Regrettably, such comfort would be ungrounded. First of all, the Commission did not provide cogent reasons why cloning would be morally unacceptable and appeared to be following opinion polls that indicated such was the position of most Americans. But we all know how fickle public opinion can be.
Secondly, there is the fact that the Commission and the Clinton Administration are in reality not opposed to human cloning. They are opposed to allowing cloned human beings come to term, that is, to be born. They have not taken a stand against the engendering of new human life through cloning techniques. Consequently robust entrepreneurs anything like Dr. Seed are able to engage in the truly difficult work of initiating human life through cloning—as long as they kill it afterwards.
And who knows? Perhaps by the time the technique is perfected, there will no longer be any government opposition to allowing human clones to be born.
The Catholic Church, however, continues to decry the manufacturing of human beings and laments the shades of narcissism, inversion, and genetic irresponsibility found in cloning. It reminds us in the 1987 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith document Donum Vitae (The Gift of Life), that married couples do not have a “right” to a child as they do to private property, for example. They do not “own” or “manufacture” other human beings. The marital embrace is not a manufacturing technique. What married couples do have is the right to the marriage act that may or may not, through the involvement of God, give rise to new human life.
According to God's plan, human life is to arise out of the unfathomable and mysterious depths of the human and divine love of husband and wife, not through manipulative techniques that diminish a sense of what each human life is—the enfleshed image and likeness of God, which rightly calls forth feelings of reverential awe.
Dr. John Haas is president of the Pope John Center for the Study of Ethics in Health Care in Boston, Mass.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Haas ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Journey to England's Nazareth DATE: 01/18/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 18-24, 1998 ----- BODY:Founded a millennium ago, once among the most famous destinations in Christendom and then forced into obscurity for centuries, the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham is now in the midst of a yearlong celebration of its new centenary.
It was just a hundred years ago in August 1897 that modern-day pilgrimages to this national shrine of England resumed. Yet during the Middle Ages it was renowned as one of Europe's greatest shrines. Kings and commoners came in ceaseless streams to Walsingham, about 25 miles from the port town of King's Lynn, and less than 150 miles northeast of London.
For nearly four centuries, beginning shortly after 1061, pilgrims journeyed to “England's Nazareth” to honor Mary. That was the year Richeldis de Faverches, the Saxon lady of the manor, was transported in spirit by Our Lady and shown the Holy House of Nazareth (a.k.a. the Holy House of Loreto) where the Annunciation took place, and where the Holy Family lived. Mary asked Richeldis to build a replica, which the lady did at once.
By 1130, Augustinian Canons with papal approval constructed a huge priory church and augmented the shrine. The medieval village of Walsingham sprung up to meet the needs of pilgrims from far and wide. Ballads and poetry from that time recall the religious fervor surrounding the location. And several wayside chapels marked the route to Walsingham.
The last chapel in line, built about 1380, was the Slipper Chapel, just a mile from the shrine and the abbey grounds. There, pilgrims prayed and removed their shoes before walking the final Holy Mile. The whole area was thought of as the Holy Land of Walsingham. At least seven English monarchs walked barefoot from the Slipper Chapel: four Edwards and three Henrys, beginning with Henry III, who granted the shrine royal patronage about 1226.
Following the feast of Corpus Christi about 150 years later, Richard II, who made at least two pilgrimages to Walsingham, knelt with his subjects in Westminster Abbey and re-dedicated England as Mary's Dowry. Tradition held that this title was first given by Edward the Confessor. By the 16th century, 161 churches in the county of Norfolk were dedicated in Mary's honor.
But in 1538, literally overnight, pilgrimages ceased. The last Henry—Henry VIII—ushered in the Protestant Reformation, and desecrated and destroyed the shrine and statue of Our Lady of Walsingham. The only vestige left standing was the Priory's great east window arch, which remains to this day.
The nearby Slipper Chapel was spared for use as a poor house, then a cowshed. It finally ended as a barn.
The devotion that remained went underground until it was permitted again in the 19th century. Then, in the 1890s the shrine was born anew—restored by Pope Leo XIII's rescript—and the first pilgrimage in over 350 years re-awakened the deep-rooted tradition.
Present-day pilgrims traveling on their own, or as part of the many organized groups, can actually visit two shrines. One is built in the village of Walsingham. The other at the Slipper Chapel was restored in 1896-97, then donated as the Catholic shrine for that first public pilgrimage a century ago.
From its 14th century origin, the Slipper Chapel was dedicated to St. Catherine of Alexandria, patron saint of pilgrims to the Holy Land. Pilgrims to this land of England's Nazareth gathered en masse in August, 1934. More than 10,000 of them joined the bishops of England and Wales to mark this site as the national shrine. Days earlier, in the Slipper Chapel, the first Mass since the Reformation was celebrated .
This Gothic stone chapel, a scaled-down version of a full-size church, enshrines the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham to the left of the altar. Though the original was destroyed in 1538, the image existed on official seals and other medieval artifacts, facilitating its reproduction.
When Pope John Paul II visited England in 1982, this statue of Our Lady, holding the Child Jesus in her left arm and a tall lily in her right in scepter fashion, was brought to his Mass at Wembley where he venerated and kissed the image.
A new addition to the chapel, installed this past year, is a west window of the Annunciation constructed in the manner of 15th century stained glass.
The shrine still sits among meadows, farmland, and fields of grain, looking like a picture-postcard scene. But it has expanded with several additions. One is the adjacent Chapel of the Holy Ghost which was needed by 1938. In it is a mosaic entitled: Descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost—Our Lady in the Midst of the Apostles.
Across an expansive lawn lies another more recent addition: The way of the cross forms a semi-circle in front of the Chapel of Reconciliation. In 1948, oak crosses for these stations were carried by pilgrims walking from as far as Westminster Cathedral in London.
In an effort to blend with the local farms, the chapel is built of flint, brick, and pantile, much like Norfolk barns. The altar in its more modern interior contains relics of St. Lawrence, St. Thomas Becket, and St. Thomas More. Up to 10,000 worshippers can be accommodated when the sanctuary is opened to the lawn for the pilgrims outdoors.
The shrine also has a reliquary handed down from Pius IX with fragments of the True Cross and of Our Lady's veil. Also, the main holy water font recalls the original Holy House's spring of water.
For the quarter million pilgrims arriving each year, daily services are abundant. Atea room and a gift shop are among the amenities.
The countryside is so lovely that pilgrims can walk prayerfully along the Holy Mile to High Street in Walsingham village, there to see the town's Anglican shrine. It was built in 1931, a glance away from the original site.
In a spirit of ecumenism, apparent in the way both shrines have worked together for years, the guardians of the Anglican shrine walked in procession with Cardinal Cahal Daly, archbishop emeritus of Armagh, Ireland, and the English bishops and pilgrims during this centenary's opening ceremony held last August 20.
In 1931, a replica of the Holy House was built within the Anglican shrine according to dimensions recorded in the 15th century. A few years later, it had to be enlarged to accommodate the numbers of pilgrims. Above the altar in the Holy House, is the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham.
Circling the church and the high altar, there are 15 chapels commemorating each mystery of the rosary. The Holy Well within the shrine is near the spot where the original had been.
Both shrines also provide accommodation. Along the Holy Mile is Elham House, the Catholic shrine's Bed & Breakfast. Once a centuries-old school, the house offers rooms at quite reasonable rates.
In picturesque Walsingham, pilgrims can feel a kinship with their counterparts of long ago because the tiny village, a center for pilgrimages for many centuries, is considered to be the finest collection of medieval buildings of any comparably-sized village in the country. The hotels and guest houses even include a 15th century inn in the village center. Also there, the Sue Ryder Foundation coffee shop is highly recommended. When available, cream teas are not to be missed.
In addition, Walsingham features museums, a long narrow-gauge steam railway, and the most complete remains of any Franciscan Friary in Britain, built in 1347 and used as a lodging place for pilgrims. Since it is now privately owned, it's not usually open but can be glimpsed from the road.
The shrine can be reached by train, bus, or car from London, King's Lynn, and Norwich. (For directions and other particulars, the office number is 011-44-01328-820217.) Drivers might want to swing along the coast just north and stop at the Norfolk Lavender farm in Heacham, close to King's Lynn.
Highlights of this year's bountiful centenary celebrations include historical seminars on the shrine Mar. 23-27, a flower festival jointly sponsored with other churches May 22-25, Forty Hours devotion June 9-11, and the closing festival week Sept. 6-13.
Before the Reformation, devotion to Mary in England was so intense that all Christendom gained from it. Now with the restoration and growth of the National Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, that former glory as Mary's Dowry can return.
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Conn.
----- EXCERPT: A 1,000-year-old shrine to Our Lady drew kings and commoners ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Religion Gets a Fair Shake DATE: 01/18/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 18-24, 1998 ----- BODY:The mainstream media dislikes evangelical Protestantism more than any other religious movement. Print journalists routinely do hatchet jobs on its leaders, implying that its followers enjoy taking orders, can't think for themselves, and threaten American democracy with a judgmental, theocratic Puritanism.
Hollywood is even worse. Evangelical ministers are usually assumed to be thieves and womanizers, and their brand of spirituality is characterized as a form of psychological oppression that results in crime, mental instability, and sexual abuse. In recent years, a handful of TV series (Touched by an Angel, Seventh Heaven, etc.) have taken a more positive view of religion. But few of them have bothered to fight against the negative stereotyping of evangelicals, particularly if the preacher is white.
The Apostle, written and directed by Oscar-winning character actor Robert Duvall, dares to explore this thriving religious subculture without any of the usual prejudices. Unlike most contemporary filmmakers, he refuses to condescend in matters of faith in a positive or negative fashion. On the one hand, the movie has no plaster saints and, on the other, there are no psychologically repressed fanatics either.
Euliss “Sonny” Dewey (Duvall) first heard the call at age 12. Since that moment he has been a workaholic in the service of the Lord.
“I quit school because I didn't like recess,” he exuberantly proclaims.
His preaching style is derived from black Pentecostal ministers, with much shouting, foot-stomping, and other dramatic gestures. His theology consists of comparing “Jesus' mailing list” favorably to “the devil's hit list,” all in the service of “Holy Ghost power.” But as he carefully points out, “No tongues,” that is to say, he doesn't speak in tongues or glossolalia, a popular form of Pentecostal worship.
He places a huge electric arrow pointing the way up, an image that characterizes his sincere but theologically shallow ministry.
When driving past an overturned car on the highway, Sonny stops, sticks his head inside the wreck and begins exhorting the badly injured young couple to “accept the Lord Jesus Christ as their personal savior.” A cop tries to lead him away from the scene, but Sonny persists until he's succeeded in communicating his message.
Later he informs his equally devout mother (June Cash Carter), “We made news in heaven this morning.”
Sonny drives a new Lincoln Continental with customized license plates bearing his nickname and runs a large, prosperous Temple of Living God church in Texas with his wife, Jessie (Farrah Fawcett). He has two pre-teen blonde children who pray when they're supposed to and joyfully attend Bible camp. He proudly calls them “my beauties.”
But all is not well in this picture-perfect family. Hinting at Sonny's womanizing and boozing while on tour, Jessie wants out of the marriage and schemes to take the church with her.
Sonny correctly suspects that Jessie is having an affair with their youth minister. He has loud, angry conversations with God in his attic that keep his neighbors from sleeping at night. Convinced that his righteousness includes his personal life as well as his ministry, he takes revenge on his wife's lover with a baseball bat. Fearing that he's killed the man, Sonny does a fast disappearing act— but he continues to look to God for guidance, praying, “Wherever thou leadest, I will follow.” Sonny sees his flight from the law as a kind of pilgrimage and winds up in Bayou Houtte, La., a mainly black area whose only minister (John Beasley) has retired. Sonny rebaptizes himself “The Apostle E.F.,” and transforms the town's small, abandoned church into his own “One Way to Heaven Holiness Temple,” which he begins to fill through his lively preaching. At the top of the building, he places a huge electric arrow pointing the way up, an image that characterizes his sincere but theologically shallow ministry.
Sonny uses equally flashy radio advertisements to further build his flock, but his work includes more than cheap theatrics. He delivers baskets of food to the poor on a regular basis and succeeds in creating a racially integrated congregation despite the opposition of local bigots. Unlike many from his background, he also thinks well of Catholics.
While watching the local priest bless a procession of fishermen, Sonny declares, “You do it your way, I do it mine. But we get it done.”
In a certain sense, Sonny's starting again with a new identity results in a spiritual transformation. He's a better minister in impoverished Bayou Boutte than he was in the affluent suburbs of Texas, and more the suffering servant, devoting himself to the needs of his largely rural congregation. The huge ego he had developed as a successful preacher on the evangelical circuit is cut down to size.
Sonny feels personal pain in his reduced, anonymous circumstances, missing his kids and his mother. But he doesn't seem to feel any guilt for killing a man; the movie doesn't present this lack of remorse as a moral flaw. This makes Sonny's inner transformation seem well-intentioned but hollow.
The Apostle is more a brilliant character study than a fully developed drama. Duvall has succeeded in creating a complex, multi-layered personality, neither fully sinner nor saint. The movie deliberately leaves unresolved the question of whether the good Sonny does as a minister outweighs the evil in his personal life. But to deal with such important issues, the filmmaker should have created some distance between himself and Sonny. Instead, what's up on the screen is a story that is as morally ambiguous as its protagonist and therefore leaves the viewer emotionally unsatisfied.
The USCC classification of The Apostle is A-III: adults. The film is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America.
REGISTER arts & culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: The Apostle isn't perfect, but it bypasses Tinseltown's usual treatment of evangelical Christians and delivers an intriguing portrait of a man of God ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Nearly Forgotten Descendant of Slave May Be Saint Material DATE: 01/18/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 18-24, 1998 ----- BODY:NEW ORLEANS—Dr. Charles Nolan, the nationally recognized archivist of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, is trained to be coolly dispassionate about the detective work he and other researchers are conducting into the life of Mother Henriette Delille, a descendant of slaves who founded a pre-Civil War religious community for black women in New Orleans called the Sisters of the Holy Family.
But when U.S. bishops voted unanimously last fall to endorse “the appropriateness and timeliness” of Mother Henriette's cause for sainthood, it was as though they had delivered a jolt of electricity to the team of historians charged with piecing together the story of an obscure free woman of color who was teaching and caring for slaves more than two decades before the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
“I guess what's so striking is that if you think of all of the remarkable people who have been a part of the Church in Louisiana—all of the military leaders, bishops, archbishops, wonderful sisters, and remarkable laymen and lawyers—of all these people she is the first native Louisianian we hold up as a model of sanctity,” Nolan said.
“It is this humble woman—someone we did not know a whole lot about, someone who many people in her own day didn't know a lot about—who is suddenly held up as the embodiment of all that we aspire to.... That, in itself, is remarkable.”
SERVANT OF SLAVES
Mother Henriette died Nov. 16, 1862, six months after Union troops occupied New Orleans and two months before President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves. She is believed to have been 50 when she died, leaving behind a community of a dozen sisters. Her obituary on the front page of Propagateur Catholique, the archdiocesan newspaper, read: “The crowd gathered for her funeral testified by its sorrow how keenly felt was the loss of her who for the love of Christ had made herself the humble servant of slaves.”
At the time of Henriette's birth there were 17,000 free persons of color living in New Orleans. These were racially mixed descendants of early French, Spanish, and African residents of colonial Louisiana who, despite severe legal restrictions, could hold entrepreneurial jobs and own property. Many even held slaves. In fact, for a brief time in 1834, Henriette owned a slave named Polly. Benedictine Father Cyprian Davis, who is writing the comprehensive scholarly biography of Henriette required for the sainthood cause, discovered the documentation in family financial records.
“One of the possibilities is that she bought the slave to protect her from being sent out of New Orleans, which was the law at the time,” Nolan said. “That's really one of the puzzles that we have not fully explored. During those times, many religious and priests owned slaves. The whole theology of the times was that you could not challenge the existing order. Our notion of civil disobedience was not current. The whole thing is so complex. We don't want to explain it away. We want to try to understand it.”
What is clear is that in the 1840s, Henriette displayed the independence—from family and societal tradition—that led her to form and inspire a religious community that reached out to the lowest caste of society. Her great-great grandparents were the African slave Nanette, and Claude Joseph Dubreuil Villars, a white aristocrat and one of the most important colonists in Louisiana history. He constructed the first levees on the Mississippi River, and in 1753, built the Old Ursuline Convent, the oldest existing building in New Orleans. Researchers know that Henriette's mother was Marie Joseph Diaz, a free woman of color, but the identity of her father is unclear. He likely was either Juan Bonilla, a Cuban, or Jean Delille, her brother's father.
“Whoever her father was, he didn't do anything for Henriette,” according to Dr. Virginia Gould, a nationally known scholar who is assisting with the research part of the story. “Several generations of women in that family survived in a very harsh world and became independent. That is one of the great gifts they passed down to Henriette. But she took that [independence] in a whole different direction.”
Researchers believe Henriette was educated at a school for free women of color run by Marthe Fortiere, who had come to New Orleans from France to work with the Ursuline Sisters before branching off in 1823 to open her own school. Tuition was between $1.50 and $5.00 a month—a hefty sum.
Much of the information about the early history of the Sisters of the Holy Family comes from a remarkable journal of Mother Bernard Deggs (1846-1896), who entered the community in 1873 and who lived with two of its cofounders, Juliette Gaudin and Josephine Charles.
Almost no one knew of the journal's existence in the community's archives until Sister Audrey Detiege, who died in 1989, rediscovered it and used it as the basis for research she was doing on the community.
“She was the one who almost single-handedly rediscovered Henriette Delille,” maintained Nolan. “Part of the folklore was that Deggs died of tuberculosis and some of the Sisters were afraid that the TB germs might still be in the manuscript.”
SWEET WATER FOR DINNER
The Deggs journal speaks evocatively of times when the sisters had so little money and food that they drank sweetened water at night to dull their hunger pangs.
“Some almost starved to death,” Gould said. “Clearly, their mission to aid the poor was an overwhelming one.”
Although 1842 is given as the official date of the community's founding, Nolan believes Henriette actually was the driving force behind the Congregation of the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which was founded in 1836. Aconstitution—written in phonetic French, which points to Henriette's possible authorship—was discovered in the middle of a financial journal in the Holy Family archives. The mission of this group of free women of color was strikingly similar: to serve the poor and offer religious instruction to slaves. Nolan believes this group later evolved into the Sisters of the Holy Family.
Researchers have found only a few shreds of Henriette's personal writing, but her 1836 inscription in a prayerbook is powerful for its strikingly simple catechism: “I believe in God. I hope in God. I love and I want to live and die for God.”
She is believed to have received some form of spiritual formation with the Sacred Heart Sisters at St. Michael's in Convent, La. Their motto, “One Heart, One Soul,” was the motto of the Sisters of the Presentation.
The Louisiana legislature made it quite clear what fate would befall anyone who aided a slave's education: an 1830 law made it illegal for slaves to be taught to read or write but the Deggs journal told of how Henriette would gather children into church and teach them Bible stories through songs and dramatization. She and her sisters would also walk up and down the levees of the Mississippi River to conduct roving catechism classes.
Nolan said city leaders probably were caught off guard by the work Henriette and her sisters were doing.
“These women sort of blind-sided them,” he said. “They weren't quite sure what to do with them. During Henriette's life, the sisters were never listed as a religious community in the Catholic directory. At the same time, the Church realized that these were the people who were accomplishing one of the Church's main missions. They needed these women.”
Sister Sylvia said the women filled a need in the Church that otherwise would have gone unmet, “kind of the redemption for the Catholic Church and within the Catholic Church because of its benign neglect of the slaves.”
In the 1840s, Henriette opened a home to care for the elderly, and she later purchased another home with her own money that served as a home for the community and center for catechetical instruction of slaves and free people of color. The community found inventive ways to keep money coming in, sponsoring a lottery and fairs.
At the end of the Civil War—three years after Mother Henriette's death—only five sisters remained with the community because of fears of their parents that the economic suffering would be too great. The U.S. bishops also met to decide what pastoral approach would be taken with the emancipated slaves.
“It's a source of great criticism that the bishops refused to adopt a national policy and basically let every diocese do what it could,” Nolan said.
A SAINT FOR NEW ORLEANS?
His team sees few parallels between the sainthood causes of Mother Henriette and Pierre Toussaint in New York, simply because so much more documentation exists about Toussaint. Toussaint (1766-1853), a black slave from Haiti, won his freedom, became a successful businessman, served the poor, and even came to the financial rescue of his former master's family.
Piecing together information about Mother Henriette has been much more difficult. Why has it taken so long for the sainthood cause to move forward?
Said Mother Rose de Lima Hazeur, former superior of the Sisters of the Holy Family: “The Church would not have been interested in the process of canonization of a black woman before 1960. It would have been a waste of time even to consider it.”
Now the U.S. bishops have placed the issue squarely on the front burner, and the local team is ready. They hope to complete the biography by the end of 1998, and hope to have her declared venerable by 2000.
“It must happen, it must,” said Sister Sylvia.
“This has energized us because it's no longer just the sisters' cause—it's the Church's cause,” Nolan said. “We now have an obligation to respond to what the Church has told us and expects of us. The atmosphere has changed enough that the first person the Church here in Louisiana is proposing for sainthood is an African-American woman. That is remarkable in itself.”
After the formal biography is submitted, the Vatican will appoint historians and theologians to review it for thoroughness and accuracy. If everything is in order, then a study must be written on the virtues of Henriette. If the Congregation for the Cause of Saints and the Pope approve, then she could be called “Venerable.”
“[Then] the Church places the material aside and stands back and asks God for a sign that their decision has been a correct one,” said Oblate Father James FitzPatrick, the postulator general for the cause. “And that sign is a miracle.”
Cardinal Frances Arinze, president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialouge, has told Sister Sylvia, that the unique nature of Mother Henriette's cause—she would be the first U.S. born African-American saint—might influence Pope John Paul II to speed the process.
“The Holy Father might move a cause like that from number 400 to number four because of the uniqueness she represents,” Sister Sylvia said. “That's why it is so urgent to get the biography in. This is our time. The Pope has said he is very interested in canonizing saints in countries where there are few saints—and the United States is one of those countries.”
“I think for African-Americans in particular the time is very right that one of our own can be elevated to sainthood. We know that she is a saint, but that the universal Church publicly proclaims her as one is significant. Her canonization would be saying God is pleased with us.”
Peter Finney writes from New Orleans.
----- EXCERPT: Bishops endorse 'the appropriateness and timeliness' of the cause of Mother Henriette Delille of New Orleans ----- EXTENDED BODY: Peter Finney Jr. ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: John Paul II: 'Don't Lose Hope!' DATE: 01/18/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 18-24, 1998 ----- BODY:I would like to say a special word to women who have had an abortion. The Church is aware of the many factors which may have influenced your decision, and she does not doubt that in many cases it was a painful and even shattering decision. The wound in your heart may not yet have healed. Certainly what happened was and remains terribly wrong. But do not give in to discouragement and do not lose hope. Try rather to understand what happened and face it honestly. If you have not already done so, give yourselves over with humility and trust to repentance. The Father of Mercies is ready to give you his forgiveness and his peace in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. You will come to understand that nothing is definitely lost and you will be able to ask forgiveness from your child, who is now living in the Lord. With the friendly and expert help and advice of other people, and as a result of your own painful experience, you can be among the most eloquent defenders of every-one's right to life. Through your commitment to life, whether by accepting the birth of other children or by welcoming and caring for those most in need of someone to be close to them, you will become promoters of a new way of looking at human life” (Evangelium Vitae, 99).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Life Notes DATE: 01/18/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 18-24, 1998 ----- BODY:HLI Elects New President
FRONT ROYAL, VA—Father Paul Marx OSB, founder and chairman of Human Life International (HLI), announced Jan. 8 the election of Father Richard Welch CSsR, JCL, as the organization's new president. He succeeds Father Matthew Habiger OSB.
Father Welch, 44, is a Redemptorist priest, ordained in 1980. For 12 years he served as a missionary in Puerto Rico. There he worked to defeat a euthanasia bill in the Puerto Rican legislature, and organized a pro-life group of teenagers whose members distributed thousands of copies of Humanae Vitae at both public and Catholic universities. He holds the distinction of being the first priest arrested for protesting abortion in the United States.
Long associated with HLI as a conference speaker, Father Welch was appointed to the staff as ecclesiastical counsel in February 1996, and elected to the board of directors in 1997.
“Father Welch is uniquely qualified to provide strong leadership for HLI's worldwide apostolic mission of promoting and defending faith, life, and family,” said Father Marx. “His educational background, administrative skill, experience in canon law, and his long career of preaching and teaching the Gospel of Life is an extraordinary combination with which to lead HLI into the new century.”
Father Habiger, who has served HLI since 1991 as executive director and later as president, continues to serve as a member of the board of directors and will focus on expanding HLI's pro-life work in Africa and Asia.
Judge Puts N.J. ‘Partial-Birth’ Ban On Hold
TRENTON, N.J.—By extending a temporary restraining order Dec. 24, a federal judge once again put on hold a New Jersey law banning partial-birth abortions. Richard Collier, the Catholic pro-life attorney defending the law for the state Legislature, said he regretted that the temporary restraining order was granted in the first place. But he said he would use the extra time it afforded to conduct extensive legal and medical research and line up expert witnesses for the full hearing on the law's constitutionality, now set for June 3 in federal court.
Assisted-Suicide Advocacy Group Moves to Oregon
PORTLAND, Ore.—The move to Oregon of a prominent group that supports a right to die will boost physician-assisted suicides, say foes of the practice. Compassion in Dying, now based in Seattle, will transfer its headquarters to Oregon, where voters in November affirmed the nation's only law removing penalties for doctors who help patients die. The organization also plans to establish a statewide network of suicide counselors by June 1. Founded in 1993, the organization has guided dozens of patients toward hastened death, even while Washington law forbids assisted suicide.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Beyond the Smoke Screen Of 'Choice' DATE: 01/18/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 18-24, 1998 ----- BODY:In the 25 years since the Supreme Court ended legal protection for pre-born children, the slogan of the pro-abortion side has been “choice.” But if pro-lifers have learned anything in the years of struggle, it's that choice (autonomy, privacy, or women's rights) is not the real enemy. The real enemy is eugenics—tinkering with the human race to improve its quality, and killing off “mistakes.”
In bull fights, the matador taunts the bull, flapping a red cape and inciting the animal to charge. When the bull strikes only an empty cape, it is no doubt startled and further infuriated to have missed the target. After a few passes, however, it learns the difference between the flag and the matador, and twists its head to impale the tormentor with its horns. To stay alive, a skillful matador must determine when the bull has learned too much.
It seems that bulls are quicker to learn than pro-lifers. We have been charging after the red flag of “choice” for 25 years. But the matador is eugenics, and we still have not learned to aim for the real enemy. As a result, the key eugenics programs— population control and genetic engineering—are still spreading.
Abortion advocates talk about choice, but with few exceptions, they do not oppose forced abortion in China. The Chinese government, in its efforts to limit population, has implemented a one-child-per-family policy; having additional children is illegal. There are exceptions and lapses in enforcement, but the law remains in place. Forced abortion, sterilization, or insertion of intrauterine devices (IUDs) are the penalties to be paid for noncompliance.
At the U.N. Conference on Women in Beijing, First Lady Hillary Clinton indirectly raised concern about these practices. The American government then raced to assure the Chinese that her words did not mean that the United States was going to take action in opposition to the policy. In the years since, China has been awarded (and re-awarded) Most Favored Nation (MFN) trade status, and Chinese president Jiang Zemin was afforded royal treatment during his recent U.S. visit, but no efforts have been made to overturn the one-child law.
Since the early 1980s, pro-lifers have asked people who identify themselves as “pro-choice” to denounce forced abortion. On one occasion, I picketed at the Chinese Embassy with a friend. My sign read: “Pro-lifers oppose forced abortion in China,” and hers proclaimed: “Pro-choicers oppose forced abortion in China.” We received a puzzled but generally positive response from passers-by. It was a wonderful time—but it was the exception, not the rule. Almost always, “pro-choicers” defend the Chinese, or overlook the government's intrusion into family life.
The problem may be mere hypocrisy, but it is often more simple: eugenicists support coercive population control.
In his prophetic 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae (On Human Life), Pope Paul VI saw the Chinese catastrophe on the horizon, and pointed out that birth control measures that are considered moral could easily become compulsory. If a method is “acknowledged to be licit for married couples in the solution of a family problem,” he asked, then “who will stop rulers from favoring, from even imposing upon their peoples, if they were to consider it necessary, the method of contraception which they judge to be most efficacious?”
Forced abortion is not just a problem overseas, though. In the past few years, the welfare reform debate within the United States has included a protracted discussion of how to fight “illegitimacy.”
Amazingly, many pro-lifers have accepted eugenics arguments, and support the family cap. The contradiction is not subtle. Crisis pregnancy centers and pro-life sidewalk counselors offer help to women and couples (often unmarried): “We will help you, no strings attached, but please don't kill your baby.”
Proponents of the family cap have another message for women on welfare: “We are tired of helping people like you, and we are attaching as many strings as we can, so please don't have another child.”
The point of the family cap is not to help women become independent. It's to put pressure on them not to give birth to more poor (or unwanted) children. The Chinese policy has come home, in a mild American fashion.
New Technologies & Death
The other half of the eugenics movement—improving the human race by “positive” means, such as test tube babies and cloning—also has been expanding since 1973. The cutting edge of “reproductive technology” for the rich includes exotic forms of artificial insemination. For the poor, on the other hand, are the abortifacient drugs Norplant and Depo-Provera. Sperm and egg banks do not recruit donors in the ghetto. Birth control “vaccinations” and implants are not promoted enthusiastically in the wealthy suburbs.
Programs of positive eugenics could not function freely without the 1973 abortion decisions. Today, “spare embryos” from in vitro fertilization clinics are thrown away after a few years. The number of human lives extinguished in fertility clinics is far less than the number killed in abortion clinics, but it is rising steadily.
The discussion regarding human cloning provides a grim glimpse of a brutal new world. President Clinton's bioethics commission recommended that the country permit cloning of human embryos, but ban the creation of human babies. This proposal might sound halfway reasonable, but it actually means more forced abortion.
If you clone a human embryo, you will get a fetus and then an infant and then an adult. Although the Clinton panel acted as if they were offering a compromise, they were really proposing an expansion of abortion, and forced abortion at that.
Pope John Paul II, responding to the twisted vision of humanity offered in the eugenics movement, spoke of a “culture of death,” and called on us to build a whole new “culture of life,” a whole new “civilization of love.” His program is more ambitious—and more beneficial—than simply reversing some bad Supreme Court decisions.
John Cavanaugh-O'Keefe, a veteran pro-life researcher, author, and speaker, is director of public policy for American Life League.
----- EXCERPT: A quarter of a century after Roe v. Wade, many pro-lifers remain oblivious to their real adversary ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Cavanaugh-O'Keefe ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Healing from the Pain of Abortion DATE: 01/18/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 18-24, 1998 ----- BODY:When Aprill Clay aborted her baby, she immediately knew it was wrong. “I felt the life being torn away from me,” she says. “I felt it in my heart, my inner soul, the moment that it happened. As soon as I did it, I knew it was the worst mistake I had ever made.”
Barely 20 at the time, the Rahway, N.J., resident thought having an abortion would erase her troubles. Those around her assured her it was the best decision. For years, she suppressed her grief.
As time passed, however, she knew she needed to deal with her grief, especially when her third child, a daughter, was born six years ago. She began four months of intense counseling with her parish priest, who gave her information about Rachel's Vineyard, a post-abortion healing ministry based in the Philadelphia area.
The retreat with other women grieving about their abortions assured the repentant Clay of God's infinite mercy. As she knelt before the Blessed Sacrament that weekend, praying the rosary and the Divine Mercy chaplet, God gave her a great gift: a glimpse of her deceased children-the daughter she aborted and a son that miscarried.
“God has humbled me,” she says. “He loves me. Because of my hurt, if there is one family that can be helped, I'm willing to share that pain.”
She wants to speak to groups about Rachel's Vineyard, leading others to the hope and healing she has found. Such post-abortion ministries are in place in many dioceses around the country and have even spread to other countries.
Rachel's Vineyard, started by psychologist Theresa Karminski Burke and Barbara Cullen in the mid-1980s, has helped hundreds of women heal through weekend retreats and a 13-week group counseling program. Burke also now travels around the country training others to provide the Rachel's Vineyard program, which combines spiritual and psychological exercises.
A parishioner at Our Mother of Sorrows in Bridgeport, Penn., Burke became involved in post-abortion healing after working in an eating disorder treatment center.
“Almost all the women in my group had had abortions,” says the 37-year-old mother of four, whose husband is a licensed clinical social worker who runs a home for unwed pregnant women. “I knew there was a big problem.”
She believes Rachel's Vineyard is so fruitful because it is “totally, intimately connected with Jesus.”
The Healing Process
As part of their healing, the women spend time in eucharistic adoration, they confess their abortion to a priest, they name the aborted baby, and they write that child a letter.
“In the letter they always say I love you,” Burke says. “They say there's not a day goes by that they don't think of the baby.”
“You're publicly proclaiming your love for this child,” Burke explains. “You're giving it honor and dignity. You're reconnecting that bond. I think post-abortion healing is incomplete until that happens. You're also reclaiming your motherhood. When they go home to their children, they can really love them.”
Rosemary Benefield, a nurse with master's degrees in pastoral counseling and marriage, family, and child counseling, leads a similar, weekend-long post-abortion retreat in San Diego. Known as Rachel's Hope, her program is adapted for Catholic women from Silent Voices, developed by an evangelical Christian.
“According to research,” Benefield says, “it's five to seven years after an abortion that women need to find a means of healing. So many of them numb out-they go into denial. They rationalize. It takes a while before they start being emotionally able to face what they have done.”
In Benefield's experience, she's found about half the women going through her program have never confessed their abortion. The others have, sometimes repeatedly, yet they never feel forgiven-or they never allow themselves to feel forgiven.
Benefield says some women decide to confront their abortion after a triggering event-a friend having a baby, for example.
“One of the biggest [triggers],” Benefield says, “is when a woman has a hard time getting pregnant. She thinks her infertility is punishment from God. The guilt is just incredible, and the daily reminder of not being able to conceive is so painful.”
Once she's had a baby, a post-abortion woman may have trouble bonding with it, Benefield says, because she's afraid she's going to lose it, God is going to punish her.
That's how Gail Checco felt. The 42-year-old Duluth, Minn., resident, who had an abortion when she was 21, always wondered how God would punish her for that. When her two children, now 19 and 17, became sick, she felt it was her fault. Would God take them away from her?
Although she had received the Sacrament of Reconciliation, she could-n't believe God could forgive her for the abortion. For years, Checco carried the burden and grief of her abortion. Formerly the religious education coordinator at her parish, Blessed Sacrament in Hibbing, Minn., Checco says she felt like a hypocrite when she had to speak on issues such as chastity. But now she has healed, thanks to Project Rachel, the widespread post-abortion healing ministry founded in 1984 in the diocese of Milwaukee by Victoria Thorn.
Checco, Project Rachel coordinator for her diocese, learned about the program five years ago, after reading Father John Dillon's book, A Path to Hope. “It opened a whole window of hope for me,” Checco says. “I thought ‘Maybe I'm not crazy.’”
Recovering Hope
That hope is essential, according to Thorn, who wrote an essay describing Project Rachel in Father Michael Mannion's book Post Abortion Aftermath. In it, Thorn notes that women who have had abortions “always describe themselves as being without hope.”
Project Rachel, which can be found in more than 100 U.S. dioceses, as well as in Austria, and soon in Guam and Canada, is a diocesan-based ministry with specially trained clergy, religious, and professional therapists that receives referrals through a diocesan number.
“The phone comes into an existing office during business hours and is answered by a staff member who knows the people on the referral list,” says Thorn. “We are simply empowering our clergy and psychotherapeutic professionals with additional information so they can address this issue effectively. This is a program that does not require extra personnel or extra programs to be able to minister effectively to God's wounded children.”
Because the Sacrament of Reconciliation is an integral part of the process of Project Rachel, it is imperative that there be trained clergy who understand the process of healing, Thorn says. In many cases, the woman prefers to begin with a priest and may work through some or all of the process with him.
“She is clear,” Thorn says, “on the fact that this is a spiritual wound.”
Thorn stresses the importance of trained personnel in post-abortion healing, particularly with a program like Rachel's Vineyard, which, she says, “should be facilitated by a therapeutic professional and a spiritual director or priest.”
“This is a model that includes some very deep psychological healing and that can trigger people into some very deep pain in the process,” Thorn says. “We also recommend that anyone interested in facilitating a Rachel's Vineyard retreat participate in one with Theresa Burke to observe how it is done. The Rachel's Vineyard support group model is also very intense and needs trained professionals to oversee it.”
In 1975, the U.S. bishops, in their Pastoral Plan for Pro-life Activities, stated that: “Granting that the grave sin of abortion is symptomatic of many human problems, which often remain unsolved for the individual woman, it is important that we realize that God's mercy is always available and without limit, that the Christian life can be restored and renewed through the sacraments, and that union with God can be accomplished despite the problems of human existence.”
Until Project Rachel was launched nine years later, however, there were few if any formal programs to help women. While the ministry has exploded, Thorn says that when Project Rachel was founded, “it was virtually impossible to find people who knew anything about abortion's aftermath and who were even willing to give it credence.” It took a while to begin because there were no experts and no models in how to conduct this ministry.
In 1990, with demand for information growing, the National Office of Post-Abortion Reconciliation and Healing was founded as an outgrowth of Project Rachel to provide resources and referrals for those seeking post-abortion information.
According to estimates, there are from 36 million to 50 million abortions worldwide each year. Because of the enormity of the problem, Thorn knows “it is imperative that the Church throughout the world address this part of the brokenness.”
John Paul II's Blessing
The Holy Father knows it, too. Thorn met Pope John Paul II some years ago and at that time, he gave her a special blessing and said of Project Rachel, “This is very important work!”
The Holy Father, Thorn says, is no stranger to the aftermath of abortion. “In 1960, in his book Love and Responsibility, he accurately described abortion's aftermath,” she says. He addressed it again in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), which she sees as “a continuation of his deep commitment to the healing of the millions of women who have made the abortion decision, so often in a vacuum of support, love, and understanding” (see sidebar, top right).
After Project Rachel, Thorn says, a woman speaks of “experiencing God's love and forgiveness in a profound way. She is affirmed in her worth. She is free to love her family and parent her other children in a healthy way. She is deeply committed to Church and her faith journey. She gives of her time and talent to promote life in any one of a multitude of ways. Often she avoids telling her story in public as it is far too risky for her and for her family. However, the story is told in her life in a profound and beautiful way. She has met God and been healed, just as the women in Scripture. That is a life-changing event.”
The National Office of Post-Abortion Reconciliation and Healing may be reached at 1-800-5WE-CARE.
Rachel's Vineyard may be reached at: The Center for Post-Abortion Healing, P.O. Box 195, Bridgeport PA 19405-0195. Their hot-line is (610) 626-4006.
Tracy Moran writes from San Diego, Calif.
----- EXCERPT: Project Rachel helps women find forgiveness and leave despair behind ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tracy Moran ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Early Church Teachings Against Abortion DATE: 01/18/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 18-24, 1998 ----- BODY:l “You shall not kill an unborn child or murder a newborn infant.”
—Didache
l “You shall love your neighbor more than your own life. You shall not slay the child by abortion.”
—Barnabas (c. 70-138), Epistles
l “For us [Christians], murder is once and for all forbidden; so even the child in the womb, while yet the mother's blood is still being drawn on to form the human being, it is not lawful for us to destroy. To forbid birth is only quicker murder…. He is a man, who is to be a man; the fruit is always present in the seed.”
—Tertullian, 197, Apologeticus
l “Those women who use drugs to bring about an abortion commit murder and will have to give an account to God for their abortion.”
—Athenagoras of Athens, letter to Marcus Aurelius in 177,
Legatio pro Christianis (Supplication for the Christians)
l “… [T]here are women who, by the use of medicinal potions, destroy the unborn life in their wombs, and murder the child before they bring it forth. These practices undoubtedly are derived from a custom established by your gods; Saturn, though he did not expose his sons, certainly devoured them.”
—Minucius Felix, theologian (c. 200-225), Octavius
l “… [I]f we would not kill off the human race born and developing according to God's plan, then our whole lives would be lived according to nature. Women who make use of some sort of deadly abortion drug kill not only the embryo but, together with it, all human kindness.”
—Clement of Alexandria, priest and the “Father of Theologians”
(c. 150-220), Christ the Educator
l “Sometimes this lustful cruelty or cruel lust goes so far as to seek to procure a baneful sterility, and if this fails the fetus conceived in the womb is in one way or another smothered or evacuated, in the desire to destroy the off-spring before it has life, or if it already lives in the womb, to kill it before it is born.”
—St. Augustine, bishop of Hippo (354-430), De Nuptius et Concupiscus (On Marriage and Concupiscence)
l “Some virgins [unmarried women], when they learn they are with child through sin, practice abortion by the use of drugs. Frequently they die themselves and are brought before the ruler of the lower world guilty of three crimes: suicide, adultery against Christ, and murder of an unborn child.”
—St. Jerome (c. 340-420), Letter to Eustochium
l “The hairsplitting difference between formed and unformed makes no difference to us. Whoever deliberately commits abortion is subject to the penalty for homicide.”
—St. Basil the Great (c. 329-379), “First Canonical Letter,” Three Canonical Letters
l “Those who give drugs for procuring abortion, and those who receive poisons to kill the fetus, are subjected to the penalty for murder.”
—Trullian (Quinisext) Council (692), Canons
Source: The Facts of Life: An Authoritative Guide to Life and Family Issues, by Brian Clowes PhD (Human Life International, Front Royal, Va.). Reprinted with permission.
----- EXCERPT: FACTS of life ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: A Month After Massacre, Chiapas Awaits Justice DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:ACTEAL, Mexico—Acteal, like many of the hamlets inhabited by Chiapas's indigenous peoples, is not visible from the main road. Its dozen pine board and corrugated metal shacks sit in the shadow of a steep wooded slope out of view.
“Invisible from the road”—is not a bad metaphor for Chiapas itself and its troubled history at the southern end of Mexico. Here in the Altos, or highlands, of the country's poorest state, the problems of rural poverty, human rights, violence, and the clash of rival religious, ethnic, and economic interests have long been “invisible” from the “main road” of Mexico's rush to modernity.
But no more. In today's Acteal, reporters and camera crews mill about looking for locals. Human rights activists and politicians come and go. Health officials pull up in vans offering aid.
The cause of such “visibility” is, by now, well known: the Dec. 22 slaughter of 45 Tzotzil Indians here by local gunmen—perhaps Mexico's worst single case of political violence in a generation. By mid January, the Acteal massacre had already forced far-reaching changes in the country's state and federal government, emboldened calls for a negotiated solution to the four-year-long Zapatista rebellion in the Altos, and united the Catholic Church behind the peace efforts of Bishop Samuel Ruiz, the controversial leader of the diocese of San Cristobal de las Casas, the state's second-largest city.
AN ONGOING WAR
When we arrived here on a sunny afternoon a few weeks after the tragedy, the multiple anxieties were palpable. With our driver, Adan, a lawyer from the municipal seat of Chenalho, and a Tzotzil-speaker, we had passed through several army checkpoints without much difficulty. Nevertheless, frequent army patrols with guns drawn passed by Acteal every few minutes, and soldiers had taken over the village school below the settlement. While the army's stated purpose was to disarm local villagers in the wake of the massacre, the inhabitants said that they created an atmosphere of intimidation—a continuation of what some Catholic human rights advocates in San Cristobal have long called “the [army's] war of low intensity” against the area's perceived Zapatista supporters.
The Zapatista Army of National Liberation, or EZLN, is an armed indigenous uprising led by a charismatic mestizo, or non-indigenous, calling himself subcomandante Marcos. The guerrilla movement, which arose in the 1980s, is headquartered in the hills above Acteal and in 1994 launched an armed insurrection to secure indigenous autonomy in the Altos. Bishop Ruiz, while sympathetic with some of EZLN's political aims, has taken a solidly nonviolent line in the conflict—a stance shared by many of the indigenous communities allied with the bishop.
Media were met on the road by the village's presidente, a young Indian named Lorenzo, who checked press credentials and arranged access to the villagers. Wire service correspondents were on hand, as were several reporters for European bureaus. As our driver was to tell us later, the presidente, shell-shocked from the commercial press blitz of his village, was especially unsure of what to do with a group of Catholic journalists. Finally, a colleague, who had been clever enough to bring along a copy of the Register showed it to Lorenzo, who, spotting a photo of Pope John Paul II, promptly ushered us to the footpath that leads to Acteal.
Acteal is a deeply religious indigenous Catholic community attached to the San Cristobal diocese, a community reflecting the ideals and paradoxes of Bishop Ruiz's controversial trail-blazing pastoral program among the area's indigenous poor. Many if not most, of the village's current inhabitants are refugees from the political violence and counter-violence that has afflicted the highlands in the decades since the bishop began a political movement pressing for indigenous rights and the EZLN, attempting to co-opt the bishop's efforts, launched its armed uprising. At the core of the refugee community is a Bishop Ruiz-supported group called Las Abejas (The Bees), headed by a local diocesan-trained Tzotzil catechist.
According to diocesan sources, the group is committed to pacifism and advocates a nonviolent, negotiated solution to the region's political conflicts. While the motives for the Dec. 22 attack remain murky, the unarmed Las Abejas were clearly the target.
Mariano, the village spokesman, met us in a clearing near Acteal's one-room church dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Benches were arranged outside the makeshift shrine, since the structure now doubles as a dormitory for refugees. He gently fended off several reporters who had found an alternate route to the village, sending them back up the slope to haggle with Lorenzo.
One of the diocese's more than 7,000 volunteer lay catechists, Mariano in his native Tzotzil calmly described the landscape of a massacre that had claimed his wife, one-year-old son, and seven other members of his family.
“It began at 11:20 in the morning,” he said.
They had heard the echo of gunfire earlier that day and had managed to contact diocesan staffers in San Cristobal to warn of their plight. (Diocesan sources said they had telephoned the police station located about a mile from the village, but were told by state police there that Acteal was peaceful.)
Fearing attack, villagers had assembled in the church to “pray for their enemies,” Mariano claimed, confident that God would not let anything bad happen to them. They were in the midst of their pre-Christmas fast, a traditional custom made famous by Bishop Ruiz as a prayer for peace in Chiapas.
“We were inside praying,” he said. “We are a peaceful people.”
THE MASSACRE
Suddenly, automatic weapon fire rang out in the village from several directions at once. Sensing that they were trapped, villagers ran out of the church and fled down a hillside, seeking protection in nearby coffee fields.
The catechist had time only to grab three of his sons and scurry into a burrow in the slope, hoping to evade the gunmen.
The planks of the church entrance bore grim witness to the hail of bullets that had greeted Acteal's faithful that morning. On the church door was a bullet-nicked sticker in Spanish from a recent Church campaign that read “In favor of life and against abortion.” More dramatic still were the signs of struggle in the wet slopes of the hillside where the attackers had pursued the fleeing Indians.
The gunmen had been nothing if not thorough. According to witnesses, the shooting went on for more than an hour. Some of the bodies of the victims were disfigured by machetes. There was even an unconfirmed report that a pregnant woman among the victims had had her stomach slashed open.
The state police, easily within earshot of the violence, never appeared.
“They were afraid,” said Mariano, simply.
Who were Acteal's attackers?
That much, too, is clear. The gunmen were fellow indigenous from neighboring villages like Esperanza and Los Chorros, well known to Acteal's inhabitants, armed vigilantes who called themselves Mascara Roja, or “The Red Mask,” attached to the entrenched political power structure in the state, particularly to Mexico's long-dominant Insitutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. According to human rights activists, the savagery of the killings was probably due to the fact that the gunmen had been drinking heavily before the siege. They may also have been on drugs. At this writing, more than 40 local indigenous have been charged in the Acteal killings, along with a PRI-allied mayor in the municipality of Chenalho who is accused of organizing the gunmen and supplying them with weapons.
Chiapas state officials may also have known that Acteal was a probable candidate for vigilante violence, according to the federal government's own human rights commission, and did nothing to prevent the tragedy.
Beyond the state itself, the national and international outcry over the massacre forced the government to appoint a new Chiapas governor, Roberto Albores Guillen, a national PRI legislator, in January, and, even more significantly, a new Mexican Interior Minister, the country's second-in-command, Francisco Labastida. Pressure has also mounted on the government to renew the stalled negotiations on the future of Chiapas.
POST-MASSACRE CHANGES
More than a month after the attack, the motive behind the killings remained unclear. Acteal villagers are also reluctant to talk about it.
Speculations are not in short supply, though. One Mexico City-based commentator even advanced the theory that the Acteal event may have had something to do with murky U.S. machinations to build a new “Panama Canal” across the southern state when the lease on the real one expires in the year 2000. But most observers place the origins of the massacre much closer to home.
While it represents the most savage attack against civilians in recent years, the Acteal massacre is hardly unique. A destabilizing climate of inter-communal violence has been growing in Chiapas over the past few years, indeed, decades—and, increasingly, much of it has been directed at Church-sponsored indigenous communities. Two years ago, a local indigenous paramilitary group, the Chinchulines, which grew out of a PRI-sponsored youth club, went on a rampage in nearby Bachajon, leaving six dead. The group also targeted the town's priests and firebombed church buildings. Last November, six weeks before the Acteal tragedy, gunmen attacked Bishop Ruiz and his coadjutor, Bishop Raul Vera Lopez, along with a convoy of 60 peasants, as they attempted to enter the highland town of Tila. The bishops were unhurt, but several Indians were injured in the melee.
As many commentators point out, economic issues play a role in the violence. Conflicts are typically rooted in decades of tension over control of communal land. In Bachajon, for example, local indigenous political “bosses,” allied with state interests, had seized control of quarries on ejido, or community land, and were selling gravel from the quarry to state companies building roads through nearby jungles. Required by law to share the proceeds with the community, the Chinchulines had pocketed the profits and persecuted anyone who challenged them. Church activists become a target for these groups because they routinely take the side of poor indigenous farmers defrauded by local state-supported elites.
A similar scenario presents itself in Acteal. It's probably not a coincidence that the shooting began on the day that the village's coffee fields, its chief source of income, were to be harvested.
RELIGIOUS CONFLICT
Along with struggles over communal land, religious rifts have opened up in indigenous communities during the past 20 years, particularly between traditionally Catholic Indios, with their blend of ancient Mayan and Catholic beliefs, and the new evangelicos, indigenous Protestant and Jehovah Witness converts. Since the mid-1970s, more than 15,000 highland evangelicos have been violently expelled from their villages. Some have been murdered.
The rise in such intercommunal violence also reflects the political transformations taking place in the country as a whole. Long ruled by the PRI, Mexico is gradually turning itself into a modern multi-party democracy. Local Chiapas authorities, both mestizo and indigenous, allied with the old establishment, find their interests threatened by the new order and the inevitable rise of economic and political competitors.
Few would argue that perhaps the most significant result stemming from the Acteal tragedy involves the growing role of the Catholic Church in Mexico as the crisis' honest broker.
That development, most Church observers say, has to do with the current consensus among Mexico's bishops to back the efforts of Bishop Ruiz to negotiate a political solution to the region's problems.
As Manuel Gomez Granados, director of the Insituto Mexicano de Doctrina Social Cristiana, a Catholic think tank based in Mexico City, told the Register, “The bishops are [now] in complete solidarity with Ruiz. He has their full backing.”
That's a far cry from the situation only two years ago when San Cristobal's controversial leader was publicly criticized by other bishops for some of his theological views, namely his occasional forays into liberation theology, and his experimental lay-based pastoral strategies in the indigenous communities. Expectations were high then that the elderly Bishop Ruiz would step down, especially when the Vatican appointed Bishop Raul Vera to be the coadjutor of the diocese in 1996 and transferred some of Bishop Ruiz's functions to his coadjutors.
Now, however, according to Gomez Granados, with the threat of regional violence increasing, Bishop Ruiz is widely viewed, in both government and Church circles (with the exception of the evangelical community), as an “indispensable element at this moment on the path to peace.”
This is not to say, Church observers are quick to point out, that the Mexican episcopate necessarily approves of everything Bishop Ruiz does, or, still less, has adopted his theological views. (In fact, some observers speculate that the bishops, through rallying behind Bishop Ruiz, hope to exert a greater influence on him.) But Bishop Ruiz's high profile in the Chiapas crisis symbolizes for many the promise of a dynamic public role for the Catholic Church in shaping Mexico's future—caught now, many fear, between a collapsing power structure and the “new technocrats.”
FAITH IN THE FUTURE
In San Cristobal de las Casas, the diocese's vicar general Father Felipe Toussaint, said as much in a recent interview when he stated that the task post-Acteal, is to “insist on the Church's vocation in [Mexican] society,” and to “continue to develop a culture of peace.”
In Acteal, in a large muddy clearing, freshly dug graves adorned with flowers hold the remains of the town's dead: nine men, 21 women, 15 children. A large wooden cross with an inscription in Spanish dominated the scene. It read: Tiempo de cosechar, tiempo de construir (A time to reap, a time to build).
Mariano, our guide, said that the inscription expressed the community's faith in the resurrection. His face was still marked by a grief that made it almost expressionless as he stroked the hair of his youngest surviving son.
Earlier we had spotted what appeared to be a government medical van on the main road and asked Mariano whether government aid had been forthcoming.
“They've come,” said the young catechist, “but we haven't accepted their help. We want justice first, then we'll accept help.”
The soft-spoken Indian was quick to add that he still believes in the government, and was willing to give Chiapas's new governor a chance.
We asked him what he meant by “justice.”
“We want a full investigation of what happened here. That's justice.” “And,” he paused, “this is important. We want the people who did this to be locked up permanently.” A flicker of the terror that had gripped this mountain hamlet only weeks before shot across the survivor's face.
“We don't want them ever to come back.”
Next week: Religious differences mark Chiapas conflict.
Gabriel Meyer writes from Los Angeles, Calif.
----- EXCERPT: Attack that left 45 dead in deeply Catholic community of Acteal still shrouded in mystery ----- EXTENDED BODY: Gabriel Meyer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Vatican Unveils New Strategies For Promoting Vocations DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY—A just-released Vatican document calls for a radical rethinking of how to promote vocations to the priesthood and religious life. In fact, it says the best way to attract new candidates for pastoral ministry is by taking a wider approach—helping each member of the Church discern his or her specific vocation.
“If at one time vocations promotion referred only or mainly to vocations to the priesthood and religious life, now it must tend ever more toward the promotion of all vocations, because in the Lord's Church, either we grow together or no one grows,” the document says.
A new evangelization is needed on the eve of the third millennium, it says, to recreate “a culture favorable to different vocations” and to help guide young people toward making decisions for their future.
The Church believes that each baptized person has a specific vocation—spouse, parent, priest, religious, single—and that this plurality of vocations serves the one vocation of the universal Church: to proclaim Christ, the only savior of the world.
Thus, the new document says each person must be helped to discern his or her individual vocation, should view it as the way to becoming who God wants him or her to be, and should be encouraged to follow that vocation as his or her God-given path to holiness, genuine fulfillment, and happiness.
“Today, true vocations promotion can be carried out only by those who are convinced that in every person, no one excluded, there is an original gift of God which waits to be discovered,” the document states.
The 112-page text, New Vocations for a New Europe, is the result of more than three years of study by four Vatican offices. Although written expressly for Europe, it provides a decidedly “holistic approach” to promoting vocations that could serve as a model for the Church in the United States and elsewhere.
The document notes that today's complex, secular culture has reduced the idea of “vocation” to the choice of a profession, with no reference to a divine plan.
In this “culture of distraction,” it says, young people are faced with a confusing array of choices—sometimes making decisions for their future based solely on economic considerations or emotional satisfaction.
The Meaning of ‘Vocation’
The document says people need help rediscovering the truth that God calls everyone to holiness and that his call is addressed in a specific way to Christians. It recommends vocations programs on the national, diocesan, and parish level aimed at helping each member of the Church discern God's plan for his or her life.
“Promoting vocations must penetrate the entire life of the Church at all levels,” Cardinal Pio Laghi, prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education and president of the Vatican committee coordinating vocations promotion told the Register. “It is one of the most urgent tasks facing the Church today.”
Seeking candidates for the priesthood and religious life must be carried out in “a spirit of trust,” confident that the Holy Spirit will provide for the Church's needs, the cardinal said. “An authentic culture of vocations” should be promoted which is motivated “not by the fear of extinction, but by the certainty of God's gift present in every person.”
Cardinal Laghi stressed that pastoral work for vocations “knows no boundaries” and that parents, educators, priests, and religious each have a role to play in helping young people recognize God's call for their lives.
The new Vatican document says educating Catholics in the faith must include educating them to the fact that they have a vocation. As the process of education moves along, a presentation of the various forms of living out one's vocation is necessary. Later, wise and well-trained guides will be needed to help each person discern his or her specific vocation.
On the threshold of the new millennium, the text states, “the Church must proclaim again the strong sense of life as ‘vocation.’”
Cardinal Laghi presented the document at a press conference in the Vatican. He said the text includes suggestions made during a meeting last year in Rome on how to attract and educate new priests, brothers, and sisters for service in the Church in Europe.
That gathering drew representatives from 37 nations and dealt with a range of issues, including the qualities of suitable candidates for religious life. It found that materialism, broken homes, and the demands of celibacy made young people reluctant to devote their lives to a religious vocation.
Worldwide, the number of priests and religious has dwindled during the past two decades, while the Catholic population has steadily increased. This has left fewer and older priests and religious to tend to more of the faithful.
Europe, too, has experienced this crisis in vocations. Nonetheless, the continent still counts more than half of all the priests and members of religious orders around the globe.
Signs of Hope
The Vatican distributed statistics at the press conference that showed a dramatic increase in vocations to the priesthood and religious life in Eastern Europe between 1978 and 1995—mainly due to the new lease on life given the Church following the collapse of communism.
For example, the number of priests in Ukraine increased by 50% during that period; by almost 200% in Albania; and by more than 500% in Belarus.
Western Europe, however, witnessed a decline in the number of priests and religious during the same 17 years studied.
Belgium and the Netherlands led the countries with the highest percentage decline in the number of priests—both losing more than 30% of their ordained ministers. By the end of 1995, the total number of priests in Europe dropped by almost 13.5% and the total number of women religious by nearly 26%.
However, Cardinal Laghi said statistics on the number of seminarians throughout the continent provide “a motive for hope.” In nearly every country, the number of candidates for the priesthood at the end of 1995 was at or above what it was in 1978.
“This positive development applies across almost all of Europe where the overall increase is 22.73%,” he said. Only Germany and Ireland had significantly smaller seminary enrollments in 1995 than in 1978.
In fact, the new Vatican document says Christian hope is “absolutely necessary for the Church's mission, particularly vocations ministry.” It also lists criteria for vocational maturity, or signs that a person is ready to begin concrete preparations for a vocation to the priesthood or religious life. They include:
• A willingness to be guided by “a bigger brother or sister.”
• A “young” attitude marked by enthusiasm, a desire to do one's best, an ability to socialize, and an awareness of personal gifts and weaknesses.
• Affective and sexual maturity, which includes “the certainty that comes from the experience of having already been loved” and the certainty of knowing how to love others.
• An act of faith that does not rule out mystery or tensions, but places a vocation on the strong foundation of knowing God has called and will give the gifts necessary to follow the vocational path.
Stephen Banyra writes from Rome.
----- EXCERPT: Document for Europe is also apt model for U.S. Church ----- EXTENDED BODY: Stephen Banyra ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Despite Politics' Bad Name, Young Idealists Urged to Pursue Office DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:NEW YORK—With the president in peril from a host of sexual and ethical allegations, and the ugly realities of political hardball popping up on both sides of the congressional aisle, why would any self-respecting, young pro-life Christian become involved in politics?
Yet at the March For Life in the nation's capital late last month, Rep. Christopher Smith of New Jersey, an 18-year political veteran, exhorted the thousands of young people from all around the country to spurn discouragement and disillusionment, run for office and change the course of history.
“A special word to our young people who march today in record numbers,” said Smith, 45, in a brief address on the Ellipse, with the White House in full view behind him. “Think about running for Congress someday. Despite what you hear, public service can and certainly should be honorable, ethical and clean.
“You can make the difference.”
His words received applause, but will they spark action? The annual March for Life is focused on the political aspects of abortion, with high school students delivering symbolic roses to congressmen in the morning, and marchers heading along Constitution Avenue to the steps of the Supreme Court; yet an informal survey among young participants turned up few who were considering a political career. A number expressed a fear of public scrutiny and others considered themselves too idealistic and doubtful of the political process, using words as “compromise,” “sellout,” and even “I don't want to lose my soul.”
Still, Smith is convinced that his offer will gain takers, and he repeats it often in speeches and college commencement addresses. Unless the seed is planted by a committed Christian, the next generation—born in the wake of Watergate and bombarded over the years by a host of political scandals—will not be prepared to take up the mantle of leadership, he says.
“Despite all the negatives you read about, there are laws to be made in this country, and they will be made for good or for ill, depending on the character and ethics of the lawmakers,” Smith, a Catholic, told the Register. “My advice to young people is that this thing called politics can be a ministry. But you have to be prepared to roll up your sleeves and take part in a nasty business. You must be willing to take the good with the bad, and never use power, unless it is power for the good.”
The toughest decision Smith made was the compromise on the Hyde Amendment, which prohibited federal funding of abortions except to save the life of the mother. Democrats moved to dump the amendment and Smith, Rep. Henry Hyde of Indiana, and their cohorts did not have the votes to preserve it. They settled on a watered down version for the sake of “saving some babies,” Smith explained.
“It broke my heart. We prayed together in Hyde's office,” said Smith. “Every day I hope I've done all that I can.”
Two strong pro-life Catholic senators expressed similar thoughts in recent interviews. Sen. Bob Smith of New Hampshire, who led the partial-birth abortion debate on the Senate floor said that young people have an obligation to speak out for their beliefs.
“Stay focused on what you believe in, don't let the cross-currents working against you stop your progress. Always remember, abortion is the moral issue of the day. Like with slavery a century ago, this country needs people who are idealistic and active and willing to suffer persecution for the truth. If you walk away from the arena, you'll leave it to those who will promote their own agenda.”
Pennsylvania's Sen. Rick Santorum said that young people must stick to their principles and not buy into the argument that Catholics and other Christians cannot bring their faith into politics.
“There is a moral dimension to what we do. To say that we must leave morality outside the public square leads to immorality all over. This will continue to happen if young people don't stand up and get involved. The battle is going to be won or lost in the public arena.”
He said that the debates and publicity surrounding partial-birth abortion have led to a dramatic shift in how the public views abortion in general and late-term abortion in particular. Recent surveys indicate that 50% of Americans consider abortion murder, and some 61% disapprove of abortion in the second and third trimesters.
These lawmakers are heartened by the entrance into the political fray of a number of ardent pro-life Christians, led by Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry. Ten years ago, Terry was the lightning rod leader of a grassroots effort to close abortion clinics by bodily blocking their entrances. Claiming biblical mandate and using apocalyptic imagery, he seemed little interested in the give-and-take of politics.
Yet he recently settled out of court a long-standing lawsuit with the National Organization of Women to be free to set his sights on Capitol Hill. Running on a populist pro-life, pro-family platform, he is seeking the seat of the 26th congressional district in upstate New York. Five other Operation Rescue veterans have begun campaigns in other north-east districts.
If elected in the fall, they will join a group and young, openly Christian legislators who have gained office in recent years, like Kansas Rep. Jim Ryun, the former world record holder in the mile, who speaks easily of God's saving grace, and former football star and now Oklahoma Rep. Steve Largent, a regular at a weekly Capitol Hill Bible study.
Congress, of course, is not the only goal for committed Christians. Chris Smith tells young people to start with local posts, to test the political waters, develop a winning record and a thick, but not impenetrable, skin. He caught “the bug” to run for Congress in 1980 after working on pro-life issues in college and running the campaign of a New Jersey pro-life candidate.
All Christians are called to sanctify themselves and others through their work, he noted, but politics offers a unique opportunity to labor for the common good of millions and make it easier for them and their families to live safe, moral lives.
“This [congressional] job is strategic, it is a place where I can do a lot of good,” he said. “As Christians and as Catholics, we cannot sit back and say that God will take care of everything. God chooses to work through his people and we have to fight for his kingdom. We need to outwork and out-think the opposition. As Christ said, be gentle as lambs but wise as serpents.”
Sen. Tim Hutchinson, a Baptist minister from President Clinton's home state of Arkansas, said that many young people are reluctant to enter politics because of the scandals surrounding Clinton and other politicians. He tells them, “The reason politics is dirty is because a lot of bad people are in it.”
About pro-life issues, he told the Register, “The other side knows the importance of getting people elected. It's about time we took that seriously too.”
The recent vote by the Republican National Committee rejecting a proposal to cut off campaign funds to candidates who support partial-birth abortion could have a negative effect on young people considering a political career. The one major party whose platform upholds the right to life showed a pragmatic face that placed power above prolife principles. Smith was “amazed by the party leadership who went back to the big tent ideas of party unity.”
Even Hyde, who throughout his career has been one of the leading prolife voices in Congress, voted against withholding funds from Republican candidates who do not support the partial-birth abortion ban.
The ultimate test of Smith's message to young people is found in his own family. He would be thrilled of any of his four children would enter politics .
“There are many mine fields along the way,” he said, “but I trust the Lord will protect them as he has protected me.”
Brian Caulfield writes from New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian Caulfield ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: In Cuba, Relief Outfit Puts Medicine on Empty Shelves DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:NEW YORK—At the final papal Mass late last month in the crumbling glory of Havana, Cuba, a husky man in his mid-40s made his way to one of the priests administering communion, then turned to walk back, seemingly unmoved.
A few seconds later, tears streamed down the man's face, his emotions seeming to come from nowhere.
“Make no mistake about it,” said Terry Kirch, director of the Catholic Medical Mission Board (CMMB) in New York who visited Cuba for Pope John Paul II's recent visit, “Cuba has changed forever.”
Founded in 1928 by a young resident intensely troubled by the vast misery caused by leprosy in the Caribbean, CMMB has evolved into a little-known but extremely effective organization that sends pharmaceuticals and doctors to the areas of the world that need them most. Each year, it ships out an average of $44 million in medical supplies, as well as organizing a volunteer program that sends doctors, nurses, and administrators to Third World hospitals and villages in the direst straits.
The causes CMMB takes on are often the least fashionable and the aid it gives is oftentimes the most practical—de-worming children, for instance, and providing basic medical supplies, which can be found here in any decent first-aid kit.
“I've seen people with terminally ill conditions from cancer or AIDS and they don't have aspirin for the pain,” said Sister Maura O'Donohue, MMM, the organization's program director. “They don't have the simplest of medicines.”
According to Sister O'Donohue, the necessary provisions in Third World countries are the most elemental—and the cheapest of modern-day drugs—pain relievers, anti-fungal ointments, deworming pills, antibiotics for eye, lung and skin infections, and anti-malarial drugs.
Over Christmas, CMMB shipped $1.5 million in drugs, including a six-month supply of insulin and antibiotics, to Cuba to shore up its alarming lack of even the most basic medical supplies and equipment due in part to the U.S. embargo, said Kirch.
Organization officials, on a fact-finding visit the previous month, came back with reports of a social decay that matched the physical deterioration of the once grand capital city. Elderly people were, quite literally, facing starvation, and pharmacy shelves were empty of even the most basic drugs. Simple, everyday things to us, such as pain killers and antibiotics, are also in excruciatingly short supply, Kirch said.
One 769-bed hospital, which also served 1,000 outpatients a day, had nothing but glucose on hand, according to Kathleen Higgens, CMMB's pharmaceutical coordinator. While she was in Cuba, the communist nation's Ministry of Health issued a report that only a two-week supply of insulin was left in the entire country.
Even the infant formula that CMMB sent to Cuba went to a parish network of soup kitchens that often serve as a lifeline for the poor. Workers, said Higgens, try to ensure that everyone gets a glass of milk a day. CMMB plans to send other nutritional supplements next month.
Higgens, Kirch, and other CMMB workers tell a fascinating tale of how a non-profit Catholic organization manages to deliver aid in one of the last communist regimes. Since 1992, when Fidel Castro officially pronounced Cuba a secular state, rather than an atheistic one, CMMB has funneled more than $16 million worth of medicine to Cuba with the help of Catholic Relief Services.
And it has not always been so easy. Unlike some Third World nations that have demanded the organization to fork over cash in so-called “duty,” CMMB has not encountered corruption in Cuba. What it has found is a socialist bureaucracy, desperately needing the stocks that CMMB donates, but disinclined to permit that it be known where they come from.
Before 1992, the bureaucracy mandated that CMMB's medical supplies be given to Cuban hospitals evenly across the board, and not to the neediest. Five years ago, Havana relented, permitting CMMB, through Caritas, to offer its supply where the need was greatest. According to state regulations, the government receives and dispenses all the medicines, but it allows Caritas Cuba to quietly designate the most needy hospitals and clinics.
“They want everything to come from the government,” said Higgens.
Despite this, although Cuba does not broadcast the fact that much of its pharmaceutical stock is donated by Catholic organizations, on the street it is well known, said Higgens.
She and CMMB's board Chairman Thomas Murphy Jr. went on a one-week visit to Cuba in November, flying from one end of Cuba to the other, sometimes in a crowded, rickety Soviet-era plane, to assess Cuba's medical needs and ensure that medical supplies were reaching the most needy. They also met with Cardinal Jaime Ortega Alamino of Havana and other Cuban bishops, as well as with officials from other Catholic aid organizations.
And likewise, although the name of CMMB has been suppressed, the organization's good works are popularly credited to the Church, rather than to the government. When a sufferer of cancer is given something to relieve the pain, it is whispered, “This is from the Church.”
The work of Caritas, which serves as a clearinghouse for CMMB's medications, stressed Kirch, “has been crucial in getting the Cuban Church established as a potent social force that benefits all citizens regardless of religious affiliation.”
In Cuba, this fall and early winter, Caritas and CMMB made up stickers and hats advertising the papal visit, said Higgens. There had been no media coverage of the trip and the news was spread initially by word of mouth. The Church was actually going from door-to-door telling people that the Pope was coming. Pictures of John Paul II appeared in public places with a countdown indicating the number of days until his arrival.
The expectations were enormous. One cab driver confided in Murphy that he wished the Pope would move to the island and whispered, “the Pope's picture is in my heart.”
Kirch came back from Cuba last week convinced that the visit of John Paul II to one of the last remaining bastions of socialism will reenergize the Cuban Church and leave profound social changes in its wake.
“The visit revealed and reaffirmed the Catholic soul of the country,” said Kirch. “The Church is a definite force here.”
He cautioned, however, that once the excitement of the visit dies down, it remains to be seen whether Castro will heed the Pope's urgent request that the Church be allowed to pursue educational and catechetical work, in addition to its humanitarian task, and that political prisoners be released.
“How easy it is to take our religious freedom in the West for granted,” he said.
Lisa Pevtzow writes from Skokie, Ill.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Lisa Pevtzow ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Single Fathers: Making Do At Home and on the Job DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:AUSTIN, Texas—When his alarm goes off at 6:15 every morning, John Lynch swings into action. There is no snooze alarm for the Bellevue, Wash., convenience store and gas station manager, a divorced father with custody of his 13-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter.
The drill goes like this: get the children out of bed; shower while the kids fix their own breakfast; prepare them for school; make their lunches; drop them at school; and head to work. The nighttime ritual of cooking and cleaning starts at about 4:30 p.m. By 9:30, the kids are in bed and John Lynch relaxes for a while, preparing to do it all again the next day.
When most Americans think of single-parent families, they conjure an image of a mother going through these struggles. But Lynch is no longer the exception to the rule. Homes led by single custodial fathers are the fastest growing family group in the United States. By the U.S. Census Bureau's count, the numbers have jumped from 303,000 in 1970 to 1.86 million in 1996. Single-father families make up 15% of single-parent families and 5% of all families.
In the Lynch family, the trio relies on teamwork and communication, which has eased the difficult transition to life without mother.
“My daughter talks to me on subjects ranging from which boys she likes to what my views on abortion are,” Lynch said. “We have been working several years on what values we admire and how they fit into daily life. We discuss things like makeup, PMS, dating, clothes, all that stuff…. I feel very blessed. My son is at that ‘discover his own values’ stage, but [we] really do communicate well.”
The trend toward fathers seeking and receiving custody in divorce cases, “might well mean that fathers of this generation are taking their responsibility for their children much more seriously,” according to Bishop John Myers of Peoria, Ill., who issued a pastoral letter on fatherhood last year.
While men who take their responsibilities to their children seriously should be applauded, it would be more encouraging news if the families remained intact, the bishop said.
“Studies show that children thrive in two-parent families,” he said. “Even when the home is not perfect, the interaction, discipline, and learning is beneficial.”
The increase in single-father families seems to have caught the attention of the mass media. Last fall, five new television programs focused on singlefather families. But Lynch said the concept still makes people uncomfortable.
“Everyone I meet seems very surprised when they discover that I have the children,” he said. “Notice all the TV shows that show the single fathers? They all assume that the guys are widowers…. My ex tells me she gets a ton of nasty comments when people learn she has children who do not live with her. The staff at one job gave it to her so bad, she says that is one of the big reasons she quit.”
Tim Dyer, a Holbrook, N.Y., computer operator who has custody of his 11-year-old son, Matt, agreed that society still has prejudices against fathers raising children, which he attributes to a “male-bashing” mentality.
“Even TV commercials always make fun of men,” said Dyer, whose son has cerebral palsy. “Men are made to look like idiots.”
Mark Fischer, a Reston, Va., computer scientist raising two young children alone, adds, “Ask any single father and he will tell you that we're sort of a curiosity. I get a lot of, ‘You must be a saint to do this, to take care of your children.’”
Though their numbers are increasing, Catholic single fathers will have a hard time finding Church-sponsored support groups ministering specifically to them. That is true of single parents in general. Most often, ministry to single parents, who head 31% of the nation's 35 million families, “sort of gets folded into ministry with separated and divorced Catholics,” according to Rick McCord, executive director of the U.S. Catholic Conference's Office of Marriage and Family Life.
Martha Tressler, single parent coordinator for the Archdiocese of Chicago's Family Ministries Office, is one of the few staff people on a diocesan level responsible for specific outreach to single parents. In that role, she has noticed increasing numbers of single fathers.
“Men's consciousness is being raised and they're becoming aware of the need to have influence in their children's lives,” Tressler said. “Perhaps they realize that while mothers are a very important part of family life, fathers are, too.”
In parenting skills courses she teaches in parishes throughout the archdiocese, Tressler said she has seen “a lot of single dads come in to learn how to be better parents to their kids.”
Fathers often need extra help as they find themselves with custody of the children because, unlike mothers, they have not been nurtured to be active parents, Tressler said.
“Boys are not taught to play house or with baby dolls. Children learn by playing,” she said. “Play is their workshop. They learn by example and by imitation. Without a doubt, it's one of the reasons men's parenting initiative was squashed. It wasn't cool to be a dad. Now, men are learning it is cool.”
Lynch, a Knight of Columbus, said he's satisfied with the available ministries at his parish, St. Louis in Bellevue.
“My parish has ‘Divorce and Beyond, Singles and Resingles,’ they have support for those struggling financially no matter what the reason. They have all sorts of things going on for families which do not discriminate against single-parent families,” he said. “I think they're doing great.”
Dyer, whose wife left him just seven months after they had their 10-year marriage blessed by the Church, said he would like to see the local Church do more.
“In my own parish, I'd like to see some kind of support group, maybe a Parents Without Partners group,” he said. “It's kind of hard to find things to do with kids and things to do with adults when the kids are in bed.”
Raising a physically disabled and developmentally delayed child, Dyer, a former nurse, has turned to a supportive family as well as relying on his own good instincts.
“I'm the first of six kids,” he said. “My mother always had problems with her pregnancies, so with the little ones I was always changing diapers…. I guess it was training.”
His priorities, he said, now all rest with Matt—making sure he's secure and happy and that his physical needs are met. Emotionally, Dyer is dealing with the boy's anger at his mother.
“He blames her for the breakup,” Dyer said. “She feels I'm feeding him this but, to be honest, I'm a strong proponent of the fact that a child needs a mother and father. I'd like her to have as much visitation as possible. If she wants to see him five days a week, fine. Hopefully he won't be too damaged by this.”
Fischer, who is returning to the Church since his marital break-up last year, also is trying to limit any emotional damage for his children, five-year-old Andy and three-year-old Becky, because of their mother's absence.
“It's up and down for them,” said Fischer, who has made a concerted effort to expand the children's boundaries and get in closer contact with family members “just to give them a feeling that there's a whole lot of people who care about them.”
Still, his success is limited.
“Not a day goes by when I don't hear, “I want my mommy,” or “I wish mommy was here.”
Dennis Poust writes from Austin, Texas.
----- EXCERPT: Nation's fastest growing family group struggles to meet challenges ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dennis Poust ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Trials of an Artist, Mother, And Would-be Politician DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:Dana
Singer-songwriter Dana has performed for Pope John Paul II on many occasions including in 1993, at the World Youth Day in Denver, where her song We Are One Body was chosen as the theme. Last November, Dana, noted for her high pro-life profile, stood as a candidate in the Irish presidential elections. Recently, she spoke with Register editorial assistant Geraldine Hemmings about the election, her faith, politics, and her hopes for the future.
Hemmings: You entered the Irish presidential race as a dark horse, but by the end of the campaign you were making great strides. Why did you decide to enter the race? Did you really hope to win, and to what do you attribute your respectable finish—third among five candidates?
Dana: At the very outset, it was with the belief that I would not win and that it would be a very difficult road, but that it would be an opportunity to speak some truth that needed to be spoken.
What is happening in Ireland today is a reflection of what has happened in America and what is happening throughout the world. After 30 years of heading down a “liberal agenda” road, America knows the truth. Their society is fractured and broken because their families are fractured and broken.
The family and the whole definition of family is being systematically broken down and I believe that those three elements, belief in God, understanding of the family as the fundamental unit of society, and the protection of life at every stage are central to me as a Christian—as a Catholic Christian—and, as it happens, central also to the Irish constitution.
Now though, there is an automatic attachment of adjectives to anyone who says they are Christian, which includes words like “rightwing,” “anti-this,” “anti-that,” “narrow-minded bigot.” It's almost subliminal at this point. The minute you say “I'm a Christian,” you can almost see a glazed look come over the eyes of anyone that you are speaking to who is not of the same frame of mind.
Ireland is quite unique in that it is one of two countries where the people have the last say and not the government. That being the case, why should the government undertake to change that Constitution and those fundamental values within it without reference to the people?
One of the reasons I believe I challenged and broke the system in Ireland was that I spoke from the heart to men and women who share the same beliefs as ours.
Do you think that there exists a tactical agenda to demean Christianity?
There is a definite push to secularize Ireland. It has been a long-term tactical agenda that these adjectives automatically apply when you say “Christian.”
Anti-abortion is almost automatically linked to being Christian. I prefer to say pro-life because of this “anti” image. You are almost anti-social if you are Christian. If you are Catholic then it is even worse.
There are people in the country who are now afraid to lift their head and say that they are Catholic because it is like lifting your head in a firing range. People have been battered into a sense of insecurity and have become afraid to stand up and to hold their head high and be proud. I would have just as much respect if someone stood up and said “I'm a Muslim” or “I'm a Protestant,” but by God I am going to stand up and say that I am proud to be Catholic.
In deciding to run for office, you said the Constitution belongs to the people, but they no longer are in control of it. Would you clarify?
I felt that the Constitution belonged to the people, but that it was quite solidly in the hands of the political system, which is OK as long as the political system reflected the people. But if it doesn't, it has to be challenged. So … I just went forward in being a pro-family, pro-life, Catholic Christian. I was simply challenging the system to gain ownership of the position of the presidency for the people.
Within the constitution that is what it says. It is the direct choice of the people. And really we didn't know all the ins and outs. I'm not a politician and I've never been interested in politics because, although there are good people in politics, survival in politics means compromise.
There are some issues that I cannot and would not compromise on. So I had the luxury of knowing that this was a non-partisan position and also of being able to say that I could do this and it had to be done.
Were the people receiving a voice in government?
They definitely were not. Not only were they not having a voice, the political leaders were actually dragging them with a ring through their nose in the direction that they wanted and that was towards a secular Ireland, where the definition of family would be changed, where abortion on demand and divorce would be available.
Was the relationship between the politicians and the people less than democratic?
Looking at the recent history and the relationship between the politicians who are elected by the people and are supposed to represent them and who are supposed to uphold the constitution of Ireland, on the issue of the divorce referendum, the actions of the government at that time were deemed by the Supreme Court and the High Court to be unlawful, illegal, and unconstitutional.
The government of the day used $750,000 of taxpayer's money to promote their pro-divorce stand and did not allow any taxpayers' money to fund the anti-divorce stand. Not only that, but out of 166 members of the Dál (Upper House of Ireland's Parliament), one stood for antidivorce. So the party whips were obviously being controlled.
There should be no party whips (method by which parties ensure that party policies are followed by members) on a matter that is put to the people of the country on a moral issue—which divorce is. We are not talking about financial decisions here, we are talking about moral issues that are enshrined in the Constitution and upheld by the people.
Almost half the people of the country were left with only one member out of 166 [in Parliament] to represent them. In the abortion issue, the referendum that was put to the people, in the words of a [national] polling company spokesman, the wording of the referendum itself was so confusing that it reflected badly upon the politicians who drew it up. There was no need for it to be so confusing. Further, the people were told by one of the political leaders of the day that if they didn't take a little abortion they would be given a lot of abortion.
In other words, if you voted yes in this referendum you had abortion and if you voted no you had abortion—a totally unfair and unconstitutional referendum. So in major moral issues, not only did the people have no voice, the political leaders were moving against them and against the will of the people.
You are clearly a woman of high values but politics is a dirty game. Many politicians have started out with good intentions but, in the interest of getting things done, end up compromising their beliefs. What makes you think that this wouldn't have happened to you?
If it came to that, you would have to choose between your values and your career, and I would choose my values because at the end of the day if you sell your soul and gain the world, what good is it to you? And what good does it do your children—and their children? If we lose belief in God, and lose respect for life and the family, we have a society that is ruthless—that is aimless. We'd have a society without values and I could never compromise my values.
What about the ethics of politicians who want to get things done these days? Are you disillusioned with them?
My heart goes out to many of them who are very unhappy. Even though they were under the party whip, many of them stood with me. There was recognition that what I was saying was truth and that the fundamental changes that have taken place in Ireland during the past 10 years, far from improving the quality of life in the society—it might have improved what is in your pocket, it might have improved the infrastructure, maybe the roads and the buildings are better—have led to its deterioration.
No one should ever feel trapped in whatever profession or whatever lifestyle they are in. They should never feel trapped to the extent that they would compromise their deepest beliefs and values, because there is always another way.
The theme of Mary McAleese's presidency is “Building Bridges.” This means crossing the divides between north and south—Protestant and Catholic. President McAleese is Catholic, but she recently received communion in an Anglican Church and was criticized for doing so. Would you comment?
I know her desire was to build bridges but, if in building a new bridge you damage an existing bridge, how much further on are you? And, while you would have respect for another person's religion, you must show that same respect for your own.
As a member of the Catholic Church, you are called to obedience. Like any team of players, if you want to do well and get results then you have to play by the rules. Try going on the golf course in a pair of stiletto heels and see how far you get. Rules are there for a reason.
This is not a suggestion of the Church, this is canon law. Catholics must maintain a united stand. Just as in a family, parents must have a united voice, leaders must also have a united voice. If there are two different voices, what is that saying and doing to those of us eager to follow the teaching of the Church? It is causing them to be confused and divided.
You grew up in the north. How did the violence there affect you as a young girl? Were any of your family members hurt or killed?
No, not anyone directly, but we knew of people. We lived in the Bogside and my mother was there Bloody Sunday [the killing of 14 unarmed Catholic civil rights marchers by British soldiers in Londonderry, Jan. 30, 1972], so were the neighbors and friends. In fact, that was one of the questions that was put to me in a news interview at the time of the election. It coincided with the peace talks beginning in Northern Ireland. The newscaster asked me whether I viewed my pro-life stance as being detrimental or hard-line. I remember saying to her that it was a monumental time. The world was looking at the peace talks beginning in the north. How could I celebrate the beginnings of peace in the north and not be deeply saddened by the beginning of killing [due to abortion] in the south? I cannot separate violence at one stage of life from violence at another.
The peace talks are at a critical stage and appear to be collapsing.
I am saddened at the state of the talks at the moment because the will of the people is to have peace, and the politicians have to reflect it. Because I have never been in a political party, I have always very easily been able to move across the religious divide in the north, and because of my very strong pro-life profile, it's the Northern Ireland Protestants that have stood with me in the House of Commons in London and supported me in my pro-life work.
What do you think about Irish Nationalists who have labeled their cause as being the “Catholic” cause or are seen as the Catholic movement?
Irish nationalists, just by the way the country was divided, would have fallen into the Catholic side but it is interesting to note that initially in the push for freedom in Ireland, there would have been as many Protestant people involved in that kind of push for civil rights as indeed there was in the beginning of the whole civil rights movement in the north. It was both Catholics and Protestants and I think that that is the hope for the future, that wherever there are fundamental injustices, men and women of strength and of character stand together against it, whatever their religion.
A seat in the European Parliament in Ireland (MEP) recently opened. You have expressed that this may be the way forward for you. Is this the opportunity you've been waiting for?
Yes, it has been suggested that I look at that way forward, though not particularly this seat. I would be very interested because Europe has had a tremendous influence [on Ireland], both good and bad. The obstacle at the moment would be that for five days a week I would have to live in Brussels, and I am a mother first.
Looking at your life up until now—your popularity as a singer; a fulfilling life as a mother bringing up a family with strong values; your strong running in the presidential race—you would seem to be many people's idea of the “successful woman of the '90s.” Is there more to it than meets the eye?
You may look at me from the outside and see these different departments of my life. I don't. I see the central things that occupy my mind and my heart. I can look back at a time in my life when my career and everything I touched turned to gold. I was on television often but inside I was not at peace. I may have had everything going for me then but inside I was in turmoil. Getting your life in order starts from the inside out.
The central thing in my life is my relationship with God. When that is a central relationship, it puts everything else in order. Living my life as a Catholic is where I find my fullest relationship with God, and it's an ongoing relationship that develops more and more as time goes by like any relationship. I have a very good husband but, again, it's a relationship that you have to invest in. You are all the time working on that—and your relationship with your children is never at a standstill.
Do you ever tire of being in the public eye?
Yes, but I never get tired of the people. I have lived all my adult life since I was 18 in this kind of world and in this kind of arena. It's as natural as breathing. But what does upset me is when I am away from my children, and the pull between work and home. It seems, though, that this is how our life has been laid out. I would say to my own children and Damien, my husband, that if a mother can be at home with her children then that is the place to be. It can't always be that way though.
In the mid-70s it was suspected that you had throat cancer. What were your thoughts at the time, so early on in what seemed to be a very promising career?
I didn't know that it was possibly cancer until after the operation, and by that time they had already discovered that it wasn't. But looking back to the time when I lost my voice, I couldn't sing at all—I couldn't speak. I could honestly say that it was the greatest blessing of my entire life because it took away all the crutches and it left me with me. I really had to look at myself and at my life and where I was going and what I believed. I think that looking back I could only be thankful for that happening because I was able to look at my relationship with God and others.
Where did you get the inspiration to write the song
I was at a youth gathering at one of the cities in North America. It was obvious that in an attempt to keep the young people in the Church, they were trying to sugar coat [the Catholic faith]. There was no reality of evil, there was no hell. The whole question of pro-life, which I spoke on, was that I had no right to speak on that in a country that wasn't my country because I was not living here at the time. I had just moved here. It was quite obvious that instead of teaching them hard truths, they were offering a “feel good” approach to keep them in the Church. I felt that it was wrong and it was also insulting to their intelligence. These were 14-, 15-, 16-, and 17-year-olds, and it would be much better to tell them the truth and to assure them that when they had to stand for the truth they would not be alone.
The song was chosen because my sister wanted me to sing at one of the events. She sent a tape with a few songs on it including We Are One Body. She had a call from the committee asking her if she wanted to enter it into the competition for a theme song. She said no, and then asked me if she had done the right thing. I said absolutely. I didn't want to enter any competitions.
Then the committee rang back about three weeks later and said that they had chosen it as the theme song of the event. I couldn't believe it. This couldn't possibly be. It was amazing!
You work with EWTN. It was recently reported that Mother Angelica, the station's founder, has been healed of some long-time physical infirmities. What do you think about this?
It's absolutely beautiful. We are continually surrounded by miracles every day. When it happens to someone you know, it has an even greater impact. And you know miracles are not just for the individual, when a miracle happens, it affects us all.
Where did you get the name Dana from and what does it mean?
It's from an Irish verb. It means to be bold.
Did you have any role models in your life?
My mother and father were the greatest influence on my life and now at this stage I think the Pope is just one of the most incredible human beings. I think that he will certainly be considered as Pope John Paul the Great.
What did the Pope say to you in Denver?
He said that his greatest regret was that his mother wasn't Irish!
—Geraldine Hemmings
Dana
History: Born Rose Mary Brown in London, August 1951; educated in Thornhill College in Derry; won 1970 Eurovision contest for best singer in Europe; had several top-ten hits in the United Kingdom; moved to United States, 1991; sang theme song for World Youth Day Denver '93 for Pope John Paul II; ran for Irish presidency in 1997.
Personal: Married Damien in 1978; four children.
Favorite book: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.
Favorite films: A Man for All Seasons, Home Alone II.
Most influential saint: St. Jude and Bl. Faustina.
----- EXCERPT: Irish singer Dana carries her deep religious convictions into a secular world ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dana ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: U.S. Notes & Quotes DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:Catholic and Pro-life Astrong majority of Catholics “even nominal ones” are pro-life. And they may even start voting that way.
This was the news reported in a Reuters news story on the 25th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in America.
The article cited statistics that show 80% of all Catholics-including non-practicing ones-oppose abortion. It quoted Camden, N.J., Bishop James McHugh, the National Conference of Catholic Bishop's Committee on Pro-Life Activities, explaining why Catholics don't always seem pro-life. Astrong historical identification of many Catholics with the Democratic Party has distorted their public expression of their pro-life ethic. But that's changing.
“There's a great discomfort in the way the Democratic Party has absolutely caved in to pro-abortion forces,” he is quoted saying.
More bishops and laypeople than ever are realizing that, despite decades of family history with the Democratic Party, “[i]t's far more important to use the abortion issue as a central criterion of how voters make up their minds in the choice of a candidate.”
One such layperson, Marie Ralbulsky, a public school teacher, gave her explanation of the Catholic Church's stance on abortion.
“We're just talking about having respect for people in life from conception to the grave. Respect is what the Church is about.”
Ralbulsky and her husband pray every week outside an abortion clinic.
Said the article, “She recalls the day when they enticed a pregnant 18-yearold girl away from the clinic's entrance. Six months later, the couple, parents of two grown daughters, attended the baptism of the teenager's newborn infant.”
Is
The Holy Father's summer trip to Denver a few years ago attracted the largest live audience ever assembled in the United States-and one of the largest ever in the world. So how come the priest in the Disney-ABC series Nothing Sacred can't even get people to watch him from the comfort of their own living rooms?
ABC is perplexed by what has happened to Nothing Sacred, according to a Knight Ridder news Service report Jan. 24.
ABC originally hoped that the controversial nature of the show would increase its ratings. “By this standard, Nothing Sacred should be challenging ER as television's highest-rated drama,” said the report.
The show depicts the life of a Catholic priest who seems to object to Catholicism and to wish he weren't a priest.
The show uniquely tested two attitudes toward the Catholic Church. When the 300,000 member Catholic League staged a boycott of the show, it was expected that the show's ratings would grow.
Instead, said the report, they went from bad to worse. Today, “it is wallowing in the WB and UPN section of Nielsenland,” alongside little-watched local programming, said the report.
The article quotes three priests who support the show, among them Chicago sociologist Father Andrew Greeley, who says that “American Catholicism … is a lot more like Nothing Sacred than it is the Catholic League. Write that in stone.”
“Unfortunately,” concluded the report, American Catholics “are not watching Nothing Sacred in significant numbers…. Neither is the rest of America.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: World Notes & Quotes DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:Pro-life Cubans
The Associated Press reported Jan. 23 that “Quietly, and with some behind-the-scenes American help, an antiabortion movement is building strength in Cuba, where the number of abortions recently matched the number of births.
“The maternity hospital physician who founded the organization Pro-Lifein Spanish, Pro-Vida-has a simple credo: ‘Abortion is an abomination.’ She might not get too strong an argument from Cuban President Fidel Castro,” who claimed, in his Vatican conversation with Pope John Paul II last year, that he believed abortion was “not healthy or desirable or advisable,” according to the article.
“With the United States and Canada, Cuba is one of three Western Hemisphere nations with legalized abortion on demand. And the demand here has been high over the years. The latest U.N. statistics, for 1989, showed Cuba with 56.5 abortions per 1,000 women ages 15-44, more than twice the U.S. level….
“Cubans acknowledge that in many cases abortion-carried out free of charge in state hospitals-has become an almost casual method of birth control….
“Pro-Vida” is affiliated with Cuba's Catholic Church, said the article, and must limit its activities—video and other educational presentations—to Church grounds.
German Clerics Forced to Join Unemployed
A century-old system in Germany used to function almost like an automatic tithe that funded the country's Churches. Now it is responsible for unemployed clerics and seminarians like Gert Holle.
Holle “began to prepare to become a Lutheran minister more than eight years ago,” according to an article by Edmund Andrews of The New York Times (Jan. 28).
“But now, five months before he is supposed to take his vows, the 33-year-old seminarian” is studying public relations so that he can find a job.
The Lutheran bishop has announced for the first time in memory that there are only a fraction of the needed openings for the 48 seminarians.
“At least in public relations you are working with people,” Holle is quoted saying.
The problem is that “religious institutions in Germany get almost all their revenue from a 9% Church surtax imposed on the income of every registered Catholic, Protestant, and Jew.” Taxpayers declare their religion as well as their income on their returns. Non-religious taxpayers don't pay the taxnor those who “revoke their registration.”
In 1996, the take for all religions was about $11 billion in Germany—which was less than the taxes taken from the sales of cigarettes in the country, according to the article. With unemployment in Germany climbing to 11%, fewer people are willing or able to pay the tax.
In 1997, though final numbers are unavailable, it seems that the revenue raised from the tax was even less.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Sainthood Cause Delayed for Legion of Mary Founder DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:DUBLIN—The British secret service, MI5, and Irish civil service red tape may delay for decades the cause of Frank Duff, founder of the Legion of Mary.
Archbishop Desmond Connell of Dublin Jan. 12 swore in the tribunal team that will examine Duff's life to examine if he is a proper candidate for canonization. If the tribunal, led by vice-postulator Father Bede MacGregor, finds that Duff led a life of heroic virtue, he will be declared “venerable” and will have passed the first of three stages on the way to being recognized as an official saint of the Catholic Church.
Duff was one of the few lay people to address the Second Vatican Council where he received a standing ovation from the world's bishops in recognition of his contribution to the understanding and implementation of the lay calling of all lay Christians to promote the Gospel in the world. He founded the Legion of Mary in 1921 and the organization now has branches in almost every diocese in the world.
Father MacGregor's investigation has one advantage over similar tribunals: Duff died fairly recently—at age 91 in 1980—and many of those who knew him well are still alive. Father MacGregor plans to call “about 40” witnesses, two of whom knew Duff for more than 50 years, to give evidence to the tribunal.
The investigation's main difficulty will be gaining access to British and Irish government archives relating to Duff's life. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints will reject any case presented to it which has not examined any “known significant archives.”
A spokesman for the British embassy in Dublin admitted to the Register that Duff was “probably” the subject of a British secret service file in 1920 when he acted as manager of the nationalist delegation to London that negotiated the Treaty of Independence for Ireland. While Duff is said to be the only one among the delegation not to carry a firearm for his own protection, he did travel under a pseudonym, F.S. Mitchell, which he later used as a pen name. However, British intelligence reports are covered by a 100-year rule that would prevent any material held on Duff from being released before 2020.
“The British are paranoid about releasing any of their security files,” said Caitriona Crowe of the National Archive of Ireland. “They have yet to release material relating to the Easter Rising in 1916, never mind material relating to the Treaty.”
Father MacGregor says the evidence he has collected so far is “highly laudatory.” Among those he wishes to talk to are Dublin women whom Frank Duff and the Legion of Mary helped save from a life of prostitution, as well as the now adult children of those women. (Cian Molloy)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Cian Molloy ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: New British Tribunal to Investigate Bloody Sunday DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:DERRY, Northern Ireland—Retired Bishop Edward Daly of Derry has welcomed the news that the British government is setting up a tribunal of inquiry into the events surrounding Bloody Sunday in Derry when 14 Catholics were massacred by British troops 26 years ago.
“It is about time this festering sore was healed,” said the bishop who was present when troops of the Parachute Regiment opened fire on peaceful demonstrators
Bishop Daly and his successor, Bishop Seamus Hegarty, have long been calling for a fresh inquiry into the killings, rejecting the first British government inquiry into the matter which was lead by Lord Justice Widgery. The Widgery Tribunal found that British troops had opened fire in self-defence to protect themselves from gunmen and bombers among the protesters. But that finding has always been disputed by the nationalist-Catholic community who claim the protesters were unarmed and peaceful.
Only two hours before the British prime minister Tony Blair announced the setting up of the new tribunal, the Irish government published a dossier containing evidence which the Widgery Tribunal had not considered. The dossier, which described the original tribunal as “wilfully flawed, selective, and unbalanced” and “a startlingly inaccurate and partisan portrayal of the events,” includes: dozens of eye-witness statements, from both civilians and troops present on the day, that were not considered by Lord Widgery; forensic evidence proving that at least three of the victims were shot by troops stationed on Derry's city walls—a claim rejected by Widgery; and transcripts of radio communications between British troops and police officers showing that at no time did troops come under fire when they started shooting demonstrators. The dossier also details wide discrepancies between statements made by British troops to military police immediately after the killings and the statements the same troops made to the Widgery Tribunal. Details of their positions, the number of shots fired, and descriptions of who they were firing at changed substantially.
Perhaps, the most damning evidence against the original official inquiry is the disclosure that the then British prime minister Edward Heath sent a confidential memo to Lord Widgery reminding him that Britain was engaged in both “a military and a propaganda war in Northern Ireland.”
It remains to be seen if Heath will be called before the new tribunal, to explain that memo.
The leader of the predominantly Catholic Social Democratic and Labor Party, John Hume, said he welcomed the new tribunal saying that it would aid reconciliation and the healing process in Northern Ireland. Hume is the only member of the British parliament who was present on that fateful day.
But David Trimble, leader of the predominantly Protestant Ulster Unionist Party rejected that claim saying: “The basic fact is that an arrest operation went wrong, an arrest operation directed at rioters orchestrated by republicans. The fault lies less with the men placed in difficult circumstances than with the men who created those circumstances.”
Noting the harm done by Bloody Sunday and the Widgery Tribunal to relations between the Catholic-nationalist community and the security forces in Northern Ireland, Bishop Hegarty said: “The more perceptive observers are asking the question whether the Troubles which we have experienced during the past 25 years would have happened to they extent they did, had people not felt such a deep sense of outrage and betrayal.” (Cian Molloy)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Cian Molloy ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Vatican Notes & Quotes DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:Detroit Teens Prefer Pope to Clinton's Scandal
More than 2,000 “[t]eens from throughout [metropolitan] Detroit gathered at a downtown hotel Sunday, expecting to watch a papal mass from Havana's Revolution Square. Instead, they saw network TV coverage of President Clinton's possible infidelity.
“That didn't deter participants at a two-day Catholic Youth Organization conference from discussing whether Pope John Paul II's visit would bring greater faith and freedom to Cuba,” said a report in Detroit News Jan. 26.
The article quoted 17-year-old Meghan McGahey expressing her disapproval of the programming change.
“I really wanted to hear [the Pope]; he is such an inspiration to me and my peers,” she said. “When I first heard him speak four years ago, I understood he knew how to make an impression on us. He put a lot of hope into our lives.”
When it was clear that the telecast of the Mass would not appear, Father Gerry LeBoeuf, a leader of the event, began an impromptu discussion about religious persecution in Cuba, telling the group, “We take our faith for granted … there are some children your own age who haven't had the same opportunity” to worship openly.
He added that the Pope, “was raised in a communist country and had to study to be a priest underground.”
Cecilia Patina, 15, praised the Pope and offered an explanation for why Fidel Castro may be more open to religion. “[H]e is getting awful old,” she is quoted saying.
Castro Confronts the Novus Ordo
Whether Fidel Castro feels comfortable with the New World Order or not, he certainly looked out of place in what was probably the first Vatican II-era Novus Ordo Mass he ever attended. When Castro was in Catholic school, the Mass was still celebrated in the Tridentine Rite.
Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, who concelebrated Sunday Mass with the Pope on his recent visit to Cuba, spoke of Castro's Mass habits when he returned home to a reporter with the Philadelphia Daily News.
Castro was “clueless” according to the reporter. He flipped through his missal and kept looking on the pages of those next to him to find the right place.
Said Cardinal Bevilacqua: “He got caught at the kiss of peace. He was off guard completely. He didn't know what to do.” Though the virulently anti-Catholic dictator did not cross himself or appear to pray during Mass, he was “very respectful,” and “enjoyed it a great deal,” and applauded politely during the homily.
Later, at a reception for about 50 bishops and cardinals from across the Americas, Cardinal Bevilacqua said, “I was very close to him … he just kept talking, but nothing of a substantive nature. He dominated the conversation,” talking about such things as different kinds of wines in Cuba.
After the Mass, said the cardinal, a Cuban he met in a Havana parish said, “‘Today, the revolution has ended.’ And that's what I sensed, too.”
Holy Father Unwelcome in Russia
A Reuters story reported Jan. 27 that “Pope John Paul II, who has just visited communist Cuba, is still not welcome in post-Soviet Russia, a Russian Orthodox Church official said Tuesday, citing continued disagreements with the Vatican.
“‘It's not that [Cuban Leader] Fidel Castro is good and the Russian Orthodox Church is so bad,” said Father Ilarion Alfeyev, who oversees the Church's relations with other Christian faiths.
“‘The Roman Catholic Church did not seize churches in Cuba, there wasn't this violence, this atmosphere that has developed here, and so in some ways it was easier,’ to go to Cuba, Alfeyev told Reuters in an interview,” referring to disputes between Ukrainian Catholics and Orthodox.
In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukrainian Greek Catholics, or Uniates began to claim Church property from the pro-Moscow Orthodox Church, according to the article. The Orthodox Church also resents Catholic evangelization in Russia.
The article noted that the Holy Father longs for a reunification of Orthodox and Catholic believers, and a strengthening of relations in the year 2000. Alfeyev, an Oxford-Educated Russian, is quoted saying that, “in human hands” reunification is “not possible.” He added, “But a miracle of God is always possible.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Promoting a ëCulture of Vocationà DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:Following are excerpts from the just-released Vatican document New Vocations for a New Europe:
“Perhaps there is no other area of the Church's life more needing to open itself to hope than pastoral work for vocations, especially where the crisis is most strongly felt…. Therefore we must regenerate it in priests, educators, Christian families, religious families, secular institutes, in all those who must serve life with the new generations.”
To parents and educators:
“You parents are the first natural vocational educators, while you formators are not only instructors who introduce people to the essential choices: you are also called to generate life in these young people whom you will open up to the future. Your fidelity to God's call is the precious and irreplaceable means by which your children and pupils might discover their own personal vocation, so that ‘they may have life, and have it abundantly’” (Jn 10:10).
To children, adolescents, and young people:
“You will be happy and fulfilled only by being open to fulfilling the Creator's dream for his creature…. Know, dearest young people, that the Church anxiously follows your progress and your choices. And how beautiful it would be if this letter would rouse up in you some kind of response, so that a dialogue may continue with the one who is guiding you.”
To pastors, priests, consecrated men and women:
“There is nothing more stimulating than a witness to one's own vocation, which is so passionate as to make it contagious…. Blessed are you, then, if you can express with your lives that to serve God is beautiful and fulfilling, and reveal that in him, the Living One, is hidden the identity of every living person.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Help for the Forgotten DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:The Catholic Medical Mission Board (CMMB) dates back to 1913 when Dr. Paluel Flagg a young anesthesiology resident in New York, visited the Caribbean. Deeply upset by the many there suffering from leprosy, he returned with the idea of creating medical missions working in foreign countries. In 1922, Flagg founded the Medical Mission Committee of the Catholic Hospital Association to establish, staff, and supply medical missions at home and abroad. In 1928, the Committee assumed independent control of the organization. Volunteer clubs were started across the United States to promote the missions, raising funds by selling canceled stamps, old jewelry, and Christmas cards, and collecting drugs and medical supplies by doctors, pharmacies, and hospitals.
By 1993, CMMB had grown into an international organization whose computerized inventory warehouse and packing system speeds medical supplies to needy areas around the world. In Third World countries, CMMB works through local Church infrastructure, said Sister Maura O'Donohue, MMM, the organization's program director.
About 35 U.S. pharmaceutical companies donate a total of about $45 million worth of drugs each year. Private donors contribute another $5 million or so that goes to pay for administrative expenses, shipments, and special field programs and specific drugs that are requested by clinics, according to Terry Kirch, director of the CMMB. Volunteer doctors and nurses contribute a total of 3,300 days to CMMB, the equivalent of $1.5 million worth of service. For every dollar donated to CMMB, about $15 worth of medical supplies are delivered, said Kirch.
—Lisa Pevtzow
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Lisa Pevtzow ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Genetic Testing: A Mixed Blessing? DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:A recent USA Today article reported that doctors can now test for 450 genetic diseases. This means that a couple can find out if one or both are carriers of a defective gene that will effect their offspring. Through prenatal diagnosis, a pregnant woman or her preborn child may be tested to see if the child is subject to a genetic defect.
The methods of genetic testing have become safer and more accurate, and can now detect a wider variety of genetic problems before a specific disease actually occurs. For instance, a genetic change, or mutation, that has been found to double the risk of colon cancer for some persons was recently discovered. The research shows that this mutation effects 6% of Ashkenazi Jews. Anyone in this population group can have periodic tests that would detect the early warning signs, allow for treatment, and thereby reduce the risk of colon cancer to near zero. In this case, genetic information allows people to identify and avoid disease.
Thanks to the Human Genome Project, a government-funded effort, the entire genetic mosaic of the human being will soon be known. That will not only enable doctors to develop diagnostic tests to determine if disease is present, but ultimately, in some cases, to intervene and change a person's genetic makeup.
It's important to distinguish genetic screening from genetic testing. In screening, entire population groups are given a test for any evidence of a genetic defect or weakness. Widespread screening can help protect everyone, or it can lead to the knowledge that only specific segments of the overall population are effected or are at higher risk, like the Ashkenazi Jews or African-Americans with sickle-cell anemia.
There are also specific prenatal tests that can ascertain whether an unborn child is effected by some genetic defect or disease. These tests have become more sophisticated, safer, and more accurate. Unfortunately, for many people the immediate response to a positive test result is to end the pregnancy. For others, knowledge is a foundation for hope. In fact, medical research has now come up with ways to correct some defects even during pregnancy, or at least minimize the danger. There are even surgical techniques that can be used to save the life of the unborn child.
As we acquire new knowledge and new testing techniques are discovered, there is also a new array of dangers and problems. Will employers be able to obtain the genetic profile of workers or those seeking employment, potentially using the information to discriminate against them? Will insurance companies and health care plans procure the information and exclude people from coverage? Will the modern-day eugenicist decide to clean up the gene pool by abortion or sterilization? These are questions raised by ethicists and they are communicated to all of us by the media.
The National Conference of Catholic Bishops' (NCCB) Committee on Science and Human Values has produced two very informative pamphlets—one on screening and one on testing. Both draw heavily on the 1987 Vatican instruction Donum Vitae (The Gift of Life), on respect for human life in its origin and the dignity of procreation and on statements of Pope John Paul II.
Because prenatal testing can lead, and often has led, to abortion, Donum Vitae addresses the question: Is prenatal diagnosis morally licit? The response is that if prenatal testing respects the life and integrity of the human embryo and fetus and is directed toward safeguarding or healing the unborn, then all else being equal, the testing is morally acceptable. Pope John Paul II was even more explicit in his 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), where he says that such tests are morally acceptable when they do not involve disproportionate risks for the unborn child or the mother, and are intended to make early intervention possible or to enable the parents to prepare for and learn how to care for their child.
The principles that apply to prenatal diagnosis can be applied to other types of testing as well. Essentially, if the test is used to provide necessary information for the person or to safeguard others, and it does not lead to euthanasia, discrimination, or denial of treatment, it is usually morally acceptable. But because of rapid scientific discoveries on human genes, we must be prepared for critical analysis.
It boils down to the fact that scientists are not prepared to provide all the ethical reflection or moral guidance we need on these issues. Priests and others in the health care apostolate must deepen their knowledge and understanding, not only of the techniques, but more importantly of the principles. The NCCB pamphlets Critical Decisions and Promise and Peril of Genetic Screening are helpful. With the enormous amount of information coming from the scientists and the media, it's important for all Catholics to read, study, and be ethically informed.
Bishop James McHugh, ordinary of Camden, N.J., is a member of the NCCB Committee for Pro-Life Activities.
----- EXCERPT: PERSPECTIVE ----- EXTENDED BODY: Bishop James McHugh ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Dancing to the Beat of Computer Designers DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:(Princeton University Press, 1997, 293 pp., $29.95)
In July 1988, the USS Vincennes, a cruiser built to provide anti-aircraft missile defense for an aircraft carrier battle group, and controlled by the advanced Aegis electronic fire-control system, was patrolling the Persian Gulf as part of a fleet enforcing the U.S. embargo of Iran.
The morning of July 3, the Vincennes and two companion ships became embroiled in a scrap with Iranian patrol boats. Just then, Iran Air Flight 655 had the bad judgment or bad luck to fly over the battle zone.
The sophisticated equipment of the Vincennes spotted the civilian plane coming. The men of the Vincennes concluded they were being attacked by an Iranian military aircraft. Two SM-2 standard missiles were fired and hit home. Flight 655 plunged into the Persian Gulf, killing some 290 people.
A case of human error in which the equipment worked to perfection? In Trapped in the Net, Gene Rochlin argues that it wasn't that simple.
It is true that the equipment on the Vincennes functioned just as it was supposed to do. It is also true that there was “confusion and disorder” among the human beings on board the ship. But what else would anyone expect?
The Vincennes was trading shots with an enemy. Confusion and disorder are likely in an ongoing battle. This was the environment in which the Vincennes presumably was meant to operate. If the ship, considered as a system, then shot down an airliner—as it did—there must have been something wrong with the system, not just its human element. Smooth functioning computerized equipment enabled human beings, acting in error, to execute a disastrous mistake.
This was neither the first nor last time such a thing has happened in our brave new computerized world. Rochlin, a professor of energy resources at the University of California-Berkeley, is no technophobe, but his sophisticated book does raise serious questions about the direction we are headed.
Other computer books have focused on the impact of computerization on the individual; the focus of this one is on the impact this process is having on large organizations—business, the military, and so forth.
One question raised by the process concerns the loss of human expertise in an automated environment. “Expertise” is a product of trial and error—and computers permit no mistakes. A world without human error sounds fine, of course, except: What happens when the computers fail or suddenly confront an alarming new circumstance they haven't been programmed to handle? In such situations, what are human operators, denied the opportunity to acquire expertise, supposed to do?
Rochlin recounts cases in which experienced airline pilots—those with expertise—were able to cope with sudden mishaps, and cases in which other pilots— apparently without the same expertise—could not.
The chapter in which these tales are told begins with a quotation from an anonymous commercial airline pilot: “In the airliner of the future, the cockpit will be staffed by a crew of two—a pilot and a dog. The pilot will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to bite the pilot if he tries to touch anything.” To which another pilot added the imaginary explanation of an airline executive for not phasing out pilots entirely: “Because accidents will always happen, and no one would believe us if we tried to blame the dog.”
Other problems arise in automated factories and offices. Here, computers came billed as restorers of power and autonomy lost by workers due to mass production and standardized office work. Owners and managers went along at first for the sake of productivity and efficiency—but only up to a point. “Control of information technology remained as central to the purposes and goals of management as ever, and it was only a matter of time and technical development before means were found to reassert it.”
A fundamental source of difficulties—perhaps the fundamental source—is that the computer revolution is being driven by the interests of designers rather than the needs of users. In one study, 75% of pilots said they didn't think the designers of aircraft took users into consideration, and 90% said they thought the logic of designers very different from their own.
The result of this designer hegemony is what Rochlin calls an “asymmetric dependency relationship”—that is to say, designers call the tune to which the rest of us are obliged to dance. “The designers and programmers are free to do what they feel is right, or necessary, and the user has little choice other than to accept it, and stay current with the latest version of software, or to reject it and drift down the irreversible path of obsolescence.”
Computers have answered many important human needs, made life more pleasant and productive for countless people. This clock neither can nor should be turned back. Rochlin asks us instead to look ahead. Computers, he writes, are “creating patterns of reliance and dependency through which our lives will be indirectly and irrevocably shaped.” Before that happens, perhaps we should pause and decide how we would like our irrevocable future to look.
Russell Shaw writes from Washington.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Russell Shaw ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Portrait of Pascal, Humble Genius DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:(Eerdmans, 1997, 210 pp., $16)
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was a genius with the precociousness of a Mozart and the breadth of interest of a Da Vinci. He lived in a time and society vastly different from our own, yet his profound reflections on universal issues remain vital and compelling. Thinkers like T.S. Eliot, Simone Weil, Peter Kreeft, and Bells of Nagasaki author Takashi Nagai are in his debt. Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, archbishop of Paris, says his early philosophical questions fell into place “when I read Pascal.”
Marvin O'Connell's chronological account of Pascal's life masterfully unveils the genius of this evergreen thinker while also revealing him as a family man and a fellow pilgrim on the road to holiness.
Pascal never married, but family ties “of unusual strength” united him with his father and two sisters (his mother died when Pascal was three). His father, a lawyer and amateur scientist with a gift for teaching, took charge of the boy's education—an experience of home-schooling at its best. Pascal's astonishing aptitudes surfaced early. Denied access to geometry until he was 16 (his father did not want him seduced away from studying grammar), Pascal explored it in secret. At 12, reported his sister, unassisted and not even knowing the word for circle or line, he had advanced “to the point where he could propound, without knowing it was so, the 32nd proposition of the first book of Euclid.”
This spirit of inquiry characterized Pascal's entire life. It yielded groundbreaking contributions in conic projection, modern computation (he invented a sophisticated calculating machine), hydrostatics (a famous experiment proved the existence of the vacuum), probability theory, and integral calculus. Pascal also devised a speed reading method, launched a plan for mass transport in Paris, and left a legacy of writings on theological and philosophical issues.
Never a Christian with his mind on hold, Pascal saw no conflict between faith and reason. But, O'Connell explains, he made a critical distinction: in the realm of nature, he sought truth through a relentless, sometimes iconoclastic application of reason and experience; in the realm of faith, he sought truth in Jesus Christ, revealed in the authority of Scripture and the tradition of the Catholic Church.
What exactly Church tradition taught, especially about certain hot-button issues, was fiercely debated in this France of the counter-Reformation. A Catholic revival was in full swing and the average educated layperson took serious interest in theology's practical implications. In rulers this interest could turn sinister. Under Louis XIII and the iron-fisted Richelieu, and later under Louis XIV, religious figures and ideas seen as somehow subversive were routinely quashed. Prominent among these suspects were the Jansenists.
Jansenism began as a movement to counter laxity and the trend to exalt natural virtue and ignore sin. St. Augustine had demolished the fifth-century version of this trend, Pelagianism. Recapturing Augustine's thought, Jansenists hoped, would do likewise for 17thcentury French Catholics. Problem was, Augustine's teaching as explained by Jansen and others could sound like a Catholic Calvinism, with free will downplayed, the pull of grace overplayed, and predestination resulting.
O'Connell has scouted out this terrain thoroughly and provides expert guidance through a thicket of complexities. Augustine's views and their interpretation by Jansenist, Jesuit, and Protestant exponents are cogently explained. Terms are clearly defined. Major players come to life: founders Cornelius Jansen and Saint-Cyran; opponents like the Jesuits Luis de Molina and François Annat; the brother and sister team of Mère Angélique and Antoine Arnauld, charismatic leaders of the reformed religious communities at the two abbeys of Port-Royal, which were Jansenism's nerve centers.
O'Connell gives a behind-the-scenes look at the maneuvering that resulted in the condemnation of Jansenist views by the Church and the state. He admits Jansenism's weaknesses—its gloomy view of human nature, discouragement of frequent communion, borderline predestination. At the same time, his basically sympathetic presentation does not leave the reader mystified as to why someone of Pascal's stature would find the movement attractive, even becoming its bestknown defender.
Like other men and women drawn into renewal, Pascal embraced Jansenism because he saw in its followers living examples of holiness in Christ. Two noblemen, reformed brawlers turned doctors, were his first contacts; their witness touched off the gradual conversion of the entire Pascal family from a dutiful to a fervent practice of the faith. This first awakening to grace left 23-year-old Pascal only half-converted, however, with an aversion to worldly amusements but no attraction to God.
It took eight years, but Nov. 23, 1654, Pascal's hesitancies vanished in a dramatic personal encounter with God. Pascal told no one about this life-changing “night of fire,” but during the experience he scrawled a onepage testament that he carried concealed thereafter. A sharp-eyed servant found it after Pascal's death, sewn into a jacket lining. With this encounter, Pascal moved from mere mental assent to loving surrender to “the God of Abraham … Isaac … Jacob. Not of the philosophers and intellectuals…. The God of Jesus Christ.” The experience brought “certitude, feeling, joy, peace … tears of joy…. Renunciation total and sweet.”
O'Connell's portrait of Pascal reveals a winning combination of genius and intellectual humility that deepened into holiness. Toward the end of his life, Pascal was reaching out with works of mercy as well as written works. He took in a homeless family, made lavish charitable contributions, visited the poor and sick in their frightful slums. “May God never abandon me!” were his last words.
O'Connell has presented a compelling life that delivers on his opening assessment of Blaise Pascal as “a remarkable human being and luminous Christian believer” and makes readers want to pursue the acquaintance. Ronald Knox once said, “There will always be room for more books about Pascal.” There is certainly room for this one.
Louise Perrotta writes from St. Paul, Minn.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Louise Perrotta ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:Catholics On-Line
Molly Mulqueen's front page article, “… Catholic Web Sites Offer a World to On-Line Users” (Jan. 18-24) lists valuable Website sources of reliable Catholic information, available now on the Internet. Please add us to your roster: We're Catholic, pro-life and proud to be!
The Catholic Medical Association is a national federation of Catholic physicians' guilds—and now, we're on the Web. Check out our Website at www.cathmed.com.
Please let other pro-life folks know where to find us.
Richard Watson MD
Mountainside, New Jersey
God Before Man
I found George Sim Johnston's column (“Inner-Child Need Nurturing? Here's Just the Program for You,” Jan. 17) to be very informative. He showed why many converts to Catholicism may he disillusioned by our RCIA programs that are often weak on dogma and truth, but strong on feelings and self-esteem.
He closes the article with “RCIA programs are not the only casualty of the therapeutic culture's invasion of the Catholic Church. Whole orders of religious have been decimated. A spotlight ought to be turned on this problem.”
I am sure his analysis is close to the truth; especially the spotlight part. But the problem is far more extensive than just RCIA. The permeating problem throughout Catholicism today is the inversion of our Lord's two greatest commandments. The spotlight has been cast on the wrong actor; the supporting cast rather than the star of the show. We have raised “love thy neighbor as yourself” to be more important than “love thy God with thy whole heart and with thy whole soul.”
This error has crept into the Church—which for nearly 2,000 years knew better—only during the past 50 years. When we reverse these commandments we end up with a form of secular humanism; a pseudo-religion that appears attractive because it is the second greatest good. It is, however, actually a form of idolatry, placing the importance of humanity above the importance of God.
John Paul II's “Threshold of Hope” will not come to fruition until the spotlight is redirected to shine on God first, and then humanity will bask in the glow of his grace.
Richard McMahon
St. Paul, Minnesota
Population Control
With particular interest I read your guest editorial of Dec. 14 (“The New Population Problem”). I've been at the United Nations more than 10 years as a journalist-columnist for a small Manhattan publication and was impressed with your comments from the Cairo conference, which had tremendous impact here, as did the Vatican-Islamic temporary alliance on the issue of family values.
In the interests of environmental and sustainable development already there is advocacy and some consensus on reducing world population to about two or three billion, and arguments are prepared to justify this.
Besides the revolutionary social, political, cultural, future impact of the coming population implosion, it has been my experience that esoteric political cults are active in the population control, environmental organizations, and NGOs. Today we would call them New Age … but they are essentially old hat to a Church historian.
A rational argument on population imbalances, pension bankruptcies, etc. would not deter such international operators, as they essentially see human life as “pollution” itself to be reduced and eliminated. I believe Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was involved in esoteric beliefs that abortion and suicide frees a spirit to roam the universe and contraception prevents a spirit from being entrapped in an “evil” body. As a priest or priestess in such cults they see no nobler a pursuit than to eliminate human life from this planet. This, of course, would be a cult(ure) of death.
Robert Bonsignore
Brooklyn, New York
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Good Signs For the Future From the March for Life DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:J It's been a busy couple of weeks in Washington, D.C. Since the moment the story broke about the latest possible scandal at the White House, it's been hard to get news about any other subject. Even coverage of the Holy Father's amazing addresses to the Cuban people was sadly truncated.
So, there was little chance that the annual March for Life, marking 25 years of legal abortion on demand, was going to be prominently featured in national or local news. For those of you who couldn't make it to Washington, a few snapshots of the 25th annual March:
Just Keep Walking Ma'am: For those of you who saw national newscasts in which it appeared that equal numbers of pro-life and pro-abortion protesters were on hand to mark the day, a news flash. The ratio was about 3,333 to one. Pro-life marchers numbered about 100,000. There were about 30 four-letter-word-screaming protesters from a group called “Cease and Desist.”
In past years, I have comfortably slowed down during the March to chat with one of the thousand or so pro-lifers I have met in my travels. This year, because the crowd was so dense, I couldn't so much as lean down to pick up a dropped glove for fear of being trampled. That made me very happy.
The Next Generation Has Arrived: I have seen the next generation of pro-life messages, and they are very cool! Several groups of protesters in the March were young men and women in their 20s wearing amazing amounts of leather, dark glasses, and pierced everythings. They carried a sleek banner in black and white that said simply “Abortion is Mean.” Another protester—bald and wearing only jeans and sneakers—was “tattooed” with pro-life messages on his back.
About 700 students from the Franciscan University at Steubenville marched in complete silence save for the recitation of the rosary. At a certain point in their prayers, pall bearers carrying 25 small, black coffins—each marked with a year from 1973 to 1998—would stop in silence, and fall on their knees.
So, just in case there are any pro-life people wondering if there is any new way to communicate the pro-life message to the next generation—relax. They're already doing a creative job of it.
Hope Springs Eternal: This is true when you have surrendered the final authority over the pro-life struggle to the Eternal One himself. At the vigil Mass before the March and at the March itself, an air of confidence and quiet wisdom were palpable.
Why was this so—when abortion on demand is still so much with us?
In conversations with pro-life people, it seemed that the answer really did lie in Mother Teresa's famous words: God calls us to be faithful, not successful.
Here were people conscious that they were pursuing good work, in the company of good people—and leaving to God what would be its final fruits. Were I an abortion advocate, patience and fidelity such as this on the part of my opponents would scare me silly.
The Handle and the Sword: For decades now, pro-life people have been telling anyone who would listen of the dangers of abortion, to the mother as well as the child. Now more and more post-aborted women are speaking for themselves. In the words of one woman whose writing was featured on the bishops' pro-life exhibit in Washington: “Everything I read on abortion before I experienced it told me that women do not suffer depression or regret afterwards…. I could expect to feel relieved…. Where did they get that from? I will never be the same again.”
Remembrance of these women is clearly deeply ingrained into the pro-life movement. From their banners and their conversation, clearly, a desire to spare mothers this awful loss and deep sorrow are part and parcel of what animates them. We have spent time over two decades with post-aborted women, and are acutely aware that the handle is as dangerous as the sword.
So many of the activists with whom I spoke last week were amused at various newspaper accounts indicating that the pro-life movement had just “discovered” women. Uhhuh. That's why we've been serving them at thousands of crisis pregnancy centers for more than 25 years, and why we offer non-judgmental post-abortion reconciliation.
Since the pro-abortion movement is not making much sense to women these days—endorsing partial-birth abortions, condemning Promise Keepers, etc.—maybe the prolife movement stands a better chance than ever of reaching out to more and more women.
Helen Alvaré is director of planning and information, Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, National Conference of Catholic Bishops.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Helen AlvarÈ ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Light from a Holy Man DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:It has been 50 years since 4 million—perhaps 5 million—people filled the streets for the funeral procession of Mohandas Karanchand Gandhi. The father of Indian independence deserves his place in history as a political giant, but animating his politics was a philosophy and moral example that is even more important than his political achievements.
To honor his memory a half-century later, it behooves one to remember the whole man. Gandhi remains even today a figure of some controversy and his legacy has not been immune from criticism. Yet in the spirit of marking the anniversary of his death, it is possible to see in Gandhi a powerful witness to some doctrines that the Church herself proclaims with ever greater urgency.
Gandhi was ignorant of Christianity. It is reported that when asked about Christianity, he replied that he only regretted that more Christians did not practice it. Gandhi preached and lived poverty, self-denial, and purity. He spent hours in prayer and contemplation. He was devoted to God, the truth and nonviolence. He was a Hindu whose life was marked by heroic virtue, and he remains a vivid example of how grace moves in mysterious ways. The Spirit blows where he wills, and Christians would do well to recognize in Gandhi a light sent by God to this century of darkness.
Power vs. Truth
The distinguishing feature of 20th century politics has been the awesome power of the modern state. So awesome has this power been, and so ferociously has it been unleashed, that it required non-violence in order to defeat it. Therein lies the drama of this age, the confrontation of power with truth. Gandhi was at the middle of this mighty confrontation, and he was killed in the middle of the century on which he left an enduring mark. The man who taught the century non-violence was assassinated 50 years ago, Jan. 30, 1948.
Gandhi came to be known as “Mahatma,” rather than his given name of Mohandas. Mahatma roughly translates as “great soul.” In a century that has celebrated many great men—from Churchill and deGaulle to Stalin and Mao—Gandhi was one of the few great souls whose name belongs in the highest place on a different scroll, one that includes Martin Luther King Jr. and Lech Walesa.
“If I could popularize the use of soul force,” Gandhi once told Lord Chelmsford, the British viceroy of India during the first world war, “I know that I could present you with an India that could defy the whole world.”
The British were only the first to learn what “soul force” was. Apotent combination of non-cooperation, nonviolent civil disobedience, and a willingness to suffer in patient witness to the truth, it brought independence to the jewel in the British imperial crown and, later, overturned segregation laws in the United States, removed the Marcoses from office in the Philippines, and brought down the mighty Soviet empire—peacefully.
It has long been thought that illegitimate regimes need to be overthrown by force, that soldiers, not saints, are needed. Gandhi showed a new way. The oppressed no longer had to stoop to the tactics of his oppressor. Gandhi rethought the solution to the problem of man's inhumanity to man; man would become a witness to his own humanity, and soon even the inhumane would be overcome. Man, no matter how downtrodden, could insist on his dignity, refuse to cooperate with his oppressor, and deny to his oppressor what tyrants want most: submission in mind and spirit. Gandhi was rediscovering the power of the martyr's blood, and giving it a forceful application to political life.
Gandhi taught the primacy of truth. Hinduism ascribes various attributes to God, but the one that Gandhi thought was most central was truth. “God is truth,” he said, “and truth is God.”
Gandhi insisted that knowing the truth ought to be man's aim, and spent his life sorting out what he identified as inconsistencies in his own thinking. Gandhi knew that truth was one and so could not admit any inconsistencies. He had a deep respect for others whose sincere search for truth led them to different conclusions, and worked closely with those of other faiths, particularly Muslims. He understood that the truth cannot be imposed, but must be discovered. Once discovered, the truth has transformative power. “The only virtue I claim,” he said, “is truth and non-violence. I lay claim to no superhuman power. I want none.”
It is an approach that echoes a profoundly Christian philosophy. The truth is not something beyond man in the realm of the gods or abstract ideas. Rather, the truth can be known by man, indeed, it is man's task to know the truth. This truth confers real power, precisely because it is real. But it is not an otherworldly power coercing man from without, but the deeply human experience of being transformed from within. Gandhi's linking of truth to nonviolence follows directly upon this understanding.
Violence obscures truth. It does not appeal to reason and conscience but to fear. Nonviolence is first and foremost witness. Gandhi's great insight was that nonviolence is not all passive, but a dynamic witness to the truth. Refraining from violence clarifies that witness, allowing the testimony to be given pure and without being obscured under violence. In his early days Gandhi recognized that the common term “passive resistance” was inadequate. He coined the term satyagraha, which he defined as “force, which is born of truth and love or non-violence.” This is not sentimentality; satyagraha is definitely a force that does not imperil the body of the enemy, but awakens his conscience.
Though ignorant of Christianity, Mahatma Gandhi—whodied 50 years ago by an assassin's bullet—was a powerful witness to doctrines proclaimed by the Church
Gandhi's philosophy of truth and religious faith made demands in the moral life. It is often remarked that the separation of morals from faith is one of the great errors of our time. Gandhi spoke emphatically against it: “My life is an indivisible whole, and all my activities run into one another; they all have their rise in my insatiable love of mankind. We needlessly divide life into watertight compartments, religion and other; whereas if a man has true religion in him, it must show itself in the smallest details of life. The slightest irregularity in sanitary, social and political life is a sign of spiritual poverty.”
Consequently he lived the ascetic life with great zeal, voluntarily embracing poverty. Together with his followers, he lived in great simplicity with few material possessions, clothed only in his famous home-spun cloth. Though a husband and father, he and his wife took vows of celibacy and lived together in perfect continence. An exchange with the young Malcolm Muggeridge demonstrated his insistence upon chastity. When Muggeridge suggested that contraception ought to be part of India's demographic policy, Gandhi disagreed, advocating abstinence instead, if necessary.
Self-Control
It was not for the “sake of the kingdom” that Gandhi embraced celibacy, but he knew that celibacy allowed him to devote more fully both his mind and heart to the spiritual life. Moreover, celibacy and the other rigors of the ascetic life, including frequent fasting and periods of silence, were means to grow in self-control. Gandhi did not emphasize self-control (what in Christian terms might be better understood as the virtues of temperance and fortitude) in order to be more efficient or as an end in itself. Self-control was the integration of human action into the whole person. It might be too much to call Gandhi a personalist, but he went so far as to say, “I do not know any religion apart from human activity.”
It is in acting that the person reveals his deepest convictions, the acting person cannot be separated from the religious person—the former reveals the latter. Nonviolence, precisely because it demands the self-control, is a manifestation of the dignity of the man who is the author of his actions. Because man always remains capable of self-control, that dignity is inalienable. While Gandhi did not work out a philosophy of human action, his understanding of the link between self-control and man's inalienable dignity is remarkably similar to the Christian personalism advanced by recent Church teaching in the defense of human rights.
Gandhi died 11 months before the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights was promulgated, and he did not speak in the contemporary language of human rights, but he belongs among the first rank of human rights champions. He understood that all men were equal in dignity and that the only secure basis of this dignity was in their status as children of God.
Hinduism's caste system relegated large numbers of people to the lowest status of “untouchables”—a term that fully described their lot in life. Gandhi challenged this system and pledged himself to work for the removal of untouchability. When untouchables were relegated to separate voting booths in the 1932 election, Gandhi began a fast to the death in protest. After five days the policy was changed and the fast ended.
Work of God
He then replaced the ugliness and cruelty of the word “untouchable” with a new term of this own: Harifans (children of God). “The most despised people are the most favored of God,” he explained.
In the poor and the weak Gandhi saw the work of God. He was full of humble reverence before the gift of life, which he insisted his followers respect. The obligation to respect life arose from his recognition that all life is a gift. “As man has been given the power to create, he has not the slightest right to destroy the smallest creature that lives.”
India was partitioned upon independence, with the creation of a separate Muslim state (Pakistan and East Pakistan, now Bangladesh). After all Gandhi had preached about human equality and fraternity, it was a bitter blow to have his nation carved up along religious lines. “It is a spiritual tragedy,” he said, “I do not agree with what my closest friends have done or are doing, 32 years of work have come to an inglorious end.”
As riots accompanied the migrations occasioned by the partition, Gandhi appealed one last time to soul power. He marked Independence Day, Aug. 15, 1947, by fasting and prayer. When fresh atrocities broke out, he began to fast and threatened to continue unto death unless the Hindu-Muslim violence ceased. Such was his spiritual authority that the riots did cease. They started up again some months later, and he fasted again. Again the riots stopped.
But the violence soon claimed Gandhi himself. On his way to lead public prayers, he was shot by a young militant Hindu. His last words were He Rama—“O God.”
India and the world immediately realized the magnitude of the loss. In the blood-soaked first 50 years of the century, Gandhi had shown a different way, the way of justice, the way of peace. Albert Einstein, who felt in a special way this century's carnage, put it well.
“The moral influence which Gandhi has exercised upon thinking people may be far more durable that would appear likely in our present age, with its exaggeration of brute force. We are fortunate that fate has bestowed upon us so luminous a contemporary, a beacon for generations to come.”
Raymond de Souza is a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Kingston, Ontario.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond de Souza ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Healthy Families: Incubators of Hope for the Future DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:Greetings from Orlando, Fla. No, I'm not visiting Disney World. Until Disney CEO Michael Eisner tones down the anti-Catholicism, especially in the ABC network division, the Johnstons will have to take a rain check on the Magic Kingdom.
It is my family, however, that has brought me down here. I'm attending an annual congress sponsored by the International Family Foundation (IFF), which operates in 30 countries. The purpose of IFF is simple but not modest: To teach parents how to build a happy family, and, in the process, transform society.
There's a lot to like about this outfit. It is counter-cultural. It is “grass roots.” And it is optimistic. During the three days of lectures and workshops, there was very little hand-wringing about how dark and inhospitable the culture has become for marriage and family. Instead, the message was: We parents have a job to do. Here's how. Let's get on with it.
What are the secrets of a happy marriage? First, ponder St. Thomas Aquinas's definition of love, which has never been improved upon: “To love is to will the good of another.”
Notice that Aquinas does not mention feelings. If you decide that the good of the person to whom you're married is the most important thing in your life—more important that your job, your friends, even your children—then the feelings will take care of themselves very nicely. It's also good for the children.
Second, learn to yield cheerfully in matters of personal preference. It did not occur to me until several years into my marriage that a father can give a bath to a small child and do it cheerfully. Marriage should never be a 50-50 proposition, but rather 80-20 or even 90-10, with each spouse trying to make those small daily sacrifices that are a key to family happiness.
Third, build shared memories. Watching reruns of Seinfeld doesn't quite do it. Your courtship should be just beginning on your wedding day, not ending. Husbands, in particular, tend to underestimate the effect on their wives when they are tender toward them or surprise them with a special dinner date. Fourth, understand that married love and children are indivisible. As Scott Hahn once put it, the unity of the marriage bond is so deep and profound that nine months (or whatever) after the wedding you have to give it a name. So much for being a good spouse. Now, what makes a good parent? What are the important things we can do for our children?
First, have more children. Any child psychologists will tell you that the best thing you can do for a child is to give him or her siblings. It is paradoxically harder to do a good job bringing up one child than raising four or five. Siblings, among other things, are a reality check.
Second, set high goals for your children. The message that many children get from their parents is: “Do your homework, eat your vegetables, do not disturb my peace.” Smart parents set long-term goals for their children, and work at instilling specific virtues.
Third, kids who have a strong sense of connection to their parents are far less likely to indulge in drugs, alcohol, or early sex. It's not just the hours that parents spend with their kids. It's their emotional availability. A daily sit-down family meal should be non-negotiable. In many households today, parents and children accidentally bump into one another in front of the microwave. They should be sitting at a table and talking.
Fourth, successful parents try to make each child feel special. Once in a while, take each child out for a special meal alone with Mom and Dad, letting the child choose the restaurant.
Fifth, always keep in mind that the family (and, with due respect to the Clinton Administration, not day care centers) is where each of us gets a sense of our personal dignity and unrepeatability. The family, finally, is a school of love. The French novelist Andre Malraux once said that the 21st century will be religious or it will not be. We can paraphrase that and say that the next century will be the century of the family or it will not be. All the good things that are going to happen in the next few decades—including the revival of religious faith—are going to be incubated in the family.
George Sim Johnston is a writer based in New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: George Sim Johnston ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: For Tradition-minded Catholics, Notre Dame Is Making a Comeback DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:At Notre Dame this year, Catholics can cheer more about what's happening on the campus rather than on the gridiron.
While the football team finished 7-6 and was soundly defeated by Louisiana State University in the Independence Bowl in Shreveport, La., Dec. 28, scores of faculty members and students are spearheading a spiritual renewal that's taking hold at the northwest Indiana school.
In a move that bodes well for the school's Catholic identity, Notre Dame's administration appointed Professor John Cavadini as chairman of the theology department in August 1997, rejecting the first choice of some powerful faculty members, according to a source on campus.
Who is John Cavadini? Well, he's no Father Richard McBrien.
Unlike Father McBrien, the outspoken ecclesiology professor who headed the department during the 1980s—or Professor Lawrence Cunningham, who succeeded him—Cavadini maintains a low profile, preferring the life of a scholar and teacher and shunning the media spotlight, according to a Notre Dame source who requested anonymity.
While Father McBrien welcomed media attention and often used his high profile to highlight differences with Pope John Paul II's teaching, Cavadini tried to downplay the importance of his becoming department chairman when a reporter called to interview him.
With a family of seven children, departmental responsibilities, and Patristics classes to teach, Cavadini probably wouldn't have time to pontificate for the media, even if he wanted to do it.
Cavadini is a popular lecturer. “You can drink his theology,” said Mary Kloska, a junior from Elkhart, Ind., who has enrolled in Cavadini's “Roads to God” class this semester. “It's so refreshing to have someone who is orthodox and true to the teachings of the Church.”
“He's very open-minded in the ways he looks at different spiritualities,” said Kloska, a theology major who is reading the Lives of the Saints in Cavadini's class. “So often, we get watered-down theology. Kids today want the truth. Things are black or white. They're either right or wrong.”
Like the student body as a whole, Kloska seems more tradition-minded than many Notre Dame faculty. But the ascendancy of professors such as Cavadini has helped to bridge the gap.
The difference between catechizing and theological inquiry is important to many Notre Dame theologians, according to Alfred Freddoso, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame.
“They see a sharp distinction between the two,” he said. But added that engaging in biblical criticism is probably inappropriate for many “poorly catechized” college students today.
Many other Catholic universities struggle with issues related to teaching introductory theology classes in such an environment, said Freddoso.
“Cavadini appears to be instigating a rethinking of [how to teach] introduction to theology,” in the department, he said.
The school's administration has gone against theology department faculty before in recent months. In December 1996, the faculty senate—chaired by Father McBrien—denounced university president Father Edward Malloy CSC, for appointing against their wishes Father Michael Baxter, a fellow Holy Cross priest, as a visiting theology professor.
Father Baxter holds a master of divinity degree from Notre Dame and a doctorate from Duke University, where he studied under ethicist Stanley Hauerwas.
Theology department faculty rejected Father Malloy's appointment of Father Baxter for either an assistant professorship in theology, which normally is a tenure track position, and Father Malloy's compromise: that Father Baxter serve a three-year term as visiting assistant professor, according to an article posted on Freddoso's Website.
Father Baxter's “A Faith to Die For” theology class is one that students clamor to get into, according to Freddoso. Father Baxter, a young cleric, has taken a particular interest in the relationship between Catholicism and the American consumerist culture and appears to relate well to students.
Freddoso, who called Father Baxter a “Catholic worker type,” said he could always recommend the priest's class or Cavadini's “Roads to God” class for undergraduate students.
“Whenever the chairman of your theology department has seven kids, you know you're in good shape,” said Freddoso.
If Malloy went to bat for Baxter in part because he's a Holy Cross priest, he may have appointed Cavadini not only to strengthen Notre Dame's Catholic identity but also to improve relations with the local Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana, diocese as well as to give a boost to Notre Dame's most recent capital campaign, which began last May.
Father Daniel Jenky CSC, formerly rector of Sacred Heart Basilica on Notre Dame's campus, recently became an auxiliary bishop in the diocese, whose ordinary is Bishop John D'Arcy.
The recent moves of Notre Dame's administration stand in sharp contrast to the late 1980s when Janet Smith was denied tenure by the university's Program of Liberal Studies, although she was popular with students. A philosophy professor who supports Humanae Vitae (On Human Life) and author of a book about Pope Paul VI's controversial 1968 encyclical, Smith went on to receive tenure at the University of Dallas.
A more orthodox spirit seems to have imbued Notre Dame since those days. About 150 people from the university went to the March for Life last month, a five-fold increase in the number who made the trip to Washington during the previous two years, according to Kloska.
Students such as Kloska prevailed upon Notre Dame campus ministry to begin 24-hour eucharistic adoration once every week. “We've had 200 people sign up,” to spend time in the church during adoration, she said. “We've invited 400 people and told them, ‘Jesus is in the Eucharist. He's there for you,’” she told the Register.
Four theology professors have signed up to take shifts during eucharistic adoration, Kloska said. Attendance at a Mass sponsored by Children of Mary, a group to which Kloska belongs, has shot up from five to 50 people, she said.
Ralph McInerny, the Notre Dame philosophy professor who edits Catholic Dossier, has become part of the effort, according to Kloska. Although McInerny has not taught undergraduates for some time and is currently on sabbatical from teaching duties, a number of undergraduate students went to him for directed readings. “It's evolved into a class on papal encyclicals with over 20 students,” she said.
Kloska and other students are working with Notre Dame's campus ministry to design retreats that stress traditional Catholic ascetical practices, such as praying the rosary and confession.
“I've never seen such faith as in these kids,” a campus ministry administrator told Kloska and her friends. “I want to go on your next retreat,” to receive the same enthusiasm for Catholic beliefs and practices.
None of this surprises Freddoso. “Students are looking for unity of life, with the intellectual, moral and spiritual sides all integrated together.
At Notre Dame, on the top of the administration building's “Golden Dome”—one of the most popular symbols on a college campus in the country—is a statue of the Virgin Mary.
“She's going to round up her kids,” said Kloska, who added “a lot of people have been praying for a long time for Notre Dame.”
William Murray writes from Kensington, Md.
----- EXCERPT: Students and faculty note signs of a spiritual renewal at the famous Indiana campus ----- EXTENDED BODY: William Murray ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: A Screwball Comedy for the '90s DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:Screwball comedies were one of Hollywood's most successful genres in the 1930s and '40s. Classics such as Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday got their laughs from the antics of offbeat men and women who pursued improbable romances in improbable circumstances. The fast-paced dialogue was noted for its clever plays on words and memorable one-liners. Last year's summer hit, My Best Friend's Wedding, recreated the magic of these golden oldies in a modern setting, adding to the mix an imaginative use of Burt Bacharach's love songs to get you to root for its characters.
The recently released As Good As It Gets stretches the genre even further. With characters that seem to have wandered in from John Cassavetes's neo-realistic melodramas such as Faces and A Woman Under the Influence, it's a nitty-gritty, kitchen-sink kind of comedy with none of the high-fashion, high-society sheen of its original counterparts (and most of their contemporary descendants). Writer-director James Brooks (Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News) and co-screenwriter Max Andrus look for humor in messy emotions, psychological pain, and the confusions of everyday living. The loose ends are bound together by well-crafted punch lines, carefully prepared payoffs, and some politically correct attitudes. One's heart goes out to their characters as they learn to make the best of bad situations in the midst of jokes and tears.
Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson) may have written 62 best-selling romance novels, but there seems to be no room for love in his own life. He has no friends and repels everyone with whom he comes into contact with a steady stream of insults and profanity. (His profanity may also offend some viewers.) Melvin particularly dislikes Jews, blacks, homosexuals, and household pets. When he catches a neighbor's dog relieving itself in his apartment building's hallway, he tosses the tiny creature into the garbage chute.
Melvin isn't just a nasty, lonely guy. He's afflicted with an unspecified obsessive-compulsive disorder. He doesn't like to be touched and refuses to step on the cracks in the sidewalk. He brings his own plastic spoons and forks whenever he goes out to a restaurant and always orders the same meal. His medicine cabinet is stacked with bars of Neutragena soap, with which he frequently washes his hands and then discards after only one use.
Melvin aims some of his most venomous wisecracks at the dog's owner, Simon Nye (Greg Kinnear), a homosexual artist. When the distraught animal lover knocks on Melvin's door looking for his pet, the writer mocks him.
“Do you like to be interrupted when you're nancying around in your little garden,” he snarls, making fun of the artist's method of working.
Melvin's only human connection is with Carol Connelly (Helen Hunt), a waitress who serves him breakfast every morning in an upscale Manhattan eatery. Somehow she is able to tolerate his sadistic sarcasm and persuade him to back down when he goes too far. She lives in Brooklyn with her mother (Shirley Knight) and 7-year-old son, Spencer (Jesse James), who suffers from debilitating asthma attacks. Worry about her son's illness consumes her life, making dating, trips to the park, and other normal things impossible.
Melvin's meticulously controlled world starts to unravel when misfortune strikes his hated neighbor, Simon. Beaten and robbed by one of his models, the artist is forced to spend a long stretch of time in the hospital. His art dealer, Frank Sachs (Cuba Gooding Jr.), knows how to manipulate Melvin's neuroses and bullies him into looking after the dog.
The writer is surprised to find he enjoys the experience. He spoils the animal by offering him gourmet food and playing the piano to create the proper mood during feeding time. These simple acts of kindness set off an emotional chain reaction.
When Carol quits her job to spend more time with her ailing son, Melvin pays for an allergy specialist to investigate the boy's medical problems. In return, Carol agrees to resume her waitress work and, once again, serve Melvin breakfast in the restaurant every morning. Sparks begin to fly between the odd couple, and the filmmakers milk this unusual romance for all the yucks they can get.
Mutual affection for the dog provides a bridge between Melvin and Simon, and the writer offers to help the artist with some of his difficulties. In the process, Melvin stops making cruel jokes about Simon's homosexuality. This leads to the writer's acceptance of the gay lifestyle as a permissible alternative to heterosexuality—a popular cause this year with Hollywood's creative community. (Witness tinsel town's universal praise for the outing of the lead character in the television series, Ellen.)
The filmmakers propagate another fashionable notion by sending Melvin to a psychiatrist who seems to mellow him out very quickly. This plug for the instant efficacy of therapy and supervised education allows Brooks and Andrus to indulge their character in some psychobabble, making some of the key confrontational scenes play like portions of a group therapy session.
Nevertheless, despite these nods to the current Hollywood zeitgeist, As Good As it Gets sparkles with originality in its reworking of screwball-comedy conventions. The filmmakers make us see the laughter that can he found in hard times. Sentimentality is sized with sharp-edged psychological insights in just the right proportions, allowing us to identify with Melvin and Carol as they decide to risk the possible pain that can come from forging emotional attachments. The healing of wounded souls is always a joy to watch.
The USCC classification of As Good As It Gets is A-IV: adults, with reservations. The film is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America. For other USCC classifications of recent releases, call 1-800-311-4CCC.
Arts and culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: As Good as It Gets offers laughs, psychological insights, and a pinch of Hollywood-style political correctness ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: An Afternoon with the Martyrs of Tyburn DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:“I want to take you on a journey. Without leaving this site, I want to take you back 400 years,” Mother Superior begins. Her words grasp the immediate attention of her audience.
We were visitors to Tyburn Convent's monthly “monastic afternoon” where the public are invited to spend three hours learning about the history of Tyburn and the life of the nuns who live there.
The building is just five minutes' walk from the west end of Oxford Street, past Marble Arch, and the site of the gallows where England's martyrs were hanged. Outside the convent is a life-sized wooden crucifix that overlooks the never-ending stream of traffic that flows along one of London's busiest streets. Nearby is Park Lane, once known as Tyburn Lane, and Oxford Street, formerly called Tyburn Road.
In days gone by, Tyburn was not a popular word in fashionable London society. But today, for Catholics all through Britain and beyond, it represents prayer and adoration and brings to mind the holy martyrs who died for their faith.
Pilgrims and visitors who step in off the street enter what seems like another world. The roar of traffic tearing down Hyde Park Place to converge with other main roads at Marble Arch recedes to a distant hum. Even the occasional rumble of an underground train passing directly underneath cannot disturb the calm and silence of the convent.
Inside the church, simple cast iron gates separate the sanctuary and the nuns' choir from the public chapel. All eyes are drawn to the two sisters who kneel in quiet adoration before the Blessed Sacrament housed under a canopy decorated with symbols of the Holy Trinity. The whiteness of the walls is broken only by the simple black veils hanging over their white choir cowls and the row of brightly colored shields near the ceiling. These are the family crests of the martyrs who laid down their lives during the times of persecution in England.
Once again, silence pervades. It is interrupted only by the gentle single chime of a bell every half-hour to signal the changing of the honor guard, as two nuns leave and two others arrive to continue the adoration. Their prayer is for the conversion of England, the salvation of souls, the successor of Peter, and in memory of the martyrs.
This year, the nuns—the Benedictine Adorers of the Sacred Heart of Montmartre—whose home this is, celebrate the 100th anniversary of their foundation as a religious congregation. It was founded by a French woman from Burgundy. March 4, 1898, Cardinal Richard, archbishop of Paris, canonically erected the new congregation. Adele Garnier, who became known in religious life as Mother Mary of Peter, was devoted to adoration of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Blessed Sacrament. When the French Basilica of the Sacred Heart was being built on Montmartre, she had petitioned the archbishop to institute perpetual adoration there. So it has happened, the Sacrament of the Altar has been adored there day and night—even through two world wars.
The Killing Fields
But let us return from Paris to the west end of London. Tyburn Fields had been a place of execution since the 12th century. When Henry VIII, by the Supremacy Act of 1534, claimed it high treason to refuse to acknowledge the king as “the only supreme head on earth of the Church in England,” the blood of the Catholic martyrs began to flow over Tyburn Fields.
May 4 of that year, the first to die for refusing to take the oath of supremacy were three Carthusian priests from the London charterhouse, along with two other priests. St. Thomas More, from his cell in the Tower of London, saw the Carthusians in their white habits stretched onto the wooden frames that would drag them to Tyburn and commented to his daughter Meg that they went “as gladly as to a marriage feast.”
At the monthly “monastic afternoon”—or on any other day—visitors may make a guided tour of the crypt chapel of the martyrs. The altar of the crypt lies under a scale model of the infamous gallows. The actual gallows were so large that eight people could be hanged on each of the three arms.
As Reverend Mother shows you around, the torture and deaths of those Catholics loyal to Rome become apparent. Although the collection of relics is small, the sisters are very knowledgeable of the history of each of the martyrs that an hour's tour barely touches the surface—but books and pamphlets are available for further reading.
The nuns are devoted to keeping the memory of the martyrs alive and hallowed. Thus you may see a piece of the bloodstained shirt worn by St. William Howard when he was martyred in December 1680 and a relic of the venerable Father Thomas Holland, hanged at Tyburn in July 1616. Also there is a fragment of the venerable Father Edward, whose heart had leapt out of the fire into which it was thrown after it had been plucked from his body. The largest single relic is an entire arm bone of Blessed Father Thomas Maxfield.
To investigate further let us make a slight detour—less than half a mile away.
One of the best-loved parishes in London is known as St. James's Spanish Place, where the Spanish embassy once stood. During the terrors of the English Reformation, Mass continued to be offered within the confines of the embassy. During the waves of executions carried out, particularly on priests who refused to deny the primacy of the papacy, the Spanish ambassador would send people out at night to salvage what relics they could from the site.
Faith's High Price
After whatever torture they had endured in prison in the months and weeks before their deaths, convicted Catholics would then be dragged on a hurdle through the streets of London to the gallows at Tyburn. There they would be hanged and cut down before they died. While still conscious they would be sliced open and disemboweled, their hearts being torn from them and cast into a fire. They would then be quartered, their limbs hacked off, and beheaded; some of these parts would be displayed as a deterrent to others, the rest of their remains being dumped into a pit near the gallows.
The first to be martyred, May 4, 1534, was the prior of the London charterhouse. St. John Houghton had been cut down from the gibbet while still conscious and it is reported that he bore the butchery inflicted on him with great meekness. As they tore his heart from his breast he cried out, “Good Jesus! What wilt thou do with my heart?”
The last words of Blessed Henry Health, a Franciscan priest martyred at Tyburn April 17, 1643, were, “Jesus, convert England. Jesus, have mercy on this country. O England, be converted to the Lord thy God.” Today those words are engraved on the gibbets of the replica gallows standing above the Altar of the Martyrs in Tyburn crypt.
St. Ralph Sherwin, a companion of Oxford scholar and Jesuit priest Edmund Campion, who was also a Protestant deacon before his conversion, was reported to have, in December 1581, “kissed with great devotion the blood of Campion dripping from the hands of the executioners.”
Four years later, in 1585, and speaking of the death of Father Campion, Father Gregory Gunne said, “The day will come that you shall see a religious house built there [the site of the gallows] for an offering.” Father Gunne was betrayed and later at his trial he repeated his prophecy that one day there would be a religious house at Tyburn in memory of the martyrs. (He himself was not hanged but sentenced to exile.)
Let us once again return to Paris at the beginning of this century. In 1901, only three years after the canonical founding of the Adorers of the Sacred Heart, the French government passed its law of associations. The nuns fled to London. The Oblates of Mary Immaculate had also taken refuge in London.
One day in 1901 Cardinal Vaughan, archbishop of Westminster, received a letter from an Oblate priest asking the cardinal's help or advice about a house for these French nuns. By coincidence (some would say Providence), in the same day's mail the cardinal also received a letter from a Catholic layman, a lawyer who would know that the cardinal was well aware of the “Gunne Prophecy” made more than three centuries before. The lawyer told the cardinal that a house had come on the market at Tyburn. The cardinal held the two letters together and said, “Let these nuns get this property.”
Tyburn is now the National Shrine of the Martyrs of England and Wales. This year, Cardinal Basil Hume will offer Mass there in thanksgiving for 100 years of the Benedictine Adorers of the Sacred Heart of Montmartre.
Tyburn Convent is today the motherhouse of the Congregation. They now have other houses of prayer and adoration in Scotland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and Peru. While so many modern religious congregations seem to be dying out, it is a source of comment in England that Tyburn, with its “real nuns”, seems to be thriving.
A Silent Procession
In 1996 on her first visit to England to address the “Faith of Our Fathers” rally, Mother Angelica (EWTN) visited Tyburn. Addressing 2,500 Catholics in Westminster Central Hall, she spoke of the glorious heritage of the English and Welsh martyrs. And each year on the last Sunday of April, hundreds of Catholics retrace the route of the martyrs to Tyburn, starting from the central criminal courts at the Old Bailey, site of the ancient Newgate Prison. The procession, organized by the Guild of Ransom for the Conversion of England, proceeds in silence, the only visible signs being the rosary beads in the walkers' hands and the crucifix, which precedes them.
On arrival at the convent, benediction of the Blessed Sacrament is given by a bishop from a balcony of the convent to the assembled crowds below now kneeling on the normally busy traffic routes. The prophecy of Father Gunne comes to mind and silent prayers of thanksgiving are made for the lives of the Tyburn nuns and England's holy shrine of the martyrs.
Jim Gallagher writes from London, England.
----- EXCERPT: The site where England's martyrs were once hanged for refusing to renounce their faith is now a national shrine to their witness ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jim Gallagher ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: A Shelter from the Streets DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:After 25 years, Covenant House, a New York-based ministry for runaways, continues chipping away at the monolithic international problem of street children, but times have changed.
Young people still go there to the original shelter, but today “there are more throw-aways and lock-outs than runaways,” said Dick Hirsch, vice-president of communications for Covenant House.
Each year 1 million young people run away from home in the United States. The Covenant House staff helped 48,000 of those last year, including 13,000 in crisis shelters, 14,000 at community service centers, and 21,000 others on the street with outreach workers. Their “nine-line” (800-999-9999) received 87,000 crisis calls in the same period.
“Things are getting worse,” said Sister Mary Rose McGeady DC, director of the Covenant House ministry. “We see increasing numbers.”
The ministry started in 1972 with a crisis shelter in New York. Since then they have assisted 400,000 young people and encourage a three-part solution: role models, mentors, and entry-level jobs. The organization has offices in 16 U.S. cities, with two in Canada and three in Latin America.
Sister McGeady came to Covenant House eight years ago from the Catholic Charities for the Diocese of Brooklyn. She had previously directed two treatment centers for severely disturbed children. (Father Bruce Ritter, the former Covenant House director, had just resigned after accusations that he sexually abused children.)
“My past was all preparation for this,” she said.
Since Sister McGeady's arrival, the ministry has expanded but conditions have worsened in New York. Bruce Henry, executive director of Covenant House in New York, said the public school system there had a graduation rate of 50% last year—and many of the non-graduates become unemployed drop outs.
Covenant House outreach workers take to the streets in a van each night to talk with young people. They take sandwiches and juice to help break the ice.
“It's an invitation for kids to come in the van and talk with us,” said Sister McGeady. “In that context, it's easier to invite them in.”
One recent night at 2:00 a.m., they found Janice, a 14-year-old in a loose halter, on a New York street curb.
“My boyfriend beats me up sometimes if I don't do what he tells me,” she told the staff members who had stopped to offer help.
Janice told them she had come from Iowa after a fight with parents. She met a “boyfriend” in a bus station. He promised to take care of her, but now she was pregnant and working as a prostitute. She wanted out, and agreed to accept help from Covenant House.
“Pimps have a lot to lose if their girls leave them,” explained Sister McGeady. “A typical young prostitute like Janice is worth thousands and thousands of dollars a year to her pimp.”
Liz, also 14, hails from London. Her mother needed money and left Liz with a local pimp. He forced her to swallow bags of cocaine for delivery through customs. Another “courier” died when a bag ruptured in her digestive track.
“I'm afraid one's gonna bust in my intestines and I'm going to die,” Liz told Sister McGeady. “I can't take it anymore.”
Sister McGeady said, “You'd be amazed how many of our kids are overwhelmed with embarrassment when they come to our shelter. Street kids are most scared of being looked down on—as if being 15, homeless, and unwanted is all their fault.”
At the shelter, a 10-yearold boy stopped to unload his pockets. He had 22 vials of crack cocaine and a 9mm pistol.
“Please help me,” he said…. “I just can't do this for my mother anymore.”
“Where'd you get the gun?” Sister McGeady asked.
“Comes with my job,” the boy replied, “but you can have it. They showed me how to shoot a cop if I have to. I just don't want to do that.”
According to Sister McGeady, it's rare that “street kids” come from a household where two parents are married and love each other. “Families are just falling apart right and left,” she said.
Paula Tibbetts is the public relations director for Covenant House in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., a facility with 104 beds that helped 1,300 teens with shelter last year.
“They have these grown-up bodies but they're not able to survive on their own,” she said of the runaways. “This can be compounded when you've lived days or weeks without food.”
Tibbetts said that Fort Lauderdale's Covenant House ministry begins with “meeting basic needs,” such as food and a shower. Then begins a process that strives to reunites the family, if possible.
Residents under 18 are encouraged to telephone home within 24 hours of arrival. Aplan for something more stable is developed for those who can't return home, which may include drug treatment or help with job skills. Younger children are placed in foster care.
“There's no fixed length of stay,” said Tibbetts. “They all come from families that are not functioning well … not nurturing the kids.”
The ministry's biggest struggle now is to find entry level jobs for the young people. They're having to compete with the people coming off welfare roles since changes in federal law—but they're finding success.
Sister McGeady said Covenant House is encouraging young people to attend training programs for computer work, nursing, and teaching aids. Youngsters involved have found success once they learn the importance of commitment.
Beyond domestic services, Covenant House has expanded into Central America where 44% of all children are born to single mothers. According to Human Rights Watch, 90% of street children in Guatemala have inhalant addictions to such things as shoe glue and paint thinner.
Casa Alianza, a Latin American branch of Covenant House, began in Guatemala in 1981. The organization now has branches in Honduras and Mexico. Last year they helped 4,000 children through a four-step system of street outreach, move to crisis shelters, transition, and placement in group homes.
In many parts of Latin America, much of the violence against children comes at the hands of soldiers and police. In the last seven years, Casa Alianza has made 365 criminal complaints against 530 individuals, most of them in the state security forces. Charges range from torture to murder. The Guatemalan judicial system resolved only 14 of those cases—less than 4% of the complaints.
“We are not willing nor able to throw in the towel and let the authorities get away with murder,” said Bruce Harris, executive director of Latin American programs.
One local study of 143 street children in Guatemala City found that every one of them had been sexually abused. Approximately 78% had genital herpes, and 64% of the girls reported their first sexual encounter was with their fathers.
Marcos Fidel Solorzano was just 12-years-old when he began begging for chicken in Guatemala. Two men handed him a bag that appeared to be a meal. It held a bomb that went off in the boy's face. Solorzano died.
The work is just as dangerous for Casa Alianza staff members.
“Our crisis center was covered with machine gun fire by three men who came looking to kill me,” explained Harris. “Three of our Guatemala staff are living in Canada because of threats against them.”
The Covenant House cemetery in Guatemala City has 42 graves filled.
“We take any kid that comes to our door,” Sister McGeady said. “There's very few kids that you can't help once you win their trust.”
Clay Renick writes from Martinez, Ga.
----- EXCERPT: Since the late 1960s, Covenant House has been a haven for teens seeking refuge ----- EXTENDED BODY: Clay Renick ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: 'They Were Born Within My Heart' DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:Thanksgiving Day in 1996, Ron and Linda Kuzlik met their five children for the first time.
The attraction was instant and mutual.
“There was such an intense connection between us and the children,” Linda says. “It was as if they were always our children, but they were just away from home for a short time, and we'd gone to pick them up and bring them home for good.”
The Kuzliks had flown to Budapest, then drove 90 minutes to an orphanage in Letervasara, Hungary, for the meeting. With nothing official yet, the five children didn't realize that six months later they'd be adopted by the Kuzliks and living as a family in Stamford, Conn.
The journey that brought Ron Jr., 11; Ilona, called Loni, 10; Anna, 9; Melinda, 6; and Kristina, 5; into the Kuzlik fold really began when Ron and Linda were married in 1993. Although from a previous marriage she had a son in his 20s, she was unable to have more children. Yet the Kuzliks wanted a family.
The newlyweds immediately looked into adoption in New York where they were living at the time, but they ran into insurmountable barriers, the exorbitant costs not least among them. When they relocated to Stamford, a city on Connecticut's coastline, Father Sherman Gray, their new pastor at Holy Name of Jesus Parish, directed them to a route that led to Maria Tomasky, a local family law attorney who specialized in European adoptions.
The first picture Tomasky showed the couple was of Kristina and Melinda. Linda “immediately fell in love” with the two girls with dark eyes and curls.
“I started referring to them as our children,” she says. “But even though I was attaching myself to these two girls, I knew in my heart that the right thing to do would be to let Ron make the final decision.”
He was hoping for a son and daughter, but also was swayed to the two girls when he and Linda looked one more time through the photos.
They were also drawn to a boy and were stunned when the attorney identified him as the brother of the little girls. And there were another two sisters. The Hungarian authorities thought the five children had a better chance at being adopted separately.
“I was devastated and Ron was extremely upset,” Linda Kuzlik says of the children's situation. The five had been abandoned by their parents, lost their grandmother, and were about to lose each other.
Ron protested they “weren't puppies” and shouldn't be split up. Practically, the couple knew their modest colonial home of three small bedrooms and one bath was too small. Moreover, mortgage and living expenses already stretched their modest incomes—he's an accountant and she's a credit and collection manager—to the limit.
Explaining how they rely on faith and prayer, Linda says she looked to God for the answer: “You know what the right thing is. Please lead me to what I'm supposed to do.”
At the decision hour she coolly announced: “We're taking all five.”
Ron says he won't ever forget that moment. “I almost had a heart attack on the spot.”
Linda insists now as then, however, that “they were always my kids, and I took it as a personal thing to have them split up. It just couldn't be.”
Writing letters to 250 foundations and charitable organizations for help in adopting the family, the Kuzliks received only five responses—all negative. Undaunted, she called stores, pleaded for help, and got bunk beds donated from Gloria's Sleep Shop. Soon after, Dial-a-Mattress called to offer goods, and Sears gave complete sets of bed linens the day she asked. Two clothing stores helped with outfits.
“Now you tell me the Lord wasn't with me every step of the way,” Linda says to people.
Thoughts of the financial hurdles took a temporary back seat to ribbons of red tape until last April, when they were able to finalize the adoption. Even then, Linda had to stay in a hotel five weeks with the children as Hungarian authorities, with their rigorous adoption regulations, stretched the trial period to make certain there was positive bonding and the Kuzliks were committed to their decision.
“They never wavered for a minute,” says attorney Tomasky, who in 11 years in the field had never placed five siblings with a single family. “The Hungarian authorities made the decision because they saw the Kuzliks were very serious about adopting the five.”
During those weeks, work forced Ron to fly back and forth four times to join his family in their hotel room, but late last spring they returned to the United States together.
Life in Stamford allows for more than the bread with lard and a pitcher of tea or water the poor orphanage was able to provide the children, but it also means many sacrifices and a long day for the Kuzliks that begins about 6:00 a.m. But the children are animated and seem happy.
People respond with offers of help. For example, architect Gerald Lione called to design an addition to the house, while the North Stamford Exchange Club promised to build it free of charge once materials are obtained. Their parish has held fund raisers, too.
“They're certainly looked upon with admiration by the parishioners,” observes Father Gray. “I think it's a wonderful thing they've done—it's quite heroic.” Tomasky also observes that “it takes a special kind of personality to take five children, and the Kuzliks are those kind of people.”
In fact, the fit seems so natural that “people comment how much they look like us,” Linda says. They assume the family has always been together. Father Gray, too, remarks about the resemblance between Ron and Ron Jr.
Linda doesn't find this unusual. “These children may not have been born from beneath my heart,” she explains, “but they were definitely born within my heart. They've always been a part of me.”
Every night Linda has the children pray for their Hungarian parents. She stresses forgiveness, and asks God to care for the couple and give them peace.
“I want very much for my children to grow up with good memories and love in their heart,” she says.
Ron wants to raise his children in a family rooted in faith and with teamwork. He emphasizes as essential the “prayer and faith” that has gotten them through everything so far.
Linda agrees. “Ron and I thank the Lord for everything we've gotten,” she says. “This wouldn't have been possible without his blessings.” She sees the will of God in all that has happened, and looks to him to take her and the family where they should be.
Life is rarely easy or convenient. The family has a two-door Nissan where a van would do more nicely. But in the face of all the necessary sacrifices that still have to be made, Ron says they're “ecstatic” as a family.
“Tomorrow, if the same situation arose,” Linda says, “I would do it. I wouldn't think twice about it.”
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Conn.
----- EXCERPT: What made a suburban Connecticut couple adopt five Hungarian brothers and sisters? ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: The Gospel of Life DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:To claim the right to abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia, and to recognize that right in law, means to attribute to human freedom a perverse and evil significance: that of an absolute power over others and against others. This is the death of true freedom: “Truly, truly, I say to you, every one who commits sin is a slave to sin” (Jn 8:34).
—Pope John Paul II
(Evangelium Vitae 20.3)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Pope John Paul II ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Chastity After the Sexual Revolution DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:Chastity educators in the United States have noted a few trouble spots in an otherwise favorable response to morality-based sex education.
With the rise in the number of teenage pregnancies, abortion, and out-of-wedlock childbirth, many have looked with renewed interest on chastity and abstinence as a remedy.
It is generally accepted that high teenage pregnancy and out-of-wedlock birth rates exact a rising social cost in North America. The figures also give a clear indication of a declining moral standard and of the distortion of traditional views of human sexuality, marriage, and procreation.
For Catholic educators, the renewed emphasis on chastity and abstinence embodies the central truths of Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae (On Human Life), and Pope John Paul II's 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life). Both seek to overcome the contraceptive mentality by emphasizing the Church's teaching on human sexuality and the sanctity of the marriage bond.
Funding for Chastity Message
The push for chastity education received a tremendous boost in 1996 with congressional passage of a welfare reform bill. Included in the legislation was the Title V provision offering states $50 million over five years to promote to teenagers the lesson to abstain from sex until marriage.
The program is bolstered by required state matching funds that could see as much as $437 million spent promoting the abstinence message.
The legislation was hailed as a major victory for pro-life and pro-family elements in the United States who have long lamented the negative consequences of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and '70s. Although the Title V provision does not permit a religious dimension to chastity education, it is seen as a positive alternative to the position of the “safe sex cartel” that, for decades, has held a monopoly on sexual education tax funding.
Nonetheless some pro-life and pro-family organizations are concerned that family planning advocates, such as Planned Parenthood and the Sexual Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), aim to thwart the Title V provision by casting doubt on the effectiveness of abstinence-only sexual education.
“There are vested interests who are working to preserve the sexual revolution's status quo,” says Teresa Notare, head of natural family planning for the U.S. Catholic bishops' Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities. “There are many family planning groups who have argued that abstinence-only sexual education has no solid research supporting it.”
Is Chastity Enough?
For example, in its public policy statement, What's Wrong with Abstinence-Only Sexuality Education Programs?, SIECUS argues that abstinence education brings a “fear-based” approach to the discussion. The council also suggests that there is no independent research indicating chastity education is effective.
SIECUS and its supporters call for “comprehensive” sexual education, which recognizes the benefits of abstinence, but also includes information about condoms and other contraceptives as means of avoiding pregnancy and the transmission of sexually transmitted disease.
“If Congress and the states are serious about helping young people delay sexual behaviors and grow into healthy, responsible adults, they will support a comprehensive approach to sexuality education that has a proven track record in accomplishing these goals,” say SIECUS officials.
Chastity supporters admit there is a shortage of independent research supporting abstinence-only sexual education.
“In some cases,” Notare says, “the most we can say is that there is no evidence abstinence education does not work.”
A number of chastity educators are now working to bring to light research into chastity education. Early last year, a group of chastity-centered educational organizations banded together to form the National Coalition for Abstinence Education (NCAE). The coalition's aim is to oversee the implementation of the Title V abstinence education program and to monitor each state's Title V program.
NCAE supporters say the sexual revolution has been “a disaster” for American society. Nonetheless, since 1971, an industry promoting contraception, abortion, and safe sex has grown highly resistant to positive change.
According to the NCAE's Title V National Report Card, Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and South Carolina are leading the way with chastity education. The majority of states, however, were given a failing grade.
Part of the problem, the NCAE says, is that abstinence educators have received little federal funding for research into the effectiveness of chastity education.
“There are credible studies to prove that abstinence programs work,” the NCAE says. “But true abstinence programs on the whole have received little or no federal funding for research.”
Pam Reed, assistant director of Project Reality, a Glenview, Ill.-based chastity education organization, suggested the limited amount of research into abstinence education is no accident.
“One of the reasons for the lack of published, peer-reviewed research about chastity is the fact that most of those willing to review the material have a stake in promoting the safe sex mentality,” she says.
Reed cited a report, Choosing the Best, sponsored by Project Reality and the Northwestern University Medical School, which showed that 54% of teens who had been sexually active before taking part in an abstinence-centered education program were no longer sexually active one year later.
Other chastity educators point to the mainstream media ignoring a fall 1997 report in the Journal of the American Medical Association that confirmed the lasting benefits of abstinence-only sexual education.
Richard Tompkins, director of education and research at the Austin, Texas-based Medical Institute for Sexual Health (MISH), agrees that there are pockets of resistance to the promotion of traditional views on marriage, sexuality, and chastity. Established in 1992, MISH is described as the pro-family answer to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood's research agency.
Encouraging Signs
“Two things that are typically done to try to stop abstinence education are trying to label abstinence promoters as religious, right-wing extremists and trying to promote the idea that abstinence programs do not work,” Tompkins says. “They will label abstinence as ‘fearbased’ or, in other words, scaring kids into not having sex.”
Tompkins is optimistic that the Title V program will eventually lead to greater national acceptance of the chastity-abstinence message.
“There are varying degrees of resistance [to abstinence education] in many quarters,” Tompkins says. “However, there are many encouraging signs that many wish to return to saner ideas and policies.”
Pam Reed agrees that “cultural resistance” to chastity education still exists, but suggested that North American society can no longer ignore the failures of liberalized sex education. “When a culture bottoms out it always returns to traditional values,” she says.
Mike Mastromatteo writes from Toronto, Canada.
----- EXCERPT: Against the odds, abstinence-only sex education programs struggle to gain a stronger foothold in the culture ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mike Mastromatteo ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Chastity: Teaching an Invaluable Lesson DATE: 02/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 08-14, 1998 ----- BODY:Chastity education gives children the moral and practical instruction they need to resist the pressures and temptations of the world and the inclinations of our fallen nature, and helps them understand God's precious gift of human sexuality. To be effective, this kind of instruction cannot stand alone. It must be part of a lifestyle taught by people who live moral lives, and who present it as a part of an integrated program on Christian living throughout all 12 years of grade and high school. The Pontifical Council for the Family's 1995 document The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality explains, “… sexuality is not something purely biological, rather it concerns the intimate nucleus of the person.”
We do not need detailed instruction in the functioning of the reproductive system to live our lives any more than we need detailed knowledge of the gastrointestinal system in order to digest our food.
Chastity education requires the most preparation of any kind of sexuality instruction. This is because it is the most difficult to teach, it is countercultural and works against man's fallen nature and, in order to be most effective, it must be carefully tailored to the needs and personality of each child. For these reasons, the parents of each child are the most appropriate chastity educators.
Truth and Meaning provides four general guidelines for education in chastity. Parents who want to teach and form their children in chastity should carefully study the following paragraphs from this document:
(1) Each child is a unique and unrepeatable person and must receive individualized formation (65-67).
(2) The moral dimension of sexuality must always be part of the parent's explanations (68-69).
(3) Formation in chastity and timely information regarding sexuality must be provided in the broadest context of education for love (70-74).
(4) Parents should provide this information with great delicacy, but clearly and at the appropriate time (75-76).
Finally, Truth and Meaning says that the three main goals of chastity education should be:
(1) to maintain in the family a positive atmosphere of love, virtue, and respect for the gifts of God, in particular the gift of life;
(2) to help children understand the value of sexuality and chastity in stages, sustaining their growth through enlightening word, example, and prayer; and
(3) to help children understand and discover their own vocation to marriage or to consecrated virginity for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven in harmony with and respect for their attitudes and inclinations and the gifts of the Holy Spirit (22).
Source: The Facts of Life: An Authoritative Guide to Life and Family Issues, by Brian Clowes PhD (Human Life International, Front Royal, Va.). Reprinted with permission.
----- EXCERPT: FACTS of life ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: After Diplomatic Triumph in Iraq, Can U.N. Solidify Peace in Holy Land? DATE: 03/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 8-14, 1998 ----- BODY:JERUSALEM—Now that the Iraqi crisis appears to have been diffused—at least for the time being—Palestinians and some local Church leaders are hoping that the United Nations will focus its attention on the ailing Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
In particular, they hope that U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, whose diplomacy persuaded Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to permit unfettered access to weapons inspectors, will pressure Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians.
“I'm waiting for the United Nations to put the screws on Israel the way it put the screws on Iraq,” said a Palestinian Catholic resident of East Jerusalem.
Sitting in his souvenir store in the Old City of Jerusalem, the 60-year-old shopkeeper likened the plight of the Iraqi people, who have endured many hardships since the U.N.-imposed economic sanctions in 1991, to the lot of the Palestinians, who, despite limited self-rule, view Israel as an occupier.
Referring to the Israeli prime minister, he said, “[Benjamin] Netanyahu is worse than Saddam Hussein. He takes our land and seals off the West Bank on a whim. We Palestinians are suffering, just like the Iraqi people.”
Although Church officials flatly reject any attempts to compare Hussein, a despot who massacred thousands of his own people and invaded neighboring Kuwait in 1990, with Netanyahu, they, too, are looking to Annan to end the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate.
“We hope that the type of solution that was employed in the Iraqi situation will be used to force Israel to abide by all U.N. resolutions,” said Archbishop Lutfi Laham, patriarchal vicar of the Greek Patriarchate in Jerusalem.
Asked whether the Palestinians, too, could use some nudging, he said, “Both sides must fulfill their promises.”
Like Catholics everywhere, members of the Church in the Holy Land spent the past several weeks praying for a diplomatic solution to the escalating Iraqi crisis. In daily contact with the Vatican, they were soothed by the knowledge that Pope John Paul had encouraged Annan to travel to Baghad.
In mid-February, when American air strikes against Iraq appeared imminent, Archbishop Renato Martino, permanent observer of the Holy See to the United Nations, sent Annan a personal message of encouragement from the Pope.
According to Archbishop Martino, the secretary general “was sincerely moved” by the gesture.
Upon his triumphant return to the U.N. headquarters in New York, Annan told hundreds of cheering employees, “There were millions of people around the world rooting for peace. That is why I say you should never underestimate the power of prayer.” (See related story, p. 4)
Local Catholics had more reason than most to heave a sigh of relief when tensions were diffused. According to Archbishop Laham, local clergy and parishioners—the vast majority of whom are Arabs—feared for their brethren in Iraq.
“The local Church was seeking justice for Iraq, especially in the wake of the U.N. embargo that has denied nutrition to the Iraqi people. We heard that 1 million children have died since the Gulf War seven years ago,” he said.
In addition, Archbishop Laham said, had the United States attacked Iraq, Saddam Hussein might have attacked Israel, killing or maiming many innocents.
Local Catholics had more reason than most to heave a sigh of relief when tensions were diffused.
“Our concern is for peace in the entire region: Iraq, Israel, Palestine. We're very, very relieved that a solution has been found, and we hope it will be the start of a better way of life for us all.”
One of the ironies of the crisis, say political observers, is the fact that Israeli and Palestinian negotiators held secret and not-so-secret meetings throughout the standoff. Though far from resolved, the issues discussed included the creation of a Palestinian airport and seaport in the Gaza Strip, as well as a travel route for Palestinians wishing to go between Gaza and the West Bank.
“With the media microscope pointed elsewhere,” one editorial writer commented, “Israelis and Palestinians had the time and space to hash out some of their differences. The Iraqi thing actually jump-started the stalled talks.”
While the Iraqi threat did speed up the peace process somewhat, it also reinforced long-standing fears.
The fact that thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza demonstrated in rallies where Israeli and American flags were burned, and where “Bomb Tel Aviv” was the rallying cry, did nothing to win the trust of ordinary Israelis.
In the Hebrew daily Ma'ariv, writer Nadav Haetzni said “The Palestinian people and its leadership crudely and clearly showed themselves in favor of Iraq, against the United States, and along the way exposed the fact that the Oslo process has not changed anything in their deep-seated hostility toward Israel.”
Haetzni quoted a survey, conducted during the crisis by the Palestinian polling company JMCC, showing that 94% of Palestinians supported Iraq; that 77% supported an Iraqi bombing of Tel Aviv; and that 80.5% believe the United States is employing a double standard in its dealings with Iraq and Israel.
These sentiments are freely expressed on the streets of predominantly Palestinian East Jerusalem.
Asked whether he was relieved that a war had been averted, a 25-year-old Palestinian Catholic named Ghazi said it “was a shame Tel Aviv wasn't attacked. It was Israel's fault that America tried to attack Iraq.”
Employing language that could only be described as anti-Semitic, he said, “One day, Israel and the Jews will try to rule the world through war. At heart, all Americans are Jews. The United Nations has to end the American double standard.”
The “double standard” argument that surfaced in the Arab world during the Gulf crisis has angered both Israeli and American Jews, who are appalled by comparisons between the Iraqi and Israeli governments.
In response to this charge, Moshe Fogel, director of the Israeli Government Press Office, said, “Israel's very existence has been threatened over the years by Arab armies on its borders. We need and want peace, but only a peace between the two parties. An agreement forced on the two parties is destined to fail.”
Iraq, he said, “is a dictatorship which killed its own citizens and used its power to grab oil resources from a neighboring Arab country.”
Fogel rejected the notion of a U.N.-brokered peace treaty.
“For the United Nations or any international body to decide on a solution and to impose it would be futile.”
He added that “the United Nations doesn't have a strong track record where Israel is concerned. Prior to the Six Day War, the U.N. troops [deployed to protect the Israeli-Egyptian border] in the Sinai withdrew when [then-Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser] asked them to.”
While not denying that their own peace process is foundering, Israeli military analysts stressed that there are other pressing problems in the Middle East.
Dr. Dany Shoham, a military expert at Bar Ilan University's Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Affairs, said that even if Iraq is ultimately disarmed— and that is a big “if”—non-conventional weapons abound in the region.
In addition to Iraq, he said, “Iran, Syria, Egypt, and Libya are all developing chemical and biological weapons at a rapid rate. Iran is evolving in the nuclear field as well, and it's said to be increasing its efforts with the help of the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, among others.”
Although neither Shoham nor other sources would comment on the subject, Israel is also believed to have non-conventional weapons at its disposal.
Whereas Iraq is being carefully monitored, Shoham said, “There is only limited scrutiny of Iran. What people don't realize is that Iran and Iraq are more or less balanced in the chemical and biological spheres. Both have an inventory of chemical and biological weaponry, and both have the offensive capability to use them.”
Shoham expressed doubt that this latest showdown with Iraq will stop Saddam Hussein in the long term. Since the 1991 Gulf War, he said, “there have been variations and fluctuations [in the security situation].”
The U.N.-Iraq agreement, he said, “appears to be promising, but essentially it's just another fluctuation, a part of a continuing cycle.”
Michele Chabin writes from Jerusalem.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Michele Chabin ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Prayer and Evangelizing Mark John Paul II's Lent DATE: 03/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 8-14, 1998 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY—It was quiet in the Vatican this past week. Pope John Paul II made his customary Lenten retreat March 1-6 and thus, held no public or private audiences.
To the casual observer it may seem like an oddity that the leader of the world's 1 billion Catholics should clear his calendar of all appointments for a full seven days, but as Vatican insiders know, prayer is a top priority for John Paul. Not only has he been diligently preparing himself for forthcoming celebrations of Holy Week, the Pope is also making sure the Diocese of Rome and the Universal Church spiritually prepare for Easter.
A quick glance at the Pope's schedule reveals the full picture of how he's spending the 40 days of Lent: a week-long retreat for himself and Vatican officials, a meeting with the priests of Rome, a pastoral trip to Africa, written Lenten messages for the laity and clergy, and a full roster of liturgical celebrations.
On Ash Wednesday, Pope John Paul II held his customary general audience in the Vatican and celebrated Mass in a church on Rome's Aventine Hill. During both appointments he emphasized that Lent is a time of grace and spiritual renewal.
“Through prayer, fasting, and charitable acts, we renew our friendship with God, we are freed from false promises of earthly happiness and, through faith, we grow in evangelical love,” he said at the general audience.
At Mass that evening in the fifth-century Basilica of Santa Sabina, the Pope marked the foreheads of clergy, religious, and the laity with ashes. He encouraged Catholics to pray and meditate during Lent on the connection between their sins and Christ's sufferings, particularly through meditation on the way of the cross.
The Pope also asked the congregation to join him in praying that people will be open to a dialogue with God during this penitential season.
Missionaries in Rome
The following day, Pope John Paul II held his annual Lenten meeting with the clergy of Rome. He spoke to them in particular about a diocesan mission now underway. During the six weeks of Lent, 12,000 laypeople, 3,000 consecrated religious, and 1,000 priests are going door-to-door in an attempt to visit every household in the city. The volunteer missionaries are delivering copies of the Acts of the Apostles—which describes how the Christian faith arrived in Rome—and are encouraging people to become more active in the Church in preparation for the year 2000.
The Pope reminded Rome's priests that the Holy Spirit “operates mysteriously and silently in the depths of each person.”
“When we knock on the door of a house, or on the door of a heart,” John Paul said, “the Spirit has preceded us there, and the message that Christ brings could perhaps resound anew in the ears of those who listen.”
The Pontiff's meeting with the diocese's priests underscores his duty as bishop of Rome for their pastoral care. As pastor of the Universal Church, Pope John Paul II is entrusted with the care of priests worldwide. In a symbolic gesture, he will release later this month his annual “Letter to Priests” for Holy Thursday—a tradition he began in 1979.
The Pope has already released his customary Lenten message for the faithful around the globe (See “Through Desert Isolation to Communion with God and Neighbor, Register, Feb. 22-28). This year's reflection focused on poverty and called on Christians everywhere to carry out acts of charity in the weeks leading up to Easter.
“I exhort every Christian in this Lenten season to evidence his personal conversion through a concrete sign of love toward those in need, recognizing in this person the face of Christ,” the Pope said.
The Lenten message noted that an equally serious form of poverty—lack of spiritual nourishment—troubles many men and women today and can also bring on grave suffering.
“The consequences of this are right before our eyes and are often very sad—a life void of meaning. This kind of misery is mostly found in environments where people live in comfort, materially satisfied but without a spiritual orientation,” he said.
Spiritual Exercises
Continuing a tradition that dates from the middle ages, Pope John Paul II made a Lenten retreat in the apostolic palace. This year, the spiritual exercises were directed by Cardinal Jan Chryzostom Korec, 75, a Jesuit theologian. The Slovakian cardinal chose as his theme, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Heb 13:8).
Cardinal Korec brought a striking personal history to the retreat, having spent 12 years in solitary confinement under Czechoslovakia's former communist regime.
The Pope was joined in the week-long spiritual exercises by Vatican Curia officials, who normally attend as many sessions as their schedules allow.
As is customary, John Paul II sat each day in a side chapel where he could see and hear the preacher but could not be seen by the other participants. Besides attending four reflections preached each day by Cardinal Korec, the Pope spent much of his remaining time in prayer and meditation.
With his spiritual batteries re-charged, the Pope will now face a daunting schedule for the remainder of the Lenten season. Later this month, he sets-out on a pastoral visit to Nigeria, where he will visit three cities in as many days.
The highlight of the March 21-23 trip will be the beatification of Father Cyprian Michael Iwene Tansi in the southern city of Onitsha. Pope John Paul II also will meet with leaders of Nigeria's Muslim community, which makes up about half the country's population of 107 million people.
It will mark his second pilgrimage to Nigeria and his 82nd pastoral trip outside Italy since his pontificate began in 1978.
Holy Week in Rome
Without a doubt, Holy Week in the Eternal City is the most spectacular eight days of the entire year. Because of this, it's also a traditional time of pilgrimage to Rome and the Vatican.
Beginning Passion (Palm) Sunday, April 5, and continuing through Easter, Pope John Paul II will lead the faithful in the most solemn liturgies of the Church's calendar—in the city where the early Christians died for their faith. It begins with Mass in St. Peter's Square, during which the Pope leads a colorful procession with palm branches recalling Jesus' triumphal entrance into Jerusalem.
Wednesday, John Paul holds his customary general audience in the Vatican. Holy Thursday morning, the Pontiff gathers in St. Peter's Basilica with priests from his diocese for the traditional Chrism Mass, which includes the blessing of oils used in the sacraments, and the renewal of promises made at ordination.
That evening, he begins the three days commemorating Christ's passion, death, and resurrection—the Paschal Triduum. During the Mass of the Lord's Supper at the Basilica of St. John Lateran, the Rome diocesan cathedral, the Pope commemorates the institution of the Eucharist and washes the feet of 12 priests.
Good Friday, the only day of the year during which Mass is not celebrated, Pope John Paul customarily spends the morning hearing confessions in St. Peter's Basilica. In the afternoon, he presides at a Liturgy of the Word including veneration of the cross. At night, he leads a torch-lit Way of the Cross procession at Rome's ancient Colosseum.
On Holy Saturday evening, the Pope celebrates the joy of the resurrection during the lengthy Easter Vigil liturgy— baptizing new Christians and welcoming them into the Church.
The following morning, he celebrates Easter Sunday Mass in St. Peter's Square followed by his blessing Urbi et Orbi (to the city of Rome and the world) in more than 50 languages.
The heavy schedule of liturgical celebrations is physically taxing for the 77-year-old Pontiff—even a priest half his age would no doubt find it demanding. Thus, at the end of the Easter weekend, Pope John Paul II normally goes to his residence in Castel Gandolfo outside Rome for a few days of well-deserved rest.
Stephen Banyra writes from Rome.
----- EXCERPT: Pope's pre-Easter plans include a week-long retreat and whirlwind pastoral trip to Africa ----- EXTENDED BODY: Stephen Banyra ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Intelligent Design Theories Chip Away At Darwinian Evolution's Stronghold DATE: 03/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 8-14, 1998 ----- BODY:COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—Charles Darwin's theory of evolution has been embraced and revered by the world scientific community since it was first promulgated in his book On the Origin of Species, in 1859. For many scientists in disciplines ranging from biology to paleontology, Darwin's particular spin on evolutionary theory is considered a first principle, a cornerstone, a fact. Some criticisms of Darwin's theory based on new scientific information are receiving attention, however, both in and outside of the scientific community.
Darwin was not the first scientist to suggest that life forms on earth have “evolved,” or changed over time so that the descendants of a species differ from their ancestors. But to understand the current debate, a distinction must be made between “micro-evolution,” which refers to small changes in a species, such as the reshaping of finches' beaks to allow them to adapt to a new food source, and “macro-evolution,” which refers to a major genetic leap, such as an invertebrate animal gradually becoming a vertebrate animal.
Micro-evolution is not disputed among scientists, or among most Christians for that matter. But Darwin's unique contribution was the idea of macro-evolution, which depends on “natural selection”—commonly known as “survival of the fittest”—and, perhaps more importantly, “random variation”—the idea that every permutation along the evolutionary road was a chance occurrence.
Today, some scientists are using scholarly research to build a case for the “intelligent design” of life on earth. This is not a new theory; in fact, it is older than Darwin's. But new scientific information not available in Darwin's era—especially in the fields of biochemistry and genetics—enhances the scientific credibility of the intelligent design theories. The intelligent design scientists conclude from their research that life forms on earth are so complex that they could not have developed as a result of “random variation.”
In his book, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, Michael Behe posits that the intricate and interdependent machinery of the cell, the basis of all life forms, could not have happened as the result of es biochemistry at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., said he feels “certain” that the cell is the work of an intelligent designer, and thinks a convincing scientific case can be built to prove it.
“Most evolutionary biologists hate my book—simply hate it,” Behe said. “[P]eople look at me point blank and say ‘You can't involve intelligent design—it is illegitimate.’ They say science is material, and Darwin's theory of evolution is the only naturalistic explanation of how life got here.
“It is fascinating to me to read science papers where complex systems are described and the writer will say, ‘Isn't Darwinian evolution marvelous?’ without a shred of doubt,” Behe said.
Missing Links
Even many of Darwin's loyal followers have to admit that there are gaps in his explanation, Behe said. For example, the fossil record to date does not show evidence of the kinds of transitional changes from one species to the next that Darwin himself hoped would be discovered to bear out his theory. Many scientists who accept Darwin's theory feel confident that future paleontological discoveries will be made to fill in these gaps.
“Scientists have a great emotional commitment to evolutionary theory,” Behe explained. “If one admits that there are gaps here [in the fossil record], you have to let go of a huge emotional commitment first.
“Are the die-hard evolutionists having second thoughts? Maybe not, but they are starting to get defensive.”
Late last year, the National Association of Biology Teachers slightly revised its long-standing platform on teaching evolution. Before, it read, “The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable, and natural process.” The new version dropped the words “unsupervised” and “impersonal,” which leaves the door open, if just a crack, for the possibility of an intelligent designer.
For its part, the Catholic Church has long treated evolution as a “serious hypothesis” worthy of “serious study,” as long as one did not “set aside the teaching of Revelation” (Pope Pius XII in Humani Generis).
In October 1996, Pope John Paul II made a statement to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on the topic of evolution. Due to a poor translation from the original French, he was widely misquoted in English as saying that evolution was “more than one hypothesis” about creation. In fact, as was later clarified, the Pope meant the theory of evolution is more than merely a hypothesis. In his remarks, he went on to stress that there are many variations of the theory of evolution, some of them purely materialistic—and thus incompatible with accepted Catholic teaching—and others that allowed for a supreme Creator.
Although Catholics and other Christians who find fault with Darwin's theory are not in complete agreement on many of the details concerning the origins of life on earth (the age of the planet, when the dinosaurs lived, etc.), for the most part, they are willing allies in the fight for credibility against purely materialistic scientific explanations.
One of the most prolific proponents of the intelligent design theory is not a scientist, but an accomplished legal scholar. Philip Johnson, who teaches law at the University of California at Berkeley, became interested in the topic of evolution a number of years ago, shortly after he became a Christian. Now he devotes much of his time to writing, lecturing, and debating on the subject of evolution.
Material Seekers
For Johnson, the accepted theory of evolution is built on very poor assumptions and factual data, which he has refuted in his three books on the subject, most recently Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds. In his opinion, many scientists are willing to accept this theory, however weak the evidence, because they are naturalists who seek exclusively material causes and effects for everything found in nature.
“Biologists tend to be strict materialists, and to reject the possibility of intelligent design in organisms with horror and outrage,” Johnson said. “A designer who does something after the Big Bang—during the emergence of life, that is—is much closer to us and hence much more unwelcome to materialists. Despite the claims that science and religion are separate realms, evolutionary biologists are strongly committed to materialism regardless of the evidence.”
Johnson disagrees with many Catholics and other religious individuals who share his belief that God created the universe, but are open to the possibility that evolution may simply be part of his creative process.
“Evolutionary science aims to explain everything about the living world, including the human mind, as a product of strictly materialistic processes in which God played no part. From this viewpoint, religion itself is a product of brain activity,” Johnson explained.
“When asked about this, many evolutionary scientists respond like White House spin doctors: they have the greatest respect for ‘religious belief,’ etc., but they will not repudiate the basic commitment of their science to materialism ‘all the way up,’” Johnson said. “They cannot afford to do so precisely because the evidence for the supposed vast creative power of natural selection is so weak. Let that divine foot in the door, and the whole structure is in danger of collapsing.”
‘We see this as a debate of faith versus faith…’
But in his 1996 statement to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, John Paul II made it clear that the Church does not see evolutionary science as an “all or nothing” proposition. The idea that God, as the intelligent designer behind creation, uses evolutionary processes is an acceptable possibility. Only theories that are purely materialistic, and thus leave out the necessity for a Creator, are incompatible with the Catholic faith.
Although Johnson does not mind being called a “creationist,” meaning one who believes that there is a Creator, his opinions differ somewhat from the traditional creationists that were immortalized in the movie Inherit the Wind. Creationists, by strict definition, believe that God created the universe directly, in literally seven days, as written in Genesis.
For many years, scientists and other academics showed little respect for creationists, whose arguments against evolution were perceived as unintellectual. Creationists have attempted to improve their reputations by establishing think-tanks for “creation science,” where scientists with advanced degrees engage in research aimed at disproving Darwin's theory.
Faith vs. Faith
Frank Sherwin is a creation scientist who holds a master's degree in zoology from a respected secular university. Currently he works as director of curriculum development at the Institute for Creation Research in Santee, Calif. The Institute has a staff of 60 who conduct research, operate a museum, and direct educational programs, including a graduate program in life and the physical sciences. He calls the Institute an “unashamedly Bible-based organization—Genesis through Revelation,” whose goal is to “expose the myth of- macro-evolution.”
“We see this as a debate of faith versus faith—it is adamantly not creationism versus science,” Sherwin said. “No one has ever observed hydrogen becoming people, and no one has ever observed God creating. In which do you put your faith?
“For so long, the biological community in particular has had no competing viewpoint,” Sherwin said. “Slowly, this is being challenged due in large part to the intelligent design theorists. We are disappointed that they don't go as far as we think that they should, but we won't throw the baby out with the bath water.”
Father Robert Brungs SJ of the Institute for Theological Encounter with Science and Technology at St. Louis University and editor of a forthcoming book about creation and evolution agrees that faith is at the center of this debate.
“Belief in a creator requires faith, and I think a lot of biologists just don't have the faith … they will only allow for impersonal design, if any,” the priest said. “Faith in itself is a supernatural gift, you either have it or you don't. You can argue with them all you want, but I don't think too many people come to faith by argument.
“Darwin's stuff was done out of a knowledge that he had, and it wasn't as wrong then as it is now. We've come a long way since Darwin died,” Father Brungs said. “I think the evolution of humans is different from the evolution of other animals and plants.… I think the human in creation is set apart.”
Molly Mulqueen writes from Colorado Springs, Colo.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Molly Mulqueen ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Islam 1998: West Watches with A Wary Eye DATE: 03/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 8-14, 1998 ----- BODY:How will Islam respond to the challenge of the 21st century? To the spread of democratic values in a post-communist world, to the sweep of the information age? Many suspect that, for the West, more may be riding on the answer to that question than at any time since Ottoman armies camped before the gates of 16th-century Vienna.
It could hardly be otherwise with the world's predominately Muslim nations forming a nearly continuous geopolitical band from the Atlantic Ocean across Africa, the Middle East, and southern and central Asia to the Pacific, and with a growing Islamic presence in Western countries themselves. Said to be the world's fastest growing religion, there are about 750 million Muslims worldwide, although some estimates put the total even higher, at nearly 1 billion.
There are a variety of reactions to the phenomenon of a renascent contemporary Islam. Much of it is negative. From academics who worry that a so-called “green menace” of spreading Islamic militancy will replace “red” communism as the primary threat to Western security, to the popular media that portrays Muslims as terrorists and fanatics, Islam and much of the modern world harbor deep suspicions of each other.
There are grounds, of course, for some of these suspicions. The West, which, since Napoleon's invasion of the region in 1799, has been a dominant force in the Middle East, brought with it not only notions of constitutional law and individual liberty, but a climate of moral license as well. For Westerners, news reports from the Middle East remain dominated by reports of Islamic militants killing their way to paradise.
Nevertheless, in one of modern history's most dramatic surprises, a coalition of largely Muslim nations, including Saudi Arabia, Arab Gulf states, Syria and Egypt, agreed eight years ago to follow American-led forces in a campaign to expel Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. While much of the promise of Operation Desert Storm has clearly faded since then—especially hopes for democratic-style political reforms in the Arab world itself, cooperation and dialogue between Islamic and non-Islamic worlds has become a feature, however fragile, of the post-Cold War world.
More importantly, there are new signs of attempts at religious reform within Islam— from Iran's Abdul Karim Soroush to Tunisia's Rashid Ghannouchi to Egypt's Hassan Hanafi, to name a few—scholars who are attempting to construct a framework for reconciling traditional Islamic values and the best aspects of modern thought.
One thing is sure: Islam today is anything but a monolithic reality. In fact, it never has been.
If you have the opportunity to travel in the Arabian peninsula, there are two things that strike you right away: the great and strangely captivating emptiness of the landscape, and how remarkable the simplest interruption in that simplicity seems. An outcropping of rock, or a lone tree is immediately invested with significance.
For the early Bedouin nomads who made this wilderness their home, long before the arrival of Islam, the meteorite (the so-called “Black Stone”) in the Kaaba (or “cube”) at Mecca was the holiest of such desert relics, around which, eventually, a great trading and caravan center emerged.
Traders, carting their goods north and south, brought news from the cities beyond the desert, including rumors of a belief in a single deity. By the seventh century, the time of Mohammed, Arabized Jewish tribes lived nearby, there was an ancient Christian community in Najran, and non-Chalcedonian Syriac-speaking Christians, fleeing persecution from the Byzantines, were venturing ever more deeply into Arabia.
(As Lebanese scholar Philip Hitti once wrote, “There were Christian Arabs long before there were Muslim Arabs.)
It was into this seething, charged world that Mohammed (the name means “highly praised”) was born in 570 A.D. in Mecca, according to the Koran, Islam's holy book, the orphan child of an impoverished family. The clan into which the founder of Islam was born, the banu-Hashim, had fallen on hard times, excluded from the prosperity enjoyed by the Quraysh, the tribe to which it nominally belonged.
Throughout the drama of Mohammed's life, there is the mark of an orphan's keen sense of wounded dignity.
By the time Mohammed was 25, his prospects had decidedly improved. He had married his employer, a wealthy Qurayshite widow who was 15 years his senior and owned a lucrative trading concern. As someone who had once been poor, Mohammed took note of the widening gap between Mecca's urban commercial “haves” and its nomadic “have-nots.” This Meccan underclass would provide the future prophet with some of his first followers.
Mohammed, the trader, also had opportunities for contact with Syriac and Abyssinian Christians and with the Jewish traders who were a feature of life in neighboring Medina. From these sources, he discovered the existence of “scriptures” that revealed the mind of God and elevated the culture of the peoples who possessed them. (Not that most scholars think that Mohammed read the Bible. Muslim tradition has it that he was illiterate; but, in any case, the Judaism and Christianity he seems to have been familiar with was drawn more from apocryphal and legendary sources.)
Increasingly tormented by the gap between his own tribe's idolatry and the faith of the Jews and Christians he admired, Mohammed isolated himself for long periods in the hill caves outside the town. (Middle Eastern scholar Bernard Lewis has suggested that Mohammed's spiritual origins may well lie with the Hanifs, a group of pagan Meccans who eschewed idol worship and sought a purer religion, but were unwilling to submit to either Judaism or Christianity.) On one of these retreats in the year 610, according to the Koran, the trader heard a voice “like reverberating bells” commanding him: “Recite (qur'an, in Arabic, hence the Koran, or “recitation”), in the name of thy Lord who creates, who creates man from a blood clot. Read out! For the Lord is the most Munificent who teaches by the pen, teaches man that which he knew not” (Surah, or chapter, 96:1-5).
Eventually, the mystic came to identify the voice as that of the angel Gabriel, and Islam, and its holy book, the Koran, was born. He understood the ultimate source of the revelation was not an angel, but Allah, a name that is formed from the Arabic contraction al-illah, “the divinity,” a designation used in pre-Islamic times, according to some scholars, by Syriac Christians. Interestingly, Mohammed's father, who died before the founder of Islam was born, bore the name Abd Allah, or “servant of Allah.”
The revelation, which concerned itself with everything from lore on biblical figures and warnings of judgment to jurisprudence, continued sporadically for the next 22 years until the prophet's death in 632. Historically, Mohammed's messages divide easily into Meccan and Medinan phases, after his two principal bases of operation, and reflect the prophet's evolving understanding of his mission and of the specific problems he was forced to address.
(Compromises are not lacking, either. In a weak moment, the prophet recognized three Meccan goddesses as intercessors with Allah, only to withdraw the favor shortly afterward [surah 53:19-23], blaming the gaffe on a Satanic deception. The prophet's attitude toward alcohol also underwent modifications: from approval [16:69] to caution [2:216] to hostility [4:46].)
Arranged in 114 surahs, some with colorful titles such as “The Bee,” “The Spider,” and “The Cow,” the Koran is written in an Arabic style reminiscent of the pre-Islamic saj, or prose poem, and is a complex blend of biblical pastiche, Arab national epic, mystical treatise, and law book.
While the Koran contains much material familiar from the Hebrew Scriptures (accounts of the Creation, stories of Adam, Noah, Moses, Solomon), it puts a surprising “spin” on many of its narratives: Ishmael, for example, from whom Arabs trace their lineage, would appear to be the Abrahamic “son of the promise,” not Isaac. In the case of New Testament echoes, the Koran's nebi Issa (“Jesus the prophet”), while the Messiah of the Bible and the Nicene Creed's “judge of the living and the dead,” is also a Gnostic Christ who does not really die on the cross.
Initially, it would seem, Mohammed had no intention of founding a new religion. What he believed he had received was an Arabic version of the same revelation that had been granted to Jews and Christians in their own languages. But opposition from Meccan authorities, eager to protect the local shrine and its lucrative revenue, from the prophet's crusade against idolatry, led Mohammed to migrate with his followers to Medina in 622 (the so-called hegirah, or “migration,” the event from which the Muslim calendar dates). There he consolidated his movement, attracted followers, and tried, unsuccessfully, to convert the local Jewish community to his cause.
Facing increasingly bitter opposition from both Jews and Christians— communities he had hoped would legitimize his mission—Mohammed began to accuse the two rival faiths of falsifying their scriptures in order to conceal the truth of the Meccan prophet's claims. Mohammed initiated the expulsion of Jewish tribes from the environs of Medina, and after defeating his Meccan foes militarily in 624, Mohammed clearly saw himself as the head of a new, now strictly Arab, religion, with the ancient Kaaba in Mecca as the principal site of pilgrimage. The aging leader referred to himself as the “Seal (khatam) of the Prophets,” that is, the one who sums up, and therefore, supplants all previous dispensations.
By 630, Mohammed's forces had captured Mecca itself, cleansed the Kaabah of idols, and forced the Quraysh to submit to the Prophet and his message. Barely two years later, June 8, 632, Mohammed was dead.
The death of the would-be prophet in the wilds of Arabia in 632 went largely unnoticed in the capitals of Zoroastrian Persia and Christian Byzantium, the seventh-century's two reigning superpowers—but not for long. In 636, largely disorganized Islamic armies, inspired by Mohammed's message, swept out of the peninsula and defeated the Byzantines at the Yarmuk River, captured Jerusalem in 638, overran Christian Egypt two years later, added the Persian empire to the list of conquests in 642, and within 70 years of the prophet's demise had broken into Spain and were marching on the borders of China.
What accounts for this astonishing turn of events?
Supernatural explanations aside, scholar Lewis thinks “Mohammed did not so much create a new movement as revive and redirect currents that already existed among the Arabs of his time.”
The fact that his death was followed by a new burst of activity instead of by collapse, “shows that his career was the answer to a great political, social, and moral need.”
But Mohammed had bequeathed something more substantial to his followers than marching orders. In the Koran, the Meccan prophet had left them, and, as history would later prove, much of the Mediterranean world, a way of life.
The dogmatic requirements are fairly straightforward. Muslims believe that God is the one, unique, supreme reality (in the Koranic formula, “there is no God whatever but Allah”); that “Mohammed is the prophet, or better, messenger of Allah”; that the Koran is the Word of God. Adherents also believe in angels, the reality of sin, final judgment, and the life to come.
However, Islam, like Judaism, centers less on theology and doctrinal formulations than on the performance of basic religious duties—what in the Muslim world are called the five pillars, or “supports,” of faith
They are:
(1) The shahadah, or Islamic “profession” that affirms that Allah is the only God, and that Mohammed is his messenger. The formula is so important that muezzins, the chanters who call the faithful to prayer from minarets in Islamic countries, begin their calls with the shahadah, and that a non-Muslim who makes the declaration with faith becomes at least a nominal Muslim on the spot.
(2) Salah, the five daily ritual, or canonical, prayers. This largely memorized set of prayers glorifying Allah and praising His unity and power is recited five times a day at specified times (dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, sunset, and early evening) and accompanied by a medley of gestures, including full prostrations. Not incidentally, the Arabic word for mosque is a corruption of the word masjid that means “place of prostration.”
(3) Zakah, the giving of obligatory alms, fixed by Islamic law at 2.5% of the individual's income, is considered by the Koran not only as a social obligation, but as a means of self-purification. In pre-Islamic times, the zakah was the tithe that Arabian merchants paid to the local deity before they could sell their wares.
(4) Sawm, the requirement to fast during the holy month of Ramadan. Clearly borrowed from the Jewish fast of Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, and customs associated with the Christian Lent, sawm involves abstaining from both food and drink during the daylight hours of Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, a month set aside to prepare for the Laylat al-Qadr (“The Night of Power”), the culmination of the season, commemorating the revelation of the Koran to Mohammed.
(5) Hajj, the performance of the pilgrimage to Mecca once in a lifetime for those physically and financially able to do so.
As many commentators have noted through the centuries, Islam's relatively straightforward requirements and its vivid memorable formula, have made it one of history's most “portable” and flexible faiths. It is easily passed on within the context of family life, possessing, for a religion so rooted in the cultures of the Arabian desert, a remarkable ability to adapt itself to the challenges of quite different civilizations and times.
Nextweek: Islamic Fundamentalism: Fact and Fiction
Gabriel Meyer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: More than 750 million belong to historically 'adaptable' faith of Mohammed ----- EXTENDED BODY: GABRIEL MEYER ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: 'If It Bleeds, It Leads!?' DATE: 03/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 8-14, 1998 ----- BODY:Archibishop John Foley, president of the Pontifical Council of Social Communications, is best known to catholics in the United States as the commentrator for televised papal liturgies, especially the Pope's Christmas Midnight Masses (he has covered the past 14.) More recently he worked extensively with NBC to cover the Pope's pastoral visit to communist Cuba.
In his Vatican offices, just behind St. Peter's Basilica, Archbishop Foley spoke with Register correspondent John Norton about his experiences in Cuba, his personal life, his vision of the Church in social communications, and his "marriage" to a "dead" dicease.
The Vatican's top communications' official on the challenges of delivering the good news in a media age dominated by stories of bloodshed,h scandal, and disaster
Norton: You are recently back from Cuba, where you were with Pope John Paul not only as archbishop but as journalist. Were you pleased with the coverage of the trip?
Archbishop Foley: It could have received much more coverage in the United States. It received quite a bit in other parts of the world. It's unfortunate that there was that other distraction (the troubles of President Bill Clinton) and the people from the networks who were there in Cuba were somewhat disappointed and frustrated, but what was done was very good.
Outside of papal events, what are the greatest opportunities for the Church in social communications?
We should be much more proactive in the field of public relations. The Church does so much in the name of the Lord in so many ways. We should make that good news better known. There are many stories that are valid and newsworthy, whether it be service of those suffering from AIDS in New York whom the Church serves better, I think, than any other organization; or the service of lepers in Cuba. That's one place where the regime had allowed nuns to work because the work is so difficult—what a wonderful Gospel testimony that affords— or the care of the poor. All that is done in the name of the Lord by the Church all over the world.
Many of those who respond to a priest–ly or religious vocation have very interesting stories of their own. Often now people enter at a later stage of life and so they've already achieved some level of success in a secular occupation and they find it not satisfying enough, and want to give more to the Lord. Those stories are fascinating.
The spiritual journeys of people. I know how famous the book of Thomas Merton Seven Story Mountain had been in the 1940s, but there are many dozens—hundreds—of stories like that today of individuals who have found that dedicating themselves completely to the service of the Lord is the most fulfilling and satisfying and necessary thing that they could do.
In media coverage dominated by scandals, controversies, bloodshed, and disaster, those sorts of stories face stiff competition.
At the 175th anniversary of the Catholic press in the United States, which was commemorated in Charleston, S.C., where the first Catholic publication was established, I spoke about the secular media having as their idea: “If it bleeds, it leads.” I said we should have two ideas: “If it pleads, it leads”—pleading for the needs of individuals; or, “If it needs, it leads.”
So there are other things that can legitimately attract the attention of people as we know the famine in Ethiopia did some years ago when the BBC did a report. People have big hearts and they respond to such stories very positively and they also respond to people.
When I was editor of the Catholic newspaper in Philadelphia I instituted a column on the back page called “Profile,” figuring that people are much more interested in people than ideas and that people personify a particular idea or movement or activity. You're much more likely to have individuals identify with that idea or activity or need through somebody who already embodies the idea or responds to the need. A number of other newspapers have imitated that same idea of a profile done in that way.
You spoke of interesting vocation stories. What is yours?
The example of my parents was outstanding and I received an excellent Catholic education. I can remember the day when I said “Yes” to the Lord. It was Christmas day, 1952. I was a senior in high school. I went back to our parish church and I knelt in front of the crib and I said, “Thank you, Lord, for my life, and my family, and my faith, my education—and thank you, Father, for sending your Son to show us how to live, redeem us from our sins and make it possible for us to live forever. Thank you for all the things you've given me and I want to give it back to you.”
Now, I did enter the seminary, the Jesuit novitiate, and then I left, but I still had the idea of priesthood in my mind. I finished at university first, which I'm very glad I did, and then entered the diocesan seminary.
I can say that I've never had an unhappy day as a priest. I have loved the priest-hood. I've done everything in the priesthood except being a prison chaplain: parish, suburban, inner city, downtown. I've been a teacher in high school, college, and seminary. I've done campus ministry, I've been a chaplain in a general hospital mental hospital. I've been an editor of a Catholic newspaper, and I've produced radio and television programs. So it's a rather varied history, all of which has brought me great satisfaction.
I can remember the words of the priest who preceded me teaching philosophy at the seminary. When he was approaching death he said, “I'm not afraid to die, just embarrassed.” I feel the same way, because God's been so good to me and it hasn't been possible to respond with the equal generosity to his goodness. I just wish I could do more or could have done more.
Where should the Church be expending greatest energy in the field of social communications?
There are two directions that I think are very important. We are attempting to foster local initiatives in social communications. Now with the privatization of radio and television it's possible for the Church to have radio and television stations. We're especially attempting to foster radio stations, which are less expensive and you might say more intimate—and that on a local level; in Africa where you can have radio stations with the local African languages; in Asia, the same. So wherever that's possible we try to promote local responsibility of the Church for serving the people in the local culture in the local language. Those things are very important.
The other is satellite communication, which now makes it possible for the Church to offer a universal message. That's a little more complicated. You have 24-hour news satellite services, for example, especially in English. What should the Church do in that area? Certainly it can serve Latin America by satellite and there are proposals to do that on a continuing basis in Spanish and Portuguese. So that's a great challenge, to do it in a way that will be both appealing and affordable.
Is any one of the media better suited than the others for the Church's mission?
Radio is more omnipresent and more intimate. It's with almost the poorest people all over the world. They can usually have a transistor radio, and that can accompany them at work, as they travel, as they're walking, whatever. That has an intimacy. You can speak to them very much.
Television, you can have more the sense of shared experience. So when you transmit a liturgy of the Holy Father, people can feel that they're there, and sometimes they can feel more as if they're there by watching it on television than if they're there, especially if it's a large crowd. They can see more and hear better. So I think the notion of shared experience is very important.
And in the print media, you have more the idea of reflection and thinking about the significance of events and having more background. So I think the media are complementary in that way. They shouldn't compete with one another.
What about the Internet?
The Internet and computer communication are very important, because you can engage in evangelization in the privacy of the home, often in an interactive way. The Church through such means is able to penetrate into areas where it would otherwise not have access.
What are the biggest challenges or obstacles for the Church working in social communications?
You have a number. Governments can be hostile and can have hostile legislation in the field of communications denying access to the Church to either take part in communications or have ownership of means of communications.
Another obstacle is what the Holy Father has called “savage capitalism”—the idea that only the bottom line is important and the means of communication exist, not for the common good but for personal profit. So if that's the norm for communications then we don't serve the religious and spiritual needs of people because they can't be quantified.
The best policy is one of private administration with public regulation. In the United States we've gone too far in the direction of deregulation and not protecting the service of the common good. Because I don't think you can say that the electronic media—which use public channels and are therefore public trust—can be guided only by demographics, by the market which they serve. “Demographics” means delivering to audiences which are able to pay for products. But then what happens to the service of the sick, the poor, the handicapped, the very young, or the very old, who are not markets which communicators wish to reach—and because of that are ignored?
I think that a balance between private administration and public regulation can guarantee the service of the common good: private administration to guarantee efficiency, and public regulation to guarantee the service of the common good to the entire public. That would be a good model for societies which are themselves changing— eastern and central Europe which had been under communist domination, some of the former socialist governments, or dictatorships which have fallen and are looking for new models of communications.
I have trust in a regulated private administration. Unregulated private administration means people go completely for greed. Too much of public administration means inefficiency, bureaucracy, and sometimes seeking political control. So what's needed is a careful balance. In that way if part of the common good of the public service is viewed as the religious and spiritual dimension of the human person, then time will be set aside for religious programming, and I think that should generally be on the basis of the presence of that particular religion or denomination within the society, as far as free access is concerned.
Your council has prepared two documents targeting specific topics:
Well, we've been asked to look at the whole notion of ethics in communication. But it's not easy to prepare something on that area, so it's a little premature to talk about a document.
Other documents that have come out were Communio et Progressio (1971) and Aetatis Novae (1991), the two pastoral instructions on communications. Communio et Progressio was called the Magna Carta of the Church in communications. It was a superb document and I'm free to say that, because I wasn't here when it was produced. I admire it objectively.
Aetatis Novae has as its strength the offering of the elements of a pastoral plan for communications, indicating that the Church should have a pastoral plan for communications and that the communications aspect should be part of every pastoral plan. If you are constructing a school or if you have a charitable initiative you have to say, “How can I communicate this to the community to make known the availability of the service and also to make known to the general community what is going on?”— not in the sense of boasting about what is happening, but in the sense of letting our light shine before men so that they might see our good works and give glory to our Father in heaven.
In reviewing films today, Catholic publications run into the problem of movies that treat lightly adultery, pre-marital sex, etc. Some think such films shouldn't be reviewed at all. Do you have any ideas on that dilemma?
Well, the document we issued, Pornography and Violence in the Media: a Pas-toral Response, offers specific guidelines to parents, church groups, educators, and legislators. That's very useful.
On the other hand, we have to live with the fact that there is evil in the world and evil in human life and it's not always wrong to portray it—as the Old Testament does and as the New Testament does. God can teach us lessons through somewhat unusual examples sometimes. Just yesterday, in fact, the first scriptural reading was about David and Bathsheba, neither of whom did a good deed in their initial encounter. But God used David as his instrument and used Bathsheba, who is the mother of Solomon, as his instrument. They repented of the evil that they had done and in that sense the good came out of the evil. So in some depictions of evil, people can draw certain lessons.
There's a difference between the glorification of evil or justification of evil— which is wrong—and the admission of evil, indicating that it does happen and that people can learn from their mistakes and that God can bring good even out of evil. That is an important lesson for our lives. We can't live in a hermetically sealed world. We are children of Original Sin, freed from it through baptism but we still live in a world tainted by sin and we ourselves are sinners. We just can't glorify or seek to justify the sin in itself. Great literature has these great themes of grace operating in a world stained by sin.
Do you keep up on TV shows or movies in the United States?
I had to give a talk in Hollywood once and they asked me if I saw any of their movies or shows and I said, “Yes, they're dubbed in Italian.”
Then I imitated John Wayne speaking in Italian. As it turned out, his son was there and said he got a kick out of that.
You are titular archbishop of Neopolis in Proconsulari. What does that mean—and where is Neopolis in Proconsulari?
It is suburban Carthage, north Africa, now in Tunisia. I've been in Tunisia as a priest but I haven't been back since I was named titular archbishop of Neopolis in Proconsulari. I think the name of the place now is Nabeul and it is a seaside resort. A titular see is one that's been suppressed because there aren't enough Catholics there to justify a local Church, a diocese. It's almost all Muslim now.
There are a number of titular sees or suppressed dioceses all around the world that are assigned to people who are bishops but do not have diocesan responsibility. They may be auxiliary bishops in a diocese, and therefore not diocesan bishops; or they may be nuncios, that is, papal ambassadors, all over the world; or serve here in the Roman Curia as department heads or secretaries.
The bishop wears a ring because, in a sense, he's married to his diocese. But I'm sort of married to a dead diocese; you could say, in a way I'm a widower.
—John Norton
----- EXCERPT: The Vatican's top communications'official on the challenges of delivering the good news in a media age dominated by stories of bloodshed, scandal, and disaster ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Norton ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Up to 2 Million Christians Will Fast To Stop U.S. from 'Losing Its Soul' DATE: 03/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 8-14, 1998 ----- BODY:NEW YORK—Evangelical leaders in the United States have called on their followers to join in a 40-day fast for national revival starting March 1. They hope that 2 million Americans will take part in the fast.
The campaign, “Pray USA! '98,” is sponsored by an interdenominational movement, Mission America, but is mainly an initiative of Bill Bright, founder of the Campus Crusade for Christ. Winner of the 1996 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, Bright has used the prize of more than $1 million to promote fasting and prayer.
Bright conducted his own 40-day fast for the first time in 1994, with many Church leaders taking part. Similar national meetings have been held since, and at the fasting and prayer gathering in Dallas last November, participants called for the 40-day fast to roughly correspond with the 1998 period of Lent.
Bright and his wife, Vonette, are honorary chairpersons of the fast campaign. He said Feb. 20 that the event “seems to be really taking off,” noting that prominent religious broadcaster Pat Robertson and Bill McCartney, the founder and leader of the evangelical men's movement, Promise Keepers, also supported the fast.
“It is not far-fetched to think that millions will be joining in at least a part of the fast,” he said.
People who think they cannot undertake a complete fast for the entire period are encouraged to fast for certain days, give up one meal a day, or follow some other limited fast.
Bright, 76, said he would be making his fourth 40-day fast on only water and vegetable juices. He was able, he said, to continue most of his activities without eating.
For Bright, the fast is a response to a severe problem in the United States of moral decadence and turning away from God. President Bill Clinton's alleged involvement with a White House intern was only “one of the symptoms,” Bright said.
“We're losing our soul,” he said. As evidence, he mentioned “the murder of 35 million babies” since the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973.
Another sign was the banning by some state authorities of prayer and Bible reading in public schools.
“The God to whom the founding fathers dedicated this nation is displeased,” he said. And, as with ancient Israel, the result could be national destruction. Bright's study of the Bible has convinced him that a combination of prayer and fasting is the way for believers to deal with the problem.
Fasting had been “overlooked in our generation,” Bright said.
Father Leonid Kishkovsky, a priest of the Russian-Orthodox Church in America, said he welcomed the new attention to fasting in the Protestant evangelical community. He noted that the Orthodox observance of Great Lent would begin this year March 2, and, when strictly observed, would exclude eating of meat, fish, eggs, or dairy products, but not require giving up all solid food. According to Father Kishkovsky, the rigor of a strict Orthodox fast, even though not as severe as Bright's, has usually been modified by “flexibility” according to individual circumstances.
Father Avery Dulles SJ, a leading American theologian, said the Second Vatican Council had tried to move away from the “juridical mentality” about fasting that emerged after the Council of Trent (1545-63). Pope Paul VI removed the legal requirements for fasting except on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday he said. More recently, some bishops had begun to encourage Catholics to fast as a personal spiritual discipline.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: U.S Notes and Quotes DATE: 03/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 8-14, 1998 ----- BODY:YOU! for the New Millennium
The Los Angeles Times profiled the Catholic youth magazine YOU! and its editor, Paul Lauer, Feb. 21.
The report noted LauerÃs two years in a ìmice-infestedî desert warehouse with friends after his conversion, and the apostolate that emerged from it. Lauer started the teen-oriented magazine Veritas that grew from a small-budget Los Angeles publication to the renamed YOU! magazine with 40,000 U.S. and 25,000 international subscribers. The magazine retained its trademark mix of ìtheologically traditionalî Catholicism and a celebrity-heavy teen-style format.
One thing has changed about the magazine, however, the newspaper reported. Its subtitle once was ìAlternative Youth Magazine.î Now itÃs ìYouth for the New Millennium.î
Lauer told the paper that he wants to persuade more Catholic youths to see themselves as cultural leaders in the new millennium, which he expects to be heralded with signs of divine mercy, quoting Pope John Paul IIÃs call for ìa new springtimeî for the Church.
Congressional Candidates as ëChess Pieces In a National WarÃ
IllinoisÃs 17th congressional district election in November will pit Rep. Lane Evans (D) against challenger Mark Baker (R).
However, a Feb. 27 story in The Washington Post says ìissue adsî placed by various independent groups could turn the candidates into ìchess pieces in a national war.î Baker is quoted saying he has the sense he may not be in control of his own campaign.
According to the article, hundreds of thousands of dollars will be spent on issue ads by various organizations: labor unions, a coalition of business groups, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Sierra Club, and Campaign for Working Families, which is a pro-life political action committee.
Campaign for Working Families is already ìcredited with tipping the balance in a Republican House primary in California in January,î according to the story.
Counting Commandments
On Feb. 5, Mary McGrory of The Washington Post wrote about the reaction to the presidentÃs alleged adultery by asking, ìAre God-fearing Americans tired of the Ten Commandments, especially the sixth?î
The Washington Post Magazine examined the same crime in a series of stories called ìWashington and the Seventh Commandment.î
On Feb. 21, the day the magazine was published, the newspaper tried to explain the discrepancy: while Catholics, Jews, and Protestants use the same content for the Decalogue, they number the items differently.
The two sources for the commandments are Exodus 20: 1-17 and Deuteronomy 5: 6-21, neither of which numbers them.
Catholics and Lutherans depend on the Deuteronomy account for their formulation, according to the newspaper. They number three commandments about manÃs relations with God, and then seven about manÃs relations with man. That includes separate commandments prohibiting coveting of a neighborÃs spouse and coveting his property, the article points out.
Protestants and Jews follow the Exodus account, and number four commandments about God. To get four, Protestants separately number the commandment not to worship graven images while the Jewish version quoted by the newspaper separates ìI am the Lord your Godî and ìYou shall have no Gods before meî into two commandments, rather than one.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Orthodox Archbishop Rejects Ruling That Greece Violated Religious Rights DATE: 03/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 8-14, 1998 ----- BODY:WARSAW—A senior figure in the Greek Orthodox Church said Feb. 27 that the European Court of Human Rights had acted “unjustly” by ruling that Greece was guilty of religious discrimination for denying rights to the minority Catholic Church.
However, Archbishop Timoteos of Crete refused any further comment on the ruling, which said that Greece had violated the 1950 European Convention of Human Rights, which laid down human rights standards for 40 states belonging to the Council of Europe.
In its judgment, delivered in December last year, the court said that the refusal of Greece to recognize the Catholic Church as a legal entity had risked invalidating all purchases and transactions by Catholic parishes and dioceses. The court also said Greece was denying Catholics rights guaranteed to Orthodox and Jewish communities.
The Greek Orthodox Church nominally comprises 97% of the Greek population of 9 million. According to Article 3 of the country's constitution, Greek Orthodoxy is the country's “dominant religion.” Article 13 of the constitution promises freedom to “practice any known religion,” and declares “proselytism” prohibited, but fails to define either term.
The ruling of the European Court of Human Rights, which is based in Strasbourg, France, followed complaints by Bishop Frangiskos Papamanolis, the acting Catholic bishop of Crete (which is part of Greece), after a 1987 incident in which two local residents demolished a wall belonging to the 13th-century Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Virgin at Khania (Canea) in Crete.
Although the diocese won a court order for the wall to be rebuilt and damages paid for, an appeal court overturned the verdict and ruled that the Catholic bishops had no legal status.
In 1994, Greece's Supreme Court upheld the appeal court's decision, confirming that the Catholic Church possessed religious freedom, but had no right to bring a legal action.
In his appeal to the European Court, Bishop Papamanolis listed 14 judgments and acts by courts in Athens and the Aegean Islands that he said had implied recognition of his Church's property rights.
The case, which could improve the Catholic Church's legal position in the country, follows three separate European Court judgments in 1996 and 1997, which found that Greece was guilty of violating the religious rights of Jehovah's Witnesses.
In September 1996, the court criticized Greek legislation, stating that there was “a clear tendency on the part of administrative and ecclesiastical authorities to use these provisions to restrict the activities of faiths outside the Orthodox Church.”
The European Convention of Human Rights, signed a year after the Council of Europe's creation in 1949, has been ratified by all member-states except Croatia, and is widely seen as the most effective human rights instrument on the international scene.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Children March To Geneva To Stop Abuses Of Child Labor DATE: 03/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 8-14, 1998 ----- BODY:LONDON—Children are traveling to Geneva from as far away as Brazil, South Africa, and the Philippines as part of a campaign to stop the abuses of child labor.
Four children, with adult chaperones, set out from Sao Paulo, Brazil, Feb. 25, taking part in the Global March Against Child Labor. To reach Washington, D.C., they will travel more than 4,600 miles, much of it on foot. They will then be flown to Geneva, where the International Labor Organization (ILO) begins a meeting June 1 to draft a new international convention on child labor.
Another group of children and chaperones set off from Manila, Philippines, in January, with more children due to leave from Cape Town, South Africa, March 21 and from London in May.
The organizers of the Global March Against Child Labor plan to hold a mass rally in Geneva to coincide with the ILO meeting.
There are 250 million child workers worldwide, many of them “modern-day slaves,” according to Christian Aid.
“Around the world from dawn to dusk you can find children working down mines, hunched over carpet looms, scrubbing their employer's floors,” says the charity. “Many are separated from their families and are working unpaid.”
In Asia child labor has been a prominent issue for the past 10 years, but in Latin America it is just recently coming under public scrutiny.
The Sao Paulo march will cross Brazil, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico before reaching Washington en route for Europe.
The route of the Asian march is Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and across Europe to Geneva.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: World Notes & Quotes DATE: 03/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 8-14, 1998 ----- BODY:Prime Minister Sides with Nuns, Not Their Homosexual Critics
John Howard, prime minister of Australia, refused to support Sydney's Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade because it was anti-Catholic, the Australian Associated Press reported Feb. 25.
“I suppose the political thing for me to do would be to send a message” of support to the parade, Howard is quoted saying.
But the parade ridicules Catholic nuns, and “I just take the view that if an activity ridicules a group in the community for whom you have regard and respect,” he said, “it's a bit odd then to turn around and send a message“ of support.
He said that while he doesn't mean to “criticize” people who are homosexual, “Why should I positively endorse something that includes ridicule of people in the community for whom I have immense respect?”
Korean Escapes Martyrdom, Becomes President
Ash Wednesday was an appropriate inauguration day for Kim Dae-Jung. The South Korean president is Catholic and knows all about sacrifice and suffering.
“Kim Dae-Jung, a survivor of assassination attempts, prison and exile, takes office [on Ash Wednesday] … with a promise to replace a culture of political vengeance with one of magnanimity,” The Washington Times reported Feb. 24.
“The message reflects Mr. Kim's Roman Catholic background. After several brushes with martyrdom, he still limps from one of the assassination attempts.”
“Whether the former dissident can apply his message of reconciliation may prove crucial as he tries to rebuild South Korea's crippled economy and achieve peace with a hostile North Korea.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Unemployment Threatens 'Entire Community,' German Church Leaders Say DATE: 03/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 8-14, 1998 ----- BODY:HANOVER, Germany—The leaders of Germany's main Protestant and Catholic Churches have made a joint appeal for urgent action to tackle the issue of unemployment, warning that unemployment poses “a serious threat for the entire community.”
In a statement released Feb. 25, Manfred Kock, leader of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), and Bishop Karl Lehmann, president of the German (Catholic) Bishops' Conference, said that the current high level of unemployment in Germany was “unacceptable.”
Earlier this month, unemployed people staged protests throughout Germany after the release of figures showing that unemployment in the country had reached a post-war high of 4.8 million.
The two Church leaders made their appeal to mark the first anniversary, Feb. 28, of a major joint statement by the EKD and the Catholic Church in Germany on the “economic and social situation of Germany.”
They said that the publication of this statement a year ago had stimulated a “broad discussion” in politics, economics, and society. However, “the consensus that is necessary to take common steps to overcome high rates of unemployment in Germany” had not been achieved.
Last year's statement had been issued because of the existence of “high unemployment, increasing poverty, and the difficulties and problems in consolidating the welfare state,” the Church leaders said. Since then, the problems facing Germany had worsened. “Unemployment has reached an alarmingly high level. The situation of many young people has deteriorated further, and their position in society remains difficult,” the Church leaders said.
They also warned that “competition and globalization” were weakening the “internal coherence” of society and its “ethical rules.” Last year's joint statement, they said, was a call for a “social and ecological” economy in which human beings were the measure and “not simply the market.”
This week's statement comes at a sensitive time in Germany, which faces a general election later this year, when Chancellor Helmut Kohl will defend his record after 16 years in power.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Vatican Notes & Quotes DATE: 03/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 8-14, 1998 ----- BODY:The Chicago Cheer and the Denver Smile
Denver's NFL Super Bowl champion Broncos never expected to lose to the Cardinals. But they have, as Denver's news organizations—like Chicago's— have lavished attention on America's two new cardinals, bumping sports out of the headlines.
Denver's Cardinal J. Francis Stafford and Chicago's Cardinal Francis George OMI, were elevated to the status of cardinal Feb. 21 in a Vatican ceremony.
Here are some samples of quotations from the Denver Post of Feb. 23 and the Chicago Sun-Times of Feb. 22 about the ceremony:
“We did our best to be heard.”
—Mary Palmert explaining Chicagoans' reaction to being the second loudest cheerers (after Mexico) for their cardinal in St. Peter's Square.
“He had the same smile he had in Denver. I'm sure the smile was with memory of the people of Colorado in 1993.”
—Cardinal Stafford crediting World Youth Day for the look on the Holy Father's face when presenting the cardinal's ring.
“I was so thrilled, my chest hurt.”
—Cardinal George's first-grade teacher Sister Rita, 80, who was on hand for his first Communion, ordination, consecration as bishop, and elevation to cardinal.
“He will grow in this job. I think he'll be known around the world.… More and more people will see him and recognize his sterling character.”
—Cardinal John O'Connor of New York speaking of his friend, Cardinal Stafford.
“They were like two kids going to Disneyland.”
—Donna Marie Pender, the 14th of Jim and Dolores Pender's 15 children, describing her parents' reaction to watching Cardinal George's elevation in Rome.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: NEWS -------- TITLE: Led Astray by TV DATE: 03/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 8-14, 1998 ----- BODY:Today's Catholic parents are forced to compete with television and other sources of popular culture for the hearts and minds of their children. Not only does television present a non-Christian philosophy of life in a very attractive package, the television industry is the object of a sustained campaign by special interest groups who want to intensify the materialist and secularist content of the media message. Case in point: efforts by organized homosexual groups to persuade media corporations to increase the number of positive homosexual images on prime time.
As reported in the national press, homosexual lobbying efforts on cultural issues have not been limited to private industry. Homosexual activists have been taking advantage of a sympathetic attitude among Clinton Administration officials to lobby government as well. One particular target: the Federal Communications Commission, the government agency charged with regulating broadcasters. Why? homosexual spokesperson Cathy Renne explained: “television shapes people's perceptions of reality.”
Vice President Al Gore agrees. Last summer in Los Angeles he praised the producers of lesbian-themed TV program Ellen for “forcing” (his word) ordinary Americans to reconsider their traditional moral beliefs about promiscuity and homosexuality.
Activists and their supporters are not the only ones who believe that television and the broadcast media generally are powerful influences on people's perceptions of reality. Conservative critics of the media industry agree with activists and the vice president on that point, if on no other.
That leaves the media corporation in the driver's seat, evaluating petitions from first one special interest group then another, and making up their own minds about how to shape “perceptions of reality.” Since most media decision makers have very liberal attitudes, as numerous surveys have confirmed and as common sense demonstrates, it is not hard to guess which petitions are accepted and which ignored.
Recent news reports note a significant increase in homosexual characters in prime time this season over last. Homosexual themes are proliferating throughout television, significantly moderating the impact of recent reports that ABC may cancel Ellen for the fall season. In terms of advancing the “gay agenda,” piggy-backing homosexual themes on already established shows may be more effective in forcing that reevaluation of the traditional morals that liberals desire, than a high-profile homosexual sit-com with a relatively small potential audience.
The Holy Father teaches that culture—the ideas and attitudes people have about the meaning of life, the dignity of the human individual, and the nature of happiness, coupled with the signs and rituals they employ to express those ideas and attitudes—is far more powerful than economics and politics. Without the habits of heart and mind—as George Weigel recently expressed it—that have been shaped by moral truth, the political and economic institutions of any country are vulnerable to corruption, indifference, and escalating incompetence.
That's why the sweaty atmosphere prevalent in American popular culture today ought to be cause for alarm. It is not that sexuality per se is dangerous. It is that a false idea of the meaning of human sexuality implies a falsified understanding of the nature of man. It implies a failure to appreciate the true ground of human dignity, and in consequence the reason why every human individual is worthy of respect, and all human life deserving of love. The 20th century is full of examples of the truth that cultures that make such large mistakes at the beginning may end up justifying grotesque crimes at the end.
It may be objected that things could never come to so dramatic a pass in democratic America, but we have already come a very long way. Thirty-five million pre-born children have been killed since 1973 under an invented “right to abortion.” Oregon voters legalized a form of euthanasia last November—the first political community in the world to do so since National Socialist Germany.
The obsession with sexuality and with violence in mass culture today suggests a profound mistake about human nature. That mistake consists in the denial of objective moral norms and in the denial of man's dependence upon God. With neither God nor nature, human beings are free to make their own rules and their own standards. This independence seems exhilarating at the beginning, but it soon becomes exhausting and unsustainable. The default to immediate gratification—the line of least resistance—is as predictable as it is demoralizing.
These are serious matters that ought not to be left to the private decisions of media corporations or the lobbying of special interest groups with cultural axes to grind. If television, films, and popular radio truly are among the most powerful influences on people's fundamental attitudes and beliefs—their “perceptions of reality”—broadcast standards ought to be decided by the whole people. And they must be measured by the yardstick of moral truth.
For years Christians have been told their ideas about decency and moral truth are “private values,” which can have no preferential status in the common culture. Now Catholic parents have a powerful weapon to defend themselves and their interests against such sophistries. The recent publication of the Catechism of the Catholic Church makes available, to all who will take the trouble to study it a clear and persuasive explanation of the moral tradition of western civilization. The discussion of human sexuality (2331-2400) is particularly useful in its presentation of the link between traditional sexual morality, human equality, and individual rights.
George Forsyth, a former U.S. foreign service officer, is executive director of the Washington-based Catholic Campaign for America.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: George Forsyth ----- KEYWORDS: NEWS -------- TITLE: Catholicism: Good for the Great Thinkers DATE: 03/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 8-14, 1998 ----- BODY:At Yale University, there is an informal group of Christian graduate students that meets on occasion to enjoy the life of gentlemen scholars. Attired in bow ties and ensconced in wing-back chairs, they drink scotch, smoke cigars, and deliver papers on appropriately weighty matters.
Last year, one paper was entitled, Why I am Not a Catholic. When the faux-Oxbridge set in the Ivy League gets defensive about not being Catholic, something is happening. It has been happening for more than 150 years.
“To join the Catholic Church meant to put up with rough, makeshift churches and chapels and the company of uncouth Irish laborers,” writes Patrick Allitt about 19th-century Britain and America, “nevertheless, in many cases religious and intellectual conviction won out, and a flow of conversions to Rome began in both countries which continued through the 19th century and well into the 20th.”
Things are different now. Catholicism is no longer wholly disreputable amongst the cultural elite and, with the likes of Richard John Neuhaus, George Rutler, Aidan Nichols, Russell Kirk, Bernard Nathanson, Malcolm Muggeridge, Conrad Black and, mirabile dictu, the Duchess of Kent and a chorus of Anglican clergy, it appears downright fashionable to swim the Tiber. Moreover, the vigor of contemporary Catholic intellectual life in Britain and America is traceable directly to converts.
Perhaps his next book will be about the above names, but here Allitt covers the period 1840-1960, when, with the notable exceptions of Cardinal Wiseman and Lord Acton, “nearly all the Catholic intellectuals writing in English were converts.” The honor roll is impressive: Cardinals Newman and Manning, Orestes Brownson, Isaac Hecker, William Ward, G.K. Chesterton, Robert Hugh Benson, Dorothy Day, Ronald Knox, Arnold Lunn, Clare Booth Luce, Christopher Hollis, Carlton Hayes, Christopher Dawson, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Thomas Merton, Marshall McLuhan, and many others of lesser fame. Perhaps the only reason C.S. Lewis did not convert was to keep Catholics humble.
Allitt wisely does not attempt an amalgam of biographical data on these converts, of which there is already a rich literature, but rather covers the intellectual trends in the English-speaking Catholic world that the converts did so much to shape. It is an academic tale told thoroughly but without tedium—not an easy thing to do. The scholarly apparatus is evident, with ample footnotes where they should be, at the bottom of the page and not exiled to the back. The notes alone comprise a full course on the intellectual history of the period, but the lack of a bibliography is inconvenient.
The main narrative explains why the earlier converts left Anglicanism (or the Episcopal Church in America) for Roman Catholicism, and their ensuing work in their new home to reinvigorate Catholic intellectual life. The disagreements amongst the converts about how the Church should engage modernity are still current today. Indeed, Allitt's book is a good starting point for those interested in different views on how the Church should evangelize cultures steeped in the Enlightenment.
The earlier generation was marked by the conversion of Newman and Manning. Both later made cardinals; they clashed about how the Church should deal with the prevailing intellectual currents in a century of rapid political and economic change. Newman represented the school that favored engagement and flexibility, seeking wherever possible to meet the champions of progress, development, critical history, and science on their own ground. Manning saw the dangers to Catholic doctrine and advocated holding fast to Rome as the best guarantee of the Church's political liberty and doctrinal purity. Manning's view triumphed with the 1870 definition of papal infallibility, which Newman declared “inopportune,” and later, after they were both dead, in the condemnations of modernism by Pius X. That retrenchment, while a bitter blow to intellectuals, may have protected the Church from “the synthesis of all heresies” that has brought the Anglican communion to the brink of collapse.
The Holy Father has observed that the world has grown weary of ideology and is opening itself to the truth.
A second wave of converts joined the Church after Pius X's crackdown, which “segregated Catholic intellectual life for 50 years.” Yet the atrocities of the first world war and the Bolshevik revolution put an end to the 19th-century belief in progress, and the very intransigence of the Church attracted converts who saw around them the collapse of Western civilization.
“We Catholics may be unable to arrest the world's progress to self-destruction,” wrote Arnold Lunn to Ronald Knox in 1949, “but at least we understand what is destroying us. We have at least the melancholy satisfaction of not being simultaneously bewildered and annihilated.”
Allitt is clearly impressed by his convert subjects, but he too is melancholy. Given that the converts failed to establish a distinctive school of thought and grew less influential as the decades passed, Allitt classifies his book as the “history of a momentous and protracted failure.”
If the criteria of success is the healing of Reformation schisms, triumphing over secularism, or imitating the Catholic intellectual explosion of the 13th century, then of course the convert intellectuals failed. But the spirit of Newman breathes strong in Vatican II, and in postconcilar documents such as Ex Corde Ecclesiae. While the declaration on religious liberty would have shocked Cardinal Manning, Vatican II went further in asserting papal primacy than anything dreamed of by the Fathers of Vatican I.
The Church after Vatican II was marked by a strong and very busy Magisterium which sought engagement with the modern world, whether on human rights or the legitimate autonomy of economics and science. The division between freedom and authority—the perspective from which Allitt describes the two camps in the 19th century—dissolves in John Paul II, who insists upon “truth as a condition for authentic freedom” (Redemptor Hominis 12), and does not trim on the Church's authority to teach that truth.
As for influence, the works of Newman and Chesterton—and Lewis—are as popular as ever. The Holy Father has observed that the world has grown weary of ideology and is opening itself to the truth. Young people are opening the books of converts from Dorothy Day to Thomas Merton and discovering the same splendor of truth that drew them to Rome. A “momentous failure” is too harsh a judgment.
Allitt is interesting even for those who know the period well. He provides four chapter-length inter-ludes on convert women, historians, novelists, and the immediate pre-Vatican II generation that provide fascinating sketches and break up the weight of the main narrative. Readers are also introduced to less famous converts such as Augustus Welby Pugin (1812-52), an architect who contributed to Gothic revival in Victorian England. He designed the Birmingham and Southwark cathedrals, and in delicious irony—Guy Fawkes and all that—collaborated on the rebuilding of the Parliament buildings in London.
One element missing from Catholic Converts is a chapter on the perennial temptation of the intellectual, and even more so the convert intellectual: The conviction that his own judgment is to be the final arbiter of the truth. The convert is not immune from this temptation, as he may have embraced Catholicism because it teaches what he thinks is the truth, rather than because it teaches the fullness of the truth it receives from God. It is a fine distinction, but the Catholic is first called to accept the authority of Christ and his Church, not his own judgment.
It is possible to become a Catholic and still think like a Protestant. It is also possible to become a Catholic and stop thinking altogether. Many of the disputes covered here result from falling too close to either error. A deeper insight into these converts requires an understanding of the challenge of professing faith in a Church that obliges its followers sentire cum Ecclesia, to think with the Church. It is easier to think on one's own, or let the Church do all the thinking. The challenge of sentire cum Ecclesia is the intellectual adventure of being Catholic.
Raymond de Souza is a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Kingston, Ontario.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 03/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 8-14, 1998 ----- BODY:Catholic Investments
I think the Aquinas Mutual Fund is playing a strange game investing in companies whose policies they disagree with in order to change behavior (“Catholic Mutual Fund Managers Keep Corporations on the High Road,” Feb. 15-21). Even as a tactical measure, I think this is unethical since to some extent the invested money will benefit the objectionable behavior. Also, playing games with investment money is not productive and does not help the economy however “noble” the motives.
Reading further into the article, I see this firm is playing the affirmative action game as well. I have to ask myself the question, what does the nonsense of affirmative action have to do with Catholic teaching? The Aquinas Fund was able to get five women promoted to senior management level at one particular company. So what! Maybe some of these women were unfairly promoted over men who were the sole support of their families. Discrimination in employment is wrong, yes, but so are attempts to remedy discrimination by using the injustice of affirmative action.
Paul Trouve
Montague, New Jersey
Winning&Miracles
I enjoyed the editorial musings on God vis-‡-vis athletic contests (“Post Super Bowl Musings,” Feb. 22-28).
There is, I believe, a logical answer to the alleged conundrum. An athletic event is a human contest with human ability—and sometimes chance—deciding the winner. Were God to take sides, there would no longer be a contest, and the loser would have just cause to complain about God. There will be no such complaints, at least not just ones, for he will not make our contests unfair. The same principle applies to any sort of human competition and games of chance.
Does God care which team wins the Super Bowl? No, but he does care how each participant conducts himself. Does he care whether Notre Dame wins? No, and despite Mr. Holtz, his mother would never ask him to stack the deck to please her.
Just a thought on Mother Angelica's alleged cure. If God cured her, why did she only “gradually” get better? One of the marks of a genuine miracle from God is its instantaneity. When Christ cured the man lame from birth, he got up without hesitation, fully able to walk and run. So if Mother is indeed cured, there is a human explanation for what happened.
Leo Kelly
Pearland, Texas
Editor's note: Sometimes God chooses to heal instantly and at other times progressively. See the account of Jesus healing the blind man in Mk 8:24.
Fighting Irish
It was heartening to read the article by William Murray on the University of Notre Dame making a spiritual comeback (“For Tradition-minded Catholics, Notre Dame is Making a Comeback,” Feb. 8-14, 1998). As a wife and mother of Notre Dame graduates I find this news very encouraging. It also shows what a difference a few holy individuals can make to change the atmosphere around them. Mary Kloska is certainly to be commended for promoting eucharistic adoration on campus. Where Jesus is adored in the Blessed Sacrament you will always find holiness.
Jim Gallagher's article for the Catholic Traveler (“An Afternoon with the Martyrs of Tyburn”) was also most interesting. My husband and I travel to London quite frequently and will certainly stop by the Tyburn Convent on our next visit to pray at that hallowed place where the English Martyrs shed their blood.
Thank you for publishing such a fine Catholic newspaper. We look forward to our copy each week.
Martha Condit
Birmingham, Michigan
Gov. Voinovich
The “U.S. Notes and Quotes” (Register, March 1) features excerpts from a Columbus Dispatch article about how his Catholic faith guides the daily policy-making life of Ohio Gov. George Voinovich.
“He doesn't check his faith at the door,” begins the article cited. Quotes from the governor include: “I do not think that one can separate who they are or what they do from their basic religious faith…” and “A lot of this stuff that we do is tough. It's redemptive.”
In the interests of filling in the thumbnail sketch of Voinovich, let me add just two facts that may be of interest to his fellow Catholics. First of all, as governor, he has long supported abortion rights in cases of rape and incest—a policy that potentially condemns to death (without benefit of baptism) the innocent offspring of those heinous sins. Secondly, in running for reelection in 1994, he eagerly chose abortion rights supporter Nancy Hollister as his running mate.
I hope Register readers take this information into account as they evaluate Governor Voinovich's public and political life.
Columbus Ohio Mark Higdon,
Corrections:
The telephone number published for the Mercy Foundation in the video review “Three Giants From Poland” (Feb. 22) was incorrect. The correct number is 888-286-3729.
In the article “Light from a Holy Man” (Feb. 8), the word “not” was omitted twice due to a transcription error.
“Gandhi was ignorant of Christianity” should read “Gandhi was not ignorant of Christianity.”
“As man has been given the power to create…” should read “As man has not been given the power to create…”
The Register regrets the errors.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: NEWS -------- TITLE: 'Feminist Pope' Inspires Doctor's Labor of Love DATE: 03/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 8-14, 1998 ----- BODY:I“am the feminist Pope.”
These were the words of Pope John Paul II at the end of an audience in Rome two weeks ago that I was lucky enough to attend. The Pope was speaking to a group of doctors, ethicists, and activists gathered for a conference in Rome entitled “Women's Health Issues,” and co-sponsored by Georgetown University and the Pontifical Academy for Life.
What I heard at that conference about work being done all over the world—inspired often by the vast and moving teaching of John Paul II on the dignity of human life—convinced me more than ever that the Pope knew whereof he spoke.
Several years ago, the Holy See made an international splash when it intervened at two U.N. conferences—one on population and development and a second on women—against the creation of an international “right” to abortion. The Holy See was widely portrayed as the enemy of women's progress. Precious little attention was paid to the strong interventions of the Holy See at these same conferences, on behalf of women's equality, women's education, fair credit practices toward women, and women's right to quality health care.
Why? Because of a tendency, in the United States and elsewhere, to reduce all questions about women's equality to a debate about abortion. But what are the issues that matter most to women in the day-to-day work of their lives? The basics. Their health, the health of their families, their right to practice their faith, domestic economic situations, access to education, the threat of violence, and so forth.
This recent conference, however, spoke to women's hearts—spoke to their real concerns. It went a long way toward answering the question, “What does the Pope mean when he calls himself a ‘feminist’?”
‘What does the Pope mean when he calls himself a ‘feminist’?’
Perhaps no speaker at the conference better expressed a Christian feminism than Dr. Robert Walley, a Canadian professor of obstetrics and gynecology. Walley is also a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, and a trusted advisor to the Holy See.
The doctor lived and worked in Africa for decades and saw firsthand the results of first world countries “telling” women that what they needed most of all for health, happiness, and prosperity, was fewer children. Foreign funds poured in for huge quantities of birth control, but not for the simplest, easily controlled medical problems. Walley talked with anger about the problem of obstetrical fistula, the number one cause of death and disability among women of reproductive age in the Third World. (The problem is so easily controlled in the First World that one of the only clinics opened to address it, closed in New York in the 1920s; there was no longer a call for its services.)
Obstetrical fistula is the condition wherein a woman's excretory organs are damaged and weakened as a result of labor and delivery. The woman leaks excrement permanently. She is ostracized from her community, and even condemned as a “prostitute.” The shame is not hers, however. It belongs to those who know that the solutions to obstetrical fistula are well known and cost little, but fail to offer them. Instead, they are busy telling her not to get pregnant in the first place—even offering her a free abortion, after which, Walley pointed out, she is returned to the poverty from whence she came.
As a result, Walley and other Catholic ob-gyns have formed MaterCare, a medical care organization that has opened a clinic in Ghana to treat obstetrical fistula. They also intend to be an international force of doctors and ethicists helping mothers receive necessary health care and helping them avoid abortion throughout the world.
Upholding the truth in love. There is no other description for what Walley and his colleagues are doing. Their inspiration and guiding light? Pope John Paul II's encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life). In that encyclical, the Pope specifically calls for the creation of a “new feminism” in service of life. One that rejects violence and overcomes all discrimination and exploitation. Walley heard that call. He puts his science, his person, and most of all, his heart into responding.
If this is what the Pope's new feminism looks like, I can't imagine anything more beautiful for women, children, and families. Sign me up.
Helen Alvarè is director of planning and information, Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, National Conference of Catholic Bishops.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Helen Alvare ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Should The IMF Bail Out Asia? DATE: 03/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 8-14, 1998 ----- BODY:Congress will soon have to decide whether to grant an increase in funding for the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In a normal year, most legislators would go along with such a request on grounds that the IMF is an essential financial institution for the world economy. It makes loans to the developing world and aids in restructuring economies that are either in transition toward a market economy or are undergoing a difficult economic downturn.
This, however, is not a normal year. The IMF has just made possible a $188 billion bailout of failing Asian economies, with its own portion of the bailout totaling $36 billion. It still has an additional $47 billion to spend, but according to the Heritage Foundation, it wants Congress to authorize a $3.4 billion emergency line of credit and $14.5 billion increase in general funds.
Congress would have intervened to stop these bailouts, but the White House already committed money from the Exchange Stabilization Fund without congressional approval—a financial move of dubious constitutional legitimacy. More money to the IMF, many legislators suspect, means more bailouts—and probably increasingly larger ones.
Thus, a fight on IMF aid increases has already broken out, with former Secretary of State George Schultz, former Secretary of the Treasury William Simon, and former Citibank chairman Walter Wriston calling for the complete defunding of the IMF.
Who Pays the Piper?
A part of the debate should be a long-overdue discussion of the role of economic responsibility in economic life. Who should be responsible for owning up to financial errors when they occur? Can people justly avoid the consequences of breaking promises? From what level of government should aid be forthcoming and should it be public or private? What kinds of incentives and disincentives are fostered if investments that go belly-up are continually bailed out?
These are questions that Catholic teaching deals with directly in its moral and social doctrine. Before discussing and applying this doctrine, however, we must have a clear understanding of what is behind the economic crisis in the first place. Recessions and devaluations are not acts of nature, such as floods and hurricanes. Clusters of entrepreneurial errors—when banks and businessmen suddenly discover their investments not paying—are usually a consequence of structural defects in the economic system itself.
Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand are liberal economies (“market economies,” in Pope John Paul's terms) in many respects. Private property is secure and prices are allowed to float freely—institutions that partially account for their quick rise to prosperity. At the same time, though, structural defects run very deep in these countries. Their governments and banking systems were linked in ways that allow for corrupt relationships to develop with the business sector.
Sometimes these defects and improperly close relationships are referred to as “crony capitalism.” This phrase is potentially misleading. Capitalism is a system whereby profits exist alongside losses as a means of sorting out successful and unsuccessful economic projects. A system that subsidizes profits and prevents loss from afflicting firms and banks with political ties to the government is not crony capitalism. It is better described as sector-specific socialism.
Everyone agrees that these structural defects need to be remedied, but rectifying the problem that initially set off the wild boom-bust cycles in Asia is going to require far more than tinkering around the edges. The central banks of these economies must be reined in so they will no longer pump excess supplies of credit into business ventures that are favorable to government.
When this credit—much of it pyramided on top of central banks' dollar reserves—is initially pumped into the system, it creates the illusion of prosperity. As the investments become unviable and investors start to sell domestic currencies for sounder international ones, however, the currency comes under intense pressure and devaluations are made inevitable.
The result is tremendous human suffering and political instability, suffering that can only be alleviated by a steady process of restabilization and political normalization within a framework of the market economy and sound money.
The principles of this reform strategy are underscored by John Paul II in Centesimus Annus: “Economic activity, especially the activity of the market economy, cannot be conducted in an institutional, juridical, or political vacuum. On the contrary, it presupposes sure guarantees of individual freedom and private property as well as a stable currency and efficient public services” (48).
What's the Proper Remedy?
How will IMF aid assist in bringing about the much needed reforms? This case has not been made. On the contrary, bailouts on the level at which the IMF has been pursuing them serve to subsidize and stabilize sectoral socialism, prolonging the readjustment process and virtually insuring that new problems are going to crop up at a later date. In fact, bailouts put the entire financial sector on welfare and thereby foster a dependency relationship between governments and aid institutions.
In fact, the Pope warns specifically against government interventions that are likely to create more problems than they solve.
“Supplementary interventions,” he advises, “must be as brief as possible, so as to avoid removing permanently from society and business systems the functions which are properly theirs, and so as to avoid enlarging excessively the sphere of state intervention to the detriment of both economic and civil freedom” (CA 48).
What can be done to restore the proper functioning of business in Asia? In addition to undertaking deep structural reforms that will replace sectoral socialism, those responsible for making economic errors must be responsible for them and not expect others to pick up the tab. Businesses that made bad investments must suffer losses. Banks that made bad investments must consider them losses as well. Of course the process is painful, but the only option is to subsidize errors and therefore create what economists call a “moral hazard” leading to ever more economic crisis.
All investment requires investors to undertake some level of risk. The higher the risk, the higher the returns will be on success but also the probability of failure will be greater. Investors use the information provided by past experience and expectations about the future to judge whether to undertake some risk. All investment involves a two-way promise: profits accrue to those who take the risk but losses to the same if that risk doesn't pan out. Bailouts and subsidies shield investors from the consequences of their actions and make promise-breaking possible.
This is contrary to Catholic ethics. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “Promises must be kept and contracts strictly observed to the extent that the commitments made in them are morally just. A significant part of economic and social life depends on the honoring of contracts between physical and moral persons—commercial contracts of purchase or sale, rent, or labor contracts. All contracts must be agreed to and executed in good faith.
“Contracts are subject to commutative justice which regulates exchanges between persons in accordance with strict respect for their rights. Commutative justice obliges structure; it requires safeguarding property rights, paying debts, and fulfilling obligations freely contracted. Without commutative justice, no other form of justice is possible” (2410-11).
It is obvious that full-scale socialism violates commutative justice, but so does sectoral socialism. Why should some businessmen have access to the public treasury and others not? Why should some firms gain credit from the central bank when there are insufficient savings in the system to back up the extension of massive loans? Why should inept managers and go-go investment houses be rewarded for their errors while everyone else, including U.S. taxpayers, are forced to pay the price?
If market economies are pampered with international aid, the structural defects perpetuate and the sectors of socialism only grow larger. Neither do IMF bailouts help people as much as often supposed. In the case of the 1995 Mexican bailout, the people underwent enormous suffering but the government and international bankers did not. Mexico met its debt obligations and investors were paid, but vast numbers in the middle class lost jobs and livelihoods. Much needed reforms never materialized because the system that caused the problem in the first place was left in tact.
A Better Solution
The social instability inevitably created in economic crises must be addressed by local government authorities, civic organizations, communities, and families. The IMF is a poor substitute for these institutions; in fact, outside aid from international organizations can displace these social functions.
Pretending that the IMF is a good substitute for financial honesty and community responsiveness runs contrary to the all-important principle of subsidiarity. As the Pope says, “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity” (CA 48).
The relationship between public and private morality is a growing area of public debate. Should the moral standards we associate with good and honest private behavior also be embodied in the principles that animate public policy? Surely so. When we make promises, we must keep them or deal with the consequences. It should be no different with international banking and finance. They must meet the contractual obligations and not turn to world taxpayers for an easy out.
Congress ought to think about the basic moral principles of sound money, promise keeping, and subsidiarity when considering whether to give the IMF ever more tax dollars with which to play. By the fundamental standard of Catholic social teaching and morality, such increases in IMF funding— and indeed the IMF bailout of Asian economies itself—appear contrary to standards of justice and the kind of market economy the Pope has repeatedly embraced in his writings.
Father Robert Sirico is president of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty in Grand Rapids, Mich.
----- EXCERPT: Drawing on Catholic principles, a noted priest and economist explains why he believes more money from the International Monetary Fund isn't the answer to Asia's failing economies ----- EXTENDED BODY: Robert Sirico ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Clinton's Alleged Sexual Misbehavior Not Strictly a Private Affair DATE: 03/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 8-14, 1998 ----- BODY:Recently, at the height of Hurricane Monica, I had lunch with the editor of a national magazine, who, like me, is not happy that we now have to turn off news bulletins about the president of the United States if children are in the room. The rest of the electorate seemed to be enjoying the White House soaps immensely. As Clinton's approval rating shot toward 100%, I recalled Shakespeare's words about how “much wealth and peace” has strange effects on the body politic.
Pegging me as a Catholic intellectual, the editor asked: What is the bottom line on sexual immorality in high places? How would a theologian respond to the argument that it doesn't matter what an elected official does in private? In reply, I faxed him a few lines from the great Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper, who died recently at age 93. The editor thought them right on target, although a bit too rarefied to share with his large readership.
Here is what a great Catholic thinker has to say about the effects of sexual immorality on the human person:
“Since we nowadays think that all a man needs for acquisition of truth is to exert his brain more or less vigorously, and since we consider an ascetic approach to knowledge hardly sensible, we have lost the awareness of the close bond that links the knowing of truth to the condition of purity. Thomas says that unchastity's first-born daughter is blindness of spirit … an impure, selfishly corrupted will-to-pleasure destroys both resoluteness of spirit and the ability of the psyche to listen in silent attention to the language of reality.”
In other words, what we do with our sex organs in private has more to do with who and what we are than we are likely to suppose.
Part of the problem is our culture's attitude toward the body. Most people today are sexual gnostics. What do I mean by this? I mean that they think of the body as a mere shell or appendage. They imagine that their real self is somewhere inside the body, the proverbial ghost inside a machine, and that what they do with their bodies doesn't make any difference. The body is a thing to be manipulated; it has no connection whatever with the deepest core of our being. This gnostic downgrading of the body is so basic to our contraceptive culture that we don't even notice it. And yet it explains many of our social and moral ills.
The Catholic Church offers a reading of the human person radically at variance with the gnostic one. To a large extent, we are what we do with our bodies. Which means that our spiritual welfare is intimately linked with our physical acts. And there is no deeper physical act than sex. Sex is not simply the functioning of a biological appetite. Rather, as Dietrich von Hildebrand puts it, sex is essentially deep. The whole person, body and soul, is involved. Which is why sexual promiscuity is hurtful in ways that other forms of sensual indulgence—gluttony, for example—can never be.
So, does it make a difference whether an elected official misbehaves sexually? Yes, it does. Do we impeach him (or her) for adultery? No, for a variety of prudential and constitutional reasons. Do we vote for him in the next election? Probably not.
Whatever Clinton's fate, there is no question that his presidency has been cordial to the cultural left and its baggage of sexual attitudes. When his adviser Dick Morris was caught doing weird things with a call girl, the response was that 85% of American husbands cheat on their wives. In Dick Morris's elitist world, that statistic may actually be true. The problem is that these people fervently believe that they know what is good for the rest of us.
The cultural left is yet another of G.K. Chesterton's prophecies come true: The next great heresy, he said, would be the outright rejection of morality by privileged elites going on a spree of polymorphous sex. The problem is that sexual misbehavior does not occur in an airtight compartment. It affects the whole person, turning him into something less than himself. Which is why there is no such thing as strictly private debauchery for a public official.
George Sim Johnston is a writer based in New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: George Sim Johnston ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: St. Bernadette's Life After Lourdes DATE: 03/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 8-14, 1998 ----- BODY:Although most people have heard about the story of Lourdes, not as many are familiar with St. Bernadette and her life after the apparitions. When questioned about it, many people recall that she later became a nun, but beyond that they don't remember much about her. Often the most difficult question to answer: Did Bernadette spend the remainder of her life in Lourdes or elsewhere?
The answer lies in a small city about 300 miles northeast of Lourdes, in the heart of France. Here, in Nevers, is the convent where Bernadette lived until her death in 1879. It is also where her beautiful, incorrupt body lies today in a glass casket. Each year, the site draws more than half-a-million pilgrims, many of them on their way to or returning from Lourdes.
The story of Bernadette, born Jan. 7, 1844 to François and Louise Soubirous, in Lourdes, is one that touches the hearts and souls of all. Things went well for Bernadette until she was 10 years old. First, an epidemic of cholera swept through the region, leaving her with a painful asthma condition that lasted the rest of her life. Two years later, poverty struck the family. François lost his job, and the family was forced to move into an abandoned prison cell. So horrible were the conditions of their new residence that the prisoners who had previously occupied the place had been moved out for sanitary reasons.
In 1857 Bernadette was sent to live with her “foster mother” in Bartres to help look after her children while minding the sheep and lambs. In January 1858 she rejoined her family in Lourdes. Less than a month later the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to Bernadette at the grotto of Massabielle.
Eighteen times the Blessed Mother visited Bernadette. On March 25, she revealed herself as the “Immaculate Conception.” As word of the appearances spread throughout Lourdes and the rest of the world, Church investigations began. On Jan. 18, 1862, the local bishop acknowledged the authenticity of the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Massabielle.
The second part of Bernadette's life began when she left for the convent July 4, 1866. She joined the Sisters of Charity in Nevers, France. On July 8, the day after her arrival at St. Gildard convent, with all the sisters present, Bernadette gave her last account of the apparitions. Thereafter, she was never to speak of the grotto again unless ordered to by her superiors.
Twenty-two days after her arrival, Bernadette received her habit and the religious name Marie-Bernard. For the rest of her religious life she was to suffer from recurring bouts of sickness. She spent most of her time in the infirmary, either as a patient or as an assistant nurse.
What was Bernadette like? One of her religious sisters described her as deeply pious and possessing child-like simplicity, extraordinary eveness of temper, and profound humility. All her sisters recalled Bernadette's youthful charm, spontaneous disposition, and playful attitude.
Bernadette held the memories of the Blessed Virgin Mary close to her heart. When a friend asked if she had seen the Virgin Mary again since the 18th apparition, tears began to well up in Bernadette's eyes. Her friend knew the answer.
Bernadette never stopped longing for her heavenly mother. Once she told a friend to pray the rosary every night as she fell asleep. She likened it to little children falling asleep saying, “Mamma, Mamma.”
During the final years of her life, Bernadette battled illness almost every day. She received the anointing of the sick four times. Her superiors realized she was being led by Jesus to live a crucified life of prayer, suffering, silence, and sacrifice. The little child of Lourdes accepted her life with perfect resignation and submission.
On Sept. 22, 1878, Sister Marie-Bernard made her perpetual vows. From this time on, her life was an ascent up Calvary. During her last year of life she once disclosed, “I am afraid when I think of all the graces I have received, and of the very little use I have made of them.”
Suffering from asthma and tuberculosis, she spent the last twenty-four hours of her life in agony.
“I can only pray and suffer,” she said. The night before she died she confided, “I am ground like a grain of wheat.”
The last day came April 16, 1879. Her sufferings intensified, and she had to be moved to an armchair to make her breathing easier. Bernadette was too weak to hold the crucifix, so Mother Nathalie Portat fastened it to her habit. Bernadette slowly kissed each of the sacred wounds.
At about 3:00 p.m. she said in an agonizing voice, “My God! My God!” Slowly Mother Nathalie began praying the Hail Mary. When she got to “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” Sister Marie-Bernard joined her. Mother Nathalie let the dying sister proceed, “Mother of God, pray for me, a poor sinner, a poor sinner.”
After taking her final sips of water from a flask, Bernadette for the last time made the majestic sign of the cross that she had learned from the Blessed Virgin at Massabielle. As her strength gave out, she gently gave her soul back to God.
Almost 55 years later, Dec. 8, 1933, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, the Catholic Church canonized Bern-adette. During this time examiners had exhumed her body on three different occasions. Each time they found it incorrupt. In 1925 they ceremoniously transferred her body to the chapel of St. Gildard, where it now rests in a glass reliquary. Her body has remained intact ever since, and only a thin layer of wax has been added to her face and hands.
Today, when visitors look at St. Bernadette, they can see the same fingers that dug in the earth at Massabielle and the same eyes that saw the Virgin Mary.
The shrine of St. Bernadette is a favorite stop on many pilgrimage itineraries to France. Along with seeing the incorrupt body of the saint, visitors can also tour the shrine's museum, which is filled with artifacts and historical documents from Bernadette's life. Another favorite activity among pilgrims is to stroll through the convent gardens, following the same path that Bernadette often walked.
Her favorite statue of the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of the Waters, lies at the end of the garden. Self-directed tour pamphlets are available for this endeavor. When it's time to rest your feet, audiovisual presentations are offered in various languages. If you would like to pray outside, you can find a quiet place near the replica of the Lourdes grotto. An information booth is also located on the shrine grounds to have your questions answered. If you're looking to stock up on St. Bernadette souvenirs, there is a shrine gift shop to meet your needs. For overnight accommodations, it is possible to stay at St. Gildard. There are also more than 30 hotels to choose from in the city, ranging from one to four stars.
The shrine is open every day of the year; from 7:00 a.m. until 7:30 p.m. between April and October, and from 7:30 a.m. until 7.00 p.m. in the winter. Principal feasts include Feb. 18 (St. Bernadette), and Feb. 11 (Our Lady of Lourdes, anniversary of the first vision). Mass is celebrated daily in the chapel, and visitors may join the sisters in the recitation of evening prayers on Wednesdays and Sundays. Often, pilgrims accompanied by a priest can also request to celebrate Mass with their group while visiting the shrine. (It's important to contact the shrine beforehand to reserve a time slot.)
Located in a small city, the shrine of St. Bernadette is easily accessible by road and train. If you are traveling by car, Nevers is located off motorway N7 (about 130 miles south of Paris). By rail, trains depart regularly from Gare de Lyon train station in Paris to Nevers. The St. Gildard Convent is about a 10-minute walk from the train station.
Kevin Wright writes from Bellevue, Wash.
----- EXCERPT: More than 500,000 pilgrims annually visit the place—300 miles from the site of the apparitions in 1858 of the Blessed Virgin Mary—where Bernadette Soubirous lived out her saintly existence ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kevin Wright ----- KEYWORDS: Traveler -------- TITLE: Celebrating Self-Centered Materialism DATE: 03/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 8-14, 1998 ----- BODY:Most people don't pay much attention to the Oscar nominations for best documentary. Their focus is on the much-hyped feature film sweepstakes that this year pits mega-blockbuster, Titanic, against critics' darling, L.A. Confidential. But the documentary contests, divided into long- and short-form competitions, shouldn't be ignored. The films nominated often highlight issues that are becoming influential among opinion makers, and an examination of their content can help us identify certain intellectual trends that are shaping our culture.
Ayn Rand: A Sense of Lifeis a two-anda-half-hour documentary about the life and ideas of the best-selling novelist and would-be economist-philosopher who died 16 years ago. A fierce opponent of communism and an enthusiastic cheerleader for free markets, Rand was despised by America's powerful, left-leaning intelligentsia for most of her career.
Nevertheless, her first-rate pulp literary skills enabled her novels to find a mass audience. The Fountainhead (1943) has sold more than 4 million copies to date and Atlas Shrugged (1957) 5 million. In addition, her various economic and philosophic texts have sold more than 11 million copies.
Rand was born Alice Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905. Her father was a successful pharmacist who ran afoul of the communists. At age 12 she declared herself an atheist and militantly held to that position for the rest of her life, proclaiming that belief in God was “evil.”
Despising what she considered Russian pessimism and its glorification of the tragic, she emigrated at age 21 to America whose upbeat, confident modernism inspired her. There she changed her name, taking her surname from the Remington-Rand typewriter with which she began to write.
She soon moved to Hollywood where her arguments against Soviet communism impressed the legendary director, Cecil B. De Mille, who hired her as an extra and then as a screenwriter. Ironically, Rand, a tireless opponent of Christianity, first met her husband on the set of De Mille's epic about Jesus, King of Kings.
Several of her screenplays became movies (Red Pawn and Love Letters), but she wasn't satisfied. She was determined that her work be an uncompromising platform for her ideas. So she turned to novels and plays.
After a few false starts, she produced her magnum opus, The Fountainhead, which skillfully popularized her thinking. Its handsome, super-masculine hero was based on an architect like Frank Lloyd Wright, who blows up his finest building rather than compromise his integrity. The book champions men like him who possess “unborrowed vision” and whose only motive is the creation of powerful, beautiful works.
Rand ridicules “second-handers” who believe that man and his creations exist to serve others. She and her fictional heroes label this kind of thinking “altruism,” which she believes is a weapon of exploitation that makes parasites of those who are supposed to be helped.
On moral issues she sounds like Frederick Nietzsche, watered down for junior high school students, and it gets worse. Rand contrasted her extreme form of individualism with collectivism as practiced in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. In her muddled mind, their totalitarian societies were somehow extensions of altruism, with the Holocaust and the gulag as inevitable results. America, on the other hand, is celebrated as the promised land because it was built on “the pursuit of happiness,” which she interprets as a personal, selfish motive.
The Fountainhead and its strange mixture of contradictory notions was rejected by 12 different publishers before finding a home. But once in the bookstores it struck a chord with American conservatives who were disgruntled by their culture's mass society and its ever-expanding federal government.
After a hit movie, starring Gary Cooper, took the novel's message to an even larger audience, Rand decided to codify her ideas into a philosophy called objectivism and soon attracted a coterie of like-minded thinkers, the most famous of whom is Alan Greenspan, the present Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, who co-authored one of her economic texts.
The documentary's writer-director, Michael Paxton, presents these events with the uncritical eye of a true believer. His material includes photos of Rand on the set of King ofKings,clips from the movie version of The Fountainhead, and feisty TV interviews with Mike Wallace, Phil Donahue, and Tom Snyder. But what is missing from this dewy-eyed presentation are dissenting voices, particularly those of other conservatives.
In the 1950s, practicing Catholic William F. Buckley founded The National Review, one of whose goals was the creation of a broad-based, coherent set of conservative principles to challenge the liberal hegemony. Buckley was always careful to purge from his pages ideas he considered poisonous. Rand and her disdain for Judeo-Christian morality were the first to go. Attacking her pseudo-Nietzschean views directly, he declared: “Support for the weak is an automatic result of the free enterprise system because no one can bring prosperity to himself without bringing it to others.”
Most conservatives followed Buckley's lead, and despite her novels' continuing success, objectivism was treated as a slightly wacky cult.
Some 40 years later the renewal of interest in her thinking is disturbing but not surprising. The selective nature of the economic booms of the '80s and the '90s, combined with our celebrity-driven narcissistic popular culture, makes her philosophic texts such as The Virtue of Selfishness seem tailor-made for the moment. The radical libertarianism favored by most of the high-tech leaders of the digital revolution isn't very different from her own. There's little room in either for loving your neighbor as yourself. So if Ayn Rand: A Sense Of Life gets an award on Oscar night, it's another sign of how prevalent self-centered materialism and contempt for human community have become in our society.
----- EXCERPT: An Oscar-nominated documentary paints a glowing picture of Ayn Rand's radical atheistic individualism ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Art&Culture -------- TITLE: Time Is Right for Catholic Music With Pop Appeal DATE: 03/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 8-14, 1998 ----- BODY:Contemporary Catholic music is coming of age—right in time for the new millennium.
As Pope John Paul II implores Catholics to become evangelizers, one group is ready to charge ahead. The Catholic popular music industry and its entertainers are poised to point young listeners to Christ, much as Catholic art has done throughout history.
“Entertainment can minister,” said John Michael Talbot, one of Catholic music's most popular recording artists.
“As soon as you're singing about Christian faith, or performing or singing in a way that is moral, you have the opportunity to evangelize,” said Talbot, who was named Billboard magazine's number one Christian male artist in 1988.
Recently, Sovereignty Music, a New York-based recording label co-founded by Stephen Connolly and Catholic recording artist Kathy Troccoli, conducted a survey among Catholic high schoolers in the New York area. When asked if they would purchase music that spoke positively about their faith, of 1,500 respondents, 51% said yes. Another 19% said they might.
“Music is so essential to the lives of teenagers,” said Phil Baniewicz, executive director of Life Teen, a liturgy-centered Catholic teen movement and former youth minister at St. Timothy Parish in Mesa, Ariz., but “young Catholics in general don't even know about contemporary Christian music.”
Though evangelical singers and groups have thus far dominated the Christian music market, Catholic artists are making headway. Talbot, a convert, has been spreading the message of Christ since the 1970s. He currently headlines a national tour that features two other prominent Catholic musicians, Tom Booth and Tony Melendez.
Booth, a music minister for St. Timothy Catholic Parish in Mesa, released seven collections of songs on his own label, De Cristo Music, before he started recording for Oregon Catholic Press (OCP). OCP just re-released Booth's self-titled project, Tom Booth, and his music on a World Youth Day project, Find Us Ready. Their new hymnal, Glory and Praise, includes five of his songs.
Also emerging among popular artists are Sarah Hart and Danny Langdon, two singer-songwriters on the Sovereignty label. Hart is riding the current wave of popularity enjoyed by Jewel, Sheryl Crow, and other female vocalists. Hart played to her first Catholic audience of 2,000 young people three years ago at a Life Teen event in Hudson, Ohio, and was moved by the experience. “When I was a Catholic teen, events like that just didn't exist,” she said.
Langdon plays mainstream, straight-ahead rock and roll, singing songs about divorce, death, and spousal abuse in trendy New York nightclubs and on a forthcoming Sovereignty release. He is currently completing the RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) process for reception into the Catholic Church.
Nashville-based ICON Media is marketing and distributing another rising star, who goes only by the name “Angela.” The New Jersey native is getting air play on Christian radio stations with her upbeat single, Glimpse of Paradise. A devout Catholic, Angela speaks of her “remarkable conversion” in concerts and appearances across the country.
In the near future, she will co-host a music show for teens on a “major cable TV network,” said ICON president Herb Busi.
While Catholic music has traditionally followed “a liturgical path,” the times are changing, according to John Michael Talbot. “In the Church, God has recently been raising up many musicians who are doing non-liturgical music.”
Most acclaimed among them is Kathy Troccoli, nominated this year for the fifth time for the Gospel Music Association's (GMA) female vocalist of the year.
Troccoli, who serves as a spokesperson for Life Teen, first hit the pop charts in 1992 with her number one song, Everything Changes. Her pop-Christian crossover tunes, My Life is In Your Hands, and Mission of Love, followed, and A Baby's Prayer, a pro-life statement, was recently nominated for the GMA's song of the year. A long-time proponent of evangelization, Troccoli has said Catholic listeners
will discover contemporary Christian music when it “becomes a part of a hunger and thirst” for God. While Catholic versions of Jars of Clay and D.C. TALK, the hottest Christian rockers and rappers around, have not yet emerged, ICON's Busi said they're not far off. “Over the next year to year and a half,” he predicted, “we're going to see another half-dozen artists emerge that are going to be serious contenders.”
For now, the music of many artists popular in Catholic circles isn't heard on the radio. For example, though he has performed before audiences, including for the Pope at Denver's World Youth Day 1993, Tony Melendez, the armless guitarist, relies mainly on religious conferences and youth gatherings to further his independent music ministry. Dana, another self-distributed inspirational artist, is popular mostly with older Catholic audiences.
There are other independent Catholic musicians. In California, Dennis and Paula Doyle issue Celtic music and Catholic hymns on their own label, much like Deborah Edie in Arizona, who releases wedding music and lullabies for Catholic listeners. Renee Bondi, a paraplegic from California, distributes her music at events and directly, by mail. Joseph Moorman, a tenor from Pittsburgh, Pa., records best-loved Catholic hymns independently, and Marty Rotella, the premier musician in the Marian movement, keeps busy with bookings and self-produced recordings.
But the music of many of these artists isn't directed to young people and is only available in Catholic and some other Christian stores. “The normal Catholic kid is not going to go into a Christian bookstore,” where most popular Christian recordings are sold, said Life Teen's Baniewicz.
Added Sovereignty's Connolly: “In order to reach the youth, we are going to have to come up with better ways, like through Life Teen or retreats.”
The time is right to develop good Catholic product, music industry sources say. And for many of the musicians, bringing music with a positive faith message and Catholic youth together is a priority for building a healthy culture.
“The youth are the future of the Catholic Church,” Talbot said, “and if we do not begin to really support artists like Tom Booth of Life Teen and Tony Melendez, who are specifically reaching out to youth, we will lose our youth.”
Lynn Stinnett Williams writes from Nashville, Tenn.
----- EXCERPT: Evangelical musicians still have corner on the market ----- EXTENDED BODY: Lynn Stinnett Williams ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Answering the Critics DATE: 03/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 8-14, 1998 ----- BODY:A National Conference of Catholic Bishops' (NCCB) subcommittee chaired by Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua of Philadelphia is currently developing an implementation plan for Ex Corde Ecclesiae, Pope John Paul II's 1990 apostolic constitution on Catholic universities.
Last week, in part two of the Register's three-part series, Kenneth Whitehead, former U.S. assistant secretary of education for higher education, addressed the first four of the eight principal objections raised by critics regarding the application of canon 812 as called for in Ex Corde Ecclesiae. Canon 812 requires that theology professors in Catholic institutions of higher education have a mandate to teach from a competent ecclesiastical authority. The remaining objections are examined below.
Objection 5: The canon contains no provision for the customary procedures in case of removal of professors.
This objection can quickly and easily be disposed of simply by the establishment of such procedures by the NCCB. The canon itself does not need to contain any such procedural measures. The NCCB's Application document refers to a conflict resolution procedure issued by the NCCB in 1989, for example, which presumably could still be used, although the Holy See was somewhat critical of this document when it was issued as tending to put theologians on the same level as bishops. However, the conditions under which a professor might be removed can easily be described in advance in the professor's contract.
Objection 6: It may cause an administrative burden for some bishops.
This objection seems to assume that some bishops would be incessantly engaged in removing theologians from universities. What this assumption implies about the present state of some Catholic theological faculties might better be left unstated. There would be no undue administrative burden for any bishop, however, if the NCCB simply followed Ex Corde Ecclesiae and made the university itself primarily responsible for maintaining its own Catholic character. The role of the bishops, precisely, should be one of oversight only. Ex Corde Ecclesiae plainly states in this connection: “The responsibility for maintaining and strengthening the Catholic identity of the university rests primarily with the university itself” (II, 4 fl 1), and this presumably includes the theology department.
What this means is that the university itself would have to see to it that only Catholic theologians loyal to the Magisterium of the Church and prepared to sign a contract including a statement to this effect were hired in the first place. Among the other benefits that would accrue with the implementation of this principle would be the elimination of the hated “outside interference” of the bishop. This is the way Catholic universities used to operate. In fact, they could be depended upon to uphold and insure their own Catholic character. It is what the handful of today's new or restored “orthodox” Catholic colleges still do; they insist on their own authentic Catholic identity. Regardless of what the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (ACCU) or the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU) might think, the bishop does not have to interfere.
No doubt one of the principal reasons why canon 812 was added to the 1985 Code of Canon Law, however, is that this self-disciplinary type of situation no longer applies on many Catholic campuses; today bishops may have to step in and exercise appropriate oversight if the Catholic character of certain institutions is ever going to be maintained, restored, or perpetuated.
Objection 7: The purpose that the law seeks is presently being accomplished within the academic institutions by the judgment of peers and by conscientious administrators.
This is exactly what is not happening on the majority of Catholic campuses. How many cases have there been in the United States, over the last 30 years, where a dissenting theologian has been either publicly corrected or removed from a college or university faculty, either because of another theologian's peer-review criticisms, or by administrative action?
The contrary situation is surely closer to the actual case. Peer review essentially went out when dissent came in. As a matter of fact, whatever disagreements one theologian might have with another's theology became subordinated to the perceived need to defend that theologian's “right to dissent.” Even non-dissenters typically defend this as a right of those who do dissent; or, more often, they simply remain silent. Who wants to bear the onus of being perceived as opposed to “academic freedom”? Hardly anyone dares any longer to state what is too often the case today, namely, that some “Catholic” theologians are quite patently no longer Catholic in any sense formerly conveyed by that particular word.
Karl Rahner once dared to say this aloud about Hans Kung, but hardly anybody else has ever said anything like it in public since. Father Charles Curran was actually accompanied to Rome for his personal interview with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger by the then dean of Catholic University's School of Religion, who wanted to lend his moral support and that of the institution to the embattled theologian being “persecuted” by Rome.
Father Curran, it will be recalled, also regularly got resolutions passed by huge majorities in his favor by theological societies, faculty senates, and the like during the long, tiresome process that his disciplining required (because his dignity was in fact respected by the Church and due process was observed at every turn, and then some).
As a matter of indisputable fact, then, the purpose which canon 812 seeks to achieve is not being accomplished by peer review or by conscientious university administrators today.
Objection 8: The canon is superfluous because adequate provision is already made in canon 810.
This is a wholly legalistic objection. In the first place, canon 810 would have to be implemented for this objection to make sense. But canon 810 has no more been implemented in this country than canon 812 has, and those who oppose the implementation of the latter probably would oppose even more strongly the implementation of the former. Since canon 810 has not been in the forefront of the Church-university discussions the way canon 812 has, it has been left to one side.
However, canon 810 deals with the appointment of university teachers generally (not just theology professors), and it requires, in addition to professional competence in one's field, not only “integrity of doctrine” but “probity of life” as well, and it further provides that university faculty members lacking in these qualities should be “removed from positions in accord with the procedure set forth in the statutes” (it assumes “due process,” in other words). This canon further says that bishops and conferences of bishops have “the duty and right of being vigilant” over all these things on Catholic campuses.
In other words, canon 810 provides for episcopal oversight, not just over the teaching of theology, but over every important aspect of the institution related to its authentic Catholic character. No wonder the Land O'Lakes Catholic colleges and universities wanted the U.S. bishops to get an indult from the implementation in the United States of the canons regarding universities in the new Code of Canon Law. If canon 812 is considered intolerable, canon 810 can only be considered even more intolerable.
Such are objections commonly raised against the implementation in the United States of canon 812 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law that are found in the current standard Commentary on the Code produced by the Canon Law Society of America.
In spite of these objections, it is to be hoped that the NCCB's subcommittee will nevertheless be able to come up with an Ex Corde Ecclesiae implementation plan which most higher education institutions bearing the name “Catholic” will be able to comply with. Certainly, on the evidence of what has been reviewed here, the objections to the implementation of canon 812 cannot be considered insuperable obstacles to the integral implementation of Ex Corde Ecclesiae in the United States.
Kenneth D. Whitehead, a former U.S. assistant secretary of education for higher education, is the author, among other books, of Catholic Colleges and Federal Funding (Ignatius Press, 1988).
----- EXCERPT: Last in a three-part series ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kenneth D. Whitehead ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Organ Donation: Shadowy Side of a Generous Gesture DATE: 03/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 8-14, 1998 ----- BODY:In his encyclical Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II called donating organs a “particularly praiseworthy” gesture when “performed in an ethically acceptable manner, with a view to offering a chance of health and even of life itself to the sick who sometimes have no other hope.”
Yet, the Holy Father also warned about remaining “silent in the face of other more furtive, but no less serious and real, forms of euthanasia. These could occur for example when, in order to increase the availability of organs for transplants, organs are removed without respecting objective and adequate criteria which verify the death of the donor.” The Pope's words, written three years ago, are taking on new meaning as the increasing demand for organs to transplant has led to controversial new strategies.
For example, last April, the CBS television program 60 Minutes conducted an investigation of the little-known policy at some hospitals that would allow taking organs for transplants from persons who could be, in narrator Mike Wallace's words, “not quite dead.” At the program's end Wallace predicted that, as a result of the broadcast, the practice called nonheartbeating organ donation (NHBD) was unlikely to continue. But he was wrong.
Transplant organizations immediately defended NHBD as ethical, and in December, a report by the Institute of Medicine—the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences—admitted that some hospitals use questionable methods to obtain organs for transplants. It called for setting national standards however, rather than recommending a ban on the growing practice of retrieving organs from people who do not meet the criteria for brain death—the common standard for organ donation, in which the heart continues to beat during while vital organs are removed.
In an intersection of the so-called “right to die” issue and organ donation, NHBD usually involves getting family permission to remove life support from a person considered by the doctor to be hopeless and then waiting as little as two minutes after the heart stops before harvesting organs. The Institute of Medicine report recommended five minutes. Critics contend that this is not enough to safeguard against taking organs from people who are not quite dead or who may even have a chance of recovery. Others also worry that NHBD further confuses the issue of removing life support and could pressure families of comatose patients to remove life support before that step is truly appropriate.
The report also examined other issues such as administering organ-preserving with potentially harmful medications before death and using surgical techniques without family permission to cool a recently deceased person's organs until a family member can be asked about organ donation. The report called these issues “problematic” but only recommended the development of guidelines.
The impetus for this change in organ donation rules is the growing disparity between people needing new organs and the low number of organs available. Despite the ethical questions, Michael DeVita, chairman of the ethics committee of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center applauded the results of the report, telling The Washington Post that nonheartbeating donors are “a huge potential source of organs” and able to boost donation rates by at least 20%.
Using non-heartbeating organ donors is not the only controversy surrounding organ transplants, though. The increasing demand for organs has spawned a number of proposals to either increase the pool of potential donors or to better allocate the relatively few organs available.
Upping the Number of Organs
Although most people are aware of the need for organ transplants and support organ donation, the number of people signing organ donor cards remains low and families often refuse to donate organs when asked.
To solve that problem, publicity campaigns have been started to make signing an organ donor card more convenient and to encourage people to discuss donation with their families. Unfortunately, potential ethical problems are seldom discussed as part of the educational effort.
Last year 70 million taxpayers received organ donor cards with their tax refunds. In many states, drivers are routinely asked about organ donation when they renew their licenses. Parishes and churches often include organ donation information at their yearly health fairs and with other Church literature. In December, Vice President Al Gore unveiled new initiatives for increasing organ donation, including a proposed federal rule requiring hospitals to report all deaths to local organ procurement organizations, which can evaluate possible donors and discuss consent with family members. A similar law in Pennsylvania has been credited with increasing organ donation there by 20%.
The American Medical Association has recommended that states consider a mandated choice policy requiring all adults to register their choice of whether they would permit donation in the event of their death.
Other proposals run the gamut from the creative to the bizarre. A Tennessee judge now allows people placed on probation for misdemeanors to get up to 12 days taken from their community service obligation if they sign an organ donor card. A Missouri lawmaker recently submitted a bill to allow death-row inmates to have their sentences commuted to life imprisonment if they agree to donate one kidney or bone marrow.
Even Jack Kevorkian has chimed in by offering to harvest organs from his assisted-suicide victims as well as proposing that prisoners have the right to donate their organs after execution.
There is also renewed interest among many ethicists in exploring such possibilities as expanding the definition of brain death to include people considered permanently unconscious but able to breathe on their own, offering financial incentives to families who agree to donate a loved one's organs, and enacting “presumed consent” legislation which would allow organs to be harvested unless it was documented that the person refused donation.
Instead of being a “gift of life,” some even suggest that organ donation should be considered a societal obligation.
“When people refuse to donate, depriving individuals of organs that could save their lives, maybe we should consider that a homicidal act,” Roger Evens of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., quipped in a recent Washington Post article.
Scientific research has also begun to herald other new possibilities. For example, when British scientists adapted cloning techniques to create a frog embryo without a head, some scientists speculated that such a technique could be adapted to grow human organs such as hearts, kidneys, livers, and pancreases in a headless human embryo. Such headless human embryos would be considered non-persons and thus sacrificed at will.
Allocation of Organs
With some 4,000 people dying each year waiting for a transplant, fair and just allocation of the organs available has become another hot button ethical issue. Following quick liver transplants for celebrities Larry Hagman and Mickey Mantle, many people were concerned that famous people jump to the front of the line of people waiting for transplants.
This has been vigorously denied by transplant organizations who maintain that only medical indications are taken into account when deciding who is to receive an available transplant.
The controversy of who receives organs first was recently revived, however, with proposed changes in the rules for liver transplants. One of the most controversial changes involved patients designated as “status one,” those first on the list for transplants. New rules would mean that patients with chronic liver failure would automatically be relegated to “status two.” Critics worry that this could mean that some sicker patients would be passed over for someone considered to have a better chance for success. Transplant experts reply that the relatively small number of people meeting status one criteria would mean that people with chronic liver failure still have a good chance of receiving a transplant. If such rules are accepted, many expect that changes in the distribution of other types of organ transplants would follow.
But even getting on a waiting list for transplantation can cause controversy. While many insurance companies cover the cost of transplantation, some do not- and the cost of a transplant often runs into hundreds of thousands of dollars. People who run out of health insurance before they become sick enough to need a transplant are usually asked to prove their ability to pay before a hospital will put them on the waiting list. This has led to patients desperately searching for financial resources and even whole communities holding fund-raising events for a local patient.
Dr. Lawrence Hunsicker, president of the United Network for Organ Sharing, told the Houston Chronicle in November that although it was unfair that anybody should be denied appropriate, needed medical care just because they are poor, he “cannot fault the hospitals that say they can't do transplants for free. If they did, then everybody would go there and they'd go broke and have to shut down.”
Money is not the only controversial barrier to getting on a waiting list for transplants. In 1996, Sandra Jensen, a young woman with Down's syndrome, was initially rejected for transplant surgery at both Stanford Medical Center and the University of California at San Diego. The hospitals relented after heavy lobbying from disability groups and an offer from California's Medicaid program to pay for the surgery and care afterward. Ultimately, this led to a 1997 California law that prohibits denying medical treatment based on a patient's disabilities.
The Limits of Science
Although science seems to raise new issues at an alarming rate, the Church has long offered guiding principles useful in evaluating ethical controversies. While people of good will may disagree on specific points, as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) observes in Donum Vitae (Gift of Life), “It would on the one hand be illusory to claim that scientific research and its applications are morally neutral; on the other hand one cannot derive criteria for guidance from mere technical efficiency, from research's possible usefulness to some at the expense of others, or, worse still, from prevailing ideologies.
“Thus science and technology require, for their own intrinsic meaning, an unconditional respect for the fundamental criteria of the moral law: that is to say, they must be at the service of the human person, of his inalienable rights and his true and integral good according to the design and the will of God.”
Nancy Guilfoy Valko, a registered nurse, writes from St. Louis, Mo.
----- EXCERPT: The increasing demand for organs to transplant has led to controversial new strategies ----- EXTENDED BODY: Nancy Guilfoyvalko ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Reproductive Rights vs. the Right to Life DATE: 03/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 8-14, 1998 ----- BODY:An important event will be commemorated later this year when the United Nations' Universal Declaration on Human Rights marks its 50th anniversary.
Members of the pro-life movement, hoping to capitalize on the attention that will be generated by the occurrence, plan a public information campaign underscoring the universal rights of the unborn. Not surprisingly, abortion advocates are planning a counter attack that centers on women's universal rights, which, they claim, should include the right to a legal abortion in every nation in the world.
On Dec. 10, 1948, the U.N. General Assembly proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a response to the atrocities of World War II. All member nations were urged to disseminate this declaration to every country and territory in the world. The preamble of the Declaration asserts “the inherent dignity and … equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.”
Father Frank Pavone, a Rome-based priest of the Archdiocese of New York and official of the Pontifical Council for the Family and the international director of Priests For Life, said the Declaration's preamble is a “key theme” upon which to build a case for the rights of the unborn.
“Governments can neither bestow nor remove human dignity from a human being,” Father Pavone explained. “Governments, rather, exist to preserve and protect rights that are inherent … rights which reside by definition within the human being precisely because he or she is a human being, not because he or she has … been awarded those rights by some outside entity.”
The case for the rights of the unborn grows stronger as one forges through the rest of the Declaration. Article 3 states that “everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the security of person.” Article 6 states that “everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.” Article 7 states that “all are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law.” Articles 18 and 19 assert the rights of each person to “freedom of religion and opinion on various matters,” as well as the right to “exercise that religion and express that opinion.”
Article 30 may, however, contain the most pertinent statement of all on behalf of the unborn. It states that “nothing in this declaration may be interpreted as implying for any state, group, or person any right to engage in any activity, or to perform any act, aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.”
Father Pavone explained Article 30 using this illustration: “If I claimed to practice a religion that required me to kill another human being every Sunday as part of the worship service, although I have the freedom of religion, I do not have right to destroy the life of another human being.”
This also applies to abortion, said the priest. “The right to life, which is inherent and incapable of being annulled by any government, may not be trampled upon in the name of religious freedom.”
“It is a favorite position of defenders of abortion to claim their ‘right to believe what they want’ and to ‘have their own opinion’ about the status of the child in the womb.” But the right of someone to live is not compromised simply because someone else does not recognize that right, Father Pavone wrote in a Pontifical Council for the Family statement.
The proponents of abortion have used some of the same citations from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to make a case for the “reproductive rights” of women, which, they contend, supersede the rights of the unborn. The interpretation of the Declaration seems to turn on the personhood status of the unborn in much the same way that it does in laws throughout the United States. If an unborn child is not considered a person under the Declaration, then it does not share the same inherent rights that its parents have. Following such logic, killing an unborn child by abortion does not violate the terms of the Declaration.
As a coordinator of pro-life activities throughout the world, Father Pavone has monitored the activities of the United Nations and is promoting a strategy to assert the “human-ness”—and therefore the inherent rights—of the unborn. The current U.N. strategy is one that he finds particularly challenging to the pro-life movement.
“At the various meetings [the United Nations has] had, a line of reasoning has developed that works as follows: Human rights are universal. Women's rights are human rights. Therefore, women's right are universal,” he explained.
“Of course, nothing about that sounds wrong—until you realize that when they say ‘women's rights,’ they include anything that is legal, as well as anything that can be put under the umbrella of ‘reproductive and sexual health.’ This includes abortion. The syllogism therefore leads to the conclusion that it is a human right for a woman to have an abortion,” the priest said.
The topic of women's universal rights will be an important part of the New York meeting of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women scheduled for this month.
“This is significant, because ‘human’ rights are more fundamental than the rights which any nation's constitution can grant people,” Father Pavone said. “Therefore, under this scenario, the nation that protects its unborn children by not allowing abortion is somehow at odds with a universal human right.”
He speculated that one of the factors motivating this new tack by abortion advocates is data released late last year by the population division of the United Nations, which shows that there is no longer a “population explosion.” On the contrary, their expert demographers said that in nearly half of the nations where the research was conducted, there is an unprecedented occurrence of below-replacement fertility levels.
“Promoting abortion under the motive of ‘reducing population’ has lost its weight in argument. Now, therefore, they try to defend and promote abortion as some kind of human right,” Father Pavone said.
The United Nations is currently attempting to increase its ability to enforce the rights set forth in the Declaration through the establishment of a world court with broad enforcement authority.
“Pro-life, pro-family organizations should consider this to be a very grave development related to all of their efforts to defend life and family,” said Father Pavone. “If these U.N. plans are successfully implemented, all pro-life work, legislation, and statements could be seriously challenged in all U.N. member nations.”
Molly Mulqueen writes from Colorado Springs, Colo
----- EXCERPT: Abortion proponents are using the United Nations' Universal Declaration on Human Rights to argue their case ----- EXTENDED BODY: MOLLY MULQUEEN ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Gospel Of Life DATE: 03/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 8-14, 1998 ----- BODY:“The process which once led todiscovering the idea of ‘human rights’—rights inherent in every person and prior to any constitution and state legislation—is today marked by a surprising contradiction. Precisely in an age when the inviolable rights of the person are solemnly proclaimed and the value of life is publicly affirmed, the very right to life is being denied or trampled upon, especially at the more significant moments of existence: the moment of birth and the moment of death.”
Pope John Paul II
(Evangelium Vitae 18.3)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Canadian Pro-Life Students Find Solidarity On-Line DATE: 03/08/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 8-14, 1998 ----- BODY:TORONTO—Canada's pro-life university students are embracing the latest information technology to help spread the right-to-life message among their peers. Students plan to use the Internet, electronic mail bulletin boards, and a biannual newsletter to link post-secondary pro-life efforts coast to coast.
Networking and the rapid exchange of information and strategy are important developments in a country characterized by vast geographical distances and rising travel and accommodation costs. An electronic network allows university prolifers in British Columbia to share news and ideas with colleagues 3,000 miles away in Newfoundland. Although nothing can replace face-to-face contact, electronic networking provides instant access on a wide range of right-to-life issues.
Leading the way in this effort is the National Campus Life Network (NCLN), a year-old organization working to link individual campus-based pro-life organizations across the country.
The organization provides information resources enabling student pro-life groups to educate the general university population about fetal development, the need for legislation to protect the unborn, and related life issues.
More than 50 pro-life university students from 13 post-secondary institutions took part in NCLN's second annual symposium last month at St. Augustine's Seminary in Toronto. Student pro-lifers from Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta, and British Columbia were represented at the symposium.
Students were front and center during the symposium, conducting small group discussions on networking, sharing resources, and taking advantage of the Internet for pro-life work. They also discussed some of the obstacles they face in proclaiming the sanctity of life ethic in an environment that is indifferent if, not hostile to pro-life values.
“We're constantly bombarded with secular ideas on campus, so it can be difficult to find much sympathy for right-to-life goals,” said Frances Macapagal, a second-year history student at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Macapagal and colleague Erica Heathe are members of the Life Line group at UBC. They expressed optimism that a central information network will be a tremendous boost to campus pro-life organizations.
“Students don't like to work in isolation,” Macapagal said. “It's encouraging to know information and resources will become available.”
NCLN executives say it is important for student pro-lifers to know where to find what they need.
Vanya Gobbi, coordinating director of NCLN, said, “There's no doubt that there is some hostility to the pro-life message on many university campuses, but student pro-lifers shouldn't feel intimidated by this hostility—especially when they have support and resources from their pro-life peers in other provinces.”
Gobbi, an international development student at the University of Toronto, referred to a recent case in which the undergraduate newspaper at the University of Toronto rejected a paid advertisement from the Birthright organization on the grounds that the pregnancy counseling service offered “too narrow” a focus. Meanwhile, the newspaper regularly features advertising from groups promoting “alternative lifestyles.”
Gobbi hopes to raise the profile of NCLN, not only to safeguard its survival, but also to bring greater continuity to student pro-life work.
Too often, Gobbi said, students find that the demands of studies and career pursuits limit the amount of time they can devote to pro-life work. As well, the transient nature of student life often results in the loss of experienced, dedicated leaders at graduation time.
Gobbi said one of NCLN's aims is to build bridges to existing high school pro-life organizations in order to allow students ongoing support and resources as they pass through their university years. Facilitating communication is also a priority.
“The easier communication is, the more likely it is that people will find the support they need when they need it,” Gobbi said. “By establishing and maintaining a network to obtain information, the various campus pro-life groups will be better equipped to achieve their goals.”
Gobbi has prepared a three-year strategic plan for the NCLN that lists a number of objectives, including an increase in the number of university pro-life groups, a 100% survival rate of existing groups, and outreach efforts to high school students about to enter university.
Gobbi said NCLN is now developing its own website and electronic event calendar that will put diverse campus pro-life groups into immediate contact with one another. She expects the website will be up and running by this summer.
Father Tom Lynch, a professor of moral theology at St. Augustine's Seminary in Toronto, is an advisor to the National Campus Life Network. The priest has long promoted the use of the latest information technology to advance pro-life work.
“It's crucial for pro-life students in a country of this size to stay hooked up electronically,” he said. “Why should those promoting the anti-life culture have the best technology?”
Father Lynch, who 14 years ago founded the short-lived Canadian Youth Pro-Life Organization (CYPLO), is a driving force behind student pro-life activity in Canada. He agreed that university students face tremendous obstacles in defending human life on university campuses. By taking advantage of the latest communications technology, he said, students can make a more compelling argument in support of life. At the same time, instant access to information allows pro-life students to anticipate the arguments of abortion and contraception advocates.
“The fight to defend human life must take on initiatives and a new vocabulary if we're going to make a difference,” Father Lynch said. “Students in particular should take advantage of the best communication methods on hand.”
The effort to promote respect for life among young people is crucial to the future of pro-life work in North America. And success appears to be in the offing. Students made a sizable contribution to the Jan. 22 March for Life in Washington, D.C. marking the 25th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion in the United States. Several daily newspapers, including the Washington Post, cited the large student turnout protesting against Roe v. Wade.
The increasing student presence in pro-life activity is gratifying to Vanya Gobbi, who is now looking for a successor as director of NCLN. She believes student involvement in pro-life work is especially important at the post-secondary level.
“By involving young adults at this time in their lives, their knowledge of pro-life issues and activism is increased,” she said. “They will also develop other pro-life contacts, and this will result in an increase in post-secondary students remaining actively pro-life in their professional life, as well as being better equipped for future activism.”
Mike Mastromatteo writes from Toronto, Canada.
----- EXCERPT: Electronic network facilitates campus-to-campus communication with others working with life issues ----- EXTENDED BODY: MIKE MASTROMATTEO ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Catholic Store Owners DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:STAMFORD, Conn.—In an effort to attract teens and young adults, a number of Christian book outlets have been updating the look of their stores. They've expanded their music sections and added clothing. Taking a page from major secular chains, a handful have even put in coffee bars.
Some of their Catholic counterparts are also dressing up their wares. In San Jose, Calif., Chris and Margaret Metcalf remodeled their large Ave Maria Community Book Center 18 months ago. Chris Metcalf noted that a number of Protestant stores have shown a 20% boost in business “after a facelift,” but added that so far his shop hasn't shown a marked increase.
Others have considered moving with the latest marketing trends but have yet to act. With 12,000 square feet in his Havertown, Pa., St. Jude Shop, the flagship of six stores family-owned more than 30 years, Louis DiCocco thinks coffee bars are “an excellent concept as a place to meet and share ideas.” He may implement them into his stores somewhere down the road, he says.
But some stores have little time for the latest trends in retail marketing. “It depends on what you want to achieve,” says Jacqueline O'Connor, of O'Connor Church Goods in San Diego. At more than 20,000 square feet, and a city block long, O'Connor's, begun 62 years ago, ranks as a veritable Catholic superstore.
Although O'Connor sees coffee bars as fine for secular bookstores, she points out that “you don't go there for a traditional religious experience.”
“We don't want our store to be trendy. True religion is based on tradition, and we want to go with that tradition. Boutiques are wonderful, but that interrupts who we are,” she adds.
The identity of Catholic stores varies from Protestant counterparts, according to Metcalf. He sees “a much different set of circumstances,” with Christian stores that are more open to the latest marketing tools to attract customers. Part of the reason is because most stores are cross-denominational, with very little specific Church affiliation. They tend to take their cues from secular retailers when setting up shop.
Literature from the CBA (formerly, the Christian Booksellers Association) says that “Christian retailers have to employ every legitimate technique and technological advantage” now because of increasing competition from secular retailers carrying CBA products. Catholic stores, on the other hand, have close ties to the Church, diocese, and even specific parishes, according to Metcalf.
Still, Catholic stores carry music and jewelry that strikes a chord with teens and young adults. “WWJD—What Would Jesus Do—is a theme we find attractive,” says DiCocco, describing the highly popular line of jewelry, cards, and books that “has kids thinking about our Lord in an unusual crisis, a compromising situation.”
Sister Helena Burns FSP, a veteran of Pauline Book and Media stores, describes the need for stores to have a youth corner that includes “music—the No. 1 draw—holy hardware (WWJD jewelry), caps, and T-shirts with Christian messages.” All those things make a store “look cool and inviting.”
Dave Kelly has used music to help introduce youth to Catholic bookstores. When his Nashville-based Lion Communications, the largest distributor of Catholic music worldwide, sponsored a concert in Cleveland, he invited the local Pauline bookstore to set up a display.
He coordinated with Sister Margaret Michael Gillis FSP, who also understands the power of music as a tool to catechize and evangelize youth. She finds once the music draws them in “they're willing to look at the books.”
“Some end up coming to the store for more music,” she says. Though foot traffic into Catholic book shops among the younger set is not nearly as high as it could be, stores are working to increase it.
A small number have installed the latest equipment, including music sampling listening centers. While no hard figures are available, industry estimates put the number of stores with the centers at less than 20%.
Chris Metcalf agrees that personal response can't be replaced by slick marketing tools or strategies aimed at attracting people.
“There's an absolutely noticeable increase in [sales] in almost every case they're used,” says Herb Busi. His Icon Media Group in Nashville, a Catholic-Christian music distributor, has placed the devices in about 70 Catholic stores. “It's really the only way you're going to influence people in that age category.”
Kelly, whose Lion Communications was among the first to introduce the sampler, sees it as a useful marketing tool that doesn't disturb the quiet ambiance many religious retailers attempt to provide for their customers.
How much interior redesigns help business is difficult to gauge. Like many of their secular counterparts, the Daughters of St. Paul, who have 21 stores across the country, provide sitting areas where people can read. It's difficult to determine if the sitting areas draw new customers, Sister Rose Pacette FSP says. But she does observe that they are often in use and make the stores more inviting. “People don't feel rushed,” she says, and “that's what the section was intended to do.”
In the Daughters' Dedham, Mass., store, Sister Pacette says the children's corner has been an especially big draw. Nice carpets and chairs, a VCR, tables, cassettes, and story hours appeal to young parents shopping with their children. A Baby Jesus Birthday Party is so successful that a tent is added to the store to accommodate the more than 200 participants.
But more than atmosphere or trendy perks, the major draw for 18- to 39-year-olds visiting Catholic stores is what retail people call “the product.” In Pauline stores, Sister Gillis sees young adults looking “for ways to deepen their faith, grow spiritually … and answer questions” posed by non-Catholics. Some are returning to the faith, others are looking for books or gifts for marriage or baptism. And when death strikes friends or family, the young adults come seeking books that offer a Catholic approach to understanding the loss.
O'Connor's staff of 15 is encouraged to spend as much time as possible with customers, explains the owner. “We view employees as family,” she says, and “that feeling carries out [to customers].”
Chris Metcalf of San Jose agrees that personal response can't be replaced by slick marketing tools or strategies aimed at attracting people. When customers come in for material to help rediscover the faith, for example, his knowledgeable Catholic staff has solid answers. “It's a nice position to be in because people are coming to you in their time of need,” says Metcalf.
With customers responding to plentiful product and helpful staff, owners of Catholic religious goods stores seem careful about embracing the latest retailing trends to increase customer traffic.
“You can go overboard,” says Sister Burns, although she approves of a number of the new methods pulling people to the Word of God. “But you have to consider how far you're going to go,” and for what reason.
Adds Metcalf: “We want a nice store, not a marketing plan. We're here for ministry.”
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Conn.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Islamic Radicalism Has Centuries-Old Roots DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:Western media's portrayals often miss key distinctions among movements
“The worst of men is he who falls short of his yesterdays,” wrote the world-weary 12th-century Muslim philologist al-Hariri.
It's an apt description of the predicament of modern Islam, caught between the glories of its past and its uneasy, sometimes violent struggle with two centuries of an all—but triumphant modernity.
This, coupled with the fact that a century-old tradition of Arab nationalist secularity—the attempt, usually inspired by Arab Christian thinkers, to construct a non-Islamic polity for the region—has been politically bankrupt for a generation. The torchbearers of that once proud legacy are Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and Syria's Hafez al-Assad, both members of the secularist Ba'ath, or “Resurrection” Party.
More than any other single factor, this sense of wounded dignity, thwarted expectations, and even “impotent envy,” as a Middle East observer once put it, fuels the many and varied movements that Western media tend to lump under the label “Islamic fundamentalism.”
The term itself derives from press coverage of the 1978 Iranian revolution in which, to the dismay of most Americans, the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the pro-Western regime of the Shah of Iran and instituted an Islamic republic. But since the early years of that decade, Western observers had warned of a thunderstorm brewing in the form of a resurgent militant Islam in countries from Morocco to the Philippines. The “hostage” crises of the late ‘70s and ’80s in which American embassy personnel, journalists, academics and aid workers were held as bargaining chips in war-torn Lebanon and Iran sealed the imagery in most Western minds.
As Godfrey Jansen describes it in his 1979 study, Militant Islam: “The image that the Western observer … take[s] away … is one of … strange, bearded men with burning eyes, hieratic figures in robes and turbans….”
Such images, of course, do an injustice to the majority of the world's Muslims, including the majority of religiously observant ones. Even militant Islam (a better term than “fundamental-ist”) is a many-sided phenomenon. And, far from being something new, it's as old as Islam itself. As last week's article indicated, Mohammed left behind the outlines of a way of life when he died in 632. That way of life encompassed not only religious practices, but principles of state and government.
Prophetic Succession
Two problems, however, emerged nearly as soon as the prophet had left the stage. The needs of the vast Muslim empire that came into being within a generation of his death soon rendered the governmental principles elaborated in the Medinan surahs (or chapters) of the Koran inadequate. In a process that took centuries, the recollections of his first followers were collated in the Hadith (traditions), along with learned attempts to find, or fabricate, prophetic backing for the ever-growing body of Islamic law. The whole of this vast literature is called the Sunnah (the trodden path).
The problem of Mohammed's successor, however, proved an even more serious challenge. Many of the divisions that continue to plague Islam and that, in some cases, fuel today's militant movement, flow in the wake of the tragedies which befell the umma, or community, in its “golden age,” even as its armies swept over lands from the Mediterranean to the borders of India.
Of the first four rulers to succeed the prophet, the so-called khalifah al-rashidun (the right-guided caliphs), Abu Bakr, Omar, Osman, and Ali, whose reigns lasted from 632 to 661, two were assassinated and one was cut down by his enemies in his home while reading the Koran. (The title “caliph” means “deputy” of the prophet.)
With the massacre of Hussein, Ali's son, in 680, a second civil war ensued that did not end until a decade later. In the meantime, the Ummayid dynasty had emerged in Damsacus (661-750) with a far more secular profile (the founder, Mu'awiya, referred to himself, significantly, not as a “caliph, ”but as malik, or “king”).
The main result of the bloody “golden age” was that Islam split into its two major groups, the majority Sunni (“orthodox,” roughly 90%) and the Shi'ah (or “sectarian,” 9%, mostly in Iran, but with significant minorities in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Oman). The Ibadiyya are another small, but important grouping, living mostly in Oman.
Opposing Movements
While there were many causes for the two civil wars that sundered Islamic unity in the 30 years after the prophet's death, the crisis of the succession tops the list.
The Sunni majority took a largely pragmatic view. Basing their approach to the crisis on the Koran and the Hadiths, they laid stress on the concept of the “consensus of the community.”
For the Shi'a, however, it was a strictly dynastic matter. Only Ali, the son-in-law of Mohammed, represented the legitimate line of succession. Anything less was betrayal. Beyond that, they viewed the caliph merely as a secular head of state and believed that the community should be led by the imam (“model,” “exemplar”), a charismatic, semi-divine leader who would act as a mediator between heaven and earth. (Orthodox Muslim scholars point out that there may be pre-Islamic Persian elements in aspects of the Shi'a creed.)
As for the Ibadiyya, they believe that anyone can become head of the Muslim community, provided such a person possesses the necessary qualifications.
There were other differences as well. The Shi'a, unlike their Sunni counterparts, viewed Islam as a cause betrayed, a force arrayed against a hostile world, and cultivated a devotion to suffering and to martyrdom in imitation of the murdered caliph-saints Ali and Hussein. Whereas the Sunni took, and take, what might be called a developmental approach to Islamic life, the Shi'a hearkened back to a lost “golden age” of purity and conquest that had been forfeited by Muslims due to infidelity and compromise.
Middle Eastern historian Bernard Lewis sums it up this way: “[The Shi'a] appealed with great success to the discontented masses … and became essentially the expression in religious terms of opposition to the state and the established order….”
Not surprisingly, Shi'ism gave rise to many militant movements in Islam as well as to a number of heretical Islamic offshoots—the Druze and the Alawites, for example. The tenor of some of these groups may be suggested by the fact that the English word “assassin” is derived from a Shi'a—inspired movement, the Isma'ilis.
Catholic Crusaders exploited such divisions when they invaded the Middle East in 1099 and established Christian fiefdoms along the Eastern Mediterranean seaboard. However, a century later Sunni forces succeeded both in achieving religious hegemony over their sectarian rivals and in expelling the last Crusader knights from Acre in 1299.
Nevertheless, the Arab caliphate perished under the Mongol onslaught in 1258, never to return. (Sherif Hussein, T.E. Lawrence's friend, the king of Hejaz, proclaimed himself caliph in 1916, to little effect.) The non-Arabs Seljuk Turks, the Ottomans, launched their colorful bid for leadership of the Islamic world at the end of the 14th century, including a stab at a sort of caliphate that fooled no one and ended with a whimper in 1924.
Meanwhile, Muslim intellectuals, increasingly disillusioned with the Ottoman model, pondered what a truly Islamic state might look like.
The very first organized manifestation of what might be called militant or revolutionary Islam in modern times started in what is today Saudi Arabia. The movement, which took the peninsula by storm, arose just before Napoleon landed his troops in Egypt in 1798-an act that signaled renewed Western involvement in the region's affairs. Mohammed ibn Abdel-Wahab (1703-1787) won the enthusiastic support of tribal chieftains in their Arabian peninsula by advocating a stern program of reform that would return to the policies of the first Islamic generation, opposing all that had been added to the Muslim faith since then.
Wahabism pitted itself firmly against mysticism, the veneration of Islamic saints, the orthodox schools of Islamic jurisprudence, and even the cult of Mohammed as the perfect man. The Wahabi revolt went so far as to raid and destroy the tombs of Islamic heroes.
While a watered-down Wahabism is the state religion of Saudi Arabia today, the themes raised by the 200-year-old revolt continue to have wider resonances in the region and in Islam as a whole—especially the theme of a return to a pristine form of Islam, and to a political life lived entirely on the basis of shari'a, traditional Islamic law. There are very few modern Islamic movements whose program would not rest on those two goals.
But the grandfather of many of the current Islamic movements hails from Egypt where Hassan el-Banna, a schoolteacher, formed the Muslim Brotherhood, or Ikwan, in the Suez Canal city of Ismailia in 1928.
The Ikwan boasts more than 100,000 members in Egypt, a country of 60 million, in addition to a vast network of sympathizers—even though the organization has been officially outlawed since 1954. (Since the mid-1980s, the Brotherhood has been permitted to publish political ads and to field candidates in conjunction with the Socialist Labor Party.)
The Ikwan, envisioned a revived Islamic state from the Nile to the Mediterranean and fought the further importation of Western law, political thought, and mores into the Arab world.
Hunted and persecuted by various Arab regimes, they eventually turned to waging urban guerrilla warfare. Banna himself was assassinated in 1949, and his organization proscribed in the aftermath of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers' 1952 coup d'etat against Egyptian King Farrouk.
In recent years, the Ikwan professes to pursue its program by nonviolent means.
The same does not hold true for many of its stepchildren: Hamas, the Syrian-based Islamic Holy War, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman's Islamic Group, Lebanon's Iranian-financed Hezbollah, and the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria.
Islamic ‘Radicalism’
Two seminal events in the 1960s and '70s set off an explosion of Islamic radicalism through out the Islamic world that continues to reverberate in our world: the 1967 Middle East War, and the Iranian revolution of 1978.
As Jansen writes of the 1967 War between Israel and the Arab states: “The defeat was so complete that it revealed the weakness not just of the Arab military machine but of the whole of Arab society, which is an Islamic society…. [What it showed] was that none of the various political systems the Muslim states had adopted seemed to work.”
The result of the setbacks was that more people looked to Islam for solutions, and the Islam they adopted became more militant. The successful rout of a pro-Western, though non-Arab, Middle Eastern regime in the 1978 Iranian revolution only encouraged the trend.
But, as it has turned out, in the nearly 20 years since the Iranian revolution, neither Western fears nor Islamic hopes, for the most part, have been realized.
For those hoping that militant Islam, with its shari'a-based economies and “Islamic” banks and morals police, would provide the path to the future, the landscape is bleaker than it used to be. Iran's experiment looks increasingly fragile. Sudan's attempt to create an Islamic state governed by shari'a has unleashed a brutal civil war that shows few signs of ending. And the Islamic Salvation Front has helped turn Algeria into a blood bath.
Destination Unknown
On the other hand, the Middle East has not been overrun by Islamic revolutionary movements. Secular states like Turkey, so far, have managed to turn back the challenge of Islamic-based political parties. Jordan has skillfully insured the participation of Islamic parties in its political process without losing its balance. And newly self-governing Palestinians, for all the political challenges they face, are not embracing the blueprint of their own Islamic radicals.
Perhaps the wisest thing that can be said at the end of this, one of Islam's most vibrant and difficult centuries, was said recently by historian Bernard Lewis:
“Only this much can be said,” Lewis wrote in a recent assessment of Iran's Islamic experiment, “that what is in progress is producing vast, deep, and irreversible changes, and that the forces that are causing these changes are not yet spent and that their destination is still unknown.”
Next week: Islam & Catholic Church
Gabriel Meyer writes from Los Angeles.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Gabriel Meyer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Abortion Issue Forces GOP Soul Searching DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:Party unity or principles? Pro-life players have different priorities
NEW YORK—Where does the center of the Republican Party lie? How far to the left can politicians stand and still gain support of the party that has formed a strong constituency by stressing social conservatism and family values? How does a party member respond to the vote last January of the Republican National Committee (RNC) to continue funding candidates who support partial-birth abortion, which is in fact infanticide?
These questions have been thrust to the forefront by prominent pro-life, pro-family advocates who have expressed a growing impatience with the Party of Lincoln. With ardent prolifers such as Pennsylvania's Sen. Rick
Santorum and Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois pleading party unity and “big tent” politics while favoring the funding of candidates who support partial-birth abortion, many worry about the soul of the party. As early Republicans rallied around the slavery issue, many modern-day GOP members appear ready to draw the line at late-term abortion and related life issues.
New Jersey Rep. Christopher Smith bemoaned that his party leadership “went back to the big tent ideas of party unity” with the partial-birth abortion candidate funding vote. But he advised pro-life Republicans to stick with the party and push for change.
A couple of visible and well-funded Republican figures outside of Congress, however, are not waiting for elected officials to take the moral lead as the midterm elections approach. Gary Bauer, president of the Family Research Council, a Washington-based conservative group, entered the political fray in a big way during a recent California congressional run-off. He aired pro-life television ads during the January primary, and poked open a GOP wound by supporting a pro-life Republican candidate over a “pro-choice” one.
Dr. James Dobson, the popular radio personality, whose Focus on the Family ministry was the parent organization of Family Research Council when Bauer took the helm of the latter in 1989, recently expressed disappointment bordering on despair regarding the direction of the GOP. He said that he and other disenchanted Republicans would consider leaving the party if a viable alternative emerged.
These independent-minded conservative leaders have plenty of recent events to mull over. Yet they and their followers are justified in wondering how truly conservative the party has been in past decades. A New York Times interview with Gerald Ford appeared in January in which the former president and House minority leader blamed an “ultra-conservative” pro-life agenda for threatening Republican chances for the White House in 2000. He stated that he and his wife, Betty, are proud to be “strongly pro-choice” and lamented the influence of pro-life “zealots” who make abortion a partisan issue.
Ronald Reagan, pro-life leaders have pointed out, supported the cause with many moving words and symbolic acts, but did little in concrete terms during his eight years as president to bring an end to abortion.
Current legislators also show chinks in their pro-life stands. Santorum has not taken back one word of his eloquent Senate floor statements on partial-birth abortion, yet he found time last year to campaign for Gov. Christine Whitman, who vetoed a bill to ban partial-birth abortion in New Jersey. Explaining his action, Santorum said that pro-life advocates dissuaded him from Whitman's campaign, but the practicalities of politics were compelling. Whitman's opponent held the same view on abortion as she, said the senator, and she had been a strong fiscal conservative in her first term as governor. A pro-life, third-party candidate will not win, Santorum added.
In response, some pro-lifers have wondered how such candidates will ever win if major party leaders refuse to support them over the long haul.
Determined to break the cycle of Republican leaders placing politics over principle, Bauer is going right to the people with a clear, uncompromising message. Considered by some observers to be the nation's most influential political conservative (Washington's neoconservative Weekly Standard recently bore the headline “Bauer Power”), he used an increasingly popular tactic—what may be called “direct-market lobby-ing”—in the California runoff last January. In doing so, he cut to the heart of the party's woes by throwing his support behind a pro-life candidate against a pro-abortion one in the Republican primary.
Through his action group, Campaign for Working Families, Bauer pumped some $100,000 into pro-life television ads, appealing directly to the voters with adorable images of newborn babies, which graphically highlighted the realities of partial-birth abortion and underlined the fundamental difference between pro-life and “pro-choice.” Bauer's candidate, Tom Bordonaro, won the primary over the hand-picked favorite of the Republican establishment, Brooks Firestone. A 38-year-old state assemblyman, Bordonaro was set for the run-off election on March 10 against the heavily favored Democrat Lois Capps, the wife of the congressman whose death late last year brought about the special election. In the three-way preliminary election in January, which served as the Republican primary (there was no Democratic opponent), Capps gained 44.9% of the votes, to Bordonaro's 29.1% and 26% for Firestone.
Assuming Bordonaro's defeat, a question arises. What did Bauer have to gain by throwing his weight and significant funds behind a likely loser?
Skeptics will see personal political ambitions, perhaps a presidential run, for Bauer, who was undersecretary of education and later chief domestic-policy adviser for Reagan. After all, Bauer made a big splash in a small congressional pond that was highly visible for the simple reason that it was the only national race at the time.
Others, while not necessarily discounting political ambitions for Bauer, will see a moral crusader of integrity investing money in a visible arena to call attention to pro-life issues and show the clear moral schism within the Republican Party. His ads by all accounts did win votes for his candidate, and caused establishment Republicans to come running to Bordonaro's side after the primary to seize the agenda in his campaign against Capps.
Amid Planned Parenthood-type ads designed to discount both Bauer and Bordonaro, mainstream Republicans spent about $400,000 for ads seeking to reposition Bordonaro away from abortion and toward the “real” issues of taxes and spending. Such tactics do not appear to present the party unity that GOP pro-life and pro-abortion members are touting as paramount.
Lincoln, the first Republican president and no stranger to the Bible, said that a house divided against itself cannot stand. Bauer and Dobson are notable in that they do not shy from exposing the party's present fissures.
The conservative, moral mind set also may be gleaned from Dobson's bluntly expressed disappointment, bordering on despair, about the party's direction—especially in the RNC's vote to continue funding candidates who favor keeping legal a form of infanticide. He said that he would consider leaving the Republicans for an independent party, one that would not play politics and plead “big tent” on abortion and family issues.
Between Dobson's radio audience and Bauer's claim of 400,000 donors, the two could flex political muscle within the party in the forthcoming mid-term elections for the House of Representatives and a third of the Senate. Moral persuasion, when taken on a wide public plane, is unavoidably political, since moral standards are fundamental to a polity—a people living under a rule for the common good.
In this light, Bauer's venture into “direct-market lobbying” on TV in the California race can be seen as a testing of the temper of the polity for November. Win or lose with Bordonaro, his Family Research Council gained valuable information and experience in a limited campaign. He will no doubt bring up partial-birth abortion and the full family agenda (with a larger advertising budget) while backing candidates in the fall.
Brian Caulfield writes from New York.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian Caulfield ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: In Asia, Church Leads Fight Against Child Prostitution DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:NEW DELHI, India—Teenage girls are a rare sight in Ichowk village, northern Nepal. Most of them are in brothels in Mumbai and other Indian cities. “Abducted or sold by their own parents, husbands, or friends of the family, the girls are brought to cities, sold and distributed like commodities for prostitution,” according to an Oxfam Nepal study on the flesh trade in the Himalayan republic.
The root cause of child prostitution is “poverty and the great demand by pedophiles for [young] children,” said Lea Robidillo, Asia desk coordinator for the International Catholic Child Bureau (ICCB).
Many poor children from rural areas are forced into prostitution amid the booming tourism trade in Asian countries. The “importation” of children from rural areas and even across borders to tourist centers is common practice throughout many Asian nations. Girls from Laos and Vietnam work in sex shops in Taiwan and Thailand that masquerade as pubs and restaurants. Bangladeshi and Nepali girls, barely in their teens, abound in the red-light areas in India.
According to the Thailand-based ECPAT (End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism), eight Asian nations account for more than one million child prostitutes. India and Thailand head the list with more than 300,000 child prostitutes; in China, there are more than 200,000. The Philippines and Taiwan come next with approximately 100,000 each. Vietnam and Sri Lanka, respectively, have more than 40,000 and 30,000 child sex workers. Just 15 years ago Sri Lanka had only about 300 child prostitutes—mostly boys.
“The Church has played a prophetic role in exposing the evil of child prostitution behind tourism,” says Redemptorist Father Desmond D'Souza, former secretary of the Ecumenical Coalition against Third World Tourism (ECTWT), which was founded by the Protestant Christian Conference of Asia in the late 1970s.
During the 1980 World Tourism Organization conclave in Manila, The Philippines, the ECTWT coalition, led by the Catholic Church, held a simultaneous “critique” of tourism in which the dangers of unbridled tourism on local people were highlighted. Since then, the campaign by the ecumenical forum of Churches has helped “focus international attention on prostitution rackets behind tourism,” Father D'Souza recently told the Register.
Child prostitution attracted the attention of the forum in 1990 when a U.S. researcher released police data on pedophiles. “Only then did we realize it was happening all around,” said Father D'Souza, ECTWT secretary during 1990-93.
“With the boom in tourism, children were in great demand. The demand had reached such gigantic proportions that many villages in Thailand had no children.” Children were even brought from China, Vietnam, and Cambodia to tourist centers in Thailand, Taiwan, and the Philippines—all former (U.S.) army bases where prostitution was already entrenched.
“We decided to launch a separate forum to combat child prostitution. That was ECPAT,” the priest said. Elaborating further, Father D'Souza, who now campaigns against child prostitution in Goa, a popular destination on the Arabian coast for Westerners seeking “sex vacations,” said that “since the tourism lobby had launched counter-efforts against us (ECTWT), we thought it would be better to have a separate forum to highlight child prostitution. It is primarily because of ECPAT efforts fully supported by Asian Churches that child prostitution has become an international concern now.”
The forum is not just operating from Bangkok. “Every major Asian NGO (non-governmental organizations)—both Christian and secular—look to the forum for guidance in the fight against child prostitution,” said the Redemptorist priest.
Shirley Peiris of PEACE (Protecting Environment and Children Everywhere) said, “Commercial sexual exploitation of children in Sri Lanka began with the boost given to tourism, the open economy, and investment promotion zones. Pedophiles came in large numbers on charter flights and tourist visas were easily obtained.”
The blind pursuit of tourists' dollars has cost Sri Lanka and other Asian countries dearly. “Now it [child prostitution] is not confined to the tourist industry. We have our local pedophiles engaging in sex with children,” Peiris told the Register.
Prostitution has been a problem in Thailand for many years. But it was exacerbated in the 1960s with the presence of the U.S. military bases during the Vietnam War. It has continued to grow due to demand by locals and tourists.
The Thai city of Pattaya, about 80 miles north of Bangkok, is a favorite destination for Western pedophiles. “Sex tourists,” even in their 60s and 70s, can be seen strolling the streets with their arms around girls barely into their teens.
“The ongoing economic liberalization has obviously led to an increase in the number of visitors to the country,” says Good Shepherd Sister Michael Lopez, who heads Fountain of Life Center, Pattaya's premier rehabilitation center for child prostitutes. “This has aggravated the child prostitution problem.”
In response to the problem, Vietnamese government officials and Church workers gathered for four days last October to hammer out an action plan to counter child prostitution. The meeting came in the wake of reports that pedophilia was spreading in Vietnam and that the country was providing thousands of child prostitutes to neighboring nations.
The ICCB in Asia runs several programs for children damaged by prostitution in China and the Philippines. It also sponsors preventive projects in northern Thailand by developing community awareness about the dignity of the child. These projects are targeted “to alleviate the effects of child prostitution by furthering the understanding of these children's experiences and to ensure re-integration into normal life,” said the ICCB's Robidillo.
Since its founding in 1990, PEACE has pioneered the campaign against commercial sexual exploitation of children in Sri Lanka. It has motivated NGOs including the YWCA and LEADS (Lanka Evangelical Alliance Development Society) and Church workers to launch rehabilitation programs for child victims of sexual abuse. It has also succeeded in motivating the Protestant and Buddhist communities to put the child prostitution problem high on their agenda.
Sri Lanka ratified the U.N.‘s Convention on the Rights of the Child five years ago. In 1995, the penal code was amended to impose seven to 20 years’ imprisonment for sexual offenses and payment of compensation for victims. While a presidential task force for elimination of child sexual abuse was established in early 1996, a bill to set up a child protection authority is still being drafted.
Child advocates attribute the steady growth in child prostitution—despite laws against pedophilia—to “lethargic” law enforcement. For instance, Victor Bauman, a Swiss millionaire settled in Sri Lanka, was deported to Switzerland in March 1996 on pedophilia charges. Had Bauman's trial been conducted in Sri Lanka, it is unlikely that any measure of justice would have been served.
“If he had been charged here, it is doubtful he would have gone to prison,” said Salesian Father Anthony Humer Pinto who spearheads the campaign against pedophiles in Negombo, a tourist magnet near Colombo. “Even if he had been convicted, he has so much money, he would have been a king inside prison.”
Thailand has laws to curb child prostitution too. “The problem,” Sister Lopez said, “has been with the enforcement of these laws.” She acknowledged that a widespread campaign against child prostitution during the last few years had led to “stricter enforcement of the laws and more prosecutions, but the menace is still very much there.”
While prostitution damages the mental health of children, there is also a grave physical toll. “With the spread of HIV-AIDS, children are in greater demand in the sex trade as clients think sex with children will be safer. Greater numbers of children are being introduced into prostitution,” said Christian Brother S. James, ICCB South Asia coordinator.
The commercial sexual exploitation of children is “promoted and maintained by criminal networks, a nexus between police, politicians, and the Mafia,” noted Brother James, a member of the government's juvenile justice board in the Tamil Nadu state in southern India. The worst part, he added, “is that the legal system and the society as a whole treat these children more as those in conflict with the law than as victims needing protection and rehabilitation.”
Determined campaigning against child prostitution by NGOs, including Church groups, has met with some success in influencing society at large. Holy Family Sister Lawrencia Marques won a national award for social service last year with her pioneering work among prostitutes in Baina Beach in Goa.
A former Portuguese colony, nearly half of Goa's 1.2 million residents are Catholic. But Sister Marques, who heads Asha Sadan (House of Hope), said her work among prostitutes brought into the country by flesh traders has met with resistance even from local Catholics. In her programs to rescue prostitutes and their children by sending them to boarding schools away from the notorious beach, Sister Marques faces opposition. Those thriving from the prostitution trade are obviously opposed to her work, but surprisingly she said that “even Catholic women were upset with us. They see no reason why we of Goan origin should take up the cause of shameless women from elsewhere?”
Though local Churches are increasingly vocal about the atmosphere that has helped “sex tourism” flourish, the problem shows no signs of letting up soon. In a recent letter, the Indian bishops lamented that “South Asia with its lax laws, extreme poverty, and thirst for dollars is emerging as a new destination” for pedophiles.
Anto Akkara writes from New Delhi.
------- EXCERPT: Poor children are primary victims of Western 'sex tourists' ----- EXTENDED BODY: Anto Akkara ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: As Unemployment Rises, France Wrangles With Workers DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:PARIS, FRANCE—The marchers took to the streets, invaded and occupied offices in Marseilles, Martigues, Aix—en Povence, Aubagne, and Arjes in the south of France; in Rennes, Lorient, Chatejjererault, and Poiters in the western region; in Arras in the north, and Bordeaux in the southwest. In Paris, workers occupied a high school. For employees who have found it nearly impossible to secure “a fair day's wage for a fair day's work,” it was a necessary and justified action.
Although the demonstrations earlier this year were carried out by a small number of protesters, their determination and actions were significant. Their protest is proof that social and economic situations in France are causing serious problems. Last year, French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin made job creation and employment a pillar of his election campaign.
A deeper understanding of the situation in France requires understanding who the strikers are, why they saw the need to take such action, and the role unions played in that action.
The protesters are not just the employed, but the long-term unemployed—more than one-third of the jobless have been without work for at least a year. They were demanding bonuses, a minimum wage, formal legal status in the negotiations with the government, and a guaranteed package of social benefits.
Jospin's Socialist government earmarked 1 billion francs ($165 million) for the jobless—a measure that neither answered the current unemployment situation nor satisfied the unemployed—and the prime minister at a loss for a satisfactory solution. Nobody expected the recent marches and building occupations, because the unemployed had kept silent for nearly 30 years—even though the unemployment rate has risen steadily to 12.4% today. Some 25 years before, however, then-President George Pompidou predicted that when unemployment reached 1 million in France, there would be a revolution.
Demonstrations in France are generally unpopular. However, on this occasion the French public recognized and encouraged the demonstrators—60% of the public gave their approval. The explanation is simple: growing unemployment rates are a concern for everyone.
The crisis is even more serious since the French appear to have lost faith in new job opportunities. Governmental aids such as ASSEDIC (Welfare Center For the Unemployed) are of little consolation—75% of the unemployed who receive ASSEDIC assistance get between $328 and $821 monthly.
What warranted attention though is not government aid, but that almost 3 million members of the labor force—15% of the wage earners—earn less than $821 monthly. These individuals receive no help from the government. Financially speaking, holding a job is not the solution to overcoming poverty.
Many of those without work fall into the long-term unemployed category, with the majority ranging in age between 40 and 50 years old. The prospects for these people ever finding employment are very slim.
Finally, and most importantly, the costs of creating new jobs, even for low wage earners, are high due to the taxes companies are forced to pay, effectively becoming a disincentive for job creation.
In an effort to decrease unemployment, the government reduced the number of weekly working hours in an attempt to divide the labor force into smaller units. The measure was initially popular among workers and those seeking employment, but many economists have expressed reservations about the strategy, which Jospin hopes the government will accept.
Role of the Unions
The dissatisfaction with government programs is only part of the reason for the marches and demonstrations. The intervention of labor unions—among them, Act Together Against Unemployment (ACI), Association For Employment, Information, and Solidarity (APEIS), The National Movement of the Precarious Jobless (MNCP), and General Congregation for the Workers (CGT)—has not improved the situation.
With the help of the mass media the unions orchestrated widespread protests, though many reports characterized the demonstrations as spontaneous reactions of dissatisfied workers. But among them, only the MNCP seems to be devoid of any political influence. It was founded in 1982 when it broke away from the union for the unemployed. Both the CGT and the APEIS have links to the Communist Party. The ACI's political alliances are more nebulous. What is known is that the movement, founded in 1994, has leftwing activists such as Alain Kricine, of the LCR (Revolutionary Communist Party) in its ranks.
According to the unions, it is difficult to organize the jobless. If membership numbers are an accurate indication, the MNCP has 15,000-20,000 members; the APEIS, 25,000 members; and the CGT, 15,000 members. ACI numbers are unknown. The ACI reports that, among its numbers, 40% are unemployed, whereas 80% of MNCP members are unemployed, indicating that the ACI has little interest in dealing with the daily problems of the unemployed.
Nicole Notat, general secretary of the Federal Confederation of Workers (CFDT), has been managing the National Union For Employment in Industry (UNEDIC). The UNEDIC has a compensation system based on insurance to which each wage earner subscribes if employed for more than a year. Notat used the term “manipulation of the distresses” to indicate that the unemployed are “used” in order to destabilize his organization. What is certain is that Notat's opponents—a few CFDT militants, and members of the ACI-benefited from the workers'plight.
Other unions also used the situation to enhance their image and to convince the socialist government and the public that they are still powerful. On Jan. 2, in its confederal head office, the CGT organized a meeting for several of the associations in order to coordinate different protests.
The president of the French Confederation of Christian Workers (CFTC), Alain Deleu, expressed his concerns with the methods used by some of the movements (see sidebar). He said that although they had differing opinions and approaches to combating unemployment in the country, they should be united in their approach to creating work and finding solutions to existing problems between employers and their employees. He said the estimated number of people at or below the poverty line had risen to approximately 7 million, and that it was up to the unions to unite in their fight for the worker and for job creation.
“The way [toward progress] is to be united in the fight against unemployment—and our actions and proposals should reflect this,” he said. “Unemployment is a violation to people. It is a scourge that destroys social [bonds] and [is] also the root of violence.”
He added that by depriving man of work, “you hit at the very heart of his humanity.”
The prime minister has not only had to deal with the problem of unemployment but also with the different leanings of his government. Jospin had hoped to avoid any instability, first of all by announcing more compensation for the jobless and then by showing his authority to some of his ministers, most particularly Dominque Voynet—the ecologist minister of environment—and Marie-George Buffet—the communist Minister of Youth and Sports—who both had supported the unemployment movement.
It's a hard economic and social situation for unemployed people and wage earners, and with the many political interests and concerns involved, it seems France faces an uncertain future.
Nathalie Duplan writes from Paris.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Nathalie Duplan ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Amid Difficulties, Faith Blossoms in Russia DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, appointed apostolic administrator to European Russia by Pope John Paul II in 1991, has been faced with tough challenges in Russia's emerging democracy. A measure enacted by the government last fall has posed serious threats to the Catholic Church's continued existence in the former Soviet republic.
During the archbishop's recent visit to the United States, Register assistant editor Peter Sonski spoke to him about the so-called “religious freedom” legislation, Catholic relations with the Orthodox Church in Russia, and the effects of political and economic transition on the Russian people.
Personal: Ethnic Pole, born in 1946 in Odelsk (part of Belarus); entered seminary in Kaunas, Lithuania, in 1976 and was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Vilnius, (Lithuania) in 1981. Ordained titular bishop of Ippona Zarito and appointed apostolic administrator or Minsk (Belarus) by Pope John Paul II in 1989; made apostolic administrator of European Russia in 1991, a 2.5 million square-mile jurisdiction.
Education: Studied physics and mathematics at the Pedagogical Institute of Grodno until 1962, when as a practicing Christian, he was forced to leave by the Communist Party; later studied engineering at the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute; received a licentiate in sacred theology (STL) from the Kaunas diocesan seminary in 1985.
Background: Founded two seminaries and a Catholic college (to educate catechists) and re-opened more than 125 parish churches in former Soviet Republics; has overseen the distribution of tens of thousands of copies of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Roman Missal in Polish and Russian translations.
Sonski: You've stated that since the enactment of Russia's “religious freedom” law there hasn't been much change for the Catholic Church there. Do you foresee changes coming?
Archbishop Kondrusiewicz: We haven't had any difficulties with the new law. In practical terms, the Church has been without too many obstacles. It is not as though there may not be some problems, but we have no norms of application [statutes of the law] as yet.
But they're being drafted?
The government will draft them, but unfortunately, up to today, they have not. So, the law is in a static state. It doesn't work yet [because the norms haven't been defined]. We now need to prepare for the future re-registration of the parishes, and so on. We will face some difficulties with re-registration but I hope we will be able to re-register all our structures.
I have already prepared a proposal for the apostolic administration's status. I am ready to go to the minister of justice when it is announced that it is possible to do so.
Do you think that the Church will have some input on these statutes or decrees? Will the government take your recommendations into consideration?
Well, they sent us proposals and asked for our recommendations. I met with some officials in the Russian government a few months ago and I feel that we will be re-registered, with some difficulties, as I mentioned. We will face difficulties with the re-registration of religious orders, and practically speaking, I am very, very doubtful that all the religious orders will be re-registered, maybe except the Jesuits, Franciscans, and some others that were in the current territory—the current borders of the Russian federation—before 1917.
To be re-registered as an apostolic administration, or as a religious order, first you need to re-register at a centralized location. In order to do this you need to have three already-registered parishes or religious communities. Currently, we have 96 parishes, so I feel we will not have difficulty. But, to re-register independent religious orders—for example, the Jesuit order in Russia—you must have three monasteries. They [the Jesuits] don't have even one—so that is a problem.
Technically, they would have to stop [their ministry] and wait 15 years [to re-register]. But they have been in Russia for a long time—before 1917—so I believe they have a right to declare this fact and to continue their work. For other orders, such as the Salesians-new orders, that had never been in Russia before 1917—it is very, very difficult.
We are lucky, in some cases, because the Church is centralized. All 96 parishes belong to the apostolic administration and new parishes, which were established two, three, five years ago, which never existed before 1917—we have such parishes—do not need to wait 15 years, because these parishes, though newly erected, belong to the apostolic administration, which is a Russian centralized religious organization. I emphasize that term: Russian centralized religious organization. We are lucky in this case, because paragraph 27 [of the law] is very, very difficult for all religious establishments that do not belong to a centralized religious organization. They face enormous difficulties.
In hindsight, do you think the Catholic Church did all it could during the debate and discussions about this bill to forestall any adverse effects?
We did what we could. Immediately after it was approved [in the Russian Parliament] last July, the Holy Father sent a letter, and the U.S. Congress and bishops' conference protested. Also, I sent a letter to President [Boris] Yeltsin urging him not to sign it. He didn't sign.
He vetoed the bill?
Yes, he vetoed, and we were very happy. But in three months he signed. I participated in maybe five or six meetings discussing some changes—I was not able to participate in all meetings. It was so difficult—practically impossible. What I achieved was in the introduction to the law; the preamble was changed. They changed it to include a definition of Christianity. That was my idea.
Another thing, we avoided so-called “pan-Russian religious organizations.” In previous texts, such a description existed, but now, there is no mention. It is very important for us because, in our current state, we never would be able to accept such status, in Russian religious reorganization. It was very difficult, but I was supported by Muslims. There are about 20 million, maybe 22 million, Muslims in Russia, but they are not present in more than half of the Russian federations, in only 45 or so regions of Russia, so they supported me in the centralized approach.
The Orthodox did not invite you, or the papal nuncio, to participate in their Christmas celebrations last year for the second straight year. Dialogue continues, but issues of proselytism and confiscation of churches remain sources of contention between the Orthodox and the Catholic Church.
Yes, you're right. I was not invited; the nuncio wasn't invited. We were not invited last Easter and last Christmas. I don't know what happened, but nevertheless, we do what we can do.
Are the Orthodox more cooperative with other religious denominations in Russia? It seems to me that they are more friendly with the Muslims and Buddhists in Russia than they are with the Russian Catholics.
Well, as I mentioned, there are 20 million or 22 million Muslims in Russia, and they play quite a remarkable role in Russian society. Now, we have a lot of contacts, but…. Maybe it's not significant that we were not invited to participate. I don't know; I don't know why we were not invited. I don't know about the Protestants—whether or not they were invited—but I have never seen them at the celebrations before.
How are you handling the relations with the Orthodox in terms of their anxieties about proselytism?
I made a lot of statements and I don't agree with such accusations [of proselytism] against the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church in Russia has not existed for just the past five, six, or seven years. Some of its parishes were established in the 12th century. It's true that we have been, and are currently, in the minority, but I do not agree with these accusations and I am against such [a practice]- especially after the Second Vatican Council announced that the Orthodox Church is our sister Church.
But on the other hand, it is a choice, for each person, to go to one Church or to another Church. And every Russian, pure Russian, has a choice to go to the Orthodox Church, or to the Catholic Church—or to be a Buddhist or a Muslim. It is his choice, and now more and more the Eastern religions are coming to Russia. I know a lot of Russians who belong to these religions.
Is it your understanding that the Church in Russia is there to shepherd the Catholic faithful exclusively, or do they serve the additional objective of assisting the needs of the Russian people—the spiritual needs of those people?
First of all, I see my service and that of the Catholic Church as being to Catholics, but we are open to others. We do not say “Don't go to the Orthodox Church, come to us.” But we are open. The doors of our Church are open for everybody and I can't say to pure Russians, “I do not baptize you; please go out from my church and go to the Orthodox Church.” This would be a violation of his right. [The churches] are open for everybody. First of all, they are for the Catholics, but we are open for everybody.
And the second thing, I see the mission of the Catholic Church to help the Russian Orthodox Church, especially in the area of catechization-because under the communists, during the three generations, the 70 years of persecution, all the Churches were suppressed. All the Churches were persecuted, but especially the Orthodox Church. She was closed, so they had no means for catechization. They had no developed social teaching. A lot of people are coming to us, so we can help with this—and also with charitable activities. In many cases we are helping.
Recently I met with local [Orthodox] authorities, and the archbishop, who was very pleased with the translation of the new Catechism into the Russian language. He asked me, “Please send us as many copies as possible to the seminary and to our parishes, because we can use this material.” He was ecstatic. This is also our service—for the Universal Church, for the salvation of the people.
A lot of people, including the Orthodox hierarchy, have asked for copies [of documents] of the Church's social teaching. It is very useful to them also. For example, in our college of Catholic theology in Moscow, dedicated to St. Thomas Aquinas, about 30% of students are Orthodox. I don't know another theological school in Russia with such openings for everybody.
No one came to me and declared, “I don't like to be Orthodox, I would like to be Catholic.” They remain Orthodox, but they are receiving some knowledge. It's the same in the West. I don't know about America, but I hope that there are not only Catholics in Catholic universities. It seems to me that it is true here as well.
I would like to underline once more, we are for the Catholics, but we are open for everybody.
Catholic and Orthodox celebrations this past Christmas attracted unprecedented numbers. Is there a religious revitalization going on in Russia?
Yes. I never have seen so many people during Christmas. I was present in two churches in Moscow. Later, I visited several churches and received information from different regions that there the participation during Christmas was very, very big. Our churches and chapels were overcrowded. You're right. It is a sign, not of revitalization, but evangelization.
On the other hand, it was in 1992 or 1993 that a lot of people left our services. Those who remained, I believe, know why they come to the Church. Now it is not enough to say that God exists, and that it is very useful for people to believe in God, and so on. The people, especially young people of intelligence, like to have presented profound Church teaching or catechization.
What has been your relationship with Bishop Joseph Werth SJ in the Siberia region? Do you desire a closer cooperation and is there hope of forming a bishops' conference of sorts?
Well, to create a bishops' conference, we need some more bishops. We are only two, so it is difficult. But we have a lot of common problems. We share the diocesan seminary in Moscow, about which we meet very often. When he travels there he stops at my house. We have many things in common: Caritas, and some other things.
If not a bishops' conference in Russia, what about in the ex-Soviet republics?
I had such an idea even in 1991, but it was very difficult to realize. It was a time when many republics were struggling for freedom, and to organize such a conference, practically, was impossible. Maybe in the future we will have something.
We have some meetings. Quite often I go to Lithuania. I have close relationships with the bishops in Belarus and Ukraine. From time to time we have meetings to discuss or develop pastoral direction. It is very important to us because of personnel. Most of our priests came from different countries, from abroad. They come from different traditions and have different mentalities than our people, so it is very important to have some guidelines, some common direction, especially in catechization.
We have printed several books on catechization in Russia. There are handbooks for children and also some guidelines for nuns and other religious teachers. Because if one sister is from Poland, the second one from the Czech Republic, the third one from the Slovak republic, and another from Korea or Mexico or France, it is very difficult for them even to know how to organize and present the material. That is why it is important to have not only the handbooks for the children but also some direction for religious teachers.
What is the Church doing to help the Russian people who are experiencing hardships as they move from communism to democracy and a market-driven economy?
There are a lot of difficulties- economic difficulties—for the people, so we have Caritas, something like Catholic Charities in the United States. And we have a very good relationship with Caritas Germany, Caritas Italy, and also with Catholic Relief Service. Now we are developing a national Caritas of Russia, so there is also close cooperation between Moscow and international programs.
Another problem is the spiritual needs of the people. Because nearly 70 years of persecution in Russia has left us in a spiritual vacuum. The sensibility of people for religion is very great but, as I mentioned previously, they like to receive very profound teaching from the Church. We are occupied not only with the building of churches, not only with material or financial help, but first of all with spiritual help for the people. I mean not only catechization, not only religious services in churches and parishes, but also special programs, such as family programs.
About 48% of families are affected by divorce in Russia. It is a very difficult problem, especially for the young people. We used to organize, every year, days in parishes in different regions as well as in Moscow for young people. Every year we try to organize a pilgrimage for young people though it is very difficult without support—often impossible because it costs too much money.
Speaking of pilgrimages, last year the international Pilgrim Virgin statue from Fatima toured all of Russia. It was there nine months. You spoke afterwards, in your homily at Fatima, about the joy the people experienced. This was a pilgrimage of Mary, of sorts, throughout your country.
Yes, it was amazing. People were so enthusiastic—and not only Catholics but also Orthodox. It was very, very important for us and especially for religious education, especially with spiritual development, because it was not only a pilgrimage of the statue in this parish and that parish, but before the statue came to every parish, three days of recollection took place. It was a spiritual preparation of the parish, spiritual preparation of the people. It was, I would say, a kind of recollection of all Catholics in Russia.
On the anniversary of the very day when the revolution took place in St. Petersburg, the statue was there. After the principal Mass we went to the site where the revolution began and prayed. Later on we went to the Winter Palace, and to the very famous prison where thousands and thousands of people were killed in the revolution. We prayed with the statue.
It was very moving and impressive. We put the statue in Red Square. Later on I brought a photo of it there to the Holy Father. He was so emotional at seeing the image of Our Lady being venerated [in the former heart of communism], that he didn't know how to respond other than to recall the words of President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic: “It's a miracle.”
—Peter Sonski
------- EXCERPT: Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz leads a people learning to live after communism ----- EXTENDED BODY: Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: U.S. Notes & Quotes DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:The Philadelphia Saints?
New Orleans' football may have the “Saints,” but Philadelphia Catholics may soon have the real thing. The city is already the hometown of one of America's three canonized saints St. John Neumann was a bishop of Philadelphia. If Mother Katharine Drexel's latest miracle is authenticated, the city can claim two of its country's four saints. Mother Drexel, who founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, has one authenticated miracle credited to her already.
“Born to affluence, Blessed Katherine renounced her role as a leading member of Philadelphia society at age 31 to dedicate herself and her fortune to the cause of African and Native Americans, establishing elementary schools, convents, and missionary churches throughout the country. During her lifetime she donated $20 million to her charitable work,” the Business Wire reported in announcing an event at Drexel University. The university was founded by members of Bl. Katherine's family.
Her canonization awaits authentication of a healing, which would be her second recognized miracle, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer (March 3). “In her first miracle, Mother Drexel was credited by the Church with miraculously healing Robert Gutherman, who had suffered partial hearing loss 14 years earlier when an infection destroyed the tiny bones in one ear. Somehow, the bones grew back, with hearing restored, after his family prayed to Mother Drexel.”
The Philadelphia Daily News (March 3) reported that her second miracle also involved the healing of a hearing loss though officials won't release names or details.
In addition to St. John Neumann, Maryland's Mother Elizabeth Seton and New York's Mother Frances Cabrini are canonized American saints.
Archbishop Says Politicians' Morality Matters
In an address to Catholic educators at the Mile High Congress, Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput was frank about prevailing views of politics and religion, according to an article in the Denver Post (March 2).
The notion that a politician's private life doesn't matter is “spectacular nonsense,” he is quoted saying, explaining that candidates too often run on a campaign of “high ideals and then tell us that their personal moral behavior has nothing to do with their public service. Look at the political environment in Washington. It would be laughable if it weren't so fatal to public trust. In America in 1998, what's ‘true’ is whatever a spin doctor can establish as plausible and defensible. We're becoming a people of alibis instead of principles.”
He also told the educators that Americans have become “slaves to the idolatry of choice, and the choices become our distractions and our chains.” He said Christmas “is the easy part of the Christian message, but there's much less consumer demand for Good Friday,” and Christians “want to soften the rough edges. We leave out the part about the bloody nails.”
“We Christians talk a good line about suffering but very few of us experience much of it.”
He also called for more silence less constant playing of music and radios and a more vigorous education in the Church's teachings against abortion, contraception, euthanasia, discrimination, and premarital sex.
Ash Wednesday Grammy Awards and Gen X
“[O]n Grammy night,” reported the New York Post (March 2) “comic Mike Myers, an Anglican, wore a cross of ash on his forehead as both a fashion statement and a religious one. On that Ash Wednesday, Catholic churches reported record turnouts, with older and younger members proudly wearing their ashes about town like fresh tattoos.”
The paper was reporting on a new trend among young New Yorkers: religion. It mentioned this evidence of the change:
1 Full Bible—study classes at Generation X-oriented Fifth Avenue Presbyterian, and even fuller dances and socials there.
1 Many young Promise Keepers members.
1 A new popularity in Christian Rock as more and more pop artists find God.
Church Attendance Higher Than Thought
For some years, surveys have placed the number of weekly Church—goers at 40% a number that was two times too high, according to many critics. But the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill now reports that the number 40% is not as inflated as many thought. About 30% attend Church weekly, the University news service reported.
The American Sociological Review reported in 1993 that only half of the people who reported weekly attendance were being truthful. The journal suggested that the question “Do you attend Church weekly?” was being interpreted as “Are you a good Christian?”
The journal also suggested that these factors increased the percentage that reported Church attendance: Churchgoers are more likely to be home, answering the telephone; they are more likely to be cooperative with pollsters; and Protestant ministers reporting Church attendance often counted donations or cars rather than heads.
The University is set to release new findings in the American Sociological Review that are based on head-counts at churches, and include underreported groups such as Eastern Rite Catholics, Newman centers at colleges, and shrines, greatly increasing numbers.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Indian Church Cautious on Prospects Of Hindu-Party Coalition Government DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:NEW DELHI—The Hindu nationalist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party-Indian People's Party) and its allies emerged as the largest block in India's recent election, winning 250 seats in the country's 545-member parliament. Now with the BJP likely to head the next government, the Indian Church is not very “enthused.”
“There is nothing much for the Church to rejoice [about],” Bishop Charles Soreng, Secretary General of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI) told the Register March 6. Divided secular groups, said Bishop Soreng, the prelate of Hazaribag in eastern Bihar state, “have let down the poor people.” While BJP's supporters are mostly upper-caste Hindus, secular parties wooing the majority lower castes gave the seats to BJP on a platter in multi-cornered contests in several areas.
The “unhappiness” in the Church regarding the election results that have made the BJP coalition the front-runner in the 12th election to parliament was evident at an ecumenical meeting in New Delhi March 4. The participants of the meeting at the CBCI secretariat foresee the “least good for the Churches” from the party that is unabashedly anti-Christian.
BJP leaders are desperately looking for new supporters to cobble together a majority of 273 in the fractured parliament. The initial euphoria in the saffron camp (BJP) gave way to caution as two of its allies refused to join the BJP-led government and instead promised “support from outside” a euphemism for freedom to bargain and pull down the coalition at will. Lurking behind the BJP's political maneuvering is the Congress party that has secured 166 seats with its allies. If BJPfails to win over some of the parties in United Front (98 seats) with its “national agenda,” the Congress party is set to prop up another secular coalition.
John Dayal, national secretary of the All India Catholic Union (AICU), pointed out that the “fractured verdict” of the Indian electorate is not a “verdict for BJP and its Hindutva (Hindu nationalism). In reality, BJP is riding piggy-back on its allies.” BJP's strategic alliance with half a dozen regional groups on election eve helped it win over 80 seats.
BJP heading a “disparate coalition with partners diametrically opposed to its Hindutva is indeed pleasing for the minorities,” said Dayal, editor of Midday, the 100,000 circulation English daily. Political observers are unanimous that the saffron brigade will have to lie low to keep the coalition intact as most of its new allies bank on minority votes.
Yet, Dayal said even a fragile BJP coalition “does not augur well for Christians and other minorities.” Whenever BJP has had even short stints in power, Dayal added, it has meticulously “infiltrated the fabric of government” pointing out that recruitment to police and other key government departments have been from BJP cadres, “a legacy that cannot be undone.”
The impact of a BJP-led government would be most visible on the campaign for equal rights to Christian Dalits (low castes). The BJP-led government will “definitely take away our enthusiasm,” admitted Father S. Lourdusamy, leader of the National Coordination Committee for Dalit Christians. The BJP has waged a vigorous campaign against Christian demands after Churches intensified their campaign for an end to the religiously based discrimination against Christian Dalits. While Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist Dalits enjoy special benefits like free education and job reservation, these rights are denied to Christian Dalits who comprise 60% of 22 million Christians.
(Anto Akkara)
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: World Notes & Quotes DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:Albania in Geopolitical History
Kosovo, a Baltic region disputed by Serbian and ethnic Albanian occupants, seems an unlikely center of world attention. But Albania's political and religious history—and the brutality of its conflicts-have made it the center of much attention throughout the Christian era.
U.N. Special Envoy Robert Gelbard is quoted (The Washington Times, March 5) saying that the United States remains prepared to act militarily against Slobodan Milosevic and his “terrorist” crack-down on ethnic Albanians in the area, 24 of whom were killed over the weekend of March 1.
Such a development would not be extraordinary in Albania, whose deep Catholic roots and location on the border between the East and West have made it the center of attention throughout its history. Consider the following facts about Albania:
1 It was first evangelized by St. Paul.
1 The country was the birthplace of Emporer Constantine, who brought Christianity acceptance by the Roman Empire.
1 Legend reports Albania as the place where the Te Deum was written, and where St. Francis of Assisi established his first foreign community.
1 The nation and its legendary crusader Skanderbeg, were celebrated by several popes for its almost singlehanded turning back of attacks from the East.
1 In our day, Albania is known as both the birthplace of Mother Teresa and the place of the fiercest Communist persecution of Catholics—a persecution that ended in Albania proper only when thousands of Albanians attended an illegal public Mass in defiance of the government.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Argentinian Mennonites Negotiate To Protect Their Lifestyle DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:BUENOS AIRES—A small religious settlement in Argentina has agreed to start negotiations with the authorities about an education law that they claim threatens their way of life.
The Mennonite community in Guatrache, La Pampa-which has 1,300 inhabitants-was founded in 1985. Mennonites trace their roots back to the 16th century Dutch reformer, Menno Simons, who committed himself and his followers to a life of non-violence, in which they refrained from carrying weapons, swearing oaths, and holding government office.
The new federal law on education introduces a common curriculum in Spanish for all schools in the country. However, the Mennonite school curriculum, entirely in German, is based on the Bible translation by Martin Luther and has remained largely unchanged for 400 years.
Representatives of the Mennonite settlement have now agreed with the authorities in the province of La Pampa to take part in a joint committee with government representatives to try to resolve the issue.
Juan Gutierrez, a Mennonite pastor from Buenos Aires said, “They don't want to lose their identity, nor do they wish to be invaded by consumerism.”
Support for the position of the Mennonite settlers has come from many Argentine farmers in the region.
One farmer said: “They are honest and are very disciplined. Their children have very good manners and behave well.”
“What are we going to teach them?” another said. “They have no prostitution, nor single mothers, nor drug problems. They keep to their word. We don't.” (ENI)
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Controversy Over Use of the Angelus In Irish Broadcasting DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:ARMAGH, Ireland—For over 50 years the Angelus bells have been broadcast twice a day, at noon and 6pm, on Ireland's national radio and television service RTE, but its future was called into doubt recently when the Anglican primate of Ireland, Archbishop Robin Eames of Armagh, reportedly called for the broadcasts to cease.
In a magazine interview, the archbishop was quoted saying that in some quarters the broadcasting of the Angelus by RTE was seen as a sectarian act that excluded Protestants. He later said he had been misquoted, but a controversy ensued.
Within the RTE organization there are many who are hostile to the twice daily pealing of the bells on air. One radio presenter, Pat Kenny, refuses to use the term ‘Angelus’ when introducing the noon bells, instead using the formula ‘we now pause for prayer.’ On one famous occasion, a studio guest, Labor politician Michael Higgins, became furious when he had to be interrupted to allow the noon broadcast of the Angelus. At the time, Higgins was claiming that Ireland was a Church—dominated society. (Cian Molloy)
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Change in Ireland's Constitution Seen as Hope For Northern Ireland Settlement DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:DUBLIN—Abolishing Ireland's constitutional claim on Northern Ireland, which is currently under British rule, would form a major part of any settlement arising from the current peace talks between the province's main political parties and the Irish and British governments.
Ireland's Minister for Foreign Affairs David Andrews hinted March 5 that a referendum on the settlement proposals is likely to take place north and south of the border on May 22. Among the issues put to the people will be an amendment to the Irish constitution that will effectively scrap the territorial claims made in articles two and three.
Article two, which states “the national territory consists of the whole island of Ireland, its islands and territorial waters,” grants automatic Republic of Ireland citizenship to all those born in Northern Ireland. In its place, Mr. Andrews is proposing a clause that would guarantee Irish citizenship to those born in the north, but which would not describe unification as a national objective.
Such a move would be a major concession to Unionists and Loyalists, who support continued British rule in Northern Ireland and are deeply suspicious of the Dublin government because of the Irish constitution's territorial claim. However, it remains to be seen if the proposal would get the approval of the electorate, as recent opinion polls show a majority favoring the retention of articles two and three as they stand.
The peace talks were due to gain new momentum on March 9 when Sinn Fein [pronounced shin-fain] was to return to the negotiation table. Sinn Fein is the political wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Northern Ireland's largest and most active terrorist group. They were ejected from the talks in mid-February after the IRA broke their cease-fire and murdered two people in Belfast at the beginning of the month.
The village of Poyntzpass in County Armagh came to a standstill on March 6 for the funerals of two youths, one Catholic and one Protestant, who were murdered by Loyalist terrorists March 3. The masked gunmen burst into the bar, demanded that the occupants lie on the floor and then opened fire on them with machine guns. Two others were injured in the attack.
The deaths of Catholic Damien Trainor and his Protestant friend Philip Allen were made all the more poignant when their families announced that Philip had been planning to marry this year and had asked Damien to be his best man. Their friendship since childhood was typical of the reputation Poyntzpass enjoys for strong cross community relations. Members of both the Trainor and Allen families helped carry the coffins of the two men to their funeral services.
At the Requiem Mass for Damien, Archbishop Sean Brady of Armagh called the murderers “frenzied killers” and said that Northern Ireland's future was now at a crossroads. He asked: “Are we going to travel along the road where the bomb and the bullet are boss, or are we going to turn on the road to genuine peace that is built on strong foundations like the friendship of Damien and Philip?”
At Philip's funeral service, the Presbyterian Moderator Sam Hutchinson called the attack “a reckless atrocity” and called on politicians on all sides to redouble their efforts for peace. Hutchinson warned: “History will be a very stern judge of those who let slip the opportunity to build a lasting settlement.” (Cian Molloy)
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Vatican Notes & Quotes DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:John Paul II as a Sign of Hope in Israel
The Jerusalem Post printed a dour opinion column by Efraim Inbar on March 2, 1998. Called “Peace is a Mirage,” it was filled with predictions of difficulties ahead around the world. He did identify one sign of hope, however. The article began:
“Saddam Hussein will continue to preoccupy us for some time, since his capacity for mischief and hegemonic ambitions remain unchanged. Even if he is somehow removed-an unequivocal blessing … we will not see the emergence of a more benign Middle East.”
He continued, “The unipolar movement where the United States is the hegemonic power in the Middle East will not last for long; the Russians are coming back,” and noted Russian insurgency in several different regions and issues.
Israel must carefully guard itself in the new world context, in order to avoid being on the short end of future developments, he argued. The one sign of hope?
“Eventually, [even such bullies as] revolutionary Iran will grow up. All revolutionaries mature sooner or later. Even the fiery Castro joined the Pope in a Catholic Mass recently,” he wrote.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: 'Every Person Needs to Have Work' DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:Alain Deleu is president of the French Confederation of Christian Workers (CFTC). He has been involved with workers associations for more than 30 years and has served as president of the National Syndicate of Enrolled Christians (SNEC). Deleu is noted for his mediation skills and for always carrying a message of hope to the people. In an interview with the Register, he spoke about unions, unemployment, and work as central to the dignity of man.
How did the CFTC view the recent protests of the unions here?
The occupations that took place in France between December and January were the result of increasing poverty in the country. The estimated number of people on the poverty line is approximately 7 million. The provoking factor was how distribution of social benefits had changed. When the unemployed went to the centers of social welfare benefits, they could no longer receive much needed aid. CFTC always insisted on unity and solidarity among its members. If you look for solutions outside what the workers actually need, they are not solutions.
Was the CFTC involved with these other movements?
The CFTC asked for what it had already asked for at its national conference last October, which is a minimum wage and minimum unemployment benefits.
We also encouraged people to work together and in harmony at a national level to find solutions for both employers and employees.
Some people say that some trade unions and unemployment movements use these actions to serve their own interests rather than the welfare of the unemployed. Do you agree?
We spoke publicly of how we disagreed with the methods adopted by four of the 6,000 associations. What is important is that we move in the direction of employment. Social dialogue in France tends to regress and each day there are more of the differing opinions about how things should be done. The way forward is to be united in the fight against unemployment and our actions and proposals should reflect this.
Do you think that there are many social injustices in France?
Yes, without any doubt. It's through work that man develops his qualities and enters more deeply into a dialogue with others. By depriving man of work you hit at the very heart of his humanity. For this reason, it is necessary for every person in society to have work. Many of the injustices and the cries today are from the very fact that we do not have the capital to create new enterprises. With the current situation of low wages in France, there is the need to look anew at examining and defining a just wage.
How is it possible for you to fight against social injustice?
Our first battle is the battle for employment. The fight against injustice within the work fields is the work of each generation, and of each field. It's not only about trade unions who give a voice to the workers. The fight against injustice has to be both a personal and collective one. It also must deal with the social, political, cultural, and also spiritual dimensions.
—Nathalie Duplan
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Who Will Raise Our Children? DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:A recent issue of National Geographic reports findings from scientists who unearthed the remains of a child who had been sacrificed to the gods in an ancient Mayan ritual. Current medical testing allowed them to piece together a chilling picture of the child's last hours on earth. It was horrifying. How could someone do that to a child?
It made me wonder: When future generations look back on late 20th century life in the United States, what conclusions will they make about how we value our children? Will they look at the evidence of the lives our children lead and admire us for our loving care, or will they think our children have been sacrificed for other things? In particular, what judgment will they pass on the widespread practice of children being raised from the most tender age, not by their own mothers and fathers, but by near strangers in day-care centers?
Forty-five percent of children under the age of one are in child care on a regular basis, and nearly 5 million school age kids are without adult supervision for some time during the average week. The life of a typical tike in day-care is not gruesome. Although stories of children not receiving the proper food, drink, and physical attention crop up frequently, the child in day-care will generally receive all the material care he requires. Yet what of his soul? God gives his parents the responsibility to shape it, yet most of the child's waking hours are spent away from his own mother.
While men, too, must live up to their roles as fathers, I believe a more serious problem is the rejection of motherhood as a career, a form of worthwhile and fulfilling work. I can think of many examples of parents who share the roles of provider and caretaker. In many cases, it works. Yet, typically, it isn't fathers who care for children where mothers cannot, but day-care providers.
Even the best-case day-care scenario is less than ideal. Children need the loving and corrective attention that only a mother can provide. And it is not just young children; even teenagers still require very personal care, considering the temptations they often face, like pre-marital sex, drugs, and materialism. After all, “Generation Xers,”—distinguished by their alienation and a lack of a moral framework—were largely shaped by day-care centers, after-school programs, and television.
Too many women have been persuaded that they should “have it all”—a career and a family. As a matter of fact, the profession of motherhood has been devalued to the point that we assume a woman needs employment outside the home to be “fulfilled” as a person. And yet what career could possibly be more critical than that of caring for our own children, shaping their wills, instructing their minds, and giving them all the love and care they deserve from us? As Pope John Paul II said in his homily in Santa Clara, Cuba, “Motherhood is sometimes presented as something backward or as a limitation of a woman's freedom, thus distorting its true nature and dignity.”
Children have a spiritual need to be close to their mothers. They need a level of concern and correction that only someone with a truly vested interest can give. Most mothers sense this, even those who work. A survey taken last year by the Pew Center found that only 41% of mothers who work outside the home felt it was good for their children.
We have come to accept the dual wage—earner family as a matter of course. For many people, it is an unfortunate necessity. The average family pays almost 40% of its income in taxes. Decades of inflation have watered down the purchasing power of money earned. Even so, for some, dual-wage status is not a necessity but a choice. It does take two paychecks to live the lifestyle many expect today—a spacious house in an affluent neighborhood, two cars, and all the toys, clothes, and gadgets imaginable.
Most of our parents got by on one paycheck and humbler dreams. They did not expect to have all the cars, furniture, appliances, clothing, meals out, and vacations they desired within the first few years of marriage. They lived frugally and sacrificed. Mothers worked at home because they knew that raising the children themselves was the right thing to do. Many mothers today would be able to stay home if the couples would make a tough sacrifice and live with less.
Some time in the past 30 years we developed the idea that in order to be good parents we had to give our children every material advantage. In fact in some cases children benefit from being denied what they want. It's not good to grow up thinking, “I will always be able to get everything I desire.” And in truth, nothing is quite as satisfying as receiving something we have worked hard and made sacrifices to acquire.
Yet our children need our time more than any material pleasure. Someday each of us will be held accountable before God for how we have raised them. Is parenting a role we can delegate?
Lisa Royal, a mother of two, lives in Auburn, Ala.
------- EXCERPT: PERSPECTIVE ----- EXTENDED BODY: Lisa Royal ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Getting History Right--and Just Getting It DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:(Alfred A. Knopf, 1997, 318 pp., $26)
Columbus Day of 1992—the culmination of the Columbus Quincentennial. International officers of the Knights of Columbus and other assorted dignitaries gather at the Columbus monument near the U.S. Capitol building for a ceremony honoring the great discoverer. The highlight of the event is to be an address by Attorney General William Barr praising Columbus and the Western values he brought to the New World.
But a funny thing happens before Barr can speak. A young man from a Washington, D.C. Catholic Worker house shinnies up the monument—no small feat in the case of this lofty and ungainly lump of stone—and dumps red paint on it. The gesture is meant to call attention to the genocide of native peoples of the Americas that Columbus's critics say began with him and has continued right up to now.
What is history? Whose version of the past is true? The serio-comic events transpiring on that sunny October afternoon five and a half years ago reflected in microcosm a conflict over just such matters that is now being fought in macrocosm all across the landscape of American culture.
In that conflict, one of the major ideological engagements of recent years was just getting underway as the skirmish at the Columbus monument took place. I refer to the controversy surrounding the drafting and publication of voluntary national standards for the teaching of U.S. and world history.
This ambitious, government-funded project began in 1992. Published two years later in three volumes, the history standards at once became targets of fierce criticism on talk shows and op-ed pages. Conservatives decried them as products of politically correct multiculturalism, creatures of feminism, and special-interest pressure, infused with the mentality of victimology and biased against traditional American and Western values.
Things eventually reached such a pass that the Senate in January 1995 voted 99-1 to express its disapproval of the history standards. Had all the senators read them? That seems improbable at best. In any event, at that point supporters of the history standards wisely beat a strategic retreat. After a further process of review, revised standards were published in 1996—this time without much fuss, the original critics having moved on to other issues. As for the first edition, Gary Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross Dunn write with apparently unconscious humor that it's become “an important artifact of American history and a collector's item.”
History on Trial recounts this story from the culture war in painstaking, indeed tedious, detail. The authors were intimately involved in the standards project, and to hear them tell it, were innocent victims of a scurrilous right-wing assault in which their handiwork was grossly misrepresented—for essentially political reasons-by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and a legion of Limbaugh clones.
Their book suffers from a gratingly self-righteous tone and from an annoying habit of demolishing straw men. They do not serve their cause well when they accuse their opponents of advocating a version of history that would do no more than “rhapsodize over Western moral successes”—a charge that is simply nonsense. Still, they have a point. A good deal of the attack on the history standards does appear to have been unfair and/or uninformed; the most extreme voices of the right were raised-loudly—in the debate; the standards apparently fell prey to an ongoing ideological conflict larger than themselves.
But along with having a point, Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn also miss the point much of the time. This is true of their strenuously repeated claim that the process by which the standards were developed was exceptionally open and representative. Anyone reading their account with some prior experience of the way of the world is likely to see here a process “open” only to insiders and “representative” of approved points of view. This is not to say it was sinister or, as these things go, exceptionally manipulative; but an exercise in pure Athenian democracy it most emphatically was not.
It is difficult to say who, besides the authors' ideological allies, will find much of interest in this overly detailed and consistently one-sided book. More interesting to those concerned about the issues was a “forum” on the standards debate featuring contributions by eleven professional historians and published in the winter issue of the Phi Beta Kappa quarterly The American Scholar.
Here a one-paragraph introduction frames the questions more clearly and realistically than anything in History on Trial: “What history should our children learn? Should this history feature the patriotism, heroism, and ideals of the nation? Or should it feature the injustices, defeats, and hypocrisy of its leaders and dominant classes? It is easy enough to answer that it ought to teach both, but, in the workaday business of teaching history this is more easily declared than done. Behind the question of what history should our children learn, is the question of what ought to be the emphasis of that history: success or failure, victory or defeat, ideals met or ideals betrayed?”
As a practical matter, several contributors say, the problem in the teaching of history in American schools is not how it ought to be done but that so little history of any sort gets taught. In 1995, recalls Diane Ravitch, the National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that 57% of U.S. high school seniors scored “below basic” in their knowledge of American history—and it is impossible to score lower than that. As of 1990, C. Vann Woodward remarks, students could graduate from 78% of American colleges without taking a course in the history of Western civilization, while high school students could satisfy their “social studies” requirement with courses in drug education, current events, and sex education.
“Never mind about standards,” one is tempted to shout. “Just teach them something!”
As for the history standards themselves, for my money the most sensible remark is John Lukacs's: “[They] are by their very nature, ephemeral. In the best case their formulation can be only a halting, and inaccurate, expression of a consensus among well—meaning historians of the present time, necessarily larded with compromises.”
Bet Rush Limbaugh wishes he'd said that.
Russell Shaw writes from Washington.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Russell Shaw ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Lucid Lessons From Six Great Saints DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:Paths to Renewal: The Spirituality of Six Religious Founders by Zachary Grant OFM Cap
(Alba House, 1998, 172 pp., $9.95)
At the end of this book comes a story that distills its essence. As a young priest, the author stands outside the friary in the Lower East Side of New York, watching the children dash out the school door. An eight-year-old skips up to him, stops in her tracks, examines him thoroughly—habit, cord, sandals, beard, twinkling eyes, then asks, “Do you live here?”
“Yes, I do,” he replies with a broad smile.
“Is your name Jesus?”
Father Grant found this a haunting question. So should we. Our answer will determine the outcome of our efforts for the renewal the Church is looking for.
Paradoxically, in the minds of many the word “renewal” has become a likely candidate for the recycle bin. We tend to line up with surly Qoheleth (or Ecclesiastes): “There's nothing new.” We've seen it all. This talk has been around for a long time. It's “a chase after wind” (Qoheleth again).
So, to quote Father Grant, “this book adds to the cascade of writings on the spiritual life that have deluged the Church of the past 30 years. That fact, plus the abundance of committees, programs, and encounter groups that have arisen for the strengthening of the bond of charity among the people of God, would make one think that the zeal of Christians is poised to conquer the effects of sin and to unite all to Christ. Aquick look around will assure us that it has not happened!”
But this isn't what Father Grant is about. Instead, he picks up a prism and holds it in the light. He turns it carefully, this way and that, so that we can see the light filter through in different colors with a freshness and intensity we hadn't expected. At least, not in connection with religious life.
The prism is religious life. The facets are founders of six religious orders, chosen for their inclusivity: Augustine, Benedict, Dominic, Francis, Ignatius, and Teresa. The “great six,” with all their splash and divergency, fill the spectrum.
Contrasting their backgrounds, the author moves through three critical periods in Church history not unlike our own: the fourth and fifth centuries, rife with heresy and secularism; the Middle Ages, tumultuous scene of new forms of religious life and preaching; and finally the post-Reformation era. In each period founders are paired: Augustine and Benedict, Dominic and Francis, Ignatius and Teresa. Differences and similarities show up as the prism turns. Charisms for Church reform blend with ways of prayer, apostolic profiles, and the characteristic virtues of the founders.
Having set the stage, the author launches into his underlying theme. His sketches of the great six lead into an overall view of the Church. Each founder reflects a unique way of responding to the Spirit. We pass beyond—or within—the boundaries of religious life. The spiritual traditions that have been reflected are opened out to the entire Church. We are all called to holiness, to the work of renewal.
But where do we fit in the picture? Here, Father Grant is at his most intriguing, as he lets the possibilities flow through the prism. Our relationship to Jesus, who is the way to the Father, is the key to our vocation in life. Do we see him as friend, Son of God, Savior, brother, Lord, victim—or do we combine several of these aspects to produce yet another hue in the spectrum? Is our prayer predominantly wonder, adoration, entreaty, praise, faithfulness, surrender? Is our preferred virtue obedience, humility, mortification, poverty of spirit, constancy, trust? These are all clues to our place and destiny in the Church.
It is the author's conviction that by relating personally to the specific characteristics of one or more of the Church's major spiritual traditions, lay people immersed in family and professional life can discover the fullness of a spirituality that they will come to experience as practically connatural to them. The great six have set in motion distinct currents that are still valid. Originating in response to the Church's crying need of reform and renewal in earlier seasons, they continue to invigorate her life today. It is to our advantage to tap the potency of our spiritual lives to grow in depth and new initiatives.
Developing his theme still further, Father Grant draws up a thought-provoking schema in which he groups the documents of Vatican II according to their relationship to the six fundamental traditions. Each has a special charism, he believes, for implementing certain decrees of the Council. The aptness of his intuitions is startling.
Were it not for the style of the author, the scope and thrust of this book could be mind-boggling. But his writing has the simplicity and clarity of a window pane. It lets in the light in great shafts because there are no curtains- no pretensions to distract. The text flows from his thinking in broad, unhampered sequence. Frequent recapitulation and previewing emphasize the overall thrust.
“Franciscans pray with their eyes open,” he remarks, in comparing ways of prayer.
Father Grant writes with his eyes open.
Sister Mary Thomas Noble, a Dominican nun, writes from Buffalo, N.Y.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Sister Mary Thomas Noble ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Historical Paparazzi DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:Three cheers to Mark Brumley for his review “The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews From the Nazis” (Feb. 15-21).
This was the first intelligent and convincing argument I have seen to counter the fanciful theories advanced by modern-day revisionists.
The Allies, whose primary objective was the destruction of the Third Reich in World War II, did all that they could with the resources available. Rescue missions to Nazi death camps deep inside enemy territory- and whose existence was not known until late in the war-would have been quite impractical.
And the bombing of such camps, if logistically possible, would have accomplished nothing except the additional slaughter of Jewish captives. The most accurate British and American bombing tactics could not have prevented this.
If this had happened, as Brumley writes, we would never be allowed to forget it.
The trouble with the so-called revisionists writing today-chiefly to make money by stirring up controversy-is that they have such limited knowledge of history. They are the paparazzi of historical literature, and they are scorned by legitimate historians.
As a military historian, I have come across a number of books advancing ludicrous historical theories, such as the suppositions that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill somehow lured President Franklin D. Roosevelt into the war, and that Churchill-an honorable man, and a humanitarian-engineered the 1943 air crash off Gibraltar that killed Polish Gen. Wladyslaw Sikorski.
And, of course, as Brumley points out, Pope Pius XII and the Vatican have not been left out of the revisionists' fantasies. The pontiff did, in fact, speak out against Nazism, but he was in a difficult position, and was bound to the strictures of neutrality.
Nevertheless, the Vatican did not collaborate with the Germans occupying Italy, as some revisionists have advanced. In fact, the Very Rev. Hugh O'Flaherty of the Congregation of the Holy Office-aided by other priests and British diplomats and officers-worked tirelessly to keep thousands of escaped Allied prisoners and Jewish refugees out of the Gestapo's hands in Rome in 1943-45.
Brumley states that author William Rubinstein concludes that responsibility for the Holocaust rests solely with Hitler and his National Socialist henchmen. The attempts by revisionists to try to implicate the Allies in the genocide is both irresponsible and historically inaccurate.
Michael Hull
Enfield, Connecticut
------- EXCERPT: LETTERS ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Palestinian Problems DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:The article, “Theology Meeting in Bethlehem ‘Outraged’ at Oppression of Palestinians” (March 1-7), relates that the Liberation Theology Conference statement of Feb. 14 blames the suffering of the Palestinian Arabs on “the Israeli occupation.” The statement also implies that Israel is responsible for the “dispossession of the Palestinian people” 50 years ago. While this appears to be fast becoming the accepted wisdom, it nevertheless fails the test of truth on both counts.
To begin with, nobody has been as brutal or oppressive toward the Palestinians as their own leadership, typified by Arafat's thugocracy—as cruel, vicious, deceitful, and ferociously corrupt as any other Arab police state (and now financed by U.S. dollars).
Secondly, an occupying power is one that forcibly takes possession of a territory from its legitimate sovereign. Israel did not take the provinces of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza from any legitimate sovereign. Quite the contrary, she seized those territories in a necessary act of self-preservation against two aggressor states, Jordan and Egypt, who themselves had been holding the provinces in violation of International Law, and who had used Judea, Samaria, and Gaza as a trio of launching pads from which to assault the Jewish State in an unprovoked war of annihilation in 1967. It is, accordingly, improper and misleading—not to say unjust—to join the U.N. General Assembly lynch mob in characterizing Israel's ongoing possession of territories whose last legitimate sovereign, the Ottoman Turkish Empire, went out of business in 1918 as an “occupation.”
As for that by-now-sacrosanct Arab doctrine of the 50-year-old Jewish “dispossession of the Palestinian people,” consider the following, published in October of 1949 by Arab activist Musa Alawi: “How can people struggle to become a nation when [they] do not know the meaning of the word?… The people are in great need of a ‘myth’ to fill their consciousness and imagination … [to give them] identity and self-respect.”
What I would really like to know is this: Does “promoting justice for all people” (the Conference theme) allow us to bear false witness against our neighbor?
Michael Zebulon
Santa Rosa, California
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Dissident Catholics Find a Hero In Sri Lankan Priest DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:A star is born. Father Tissa Balasuriya, an Oblate of Mary Immaculate from Sri Lanka, is the new darling of dissident Catholics.
Ever since his excommunication last year for refusing to retract teachings declared erroneous by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the case has become a rallying point for Catholics who hope to reshape the Church in their own image.
In fact, Call to Action issued a statement on the Internet last year saying that Father Balasuriya was planning to appear at their national conference and was available to speak to other groups during the following weeks.
The announcement urged people to contact CTA at its Chicago headquarters to arrange appearances.
But, despite their public admiration, many dissenting Catholics admit, privately, that Father Balasuriya's star lost some of its luster when the Vatican lifted his excommunication Jan. 15.
In some ways, he held the line and made all of them proud. On key points, though, he appeared to back-pedal.
The Sri Lankan priest refused to retract statements from his book, Mary and Human Liberation-including his seeming denial of key points of doctrine, such as the Immaculate Conception, the necessity for baptism, and the reality of Original Sin.
Some groups are candid about the fact that they hope to overthrow the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.
Instead, he issued an apology for “perceived errors” in the text, and expressed regret for the “negative reactions” that ensued.
“I truly regret the harm this has caused. This entire episode has been very painful for me,” he wrote, in his “Statement of Reconciliation.”
He refused to sign an oath worded by the CDF that clarified questions his book had raised. The oath included statements from various documents that affirm Church teachings on the Immaculate Conception, the Assumption, papal infallibility, Original Sin, the necessity of baptism, and the impossibility of ordaining women.
So far, so good. If he held the line there, he would have won the undying approbation of dissident Catholics around the globe.
But, he went a step too far when he agreed to profess the Credo of the People of God, issued by Pope Paul VI in 1968.
From the perspective of a discontented Catholic, the problems in Paul VI's Credo begin with the seventh word:
“We believe in one only God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” it reads. If that's not enough to make them wince, almost every paragraph of the Credo contains references to God as “him.”
And, the Credo twice affirms the hierarchical nature of the Church. For example, it states:
“We believe in One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church built by Jesus Christ on that rock which is Peter. She is the Mystical Body of Christ; at the same time a visible society instituted with hierarchical organs.”
That's a sore point for some Catholics. In fact, some groups, such as the Women's Ordination Conference, are candid about the fact that they hope to overthrow the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.
It's not a secret. They delineate that goal to any journalist who asks. And, they say it loudly and proudly from the podiums of their open conferences.
“Ordination, not subordination” is the mantra du jour for many of these liberal Catholics. That means—they want women priests, but they also want to reshape the structure of the Church into something that mixes modern democratic principles with group therapy.
Liberals are not going to be very happy, either, about the Credo's statements concerning the Virgin Mary. It reads:
“We believe that Mary is the Mother, who remained ever a Virgin, of the Incarnate Word, our God and Savior Jesus Christ, and that by reason of this singular election, she was, in consideration of the merits of her Son, redeemed in a more eminent manner, preserved from all stain of Original Sin and filled with the gift of grace more than all other creatures.”
Dissident Catholics seem to have mixed opinions about the Blessed Mother-some profess a great love for her, some deny her perpetual virginity, some ignore her, and some despise her example of meekness and submission. For all of them, the Virgin's fiat-“Be it done unto me according to thy word”-is in direct contrast to their rebellion against Church doctrine.
Yes, poor Father Balasuriya let them down on several points. Of course, the Call to Action crowd could claim that the big, bad Vatican coerced him.
Still, his future appearances in America won't be quite as glorious. He would have made a better hero, to them, if he had simply said, “Non Serviam.”
Kathleen Howley is a Boston-based journalist.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kathleen Howley ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Cardinal Ratzinger Nobody Knows DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:A recent book-length interview shows the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has little in common with the rigid guardian of the Faith fashioned by the American media
Salt of the Earth, Peter Seewald's thought-provoking interview with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (translated into English by Adrian Walker) ranges over a great many topics, but a few themes recur: Christianity's essential message, internal problems of the Catholic Church, Catholicism's quarrel with aspects of modernity, and contributions that an intact Catholicism can offer to the modern world.
Cardinal Ratzinger, a learned theologian and prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) since 1981, lives up to his description of himself as an Augustinian theologian. He clarifies the Catholic faith in simple terms as does Augustine in his homilies: he respects and uses reason, but thinks with the Church and brings contemporary thought into discussion with the Christian faith. Furthermore, the cardinal defends Christianity as an “ethical power” in the world.
In Hitler's Shadow
Joseph Ratzinger was born in 1927 and, therefore, had to endure Hitler's Third Reich between 1933-1945. He grew up in Bavaria, near the Austrian border, in a family of modest means. The relative poverty and financial difficulties created a strong bond of solidarity among his family members. As a young boy, Joseph attended the music festivals in Salzburg and developed a great appreciation for Mozart. He was also fortunate to receive a solid early education, including exceptional training in Greek and Latin. His father's religious fervor and antagonism to Hitler's regime wasn't lost on the young Ratzinger or his siblings.
After the war he finished his seminary and university studies and eventually became a well-known and respected theology professor in Germany.
“I tried, in the style of Saint Augustine, to place as much of the material as possible in a clear relationship to the present and to our own struggles,” he tells Seewald. His knowledge of theology, philosophy, literature, contemporary culture, and languages undoubtedly aided the effort.
Another outstanding characteristic of Cardinal Ratzinger is—contrary to his prevailing image in the American media—his openness to seeking the truth through discussion. As a professor he had the opportunity to have in-depth conversations with such theologians as Karl Rahner, Karl Barth, and Yves Congar.
About these conversations he said, “We didn't spare one another either. We knew that there wasn't any animosity among us, but that we were helping each other by analyzing things critically.”
As head of the CDF, Cardinal Ratzinger remains ever the inquiring theologian as he goes about his work. He has expressed special satisfaction with the CDF's work on the new Catechism of the Catholic Church, its statements on liberation theology and bioethics, and its extensive contacts with bishops'conferences around the world.
About his leadership of the CDF he says, “[W]hat I really have at heart is keeping this precious treasure, the faith, with its power to enlighten, from being lost, and this applies to the good and beautiful things that have accrued to it in our history.”
In the late 1960s the cardinal attempted to reveal the essence of Christianity by sketching six principles in a brief section of his well-known Introduction to Christianity. His sixth principle riveted my attention. It is the primacy of acceptance.
“From the point of view of the Christian faith, man comes in the profoundest sense to himself not through what he does but through what he accepts. He must wait for the gift of love, and love can only be received as a gift.”
The Essence of Christianity
In the interview with Seewald, the cardinal continues attempting to formulate the essential Christian message, not systematically, but in short snippets. For example, “The core of faith rests upon accepting being loved by God, and therefore to believe is to say Yes, not only to him, but to creation, to creatures, above all to all human beings, to try to see the image of God in each person and thereby to become a lover.” In other words, being able to receive from God, his Word and his grace, is the indispensable condition for loving others in the proper manner. The character of all human relationships depends on people's decision to love God or not.
Cardinal Ratzinger returns to this theme in the last two pages of the interview when Seewald asks, “What, Your Eminence, is the true history of the world? And what does God really want from us?” Before giving his answer the cardinal mentions Goethe's view that history is the struggle between belief and unbelief along with Augustine's well-known judgment that it is “the struggle between two kinds of love, between love of God unto sacrifice of self, and self-love unto the denial of God.” Cardinal Ratzinger tries to make Augustine's thought more precise and comprehensible by saying that history is the struggle between love and the inability or the refusal to love. God wants us to become loving persons.
The Church's mission, then, is to persuade and admonish people not to live badly. She must urge people to do all that love requires: the observance of negative and positive commandments, fidelity to prayer, the reception of the sacraments and adherence to the Creed. While the cardinal's comments on the essence of Christianity are crystal clear, he still has the same questions that everyone else has: “Why is the world as it is? What is the meaning of all the suffering in it? Why is evil so powerful in it when God is the one with the real power?”
Cardinal Ratzinger recognizes that appropriating the Christian faith is no easy matter these days. Catholic culture has disappeared from society and, in the cardinal's mind, is not likely to become a significant influence in the future. He places his hopes instead in the formation of pilgrim communities within the Church.
“She will be less identified with the great societies, more a minority Church; she will live in small, vital circles of really convinced believers who live their faith. But precisely in this way she will, biblically speaking, become the salt of the earth again.”
Future of the Church
These small groups, also described by Cardinal Ratzinger as mustard seeds and leaven, “live an intensive struggle against evil and bring the good into the world.“ How faithful is the Church to her mission? Seewald goes so far as to say ”that hardly any other institution provokes the world more than the Catholic Church.“ The cardinal agrees with this observation and argues that ”it says something for the Catholic Church that she still has the power to provoke.” The Church's challenge to error and evil is necessarily a scandal to a number of people, but an unmistakable sign of her fidelity to Christ. Cardinal Ratzinger, of course, deplores the kind of scandal in the Church that stems from her mistakes and defects.
While the formation of these small groups will always be possible, there are serious obstacles to the revitalization of Christianity within the Church.
“Today's Christians are often weary of their faith and regard it as very heavy baggage that they drag along but that they really aren't joyful about.”
Many are ignorant of the Bible, he adds, don't really understand their faith or the meaning of ordinary religious language and even lack the curiosity to ask questions. To make matters worse, sometimes theologians and bishops provide further obstacles to the recovery of Christianity. “Theology is a very important and noble craft.” Theologians, however, err when they determine rather than acknowledge what the Church is, according to the mind of Christ. They also go astray if they just pose questions, give the impression that reading the Bible is just too complicated for the ordinary person, fail to offer a positive way to faith, or undermine the correct beliefs of people who “can't fight back intellectually.”
Peace Is Not Primary
While Cardinal Ratzinger has great respect for the fine work done by many bishops, his love of truth prompts a penetrating observation about Church leaders who don't “appeal to the consciences of the powerful and of the intellectuals” or address such problems as the exhaustion of faith and the lowering of moral standards.
He says: “The words of the Bible and the Church Fathers ring in my ears, those sharp condemnations of shepherds who are like mute dogs; in order to avoid conflicts, they let the poison spread. Peace is not the first civic duty, and a bishop whose only concern is not to have any problems and to whitewash as many conflicts as possible is an image I find repulsive.”
A dramatic instance of the Church's failure to educate her flock in the early 20th century is evident in the rise of Christian anti-Semitism in all European countries. This anti-Semitism “prepared the soil to a certain degree” for “Hitler's annihilation of the Jews.” Cardinal Ratzinger's honesty about this and other defects in Church life can go a long way to promote self-knowledge, reform and zeal in the lives of Christians.
The decline of the Church and of Christianity is not just an internal matter, but “is partially to blame for the spiritual breakdowns, the disorientation, the demoralization” that is evident throughout the world. By invoking the common good of society the cardinal tries to persuade Christians not to compromise their faith by bowing down before the prevailing “dictatorship of opinion” that, alas, even good people are now afraid to oppose. Of course, the cardinal also attempts to persuade Christians to practice their faith for the sake of their own personal happiness.
Wrestling with Modernity
Cardinal Ratzinger's quarrel with aspects of modernity cannot be briefly summarized. He especially criticizes relativism, liberation theology, and feminist ideology (that “is a revolt against our creatureliness”) ideas about autonomy and the opposition to authority in today's world view, along with seeing everything as a struggle for power. The autonomous person, he points out, doesn't look to nature or revelation for guidance, or make use of reason to arrive at truth.
“If the autonomous subject has the last word, then its desires are simply unlimited.” The cardinal notes that we defend the freedom of inner spiritual self-destruction, and then inconsistently deplore its outward effects in the world. For example, “the pollution of the outward environment that we are witnessing [and legitimately oppose] is only the mirror and consequence of the pollution of the inward environment [i.e., the soul], to which we pay too little heed.”
Cardinal Ratzinger believes the role of the Church in promoting justice and freedom in the modern world is indispensable. The Church's formation of the inner man or her education of the soul is “important for keeping humanity together and for maintaining its human dignity.” In other words, the Church's education of conscience contributes to personal and political well-being. The cardinal defends the Gospel's message of judgment as an additional incentive to overcome our weakness, in addition to gratitude for God's love manifested in the life and death of Jesus Christ. He further notes that the consciousness of judgment by God moved medieval rulers to make amends for their deeds of injustice by various good works.
The history of the 20th century has surely shown that the Church is a force against repression and the dictatorship of opinion. “The bond of communion that is the Church is a counter-force against all worldly, political, and economic mechanisms of oppression and uniformization. She gives men a place of freedom and sets a sort of ultimate limit to oppression.”
To understand the meaning and importance of this statement one need only recall Pope John Paul II's visit to Poland in 1979 and his recent visit to Cuba.
J. Brian Benestad is a professor of theology at the University of Scranton (Pa.) and D'Alzon visiting professor of theology at Assumption College, Worcester, Mass.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: J. Brian Benestad ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Chastity: The Most Misunderstood Word in America? DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:The auditorium in the university must have been filled with 400 students. I had been involved in a debate on abortion. During the discussion period after the debate, a student remarked: “Since you are opposed to abortion I assume you would advocate the distribution of condoms to prevent women getting pregnant so that they would not have to seek an abortion.”
“No,” I answered. “I don't believe you can fight one immorality with another one.”
“What would you recommend then?” he asked somewhat incredulously.
Somewhat naively I answered with one word: “Chastity.”
I was unprepared for the response. The auditorium erupted. Students began to jeer and hoot and whistle. They stood on the chairs in the auditorium with thumbs down. They began to pelt me with paper wads, pencils, and erasers. The program was over.
A bit shaken I walked down the corridor with one of the vice-presidents of the university. She shook her head in disbelief. Seeking some comfort and reassurance, I turned to her and said, “Wasn't that incredible?”
She did not hear a word I said. She looked at me with disbelief and asked, “How do you expect people to live without sex?”
Chastity just might be the most misunderstood word in modern America. The fundamental meaning of chastity is simple enough: sexual activity is for marriage.
In fact, a better understanding of the “C” word might lead to a vastly improved America. Each year more than 30% of our children are born out of wedlock. Roughly 1.5 million abortions are performed annually. According to the Center for Disease Control there are approximately 12 million new cases of sexually transmitted diseases in the United States every year.
There are 4 million new cases of chlamydia alone each year. Chlamydia and gonor-rhea lead to pelvic inflammatory disease in some 20-40% of women infected with them that often results in infertility and later ectopic (tubal, or out-of-place) pregnancies, which can be fatal. Ectopic pregnancies could be reduced by as much as 50% by eliminating these venereal diseases.
It is estimated that sexually transmitted diseases add $17 billion to U.S. health costs each year.
Currently 650,000 to 900,000 people in the United States may be infected with HIV. Through June 1997, over 379,000 persons in America had died of AIDS. None of these frightful social ills would plague America now to the extent they do if more of its citizens were chaste.
Curiously enough, sex is still a “licensed activity” in the United States. You want to go deer hunting? You buy a deer license. You want to go fishing? You buy a fishing license. You want to have sex? You get a marriage license.
Why would the state be concerned about the sexual activity of its citizens? Quite simply because sexual activity can result in children, and for the sake of the common good the state must exercise a degree of regulatory control over it. Sexual activity within marriage serves to bring about the most basic social unit, the family.
No institution has ever been found to replace the family in the efficacy of rearing children and preparing them to contribute to the future good of society. When a society departs from chastity, it departs from reasoned good order, and the social consequences are horrific. Chastity is not a cute, passé '50s word. It is a prophylaxis against venereal disease, unwanted pregnancies, single parent households, death, and social disintegration.
Celibacy is not chastity, although it involves it. Celibacy refers to men or women freely choosing not to marry in order to give their lives to some good work; taking care of infirm parents, teaching young children, providing nursing services, praying.
The Catholic Church, for example, never imposes celibacy on anyone. There are those in the Church who choose celibacy in order to give themselves more fully to a life of service to others, such as priests and nuns do. But it is a free choice. And celibacy is not for everyone.
The Church teaches, however, that everyone should be chaste, which means using one's sexual powers in accord with one's state in life. If one is single or celibate, one abstains. If married, one is faithful to one's spouse and faithful to the purposes of marriage.
But confusion still abounds. A recent opinion piece in an East Coast newspaper accused the Church of imposing the “medieval” practice of celibacy on homosexuals.
First, there is nothing “medieval” about the practice of celibacy. People have always chosen celibacy for some good purpose. The Romans had their Vestal Virgins. England had its Florence Nightingale.
Second, the Church expects nothing less of its homosexual members than it does of its heterosexual members. As the old adage goes, use your sexuality according to its purposes. If you are not married, it is wise not to engage in sexual activity—for your own good, your partner's good, for society's good.
Do you want to make a significant contribution to the common good of society that will take none of your time and none of your money? It's simple. Be chaste.
John Haas is president of the Pope John Center for the Study of Ethics in Health Care in Boston, Mass.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Haas ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Home Town of the Little Flower DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:Pilgrims traveling to Lisieux, France, can visit the house and old haunts of St. Thérèse and find a wealth of information on one of the Church's most beloved saints
Quickly becoming one of the world's most beloved saints, Thérèse of Lisieux recently earned her place in Catholic history. On Oct. 19, 1997, Pope John Paul II proclaimed her a doctor of the Church—distinguishing her not only as a person of outstanding holiness and sanctity, but an eminent scholar of the spiritual life as well. Only the 33rd person in the history of the Church to receive such an honor, she is also only one of three women to have ever earned this, the highest of ecclesiastical titles.
To get a sense of how remarkable and popular St. Thérèse of Lisieux is, consider the following she lived to be only 24 years old, whereas the previous 32 doctors of the Church lived on average to be 64 years old: her autobiography, Story of a Soul, has become a worldwide bestseller and has been translated into more than 60 languages and dialects; she's just over 100 years dead, more than 1,700 churches and chapels, two cathedrals, and five basil-icas have been consecrated to her in the world; hundreds of religious congregations have been placed under her patronage; Pope Pius X declared her the greatest saint of modern times; in the first 28 years following her death, the Lisieux Carmelites had sent out more than 30 million pictures and 17 million relics in answer to people's requests from all over the world; and today, her home and convent is one of the premier places of pilgrimage in the world—receiving more than 2 million pilgrims and visitors every year.
Popularly known as the Little Flower, St. Thérèse of Lisieux was born on Jan. 2, 1873. The youngest of nine children, Thérèse came from a devout and well-to-do family. A lively child during her early years, she soon experienced the tragedy of losing her mother at the age of four-an event that affected her deeply. The following 10 years were for her a period of extreme shyness and seriousness.
During this time she became inseparable from Pauline, her older sister. The bond between the two of them was so close that when Pauline left home to enter the Carmelite convent, Thérèse fell mysteriously ill. However, May 13, 1883, while praying a nine-day novena before the family's statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Thérèse went into a deep ecstasy. After a vision in which the Virgin smiled at her, little Thérèse was cured.
A profound conversion took place in the life of the saint on Christmas day 1886. After returning from midnight Mass, Thérèse heard her father talk of “being glad that this was the last year of filling Thérèse's Christmas stockings.” In a single moment, upon hearing these words, Thérèse experienced a sudden and complete transformation of heart. All her shyness and seriousness washed away in an instant and she received strength and peace of soul, which was to last the rest of her life.
With her conversion, at the age of 14, she felt ready to enter the Carmelite order. As the Rule of Carmel allowed only those 21 years and older to enter, Thérèse would need a special dispensation. In November 1887 her family went on pilgrimage to Rome. While kneeling before Pope Leo XIII, Thérèse asked if she could enter Carmel at age 15. The Holy Father responded, “If it be God's Will, you will enter.” One year later—with permission from the local bishop- Thérèse entered the Carmelite convent.
Throughout her life as a nun, she lived the faith of Christ in a most ordinary—yet extraordinary—way. On the eve of her profession, Thérèse declared, “I came to Carmel to save souls and to pray for priests.” For seven years, she fulfilled all her duties with exceptional love. At the age of 22, she declared her vocation to be that of “Love.” Her spiritual childhood and simplicity became known as the “Little Way.”
On July 17, 1897, as Thérèse was dying, she said, “I feel that my mission is just beginning, my work of making people love God as I love him.” Today, her promise is bearing fruit as millions around the world are adopting her way of spiritual childhood.
For those who would like to make a pilgrimage to Lisieux, the city offers a number of spectacular places related to the life of St. Thérèse. Among the most prominent are the Carmelite convent, Hall of Relics, Les Buissonets (family home of St. Thérèse), the basil-ica, the cathedral, and the International Center of Pastoral Reception.
In the Carmelite convent, pilgrims can spend time in prayer near the reliquary containing the sacred remains of St. Thérèse, and those of her three sisters, Pauline, Marie, and Celine. Above the saint's tomb is the statue of the Virgin Mary that smiled at St. Thérèse during her life.
Just outside the Carmelite chapel, in the courtyard, is the Hall of Relics. Pilgrims can tour the small museum which features a number of items relating to the life of St. Thérèse, while listening to an audio description of the relics in one of eight languages-including English.
Located within walking distance of the Carmelite convent is Les Buissonets, the family home of St. Thérèse. Often serving as the most memorable part of any trip to Lisieux, pilgrims can walk through the saint's house guided by a narrated tour in one of several languages, including English.
Home to a vast number of magnificent frescoes and chapels, the giant Basilica of St. Thérèse is the principal religious focus in Lisieux and serves as the chief gathering place for pilgrims and visitors. Built in 1929, the shrine has played host to many extraordinary events including the 100th anniversary of Thérèse's birth in 1973, the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1980, and the centenary of the saint's death in 1997.
Pilgrims can also visit the Cathedral of St. Peter, the site where St. Thérèse attended daily Mass until her entry into the Carmelite convent. It is also where she frequently received the sacraments as well as receiving a number of other graces.
Of great significance is the International Center of Pastoral Reception that was inaugurated Oct. 4, 1996. Designed to accommodate the millions of new pilgrims arriving each year, the complex provides opportunities for visitors to learn more about St. Thérèse and her teachings via films, videos, conferences, and exhibitions. The Center also contains a book department featuring the writings of the saint and the many works written about her.
Reaching Lisieux by road or train is easy. From Paris, head west on A13, exiting at Pont l'Eveque, and heading south to Lisieux. Another option is to take N13 due west to Lisieux. To arrive by train, there are frequent departures from the St. Lazare railway station in Paris.
With a side trip to Alenáon, one can also visit the house where she was born (located at 50, rue Saint-Blaise, opposite the Prèfecture) and the Church of Notre Dame where she was baptized.
For more information on making a pilgrimage to Lisieux, contact one of the many Catholic travel organizations offering guided tours to France or contact the pilgrimage office of St. Thérèse: (tel.) 011-33-231-4855-08 or (fax) 011-33-231-4855-26.
For information on city and hotel accommodations, contact the Lisieux tourist office: (tel.) 011-33-231-6208-41 or (fax) 011-33-231-6235-22.
Kevin Wright, author of Catholic Shrines of Western Europe, writes from Bellevue, Wash.
------- EXCERPT: The Catholic Traveler ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kevin Wright ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Missing the Message of Ex Corde Ecclesiae DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:The heated debate about the Pope's apostolic constitution on Catholic universities has led many to forget about its inspired idea of a community of scholars, learners, and staff united in pursuit of truth
Each fall I teach an undergraduate course at Notre Dame called Faith and Reason in which the students read the first chapter of Veritatis Splendor. Pope John Paul's aim in this encyclical is to affirm the existence of absolute moral norms such as “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” But he makes clear in the first chapter that every Christian has a vocation to holiness that involves much more than mere obedience to negative moral absolutes. To obey such commandments is a great good, but it is not by itself enough to satisfy either God or the deepest longings of the human heart.
This first chapter consists of a meditation on the poignant story of the rich young man who asks Jesus what he must do to gain eternal life. The young man is not asking, “What is the bare minimum I must do in order to avoid divine punishment?” Rather, he comes forward as one who is already morally upright but aspires to a loftier goal. Similarly, the Pope tells us, each of us must approach Jesus with the same aspiration for perfection.
If there is a more compelling text for evoking the generosity latent in the hearts of college students who are on the verge of making definitive life-decisions, I don't know what it might be.
Sadly, though, the first chapter of Veritatis Splendor was largely ignored in the public debate that began immediately after the encyclical was published. Dissenting moral theologians complained that their positions had been misrepresented in chapter two, where the Pope presents his main arguments for moral absolutes. In response, orthodox defenders of the Pope chided his critics for adapting their moral theories to worldly standards. But both sides focused exclusively on chapter two- and lost in the heat of the debate was the more basic challenge, laid down for each of us individually in chapter one, to put ourselves into the shoes of the rich young man.
Why do I raise this issue on the Register's Education Page? Because of the exact parallel between the reception of Veritatis Splendor and that of Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the Pope's apostolic constitution on Catholic universities.
The typical big university today is a knowledge factory shattered into many fragmentary units, each motivated almost exclusively by narrow self-interest. And university administrators, as hard as they may try, can no longer articulate a coherent vision of the whole that is capable of uniting their disparate constituencies under the flag of a common project.
In part one of Ex Corde Ecclesiae the Pope describes an inspiring alternative: a genuine community of scholars, learners, and support staff united by their “consecration to the cause of truth” and their “dedication to protecting and advancing” in an intellectually rigorous manner, the dignity of the human person and their own cultural heritage. A university should dedicate itself, first of all, to seeking an integrated understanding of the human person and of human society that draws upon all the scientific and humanistic disciplines; second, it should strive to serve the human community so conceived. As the Pope puts it, the Catholic university's intellectual mission is characterized by “a commitment to the integration of various types of knowledge, a dialogue between faith and reason, an ethical concern, and a theological perspective.”
Implicit in this description of a university is the bold claim that the Catholic university can serve as a light to the contemporary academic world by its combination of “rigorous fidelity” to the Word of God and “courageous creativity” in its intellectual endeavors.
It is a compelling text for evoking the deep desire of self-consciously Catholic scholars, as well as sympathetic non-Catholic scholars, to integrate their intellectual work with their spiritual aspirations.
Sadly, though, the ideal set forth in part one of Ex Corde Ecclesiae has been largely ignored in the public debate that began even before the document was published.
Catholic university presidents have concentrated exclusively on the requirement, implicit in part two of Ex Corde Ecclesiae and explicitly enunciated in canon 812 of the Code of Canon Law, that “those who teach theological subjects in any institute of higher studies must have a mandate from the competent ecclesiastical authority.” To put it mildly, they don't like this requirement. Seemingly intent on adapting their institutions to secular standards rather than being a light to the secular academic world, they have resisted the call to “rigorous fidelity.” They have asked, in effect, “What is the bare minimum our institutions must do in order to avoid ecclesiastical punishment?” (They realize that any change in the now comfortable status quo would provoke angry protests from their theologians and from the rest of their largely secularized faculties.)
In response, orthodox scholars have urged the American bishops and key Vatican officials not to buckle under to pressure but rather to insist on orthodoxy in theological teaching and research.
But notice, sadly, both sides have focused exclusively on part two of Ex Corde Ecclesiae and have simply ignored the broader vision proposed in part one. Rigorous fidelity is indeed necessary if colleges and universities are to flourish as Catholic institutions of higher learning. The tragedy of many of today's Catholic colleges and universities is that they are so strongly motivated by the fear that such fidelity will endanger their prospects for worldly success. But in order for a Catholic college or university to accomplish its distinctively intellectual mission, rigorous fidelity is not enough. This is why Pope John Paul calls for “courageous creativity” as well. This courageous creativity has many dimensions, and I will mention just two of them.
First, according to the Catholic vision, a life devoted to intellectual excellence and creativity is itself a great human good and at the same time a possible path to sanctity. All graduates of Catholic universities should come away appreciating this fact, even those who are not themselves called to the intellectual life. For this reason, the Catholic university's spiritual mission cannot be confined—as it often is nowadays—to what goes on outside the classroom; it must instead be fully integrated with the university's intellectual mission. Nor can the full burden of this integration be placed upon professors of theology. Rather, students must come into contact with a large number of faculty members, across a wide range of academic disciplines, in whose own personal lives there is no bifurcation of the intellectual from the spiritual.
Second—and ironically—many non-Catholic (and even anti-Catholic) intellectuals welcome distinctively Catholic contributions to current academic debates. Why? Because such contributions, if well articulated, provide much more intellectual stimulation than second-rate imitations of what's already available from the best secular universities. We all want our Catholic universities to gain respect from their secular counterparts. But in our present situation what we should be aiming for is grudging respect—the kind that The New York Times itself gave to Veritatis Splendor. This is what the Pope had in mind in calling for creativity that is “courageous.” And in this regard there is no better role model for us than the Holy Father himself.
Alfred Freddoso is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Alfred Freddoso ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Looking for Love In the Golden '80s DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:The Wedding Singer fondly remembers—and pokes fun at—conventions of the recent past
For those of you who thought the 1970s revival films (Boogie Nights, The Ice Storm, etc.) brought to the screen an era best forgotten, brace yourself for the latest nostalgia-driven fad—movies that celebrate the 1980s.
For sure, the '80s had certain virtues. President Ronald Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher stiffened the backbone of the West to stand up to the Soviets and win the Cold War. These very same leaders also made a persuasive case for the free enterprise system, thus helping to discredit socialism.
But such positive events aren't what interests Hollywood. Its focus is on cultural trends, and the ‘80s were when the hedonism and sexual revolution of the ’60s and '70s counterculture went mainstream. This time period was also the first era in which young people's notion of culture seemed taken almost entirely from mass entertainment. Traditional institutions no longer had much influence,
The Wedding Singer, this winter's surprise comic hit, is set during the Reagan years and takes for granted a middle class whose values are governed by moral relativism and popular culture. The movie recycles many of the same classic screwball comedy situations used in last summer's blockbuster success, My Best Friend's Wedding, and Director Frank Coraci and screenwriter Tim Herlihy make sure The Wedding Singer's romance has the same kind of sweetness as its predecessor. But the film is also crammed with lewd jokes and unnecessary profanity and encourages a “why not” attitude toward all sexual encounters.
The year is 1985 when MTV was beginning to make an impact and CDs were replacing vinyl records, and the filmmakers get many of their laughs out of spoofing the music and fashions of the period. Robbie Hart (Adam Sandler) once seemed headed for rock star fame as lead singer in the spandex-wearing band, Final Warning. But now he's hustling to support himself singing at wedding receptions. Always the nice guy, he works hard at pleasing his new audience, making a special effort to see that the geeks and wallflowers at these events feel part of the celebration. He expects to get married himself very soon.
But Robbie's heart is quickly broken. His fiancee, Linda (Angela Featherstone), stands him up at the altar. Habitually decked out like one of the bimbos in a Van Halen video of the period, she's got no use for anyone who doesn't want to be a star.
Emotionally frazzled, Robbie turns nasty at his next gig, making fun of the newlyweds and getting punched out by the father of the bride. Only one person is sympathetic to his plight-Julia (Drew Barrymore), a waitress who works the same wedding reception circuit as he does. She accepts him for who he is and encourages him to try his hand at songwriting.
Robbie and Julia seem made for each other, but there's a problem. Julia's already engaged to a rich, arrogant Wall St. yuppie, Glenn Goulia (Matthew Glave), who behaves like a jerk in a particularly '80s fashion. In similarly themed movies of the past, a bond trader who's a scoundrel like Glenn would have been a pseudo-English gentleman with a snotty accent and even snottier attitudes toward his social inferiors. He would have favored fine wines, houses in the country, and proper dress for all occasions. Even though a bad guy, he would have observed all the social niceties.
Glenn, on the other hand, revels in looking and behaving like an outlaw. He flaunts a too-cool, hipster wardrobe copied from the TV series Miami Vice, and cheats on his fiancee whenever he can. In short, he's politically and economically conservative but has the morals of a rock star—a set of seemingly contradictory attitudes that first coalesced during the eighties and is still popular today.
Most of the other characters are cut from this same mold. Adam's best friend, Sammy (Allen Covert) is a limo driver who sports a Michael Jackson-like red leather jacket and wears a single glove. His highest priority, learned from TV sitcoms starring John Travolta and Henry Winkler (the Fonz), is the aggressive pursuit of every attractive woman with whom he comes into contact. Fortunately, Robbie declines to follow his example.
Julia's female soulmate imitates both the wardrobe and aggressive sexuality of pop singer Madonna. But she's also the first to see the sparks that are flying between Robbie and Julia. The rest of the plot turns on Robbie's efforts to win his true love away from Glenn.
The music on the soundtrack and sung by Robbie's band is eighties techno-pop originally performed by British and American groups like The Culture Club, The Thompson Twins, The B-52s, and The Cure. Tacky velour warm-up suits are the costume of choice for the men on the dance floor while their girlfriends move about in appliquéd metallic outfits. The movie also successfully satirizes the way these party animals indulge themselves in other fads from the period like Rubik's cubes and break-dancing.
The corniness and pretentiousness of the songs are often exaggerated for laughs, but the filmmakers also skillfully use their tuneful romanticism to grab us emotionally and get us to root for the young lovers. The chemistry between Robbie and Julia is winning, and with stars in their eyes they ignore all the garbage swirling around them.
The movie's biggest surprise is that despite its permissive morality, the '80s seem a more innocent time than today. Back then there wasn't as much violence, everyone had hope, and people were less self-conscious. When contrasted with the deep cynicism of the '90s, The Wedding Singer seems like a throwback to a golden age.
The U.S. Catholic Conference classification of The Wedding Singer is AIII: adults. The film is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America.
Arts & culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts & culture -------- TITLE: The Staircase: 'High-minded' Movie Makes it to Network TV DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:It took eight years for television producer Craig Anderson to get The Staircase made.
The Staircase, a fictional treatment about an amazing staircase in a convent chapel in New Mexico, will air 9:00-11:00 p.m. EDT Easter Sunday, April 12, on CBS.
In the movie, Barbara Hershey plays Mother Madalyn, a dying Loretto sister whose last wish is to see the chapel completed. But the contractor and the builder goof up by not putting in a staircase to the choir loft, and the chapel's dimensions make a conventional stairway impossible.
Mother Madalyn and the sisters pray a novena to St. Joseph, the patron saint of carpenters. On the novena's last day, a mysterious but disarming stranger named Joad (William Petersen) appears, offering to install a staircase.
Without using nails or a center support and using wood that defies classification, Joad builds a circular staircase.
The actual staircase still astounds people even today, including screen-writer Chris Lofton, himself a carpenter with a degree in civil engineering.
Since the chapel housing the staircase couldn't be used for filming, a replica had to be made.
He Lofton speculated on who Joad might have been.
“He was a carpenter who, for whatever reasons in his life—some terrible losses, personal losses—took another step along the evolutionary ladder and became someone who dedicated himself to helping people,” Lofton said.
“I regard him mostly as a selfless person, committed to helping people, wherever he can, whenever he can.”
In writing the script in 1977, Lofton found it a tough sell. One network—he won't say which—turned it down, telling him it was “too high-minded.”
“That climate has changed a little bit,” Lofton said. “The networks realize that television has a hunger for this kind of material,” and that high ratings for such programs as the TV debut of the motion picture Chariots of Fire are more than “a fluke,” something else he said a TV executive told him.
He considers his script “timeless” in the sense that he “can put it in a drawer and take it out in five years” without needing revisions to make it contemporary.
Anderson said his eight-year wait to make The Staircase was not his longest. The TV movie Return of the Native took 20 years, and another TV film, Spoils of War, also took eight years.
The Piano Lesson, which earned Anderson a Christopher Award, took a mere four-and-a-half years, he said.
He noted that last Easter, showings of the theatrical movies The Ten Commandments and A Few Good Men plus a Waltons Easter special drew a combined 51% of viewers, “a large audience for TV on Easter Sunday.”
This makes Anderson think The Staircase will do well.
“TV was getting tired of the crime of the week, disease of the week, rape of the week movie,” he said.
His own take on who Joad was?
“He's a man on a donkey, a carpenter. He performs miracles. We don't say any more than that. You can read between the lines. You can make up your own mind who you think he is- Jesus, Joseph, an evolved man.”
Mark Pattison writes for Catholic News Service.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mark Pattison ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Hope for Generation X DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:In a new mini-magazine for young people, singers, athletes, and other celebrities talk up the pro-life message
“Our society needs hope,” says Pro-Life America founder J.T. Finn, who is publishing a new pro-life tabloid-format magazine targeted at students from age 15 to 25.
The 24-page, Gen X-aimed publication will feature positive chastity and pro-life messages from popular youth celebrities such as supermodel Kim Alexis, Washington Redskins all-pro cornerback Darrell Green, Miss Teen California 1997 Kimberly Gloudeman, French supermodel Noelia Garcia, singer and songwriter of the 1997 No. 1 hit Butterfly Kisses Bob Carlisle, and Los Angeles Dodgers all-star centerfielder Brett Butler. Finn plans to distribute the publication on college campuses and in teen youth groups nationwide by late spring 1998.
“People talk about not needing to preach to the choir,” continues Finn, “but the choir isn't singing anymore. Today the problems of promiscuous lifestyles, contraception, and abortion aren't just outside the Church, they're even within the Church.”
Citing widespread divorce, use of contraceptives, and acceptance of abortion among those who consider themselves Christian, Finn says the pro-life message must be promoted not only to unchurched teens and college students, but also to Christian youth. “Our goal is to strengthen Christians and give them resources to reach out and help convert the society around us.”
Finn's student education campaign, which began in 1992, has done more than preach to those inside and outside the proverbial “choir.” It has saved the lives of countless babies and their college-aged mothers, primarily through the distribution of a 12-page, Minnesota-based Human Life Alliance newspaper insert called She's a Child, Not a Choice.
“Marlene Reid [HLA director] and the rest of her team did a super job putting together the original HLA newspaper, which I began distributing on college campuses in 1992,” says Finn.
More than 3 million copies of the HLA insert have been distributed to some 100 college campuses in a five-year period, including Stanford University, Purdue, Iowa State, Gainsville (Florida), Ohio State, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of California at Los Angeles, and Texas A&M. On one Saturday morning, 250 volunteers distributed the tabloid door-to-door, reaching about 30,000 homes in less than four hours. Thousands of copies of the insert were distributed in front of high schools across the country.
In July 1996, the Human Life Alliance issued the results of an independent, professional survey commissioned to determine the efficacy of their supplement in reaching college students. In a pre- and post-distribution phone survey involving more than 700 students at a large southern university where the She's a Child, Not a Choice supplement was being inserted into the campus newspaper, the percentage of students who believed that abortion should not be legal more than doubled.
The number of students who found abortion “troubling” increased by 170%, and half of those who said they were more opposed to abortion after reading the HLA supplement also said they would become more active in opposing legal abortion. In total, 21% of the students surveyed said they were more inclined to oppose abortion after reading the insert, and those showing the greatest propensity for this shift in opinion were single, Hispanic women between the ages of 19 and 23. Sixty-seven percent of respondents who read all of the insert were Hispanic.
Noting the remarkable effectiveness of the original HLA tabloid, the 37-year-old Southern California-based Finn decided to publish the new pro-life piece with a contemporary graphic look and he has even bigger distribution plans for his new magazine supplement. Finn hopes to raise $1 million, which will enable him to distribute between 4 million and 5 million supplements to college students across the nation. He estimates that each dollar raised will put the newspaper into the hands of four or five students. It could easily reach many more students than that, as each recipient shares the supplement with friends.
In addition to featuring popular celebrities, athletes and singers, Pro-Life America's supplement emphasizes a four-part message: Save sex for marriage; choose life—not abortion; be forewarned about contraceptive dangers, and make virtuous decisions that lead to happiness. Young people such as the 17-year-old Gloudeman, are quoted in the supplement with hard-hitting messages and practical tips for avoiding tempting situations.
“I am saving sex for marriage because I know God has great things destined for me,” says Gloudeman, who is also founder of TAPS (Teens Against Premarital Sex). “I don't want to have premarital sex, STDs [sexually transmitted diseases], or anything else stop me from reaching those great things.
“It's been echoed to teens over and over again—we are Generation X—we have no morals, no dreams, and no future. But I know I am not a part of that same generation,” Gloudeman continues, noting that millions of teenagers across the nation are discovering the same thing about themselves. “We decided to rise above the constant stereotyping. We are standing up for what we believe in…. I strongly believe we are Generation X-cellence.”
Half of the new publication is devoted to changing attitudes about pre-marital sex and behavior that leads to abortion. The other half will deal with abortion.
The consequences of abortion, Finn explains, have left our nation and society suffering from 35 million dead babies and tens of millions of wounded women. The statistics are so overwhelming that he believes any pro-life educational supplement must also include direct facts about abortion as well as hope and help for those who have already had abortions.
“But we also need to get to the root problem,” says Finn. “We need to talk about those things that lead to abortion, such as promiscuous lifestyles, the loss of a proper understanding of sex within marriage, widespread use of contraceptives, a breakdown of the family, the epidemic number of sexually transmitted diseases, and a lack of respect for basic human life. All of these show a loss of faith.”
Finn and those working with him are certainly following the recommendations of Pope John Paul II, who has repeatedly urged Catholics to evangelize society, especially appealing to the youth of the world.
For more information about the educational newspaper supplement, visit the Pro-Life America Website (www.prolife.com).
Karen Walker writes from Corona Del Mar, Calif.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Karen Walker ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Managing the Pain of Miscarriage DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:After decades of suffering alone, couples are finding support as they grieve the loss of an expected child
“Everyone kept telling me not to worry. I'd have another baby. But they didn't understand. I didn't want another baby, I wanted that baby.”
Cries like this are nothing new to those who minister to women who experience a miscarriage. And thanks to the efforts of some in the Church, those cries aren't being ignored. Instead, they're being heard, recognized, validated, and understood.
Losing a baby before its birth through a miscarriage isn't rare. Statistics reveal that 20% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. For decades, the women and families who experienced a miscarriage often suffered alone. People didn't know what to say or would unintentionally inhibit the grieving process by minimizing the experience. Fortunately, women experiencing miscarriage today are finding more resources—and more compassion.
Christine Cina miscarried a baby last year in her sixth week of pregnancy. Her baby, whom she and her husband named William, would have been the Cinas' first-born child. The miscarriage took Cina and her husband by surprise. While they had prayed for a child since their marriage in 1993, William was the first child conceived. Shortly after taking a home pregnancy test, she began miscarrying. After two painful weeks, Christine went to a Catholic hospital seeking medical attention.
What she experienced there disturbed her. Practicing Catholics active in the pro-life movement, the Cinas chose a Catholic hospital for specific reasons, namely because the Church recognized and affirmed the humanity of their unborn child. Instead of a warm, compassionate environment, however, the Cinas say they found the hospital doctors and staff insensitive and cold.
“I was shocked,” said Christine. “I was never offered a priest, and when my husband requested the baby's body so we could bury him, we received his body in a container labeled ‘POC’—meaning products of conception.”
“That really upset me. We left and that was it. They never sent me anything, and there was no follow up at all.”
As they prepared for the burial, the Cinas asked if any Catholic cemetery in the area offered plots for miscarried babies. They were told nothing was offered. With the help of a priest, the Cinas buried their son on the grounds of a local parish.
While she is still upset by the experience, Christine does-n't blame the Church—even though she wishes it would offer more for women in her situation. Instead, she insists that more sensitivity needs to be instilled in the medical profession, especially among Catholic health professionals.
“There needs to be training in how to mourn with someone, to pray with someone who's going through this,” she said. “They didn't recognize that he [William] was a gift from God, not some fluke of science.”
Christine's experience has prompted her to take steps to assist in the formation of a ministry in her diocese to specifically reach out to women and families who lose babies before birth. She describes it as part of her own healing process.
“You're almost made to feel like you're an abnormal person if you go through this,” said Christine. “To help another person who has lost a child, to reach out, that helps me.”
One place the Cinas turned to for assistance in their grieving process was the Shrine of the Holy Innocents in New York City. Located inside the Church of the Holy Innocents, the shrine is a memorial to all children who have died by miscarriage, abortion, or stillbirth. Dedicated by Cardinal John O'Connor on the (Dec. 28) feast of the Holy Innocents in 1993, the shrine includes a Book of Life where the children's names are entered.
Loraine Gilchrist, program coordinator for the shrine, says that 1,500 people have contacted her office since the shrine's dedication. The families are given the opportunity to name their child and have a Mass celebrated in memory of the child. Each family receives a package with a letter, a certificate of enrollment bearing the child's name, prayer cards, pamphlets, and books on healing from the shrine.
“Our feeling is that the child has an immortal soul and the families will be reunited with their children in heaven,” said Gilchrist.
Gilchrist feels that Catholic hospitals are often much better than secular hospitals at acknowledging the loss associated with a miscarriage, however she agrees that more education is necessary.
“There's more knowledge today as opposed to 10 or 20 years ago, but more education for doctors, nurses, and staff is necessary,” she said.
Gilchrist points out that there are some “Do's” and “Don'ts” to follow when speaking to a woman who has just suffered a miscarriage.
“Never say, ‘Don't worry, you'll have another one’ or ‘It was God's will,’” she said. “If someone lost a spouse, you wouldn't say, ‘Don't worry you'll get married again’ or ‘It was God's will.’”
“Listen to the woman. Ask her about the child. What she felt for the child. You don't have to say much, just a few compassionate words.”
While other Christian ministries—such as the Sharing Network and Elizabeth Ministries—are growing rapidly and reaching out to women and families, secular sources of healing are also popping up—even on the Internet. One parenting web site offers a question and answer bulletin board where women can post questions for a family therapist to answer. While offering families an outlet for their grief, the therapist routinely refers to the lost child as “the pregnancy” or a “potential child” in her responses to the grieving parents. Gilchrist and Cina see this as an impediment to the healing process.
“When I hear someone say ‘potential child’, it sets me off,” said Cina. “My child wasn't a potential child. He was a child.”
“Language like ‘the pregnancy’ or ‘potential child’ harms the grieving process. William existed, and it wasn't a potential existence.”
Gilchrist agrees. “By calling the baby a ‘potential child’ it nullifies their grief,” she said. “It diminishes the whole experience.”
Cina admits that the grieving process is a lengthy one that won't produce total healing in a few weeks or months. In the midst of that healing process, however, the Cinas received some good news. Prior to the miscarriage, the couple had completed their application process to adopt a baby girl from China. In November, they received word that their little girl, Maria, was waiting for them. The next day, Christine's pregnancy test turned out positive. In February, Christine's husband and sister-inlaw flew to China and brought Maria home. And Christine's second pregnancy is progressing well—her unborn baby is entering his or her fifth month.
Even with all the excitement of new life, Cina says she still feels the loss of her son. “I always think of William,” she said.
For more information, contact the Shrine of the Holy Innocents: Church of the Holy Innocents, 128 W. 37th St., New York, NY 10018; tel. 212-279-5861.
Greg Chesmore writes from Bloomington, Ind.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Greg Chesmore ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: The Gospel Of Life DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:“… Contraception and abortion are often closely connected, as fruits of the same tree. It is true that in many cases contraception and even abortion are practiced under the pressure of real-life difficulties, which nonetheless can never exonerate from striving to observe God's law fully. Still, in very many other instances such practices are rooted in a hedonistic mentality unwilling to accept responsibility in matters of sexuality, and they imply a self-centered concept of freedom, which regards procreation as an obstacle to personal fulfillment.”
Pope John Paul II
(Evangelium Vitae 13.3)
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Will the 'Right' to Die Become a 'Duty'? DATE: 03/15/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 15-21, 1998 ----- BODY:Oregon's assisted suicide law works its way into the fabric of society
PORTLAND, Ore.—It was sold as a law rooted in openness and compassion. At least that's how backers described the proposal to give Oregon the groundbreaking distinction of leading the way in legalizing doctor assisted suicide. Stop the needless suffering, they said, and put the heart-wrenching decision-making into the family's hands, where it belongs.
That's not what has come to pass.
“Before the November vote, proponents of the suicide law said it would empower patients and families in making difficult personal decisions,” said Richard Doerflinger, a public policy analyst for the U.S. Catholic Conference in Washington, D.C. “Opponents warned that the power to assist suicides would give doctors even more unreviewable control over the life and death of depressed patients—and the ‘right to die’ could become more of a government-approved duty than an individual choice. Guess who seems to have been right?”
Last month an Oregon agency opted to shift taxpayer funds to pay for assisted suicide for the poor. That move is expected to generate another conflict between state and federal officials.
Despite heavy opposition from the Oregon Catholic Conference of Bishops and others, the Oregon Health Services Commission approved payment for lethal drugs under the state's health plan for the poor. However, a law passed by Congress in April 1997 blocks federal spending on assisted suicide.
“It looks as though the state is deliberately provoking another federal-state conflict,” Doerflinger said. “The Federal Assisted Suicide Funding Restriction Act does not allow a state to integrate assisted suicide into its federally approved benefits package and then claim a mere paper separation of state and federal funds. It has to be in a separately administered program.”
Oregon's 1994 voter initiative legalizing assisted suicide is already facing scrutiny for possible violation of federal narcotics law. U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno is expected to announce any day whether doctors can legally prescribe lethal drugs under Oregon's law.
“Many Oregon citizens object in good conscience to physician-assisted suicide,” the state's Catholic bishops told the health commission in prepared testimony. “They should not be compelled to pay for physician-assisted suicide through the Oregon tax system and thereby be forced to contribute to an act which violates their conscience.”
Nonetheless, the commission, in a 10-1 vote, included assisted suicide in the Oregon Health Plan under the category “comfort care.” The plan is the state's health-insurance program that covers 270,000 poor residents. It makes the money allocated to it go further by creating a prioritized list of medical treatments.
“The poor, who are among the weakest and most vulnerable people in Oregon, should not be victimized through the inclusion of physician-assisted suicide in the Oregon Health Plan,” the bishops wrote.
The bishops asked that symptom control, pain management, and pastoral care be the focus of end-of-life treatment. They said they support hospice care and public support for the “social needs” of patients. A state study from last year indicates that the poor, the disabled, and the mentally ill are most likely to have suicidal thoughts.
Catholic teaching traditionally gives special consideration to those on society's fringes, the poor, and the weak. Oregon's bishops maintain that assisted suicide will slowly erode into a “duty to die” or even involuntary euthanasia. The bishops say the poor and elderly will become victims because they lack influence.
Assisted-suicide proponents told the Health Services Commission that because most voters approved of the suicide law twice the procedure should be covered for all Oregonians who choose it. In November, by a 20% margin, state voters chose not to repeal the law permitting assisted suicide first narrowly passed in 1994.
Will these wranglings in the Pacific Northwest make a difference elsewhere? “The developments in Oregon on physician-assisted suicide definitely and tragically set a national precedent,” said Bob Castagna, executive director of the Oregon Catholic Conference. “The nation should be aware of and concerned about the developments on physician-assisted suicide. Because we're setting the precedent, it can be exported as public policy to other states.”
That sounds just like what the Hemlock Society and others behind Oregon's controversial law are hoping. In December, the Hemlock Society also said it supports legalizing non-voluntary euthanasia in cases of “a minor or incompetent adult” who never sought to die. The group adds that this should only be permitted in cases involving terminal illness.
“As life expectancy increases,” said the Hemlock Society, “chronic diseases proliferate and medical science can lengthen life almost indefinitely. We must find ways to provide help to people who wish to hasten the dying process.”
Some, including most Catholics, are deeply disturbed by such a view of society's role. What can be done to respond?
Castagna urges action. At least five other states are considering new laws against assisted suicide, or have defeated legislation similar to that passed in Oregon. Castagna said it's not too early for voters to write their legislators, stressing opposition to following Oregon's frightening lead. Castagna is not without hope; he said various appeals that could bear fruit are currently underway, including through the courts and through Congress.
Relief could come from the government. Reno and the Justice Department are reviewing a decision by the federal narcotics chief who in November said he would remove the prescribing licenses of doctors who authorize poison for patients seeking suicide. A spokesman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has said that lethal prescriptions violate the Controlled Substances Act.
Some Oregon pharmacists are seeking to require doctors to list which prescriptions of barbiturates were intended for suicide. This would allow a pharmacist to choose not to participate in helping someone kill themselves.
“Not to be outdone, Oregon's doctors have become newly protective of their own privacy,” Doerflinger said, adding that the Oregon Medical Association is crying physician-patient “confidentially.” The doctors contend that this extends even to withholding from pharmacists who give the drugs to patients the purpose of those potentially lethal prescribed drugs.
Doctors and counselors report that at least 10 terminally ill patients have officially asked to invoke Oregon's assisted suicide law. They say no one has had a chance to use the drugs to die. During the 15-day waiting period the law requires between request for death and prescription of the lethal pills, about half of those making the request have died. A report from the Oregon Health Division on the number of actual suicides via the law is not expected until the end of the year.
The health office has ordered county registrars to neither confirm nor deny if a death has occurred in their county.
“The state is also working to ensure that families and ordinary Oregonians will be kept in the dark regarding the deaths of their loved ones,“ Doerflinger said. “Assisted suicide proponents said that legalization would allow assisted suicide to come out into the open, where it could be regulated to prevent abuse. Now the practice is wrapped in a conspiracy of silence, and no one will know about the abuses.”
Meanwhile, the legality of assisted suicide remains shaky. Feb. 17, U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan listened to arguments in favor of restarting a 1994 suit against the practice. That suit was dismissed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Plaintiffs say the court did not focus on if the assisted suicide law places a “stigmatic injury” on the terminally ill because their lives are categorized as not as important to protect as others. A ruling on the case before Hogan is not expected for at least another month.
Hazel Whitman writes from Portland, Ore.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Hazel Whitman ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Delegation to China Gets Mixed Reviews DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:U.S. archbishop defends visit as ‘a first step’ to religious freedom, critics see only a public relations coup for Beijing
ROME—An ancient Chinese proverb says, “Even the longest journey begins with a single step.” For Archbishop Theodore McCarrick of Newark, N.J., his ground breaking trip to China covered some 20,000 miles.
His hope, he says, is that the trip will be “a first step” on the road toward religious freedom in the communist nation.
“I pray this is the start of the building of a bridge over which many people will cross and ideas are shared between ourselves and the leaders of the People's Republic of China,” Archbishop McCarrick told the Register. The prelate briefed Pope John Paul II about his three-week journey ahead of an official report set for release March 18 at a press conference in New York.
The archbishop's visit, which wrapped up earlier this month, was made together with a Baptist minister and an Orthodox Rabbi. The delegation was the highest-level group of U.S. religious leaders to ever travel through China.
It came at the invitation of Chinese President Jiang Zemin who, before his first trip to Washington last October, acknowledged that allegations about religious rights in China were a major obstacle to improving U.S.-Chinese relations.
To express these concerns more clearly to the Chinese government, President Bill Clinton sent Archbishop McCarrick, who is chairman of the International Policy Committee of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops; Dr. Donald Argue, president of the National Association of Evangelicals; and Rabbi Arthur Schneier, president of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation.
“We met with President Clinton for about a half hour, following a number of briefings by the State Department, and by the House and Senate,” the archbishop said. “The president spoke about his own feelings of the importance of this trip.”
Weeks later, on March 13, the Clinton administration withdrew U.S. support for a United Nations' resolution condemning China's record on human rights. The decision not to support the annual resolution, which was introduced in 1990 after the massacre of unarmed pro-democracy protesters at Beijing's Tiananmen Square, comes in the wake of what the administration says it believes are sincere efforts by China to improve its rights record. China announced in mid-March that it intended to sign the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a U.N. treaty meant to guarantee freedom of expression and religion, and to ensure equality before the law.
Human rights groups, however, denounced the administration's decision to drop sponsorship of the annual U.N. human rights resolution, saying it was relinquishing one of its most effective tools to pressure China into ending abuses.
Dialogue, Not Fact-Finding
The trip of the religious leaders that ended just days before the administration shifted its position was never intended to be a “fact-finding” mission but rather, was meant to promote dialogue, according to Archbishop McCarrick. By avoiding the media and controversy, the three religious leaders were given high-level access throughout their mission, which included private talks with President Jiang.
“The goal of the mission,” he said, “was to try, through substantive dialogue and conversations with the highest authorities in China, to give them some idea of the fact that religion does play a major role in the foreign policy of nations—especially of the foreign policy of the United States.”
He said the delegation tried to make that point wherever they were able to go. Besides meeting top government officials, they also met with leaders of the Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, and Taoist faiths from across the vast nation.
Drawing a contrast between the United States and China, the archbishop said that while 90% of the U.S. population has some commitment to religion, in China 90% or more of the people are atheists.
“It becomes a subject for diplomacy because it affects how Americans look at other nations,” he said. “We went to China to make the point that religion is important—and is not just an add-on. It's an essential element of a mutual relationship among nations.
“It seems the government of China suspects that when American foreign policy talks about religious liberty and religion, it's just a ploy or a gimmick,” he said.
“We spent more than an hour with President Jiang,” the archbishop said. “As I said to him, because Americans go to church, they are concerned about their brothers and sisters who share their beliefs in other parts of the world.”
The U.S. delegation held separate discussions with officials in China's Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Justice, the Religious Affairs Bureau, the Politburo, local governors and with Communist Party officials.
In total, there were nearly 50 substantive meetings in Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Lhasa (Tibet), and Hong Kong.
The Persecuted Church
The Chinese regime sees unsupervised religious freedom as a threat to the supremacy of the Communist Party. It is especially suspicious of the Catholic Church, since it recognizes a spiritual—and political—leader outside China.
All officially recognized religions must report to a government agency whose mission it is to promote atheism. Since seizing power in 1949, the communists have insisted that Christians join the state-sponsored Catholic or Protestant Churches.
For Catholics, this means severing all ties to Rome and participating in the Patriotic Association of Catholics. Many have refused and instead worship in the “Underground Church,” risking harassment and arrest. (See interview with Cardinal Paul Shan Kuo-hsi of Taiwan, page 1)
Officially, the Chinese regime reports fewer than 15 million Christians in a total population of 1.2 billion, but estimates by missionary groups put the figure as high as 90 million, including as many as 8 million Catholics in the Underground Church.
According to Archbishop McCarrick, the biggest obstacle to growth remains the fact that Beijing requires all Churches to register with the state and be subject to a degree of state control.
“We told the Chinese authorities that Americans find hard to understand the need to register Churches,” he said.
The archbishop also said the three religious leaders had done much research preparing a list of prisoners of conscience and appealed to the Chinese authorities for an investigation.
“I presented a list of some 30 people to the head of the Religious Affairs Bureau in Beijing,” he said. “We said the continued detention of these people was a serious problem for religious believers in the United States.”
The delegation has received no response to their appeal.
The visit by the U.S. religious leaders to China was not without its critics, among them the Stamford, Conn.-based Cardinal Kung Foundation and Fides, the missionary news agency of the Vatican. Both organizations interpreted the visit as a ploy to soften criticism of Beijing for its persecution of religious believers who practice their faith outside state-sanctioned institutions.
Fides called the mission “a public relations coup” for China's communist government but a “fiasco” in terms of discovering the true level of religious freedom in the country.
Archbishop McCarrick countered that criticism, saying Fides “should have paid attention” to the reasons for the trip and the mission the U.S. delegation had outlined in advance.
“If it was a fact-finding trip, then Fides was absolutely correct,” he said, “but since it was not a fact-finding trip, Fides was absolutely incorrect. It was obvious Fides hadn't been paying attention.”
Throughout the 18-day journey, the archbishop said he did not celebrate Mass in any of the Catholic churches in China, since they are not in communion with Rome. Instead, he would offer Mass each day in his hotel room.
“I did, however, visit both [states-sponsored] Protestant and Catholic Churches to observe the ceremonies, and the deep faith of the people was evident,” he said.
The archbishop said when Chinese (Patriotic) Catholics learned he was a bishop from the Universal Church, they would greet him and ask for a blessing.
“In my mind that was so clear a sign there is a longing for the full expression of the faith in China.”
He also said he experienced a “personal joy” during the delegation's visit to the ancient city of Lhasa in Tibet, where local authorities informed him he was the first Catholic bishop to visit in nearly 700 years.
“I may have been the first Catholic bishop to enter central Tibet since the 13th century—since the Franciscan missionary John of Monte Corvino—almost in the time of Marco Polo,” Archbishop McCarrick said. “I offered Mass for Pope John Paul II in my hotel room there and prayed for the full reconciliation of all peoples in the Church of the Lord Jesus.”
A Final Evaluation
When asked if the delegation's visit to China was a success, the archbishop responded affirmatively.
“When you look at what our major purpose was—to begin these negotiations— that certainly was achieved,” he said. “To have been able to talk about religion with the president of China was a rare opportunity.”
He said all three U.S. religious leaders hoped the Chinese government might see the value of talking to religious leaders and that dialogue might continue in the future.
Despite the seemingly insurmountable obstacles to religious freedom in China, Archbishop McCarrick said his prayer is that Chinese authorities will take steps, however small, toward easing restrictions on believers. He also said he hoped the U.S. delegation's visit had been “a first step” along that pathway.
Stephen Banyra writes from Rome.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Stephen Banyra ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Islam & Christianity: Past Complicates Modern Attempts at Bridge-Building DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:From the very beginning, Mohammed acknowledged that Christians, along with Jews, were the “People of the Book,” and therefore, as partisans of a true (if incomplete) faith, entitled to official toleration. Nevertheless, as early texts show, many central orthodox Christian beliefs—the Incarnation, the Atonement, the Trinity—were virtually anathema to Islam's founder and his followers.
Not that Christians haven't returned the compliment-with interest. St. John of Damascus (A.D. 675-750?), one of the first major theologians to live under Islamic rule, had the right idea. Islam, he wrote, was a Christian heresy. While the revelation may be of dubious origin, it had resulted in a whole people abandoning idolatry. Engage Muslim leaders, he advised, in firm but prudent dialogue.
Last in a III part series on ISLAM
It was a road not taken. Almost from the very beginning, the Christian polemic against Islam was very personal, much of it focused, unhelpfully, on Mohammed himself.
The “prophet” of Islam, so the polemic ran, was a low-born pagan upstart, who schemed himself into power and maintained it by pretended revelations, and who spread his religion by fire and sword. The Koran is a hodgepodge of biblical and heretical Christian allusions, ultimately inspired by the devil. Christianity, in this long-held view, is essentially a spiritual religion whereas Islam is centered on worldly gains and carnal delights.
Add to that the very real military threat Islam posed to Christendom-a threat that, in part, inspired the Crusades, the Reconquista of Spain and Portugal, and the Turkish wars of the 18th and 19th centuries—and the Damascene's counsel of patient dialogue, understandably, was an early casualty of the struggle. With a few exceptions on both sides, there things stood until modern times.
The exceptions, however, are significant. After two abortive attempts to reach Muslim territory, St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) reached Egypt with the Crusaders in 1219. There he impressed the Sultan Malek el-Kamil who allowed him to preach the Gospel in his presence. Though the sultan refused to indulge in religious controversy, he protected the saint and showered him with gifts. The saint's reputation in Islamic lands disposed later Muslim rulers to permit Franciscans to care for hard-pressed Christian minorities in the Near East.
About the same time, in Islamic Persia, the Afghan-born Muslim mystic Jalal al-Din or “Rumi” (1207-1273) wrote poetry warmly celebrating Jesus as the ascetic ideal and taught his followers that love is monotheism's supreme value. In his poem, The Sultan of Lovers, Rumi embraces Jews and Christians with the bold line, “In mosques, synagogues and churches, I find one shrine.”
St. Thomas Aquinas' “second” Summa, the unfinished Summa contra Gentiles, in part addressed to Catholic missionaries in Muslim lands, shows a deep and respectful familiarity with the ideas of contemporary Muslim thinkers such as Ibn-Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn-Rushd (Averroes).
Paradoxically, these remarkable careers took place during the signature episode in Muslim-Catholic relations: the two hundred years of the Crusades (1099-1299).
Launched by Pope Urban II in 1095 and preached by the likes of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the goal of the Crusades ostensibly was to wrest control of the Christian shrines in the Holy Land from Muslim control and protect the pilgrimage routes from Europe to the Near East. Sparked by the Fatimid caliph Hakim's destruction of Jerusalem's Church of the Anastasis (today's Church of the Holy Sepulcher), traditional site of Calvary and the Tomb, and many other Christian shrines earlier that century, the movement quickly fell prey to the lust for gain and the competing ambitions of the powers—Franks, Venetians, Byzantines—that bankrolled it.
Suspicion in Modern Times
Mutual suspicions born during that largely destructive encounter between Catholic West and Muslim East continue to reverberate today. Nowhere does that fact show up more sharply than in stilltense relations between Middle Eastern Christians and their Muslim neighbors. Muslims often harbor suspicions, largely based on the past, that Catholic and Eastern Orthodox communities side secretly with the “colonial” aims of Christian powers in the Muslim world.
But if the Crusades mark the historical low point in Muslim-Catholic relations, few would dispute that, more than any other single event, the Second Vatican Council opened a whole new chapter in the Church's approach to the world's second largest faith.
In Lumen Gentium, the Council's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, the Council Fathers note, after a passage on God's love for the Jewish people, that “the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator. In the first place among these are the Muslims, who, professing to hold the faith of Abraham, along with us adore the one and merciful God, who on the last day will judge mankind” (LG 16).
A fuller passage in the trail-blazing Nostra Aetate, the Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non—Christian Religions, states that the Church “looks with esteem upon the Muslims. They adore one God, living and enduring, merciful and all-powerful, maker of heaven and earth, and speaker to men. They [Muslims] strive to submit wholeheartedly even to his inscrutable decrees, just as did Abraham, with whom the Islamic faith is pleased to associate itself. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, his virgin mother; at times they call on her, too, with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgment when God will give each one his due after raising him up. Consequently, they prize the moral life, and give worship to God especially through prayer, almsgiving, and fasting.”
The Declaration goes on to recognize that “in the course of centuries many quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Muslims. This sacred Synod urges all to forget the past and to strive sincerely for mutual understanding. On behalf of all mankind, let them [Muslims] make common cause of safeguarding and fostering social justice, moral values, peace, and freedom” (NA, 3).
After more than thirty years, some of the remarkable elements in these texts—still the Church's blueprint for Islamic—Catholic relations-are easily missed.
Theological Comparisons
For one thing, they reflect the wise, pastoral tenor of one of the Church's first official reactions to the phenomenon of Islam.
In 1076, Pope Gregory VII wrote a famous letter to Anzir, the Muslim king of Mauritania, in which he acknowledged that Christians and Muslims worship the same God: “[F]or we believe and confess one God, although in different ways, and praise and worship God daily as the creator of all ages and the ruler of this world.”
The acknowledgment is significant because some Christians, even today, question whether Islam's God, Allah, an Arabic contraction for “the divinity,” is the same as the one true God Christians and Jews worship. Some American evangelicals, for example, believe that Muslims adore, not God, but a demon under this name.
On the other hand, it's worth noting that while Vatican II's approach to Islamic religious values is generous, there is also an undercurrent of respectful uncertainty in the texts about some of Islam's claims.
Muslims, according to the Council, “profess to hold the faith of Abraham (LG, 16), and “Islamic faith is pleased to associate itself” with Abraham's humble submission to God (NA, 3).
Nevertheless, the Council underlines those common elements that Muslims and Catholics share-among them, one that many Catholics aren't even aware of: Muslim devotion to the Virgin Mary.
Sayyidattuna Maryam, Our Lady Mary, is the subject of a whole chapter (surah) of the Koran and many other verses besides. Citations from her surah adorn prayer niches to inspire and guide Muslims in their daily submission to God. The Koran calls her “the woman most favored.”
But despite convergences, few expect theological breakthroughs between the two faiths anytime soon.
In fact, as scholar Georg Evers remarked a decade ago, a certain disillusionment has set in among many professional Muslim-Christian scholars in recent years. “The differences are so great,” he lamented, “that one may well wonder whether there's any hope of Christian—Muslim dialogue progressing beyond the stage of registering the differences.”
Allies & Opponents
Joint political action, however, appears to be a different story. Only a generation ago, the idea that quiet collaboration between the Vatican and delegates from Catholic countries and Islamic states would help defeat a U.S.—backed plan to get the developing world to sign on to Western-style abortion and contraceptive measures would have been unthinkable.
But that's exactly what happened at the 1994 U.N. International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo.
Not only did some of the Muslim world's most authoritative voices speak publicly in favor of the Vatican's efforts to rework the U.N. draft but even press spokesmen for the Iranian government joined in.
“The future war is between the religious and the materialists,” one Teheran newspaper editorialized. “Collaboration between religious governments in support of outlawing abortion is a fine beginning for the conception of collaboration in other fields.”
However, even in the field of social concern, complications between Catholics and Muslims can arise.
Take the issue of female circumcision, for example.
No sooner had Muslim and Catholic allies taken credit for revisions in the U.N. resolution on population and development than the debate on the ancient African practice of female circumcision arose in Egypt. The procedure, which usually involves removal of all or part of a young girl's genitalia, is widespread in Africa and the Middle East. Opponents claim that more than 85 million women have endured some form of it. A practice dating back to Pharaonic times, female circumcision is intended to ensure virginity and curb sexual pleasure and is typically administered by a non-surgeon, often without anesthetic.
When Egypt's health minister banned the procedure outside hospitals three years ago, there was a storm of protest from prominent Muslim scholars defending the pre-Islamic custom.
Vatican spokesmen led the way in condemning the mutilations and vowed to work for a universal ban on female circumcision. Later on, pressure from a variety of groups, including western feminists, persuaded Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to reverse the decree which permitted hospitals and health clinics to perform the surgery and bills were introduced in the Congress to ban the practice among mainly African immigrants to the U.S. Some Islamic reformers, it must be noted, also oppose the practice.
The Road Ahead
Writing a new chapter in Catholic—Muslims relations will not be easy, nor will it pay quick, easy dividends. As Catholic ecumenist Georges Anawati has written, it will require a sober patience and a willingness to “hope for what one does not yet see.”
And perhaps something still more mysterious and costly.
Two years ago, in May 1996, seven French monks were killed by an Islamic rebel group in strife-torn Algeria. One of the Trappists, Father Christian-Marie de Cherge, prior of the Monastery of Notre Dame de l' Atlas, left behind a letter anticipating his assassination.
The letter begins by reminding his readers that his “life had been given to God,” and urges them to reject “the caricatures of Islam that are fostered by a certain Islamism.
“It is all too easy to appease one's conscience,” he writes, “by simply identifying this religious tradition with the allor—nothingness of the extremists.”
De Cherge concluded: “My death would seem to vindicate those who dismiss me as naive, an idealist, (saying): ‘Let him say how he sees things now! ’ For then I shall be able, if it pleases God, to submerge my gaze in the Father's, to see his Islamic children, illuminated by the glory of Christ, by the fruits of his passion, endowed with the gift of the Spirit, whose secret joy is always to establish communion and to restore likeness, by acting among differences.”
Gabriel Meyer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Gabriel Meyer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Boy Scout Case: Latest Advance of 'Gay Rights' Movement DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:Successes have come mostly in the courtrooms, not at the ballot box
AUSTIN. Texas—The March 2 ruling by a New Jersey appeals court that the Boy Scouts of America's ban on homosexuals violates the state's anti-discrimination law was the latest victory for advocates of a growing “gay rights” movement that critics say is directly at odds with Catholic morality.
Catholic and Christian leaders decried the decision and the Boy Scouts vowed to appeal to the state's Supreme Court.
“We have to have empathy for those who struggle with sexual temptation, and not engage in any harsh words or stridency,” said Keith Fournier, executive director of the Washington-based Catholic Alliance. “What we are dealing with is an activist agenda. There's a certain fringe in the homosexual community that is seeking to change the law and give homosexual sex special treatment. This very latest decision is but one in a long string of cases.... The fact is, homosexual practice should not be given the same treatment in the law as immutable characteristics like race or gender.”
Regarding homosexuality, the Catechism of the Catholic Church says: “Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered. ’ They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved” (2357).
The Catechism goes on to say, however, that homosexuals “must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided” (2358).
The past two years have seen numerous victories for homosexual activists, though sometimes those victories-such as the “coming out” of Ellen Degeneres's lead character on the recently cancelled ABC comedy Ellen—were more symbolic than substantive.
Many of the victories have had strong consequences, though. Ten states and many local governments currently have non-discrimination laws specifically aimed at homosexuals, covering things like public accommodations, housing, and employment. A similar federal bill—the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA—failed by one vote in the Senate last year, though it was vigorously supported by President Clinton.
Gay rights advocates won their biggest legal victory in 1996 when the U.S. Supreme Court threw out a Colorado constitutional amendment that forbade laws protecting homosexuals from discrimination. The justices said the Colorado amendment denied homosexuals a political right enjoyed by everyone else—the chance to seek protection from discrimination.
In Hawaii, the state Supreme Court is preparing to rule on the legality of same-sex marriage. A similar battle is being waged in Alaska. In response to such initiatives, the Defense of Marriage Act was passed by Congress in 1996, stipulating that same-sex marriages are not recognized by the federal government. The law also allows individual states to do the same.
In New Jersey, late last year, a homosexual couple won a court battle to adopt a 2-year-old foster child they were raising. And six states have seen sodomy laws thrown out by the courts.
Steve Schwalm, senior analyst in cultural studies for the Family Research Council, a pro-life, pro-family advocacy agency in Washington, said the “gay rights” movement has been particularly successful in the courts but has “failed when it comes to the democratic process.”
In particular, he pointed to an anti discrimination law passed in Maine that was struck down by popular vote in a Feb. 10 referendum, as well as a similar situation in Washington state last year, in which voters, by a 20% margin, rejected a proposed bill.
By targeting the courts, Schwalm said, “You can pick your fights. You can take it to judges and circuits where you think you might have some success.”
William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, has frequently found himself directly at odds with homosexual activists because of what the league sees as threats to the rights of Catholics who wish to live out their faith.
This is an attack on a private, voluntary organization, which is committed to traditional values and to a Judeo-Christian ethos.
“It's scurrilous to say that there's a ‘gay agenda’ any more than to say that there's a ‘straight agenda, ’” Donohue said. “I do believe that there's a radical gay agenda. There's a militant group within the gay population which may not accurately represent gay thought on a host of public policy issues.”
“Clearly they have as their goal a libertine understanding of sexuality. This will often run into conflict with Catholic teaching. The Catholic Church teaches the virtue of restraint. The libertine expression of this gay militant group preaches license. The main focus is this notion of sexual liberty, which holds no boundaries, where shame and guilt are considered to be throwbacks, where sexual expression is seen as a means and an end without any social context.”
Donohue said this mind set is manifested in popular homoerotic artwork as well as in periodicals as mainstream as The New York Times.
“One of the barometers of change in the culture is bookstores,” Donohue added. “A generation ago, if you walked into the largest bookstore, Barnes and Noble, there was no section for gay and lesbian studies. Now there is row after row. And there's even gay and lesbian bookstores. What it comes down to is the eroticization of society, and anything goes.”
Donohue sees the Boy Scouts case as somewhat different from other gay rights issues.
“To be fair, this transcends any gay agenda; this has to be understood differently,” he said. “This is an attack on a private, voluntary organization, which is committed to traditional values and to a Judeo-Christian ethos. This goes beyond a gay agenda; this is the [American Civil Liberty Union's] vision of liberty.”
The case was brought by James Dale, who was an eagle scout and assistant scoutmaster of a Matawan, N.J., troop. Dale was dismissed after he publicly announced his sexual orientation and became active in homosexual causes while a student at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.
A lower court had previously upheld the Boy Scouts' actions, but it was overturned on appeal.
“The Boy Scouts of America has taught traditional family values since its founding in 1910,” said Greg Shields, national spokesman for the Boy Scouts. “A person who engages in homosexual conduct is not a role model for those values. Accordingly, we don't offer leadership positions to avowed homosexuals.”
The case could potentially raise religious freedom issues in addition to questions of freedom of association because of the structure of the Scouts. The Scouts rely on what is known as chartering organizations that take the programs developed by the national organization and implement them in their local groups. More than 50% of the chartering organizations are Church groups, according to Shields. The Catholic Church is the third largest chartering organization.
At the end of 1997, the group had 355,000 youths involved in Catholic chartering organizations.
The Catholic Committee on Scouting, an arm of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, has its national office at the Boy Scouts of America headquarters in Irving, Texas. In addition, every diocese in the country has approved a local committee.
“As Catholic parents we have to be clear that, particularly in a wonderful organization like the Boy Scouts, we should have every right to make sure that those leaders are not engaged in promiscuous homosexual lifestyles,” Fournier said.
Dennis Poust writes from Austin, Texas.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dennis Poust ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Permanent Deacons Get Boost From Vatican DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:New documents on diaconate complete ‘indispensable’ ministry trilogy
VATICAN CITY-As the Church prepares to enter a new millennium, the Vatican has placed new emphasis on the importance of permanent deacons, who played an integral role in the life of the early Christian communities.
Some 30 years after the ministry was re-instituted by Pope Paul VI, the Vatican released two new documents March 10 to meet the need to “clarify and regulate the diversity of the beginnings of the experiments conducted to this point, both at the level of discernment and preparation and at the level of ministerial activity and permanent formation.”
“In this way,” said a joint declaration by the two Vatican offices which authored the documents, “one will be able to ensure the stability of instructions which will not fail to guarantee indispensable unity in legitimate diversity, with the consequent fecundity of a ministry which has already produced good fruits and promises a valid contribution to the new evangelization...”
The documents, entitled Fundamental Norms for the Formation of Permanent Deacons by the Congregation for Catholic Education and Directory for the Ministry and Life of Permanent Deacons by the Congregation for Clergy, were published in a single 144-page book immediately available only in Italian. An English version is expected by the end of March.
Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, head of the clergy office, said the documents were the last of a Vatican trilogy on ministry which are “to be studied, assimilated, absorbed into the humus of local Churches, and applied with motivated fidelity and enthusiasm.” The previously released parts of the trilogy were the Directory for the Ministry and Life of Priests (1994) and the Interdicasterial Instruction on the Collaboration for the Laity in Pastoral Ministry (1997).
The trilogy, said Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos, “is indispensable for the ever-widening work of the new evangelization upon which depends the fecundity of the mission for the third millennium of the Incarnation of the Word.”
The number of permanent deacons has “blossomed” in the three decades since the ministry was restored, said Cardinal Pio Laghi, head of the Catholic education office.
There are currently 22,390 permanent deacons, the former papal nuncio to the United States reported. Of these, 68% are in the Americas, 29% in Europe, and the remaining 3% in Asia, Africa, and Oceania.
Because the majority of permanent deacons are found today in the United States, the norms already put in place by the U.S. bishops were of “great inspiration” as the Vatican prepared the new documents, Cardinal Laghi said.
Nonetheless, in many parts of the world there is still confusion surrounding the ministry. “The almost complete disappearance of the permanent diaconate in the Western Church for more than 1,000 years has certainly made it more difficult to understand the profound reality of this ministry,” said the formation norms document.
The ministry of the permanent diaconate flourished until the fifth century, when it began a slow decline in the West until it became just a transitional stage for candidates to the priesthood.
Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos said, “it is clear that the deacon is neither a ‘beefed-up layman’ nor a ‘half-priest’; nor can he be defined as a ‘lay minister’.”
“The theology of the diaconate, his spirituality, his juridical dimension, his ministerial activity, must be developed entirely within the ambit of the Sacrament of Orders,” he said. The Sacrament of Holy Orders includes three different levels, comprised of deacons, priests, and bishops.
“The sacramental act of ordination goes beyond a simple election, designation, delegation, or institution on the part of the community, because it confers a gift of the Holy Spirit, which permits [the recipient] to exercise a holy power, which can only come from Christ, through his Church,” the congregations' joint declaration said.
Explaining the theological difference between an ordained minister and a lay person to journalists at the documents presentation press conference, Cardinal Laghi said, “All of you are ‘alteri Christi’ [other Christs]; but through ordination the ordained man acts ‘in persona Christi’ [in the person of Christ].”
This is the reason why the diaconate is reserved to men, he said. When Cardinal Laghi and the other Vatican officials were asked by journalists about references to deaconesses in the New Testament, he said scripture study and the constant tradition of the Church indicated that such women had received a special blessing through the laying on of hands, but not sacramental ordination.
Archbishop Jose Saraiva Martins, secretary of the Catholic education office, said speculation about the introduction of deaconesses would seem to be ruled out by Pope John Paul II's apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (On Reserving Priestly Ordination to Men Alone) and a similar document by his predecessor, Pope Paul VI.
As far as requirements for the education and formation of permanent deacons, the Vatican officials said it should resemble more closely priestly formation than catechists' training. After a vocation-testing period, the candidate must spend at least three years directed at “human, spiritual, doctrinal, and pastoral” development.
Just as for priests, it is important that candidates for the diaconate “shape their human personality in such a way as to make it a bridge and not an obstacle for others in encountering the Lord,” said Cardinal Laghi.
Strong intellectual formation was underlined as especially important. “Religious indifference, the obfuscation of values, the loss of ethical convergence, and cultural pluralism necessitate that those who are occupied in the ordained ministry have a complete and serious intellectual formation,” said the formation norms document.
Candidates for the permanent diaconate are required to take a minimum of 1,000 hours of courses during the three years, to develop a strong knowledge of scripture and its correct interpretation, and of Catholic moral and social teaching.
What differentiates the diaconate orders from those of the priest and bishop is the special emphasis on living Christ's role as servant, Vatican officials said.
The deacon is “a specific sacramental sign of Christ the servant in the Church. His task is to be an interpreter of the needs and desires of the Christian communities and animator of service, that is, of diakonia, which is an essential part of the mission of the Church,” the formation norms document said.
Beginning with the reference to the first seven deacons ordained in the Acts of the Apostles (6:1-6), the diaconate has been closely tied to service of those in all types of poverty.
Pope (Saint) Fabian (236-250) even divided Rome into seven zones, later called “diaconates,” over which a deacon was placed to direct works of charity and assistance to the needy.
“A particularly felt need in the decision to re-establish the permanent diaconate was, and is, that of the greater presence of ministers of the Church in the various environments of family, work, school, etc., beyond that of the already existing pastoral structures,” Pope John Paul said at a 1993 general audience.
In this year of preparation for the Jubilee which Pope John Paul has dedicated to the Holy Spirit, Vatican officials stressed that the rebirth of the permanent diaconate should be attributed to the Holy Spirit.
In the Second Vatican Council “the Holy Spirit, protagonist of the life of the Church, was working mysteriously,” said the joint declaration quoting the Pope, “leading to a new restoration of all the components of the hierarchy, traditionally composed of bishops, priests, and deacons. In this way was promoted a revitalization of Christian communities, more conformed to those under the hands of the Apostles and which flowered in the first centuries, ever under the impulse of the Paraclete, as the Acts of the Apostles attests.”
John Norton writes from Rome.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Norton ----- TITLE: 'Jesus Christ Is Not a Foreigner' DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:A newly elevated cardinal discusses the challenges facing the Christian minority in Taiwan and mainland China
Cardinal Paul Shan Kuo-hsi SJ, archbishop of Kaohsiung, Taiwan, received his red hat from Pope John Paul II Feb. 21, making him the fifth Chinese cardinal in the history of the Church. The 74-year-old prelate joins Cardinal John Baptist Wu Chen—Chung, bishop of Hong Kong, and Cardinal Ignatius Gong Pin-mei, bishop of Shaghai, China (living in exile in Stamford, Conn.), in representing the world's Chinese community.
Being the first cardinal from Taiwan in 20 years, his appointment has been taken as an affirmation of the faith of the 300,000 Catholics of Taiwan's mainly Buddhist population. He recently spoke with Register correspondent Joyce Martin in Taiwan.
You have been bishop of two dioceses in Taiwan. What has been your most rewarding experience?
I was bishop of Hualien, on the east coast, for 12 years beginning in 1979. In that diocese, most of the Christians are aborigines; 93% of them are tribal people. They are simple, honest people and not ambitious for material things, but they are quite rich in spiritual things and are close to God. I was very happy there.
Kaohsiung is the oldest diocese in Taiwan, because the missionaries first arrived here. The cathedral there was the first local church in Taiwan.
The number of Christians in Kaohsiung is not very big—only 50,000—but they have a very strong faith. They are united, cooperative, and becoming more and more active in pastoral and missionary work.
Could you provide a brief historical background of the Church in Taiwan?
The Church in Taiwan started more than 300 years ago. At that time, there were a few Spanish Dominican missionaries who came with Spanish soldiers from the Philippines. They worked mainly in the northern part of Taiwan and converted about 4,000 tribal people. Later the Dutch came, captured them, and sent them back to Europe. The mission was interrupted.
The second phase began in 1859. A few missionaries, most of them Spanish Dominicans, came from the Philippines through Amoy to Kaohsiung, where they established the Church. So next year, we will celebrate 140 years.
In 1945, after the end of the Second World War, there were only about 9,000 Catholics on the whole island. Now we have approximately 300,000, divided into seven dioceses.
Today, there are also more than 50 denominations of Protestant Churches. Together they total about 400,000. The biggest denomination is the Presbyterian Church, which makes up half of the Protestants.
The majority of the population are Buddhists, but I would not say they practice “pure Buddhism.” Buddhism here is often mixed with Taoism or with other religions. Real, pure Buddhists are very few in number.
What are the strong points of the Catholic Church in Taiwan?
The Catholic Church here is small, but lively. At a time when there is a worldwide crisis in vocations, we have more than 100 major seminarians in Taipei. There are also many baptisms every year—men, women, and children.
We have two [Catholic] universities, one junior college, 47 high schools and professional schools, a dozen big hospitals, around 30 homes for the aged, and 30 centers for the retarded. There are also numerous clinics in remote areas to assist aborigines.
The Church is very concerned about migrant workers as well. In my diocese, we have three full-time chaplains who take care of migrant workers. There are also many other charity organizations. To deal with the problem of inculturation, there are also recreational and cultural centers, such as the Ricci Institute and the Cardinal Tien Center, that teach the Chinese language.
Another strong point is that, nowadays, there is more lay participation in the Church.
What are its weak points?
Right after World War II, when the communists took over mainland China, many priests who were expelled from the continent arrived here. Because they could not go back to their homeland they stayed here. So, about 34 years ago we had 1,100 priests who were in their 30s and 40s—the best time for apostolic, missionary, and pastoral work. We still have about 700 priests, but 400 of them are over 70 years old, and only 150 are under 60. That is our weak point; we do not have enough priests.
Also, most of our Catholics are new converts. Their faith is not very strong as yet, and not yet deeply rooted. Athird point is that the Taiwanese overemphasize the material aspects of life, so that apostolic work and conversion are not very easy.
What are the present challenges of the Church and society?
As the result of urbanization, many young couples now have their own jobs, and many families are separated. Our society has enjoyed material well-being, but there is a need to promote ethics and morality. Taiwan faces one of the highest divorce rates in the world. Children grow up without experiencing the love of a family, and adolescents who come from broken homes get into trouble.
We also need to help the less fortunate, like the elderly. Yesterday in my homily, I asked other religions to promote a spiritual renewal in the society; to raise up not only material standard of living, but also to pay attention to spiritual personal and moral ethics.
What is the Taiwanese Church doing in the area of interreligious dialogue?
We have good and friendly relations with the other religions. At a recent reception [upon my being made a cardinal] at the Grand Hotel, all the religious leaders were present. With the Protestants, we discussed ecumenism. There is the National Council of Churches of which the Catholic Church was a founding member, and I was its first president. There is also the Association of Greater Religions with 13 members, one of which is the Catholic Church.
Two years ago in Taiwan, we had the first international dialogue between Christians and Buddhists. Each year, we conduct a “living-in dialogue” with different religions—with Taoists or Buddhists and others. Fifty Catholic and 50 Buddhist families live together for three days, exchanging experiences concerning family problems.
What is the current relationship between the Patriotic Church and the Clandestine or Underground Church in China?
The Patriotic Church was created by the government while the members of the Clandestine Church do not want to follow the government's policy of denying the primacy of the Holy Father.
I believe that most people who are in the Patriotic Church want, in their hearts, to be united with the Pope, to be united with the Church. But under the present conditions, they cannot do so.
Cardinal Paul Shan Kuo-hsi SJ
Personal: Age 74; native of Puyang Hopei (mainland China)
• 1955 ordained at in Baguio, Philippines
• 1979 consecrated bishop of Hualien (Taiwan)
• 1991 appointed archbishop of Kaohsiung March 4
• 1998 elevated to cardinal by John Paul II in Rome
Background: President of the Commission on Evangelization of the Chinese Regional Bishops' Conference; secretary for the Asian Bishops' Synod in Rome April 19-May 15, 1998.
Episcopal motto: Restore everything in Christ (Ep 1:10).
There are speculations—just speculations—that one of the recent cardinals in pectore is Chinese. The Pope did not announce their names so as not to cause them any inconvenience. This was the case of Cardinal Gong Pin-mei of mainland China who was only openly declared cardinal in 1991 when he had to go to the United States for medical treatment.
What is the role of the Church of Taiwan toward the Church in mainland China?
The Holy Father gave us a mandate in 1984 to be a “bridge Church” between the Church in China and the universal Church, because the Church in China is living in a very special situation now: it is not free in its contacts with the Church outside the country. So we have to promote communion of the local Church with the universal Church.
The Vatican is the only state in Europe that maintains diplomatic ties with the Republic of China. However, there has been speculation that the Pope named a cardinal from Taiwan as “compensation” for the Vatican's rumored consideration of switching diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Peking. Could you comment on this?
My nomination is a purely religious affair. It did not involve politics.
What is the significance of your appointment coming just before the third millennium? Do you think it is a timely event?
The Holy Father is very much concerned about the Chinese Church because, in China, the Church is still persecuted and the Church in Taiwan is still very small. He wants the Chinese people to play a very important role in the third millennium. The Chinese population is so big: one fourth of the world population is Chinese. It is very natural that the Holy Father shows his love and concern for them. When the Pope spoke of the Chinese people, he repeated: “Great! Great!” He would like the Chinese people to contribute to world peace and not to catastrophe.
My being named cardinal at the end of this century means that the Church in Taiwan has to play a very important role and also to pay attention to missionary work towards other Chinese communities in diaspora as there are many Chinese people abroad.
What was your reaction to your nomination as cardinal?
I do not consider this a personal honor or personal gain. Many others are more deserving of this honor. Religious freedom has been granted in Taiwan, the Pope has recognized this and has chosen me to represent the people of Taiwan in receiving this honor. It is a sign that the Holy Father is concerned about China and the Chinese people. I think that the Holy Father is also encouraging the Church here to do more evangelization.
You are president of the Commission for Evangelization of the Chinese Regional Bishops' Conference. What are the challenges of evangelization in Taiwan now?
We are now actively preparing the national symposium with the theme, “New Century, New Evangelization.” We started two years ago and hopefully the symposium will be held in the year 2000 to prepare the Church to meet its needs in the new century—how to evangelize in the new century. Taiwan needs more missionaries because we are living in a mission country. Most are not Christians and the Christians have the responsibility to bring the Good News to others.
Recently you celebrated a Mass in honor of the Holy Spirit in keeping with the preparation for the Jubilee Year 2000. What signs of the Holy Spirit do you see and expect from this year?
We pray in the hope that the Holy Spirit may spark a fervent desire in the hearts of the Christians here to evangelize and bring the Good News to their neighbors; and to influence the society here with the Gospel.
We can already see signs of the Holy Spirit working. Our laypeople are waking up and many have already started to evangelize. There are many centers training laypeople to be better evangelizers. We also see older and retired persons who also want to do something for God. They want to offer their life and energy for God's work.
You have been chosen as secretary of the Asian Synod of Bishops in Rome next month. What do you expect from this encounter?
This Synod will include the whole of Asia—from the Middle East to Siberia. It is a huge continent. We know the bishops from East, Southeast, and South Asia. But we do not know the bishops from the Middle East, Siberia, or former Russian Asian Republics. During the Synod, we will get to know all of them.
This Synod will bring greater fraternal solidarity, mutual aid, and understanding. As a whole, we can try to solve some of the common problems in Asia.
As the Holy Father said, it was during the first millennium that Christianity spread in Europe and to some parts of Africa. In the second millennium, Christianity spread to a new continent—the Americas. In the third millennium, Christianity should spread in Asia. Except for the Philippines, all the other countries have not yet been evangelized. There are very few Christians in China, Japan, India, and in other countries. We still have much work to do for evangelization. I hope that through this Synod, we may renew our missionary zeal.
The central theme is that Jesus Christ is the Savior, and his mission is one of love and service to Asia. We hope that more and more Asian people may know Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. His mission is to bring life to the Asian people—abundant life.
Jesus Christ is not a foreigner. He is an Asian. He did not come to conquer but to love and to serve the Asians. Being Christian and being Chinese are not two separate things. You can be a good Christian and a better Chinese. There is no contradiction.
Did you always want to become a priest?
In the beginning at elementary school, I wanted to become a doctor because I saw a neighbor die of appendicitis without any medical treatment during the Sino-Japanese war. In high school, I saw the damage done by drought in China. Then I wanted to be involved in agriculture and irrigation to solve the problem of the farmers.
Finally, in a country that did not find peace after the Sino-Japanese war, I decided to be a priest. I was inspired by many good priests and their example. I only want to be a good Jesuit, to lead young people and lead other people to do good things in the society.
If you were to address a message to Churches in the United States, what would it be?
The American Church has always been very generous by sending out lots of missionaries. I hope that the Church will continue to do so and help many young Churches in the other countries.
—Joyce Martin
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: U.S. Notes & Quotes DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:Christian Love to Be Deployed Against KKK
Christ's injunction to love one's enemies is perhaps his hardest commandment, it is said. Last week, Cardinal Francis George, OMI called the people of Chicago to love some very unsavory enemies: the Ku Klux Klan.
While stressing in a Chicago Sun Times quote (March 10) that Chicagoans should “stand up in conviction to oppose them,” George also instructed members to “approach even the members of the Klan with love and respect.”
The quotes were taken from a letter Cardinal George wrote to Father Richard Prendergast of St. Mary of Celle Catholic Church. The letter was sent anticipating a Klan demonstration in Suburban Chicago. Both the cardinal and Father Prendergast urged nonviolent responses to the march, saying “racism is a sin,” according to the report.
Flashdance Traditionalist on Nothing Sacred
While the Religious Public Relations Council was giving its annual Wilbur Award for best TV drama to Disney/ABC's Nothing Sacred, the program was adding a new character-one being described as a “traditionalist” and an opponent of its disbelieving and rebellious priest protagonist. Critics are not confident that the development indicates a change in the attitude the show takes in its title and story line, however.
Jennifer Beals, who influenced fashions by making ripped sweatshirts popular when she starred in the movie Flashdance at age 17, has joined the cast of the controversial ABC television show. She will finish out this year's season and return next year, according to a March 9 report in the Kansas City Star, “and perhaps longer, if Nothing Sacred is renewed...”
“Beals will play Justine, the director of religious education brought in by reformist Father Martin (David Marshall Grant) to replace the popular Sister Maureen (Ann Dowd). “Because she is seen as loyal to the traditionalist Martin, Father Ray (Kevin Anderson) doesn't trust her, nor does anyone else on the St. Thomas staff.”
David Manson, one of the shows creators, is quoted in the report saying, “We wanted a female character who could create challenges for Ray... (including) possible adversarial relationships for Ray so that he's not always at war only with himself.”
But will the show balance its trademark Nothing Sacred Catholicism with a respect for the sacred? Will Justine love the Church?
Critics highly doubt it. The article calls Justine “spirited” but says “her allegiances aren't always clear.”
Parish Financial Planning
A financial consultant company in Philadelphia has found a unique marketing niche: Catholic priests.
“If your boiler breaks down in the middle of the night, your main concern is to get someone out to fix it before your pipes freeze,” begins a report in the Philadelphia Inquirer (March 9).
“But if you're a Catholic priest and pastor, responsible not only for the spiritual life of the parish but also for its temporal needs, the situation can be a bit more daunting. Six years ago Dave Minnick and Bob Tammaro created Parish Business Consulting Inc.... dedicated to helping pastors with a variety of financial concerns—from broken boilers to computerization to collection of school tuition.”
The report notes that in 1983, canon law required that parishes have financial counsel. Philadelphia's Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua has strongly advised each parish to have a business manager.
Minnick, who converted to Catholicism as a teenager, started his company originally to assist his own parish, St. Matthew. Priests quoted in the article praised the service provided by the company.
An archdiocesan spokesman said that business classes were not offered in its seminary because it takes so long to become a pastor. New priests are expected to pick up most of the needed skills from their work in their parish assignments by the time they are needed, according to the article.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: World Notes & Quotes DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:Christ's Divinity Defended in Australia
A Catholic priest in Australia has recently earned censure from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald (March 11).
As a result, said the report, Melbourne Archbishop George Pell released a statement announcing that a book by Father Michael Morwood is not to be used or “displayed, sold, or distributed” in any of his diocese's churches. The statement also announces that Father Morwood is prohibited from speaking publicly on issues of Incarnation, Redemption, or the Trinity.
According to the bishop, the book, Tomorrow's Catholic: God and Jesus in a New Millennium repeatedly advances heretical propositions about the nature of Jesus as God and man, the paper reported.
Father Morwood defended himself by saying that his book was not meant for children and that the censure has damaged his integrity, according to the report. His critics will likely agree with him on both counts.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Anglican Archbishop Under Fire Over Homosexual Ordination DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:LONDON—Archbishop George Carey of Canterbury, leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, is being targeted from all sides in a fight to have the ordination of known homosexuals accepted at this year's Lambeth Conference.
The Conference, held every ten years, gathers some 750 Anglican Church leaders from around the world. In an apparent battle between western liberal bishops and their ‘southern’ more evangelical counterparts, details of a tense correspondence between Archbishop Carey and Newark, N.J.'s Bishop Jack Spong have appeared in the English press.
Bishop Spong claims to have the backing of 73 Episcopalian bishops who want the 1998 Lambeth Conference to accept the ordination of actively homosexual ministers. Archbishop Carey said Bishop Spong's initial call for the issue to be debated at the Conference, was “hectoring and intemperate.”
The response from Bishop Spong, quoted in the Sunday Times March 8, is reported to have set the tone for future exchanges. He wrote to Archbishop Carey: “Your quite critical response to my initial statement was an emotional and angry one; not the response of one who is willing to listen and to be in dialogue.”
The Archbishop of Canterbury, apart from his own biblical views, must try to keep peace between the increasingly bold liberals and the majority of Episcopalian bishops worldwide, from Africa, Asia, and South America. When the so-called ‘bishops of the south’ met in Kuala Lumpur last year, their declaration on human sexuality included the paragraph: “We are deeply concerned that the setting aside of biblical teaching in such actions as the ordination of practicing homosexuals and the blessing of same-sex unions calls into question the authority of the Holy Scriptures. This is totally unacceptable to us.”
It is expected that Archbishop Carey will attempt to establish a commission to study the question of the ordination of homosexuals in an effort to avoid a complete split at the Lambeth Conference.
Meanwhile, the leader of the Episcopalian Church in Scotland, Bishop Richard Holloway of Edinburgh, joined the fray in early March. In response to the concerns of the “bishops of the south” he was quoted as saying, “I do not think the conservatives will win. I am irritated by the tone of some of these statements. This is fundamentalist language and part of something you get in authoritarian societies. These bishops will have to learn to live in a multicultural communion.”
Members of the Church of England who opposed the ordination of women to the Anglican ministry four years ago predicted at the time that liberal elements would go on to campaign for Church recognition of homosexual vicars and same-sex ‘marriages.’
(Jim Gallagher)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Anglican Bishop Warns England's Blair Against Rome DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:LONDON-While an English Catholic newspaper last week reported that British Prime Minister Tony Blair has often attended Mass on his own at Westminster Cathedral in recent months, an eminent Anglican bishop wrote a long article in The Times of London counseling him against becoming a Catholic.
It is public knowledge that Blair normally attends Sunday Mass with his wife, Cherie, who is Catholic, and their three children. The Prime Minister's office last week stated that he had only attended Mass at the Cathedral alone when official engagements had prevented him from attending Mass with his family.
Over a year ago the same Catholic newspaper caused a furor when it reported that Blair- before the General election and his appointment as Prime Minister—had been receiving Holy Communion when he attended Mass with his family at their local parish church.
Before that, a political storm had ensued after the Blairs' decision to send their eldest son to a grantmaintained selective boys' school connected with London's Brompton Oratory.
Perceiving perhaps a glimmer of openness to Catholic teaching, both England's Cardinal Basil Hume and Scotland's Cardinal Thomas Winning appealed to Blair to change his stance on abortion. Blair has consistently said he is “personally against abortion” but has on every occasion voted for further liberalization of Britain's already-liberal abortion laws.
In the March 9 edition of the Times, the Anglican Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, issued a public warning to the prime minister. In a long article on the paper's “Op-Ed” page, the bishop's message to Blair was blunt: “You should not become a Catholic (or, at least, not yet.)”
The Anglican bishop's reasoning was that the Catholic Church's teaching on divorce, family matters, abortion, celibate clergy, and the refusal to ordain women were not fit views for a British prime minister to hold. On top of this, according to Bishop Nazir-Ali, was the problem of the Catholic Church's authoritarian style of leadership. The authority accorded by Catholics to papal teaching was, he wrote, “a harking back to the ultramontane days of the First Vatican Council.”
And the challenge thrown down to Blair by this Anglican bishop appointed by a previous prime minister was: “Can a modern, democratic leader really declare that he orders his spiritual life within such a dogmatic framework?”
The message was clear: the Establishment is not ready to see a Catholic prime minister. In any case, ancient laws are still in place in Britain which forbid a Catholic from holding the office of prime minister or chancellor of the exchequer. Likewise, the law still forbids the heir to the throne to marry a Catholic.
(Jim Gallagher)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Vatican Notes & Quotes DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:John Paul II Appeals for the Rights of Women
Pope John Paul II marked International Women's Day by decrying the segregation of women by certain “political regimes” he did not name, according to a Reuters report.
His words coincided with demonstrations by Muslim women who protested their segregated status in Afghanistan, and by Polish pro-lifers, who were pelted with eggs and potatoes as they demonstrated, according to the report.
John Paul II said, “I would like to launch an appeal for the women who even today have their basic rights denied by the political regimes of their countries: women segregated, forbidden to study, follow a profession, even to express their own opinion in public.”
If it is true, as the report speculates, that the Holy Father was referring to the predicament of Muslim women, it would be the second time he found himself allied with them. At the pro-abortion UN conferences on women that met in Beijing and Cairo, the Vatican's delegation worked in concert with Muslim and other women from third world nations to prevent a program enforcing abortion, sterilization, and contraception on a worldwide scale.
Will Pope Succeed in Ending Cuban Embargo?
Behind the scenes negotiations might soon fulfill Pope John Paul II's call for America to end its embargo of Cuba, says one London newspaper.
A report in The Telegraph (March 10) said, “America may ease sanctions against Cuba after agreeing with the Vatican to adopt a ‘religious driven’ policy towards the island, according to reports in Italy...
“La Repubblica newspaper, which enjoys close contacts with the Holy See, quoted an American diplomat admitting to Vatican officials that Washington had been ‘over-reacting’ to the Castro regime ‘for years’ and a policy change was needed.”
“The Vatican's response was to ‘unfurl a map of Latin America, and to mark all the countries where personal efforts of the Pope and local bishops in the 1980s favored the transition to democracy. ’”
The report noted that the Holy Father had intervened on behalf of ending the sanctions with both U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Cuba's Fidel Castro.
He is pressing for certain concessions from Cuba in return, like allowing Catholics running for office to acknowledge their faith, according to the report.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: In Some College Classrooms, a Potent Dose Of Catholic Social Teaching Awaits Students DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:Though Catholic social teaching is gaining new audiences among the laity and even among non-Catholics, most college students on the nation's 241 Catholic campuses still have only limited exposure to it. They have little opportunity to learn about and apply the rich and ancient tradition of the Gospel and pastoral wisdom to the issues of the day.
But in the classrooms where Catholic social thought is being presented and discussed—usually in theology or ethics classes—the parable Jesus told about the tiny mustard seed may be perfectly applicable.
Dr. Robert Kennedy of the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., routinely reminds his management students that Catholicism is a uniquely useful creed for those who want to do something for the world.
“Catholicism is a faith that is particularly concerned with community. The Protestant notion that we all establish individual pipelines to God is really antithetical to Catholicism,” Kennedy says. “From the earliest times, certainly from the patristic times, there was a great deal of concern among Catholic theologians about the justice of the community and so on....”
Kennedy's intense interest in Catholic social teaching was reignited about a dozen years ago. After earning a doctorate in medieval studies, he served in diocesan ministry. Later, he moved into the realm of business, working in retail sales and real estate. As he moved back into academia, he re-examined the Catholic tradition—Church history, the papal encyclicals, the writings of the Church fathers and doctors.
Awed by what he found, he began to incorporate more of Catholic social teaching into his courses on management, business ethics, and philosophy.
“I and others thought that there was a considerable coherence between some of the principles of Catholic social thought and good management,” Kennedy explains.
In recent decades, there has been little difference in the way Catholic colleges and secular colleges trained young people for business careers. But Kennedy and others believed that the Church had something important to teach them. St. Thomas will soon be offering a new major called “Catholic Studies,” adding to its commitment to present Catholic social teaching.
In his economics and management courses, “we talk about a variety of issues,” Kennedy says. Students might read sections of Pope John Paul's 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, which deals with such topics as private ownership, the legitimacy of profit, and Third World debt. Students can grapple with big questions situated in an ethical framework. For example, “How do we assist less-developed nations to become more developed? What are the responsibilities of multi-national corporations?”
Kennedy also presents the micro-economic issues—the kinds of problems that business professionals will deal with personally. “Are there some kinds of products that we shouldn't be developing, even if there's a market for them? What about plant locations and down-sizing? What role does faith have in the work place? What about fair wages, job discrimination?”
Several years ago, Kennedy also founded the Institute for Catholic Social Thought and Management. The institute has already sponsored several international conferences to highlight what he describes as “Catholic social thought's relevance to business management.”
But faculty in fields outside of management and business are also deeply concerned about strengthening Catholic social teaching in the college curriculum. That concern was the motivation behind a book written by Dr. Michael Schuck, a professor of theology at Loyola University in Chicago.
He became interested in Catholic social thought as a graduate student in political science and while in divinity school at the University of Chicago. He wondered about papal encyclicals. Did statements the popes made 200 years ago about family life resemble teachings from the 20th century vicars of Christ? How did the teachings about war, capital punishment, sexuality, and the value of human work compare?
In many areas, Schuck found a remarkable and timeless coherence in the encyclicals. In other areas, such as in the area of religious freedom and Church-state relations, “There have been 180-degree changes in papal teaching,” he notes.
Schuck's book —That They Be One: The Social Teaching of the Papal Encyclicals, 1740-1989—was published in 1991.
“From 1740 to the present, society has gone through tremendous transformations,” he says, “and papal social teachings kept abreast of those transformations and commented on them. The earliest encyclicals comment directly on the French Revolution, then on the Industrial Revolution, and later on fascism and communism.”
Schuck was surprised at how consistently responsive the popes were to crises in social morality. But young Catholics aren't likely to hear about it.
In his own department of theology, “Catholic social teaching is given sufficient attention, but we also have a political science department, a sociology and anthropology department, and a social work department where I suspect it's not.”
But Schuck and Professor Dan Finn of St. John's University at Collegeville, Minn., agree that people in the parishes—and Americans in general—have more exposure to Catholic social teaching now than they did 25 years ago. In fact, a new sensitivity and respect for it have emerged.
“Credit for that goes largely to the U.S. bishops and their pastoral letters on peace (The Challenge of Peace, 1983) and the economy (Economic Justice for All, 1986),” Finn maintains. He says that when the bishops invited and encouraged public dialogues about these issues, Catholics were impressed when such “worldly” issues were so fruitfully discussed against the backdrop of Gospel principles and Church teaching.
Finn, who is a professor of both theology and economics, is just as concerned as others that Catholic social teaching get more attention on Catholic campuses. But he believes that you can't assess progress “by counting courses on Catholic social teaching” in college catalogues.
Important as they are, “those focused courses reach only a small group of students,” he argues. Another approach is to filter Catholic ideas and teaching into many different academic fields.
“You might want some papal statements on ecology given attention in Biology 101. Or, you might get the economics department to spend a few days discussing ethical issues related to the environment.”
In other words, Finn says, get young Catholics to listen and discuss what their Church is saying.
According to Finn and Kennedy, Pope John Paul II has done more to single—handedly bring issues of Catholic social teaching before the world's eyes than any pope before him.
“He has been so visible in his travels and people have had a chance to see and hear him whenever he travels,” says The Catholic University of America's John Gabrowski, an associate professor of moral theology. He believes that Pope John Paul has unified the social teaching of the Church in a way that may make it easier to present. The Pope grounds his teachings in a concept from Vatican II's Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, which says that Christ shows us what it means to be human.
It is the intellectual energy and unifying voice of the Pope and that precious heritage of a Church with its eyes and heart ever on the community that encourages Catholic academics. Catholic social teaching will continue to teach new generations in many ways.
Catherine Odell writes from South Bend, Ind.
----- EXCERPT: Church's rich tradition has a lot to say about good business management, fair wages, job discrimination, etc. ----- EXTENDED BODY: Catherine Odell ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: PERSPECTIVE DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:An Exceptional Catholic Novel at Lent
What makes a great Catholic novel?
Does the author have to be a Catholic? Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop disproves that. Does it have to be populated by priests and nuns in a distinctively Catholic environment? Paul Horgan's A Distant Trumpet, an old-fashioned saga about the frontier on one level and a great Catholic novel on another, has no nuns whatsoever, and the only priest is fleetingly mentioned in a single sentence.
If the novel does involve a priest, does he have to be an unsullied paladin of the faith? Read Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory and you'll never make that assumption again. Must it have a happy ending? Try Shasaku Endo's Silence.
A novel is both great and Catholic if the author believes—and conveys with literary skill—the truth at the end of Georges Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest: “Grace is everywhere.”
A great Catholic novel is filled with a sacramental sensibility. The old Baltimore Catechism definition helps here. A sacrament is an outward sign instituted by God to give grace. Translate that into a world view and you get a sacramental sensibility: the extraordinary is not located in some alternative universe; the extraordinary is just over there, on the other side of the ordinary. Everyday things and ordinary people become vessels of grace, not by magical transformation but by being what and who they are.
I was recently asked who today's great Catholic novelists were and after an embarrassed silence had to confess that I couldn't think of any. It seemed odd, in a century that had produced Bernanos, Greene, and Evelyn Waugh, Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, and Endo plus the Catholic efforts of non-Catholics like Willa Cather. But most of what passed for “Catholic novels” today struck me as banal, literarily or theologically.
Then I found Mr. Ives' Christmas.
First published in 1995 and now available in a HarperPerennial paperback, Mr. Ives' Christmas is the fourth novel by Oscar Hijuelos, a Cuban—American born in New York City in 1951. His second book, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, defied all the odds by successfully portraying Desi Arnaz, Lucille Ball's husband, as Aristotle's great-souled man. But what really makes Hijuelos an exceptional writer, according to my friend, the critic J. Bottum, is that Hijuelos may be the only American novelist who “still believes in the possibility of great-souled men” and has a literary technique that does “more than mock or demean them.”
Mr. Ives' Christmas is a far less exuberant book than Mambo Kings, which befits its subject: Edward Ives's struggle to reconcile his faith with the murder of his son (gunned down senselessly on a New York street just before entering the seminary) and to forgive his son's murderer. In less skilled hands, that plot line would be a sure prescription for literary catastrophe of the most saccharine sort. But Hijuelos's bare-bones narrative style and theological sophistication have given us a book that is sweet (itself a minor miracle in serious contemporary fiction) without being sentimental. Sharply chiseled three-page chapters are laced with an Augustinian determination to look life in the eye and an ineradicable, if deeply shaken, conviction that God must be doing something redemptive with all this sorrow.
The result is a novel that tells a wonderful story and makes Catholicism seem a faith for intelligent, serious adults. Mr. Ives' Christmas displays none of the hand-wringing neurosis that distorts other self-consciously Catholic novels these days. Ives is a very stricken man. He is a realist, but never a whiner.
Hijuelos has nerve as well as skill. How many other contemporary writers would dare end a novel like this?
“With pained but transcendent eyes, bearded and regal. He would come down the central aisle toward Ives, and placing His wounded hands upon Ives' brow, give His blessing before taking him away, and all others who were good in this world, off into His heaven where they would be joined unto Him and all that is good forever and ever, without end.”
The title bespeaks Christmas, but the story is about a lifetime of Lent completed by Easter. I commend it to you at this season, and indeed at any season.
George Weigel is senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: George Weigel ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Why the Lewinsky Case Matters DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:In the matter of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, almost everything points to the conclusion that something unseemly happened: the tapes; Ms. Lewinsky's 37 visits to the White House; Mr. Clinton's morning-after-the deposition meeting with his secretary, Betty Currie; the gifts; the talking points; Vernon Jordan's many activities; the job offer from United Nations Ambassador Bill Richardson; the president's stonewalling; his initial, unconvincing denial; his refusal to explain what happened; Press Secretary Mike McCurry's remark that the relationship is probably “very complicated”; and White House surrogates' declaration of “war” against the independent counsel.
Nevertheless, many Americans think the scandal—even if true—is either “none of our business” or not worth the effort to inquire about. This apparent indifference is surprising and unsettling. It is therefore important to respond to the most common arguments made by those who believe that a president's sexual involvement with a 21-year-old intern, and the ensuing suspected cover-up, are essentially irrelevant to our national life:
1 We shouldn't be judgmental. At a recent speech before an organization of religious broadcasters, I criticized the president's unwillingness to explain what happened in the Lewinsky matter. A member of the audience took me to task for “casting stones.” I responded that it shows how far we have fallen that asking the president to account for possible adultery, lying to the public, perjury, and obstruction of justice is regarded as akin to stoning. This is an example of what sociologist Alan Wolfe refers to as America's new “Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not judge.”
Lost Its Way
Even the Rev. Billy Graham declared [recently]: “I forgive him. I know how hard it is, and especially a strong, vigorous, young man like he is; he has such a tremendous personality. I think the ladies just go wild over him.” Mr. Graham, perhaps the nation's most admired religious figure, apparently is willing to shrug off both adultery and lying, without any public admission or apology on Mr. Clinton's part. This is what the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace.”
All of us are in favor of tolerance and forgiveness. But the moral pendulum in America has swung too far in the direction of relativism. If a nation of free people can no longer make clear pronouncements on fundamental matters of right and wrong—for example, that a married, 50-year-old commander-in-chief ought not to have sexual relations with a young intern in his office and then lie about it—it has lost its way.
The problem is not with those who are withholding judgment until all the facts are in, but with the increasing number of people who want to avoid judgment altogether. For it is precisely the disposition and willingness to make judgments about things that matter that is a defining mark of a healthy democracy. In America we do not defer to kings, cardinals, or aristocrats on matters of law and politics, civic conduct, and moral standards. We rely instead on the people's capacity to make reasonable judgments based on moral principles. Our form of government requires of us not moral perfection but modest virtues, and adherence to some standards. How high should those standards be? Certainly higher than the behavior alleged in this case.
Those who constantly invoke the sentiment of “Who are we to judge?” should consider the anarchy that would ensue if we adhered to this sentiment in, say, our courtrooms. What would happen if those sitting on a jury decided to be “nonjudgmental” about rapists and sexual harassers, embezzlers and tax cheats? Justice would be lost. Without being “judgmental,” Americans would never have put an end to slavery, outlawed child labor, emancipated women, or ushered in the civil-rights movement. Nor would we have mobilized against Nazism and communism.
Mr. Clinton himself put it well, in a judgment-laden 1996 proclamation he signed during National Character Week, which said that “individual character involves honoring and embracing certain core ethical values: honesty, respect, responsibility.... Parents must teach their children from the earliest age the difference between right and wrong. But we must all do our part.”
1 A president's private behavior doesn't matter. In a recent Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, 57% said that private character doesn't matter at all or matters only if it interferes with his ability to do the job. Of course, if Mr. Clinton did have sexual encounters with Ms. Lewinsky, it involves at least adultery and lying to the public—and probably lying under oath as well. In any event, the attempt to rigidly compartmentalize life in this way is divorced from the real world. A mother would not accept from her son the explanation that his drug habit doesn't matter because he did well on the Scholastic Assessment Test; a police commissioner should not dismiss the raw bigotry of a detective because he has a good arrest record.
Yet in the name of “compartmentalization,” many now seem willing to accept raunchier behavior from our president than we would from any CEO, college professor, or army drill sergeant. Housing Secretary Andrew Cuomo put it this way: “Let's remember what's important here. The lives of the American people are more important than the personal life of the president.” But Mr. Clinton is a laboratory test case of why private character is relevant. Prevarications typify his private and public life. A seamless web of deceit runs through the man and through his administration.
John Adams held a far different view than Mr. Cuomo does. Adams wrote that the people “have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge; I mean, of the characters and the conduct of their rulers. Rulers are no more than attorneys, agents, and trustees, for the people; and if the cause, the interest and trust, is insidiously betrayed, or wantonly trifled away, the people have a right to revoke the authority that they themselves have deputed.”
To better understand the limits of the “private public” argument, imagine the storm that would engulf a president who privately supported a whites only membership policy at a country club. Most voters would rightly deem this private sentiment to be of intense public interest. Why, then, are we supposed to accept a man in the Oval Office whom many parents would not trust alone with their daughters?
1 The only thing that matters is the economy. “What we should be talking about is that we are going to have the first balanced budget in more than three decades,” says one citizen, who voted against Mr. Clinton in 1996. “That's going to impact our children, not this sleaze that is masquerading as news.” This sentiment reveals an arid and incomplete understanding of the presidency. More than any other person, the president symbolizes America. He stands for us in the eyes of the world and of our children, who inevitably learn from his example. Whether or not Bill Clinton escapes impeachment, his legacy will be one of pervasive deceit, squandered trust, a reckless disregard for the truth, heightened cynicism, and a nastier political culture.
A Rogue in Our Midst
This corruption matters a great deal. Even if the Dow Jones breaks 10,000. Even if Americans get more day care. Even if the budget is balanced. It matters because lessons in corruption, particularly when they emanate from the highest office in the land, undermine our civic life. Children are watching, and if we expect them to take morality seriously, they must see adults take it seriously. As C.S. Lewis wrote: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
Today we find not a traitor but a rogue in our midst. Of course, rogues have been with us forever, and the corruption of people in power is at least as old as the Scriptures. But in America today, more and more citizens seem to be complicit in that corruption. One worry of the Founders was that luxury and affluence might dull our moral sensibilities. The next few months will go a long way toward determining how strongly we believe in something we once revered as “our sacred honor.”
William J. Bennett is author of Our Sacred Honor: Words of Advice From the Founders in Stories, Letter, Poems and Speeches (Simon & Schuster, 1997). This article is reprinted with the kind permission of the author and The Wall Street Journal.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: William J. Bennett ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:Orthodoxy's Appeal
I think it is ironic that in the same issue, articles about catechetical reform and Dr. Janet Smith (“Saving Matrimony Before It Starts,” March 1-7) would appear. I have spent this year teaching 12thgrade religious education (CCD), and have found the curriculum materials available “lukewarm” at best. I have found the students' response to these curricula to be likewise. However, when I substituted discussions on abortion and contraception from Dr. Smith, apologetics from Tim Staples and Scott Hahn, and Bible study from Jeff Cavins, the fires were stoked, the discussions were lively, and the response was overwhelmingly positive.
Orthodoxy is in vogue, it seems, even among the teen set. I submit a vote of approval for catechetical renewal based on the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Magisterium, and tradition, and have seen the shining faces of 22 young Catholic adults that second that vote.
Larry Boggeln MD Temecula, California
Religious Life
I enjoyed your article on the consecrated virgins (“Consecrated Virgins Serve God in the Secular World,” March 1-7), however, the correct title should be secular institutes. There are 21 organizations devoted to this form of religious life, listed in A Guide to Religious Ministries for Catholic Men and Women.
Granted they are not nuns or brothers, but they are required to take the same vows as religious, such as: poverty, chastity, and obedience. They don't wear habits or clerical garb, but how long has it been since you've seen a religious wear a habit?
Thomas O'Brien Casper, Wyoming
Editor's note: Mr. O'Brien's letter contains interesting information about secular institutes. The referenced article, however, was about celibate women who are consecrated through the action of their local bishops and are not part of secular institutes.
The Church in China
The notion that there is papal support for “healing the division in China between those who belong to the government sponsored group and the “underground Church” is proved to be fiction by the recent elevation to cardinal of a Taiwanese archbishop who is the principal repudiator of the reformationist, separationist theology of the Jesuit leader of the Patriotic Church, Jin Lukian.
Cardinal Shan Kuo-hsi has reprinted instructions of Jin Lukian in which the Patriotic Church bishop rejects the primacy of all popes including Peter the Apostle. For Jin Lukian, the Conference of Bishops is the basis for authority in the Catholic Church. So Jin says in an address of his, mailed to us by Cardinal Shan.
Beijing is furious that a bishop from Taiwan has been made a cardinal, especially one whose rejection of its Patriotic Church has been so pronounced. Cardinal Shan's elevation proves the Vatican does not in any way desire relations with Beijing and will not engage in any appeasement to curry favor with that regime.
For 40 years our missionaries have backed the Holy See in its rejection of the Patriotic Church.
You say some Patriotic Association bishops have secretly professed their allegiance to Pope John Paul II. This is meaningless because the criterion of Christianity is willingness to suffer for your faith.
The certain sign of the true Church, i.e. the mark of genuine Christianity, is that that Church accepts suffering to preserve its faith. The Patriotic Church makes nothing but compromises with the Chinese government in order to avoid suffering, while the “Underground” Church passes the test of having genuine faith by its suffering.
Father Philip Coneally SJ Los Angeles, California
Editor's note: See Cardinal Paul Shan Kuo-hsi's comments on the situation of the Church in China in this issue's Inperson interview, beginning on page one.
Truly Catholic Paper
May I express my appreciation and joy in what your newspaper has become—and is becoming since I sincerely hope it continues to improve.
Jesuit Father Thomas Rausch's recent critical review in the Los Angeles Archdiocese newspaper, the Tidings of various “Catholic” newspapers and magazines characterized the Register as a formerly moderate paper that has moved to the “right.” This assessment validated my view that the paper was moving to become a truly “Catholic” newspaper. The paper has not moved to “the right” but to “the correct” point of view for a Catholic newspaper; a newspaper which gives faithful assent to the leadership of the Pope and the guidance of the Magisterium.
Your paper treats the Holy Father with proper respect and with love, unlike others which Father Rausch rates very highly-largely because of their disrespect and dissent.
Until recently I had gotten my copy of your paper from the rack at the back of our church. I am no longer able to find it there and so began a subscription a few weeks ago.
Letters sections are one of my favorite parts of good newspapers and magazines. Please keep publishing them. Also I appreciate your editorial comments to letters obviously in need of clarification regarding Catholic teaching.
Ken Brinkman Rancho Palos Verdes, California
Catholic Media
John Prizer's March 1 article on religiously-themed television argues that series like Touched by an Angel are “lukewarm and watered down.” True and perhaps they should be.
If there is to be more religious TV it must be successful. A successful prime time network series needs roughly one-sixth of the TV audience for 5 years, or about 130 hours for an hour long drama.
As only about a third of the population is Catholic, a successful series almost has to be ecumenical, which frequently means religiously shallow.
Protestants do not want to watch 130 hours of Catholicism. A movie, sure, even a mini-series, but not a series.
But not to worry, less than 10% of our media time is spent on prime-time broadcast network comedy and drama series.
Other media, particularly magazines, books, cable TV, radio, and the Internet, address narrow audiences and are therefore more appropriate for deeper, more Catholic presentations.
I would encourage the networks to produce series that support “mere Christianity” or perhaps mere monotheism and leave the heavier messages to other media. Use the right tool for the job and the right media for the message.
Richard Bruce Davis, California
Corrections:
The telephone numbers published in the March 1-7 issue for Catholics United For The Faith, “Groups Toll-Free Number on Faith Facts Grows in Usage” (CUFF) and the Millennium Evangelization Project were incorrect. The correct numbers are, Catholics United For The Faith: 1-800-693-2484, and Millennium Evangelization Project: 1-972-721-4063.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Bible Sleuths Find Proof For Church Doctrine DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:While not every exegetical argument can be settled with the citation of a verse, some can. I regularly receive letters and e-mail from non-Catholics saying, “Put up or shut up. Where does the Bible mention anything about confession?” I quote John 20:22-23: “Whose sins you shall forgive they are forgiven them, whose sins you shall retain they are retained.” Of course, I don't stop there. I draw the logical inference.
If a priest is to distinguish which sins are to be forgiven and which are not, he must be told what the sins are and must be able to determine whether the penitent is sorry for them. The only way a priest can learn a penitent's sins is by being told them, and the only way he can weigh whether the penitent is repentant is to listen to and speak with the penitent. I like to say that John 20:22-23 proves the validity of the confessional—not that “the box” existed in apostolic times, of course (it was a 16th-century development), but that auricular confession must be what is implied by the pair of verses, or they don't imply anything at all.
Other issues don't lend themselves to so convenient a resolution. A Protestant, arguing for sola fide, may cite Romans 3:28: “For we hold that a man is justified by faith apart from the works of the law.” (Luther translated it “by faith alone.”) A Catholic will rejoin with James 2:24: “You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.” To many, these verses seem contradictory. Partisans of one verse often seem unaware that the other verse exists. But at some point most intelligent readers of the Bible realize that these verses are interrelated. To reconcile Romans 3:28 and James 2:24 takes no legerdemain, but it does take a deliberate effort to work through several chapters to get the sense of what is going on. In the end, Paul and James are seen to be writing in harmony.
Then there are issues that require even more work. Consider Mary's perpetual virginity. Both Protestants and Catholics too facilely focus on verses such as Matthew 13:55, which names four men—James, Joseph, Simon, and Jude—as “brothers of the Lord.” Protestants tend to say this settles the matter: If the men were our Lord's brothers, they were Mary's sons. Defenders of Catholic teaching seem too satisfied to point out that Hebrew and Aramaic had no words for close relations such as cousins, so Matthew, writing from a Jewish background and using the diction with which he was familiar, would have used “brothers” to describe any close relations. Thus, these men would not have been Mary's children, but possibly her nephews.
The only way a priest can learn a penitent's sins is by being told them.
Neither side wins by sticking to Matthew 13:55 alone. Mary's perpetual virginity can be established from Scripture, but not by a consideration of any of the “brothers of the Lord” verses. If those verses were all we had, we'd have to take an agnostic position on the issue. But they aren't all we have. The exegete must don the detective's cap and look at multiple verses. When this is done, he discovers that all the other verses point in the same direction, toward Mary's perpetual virginity. Here are some of them:
The James and Joseph mentioned in Matthew 13:55 are elsewhere (Mt 27:56, Jn 19:25) said to be the sons of Mary the wife of Cleophas, not Mary the wife of Joseph. Thus they couldn't be Jesus' brothers.
From the cross, Jesus gave his mother into John's care, something he would not have done if Mary had other children who could have taken care of her.
The “brothers of the Lord” are never called sons of Mary, although Jesus regularly is called her son. If they also were her sons, why this odd construction? It was not a natural way for the Evangelists to write.
John 7:3-4 reports, “His brothers said to him, ‘Leave here and go to Judea, so that your disciples may see the works you are doing. No one works in secret if he wants to be known publicly. ’” They were giving him advice about his future. In ancient times, younger brothers never gave older brothers advice on how to live their lives. It was considered rude to do so. This suggests either that the “brothers,” if Mary's children, were older than Jesus-not possible, since he was the first born-or that they weren't his brothers at all.
Answering the angel, Mary asks, “How can this be since I know not man?” If she had been intending to have a “normal” marriage with Joseph, she would have had no need to ask how she would have a child. She would have expected to have children. Her question makes sense only if she had taken a vow of lifelong virginity.
It may take work, but many doctrinal issues can be settled by recourse to nothing but Scripture. It's too bad that Catholics are gun shy about using the Bible to back up their beliefs. They need to learn that using proof texts is not a sin.
Karl Keating is the founding director of Catholic Answers.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Karl Keating ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: A Crisis Pregnancy Close to Home DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:When it's your own unmarried teenage daughter facing a staggering ‘choice,’ are you still pro-life?
Mom, I'm pregnant.” When these words are uttered by your unmarried teenage daughter, it's a heart-stopping moment for any parent. When the parent is a committed pro-lifer, the shock is often overlaid with stunned disbelief, shame, and guilt. “Hasn't she been listening? This isn't supposed to happen to my daughter!” and “How did I fail her?” are common first reactions. I know.
This Christmas, my 18-year-old daughter quietly told me that two at-home pregnancy tests came out positive.
Marie, named after the Blessed Mother, had long been my “worry child.” A brittle crust of teen rebellion had long covered a soft, sensitive heart, leading to a constant round of minor and not-so-minor infractions and arguments. Lately, though, her life seemed to be coming together. A“B” average at college and a job she loved lulled me into a sense that the worst was over. She confided that she thought she was falling in love and we talked about the pressures and temptations such strong emotions bring. Street-wise and assertive, I thought she was “safe.” But, as countless other parents have also discovered, my child lives in a world that too often considers virginity a disability and chastity an old-fashioned ideal.
The one bright spot in that night of tears and fears was that abortion was never considered an option by Marie: “Mom, I couldn't kill my baby!” Although I was heartbroken by the circumstances of this pregnancy, I couldn't help but feel proud of her for having the courage and common sense to reject the abortion “option.”
Surprisingly, she said all her friends were against her having an abortion and a few who had been leaning “pro-choice” were now rethinking their position. Two of her friends actually threatened to physically stop her from having an abortion even before she told them that she would never abort.
We didn't resolve everything that first night or even later. Adoption or keeping the baby is still the big question and one that will involve a lot of prayer, thought, and discussion. It hasn't been easy, but facing this crisis together has taught both of us so much already. What the future holds for Marie and her baby is uncertain but, with prayer and love, it is still a future bright with promise for both of them.
A Common Stereotype
A January 1998 New York Times article, “Many Women Make No Link Between Abortion and Politics,” perpetuates a common stereotype-the pro-lifer who chooses abortion when a crisis pregnancy hits home. Writer Tamar Lewin states, “Almost every abortion-clinic counselor can reel off stories of patients who say that they have always opposed abortion but that their own situation is different, or men who bring their pregnant wives or teenage daughters to the very same clinics that they have long spoken out against.”
But conversations with people active in the pro-life movement reveal a very different picture. Not surprisingly, pro-life people willing to help total strangers with a crisis pregnancy are also ready to help and support their own sons and daughters facing the same crisis.
“You think it's the blackest day in your life when your daughter tells you she's pregnant,” Lucy R., long active in the pro-life movement, says. A smile lights her voice. “But it's really the beginning of a great blessing. That little boy (now six years old) is the light of our lives.” She credits prayer and pro-life principles for that happy ending.
Janet B. was a young professional when her sister told her that she had had an abortion without their parents' knowledge because although their mother and father were strongly pro-life, the sister was sure they “just couldn't take it (an unwed pregnancy).”
When Janet herself became pregnant out of wedlock, her parents became her biggest supporters. “We became so much closer,” she says. “My sister was wrong.” Interviews with pro-life supporters around the country reveal that this kind of family support during a crisis pregnancy appears to be the norm, not the exception.
Marcia Buterin RN, founder of Missouri Nurses for Life and active in the pro-life movement for 25 years, has had broad experience with pro-life parents whose daughters or sons have had crisis pregnancies. “It almost seems like an epidemic sometimes,” she says. “Pro-lifers are not immune from what is happening in the rest of society.”
But, she says, the reaction of the parents she has known has been invariably positive despite the heartache at discovering a son or daughter has been sexually active. She also says that, in the vast majority of cases, the young women keep their babies rather than releasing them for adoption. This echoes statistics which show that more than 90% of unmarried mothers keep their babies, almost the opposite situation of a generation ago when most of these mothers chose adoption. Thus, pro-lifers are not only supporting their daughters and sons during their pregnancies but also are usually involved in helping to raise their grandchildren.
Waning Support for Abortion
Not only do pro-lifers appear to routinely reject abortion for their unmarried children, society seems to be slowly starting to change its attitude toward abortion and the unmarried. According to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, not only has support for abortion-on-demand eroded by an estimated 8% since 1989, but public support for abortion when pregnancy threatens to interrupt a woman's career or education has also dropped 14% and 8% respectively.
A clear majority of the people polled did not feel these circumstances justified abortion. Undermining a basic abortion rights tenet that familiarity with abortion increases public acceptance, the same poll showed that “personal experience” was twice as likely to be given as a reason for becoming less favorable towards abortion rather than more supportive of abortion.
At the same time, a new wave of pro-life sentiment appears to be rising in a most unexpected place-the young people who have grown up under the shadow of Roe. The Times/CBS News poll showed even less support for abortion on demand among 18-29 year olds (29%) than among the general public (32%). The Alan Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood, has noted that “in recent years, fewer pregnant teens have chosen to have an abortion.” Even the media is beginning to notice. In a Jan. 21 New York Times article “A New Generation Rising Against Abortion,” writer Laurie Goodstein interviewed an eclectic group of young people attending a Rock for Life concert and found thoughtful and strong pro-life support even among those sporting tattoos and punk-style clothing.
Some explained that they began considering the value of life after losing friends to suicide, drug overdoses, and automobile accidents.
Goodstein also noted that many of the concert-goers she interviewed said that they arrived at a “right to life” position on their own and that, to be consistent, they also opposed the death penalty and assisted suicide and supported abstinence.
Countering Rock for Choice and other groups which help raise money for abortion rights groups, Rock for Life is a relatively recent phenomenon which reaches young people through the potent medium of music. Concert organizer Bryan Kemper told Goodstein that 15 concerts have already been staged and that there have been 110 bands “willing to perform for gas money.” Rock for Life is not the only sign that the pro-life movement is connecting with a new generation. Teens for Life, started in 1985, is a national organization run by young people encouraging teens to speak up for life and get involved in community activities. It has chapters throughout the country and continues to grow in numbers.
Another positive sign is the increasing number of pro-life groups springing up on college campuses. And not just on religiously-affiliated college campuses. MIT, Princeton, and the University of Texas are among colleges which not only have pro-life groups but also have websites on the Internet.
What Helps, What Hurts
But trends and statistics do not meet the needs of the individual young woman and her family suddenly facing a crisis pregnancy. The first reactions of parents and others to the news is extremely important to the woman and can even make the life-or-death difference for the unborn baby. When the first reaction is anger or a stern lecture about premarital sex, the young woman can feel abandoned and, in her despair, decide that eliminating the baby will make everyone feel better.
Parents and friends of young men and women coping with an unwed pregnancy are often unsure of what to say or how to handle the situation. One newer resource developed to help with this problem is a video and pamphlet called First Words: Can Our First Reaction to an Unplanned Pregnancy Save a Child's Life? produced by American Life League.
The video tells the stories of four young women who faced an unwed pregnancy and encountered a range of reactions from friends and family. In their own words, these young women share how these reactions influenced their decisions about whether or not to abort their babies. The pamphlet is written by Cathy Brown who candidly tells her own story and offers helpful advice to parents and others.
But deciding against abortion is only the first step in a crisis pregnancy. The decision about whether to keep the baby or release him/her for adoption is often the most agonizing question for a young woman. Questions about insurance coverage and prenatal care, maintaining or losing a relationship with the father, the reactions of other children in the family, etc. are some of the practical and immediate concerns. Birthright and other pro-life pregnancy counseling centers can be a big help to families struggling with a crisis pregnancy.
Members of the family's church can also help provide much needed spiritual and emotional support as well as involving the community in the nurturing of a new life.
For parents, especially pro-life parents, embarrassment and feelings of failure are common and understandable. It's hard to put aside such feelings and concentrate on the feelings and needs of a son or daughter. But, as Donna B., a long-time pro-life activist and herself the mother of a pregnant teen, says, “Abortion is the real failure. It's OK to be proud when your daughter chooses life.”
Nancy Valko writes from St. Louis, Mo.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Nancy Valko ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: A Handful of Reasons to Call God 'Father' DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:In the late 1980s, two nuns at a small Catholic college for women asked me to celebrate Mass for the students in their weekend college program. They praised the seriousness of the students' work and their commitment to the program. However, the class schedule ruled out attendance at Mass during the normal times when it was offered. I agreed to celebrate a Mass for them on Saturday evenings.
Late in the spring semester the cycle of post-Easter Mass readings included selections from John 17, our Lord's “High Priestly Prayer,” as many scholars call it. These selections from the Gospel got me into trouble. Not that the content of my sermons was mentioned. Rather, the nuns who invited me to celebrate these Masses were very upset because when reading John 17, I said the word, “Father.” Whenever Jesus our Lord is quoted as saying “Father,” I read out “Father.” The two sisters told me I must stop saying “Father” when reading the Gospel, or I would not be invited to return. I responded, “I did not write the Gospel and I cannot change it.” They fired me. The next Jesuit priest refused to change the text, so they informed him that he, too, would be fired. Today, the women's college no longer exists.
This was the second time in my life as a priest that I ran into trouble for calling God “Father.” A campus minister was visibly upset when she told me that I must stop calling God “Father” as I prayed the canon of Mass. Her relationship with her own father was very negative and she could no longer attend my Mass if I continued to call God “Father.” I insisted that the Mass is not mine; it belongs to Jesus Christ and His whole Church. I do not have the authority to change the words of the Mass, as the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of Vatican II explicitly states in its norms: “Therefore no other person, not even a priest, may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority” (22.3). Though I continued to celebrate Mass on campus, that nun no longer attended when I presided.
I regret the fact that some Catholic nuns found my approach to celebrating Mass so intolerable that either I had to go or they had to go. However, I would regret changing the words of Sacred Scripture and the Mass even more, if not in this life, certainly in the next. One reason to regret such changes is that ceasing to call God “Father” would cause far more division than would maintaining that name. At least that is what our Lord Jesus Christ says.
In John 17:11 our Lord prayed, “Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you gave me, that they may be one, even as we are one.” In other words, the name “Father” has the power to keep or protect Christ's disciples in such a way that they can be united among themselves similar to the way Jesus is united with God the Father. Christ our Lord develops this idea at the end of the prayer: “I made known to them your name, and I will make it known, that the love with which you loved me may be in them, and I in them” (Jn 17:26). His purpose in revealing the name “Father” is to make it possible to receive the very same love which the Father has for the Son and to make it possible that the Son may be in them.
The reasons for calling God “Father” are overwhelming. Only quiet meditation on these words will allow their impact to turn us around and effect the kind of conversion of heart and mind that our Lord Jesus envisions. Removing the word “Father” as an offending term is a mistake which would depersonalize our relationship with God. This is made all the more clear when alternative terms like “parent” or “creator” are proposed by those who disapprove of “Father.” Instead of Christ's interpersonal term, the alternatives are functionary terms.
Instead of depersonalizing God as a functionary, we need to take up the prayer which Jesus taught us: Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” Christ taught us to hallow the name “Father.” This means we make it holy, treat it as holy, and love it as holy. More importantly, the name “Father” makes us holy. We need his holiness to sanctify us and unify us. Father, hallowed be thy name!
Jesuit Father Mitch Pacwa is a professor at the Institute for Religious and Pastoral Studies at the University of Dallas.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mitch Pacwa SJ ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Revisiting the Master Conservative DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:Rights and Duties: Reflections on our Conservative Constitution by Russell Kirk, edited by Mitchell Muncy
(Spence Publishing, 1997, 286 pp., $27.95)
Russell Kirk appeared on the American intellectual scene in 1953 with the publication of The Conservative Mind. That book, unsurpassed as the seminal study of Anglo—American conservative thought, launched Kirk's string of vital contributions to Western social and political thought. Until his death in 1994, Kirk was recognized by many as the single most perceptive synthesizer of cultural-especially jurisprudential—trends in the United States.
I first started reading Kirk nearly 20 years ago, half-way through law school, when I found a copy of The Conservative Mind at a used book sale. Later, shortly before graduation and with the bar exam still looming over me, John Lulves of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute invited me to join a small group of graduate students for a weekend seminar with Kirk at his ancestral home in Piety Hill, Mich. There, a dozen of us from all across the country-no two with similar academic specialties-gathered for a long weekend in the presence of one of America's best educated and most capable teachers.
During the days, Kirk led us through law, literature, history, and philosophy. Each evening he dimmed the lights, allowed his younger children to join us, and read us ghost stories from his award-winning fiction.
The details, both visual and intellectual, of that splendid summer seminar have faded during the years, not in the sense of being lost, but rather by becoming a part of me indistinguishable from the whole. Till this day though, one particular image remains sharp: that of a young man named Russell Hittinger, then a doctoral student in philosophy in St. Louis, who in a way quite beyond the others (myself included), seemed to grasp what Kirk was saying and whose exchanges with Kirk were designed not so much to clarify for himself what the master had said, but rather to amplify it for the benefit of all.
One can imagine my delight, these many years later, at seeing Kirk's final collection of essays, Rights and Duties: Reflections on our Conservative Constitution, introduced by Hittinger, now holder of the prestigious Warren Chair of Catholic Studies and research professor of law at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Rights and Duties consists of some 20 essays, none of daunting length, each supported by but not clogged with endnotes. The essays are loosely grouped under five headings, but they need not be read in any particular order to be enjoyed. The book is of archival quality and the index is detailed and useful. Hittinger's introduction is quite fine, and if Rights and Duties is one's first taste of Kirk, I would suggest reading the introduction both before and after one reads the rest of the book.
Besides a copy of the Constitution and The Federalist Papers, one might also wish to have access to a selection of Edmund Burke's main works, and perhaps a sampler of Orestes Brownson, since Kirk is not shy about referring his readers to the masters from whom he learned so much.
It is Kirk's contention that American society, the values that support it, and Constitution that governs it are, objectively considered, conservative. Regrettably, the words “liberal” and “conservative,” having begun their corruption in the bloody days of the French Revolution, are now so degraded as to imply nothing more than “abortion on demand” to one group and “corporate greed” to another.
Kirk points to a deeper and more fruitful understanding of what conservatism is, however: a recognition that, in most cases, healthy change is slow change. Abrupt breaks with law and custom usually result in harm to body and mind, soul, and society. For most of his career, one of Kirk's main contributions was showing that the “radical American experiment” was, despite the attendant rhetoric, actually a conservative evolution that preserved the healthy order of the past, albeit leaving room for necessary accommodations to modern times.
Only in Rights and Duties, notes Hittinger, does Kirk become “somewhat more cautious in his verdict” that “the general character of that American order remain little altered [and] that, though circumstances have changed markedly from time to time, the laws and mores have endured.”
Kirk, for all his command of the various disciplines that make up American public thought, does not lord that knowledge over his readers. In fact, several of these essays began as lectures or oral addresses and thus are remarkably easy to read. If Kirk expects anything from his audience beyond the ability to think carefully, however, I'd say that he assumes a certain level of basic historical knowledge, as opposed to, say, legal or philosophical training. If one is broadly familiar with major names and events of American (and to some extent English) history, Russell Kirk will take it from there.
Edward Peters is a canon and civil lawyer in San Diego, Calif.
----- EXCERPT: Book Marks ----- EXTENDED BODY: Edward Peters ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: When All Hell Broke Loose in Canada DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:1967: The Last Good Year by Pierre Berton
(Doubleday Canada Ltd., 1997, 391 pp., $36.95)
In July 1967, Gen. Charles de Gaulle stood on the balcony of the Montreal City Hall and said what the separatist crowd below wanted to hear: Vive, le Québec libre! (Long live a free Quebec.) In December 1967, Pierre Trudeau told the House of Commons, “There is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” The then-president of France and soon-to-be Prime Minister of Canada spoke with malice aforethought. Their words still echo across Canada. For 30 years the most consequential issues in Canadian politics have been the threat of Quebec separatism and the legal entrenchment of the sexual revolution.
The most consequential year in modern Canadian history was 1967. “It was a special year-a vintage year. Writes Pierre Berton, “It was a turning-point year. An aging political establishment was about to fade away to be succeeded by a younger, more vibrant one. Canadians talked about economic nationalism, women's place in society, the outmoded divorce laws, national unity, the drug culture ... All these diverse subjects reached a kind of realization in 1967.”
Berton has been Canada's best-selling popular historian for decades, writing a shelf-full of books on everything from the greed of the Klondike gold rush to the gallantry of Canadian soldiers at Vimy Ridge. He turns his attention now to 1967, Canada's centennial year, when euphoria reigned over the national birthday party and its centerpiece, Montreal Expo '67.
Written in his familiar breezy style, 1967 reads like a magazine article. The analysis is not deep; it is more reminiscence that reportage, and the reader gets what the septuagenarian Berton remembers of that year. What Berton remembers most clearly is that 1967 was the year that modern liberalism took hold of the Canadian body politic. A charter member of the Canadian liberal establishment, Berton looks upon 1967 as a very good year indeed.
It was the year various challenges to traditional cultural norms reached critical mass. “The End of the Dark Ages” is how Berton characterizes the revolution that liberalized divorce, sodomy, and abortion laws. It was the “dawn of women's lib” and “the seeds of gay pride,” a revolution in morals was underway and Berton positively gushes. Not everything was achieved of course; Berton laments that it wasn't until 1997 that women had the right to go topless on Ontario streets.
Berton relishes the role of the old liberal, chiding those cretins who have never understood how hip he has always been. There is not an issue in the book—whether economic protectionism or native Canadian grievances-on which Berton does not stand bravely with the herd of progressive thinkers that rule over Canadian politics. A self-congratulatory tone dominates, inviting the reader's gratitude that sensible folk such as Berton were around in 1967. And where problems still fester-most obviously the question of Quebec separation-Berton winks and nods that everything would have been just fine if only the country was as accommodating as he has always been.
Berton's smugness sustains itself only by ignoring history—an odd approach for a historian. The explosion in social pathologies since 1967 is never mentioned. While Berton has a good laugh detailing the shenanigans couples staged to get a divorce pre-1967, he does not reflect upon the vast numbers of divorced and never-married mothers living in poverty today. He gives ample time to 1967's homosexual cause célèbre: a man sentenced to life imprisonment for homosexual liaisons that classified him as a repeat sexual offender. (The case provided the impetus for repealing the sodomy laws.) Yet he says not a peep about the death sentence of AIDS that has cut like a scythe through Canada's homosexual community.
Berton might be excused for wrong-headed optimism in 1967. Yet 30 years is enough time to repent of mistakes in the face of evidence that the developments he celebrates have caused a great deal of suffering. There are thinkers of his ilk that have adjusted their views to take account of reality; so many indeed, that they invented the label “neoconservative.”
It is not necessary to defend the injustices of 1967 to find Berton guilty of an injustice to history since 1967. A neoconservative is a liberal who was mugged by reality, but Berton is just a liberal who mugged history to avoid reality. He is not a scholar but a socialist.
Berton notes that the euphoria of 1967 seems to have produced a 30-year hangover. He speculates as to why. Canadians are better off materially than in 1967, so he concludes it is not economics that ails us. He thinks it might be in part the burden of higher taxes and cutbacks in government services. What was called the “global village” then, and “globalization” now, means competition instead of international brotherhood. The constant anxiety over Quebec separation gets most of the blame. Berton does not acknowledge that his preferred approach of accommodating Québécois nationalism while chastising English-Canadians for their lack of generosity toward Quebec has not solved the problem.
Yet he remains willfully blind to the possibility that many of the stresses and strains of contemporary life have their roots in the breakdown of family life. The old liberal still remembers how glorious it was supposed to be. “In 1967, a better world seemed to beckon—a world no longer uptight, where marriage ceased to be slavery, where birth-control was everybody's right,” writes a wistful Berton, “a more tolerant world that treated women and minorities with respect, in which everybody could do his own thing without attracting the attention of the police.”
The emergence from “The Dark Ages” has not been for Canadian families a time of sunshine and light. For many Canadians living in the wake of all that 1967 represents, Berton's social and political revolutions have ensured that it was the last good year.
Raymond de Souza is a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Kingston, Ontario.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: Educatiom -------- TITLE: A High Society Hostess Reflects on Life DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:Mrs. Dalloway captures the spirit of the liberal-thinking Bloomsbury set, but gets weighed down by its too-literary approach
The celebrated Bloomsbury group of early 20th-century artists and intellectuals had a single goal-the destruction of the institutions and values on which Victorian England had been based. That stable, prosperous, moralistic, bourgeois culture offended the aesthetic sensibilities of free-thinking talents like novelists E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, economist John Maynard Keynes, and essayist-biographer Lytton Strachey, who banded together to subvert family, God, and country. Instead they promoted art, socialism, and free love, preaching that personal relationships were more important than social status or economic achievement.
The members of the Bloomsbury set are hailed today by many in the academy and the media as cultural pioneers, role models for how to live and do good work in a morally relativistic society. Woolf's novel, Mrs. Dalloway, propagates the Bloomsbury message in a subtle, ironic, literary fashion, and Dutch director Marleen Gorris (Antonia's Line) and British screenwriter Eileen Atkins (Upstairs, Downstairs) do their best to find its cinematic equivalent.
Clarissa Dalloway (Vanessa Redgrave) is the top hostess in highsociety London of 1923. On the day of one of her most glittering soirees, circumstances force her to reflect on the choices she has made during the past 30 years and whether or not her life has been wasted.
While selecting flowers for the occasion, Clarissa spies through her florist's window a young World War I veteran, Septimus Warren Smith (Rupert Graves), who's suffering from delayed traumatic stress syndrome. He often thinks he sees walking towards him the body of a dead friend killed in the trenches. Although Clarissa never runs into him again, the movie stays with Septimus and his long-suffering wife, Sally (Amelia Bullmore), as they struggle with doctors' efforts to institutionalize him because of his suicidal tendencies.
The encounter haunts Clarissa for the rest of the day, and her memory is jarred. She flashes back to the summer of 1890, a time of crucial decisions in her life. The young Clarissa (Natascha McElhone) is enjoying herself on her family's large country estate. Two men and a woman are pursuing her. Peter Walsh (Alan Cox) urges her to abandon the values of her upper-class upbringing and live a “dangerous” artistic life with him. Her best friend, Sally (Lena Headley), is also a rebellious spirit who flirts with her while praising left-wing causes.
Clarissa spurns Peter because he “wants too much” of her and doesn't leave her emotional space in which to breathe. She responds to Sally's advances but is turned off by her obsession with social activism. Both Peter and Sally are afraid she will reject them for the more stolid, aristocratic Richard Dalloway (played as a young man by Robert Portal) who offers her security instead of adventure.
Back in the present, we learn that Clarissa has, in fact, married Dalloway (John Standing), an influential member of Parliament, who's given her a sheltered, privileged life many would envy, but who the filmmakers, following the novel, see as soulless and shallow. As proof, Dalloway and another of Clarissa's childhood friends, who now works for the royal family, are shown meeting with an eccentric, titled dowager (Margaret Tyzack), who wants to solve Britain's so-called population crisis by encouraging young couples to emigrate to Canada.
As Clarissa continues to prepare for the evening's events, a middle-aged Peter (Michael Kitchen) shows up for the first time in three decades. He's been working as a solicitor in India where he's made a mess of things. He clearly hasn't lived up to his potential. His much-anticipated novel remains unwritten. There's been nothing dangerous or exciting about his life except perhaps some illicit affairs. Nevertheless, he's still attractive to Clarissa, and she invites him to her party.
Clarissa's daughter has forgotten about the evening's festivities. She had planned to spend the time working in a mission shelter. She's becoming a practicing Christian. The filmmakers and Mrs. Dalloway disapprove of this. True to the Bloomsbury credo, the young woman's religion is caricatured as somber and humorless, a set of beliefs which constrict the mind and spirit.
Despite Clarissa's anxieties, the party's a great success. Both the prime minister and the Duke of Marlborough attend, along with her daughter. The surprise guest is Clarissa's youthful best friend, Sally, who has cast aside her lesbian tendencies and married a lord, producing five sons in the process.
Unfortunately, the coming together of all the suitors from Clarissa's past produces no dramatic fireworks. Although Peter still rails against the superficiality of the upper classes, he and everyone else behave with impeccable, stiff upper lip manners. He and Dalloway nod at each other politely, and Sally proffers cryptic words of wisdom like: “All our relationships are just scratches on the surface.”
One of the doctors who treated the shell-shocked Septimus makes an appearance and tries to enlist Dalloway in supporting psychologically damaged war veterans. The M.P.'s lukewarm response is meant to be an indictment of ruling class complacency. But like most of the movie's social criticisms, it's too oblique and ironic to have any dramatic impact. The movie has remained faithful to the novel's use of interior monologue to tell its story. As a result, there aren't enough plot twists or emotional climaxes to keep the audience interested.
The filmmakers are true to the Bloomsbury spirit in pointing up the vapidity of both 1890s' Victorian country gentry and the 1920s' London ruling class. Many of their observations seem accurate, but the self-confidence, cultural cohesiveness, and moral certitude of the era depicted look good compared to the anythinggoes cynicism of today.
Arts & Culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
Mrs. Dalloway has not yet been reviewed and classified by the United States Catholic Conference. The film is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Gift of the Miraculous Medal DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:The Daughters of Charity convent where the Blessed Virgin appeared to St. Catherine Labourè is one of Paris's lesser-known charms
Home to some of the world's most beautiful churches, Paris is also the birthplace of a heavenly treasure. At the city's Daughters of Charity Convent, the Blessed Virgin revealed the Miraculous Medal to St. Catherine Labouré last century. Seldom mentioned in travel guidebooks, the convent and shrine are visited by more than a million pilgrims each year.
The story of the Virgin Mary's appearances to St. Catherine Labouré began the night of July 18, 1830. A small boy, clothed in white, awoke the sleeping Catherine and escorted her to the chapel where the Blessed Virgin awaited her. Upon entering the chapel, Catherine saw Mary seated in a chair by the altar steps, hands resting on her lap. The little boy, later revealed as Catherine's guardian angel, led her to the Mother of God. The Virgin then spoke to the young nun about the mission she was entrusting to her. In her message to Catherine, she said, “My child, the good God wishes to charge you with a mission. You will have much to suffer, but you will rise above these sufferings by reflecting that what you do is for the glory of God. You will know what the good God wants.”
The Virgin appeared for a second time Nov. 27 that year. Catherine described her as “so beautiful that it seems to me impossible to express her ravishing beauty.” In this vision, Mary stood on a globe, with her feet crushing a serpent. She held a second, smaller, golden globe. Rays of light came from Mary's hands and lit up the globe on which she was standing. As a circle in the shape of a medal formed around the vision, the letters were written, “O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.”
During this vision, the Virgin told Catherine to have a medal struck after this model, and she promised graces for those who wore it with confidence. As the medal turned, Catherine saw the other side. Mary's initial (M) was surmounted by a cross, with the Sacred Heart of Jesus crowned with thorns and the Immaculate Heart of Mary pierced with a sword underneath. Twelve stars encircled the picture.
A short time after the apparitions, the medals were made and distributed as requested by Mary. So many miracles, conversions, and healings took place that within four years, two million more medals had to be made. The “Miraculous Medal,” the name later attached to it, earned the reputation of converting the hardest of hearts. One of the most famous conversions is that of Alphonse Ratisbonne, an agnostic Jew who later became a Catholic priest. One of the greatest proponents and distributors of the Miraculous Medal was St. Maximilian Kolbe, an Auschwitz martyr who died in the place of a Jewish prisoner.
Today, the Miraculous Medal remains an ever-flowing source of grace. Millions throughout the world wear it. Christians meditating on the medal will find summarized the entire doctrine of the Church concerning the providential role of Mary in the Redemption and especially her universal mediation.
With the popularity of the Miraculous Medal, the shrine in downtown Paris receives pilgrims from all over the world. At the chapel, pilgrims can find many references commemorating the apparitions of Mary. The incorrupt body of St. Catherine Labouré lies at the right side of the sanctuary. Above her is a statue of the Blessed Virgin with a golden globe. Behind the main altar is a splendid statue of the Madonna, located at the place where the Virgin first appeared in July 1830. Adorning the walls are many beautiful frescoes and paintings depicting the heavenly visits of the Blessed Mother to St. Catherine Labouré. At the left side of the sanctuary is a reliquary containing the body of St. Louise de Marillac.
Visitors can attend one of the many daily Masses celebrated throughout the day in the chapel. Pilgrims accompanied by a priest can also request to celebrate Mass with their group during their own visit to the shrine. (It is important to contact the sanctuary beforehand to reserve a time slot.) Official Marian devotions and services take place every day at 4:00 p.m.
For pilgrims who are hoping to stock up on Miraculous Medals, there is no better place to do it than here. Inside the small convent gift shop, visitors can buy Miraculous Medals in all different sizes—and in bulk packages.
Arriving at the shrine in downtown Paris is easy. From the Sèvres-Babylone subway (Métro) station, exit onto the street named rue de Sèvres. You will see a brown sign titled Chapelle Notre-Dame de la Medaille Miraculeuse. Follow this sign, which points you down rue de Sèvres. After one block, turn right onto rue du Bac. The chapel will be on your left about half a block down; the street address is 140 rue du Bac. (The shrine is next to Bon Marché.)
Of particular interest as well, is the shrine of St. Vincent de Paul, located just several blocks from the Miraculous Medal chapel. To reach the shrine, which features the body of St. Vincent de Paul in a glass reliquary, take a right onto rue du Bac as you exit the Miraculous Medal sanctuary grounds. Walk to the first corner and then turn right onto rue de Sèvres. After two or three blocks, on the other side of the street, five steps lead up to the chapel of St. Vincent de Paul. The address of the shrine is 95 rue de Sèvres.
For more information on making a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal, contact one of the many Catholic travel organizations offering guided tours to France, or contact the shrine's pilgrimage office: Chapel of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal Pilgrimage Reception Service, 140 rue du Bac, 75340 PARIS Cedex 07; (tel.) 011-33-149 54 78 88; (fax) 011-33-149 54 78 89.
Kevin Wright, author of Catholic Shrines of Western Europe, writes from Bellevue, Wash.\\\
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kevin Wright ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: For this Family, Passion Runs in the Blood DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:For eight generations, the Meiers have reenacted the final days of Christ's mission on earth
Every year, from February until April in Florida, and from June through August in South Dakota, tens of thousands of visitors see a performance of the Black Hills Passion Play.
Since it was brought to the United States over 65 years ago, the passion play has continued the seasonal cycle without interruption, whether on tour or in its two permanent homes, which makes it the leading candidate in this country for longest running dramatic production of any kind, according to Johanna Meier, the co-producer and director. And fittingly so, considering the subject and the company's reverential interpretation.
The production focuses on the last seven days of Jesus' earthly mission. The events unfold in amphitheaters built in proportion to the scope of the scenes. The one in Spearfish, S.D.—the largest amphitheater in the United States—has a 650-ft. stage. Its sister in Lake Wales, Fla., has a similar multi-building set with a 350-ft. stage. The theatres sit 6,400 and 3,500 respectively, who watch a cast that swells to nearly 200 with extras joining the 25 professional actors. Then there are the camels, horses, and other animals.
But numbers alone don't tell the story of this reenactment of the greatest story ever told. The Black Hills Passion Play has been a labor of love and commitment for one particular family and a production that has influenced the lives of both audiences and actors.
Feedback often comes in unlikely places. Meier, who is the eighth generation of her family connected with the passion play, remembers the time she was on tour in Minneapolis, singing professional opera. Alocal make-up woman noticed a flyer for the play in her dressing room, but Meier never mentioned her family was responsible for the production. She still vividly recalls the woman saying how “it changed our lives. The family went to see it years (before) and as a result became practicing Christians.”
Johanna's father, Josef Meier, arrived from Germany with the play in 1932. It was then called the Luenen Passion Play, after the town of Luenen in western Germany where it could be traced in different forms through the Middle Ages to Easter presentations at Cappenberg Monastery around 1242. (In comparison, the village-wide Oberammergau Passion Play began its presentation cycle in the Bavarian countryside in 1632.)
With Europe on the brink of World War II, Meier translated the passion play into English and brought it to America—first stop: Pittsburgh. When most of the cast decided to return to Germany, Meier replaced them with American actors, among whom was his future wife, Clare.
In 1939, the Luenen Passion Play was re-named when it found a permanent home in the Black Hills in Spearfish, a majestic setting near Mount Rushmore. When World War II rationing interrupted tourist travel, the government waived restrictions for the company so that it could tour the states as a morale builder. By the final tour in 1962, the Passion Play had visited 643 cities across the United States and 25 in Canada.
By then, the second permanent amphitheater was set up in Lake Wales—centrally located, 57 miles east of Tampa, and 55 miles southwest of Orlando, with the Bok Singing Tower nearby. Josef and Clare Meier appeared in both Lake Wales and in Spearfish. When they retired in 1991, he had played Christ in more than 9,000 performances, and she had played Mary, Mother of Jesus, 7,000 times. Now daughter Johanna appears as Mary, while Roger Iwan grew into the role of Christ under the tutelage of Meier.
“I began listening to my mother as a child, and I was filled with her interpretation,” Johanna Meier says. “Gradually and thoughtfully, I went into it. It's the kind of role that takes a good many years to absorb.” She explains that “it has been such an intrinsic part of my life that it's hard to separate out—the impact on every way of my life has been tremendous,” especially with her parents “being so deeply immersed in their roles” for 60 years.
She herself has played every female part. Although she took time for a 15-year career singing major roles with the Metropolitan Opera as well as internationally, since 1991, she has poured all her energy into the Passion Play.
It has also become a way of life for Roger Iwan, who gradually alternated the role of Christ with Josef Meier until taking over when the patriarch retired. “For the first few years [the role of Christ] had quite an impact on my life,” says Iwan, who sees his role in the Passion Play as much more than an acting job. “Certain scenes sent shivers up and down me, [and] those thoughts stay with you—what Christ might have been going through.” These insights, he stresses, are important to remember and to convey.
In his own life, the impact from the role and its constant study in various sources has led him “out of run-of-the-mill drama.” Off season, he will only perform in dramatic religious pieces in churches.
The Black Hills Passion Play isn't affiliated with any one denomination, but aims to appeal to many with its scripturally—based traditional drama.
Johanna Meier vividly recalls an exceptionally large gathering in 1993 when many youth groups stopped on their way to meet Pope John Paul II in Denver. Before one performance, the Spearfish amphitheater swelled with 8,000 for a Mass concelebrated by two archbishops, 11 bishops, and 60 priests.
“They were so excited and involved,” Meier says of their reaction to the play. “The applause after every scene was so intense.”
1998 Season: Lake Wales, Fla.: March 1 through April 12, Easter Sunday (on Alt. 27A), call 1-800-622-8383. Performances: Sun-Tues., Fri., Sat. at 7 p.m. Wed. at 3 p.m.
Spearfish, S.D.: June 2 through Aug. 30 (off I-90), call 1-800-457-016. Performances: Sun., Tues., Thurs. at 8 p.m.
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Conn.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Fetal Tissue Transplants: Less Than Meets the Eye DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:About 20 million people in the United States suffer from diseases and injuries that doctors allegedly could treat, to various degrees, with fetal tissue transplants. These maladies include Parkinson's Disease, Alzheimer's Disease, diabetes, head injuries, strokes, and paralysis. These are the conditions on which pro-harvesting researchers focus when they say that fetal transplants can be of help.
Some bioethicists and hospital researchers have become almost giddy over the prospect of having access to an abundant source of useful “fetal material” produced by millions of abortions.
As Dr. Abraham Lieberman of the New York University Medical Center put it, “This [fetal tissue techniques] is to medicine what superconductivity is to physics.”
Fetal cells can be used for transplantation because they are “immunologically naive,” meaning they have not yet developed all of the antigens that allow a transplant recipient's immune system to identify and reject them. Also, fetal nerve cells regenerate and grow unlike adult nerve cells.
Despite these remarkable qualities, fetal tissue transplants have not lived up to their advanced billing.
In Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II expressed a moral condemnation of those procedures “that exploit living human embryos and fetuses—sometimes specifically ‘produced’ for this purpose by in vitro fertilization—either to be used as ‘biological material’ or as providers of organs or tissue for transplants in the treatment of certain diseases. The killing of innocent human creatures, even if carried out to help others, constitutes an absolutely unacceptable act” (63.2).
Source: The Facts of Life: An Authoritative Guide to Life and Family Issues, by Brian Clowes PhD (Human Life International, Front Royal, Va.) Reprinted with permission.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Who Are the Parents of Jaycee Buzzanca? DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:The strange case of an in-vitro orphan is defining the hazy area of surrogacy rights
ORANGE COUNTY, Calif.— Adorable, chubby-cheeked Jaycee Buzzanca will turn four years old April 26, yet due to the bizarre circumstances surrounding her birth, an Orange County, Calif., Superior Court determined last May that she was without legal parents.
However, a March 10 Appeals Court ruling overthrew the Superior Court decision and determined that John and Luanne Buzzanca are Jaycee's legal parents because they contracted to bring her into existence—literally.
As reported in the Nov. 23, 1997 issue of the Register, the Buzzancas, a married couple unable to conceive a child, contracted to use donor sperm, a donor egg, and a surrogate mother to “have” a child of their own. A month before Jaycee was born, however, John Buzzanca filed for divorce.
In February 1996, 10 months after the child's birth, the 4th District Court of Appeals issued a temporary ruling that John must pay child support pending the divorce case. In September of that year, the surrogate mother entered the law suit, filing for custody of Jaycee with the claim that she agreed to bring a child into a loving family, not a legal struggle that would force Luanne to formally adopt the child she and her husband contracted to bring into existence.
In May 1997, Superior Court Judge Robert Monarch ruled that Jaycee had no legal parents and relieved John of child support responsibilities. The recent Appeals Court decision overturned that ruling and required that both the Buzzancas be identified as parents on Jaycee's birth certificate. The court also ordered John Buzzanca to support Jaycee until she turns 18.
Legal experts are calling this a landmark case in surrogacy rights because it is the first case tried in which none of the parties involved has a genetic link to the child. The court decision emphasized the responsibility of people who undertake to create children using scientific technology.
“A child cannot be ignored,” read the decision. “Jaycee never would have been born had not Luanne and John both agreed to have a fertilized egg implanted in a surrogate.”
Robert Walmsley, Luanne Buzzanca's attorney said the case “carries significant ramifications because in the arena of surrogacy there are literally hundreds of folks ... where the genetic material has been donated from one place or another.”
While legislators and civil lawyers discuss the far-reaching ramifications of this case and what should be done to ensure that artificially conceived children grow up with clear parental identity, the Catholic Church stands firm in her declaration that such artificial tampering with human birth is immoral.
In its 1987 instruction on respect for human life in its origin and the dignity of procreation, Donum Vitae (Gift of Life), the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith wrote: “The inviolable right to life of every innocent human individual and the rights of the family and of the institution of marriage constitute fundamental moral values, because they concern the natural condition and integral vocation of the human person; at the same time they are constitutive elements of civil society and its order....
“Heterologous artificial fertilization,” the document continues, “is contrary to the unity of marriage, to the dignity of the spouses, to the vocation proper to parents and to the child's right to be conceived and brought into the world in marriage and from marriage.... [I]t brings about and manifests a rupture between genetic parenthood, gestational parenthood, and responsibility for upbringing. Such damage to the personal relationships within the family has repercussions on civil society: What threatens the unity and stability of the family is a source of dissension, disorder, and injustice in the whole of social life.”
Karen Walker writes from Corona del Mar, Calif.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Karen Walker ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Off the Hook? DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:Canadian pro-lifers fear a judge's dismissal of murder charges against a doctor who hastened a patient's death may lead to a push for changes in the country's Criminal Code
Canada's euthanasia debate intensified late last month with a judge's decision to throw out first-degree murder charges against a Nova Scotia doctor in the death of a terminally ill cancer patient.
Halifax respirologist Dr. Nancy Morrison was charged with first-degree murder last May after it was alleged she administered potassium chloride to Paul Mills, 66, a Moncton, New Brunswick man undergoing treatment for cancer of the esophagus.
“It is my opinion that a jury properly instructed would not convict the accused of the offense charged, or any other offense, and therefore she is hereby dismissed,” said Judge Hughes Randall of Nova Scotia provincial court.
The prosecution must now decide if it will let the Hughes decision stand, appeal it to the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, or prefer another indictment against Morrison.
“The prosecution service has already indicated that we felt manslaughter would be an appropriate charge in the case and we would consider that certainly in arriving at a decision as to what indictment to prefer,” Nova Scotia Crown attorney Craig Botterill said in response to the Randall ruling.
Morrison's defense team argued throughout the case that their client acted in Mills's best interests. “This is not a case of doctor-assisted suicide, mercy killing, or euthanasia,” said defense attorney Joel Pink. “This is a case where we have a caring doctor who is interested in comforting her patient who was dying, in the final dying processes.”
Mills died Nov. 10, 1996, nearly two months after being admitted to Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Center in Halifax, where Morrison served as an intensive care duty officer.
The hospital conducted an internal investigation of Morrison's action, but other than suspending Morrison from intensive care duty, little action was taken. Acting on information from a colleague who described Morrison's action as “active euthanasia,” police arrested Morrison May 6, 1997, and filed first-degree murder charges.
During testimony at preliminary hearings, Morrison said the potassium chloride was used to ease Mills's suffering. However an attending nurse later testified she had never before seen potassium chloride administered to patients in similar circumstances.
Pro-lifers monitoring the case accept that Mills was suffering greatly and that he was in the final stages of life. Nonetheless they are troubled by the notion that some medical professionals would take steps to hasten death.
The arrest immediately sparked a nation-wide debate on euthanasia and assisted-suicide in Canada. Pro-euthanasia forces hailed Morrison as a victim of outdated legislation, and a Halifax resident circulated a 5,000-name petition urging the Crown to drop all charges.
A publication ban has muted the pro-life response to Judge Randall's decision, nonetheless some groups fear the move will lead to greater public acceptance of euthanasia and assisted-suicide.
“If indeed this physician hastened the death of her patient, we are heading for perilous times,” said Mary Ellen Douglas, a national organizer with the pro-life group, Campaign Life Coalition.
Douglas said the Morrison case is an ideal time to remind legislators and justice officials to enforce existing laws against euthanasia.
“The law must protect our most vulnerable citizens,” Douglas said. “And those who would kill them must be told that such actions are not tolerated in our society.”
Douglas also expressed fear that right-to—die advocates will seize on the Morrison decision to step up demands for a change in the Criminal Code with respect to assisted suicide.
For Cynthia Clarke, a director of Campaign Life Coalition Nova Scotia, the Morrison case underscores the confusion surrounding the country's euthanasia laws.
“Although the laws on the books are necessary to protect us from those who might choose our time of death, perhaps the physicians' concerns should be listened to as well,” Clarke told the Register. “What many are saying is that with all the medical advances available to prolong life, doctors are caught often interfering with someone's natural dying process. Doctors are not seeking permission to kill, but guidelines for patient treatment in terminal cases.”
Clarke also said Morrison should not be seen as a Canadian version of suicide doctor Jack Kevorkian. She admitted however that Morrison's actions will be used by right-to-die activists to further their agenda.
The Morrison case adds to the pro-lifers' fears of a relaxed attitude towards involuntary euthanasia and assisted suicide. Last December, a judge imposed an extremely lenient sentence on Saskatchewan farmer Robert Latimer, who murdered his severely disabled daughter. The judge accepted a “compassionate homicide” argument to dispense with the mandatory ten-year prison term for second—degree murder cases. Latimer was sentenced to two-years, less a day, most of it to be served on his family farm, near Wilkie, Saskatchewan.
Mike Mastromatteo writes from Toronto, Canada.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mike Mastromatteo ----- KEYWORDS: Culture -------- TITLE: The Gospel Of Life DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:“Aside from intentions, which can be varied and perhaps can seem convincing at times, especially if presented in the name of solidarity, we are in fact faced by an objective ‘conspiracy against life,’ involving even international institutions, engaged in encouraging and carrying out actual campaigns to make contraception, sterilization, and abortion widely available. Nor can it be denied that the mass media are often implicated in this conspiracy, by lending credit to that culture which presents recourse to contraception, sterilization, abortion, and even euthanasia as a mark of progress and a victory of freedom, while depicting as enemies of freedom and progress those positions which are unreservedly pro-life.
Pope John Paul II
(Evangelium Vitae, 17.2)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Peru's Forced Sterilization Fiasco Won't Go Away DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:Bishops unmoved by government's softening of so-called birth-control campaign
LIMA, Peru—In response to international pressure against the Peruvian government's birth control campaign, health authorities have announced a change in the country's population program. But Peru's Catholic bishops believe the change is too little and too late.
The scandal surrounding the allegations of forced sterilizations as part of an official population control campaign hit the government last November. Despite President Alberto Fujimori's high profile battle against the devastating consequences of El NiÃ’o, the “sterilization issue” never disappeared from the front pages. The scandal has haunted him almost daily, jeopardizing his hopes of remaining in office for a third term.
The government's first reaction to the avalanche of criticism that sterilization was being carried out by force or deception, was to accuse the Catholic Church of trying to derail the birth control program “for ideological reasons.”
The Ministry of Health launched an aggressive public relations campaign saying that there had been only a “few cases” of forced sterilization in the midst of the birth control campaign.
But a new and unexpected attack against the birth control program came to light when the local press gave consistent evidence—official letters and internal memos—confirming explicit directives by the government to establish tubal ligation quotas, and of a reward and penalty system for health officials meeting or missing established goals.
A U.S. Commission's Report
The criticism of the sterilization program has had a strong impact on public opinion. But since the judiciary is tied to the government, efforts by some local congressmen to sue the Minister of Health, Marino Costa Bauer—who denied all charges at a hearing before the Peruvian Congress—have little chance of success. A critical report from a U.S. Congress Commission that visited Peru Jan. 17-25, made a stronger impression on Fujimori, who is always concerned about his relationship with the super powers.
The Commission's 20-page report indicated that there is hard evidence demonstrating that the Peruvian government's campaign systematically violates human rights. It also states that the U.S. Government is connected to the program through financial support provided by the Agency for Inter-American Development (AID).
In conclusion, the report strongly recommends that U.S. Congress withdraw financial aid to the population control programs until the Peruvian government demonstrates its determination to stop human rights violations.
The Peruvian Congress recently reached the majority necessary to summon Health Minister Costa Bauer for another hearing, thus revealing a significant crack in the once monolithic pro-birth—control stance of the majority in Peru's Congress.
On March 11, Costa Bauer made a surprise announcement before Congress: He stated that 10 doctors around the country would be suspended for abuse and presented a redesigned birth control manual which, among other things, establishes a 72-hour waiting period between proposing sterilization to a woman and carrying out the procedure. The revision of the birth control manual—the handbook used by all health officials—is in keeping with a new government ad campaign requesting couples to ask for the “best birth control method for your family” in each health center, because “health authorities are fully respectful of your choice.”
The ad seems to soften the government's inflexible stand, but critics believe it's little more than a cosmetic change. “The government will be more careful about mistakes and evident violation of human rights, but there is little evidence that major changes will be introduced in the overall policy, quotas included,” according to an editorial in the left-wing newspaper La Repubblica.
In fact, the government has announced that health authorities will maintain “strict control in order to ensure that the (birth control) campaign is properly carried out at the lowest levels of command.” The Fujimori Administration has not said anything about the policy of quotas, but has confirmed that the campaign will continue.
In an emergency document, the Peruvian Bishops' Conference said they “are more united than ever in our strong rejection of the current birth control campaign. There is enough evidence to show that such a campaign is addressed to fight the poor, and not poverty, and that [the campaign] in its very nature violates human rights.”
Archbishop Juan Luis Cipriani, a close friend of Fujimori and a key player in last year's hostage crisis at the Japanese residence, said the government's program “treats the country as a big farm and Peruvians as animals only concerned with mating.” Archbishop Cipriani demanded the immediate cancellation of the program and called for the resignation of Health Minister Costa Bauer, a friend since their school days.
For its part, Caritas Peru—the Peruvian Catholic relief organization—has disclosed evidence of new cases, gathered in Ayacucho and Huancavelica, of forced sterilization. The two regions are among the poorest in the country. With testimonies which have been well documented since the beginning of the year, Caritas called a press conference, providing dramatic material that promised bold headlines and more cover stories.
Testimonies gathered by Caritas include cases of peasant women such as Paulina Aranda, a mother of three, who was told that police would put her in jail if she did not accept a tubal ligation. Another mother, Maria Pucalla Ponce, was forcibly sterilized in exchange for the birth certificate of her fourth child. There was also the case of Eleuteria Yauri, an illiterate, who signed what she thought was a paper accepting a donation of medicine. In fact, the form gave her “consent” to a tubal ligation.
Investigations into the government's sterilization program have turned up names, dates, and places confirming similar testimonies. “All departments of Caritas around the country are carrying out or have already finished the same investigation,” said Bishop Alberto Brazzini DÃŒaz-Ufano, president of the Peruvian bishops' Life and Family Commission. “If the government insists that human rights violations in this (birth control) campaign are [rare], we are willing to demonstrate that it is the regular operating mode and not the exception.”
In other words, the bishops have expressed their willingness to play hard ball despite the government's hopes that the sterilization debacle would fade as have most political scandals involving the government in recent years.
The Catholic Church, along with several human rights organizations, seem prepared to continue highlighting the current government agenda until it drops the population campaign outright. In early March, new cases presented by Caritas Peru received front page coverage and two full pages in the Sunday edition of El Comercio, Peru's most influential newspaper. “We don't have political calculations, we only have a mission and a commitment to God and our people,” Bishop Brazzini says. “For us, this will end only when it is over, that is to say, when the life and the rights of our people are fully respected.”
Latin America Correspondent Alejandro Bermudez writes from Lima, Peru
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mike Mastromatteo ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Kevorkian Sets His Sights on the Non-Terminal DATE: 03/22/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 22-28, 1998 ----- BODY:The assisted suicide of a 21-year-old college student opens a new chapter in the ‘right to die’ debate
Roosevelt Dawson wanted to die. Since a viral infection attacked his spine 13 months ago, Dawson reportedly hadn't been able to use his arms and legs and received assistance in breathing. The 21-year-old college student wanted to die so badly he took a hospital to court for the right to leave and seek Jack Kevorkian's help.
Late last month, just hours after receiving permission to leave the hospital, Dawson was dead. A spokesman for the Oakland County, Mich., medical examiner's office said Dawson's disability made it impossible for him to operate Kevorkian's “suicide machine” himself.
In the aftermath of Dawson's death, activists on both sides of the assisted suicide issue are expressing concern. Assisted suicide, many thought, was supposedly limited to those with terminal illnesses. Now, Kevorkian and his associates have opened a new chapter in America's debate over whom should have the so-called “right” to die and who should not. Dawson isn't the only victim of Kevorkian's who did not suffer from a terminal illness.
Less than two weeks after Dawson's body was dumped at a local hospital emergency room, Kevorkian and his associate, retired psychiatrist Georges Redding, showed up at two different Michigan hospitals with two more dead bodies. One was that of a woman who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. The other, a man with fibromyalgia, a non-fatal muscle disorder.
Kevorkian's recent trend of assisting nonterminal patients in killing themselves isn't a surprise to pro-lifers.
Pro-life groups in Michigan, where Kevorkian continues performing his assisted suicides, say his agenda is clear, but it's nothing new. They say Kevorkian has always advocated unlimited access to assisted suicide.
Fickle Supporters
“His agenda is clear—if you're less than perfect you' re better off dead,” said Erin Wilson, director of public information for Right to Life of Michigan, which is running television commercials against assisted suicide. “He's expanding incrementally until anyone with a chronic illness or disability is looked upon as a burden to society.”
Rita Marker executive director of the International Anti-Euthanasia Task Force, agrees. Marker, who has debated Kevorkian and other leading pro-euthanasia leaders across the nation, claims Kevorkian's recent actions are nothing new. However, she sees public awareness of his real agenda increasing.
“People are becoming more aware of what Kevorkian is all about,” she said. “Kevorkian hasn't changed, but the public is realizing how crude, how bizarre, and how bigoted against people with disabilities Jack Kevorkian actually is.”
Some of Kevorkian's past supporters are also calling into question his recent actions. “The answer he chose seems to be a pretty horrible one,” Charlotte Ross, executive director of Death With Dignity, a pro-assisted-suicide lobby group, told ABC News after Dawson's death. “Unfortunately, what this does is tend to raise all kinds of red flags and cloud the issue.”
While Ross may be uncomfortable with Kevorkian's latest actions, other assisted suicide supporters say Dawson's “quality of life” made his life undignified. Geoffrey Fieger, Kevorkian's flamboyant attorney, told reporters after Dawson's death that his low “quality of life” made him an appropriate candidate for assisted suicide.
“I don't care what they say,” he told reporters. “Critics? How can they criticize him for this? Ask Christopher Reeve if he'd approve of Roosevelt Dawson's quality of life.”
Fieger was referring to the actor who is paralyzed from the neck down after a 1995 horse-riding accident. Reeve also needs assistance in breathing, but makes regular public appearances and speaks of his near-death experience.
Marker, who points out that Fieger is just as much a leader in the assisted suicide crusade as Kevorkian, says claims of concern by the leaders of some euthanasia advocacy organizations, such as the Hemlock Society, should be carefully examined. She says the leaders are quick to support Kevorkian when public opinion is on his side, but change their tune when it's not.
“They talk the talk of allowing assisted suicide only for those who are terminally ill, but they're not stupid people,” Marker said, claiming the leaders realize that any law legalizing assisted suicide will inevitably lead to non-terminally ill patients being put to death.
Michigan Pro-Lifers Respond
For Catholic leaders and pro-life advocates in Michigan, the battle is in their own back yard. That fact has prompted leaders to not only fight for a specific state law banning assisted suicide—which Michigan does not have—but also to reach out to those considering seeking Kevorkian's offer of death.
In 1997, the Archdiocese of Detroit founded Project Life, an organization dedicated to reaching out to those in need. Project Life offers social services agencies, health care providers, and hospices to counsel and guide people not to choose assisted suicide or abortion. The organization also has a toll-free number for those in need.
In the days preceding Dawson's death, the archdiocese signed and released an open letter to Dawson and his family offering counseling on alternatives and direct assistance with palliative care. After Kevorkian's team helped end his life, the archdiocese responded.
“Sadly, once this young man's picture appeared on the front page of major newspapers, he was on a fast track to making a decision,” archdiocese director of communications Ned McGrath said in a press release. “Think of the pressure he must have felt when the Kevorkian team showed up in Grand Rapids and told him everything was ‘scheduled and ready to go. ’”
The Michigan bishops also have released an unprecedented joint pastoral letter to the Catholics in the state of Michigan, entitled, Living and Dying According to the Voice of Faith. In the document, the seven bishops called on Catholics to reaffirm their commitment to life.
“Choosing death by one's own hand contradicts our deepest identity as sons and daughters of God,” the bishops wrote. “Such an action also conveys the tragic message to our family and friends that we reject their genuine love and our solidarity with them.”
Kevorkian Performs 100th Assisted Suicide
DETROIT—Dr. Jack Kevorkian assisted a 66-year-old man with lung cancer to kill himself and has now assisted 100 suicides, his attorney, Geoffrey Fieger, said.
Waldo Herman died March 13 at his Detroit home in the presence of the retired pathologist—one day after the Michigan House of Representatives adopted a bill targeting Kevorkian, who has been acquitted in three trials.
The bill would make assisted suicide a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and $10,000 in fines, or both. It now goes back to the Senate, where minor changes are expected to be adopted before it goes to Gov. John Engler, who is expected to sign it.
Kevorkian, 69, had for years refused to confirm the number of suicides he had assisted in.
When reached at his home, Kevorkian confirmed he was present at Herman's death, but declined further comment.
Detroit police said they had no information on Herman's death. There was no answer at the Wayne County medical examiner's office. (Pro-Life Infonet)
While reiterating that the conscious choice to end one's own life is always morally wrong, the bishops offered hope to those who fear the dying process.
“We proclaim a message of hope: no one has to die alone or unwanted, in terrible physical pain or psychological distress,” they wrote. “We put our faith and hope into concrete expression by promising to share our life journey with one another. As brothers and sisters in a family of faith, we live and die together.”
As the Michigan bishops and pro-life organizations educate and reach out to those in need, assisted suicide advocates are working to put the issue on the fall ballot. A group called Merian's Friends recently hired a firm to assist them in collecting enough signatures to force a vote on assisted suicide through a referendum.
Pro-life groups oppose the effort, supporting legislation to ban assisted suicide instead.
“We elect legislators to take the time to carefully consider these issues, hearing testimony for days, weeks, and even months,” said Right to Life of Michigan's Wilson. “The legislature should decide this issue conclusively, rather than giving the voters 30 seconds to decide this monumental decision at the ballot box.”
Though the Supreme Court ruled last summer that there is no constitutional “right to die,” the justices gave states the green light to experiment with assisted suicide. Thanks to that ruling, both sides expect the battle to continue in the legislature, the voting booth, and the courts. Meanwhile, Kevorkian, who claims to have assisted in the suicides of more than 100 people, shows no signs of slowing down.
Greg Chesmore writes from Bloomington, Ind.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Greg Chesmore ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: War Archives May Be Opened To Jewish Scholars DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY—Less than two weeks after issuing a landmark document on the Holocaust, the Vatican held out hope it may open its archives from the World War II period to Jewish scholars.
Cardinal Edward Cassidy, the Vatican's top official for religious relations with Jews, suggested a team of Catholic and Jewish scholars review 11 volumes of archival material already made public as a first step.
“If questions still remained, they should seek further clarification,” an official statement said.
It followed four days of talks at the Vatican by the International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee (ILC). During the meeting, Jewish delegates repeated their “demand for impartial access to the relevant archival material” on Vatican and papal activity during World War II, according to the communiqué.
“Cardinal Cassidy did not rule out that if we have to turn to the archives, so we must to further clarify the Church's role during the Holocaust,” Rabbi Marc Schneier told journalists following the talks. “That was a very significant step in what we view as an ongoing process.”
The ILC talks March 23-26 represented the 16th time the interfaith group has met since its establishment in 1971. Much of the session focused on the importance of educating Catholics and Jews about each other's beliefs.
However, the meeting was particularly significant for two other reasons: first, because the ILC held the talks for the first time within the Vatican walls; and second, because the session immediately followed the publication of the Vatican's document on the Holocaust.
Although the meeting was arranged well before the release of the document, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, delegates said the text was a major topic of their discussions.
They described the document as “a beginning and not as an ending of a process” of reflection and examination. Cardinal Cassidy noted that Catholics still have much to learn, but he also pointed out that the Jewish community as well needs to understand better how the Catholic Church views itself.
Since its publication in mid-March, the Shoah document has prompted ongoing praise, criticism, and reflection from Catholic and Jewish leaders.
It has drawn universal approval for expressing repentance about past Christian discrimination against Jews and its strong condemnation of the practices and ideas that led to the Nazis' “final solution.”
However its defense of Pope Pius XII re-opened a bitter debate about the role of the wartime pontiff. The crux of the issue regarding the archives is whether Pius did all he should have done to save Jewish lives. While the pre-1922 archives are now open to outside historians, material from subsequent years is still being classified by Church scholars.
Years ago, trying to shed light on World War II, Vatican historians researched the wartime archives and produced an 11-volume study from 1965 to 1981. Their work, however, has not laid to rest calls for unfettered access to archival material from the period.
A joint statement at the end of the ILC meeting stated that participants agreed to establish a joint working group of historians and theologians, to pursue further studies on the period of the Shoah, and to seek together a “healing of memory.”
Pope John Paul II did not mention the Vatican's Holocaust document in a meeting with ILC delegates, but he said the continuing dialogue between Catholics and Jews was “an impressive sign of hope to a world marked by conflict and division.”
He also prayed that better methods would be found “to make known and appreciated by Catholics and Jews alike the significant advances in mutual understanding and cooperation that have taken place between our two communities.”
Jewish delegates thanked the Pope for his support of the dialogue and his promotion of respect for Jews and Judaism. However, Geoffrey Wigoder of the Israel Interfaith Committee repeated some criticisms raised by Jewish leaders about the Shoah document.
“It was felt that the self-criticism—for all its importance—did not go far enough,” he said in a prepared speech to the Pontiff.
At the same time, Wigoder noted, Jews share the document's concluding hope that an “awareness of past sins” can be transformed into “a firm resolve to build a new future based on a shared mutual respect.”
Speaking after the papal audience, Rabbi David Rosen, who also serves as the Anti-Defamation League's co-liaison to the Vatican, said the ongoing dialogue between Catholics and Jews has created “an increasing climate of trust.”
“Our ultimate goal is to work together to bring about the kingdom of heaven on earth—even if we may have certain different theological understandings of what that means,” he said.
The rabbi noted that both faith communities share many “profound social and ethical values” and that by concentrating on what unites them, Catholics and Jews could reach “a very high level” of cooperation.
When asked about the Holy See's wartime archives, Rabbi Rosen said he believed it was “in the interest of the Vatican” and of history to open them to international scholars.
“It is not a barrier to our future cooperation,” he said, “but it would be nicer if we could, as it were, reconcile memory and have some accepted analysis of the events.”
Following the publication of the Shoah document and the international debate it sparked, the Vatican's leading historian of the World War II era said he had no opposition to opening the archives, as many Jews have asked. Jesuit Father Pierre Blet said, however, that he doubted if they would find anything new. He also hit back at accusations made against Pope Pius XII.
Father Blet said the Pope did not speak out more forcefully for fear of worsening the fate of Catholics, as well as Jews, in Germany and Nazi-occupied countries.
“The apparent silence hid a secret action carried out [by Pius XII] through nunciatures [Vatican embassies] and episcopates to avoid, or at least to limit, the deportations, the violence, the persecutions,” he said.
Father Blet made his comments in the current edition of the scholarly journal, La Civilita Cattolica. He is the only surviving member of the team of historians that researched the Vatican's wartime archives and produced an 11-volume study.
He noted that when Pope Pius died in 1958, there were “unanimous” expressions of admiration for his work, including from Jewish leaders. But beginning in the 1960s, he said, a “black legend” about his presumed silence arose. The Vatican responded by authorizing an early publication of its archive materials from the period. Father Blet and three others worked some 15 years on the project. But today, he said, “few people have read the material.”
He also rejected recent scurrilous accusations that he and other members of the archival team intentionally overlooked documents detrimental to Pope Pius XII.
“We did not deliberately overlook any significant document that could have hurt the image of the Pope and the reputation of the Holy See,” the priest said. He emphasized that the research team went through every box of documents from the period and published those most relevant. The material included messages, speeches and letters of the Pope, as well as diplomatic and private notes and correspondence of other Vatican officials.
The archival finds include a series of letters from Pope Pius to the German bishops during the war period that show the Pope's strong feelings against the Nazi threat, he said.
Evidence showed that the Pope generally chose quiet diplomacy instead of public condemnations of Nazis, Father Blet said, because he was convinced that public statements would only “worsen the fate of the victims and increase their number.”
Stephen Banyra writes from Rome.
----- EXCERPT: Controversial Holocaust document examined at Catholic-Jewish meeting ----- EXTENDED BODY: Stephen Banyra ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Prelates Examine Church's Approach To Cyber Age DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:DENVER—Technology gurus dazzled more than 50 bishops and cardinals with displays of digital wizardry at a first ever international conference on cyber communication given for Catholic leaders, held in Denver, Colo., March 26-28.
Hosted by Archbishop Charles Chaput OFM Cap of Denver and Archbishop John Foley, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, New Tech '98 took as its theme “ The New Technologies and the Human Person: Communicating the Faith in the New Millennium.”
The forum, a crash course in the digital revolution, explored new means of evangelization for the third millennium.
Key Latin American and North American bishops examined those opportunities and discussed how the Church ought to relate to a secularized, post-modern world.
Adobe, Microsoft, and Echo Star executives were on hand to explain to the prelates the capabilities and applications of “next generation” communication. Pectoral crosses clacked against keyboards as the prelates leaned over powerful computers linked to the Internet. In the hallways, bishops chatted together about Direct to Home (DTH) and Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS), which would deliver diocesan catechetics to their parishes and schools. Several orders of nuns put heads together to discuss computers in classrooms and school intranets. A survey indicated that 90% of the attendees were computer literate, but were eager to find applications for catechesis, education of seminarians, and missionary outreach along the information super highway.
Despite their excitement, however, participants and presenters were cautious about an unrestrained acceptance of “life on the net.” Several of the sessions questioned the wisdom of “virtual communities.”
Internet & the Church
Former Wall Street analyst Ester Dyson, a celebrated theorist and author of Release 2.0, prophesied, “It's going to shake up every established authority in the worldÛincluding the Catholic Church.” Characterizing the Internet as “hundreds of thousands of global villages” who make any rules they choose, as do geographical communities, Dyson suggested the Church use the net itself to steer the faithful to worthwhile sites, as well as warn them of harmful ones. Several bishops expressed concern for sites that made no distinction between links to dissident Catholic websites and those of lay faithful who have jumped onto the Internet with excellent Catholic resources for the cyber-surfing public.
Dyson also noted that issues of free speech and anonymity require serious reflection. Many who lack the courage to seek the Church in person might explore Catholic doctrines privately via the Internet—if it can be done anonymously. Dyson's address, “Being Digital: What the New Technologies Are; Why They Matter, and What Will They Do To Life As We Know It,” caused heads to nod in agreement that caution is prudent.
Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, archbishop of Paris, delivered a profound meditation, “Why This ‘Millennial Moment’ Is Decisive: Understanding Today's Cultural Challenges in The Light Of Christian Anthropology And The Gospel.” The cardinal warned of reliance on imaginary, fictional worlds that come between man and man, or man and reality. Speaking particularly of the relationship between men and women, when “the picture is only virtual and therefore leaves man alone and without any responsibility,” desire becomes a dehumanizing fantasy, a “mirage of the real, personal encounter…. Man is then locked up in narcissistic and solitary passivity” that renders him incapable of a true relationship.
The cardinal expressed concern that simulations, virtual realities (complete with sound, smell, and touch) and holograms, give the perception that time and space are no longer anchored. The result is that the distinction between “here” and “there” or “then” and “now” are dissolved and the concept of “after” is destroyed. “What we have here is a parody of eternity. Man pictures himself as eternal. He dreams of forgetting the human condition with its mortality and infinitude, his status as a creature.”
Cardinal Lustiger asked, “How are we going to adapt the Christian rites, and even the faith itself, to the demands of modern civilization?”
Noting that many preferred the comfort of their couches, he reminded all that a TV recording of the Mass is not a substitute to being physically present; that as Christ is physically present as the giver, so we, too, must be physically present as the receiver.
New Way of Thinking
Author James Bailey (After Thought: The Computer Challenge to Human Intelligence) followed Cardinal Lustiger's address with “How The Information Revolution Will Change The Shape And Process Of Thought.”
“The patterns of thought we've known since the Renaissance are not just speeded up,” he said, “but goneÛre-placed.”
Bailey explained that man develops partnerships with his communication tools; previously it was man and books, now it is man and electronic circuitry. He instructed his prestigious audience with illustrations from Catholic history, “Until the printing press, it was manuscripts and ink in scriptoriums.”
Manuscripts were spatial—three dimensional. During the 17th and 18th centuries, with the advent of the press, words dominated pictures and thought became sequential. Visual images declined, so man examined his world in text. There were great losses, since, for hundreds of years, the works of Leonardo Da Vinci were lost to universities for lack of an inexpensive way to copy his diagrams and schemata.
If Catholic students are to compete, if Catholic men and women are to influence the sciences and bring a sanctified view of man to the secular world, they must learn to think in new modalities made possible by the computer. Bailey presented a video of Forest Ridge School of the Sacred Heart in Seattle, Wash., where students are issued personal computers. Because computers combine text and images, students learn to think in parallel modes. Particularly in science, parallel thinking—that is, seeing life simultaneously rather than sequentially—gives rise to new understandings of our biological world.
The “biological revolution is not amenable to words,” Bailey advised, “we are de-coupling from words.” Biology must be studied via computer to mind, not books to mind, the author explained. “Move ethics and religion onto the Web,” Bailey suggested, for “it will be a bio-tech century.”
Cultural critic Dr. Neil Postman added this caveat to the impact of new technology: “What we need to know about technology changes is that all change is a Faustian bargain.”
Every advantage carries its own disadvantage that must be weighed against any gain for society. Automobiles brought a transportation revolution, but it also brought pollution and interstate highways to mar our landscape. “What technology giveth, technology taketh,” Postman chuckled.
Author of Amusing Ourselves To Death, Postman offered an analogy from Church history, “By placing the word of God on every Christian's table, the mass produced book undermined the authority of the Church hierarchy and hastened the break-up of the Holy Roman Empire.”
Postman commented, “The advantages of technology are not equally distributed among all people.” The question for religious leaders is, “What is the advantage [of the new media] for the average person?”
More information implies solving man's dilemmas, but, Postman suggests, “Maybe not.” More information is not needed to feed the starving people of the world.
“Ask who is given power by the new technology,” Postman said “Technology isn't neutral, it favors certain values.”
Chris Archibald, a Microsoft executive, disagreed. Archibald, whose children attend St. Vincent DePaul School in the archdiocese, told the Register, “For people of faith that is the dilemma. Technology is neutral. Don't fear technology or hide from it because the technology will acquire a different flavor from what it would be if we Catholics stay engaged.”
Vatican Web whiz, Sister Judith Zoebelein FSE, put much into perspective for the Register, “The role of the hierarchy is to give us some criteria, some context of good and evil to help us understand our experiences in the new technologies.”
As technical director of the Internet office of the Holy See, Sister Judith is responsible for content, design, and integration of the Vatican Web pages.
Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, reminded the attendees of the Holy Father's directive that the Church “must avail herself of the new technologies.”
Cardinal Hoyos offered this thought to his brother bishops, “In an age of ‘virtual reality’ people have a deeper hunger than ever for the deeper reality … this is the challenge for our evangelization of the [computer] culture, this is the new Areopagus.”
The close of the New Tech '98 conference was celebrated with a solemn Mass. Amidst the beauty of Immaculate Conception Cathedral and the many mitered heads representing some of the wisest men in the Church, Archbishop Chaput found joy and promise in the reading from Isaiah “Behold, I do a new thing.”
Mary Jo Anderson writes from Florida.
----- EXCERPT: At international meeting, talk of opportunities and words of caution ----- EXTENDED BODY: Maryjo Anderson ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Church Pressure Leads To Easing of Cuba Sanctions DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON—President Clinton's decision to ease some U.S. sanctions against Cuba, announced March 20, was an outgrowth of renewed activism by U.S. religious groups, especially the Catholic Church, aimed at reaching out to Cuban people in the wake of Pope John Paul II's January visit to the island nation.
At the same time, the Administration's decision was also driven in part by concerns about U.S. relations with a post-Castro Cuba. “We're reaching out to the people of Cuba to make their lives more tolerable,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said at the time the sanctions were eased. “We have to look beyond Castro.”
The Pope—who condemned the long-standing U.S. trade embargo against the communist island as “immoral,”—the U.S. Catholic Church, the National Council of Churches and other religious organizations that have long sought an easing of U.S. sanctions, gave the Administration the “political cover” that enabled it to take a tiny step toward thawing U.S.-Cuba relations.
“We are pleased to know that President Clinton has been listening to the growing clamor of the Churches,” said Rev. Rodney Page, executive director of Church World Service, the relief arm of the National Council of Churches. “It is our deepest hope that the reinstatement of direct flights will help reunify Cuban families here and abroad, as well as guarantee the swift delivery of critical food and medicine to a people who have suffered mightily under the U.S. embargo.”
Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua of Philadelphia called the change in policy “a step in the right direction.”
“The decision to permit direct humanitarian flights to Cuba will allow life-saving food and medicines to reach the island,” he said. “This and the ability for Cuban-Americans to send money to relatives in Cuba will strengthen the Cuban people not only physically, but emotionally and spiritually.”
Cardinal Bevilacqua said Clinton's decision “slowly opens the door of hope for the people of Cuba, which will allow them, in the words of our Holy Father, ‘to build a future of ever greater dignity and freedom.’”
The Administration's action will make providing humanitarian aid to Cuba easier to arrange and less costly to accomplish. The changes in policy will include:
l Licensing direct humanitarian charter flights to Cuba, to make it easier for Cuban-Americans to visit relatives and for humanitarian organizations to provide assistance quickly and less expensively.
l Permitting U.S. citizens and residents to send up to $300 per quarter to family members in Cuba.
l Streamlining and expediting licensing for the sale of medicines and medical equipment in Cuba.
Church groups hailed Clinton's easing of restrictions that had blocked Cuban Americans from providing financial aid to family members in Cuba.
“Cuban Americans will once again be free, as they should always be, to send needed financial aid directly to their family members in Cuba,” said Archbishop Theodore McCarrick of Newark, N.J., chairman of the U.S. Catholic Conference's committee on international policy.
Religious groups wasted no time responding to the eased situation. On March 23, the first part of a stockpile of $6 million in medical aid collected by the New York City-based Catholic Medical Missions Board left the United States for Cuba.
While Clinton acknowledged he was taking the steps to “build further on the Pope's visit” to Cuba, religion's role in U.S.-Cuba relations began long before the historic Jan. 21-25 papal trip.
Since Cuba's economy plunged into a free-fall in the early 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, U.S. religious leaders have taken the lead in providing humanitarian aid to the island and in calling for an end to the economic embargo aimed at toppling Castro.
Castro has reciprocated by loosening restrictions on religious worship and by changing Cuba's constitution in 1992 to make the nation a secular rather than atheist state.
Last year, most of the major U.S. religious organizations backed bills in the House and Senate aimed at lifting U.S. restrictions on the sale of food and medicines to Cuba. After the Pope's visit, U.S. religious leaders, especially the Catholic clergy, stepped up their efforts to pressure the U.S. government toward change.
Archbishop McCarrick, who had earlier pressed for an end to the ban on direct flights, welcomed the president's new policy, but said he “looked forward to further initiatives both to assist the Cuban people and to advance reconciliation and better relations between them and the people of the United States.”
Cardinal John O'Connor of New York also welcomed the easing of restrictions on humanitarian aid, but questioned the continued restriction on travel between the United States and Cuba. Speaking at a Spanish-language Mass of thanksgiving March 20 for the Pope's visit to Cuba, the cardinal referred to his own participation in the papal trip, and recalled meeting a woman who was able to see her family in Cuba again after 40 years.
“Why should there be such restrictions? Is that good? Is that human? Is that what God wants?” he asked at the Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York.
The day before the Administration announced its Cuba policy changes, Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston repeated his call for a new relationship between the United States and the island. “The lack of medicines more quickly and cheaply attainable from the United States severely restricts the treatment that can be provided [in Cuba],” said Law. “The effect of the lack of sufficient food threatens the most vulnerable members of the population, the young and the old. The people of Cuba deserve better than that from us.”
The aid shipped to Cuba March 23 is part of $6 million in drugs and medical supplies collected from the nation's major pharmaceutical companies by the Catholic Medical Mission Agency just prior to the Pope's visit. Responsibility for the huge shipment was transferred to Baltimore-based Catholic Relief Services (CRS), which works with Cuba's Caritas to distribute humanitarian aid.
Kate Higgins, Catholic Medical Mission Board's associate pharmaceutical coordinator, said she traveled to Cuba last November to assess the medical needs of the island. Upon returning to the United States she discovered the drug companies were more than willing to meet those needs, she said. Higgins collected nearly $1 million of insulin, enough to “take care of every person in Cuba who has diabetes for the next six months.” She also tapped the drug companies for another $5 million in assorted antibiotics, vitamins, nutritional supplements, bandages, gloves and “a variety of basic supplies.” Chris Gilson of CRS said the organization applied Feb. 10 for a special license to ship the aid directly to Havana. On March 20, the date Clinton announced his new Cuba initiative, Gilson was still waiting for the permit. Impatient with the Administration's lack of response, Gilson moved about $1 million of the medicines through Canada. The rest remained in a warehouse in Queens, N.Y. “Worse than the financial expense is the time loss,” he said. On March 23, however, just a few days after the president's announcement, a refrigerated airplane took off from Miami with part of the shipment's insulin, which must be shipped cold. Other flights were scheduled for later in the week.
Kenneth Hackett, executive director of CRS, said the Clinton Administration's change in policy was encouraging to all who saw signs of new hope for Cuba during the Pope's visit there. He said his agency would ship more than $5 million worth of medicines and medical supplies to Cuba as soon as possible.
The easing of sanctions wasn't universally praised, however. The Cuban American National Foundation said the Administration was sending the wrong signal to Castro.
“Nothing has changed on the part of the Cuban government,” spokeswoman Ninoska Perez told Reuters news service. “Repression has not changed. Nothing in the Cuban government has changed.”
The Cuba Committee for Democracy voiced support for the Administration's action, but said humanitarian aid alone would not end the suffering of Cuba's people. The group encouraged Congress to lift broader bans on sales of food and medicine.
In an interview with the Cable News Network, Castro said Clinton's announcement seemed positive and that he hoped the changes could be “helpful and conducive to a better climate” between the two countries.
Ana Radelat writes for Religion News Service. CNS contributed to this story.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Ana Radelat ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Line Between Clergy and Laity Remains Blurred DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:LOS ANGELES—A priest walks into a sacristy to vest for Mass and is greeted by a layman dressed in a white alb. The man then informs the cleric that he, the layman, is the “ordinary minister of the Eucharist.” The priest asks his lay assistant if he means extraordinary eucharistic minister, one who helps the priest distribute Communion. “Oh no,” his friendly helper assures him, “I'm the ordinary minister all right—I do this every Sunday!”
For key Vatican officials, such incidents highlight a growing and dangerous confusion between ordained and non-ordained ministries in the post-Conciliar Church and, what's more, they're determined to do something about it.
Last November eight Vatican agencies, including the Congregation for the Clergy and the Pontifical Council for the Laity, signed a 38-page document titled Instruction on Certain Questions Regarding the Collaboration of the Non-ordained Faithful in the Sacred Ministry of the Priest, which emphasized the unique place in the Church's life of ordained ministry based on apostolic succession, calling it “an essential point of Catholic ecclesiological doctrine.” The document had been approved by Pope John Paul II three months before.
As Archbishop Dario Castrillon Hoyos, pro-prefect of the Congregation for Clergy explained in a Nov. 13 press conference, if the activity of a Catholic community does not clearly flow from the leadership and sacramental ministry of a priest, even if he is not resident in a parish, it “becomes a social-religious entity, an institution marked by efficiency.”
The Instruction met initially with criticism from some Austrian and German bishops, and with questions from some bishops in the United States. Bishop Karl Lehmann of Mainz, president of the German bishops' conference, for example, complained that the document indicates “a climate of mistrust for the laity,” and Cincinnati's Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk regretted what he called its “anxious tone.”
Lately, however, “people have been pretending that the document doesn't exist,” Father Peter Stravinskas, Pennsylvania-based editor of The Catholic Answer, complained.
That was before Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, reiterated the Instruction's warning March 11 in an article in the Vatican daily newspaper L'Osservatore Romano—a move that indicated, most observers believe, that Rome is not likely to let the Instruction die a slow, bureaucratic death.
Cardinal Ratzinger said that in some parts of the world “a loss of the meaning of the Sacrament of Holy Orders” and “the growth of a kind of parallel ministry by so-called ‘pastoral assistants’ or ‘pastoral workers’” is leading to confusion about the special identity of ordained priests. He pointed to problems in north-central Europe and, to a lesser degree, in North America and Australia.
Clarity, he said, is needed to avoid undervaluing the ordained priesthood and “falling into a ‘Protestanization’ of the concepts of ministry and of the Church,” as well as to avoid the clericalization of the laity.
The situation is particularly serious, he said, when lay pastoral workers “exercise the role of leading the community, wear liturgical vestments during celebrations, and do not visibly distinguish themselves from the priests.”
The Instruction, which came about, in part, as a result of a 1994 Symposium on “The Participation of the Lay Faithful in the Priestly Ministry” in Rome, attended by the Pope, breaks little new ground, but underlines the vital importance of observing Church norms. For example, the document renews the traditional ban on lay people preaching the homily at Mass and reiterates the conditions under which lay persons may assist at marriages or lead funeral celebrations. Diocesan and parish pastoral councils are also reminded in the statement that their lay members “enjoy a consultative vote only and [that such councils] cannot in any way become deliberative structures … directing, coordinating, moderating, or governing the parish.”
Perhaps the two provisions of the Instruction that have drawn the most attention though, concern the use of extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist to distribute Holy Communion and the use of such titles as “chaplain” or “pastor” by Catholic lay persons.
Extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist have, in many countries, become a regular feature of liturgical life since the Church first permitted the practice in the 1973 Vatican instruction Immensae Caritatis. While the new Instruction acknowledges that “such … service is a response to the objective needs of the faithful,” especially those of the sick and in the case of large liturgical assemblies, “the habitual use of extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion,” the document insists, is a source of “confusion,” and should be “avoided and eliminated.”
In a move calculated to affect Catholic hospital and prison ministries, the Instruction also reaffirms the Code of Canon Law's restriction of the title “chaplain” or “pastor” to ordained priests.
A Controllable Problem
Veteran Church observer Russell Shaw thinks that the “confusion” the Instruction addresses “is not yet a roaring big problem in the United States,” but if it's not tackled now, “in the early stages, it will become much worse.”
Some U.S. bishops, Shaw told the Register, have been slow to address the concerns of the Instruction because they're worried that lay people—lay women in particular—who, according to some figures, count for more than 80% of Catholic laity involved in Church-related ministries, “will see the statement as a Vatican slap at them, a ‘shot across the bow.’”
But, said Shaw, who is information director for the Knights of Columbus, “no well-informed lay person thinks of the [Instruction] that way. The problem for the Vatican is not the laity, but the theology of the priesthood.”
“A bad theology of the priesthood, a bad theology of ministry has sneaked in the door in the past 30 years,” Shaw observed, “a theology that, in essence, says there's no essential difference between the ordained and the non-ordained. That may have been [Protestant reformer Martin] Luther's position, but it's not Catholic theology. This statement is an attempt to help priests.”
Father Matthew Lamb, a professor of theology at Boston College, has a name for that “bad theology.” He calls it “congregationalism.”
“There's a strong tendency toward congregationalism in American culture,” he said—the idea that the priest is merely a religious employee of the people and that the Mass is solely the faith expression of the community. “It's hard for Catholics to resist it altogether.”
“It's one of the bad effects of the kind of ‘hail-fellow-well-met, let's-just-get-together-with-the-balloons-and the-guitars-and-celebrate-community’ approach we've entertained in the past decades.”
Some theologians say the Church must move from a priest-centered to a congregation-centered Eucharist.
“But the Eucharist,” said Father Lamb, “isn't priest or congregation-centered; it's Christ-centered. We're celebrating not community spirit—that's what clubs do—but the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. That's what's really going on.”
“If the Mass becomes merely a community forum, without the transcendent holiness of the Eucharist—well, Catholics have, and will continue to vote with their feet,” Father Lamb observed. “I don't see this vast increase in conversions to the Church as a result of the ‘congregational’ approach. People are looking for transcendence, for worship, for doctrinal clarity. The low-church Protestant denominations are dying.”
Centers of Dissent
Part of the problem, says Father Lamb, is that several of the leading centers for Catholic liturgical studies in the United States—liturgy departments at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind., were two he cited—offer platforms to professors who openly question central tenets of Catholic sacramental theology.
“A Dominican at Catholic University wrote an article recently questioning the notion of the Mass as sacrifice,” he said, “and a Lutheran theologian teaching liturgy at Notre Dame applauded him. The head of the liturgical studies program at Notre Dame is an Anglican who's currently doing ‘deconstruction’ on some of the Apostolic Fathers,” the Christian writers of the first post-apostolic century.
“Frankly, I question the ability of these centers to provide an in-depth formation in Catholic liturgical theology,” Father Lamb said.
If a sound theology of the ordained ministry is at stake in the current crisis, however, so is Vatican II's bold vision of the apostolate of the laity.
“The priority of the task of the New Evangelization,” urges the Instruction, “requires that, today in particular … there be a full recovery of the awareness of the secular nature of the mission of the laity.”
“The faithful can be active in this particular moment in history in areas of culture, in the arts and theater, scientific research, labor, means of communication, politics, and the economy,” the Instruction exhorts. “[The laity] are also called to a greater creativity in seeking out ever more effective means whereby these environments can find the fullness of their meaning in Christ.”
Dominican Father Benedict Ashley, who serves on the adjunct faculty for health care ethics at St. Louis University, couldn't agree more.
“The lay vocation is not so much to help out the clergy,” he told the Register, “that's not the primary focus. It's to fulfill their own complementary vocation in the workplace and the professions, being involved in the problems of our time.”
In fact, he said, there was more of that kind of lay Catholic vitality a generation ago than there is now.
“Forty years ago, we had a strong Catholic movement in the labor unions,” Father Ashley explained, “in Catholic student and worker movements—lay people trying to bring Catholic teachings into the marketplace.”
Now, he lamented, we have lay people encouraged to involve themselves in all sorts of ecclesiastical roles. “We're wasting a lot of energy,” he said.
Father Ashley acknowledged that the Church needs lay people serving in various diocesan apostolates. “Of course, we need catechists, directors of religious education, people serving in Catholic hospitals,” he said, “but that's only a very small part of the laity.”
What the Instruction urges, he said, is a proper division of roles.
“The point is that everybody in the Church—clergy and laity—has a role to play. What kind of a football team would it be if everybody was a quarterback?”
Father Stravinskas puts it more bluntly.
“The idea of delegating aspects of the priestly ministry to the laity—it's an insult to the lay vocation,” the veteran Catholic educator said. “The real lay person is the one most like a priest? The only sanctity you can have as a lay person is something borrowed from the clerical state?”
The Church won't see a wholesale renewal in vocations to the priesthood, and, hence, an end to the priest shortage, or the energized Catholic lay apostolate Vatican II envisions, until an end is found to the vocational confusion, he said.
“It's that simple.”
Senior writer Gabriel Meyer is based in Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Gabriel Meyer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: For Newcomers to Church, RCIA Can Be Blessing or Curse DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:NEW YORK—With the first blaze of Easter candles in darkened churches across the land, and the intoning of Lumen Christi at the Saturday Vigil Mass, aspiring adult Catholics will come forward to declare their faith in the Risen Christ through a ritual rooted in the early Church. Bishops in their cathedrals and priests in their parishes will confer upon them the sacraments of initiation: baptism, confirmation, and the Eucharist.
Cradle and longtime Catholics in attendance, seeing this ritual for perhaps the first time, will have their own faith renewed by the witness of these neophytes, known to parishioners who have watched them advance publicly through stages of initiation and sign their names in the book of the elect at the beginning of Lent.
Initiation programs vary widely in quality from parish to parish
This is the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) in ideal form. How it actually works in the parishes is another story and has become a source of contention between two camps since the RCIA's gradual development following the Second Vatican Council. Some think RCIA is the definitive step in implementing the Council and bringing the Church to a vibrant renewal through a recasting of the sacraments as communal celebrations and the building of small Christian communities. Others see it as a destructive force controlled by agents of change who neglect or nuance Church teachings to promote subjective religious experiences and agendas such as married priests and women's ordination.
Evidence is available to support both sides, and many views in between. The truth depends greatly on the personal element. How good or bad is the RCIA in this country? It depends on who is implementing it on the diocesan and parish levels, how the program is structured, and who is encouraged to come and remain. Even within the same diocese, the quality of programs may vary.
Royal and Jan Fink were pro-life Presbyterians drawn to the Catholic faith by former Protestant ministers who converted. After studying Church history, the couple, who have nine children, enrolled in the RCIA and encountered a shock. The priest teaching the classes told the aspiring Catholics that they did not have to believe in purgatory, a defined doctrine of the Church. The RCIA team of lay people did not encourage the Finks' thirst for truth and told them that it didn't matter whether or not they became Catholic because all faiths were equally valid.
“We were scared,” Mrs. Fink told the Register. “We knew enough to realize that they weren't teaching what the Catholic Church teaches, but we weren't ready to argue.”
They left the program and eventually found another parish with a trustworthy RCIA. “It was like night and day, but it made us realize one thing,” she said. “We were coming from a small evangelical Church and thought we'd go into the bigger Church of one happy family. You have to be careful.”
RCIA's Origins
The RCIA grew out of Vatican II's call for a restoration of the catechumenate and a revision of the Rite of Baptism for Adults. The idea was to base the process of conversion more in the life of a parish than in private instruction by a priest and a small family baptism ceremony. Texts and an order for the new rite were prepared by the Vatican in 1972, but the U.S. bishops did not approve the use of RCIA in English until 1986; two years later the present order and translations were promulgated. Officially every diocese has implemented the RCIA. Practically speaking, even the bishops' own promoters admit there is much work to be done.
Paulist Father John Hurley last year began a three-year study of the RCIA for the National Council of Catholic Bishops. Surveys have been sent to each diocese and later this year he and his team will conduct consultation days with RCIA directors in each of six regions. The focus will be not only on the numbers of baptisms, confirmations, and First Communions; they will also find out how the rite is being implemented or adapted to meet local needs, how long the average catechesis lasts, and whether those going through the programs are remaining in the faith. Next year Father Hurley will gather the data, analyze it from many perspectives, and present the findings at a national gathering of RCIA directors.
“The bishops want the RCIA to be the primary way of bringing people into the Church, so it's time to see how well the task is being done,” said the priest.
RCIA is structured to recreate, in a limited way, the process of initiation of the early Church, with emphasis on a call to conversion by a parish community and a series of liturgically based steps concluding with reception of the sacraments at Easter. Those who respond to the parish's evangelization efforts represent two main categories: catechumens, who are unbaptized; and candidates, baptized persons who lack either confirmation, First Communion, or both. They are welcomed by the parish in an acceptance ceremony (often on the first Sunday of Advent) in which a priest blesses them and parishioners show their approval.
The catechumenate follows an indefinite period of instruction in Scripture and the teachings and practices of the faith. Depending on individual needs, this could last up to three years, but a number of parishes settle on what Father Hurley calls, “the quick 16-week class and then bring them in” method. The period of instruction includes the Rite of Election on the first Sunday of Lent, when the bishop welcomes the catechumens and candidates and accepts their intention to receive the sacraments as they inscribe their names in a book before families, friends, and parishioners.
During Lent, they are asked to examine their consciences, and deepen their prayer in preparation for the sacraments. A period of post-initiation catechesis, or mystagogy, is then required, but many parishes fail to follow up adequately. This is where, critics assert, new Catholics are left dry, with little grounding in the faith, and may drift away. RCIA professionals are aware of the problem.
“If we are weak in any area, it's in this period,” said Sister Rose Vermette RCD, RCIA director for the New York archdiocese.
With the various demands on priests and the many programs in parishes, RCIA can be viewed in a “fill 'er up and drive away” perspective, she said.
“We try to stress that this is just the beginning of your education—not the end. RCIA is not just about receiving sacraments, it's about continuing conversion.”
RCIA supporters usually call it a “process, indicating continuing learning and growth, rather than a program.”
Church Doctrine Misrepresented
Most of the criticisms of the RCIA , however, are focused on the period of catechesis. As the Finks found out, quality of instruction varies from parish to parish. A more basic criticism is of the philosophy that animates many who run RCIA programs.
An article in the February issue of Crisis magazine by a man who had gone through RCIA is indicative of the complaints. The writer asserts that RCIA programs are vehicles for heterodox reformers who present the sacraments as “simply ritual expressions of deeply felt human needs.” Church doctrines are merely codifications of a community's search for God, and Scripture is open to personal interpretation. RCIA recommends Lectionary-based catechesis, which presents the faith according to the cycle of weekly Mass readings, and many dogmas may be neglected because they do not come up easily in the average Lectionary cycle, the writer asserts.
The North American Forum on the Catechumenate (NAF), which conducts nationwide workshops to train RCIA catechists, is heavily criticized in the article, especially the writings of NAF founder Father James Dunning, who died three years ago. Many RCIA directors use Father Dunning's 1993 book, Echoing God's Word, which draws heavily from the work of Father Richard McBrien, the Notre Dame theologian whose book, Catholicism, was declared by the U.S. bishops to be deficient on points of moral theology, and from Father Richard McCormick, an outspoken critic of the Church's teaching on contraception.
Father Dunning's methods would support RCIA critics, but not all programs look to his work for guidance.
“There is a great deal of variation and freedom in how it is implemented here,” Father Timothy Thornburn, chancellor of the Diocese of Lincoln, Neb., told the Register. Lincoln's ordinary, Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz, is known for his allegiance to Church teaching and his direct methods, such as his willingness to excommunicate members of dissenting groups.
“[The bishop] has made it clear: no one is to be excluded from becoming a Catholic because of the restrictions that an RCIA program may impose,” such as making people wait who seek admission after the program, Father Thornburn said. “Priests are told to be flexible, to make allowances for private instruction.”
The RCIA is not well suited for everyone, he added, and provisions are made for those who feel uncomfortable participating in public rites, or who want to delve deeper into the faith in private instruction.
Addressing the criticism that RCIA programs are often weak on doctrinal instruction, Father Tom Mayefske, RCIA head for the Santa Fe, N.M., archdiocese, said that most Catholics, even through years of Catholic instruction, pick up the content and meaning of doctrine gradually, and some reach adulthood uncertain and ill-informed.
“It is not fair to expect that, in the course of a year, a new Catholic should know better than a life-time Catholic” he said. “RCIA is intended to be an experience of faith sharing, built on the Lectionary. Within that scope, all the truths we believe are contained.”
Despite problems and shortcomings, some dioceses report record numbers of conversions. Last year, New York had more than 1,200 persons baptized or received into the Church—and the number this year is close to that. Cardinal John O'Connor tells every new pastor to maintain the RCIA in his parish or begin a program if there is none.
Though she had a negative experience initially, Jan Fink is glad she went through the RCIA. When she and her husband were received by the bishop with other new Catholics from Atlanta at the Easter Vigil, “I was so moved; it was so beautiful,” she said.
“All the things you just learned came alive and you knew what was going on, with all the symbolism, and the true body and blood of our Lord,” she recalled. “I think every Catholic should be re-taught the beauty of the faith every year.”
Brian Caulfield writes from New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian Caulfield ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: A Reluctant Politician Answers God's Call DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:Steve Largent
Rep. Steve Largent, 43, has represented the 1st congressional district of Oklahoma in the House of Representatives since 1994. He first gained national fame as a record-setting wide receiver in the National Football League. Now, Largent has emerged as a strong, new voice in Congress for pro-life positions and religious freedom. He recently spoke with Register correspondent Eleanor Kennelly.
Kennelly: How has your faith guided or strengthened you in what has been quite a successful public life?
Largent: Interestingly enough, I've been asked that question for 25 years. Prior to being in Congress, I was in professional football for 14 years and I was asked, “How do you mix your faith with what you do? How do you mix your faith with playing a violent sport that schedules all of its games on Sundays? How does that work?” So I've been answering that question for a long, long time. And my response is that my faith is at the foundation of who I am as a person.
It's not a club I belong to, or an appendage to everything else I do. It's not something I just take along and bring out to experience at appropriate times. My relationship with Jesus is the foundation of who I am. And so everything else is built on that foundation: all the decisions that I make, the way I conduct myself as a husband, a father, a congressman, or a football player all emanate from this core value and belief that I have in [my] relationship with Jesus. My faith strikes at the core of who I am.
Did you develop a commitment to faith at a young age or as you got older?
Actually, I was not raised in a religious family at all. My parents were divorced when I was six. My stepfather was an alcoholic. There were a lot of problems that accompanied that. And when I was a high school student I really began to sense, as Pascal said, the “God-shaped vacuum” that only God can fill. I discovered that friends, and football, and popularity, or drinking, or smoking, couldn't fill that vacuum I had in my life. It was when I was a high school student that I first had an experience with Christ.
What kind of experience was it?
Really it was the first time that I heard the message about love and forgiveness, about reconciliation, about joy versus happiness, about the eternal versus the temporal, about the invisible versus the visible, and all I can say is that for me, all the pieces came together and I knew that this was what I needed to fill the vacuum that I had in my life.
So did you join a Church at that time?
No, not really. I like to say all the time that following Jesus is not a destination that you arrive at, it's a process that you walk, with him. Like any relationship, it's a dynamic thing. It's different for different people. And I am still involved in that process, a process that began slowly and has no end.
As a pro football player, especially a successful one, you must have felt on top of the world. How were you able to maintain perspective in the midst of the kind of success so many young people dream about?
You can come home and think you're a superstar guy but when your wife tells you to change a diaper or take the trash out … it really has a humbling effect.
I can honestly answer this and say that two things were absolutely instrumental in helping me keep my feet on the ground and my head out of the clouds—my faith and my family. When you have a relationship with Jesus and he teaches you all the things that are diametrically opposed to the world in order to gain life, you have to lose your life. In order to receive, you have to give. All these principles are about humility, and about sacrifice, and about service and love. Those are not values that you learn in the NFL or in Congress. So my faith has a very important role in terms of gaining a healthy perspective on who I am and my role in the world.
My family also played an important role. You can come home and think you're a superstar guy but when your wife tells you to change a diaper or take the trash out, which I did, it really has a humbling effect. And I think part of the beauty and the chemistry we've had for 23 years is that my wife knew me when I was a pimple-faced, curly-haired, nerdy guy in high school. That's how our relationship began. It didn't begin when I was an NFL football player with money, all that sort of stuff.
You've gone from one career to another that are both hard on families.
It's hard on families and it's very inflating as well. When you walk down the hall and people say, “Hi Congressman” or “Let me open the door for you,” or buy you lunch, or if your staff is bowing down to worship you because, you know, you're the boss: That is very addicting and ego-gratifying, and gives you tremendous temptation to let that go to your head.
How did you make the transition from sports to politics?
This is one thing [politics] I said I would never do, this and coaching. And I learned you should never say never. All I can say is that my wife had been whispering in my ear for a long time after I retired from football, “Why do you think it is you have this tremendous platform in name-identification and reputation? Is this just so you can come back to Tulsa and blend into the woodwork or are we supposed to leverage it for some higher purpose—like politics.” And that was the end of the conversation because I wouldn't go any further. I didn't want to go down that road. I never had an appropriate answer for her until there was an open congressional seat and I got a call from [the Republican Party in Washington]. I said I would pray about it with my wife. We did, and my heart was changed. It was still not something I wanted to do, but it was something I knew I was supposed to do.
Now when you look back on that experience, do you have a clearer understanding of why you got that message?
I think so. Because my impression at that time was … well I was totally naive. I knew I had some core values and principles that I thought would make me effective as a representative and legislator. But I had no experience. I would say that in May 1994, when I made the decision to run, the conclusion I had reached was, well, it must be that I'm supposed to do this to go change Washington and now in hindsight I can say that that was not the reason at all. It was that God would change me. And that's what has happened. I have learned a lot about myself. I've learned a lot about people. I have matured and grown, personally and professionally, in ways that I never would have if not for this experience.
Why do you think you were given that direction, toward what end? Not just personal edification certainly.
Well, I have always heard it said that God is more concerned about your character than your comfort, and this has not been a comfortable job. This has been very hard, personally going back and forth every week from Tulsa to Washington, D.C., but for my family as well. My wife has experienced being a single mother for most of every year. For more than half of the year, she's a single mother at home alone dealing with four kids, and three of them are teenagers. So that is a very difficult thing.
All I can say is that God has not only transformed my character but my wife's and my children's as well—not through tremendous blessing but through tremendous hardship. And that's why I say I don't know if I can do this forever. What I'm saying is I came with this idea that I was Don Quixote and I would slay the windmills in Washington, D.C. and I've found out that what has actually taken place is that God has transformed my heart. If you're asking me where I take this from here, I haven't a clue. I have no political aspirations. I didn't have any when I ran for office.
Have you found that the American political system today is essentially a “Godless” system?
I think I came into the political system thinking that, but what I found is that the American political system is a very human business. It is about people, it's not about institutions. And all of the greatest qualities of people and the worst attributes of people are glaringly obvious in the political arena. So all the worst aspects of human nature are very evident, but so are the greatest—like sacrifice and humility, those things appear as well in the people who work here.
Do you think that the division between Church and state, which is very pronounced in the American system, has become more exaggerated than it should be?
I don't think that we currently have a balanced view of the separation between Church and state. You know they always say that the pendulum is never in the middle except when it swings from one extreme to the other? Well, we have swung to an extreme in trying to eradicate every semblance of God in our public institutions. We are ripping down the Ten Commandments from courthouse walls while we protect pornography on the Internet. Something's wrong with that picture, and so I think what we need to do is to return to a more balanced view, the view of the founding fathers of this country.
You can not deny the spiritual roots and foundation that our country is built upon. You walk over to the House chamber and you see “In God We Trust” above the speaker's chair. You've got the face of Moses looking down upon the House floor. We say the Pledge of Allegiance and we pray before every session of Congress. Things you can't do in the schoolhouse we do in the Congress. So there is a great misappropriation of the term “separation of Church and state”.
Is prayer in the school a political issue any more?
Yes, I think it is. I think all the religious issues—the Religious Freedom amendment—the whole issue is still a political issue. I just believe that when it says in 2 Chronicles 7:14, “If my people, upon whom my name has been pronounced, humble themselves and pray, and seek my presence and turn from their evil ways, I will hear them from heaven and pardon their sins and revive their land.”
And I think when we are living in a country where we have the plague of the AIDS virus, we have 20 some million women who have experienced abortion, there is a lot of pain and hurt and guilt that we need to heal. The way you do that, according to 2 Chronicles 7:14, is to pray. And I really don't see how the circumstances within schoolhouse walls are exacerbated in the wrong direction by praying. How can it get worse than putting up metal detectors, students beating teachers, teachers sexually abusing students, nobody learning anything, SAT scores down, truancy up, drug use and violence up. How will that be worsened by allowing students to pray?
Are there any new faith-based political issues, or issues of particular interest to religious people, that you see on the radar for this Congress or the next?
To me, all the issues related to and surrounding the abortion issue—while that's not the root problem—symbolize a deeper spiritual problem in our country. To me it is a vital test of this Congress and a litmus test of where we go from here as a nation and as a culture. How we deal with that. It is not an issue on which we can merely sit back and wink and nod and give a few lines for applause at a rally and then do nothing about. We have the partial birth abortion debate coming up again. I think we should do it every week and continue to pound on it.
Why?
Well, because it's the right thing to do. That's the only reason we should continue to do it. I think parental notification on Title X funding is the right thing to do. Those are like incremental steps in the right direction, but again the underlying problem is a moral meltdown in the country and there are no laws that we can pass to address that.
Are you worried that the public response to the current White House crisis represents a certain weak morality on the part of the American public?
I don't know how to interpret that, but I am still confident that the country has a very moral fabric woven into it, and that people with deep-seated beliefs and values are out there. They may be quiet but I sense a real restlessness in the spirit of this country. You know the landscape is really ripe for revival, which is what I think we need.
What kind of revival?
A spiritual revival, not a political revolution.
Do you see that spirit stirring more in Oklahoma than in Washington?
I see it here in Washington, too, absolutely. As I come in contact with members of Congress from around the country, I see their response to the spiritual vacuum and they too are seeking the deeper things in life on a personal level.
Do you see this revival as occurring across religious denominations, or mostly within Protestant Churches.
I think, absolutely, across religious differences. You know the idea that most people don't reject Jesus, they reject a caricature of Jesus, and I think a lot of our religious institutions are responsible for erecting most of the caricatures of who Jesus is. So if we can just break down the caricatures, erase those, and really lift the person of Jesus up, not Church dogma or doctrine or a particular theology, just lift Jesus up, we'll be able to get beyond all the differences. As St. Francis of Assisi said, “Unity on the essentials, liberty on the non-essentials, and love over all.” That's the goal.
—Eleanor Kennelly
----- EXTENDED BODY: Eleanor Kennelly ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Steve Largent DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:Football:
Wide Receiver for the Seattle Seahawks, 14 years. Set six career records, played in seven Pro Bowls. Retired in 1989 and founded advertising and marketing consulting firm. Inducted into Pro Football Hall of Fame, 1995.
Politics:
In 1994, elected to represent the 1st congressional district of Oklahoma in the U.S. House of Representatives; now serving his third term. Currently serves as a member of the House's Commerce Committee; the Energy and Power Subcommittee; Telecommunications, Trade, and Consumer Protection Subcommittee; and the Finance and Hazardous Materials Subcommittee.
Personal:
Age 43, native of Tulsa, Okla.; married to Terry for 22 years; four children; attends Fellowship Bible Church in Tulsa.
----- EXCERPT: Pro football hall-of-famer turned U.S. Rep. Steve Largent on the challenges of being a man of faith on Capitol Hill ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: -------- TITLE: U.S. Notes & Quotes DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:Healing Services Becoming More Popular
In an extended special report, the Columbus Dispatch of March 20 examined a popular new practice in evangelical worship: faith healing.
Catholics might consider the new trappings of the practice familiar: oil, laying on of hands, a belief that the soul's cure must accompany the body's.
Said one bishop of the local Evangelical Lutheran Church, “Our understanding of the healing service is it is to bring wholeness and peace…. It includes the spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and the physical.”
A spokesman of the United Methodist Church in the area described a similarly expansive view of healing services. In a healing service, “you talk about bringing people to health in mind, body, and relationships. It also involves reconciliation, coming to terms with your situation, forgiving people.”
At a Pentecostal Church in the area, the pastor explains that at his Church “We will do laying on of hands, with oil, and pray.”
But, giving credit where credit is due, the article points out that the “oldest healing services come from the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches.”
The article quoted Columbus diocesan spokesman Father Larry Hemmelgarn, who pointed out that the sacrament of the anointing of the sick or “last rites” has always included oil and the laying on of hands intended to heal the soul—and, at God's discretion, the body as well.
There may be a new emphasis on healing in other Churches, but having merited a place among the seven sacraments, “Healing has always been important in the Catholic Church,” he said.
ACLU and Evangelical Go Against Catholic Charities
It is hard to imagine the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) taking a born-again Christian's side in a religious freedom dispute. But it happened in Pittsburgh, according to a March 19 report by the Associated Press.
Carlyn Kline was jailed for 26 hours last year because she refused to attend court-ordered marriage counseling. According to Kline, Judge Robert Kunselman sent her to jail when she said she objected to the counseling because it included literature published by Catholic Charities.
Kline told the judge she considers some Catholic teachings counter to the teachings of Jesus. “My God forbids me from contacting the dead,” she is quoted saying, explaining her objection to prayers to the saints. The judge was apparently unconvinced, and sent her to jail for avoiding counseling.
Kline's case, however, was decided on a technicality rather than on the merits of her religious challenge. Her brief jail time ended when a federal judge freed her from the court order—on Good Friday of last year. Pennsylvania state judges like Kunselman don't work that day.
Since the incident occurred, the ACLU has made a settlement that forces Catholic Charities to provide their literature indirectly, by giving it first to the court, so that no one has to pay the organization directly for its services.
Understanding the ‘Fifth Dogma’
A daily secular newspaper may be an unlikely place to find a well-presented discussion of the Blessed Mother's role in salvation history—but Baltimoreans woke Saturday March 21 to find a thorough treatment of the matter on their doorstep.
A Baltimore Sun article, prompted by a Steubenville, Ohio group's attempt to persuade the Vatican to proclaim Mary “Mediatrix,” included the following explanations:
• For those who missed the news last year, “a Vatican commission of 23 Mariologists unanimously advised the Pope not to proclaim the teaching. And the Pope's spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, said last year that neither the Pope nor any Vatican commission is studying the proclamation of any new Marian dogmas,” according to the account.
• The promulgation of the proposed new title is what supporters call the “Fifth Dogma,” or “Fifth Doctrine,” because it follows four other proclamations about the Blessed Mother: (1) the Council of Ephesus declared her the Mother of God in 431; (2) the Council of Constantinople proclaimed her perpetual virginity in 681; (3) Pope Pius IX proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854 by ex cathedra decree; and (4) Pope Pius XII similarly proclaimed the Assumption in 1950.
Father Frederick Jelly OP, identified as a prominent Mariologist at Mt. St. Mary's Seminary in Emmitsburg, Md., is quoted in the article explaining the appropriateness—but perhaps the imprudence as regards timing—of the title Mediatrix.
Use of the term “Mediatrix,” he said, raises the question, “What is she mediating that Christ is not?” Though some theologians favor the proposed title, none were quoted in the article.
Further, said Father Jelly, the full title being proposed, “Co-Redemptrix, Mediatrix of All Graces, and Advocate for the People of God,” raises another issue. In modern English, the prefix “co-” puts two people on the same level, he said, citing the example “co-signer of a check.” He is quoted saying, “If it's interpreted that way, you're in trouble … that is not Catholic doctrine.”
In Latin, the problem disappears. In Latin, “co-” has “the connotation of saying that Mary is subordinate to, dependent on” Christ, rather than a sort of easier-going Christ or a surrogate of the Holy Spirit.
Father Jelly agreed that the Holy Father's well-known personal devotion to the Blessed Mother might well embrace the proper use of both these titles, but pointed out that the Holy Father was not likely to make a determination for the Church based on his private devotion.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Delegation Head Says Reports of Persecution Of Egypt's Christians Are 'Overstated' DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:NEW YORK—The leader of a delegation of U.S. pastors who visited Egypt early last month has declared that reports of mass persecution of Christians in the predominantly Muslim country are “grossly overstated.”
Recently the U.S. media have claimed that Christians in Egypt face persecution, but Calvin Butts III, president of the New York City Council of Churches and leader of the delegation from the Council that visited Egypt March 10-15, told journalists at a press conference yesterday that he had found no evidence of government-sanctioned persecution of Christians.
The delegation met leading politicians and diplomats and religious leaders—Protestant, Orthodox, and Muslim.
Butts, a black clergyman and pastor of the most prominent Church in New York's Harlem district, the Abyssinian Baptist Church, said his experience in the United States convinced him that a minority group would always suffer some measure of discrimination, and he had found some matters of concern in Egypt.
According to the World Churches Handbook, published in London, about 8.7 million of Egypt's 61 million citizens are Christians. The biggest Church is the Coptic Orthodox Church, which has about 8 million followers.
“Isolated incidents” sometimes occurred in Egypt, Butts said, but Christian leaders there told the delegation that relations with Muslims were good, and that the government was not “turning a blind eye” to offenses against Christians.
Butts said that the leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church, Pope Shenouda III of Alexandria, Patriarch of the Holy See of St. Mark, told the delegation that any conflicts between Christians and Muslims were “best resolved by Muslims and Christians in Egypt.”
Asked what American Church leaders might do, Pope Shenouda, who is also a president of the World Council of Churches, advised them to go home and deal with “troubles among your own young people,” Butts said.
Many Church leaders in the Middle East have deep misgivings about foreigners and foreign governments, particularly the U.S. government, exerting pressure for better treatment of Christians in the region. Such interventions could, they believe, cause harm by politicizing interfaith relationships and arousing local resentment against Christians as the supposed cause of the foreign pressures.
Representatives of a U.S. organization, the American Coptic Union, which has made serious claims about the treatment of Egyptian Christians, attended the press conference, and insisted yesterday that acts against Egyptian Christians were not “isolated incidents,” but occurred regularly. They insisted that officials of the Egyptian government did not give equal protection to Christians, but acted in collaboration with terrorists attacking Christians.
Butts disagreed with their claims and said the delegation found no need for a “crusade” to deliver Egyptian Christians from persecution. (ENI)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Russia's Baptists Want Same Rights as Orthodox Church DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:MOSCOW—Russia's Union of Evangelical Christian-Baptists—the country's biggest Protestant denomination—has called on its members to promote further growth of the denomination and also demanded that Russian authorities give it the same respect as the nation's dominant Russian Orthodox Church.
The union's 30th congress, held in Moscow March 17-20, also called for peace between Russia's Churches. They stressed the Russian history of their evangelical faith, and rejected the common perception that Russian Baptists belong to a “foreign” religion.
The congress brought together 374 delegates and more than 200 guests, most of them Baptist pastors, at a hotel in the southwest of the Russian capital, under the theme “Thy Kingdom Come.”
Interest at the congress was focused on reactions to Russia's new Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations, which many people believe discriminates against the country's minority Churches.
But Pastor Pyotr Konovalchik, who was re-elected as the union's president during the congress, said the law was not aimed at Russian Baptist Churches and did not infringe their freedom.
“We do not see how we can be persecuted on the basis of this law,” he said. However, he added that much would depend on the practice of re-registration of the communities, which was required by the new law.
The congress emphasized mission and evangelism as the backbone of the Church's activities.
“We should be more open to all of society, reach out to mass media, enter into contacts with all groups of population,” the message from the congress to Russia's Baptist communities declared, adding that Baptists should “be neither ashamed of our name, nor consider ourselves superior to other confessions, but through our love and kind Christian behavior lead people to understand that the Churches of Evangelical Christian-Baptists are indeed part of God's Kingdom on earth.”
Baptists are often seen by Russian nationalists—both within and outside the Russian Orthodox Church—as a sect. Although the Church's Moscow Patriarchate maintains official contacts with the union, many Orthodox priests and lay activists are highly critical of Baptists.
In a message to President Boris Yeltsin, the union's pastors declared their loyalty to him and to Russia, but complained of discrimination. They said they were “profoundly saddened” by the violation by local authorities of the rights of freedom of conscience and of Church equality before the law. The pastors referred to the fact that they had been refused time on television and radio, as well as places for worship. Russian authorities had also refused to return to the Churches the ownership of houses of worship in several Russian cities.
Pastor Pyotr Stebakov, a delegate from the city of Oryol in southern Russia, told the congress that in his city the Orthodox Church was trying to restrict the work of the Baptists. Last year, he said, Oryol's Baptists had planned an “evangelization” of the city. A Moscow-based American missionary, Victor Gamm, was to have preached in the city center, but when the local Orthodox bishop protested the mayor refused permission.
Konovalchik said the union now had 1,250 Churches with a total membership of about 85,000 adults. In proportion to the population there are more Baptists in Siberia than in European Russia. In comparison, the Russian Orthodox Church has about 8,000 parishes with tens of millions of members.
According to Konovalchik, between 7,000 and 9,000 are baptized in Baptist Churches every year. (ENI)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: World Notes & Quotes DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:Ingredients in the Kosovo Conflict
Mother Teresa would express sadness at—but would intimately understand—the fierce racial tensions in Kosovo, which pit its majority Albanian population against a Serb minority rule.
As a child growing up in Skopje, Macedonia, Mother Teresa found herself at the center of just such a situation. Her father was a leader in a movement for Albanian independence in Macedonia, whose predicament is similar to Kosovo's.
In an article in The Los Angeles Times March 23, Isuf Hajrizi fills in some facts about the Albanians and their lands and sheds light on a situation that is becoming a difficult one.
Seven million Albanians today live in Albania itself and in five surrounding countries: Mother Teresa's Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Greece, and the current hot spot, Kosovo.
The Albanians, originally Illyrians, inhabitants of the prized Roman prefecture Illyricum, have been disinherited in their own lands since the sixth century, he writes.
In Kosovo, 200,000 Serbs rule over 2 million Albanians.
The problems there are better characterized as racial conflict, rather than religious: Albanians of different religions have tolerated each other for years in these nations. Muslims predominate, but often join in the feast day celebrations of their Catholic and Orthodox countrymen.
Kosovo is rich in gold, silver, copper, and lead—which, Hajrizi speculates, is the real reason for Serbian interest in the country.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Vatican Notes & Quotes DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:Keeping Up with John Paul II
Has anyone noticed how busy the Holy Father has been? Tad Szulc, the author of an unofficial biography about the Pope, has. His March 22 Los Angeles Times report might explain why there has been so little talk recently, as there once was, of the Holy Father retiring early to allow a more vigorous man to take over as Pope.
The Holy Father's activities “seem boundless in all imaginable ways,” he writes:
• “The Pope started 1998 with a five-day four-city visit to Cuba—immensely hot even in January.”
• Later, he elevated 20 new cardinals—meaning, reminds Szulc, that John Paul II has appointed 106 of the 122 cardinals who are younger than 80 and therefore eligible to vote for his successor.
• That same week, the Vatican released 4,500 volumes of files going back 500 years that shed light on the true nature of the Inquisition, hoping that “this image of the black legend” can be re-examined.
• In March, the Vatican released its statement about the Holocaust, which the Holy Father had initiated after his 1987 meeting with Jewish leaders.
• Two weeks ago, the Holy Father returned from his 82nd foreign trip, to Nigeria.
• In between the above events, and the ordinary events filling and overfilling his schedule, the Pope found time to meet his world and personal obligations. He met with Russian President Boris Yeltsin, and he elevated his long-time personal friend and secretary, Msgr. Stanislaw Dziwisz, to bishop.
The Pope and the Jewish People
Reporters have had a hard time finding a reliable list of things this Holy Father has done to reach out to the Jewish community worldwide. In his Los Angeles Times article March 22, Tad Szulc provides a partial list of important gestures:
• John Paul II was the first Pope ever to visit a synagogue (in Rome), and then writing about it with obvious joy in Crossing the Threshold of Hope.
• He presided over “an emotional concert at the Vatican to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the uprising in the Warsaw Jewish ghetto during the Nazi occupation.”
• He shepherded “delicate negotiations” to establish diplomatic relations between the Vatican and Israel.
The Unity and Authority of Nigerian Priests
To conclude its March 23 account of the Holy Father's recent visit to Nigeria, The Washington Post recounted the following anecdote, which it said shows—in its small way—the power and papal devotion of Nigeria's priests.
“[A]s the Pope took the podium, a local television cameraman stood before rows of Nigerian priests, taping the Pontiff. One priest crept forward to tap him on the arm. ‘You are blocking our view of the Holy Father,’ he whispered.”
“The cameraman turned and raised a hand for patience. ‘I'll just be a little while,’ he said.”
“This answer turned the polite plea into a display of priestly authority and unity. A score of clerical index fingers wagged at the cameraman like metronomes, to a chorus of ‘No, no, no, no, no!’ He slunk away.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Human Rights Stance of Pope In Nigeria Given High Marks DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:ABUJA, Nigeria—Human rights groups and Churches in Nigeria have welcomed the outspoken stance taken by Pope John Paul II during his visit to Nigeria against the repressive military regime of Gen. Sani Abacha.
The Pope's declarations—at two outdoor Masses and in three public speeches—were significantly more defiant than similar pronouncements about the regime of Fidel Castro during his visit to Cuba in late January.
Before his return to Rome, the Pontiff directed his aides to hand over a list asking for the release of 60 political detainees whose names had been gathered from human rights groups, governments, and relatives. In Cuba hundreds of political prisoners were released after the Pope's visit.
By the end of the three-day papal visit March 23, Abacha had not acted on the list. It is believed to contain the name of Abacha's arch-rival, Moshood Abiola, the presumptive winner of elections in 1993, as well as the former head of state, Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo.
But some observers said the Pope's visit should not be interpreted entirely as a victory for religious unity and human rights. One who did not want to be identified said: “The generals [who run the country] see the Pope's visit to Nigeria as proof that this is a great nation. A great man came to a great nation—that is where their analysis ends.”
Some are pessimistic about the outcome of the Pope's lobbying, believing that Abacha may release some prisoners but only those who are not likely to stand against him in elections due in August.
A human rights group, the Constitutional Rights Project (CRP), issued a statement welcoming the Pope's intervention. “CRP believes that the immediate release of all political detainees, respect for human rights, and the implementation of a credible program of return to civilian rule, will lead us to the path of national reconciliation and prosperity,” said the group.
The Pope's visit—his second to Nigeria in 16 years—came at a sensitive time for Abacha. The August elections—which have not yet been confirmed—are supposedly part of a process to switch to civilian rule by October.
Meanwhile, imprisonment and torture by the military are continuing unabated. About 150 journalists, lawyers, and other critics of the regime are believed to be in jail; about 65% of Nigerian inmates are being held without trial.
The Pope gave crusading homilies and speeches during his visit. “God has blessed this land and it is everyone's duty to ensure that these resources are used for the good of the whole people,” he said in a clear reference to Nigeria's oil wealth—exploited by foreign companies for the financial benefit of very few.
At present, decrepit oil refineries and ill-maintained power stations are running at low capacity due to poor maintenance. This is causing fuel shortages and regular power cuts in a country that is rich in oil. Water is scarce in the provinces.
In Oba, the Pope told a crowd of nearly a million people: “There can be no place for intimidation and domination of the poor and the weak, for arbitrary exclusion of individuals and groups from political life, for the misuse of authority or the abuse of power. Justice is not complete without an attitude of humble, generous service.
“As your nation pursues a peaceful transition to a democratic civilian government, there is a need for politicians—both men and women—who profoundly love their own people and wish to serve rather than be served.”
In Abuja, the capital, the Pope met leaders of Nigeria's Muslims. During the meeting he denounced killing in the name of religion, apparently referring indirectly to brutal lynchings by Islamic fundamentalists in northern Nigeria during the past three years. (ENI)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: A Tainted 'Gift' to the Third World DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:A high-stakes game of “chicken” is being played out between congressional leadership—committed to restore the Mexico City Policy—and President Clinton, who overturned that policy in January 1993. The policy would deny family-planning funds to international organizations that perform abortions and promote pro-abortion laws in foreign countries.
Sadly, worldwide access to abortion is high on the president's agenda. In light of this he has threatened to veto any bill containing the Mexico City Policy, including two bills he says are vital to American interests: the back payment of U.N. dues, and payment of about $18 billion to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Congressional leaders plan to use all available leverage to reinstate this quite modest restraint on family planners' hegemony over the developing world's peoples.
The outcome of this stand-off is anyone's guess. What we can expect is no final resolution concerning abortion's role in international family planning as long as such funding is authorized by Congress. Congressional and public support for U.S. funding of international family planning rests on several assumptions:
l First, that these family-planning programs are voluntary: neither coercion nor serious abuses of human rights are involved.
l Second, that funds are exclusively used to provide access to contraceptive methods, not abortion.
l Third, that current family-planning programs improve the reproductive health of women in developing countries.
l Fourth, that voluntary family-planning programs are effective in reducing fertility rates.
l Fifth, that population growth must be curbed to spur economic development and reduce “overpopulation,” with all its perceived threats: mass starvation, environmental degradation, political instability, and natural resource depletion.
Wouldn't most Americans reject a policy that trampled on human rights, violated host country laws against abortion, endangered women's health, that was “effective” only when conducted coercively, and, finally, was unnecessary? Evidence continues to mount—from those suffering from these programs, from human rights groups, and from agencies that support, conduct, or monitor population-control activities—that none of the stated assumptions underlying support for population control remains valid, if they ever were.
Coercion and abuse of human rights: The Population Research Institute recently brought to Congress's attention the coercive nature of Peru's sterilization program, which is supported through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). A Peruvian doctor and two victims of coercive sterilization testified about the pressure and incentives on medical personnel to meet monthly quotas of sterilizations, the illnesses and deaths from sterilizations performed in unsanitary settings by poorly trained staff, the lack of knowledge and consent on the part of women who are sterilized, the coercive threats and incentives used to induce women to agree to a procedure they are told is temporary.
Peru is one of 38 countries on record for violating human rights in the course of enforcing their population policies. In many countries (including Mexico), women may be sterilized or have IUDs inserted immediately after giving birth without their knowledge or consent, and even against their express wishes.
USAID is not the only channel for funding such coercive programs. The World Bank loans $2.4 billion annually for “health, nutrition, and population” programs. Apopulation sector review issued by the World Bank refers approvingly to an array of family planning incentives and disincentives—for example, promising a new well or irrigation system to a village, provided all (or nearly all) villagers accept sterilization or another long-lasting form of contraception. The World Bank has long been accused of having tied lending and disbursement to the adoption of, and compliance with, “population measures.”
Abortions by any other name: “Contraceptive” methods include oral contraceptive pills, intrauterine devices (IUDs), long-acting injectables like Depo-Provera and Norplant. Each method has multiple mechanisms of action—and in each, an abortifacient action is a back-up when the contraceptive action fails. Although one cannot possibly calculate the rates of conception and abortion as a consequence of breakthrough ovulation under the various methods, in light of the number of women now using the methods worldwide, the level of non-surgical abortion must be staggering. Girls and women in the developing world who have had “unprotected” sex are encouraged to take “emergency contraceptive” pills or RU-486 or to undergo “menstrual regulation.” All three methods constitute abortion.
Health risks: Far from improving their reproductive and general health, these hormonal and surgical methods are inappropriate for women who may be malnourished and in poor health generally and who have no access to competent medical care. Procedures are often performed in unsterile settings by staff with little medical training. Typical short-term side effects of Depo-Provera include: heavy, irregular, or interrupted menstrual bleeding, depression, weight gain, headaches, and dizziness. In addition to these symptoms, Norplant may produce nausea or vomiting, mood swings, nervousness, hair loss, acne, and more. Long-term effects of Norplant include liver disease, kidney disease, diabetes, and blood clots. Life-threatening ectopic pregnancies can also occur. Sterilization poses a risk of ectopic pregnancy and increases the possibility of needing a hysterectomy. Is this the best we can do for women in the developing world?
Susan Wills is assistant director for program activities, NCCB Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities.
----- EXCERPT: PERSPECTIVE ----- EXTENDED BODY: Susan Willis ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Papal 'Sorry': A Mixed Blessing DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:By Luigi Accattoli
(Alba House, 1998, 257 pp., $16.95)
On the eve of the millennium, Pope John Paul II is calling the Church to a general examination of conscience. It's a dicey business. Wise pastors are disinclined to propose such a taxing measure to the scrupulous. The unscrupulous, for their part, pay little heed to conscience, much less to wise pastors. Perhaps the Pope finds most of the flock gathering between the two extremes. Luigi Accattoli, a Vatican correspondent for Corriere Della Sera, has collected nearly a hundred citations from John Paul. Again and again, the Pope admits to the Church's moral failures and seeks pardon for them. In gathering these statements, Accattoli does us both a service and a disservice. Indeed, from start to finish he exhibits the curious hyper-ventilation of certain Vatican correspondents.
But let's begin with the positive. Why does the Pope ask for forgiveness? Why does he ask us to join him? Scripture is blunt. “If we say we have not sinned, we make [God] a liar, and his word is not in us” (1 Jn 1:10). Because we are the prodigal sons, we pray “forgive us our sins.”
The plea for forgiveness shapes Catholic life. Even from the cross, Jesus forgave us. For our part, we're to leave the altar if we've neglected to beg, or to grant, forgiveness. Vatican II teaches that we are “always in need of purification” (Lumen Gentium, 8). Saints and martyrs lead the way. Mother Teresa confessed daily. And how piercing are the words of the Trappist superior murdered, in 1996, by Algerian terrorists: “I have lived long enough to consider myself an accomplice in the evil which [prevails] in the world … I would like to have the spark of lucidity … to ask pardon of God … and at the same time with all my heart to pardon him who has struck me.”
Catholic thinkers have tried to understand just what forgiveness means. Aquinas, for example, says that forgiveness is the finest expression of God's power. Our own experience, no doubt, says that forgiveness can seem impossible. No wonder that John Paul II often speaks of the “courage to forgive.”
There's also a “logic” of forgiveness. You can't forgive without judging that a wrong has been done. There must also be a taking responsibility for the wrong and sense of remorse. Yes, we can extend forgiveness to the unrepentant, and others might extend it to us when we are unrepentant. But isn't it also true that a forgiveness that we cannot accept, because we have no sorrow, cannot heal us?
Logic, of course, becomes twisted. For example, forgiveness sometimes is supplanted by a peculiar rhetoric of forgiveness. This phenomenon ignores both the courage of forgiving and the remorse that opens us to forgiveness. Its practitioners refuse to judge others and insist that none judge them. The result? All are forgiven even though no one has sinned. Such rhetoric of course, is virtue “on the cheap.”
Accattoli recognizes the distinctive courage, and discernment, of forgiveness. He gives us a sense, too, of how the Church struggles with Catholic sins, including failures to ask and to give forgiveness. (His account of Catholics busy at slaughter in Rwanda is heartbreaking.)
Accattoli's disservice lies in his intimating that the Church should ask forgiveness for not advancing his theological agenda. His intimations take various forms. Overstatement is a favorite, and it frames his own brand of feminism. Had we realized that the Holy Father, in his 1988 apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem (On the Dignity and Vocation of Women), allegedly “corrects St. Paul?” That he hints at “doctrinal revision?”
If he finds that the Pope can correct St. Paul, Accattoli finds it easier still to show that John Paul II corrects earlier popes. To be sure, some corrections are in order. But how Accattoli muddies the water. First he declares that “no one can pit one pope against another pope.” Then, with relish, he pits John Paul II against the “many popes” who silenced earlier admissions of guilt, against the popes who supported the Crusades, and against popes who discriminated against the Jews. But Accattoli has still another ax to grind.
The Church, he suggests, should ask forgiveness for the papacy itself. Why so? There's quite a list: it's too rich; the Swiss Guard is out of place; and we oughtn't to think of the Pope as Sovereign Pontiff. (Following Mt 23:9, he adds, we should drop the titles of “abbot” and “father.”)
But there's more. We also need “to some extent” to repent “the doctrine on papal infallibility.” Perhaps this simply means that we be clear that infallibility doesn't extend to “contingent matters” that surround questions of faith and morals. But by now what's most clear is that Accattoli's contortions need unraveling.
He needs, at a minimum, to address two points. The first is that we all sin, but this is hardly news. The second is that, as John Paul II teaches, “The Church as such cannot be held responsible for the faults of her members who acted against the law of the Gospel….” Here the Holy Father does not correct, but rather affirms, the language of St. Ambrose: “We wound not the Church but ourselves.”
Contributing writer James Hanink is a professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and associate editor of New Oxford Review.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: James Hanink ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: A Priestly Dream Realized Before Death DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:by Father Benedict Groeschel CFR
(Our Sunday Visitor Press, 1998, 206 pp., $9.95)
Forever: The Life of Father Eugene Hamilton could spark a renewal of priestly vocations. It surely will challenge the reader with thoughts of life, death, divine Providence, and the place of the priesthood in today's world.
Father Hamilton was a 25-year-old New York seminarian ordained on his deathbed by special permission of the Pope. But to say this is to get far ahead of the story—which is about the heart of a young man meeting the heart of the Church and revealing the heart of Jesus the High Priest, broken, burning with love, and rich in mercy.
It is a story of joys amid pain, of hope amid dark days and draining doubts, of a young man of talent and high spirits dying, fighting and accepting death. It is a family story, of the firm-faithed Hamiltons and the family of the Church, forming one loving body as the son of both, Eugene Jr., grows to maturity and enters the seminary at the same time he encounters the shock of advanced cancer.
The tumor in his chest was diagnosed in September 1995, weeks after he started the spirituality program for St. Joseph's Seminary, the New York archdiocese's 100-year-old priestly training ground. Through 17 months, which found him in the hospital as much as in the seminary, Hamilton never surrendered and rarely showed signs of discomfort or discouragement, though his heart was dislocated and his chest rent from within.
More strikingly, he never gave up on the hope of being a priest, bearing a bafflingly serene conviction that he would be ordained even as his solid frame became wasted and his thinning neck failed to fill his proudly worn seminarian's Roman collar. Months after his one operation, he received news of the cancer's spread with the simple words, “Am I going to die?” He told only his family, the seminary priests who advised him and two close friends of the death sentence. To each he expressed a certainty that somehow in God's Providence he would be a priest. The fifth chapter of his book of reflections is titled, “Preparation For Priesthood; Preparation For Death.”
Father Benedict Groeschel, spiritual director and psychologist for the archdiocese, relates with admirable reserve a story that could easily give way to sticky sentiment or maudlin detail. He quotes extensively from the autobiography the seminarian started soon after learning of his cancer, and calls his effort “a book within a book.”
The unfinished autobiography, stored on Hamilton's computer, reaches into wells of emotion, intellect, and spiritual wisdom. It is titled “Servant, Victim, Brother, Listener, Friend,” the description of the priesthood given by Cardinal Terence Cooke, archbishop of New York when he died of cancer in 1983. Hamilton had a devotion to the cardinal even before the onset of his own cancer. His prayers for Cardinal Cooke's intercession increased with his own illness. It was at this point he contacted Father Groeschel, the vice postulator for Cardinal Cooke's canonization cause. At one point, Father Groeschel told the dying seminarian that by quietly insisting he would be ordained, he was praying for a miracle—he either would be cured or be ordained well before finishing his seminary studies, by special intervention.
Father Groeschel reveals the young man's deeply Catholic view of life and death—a subtle mixture of sadness and sense of defeat that comes with the realization that death is a punishment for sin, and a gentle joy that accompanies a hope in the resurrection and eternal life. Hamilton paced out the stations of the cross in the corridor of the cancer ward during his last Lent, yet stopped in each room to offer his fellow patients comfort and words of hope. In an age when so many young men do not hear a priestly call because of the preponderance of cynical noises in the culture, he was a “gentle sign of contradiction,” who maintained traditional piety and theology without anger or accusation.
In August 1996 Hamilton was given the ministry of candidacy by seminary rector Bishop Edwin O'Brien (now archbishop of the military archdiocese), and bravely began his year of theology studies under a death sentence. In November, he took a private vow of celibacy as an act of religious piety. He did not know at the time that this vow would facilitate his death-bed ordination two months later, when Bishop O'Brien would rush to Hamilton's parent's home, with holy oils and ordination ritual in hand, to confer on the barely breathing Hamilton first the diaconate and then the priesthood.
Permission to do so had come days earlier from Pope John Paul II through the request of New York's Cardinal John O'Connor. Assured that Hamilton intended to complete his studies if possible, the Holy Father gave his blessing toto corde, with full heart.
Father Groeschel devotes an addendum to the meaning of the priesthood and the reason for conferring ordination on a young man who would die less than three hours later without celebrating Mass. Affirming the Church's teaching that ordination effects a permanent interior (ontological) change, and conforms a man to Christ in a unique way, the author challenges revisionist theologians such as Hans K¸ng and Edward Schillebeeckx, who see priesthood in purely functional terms. Father Eugene Hamilton was made a priest, the author says, because God's hand was upon him: his last hours of suffering were sacrificial and redemptive, and he remains a priest in eternity, more closely united with the High Priest.
This book is for every seminarian suffering doubts or mid-semester blues, every priest who seeks a deeper understanding of the sacrament he irrevocably received, and every Christian in need of hope. They will be lifted by the story of a young man who lived just long enough to see his dream fulfilled, and died with the sacred oils on his hands.
Brian Caulfield writes from New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian Caulfield ----- KEYWORDS: Books -------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:Thorough Coverage
I just want to say that I think your paper is excellent. I really enjoy the Pro-life Profile features, the Culture of Life section, and The Catholic Traveler. Please continue with your excellent coverage. I really love the depth of the articles especially the historical aspect of major events such as upcoming synods and past synods, the upcoming jubilee, the article on the doctors of the Church when St. Thérèse was elevated (Nov. 2-8, 1997), the review of past World Youth Days, conferences on the family, and the articles that your reporters look into with extra effort.
I am hoping you might be able to provide equally good background information on the upcoming meeting of the lay apostolate movements and the Pontifical Council on the Laity to convene May 30, 1998. Please keep up the excellent work.
Michael LaFata
via e-mail
Jewish Holy Land
I've noted with interest that, like much of the popular media, your fine Middle East Correspondent, Michele Chabin, has been caught up of late in the increasingly widespread journalistic error of referring to the eastern portion of Israel's capital as “predominantly Palestinian East Jerusalem”—as most recently demonstrated in the cover story, “Can U.N. Solidify Peace in Holy Land?” (March 8-14). Common variations of the above-mentioned misbegotten expression currently include such media-favored locations as “historically Palestinian East Jerusalem,” “traditionally Arab East Jerusalem,” and the like.
The unstated, though clearly intended—and thoroughly pernicious—inference that we are supposed to draw from these frequent constructions is, of course, that there are in fact two Jerusalems: an Arab one and a Jewish one. But such a conclusion would not only be manifestly false; it would also just happen to be prime grist for the agenda mill of those whose vision of the city of peace is apparently something on the order of Beirut, Belfast, or Cold War Berlin. (God forbid that their contrivances should meet with success!)
In the interests of clarity, permit me to make the requisite corrections:
(1) The eastern sector of Jerusalem is not “predominantly Palestinian.” On the contrary, it is a part of the city whose demographic complexion is very evenly balanced by equal numbers of Arabs and Jews, and in which neither ethnicity truly predominates. (For the past several years the relative percentages have fluctuated within a very narrow range: 51% to 49% and vice versa, from one census to the next.)
(2) Neither is eastern Jerusalem “historically” or “traditionally” Arab either. To be sure, it was homogeneously Arab for the 19 years between 1948—when King Abdullab of Jordan illegally seized it during Israel's War of Independence, and 1967—when King Hussein (Abdullah's grandson and successor) tried to use it as a springboard to again invade the tiny Jewish State during the Six Day War (and thereby lost control of the territory when he, along with his Syrian and Egyptian allies, was repulsed and defeated by the Israelis). But 19 isolated years of illicit possession do not a “tradition” or “history” make.
During those years of Arab rule over eastern Jerusalem, the Jordanians killed or expelled all the Jews who had resided there, and, in an effort to erase the centuries-long Jewish presence, destroyed every single one of the 58 synagogues in that part of Jerusalem, and desecrated its Jewish cemeteries by using the headstones to pave latrines. This glorious and charming 19 year “tradition” and “history” of an exclusively Arab, thoroughly judenrein “East Jerusalem” ended (as abruptly as it had begun) some 31 years ago this June.
(3) Within eastern Jerusalem is the entire old city, which contains the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, and the “Jewish Quarter.” Note that also within eastern Jerusalem are Hebrew University (built 1925), Hadassah Hospital on Mt. Scopus (built 1938), and the Jewish National and University Library (built 1930).
No knowledgeable person seriously disputes these facts. Don't be taken in: Anybody who is suggesting to you that some portion of Jerusalem isn't Jewish is either ignorant or malicious.
Michael Zebulon
Rohnert Park, California
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Untold Story Behind the 'Population Crisis' DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:If you're like a lot of people, you probably believe the world is suffering some form of “population crisis.” Or will very soon. You may have in your head those memorable photos of vast numbers of children orphaned through wars in Rwanda or Burundi—some no more than infants—lying or sitting on white sheets as far as the camera can see. You may be convinced by the words of Vice President Al Gore that “global warming” is a problem of “too many people” on earth. Also you may believe the equation “less people equals more prosperity and a healthier planet.”
Think again.
A careful look at demographic trends provides a vastly different and more nuanced picture. First, it is impossible to speak of one giant global “population problem.” Around the globe, there are numerous countries whose problem is shrinking population. Due to low fertility rates (families having fewer than 2.1 children), people are not “replacing themselves.”
Thirty-five European nations are suffering this problem rather drastically. This is a result of what observers call the “first demographic revolution.” It happens when infant mortality rates drop and life expectancies rise. People then decide to have fewer children. It is also a function—and Europe is a good example of this—of a “second demographic revolution” wherein, due to cultural changes, families decide to have few or no children. Such cultural changes might include the embracing of exaggerated materialism and individualism, secularism, and even a reaction to population alarmism.
Around the world, different countries, and even different regions within the same country, are at various points along the continuum of demographic change. Some have not even experienced the first demographic revolution. But even in most of these countries, fertility rates are declining. Overall, the rate of population growth globally reached its peak in 1970. Since that time, the rate of growth has slowed down. It is now predicted that global population will peak by 2050, at around 8.5 billion people—and decline thereafter. The news of which has led even the scariest of the scaremongers—the U.N. Population Fund—to begin backing off predictions of imminent disaster.
But they haven't for one second stepped back from their zealous efforts to lower population dramatically via programs of massive distribution of contraceptives and sterilization, combined at times with abortion (legal and illegal).
For the wealthy nations, controlling the populations of poorer countries is a defense issue…
This approach has massive financial backing from a growing number of rich and powerful foundations. Just in the past few months, Ted Turner of CNN and Zero Population Growth fame announced that he is giving $1 billion to the United Nations—for what else, population control. The Packard Foundation—with a mind-boggling $9 billion endowment— has also announced that it will devote about $550 million per year to population control. As for the United States, President Clinton is at present willing to withhold all funding from the United Nations unless U.S. money goes to organizations that promote abortion overseas and lobby internationally for more permissive abortion laws.
Even under the kindest interpretation, this approach reveals tremendous ignorance of population history and the real sources of poverty and underdevelopment. It has been demonstrated again and again that no country achieves prosperity primarily due to reduced population. In fact, a continually declining population is a recipe for financial ruin, not success. There is also enough evidence on hand to demonstrate that the most likely causes of underdevelopment include: corruption in political or economic systems; ethnic or racial or religious discrimination and conflicts; unjust distribution of resources; and a crushing debt burden. But here's the rub. These serious problems are more complex, and require a greater investment of time and money, than the simplistic approach of pushing contraception on the poor, and/or coercing women into sterilization and abortion.
There's a second and related reason why the real sources of underdevelopment are so rarely addressed by rich countries and foundations. It's not pretty. For the wealthy nations, controlling the populations of poorer countries is a defense issue, not a human rights or development issue at all. Recently released U.S. national security documents from the 1960s show that the impetus for U.S. “aid” to the third world in the form of birth control and abortion is to lower the percentage of “them” to “us.” All the while we cheerily assure everybody we're just “empowering” women in their reproductive lives.
The Holy See has taken a great interest in these matters. It raised its voice internationally in connection with recent U.N. conferences concerning population. And it has called on individual Catholics, particularly Catholic educators, to learn the real facts about global population. This is too important a human rights issue to be left to demographers.
Helen Alvaré is director of planning and information, Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, National Conference of Catholic Bishops.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Helen Alvaré ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: 'Free at Last, Thank God Almighty, I am Free at Last' DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a 20th-century man. His struggle for freedom against state-enforced oppression was the 20th-century struggle. In this century the awful power of the state to do evil has been met by the awesome power of peaceful resistance grounded in the truth.
April 4, 1998, marked the 30th anniversary of King's assassination and it is proper to remember his civil rights achievements. A few insist on pointing out that he was a sinful man. But there is a broader lesson to be drawn from King's reading of the signs of the times—a lesson of particular interest for Catholics in the post-conciliar era.
King knew he was living in the era of human rights and human freedom. The main obstacle was state power wielded against its own people. The solution was to overthrow unjust laws through peaceful protests. The force employed was the power of witness to the truth about man. In this broad outline, King's movement can be understood as a particular application of the general principles that have increasingly informed the Church's social teaching since Vatican II.
A Death Foretold
On April 3, 1968, in Memphis, King delivered his most apocalyptic sermon. To read it now is to marvel at the afflatus that moved him on the last night of his life.
“Like anybody I would like to have a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that,” said King, reflecting on the threats to his life. “I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But we as a people will get to the promised land. And I'm happy tonight.”
King's remarkable valedictory was full of gratitude for the times in which he lived. His preaching cadences began that night with a provocative question and answer. “If I were standing at the beginning of time, with a panoramic view of the whole human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, ‘Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?’ I would turn to the Almighty and say, ‘If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the 20th century, I will be happy.’”
“Now that's a strange statement to make,” King conceded, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion is all around. That's a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the 20th century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding—something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, the cry is always the same—We want to be free.”
In its great charter on the Church in our times, the Council taught, “Our contemporaries make much of freedom and pursue it eagerly; and rightly so. Authentic freedom is an exceptional sign of the divine image within man” (Gaudium et Spes, 17). While warning against the misuse of freedom, the Church has joined its voice, more in this century than ever before, to the cry of the masses yearning to be free.
In the decree on religious liberty, the Council opened itself fully to this growing cry, recognizing the increasing “sense of the dignity of the human person” and, “the demand that constitutional limits should be set to the powers of government, in order that there be no encroachment on the rightful freedom of the person and of associations.” The Council declares these desires “to be greatly in accord with truth and justice” (Dignitatis Humanae, 1-2).
The Council took note of and doctrinally affirmed the spirit that animated King's movement, and similary inspired movements in other parts of the world. The full flowering of this teaching would have to wait for Pope John Paul II and the challenge to communism, but the Council Fathers provided here the foundation. Just as it would be difficult to imagine a 19th-century King figure, it would be difficult to imagine such Church teaching before the 20th century.
To adapt King's words, if the starlight of our times has been the focus on human freedom, then the great darkness against which it shines has been the brutality of state power suppressing that freedom. About this phenomenon the Holy Father wrote in 1991: “In the totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, the principle that force predominates over reason was carried to the extreme. Man was compelled to submit to a conception of reality imposed on him by coercion, and not reached by virtue of his own reason and the exercise of his own freedom” (Centesimus Annus, 29).
Mutatis mutandis, that analysis can be applied to examples not at the extreme, such as American segregation or South African apartheid. “That principle must be overturned,” continues the Holy Father, “and total recognition must be given to the rights of human conscience, which is bound only to the truth, both natural and revealed. The recognition of these rights represents the primary foundation of every authentically free political order.”
Dictates of Conscience
The call to make power submit to the dictates of conscience was the heart of King's philosophy of civil disobedience and protest. King recognized that state power could never legitimately demand what conscience would not allow, and the powers and principalities that so demand ceased to be legitimate. Operating in a country that holds law in the greatest esteem, it was incumbent upon King to argue that conscience demanded that some laws should be disobeyed.
This he did in his Letter from a Birmingham City Jail, dated April 16, 1963. Written while serving a sentence for participating in civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham, the open letter was addressed to white clergymen who urged King not to inflame the civil rights issue, but to wait upon the initiative of the courts. Frustrated by the “white moderate who is more committed to ‘order’ than to justice,” and who prefers “the negative peace which is the absence of tension to the positive peace which is the presence of justice,” King explained why he could not obey unjust laws.
Arguing passionately that his approach was rooted in the Christian tradition, King turned to two doctors of the Church, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. “I would agree with St. Augustine,” he wrote, that “an unjust law is no law at all.”
“A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God,” King further explained. “An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.”
It is a centuries-old principle, but given particular application by King: “Segregation is not only politically, economically, and sociologically unsound, but it is morally wrong and sinful.”
If that sounds familiar to students of the recent Magisterium, it should. Pope John XXIII quoted the same passage of St. Thomas to make the same point in 1963. “Authority is a postulate of the moral order and derives from God. Consequently, laws and decrees enacted in contravention of the moral order, and hence of the divine will, can have no binding force in conscience” (Pacem in Terris).
Pope John's encyclical on peace, Pacem in Terris, is dated April 11, 1963. It is testimony to the 20th-century Christian rediscovery of human dignity and freedom that in the same week, the Pope from the Vatican and a Southern Baptist preacher from his jail cell would remind their brethren that true peace can be found only where man is allowed the freedom to obey the truth he recognizes by his conscience.
The struggle for that freedom is never easy. “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor, it must be demanded by the oppressed,” wrote King. The lesson of our century is that the oppressed can effectively demand their freedom without recourse to arms and violence. The oppressed have the awesome power of truth on their side, and can bring this to bear on the unjust law.
“One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly and with a willingness to accept the penalty,” wrote King in Birmingham. “I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law.”
It is not new to claim that the martyr is the true law-abiding citizen and the true patriot. What the example of King and others teach is that the witness of the oppressed, exercised insistently and creatively, has a power to bring about change in a relatively short period of time. It is a witness born of conscience and aimed at conscience—the conscience of the oppressed giving rise to the witness that enlightens the conscience of the oppressor.
The Holy Father's analysis of the overthrow of communism is apposite here: “The events of 1989 are an example of the success of willingness to negotiate and the Gospel spirit in the face of an adversary determined not to be bound by any moral principles. These events are a warning to those who, in the name of political realism, wish to banish law and morality from the political arena” (Centesimus Annus, 25).
King's Legacy
Vast possibilities for constructive change are created by those who refuse to banish the Gospel spirit from public life. King's legacy can be understood as a successful application of the recent social teaching of the Magisterium on the centrality of human dignity and freedom in the political order. Indeed, King's successful application of those principles may have contributed to their recognition by the Magisterium, which must always be alert to the signs of the times.
In his last Sunday morning sermon, delivered at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., on Passion Sunday, four days before he died, King spoke about the three great revolutions of his lifetime. He identified a technological revolution, a revolution in warfare due to atomic weapons, and “a human rights revolution, with the freedom explosion taking place all over the world.”
George Weigel, a senior fellow of the Washington based Ethics and Public Policy Center, quotes Oxford historian Sir Michael Howard to the effect that the two great revolutions of the 20th century have been the Bolshevik revolution and the transformation of the Catholic Church into the world's foremost defender of human rights. On the one hand, a revolution in the service of state power, and on the other, a revolution in the service of human freedom.
Malevolent state power and human freedom have been the principal opposing forces of the century in which Martin Luther King would have chosen to live. For him and so many other Christians, especially Catholics in the conciliar era, the joy of the millennium will be to sing out, as he did in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, I am free at last.”
Raymond de Souza is a seminarian for the archdiocese of Kingston, Ontario.
----- EXCERPT: Among Martin Luther King's soaring legacy: Lessons of note for Catholics in the post-conciliar era ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond de Souza ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: A Darwinist Takes His 'Dead' Theory to the Bishops DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:Last autumn, the U.S. bishops had a workshop on the theory of evolution. Since the theory of evolution touches on the subject of man's origins, the Church has a deep interest in the matter. Pope John Paul II, in fact, has urged Catholics to avoid a fortress mentality when dealing with scientific evidence for the theory.
But the Pope also cautions about materialist philosophy disguised as science: “ The Church … distrusts only preconceived opinions that claim to be based on science, but which in reality surreptitiously cause science to depart from its domain.” There is no question that the writings of many Darwinists flunk this test. People like Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, and Richard Lewontin will not do science without first putting on their philosophical blinders. Lewontin, who teaches genetics at Harvard, has said as much: “ We take the side of science … in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.”
Unfortunately, the keynote speaker at the bishops' conference was just this sort of Darwinist. To compound the problem, his Darwinism is badly dated. In the keynote address, Francisco Ayala, who teaches biology at the University of California, presented to his audience a brand of neo-Darwinism which Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard long ago declared “dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy.” Ayala misrepresented the fossil record and gave the false impression that the genetic mechanism that turns one species into another is perfectly transparent to science. His presentation of Darwinism was full of the sort of philosophical additives about which the Pope was speaking.
Ayala used a favorite rhetorical device of Darwinists when addressing an audience of scientific laymen. He made no distinction between “Darwinism” and “evolution.” The idea of evolution, of the common descent of species, has been around since the ancient Greeks. St. Augustine was a kind of evolutionist, although hardly a Darwinist. What Darwin did was suggest a simple mechanism—natural selection—to explain how evolution had occurred.
Although you would never know it from reading Ayala's paper, it has long been clear that Darwin's mechanism is due for retirement. Neither the fossil record, nor breeding experiments, nor mathematical probability support the idea that small DNA copying errors “guided” by natural selection created everything from bacteria to human consciousness. Leaving aside the vexed question of how DNA assembled itself in the first place, a growing number of scientists think that Darwinian selection is a grossly inadequate mechanism for the creation of complex life forms.
In fact, natural selection doesn't create anything. It simply eliminates what doesn't work. As one biologist puts it, to say that natural selection does anything is a bit like answering the question, “Why are there leaves on the tree?” with, “Because the gardener did not cut them away.”
Ayala states that the absence of transitional forms in the fossil record has been “discredited.” But all he offers are “micro-evolutionary” examples. The fact is, there are systematic gaps between all major animal groups. A man from Mars looking at the fossil record of the last half billion years would say that species are replaced by other species, rather than evolve into them. Steven Stanley, a pale-ontologist who teaches at Johns Hopkins, writes in The New Evolutionary Time Table that, “the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another.”
Ayala's basic argument is that you can simply extrapolate major evolutionary changes from the small shifts that occur all the time within species. But scientists like Gould, Niles Eldredge, and the late Pierre Grasse argue that such extrapolation is inadmissible. All species appear to be “hard-edged.” They have enough genetic variability to cope with changes in their environment, but never go beyond certain barriers. Dogs remain dogs, fruit flies remain fruit flies.
Several years ago I had drinks with an evolutionary biologist who works at the Museum of Natural History in New York. I waited until he had had a couple of beers, and then said: “You say that Darwinism is dead, and you are obviously not a creationist. So, what do you believe?” His reply was honest: “Look, we know that species reproduce and that there are different species now than there were a hundred-million years ago. Everything else is propaganda.”
The origin of species remains a scientific mystery. The idea of the common descent of all species is perfectly plausible, but we have no idea how a batch of inorganic material morphed itself over billions of years into giraffes and chimpanzees. Man is a separate mystery altogether. The explanatory glibness of Ayala's paper glosses over many serious problems.
George Sim Johnston is a writer based in New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: George Sim Johnston ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: A Holy Place in the French Alps DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:Surrounded by spectacular scenery and breathtaking views, Our Lady of La Salette shrine at the top of the Alps in southern France has become recognized as one of the most prominent Marian shrines in the world. Drawing more than one million visitors each year from every continent, the shrine recently celebrated the 150th anniversary of the Blessed Virgin's appearance at La Salette. The story of Mary's visit has been echoed throughout the world in numerous languages, and her message of peace and reconciliation has spread to the far corners of the earth.
The apparition of the Virgin Mary at La Salette took place on the sunny afternoon of Sept. 19, 1846. Afarmer from the nearby village of Corps had recruited two young children, Maximin and Mélanie, to shepherd his cows. After climbing up a mountain to a grassy plateau, the two young shepherds fell asleep as they watched the farmer's cattle grazing peacefully nearby.
Mélanie, who slept for about half an hour, awoke to find the cows missing. After she summoned Maximin, the two children quickly climbed the ravine only to find the animals grazing in the same spot where they had left them.
Descending the hillock, the children suddenly froze. Just a short distance away, a dazzling ball of light had burst into view. After a moment, the two shepherds recognized a woman seated, with her head buried in her hands, crying.
As the two shepherds neared the luminous being, she rose and said, “Come near, my children, do not be afraid. I am here to tell you great news.” Reassured by these words, the children dropped their sticks and hurried to meet her. As the children neared her, she continued to weep as she spoke about the loss of religion in the area, the desecration of the Sabbath, and the profanation of her Son's name.
After confiding different secrets to Maximin and Mélanie, she began to speak with great hope of the good things to come if people amended their lives. She then spoke several more words to the children and concluded, “Well, children, you will make this message known to all my people.” Then with a friendly wave she slowly vanished from their sight as she said, “Please, children, be sure to make this known to all my people.”
As the Lady vanished, Mélanie remarked that perhaps it was a great saint. Maximin replied that if only they had known, they would have asked her to bring them with her. Upon arriving back home, Maximin immediately told his family about the beautiful Lady. Mélanie was then summoned from her stable work and confirmed his story. Both children were shocked that nobody had seen the great light emanating from the hill.
Upon hearing the news of the apparition, the parish priest, teary-eyed and trembling, related the story in his homily during the Mass. The town's mayor, however, was deeply disturbed by the incident and summoned the two children for questioning. With bribes and threats the mayor unsuccessfully tried to silence them.
News of the apparition spread quickly throughout the region, eventually reaching Rome. Believers and non-believers alike went to the mountain top. Many interrogated the children in hopes of trapping them into some contradiction. All were unsuccessful. After five years of diligent inquiries by ecclesiastical authorities, the apparitions of La Salette were given official recognition.
On May 1, 1852, the bishop of Grenoble published a decree announcing the construction of a shrine on the mountain of La Salette, as well as the founding of the religious order Missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette. On Sept. 19, 1855, the bishop summarized the situation: “The mission of the two shepherds has come to an end, that of the Church now begins. Those men and women of all nations and races who have found in the message of La Salette the path to conversion, a deepening of their religious faith, a vital force for daily living, and a rationale for their commitment to Christ in the service of others, are beyond number.”
The shrine of Our Lady of La Salette is located in a high alpine pasture at an altitude of about 6,000 feet, about nine miles from the nearest settlement. Easily accessible by car, bus, and taxi, the shrine operates a first-class hospitality service with accommodations ranging from dormitory bunks to hotel-like rooms. La Salette offers the visitor an excellent setting for contemplative prayer and retreats with its spectacular mountain scenery. The shrine welcomes pilgrims throughout the year, except during its annual closure every November.
Among the greatest attractions at the shrine are its basilica and hospitality center, as well as the site of the apparition (marked by statues) and the spring that began to flow after the Virgin's appearance. Video presentations, daily Mass, and prominent Eucharistic and Marian processions are just some of the many activities and events taking place at the shrine. Nearby trails also offer an opportunity for visitors to enjoy a walk in the beautiful countryside of the Alpine Mountains.
To arrive at La Salette by car from Grenoble, take N85 south to Corps, then follow the signs to the shrine (nine miles). To arrive at La Salette other than by car, one must use a combination of both train and bus service. There is no railway station at La Salette; the nearest one is at Grenoble. During the summer months, an early morning bus departs daily from Grenoble for La Salette. Outside of the summer months, one must use a combination of bus and taxi service.
For more information on making a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of La Salette, contact one of the many Catholic travel organizations offering guided tours to France or contact the shrine's pilgrimage office at: Sanctuaire Notre Dame De La Salette, F-38970 La Salette; (tel.) 011-33-476-30-00-11; (fax) 011-33-476-30-03-65.
Kevin Wright writes from Bellevue, Washington.
----- EXCERPT: The Shrine of Our Lady of La Salette remembers the faith of two shepherd children ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kevin Wright ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Raising Kids: It Takes An Association DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:If being a parent in the 1990s is a tough assignment, an organization in the nation's capital is trying to make the work a little easier.
The Parents' Council of Washington is an education association for 28,000 parents and helps them to connect with each other and trade tips about raising their children. Supported by 58 dues-paying independent schools, the council features 12 Catholic schools, who receive some additional services beyond those the Archdiocese of Washington provides for them.
Parents' positive response to the Council indicates that it is meeting an important need. Indeed, the organization could serve as a model for other groups of private school parents around the country. As Council co-president Elly Frieder says, many families need additional resources to gain a better understanding of their children and their schools. What's more, since students today have the opportunity for peer relationships well beyond their own neighborhoods, parents can also benefit from relating to each other on a wider, regional basis.
Through regular meetings, a newsletter, and other means of communication, the Parents' Council brings parents together to help each other set standards, know their children better, and understand what is “normal,” particularly during adolescence. The group also provides guidelines for parents to form peer groups in the schools.
“It's comforting to know that your teen-aged son who shuts himself in his room isn't abnormal. That's what teenaged boys do,” said Karen Zill, president of the Parents' Association of St. Anselm's Abbey School in northeast Washington, and the mother of two boys. She serves as a school representative on the Parents' Council for the Benedictine school for boys.
Through its meetings and its 175-page book, Parent to Parent: Raising Children in Washington, the group offers a mixture of time-honored advice about raising children, mixed with a contemporary understanding of children's psychology, and the importance of respecting differences in children.
A Parents' Council-sponsored lecture in February by Peter Cobb, president of the Council for Religion in Independent Schools, addressed “Raising Moral Children.” Cobb encouraged attendees to give examples of the values they wanted to instill in their children.
Beyond basic values such as honesty and hard work, respect for one's body, nature, and animals appeared on the list, which had more than two dozen items.
The Parents' Council, he said, acts as a resource for parents without claiming to have any exclusive answers to the problems families face, a resident of Rockville, Md. Nonetheless, parents at meetings can find others who share their values.
“It's easier to pick up on who has similar values,” at meetings, said Frieder, whose 15-year old daughter attends Connelly School of the Holy Child in Potomac, Md., an all-girls Catholic school. Her 20-year old son attends Jesuit-run Loyola College in Baltimore.
The ambitious organization also has a World Wide Web site at www.capaccess.org/parentscouncil and recently published a revised issue of its flagship book.
Published late last year, Parent to Parent recently sold out its first printing of 7,500 before the organization authorized a second print run of 5,000, according to Council co-president Elizabeth Hayes.
The book gives parents advice on how to define and maintain standards in raising their children, and it helps them to detect warning signs for typical problems in children, as well as how to recover after they or their children make serious mistakes.
As any good Christian would need to do, parents must be prepared to stand alone at times.
“Be prepared for the fact that your family's values may conflict radically with those of your children's friends, even parents you have known and respected for many years,” the book says.
Subjects covered in it include “Beach Week,” “Cheating and Honor Codes,” “Dating: Twos & Groups,” “Eating Healthy & Harmful” and “Alone & Latchkey.” The chapters are short and are cross-referenced to related subjects in the book as well as to other publications and organizations that can provide further assistance.
The book advises parents to maintain an optimistic attitude about their children's development. It also encourages them to apologize for their mistakes, which helps children understand that they can learn from their errors.
“Love is everything,” the book says. “Every time we kiss or hug our children, we give them the love they need to feel strong and important. Unconditional love from parents is the basis of the ‘self-esteem’ we hear so much about. Our children should feel they can depend on us—even if they have done something we don't approve of. We can love our child and hate the behavior.”
The Council helps to reinforce the message that “we're working on behalf of the children, on the same track,” Zill said.
Founded in 1964, the Council included secondary schools for many years and grew primarily through word of mouth among school administrators and parents. During the last two years, primary schools have also joined the Parents' Council. Parents of elementary school children want to get more involved, Hayes said.
Recent Catholic elementary schools that have joined include Blessed Sacrament in northwest Washington, and Little Flower and The Woods Academy, both in Bethesda, Md. Overall, eight schools have joined the fold during the past 18 months, Hayes said.
Many Catholic parents would disagree with the Parents' Council book's idea that “there are no ‘right’ answers, only possibilities to choose from.” The book passed muster with the principal of one Catholic school, however, who bought copies for all school's parents, after asking Frieder about its contents and taking a look at the book, she said.
Although the Parents'Council regularly attracts 200-300 parents to its meetings, 90% of attendees are mothers, said Hayes. Fathers tend to take more interest in meetings about college admissions or sports, she said.
The organization's board is all-women, but they would prefer to have men involved, she said.
Involvement in parents organizations is “another way to find out what's going on” at the school, said Zill. “My sons don't say a lot. I learn more of what's going on [through the Council], and it can be an opener for conversation.”
Through greater interaction with their peers, parents can also learn that their children's claims—that all their friends have later curfews or can attend beach week unsupervised—are not necessarily true.
William Murray writes from Kensington, Md.
----- EXCERPT: In nation's capital, parents' council offers an invaluable resource ----- EXTENDED BODY: William Murray ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: 'You're No Abraham Lincoln' DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:Politics is always the art of the possible. Compromises are necessary to get candidates elected and legislation passed. The hope is that the dark side of these activities will be justified by the importance of a larger cause. It's often a difficult piece of moral calculus.
Primary Colors is a deft political satire that starts out by tackling these issues head-on. Based on the best-selling novel by New Yorker magazine staffer Joe Klein (who first published the book under the pseudonym, “Anonymous”), the movie claims to be fiction. But, of course, everyone knows it's based on Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. Part of the fun is figuring out who the real-life models for each of the characters are and how closely the plot twists resemble actual events. Its scenes about the fallout from the candidate's alleged affair with a very young girl seem to have anticipated the Monica Lewinsky scandal with an eerie prescience.
The story is told through the eyes of Henry Burton (Adrian Lester), who's a cross between former Clinton aide, George Stephanopoulos, and a mythical grandson of Martin Luther King, Jr. The young African-American signs on to be campaign manager of a dark-horse, Clinton-like presidential candidate, Jack Stanton (John Travolta), who's governor of a small Southern state.
Burton's girlfriend, March (Rebecca Walker), describes Stanton as “some cracker who hasn't done much in his own state.” But the young idealist explains to Stanton's Hillary-like wife, Susan (Emma Thompson) why he joined up: “You had Kennedy. I want to be part of something that is history.”
Stanton has the hubris to see himself as following in Lincoln's footsteps.
From that moment on, Burton is pegged by the rest of the staff as suffering from a case of “galloping true believerism.” The movie's dramatic tension comes from the clash between his high hopes and the reality of the campaign. It's a classic tale of innocence betrayed.
Burton first sees Stanton in action at a minority adult literacy class in New York. The candidate is moved to tears by the students' tales of hardship and shares with them a similar story from his own past. But he can't resist seducing the group's female teacher (Allison Janney).
The incident reveals the candidate's greatest strength, his seemingly heart-felt empathy for ordinary people's problems. But it also points to his achilles heel, what's described as “the woman thing” by veteran consultant Richard Jemmons (Billy Bob Thornton), who's based on James Carville.
The New Hampshire electoral primary takes up the first half of the film. The Stanton campaign has to deflect charges that their candidate was arrested during a Vietnam war protest and had the incident illegally expunged from his record. Then allegations are made that he had an affair with his wife's former hairdresser (Gia Carides), a character suggested by Gennifer Flowers, and a tape recording is played which seems to prove it.
Susan Stanton publicly stands by her man and leads the campaign's rapid-response team to media inquiries. But in private, she slaps her husband's face upon learning of his infidelity and later pulls her hand away from his after faking forgiveness during a 60 Minutes-like TV interview. Her attitude toward her husband seems to be an accurate rendering of the combination of true love, anger, and denial that binds her real-life counterpart to the president.
Brought in to counter the dirty tricks of Stanton's opponents is “dust-buster” Libby Holden (Kathy Bates), based on long-term Clinton associate, Betsey Wright. A foul-mouthed homosexual, she's not above using threats of violence to get her way. With Holden's help, Stanton is able to neutralize the allegations made against him and finish second in New Hampshire. When the candidate who beat him drops out for health reasons, he becomes the front-runner.
Then things take a turn for the worse. Rumors surface that he has gotten a teen-age African-American girl pregnant. At the same time a respected party veteran, former Florida governor Fred Picker (Larry Hagman), enters the race to run against Stanton on a good-government platform.
Burton gets his hands dirty dealing with these problems and feels sick about it. Surprisingly, Holden turns out to be as much an idealist as he is. After finding enough skeletons in Picker's closet to force him out of the race, she challenges the Stantons to remain true to their shared McGovernite past and not stoop to their opponents' level by releasing the material.
The problem with Primary Colors is that both director Mike Nichols (The Graduate and Birdcage) and screenwriter Elaine May (Birdcage) are liberal Democrats who've participated in Clinton fund-raisers, and three-quarters of the way through the film they realize the Clinton surrogate they've created is a monster. Jack Stanton is depicted as a charming manipulator who'll use any means necessary to accomplish his goals. He functions as a kind of Mephistophelean tempter with Burton, encouraging the young man to do things that go against his nature. After all this, how are the filmmakers going to be able to justify their support for the movie's real-life model and for the principles they and he claim to hold dear?
In its closing scenes, the movie ceases being funny and bogs down in exaggerated melodrama and unconvincing moral rationalizations. Nichols and May want us to believe that almost all of America's presidents have used dirty tricks. Delivering some of the most offensive lines of dialogue in recent memory, Stanton tries to persuade Burton to stay on board. “You don't think Abraham Lincoln was a whore before he was president?” the candidate asks. “He had to tell his little stories and smile his back-country grin. He did it all just so he'd get the opportunity to stand in front of the nation and appeal to the better angels of our nature.” Obviously, Stanton has the hubris to see himself as following in Lincoln's footsteps.
Because Primary Colors shows the Stanton campaign concerned almost exclusively with image and rarely with substance, there's very little sense of a higher cause to justify all the chicanery. In order for the audience to accept Stanton as anything other than a wily corrupter, the filmmakers are forced to fall back on a blanket cynicism about politics that makes their hero look good. Despite all the laughs, it leaves a bitter taste.
Arts & culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
Primary Colors is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America.
----- EXCERPT: In the world of Primary Colors, politics--not the president--is the bad guy ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts & Culture -------- TITLE: Misreading Anne Frank DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:Why would anyone want to mount a revival of The Diary of Anne Frank? In a certain respect, the film Schindler's List has determined the definitive way to remember the unspeakable atrocities of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, thereby rendering less eloquent depictions of those events redundant. What new insight might the current Broadway production hope to promote? In other words, just what does this new presentation of the play want us to remember?
In fact, it is not the production but rather the script that is new here. The production now playing at the Music Box Theater is not a revival, but rather a redaction by Wendy Kesselman of the original play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. Regrettably, no rationale is given to justify or explain Kesselman's adaptation, whose anti-Christian slant will leave many in the audience bemused if not downright outraged.
If there is any reason to see this production, it rests in Natalie Portman's stunning, exuberant portrayal of Anne. Portman exhibits the profound self-possession, poignancy, and convicted verve that one might associate with St. Thérèse of Lisieux.
Kesselman's anti-Christian slant will leave many bemused if not downright outraged.
Unfortunately, much of the rest of the production is disappointing and even disturbing. It is painful to watch the impotency of the human spirit when co-opted into self-sacrifice. The staging fails to give the audience a strong sense of the destitution of these people, of what it is to be cooped up in an annex with no possibility of bathing, without enough food, with only their fears.
The horror or their predicament does break through at times. In perhaps the most unsettling scene, Mr. Van Daan, father of the family sharing the Franks' hiding place, is caught stealing bread in the dead of night. We wince as his son Peter witnesses the selfishness, deception, and cowardice that the boy realizes can consume any man—even his own father. It stands as an irrefutable reminder of how savage the power of pettiness can be when we refuse to make of life a sincere gift of self.
The impetuous response of Mr. Dussel, another refugee, to this heinous injustice is to start parceling out the rotten potatoes on the spot. But the only response that can truly satisfy such a crisis is mercy.
A brief moment of redemption appears in a moving (new) monologue spoken by Mrs. Van Daan (delivered with elegant power by Linda Lavin) to her unrepentant spouse. By reminding him of the romance they shared in the long-ago days of their courtship, she attempts to revive her husband's belief in the all-encompassing power of love. She says to him tenderly: “Putti, next time you're hungry, hold on to me.” He does so immediately. It makes us think of the meaning of the Eucharist.
More often though, misrepresentations of the original material mar the new production. One exchange between Peter Van Daan, Anne, and her sister Margot, is particularly disquieting. In the original play, Anne says: “I wish you had a religion, Peter.” He replies: “No, thanks. Not me.” In Kesselman's mutation, however, Peter says: “When I get out of here I'm never going to tell anyone that I'm Jewish.” Margot responds by saying: “What? You mean you're going to get yourself baptized?” The quantum leap to such a conclusion is both absurd and abrasive. If anything, Peter seems to suggest that he will in the future profess agnosticism. And were not Miep Gies and Mr. Kraler, the heroic resisters who made this refuge possible, themselves “baptized?” Kesselman's adaptation renders Margot a cold-hearted, unthinking, ungrateful bigot. Such a suggestion is itself unthinkable.
The momentum of the entire play builds to the suspenseful climax when the Nazis come to hustle away the castaways. Incredibly, the play's director, James Lapine, completely misses the moment. Three boyish soldiers sneak into the attic like impish adolescents up to some prank. In the original script, Nazis never appear on-stage. Instead, the sense of terror for those in hiding comes across through the clamor of bells ringing, doors crashing, voices shouting, and heavy boots smashing their way into the sanctuary. Imagination can supply a far more horrifying effect than depiction.
The insinuation of a non-dramatic, concluding monologue by Anne's father, Otto Frank, (unconvincingly delivered by the understudy Peter Kybart at the performance I attended) is the final shortfall of the new production. It manages to relate what happens to every character we've encountered except for Miep and Mr. Kraler—the two people who risk their lives to save their persecuted friends, and with whom the audience has established an emotional bond. Because we truly care about them, we feel deprived when they disappear without a mention.
The original play included these characters in the drama's resolution. In this new production (which should accordingly be given its own distinct title) Miep and Kraler are meant to be forgotten.
At the end of the play, Anne's writing literally is on the wall. One would have hoped for that from the beginning instead of so much interloping. It is one thing to recall accurately the past to prompt people to remember well. It is quite another to revise remembrance according to an adapter's agenda. Then memory becomes manipulation. Whose diary is it, anyway?
The Diary of Anne Frank is now playing at the Music Box Theater, 239 W. 45th St., New York City.
Dominican Father Peter John Cameron, a Register contributing writer, is an award-winning playwright with a master's degree in playwriting from The Catholic University of America.
----- EXCERPT: The current Broadway production doesn't do justice to a young Holocaust victim's famous diary ----- EXTENDED BODY: Peter John Cameron OP ----- KEYWORDS: Arts & Culture -------- TITLE: Patiently, Pro-lifers Maneuver To End Partial-Birth Abortion DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON—Behind the scenes, Congress has begun considering how to override President Bill Clinton's veto of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act (HR 1122).
This will be the second round of a political showdown that began in 1996 when Sen. Rick Santorum (RPa.) challenged the late-term procedure known in the medical industry as intact dilation and extraction (D&X) on the floor of the Senate. Since the method involves killing a child that has been delivered in a breech fashion up to its neck, many—including U.S. bishops, lawmakers, and physicians— have termed it infanticide.
At every step in the drawn-out struggle, support for the ban has grown. When the president vetoed the measure for the second time Oct. 10, it had won by a veto-proof margin (296-132) in the House of Representatives, and passed the Senate only three votes shy of the necessary two-thirds majority to override a veto (64-36).
While many Democratic senators have been persuaded to support the ban, including Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, and senior statesman Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, at least eight self-identified Catholic members of the Senate, some from the most heavily Catholic areas of the country, have opposed the ban and voted to uphold the president's veto. Sens. Christopher Dodd (DConn.), Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), John Kerry (D-Mass.), Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), Carol Moseley-Braun (D-Ill.), Barbara MikuIski (D-Md.), and Mary Collins (R-Maine) all support keeping legal the practice of partial-birth abortion. Even Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), who represents the only state in which Catholics are a majority of the population, voted to keep it legal.
The allegiance of so many Catholic legislators to the “pro-choice” camp is perhaps the most distressing aspect of this political struggle for pro-life organizers. Why the contradiction? Why do politicians who publicly list themselves as Catholics, vote against the Catholic position on abortion issues?
Various senators make different arguments to justify their support for partial-birth abortion, but virtually all cite two broad arguments: The need to defer to the rulings of the Supreme Court, and the (former New York Gov.) Mario Cuomo argument, that while “personally opposed” to abortion, the decision to have an abortion should be reserved to the individual involved. Unfortunately, this opinion resonates with many people—including Catholics.
That is not to say that all Americans favor the present “abortion-on-demand” philosophy in the United States. A recent public-opinion analysis of the abortion issue sheds light on this topic. Carll Ladd and Karlyn Bowman, polling experts at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank, argue that, based on polls published in the last 25 years, the American population is deeply divided on this issue. “People recognize that human life is precious, and they think it should be protected. At the same time, they feel strongly that individual choice should be respected. Most Americans are at once pro-choice and pro-life.”
Ladd and Bowman point out that this “pluralistic compromise,” with its deference to the choices of others, is the pattern of public opinion across a range of issues (e.g. smoking, school choice, health-care options, and access to pornography. However, by large majorities, most Americans support restrictions on access to abortion after the first trimester. Regarding the partial-birth procedure, more than 70% of the population favors an outright ban.
That is why the pro-life movement has dramatically changed its emphasis in recent months. The brutal facts about partial-birth abortion shift public attention away from who is making the choice to what is being chosen—and most Americans simply don't have the stomach to support it. Whatever their conviction about abortion in general, infanticide is clearly outside the mainstream.
That has been the impetus behind the most significant movement in voting behavior on abortion issues since 1973. Eighteen states have passed versions of the Santorum bill during the last two years (not including Ohio, where the language of the ban was flawed) and many congressional Democrats (13 senators and 79 representatives) have abandoned their party's traditional pro-abortion posture.
In the Senate, Daschle, a Catholic, leads the list of pro-abortion Democrats who voted against his party and the president. His last-minute switch to support the Santorum bill came only after intense pressure from South Dakota voters and from Bishop Robert Carlson of Sioux Falls. (Daschle is reported to have exclaimed, “That's enough. Let's get this thing out of here and send it to the Supreme Court” in reaction to Bishop Carlson's leadership on the issue.) Other Catholic senators who were either unwilling to buck the demands of public opinion and the Church include John Breaux (D-La.), Mary Landrieux (DLa.), and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.).
By contrast, Sen. Robert Byrd (DW.Va.) changed his position to support the ban after learning the full details of the procedure. Rep. Sanford Bishop (D-Ga.) switched his vote in favor of the ban after his home state passed its own measure with broad popular support. Bishop said he felt bound to uphold the moral convictions of those who elected him.
These prominent defections have increased the pressure on the holdout Catholic Democrats. Most vulnerable are those facing election this year, such as Illinois Moseley-Braun, and Washington's Patty Murray. Moseley-Braun faces a strong pro-life Republican candidate in this fall's election, and a state Democratic Party that appears to be divided on abortion issues, having nominated a pro-life candidate for governor. What's more, Illinois is one of the states that has outlawed the partial-birth procedure. In a close election, the issue could determine the outcome.
“Why do politicians who publicly list themselves as Catholics, vote against the Catholic position on abortion issues?”
There are similar situations in a number of upcoming political races. In fact, the override vote has become a central issue in the 105th Congress. Pro-life forces are working fervently to persuade three senators to switch their override votes. Though the debate has been quiet (at least in the national press) for months, the override issue is shaping up to be a defining moment in American political history.
The motion to override will begin in the House Judiciary Committee, where much interest and speculation centers on the timing of the vote. Though assured of passage in the House (the margin is 10 votes greater than the required two-thirds majority), if the measure were to arise now, most observers believe it would ultimately fail. Pro-life leaders argue that it would be a mistake to rush the vote.
“The National Conference of Catholic Bishops, the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), the Christian Coalition, and other pro-life organizations need as much time as possible to round up the crucial three votes [in the Senate],” said NRLC Legislative Director Doug Johnson. The best estimate is for a vote in late summer.
As the behind-the-scenes debate in Washington intensifies, the approvals of statewide bans are cause for hope. In New Jersey, Republican Gov. Christine Whitman, re-elected by a slim margin in November, suffered a legislative override of her veto of a state ban in December. In February, the Florida legislature demonstrated its determination by overriding Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles's veto. Virginia's newly elected state Assembly, previously dominated by pro-abortion Democrats, voted in favor of a ban in March. And in Maine, despite Greek Orthodox senator (Republican Olympia Snowe) and a Catholic senator (Collins) siding with the president, the Christian Coalition's polling shows that more than 80% of state voters favor a ban on partial-birth abortions.
With the tide running strongly against them, abortion advocates have begun the classic “end run” to the courts. Most state bans have been delayed by federal court order, and the issue seems destined to wind up in the Supreme Court. Whatever the outcome, the partial-birth issue has given the pro-life cause a new vigor and a dramatic new platform from which to educate the public. As one veteran observer commented, “it's yet another instance of God bringing good out of evil.”
George Forsyth, a political scientist and former foreign service officer, is executive director of the Catholic Campaign for America.
----- EXCERPT: Many believe it would be a mistake to rush a vote in Senate, which is still three votes shy of veto-proof margin ----- EXTENDED BODY: George Forsyth ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: The Gospel Of Life DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:“Even in the midst of difficulties and uncertainties, every person sincerely open to truth and goodness can, by the light of reason and the hidden action of grace, come to recognize in the natural law written in the heart (cf. Rm 2:14-15), the sacred value of human life from its very beginning until its end, and can affirm the right of every human being to have this primary good respected to the highest degree. Upon the recognition of this right, every human community and the political community itself are founded.”
Pope John Paul II
(Evangelium Vitae 2.2)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Assisted Suicide: A Way of Death in Oregon DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:PORTLAND, Ore.—“Let's allow this grave news to inspire us to reach out to those who are terminally ill.” That was the reaction of Portland Archbishop John Vlazny to word last month of Oregon's first reported suicide.
“At this time,” Archbishop Vlazny said, “I believe it is especially important that we reach out to one another to strengthen our resolve that no one feel abandoned in his or her final illness.”
A Portland woman in her mid-80s with breast cancer died March 24 after taking a lethal prescription of barbiturates mixed with Maple syrup followed by some brandy. She reportedly died “peacefully” while asleep about a half-hour later, with her family and her doctor at her side.
The woman's family asked that she remain anonymous. She did make an audio tape recording a few days before she died. In the tape she said she is looking forward to dying “because, being I was always active, I cannot possibly see myself living out two more months like this…. I will be relieved of all the stress I have.”
Archbishop Vlazny said he was “deeply saddened” the news. “The suicide of this elderly woman can only bring anguish to those who have resisted the public policy initiatives that changed the law in Oregon.”
There has been at least one other publicly announced doctor-assisted suicide in Oregon under the “Death with Dignity Act.” This person was an adult who had cancer. Other people might have already killed themselves under the law and not disclosed details. State officials said they will not issue a report on how the law is working until at least 10 deaths have been recorded.
While a spokeswoman for the Hemlock Society responded to the news with “Hooray for the people of Oregon,” others joined the archbishop in expressing sorrow.
“This is a tragic day for Oregon and our nation,” said Bob Castagna of the Oregon Catholic Conference.
Castagna said those against the doctor-assisted suicide law are still working toward having it outlawed. Currently the U.S. Justice Department is examining a Drug Enforcement Administration opinion that deadly medication violates medical standards.
Catholic physician Edmund Pellegrino of Georgetown University has been an outspoken foe of Oregon's law. He maintains that a dignified death is not brought on with an overdose of pills.
“A dignified and human death is one in which we participate in the mystery which is at the root of our existence as creatures,” the doctor said. “In a dignified death we affirm ourselves as persons by giving ourselves over to God's presence even in our most despairing moments, just as Jesus did in the awful hours of Gethsemane and Golgotha.”
Another doctor, Gregory Hamilton, a psychiatrist and president of Physicians for Compassionate Care, expressed grief not only for the deceased and family members—but for his profession and all of America as well.
“This is a terrible thing because people's lives are no longer being equally valued,” Hamilton said. “Suicide doesn't take place in a vacuum, and when a doctor writes a prescription for them to use to kill themselves, they are agreeing that that person's life is no longer as valuable as the lives of the rest of us.”
Despite staunch opposition from the Catholic Church, Oregon voters have stood by the concept of assisted suicide. In 1994, just 51% of the state's voters approved Measure 16. It was the first law anywhere, ever to legalize doctor-assisted suicide.
A series of legal challenges followed, and in November Oregon voters, by a lopsided margin of 60% to 40%, declined to repeal the 1994 law.
Hazel Whitman writes from Portland, Oregon.
----- EXCERPT: Church reacts with sorrow to first official occurrence under the law ----- EXTENDED BODY: Hazel Whitman ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Joan Andrews Bell Freed on Unsupervised Parole DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:Joan Andrews Bell left a Pittsburgh prison March 26 with the same message that led to her incarceration more than two months ago: She will not cooperate in any way with corrupt court and law enforcement systems that condone the killing of unborn children and penalize those who attempt to save them.
Sentenced Jan. 15 to three to 23 months, with three years probation, for refusing to register for probation, Bell was unexpectedly released more than two weeks short of the minimum sentence, with time off for good behavior. Officially, she is on parole, but she was not informed of any terms of the parole or appointed a parole officer.
In contrast to the tortuous legal case that began in 1985 with her trespass arrest at a Pittsburgh abortion clinic, and included a federal warrant issued last September after she and her husband went through an immigration service background check in connection with a foreign adoption, her release was amazingly simple.
“The officer in charge of our section of the jail came that evening and said, ‘You're released. Get your stuff and get out.’ I was shocked,” Bell told the Register from her New Jersey home three days after being freed. “I had no idea anything of the sort was in the offing.”
As she walked toward the front desk of Allegheny County Prison around 8:30 p.m. March 26, she was cautious, suspecting a legal trap. She had been jailed for refusing to follow the judge's order to register with the probation board. Perhaps there would be papers waiting and the authorities would expect her to sign in a weak moment after tasting the hope of freedom.
“There was a delay and they said there was a problem,” Bell recalled, “but it turned out they were having trouble finding my clothes. Soon after that I was out.”
Bell, who has been arrested more than 200 times for Operation Rescue activities, will not register for probation, because doing so would be admitting that she had done wrong and needed rehabilitation.
The most curious part of the proceedings, as she was later to discover, was that prison authorities had filled out the papers for her early release, hand-delivered them to the judge, Raymond Novak, who signed and returned them the same day. Her lawyers were left shaking their heads. Their client, who had followed a practice of non-compliance with most prison regulations to protest an unjust legal system, and who was placed in the psychiatric ward because of this practice, was given time off for good behavior.
The Bells attribute her release to the Blessed Mother. A New Jersey priest who is a friend of the family told her husband, Chris, to pray especially hard on March 25, the solemnity of the Annunciation. The next day she was out.
“I know this was the Blessed Mother, she watches over all her children,” said Bell.
She stayed with a friend in Pittsburgh for one night and the next morning was in Allegheny County Court to testify on behalf of a pregnant woman she had befriended in prison who was in danger of miscarrying. While incarcerated, Bell had arranged for her own lawyers to petition for a medical furlough for the woman. Throughout her jail stay, Bell helped arrange the release of a dozen such woman, and persuaded one young inmate to cancel her abortion and give the baby up for adoption.
“If for no other reason, being in jail was worth it just to save that one baby,” she told the Register.
Now that she is out, the Bells can move forward with the adoption of Emiliano, a nine-year-old handicapped Mexican boy whom they have had custody of for three years. They are scheduled to meet with Mexican child-care authorities in late April for what they hope will be the final time. They also have a five-year-old daughter, Mary Louise.
The three-year probation still hangs over Bell's head. Judge Novak, a former priest, could call her back at any time to register with the probation board, and she could be jailed again for refusing. She is too thankful for being reunited with her family to think about that possibility.
“I took the children to the park when I got home, and we went to Mass at Sts. Peter and Paul in Hoboken. It was wonderful,” she said.
Brian Caulfield writes from New York.
----- EXCERPT: Surprise move brings pro-life heroine back to family ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian Caulfield ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Even in the High Court, Majority Rules DATE: 04/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 05-11, 1998 ----- BODY:TORONTO—Canadian Catholic and pro-life organizations are shocked by the top court official's admission that public opinion plays a role in important legal decisions.
Speaking at the Faculty of Law of the University of Toronto in February, Antonio Lamer, chief justice of the Canadian Supreme Court, said popular opinion was a factor in his decision 10 years ago to overturn Canada's former abortion law. This despite Lamer's personal opposition to abortion.
“Had you asked me at a hearing if I was for or against [abortion], I would have said against,” the chief justice told his University of Toronto audience. His comments suggest that despite the justice system's claims of impartiality, majority opinion plays a role in determining even the most basic legal considerations.
Lamer was responding to a question about the benefits of a parliamentary committee reviewing appointees to the Supreme Court. His comment about public opinion playing a role in legal decisions was his way of arguing against such review committees.
Lamer was appointed to the Canadian Supreme Court in 1980 and became chief justice in 1990. He was among the majority of justices who on Jan. 28, 1988, ruled to strike down the country's former abortion law on the grounds that it violated women's security of person guarantees.
The chief justice indicated the basis for his decision to reject the former abortion law was influenced by public opinion.
“My reasoning is that unless you have a vast majority of people who think something is criminal, you should not make it a crime,” he said.
Canadian pro-life supporters have long intimated that Supreme Court rulings are not immune from partisan considerations. Nonetheless the Lamer revelation is dismaying to Catholic groups and pro-life organizations.
’…Unless you have a vast majority of people who think something is criminal, you should not make it a crime…’
The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops has reserved comment on the Lamer revelation. However, Tom Langan, president of the Catholic Civil Rights League (Canada), suggested the Lamer comments reflect the “relativistic” approach to the administration of justice.
“There is little meaningful discussion based on principle and natural law anymore, and that leaves even our best judges in a difficult position,” Langan said. “Any justice attempting to make a ruling based on personal belief or principle, would have a hard time justifying that ruling in our pluralistic society.”
Canadian pro-life officials meanwhile are less reserved in their criticism of Lamer's comments.
“Chief Justice Lamer's decision in the abortion law case of 1988, based on what he perceived to be the popular will, is a blatant misuse of power on his honor's part,” said Mary Ann Miller, president of Alliance for Life Ontario. “The whole exercise of having a trial on the abortion issue at the time was to bring hard evidence from both sides to an appointed judge who would weigh the evidence and make a fair decision. That he lacked the courage or the will to do so has set a precedent for all cases brought to the Supreme Court involving life issues.”
Miller said Lamer's attitude will serve to erode respect for the Supreme Court in Canada.
Attorney Gwen Landolt of Toronto, national vice-president of REAL Women of Canada, called the Lamer comments “truly astounding.” REAL Women of Canada is a national pro-life organization espousing a traditional role for women and families.
“Now the mask is off the Supreme Court,” Landolt said. “We all suspected that the justices were making political, rather than legal decisions, but now we have the chief justice more or less confirming it.”
Landolt agreed that the Lamer admission will likely cause greater cynicism among Catholics and pro-life supporters with respect to the justice system.
“[The 1988 abortion law ruling] was a major life and death decision and it was influenced by one man's perception of popular opinion,” Landolt said. “We have to wonder now on what other issues will he conduct his own private poll before making a ruling.”
Landolt has monitored Supreme Court behavior since the enactment of the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Canada. She said the Charter, which allows the Supreme Court to rule on the constitutionality of Canadian law, in effect leaves Parliament subservient to the courts.
Other commentators across the country have been equally critical of Lamer's revelation. Many believe the comments confirm pro-life suspicions about the Supreme Court, particularly its tendency to overturn long-held values and traditions in the face of new and trendy issues. The Lamer comments also give credence to criticism that the Supreme Court has usurped Parliament's law-making prerogative.
Paul Schratz, editor of a British Columbia Catholic newspaper, echoed these views in a recent editorial. “In the case before the Supreme Court in 1988, at least one judge admits he helped kill the law—not because he considered the law unconstitutional (the usual reason for striking down legislation these days), but because he felt the majority of Canadians were opposed to it.”
Schratz also expressed surprise at Lamer's unique interpretation of the function of a Supreme Court justice.
“Somewhere the chief justice got the impression that it was his job to do what the majority of Canadians want,” Schratz said. “Where did he acquire the notion, let alone the certainty, that he is qualified to know what the majority want?”
At least one observer, however, believes there may be some justification for Lamer's citing public opinion as a factor in certain legal decisions.
Iain Benson, a senior legal researcher with the Center for Renewal in Public Policy, said “consensus” is an important component for the Supreme Court in making legal determinations under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Center for Renewal in Public Policy is an Ottawa-based forum that provides critiques of selected Supreme Court decisions.
Benson cited a recent court ruling that found community standards to be an acceptable yardstick in regulating some aspects of public policy, such as obscenity.
“Despite the apparent primacy given to the views of individuals, the court has held that the views of the community could form the basis of constitutionally acceptable law, despite the limits on individual autonomy in the area of obscenity,” Benson said.
He added, however, that the Supreme Court remains inconsistent in its attitude toward the significance of popular opinion on legal decisions. “This is because [the justices] are insecure about the relationship between morality and law,” Benson said.
Mike Mastromatteo writes from Toronto, Canada.
----- EXCERPT: Canada's chief justice admits popular opinion affects Supreme Court decisions--including the one that overturned the country's abortion law 10 years ago ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mike Mastromatteo ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: As Ireland Celebrates Peace Accord, Prelate Defends 'Too Catholic' Constitution DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:DUBLIN, Ireland—With most of Ireland abuzz with talk of the April 10 landmark peace accord that aims to bring Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland together after three decades of nearly perpetual violence, at least one prominent Churchman is focusing on a lower profile, but crucial, issue for the country: A government review group's contention that parts of Ireland's Constitution are “too Catholic.”
As Ireland enters a major period of constitutional change, Archbishop Desmond Connell of Dublin has warned that the country is not only “at a cross roads,” but “facing a deep crisis,” because “economic progress is moving ahead of our spiritual progress— indeed our spiritual progress is under threat and there are tendencies dismissive of religion at work in Irish society.”
The archbishop made his views known in a series of four articles written for The Examiner daily newspaper. The Irish Constitution, Bunreacht na hEireann , was written 76 years ago by Eamon DeValera, a hero of the 1916 rising who avoided execution at the hands of the British because he was an American citizen. Sweeping changes to that Constitution were proposed last May by a government all-party interdepartmental review group who claim the Constitution is “too Catholic.”
At least two constitutional referenda will be held this year in the Republic of Ireland: On May 22 the electorate will vote on the Amsterdam Treaty, an international agreement that would bind Ireland closer to a United Europe, and on the landmark accord reached April 10 (see story, page 11 ).
Such is the pro-European movement in Ireland, that there is at present little public debate about the Amsterdam Treaty even though it affects labor relations, sovereignty, and Ireland's traditional neutrality in international conflicts. There is far greater public debate about the Northern Ireland peace process and the debate is likely to increase once the electorate are presented with a final version of the “framework document.”
The document will include proposals for constitutional change in Northern Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the Republic of Ireland. Almost certainly, it will include proposals to change Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution that claims Northern Ireland as sovereign territory of the Republic of Ireland.
It is also extremely likely that the Republic of Ireland's electorate will be presented with a new abortion referendum. A government all-party interdepartmental working group is currently preparing a Green Paper on abortion in Ireland and is being asked to either recommend holding a new referendum on the issue or legislation to allow procured abortions in the republic for the first time in its history.
In such an environment, with votes taking place on European Unity, Northern Ireland, and abortion, it is more likely that the recommendations made by the all-party Constitutional Review Group will also be put to the people. That is Archbishop Connell's fear and his articles raise his concerns about education, the family, the role of religion, and human rights.
Key Words at Stake
Catholic social teaching is reflected in Articles 41 and 42 of the Constitution, for instance, stating that “the primary and natural education of the child is the family” and recognizing “the family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights.” The Constitutional Review Group recommended that the words “natural,” “inalienable,” and “imprescriptible” be removed from the Constitution, a move Archbishop Connell said showed “a failure to appreciate the importance of the family itself.”
He added: “The language of the existing Constitution is said by some to reflect the language and thinking of the Roman Catholic Church of the 1930s.
But what is often not acknowledged is that the current Constitution formally acknowledges and provides for the right of members of all religious communities to educate their children.”
The Review Group seems to suggest that, if the Constitution's provisions relating to religion, education and the family are repugnant to the rights of non-believers (about 6% of the population), the Constitution must in some sense reflect the views of these non-believers.
“The proposed removal of any positive affirmation of religious belief is not, however, an act of neutrality. Instead, it substitutes for the views of the vast majority of Irish citizens a view which implicitly rejects the deep and personally held belief of so many Irish people in the existence of God and the religious dimension of life. The priorities identified as being Catholic in their origin are the priorities recognized by all of the mainstream Christian faiths, as well as the Jewish and Islamic faiths,” the archbishop said.
“The Catholic viewpoint that the family has ultimate responsibility for the education, including religious education, of its children and has the right to state support in its choice of schools reflecting its ethos, is no different from that of every other recognized organized religion,” he continued. “I do not believe sufficient account has been taken of this fact.”
Turning his attention to proposals to end the special constitutional status given to families based on marriage, Archbishop Connell said: “The Review Group's vision of the Family is not so clear. It draws attention to an increase from 3% to 20% in the incidence of births outside marriages, but makes no comment on the impact of this change.
“Most people would regard this trend as a negative one. Surely the state, which has an interest in social stability, would agree. Should the Constitution not lend support to the values which give stability to relationships?”
“The Review Group acknowledges significant difficulties if the Constitution seeks to protect the rights of family units other than those based on marriage but then proposes to dilute the state's pledge 'to guard with special care the institution of Marriage,’ by removing the phrase ‘on which the Family is founded.’”
“The advent of divorce has already weakened the support for the family provided by the Constitution. But by breaking the link between marriage and the family altogether, we would no longer see the family as a naturally occurring institution but something which the state takes it upon itself to define,” Archbishop Connell wrote.
“If the state acknowledges the equal claims of all relationships, however diverse, social cohesion will be damaged. This would underestimate the particular needs which children have—a father and a mother, stability in the parental relationship, economic well-being and so on. The state itself has neither the mandate nor the capacity to supply these needs. Its role is to support, not decide, the family.”
Secularizing the Constitution
Turning his attention to religion and religious guarantees in the Constitution, Archbishop Connell believes that references to God and religion are not just necessary to reflect people's beliefs, but also play a critical part in defending their rights. He said: “While there are positive aspects to the Constitution Review Group's treatment of religion, I would be worried that a radical secularization of the Constitution and the life of the state could result from the proposed removal of references to God and to the homage due to God.”
The Review Group recommends major changes to the Irish Constitution's preamble which begins: “In the name of the Most Holy Trinity, from whom is all authority and to whom, as our final end, all actions of men and states must be referred, we the people of Eire, humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial.”
Archbishop Connell said: “The changes recommended to the preamble suggest a reluctance to appreciate the importance of a religious understanding of life and society, despite the fact that this characterizes the experience of most people. Our Constitution currently invokes the Blessed Trinity and acknowledges our obligations to ‘our divine Lord, Jesus Christ.’ The Group says this is ‘overly Roman Catholic’ in tone. This is very puzzling because these words express the faith of all the Christian denominations. Some might argue that people of a non-Christian or no faith would object to the invocation of Jesus in the preamble but the rights and freedoms of all religions are guaranteed equally in the constitution. In any case, the views of Rabbi Sacks [Britain's chief rabbi] suggest that even references to a Christian God, where that is the faith of the majority, may be helpful to other minority faiths.”
“Looking abroad, we see that God is not bad news in the public sphere in Switzerland and South Africa,” the archbishop wrote. “Despite troubled histories of religious difference in both countries, God is still invoked in the preambles to their Constitutions. Vaclav Havel, president of the Czech Republic, has repeatedly defended the importance of transcendent values in our society. He points out that when there is a loss of religion there is a loss of respect for fellow humans and even for oneself.”
“While rates of religious practice may vary, the most recent surveys show that religion is still very important to the vast majority of people and that is significant,” the archbishop continued. “In this context the Review Group's recommendation that we delete the State's acknowledgment of the homage due to God found in Article 44 is regrettable. There is nothing neutral about removing references to God from the Constitution. It discriminates in favor of a minority against the deep convictions of the majority. When you leave God out of a document like the Constitution, which sets out what our life together in society should mean, you do not say there might be a God. You say there is no God.”
Natural Law and Human Rights
“On reading this analysis, some might accuse me of being excessively defensive about maintaining God's position in the Irish Constitution, as the source of the rights and values contained in it,” the archbishop wrote. “But keeping God in the preamble, or deriving authority “under God” as in Article 6, is not only about recognizing the ultimate meaning of life as most people see it. The Constitution also needs God in order to protect the notion that some human rights are beyond change by any law or any government. The late Mr. Justice Brian Walsh recognized this fact and said ‘it must be accepted that the Constitution intended the natural human rights’ as being in the category of natural law derived from God's law.”
“There are important reasons for maintaining a natural law approach to interpreting the Constitution: (1) To lose it would mean recasting the entire Constitution since it is drawn up with the natural law woven through it; (2) It would also mean jeopardizing those rights already identified by the courts on the basis of a natural law interpretation of the Constitution; (3) Finally, opting for some other interpretative principle would be equally open to controversy and debate and would be more likely to be arbitrary, a criticism that cannot be made of the Natural Law approach. That is how important natural law is,” the archbishop wrote.
“Whenever the natural law has been invoked by the courts it has succeeded in protecting the fundamental rights of Irish persons. Where it has been ignored or rejected, human rights have been violated. It is because the natural law underpins the Constitution that Article 40.3.1 and 40.3.2 [guarantees on the right to life of the unborn] can be interpreted in such a wide-ranging and broad way.”
“Without an acknowledgment of the fundamental principles that are intrinsic to human flourishing, such as those found in the natural law, society risks disintegration because of the force of populist ideologies. If a foundation as strong as the natural law is removed, the rule of law itself can be said to rest upon arbitrary principles.
“History shows the importance of natural law. In Nazi Germany, the State created positive laws which were evil and yet which law abiding citizens obeyed. Were it not for the natural law, there would have been no real philosophical justification for resistance to Nazism by German citizens. The same can be said for resistance to apartheid, for Gandhi's peaceful but forceful resistance in India, and as I said earlier for Martin Luther King's disobedience to unjust laws in the Southern United States. Because of the natural law, we are justified in standing up for what is right and in standing against evil in our society, even when that evil is enshrined in the laws of society.”
Cian Molloy writes from Dublin, Ireland.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Phenomenon of Young Killers Shouldn't Surprise, Say Experts DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:A damaged culture offers fertile ground for Jonesboro and other tragedies
LOS ANGELES—“It was their eyes,” a foreign correspondent wrote recently in his account of a near-death experience in war-torn central Africa involving pre-teen guerrillas. En route to an interview with the head of a rebel army, he had found himself surrounded on an isolated landing strip by dozens of 10- and 11-year-old free-lance fighters—armed with semiautomatic weapons—when his general failed to arrive on time.
One look at these boys, the reporter wrote, at the emptiness in their eyes, and you knew that you didn't stand a chance. Luckily, a military escort arrived a few seconds later, sending the journalist's captors scurrying into the bush.
In the aftermath of the March 24 shootings at a middle school in Jones-boro, Ark., the world's leading industrial nation has had to contemplate a pair of its own precocious killers, and wonder how it happened, and why.
For many, the incident that claimed the lives of four elementary students and a teacher in a tight-knit Bible-belt community of 50,000, along with the wounding of four other students and another teacher, is inexplicable.
“Television pontificators often provide plausible theories,” The New York Times editorialized earlier this month, “but nothing is likely to make these killings truly comprehensible.”
Not that reactions and remedies were in short supply.
On April 6, President Clinton signed an executive order banning the importation of 58 types of high-powered foreign-made guns with large capacity magazines (most variations of the AK-47 and Uzi semiautomatic weapons) and, with an eye on Jonesboro, lawmakers in several states contemplated ways to further tighten state and local gun control laws to restrict the availability of weapons to minors.
That same day, a 15-year-old student in West Lafayette, Ohio, was kicked out of school for compiling a “hit list” of students and teachers he wanted dead or injured. The list was turned over to police by school authorities who said that they took quick action in the case because of the Jonesboro shootings.
Jonesboro's alleged assailants, Andrew Golden, 11, and Mitchell Johnson, 13, were not obvious candidates for the carefully planned attack with high-powered rifles that pumped 22 bullets into the bodies of their classmates in a matter of minutes during an early afternoon fire alarm drill at Westside Middle School. (The alarm was allegedly pulled by Golden before he joined his partner in a cover of trees to await the stream of students.)
Johnson's Baptist pastor, for example, pointed out that the boy had “found God” at a revival meeting six months ago, was well mannered, and only two weeks before the shooting had volunteered for youth ministry at a local nursing home.
While Golden had a reputation as a “rowdy” kid, he nevertheless played trumpet in the school band and his family told reporters that he'd been especially considerate before the school-yard murders.
In retrospect, other darker aspects of the boys’ recent behavior have attracted attention. Mitchell's family saw signs of disorientation in the wake of his parents’ divorce in 1994. The boy lost his temper easily and got into fights. Last summer, family members and fellow students grew concerned about his obsession with belonging to gangs, and the dark turn his infatuations with girls took— including threats of suicide over rejections.
Golden was known as a “gun lover,” a tough kid who horsed around with hunting knives and wore military fatigues.
Even so, the profiles of the assailants, on the surface, hardly add up to a clear-cut disposition to mass killing.
Father Augustine DiNoia OP, theologian to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB), thinks part of the problem of grappling with the meaning of Jonesboro has to do with the modern American view of children.
“For one thing, I don't think that children are innocent,” the Dominican priest told the Register . “That's why we require that children above the age of reason go to Confession. The Church is very realistic about human beings. Anyone can be bad, anyone can decide on a course of action that is objectively evil—and that includes children.”
The theologian pointed to the media glut of “talking heads,” experts, drawing large conclusions for American society on the basis of the Jonesboro killings. In this discussion, he said, “the only moral fault is found outside the individual. It's Arkansas gun control laws; it's the divorce rate; it's the education system—it's never the individual; it's never a matter of the reality of sin .”
Dr. Thomas Lickona, a developmental psychologist and professor of education at the State University of New York at Cortland, agrees.
“Jonesboro is a humbling event,” he said, “and we need to make some kind of sense out of it. What it shows is that children are capable of premeditated evil on a horrifying scale. That won't surprise anyone who believes in Original Sin, and that won't surprise anyone who's realistic and unsentimental about children, who knows how cruel and vicious they can be to their classmates.”
Lickona remarked that the Arkansas tragedy is part of a growing pattern of school-yard shootings by children—the fourth such incident in five months.
Last October, 16-year-old Luke Woodham, declaring that the “world had wronged him,” shot his mother and two classmates with a rifle in Pearl, Miss. Seven other boys were arrested in connection with the incident. In West Paducah, Ky., Michael Carneal, 14, opened fire on a student prayer meeting last December, killing three students and wounding five. Eighth-grader Joseph Todd, 14, of Stamps, Ark., gunned down two fellow students in December, claiming that he'd been bullied by other classmates.
“Increasingly, we have these examples of kids who enter into a violent spirit, who kill for kicks, without remorse or empathy,” said Lickona. “There's clearly something missing on a human level in these kids: the empathy, the ability to identify with others that makes us human beings.”
For example, Luke Woodham, the 16-year-old gunman of the Pearl, Miss. killings, told police that “murder is not weak, it's gutsy and daring.”
What's creating such a phenomenon?
“Kids today are consuming literally thousands of hours of violence-saturated media,” Lickona said, “and it has an effect.” The scholar referred to recent studies that show that preschool children exposed to hours of cartoon violence each day double or triple their levels of physical aggressiveness on the playground.
“The kids that are most vulnerable,” said Lickona, the ones on whom media violence has the greatest influence, “are the ones who do not have another source of moral values, who don't have a loving relationship with their parents. Even the ones that come from conventional religious families—if there's not the empathy there, the climate of understanding and responsibility, the child will be especially vulnerable to the desensitizing going on in the culture.”
Donald De Marco, professor of philosophy at St. Jerome's College in Waterloo, Ontario, also sees Jonesboro not as “a bizarre event,” but as a product of “many forces and trends at work in today's society.”
“It seems to me that these kids [Johnson and Golden] are only too typical,” said De Marco. “We live in a ‘pro-choice’ culture where we're told that you can do whatever you like and there'll be no consequences. How can we be surprised when kids act on that formation?”
In addition, De Marco underlines the fascination with death that, he says, pervades modern life.
“It's one of the marks of our age,” he said, “the juxtaposition of boredom and this desire to live on the edge.”
De Marco cites the example of a recent trend in schools where, as a form of entertainment, children apply pressure to each other's necks, inducing a form of unconsciousness. In a few cases, serious injuries have resulted.
“Young people have jumped out of windows because their favorite television series was taken off the air, or because a parent asked them to take out the trash,” he said. “It's only a short step from there to a situation where an adolescent's romantic frustrations can lead to getting out the guns.”
Dan Misleh, policy adviser on non-violence issues for the United States Catholic Conference, says that while he supports gun control efforts as one response to Jonesboro, “that's not the whole answer.”
“We're part of a culture that glorifies violence,” he told the Register , “from the way we behave behind the wheel of a car to the Oklahoma City bombing. Gun control by itself just puts a band-aid on the cultural crisis we face.”
Misleh sees the elements of that crisis linked to Pope John Paul's vision of the “culture of death.”
“What the Pope sees so clearly is that when you lose respect for life and set up a culture founded on convenience,” said Misleh, “you'll seek the easy way out of difficulties. A problem with pregnancy: abort. A difficult medical problem: euthanasia. Frustrated expectations: the gun.”
“We have to learn again to choose life.”
Senior writer Gabriel Meyer is based in Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Gabriel Meyer ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Pro-Life 'Conspiracy' Case Threatens Protesters' Rights DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:NOW v. Scheidler case moves toward conclusion in Chicago
NEW YORK—The Chicago court proceedings that defendant Joe Scheidler only half-kiddingly calls “the trial of the century” reached a critical stage during Holy Week as the pro-life defense called Norma McCorvey, the “Roe” of Roe v. Wade , and Sandra Cano, the “Doe” of the 1973 companion case Doe v. Bolton . The two women whose cases were brought to the Supreme Court to gain abortion-on-demand and the resulting slaughter of more than 30 million innocents proudly spoke in defense of Scheidler and other pro-lifers who have labored long in defense of unborn babies.
Scheidler, for 25 years one of the nation's most active and out-spoken pro-life advocates, and head of the Chicago Pro-Life Action League, was brought to trial by the National Organization for Women (NOW) in a civil suit under the federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law. NOW alleges that Scheidler and a host of other named defendants have engaged in a conspiracy to close abortion facilities nationwide through on-site protests, a campaign of ongoing violence, and harassment of abortion clients.
The outcome of the jury trial will affect pro-life activists everywhere as their right to speak, protest, and associate with one another hangs in the balance. A guilty verdict from the six-person jury would slap defendants with triple damages for economic injuries caused to abortion clinics over two decades, and payment of legal fees for the plaintiffs during the 12 years the case has stretched.
“It's Kafkaesque, surreal, unbelievable,” Scheidler said. “They're trying to break our bank because we've been successful and are saving the lives of women and their babies. They have created a huge pro-life organization on paper and have all imaginable pro-life groups under my leadership in attempt to show conspiracy.”
The defense, led by lawyer Tom Brejcha, who left a partnership in a major Chicago firm to remain on the case, is hamstrung by the fact that the judge will not allow talk about the actual abortion procedure. Also ruled out has been testimony on the violence engaged in by pro-abortion advocates, malpractice findings against abortionists, and how a collection of aborted babies wound up in a dumpster. Ironically, NOW lawyers introduced the dumpster issue to use against Scheidler, whom they attempted to portray as a religious fanatic for arranging a funeral Mass and burial for the babies after they were discovered. Brejcha thought he could touch on the violence of the abortion procedure in cross-examination but federal district Judge David Coar ruled him out of bounds.
“Much of our evidence has been ruled out,” Brejcha said in a late-night interview between sessions. But he remained “guardedly optimistic” in the hope that no rational jury could find Scheidler and others guilty of conspiracy on the thin threads of connection the defense has woven among pro-life activists.
“The truth of the pro-life movement is that everybody is so disorganized that on the face of it you can rule out conspiracy,” Brejcha said. “What it comes down to is that they are being tried for their common beliefs and opinions rather than for any wrongful conduct they have engaged in, and this is dangerous. [Scheidler] has expressed a lot of opinions that have no correspondence to his actions.”
Defendants stand as proxy for the whole pro-life movement since anyone who takes part in activities labeled conspiratory can be charged with advancing the conspiracy, said Brejcha.
Therefore, every person who blocks clinic entrances, counsels or prays outside clinics, or hands out pro-life literature can be called a conspirator if NOW wins the case.
The trial began March 2 and was expected to last three weeks but NOW lawyers took almost four weeks with their witnesses. Brejcha called his first witness March 30 and was frustrated when Norma McCorvey was shut out all day April 1 as plaintiff lawyers cross-examined Operation Rescue leader Keith Tucci for hours in a barely concealed effort to keep “Roe” from speaking in her own name. The tactic worked for that day but McCorvey was back the following week, when NOW lawyers tried to prevent any mention of her as the plaintiff in the Roe case and to keep her testimony solely on her role as a former administrator of a Texas abortion clinic.
“Here's a woman who spends all her time now speaking against abortion with Roe No More Ministries, and we're told we cannot ask her about her present work, only her work as a pro-abortion-ist,” Brejcha said.
On that issue, she testified that all the pro-life protests at the clinic she ran were peaceful and the witness of pro-lifers changed her heart on the issue.
A key witness was Dr. John Willke, a major national figure in the years after Roe and former president of the National Right to Life Committee. NOW tried to portray Willke, a medical doctor, as a “good and rational” pro-life advocate as opposed to the extremism of Scheidler, but Willke would not bite. He gave a ringing endorsement of Scheidler's direct-action methods and said he was very much in the mainstream of peaceful pro-life thought and activity from the beginning.
“I consider the charges against him to be ridiculous, complete harassment and empty of all credibility,” Willke said outside court.
Also called by the defense were John Cavanaugh-O'Keefe, who peacefully blocked abortion clinic entrances long before Operation Rescue was formed; Joan Appleton, former abortion nurse and NOW member; Jerry Horn, Scheidler's assistant in the early days of the movement who is now senior vice president of Priests for Life, and a Jewish Holocaust survivor who has engaged in pro-life direct action.
Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), a strong voice for the unborn on Capitol Hill, took the stand as a character witness for Scheidler Thursday, April 9. He endorsed Scheidler as his friend and hero saying that Scheidler probably had more courage than he. Hyde ended his testimony by saying that if more people had stood in front of the entrances to Dachau and Auschwitz fewer people would have been incinerated there.
Anne Scheidler, the defendant's wife, testified briefly in her husband's defense as well. She was expected to resume testimony after the trial's Easter recess.
Scheidler also took the stand for three days during Holy Week and his most difficult task has been trying to distance himself from his own printed and recorded statements, including his private correspondence that the plaintiffs won access to. A one-time Benedictine monk who is married with seven children, the tall and deep-voiced Scheidler is known for his bombastic statements and hyperbole in support of the movement. He has boasted of forming a national pro-life organization, and has been photographed posing with Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry as mobsters to lampoon the notion that they are racketeers. Scheidler must testify against his own words that were used in a failed attempt to make a more cohesive pro-life movement.
All testimony was expected to conclude by April 17.
“They're using deception and innuendo, taking my words out of context,” Scheidler told the Register . “It's kids’ stuff they are using to convince the jury we're arsonists and bombers. They have no predicate acts to charge us under RICO.”
True to form, though, Scheidler maintains his web site (www.prolifeaction.org) and telephone hot-line (773-777-2525), which he updates with regular reports on the trial and precise criticism of NOW's tactics.
The judge has expressed concern about the many free-speech issues being raised in the case, but as yet has not made a judgment on how to instruct the jury, Brejcha said.
“Our position is that it is impossible to adjudicate First Amendment issues on a wholesale basis,” said the lawyer. “Asking the jury to pass on the legality of hundreds of these pro-life demonstrations over 25 years by hundreds of people who are allegedly part of a nationwide conspiracy—it cannot be done.”
“We could lose this,” Scheidler said. “This is an example how dangerous this [RICO] law can be when it's selectively used.”
Brian Caulfield writes from New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian Caulfield ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Sonia Gandhi, Pawn of the Vatican? No, Just India's New Political Force DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:NEW DELHI—The Indian National Congress Party emerged unscathed, if not victorious, from the recent Indian elections thanks to Sonia Gandhi, by birth an Italian Catholic and widow of assassinated Rajiv Gandhi—former prime minister and Congress Party leader. The 51-year-old Mrs. Gandhi emerged as a force during a whirlwind tour of the nation—traversing 37,000 miles and addressing more than 150 election rallies within a month.
No sooner were the election results declared early last month than a 20-member Working Committee of the party staged a coup, removing its octogenarian leader, Sitaram Kesari, and appointing Mrs. Gandhi in his place. On April 6, more than 1,200 elected members of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) gathered in New Delhi to endorse Mrs. Gandhi's elevation as party president, the eighth foreign national to head the 113-year-old party. The Congress Party led the struggle for independence from Britain, achieved in 1947, and has been in power for most of the time since then.
It was in late December that Mrs. Gandhi, after nearly seven years in mourning since her husband was killed by a suicide bomber during the 1991 election campaign, announced she would campaign for the Congress Party in the 12th general election. Her support boosted party morale when crowds flocked to her rallies, including half a million in the western Maharashtra state where the party virtually swept the polls, winning 38 of the state's 48 seats.
Predictions that the right-wing Hindu nationalist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party—Indian People's Party) would increase with the election from the 164 seats it's held since 1996 to 180 seats in the 545-member Parliament were quieted with the onset of “Sonia fever.” The BJP had to put its “Hindutva” (Hindu nationalism) on the back burner and negotiate to change the rag-tag coalition government of 22 parties that BJP leader Atal Behari Vajpayee now heads as prime minister.
The enthusiasm generated by Mrs. Gandhi's rallies did not, however, translate into an extraordinary number of votes. The Congress Party had to be content with gaining only a few extra seats from the 140 it has occupied since the 1996 elections. The post-election task now facing Mrs. Gandhi is clear: revamp and invigorate the “decaying” party associated for decades with her late husbands’ family.
The family's relationship to the Congress Party goes back to Motilal Nehru, the party's president during India's struggle for freedom from the British. Jawaharlal Nehru, his son, became India's first prime minister when the country achieved independence. He held it through successive elections for 18 years until his death. Soon after, Indira Gandhi—Nehru's only daughter—assumed leadership of the Congress Party. Except for 1977-79, she held the post of prime minister for 17 years until being assassinated by security guards in 1984. Prior to that, Sanjay Gandhi, who had been groomed to be her mother's successor in the party, died in an airplane crash in 1980.
Following Sanjay's death, Indira virtually pushed her elder son, Rajiv, into politics against the will of Sonia, his Italian wife. Rajiv had married Sonia Maino from Turin in 1968 (under Hindu rites). The two had met at Cambridge University while they were students. Within hours of his mother's assassination, Rajiv was tapped by the Congress Party to lead it as prime minister. But corruption scandals under Rajiv cost the party dearly and he was ousted from power in the 1989 election. During the campaign of the mid-term election in May 1991, Rajiv Gandhi was killed by a suicide bomber.
Shortly thereafter, the Congress
Party offered the slain leader's widow the mantle of the party. She declined. Despite Sonia Gandhi's “secluded” life outside the media eye and her silence on party affairs, key Congress Party leaders urged her to take over party stewardship. When Mrs. Gandhi became a member of the Congress Party two years ago, the media began to speculate about her political aspirations. Their suspicions were confirmed when she joined the political fray late last year.
With her “coronation” as head of the Congress Party April 6, Mrs. Gandhi has taken on a formidable task. Her Congress Party's vote share has declined by half from the 50% it used to hold. If the speech she delivered at a recent convention is any indication, she is well aware of the party's strengths and weaknesses.
“Ours is the most venerated and representative party because it is present in every nook and corner of the country. The Congress is the true political mirror in India. Ours is the only party that excludes none and includes all,” Sonia told cheering Congress members.
But she also asked what had become of the great Congress organization. “Our numbers in Parliament have dwindled and our support base among dalits, scheduled castes, and tribes and minorities has considerably declined. We are now in danger of losing our prime position as the national party,” she said. Pointing out that her main task is to infuse faith and credibility in the party, Mrs. Gandhi said the party revival would be “a long-drawn process.”
The “new sign of life” in the Congress Party that the majority of Indian Christians had treated as their party for decades has been welcomed. However, Church heads have declined to express their support for Mrs. Gandhi, because of her Italian Catholic background. During the recent election, in fact, she was the target of a slanderous campaign by Hindu fundamentalists.
Peeved by the massive gatherings at Mrs. Gandhi's rallies, Hindu zealots in the Panchajannya (Clarion Call) weekly described her as an “agent” of the Pope and part of a Roman conspiracy to “Christianize” India. The paper even carried photographs of the Holy Father and Mrs. Gandhi on the cover page. The English version of the weekly Organizer went a step further portraying her as “vulnerable to Vatican blackmail” and “a friend of Archbishop [Paul] Marcinkus, former head of the Vatican Bank that was involved in drug smuggling and drug money laundering.”
But John Dayal, All India Catholic Union national secretary, said the scurrilous reports had not damaged Mrs. Gandhi's reputation. “She is a national figure. Indians do not look at her as a Christian.” The reason: Sonia was married in a Hindu ceremony in 1968; she has followed Hindu rites throughout her time in India; and both of her children were brought up as Hindus.
“Indian women see in Sonia a woman, Hindus look at her as a Brahmin [upper caste] widow. For the middle class, she is neither Hindu or Christian. For them, she is a neutral person—a symbol of Indian secularism,” said Dayal, who is also editor of New Delhi's 100,000 circulation Midday English afternoon daily.
Hindu critics who have vowed to continue dredging up Mrs. Gandhi's Christian and Italian background haven't succeeded in swaying public opinion. An elderly village lady who waited patiently for hours to catch a glimpse of Mrs. Gandhi at a rally told a reporter that “when the daughter-inlaw comes home after crossing the river, she becomes an integral part of the family.”
Mrs. Gandhi's concern for minority rights and commitment to maintaining a secular state with freedom of religion bodes well for the country, Dayal said. Under Mrs. Gandhi, he added, the Congress Party will help keep close watch for any infringement of minority rights.
“Congress workers are excited about Sonia taking over Congress's reins,” said professor Saral Chatterji, director of the Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society (CISRS) in New Delhi. Even ordinary citizens have reasons “to rejoice,” she added, pointing out that “had Sonia not stepped in to the election campaign, BJP would have had attained a clear majority in parliament.”
Anto Akkara writes from New Delhi.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Anto Akkara ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Poland's 'Divine Mercy' Observance Catches Fire Stateside DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:STOCKBRIDGE, Mass.—The second Sunday of the Easter season has unofficially come to be known as “Mercy Sunday” to many U.S. Catholics. The term stems from the revelations of Jesus to a humble Polish nun early this century, and it has developed into a nationwide observance, the heart of which is the National Shrine of Divine Mercy, located in southwestern Massachusetts.
The town of Stockbridge is situated in the picture-perfect hills of the Berkshires. Eden Hill rises several hundred feet above the main street, its tranquil, rolling landscape serving as home to the National Shrine. Some 15,000 people from the United States and Canada are expected to gather here April 19 to celebrate Jesus’ infinite mercy.
“We're finding the message of Divine Mercy is just exploding,” said Father George Kosicki CSB, assistant director of Divine Mercy International, an organization that promotes devotion to God's mercy.
In his many talks and presentations on the Divine Mercy devotion, Father Kosicki has asked more than 100,000 people whether their lives have brokenness, sin, fears, anxieties, depression, or misery. He reports that a sea of hands regularly rises in response.
“People are carrying wounds and hurts, memories of anguish, fears, inadequacies, and all that,” he said.
But what you should do in your misery, Father Kosicki said, is to thank God, “because now you're a perfect specimen to receive his mercy.”
“The greater the sinner, the greater the right he has to my mercy” was the essential message that Jesus expressed to Sister Faustina Kowalska in a series of revelations from 1931 to 1938. Among other directives, Jesus called for a “Feast of Mercy” to be established on the first Sunday after Easter, and he promised an “ocean of graces” to those going to Confession (during Lent is acceptable) and Communion on that day.
Jesus also appeared to the nun inside the door of her cell. His right hand was poised in a blessing; his left hand was placed on his breast, over his heart, from which clear and red rays of light shone to depict his merciful love. He requested that an image be struck of the vision, that the image be venerated as part of the Divine Mercy devotion, and that it always bear the signature, “Jesus, I Trust in You.”
A member of the congregation of Our Lady of Mercy, Sister Faustina was beatified by Pope John Paul II April 18, 1993—the Second Sunday of Easter. (In 1965, the Pope, then Archbishop Karol Wojtyla of Krakow, initiated the cause for the nun's canonization.) During the beatification Mass he referred to her as the “great apostle of divine mercy in our time,” and in his homily asked, “Where, if not in divine mercy, can the world find refuge and the light of hope?”
In 1995, the Pope approved the request of the Polish bishops to celebrate Mercy Sunday as a feast in Poland, and during his pastoral visit to Poland last June, he visited the Shrine of Divine Mercy in the convent in Lagiewniki, Poland. There he prayed at the tomb of Blessed Faustina.
While at the shrine, the Pontiff said, “There is nothing that man needs more than Divine Mercy…. The message of Divine Mercy has always been near and dear to me…. I give thanks to divine Providence that I have been able to contribute personally to the fulfillment of Christ's will, through the institution of the feast of Divine Mercy.”
Divine Mercy in America
The now-popular devotion arrived on Eden Hill in 1944 to the congregation of Marians of the Immaculate Conception, the priestly order affiliated with Blessed Faustina's congregation. It was brought out of Nazi-occupied Poland by Father Joseph Jarzebowski. Forced to flee Vilnius in 1940, he promised to spread the mercy message and devotion if he reached the Marians in America. In May 1941, after traveling through Siberia and Japan with an invalid visa, he arrived in the United States.
A month later, he spoke of the devotion to the Felician Sisters of Our Lady of the Angels Province in Enfield, Conn., who helped him print the first accounts of the devotion in this country. Shortly after, the Marian congregation in Washington, D.C., began the work of printing and distributing the Divine Mercy message and image. Headquarters soon moved to Eden Hill, taking Our Mother of Mercy as patroness. By 1950, the center was promoting the message through the world.
Two words sum up the message, said Father Kosicki—trust and mercy.
“God is mercy itself, and he pleads with us to turn to that mercy and receive it. That's his part,” he said. “Our part is to receive it mainly by trust—abandonment to him. Trust's first action is receiving his mercy, and the second is giving thanks and giving it away.”
The mercy received through trust then has to be passed on: “Be merciful as your Father is merciful.” That is done by actions, words, and prayers; forgiving, and performing the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, said the priest.
Maureen Digan, a secretary at the Massachusetts shrine, received grace through the Divine Mercy devotion in an extraordinary way. In 1981, she was healed of an incurable disease at the tomb of Blessed Faustina in Poland. It was the miracle used by the Vatican in the cause for her beatification. Beyond the physical cure, it effected a spiritual healing as well.
“The mercy message has dramatically changed my life,” Digan said.
Foundation in the Church
Bishop Thomas Dupré, ordinary of Springfield, Mass., the diocese in which the shrine is located, said that the Gospel account for Mercy Sunday describes Jesus appearing to the apostles and establishing the Sacrament of Reconciliation (Jn 20: 19-31).
“What more appropriate day” for this celebration, he said. “Even before the devotion of Divine Mercy came into existence, mercy was foundational in the Church.”
“Divine Mercy … calls to sinners to understand the great love and compassion God has for us,” the bishop said. “He's looking for that little spark—anything—to bring them back to the fold. He guarantees he can and will do anything. He came to bring us back to him.”
This year's program at the shrine begins with a 10:00 a.m. Polish Mass celebrated by Archbishop Jozef Kowalczyk, apostolic nuncio to Poland. The principal celebrant of the English Mass at 1:30 p.m. will be Bishop Dupré. Confessions, benediction, a Divine Mercy novena, and chaplet are also planned. For the seventh consecutive year, the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) will broadcast live coverage to an expected audience of 20 million.
With more and more places around the country celebrating Mercy Sunday, people are staying in their local parishes, said Sister Isabel Bettwy, director of the National Shrine. Though attendance on Eden Hill continues to rise, so does the number of churches reporting local celebrations to Divine Mercy International. In two years, the directory has tripled.
“It would be impossible for the whole world to come to one place,” said former shrine director Father Joseph Roesch MIC. “But spiritually, wherever we are, we can always turn with trust to Jesus, the Divine Mercy.”
For more information, contact: National Shrine of Divine Mercy, Eden Hill, Stockbridge, MA 01262, (tel.) 413-298-3931.
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Putting the Financial House in Order DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:Phil Lenahan is founder and president of Financial Foundations for the Family, a Southern California-based non-profit organization dedicated to helping families serve God better through gaining control of their finances. In addition to counseling married couples on money matters, Lenahan, former controller for the western division of Fleetwood, a $3 billion Fortune 300 company, is vice president of operations for San Diego-based Catholic Answers. He recently spoke with Register correspondent Karen Walker.
A family finance counselor explains how getting out of debt can be a spiritual experience
Walker: What is Financial Foundations for the Family?
Lenahan: It's an apostolate serving Christ by teaching families and individuals how to apply Christian financial principles in their lives.
How and when did you get started?
Financial Foundations for the Family was officially formed in 1996, but the apostolate grew out of working with financially struggling families at our parish. I had expressed a willingness to help in this area to our pastor and he quickly took me up on it.
What difficulties have you experienced in the project?
Coming from a strong business background, I was accustomed to succeeding at projects. When I first started out helping families, I felt like I only succeeded about one-third of the time and that I wasn't cut out for it. My experience was in finances, not in marriage counseling, but my pastor told me that if I was successful a third of the time, I was doing great.
Most couples who come to us are dealing with a myriad of issues and finances are just a hot point. Sometimes they can see it objectively and take the “medicine,” but there's some pain and sacrifice involved and some aren't ready to deal with the root issues and turn a corner yet. Sometimes I think I've failed, and then a year or so later I'll get a call with a real success story that I hadn't expected.
In one of the worst cases I've seen, a couple came to us with $70,000 of debt— not including car or house debt. Their marriage was strained and the husband wasn't willing to work on it. Basically, if you can get the husband and wife to work together, financial issues are almost always resolved and in a way that will honor God.
What do you mean by “Christian financial principles”?
Within the body of Church teaching, there's a wonderful array of writing—the Bible, the writings of the Fathers and saints, the Catechism —that directly ties together finances and principles of the faith. If you read these works, you get a balanced perspective as to how we should view material goods and money.
There are evangelicals who do this already. Larry Burkett comes to mind; he's been doing it for 25 years, using the Bible alone. I had already gone through the Bible searching for these principles and when the Catechism came out, I studied it and made an outline of what some of the Church teachings were regarding managing family finances. From researching these references, we simplified the teachings of family finance management into five categories: (1) seek first the kingdom of God, (2) trust in the providence of God, (3) develop a charitable spirit, (4) practice the virtue of temperance, and
(5) develop personal responsibility.
What do these five principles have to do with money and finances?
The first principle, seek first the kingdom of God, gets back to one of the problems with our consumer-driven, materialistic society: we departmentalize our faith. Financially speaking, if you fall for the trap of a materialistic society and buy into the consumer attitude, you'll tend to seek fulfillment and happiness through things rather than through God. But, we'll only truly find our happiness in God. It's like a veil that's very easy to get caught up in and that takes our eyes off what's important. The first principle teaches that with regard to money, make sure we keep it in its proper place and that it does not replace God.
The second principle, trust in the providence of God, is tough in our society. We're so good with technology that we tend to want to control everything. It takes a pretty substantial world event for us to remember that we don't have things under our control. In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ tells us not to worry about what we wear or eat: that we have a father who will take care of us.
We deal with a lot of families from a wide range of income levels—those who have a lot are searching for more, those who have little suffer from a lot of anxiety and worry. St. Ignatius told us to pray as though everything depended on God and work as though everything depended on us. There's a balance; that's the beautiful thing about Catholicism. God is our father and he'll take care of our needs as he sees fit, not always as we see fit.
The third principle, to develop a charitable spirit, is a very broad concept. Initially, we focus on the concept of tithing, which is not taught for the most part within Catholic churches. Yet tithing can be a beautiful way of life; a transformation of heart often occurs when it is embraced by families.
In order to come up with a framework as to how we're going to live this principle, we have to go back to the body of Catholic teaching. In the Old Testament, a tithe [a tenth] was presented as the ideal model to provide for divine worship and for the needs of the poor. Today, people question whether tithing is old law only. But as we clearly see in Matthew 23:23, while our Lord is chastising the Pharisees for their legalistic approach to tithing, he is nonetheless encouraging them to continue, with a change of heart. In addition, St. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae (Q. 87, vol. II), gives a detailed analysis of tithing. He argues that the concept of tithing comes from natural law, not from man-made law.
Too often the tithe is viewed from the perspective of raising money to provide for some need, such as a church building or school. Yet, in Malachi 3:8-10 the Lord of hosts says “return to me and I will return to you…. Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse that there may be food in my house….” What's important here is that he's talking about our relationship with him. That's the beautiful aspect of tithing that is so often forgotten; it helps us grow closer to our Lord. He goes on to talk about blessings being poured down as a result of our faithfulness.
What do you mean by blessings? People often think it refers to material goods.
When we talk about blessings, we're talking about a loving father who only wants what's best for us. Blessings are given as our Lord sees fit; anything that brings us closer to him and closer to our final destiny in Heaven is a blessing. Whatever he chooses to give us, that's our way of honoring him and keeping him first. Blessings are not necessarily monetary.
Please continue explaining the five principles of Christian financial management.
The fourth principle, practice the virtue of temperance, is learning to be content. Starting at Timothy 6:11, St. Paul talks about moderating your desire for things. We encourage couples to look at their needs through different lenses. The first thing we normally hear from couples is that there isn't enough money to make ends meet. When the income is $30,000 or $40,000 and they are raising five or six children, this is understandable, but when a family is bringing in six figures and having the same problem, there's something else going on. As humans, we have an insatiable appetite for things. In our apostolate, we try to bring balance back.
The fifth principle, develop personal responsibility, applies to all aspects of our life, including our family and work obligations. We're called to fulfill our duties and when it comes to finances, there are things it's proper to do if you want to manage your money well, such as using a budget and managing a checkbook. Couples need to use some of these tools if they're going to know where they're at with their finances. Otherwise they'll find themselves over-spending and falling into the trap of using credit cards to make up for any shortfall. The minimum payment on credit cards allows them to feel that they are somewhat in control. The debt can easily rise from $2,000 to $5,000 to. … At some point a couple realizes that they are in trouble—they are in a huge amount of debt. Getting it under control is a painful process. By using the tools and applying the principles up front, you avoid that pain.
How are you usually contacted?
About 80% of the time the initial contact is made through the wife. She is feeling pressure and often the couple doesn't have good lines of communication going. Money touches every aspect of your life.
What process does a couple generally go through, from contacting you to working through their financial problems?
Normally, they'll call and say they've accumulated $5,000 to $15,000 debt and they're out of control. We tell them that we have some resources available and we'll send them our workbook, Home Finances for Today's Catholic Family . It's a self-study; the first half goes into the five principles and the second half is practical application, using a sample family and providing blank forms for the couple to fill out. They are required to do the workbook first, before any counseling. If a family wants counseling, they make a copy of their forms and send them to us. Then we'll call them. If they need to get out of debt, then we come up with some scenarios and solutions that honor God and follow the five principles. We work with them to establish a budget. We'll give them a follow-up call and send a memo that summarizes the suggestions.
Basically, the couple has to want to solve the problem themselves. The workbook gives them everything they need to know; that's its beauty.
Again, if you can get the husband and wife to work together, the situation is almost always resolvable in a way that will honor God.
Finances should not be the all-consuming aspect of the marriage. There are so many other dimensions of marriage—mutual enjoyment of each other, parental duty, etc. Catholic teaching allows us to place finances in the proper perspective within marriage, which involves charity, desire for the good of the other, seeking holiness together.
What if someone's spouse isn't willing to work on it?
It's always difficult when one or both are fighting. We would make some recommendations, such as doing all you can from the practical side, maybe take over budgeting, present a simple picture of the finances every three months and show them a few things they can work on. We'd also encourage them, of course, to pray. In the workbook we lay out a basic spiritual plan.
How has your faith influenced your life?
I received a good Catholic formation through the early years and attended Catholic elementary school and Catholic high school, but society's impact on the faith influenced my later years. We never stopped practicing the faith, but things got muddy. From high school to about age 30, something was missing in my faith; there was not a fervor. I got an offer to subscribe to L'Osservatore Romano , took advantage of it, and from reading this newspaper lights began to go on. In his weekly talks, the Holy Father spoke about the Eucharist, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the life of virtue, the role of the family, the role of the laity.
I got excited over what I was reading every week. I began to pray the rosary and attend daily Mass and adoration. I made a consecration to Our Lady and enthroned the Sacred Heart in our home. As my prayer life deepened, a whole other world opened up. I felt challenged to use my talents in whatever way would further God's kingdom and that's when the opportunity to counsel families opened up. Doors continued to open after that.
—Karen Walker
----- EXCERPT: Inperson ----- EXTENDED BODY: Phil Lenahan ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: U.S. Notes & Quotes DATE: 12/21/1997 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 21-27 December, 1997 ----- BODY:Mother Teresa's Letter Arrives on Time
When a sister of the Missionaries of Charity came across a 1981 letter Mother Teresa had typed and signed but never sent, she dropped it in the mail.
But, after 17 years, the letter came to Gilbert Ortiz right on time, according to a Rocky Mountain News report April 4. Its advice on accepting suffering arrived the same day Ortiz learned that his kidneys were failing and that he would die soon.
In the letter, Mother Teresa writes: “Pain, sorrow, and suffering is but the kiss of Jesus … [a] sign that you have come so close to him that he can kiss you. May God give you all the courage to accept your cross with resignation and love in union with the passion of Jesus.”
Ortiz, a barber, wrote his letter to Mother Teresa in 1981 to accompany a donation.
“I know they're going to canonize her as a saint and, as a Catholic, it's hard to believe that I have a letter from a saint,” he is quoted saying.
Should Christians Eat Meat?
When Cardinal Francis George OMI, archbishop of Chicago, received a letter from an animal rights group asking him to promote vegetarianism, he was inspired to write back with an idea of his own.
“Why not spend our energies opposing the deaths of unborn human beings, rather than animals?” he asked, according to an April 3, 1998 report in the Chicago Sun-Times.
In a letter dated March 3, he also flatly rejected the idea that Jesus was a vegetarian, a claim made in a January mailing by the Norfolk, Va.-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) said the report.
The Franciscan Menace?
Mexican-Americans are almost unanimously proud of their heritage and of their Catholic faith. That's why some of them may be offended by a new slant on California history reported in the April 6 Sacramento Bee.
April is the month when many California fourth-grade field trips visit the 21 Spanish Franciscan missions that brought many riches to California: the Catholic faith to heal the soul, modern medicine to heal the body, and prosperity from cattle ranging, orange growing, and wine making.
But now, Catholic faith is considered “harsh discipline,” disease a Western phenomenon, and prosperity a loss of culture.
The article quoted the text of O, California, the fourth-grade text recommended by the state Department of Education, which calls the growth of the missions “tragic.”
The article quoted one teacher who favored the revised, anti-mission slant: “We're rethinking what we want students to know.”
On the other hand, a fourth grader, looking around at the Franciscan mission, ornate with religious artifacts, merely said: “This place is really cool.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: World Notes & Quotes DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:One intrepid reporter has learned a Christian lesson from his international assignments, according to the April 8 San Francisco Chronicle: it's better to own up to one's mistakes squarely and seek forgiveness.
“En route to China, with a stop at [the University of California at] Berkeley for a conference at the Graduate School of Journalism, Washington Post correspondent John Pomfret reflected on a major difference between the conflicts in Bosnia [where he spent four years] and the former Zaire [where he spent three months],” said the report.
“In Bosnia, he says, people were not concerned about the accuracy of reporting, just whether it was positive or negative about their side. Was it good for the Serbs or bad for the Serbs? Or the Croats? Or the Muslims? Bosnians never showed him a place where an atrocity had been perpetrated by their own ethnic group.
“In Zaire, he was taken to massacre scenes by people whose enemies had been slaughtered. ‘They were bad people,’ a man might say, ‘but they shouldn't have been killed like that. I am a Christian. This was wrong.’”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ------ TITLE: Vatican Notes & Quotes DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:Soviet Plot to Assassinate Pope
Many scholars in the West have begun to give Pope John Paul II a healthy share of the credit for the spectacular 1989 collapse of the Soviet Union.
As it turns out, one group had given him credit all along: the KGB. “The KGB considered assassinating the Pope and conducted a campaign to discredit and destabilize the Roman Catholic Church during the 1980s, according to reports of newly declassified Italian security papers,” said an April 8 BBC report.
The details of the battle between might and right that pitted one of the world's greatest superpowers against the world's smallest state reads like the plot of an action movie.
According to the Italian intelligence papers, the report said: The plan to “discredit the Catholic Church and the Pope himself, who was to be physically eliminated if necessary” was code-named Priest.
Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, in charge of foreign affairs for the Vatican, was also said to be a target. His Vatican apartment was allegedly bugged by a woman KGB agent who married his nephew. She switched a statuette he displayed with a look-alike containing a microphone, it said.
The Vatican, which did not deny that the KGB had targeted the Church, dismissed the story about Cardinal Casaroli as pure fantasy. A spokesman also pointed out that the cardinal had no such nephew.
The Pope's New Poetry CD
Business Wire News Service reported March 31 that RCA Victor is releasing Poems from The Pope.
“The 15 poems are recited in Italian by renowned actor Vittorio Gassman over lush soundscapes of choir and orchestra. Original music is by Olimpio Petrossi and Mintur. Petrossi also did the arrangements and produced the recording. The CD booklet contains English translations as well as notes from the Pope on the creation of these poems. Poems from the Pope was in stores on CD and cassette April 7.
“The inspiration for the material on Poems from the Pope ranges from the Pontiff's youth spent working in the stone quarries and chemical factories of Krakow, Poland to the history of his homeland, the Gospel, and his thoughts on man. Some listeners may be surprised to learn that one piece, ‘Attore’ (The Actor), was inspired by Pope John Paul II's theatrical career. While still in school, he adapted the works of 18th-century Polish poets for the stage and later published two plays of his own. Another work, ‘Il Pavimento’ (The Floor), was written in St. Peter's Basilica while he was participating in the historic Second Vatican Council. One moving poem, ‘In memoria di un compagno di lavoro’ (In Memory of a Fellow Worker), recounts the young Karol Wojtyla's flood of emotions as he witnessed the accidental death of a co-worker in a chemical factory.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Guns & Children in America DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:The United States continues to top the countries of the civilized world in deaths by gunfire. In 1992, for example, 13,200 people died in firearms-related deaths in the United States to Canada's 128. More important, the firearm death rate among U.S. children younger than 15 was nearly 12 times higher than that among children in the other 25 industrialized countries combined.
Even so, like crime generally, juvenile violence involving guns has been on the decline since 1994, for which the downturn in the crack cocaine trade is largely credited. Nevertheless, these figures can be deceiving. Youth violence, in the opinion of many experts, has merely stabilized, and at a level that would have seemed very high only a generation ago. What's more, while the number of murders committed by children under 14 remains small, among older teens the figure is double what it was a decade ago.
—Gabriel Meyer
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: John Paul II's Annual Easter Message DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:You know what took place regarding Jesus of Nazareth … we are witnesses to all that he did both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem” (cf. Acts 10:37-38). These are the words which the Apostle Peter, a witness to the resurrection of Christ, addressed to the centurion Cornelius and his household.
Today the witnesses speak: the eye-witnesses present at the events of Good Friday, those who were afraid before the Sanhedrin, those who on the third day found the tomb empty. Witnesses to the resurrection were, first, the women of Jerusalem and Mary of Magdala; and later the Apostles, informed by the women: first Peter and John, then all the rest.
Another witness was Saul of Tarsus, converted at the gates of Damascus, whom Christ permitted to experience the power of his resurrection, that he might become the chosen vessel of the missionary thrust of the early Church.
Yes, today the witnesses speak out: not only the first ones, the eye-witnesses, but also those who, from them, have learned the Easter message and have borne testimony to Christ crucified and risen from generation to generation. Some have been witnesses even to the shedding of their blood and, thanks to them, the Church has continued on her way, also amid harsh persecutions and obstinate rejection.
On the strength of this unending testimony the Church has grown, and is now spread throughout the world. Today is the feast of all witnesses; including those of our own century, who have proclaimed Christ in the midst of the “great tribulation” (Rev 7:14), confessing his death and resurrection in the concentration camps and the gulags, under the threat of bombs and guns, amid the terror unleashed by the blind hatred which has tragically engulfed individuals and whole nations. Today they come from the great tribulation and sing the glory of Christ: in him, rising from the shadows of death, life has been made manifest.
Today, we too are witnesses to the Risen Christ and we repeat his proclamation of peace to all humanity on its way to the third millennium. We bear witness to his death and resurrection, especially to the men and women of our own time, caught up in fratricidal strife and slaughter which reopen the wounds of ethnic rivalries, and, in different parts of every continent, especially in Africa and in Europe, are now sowing in the earth the seed of death and new conflicts for a sad tomorrow.
This proclamation of peace is for all those who are undergoing a calvary seemingly without end, thwarted in their aspiration for respect for their dignity and human rights, for justice, for employment, for fairer living conditions.
May this proclamation be an inspiration to the leaders of the nations and to every person of good will, especially in the Middle East and particularly in Jerusalem, where peace is put at risk by dangerous political decisions. May it give fresh courage to those who have believed and still believe in dialogue as the way to settle national and international tensions. May it fill everyone's heart with the boldness of the hope which springs from the truth being recognized and respected, so that new and promising prospects of solidarity may open up in the world.
Christ, who died and rose for us, you are the foundation of our hope! We wish to make our own the testimony of Peter and that of countless other brothers and sisters down the centuries, in order to proclaim it again at the threshold of the new Millennium. It is true: “The stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner” (Ps118:22). On this foundation is built the Church of the Living God, the Church of the Risen Christ. In today's liturgy this Church sings a song both old and ever new. With words filled with ardor she proclaims the victory of life over death: “Mors et Vita duello conflixere mirando….” “Death and life joined in a wondrous duel. The Lord of life was dead; but now, alive, he triumphs.” And as though it had happened only yesterday, the Church turns to Mary of Magdala, who was the first to meet the Risen Lord: “Dic nobis, Maria, quid vidisti in via?” “Tell us, Mary, what did you see on the way? The tomb of the living Christ, the glory of the Risen Christ, and his witnesses the angels, the shroud and his garments. Christ, my hope, is risen; he goes before you into Galilee.”
Today, you, the Risen One, wish to meet us in every corner of the earth, just as yesterday you met the Apostles in Galilee. By virtue of this encounter we too can repeat: “Scimus Christum surrexisse a mortuis vere: tu nobis, victor Rex, miserere.” “Yes, we are certain: Christ is truly risen. O victorious King, bring us your salvation.”
----- EXCERPT: URBI ET ORBI ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: El Salvador's Messenger of Love DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:An active book. Since it has entered my house, what is there that it has not stirred up? Since it has entered me, what is there that it has not moved?” So wrote Jacques Rivière, the great French critic, of Charles Péguy's poems. Péguy, he said, was able to convey “the taste of truth which does not lie.” The Violence of Love is this kind of book, with this kind of taste. Now and then, across the world, we find such writers.
In London, in the blitz, there was Caryll Houselander. In New York's Bowery, Peter Maurin. And in El Salvador, Archbishop Oscar Romero. What is it they have in common, save that they will not let us alone? In spite of the terrible things they say, we hear them willingly. As Herod heard John the Baptizer?
At any rate, we hear them willingly, and know them for prophets. We are not surprised when the message is suddenly cut off by violence, but we remember. While Archbishop Romero's message flowed, it was clear, cold water in the desert of El Salvador. It was the undiluted truth that gripped, then haunted, and in the end drove men to kill him.
The archbishop had a way of presenting truth that could not be denied. He spoke the Gospel theme of love with complete integrity. This is why the desire of some proponents of liberation theology to “adopt” him and his sainthood miss the mark. The limitations of that theology would short-change his message.
As he says: “When individuals or groups want to work only for the earth and have no horizon of eternity and don't care about religious horizons, they are not complete liberators. Today they struggle for power, and once in power, tomorrow they will be the worst repressors if they have no horizon that goes beyond history to sanction the good and the bad that we do on earth….”
Indeed, he suffers from liberation theologians’ erroneous readings of his words and his life. “I want to … reply to those who want to put me at odds with the Holy See,” he wrote, “The archbishop of San Salvador is proud of being in communion with the Holy Father. He respects and loves the successor of Peter. I know that I would not serve you well, beloved people of God, if I were to tear you off from the unity of the Church. Far be it from me! I would rather die a thousand times than be a schismatic bishop!”
His hearers knew that his words were the valid articulation of his life; they knew, as he did, how it would all end. He fought the violence of hatred with the violence of love, and won.
Jesuit Father James Brockman, the compiler and translator of this book, has done something extraordinary. With a keen instinct for essentials he has selected passages from homilies and newspaper columns of Archbishop Romero delivered and written between Feb. 22, 1977, the day of his consecration as archbishop of San Salvador, and March 24, 1980, the day he was assassinated during his last homily. Through these excerpts we follow the sequence of events in the tumultuous city and nation. Yet in the midst of tragedy, the leitmotif is love. It is not about love; it is love speaking.
There is more, however—and this is what turns the book into a personal experience for the reader. Father Brockman has opted to set out the fecund phrases in a kind of poetic format, reminiscent of the rhythms of Caryll Houselander, the Easy Essays of Peter Maurin, or Péguy's Mysteries and Tapestries. Archbishop Romero's words lend themselves to this type of interpretive presentation because his approach is totally direct and uncomplicated.
The effect is that we feel moved to pause at line's end, savor the thought, and then proceed at a contemplative, unhurried pace. There is room to think, space to reflect—even pray. The book is a catalyst. To his people, the archbishop spoke quietly, in the language of poetry, about things close to their earthliness, their creaturehood. He spoke with the unshad-owed vision of a child, awakening the child in his hearers. We can almost see the poor of El Salvador packed in the cathedral week after week for the 8:00 A.M. Sunday Mass. They listened avidly as their pastor spoke out the secrets of their hearts, owned the agony they were living through and the hopes no tragedy could silence. Over the radio a whole nation hung on his words—until the station was bombed.
Archbishop Romero told his people from the outset how it was with him, what it felt like to face the sea of faces looking to him for reassurance. In a few words, by revealing his utter dependence on them, he taught them the reciprocal nature of the Church, which they were: “I came to you weak and fearful.
God knows how hard it was for me also to come here to the capital, how timid I have felt before you, except for the support that you, as a Church, have given me. You have made your bishop a sign of Christianity.” In two sentences he lay open the theology of preaching: “What is my word, what is human wisdom but a noise that reaches the outer ear? But from that ear to the heart lies a road that only God can travel.”
The archbishop knew firsthand what was happening in El Salvador. He bore the pain of those who grieved for abducted family members; the wounds of those who were being tortured in prisons at the very moment when he was preaching.
With their families he pleaded: “Do not let the serpent of rancor nest in your hearts. There is no greater misfortune than a vindictive heart, even though it be turned against those who have tortured your children, against the criminal hands that have placed them among the missing. Do not hate.”
The thought of death—his own death—was never far from him. Living in the midst of violence, he pondered its mystery in depth: “The Church believes in only one violence, that of Christ, who was nailed to the cross.”
He spoke with a love that left no one out, not even the murderers of his recent predecessors in the capital: “Who knows if the one whose hands are bloodied with Father Grande's murder, or the one who shot Father Navarro, if those who have killed, who have tortured, who have done so much evil, are listening to me? Listen, there in your criminal hideout, perhaps already repentant, you too are called to forgiveness.”
For his enemies, who had hounded him unmercifully for three years in the media and with personal threats, only waiting for their chance to kill him, he had the last word: “If I have the joy of possessing heaven, I would not mind being in that heaven near to those who today declare themselves my enemies, because there we will not be enemies. I am never anyone's enemy. But let those who without cause want to be my enemies be converted to love, and in love we shall meet in the blessedness of God.”
The Violence of Love is a book to read with caution. It is indeed an active book; once you give it house room, it is very likely to stir up, to move.
Dominican Sister Mary Thomas Noble writes from Buffalo, New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mary Thomas Noble OP ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: The Universe: Divine Plan or Random Creation? DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gn 1:1). Despite the enormous controversy surrounding the structure, function, and interpretation of Genesis 1:1-3, one apparent conclusion concerns the centrality of God in the creation of the cosmos. An important theological implication flowing from this is that God as origin and end (alpha and omega) of everything imbues creation with divine purpose: nothing happens completely randomly or capriciously. That creation is ordered and follows a divine purpose points to an inherent cosmic structure that itself follows various laws.
Ironically it is this biblical view of a universe which has led to groundbreaking discoveries that seem to test explanations of God's importance in creation.
Martin Rees, who currently serves as a Royal Society research professor and as Great Britain's Astronomer Royal, has published a popularly written scientific book that presents the newest findings from astronomy on the universe's origins. Despite the subtitle Our Universe and Others which led this reviewer to think the author was going to delve into fanciful science fiction-like theories that would go beyond hard science, Before the Beginning tries to stick close to hard science—even when explaining the most recent revolutionary theory in cosmological thought, the multi-universe theory.
Sadly, God doesn't figure into Rees's book, for he is, according to Stephen Hawking's introduction, only “a theoretical concept.”
The major advancements in scientific cosmology have been made in the 20th century. These recent advances are founded on Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity (his gravitational theory) that challenged Sir Isaac Newton's concept of absolute space by establishing a link between gravity and the curved space. Unlike Newton's theories of a static universe, Einstein, who unified our concept of time and space, allowed for an expanding universe. In the 1920s, Edward Hubble discovered that galaxies were moving away from us at a speed proportional to their distance. Hubble's finding confirmed part of Einstein's theory and provided the observational proof for an expanding universe.
The second fundamentally important discovery was that of cosmic microwave background radiation (COBE) by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at Bell Labs in 1964-65; this radiation constitutes a vestige from the original fireball, the so-called big bang. Taken together, these two discoveries provided the groundwork for the replacement of the steady-state theory of continuous expansion of an unchanging universe with the big bang theory hypothesized by George Gamow and Georges LemaÓtre which holds that the universe has not existed forever but was initially created from highly compressed and extremely hot gases (about 10 billion degrees). What is not definite about the big bang theory is whether the universe will continue expanding forever, or if it will collapse upon itself at some future time.
In his 15-chapter book, Rees discusses the various recent (i.e., post-1960s) discoveries that confirm the big bang theory. Among the most important of these include the detection of black holes, pulsars, and dark matter. The multiverse theory hypothesizes that a perpetually expanding multiverse may give birth to a number of separate universes or “domains.” For each universe, the laws of physics, which may be different in each one, are established. For complexity and life to develop, particular physical laws must be established. In our universe, whether or not it constitutes part of a larger collection of universes, the laws governing it had to permit the emergence of evolution and life.
Interestingly, Rees employs the word cosmology rather than astronomy to describe the scientific processes involved in the development of the universe(s). Traditionally, astronomy (or, perhaps more technically, astrophysics) has been considered the academic discipline that deals with scientific issues concerning the universe, its creation, expansion, and final destiny. Cosmology, on the other hand, has been considered a branch of philosophy or theology concerned with metaphysical issues of creation.
Rees’ thought, like that of Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking who have influenced him, exhibits this recent trend in science that crosses transdiscipli-nary boundaries.
In theological language, Rees's argument closely resembles the design argument. George Shields, in an article entitled “The Wider Design Argument and the New Physics” in Science, Technology, and Religious Ideas, edited by Mark Shale and George Shields (University of America Press, 1994), postulates that cosmological models fall under the general rubric that the universe either is or is not “logically necessary.” Aweakness of the logical necessity argument is found in the explanation of determinism or the multiverse. The problem—as Shields sees it—is that scientific cosmological explanations cannot sufficiently deal with contingency (i.e., what is the fundamentally necessary reason why the four primordial forces—strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, electromagnetism, and gravity—arose and evolved as they did resulting in the universe as we know it today?). A related question concerns how these laws then developed into a coherent structure that ultimately gave rise to life. Notwithstanding Rees's thoughtful scientific explanation of “selection effect,” the basis still depends on coincidence or luck. This underscores the conception of an arbitrary and capricious universe as outlined in a poem by Stephen Crane (1871-1900) entitled A Man Said to the Universe:
“A man said to the universe: ‘Sir I exist!’ ‘However,’ replied the universe, ‘The fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.’”
According to our Christian faith, however, what seems arbitrary and coincidental in creation has been part of God's plan from the very beginning.
Stigmatine Father Pius Murray is a professor of Old Testament and library director at Pope John XXlll National Seminary in Weston, Massachusetts.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Pius Murray CSS ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Letters DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:Another Read on MLK
Raymond DeSouza's column “Free at Last?” (April 5-11) mistakenly tries to honor Rev. Martin Luther King by dishonoring America's founding principles of equality and liberty. But Rev. King's struggle to realize equal rights for all stands or falls by those principles. In fact, if you disregard America's founding principles, you end up agreeing with his racist opponents who charged him with mere rebellion against law.
The column implicitly equates the South's old segregation policies with South African apartheid and even with Soviet communism. It focuses so narrowly on “oppression” that it ignores the elementary moral difference between authoritarian regimes and American constitutional government, which is based on certain great “moral truths” (to quote the Holy Father's words praising the American founding). To ignore this distinction is not only a glaring mistake; it also harms the cause of freedom everywhere.
To build a civilization of love, Christians must proclaim the Gospel and must also defend the Founders’ high moral vision that finds its source in “the laws of nature and of nature's God.”
Rev. King did not ignore that distinction. He recognized that his campaign for equal rights differed from revolutions against despotic governments whose very ideals denied the self-evident truth that all men are created equal. For the United States not to recognize the equal rights of black Americans constitutes a failure to live up to her own noble principles of human dignity. To be true to our own highest self, Rev. King's demand for equal treatment had to be granted. By contrast, the struggle for justice in South Africa or the USSR required abandoning their foundations that were based on race or class discrimination.
Thus, in the Pauline-style Letter from a Birmingham City Jail, Rev. King wrote that the civil rights demonstrators “were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy that were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”
Secondly, the assertion that Rev. King contributed to the Magisterium is doubtful. He learned about the imperatives of conscience from Sts. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, not the other way around.
Finally, Mr. DeSouza should not so easily dismiss Dr. King's character problems. His own biographers report that he dishonestly acquired the graduate degree his profession required and he recklessly violated his pledged faith to spouse and children. All men are sinners, indeed, but is it not self-contradictory for the column to venerate a leader who called on the nation to respect “the dignity of the human person” and then to claim it doesn't matter that he did not bear witness to his own call?
Dennis Teti Alexandria, Virginia
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ------- TITLE: In Post-WWII America, Clues For Would-be Convert-Makers DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:In recent years Holy Saturday has signaled not just the end of Lent and the dawn of the Easter season, but also the entrance of new Catholics into the Church through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). Not every parish has an RCIA program, and not every RCIA program is well constructed, but those considerations are overshadowed by our joy in welcoming new souls into the Body of Christ.
Parishes rightly publish statistics about their RCIA programs, and many of them can boast of more catechumens this year than last. I have seen parish bulletins crowing that the number of catechumens has reached double digits, and some dioceses, combining tallies for all their parishes, have busted their statistical buttons in showing off totals that creep past the 1,000 mark. In the most recent issue of the diocesan newspaper, my own diocese did just that.
As encouraging as the numbers are, they need to be put into perspective. Half a century ago, when America's Catholic population was only 25 million (compared to today's 60 million), a poor New York parish serving an ethnic group with a historically tiny percentage of Catholics was able to produce more converts than most dioceses today. In 1946 alone, St. Aloysius Parish in Harlem counted a remarkable 450 converts—and its achievement was not unique.
St. Charles parish, also in Harlem, grew from 318 parishioners to 6,500 in 14 years. That's 442 converts a year. In a single year St. Francis Xavier Parish in Baltimore brought in 206 converts (about a fifth of what my populous diocese generated this year). St. Charles Borromeo in Philadelphia garnered 227, Sacred Heart of Jesus in Detroit 180, and St. Anthony of Padua in the Bronx 140. Asingle priest in Lansing, Mich., averaged 50 converts a year for 25 years, and in Chicago a priest made 1,300 converts in 21 years—that's 62 a year by one man.
At a time when there were only 40% as many Catholics in the United States as there are today, when parishes were much poorer, when there was no easy access to mass communication, how did we reap such harvests? The story is told in Winning Converts , a book my apostolate, Catholic Answers , reprinted recently. It appeared originally in 1948 and shows that what worked then can work again.
‘I know there's someone waiting for me, so I go. After all, I'm a priest.’
Of course, since that time the dynamics have changed. In the 1940s most conversions were made by priests. Today the majority are made by laymen. Priests in post-war America worried that too few laymen were interested in seeking converts. Today many laymen worry that too few priests think convert-making is respectable. This change was highlighted in the contribution by Father John McGinn, then head of the Paulist League and editor of Techniques for Convert-Makers . He opened with this: “The writer takes the view that the American clergy are vividly aware of the necessity of a more systematic and energetic apostolate to the non-Catholics of our country.”
You have to smile. However accurate that may have been of the clergy as a whole in 1948, I think it is not uncharitable to say that it is not accurate today, even though there are many priests who take a keen interest in conversions. While Father McGinn's remark may seem out of date, it inspires us because it shows what the Church in this country once did and what it can do again.
Of the original contributors to Winning Converts , only one survived to the book's reprinting. Father William Quinlan, ordained in 1938 for the Archdiocese of Chicago, has been in active retirement since 1984.
“I always have been a street man, knocking on doors, searching for fallen-away Catholics,” he told me. He says true evangelization involves going “into the highways and byways,” looking for people who have been waiting for a reason to investigate the Church for the first time or for an invitation to come home after years of not practicing the faith.
Understandably, getting out is no longer easy for a man in his ninth decade.
“Often I don't feel like going door to door,” admitted Father Quinlan. “Maybe I'm tired or it's dark. But I know there's someone waiting for me, so I go. After all, I'm a priest.” This is the spirit that produced the flood of conversions in the 1940s and could produce another flood at the dawn of the millennium.
Five decades ago there were high hopes, but, in the years following the original publication of Winning Converts , conversions dipped, then plummeted, and the Church grew not so much because the unchurched or Protestants were brought into it, but because of the baby boom and immigration. Perhaps the recent RCIA numbers, though nothing to crow about compared to the numbers of the 1940s, are an early sign of another upsurge.
In the 1980s, parishes weren't making much of a hubbub regarding their catechumens. (Why bother, when many had but one or two a year?) Despite generally inadequate RCIA materials, we are seeing more converts and more interest in getting converts. Catholics again are taking pride in bringing new faces into the Church. In Newman's phrase, could it be a Second Spring?
Karl Keating is founding director of Catholic Answers.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Separating Church and State: The Sad, the Comical, the Absurd DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:Erroneous application of the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses of the First Amendment have solidified the notion that expressions of faith have no place in public
Separation of Church and state is an idea that comes built-in to our American mentality. It is one of those phrases, like “all men are created equal,” that we have all grown up believing in. We cannot remember ever actually learning it. It somehow seems that we have always known it. But what does separation of Church and state really mean, not just in theory, but in practice? Does it mean the same thing to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and to the present Supreme Court as it did to America's Founders? And what of the tens of thousands of bureaucrats, ranging from public school principals to park rangers, who try to apply it day in and day out. How do they all understand it?
The answers to these questions are sometimes serious and sometimes comical. But taken together they paint a disturbing portrait of the current state of religious liberty in America. First, however, some background.
The Original Idea
Contrary to what most Americans assume, the phrase “separation of Church and state” does not appear at all in the Constitution. It is, instead, a shorthand expression for what does appear in the Constitution: the establishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” the clause reads. As with all shorthand expressions, “separation of Church and state” serves its purpose so long as everyone remembers the precise point that it stands for. But, as with all shorthand expressions, it can cause real problems when it takes on a life of its own. In order to understand what separation of Church and state really means it is necessary to understand what the First Amendment itself means.
The First Amendment, like the Bill of Rights generally, was originally designed as a check on the federal government. It was designed to give the states the freedom to legislate on religious matters, as on most other subjects. States like Massachusetts could have an official religion if they wanted. (The official religion of Massachusetts was Congregationalism up until 1833.) States like Virginia could have no established religion. That is why the establishment clause bans laws “respecting an establishment of religion”—it was phrased to prohibit both laws that set up a national Church and also laws that might forbid established Churches at the state level.
The First Amendment was written against the backdrop of the various state constitutions, all of which dealt with religion in one way or another. Each of the 13 original state constitutions explicitly referred to God. (Today, 48 of 50 still do.) Eleven of the 13 original states included in their constitutions explicitly religious tests for holding state office. And some of the states, like Massachusetts, even had their own established Churches. In short, the founders'original intent was for separation of Church and the federal government.
It was never the founders’ intent to seal religion off from government or from society generally. President Madison, for example, who originally drafted the First Amendment, proclaimed a day of fasting and prayer for his war of 1812. Earlier, writing in support of the adoption of the Constitution, he credited God with assisting in the constitutional convention itself. “It is impossible,” he wrote, “for the men of pious reflection not to perceive in it the finger of that almighty hand which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolution.” And George Washington, in his farewell address, reminded the nation that “religion and morality are indispensable supports” for American democracy.
The reach of the First Amendment lengthened after the Civil War, but its basic purpose stayed unchanged. Following the Civil War, Congress proposed and the states ratified the 14th Amendment. As interpreted by the Supreme Court, the 14th Amendment, among other things, extends the First Amendment's prohibitions to the states as well. So, read together, the First and 14th Amendments mean that neither the federal government nor any state or local government can establish a religion or prohibit its free exercise. This is, of course, a good thing. No modern American wants states setting up official religions.
Activist Judges
Nevertheless, as important as it was, this development did no more than extend the First Amendment's prohibitions to the states. It still did not come close to removing religion from public life. So how did we get from there to the now-familiar ban on Christmas trees in many public schools? Via an activist majority on the Supreme Court and a host of dim-witted bureaucrats.
Following World War II, a majority of Supreme Court justices began to interpret the First Amendment—and, in fact, the entire Constitution—more loosely. Suddenly the Establishment Clause, which had originally been designed to ban only an official Church, mutated into something quite different. The Supreme Court majority began to insist that all government officials, from the president down to substitute public school teachers, had to be neutral not only among individual religions but also between religion and what the Court called “irreligion.” That is, not only could government employees not do anything to play favorites between one religion and another, they also could not do anything to “advance” or “endorse” religion generally. That triggered a massive effort to purge religion from public life and treat it instead as just another private choice.
For example, the Court now considers tax exemptions for religious activities and organizations to be permissible only if they are a part of a larger tax exemption for charities generally. In Texas Monthly, Inc. v. Bullock , the Court struck down a state sales tax exemption for religious publications because it did not also cover non-religious publications. The justices wrote that “when government directs a subsidy exclusively to religious organizations,” that effort normally violates the Establishment Clause. In a later case, Jimmy Swaggart Ministries v. Board of Equalization of California , the Court said that the government may tax religious organizations if it chooses. What is more, the Court emphasized that the government can only choose not to tax them when the tax exemption for religious organizations is “part of the general exemption for nonprofit institutions.” Taken together, the cases demonstrate the Court's determination not to permit tax benefits to religious organizations, as such, but only as one among many types of charity.
The Court has been even stingier with other types of public benefits. The Court's majority has made clear that it will permit government aid to go to religious organizations only as the result of the private choices of individuals. So, for example, in Witters v. Washington Department of Services for the Blind , the Court permitted Washington State to issue a vocational tuition grant to a blind man who intended to use the money to attend a Bible college. The Court approved the scholarship because it was not given directly to the college, but only to Witters, who was then free to apply it to either religious or secular colleges. Similarly, in Agostini v. Felton , the Court held that New York City could give federally funded remedial instruction to disadvantaged children inside parochial school buildings. But that was possible, the majority reasoned, only because the same remedial instruction is offered to all school children. That way it is the children's parents, not the state, who are responsible for the tutoring being given inside parochial schools. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor compared the case to a federal worker donating her government paycheck to her Church. Once again, the underlying principle is the privatization of religion: the government itself, which gives public benefits to all sorts of things, cannot give any public benefits to religion, although it is acceptable if some private citizens choose to use their own government benefits at religious institutions.
Candy Canes in the Manger
The privatization principle is best seen, however, in the Court's religious display cases. In two badly splintered decisions, Lynch v. Donnelly and Allegheny County v. ACLU , the Court managed to hold that government display of nativity scenes at Christmas and menorahs for Hanukkah are permissible only when their context makes clear that the government does not endorse their message. In the lower courts this has come to be known as the “plastic reindeer rule“—i.e., a rule requiring Christmas Nativity scenes to be festooned with plastic reindeer, candy canes and other trinkets to negate any possible religious theme. Indeed, the lower courts have taken this kind of analysis one step further, and are busily striking down municipal seals, emblems, and mottoes containing religious symbols. One federal appeals court recently struck down a city seal that contained, among other things, a cross. Another struck down two other seals that included religious heraldry.
“There is no logical stopping point to this process,” says one Church-state lawyer. “What's next, renaming San Francisco?”
The Supreme Court is protecting, under the Free Speech Clause, private religious expression in open public places, but only barely. In Capitol Square v. Pinette , the Court ruled that the Ku Klux Klan had the right to erect a cross in a public square that was open to other unattended displays. Nevertheless a majority of the Court was unwilling to make that rule absolute. Five justices held open the possibility that some private religious speech might have to be discriminated against to avoid any misunderstanding that the private speech might represent the government's own view. The majority's rationale is that religious expression belongs in private. Therefore there should never be any religious expression as part of the government's own cultural celebrations, and even public expressions of private faith will get only grudging toleration as free speech.
What is more, challenges to public religion, and only challenges to public religion, enjoy relaxed standards of what is called standing. The doctrine of standing strictly limits lawsuits in federal court to parties who have suffered some concrete injury. Only one whose ox has been gored may sue. This is, of course, a wise policy. It keeps generalized policy disputes out of court and in the democratic process where they belong. Thus, as a general rule, citizens may not sue merely to attempt to change government policies they disagree with—except for religion. Any taxpayer is permitted to sue to claim that the government is violating the Establishment Clause. The result is that radical secularist groups, such as the aptly named Freedom From Religion Foundation, the ACLU and others, have standing to sue to remove religion from public life anywhere in the country.
Some individual justices have tried to take privatization even further. Justice John Paul Stevens in particular has compiled a remarkable voting record. In his nearly 22 years on the Court he has voted in favor of finding an establishment of religion in almost every Establishment Clause case he has heard. The only exceptions have concerned the constitutionality of federal anti-discrimination laws and cases concerning limited, neutral benefits. He has also written some amazing individual opinions. In Board of Education of Kiryas Joel School District v. Grumet , the Court struck down a public school district composed exclusively of Hasidic Jews. Justice Stevens voted with the majority but also took the trouble to write his own, separate opinion. In it he said that one of the things that was wrong with such a school district was that it aided Hasidic Jewish parents in raising their children to be Hasidic Jews.
“Kiryas Joel was difficult legally,” says a lawyer familiar with the case. “But one would have thought that, whatever else might have been wrong with the school district, something that was surely right with it was that it helped parents raise their children in their faith.”
Justice Stevens has even gone so far as to suggest that moral convictions are an unconstitutionally religious basis for legislation. In his dissenting opinion in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services , he wrote that a legislative preamble declaring life to begin at conception violates the Establishment Clause, because it “endorses the theological position that there is the same secular interest in preserving the life of a fetus during the first 40 or 80 days of pregnancy as there is after viability—indeed, after the time when the fetus has become a person with legal rights protected by the Constitution.”
The privatization of religion is accomplished even more crudely when the idea reaches the lower, bureaucratic levels of government. While the courts are formally charged with interpreting the Constitution, the day-in, day-out practical interpretation falls to park rangers, zoning commissioners, public school principals—all the various low-to-mid level government employees who actually deal with the public. Many are, in practice, even more hostile to religious expression than Justice Stevens is. Their hostility, however, tends not to derive from ideology so much as from simple-minded bureaucracy. They have been conditioned, over the years, in the belief that to allow religion anywhere near the government is to risk a lawsuit by the ACLU or others. Consequently, they tend to avoid trouble by avoiding religion. The results are sometimes sad and sometimes funny, but always very serious.
Merry ‘Sparkle Season’
It is common for public school districts to ban Christmas trees in the mistaken belief that they violate the Constitution. Pittsburgh has gone a step further and actually renamed Christmas and Hanukkah. Pittsburgh now refers to the holidays collectively as “Sparkle Season.” And at what used to be called Easter, public school children now get unnamed chocolate eggs from something called the “Special Bunny.” The movement seems to be gaining momentum. Several school districts have done away with Halloween, either because it was once called All Hallow's Eve or because it has roots in Druidism. The reasons vary, but either way it apparently sounds too religious. And Hillsborough, New Jersey, has banned Valentine's Day, because it was originally named after St. Valentine. Now little boys who have crushes on little girls can only give them “Special Person Cards,” because in Hillsborough Feb. 14 is now “Special Person Day.”
One would think that these sorts of misunderstandings would be rare. Unfortunately, they are not only common, they also cut across age groups and types of government agencies. A particularly good example is one that Perry Mason might have called the “Case of the Sacred Parking Barrier.” For many years, behind the tea garden in Golden Gate Park in California, there stood an abandoned parking barrier. And for many years parkgoers tried unsuccessfully to get it removed. Nothing happened until three years ago, when a New Age group discovered the parking barrier and began to worship it. Almost immediately, the same park officials who had long neglected to remove the parking barrier as an eyesore decided they now had to remove it to preserve, in their words, “the constitutional separation of Church and state.”
It is easy, and healthy, to laugh at these kinds of stories. Others, however, are more poignant. In May 1994, a public school student in Baltimore was in shop class, making a cross for his grandmother's grave. Just as he was about to attach the cross piece, his teacher discovered the nature of the project, snatched it from the boy's hand and scolded him that crosses could not be made in public school classes.
All of these stories, the funny as well as the sad, are serious. Each represents not only some bureaucrat's misunderstanding of the law. Each represents an interaction between the government and the citizenry in which the citizens (usually young, impressionable ones) are instructed by the government that expressions of faith do not belong in public. The cumulative effect of these episodes on our culture is considerable—especially when they are combined with a steady drumbeat of court opinions and the unrelenting media efforts of radical secularist groups.
Nearly two full generations of Americans have grown up since the Supreme Court first embarked on its campaign of neutrality between religion and its opposite. Along the way, far too many have come to assume that the separation of Church and state means the separation of religion and public life.
Next Week: Where Are We Going?
Kevin Hasson is president and general counsel of The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a bipartisan and ecumenical public-interest law firm that protects the free expression of all religious traditions.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kevin Hasson ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: A Cult Watcher Reveals a Few Secrets of the Trade DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:March 31, 1998: God did not send the spaceship. Today's disappointment follows last week's letdown when God did not deliver a message on Channel 18. Therefore a Taiwanese group has announced its departure from Garland, Texas, a suburb of Dallas— which the leader had chosen as home base because Garland sounded like “God Land” to the newcomers. Since God did not send the spaceship to take them away before the tribulations, the group has decided to move to Gary, Ind.
A number of newspapers, and radio and television shows interviewed me recently about this group because I have had some experience with cults in the past few years. I told the press I could not predict what the members of this group would do, since each group makes up its own rules. However, a few general patterns are found among cult groups, and increasing awareness of these patterns is worth discussing.
First, the leader of a cult is the source of all truth in the world to its members. He or she alone has direct contact with God, various spirits, the ascended masters of the Great White Brotherhood (Madame Blavatsky, various branches of theosophy, and the Church Universal and Triumphant are allegedly in contact with these spirits; Oscar Ichazo, the man through whom the enneagram was channeled by spirits, also says he is in contact with the ascended masters), beings from outer space, or combinations of these resources. The leaders are able to convince their followers that the particular source making contact with him or her is in charge of the universe, knows all that is important, and is presently revealing very important information to a select few. Occasionally the leader claims to have acquired the information without the help of these celestial sources.
Second, the members of the group must come to the leader to receive all important information. In members’ minds, the rest of the world does not know anything, so no one in society can offer a valid critique. Sometimes the leaders reject the principles of logic and reason since these tools can trick the follower into a rejection of the leader or of the basic principles. The use of other philosophies is rejected, since the leader offers the only complete way of thinking possible. In addition to cutting off relationships with the outside world, the followers are discouraged from having close friendships among themselves.
All knowledge comes from the top down; listen only to the leader and not to each other.
This isolation is commonly reinforced by using language in a new and unconventional way. The same English words may be used by cult members, but they give those words a meaning known only to cult members. When you think you have carried on a serious dialogue, and then discover that the other person took away an impression completely opposite from your express words, the problem may be in the way the cult has redefined the terms for the followers. Particularly, they have their own definition of terms like “Christ,” “God,” and other religious words.
Third, the cult has many control techniques to dominate and manipulate members. Certainly, all groups, from the family to the military, police and Church, use various means to maintain control over members of their societies. However, the difference between the army's control over a soldier and a cult's control over a member is that the army knows how to limit the controls. When a soldier is off duty or discharged, the military's control is over. The cult goes beyond a critical mass of controls and it does not have a sense of its limits or of the rights of the individuals.
Fourth, cults design themselves, either consciously or unconsciously, to target particular members of society. Some cults recruit the young because they are energetic and will be able to work hard in the cult's enterprises. Some groups target physically attractive people as sexual objects. Other cults target the middle-aged or elderly because they already have money and may be persuaded to give it up. Rarely do cults target the ignorant or the poor. Though a few exceptions have existed of cults directed to the poor, most cults seek middle class and highly educated people. Why? Because the highly educated and middle class members can earn more money and have more power than the poor.
The biggest mistake people make is thinking, “I would never fall for the claims of a cult. I'm too smart, religious, or sophisticated to believe a cult leader.” That attitude can be dangerous as it lowers one's defenses against cult tricks of recruitment. The best defense is to admit the possibility and stay alert to any invitations to join new groups. Attractive recruiters have enticed many intelligent prospects into a dinner, lecture, weekend away, etc. “Researchers” have hooked people into filling out questionnaires that revealed exactly the kind of personal information the cult wanted to know before recruitment. A variety of techniques are used, including sexual seduction. The alert person can keep an eye open to protect against recruitment by the cults. The Catholic who knows the Faith and lives it can depend on the help of God to protect against the wickedness and snares of the enemy of our souls.
Jesuit Father Mitch Pacwa is a professor at the Institute for Religious and Pastoral Studies at the University of Dallas.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: The 'Cherished City of Heaven' on Earth DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:Paray-le-Monial, France, is home to the Sacred Heart of Jesus
“Behold this heart which has loved everyone so much that it has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming itself, in order to testify its love.”
—Jesus to St. Margaret Mary
Home to one of the most famous devotions in the Catholic faith, Paray-leMonial features a world-renowned shrine dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Ushering in a new era of grace and mercy in the Church, it was here that Christ revealed his great love for humanity in a special way to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque during a number of apparitions between 1673 and 1675. Today, the chapel where Christ appeared draws more than a million pilgrims and visitors every year.
Christ's revelations of his Sacred Heart to St. Margaret Mary began shortly after her entry into the convent June 20, 1671, just before her 24th birthday. On the night of Dec. 27, 1673, St. Margaret Mary was kneeling alone before the Blessed Sacrament when Christ appeared for the first time.
In his first revelation he said to her, “My divine heart is so full of love for all, and for you in particular, that it is unable to contain within itself the flames of its burning love. It has to pour them forth through you, and so manifest itself to all to enrich them with the treasures this heart contains.”
Jesus then mourned the world's ingratitude, indifference, and coldness and asked Margaret Mary for a communion of reparation on the first Friday of each month. The divine heart was then exposed to her, “like a sun, ablaze with a dazzling light.”
In 1674 Jesus appeared again to St. Margaret Mary. Later, in detail, she recorded what she heard and saw. “The divine heart was represented to me as upon a throne of fire and flames,” she wrote. “It shed rays on every side brighter than the sun and transparent as crystal. The wound that he received on the cross appeared there visibly. A crown of thorns encircles the divine heart, and it was surmounted by a cross.”
Jesus exposed his Sacred Heart again. With burning love he spoke these words to her: “Behold this heart which has loved everyone so much that it has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming itself, in order to testify its love.”
After Pope Pius IX declared Margaret Mary ‘Blessed’ in 1864, the era of great pilgrimages to Paray-le-Monial began.
Christ then asked for the first Friday after the Octave of the Body and Blood of Christ to be set apart as a feast day in honor of his Sacred Heart. He also asked for a “solemn act of reparation” for all the offenses and indignities he had received in his sacrament of love, the holy Eucharist.
Aware that carrying out this mission alone would be difficult for the cloistered nun, Jesus sent a holy Jesuit priest to her. St. Claude La Colombiére became her confidant. The holy Mother of God solemnly affirmed St. Claude's role when she told St. Margaret Mary, “If it is given to the Daughters of the Visitation (St. Margaret Mary's order) to know and distribute the devotion to my son's Sacred Heart, then it is reserved to the fathers of the Society of Jesus to show and make known its utility and value so that people may profit from it by giving it the respect and gratitude due to so great a benefit.”
By the time of St. Margaret Mary's death Oct. 17, 1690, the devotion was well established in her community and the surrounding areas. Today, devotion to the Sacred Heart is widespread, an indication of the divine origin of the mission. The culmination of Jesus’ revelation to St. Margaret Mary was the consecration of the whole human race in 1899 by Pope Leo XIII to the Sacred Heart.
After Pope Pius IX declared Margaret Mary “Blessed” in 1864, the era of great pilgrimages to Paray-leMonial began. Since then, pilgrims from every continent have continued to come to behold the place where Christ appeared. Pope John XXIII summed it up best when he called Paray-le-Monial the “Cherished City of Heaven.”
Attracting visitors from around the world, Paray-le-Monial features a number of sites related to the revelations of the Sacred Heart.
Among the most prominent are Chapel of the Apparitions inside the Monastery of the Visitation, the “House of Pages,” the Chaplains’ garden, Basilica of the Sacred Heart, Chapel of St. Claude La Colombiére, and the Hieron.
Of the various places, the most popular is the monastery chapel where Jesus appeared between 1673 and 1675. Upon entering it, one reads the inscription on the faÇade: “In this church Our Lord revealed his heart to Saint Margaret Mary.” Throughout the year, pilgrims can be found kneeling near the sanctuary, reflecting on the extraordinary events that once occurred here. At the center of the chapel, to the right, is the shrine of St. Margaret Mary. Here, under an impressive reliquary containing a wax replica of the saint, lay her sacred remains.
Another prominent attraction, outside the chapel, is the “House of Pages,” a room featuring a number of sacred objects once belonging to St. Margaret Mary. After a visit here, one can stroll over to the Chaplains’ garden and catch a glimpse of the diorama—a painting depicting the life of the saint and Christ's revelations. Opposite the garden is the 12th-century Basilica of the Sacred Heart, another chief pilgrimage destination.
Also not to be missed, is the nearby Jesuit Chapel. Located about two blocks from the shrine of the revelations, the sanctuary features the tomb of St. Claude La Colombiére. Across the street from the chapel is the Hieron, or museum of sacred art. Among its prized possessions is one of the first representations, in gilded 18th-century wood, of Christ's Sacred Heart being revealed to St. Margaret Mary.
Paray-le-Monial is about 180 miles southeast of Paris, and 60 miles northwest of Lyon. In traveling there from Paris by car, take motorway A6 south to Macon, then take N79 west to Paray-leMonial. Trains depart regularly from the Paris Gare de Lyon railway station to Nevers, where you must change trains to complete your journey to Paray-le-Monial. Another option is to take the TGV (fast train) from Gare de Lyon to Le Creusot, then take a bus from Le Creusot to Paray-le-Monial. Le Creusot has no train service to Paray-leMonial, but the bus schedule works in collaboration with the train schedule.
For more information on making a pilgrimage to Paray-le-Monial, contact one of the many Catholic travel organizations offering guided tours to France or contact the tourist office at: Office de Tourisme de Paray-le-Monial, 25 avenue Jean Paul II, BP 119 71603 Paray-le-Monial; (tel.) 011-33-385-81-10-92; (fax) 011-33-385-81-36-61.
Kevin Wright, author of Catholic Shrines of Western Europe, writes from Bellevue, Washington.
----- EXCERPT: The Catholic Traveler ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kevin Wright ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Pope Lauds Irish Accord, Urges Pursuing 'Path of Peace' DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:BELFAST, Northern Ireland— Church leaders across Northern Ireland welcomed the peace settlement brokered April 10 by politicians.
Pope John Paul II also welcomed the agreement and asked for prayers that the people of the region would have the courage to make peace a reality.
Archbishop Sean Brady, primate of all Ireland, commended politicians’ efforts to work out a settlement to end Northern Ireland's 27-year civil conflict and asked people to consider the agreement carefully.
“It is my hope that an agreement will lead the way to the future,” he said, asking people to “see the positive and see the advantages and see what is in it for our neighbors as well as for ourselves.”
In a statement issued Good Friday, April 10, the archbishop said he hoped the agreement would “lead the way to an Ireland where people grow and respect each other and learn to trust each other despite their differences.”
“Only a limited number was involved in the peace talks; all of us now must be participants in the work of reconciliation, of building trust, and healing the hurts,” he said.
Other Church leaders added their voice of support to the peace settlement but recognized that difficulties lay ahead. Archbishop Robin Eames, Anglican primate of the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland, said that in order for the settlement to come to fruition, “we have to say that we are prepared to take a step of faith.”
At Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence south of Rome, Pope John Paul told visitors April 13 to “give thanks to God for the positive results reached a few days ago in Northern Ireland.”
The Pope said the agreement would allow “the dear and so harshly tried populations” of the island “to look to the future with greater trust.”
“We pray to the Lord that each person, listening to his or her own conscience, will have the courage to make responsible and concrete gestures that will allow all to walk together along the path of peace, preventing anything which could lead again to hatred and violence,” the Pope said.
The peace agreement accepted April 10 by the governments of the Irish Republic and Great Britain and the political parties of Northern Ireland was reached after a marathon negotiating session in Belfast. The agreement will be put to voters in the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland May 22.
It includes establishment of a new 108-seat Northern Ireland assembly, a North-South ministerial council and a British-Irish council, as well as constitutional changes in Britain and the Irish Republic. It also includes a review of the criminal justice system in Northern Ireland, decommissioning of paramilitary weapons and the early release of political prisoners.
Former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell mediated the peace talks. More than 3,300 people have died during the course of Northern Ireland's conflict.
Some politicians, who refused to attend talks, were expected to campaign for Northern Ireland's electorate to reject the agreement.
Preaching from the pulpit on Easter Sunday, the Rev. Ian Paisley, a Free Presbyterian pastor and leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, warned parishioners against the agreement, which he said would distance Northern Ireland from Britain and push the province to a united and predominantly Catholic Ireland.
“Our land is in turmoil and crisis. We are going to be fed lies from now until the referendum by politicians,” he said. “But our enemies do not know that we have a secret weapon, and that weapon is truth.”
Msgr. Denis Faul, a prominent Northern Ireland peace campaigner in Dungannon, said the settlement was the first step along the road to peace but cautioned that without support from every section of the community, the agreement would fail.
“The settlement offers a new beginning, a new setting off point, and we should all be working very hard for this opportunity to build the peace,” he said, warning that “blood on the street can wreck any political settlement.”
Father Brian McCann of St. Bernadette Church, Belfast, said his parishioners were cautious about voicing optimism but “behind apprehension, there is a solid foundation for hope and anticipation.”
Another parish priest from St. Bernadette's, Father Fred McSorley, said that “it might take time to change hardened attitudes, but now we have that opportunity.”
Christena Colclough writes for Catholic News Service.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Christena Colclough ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: New Magazine Scrutinizes 'Crisis' of Education in America DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:Grassroots organizers, academics, and educators weigh in on one of the most serious cultural problems facing the country
Schools are committing the educational equivalent of malpractice, according to Crisis in Education , the new entry into the national debate on how best to educate our children. Reading has become politicized, education has been defined as human resources, and controversial teaching techniques, which shouldn't yet make it out of the laboratory, are appearing in the classroom, according to the new magazine's publishers.
Schools are going downhill and parents feel powerless.
“Every radical experimental curriculum is being implemented in the classroom,” said Karen Iacovelli, Crisis in Education co-publisher. “More money has brought fads, not academic achievement.”
Many think tanks are devoted to this issue, possibly the second hottest right now to abortion and right-to-life. But Crisis in Education , an ecumenical initiative of Crisis magazine and the Morley Institute, is the first magazine designed to give a forum for grassroots organizers as well as academics and educators to present what they've learned, said Iacovelli.
“This is the first attempt to address a serious cultural problem that brings together all faiths and all people of sound moral perspective,” said Deal Hudson, president of the Morley Institute and the magazine's co-publisher.
“We hope to become a lightning rod for the debate and also to keep private schools from going down the same path.”
Also, as the first Catholic-led publication on this issue that has been dominated by evangelical Protestants, Crisis in Education brings Catholics back in the center ring, according to Hudson.
“We as Catholics are acting through Crisis in Education like some evangelicals have acted through their organizations,” said Hudson. “They have had so much influence over the last 20 years. There is no reason why we should not have that same influence, particularly since Catholics are specially empowered as lay men and women to use their area of expertise.”
Two issues of the magazine will come out this year, and a minimum of four next year. Subscribers to Crisis receive the new magazine free. Individual copies cost $5.
The new magazine targets anyone who believes there is something wrong with the way present-day schools educate children. The common thread among the new twice-yearly magazine's many contributors is that they have not had a voice, that they feel disenfranchised, said Cindy Duckett, president of the Wichita-based Project Educate and an associate editor of the magazine. Besides e-mail addresses of some of the people and organizations that have helped to launch the initial issue, it provides a compendium of books and other documents as a resource tool.
“This is the first time that people from the grassroots get the word out to the nation at large,” Duckett said.
The magazine's first issue, which came out in February, is a sort of primer of the problem. It concentrates on school choice: explains some of the sources of the crisis, including the head-lock the teachers'unions hold education in, the federally led school-to-work issue, and the way in which universities set the agenda for the lower grades. A chronology of federal education laws that set national standards for schools, the workforce, and national health care is also provided.
In the issue, Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler and Paul Steidler, director of the Education Reform Project of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, write separately about the widespread support for school vouchers among blacks and residents of housing projects. Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) discusses the danger of federally established education standards and the school-to-work initiative that switches the priority from traditional academics to job training.
On the higher educational front, Candace de Russy, a trustee of the State University of New York, outlines the trivial and “postmodernist” curriculum of multicultural and poststructural studies that has replaced the great works of Western civilization.
An examination of what's going on at the college level is important, because as post-secondary institutions buy into these new curricula, they are beginning to dictate to lower schools what children must know, said Iacovelli.
Other major sections are devoted to reports from school parent activists in the field and teachers. Cindy Duckett, for instance, writes of how parents in Wichita persuaded the school board to allow parents to inspect teaching materials. Carolyn Steinke, executive director of Parents Involved in Education and the mother of seven children, gives practical advice to parents who want to fight for their children's education.
In another article, John Taylor Gatto, the 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year, recounts the case of Benson, Vermont, which voted down the proposed school budget a record 12 times. “At the heart of the problem of American schooling is that it sets out deliberately to overturn the way we used to be and desperately need and want to be again,” he wrote. “The freedom to write our own scripts in the short time we have before our deaths is the primary good. It cannot be replaced by any service the government provides in exchange for centralizing.”
Duckett's children, for instance, were taught how to read by the new “whole education” technique, and almost didn't. “Too often the teaching techniques being used in the classrooms are fads with no basis in research,” said Duckett.
The “whole education” method, which teachers like because it is more fun to teach, involves teaching children how to read by guessing how words should be spelled instead of the traditional way of sounding them out.
When Duckett was concerned that her children were not learning how to spell, she was told that by the end of their elementary careers they would pick up spelling. By the time her son finished fifth grade, more than half of his classmates had difficulty reading, she said.
A few years back, after illiteracy skyrocketed in California, the state legislature banned the technique.
The next issue the magazine plans to take up is the school-to-work issue and that come out in the fall, according to Iacovelli.
“What is raising eyebrows is how education is becoming tailored to meet the needs of government and business,” she said. “They are redefining education as human resources and redefining the purpose of education and human behavior.”
The magazine is designed so it will be a resource tool, something that will be kept, not read in a Saturday afternoon, said Iacovelli. “The [crisis in education] is so serious, so heavy, it can only be reached in small doses.”
Lisa Pevtzow writes from Skokie, Illinois.
----- EXCERPT: Education Page ----- EXTENDED BODY: Lisa Pevtzow ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Phil Lenahan DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:Current Posts: founder and president, Financial Foundations for the Family; vice president of operations, Catholic Answers; columnist for the Catholic weekly Faith and Family (Twin Circle )
Experience: CPA with Arthur Andersen & Co., five years; comptroller for western division of Fleetwood, eight years
Education: bachelor's degree in business administration from Cal State University at Fullerton
Personal: married, with five children
Contact Financial Foundations for the Family at P.O. Box 890998, Temecula, CA 92589-0998; (tel.) 909-699-7066; (fax) 909-308-4539; (e-mail) plenahan@ix.netcom.com
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: A Crash Course in Public Virtue DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:The 1966 classic A Man for all Seasons shows that political power doesn't always corrupt
What to do about Hollywood?
To many Christians, much of what is currently on view in our movie theaters seems to encourage a moral relativism that presents excessive violence, pre-marital sex, adultery, and other forms of damaging behavior as the norm. Some argue that it might be best to ignore most Hollywood products altogether because they can be harmful to the soul.
In a March 8 Registerinterview, however, Archbishop John Foley, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, suggested a different approach.
“We have to live with the fact that there is evil in the world and evil in human life and it's not always wrong to portray it,” he pointed out. “There's a difference between the glorification or justification of evil—which is wrong— and the admission of evil, indicating that it does happen and that people can learn from their mistakes and that God can bring good even out of evil.”
In line with this thinking, the Pontifical Council compiled in October 1996 a list of 45 films, both American and foreign, that were deemed to have special and artistic merit. The occasion was the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the cinema. The films chosen are broken down into three separate categories based on religion, values, and art. Each category contains 15 different titles. The Council's goal is to promote discernment in film appreciation.
The list is significant for what it includes and what it leaves out. Not surprisingly, several films about the lives of the saints—Vincent de Paul, Francis of Assisi, Thérèse of Lisieux, among others—are recommended. However, omitted are Cecil B. De Mille's hugely successful version of The 10 Commandmentsas well as those favorites of many American Catholics, Going My Wayand The Bells of St. Mary, which feature the late Bing Crosby in idealized depictions of a parish priest.
The Vatican also wants us to cast a wide net in searching out the kind of movies that can be morally enlightening. The list includes period films such as The Missionand Nazarinthat are critical of certain Church leaders during their eras. In addition, the pontifical commission selects a small number of classics without any overt religious references, like the sci-fi epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the British comedy about a bank heist, The Lavender Hill Mob.
As an exercise in discernment, the Registerplans to review all 45 of the movies chosen. Each week a single title will be analyzed in hopes that readers might rent or borrow a video of the film discussed or watch it when aired on cable TV. By examining these master-works, Catholics will also be able to see movies that can be both entertaining and helpful to them on their spiritual journeys. Perhaps through this process they will be able to find similar values in the best of current Hollywood fare and deepen their present-day movie-going experience.
A Man For All Seasonsis on the Vatican list in the category of religious values, and it's a good place to start. The movie dramatizes with sensitivity and intelligence issues of conscience and the conflicts between God's law and the edicts of the state. A major studio production released in 1966, it won six Oscars, including best actor, director, screenplay, and picture.
The story is set in England during the reign of Henry VIII. The burning issue is whether the strong-willed ruler (Robert Shaw) should be allowed to divorce his current queen, who's barren, and marry Ann Boleyn (Vanessa Redgrave) to produce an heir. Such an action would be contrary to the Pope's will and create problems for the Church in England.
Sir Thomas More (Paul Scofield) is a highly respected lawyer and one of the king's favorites. A skilled courtier, he knows how to conduct himself in the corridors of power. Director Fred Zinneman (From Here to Eternityand High Noon) and screenwriter Robert Bolt (Lawrence of Arabia) recreate with a few deft touches the sense of how influence was wielded during that era. Castle hallways are always filled with supplicants pleading their woes and offering bribes to well-connected men like More.
The distinguished jurist is impeccably honest in word and deed, and he would like to find a way to remain loyal to both the king and the Pope. In an electrifying confrontation with the Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Woolsey (Orson Welles), he declares: “When statesmen forsake their private consciences for the sake of public duties, they lead their country by a short route to chaos.”
Woolsey counters: “You'd like to govern the country by prayer. With a little common sense you could be a statesman.”
More is soon put to the test. Upon Woolsey's death, he's made chancellor. When Henry renounces Rome, More resigns as a matter of conscience. However, even after the king marries Ann Boleyn and founds the Church of England with himself as head, the jurist refuses to criticize his ruler directly. “This is not the stuff of which martyrs are made,” he declares.
But this isn't good enough. The king insists More take an oath of loyalty to him and his newly created Church. The ex-chancellor defies the crown but won't give his reasons why, fearing that if he did he might be indicted for treason. The filmmakers dramatize the personal pain this silence inflicts on More. His wife, Lady Alice (Wend Billed), becomes angry with him for not cooperating with the king.
Henry throws More into prison even though there's no just cause. The ex-chancellor is then convicted of treason through perjured testimony. At his death he tells his executioners: “You send me to God.”
At a time in our country when the whole notion of public virtue is undergoing redefinition and the standards for our political leaders seem to be lowered, watching A Man For All Seasonshas a salutary effect. Unlike most of today's officeholders, More, despite his power, is guided by transcendent moral values in all his decisions. We are reminded that even politicians are capable of making sacrifices in pursuit of a higher good. The beauty of such acts of conscience is awesome to behold.
Arts & Culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: Arts & Culture ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: FILM Clips DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:Following are recent VHS videocassette reviews from the U.S. Catholic Conference (USCC) Office for Film and Broadcasting
Puerile comedy in which British comic Rowan Atkinson plays a bumbling London museum guard entrusted to deliver a priceless painting to a Los Angeles gallery—with predictable results. Directed by Mel Smith, the slapstick antics of Atkinson's nearly wordless character occasionally amuse, but usually fall flat. Brief drunkenness, nude pin-up photo, some toilet humor, and a streak of profanity. The USCC classification is A-III. The film is rated PG-13. (Polygram, rental)
Romanticized account of the controversy stirred in 1917 England by two little girls whose photographs of what they said were tiny fairies frolicking in their garden aroused the skepticism of Harry Houdini (Harvey Keitel), though were proclaimed genuine by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Peter O'Toole). Director Charles Sturridge spins an enchanting tale of childhood innocence in a sweet family film marred by a few rude words. Serious argumentation over the existence of fairies and fleeting mild language. The USCC classification is A-II. The film is rated PG. (Paramount, rental)
Darkly comic tale in which an unstable young woman (Parker Posey) becomes unhinged when her brother (Josh Hamilton) who was once her lover returns from college with a fiancee (Tori Spelling). Director Mark Waters’ talky story shows its stage-play origins while depicting a thoroughly dysfunctional family, but instead of being madly amusing its humor is often tasteless. Fleeting violence, implied sexual encounters, flippant treatment of incest, occasional profanity, and rough language. The USCC classification is A-IV. The film is rated R. (Miramax, rental)
Popular TV comedy series (1962-66) comes to the big screen with a story in which the conniving Cmdr. McHale (Ernest Borgnine) of the PT 73 while stationed on a South Seas island leads his wacky crew in a scheme to win a horse race by generating a smoke screen to hide the track. Directed by Edward Montagne, it's a simple mix of bungling characters awash in slapstick situations and resulting confusions. For the undemanding. The USCC classification is A-I. The film is not rated by the Motion Picture Association of America. (MCA/Universal, $14.98)
Dippy sequel directed by Edward Montagne in which PT 73's Ensign Parker (Tim Conway) masquerades as an Air Force pilot to become a national hero when he spots the hidden Japanese fleet. Broad comedy with silly characters and slapstick situations. The USCC classification is A-I. This film is not rated by the Motion Picture Association of America. (MCA/Universal, $14.98)
Charming Japanese film in which a restless married businessman (Koji Yakusho) secretly takes ballroom dancing lessons because he is attracted to one of the instructors (Tamiyo Kusakari), but instead of having an affair he benefits from the supportive friendships that develop among the students and teachers. Writer-director Masayuki Suo deftly uses the social nature of ballroom dancing to explore with gentle humor the contradictions of a culture that frowns upon emotional displays by males. Subtitles. Some sexual references. The USCC classification is A-II. The film is rated PG. (Miramax, rental)
Feeble family comedy about five 7-year-olds known at school as the Stinkers who sneak Slappy the sea lion out of an aquarium to free into the ocean, but instead Slappy is stolen by a villain aiming to sell it to a circus. Directed by Barnet Kellman, the result is a mirthless slapstick comedy of “cute” kids outsmarting dopey adults but the property damage and bodily harm caused by the Stinkers’ antics is rarely amusing and anything but cute. Slapstick violence, bathroom humor, and crude language. The USCC classification is A-II. The film is rated PG. (Columbia TriStar, $19.95)
Earnest drama about a Jewish family whose grown son (Brendan Fraser) is homosexual and whose married daughter (Jennifer Beals) ponders abortion after learning that her fetus carries a gene supposedly linked to homosexuality. Director Ross Marks insightfully explores fractured relationships as family members confront homo-phobic attitudes, struggle to accept or forgive one another and embrace unconditional love. Serious treatment of an abortion decision, brief male kissing, occasional profanity, and an instance of rough language. The USCC classification is A-III. The film is rated PG-13. (BMG, rental)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Canadian Court Accords 'Rights Status' To Sexual Orientation DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:After legislative attempts to change human rights law fail, Canada's High Court turns to ‘judicial usurpation of politics’
On April 2, the Supreme Court of Canada delivered a homosexual rights decision breathtaking in its exercise of raw judicial power. The Court unanimously ruled that the province of Alberta's human rights legislation must include sexual orientation among the prohibited grounds for discrimination. Instead of declaring the law unconstitutional as written, the Court decided to “read in” sexual orientation.
The Court amended the law, which prohibits discrimination on the grounds of race, religious beliefs, color, gender, physical disability, mental disability, age, ancestry, place of origin, marital status, source of income, and family status. Henceforth, Alberta's human rights law will be interpreted to include “sexual orientation” as part of that list. The Court's edict was made with the explicit knowledge that such an inclusion was against the will of the Alberta legislature.
It is, to borrow a phrase from the celebrated controversy set off by First Things , the judicial usurpation of politics.
In Canada, human rights legislation is the counterpart to American civil rights laws. Both the federal government and provincial governments have human rights laws that forbid discrimination by private actors in such fields as employment, housing, and commercial transactions. For example, a private employer is forbidden to discriminate on the basis of race in hiring decisions.
The case stemmed from the 1991 firing of a schoolteacher at a private Alberta Christian college. Delwin Vriend, in response to an inquiry from college officials, disclosed that he was homosexual. When the college established an official policy against homosexuality in 1991, he was asked for his resignation. He was fired when he refused to submit his resignation.
Vriend attempted to file a complaint with the Alberta Human Rights Commission, but was unable to do so because Alberta's human rights law did not include sexual orientation as a prohibited ground for discrimination. Vriend then challenged the constitutionality of the human rights law itself, which resulted in this court decision.
The decision concerned the human rights law itself, and not the facts of the Vriend case. If he wishes to press his claim against the college, he would now be able to do so, but that case would start from scratch. Observers have speculated that Christian colleges would be able to claim a religious exemption from the court-mandated sexual orientation provision in the law.
While the Vriend case was winding its way through the courts, the Alberta government and legislature repeatedly addressed the issue. In 1992 the Human Rights Commission asked the legislature to amend the law to include sexual orientation. It refused. Several members of the legislature introduced bills to effect such an amendment. None passed. At one point, the government minister responsible for the human rights law advocated the amendment. It was never introduced.
The Court noted in its opinion that “the omission of sexual orientation from the [human rights law] was deliberate and not the result of an oversight.” In other words, the matter had been considered by the elected representatives of the people of Alberta, and they had decided not to include sexual orientation in the human rights law.
The Court refused to accept this as a legitimate democratic decision. Citing the “psychological harm” suffered by homosexuals, the Court asserted that “by excluding sexual orientation from the [human rights law's] protection, the government has, in effect, stated that ‘all persons are equal in dignity and rights’ except gay men and lesbians.”
Consequently, the Court ruled that the omission violated the Constitution's guarantees of equal protection of the laws. The equality rights section of the Canadian Charter of Rights does not include sexual orientation either, but the Court had decided some years ago to “read in” sexual orientation there too.
The Constitution can be searched high and low, but no justification for the Court's position can be found in the text, save for the general principle of equality before the law. The Alberta human rights law did not penalize homosexuals, but the Court ruled that the omission of sexual orientation “in effect” did just that.
Dismissed outright was the possibility that, in effect , the law attempted to reflect something of the historic public consensus on homosexuality that still holds in Alberta today. The law simply reflected the position that homosexuals, as homosexuals , could not claim protection from discrimination on the basis of their homosexuality alone.
Justice Jack Major wrote that because “no explanation was given for the exclusion of sexual orientation from the prohibited grounds of discrimination in the act … the inescapable conclusion is that there is no reason.”
Leaving aside the peculiar expectation that legislators would draft legislation with explanations for what is not in the law, the opinion reveals an appalling hostility to traditional moral norms and social conventions. That no reason was given might be due to the fact that the reason was obvious. Homosexual behaviour is held by every major world religion to be immoral. The weight of millennia support the social convention that homosexual behaviour is not to be promoted in law.
The Vriend decision establishes, in effect , that the Court has arrogated to itself the decision about what moral and social judgements legislators are permitted to make. In its ruling the Court ignored the moral teaching of the ages, it disregarded the explicit will of the legislature, and it invented constitutional rights that are found nowhere in the text. In effect, the Court literally re-wrote the Constitution and laws that do not reflect its preferences.
Fully aware that its claim to imperial power would be criticized, the Court attempted an explanation. Justice Frank Iacobucci advocated a joint role in improving legislation: “This dialogue between [courts and legislatures], and the accountability of each branch, has the effect of enhancing the democratic process, not denying it.”
The Court's edict was made with the explicit knowledge that such an inclusion was against the will of the Alberta legislature.
The central democratic point, however, is that the Court is accountable to no one. When it overrules the legislatures, it may enhance justice, sweetness, and light according to its own criteria, but to claim that it “enhances the democratic process” is simply Orwellian.
The Court has retreated to doubles-peak to disguise its overarching design. Knowing that the implementation of a radical social agenda will meet with opposition at the local level, the Court has decided to disarm its opposition. There will be no dialogue; the Court always gets the final word. It is not the approach of those who believe that their arguments might be persuasive in the court of public opinion. These are the tactics of those driven by ideology. The Court is powerful, and it has announced that it will corrupt its own power if needs be, to silence any dissenters.
Raymond de Souza is a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Kingston, Ontario.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond de Souza ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----------- TITLE: Pro-Life Shopping Guide Alerts Consumers To Companies Who Fund Abortion DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:Publication has led some corporations to change their donation practices
Pro-life advocates have faced many giants over the years. Battling in Congress hasn't been easy, and front-line activism at abortion clinics can be frustrating. But what about trying to rid corporate America of the abortion mentality? Sound impossible? That's where the St. Antoninus Institute appears on the scene.
Named after the Italian archbishop of Florence who wrote a document on the ethics of business calling businessmen of his time to be faithful witnesses for Christ in the marketplace, the St. Antoninus Institute is a non-profit organization seeking to promote Catholic social teaching in the business world. As part of that mission, the Institute began publishing the Pro-Life Shopping Guide six years ago, giving shoppers valuable information on which corporations are funding the abortion industry. Its 1998 edition recently rolled off the presses.
Dr. Jean-FranÇois Orsini, president of the St. Antoninus Institute, is no stranger to the business world. While studying business ethics, Orsini found no one was talking about corporate support of abortion and its ethical implications.
“There was simply no mention of abortion and I had to do something about it,” he said.
So he began researching corporate-giving to such pro-abortion organizations as Planned Parenthood and the National Organization for Women. Using sources such as the Foundation Grant Index and the Chronicle of Philanthropy in his investigation and research, he quickly discovered a sobering reality: the bank accounts of pro-abortion organizations are filled with corporate dollars.
As a matter of fact, the Institute's 1998 Pro-Life Shopping Guide includes a listing of more than 150 major corporations which financially support the abortion industry through groups such as Planned Parenthood or NOW. Major U.S. corporations such as American Express, Levi-Strauss, General Mills, Hewlett-Packard, Pillsbury, and Reebok are among those on the list.
After documenting the funding source, Orsini sends a letter to the corporation asking them to stop the funding and informing them of the Institute's plan to publicize their “charitable” actions. Once organizations appear in the Pro-Life Shopping Guide as a corporate supporter of abortion, some have bent over backwards to escape the negative publicity.
Orsini proudly tells the story of the recent conversion of Josten's—a national leader in providing high schools and colleges with various services such as yearbooks, class rings, and graduation materials. Upon realizing that their support of Planned Parenthood and NOW would be published in the Pro-Life Shopping Guide , the organization contacted Orsini and asked what they would have to do to be removed from list. According to Orsini, Josten's immediately ended its corporate support of the pro-abortion organizations and sent him a letter indicating their intention to never again lend their support. A copy of the letter is included in the 1998 Pro-Life Shopping Guide .
It is results like that that make pro-life leaders like American Life League's Judie Brown sing the praises of the St. Antoninus Institutes and groups like it, which monitor corporate funding and give pro-life shoppers the tools to make a difference in the marketplace. “Wise pro-life shopping is most effective in protecting and defending innocent preborn children when corporate presidents and CEO's hear from pro-lifers in writing, either explaining why they are making a purchase or why they no longer will do so,” she said.
She said the Pro-Life Shopping Guide and other publications like it, such as those produced by the New York-based Life Decisions International, not only send a message to corporate America, but also create a powerful educational message.
“Selective shopping makes a statement: I love my fellow brothers and sisters in the womb and will make whatever sacrifices are required of me,” Brown said. “The Lord of life is the one I serve; not the bloated economy or my own selfish interest.”
Orsini doesn't claim that his phone rings off the hook every time he sends a letter to a corporate supporter of the abortion industry. Instead, he said he's only received five or six calls since the guide's inception six years ago. But little signs of progress continue to roll in. One Catholic diocese decided against using a company that had placed a bid to provide its schoolchildren uniforms after seeing the company listed in the guide. Another diocese switched financial advisors after discovering its current financial company was a corporate supporter of Planned Parenthood.
To Orsini, the victories don't necessarily have to be big.
Instead, he said publication of the Pro-Life Shopping Guide goes to the heart of being faithful to the Lord.
“We want the Kingdom of God to come around,” he said. “If we count just Catholics and pro-lifers—about 25% to 40% of the population—that translates into trillions of dollars in buying power. If people are reinforcing the politically correct political picture which is antithetical to Catholic values, we will be held accountable for that.”
Corporations aren't the only ones Orsini is trying to reach. He's also hoping politicians will get the message once corporate America divests itself of the abortion industry.
“Right now many people think the abortion issue is settled,” he said. “But when major contributors to politicians say, ‘I really don't like your involvement with abortion, the politicians will hear that.”
The Pro-Life Shopping Guide isn't a money-maker for the St. Antoninus Institute. The institute simply uses it to spread the word. While a hard copy of the 170-page guide can be ordered, the entire list of the companies that support the pro-abortion organizations is also available on the Institute's Internet web site. The site contains not only the name of the organization, but a hyper link which allows anyone accessing the site to send an e-mail message to the corporation with the simple click of a button.
Orsini realizes that fighting corporate America's involvement with abortion isn't an easy job—but he hasn't lost hope.
“We can continue to chip away at [corporate abortion supporters] numbers by turning them around, one by one,” he said.
To obtain a copy, write: Pro-Life Shopping Guide, 4110 Sessenden St., NW Washington, DC 20016; Internet: www.ewtn.com/antonin/antonin.htm.
Greg Chesmore writes from Bloomington, Indiana.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Greg Chesmore ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----------- TITLE: The Gospel Of Life DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:“Another present-day phenomenon, frequently used to justify threats and attacks against life, is the demographic question. This question arises in different ways in different parts of the world. In the rich and developed countries there is a disturbing decline or collapse of the birthrate. The poorer countries, on the other hand, generally have a high rate of population growth, difficult to sustain in the context of low economic and social development, and especially where there is extreme underdevelopment. In the face of overpopulation in the poorer countries, instead of forms of global intervention at the international level—serious family and social policies, programs of cultural development, and of fair production and distribution of resources—anti-birth policies continue to be enacted.”
Pope John Paul II
(Evangelium Vitae, 16.1)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----------- TITLE: Young Canadian Joins Irish Pro-life Efforts DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:A Toronto-area woman is off on a four-month speaking tour of Dublin and Ireland's surrounding counties to bring an outsider's view of the hotly-debated abortion situation.
Emma Maan, 21, of Georgetown, northwest of Toronto, is the chief speaker and public relations director with Ontario Students for Life (OSFL), an organization coordinating pro-life efforts among the province's high school students. She was invited to Ireland by the Dublin-based Youth Defense organization. Youth Defense is a network of young activists who since 1992 have taken a leading role in the Irish pro-life struggle.
Tour organizers hope Maan's message will help overcome what some see as a near blackout of pro-life news in the predominantly Catholic country.
Maan believes a young Canadian pro-lifer will more likely enjoy a sympathetic ear in Ireland than would someone from the local scene. She is optimistic that students will be especially receptive to her message.
“Many pro-life supporters have suggested that the word is not getting across, especially in the classrooms,” she said. “I hope to address a number of adults during the tour, but I'm especially looking forward to bringing the right-to-life message to students in the 11 to 19 age group.”
Maan left for Dublin March 31 and is scheduled to return July 29. She will be joined for part of the tour by Ada Wong, 19, of Toronto, vice-president of Ontario Students for Life. Wong is set to depart for Ireland May 18.
During their time in Ireland, Maan and Wong will address a number of youth and adult organizations. The pair will also represent Canada at an international youth pro-life conference in Dublin June 19.
Abortion is officially prohibited in Ireland thanks to a 1983 amendment to the country's Constitution. Over the past 15 years however, there has been increasing support in the media and in some government circles for a relaxation of the law.
“There are a number of elements in Ireland who have been aggressively promoting access to abortion, and these voices have support in government and the media,” Maan told the Register . She said several pro-life supporters in Ireland have been made to feel unwelcome in schools and community organizations.
Maan cited a 30-second pro-life television commercial produced by Youth Defense, which was banned from broadcast by the Irish Radio and Television Commission. The advertisement offered a graphic but otherwise restrained account of the true nature of abortion. Irish government officials rejected the ad on the grounds that it was overly political and religious in nature.
Other pro-life efforts, including a campaign displaying graphic images of aborted fetuses on city streets, have been hindered by Irish police and civic officials.
Maan hopes her speaking tour will enjoy success similar to that of the Chastity Challenge team, a group of Canadian young people who visited Ireland last fall to promote the chastity/abstinence message. It was a member of the Chastity Challenge team who suggested that Maan would make an effective pro-life ambassador to Irish young people.
Although her itinerary had not been finalized at departure time, Maan expects to address dozens of organizations and community clubs in Dublin and the surrounding counties.
Funding for the Irish tour comes from a number of sources, including the Knights of Columbus, the Toronto Right to Life association, and Catholic parishes in the southwestern Ontario region.
Peter Scully, director of Family and Life, one of Ireland's leading pro-life organizations, said Maan's tour should have some benefit, particularly for its novelty value. He added however that it will be up to Irish pro-life groups themselves to keep the issue squarely on the public agenda.
“We are planning for another national referendum in 1999 which will ask the Irish people if they want to keep abortion illegal in this country,” he said.
Scully, who attended the January 22 March for Life in Washington, agreed that the pro-life message is becoming more difficult to promote in Ireland. He said the Dublin-based media, which dominate print and broadcast journalism, is largely pro-abortion. Only in the smaller media centers, he said, does one find sympathy for the pro-life position.
Scully also cited an ordinance by the body controlling Irish schools which prevents any information on the right-to-life issue to be discussed in the country's schools. “No one is allowed to discuss the issue—either for or against abortion—in the Catholic schools,” he said.
‘There are a number of elements in Ireland who have been aggressively promoting access to abortion, and these voices have support in government and the media.’
— Emma Mann
Maan meanwhile anticipates some heated debates during the next four months as she shares her experience in pro-life work. The abortion issue has raged in Ireland especially since the Supreme Court's 1992 ruling in the noted “X” case. The case involved a 14-year-old Dublin girl who became pregnant as the result of rape. The girl looked to get around the prohibition on abortion by traveling to Britain for the procedure. A lower court ruled that it was illegal for Irish citizens to go abroad for the purposes of abortion, but a week later, the Supreme Court overturned that decision, freeing the girl to travel to England.
At the time, Irish pro-life groups criticized the Supreme Court for misinterpreting the constitutional's prohibition of abortion. They argued that the Supreme Court ruling in effect permits abortion by giving citizens the right to obtain the service in other countries.
A few weeks later, Irish voters narrowly approved by referendum a series of constitutional amendments allowing the state to provide abortion information and to end restrictions on citizens going abroad to obtain abortions.
A similar situation, known as the “C” Case, rocked Ireland's pro-life community last fall. The case centered on a pregnant 13-year-old rape victim who was pressured by workers with Dublin's Eastern Health Board (EHB) to travel to England for an abortion.
The girl's father said his family was prepared to raise the child, and that the EHB officials had “kidnapped” the girl in their eagerness to go ahead with the abortion. In November 1997, a judge of Ireland's Children's Court ruled that despite the family's objections, the girl could travel to England to abort the baby. The EHB acted as the girl's guardian throughout the ordeal.
Not only did the court ruling promote abortion as the solution to unwanted pregnancy, it also ignored the parents’ wishes in a health decision involving their child.
Human Life International founder, Father Paul Marx has commented on the sorry state of pro-life affairs in Ireland over the last several years. In a special report for Human Life International, Father Marx said the 1992 “X” Case and a number of scandals involving Irish clergy have led to widespread skepticism of the Church's voice among the Irish people.
He estimates that since the “X” case, between 1,500 and 4,000 Irish women travel to Britain each year in search of abortion.
As for Maan, she hopes to sidestep the controversy by relying on the plain facts surrounding the abortion issue. “I've been advised by pro-life leaders in Ontario to stick to the facts and to show how pro-abortion supporters try to manipulate people's emotions to back their position,” she said.
Mike Mastromatteo writes from Toronto, Canada.
----- EXCERPT: Prolife Prolife ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mike Mastromatteo ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----------- TITLE: 'Partial-Birth' Ban Blocked in New York DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:ALBANY, N.Y.—The State Assembly April 8 night voted narrowly to block a measure to ban “partial-birth abortions.” Members voted 73-71 against releasing the bill from the Health Committee, which would have allowed it to reach the floor for a full vote. It was the second time in two years that abortion supporters mustered the necessary votes to keep the measure from reaching the Assembly floor.
Speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan), who supports abortion rights, is planning to introduce an alternate measure later this month, in response to pressure from some of his colleagues. His bill would give Assembly members who support abortion a measure they can accept, but one that allows them to tell pro-life constituents that they voted for a ban.
Republican Gov. George Pataki and the GOP-controlled State Senate support a version that would ban the procedure at any point during a pregnancy. Pataki's spokeswoman, Zenia Mucha, described Silver's measure as “a charade” and said the governor would continue to support the stronger version that the Senate has already passed.(Pro-life Info Net)
----- EXCERPT: LifeNotes ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----------- TITLE: Norplant at a Glance DATE: 04/19/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: 19-25 April, 1998 ----- BODY:Norplant is a member of the single-synthetic hormone class of abortifacients that includes the “mini-pill” and the Progestasert intrauterine device (IUD). Once implanted, the six Norplant carrier capsules slowly release levonorgestrel (low-dosage progestin), an abortifacient that prevents implantation of the developing human being in the uterus.
The Population Council owns the patent for Norplant, which was developed by embryologist Sheldon Segal of the Rockefeller Foundation. Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories of Philadelphia, a subsidiary of American Home Products Corporation, produces the abortifacient, which costs women about $500 to produce about five years of sterility. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the abortifacient “contraceptive” Norplant for public use Dec. 10, 1990. Norplant was formally introduced to the American public in February 1991.
The Norplant carrier consists of six small tubes about the size of match sticks. These tubes are made of solstice (silicone rubber), the same material used in heart valves and medical tubing.
A physician begins the insertion procedure by making a 1/8-inch incision about six inches above the woman's elbow. He then loads the capsules one by one into her arm in a fan-shaped pattern using an insertion tube. He uses local anesthetic for both the implantation and extraction procedures.
In many cases, removing the six tubes is trickier than implanting them, because they become coated with fibrous tissue and gradually anchor into the surrounding tissue (i.e., they grow into the arm). This is a result of trauma caused by the implants being pushed into the tissue and a low-level inflammatory reaction to the tube's foreign substance.
How It Works
According to Contraceptive Technology , Norplant has a triphasic (three-fold) mode of action. It inhibits ovulation, thickens cervical mucus, and alters the endometrium (the lining of the uterus) so that its degree of receptivity to the blastocyst (early developing human being) is significantly decreased.
A test of 41 women using Norplant for one year showed that 24 women experienced a suppressed uterine lining, 12 had an irregular uterine lining and only five had normal (unchanged) uterine linings. Thus, Norplant had a clearly abortifacient effect in up to 88% of the women tested.
This means that a woman using Norplant will occasionally ovulate and conceive, and will therefore be aborting at least once or twice each year.
As of August 1995, about 1 million North American women had used Norplant.
Side Effects
Women have brought more than 200 lawsuits, including 50 class-action suits, against Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories alleging inadequate warnings of side effects. Although they naturally vary widely from woman to woman, the range of typical Norplant side effects generally include changes in the endometrium (uterine lining), odd menstrual bleeding patterns; spotting between menstrual periods, missed or prolonged menstrual periods, dizziness, thrombosis (formation of blood clots), liver dys-function, headaches, sudden weight gain or loss, ectopic (tubular) pregnancy, nervousness, nausea, breast pain, hirsutism (abnormal body hair growth), high blood pressure, arm numbness, allergic or immune reactions, “migration” of the six polymer capsules, and, ironically, a decreased sexual appetite. One Texas survey showed that 8% of Norplant users experienced pseudo-tumor cerebri, a condition where increased fluid pressure in the brain crushes the optic nerve and causes partial or complete permanent blindness.
Source: The Facts of Life: An Authoritative Guide to Life and Family Issues, by Brian Clowes PhD (Human Life International, Front Royal, Va.) Reprinted with permission.
----- EXCERPT: Facts ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----------- TITLE: Population Control Funds Tied Up by Congressman DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON—A war of words is being fought in the nation's capital. Unlike most wars, where the stakes are high but the instigation is trivial, the results of this struggle will spawn both serious political implications and great moral relevance. It is a fight over whether the United States should stop its tax revenue from being transferred into International Monetary Funds (IMF) and United Nations accounts to prevent funding of abortions overseas.
On one side is the White House, the State Department, environmental protectionists, most of Congress (including its sometimes conservative Republican leadership), and the entire international community. On the other side is Rep. Chris Smith, a strongly pro-life, blue-collar Republican from New Jersey, who chairs the influential House subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights.
Ideological disagreement over U.S. involvement in the IMF has proven to be one of the most contentious scraps in Congress in a long time. American financing of global population control is commonly sent to organizations that perform abortions. While American law prevents U.S. support from being directly spent on foreign abortion, money sent to groups that supply both contraception and abortion obviously underwrites general expenses which frees other available resources for abortion. Smith is deftly managing the IMFUN funding bills as barter to end such indirect abortion support.
Complicating matters further are conservative protests about American participation in IMF-sponsored bailouts at all. According to Judy Shelton, an international economics expert at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Empower America, “the IMF has come up short on its policies for restoring stability to currencies and providing the necessary solid monetary foundation for long-term economic growth.” Moreover, American financial assistance in questionable IMF schemes constantly rises, as with the Asian bailout where an original U.S. contribution of $3.5 billion has since ballooned to over $18 billion. In the opinion of economists like Shelton, the IMF actively encourages economic mismanagement in corrupt nations by guaranteeing to bail out systems that fail. Then the IMF rides to the rescue, but assistance comes only if faltering nations agree to pursue austere economic measures favored by the international body such as massive tax increases, floating currencies and increased centralization of social and economic programs.
Mexico, which was bailed out by the IMF in 1995, is still very unstable after three years of intricate monetary machinations. This agenda makes nations poorer, increasingly dependent on IMF and UN help, and more likely to fall into the population control trap that proposes nations must rein in childbirth rates to flourish economically. In fact, the United Nations’ Population Fund spent over $309 million in 1996 on its agenda to refine developing nations through radical population control measures. The UN's goal is to raise a whopping $17 billion for population control by the year 2000.
The funds for birth control showered across the globe by the United States are not paltry. Some $550 million was spent in 1995, $356 million in 1996, and $385 million is appropriated this year. Foreign contraception providers have such a demand for this money that in many cases nations liberalize their abortion laws to accommodate pro-abortion strings that are attached to American assistance. Cambodia legalized abortion in October 1997 and approximately one hundred other nations in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean are on the brink of abandoning abortion restrictions to receive lucrative U.S. foreign aid.
The worldwide impact of American leadership is obvious. If foreign governments tailor their abortion laws to receive U.S. funds, new restrictive abortion laws passed by Congress would impel similar restrictions abroad. Pro-life policies during the Reagan and Bush presidencies successfully forestalled dollars from going to foreign Planned Parenthood clinics, which alone have received $75 million from the Clinton Administration. A breakthrough in the Republican conference occurred last November when House Speaker Newt Gingrich agreed with Smith's position that IMF funding and anti-abortion stipulations “are bound in perpetuity.” If the speaker sticks to his word, no foreign aid appropriations bills will be passed without anti-abortion stipulations. Pressure, however, is building on Capitol Hill to pass the funding packages for the international groups.
Environmentalists are also flexing their political and financial muscles in favor of abortion and contraception under the notion that fewer childbirths worldwide are good because proportionately less harm to the earth will result. Last year, a joint letter drafted on August 29 by the National Audubon Society, National Wildlife Federation, Population Action International, Zero Population Growth, and the Sierra Club was sent to congressmen urging them “to reject the amendment offered by Representative Chris Smith to cut off the U.S. contribution to the United Nations Population Fund.”
The chilling letter continues that “a decline in the rate of population growth was heralded as the most positive environmental achievement in five years. The success in slowing the rate of population growth is due, in large part, to sustained international efforts led by the United States.” This bizarre twist illustrates the complications of IMF-UN policy: American environ-mentalist groups lobby U.S. Congress to fund abortion and contraception in foreign countries channeled through international organizations.
State Department reorganization, fast-track trade authority, disaster relief funds, U.S. military authorization, UN funds, IMF funds, and reform initiatives at the latter two organizations are involved in the controversy. The easy explanation for this political shell game lies in the congressional practice of attaching controversial legislation to bills that are nearly impossible to vote against. It is essentially political blackmail: Not too many politicians are willing to vote against helping flood victims (and similar sympathetic measures) no matter what other principles are involved.
Even staunchly pro-life Senator Jesse Helms stumbled over his desire for reorganization of the State Department. Angered by Smith's firm stand against compromising on abortion language which scuttled the parent bill that included State Department reform, Helms and his staff had a temper tantrum which included publicly attacking the New Jersey subcommittee chair. “What has [Smith] accomplished?” stormed Helms last December. “He didn't save one unborn life.” Helms has since changed his tune and supports Smith's tactics.
An essential component to Smith's strategy is fidelity to the Mexico City Policy for funding so-called family planning clinics across the globe. Instituted by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 and effective throughout the Reagan-Bush years, the provision bans U.S. birth control funds sent overseas from going to clinics that provide abortions, violate a nation's abortion laws, or lobby to change a government's existing restrictions on abortion.
President Clinton barely had time to blink before terminating the policy two days after taking the oath of office on Jan. 20, 1993. Acquiescing to the president's uncompromising position in the hope of striking a deal, Gingrich has crafted a watered-down version of the Mexico City language that now includes the lobbying provision only.
So when will all this be resolved? The Republican leadership hopes to settle the issue now that Congress has reconvened from its recent recess. The Senate planned to address the Mexico City Policy April 21 or 22. On March 26, the House passed the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act with the compromised Mexico City language, by voice vote. The ball is now in the Senate's court. But Smith makes clear that such issues will not be solved if it involves further compromise on abortion.
“It's about time the abortion rights side met us halfway,” says Smith, noting that Congress last year offered the president the $3.5 billion he wanted for the IMF, $926 million for the UN, and the desired comprehensive reform initiatives for both the UN and the State Department. Once again proving that increased access to abortion is a top priority at the White House, Bill Clinton rejected everything he had asked for because of the attached Mexico City language. Odds are good that Clinton will veto the legislation this year even with the compromised Mexico City stipulation.
Serious questions over tactics also plague the Republican Party. Many conservatives are opposed to Smith's strategy of using billions of dollars as leverage on abortion policy because they do not think the U.S. should pay UN dues or contribute to IMF handouts at all. Other critics question how Catholic congressmen can vote for any legislation that earmarks hundreds of millions of dollars for birth control given its inherent abortifacient nature. Other Republican legislators are either expressly pro-abortion or willing to compromise all the way to the bank.
For his part, Smith defends his tactics, stating that abortions could be prevented “if only we can agree to re-erect the wall of separation between family planning and abortion.” It is a compromise most oppose as too strict. Congressional efforts to end birth control funding altogether are nonexistent.
In matters of faith, all roads eventually lead to Rome. In matters of IMFUN funding in Washington, D.C., all paths lead to Smith's office, where every inch of legislation is checked to make certain no abortion funds are being exported from American soil. As the Chicago Sun-Times noted on April 13: “Smith virtually controls foreign policy in the House.” That control is now being used to curtail American-sponsored abortion in foreign lands.
Brett Decker writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: Rep. Chris Smith opposes U.S. aid linked to overseas abortion agenda ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brett Decker ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Catholic Educators' Convention Focuses on Diversity DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:LOS ANGELES—More than 12,000 Catholic educators from around the United States, Puerto Rico, and Canada, convened in Los Angeles April 14-17 for the 95th annual National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA) conference. This year's theme, “Spotlighting the Mosaic of Catholic Education,” emphasized cultural diversity among the Catholic population.
The city's Cardinal Roger Mahoney welcomed attendees to the conference, noting that his archdiocese, in which Sunday Mass is celebrated in 42 different languages, reflects the diversity he believes will become typical for many dioceses across the nation. Mayor Richard Riordan, a strong proponent of Catholic education, welcomed attendees to the City of the Angels, saying that “Catholic education is the future of our society, of Los Angeles, and of our nation.”
Contrasting top-heavy bureaucracy and poor test scores common to many public schools, the mayor underscored the material benefits and superior academics of a Catholic education, such as students gaining the skills to compete in a high-tech business world. He said this education makes it possible for them to achieve “the American Dream.”
Despite the conference's theme, opening keynote speaker Alan Keyes encouraged Catholic educators to focus less on diversity and more on the common thread which unites all of humanity—namely, our utter dependence upon a loving, merciful Father and Creator.
Referencing recent news events, including a South African priest giving President Clinton Holy Communion in South Africa and the Jonesboro school-yard murders, Keyes, a former ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council, 1996 U.S. presidential candidate, noted author, and host of a TV/Radio live call-in show, said that although economic and material prosperity is improving, times are getting worse. He noted that society needs the kind of courage that stands up for its beliefs, the courage of the early martyrs, the courage of Mother Teresa who did not hesitate to tell the president of the United States to “stop killing the babies.”
“Whatever the diverse roads we take,” Keyes said, “the key to success in Catholic education lies not in the results, but in the faith that shapes it.” Poverty of soul, more than material poverty, afflicts this time more than any other, Keyes asserted, underscoring the critical importance for Catholic educators to embrace and live their faith with zeal. “We must put the crucifixes back up on the walls and we must fix our eyes upon them … Our first application is to feed the spirit. When we do, it has a transforming effect on material things.”
Keyes’ powerful remarks moved the filled-to-capacity general assembly crowd to a standing ovation.
Reinforcing Keyes’ remarks, Cardinal Mahoney challenged attendees at the opening day's Mass to imitate Mary Magdalen when she discovered the risen Lord at the tomb in the day's Gospel reading. Search for Christ in the daily circumstances of life, he said, listen to him, embrace him with generous love; and when you embrace the Lord fully, by the power of the Holy Spirit, the Lord will send you on a mission. In this case, of course, the mission is to pass on a zeal for the faith to future generations currently sitting in classrooms.
The myriad of workshops at the conference offered everything from information on developing English language skills and self-confidence in students struggling with the native tongue to sessions on the use of media and on spiritual formation. In addition to more than 450 sessions, the conference featured more than 700 exposition booths displaying a wide range of educational products, technology, and services.
The sessions regarding media literacy drew educators who were interested in bringing media into the classroom effectively, while also teaching children to become more discerning about what they absorb from secular programming. “We live in a media culture,” explained Father
Keyes said that although economic and material prosperity is improving, times are getting worse.
David Gallardo, senior religion teacher at Bishop Amat High School in La Puente, Calif., who was interested in learning more about what the media can offer Catholic students. His school plans to incorporate the use of television more into the classrooms next year. “We need to make kids alert to hidden messages that are being transmitted to them [by secular TV programs]. The media also provides a strong visual aspect, presenting a living example to students.”
The conference offered a notable number of sessions devoted to sharpening fundraising skills and knowledge. Raising sufficient money to sustain Catholic education seemed to be an across-the-board issue for many attendees. Many expressed concern both for providing fair and adequate salaries for lay teachers as well as providing subsidies for families who cannot afford to send their children to Catholic schools.
“Our biggest challenge is trying to pay just salaries to Catholic teachers,” said Marianist Brother Francisco Gonzalez, director of education for his order in the Northeast region and principal of a grade seven through 12 all-boys school in Puerto Rico. “Enrollment is no problem, but the salaries are very low right now—$10,000 to $12,000 per year. Yet if we raised tuition, parents couldn't afford it.”
Other principals in attendance also noted that keeping the cost of Catholic education down while making it available to all was a key concern.
For some others fundraising was not a primary concern. Providence, Rhode Island, diocesan elementary teaching consultant Sister Mary Dumond, CP, believes the biggest challenge facing Catholic schools nationwide is keeping the Catholic mission alive in its schools. “The aim of the Catholic school is what makes it different from other schools,” she explained.
Sister Dumond was concerned that many younger teachers seem to lack a strong faith or profound connection with the traditions of their faith. “What they hand down [in the classroom] is affected by what they believe,” she said. “You can't pass on something that you don't have. It's a big concern and it seems to me that the NCEA thinks so also.”
Sister Rosario Reyes, OP, from Beeville, Texas, in the diocese of Corpus Christi noted that for some parents Catholic schooling is less important. “I've been a teacher for 30 years and a principal for six. I've seen that more and more young parents are losing their priority of [securing a] Catholic education for their children so that they can buy more material things.”
A small group from Saskatchewan, Canada, reiterated the need for understanding the difference in Catholic education in terms of something other than dollars and cents. In Canada, explained Miles Meyers and Tracy Fuchs of Michael A. Riffel High School, there are two systems (Catholic and public) which are equally funded by the government. Education tax dollars follow each student.
The biggest challenge that these Canadian teachers face is, in their words, “keeping naysayers of the two-system from winning ground based on money only. They don't touch the issue of ‘Catholic,’ they only talk of dollars and cents and now the public system is promoting values education. We've spent the last five years boldly explaining the difference between the public and Catholic system and the public has lost a lot of students to our system.”
The ‘90s trend of rising enrollment in Catholic schools continues. Dr. Jerome Porath, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles's superintendent of schools, noted that this is the sixth consecutive year of nationwide growth. NCEA statistics reveal that total enrollment for the 1997-98 academic year is 2,648,859—an increase of 81,000 since 1992.
Of the roughly 2.6 million Catholic school students, 1,995,649 are in elementary school, 19,392 attend middle school, and 633,818 are in high school. Minority student enrollment constitutes 24.4% of the total and the average student-to-teacher ratio is 17 to one. Annual tuition in Catholic schools averages $1,499, up 13% since 1995, according to the NCEA.
At a press conference, Dr. Robert Kealey, executive director of the NCEA Elementary School Department, said 150 new Catholic schools have opened around the country during the last 10 years. Most report full enrollment and long waiting lists.
The popularity of the Catholic schools can be attributed to numerous reasons. But NCEA president Dr. Leonard DeFiore focuses on one in particular. “No matter what popular polls may seem to say, people are concerned about character,” he said. “Parents want their children to grow into adults with strong moral values. That's what Catholic schools deliver and that's why more families are enrolling.”
Karen Walker writes from Corona del Mar, California.
----- EXCERPT: Keynoter Alan Keyes's detour from theme draws standing ovation ----- EXTENDED BODY: Karen Walker ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Asian Bishops Address Priorities Of Their Massive Continent DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:TAIPEI, Taiwan— The bishops of Asia began their meeting in Rome this week to mark the first synod for their region in history. About 250 participants, including bishops, experts, and observers from Asia and other continents, are taking part in the special assembly which winds up May 14. (See related stories on page 6)
Like other recent synods, the Synod of Bishops for Asia is a preparatory exercise for the year 2000. It was formally announced during the papal visit to Manila at the VI Plenary Assembly of the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conference in 1995. The gathering is the third continental synod, following the African and American Assemblies, held in 1994 and 1997, respectively. Dates on synods for Oceania and Europe have yet to be decided.
As they meet in Rome, the bishops of Asia are reflecting on Jesus Christ and his mission of love and service on the continent where three-quarters of the world's population live and more than half are under the age of 25.
“The synod will focus on the Church's service to life,” said Philippine Archbishop Oscar Cruz and president of the synod's committee for the message.
The lineamenta, or working plan, was first published in September 1996 to elicit answers on pastoral problems in Asia. This past January, the Instrumentum Laboris was drawn up—the result from responses received from bishops, theologians, and other groups, and sent to synod participants.
During the first two weeks of the synod, bishops of each region will address statements to the general gathering. The Instrumentum Laboris, the working document of the synod is a starting point, but does-n't necessarily reflect all the issues that will arise. “As far as I'm concerned, there are three strong points to be discussed: inculturation, interreligious dialogue, and the social action of the Church,” Archbishop Cruz said before the synod began.
Pre-synodal input from the bishops underscored their interest in discussing the role of the Church in relation to socio-economic issues affecting developing or extremely poor regions of the continent. They also wanted to address pastoral methods of helping people develop their thinking on issues involving human dignity, including such areas as child labor, migration to and from Asia, the rising culture of media, AIDS, caste systems, and the continent's flourishing sex trade.
Despite these challenges, there are visible signs of hope in Asia: the rising level of education, liberation of people from negative traditions, a heightened awareness of human rights, flourishing vocations, and the growth of Christian communities and interreligious dialogue.
The bishops also hope to explore how to focus their pastoral efforts more clearly on the family. Many believe the strengths and weaknesses of the Asian continent can be traced back to the Asian family.
The Catholic Church is a minority in Asia. The continent is home to the most ancient religious traditions, such as Buddhism, Shintoism, and Islam. And Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world. In Southeast Asia, with its population of three billion people, Catholics number up to a hundred million, half of them from the Philippines. The Middle East has a population of 220 million, five million of whom are Catholic.
Throughout North Asia, including the Siberian region, there are another ten million Catholics. Among other issues, the synod will study how better to spread the Gospel in areas ripe for evangelization such as in Siberia and Mongolia, former Soviet states.
The Instrumentum Laboris for the synod regards inculturation as “a major missionary challenge” for the Church. “Faith should be inculturated gradually in our lives,” says Archbishop Cruz. However, the problem of inculturation is complicated by the fact that in present-day Asia, no “pure culture” exists though there is an emerging “culture of the city.”
Most bishops on the continent express concern over the power of the Western media and advertising, which are contributing to a universal “mono-culture,” threatening to drive Asian cultures to extinction.
While the Church is respected for her organizational, administrative, educational, and health services, often people do not see her as totally Asian because of her Western approach in theology, architecture, art, etc. and her link with past history. During the synod, the bishops will discuss the burning issues of colonialism and westernization.
Another issue to be tackled is the peoples' perception of Jesus Christ. “The central theme of the synod is Jesus Christ as Savior of mankind,” said synod recording secretary Cardinal Paul Shan SJ of Taiwan. “Some people say that Jesus Christ is not the only Savior. This needs to be clarified in the synod, which should help the Catholics in Asia know their (faith's) authenticity.”
The Instrumentum Laboris states the main question clearly: “How can the Church in Asia explain that Christ is the one and only Savior and unique mediator of salvation distinct from the founders of Asia's other great religions?”
Most bishops stress the importance of proclamations in deeds more than in words. The bishops cite the witness of the late Mother Teresa, admired in Asia by both Christians and people of other faiths, as an example of this type of evangelization. They also agree that new evangelization begins with a proper catechesis of the Church's members, as well as with a renewed awareness of prayer and contemplation. They emphasize the role that liturgy should play as the source and summit of the evangelizing activity of the Church.
The bishops note the need to use modern technology and traditional forms of communication such as dance, theater, speech, and shadow plays.
The current question of interreligious dialogue is also a priority for the Asian bishops. Dr. Sebastien Karotemprel, SDB, professor of Theology of Mission at the Pontifical Urban University in Rome and a member of the theological-historical commission for the year 2000 said, “the Church is challenged to demonstrate its willingness for true dialogue.”
The Instrumentum Laboris enumerates the elements shared with followers of other religions and cultures of Asia: the centrality of the will of God in Islam; with Hindus, the practice of meditation, contemplation, renunciation of one's will and spirit of non-violence; with Buddhists, detachment and compassion. In Confucianism, there is filial piety and humanitarianism; with Taoists, simplicity and humility; and with traditional religions, reverence and respect for nature.
Lastly, the bishops have expressed the need to see Mary as Mother of Evangelization and model of the mission. Some members of the Asian Church are reflecting upon the Gospel image of Mary to better represent her spirituality and to make her a model for Asian women.
“The success and impact of any synod depends on two factors,” Karotemprel said, “the new insights brought into the synod and the use made of them by the post-synodal documents. Whether the Synod of Bishops for Asia will have a lasting influence upon the future of the Catholic Church in Asia is still to be seen. It is too early to make any evaluations. One can only hope that the synod will have the spirit of discernment and the courage to move forward with the mission of the Church in Asia.”
Joyce Martin writes from Taipei, Taiwan.
----- EXCERPT: Evangelization, inculturation, and interreligious dialogue occupy prelates at historic synod ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joyce Martin ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: 17th-Century French Spirituality: Good Stuff for Modern Catholics DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:LOS ANGELES—It would have been nearly impossible to have stopped by a religious book rack in a pre-Vatican II church vestibule and not found ample supplies of titles like True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin and, in vast paperback quantities, The Secret of the Rosary by St. Louis-Marie Grignon de Montfort.
Whoever flipped through a copy of the latter would not soon forget its no-nonsense opening lines: “Poor men and women who are sinners, I, a greater sinner than you, wish to give you this rose—a crimson one, because the Precious Blood of Our Lord has fallen upon it. Please God that it will bring true fragrance into your lives—but above all that it may save you from the danger you are in.”
Decidedly not a ‘60s sentiment. And among the various leading spiritual voices of the recent past, few were banished more thoroughly from the postconciliar mindset, at least for many Catholics, than was de Montfort's, one of the last great figures of the seventeenth century Catholic revival in France.
De Montfort's austere teachings on the cross, abandonment, and “loving slavery to Jesus through Mary,” seemed, to many, the very epitome of what the post-Vatican II Church had jettisoned in favor of an optimistic view of human nature and the vision of a cheerful, progressive God who, apart from politics, made few radical demands.
De Monfort's fervor and flowery language were relics of French Baroque piety, and reflected, so some historians of spirituality informed us, the fawning court etiquette of absolute monarchs like Louis XIV. All told, they had very little, if anything, to say to Catholics of the late 20th century.
However, there are abundant signs that, in the wake of a more sober assessment of the message of Vatican II, the preaching of Pope John Paul II, whose motto, “Totus Tuus” (“All Yours”) is borrowed from De Monfort, and a revival of interest in the so-called “French” school of spirituality, the saint's “exile” from the book racks may well be ending.
DEMONTFORT'S STORY
Louis Grignon de Montfort was born on Jan. 31, 1673 at Montfort-la-Cane near Rennes, the eldest in a large and once-prosperous family that had fallen on hard times. Even in his early years he showed signs of a special devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.
After being educated by the Jesuits, poverty prevented him from realizing his wish to enter St. Sulpice seminary in Paris, one of the centers of French Catholic life. Instead, he attached himself to one of the small communities affiliated with St. Sulpice. There, as contemporary witnesses attest, real destitution reigned; so much so that St. Louis fell dangerously ill and had to be hospitalized. Eventually, he completed his studies at St. Sulpice, where he received a solid education in theology, the Church Fathers, and in the spiritual writers of the day—particularly the works of the highly influential Cardinal Pierre De Berulle (1575-1629), the leading light of the 17th century Catholic revival in France, and his disciples, Charles De Condren (1588-1641), Jean-Jacques Olier (1608-1657), and Henri-Marie Boudon (1624-1702).
Experts today insist, rightly, on placing De Montfort solidly in Berulle's camp with its emphasis on the primacy of God (as against the so-called devout humanists), the contemplation of Jesus in his mysteries, liturgy as the font of spirituality, devotion to Mary, and the apostolate as the fruit of prayer.
From the beginning, De Montfort manifested a particular apostolic zeal for the poor. While still a seminarian, he gave catechetical instruction to rough Parisian street urchins. Ordained in 1700, St. Louis was sent to Poitiers where he served as the hospital chaplain, ministering to beggars, the sick, unwed mothers, and other societal outcasts. While at Poitiers, he found time to write his most significant theological work, The Love of Eternal Wisdom (1703), and to organize the nucleus of the Daughters of Wisdom, the first of three religious congregations inspired by his teaching and example (the others are the Company of Mary and the Brothers of St. Gabriel).
He also managed to arouse the jealousy of the local bishop who forbade him to preach in his diocese. Undismayed, St. Louis made his way to Rome where he appealed to Pope Clement XI to allow him to enlist in the foreign missions. Wisely, the Pontiff sent him straight back to France, armed with the title “apostolic missionary.”
For the next 16 years, De Montfort traveled thousands of miles, often on foot, preaching missions. His methods were often nothing if not bold. For example, he would invite parishioners to toss their irreligious books on a pyre surmounted with an effigy of the devil dressed as a society woman. He would present theater sketches with himself playing the role of a dying man contended over by devils and guardian angels. In perhaps his most famous resort to “visual aids,” the saint encouraged the peasants of Port-Chateau to erect a life-sized Way of the Cross in stone, an act which aroused the ire of another bishop who ordered that the multi-acre site be leveled. (Eventually, the shrine was rebuilt and can be visited today.)
But when it came to the apostolate, De Montfort was, quite simply, fearless. On one occasion, traveling by boat, he asked his fellow passengers, who were singing obscene ditties, to join him in the rosary. They greeted his invitation with jeers, but were eventually persuaded not only to recite the prayer on their knees, but to listen to the saint's admonitions afterward as well.
It's not for nothing that one De Montfort scholar called the saint's teaching “feet-on-the-ground theology.”
In 1712 St. Louis wrote his most famous work, the Treatise on True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin, still perhaps the Western classic on Marian devotion and consecration, and whose teaching on “consecration to Christ through the hands of Mary” Pope John Paul endorsed in his encyclical Redemptoris Mater(187-88). De Monfort's other works like The Secret of Mary and The Secret of the Rosary are popularizations of teaching contained in the far more comprehensive and well-balanced Treatise.
Louis-Marie Grignon de Montfort died, fittingly, on April 28, 1716, while preaching a mission. He was 43 years old. He was canonized in 1947.
PROBLEMS IN COMMON
“What you have to understand,” says Sister Agnes Cunningham, SSCM, of Batavia, Ill., a former seminary professor and expert on the French school of spirituality “is that the problems that Berulle and De Monfort faced are very similar to our own. That's one of the reasons why the French school is particularly relevant to our times.”
For one thing, Sister Agnes stressed, the masters of the French school, like us, were living in a postconciliar age. For them, it was the Council of Trent, concluded in 1563, whose teachings sought to reform the Church in the face of the Protestant challenge. Like us, the French school was concerned about the relationship between faith and life, and about the questions raised by science.
“And, like us, they lived at a time when the Church called for a return to the sources,” Sister Cunningham told the Register, “to Scripture, the Church Fathers, to the mystical tradition, to the whole renewal of prayer and spiritual life that Vatican II proposes.”
In fact, said Sister Cunningham, echoing other writers on the French school, Vatican II itself, far from wishing to distance contemporary Catholics from figures like De Montfort, is inconceivable without them.
Landmark conciliar documents like Lumen Gentium, Gaudium et Spes, and Ad Gentes, the decree on the missionary activity of the Church, “one would have thought that [Berulle's school] had written them.”
Berullian (and De Montfortian) themes like the necessity of basing the spiritual life on the major realities of faith, the notion of an interiorized liturgical life, the necessity of a personal relationship with Jesus, prayer's goal as union with God, the apostolate as the fruit of contemplation, the centrality of the priesthood and the Eucharist, the urgency of evangelization, the role of Mary in forming the soul in the image of Christ, the role of the laity as active cooperators with Christ in the world— these all find their echoes in the major thrusts of Vatican II's teaching.
One of the central problems the average Catholic faces in rediscovering masters of the French school like De Montfort has to do with terms they use that are nothing if not jarring to a late 20th century sensibility—terms such as: “abandonment,” “annihilation,” “slavery,” and the whole concept of Marian consecration.
As Raymond Deville writes in The French School of Spirituality: An Introduction and Reader (Duquesne University Press, 1994), perhaps the best single introduction to the field, “frequently the vocabulary [of the leaders of the Berulle school] has to be decoded.”
The first thing to notice, says Sister Cunningham, is that the French school find much of their language in the writings of St. Paul and in the Gospel of St. John. “That's important. For example, it's the Apostle Paul who frequently refers to himself in his epistles as the doulos, the Greek word for ‘bond slave, ’of Christ.”
There's also the example of Mary's Magnificat, and the so-called kenosis hymn in Paul's Letter to the Philippians (Ph 2:5ff), where Christ “empties himself, taking the form of a doulos, or slave” in order to fulfill his mission of salvation.
“Slavery to Jesus through Mary,” says Sister Cunningham, “comes out of Berulle's idea of realizing, in an adult way, one's own baptismal promises. That's what's going on here. When De Montfort preached his parish missions, he would conclude them by calling people to recommit themselves to their baptismal profession. What he was calling for was an adult decision to live for Christ, and he called that, in his typically vivid way, ‘the servitude of love.’”
“It's not a lugubrious, oppressing, negative kind of thing,” says Sister Cunningham, “but an openness to the transforming action of the Holy Spirit in our lives through Mary, our companion, model, and precursor in the pilgrimage of faith.”
‘HOLY SLAVERY’
As Pope John Paul himself pointed out in a 1984 interview with Andre Frossard, “the word ‘slavery ’may upset our contemporaries. Personally, I don't see any difficulty in it. I think we are confronted here with the sort of paradox often to be noted in the Gospels, the words ‘holy slavery ’signifying that we could not more fully exploit our freedom, the greatest of God's gifts to us. For freedom is measured by the love of which we are capable.”
Interestingly, the current Pope's sense of his mission as servus servorum Dei, “servant of the servants of God,” has, according to many Marian scholars, a profoundly Montfortian coloration.
Another De Montfortian term that often grates on contemporary ears is “abandonment to God,” or even praying to “annihilate” one's will in His service.
“These are ‘dark ’terms, chiefly borrowed by the French writers from Spanish mystics like St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross,” said Sister Cunningham.
“What it's really about is creating capacities,” she explained. “‘Abandonment ’means setting aside our own desires, the ones with a small ‘d’, in order to create a capacity for, an openness to the capital ‘D ’Desires of God.”
The whole idea of daily abandonment is not a negative idea at all, she said, but a recognition that there's a daily struggle going on between what I might want to do and what the divine plan for my life is.
“It's a constant search,” she said. “Particularly when it comes to the apostolate. That's what ‘annihilation ’means: to empty myself in order to develop a capacity for the love of God that frees me to do virtually anything He asks.”
“It all has to do with openness to the Holy Spirit,” she said, quoting one of the writers of the French school who asks “to be as light as a feather borne on the breast of the Spirit.”
Or as Jean-Claude Guy a Sulpician writer, put it, “If I am to enter into communion [with God], … I must move out of myself, I must ‘decentralize ’myself, … [moving] away from myself as the center of all things, [in order] to center myself in Christ. [Thus] the Spirit initiates me into another life, life in Christ.”
For De Montfort, no person was able to model, guide, and nourish that process, so essential to personal holiness and the apostolate, as Mary.
But De Montfort's Marian focus was not on the Virgin as an isolated figure of greatness, but, as he insisted, on “Jesus living in Mary.”
Contrary to the impressions of some De Montfort critics who have read him only superficially, the saint preached a highly Christocentric mariology.
As Marianist Father Bertrand Buby, a professor at the University of Dayton's International Marian Research Institute, told the Register, “De Montfort and the whole French school of spirituality have one of the soundest Mariologies. Mary is always seen in relationship to Jesus and the Holy Spirit and in the context of the reality of the Incarnation.”
There is perhaps no more compelling example of De Montfort's Christocentric Mariology than this famous passage from True Devotion:
“If, then, we are establishing sound devotion to our Blessed Lady, it is only in order to establish devotion to Our Lord Jesus Christ more perfectly … If devotion to Our Lady distracted us from Our Lord, we would have to reject it as an illusion of the devil. But this is far from being the case … This devotion is necessary simply and solely because it is a way of reaching Jesus perfectly, loving him tenderly, and serving him faithfully.”
It's because of the “integrated character of the spirituality of the French school,” says Father Buby, that interest in De Montfort and other Berullian exponents is on the rise.
“It's an extremely important school of spirituality,” he said, “steeped in sound, robust incarnational theology, and extremely well-grounded in the New Testament and the Fathers.”
One of the reasons we're paying more attention to it these days, he explained, is that it's practical, and “brings home with such vigor and scope the tremendous relationship anyone can have with God, and the difference that can make to the world.”
“We'll be taking De Montfort with us into the 21st century,” he concluded. “I'm sure of that.”
A Congress will be held this summer on the theme “Alive in the Spirit: Prayer in the French School of Spirituality” July 17-24 at the Simpsonwood Conference and Retreat Center in Norcross, Georgia. For information, contact Father Ron Bagley, CJM /Eudist Fathers/ 36 Flohr Ave., West Seneca, NY 11244-1818, fax: (716) 825-4376.
Senior writer Gabriel Meyer is based in Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: St. Louis de Montfort, `retired' after Vatican II, makes a comeback ----- EXTENDED BODY: Gabriel Meyer ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: With Local Solutions, Vocations Numbers Start Creeping Up DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:Does the Holy Spirit need a marketing plan? For most of its history, the Catholic Church in America has had the luxury of sitting back and waiting for young men to answer the call to the diocesan priesthood. However, with vocations—or lack of vocations—emerging as one of the Church's greatest challenges at the end of the millennium, it has become obvious that a concerted action plan has become increasingly necessary.
On a national level, the U.S. bishops are in the final year of a three-year national strategy for vocations. Called A Future Full of Hope, the strategy addresses the responsibilities of bishops, priests, Catholic organizations, and families in promoting vocations.
The hope is that the strategy will provide valuable research, resources, and encouragement for local bishops, priests, and vocations directors, because in the long run, there is little disagreement that the late House Speaker Tip O'Neill's famous line, “All politics are local,” also applies to vocations.
“The key is to get people in the parishes—to raise their awareness that they can do something about vocations,” said John Latenser, president of the USA/Canada Council of Serra International, the only Catholic international organization that has defined encouragement and support of vocations as its primary mission.
If the Church can get people in the pews involved in prayer for vocations and actually asking young men to consider that they are being called, “then we've gone a long way,” he said.
“The programs that are working so well are really an application of that principle in some way,” Latenser added.
While it is hard to demonstrate a cause and effect relationship, some specific diocesan programs seem to have created a heightened interest in vocations, which usually translates into practical numbers, according to Father Timothy Reker, director of the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Vocations.
One such initiative was started by Cardinal John O'Connor in the Archdiocese of New York and has since been duplicated in several other dioceses around the country. The idea is a simple one—a discernment retreat led by the cardinal himself.
To date, the cardinal has held four full retreats and one “mini-retreat.” The full retreats have attracted between 35 and 65 men. Retreats are publicized through a letter sent to pastors, calls to men who had already made inquiries with the vocations office and Cardinal O'Connor's weekly column in Catholic New York, the newspaper of the archdiocese.
The Friday-Monday retreat is a huge time investment for a bishop, especially a bishop with as full a schedule as Cardinal O'Connor. But it is well worth it, according to Father Robert McKeon, special assistant for vocations to the archbishop.
“It's going to have long-term benefits,” Father McKeon said. “One of the things I feel very strongly about is that it allows priests to really get involved. The cardinal writes to each of them individually; he knows vocations are going to come from parishes. Many times, I end up speaking with the priests as well. For the long-term, you want priests involved. National studies speak to that so much—the importance of a good example, a mentor, someone you can emulate.
“A second benefit is that it helps the men who come on the retreat because it is so difficult to talk about the priesthood today. It seems so countercultural. This allows men to come together and see that they are among peers who are having the same kinds of thoughts, and they feel comfortable talking about it.”
Since the first retreat in 1995, the archdiocese has seen an increase in men who enter St. John Neumann Residence (a pre-seminary discernment program) from 32 to 48 men.
Another popular program in many dioceses is Operation Andrew, which is basically an evening with the bishop. It's geared to young men, mainly high school juniors, and participants come with their pastor. The group spends time in prayer, dines together, listens to priests tell their vocations stories, and is invited to ask questions.
The program has had success in the Diocese of Joliet, Ill, where the seminary population has increased from 14 to 21 men in the last three years. The diocese, which has 145 diocesan priests serving 520,000 Catholics, is in the early stages of a 10-year campaign to ordain 100 men in the next 10 years.
“There are tangible results; the number of seminarians has increased,” said Father John Regan, the diocese's vocations director. “It's hard to say which programs are responsible. However, most of the guys in our seminary have attended an Operation Andrew … The program's main purpose is to serve as an initial-contact event,” he continued, adding that it is “fairly nonthreatening.”
Father Regan has been a leader in a new form of recruitment which may end up dwarfing any other method for identifying potential candidates—the Internet. Joliet has a comprehensive, attractive website (www.vocations.com) which has generated 8,300 hits in just over two years. According to Father Regan, since the site moved to its current, easy-to-remember address, it has been getting 400 hits per month.
“The use of the Internet has dramatically increased the number of contacts from people interested in the priesthood and religious life, but they are from all around the country.”
Father Regan e-mails anyone who contacts the Joliet Vocations Office through the website. For those from out of town, he encourages them to contact their local diocese's vocations office. A couple of Joliet seminarians made their first contact with the diocese through the website.
Though he said the Internet is “a significant piece that has to be there,” he cautions that a multi-pronged approach must be used. “You can't put all of your eggs in one basket and say this is the way we're going to recruit priests,” he said.
Father Reker at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops said he is partial to a program that has had success in his home diocese of Winona, Minn. Known as Quo Vadis Days in Winona, similar programs by other names are popular throughout the country. It is aimed at younger children from seventh to ninth grade.
“It goes under the category of sowing the seed,” Father Reker said. “When we started out we hoped for 30 to 50 kids. We got over 100.”
The children are brought to Immaculate Heart of Mary Seminary where they spend a day with younger priests and seminarians.
“We gave them some fun but we also gave them talks by the seminarians and priests, Mass and reconciliation. Then we gave them a little prayer book and told them not to expect to make a decision in junior high school, but to keep praying and asking God what they should do with their lives.”
The primary purpose is to provide role models who are priests and seminarians and to get the boys thinking.
“For boys, a big part is to interact with the men and to see that they have fun and are normal guys,” he said.
Dennis Poust writes from Austin, Texas.
----- EXCERPT: Successful efforts involve Internet and time commitment from busy bishops ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dennis Poust ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Courage in the Marketplace DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:Paul Henkels
Paul Henkels is Chairman of Henkels & McCoy, a company his father started in 1923 with an investment of $1000. The company's annual sales are now approaching $500 million. Henkels & McCoy currently employs over 5,000 people operating from 70 offices throughout the United States and one in Mexico. It provides engineering, construction, and maintenance for electric, telephone, and gas utilities, industrial firms, institutions, and foreign governments. Henkels spoke with Register assistant editor Gerry Rauch in the offices of XRT Corporation in Wayne, Pennsylvania.
Rauch: I've heard your Catholic background makes a big difference in the values you bring to your company.
Henkels: It very definitely does. To me, business is not just making a living. A good deal of my life is spent in business. If I've got values why not bring them to the marketplace, because then I'm living them in my total life, not just at home or in my community.
How did you form your values as a Catholic?
Well, first off, both my parents were very good Catholics and had very good values.
Let me tell you a story. I was probably about eight years old, and it was in the depths of the Depression. The company was about ten years old, and I was home alone. The office for Henkels & McCoy was in a room just outside the kitchen of the house. I was on the second floor; my father was in the office. We were the only two people in the house.
A subcontractor came in and said my father owed him about $2,000 worth of extras that he did on a job. Now in those days $2,000 for a small business like ours was a very large sum of money, particularly during the Depression.
My father was a man of very strong character, and he also had a very awesome temper. But he really was a very principled man. The exchange got heated, and for an eight-year-old on the second floor it was frightening.
The conversation went on for several minutes, and finally there was a long pause. Then my father said in a much lower voice, filled with emotion, “I made an agreement with you and I told you what it was. It was up to me to make myself clear. I did not make myself clear. Therefore, I shall abide by your interpretation and pay you the $2,000. I'm not sure how we're going to be able to do it, but we shall do it.”
This was very remarkable because as prime contractor my father was holding the money and he had tremendous control over the site and situation. But that's the way my father decided. So that was my first lesson in ethics in business.
How did your interest in Catholicism develop through your life?
I went to an excellent grammar school. We were taught the fundamentals of the Church primarily through the Baltimore Catechism. And we would discuss these things at home around the dinner table. We always ate dinner together and these things were discussed and everything was taught to me very clearly. It all made sense to me and I have stuck with it ever since.
My wife, Barbara, has the same values and has the same good grounding, knowing what the Catholic religion is all about. So there is complete compatibility there.
I understand you are very much in favor of unions. Many business people aren't.
Well, first off, when businessmen talk to me I tell them that if management treated their people properly there would never be unions. So just on the face of it there is a justification for unions.
Business people are against unions because with unions they don't have total freedom in running their employees the way they want to. And secondly, of course, unions will over-step their bounds too. So at their best, unions make for creative tension. At their worst, there are other kinds of tensions.
So you've found unions helpful?
No, I don't find them helpful. I find them just.
But I do not find them harmful in most cases. There are advantages because you have somebody representing the other side—which isn't actually another side. If we don't have work, the union doesn't have places to put their people. So they have an interest in Henkels & McCoy getting work and being competitive.
There is also a certain stability that unions bring in other ways. For instance, you are setting wages for your people generally once a year and this means that you don't have to bargain with each individual. We have five thousand employees and it's useful that you don't have to bargain with each individual.
How do you handle business ethics when competition puts you under pressure to go another way?
When I tell our people what we're going to do, let's say concerning an unethical practice such as collusion, I tell them we are not going to violate any trust laws. When I explain it, I give them two reasons. One is the best reason, the right reason: that it is the wrong thing to do. But I know all of our people do not have the same values and morality that I do, so I don't expect them all to buy that. So then I give them the pragmatic reason, which is you're going to get fired if you get caught, and you're going to go to jail if the authorities get after you.
Does rejecting collusion make a difference in how competitive you are?
Yes. In construction you will read from time to time about collusion and anti-trust violations someplace in the country. Some industries are more noted for it than others. I make it very plain to our people at least once a year that we are not going to do those things.
But I also tell them that it is wrong because if a group of contractors colludes and passes the work around from one to the other, the prices rise and the practices in the field are not as efficient as they can be. People know they've got a profit, and that they've got an extra margin in there, so they don't operate as efficiently as they can. Somewhere down the line, in a matter of years, they're going to become non-competitive. Somebody else will start a business in the area, or somebody from another area will bring their very efficient business in and give you competition. So in the long run, collusion is the wrong way to go simply for pragmatic reasons.
In the long term, your company will also have a totally different reputation from the others in your field.
Absolutely. We've got the highest reputation across the country for integrity first and foremost, and also for quality and safety.
What are the short-term losses, though?
Collusion can take place not only among you and your competitors, it can also be with your customer. So if you don't go along with that game, passing jobs around, you might not be able to work for a customer who has a purchasing agent or somebody important that wants something back for himself—like a vacation in the Caribbean or a TV set or whatever.
Also, if you don't collude with a union, the union can visit sorrow on you by giving you poor workers or telling people that the work went sour.
They sabotage you?
It's a form of sabotage, yes.
Are you able to get around that?
Well, the first thing we do in our business is not to think about profit. If we do a good job for our customer and treat our employees properly then we will find a way to make money. But we don't start out to make money. We start out to do a job for the customer.
Where does risk-taking fit in?
We're taking risks all the time. The thing you have to do is never take a risk that you can't absorb. You can't take a risk that would take your company down. Yes, maybe once or twice in a businessman's life he has to take a risk that could put his company into bankruptcy. If he does it more than once or twice he is taking too much risk. But sometimes you just have to do it, either for principle or for some other reason.
Do Catholic values put you in some hot spots?
Well, I can tell you an experience I had. For a number of years we were working on telephones with an electrical union down in the Tampa area in Florida. They had a contract and we would renegotiate the wages every year. There were two contractors negotiating with the unions, one being us. The other one had about a third of the work that we did.
One year I did not go down to the negotiations. I let a division manager handle the negotiations. When it was over I asked how it went and he said, “Fine.” He said we had settled for 4%, as I remember it—but the specific percentage doesn't matter. I said, okay, that seemed to be about the pattern, so fine.
Then he said, “Paul, there's one thing you should know about this: we gave 6% to the men on the top, the foremen and the journeymen, and we gave 2% to the men on the bottom, the truck drivers and the groundmen.”
I said, “Oh, that's a little unusual. How did that come about?” He said, “Well, the union said that's what the members wanted.” I said, “Okay, but next year I want to attend the negotiations.”
So I went down the next year. Negotiations can generally end pretty quickly, in several hours, if everybody is realistic. And that's what happened. We started at nine and settled by eleven o'clock and had agreed again on 4%.
But the union said there was one thing that the membership wanted: to give 6% to the men on the top and 2% to the people on the bottom.
Normally, it's the practice that you agree on a settlement and you give them the money and you let the union spread it around the way they want it. For example, 2% could go into the pay envelope, and 1% could go into pension, and 1% into health and welfare, or whatever. So, I called a caucus and left the room and told the other contractor on our side of the negotiations that we were not going to settle for that. I said it had to be 4% across the board.
The other contractor said, “Well, Paul, it's the top people who are the ones who are key to us and the people on the bottom are not key to us.” But I said that Henkels & McCoy was not going to accept it.
We went back to the union and told them that we weren't going to do it. They asked why not. I said that we had had a lot of turn-over in the lower ranks and none on the top; and I said that we just didn't think it was fair, and that we thought we ought to stop the turn-over.
The thing that was never said during all those negotiations was that the people on the top were white, and the people on the bottom were black. We argued all that day and adjourned at five o'clock and started in the next day and talked about this thing, and never once was race mentioned. Finally, we were getting nowhere and about 11:30 a.m. we called a caucus and the other contractor said, “For God's sake, give in.” I said, “Well, I'm going to throw race into the thing and see what happens. We might as well get that into the open.”
So, we went back in and I told them we had not talked about race this whole time, and that I was just not going to settle this way. I said, “We work on a very close margin. So the foremen could slow down the work and it would take us three or four weeks to find out about it. In that interim we would lose our profit. But this is the chance we have to take because this is the right thing to do.” There was silence. Finally the business agent said, “We want a caucus.” He went out, and when he came back he accepted our offer. That was something that brought nothing extra to Henkels & McCoy, but it was just the right thing to do.
What would you like the American bishops to hear about business?
That business is an asset to the country, it is an asset to people, it is an asset to the Church. Business people are not all ogres. A lot of them are very constructive, very good, very just people, and they add quite a bit to the world.
Who do you turn to to learn about business from a Catholic point of view?
Father Robert Sirico (president of the Acton Institute, a Grand Rapids, Mich.-based think tank) is absolutely outstanding. I like to hear what he has to say. Of course we talk to business people in our meetings of Legatus (an organization for Catholic CEOs), so this has been a wonderful association. Also, I think Father George Rutler, who is the national chaplain for Legatus, is always very interesting and has his feet on the ground and knows what business is about.
What other things are you involved in outside the field of business?
I have always been interested in education, mostly higher education. But then in the late '80s I was very upset about poverty in the inner cities, particularly in the minority areas. And also I saw how poorly high school graduates and even college graduates were coming out. They could not write a decent letter, for example. So I figured I had to put some time in to help improve elementary and secondary education.
After thinking about it and talking to people, I became convinced that the only answer was school choice. This would allow parents to send their children to the schools they wanted, and more importantly the competition would shape up the public schools.
I have been very active in that ever since. I am chairman of the REACH Alliance, which is Road to Educational Achievement through Choice in Pennsylvania. We are the state closest to putting in place a state-wide law on school choice. In the last year or so I have also been trying to do something on a national level, particularly to have Congress enact school of choice laws for at least 2,000 children in Washington D.C.
Once we get a full statewide school of choice law enacted and it goes to the Supreme Court, this will be the first real step to reforming education, which in this country is very badly needed.
How close do you think we are to getting school choice?
It's within a few votes in Pennsylvania.
—Gerry Rauch
----- EXCERPT: The Chairman of a $500 million company says Catholic values and ethics are good for business ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: U.S. Notes & Quotes DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:Foes of Male Priesthood Protest Chrism Mass
As celebrated every day in Masses all over the world, on the first Holy Thursday, Christ gathered his apostles around him and instituted the Eucharist, commanding the 12 men at table to continue the practice. But when priests gathered in Philadelphia to commemorate that event they were greeted by protesters who argue that women, too, should be priests, according to an account in the Philadelphia Inquirer (April 10).
Despite rain and cold temperatures, women like Bernadette Cronin-Geller gathered with signs and shouted at priests who were arriving to participate in the Chrism Mass honoring the priesthood and blessing the oils to be used in ordinations and confirmations year-round.
“It's a sin to go in there without your sisters!” Cronin-Geller is quoted yelling to one priest.
“I'll say a prayer for you,” the priest reportedly replied with a smile.
The protests have been held for 11 years at Philadelphia's Saints Peter and Paul cathedral despite the fact that in 1994, as the article noted, Pope John Paul II declared “infallibly” that the Church has “no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women.”
The Archbishop Who Wants to Be Sacristan
The Denver Post (April 12) profiled the new local ordinary, Archbishop Charles Chaput OFM Cap, and found that many lay people were very appreciative of him.
“He's a holy man and a good communicator,” said one. “He's really a prayerful person and lives what he says,” said another.
But he has his detractors too. Some were particularly unhappy with his refusal to use his position of authority within the Church to sanction homosexual “unions” or to encourage homosexual men to adopt children.
Archbishop Chaput told priests on Holy Thursday this year, “we must never cut ourselves off from what the Church teaches. … Nothing is more important than obedience to your identity as a priest. Our souls and the souls of the people depend on that fidelity.”
The paper concluded by reporting that the archbishop has one ambition for after his retirement: he would like to be the sacristan of a church, centering his life around care for the tabernacle and altar.
From the Altar to the Mound
When Jeff Suppan, pitcher for the Arizona Diamondbacks, pitched in Dodger Stadium earlier this month, it was a homecoming of sorts. The pitcher, said a report in the Los Angeles Times, has deep—and spiritual—roots in L.A. His spiritual life has followed his baseball career.
Said the April 9 report:
• The devout Catholic pitcher has made it a point to return to his Catholic high school in California since 1994 to accompany seniors on their annual retreat as an adult mentor.
• When playing in the minor leagues in Boston, he made a priority of finding a spiritual director. And he did—an elderly priest who is also a baseball fan. “Boston has a large Catholic community and I felt comfortable there,” Suppan is quoted saying. “There are a lot of temptations out there and it was important to me to have someone I could confide in and who could answer questions.”
• Throughout his childhood, Suppan could be found often in one of two places: in Church or on the mound. He was an altar boy until he was 17.
• About his pitching, Suppan said, “God gave me an opportunity and a gift. It's up to me to make the most out of it.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: World Notes & Quotes DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:Cloning Jesus?
Cloning has been in the news for months now, and Easter Week brought a fresh angle to the debate. Could Jesus be cloned, perhaps from the Shroud of Turin (which stared from the cover of Time magazine that week)?
The question is a serious one—if a bit premature. Scientists have so far cloned only early fetal animals, not fully developed ones—let alone dead cells like those on the shroud.
A London Guardian article (April 11) quoted a number of possible answers to the question of cloning the shroud.
Film-maker David Rolfe (who plans a science fiction movie on the subject) is a believer: “Someone in possession of the shroud might just put together enough DNA from the blood on it to clone—Jurassic Park-style—the person to whom the blood belonged, whoever it may be.”
The Rev. David Hilborn, theological secretary to Britain's Evangelical Alliance is quoted saying that “you cannot clone Jesus Christ anyway. God does not have DNA. If you cloned cells from the grave clothes, you might get someone who looked like Jesus, spoke like Jesus, but it would be a mere physical similarity—he would not be the Lord and Master of the universe.”
A spokesman for the Church of England was less certain. “So far, mercifully, cloning Christ is hypothetical,” he said. Catholic spokesman Monsignor Kieran Conry said that if such a cloning occurred, “You'd only get one side of the story—Jesus's humanity.”
Scientists said not to worry: the idea is not possible in the “imaginable future.”
Poisoned Wine Kills Priest and Nun
Bottles of poisoned wine were given to Colombian priests on Holy Thursday, said several wire reports, including an April 13 Reuters report. One priest and one nun died after drinking theirs. At least two such gifts of poisoned wine have been confirmed in the area surrounding Bogota.
Father Gilberto Pulido, who knew Father Jesus David Saenz and Sister Marina de Rojas, said that the wine, which arrived on Holy Thursday, the day when the Church honors priests, was taken to be a parishioner's thoughtful gift. The two died shortly after drinking it.
Father Pulido also received a bottle of tainted wine and drank some—but spat it out immediately, because of the foul taste.
A similar case was reported in another Bogota suburb, where a priest's sister and a sacristan received and drank wine laced with wood alcohol. Police don't know who to blame, and speculate that it may even be the work of a Satanic cult.
----- EXCERPT: World ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Vatican Notes & Quotes DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:Seeing God in a Telescope
At the Vatican Observatory near Tucson, Ariz., faith and science walk hand-in-hand, according to an April 13 Los Angeles Times report.
The report interviewed George Coyne SJ, PhD, who is responsible for studying the skies and reporting what he finds to the Holy Father.
“I did not come to believe in God through any scientific knowledge,” Coyne is quoted saying. “I believe in God because God gave himself to me. Not in any miraculous way. I grew up and I questioned this and that. I thought, ‘Could this be true?’ I never came to a point where there was any need to reject what was given”
“Once I am a believer and I start doing science, I find that not only does science not challenge my faith, but that it enriches it. “ [I]t gives me more to think about as far as God being the source of all this. Faith goes beyond reason. It's transcendent.”
New Swiss Guard Commander Still Needed
The Vatican is looking to hire a new leader of the Swiss Guard.
A New York Times news service report (April 13), had this to say about the Swiss Guard and its commander:
• The guard's commander must be Swiss, preferably of noble birth, with military experience, 5 feet 9 or taller, and a Catholic.
• The Swiss Guards have guarded the Vatican gates since they were hired after defending Pope Clement VII during the sack of Rome in 1527. To this day, they dress in the Medici family colors (red, yellow, and blue) with plumed helmets and seven-foot pikes at their sides. They have added one item: tear gas for crowd control.
• They are also the Pope's personal guards, keeping a 24-hour watch at the door of his apartment. Two accompany him (in plain clothes) as part of his security entourage when he travels.
Lt. Col. Alois Estermann became acting commander when Cmdr. Roland Buchs retired early in October. Estermann was only a few yards from the Holy Father when he was shot. The article quotes him saying, “To serve as a soldier to the Holy Father is a beautiful combination for me.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Dirty Laundry in the Third World DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:John D. Rockefeller III's 1958 swing through Asia had momentous consequences for the cultures of the world. For the scion of the Rockefeller family came back from a close encounter with Asian poverty convinced that population control, not economic development, was the cure—and ready to put his millions to work towards that end. The peasant societies of Asia, Africa, and Latin America would never be the same.
By the late ‘60s, American family-planning field workers bearing boxes of contraceptives were a common sight in many countries. The villagers they approached, residents of a calmer, more congenial world, rarely rejected these gifts outright.
“[The workers] were so nice,” one Indian man later remarked, “and they came from distant lands to be with us. All they wanted was that we accept the [foam] tablets. I lost nothing and probably received their prayers. And they, they must have gotten some promotion.”
This villager's shrewd guess could not have been closer to the mark. From the beginning, the success of population-control programs has been measured not by declines in fertility, but by the numbers of “acceptors” it generates. Those workers who meet their quotas of acceptors are promoted; those country programs that meet their targets are expanded. Since those that fail on either count are terminated, there is little incentive to make sure that all this contraceptive largess is used for its intended purpose. One villager used his free boxes of vaginal foaming tablets, their contents undisturbed, to build a little temple in his living room to the local Hindu deity.
The leaders of newly independent states had little use for this new wave of secular missionaries or the anti-natal religion they preached. It seemed to many that a new and insidious form of cultural imperialism was being unleashed on them by their former colonial masters. Had they known of the existence of National Security Study Memorandum 200, a remarkably chauvinistic document produced by the National Security Council (NSC) in 1972, perhaps they would have barred the condom bearers entirely.
Steven Mosher
Written in near-apocalyptic terms, this secret report declared continued world population growth to be a grave threat to U.S. national security. If the peasant hordes of Asia, Africa, and Latin America were allowed to multiply, it declared, their search for social justice would inevitably lead them to communism. This would limit America's access to strategic minerals and other raw materials, both directly through the action of hostile regimes, and indirectly because of greatly expanded local consumption.
Thus was population control declared to be a weapon in the Cold War. The immediate result was a huge jump in population-control spending by the United States and its allies. Dozens of countries around the world were targeted, especially those that were considered to be vulnerable to communist insurrection (such as Thailand), and those sitting on top of valuable metals (such as the southern tier of Africa).
The programs themselves also became more sophisticated, especially in the use of surrogates. To answer the charge of cultural imperialism, local elites in targeted countries were recruited to serve as the public face of these new programs. To avoid the appearance of neo-colonialism, U.S. population-control funding was increasingly funneled through international organizations like the United Nations Population Fund and the International Planned Parenthood Federation.
Having muted, or at least neutralized, many of its developing world critics, the stage was set for a war on population. The NSC, in a follow-up study, issued specific guidelines on how this war should be fought.
“[P]opulation programs,” this report noted, “have been particularly successful where leaders have made their positions clear, unequivocal, and public, while maintaining discipline down the line from national to village levels, marshaling governmental workers (including police and military), doctors, and motivators to see that population policies are well administered and executed. Such direction is the sine-qua non of an effective program.”
At the time the NSC report was written, India was in the middle of its infamous “compulsuasion” campaign. Although this strange word was an amalgam of compulsion and persuasion, the emphasis was definitely on the former. No longer was our congenial Indian villager merely to be given boxes of contraceptives with which to build temples. Instead, he was to be sterilized. Governments'officials were assigned vasectomy quotas, and denied raises, transfers, and even salaries until they had sterilized the requisite number of men.
At the same time it was privately commending India's programs, the NSC strongly cautioned against public praise.
“We recommend that U.S. officials refrain from public comment on forced-paced measures such as those currently under active consideration in India … [because that] might have an unfavorable impact on existing voluntary programs.”
Indeed, the NSC cynically advised U.S. officials to pretend a complete lack of interest in population control.
“[A]void the language of ‘birth control'in favor of ‘family planning'or ‘responsible parenthood,’with the emphasis being placed on child spacing in the interests of the health of child and mother….”
With the United States looking benignly on, several million “compulsuasion” sterilizations took place in India. The program was wildly unpopular, especially among untouchables and Muslims, and riots followed. For the rumor (later verified as fact) had spread that the Hindu majority was deliberately targeting low caste and minority groups for sterilization in an effort to reduce their numbers.
Such an obvious and callous display of racial and religious bigotry is easy to condemn. But how can we possibly claim the moral superiority to do so? For our own government more than 20 years ago set in motion a policy designed to eliminate our own version of low caste and minority groups—the poor Africans, Latinos, and Asians of the world.
Steven Mosher is president of the Population Research Institute and author of A Mother's Ordeal: One Woman's Fight Against One-Child China (HarperCollins, 1994).
----- EXCERPT: Perspective ----- EXTENDED BODY: Steven Mosher ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: The Priesthood: A Scandalous Vocation DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:The North American College (NAC) has the best view in all of Rome. Sitting atop the Janiculum Hill, the diocesan seminary for Americans studying in the Eternal City is only a stone's throw from the Vatican. St. Peter's sits upon the skyline like a great ship in a quiet harbor, solid as a rock.
Brian Murphy's book about the NAC—The Vatican's Elite School—makes much of this proximity. Men at the NAC get a privileged view of the center and history of the Church, and also its corridors of power. It is here that many of the most promising seminarians are sent, to live and study under the shadow of the Rock, and to learn what the Roman in Roman Catholicism is all about.
Murphy promises us an inside view. The breathless subtitle suggests scandals to be exposed. And Murphy delivers, not scandals, but souls. The seminary is the heart of the Church, and the only way to know someone's heart is from the inside. Self-described as a “born-and-bred” Catholic, Murphy portrays a seminary as it really is—a school for souls. Seminarians spend a lot of time studying and learning how to live together—and perhaps plotting their ecclesiastical careers—but the most important work of a seminary happens within. The “inside view” Murphy presents is scandalous, presenting in all honesty the scandal of men who believe that God has called them to be his priests.
The New Men—capital N, capital M—is what first year seminarians are called at the NAC. It sounds a bit like West Point, and it is supposed to, for studies in Rome are a special privilege. The book focuses tightly on six new men and the rector of the NAC, all of whom who confide in Murphy with remarkable candor.
Murphy's six include the unlikely phenomenon of twin brothers, Scot and Roger, both star students at Harvard. Roger is secure in his vocation. Meanwhile Scot has questions—among them, whether he should switch to Roger's diocese. Chris lived the New Orleans high life and now agonizes over whether he can live celibacy. Gary, a quiet farmboy from the Dakotas, is torn between remaining at the NAC or entering a Benedictine monastery. Brian, a former air force pilot, wonders whether God wants him in the seminary or with the woman he loves. Tran is the least interesting—no dramatic vocational struggles—but the most heroic; a refugee from Vietnam after his father was imprisoned by the communists, he has remained faithful to the call he first heard as a boy, before the war stole his childhood.
All six seek answers in the right place. They pray. They pray so much that Chris gets callouses on his knees. Murphy allows his narrative to breathe with the spirit of prayer, wisely choosing quotations from the Breviary—the daily prayer of the Church, recited by seminarians—to begin each chapter.
“Taking the test, wearing the clerics, cutting the ties with the secular life,” writes Murphy, “are all subordinate to something as basic as prayer. It is the lead in the stained glass. Without it, the seminarians say there is nothing.” If Murphy's six are typical, then the NAC is what a seminary should be: a house of prayer. God speaks softly in prayer and the six are ready to listen.
Chris receives the grace to embrace celibacy after months of rising at five o'clock for a private holy hour. Gary decides that he is called to serve in the rural parishes—not the monastery—but only after two pilgrimages to Subiaco, shrine of St. Benedict. Roger and Tran remain secure, but Scot does not return for the second year after his diocesan transfer goes awry. And most moving of all, Brian meets his former girlfriend over the Christmas holidays in Ireland and they decide together—emotionally and prayerfully—that God wants Brian in the priesthood.
The book cuts through the cynicism and worldliness that corrodes so much writing about the priest-hood.
Murphy captures the great joy of the seminarian secure in his vocation: the certainty of knowing God's plan for life. The world offers seemingly unlimited options. But one mission is better than 1,001 options. “The new men say they feel in themselves “ the lovely serenity coming from conviction, from being certain,” he writes. Lovely serenity is a felicitous phrase, for a vocation gives a serenity born out of love, the love encountered in prayer, the love that never fails.
The New Men is a deeply edifying book. It cuts through the cynicism and worldliness that corrodes so much writing about the priesthood. As the new men try to become new men in Christ, the grandeur of the priestly vocation shines through. Only something grand can persuade six highly intelligent and capable men to turn their back on worldly success. “I can do anything and the thing I want to do is to become a priest,” says one seminarian, who left a high-paying job. The grandeur of the priestly vocation lies in the fact that no man can say “I can do it,” but rather, “I will allow God to do it through me.”
These seminarians are ordinary men with an extraordinary mission. They get angry and frustrated and even cry. But they also play football, barbecue up on the roof, have a few beers or a scotch, and a cigar. There are times for letting off steam and enjoying some friendly rivalries—as with the Legionaries of Christ, who always get to papal events before the NAC and claim the front seats.
But the diversions remain just that, diversions. Cardinal Edmund Szoka comes to dinner to celebrate his 25th episcopal ordination anniversary and the Vatican's “money-man” tells the seminarians that Holy Mass is the center of his day. “Never let the external obligations of the Church divert you from the internal beauty of prayer,” he advises them.
Acurial official plays tennis with Roger and discusses clerical ambition—everybody assumes Roger is headed for high office in the Church. “Never stop seeing the world through the eyes of a priest,” warns the monsignor. “If you forget that, you are in deep trouble.”
The seminary is where a man learns to look at the world through the eyes of a priest. Murphy has done seminarians and those considering priestly vocations a service in allowing them to see that process from the inside. A new man must learn to look at the world a new, through the eyes of Christ. Seeing a new begins with seeing. And so the new men must look.
“Look at this Eternal City, Rome, the most effective of classrooms to teach you about the Church,” instructs the rector in his welcoming address, “Look over at that dome, overshadowing every corner of this Janiculum Hill, reminding us of St. Peter and his successor. And new men, look within. Look within and see a man who has come to do God's will.”
Raymond De Souza is a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Kingston, Ontario.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond de Souza ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Praying with Saints and Seminarians DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:If a seminary is to be place of prayer, it will be a place of prayer books. The most important of these is the Breviary, the book used in praying the Liturgy of the Hours (often called the Divine Office). Brian Murphy uses quotations from the Breviary to provide themes for the chapters in his book on the North American College (see review above). But there is another prayer book at the NAC that merits comment, and it is not just for seminarians.
Years ago a new seminarian at the NAC would be issued a prayer book to strengthen his prayer life with the wisdom of the centuries and saints. That custom, like so many others, died out, but through the enterprise of recent seminarians, supported by the faculty, the prayer book is back. It is a welcome sign of renewal. And like any authentic renewal it incorporates what is new into the best the tradition has to offer.
Manual of Prayers follows the standard layout, with prayers before and after Mass, prayers for confession, morning and evening prayers, stations of the cross, and litanies and devotions to the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Joseph, and the saints. Ranging from St. Andrew to Mother Teresa, the manual presents the most beautiful prayers composed in Latin and English. To pray these prayers is to pray with the saints of all time, and to pray more fervently today, for the language of these prayers elevates the mind to God in a way that most of us could not do unaided.
To pray with Augustine on the beauty of creation, with Anselm for understanding… is to experience the joy of being Catholic.
To pray with Augustine on the beauty of creation, with Anselm for understanding, with Leo the Great for the Church, with Thomas More for our enemies, with Aquinas in adoring the Eucharist, all in the same words they used, is to experience the joy of being Catholic. The tradition is always being enriched: it invites us to pray with Father John Hardon for family life, and with Cardinal Cushing in his moving prayer for priests. A special treat are the pages devoted to Cardinal Newman, including his magnificent translation of the prayer to St. Philip Neri, composed originally by Cardinal Baronius, a vivid example of tradition remaining vibrant through the centuries.
The inclusion of the sequences for the great feasts of the Church, the Eucharistic hymns, the seven penitential psalms and seasonal chants, all in Latin and English, make this an unusually comprehensive prayer book. Bonded in black leather, with Vatican yellow and white ribbons, gilt-edged, and on heavy stock, the manual itself is a fitting repository for its prayers.
When Manual of Prayers was published in 1996, it proved to be a success among the laity as well as with priests and seminarians. A second edition is already in print. It would make a fine gift for a seminarian, or even better, a confirmation gift that might plant in a young man the seeds of a priestly vocation.
Raymond De Souza is a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Kingston, Ontario.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond de Souza ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Letters DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:Film Critiques
I have recently given a gift subscription of the Register to my family. The paper gives good coverage of the universal Church and provides insight into the workings of the Vatican, allowing the reader to maintain ties with the center of the Church in Rome.
You do good service by providing such information and news. One section of the paper, though, seems to be inconsistent with the rest, namely the section titled “Film Clips.” The large majority of the films included in this section are morally objectionable, I believe. Viewing these films would put one into a state of temptation at the very least, and more probably into a state of sin. The simple standard to apply to such films is WWJD—“What would Jesus do?” When deciding which film reviews to include in the paper ask the simple question, “Would Christ watch such a film?” If the answer is no, then the film is not worth reviewing, unless to condemn it in strong terms.
I appreciate the good work you do in publishing the Register and only write in hopes of helping to make it an even better paper.
Michael Deqscanis via e-mail
Editor's note: The film clips the Register runs periodically are meant to be a quick reference-not a recommendation—to help readers evaluate current films and to alert them to any unwanted “surprises” once inside the theater. The rating guide from the USCC provided with the clips makes clear if a film is objectionable from a Catholic perspective and why.
Oscar Night
This message is in reference to the article and photograph of Jesuit Father Chris Donahue, Oscar winner for the film “Visas and Virtue” (Register, April 5-11).
What a pity that Father Donahue lost the opportunity of giving testimony of being a priest on Oscars’ night. He could have worn the Roman collar instead of assimilating himself to the rest of Hollywood in a tuxedo.
Salvador Miranda Miami Beach, Florida
Clinton's ‘Photo Op’
I viewed with disgust the picture, and read the article regarding President and Mrs. Clinton receiving the Holy Eucharist at Regina Mundi Catholic Church in Soweto, South Africa (Register, April 5-11). What you didn't mention was how many more non-Catholics in his party of 700 also inappropriately received the Eucharist at the same Mass.
I view the incident as Mr. Clinton, his planners, and handlers setting up a “photo op” similar to looking out of the prison cell or the slave trade holding area. What other reason would the planners have for approaching the priest? I believe that the priest was somewhat pressured to let them receive the Eucharist, and be photographed in his church. As smart as these people are they know that they should go to the bishop for such a request.
What has bothered me, is why Catholic Bishops haven't condemned this act by the United States President and his wife as morally reprehensible. There was no special feast or occasion. It was only a visit by a person who “surfs” churches for political gain. When is the Church leadership going to speak out against such hypocrisy?
Edward Wood New Port Richey, Florida
Correction: The April 12-18 story by Karen Walker on pro-life rock musicians quotes Bryan Kemper saying: “I was abused and molested by my uncle and parents.” It should read: “I was abused by my parents and molested by my uncle.” The Register regrets the error.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----------- TITLE: United We Stand, Or How Catholics Can Avoid the Jell-O Syndrome DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:Catholics present a less than united front when speaking out on issues. Afriend of mine says trying to organize Catholics is like trying to organize Jell-O. One difficulty is that as a group they are on both sides of every issue. For example, Catholics have taken leadership in the pro-life movement but there are still many Catholics who are pro-abortion, often defending their position with political reasons, not moral ones. Catholics undergo half of all abortion procedures. Prominent Catholic politicians scandalize us with their pro-abortion views while touting their Catholicism.
One wonders where Catholics stand on the question of President Clinton's actions in the Lewinsky matter; would they dismiss private behavior as unimportant as long as the president does his job, a popular opinion among the American people? What kind of principles guide their thinking in evaluating the facts we know so far? A poll would undoubtedly find that we are divided on how to evaluate our political leaders. Both abortion and the Lewinsky matter involve primarily moral questions in a highly charged political and legal climate and Catholics, of all people, should be able to sort out popular opinion from sound judgment.
Many Catholics unfortunately go along with the dominant opinions in the culture without much reflection. Many people I talk to are so depressed about many cultural tendencies that they want to go and live on an island and pull up the drawbridge. Others want to take some action but they despair that their efforts will make no difference when the cultural problems seem so intractable.
Engaging in partisan politics comes naturally to us. We want our man to win and our cause to succeed. Identifying the guiding principles of social teaching can clarify what we want to achieve in the give and take of politics. A first step for Catholics is to learn more about the treasure of social teaching that is available to them in the Church. Laymen tend to think that only bishops should write letters and take stands on issues. But it is precisely the role of the laity to be active on questions that affect our life together in society, questions like abortion, euthanasia, school choice, and policies affecting the family.
Many of us say we are too busy for this kind of study. True, we have many family, professional, and charitable responsibilities that make sitting down to study seem like a leisurely exercise. On the other hand, educated Catholic citizens should see the work of defending moral principles in the public square today as a part of their Christian vocation. Why? Because our society is suffering a truth deficit and Catholic laity are intellectually equipped to witness to truth in all areas of life.
If we know the principles from studying documents such as Evangelium Vitae, Centesimus Annus, and the Catechism, it is easier (but never simple) to look at a policy debated by Congress and decide how to evaluate it beyond mere partisan politics. The problem is many of us never get beyond our partisan view. Catholic social teaching can sharpen or challenge our partisan views. We can deepen our understanding of the values under attack and be better able to argue in their defense. If knowledgeable Catholics were more involved in public debates perhaps we would have fewer pro-abortion Catholic politicians because they would be taught by their fellow Catholic citizens.
When people ask what Catholics stand for in our society the answer should reflect a few key principles: the dignity of the human person, the sanctity of human life, the pursuit of the common good, the irreplaceable role of the family, solidarity in working for the good of the poor and the suffering, and subsidiarity (i.e., keeping responsibility close to the personal level). These principles should form the basis of a more united Catholic presence in today's great debates. Instead of a house divided on moral issues we could weigh in with one intelligent voice and promote a more focused policy discussion. This is a witness to truth.
Some of us think the Democrats have a better practical application of these principles; others think Republicans do. That is what makes politics. But Catholics are called to more than mere politics. We are in the business of transforming society, of lifting it to a higher moral level. One of the best ways to achieve this goal is to form our conscience by a better grasp of Catholic teaching. Then we can better scrutinize secular arguments to see if they come close to a Christian view of society. Then we can better work to restore the link between freedom and truth and have a more substantial presence in society than Jell-O.
Mary Ellen Bork, a board member of the Catholic Campaign for America and the Institute for Religion in Democracy, writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Separating Church and State: The Justices, The Key Cases, The Interest Groups DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:Does the U.S. stand for freedom
Part one of this series in last week's Register discussed how the idea of separation of Church and state has mutated since America's founding. The Founders believed religion was necessary to the success of the American experiment, and they encouraged it. For them, “separation of Church and state” meant that the government could not choose an official religion. It did not mean that the government could have nothing whatever to do with religion. And it certainly did not mean that religion must be banished from public life. Separation of Church and state, for the Founders, meant only that the government must be neutral among the individual religions.
But things began to change after World War II. An activist Supreme Court majority, egged on by activist pressure groups, began to hold that the Constitution requires not only neutrality among individual religions, but also neutrality between the very idea of religion and its opposite.
Now, fifty years later, this notion has been reduced to absurdity. Not only have nativity scenes been banished from town squares, but Christmas trees are increasingly being banished from public schools. And one school district, in Hillsborough, New Jersey, has even forbidden students from exchanging Valentines because St. Valentine's Day was once a religious holiday.
Fortunately, this insistence on neutrality between religion and what the Supreme Court majority calls “irreligion” has not gone unchallenged. Throughout the last 50 years dissenting justices have consistently disputed the majority's reading of the Constitution. A number of think-tanks and public-interest law firms (some more sophisticated than others) have arisen to challenge the secularist pressure groups.
This article describes the attitudes of the present Supreme Court justices and summarizes the positions of some of the more prominent activist organizations, in order to show just how much is at stake in the current battles over the meaning of the Constitution.
The Current Supreme Court
The nine justices of the Supreme Court fall into three factions on the question of Church-state relations. The hard-core secularist faction is composed of four justices: Justice John Paul Stevens, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and usually Justices David Souter and Stephen Breyer. Three justices are committed to the original understanding of the Constitution and believe that it bars only official discrimination among religions. They are Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Justice Antonin Scalia, and Justice Clarence Thomas. Finally, two justices, Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy, are swing votes. They give a majority to the secularist faction in some cases and to the originalists in others. As a result, neither faction is currently able to cement its position in pure form. Also as a result, the litigation strategies of most Supreme Court lawyers come down to a struggle for the minds and hearts of these two justices.
For example, in Agostini v. Felton, the question before the Court was where government-paid tutors could give remedial help in math and reading to underprivileged parochial school children. The tutors helped public school children inside their public schools. Could they also tutor parochial school children inside the parochial schools or only in vans parked outside? The Court split 5-4. The two swing votes (Justices O'Connor and Kennedy) joined the three originalists (Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Scalia and Thomas) in upholding the tutors'presence inside parochial schools. But the rationale of the opinion was a compromise. Rather than simply holding that the Constitution permits public support, on an equal basis, of all schools, the narrow majority produced a narrow opinion. It held that because the government program aided all eligible schoolchildren, regardless of where they went to school, any aid that ended up at parochial schools arrived there only because of the private choices of parents who chose to send their children to parochial schools in the first place. But even that was too much for the four secularist justices. They dissented bitterly that religion was being aided in violation of their view of the Constitution.
A second case, Board of Education of Kiryas Joel v. Grumet, shows what happens when the swing votes go the other way. The question was whether a town called Kiryas Joel, which was composed entirely of Hasidic Jews, was able to receive government funds for its public school. This time Justices O'Connor and Kennedy voted with the secularist faction to strike down the funding.
Once again, however, the opinion was an ideological compromise. Justices Stevens and Ginsburg voted with the majority but still wrote separately to express the view that the school district of Kiryas Joel was even more problematic than the majority opinion let on. In their view, what was really wrong with Kiryas Joel was that it “increased the likelihood that [children] would remain within the fold, faithful adherents of their parents’ religious faith.”
Activists'Agendas
Because the Court is so deeply divided on the meaning of religious liberty, every Church-state case that comes before it is literally a crisis. With so much at stake, it is not surprising that activist groups on all sides of the Church-state question are pouring resources into the fight. What is surprising, though, is just how frank some of these groups sometimes are about their true agendas.
The Freedom from Religion Foundation is a good example. It is nothing if not aptly named. Claiming members in all 50 states and Canada, the Freedom From Religion Foundation states as its first principle that “the history of Western civilization shows us that most social and moral progress has been brought about by persons free from religion.”
An avowedly atheistic organization, it is active both in the media and in court. Its efforts, while cranky and idiosyncratic, are effective. Its media program, for instance, is directed by Dan Barker, an ex-minister and ex-Christian musician who now puts his musical talents to use in the service of atheism, penning such tunes as “Nothing Fails Like Prayer,” and the “Stay Away Pope Polka.” Nevertheless, the Freedom From Religion Foundation is regularly quoted in mainstream, national media. The Foundation's litigation efforts are even more effective. It is active in suing to remove from public property war memorials containing religious references, crosses, statues, etc.
Americans United for the Separation of Church and State is an organization that has for its 50-year history dedicated itself to a decidedly idiosyncratic notion of the principle of separation of Church and state. Officially founded in 1947 as Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, its genesis is said to have been a reaction to the appointment of Myron Taylor as U.S. ambassador to the Vatican. In all events, its early work was certainly marred by overt anti-Catholic bigotry. Its special counsel, Paul Blanshard, was particularly notorious. His book, American Freedom and Catholic Power, was panned even by The New York Times: “despite occasional sorties into reality, Mr. Blanshard repeats, often in modern dress, old scandals, and old wives’ tales that one had assumed were forgotten. …Unfortunately, this reviewer can find little in these pages that is not on a very prejudiced plane.” Nonetheless, it was effective. Blanshard's book was cited as authority in some of Justice Black's opinions for the Supreme Court.
In recent years Americans United has broadened its attack (but has not disavowed its origins). Both in the media and in court, the organization now attacks virtually any public acknowledgment of any religion. It is particularly active against any type of school choice program.
Founded in 1920, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is the grand-daddy of all public interest law firms. Its anti-government stance was originally forged in conflicts with Attorney General Palmer, who had been conducting discriminatory deportations. Suspicious of religion from the beginning, the ACLU has since become by far the most effective force opposed to religion in public life. Thus, when the Supreme Court, in Lynch v. Donnelly, approved including nativity scenes in public holiday displays, it was the ACLU who set out to overturn the decision. In practical terms, they have nearly succeeded.
In Allegheny County v. ACLU, they convinced a narrow majority of Supreme Court justices to strike down a particular nativity scene ruling. Ever since, they have been arguing before school boards and county councils that the logic of that case should banish all public religious symbols everywhere. The result has been that local governments, fearful of expensive litigation, have tended to back down.
For decades, groups like the ACLU were all but unopposed. More recently, groups such as Pat Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), The Rutherford Institute (which handled Paula Jones's lawsuit against President Clinton), the Christian Legal Society, and other similar, largely evangelical groups have been formed in response. They have been effective to varying degrees. (The ACLJ has actually won several Supreme Court arguments.) Their success, however, has largely been limited to forcing the courts to live up to the neutrality they preach. That is, the main approach taken by the Christian Right law firms has been to argue that neutrality really means neutrality and not hostility.
Also opposed to the secularist groups, yet apart from the Christian Right, is The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, headed by the present writer. The Becket Fund, named after St. Thomas a Becket, follows a philosophy consistent with the teaching of Vatican II and Pope John Paul II on religious liberty. It is bipartisan and ecumenical, and litigates on behalf of all religious traditions.
The Underlying Question
Last year, for example, in Rigdon v. Perry, it succeeded in striking down the Clinton Administration's order barring military chaplains from preaching against the President's veto of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. The case was brought on behalf of a priest, a rabbi, and the Muslim American Military Association. It is currently representing Mayor Bret Schundler of Jersey City in ACLU v. Schundler. That case is a challenge by the ACLU to Jersey City's display of both a Nativity Scene for Christmas and a Menorah for Hanukkah. The Becket Fund, on behalf of interfaith coalitions, is also challenging the constitutionality of several states’ Blaine Amendments, which ban many types of public aid to parochial schools.
As hard-fought as the legal questions are, however, they are not the ultimate question. Ultimately, the question of religious liberty comes down to a debate over the true nature of the human person. Underlying the secularist position is the notion that religion is like second-hand cigarette smoke: it is bad for you and so should be outlawed in public. ACLU President Ira Glasser recently wrote that the reason the federal Constitution does not refer explicitly to God is that the Founders knew that any such reference would violate the separation of Church and state and thus of religious liberty. Never mind that the First Amendment did not even exist yet, so there was no separation of Church and state to violate. And never mind that all of the state constitutions referred to God (and still do). This is a startlingly mistaken view of human nature.
The Declaration of Independence finds it “self-evident” that individuals’ right to liberty is “endowed by their Creator.” Glasser thinks it is obvious that we have the right to be shielded from the mere mention of God in official documents. Not surprisingly, the Freedom from Religion Foundation agrees with the ACLU.
Opposed to this view of the human person is that taught by the Second Vatican Council in Dignitatis Humanae, and by Pope John Paul II throughout his pontificate. According to the Holy Father and the Council, the human person comes with a builtin thirst for the transcendent as well as a built-in desire to live in community. People thus require freedom in order to search for God and express in public what they believe they have found. In short, because the religious impulse is natural to human beings, religious expression is natural to human culture.
It is not too much to say that whichever side wins this underlying philosophical debate will ultimately determine the future shape of religious liberty in America. If Glasser wins we will have freedom from religion. If we win there will be freedom of religion.
Kevin Hasson is president and general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty in Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kevin Hasson ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: A Radical Solution for a Post-Cynical Society DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:In one of his more lucid moments Oscar Wilde defined a cynic as “a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Now, a century after Wilde penned Lady Windermere's Fan and put this clever phrase into Lord Darlington's mouth, there has been no diminution in the cynical composition of society. If anything, we could say that such cynicism is firmly ensconced at the heart of the modern Zeitgeist.
One could even argue that modern man has gone beyond cynicism. Not only does he know the price of everything and the value of nothing, he would be astonished to learn that there is a difference between the two. After all, isn't value determined by market dynamics? And isn't this market consensus faithfully reflected in price?
Identifying value with price carries with it three fateful flaws. The first is that by their very nature many real values cannot be bought and sold. Who ever thought of putting a price tag on a sunset, or friendship, or world peace? Yet such values are of undeniable worth. Not that man hasn't tried to convert these values into commodities. All around us we can witness attempts to turn even the most intimate human values into merchandise. In this barbaric exercise, no stone has been left unturned: sex (pornography, prostitution, sex-based advertising), life (sperm banks, test-tube babies, wombs for rent), death (assisted suicide, abortion)—even human beings themselves are reduced to chattel in the institution of slavery, still in existence today.
The second flaw in identifying price with values is a corollary to the first: values are incommensurable. Through a common medium of exchange all commodities can be converted into others. Thus yo-yos can be traded for bicycles, bicycles for televisions, televisions for boats, and so forth. Price makes this possible. With many human values, however, such convertibility runs amuck. On Holy Thursday, Christians shudder as they behold Judas Iscariot handing over his Lord and Master for 30 pieces of silver. The repugnance stems not from the paltriness of the price, but from the very thought that loyalty and friendship could be sold to the highest bidder.
Finally, values and price differ in their genesis. Price results from a consensus of the market regarding the monetary worth of a given item. Thus prices fluctuate with changes in consumer perceptions and tastes, which reflects their subjective underpinnings. Values, on the other hand, bear an intrinsic worth independent of these variations. This is because values, in the words of German philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand, refer to what is important, and importance is grounded in objectivity. When Jesus asked his disciples, “What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?” he was referring to the absolute value of eternal life. Eternal life is objectively important to everyone, more important than any temporal concern.
By ignoring these real differences between price and value, the post-cynical society has fallen victim to a cultural disease: consumerism—which, as Pope John Paul II reminds us, encourages man “to have and to enjoy rather than to be and to grow.”
Make no mistake, consumerism and capitalism are not the same thing. In our day it is commonplace to rail against capitalism as one of the graver social evils of the fin de siËcle. We are terribly concerned about all the shopping going on, the widespread preoccupation with financial affairs, and the quantity of things that clutter our existence. We sigh wistfully for the simple life of bygone days before technology seduced our soul with microwave ovens, personal computers, and trash compactors. And worst of all, we no longer have the gumption to leave it all behind, to pack up and move to Walden Pond.
But the abundance of things isn't the problem any more than their scarcity is the solution. The availability of goods and services furnished by the free market is no social evil. The great danger of consumerism isn't that people are buying or producing more. The problem lies rather in absolutizing the market and reducing all other spheres of life to the economic. In equating price and value, consumerism accepts as worthwhile only those things that can be bought and sold, and implicitly disdains those intangible goods that elude commercial exchange. As a result, the Pope points out, “The more one possesses, the more one wants, while deeper aspirations remain unsatisfied and perhaps even stifled.”
How can consumerism be overcome? It would seem that the most effective means is an uncompromising option for such values that clearly cannot be bought or sold. Volunteerism and the consecrated life, for example, confound conventional wisdom and throw the consumerist mentality into tilt. Perhaps only through the radical witness of “leaving all to follow Christ” will our post-cynical society be led to reevaluate its criteria and put price and value back in their proper places.
Father Thomas Williams is rector of the Legion of Christ's general directorate in Rome.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----------- TITLE: Saint for a City of Workers DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:Lowell, Mass., birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution, is a fitting home for a shrine to St. Joseph the Worker
Less than 50 years after the Revolutionary War's Battle of Lexington—and 14 miles north of the site where it was fought—America's second major revolution began in Lowell, Mass., at the confluence of the Concord and Merrimac Rivers. Once their water power was harnessed and channeled through five-and-a-half miles of new canals, textile mills constructed alongside them made Lowell the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution.
Laborers poured into the burgeoning city to work in the largest concentration of mills anywhere, which by 1888 rolled out 4.6 million yards of cloth weekly. At the time, more than 21,000 men, women, and children— many of them immigrants—toiled to keep the mills humming.
It's only fitting, then, that the shrine of St. Joseph the Worker, model and patron of laborers, be located in Lowell. His shrine, located just steps away from the now quiet canals and mill buildings, was dedicated May 10, 1956, by then-Archbishop Richard Cushing of Boston.
The shrine was first established in 1868 as St. Joseph Church, to serve the Franco-Americans recruited from Quebec to work in the mills. The French-speaking Oblates of Mary Immaculate in Montreal, responding to an invitation, came to Lowell to staff the workers’ parish. Within two weeks of their arrival, the pastor purchased an existing Gothic stone church, and dedicated it to St. Joseph during a first Mass May 3.
With Canadians streaming to Lowell, the church needed two additions by 1881. Later, when it was necessary for the burgeoning parish to build nearby St. John the Baptist Church, St. Joseph's became a mission church. As the mills dwindled and eventually emptied by the mid-20th century, workers still faithfully attended the church.
Through the years, the Oblates maintained a strong presence and continued as guardians when the church was dedicated as a shrine after Pope John XXIII established May 1 as a liturgical memorial honoring St. Joseph the Worker.
At the shrine's dedication, Archbishop Cushing urged the working people of Lowell to maintain their ardent devotion to St. Joseph. “A greater saint you couldn't have,” he said. “We don't know a word he ever spoke or wrote, yet, next to Mary, Mother of God, he is the greatest saint.”
Reminders of St. Joseph's unique relationship with Jesus and Mary are present throughout the shrine's interior. Tall stained glass windows, which were added during recent renovations, illustrate the saint's life and invite admiration and meditation. Pictured along with the marriage of Joseph to Mary are the biblical events of the Nativity, the finding of Jesus in the Temple, Jesus working with Joseph at Nazareth, and the holy man's death. Another window depicts the Holy Family's appearance during the miracle at Fatima.
“Work was the daily expression of love in the life of the Holy Family of Nazareth,” wrote Pope John Paul II in his 1989 apostolic exhortation, Redemptoris Custos (Guardian of the Redeemer). “If the Family of Nazareth is an example and model for human families, in the order of salvation and holiness, so too, by analogy, is Jesus’ work at the side of Joseph the carpenter.”
As if to personify the “sanctification of daily life” through work, medallions at the bottom of the windows also picture men and women at work in Lowell: mill workers, carpenters, electricians, teachers, medical workers, printers, mechanics, musicians, attorneys, firefighters, and police officers.
The stained glass windows dating from 1881 offer subtle reminders of the shrine's origins as a parish. Among them is Our Lady of Lourdes, revealing the devotion of the original parishioners to her.
The interweaving of the new and the old, the spiritual and the artistic, finds another example in the large paintings above the side altars. The marriage of St. Joseph, a copy of the Raphael original from the 1880s, stands above one altar. A side altar has above it a 1960 painting of a young St. Joseph being assisted by Jesus, as Mary, at a spinning wheel, watches them.
The Blessed Sacrament is exposed here daily (except Sunday) for adoration from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. The atmosphere is always prayerful and devotion is strong. During the week, three Masses are celebrated daily, preceded by the joyful, sorrowful, and glorious mysteries of the rosary. Wednesdays include prayers and a perpetual novena to St. Joseph, a practice as old as the church itself.
Confessions are heard six days a week, mornings and afternoons. “The basic ministry here is the ministry of reconciliation,” says shrine director Father George Roy OMI.
The shrine continues drawing workers from Lowell's downtown as the city itself undergoes a renewal. Many who live in the area's housing for the elderly are regulars, as are people from neighboring towns who attend the devotions, come for eucharistic adoration, or light votive candles before rows of statues, such as St. Joseph and the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Pilgrims can also enjoy many other sites in the Lowell National Historical Park—all within a few blocks of the shrine. Canals, mill workers’ housing, and the thunderous operation of 88 power looms in a restored cotton weaving room are just a few of the sights.
Everything from a 1930s-era diner to fancy dining are nearby too, as are plentiful overnight accommodations. Street parking is hard to come by, but visitors’ lots and garages are nearby. About 30 miles northwest of Boston, Lowell is easily reached via Route 495 to the Lowell Connector to Exit 5B, where signs indicate the simplest way to the humblest of saints, honored at St. Joseph the Worker Shrine.
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Conn.
----- EXCERPT: The Catholic Traveler ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: In the Middle Ages, Church Supported Fledgling Universities DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:In his statement on Catholic higher education, Ex Corde Ecclesiae (“From the Heart of the Church”), Pope John Paul II reminds the world that, far from the Church and the universities being natural enemies, the universities themselves were conceived within the womb of the Church and grew to maturity there.
The early history of universities is necessarily hazy, since schools of various kinds always existed in important cities following the fall of the Roman Empire, and eventually some of them grew to the point where they might be recognized as what were later called universities.
The earliest of these are thought to have been at Salerno and Bologna in Italy, the former specializing in medicine, the latter in law. They seem originally to have been based on the guild system in which certified practitioners of a particular skill banded together to train students and to regulate the standards of the profession. Thus in a sense the two Italian institutions originated outside the formal framework of the Church. But neither became a full-fledged university until the thirteenth century, and at that time they came under some kind of ecclesiastical authority.
A “university” in the Middle Ages was another name for a corporation, a group of people with an officially recognized collective identity. In order to achieve such a status it was necessary to be chartered by some authority. Although kings and emperors sometimes issued such charters, especially in Italy, charters were more normally granted by a bishop or the Pope. Thus universities had no official existence without Church authority.
The first institution to attain full status was Paris, which grew out of the cathedral school of Notre Dame in the late twelfth century. For the remainder of the Middle Ages universities spread all over Europe, as far south as Sicily, as far north as Sweden, and as far east as Poland. Everywhere the Church played an indispensable role.
But this true not only in a mere formal or legal sense. Theology was pronounced the “queen of the sciences,” because it dealt with the highest and most certain truths, those pertaining to God. The word “science,” which simply means “knowledge,” was not yet given the restricted meaning it now has, and theology was the queen of the sciences because divine revelation provided real knowledge.
Thus the very idea of a secular university would have been unthinkable in the Middle Ages, because it would have excluded the single most important and exalted branch of knowledge.
In the early centuries of the Church the theologian Tertullian had asked the famous rhetorical question, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” and had given the implied answer “nothing.” In other words, the Church, possessing divine truth, had nothing to learn from human wisdom.
But, momentously, the Church as a whole answered the question quite differently. Human reason was seen as itself an image of God in the soul, the way in which man was most like God. And, since God created the universe, signs of his presence could be seen everywhere. The godlike faculty of reason was to be used to read those signs.
This then formed the intellectual basis for the universities—institutions dedicated to the pursuit of truth through reason as well as divine revelation. Unknown in the ancient world, and equally unknown outside Christian Europe, these religiously inspired institutions were the first communities established precisely in order to encourage men to exercise their reason to the fullest. As later centuries would put it, they were pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. (Institutions which might be called universities also existed in the medieval Muslim world. However, Islam in the end proved less hospitable to reason than did Christianity, and these Muslim institutions stagnated.)
First of three parts on the History of Religion and Universities
In certain disciplines the autonomy of reason was obvious—law, medicine, and the seven courses theoretically found in every undergraduate curriculum: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. In such subjects there were no revealed divine truths, and men were left on their own to discover wisdom.
More complicated was the status of philosophy as a whole. The medieval universities did not make the clear distinction between theology and philosophy which became commonplace later, but saw the use of reason to seek truth as inseparably intertwined with meditations on divine revelation. Thus St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the medieval “schoolmen,” expounded his purely rational arguments and his reflections on revelation as part of a seamless whole.
The method of instruction in medieval universities revolved around “disputations.” A master (professor) would expound certain positions in lectures which were expected to be logically compelling. Students or other masters might then take issue with him, and he would be expected to answer their objections satisfactorily. Masters like Aquinas would attempt to anticipate as many objections as possible and to answer them.
Thus, while the ultimate authority of divine revelation was acknowledged, this by no means foreclosed rational inquiry. While Church authorities might occasionally step in to condemn certain opinions which seemed contrary to Church dogma, most of the time a master's ideas would stand or fall on the persuasiveness of his arguments, and different schools of thought actively contended with one another.
The medieval universities did not neglect the physical sciences. The Greeks had been interested in the subject, and so were medieval thinkers, especially at Paris and Oxford. They made genuine efforts to understand the physical world through rational principles, and by the end of the Middle Ages many scholars had concluded, for example, that the world was round, or had come to suspect that the sun was the center of the universe.
What medieval universities mainly neglected were the historical and artistic disciplines (music was studied for its mathematical properties only), those subjects deemed not amenable to rigorous logical investigation. If those universities had a fault, it was an excessive rationalism which did not recognize truths which might be found in ways other than by formal reasoning. In virtually every field which they did study, medieval scholars made important contributions to human understanding, which every fair-minded historian has recognized. The universities of the Middle Ages were a unique and remarkable achievement, and could not have happened without the support and encouragement of the Church.
James Hitchcock is a professor of history at St. Louis University.
----- EXCERPT: The two weren't `natural enemies' then and they shouldn't be today ----- EXTENDED BODY: James Hitchcock ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Before Titanic, There Was Ben-Hur DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:Nearly 40 years after its release, the first film to win eleven Academy Awards still packs a spiritual punch
Biblical spectacles were once a Hollywood staple. Although often sentimentalized and overly melodramatic, they gave mass audiences a positive, orthodox view of Christianity. For more than 50 years, moviegoers around the world eagerly bought tickets. Then sometime in the late 1960s, regular production of these epics stopped.
Studio executives claim it's because audiences lost interest, but other factors are involved. “For many of the most powerful people in the entertainment business, hostility to organized religion goes so deep and burns so intensely that they insist on expressing that hostility, even at the risk of financial disaster,” Michael Medved observes in his landmark book, Hollywood vs. America.“On no other issue do the perspectives of the show business elite and those of the public differ more dramatically.”
Gen. Lew Wallace's novel, Ben-Hur, was subtitled a Tale of the Christ and first published in 1880. After a series of successful stage adaptations, it was produced as a silent film in 1926 and then remade as a “talkie” 33 years later. Both times it was a huge hit. The later sound version won 11 Oscars, including best picture, director, and actor—a record unmatched until this year when The Titanic racked up an equal number of wins.
The 1959 production of BenHur interweaves an orthodox depiction of Jesus’ life with the fictional story of the friendship and rivalry between a Jewish prince, Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston), and a Roman soldier, Messala (Stephen Boyd). Director William Wyler (The Best Years of Our Lives) and screen-writers Karl Tunberg, Gore Vidal (uncredited), and Christopher Fry (un-credited), convincingly dramatize how God can enter into our lives even when we don't expect it and how his mercy and love can transform us if we'll let them.
Ben-Hur and Messala were boyhood friends in Jerusalem. When the Roman returns as a commander, he asks the Jewish prince to spy for him. Ben-Hur refuses, declaring that some day his people will rid themselves of Roman domination and “there will be a shout of freedom such as you have never heard before.”
In retaliation, Messala arrests the Jewish prince, his mother, Miriam (Martha Scott), and his sister, Tirsa (Cathy O'Donnell), on trumped-up charges of sedition. Ben-Hur is sentenced to be a slave on a Roman galley, and his family is kept in prison.
On the way to the seacoast, BenHur's captors refuse to give him food and water. During a stop in the small village of Nazareth, he cries out, “God have mercy.” The carpenter's son, Jesus, offers him a drink of water, and Ben-Hur experiences an unexpected moment of peace.
During a naval battle he saves the life of his galley's commander, Quintus Arrius (Jack Hawkins). In gratitude, the Roman adopts him as a son. But Ben-Hur wants to return to Judea to find his mother and sister.
Back in Jerusalem, he gets a job training the horses of an Arab sheik (Hugh Griffiths) and defeats his childhood friend-turned-enemy, Messala, in a spectacular chariot race. But Ben-Hur's joy is short-lived when he learns that years of cruel imprisonment have turned his mother and sister into lepers. He visits them in the valley to which they've been exiled. Jesus is preaching nearby.
Later Ben-Hur watches Jesus drag his cross through the streets of Jerusalem and tries to offer him water in return for his earlier kindness. The Jewish prince witnesses the crucifixion, and both he and his family experience the power of God's healing grace.
Ben-Hur is the foremost example of the kind of intelligent, reverent, big-budget spectacle that was produced when Hollywood and its audience were on the same wavelength. Although some of the special effects seem primitive by current high-tech standards, the chariot race and naval battles are exciting, and the conflict between Ben-Hur and Messala packs a punch. More than offering thrills and emotional climaxes, the movie is also a story of spiritual growth that's still relevant to contemporary audiences. It's too bad similar films aren't being made today.
Arts & Culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: Arts & Culture ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: PBS's All-Human Jesus DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:Most academic experts use quasi-scientific methods to establish the historical truth about an individual or a social movement. Great emphasis is placed on cultural context and on speculations about the psychology of the people during the time period under discussion. So it should be no surprise that scholars at our elite educational institutions work with the same set of assumptions when they analyze Jesus Christ and his Church. Their activities are rarely part of a spiritual journey, and non-rational events like the resurrection and the miracles are usually explained away.
The four-hour PBS special, From Jesus to Christ; the First Christians, which aired earlier this month, reflects this mainstream, secularist approach. Twelve top-ranked scholars from places like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Union Theological Seminary, and DePaul University present the most recent findings on the subject in a well-organized, easy-to-understand fashion. A distinction is made between the historical person of Jesus and the Christ, who's treated as a symbolic figure whose identity evolved as the result of political, cultural, and religious conflicts. There is much talk about “a plurality of Jesuses.”
Writer-producer Marilyn Mellowes, and director-senior producer Paul Cran, use appropriate images from the Holy Land and sacred texts as well as architectural mock-ups to advance the academics’ arguments. But this slick, high-brow packaging shouldn't blind orthodox believers to the program's overall impact, which is to weaken the faith.
The opening sequences are promising. Some socio-political aspects of the Jesus story are highlighted. Recent archaeological excavations at Sepphoris, an ancient city in Israel, reveal Galilee was not the backwoods, provincial village society many have imagined. The place is found to have been a cultural crossroads, and Jesus, who grew up in nearby Nazareth, would have been exposed to sophisticated ideas from Jewish, Greek, and Roman sources that could have influenced his teachings.
But Galilee was also conquered territory under Roman rule. As such, Jesus would have understood that his preaching was political as well as religious. “In the first century, these were intertwined,” notes John Dominic Crossan, professor emeritus of religious studies at DePaul.
“Everything Jesus is doing is politically dangerous,” Crossan continues. “If you are following his life from day to day, you should be saying to yourself, ‘Somebody is going to kill this man.’”
Christianity is described as an apocalyptic sect of Judaism which grew up around the person of Jesus. But with the introduction of Paul, the show's secularist biases become apparent. The resurrection is presented solely as a doctrine which was useful to the apostle in building up the early Church. Its reality is neither affirmed nor denied by the show's scholars. Similarly, Paul's conflicts with Peter and James over the gentiles and their adherence to Judaism are depicted primarily in terms of the tactics needed to win new converts. No one mentions that the debate about these issues was also part of a search for the truth.
The show argues that the four Gospels were written after Paul's death and the trauma of Jerusalem's fall in 70 AD. “The followers of Jesus coped by telling stories about the man they had expected would deliver the new Kingdom on earth,” the narrator says. “These were not historical accounts but shared memories shaped by a common past.”
The idea that the Gospels were concocted as a coping mechanism for intellectual confusion and grief is offensive to many believers. But this kind of dumbed-down pyschologizing is typical of contemporary scholarly endeavors. It also underscores that the show's depiction of Jesus isn't the neutral, objective effort it pretends to be. Its conclusions are defined by certain currently fashionable academic notions that are, in their way, as dated as the sentimentalized, overly pious versions of the Jesus story popular in the 19th century.
Even more disturbing is the show's championing of heretics. The scholars rightly wax enthusiastically about the fifty-two early Christian texts discovered in Egypt in 1945. They include the gospels of Thomas, Philip, and Mary Magdalene, among others. Princeton's Elaine Pagels claims that these writings contain important teachings excluded from canonical texts. Using the language of contemporary radicalism, she argues that the works were suppressed by an emerging hierarchy that “didn't want people making choices about what to think.”
Pagels singles out second century apologist Irenaeus as the villain. “He thundered against those he saw as heretics,” she says. “He wanted people thinking what the bishops told them to think.”
The whole struggle is presented exclusively in terms of power politics. To the show's scholars, orthodoxy is just the point of view of the particular faction that won control of the Church, and like all victors, it rewrote history to discredit the losers, in this case the Gnostics. The extraordinary second century debates that resulted in the Apostles’ Creed and other important statements of belief are ignored. There's no sense that the institutional Church's view of Jesus may have prevailed because it was right.
But the program has more serious flaws. None of the scholars deals with the significance of the Church's belief in Jesus’ divinity or the doctrine of the trinity. The possibility of the Holy Spirit entering into history and affecting its outcome is also never discussed. This exclusively humanistic view of Jesus has had a following among certain segments of the intelligentsia for more than a century. From Jesus to Christ merely articulates the details of its latest incarnation.
The sad truth is that none of the show's viewpoints is considered controversial in the academy today. It's the orthodox interpretation of the Jesus story that's been marginalized.
Arts & Culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Dying Want Pain Relief, Not Suicide, Bishop Says DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:DUBUQUE, Iowa—To fight against assisted suicide, we must work to stop needless suffering for the sick and dying, said Bishop John McGann of Rockville Centre, N.Y., during a symposium on health care ethics. Bishop McGann was the keynote speaker for a March 25-27 symposium celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Bioethics Research Center at Loras College, a Catholic institution in Dubuque.
“In the face of serious illness, it is natural to struggle with grief, anger and self-doubt,” the bishop said, “but we must recognize that people who ask for help to commit suicide are almost always really longing for something else; not death but relief from physical pain, depression, and the social pain caused by isolation.” (Pro-life Infonet)
----- EXCERPT: Life Notes ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: A City's Top Politician Doubles As Its `Spiritual Leader' DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:Jersey City, N.J., Mayor Brent Schundler takes up the ‘life is sacred’ banner
Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler sounded like the preacher he once thought of becoming as he held a government–sponsored prayer vigil April 13 outside a sewage treatment plant where a newborn baby had been found dead amid the refuse. He spoke of life as a sacred gift and blamed an immoral and throwaway culture for creating the conditions that would lead a mother to drop her hours–old baby into the sewer, and also cited the recent school shootings in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and in other public schools across the country.
He plans to lead his New Jersey city in publicly proclaiming “the sacredness of life” and announced that a section of a local cemetery would be set aside for burial of unidentified bodies of children and adults, so that those who died unknown and unnamed may receive the respect they apparently did not receive in life.
“There was an incident in Jersey City last year in which one 19–year–old murdered another teenager within 10 feet of a police officer,” Schundler said in a Register interview. “This shows a society that has contempt for life, and people end up showing self-contempt by their violence. Sometimes people despair that things can't be changed, but they can. We can only do it by coming together as a community.”
The recent vigil at the sewage plant was opened by the prayers of a Catholic priest and closed with an invocation of a Protestant minister. Schundler, a rare pro-life Republican leader operating in close proximity to New York City, would later be debating lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union over the placement of a creche last Christmas on city property. He contrasts sharply with New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a nominal Catholic, who supports abortion, criticized the Pope for condemning partial–birth abortion, and marches each year in a “gay pride” parade that passes in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral.
A Presbyterian who speaks passionately of the “natural law,” Schundler insists that government has an obligation to take sides on moral issues and should allow for a reasonable public practice of religious faith. He calls partial-birth abortion “legalized infanticide” and chides New Jersey Gov. Christine Whitman, also a Republican, for vetoing a state bill outlawing the procedure. He is a strong advocate of school choice for parents and has won three elections mainly on the strength of his economic policies, which have drawn on his Wall Street experience, after the previous mayor wound up in jail for fiscal shenanigans. Schundler has bought the city time by selling off the municipal debt and enforcing greater compliance with property tax laws.
Not your average mayor by any standards, Schundler is a strong, consistent voice within a too–often–compromising Republican Party. He is up for re–election in two years and the 39–year–old talks of “limiting myself” to two terms and possibly seeking higher office.
Jersey City lies a few hundred yards directly across the Hudson River from midtown Manhattan, just out of the shadows of the impressive skyscrapers. Built largely by Catholic immigrants of the past century, it is a place of old factories, new sweatshops, and deep pockets of poverty that has also seen an influx of new residents and sparks of prosperity since the 1980s. Young urban professionals, drawn by the quick rail ride under the Hudson to Manhattan, have remade parts of Jersey City in their own image, turning old industrial buildings and rundown two–family houses into quality residences and reclaiming swaths of waterfront real estate for parks and malls.
The city also has a long history of corrupt politicians and an entrenched Democratic machine. When Mayor Jerry McCann was jailed in 1992, Schundler was a Wall Street yuppie living with his wife and their daughter in a gentrified section of the city. Letting idealism and the call to public service get the better of him, he left a large salary to take on the sea of troubles that come with inner–city governance. His economic talk sounded good to people who had been sold out by the previous mayor, and he struck a chord with the city's poor people, performing an end run around the liberal Democratic tactics of winning their support with subsidized housing, high taxes, and handouts. Schundler pounded the pavements and climbed the steps of the public housing projects, pushing his school choice program to parents who were fed up with an ineffective and dangerous public school system that had been taken over by the state because the city could no longer handle it. He won the special election to fill the vacant City Hall seat in the summer of 1992, won the regular election a few months later, and was re–elected in 1996.
Exactly how his fiscal program will fare in the long run remains to be seen and he will likely be back on Wall Street or off to higher office by the time the creditors come knocking. He has drawn criticism from human rights watchers who cite him for placing economic good above moral principle, by maintaining Jersey City's “sister city” relationship with a region in China, which carries out a one–child policy and forced abortions. Schundler has responded that free trade of goods and ideas is a way toward social change.
He has failed to get school choice instituted though he continues to push it as a foundational tenet in turning around the culture and giving families a greater stake in the future of their children. In a recent letter to the Wall Street Journal, Schundler debunked the notion that the Constitution is violated by allowing public funds to help parents send their children to private and religious schools.
The GI Bill allowed veterans to attend the schools of their choice, he wrote, and “federal Stafford loans and Pell grants for higher education can be similarly used at any accredited college or university, regardless of religious affiliation.” He added that public schools are not “value neutral” but inculcate values “which are generally secular and relativist in nature.”
He continued, “Those parents who seek alternatives to the govern-ment's education monopoly by sending their children to schools that reinforce the message of there being absolute rights and wrongs should not be legally discriminated against by having to pay extra to educate their children accordingly.”
He said that he is against abortion at all stages of life in the womb and remarks of partial–birth abortion, “What's the difference of an inch? If it's illegal to kill the baby once fully delivered, why is it legal just a few moments before?”
The focus on the late–term procedure is good, he added, because the Supreme Court allows state regulation of abortion in the third trimester and too few local governments have taken the initiative to ban or limit abortion in that period.
Whatever economic, crime, and educational problems the city may suffer, Schundler sees himself as a leader of the human spirit as much as the city's top politician. A prayer vigil to mourn the death of an abandoned baby is more symbolic than practical, but symbols can have deep–reaching effects, he said.
“It's not enough for the mayor to say, ‘If you murder a police officer, we'll arrest you,’” he said at the vigil. “It's part of my role to say, ‘Murder is wrong.’”
Only moral convictions based on religious beliefs and a sense of absolute truth and justice have the strength to move people to act together for change, he told the Register.
Brian Caulfield writes from New York.
----- EXCERPT: Culture of Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian Caulfield ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Indiana University Students Protest Mandatory ‘Health Fees’That Fund Abortion DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:Every semester, Emily Allen receives a bill from Indiana University. As a junior at IU, Allen expects to pay the necessary amount to receive her education. What she doesn't expect is to pay for other students’ abortions.
Yet Allen, and other pro-life students at the university, are forced to pay a mandatory $70.50 each semester as a “student health fee.” This fee is used to fund the IU Health Center, the main health-care provider for students. What bothers Allen is the health center's policy promoting chemical and surgical abortion. The center not only distributes abortifacient birth control and provides information on abortion, but it also has launched campaigns to make students aware of its special “contraceptive” services such as the “morning after pill.”
“It's quite aggravating to be forced to pay this fee, especially since I have visited the center and picked up their literature on birth control and pregnancy. They are completely into the abortifacient, sex-with-no-consequences mind set,” she said. “They're feeding my fellow students with lies about the nature of the ‘morning-after pill’ and many other so-called ‘contraceptives.’”
These sentiments are what drove Allen and two dozen other students to picket and leaflet at the IU Health Center in early April. They decided that an educational picket would serve two purposes: It would educate students and other members of the community about the deadly ramifications of such chemical birth control methods as the Pill, the “morning after pill,” DepoProvera, and Norplant. The public demonstration also let the university administration know the students’ opposition to having their student health fees going to pay for a health center that distributes abortifacients and refers for abortion.
The demonstration worked. Besides the typical positive and negative remarks from passersby, the students were also able to distribute educational brochures to other students about the “morning after pill,” Norplant, and Depo-Provera. The picket also ended up sparking local media attention, including a major article in the local paper, The Herald-Times, and discussion in the campus newspaper, the Indiana Daily Student.
Scott Tibbs, a columnist for the Indiana Daily Student and treasurer of IU Students for Life, used the demonstration to highlight the fact that university students were forced to pay the health fee whether they used the Health Center or not in his weekly column.
“I was one of about 20 students who picketed outside the IU Health Center to educate students about the issues surrounding the ‘birth control’ provided there,” Tibbs began his April 13 column. “Our main concern was many of these ‘birth control’ devices are not contraception at all, but are forms of chemical abortion.”
Tibbs went on to share his thoughts of the demonstration's affect on the community.
“I began seriously thinking about the picket during the next few days,” he wrote. “Perhaps the pro-choice side does think it would be best if we pro-lifers would just ‘Go Home!’ as one of the passersby suggested. But we have been sitting on the sidelines for too long while innocent children are slaughtered in the womb, both surgically and chemically.”
The demonstration and press coverage grabbed the attention of Dr. Hugh Jessop, administrator of the IU Health Center. After stating that he respected and understood the concerns of pro-life students, Jessop said he would not favor any proposal allowing students to “optout” of paying their mandatory health fee. He explained that only approximately 60% of the health center's operating budget comes from student fees, with the remaining amount coming from fees patients pay for services. He also told pro-life students that they should accept the mandatory health fee, comparing it to a tax for living in the community.
“The health center provides medical services to students and it provides educational services on practically every health topic you can imagine, including the ‘morning after pill’ and abortion,” Jessop told the Herald-Times.
He also said use of the “morning after pill” is not abortion, and that the pro-life students have a different definition of pregnancy than he does. According to Jessop, the “morning after pill” is not abortion because, while it allows fertilization to take place, it prohibits implantation of the newly conceived human being.
This is clearly an abortifacient property, however, and as such, is condemned by the Catholic Church. In his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae The Gospel of Life, Pope John Paul II wrote: “Among the Greek ecclesiastical writers, Athenagoras records that Christians consider as murderesses women who have recourse to abortifacient medicines, because children, even if they are still in their mother's womb, ‘are already under the protection of Divine Providence.’ Among the Latin authors, Tertullian affirms: ‘It is anticipated murder to prevent someone from being born; it makes little difference whether one kills a soul already born or puts it to death at birth. He who will one day be a man is a man already” (61.3).
‘Campus health centers, in distributing abortifacient birth control, give credibility to drugs that are not used to improve health but instead make women sick…’
The public debate at Indiana University about using student fees to fund such things as health centers isn't entirely new. In fact, Jessop said, pro-life students picketed the health center in 1994 as well. However, the suggestion that pro-life students should be able to “opt out” of paying the fee makes this debate noteworthy, according to collegiate pro-life leaders.
Laura Carroll, director of Collegians Activated to Liberate Life (CALL)—a national network of pro-life college students—said her organization encourages pro-life students to make the health center's involvement in surgical and chemical abortion an issue on campus.
“Campus health centers, in distributing abortifacient birth control, give credibility to drugs that are not used to improve health but instead make women sick with side effects, may act to kill preborn children and in general promote an attitude of careless disrespect for the gift of sexuality,” she said. “We strongly encourage pro-life students to reveal the hypocrisy of health centers giving out drugs that harm people and to alert fellow students to any student fees that are paying for the destruction of human life.”
Education is the key component to IU Students for Life's campaign against their student health center, according to Allen. While exploring legal options the students may have to conscientiously object to paying the mandatory health fee, Allen said the group's main goal to is educate fellow students.
“The truth must be told about the abortive nature of these forms of birth control,” she said “Since the health center supplies young, sexually active students with these chemicals, it's a prime place to start the education process.”
Greg Chesmore writes from Bloomington, Indiana.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Greg Chesmore ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Nathanson Sounds Alarm On Unrestrained Genetic Manipulation DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:Afearsome new world where headless humans beings are created as “farms” for organ transplants, disaffected human clones band together against naturally born people, and a genetically enhanced super-race live forever may well become reality at the hands of unrestrained geneticists, according to pro-life author and lecturer Dr. Bernard Nathanson.
The keynote speaker for the Dallas bishop's fifth annual Catholic pro-life dinner last month told of current experiments in biotechnology, which include human cells being implanted into the testicles of mice to be used for human in-vitro fertilization, embryos that can be kept alive in artificial “test tube” environments for as long as 19 weeks, and the creation of headless mice.
Studies in so-called enhancement genetics, he said, involve identifying and “puffing up” individual genes so that a person with an enhanced memory gene would remember everything, and one with an enhanced sleep gene could survive on only one hour of sleep a night. Other work on genetic aging presents the possibility of virtual immortality, from a life span of 500 years to as many as 10,000 years, he added.
“The cutting edge of new biotechnology poses serious challenges to those of us who are pro-life,” Nathanson told his audience of 1,600, gathered in the Great Hall of the International Apparel Mart. “With this technology— this cloning, tinkering with the aging process, we are…redefining human life.
“There are no federal regulations on any of (these experiments). The geneticists and the embryologists are running wild,” he said. “You will see it for yourself. This is not science fiction.”
Nathanson, a former abortionist and pro-choice leader who once directed the largest abortion clinic in the world, warned his audience that just as in 1969 when the abortion movement “caught the Catholic Church sound asleep” and passed abortion laws in 13 states, “it is not good, it is lethal, to play catch up on these issues.”
Having been “burned out” as an obstetrician, Nathanson enrolled in Georgetown University's Kennedy School for Bioethics in 1993. There he began his encounter with the brave new world of biotechnology, which poses ethicists such problems as the fertilization of eggs taken from aborted female fetuses and human cloning.
Despite his grim forecast, Nathanson, the producer of the ultra-sound pro-life videos Silent Scream and Eclipse of Reason, expressed optimism about the main focus of event sponsor Dallas Bishop Charles Grahman's pro-life committee: ending abortions. The committee sponsors such projects as prayer vigils at Dallas’ seven abortion clinics, parish-level support for unwed mothers, and youth education.
Just as in 1969 when the abortion movement ‘caught the Catholic Church sound asleep, it is not good, it is lethal, to play catch up on these issues.’
“There is an ebbing tide for the prochoicers and a flowing tide for those of us who are pro-life,” he said, noting a New York Times poll that showed 50% of Americans believe abortion is murder and 70% believe it should be severely regulated and eventually eliminated.
Nathanson went on to describe a strategy for the current pro-life effort to ban partial-birth abortion: to demonstrate that the procedure is not, in fact, an abortion but “a pre-term delivery with an act of infanticide at the end of it.”
“Roe v. Wade addressed only the ante-partum phase (of pregnancy and delivery). Partial-birth abortion is an intra-partum event, so by definition it is not protected by the Roe v. Wade decision, and that is where we need to make our attack,” he said.
Pro-lifers also need to be aware of the “irrefutable data” about the three major abortion pills, whose “many consequences have been for the most part ignored by the media,” he said. Fetuses exposed to, but not killed by, methotrexate and RU 486 typically develop severe skull and brain abnormalities. Children born to women who used the drugs often develop complications with multigenerational effects.
Nathanson, a lifelong atheist whose celebrated conversion to Catholicism culminated in his baptism by New York's Cardinal John O'Connor in 1996, closed his talk with the story of his spiritual journey, chronicled in his recently published book, The Hand of God.
“My life had become a charred and smoking ruin. It had spun completely out of control,” said Nathanson, citing a series of failed marriages, supervision of 75,000 abortions—including that of his own child—an emotionally disturbed child and finally, thoughts of suicide.
Intrigued by the conversion of his former professor Karl Stern, author of Pillar of Fire, Nathanson studied the book and began meeting monthly with a priest who grew from his intellectual companion to a spiritual confidant. Though Nathanson's views had long been compatible with Catholicism—he became pro-life years before on the strength of ultrasound evidence of the humanity of the unborn fetus—he never saw himself as a believing Catholic, he said.
“The parallel lines intersected at my baptism, and I shed a quiet tear that morning to mark that improbable intersection,” he said, quoting from an article he wrote about his conversion.
Ellen Rossini writes from Dallas, Texas.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Ellen Rossini ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----------- TITLE: The Gospel Of Life DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:“I repeat once more that a law which violates an innocent person's natural right to life is unjust and, as such, is not valid as a law. For this reason I urgently appeal once more to all political leaders not to pass laws, which, by disregarding the dignity of the person, undermine the very fabric of society.”
Pope John Paul II (Evangelium Vitae 90.3)
(See profile of Mayor Brent Schudler at left)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----------- TITLE: The Story Behind the RU-486 `Abortion Pill' DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:The manufacturer of the RU-486 abortion pill, (originally labeled ZK 95.890, but now classified as RousselUclaf 38486 (RU-486 for short) is the French company Groupe Roussel-Uclaf, a subsidiary of the West German pharmaceutical giant Hoechst.
RU-486 imitates progesterone, the hormone that signals the uterus to become receptive to the fertilized egg. The abortion pill is used in tandem with a prostaglandin that prepares the uterus for evacuation.
RU-486 contains a progesterone analogue (impostor) that “plugs in” to the uterine progesterone receptors, but does not deliver the message that progesterone is supposed to transfer naturally. These hormone impostors are commonly labeled “anti-hormones.”
Once the anti-hormone has occupied the progesterone receptors, the blastocyst (developing human being) is denied attachment and simply starves for want of nutrients and oxygen. He or she is expelled after several days. This method is “effective” to kill pre-born children up to eight weeks of pregnancy.
Most abortion pills, including RU-486, are about 80% “effective” when used by themselves, and about 95% effective when accompanied by one or two subsequent injections of synthetic prostaglandin E or Sulprotone. Other abortion pills are used to kill preborn babies of less than five weeks gestation, and their efficiency decreases dramatically past seven weeks’ gestation.
The RU-486 pill was designed to be an abortifacient. However, the public is much more comfortable with contraception than with abortion. When polls have been conducted on RU-486, the results vary depending on how the question is asked. If RU-486 is referred to as an “abortion pill,” it has significantly less support than if it is called a new form of birth control. The description can change support by as much as 15-20 percentage points and determine if a majority of those polled are in favor of the pill.
The inventor of RU-486, Etienne-Emile Baulieu, offered some ironic comments in the Register in April 1990: “I don't like abortion and I don't like talking about it. I am a physician and would rather talk about saving life. I am not really for abortion, I am for women…. I resent it when people present the very early interruption of pregnancy as killing a baby, morally or physically. I think it's a crime to say that.”
Source: The Facts of Life: An Authoritative Guide to Life and Family Issues, by Brian Clowes PhD (Human Life International, Front Royal, Va.) Reprinted with permission.
----- EXCERPT: Facts of Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Scheidler Guilty Under Racketeering Law DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:Pro-life leader gets the criminal treatment
CHICAGO—As the guilty verdict was announced by a Chicago jury in federal court against Joe Scheidler and his fellow pro-life plaintiffs midday April 20, they were ready with post-trial motions and applications for an appeal. They will not let the decision stand since the defendants have been made to stand for the entire pro-life movement and the movement's future hangs in the balance, from Operation Rescue participants to people who pray in front of abortion clinics.
“We expected a defeat during this round,” said Scheidler, director of the Pro-Life Action League in Chicago. “The plaintiff's case was full of lies and mis-statements. It was nearly impossible to sift through it all to discern the truth.”
The First Amendment rights not only of pro-lifers but of all civil rights activists are threatened by the verdict, which charges that persons involved in unpopular activities are guilty of extortion against the person or group they are protesting against, said Scheidler.
“We have no intention of backing off our life-saving efforts,” he stressed. “With the trial behind us we will turn our full attention back to carrying on our pro-life mission.”
The case, National Organization for Women v. Scheidler et al, began March 2. NOW and a number of abortion clinics sued Scheidler in a civil suit under the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act that was drafted as a tool against mobsters. The jury found that Scheidler and the other defendants had acted in a conspiracy to close abortion facilities around the country through rescues, pickets, and other forms of direct action.
The jury awarded two abortion clinics in the case $85,926.92 in damages, a figure that the judge is expected to triple under RICO guidelines.
Defense lawyer Tom Brejcha has said throughout the seven-week trial that RICO was exceedingly vague. The judge repeatedly refused to allow the defendants to mention the bloody details of abortion or the success of their efforts, which have saved thousands of unborn babies and their mothers from abortion, said the lawyer.
An example of the judge's behavior during the trial was seen during the testimony of Anne Scheidler, Joe's wife, said Jerry Horn, a former assistant to Scheidler. The judge interrupted her on numerous occasions as she tried to answer questions about the activities of the league, and then allowed a NOW lawyer to state that he had no cross-examination since it was obviously that Mrs. Scheidler would “stand by her man,” Horn told the Register.
The judge instructed the jury to decide the case on a very narrow interpretation of the law, which in effect decided the case, Brejcha said. If the defendants simply could be shown to have engaged in action to try to close an abortion clinic— an action the defendants admit to have engaged in—they were to be found guilty. On appeal, Brejcha hopes to show that the defense was unfairly limited by the judge and to introduce more evidence on behalf of his clients.
He said that the defendants were sued as proxies for all pro-lifers “as if the entire movement could be equated with some high Mafia family, whose 'street soldiers’ engaged in lawless acts of greed, fear, malevolence, and malice, rather than in peaceable, self-sacrificing and non-violent acts of civil disobedience, as a matter of conscience in order to save human lives and signal moral disagreement with the status quo.”
Brian Caulfield writes from New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian Caulfield ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Governor Signs `Partial-Birth' Ban DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:RICHMOND—Republican Gov. James Gilmore signed into law April 13 a ban on so-called “partial-birth abortions,” which he described as “repulsive” and “hideous.”
The new law would ban the procedure except when the life of the mother is threatened, creating regulatory procedures to review the steps taken by the doctor performing the abortion. Violating the law is a misdemeanor, punishable by a maximum penalty of one year in jail and a $2,500 fine.
“This procedure … is never medically necessary,” Gilmore said. “Not only does it snuff out the lives of children, it can put the lives of women in jeopardy.”
More than 20 states have enacted similar bans, Gilmore told a crowd of about 100 people assembled at the signing ceremony, and he contended that Virginia's version “rests on sound constitutional grounds.”
Abortion advocates continued to threaten a court challenge to the new law, saying it infringes on rights granted 25 years ago in the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision. (Pro-life Infonet).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Parental Consent Bill Fails In California Senate DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:SACRAMENTO—The Senate Judiciary Committee, by two votes, rejected legislation April 14 to restore California's parental consent abortion law, which was tossed out by the state Supreme Court last year. The court held that the 1987 law requiring minors to obtain permission from a parent or judge before procuring an abortion was “an unconstitutional invasion of privacy.” To overcome that decision, Sen. Tim Leslie (R-Tahoe City) authored a measure that would have asked voters in November to place the requirement in the California Constitution. Leslie told lawmakers that “parents have the right and responsibility to know if children are undergoing medical procedures.” State Attorney General Dan Lungren added that youngsters cannot go to a tanning salon without a parent's permission, or get a tattoo if under 18—even with their permission. Similar legislation is pending in the state Assembly. (Prolife Infonet).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Connecticut Residents Oppose Assisted Suicide DATE: 04/26/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 26-May 2, 1998 ----- BODY:HARTFORD, Conn.—When Connecticut residents are asked if they support “making physician-assisted suicide legal in Connecticut” 44% said they favored such suicide help, while 49% were opposed.
The poll was taken in mid-March, about a month after North Branford resident Muriel Clement became the first state resident to die with the assistance of Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Clement, a 76-year-old retired nurse suffering from advanced Parkinson's disease, died in Michigan of intravenous poisoning.
Catholics are least likely to support it while non-Christians or people with no religious affiliation are most supportive.
The telephone poll, conducted by the University of Connecticut, surveyed 500 randomly selected adults. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus five percentage points. (Pro-life Infonet)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: After Tragic Murders, Swiss Guards Vow Return to Honorable Tradition DATE: 17/5/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 17-23, 1998 BODY:ROME—“The black cloud of one day cannot obscure more than 500 years of generosity.” With these words, Vatican Secretary of State Angelo Cardinal Sodano comforted Swiss Guards at the May 6 state funeral of their commander, Alois Estermann, inside St. Peter's Basilica.
Just hours after he was named head of the smallest army in the world, Estermann, 43, and his wife Gladys Meza Romero, 49, were found dead in their Vatican apartment May 4. Nearby lay the body of 23-year-old Vice Corporal Cedric Tornay. The Vatican said that Tornay, in a “fit of madness,” used his service revolver to kill the couple and then himself.
“There is no mystery,” Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls told hundreds of journalists the day after the tragedy. “An act of this kind, so sad and painful, could happen in any social group. It was a fit of madness in the mind of a person who had agonizing thoughts and who did not feel valued enough in the corps.”
According to Navarro-Valls, Tornay, a three-year veteran, had complained to some fellow soldiers that he had been unfairly denied a medal of recognition to be given at the annual swearing-in ceremony attended by the Pope. He was also upset about a written reprimand he had received in February from Estermann, who had been acting commander of the guards since November. The letter admonished Tornay for not returning to the barracks one night.
By portraying Tornay as a disturbed young man whose pent-up rage simply exploded on the night of the murders, the Holy See quickly sought to put to rest other more scandalous motives involving love triangles or even homosexuality.
About an hour before the murders took place, Tornay, according to the Vatican, gave a letter to a fellow soldier and asked that it be delivered to his family. In the letter, which was not made public by the Vatican, but managed to appear in the Italian press, Tornay told his mother, “I hope you can forgive me but they forced me to do what I have done.”
He goes on to complain about the medal that was denied him and of all the injustices that he had suffered. Before saying good-bye to his family he said, “I have sworn to give my life for the Pope and it is exactly what I am doing.”
On the same day Tornay found out that he would not get the recognition he so coveted, he learned that the officer whom he believed punished him unjustly was being promoted to commander. According to one of his fellow soldiers, Tornay often rebelled against the rigid discipline of the guards and Estermann had little patience with such dissent: “The punishment given to Cedric when he broke the rules was always excessively harsh. He had even been told that his term as a guard would not be renewed.”
Another guard said Estermann often forced the vice corporal to work long hours with no reward: “On that terrible night, after finishing a very long shift, Cedric saw that his name was not among those to get a medal. He went to the commander to get an explanation, but he was too exasperated and the tragedy happened.”
The investigation of the murder-suicide is being conducted by Vatican prosecutor Gianluigi Marrone. An independent state with its own police force and magistrature, the Vatican politely refused an offer of assistance from the Italian authorities.
The speed with which the Vatican moved to resolve the perplexing mystery fueled much speculation among commentators in the days following the murders. Italian newspapers were full of questions: Why was Estermann's wife killed? How can Tornay's actions be attributed to “a fit of madness” if an hour before showing up at his commander's residence he supposedly handed his comrade a letter? How could someone kill with such cold-blooded precision without premeditation? Why was he even carrying a gun if he was off duty? Why had no one noticed any signs of psychological imbalance?
In an interview, Tornay's mother told the Italian press she had spoken to her son on the day of the tragedy and he had seemed fine. She also said he was very happy that he had recently been offered a job in Switzerland. Why, she asked, would he be so upset about having to leave the Swiss Guards?
Few people expect these questions will ever be answered, but surprisingly, the Vatican prosecutor said May 10 that the investigation is not yet complete and that “there are still some points to be clarified in the dynamics of the murders.”
While Marrone did not offer any further explanations, he was probably referring to the fact that the Vatican is still awaiting the results of forensic tests, such as the paraffin glove that will reveal the identity of the person who fired the pistol. Further, it is still unclear whether anyone present in Estermann's apartment was under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
The German newspaper Berliner Kurier added yet another element of intrigue to the story by claiming that Estermann was a spy during the 1980s for the Stasi, the East German secret police. The Vatican has categorically denied the report.
It is sadly ironic that Swiss Guards divide themselves into two groups, the obedient santos (saints), who spend their free time studying theology and listening to classical music and the rebellious “killers,” who feel stifled by the medieval discipline of the guards and are often drawn into the many temptations offered by the city of Rome. In 1995, several guards were arrested after they became drunk and vandalized cars in Piazza Risorgimento near the Vatican.
Tornay was known to belong to the “killers” though he had never gotten into any serious trouble.
An Unexpected Funeral
May 6 was supposed to have been a day of celebration for the Swiss Guards, for it is the day of the annual swearing-in ceremony, which is attended by the Pontiff. This year, however, the guards, along with their families and friends, found themselves at the Estermanns' funeral instead.
“In offering my most heartfelt condolences to the parents and relatives of Cmdr. Alois Estermann and his wife, I elevate my prayer to the Lord so that he may welcome their souls in peace,” said Pope John Paul II at the end of the general audience in St. Peter's Square on the day of the funeral. “Cmdr. Estermann was a person of great faith and solid dedication to duty. For 18 years he gave faithful and precious service and for this I am personally grateful.”
The Pope also had words of comfort for the relatives of Tornay, “who now finds himself before God's judgment.” At the end of the audience, the Pontiff went to the Swiss Guards' chapel and said a prayer before the three coffins.
Cardinal Sodano celebrated a solemn state funeral at St. Peter's for Estermann and his wife, in the presence of 16 cardinals, 30 bishops, and 70 priests. It was the highest honor that Estermann could have ever hoped to receive, and marked the first time a lay person received the kind of funeral usually reserved for high prelates.
Tornay's funeral took place in Rome's church of St. Anne — the first time that the Vatican opened its doors to someone who had committed suicide.
It was Estermann who on May 13, 1981, used his body as a shield to protect the Pontiff during an assassination attempt in St. Peter's Square. He had accompanied the Holy Father on over 30 trips throughout the world.
Though he was considered an exemplary military leader as well as a devout Christian, Estermann, who had previously been vice commander, was not immediately named head of the 100-man corps when the former commander retired. By tradition, commanders are of noble birth and Estermann was a commoner.
It seems that after six months of searching in vane for a “qualified” candidate, Estermann was finally offered the position.
The murder of Estermann and his Venezuelan wife of 15 years stands out as the most brutal act of violence to take place inside the Vatican walls since the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. Estermann's wife, Gladys Meza Romano, was a specialist in canon law and worked in the library of the Venezuelan Embassy to the Holy See.
In 1959 a disgruntled Swiss Guard arrived at his superior officer's home carrying a gun. After Adolf Rucker fired a shot that slightly wounded Col. Robert Nunlist, the officer managed to disarm him. Forced to resign, Rucker tried to commit suicide but failed.
The Pope at Risk?
Shock waves were sent throughout the Vatican after the recent murder of a man so close to the Pontiff. “It's terrifying,” said Pio Cardinal Laghi, one of the Vatican Curia's ministers. “Everyone in the Vatican feels more vulnerable now. Before it seemed that this type of bloodshed was relegated to the world beyond the Tiber.”
According to Rosario Priore, the Italian magistrate who headed the investigation of the 1981 assassination attempt on the Pope, Estermann's murder is a reminder that the Holy Father's life is never out of danger, especially as the Great Jubilee approaches.
“Estermann's death weakens the security structure around the Pope. The commander's role was essential. He had been protecting the Holy Father for almost 20 years.”
Just a few months ago, CIA Director George Tenet is said to have gone to the Vatican in order to warn officials of serious security problems for the Pontiff.
To complicate matters further, there were two bomb threats in the Vatican at the beginning of the month, one in St. Peter's and one in the Sistine Chapel.
In the aftermath of the slayings, there have been rumors of the Holy See abolishing or at least reforming the Swiss Guards, which some view as simply an anachronistic, albeit picturesque, army. There has been talk of low morale and a crisis in vocations due to the severe discipline and inadequate pay.
Meanwhile, Cmdr. Roland Buchs has been recalled from retirement in order to take over as head of the guards.
“The corps is still in shock,” said Buchs, “but thanks to the Holy Father's trust, we will overcome this difficult moment. The Pontiff has renewed his faith in us and we will continue to serve him with honor, courage, faith, and fidelity.”
Berenice Cocciolillo writes from Rome.
----- EXCERPT: Cardinal comforts unit at state funeral of their slain commander and his wife ------ EXTENDED BODY: ------ KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Pakistani Bishop's Suicide Brings Harsh Blasphemy Laws to Fore DATE: 17/5/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 17-23, 1998 ----- BODY:NEW DELHI—The awami (people's) prelate, Bishop John Joseph of Faisalabad, Pakistan, who shot himself May 6 to protest the nation's blasphemy law was buried May 10 after an ecumenical service at the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul in Faisalabad amid chants that “his blood shall not go waste.”
The 66-year-old prelate, head of Pakistan's Justice and Peace Commission (JPC) and the first Pakistani to be ordained bishop (in 1981) was laid to rest at the Marian grotto in front of the cathedral. Mourners numbered some 50,000, including many Muslims. Among those present were Archbishop Armando Trindade, president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of Pakistan (CBCP) — who returned from the Synod of Asian bishops in Rome — and heads of major Christian denominations in Pakistan.
Bishop Joseph's coffin had been brought to the cathedral May 7 in procession from Khushpur (his native village), 30 miles south of Faisalabad, after a solemn funeral service led by papal nuncio Archbishop Renzo Fratini and three Catholic bishops from Pakistan.
Father Immanuel Yousaf, JPC director, told the Register that police prevented thousands of Christians, including priests and religious, from attending the funeral. Buses with banners carrying mourners from as far away as Karachi were stopped on the way. Nuns and priests, identified easily by their habits or clerical garb, were turned back, the priest said.
“It's sad that our people were prevented from paying tribute to the leader who fought for them,” said Father Yousaf, vicar general of the Lahore archdiocese.
Earlier, during the May 7 procession, police shot at Christian marchers, injuring three. Worse confrontations occurred the evening of May 10 when Muslim fundamentalists attacked Christian mourners and burnt several Christian houses and shops in Faisalabad demanding the immediate execution of Ayub Masih who was sentenced to death April 27 for violating the blasphemy law.
The controversial law calls for a death sentence or life imprisonment for defaming the Prophet Mohammed, founder of Islam, and life imprisonment for those who insult the Koran, Islam's holy book.
The blasphemy laws were introduced in 1986 under an Islamization program pursued by the late president, Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq. They have been widely criticized as discriminatory toward non-Muslims and as wide open to abuse by Muslims seeking retribution against their non-Muslim neighbors.
Bishop Joseph Coutts of Hyderabad, Pakistan, who succeeded Bishop Joseph last month as chairman of the Pakistani bishops' commission for interreligious dialogue, said for 12 years the bishops and human rights organizations have been struggling to get the blasphemy laws dropped or amended.
The prelate said he believed Pakistani Catholics “will consider Bishop John a martyr.” In protesting the blasphemy laws, Bishop Coutts added, the bishops repeatedly have emphasized that “we are not saying all Muslims are bad or that the government is bad. It is a few fanatics who are very intolerant.”
Bishop Joseph, chief crusader against the so-called “black law,” shot himself May 6, at 9:00 p.m., outside the court (in Sahiwal in Punjab province) that had sentenced Ayub Masih, a Catholic, to death for allegedly speaking in support of Salman Rushdie's controversial book Satanic Verses.
Earlier in the day, Bishop Joseph visited the sentenced youth's house and addressed a meeting where the he spoke of “the helpless situation,” Father Bonnie Mendis of the Faisalabad diocese told the Register. Many attorneys support the growing demand for repeal of the law, Bishop Joseph told the crowd, but, “none of them are willing to take up Ayub's case for fear of their life.”
Lahore High Court judge Arif Iqbal Bhatti who acquitted two Christians — including a 14-year-old boy — on appeal in blasphemy cases was shot to death last October, and two Christians acquitted in 1995 had to seek asylum abroad after Islamic groups threatened to kill them. Ayub was shot at too in the Sahiwal courthouse during his trial. Anwar Masih, another Christian accused of blasphemy (the name “Masih” is used to identify people as Christians), was set free by Faislabad district court April 24 and is in hiding.
After the verdict, the JPC called for protests noting that the case was a sequel to a property dispute between a Muslim landlord and landless Christian peasants including Ayub. (Christians had applied to the local government for allotment of land for housing. When the case was filed in October, all 15 Christian families had to abandon their homes due to threats.)
“If anyone has to shed blood [for repeal of the blasphemy law], I will be the first,” Bishop Joseph declared at Ayub's village May 6 after fasting for the day. Later, the prelate went to the court with a local parish priest. There, claiming he wanted “to be alone to pray,” he moved inside and shot himself.
“Without worrying about the sacrifices we shall have to offer, dedicated persons do not count the cost,” the bishop wrote in his last message titled Akhri Katam (Final Step). The message urged bishops, members of Parliament, non-governmental organizations, Muslims, Christians, and others to unite to have Ayub's death sentence suspended and to have sections 295b and 295c of the blasphemy law repealed.
Section 295c of Pakistan Penal Code, added under the regime of Gen. Zia-ul Haq in 1986, reads: “Whoever by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representation, or by any imputation, innuendo or insinuation, directly or indirectly defiles the sacred name of the Holy Prophet Mohammed [Peace be upon him] shall be punished with death and shall also be liable to fine.”
“The insertion of section 295c transformed the innocuous provision into an utterly obnoxious law,” Justice Dorab Patel, former acting chief justice of Pakistan's Supreme Court, told the Register in 1995. “The most conspicuous feature of the definition of blasphemy is its vagueness. Although section 295c purports to define a crime punishable only by death, the words ‘by any imputation, innuendo, or insinuation, directly or indirectly’ make the definition of the crime of blasphemy arbitrary.”
At Bishop Joseph's funeral service in Khushpur village, Ashma Jahangir, chairman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) described the prelate as a “martyr for human rights” in Pakistan. The HRCP's 1997 annual report said most of the blasphemy cases are imposed on members of Pakistan's minority communities to settle land and other disputes.
In a 1997 interview with the Register, Bishop Joseph said, “Anybody could be framed under blasphemy law,” and added that it had generated “a psychosis of fear” among Pakistani Christians who comprise only 1.5% of the country's population of 140 million.
Some Muslims who want to become Christians are deterred by the blasphemy law he said at the time. “If at all any Muslim becomes Christian, it is kept a secret because of the blasphemy law.”
Despite the manner in which Bishop Joseph died, there has hardly been any criticism of the suicide — even from Pakistani Church leadership. While the Catholic Church considers suicide an affront to God and an offense against the bonds of love and friendship that tie people together, it usually avoids passing judgment on a person felt pushed to such an extreme.
For much of this century, the Catholic Church prohibited public funerals and Catholic burials for those who committed suicide. The prohibition was contained in the 1917 Code of Canon Law, but was dropped from the new code promulgated by Pope John Paul II in 1983.
Indian Bishop Valerian D'Souza of Poona told reporters at the Vatican May 8 that too much attention was being focused on whether Bishop Joseph was justified in taking his own life.
“We forget why he died,” Bishop D'Souza said. “The main focus should be on why did he die? Why did he take such an extreme step? It is an unjust law — the focus should be on that.”
A Pakistani bishop's conference press release, issued from the synod, said Bishop Joseph “devoted himself to the struggle for human rights of the poor and victims of injustice” and “prepared to offer his life for the abolition of laws repeatedly being misused against innocent minorities…. We believe that the Lord he sought so heroically to serve, will now prove to be his merciful judge and give him the reward he deserves.”
“It was a great sacrifice in a difficult situation,” Archbishop Trindade told the Register when questioned about the suicide. “We now pray that all will unite — Protestants and everyone of good will in the majority community — so that the problematic law will be repealed.”
Father Yousaf, an associate of Bishop Joseph for 15 years, reacted sharply to the same question.
“We are very sorry and sensitive to that word [“suicide”]. He has not committed suicide,” said Father Yousaf adding that the bishop had “given his life for the cause he stood for. The place where he died is very significant. He is our martyr.”
The refrain among people, he added, is that “[the bishop's] blood will bring a solution.”
Emotions are running high and they are prepared to do anything. The danger is that many Christians have threatened to immolate themselves unless the law is repealed. “We pray earnestly that the people will exercise restraint,” said Father Yousaf.
The death of Bishop Joseph seems to have awakened the international community to the situation in Pakistan. President Bill Clinton urged the country May 6 to repeal the blasphemy law that, he said, breeds a climate of religious intolerance.
The Catholic Bishops Conference of India described Bishop Joseph as “a martyr in the sub-continental struggle for freedom, justice, and dignity of human beings.” Later, nearly 200 nuns, priests, and laypeople, led by two bishops of Delhi demonstrated May 8 at the gates of the Pakistan embassy demanding “immediate repeal of the infamous blasphemy laws.”
Anto Akkara writes from New Delhi. Catholic News Service contributed to this story.
----- EXCERPT: Well-loved leader mourned after ‘extreme act' of protest ----- EXTENDED BODY: Anto Akkara ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: New Brain Research Sheds Light On the Nature of Body and Soul DATE: 17/5/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 17-23, 1998 ----- BODY:LOS ANGELES—In Tennessee Williams's Southern Gothic tragedy, Summer and Smoke, a young doctor taunts Alma, the idealistic daughter of the local preacher, with the news that in his extensive explorations of human anatomy, he had never once come across the soul.
If Williams's doctor had been doing his medical studies today, he might not be so sure.
Pioneering advances in the study of the biology of behavior are raising questions about the functions of brain mechanisms in activities such as prayer and meditation, and, in a far more controversial vein, whether there may be something in our neurological makeup that disposes human beings to religious experience in the first place.
Much of the research in this area by American neuroscientists is barely at the starting gate, but already it's attracted wide attention and provoked some fervent debate — much of it, not surprisingly, from theologians who specialize in the dialogue between contemporary science and religion. One of the most prominent U.S. institutes devoted to that discussion, the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS) based at the Graduate Theological Union (GTU) in Berkeley, Calif., is sponsoring a conference in conjunction with the Templeton Foundation of scientists and religious leaders this June. The Vatican, for its part, will convene a week-long symposium under joint Vatican Observatory-CTNS sponsorship June 21-28 in Krakow, Poland to consider the theological implications of the new brain research.
What has caught the attention of the public has been mainly the studies coming out of brain imaging, the use of pet- and CT-scans, MRIs, radioactive tracers, and other similar devices to monitor brain activity in subjects while they pray or meditate.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania recently photographed neural activity in the minds of nine Buddhist monks in prolonged meditation. Each monk was injected with a faintly radioactive tracer chemical that helped illuminate changes in the brain for the SPECT(single positron emission computed tomography) camera. According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, the experiment concluded that during meditation neural activity diminished in those parts of the brain that establish spatial relationships. Perhaps, the researchers speculated, that means that a sense of the transcendent is hard-wired into the human brain. The researchers say they plan to carry out a similar study of Franciscan nuns at prayer for comparison.
University of California at San Diego (UCSD) researchers have been using skin sensors to test how synapses respond while subjects are reading a religious text — this with a view to trying to measure the physiology of particularly intense forms of spiritual concentration, like the Orthodox Jewish practice of Talmudic study and discourse.
More clinically, V.S. Ramachandran of UCSD's Center for Brain and Cognition, an experimental neurologist who specializes in epilepsy research, studies the phenomenon of the heightened religious experience that often accompanies epileptic seizures in a search for whether there is a “dedicated neural machinery” that attunes a person to spiritual matters, as the scientist put it in a recent Times interview.
A few proponents of the so-called “biochemistry of belief” research are already making spectacular claims for it.
“Alot of what people hold as articles of faith,” a University of Southern California brain theorist was recently quoted as saying, “[will be] eroded by neuroscience…. In 20 years we'll understand what happens in the brain when people have religious experiences.”
And a University of California at Los Angeles psychiatrist recently wondered out loud “whether there will be room for a divine being once we can explain the phenomenon of subjective experience through neural mechanisms.”
Some scientists close to the new research are far more circumspect, however — both about the limits of the new findings themselves and their implications.
“The people who do this sort of research are pretty clever,” said Dr. George Moore, a University of Southern California professor emeritus in biomedical engineering, currently doing research in Parkinson's disease. “By way of brain imaging, they can detect increases in blood flow to a particular region of the brain. The subject performs one activity, you take a scan, identify changes in blood flow, and then design the research that tries to establish that the observed differences are specific to the behavior of the subject. It's neither more nor less profound than that.”
“What these changes in region X that you've photographed might mean, however,” he told the Register, “nobody has the slightest idea. At most, it may point to a region of the brain that deserves fuller examination.”
“Frankly,” he said, “a lot of the current discussion is public relations, media hype. Even if the research produces results, it won't settle anything. After all, we would expect different mental activities to light up different parts of the brain, wouldn't we? As for the deeper, theological questions — just how do you propose to construct the study of mystery?”
Some Catholic theologians also see the “biochemistry of belief” controversy as more “molehill” than “mountain.”
“It's a lot of fuss about nothing,” said John Haught, a theology professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and director of the university's Center for the Study of Science and Religion.
“The reason why [the recent research] is controversial at all,” he told the Register, “is because simple-minded materialists are running around saying, ‘Aha,’ as though they'd just got the goods on religion.”
Materialism, the theologian and author of the 1995 study Science and Religion, told the Register is not a matter of logical outcomes, but an alternative belief system. (Materialism is a philosophical theory that proposes that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality.)
“The idea that science will eventually answer everything and that spirituality is simply a matter of neurons,” he said, “that's called scientism. That's not science; that's an expression of a kind of secular faith.”
The theologian said that he preferred St. Augustine's view that “we can never grasp the mind because it's the mind that's doing the grasping.”
As for the new brain research, Haught called the preliminary findings “wonderful knowledge. Something has to be there and functioning reliably in order for consciousness and spirituality to come about.” However, he said, “we can acknowledge the dependency of mind on body without having to imply that mind is reducible to chemistry. Even if we find the [mental] wiring, that says nothing about the truth that is being communicated through it.”
“There's always mystery,” he said, “because we humans are finally never the masters of reality.”
Some theologians sympathetic to the new research are also concerned about what they call the “reductionist” temptation inherent in certain approaches to it.
“More is being made of these results than science will allow,” said Nancey Murphy, who teaches philosophy of science at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. “Some scientists use it to debunk religion, but the conclusions don't follow. We Christians always knew there was something real going on when we prayed, now even the neuroscientists know it.”
CTNS director Robert Russell, a professor of theology and science at the GTU in Berkeley, concurs.
“Look, even the reductionists for whom science provides a sufficient account of reality have to account for the ‘I'that understands and apprehends truth. It can't all simply be a matter of genetic determinism. There are always these transcendental, nonreducible aspects that all of us, in fact, base our actions on.”
However, Murphy, along with other experts associated with CTNS, stress that there are important theological challenges posed by this ongoing research.
“What this research is pointing us toward is the notion that the ancient debate about dualism is over — that human beings are composed of a material body and an immaterial soul,” the Protestant theologian opined. “What ancient and medieval theologians attributed to the soul, we now know happens in the brain. The brain is the seat of the interaction with God.”
One of the benefits of this research, she claimed, was that it “ultimately leads us to a clearer recognition of the ways we [humans] are thoroughly embodied. If you've got the new neuroscience in the back of your mind, you can think about these issues in a fresh way.”
Haught is not so sure.
“The kind of radical dualism that opposes material body to immaterial soul,” he said, “has never been good theology — the idea that we are essentially ‘soul’ and only accidentally ‘body.’” In biblical terms, our final destiny is “always an embodied destiny. Witness the notion of the resurrection of the body.”
But the word “soul,” he said, expresses far more than some “disembodied part of us.” Rather, it points to the deepest level of our being, the irreducible mystery at the core of the human person. “I hardly think we're entitled to abandon that idea.”
The immortality of the soul, Haught told the Register, is a vital concept, one that we need to carry with us into this discussion, pointing, as it does, “to the eternal value of the individual person.” The immortality of the soul tells us that “we're not just stuff,” he said.
In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Church emphasizes the radical unity of soul and body (“Man, though made of body and soul, is a unity” [364]), a union so profound, in fact, that “spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature” (365). Nevertheless, it also stresses that the soul is not a product of biology, but “created immediately by God,” and also that it is survives the death of the body to be reunited with it at the final Resurrection (366).
“Finally, the questions this research raises go beyond anthropology and into cosmology,” said Haught. “The cosmos, as we're coming to learn more and more about it, is not merely matter into which souls were exiled, as Plato thought, but organized, from the very beginning, in such a way as to give rise to the mind.”
Perhaps, as several theologians have suggested, the thrust of the new landmark research on the brain and spirituality may end up providing scientists and religious leaders, not with answers, still less with more polemical ammunition to use against each other, but, finally, with a common summons to wonder.
Gabriel Meyer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Gabriel Meyer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Museum's 'Anti-Christian' Film Draws Ire of Jewish Leaders DATE: 17/5/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 17-23, 1998 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON—Every 14 minutes, about 32 times a day, 363 days a year, in the shadow of the Washington monument, a woman slowly intones her version of history: “Christianity emerged from Judaism. Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew,” she begins. “The early Christian Church condemned Jews as agents of the devil, and blamed them for killing Jesus. This accusation was not renounced until the 1960s with the Second Vatican Council.”
She continues, “Christian crusaders slaughtered tens of thousands of Jews…. The Protestant Reformation brought no end to the anti-Jewish tradition of Christianity.”
After quoting Martin Luther that Jewish homes should be burned, she gets to the present century: “Enter Hitler, Austrian-born and baptized a Catholic.” Her voice goes deep as she imitates Hitler: “In defending myself against the Jews I am acting for the Lord. The difference between the Church and me is that I am finishing the job.”
Finally, she warns, “This is where prejudice can lead,” clearly meaning that Christian prejudice against Jews led to their murder under Nazism.
Every 14 minutes, a clutch of sober visitors listen to this explanation of the Holocaust, but this woman is not just another individual with a cause, wearing a hand-stenciled placard, a common sight on the Washington mall.
She is the voice-over for a film underwritten with federal money produced by the Holocaust Memorial Museum, which has been prominently featured in the museum's permanent exhibit for several years.
Until last December, there was no organized protest against the film AntiSemitism, but on Dec. 5, 1997, five prominent Jewish leaders led by Michael Horowitz (see “InPerson” page 1) wrote to the director of the United States Holocaust Museum protesting what they viewed as “libels of Christianity” in the film's “profoundly inaccurate thesis: that Christianity and Christian leaders were the initial causes of anti-Semitism and have at all times been its major proponents.”
The letter was signed by policy analysts Michael Horowitz and Chester Finn of the Hudson Institute; Elliott Abrams, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center; Jewish historian David Dalin; film critic Michael Medved; and scholar Michael Ledeen. Horowitz, Finn, Abrams, and Ledeen all served as Reagan Administration officials.
The five-page letter is a detailed challenge to the film. The authors point out that by blaming Christianity for the Holocaust, the producers ignore numerous other historical sources of antiSemitism including the fact that AntiSemitism pre-dates Christianity. They cite the Old Testament itself as a record of pre-Christian persecution and enslavement of the Jews.
More important, the authors write, Christianity has been a civilizing and democratizing force throughout history despite sins committed in its name. By using a quote from Adolf Hitler that creates the false impression that Hitler saw himself as acting on behalf of the Church — when there is even more evidence that he saw religion and religious organizations as rival forces that should be destroyed — the film's producers conflate Nazism and Christianity, promoting the idea that religion and intolerance are synonymous.
The museum did not officially reply to the group until last month when exhibition curator Steven Luckert wrote to Horowitz alone explaining that an extensive review of the film is underway. According to a museum spokes-woman there is no deadline for the conclusion of this review.
Michael Horowitz, for one, is not satisfied with the museum's response to date.
“It's a classic, ‘Don't call us, we'll call you’ pro forma response,” he complained. In an interview with the Register, Horowitz explained that he and other conservative Jews have taken up this cause for two reasons.
First, he said, Christians themselves are often intimidated about defending their own religion especially when it comes to the Holocaust. Second, by blaming the Holocaust on the existence of Christianity, it's just a short step to condemning all religions as intolerant and all believers as superstitious at best, potential murderers at worse.
“Aggressive Christianity certainly didn't cause the Holocaust,” explained Horowitz. “Aggressive Christians saved many Jews during the war as we all should know, but the attitude represented by the film could be read as meaning, ‘if we get rid of religion, we'd have a perfect world.’Well the communists tried that and guess what? Stalin was one of the biggest anti-Semites of the century.”
Horowitz continued, “As a religious person, I am offended. Jews should defend Christianity as a sister religion, but sometimes it's hard for Christians to defend Christianity. So we got the ball rolling and I hope Catholics and evangelicals, all people of faith, challenge it too.”
So far, though, the most vocal response to the Dec. 5 protest has come from another Jewish figure, Leon Wieseltier, an editor of The New Republic.
In a sarcastic article titled “Epistle to the Hebrews” (The New Republic, Feb. 9, 1998), Wieseltier declared, “The letter (of protest from Horowitz, et al.) is an ignorant and indecent document.” He called the authors “fools” for making their case.
For Wieseltier, only one thing matters: “The brutal and incontrovertible truth is that Auschwitz was created in the heart of Christian civilization [and] Auschwitz was not the first time that Christian civilization inspired, supported, or countenanced an attempt to destroy the Jews physically.”
Wieseltier's attitude echoes the response of some in the Jewish community who expressed disappointment in the Vatican's statement on the Holocaust, We Remember: Reflections on the Shoah, released March 16. The Vatican document makes a distinction between religious prejudice against the Jews, termed anti-Judaism, of which Christians have been guilty, and AntiSemitism as a racial theory that guided Nazism.
Pope John Paul II first made this distinction last October at a Vatican seminar on anti-Jewish currents in Christian theology. At that event, the Pope explained his view that wrong interpretations of the New Testament had created hostility toward the Jews among Christians, but he made clear that he was not attributing blame to the Church as an institution.
As Elliott Abrams made clear in his reply to the Wieseltier article, there is a growing academic consensus that Nazi ideology is significantly different from earlier anti-Jewish prejudice in its racially based, pseudo-scientific condemnation of Jews.
Has any Catholic organization weighed in on the matter of the film Anti-Semitism? The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has received several complaints about the film during the last few months, but the League has not taken a position on it because, according to communications director Rick Hinshaw, no one there has seen it yet. Hinshaw did note a trend toward blaming Christianity for the Holocaust, though.
Sources close to Holocaust Museum deliberations said it's unlikely that the museum will change the film especially because Catholic members of the museum's Church relations council have been supportive, including council chairman Father John Pawlikowski, professor of social ethics at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.
Another member of the museum's Church relations council, Eugene Fisher, director of Catholic-Jewish relations for the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, reviewed the film while it was still in production: “I think Michael Horowitz is straining at gnats to pull it this way,” he said. “I viewed it along with the rest of the Church relations committee. I offered a few corrections but you can't take it out of context. The museum has a whole section honoring Catholics who saved Jews. Alone, the film is inadequate. That's why it isn't shown outside the museum. Within the context of the museum, I don't think it is anti-Christian.”
Whether or not it's adequate, the film has not attracted much criticism from Christians. Why not? Robert Royal, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinks we're used to it: “As far as criticism of Christianity, we're not as sensitive because, maybe, we tend to feel, Christianity has lasted for centuries and will last for centuries, so why bother. There isn't much burning interest on our side to go see this thing. We don't have as much investment in the whole question of the Holocaust as the Jewish community does.”
Eleanor Kennelly and Victor Gaetan write from Washington.
----- EXCERPT: Observers debate merits of Holocaust Museum production that links Christianity and Nazism ----- EXTENDED BODY: Eleanor Kennelly And Victor Gaetan ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: For U.S., Missionaries Are No Longer Just for Sending DATE: 17/5/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 17-23, 1998 ----- BODY:BRIDGEPORT, Conn.—Mention “missionary,” and the common image is of priests and nuns leaving the United States for work in far off lands. While at one time this idea was the norm, in recent years roles have reversed somewhat. Now, orders from foreign countries are carrying on missionary work in the United States. They come from as near as Mexico and as far away as Korea and Africa.
One order of recent arrivals, the Daughters of Mary, Mother of Mercy, traveled from their native Nigeria in 1994. To date, they have brought more than 80 nuns to several dioceses in eight states, from New York and New Jersey to Louisiana and California.
Sister Mary Joachim, newly appointed regional superior, explains that the order accepted an invitation to come “as missionaries” with their charism of working with schools, hospitals, orphans, and old people. In her two years in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, she has received her nurse's license and joined the spiritual care office at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, Calif.
In addition, she and the other four nuns in her convent perform out-reach with the 100 Nigerian families in the area, such as teaching the Catechism and being active with the biweekly Nigerian Mass and periodic cultural festivals.
The Daughters of Mary, Mother of Mercy are but one of the many missionary orders in the Los Angeles area that Sister Faith Clarke SMJM, vicar for women religious in the archdiocese, calls “a wonderful presence.” The Lovers of the Holy Cross Sisters from Vietnam are another. Sister Clarke lists several orders of nuns from Korea who often emphasize Bible study and religious education among the Korean population; the sisters from Guadalupe in the Servants of the Blessed Sacrament, who staff schools with a heavy Latino enrollment; and orders from Mexico, such as the Eucharistic Evangelizers of the Poor, who have arrived only within the year. They speak no English yet, “but go right into the homes” and help “with whatever the need is,” according to Sister Clarke.
Because many of these missionary orders in Los Angeles don't have to hurdle the language barrier to reach the immigrants, they're readily welcome. The same holds true of priests and sisters in the Archdiocese of Newark, N.J. Many of the 75 adjunct priests from Central and South America and countries such as Portugal, Poland, and Korea, have been invited to minister in their native language to vast numbers of immigrants there, according to Father William Fadrowski, the executive director of clergy personnel.
Certainly, there's no lack of mission. When the Lovers of the Holy Cross Sisters reached Los Angeles, they began working with homeless women at the Good Shepherd Center, and now help the poor, teach catechism to Vietnamese children, and do nursing at the St. Francis Medical Center.
They arrived by a circuitous route. When Vietnam fell, “we followed the crowd and got in the boats,” says Sister Iwaniac Phi Tarn LHC, the order's superior. They eventually arrived in Philadelphia, and then went to Allentown, Pa., before the invitation came to move to Los Angeles. They gained official status in the archdiocese in 1992. Today, with three convents in the city, one in Orange, Calif., and another in New Orleans, the order remains “missionary” and, among other services, says Sister Monica, does “the same kind of catechetical work with children as when we were founded.”
Working with children is also a priority of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, who visit and pray with the elderly. Since arriving from Korea in 1990, the five sisters have established St. Mary pre-school, the first such Catholic Korean program in Los Angeles.
In Dallas, the six Missionary Catechists to the Poor also work with the very young. According to Sister Beatrice Martinez MCP, these nuns came from Mexico to work with the largely Latin community, which, in addition to a large Mexican community, also includes immigrants from Peru, Honduras, and El Salvador. They catechize, visit families in homes to find the needs, work with young adults, and run several Bible reflection groups in various neighborhoods.
They're instrumental in helping celebrate the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe with its three-hour pilgrimage around Dallas to the cathedral “as an expression of our Spanish faith and … to try to conserve our roots,” Sister Beatrice says. “We try to support our Spanish people spiritually, and help them get jobs, study English, and prepare themselves to live in the United States.”
In Chicago, the five Missionary Sisters of St. Pius X also arrived from Mexico to work with the growing Hispanic population. They are the only nuns in the three parishes they serve, providing the presence and help that would otherwise be lacking among the immigrants they serve. They are but one of several missionary congregations that have come to the archdiocese from foreign shores.
According to Father Aniedi Okure OP, coordinator of ethnic ministries at the U.S. Catholic Conferences's Office for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Refugees, there are close to 400 African priests in the United States (half as students) and 210 sisters working with African Americans. The sisters, who are mostly from Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda, “are a relatively new phenomenon here,” says Father Okure. Most have arrived within the last six years.
The priests have been here longer. For example, the Missionary Society of St. Paul has staffed African-American parishes since 1986. Father Paul Ofoha MSP, superior of the society, says 17 are currently active, primarily in Texas (dioceses of Galveston, Houston, Beaumont) and Louisiana, with a presence also in Baltimore and New Orleans.
The order sees these Nigerian priests as a gift of the African Church to the United States and, even if short of clergy in their native land, a way to take part in the universal mission of a Church that must be missionary in purpose.
Sister Roseanne Rustemeyer SSND, executive director of the U.S. Catholic Mission Association in Washington, explains: “The bishops' pastoral letter in 1986, To the Ends of the Earth, says we are both a mission-sending and a mission-receiving Church. It's quite simple and straightforward.”
With that definition, Sister Roseanne, who served in Sierra Leone, stresses that we “have to be a mission-receiving” Church everywhere. In a sense, ethnic lines stretch to include Americans too, as the Bethlemites, Daughters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, illustrate.
They came to Dallas from Guatemala in 1955 at the bishop's request to operate St. Joseph's Residence, a home for ambulatory seniors. This is the order's only presence in the States.
“To work with the elderly you need a special vocation,” says Sister Adelaide Bocanegra BTHL, the superior, adding that her order has thrown themselves into the work.
The Missionaries of Charity, on the other hand, have many houses. Nonetheless, they try to maintain a low profile and shy away from recognition as they go about helping the poorest of the poor, from Brooklyn's poverty stricken Bedford-Stuyvesant section, to places such as Charlotte, N.C., where the Catholics number only 5% of the population.
Inviting missionaries to this country isn't such a new idea, but in earlier decades the purpose of their work was often a bit different. In the 1970s, with Florida's population beginning to burgeon, bishops actively recruited in the seminaries of Ireland. At the same time, the Biafra Nigeria civil war displaced upwards of 400 Holy Ghost fathers and brothers who were forced to close their mission there. Many of these Irish missionaries soon became a mainstay in Florida parishes and many are still active staffing parishes.
For these priests, the assimilation in America was much easier than for some of the newly arrived orders. “When they come, the change is so drastic,” says Sister Faith, continuing that Los Angeles is “a vast diocese and they might come from a small village.” Walking everywhere has to be replaced by bus or car transportation. Social mores, too, mean learning taken-for-granted things like when and how to shake hands.
Language and diet are challenges. A few new orders speak no English or struggle to learn it. While Sister Monica learned English in six months, she relates that the elderly Vietnamese nuns in her order had a problem with the language and diet. Some solved the difficulty in community by retaining, as much as possible, their native diet, as do the Nigerian sisters of the Daughters of Mary, Mother of Mercy, who work in hospitals.
On the other hand, some missionaries find similarities that help to ease the transition. “It really reminds me of India here,” observes Sister Theresa Dennis Punchekunnel MSJ, one of the Medical Sisters of St. Joseph, who works at St. Mary's Medical Center in Long Beach, Calif. The missionary community has established itself officially in this location in just the past few months, although Sister Dennis has been in the country for some years.
“It's like home,” she says, citing the needy Cambodians, Americans, and Hispanics she serves as a pediatric nurse. “You realize here or in India, the needs are the same. There are the same kinds of problems, but the abuse is a little more here.” In the future she'd like to open a home for abused children, she adds.
Meanwhile, beyond the hospital's pediatric unit, the children in the public school are tuned into her presence. They see her full flowing white habit and, as they tell her, they “know I'm something with God.”
That, in fact, is an apt description for all the missionaries coming from other countries to serve in the States.
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Connecticut.
------- EXCERPT: More foreign orders send members stateside to minister to immigrant populations ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Screaming the Country Awake DATE: 17/5/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 17-23, 1998 ----- BODY:One of the loudest voices in the struggle to end Christian persecution belongs to a Jewish intellectual
Michael Horowitz, 59, is senior fellow and director of the Project for International Religious Liberty at the Hudson Institute, a small conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. A major force behind the Freedom From Religious Persecution Act (the Wolf-Specter bill), Horowitz, who is Jewish, has been described in The New Republic as having “almost single-handedly transformed persecution of Christians into a major issue” by forging an alliance between evangelical Christian groups, conservative Jewish thinkers, Catholics, and non-religious social activists. Recently he spoke with Register correspondent Eleanor Kennelly.
Kennelly: What is the status of the Freedom From Religious Persecution Act?
Horowitz: Just recently the leadership of the House placed the act on the House calendar for a vote May 21 (See related story, page 3). This major step follows on the heels of the movement's major victory March 25 when the House International Relations Committee approved it by a stunning 31-5 vote. There was intense opposition from the [Clinton] Administration with threats of a presidential veto. In the two weeks before the committee met, more money was spent on lobbyists working against us than our [the steering committee working to pass the bill] entire budget for the last year. The Chinese, Egyptian, and Saudi embassies got involved, all trying to take the sting out of this movement against Christian persecution. Everyone understood that the committee vote was very significant.
We really mobilized people all over the country to put the pressure on for this vote, and all I can say is, democracy works.
Washington politicians are very sophisticated. They know the difference between real concern and support throughout the country for legislation and phony support generated by a small group. To get people behind the Wolf-Specter bill before the committee vote, the religious broadcasters were remarkable. Chuck Colson did five broadcasts of his Breakpoint show on this. The Anti-Defamation League joined with the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in a series of critical meetings with key members of the committee. The Salvation Army newsletter was filled with material on the bill.
But now, with the final vote scheduled for May 21, everything hangs in the balance. We need, no we must have, at least 250,000 telephone calls and letters to members of Congress within this next week if we are to be confident of easing the plight of persecuted Christians and making history.
Please describe the role of Catholic leadership in the initiative.
For our movement, the single most important strategic development came when, earlier this year, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops decided that passage of Wolf-Specter was a high priority. The Conference had already supported it in a qualified way before, but after a few modifications to the bill's language they made it a top priority, which really matters in Washington.
The Conference's support was key to changing the make-up of this movement because we had a movement that was largely evangelical, and the Administration, in a profoundly bigoted way, was making appeals to defeat the bill by saying it was just an obsession of the Christian right and you don't want to work with these people. So a critical element in making the anti-persecution movement a broad-based one was the leadership of the Catholic Conference. Many other Jewish and secular human rights groups became part of the movement in a fully committed way after that.
We now have a situation where there is not one iota of difference of opinion or commitment between the Reformed Jews and the Christian Coalition, between the National Association of Evangelicals and the Campaign for Tibet regarding the importance of the Wolf-Specter Freedom From Religious Persecution Act.
You get a lot of credit for engineering this coalition.
In fact, the real credit goes to Congressional leaders like Frank Wolf, Chris Smith, Nancy Pelosi, Dick Armey, Arlen Specter, and others, who fought for years to keep this issue alive and inspired us all in the process. The real credit also goes to Christian rights activists like Nina Shea, Steve Snyder, and such organizations as Voice of the Martyrs for fighting often lonely battles on this issue during the past decade. My voice on the issue had a certain dramatic effect because I am a Jew and helped make the issue seem like it involved more than a parochial special interest effort. In the end, my greatest contribution has come from playing a part in making it easier for evangelical leaders like Chuck Colson and such Catholic leaders as Cardinal O'Connor to take leadership roles in the movement.
This movement has confounded the experts. Why were you underestimated?
For a long time the Administration and politicians underestimated this group forming around the issue of Christian persecution because the steering committee is the most ragtag, under-financed group Washington has seen in a long time. We have no stationery. We have no executive director. We meet in a ratty room on the fourth floor of the Cannon building. We don't have the trappings of a serious political force and we like it that way. In short, this is an ever-broadening grass roots movement that believes good ideas can beat money and muscle. From the start, our objective was to make history and in the process to shatter the bigotry against people of faith that is prevalent in official Washington. We never worried about the network news programs and concentrated instead on Christian radio stations. We never worried about The Washington Post, but spread our message instead through denominational newsletters and papers like the Register and we operated on the faith that the miracle of democracy could be made to work its way.
Have you had similar experiences in political organizing?
Not personally, but I and everyone else had a perfect model to follow: the campaign against Soviet anti-Semitism of the ‘70s in which Jewish and Christian groups working together forced a reluctant U.S. government to take a stand against Soviet persecutions. From that movement we knew that the power of Christian groups in opposition to tyranny was the A-bomb of American politics.
Much has been made of the fact that, as a Jew, you were able to legitimize the issue of Christian persecution to a wider audience, to bring it to the attention of people like New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal who says you “screamed him awake” on the plight of Christians, particularly in China. How do you see your own role?
I'm in the fascinating position of being someone who doesn't have to be defensive. Some Christians have difficulty defending their virtue in an unbelieving world. When many of the elite in media, politics, and culture imagine Christianity as retrograde, or religion as superstition, I'm in a position to make the point that our Judeo-Christian heritage has been the greatest force in the world for democracy and modernity.
As we depart from a century in which we worshipped the god of politics there is greater hope in a century rooted in faith.
When you think about the drama of the end of this century, everyone talks about two great transformational events, the collapse of communism and the technological revolution and the triumph of computers, but there is a third. The 21st century will also be characterized by a third “C” — Christianity. We are also witnessing the greatest explosion of Christianity in its history. Christianity today in Asia and Africa is beginning to have the very impact and influence on culture, democracy, productivity, values, and morality that it did in Europe during much of European history. Christianity is also a great force for democracy.
Michael Horowitz
Current Positions: Senior fellow at Hudson Institute; director of its Project on Civil Justice Reform and its project on International Religious Liberty.
Background: Recipient of the 1997 William Wilberforce Award of Prison Fellowship Ministries (for efforts to end worldwide persecution of Christians); senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute; general counsel for the Office of Management and Budget; chairman of President Reagan's Domestic Policy on Federalism; private law practice; associate professor of law at the University of Mississippi.
Personal: married with two children; LL.B graduate from Yale Law School; honorable discharge from U.S. Marine Corps.
Some people consider religion to be an anti-democratic force.
That's wrong. The reason we have democracy is because we had an imbedded Judeo-Christian tradition that taught all men are created equal before God. The most radical political message of all time. We haven't always lived up to that principle but it has shaped us powerfully and is the shared core belief that made democracy possible. One interesting aspect of the movement against Christian persecution is that it has become a campaign to redefine the Christian faith to an elite world which defines Christianity by the sins committed in its name. I'm in a good position to deal with that because as a child I was beat up by kids from the local Catholic school saying ‘you killed our Christ.’ But I also knew, and have been able to speak of the larger truth: that America's goodness and greatness is based on the rooted faith of its people. I therefore knew that for all the sins committed in its name, I'd be a bar of soap, a lampshade, if America had not been a country whose people are rooted in their Churches.
Which is why you wrote a letter to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. protesting their film on antiSemitism which blames Christianity for the Holocaust?
Right. It's more appropriate to trace Nazism to the anti-religious aspect of Enlightenment thought, than to the rejection of Christianity. In the case of the Holocaust Museum film, you see a libelous, one-sided, historically false thesis suggesting that the Nazi concentration camps directly flowed from medieval Christian anti-Semitism. The recent Vatican statement on this very subject is a powerful shot across the bows of those who have libeled Christian faith and faith in general and many of us intend to keep communicating with the Holocaust Museum until its film reflects the larger truths of We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah.
Do you go to synagogue?
Oh yes. In fact, my involvement on behalf of persecuted Christians has powerfully strengthened my faith. If I don't go to synagogue I feel like I've missed something important, something I want to do and need to do.
Do you think the campaign to make worldwide Christian persecution an American political issue has had any effect abroad yet?
Without the slightest doubt. The Chinese government recently invited a delegation to the country in a failed effort to defuse this movement. The Egyptians are all over the place pledging and swearing that there's no persecution of Copts in Egypt and progress is being made. Privately, we have heard from some Muslim groups — senior figures in Muslim countries — saying, ‘Keep it up. Publicly we will denounce the movement but it helps us put pressure on more radical elements.’
The day of the free hunting license on Christian communities is over. Many of the business community groups that opposed the Wolf-Specter bill and wish to maintain good relations with persecuting countries like China are privately telling the persecuting governments that they will never have good relations with the United States as long as Christian persecution continues.
Tell us about China and the underground Christian movement there.
Worshippers and Church leaders have been treated brutally by this regime. Bishop Suzhimin is one of the great heroic figures in the world today. He spent more than 15 years in prison while systematically confronting torture and solitary confinement while the official establishment of the world has done little on his behalf. He's been tortured for refusing to renounce the Pope and the Church. In a mockery of the crucifixion, Chinese officials have beaten this aged bishop then hung him by his wrists from the ceiling while beating him. Our movement pays honor to this great man and many like him in China.
The Chinese government knows that the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe largely came from Church movements in general and the Pope in particular. In speaking about evangelical Churches and the Catholic Church, their official policy has been, “to strangle this baby while it is still in the manger” a direct quote from an official Party newspaper. If we don't stand with heroes like Bishop Suzhimin, if America doesn't follow the lead of the Pope in combating religious persecution, years from now people will think of America like the world now thinks of the Swiss — people who cooperated with evil for a few bars of gold. Not only is our virtue at stake in never forgetting people like Bishop Suzhimin, but our long term national interest is also at stake.
How has the Clinton Administration responded to your pressure?
On the one hand, they've opposed it with a vigor that has been surprising and shameful. In fact, the president recently made comments to the National Association of Evangelicals asking them to withdraw their support for the Wolf-Specter bill and threatened to pressure government officials to lie about whether persecution exists if the bill passes. Other government officials from the Secretary of State on down have worked hard, and thus far unsuccessfully, to defeat the bill and defuse our movement. At the same time, the Administration is huffing and puffing to keep up with the parade. They just issued an executive order barring trade with Sudan. There's no doubt this wouldn't have happened without the movement. Sudan is an interesting example of how the Christian persecution issue demonstrates a human rights double standard that gets employed when believers are victims of murder and torture. The same people who fought, as they should, against apartheid in South Africa have been silent about the politically incorrect victims — Christians! — in Sudan. Sudan is a country where Christian communities are being systematically starved, where you can buy a young Christian slave in an open air market for the price of a few chickens, and the Wolf-Specter bill seeks to deal with this by applying the language of the anti-apartheid laws against the anti-faith persecutions in Sudan.
Where have the established human rights groups been in this battle?
All too often, sadly, on the sidelines. Thus, for example, while the current annual report of Human Rights Watch describes some anti-faith persecutions in particular countries, no serious priority is given to the problem. Human Rights Watch has established fully staffed special initiatives on children's rights, women's rights, prisoners' rights, drug-users' rights, media rights, the rights of academics, and the rights of gays and lesbians.
Are you confident that the Freedom From Religious Persecution bill will win passage in the House of Representatives?
It's hard to be anything but heartened, but it's impossible to do anything but redouble our efforts. One thing I know from having read history and from being in Washington: there's a tendency to relax when you're winning. But the stakes are high in this case. Things will go back to the status quo if our movement falters. But let me repeat, this is the week when it all counts. We'll see the battle in the House of Representatives while the Senate will debate this bill in June or September. If hundreds of thousands of American believers and thousands of Church leaders make their views clear to their congressman, senators, and the president about the moderate character of and the historic need for the Wolf-Specter bill, there is no doubt that the bill will become law.
—Eleanor Kennelly
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Michael Horowitz ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: U.S. Notes & Quotes DATE: 17/5/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 17-23, 1998 ----- BODY:Chicago Priest v. Jerry Springer
Chicago's Father Michael Pfleger has won an important victory against TV sex and violence, as found on his local Fox TV's notorious Jerry Springer Show. But Springer won't admit it.
The south Chicago priest met with the show's producer and distributor to complain about the show's “nudity, the degradation of women,” and obscenity — according to a May 2 Associated Press report — and to explain the boycott he had organized against advertisers.
Father Pfleger, known previously for his willingness to take on anyone he saw as abusing his African-American Chicago community, picketed the local NBC affiliate when it carried the show, and received credit when they dropped it. When Fox picked it up in April, the priest merely took his protests to the new location.
Now, after meeting with Father Pfleger, Studios USA, the show's producer, released a statement vowing to “eliminate all physical violence from the series.”
Jerry Springer denies that any such agreement has been made, making his comments on Howard Stern's morning radio show — itself an often-cited example of prurient entertainment.
“I don't know why they issued that statement,” Springer said. “That's absurd…. I don't want to tone it down.”
Father Pfleger speculated that Springer might be looking for a way to leave the show for good without having to condemn it — by forcing his producers to cancel it.
“He knows that his show without the fights is a whole different show,” Father Pfleger said, according to the report. “I don't know if he knows what to do without the fights.”
Faithfully Yours, William F. Buckley
In a May 3 letter to the Los Angeles Times, William F. Buckley defended his faith and his autobiographical book Nearer, My God, saying the paper's review of the book was “a freestyle display of the reviewer's complaints against Christianity.”
Buckley responded to several points, including:
l Christians unreflective? Quoting the reviewer, Martin Gardner saying that Buckley had “made little effort to think through the implications of [my] beliefs,” Buckley answered, “… if I have not thought through these implications — or the beliefs from which they derive — then neither has any Christian … [and] the consequences are absolutely enormous. You should consider giving over an entire issue of The Los Angeles Times to dramatize Gardner's concerns.”
l New Doctrines? He quoted Gardner writing about Catholics, “They … believe that God continually reveals … new doctrines.” Buckley responds: “What is Gardner talking about? Catholics … believe that Revelation ended with the death of the last apostle. So what ‘new’ truth is he talking about? When did a pope announce a ‘new’ doctrine?” The Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of the Blessed Mother “were reaffirmations of very old doctrines.”
l Ultra-Orthodox? Buckley says that Gardner labels him “ultra-orthodox.” He answers, “What's the big deal about a Catholic supporting Catholicism, whose tenets are defined by the Magisterium? Even if the reviewer could come up with 100 names of men and women who call themselves Catholics but don't believe in Catholic dogma, what is the point in the exercise…? Would a book arguing the validity of the United States Constitution merit a half-acre of a reviewer's space to point exultantly to people who do not believe in the Constitution?”
The Los Angeles Times repeats the attacks against the Church in a response by Gardner, who adds, “… I admire true believers like Buckley and Chesterton more than I do … [Catholics] who, after abandoning all the unique doctrines of their faith, lack the courage to walk out of their Church.”
Play about Christ is ‘Tired and Tiresome’
A new, homosexually suggestive play about Christ and the apostles is not just bad morality, bad theology, and bad history. It is also bad art, said an editorial in the New York Post.
Shocking audiences not only slights traditional morality — it also undercuts modern playwrights' misguided attempts to push their own moral arguments, said the May 1st column.
“Tony Award-winner Terence McNally has written some charming, and sometimes moving, gay-themed plays. Now he has penned one called Corpus Christi - which, production insiders told The Post, portrays a Jesus Christ who is not just gay, but actually sleeps with the Apostles.
“Presumably McNally's creative well has run dry. Because, even as a ‘60s-style attempt to shock, this is a pretty tired — and tiresome — stunt.” While the play should offend everyone, it will particularly offend Catholics whose sensibilities the theater deems ‘utterly unworthy of consideration,” said the editorial.
The play also represents a double standard. “What if some Broadway rebel produced a play that showed homosexuals, or gay icons, in an unflattering light?… [W]e'd be subjected to endless sermons about ‘offensiveness' and ‘bigotry,’” said the article.
The Post concluded by drawing a parallel with Oscar Wilde, the literary hero of many homosexual activists.
“Wilde died a practicing Catholic…. His own stylish humor would have been impossible without a culture that valued reticence in sexual matters. If he were alive today, Wilde too likely would see the Corpus Christi idea as crass, vulgar, and offensive.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Irish Archbishop Approves Inclusive Version of the Creed DATE: 17/5/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 17-23, 1998 ----- BODY:DUBLIN—The word “men” has been removed from the Nicene Creed in Ireland to make the prayer said at most Sunday Masses more acceptable to women.
The prayer beginning “We believe in one God, the Father …” formerly contained the line, “For us men and our salvation he came down from heaven.” Now the line reads “For us and our salvation” when it appears in missalettes approved by Archbishop Desmond Connell of Dublin.
According to Father Patrick Jones of the National Center for Liturgy in Maynooth, County Kildare, the new version is the one approved by the international ecumenical bodies such as English Language Liturgical Consultation (ELLC) and International Consultation on English Texts (ICET). He says that on an international level major efforts have been made to harmonize prayers shared in common by all the major English-speaking Christian Churches. As well as the Nicene Creed, there also exist approved ecumenical versions of the Kyrie, the Gloria, and the Magnificat.
Father Jones admitted, however, that the removal of the word “men” from the Creed was connected with “the question of inclusive and exclusive language.”
The change in the Creed is part of a larger project by ELLC to produce a new missal that is hoped will be published in time for the celebration of the Jubilee 2000 — however, the final draft of the missal has yet to receive full official status from Rome.
The new missal will be used by the Catholic Churches of England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland, but will differ from that used in the United States. Father Jones said: “At present, because the United States used an earlier draft of the Creed than we are now using, their Nicene Creed differs in four places from ours.”
There has been some controversy in Ireland about inclusive language in the liturgy since a report on the issue was presented to Archbishop Connell in February.
The report by the Dublin Archdiocesan Women's Forum, a body set up two years ago by the archbishop, recommended that he “make a positive statement regarding inclusiveness in language and liturgy and encourage all parishes in the diocese to use inclusive language.”
The forum defined inclusive language as “language that is sensitive to the equality and dignity of each person regardless of racial or ethnic background, gender, creed, age, or ability.”
There was a split in the Women's Forum following publication of the report. Forum members who claimed the report had been hijacked by feminists particularly objected to one recommendation for an “open discussion [of] the issue of women priests.”
However, Dublin's five auxiliary bishops expressed varying degrees of support for the document. Bishop Martin Drennan said, “There is much that needs to be done with the language of our prayer and liturgy to make it gender-sensitive.”
Canon Padraig O'Fiannachta of the Advisory Committee for the Liturgy in Gaelic, the body that advises on Irish-language liturgy matters, said that when it came to inclusive language for women “there is no trouble at all in the Irish speaking community.”
“This is because the Irish word daoine cannot be translated as ‘men’ or ‘women’ it is not specific to either sex. The nearest most accurate translation is ‘people,’” he explained. (Cian Molloy)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: WORLD Notes & Quoets DATE: 17/5/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 17-23, 1998 ----- BODY:In Rare Instance, Church Condones Looting
A massive drought has left 10 million people at risk of going hungry in the world's largest Catholic country, and the Church has tacitly condoned looting by starving families.
A CBS report on Brazil's disastrous weather conditions featured a man reduced to capturing a rabbit amidst his devastated cornfields in order to feed his family.
“At least tonight, my family will have something to eat,” Sebastao da Silva is quoted saying in the May 1 program, which relied on Associated Press reporting.
The droughts, which are being blamed on weather conditions resulting from the El Nino weather phenomenon in the Pacific, have led to such desperate conditions that Brazilians have resorted to stealing food. The report said that last month, a storehouse run by the government was looted by 700 men, women, and children, who took away 13 tons of rice, beans, flour, manioc meal, corn, and pasta.
“Most of the looters were honest, hard-working people who had nothing to eat,” one official is quoted saying.
“It is not a crime to resort to this kind of action when in extreme need,” said Bishop Francisco de Mesquita Filho of Afogados da Ingazeira.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church backs him up. In discussing the seventh commandment not to steal, the Catechism says that taking possession of others goods is not theft if each of three conditions is met: (1) consent by the owner “can be presumed” or if his refusal is unjust; (2) if it is a case of “obvious and urgent necessity”; and (3) If the goods in question are for “immediate, essential needs [food, shelter, clothing…].”
Pope was Target of Failed 1997 Attack
One of the most spectacular of many acts of terrorism in 1997 was an attempt to blow up a bridge the Holy Father was crossing in Bosnia, said the State Department's annual report on international terrorism, released April 30.
Attacks in 15 European countries mostly targeted buildings, often in protest of the international community's response to local issues. Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union were the hardest hit, said the State Department document, according to a May 1 Radio Free Europe report.
Pope John Paul II was the target of the most serious incident. In Bosnia, an unidentified assailant placed 23 remote controlled land mines beneath a bridge that was part of the Pope's intended motorcade, said the report. The land mines were diffused, however, after a suspicious person was seen near the bridge. No one was hurt, and no one claimed responsibility.
The document tallied more than 300 terrorist attacks last year, which is more than in 1996, but still part of a downward trend that has seen fewer attacks since such incidents began to become more common in the 1970s and ‘80s. Two hundred twenty-one deaths by terrorism were reported, down from 314 in 1996, but more than 690 people were reported injured by terrorists throughout the year.
How Europe Became Christian
Pope John Paul II has called the Church to a new evangelization. Surprisingly, however, little is known in common history about the methods employed in the first evangelization of Europe.
A new book covers that territory, says a Boston Globe book review (May 6). The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity by Richard Fletcher of the University of York stretches from the baptism of Constantine in 337 to the conversion of Lithuanian Grand Duke Jogaila, in 1388.
By beginning and ending with the rulers, the book suggests one answer to questions about how missionaries worked to maximize their effectiveness as God's messengers. Who were targeted as potential converts? The review notes that early sources say the answer is two-fold: the common man and leaders.
In Lithuania, for example, it was necessary to convert the aristocracy, whose Christianity could then transform the whole country. That job was made easier because aristocrats had been raised by Christian wet-nurses and nannies, who had laid a foundation. Similar situations prevailed in St. Patrick's Ireland and elsewhere, where society's leaders were singled out for conversion by the tireless efforts of the Christian faithful.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Vatican Notes & Quotes DATE: 01/10/1999 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 10-16, 1999 ----- BODY:A Brief Tour of Vatican City
The shooting incident in Vatican City brought a flood of attention to the world's smallest independent state.
An AP story listed these facts about Vatican City on May 3:
• In the heart of Rome, it has a population of 1,000 in its 100 acres. “It has its own flag, coins, postage stamps, radio station, library, pharmacy, and train station” and is “one of the greatest repositories of art in the world,” including many works by world masters.
• It includes: St. Peter's Basilica, the Sistine Chapel, the Vatican Museums, the papal apartments, offices and bedrooms for many employees and officials, a private hotel, tapestry workshops, printing presses, and the offices of several pontifical institutions.
Israel Wants to Send Jesus' Boat to the Vatican
The Vatican and Israel, when looked at one way, are the centers of the world's two greatest religions, enjoying increasingly friendly relations. When looked at another way, they are competitors for tourists.
The Israel Antiquities Authority takes the first view. They want to transfer a boat that Jesus is said to have owned from the Holy Land to the Vatican for exhibition there in the Jubilee Year 2000, according to a May 3 report in the Israel Business Arena.
Israel's ministry of tourism takes the second view, and argues that Jesus' boat “constitutes a significant component of the tour route for pilgrims in the region,” said the report.
Tourism director Shabtai Shai, in a letter to antiquities director Amir Drori, said that to send a tourist attraction away during a recession is unwise — particularly when it is being sent “to a ‘competitor’ in the tourism industry…. Are we trying to encourage tourist visits to the Vatican?” Drori supports the gesture of lending the boat.
U.S. News Cover Story Praises Pope
In a cover story entitled “The Next Pope,” U.S. News and World Report (May 11) had much praise of the current Holy Father, John Paul II. It said his pontificate “has been full of historic significance” with his 82 overseas trips making tremendous headway against the greatest forces in our time, including communism and consumerism.
The magazine touched on his accomplishments in doctrinal and spiritual matters also. He has drawn the largest crowds in history, to hear his sermons in a time when his doctrines are supposed to be unpopular.
Archbishop Theodore McCarrick of Newark, N.J., was quoted saying, “I've had great fun with the Holy Father…. We always joke about things, and that is a sign of astute intellect and lucidity.”
Quoting the Pope, the article sums up the work of John Paul II this way: “‘Do not be afraid!’ the Polish Pontiff declared reassuringly to an anxious Church at his 1978 inauguration. ‘Open wide the doors for Christ. To his saving power open the boundaries of states, economic and political systems, the vast fields of culture, civilization, and development.’ It was a prescient admonition that set both a tone and an agenda for his papacy through two tumultuous decades.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Facts on the Swiss Guards DATE: 17/5/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 17-23, 1998 ----- BODY:
ROME—The Swiss Guards, founded in 1506 by Pope Julius II, are responsible for protecting the Pope's physical security. They guard the entrances of Vatican City as well as provide security during religious functions and papal audiences. Legend has it that the bright yellow, red, and blue dress uniform was designed by Michelangelo.
The guards, which number 100, are the only armed corps left in the Vatican after the 1970 reforms by Pope Paul VI. May 6 commemorates the day in 1527 when 147 guards lost their lives in defense of Pope Clement VII during the Sack of Rome.
To enroll in the guards, it is necessary to be a Roman Catholic Swiss male, at least 5 feet 8 inches tall, between ages 18 and 30, and to have performed military service in Switzerland. The guards live in barracks located inside the Vatican. In traditional uniform they carry seven-foot pikes, but they also have firearms and during papal audiences they carry tear gas.
The lowest rank, called alabardiere (pike carrier), earns about $700 per month. The term of duty is two years, which can be renewed.
— Berenice Cocciolillo
----- EXCERPT: Well-loved leader mourned after ‘extreme act'of protest ----- EXTENDED BODY: Anto Akkara ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Revising the Founding Fathers DATE: 17/5/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 17-23, 1998 ----- BODY:Well, we're at it again in New Jersey.
Events which shape and confound the constitutional landscape have not been dampened by El Niño or the misapplication of the RICO law. In my home state, known to the media for our Turnpike and a cruel rash of newborn baby dumpings in 1997, we still set trends. Here are two.
One involves religious freedom and the classroom; the other a father's concern for his prenatal child. Both episodes were treated predictably in editorials by my local newspaper.
Let's begin at school. A six-year-old boy in Medford, invited by his public school teacher to read aloud for his classmates any story of his choosing, selected his favorite: a story about brotherly love and family reconciliation. Sounds good so far; but young Zachary Hood chose a version of the Esau and Jacob story from Genesis, as presented in The Beginner's Bible.
We can't have that, can we? So young Zachary's teacher employed modernity's interpretation of everyman's constitutional law with required obeisance to political correctness, and censored his choice. Zachary and others are confused: they had heard that Americans oppose censorship and favor choice. But we seem to have it backwards here.
“Fear of God” is no longer what it used to mean. It speaks now not of reverence but of denial. It has become for many Americans a dreadful fear that someone naive or misguided might mention the name of God. This fear, of course, does not apply to the president's inaugural oath, the opening of every session of Congress, the inclusion of God's name on Caesar's coinage, or when Zachary and his classmates stand to recite the Pledge of Allegiance (if they still say “one nation, under God”).
Zachary's folks took the case to court and lost. But the human spirit is an amazing ghost that ascends like smoke to light when it rises above the ashes of discord. The case is under appeal in a federal court in Philadelphia, which in Greek means a city of “brotherly love,” as in Esau and Jacob.
Drew DeCoursey
In an editorial, one local paper showed fear of Zachary more than of God. They wrote: “This was the second incident involving Zachary at … school. In kindergarten, Zachary wrote ‘Thankful for Jesus’ on a poster for a Thanksgiving assignment.”
How un-pilgrimlike!
The second New Jersey event involved an unmarried man who sued to prevent his girlfriend from aborting their 17-week old prenatal child (or fetus; it does not change the reality). The court concluded that the father has “no legal standing” when abortion is at issue; “there are no statutes on the books that deal with a father's right to a say over an abortion.”
Meanwhile, as the wheels of justice cranked along in the court room, the woman visited the abortionist to make it all academic and moot. Yet it is sadly the best argument against corpus deliciti. “Who me? What pregnancy?”
A few years ago, also in New Jersey, a man named Alex Loce was arrested when he attempted to block the abortion of his developing child. He lost too, as did his developing child.
Someone suggested naming those two aborted lives Esau and Jacob. Grim, indeed.
The Declaration of Independence lists “life” as the first unalienable right, while the Constitution orders the first freedom as “religion.” Drafters of those documents breathing life and order into this nation were wise, learned individuals who listed truths by order of precedence, not alphabetically, randomly, or whimsically.
Our founders saw life as the first awakening of all things. Nothing can be if there is not first life. Those founders would not countenance a court system that consigns the taking of innocent human life as another's choice, let alone consider such abridgment a “right.” There is no reference or language in our Constitution authorizing the destruction of innocent human life at any stage. No one, our founders would agree, has a right to kill another innocent, especially the most vulnerable and voiceless.
As to religion, the founders ranked it first among the five enumerated freedoms of the First Amendment because, to them, all freedoms flowed from the spiritual beliefs of their hearts and the proper exercise of reason in their heads.
Two months before the U.S. Constitution was signed in Philadelphia, the Continental Congress created the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 which, in Article III said: “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”
Who among the founders ever suggested the exile of God from a school child's lexicon?
Jefferson's Declaration is replete with references to the Creator and Nature's God. It was Washington who added “so help me God” to the president's inaugural oath. Our founders would be dumbstruck by today's nullification of religion which revisionists attempt to recast as a threat to the community. Such as school kids reading aloud about brotherhood in an American classroom.
Drew DeCoursey, author of Lifting the Veil of Choice, writes from Morristown, New Jersey.
----- EXCERPT: PERSPECTIVE ----- EXTENDED BODY: Drew DeCoursey ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Chronicle of the White House Spin Machine DATE: 17/5/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 17-23, 1998 ----- BODY:Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine by Howard Kurtz (Free Press, 1998, 32 pp., $25)
With the end of the Cold War, politics seems less important to most Americans. The president, in particular, has become a much diminished figure now that he is no longer locked in nuclear combat with the Soviets. Instead the occupant of the Oval Office is treated like just another celebrity. The press covers him using the same set of rules that it applies to pop-culture icons like Leonardo DiCaprio, Dennis Rodman, O.J. Simpson, and Madonna. White House handlers have to compete with sports and mass-entertainment events to get the nation's attention. So style becomes more important than substance, and image is more valued than policy positions.
The Clinton Administration seems to have understood those changes in media better than anyone else and used them to their advantage. Ever since the revelations about Clinton's relationship with Gennifer Flowers at the beginning of the 1992 presidential primaries, tabloid-like scandals and allegations of financial and political misdeeds have dominated the news, often obscuring Clinton's public-policy message. The amount of sleaze is overwhelming. To list just the most publicized items, there have been Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, the Paula Jones lawsuit, the Webster Hubbell payoffs, the campaign finance scandals, and Monica Lewinsky.
To survive this onslaught, Clinton has developed a highly sophisticated method of damage control. Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz was allowed behind the scenes to observe this operation for most of 1997, and his record of its Byzantine maneuvers — Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine — is the best-ever chronicle of White House media relations and how they have been effected by celebrity-driven values. The main actors are press secretary Mike McCurry and anti-scandal spokesman Lanny Davis. Kurtz lets us see them stonewall, stage manage, and intimidate reporters with surprising success.
Ronald Reagan was more mediagenic than Clinton, and his handlers manipulated this to good effect. Their credo was that “television pictures mattered far more than what the correspondents said,” Kurtz writes. “The entire Reagan Administration was a made-for-TV enterprise, a daily staging of visuals for the networks.”
The Clinton gang took spin-doctoring one step further by redefining the role of the presidential press secretary. McCurry's predecessors had always labored to keep some information from the media, but the sheer volume of accusations forced Clinton's press secretary to compartmentalize his job. When questioned about a scandal, McCurry “followed a path of willful ignorance, repeating only information that the counsel's office had assembled and not quizzing Clinton directly if he could help it,” Kurtz notes.
Reagan's top flack, Larry Speakes, and Bush's spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater, would have been embarrassed to admit publicly that they were out of the loop, and when pressed, they almost always queried other aides to find out the president's position. McCurry first employed his “willful ignorance” tactic during the campaign fund-raising scandals and refined the technique to perfection during the Lewinsky affair. He has learned that it works. Journalists are silenced, entire areas of investigation are shut down, and stories are killed.
McCurry, of course, sees himself as a good guy. He believes his job is to give the American public a window into the White House and to protect his boss from enemies. Unfortunately, the paranoid Clinton Administration sees the entire press corps as unfriendly even though both groups are ideologically liberal. Reporters “viewed themselves as the cavalry, the last line of defense against a corrupt White House that had perfected the art of the cover-up,” Kurtz observes. They were “the one force in society that could charge through the fog and uncover the truth.”
McCurry is able to counter these hostile attitudes because he understands reporters are also worried about career advancement. He masterfully grants or withdraws favors like one-on-one interviews with Clinton to bring them to heel. “For all their animosity, the White House spinners and their cynical chroniclers were ultimately joined at the hip in a strangely symbiotic relationship,” Kurtz writes. “McCurry and company needed the press to peddle their message to the public, and the journalists needed an action-packed presidency on which to build their reputations and name recognition.”
Clinton's spin doctors achieved their greatest success during the campaign finance scandals. The issues cut to the heart of the way politics was being conducted, and, for once, the voters seemed to be listening. Clinton appeared to be selling off his office to the highest bidder, and foreign governments were alleged to have made illegal contributions in order to influence policy.
Congressional investigations were scheduled, but McCurry and Davis decided to get out ahead of the story and release all the documents with potentially damaging information before the hearings. They would take some hits, of course, but the bad news would come out in dribs and drabs in a convoluted fashion that would be hard to follow. The net result would be to deprive the hearings of any dramatic disclosures with which to grab the headlines.
The strategy worked. Davis stood outside the hearing rooms and persuaded reporters that all the charges under discussion were “old news.” From a public opinion standpoint, the congressional investigations turned out to be a bust.
“In boxing terms, the White House had clearly won on points,” Kurtz writes. “Through ceaseless spin cycles, Administration officials had walled off burgeoning scandals and managed to convey Clinton's message, however muted, to a skeptical public.”
But the main casualty in these White House-media wars is the truth. Nowadays presidential spin doctors aren't expected to be any more honest than the PR reps of Hollywood stars or big-time sports figures. And media standards aren't much higher.
“The Clinton presidency fits the tabloid times,” Kurtz concludes. “The battle between the president and the press was viewed as a clash between two morally ambiguous forces … and Clinton proved to have more firepower than anyone imagined.”
Arts & Culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Quick Draw Answers for Generation Next DATE: 17/5/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 17-23, 1998 ----- BODY:Did Adam and Eve Have Belly Buttons? And 199 Other Questions from Catholic Teenagers by Matthew Pinto
(Ascension Press, 1998, 270 pp., $11.99)
Question-and-answer (Q&A) books are highly popular for two reasons: First, they are a fast read. People are busy these days, and Q&A books provide quick answers. Second, Q&A books are practical.
People want the options on and consequences to an action explained to them in practical terms. Q&A books do this better than any other medium. Not surprisingly, they have been used successfully in Catholic evangelization and catechetical situations for some time. They have been somewhat less prominent over the last 30 years, but it seems a good bet that they are going to make a comeback and be popular for a long time to come.
There are essentially two concerns when it comes to evaluating such a book. First, are the answers right? Speed and clarity are no substitute for accuracy and reliability. Second, assuming the answers are correct, do they lull the reader into a false sense of security by fostering the impression that a quick and clear answer exhausts the possibilities raised by a particular question?
Matt Pinto's delightful tour of questions posed by Catholic teenagers, Did Adam & Eve Have Belly Buttons?, scores excellently in the categories of brevity of reply and practicality of the questions. Hardly any of Pinto's pithy answers to 200 questions runs even two full pages. Nor could his selection of questions have been more practical since every one of them was posed by real Catholic teenagers with real questions about the Faith. An experienced apologist and youth minister with, literally, coast-to-coast credentials, Pinto knows what young people are wondering.
Consider, for example, question 45: “Why does it seem that evangelical Protestant teens have a closer relationship with Jesus than do Catholic teens?” A real question, that, and honestly put. Pinto replies in kind: “Some evangelical teens do seem to have a closer relationship with Jesus than many Catholic teens, probably because evangelical Churches stress personal conversion more than individual Catholics typically do. That's unfortunate because the Catholic Church teaches as strongly as evangelicalism the need for personal conversion.” Pinto notes the Protestant practice of “altar calls” and continues: “It is important to recall two things about that sort of thing. First, that human experiences come and go. What matters is one's continuing commitment to follow Jesus, with or without an ‘experience.’Second, Catholics have an ‘altar call’ every week — the call to receive Jesus in the Holy Eucharist. There is no more personal relationship we can have with Christ in life than to be united with him in the Holy Eucharist.”
I came across no actual errors in the book, and considering the incredible range of topics that these teens surfaced and which Pinto forthrightly addressed, that alone is an accomplishment. True, there are some questions whose answers seemed to me incomplete, but this is a Q&A book. A few other answers seemed to raise, albeit secondarily, new problems. For example, in responding to a question about one's possibly going to hell if, in war time, one kills another person, Pinto replies “fighting for your country if it is a ‘just war’ is a noble thing to do,” etc.
Now, while Pinto's answer is quite sound, his throwing in that “just war” criteria suggests that it is the citizen's duty to assess the legality of the war and then to decide whether to cooperate with it. Suffice it to say that that's not quite right, and such points, although beyond the scope of this review and Pinto's book, should not be left dangling in future editions.
In no way, finally, does Pinto's book lull the reader into a sense of complacency with brief answers to tough questions. At several points Pinto incorporates research references into his answers, and he provides a reliable guide to more detailed readings on numerous topics at the back of the book. Pinto, in a true Catholic spirit, opens his book with a prayer to the Holy Spirit, and closes it with sound advice about how to examine one's conscience.
This is the kind of book that a Catholic parent can give with confidence to a Catholic son or daughter. Ditto for grandparents looking for something religiously reliable but not stuffy for their teenage grandchildren. And Confirmation sponsors looking for an age-appropriate gift for their confirmands upon reception of that sacrament will definitely want to check out this delightful text.
Edward Peters writes from San Diego, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Edward Peters ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 17/5/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 17-23, 1998 ----- BODY:Holy Land Peace
In your CNS story, “Latin-Rite Patriarch Urges Palestinian Freedom & Blames Israel” (April 19-25), we see that Patriarch Michel Sabbah of Jerusalem apparently subscribes to the silver bullet theory of intercultural conflict resolution. The prelate is reported as having declared, just after delivering his Easter message, that “Israel does not want peace,” and that Israeli acceptance of Palestinian state sovereignty would somehow bring peace and an end to Palestinian violence in the Holy Land.
If Patriarch Sabbah genuinely believes this politically correct pipe dream and wasn't just tailoring his pronouncement to ease the very real and relentless pressure on his flock from their Muslim neighbors, then the patriarch needs to understand that wishful thinking is a luxury that, frankly, neither Israel's Christians nor its Jews can afford.
History, that stern and most demanding teacher, simply won't allow it — and she reserves her harshest chastisements for the compulsively myopic.
The wretched but glaring truth of the matter at hand is that violence — murder, massacre, mayhem, rape, torture, and mutilation — is very much at home in the Arab world in general and in Palestinian culture in particular. Palestinian terrorism — the deliberate targeting of Jewish civilians for violence, atrocities, and death — did not begin with Israel's acquisition of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967. Neither did it begin with the founding of the State of Israel a generation earlier — quite the reverse actually: Palestinian terrorism was a factor in making a Jewish state necessary.
Bluntly put, Arab violence against Jewish non-combatants has never been a rarity in the Holy Land since the turn of the century and beyond. What's more significant is that it has never been treated as anything other than heroism and valor in Palestinian society.
This is hardly a secret and the Patriarch of Jerusalem should know it as well as anybody else.
Until such loathsome conduct is met with the same heartfelt and widespread revulsion, outrage, and contempt among their own people as it is by the Jewish community when a Jew attacks Arab civilians, the only “peace” that region will ever know is the peace of the grave.
Michael Zebulon Santa Rosa, California
Bishop Bruskewitz's Stand
Thank you for printing Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz's comments concerning the pastoral letter Always Our Children (“Always Our Children: A Document to ‘Ignore or Oppose’,” May 3-9). I am so happy to see that there is at least one bishop with the courage to set the record straight.
When this letter was first reported by the media, I was very disturbed by what I heard. Later, when I received a copy of the document, I was even more troubled by what I read. It was shocking to see the one-sided way in which the document was dealing with homosexuality. While I appreciate that this is a sensitive issue, the pastoral message was overboard — supporting the homosexual activists' assertions of “victimhood” and that homosexual orientation is “a given, not something freely chosen” (which has yet to be proven).
Always Our Children leaned over backwards to defend the homosexual, and to call attention to his sensibilities. Yet, it completely ignored the sensitivity of parents. Parents of such children have been hurt too and are also suffering. If we really wish to promote understanding — shouldn't it be a two-way street?
If the topic had been about children from alcoholism or drug addictions, would the authors still be singing the same tune? The document states, “it is essential for you to remain open to the possibility that your son or daughter is struggling to understand and accept a basic homosexual orientation.” Would it make such a claim about alcoholism or drug addiction? Always Our Children tells us that professional help may be necessary for homosexual children, but that it is important, of course, that he or she received such guidance willingly.” If a child were an alcoholic, would these authors expect the parent to stand by and do nothing just because the child was not willing to receive help? What if the child were a promiscuous teenager? Would the document's statement about “accepting the full truth of God's revelation about the dignity of the human person and the meaning of human sexuality” still apply?
It doesn't take a theological scholar to see that Always Our Children is not a “Catholic” document but a “politically correct” one. Jesus said, “Feed my sheep.” I applaud Bishop Bruskewitz for his courage to set the record straight and to feed us the truth. Without such truth, souls could be mislead. I only hope that the American Catholic bishops will join Bishop Bruskewitz in speaking out against the very misleading pastoral letter.
Maria Sumanski
Scotch Plains, New Jersey
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Openion -------- TITLE: H.G. Wells's War on The Church DATE: 01/10/1999 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 10-16, 1999 ----- BODY:Recently, while running my fingers along a bookshelf at home, I found a work I first fell across a few years ago. It is one of H.G. Wells's least-known books, Crux Ansata. The subtitle is An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church. First published in 1943 in Britain, it was reprinted recently by Prometheus Press, but the copy I have dates from 1944. Wells died two years later, aged 80. As a boy I enjoyed his science fiction, but this book shows that at the end of his life his inventive powers were consumed in hatred for the Catholic Church.
Crux Ansata is at once depressing and encouraging. It is depressing to read 116 pages of venom and to see Wells demonstrating his incompetence as a historian, theologian, and logician. It is encouraging to realize that the subsequent half century has shown that Wells was wrong in all his prejudices, whether political, economic, historical, or religious.
On the opening page Wells says, “Not only is Rome the source and center of Fascism, but it has been the seat of a Pope [Pius XII], who, as we shall show, has been an open ally of the Nazi-Fascist-Shinto Axis since his enthronement.” He asks, “Why do we not bomb Rome? Why do we allow these open and declared antagonists of democratic freedom to entertain their Shinto allies and organize a pseudo-Catholic destruction of democratic freedom?”
Then he surveys the history of the Church. “Early on Christianity entangled itself with archaic traditions of human sacrifice, with Mithraic blood-cleansing, with priestcraft as ancient as human society, and with elaborate doctrines about the structure of the divinity.” These words I have heard elsewhere, in discussion groups at a local Unitarian Church, where, years ago, I listened to people with no background in theology or religious history darkly warn about “priestcraft” and recount the early corruption of “non-doctrinal” Christianity.
Wells is worse than vicious — he is sloppy. He says Augustine “wrote between 354 and 430,” which suggests that Augustine's first work appeared in 354, which, if true, could only increase one's estimation of the saint, since 354 happened to be the year of his birth. Wells refers to 16th-century people of Munster “who did not draw the blinds.” (Blinds had not been invented yet.) He speculates that Shakespeare may have been neither a Catholic nor a Protestant, but an atheist. He thinks that on matters concerning the Catholic Church, Professor G.G. Coulton was a “patient, unrelenting, trustworthy guide” — the middle term surely was true, but Father Herbert Thurston demonstrated that Coulton's prejudices against Catholicism went so deep that he fumbled repeatedly in writing about the Church.
Wells hated the Church and Catholic society and advised readers to ‘avoid true and social intercourse with Roman Catholics …’
Wells is no better in theology. He says, “The filioque is a subtle [idea], and a word or so of explanation may not seem amiss to those who are uninstructed theologically…. The [Eastern] attitude seems to incline a little towards the Arian point of view [in fact it does not]. The Catholic belief is that the Father and the Son have always existed together, world without end; the Greek orthodox [sic] idea is tainted by a very human disposition to think fathers ought to be at least a little senior to their sons” — a grotesque misreading. But he gives sound advice: “The reader must go to his own religious teachers for precise instruction on this point.” Precise instruction cannot be had from Wells.
He describes the people of the Middle Ages this way: “These people were often married at 13, they were warriors and leaders in their later teens; they became cruel old satyrs at six-and-thirty. In fact they never grew up either physically or mentally. They lived in a world of witless lordship and puerile melodrama.” They never grew up physically? What can this mean? And did they all become cruel old satyrs?
Wells, always pictured in a dull, three-piece suit and indistinguishable in dress from other men on London's streets, complained that in the late Middle Ages “the costume of the [upper class] displays a resort to pinking, puffing, slashing, legs of different colors, and the like feeble devices.” He adds, “Nobody catered for the ordinary man's clothing. He wore old cast-off stuff.” Since there were so many more “ordinary men” than men of any other social class, how could there have been enough “cast-off stuff” to go around? And did all these ordinary men wear worn-out clothes noted for “pinking, puffing, slashing”?
Wells hated the Church and Catholic society and advised readers to “avoid true and social intercourse with Roman Catholics … Condemn every mixed marriage which introduces a priest into the menage as the supervisor of the children's education. Resist the diversion of public funds for the upkeep of Roman Catholic schools, withdraw patronage from Roman Catholic booksellers, organize public protests at the inordinate preference shown by the BBC for Jesuit discourses…. Fight intolerance with intolerance. We have tolerated the Roman Catholic Church in England for more than a century, believing that it would play a game of candor. We know better now.”
Poor Wells. Wherever he is, he really knows better now.
Karl Keating is the founding director of Catholic Answers.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Karl Keating ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Blessed Queen of May DATE: 17/5/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 17-23, 1998 ----- BODY:Vatican II saw the end of much popular Marian spirituality, but the lush poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins reminds us why, especially in Mary's month, there is something worth reclaiming
The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wondered about it more than a century ago.
“May is Mary's month and I Muse at that and wonder why. Her feasts follow reason, Dated due to season- Candlemas, Lady Day; But the Lady month May, Why fasten that upon her With a feasting in her honor?”
It's a good question. Church tradition sets aside the month of May as a special season of Marian devotion — but why?
Catholics of a certain vintage remember such pious customs as children's “May altars” in the home, or special parochial school ceremonies where a statue of the Virgin was crowned with flowers.
Touching as such observances were, much of that piety was jettisoned in the years after the Second Vatican Council in an urge to refocus Catholic culture on its foundational truths and avoid the sentimentality that has often distorted aspects of popular Marian spirituality.
But is there something to be reclaimed here at the turn of a new millennium?
As a liturgical custom, May as Mary's month is a fairly recent invention. The practice as we know it today or, better, as we knew it a generation ago — domestic “shrines,” processions, and flowers — hails only from 18th century Naples. But the story of how Mary came to rule over the fifth month of the year goes back much further.
It begins, as these things usually do, with a name.
The month we call “May” gets its name from the Greek nymph Maia. In Greek mythology nymphs served as female attendants to the gods and specifically presided over the world of nature — springs, fountains, groves, mountains, and the sea.
Maia was the mother of the god Hermes by Zeus, and was transformed with her sisters into the seven stars of the Pleiades constellation. Heralds of summer, they appear in the sky in the month of May.
By Roman times, the month had become associated with Bona Dea, an earth goddess of plenty and fertility whose cult was popular in the later years of the Roman Empire. Romans also pelted each other with flowers from April 23 to May 3 during the riotous feast called Ludi Floreales in honor of Flora, a Roman goddess of the harvest, whose special flower was said to be the mayblossom.
Even in the Middle Ages, some remnants of these ancient associations remained. The most popular manifestation of these semi-pagan customs was the celebration of May Day and the maypole. All over medieval Europe on the first of May, the “Queen of the May” was crowned with flowers. Merrymakers adorned their hats with the budding branches of early summer and wore bright green jackets in her honor.
Late medieval and Renaissance piety also reflected aspects of this mystical spring culture. The spiritual writer Blessed Henry Suso (d. 1365) recommended the practice of making May floral garlands to honor Our Lady. During these centuries, folklore would also give the names of many common wildflowers a Marian touch: “Lady fern,” “Crown of Mary” (cornflower), “Lady mantle” (English morning glory), “Lady's keys” (the primrose).
By the time of the 16th century Reformation, both Catholic and Protestant reformers were eager to stamp out the carousing and immorality that often went along with such festivities. Their approaches, however, to solving the “rite of spring” problem could not have been more different.
Protestants tried to uproot such quasi-pagan celebrations altogether. Seventeenth-century British poet Richard Corbet doubtless spoke for many of the less devout in non-Catholic countries when he lamented that: “… since of late Elizabeth and later James came in,
They never dance on any heath as when the time had been….”
Remnants of “loathsome frivolity” nevertheless survived well into the 20th century.
Catholics adopted a much more insightful and constructive approach. The Jesuits took the lead in transforming the semi-pagan festival of the Queen of May into a celebration of the Blessed Virgin Mary. By the mid-16th century, much of Catholic Europe bedecked statues of the Virgin in floral crowns on May 1, bearing them in cheerful processions through flower-strewn streets and city squares carpeted with blossoms.
May Becomes Mary's Month
By the early 18th century, books of “May devotions” were becoming popular. In the first known example, an Italian Jesuit writer tells his readers that “we choose the most beautiful month, May, the season of flowers, which invites us to crown [Mary] with the blossom of good deeds.” The Neapolitan priest went on to recommend to his readers certain devotions, such as setting up temporary shrines (or “altars”) to the Madonna in the home, before which the family might gather in prayer throughout the month.
It took more than another century for such May devotions to make their way to the English-speaking world. It wasn't until 1954 that the feast of the Queenship of Mary was formally instituted as a May 31 observance, capping the long transformation of these rites of spring into established Marian devotions. (After Vatican II the feast was transferred to Aug. 22 so that it follows the Aug. 15 solemnity of the Assumption.)
Questions naturally arise out of such a history.
Does the Church's attempt to “Christianize” pagan customs such as May Day mean, as many conservative Evangelical Christians charge, that there is a “pagan” character to aspects of Catholic devotion?
The Church's wise and prudent absorption of some formerly pagan observances is, in fact, one of the glories of her long tradition of spiritual discernment. Some Protestants (and some feminists) aside, the “baptism” of May Day has nothing to do with religious syncretism.
Following St. Augustine, the Church has always recognized that God has deposited hidden kernels of wisdom and truth throughout his world. The great Church Father insisted, particularly in his landmark De Doctrina Christiana (On Christian Doctrine), that it is the task of the Church to discern the truth in other religions, ideologies, and customs to purify them in the light of the revelation of Christ, and then, to absorb them into their proper and divinely intended setting: the life and culture of the People of God.
In this view, God prepared the pagan world no less than the Jewish one to receive the mystery of Jesus, God made Man. As the Hebrew Scriptures create a “vocabulary” for the coming of the Son of God, so, too, in a far more fragmentary way, do aspects of pagan pre-Christian cultures, beliefs, and symbols foreshadow the appearance of the Redeemer.
Thus, while the Church clearly rejected the licentiousness associated with pagan culture's celebrations of the rebirth of nature, she saw in May Day's pagan association with fertility and the goodness of nature's bounty an affirmation — contra Puritanisms old and new — of the joy, beauty, goodness, and spirituality of the natural world created by God. And, not incidentally, the maternal role that Mary plays in that creation.
No one has understood that truth better than the 19th-century Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, as expressed in the poem with which this article begins, “May Magnificat,” and in his longer Marian ode “The Virgin Mary Compared to the Air We Breathe.”
Hopkins (1844-1889) converted to Catholicism from Anglicanism at age 22 after a brilliant career at Oxford University. Already an able poet, he entered the Society of Jesus two years later. The “May Magnificat” was written in 1878, the year after Hopkins's ordination to the priesthood, at Stonyhurst College, where it was the custom to hang verses near a statue of Mary during the month of May. The famous poem was Hopkins's contribution.
The structure of the poem is simple. It begins by asking why May should be chosen as Mary's month and spends the rest of the poem answering the question.
For Hopkins, one of the great nature poets in any language, May is the time of blossoming and fecundity, when all life emerges from the earth. This is “nature's motherhood” upon which Mary smiles because it recalls the experience of the Incarnate Christ in her womb.
But Springtime, for the poet, is also a “Magnificat of nature,” a hymn to earth's ecstasy and a reminder of Our Lady's own hymn of praise when, at her greeting, a babe leapt in her cousin Elizabeth's womb (Lk 1:44).
Mary's Strength
As scholar Allison Sulloway has written in an essay on the poet's imagery, Hopkins's Marian poems “represent a more varied and vigorous Marian figure than medieval iconography and even some fairly lush Renaissance paintings allow the Virgin. Hopkins's Mary is no Victorian prude: She has undergone labor and birth herself; she has been ‘a mighty mother,’ and Hopkins's delightful puns on the adjective ‘mighty’ and on ‘May’ or ‘Mary’ or ‘magnificat,’ ‘magnified,’ suggests both her enormous moral stature and her own example of fecundity. Here [Hopkins] combines an almost erotic lushness with innocence as she [Mary] pours out selfless love that envelopes the speaker [in the poem ‘The Virgin Mary Compared to the Air We Breathe’] ‘with mercy round and round.’”
But Hopkins's Marian nature poetry is not all sweetness and light. The natural pastoral world of the English countryside with which he identifies the Virgin was, even in his day, falling victim to ecological destruction through massive industrialization. Hopkins's “Mary” is not only a vision of untainted purity, she is the nurse of a wounded world.
No poem reveals this more than perhaps his most significant Marian poem, “The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe.” Apparently, Hopkins's religious superiors commissioned the poem for Stonyhurst's May celebrations of 1883.
For Hopkins, the vivid imagery of Mary as “the nursing element” sustaining all life is juxtaposed with his descriptions of “the mothering earth,” “that country so tender, to touch, her being so slender” — in other words, with a fragile world under threat from merciless men, those who, in the words of another poem, “Binsey Poplars,” “hack and rack the growing green” and leave it “seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil.”
In “God's Grandeur” Hopkins's central image — the Virgin as the life-sustaining air — sees Mary as the softening, humanizing medium of God's glory, justice, and grace, analogous to the atmosphere that sustains the life of man and tempers the power of the sun's radiation.
Even more than the flowers-and-candy imagery of May devotions past, one suspects that this message comes closer to the heart of the Church's long historical identification of the Virgin Mary with the love of the life-giving earth. Perhaps even more than our fore-bears, we, at the end of this century of unprecedented ecological degradation, deserve to be reminded of the spiritual imperative of loving, cherishing, and guarding the natural world in which God has placed us. But, more than that, the May devotions, and their poet, Hopkins, remind us that, as air surrounds, protects, and nurtures our physical existence, so the ministry of Mary gently fosters and protects our spiritual lives.
Senior writer Gabriel Meyer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Gabriel Meyer ----- KEYWORDS: News ------ TITLE: Angels of the New Age Variety Are a Marketer's Dream DATE: 17/5/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 17-23, 1998 ----- BODY:The craze over angels fascinates me. A very popular TV show and a recent Hollywood movie are part of the 1990s fad dedicated to the heavenly creatures. Where does this interest originate and where is it going? What are some of the ramifications of this neo-angelology for the spiritual life of Christians?
Much of the interest in angels arose after they had been ignored by members of the Church as part of an antiquated mythology that no longer seemed relevant to the modern world. As is sometimes the case, the world picks up what religious professionals neglect. Frequently the world uses — and even profits from — ideas when orthodox and careful theological reflection are not available to curb excesses.
In this case, much of the recent pursuit of angels originates in the New Age movement. In the 1970s through the late 1980s the American practice of seances was transformed into spirit channeling. Seances began in 1849 with the Fox sisters of upstate New York. People were attracted by the floating tables and horns, eerie sounds, ectoplasm, and appearances by ghosts. However, these were all tricks exposed by professional magicians more often than by scientists. The latter group of investigators were generally more easily duped by the spiritist gimmicks than were the likes of Harry Houdini.
After many ups and downs in the seance business, a new spin-off appeared when Ruth Montgomery used self-induced trance states to write and type the messages of the spirit world without any of the paraphernalia of the old spiritists. Her books containing channeled messages and her personal stories sold very well. Jane Roberts found equal success with the books she channeled from “Seth.”
In the 1980s, books, personal channeling sessions, seminars and retreats revolving around the spirit world were all the rage. However, the early death of some channelers, infighting and lawsuits by others, and personal and financial scandals from still others led to a certain disillusionment with channeling.
Enter the angels to the rescue. Angels have a long history in Jewish and Christian writings, especially in the Bible. Christian art is full of angels familiar to the smallest children. Jesus taught that everyone has an angel: “See that you do not despise one of these little ones; for I tell you that in heaven their angels always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven” (Mt 18:10). Most people have a certain predisposition to accepting the presence of angels, and a very popular Christmas movie gives an angel a lead role. By the 1970s and 1980s, angels began to take the place of the channeling spirits.
The advantage of the angels over the channeled spirits of the past is that the former cannot be asked embarrassing questions about their personal history on earth. They do not have relatives known to historians, neither did they have to explain how they forgot their ancient language once they entered the body of a spirit channeler.
In other words, people who “speak” and “write” for the angels have more freedom than did the spirit channelers. In addition, angel stores could reproduce old paintings of angels by the great masters, or even resell the carved and painted angels sold after church renovations. The angel industry is reported to be a $7 billion-a-year business.
Angel books sell well. Charming artwork and easy theology combine to make good sales. The typical approach is to overcome modern doubts by relating stories of danger, disease, and discomfort that were resolved by a felt presence of goodness. People tell stories in which they are certain that it must have been an angel who saved them from a car wreck, pulled them through a disease, or even helped them find a desperately-needed parking place in Manhattan.
I suspect that many of these people may be right. The angels of God do help us in amazing ways. Once while I was working with a street gang, a boy pulled a pistol on me, pointed it at my face and pulled the trigger twice. It did not fire and I am here to write about it. I have often wondered whether my angel got high blood pressure from that — if an angel had blood.
However, unlike most of us who attribute key moments of rescue to the angels, the recent faddists go a step further and enter into dialogues with their angels. They learn the true state of the spiritual world from these discussions, write them down, and share them with the rest of us. The angels explain that the moral strictures imposed by the Church are not really God's doing, since he only wants people to love without external restraint from society. Other angels correct the misunderstandings of Jesus Christ found in the Gospels. Never have I read an angel book that is faithful to the teaching of Jesus as given us by the evangelists.
I cannot help thinking of St. Paul's warning in Galatians: “But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preached to you, let him be accursed” (1:8). We need to beware of angels who change the Gospel to meet modern fancies. While God definitely has angels who intercede for us and help us, the enemy of our souls also has his angels to destroy us. They will not use the obviously horrible to trick us but will disguise themselves as angels of light (cf. 2 Cor 11:14).
Jesuit Father Mitch Pacwa is a professor at the Institute for Religious and Pastoral Studies at the University of Dallas.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mitch Pacwa SJ ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Cooperation Among the Missionaries DATE: 17/5/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 17-23, 1998 ----- BODY:There's “a real mission and partnership,” Brother Richard Hirbe BSCC observes when he speaks about the missionaries who now work in St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, Calif. In many respects, the missionaries at the inner city hospital run by the Daughters of Charity make up a microcosm of the service brought by those orders who have emigrated to the states.
Brother Richard, director of chaplain services in the pastoral care department, has high praise for the staff which includes Sister Mary Joachim of the Daughters of Mary, Mother of Mercy, and Sister Paz Sanchez EFMS of the Eucharistic Franciscan Sisters of Mexico.
Most patients in the 515-bed facility that borders Watts, the scene of the L.A. riots, are “marginalized and poor,” according to Brother Richard. Every 24 hours, 250 enter the emergency area. Every month, there are 500 births and most of the women giving birth have had no pre-natal care.
The Nigerian sisters, in their royal blue and white full habits, work as nurses, dieticians, and spiritual counselors to patients, three-fourths of whom are Hispanic and one-fourth African American. The Vietnamese Lovers of the Holy Cross are also nurses at the hospital. They are indirectly aided by the seven Missionaries of Charity who live around the corner and care for homeless expectant mothers.
“My prominent place every day is in the surgery center,” says Sister Joachim, who is on the pastoral care team. “I meet them, pray for them, give them emotional support.”
In the same department, Sister Paz visits the sick, helps counsel patients in emotional and spiritual conflicts, and does much evangelization, especially among the Hispanics, many of whom are former Catholics.
“You're re-affirming what they used to believe in,” she says. “They begin to understand what they've lost. Then you leave it up to them.”
—Joseph Pronechen
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Mount Athos, Holy Mountain of Greece DATE: 17/5/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 17-23, 1998 ----- BODY:Visitors (men only, please) to the 20 Greek Orthodox monasteries here experience the beauty of monastic life 6,500 feet above sea level
Modern-day pilgrims to Mt. Athos in Greece hike for hours from one spectacular monastery to the next, as pilgrims have done for 10 centuries. The mountainous terrain of the small peninsula is covered with dense woods. The path to Simonopetra (the rock of Simon), one of the cliff-hanging monasteries and the most daring building on the Holy Mountain, curves tortuously along the coastline. Finally, Simonopetra comes in view. It rises high on a cliff, practically bursting out of the rock below it. It seems as if only God could have placed it on its rocky pedestal.
The lodging at Simonopetra gives new meaning to the phrase “room with a view.” Outside the snug, Spartan rooms is a narrow flimsy walkway and over the rickety railing is a sheer drop of several thousand feet. Foamy water crashes against the jutting rocks far below.
But it's not the view that brings Christians of all denominations to the 20 Greek Orthodox monasteries on Mt. Athos. Guests share simple meals with the silent, sphinx-like monks in shadowy dining halls illuminated by oil lamps. Pilgrims join the monks in centuries-old chapels for prayer services distinguished by fervent chanting and deep reverence for the Eucharist. Throughout the day the monks observe a code of silence; any conversation is done in a near whisper. They go about their holy business, hardly noticing the pilgrims among them. Visitors are keenly aware they are not on their home turf, that this is sacred land.
Mt. Athos is closer to the Middle Ages than the modern age. It's not just the near absence of cars, radios, and other wonders of technology that gives it an ancient air. Mt. Athos is where the sacred is part of everyday routines. Its 1,700 monks divide their day into structured intervals of work and prayer, and not for a moment do they ever seem to forget how God is part of all they do.
The mountain rises 6,500 feet above the sea on the easternmost of the three peninsulas of Halkidiki. The nearest major city is Thessaloniki, 100 miles northwest. The peninsula is a scant five to seven miles wide and 35 miles long.
Legend holds that monasticism began on Mt. Athos when the Virgin Mary, on her way to Cyprus with St. John the Evangelist, was blown ashore by a sudden storm. She was overwhelmed with the beauty of the peninsula, and a voice from heaven consecrated the place in her name.
Historical records show that the first monks arrived in the seventh century. The first monastery, the Great Lavra, was founded by the learned monk Athanasios in 963. Thus, the monasteries were begun while the Orthodox Churches were still in communion with Rome. (The split occurred in 1054 over theological and political issues.) Throughout the millennium the monasteries have seen periods of prosperity and decline. Though monks from Russia, Romania, Serbia, and other Orthodox countries have flocked here and still do, Mt. Athos always has been a stronghold of Greek Christianity. Mt. Athos was Greeks' educational and intellectual center when Turkey occupied their country in the 17th and 18th centuries.
It's not easy to get to Mt. Athos. For women, it's impossible. Females have been barred from the Holy Mountain since the Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX issued an edict in 1060 after a series of scandals. In fact, even female farm animals are prohibited, and cruise ships with women on board can come no closer to the shore than 500 feet.
Devout Greeks make regular pilgrimages to Mt. Athos. But, to avoid Mt. Athos being overrun by tourists, only 20 foreigners each day are permitted to enter the peninsula. The procedures for gaining entry are, well, Byzantine. Visitors must first secure a “letter of introduction” from the U.S. embassy in Athens or the American consulate in Thessaloniki. Then a permit must be secured from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Athens or the Ministry of Northern Greece in Thessaloniki. A permit is valid only on the specific date requested, so travelers must determine accurately when they will arrive in the small town of Ouranoplis, from which a ferry takes them on the two-hour journey to the Holy Mountain. Stays are limited to four days.
Part of the unique experience of Mt. Athos is surviving the journey. The ferry takes pilgrims to Daphne, from which they travel by bus to Kayres. The battered bus is in such poor condition that the poorest church or school in the United States would have sold it for scrap years ago. The bus driver's previous job must have been a thrill ride operator at Disney World. He drives his belching beast perilously close to the edge of the road and its steep drop, only to sharply swing the steering wheel just before the tires run out of real estate and hit air.
Uniformed officials check travel documents in Kayres, and then pilgrims, armed with a poorly drawn map, are on their own. The monasteries are hours of rigorous hiking from one another. Signs are intermittent and confusing. Most pilgrims carry with them fruit, cookies, and bread. True to their tradition of hospitality, the monks offer free meals and lodging. But they eat just twice a day and don't leave out leftovers for late arrivals. The outer gates of monasteries are closed at sunset, not to be opened again until sunrise. Stragglers must sleep under the stars.
The focus of most pilgrims is the miraculous icon of the Virgin Guarding the Gate, housed in a chapel.
The rough paths on Mt. Athos cut through olive trees. The landscape is straight out of a boy's pirate book — rugged, pristine, and lonely. Prayer comes easily to pilgrims in such lovely wilderness.
Vatopedi is one of the largest and most visited monasteries on Mt. Athos. Like the other monasteries, it resembles a fortified medieval town. Yet its buildings are bright and colorful. A thick turreted wall, including an ancient defense tower, surrounds the complex. Over the centuries Mt. Athos was besieged by waves of pirates and ruthless Catalan mercenaries. The tower was the last refuge for the embattled monks during a siege.
A rotund and jocular monk greets visitors to Vatopedi and gives each a cup of coffee. Other monasteries offer ouzo, an alcoholic drink, or loukoumi, a Greek sweet. Sleeping quarters here are in a dark, austere dormitory room with none of the comforts of home.
The Katholikon (main church) at Vatopedi, dating from the 10th century, is painted flaming red. A dignified statue of a black soldier is mounted on its soaring bell tower. The church contains a superb marble floor and exquisite Byzantine mosaics depicting the Annunciation of Mary.
Vatopedi's valuable treasures, under lock and key but sometimes available for viewing, include purported fragments of the True Cross, gold-embroidered vestments, and part of the reed that held the sponge of vinegar offered to the crucified Christ. Always available for viewing are the magnificent chapels, library, and other centuries-old buildings of Vatopedi. Colorful frescoed Biblical scenes are everywhere.
Mt. Athos is a living museum of art. Its monasteries guard the cloaks of long-dead kings and patriarchs, miracle-working icons, priceless manuscripts, and relics of saints, including the right hand of St. John Chrysostom.
Another popular monastery is the Great Lavra. The marvelous frescoes of the church were done by the famous Cretan painter Theophanes in 1535. The refectory (dining room) features Theophanes' rendition of the Last Supper. The monastery has 15 chapels, some of them with high artistic merit.
The monastery of Iviron has the largest church on the mountain; the church's elaborate mosaic floor dates from 1030. The focus of most pilgrims is the miraculous icon of the Virgin Guarding the Gate, housed in a chapel. The monks believe that terrible misfortune will befall them if the icon ever leaves the mountain.
The piety of the monks is even more impressive than the monastery's material treasures. They pray together five times daily, summoned to worship by a wooden gong. The services are held at night or in early morning, while the rest of the world sleeps, works, or plays. The monks divide themselves into two groups on opposite sides of the room and chant with gusto. On occasion the bones of a patron saint are brought out. The monks solemnly kiss them and cross themselves.
Prayer is part of the evening meal, too, a ritual all its own. Heaping plates of honey, potato soup, olives, beans, and apples are placed on a long table. A monk at a lectern reads from the Bible. A bell is rung. The monks eat surprisingly hurriedly until the bell is rung again in a few minutes. Dinner is over in a flash.
The most lasting image of Mt. Athos are the monks. Many are in their 20s and 30s and actually stay on the mountain only for a few years before returning to other duties. The monks silently appear out of shadows and mysteriously disappear down dark corridors.
The self-possessed monks are at peace with themselves. The rare times they speak to pilgrims, they gaze with an uncommon directness. Their eyes convey forbearance and mirth. The monks are no stick-in-the-muds. They can be seen in groups of two or three quietly sharing what has to be a gentle joke. Monastic living obviously is something to smile about.
Jay Copp writes from Chicago.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jay Copp ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Orthodox and Catholic, Sister Churches DATE: 01/10/1999 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 10-16, 1999 ----- BODY:Orthodox Churches may seem strange and unfamiliar to Catholics, but Catholicism and Orthodoxy actually are closely connected in terms of faith, the sacraments and Church governance. In fact, the two are often described as “sister Churches.”
Orthodoxy and Catholicism are so similar that Pope John Paul II issued an apostolic letter three years ago in which he said it would be scandalous if a commitment to full unity was not made. That same year he hosted the Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople at the Vatican.
The Orthodox are a major presence in the United States with about five million members. The 14 or 15 Eastern Orthodox Churches (the status of one is not accepted by all) are separated by nationality or language but share the same faith. The Greek Orthodox Church and the Serbian Orthodox Church are two of the most prominent.
Catholicism and Orthodoxy share many characteristics:
3 Both are sacramental Churches. Like Catholics, Orthodox participate in seven sacraments. An Orthodox can become a Catholic by simply making a profession of faith. A Catholic, if a priest is unavailable, is allowed to receive some sacraments from an Orthodox priest.
3 The Churches share common ground on faith and morals.
3 Despite some differences, the Mass and the Orthodox liturgy have much in common. The latter is structured like the Mass. Like Catholics, Orthodox believe the Eucharist is the real presence of Jesus.
3 Both treasure a great devotion to Mary.
3 Both greatly value monastic life.
A major difference between the two faiths is that the Orthodox Church ordains married men. But most observers agree that the chief obstacle to union remains the role of the Pope. The Orthodox Churches are headed by patriarchs, who are seen as “first among equals.”
— Jay Copp
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jay Copp ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: 'Pre-Theologates' Offer a Promising Solution to Vocations' Crisis DATE: 17/5/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 17-23, 1998 ----- BODY:Last year, for the first time since the 1960s, the total number of seminarians in the United States increased slightly. Considered alone, 147 more seminarians doesn't sound like much to get excited about, but further evidence suggests a slow reversal of the long-standing vocations crisis in this country.
The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University reports that for the third straight year, the number of college seminarians also increased. And the decline of high school seminarians, while still dropping, has slowed compared to the precipitous drops of the 1980s.
By all indications these positive trends will continue. No matter how small, these changes should receive a warm welcome in the United States where more than 2,000 parishes have no full-time pastor.
As bishops look for ways to further boost the number of vocations, they find typical means don't provide much hope. For instance, men have traditionally fulfilled their formation prerequisites for entrance to a major seminary in one of three ways: (1) they can receive their bach-elor's degree and then enter a minor seminary, sometimes called a “pre-theologate”; (2) they can enter a stand-alone college seminary and graduate with their bachelor's degree and their pre-theologate requirements fulfilled (but since 1969, the number of these college seminaries has dropped from 120 to 15); or (3) they can enroll in other programs that allow seminarians to study for the priesthood by taking classes at independent colleges and universities. Twenty-six seminaries around the country currently have educational agreements with schools such as the University of Notre Dame and the University of Dallas.
College Seminary Decline
Just as the number of college seminaries has dropped, however, the number of men in such programs has either dropped or, in some cases, held constant (e.g., Holy Trinity Seminary in Dallas once had 45 to 50 men in its collegiate program; today it has 35).
Father James King CSC, vocations director for the Congregation of the Holy Cross at Notre Dame, says 30% of the men ordained for his order come from their collegiate program. This, however, draws just 10 to 20 men in any given year.
Given these facts, it seems obvious that the Church can't look for a solution to the vocation crisis from its traditional sources for future priests. A solution, though, might come from a fourth way.
Schools such as Christendom College in Front Royal, Va., and Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, now offer unique opportunities for men to reflect on their vocation says Brian Froehle, executive director of CARA. Because of the shortage of priests, he believes the role these institutions play in forming men for the priesthood could prove crucial.
Like Notre Dame and Dallas, these two schools offer priestly formation in a regular college environment. The difference is they have no connection with a particular diocese or order.
According to Froehle, this gives students the ability “to spend some time discerning the priesthood, yet if they later decide against it, their decision is not as etched in stone as it might be in a more traditional situation. The same costs — financial and otherwise — aren't involved.”
What's more, because a solid support structure is in place, the young man has both rewards and incentives.
“He has the identity of a seminarian and he receives formation, but at the same time, he's living with his fellow students — he's not set apart,” says Froehle. “While many will enter such programs because they're sponsored by their bishop, some are merely exploring the possibility of the priesthood. An option like this offers more latitude and less pressure.”
This aptly describes the situation at Franciscan University. Nearly two decades ago, its president, Father Michael Scanlan TOR, was asked to start a seminary on campus. Recognizing that a seminary wasn't possible, he agreed that the school should do more to foster vocations. As a result, the university founded its pre-theologate program in 1981.
By 1994, some 20 undergraduates were taking part in the program. At that time, Father David Testa, a priest from the Diocese of Albany, took over as program director. In the four years since, the school's pre-theologate ranks have swelled to 65 men. Next year, Father Testa expects 80 men to participate. The program will graduate 12 men this year, who will then continue their studies for the priesthood at major seminaries.
“If things keep going the way they are,” the priest speculates, “at 12 men a year over the next 20 years, that's a lot of priests, assuming they all stay in.”
Academic and Spiritual Demands
Like their peers in more traditional situations, pre-theologians at Franciscan University must complete a number of requirements. Academically, they must take 24 hours of philosophy and 12 hours of theology. Spiritually, each attends daily Mass, prays the rosary, attends twice-daily communal prayer, and goes to confession regularly.
They must choose a spiritual director and meet with Father Testa every two weeks to discern their progress. As the priest points out, “this is the minimum required by the bishops for ordination.”
At graduation, the future seminarian receives a certificate as “a guarantee by Franciscan University that this man is prepared to enter the major seminary,” says Father Testa.
Due to the rapid growth in size and reputation of the program, five dioceses will send their young men to Franciscan University next year for formation, including the Archdiocese of Denver and the Diocese of Savannah, Ga.
“People come for this program,” says Father Testa, “because of the orthodoxy and the spirituality present at the university. We take an evangelical outlook here, emphasizing the spread of the Gospel, especially by the way we live. It's a great environment to discern a vocation in because, for instance, everyone here goes to daily Mass.”
Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput OFM Cap., says he sends men to Franciscan University's pre-theologate program because he believes the campus “provides a strong environment and outstanding educational opportunity,” even though it is not a seminary.
“Franciscan University offers them [pre-theologate students] an opportunity to be challenged by the spirituality of the laity, which is so evident throughout the campus,” he adds. “I prefer college students to live in an environment that promotes contact with a large number of their peers. I believe this helps them grow as persons and will provide a strong support for these men in their future ministry.”
Christendom College also has a priestly formation program that admits juniors and seniors (unlike Steubenville's program, which is open to all years). Approximately 30 men participate each year.
Theology department chairman Father Robert Skeris describes the program as having a Thomistic nature in its core curriculum and stresses that because the men must know ecclesiastical Latin, the result is a well-prepared seminarian and a better priest. He proudly relates that 20 of the school's alumni have received the Sacrament of Holy Orders since Christendom's founding in 1977. Father Skeris points out that some ordinaries, such as Bishop Robert Carlson of Sioux Falls, S.D., send young men to Christendom for their pre-theological training. And he mentions that the school recently graduated 11 men who will study next year at major seminaries throughout the country.
“My own experience,” he says, “inclines me to believe vocations are there even in dioceses where the figures indicate otherwise. What we do is blow the ashes off the fire and then the flames that are subdued there rise. The vocations are out there, I'm convinced of that.”
Joseph Williams, a 23-year-old member of Franciscan University's pre-theologate program agrees.
“God is not outdone in generosity,” he says. “If you give him the sacrifice to discern his call to you, you will hear his voice and respond appropriately. The pre-theologate program is a perfect example of giving something to the Lord. I'm doing as much as I can to place myself in an environment where I can truly hear God's voice. After all, God can't steer a parked car.”
Brian O'Neel writes from Steubenville, Ohio.
----- EXCERPT: A financially prudent and spiritually sound idea catches on at some Catholic universities ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian O'Neel ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: The Sweet Sound of Music DATE: 17/5/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 17-23, 1998 ----- BODY:A soaring Broadway production that dares to celebrate moral integrity
There are currently three shows playing on Broadway that deal with World War II Nazism, The Diary of Anne Frank, Cabaret, and The Sound of Music, but the only one worth the price of a ticket is The Sound of Music.
It seems unfathomable to believe that a production that opens with cloistered nuns joyfully chanting ancient prayers, blessing themselves, and bowing at the singing of Gloria Patri … could be the utterly captivating and satisfying entertainment that it is. This same spirit of reverence and grace permeates the entire production, especially in its promotion of goods that the secular world considers far from commercial: uncompromising moral conviction, family life, fatherhood, the beauty of childhood, patriotism, the triumph of good over evil, redemption. The list goes on.
All the production values are first rate. Susan Schulman's meticulous direction never misses. Heidi Ettinger's immensely imaginative scenery is entrancing and evocative while at the same time being practical, functional, and rich in symbolism. Catherine Zuber's enchanting costumes lend mesmerizing elegance. The cast is excellent, especially Rebecca Luker's fresh and lovable Maria. This exquisite production proves that “stars” are not needed for success. The entire production exudes love.
Moreover, this stage production is far more sophisticated and less sentimental than the movie version. That enhancement is due to the inclusion of two great songs that the movie omits. In a masterful parody, the song How Can Love Survive asserts the way the over-abundance of money, security, and creature comforts dooms love. Only self-giving sacrifice ensures love's survival. In the second song, No Way to Stop It, Elsa Schraeder and Max Detweiler scheme to get their friend Capt. Georg von Trapp to concede his allegiance to the Nazis as they have. Theirs is a world of laxism and fatalism, and “the center of the universe is ‘I.’” But, as the upright and uncompromising captain poignantly replies, “You don't save yourself by giving in.” In the play, unlike the movie, the glamorous Elsa Schraeder (superbly played by Jan Maxwell) breaks off her relationship with the captain — not because she feels defeated by Maria, but because she is more enamored of the Nazis. Elsa wants the captain to marry her on her own intractable terms, but the captain is willing to do so only on God's terms.
That celebration of moral integrity is perhaps what makes this production most compelling. In an era of rampant relativism and individualism, especially on Broadway, it is more than refreshing to hear Capt. von Trapp profess to Maria: “In this uncertain world, a man can't promise anything except love.” And for Maria to resist the conniving of the captain's would-be friends by avowing: “I will not ask Georg to pretend to be less than he is.”
That is what this play is about: being the persons God has created us to be. The play offers a profound commentary on the grandeur of the human vocation as it is defined by the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “The vocation of humanity is to show forth the image of God and to be transformed into the image of the Father's only Son…. Man's vocation is to make God manifest by acting in conformity with his creation ‘in the image and likeness of God’” (1877, 2085).
No wonder the audience rejoices whenever the sagely child Brigitta (played with aplomb by Tracy Alison Walsh) is on-stage, for “Brigitta always tells you the truth … especially when you don't want to hear it.”
In the same way, Maria's decision to leave the convent is not a repudiation of religious life, but rather a celebration of it. Maria realizes that consecrated life is not God's will for her — an awareness that only deepens her love for the nuns and their life. In this way, the production depicts religious life with true authenticity and genuine depth — unlike so many other romanticized and trivialized stage portrayals. When the Nazis invade the monastery, violating the Church's ageold sanction, one child asks with breathtaking guilelessness: “Isn't this God's house?” Even the littlest ones recognize the horror of sacrilege long before they can spell it.
Holiness has its privileges. When Capt. von Trapp believes himself to be trapped with his family in the Nazi-filled abbey, he now looks upon the mountains that he has so-long loved as his enemies. We know how he feels, for throughout the performance we feel surrounded and uplifted by Ettinger's stunning mountain vistas. However, Mother Abbess assures him that the mountains are in fact the family's way to freedom. They are not enemies, but friends and saviors. In this way, the play shows us how those things in our own life that seem like towering obstacles can really be instruments of grace.
The central emblem for this production is an ingenious, massive souvenir snow-globe suspended in the middle of the proscenium curtain. The snow-globe is supported by a trinity of angels — a powerful symbol that God is holding the world in his hands, and that his Divine Providence will prevail. If beauty is the happy union of truth and goodness, then this production is profoundly beautiful.
One hopes The Sound of Music will set the new standard for all theater on Broadway.
The Sound of Music is playing at the Martin Beck Theater, 302 West 45th Street, New York City.
Senior writer Father Peter John Cameron is an award-winning playwright with a master's degree in playwriting from The Catholic University of America.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Peter John Cameron Op ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Beautiful Take on a Little Life DATE: 17/5/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 17-23, 1998 ----- BODY:St. Thérèse of Lisieux is one of the most popular saints of our times. The facts of her life were simple, but her impact has been great. Often called the Little Flower, she was born Marie Françoise Thérèse Martin, of a haute bourgeois family, in 1873 in France. In 1888 she entered a Carmelite convent where she wrote her autobiography, Story of a Soul. She died at the age of 24.
In Thérèse, French director Alain Cavalier tries to capture the essence of her sanctity. The film is made with the same spirit of simplicity and humility that the saint herself displayed. The camera rarely moves. It stays close to the people in its frame, recording the smallest movements and gestures. Its sense of spiritual power derives from its evocation of the little things in its characters' lives. The movie won the Jury Prize at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival, and six Cesars — the French equivalent of the Oscars.
The film opens on Thérèse (Catherine Mouchet) as a young teenager living with her widowed father and older sister, Celine. She asks that a Mass be said for a three-time murderer, Pranzini, who is scheduled for execution. She prays that he will ask for forgiveness.
When Thérèse learns that he kissed the crucifix before his death, she believes she has had some effect.
“What a gift you have,” her sister remarks.
“I'm in love with Jesus,” the saint-to-be declares. “I want to pray to save a lot of people for him.”
Thérèse hopes to enter the Carmelite convent in Lisieux by age 15. Two other sisters have already taken their vows there. As the Rule of Carmel permits only women 21 years and older to enter, there is opposition. Town gossip whispers that her father is trying to get rid of his daughters. The local priest and bishop deny her permission, but she refuses to take “no” for an answer. On a pilgrimage to Rome, she asks Pope Leo XIII for help.
“If it be God's will, you will enter,” the Pontiff replies.
A year later she is admitted.
The filmmaker shows Thérèse dressed as a bride when she's accepted into the order. His camera lingers as she says good-bye to her family and friends and it focuses on her radiant smile while her hair is trimmed. She is giddy and schoolgirlish, very human and in no way a plaster saint.
Thérèse's special calling slowly emerges. She's shown to be humble in her day-to-day living and her service toward others. We see her lovingly bathe an older nun, who confesses to her a sin she had previously concealed.
The mother superior asks Thérèse to write down her thoughts.
“It's like fishing,” she later remarks. “I write whatever pops up.”
These reflections, of course, later became Story of a Soul, which has been translated into 60 languages.
The film includes relevant excerpts from the book on the sound-track as we watch her struggle to get to know Jesus Christ at a personal level. Their relationship goes through stages, with ups and downs, but eventually a deep bond is established.
Thérèse contracts tuberculosis, and the film pulls no punches in showing the disagreements between the mother superior and a local physician about how to treat her. Thérèse bears her great pain with silent dignity, and her suffering brings her closer to God. She learns to perceive the opportunity for grace in every instant of her life. She tells the mother superior she wants to be a saint in secret so that only God will know of her goodness. There is always joy in her eyes even when she is too sick to get out of bed.
Thérèse was canonized in 1925, just 28 years after her death. Along with St. Francis Xavier, she was declared the patron saint of foreign missions. In 1947 she was named with Joan of Arc co-protectress of France. On Oct. 19, 1997, Pope John Paul II proclaimed her a doctor of the Church for the wisdom of her writings — an honor given to only 33 persons in Church history.
Thérèse gives us a glimpse into the saint's soul, quietly inspiring us to learn from her life and work.
Next week: Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Arts & Culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: Alan Cavalier's Thérèse captures the essence of one of the Church's most popular saints ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Morgentaler Clinic Employees to Appeal In Abortion Negligence Suit DATE: 01/10/1999 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 10-16, 1999 ----- BODY:HALIFAX, Nova Scotia — Dr. Jacques Desrosiers, an abortionist at Halifax's Morgentaler abortion facility, and Jean Palmer, another Morgentaler employee, sought May 7 to appeal an earlier court ruling against them that awarded more than $700,000 to a woman who was badly injured in a car accident after an abortion.
Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice Douglas MacLellan ruled Dec. 23, 1997 that Wanda MacPhail, 37, was traumatized by the March 24, 1993 abortion, and that Desrosiers and Palmer should not have allowed her to her drive home, 25 miles away. He awarded MacPhail $724,547 — mostly for lost future income — along with prejudgment interest of $9,105, and $41,393 in legal costs.
The ruling found the employees breached their duty of care to the plaintiff. MacLellan reasoned that MacPhail was suffering from “immense emotional turmoil” following the procedure, which contributed to her crossing the center line of Highway 103 and colliding head-on with another vehicle.
She suffered numerous injuries, including a head laceration, crushed nose, fractured chest bone, collapsed lung, broken ribs, fractured leg, and a torn knee cap that had to be removed.
A passenger in the other vehicle also suffered serious injuries and filed a similar suit in which the abortion facility staff were found liable. No decision on damages in that case has been rendered as yet.
In light of the appeal, the court issued a partial stay on the payment order. Desrosiers and Palmer were to pay $5,000 per month beginning Jan. 1, pending the appeal outcome. (Pro-life Infonet)
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Upholding Law & Defending Life: Officers Try to Serve God and Men DATE: 17/5/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 17-23, 1998 ----- BODY:NEW YORK—Barney Krahm has seen police work from both sides of the abortion divide. As an officer he has stood outside a Long Island, N.Y., abortion clinic while peaceful pro-life advocates prayed and counseled women on the sidewalk. As a pro-life citizen he has fingered his rosary beads and joined those same pro-lifers in prayer.
Not surprisingly, his heart is torn. Alaw enforcement officer for 19 years, he is trained to spot crimes and stop perpetrators, and each time he sees an abortionist enter a clinic, he knows a crime is in the making. Yet Krahm has sworn to uphold the law of men and that means taking a professionally neutral stand toward abortion. As a matter of conscience, however, when assigned to the clinic, he tells his superiors that he will not arrest a pro-lifer unless that person does something to endanger other people.
“I knew a lot of people who were praying knew what my position was,” Krahm, an officer for the Suffolk Police Department, told the Register. “I was on duty, but I was still praying the rosary with them privately.”
Police personnel do not have the best of reputations with pro-life activists and are often seen as agents of the enemy — there to uphold unjust laws on abortion and protect the lethal trade of abortionists. A number of well-publicized incidents in which Operation Rescue participants were beaten, abused, tortured, and sexually harassed have also given police a bad name among the pro-life community. The names “West Hartford,” “Pittsburgh,” “Los Angeles ‘89” are almost legendary and carry painful memories for rescuers who were on the receiving end of brutal police tactics.
Krahm knows of the war stories and winces. “It makes me uncomfortable to hear that a member of a police department anywhere has been abusive to pro-lifers. A lot of cops think they're relieved of doing what's right by blindly following orders. They don't see the matter of conscience involved.”
As a Parks Department officer in Des Moines, Iowa, Frank Lacoma has noticed the direction that society has taken since abortion was legalized.
“I see people who succumb to violence as a way out of their problems, and the government gives them the sales pitch,” he said. “There's talk of legalizing gambling and drugs, which are only going to add to people's misery. Child abuse has skyrocketed since abortion was legalized. There's a lack of respect for life all around.”
Krahm and Lacoma are members of a small but growing organization, National Cops For Life, which bills itself as “Pro-God, Pro-Life, Pro-Family.” The group was founded three years ago by Vincent Ciappetta, a Suffolk County narcotics detective who sees great pro-life potential in the goodwill and courage of officers. He is upset by the negative image many pro-life advocates have of police and wants to awaken fellow officers to their higher duties to God and neighbor.
Although his organization does not advise officers to ignore trespass violations and other illegal actions by pro-lifers, it does offer guidance in matters of conscience and asks officers to make a serious commitment to prayer and witness. A prayerful cop can have a powerful effect among his fellows, Ciappetta said, since police are, on the whole, men and women of faith who want to do the right thing. The logo of his group is a badge wrapped in a pro-life rose, a reminder that their duty as officers cannot be separated from their special obligation to protect human life.
“The authentic laws are set down by God, and man's laws must be in line with God's laws,” said Ciappetta, a Catholic. He cites Pope John Paul II's teaching in Evangelium Vitae, the 1995 encyclical in which the Holy Father says that laws allowing abortion and euthanasia are not legitimate laws and must be opposed.
“We all need support in bringing our faith to bear on our jobs,” said Ciappetta, who has been on the force for 28 years. “Our political leaders are given the power to rule by God and they must follow God's laws. We cannot vote for pro-abortion politicians and all our members are asked to write these politicians and remind them of their obligation to God and to the common good.”
Blue Brutality
Raymond Mylott, a New York City attorney who has represented pro-lifers who were victims of police brutality, told the Register that his view of cops changed after the 1989 rescues in West Hartford, Conn. Officers removed their badges and nameplates before wading into a crowd of rescuers and used pain compliance and rough-up techniques to get the peaceful but non-cooperative protesters moving. Some of the worst incidents were captured on video tape.
“They were thugs,” said Mylott. “They engaged in absolutely brutal beatings of people who were not resisting at all.”
A participant in the June 1989 rescue there, who did not want his name used, told the Register he was lying on the sidewalk when an officer grabbed his arm and threatened to break his wrist. Similar techniques were used on grandmothers and pregnant women, he said.
“I was in Vietnam and I can honestly say that I never saw such deliberate brutality as I did that day in West Hartford,” he said. “They were out as a police force to break us up. Let's just say that I now know what human nature is capable of.”
In Los Angeles that same year, said Mylott, mounted police rode into the midst of sitting rescuers. In Pittsburgh, a group of college women charged officers with brutal sexual harassment. In none of the incidents did police officers suffer so much as a public reprimand from superiors. When it comes to pro-lifers, the lawyer said, cops know that in most communities they can get away with just about anything.
John McGrath, a detective in Pittsfield, Mass., said that too many cops are hypocrites when it comes to abortion. One of the biggest frustrations in police work is trying to get testimony from witnesses who are apathetic or afraid to become involved. Yet police officers are guilty of the same silence when they refuse to call abortionists killers or witness to fellow officers, he said.
“Abortion is vicious, brutal murder and yet so many of us cops treat pro-lifers like they are the enemies,” he said.
Two years ago he brought his daughter to the March for Life in Washington, D.C., and saw a dozen or so well-armed and helmeted officers standing on the steps of the Supreme Court at the march's end.
“I saw a couple slapping their night sticks and a couple cracking jokes,” he recalled. “You could see their attitude was very negative.”
Small But Committed
Cops for Life has about 50 members nationwide but Ciappetta is not concerned with numbers.
“We want zealous and committed prayer warriors to set an example. If God wants us to grow, we will,” he said.
All members happen to be Catholic, though membership is open to officers of other faiths. Ciappetta thinks that only Catholics have been attracted because of his emphasis on the rosary and devotion to the saints, including St. Michael the Archangel, patron of police officers. The chaplain for the group is Father Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life who works in Rome for the Pontifical Council for the Family.
Cops for Life form a companion group to the National Federation of Officers for Life, run by Sgt. Ruben Rodriguez of Corpus Christi, Texas, which is slightly larger and maintains a World Wide Web site.
Ciappetta and his companions are inspired by the example of Sheriff John McDougall of Lee County, Fla. In response to a request for police protection from a Fort Myers abortionist who felt threatened by two pro-life “stalkers,” the sheriff sent a letter last December that stated, “Tell me, doctor, did those tiny defenseless babies feel threatened when you ripped them out of their mother's wombs? Were they fighting for their lives when you began your slaughter?”
McDougall, a Catholic who has held the elective office for 10 years, pointed out in his letter that abortion has been legalized by the same Supreme Court that legalized slavery a century ago. He informed the abortionist that his officers would protect him like any other citizen, but they would do nothing to obstruct the free-speech rights of pro-life demonstrators.
“I'm in the business of protecting people and it's frustrating that I can't protect these little babies,” the sheriff said.
Ciappetta knows the feeling. He became a police officer in 1970 largely in response to the widespread campus unrest, anti-war demonstrations, and inner-city riots that gripped the nation. At a time when many people his age were calling police “pigs,” Ciappetta felt “a calling” to help right the injustices and place himself between the attacker and the victim. His vocal support of unborn babies is simply another form of his advocacy for the victim, he explained.
“The cornerstone of all rights is the right to life. All laws are simply an enhancement of that basic right,” he said.
This reasoning leads him to oppose the death penalty though he does not make opposition an official part of his organization. He understands that the Church strongly discourages the use of lethal punishment but acknowledges the state's right to impose capital punishment in extreme cases.
Speaking for himself, he told the Register, “The death penalty is vengeance and we are supposed to get beyond vengeance personally and as a society. As a police officer for almost 30 years I can say quite realistically that there are some people who are not supposed to be out in society and there is really no hope of rehabilitation. Life sentences should be used, though, because killing is not the answer.”
For information, write National Cops for Life, P.O. Box 267, Cutchogue, NY 11935; e-mail: ncfl@juno.com.
Brian Caulfield writes from New York.
------ EXCERPT: Cops for Life show pro-lifers that sometimes the law is on their side ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian Caulfield ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: The Gospel Of Life DATE: 17/5/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 17-23, 1998 ----- BODY:“Many centers in support of life, or similar institutions, are sponsored by individuals and groups which, with admirable dedication and sacrifice, offer moral and material support to mothers who are in difficulty and are tempted to have recourse to abortion. Increasingly, there are appearing in many places groups of volunteers prepared to offer hospitality to persons without a family, who find themselves in conditions of particular distress or who need a supportive environment to help them to overcome destructive habits and discover anew the meaning of life.”
Pope John Paul II
(Evangelium Vitae 26.3)
(See ProLife Profile of Inez Ryan)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: In a Mother and Child, Fruit of a Sidewalk Counselor's Efforts DATE: 17/5/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 17-23, 1998 ----- BODY:KENSINGTON, Md.—Serving in the front lines of the pro-life movement, sidewalk counselors rarely see the victories they help win in the battle against abortion.
In many cases, they come to witness and give prayerful support to women facing crisis pregnancies. But there are few “turnarounds,” in which women with appointments cancel them and announce to counselors their plans to carry their pregnancies to term.
Eight years ago in Kensington, Md., Inez Ryan played a key role in a turnaround. Not only that, the mother Ryan helped thanked her profusely for leading her to make the right decision. The two have kept in touch through the years.
In April 1990, Ryan stood in front of Cygma Health Center with two other women. Toward the day's end, a Chinese woman approached Ryan and told her, “I have heard there were people like you who could help, but I didn't know where to find them.”
The woman told her story: she had a one-year old son whose pregnancy had been complicated and expensive due to maternal diabetes. Since her husband was an unemployed violin maker, she rued the thought of another pregnancy.
She had an abortion appointment in 15 minutes.
Ryan prayed to the Holy Spirit for guidance and persuaded the woman to enter a diocesan-sponsored program at Providence Hospital that provides a discounted prenatal and delivery program to women in crisis pregnancies.
“Inez was very involved with her,” said Liz Troy of Bethesda, Md., one of the women with Ryan that day. “She drove her many times,” to appointments. “She didn't just give her an address and a name.”
Within a few months, the family moved to Philadelphia, but the mother sent Ryan a letter in response to a one-year birthday card for her son, Billy (not his real name) in December 1991.
“I know you must be happy for him, he seems like your grandson. I am so grateful for what you have done for him. Thank you from the bottom of my heart…. I'll never forget the first time we met each other at clinic,” the woman wrote.
Two years ago, the two brothers played music for Ryan, the older one on the violin and the younger at the piano.
Last year, she came to visit relatives in the Washington area, but Ryan was in the hospital, so the Chinese woman wrote a letter to her and called her on the phone. The boy Ryan helped save is getting all A+ marks in school, his mother told her.
The Cygma Women's Center still performs abortions in Kensington, but Inez Ryan made a profound difference with one family.
Although some sociologists point out that there are now fewer young women of child-bearing age to explain the declining number of abortions reported by the Centers for Disease Control in recent years, the persistent work of pro-lifers such as Ryan has also helped improve the situation.
Stories about turnarounds fly in the face of conventional logic that all women who enter abortion clinics have irrevocably made their minds up to have abortions and that sidewalk counselors or people who come to pray at clinics are wasting their time.
And pro-lifers such as Ryan show by their continued involvement with the women they meet in abortion clinics that they are concerned for more than just the child's welfare.
Success did not come very often for Ryan as a sidewalk counselor, but she did not develop a negative attitude.
“She has too much trust in God to get discouraged,” said Father William Ryan, one of Inez's two sons who has become a priest.
Father Ryan said his mother has supported the pro-life cause for years but familial obligations restricted her involvement for years.
She had eight children with her husband Philip, who died in 1977. Her first pro-life activism occurred in 1972 when she held a pro-life sign in downtown Washington for her son Bill, then a recent graduate of Georgetown University waiting to enter the Peace Corps.
After Inez Ryan's mother died in 1984, she became more involved in the pro-life movement, according to Father Ryan. She participated in rescues at abortion clinics and got arrested “two or three times.”
“She's the last person you'd think would get arrested,” said Father Ryan. “She's a very selfless, loving, giving person.”
Linda Cicone, a student at John Paul II Institute for Studies of Marriage and Family in Washington, who has rented a room in Ryan's house for two years, calls her “a role model of what a woman is.”
Ryan has a bachelor's degree in art from Wellesley College and a master's degree in art history from Harvard University, and Cicone enjoys discussing her graduate classes in theology with her, she said. Despite her educational accomplishments, “she always wanted to be a wife and mother. She never wanted to work,” said Cicone.
“You can see how her children and many grandchildren respect her,” Cicone said. Ryan has remained “joyful,” through the process of seeing her children grow up and leave the house and seeing her husband die, Cicone said. “She's always active, pouring herself out for others,” and is a humble woman.
Seeing her six sons carry her husband's casket into church for his funeral made all the sacrifices worthwhile, Ryan told her children.
She now has 18 grandchildren — plus Billy — and serves on the board of directors for Centro Tepeyac, a crisis pregnancy center in Silver Spring, Md., that specializes in helping Hispanic women.
She also helped launch Bible study and literary groups at her parish, Holy Redeemer in Kensington, and hosts out-of-town guests during the annual March for Life in Washington each January.
In a quiet, unassuming way, Ryan has practiced and imparted in her children an apostolic Catholicism. An African woman that Ryan met through other sidewalk counselors — who called her because Ryan can speak French — later converted. Ryan is now the godmother to her child, Cicone said.
Her son Father Ryan, a priest of the Washington archdiocese who dedicates his priestly ministry to Hispanic Catholics at St. Martin's Parish in Gaithersburg, Md., helped found Centro Tepeyac.
William Murray writes from Kensington, Maryland.
----- EXCERPT: Veteran pro-lifer Inez Ryan has seen how her words and actions eight years ago changed a family's life ----- EXTENDED BODY: William Murray ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Ironically, Financial Woes Lead Newfoundland to Pay for Abortions DATE: 17/5/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 17-23, 1998 ----- BODY:NEWFOUNDLAND, Canada- Pro-lifers in Atlantic Canada are alarmed by the Newfoundland government's decision to provide full funding for abortions at Dr. Henry Morgentaler's St. John's clinic.
Bowing to pressure from the federal government to fully insure what has been described as an essential medical service, the Newfoundland health ministry announced early this year that it would begin paying the full cost of abortion at the Morgentaler clinic.
Morgentaler, Canada's leading abortionist, operates a string of free-standing clinics in St. John's, Halifax, Fredericton, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, and Edmonton. The clinics are part of a 30-year crusade by Morgentaler to increase access to abortion for Canadian women.
The decision has shocked Newfoundland's pro-life community, especially as the provincial health ministry struggles to maintain hospital services at a time of severe fiscal restraint.
“[The province] backs up its decision by saying the decision will actually save our province money,” said Lorraine Cole, president of the Newfoundland Right to Life association. “What they fail to tell you is that the economic toll of abortion is disastrous to our economy. Abortion is costing Newfoundlanders and Canadians billions of dollars annually.”
Previously, the Newfoundland health insurance program covered only the cost of doctor's fees at Morgentaler's abortion facility. Abortion-seeking women were required to pay an additional $400-$600 (Canadian) to make up the difference.
Threatened with loss of federal funds, local government gives into providing what Canada has deemed an ‘essential medical service’
But in 1995, Canada's federal health ministry announced that provinces that refused to cover the full cost of abortion services would see an equivalent amount deducted from federal transfer payments. In an economically recessed province like Newfoundland, the threat of a transfer payment reduction could not be taken lightly.
The Newfoundland government at first resisted the federal pressure at a cost of up to $11,000 per month. In December 1997, however, Premier Brian Tobin and provincial health minister Joan Marie Alyward said enough was enough.
Newfoundland's pro-life community is particularly incensed that the announcement to fully fund the Morgentaler clinic coincided with the 10th anniversary of the Canadian Supreme Court's decision to overturn the country's former abortion law. The announcement also came close to the Jan. 22 anniversary marking the infamous Roe v. Wade decision in the United States.
Archbishop James MacDonald of the St. John's archdiocese, said it is “appalling” that the provincial government is now the largest provider of abortion services in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador.
“The people of Newfoundland are being forced to pay for these services from their taxes,” Archbishop MacDonald said. “The government provides no alternatives and thus women do not have a choice. Abortion represents poverty of thought.”
The Right to Life association's Cole said full funding of abortion at the Morgentaler clinic is a blatant misuse of public tax dollars. She said a province which is struggling to find funds to keep hospitals open and maintain even basic levels of health care, should not divert scarce funds to an elective procedure.
“Our province has had its share of down-sizing, layoffs, and bankruptcies, and our government has cut back hospitals to the point where waiting lists for elective surgery are years long,” Cole said. “[The provincial medical insurance plan] refuses to cover all costs for certain medical conditions, yet it has no problem paying for the destruction of our unborn children.”
Cole believes Newfoundland government leaders have been too influenced by hardship stories put forward by staff and supporters of the Morgentaler clinic. A Canadian medical journal quoted the manager of the Morgentaler clinic in St. John's as saying Newfoundland women were paying for abortions with student loans and income tax refund checks.
“I would like to know how this decision was made and who had so much influence on our leaders,” Cole told the Register. “From the reaction I've heard on open-line radio programs, the people are saying they don't like this decision in the least.”
Cole said an anti-funding rally attracted nearly 1,000 people to a St. John's park on Good Friday.
Margaret Hynes, leader of Campaign Life Coalition Newfoundland, was not too surprised the by government's action. She said the province had been following a more secular course, especially in light of recent action to end decades-old support of denominational schools in the province. As well, the province recently moved to protect homosexual interests by amending its human rights act to include sexual orientation as prohibited grounds for discrimination.
“In some ways, this abortion funding decision could be a blessing in disguise,” Hynes said. “The move to provide full funding of abortion has already triggered a tremendous backlash in Newfoundland. A number of people have spoken out against it.”
Hynes said the abortion funding decision has bewildered Newfoundlanders, many of whom are reeling from downturns in the fishing and shipyard industries. At a time when many are worried about simple economic survival, a government decision to fully fund an elective, unpopular medical service is especially demoralizing, she added.
Hynes has taken a leading role in circulating a petition aimed at overturning the funding decision. The petition, which by April 29 had received thousands of signatures, calls on the government to divert health care funding dollars to more urgent areas of need.
“Taxpayers in this province protest and raise objection toward the full funding of an elective procedure,” the petition reads. “Real and urgent health care issues in this province, such as cardiology, renal disease, cancer detection and treatment require priority over inappropriate election procedures.”
Hynes and Cole were scheduled to present the petition to the Newfoundland government in mid-May.
For their part, Morgentaler supporters see the Newfoundland government's action as one more victory in providing wider access to abortion in Canada.
Morgentaler opened his clinic in St. John's in October, 1990. At the time, the clinic received no government funding. Like other provinces in Atlantic Canada, Newfoundland government officials argued that it was not necessary to use tax dollars to support free-standing clinics when abortion was available at public hospitals.
It is estimated that nearly 1,000 abortions are performed annually at public hospitals in St. John's. It is difficult to obtain statistics from free-standing clinics themselves, but Morgentaler himself has stated that up to one-third of the total number of abortions in Canada are performed at clinics.
Pro-life leaders in Atlantic Canada, who have already noted a steady traffic in abortion at Morgentaler clinics in Halifax and Fredericton, will now monitor the situation in St. John's. They are concerned the funding decision could put St. John's on a par with Halifax as the abortion center of Atlantic Canada.
Pro-lifers will also have to look to the federal government for any possible abortion de-funding initiatives. As Cynthia Clarke, head of Campaign Life Coalition Nova Scotia noted, “It seems to me that de-funding will have to become a federal priority or else the provinces will continue to tell us that they have no choice. I think in many ways they are right. The federal government has ways to punish the provinces for breaking ranks.”
Mike Mastromatteo writes from Toronto, Canada.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mike Mastromatteo ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Worldwide Abortion Legislation at a Glance DATE: 17/5/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 17-23, 1998 ----- BODY:A summary of world abortion legislation finds that, as of 1997, there were 191 countries, sovereignties, or dependencies with populations greater than 100,000. Slightly fewer than half of these nations (93) protect the preborn completely or allow only strictly monitored exceptions such as “life of the mother,” rape, and incest. However, these countries comprise only about 34% of the world's population.
Ninety-eight of the world's nations offer little or no legal protection to the preborn. Their laws allow either abortion on demand or the physical and mental “health of the mother” exceptions, which, in practice, means abortion on demand. All of the world's “developed” nations use taxpayer revenue to fund abortions. The exception is the United States, which leaves funding decisions up to the 50 states.
The countries that offer little or no protection to the preborn account for about 66% of the world's population. India and China, two of these countries, have 37% of the world's population.
There are approximately 55 million surgical abortions performed in the world each year. This number has steadily increased since 1960 when there were about 40 million surgical abortions worldwide. During the period of 1960-1997 inclusive, surgical abortions have killed about 1.8 billion preborn babies — a number equal to 30% of the world's population.
Abortion laws have a profound effect on the total fertility rates (TFRs) and population growth rates of nations. Nations with abortion on demand have a much lower TFR than those that protect their preborn citizens (2.5 children per “completed family” compared to 4.3) and have suffered much steeper declines in TFR since 1965. Further, nations that provide little or no protection for the preborn have only about half the population growth rate that nations that protect them do (1.2% compared to 2.27%).
Source: The Facts of Life: An Authoritative Guide to Life and Family Issues, by Brian Clowes PhD (Human Life International, Front Royal, Va.). Reprinted with permission.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ------ TITLE: Pope Pledges Prayers for Austria's 'Suffering' Church DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY—Pope John Paul II called on Austria to be a “heartland of Christianity” at the center of Europe. During a three-day pastoral visit to the alpine nation, he also said the process of European integration must take account of the continent's long-standing Christian traditions. The trip June 19-21 was the Pope's third visit to Austria. Unlike previous occasions, however, this trip was aimed at unifying a Churchs badly shaken by scandal and dissent.
Since his last visit in 1988, Catholics have been rocked by allegations of sexual misconduct by Vienna's former cardinalarchbishop, divisions among the country's bishops, and a petition calling for radical change in Church practice signed by half-amillion Austrians.
Even before his weekend pilgrimage, Pope John Paul indicated he hoped the visit would help heal divisions.
“Recent years have been a time of great suffering for the Church in Austria,” he said during a general audience in the Vatican. “I hope that my visit will help bring unity to the Church in truth and in love.”
The occasion for the trip was to mark the 1,200th anniversary of the Archdiocese of Salzburg and to beatify three Austrians during an open-air Mass in the capital, Vienna. In addition, the Pope celebrated Mass in the city of St. Polten where he prayed for vocations to the priesthood and religious life.
Within hours of his arrival, Pope John Paul confronted the nation's discontent head-on as he exhorted believers not to lose their faith.
“Do not abandon the flock of Christ, the Good Shepherd! Do not leave the Church!” he said.
With a population of 8 million — 78% of whom are Catholic — Austria is truly a Catholic country and has been so for more than a millennium. Nevertheless, tens of thousands of people have left the Church in recent years following an alleged scandal by Vienna's former archbishop.
Hermann Cardinal Groer, 78, was forced to resign as Austria's top churchman in 1995 over allegations that he sexually abused a schoolboy 20 years earlier. Most bishops, including Vienna's new archbishop, Christoph Cardinal Schˆnborn, have publicly stated they believe the charges against Cardinal Groer are substantially true.
Cardinal Groer was banished to a con vent in Germany last month and has been forbidden to carry out his functions as a priest. But Church authorities in Austria and even the Vatican have come under fire for taking more than three years to resolve the case.
In Pope John Paul's only possible reference during the trip to the Cardinal Groer case and to organized dissent among the faithful, he said he knew Austria's bishops had been “put through trials” of various types.
“Even if this is not the time to make a general judgment, I would all the same like to say that you have been in my prayers in this period,” he said.
Cardinal Schˆnborn spoke more candidly, referring directly to what he called the “conflicts in our Church that have shaken the confidence of many in the Pope and the bishops.”
Many Catholics felt they were not understood by their pastors and that their concerns were ignored, added Cardinal Schˆnborn.
“All of this calls for change, forgiveness, reconciliation, and renewal,” he said.
In a gesture aimed at revitalizing the local Church, Pope John Paul set three Austrians on the path to sainthood at a Mass in Vienna's Heldenplatz, or Heroes' Square — the vast plaza designed by the Hapsburg emperors where hundreds of thousands poured in to welcome Adolf Hitler in 1938.
The size of the congregation for the beatification Mass was estimated at 50,000 — much less than the 130,000 people who attended the Pope's last Mass on Vienna's Heldenplatz in 1983, and a small proportion of the capital's population of 1.5 million. Church authorities had canceled all Masses in the city's churches to boost the turnout.
Among those the Pope beatified was Sister Restituta Kafka, who was arrested by the Gestapo for putting up crosses in a hospital in a challenge to the Nazis. She was beheaded in 1943.
Referring to the infamous events in 1938, Pope John Paul said, “Sixty years ago, a man [Hitler] stood on the balcony overlooking this square, and proclaimed he was bringing salvation. The new blesseds proclaim a different message. They tell us not to seek salvation from human beings but from Christ.”
The other two beatifications were of Father Jakob Kern, a priest seriously injured in World War I who died in 1924, and Father Anton Maria Schwartz, who founded an order to care for the working class at the end of the 19th century.
The Pope said all three were examples of living Christianity.
“They were not 'photocopy' Christians, each was an original, irreplaceable and unique,” he said. Today's Church does not need “part-time Catholics” but “full-blooded Christians,” he added.
The Sunday Mass marked the culmination of the Pope's 83rd foreign visit, which began in Salzburg and also took him to St. Polten.
Austria is the birthplace (in 1995) of We Are Church, a coalition of dissenting groups in the Church, which eventually spread to other European countries and to the United States. We Are Church proposes, among other things, an end to requiring priestly celibacy, calls for the priestly ordination of women, and seeks greater lay participation in the naming of bishops. Some half a million Austrians have signed a petition circulated by the coalition, calling for radical changes in Church practice. (A similar petition in the United States, aimed at garnering a million signatures, resulted in less than 40,000.)
Pope John Paul did not address these concerns directly, but said he wished to encourage the faithful to continue to participate “in building of the kingdom of God.” Acknowledging that the numbers of Catholics in Austria had dwindled in recent years, he urged the faithful to resist the growing influences of consumerism and secularization in European society.
“The table of prosperity and consumerism seems more attractive,” he said. “Hence, many of our contemporaries live as if there were no God.”
Instead, Pope John Paul proposed that Austrian Catholics be a “driving force” in building a European civilization that takes account of the continent's Christian traditions.
“Many hands will be needed, but especially hearts, which not only beat for careers and money but also for God and mankind,” he said.
The Pope urged priests and religious to remain vigilant in their missions, and told young people, “The Pope is counting on you.”
He also spent time with some terminally ill and elderly patients at a hospice run by the catholic aid agency Caritas Socialis. The 78-year-old Pontiff passed among them in near silence for 20 minutes, grasping hands and caressing faces.
Austria's President Thomas Klestil acknowledged the role Pope John Paul II played in helping shape the landscape of modern-day Europe. He told the Pontiff “Austrians remember with gratitude and admiration” how much his pontificate contributed to the end of communist rule in central and eastern Europe.
Throughout the Pope's visit, a recurring theme was “Austria as a heartland of Christianity” on the continent. The country takes over the six-month, rotating presidency of the European Union July 1, and Pope John Paul appeared to have carefully chosen the timing of his trip.
“With all political planning and economic concepts currently dominating the discussions,” he said, “it is apt to consider that Europe owes a lot to Christendom, but Christendom also owes Europe manifold gratitude.”
The Pope noted the aspirations of the former communist countries in Europe as the 15-nation European Union considers admitting them. He insisted that western Europe could not remain an “island of Western well-being on the continent.”
“The richer countries, inevitably, will have to make concrete sacrifices” to overcome the “inhuman” economic differences, he said.
Stephen Banyra writes from Rome
----- EXCERPT: AMID COUNTRY'S CONFLICT AND DISSENT, PONTIFF URGES UNITY ----- EXTENDED BODY: Stephen Banyra ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: After Wisconsin Judicial Victory, School Choicers Look Ahead DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON—As the dust settles after the biggest judicial victory in the history of the school choice movement, activists on both sides are assessing the ruling's impact and attempting to predict the future.
As a result of the Wisconsin Supreme Court's ruling, more than 15,000 children from lowincome families will be eligible to attend one of more than 110 private and parochial schools as part of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). The outlook, however, even after the decision that allows publicly funded vouchers to be used for tuition in religious schools, continues to be filled with questions.
Some questions involve the immediate judicial situation: Will the losers in the MPCP decision, the teachers' unions (in this case, the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association), civil liberties organizations, and separation-of-Church-andstate groups, appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court? If so, what are the chances that the Court will strike down the decision and restrict vouchers? If the Court should uphold or decline judgment on the ruling, what does that bode for school choice in other states that have similar initiatives pending in the courts (including Ohio, Arizona, Maine, and New Hampshire)?
Other questions concern the impact of potential regulations. Now that the Court has acted, the bureaucrats must weigh in. Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and elsewhere in the state are waiting to learn what regulations the state Department of Public Instruction will impose to govern the use of vouchers. Many Catholic observers are concerned that these new regulations may undermine the religious content of their curricula.
Regarding immediate action in the courts, there are doubts whether an appeal will be filed.
“Some people think that the opponents will not appeal,” said Sister Dale McDonald PBVM, director of public policy and educational research at the National Catholic Education Association (NCEA). “They might just cut their losses, call it quits in Wisconsin and focus on the Ohio case.” In Ohio, a school choice plan in Cleveland that allows public vouchers to be used for religious schools has been in effect since 1996 and is currently being litigated. (Unlike the Milwaukee plan, where lower courts prohibited the program from expanding to religious schools while the case was being appealed, courts in Cleveland allowed the inclusion of religious schools.)
“I think choice opponents are probably just waiting and hoping that Ohio declares vouchers for religious schools unconstitutional. They might not want to risk setting national precedent on vouchers,” said Sister McDonald.
Gordon Baldwin, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, agrees. He noted that Justice Donald Steinmetz, writing for the majority in the MPCP case, went to great lengths to justify the expansion to religious schools under both the Wisconsin and United States constitutions.
“It is a very workmanlike opinion,” Baldwin told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. “Steinmetz covers all the bases. He very firmly rejects the argument that it offends the Wisconsin constitution and analyzes the messy U.S. Supreme Court law on this subject. If I were advising the plaintiffs, I'd advise them not to take the risk of turning this into a national precedent.”
Other observers disagree. Kevin Hasson, president and general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a bipartisan, ecumenical public interest law firm in Washington, thinks the teachers' unions and their allies have no alternative but to appeal.
“This is a high-profile issue,” he said. “The rhetoric of the teachers unions has so inflamed their rank and file that I do not think they can avoid taking it all the way to the Supreme Court. I think they will almost certainly appeal.”
Even if an appeal is filed, it may not receive action; the Supreme Court typically agrees to hear only about one of every 80 appeals it receives.
“Sooner or later, the Court will deal with school choice,” said Hasson. “Whether it will be right now is hard to say. The court tends not to act on the very first case it receives on a certain issue. It might wait to get more input from state courts before acting on this issue.”
When the Court does act, many observers feel that vouchers for religious schools might just pass constitutional muster.
Although the Supreme Court struck down New York's “parochaid” program of public assistance to religious schools in 1973, school choice advocates have won a series of high court victories since 1983. Clint Bolick of the Institute for Justice, writing in the June 15 Wall Street Journal, quoted the 1973 ruling as leaving the door open to “some form of public assistance [such as scholarships] made available generally without regard to the sectariannonsectarian, or public-nonpublic nature of the institution benefited.”
According to Bolick, such a formulation is similar to the GI Bill for higher education, which recipients may use at religious or secular schools. Since 1973, the Supreme Court has generally decided this type of case based on the principle of “neutrality.” Choice proponents contend the MPCP and similar voucher plans are neutral because the choice of where the voucher is used is made by the parent, not the government.
“The line of cases since 1983 makes it very likely that the Supreme Court will uphold the Wisconsin decision,” said Hasson.
Other activists noted that the dissenting justices in the MPCP ruling (the case was decided by a 4-2 margin) based their dissent on their reading of the state constitution, not the U.S. Constitution.
“The dissenters agreed with the majority that the Milwaukee vouchers did not violate the federal Constitution,” said George Corwell, education director of the New Jersey Catholic Conference. “On the federal constitutional issue, the case was actually 6-0. That is pretty significant.”
On the regulatory side, all eyes are on the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) and its controversial state school superintendent, John Benson. An outspoken opponent of school choice, Benson, on the day of the ruling, called for a moment of silence for the loss of religious liberty as a result of the court decision.
In the days since, DPI officials have been more conciliatory. Meetings between DPI administrators and choice supporters have been positive. A June 12 Wisconsin Catholic Conference report of a DPI meeting with plan proponents quoted an official stating the agency had no intention of overregulating the law, but providing the “best and quickest opportunities” for participation.
A concern among religious leaders is how the state will enforce the “optout” clause included in the law, which allows students to decline participation in certain religious practices. Some feel that this clause could be applied broadly to effectively water down the values-based content of religious instruction.
The Vatican II declaration on Christian education, Gravissimum Educationis, states: “The Church as a mother is under an obligation, therefore, to provide for its children an education by virtue of which their whole lives may be inspired by the spirit of Christ. At the same time it will offer its assistance to all peoples for the promotion of a well-balanced perfection of the human personality for the good of society in this world and for the development of a world more worthy of man” (No. 3).
Jerry Topccewski, communications director for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, said, “We do not expect that the regulations will be overly burdensome.”
The archdiocese operates some 42 elementary and high schools, each of which is eligible for the program.
“From a Catholic perspective,” Topccewski said, “we already operate with a quasi opt-out clause. None of our non-Catholic students is forced to participate in any ceremony they may disagree with.”
Officials estimate that Milwaukee's Catholic elementary school population could increase by 1,000 students. At present, 2,500 students are attending archdiocesan schools under a privately funded school choice plan.
“We have no intention of using Catholic schools to proselytize,” Topccewski added. “We do not do it with our Catholic hunger or poverty programs. Why would we do it with our education programs?”
The NCEA's Sister McDonald said the regulation issue should not be a great concern noting that Catholic schools are already regulated to some basic degree, including compliance with health and safety and civil rights laws.
“There are safeguards in place to ensure that religious schools are not over-regulated,” she said. One of the standards used by courts in determining if regulations of private schools are justified is whether the rules create “excessive entanglements” that compromise the relationship between Church and state. “Any regulation that is overly burdensome can be challenged based on this principle.”
Michael Barbera writes from Washington.
----- EXCERPT: Will High Court appeal follow? Advocates disagree ----- EXTENDED BODY: Michael Barbera ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Croatian Catholics Fight To Survive in the Balkans DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:SARAJEVO, Bosnia—After more then 12 centuries of struggle for survival in the Bosnia-Herzegovina region, Croatian Catholics are threatened with extinction, even though they once comprised 90% of the population.
A lucid example of this strife was Vinko Cardinal Puljic's unsuccessful attempt to lead a group of displaced faithful to their home village Derventa, in northern Bosnia this spring (see Rebuilding from the Ashes of War below). The cardinal, who is the ordinary of the Sarajevo archdiocese, had intended to celebrate Mass in the ruins that was once their church.
Father Ivo Tomasevic, the cardinal's secretary, described the events:
“ Some of the Serb civilians … jumped on the roof of the totally destroyed church and started throwing concrete pieces at us. I tried to protect the cardinal but one of the pieces hit me on my forehead. I fell down, but managed to get up and somehow drag myself into the SFOR's (International peace-keeping soldiers known as Stabilization Forces, see sidebar) vehicle.
Soon after, the four priests with us entered the same vehicle, which was showered with rocks as we drove off.”
The present situation has been preceded by several instances of persecution or oppression of Catholics in the region, which the Vatican has called “the wounds of Christian Europe.” A recap of the area's history discloses the consistent anguish with which the faithful have long had to contend.
The conflict between the Muslims and Croats has its roots in WWII. At that time, many Muslims from Bosnia and Herzegovina served in the Croatian army. After the war, many were killed by the communists for siding with the Croatians.
Basically, two explanations exist as to why war broke-out in Bosnia-Herzegovina in March 1992. The first and most widely believed by the local people is that it was the result of ambitious world powers such as the USSR, U.S., and Germany trying to reestablish their influence in the post Cold War era. They had hoped for a reordering of the international balance of power in the territory of the former Yugoslavia.
The second theory, mainly held in the West, is that war erupted due to the return of ancient hatreds. Instead of the people of the former Yugoslavia challenging the communists who had incited religious hatred, they turned on one another.
The existence of Catholic dioceses in the Balkans are recorded in official Church documents as early as the 11th century. At the beginning of the 16th century, during the Turkish conquest, Croatian Catholics were forced to flee their villages and emigrate to neighboring countries. Some were captured and held as slaves. Many more converted to Islam or Orthodoxy to survive.
After 415 years of Turkish rule in the region only some 200,000 Catholics remained, totaling roughly 18% of the population. With the entrance of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in Bosnia on the eve of World War I, the plight of Catholics improved — at least for a while.
Re-establishment of a regular Church hierarchy was the most significant development in this period. Today, in the regions of Bosnia, there are Sees in Sarajevo, Banja Luka, and Mostar. The bishop of Mostar also oversees the Trebinjsko-Mrkanjska district. The earlier Franciscan-run province of Bosna Srebrena has been separated into Bosna Srebrena and the Herzegovian province.
According to terms set down following WWI in the Versailles Treaty, kingdoms for Serbs, Croatians, and Slovenians were formed on the Balkans peninsula. This region later was referred to as Yugoslavia, whose leadership the Catholics of Bosnia particularly remember because many were forced to leave the country due to the lack of jobs and also because of persecution by the communists. During that time, many churches were closed and orders of religious sisters were expelled.
Between the World Wars, in the Yugoslav kingdom (present-day Bosnia), the Catholic population dwindled and emigration continued. The kingdom, led by the Serbian Karadjordjevic dynasty, favored the Orthodox Church over the other three religions present in the region.
World War II opened a new and bloody time in the history of Bosnia. During the five years of conflicts, many Catholic were killed and expelled — in Eastern Yugoslavia the Catholic population was completely wiped out. Many parishes were annihilated; more than 100 priests were brutally murdered, and the Church disappeared completely in many areas.
The situation did not improve with the end of the war and the rise of the communist regime. Political repression and economic problems forced still more Croatian Catholics to immigrate to Western Europe, Australia, and the United States. Government officials sought to separate people from the Church by persecuting priests and believers, staging court trials, and through other forms of harassment by the state.
In 1960, tensions finally eased somewhat. The Catholic Church regained some liberties and opened a theological seminary. Nuns who had been expelled from Bosnia by the communist government in 1945 were allowed to return.
The breakdown of Yugoslavia and the communist regime in 1991 marked the emergence of new countries in the territory — Bosnia among them — and with it the beginnings of a new and bloody war. According to Dr. Ante Markotic, a professor and demographics expert at Mostar University, more than 300 settlements in Bosnia — where the majority of the population were Croatian Catholics — were destroyed. Some 10,000 were killed, and 21,000 were injured.
At an International Conference on Bosnia held in Zagreb in April 1997, Jonas Wiedgren, director of the International Center for Development and Emigration Policies in Vienna, Austria, noted the fact that more than 500,000 Croatian Catholics (approximately two-thirds of the Croatian population) were forced to abandon their homes.
In the Banja Luka diocese more than 90% of the Catholic population (about 114,000) was expelled. In eastern portions of Bosnia (regions such as Trebinjsko-Mrkanjske and Vrhobosanska) the Catholic population totally disappeared.
With the intent of wiping out the Croatian Catholics, Serb and Muslim military forces attacked and desecrated churches. Between 1992 and 1997 more than 1,000 churches, chapels, monasteries, and other church properties were either destroyed or severely damaged.
Although the Dayton Accords of late 1995 brought renewed hope of peace, this too soon disappeared. (The Dayton agreement ended a four-and-ahalf-year war, but it did not determine whether Bosnia-Herzegovina would be a unified country or split into two or three parts.) Five churches were bombed and burned shortly after the agreement was signed. Between 1992 and 1995 more than 112 assaults on Croatians returning to their home villages were recorded in the Vrhobosanska region alone.
Islamic extremists remain a particular threat to Catholics in Bosnia. They have received support from the Bosniak-Muslim leadership despite the Dayton agreement. The extremists, more than 1,000 of whom have settled in Central Bosnia, have terrorized the Catholic population. International pressure, not least from the United States, forced some to leave, but others remain.
Pope John Paul II's 1996 trip to Sarajevo brought a new optimism to the Catholics of this country but at the same time, aggression increased towards the faithful. Bombs planted in a Catholic church in Sarajevo exploded days after the announcement of the Pope's visit.
This situation forced the Ministry of Internal Affairs to provide police protection for Church facilities. It proved to be insufficient. More bombs exploded in at least one church in Sarajevo and elsewhere in Bosnia's capital.
Despite the hope it stirred among the area's Catholics, not even the Pope's visit could improve the situation for the long run. Today, two years later, Croatian Catholics still are unable to return to their homes from which they have been expelled in Serb- or Muslimcontrolled territory.
Ironically, the international community has placed considerable pressure on Croatians — the aim being to ensure the return of Serbs in the shortest possible time.
Security precautions were cited as an excuse by the SFOR to prevent some Croatians from visiting the Franciscan monastery “Plehan, “ historically one of the most popular pilgrimage sites for Catholic Croatians in Bosnia. The Croatians were stopped from making their announced and approved visit by forces charged with ensuring freedom of movement and the safe return of these displaced people to their homes.
Also noteworthy is that the international community did not dismiss any government officials who prevented Croatian Catholics from returning to their homes. However, an incident in Drvar, a city controlled by Croatians in the northern Bosnia, led to the dismissal of a Croatian government official and the placement of the SFOR to ensure the peaceful return of Serb refugees to their homes. The chief of police in Stolac was dismissed due to the similar treatment of Muslims. Meanwhile in the cities of Bugojno, Travnik, Derventa, and Banja Luka, power remains with the authorities who expelled and killed the Croatian Catholics near their own homes.
During the war and after, Cardinal Puljic, head of the Catholic Church in Bosnia, has pleaded for reconciliation between all groups, participated in many peace initiatives, and criticized many Croatian Catholic politicians for their unChristian behavior. Even so, he is not popular with the Bosnian media.
Cardinal Puljic completely opposes any attempt to suppress the Croatian people and has been outspoken on a number of occasions against the marginalization of the population's Catholic members. He has called for one country with three equal nations, which does not suit many who would like to create an artificial nation free of any historical considerations. Aserious struggle continues in these regions for Croatian Catholics. Having learned from experience in past centuries they had no delusions that their struggle would be easy.
Regarding the Church in Bosnia, Cardinal Puljic recently said he invited “all people of good will to help us, that the Crucified Church of Bosnia does not die. In this spirit I ask Mary our Mother, the mighty advocate, to guide us on our pilgrimage into the third millennium.”
Ivan Cigic writes from Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina
----- EXCERPT: Centuries-old struggle continues for dwindling minority ----- EXTENDED BODY: IVAN CIGIC ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Irish Sporting Club Controversy Underscores Heightened Sensitivities DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:DUBLIN, Ire.—Priests involved in Ireland's largest sporting organization, the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), say the organization insulted its patron, Archbishop Dermott Clifford of Cashel and Emly, when it refused to publish a letter from the archbishop calling for an end to the Rule 21 ban on British police and security personnel.
Under the rule, no member of the British defense forces or the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) may play Gaelic football or hurling — Ireland's national games. At the end of last month, a special congress of GAA delegates was called to vote on deleting the ban from the rule book — a move supported by the archbishop who said “nothing but good” could come of it.
But the 293 delegates present — some representing GAA clubs in Boston, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco — were kept ignorant of the archbishop's plea until after the crucial vote in favor of keeping the ban until sweeping RUC reforms take place.
“It seems a great discourtesy not to have read it out and discussed it,” said Father Desmond Dockery, pastor of Rathnew, Co. Wicklow, who was a Roscommon county footballer in the 1960s. “Were the GAA executives afraid of the power of the archbishop or that delegates were not mature enough to take everybody's view of the board?”
Incidentally, Father Dockery was the victim of another ban during his playing career — Archbishop John Charles Mc-Quaid of Dublin refused to grant him permission to continue playing football after he was ordained. As a seminarian, he played under the pseudonym 'Des Cryan' in an all-Ireland semi-final.
Former Limerick county hurler, Father Seamus Ryan, PP of Ballyfermot Upper in Dublin and president of the Ballyfermot DelaSalle GAA club, commented on the GAA special congress: “It was not a very nice thing to do.”
However, another former Limerick country hurler, Father Ronnie Neville, PP of Rolestown, suggested that the executive might have decided not to publicize the letter to avoid embarrassing the archbishop. “The delegates had been mandated long before, it would have been a severe rebuff to the patron if his letter had been read out and then seemingly ignored.
“Once the Northern Ireland delegates indicated that they were opposed to the move, delegates from the south were not going to force them to play GAA with RUC officers.”
How far the decision to maintain the ban affects the Northern Ireland peace process remains to be seen. Other more pressing matters, such as the re-routing of controversial Protestant parades through Catholic areas, are more likely to have influenced the vote scheduled for June 25 for the new Northern Ireland Assembly. Because that vote is by proportional representation (PR) in multi-seat constituencies, it has been difficult to predict its outcome.
It remains to be seen, for example, if moderate nationalists have given second preference votes to moderate unionist candidates and vice versa. The complexities of the PR electoral system mean that a handful of votes will decide whether a proor anti-Good Friday Agreement candidate wins the final seat in some constituencies.
One aspect of the GAA's decision to keep the ban is that it highlights how unacceptable the RUC are at present to Northern Ireland's predominantly Catholic, nationalist community. At present, Catholics make up only 7% of RUC police officers, despite comprising nearly 45% of Northern Ireland's general population.
The number of Catholics applying for work with the RUC has increased since the Good Friday peace agreement this year, but they still only comprised 21% of applications.
Unionists, who are predominantly Protestant, resent the ban. Some Unionist extremists use it to justify their claim that the GAA is part of a pan-Nationalist front and that GAA members are legitimate targets for terrorist attack.
Earlier this month, Chris McGimpsey, an Ulster Unionist councilor, claimed that a GAA member he knew who had supported the deletion of Rule 21 had been branded “a Prod lover” by other GAA members.
He added: “Rule 21 is viewed by the Protestant community in Northern Ireland as a slight, and rightly so. To ban people from a sport because they decide to serve their community in the Royal Ulster Constabulary is clearly contrary to natural justice. The courageous stand by the archbishop of Cashel deserves recognition. His letter, written as patron of the GAA, was suppressed until after the vote so as to ensure than any waverers would not be influenced by the association's patron. However, his criticism of the decision cannot be ignored.”
Renowned GAA sports journalist Con Houlihan pointed out that the RUC was less likely to improve in the eyes of nationalists if members of the nationalist community were being discouraged from joining the force because of the GAA ban. He commented: “It seems to me that Rule 21 is also Catch 22.” After the vote, Archbishop Clifford claimed that some delegates had faced lobbying that was “bordering on intimidation.” He added: “Delegates in the North came under severe pressure from political elements.”
One Northern Irish priest who is very active in GAA circles in County Derry said that before the vote his club had been picketed by members of Sinn Fein shouting 'Keep Rule 21.'
The priest, who asked not to be named, said if more consultation had taken place at a local level the proposal might have succeeded. “There were many concerns: would the rule change allow a whole barrack of RUC police men to join in one go? I know it sounds unlikely, but there were fears that there would be a large influx of people who might vote in new changes at club level. People were asking if it could mean an end to the playing of the Irish national anthem and the flying of the Irish Republic's Tricolor at GAA games.
“There is also still a lot of pain around regarding the army, the Ulster Defense Regiment and the RUC whose disposition towards the GAA has not been kind. The harassment of players on their way to and from training became such a part of normal life that it no longer became a matter of comment. There are also issues like the murder of Sean Brown, the chairman of Bellaghey GAA club, last year and the fact that there has been no satisfactory outcome to the police investigation into his killing.
“To describe the vote against deletion as 'narrow-minded and anti-police' would be unfair, people had genuine concerns which were not being addressed. The GAA could have taken a lesson from Sinn Fein on how to consult with people to bring them along with you. If the vote is prepared for properly next year, I believe there will be no difficulty in removing Rule 21.”
Cian Molloy writes from Dublin, inland
----- EXCERPT: Archbishop's letter favoring inclusion of British police as players goes unpublished ----- EXTENDED BODY: Cian Molloy ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Jubilee 2000 Should Be 'New Springtime for Church' DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:SOUTH BEND, Ind.— With the same creative and scholarly care with which he has long and lovingly studied the Church as an ecclesiologist, 80-year-old Jesuit Father Avery Dulles recently presented new and insightful observations about the approaching Great Jubilee of the Year 2000.
This Jubilee celebration, now less than two years away, should be seen as “the greatest jubilee” of all, the Ford h a m University theologian told 250 clergy and p a s t o r a l ministers gathered at the University of Notre Dame for a day of Jubilee preparation. His talk keynoted a one day workshop on the Great Jubilee, sponsored by the National Service Committee (NSC), a Catholic Charismatic Renewal organization. The NSC had invited Father Dulles, an internationally known theologian whose theological work has helped to enlarge a popular understanding of the Church since Vatican II. Among his best known works are Models of the Church and Models of Revelation.
The Church has marked centenary and golden jubilees of the Nativity for many centuries, Father Dulles informed his audience. But this 2000th anniversary, he said, would be a unique and unprecedented celebration. In fact, it could best be seen as a charism or special gift from God, given for the upbuilding of the Church. And “if God sees fit,” he added, the Great Jubilee could also be accompanied by “palpable manifestations of the Spirit.”
For the Christian, noted the priest, the coming Jubilee means a remembering and a celebration of the birth of Jesus 2,000 years ago. The Incarnation can only be seen as a “stupendous achievement of divine power, wisdom, and love.” In some respects, he added, the birth of Jesus Christ into the world surpasses God's gifts of Creation and Redemption. But even the secular world has historically honored the birth of Jesus as central. “All the years of the calendar are numbered in reference to it.”
As a whole, jubilee celebrations have a long Biblical history, according to Father Dulles. They were seen by the Jews as a special year of favor from the Lord. They were “charged with a promised grace.”
That “promised grace” of the year 2000 could and should mean “a new Springtime for the Church,” the theologian continued, quoting Pope John Paul II. The Pope announced his plan for the Great Jubilee in 1994 in his letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente (As the Third Millennium Draws Near). In this letter, the Pope pleaded for support from everyone so that the “great challenge of the year 2000 is not overlooked, for this challenge certainly involves a special grace of the Lord for the Church and for the whole of humanity.”
What are the graces which the Jubilee will bring to the Church?
“It should involve an intensification of three of the Church's properties,” said Father Dulles, citing them as holiness, unity, and the power of expansion or growth.
Anointed by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the Church is created to bring men and women to holiness, the priest said. The sacraments, Scripture, doctrine, ministries, and everything associated with the Church are directed to this end. But “holiness is not greatly esteemed in our society,” Father Dulles remarked dryly, prompting a few ironic chuckles among his fellow clerics. And some “bishops, priests, and religious, by their misconduct, have given great disedification,” he said.
Sin is always an evil, he observed, but sin within the Church “takes on the added malice of being the profanation of God's temple. When the Jubilee arrives, Christians can rejoice over the holiness already given to the Church and can rededicate themselves to the pursuit of holiness, confidently appealing to Christ, the living source of all true holiness.”
The second blessing that can be expected for the Church at the Great Jubilee, he continued, is unity. The Church should reflect the intimacy among the Divine Persons — Father and Son united in the Holy Spirit. “Within the Godhead, the Spirit seals the unity between the Father and the Son,” the theologian explained.
“The unifying activity of the Holy Spirit in the Church reaches us both through sacraments and through various ministries and charisms,” Father Dulles said. Christians must reflect on the value of ecclesial unity as a goal. “A divided Church is hardly any Church at all.… The schisms that have separated large bodies of Christians from the Roman unity are matters of great concern. The ecumenical movement is undoubtedly inspired by the grace of the Holy Spirit.”
The third property or characteristic of the Church which should flourish, powered by the Jubilee, is growth or expansion. Because “the Gospel is a dynamic reality,” he explained, the Church naturally spreads by spreading the Good News. The apostles could not be restrained from bearing witness everywhere, he added. The same should be true for Christians today.
In today's Church, both Confirmation and Ordination are the primary sacraments of testimony. They are conferred in order to make the recipient a stronger and more effective witness of Christ.
“But the obstacles to evangelization in our age are evident,” the priest warned. “We encounter massive resistance from the opinion makers, advertisers, commercial and political interests. They seem to be conspiring to make a relativistic culture in which all access to the transcendent is cut off. The faith is treated as a private opinion that should play no role in public life.”
The intensification or growth of holiness, unity, and expansion in the Church will not take place automatically, Father Dulles concluded. “We are faced with great difficulties, but we have not been called to a life of ease.”
In a separate talk given during the day, Father Dulles talked about the charism of priesthood. Although some writers have suggested that the priesthood was only instituted when the charisms of the early centuries “ran out,” he insisted that the ordained priesthood is rightly seen as a different sort of charism given by the Holy Spirit to the Church.
The role of the Holy Spirit is brought out in the ordination rite with the laying on of hands, Father Dulles said. Later, when a priest acts in the person of Christ, Christ acts in him. Because of that, priests have a unique pastoral authority. “Jesus was sent by the Father,” he explained. “By virtue of that authority, he sent his Apostles into the world, knowing that people would hear him and his Father speaking through them.” The authority of the Church is therefore historically hierarchical.
As the secular world counts down toward the millennium, putting on party hats and stocking its shelves with bottled “refreshments,” Christians must patiently prepare for “the year of favor that the Lord has commissioned us to proclaim,” Father Dulles concluded.
“The Holy Spirit who renews the face of the earth is a promise, pledge, and foretaste of the final kingdom of God,” said the now fragile but enduring theologian. “We can become beacons of hope when hope is in short supply.”
Catherine Odell writes from South Bend, Indiana
----- EXCERPT: But noted theologian says societal challenges to holiness must be met ----- EXTENDED BODY: CATHERINE ODELL ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Sarajevo: From the Ashes of War DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:Meyer: One of the conditions of the 1995 Dayton Agreement had to do with the return of refugees, no matter what their ethnic or religious allegiance, to the villages and towns from which they had been expelled by the war. To what degree is this happening?
Cardinal Puljic: I see a difference between the Republika Srpska, the Serbian entity, and the Federation of Muslims and Croats in Bosnia-Herzegovina when it comes to refugees. A safe return of non-Serbs to the Republika Srpska has not really begun, except for a few returnees to territories on the borders and to the town of Brcko in the north. In the Federation, the return of refugees depends very much on the good will of local ethnic leaders. Generally, in the territory controlled by Croats, local leaders try to prevent the return of Muslims, and the Muslims do the same thing to Croats in Muslim-controlled areas. Despite these attitudes, I know of many Muslim families who have returned to the Jajce region and some Muslim families who have come back to the Prozor area, both controlled by Croats, and of many Croat families who have returned to Vares and Bugojno, which are in Muslim hands.
During your last interview with the
There are slight signs of change for the better. In any case, the exodus of Catholics from our country has not worsened. But we face a new problem in Bosnia: I know that some charitable organizations are offering Bosnian Catholic refugees currently housed in Croatia or other European countries a chance to permanently emigrate to countries like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. Obviously, from our point of view, that is a problem. I wouldn't call it a real campaign, but it's a trend that worries us.
Clearly, normalization of life in Bosnia would have to be part of any lasting peace. And yet haven't you, personally, been attacked — and not only with words — for trying to carry out the normal functions of the Church in some areas dominated by Serbs or Muslims?
You are hinting at the assault on me and 63 other persons in the crypt of the destroyed parish church at Derventa in the Republika Srpska on the feast of St. George.
Father Mirko Beslic, the pastor, who since August 1992 has lived in exile with his parishioners in Croatia, asked permission of the local civil authorities to organize a visit of his parishioners to Derventa on the occasion of the feast of their patron saint.
He was granted written authorization to proceed, and so April 23 he lead a convoy of 17 buses of pilgrims from the direction of Slavonski Brod in Croatia. I came with my associates by car from Sarajevo.
Once there, local Serbian police escorted my delegation to the crypt by a round-about route that, effectively, alerted the local population that “the enemy” had arrived. Meanwhile, U.N. forces, warned by Serbian police that “spontaneous demonstrations” against the pilgrimage were planned, held up the buses of pilgrims at the border.
We, however, found ourselves holed up in the ruined church of Derventa for six hours surrounded by a hostile mob ready to stone us. I truly feared for the lives of the priests, nuns, and lay faithful who were with me. Thank God, nobody was killed, but Father Ivo Tomasevic, the chancellor of the archdiocese, was seriously injured by a flying brick. Finally, U.N. troops came to our rescue.
These and similar incidents are the product of extremists who want to scare off potential returnees. I must admit that, for me, this was one of the most difficult, if not the most difficult, moments of the whole conflict. But, despite all this, we will continue to do all we can to send priests to the remaining Catholics in Republika Srpska and to those who wish to return.
Are such incidents attributable mainly to one group, or do other or all Bosnian factions engage in such tactics? I admit that there are extremists on all sides who would like to preserve the sad results of ethnic cleansing, but not in equal measure. In Republika Srpska these extremists manage to prevent any significant return of non-Serb refugees. I now have information about the real organizers of the so-called “spontaneous rebellion” of the civil population of Derventa. They were extreme Serb radicals.
What about the postwar situation of the Bosnian Serbs themselves? Is there some kind of emerging democracy in the Serbian leadership in Banja Luka, as much U.S. press coverage suggests? Do you have contact with some of the more moderate elements in the Serb community?
I do not see any real change for the better in Republika Srpska. But this much should be noted: systematic discrimination against non-Serb populations in Banja Luka has been stopped, and this is to be welcomed as a positive sign. I have demanded the right to send several resident priests to serve the needs of Catholics who are part of the Sarajevo archdiocese and who live in Republika Srpska. I wrote recently on this matter to the new prime minister, Mr. Dodik and to President Plavsic [of the Republika Srpska], but I have not received a reply.
Many commentators have been struck by the swift pace of reconstruction in postwar Sarajevo and other cities only recently under siege. Are you impressed also, or are these signs of recovery merely cosmetic?
First, reconstruction programs depend on donors and donations are being given to the civil authorities who decide what is a priority. In this way the process of reconstruction depends on the political and ethnic preferences of decision makers. My feeling is that not enough attention is being paid to the school system, health institutions, and the needs of families.
You were pessimistic 18 months ago about the agenda of the Izetbegovic government and its support for the 'Islamicization' of Bosnia. Has anything changed since then? What is the likelihood of a more democratic administration once the current office-holders are out of power?
I deplore that our Muslim neighbors and fellow citizens do not fully appreciate what the Catholic Church did for this country during the war, and is doing today. We encouraged then, and encourage now, the creation of Bosnia and Herzegovina as an open, democratic society with full protection for human rights: a country with equal rights for all individuals and ethnic communities.
I am afraid that in the Muslim ruling class of our society one still finds numerous persons who treat their own community preferentially and who would like to see the whole country under their control. In September we will have new elections. But because of the climate of mistrust that remains, I foresee that the ethnically based parties will win again and that most of our current office-holders will remain in their seats.
What about the idea for an interreligious council you spoke about a year ago? Has that developed?
The Interreligious Council of Bosnia-Herzegovina is in the process of formation. We religious leaders meet regularly and discuss common problems, but what we have not been able to agree upon yet are the standing rules for the Council — particularly whether the Council should register with the civil authorities as a legal body. Nevertheless, it's already a forum for cooperation between the country's religious leaders.
An important aspect of the Council's activity involves educating our respective communities in a culture of tolerance, since in all our communities there are extremists who inflate incidents and nurture hostilities. We Catholic bishops have issued guidelines on respect and tolerance to our priests to help them in their work among the people.
But it's hard to monitor how our priests are implementing the guidelines or exactly what other religious leaders are doing to educate their communities.
A Croatian commentator said that reconciliation in Bosnia will only happen when Catholics offer to rebuild the mosques they damaged in the war and Muslims raise money to rebuild destroyed churches. Do you agree?
This is an oversimplified approach, and even if it were to happen, the fruits would not be lasting. We religious ministers and citizens cannot wash away the guilt of political and military leaders who are responsible for the destruction during the war. It's a non- solution to erase, in effect, the responsibility of political leaders or saddle religious communities with war crimes committed by others. But I do support the very traditional practice in Bosnia and Herzegovina whereby local congregations used to help their Muslim or Christian neighbors build a new mosque or church. This was, and can be again, a sign of sharing in each other's concrete needs and joys.
When I was in Bosnia last year, a number of people had been able to return to their old jobs and their prewar lives. What impressed me was how little they thought about the future and how little sense of responsibility they seemed to feel for their own political future. 'America will fix things,' they would say. Is such an attitude common?
Sadly, you are right. My impression is that this is the general attitude. It's a consequence of 50 years of communism when 'Big Brother' made all the important decisions. Our citizens are not trained to take their civil destiny into their own hands in a civilized way.
We must educate believers and fellow citizens to cherish the spirit of democracy and to demand a high degree of accountability from their elected legal representatives. I would also expect the international community, which is now helping us to build a stable peace, to get more deeply involved in educating our public in such civic virtues.
You said in the past that the St. Vincent Hospital project in Sarajevo, which you have beeen pursuing for the past several years, was more than a matter of medicine. It was a matter of the Church resuming her social mission after a half-century of communist interference. How is the hospital project being received in Sarajevo?
In the old building that is to be transformed into a hospital there is now a pharmacy that was opened during the war. Thousands of people keep coming to this Catholic pharmacy for their medicine, and most of them are non-Catholics. This is a sign that a Catholic health institution will be welcome in our capital city.
For the Catholic population of this area, a Catholic hospital and other institutions will serve as a sign of our centuries-long presence here and a guarantee that we will remain. As for the hospital itself, the plans for adapting the building have been approved by the civil authorities and in a few weeks, construction will begin.
Will the success of St. Vincent's persuade the government to release other former Catholic properties in Bosnia to the Church?
Well, the new law [concerning such property disputes] has not been passed by Parliament yet, so the federal government has a good excuse to stall. It all depends on local civil leaders. They are giving back some religious buildings to their constituencies, all the while telling the leaders of other groups that we should wait for the new law.
Are there any medical needs peculiar to the situation in postwar Bosnia on which St. Vincent's staff will focus?
The economic situation of all the hospitals in Sarajevo is very bad, so they have few resources with which to take systematic care of the problems associated with postwar syndrome in our population. St. Vincent's, as a Catholic hospital, will pay special attention to the needs of pregnant women, young mothers, and their children. These services are essential for the Catholic families in the city.
In America, the post-Vietnam War era had terrible effects on a generation of young people. Now, a few years after the Bosnian War, what do you see happening with Bosnia's youth? How can the Church help them?
The main problem of young people in Bosnia is the uncertain political and economic future of the country. When students graduate from high school or university, they cannot find jobs. This is why many of them want to emigrate. As far as Catholic youngsters are concerned, we offer them some modest programs at the parish level to help heal postwar trauma, and I have seen that a sense of belonging to a supportive community helps in that process.
One of the historic challenges of the Church in Bosnia has been the so-called 'Herzegovinian problem,' the Vatican-mandated hand-over of Franciscan parishes in Herzegovina to the pastoral care of diocesan clergy. Has there been any movement or improvement in this long-standing dispute since the war?
First, I object to the expression 'Franciscan parishes.' They are not the property of the Franciscan province of Herzegovina, but ecclesiastical units of organized Catholics under the pastoral care of the diocesan bishop. Having said that, yes, there is some new movement coming from the Franciscan leadership in Rome decisively asking the Franciscans of the Herzegovinian province to implement the decisions of the Holy See in this area — that is, to turn over parishes to diocesan control. And there are signs that the whole situation is quieting down.
What is the most significant problem you see in your diocese at this time?
We face several sets of problems. First, many of our elderly and middleaged priests are exhausted or sickly, and they need medical care. Second, civil and economic security for Catholics remaining in their localities: How can we help them stay there and live in safety? Third, the needs of returned refugees: How can we help them rebuild their destroyed homes, livelihoods, and churches?
What is the best news you have heard lately about the Church in Bosnia?
The ordinations of 12 diocesan deacons to the priesthood — eight for Sarajevo, three for Mostar, and one for Banja Luka dioceses — and 12 Franciscan deacons to the priesthood for the Bosnian province. They will all be ordained June 29, and I ask your readers to pray for them and their families. These young men are a new sign of hope for the Catholic people in Bosnia.
— Gabriel Meyer
The cardinal archbishop of Sarajevo shepherds a multiethnic flock that is rebuilding after the devastating four-yearlong Balkan Conflict. Although the active fighting has ended, remnants of the practice of “ethnic cleansing” still remain. Register senior writer Gabriel Meyer recently interviewed Vinko Cardinal Puljic by phone
----- EXCERPT: Cardinal Puljic on the dangers of life in Bosnia--and the reasons for hope ----- EXTENDED BODY: Vinko Cardinal Puljic ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson ----------- TITLE: U.S. Notes & Quotes DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:St. Christopher Now Inspires Athletes Too
St. Christopher has always been popular. Devotion to the patron saint of travelers, pictured carrying the Christ child across a river, even survived widespread rumors that he never existed. Now, the saint has new devotees: high school athletes.
Newspapers in the United States and Canada reprinted a June 13 article from the Detroit Free Press that explored the phenomenon.
“The new thing is St. Christopher as a sports protector — soccer, hockey, baseball, basketball. We're selling a lot of those medals,” one Catholic bookstore manager is quoted saying. Catholic medallion manufacturers are obliging the new trend — stamping special medals with St. Christopher on one side, and a depiction of each of several sports on the other.
Said the report, “He ran into rough times when the Catholic Church stripped him of his feast day in 1969 and the Vatican announced there was no proof St. Christopher ever existed beyond legend, and even that was pretty flimsy.…”
Nonetheless, “[h]e held onto his sainthood, but just barely.” Father John West, theologian for the Archdiocese of Detroit is quoted saying the devotion to St. Christopher — particularly popular among young hockey players — is fine, “just so it doesn't become a magical charm and people don't think, well, if I wear this medal, I'm going to win.'”
“We don't pray to win. We pray that what we do can be focused, and in the process, we don't give up our morals, values, and faith,” he claimed.
Festival Seeks to Unite Catholic Movements
One man's unflinching pursuit of an apostolate grew into an impressive cultural event uniting different Catholic movements, reported the Philadelphia Inquirer June 13.
Dominic Lettieri, a high school religion teacher, felt moved by the Holy Spirit — particularly as expressed in the Vatican II decree on the means of social communication Inter Mirifica — to begin a radio project in 1976. He began hosting broadcasts centered on Catholic spirituality and doctrine from his garage.
More than 20 years later, he is 65 and retired, but still broadcasts daily on a local AM channel, under the auspices of his nonprofit corporation, IHS (In His Sign). He features Catholic authors, clergy, and other guests in his drive-time call-in show.
The apostolate took on another project several years ago, by accident, according to the report. Lettieri gathered a number of his guests together for a conference at a local hotel to attract benefactors. He told the newspaper he wanted to “bring together the various streams of Catholics who have different devotions, to Mary, to the Eucharist, and charismatics, pro-life people, whatever. This was the first unity conference.” Now, his Catholic Unity Conference and Arts Festival feature music and other arts as well. This year's included:
• An exhibit of 160 pieces of religious art by more than 50 artists, including the 15 “sculptures for peace” by Balkan war veteran Jose Ostojic-Josic that were recently on display at the United Nations.
• Singer Grace Markay will perform her songs devoted to Mary.
• A one-woman drama about St. ThÈrËse of Lisieux, produced by Leonardo Defilippis and acted by Maggie Mahrt, both of Oregon, will follow.
• Other acts include: musicians Lola Falana and Tony Melendez, charismatic renewal leader Robert Valiante, and Eternal Word Television Network hosts Bob and Penny Lord, and Father Andrew Apostoli CFR.
• Mass, eucharistic adoration, and confession will be offered daily.
San Francisco Laws Target Church Again
Last year, San Francisco's domestic partnership ordinance refused to exempt the Church from its requirement that sexual partners who live with city employees and contractors should receive benefits as if they were spouses. This year, a new law in San Francisco would force the Archdiocese of San Francisco and Catholic Charities to open private meetings of Church activities to homosexual activists and other opponents of the Church.
Archbishop William Levada has asked Mayor Willie Brown to veto the bill — and an archdiocesan official added later that it might force the Church to cancel contracts with the city, according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle. The law, which many nonprofits opposed, extends the city's “Sunshine Ordinance” to religious and secular charities.
It would force the Church to hold two public meetings a year, with 30 minutes set aside for public comment. “It is an invasion of the city and the secular into nonprofit religious matters,” said George Wesolek of the archdiocese.
“We can live with public comment on city-related items, but the legislation gives free rein for people to comment on any activity of Catholic Charities or the Church,” he said.
Asked if the charity could cancel its contracts, he said, “It is possible as a last resort.”
The Church sought but failed to receive exemption from the regulation as the bill was being written. Abortion clinics and homes for domestic violence victims did receive waivers, on the claim that their clients need privacy, and that their groups have received “threats of violence.” Wesolek pointed out that Catholic programs — among them services for people with AIDS — also involve private matters.
Jeff Sheehy of the HIV caucus of the Harvey Milk Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual Democratic Club is quoted saying, “If the Church doesn't want to deal with people's concerns about the Church, they shouldn't bid for public contracts.”
He added that he was “not aware” of the violence that targets Catholics.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: World Notes & Quotes DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:A Tridentine Bishop Consecrates a Dissenter
Father Pat Buckley is now Bishop Pat Buckley, and has been excommunicated as a result, said the Irish Times June 15.
The notorious Irish cleric, known for his dissent from Church beliefs and practices, was consecrated by Bishop Michael Cox, known for his disobedience to the Church disciplines of Vatican II.
Done in the proper form, the consecration was “valid but unlawful” under Canon law, said a Church spokesman, according to the article. Bishop Cox said in a statement that he had consecrated Father Buckley a bishop at the priest's home May 19, saying he had “come to know of Bishop Buckley's compassionate work” and was “in full agreement with him on many matters.”
“If I as a traditionalist and he as a liberal can cooperate it will give great example to the Church on accommodating both,” he said.
According to the Church, however, both bishops excommunicated themselves.
The report quoted canon 1382 stating: “Both the bishop, who without a pontifical mandate, consecrates a person a bishop, and the one who receives the consecration from him, incur a latae sententiae excommunication” that can only be lifted by the Holy See.
Bishop Buckley was aware of the consequences of his act, but called canon law “medieval” and an “abuse.” The two bishops plan to begin a Church of their own together, ordaining others, which they expect will improve upon the Catholic Church.
In Europe, More Belief in Satan And More Demand for Exorcism
Information reported in a June 14 New York Times article can help explode two popular myths about the devil: first, the myth that he doesn't exist; and second, the myth that he limits his activity to Hollywood-style bed-shaking possessions.
The article profiled the resident exorcist in Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, whose days are not spent shouting Latin at the writhing bodies of little girls, an image from the popular movie The Exorcist. But he has more business than ever nowadays.
Why? First, because more people recognize the devil's existence than they have in some time. According to the report, one-third of the French now say they do, compared with 25% 10 years ago. Another reason is the prevalence of cults and sects that has followed a decline in authentic spirituality.
Father Claude Nicolas sees more than ten people every day, from all across France. Though each diocese there has its own exorcist, people seem to prefer the one in the famous cathedral lined with gargoyles, he said.
The report noted that those who come are “both men and women, many in their 20s and 30s the supplicants represent Paris's multicultural mix, including African and Caribbean immigrants accustomed to the notion of spiritual possession.”
They are usually treated simply by “saying a quiet prayer, holding someone's hands, or applying a drop of holy oil.”
“There are a lot of things brewing that disturb people,” he is quoted saying.
“There are all sorts of sects and black cults. Some people believe there is a spell on them.
“Of course, the evil spirit often disguises a serious mental problem,” he added.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: World ----------- TITLE: International Criminal Court Would Deal with War Crimes DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:ROME—A global conference meant to establish the world's first permanent war crimes tribunal began in Rome with the endorsement of Pope John Paul II. Delegates from nearly 160 nations and observers from more than 200 non-governmental organizations are taking part in the June 15-July 17 International Criminal Court (ICC) meeting.
On the eve of the gathering, Pope John Paul said he hoped the discussions and the eventual international tribunal would be inspired “by the desire to adequately safeguard fundamental and inalienable human rights.”
Participants are studying a draft statute, which if endorsed, would establish the tribunal in the Hague.
The 175-page proposed statute has taken three years to draft. If the conference approves the text, participating nations must then ratify it.
The Court would try the worst of crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The ICC would differ from the ad-hoc war crimes tribunals set up to investigate ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and genocide in Rwanda in that it would be a permanent court, designed to punish criminals sheltered by their own national justice systems or benefiting from their collapse.
The Vatican's representative at the ICC conference said the tribunal should protect human life and must be aimed at reconciliation, not revenge.
“The verdicts, and most especially the sentences which the Court will impose, must always keep in mind this higher goal of reconciliation,” Archbishop Renato Martino, the Holy See's permanent observer to the United Nations told the assembled delegates.
“For that reason, the Holy See is convinced that the death penalty has no place in this statute. The destruction of life — be it as punishment or as panacea — is inconsistent with the universal norms that serve to justify an International Criminal Court.”
Archbishop Martino also said the tribunal should exist “in order to ensure protection of the dignity of the human person, from the unborn to the elderly.” He added that the statutes and crimes that come under the jurisdiction of the Court must reflect the “equal dignity” shared by all people.
So far, there is general agreement on the three prosecutable “core crimes”: war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Disagreement, however, covers a wide range of issues, from defining exactly what war crimes and crimes against humanity are, to the Court's jurisdiction, to the method by which a case may be brought before the Court, its financing, and the compatibility of the Court with individual nations'
courts.
Several delegations have expressed concern about the role the U.N. Security Council would play.
Many believe the effectiveness of the Court depends on its independence from external governing bodies, such as the U.N. council, which gives five nations (the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China) singular veto-power, and consequently, the power to undermine the ICC's effectiveness.
The United States urges a strong role for the Security Council in the structure of the tribunal, saying the council must be the trigger to set in motion prosecutions by the Court.
This position puts the United States at odds with key allies like Britain, Canada, and most European nations, which want the tribunal to remain independent from the U.N. council.
(Stephen Banyra)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: World ----------- TITLE: Bishops Want More Spiritual Influence in European Policy DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:WARSAW, Poland—Catholic bishops from the European Union (EU) have urged a “deeper dialogue”
with EU institutions to strengthen the continent's cultural and spiritual roots.
However, a Catholic official said EU-Church contacts still lacked an “institutional framework” that could allow religious leaders some influence in policy-making.
Speaking at a mid-June Brussels meeting with EU commission chairman Jacques Santer, the German head of the Commission of Episcopal Conferences of Europe (COMECE), Bishop Josef Homeyer of Hildesheim, said Catholic Church leaders hoped to begin formal annual meetings with EU leaders, as well as joint working groups on specific issues.
He added that the aim would be “closer institutional co-operation,” as well as to encourage a “new quality” in EU attitudes to Christian Churches.
Grouping bishops' conferences from the 15 EU member-
states, COMECE has monitored EU legislation since its foundation in 1980, and has permanent sub-committees on law, bioethics, and social affairs.
Among current initiatives, it is expected to specify Church recommendations for minority rights and conflictresolution mechanisms in an Architecture of Peace declaration this autumn.
Aseparate Manifesto on Europe, linking EU expansion with Christian values, is also to be finalized at a 1999
Rome Synod of Bishops.
Churches were not mentioned in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, under which EU member-states agreed to closer political and economic links. However, a brief statement recognizing the “status enjoyed by Churches and religious associations” was accepted by EU foreign ministers at their June 1997 Amsterdam summit.
Speaking in Warsaw to a conference of Polish Church and government representatives, COMECE's Irish secretary-
general, Father Noel Treanor, said current COMECEEU contacts provided no “input into policy-making.”
The priest said this means there is no guarantee of “ethical and religious voices in the decision-making process.
Hence the desire on the part of Churches in some memberstates for a more formally based relationship with EU institutions.”
Father Treanor said the Catholic Church had no wish to “play the role of politician or legislator,” and would always recognize “the legitimate autonomy of the political order.”
Besides highlighting spiritual and ethical issues relating to the creation of an independent European Central Bank and planned January adoption of the “euro” single currency, COMECE has also vigorously backed the EU's planned enlargement to ex-communist East European states, five of which — Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic — opened formal membership negotiations March 31. (Jonathan Luxmoore)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: World ----------- TITLE: Vatican Notes & Quotes DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:'Miracle' First U.S. Performance of Vatican Choir
At the request of a Jewish conductor, the Vatican Choir performed its first concerts in the United States in Oceanside, California's Mission San Luis Rey June 13 and 15 (see “Mission's Bicentennial Festivities Include Vatican Choir,” June 7-13). Thereon hangs a tale that a June 16 Los Angeles Times report calls a “minor miracle.”
Ten years ago, Gilbert Levine attracted the notice of Pope John Paul II when he became the conductor of the Krakow Philharmonic — the first American to head an Eastern European orchestra. He attended an audience with the Pope in the Vatican, expecting the usual, brief encounter. Something else was in store.
“I was shown room after room after room,” Levine is quoted saying, “and finally I arrived in the private library of the Pope, a room that is incredibly bright, full of light coming in from everywhere. The Pope walks up to me and says, 'I read about you in Newsweek.'”
“He talked to me as if he were honoring the Jewish presence in Poland, as if it were interesting to him for a Jewish conductor to be leading the Krakow orchestra.”
The Jews were treated brutally in Poland during the Holocaust, the report noted.
Continued Levine: “'How is my orchestra treating you?' he asked.
'My orchestra,' he said. After 15 or 20 minutes, he gave me an impish grin and said, 'See you at your concert.'”
Levine later discovered that the Holy Father had arranged a Vatican concert for his 10th anniversary as Pope, featuring Levine. A 1994 concert to commemorate the Holocaust — which was Levine's idea — followed.
“He said he wanted to host the concert, an extraordinary gesture, to commemorate the Shoah — he used the Hebrew word,” Levine, the son of a Holocaust survivor, told the newspaper.
Then, according to the report, “It was several years later that Levine made his memorable visit to Mission San Luis Rey. He was so taken by the mission he decided to try to bring the Vatican choir to mark the building's bicentennial.”
Said Levine, “You don't exactly call up and say you'd like to talk to the Pope.… With just the hint of chutzpah, I asked and was given permission.”
So the choir scheduled its first American concert in California, performing works by Mozart, Palestrina, Haydn, and Faure.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----------- TITLE: PERSPECTIVE DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:Southern Baptists on Marriage and Family
In early June, the Southern Baptist Convention issued a newly revised declaration, the Baptist Faith and Message, that included a special section on marriage and family life. The short phrase stating that a wife should “submit graciously to the servant leadership of her husband” was the touchstone for most of the journalistic reaction. Before giving my own opinion, let's look at the whole paragraph:
“The husband and wife are of equal worth before God. Both bear God's Image but each in differing ways. The marriage relationship models the way God relates to his people. Ahusband is to love his wife as Christ loved the Church. He has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect and to lead his family. Awife is to submit graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the Church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. She, being 'in the image of God' as is her husband and thus equal to him, has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his 'helper' in managing their household and nurturing the next generation.”
Various press accounts described this new article as defining marriage exclusively in heterosexual terms, as redefining women's role in marriage, as a “hardright”
stand on marriage and family life. But a careful reading of the reports shows an effort to be fair, objective, and understanding. There was some dissent and equivocation.
The White House made it clear that President Clinton, a Southern Baptist, often disagrees with his Church and Vice President Gore's staff said that he “obviously doesn't agree with this one.” More regrettably, a Catholic spokesman said that the new article will hurt the Baptists' evangelization efforts because the word “submit” has come to mean “oppressive domination by men.” Of course, there is no evidence whatsoever for such a prediction, nor for the alleged popular understanding of the term. Nor does it matter since the majority of those at the convention voted overwhelmingly in favor of the statement.
Bishop James McHugh
The paragraph quoted above is in fact based on the Letter to the Ephesians attributed to St. Paul. The Letter to the Ephesians is meant to highlight the challenges and demands of faith in Christ and it provides practical principles for living the Christian life. The author of the letter speaks of marriage as a sacrament and he describes the relationship of husband and wife in terms of Christ's relationship with the Church. In the New Jerusalem Bible the pertinent passage of Ephesians says: “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives should be subject to their husbands as to the Lord, since, as Christ is head of the Church and saves the whole body, so is a husband the head of his wife; and as the Church is subject to Christ, so should wives be to their husbands, in everything. Husbands should love their wives, just as Christ loved the Church and sacrificed himself for her” (Ep 5:22-23). (The New American Bible, published by the NCCB, uses the phrase “wives should be submissive to their husbands”)
Southern Baptists follow the Bible closely in formulating their theological statements. Those at the convention saw their new statement as a faithful interpretation of Scripture and as necessary to counterbalance secular attitudes toward marriage and legal efforts to virtually do away with the traditional understanding of marriage as a union of man and woman, committed to each other faithfully and permanently, and mutually committed to bearing and raising children. The convention states that the family is the “fundamental institution” of society. The new amendment intends to give a “clear call to biblical principles on family life.”
The Southern Baptists' statement is in fact a contemporary and much desired statement in regard to the family. Academics, family advocates and an increasing number of politicians realize that we must clearly and strongly assert the value of the family and the responsibilities of society to uphold the family.
Cohabitation, out of wedlock parenting, teenage pregnancy, and the escalating number of divorces have had disastrous effects on our society. The only way to reverse all this is by a reaffirmation of religious beliefs and moral principles.
Recently Pope John Paul II gave the same message.
“Today the family is under pressure from many quarters,” said the Holy Father to a group of American bishops. “At a time when the very definitions of marriage and family are endangered by attempts to enshrine in legislation alternative and distorted notions of these basic human communities, your ministry must include the clear proclamation of the truth of God's original design. The parish should be a 'family of families,' helping in every way possible to nourish the spiritual life of parents and children through prayer, the word of God, the sacraments, and the witness of holiness and charity. Bishops and priests should be eager to help and encourage families in every way, and should give their support to groups and associations which promote family life.”
The Southern Baptists showed perception, fidelity and courage in their new statement. Catholics, with a long tradition of Christian theology on marriage and family life, have been too timid in affirming the Church's teaching and calling our young people to live that teaching. Hopefully we will draw some inspiration and determination from the example of the Southern Baptists Convention.
Bishop McHugh is the ordinary of the Diocese of Camden, N.J. This column is reprinted with the permission of the Catholic Star-Herald
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----------- TITLE: Chasing After Church Honors on Earth DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:The Red Hat by Ralph McInerny
(Ignatius Press,1998, 585 pages, $24.95 hardcover)
How many ways can you tell a story? There is the news report, the interview, you can write straight history, drama, poetry, or fiction. Beyond words, you can tell your story in stone or marble or glass, in music, dance, on canvas, or screen, as is so well attested by the internationally renowned historian Guy Bedouelle OP in his current history of the Church. There are as many ways to tell a story as there are people.
Ralph McInerny has elected to tell his story in the form of a carefully crafted detective thriller, a can'tput-it-down book that keeps you in suspense up to the next to last page — on which page you breathe a sigh of incredulous relief. McInerny has drawn you into his story. You're a part of it; it is part of you. This is true in more than a purely aesthetic sense. The Red Hat is about the Church, America, and about the Church in America, where it gets very close to home.
If Thomas Lannon, archbishop of Washington D.C., and president of the NCCB, is the protagonist in this tale, and Father Frank Bailey the liberal antagonist, their boyhood friend Jim Morrow, retired Notre Dame professor and newly appointed ambassador to the Holy See, functions as a Greek chorus, reflecting McInerny's mindset, indeed imagine the author.
Archbishop Lannan has an insatiable desire for a cardinal's red hat, symbol of the top rung of the ecclesiastical ladder, bar pope. He has quietly and persistently worked the usual channels open to a Church politician, including the Rector of the North American College in Rome and the papal nuncio in Washington, without tangible results, although rumor has it that the aged Pope is drawing up a list of 20 new cardinals, the names to be announced shortly. Then fate plays into the archbishop's hands.
Leslie Norman, recently appointed as Justice to the Supreme Court, a Catholic and self-admitted lesbian, is refused Communion by her pastor in Arlington, Virginia. Furthermore, New York's outspoken cardinal condemns Norman's perverted sexual life from the pulpit of St. Patrick's Cathedral. At this point Archbishop Lannon, as president of the Conference, comes under fierce pressure from conservative Catholics to back his fellow churchmen. But in a homily in St. Matthew's Cathedral he waffles, aiming to save face for the president regarding his recent appointment to the bench, and to project an image of his own compassionate understanding.
He is now in position for acknowledgement from the administration.
With Lannan's diplomatic suggestion that James Morrow, retired Notre Dame professor and author of the current best-seller, The Decline and Fall of the American Catholic Church, might be an appropriate presidential nominee for the lapsed post of American ambassador to the Holy See, the plot gathers momentum and rollicks at roller coaster speed over the terrain of the States and Italy.
The startling prologue of the book now falls into place. In straightforward, classic fashion, the audience has already been made privy to the key facts of a recent murder on the West Coast, or so it thinks. The stage is set for the play of plot and counterplot, muted scandal and political machinations, ideals and human foibles — the whole human condition — against a backdrop of Church/state polarity.
Within the fascinating framework of a mystery story well told, what is McInerny saying? Revealing is the discussion between Jim Morrow, and the Dominican Jordan Boone, who asks, “How do you yourself see these events?” “I am trying to make them visible to others.” “But what do you take them to mean?” “I am a historian, not a theologian.” “Meaning what?” “I am trying to provide the basis for the kind of judgment you're asking me for. Has the direction the Church has taken been for the good or for the bad, or is it a little bit of each? That is not for me to decide, not in this book.”
And so we have a factual picture, gruesome in its accuracy, of the Church in this country over the past four decades and into the Third Millenium. Thrown in for the novelist's good measure are the deaths of two popes, an election, an incipient schism, an antipope, and a scheme for Vatican Council III, to be held in Avignon. Gruesome, yet not without hope, because the picture is realistic and therefore transcends this three-dimensional world. It introduces the supernatural— the air we breathe if we would be fully alive. True to the detective story genre, the Dickensian weave of plots and subplots, replete with exquisitely drawn minor characters, is finally resolved, to the reader's wonder and satisfaction. The study of Archbishop Thomas Lannon may be said to encapsulate the theme of this book. When the story opens he is motivated unabashedly by his lust for the red hat, and determines to use James Morrow, despite their lifelong friendship, as his political trump card in the ecclesiastical game. Yet he vacillates, and goes to Gethsemani Abbey to make a private retreat and to reconsider his values.
On his last day at Gethsemani, he receives word from the nuncio in Washington that his name is on the list of the 20 new cardinals. The die is cast. He flies to Rome. At the Fiumicino airport he is kidnapped and stashed away for three days. In that interval, in a lightless, windowless, soundproof cell, facing the probability of death, the archbishop grows to new stature.
“He smiled in the dark. Among his new certainties was that Thomas Lannan would never be invested as a cardinal. The thought was liberating. How he had wanted that honor. How he had convinced himself that it was an impersonal desire, for his archdiocese, for his country, that he himself did not matter. But it had mattered greatly to him that he should be raised to that penultimate level in the Church. Now he knew it would not happen, and he thanked God that the realization carried no pain. His captors had done him the great service of freeing him once and for all from his ambition. But it was not for their reasons that he renounced the red hat.”
The Church, like this man, is a compact of dark and light, agony and peace. Inevitably, we are reminded of the final words of Matthew's Gospel: “I am with you always, to the close of the age.”
Dominican Sister Mary Thomas Noble writes from Buffalo, New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: MARYTHOMAS NOBLE OP ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----------- TITLE: How Should a Christian Relate to Society? DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:Catholics who have long been fighting manifestations of cultural decay such as abortion and euthanasia are aware of the temptation to identify Catholicism with a political program. At the same time they recognize the opposite temptation of being co-opted by the status quo, so that whatever most people want or believe is deemed OK. The May-June issue of Moody, an evangelical magazine published by the Moody Institute, shows evangelical Christians wrestling with a similar range of problems as they explore how a Christian should relate to society.
The introduction to this collection of related articles states: “We should be salt and light in [the political]
arena,” but Christians can become so focused on furthering political goals that they may unknowingly erect barriers against “those who do not share our political views — those who are likely to reject Jesus if they think that embracing him means having to endorse a particular social agenda.”
Each contributor tackles a separate aspect of how the Christian is to interact with the world. Erwin Lutzer asks “Are we becoming too much like the world we seek to win?” noting that the gradualness of 30 years' worth of moral decline can disguise the enormity of the descent. Soaking in the self-seeking values of our culture, we see “Many divorces happen because of a conviction that one's personal fulfillment should be put above the marriage covenant.
Although marital unhappiness has been a part of many marriages since Eden, we balk, insisting that such suffering is to be shunned at all costs.”
Lutzer cautions politically active evangelicals that “In the minds of the masses, the cross of Christ looks like a sanctified bulletin board; on it is tacked everything from tax breaks for families to term limits for congressmen.”
Other Christians are too eager to conform to the age: “When the homosexual community tells us that the Bible does not condemn their lifestyles, some evangelicals resort to novel interpretations and conclude that we have misread Paul.” Lutzer's guide to the perplexed is Paul's words in his epistle to the Romans (12:1-2): “Present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
John Fischer then looks at the “take back America” rhetoric of the Christian right and reminds his readers that “Boycotts, marches, and representatives in the White House often eclipse the long-term change of a heart that only God can produce.… As Christians, we pray repeatedly that God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven, but how often do we check into a heavenly perspective to determine what that will might be?”
Fischer uses the parable of the salt that loses its savor to argue: “Hardly an assault on society, this is a call to be distinctive.… The best weapon against the sexual perversion in society, for example, is a happy marriage. One need not look far to see the inconsistency of Christian boycotts against perceived immoral influences while the divorce rate among professing Christians keeps right up with the world's.”
Kay Arthur takes on the American heresy that “Popularity Validates a Message,” by reminding us of the overwhelming acceptance enjoyed by the Arian heresy in the fourth century. She uses Jeremiah and St.
Paul as further examples for Christians to show a little courage in rejecting whatever is bad or meretricious, whether it appears on The New York Times bestseller list or the catalog of a religious publishing house.
Crawford Loritts confronts the modern god of self-fulfillment head-on, charging that “Too many of us allow our emotions to stand in the way of obedience.… The issue is surrender.” We must approach important decisions knowing that “The issue is not so much what I want, but what is his will.… Everything that we are is to be surrendered to him. Our goals, dreams, ambitions, possessions — even our happiness and fulfillment needs — must be given to him.” Those who have done this find that “Real joy came as a result of making the decisions to realign [one's] life in submission to God's will.”
Moody's exercise in self-examination shows a surprising number of parallels for American Catholics to meditate upon.
Ellen Wilson Fielding writes from Davidsonville, Maryland.
The Definite Article samples the Register's choice from the nation's top journals.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ELLEN WILSON FIELDING ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:The Little Way
Thank you for your charitable reporting. I'm often discouraged by other publications using cutting remarks toward those holding differing views, “right” or otherwise. It seems the longer we are in the faith, most of us forget that the Lord wooed us to the truth with his tender love. The temptation then is to force others to the truth by verbal rock throwing. Without his kindness, would any of us have assented? Our most recent Church Doctor taught us to be always little. This isn't only her way — it is the way of Jesus.
Richard Ziegman
Denver, Colorado
Mothers & Abortion
I'm a mother of eight young children and enjoy reading the Culture of Life section in the Register.
But there is something that concerns me in the pro-life movement. Over the last 25 years the focus of blame for abortion has shifted from the mother to the doctor, to the organization, like Planned Parenthood, finally to the government and even to society itself. Today, I'd like to ask if we shouldn't refocus on the mother.
In my opinion, God wrote the commandments on the hearts of all men. He instilled a knowledge of right and wrong so basic that every single, thinking human being knows that killing a child in the womb is wrong. Therefore, this inner knowledge or conscience, in every instance of abortion makes the mother culpable. However, the degree of that culpability can be reasonably argued based on such factors as age, knowledge, pressure, full consent, and beliefs. Still, the guilt a mother has in the abortion of her child is clear. She, and she alone, holds the life in her hands, and literally in the sanctuary of her womb. Remember, the abortionist and his clinic would not exist, if it were not for the women willing to walk through his doors.
Talking about the mother's guilt in abortion is uncomfortable for us, and even considered out of bounds by some. However, we pro-lifers, by our silence in the matter of the mother's part, have effectively joined in exonerating her. Legalization of abortion, society's attitude, and our reticence have removed what Cardinal Ratzinger calls the “sense of sin” from abortion. I see talking this way as a kind of “tough love,” and a message women and girls need and deserveto hear.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta spoke often and loudly of abortion as the greatest evil of our times. At the 1994 National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., she asked “If we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell people not to kill one another?” In another speech she said “The mother herself kills her own child through abortion — it's a real killing. By destroying that child she destroys that presence for which that little one has been created.”
Mother Teresa had it right. By giving the mother her proper share of the guilt in this evil of our times, we may be helping her more than all the softened “victim rhetoric” aimed at gaining her allegiance. Perhaps by pointing out her part, we can awaken that sleeping conscience, awaken her motherly instinct to protect her child, cradled deep within the sanctuary of her womb.
Carla Marie Coon
Johnson City, New York
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----------- TITLE: Abortion Advocates' Testimonies Reveal Extreme Colors DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:Have you ever noticed how abortion supporters often say the most outrageous things — and get away with them? I believe it's because once they start down the path of denying obvious truths, such as the humanity of the child, or justifying what contradicts every urge in human nature — killing — it becomes hard if not impossible to maintain a grasp on sincerity or logic. Unfortunately, by sheer dint of repetition, they have begun to dull some listeners' sensibility to the truth.
One regular example deals with the question of giving prospective abortion clients fully informed consent before surgery. Advocates of abortion on demand call informed consent requirements “intimidation laws,” and oppose them (usually unsuccessfully) every chance they get.
Information as intimidation? Come on. If someone suggested that any other surgery performed solely on women — a hysterectomy or mastectomy, for example — avoid informed consent requirements, these same advocates would be nearly speechless with outrage.
Another case of speech that would be deemed out of order in the “any-subject-but-abortion” category is happening in the halls of Congress as you read this. Abortion advocates today are actually supporting the “rights” of “basically anybody” (their words) to drive minor girls across state lines for secret abortions and evade any parental involvement laws enacted in the girls' home state. They have stood by this position even in the most outrageous situation imaginable: rape.
In the state of Pennsylvania, the stepmother of a man convicted of statutory rape (with an eighth grade girl) was charged with “interfering with the custody of a minor” when she accompanied the girl to a New York clinic for abortion. New York has no parental involvement law; Pennsylvania does — and it was not satisfied. The minor girl was given an incomplete abortion, and suffered physical and psychological consequences from the experience. The New York clinic, furthermore, prescribed a painkiller for the girl that was contraindicated by her medical history. Her mother knew this, but the rapist's stepmother did not.
Abortion advocates argued in court on the stepmother's behalf that abortion is an exception to the general principle that parents have authority over the medical treatments given to their minor children. All this led to the recent introduction (in Congress) of a law that would ensure that abortion does not trump parents'rights, the Child Custody Protection Act. This bill would make it a crime to take minor girls across state lines for a concealed abortion, and evade the home state's parental involvement laws. The entire pro-abortion lobby opposes it.
True to form, during the committee hearings on this bill in the House and Senate, abortion advocates continued to make arguments that would be rejected as utterly inappropriate in any other context. A first example is the statement of the director of a group that calls itself the “Religious Coalition for Reproductive Rights.”
Rev. Catherine Ragsdale, an Episcopal priest, recounted with pride how she drove a young girl she had never met before to get an abortion, in order to help conceal it from the girl's parents. She then, with no knowledge of the girl's medical history, proceeded to pay for a prescription recommended by the abortion clinic, also in order to keep the abortion a secret from the parents.
What was most outrageous was yet to come. “Why did she do this?” she was asked. Because in her words, she “took a vow” that commanded it. That vow? To follow the “Gospel of Jesus Christ.” To the credit of the listeners at that committee hearing, there was an audible gasp at this point. Most, however, were not overwhelmed with the implication of ordained clergy gloating (the only word for her demeanor) about deceiving the parents of a minor girl, risking her health, helping extinguish the life of one of God's own, and citing obedience to Jesus Christ in the whole affair.
It would be impossible to match Rev. Ragsdale for outrageous, but California Sen. Dianne Feinstein made a valiant try. Feinstein was only too eager to share with the committee her story of helping a fellow student break the law during her college days. That's right, a U.S. senator happy to talk about helping break the law — but of course the law in question was a law banning certain kinds of abortions, before Roe v. Wade. And so everyone in the hearing room was presumed to be as proud of Feinstein as she was of herself. Were it a question of breaking laws about drug use or civil rights, of course, Feinstein would never have felt free to discuss it. But there are apparently different rules in the abortion debate.
Honest to goodness, the intent of these reflections is not to discourage. It is to remind you to be en garde! Truth does and always will matter. That's the way God has built the human person.
At the end of the day, a majority of the public does reject the abortion lobby's awful positions on informed consent and on minor girls. But the amount of falsity that surrounds us can blunt our sensitivity to truth. And in the abortion debate, we can't afford that weakness.
Helen AlvarÈ is director of planning and information, Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, National Conference of Catholic Bishops.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Healing Racism Through Faith and Truth DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:Second of two parts
This pastoral letter on racism was issued Jan. 6 by the cardinal archbishop of Philadelphia. The Register, prompted by the racially motivated murder in Texas earlier this month, presents the document in its entirety (in two parts).
It is my firm conviction that there is within our Catholic teaching, especially in the social doctrine of the Church, much that can be brought to bear in this effort. There have already been reasoned, impassioned pleas, particularly from the Catholic Black bishops of our nation. One cannot hear their message without being moved by the depth and longing from which they speak.
Our Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, through his teaching and world-wide witness, has personally emphasized the concern for the human person which is the foundational truth of the Church's mission. It has been Pope John Paul's consistent mission to teach that concern for the human person flows from the same mystery that constitutes the life of the Church. He speaks of this concern as the human dimension of the work of redemption. Because of it, there is in the Church a compelling commitment to safeguard the transcendence of the human person and a perpetual watchfulness that life should conform to human dignity.
The Holy Father expresses anew the soaring insight of St. Paul in the Second Letter to the Corinthians:
“He died for all so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who for their sakes died as was raised up. Because of this we no longer look on anyone in terms of mere human judgment… This means that if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old order has passed away; now all is new” (5:15-17).
It serves us well to recall the explicit words of the Holy Father: “Out of regard for Christ and in view of the mystery that constitutes the Church's own life, the Church cannot remain insensible to whatever serves true human welfare” (Redemptor Hominis, 13).
“The human person is the way for the Church … because the human person — every person without any exception whatever — has been redeemed by Christ and because with the human person — with each person without any exception whatever — Christ is in a way united, even when the human person is unaware of it” (Redemptor Hominis, 14).
Pope Paul VI had already given this teaching contemporary expression in the encyclical, On the Development of Peoples, 1967. He spoke of a renewed consciousness of the demands of the Gospel. The theme of this key Church document is the dynamic notion of development, which is the transition from less to more human conditions toward a better condition for the entire human family. Pope Paul expressed an urgency for concerted action.
Concern for the human person has been at the heart of Christian life from the beginning. The intimacy of this concern with our closeness to God derives from the words of the Lord:
“I tell you, unless your holiness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter the kingdom of God … any man who uses abusive language toward his brother shall be answerable to the Sanhedrin, and if he holds him in contempt he risks the fire of Gehenna. If you bring your gift to the altar and there recall that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift at the altar, go first to be reconciled with your brother and then come and offer your gift” (Mt 25:20-25).
Jesus is clear that this is a matter of holiness and a matter of salvation. Our attitudes and actions toward others enter the mystery of our communion with God. Racism is a sin that weakens and diminishes this sacred union.
Jesus, through his life and death, revealed the mystery of God's life in us as love, which is the giving of oneself for others. Our Christian vocation is to share this mystery by living it. By giving of ourselves for others we show this mystery of salvation to all who wish to follow the law of God as written in their hearts. Our faith does not turn us away from others, but toward them. In the opening prayer of Mass for the 30th Sunday of Ordinary Time, we pray, “… give us the love to carry out your command.” We need God's love in order to love others. God's love in us and our self-giving love of others are of one and the same mystery. God is love. The Apostle John expresses this mystery very forcefully, “Anyone who says he loves God and hates his brother is a liar” (1 Jn 4:20).
Faith into Action
Bringing this vision of faith to bear upon the evil of racism is the challenge before us. These truths of faith, beautiful as they are, will not bring power to bear unless they are alive and at work in us. I pray that all may see how intimately our attitudes and actions toward others are united with our desire to be closer to God. I encourage and bless all efforts within our educational, social and health institutions, as well as our parish communities, to bring this message of faith into the hearts and minds of our people. I ask all our priests and deacons to preach with fervor the power of this mystery. I ask, most especially, all parents, in their desire to give what is best to their children, to create an atmosphere in their homes in which the mystery of self-giving love will grow and be nourished. Let the wretched racial words which bring such hurt never be mentioned among us.
No one says this will be easy. Self-giving love never is. Racism has been too long with us and too ingrained in our way of life. It cannot be overcome without a difficult and sustained struggle. Even though some of the most blatant racist actions have lessened and real progress has been made, the evil persists. It operates silently in strategies of selfinterest and in structured patterns of discrimination. Most of all, it is carried forward in the damage it has wrought and the wounds it has inflicted.
Since racism is fundamentally a moral evil against the nature of the human person, its elimination requires ultimately a moral solution. The sin of racism will be eliminated only when every human being acknowledges and respects every other human being as a person made by God to his own image and likeness. At the same time, it would be naive not to recognize the enormity of the historical, social and cultural entrenchment of this moral plague. The moral solution is self-evident.
The achievement of the remedy regrettably may be more complex than the causes of the disease. In spite of past failures, we must never despair. That would be the greatest sin. We must renew our efforts to end the evil of racism so that the children of the new millennium will inherit a legacy of racial unity and fraternal peace.
In order to be effective, the response to racism must engage the committed efforts of a broad range of experts in many disciplines. Religious leaders with one voice must call on their faithful to end the evil of racism in their own lives through prayer, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Public officials, heads of corporations, union officials, the public media as well as other community agencies, and leaders will have to act with courage and much wisdom. I call upon all Catholics, whatever their field of endeavor, to cooperate fully in all sincere and prudent efforts to create and carry out those actions which will contribute to the eradication of racism.
Our own city of Philadelphia, along with other communities in the region, has undergone a drastic decrease in the number of jobs available. The manufacturing industries which accounted for a large percentage of jobs as recently as a few decades ago have moved elsewhere or have ceased to exist. Our neighborhoods have suffered. Much of the racial tension we have experienced has grown out of the dislocation and pressures brought on by the loss of economic security.
Surely our nation has learned that restricting people to confined areas, whether they be reservations or ghettos, is a sentence leading to the worst sort of social pathologies. To continue in this path is both a result and a cause of deeper racism. To propose programs suggesting that jobs will become available in these areas is disingenuous and can only lead to deeper resentment and racial tension. The American experience has always been the freedom to move where opportunity exists. Any national effort to overcome racism must ensure this freedom.
Love in Truth and Deed
In the very last scene of the fourth and last Gospel, Jesus is on the shore near a charcoal fire with fish cooking on it. He invites Peter to come sit by him. Peter was in need of healing because of his betrayal. He had accommodated to gain acceptance. Was he any longer worthy to be loved? Peter, blessedly, received the invitation to come sit down by Jesus.
Our nation accommodated too in a way that was also a betrayal of our founding proposition. As a tragic result, millions of human beings endured existence as being unwanted. Feeling unwanted was the condition imposed by racism on generations of African-Americans and, more recently, on other minority groups coming to this country. This is a wound to the soul which only our compassionate Savior can understand.
There is no greater affirmation than to be told, “I would like you to be with me.” This core affirmation is our healing and the beginning of eternal life: to be told we are wanted; to be affirmed as worthy of love. “Do you love me,” Jesus asked Peter. Three times he asked him this. Since love to be real must be mutual, for Peter to be able to say, “Yes, I love you,” he would have had to come to believe he now was, himself, loved. Once again he was made whole. His faith in being loved made him whole.
MLK's Dream, God's Will
While the experts and professionals seek solutions and programs in the national effort to repel racism, the presence of the risen Lord invites us to the ministry of affirming one another in our human dignity. It is not enough to profess belief in the dignity of the human person. We realize our dignity in the experience of being wanted and loved. In this we can all share.
I ask all Catholics to take this teaching of the Church to heart with all seriousness. I ask that all parishes, schools, and other Catholic agencies and institutions find innovative and visible ways of insuring that African-Americans and people of all races are welcome. I ask that this be done even if it means reaching out in previously untried ways. It is my hope that each of our institutions will have in place some activity, some program, which makes real the Lord's invitation, “Come, sit beside me. I want you to be with me.” I call on Catholics and all people of good will to pray that God will cast out the demon of racism from wherever it exists. I urge that every individual and every organization in our community become united in a renewed serious effort to achieve the eradication of this horrible evil. This is our common task. This was the dream of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. This is the will of -.
----- EXCERPT: Within the Catholic Faith lies a powerful answer to the evil of racism, but unless these truths are made active, racism will remain. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ANTHONY CARDINAL BEVILACQUA ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Humanae Vitae's Truth Will Outlast Contraceptive Mentality DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:Three decades ago next month Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae, touching off a 30-year war in the American Church. It was the defining moment of modern American Catholicism. It put famous theologians into open rebellion against the Holy See. It drove a wedge between the Magisterium and the laity. It made heterodoxy normative in many, if not most, Catholic institutions.
It has been said that the teaching of Humanae Vitae would have been enthusiastically accepted if it did not insist that couples place demands on themselves. If you cut through all the verbiage of Catholic theologians who dissent from the encyclical, you will find a Christianity which seeks above all to confirm the tastes and comforts of the affluent middle class.
But the Church is not in the business of canonizing the whims of a bourgeois society. And the message of Humanae Vitae happens to be profoundly true: Sex is about two things which cannot be separated: babies and total self-giving. When you try to short-circuit sex's procreative end, you also hurt the unitive. The divorce statistics, not to mention abundant anecdotal evidence, attest to the fact that when you tamper with the baby-making potential of marriage's most intimate act you are putting the marriage itself in jeopardy.
A Jesuit who teaches in Calcutta once faxed a letter to a friend of mine which nicely refutes the theological subtleties of dissident theologians: “To explain the fundamental moral difference between Natural Family Planning (NFP) and contraception, I shall outline a discussion I recently had with a Hindu doctor. This doctor began by telling me that he had sincerely prescribed contraceptives and even sterilization for many of his clients to control p o p u l a t i o n .
However, when he followed up on these clients he discovered that an alarming percentage of them subsequently had marital problems, often including adultery. He was wondering how contraceptives lead to these other ills.
“I explained that NFP by its very nature demands communication and cooperation between the spouses. It turns the attention outward toward one's spouse … while contraception by its very nature turns attention inward toward self … a contraceptive act is not an expression of a total self-gift. The spouse who practices contraception does not give herself or himself as (s)he is, but as (s)he has made herself or himself to be.…”
Dr. Ellen Grant, a prominent English physician working in a very different social milieu, became similarly alarmed after enthusiastically prescribing the Pill in the early '60s. Many of her patients developed pathologies, physical and mental, and a number gave the break-up of their marriage as a reason for ceasing to come to her clinic.
Grant came to the conclusion that a woman's sexual chemistry is too deeply connected with her psychic well-being to handle constant doses of steroid hormones. She wrote an interesting little book, The Bitter Pill, which richly documents Chesterton's early intuition that the whole birth control movement smacks of “quack medicine and smelly science.”
But the best book ever written on sexual love and contraception is Love and Responsibility (1960) by the future Pope John Paul II. In that book he makes an airtight case that contraception is a negation of everything that married sexual love is supposed to be about. He developed his arguments further in those extraordinary Wednesday audiences about human love early in his pontificate and in writings like Familiaris Consortio and Evangelium Vitae.
One of the intellectual scandals in the Church today is that prominent dissenters have not seriously addressed John Paul II's writings on sexuality. The Pope's “personalist” arguments against contraception, while owing something to earlier thinkers like Dietrich von Hildebrand, are both new and persuasive. The Pope is trying to help married couples form deeper and richer bonds, while these theologians carry on their endless faculty room debates about ontic and pre-moral evils.
Nor have the dissenters squarely faced the causal link between the Pill and abortion.
When it was pointed out to Father Charles Curran during a debate in front of a college audience that the Pill can act as an abortifacient, he declined to answer the question: You have no serious objections to the Pill; but what about the micro-abortions which the Pill often induces?
It is going to take a while for the American Church to recover from the intellectual corruption which followed in the wake of Humanae Vitae. An obvious example is the redefinition of “conscience” as an agency which manufactures, rather than locates, moral truths.
Heterodox Catholics who talk endlessly about the “primacy of conscience” should look up what the Second Vatican Council actually said on the subject.
There are signs of hope, however. Today the future of the Church is being shaped at two levels: the pontificate of John Paul II, and at the grass roots. And both are preparing a general rebellion against the contraceptive mentality which, as the Pope correctly points out, is at the heart of the culture of death.
George Sim Johnston is a writer based in newyork
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: GEORGE SIM JOHNSTON ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Peace-Keeping Forces in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:The international community believes that a security presence is necessary in Bosnia-Herzegovina until progress is made among the parties representing the various peoples there. Here's a chronological look at the history of those charged with peace-keeping:
1992: UNPROFOR (United Nation Protection Forces), a force made up of soldiers from 42 countries, arrives in Croatia and B&H. The price of their four-year stint: $4.8 billion.
1995, December 20: Transfer of authority from UNPROFOR to IFOR (NATO-led Implementation Force) with a one-year mandate. Of the 55,000 IFOR troops in B&H, 28,000 came from European countries (not including Russia) and 18,000 from the United States.
1996, December20: IFOR replaced with SFOR (Stabilization Force) with mission to discourage renewed hostilities and to stabilize the peace. While SFOR is only half the size of IFOR, it retains the same unity of command, robust rules of engagement, and enforcement authority. SFOR, like its predecessor, is a joint operation led by NATO but with the wide participation of non-NATO countries (Both IFOR and SFOR include countries that are not part of NATO, e.g. Poland, Czech, and Ukraine.) While UNPROFOR was ineffective and had a bad image in Bosnia, the arrival of U.S. forces & the SFOR improved both problems.
1998, July: This summer, DFOR (Detention Forces) are expected to further reduce the number of peace-keeping forces in the country to 30,000.
—Ivan Cigic
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Vinko Cardinal Puljic DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:Personal: Age 53; archbishop of Sarajevo, the largest See in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Background: consecrated a bishop in 1991; upon elevation to cardinal in 1994 at age 48 (the youngest cardinal in the curia at the time); refused to leave Sarajevo during the most devastating months of the threeyear Serbian siege of the city; noted for his tireless efforts to provide for the needs of the suffering of all ethnic communities. Since the war, Cardinal Puljic has continued to be not only a voice raised in defense of the 1,500-year-old Catholic presence in Bosnia, but a prominent champion of the vision of a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural Bosnia-Herzegovina.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: ACatholic Family in Sarajevo DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:The Lasic family have been living in Sarajevo for several generations. Silvester Lasic, 57, studied in Zagreb and worked in the city as an architect until the war began. His wife Marija, 47, was employed by the same company as an architectural technician.
They have two children, Ana Marija, a 26-year-old journalism student, and Ivan, an 18-year-old seminarian in the city of Zadar on the Croatian coast.
The Lasic family never believed that the war would take place. Three members of the family — Silvester, Marija, and Ana Marija — spent three terrifying years, from 1992 to 1995, surrounded by the death of friends, relatives, and neighbors.
When Silvester became sick he stopped working and took charge of providing food and water for the family. Maria lived in fear that a bomb could explode at any moment as her husband searched the streets for food.
Throughout the war, Ana Maria continued her journalism studies. Her boyfriend escaped into Western Europe and for two years no one heard from him. Meanwhile, Ana Maria began singing in the cathedral choir. It was her way of escaping the terrible reality of war. Day after day, the nightmare of living in the shell-shocked city continued. Many of the family's friends and acquaintances left Sarajevo. Tthose who remained changed their attitude toward the family. Neighbors and friends who differed in nationality or religion no longer spoke to the Lasics.
The family was encouraged when they heard in the springtime of 1994 that the Holy Father would pay a visit to the city. Somehow, they felt that the Catholics in Sarajevo had not been abandoned. They waited patiently, but Serb threats forced John Paul II to cancel his visit. The Lasic family, like many other Catholics in Bosnia and Herzegovina, were desperate. There seemed no end in sight to the war. It wasn't until after the Dayton agreement was signed that a new possibility of peace became visible.
When the people heard in January 1997 for the second time that the Pope was planning a visit, they were afraid to hope. They feared another cancellation.
However, on April 12th of that year, the Holy Father visited the city and addressed the Catholics of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Together with 50,000 people from all over the region, the Lasic family went to greet the Pope. His words during the Mass at the Kosevo football stadium in Sarajevo gave them a renewed strength in their fight to continue to live in the city where they were brought up.
Today the Lasics still live in their same building close to a Catholic school in Sarajevo. Their son continues his studies for the priesthood and their daughter continues studying to be a journalist. Still, a great sense of uncertainty remains.
Although the international community is promoting the return of refugees, many are unable to go back to their homes. The reason: those who persecuted them are still in power and their houses remain destroyed. Many older family members are holding out for a better tomorrow, encouraged in part by the Pope's visit. But Catholic Croats can rarely find decent jobs and many of the young among them are considering leaving the country. Some have already purchased one-way tickets for other countries. If you ask them their reason, they say they don't want their children to repeat their mistakes.
—Ivan Cigic
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Voyeurs in TV Land DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:The medium is the message,” proclaimed visionary thinker Marshall Mc-Luhan more than 30 years ago in an attempt to explain television's impact on our lives. It sounds like a brilliant insight even though people have never been able to agree on its exact meaning.
The Truman Show provides its satiric interpretation of that famous maxim with comic observations about commercialism, celebrity worship, and the confusion between reality and what is on the TV screen. Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) is the hero of a 24-hour reality TV show that records everything he does for millions of fans around the world. He was even born on the tube and for 30 years all his family, friends, and co-workers have been actors employed to follow a script. The program uses 5,000 hidden cameras. Only Truman thinks it's real.
Australian-born director Peter Weir (The Last Wave and Witness) and screenwriter Andrew Niccol (Gattaca) let the audience in on the ruse from the very beginning. The movie's first image is of the TV show's creator, an obsessed genius in a beret named Christof (Ed Harris). In a nice ironic touch, he believes himself to have good intentions and claims his manipulations have the star's best interests at heart.
“While the world he inhabits is in some respect counterfeit, there is nothing faked about Truman,” Christof explains. “It's genuine; it's a life.”
Adds the actor who plays Truman's best friend Marlon (Noah Emmerich): “It's merely controlled.”
Everything takes place on Seahaven Island, an idealized suburban tract with the motto: “It's a nice place to live.” In fact, the entire 90-acre community has been built on a giant Hollywood sound stage.
“Seahaven is as the world should be,” Christof boasts. “In my world you have nothing to fear.”
Truman, who has conveniently developed a phobia about crossing water, has never left Seahaven.
The town is filled with friendly, clean-cut inhabitants who look like refugees from a present-day TV commercial or a 1950's sitcom. Everything in it is so perfect that it's surreal. At times the people's cheerful conformity make them seem like androids. Truman's wife, Meryl (Laura Linney), is typical.
“There's no difference between my public and private life,” she proudly declares.
This soulless community is the embodiment of the kind of consumerism that John Paul II and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger have often warned us about. Its inhabitants' deepest desires seem to be to acquire more material goods. Everyone is out for number one. There is no sense of any higher power or cause. Unlike most suburban tracts, Seahaven contains no churches.
Truman, like all human beings, has one saving grace — free will. Even the TV show's creator can't take that away from him. He longs for something different although he is not sure what. His secret dream is to run away to the Fiji Islands where he believes a childhood sweetheart called Sylvia (Natascha McElhone) is now living. She is the only person who ever encouraged him to reject Seahaven.
Truman develops what he thinks is a secret life. He furtively collects fashion magazines and cuts out parts of photos of high-fashion models to try to create a portrait of his long-lost Sylvia. Of course, it's all televised, and his non-conformist quirks make him even more lovable to his fans.
Eventually, Truman figures out the truth about his synthetic life and tries to flee. Ever the consummate showman, Christof makes the attempted escape part of the program, and the show's ratings go through the roof.
The filmmakers make the movie's audience complicit in Christof's schemes by allowing it to identify with Truman's fans. Throughout the movie the same group of ordinary TV viewers comment regularly on the action. These include two elderly sisters, a pair of on-duty cops, and some regulars at a bar. Posters of Truman and other similar merchandising tieins are often visible in the background. Much as these people adore their TV star, they see nothing wrong with Christof's manipulations. They accept without question the fact that for 10,909 shows, Truman didn't know that everything around him was fake.
Like many of today's real-life TV audiences, these fans also believe they have the right to have access to a celebrity's most intimate moments — even when it's against his will. If technology can make it possible, they want to be there; the right to privacy is no longer respected.
These media-driven relationships often become as meaningful to viewers as are the people in their real lives. And, unlike them, a friend on the TV screen makes no demands. He is just there when you need him.
Seahaven's consumerism is also embraced by Truman's fans. Viewers can obtain a catalogue of all the products visible on the program and order them. This is a source of huge profits for the manufacturers and Christof.
The Truman Show dramatizes how television has become an alternate reality for many people and, for some, the primary one. When this happens, its values become ours; in this sense, the medium has become the message.
The filmmakers also leave us with some hope. Truman's desire to escape Seahaven shows he has the innate capacity to distinguish good from evil. However, there is nothing he has encountered in his on-camera life that can help him develop a conscience.
The Truman Show suggests that this is perhaps television's greatest threat, not its sometime exploitation of sex and violence, damaging as they may be. The tube ceaselessly bombards us with a mindless consumerism that encourages self-gratification regardless of a program's particular content, but we're rarely presented with a set of moral values that could combat it.
Arts & Culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
The Truman Show is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association of America.
----- EXCERPT: The Truman Show pokes fun at a culture more interested in television than reality ----- EXTENDED BODY: JOHN PRIZER ----- KEYWORDS: ARTS & CULTURE ----------- TITLE: Life and Death of a Media Mogul DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:What makes a media mogul tick?
The question is important because the answer involves issues that go beyond human interest concerns. We now realize that media is more than just the carrier of information and entertainment. It also plays a key role in determining which events and personalities our culture highlights, and in the process, helps shape our moral values. For these reasons, people want to know when they're being manipulated, by whom, and why.
Citizen Kane is a hard-hitting, multi-layered portrait of the kind of personality who creates a media empire. Several critics' polls, including the American Film Institute survey that aired earlier this month, have voted it the best film of all time. Its reputation rests primarily on Orson Welles' spellbinding performance and its numerous technical innovations and groundbreaking narrative devices. When viewed today, however, its subject matter is what seems most outstanding, carrying even more weight that it did at the time of its first release, 57 years ago.
Writer-director Orson Welles (Touch of Evil) and co-screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz have based their movie loosely on the life of wellknown newspaper tycoon, William Randolph Hearst. Nowadays electronic product has supplanted print as the cutting edge of media power, but this doesn't date the material. The filmmakers understand that the mixture of idealism, power, and desire for fame that drove Hearst illuminates some dirty secrets about our culture and the sorts of people who want to lead it.
The film begins with the death of Charles Foster Kane (Welles) in 1941 as he mouths his final word, “Rosebud.” We then watch a movie within the movie — a typical newsreel obituary of the period that touches on all the key incidents in Kane's life. The lights go up, and the reporters who've been watching it are still unable to understand the human being behind the public persona. The general consensus is that if they can discover what “Rosebud” means, they'll have their answer. An experienced journalist named Thompson (William Alland) is assigned to interview all the major figures in Kane's life.
Kane's life is part Great Gatsby, part Horatio Alger story. Its details are set before the audience like a jigsaw puzzle. The different pieces are the personal reminiscences of those interviewed: his banker-guardian, Walter Thatcher (George Couloris); his business manager, Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane); his second wife, singer Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore); and his best friend from childhood, Jedidiah Leland (Joseph Cotten).
Kane is born poor just after the Civil War. His mother (Agnes Moorehead) is the owner of a small boarding house, who's given what looked like worthless shares in a Colorado mine by a broke boarder. When these holdings unexpectedly begin to mushroom into the country's sixth largest fortune, she decides that Kane should be brought up away from simple people like herself among the rich and well-bred.
This uprooting leaves scars.
“All he ever wanted out of life was love,” observes best friend, Leland. “He just didn't have any to give.”
After being bounced out of several prep schools and colleges, Kane takes over an ailing newspaper and uses it to expose the greed and corruption of the robber barons, but his journalistic impulses go beyond muckraking.
“If the headline is big enough,” he declares, “that makes the news big.”
Kane's tabloid instincts help him build a large chain of national newspapers. He exploits this power to get the United States into the Spanish-American War. Next he runs for governor as a crusading reformer, but the election is lost when his machine-boss opponent (Ray Collins) exposes his extra-marital affair with Susan Alexander. Kane divorces his wife and marries Susan, using his money and newspapers to try and make her an opera star, but she has no talent. He retreats to his huge palace, Xanadu, where he indulges himself in flashy parties and extravagant purchases of art.
Thompson never finds out what “Rosebud” means.
“It must have been something he lost,” Bernstein speculates.
Kane understood how to use media to influence society. He was also as narcissistic as a movie star. He was a creator of mass culture myths who became one himself. As such, his story is a cautionary tale still relevant today.
Next week: Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
Arts & Culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: After more than half a century, Citizen Kane still provides an erie view at the crossroads of media and culture. ----- EXTENDED BODY: JOHN PRIZER ----- KEYWORDS: ARTS & CULTURE ----------- TITLE: A Texas Home for All Things Hummel DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:Visitors are drawn to the Hummel Museum in a small town in Texas by its huge collection of figurines of cherubic children. They leave with a lasting impression of Sister Maria Innocentia, whose genius inspired the popular collectibles.
The Franciscan sister was born as Berta Hummel in 1909 in Germany. Her sketches and watercolors were the basis of the porcelain figurines that achieved mass popularity after World War II when GIs in Europe brought them home in their duffel bags. The Nazis had detested Hummel's art, and Hitler himself denounced the Hummel images for their “hydrocephalic heads.” Sister Hummel suffered terribly during the war and died at the age of 37 in 1946.
The life and works of Sister Hummel are vividly displayed at the Hummel Museum in New Braunfels, a town of 25,000 north of San Antonio. The museum has more than 300 pieces of original Hummel art as well as 1,500 figurines. A photo gallery and a video trace the life of the artist-nun. Exhibits include replicas of Sister Hummel's schoolroom, convent studio, and chapel. Her rosary, prayer bench, and easel are displayed. Also here are the books she read as a child, including Tom Sawyer in German.
The special projects director of the museum is known as “the living Hummel.” As a small child in Germany, Sieglinde Schoen Smith visited Sister Hummel's convent and served as the model for two of her drawings. Smith, who emigrated to the United States in 1963, helped found the museum in 1992. She traced the ownership of 300 original Hummels to the Jacques Nauer family in Switzerland. Nauer's great grandparents founded the publishing company that printed Das Hummel-Buch, which led to the production of the figurines. The Nauers had the Hummel art packed away in crates. Smith convinced the family that a U.S. museum was a better idea. New Braunfels was chosen because it was founded by German immigrants in 1845.
The Hummel art at the museum shows a side of the nun's art never seen by the public: religious subjects. Sister Hummel drew superb Madonnas, angels, and wayside shrines. Deeply devout, she spent many hours daily in prayer and meditation.
About one-quarter of the museum's collection is displayed at a time. The art is rotated every few months. When not displayed, the art is preserved in a darkened room.
The modern, 15,000-square-foot building includes a children's drawing room, a meeting room for M.I. Hummel Club chapters, and a gift shop.
Berta Hummel grew up with six siblings in Massing, Bavaria, a heavily Catholic area. Near her village is Oberammergau, site of the famous Passion Play. Her family lived above the dry goods store owned by her father, Adolph. The family was devout and attended Mass together.
Young Berta was known for her cheerful temperament. Hummel means “bumblebee” in German, and friends said the name fitted her perfectly. She buzzed around with a zest for life. Her childlike innocence, reflected in her art, stayed with her even during the darkest days of World War II. She never lost her faith in God or in the power of goodness.
Berta showed artistic talent early on, and, planning to be an arts teacher, she enrolled at the prestigious Academy of Applied Arts when she was 18. After a short time in Munich she bypassed the typical student accommodations and instead chose a boardinghouse run by nuns. There she met two Franciscan sisters who also were studying at the Academy. Her father told her becoming a nun would ruin her as an artist. Despite his misgivings, she joined the Franciscan convent in Siessen, a community that valued the arts.
While in her 20s Sister Hummel taught art at a Catholic school. She gave her students original picture cards as a reward for good work, delighting them and honing her talent. Her community, impressed with her skill and in need of income, sent her work to a Munich publishing house. Das Hummel-Buch was a bestseller.
The genesis of Hummel figurines was fortuitous. One of the first buyers of Das Hummel-Buch was a craftsman at a porcelain factory in Oeslau that was on the verge of closing. He urged the factory owner Franz Goebel to recreate Sister Hummel's drawings as porcelain figurines. Goebel agreed, and Sister Hummel, sympathetic to the plight of the factory's many workers, gave her approval.
Sister Hummel periodically visited the factory to oversee work on the figurines. One day an elderly worker rose and effusively thanked her for saving the jobs of the workers.
Hummels were adorable, impish, carefree children captured in moments of play and innocence. But the Nazis, believing Germans were a super race, detested representations of German children in patched clothes playing frivolous games. The Nazis eventually banned the distribution of Hummel art in Germany.
During the war the Nazis persecuted religious communities. All Franciscan schools were ordered closed in 1940, and the motherhouse at Siessen was confiscated later that year. Only 40 of the 250 sisters were allowed to stay. War refugees were housed in the convent. Food was scarce. In the winter the convent was brutally cold. In a small sleeping room that doubled as her studio, Sister Hummel continued to draw. Even though the Nazis took half the profits, her work was the main source of income for her community.
In 1944, Sister Hummel contracted tuberculosis. She never fully recovered and died Nov. 6, 1946, as the Angelus was ringing. She was 37. Her grave at the convent in Siessen is marked by a plain white tombstone.
U.S. Franciscan Sister M. Gonsalva Wiegand, in a 1951 biography of Sister Hummel, described her as “an opposing force of purity and consecrated service. She possessed in herself the power to see the bright side of ordinary human affairs and translated it for the enjoyment and stimulation of her fellowmen.”
Says Sieglinde Smith, “Sister Hummel was a very special person. It didn't matter how old you were, you could not forget her love and kindness.”
The Hummel legacy is alive and thriving. Goebel artists still base their work on the charcoal sketches and pastel drawings of the prolific Franciscan artist. An artistic board from the Siessen convent provides input for each new creation. Apercentage of the profits still goes to the convent and the sisters' missions.
But the best little museum in Texas is the place to enjoy the artistry and faith-inspired innocence of Sister Hummel. Her vision of the goodness of children and life itself prevailed through some of the darkest days of humanity.
Jay Copp writes from Chicago
----- EXCERPT: Many know the well-loved figurines, few know the story of the artist-nun who created them under the dark cloud of Nazism ----- EXTENDED BODY: JAYCOPP ----- KEYWORDS: CATHOLIC TRAVELER ----------- TITLE: With Virtual Universities, Non-Traditional Students Go Back to School DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:Dr. Andrew Minto remembers one of his Franciscan University of Steubenville students who stood out from the rest.
“When she was exposed to the material in my biblical foundations course, she ate it up. She read all the suggested reading. She devoured everything she could and wrote an exceptional paper,” he recalled.
One other thing about his stellar student set her apart — Minto never met her. Acloistered nun, she took his course by audiotapes and correspondence.
As an associate professor of Sacred Scripture and theology, Minto has many such students who have registered with Franciscan University's “distance learning” (DL) program to complete their coursework off-site.
“The distance education phenomenon is sweeping secular and religious schools alike,” Minto said. “DL is a big business; it's huge.”
According to Deacon Dominic Cerrato, Franciscan University's DL director, “A large proportion of those enrolled in our programs are non-traditional students: They come from business, industry, monastic tradition; or they are moms, or just people who have a good reason why they can't get away,” he said. “There is almost a paradigm shift in education in America today, and the largest growth is among non-traditional students.”
A Virtual University
When Ex Corde Ecclesiae (From the Heart of the Church), Pope John Paul II's apostolic constitution on Catholic universities, came out, Notre Dame professor Dr. Ralph McInerny observed that many of the larger Catholic universities were not ready to implement it.
“The reaction was skeptical, or even negative, among some [of the educational establishment],” he remembers.
“In a big university, you can have people who are hired and tenured who may not have any concept of how to respond to that encyclical. It occurred to me it would be easier to start a new place and have people who did not have to be convinced, who were of one mind about Ex Corde Ecclesiae,” McInerny explained.
He conceived of bringing these people together on one campus. “It seemed impossible, until I thought of the electronic thing. I decided to get it on TV.”
McInerny approached Mother Angelica of EWTN, who greeted his idea enthusiastically. She allowed him to promote his vision on her cable network, and offered her studios to videotape the first courses for the new venture. In 1995, he launched the International Catholic University (ICU). Since then, many of ICU's classes have been broadcast by EWTN. The first ICU courses were videotaped at EWTN's studios, but now the university hires a photographer to tape instructors on campuses around the country.
“We brought together people from around the country who can implement this document, From the Heart of the Church. It's like a virtual institution. They are very dedicated people, and what we have is very much like [John Henry Cardinal] Newman's idea of a university,” said McInerny.
He and Mother Angelica decided to make the program available “as quickly as possible and cheaply as we could, with as many people as we could.” After he assembled the instructors and determined the curriculum, McInerny said he thought about delivery.
“I wanted us to use methods as sophisticated as possible, but I didn't want people to have to be some kind of high-tech nerds to do this. I wanted it to be as simple as people using tapes in cars.”
For that reason, although the ICU began with videotaped lectures, it now offers many of the same courses on audiotape. At the genesis of the project, McInerny said he “wasted” a lot of time worrying about accreditation, even though only about 20% of ICU's students are seeking credit. When accreditation did come, it came quickly. Working with Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell, Conn., ICU applied for accreditation in that state. In March, ICU learned that all their courses are accredited.
ICU now has two master's degree tracks, one in philosophy and the other in theology.
Seeking Understanding
In 1994, Franciscan University began a formal study of methodology and available technology with the intent of starting a distance learning program.
“We discovered there was a clear niche we could fit into,” DL director Cerrato said.
Noting that Franciscan University has a twofold focus — fidelity to the Magisterium and commitment to renewal of the Church — he said the niche was clearly among people who wanted to learn more about Church teaching for practical pastoral application.
“If Catholicism means whatever you want it to mean, then it means nothing at all,” the deacon said. “At Steubenville, we don't see any dichotomy between theological training and pastoral application. We say that theology is 'faith seeking understanding.' It provides a commonsense infrastructure that Catholics need in all walks of life, especially if they are trying to convey their faith to others. It helps them do so in a way that conforms to the revelation of Christ and the teaching of the Church.”
“The benefit of our experience teaching theology to a wide range of students was transferred to our DL program,” Cerrato said. “Our DLaudiotapes are digitally edited versions of actual lectures. So what we are doing with DL is mirroring the program that already exists on a national and international level.”
His department decided to go with audio as the primary mode of delivery because “the non-traditional students we are dealing with tend to be older. They did not grow up on SuperNintendo and Sega,” Cerrato said.
Study guides for distance learning must take into account that students have fewer cues when they are listening to audiotapes.
“We want students to take notes, but certain specialized terminology or foreign words [like Greek or Latin] have to be dealt with in enhanced study guides,” he explained. “For instance, if a teacher talks about “circumlocution of the Tetragrammaton” on a tape, it tends to throw a DL student. They might need to look in a study guide to discover this refers to the Jewish avoidance of saying God's name. We spend a lot of time on our study guides.” To help minimize differences between student experiences and to aid in their assessment, Franciscan University has an on-site requirement for DL students. To obtain a degree by distance learning, the student must take the equivalent of two courses on campus, said Ceratto. For example, a DL student can take two three-week segments on campus over two summers.
Professor Minto notes that of three aspects to be considered in a DL program, two are no different from traditional learning.
“Delivery is much the same, since the DL tapes are taken from live lectures. Assessment — tests and papers — are also similar, but the element of interaction with the professor and other students in the course is not so easily duplicated,” he said. “We are going slowly with that one.”
For several courses, they have experimentally initiated Internet “chat rooms” to provide a means of interaction. Yet Minto believes the most important element in the success of DL has nothing to do with technology or methodology — but with the student.
“A distance learner is more like an entrepreneur in learning. Students must take charge of their own education, while the teacher is there to help the student achieve their own goals.” Minto continued, “Distance learning doesn't work for everybody. Some can't complete their assignments on time, or exhaust the time period for the whole course and don't complete it, some aren't equipped to compete academically at the level expected of them. But those who are equipped actually succeed as educational entrepreneurs. And our programs are really tailored to those students, who make up a lion's share of our DL program.”
More information on ICU and Franciscan University's distance learning programs can be found on the Internet at www.Catholicity.com.
Kate Ernsting writes from Ann Arbor, Michigan.
----- EXCERPT: If you can't make it to campus, distance learning is the next best thing ----- EXTENDED BODY: KATE ERNSTING ----- KEYWORDS: Education ----------- TITLE: Jane Roe's Long Road to the Truth DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:ProLife ProFile
Truth and sin have very little in common, but there is one characteristic they both seem to share: Start flirting with either one of them, and they draw you all the way in.
Norma McCorvey's life and conversion, so powerfully summarized in her recent book Won by Love, illustrate this fact dramatically. The deceit of the abortion industry drew her in and brought her to the depths of anguish, misery, and confusion. That deceit began when she was told by attorneys that they could help her. Instead, she never received the help she needed, was never asked to come to court, and was simply used to advance a socalled “pro-choice” agenda. It was hardly a road of glory and joy. Anyone who reads Won by Love, or Norma's first book, I am Roe, will discover that Norma is someone acquainted with sorrow, grief, and plenty of suffering. Not knowing which road to take, and feeling worthless, she took the low road — the path to drinking, drugs, and lesbianism.
She was used for a time as an icon by those in the “pro-choice” movement, but they were plagued by her straightforwardness. On one occasion, when she was being shown a new abortion device, she shocked the clinic administrator by bluntly asking, “Is that what you guys use to suck the children out of their mothers' wombs?”
Then she began flirting with the truth, a little here and a little there. As St. Peter was brought to repentance at the moment he heard the cock crow, Norma heard several cocks crow. In many instances, it was a normal human event that became a deep interior summons to life. Rev. Flip Benham, the founder of Operation Rescue, apologized to her one day for some unpleasant things he had said on a previous occasion. His admission to her that he, too, was a sinner, opened her eyes to the fact that pro-lifers were not selfrighteous.
On another occasion, she was moved by the hug of Emily, the little girl whose invitations to Norma to come to Church finally prevailed upon her. (This is significant. Many in the abortion industry fail to recognize the value of the unborn child's life because they fail to recognize the value of their own lives.) The hug and invitations of this little girl gave Norma a message that many others in her life had denied: You are lovable; you are good; your life is valuable.
Conversion is not an easy road. Norma began realizing many things she didn't like, such as how cold and callous the abortion industry really is, being more concerned for itself than the good of the woman. She even began persuading women not to have the abortions for which they were calling to make an appointment. Little by little, truth drew her in and proved itself more attractive than the abortion industry. Her rediscovery of the value of her own life helped her rediscover the value of the unborn.
Norma was not sure who God was, but what enabled her to continue to walk the road of conversion was that she was not afraid to ask. She would call Pastor Flip Benham or fax him questions. A particular Bible passage that troubled her was the death of Uzziah the Hittite (cf. 2 Sm 11). Through many re-readings of the tale, and long hours of prayerful meditation, she realized it was the result of an act of disobedience of God's law. Through this passage of Scripture, Norma began to realize that abortion, too, was an act of disobedience to God's law.
She finally accepted Christ in faith, was baptized, and became a believer. At the beginning, however, she still thought some early abortion would be acceptable. She was open to truth, however, and truth did not let her go. It drew her further, and she became convinced that abortion is wrong at any stage, no matter what the reason. She even wears a T-shirt at pro-life gatherings that reads: “100% Pro-life, Without Exception, Without Compromise, Without Apology.”
The truth has continued to draw Norma further. In my contacts with her in recent years, I noticed her interest in Catholicism. Shortly after her baptism, she asked me to bless her home. Not being used to the custom of Holy Water, she and her friend inadvertently drank the entire spare supply I left with them. Later, troubled that she had done something wrong — something that would incur God's anger — she asked of potential consequences. She was relieved to learn that she wouldn't be punished — in fact that it would likely do some good!
She attended with interest a Mass I celebrated in Dallas, and the following summer came with me to EWTN to tape a television interview.
During that interview, she asked me to bless the cross she wears, a cross that was made out of what used to be a “pro-choice” bracelet.
Some months ago, Norma asked me to teach her to say the rosary. As we continued to talk about her faith, I realized she felt very strongly the call to fully embrace Catholicism. I simply answered her questions, which she raised in her own time and her own way. Then one day she sent me an e-mail message in which she told me “The Big Boss” told her she was to join the Church.
I look forward to welcoming Norma here to Rome to complete her initiation. The warm embrace that the Church extends to her is a sign of hope to everyone, but I especially see it as a sign of hope to our brothers and sisters who are still enmeshed in the abortion industry. We vigorously oppose what they do, but we do not hate them; we embrace them, too. The door of the Church is open. Truth continues to lead her children forward.
Father Frank Pavone is the international director of Priests for Life and a member of the Pontifical Council for the Family. He wrote this article in collaboration with Norma McCorvey.
----- EXCERPT: How a 'pro-choice' icon came to value all life — including her own ----- EXTENDED BODY: FATHER FRANK PAVONE ----- KEYWORDS: CULTURE OF LIFE ----------- TITLE: Pro-Lifers Split on Meaning of New Jersey Study DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J.—A Rutgers University study released June 8 has confirmed the fears of some pro-lifers: denying additional money to mothers who give birth while collecting welfare apparently increases the abortion rate.
The $1 million study, commissioned by New Jersey Department of Human Services and funded by the state and federal governments, reveals that the “family cap” provision in New Jersey's 1992 welfare reform law results in about 240 additional abortions per year. Under New Jersey's law, a mother who gives birth to a child while on welfare is denied the additional $64 a month she would have received from the state. New Jersey was the first state to enact a “family cap” provision in its welfare reform law. State and federal lawmakers, as well as social scientists, have anxiously awaited the results of the Rutgers study.
U.S. Rep. Christopher Smith (R-N.J.) said the study proves the reform measure encourages women to obtain abortions. He introduced a bill in the House of Representatives June 16 that would ban family caps.
Smith, who argued unsuccessfully against New Jersey's cap in 1992, and failed previously to enact a ban in Congress, said his latest effort is a direct response to the Rutgers report. At a rate of 240 per year since 1993, Smith said, “We're talking 1,000 abortions — directly attributable to welfare moms being pushed to having that abortion.”
The only possible outcomes of a family cap, Smith said, are more abortions or poorer children. Both scenarios, he said, are “profoundly unacceptable.”
The study's results drew swift response from pro-life organizations. For many years, pro-life leaders have debated the impact of “family cap” provisions on women's' pregnancy decisions. On a national level, those organizations that take more of a “single-issue” approach to abortion — such as the National Right to Life Committee and American Life League — have opposed “family cap” provisions. Those organizations with a broader “pro-family” legislative approach — such as Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, and Christian Coalition — have supported the provisions.
According to the National Conference of State Legislators, 21 other states have enacted similar “family cap” provisions in welfare reform laws.
Marie Tasy, director of public legislative affairs for New Jersey Right to Life, told the Register that the results of the Rutgers study are cause for concern.
“If the study is accurate, it's very troubling and our concerns have been validated,” said Tasy. “Our organization has been concerned from the beginning of the law's enactment. This does not bode well for New Jersey.”
Tasy said the issue is especially troubling for New Jersey because while the state cuts off funds from the children mothers give birth to while on welfare, it offers free abortions under the state's Medicaid program. Those free abortions for poor women are mandated under a 1982 state Supreme Court decision that ordered the state to pay for “medically necessary” abortions. The liberal interpretation of “medically necessary,” Tasy said, has led to public funding of abortion on demand for poor women. That fact made New Jersey Right to Life's position on the “family cap” clearer.
The fact that the state will fund an abortion for a woman on welfare, but won't provide the additional funds if the woman chooses to carry her child to term is a “draconian, coercive measure that leaves women no choice,” said Tasy. Because New Jersey Right to Life is a single-issue pro-life organization that takes no official position on welfare reform measures as a whole, Tasy said the group felt obligated to oppose the “family cap” provision.
“When government policies encourage or coerce abortions, it's our duty to speak out against those government policies,” she said.
The Rutgers study revealed that while the abortion rate in New Jersey and the nation declined between 1991
and 1995, the abortion rate among New Jersey's welfare recipients rose during the same time period. In 1996, the gap expanded even further with 29 abortions per 1,000 women on welfare compared with three per 1,000 women in the general population.
The impact seems to have hit black women especially hard. The report says that while the abortion rate for white and Hispanic women increased only slightly from 1993 to 1996, abortions among black women exceeded births during the same time period.
The study was immediately attacked by state officials. Spokespersons for the Department of Human Services challenged the way the authors arrived at the numbers and demanded a rewrite. Republican Gov. Christine Todd-Whitman, an ardent supporter of abortion rights, said that more research must be done on the impact of the “family cap” provision before any changes in public policy are considered.
“We're going to have a real discussion if it turns out there is a direct correlation [between the family cap and abortion] and we see troubling numbers,” Whitman told The Bergen Record. “But we're just not there yet.”
Despite the Rutgers study, some pro-life organizations remain steadfast in their support of the “family cap” provision. Arne Owens, director of communications for the Christian Coalition, said during an interview with the Register that he believed the increased abortion rate among New Jersey welfare recipients isn't necessarily due to welfare reform policies, but a “callous disregard for human life.”
Calling the Rutgers study “interesting data,” Owens said that despite its results the Christian Coalition remains strong supporters of welfare reform efforts.
“If that's what people are doing [having abortions], that's very tragic,” said Owens. “But we don't believe that points to problems with the family cap. That points to problems with the moral conditions of many parts of American society.”
He said it can't be determined yet if state legislatures will be impacted by the study.
“It's too early to say if it will have an impact on legislation, but it will impact the debate,” Owens said. “Proponents of welfare measures will use this to attempt to advance their own perspective, but their approach has an abysmal record.”
He said claims by some pro-life leaders that the family cap's coercive elements will lead to increased governmental involvement in childbearing are “absurd and completely false.”
“What this is saying is that we won't provide an economic reward if they have more children,” said Owens. “Whether they have more is up to them.”
New Jersey Right to Life's Tasy said the results of the Rutgers study should not only make state legislators reconsider “family cap” provisions, but also spark renewed efforts to ban taxpayer funding of abortions.
“States are saying on one hand to women, 'We will not give you support. However we will pay for an abortion.' That's very discriminatory,” she said.
Greg Chesmore writes from Bloomington, Indiana.
----- EXCERPT: Abortion on rise for welfare recipients since 'family cap' law of '92 ----- EXTENDED BODY: GREG CHESMORE ----- KEYWORDS: Culture & Life ----------- TITLE: In Washington, Homosexuality Debate Takes CenterStage DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON—The topic of homosexuality dominated Washington debate in mid-June as the political right belatedly reacted to President Bill Clinton's new affirmative action fiat. With little media fanfare and even less grassroots publicity, Clinton signed an executive order May 28 mandating that all federal employers consider homosexuality to be a protected-minority status regarding discrimination policy and affirmative action hiring procedures. The new policy effectively dictates quotas for homosexuals in the workplace.
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) countered the president's action by flatly opining that homosexuality is a sin. In response to a question during the Armstrong Williams Show on the America's Voice cable television network, Lott said that “you should try to show them [homosexuals] a way to deal with that problem [homosexuality], just like alcohol or sex addiction or kleptomania.”
Williams is a well-known Christian talk show host in the black community who extols a return to the traditional family and Christian values as the solution to modern societal problems.
Responding to the criticism, White House Press Secretary Michael McCurry June 16 lambasted Lott as “backward,” claiming that “contrary to statements of the medical community and those who are expert, the majority leader has taken an incorrect view that homosexuality is a disease.”
Counter to McCurry's assertions, however, a large segment of the medical and scientific community does indeed hold that homosexuality is a curable condition.
Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, executive director of the National Association of Research and Therapy on Homosexuality (NARTH), is a prominent California psychologist who specializes in reversing the homosexual mentality. He told the Register that “homosexuality is a developmental disorder based on self-defeating behavior. It is treatable. The latest science corroborates Lott's statements.”
Courage, a support group for Catholics struggling with homosexual inclinations, encourages help for those with an attraction to homosexual acts.
According to the group's founder, Father John Harvey, “If someone is attracted to drugs or alcohol, we do not accept that attraction as a given, or indicate that it is beyond their power to reject. The truth is that we are dealing with an objective disorder within the person.”
The uproar regarding Lott's comments on homosexuality has stirred a debate about the influence of religion in politics and public life. House Majority Leader Richard Armey (R-Texas), jumped to defend the Mississippi senator's views on sin by noting that “the Bible is very clear on this.”
Sen. John Ashcroft (R-Mo.) told the Register June 18 that he agreed with Lott's views but added that “it's not a major issue.”
Referring to a prominent homosexual-GOP interest group, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said carefully that “The Log Cabin Republicans should be part of our party. The Christian Right should be part of our party.”
Two weeks ago, the Texas Republican party refused to allow the Log Cabin Republicans to have a booth at the state convention in Fort Worth.
Arguments on both sides of the homosexual issue have tried to justify their stands through appeals to justice and religion. Gary Bauer, president of the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., said that “homosexuality is considered unacceptable behavior by every major religion in the world and by most Americans.”
In response to the debate, The Washington Times ran a story June 17 headlining that “With few exceptions, Christian Churches condemn the Practice of Homosexuality.” A pullquote in the article noted that “Catholic doctrine forbids all sexual activity outside of heterosexual marriage.”
Despite the clarity of Catholic doctrine and the long history of traditional teaching on sexual morality, some homosexual activists have wielded Always Our Children, the October 1997 pastoral letter issued by a committee of U.S. bishops, on the topic of homosexual identity and practice. But in April, Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Neb., wrote a widely published clarification denouncing the document because it “is founded on bad advice, mistaken theology, erroneous science, and skewed sociology.” The bishop noted that the majority of American bishops had neither input into the document's text nor control over its release.
In an ongoing controversy, homosexual activists are protesting Republican refusal to approve San Francisco socialite James Hormel as U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg. The nominee, millionaire heir of the Hormel meat-packing fortune and commonly described as “the nation's most aggressive financier of the 'gay movement,'” funded a documentary legitimizing homosexuality to school kids, matches any donation up to $1,000 to undermine the military's ban on open homosexuals, and donated $500,000 dollars to establish a homosexual center at the San Francisco public library, which, among other things, catalogs child pornography.
Lott has vowed that Clinton's nomination of Hormel will never get to the Senate floor for a vote. For months, the nomination was blocked by Sens. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Tim Hutchinson (R-Ariz.), and Bob Smith (R-N.H.). Hormel has supported sacrilegious attacks on the Catholic Church such as homosexual protests during Mass (notably at the consecration) and homosexuals dressing as nuns for marches. Hutchinson said Hormel will never be confirmed “because of the nominee's promotion of the 'gayrights' agenda and lifestyle and his refusal to repudiate those who mock the Church.”
Politics is an art of finessing policy positions and avoiding controversy. The majority of Americans are opposed to the homosexual lifestyle and activity but politicians usually shun the thorny issue. In Washington, the silence has surprisingly been broken.
Brett Decker writes from Washington.
----- EXCERPT: Senate Majority Leader Lott disputes Clinton's granting of 'protected-minority'status ----- EXTENDED BODY: BRETT DECKER ----- KEYWORDS: Culture & Life TITLE: The Gospel Of Life DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:The Catechism of the Catholic Church on homosexuality:
“Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity (cf. Gn 19:1-29; Rm 1:24-27; 1 Co 6:10; 1 Tm 1:10), tradition has always declared that 'homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered' (CDF, Persona Humana 8). They are contrary to natural law. They close the genital act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved” (2357).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture & Life ----------- TITLE: On Walk Across America, Pro-Lifers Experience Scorn and Peace DATE: 06/28/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 28-July 4, 1998 ----- BODY:In the May 10-16 issue, the Register reported on a cross-country pro-life walk sponsored by a student-run nonprofit organization called Crossroads (“Coast-to-Coast Walk Attracts Committed Young Pro-Lifers”). This is the second installment of a journal series by Joseph Flipper, a participant in the three-month journey.
Since May 23, Crossroads has logged 782 miles, from San Francisco to Salt Lake City, Utah. Our feet have carried us over the Sierra-Nevada mountain range and across the Nevada desert towards our final destination, Washington D.C. We have traveled along Highway 50, meeting many people on the way. Most folks bless our journey, some are opposed to anyone who is pro-life, and many are indifferent. While on the road, we have come into contact with a microcosm of humanity.
One night our support vehicle, which is used to transport the walkers to the walk site, ran out of gas. As a result the walkers, after hiking through the night, were stranded at 3:00 a.m. in the cold Nevada desert about 30 miles from our campsite. They attempted for an hour to flag down someone who could help. Finally two women decided to give them a ride into town.
As Jimmy Nolan, our walk leader, explained the prolife mission of Crossroads, it became apparent that neither of them thought highly of our efforts. One woman was pro-abortion, and the other called herself a “recovering Catholic” — that is, “recovering” from Catholicism.
Jimmy patiently endured their taunts while trying to evangelize both. Justin Schneir, a senior at Franciscan University, gave them each a handmade necklace, which softened their dispositions towards Crossroads. We continue to pray for them every day, as well as everyone we meet along the way.
Other walkers, from the areas we traverse, have joined us for parts of our journey; some spent a few days with us, some a few hours.
We enjoyed the company of one young man named Patrick, a 16-year-old Seventh Day Adventist. He was bold in sharing his faith and charitable in his actions, giving us gifts even though he seemed to have very little. Over several days he ate and prayed with us, and took us to swim in a nearby hot spring.
We also met Luke, a college student who was traveling the country on his bicycle. After inviting him to eat dinner with us, we asked him to join us and he ended up spending a few days in our company. Evidently we were a welcome presence for him; he was lonely from many days of traveling without anyone to talk to. Nobody on Crossroads ever found out what he thought of our faith or our pro-life activities, but he did say that he wished to see us again, perhaps at the end of our walk.
While in Salt Lake City we had the opportunity to pray and sidewalk counsel outside abortion clinics. We discovered, by the encouragement of passers-by, that many residents there desire the renewal of the culture of life. One woman even exclaimed, “I cannot believe that there is an abortion clinic in my neighborhood! I just didn't know.”
One morning, while praying before the doors of an abortion mill, we were continually orally battered by men who were working nearby. Mary Elizabeth Evans and Rich Scanlon spoke with women who were walking past. One woman, who was planning to abort her child — though not that morning — spoke with Rich for about 15 minutes. He empathetically but firmly told her about the realities of abortion and its alternatives, encouraging her to consider adoption.
His counseling was interrupted by the police, who came in response to a call made by the men who were taunting us. At that point, Mary Elizabeth stepped in, giving the woman a Miraculous Medal and a pamphlet on abortion. The woman eventually went into the clinic. Though she didn't immediately turn away, we continue to pray that God may use the actions of Rich and Mary Elizabeth to save the life of the child and the soul of the mother.
Crossroads has also put us before others who are in great need of hope: the poor and the homeless. While spending half a day at the Cathedral of the Madeleine in downtown Salt Lake City, we were given the opportunity to witness to many of the homeless who circulate the area looking for money or food. We ate lunch with some and talked with others who lived off the street, many of whom were Catholic. One woman I met seemed filled with hope when I gave her my rosary.
We have realized that our primary work in establishing and promoting the culture of life is to be God's instruments for changing people's hearts. The most important work that we have done so far has been spiritual: praying for the conversion of souls. We have also seen that the culture of life is extended by more than pro-life activities, but also through the faithful raising of a family, through religious devotion, and by being willing to speak the truth. May God grant us all the grace to be active participants in the culture of life.
Our new RV arrived June 19. There are large letters painted on the sides of the vehicle that read, “Crossroads: Coast to Capital Walk for Life.” If you see us along the way to Washington D.C., feel free to stop us and say hello.
March for Life founder-coordinator Nellie Gray, former presidential candidate Alan Keyes, and Priests for Life director Father Frank Pavone will be featured speaks at Crossroads's mid-August closing rally in Washington D.C. Father Pavone will be celebrating a special Mass for us at the end of our trip as well. For more information, contact our headquarters at 1-800-277-9763; or write to Crossroads, Box 771, Franciscan University, Steubenville, OH 43952.
Joseph Flipper, a native of Idaho, is a student at Franciscan University of Steubenville.
----- EXCERPT: Nearly 800 miles into journey, young pilgrims find hope for culture of life ----- EXTENDED BODY: JOSEPH FLIPPER ----- KEYWORDS: Culture & Life -------- TITLE: Population Control Advocates' Sterilization Program Exposed DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:Register Correspondent
WASHINGTON-The 15-year saga of free distribution of a horrific chemical sterilization pellet, quinacrine, has finally received broad exposure. An extensive Wall Street Journal article June 18 detailed the work of two North Carolina men who have been responsible for 100,000 sterilizations in the Third World. At the heart of this effort is a strong anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic mentality.
The article, as well as work done by the Population Research Institute of Falls Church, Va., examines the efforts of Stephen Mumford and Elton Kessel to provide population control advocates in 18 countries with the means to painfully damage women's fallopian tubes.
The pellets, placed at the top of the uterus with a modified intrauterine device, release an acid that produces burns. The resulting scar tissue blocks the fallopian tubes. Although two applications are recommended for complete sterilization, frequently only one is given.
One application presents a problem: the job is often incomplete and a life-threatening ectopic (tubal) pregnancy can result.
According to Kateryna Fedoryka of the Population Research Institute, “There is no official body anywhere in the world which recognizes quinacrine as an acceptable contraceptive.”
Even most family planning groups that normally support sterilizations oppose the use of this chemical. Perhaps this near universal condemnation is not surprising given that the pellets are inserted without the use of anesthesia, the side effects are significant, and the link between quinacrine and cancer is unclear. Equally appalling, women are often coerced or tricked into undergoing the procedure.
Quinacrine, an effective anti-malaria drug, has been used for sterilization since the 1960s. Published reports of side effects have been available since at least 1983. Use of the chemical for sterilization is now banned in many countries, including the United States. The Food and Drug Administration has never approved it as a sterilizing tool and, in fact, directed a Colombian quinacrine provider to remove its U.S.-targeted advertising from the World Wide Web in 1997.
Mumford, quinacrine's biggest champion, runs the Center for Research on Population and Security, a small nonprofit near Chapel Hill, N.C. Kessel, an elderly physician, has been Mumford's partner since the 1980s. They argue that quinacrine helps poor women who are at risk for death through childbirth.
But Dr. Brian Clowes, director of Human Life International's Pro-life Pro- Family Institute said, “Together they essentially travel around the world with quinacrine in a suitcase and without supervision, using Third World women as guinea pigs.”
The pellets they distribute have been produced by a Swiss pharmaceutical firm, Sipharm Sesseln AG, since 1991. As a result of recent negative publicity, the company announced June 25 that it would stop manufacturing quinacrine. Mumford and Kessel said a new provider will be found and their work will not be hampered.
The drug is basically given free of charge to population planners in Asia, Latin America, and in countries of the Near East. Nearly half of all sterilizations by means of the pellets have occurred in Vietnam, about 25% in India, and 14% in Pakistan. The remaining sterilizations have taken place in 15 other countries.
Not surprisingly, the ethical and moral implications of this program have offended many people of faith. Franciscan Father Germain Kopaczynski, director of education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Boston, told the Register, “The ugly American, unfortunately, is alive and well. Cultural imperialism is seen very much in the attitude of these men in the name of helping the poor.”
“Here is Robin Hood in reverse: serving the rich by robbing the poor, robbing them of their fertility, self-respect, and dignity. Children are often the most valuable resource of the poor. It's demeaning and extremely disheartening to see this taking place by anybody, but especially by citizens of the United States of America,” he added.
Gary Bauer, president of the Family Research Council, said of this worldwide distribution program: “It's disgusting because it's inhuman and it violates every concept of human rights. What strikes me as bizarre is that it's justified in the name of national security.”
Indeed, Mumford appears to be motivated by a desire to control future foreign infiltration across U.S. borders. He was quoted in The Wall Street Journal as saying, “This [population] explosion in human numbers, which after 2050 will come entirely from immigrants and the offspring of immigrants, will dominate our lives. There will be chaos and anarchy.”
Such an outlook has apparently endeared him to some anti-immigration advocates. He receives support, for example, from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an association based in Washington, D.C. FAIR promotes legislation that would severely restrict immigration. Recently the organization aggressively lobbied Congress to remove a provision of the Freedom from Religious Persecution Act that would ease restrictions on granting refugee or asylum status.
Dan Stein, FAIR's executive director, lauded a study released in January 1998 that ranked U.S. metropolitan areas according to the number of foreign-born residents — the greater the percentage of foreign born, the less desirable the area.
Stein said, “FAIR has looked at the new index of financial security [as reported in the study] and found that a reliable shortcut to determine the best and worst locations would have been to simply look for large concentrations of immigrants.”
For Mumford, the biggest stumbling block to world population control and U.S. national security is the Catholic Church. Among his books are American Democracy and the Vatican: Population Growth and National Security, The Pope and the New Apocalypse: The Holy War Against Family Planning, and The Life and Death of NSSM 200: How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U.S. Population Policy. The last book, also highly critical of the Vatican, traces the path of population planning in the United States since President Nixon's 1974 National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM 200) on world population growth. (See box for excerpts.)
The NSSM book devotes a chapter to the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, headed by William Donohue. The Catholic League describes itself as “the nation's largest Catholic civil rights organization. It defends the rights of Catholics — lay and clergy alike — to participate in American life without defamation or discrimination.” (Donohue and the organization were profiled in the Register's May 10-16 issue, “At 25, Catholic League Still Fighting ‘Respectable Bias ’of Anti- Catholicism.”)
Mumford, bemoaning the success of the Catholic League, asks, “How can Americans publicly discuss the obvious conflict between American national security- survival interests and Papal security-survival interests in this environment that the Catholic League now so effectively fosters? Obviously, it is not possible.”
Donohue spoke to the Register about Mumford, his work, and his views on the Catholic Church. He said, “There is a segment of the population control movement which is pro-abortion, anti-immigrant, and anti-Catholic. We have no problem with any scholar who exercises healthy freedom of speech. We do have a problem with people like Mumford who need to express themselves in a bigoted way.
“We're talking about well-funded, well-educated people who ought to know better. The first thing we must do is to unmask them. We need to get the truth out there and expose the hidden agenda. We need to educate the public to get their antennae up,” he said.
Despite the medical and psychological hazards of quinacrine, there appears little the U.S. government is able to do to inhibit the work of Mumford and Kessel. Although quinacrine is banned for sterilization use in this country, distribution of these pellets oversees does not seem to violate any of our laws. Perhaps Donohue's call for education and condemnation is the best prescription for the present time.
Father Matthew Habiger OSB, a board member of Human Life International, also urged Catholics to expose the promoters of quinacrine. But he suggested they not lose sight of the bigger issue.
The use of these sterilization pellets, he said, “is the logical progression of what we [the U.S. government] are funding overseas. Many countries are getting foreign aid from our country, and this props up governments which allow such activities to take place. Until we stop funding dictatorships, the problem is going to continue.”
Through pressure exerted by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), by human rights groups such as Population Research Institute and Concerned Women for America, and by the Peruvian Catholic bishops, a government-sponsored surgical sterilization program has been deflated in Peru. Protests against Peru's government, and President Alberto Fujimori, have become so intense during the last six months that the Ministry of Health announced June 9 that there was a 68% decline in sterilizations.
Many human rights activists are hopeful that President Clinton's trip to China (June 24-July 3) will have some impact on the systematic program of forced abortions and sterilizations in the world's most populous country. Unlike Peru, China does not receive direct foreign aid from the United States. Still, the United States ’options include such tough moves as abandoning Most Favored Nation trade preferences for China.
The whole debate over involuntary sterilization in the developing world, whether by chemical or surgical means, eventually comes back to the core issue of the sanctity of human life.
Father Kopaczynski of the National Catholic Bioethics Center suggested the public be on guard for those who say they are helping the poor and society by promoting population control programs. Citing Isaiah 5:20, as Pope John Paul II has: “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil.”
Another trenchant analysis comes from Dr. William Colliton, a retired gynecologist associated with the Culture of Life Foundation in Washington, D.C.
“A lot of these problems we are witnessing today we wouldn't have if we supported Humanae Vitae,” he said, referring to Pope Paul VI's landmark encyclical on human life issued 30 years ago this month. Too often, Colliton said, population control advocates are arguing, “My will be done, not Thy will be done.”
Joseph Esposito writes from Springfield, Virginia.
----- EXCERPT: ANTI-IMMIGRATION, ANTI-CATHOLIC AGENDA FUELS WORK OF NORTH CAROLINA DUO ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Esposito ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Stephen Mumford on the Catholic Church DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:• “Syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer had it right when she said the Pope's policies are no longer merely the business of Catholics, since they can now lead to the death of us all.”
• “In this [population] battle, the Vatican has no qualms about destroying American institutions, including democracy itself.”
• “Restrictions on freedom of speech and freedom of the press, in particular, would meet known preferences of popes going back to the 1830s.”
• “Intimidation, such as has been described in this chapter, by Catholic institutions over the past hundred years, has resulted in a population woefully ignorant of the threat to American democracy and security posed by the Church.”
• “If we are going to succeed with population growth control, Vatican influence must be neutralized.”
• “If they [the Church] rally sufficient numbers, then the civil war that President Grant predicted [1869-1877] may be inevitable for the very reason that he made his prediction.”
From: Stephen Mumford's, The Life and Death of NSSM 200: How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U.S. Population Policy (1996)
—Joseph Esposito
Joseph Esposito writes from Springfield, Virginia.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Esposito ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Orthodox-Catholic Relations Teeter At Critical Juncture DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:Eastern Europe Correspondent
WARSAW, Poland-When a new leader was enthroned May 31 for Poland's minority Orthodox Church, he took care to stress his commitment to ecumenical co-operation. Putting this into practice, however, will be no easy thing.
At 60, Metropolitan Sawa of Warsaw and all Poland heads a community of 750,000 in a predominantly Catholic country. Though dwarfed by others around Europe, it's by no means the smallest
Orthodox Church, but like them, it'll be facing tough choices in the months ahead.
Since mid-1997, Catholic-Orthodox ties have slumped, amid acerbic disputes over the very sense and purpose of ecumenism. Just what will emerge from today's inter- Church disputes remains to be seen, but it seems certain to have a key impact on the future of European and world Christianity.
Ironically, the decline in relations became public at the time of the Second European Ecumenical Assembly at Graz in June 1997. There had been talk that this would be marked by a sensational encounter between the Pope and Patriarchs Bartholomew of Constantinople and Alexei of Moscow.
But Bartholomew pulled out of the Assembly, declaring he didn't want to be drawn into “a tug of war over superiority.” Alexei went to Graz, but devoted his speech to an attack on foreign missionaries in Russia.
The slump has had feedback locally.
Russia
Russia's new religious law, enacted last September, was supported by Orthodox leaders as a way of restricting the spread of sects. But it has created complications for the country's minority Catholic Church too. Though the law's 27 articles promise all religious groups “legal protection,” they require local Church members to have been legally active for at least 15 years before conducting any religious activities.
A Catholic archdiocese was created in Russia as early as 1783, but the Church's two present apostolic administrations weren't set up until 1991, since Catholic activities were suppressed by the Soviet rulers.
On June 4, Russia's Catholic leader, Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, confirmed he had received a justice ministry certificate re-registering his Church as a “centralized Russian religious organization.” Yet ambiguities in the law have opened the door to arbitrary local government restrictions.
These haven't prevented Catholics from strengthening their presence. This year alone, two new bishops have been appointed, along with an 11-member clergy council. Meanwhile, Catholic baptisms and marriages are on the rise. In May, the first Russian-trained deacons were ordained in St. Petersburg's newly reopened Catholic cathedral.
But the Russian press has reported a growing anti-ecumenical climate. Local Catholics criticized the secrecy surrounding the last round of talks between Vatican and Moscow Patriarchate representatives in January. The pledges of cooperation and reconciliation, they pointed out, weren't matched by local gestures.
Romania
Catholic-Orthodox conflicts are reverberating elsewhere too. Romania's Orthodox leaders, who claim the loyalty of 87% of their country's 23 million citizens, are angry about a draft June 1997 law. If finally enacted, this would require Orthodox parishes to give back some of the 2,000 churches they took over when Romania's minority Eastern-rite Greek Catholic Church was outlawed by the ruling communists in 1948.
New Vatican data suggest the Greek Catholic Church, which combines loyalty to Rome with the eastern liturgy, has tripled in the past five years, raising it to a healthy 6% of the population. So far, however, fewer than 100 Eastern-rite churches have been handed back.
In March, fist-fights broke out when Greek Catholics tried to reclaim possession of Cluj's Transfiguration Cathedral. Romania's Orthodox leader, Patriarch Teoctist, blamed Catholics for rejecting his Church's “call to dialogue.” But the Greek Catholic bishop of Cluj-Gherla said its ownership of the cathedral had been recognized by a court order, and accused Orthodox objectors of “manifestly disregarding the laws and authority of the state.”
Up to 2,500 Orthodox priests protested the cathedral incident at a Cluj rally a week later. However, a Greek Catholic senator who was present at the cathedral clash warned that “Orthodox injustices” had created similarly explosive situations in 200 other communities.
Bulgaria
In predominantly Orthodox Bulgaria, where the Catholic Church's 100 parishes account for 3% of the population of 9 million, the reformist President Petur Stojanov promised help in tackling tax and property restitution problems during his first meeting with the country's three Catholic bishops in March.
The Vatican's Prefect for Eastern Churches, Achille Cardinal Silvestrini, visited Bulgaria the same month after the Rome beatification of Bulgarian Bishop Eugen Bossilkov. But Bishop Christo Projkov, who chairs the country's episcopal conference, has accused Stojanov of merely exploiting his Church contacts to foster links with Europe.
Greece
In neighboring Greece, where Orthodox Christians traditionally make up 97% of inhabitants, non-Orthodox denominations are technically illegal. Late last year, the European Court of Human Rights declared Greece guilty of discrimination for denying rights to its Catholic minority.
Article 3 of the constitution of Greece, a European Union and NATO memberstate, declares Orthodoxy the country's “dominant religion,” and even prohibits Bible translations without Orthodox Church consent. There is pressure for constitutional reform. In May, government and state leaders said they would avoid the coronation of Greece's new Orthodox Patriarch, Chrystodulos Paraskevaides, as a way of signaling the need for a clearer separation of Church and state.
Yugoslavia
Meanwhile, in nearby Yugoslavia, where Catholics form just 5% of the population, plans for a Russian-style religious law were announced this spring. In an April letter, Archbishop Franc Perko of Belgrade promised his bishops ’conference would “maintain good contacts” with the government's religious affairs minister, a member of the nationalist Radical Party. However, the government hasn't responded to requests for citizenship and visa rules to be clarified for Catholic priests and nuns. Nor has Serbia's predominant Orthodox Church answered a separate letter proposing an inter-Church commission. Three-quarters of Archbishop Perko's Church members fled Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.
The situation isn't universally bad. In Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, small Orthodox minorities coexist peacefully with other faiths, while even in war-torn Bosnia and Croatia, steps have been taken to patch up relations.
Nor is the tension confined only to Catholic-Orthodox ties. Throughout the Orthodox world, pressure is growing against ecumenical involvements generally.
In May 1997, the Georgian Orthodox Church became the first to announce its formal withdrawal from the Geneva-based World Council of Churches (WCC). The WCC's 332 member- Churches are to stage a “recommitment service” when they meet at Harare next December, but several other Orthodox Churches may have followed Georgia's lead by then.
“We joyfully accept the positive things Western culture is offering us, but it contains elements which endanger our nation,” Patriarch Ilia, whose Church claims the spiritual loyalty of 80% of ex- Soviet Georgia's 5.4 million citizens, told a Polish newspaper this May.
“A nation can survive the pressure of a bad or phony culture when it can distinguish this from a true culture, but this needs faith, appropriate spiritual progress, intellect, formation, and knowledge. “
Orthodox leaders say the WCC and Conference of European Churches (CEC) are dominated by Protestant denominations, whose pet agendas — women pastors, sexual minorities, “inclusive language” — reflect narrow Western preoccupations.
Calls for a boycott of the WCC's Harare Assembly were voted down when 15 Orthodox Church delegations met at Thessaloniki and Damascus last month, but it was agreed Orthodox participants should “express their concerns” by staying away from services and voting sessions.
An Orthodox Vatican II?
Some observers think the latest anti-ecumenical climate reflects internal Orthodox tensions. The world's Orthodox population, currently 200 million, is growing thanks to a revival in post-communist countries and increase in diaspora conversions. Several Orthodox leaders have conceded they need something like the Catholic Church's Vatican II, to introduce universal reforms and standardize rules and structures.
But who would have the authority to summon it?
Unlike Catholicism, Orthodoxy's nine patriarchates and 15 self-governing Churches lack a unitary authority. Although Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew is traditionally recognized as “first among equals,” his own Istanbul-based patriarchy wields direct jurisdiction over just 3.5 million, compared to the mighty Russian Church's 60 million members.
After the collapse of communism, several Orthodox communities from Estonia to Moldavia attempted to wrest free of Moscow's control by appealing to Constantinople. In 1996, the resulting feud come close to a full-scale rift.
Parallel conflicts of jurisdiction have occurred in other countries.
Ukraine's Orthodox Church has been divided into three rival communities for five years. Bulgaria's is in full-scale schism after the July excommunication of an alternative patriarch. Russia's Orthodox Church faces competition from old believers and foreign-based Orthodox groups, while Churches in Belarus and Serbia are trying to stop regional communities from breaking away.
Other Countries
Attitudes to Catholics have exacerbated the feuding. Publicly at least, all Orthodox patriarchs would like to patch up ties with the Pope — particularly Patriarch Bartholomew, who paid a historic week-long visit to Rome in June 1995. But they're answerable to their local synods, who reflect domestic pressures and claim to have serious grievances against the Catholic Church.
The most important concerns the Pope's primacy. Although most Orthodox admit the Bishop of Rome should exercise a “unifying office,” they insist this cannot be done at the cost of their own apostolic authority.
Some say the progress achieved in Catholic-Orthodox dialogue since Vatican II has been reversed under John Paul II. Instead of recognizing the Orthodox as separated “sister-Churches,” endowed with the Holy Spirit, the Vatican has made allegiance to Rome a criterion for all “true Churches.”
Claims of Proselytizing
Some Orthodox objections are closer to home.
Having seen 200,000 of its priests, monks, and nuns slaughtered under communism, and its hierarchy crushed into subservience, Russia's Orthodox Church thinks Catholics are exploiting its weaknesses by setting up parishes and dioceses in new areas. Some say Rome is pursuing an age-old dream of “reuniting Christendom” and violating canonical rules by proselytizing.
In June 1993, an agreement was reached at Balamand in Lebanon by negotiators from the Vatican and nine Orthodox Churches that Eastern-rite Catholicism couldn't be viewed “as a method of searching for unity,” and stressed that all Christians should be free to decide their church affiliations “without pressure from outside.”
But Orthodox leaders accuse the Greek Catholics of reclaiming far more churches than their present numbers merit — especially in Ukraine, where the Church was outlawed in 1946 and formally re-legalized only in 1990.
“This Church's suppression was an illegal decision by an atheist Soviet government: it's absolutely clear it must be corrected,” Father Ilarion Alfiev, the Moscow patriarchate's external relations secretary, said in a recent interview.
“But you can't correct one historical injustice with the help of a second — 50 years have passed since 1946, and three new generations have grown up in Ukraine for whom the Orthodox Church is a spiritual mother.”
Many Orthodox Christians fear their Eastern spirituality will be eroded by the inrush of Western junk culture. They fear Catholicism will gain ground by default, as a better organized “Western” faith.
Father Aleksander Hauke-Ligowski, a Polish Dominican who heads Kiev's Catholic academy, thinks this explains why hostility to Catholics forms an important part of the growing “non-ecumenical option.”
“This isn't an anti-Catholic option as such, but an anti-Western one,” the priest said.
“It's rather a question of living out the Greek-Byzantine identity, in a way which is opposed to Greek-Roman tradition and civilization. The Catholic Church is viewed here as the fullest expression of this.”
Yet the Catholic Church has arguments too.
As the millennium approaches, Catholics say, it's vital that Christians make a show of unity, and set an example for the world around them. Top-level meetings are warranted, even if disagreements remain. Rather than just complain about decadent Western influences, Christians should unite to combat them.
As for papal primacy, the Catholic side says it's ready for dialogue. Far from reversing the progress of recent decades, the Pope has merely corrected the hasty steps taken by his predecessors, showing unity can't be achieved at the cost of Church order.
Catholics also reject Orthodox charges of proselytism. The Catholic Church hasn't set up dioceses in Russia, they point out, only provisional “apostolic administrations.” Nor has it tried to “convert” Orthodox Christians. Parishes have been formed where Catholics live. Since many were deported under communism, it's hardly surprising the parishes are often in new areas.
In April 1998, the Catholic Church had 93 registered parishes and 112 mostly foreign priests in western Russia. How can these be seen as a threat to the Orthodox Church, which had 16,000 parishes and 14,000 priests?
Meanwhile, although Orthodox Churches claim the loyalty of two-thirds of Ukraine's 53 million citizens, only 20% called themselves Orthodox in a 1996 survey. That figure could be closer to 10% in Russia. Against this background, can any Church claim exclusive “canonical rights” at the cost of others?
As for the revival of the Eastern-rite Greek Catholic communities, the Catholic side insists this is a simple matter of justice. Churches that belonged to Greek Catholics when their communist-era persecution began should be given back — at least when this is requested.
Some Catholics say Orthodoxy's traditional subservience to the state restricts its freedom to witness. Most national Churches needed reforms and a personnel shakeup after the collapse of communism, but the hierarchies resisted this — often in tacit alliance with political antireform forces.
At the same time, the importance of ecumenism has never been greater — and not only as a gesture to the third millennium.
Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic are expected to join NATO in April 1999, while formal negotiations on their accession to the European Union opened March 31.
Quite apart from their geopolitical significance, both steps could have confessional implications. Since the three countries are predominantly Catholic, their priority treatment could suggest a new division in the heart of Europe — between a more secure and advanced Catholic West, and a poorer, less stable Orthodox East.
After the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia, particular dangers may exist where this border runs internally, such as in Belarus and Ukraine, and perhaps in Poland too. Hence the pressing need for Church leaders to foster tolerance and coexistence more than ever.
This may explain why it's governments in these countries that have taken the initiative in fostering inter-Church ties, independent of the wider international problems.
When President Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine met the Vatican's secretary of state, Angelo Cardinal Sodano, in Kiev June 3, he told him it was “too early” to plan a visit by the Pope, but Kuchma didn't dismiss a future papal pilgrimage.
John Paul II holds state invitations from predominantly Orthodox Romania, Bulgaria and Georgia too, while President Yeltsin hinted during his February Vatican stopover that a Russian invitation was pending as well.
Yet this depends on many things — above all, the ebb and flow of Catholic- Orthodox ties.
Speaking before his May 31 installation in Warsaw's St. Mary Magdalene Cathedral, Poland's new Orthodox leader, Metropolitan Sawa, insisted inter- Church ties were “not bad” in his country, adding that he'd be working hard to ensure a “spirit of unity and understanding.”
But he studiously avoided commenting on disputes with Catholics and his view of future ecumenical involvements. For now at least, Metropolitan Sawa concluded, those subjects were best avoided.
Jonathan Luxmoore writes from Warsaw, Poland
----- EXCERPT: Outcome of disputes will shape Christianity in Eastern Europe ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jonathan Luxmoore ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Pope Stresses Teachings On Women and Ordination DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:Senior Writer
LOS ANGELES-If some Church leaders imagined that Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, Pope John Paul II's 1994 apostolic letter affirming the Church's traditional ban against the ordination of women to the priesthood would retreat to the theological sidelines, the Pontiff would appear to have dashed such hopes.
In a May 21 Ascension Day address to bishops from Michigan and Ohio making their ad limina visits to Rome, the Pope not only reaffirmed the prohibition, but, in a speech focused on the theme of priesthood, told the bishops that they “must explain to the faithful why the Church does not have the authority to ordain women to the ministerial priesthood, at the same time making clear why this is not a question of the equality of persons or of their God-given rights.”
He added, significantly, that “the ‘genius ’of women must be ever more a vital strength of the Church of the next millennium.” Bishops pay ad limina visits (Latin, “to the threshold [of the Apostles”]) every five years in order to give an account of the state of their dioceses to the Pope and to venerate the tombs of Sts. Peter and Paul who, tradition asserts, were martyred in the Eternal City. These visits also provide an opportunity for the Pontiff to underscore issues he thinks should be high on their pastoral agendas. The May 21 visit marked thefifth of eight groups of U.S. bishops who will meet with Pope John Paul this year.
Does the fact that the Pope is urging U.S. bishops to be out front on the women's ordination issue imply that the Vatican thinks that America's episcopate has not been forceful enough in promoting the Church's stand? Father Augustine Di Noia, theologian to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB), cautions against reading too much into the recent ad limina address.
“The Pope is working through various themes of importance to the Church in these addresses,” he told the Register. “There is no particular reason that the [May 21] discourse should be singled out,” or that anyone should think there is a hidden critique there.
In any case, said Father Di Noia, the American bishops “responded forthrightly to criticisms [four years ago] of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis coming from the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA)” and others, and earlier this year published a collection of essays and commentaries on Church documents related to the women's ordination issue.
Jesuit Father Avery Dulles, Laurence J. McGinley professor of religion and society at Fordham University, and a prominent commentator on the women's ordination issue, agrees that it's difficult “to read the mind of the Pope.” Nevertheless, he points out that the U.S. bishops have said little on an official level about the teaching since 1995. In late 1995, the U.S. bishops issued a statement supporting the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's (CDF) Oct. 28, 1995 clarification on the apostolic letter, the Responsum ad Dubium, which indicated that the prohibition on women priests “requires definitive assent ... [and] has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.”
“It's only a guess, but perhaps the Pope feels not enough is being done,” he said.
The reticence is not hard to understand, said Father Dulles. “Some [bishops] feel that [the women's ordination ban] is a hot iron, and they're not particularly anxious to touch it. They don't want to stir up the ‘other side, ’the teaching's opponents, and incite more vitriolic reactions.”
The influential 1,400-member CTSA, for example, has continued to be in the forefront of opposition to the papal teaching. Three years ago, in the wake of the Responsum, they published statements challenging the CDF's assertion that the prohibition on women's ordination was irreversible. And just last June the society enmeshed itself still further in controversy when it renewed the challenge, arguing that “serious doubts” remain about the authority of the Pope's ban and “its grounds in tradition” -a position sharply criticized by several U.S. bishops, among them Bernard Cardinal Law of Boston.
“What [the CTSA] has tried to do,” observed Father Dulles, “is to focus not on the teaching — what the apostolic letter taught — but on the CDF clarification and the infallibility issue. It's a tactic. They don't want to be labeled as dissenters, but what they're saying is that it's not necessary for all the faithful to give full assent to this teaching. That places them in real conflict with what the Pope is saying.”
On the other hand, said the theologian, “the silence of the teaching's defenders runs the risk of giving the impression that all the theologians and the best scholarship are on the dissenting side. And that's just not the case.”
In fact, there's evidence that a growing band of theologians, philosophers, and distinguished lay people — men and women — are helping to develop the kind of framework the Pope has urged: a positive presentation of the teaching of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis that both “explains” the prohibition theologically and articulates a genuine Catholic vision of the role of women.
For one, Dr. Ronda Chervin, the well-known Catholic philosopher and lecturer, author of Feminine, Free and Faithful, has made the Pope's message a centerpiece of her talks to lay groups around the country.
“A point that the Pope emphasizes in his teaching,” she explained, “is Christ's sovereign right to choose. As Lord, he has a right to choose certain disciples, and not others, for the performance of specific tasks.” He chose certain men to serve as the Twelve; but, likewise, he chose to reveal his divine identity first to the Samaritan woman at the well, and not to others.
“It's his right,” she said.
Chervin, a consultant to the U.S. bishops ’committee on the concerns of women, has little patience with the objection that in choosing male disciples, Jesus was simply operating according to the customs of the time. Even Christianity's critics, she pointed out, acknowledge that the behavior of Jesus toward women “runs deeply against the grain of first-century Jewish culture.”
Citing Anglican writer C.S. Lewis's God in the Dock, written during the early stages of the Anglican communion's debate on women's ordination in the 1960s, Chervin said that the issue is really about two completely different notions of religion: religion as a cultural expression, and religion as revelation.
“What we are defending in this debate,” she said, “is nothing less than revealed religion.”
Having said that, Chervin underlines that the issue of respecting women and “receiving women's gifts in the life of the Church” is the other half of the Pope's message.
“Some women seek the priesthood as a solution to the sense of powerlessness,” she said.
For Chervin, the way forward lies in studying “the whole tradition of women saints,” the teaching of major Catholic figures such as Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, and, more recently, Blessed Edith Stein's “theological anthropology of woman,” which, many scholars insist, has influenced Pope John Paul's pioneering teaching on women in his Letter to Women, issued on the eve of the 1995 U.N. women's conference in Beijing, in the call for a “new feminism” in the encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life) and, most significantly, in the 1988 apostolic letter on the dignity and vocation of women, Mulieris Dignitatem.
Stein, born into an Orthodox Jewish home in Breslau in 1891, converted to Catholicism during her philosophical studies at the University of Gottingen in 1921. As one of the first women admitted to university studies in Germany, Stein wrote extensively in the area of the ontology of woman in the years after her conversion, and eventually became a leading voice in the Catholic women's movement in central Europe.
“Her best pupil,” observed Jean- Marie Cardinal Lustiger of Paris during a recent visit to the United States, “is the Holy Father.”
Father Matthew Lamb, a theologian who teaches at Boston College, likewise sees the women's ordination issue in the context of the central tenets of Christianity.
“The priest isn't carrying out his own ministry, but he carries forth the priestly ministry of Jesus,” he said. “The Church is not the expression of our mission, but the continuation throughout time of the visible mission of the Word incarnate.”
Since this is her charter, he said, the Church “doesn't have the authority to contradict this mission from the Lord. The question of who is, or is not ordained [to the priesthood] is something in response to the actions and choices of Jesus Christ communicated through the apostles.”
The push for women's ordination, says Father Lamb, is “not the result of serious theological reflection,” but a superficial response to certain cultural movements.
“We live in a careerist society,” he said. “For some, if we don't play the same role in the drama, we're not equal. But that fails to grasp the different ways that men and women embody the response to Christ. There's a kind of clericalism at work here.”
Finally, he said, there is “only one calling: being caught up in the beatific vision and sharing in the life of God.”
Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon puts the stress on what is happening at the grassroots level, in parishes.
“My perception is that women's ordination is a non-issue for people in the pew,” she told the Register. “Women's ordination is a flag waved by ideologues. The regular Churchgoing Catholic has got a lot of things on his or her mind — good preaching, good liturgy, the shortage of priests — but not that.”
For one thing, she said, most Catholics realize that ordaining women to the priesthood won't solve any of the major problems facing the Church. They have taken note of the fact that the Anglicans in the United States who elected to ordain women in 1977 have been plagued with division, but haven't solved their priest shortage by doing so, or added numbers to their ranks.
“But,” said Glendon, “that's not to say that we don't need to listen to what the Holy Father is saying about women.”
Glendon, who headed the Vatican delegation to the 1995 U.N. women's conference in Beijing, laments that the Pope's vision of “a new feminism” is not better known.
As the law professor wrote in a widely quoted March 1997 article in Crisis magazine, “Where women's changing roles are concerned, the Pope's writings contain no trace of the dogmatism that often characterizes the rhetoric of organized feminism and cultural conservatives alike ... [John Paul II] invites women to reflect and meditate with him about the quest for equality, freedom, and dignity in the light of the faith.”
That's not to say, Glendon urged, that the Church lags behind other institutions in society in according respect to women.
“There never has been a secular institution that shows as much respect to women as our Church does,” she told the Register. But as long as significant numbers of women experience forms of injustice in the Church, or find that their contributions aren't welcomed, “you are going to have this argument for women's ordination.”
Finally, said Father Dulles, the issue comes back to the connection between the sacraments and the actions of the historical Jesus. An essential insight of Catholicism, he said, has always been to insist that what the Church does is in conformity with what Jesus did.
“It's vital to preserve this,” he said. “We can't just substitute what we would have done if we'd been Christ. Otherwise, we'd be right to wonder whether religion has any real content at all.”
Gabriel Meyer writes from Los Angeles.
It appears on the books as early as the middle of the fourth century.
Epiphanius, a bishop in Cyprus, complains in his encyclopedia of heresies, The Panarion, or “Medicine Chest,” written about 375 A.D., about the Collyridians, assemblies where women offer bread and partake of it in a quasi-sacramental manner.
In the Middle Ages, at least on a theoretical level, scholastic theologians debated the issue of whether women could be ordained to the priesthood, often using the same scriptural texts and considering the same arguments proponents of women's ordination raise today. Agradual consensus developed that the tradition was a matter of divine law.
In 1916, the Holy Office, the predecessor of today's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, condemned the making and distribution of images of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Calvary clothed in the vestments of a priest — a reaction to a 19th century Marian devotion which posited that the Virgin offered Christ to the Father on the Cross after the model of the Mass.
According to some scholars, the acute priest shortage following World War I caused German bishops to raise the issue of ordaining women to the priesthood — a discreet discussion in which Blessed Edith Stein figured — and which ended with a unanimous verdict that the Church could not ordain women. Some other significant Catholic women scholars also participated in this 1930's effort, among them, the writer Hilda Graef.
In 1976, during the debate on women's ordination in the Anglican communion, the CDF issued the declaration Inter Insigniores, on the question of the admission of women to the ministerial priesthood. This is a much longer statement than Ordinatio Sacerdotalis and contains a fuller treatment than the 1994 apostolic letter does of the theological underpinnings of the prohibition.
----- EXCERPT: Says bishops 'must explain' reason for Church's position ----- EXTENDED BODY: Gabriel Meyer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: John Paul II's Recent Words on Women DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:The following is an excerpt from Pope John Paul II's May 21 ad limina address:
“As bishops, you must explain to the faithful why the Church does not have the authority to ordain women to the ministerial priesthood, at the same time making clear why it is not a question of the equality of persons or of their God-given rights. The sacrament of holy orders and the ministerial priesthood are given by God as a gift: in the first place, to the Church; and then to the individual called by God. Thus ordination to the ministerial priesthood can never be claimed by anyone as a right; no one is “due” holy orders within the economy of salvation. That discernment belongs, finally, to the Church, through the bishop.
And the Church ordains only on the basis of that ecclesial and episcopal discernment.
The Church's teaching that only men may be ordained to the ministerial priesthood is an expression of fidelity to the witness of the New Testament and the constant tradition of the Church of East and West. The fact that Jesus himself chose and commissioned men for certain specific tasks did not in any way diminish the human dignity of women (which he clearly intended to emphasize and defend); nor by doing so did he relegate women to a merely passive role in the Christian community. The New Testament makes it clear that women played a vital part in the early Church. The New Testament witness and the constant tradition of the Church remind us that the ministerial priesthood cannot be understood in sociological or political categories, as a matter of exercising “power” within the community. The priesthood of holy orders must be understood theologically as one form of service in and for the Church. There are many forms of such service, as there are many gifts given by the same Spirit (1 Co 12:4-11).
The Churches-in particular the Catholic and Orthodox Churches — which set sacramentality at the heart of the Christian life and the Eucharist at the heart of sacramentality are those which claim no authority to ordain women to the ministerial priesthood. Conversely, Christian communities more readily confer a ministerial responsibility on women the further they move away from a sacramental understanding of the Church, the Eucharist, and the priesthood. This is a phenomenon that needs to be explored more deeply by theologians in collaboration with the bishops.
At the same time, it is indispensable that you continue to pay attention to the whole question of how women's specific gifts are nurtured, accepted and brought to fruition in the ecclesial community (cf. Letter to Women, 11-12). The “genius” of women must be ever more a vital strength of the Church of the next millennium, just as it was in the first communities of Christ's disciples....”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Poll Says Most Parents Look To TV Ratings for Guidance DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:Arts & Culture Correspondent
MENLO PARK, Calif.-A majority of parents say they use the new TV ratings system to help guide their children's viewing, and almost half say they have stopped their kids from watching a particular show because of its rating.
These are the most important findings in the first comprehensive survey of TV ratings since the revision of the system last fall at the beginning of the current season.
In May, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation of Menlo Park, Calif., released two studies on the subject. One interviewed 1,358 parents of children ages two-17, and the other questioned 446 kids ages 10- 17. The nonprofit organization, best known for its work on health-care policy issues, discovered that nearly all the parents who consult the ratings term them “useful.” But the studies also reveal that TV viewers are reluctant to pay for new technology like the V-chip that would automatically monitor TV shows and their ratings.
“Almost everyone who uses the ratings system finds it helpful,” Vicki Rideout, director of the Kaiser Family Foundation Entertainment Media and Public Health programs which supervised the studies, told the Register. “Parental concern about content is broad and deep.”
Among parents, 54% questioned said they had used the ratings, and 45% said they made at least one of their children switch off a show because of an inappropriate rating. As a result, 93% of those who consult them call them “useful.” The studies were released two months after the Federal Communications Commission formally approved the industry ratings plan.
“The conventional wisdom is that parents have greeted the system with a yawn,” Vice President Al Gore said at a recent Washington, D.C., news conference to announce the studies ’findings. “This simply isn't true.”
The Kaiser Family Foundation's study of children reveals that kids also use the ratings. A third of children interviewed say that they themselves have decided not to view a particular program because of its rating. An equal number report that their parents have prevented them from watching a show after consulting its rating.
The studies ’results contradict other polls that claim the ratings system is a bust. For instance, the Associated Press conducted a poll in February that asserted seven out of 10 adults surveyed pay little or no attention to the ratings system. And last September a Los Angeles Times poll maintained that 74% of those interviewed say they never consult the ratings before selecting a program.
Pro-family groups declared that the Kaiser studies' results indicate that the current ratings system doesn't do enough to curb excessive sex and violence on the tube.
“Programming with a garbage label is still garbage,” Mark Honing, executive director of the Los Angeles office of the Parents Television Council, told the Register. “Until the networks address the issue of programming, people are going to be upset about what's on the airwaves.”
The Kaiser studies found evidence to support Honig's view. The number of parents who are concerned “a great deal” about too much sexual content increased to 67%, from 43% a year and a half ago. Those expressing similar worries about excessive violence rose from 39% to 62% during the same time period.
“People are more upset than ever,” Honig declared. “Families are going to use the V-chip. That's a bad sign. They shouldn't have to do it.”
The 1996 Telecommunications Act requires the use of V-chip technology beginning next year. The current ratings system will then be supplemented by the electronic V-chip device which can read the ratings of a particular show and block programming in ratings categories determined by the viewer. It must be included in half of all new TV sets with 13-inch screens or larger by 1999. All new sets must be equipped with the device by 2000.
Sixty-five percent of parents surveyed say that if they had a V-chip they would use it to block objectionable shows. But even though the V-chip equipment will cost little additional money, many viewers seem reluctant to pay extra for it. Forty-five percent of parents interviewed say they are “not at all likely” to buy the new device in the next year, and 24% say they are “not too likely” to spend any money on V-chip technology.
Nevertheless, 71% of parents who use the ratings believe they provide “reasonably accurate” information about TV programming, and 73% say they learn a show's rating from the on-screen symbol at the beginning of each program.
Under current guidelines, a show's rating is displayed during the first 15 seconds of a program in the upper left corner of the screen. If the show runs longer than an hour, the rating must appear again during the first 15 seconds of each hour of the program.
The studies find that parents don't think this is good enough. Sixty-seven percent say that even when they are looking for the rating, they miss it, and 84% who consult the ratings wish it appeared more often.
The current system was first put into place in January 1997. Conceived in imitation of the 30-year-old movie ratings system, it was adopted because the White House, responding to pressure from parents, insisted that the entertainment business do more to reduce sex and violence in its programs. The TV industry's first system produced ratings that went from “TVG” (appropriate for general audiences) to “TV-MA” (unsuitable for children under 17). Because of additional pressure from pro-family groups, the system was altered in October to include ratings for content. Added were the labels, S, V, L, and D, which refer, respectively, to sex, violence, language, and suggestive dialogue. All the networks and cable systems went along with the new ratings except for NBC, whose programming is watched by more people than any other outlet.
Despite these changes, many viewers want even more information.
“Parents are still confused,” Honig said.
The Kaiser studies reveal they particularly need to know: how the ratings system operates, what types of shows are rated, what the different symbols mean, and who determines the ratings. Less than half of all parents know that children's programs, talk shows, and daytime dramas are rated as well as prime time comedy and dramatic programming. And only 54% understand what at least six of 11 ratings symbols stand for, and 46% recognize only five or fewer.
The studies also found that only 31% of parents realize that the TV industry rates itself. Many assume outsiders rate the shows. Thirty-two percent believe an independent board comes up with the ratings, and 9% think it's the government.
According to the studies, 18% of parents, about one in five, say they have never heard of the ratings system. And 27% of those who know about it say they would “never” or “hardly ever” use it. About a third of those not using the ratings say they would rather decide for themselves what their children should be viewing.
“The system is not working because it's incomplete,” Honig said.
Studies' director Rideout agrees. “Parents don't think the TV ratings system fully addresses their concerns,” she says. “It's just one tool in the toolbox. It's not the whole solution.”
The Kaiser Family Foundation plans to do more research in this area.
John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: But many see system as incomplete solution to racy programming ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Catholic Marketing Is Becoming Big Business DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:Register Correspondent
VALLEY FORGE, Pa. — “Don't put new products in the children's play area. They don't know they're not supposed to play with them,” cautioned one 10-year veteran retailer to a young couple who plan to open a Catholic gift and bookstore next month.
Although snatches of similar exchanges were audible throughout Catholic Marketing Network's (CMN) third annual trade show, held June 17-21 near Philadelphia, no one walked away from the show with marketing tips alone. Tired bodies, aching feet, and a refreshed Catholic spirit more accurately describes attendees' comments.
The trade show is the only one of its kind in the country, said Catholic Marketing Network president Alan Napleton. Featuring more than 164 exhibitors of Catholic books, videos, statuaries, and other merchandise, and comprising more than 70,000 square feet of exhibit space, this year's show drew more than 3,000 participants — an increase of more than 145% from last year's count.
“It's the largest gathering of Catholic retailers in the country,” Napleton added. “The Catholic Marketing Network was formed three years ago as a response to the Holy Father's call for lay people to utilize every means of mass communications and commerce to spread the Gospel,” Napleton explained. “We're gratified by the overwhelming interest of the Catholic community which has helped make the CMN trade show a must-attend gathering for Catholic professionals.”
“One of the real values of this show,” added Ignatius Press director of marketing Tony Ryan, “is learning what customers like or don't like about your company.”
Ryan also pointed to a growing number of new Catholic recording artists and groups, and a number of new chant CDs, including one called Women in Chant produced by the Benedictine nuns at Connecticut-based monastery Regina Laudis monastery. “There are a lot more Catholic musicians coming up,” he said, adding that Ignatius Press wrote more orders this year than in previous years at the show.
Maureen Pinney, customer services manager for the religious jewelry and articles manufacturer McVan and Company, noted that many retailers were looking for new products or for new jewelry or rosary suppliers. She made a number of new contacts at the show.
“More people were looking for traditional Catholic prayers on plaques or prints,” noted Sue Kloeck of Indiana-based Abbey Press.
Several book and gift store owners commented on the increase of customers wanting to better understand their faith. Apologetics books by such authors as Karl Keating, Patrick Madrid, and Matthew Pinto and others were especially in demand.
Each year the show has expanded in more ways than with exhibit show floor space to incorporate the growing dimensions of Catholic influence in the marketplace. This year, a half-day, pre-conference seminar by Joe Tabers, president of Productive Training Services, was offered free-of-charge to more than 125 retailers who sought practical tips on how to improve their customer service and more fully incorporate their Catholic Faith into their business relationships.
In addition, the first annual Catholic Communications Expo was held simultaneously with the trade show. Hosted in conjunction with California-based Lay Catholic Broadcasting Network, it focused on the development of Catholic radio and the effective use of the Internet.
Next year, Napleton plans to add visual arts to the communications expo with another simultaneously held event dedicated to featuring Catholic producers, directors, and others involved in the production of Catholic films and videos. In addition, he plans to showcase Catholic artists and sculptors.
“The Catholic Marketing Network is an apostolate and a ministry first,” explains Napleton, who understands that while many participants are producing products that will foster the Faith, they must also be concerned with following a business plan and meeting their financial obligations.
“By assisting the individual businesses and ministries involved in the manufacturing, production, and distribution of Catholic materials, we are supporting the Church and helping to build up the body of Christ,” Napleton said.
Lu Cortese of California-headquartered St. Joseph Radio, whose program is broadcast daily around the world on Mother Angelica's WEWN, concurs. She recorded nearly seven hours' worth of radio programming each day of the conference, featuring on-site interviews with many of the more than 100 Catholic authors, contemporary and classical musicians and artists at the show.
“One thing we try to do is give trade people, authors, and artists an opportunity to be on the air who would never otherwise have that opportunity,” explained Cortese. “We had authors and recording artists waiting all day to get on air!”
Musicians at the trade show included seasoned professionals such as singer-guitarist Tony Melendez, international Irish tenor Mark Forrest, and international recording artist and Grammy-nominated singer Kathy Troccoli, a, singer Sara Hart, as well as “The Singing Nuns” from St. Michael's Convent in Spokane, Wash., and newcomers such as singer Lynn Cooper and others. Authors included best-selling author Michael O'Brien; Karen Santorum, wife of U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.); popular Catholic novelist Bud Macfarlane, and many others.
St. Luke Productions' The Story of A Soul, a moving one-woman performance recreating the story of St. ThÈrËse of Lisieux, was presented to a capacity crowd of more than 1,700. And nearly 60 attending musicians and authors showcased their works at an informal Friday evening author-artist reception attended by retailers, distributors, and media professionals.
Napleton said that the Catholic Marketing Network plans to immediately start building on the “tremendous momentum” of this year's event, starting early to bring it to the next level of expansion and opportunity for participants.
For more information on the Catholic Marketing Network, call Alan Napleton at 800-929-0608.
Karen Walker writes from Corona Del Mar, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Karen Walker ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Awakening the Voice of Conscience DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:Esposito: What is the goal of The Caring Foundation?
Swope: To develop a national pro-life media effort, primarily through television. This effort will create a cultural shift for the restoration of life values and build a compassionate society.
We're currently targeting women of child-bearing age. This is one of the aspects that makes The Caring Foundation so unique. We don't “preach to the converted,” but focus on communicating with women who call themselves “prochoice.”
Can you talk a little about your “right brain” research?
“Right brain” research is a type of marketing that attempts to understand people from their intuitive, emotional, creative (and some even say spiritual) side — characteristics thought to originate from the right side of the brain. Your “left brain” activities tend to be analytic, linguistic, and rational.
Much of the debate over abortion has been just that, a back-and-forth debate, a “left brain” intellectual argument. The Caring Foundation has used right brain research to transcend the level of argumentation to better understand how women really feel about this issue in order to reach them more effectively.
We have worked with Kenny & Associates in Tennessee, which pioneered such research. These studies revolutionize how the pro-life movement presents its message to “pro-choice” women. A key insight is that the choice to abort or carry to term is often settled not by how the woman views the child — she knows it is a human life — but by how she views herself and her future.
Psychologically, abortion is resorted to because the woman sees it as an act of self-preservation. Pro-lifers know that calculation is misguided, but we have to present our case in a way that is persuasive to the women in crisis, not to ourselves, as has often been the case. That's what makes the work of The Caring Foundation so exciting. We're using new research to reach a new audience: women who most need to hear the pro-life message.
What constitutes a typical Caring Foundation commercial?
First, our ads feature women who share their own experience and who are credible to the targeted audience, presenting the issue in terms they will understand. They usually end with a question rather than a dogmatic statement. For example, one ad shows a woman practicing ballet, and it talks, in very poetic terms, about “female intuition.” What we're talking about is God-given conscience, the guidance of natural law that's written in every human heart.
But appealing to “conscience” is likely to confuse and even alarm the very audience we're trying to reach. So this ad ends with the following thought: “Your intuition doesn't always tell you what you want to hear, but when you think about it, when was the last time that voice was wrong?” Of course, an ad such as this isn't likely to change the hardened of heart, but we know that most women aren't in this category. Most women are yearning for just a small voice to tell them what they know to be true inside and to give them encouragement.
So the ad provides that small voice.
It's important to clarify that using a gentler term is not evading the truth. One of the keys to successful communication is knowing your audience and working within the limitations of your medium. In a 30-second ad, you can only say so much. I think sometimes pro-lifers are so intent on the importance of their message, that they can forget to adapt to the means at hand. If a 30-second ad is going to be effective, it has to touch the listener in a way that resonates with something already inside them.
We know, for example, that women struggle with two conflicting voices over this issue: there is the “voice of conscience” and what you might call the “voice of convenience.” Our goal in a TV ad is to gently encourage the former, so that the women will decide from within themselves to choose life.
Don't your ads include a toll-free 800 number?
Yes, nearly all our ads now include an 800 number for women in crisis to call for help. This was a tremendous development because we now connect women who most need help with the agencies created to serve them. Most crisis pregnancy centers don't have the funds to gain visibility via television, and most women don't know where to turn for help.
We fill that critical need, and there's no cost to the centers for the service. Some crisis pregnancy centers have reported an increase in calls to their centers of up to 400% when a campaign of The Caring Foundation is initiated.
You wrote in the April issue of First Things that the pro-life effort, although vigorous and compassionate, has done little to change public attitudes about abortion. Why?
I need to make it clear that the focus of that article, like the overall work of The Caring Foundation, is to reach pro-choice women through the medium of television. I tried to be careful to state that our approach doesn't invalidate the pro-life work done in the classroom, the legislature, or elsewhere.
However, I can speak from my own personal experience within the movement. I notice that we spend the vast majority of our energy and resources in communicating with those who agree with us. We hold dinners, raffles, bake sales, and church meetings. We write newsletters to our members and then contact them for donations. Yet, how often and how effectively are we actually getting our message into the living rooms of the average American? The truth is, when we do get any exposure, it's not done on our terms but through the reporting of a biased news media, which present pro-lifers as anti-woman extremists.
So I have long been concerned about actually getting the pro-life message to those outside our movement. Next, we should look at the messages we don't send out. We tend to view this issue in battle terms, with an “us” against “them” mentality. As a devout Catholic, I passionately believe that this issue is ultimately between the forces of the Devil and the power of Christ, but I don't believe that people or their beliefs can be neatly dropped into one camp or the other.
How can the general public be characterized, then?
Actually, most people are mostly pro-life, in that they only approve of abortion in very limited circumstances. It's a mistake for our movement to encourage polarization, forcing people to either accept the pure “pro-life” label or be cast into the “pro-abortion” camp. The truth is, people dislike being labeled, and they don't wish to be viewed as an extremist on either end of the spectrum.
With the choices being “pro-life” or “pro-choice” in today's terminology, most people will feel more comfortable under the “pro-choice” label, because it sounds more open-minded and reasonable. In short, argumentation leads to polarization, to the taking of sides, which does not encourage people to reexamine their beliefs, and may even erode our base of support.
The Caring Foundation tries to get past the labels and the argumentation and influence the deeper emotional and psychological reactions to this issue. I think this approach is much more likely to create lasting change in public opinion.
A foundation of the pro-life position is that abortion kills a baby. By focusing exclusively on the emotional needs of women in crisis, are you shortchanging the moral issue?
That's a good question, and two thoughts come to mind. First, our focus on the woman doesn't discount the humanity of the unborn child. In fact, our psychological research reveals that even pro-choice women know that abortion takes a human life. This fact is presupposed, not dismissed, in our ads.
Second, we might ask whether our movement is about presenting an argument, or about communicating effectively to help the unborn child a mother is carrying. Women do have the power to take the life of their unborn children, so for us to ignore or downplay their needs would defeat our mission.
Remember, the goal of the ads is to effectively persuade women of childbearing age to choose life for the child inside them, it isn't to present biological facts to school children or lobby for a particular bill. We're simply being smart enough to tailor our message to the audience we're trying to reach and working within the limitations of the television medium.
Polling is an integral part of this program. Can you tell us what have been your polling results?
It's hard to really go into the polling data, as the report on each market often runs 100-200 pages. Basically we hire a professional pollster to carry out a poll before a campaign is initiated to assess existing pro-life sentiment. We then conduct the same poll in the area after the campaign to see if there has been an impact and what themes have been successful.
That our campaigns shift public opinion and move women to choose life is beyond dispute. We have now received over 6,000 calls on the 800 number included with the ad, and polls showing positive movement have been done in over 15 markets. In Indianapolis, for example, the poll showed a shift among the target audience from 33% pro-life in the pre-poll to 44% pro-life in the post-poll. That's an increase of over 30%.
I would encourage anyone who is sincerely interested in our work to request the documentation about our polling and the impact of our ads. The closer one scrutinizes our work, the clearer it becomes that this approach is important and effective.
Is there a danger of placing too much emphasis on a television campaign?
Actually, I think it has been a tragedy that our movement has neglected television for so long. Television is the most powerful medium in the modern age. While The Caring Foundation is not denying the efficacy of other means of communication, it is just filling the critically important gap of reaching the American public through television.
I know many pro-lifers write off television because it seems to be too expensive. I had the same idea until I learned more about it. It's true it takes a large sum of money to saturate a market effectively, but you have to consider the number of people reached and influenced for the dollars spent.
For example, The Caring Foundation insists on a minimum time-buy of about 13 weeks, and it actually comes out to about 10 cents for every person reached with our message. Each person will see our message several times, for several weeks — all for just 10 cents. I've been in the movement a long time, and there is nothing so efficient and effective. It really is a terrific vehicle for the pro-life movement.
I'm sure some people are skeptical that a few 30-second ads can make a difference. What they need to keep in mind is that we're awakening a voice of conscience already inside people, and that's why they are so effective.
Can you talk a little about your journey of faith?
That's quite a long story. I'm a convert to Christianity, and I joined the Catholic Church while a graduate student at Harvard University. Looking back, I can see the patience and persistence of the Holy Spirit, as I passed through phases of rebellion, eastern mysticism, and two years of hitchhiking through 20 countries.
But what the Divine Chiseler used to split my life in two was this issue of abortion. Despite attending Ivy League colleges, I really didn't know much about abortion. Yet, when I read that abortion involved the dismemberment of a tiny person, I instinctively knew that it was horribly wrong. This brought me to question the whole modern view of sexuality, going back to the contraceptive mentality.
Basically, I lost all respect for a society that so enthusiastically embraced such an abominable evil. I saw in the Christian faith the only coherent and complete response to the issues over which I was struggling. In my reading I was deeply moved by the vision, maturity, and power of Catholic teaching. In fact, my exposure to Catholic teaching came from volunteering at a pro-life office, and I had the job of cutting out and filing pro-life articles. That was, by the way, my first exposure to the Register.
I felt called to give my life to the pro-life cause shortly after my conversion to Christianity. It was the pro-life issue that brought me to Christ, to salvation, so my life seems little to give in return.
What is the future of The Caring Foundation, and how can people support your efforts?
Right now The Caring Foundation is working to be on the air in the top 25 television markets in the United States; that will reach almost half the population of the country. In some states we work closely with the local right-to-life group and in some cases we work independently. Where and when we air depends entirely on the enthusiasm and support from people in local television markets, so we need individuals to contact us who would like to see these ads in their region.
The whole effort is beautifully simple, as we only need a few people willing to help spread the word about our work, right from their home or place of work. We don't generally use large events or an administrative team other than one representative of The Caring Foundation. This way the vast majority of every dollar raised goes directly into air time. Once people in a region start to learn about our work, it tends to snowball rather quickly, and the funds, which are tax deductible, can be raised for local campaigns.
Initially, my involvement with The Caring Foundation was only a small part of my pro-life work, but I am now hoping to focus on it full time. As much as I've enjoyed my various pro-life endeavors, it has been a special honor to work with a team of such professionals, helping to promote a pro-life effort that is positive and persuasive, with a proven track record.
It means a lot of travel for me, and being away from my lovely wife and the kids is not easy. But I trust I'm where God wants me to be right now. If loving your work is a sign that you are in the right place, then I have no worries.
Paul Swope is the Northeast director of The Caring Foundation, a nonprofit organization that combines marketing research and television advertising to promote the prolife message. Television commercials, which target women ages 18 to 44, have been seen in more than 30 media markets in the past two years, reaching approximately 40 million adults. Swope, who resides in Derry, N.H., recently spoke with Register correspondent Joseph Esposito.
Paul Swope may be reached at The Caring Foundation: 1-800-705-9497.
—Joseph Esposito
----- EXCERPT: Can a television ad campaign reshape the abortion debate? ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Esposito ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: NOTES & QUOTES DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:U.S.
American Religious Breakdown Changing Rapidly
In the mid-19th century, Catholics began to change America's religious makeup when they began immigrating here in droves.
At the end of the 20th century, the same thing is happening — only other religions are immigrating now as well, said a two-part article June 21-22 in The Los Angeles Times.
Four million Muslims now live in the United States — five times as many as there were in 1970. Nearly half are African-Americans, said the article — and, if the current pace keeps up, Islam should be more prevalent in the United States than Judaism (which has stopped growing at 5.5 million members) by the year 2000.
Buddhists have increased by 10 times their 1970 numbers — to 2 million; Hindus from 100,000 to 950,000; Sikhs from 1,000 to 220,000.
The nation's high-majority Christian population (85%) is changing, as well, said the article. Only half of Americans now die in the denomination they were born into. The fastest growing communities in the last 25 years: Pentecostal, Mormon, and Jehovah's Witness.
Sharp declines by Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and United Methodists are arrested only by an influx of Presbyterian and Methodist Koreans, who are beginning to make up small but significant percentages of those Churches, said the article.
The Catholic Church still has the most American members, at 60 million, and unlike the other mainline Christian Churches, it is expanding. Latino immigrants have helped it expand even more: Catholics from south of the border now make up nearly a third of Catholic Church membership.
The article said atheism is thriving. There are 1 million Americans who call themselves atheists, five times the number 30 years ago. Many of the self-reported atheists, however, are perhaps better described as “agnostic.”
The article pointed out that many are Church-going and say they are hedging their bets.
Senators' Views Are Intolerably Intolerant
Homosexual activists are all for tolerance, Debra Saunders said in a June 21 column in the San Francisco Chronicle — as long as it means other people tolerating their views, and not the other way around.
She referred to Sens. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Don Nickles (R-Okla.), who have been under fire for condemning homosexual sex acts in separate interviews.
Speaking about the nomination of homosexual activist James Hormel to a U.S. ambassadorship, Lott called sodomy a “sin.” Nickles agreed, and made a distinction between something that was a private behavior and a lifestyle that was publicly promoted. Echoing the sentiments of those who criticized the senators, the White House called their views “backward.”
Wrote Saunders, “Lott counseled in favor of loving the sinner if hating the sin, and against mistreating gays as ‘outcasts.'”
“Shame on that Trent Lott,” she continued. “He is a very intolerant man, intolerant even for a politician in Washington, D.C. And if there's one thing folks [in San Francisco] can't tolerate, it's intolerance.”
She said, sarcastically, “Yes, San Francisco is soooo tolerant ...” and then pointed to the city's failure to give Catholic Charities and the Salvation Army waivers to the city's requirement that businesses and nonprofits provide benefits for the sexual partners who live with workers.
The Salvation Army left the city over the policy — forcing it to end its soup kitchen and AIDS hospice services. Saunders pointed out that high-profile and high-profit ventures such as sports groups and amusement parks were given waivers.
In short, she said, “Tolerance is a one-way street in The Special City. That's because we're so much better — so much more open — than that rube Lott.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Catholic Radio Network Scheduled To Begin Broadcasting Sept. 1 DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:SAN DIEGO-As reported in the Register May 3, Ignatius Press founder and president Father Joseph Fessio SJ is working feverishly with San Diego-based broadcast veteran John Lynch and others to form a 24-hour national talk radio network, the Catholic Radio Network.
The organization is in the process of finalizing purchase of a 10-station network from Children's Broadcasting Network, which includes major stations in six of the 10 top radio markets in the United States.
A life-long broadcaster, Lynch started a radio network, which he sold to Jay Corps 18 months ago, resulting in significant returns for his investors. Speaking from experience, he projected that the Catholic Radio Network will increase to 40 or 50 stations in order to maintain an efficient model. New deals, he said, are already on the table in San Francisco, San Diego, and Washington, D.C.
Lynch, the network's CEO, also stated that the enterprise has been established as a for-profit entity in order to attract investors who want to earn a good return as well as being committed to the cause of nationwide Catholic radio.
He spoke by phone to attendees of the Catholic Marketing Network-Catholic Lay Broadcasting Network communications expo regarding the status of the network and programming plans.
“Sept. 1 is our start-up date,” Lynch said, adding that Archbishop Charles Chaput OFM Cap, who is on the network's board of directors, wrote letters to all of the bishops asking for their support in this enterprise and had received many encouraging replies.
Lynch said the network has secured $35 million from banks and that it seeks at least as much funds from investors. So far, he said, a total of more than $55 million dollars has been raised, but they were “holding out for another major investor.” The minimum investment is $250,000.
Chief Financial Officer Frank DiFrancesco, a long-time associate of Lynch's, is in the process of assembling a strong sales team for each major station. Bill McMahan, one of the nation's top talk-show consultants, noted for “putting Rush Limbaugh on the air,” was hired full-time in order to develop the network's programming.
The popular Dr. Laura show is one of the models the network seeks to emulate, perhaps incorporating short features such as “businessperson of the day,” “mother of the day,” etc., to highlight people who are living their faith in the ordinary circumstances of life.
Hourly news is scheduled to be supplemented with Catholic news, and special weekend programming is slated to include such features as Notre Dame football, an hour call-in show with Church prelates, and Sunday morning Mass broadcast from the great cathedrals of the world.
“We need compelling programming,” Lynch explained. “Our target is the broad amount of Catholics who are either not committed [in their faith] or doing a good job” but needing encouragement and support.
Lynch further explained that there are several ways they plan to expand the network. Catholic Radio Network will assume any group, anywhere in the country, who secures half the cost of purchasing a wide-range suitable station in their area and shares the network's vision. They will also enter into affiliation agreements with other stations.
At this point, the first-ever national Catholic radio network seems to be “moving on” just fine. Keep your ears tuned for Sept. 1.
For more information, call the Catholic Radio Network headquarters: 619-784-6900. (Karen Walker)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Colombia's New Catholic President Awakens Hope of Change DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:BOGOTA-The scene was both unusual and highly emotional. In her best Spanish, Valentina, the two-year-old blond daughter of Andres Pastrana, officially announced, on behalf of the Conservative Party, that her father, a presidential candidate for the second time, was the new president of Colombia.
The atypical gesture was, for many, a metaphor of the fresh start Colombians are expecting after 12 years of Liberal Party control over the presidency and the government structure.
“In these [last] years, Colombia has seen a political, social, and economic decline with almost no precedence in the history of the Republic,” said independent congressman Carlos Corsi Otarola, a harsh critic of the Liberal administration. According to Otarola, “From the moment in which [President Ernesto] Samper took office, Colombia has only gone down and down.”
Figures seem to support Corsi's opinion. In fact, when Samper became president of Colombia after narrowly defeating Andres Pastrana, Colombia was the South American country with the smallest foreign debt; it competed with Chile for the lowest inflation rate in the region; and it had a stable annual growth rate between 2.5% to 3%. Nevertheless, a dramatic lack of confidence followed accusations involving Samper's campaign with drug money, and it had a severe impact on Colombia's economy, as well as on the government's capacity to negotiate with the ever-growing Marxist guerrilla movement.
This time, Pastrana defeated Horacio Serpa — dubbed by the press as “Samper's political bodyguard” — with a campaign focused on two main promises: immediate peace negotiations with the guerrillas and bold economic reform.
Archbishop Alberto Giraldo Jaramillo, president of the Colombian Bishops' Conference, was one of the first to greet the newly elected president.
“We offer our prayers for him and for all Colombians, and we expect that he will start to deliver the promises he made to our people,” Archbishop Giraldo said.
Archbishop Pedro Rubiano Saenz of Bogota, an outspoken critic of President Samper, said fighting corruption, especially the ties between political power and drug money “is a challenge that the new president must face in order to recover the internal and international credibility of the Colombian government.”
Despite the fact that the Catholic hierarchy was clearly neutral during the presidential campaign, sources from the Colombian bishops' conference, off the record, expressed relief about the end of Liberal control, which not only affected the country, but also damaged the Catholic Church with the approval of several laws — including the legalization of euthanasia.
Minutes after his daughter announced his victory, Pastrana delivered an eloquent message, making an appeal “for a reconciliation among all Colombians, especially with those who have chosen the path of violence.... I am starting a conversation with the insurgency right away, I only request the government to provide me with the needed support,” said Pastrana.
His possibilities to broker a peace agreement are better than those of any other president in the recent past: for the first time, leaders of the “Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia,” known as FARC, have announced their willingness to negotiate a peace agreement with the Colombian president.
Pastrana, a practicing Catholic, has requested all Colombians to pray for the future of the country. At the end of his campaign, a few minutes before the electoral authorities confirmed his victory, Pastrana's core political team gathered around a tall image of Mary as the Immaculate Conception and prayed for several minutes in silence. He then left his private studio to speak his first words as president: “Let us pray to God, asking for his guidance in order to achieve peace and justice soon in our country.”
“May he bless you all and bless me, your new president.” (ACI-PRENSA)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: World Notes & Quotes DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:U.S. Lithuanians Brought Eucharistic Devotion with Them
To Lithuanians in the United States, Corpus Christi has an added significance. Eucharistic processions were illegal after the invasion of Russian communists, and immigrants are happy to have the opportunity to honor the Blessed Sacrament here.
This year's Corpus Christi date also coincided with the June 14 anniversary of the deportation of 35,000 Lithuanians to Siberia by invading Russian communists in 1941. Danute Surdenas, a Philadelphia participant in eucharistic devotions told the Philadelphia Inquirer June 21: “All of us had relatives who were deported,” that year. Eucharistic devotion is a way to participate in the same celebration as those relatives.
Said the report, “In the procession, [Father] Peter Burkauskas carried a gold monstrance containing a communion host to four altars erected outside the church, stopping at each one to chant a prayer while the congregation sang hymns.”
Father Burkauskas said of the processions, “We bring the Lithuanian heritage out of the church to show the world our devotion to the Eucharist. On this day, we reverence the memory of our people who suffered and thank God that the light of freedom and the blessing of independence has returned to Lithuania.”
Lebanese Christians Wary of Present Peace
Unusual in the Arab world, Lebanon's politics, culture, and economy have been dominated by Christians for 50 years. But no longer, said an Associated Press report June 22.
“The Christians today are splintered,” Father Joseph Sukkar, a Maronite Catholic priest there, is quoted saying. “They are nowhere to be found in government or in politics.”
The devastating 1975-1990 civil war there was lost by Lebanon's Christians when they surrendered authority to stop the fighting. The powerful Maronite Catholic presidency and the guaranteed Maronite majority in Parliament have been lost due to new census procedures, said the report, while “long-time Christian leaders are in prison, in exile, or in the grave.”
Lebanese Christians also feel the absence of support they once received from Europe, America and, occasionally, even from Israel. The present peace comes at the cost of Syrian control — which many Christians consider antagonistic to them.
While Christian suburbs in Beirut and elsewhere flourish, critics point out that the only war crime successfully prosecuted after the long civil war was against the brutal warlord Samir Geagea, of Maronite descent. Crimes by Syrians have not been pursued, they say.
Christian leaders, perhaps fearing a rekindling of the violence, are calling for Christians to become more active in civic life in the Arab nation.
British Parliament Lowers Age of Consent for Homosexuals
The British parliament has taken the first legislative step to legalizing pedophilia, London wire services reported June 23. The British Commons voted by a 3-1 margin that homosexual men and lesbians could legally have sex with consenting 16- year-olds in England.
Homosexual activists reportedly consider the move a “first step” and eventually want the consent age lowered even further — initially, to age 14, according to the report.
The measure passed by a 3-to-1 majority, and it is unlikely that the House of Lords will overturn it.
Basil Cardinal Hume, archbishop of England and Wales, strongly opposed the measure. He is quoted saying: “I would urge [Members of Parliament] to reflect on the signal they wish to send to the nation.”
After the vote, he said, “Whatever the legal age of consent, the Catholic Church's teaching remains that homosexual sex acts are morally wrong.”
Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey also warned that the measures would send “the wrong messages.”
One amendment was proposed to prevent men from sexually preying on boys in their charge. It would have raised the consent age to 18 where one party was in a position of “authority, influence, or trust.” That amendment was rejected, allowing teachers, supervisors, or bosses to legally engage their charges in a sexual relationship.
The age of consent for heterosexual sex acts had previously been lowered to 16 in England, and homosexual sex acts are permitted with 16 year olds in much of the European Union, according to the article.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Vatican Notes & Quotes DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:Pope Continues Pace of Travels
BBC Religious Affairs Reporter Jane Little narrated a June 19 story about the Pope, whose recent visit to Austria showed that John Paul II is still the most mobile Pope in history. As she spoke, images of the Pope's many recent travels were shown.
“It is hard for many to keep up with this Pope's travel itinerary.... The 78- year-old John Paul shows no signs of slowing down, determined to preach to as many of the world's 1 billion Catholics as possible.
“He has now visited more than 100 countries and has, according to one estimate, circled the world 27 times in the ground he has covered.... His favorite destination outside of Europe has been Latin America where he has been to every nation.
“Many of his visits have been on saint-making missions and to rally the faithful,” but often with political consequences, she said.
His visit to Cuba, “was a publicity coup for a man who after 20 years in power, has raised the political profile of the Church, and his own as a champion of human rights.”
As for the future?
“The Pope has already announced plans to visit Croatia, Mexico, and his native Poland, and hopes to visit Jerusalem and the Holy Land to celebrate the new millennium,” she reported.
Cardinal Schˆnborn: ‘A Man on the Move'
“When Pope John Paul II's plane landed in Vienna, a prelate in cardinal's red raced down its back stairs and bounded up the front ramp to officially welcome the Pope to the Austrian capital,” said a June 24 Associated Press story.
“It seemed only natural that it was Cardinal Christoph Schˆnborn, the archbishop of Vienna — clearly, a man on the move.”
The report said that, though a cardinal since only February, and young at 53, Cardinal Schˆnborn is already expected to find a place in the Vatican and is even considered among the more likely candidates for next Pope.
As Vienna's archbishop since September 1995, said the article, “he has shown himself to be open, articulate, and courageous” in a very difficult situation.
At a press conference associated with the Holy Father's visit, Cardinal Schˆnborn surprised reporters by answering questions in fluent English, Italian, and French as well as his native German.
“I hope the Pope's visit will show that the Austrian Church is alive, not without problems, but full of vitality,” he said.
Cardinal Schˆnborn was born in Czechoslovakia “to a noble family of Austrian descent,” said the article. They had left their native land in 1945 to escape the communists.
A Dominican, he was educated in Austria, Germany, and France. He has been a priest since 1963 and a bishop since 1991. An expert in Catholic theology, he edited the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
“[Cardinal] Schˆnborn's friends point out that he has another important quality: being able to laugh at himself.” At one point in his dealings with reporters, said the report, he mocked his own seriousness, pausing and asking, “Am I being too pious?”
When In Rome, Mormons Sing from Catholic Hymnal
Featuring Catholic soloist Robert Breault, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performed a truly memorable concert just outside the Vatican in Rome recently, said a June 24 Church News report. The show, and its enthusiastic reception, demonstrates the power of the arts, and the importance of the Catholic Church's rich artistic heritage.
“The choir's [June] concert in Rome is being touted as one of its best and one that conquered the hearts of its audience. So well received was the choir that many in the audience stood, cheered, applauded, and called out for more songs.
“It seemed that the audience didn't want the choir to leave, and evidence that the choir touched their hearts was found in the tears that many wiped from their eyes, especially during the singing of Come, Come, Ye Saints and I Am a Child of God. The first verses of both were sung by guest tenor soloist Robert Breault, professor of voice and director of opera at the University of Utah.”
“Breault stepped onto the stage of Academia Santa Cecilia, located near the Vatican — the center of his own Catholic roots — to also perform the tenor solo in the Gloria from Puccini's Missa di Gloria, or Mass of Glory. He sang with such tender yet exultant conviction that the audience seemed convinced that he was exactly where he wanted to be, singing just what he wanted to sing.”
Breault was happy to sing with a choir of a different faith — they are the best he has performed with, he said — particularly since they were singing Catholic pieces, according to the report.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Two Small Steps for Parents' Rights DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:Two important bills are pending in Congress: the Child Custody Protection Act and the Title X Parental Notification Act. While brief and uncomplicated, they expose a rift at the fault line dividing American society. The bills rest on a simple truth: You can't get a life, and you can't get on in life, without parents. Although this reality is an enduring source of embarrassment to most teenagers, there's no escaping it. Much as teens chafe under their parents' control, values, advice, probing questions, and even their proximity in public, the parent-child relationship is an immutable feature of the human condition.
Children need two decades, more or less, of love, education, training, discipline, and experience to be able to function independently of parents and make sound decisions concerning their lives. Throughout this formative period, parents have the right and duty to guide their children well. This last proposition should hardly be controversial. For centuries, all sorts of rights flowing from the parent-child relationship have been acknowledged and protected by law, among them decisions concerning custody, education, and medical care.
Any mom and dad who has had to provide a school nurse with written permission just to see that their child gets a midday dose of an over-the-counter medication might think that parents have adequate control over medical care. But they would be mistaken. There's one large and hazardous exception, thanks to a quiet transformation in the law at the hands of activists who have been trying to liberate American culture from traditional (“religious”) values.
When it comes to sex — the prevention and “treatment” of pregnancy and the prevention and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) — it seems neither mother nor father knows best. Arecent issue of Time magazine implies that such issues are best left to experts like Planned Parenthood, the abortion industry, and their whole network of sympathetic educators, counselors, and lawyers. These groups have systematically eliminated parental “obstacles” along the pathway of youngsters wanting to be sexually active.
Kids want to avoid pregnancy and STDs, those double whammys of teen sex that used to be red flags for parents? No problem. Your school or neighborhood clinic offers free condoms and prescriptions for the Pill. No questions asked.
Oops, caught a STD anyway? Your parents don't have to know. We'll treat you confidentially at government expense.
Aw, the contraceptives failed and now you're pregnant and need to dispose of the evidence before your parents find out? You bring the cash and we'll take care of the problem.
Your state has a parental notice or consent law? Well, we can walk you through the judicial bypass or, even easier, drive you into the next state where abortion clinics advertise “no parental consent needed.” We do that for thousands of girls every year.
Parents aren't left completely out of the picture. They are encouraged, of course, to become involved in caring for their children afflicted with AIDS, as well as in post-abortion medical complications like uterine punctures, blood clots, hemorrhaging, suicide attempts and the like.
What the current scheme amounts to is nothing short of a conspiracy to keep parents in the dark about their minor children's sexual exploits, abuse, diseases and “unforeseen complications,” such as pregnancy. Yet polls consistently show overwhelming (85%) support for parental notice-consent laws regarding minors' abortions. More than 20 states have enacted such laws to ensure that parents are able to exercise their right and duty to assist a minor daughter in pregnancy-related decisions, and to protect her, if a bit belatedly, from abuse and coercion by the baby's father or third parties. Recent studies reveal that about two-thirds of pregnant single teens are impregnated by predatory adult males, seven years older on average than the girls involved.
The Title X Parental Notification Act would lift the blanket of confidentiality surrounding prescription drugs and devices given minor children for the purpose of contraception and the treatment of STDs. Title X-funded family planning clinics would be required to notify parents five business days before their unmarried minor child receives such a prescription.
Many contraceptive drugs and devices pose serious health risks. They also give children a false sense of security, thus encouraging risky and immoral behavior. The abortion industry admits that 56% of women seeking abortion were using a contraceptive in the month they became pregnant. The epidemic of STDs (including incurable and fatal STDs) proves that contraceptives offer little or no protection against many such afflictions.
Moreover, confidentiality abets child abusers like the Crystal Lake (Ill.) teacher convicted last year of criminal sexual assault for his 18-month affair with a 14-year-old student. He had taken her routinely to a local Title X clinic for injections of Depo- Provera, a powerful hormonal contraceptive. The bill would require Title X clinics to comply with state reporting laws concerning child abuse, child molestation, sexual abuse, rape, and incest and end clinics' complicity in these crimes.
It's time for a reality check. Parents must be trusted to protect their minor children from the many dreadful consequences of the promiscuous lifestyle they are being encouraged to follow. These two bills are small, but necessary, steps to reverse the erosion of parental rights.
Susan Wills is assistant director for program development for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Susan Wills ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Middle-class America: A Study in Apathy? DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:by Alan Wolfe
(Viking Penguin, 1998, 322 pages, hardcover $24.95)
One hundred twenty-five years ago, Abraham Lincoln spoke briefly at a new cemetery at Gettysburg about the uniqueness of the American nation, a nation founded on a shared commitment to a set of propositions. Where other nations were bound together into a civic whole by a common language or a common history, the American people were bound together by a conviction that certain things were true about how a society ought to be shaped. Whatever the background of an individual, he could be an American by dedicating himself to hold and defend these truths.
In recent years, though, we have heard a great deal about the disintegration of the American experiment, about the rejection of traditional values, and about the abandonment of our common convictions. We are moving, some would say, from being a Christian nation with a shared culture to a nation of many faiths, many cultures, and hyphenated citizens.
Alan Wolfe, a sociologist at Boston University, and his colleagues began to wonder several years ago whether these claims and criticisms were really true. They decided to explore in some depth the convictions of a small number (about 200) of middle-class Americans from typical suburban communities around the country. In particular, the researchers wanted to discover what the views of these Americans might be on issues related to religion, morality, family values, multiculturalism and racism, and citizenship.
To ferret out these views they developed a written survey and followed the survey with extended personal interviews. The result is One Nation, After All, a summary of their research results heavily interlaced with quotations from the subjects themselves.
Their research led them to conclusions about middle- class morality that were somewhat different from what they had anticipated. Focusing on the suburbs, they expected to find people who were largely indifferent to the problems of the inner city and the poor, but found otherwise. They expected to find people who supported politically conservative goals, and while their research confirmed this, they were surprised to discover that most people were quite uncomfortable with Republican means for achieving these goals. They also expected to find a considerable erosion in the commitment of middle-class Americans to fundamental values, but instead they found a strong and consistent set of convictions.
The first area that Wolfe explores is the faith life of his respondents. Not surprisingly, he finds that a large majority of middle-class Americans readily admit that religion is important in their lives, but that faith takes quite a few different shapes in practice.
“Most middle-class Americans,” he writes, “take their religion seriously. But very few take it so seriously that they believe that religion should be the sole, or even the most important, guide for establishing rules about how other people should live.”
For most Americans, religion is an intensely private area of life. Wolfe notes with approval that tolerance toward the religious practices of others (not to say indifference) appears to be growing. While tolerance can be a virtue, especially in so pluralistic a society as our own, it may also arise not so much from a fundamental respect for differing religious traditions as from apathy toward one's own.
Wolfe characterizes many of his respondents as possessing a “quiet faith,” one that is held privately and perhaps even strongly, but one that plays only a limited role in shaping one's participation in the community. If this is truly characteristic of middle-class America then perhaps we are not merely quiet in our faith, but dormant.
Wolfe acknowledges a disconnection in the thinking of many people who admit that their faith is very important in their own lives, but who resist sharing that faith with others. In his view, we are quite individualistic in our beliefs. This emerges not only as an insistence on faith as a private matter, but also in a disdain for organized Churches.
“A situation in which every individual finds their own way to God,” he observes, “is one that a large number of Americans find more comfortable than one in which highly organized institutions fight with each other both for members and for truth.”
A similar disconnection appears to exist in the minds of many of the people interviewed when the subject is morality as distinct from religion. Wolfe's team was surprised to discover that while many people have firm views on the rights and wrongs of certain kinds of behavior, their willingness to oppose what they regard as wrong behavior is severely tempered by their concern for privacy. They may think something is quite wrong, as a large majority do in the case of homosexual activity, but they are unwilling to support restraints on it as long as it remains private behavior.
Part of this attitude apparently has to do with the fact that most people have intuitive rather than principled objections to immoral behavior. They may feel that it is wrong, but apart from those who appeal to Scripture or religious doctrine, they rarely have an explanation to offer.
Instead, they are inclined to make judgments in terms of immediate consequences. “Middle-class Americans seek not to do the right thing,” Wolfe notes, “but to do the workable thing.” They are very strongly disposed to avoid conflict and to prefer moral accommodations, as in the abortion debate, that respect a person's right to hold and express an opinion, but that also insure the liberty of individuals to act as they choose.
Though Wolfe is inclined to hold a position of greater tolerance for religious and moral differences, to his credit he is uncomfortable with a purely pragmatic morality. He is right when he writes that “A society that reaches moral judgments through anecdotes is a society whose moral judgments will always be arbitrary.”
One could quite readily come away from this book concluding that the real moral problem for American society is not a passionate attachment to the wrong moral principles, but rather a sort of apathy toward any moral principles at all. In the end, One Nation, After All is an intriguing portrait of middle-class America that rings true in many ways. Wolfe's liberal biases are apparent, but he takes care to make them so. While there are significant limitations in the book, the insights it provides are a reminder that the middle-class may not have changed as much as some would have us believe.
Robert Kennedy heads the Department of Management at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Robert Kennedy ----- KEYWORDS: Analysis -------- TITLE: It Takes Not a Village, But a Mother DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:The spring 1998 issue of Human Life Review carries Maria McFadden's look at the tension between parents and experts regarding the day care issue.
McFadden describes “studies that link early full-time day care with psychological, social, and behavioral problems: children become less attached to their parents, more resistant to authority, more aggressive with peers, and, in cases of low-quality care, become cognitively delayed. A 1995 national study by the University of Colorado found 40% of day care for infants and toddlers to be of harmful quality (only 8% was considered ‘quality').”
Most working parents, aware of the potential for problems in an institutional approach, “want to keep care-giving at home with family members, nannies, or au-pairs. Nor do most parents see child-care as an area for governmental intervention. The Clinton (read Hillary?) ... plan is to give tax breaks for day care, and ‘improve it,'while doing nothing — in fact, even making it harder — for parents who want to stay home, work part-time, or have private child-care arrangements.”
Why this governmental prejudice in favor of institutional care? “There is ... a social agenda, which is very much in accord with both the Clintons' politics and policies and radical feminism: put pressure on Americans to accept the social rearing of children. You know, It Takes A Village.”
As it has been since Betty Friedan, “Motherhood is the road block in the progress of radical feminism, which seeks to free women from their biology.... Thus, the raising of children must be a social endeavor.”
In the real world of working mothers, McFadden points out, “Women who work full-time often feel guilty or constantly worried about the quality of their child care; women who mother full-time often feel underappreciated and denigrated by others, and maybe even in conflict with their husbands. Mothers who do feel that they ought to be the primary caretaker of their children are often made to feel backward or unambitious by their peers and the culture of the elite.”
McFadden credits George Gilder's 1973 book, Sexual Suicide, with predicting most of the ramifying results of the sexual revolution: “Gilder also wrote of the danger of the feminist demand for universal day care — it would benefit the middle and upper class women seeking ‘meaningful ’careers, but would force poor women, who might want to stay home, into the work force.... Gilder predicted that if the mother- child bond was, in extraordinary circumstances, broken, then the identity of the group would also break down. Sexual Suicide was published in 1973, the year of Roe v. Wade. With the legalization of abortion, the mother-child bond was broken in a profound way. Pregnancy no longer meant you were tied to another, like it or not; it was something you could ‘reverse.'”
If the feminists are wrong, and biology is destiny, writes McFadden, then “life in the womb is an allegory of the life outside and, really, a preview. In pregnancy, the woman and her child share an intimate relationship that is unique, irreplaceable, and constant. Once born, the relationship is of necessity physically less close and constant, but ideally birth is the beginning of a new stage of powerful love and intimate connection between mother and child.”
But many experts make their living “correcting” parental decisions, for “in a society with more and more paid ‘experts ’on child care, mothers' and parents' instincts are not trusted. Parents are told that their children are better off in daycare centers or early school programs than at home, because they will be ‘socialized early, ’even though most people instinctively feel that whole days spent away from home can be a real strain on little children, and that secure nurturing fosters individuality. We are told that it is ‘quality time, ’not quantity time, that matters. But how many marriages break up because the husband and wife were too often physically separated?”
But then, other experts attack traditional marriage too: “Pretty soon we will question whether people even need significant others — why not a series of ‘mutually enhancing ’relationships (it takes a village...)?”
Maria McFadden closes with another quotation from George Gilder: “When [a mother] raises a child she imparts in privacy her own individual values. She can create children who transcend consensus and prefigure the future: children of private singularities rather than ‘child development policy.'“
Ellen Wilson Fielding writes from Davidsonville, Maryland.
The Definite Article samples the Register's choice from the nation's top journals.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Ellen Wilson Fielding ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:Excellent Reading
My wife and I read many Catholic and secular publications. We are pleased to discover that your paper provides excellent reading and stimulating news which we had not been getting from other sources.
Edward Waterbury Clearwater, Florida
Good Theater, Good Paper
I am writing in belated appreciation of Peter Cameron's insightful and inspiring review of The Sound of Music in the May 17-23 issue. It was the best example of delight and instruction that I have seen in years. The review was as ennobling as the show itself. Broadway and journalism both at their best.
Frederick Marke Forest Hills, New York
Catching Up
When I studied and lived in the United States in the 50s and 60s. I always read your excellent paper.
Earlier this year I wrote to a priest-friend who was kind enough to locate your March 8-14 issue and send it to me. It took me many, many years to relocate you, but finally I succeeded.
I especially enjoyed your news and the articles on Islam and St. Bernadette in that issue.
Best regards to you, your associates, and your readers. U.S. Catholics do not know how lucky they are to have some intelligent Catholic periodicals.
Jose Guzman Quito, Ecuador
Jane Roe's Conversion
Kudos on all the recent coverage of Norma McCorvey, or “Jane Roe,” as most of this country knows her. After following the occasional stories about her in recent years, I believe your coverage — especially “Living With the Ghosts of Roe,” the lengthy “inperson” interview with her, Register June 21-2, gave a more complete picture of the woman who has most often been portrayed as an unwitting pawn of forces bent on legalizing a woman's so called “right to choose.” Then, I vividly recall a few years back when she became a born-again Christian, the Los Angeles Times did a profile of McCorvey that made her seem like an unsophisticated bumpkin who was now going to be used as a “we told you so” poster child of the pro-lifers. Well, judging from your interview with McCorvey, she reveals, with her own words and ideas — instead of the L.A. Times reporter's obviously skewed rendering of her — that she's no dummy. She knows where she's been and just who's used her, and she's more than capable of articulating it. If once she was a pawn, it now seems she's a woman who knows her own heart and mind. When I think of her journey from drug-poisoned dupe of the abortion movement to ardent pro-lifer and future member of the Catholic Church, I can't help but think of Mary Magdalene.
I. Matias via e-mail
Fax: (203) 288-5157; e-mail: editor@ncregister.com
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Young America's Love AffairWith The Spice Girls DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:When it comes to the Spice Girls, a scantily-clad English group that has evoked almost as much high-pitched screaming as The Beatles, it's not the lack of talent that bothers me.
Or the banal lyrics. Or the elevator-music quality that seems to infest their melodies.
No, I could live with all that. I could laugh at a British invasion by women with names like Baby, Posh, Scary, and Sporty. I could chuckle at the devotion expended on the group by so many pre-pubescent American girls who idolize the gang of four. (Spice Girl watchers will remember that flame-haired Ginger recently left the group, a move that broke many a young heart.)
Of course, when mentioning the remaining girls to young devotees, it is proper to use “Spice” in place of their last names: Baby Spice, Posh Spice, Scary Spice, and Sporty Spice. Just a word of advice, to avoid correction by those in the know.
Once, I was immature, too. When I was 12, I idolized Mickey, one of the singers in The Monkees. The other girls in my class were devoted to Davey, the bestlooking member of the four-man band. But I loved curly-haired Mickey, the joker of the bunch. He wasn't as handsome, but he had hidden depths to his personality, or so I imagined. He never answered the letter I sent to him.
The Spice Girls, though, are a different sort of animal. They are a band with a message that is distinctly anti-women. They are saying to young girls: you are sex objects.
For a brief history lesson, it's a philosophy that originated with men in the decades and centuries prior to the Women's Movement of the 1970s. In that long-ago era, males who did not accept Christian teachings concerning the dignity of women tended to be the only ones who used women as sex objects.
Today, many women have learned, though exposure to modern culture, to treat themselves like sex objects. To see examples of such behavior, take a look at the best-selling “women's magazines” the next time you're standing in a grocery checkout line. You're likely to find a half-naked model on the cover, in an animalistic pose. Remember — these are magazines aimed at women, not men.
And you're sure to find one or two cover stories on sex — getting it, improving it, or changing it — as well as a quiz to check to see whether you're up to par with your sex life (an odd term that could only exist in an age that encourages the fragmentation of the human personality).
As well, there is likely to be a cover story on “how to get him to commit.” Leading to the next natural question: why should he?
The Spice Girls represent a giant step forward in the campaign to strip women of their dignity. The group is like a human smart bomb. Why wait until girls are in their late teens or early 20s to teach them that their human worth is based on sex? Get them when they're young — even as young as seven or eight, the age of many devotees.
If you doubt my words, check out the pictures that accompany the June 23 story on the group in the Life section of USA Today. One shows a 12-year-old girl with a bare midriff and low-slung jeans, a fan who attended a recent Spice Girls concert in Virginia.
Her T-shirt is pulled up and knotted so high that it borders on being indecent. Written on her stomach is the battle cry of the band: “Girl Power.”
She's just copying the style and behavior of her idols, the Girls.
“Let's get naked,” one of the Spice Girls announced as the group performed one of its hits, straddling chairs that strategically conceal what is supposed to look like nudity.
Perhaps the scariest part of the story is the input from the adult women who were at the concert — the so-called “Spice Moms,” who dress like the members of the band and encourage their young daughters, or, in some cases, their nieces, to idolize the Girls.
“They teach girls how to be independent,” said a 38- year-old woman who brought her 13-year-old niece to the concert. Both are pictured, dressed in crotch-revealing shorts, high heels, and immodest shirts. Not surprisingly, the 13-year-old looks like a grown-up woman.
Is that what being independent means? Dressing and acting like a prostitute?
Today, young girls need examples of strong-minded women who will teach them the meaning of human dignity. They're not going to find that in the Spice Girls.
Kathleen Howley is a Boston-based journalist.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kathleen Howley ----- KEYWORDS: Analysis -------- TITLE: Burying the Abortion-Breast Cancer Link DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:Has ‘mainstream ’medicine's interest in preserving the notion of 'safe abortion ’marginalized a significant and statistically provable danger to women's health?
What do you suppose would happen if a reputable team of American cancer researchers, funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the federal agency that pays for most cancer research in the United States, conducted a study that produced convincing evidence that American women who have had an induced abortion end up with a significant (50%) higher risk of acquiring breast cancer than those who have never had an abortion? And what if these scientists then published the results in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI)?
Reasonable people would expect the JNCI would also publish an editorial in the same issue highlighting the study as important for American women to know. After all, induced abortion is a matter of choice, and breast cancer is the leading killer of middle-aged women. With well over a million abortions performed in the United States each year, and more than 180,000 cases of breast cancer resulting in some 40,000 breast cancer deaths, one would expect the NCI to sound the alarm.
In fact, this very scenario occurred in late 1994, with a slight difference: The JNCI editorial called the reported increased risk “small in epidemiologic terms,” and concluded that “the overall results as well as the particulars are far from conclusive, and it is difficult to see how they will be informative to the public.” This dismissive tone was adopted indiscriminately by the media and the possibility of a causal link between abortion and breast cancer (ABC link) faded quickly from the public mind.
Considering the investment of “mainstream” medicine and public health in the reputation of “safe abortion,” a reluctance to allow abortion to cross the usually low threshold of inclusion on a list of cancer risk factors is understandable, if regrettable. But what is particularly significant and troubling about this episode is that it is neither the first nor the last chapter in the story of a death-dealing cover-up that has spanned the globe for decades, and which continues in full force, from the highest places.
Early Research
Long before Roe v. Wade, a nationwide study on cancer in Japan, published in that nation's most prominent (English language) cancer research journal, found a 150% to 200% increased incidence of breast cancer among women who had had abortions. These were cancer patients diagnosed between 1948 and 1952, and the study was published in 1957.
With abortion being uncommon in most of the world at the time, few studies appeared in the next several years. The most prominent was a multi-center study conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO) in places as far-flung as Taipei, Taiwan; Boston, Mass.; and Sao Pauolo, Brazil. Although this study did not distinguish between induced abortion and spontaneous abortion (miscarriage), it revealed a disturbing trend “in the direction which suggested increased risk associated with abortion — contrary to the reduction in risk associated with full-term births.” That was 1970, when abortion was first legalized in several U.S. states, and the landmark study was published in the WHO's own Bulletin.
Millions of “safe, legal” abortions later, in 1981, the first study on the ABC link in American women was published in the British Journal of Cancer. In the study, prominent University of Southern California epidemiologist Malcolm Pike and colleagues reported that women were 140% more likely to be afflicted with breast cancer by the age of 33 if they had aborted their first (or only) pregnancy.
Some public health authorities took Pike's findings seriously and responded appropriately. For example, Willard Cates of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), writing in the journal Science in 1982, expressed “concern about ... possibly higher risks of breast cancer in certain women.” National Institutes of Health scientist Bruce Stadel and colleagues at the CDC, in a letter published in the prominent British journal The Lancet, stated unequivocally, “Induced abortion before first-term pregnancy increases the risk of breast cancer.”
Such warnings were all the more credible as experimental verification in laboratory animal experiments were also appearing, most notably in the work of Jose and Irma Russo of the Michigan Cancer Foundation. Their experiments, still viewed today as landmarks, were published in the American Journal of Pathology in 1980.
Protecting Abortion
But signs of trouble in the medical research community emerged as well. A very prestigious group of Oxford epidemiologists, headed by Martin Vessey, reported in the British Journal of Cancer the results of a study they conducted on almost 1,200 English breast cancer patients. In the first line of their abstract, Vessey and companions noted the Pike study by name, and proclaimed that, on the contrary, the Oxford results were “entirely reassuring.” In other words, there was no trend toward increased risk in women who had had an abortion.
The trouble was the number of subjects in the Vessey study who had actually chosen abortion: It was “only a handful,” admitted the researchers (deep in the body of the text). In truth, the Vessey study was entirely irrelevant regarding any effects of induced abortion, yet it was put up as an authoritative study to protect the reputation of “safe” abortion. It seemed to do the trick, however, with the dreaded term “breast cancer” being absent from the ongoing public debate on abortion for more than another decade.
There was, however, a stream of studies quietly being published in the medical literature in the United States, Europe, and Japan that continued to verify the ABC link. But even in 1992, the American Medical Association's report of the safety of abortion, published in its own journal (JAMA), made no mention of breast cancer whatsoever; nor did the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in its review of potential as well as established breast cancer risks, mention abortion at all.
Late in 1992, having been engaged in breast cancer research among other projects, I came across evidence of the ABC link buried in the medical literature. In October 1994, the NCI study (mentioned above) by Janet Daling et al. of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center was published in the JNCI, with its gainsaying editorial. Two years later, my own “comprehensive review and meta-analysis” of the ABC link, written with colleagues from the Penn State College of Medicine, was published in the British Medical Association's Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health (JECH). In our study, we combined data from every available published study, using the most conservative statistical model. Of the 23 studies analyzed, 18 showed increased risk of breast cancer after induced abortion (now 25 of 31 studies; 11 of 12 on American women), and the average risk increase was — remains — a statistically significant 30%.
Bias, But Whose?
One of the reasons we opted for publishing the study in a British journal was to avoid the kind of editorial response Daling had received from the JNCI. However, two months later, the JNCI (Dec. 4, 1996 issue) published an editorial that attacked our study, calling our inference of a cause-and-effect relationship “a leap beyond the bounds of inference.” They resorted to ABC link critics' favorite four-letter word: bias. It was not an accusation of bias on our part against abortion (our research team represented both “pro-life” and “prochoice” points of view), but rather to the claim that actual findings of increased breast cancer risk in women who have had abortions are likely due to bias on the part of the study subjects.
This sort of bias is variously referred to as “response bias,” “reporting bias,” or “recall bias.” The theory is that in epidemiological “case-control” studies (most are of this type), women who have breast cancer may be more forthcoming and honest about reporting their abortions than the healthy “control” subjects to whom they are compared. If this occurs, the cancer patients will appear to have had a greater frequency of abortion than the healthy women, and will translate statistically to an increased risk of breast cancer among women who have aborted.
A team of Swedish researchers, headed by Olav Meirik of the World Health Organization, claimed to have direct, significant evidence of response bias in Swedish women. Specifically, they compared interview-based data to computerized medical records on the same population of Swedish women and found that healthy women underreported their induced abortion history “relative to over-reporting among cases.” In other words, their “evidence” of response bias depended on the assumption that abortions reported by some breast cancer patients, of which abortions the computer had no record, had not taken place at all — they had been “over-reported.” (This claim was retracted by Meirik et al. in March 1998.)
Importantly, every other attempt to produce evidence of response bias has come up empty. Further, the only American study based on computerized medical records rather than interviews (therefore immune to response bias) found a 90% increased risk of breast cancer with induced abortion.
None of this has managed to deter those bent on denial of the ABC link. The NCI has effectively adopted the position that a woman need not worry about the risk of breast cancer when considering abortion, based on a single study of Danish women published in the Jan. 9, 1997 NEJM. The study concluded that “Induced abortions have no overall effect on the risk of breast cancer,” but was a broad analysis of all 1.5 million Danish women born between 1935 and 1978; more than 300,000 abortions, and some 10,000 cases of breast cancer. The New York Times did not hesitate to jump on the NCI bandwagon, claiming that the Danish study “largely disproved the notion that abortions cause breast cancer.”
Flawed Study
Now, a year-and-a-half later, the NCI and its followers show no indication of modifying their position. On closer inspection, the Danish study (funded in part by our U.S. Department of Defense) falls apart. To detail but one of its fatal flaws, the study was based on abortion records dating back only to 1973, whereas, contrary to the study's claim, abortion had been legalized in Denmark, for reasons other than medical necessity, in 1939, and some 60,000 women recorded in the study as having had no abortions, actually had legal abortions on record. Although such flaws have been enumerated in the NEJM and other medical journals, such statements are as easily buried as the 40- plus years of published research that documents the ABC link.
The NCI and other federal agencies are subject to oversight by Congress, however, and some Washington officials are fulfilling the job they are constitutionally mandated to do. In a recent letter to the chairman of the Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation, Reps. Christopher Smith (R-N.J.) and Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) said: “It is clear that Congress must take the NCI to task for its alarming attempts to bury the ABC link.” The letter included a formal request for public hearings to be held by the Subcommittee. A similar letter was sent by Reps. Dave Weldon (R Fla.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who are physicians.
It is comforting to know that Lincoln was right: “You can't fool all the people all the time.” Especially when it concerns the most avoidable risk for breast cancer.
Joel Brind PhD is a professor of biology and endocrinology at Baruch College of the City University of New York, and editor-publisher of the Abortion-Breast Cancer Quarterly Update.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joel Brind ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Some Living Wills Put Catholics at Odds with Church Teaching DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:There are documents floating about these days known as “living wills.” The name is peculiar because a will deals with the distribution of property after death, but these “wills” give directions to physicians about the provision of health care for those who are still living.
They often begin “If I should ever become unconscious or incompetent to make medical decision on my own behalf, I hereby give my physician permission ...” and proceed to list various procedures that may or may not be employed on their behalf.
Advocates of euthanasia have been promoters of living wills. They see the use of such documents as moving the nation closer toward the goal of giving health care personnel the freedom to kill patients who request death.
Catholic teaching does not oblige us, however, to keep ourselves alive for as long as possible or at all costs. There are times when it is best to allow nature to take its course. When nothing more can be done to extend a person's life without imposing undue burdens, then we provide “comfort care” for that individual until he dies.
One may put into writing his wishes about the type of care and treatment he would like to receive at the end of life. No one may ask to be put to death at the hands of his loved ones or his physician, but instructions to refuse treatment that is excessively burdensome or futile may prove helpful to family and friends who are obliged to assume responsibility for a loved one no longer able to make his wishes clear.
The Church was initially reluctant to recognize even the legitimate use of the living will — there are some good reasons not to have one. First of all, the Church did not want to appear to be giving any support to the advocates of euthanasia. We cannot even appear to give aid and comfort to the “culture of death,” as the Holy Father has so aptly termed it.
Second, it is hard to know what sort of circumstances will arise when we are dying. To try to anticipate and give instructions about all medical eventualities ahead of time is virtually impossible.
In the worst scenario, a family may find itself in possession of a living will that gives instructions that are contrary to the best interests of a loved one. Will the attending physician feel obliged to follow through on the requested course of action even though it might cause the patient more pain and suffering, conflict with the wishes of loved ones, or hasten death? A living will can greatly limit the freedom of a physician to respond to the patient's needs in changing circumstances.
Other doctors, however, like the idea of having a piece of paper that makes clear what sort of treatment the patient would or would not want if he were unconscious and dying. It may be that the likelihood of a lawsuit is lessened because the patient has clearly expressed his wishes in writing about a particular course of action. It is sad that legal considerations must sometimes take precedence over the best interests of the patient.
Possession of a living will, on occasion, gives the physician a strong tool for resolving disputes among family members about the kind of medical care their loved one should receive at the end of life. At other times, however, family members produce dueling living wills or encourage an aged relative to sign a new living will that thwarts the wishes of others.
The Church did cease its opposition to living wills when the push for their acceptance proved overwhelming. As states began granting legal standing to the documents, Catholic authors went to great lengths to draw up “Catholic Living Wills” that would provide for the withdrawal of extraordinary means of preserving life without giving any approval to the direct killing of another.
In 1990, Congress passed the Patient Self-Determination Act, which obliged hospitals and nursing homes to inform incoming patients of their right to have a living will on file. Unfortunately, some hospitals and nursing homes then began telling their patients that the law mandates the possession of a living will. That is not true. Nor is an incoming patient obliged to fill out the living will that he is handed upon admittance. Indeed, some of these documents do not conform to Catholic moral teaching.
Many state Catholic conferences, dioceses, Catholic hospitals and nursing homes have drawn up their own versions of a living will. These vary in quality and the Catholic would be well advised to make sure that the document he signs both conforms to Catholic moral teaching and to the laws of his state. The National Catholic Bioethics Center has produced a document valid in the state of Massachusetts and some other states, referred to as an “Advance Medical Directive” rather than a living will.
We want to avoid any association with the euthanasia movement and, quite frankly, the title more accurately states what the document does. More importantly, on the reverse side there is a form to assign durable power of attorney for health care. This enables one to indicate who will assume responsibility for making health care decisions if someone is unable to do so himself. Designating durable power of attorney overcomes most of the difficulties associated with a living will, because it assigns the responsibility for end-of-life decisions to a living person who knows you well enough to represent your best interests in the changing circumstances that may surround the time of your dying.
Dr. John Haas is president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Boston, Massachusetts.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Haas ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: A Child Saint For Our Times DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:Among the ranks of the Church's most beloved young saints is Maria Goretti. She was murdered at age 12 while defending her purity against an aggressor. Today, she remains one of the most popular role models in the Catholic faith.
Serving as an important place of pilgrimage for youth and those involved in pro-life movements, the shrine containing the body of this celebrated saint is located just outside Rome.
Maria Goretti was born Oct. 16, 1890, the third child of her family. She lived in poverty and at the age of 10 lost her father to malaria. After his death, the Goretti family moved to Ferriere di Conca near Nettuno. Too poor to afford their own home, the Gorettis moved in with the Serenelli family, Giovanni and Alessandro. With the death of her husband, Assunta Goretti had to undertake chores in the field, leaving Maria in charge of the household.
As a pious girl, Maria prayed the rosary often, had a special affection for the Virgin Mary, and was greatly devoted to Jesus in the holy Eucharist. Vulgarity and ill-mannered behavior offended her deeply. Although she never learned to read, she knew her prayers by heart. Whenever she went to the market, she always visited the Sanctuary of the Madonna of Graces.
Obedience, meekness, and cheerfulness marked her character. She often accepted a spirit of mortification for the benefit of others. Knowing the family was poor, a generous storeowner once gave Maria an apple and a sugar cookie. Maria immediately thanked the merchant for the items and quickly put them into her bag. When the storeowner questioned if she was going to eat them, she replied that they were for her brothers and sisters.
Living with the Serenelli family was very trying for the Goretti family. The father and son abused alcohol, posted pornographic pictures on their walls, and practiced no faith. Alessandro, the son, also developed a liking for Maria, which made matters worse.
On July 5, 1902, while both families were outside working, Alessandro seized the opportunity to approach Maria, who was mending a shirt inside the house with little Teresa next to her. Alessandro grabbed Maria by the arm, dragged her into the kitchen, and attempted to rape her.
Maria struggled and gasped for air. “No! No! It is a sin! You will go to hell,” she said.
As she continued to struggle, he pulled her dress up and began stabbing her with the broad blade of a brush hook.
Maria responded again in desperation, “What are you doing, Alessandro? You will go to hell!”
Seeing blood everywhere, and knowing that he had wounded her mortally, Alessandro threw the blade away and ran into his room.
The incident caused little Teresa to wake up. Hearing Teresa's cries, Assunta summoned her son, Mariano, and Alessandro's father, Giovanni, to check on the baby. Upon entering the house, they found the mortally wounded Maria lying on the kitchen floor.
The last 24 hours of Maria's life were the most moving. Unable to receive any medicine, anesthesia, or water due to the severity of her wounds, she bore everything with forgiveness and love. In her final hours she received Holy Communion and the last rites and was made a Daughter of Mary. Witnesses said that at this time she had a miraculous vision of the Virgin Mary.
Her road to sanctity culminated in the forgiving of her murderer, Alessandro Serenelli. Maria spoke these words to those around her: “Yes, for the love of Jesus, I pardon him, and I want him to come with me to paradise. May God forgive him because I already have.” With these moving words, she gave up her soul to God, just after three o'clock the afternoon of July 6.
Alessandro, sentenced to 30 years in prison, remained unrepentant. Then one night, while in his cell, he had a dream in which Maria Goretti approached him with lilies in her arms. As he received the lilies from her, he experienced a complete conversion of the heart. After serving 27 years of his sentence, he left to spend the rest of his life serving as a gardener at a monastery.
Maria Goretti was beatified April 27, 1947. She is the only saint ever to have had family members, including her own mother, present at the canonization ceremony.
Today, the shrine that contains the body of this holy martyr, attracts pilgrims from around the world. Many who journey here, come on pilgrimage to pray and seek her intercession. As the chaste body of Maria Goretti lies in a glass reliquary in the lower part of the church, pilgrims can get up close and catch a glimpse of the young saint. For most, this proves to be an extremely powerful experience — especially for children, who often identify with this young saint.
Along with spending time at the sanctuary, pilgrims can also visit the farmhouse in which Maria was martyred. The home is located about eight miles from the Nettuno shrine in the town of Le Ferriere di Conca. A small monument marks the spot in the kitchen where the saint died defending her chastity. Today, the room also serves as a chapel. The best way to arrive at the house is by taxi. On request however, the shrine can provide a bus for transportation of a group of 10 or more people.
Most pilgrims arrive at the shrine on pilgrimage between spring and the end of the summer. The greatest day of celebrations takes place July 6, the feast day of St. Maria Goretti. Thousands of pilgrims arrive for the various festivities and events, including the eight mile pilgrimage walk from the shrine in Nettuno to the house in Le Ferriere di Conca.
Arriving at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Grace & St. Maria Goretti in Nettuno is easy. From Rome, head south on S148 “Pontina” to the junction of Aprilia and turn right onto S207 “Nettunense,” then head south to Nettuno via Anzio.
By rail, there are almost hourly departures from the main Rome train station, “Stazione Termini.” The trip takes about one hour. To arrive at the shrine from the Nettuno train station, take the street directly in front of the railway station (v. Colombo) and head toward the beach. At the end of the street, look to your left and you will see the shrine located alongside the beach.
For more information on making a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Maria Goretti, contact one of the many Catholic travel organizations or contact the shrine's pilgrimage office at: Basilica Madonna delle Grazie e S. Maria Goretti, Piazza S. Rocco, 00048 Nettuno, Italy; (tel.) 011-39-6-98-575- 828; (fax) 011-39-6-98-54-076; or contact Mr. Valenti, Secretary, Friends of St. Maria Goretti, in Nettuno, 011- 39-6-98-585- 71.
Kevin Wright, author of Catholic Shrines of Western Europe, writes from Bellevue, Washington.
----- EXCERPT: Travelers to Rome shouldn't miss visiting the place where Maria Goretti lived her short, inspired life ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kevin Wright ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: For Theologian, Taking Oath Was a Moment of Grace and Freedom DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:In 1983, the Church promulgated a completely revised edition of The Code of Canon Law. It specified several requirements for Catholic universities. In particular, canon 812 has been the subject of much concern. It reads: “It is necessary that those who teach theological disciplines in any institute of higher studies have a mandate from the competent ecclesiastical authority.”
In March of 1989, the Church presented new formulae for a profession of faith and oath of fidelity in keeping with this canon. The profession and oath offer Catholics who assume teaching offices within the Church a universal, public, rich, and venerable language with which to personally express their faith in the teachings of Christ handed down through the Apostles and their successors.
The publication of the apostolic constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae (From the Heart of the Church) in August 1990 intensified the Church's focus on the now famous canon 812.
Much is at stake here. Judging by professional and popular writings of theologians, there is a pressing need to clarify just how this canon should be implemented.
Some of the questions raised are: How should a local bishop exercise his apostolic role as teacher of the faith in relation to those who teach theology at institutions within the diocese? Should his role be different if the institution is sponsored by a religious community or governed by lay people, rather than by his diocese? Exactly what would prompt a bishop to intervene in how theology was taught? Why hasn't there been more exercise of such authority? Would academic freedom in theology become grist for the magisterial mill?
No one knows exactly how these questions will be answered. However, my personal experience with canon 812 as a believer and a theologian has been positive. My faith and my ecclesial and professional mandates have been deeply affected by what has been done in response to this canon at my university.
Let me first offer an apologia for personal reflections on this topic. Theologians are like any other baptized Christians. We all seek a true, living, and dynamic relationship with God. However, theologians realize they will be held accountable specifically for teaching God's Word. That is, we theologians speak and teach about God from a personal experience of God. We carry out our work as people who have been personally affected by the light and power of God's living Word.
Our role as theologians is of course rooted in our common baptism. It is also based on the work of acquiring the technical knowledge necessary for the profession. However, it is critical for us to realize that our role is also indispensably related to the bishop's charism of office.
Thus, to be a theologian is to experience the Word of God actualized in me personally, to articulate that Word with the help of technical knowledge, and to hold my professional position with the affirmation of my bishop.
In short, I look at the oath of fidelity quite personally. It affects how I think and act. It represents a moment of grace for me.
I think of it this way: as a theologian I both “take” the oath and “offer” it to the universal Church in the person of the bishop. I “take” the oath in the sense of actualizing it in my life; I “offer” it to the local ordinary as my free gesture of faith in Christ and the Church.
Furthermore, I could not do all this were it not for the grace of the Holy Spirit. How else could I answer the Lord's call to teach and bear witness to Christ?
The oath itself is wonderfully simple to understand. Whether in full or modified form, it identifies the office to be assumed and it expresses a commitment to preserve and transmit the deposit of faith in all its beauty and integrity. The theologian professing the oath proclaims his apostolic devotion to his bishop and professes his faith in God's Word. With religious submission of mind and will, he expresses his assent to the truths of the faith as taught by the Pope and bishops in union with him.
I've offered the oath on several occasions. Some of them occurred when I was teaching at a different Catholic institution of higher learning. However, when I participated in offering the oath at Franciscan University of Steubenville a surprise awaited me.
We took the oath here during a liturgy, just after the reading of the Gospel. The entire campus community was invited: students, faculty, administration, in the presence of our Bishop Gilbert Sheldon. All of us jammed into the chapel.
“It's a good thing God is spirit,” I said to myself, otherwise the three members of the Trinity wouldn't be able to squeeze in here with all the rest of us.
All of use — new theology professors and all priests assigned to pastoral duties on campus — were invited to step forward in front of the bishop. Together we offered the oath to the bishop and through him to the rest of the Church and to Christ himself.
After we completed the profession and offered a gesture of obedience to the bishop, much to my surprise, thunderous applause erupted, breaking the solemn silence. Somewhat startled by the applause, I found myself looking up at the large tapestry of the Blessed Mother on the opposite wall of the Chapel. The sight of her in that moment, in that liturgical context, struck something deep within me — consolation, joy, the desire to yield my mind and heart to Christ without hesitation.
Is this what Mary experienced after the angel heralded the Good News? I thought of Mary and her faith response to the prospect that she would bear Christ to the whole world, that she would be an essential participant in the ultimate expression of God's love for the world. What a paradox — unmarried yet spouse of the Holy Spirit, virgin yet prototype mother. Could I be this fertile as a teacher, academic advisor, colleague, department chair, father, husband, brother, and son?
The words came to mind: “Pray for me, Mary, as you do for all sinners; bring me the merits of Christ's work at the Cross; help me help my students. Come Holy Spirit, draw me ever farther away from my own sin and ever more deeply into the mystery of Christ, the divine Son of God.
” It was a moment of deep grace, a Marian moment I shall never forget, which sustains me even to this day. I believe I was touched by a mystery that helps me into deeper freedom, into a deeper experience and grasp of truth.
Her words, “Let it be to me according to your word,” became my words to Christ. The oath and profession of faith became for me a “yes” to Christ's revelation of his person and to his plan for me, my family, and my department of theology.
This is the essence of religious obedience — a self-abandoning trust in God's love giving me the power to act, without hesitation or reservation, without fear, in complete confidence. God will help me teach my students and serve my colleagues with hope and courage. Such is not possible without grace, without the help of the Holy Spirit.
This experience of grace in no way solves the technical problems. Otherwise, piety would suffice and necessarily replace committed, professionally competent, and rigorous research and writing. But there must be a foundation for this work, namely, being deeply rooted in God's very Life, which leads to understanding.
And the oath, far from being what we theologians sometimes fear — a removal of our freedom — has been for me an occasion of greater liberty, allowing me to more fully comprehend the truths of the faith and more fruitfully communicate them to others. Dr. Stephen Miletic is an associate professor of scripture and catechetics and chair of the theology department at the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Stephen Miletic ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Alien Fascination for the Masses DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:TV series have often been good vehicles for explorations of the paranormal. Episodes on the subject from classic shows as Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone still air regularly, decades after they first appeared. The X-Files, currently in its fifth year on prime time, has developed both a cult and a popular following because of its distinctive treatment of its material. The show's creator, Chris Carter, has now produced and co-written a feature film with the same title.
As the series's 20 million obsessive fans (called “X-philes”) already know, Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) are FBI agents who investigate unsolved cases, an assignment that often brings them into contact with phenomena that can only be explained by paranormal or supernatural causes. Mulder, who claims his sister was kidnapped by aliens, believes in extra-terrestrial beings, UFOs, and a vast government conspiracy to cover it all up.
By contrast, Scully, a physician by training, is skeptical of such far-fetched notions and tries to use science to account for that which appears to be inexplicable. Neither her own possible abduction by aliens nor the growth of a mysterious cancer inside her skull can shake her rationalist principles.
Unlike previous TV series about the paranormal, The X-Files creates an atmosphere of pervasive paranoia which assumes that authorities routinely lie to the public and that murky cabals continuously plot against the general interest. Ever since Watergate, fears of this type have been widespread throughout our culture. It seems that almost every week another reputable figure endorses a conspiracy theory that once was considered marginal. For example, paranoid explanations of the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon and of the spread of AIDS in the African American community have now become mainstream.
Another unique feature of The X-Files is the way paranoia is made to seem cool. Mulder and Scully exchange hip banter and look as if they would be at home at an alternative rock concert. They rarely become unhinged when confronted with their own powerlessness in the face of these wide-ranging conspiracies.
In this season's last episode, a fire set by a recurring villain, the Cigarette- Smoking Man (William Davis), destroys all the X-files on paranormal activities. The feature film, directed by Rob Bowman and co-written by Frank Spotnitz, picks up the story from there. Mulder and Scully have been reassigned to an anti-terrorist unit in Dallas. A tall government building is blown up, in an incident that resembles the Oklahoma City bombing three years ago. The two FBI agents manage to evacuate the building of almost all its inhabitants before the explosion. The few bodies recovered are connected to a government agency that Mulder suspects is covering something up.
Sure enough, the cadavers originally came from a small Texas town where a boy had fallen into an underground cave and died after contact with a mysterious black substance. It seems that 35,000 years ago two cavemen were also attacked there by a strange creature with black blood.
Mulder is contacted by a maverick scientist on the run from the Feds, Dr. Alvin Kurtzweil (Martin Landau), who was a friend of the FBI agent's dead father. He claims the Dallas explosion is part of an alien colonization plan and that the lethal black ooze is part of the remains of extra-terrestrials who've been on earth since the Ice Age.
At this point the movie introduces a slew of characters from the series. First-time viewers of The X-Files phenomenon will have difficulty figuring out what's going on, and even when they do, there's so much new information to absorb, almost none of the rapid-fire plot twists that follow will have an emotional impact.
The Cigarette-Smoking Man is part of a vast conspiracy called the Syndicate which includes the Well-Manicured Man (John Neville) and a dozen or so other prosperous-looking, elderly white males who seem to have the power to overrule the government. During the series, the Syndicate plotted against Mulder and Scully whenever they uncovered anything involving aliens.
The feature film suggests that all the Syndicate's sinister activities may be motivated by good intentions. For 50 years it's been secretly hybridizing humans with alien colonists, creating a master race that can't be killed by contact with the lethal black ooze. However, Kurtzweil maintains that the Syndicate's purposes are still evil. After it has infected the United States with the deadly alien substance, he claims, it will use the Federal Emergency Management Agency to take over the country and suspend the Constitution.
Mulder and Scully must work their way through this paranoid maze while the Syndicate tries to kill them. They also try to resolve the loose ends of their relationship left hanging from the series. Are they in love, or is their liaison just professional?
Carter has said he created the TV show after reading a 1991 Roper poll that reported that 70% of Americans think JFK was killed by a conspiracy, and that 40% believe aliens have vacationed on earth. The poll also revealed that more than three million people think they've had contact with the extra-terrestrials.
During publicity interviews, Duchovney has described The X-Files as “a secular religious show.” Carter has gone further.
“Even if we don't believe in God,” he declared, “I believe we're all looking for something beyond our own rather temporal lives that is going to shake our foundations of belief.”
Contact with aliens is almost always described as a life- shattering experience. Yet, there's no linking of that kind of event to a transcendent moral code such as found in Christianity. In this regard, The X-Files unwittingly parallels certain New Age spiritual movements that promise connection to the supernatural through personal experience alone, without organized religion.
Arts & Culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
The X-Files is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America.
----- EXCERPT: A big-screen-sized dose of paranoia to thrill X-Files fanatics ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Silent Triumph of the Human Spirit DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:Contemporary film culture often ignores silent-movie masterpieces. Shamefully, the recent American Film Institute poll of the 100 best movies included only three. The Vatican's list is better. Among the silents it recommends is the 1926 science-fiction classic, Metropolis.
The film's breath-taking futuristic vision of a machine-dominated, authoritarian society has been imitated many times. Tall, geometric skyscrapers tower over tiny human beings who pointlessly scurry about in ant-sized airplanes, cars, and elevated railways. Inside the buildings, muscular workers in matching, drab uniforms and caps toil with almost military precision although it's never revealed what products are being manufactured. Their souls belong to their machines, and they seem to have no will beyond obedience to their masters.
Director Fritz Lang (M) and screenwriter Thea Von Harbou have constructed a dysutopian fantasy that isn't a literal prediction of what modern cities have become. But its images and story have often been interpreted as prophetic of the totalitarian nightmares of Nazism and communism. Recent borrowers of the film's style include last year's sci-fi extravaganza, The Fifth Element, and a much praised, MTV-promoted music video by Janet Jackson.
Metropolis is set in the year 2000 when society has been divided into two distinct classes: the laboring force, which lives and works beneath the city; and the rulers who reign in hedonistic luxury above. Master of all is Jon Fredersen (Alfred Abel) who issues orders from a huge, high-ceilinged, artdeco office.
His son, the spoiled Freder (Gustav Froelich), indulges himself in idleness until he encounters the charismatic Maria (Brigitte Helm), a worker's daughter. She has broken all Metropolis' laws and taken a group of poor children up to the rulers' dwellings.
“Look at them,” she tells Freder. “These are your brothers.”
Overwhelmed by her beauty and moral intensity, the young playboy is determined to find out more about her. For the first time in his life, he descends into the world of the machines, and when he sees workers being pushed to the breaking point, he has a vision of Moloch, the god of the Phoenicians and the Ammonites in the Old Testament, devouring human sacrifices. This is the beginning of a series of religious images used by the filmmakers to comment on the struggle between good and evil within the city.
One of the workers passes out at his machine, and Freder takes his place. Meanwhile, his father visits the inventor of Metropolis' machines, Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), who has on his door a pentagram, often a sign of the devil.
The elder Frederson has two purposes. First, he wants to check on the progress of the robot Rotwang is building to replace all the human workers. Second, maps of an unknown, underground location have been discovered on workers believed to be planning a revolt. Rotwang identifies the place as the ancient Christian catacombs upon which the city was built, and he leads Frederson through them to where a workers' meeting is in progress.
Against a background of crosses and burning candles that looks like an altar, Maria is preaching a Christian message of non-violence, not armed revolt. She compares their situation to the building of the biblical Tower of Babel. Among her listeners is young Frederson.
His father orders Rotwang to create the robot in the image of Maria and program it to incite revolutionary violence so he can crush the workers. His stratagem succeeds, and the laborers begin to tear down their underground city. The elder Frederson celebrates “the world going to the devil.”
His son sets out to rescue the real Maria who has been kidnapped. He hopes she can persuade the workers to change their destructive ways. The filmmakers bring to life sculptures illustrating the Seven Deadly Sins to help interpret the action.
Metropolis's cautionary tale may seem more relevant to early 20th-century industrialism than to today's computer age, and its melodramatic devices sometimes seem dated. Nevertheless, the movie's expressionistic images and Christian symbolism give it a timeless meaning. With greater force than almost any other film, it communicates the horrors of a society where the production of material goods is more important than the human spirit.
Next week: Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion.
Arts & Culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: Even without sound, Fritz Lang's classic Metropolis remains a haunting story of man vs. machine ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: As Sidewalk Counselor, Brooklyn Priest Visits 'Modern-Day Calvary' DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:National Affairs Correspondent
NEW YORK-By the end of next month, Msgr. Philip Reilly's passport will have the stampings of a well-traveled diplomat. Wherever he goes, however, for him the destination is always the same — modern-day Calvary.
Founder and director of the Helpers of God's Precious Infants in Brooklyn, New York, he recently left on a tour of 10 European countries and 21 cities to teach the methods of prayer and sidewalk counseling outside abortion clinics that help to save thousands of unborn babies in America each year. Despite increasingly restrictive laws in New York City and nationwide, and a lawsuit brought by abortionists charging him with an interstate conspiracy in restraint of trade, he has spread the Helpers' message in more than 50 U.S. dioceses.
He spends most mornings in front of New York City's largest abortion clinic, rosary beads in one hand, pro-life literature in the other, talking to young pregnant women about the love and mercy of God, and the resources available for them if they decide to keep their babies.
“Our goal, our purpose, is not only to save the physical life of the child. What we aim for ultimately is the conversion of hearts and the salvation of souls,” Msgr. Reilly said. “We seek to join the Blessed Mother and St. John at the foot of the cross, the modern-day Calvary at the abortion mills, where the image of Christ among us today is being crucified. Even if we don't succeed in changing a woman's mind and saving her baby, at least we are there to pray and to express our love for the baby before he is destroyed.”
The pro-abortion counselors and abortionists need prayers just as much as the women and their babies, because God desires their salvation as well, he said.
The Helpers began in New York in October 1989 with a handful of pro-life activists who for years had been quietly going to the clinics to pray and counsel. Operation Rescue was just swinging into full gear at the time, blocking clinic entrances in many cities and gearing up for the massive movements that recalled the social disobedience protests of the '60s. Despite this pro-life success, Msgr. Reilly was thinking long-term. The number of people who can afford to spend time in jail with Operation Rescue is relatively small, he concluded. There must be a way for the average family man or woman to become involved in pro-life work on a regular basis without the threat of a major disruption in their lives.
He formalized the efforts of his small group and in June 1990 gained media attention when Brooklyn Bishop Thomas Daily joined the Helpers, celebrating Mass and leading a prayer procession that attracted hundreds of pro-lifers and dozens of pro-abortion clinic “defenders.” The bishop assigned Msgr. Reilly full-time to pro-life work (he had been rector of the diocesan high school seminary) and has joined the Helpers one Saturday most months during the years.
In July 1992, right before the Democratic National Convention in New York that nominated Bill Clinton for the first time, John Cardinal O'Connor led a procession through the streets of midtown Manhattan. The Helpers gained national attention from this effort and since then Roger Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles and 50 other bishops have brought their people in procession and prayer to local abortion clinics. Msgr. Reilly visited Australia and New Zealand two years ago to organize Helpers groups Down Under, and his current European excursion is his most ambitious yet. He is working with the bishops in 15 dioceses located in England, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Croatia, Slovenia, Slovakia, and Hungary.
In each diocese, he will hold a seminar for local pro-life activists, explaining the Helpers' methods, stressing their prayerful approach, and giving out the Helpers booklets, which are organized for three periods of hourly prayer, including 15 decades of the rosary and the stations of the cross. He will conduct an evening vigil before the Blessed Sacrament and the next morning celebrate Mass and lead people out to an abortion clinic to pray. In some dioceses, the bishop will join the group. The goal is to inspire a handful of leaders in each area to continue spreading the message and teaching the methods.
“Whether they call themselves Helpers of God's Precious Infants or something else, the work is the same,” said Msgr. Reilly. “This is God's work and we rely totally on his help and on the powerful intercession of the Mother of God.”
Some pro-life activists have expressed reservations about the intensely spiritual approach of the Helpers. Prayer and counseling are fine, they say, but may lead pro-lifers away from what they consider to be more effective ways of saving babies, such as Rescue or lobbying to get laws changed. Msgr. Reilly understands the criticisms but thinks there is a place for each activity. God will organize the pro-life movement if each member remains faithful, he said.
“If we could change the laws tomorrow, we would,” he said, “but even if the laws were changed, women would still seek and get abortions. To truly end abortion, we need to change hearts, to seek conversions. We will never succeed except by bringing Christ. We know that in Christ's view, the most important thing is to have every person he has created with him in heaven — that is why he died, to bring salvation. We are to have the mind of Christ, which means to intensely desire the salvation not only of the babies, but of the mothers, their husbands or boyfriends, the clinic workers, and the abortionists. We may not like them, we may hate what they do, but the only way they will convert is if we love them and sacrifice ourselves for them.”
He works closely with Sister Dorothy Rothar, a Sister of St. Joseph, who sidewalk counsels in Brooklyn each morning and trains local pro-lifers in the Helpers' methods. Jane Scheulke, who works in neighborhood development for New York Catholic Charities, took her class two years ago.
“The most valuable part of her training is her enthusiasm. She convinced me that I could do this and got me over my fears about approaching total strangers and talking about this very sensitive issue of pregnancy and abortion,” said Scheulke.
Steve Raiser, who sidewalk counsels in Manhattan weekday mornings, said, “You have to make it a priority. If you think that your presence in front of a mill that morning may help save someone's life, that gets you up and out, no matter the weather.”
He works for Holy Innocents Church, in the very secular Garment District, where a Shrine to Children Who Have Died Unborn was blessed four years ago by Cardinal O'Connor. Women who have suffered miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion are encouraged to name their lost babies in the shrine's book and write out prayer petitions. Letters arrive from all over the world from people who have seen the Shrine's Web site.
“You hear so much about a woman's right to choose,” said Raiser, “but we see the other side that fewer women talk about. We see the pain, the hurt, the guilt that so many feel over having had an abortion.”
Recently, a young woman entering a Manhattan abortion clinic had her hand on the door handle when Raiser held out a pro-life pamphlet.
She stopped and told him that she had no choice since the abortionist had already implanted the larminaria, the seaweed sticks that dilate the cervix, and told her they could not be removed. Raiser took her to a pro-life pregnancy center and made arrangements for her to enter St. Vincent's Hospital, where she delivered a healthy though premature baby.
“That makes it all worth it, to save a life,” he said.
Brian Caulfield writes from New York.
----- EXCERPT: Increasingly strict laws haven't deterred his routine of prayer and talking with women seeking abortions ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian Caulfield ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: The Gospel Of Life DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:In Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul outlined the dangers of godlessness in society:
“[W]hen the sense of God is lost, the sense of man is also threatened and poisoned ... Man is no longer able to see himself as ‘mysteriously different ’from other earthly creatures; he regards himself merely as one more living being, as an organism which, at most, has reached a very high stage of perfection. Enclosed in the narrow horizon of his physical nature, he is somehow reduced to being 'a thing, ’and no longer grasps the ‘transcendent ’character of his ‘existence as man. ’He no longer considers life as a splendid gift of God, something ‘sacred’ entrusted to his responsibility and thus also to his loving care and ‘veneration.’ Life itself becomes a mere ‘thing,’ which man claims as his exclusive property, completely subject to his control and manipulation.
Thus, in relation to life at birth or at death, man is no longer capable of posing the question of the truest meaning of his own existence, nor can he assimilate with genuine freedom these crucial moments of his own history. He is concerned only with ‘doing,’ and, using all kinds of technology, he busies himself with programming, controlling, and dominating birth and death. Birth and death, instead of being primary experiences demanding to be ‘lived,’ become things to be merely ‘possessed’ or ‘rejected'” (22).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Across Nation Marriage-Saving Laws Are Increasing in Popularity DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:Register Correspondent
TALLAHASSEE-Florida couples headed to the altar are receiving a unique offer from the state: Complete a marriage preparation class, and get $32.50 (approximately 37%) off your marriage license fee.
Under a bill passed overwhelmingly by the Florida legislature and signed into law by Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles, couples who take a course on the relationship and communication skills necessary to make a marriage work would be eligible for the discount. Those who choose not to complete a course would pay the normal $88.50 license fee and be required to accept a three-day “cooling off” period before tying the knot.
The bill, introduced by State Reps. Elaine Bloom (D) and Stephen Wise (R), enjoyed bipartisan support throughout the process. Although Chiles has recently angered pro-family forces in Florida by vetoing pro-life legislation, he signed the marriage bill — called the “Marriage Preparation and Preservation Act” — in mid-June.
In addition to the discount on the license fee, the new law also increases the court fee for divorce by $32.50; requires couples with minor children who want a divorce to take a four-hour divorce education course; mandates that marriage and relationship skill-based education be offered as part of the “Life Management” curriculum in Florida's high schools; and earmarks funds for the production of a handbook that outlines the legal responsibilities of spouses to each other and to their children.
Bloom told the Register that she sees the marriage preparation bill as a logical extension of her priorities during her 23 years in the Florida legislature. The former chair of the Florida Task Force on Marriage and the Family Unit, Bloom said her concern about increasing divorce rates led her to lead the charge for the bill.
“I've been concerned for some time [about divorce rates in Florida],” she said. “This legislation is consistent with what I've been working on for many years.”
Bloom said the purpose of the bill is not to mandate communication between couples preparing for marriage, but to give them options.
“I'm not telling people what to do,” said Bloom. “I believe if you give people an option, they'll avail themselves [of] it.”
She said she was surprised by some of the opposition to the marriage preparation legislation, particularly from young legislators who objected to the provision requiring couples who do not take a preparation course to wait three days before marrying. While some legislators and interest groups have accused the legislature of meddling in citizens' private lives by passing the bill, Bloom defended it.
“All of these family issues already have government in the middle of them,” she said, noting that government often picks up the economic costs of divorce by providing for displaced homemakers through such things as job training and public assistance, and for children who suffer the harmful effects of divorce.
In the end, Bloom said the new law will have an impact on individual relationships.
People who have completed the courses, she said, told “it was a very important mark in learning more about the person they fell in love with.”
Representatives of the Florida religious community have hailed passage of the law. The Florida Christian Coalition lobbied heavily in support of the bill, and the state's Catholic Conference offered its support as well. Pat Chivers, associate for social concerns with the Florida Catholic Conference, said the law is a good first step in addressing the accelerating divorce rate in the state. Chivers, who will serve on a committee considering implementation strategies for the new law, said the law covers a variety of different marriage preparation courses, including those offered within the Catholic Church.
“It doesn't replace what the Catholic Church requires for couples preparing for marriage,” said Chivers.
Catholic couples can take a course completion certificate from their local parish or diocese and receive the $32.50 discount off the marriage license fee, she said.
Chivers said the law's focus on improving communication skills would undoubtedly offer some engaged couples a new perspective on the commitment that they are about to make.
“It's definitely a step forward in requiring Florida couples to pause before getting married,” she said. “There are many couples today who go into marriage with no training in marriage and family life.”
Pope John Paul II addressed the importance of marriage preparation efforts — and society's role in the process — in his 1981 apostolic exhortation on the Christian family in the modern world, Familiaris Consortio:
“More than ever necessary in our times is preparation of young people for marriage and family life. In some countries it is still the families themselves that, according to ancient customs, ensure the passing on to young people of the values concerning married and family life, and they do this through a gradual process of education or initiation. But the changes that have taken place within almost all modern societies demand that not only the family but also society and the Church should be involved in the effort of properly preparing young people for their future responsibilities” (66).
The recent action in Florida is part of a nationwide trend among state legislators and public policy groups to address the increasing divorce rates in the United States. According to statistics, the U.S. divorce rate continues to be the highest in the world, surpassing Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, and Italy. Approximately 60% of new marriages in this country will end in separation or divorce. According to research conducted by researchers for USA Today, divorce contributes to as many as 75% of teen suicides and 80% of teen psychiatric admissions.
Those startling figures have led some researchers and family law attorneys to call for major changes in the nation's divorce laws.
John Crouch, a Virginia attorney, is executive director of Americans for Divorce Reform. Crouch says while laws that require marriage and divorce education are a positive step, the removal of no-fault divorce laws needs to be a priority.
“Marriage education is great, and it's a crucial part of the solution to divorce in this country,” said Crouch. “Still, the rules of marriage today favor those who want out of marriage. We believe in long-term change in the divorce laws.”
Efforts to remove no-fault divorce laws from state statutes have been tried recently in some states, including Iowa and Virginia, but all attempts to date have failed. Other legislative actions to reduce divorce rates, however, such as Florida's new law and Louisiana's Covenant Marriage law, have moved forward. Louisiana's 1997 law gives couples an option: They can either acquire a conventional marriage license and retain the freedom of no-fault divorce statutes, or they can opt for a covenant marriage license, which requires premarital counseling as well as the finding of fault in divorce proceedings.
In the past year, covenant marriage legislation has been introduced in at least 10 states. While the real-world effects of such laws remain unknown, observers expect the trend in favor of marriage-preparation laws to continue.
Greg Chesmore writes from Bloomington, Indiana.
----- EXCERPT: Florida measure aims to counter state's growing divorce rate ----- EXTENDED BODY: Greg Chesmore ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Canadian Churches Fear Government Is Softening Stand on New Reproductive Technology DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:Register Correspondent
TORONTO-Canadian Church groups have raised concerns that the federal government may be backing away from a pledge to regulate a number of controversial practices in the new area of reproductive technology.
Last summer, Canada's health ministry shelved Bill C-47, a major piece of legislation that would have banned 13 types of reproductive and genetic technology. Among the practices to be prohibited were the sale of human sperm and ova, human cloning, and the creation of human-animal hybrids.
The bill, originally introduced in Canada's Parliament in 1996, received its second reading in November of that year. At that time, the measure seemed to enjoy the support of both medical and Church organizations. Final action on the bill (which is conducted after a required third reading) was postponed, however, when the government called a general election last summer.
Several groups have since urged the government to revive Bill C-47, but Canada's federal health minister, Allan Rock, has been in no hurry to proceed with the legislation.
Rock recently told Canada's national pro-life newspaper that further consultation is required prior to further government action on Bill C- 47. He suggested there is need for more review of the complexities surrounding genetic technology before proceeding with any legislative initiatives.
“The development and application of new reproductive and genetic technologies has raised many profound social, ethical, legal, and health issues,” Rock said. “Consultations reveal the need to legislate in this area to ensure the health and safety of those most affected by these practices, and to ensure that new reproductive and genetic technologies which violate Canadian values are not performed.”
Meanwhile, Canadian Church groups claim there has already been widespread consultation on the issue and that it is time to continue with the measure. Some months ago, the health ministry indicated it was prepared to make new reproductive technology legislation a priority. Church and pro-life groups have been left wondering about the lack of progress. In his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), Pope John Paul II wrote: “Respect for life requires that science and technology should always be at the service of man and his integral development. Society as a whole must respect, defend, and promote the dignity of every human person, at every moment and in every condition of that person's life” (81).
Bill C-47 was seen as an attempt to fill a legislative void in the new reproductive technology and genetic engineering field. The bill was the suggestion of a Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies, which was established in 1992 to make recommendations for new legislation. Before acting on the proposals of the Commission, the Canadian government asked medical and genetic research organizations to abide by a voluntary moratorium on controversial reproductive practices. Bill C-47 was described at the time as an attempt to establish a legislative framework around the moratorium.
Despite some concerns, Catholic and pro-life organizations generally supported Bill C-47.
“Notwithstanding some reservations and concerns, the Catholic bishops believe that the government has made important progress in setting boundaries around these rapidly expanding technologies both in the provisions of Bill C-47 and in the proposal for a regulatory scheme,” Canada's Catholic bishops' conference said in response to the legislation.
Suzanne Scorsone, director of the family life office for the Archdiocese of Toronto, and a member of the Commission on Reproductive Technology, is unaware of any government plans to radically change Bill C-47.
“As far as I have heard, the health minister is standing by his pledge to move forward with this legislation — although I understand he has many other items to deal with at this time,” Scorsone told the Register.
Nonetheless, Catholic and evangelical groups have become dismayed at the slow pace of implementation. Further, some groups have expressed fear that the health ministry may be bowing to pressure from medical groups to soften its original position.
Archbishop Adam Exner of Vancouver, British Columbia, head of the Canadian bishops' Catholic Organization for Life and Family (COLF), has criticized the federal health ministry for its foot-dragging on Bill C-47.
Archbishop Exner referred to a letter COLF received from Rock in December. In the letter, the health minister said further review of the complexities surrounding the new reproductive health issue is needed before making any decisions.
“Nearly four years have passed since the Royal Commission delivered its substantial report,” Archbishop Exner said. “While we recognize the complexity of these issues, we are not convinced that action should be postponed pending further investigation, given the extensive consultation by the Royal Commission, the government's own department, and the parliamentary committee studying Bill C-47.”
The prelate said recent media reports of a plan to clone human beings makes legislation in the reproductive technology area more urgent than ever.
“It is no comfort to us to be reminded that the voluntary moratorium, which was roundly condemned when it was announced almost three years ago, is still in place,” Archbishop Exner said.
Other voices have echoed Archbishop Exner's view. Sister Kateri Ghesquiere of the Congregation of St. Joseph is chairperson of the Ottawa-based Catholic Health Association of Canada (CHAC). In a recent letter to Canada's health minister, Sister Ghesquiere criticized any move to soften the strong stand against various types of genetic engineering.
“Bill C-47 represented an important step toward safeguarding such core values as human dignity, respect for life ,and protection of the vulnerable,” she wrote. “The Catholic Health Association of Canada is now concerned that recent comments by the health minister reflect a major change in policy concerning new reproductive and genetic technologies.”
Sister Ghesquiere said most of the proposals contained in the original legislation were in accord with the wishes of the majority of Canadians. She added that Canadians are overwhelmingly opposed to the commercialization of human reproduction and to the unregulated excesses of genetic manipulation and experimentation.
Sister Ghesquiere also suggested the federal government's handling of Bill C-47 is an abdication of leadership in a crucial area of public health policy.
“We urge the government to reintroduce Bill C-47 immediately and to refrain from weakening the prohibitions which this same government, only months ago, said were necessary to protect the health and values of Canadians,” she wrote. “Bill C-47 went a long way to achieving important goals and we urge the government not to weaken its commitment to put firm legal limits on the use of these technologies.”
Other Canadian Church groups, including the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada and the Canadian Council of Churches, are monitoring the progress of a government task force on biotechnology. The task force, which wrapped up its hearings April 30, will make further recommendations to the health minister. The Church groups are concerned that many of the task force hearings focused on the medical and economic aspects of new reproductive technology, rather than on moral and ethical considerations.
Mike Mastromatteo writes from Toronto, Canada.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mike Mastromatteo ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Ethical and Moral Implications Of Reproductive Technologies DATE: 07/05/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 5-11, 1998 ----- BODY:Among reproductive scientists, there has been a fundamental shift in philosophy from assisting the begetting of children in a loving family environment to manufacturing a product — and the “manufacturers” can dispose of the “product” if it does not meet their rigid specifications.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (2376-2377) describes the major moral problems of most of the assisted reproductive technologies in use today — corruptions of both the unitive and procreative functions of marriage between husband and wife:
“Techniques that entail the dissociation of husband and wife, by the intrusion of a person other than the couple (donation of sperm or ovum, surrogate uterus) are gravely immoral. These techniques (heterologous artificial insemination and fertilization) infringe the child's right to be born of a father and mother known to him and bound to each other by marriage. They betray the spouses' ‘right to become a father and a mother only through each other.'”
“Techniques involving only the married couple (homologous artificial insemination and fertilization) are perhaps less reprehensible, yet remain morally unacceptable. They dissociate the sexual act from the procreative act. The act that brings the child into existence is no longer an act by which two persons give themselves to one another....”
Determining Whether a Procedure Is Licit
There are currently more than 100 different assisted reproductive techniques available to couples who are suffering from infertility. Couples may be uncertain whether the procedure( s) they are considering are morally acceptable.
According to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's Instruction Donum Vitae (the gift of life), the determination of whether a technique is licit depends upon its relationship to natural intercourse: “If the technical means facilitates the conjugal act or helps it to reach its natural objectives, it can be morally acceptable. If, on the other hand, the procedure were to replace the conjugal act, it is morally illicit” (II, B,6)
Donum Vitae also states that an assisted reproductive procedure must meet these five specific criteria in order to maintain the procreative and unitive aspects of the marital act, as well as to avoid other grave sins:
(1) All assisted reproductive procedures should be performed upon married couples only: “Respect for the unity of marriage and for conjugal demands that the child be conceived in marriage; the bond existing between husband and wife accords the spouses, in an objective and inalienable manner the exclusive right to become father and mother solely through each other” (II, A, 2).
(2) The wife must contribute the egg and the husband must contribute the sperm. No other person must be involved, as this constitutes “technological adultery”: “Recourse to the gametes of a third person, in order to have sperm or ovum available, constitutes a violation of the reciprocal commitment of the spouses and a grave lack in regard to the essential property of marriage which is its unity” (II, A, 2).
(3) Masturbation must not be required: “Masturbation, through which the sperm is normally obtained, is another sign of this dissociation: Even when it is done for the purpose of procreation, the act remains deprived of its unitive meaning (II, B, 6). (Note that sperm collection may be accomplished licitly by means of “home collection,” which consists of the use of a perforated condom during normal marital intercourse.
(4) Fertilization must take place inside the woman's body: “The origin of the human being thus follows from a procreation that is ‘linked to the union, not only biological but also spiritual, of the parents, made one by the bond of marriage.’ Fertilization achieved outside the bodies of the couple remains by this very fact deprived of the meanings and the values which are expressed in the language of the body and in the union of human persons” (II, B, 4, c).
(5) “Spare” embryos must not be discarded, frozen, or experimented upon, and procedures such as “selective abortion” (pregnancy reduction) must not be used: “[T]hose embryos which are not transferred into the body of the mother and are called ‘spare’ are exposed to an absurd fate, with no possibility of their being offered safe means of survival which can be licitly pursued” (I, 5).
Source: The Facts of Life: An Authoritative Guide to Life and Family Issues, by Brian Clowes PhD (Human Life International, Front Royal, Va.) Reprinted with permission.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Esposito ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Bishops' Poverty Campaign May Revise Funding Criteria DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:Proposed guidelines meant to safeguard Church's respect for life
WASHINGTON—In mid-September, the United States Catholic Conference (USCC) Administrative Board will vote on proposed guideline changes that tighten criteria for projects receiving funding from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), the U.S. bishops' domestic anti-poverty program. Revisions to the moral guidelines restrict funding for projects or programs sponsored by organizations involved in any activity that is not in accord with Church teaching about the “sanctity of human life from conception to natural death.”
The guidelines indicate that CCHD will consider projects that “demonstrate respect for the human person” and “will not consider projects or organizations which promote or support abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty, or any other affront to human life and dignity.”
The CCHD established by the bishops in 1970 has given more than $100 million in grants and loans to more than 3,000 projects that supporters say help poor people help themselves. Critics of the CCHD say its funding has reached groups that oppose Church teaching. Current and proposed guidelines require that projects and programs receiving CCHD funding are in conformity with Catholic teaching. The revisions require recipients of CCHD funding to sign a statement agreeing to adhere to the principles detailed in the guidelines.
Guideline revisions were unveiled at the U.S. bishops' June 19 meeting in Pittsburgh.
Do those changes reflect an existing problem or are the modifications just a safeguard? Officials at the national CCHD office in Washington, D.C. won't comment until after the administrative board's vote, said Bill Ryan, a USCC spokesman. A panel of approximately 50 bishops is scheduled to meet Sept. 15-17. Some details can be gleaned from a June report to the bishops from the CCHD task force that wrote the guidelines. The report said modifications “affirmed the basic integrity of the 1972 guidelines … [that] had served CCHD very well.” The original guidelines were drafted by Philadelphia's John Cardinal Krol while he was president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) and USCC.
Task force members were in agreement that “reformulation of guidelines might be warranted at this particular time … especially in light of the more complex social realities which CCHD might encounter,” the report said. Furthermore, according to a Catholic News Service (CNS) report on the June meeting, Bishop Ricardo Ramirez of Las Cruces, N.M., chairman of the bishops' CCHD Committee, told bishops that the Campaign “doesn't fund organizations, it funds projects.” He said that CCHD “has never knowingly funded any project contrary to Catholic teaching.”
Those statements have been repeated throughout CCHD's history in response to accusations about its allocation of monies. Guideline modifications may have been motivated by concern that funds were misused or to avoid such situations in the future, said Mark Brumley, who coordinated CCHD activities while director of the Office for Social Ministries for the Diocese of San Diego from 1991 to 1995.
“We tried to carefully screen the local recipients of local grants so they were not involved in activities contrary to the Catholic Church,” said Brumley, now managing editor of Catholic Dossier and The Catholic Faith magazines.
Project screening at the diocesan level precluded projects in conflict with Church teaching, said Kent Peters, current director of the San Diego Office for Social Ministries, who also served in that capacity in the Diocese of Duluth, Minn., from 1989 to 1997.
“There was never any doubt that organizations in any way violated Church moral teaching,” he said. “That didn't mean everyone in the group was in line. With the new guidelines, organizations can't be involved in anything contrary. There is a little bit of flexibility. [For example,] a homeless project [could be] funded by coalitions of groups [that could include] the American Civil Liberties Union.”
Cautious Support
Critics of CCHD endorsed the guideline changes, but stated that problems still exist.
“The bishops are to be commended for addressing this issue. It has been a point of contention,” said Father Robert Sirico, director of the Acton Institute, a Grand Rapids, Mich.-based think tank.
Father Sirico lauded the task force's decision to consult with Father Augustine Di Noia OP, director of the NCCB's Office of Doctrine and Pastoral Practices.
“Some reflection needs to be given on the ways things are done,” he said.
The idea of proposed modifications met with mixed reactions from Terrence Scanlon, president of Capital Research Center, a Washington, D.C. think tank that studies the philanthropy of nonprofit organizations. CCHD has been the subject of critical reports in the center's Organization Trends publication since 1988.
“Hopefully, it will be an improvement. The fact that the bishops are looking at this is good,” he said.
However, Scanlon believes there are loopholes in the new guidelines. One is that applicants have to adhere to Church teaching in project administration only, but not in other activities.
“With the track record of CCHD, that could be a problem,” he said.
Father Richard Neuhaus, editor of First Things magazine, called the proposed guidelines “a very encouraging turn of events.” He and other critics maintained that there is still a risk of fungibility, that CCHD grants issued to an organization could indirectly support efforts contrary to Church teaching.
Father Neuhaus said, “I think CCHD got into an awkward position. If they give money to one project, it frees [funds] for other programs.”
Over the years, CCHD officials have responded to those accusations as Bishop Ramirez did at the June meeting. In CNS articles, they have refuted charges that the Campaign funded family planning clinics. The Register researched those charges for more than a month, following leads and asking CCHD critics about direct funding of clinics. No concrete evidence of that direct funding was uncovered.
Supporters of the Campaign say some criticisms of CCHD aren't credible. Cited among those was a booklet from Wanderer publications. One CCHD director said the book contained “half-truths” that took time to refute.
“We waste our time putting out nonexistent fires,” he said.
Brumley, however, indicated that while the publication cites factual data about the Campaign, the criticisms seem to stem from a differing philosophy about Catholic social teaching.
The Register looked into allegations made in the July 2 issue of The Wanderer. The article about the June bishops'meeting included the statement that, “Triumph magazine produced evidence that $300,000 in CCHD money was allocated to 16 clinics involved in abortion, contraception, or sterilization programs.” Triumph was not listed in media directories. The Register contacted Triumph Books, a Christian publishing company in New York. They had no knowledge of the magazine.
When The Wanderer was contacted, a woman who answered the inquiry sought to know the writer of the article. When told the story had no byline, she said, “We don't know who wrote it; someone sent it in.”
When asked how to contact Triumph magazine about the $300,000 in funding, she said, “They're out of business. I guess that solves your problem.”
The magazine closed 20 years ago, according to a staffer at Capital Research Center.
Furthermore, in its July 2 article, The Wanderer alleged, “based on documents filed with the U.S. government, the Claretian Medical Center in Chicago used [CCHD] funds to start up family planning clinics in Hispanic neighborhoods to provide contraceptives as well as sterilization and abortion referrals.”
The archdiocese in 1978 funded part of the salary for a nurse practitioner for a medical center started by the Claretian order, said Jim Lund, co-director for the Chicago archdiocesan Office for Peace and Justice. The archdiocese under John Cardinal Cody did not follow national guidelines when issuing local grants.
The Center was established in an area where the closure of steel mills resulted in the loss of services including primary care. The government document referred to the application from the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare for construction of the clinic. The document included the question about where people would be referred for contraceptive counseling. The question had to do with referrals and was not thought to be an issue because the clinic served senior citizens, said Lund. He added that since 1980, the archdiocese has followed national guidelines for local projects.
Campaign History
Another criticism of the CCHD is the political nature of funded projects. CCHD supporters point out that the Campaign is not a direct service charity — and that funded projects are in accord with Church social teaching. To understand that debate, one must look back at the Campaign's history. U.S. bishops founded the CCHD in 1970 as an anti-poverty and social justice program. The Campaign's goal was to address the root causes of poverty in America through promotion and support of community-controlled, self-help organizations, and through education.
The national CCHD office would work with local dioceses, and the Campaign would be supported by an annual collection, traditionally held the week before Thanksgiving. Most of the collection is applied to national grants, with 25% of donations remaining in the diocese and applied to smaller projects. The first annual collection in 1970 raised a total of $8.5 million, according to the USCC communications office.
The CCHD indicates that the national share of 1996's collection was $10.2 million — 75% of the $13.6 million total. The remaining 25% stays in the dioceses. Figures for the 1997 total were not complete because 15 dioceses have yet to send their contributions. (Not all dioceses schedule collections at Thanksgiving.) However, the Register learned that the total is expected to be $14 million.
Last year, the Campaign awarded $8 million in national grants that were distributed to 256 self-help projects in 43 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.
The highest (final) total on record is $13 million in 1993, with about $3.3 million remaining in dioceses, according to a 1994 announcement by Bishop James Garland of Marquette, Mich., then-chairman of the bishops' CCHD committee. That same year, critics blasted the issuance of a $100,000 grant (made in 1993) to the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP), a group that seeks to direct charitable giving. That direction was to “liberal nonprofits, including pro-abortion groups,” according to the October 1994 issue of Organization Trends. The publication cited a 1990 NCRP report titled Rightwing Attacks on Corporate Giving, saying it focused on a “campaign of harassment” by pro-lifers against corporate funders of Planned Parenthood.
Despite the criticism, 1997 funding projections cited above seem to indicate that financial support has not waned permanently.
The piece compared pro-life activists to Nazis. Bishop Garland's response to charges against the Campaign was reported in a Nov. 3, 1994 CNS article. The bishop said NCRP sought funding for a specific project — to make community foundations more responsive to the needs of the poor in spending foundation money.
In the past, CCHD funding recipients have included organizations that help low-income people create jobs, fight crime, reform schools, improve working conditions, and find affordable housing. This year, the word “Catholic” was added to the Campaign name. Although CCHD officials won't comment, there is an explanation about the name change in the Campaign's summer newsletter, Helping People Help Themselves.
Father Robert Vitillo, CCHD's executive director, wrote that the change was recommended by the bishops' Conference Committee.
“People of all faiths know of the work … but are often not aware that it is an integral part of the Catholic Church's social mission…. The addition of the word ‘Catholic’ is also a faithful link with our history,” the newsletter states.
Campaign critics also wondered about a link between funding and organizations with a liberal agenda. Three critics interviewed for this article (Fathers Neuhaus and Sirico, and Mr. Scanlon) maintained there is a “leftist” bias at the CCHD staff level. They say that bias is reflected in groups that receive grants. A long-time recipient, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has been criticized by Organization Trends for activities that included protesting U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party's Contract with America.
Enabling The Poor
A broader criticism of CCHD comes from a misunderstanding of how the Campaign works, said former San Diego diocesan director Brumley.
“It's not a direct service organization to feed or clothe the poor,” he said. “[It funds] projects to enable the poor to help themselves.”
CCHD money funded a San Diego project to organize domestic care workers to rally for better working conditions from their employer, the state of California. Higher wages and more training were among the demands.
San Diego's Peters said, “It created a very negative work environment. The state was treating each one like an independent contractor; a private employer couldn't do that. Some folks think unions are a bad thing, but if you look at Catholic social teaching, sometimes it's accepted.”
The people in the pews need to know that the Campaign is not a direct service program, added Brumley.
“People need to be informed,” he said. “When I give, do I realize I give to help people help themselves even if it's political?”
That political involvement is described in Campaign material that reads, “funded groups have been instrumental in securing passage of federal and state legislation on such issues as child support, family and medical leave, community reinvestment, and housing.”
It remains to be seen whether criticisms of the Campaign will affect the annual collection, scheduled for the weekend of Nov. 21-22.
The October 1997 issue of Organization Trends stated that two dioceses refused to participate in the Campaign. But the motives for declining appear to be unrelated to CCHD's approach to funding projects. Marty Wind, spokesman for the Diocese of Corpus Christi, Texas, confirmed that the now-retired Bishop Rene Gracida dropped the collection during the late 1980s. The decision had to do with the decision to fund a local ministry, according to Wind. Bishop Gracida retired in April 1997, and Bishop Roberto Gonzalez, a Franciscan, was installed as ordinary. Bishop Gonzalez reinstated the CCHD collection for this year.
While Organization Trends correctly indicated that the Diocese of Allentown, Pa., did not participate in the Campaign, that could change, said Deacon John Murphy, director of the Allentown diocesan Office of Information.
“Since its founding in 1961, the Diocese of Allentown has believed that the most cost effective and spiritually productive use of its funds has been to primarily support diocesan-related agencies and pastoral outreach programs,” he said.
“The number of national and annual collections was reduced; however, now that we have a new ordinary [Bishop Edward Cullen, installed Feb. 8], these matters in addition to many others will have to be reviewed as he determines his priorities,” said Deacon Murphy.
While the USCC board prepares to review the proposed moral guidelines, debate continues about the viability of the CCHD. San Diego's Peters said some resistance could be attributed to the fact that certain programs for low income people could appear at odds with people paying salaries. Such programs could be perceived as “anti-business,” but the programs work at the community level by building coalitions of liberals and conservatives.
“CCHD has a way of bringing people to the table,” he said.
Father Neuhaus wonders if the guidelines are sufficient to remedy what he perceived as problems.
“Something like CCHD is an important expression of Catholic social teaching. Whether CCHD can do that or is weakened by mistakes (remains to be seen). It may require a new initiative or CCHD may become what it was meant to be,” he said.
Liz Swain writes from San Diego.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Liz Swain ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Vatican Fights Recurring Battle for Family DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:NEW YORK—The Vatican's role at United Nations international conferences has taken on an almost wearying routine. At the meetings in Beijing on women, in Cairo on population, and in Istanbul on living conditions, the Holy See's Permanent Mission to the United Nations was the major voice opposing aggressive population control measures and abortion, and standing up for the family as the central unit of society, based on marriage between a man and a woman, and the rights of parents to rear their children according to their own beliefs.
The recent U.N.-backed meeting for youth in Lisbon, Portugal, saw similar questions raised and the Holy See making familiar objections against terms such as “reproductive rights,” a code for birth control and abortion, “gender preference” and the promotion of homosexual lifestyles, and the failure to recognize the family as the primary unit of society. Especially noticeable in the Lisbon Declaration, approved at the Aug. 8-12 meeting, was the absence of any recognition of the rights and responsibilities of parents in the lives of their children. Young people, defined for the purpose of the conference as those from ages 10-24, were presented as largely autonomous, self-determining persons who are able to exercise a wide range of rights apart from parental or familial influences.
A statement affirming the family as “the basic unit of society” and the unique character of marriage was added to the preamble of the document late in the conference after heated debate and a written intervention by the Holy See. Whether the entire document will be read in the light of the preamble is questionable, said Vatican delegates.
In a speech to the meeting, Bishop Stanislaw Rylko, secretary of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, said, “The poverty and marginalization of entire populations are increasing, and on the spiritual level the crisis of essential values becomes deeper.” Many young people around the world, he added, “are experiencing the frustration of false freedom, the lack of meaning in life and of reference points.”
John Klink, who has served as a delegate for the Vatican for the past 11 years at dozens of conferences, led a coalition of Christian, Muslim, and Mormon delegates at Lisbon in pushing for a more traditional view of youth and the family. Despite performing similar tasks repeatedly at other conferences, Klink, from California, has not grown cynical of the international conference process. He still sees such meetings as useful forums of international dialogue, and is especially convinced of the vital importance of the Holy See's participation.
“If we weren't speaking, there would be a real lack of balance. I hate to think of the result if the Holy See were not there,” Klink told the Register soon after returning from Lisbon.
The Holy See approaches issues from a moral perspective, not from a strictly political one, and draws upon the truths of divine revelation and the wisdom of Catholic philosophy, he said. This fact is not always appreciated by the delegates from other countries who seek to understand interventions of the Vatican in terms of political gain and earthly power, Klink added.
Msgr. James Reinert, an attaché to the Holy See's U.N. Mission in New York City, wrote the Vatican's Aug. 10 statement on the Portugal Declaration, with clearly noted objections. At preparatory meetings at the United Nations in New York, he said, the Holy See tried at least five times to include language affirming the family and parental rights.
“When we're talking about youth, education, and the next generation, not to mention parents is a big omission,” he stated. “This is especially true when we get to the controversial issue of so-called ‘reproductive health.’ To suggest that parents have no rights and responsibilities in this area is plain wrong.”
Particularly disturbing, he admitted, was a report that a World Health Organization spokesman said in a press conference Aug. 10 that U.N. agencies will interpret the Lisbon Declaration's health recommendations on sexuality to apply to children as young as 10.
Kay Balmforth, a Mormon from the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Family Voice in Provo, Utah, told the Register, “Below a certain age, people need protection and help and direction in their decision making. Every country recognizes this; it is the difference between adults and minors.”
The groups attacking the rights of families and parents know that young people are in formative stages and open to influence. “They don't want parents to be the influence; they want it to be themselves.
“There were enough family-oriented NGO to make our views heard,” said Balmforth, “but there is a great need to get more traditionally minded people lobbying at the United Nations. We've ignored the United Nations for the most part and the radicals have run amok.”
Like other U.N. declarations, Msgr. Reinert said, there were enough positive points in the Lisbon document to make the conference a worthy effort. Included were statements on the exploitation of children in labor, in wartime, and by governments. These points are not stated as strongly as they are in the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, drafted in the early 1990s, he said, and efforts must be made to ensure that the language of the more recent meeting does not supplant that of the former one.
The Lisbon meeting, the First World Conference on Ministers Responsible for Youth, was sponsored by the government of Portugal and approved by the United Nations. It came a few days after the Third World Youth Forum of the United Nations in Braga, Portugal, which was heavily influenced by non-delegate lobbyists advocating abortion, contraception, and homosexual rights. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan opened the Lisbon proceedings by reading from the declaration of the Braga conference.
Since it was sponsored by a government and not directly by the United Nations, it is unclear precisely how the Lisbon meeting fits into the series of U.N. conferences and what authority its findings will hold, said Msgr. Reinert.
In a straightforward 600-word statement, the Holy See made clear that it joined only partially in the Portugal document and noted five major reservations: “Reproductive health care” and “reproductive rights” are to be understood in a more general concept of health which encompasses the whole good of a person, including maturity in sexuality according to moral norms. Abortion and access to abortion are rejected.
“Family planning” and “family life education” are terms that the Holy See interprets according to its moral objection to birth control methods and its recognition of the duty and right of parents as the primary educators of their children in areas of sexuality.
Any references to family planning services should be understood as relating exclusively to married couples, who alone are given the privilege to make decisions about conjugal relationships.
The Holy See interprets the word “gender” to be grounded in the biological reality of two sexes, male and female.
References to “family unit” and “family structures” are interpreted as meaning the family as the basic unit of society, based on the conjugal love of a husband and wife.
About the consistent efforts of abortion and population-control advocates at these conferences, Msgr. Reinert said, “We're going to see them get stronger each time if we don't keep vigilant. We always hope they finally have as much as they want and their influence will not get worse, but it keeps getting worse.”
Currently, the Holy See is preparing for the five-year review meeting of the 1994 Cairo Conference on Population, to be held in New York in the spring.
“We're digging in, waiting to see how bad this can get,” said Msgr. Reinert.
Klink said that he was encouraged at Lisbon by the significant number of pro-life young people attending their first international conference. They kept proceedings in the working groups from being dominated by voices for abortion and other anti-family measures and signaled possible improvements for the future, he said.
Brian Caulfield writes from New York.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian Caulfield ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: 'Just War' Theorists Weigh Impact Of U.S. Strikes on Terrorist Camps DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON—Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican who represented Michigan in the Senate from 1928 to 1951, is largely remembered for his statement, “In foreign policy, all politics stops at the water's edge.”
This call to bipartisanship is still largely followed when U.S. interests are perceived to be in jeopardy.
So when President Clinton launched missile strikes at terrorist camps in Sudan and Afghanistan Aug. 20, he was given strong support from Congress and the American public. This was in sharp contrast to the criticism he has received as a result of the Lewinsky scandal, which has tarnished his presidency.
Broad endorsement for the U.S. government's action also was based on the recognition that terrorism, which has invaded the lives of many Americans during the past two decades, needs to be decisively addressed. Many were horrified by the terrorist bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania Aug. 7, which claimed 12 American and nearly 300 African lives.
Despite this understandable sense of patriotic support and moral outrage, people of faith often question and pray whether particular military actions, which sometimes claim innocent lives, are just. That is an appropriate response because Church teachings have encouraged us to do so.
For Catholics and, indeed, for other Christians and even non-Christians, one enduring standard here has been the concept of “just war.” Partly built on the framework developed by St. Augustine, the doctrine is largely attributable to the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, the great 13th-century doctor of the Church.
The just war theory stipulates when military force is morally appropriate (jus ad bellum) and what action is reasonable (jus in bello). To determine whether force can be justified, several standards need to met, including whether the cause is just, whether the intent of the action is reasonable, and whether the response is made under lawful authority.
Among other considerations are proportionality — whether the magnitude of the response is consistent with the transgression — and taking care that innocent people are not punished. Retribution itself is not sufficient reason to wage war.
Several 20th century popes have addressed the issue of war, including Pope John XXIII in his 1963 encyclical Pacem in Terris. Probably the most notable guidance to come from American Church leaders is the bishops' pastoral letter The Challenge of Peace, issued in 1983.
This letter restates just war theory, especially in the context of the nuclear age. The complexity of the concept today is noted in the following passage: “For resort to war to be justified, all peaceful alternatives must have been exhausted. There are formidable problems in this requirement.”
In an effort to present a clearer understanding of how this early Christian doctrine might be better understood today, particularly as it applies to terrorism, the Register consulted several leading experts in the field. Most reiterated the value of just war, but a few raised questions that thoughtful Catholics might wish to consider.
Gerard Powers, executive director of the Office for International Justice and Peace at the U.S. Catholic Conference, said, “The just war tradition is still relevant to international affairs, and it provides a set of moral criteria to guide leaders and citizens in deciding when and how force can be morally justified.”
The National Conference of Catholic Bishops has not issued a statement on the recent missile strikes, but Powers, who is an expert on the ethics of war, suggests that preemptive, self-defensive strikes against terrorism are not unreasonable.
“Government — the United States and the international community — has a moral responsibility to effectively reduce the threat of terrorism.” But, he asked, “What is the moral way to respond?”
Imminent threat, ongoing aggression, and the need for self defense — all of which appear to be present in the threat of terrorism — are among those criteria that would suggest a military response is appropriate, he added.
More troubling to Powers is that the Aug. 20 attacks are clearly not a “one-shot deal.” Should a likely long-term struggle against terrorism develop, he said, Catholic teaching would suggest that an international, rather than a purely U.S. response, would be more desirable.
Dr. Daniel Pipes, the editor of Middle East Quarterly, believes we are in a protracted struggle, one that began in the early 1980s.
“A war has been declared on us the last 15 years by a motley group. More Americans have died in terrorist attacks than in any other violence since the Vietnam War,” he said.
Such aggression, Pipes contended, requires the United States to respond forcefully to what he characterizes as “an Islamic flavor to totalitarianism.” He believes we are confronted with a violent ideology in the Marxist, Leninist, and Fascist tradition. He stresses that ideology, not religion, is the key to understanding the motivations of these terrorists.
This idea that war has been declared on the United States by terrorist groups also resonates with Dr. Ernest Lefever, a noted political philosopher and founder of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
“In this case,” he said, “I regard — as President Reagan did — a deliberate attack on American facilities as an act of war. The tricky part is that the state did not perform this attack.”
Lefever, an advisor on terrorism to the State Department in the 1980s, said, “I believe it is legitimate for the United States to destroy terrorist camps. Putting a terrorist organization out of commission is a strike for peace and freedom.”
But, he added, in the context of just war tradition, “great care must be taken to spare citizens, where possible.” A holder of a divinity degree and doctorate in Christian ethics as well as a colleague of the late Reinhold Niebuhr, Lefever clearly sees the vital link between ethics, religion, and public policy. He told the Register, “Churches should teach the doctrine of just war.”
Charles Lichenstein, a former ambassador to the United Nations and now a fellow at The Heritage Foundation, added to the discussion by offering his views on deterrence and proportionality.
The expert on terrorism said, “Proportionality must not only be measured in actual acts of terrorism, but how much force is necessary to deter them. Pinpricks usually do not do the job. Deterrence is part of your judgment of proportionality, in my judgment.”
While supporting Clinton's action, he also raised issues to be considered in this and similar attacks. One of the “ifs,” as he calls it, is whether the right people were targeted. Intelligence and good advance police work are ways to minimize inappropriate strikes.
He expressed concern that even in precision strikes, there will be peripheral and coincidental loss of life. Innocent lives are likely to be taken, he said, and “that is always a problem for those who have a conscience.”
Another prominent thinker on just war theory is Father John Langan, a Jesuit at Georgetown University's Kennedy Institute of Ethics. He reiterated that “Just war theory really is designed for conflicts between states. One of the basic assumptions is proper authority, and that is a state.”
Although the adversary often is unclear, “there's no question that the group that struck at the embassies showed their contempt for the norms of just war thinking. It is important to note that the folks on the other side are not playing by the rules,” he said.
Still, he continued, “The crucial question is whether it was, indeed, true that we were at risk for taking more attacks from this group. If so, it's a last resort issue,” which makes force justified under Aquinas's theory.
“This is a murky world,” the priest added. “Our government relies on its intelligence sources, and it's never as clean as moral analysts or journalists would like it to be.”
Another perspective was given by Diane Knippers, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute on Religion and Democracy, an organization that represents mainline Protestant churches.
“I consider just war criteria a tool — an essential tool — for government and military leaders,” she said. “The only people who can apply the theory are these officials.”
“Most government and military leaders are not adequately trained” to understand the concept, so “it's the role of the Church to teach and preach these ethical principles. But it's not the role of clerics to prejudge the application of them,” Knippers added.
Interestingly, noted Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, some of the ideas embodied in the just war theory are not restricted to the Christian tradition. Rabbi Eckstein, the president of the International Fellowship of Christian and Jews, said, “There is a very clear line of thought that runs through Jewish law and tradition: ‘If someone is coming to murder you, you may kill him first.’”
“This is very ingrained in Jewish thought,” he said. This helps explain the military policy of Israel, the rabbi emphasized, particularly the idea of preemptive strikes. He suggested further that a disproportionate response might even be appropriate if it has a deterrent effect.
Yet, he added, “exercising power doesn't give license to abuse.” The Israeli army practices the idea of “purity of arms,” in which power, necessity, and morality are all balanced. One way to practice restraint is to first pursue diplomacy, then boycotts and other means, and only finally resort to military action.
It would be misleading to imply that support for the president's action was unanimous and even that the just war concept — or similar manifestations of it — is universally accepted. One alternative view is offered by Father John Dear, a Jesuit and executive director of the interfaith Fellowship of Reconciliation, headquartered in Nyack, N.Y.
Father Dear quoted the late Bishop Carroll Dozier of Memphis, Tenn. (1971-82), who said, “Just war theory belongs in the same drawer as the flat-earth theory.”
The priest said, “I believe the just war theory doesn't hold anymore because of the kinds of weapons we now have.” Proportionality is the key to him. “Warfare has changed. The criteria [for just war] can't be met anymore,” he argued.
“Terrorism cannot be stopped by further terrorism. We condemn these latest bombings, just as we condemn the terrorist bombings of the U.S. embassies, and we call for creative non-violent means to solve international conflict. There are such means available. It is time to use them,” he said.
Despite the views of Father Dear and other proponents of nonviolence, support for the Aug. 20 retaliation has been strong. There is, however, a diversity of views as to whether such strikes can always be assumed to be moral and just, under the teachings of the Catholic Church and other religious groups.
The concept of just war, although ingrained in our cultural ethos, may or may not need refining in the nuclear age, but it continues to give many insights into what might constitute appropriate action.
It also provides an opportunity for vital introspection for those who are trained and willing to do so. As with so many rich traditions that the Church has preserved, it causes us to think about our impulses and their potential consequences.
Joseph Esposito writes from Washington, D.C.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Esposito ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Muslims Raise Fairness Issues As U.S. Gets 'Tough on Terrorism' DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON—Sudanese protesters may be filling the streets of Khartoum with placards reading “No war for Monica” — a reference to suspicions that President Bill Clinton's mid-August bombing raids on a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and suspected terrorist bases in Afghanistan were undertaken to deflect attention from the president's domestic troubles — but most Muslim observers and Middle East specialists are thinking hard about the long-range implications of the Administration's new “get tough on terrorism” policy.
On the morning of Aug. 20, the United States launched military strikes in Afghanistan and Sudan aimed at groups believed responsible for bomb attacks at American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya Aug. 7 that killed more than 260 people and wounded 5,500 others, mostly Kenyans. U.S. officials said that early investigations by American and African intelligence teams had led them to target the terrorist network believed to be run by the super-wealthy Saudi dissident and guerrilla leader Osamma bin Laden.
The Clinton Administration later characterized the actions as part of a broader “war against terrorism” and vowed to crush the bin Laden organization, a loose coalition of radical groups with bases in many predominantly Islamic countries, that law enforcement officials have long believed to be behind terrorist attacks in the United States, the Middle East, and now Africa.
Despite all the anti-terrorism rhetoric, however, Administration officials have gone out of their way to distance their war against bin Laden from relations with the Muslim world at large.
“I want the world to understand,” said Clinton in his formal address to the nation Aug. 20, “that our actions today were not aimed against Islam.” Instead, the president made careful distinctions between the Muslim followers of “a great religion” and radical groups that espouse “a horrible distortion of their religion to justify the murder of innocents.”
(Bin Laden, who is not an Islamic jurist, issued a fatwa, or “ruling,” earlier this year in which he said that killing American civilians, in addition to targeting military personnel and government employees, was religiously permitted.)
The Administration's stance was, as Gustav Niebuhr noted in The New York Times Aug. 22, an unusual mix of national security considerations, the recognition of the importance of a religious faith, and a gingerly attempt to zig-zag through the minefield that lay between the two.
“It was as if, after a Cold War that obscured forces like religion, ethnicity, and national culture within a global struggle between democracy and Communism,” Niebuhr remarked, “Mr. Clinton was saying that his Administration did not want to see the struggle revived as a confrontation between the West and Islam.”
Aside from anticipated anti-American protests in a few Muslim capitals, the general response of the Islamic world so far to the bombings — and, more particularly, the response of America's Muslims — has been critical, but thoughtful, and, some say, may well presage a more concerted attempt on the part of mainstream Muslim organizations to help shape, and temper, the new U.S. anti-terrorism crusade.
“I have, frankly, mixed feelings about the president's comments about Islam,” Salaam al Marayati, director of the Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), told the Register.
“On the one hand we have these gentle words about the Islamic faith,” he said. “But on the other, the Islamic world is treated to these harsh military actions. There really is a double standard at work here.”
Al-Marayati pointed to the examples of Ireland and Bosnia.
“There's terrorism there, too,” he said, “but there the U.S. advocates diplomatic solutions. In the Muslim world, though, the first reaction is the use of military muscle. It's all getting a bit transparent.”
And counterproductive, he said.
We don't attack Radko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, Serbian warlords who are responsible for the deaths of thousands of Bosnian Muslims, even though they're headquartered within a few miles of American forces stationed in Bosnia, al-Marayati opined, because we fear they'll retaliate against our troops.
“We go against cheap targets, poor countries like Sudan or Afghanistan who have no conventional means to hit back,” he said. “And precisely because they have no conventional way to respond, the likelihood of the use of terrorism increases.”
“Air strikes, anger, anti-American feelings, terrorism — we're caught in this vicious cycle of violence,” said al Marayati.
Dr. Maher Hathout, spokesperson for the Islamic Center of Southern California, and a leading Muslim inter-faith leader in the Los Angeles area, thinks that one of the ways the United States might break out of the “old paradigm” is to include American Muslims in the development of anti-terrorism policy.
According to most estimates there are more than 4 million Muslims in the United States today.
“Who has more to lose from terrorist acts [like those attributed to bin Laden] than ordinary Muslims? Terrorism puts us in a very difficult position. On the one hand, it kills Americans, our fellow countrymen. On the other, terrorism tends to scapegoat Islam, and puts people in Muslim countries in harm's way. We have more to gain from eliminating terrorism than anybody else, so why shouldn't we be included in the policy debate?” he asked in a recent radio interview.
Hathout is writing an open letter to the president calling for a public debate on anti-terrorism policy. In addition, several Muslim organizations, including MPAC, are planning to convene a conference on the subject in Washington, D.C., before the end of the year.
However, Joshua Muravchik, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., finds himself less than impressed with the current Muslim reactions to the campaign against Osamma bin Laden.
“I'd be happy to see more Muslims denounce him,” he said. “What disturbs me is that, instead of denouncing extremists, most Muslim groups denounce the West for stereotyping.”
There's an easy way to stop the West from stereotyping Muslims, said Muravchik.
“Make more noise about how repugnant you find what these extremists stand for; how angry you are about what they do; how serious the misrepresentation of Islam is that they pose. I just find most Muslim spokespeople grudging, finally, in their denunciations.”
But Muravchik agrees the recent U.S. air strikes are “worthless if they're not part of a broader policy.”
“I think that it will be necessary to combine fighting terrorism with making a maximum effort to cultivate forces in the Islamic world that share certain basic civilizational assumptions with us,” he said.
“I have to imagine that encouraging the development of democratic values in the Islamic world is a big part of that.”
For Christian Brother David Carroll, assistant to the secretary general of the New York-based Catholic New East Welfare Association (CNEWA), empowering majorities in the Muslim world to reject violence is the key to solving the terrorism dilemma.
“It's really a matter of moral suasion,” said Brother Carroll. “Not air strikes.”
Brother Carroll pointed to the example of Northern Ireland.
“We couldn't just ‘write off’ the nationalist groups that were violent,” he said. “They were part of the problem, they needed to be part of the solution. Eventually the desire of the majority for peace, and the majority's disillusionment with violence, compelled the extremists to come to the table.”
Now that much of the Irish Republican Army mainstream has been persuaded to join the peace process through patient dialogue, Carroll said, “the cranks can be effectively isolated.”
The same goes for the Middle East, he said.
The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was long considered a terrorist group, but today they form the basis of the Palestine Authority and negotiate with the government of the state of Israel, he pointed out.
“There's no easy way to bring such developments about,” he said. “Certainly not by knocking out military dormitories and shooting ranges in a Third World country.”
“The process of long, sustained dialogue — that's the crucial element.”
Paradoxically, Carroll sees a potential opening for dialogue in the aftermath of the U.S. air strikes on Sudan and Afghanistan.
“There's a window of opportunity now for Western leaders to sit down with the regime in Khartoum,” he said. The long-isolated Sudanese regime of Hassan al-Turabi issued an invitation Aug. 24 for United Nations officials and other international leaders to inspect the damaged pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum that the United States contends was used to make precursors for chemical warfare.
“A lot will depend on how the West responds,” he said. “There's a chance here to start a process that might help moderate this regime. I just hope we seize it,” he said.
Gabriel Meyer writes from Los Angeles.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Gabriel Meyer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: La Vang Bicentennial Marked with Fervor DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:Vietnamese Marian apparitions of 1798 bolstered persecuted faithful
WASHINGTON—Most Catholics are familiar with the Blessed Virgin's appearances in places like Lourdes and Fatima. What is not so well known is that Marian apparitions have been reported in many non-western settings as well—in Africa, for example, and, perhaps most strikingly, in Asia.
Among the Marian visions granted to Asian Catholics, the 200-year-old apparitions at La Vang, Vietnam, have been attracting media attention in recent weeks. Pilgrimages to the shrine for the 1998 bicentennial of the event in mid-August demonstrated the fervor and vitality of the Church in communist-dominated Vietnam, and a high-profile celebration of La Vang in Washington, D.C., last month reminded Americans of the determination of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese Catholics who found refuge here after the collapse of South Vietnam.
There are approximately 200,000 Vietnamese Catholics in the United States today. The Catholic population of Vietnam is about 6 million, out of a total of 62 million.
La Vang also highlights for many western observers one of the least known corners of the Catholic world — the long-suffering communities of Asian Catholics in places such as Vietnam, Japan and China — “martyr Churches” that have endured centuries of often unimaginable persecution in the name of Christ.
“At La Vang, Our Blessed Mother appeared in order to console the people and to urge them to pray for the strength to persevere.”
That's how Father Joseph Tran, a U.S.-based Vietnamese priest, and secretary general for the organizing committee of the La Vang celebrations in Washington, D.C., recently summarized the message of Our Lady of La Vang.
It was a message addressed to a Church in extremis.
In the 18th century what is now Vietnam was divided into two kingdoms: The north, with Hanoi as its capital, was ruled by the Trinh family and the South, ruled from the city of Hue, was governed by the Nguyens. These southern rulers sought the help of the French in 1787 as part of their campaign to subdue the north. However, a group of intellectuals, known as Van Than, opposed French influence and led a palace revolution that placed a king who shared their point of view on the southern throne. Quang Trung died shortly after reuniting the country, leaving the reins of government in the hands of his ten-year-old son, Canh Thinh.
On Aug. 17, 1798, in an action reminiscent of the edict of Japan's shogunate two centuries earlier, the young king's advisers issued a royal ordinance forbidding the practice of the Catholic faith by Vietnamese on the grounds that it was a foreign religion. The Van Than clique saw native Catholics as a “fifth column” responsible for the growing French presence in the country.
Like its Japanese counterpart, the decree commanded nothing less than the wholesale extermination of Christianity in Vietnam. Churches were destroyed, foreign and native clergy arrested and killed, and Vietnamese believers were given the option of apostasy or death. In the century of persecution and civil war that followed — a war that ended with a French protectorate over what was then called Indo-China in the late 1880s — more than 100,000 Vietnamese Catholics were slain.
When the king's decree was first issued in 1798, many Catholics fled into the jungles. The dense foliage of La Vang, a hill about 40 miles from the city of Hue in central Vietnam, provided a haven from persecution for thousands of believers, although other dangers stalked them there — wild animals, famine, disease.
Families gathered every night beneath a large tree in the forest to pray the rosary and seek God's help. According to the traditional account, one night Our Lady appeared to them, bearing the Child Jesus and surrounded by angels. She promised them her protection and assured them that their prayers would be heard. Most of all, she urged her supplicants to be faithful.
“Have trust, be willing to suffer hardship and sorrow. I have already granted your prayers,” she told them. “Whoever will come and pray with me here will receive favors and blessings.”
As a sign, she instructed the faithful to boil the leaves of certain trees and many of those suffering from diseases were cured.
Other apparitions followed, and a series of small straw chapels were built to commemorate the site.
“The oral tradition,” said Father Tran, “is that Our Lady appeared every night to encourage the people. Word spread and La Vang became a place of pilgrimage. What I can say is that many miracles have taken place, and continue to take place there.”
Unfortunately, no early written attestations of the appearances at La Vang survive, probably because Church archives in nearby Hue were destroyed during the civil wars of 1833 and 1861.
Nevertheless La Vang continued to function as a beacon of hope and as a place of solace and blessing for thousands of harried Catholics during the terrible decades of persecution.
When the war against the Church ended in 1886, pilgrimage to La Vang increased. Beginning in 1901, national pilgrimages to the site were organized, usually every three years. By 1928, the shrine had become an independent parish.
La Vang was, however, destined to play as major a role in Vietnam's recent history as it had in the brutal civil wars of the past. In that sense, La Vang occupies a place in the drama of Catholic identity in Southeast Asia that is not unlike the role of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the life of Mexico or Czestochowa in Poland.
The defeat of the French in the IndoChina war (1946-1954) led once again to the division of the country, this time into a communist North and an anti-communist South. In April, 1961, the bishops of South Vietnam, assembled in Hue, made a vow to the Immaculate Heart of Mary to consecrate a national shrine to her, asking Our Lady for the freedom of the Church and peace for their divided land. Later in August, the bishops recognized La Vang as a national Marian center, and early the following year, in the letter Magno Nos, Pope John XXIII raised the parish to the status of a minor basilica.
By the mid-1960s, La Vang had been transformed into a veritable Marian polis. Holy Rosary Square with its 15 statues representing the mysteries of the rosary set off the new basilica. There were two small lakes, fountains, retreat houses. But in 1972, barely nine years after completion, the new Marian complex was totally destroyed by invading North Vietnamese forces.
But that was hardly the end of the story.
After reunification, all the bishops of Vietnam, gathered in Hanoi in 1980, reconfirmed the earlier designation of La Vang as the country's central Marian site, and national pilgrimages resumed. In 1996, the last major national pilgrimage to the shrine before this year's bicentennial observances, not only did larger numbers of Vietnamese Catholics participate than ever before, but they were joined by significant numbers of pilgrims from the surrounding countries.
This year's bicentennial celebrations began to take shape as early as 1993. Pope John Paul II urged Vietnamese Catholics who participated in that year's World Youth Day in Denver to look to the 200th anniversary of the La Vang apparitions as an opportunity “to reinforce unity and mutual understanding” between all Vietnamese. And on several other occasions, particularly the 1994 ad limina visits of the Vietnamese bishops, the Pontiff spoke about the importance of the upcoming anniversary, especially in light of the Church-wide preparations for the Great Jubilee of the year 2000. He also underscored his regard for the event by granting a plenary indulgence for those who participate in any of the bicentennial celebrations of Our Lady of La Vang.
Following that lead, the bishops in Vietnam announced a year-long series of pilgrimages to La Vang and other commemorative events only to find those plans scaled back by the communist-dominated Vietnamese government late last year.
According to a Catholic News Service report, the government's office of religious affairs ruled last December that the celebrations of La Vang would be limited to the traditional Aug. 13-15 time slot, and be open only to Catholics from the Archdiocese of Hue, where the shrine is located, and that tour operators would be forbidden to bring foreign visitors to the site. The government said that the province was experiencing the worst draught in a century, and that its restrictions were appropriate for difficult economic times.
“The government tried to frustrate the organization of pilgrimages,” Father Tran told the Register, “and there was no reason to do so. We had clearly demonstrated that the [commemoration] had no political implications, that it was purely religious.”
As it turned out, more than 200,000 people mobbed the three-day event in central Vietnam in mid-August, including 14 bishops, 300 priests, and representatives from every diocese in the country.
Vatican Radio reported Aug. 17 that the celebration, marked by processions, Masses, and catechesis was perhaps the largest “unofficial” gathering in Vietnam since the country's reunification 23 years ago — with numbers exceeding even the organizer's expectations.
La Vang celebrations in the U.S. took place a week later than their Vietnamese counterparts, Aug. 20-23 in Washington, DC. These involved workshops on the Church and the third millennium held at The Catholic University of America, a youth rally and candlelight prayer vigil, an outdoor procession in honor of Our Lady of La Vang and the martyrs of Vietnam, all culminating in a Mass in honor of Our Lady of La Vang held at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception with James Cardinal Hickey presiding, and Archbishop F.X. Nguyen Van Thuan, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, as homilist.
More than 10,000 people attended the celebration.
“One of the aims we had at the event,” Father Tran related, “was to thank the American people and the Catholic Church in America for helping welcome more than one million Vietnamese refugees to this country since 1975. We really want to do this, to thank people for their generosity and help.”
Father Tran also indicated that his committee was “in the process of preparing a request” that a chapel to Our Lady of La Vang be included among those in Washington's National Shrine.
We have so much to thank her for, said the priest. “In a certain way, Vietnamese Catholics — their survival, their faith — is the greatest of the miracles of Our Lady of La Vang.”
Senior writer Gabriel Meyer is based in Los Angeles.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Gabriel Meyer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Governing with a Sense of God DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:Michigan's Gov. John Engler grew up in a Catholic family of nine on a farm near the small town of Beal City, Mich. He was elected the state's chief executive on a strong pro-life plank in November 1990. He is currently running for a third term against Geoffrey Fieger, a long-time attorney for Jack Kevorkian. Under Engler, Michigan has passed a law to allow more educational choice and has opened more than 100 new charter schools. His tenure has also produced a parental-consent requirement, and a late-term abortion ban. Most recently, Engler signed a ban on assisted suicide. He spoke recently with Register correspondent Kate Ernsting.
Personal: Age 49; married to Michelle Engler; father of three-and-a-half-year-old triplet daughters: Hannah, Madeleine, and Margaret; parishioners of St. Thomas Aquinas Church in East Lansing, Mich.
Background: Two-term Republican governor; at 22 (1970), became the youngest state representative ever elected — the first in a series of nine straight election victories; elected to the State Senate in 1978, and later made Senate majority leader.
Achievements: Abortions in Michigan have decreased by 40% during the past decade, and teen pregnancies have dropped by 25%; student performance on nationalized tests is up more than 10%; Michigan ranks first in the nation in new factories, independence in welfare, adoption of abused and neglected children, and in tax reductions.
Ernsting: Michigan has been a battleground for the assisted suicide issue during the last few years. Jack Kevorkian is nationally known because he has helped more than 100 people commit suicide. Previous attempts to prosecute him have failed. In July, you signed into law a new assisted-suicide ban. Please tell us about it.
Engler: We think it will be very effective. Those who are assisting someone to commit suicide — who are preying on the innocent — this law will put out of business. And specifically, that would be Dr. Kevorkian.
So you expect this law to stem the threat posed by Kevorkian and those like him?
The penal code has been amended and a felony established for assisting in a suicide…. The law is written to address the legal objections that had been raised about previous legislation that had been struck down. Michigan has a common law prohibition against assisted suicide, but the difficulty has been to communicate to juries what that means in practice. So, now a prosecutor will be able to point to the [written] law.
This ban passed both houses of the legislature with substantial bipartisan support…. I think we are appalled that Michigan has become, with Dr. Kevorkian, a national site for people wishing to end their lives.
You helped negotiate enactment of this law.
Yes. I support this law and have also been involved in other legislative efforts to end assisted suicide. With this one, we had the votes to pass the measure, but we were short of having two-thirds of the vote to make it effective immediately. So at the end of the legislative session we were able to get an agreement that it would become effective Sept. 1. Otherwise, it wouldn't become effective until next April.
Every month that goes by we are more at risk and — more importantly — vulnerable people are at risk.
A local assisted-suicide advocacy group, Merian's Friends, has successfully placed an initiative to legalize assisted suicide on the November ballot. If approved, this proposal would nullify the ban.
Very simply, what the ballot proposal does is legalize Jack Kevorkian's suicide plan. It even allows people from out of state to continue to come to Michigan if they can show any connection to anybody inside Michigan.
I understand that the Merian's Friends' initiative would effectively preempt the medical examiner from investigating an assisted suicide.
It uses a politically appointed taxpayer-funded group of citizens to give a review — and I think that is a very dubious provision.
Recently it was reported that abortions in Michigan have decreased by 40% and teen pregnancies by 25%. To what do you attribute these trends?
I'm pleased by this very substantial decline. To talk about it, let me separate the two. The decline in teen pregnancies is also accompanied by a substantial decline in teen birth rates. The birth rate has come down among 15- to 19-year-olds some 21%, and only three states — Alaska, Maine, and Vermont — have shown a greater decline. It is very clear that the educational message of abstinence is working. The message we are giving is of abstinence — period.
Is it a message you are promoting in Michigan's schools?
We want the message in the schools, but there's also a public campaign we have sponsored with ads praising abstinence. Everywhere that we can in terms of public utterances from state officials and leaders, we are saying that one of the biggest mistakes a teen can make is to become pregnant. There's nothing they can do that will more surely reduce their ability later in life to enjoy the kind of lifestyle they would like than to have a child as a teen.
In terms of protecting the lives of the unborn, I think we have established certain priorities. Under the leadership of my lieutenant governor, Connie Binsfield, we have reformed our adoption laws to make that much easier in the state. We've made “adoption the better option.” We have really tried to stress that if someone does find themselves with an unwanted pregnancy there is that option — that there are so many childless couples in our state who are just praying to have an opportunity to raise that child.
How does your Catholic faith help you personally? What do you derive from it that assists you in your role as governor?
It's a source of great strength for me, for Michelle, my wife, and for our family. We both learned this growing up. We have always found that our belief in God — our faith — is something that we can rely on. It puts a perspective on whatever you are doing.
Even if you are the governor of a state, it pales in comparison to the eternal truths.
Do you have any new perspective on your faith and God's nature since the birth of your triplet daughters?
I'll tell you one of the things that has struck me. I think it is possible to maybe glimpse the meaning of what it is for everyone to have their own unique soul when you see three daughters, born on the same day, within the same womb — and now see them as they are three-and-a-half years old, growing up in the same environment all of their lives, yet each of them unique and different, with likes and dislikes, and thought processes that are just their own.
There's nothing that was done to develop one in one way and one in another. They're just a gift from God — unique little people.
In exit polls conducted after the Aug. 4 primary, Michigan voters cited education of their children as their most important issue. You've supported educational choice since you became governor. Please comment on your efforts to improve educational opportunities in the state.
Michigan has a very firm constitutional ban against public dollars assisting non-public or private schools. Rather than engaging in a campaign to change that, I put my focus on creating as much opportunity through choice and competition as possible in the traditional public school system.
We now have more than 100 charter schools — the third greatest number in the country. We have students attending school districts next door or across town, that are different and fit their individual needs for an education program better. It's what the parents and the students want. This is sending a message to every school that, just as happens in our community college and university system, when the student and parent have a choice, schools are working to satisfy the customer. I'm seeing school reform efforts undertaken in schools that have been resistant for years.
I've always felt that we had a lot of talented teachers, and if they were unleashed to teach, if some of the distractions were cleared away — such as a violent student, a bureaucratic lack of priority, or something outside the school — that we could do very well. Gradually, we are winning a lot of converts among public school teachers who say, “We understand what's going on now.”
The Republican Party has a pro-life platform, but there is pressure from some quarters to not only include people who are pro-abortion, but to change the pro-life stance of the platform. Do you think that will happen? Do you think the idea of appealing to more voters justifies changing the platform?
I think there's a difference. There are Republicans who have very different opinions on issues like abortion. That doesn't mean they're not Republicans. Just as some Democrats have gone against their party's platform and been very anti-abortion. [Outgoing State Sen.] Mike Griffin from Jackson is one, he has been a great Democratic legislator over the years. [Former] Gov. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania is another. Now, it may mean that Bob Casey doesn't get invited to speak at the Democratic convention, but it doesn't mean that he's not a Democrat.
In the Republican Party, since we only have two main parties in the country, you are going to have some differences. There are some Republicans who are more economic-oriented, some who are almost libertarian. We have had a debate within the party about drugs, and have had very prominent Republicans who have basically tossed in the towel on the drug fight, saying, “Look, let's just legalize them.” I don't mean to equate these things with the [pro-life part of the platform], but obviously, drugs take lives, too.
I don't think we are applying a litmus test and saying, “You can't be Republican.” I know there was a debate at the National Republican Committee a few months back, where folks proposed that we deny funding to [candidates] who have a position on abortion different than the platform. [Michigan State Republican Chairwoman] Betsy DeVos did not support that, and she is strongly pro-life.
We had three “no” votes to that proposal from Michigan. That is based on the fact that, as this debate goes on, you want to be able to do some persuading and arguing, and you want to be able to talk to people and say, “Will you take a look at this issue?” For instance, I think that the partial-birth abortion issue has caused a lot of people to rethink what had been absolute positions on the abortion issue.
Do you think people are turning around and going against abortion-on-demand when they hear the facts about partial-birth abortion?
They begin to realize what's going on. I mean, our girls were born at 35 weeks. You know, multiple births often come earlier. Like those remarkable septuplets out in Iowa. At the University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor, what they can do in terms of saving a two-pound baby is extraordinary. It's hard to imagine — as a father of what were very tiny infants — how in one room we're going through heroic efforts to save, and in the next room we're killing, babies of the same age.
Do you foresee the Republican Party changing its platform?
Every four years it's a completely different set of people who participate. But if the presidential candidate, for example, comes in and says, “I want a change,” that candidate would be talking to delegates who would have been elected before [the nomination].
It's going to be the grassroots, and I don't see the party platform changing very much.
Geoffrey Fieger, Jack Kevorkian's former lawyer, was nominated by Democrats to oppose you this November. Will your election strategy change because of the reputation of your opponent?
We're not going to change our campaign. Of course we are going to work very hard to reach out to Democrats who are simply going to be unable to support somebody who, I think, lacks the ethics necessary to be governor. I think this is the first time we have someone running who has been cited by the state courts for unethical behavior in the practice of law.
For somebody like me, who is Catholic, or even for any person of faith, whether Jewish, Christian, or otherwise, it is hard to imagine somebody who refers to Cardinal Maida [of Detroit] as a nut and then describes the Council of Orthodox rabbis as “closer to Nazis than they realize” as deserving support.
He tends to paint people of faith as religious zealots with a very broad brush, and that is unacceptable. The intolerance is a sharp break from the civility we've always had in Michigan politics. You go all the way back to [former Democratic Gov. G. Mennen] “Soapy” Williams and there has always been, at least in this state, a clean campaign and a level of discourse that didn't tolerate singling out groups or people.
Can you name anyone, historical or contemporary, who is a personal hero for you?
One of my great heroes is Margaret Thatcher, who I think has been enormously important in the way in which she helped change the world. She was elected prior to Reagan and was a wonderful leader. Teddy Roosevelt was one of the presidents I admire. Of course I've read a lot about Lincoln, I admire him, and Jefferson was another who was so remarkably gifted as a leader.
The Pope holds great hope for the new millennium, based on God's plans and dependent on our response to them. What are your hopes for your daughters and their generation in Michigan, in the United States, and world?
First and foremost we want to see them and their generation be able to grow up in a world that is at peace — in a world that is able to deal with some of the human tragedies that still are out there. When you see the magazine pictures of the Sudanese people right now, it's inconceivable that this could go on, that governments could look the other way as people starve to death … when we deal with surpluses of food in many countries.
In this country, we need to see people get out of the grinding poverty that still exists. With the welfare reforms that we are having, I'm hopeful that my daughters will be the first to grow up in a country where people are in charge of their own lives. I'm hoping it is as close to a drug-free generation as possible. If we could end the curse of drugs and other substance abuse in society, we would see overnight a dramatic reduction in incidences of child abuse and neglect.
—Kate Ernsting
------- EXCERPT: Michigan's chief executive assesses the future of his state and the country ----- EXTENDED BODY: Gov. John Engler ----- KEYWORDS: Imperson -------- TITLE: U.S. Notes & Quotes DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:Catholic Schools Vouch for Latino Kids
The situation there highlights the issues involved in voucher debates nationwide: public schools complain that they are losing money because of the scholarships, while thousands of poor families are eager to abandon well-funded but ineffective district schools. Voucher dollars are causing the school district to compete in ways it otherwise did not, and diocesan schools are a major beneficiary of the new students, whom they welcome while worrying about how it will affect their Catholic identity.
About 616 awardees have shared $3 million in tuition payments so far, officials with the Children's Educational Opportunity Foundation (CEO) told the paper. CEO gives vouchers of $2,000-$4,000 to families, said the report. Meanwhile, the school district complains it stands to lose $6 million in projected state funding next year as a consequence — though admitting that the state of Texas will still provide it more than nine times that amount.
What's more, even though CEO had to turn away most of the 1,479 applicants and more than 4,500 phone calls, the popular vouchers have caused a competitive response. Edgewood has opened up special vocational and other programs to outside districts to attract more students. One district board member even complained about the competition. He was quoted expressing resentment that “these kids are being experimented with.”
The archdiocesan superintendent, Dale Hoyt, claims enrollment is rising noticeably in Catholic schools in the area. He wants to reassure state critics, he told the paper, “as long as it does not take away the Catholic identity, as long as it does not have a negative effect on the purpose and philosophy of Catholic schools.”
Scandal Drove Catholic Supporters from Clinton
That made William Powers of the National Journal notice something: it seems that many of the president's former allies who dropped their support of him during the scandal share one thing in common.
“Is it any coincidence that so many of the commentators who have chosen to signal their unhappiness with Mr. Clinton, despite their ideological comfort with him, come out of the same Church?” he asked in his report.
He listed several Catholic detractors: CNBC's Matthews, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, The Washington Post's Michael Kelly and Mary McGrory, PBS's Mark Shields, ABC's Cokie Roberts, NBC's Tim Russert, and former White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, each of whom has criticized the president regarding the scandal. Matthews gives Catholic morality the credit for his opposition.
Roberts gives the Sacrament of Penance some of the credit, too. Growing up Catholic, she is quoted saying, “You just hear over and over, ‘You take responsibility. You did it.’”
In contrast, she called Clinton's begrudging admission of lying to the country but not to the independent counsel a “mea minima culpa.”
Elected Catholics in Michigan Told to Defend Life
The law would legalize assisted suicide, repealing the state's ban. It is a centerpiece of the gubernatorial campaign of Geoffery Fieger, whom the state's Democratic party has vigorously supported despite much controversy.
Fieger, the lawyer who successfully defended suicide-specialist Dr. Jack Kevorkian, has been widely quoted ridiculing the Pope; saying Orthodox Jews are like Nazis; and calling Jesus a “goofball who was nailed to a cross.”
The Catholic Campaign named Catholic politicians and quoted Pope John Paul II's words in The Gospel of Life that prohibit them from supporting the measure.
“In the case of an intrinsically unjust law, such as a law permitting abortion or euthanasia, it is therefore never licit to obey it, or to take part in a propaganda campaign in favor of such a law, or vote for it,” said the encyclical.
Robert Mylod, co-chairman of the Catholic Campaign for America, named these Catholic elected officials in Michigan: U.S. Rep. John Dingle, David Bonier, Joe Knollenberg, Dale Kildee, Gov. John Engler, State Attorney General Frank Kelly, Wayne County Executive Ed McNamara, and Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer.
Gov. Engler opposes assisted suicide. (See related “InPerson,” page 1.)
------- EXCERPT: Excerpts from select publications ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Orthodox Theologian Praises Catholic Model DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:WARSAW—A leading Russian Orthodox theologian has praised the “universalism” achieved by the Catholic Church under Pope John Paul II.
He added that more and more Russian priests believed an encounter with Western Christianity could help the Orthodox world meet contemporary challenges.
“The Catholic Church has preserved its universal character, even though there were moments when it forgot it,” said Father Georgi Chistiakov, a Moscow University professor.
“I'm amazed and fascinated by its current dynamism, its courage in asking old questions while seeking new answers. I'm impressed by the path the Church has taken over the 30 years since Vatican II.”
In an interview with Poland's Tygodnik Powszechny Catholic weekly, Father Chistiakov said Western Christians had responded successfully to new problems at a time when Orthodox counterparts were convinced their main task was to restore Church life and theology “in a 19th-century form.”
“Seeking out new theology isn't a Russian tradition — Orthodox Russia needs to be shown that new horizons are possible,” the priest continued.
“We must be conscious that Christianity isn't only a repetition of old revealed truths, but an endless search and discovery, an eternal spring. This is visible in the contemporary theology and life of Western Churches.”
Father Chistiakov said views of Catholicism in Russia were outdated, adding that few Orthodox Christians were aware of key papal texts such as Orientale Lumen and Ut Unum Sint.
However, he stressed that traditional attitudes were being questioned increasingly by “theological daredevils,” who believed the Church's authorities should be open to criticism.
“Orthodox theology is dominated by a fear of taking new steps — many are convinced all such steps will amount to a betrayal of Orthodox tradition,” the theologian said.
“In reality, traditions shouldn't divide us, but allow us to see the variety and richness of Christianity. A Catholic can be fascinated by St. Serafin of Sarov, just as an Orthodox Christian can revere St. Francis of Assisi.”
Disputes over ties with the Catholic Church, whose million Russian members face tough curbs under a 1997 religious law, have intensified in the past two years, with many Orthodox clergy demanding a cutback in ecumenical contacts in response to alleged Catholic proselytism.
Among recent incidents, an Italian priest was dismissed from Altai State University at Orthodox insistence, while Jozef Cardinal Glemp of Poland was reported by Church sources to have emerged “depressed” from a June meeting with Metropolitan Vladimir of St. Petersburg.
However, in his interview, Father Chistiakov said Orthodox anti-ecumenists had failed to enlist their Patriarch's support against proponents of change.
“Alexei II finds himself between the hammer and the anvil,” the theologian added. “But he is not our opponent. He always says he has nothing against us, but only believes there's too much noise around us.”
Father Chistiakov said he had met the Pope several times, and believed John Paul II embodied an “unusual mixture” of “fundamentalism and openness.”
“The Church elected him knowing he could harmoniously combine faithfulness to tradition with a courageous acceptance of contemporary challenges,” the priest said.
“He is able to take new and unexpected steps, while remaining deeply rooted in Polish spirituality.”
The theologian, a former close associate of the murdered Orthodox ecumenist Father Alexander Men, said he saw himself as belonging to a “universal Church,” adding that he hoped to bring other Russian Christians closer to Western traditions while remaining loyal to his Orthodox priesthood. (Jonathan Luxmoore)
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: World Notes & Quotes DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:Non-Catholic Students Learn Prayers and Attend Mass
In Australia, the latest enrollment figures show that non-Catholics are flocking to Catholic schools as never before — knowing that they will be required to participate in religious education and regularly attend Mass.
In many parts of Australia, non-Catholic enrollment has grown as high as 25%. A spokeswoman at Australia's Parramatta diocese told the paper that “students come to the school knowing it has a definite ethos and commitment to religious instruction and prayer.”
It quoted one non-Catholic high school freshman student saying, “I don't see myself as being Catholic. But I pray to God at church and I learn about loving God and helping people.”
In recent tests, students averaged 97% on questions requiring that they know Catholic prayers, said the report. The schools want the students to get their scores on doctrinal questions up to that same level.
Said one school spokesman, “My hope would be that when these children finish [senior year] that there would not be any significant gaps in their knowledge and understanding of the Catholic faith tradition.”
Polish Diaspora United by Church and Scouting
They haven't forgotten them, however, thanks to the International Polish Scouting Organization (which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year) and the Catholic Church.
There are Polish scouts in 11 countries. In the United States, the group now has more than 100,000 members in 11 states, said the Columbus Dispatch. Ohio was the site this month of the international group's jubilee, which is held every six years.
The Polish scouts stress their heritage, which includes Catholicism. Archbishop Szczepan Wesoly flew in from Rome to kickoff the golden anniversary jubilee with an outdoor Mass in Polish at the camp Aug. 16, said the report.
“Incorporating Polish language and heritage into programs keeps Polish-American youth in touch with their roots,” Scout leader Andy Stachowiak of New Britain, Conn., told the paper. “If you know your background, you fit in.”
Julian Green's Diary Ends
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Aug. 17—One man who figured largely in what has been called the “20th century Catholic literary revival” has died, reported the Associated Press (AP), which learned the information from French media.
Julian Green, born in Paris to American parents and educated at the University of Virginia, was the author of several novels about the American South — in French. But perhaps he was best known for his extensive diary that chronicled his life among the Parisian elite, and which expressed a profound faith and his struggle to keep it.
He also translated Catholic poet Charles Peguy into English in language that bilingual critics have called better than the original. AP reported that he was the first foreigner to be elected to the Academie Francaise that guards the purity of the French language. He died at age 97, but the report said that he had already stopped his ambitious schedule of spending hours every day writing in his journal.
The diary itself, 40 years before his death, offers a clue why.
“You will be a better man only when you have completely lost sight of yourself and will then think of your Creator,” he told himself. “No more diary, no more mirror, no more self-complacency. A fly, after long wanderings over a windowpane in search of the sun it sees but cannot reach, being separated from it by this sheet of glass, will fly out of the window when death opens it.”
------- EXCERPT: Excerpts from select publications ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Vatican Notes & Quotes DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:20 Years Later They Call Paul VI a Prophet
Paul VI's Humanae Vitae is the encyclical letter that reaffirmed Church teaching about of contraception. It correctly predicted that a contraceptive culture would mean more immorality, worse situations for women, disregard for human life, and governments that would push the pill as an easy — but ultimately ineffective — solution to poverty.
Often overlooked, Paul VI's other work was prophetic as well, wrote Schultz, prefiguring Pope John Paul II's unique pontificate. His many trips set the stage for his successor's extensive travels. The Pope also prepared for later anti-communist successes when he “established connections and precedents that John Paul II would use to elicit growing concessions from the communists.”
“Paul VI also helped bring the various parties to the Paris peace talks,” which led to the end of the Vietnam War, he continued — and it was Paul who first said: “If you want peace, work for justice.”
Schultz said the popular Pope did much for women, as well: first of all, by standing single-handedly against contraception, but also by proclaiming the first women as doctors of the Church (Teresa of Avila and Catherine of Sienna), and by other actions.
On a personal note, Shultz added, “[g]ood literature, art, music, and culture touched him as deeply as theology and philosophy.”
------- EXCERPT: Excerpts from select publications ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: The Catechism of the Catholic Church on 'Just War' Doctrine DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:“The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time:
• the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
• all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
• there must be serious prospects of success;
• the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.
“These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the ‘just war’ doctrine.
“The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.”
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Ethics of Cloning DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:The American Enterprise Institute has just published an informative little book called The Ethics of Human Cloning. The book is an exchange between Leon Kass, a physician and bioethicist, and James Wilson, a retired UCLAprofessor who has written on restoring a moral sense to our nation. When it was announced in early 1997 that Dolly the sheep had been cloned by Scottish scientist Dr. Ian Wilmut, a public debate began about the implications of cloning. Scientists tended to favor tolerance for further controlled experiments. Ethicists tried to evaluate the implications of such experiments. Government leaders in the United States looked to the National Bioethics Advisory Committee for a thorough review of the legal and ethical issues raised by the possibility of human cloning.
Dr. Wilmut emphasized the complexities of his success — he had 276 failures before the procedure worked. He also expressed opposition to human cloning. Gradually the public debate seemed to reach some type of consensus that cloning techniques on plants, animals, and human tissues should not be prohibited, but attempts at cloning a human being should not be pursued. The consensus was and is fragile, and most people do not expect people's ethical discomfort to ultimately prevent human cloning.
Professors Kass and Wilson each had published essays that stood out for their moral clarity and seriousness. These are presented in The Ethics of Human Cloning, along with a response from each scholar.
Kass' original essay, “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” published in The New Republic, argues that “by removing human conception from the human body and by introducing new parties in reproduction [scientists and physicians],” the origin of life has been put literally in human hands and a process has been initiated that leads “in practice, to the increasing technical mastery of human generation and, in thought, to the continuing erosion of respect for the mystery of sexuality and human renewal.”
Kass' underlying argument is based on respect for the “anthropology — natural and social — of sexual reproduction.” In effect, Kass argues for a total prohibition of human cloning. At the same time he recognizes that such a prohibition will be hard to achieve unless founded on social repugnance.
“In crucial cases,” says Kass, “repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power fully to articulate it.” He further states that in a world where virtually everything is permissible so long as it is freely done, “repugnance revolts against the excesses of human willfulness, warning us not to transgress what is unspeakably profound.”
Professor Wilson, in his essay, “The Paradox of Cloning,” originally published in The Weekly Standard, argues that “cloning presents no special ethical risks if society does all in its power to establish that the child is born to a married woman and is the joint responsibility of the married couple.” While far more tolerant and trusting than Kass, Wilson's position is grounded in the value of marriage and the family. He approves other techniques of assisted reproduction as long as they assist a married couple who accept the responsibilities of parenthood.
In reading the essays, I was impressed with the similarity of the reasoning with Catholic moral teaching, more so with Kass than Wilson. Wilson's strong point is parenting within the family, but with some limits on unfettered freedom. For instance, Wilson would not allow cloning so parents could have geniuses, dancers, or football stars. Failing a stipulation to prevent such abuses, he would oppose human cloning.
Kass, on the other hand, is resonant of John Paul II in his emphasis on the generative meaning of sexuality and his conviction “that one will be increasingly incapable of defending the institution of marriage and the two-parent family if one is indifferent to its natural grounding in what I call the ontology of sex.” And Kass raises the further question as to whether and how we can ensure “that all children will have two parents if we ignore, in our social arrangements, the natural (hetero) sexual ground of parenthood?”
Kass makes a powerful argument that limits on cloning will not be effective.
“Given our current beliefs about reproductive freedom, the fracture of the once-respected and solid bonds among sex, love, procreation, and stable marriage, and the relentless march of technology,” Kass believes it will be impossible to safeguard the family and parenting “in the absence of some miraculous recovery of good sense about sexuality and the meaning of procreation and an attitude that once again sees children as a gift to be treasured rather than as a product for our manipulation.”
Kass argues that the battle about reproductive rights was lost when the couple's right to marital privacy in the use of contraception (Griswold) was almost immediately converted into an individual's right of sexual privacy, married or not (Eisenstadt). Of course, privacy was extended even further in Roe v. Wade.
Kass recognizes that in our present culture it is difficult to take a strong moral stance on almost anything, and that due to cultural change, it is “now vastly more difficult to express a common and respectful understanding of sexuality, procreation, nascent life, family, and the meaning of motherhood, fatherhood, and the links between the generations.”
All of this reinforces Kass' wisdom of repugnance. He is convinced that “human cloning is unethical in itself and dangerous in its likely consequences.” Thus he argues for legislation to permanently prohibit human cloning and the taking of all necessary steps to make such a prohibition effective.
The debate is ongoing, and The Ethics of Human Cloning is an important and informative contribution to the ethical discussion.
Bishop James McHugh is ordinary of Camden, N.J., and a member of the NCCB Committee for Pro-Life Activities.
------- EXCERPT: PERSPECTIVE ----- EXTENDED BODY: Bishop James McHugh ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Radiant Words of a Neglected Saint DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:Meditation on the seven penitential psalms was long a part of Catholic piety. Daily recitation of these seven psalms was part of Galileo's sentence (his niece, a nun, was later allowed to pray the psalms in his stead). These psalms of King David are divinely inspired confessions of sin, moving the sinner to make his own the words of King David: peccavi Domino (I have sinned against the Lord). This new printing of St. John Fisher's masterful sermons on the psalms may well encourage readers to pray them, perhaps at the end of the day (seven psalms — one per day), or during the penitential seasons.
This reprinting also serves to reintroduce St. John Fisher to contemporary readers. Fisher shares a feast day with St. Thomas More, June 22, the date on which Fisher was martyred in 1535 for resisting Henry VIII's break with Rome. In this century we have become accustomed to courageous bishops standing up to tyrants — for example, just last month Alojzije Cardinal Stepinac (d. 1962) of Croatia was declared a martyr under the communists and will be beatified in October.
Yet in his time Fisher was the only bishop to defy Henry VIII, understanding himself to be following in the footsteps of his namesake, John the Baptist, in defending the indissolubility of marriage. Fisher was not only a bishop, but a leading scholar, man of letters, chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and confessor to Lady Margaret Beaufort, the saintly grandmother of Henry VIII. Alas, he remains as ignored today as St. Thomas More is celebrated.
This volume presents in modern English Fisher's sermons on Psalms 6, 31, 37, 50, 101, 129, and 142 (alternatively numbered 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130 and 143). The most well known of these are 50 (51), the Miserere, and 129 (130) the De profundis. The former appears every Friday in the Liturgy of the Hours, and the latter is traditionally recited when praying for the dead. Together with the other five, they comprise the seven penitential psalms.
Anne Barbeau Gardiner has rendered Fisher's English (he wrote before Shakespeare) into felicitous modern English, while not sacrificing the elegance of the older, elevated style. Her introduction briefly outlines Fisher's life, describing him as “a virtual one-man counter-reformation in England,” first against Luther and then against Henry VIII.
Barbeau makes a contribution to the continuing project of correcting anti-Catholic history, arguing that the popularity of Fisher's sermons — reprinted seven times between 1508 and 1529 — “evinced a high measure of spiritual receptivity and showed that genuine faith and devotion were far more alive than usually claimed by defenders of the Protestant Reformation.”
There is no mincing of words about the horror of sin and our culpability.
The sermons are of high literary quality, devotional and theologically rich. His graceful combination of systematic argument and literary devices makes his prose useful both for study and spiritual reading. Notwithstanding either devotional fervor or theological argument, it is Fisher's transparent holiness that gives the work its true radiance.
While Fisher focuses on conversion, contrition, and the need for penance (sacramental and otherwise) in the spiritual life, his reflections are wide-ranging. He preaches at some length on the Virgin Mary in Psalm 37, and his sermon on Psalm 129 interweaves a brilliant exegesis of Jonah with a detailed description of the process by which we entertain sin, consent to it, revel in it, boast of it, and finally are ruled by it. There is no mincing of words about the horror of sin and our culpability. He dwells upon the wretchedness of sin only to move his listeners to “tears of contrition,” directing them to the “cleansing power of Christ's blood.”
No recommendation of this volume should lack a sample of this fine work. In a splendid passage of his sermon on Psalm 50, Fisher vividly “measures” the mercy of God, mixing Latin and English, and weaving together verses from other psalms:
“Truly, the mercy of our most mighty and blessed Lord is great, so great that it has all measures of greatness. Of its greatness in height it is written, Domine, usque ad cælos misericordia tua, Lord, your mercy extends and reaches up to the heavens (Ps 56:11). It is also great in depth, for it reaches down to the lowest hell. The prophet says, misericordia tua magna est super me, et eruisti animam meam ex inferno inferiori, Lord, your mercy is great over me and you have delivered me from the lowest and deepest hell (Ps 85:13). It is broad, for it occupies and spans all the world, the same prophet saying, misericordia Domini plena est terra, the earth is full of the mercy of our Lord (Ps 32:5). It lacks no length, for also by the same prophet it is spoken: misericordia eius ab æterno, et usque in æternum super timentes eum, the mercy of God is without end on those who fear him (Ps 102:17).
“Therefore since the mercy of God is so high, so deep, so broad, and so long, who can say or think it is little? Who will not call it great by all measures of greatness? Then, everyone who wants to acquaint himself with this mercy can say, miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam, Lord, have mercy on me according to thy great mercy.”
That passage should serve to whet the appetite for St. John Fisher's works, which here and elsewhere move us to confess peccavi Domino, secure in the knowledge that the prayer, Miserere mei, never goes unheard.
Raymond de Souza is a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Kingston, Ontario.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Private Revelations: Handle With Care DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:Digest of Father Mark Slatter's article on private revelations in the June 1998 issue of This Rock magazine
The June 1998 issue of This Rock magazine carries an article by Father Mark Slatter on judging the validity of private revelations. Father Slatter reminds us that, “Though the Church is never without false mystics, she also recognizes the role that private revelation has played in history…. These revelations have sparked faith in countless lives. I've lost count of the number of people who've attested to significant religious conversions at these apparitions.”
Besides producing powerful positive effects, however, a hankering for special access to God “has its share of pitfalls. Some Catholics are unknowingly damaging their faith and that of others for want of discernment of the authenticity of the ‘messages.’Others are taking fairly harmless messages — even those considered respectable — and bringing harm upon themselves because of the way they take them to heart….”
“To keep a sane view of private revelations, you must know first and above all that you do not have to accept any private revelation whatsoever…. The public or universal call to faith for all and for all time is Jesus Christ, the love of our lives. It's not belief in a message, however credible it might be, that will save you.”
And we have to consider not just the message, but the messenger.
“Even the exceptionally gifted will not receive every revelation perfectly from the Holy Spirit…. To see the truth of this, we should note the many examples of ‘erroneous revelation’ in the lives of the great saints. It is thought that Catherine of Siena believed the Lord told her that the Immaculate Conception did not happen. Joan of Arc had an interior locution concerning her death, but misinterpreted both the date and the manner…. Now, if these giants knew error, can others among us refrain from slipping into the same?”
“Spiritual experiences are still human experiences…. [Those who] were closer to the Lord than any of us are … were sufficiently wise and humble to know that it was murky and potentially hazardous in that Cloud of Unknowing, and one could easily get lost in it.”
In addition to verifying the revelation's “alignment with the Gospel and Church teaching, the lifestyle, and integrity of the seer … submission to ecclesial authorities,” Father Slatter recommends these six criteria:
“1. Syncretism. Some sources are a hybrid of pagan, secular, and Christian ideas….
“2. Hidden agenda. Other messages are strongly ideological, promoting an agenda that reflects the anger and dissatisfaction of certain interest groups in today's Church….
“3. Anti-hierarchy. Other messages are not only critical of the Church hierarchy … but actually deny Church authorities their delegated responsibility of shepherding God's people….
It's not belief in a message, however credible it might be, that will save you.
“4. Common sense…. I can't recall the exact details, but somewhere out there there's a set of messages detailing a future disaster for Canada. To survive, one is required to have a piece of paper upon which these or similar words are written: ‘Christ, save me’….
“5. Freedom to respond. Some … ‘revelations,’on the other hand, resort to emotional blackmail. I have in mind a pamphlet that put into the mouth of Christ these words: ‘These people, who brawl against my religion and cast slurs on this sacred letter, shall be forsaken by me’….
“6. The messenger…. Sister Faustina's authenticity and the beautiful devotions begotten by her life are watertight, almost beyond question. On the other hand, there is the case of Maria Valtorta, author of The Poem of the Man-God … in the words of Father Benedict Groeschel, who happens to be a trained psychologist: ‘Miss Valtorta was a very devout and intelligent person. She spent the last 10 years of her life in complete cata-tonic schizophrenia, unable to speak to anyone. This disease came on her gradually. It's important to realize that the progress of a disease like that may take years before the acute symptoms occur….’
“Some might object that they've experienced an inspiration from God through The Poem of the Man God. Yet anything can inspire faith…. Ultimately the question is not one of inspiration but of credibility and authority….”
Finally, Father Slatter considers contemporary apocalyptic messages: “There is great danger here, for, however sincere the desire to inspire or strengthen faith by an apocalyptic message, it's possible that the end effect will be a weakening of faith … the possibility for sin with private revelation is trust not in the Lord but in a supposed knowledge of a future event. The only difference between this and consulting the horoscope is that one harvests knowledge from the stars and the other from a mystic.”
Ellen Wilson Fielding writes from Davidsonville, Maryland.
The Definite Article is a digest of the Register's choice from the nation's top journals.
------- EXCERPT: THE DEFINITE ARTICLE ----- EXTENDED BODY: Ellen Wilson Fielding ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Firm Stand DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:Congratulations on the issue of July 12-18, 1998. It's a wonderful boost to my sagging morale to see you take a firm stand on essential points. Your front page article by Mark Brumley, “Controversial Homosexuality Document Reissued with Revisions by U.S. Bishops” comes late, but no less welcome, followed by Bishop [Fabian] Bruskewitz's statement of some months ago, to which you accorded editorial status along with Pope John Paul II. Also, Karl Keating is a pleasure to read for his “episcopal backbone” and other phrases!
Antoinette Edrop
Lake Geneva, Wisconsin
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Lefebvre's Undoing DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:I found the article on “New Latin Mass Orders Making Pa. Diocese a ‘Spiritual Powerhouse’” (Aug. 9-15) both informative and inspiring, in that the more traditional movement is creatively inspiring vocations at the same time that the new theology can only propose the non-Catholic notions of priestesses and the suppression of celibacy as solutions to the vocations crisis it itself created.
However, certain statements made about the Society of St. Pius X and its founder, Archbishop Lefebvre were not entirely accurate. As anyone who has read Pope John Paul's apostolic letter Ecclesia Dei knows, Lefebvre was excommunicated for the “schismatic act” of disobeying a “formal canonical warning” not to consecrate bishops against the Pope's wishes (No. 3), not at all for a “lack of support for changes brought by the Second Vatican Council.”
Many loyal groups, such as Father Joseph Fessio's Adoremus, point out that the liturgical innovations of our day were not so much as mentioned in any Vatican II documents. Even Lefebvre, in his 1976 book A Bishop Speaks, supported much of the Council's liturgical agenda, saying, “Some reform and renewal was needed…. Let the priest draw near the faithful, communicate with them, pray and sing with them, stand at the lectern to give the readings from the Epistle and Gospel in their tongue…. All these are happy reforms restoring to this part of the Mass its true purpose.”
On the other hand, Pope John Paul has, in his concern for “those Catholic faithful who feel attached to some previous liturgical and disciplinary forms of the Latin tradition” and to “facilitate their ecclesial communion” and “rightful aspirations” (Ecclesia Dei, No. 5c) provided the indult “for the use of the Roman Missal according to the typical edition of 1962” (6c). The article failed to mention that not only the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, but all of the sacraments are licitly administered in their traditional, pre-Vatican II form by the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter. Therefore, it seems inaccurate to say that the schismatic group's problems relate to “lack of support” for Vatican II changes, when the Pope himself has explicitly given the indult for just that: all of the sacraments and minor orders in their 1962 form with no Vatican II changes.
Eugene Mafi
Seal Beach, California
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Age-Old Book Offers Unusual View Of Early Popes DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:The ancient Liber Pontificalis (Book of Pontiffs) gives brief lives of the first 108 holders of the see of Rome. Only recently has this important work been translated into English, allowing those of us whose Latin is less than fluent to browse at will. The fourth pope listed is Clement, known to history as Clement of Rome and the author of an epistle, addressed to the Corinthians, that is used by Catholic apologists to show the early exercise of papal authority. It seems that the Corinthians had called on Clement to settle a dispute (the poor Corinthians were still troubled, long decades after Paul had tried to straighten them out, apparently with insufficient success). The last surviving Apostle, John, lived much closer to them and would have been the logical adjudicator, but they didn't write to him. They wrote to the successor of the chief apostle, and Pope Clement replied in tones of authority. The Liber Pontificalis gives only 20 lines about Clement, including the curious note that “on St. Peter's instruction he undertook the pontificate for governing the Church, as the cathedra had been handed down and entrusted to him by Jesus Christ…. Hence Linus and Cletus are recorded before him because they were ordained bishops to provide the sacerdotal ministry by the Prince of Apostles himself.”
For clarification of this peculiar passage, I flipped back a page to the life of Peter. “He ordained two bishops, Linus and Cletus, to be present in Rome to provide the entire sacerdotal ministry for the people and for visitors.”
Today we would call Linus and Cletus auxiliary bishops. They seem to have been given most of the sacramental duties, while Peter oversaw the Church as a whole. “Peter himself was free to pray and preach, to teach the people” (suggesting perhaps that the sacramental duties of a bishop tended to limit his leisure for prayer and for homiletics?).
Then comes a curious point: In addition to praying, preaching, and teaching, Peter seems to have been noted for his public debates. “He held many debates with Simon Magus, both before the Emperor Nero and before the people, because Simon was using magical tricks and deceptions to scatter those whom Peter had gathered into Christ's faith. When their disputes had lasted a long time, Simon was struck down by God's will.”
In addition to praying, preaching, and teaching, Peter seems to have been noted for his public debates.
Nero, later the first great persecutor of the Church, thus knew Simon Magus and Peter and amused himself by watching the magician joust with the fisherman from Galilee. But Nero's champion “was struck down by God's will.” Did this embitter Nero against the Christians? We aren't told, but it is a fair surmise. Recall that Pharaoh's opinion of the Israelites was not improved when he saw his priests bested by Moses.
The next sentence of the life of the first Pope records that Peter “consecrated St. Clement as bishop and entrusted the cathedra and the whole management of the Church to him, saying: ‘As the power of government, that of binding and loosing, was handed to me by my Lord Jesus Christ, so I entrust it to you; ordain those who are to deal with various cases and execute the Church's affairs; do not be caught up in the cares of the world but ensure you are completely free for prayer and preaching to the people.’ After making this arrangement he was crowned with martyrdom along with Paul in the 38th year after the Lord suffered.”
Do not misinterpret what is going on here. No pope can make another man his successor; the most he can do is make him a bishop, which is what Peter did to Linus, Cletus, and Clement. It is unclear what force should be given to the clause “after making this arrangement,” but I take it to mean that Clement was consecrated not long before Peter's death.
He appears to have been Peter's recommendation for pope, but that choice could not be made until the papal see fell vacant and thus would be made by the living, not by Peter. Since Linus and Cletus had been ordained some years earlier to assist Peter in the administration of the see of Rome, and since each had paid his dues, so to speak, it must have seemed proper to the clergy of Rome to allow each in turn to serve as chief bishop of the imperial capital.
Thus Linus became the second pope, holding the see for 11 years, and Cletus the third, holding it for 12. Next came Peter's personal favorite, Clement, who was pope for nine years. The Liber Pontificalis closes its lives of Linus and Cletus by noting that each was buried “close to St. Peter's body on the Vatican [Hill].” Unexpectedly, Clement, Peter's favorite, died in Rome but ended up being buried in Greece.
Karl Keating is founding director of Catholic Answers.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Karl Keating ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The First Catholic Voice Before Congress DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:In a bold 1826 address, Bishop John England defended the faith in front of President John Quincy Adams and others who thought badly of it
Much attention has been given in recent years to the role of religion in American life. A recent exhibit at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. contributes to that discussion by highlighting the religious views and practices of Americans from the colonial to ante-bellum eras.
The exhibit, “Religion and the Founding of the American Republic,” shows the vital role that faith played in the early years of the nation. By presenting the contributions of various denominations, it also celebrates the diversity of beliefs that have come to characterize the American religious experience.
Several artifacts reflect Catholic practices, but perhaps the most interesting of these focuses on a sermon given by Bishop John England of Charleston, S.C., in 1826. This talk was delivered in the U.S. House of Representatives, and it marked the first time that a Catholic spoke on religion in that chamber. A copy of the speech and an oil portrait of Bishop England are included in the exhibit.
What is most important to us today is that Bishop England delivered a memorable speech that boldly proclaimed the beliefs of his faith while at the same time stressing its compatibility with republican virtues.
But this was only one event in a career that was notable in its defense of Catholicism in the press of the day.
A Rebuttal to the President
The speech he delivered in Washington Jan. 8, 1826, partly responded to anti-Catholic remarks made by John Quincy Adams in a Fourth of July oration nearly five years earlier. Adams was by then president and was on hand to hear the bishop's rebuttal.
Bishop England's route to the dais of the House of Representatives was a rather unusual one. Born in Ireland, he arrived in the United States in 1820 as a 34-year-old priest, newly appointed as the first bishop of Charleston. The post was largely a missionary one, for the diocese included only three priests and 5,000 Catholics in three states.
Still, he accomplished much in the 22 years he led his people. He established a prototypical diocesan council, founded the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Mercy — which still exists today — and launched the first American Catholic weekly newspaper, the United States Catholic Miscellany. In recognition of his many journalistic efforts, the Catholic Press Association presents an annual publisher's award in his name.
The catalogue for the Library of Congress exhibit notes that clergymen from various denominations were routinely invited to preach in the House. Bishop England apparently leapt at the opportunity to present a Catholic rejoinder to those who, like Adams, were either skeptical or disdainful of the Church. Virulent anti-Catholicism would not develop for another decade or so, but clearly the antecedents were present.
In a preface to the published version of his speech, England said he had sought to address the misunderstanding that even educated people had about the beliefs of the Catholic Church. At several points in the sermon, he discussed the myths that were conveyed regarding Catholic practices, and he most certainly believed Adams was one of those myth makers.
Separating Church & State
In an age where republicanism — a commitment to equality and virtue — was strongly followed, Bishop England sought to show that Catholicism was perfectly compatible with that ideal. He also endorsed a division between religion and civil government, saying that such a dichotomy was in the best interest of both institutions. One of the bishop's biographers, Peter Clarke, has written, “John England was the first theoretician of separation of Church and state and freedom of religion.”
In dissecting this notable speech, the reader is impressed by the steady, but forceful apologia offered by the Irishman. He tells the assembly, which surely was overwhelmingly non-Catholic, that the revelation of truth from the Lord was given to early Church leaders.
In the first century these holy men “formed but one Church through many nations — one tribunal to testify in every place the same doctrine — all the individuals who taught, were witnesses for or against each other: the whole body, with the successor of Peter at its head, watchful to see that each taught that which was originally delivered,” he said.
There has been a constancy to this truth throughout the ages, and it must be presented to each age “neither adding, omitting, [nor] changing.” After arguing the static universality of revealed truth, Bishop England then addresses the political issues that were of interest to his republican audience.
Politics & the Pope
First he discusses the same question that dogged Alfred Smith in his 1928 presidential campaign and John F. Kennedy in 1960: Does a Catholic have inappropriate loyalty to a foreign power — that is, the Pope? Here is where Bishop England is most emphatic.
“I would not allow,” he says, “to the Pope or to any bishop of our Church, outside this Union, the smallest interference with the humblest vote at our most insignificant balloting box. He has no right to interference.”
He then goes a step further by emphasizing that Congress and the U.S. government have no right to meddle in the affairs of the Church.
He told the gathering, “You have no power to interfere with my religious rights, the tribunal of the Church has no power to interfere with my civil rights. It is a duty which every good man ought to discharge for his own, and for the public benefit, to resist any encroachment upon either.” Unfortunately, he notes, there are misinformed people who believe certain slanders against the Catholic Church. One is that the Church is despotic and antithetical to a republican form of government. He counters by citing Catholic individuals and nations who have been bulwarks against despotism, and argues that there is no evidence that Catholics are anything but true republican patriots.
To the charge that the Church has encouraged persecution, he says that, sadly, every Church has practiced some degree of cruelty and bigotry. This was wrong, but there is nothing in Catholic teaching which encourages it. Even the Inquisition, he notes, was a civil, not a religious, movement.
The final political point he addressed dealt with the Church's role in deposing unfriendly kings — clearly a practice that would raise concerns. The evidence, he argues, is absent; and legends to the contrary are the product of biased writers. It is not, he stresses, a tenet of the Church that popes interfere with legitimate governments, whether kingdoms or republics.
Kudos from Congress
The bishop's sermon, which lasted two hours, was apparently so well received that 21 members of Congress immediately encouraged him to publish it in book form. This he did, and a copy of that book is part of the Library of Congress exhibit. Less than one month after the speech, Bishop John England, a native of Cork, Ireland, became an American citizen.
The exhibit is replete with stories such as that of Bishop England. Although the various components of the historical display do not go into the detail provided here, the overall effect is to create a better appreciation for the richness of America's religious history.
“Religion and the Founding of the American Republic” ended its showing in Washington, D.C., Aug. 25, but is scheduled to continue to other U.S. cities. Presumably, many more Americans will get a chance to see the works of people such as Bishop England and Father Andrew White, who celebrated the first Mass in America in 1634.
These offerings help us to understand one notable observation made by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835 and cited in one of the exhibit's booklets.
The legendary Frenchman wrote in Democracy in America: “I do not know whether all the Americans have a sincere faith in their religion, for who can read the human heart?
“But I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens or to a party, but it belongs to the whole nation and to every rank of society,” he said.
Joseph Esposito is the Register's Washington Correspondent.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Esposito ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: So-Called 'Private Acts' Have Profound Impact on Society DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:We live in a world of crises. And none is more dangerous than the current crisis of conscience. After all, conscience is, the Pope tells us, “the monitor of true social and moral order.” Without it we lose our bearings, not only individually but socially as well. Since we are social beings even our “private acts” are profoundly social. In many respects, there are no “private acts,” since any of our actions affect our families, our friends, our communities, our nation.
If we are Christians, our “private acts” either strengthen or weaken the entire Body of Christ.
Abortion, which was supposed to be merely a private matter, has had profound social ramifications. A single Supreme Court decision, claiming that abortion was a “private matter,” wiped out many public laws enacted by countless legislators over decades. Since that time our country has been torn apart by controversies over that “private act.” There have been legal and legislative battles. There is the social fact of millions of citizens never born, workers never producing, future teachers, scientists, and doctors never seeing the light of day to make their own unique contributions to society. Ironically there are also those who want the government to pay for that “private act” with public tax dollars. “Private acts” never remain merely “private.”
The Supreme Court is supposed to interpret the Constitution, that document which shapes our life together as a nation. Yet the Court seems so mired in radical subjectivism that it cannot see the necessarily social impact of “private acts.” In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the justices spoke of the Constitution granting citizens a broad “right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
The problem of course is that one does not have “a concept of existence, of meaning … of the mystery of human life” without acting on it. The individuals who blew up U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania certainly had their “concept of existence.” Those who kill babies as they are being born through partial birth abortion have their “concept of meaning.” So do scientists who experiment on embryos, and physicians who help patients kill themselves. And so do men in positions of responsibility who exploit women who work for them.
Is it surprising in such a world that even the president of the United States would try to excuse immoral behavior on the grounds that it concerned only his “private life”? Yet we can see how quickly such “private acts” have their social impact, on family, friends, nations.
They even have their implications for national security as we saw when the motives of the commander-in-chief were called into question when he bombed Sudan and Afghanistan.
What is the protection against such dangerous subjectivism? Conscience. It is “the monitor of true social and moral order.” There can be no social order without a moral order. A democracy is only as strong as its citizens and leaders are virtuous. Did our Lord not tell a parable in which a master entrusted his servant with great things precisely because he had been faithful in small things?
Today conscience is falsely understood as the power to do whatever one wants rather than the power to do what one ought. When properly understood conscience tells us how to live for others, not how selfishly to gratify ourselves. Conscience helps us live in accord with our true, God-given nature that was described concisely by the Second Vatican Council: “man … cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.”
We can all know what is truly good for us since God created us all with the same human nature. Everyone can know how they ought to act, if they are sufficiently attentive to the voice of God in themselves. Robert Spaemann, a Catholic philosopher, writes: “If there were no such thing as the basic structure of human nature [created by God], whereby certain things are considered reasonable or unreasonable, then the command to love one another would be meaningless and could be replaced by whatever we wanted, for it could be filled with any content.”
This of course is precisely what has happened in our day of “private acts” justified by our “private conscience.” However, even conscience is not really private. It is most assuredly personal. I am the only one responsible for my acts, and I am the only one who will be rewarded or punished for those actions dictated by my conscience. However, one reason we have to answer even for our “private actions” is that none is ever simply “private.”
John Haas is president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Boston, Massachusetts.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Haas ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Campaign in Action DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:Projects that conform to Church moral teaching and “innovatively address the basic causes of poverty and effect institutional change” are the focus of funding from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, according to the Campaign's annual report. At least 50% of those benefiting from the project must come from a low-income community.
The funding process starts with an application that may be prescreened at the diocesan level, said Kent Peters, who presently serves as San Diego diocesan CCHD director in his capacity as director of the Office for Social Ministries. He came to that position last year after serving in a similar capacity from 1989 to 1997 in the Diocese of Duluth, Minn.
In Duluth, CCHD-funded projects for organizations focused on Church-based organizing, women's issues, homeless advocacy, and Native Americans.
“There was never — in San Diego or Duluth — a project that was close to questionable [in terms of adherence to Church teaching],” said Peters.
He pointed out that if an ordinary didn't like a project, funding would be pulled.
Peters explained that a new organization completes a pre-application used to screen such agencies according to prescribed guidelines. If the organization satisfies this first step, a full application is reviewed by a team at the diocesan level. The team's recommendations are forwarded to the national CCHD office and reviewed by an advisory committee. That panel makes recommendations to the CCHD bishops'committee, which makes the final decisions.
Here's a look at some Campaign recipients:
• The Environmental Health Coalition (EHC) in San Diego received grants for two projects. Several years ago, CCHD funds helped start the program. The acronym SALTA stands for Salud Ambiental, Latinas Tomando Accion (Environmental Health, Latinas Taking Action). Women in two low-income neighborhoods were trained to be promotoras, environmental health promoters. The promotoras then recruit, train, and educate other women to recognize environmental health hazards and to teach other women about the dangers of potentially hazardous household cleaners and toxic pesticides.
• In 1995-1996, EHC trained 18 promotoras who recruited more than 200 other women. One critical issue that SALTA tackles is children's exposure to lead, which can be found in pottery and dishes, in paint on houses built in the 1950s, and in some candy from Mexico, said Diane Takvorian, EHC executive director. The coalition's Lead Project also receive CCHD funds for activities including educational programs and free testing of children. The EHC says children under three are at most risk to contract lead poisoning. Risks include stunted mental and physical growth. Furthermore, exposure to pregnant women can lead to spontaneous abortions.
• In the Chicago archdiocese, 20 organizations receive local and national funding, said Jim Lund, co-director of the Office for Peace and Justice. Funded organizations include Not Dead Yet, a group of disabled people fighting against physician-assisted suicide.
Also funded is the Resurrection Project in the Pilson neighborhood. The housing program targeted at Hispanics includes the purchase of lots in the city and construction of more than 100 homes.
Economic development is represented by the Academy Bakery. A CCHD grant was used to found the bakery where at-risk students from a poor neighborhood learn to run a business.
— Liz Swain
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Liz Swain ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: John Paul II's Letter on La Vang DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:The Pope addressed this letter to Paul Joseph Cardinal Pham Dinh Tung of Hanoi, president of the episcopal conference of Vietnam, to mark the 200th anniversary of the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin in La Vang (excerpt).
“… For two centuries [Our Lady's] message, still up to date, has been fervently welcomed in La Vang. Despite the great trials which have marked it in the course of its history, it has now become a national Marian center, which has been able to keep alive the tradition of pilgrimages. Many people, of all origins and all conditions, come here privately to entrust their troubles and hopes to their Mother in heaven. Bishops, priests, religious, and lay people like to find in her the welcoming presence of the One who gives them the courage to bear an admirable witness of Christian life in circumstances that are often difficult. I bless God who never abandons the people who seek him and who, with the motherly assistance of the Virgin Mary, continues to guide them, in days of happiness and of adversity. I hope that the faithful who will come here to pray to Our Lady of La Vang at her shrine during this jubilee year and those who will invoke her in other places will find a new apostolic impetus for their Christian life and receive comfort and strength to face life's trials….”
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Letters -------- TITLE: Collegiate Institute Defends Belief That Ultimate Truths Can Be Known DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:The ISI works to counter relativism on campuses across the country
A conservative, non-sectarian organization is working with leading Catholic thinkers, among others, to spread traditional liberal arts ideals on college campuses.
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute Inc. (ISI) promotes John Henry Cardinal Newman's concept of a liberal education as one that does not serve any particular ends and can help young people liberate their minds, guide them to wisdom and virtue, and attain some degree of inner harmony within themselves, said Jeffrey Nelson, vice president for publications at ISI in Wilmington, Del.
Those liberal arts ideals have caused many ISI supporters to oppose movements such as feminism, historical revisionism, and multiculturalism because they serve specific, political ends, according to Nelson.
Issues regarding what Nelson calls ‘moral normalcy’- right to life and homosexual issues — seem to ‘get the passion going’ on campus more than any other issues.
“Newman would have considered them servile arts,” as opposed to the liberal arts, Nelson said, citing The Idea of a University by the English convert.
Philosophical relativism is “the most insidious influence in higher education,” because it teaches young people that there are no ultimate truths, Nelson told the Register.
Many who oppose ISI would claim that any pedagogy is inherently political, and ISI's is to preserve the status quo, which has benefited certain classes, creeds, and races of people throughout history.
“Any assertion of truth is not a power play,” said Nelson in defense of ISI's viewpoint. “We do have a point of view [which] is to pursue truth for its own sake. We believe there is a truth that we can know.”
ISI has 60,000 professor and student members, which makes it the largest such academic organization in the United States, “by a long shot,” said Nelson. The organization does not charge membership fees.
After launching its first such effort in 1993, the group now publishes eight to twelve titles each year and sells more than 100 discounted books, Nelson said.
Leading authors include G.K. Chesterton, Father Stanley Jaki OSB, Russell Kirk, and C.S. Lewis. Chesterton was an English convert to Catholicism, and Father Jaki is a theoretical physicist and theologian at Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J.
ISI has also published A Student's Guide to Liberal Learning, a handbook by Father James Schall SJ, of Georgetown University, about authors and books that liberal arts' students should read. Next month, the organization will co-publish Choosing the Right College, which features 52 schools, among which are about a dozen Catholic colleges and universities. The book reviews their ability to provide a solid liberal arts education and a healthy living environment for students.
One of ISI's most important works is its lecture bureau, which coordinates 300 lectures each year through a legion of “lesser-known” professors who do not require as high honorariums as some conservative speakers, said Mike Wallacavage, ISI's lecture director for the college and university level.
ISI, which has sponsored lectures since its 1953 founding, works with leading Catholic thinkers like Dinesh D'Souza, Robert George, Register columnist John Haas, Thomas Howard, Peter Kreeft, Father George Rutler, Father Robert Sirico, and R.V. Young.
George, a Princeton University professor, participated in the “End of Democracy? Judiciary Usurpation of Power” debate in First Things and wrote Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality, published by Oxford University Press. He will speak at Duke University in Durham, N.C., this year, according to Wallacavage.
Last April, Boston College's Kreeft spoke at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire about the superiority of Western civilization. Father Rutler, from the Archdiocese of New York, may speak at Princeton this year, Wallacavage said.
ISI sponsors about 20 conferences each year, including one on Lewis's thoughts and writings at Seattle Pacific University last June,which featured Kreeft and fellow convert Howard, who teaches at St. John's Seminary in Brighton, Mass.
Intercollegiate Review, published two times a year with a circulation of 60,000, speaks about the “great ideas and great authors in an interdisciplinary way … to make sense of their ideas today,” said Nelson.
Campus is mailed to 125,000 subscribers three times a year and takes on hot campus issues such as multiculturalism, sensitivity training, and political correctness.
“People don't realize how hostile a college campus can be” for conservatives, Nelson said. “Speech codes and harassment codes [are an attempt to] intimidate students into submission.”
College administrators usually justify speech and harassment codes as ways of protecting minorities and women.
Issues regarding what Nelson calls “moral normalcy” — right to life and homosexual issues — seem to “get the passion going” on campus more than any other issues, in some cases leading to the burning or trashing of independent conservative newspapers and threats against writers, he said.
ISI backers object to multiculturalism because of the cultural relativist and political overtones of such studies, Nelson said. “It's a beating down of the Eurocentric attitude,” and multiculturalist proponents claim “we can't really say with any certainty that there's anything special behind the West's achievements,” he said.
From a Catholic perspective, Nelson called attention to the “degree to which envy and hatred motivate multiculturalism.” He called for a “love of our culture but not an indiscriminate love.”
During the past four years, ISI has sponsored a network of independent student newspapers, and the number of publications has grown from 38 to 67 in that time, Nelson said. The publications serve as “watchdogs” who document the rise in incivility and immorality on college campuses, and they advocate the colleges and universities cut their “bloated bureaucracies” and make higher education more affordable, Nelson said.
The publications have a combined circulation of 2.7 million.
There are also ISI chapters at a number of colleges and universities.
ISI also prints two other journals, Modern Age and Political Science Reviewer, and distributes three other ones, including one dedicated to Chesterton's writings.
ISI was founded in Bryn Mawr, Pa., as the Intercollegiate Society for Individualists, to counter the Intercollegiate Socialist Society and its collectivist theories, Nelson said. Many people would consider the group's founders as economic libertarians, individualists, and proto-conservatives, he said.
The founders “came to learn that the crisis that confronted the West was much more than an economic one,” according to Nelson. Quoting Kirk, Nelson said they saw that there had to be “order in the soul and in the commonwealth.”
The Institute developed into one that promotes the cultural, economic, political and spiritual values that ISI members believe sustain a free society, he said.
ISI has granted about 400 graduate-level humanities grants. Edwin Feulner, president of The Heritage Foundation; Russell Hittinger, Warren Professor of Catholic Studies and a law professor at the University of Tulsa; William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard; and former Navy Secretary John Lehman are among those who attained ISI grants in their college years.
Through an honors program, ISI pairs up some students with faculty members at other universities with whom they can develop close ties and a mentorship if all goes well, Nelson said.
Contact ISI at 800-526-7022 or via the Internet at www.isi.org.
William Murray writes from Kensington, Maryland.
------- EXCERPT: EDUCATION PAGE ----- EXTENDED BODY: William Murray ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: A Landmark of Early American Catholicism DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:In Bally, Pa., a town named for a priest, the faith took root even before the Revolutionary War
Sixty miles north of Philadelphia, in the town of Bally, Pa., St. Paul's Chapel is located in the apse behind the sanctuary of Most Blessed Sacrament Church. The historic chapel remains one of the oldest original places of Catholic worship in the 13 colonies.
When it was built — with nearly three-foot-thick stone walls — Daniel Boone was a child playing at his family home a few miles away.
George Washington wasn't yet a teen. By the time he became our first president, when most towns didn't even have a Catholic church, the Krauss brothers were building the organ for St. Paul's new 35-foot addition. This organ is still in use today.
Visitors to the historic church quickly realize it continues to be an active parish of 800 families in a well-preserved context that dates to the initial mission stops in the English colonies.
A stately colonial structure, St. Paul's received its name change to Most Blessed Sacrament in 1837, the year of its final (80-foot) addition. Since then, the exterior has remained true to the facade depicted in 19th-century postcards of it. The few changes include the front vestibule, side entrance, and stained glass windows.
In the 1750s, half the Catholics in the state were members of this parish. At the time, the area was known as Goshenhoppen. The first resident pastor, Father Theodore Schneider SJ (previously the rector of Germany's Heidelberg University) emigrated to the colonies to found St. Paul's in 1741 as a mission primarily for German Catholic settlers. Sacramental records begun that year are now the oldest such accounts in existence among the 13 colonies.
Because the times were unfriendly, legally speaking, for Catholics, early missionaries concentrated their pre-American Revolution efforts in Maryland, then Pennsylvania, where oppressive laws went largely unen-forced. With milder restrictions because of William Penn's policy of peaceful toleration, a Jesuit came to Philadelphia and soon began Catholic services in what became Old St. Joseph's Church. By 1741 two other hubs on the missionary circuit emerged: Conewago Chapel (to be described in an upcoming “Catholic Traveler” feature) in Hanover, Pa., on the other side of the Susquehanna River, that covered the western portion of the state to the limits of civilization; and Goshenhoppen, with a mission trail that covered eastern Pennsylvania and extended to Lake Erie.
Father Schneider's congregation wasn't made up only of German immigrant farmers working the fertile countryside. Early parishioners included some Irish and English Catholics, Native Americans who had converted, and black Catholics — both free and slave. Many worked for the nearby large iron industry.
For 23 years the pastor shepherded his territory, plus much of the state for a few years when he was appointed simultaneously to head Conewago Chapel. He even ventured east into New Jersey, often disguised as a physician because of Catholic oppression, and is credited with laying the foundation of the Church there.
At St. Paul's Chapel, he also founded what is believed to be the first Catholic parish school in the country. Today, centuries later, it remains vibrant with 270 students.
Father Augustin Bally SJ, appointed pastor in 1837, also strongly promoted the school. At the time he arrived, the town's name was Churchville. On Aug. 7, 1883, a year after he died, the name was officially changed to Bally in his honor. Even the town's non-Catholics mourned him. During his 45 years at the parish, he completed the extension of the church begun by his predecessor and oversaw construction of a new school building as well as the rectory, which is still in use today.
Including these two priests, members of the Society of Jesus administered the parish for 148 years before diocesan priests took over.
Despite many changes, St. Paul's Chapel has remained. With the 1799 addition, it was used as the sacristy. In 1837 it returned to a chapel, still used today for small baptisms and weddings. On Holy Thursdays, the Blessed Sacrament is reserved in its wooden tabernacle, surmounted by a carved statue of Mary holding the child Jesus.
The chapel is well-preserved and looks much as it did in the mid-1700s. The wooden candlesticks and altar remain flanked by tall pedestal candelabras in the shape of wooden wagon wheels.
Once behind the altar but now relocated is an 18th-century painting of The Last Supper, a gift from the prince-elect of Saxony. Displayed on the side wall is the tall cross of iron used on the steeple erected in 1743. Father Schneider and other early priests are buried at the foot of the altar.
The main church, restored and renovated most recently in 1990, is beautiful. Sublime religious art combines with colonial, Roman, and gothic touches that lift minds and hearts to God.
Beneath the intricately painted barrel vault, the reredos has a moving painting of the Crucifixion. A magnificent mural fills the arched top of the reredos — before a heavenly background, the Sacred Heart holds a chalice from which emerges a dazzling white host.
Mid-sanctuary, the vault has a mural of the Last Supper, while in the center of the nave, a huge mural depicts the Holy Trinity crowning Mary. These were completed within the last century.
Highly detailed stained glass windows from the early 1900s line the nave with such scenes as the Good Shepherd, the Holy Family being blessed by God the Father and the Holy Spirit, and the death of St. Joseph.
Among other highlights are the intricate side altars and white walk-up pulpit with canopy, and the gleaming oak, spindle-top pews installed on the occasion of the church's bicentennial. The white side altars honor Mary as the woman in chapter 12 of the Book of Revelation, and St. Joseph with the Child Jesus.
Original pews remain in the balcony and choir loft, where the 1799 Krauss organ is situated. With late baroque-style white case trimmed in black and gold, it is the oldest Krauss in continuous use. Since its installation it has been expanded by a Krauss grandson, rebuilt early this century, and restored in 1990. Professional organists, who come across the country to play it, marvel at its perfect tones.
Everything from the church's original bell, cast in Paris in 1706, to many sacred and colonial artifacts and items make the historic Most Blessed Sacrament Church, situated in the midst of picturesque farmland, recall the nation's early heritage.
From Philadelphia, take Interstate 76 (west) to Route 422 into Pottstown and Route 100 (south). In Bally, take a right on 7th Street and travel three blocks to Pine Street. The steeple is a landmark. From New York, pick up Interstate 78 (west) in New Jersey, follow to Allentown, Pa., and Route 100 (south) into Bally, then as above. Padre Pio National Center (to be featured next week) is about two miles from Bally. There are tourist activities in the Allentown and valley area, with motels and plenty of restaurants. Contact the church at 610-845-2460.
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Connecticut.
------- EXCERPT: CATHOLIC TRAVELER ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: A Post-Feminist Cinderella for Our Times DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:Despite its politically correct trappings, Ever After still casts a charming spell
Considering current Hollywood trends, it finally had to happen: a politically correct Cinderella. After Disney perfected this revisionist type of storytelling in its animated versions of classic folk tales with heroines (Pocohantas, Mulan, etc.), live-action producers aiming at the same youth market niche were bound to do likewise.
Regarding Cinderella, first you have to dump the fairy godmother and the magic pumpkins. Post-feminist heroines who rise from rags to riches must do so on their own — even if the action is set in the 16th century. They can't let some sappy, supernatural creature wave a silly wand and make it all come out right.
Next, you can't permit an intelligent, liberated young woman to wait passively for Prince Charming to make his move. She must be an activist in all things, particularly romance. It's her energy that has to push the courtship forward, and if he refuses to treat her as an absolute equal, the whole thing must be called off lest her self-esteem be damaged. The surprising thing about the use of this post-feminist ideology is how little harm it does to the original tale. Ever After: A Cinderella Story — which is P.C. to the max — proves that the romantic elements of the fairy tale are virtually indestructible. The audience winds up rooting for the good-hearted young woman to best her wicked stepmother and grab the prince despite the ideologically fashionable packaging.
Writer-director Andy Tennant (Fools Rush In) and co-screenwriters Susanah Grant and Rick Parks invent a 19th-century prologue in which an unnamed aristocrat (Jeanne Moreau) tells the Brothers Grimm that Cinderella was a real person, her ancestor, and that certain key elements of their story are wrong. Now, the noblewoman has decided, is the time to set things right.
The action flashes back to Renaissance France where we meet the real-life Cinderella named Danielle. An eight-year-old tomboy, she has been raised by her loving father, Auguste (Jeroen Krabbe), who has taught her to read and think for herself. His favorite book is Sir Thomas More's Utopia, which she has learned contains great wisdom.
Auguste is remarried to a haughty Belgian, Rodmilla (Anjelica Huston), whose two daughters are the kind of perfect, feminine little ladies Danielle and the filmmakers despise. Almost immediately, Auguste dies of natural causes, and Danielle is left to be raised by her stepmother.
Ten years pass, and Danielle (Drew Barrymore) is treated as a servant in what was once her father's house. She waits on her stepsisters, the beautiful Marguerite (Megan Dodds), and the plain-looking Jacqueline (Melanie Lynskey), who've nicknamed her “Cindersoot” because she's dirty from sleeping with the pigs.
The action cuts away to the crown prince of France, Henry (Dougray Scott), who's rebelling against his father's wish that he marry a Spanish princess for political reasons. The young hunk wants “nothing more than to be free of my gilded cage” and runs away to be his own person.
Pursued by the king's guards, Henry steals a horse from Danielle's manor. She stops his escape by beaning him with an apple. He, of course, is taken with her feistiness, but she doesn't yet reciprocate even though she knows he is the prince.
To make sure we grasp that Danielle is the equivalent of a feminist for her time period, the filmmakers show her using Utopia as a handbook for political action. When her cruel stepmother sells to the royal family a servant who had worked for her father, she rushes off to the court where she delivers to Prince Henry a lecture on human rights that would bring cheers at a present-day Amnesty International meeting. The family retainer is quickly freed.
Henry's father takes pity on his son and decides to allow him to marry the woman of his choice if he can make up his mind within five days. Rodmilla pushes forward her darling Marguerite, but the prince pines for Danielle whose true identity is unknown to him.
The filmmakers engineer a series of encounters between the two. Moments of dewy-eyed romance alternate with lectures from Danielle on the responsibilities of privilege, and as a result of her influence, the young royal asks his parents to endow a university for the poor.
During one romantic interlude, the couple is kidnapped by gypsies. After both prove their physical prowess in fighting the outlaws, Danielle rescues Henry by literally carrying him on her shoulders. But the two decide to stay and party, and Danielle, ever politically correct, teaches him not to be so prejudiced against people from another ethnic background.
Also present at the royal court is Leonardo da Vinci (Patrick Godfrey) whom the couple befriend. Leonardo, though carrying a canvas of the Mona Lisa, seems less involved with painting than with his visionary, screwball inventions that provide everyone with a few laughs.
In keeping with the legend, the evil stepmother manages to thwart Danielle's plans on the night of the big ball. The filmmakers have Leonardo assume part of the fairy godmother's traditional role in helping her overcome obstacles. He even designs for her a breathtaking costume that includes another holdover from the original, the glass slipper.
Credibility is sometimes stretched as the filmmakers try to construct a happy ending without any kind of rescue by the prince, and the dialogue occasionally sounds more like a TV soap than the conversation of the 16th-century upper classes. But the movie's most significant departure from the original is to make the Cinderella character seem almost too good for her Prince Charming. This may reinforce certain post-feminist prejudices about the general superiority of women to men. However, it's also an excellent dramatic device which traditional romances have often employed with telling effect.
Most importantly, in this version as in all others, Cinderella's prince recognizes her beauty and virtues that have been hidden from the world by her stepmother, and he makes a special effort to win her heart. The trappings may be politically trendy, but how can we resist?
Arts & Culture correspondent John Prizer is based in Los Angeles.
Ever After: A Cinderella Story is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Love and Rivalry Among Sisters DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:In George Cukor's Little Women, the March girls bring family values to life
Our family is usually the place where we learn how to love, and it's not always easy. Few family units are like Ozzie and Harriet. Jealousy, competition, cruelty, and neglect often rear their ugly heads and put us to the test. Yet our moral values are forged in this crucible, and families are the basic building blocks of any decent society.
Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott, has been a popular novel for more than a century. Several generations have identified with the four March sisters, who love each other fiercely as they negotiate life's misfortunes and their own petty jealousies.
Hollywood has adapted this classic four times to the screen with varying degrees of success, but the version most faithful to the novel's spirit is the 1933 production directed by George Cukor (My Fair Lady) and co-written by Sarah Mason and Victor Heerman, whose screenplay won an Oscar.
The emotional spine of the movie is the coming of age of Jo March (Katherine Hepburn) and her growth as an independent woman and a writer. Feminists have long claimed her as a prototype for their values, but Alcott and the filmmakers are careful to balance the blossoming of her talent and career with her passionate attachment to her family, whose needs are usually her first priority.
The Marches live in a small New England town during the time of the Civil War. At one time they were rich, but financial problems have made them part of the struggling middle class. The father is off fighting to free the slaves, and his wife (Spring Byington) and daughters are forced to support themselves.
Jo is an aggressive tomboy who contributes to the family income by serving as a companion to her rich, mean-spirited Aunt March (Edna May Oliver). It's Christmas eve, and the sanctimonious old lady congratulates herself as she gives each of the girls a dollar bill. The four sisters fantasize how they will spend it, but eventually they decide to forgo their personal pleasures and pool the money for a gift for their hard-working mother, a generous gesture typical of the girls. The day ends with all of them gathered around the piano with their mother, singing the hymn, Abide With Me — an image of family togetherness rooted in religious belief.
On Christmas morning, a sumptuous hot meal has been prepared in the grand manner they were used to before they lost their money, but their mother persuades them to give it to a poor, hungry family in an act of pure Christian charity.
The March sisters are also all too human. They live next door to the wealthy Laurence family, and when Meg March (Frances Dee) becomes smitten with their tutor, Mr. Brook (John Davis Lodge), Jo opposes the match.
“Do you have to go and fall in love and spoil all our happy times together?” she laments because her sister has stopped confiding in her as before.
Jo's feelings make no difference, and Meg and Mr. Brook are soon married. But Jo has her own romantic difficulties. The tutor's former pupil, Laurie Laurence (Douglass Montgomery), loves her. Even though the two have developed a deep friendship, she rejects him, citing as reasons her ambition as a writer and his taste for high society elegance.
Jo moves to New York where she supports herself as a governess. Her stories are published in popular, low-brow magazines. The German-born Professor Baer (Paul Lukas) encourages her to aim higher and exposes her to the worlds of opera and theater.
Aunt March takes Jo's flirtatious sibling, Amy (Joan Bennett), on the European grand tour always promised to Jo. Jo's resentment has the potential for turning to bitterness when she later learns a romance has blossomed between her rejected suitor, Laurie, and Amy during their travels.
Meanwhile, Beth March (Jean Parker) has contracted scarlet fever while looking after the baby of an impoverished family. The filmmakers show Jo praying for her, indicating that her literary ambitions haven't extinguished her faith. When Beth's illness becomes worse, Jo drops everything in New York and rushes home to be with her.
Jo is an exemplary person for our times. Her spirit isn't embittered by the disappointments and conflicts in her personal life and career. Her outlook is grounded in love of God and family, and Little Women shows how these commitments sustain her.
Next week: Luchino Visconti's The Leopard.
Arts & Culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: U.S. Catholics Gearing Up For 'Partial-Birth' Action DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON—Catholics throughout the United States are being asked to join in a novena for life from Sept. 7, the vigil of the feast of the birth of Mary, to Sept. 15, the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows.
At least one of the nine days is likely to coincide with debate in the U.S. Senate on overriding President Clinton's veto last October of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. The House overrode the veto July 23 by a 296-132 vote.
The “Nine Days for Life” novena, prepared by Father James Moroney, executive director of the U.S. bishops' Secretariat for the Liturgy, asks Mary to bless “all mothers, especially those wearied by life and overcome by the suffering they bear for their children.”
Each day of the novena is dedicated to a different group — suffering women of the world, women giving birth that day, new fathers, all children, and families, for example.
Helen Alvaré, director of planning and information in the U.S. bishops' Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, said the novena is part of a widespread effort since last spring to fight partial-birth abortion at the grass-roots level.
“There's a lot of stuff percolating at the local level,” said Alvaré. She outlined a strategy that included postcards and letters to senators, attempts to arrange private meetings with senators at the local level and in Washington, and efforts to refute misinformation about partial-birth abortion on a point-by-point basis.
The postcard campaign, a continuation of the effort against partial-birth abortion that began in January, has resulted in requests for 14 million cards from around the country and a “steady stream” of messages to Congress, Alvaré said.
A videotape aimed at helping Catholics send personal messages to Congress also is getting extensive use at the parish level, she said.
The 12-minute video, prepared by the Pro-Life Secretariat and the National Committee for a Human Life Amendment, outlines how individuals can help stop partial-birth abortion and includes comments from both Republican and Democratic congressmen on the importance of letters from constituents.
The ultimate goal of all the messages is to convince at least three U.S. senators who voted against the partial-birth abortion ban last year to change their votes. The 1997 Senate vote was 64-36, three short of the two-thirds majority necessary to override the veto.
“There are very few among the 36 who aren't a bit queasy” about voting in favor of partial-birth abortion, Alvaré said.
“Only a few are bold and really proud of their position.” And in light of President Clinton's recent admission of sexual misconduct with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, many of the president's supporters “may want to get the vote behind them,” she added.
Alvaré also has been doing a word-for-word analysis of the Senate debate before the 1997 vote and sending letters correcting any misinformation that senators might have communicated on the Senate floor. Those letters go to the senators themselves and to local newspapers covering the debate.
“Many things were said that are contradicted by the facts,” she said. “You ought not to be able to say just anything on the floor of the Senate.”
Although the issue has been getting little national coverage since the Clinton-Lewinsky story broke in January, there has been a lot of interest at the local level because of lawsuits against partial-birth abortion bans, state referendums, and candidates'stands on the issue, Alvaré said.
Another aspect of the Pro-Life Secretariat's work on partial-birth abortion is to communicate with editors of both Catholic and secular newspapers about the facts of the partial-birth abortion debate.
Through a new campaign called “True to Life,” the Pro-Life Secretariat will be sending to editors around the country “hot sheets” with facts on partial-birth abortion. Anew version of the sheet will be sent out every two or three days to the editors, as well as to “various political pundits and commentators,” Alvaré said.
Nancy Frazier O'Brien writes for Catholic News Service.
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Nancy Frazier O'Brien ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: For No. Ireland's Unborn, 'Good Friday' Peace Accord Has a Dark Side DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:DUBLIN, Ireland—One might think that everyone would fully welcome Northern Ireland's Good Friday Agreement, but pro-lifers say the agreement is bad news for the unborn.
Since April 1987, it has been the policy of the British Labor Party to extend the provisions of the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland. The party is now in power and the Good Friday Agreement, once enacted into UK law, will give it the ability to go ahead with its plans. Northern Ireland escaped the “abortion-on-demand” that exists in the rest of the United Kingdom, because when the Abortion Act was passed by the Westminster parliament, Northern Ireland had its own independent assembly.
Even when the Northern Ireland Assembly fell in 1972 and the province came under direct rule from Westminster, successive British governments avoided liberalizing the province's abortion laws because Britain claimed — and still claims — to rule in Northern Ireland by consensus. The desire to promote this view also helped the province escape the deeply unpopular poll tax and cuts in spending on public housing and social services introduced elsewhere in the United Kingdom.
But the need to maintain the artifice of consensus ended with the Good Friday Agreement, which allows for the creation of a new assembly to govern Northern Ireland's affairs. Though the new assembly's members have already been elected, the assembly will not have law-making powers until the Northern Ireland Bill is passed in Westminster. This will happen soon after the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, London, reconvene in October after their summer break. Under the terms of the agreement, the new Northern Ireland assembly has powers over most of the areas controlled by a national government. The one major exception is criminal legislation which was included in the agreement to allay fears that former terrorists would have control over security matters.
The pro-abortion groups were told to stay out of the limelight and not make any public statements on liberalizing abortion law.
However, in the UK abortion law is part of criminal legislation. This means that the Northern Ireland Assembly will not have any control over the regulation of abortion facilities and, once the agreement is enacted, the UK parliament will have the clear right to impose abortion laws on the province.
According to the pro-choice journalist Eamonn McCann, this loophole in the Good Friday Agreement was deliberately kept quiet by the British government. He claims the pro-abortion group Voices for Choice were told by the British government's Northern Ireland Office to stay out of the limelight and not make any public statements on liberalizing abortion law before the two referenda on the Good Friday Agreement took place.
In recent years, the British Labor Party has become increasingly pro-abortion. At present, the party's selection procedures militate against pro-life candidates. An internal party fund, named Emily's List, provides additional campaign funding to female candidates on one condition: that they support legal abortion. Because of their access to additional campaign funding from Emily's List, party branches are more likely to select pro-choice candidates. The irony is that the fund is named after the 19th-century women's suffragette Emily Pankhurst who was also a leading Victorian pro-lifer who described abortion as “an abomination.”
Despite Labor's massive parliamentary majority in Westminster, Labor Members of Parliament (MPs) are being subjected to a three-line whip when the house votes on the Northern Ireland Bill and on the proposal to extend the provisions of the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland. The three-line whip, a party disciplinary procedure, demands that all Labor MPs attend the House of Commons for the debate and vote according to the party line. To do otherwise, would mean expulsion from the party. In the past, Westminster MPs were allowed to vote ‘according to conscience’ on abortion legislation.
When the bill creating a new devolved Scottish Assembly was placed before the House of Lords last July, a similar whip was placed on government peers demanding that they vote against an amendment that would give Scotland control over its abortion law. Because of the whip, the amendment was defeated by almost two-to one and Scottish abortion law remains under the control of London.
There is no doubt that abortion is opposed by the majority of people in Northern Ireland. Abortion is opposed by all the major political parties in the Northern Irish Assembly except for members of the Women's Coalition and Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA. Nuala Scarrisbrick, who was named a Dame of St. Gregory by the Pope in 1994 for her pro-life activities, told the Register: “The sanctity of human life is the one thing that politicians of every hue, nationalist and unionist, Catholic and Protestant, agree on. Abortion is the one issue where you will find the Rev. Ian Paisley sharing a platform with Catholic campaigners. I am not surprised Sinn Fein are pro-abortion, they have been connected with enough killing in the past. But the people of Northern Ireland don't want abortion, the pressure is coming from England.”
Betty Gibson of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC) in Belfast agrees: “The majority of the people, whether orange [unionist] or green [nationalist], are not in favor of killing babies. We've come through 30 years of very terrible trouble and the majority of people in Northern Ireland have never lost their respect for life.”
Bernie Smyth of the Northern Irish pro-life group Precious Life points out that in the past 30 years more people have died in the United Kingdom because of abortion than have died because of the violence in Northern Ireland.
“Since the 1967 Act, 3 million babies have been killed before they were born, the Northern Ireland Troubles have only led to just over 3,000 deaths,” she said. “These are the facts we are trying to highlight to prevent abortion being forced on Northern Ireland, but the government's plans have been kept quiet to make sure the Good Friday Agreement succeeds. In the politics of Northern Ireland, the peace process comes before everything else, including the life of the unborn.”
Among pro-life politicians there is a great deal of confusion over whether or not they can stop the Labor Party in London from forcing a liberal abortion regime on Northern Ireland. Ian Paisley Jr. of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) told Precious Life he believes little can be done. However, the Rev. Geoffrey Donaldson of the Unionist Party says he thinks the House of Lords may succeed in amending the bill so that a referendum on abortion would have to take place in Northern Ireland beforehand.
In the House of the Lords, the rebellion against the government is being led by Peer Lord Alton, a Catholic who hopes to succeed in amending the legislation so that powers over abortion legislation are devolved to the new Assembly in Belfast. Lord Alton says he has been informed by Lord Strathclyde, the Conservative's chief whip, that the proposal would be the first item for debate in the House of Lords when the peers return from their summer recess. However, the Liverpool pro-lifer is confident that his group can stage a major revolt against the British government, saying: “I hope the initiative will come from both sides of the divide.”
Cian Molloy writes from Dublin, Ireland.
------- EXCERPT: CULTURE OF LIFE ----- EXTENDED BODY: Cian Molloy ----- KEYWORDS: Culture & Life -------- TITLE: The Gospel Of Life DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:Pope John Paul warned in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae that new scientific techniques designed to overcome problems of infertility are not only immoral, but pose a threat to the life of children conceived by these methods.
“The various techniques of artificial reproduction, which would seem to be at the service of life and which are frequently used with this intention, actually open the door to new threats against life. Apart from the fact that they are morally unacceptable, since they separate procreation from the fully human context of the conjugal act, these techniques have a high rate of failure: not just failure in relation to fertilization but with regard to the subsequent development of the embryo, which is exposed to the risk of death, generally within a very short space of time. Furthermore, the number of embryos produced is often greater than that needed for implantation in the woman's womb, and these so-called ‘spare embryos’ are then destroyed or used for research which, under the pretext of scientific or medical progress, in fact reduces human life to the level of simple ‘biological material’ to be freely disposed of” (14.1).
------- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Couples Find Answers to Infertility in Prayerand Science DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:Special ministries offer guidance in line with Church teaching
NEW YORK—After three years of marriage, Ann and Jim C. began to wonder if they would ever be able to have a baby. The New York City couple became so concerned about their child-lessness that they consulted their doctor, who referred them to a fertility specialist. Tests revealed that Jim had a low sperm count, and the specialist indicated that Ann's chance of getting pregnant in the usual way was practically nil.
She felt empty and frustrated, but for three more years the couple tried several options to address the problem. Jim had a surgical procedure known as varicocelectomy to correct blockage of semen, injections of a male hormone to stimulate sperm production, and surgery to alleviate tubal blockage. When nothing worked, the specialist suggested in vitro fertilization.
Although Ann, who did not want her real name used for this article, was a practicing Catholic, she admitted she was tempted by the idea. She badly wanted a child, and at 40, she felt time running out.
She and her husband eventually realized though, that throughout all their efforts with medicine, they “didn't really petition God.”
Ann then asked herself, “Who are we really going to trust, God or science?”
Trust in God is the quality she encourages others in her situation to develop. She meets infertile couples regularly under the auspices of the St. Elizabeth's Hope Ministry in New York, which was started by another woman who suffered from childlessness. Apostolates such as St. Elizabeth's developed out of real-life needs and the wish of Catholic couples to do what is right in the eyes of the Giver of Life.
Apostolates such as St. Elizabeth's developed out of real-life needs of Catholic couples.
Often barraged by an array of technical options in baby-making, many Catholic couples are subject to confusion. Many do not know what is right and wrong in assisted reproduction.
“St. Elizabeth's is a teaching ministry to help people protect their bodies and their souls,” explained founder L.A. Doyle, an obstetrics and gynecology nurse. Many fertility techniques are not only contrary to Church teaching, she said, but can be damaging physically and emotionally.
Twice a year, couples meet at a convent of the Sisters of Life in the Bronx, a community of nuns founded by John Cardinal O'Connor to pray for and promote a sense of the sanctity of life. Speakers discuss the problem from both spiritual and medical perspectives. Some offer resources and information on adoption and natural family planning. Couples are then invited to attend bimonthly holy hours.
Infertility has been on the rise in recent years because of delayed marriage and childbearing, the long-term effects of venereal diseases, and the use of the pill, the intrauterine device, and other contraceptives. Childless couples are boosting a $2 billion a year industry that markets everything from fertility drugs to “custom embryos” made by selectively matching donor egg and sperm to enhance the intelligence and good looks of the resulting child.
What's more, human cloning is appearing to be more and more a possibility. The recent successful cloning of mice in Hawaii seemed to confirm the breakthrough made last year by Scottish researchers. Dolly the sheep was the world's first clone of an adult mammal, an advance that put man a step closer to human cloning.
Advances in the technology have encouraged a mentality that “if it can be done, it should be done,” said Dr. Kevin Reilly, director of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Our Lady of Mercy Medical Center in Bronx, N.Y. A significant number of couples will try just about anything to have a baby, believing they have a “right” to a child, he said.
But looking at a child in any way other than as a gift from God reduces him to the status of a product or commodity, many Catholic thinkers point out.
Catholic teaching states that the child is not “an object to which one has a right, nor can he be considered as an object of ownership: rather, a child is a gift, ‘the supreme gift’ and the most gratuitous gift of marriage, and is a living testimony of the mutual giving of his parents. For this reason, the child has the right, as already mentioned, to be the fruit of the specific act of the conjugal love of his parents; and he also has the right to be respected as a person from the moment of his conception” (Donum Vitae, 7).
The St. Elizabeth's Hope Ministry — named for the mother of St. John the Baptist, who was thought to be sterile but conceived in her old age — was founded in the summer of 1996 after Doyle said she was “horrified” hearing the news that some 3,000 frozen embryos created in Great Britain by in vitro fertilization were scheduled to be thawed and destroyed because they had reached their five-year storage limit.
Doyle realized that couples often receive bad advice from fertility specialists, support groups, and the media, and need not only knowledge of what techniques are moral, but support in prayer.
“In this ministry, we go to God as Creator,” she explained. “We have couples pray together because it's a couples problem.”
After four miscarriages in six years of marriage, Doyle began to feel that doctors were putting a Band-Aid on her problem rather than going to its root. She too was about to agree to a specialist's advice — in her case to use a drug that stimulates egg production.
“He wanted to give me the same drug [Iowa septuptlet mother] Bobbi McCaughey was taking,” she told the Register. “But he said that if there was a multiple pregnancy, he would recommend a ‘fetal reduction.’This is the man who was supposed to help me have children, and he was willing to destroy them. I never went back.”
McCaughey's doctor recommended aborting some of the unborn babies so the others would have a better chance of surviving. She and her husband, devout, pro-life Baptists, declined, saying they would trust in God. All seven children, born last November, are still doing well.
The Church has not condemned the use of such drugs, but couples employing medication such as Pergonal or Metrodin “would have to be well advised,” in the words of Msgr. William Smith, professor of moral theology at St. Joseph's Seminary in the Archdiocese of New York. He said that if the doctor can determine via sonogram that the medication has produced more than three ripe eggs, it would be better for the couple to refrain from intercourse until the next cycle.
“We are designed to be born one at a time,” he said. “The womb is not constructed for overcrowding.” Having so many fetuses increases the chance for premature birth, with its concomitant problems of low birthweight, underdeveloped lungs and skin, and the possibility of birth defects.
Donum Vitae (Gift of Life), the 1987 Vatican document that formally condemned in vitro fertilization (IVF) and other artificial techniques, explained that it is wrong to generate human life outside the marital act.
“These procedures are contrary to the human dignity proper to the embryo, and at the same time they are contrary to the right of every person to be conceived and to be born within marriage and from marriage” (Donum Vitae, 5).
Techniques that help intercourse achieve its objective of procreation but do not substitute for it are morally licit. But IVF, artificial insemination, surrogate parenting, and techniques that involve the freezing or donation of sperm or eggs entail the dissociation of husband and wife by the intrusion of a person other than the couple.
“The freezing of embryos, even when carried out in order to preserve the life of an embryo-cryopreservation-constitutes an offense against the respect due to human beings by exposing them to grave risks of death or harm to their physical integrity, and depriving them, at least temporarily, of maternal shelter and gestation, thus placing them in a situation in which further offenses and manipulation are possible” (Donum Vitae, 6).
Also immoral are techniques involving only the married couple but that dissociate the sexual (unitive) act from the procreative act.
That includes artificial insemination, even when the husband's own sperm is used.
Father Russell Smith, theological consultant for the Diocese of Richmond, Va., sees Donum Vitae as building upon a 1949 address of Pope Pius XII to an organization of Catholic physicians.
“What he said still holds true,” Father Smith told the Register. “Medicine is not a matter of being artificial or natural. But if one spouse becomes unnecessary in the reproductive process, it is not a worthy way of bringing forth life.”
What options are open to a faithful Catholic couple?
“Most Catholic hospitals have fertility clinics,” said Father David Liptak, cofounder of the John Paul II Bioethics Center at Holy Apostles Seminary in Cromwell, Conn. “This would be the first instance of inquiry.”
Procedures that assist but do not replace the conjugal act would include surgical treatments for tubal blockage, reversal of tubal ligations, and medical or surgical treatment of endometriosis, where tissue that is normally confined to the lining of the uterus is growing outside that area, such as in the ovaries.
There are also procedures that, because they are relatively new and subject to further study, the Holy See has not yet determined to be moral or immoral and can be considered “an open question, pastorally,” said Father Smith. Some Catholic hospitals offer Gamete Intra-Fallopian Transfer (GIFT), for example, which extracts an ovum, places it near sperm cells in a catheter and then inserts both into the uterus. Conception follows in vivo — in a woman's body.
There is debate among medical ethicists concerning GIFT, which was developed in 1988, when Donum Vitae was issued. Critics say that everything that intervenes in the conjugal act is so invasive that it renders the husband virtually unnecessary. But Peter Cataldo, director of research at the National Catholic Bioethics Center (formerly the Pope John Center for Medical Ethics) in Boston, said that a modified form of GIFT can be used as long as masturbation is not involved. Semen may be collected during the conjugal act by using a special perfo-rated sheath (not a condom) that allows for a quantity of semen to pass into the woman before it self-seals, collecting the remainder. The device has a chemical composition that is not hostile to sperm.
“If fertilization occurs, it would be as a result of the conjugal act,” Cataldo said.
Added Father Smith, “Assisted insemination is as medical and technical as other things but it doesn't replace the conjugal act. Neither spouse is made unnecessary.”
There are also a number of “lowtech” solutions that Catholics may try, including natural family planning (NFP), which is normally used for spacing births for serious reasons.
Many cases of childlessness are due to “bad timing,” missing the fertile time in the woman's cycle, said Nona Aguilar, author of The New No-Pill, No-Risk Birth Control, a book about NFP (MacMillan, 1986). Couples have a 27% chance of conceiving a child once they isolate the day in which the wife is ovulating.
Marilyn Shannon, author of Fertility, Cycles, and Nutrition (Couple to Couple League, 1996), believes that obtaining enough vitamins and other nutritional elements is crucial to fertility. She said Americans are not receiving enough essential fatty acids because of the country's low-fat craze, for example. She cites instances where taking flax oil, which contains those acids, has made a difference.
“We recommend couples to try all of this low-tech stuff for six to nine months,” said Shannon. “Then, if they still don't get pregnant, we recommend that they seek ethical, prudent medical care.”
For those for whom nothing seems to work, Donum Vitae offers consolations. It calls infertile couples to find in sterility “an opportunity for sharing in a particular way in the Lord's cross, the source of spiritual fruitfulness.” It suggests finding “other important services to the life of the human person,” for example, adoption, various forms of educational work, and assistance to other families and to the poor or handicapped children.
Dioceses around the country have adoption services, as does Catholic Charities USA. Ann and Jim were offered a nine-month-old girl with “special needs,” and were unsure about what to do. They were still praying for a baby of their own as well.
“We wanted a guarantee that everything would be perfect but realized that any way you have a child there are risks and that she would need a lot of love,” Ann said. When the couple brought the child home, they “just fell in love” with her. She could not sit upright, was very frail and underweight, did not like to eat and did not make eye contact.
But by her first birthday, the girl was “scooting around” in a walker. “The more she was loved, the more she responded, and now, at age three she's making eye contact.”
Stories abound of couples who adopt and then find themselves expecting one of their own, and six months after adopting, Ann became pregnant. She wasn't sure how to explain it, except as the answer to their prayers, since Jim's last test showed his blockage had come back and his sperm count still low.
Ann said she feels her life is “full” and looks back at how God's plan has worked itself out in her life.
“I thank God now because if I had conceived naturally from the beginning, I'd never have my adopted daughter. And I couldn't imagine life without her.”
St. Elizabeth's Hope Ministry may be contacted at 914-526-3905; the National Catholic Bioethics Center may be contacted at 617-787-1900. For information about local instruction in NFP, couples may call their diocese or the Couple to Couple League, 513-471-2000.
John Burger writes from New York.
------- EXCERPT: CULTURE OF LIFE ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: Culture & Life -------- TITLE: Canadian Student Lobbied for Por-Life at U.N. Meetings DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:There's ‘little awareness’ of right-to-life message, 26-year-old reports
TORONTO—A Canadian student is back in Toronto after nearly six weeks of lobbying for the pro-life, pro-family position at two United Nations conferences in Europe.
Charmaine Graves, 26, an international relations student at the University of Toronto, traveled to Rome in July to represent the International Right to Life federation and Canada's Campaign Life Coalition at meetings to establish an International Criminal Court (ICC). It was a heady time for Graves, given some of the controversies surrounding the creation of this new international court.
After a brief return to Toronto, Graves flew to Lisbon, Portugal in mid-August to attend the First World Conference of Ministers Responsible for Youth. The conference was called to find ways of allowing young people to take on greater decision making “at all levels and spheres of society.”
In Rome and Lisbon, Graves and her pro-life colleagues lobbied national delegations to ensure that the right to life voice was not lost in the diplomatic shuffle.
Pro-life, pro-family organizations have made it a priority to send lobbyists to international conferences to counter what many see as the United Nations' increasing support for radical feminist objectives. The Holy See has also made numerous interventions at past UN gatherings to defend the dignity of the human person and the traditional family.
Often, however, pro-life and pro-family voices are swamped by other voices calling for new definitions of marriage, family, and gender roles. The Women's Caucus for Gender Justice attended the Rome meeting and has been a major player at previous UN conferences.
Graves had little idea she would be working on the international stage when she was hired in May as a summer student with Campaign Life Coalition, Canada's leading pro-life organization. However, the Cape Breton, Nova Scotia native quickly found the international experience eye-opening.
“We didn't enjoy total success at the conferences, but I found it exciting to bring the right to life viewpoint to international delegates,” Graves told the Register. “So many of them seemed open to our message. It was surprising how little awareness there is about the right to life message among these people.”
At the Rome conference, pro-life lobbyists were leery of a proposal to include the term “enforced pregnancy” in the list of crimes that could be tried by the International Criminal Court. Many saw the use of the term enforced pregnancy — even if it was the result of rape — as an attempt to undermine any federal legislation limiting abortion on demand.
Just prior to the Rome conference, for example, the Vatican expressed concern over the use of the enforced pregnancy language on the international war crimes list. Other Church groups, including the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, voiced similar concerns. In a recent letter to Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, Montreal's Archbishop Jean-Claude Turcotte, president of the Canadian bishops'conference, called for “forcible impregnation” to replace the term enforced pregnancy.
“The distinction between enforced pregnancy and forcible impregnation is a vital one which may have been overlooked in the legitimate and understandable haste to make this aggravated form of rape subject to clear and effective sanctions,” Archbishop Turcotte said. “We are very concerned that if the term enforced pregnancy is retained, pregnancy itself could be considered a crime, or abortions compelled to avoid prosecution, and that the perpetrators could escape without accountability.”
This was also the view of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, a New York-based organization that monitors United Nations activity.
In a report published on the Institute's Web site, director Austin Ruse said concerns about the United Nations' International Criminal Court overriding national sovereignty are not unfounded, especially when it comes to right to life issues. Ruse is one of many North American pro-lifers who believe the United Nations has shifted away from its humanitarian founding principles to embrace a contraception mentality.
“The concern of the pro-life, pro-family world has always been that this [UN] tribunal could be used for purely ideological and destructive ends,” Ruse said. “With the proposed International Criminal Court statutes, there exists language that could make pro-life advocates war criminals simply by working on behalf of the unborn child.”
Although delegates to the Rome conference changed the term enforced pregnancy to a more narrowly defined “forced pregnancy,” pro-lifers are wary that the ICC could be the first step in a concerted effort to outlaw any restrictions on abortion.
Despite some lingering concerns, Graves was inspired by the overall experience in Rome. She said she did not feel overwhelmed as a young person among so many experienced diplomats and world travelers.
“In many ways it was inspiring to share our information with the delegates. I was eager to note if they are aware of some of the anti-family elements of the United Nations'agenda,” she said.
Graves recalled being positively received by most groups at the two conferences, particularly delegates from Africa and Third World countries. Unfortunately, she added, the Canadian delegation, along with those from western European countries, were unreceptive to pro-life overtures.
“We more or less avoided them with our efforts,” Graves said, “because we knew they would be unfavorable to the right to life position.”
In Lisbon, Graves was preoccupied with efforts to have a pro-family attitude enshrined in an international declaration of the rights of young people. She was gratified to see the inclusion of the family and marriage “as the basic units of society” added to the official Lisbon Declaration.
Nonetheless, the declaration also contains a number of problem areas for pro-life supporters, particularly its support for youth access to “reproductive health care” and family planning methods of their choice. By UN definition, reproductive health care and family planning refer to access to abortion and contraception.
Furthermore, the Lisbon Declaration contains no references to parental responsibility in children's access to reproductive health information. Graves said this could mean parents having no control over the kinds of family planning information available to their children.
Graves believes her experiences in both Rome and Lisbon have given her a deeper commitment to uphold right-to-life values on a larger scale. She echoed the view of many Canadian pro-life activists that United Nations' initiatives must be closely monitored for their tendency to downplay or ignore long-held humanitarian ideals.
As Jim Hughes, president of Campaign Life Coalition, advised Graves prior to her departure overseas, “We can't underestimate the very serious danger to life and family inherent in these UN initiatives … as they attempt to bypass elected legislatures and local customs to impose a radical social doctrine on all the nations of the world.”
Mike Mastromatteo writes from Toronto, Canada.
------- EXCERPT: ProLife ProFile ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mike Mastromatteo ----- KEYWORDS: Culture & Life -------- TITLE: India Bans Notorious Sterilization Drug DATE: 08/30/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 30-September 5, 1998 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON—Quinacrine, a chemical pellet used for sterilization, has been banned in India. Although no government has officially approved Quinacrine, it has caused more than 100,000 sterilizations in the Third World, about one quarter of them in India.
The pellets, which are inserted into the uterus to burn and scar a woman's fallopian tubes, have been distributed in Asia, Latin America, and Middle Eastern countries by two Americans, Stephen Mumford and Elton Kessel. The largest number of sterilizations have occurred in Vietnam; India ranks second.
Catholic teaching prohibits sterilization. In addition, there are significant side effects of Quinacrine — including possible ectopic (tubal) pregnancies — and the potential link between the drug and cancer remain unclear. Poor women often are tricked or forced into the painful procedure, which is done without the use of anesthesia.
The Wall Street Journal and the Register published extensive reports on Quinacrine earlier this summer (see “Population Control Advocates' Sterilization Program Exposed,” July 5-11). The Journal article is thought to be directly responsible for Sipharm Sesseln AG ceasing production of the drug. The Swiss pharmaceutical firm has been the world's sole manufacturer of the drug. Mumford and Kessel are seeking a new producer.
The Population Research Institute (PRI) of Falls Church, Va., has strongly opposed Quinacrine. In expressing support for the Indian government's action, Stephen Mosher, president of PRI, said, “For years, experimenters in Quinacrine have been hiding behind the letter of the law, which did not forbid the use of this chemical, to experiment on tens of thousands of Third World women in their attempt to develop the ‘perfect’ population control drug.”
Chile, another country where Quinacrine sterilizations have been carried out, also banned the drug recently. Speaking of both countries' action, Mosher added, “PRI applauds this action, and hopes that other countries throughout the world will take similar steps to outlaw this dangerous practice.”
Franciscan Father Germain Kopaczynski of the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Boston, also expressed approval. Quinacrine, he said, “is a bad thing for women's health. The notion of using women as guinea pigs is wrong.”
In addition to his grave concern about the practice of sterilization, the priest continued, “There has to be a better way to improve the quality of life for women without subjecting them to the very real risks of life and limb on the part of so-called American fertility experts.”
India's action, which took place Aug. 17, appears to completely remove the prospect of any future use of Quinacrine in the world's second-largest country. The new law prohibits the importation, production, and dissemination of the drug. Penalties for violations include imprisonment and fines.
Joseph Esposito is the Register's Washington Correspondent
------- EXCERPT: CULTURE OF LIFE ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Esposito ----- KEYWORDS: Culture & Life -------- TITLE: Provincial's 'Front-Line' Work Inspired by Mother Teresa DATE: 10/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: October 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:TORONTO—The life and work of Mother Teresa of Calcutta continue to inspire the people of India more than a year after her death, says an Indian Jesuit priest who recently toured the Toronto area.
Father Cherian Padiyara, head of the Darjeeling province of the Society of Jesus, met fellow Jesuits last month during a 10-day Canadian visit. The recent one-year anniversary of Mother Teresa's passing prompted him to reflect on the profound influence of the founder of the Missionaries of Charity in his native country.
“One year after her death, people in India still speak of her influence, not only in the Calcutta area, but throughout the country,” Father Padiyara said. “To the Indian people, Mother Teresa was the finest expression of the Gospel being put into action. She continues to be regarded as the most effective symbol of preaching the Gospel.”
Father Padiyara, who worked with Mother Teresa on several occasions, entered the Jesuit novitiate in Darjeeling in 1970 and was ordained to the priesthood in 1984. He described his pastoral work in northeast India as serving among the poorest of the poor — a clear reference to Mother Teresa's sterling example.
Despite his administrative responsibilities as Jesuit provincial, Father Padiyara devotes most of his time to “front line” ministry to the many poor and destitute in West Bengal.
“We try to serve in areas where no others want to go,” he told the Register. “Most of the people of the region are denied opportunities as basic as learning to read and write, so much of our work is directed to educating the very poor.”
His own call to a more active service was initially inspired by his father, who encouraged him to read about the lives of St. Francis of Assisi and Father Damien, the leper priest of Mokolai. Father Padiyara was also inspired by the efforts of Canadian Jesuits who opened a mission in Darjeeling in the late 1940s and who have since sent more than 50 men to work among the local people. He said one still-active Canadian Jesuit, Brother Bob Mittleholtz, is fondly described as the “Father Teresa” of West Bengal.
While acknowledging the resignation with which many destitute Indians accept difficult circumstances, Father Padiyara says they must be given opportunities for advancement.
Father Padiyara's work centers on education and basic health care. He is especially concerned with helping families break the cycle of illiteracy and poverty by encouraging even the poorest to learn basic reading and writing skills. He also assists at a small parish in Matigara, West Bengal.
The Darjeeling provincial said many of the people in his area are known as “stonebreakers,” semiliterate settlers whose only source of income is hauling rocks from riverbeds for use in nearby quarries. It is an occupation open to exploitation and abuse, but for thousands in northeastern India, it offers the only means of making even a modest living.
Teresa Ramnarine, 18, a senior at St. Joseph's High School in west-end Toronto, knows something of the stone-breakers’ plight. During a school trip to India and Nepal in 1996, Ramnarine and her fellow students visited Father Padiyara's parish in Matigara, and worked with some of the stonebreakers. The Canadian students borrowed the stonebreakers'tools and spent part of an afternoon chipping away at large rocks plucked from the riverbed. It was their way of experiencing something of the hard reality of stonebreaker existence.
Ramnarine said entire families spend hours each day hauling and breaking large rocks for use in cement plants and quarries. “The income from this work amounts to about $4 a month for each family,” Ramnarine said, “but there is no other work available for these people.
“The people seem happy enough despite the hardship. They may be impoverished … but they are content with simple things like work, a home, and a community.”
Father Padiyara is amazed at the people's perseverance in the face of such poverty and hardship. While acknowledging the resignation with which many destitute Indians accept difficult circumstances, Father Padiyara says they must be given opportunities for advancement. Chief among these is simple self-reliance.
“We are trying to teach the local people that despite all the hardships they face, there is a way out,” he said. “They don't always have to view themselves as victims, struggling with forces they can't control. Providing the tools of self-reliance is the key to ensure that the people won't be forever enslaved on the riverside.”
He identified literacy, work opportunities, and updated skills as the basic steps in promoting a sense of self-reliance among the stonebreakers. This approach is in line with an essential component of Jesuit spirituality: that missionary work and evangelization should be tempered with social justice.
As one of the documents of the Jesuits’ 34th General Congregation notes, “In order to feel the anxieties and aspirations of the dispossessed in a way [comparable to Jesuit founder St. Ignatius of Loyola], we need direct personal experience. We can break out of our habitual way of living and thinking only through physical and emotional proximity to the way of living and thinking of the poor and marginalized.”
While success is often modest, Father Padiyara has noted a slight improvement in the lot of the stone-breaker community.
“There has been a change in the lives of the people,” he reported. “Self-reliance is growing. There is increasing awareness of the rights of these people. And the problems of illiteracy and injustice are coming to others'attention.”
Father Padiyara and those he ministers to would likely take heart from a comment attributed to Mother Teresa shortly before her passing. She was asked if her work on the streets of Calcutta, where so many hundreds of thousands were sick and dying, was little more than a drop in a bucket. “Yes,” Mother Teresa replied, “but without that drop, the bucket is empty.”
Mike Mastromatteo writes from Toronto.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mike Mastromatteo ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Dr. Marijo and Darka Zivkovic DATE: 10/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: October 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:Dr. Marijo Zivkovic and his wife, Darka, were appointed to the P o n t i f i c a l Council for the Family in recognition of their pro-life, pro-family efforts in Croatia. The couple founded a Family Center in 1987, despite the difficulties of such a project under communist rule, to promote the Catholic approach to family life. Register correspondent Raymond de Souza recently spoke with Dr. and Mrs. Zivkovic in Eichstatt, Germany.
Marijo and Darka Zivkovic
Personal:Dr. Marijo Zivkovic, born 1939, was trained and employed as an economist. Darka Zivkovic, born 1943, is a former elementary school teacher. The couple had seven children, of whom six survive, and is awaiting the birth of their ninth grandchild this month.
Current positions: Founding directors of the Family Center in Zagreb, Croatia; members of the Pontifical Council for the Family.
Background: Members of the Commission for the Lay Apostolate in the former Yugoslavia from 1979 to 1989, throughout which time Marijo Zivkovic served as secretary of the Commission. He also served on the Family Commission of the bishops’ conference of Yugoslavia and Croatia from 1973 to 1993. Both participated in the Holy Father's Synod on the Family in 1980, and organized several conferences in the 1980s which were the only forums in the Communist world for East-West Catholic dialogue on the family.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Secrets for a 'Beautiful & Successful' Life DATE: 10/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: October 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:De Souza: What are your thoughts on meeting John Paul II in Croatia during the papal visit this month?
Dr. Zivkovic: We are very grateful that the Holy Father is coming to Croatia again. It will help our country greatly, for we have suffered a lot. We are also very happy that he will beatify Cardinal Stepinac, who is a national hero for the Croatian people.
When did you start the Family Center in Zagreb?
My wife and I have been involved in the systematic promotion of successful family life since 1969. We were both members of the commission for the laity of the bishops’ conference of Yugoslavia. I was a member of the family commission of the [national] bishops’ conference, [first] of Yugoslavia and then of Croatia, from 1973-1993; we worked throughout all of Croatia, Bosnia, and other parts of Yugoslavia.
This work was growing, and as freedom grew in communist Croatia and Yugoslavia, we officially opened the Family Center in 1987 in Zagreb, just two years before the fall of communism. It was very dangerous in communist times. We never kept a list of people who worked with us, because we did not want them to be arrested based on lists the authorities might confiscate from us.
What is the main purpose of your center?
To help people to accomplish what I call a “beautiful and successful” life — beginning first within family life, and carrying into our lives as individuals. And, of course, all our experience shows us that the best way to accomplish such a life, insofar as it is possible in this world, is by applying the complete and authentic Catholic position regarding personal and family life. So I do not need to promote Catholic positions because they are Catholic, but because they are the best way to live.
That is the approach you take with people who use your center?
Yes, but we have two lines which run parallel. My experience and position is that we can adequately argue for any Catholic position regarding interpersonal relationships without invoking Church teachings or the Catholic faith, by relying on universally understandable and acceptable principles: justice, honesty, kindness, and love. This is not easy, but it is possible, and we have had successes. And then, for those of us who have the gift of the Catholic faith, we have more arguments, more ways to accomplish the same kind of beautiful and successful life.
Croatia is 90% Catholic …
You mean 90% of people call themselves Catholic. But a survey [of people's beliefs] shows something different. Still, we are in a much better situation than other countries because of our Catholic culture. Everyone claims to be Catholic, everyone is prepared to have holy pictures in his home, everyone is prepared to listen to the Catholic Church in a certain way. In this situation, re-evangelization is much easier.
So even though most are Catholic, you still find that it is more effective to start using arguments not based on the Catholic faith?
I would say that we should always use different arguments in parallel. Why? Take the situation of teen-agers, who often during that period lose their faith, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. In their minds, faith is connected with serious ethical demands, and many do not want to follow things that they think to be only Catholic teaching. So they leave the Church. But if we explain to these young people that simple honesty and human kindness demand fidelity to a future spouse, or that simple justice demands from young men and women not to conceive a child if there is not permanent love between them, then this child is much less likely to leave the Catholic faith.
Did the war mark your work at the Family Center?
Yes. This terrible war brought a lot of good to Croatia — in people's reactions to the war. We noticed it immediately in the Family Center in the summer of 1991. Our activities tried to build on the new openness of people to think again seriously about life, death, and family matters, because of the tragedy of war. We were helping pregnant women. One pregnant lady came to us. She was about 23 or 24 years old and in a most difficult socioeconomic and psychological situation. But she had no doubts about giving birth to the child. She only asked for help. In the process of helping her, I asked this lady how she had such a strong wish to give birth to her baby amid her difficulties. Tears came to her eyes; she said that her younger brother was on the front lines, and every day she worried about his survival. She said it was not possible that she could kill her baby in this situation.
Another example: you could not find babies to adopt during the war because all families wanted to look after all children in the extended family. Friends of ours wanted to adopt an orphan, but there were no babies to adopt. If the parents died in the war, grandparents, aunts, and uncles wanted to take care of the baby. Nobody could believe it.
More than half of all refugees stayed with their families — not in camps. Croatia is a nation of 4.5 million people and, at times during the war, we had half a million refugees. But we never had the tent cities that you have seen in other parts of Europe where there have been disasters. Nobody had to live in tents. Some 100,000 people were put up in hotels. But 80% of the refugees were received into families, many of whom they had never met before. This is something to be proud of. It says something about the Catholic mentality, the Catholic culture.
You mentioned the story of that young woman. The abortion rate in Croatia has dropped sharply in the 1990s.
Let me tell you the exact numbers. During the 1970s and 1980s, it was always over 40,000 per year, in a nation of 4.5 million. In the early 1990s there were big demographic changes, but in 1993 the population stabilized. That year there were about 25,000 legal abortions. In 1994, there were about 19,000; in 1995, about 14,300; in 1996, about 12,000. Last year, 1997, there were 10,076 [abortions in Croatia]. Interestingly, we have always had great regional differences [regarding] abortion in Croatia, both now and during communism. For the last two years, in the Adriatic coast region, which has 470,000 people, there were practically no legal abortions. We have four major cities. In Split, one of the three cities, we have practically no legal abortions. In the other cities, we have [many]. Now in Split, in 1996, the rate of contraceptive use was three prescriptions for every 1,000 people. In Osijek, which has a lot more abortions, there were 10 per 1,000. And in Rijeka, which has even more abortions, the ratio was 13 per 1,000. In Croatia, all physicians must report every medical procedure to the state in order to be paid by the state health system — [so] you can see reliable state statistics that when you have more contraception, you also have more abortion.
What was the effect of the war on attitudes toward respect for life?
The dramatic decrease in legal abortions is due in large part to the war. The whole nation and the government felt that the Croatian people were in danger. We family-life advocates had always been concerned about the birth rate, about how children are one of the key points in a healthy national life. But now our government has a “National Program of Demographic Renewal,” accepted unanimously by the parliament in February 1996, which says that human life is the highest priority in our society, and must be protected from conception to natural death. The program mandates protection by legal, moral, and medical means.
In two or three places in this program, it is mentioned that the protection of life from conception to natural death should be taught through the educational system. It also introduced one very effective economic measure. Every woman who gives birth to a third, fourth or following child, if she is employed, is granted a three-year paid leave — paid out of the state budget, not by the company where she works. And if she is not employed, each woman gets the equivalent of $250 per month, which is more than many lower-paid workers receive. This is more than the minimum wage, for example. In this way, couples who love and want children are supported in realizing their hopes; for those who love children, this financial support can help to make that love fruitful.
The behavior of our bishops and priests was also important. On account of the war, our bishops had many more opportunities to speak on television directly to the people. If any bishop had three minutes to speak on television, he would speak about abortion for one minute. It was almost a rule. A lot of our priests were also very open. This was all helped by our educational campaign. We at the Family Center produced audio-visual materials for young people. We have printed literally millions of leaflets, booklets, and now books to spread the message about protecting the unborn. So there have been three factors: a substantial educational effort, material help from the state and others, and the leadership of our bishops and priests.
What material help does your center offer?
We help pregnant women, women in many kinds of difficulties. We offer practical help. Even during communist times, we would take care of pregnant women in distress — finding a home for them until they could give birth and their situation settled down. Now, with freedom, we can do a lot more to provide help to families who are expecting children, to nursing mothers, and to families with many children. For example, to couples who have a third child, we give a baby carriage, plus clothes, diapers, and food for babies up to a year old.
You mentioned the third child; you emphasize having three or more children.
The Croatian government also pays benefits for the third and subsequent children. Why the emphasis on the third child? The statistics in Croatia for the last 25 years show that, among women who have one child, between 80% and 90% would have a second child, but only 20% would have a third. Among those who have three children, more than 50% would have a fourth child; among those, more than half would have a fifth. We noticed that the turning point is the decision to allow the third child to be born.
We are very deeply convinced that having four children or more is a great gift to all members of the family. In families which have only one child, it may be more difficult to understand Jesus’ call to love everyone as a brother and sister; an only child does not have brothers and sisters. With more children, life has perhaps more hardships but there is certainly also more beauty and joy.
—Raymond de Souza
----- EXCERPT: A couple work to preserve the family in Croatia ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Population Control Denounced by Experts At Women's Conference DATE: 10/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: October 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:ALEXANDRIA, Va.—Global population control was roundly criticized by a panel of experts at the 19th annual convention of the Concerned Women for America (CWA) Sept. 25. The conservative grass-roots group, the largest women's public policy organization in the nation, supports pro-life and pro-family initiatives.
The 600 participants who met outside of Washington, D.C., heard Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), a physician and long-time opponent of foreign aid; Steven Mosher, president of the Falls Church, Va.-based Population Research Institute; and Robert Sassone, a physicist and population specialist for the American Life League.
Paul, who also received CWA's Champion for Life Award for his pro-life efforts, has been a leading critic of overseas population-control initiatives. He is the author of an amendment which would prohibit any U.S. funds being used to support population planning, abortions, abortifacients, or contraceptive distribution.
He considers foreign aid unconstitutional. He said, “I don't see the authority in the Constitution to give away your money to foreign governments.” Further, Paul added, it's “too hard to pick out who the good guys are.”
The congressman added, “If they [any government] get your money, they're going to do whatever they want with it.” He said that even if foreign aid money is earmarked for programs other than population, other funds are freed up for abortion, sterilization, and contraception.
“It's wrong for American taxpayers to be forced into [supporting] some program that is morally offensive to us,” Paul said. It is for that reason that he continues to offer his amendment. The amendment received 149 votes in the House last year — 69 short of passage. His press secretary, Michael Sullivan, told the Register the proposal will be back in the 106th Congress, and “from now on until we stop this nonsense.”
Mosher, a social scientist who lived in rural China in the 1970s, has been a long-time observer of errant population control programs around the world. His Population Research Institute (PRI) has been deeply involved in attacking the Peruvian government's forced sterilization program, the one-child policy in China, and in other issues such as the use of quinacrine pills to promote sterilization in 18 developing countries.
“There's a war on people,” Mosher said. “It's being carried out by our country and other nations around the world.”
“If we continue our war on population,” he added, “we're going to have to pay a heavy price.”
Mosher argued that contrary to popular media reports, there is no population crisis. In fact, “fertility rates are going down,” he said. Some countries, such as Japan and those in Europe, are actually experiencing a decline in population.
“Population control programs are always rife with human rights abuses,” he said. He noted the work that the PRI and the CWA did to call attention to the coercive measures employed by the Fujimori government in Peru.
Peru initiated its program soon after then U.S. Undersecretary of State Timothy Wirth visited Lima in June 1996 and encouraged a more vigorous population control effort. Wirth is quoted as having said, “Abortion is a fundamental human right.”
Since the 1960s the U.S. Agency for International Development has implemented 30 different population programs in Peru. But nothing had approached the vigorous effort undertaken in 1997, whereby the government established a quota of 100,000 sterilizations and anticipated another 200,000 this year.
Aggressive work by PRI and CWA as well as by the Peruvian Catholic bishops helped galvanize the Peruvian media, despite the threat of government retaliation. The sterilization program, which relied on bonuses and punishments to workers in the field, was derailed by the efforts of these organizations as well as the intervention of pro-life U.S. Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.).
Mosher noted that human rights abuses exist in population control initiatives in 37 countries, including Indonesia, Mexico, and Bangladesh. He also said such efforts undermine primary health care services, where doctors are encouraged to concentrate on abortions, sterilization, and contraception, rather than on providing basic medical care.
Each year, although the number of women of childbearing age increases by about 15 million, nearly a million fewer babies are being born in the world.
Mosher also mentioned the Tiahrt amendment, which was introduced by Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.) and adopted by the House of Representatives by a voice vote Sept. 17. The legislation, if enacted, will prevent coercion in any U.S.-funded population control program.
This amendment would be the first effort in law to define what is meant by the term “voluntary” in population programs. It rejects quotas, bonuses, or bribes. It also requires programs to spell out options to and the dangers of population control.
Referring to the situation in Peru, Tiahrt has said, “Forced sterilization of some of the most vulnerable class of women in foreign countries should not be occurring in U.S.-funded family planning programs.” The amendment, which now goes to a House-Senate conference committee for review, would stop these and other abuses.
Mosher, a convert to Catholicism and father of eight children ("and two more in heaven waiting for us"), concluded his talk by saying, “The Bible tells us that children are a blessing from God. We don't have an overpopulation problem on earth or in heaven, where 'there are many mansions in my father's house.’”
The final speaker was Sassone, the author of Handbook on Population, which addresses 1,204 pro-life issues. He said, “The definition of foreign aid is a system of taking the money from poor people of rich countries and giving it to the rich people in poor countries.”
He also drew the group's attention to several surprising facts. For example, there is no increase in the number of babies being born each year. In a fact sheet he distributed, Sassone noted, “Each year, although the number of women of childbearing age increases by about 15 million, nearly a million fewer babies are being born in the world.”
Sassone, like Mosher, talked about the population decline in Japan and Europe, especially in heavily Catholic Spain and Italy. This has important social and economic implications. In an interview with the Register, Sassone said, “Europe and Japan show us what the rest of the world will be like in 30, 40 years with present trends.”
The panel was joined in the question-and-answer session by CWA's director of legislation, Laurel MacLeod. She said that CWA was looking for ways to be involved in the next United Nations population conference, which is scheduled for June in New York.
The conference is entitled “Cairo Plus Five,” referring to the 1994 United Nations meeting in Egypt which promoted abortion and other initiatives repugnant to pro-life and pro-family supporters. One of the agenda items will be to “try to make abortion a fundamental human right,” MacLeod said.
The CWA was founded in 1979 by Beverly LaHaye. In its public policy initiatives, it promotes a traditional Judeo-Christian approach to public policy issues. Among other speakers at the three-day convention were prospective Republican presidential candidates Gary Bauer, Steve Forbes, and Sens. John Ashcroft of Missouri and Bob Smith of New Hampshire.
Joseph Esposito is the Register's Washington Bureau Chief.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Esposito ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Three Decades of Abortion Hasn't Quivered British ProLifers DATE: 10/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: October 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:DUBLIN, Ireland—The oldest pro-life organization in Britain and Ireland is the Church. Until 1967 legislation in both countries reflected the view of the majority of the population that abortion was wrong and ought to be outlawed.
In both countries, performing an abortion was a criminal offense under the 1861 Offenses against the Person Act. It continued to apply in Irish law following the end of British rule in 1922. But British law changed in 1938, following the prosecution of a gynecologist, Aleck Bourne, who terminated the pregnancy of a rape victim. In the case, Rex v. Bourne, the jury upheld the view that an abortion could lawfully be carried out to prevent the mother from becoming “a physical and mental wreck.”
Following the Bourne judgment, a move was made to amend British statute law, and the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Bill was put before Parliament. A campaign against the bill was started, lead by the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC). The campaign marked the birth of the modern political pro-life movement in the British Isles.
Ironically, Aleck Bourne was a founding member of the society, appalled that his landmark court case was being used to justify legislation that would eventually lead to abortion on demand in Britain. Despite SPUC's efforts, the bill was passed in the form of the 1967 Abortion Act. Since then 3 million unborn babies have been killed by abortion in the United Kingdom — a figure a thousand times greater than the number killed in the Northern Irish conflict.
Perhaps because of the violence in Northern Ireland, people there value life more and they have resisted a liberal abortion regime. The current British government, however, plans to extend the provisions of the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland, against the will of the province's majority. Resisting this threat is a priority for SPUC and other UK pro-life organizations.
At present, SPUC's main activity is lobbying parliament and organizing the all-party pro-life group of MPs and Lords. It is also active in campaigning against euthanasia, in vitro fertilization and embryo experimentation, and in running schools education campaigns. It is a non-denominational organization, but has denominational subsections. Its Muslim division is one of the most active branches of SPUC in the United Kingdom. SPUC's current annual budget is roughly £1 million Sterling (about $1.7 million).
The second largest UK pro-life group is LIFE, founded by husband and wife Jack and Nuala Scarrisbrick in 1970. LIFE began as a charitable organization and has 140 LIFE Centers providing non-directive counseling to women with crisis pregnancies. It has 43 LIFE Houses that provide shelter and support for women who, despite difficult circumstances, keep their babies.
LIFE runs two baby hospices and is planning to open a third shortly. One of LIFE's main activities is manning a 24-hour crises telephone helpline, and every year 8,000 people seeking help contact LIFE. It also offers pro-life fertility treatments and family planning services. LIFE receives no government funding; Labor Party sources, however, have indicated that might soon change. At present it has 32,000 dues paying members and an annual budget of about £1 million. Recently, Pope John Paul II named the Scarrisbricks as a Knight and a Dame of the Order of St. Gregory for their pro-life work. Other pro-life organizations in Britain include CARE, whose membership is mainly Evangelical Protestant; Alert, which campaigns against euthanasia specifically; and Doctors for Life, which monitors and develops medical ethics in the fields of embryology and euthanasia.
One reason the PLAC was formed was that they believed SPUC in Ireland did not have sufficient public relations and lobbying expertise.
In Ireland, the oldest modern pro-life group is also named the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC), though it is separate from the UK organization of the same name. The organization was founded by Dr. Mary Lucey shortly after the enactment of the 1967 Abortion Act in Britain when she was approached by a pregnant girl seeking information about abortions in the United Kingdom. SPUC in Ireland is mainly a campaigning and education group, leaving counseling and the care of women in crises pregnancy to CURA (Latin for “care"), an agency of the Irish hierarchy. CURA, which was founded in 1977, has 14 counseling centers in Ireland and runs a telephone helpline. Last year, it dealt with 9,939 telephone inquiries and 4,016 personal callers, and offered 146 women post-abortion counseling. Its main source of income is the Eastern Health Board, but it is also supported by the Irish hierarchy. CURA organizes educational talks in schools, but is not involved in political lobbying.
Ireland's other main respect life organization is the Pro-Life Campaign (PLC), which is lobbying for a new constitutional amendment that will fully protect the unborn child's right to life. The PLC's mission is broadly the same as that of the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign (PLAC) which was formed in 1981 with the specific aim of amending Ireland's constitution to protect the unborn.
One reason the PLAC was formed was that they believed SPUC in Ireland did not have sufficient public relations and lobbying expertise. Many of the PLAC's members were already senior political figures in Irish society when they formed the organization.
They were successful in their aim. When following a referendum in 1983, a new amendment was inserted into the Irish constitution stating: “The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.” Following this victory the PLAC was formally dissolved. SPUC in Ireland remained active and in 1985 it secured a High Court injunction against two Dublin clinics and two university student unions that were providing abortion referral information to Irish women seeking to terminate their pregnancies in Britain.
While abortion was illegal in Ireland, hundreds, if not thousands of women, were traveling to abortion clinics in Britain.
This situation was highlighted in 1992 following public outcry at a decision by Ireland's police, the Garda, to prevent a 14-year-old rape victim from traveling to Britain for an abortion. In what became known as the “X” case, the Supreme Court ruled that the 1983 amendment allowed a woman to have an abortion in cases where suicide was threatened if the pregnancy continued.
This court decision led to the formation of Youth Defense, an organization criticized by the Catholic hierarchy for its tactic of picketing the homes and offices of pro-choice politicians and doctors. Following the “X” case, a second pro-life referendum was held. Three questions were put to the Irish people: They voted again against legalizing abortion; in favor of legalizing information about abortion services overseas; and in favor of the right to travel abroad when seeking an abortion.
In 1993, when another young rape victim became pregnant, the High Court ruled in the “C” case that, while in the care of social services, a 13-year-old girl could be taken to England by social workers and her pregnancy could be terminated at taxpayers’ expense. The tensions between the Pro-Life Campaign (the reformed PLAC) and Youth Defense were highlighted when a PLC spokesman, Denis Murphy, claimed this year that Youth Defense's militant tactics had contributed to the death of the 13-year-old's unborn child.
Youth Defense countered by saying the PLC had done little to save the unborn children in either the “X” case or the “C” case. Youth Defense say that it was precisely because of the lack of pro-life activity at the time of the “X” case in 1992 that they decided to form their organization.
It is often said in Ireland that the first item on the agenda of any new political organization is the split. So it's not surprising to find divisions between two new pro-life organizations in the country, Human Life International Ireland and Family and Life. HLI was set up in 1994 by its American parent Human Life International and employed Peter Scully, who had been prominent in Youth Defense, as its director.
In November 1996, however, Scully broke with the organization claiming its work in Ireland was being interfered with by Americans. HLI sought an injunction against Scully seeking access to their former offices and their property, in the building in which Scully also resides and runs his new organization. In the event, an out-of-court settlement was reached with Scully receiving an undisclosed sum from HLI.
Since his departure, HLI has not been as active in Ireland, though it organizes a major pro-life conference every year. All five of Ireland's pro-life campaigning organizations — SPUC, the Pro-Life Campaign, Youth Defense, HLI, and Family and Life — are campaigning for a new pro-life amendment to the constitution to reflect the opposition of the Irish. It remains to be seen if they can work as a united front.
Cian Molloy writes from Dublin, Ireland.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Cian Molloy ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: 'Angel Mania' Can Mislead The Unsuspecting Faithful DATE: 10/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: October 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:LOS ANGELES—At every Sunday Liturgy, Catholics profess their belief in the angelic world in the words of the Nicene Creed: “I believe in one God … maker of heaven and earth, and of all things seen and unseen.” It's surely one of Christianity's most majestic truths, the teaching that the physical universe is filled with angels — from the Greek angelos, meaning “herald” or “messenger” — these mysterious and invisible ministers of God's grace.
“The Creator of the world,” writes the Church Father Athenagoras, “through the medium of his word, has apportioned and ordained the angels to occupy the elements, the heavens and the world, and whatever is in the world” — a teaching confirmed by St. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae. “All corporeal things are governed by the angels,” declares the Church doctor.
Angels, in other words, are everywhere. But not only as a reality of faith. For the past several years at least, angels have become an ubiquitous cultural phenomenon as well. “Angel mania,” they call it. And from the bookstore shelves to television sitcoms to cyberspace, you can't get away from it.
On the Internet, for example, you can logon to angel web sites that invite you to “please draw an angel card to see which angel is assisting you in your life right now;” or buy cassette tapes and compact discs of “angelic harmonies” created by an “angel” named Ann; or “surf” the Angel News Network; or consult “celestial webrings” that offer “professional” angel card readings for a mere 99 cents a minute.
Beginning in the 1970s with Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's studies on so-called near-death experiences, which popularized the notion that people can, and should, develop relationships with “spirit or angelic guides,” New Age circles in Europe and the United States have been quick to exploit the growing fascination with angels and angelology.
For one thing, as the briefest perusal of the growing “angel” literature will show, Christians are more apt to be drawn into New Age movements through distortions of traditional teachings, like belief in guardian angels, than they would be by more typical New Age appeals to goddess-worship or the insights of Eastern religions. It's a fact which has not gone unnoticed by the Church.
A Sept. 19 editorial in the influential Rome-based Jesuit weekly Civilta Cattolica said that the angel craze has more to do with “human desperation than with Christianity,” and warned that the current popularity of angels runs the risk of “misleading Christians or even leading them away from the faith.”
Much modern angel lore, said the editorial, is related to New Age and the rise of neo-gnosticism and to its strictly individualistic search for meaning and spirituality.
“It is dangerous to penetrate the angelic world with esoteric or magical intentions because this is idolatry in the worst case, or stupidity in the case of superstitious naivete,” the editorial cautioned. “An angel is a sign of the only one who should be adored, God.” They are not beings who perform magic on behalf of those they protect.
The term “angel” as currently used in Catholic theology indicates a purely spiritual creature; an individual, personal being, who has by nature an intelligence more acute and a perfection surpassing all other visible creatures, who has been present since creation and who, throughout the history of salvation, serves as an agent of the accomplishment of the divine plan (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 328–337).
The Civilta Cattolica article echoed a recent pastoral letter issued by the bishops of Italy's Tuscany region which lamented the rise of widespread interest in magic and the occult there, fueled, in part, the bishops said, by fascination with angels.
But the Italian bishops also recognized that there are more than spiritual factors behind the craze.
“The growth of the phenomenon, at least in general terms, can be tied to existential problems,” such as the need to find meaning in life, to find liberation from suffering and fear, to find reassurance in the face and anxiety and uncertainty, and to find a firm point of reference, the bishops said.
Many Church commentators say that it is significant that angel mania has emerged, not as a byproduct of traditional societies, but in the heartland of the industrial world, particularly in the United States, Great Britain, Switzerland, Holland, and Italy.
It shows that people are thirsting for security and protection in a world that is often frightening, “cold,” and devoid of spiritual values, said Civilta Cattolica. “Angels have returned to technopolis,” it said.
Of course, an exaggerated interest in angels is at least as old as Christianity, and, one suspects, may have been as much a problem for the early Church as it is today.
While St. Paul recognizes the role of the angels in delivering the Jewish Law (Galatians 3:19) and in the Christian community (1 Corinthians 11:10, Galatians 4:14), he rebukes Christians for the “worship of angels” (Colossians 2:18) and reminds them that the Christian dispensation is not subject to angels but to Christ (Hebrews 2:5–18).
It shows that people are thirsting for security and protection in a world that is often frightening, ‘cold,’ and devoid of spiritual values. ‘Angels have returned to technopolis.’
Father Basil Cole OP, co-author of an essay in the catalogue of the The Invisible Made Visible: Angels from the Vatican, an exhibition of paintings, sculptures, and artifacts from the Vatican Museums now on a five-city U.S. tour, likewise sees the angel phenomenon as an expression of human need.
When asked the cause of the angel craze Father Cole replied, “Loneliness.” “The need to know that there's always somebody near by — a personal being, not an ‘it,’ not a force. Someone who will never leave you.”
Father Cole, who teaches moral and spiritual theology at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., agrees with the Civilta Cattolica editorial that the anonymity of modern urban life plays a part in the renewed focus on angels. But he also blames the “desacralization” of much post-Vatican II Catholic life for part of the problem.
“Taking away the sense of the sacred from the Liturgy, turning the Mass into a fun fest where we spend our time looking into each other's eyes instead of sensing, as we should, that we're in the court of heaven with the angels,” Father Cole told the Register, “that's created the paradoxical situation where people are prepared to find the sacred anywhere but in church.”
Because many Catholics don't seem to take spiritual realities like angels seriously anymore, he said, we can understand why people seek them out in some strange places.
“What the Church needs to do is to restore the sense of the Mass as an encounter with the ‘holy,’” Father Cole said. He also urged the revival of “the many wholesome private devotions that were abandoned after the [Vatican] Council.”
Among the most significant of these, says Father Cole, is “entrustment to our angels.”
The Dominican, who did special studies on the angels as a young theologian, told this story:
“I read an article in the 1970s about Dominican preachers who began their sermons with an unspoken prayer to the guardian angels of all their listeners, so that their words would have real effect.”
He decided to try it.
Armed with a prepared homily for a parish mission, the priest said his prayer to the angels of his congregants, only to find that the subsequent sermon he delivered was, as he put it, “not on my outline.”
Afterward, penitents lined up for the sacrament of reconciliation. “I'm here,” one after the other said, “because of that sermon.”
Since then, said Father Cole, “I've always sought the help of the angels — before class, before preaching. And I find that it generally improves the effectiveness of whatever I do.”
The theologian cautioned, however, that it's possible even for good Catholics to be misled in this area if they're not well-grounded in the faith. A lay Catholic spiritual movement, Opus Sanctorum Angelorum, founded in the late 1940s, largely on the basis of private revelations to reputed Austrian mystic Gabriele Bitterlich, to foster devotional collaboration with the angels, ran afoul of Church authorities, beginning in the 1970s, for allegedly indulging in quasi-gnostic practices such as seeking the names of individual angels and speculating on the nature of the celestial hierarchy.
In 1992, the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) issued a decree forbidding these and similar approaches to angelic devotion.
“God reveals to us what we need for our salvation,” Father Cole commented. “He doesn't want us to stray into the quest for unusual or secret knowledge — even with the best intentions and motives. It's unnecessary and it's dangerous.”
Revelation has given us three angelic names, he said — Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. “It's not the prerogative of the human person to know more,” he said.
It's the Gospel, the Civilta Cattolica article pointed out, that provides the answers people are looking for in their fascination with the possibility of unseen worlds.
And angels are part of that Gospel. “The Church believes in their powerful and mysterious assistance,” the article said. “From its beginning to its end, human life enjoys [the] protection and intercession [of the angels].”
But, most importantly, the article concludes, “in imitation of the angels, Christians are called by Baptism to an ever deeper contemplation and the appreciation of the divine beauty which shines from the face of Christ.”
As the Catechism succinctly puts it, echoing the words of Paul's Letter to the Colossians: “Christ is the center of the angelic world. They are his angels…. They belong to him because they were created through and for him” (Colossians 1:16, CCC, 331).
The last glimpse the Bible affords of these glorious creatures shows them doing what they and we, together, the seen and the unseen, were uniquely created to do:
“Then I looked and I heard around the throne and the living creatures and the elders the voice of many angels, numbering myriads upon myriads and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice: ‘Worthy is the Lamb who was slain to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!’ And I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all therein, saying, “To him who sits upon the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!’” (Rev. 5:11–13).
Senior writer Gabriel Meyer is based in Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: New craze is filling a void, for better or worst ----- EXTENDED BODY: Gabriel Meyer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: U.S. Notes & Quotes DATE: 10/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: October 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:Invalid Ordination Stirs Confusion
The Detroit News called Frances Meigh a “controversial Catholic woman recently ordained a priest,” in its Sept. 19 report.
Not so, countered the Rev. Teresa Hunt, rector of Grace Episcopal Church there. She told the paper that she could not call Meigh a priest. “I can understand where a person has a sense of call,” she is quoted saying. “But to be called a priest or minister, ordained, you must have a community of faith to lift you up. That's in Scripture.”
“Just getting in the face of denomination rules doesn't cut it for Hunt, who noted another option,” said the paper. “It's not such a terrible thing to be a Christian in a Protestant Church,” Hunt suggested.
“Teachable Moment” in White House Scandal
The Post-Gazette quoted him asking all Catholics “to affirm again some very basic truths so that our young are not left bewildered by all of the politically correct double talk, the made-for-TV morality and the talk show deluge of opinions justifying just about anything in the name of personal freedom.”
His letter, called Right and Wrong, offered a “moral critique” of the scandal, without addressing issues of resignation or impeachment. He wrote that sexuality must be affirmed in its “rightful context within a lifelong, loving marriage,” according to the report.
The newspaper asked the bishop if it is ever acceptable to lie in order to spare one's family the pain of adultery. Bishop Wuerl responded, “After the gift of faith — if we have received that gift — the most important thing we have is our personal integrity.”
Politician Prefers Priesthood
Rodak has been a legislative aid, a Hackensack, N. J., board appointee, and a public affairs talk show host on the radio, said the report. But he ultimately felt a stronger identification with other activities in his life: altar boy, lector, and mentor for disadvantaged youth. In Sept., 32-year-old Rodak ended an internal debate that had proposed two options: running for office or entering the seminary.
Said the report, “After considering several dioceses in New Jersey, Rodak applied to the Diocese of Allentown, Pa., which accepted him into its priesthood program. He chose that diocese because it followed traditional Catholic teachings, had a shortage of priests, offered a combination of urban, suburban, and rural areas, and was only two hours from Hackensack.” It added that he also wished to minister to parishioners who would not know him from his past political life.
Rodak told the paper, “Government's not going to come in there and help somebody if they want to confess to a sin they may have done. Government can't come in and help somebody if they're having a problem with their marriage. It's something, though, that a priest can do. And if I'm able to help people in that order, thank God.”
----- EXCERPT: Excerpts from select publications ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Apologist Hahn Defends Church's Understanding of Trinity DATE: 10/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: October 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:WESTCHESTER, N.Y.—The Church's teaching on the Holy Trinity reveals that God in his very nature is a family of relationships which is the pattern for all human families, said Scott Hahn, a Catholic apologist and Scripture professor, at a recent lecture in New York.
Far from being simply a dogma to memorize, believe, and never quite understand, he said, the mystery of the Holy Trinity opens up for believers the possibility of a deep personal relationship with God, and determines how Christians should look at the Church and the world.
“This is the mystery of all mysteries, that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” Hahn stated. “What we mean by mystery is not something irrational. We mean something not knowable by our unaided reason. Mysteries of the Christian faith must be revealed, but they never go against reason. They go beyond reason. They are like the light that illumines our eyes to see more clearly and further than we ever could before.”
Hahn, a professor at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, spoke Sept. 25 at the Thornwood Conference Center in Westchester, run by the Legionaries of Christ. A onetime Presbyterian minister who attacked the Church, he converted to Catholicism in 1986 and has become a renowned lecturer and author.
His latest book, A Father Who Keeps His Promises, explores the fatherhood of God and the reliability of revelation found in sacred Scripture and the sacred tradition of the Church.
The truths contained in the Holy Trinity have come under attack in recent years by theologians who wish to do away with the fatherhood of God, he said. Those who use the titles Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, rather than Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are not only denying the personal relationships within the Trinity, they are obscuring the true nature of God and reducing him to his actions in history.
Before God ever created, he was Father; before God died on the Cross for sinners, he was Son, and before God sent his grace into the hearts of men, he was Holy Spirit, Hahn stressed.
“God's essential identity is the three persons of the Trinity; we cannot reduce him to his actions. Whatever God does flows from who he is,” he said. He quoted from article 236 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “God's works reveal who he is in himself; the mystery of his inmost being enlightens our understanding of all his works.”
The names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit “are more than metaphorical. They are a metaphysical insight into who he is,” added Hahn. (Brian Caulfield)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: World Notes & Quotes DATE: 10/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: October 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:True Ecumenism and the Eucharist
Anglican Bishop Richard Clarke of Meath and Kildare recently argued that those married to Catholics, regardless of their own beliefs or state of grace, should also be allowed to receive communion, said the report. But that question has been addressed recently by the Church, the paper noted. Basil Cardinal Hume personally asked Prime Minister Tony Blair in England not to receive communion with his wife, it said.
Father Raymond Moloney SJ defended the Church's eucharistic faith, said the article, writing that it “is not at the disposal of the worshiper but is essentially dependent, as is the faith generally, on the meaning given it by Christ and declared through his Church…. [T]he sacrament makes no sense apart from the faith of the Church which brings Christ's Eucharist to us.”
Father Moloney called for true ecumenism, adding that “certainly for one party to put moral pressure on members of another Church to go against the norms of their Church can scarcely be seen as a truly respectful form of ecumenism.”
Mormon Editorialist Applauds French Bishops
He cited the French Bishops Council's condemnation of legislation that would give marriage-style benefits to cohabitating couples — including homosexuals. He quoted the bishops’ statement which said, “It is not necessary to put a new statute on the legislation books that risks further destroying the idea of being a couple and a family. … [Marriage] is not a simple contract or private affair but constitutes one of the fundamental pillars of society.”
Added Robinson, “Anybody know what happens when the pillars of a structure are knocked over?”
He concluded, “Marriage is a sacred and desirable institution. And it needs to be viewed as such from an early age. Thanks to the Catholic Church for reminding us of that.”
Movie Takes “Realistic” Look at Damien's Challenge
The new $10 million European-financed film features Peter O'Toole, Kris Kristofferson, and Sam Neill in the story of the Belgian priest's 19th century mission, and includes details story-tellers have flinched from. The colony was a haven for many forms of immorality before the priest brought the faith there, said the paper. It remains to be seen how the movie will handle that material.
But 47 remaining island patients support and appear in the production, it said.
“At first, many of them objected to [the film], but then they all fell in love with it,” an island official told the paper. Dutch-Australian director Paul Cox said he was grateful.
“The actual patients offered us their hands without fingers, their faces without eyes,” he said. “It was an amazing experience. It wasn't about making people up as lepers, it was having real patients playing these parts. It was very moving.”
The film, written by Oscar-winning Gandhi screenwriter John Briley, is based on a book by Hilde Eynikel who exhaustively researched the story of the Blessed Damien.
“For two months, he did not risk contagion, but he found out he was unable to get the trust of the people,” Eynikel told the paper. Then a bishop gave him permission to risk his own health. “From that moment, he took all the risks. He ate with them, touched them, bandaged their sores.”
Italians Propose New Rules for Sacramental Wine
The possibility of a change was initiated by Italian priests who say current wines are “unfit to drink,” said the report.
“The news was a surprise to the Archdiocese of Chicago, which knew of no problem. But its priests use California wines,” said the paper. The report quoted canon law, which requires that the wine be “natural, made from grapes of the vine, and not corrupt.”
Italian wine makers, however, say that other regulations there have put constraints on the production, cultivation, and bottling practices that cause greatly deteriorated quality, according to the report. Vatican officials and wine makers are working to draft new proposed rules, it said.
“It seems this is a very Italian kind of thing,” a Chicago Archdiocesan spokesman said. “I have not heard American priests complaining about the quality of sacramental wines.”
The Sun-Timescited the London Daily Telegraph as contributing to the report.
----- EXCERPT: Excerpts from select publications ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Vatican Notes & Quotes DATE: 10/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: October 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:Ohio Bishop Cites Two Things to Emulate in the Pope
“Not everyone shares Father Dunn's and Ms. Foley's negative critique,” he wrote.
“From my familiarity with Pope John Paul, I must say there are two qualities that I would like to emulate. His teaching is both consistent and constant from year to year and country to country. Polls do not influence his teaching.
“Second, he possesses a world view. I am disappointed in myself from time to time by my parochialism. I think it's a characteristic of many of us in the United States.
“In conversation as well as in his speeches and writings, it is always clear to me that the whole wide world claims the Pope's concern.”
Vatican and Mormons Trade Musical Kudos
Now a press that covers Mormon issues has reported the similar response a Salt Lake City audience has given a concert by the Vatican's chief organist at the Mormon Tabernacle.
“When the principal organist of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome journeys half-way around the world to play in another of the world's great religious halls. … one goes to the concert with certain expectations. Among them, a hope of hearing faith, good works, and charity,” said the review.
“And on Friday night, James Edward Goettsche delivered all three, offering a recital full of assurance, professionalism, and a deep love for the grand organ music of the world,” including pieces that are a rich part of the Catholic Church's centuries-old artistic heritage, said the report.
“The standing ovation he received was quick and spontaneous.
“Yet, more than the music itself, perhaps the most impressive aspect of the concert was how much at home Goettsche felt on the Tabernacle Organ. Proving, perhaps, once again that when great musicians and great instruments meet for the first time, they always greet each other like old friends,” it concluded.
----- EXCERPT: Excerpts from select publications ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Pope's Week DATE: 10/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: October 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:Audiences
Monday, Sept. 21, at Castel Gandolfo:
• Archbishop Luigi Dossena, apostolic nuncio in Slovakia.
• Archbishop Luis Robles Diaz, apostolic nuncio in Uganda.
• Archbishop Rino Passigato, apostolic nuncio in Bolivia.
• Archbishop Bruno Musaro, apostolic nuncio in Panama.
• Archbishop Augustine Kasujja, apostolic nuncio in Algeria and Tunisia.
• Archbishop Luigi Gatti, apostolic nuncio in Malta and in the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.
• Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy.
Tuesday, Sept. 22, at Castel Gandolfo:
• Archbishop Jozef Kowalczyk, apostolic nuncio in Poland.
Wednesday, Sept. 23, at Castel Gandolfo:
• Archbishop Jean-Paul Gobel, apostolic nuncio in Senegal, Cape Verde, Mali, and Guinea-Bissau, and apostolic delegate in Mauritania.
• Five members of the presidency of the Latin American Episcopal Council: Archbishop Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga SDB of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, president; Archbishop Luciano Pedro Mendes de Almeida SJ of Mariana, Brazil, first vice-president; Jaime Lucas Cardinal Ortega y Alamino, archbishop of San Cristobal of Havana, Cuba, second vice-president; Archbishop Emilio Carlos Berlie Belaunzaran of Yucatan, Mexico, president of the economic committee; Bishop Jorge Enrique Jimenez Caravajal CIM of Zipaquira, Colombia, secretary general.
Thursday, Sept. 24, at Castel Gandolfo:
• Six prelates from the Episcopal Conference of Madagascar on their ad limina visit.
Friday, Sept. 25, at Castel Gandolfo:
• Six prelates from the Episcopal Conference of Madagascar on their ad limina visit.
OtherActivities
Thursday, Sept. 24:
Elevated Bishop Karel Otcenasek, emeritus of Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic, to the dignity of archbishop.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Promoting Vocations DATE: 10/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: October 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:Beautifully situated on the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay, the Abbey of Saint Gregory the Great in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, is a Benedictine monastic community, faithful to the Church's teachings, dedicated to a serious life of prayer, and centered on the Eucharist, spiritual reading, and the important work of educating and forming young men and women. The coeducational boarding school (grades 9–12) which we administer is committed to handing on the faith in the context of high liturgical, academic, and moral standards.
Address inquires to:Director of Vocations The Abbey – 285 Cory's Lane Portsmouth, RI 02871-1352 Tel: 401-683-2000 Fax: 401-683-5888
E-mail:
----- EXCERPT: Portsmouth Abbey ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: A Pro-life Heart Free of Anger DATE: 10/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: October 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:Recently I recounted to my 13-year-old son the story of a young Marine killed in action in Vietnam, who was recently given a posthumous Bronze Star for valor. His former commander, now a parish priest in Virginia and a good friend of our family, was asked to present the award to the young man's mother. During the ceremony, Father John read from the last letter Joseph Roble had written to his family.
Joseph, 21, had been on active duty for 10 months when, in September 1968, he wrote a letter home. While driving back to his unit a few days earlier, he'd seen a little Vietnamese boy, about 4 years old, standing by the road. For some reason, the boy reminded Joseph of his young brother, Billy. Joseph thought: Why shouldn't this little boy have the same happiness and security, the same hope for the future, as my young brother has? He went on to say that he was prepared to give his life to see that this little boy had that chance. That if he were to be hurt or killed in trying to do that, he didn't want a lot of tears; he wanted his family and friends to be proud that he had died for something he fully understood and firmly believed in. Joseph was killed in action a few days later.
DANA
My son was as deeply touched by this story as I was, and we went on to discuss the different opportunities we have in life to give of ourselves to help others. As a family, we have just finished a novena for life, supporting in prayer the attempt in Congress to override President Clinton's veto of the ban on late-term abortions. My son was shocked that we couldn't stop such terrible acts of violence, and I was at a loss to explain it all to him. It seems so obvious that good people would want to protect the lives of those who are so defenseless.
Yet for so many years I, too, had closed my eyes and ears to the pro-life message. I knew abortion was wrong; I just didn't want to be involved. I felt I had no right to tell another woman what to do, that perhaps I didn't understand her circumstances and would just add to her pain. I was so aware of the mother, I couldn't see her unborn child. Yet at the end of the day it was women who had aborted their children who finally helped me understand that abortion not only brutally kills the child, it wounds the mother for the rest of her life — and can destroy the soul of a nation. Understanding that truth, and firmly believing that we have a duty to speak the truth, not in anger but in love, I made respect for life from conception to natural death a central issue in my run for the presidency of Ireland last year.
Fifteen years have passed since my “Road to Emmaus” experience. As each year goes by, it seems that my pro-life vision widens, so that, along with the life of the unborn child, it also includes the spiritual life of the mother, the abortionist, and any one else who facilitates the death of the defenseless pre-born baby. There is no room for anger in a pro-life heart. For myself, prayer keeps it at bay, along with the memory of the words of a dear friend, Msgr. Philip Reilly, who says that abortion centers are the Calvary of today. We are called to be there, like Mary and John, not locked away fearful in the upper room. Even if we cannot help a woman understand the mistake she's making, the last look she'll see as she enters the building will be the love of Christ in our eyes, and when she leaves after the abortion, the first thing she'll see is the look of Christ's forgiveness in our eyes.
I have no doubt that the terrible ongoing repercussions of abortion in our society, where the value of life is continually devalued, will be recognized in time. If we cannot teach our young people, in word and in action, that it is wrong deliberately to take the life of another person, then may God help us all.
We have God-given opportunities every day to live our lives for others. As we do so, we ourselves grow closer to God, and inspire others by the example we give. The words written 30 years ago by the young Marine Joseph Roble are still touching hearts today. His young brother Billy, now in his 30s, will soon leave for Vietnam, where he will teach English to Vietnamese children — a gift given in memory of his brother's dream for a young child he saw standing by the roadside. We are not all called to acts of heroic self-sacrifice. But anything we do in love, however small, to defend and protect life will be an essential and irreplaceable part of breaking down the Culture of Death and building up a beautiful and lasting Culture of Life.
Dana, an internationally acclaimed singer-songwriter, has performed on numerous occasions for Pope John Paul II. She ran for the presidency of Ireland in 1997.
----- EXCERPT: PERSPECTIVE ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Heroines Without Knowing It DATE: 10/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: October 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:by Daniel Thomas Paulos
(St. Bernadette Institute of Sacred Art, Albuquerque, 1997, hardbound, 200 pages, $26.95)
Fling the pages wide open, and let in the fresh air! Here is a new view of nuns to overturn the stereotypes we have been fed for too long. The nuns of the persecution complex, those of the psychological suffocation, the ones with a political agenda in the world of woman's rights and feminism — with these we are sated.
In Behold the Women, Dan Paulos gives us not “nuns,” but the nun, that unique, irreplaceable woman that each of us once knew, were touched by, and can never forget.
They are all here: the martial second-grade teacher we dreaded and adored, the novice who slipped us a cookie when we were desperate, the gentle fourth-grade teacher who saw deeper than anyone else and knew we would learn to read and write some day. These and hundreds more come to life in this coffee-table type book, with photographs on every left page and texts opposite.
The book is a collection piece. The 217 photographs were selected from more than 400 submitted; the 153 written testimonies represent writers from a broad spectrum of life styles and levels of society. Through all this runs a feeling of genuineness. These nuns are real people. Some of the photographs have the quality of portraits; others were probably snapped by a Brownie.
Some of the tributes come from professional writers; others are totally simple in style. There are snippets from Mother Mary Francis PCC, of Right to be Merryrenown; Will Durant; Sister Mary Jean Dorcy OP; John Michael Talbot; Father Benedict Groeschel CFR; and a superb foreword by Dame Felicitas Corrigan OSB of Stanbrook Abbey, to mention only a few.
You meander along in a leisurely, reflective mood, by turn amused and moved almost to tears. I challenge you to read this book straight through without stopping to look up the identifications of the photographs that keep catching the corner of your eye. I challenge you not to chuckle at photograph No. 75, showing a Sister of Charity, with her trademark headdress flaring high and wide, reading to three children, while a dog leans over her lap with literary absorption, nose pressed to the page.
I challenge you to speed-read Janda's contemplative poem, Marie of the Incarnation, which intuits the stricken feelings of the French Sister of Charity on the Canadian missions, after the martyrdom of Lalemant and his Jesuit companions and the burning of her convent. Janda depicts her sitting in the dank fog on a rock cushioned with moss, remembering: glowing axe necklaces they were made to wear … their tongues pierced, their flesh cut and eaten … their blood drunk … Lalemant's head cleft by a hatchet, his brain exposed. I challenge you to skip over photographs when you come to Father Daniel Berrigan's salty four-page piece, “My Aunt,” or to refrain from laughing out loud with Paulos himself as he recalls his bewildered conjectures, at age 7, about nuns, in the vignette “Do Nuns Have Legs?”
Nuns have always been a mystery to the throngs of the uninitiated — the luckless ones — in our contemporary world. For those in this category, Behold the Women opens up a new dimension of American history and American life, a whole new world of women who were pioneers in the fields of health care, education, and equal human rights, forthright women of compassion and energy, their eyes on the heavens and their feet planted firmly on the earth.
For those who have been fortunate enough to know nuns in real life, the book is an affirmation. In the face of the current discussion in the media about nuns and their relevance, of the self-questioning that nuns themselves may bear under the weight of modern pressures, in the face of our own aching nostalgia for the values nuns epitomized when we were very young, the book is a message of life and hope for the future.
Abraham Lincoln had words for this, at the close of the Civil War, words with the familiar ring of truth: “Of all the forms of charity and benevolence seen in the crowded wards of the hospitals, those of some Catholic sisters were the most efficient. I never knew whence they came, or what was the name of their orders. More lovely than anything I have ever seen in art are the pictures that remain of these sisters going on their errands of mercy among the suffering and the dying. Gentle and womanly, yet with the courage of soldiers having but a forlorn hope to sustain them in contact with such horrors, they were veritable angels of mercy.”
It takes an artist to see things whole. He needs the eyes of a child, because children see things in the round, and the eyes of an artist, because artists pursue the details of things relentlessly. In this book, Dan Paulos has achieved the perfect blend, portraying nuns with the huge simplicity and the keen attention to detail that mark the true artist.
Paulos, well known in his own right for his silhouettes in black and white, was introduced to the art of paper-cutting by the celebrated American scissorist, Sister Mary Jean Dorcy OP. It is tempting to see a connection between his mastery of the silhouette, with its delicate tracery and filigree finesse, and the effect he has succeeded in bringing off in this book.
“It is a simple book,” he acknowledges. “It is a reminder that ‘once upon a time'there were silent women who were, in reality, heroines without even knowing it. It is to all of these unsung activists that we owe our eternal gratitude.” These words — and this book — are blessed with the all-inclusive simplicity of truth.
Sister Mary Thomas Noble is a Dominican nun in Buffalo, New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mary Thomas Noble Op ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Rediscovering the Bible, Catholic Style DATE: 10/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: October 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:by Scott Hahn
(Lay Witness, September 1998)
Faithful and fruitful Bible study, writes Scott Hahn, professor at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, “requires critical and contemplative study, by which the intended meaning of the scriptural authors, both human and divine, may be discovered in two stages: first, by distinguishing the literal and spiritual senses; second, through discerning the three spiritual senses — that is, allegorical, moral (or tropological), and anagogical.”
“In speaking of the literal sense of Scripture,” Hahn says, “Catholic tradition does not necessarily mean the same thing as Fundamentalists, who … generally seek the ‘literal’ meaning of a text without sufficient consideration of literary genres or adequate study of the figurative use of language by the human writers. Consequently, they equate the ‘literal sense’ with a rather flat and wooden interpretation. Not surprisingly, Fundamentalists also end up rejecting the classical notion of the three spiritual senses altogether.”
Hahn notes that “because Scripture is uniquely inspired by God, other meanings — namely, the spiritual senses — may be conveyed by those things that are signified by the words themselves. … In other words, God not only communicates through the words of Scripture but, as the Creator and the Lord of history, he also gives special meaning to the things, people, and events mentioned in Scripture and uses them as signs to tell us something about his plan of salvation.
“For example, when the Old Testament speaks of the Temple, its literal-historical meaning refers to the magnificent building in ancient Jerusalem. However … God intended it to serve not only as a place of worship but also as a sign of other higher realities. The New Testament applies it to: first, Christ's body (John 2:21); second, the Mystical Body of the Church and individual believers (1 Corinthians 3:16–17, 6:19; 2 Corinthians 6:16); and third, the ‘heavenly dwelling’ of the saints in eternal beatitude (2 Corinthians 5:1–2; Revelation 21:9–22).
The theory of the sense of Scripture is not a curiosity of the history of theology but an instrument for seeking out the most profound articulations of salvation history.
“These three signify the allegorical, tropological (or moral), and anagogical senses. The Catechism … explains them by quoting the thirteenth-century Danish theologian Augustine of Dacia: 'The Letter speaks of deeds; Allegory to faith; the Moral how to act; Anagogy our destiny.”
Hahn traces the historical course of spiritual exegesis through the age of the Church Fathers and the Middle Ages, until “as a result of the Protestant Reformation and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and the consequent dissolution of the medieval synthesis, spiritual exegesis fell into neglect and disuse, even in the Church….
“[But] the last four decades are witness to a rising tide of Catholic theologians and exegetes (e.g., Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Yves Congar, Jean Danielou, Louis Bouyer, Joseph Ratzinger …).”
Hahn writes that “spiritual exegesis attempts to steer a middle way between two opposite extremes: that of historicism on the one hand, which invalidates the New Testament writers’ ‘pre-critical’ exegesis, and fundamentalism on the other, which tends to interpret the New Testament spiritual sense in an exclusively literalistic manner. Both extremes may be traced to a rejection of the Church's living tradition and its normative roles in guiding scriptural interpretation.”
But, Hahn concludes, “faithful exegetes such as de Lubac have demonstrated that 'the theory of the sense of Scripture is not a curiosity of the history of theology but an instrument for seeking out the most profound articulations of salvation history’ for ‘when exegesis is understood in this way, it includes all of theology, from its historical foundation to its most spiritual summits.’”
Ellen Wilson Fielding writes from Davidsonville, Maryland.
The Definite Article is a digest of theRegister's choice from the nation's top journals.
----- EXCERPT: THE DEFINITE ARTICLE ----- EXTENDED BODY: Ellen Wilson Fielding ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 10/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: October 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:“Poster Child” for Moral Crisis
I commend you for your balanced, insightful front page story on the Clinton crisis and thank you for providing faith-based parameters for examining the issues. There is a strong need for such anchors amid the sea of issues swirling in the secular arenas of our nation.
Mr. Clinton has become the “poster child” for the moral crisis that has become prevalent in our nation, resulting from our ambivalence about taking clear-cut stands and our urge to succumb to our collective addictions. As your article stated, all of our actions, private or public, have an effect on our national soul. While it has been grotesquely painful to see the raw details laid out before us, I believe that Mr. Clinton has forced us as a nation to “hit bottom.” Maybe now, as our President walks his own road of recovery, the nation can begin its own 12-step program. Perhaps it is time to admit “we are powerless,” and that “a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.” Our nation's hope lies in the ability to look again to a Higher Power for answers; ethical and moral issues cannot be voted on in a democratic process, using spin doctors, polls and elections.
Maura Walsh
Sierra Madre, California
EWTN not “mainstream”?
The article on the new Catholic Radio Network ("Catholic Radio Network Prepares to Hit Airwaves,” September 20–26) left me mystified in a few of its statements. The first of these statements: that EWTN represents “solid” Catholic audiences, but that a network for “mainstream” Catholicism is also needed. Really? Does the Church have two catechisms? Didn't Mother Teresa say that there is no “new” Church or “old” Church, but only one holy Roman Catholic Church?
Another concern: the comment that Mother Angelica made an inopportune remark concerning Roger Cardinal Mahony's pastoral letter on the Eucharist (for which she later apologized) could have been balanced by mentioning the fact that the 18-page treatise by the Cardinal makes reference only once, in a brief footnote, to the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist!
M. J. McLauchlin
Livermore, CA
National Catechism and 6th Grade
I want to voice my own personal “Hooray!” for Kelly Bowring's article ("The Case for a National Catechism,” Sept. 6—12).
I occasionally substitute in 6th-grade CCD. One day, two weeks before the end of term, I gave them a test, consisting of two questions:
1. How many Commandments did God give Moses? Name them.
2. How many Sacraments do we have? Name them.
Working in groups of three, using their notes, their textbooks and their Bibles, they all knew that there were Ten Commandments, and most even knew that there were seven Sacraments. As for naming them, nobody was quite so successful (although one boy said there was a Sacrament that “makes some guys into priests"). The answers were in the textbook — mentioned once, in a chart on the back page.
I'm all for a new catechism — and a new set of textbooks. How can I help?
Lois Manning
Visalia, California
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Impeachment Decision Will Send ACrucial Message To Young Americans DATE: 10/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: October 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:The question of impeaching the president should occupy not only Congress but all of us citizens in the next several months. Many are indifferent or cynical, saying, “Enough, already.” “Let's move on to the nation's business.” “It's too partisan.” “It's just about sex.” “The president has only two more years, let him finish his term.”
There could be no more important “national” business than finding out if the president, the chief law enforcer, has put himself above the law and undermined our constitutional government. The impeachment process was not intended by the founders as punishment for the president, but as a way to preserve our government by removing corrupt leaders.
Independent Counsel Ken Starr has made charges against the president and drowned us in thousands of pages of evidence and the videotape. Most of us will not read through the material, but we should pay attention to the arguments offered, both in Clinton's defense and against him. Why? Because this process of finding the truth and affirming the moral basis of government will have lasting effects on our country.
This political crisis is not just another “inside the Beltway” affair, of interest only to politicians and journalists. Nor will this scandal affect only the Clinton administration. This was brought home to me by a letter to the editor in The Washington Post, in which the writer listed what children will learn from our president:
• Women are sex objects.
•'Tis better to receive than to give.
• Honesty is not the best policy.
• Rules are for losers.
• If you are contrite, they can't indict.
• Certain kinds of lies are necessary and wise.
• Never accept responsibility for your wrongdoing.
• Character doesn't matter.
• If an event is denied by those in attendance, it didn't happen.
• Anything goes if you are not caught.
• A clever lie is admirable.
Young people will learn from the president's behavior that rules do not apply across the board and that the end justifies the means. It matters, says Bill Bennett in his book, The Death of Outrage, “if we demean the presidency by lowering our standards of expectations for the office and by redefining moral authority down.” Lowering the standards of moral authority for the president will encourage indifference and cynicism across the country at a time when most people are hoping for a moral renewal.
Congress will have to have the moral courage and political will to say there is no legal defense for criminal conduct.
A central question for the Judiciary Committee will be whether the president's actions meet the requirement of “high crimes and misdemeanors” required for impeachment by the Constitution. They will assess this question from both the law and politics, since impeachment is basically a political process. They will have to decide, ultimately, if the body politic has been injured by this president. We will learn if our political leaders believe that lying inflicts moral injury. Will they put political achievements ahead of moral values? Will they lay aside principle and say, “all politicians do it,” or will they defend the rule of law and say personal conduct and character matter?
Watching this important process could do much good for the country. It will remind us that large civic questions cannot be reduced to narrow legal ones. The law is a guide, but not all civic relationships can be reduced to questions of law. The picture of the president parsing his tortured understanding of sex in the well of the Senate in his defense is not a happy one. He has grasped at the letter of the law and lost its spirit. Congress will have to have the moral courage and political will to say there is no legal defense for criminal conduct. Not only legal standards but America's spiritual standards have been violated, and only a return to a rule of law based on truth and the raising of the people's standards and expectations can make things right.
What Congress will do (we hope) cannot be dismissed with a hand-washing attitude. Making judgments about moral values is not “judgmentalism,” but the very definition of human freedom, of choosing right from wrong. Congress will be preserving our democratic form of government by saying: Certain actions corrupt the moral basis of democracy, and we stand against them.
There is a time for apologies, and there is a time for judging apparent criminal conduct by a president and seeing it as an important matter. The good that could come out of this sobering moment for the country: delineating criminal actions we will not tolerate, and at the same time affirming our ideals as a nation. If Congress fails to take this action, it may indicate we have lost our moral compass.
Mary Ellen Bork, a board member of the Catholic Campaign for America and the Institute for Religion in Democracy, writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mary Ellen Bork ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Revelations of the Incredible Shrinking Man DATE: 10/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: October 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:The Fellowship of Catholic Scholars held their 21st annual convention in Denver Sept. 25–27. The following is excerpted from the keynote address of the convention.
I. THE VOICE FROM THE WHIRLWIND
I believe the Holy Father is right when he says that no fundamental conflict can exist between science and religious faith, whatever the appearance to the contrary. Truth can't contradict itself, and both science and faith are means to discovering truth about creation. But their estrangement is often still very real. Why is there a “disconnect” between them, and how do we fix it? …
[First] I'd like to talk about the theology of B movies. … Some of you may also remember the films. I don't mean the big-screen, Cadillac releases like Ben Hur. I mean the low-budget, black and white titles like The Blob, which starred a giant, man-eating amoeba; Them, which starred giant, man-eating ants; and The Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, which starred a giant, taxi-crushing Amazon. … In most of the B movies of the 1950s, a scientific accident — usually involving radiation — triggers an outof-control monster who's defeated only by luck, or by an even more ingenious scientific countermeasure. Each of these movies points to a deep popular ambivalence toward science. We desire the power science brings. But we also fear its consequences, because deep down we instinctively realize that we lack the ability to control what we unleash. Like Pandora, we've opened a box filled with surprises — and not all of them are welcome. We've released a whirlwind of change that threatens to unhinge all our notions of coherence. …
One of these films stands out as a very interesting anomaly. How many of you have seen The Incredible Shrinking Man? Does anyone remember the ending? It's pretty unusual.
Here's the plot: The hero is an average, innocent, middle-class fellow who, one day, gets hit by a random burst of cosmic radiation. That's all the explanation we ever get. A few days later, he notices that his clothes are a bit loose. Gradually he discovers that he's actually shrinking. He goes to the doctor. The doctor does tests, gives him a shot, and reassures him that science will find a cure. But it does-n't. He continues to shrink until he's the size of a mouse, and then an insect. At this point he has a fairly standard, B-movie, life-and-death struggle with a house spider — which now seems the size of an elephant, by his scale. He kills the spider, but the effort exhausts him. He falls into a deep sleep, and when he awakes, he has evaporated to virtually nothing. In the movie's final scene, he drags himself to a basement window and looks out — and then upward — through a forest of grass, to a night sky blazing with stars. And this is what he says:
“I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens. The universe — worlds beyond number, God's silver tapestry — spread across the night. And in that moment, I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. … All this vast majesty of creation had to mean something — and then I meant something too; yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something too. To God, there is no zero.” …
It sounds familiar, doesn't it? Let me remind you where we've heard that message before: Job 38 and 40.
“Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: … Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? … Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place… ? Have you an arm like God, and can you thunder with a voice like his … ?”
And this is my first point. The appropriate posture of man and woman before God, and science before God's creation, is humility. … Science uninformed by modesty in the face of its own limitations will end by dehumanizing the humanity it intends to serve.
Pride, including scientific pride, kills the human spirit. The evidence of this century is irrefutable. We are not gods. We will never be gods. And to be in right relationship with nature, we must never seek to be gods. …
Science will regain its soul and grow to work with faith to serve truth and advance human dignity through the witness of intelligent believers.
II. THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
The first point leads to my second: Human happiness is not a function of worldly knowledge, including scientific knowledge. Knowledge sometimes creates as much misery as comfort. We all know hundreds of facts which really add nothing to our lives. Does it help you to know that the surface temperature of Venus will boil lead? … No, happiness flows from meaning, the discernment of which requires wisdom.
Let me share with you another story. … [In Taylor Caldwell's book Dialogues with the Devil] Lucifer describes a room in the afterlife reserved for scientists who have knowingly and willfully rejected God. It has no demons. No fires. No instruments of torture or discomfort of any kind. In fact, just the opposite. Every tool of scientific inquiry is immediately available. So is every reference book. So are unlimited data about anything which any scientist would ever hope to know. Only one thing is missing: purpose. In rejecting God, they've rejected the One Being who gives context and meaning to all knowledge; the Whole who completes all the fragments of information which science laboriously acquires and studies. That's their eternity. They know everything … and yet they also know it's empty without the one priceless piece they've thrown away forever. …
I have one final, cautionary thought about science, and it has to do with its bloodline. “Science” is an interesting word. It traces itself back to the Latin verb scire (to know) and the Latin noun scientia (knowledge). … What science has done in the 500 years since Francis Bacon lived and wrote, is to provide living proof for his claim that “knowledge is power.” Bacon is the earliest salesman for today's “knowledge societies.” Knowledge works. It's useful. American technology is a global witness to it. Scientific knowledge has brought us many tremendous benefits, from antibiotics to electric lights. But the spirit of utility at the heart of applied science is something with which none of us should feel entirely comfortable. … Today's science and technology, in fact, have an ambiguous family history. In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis reminds us that, “The serious magical endeavor and the serious scientific endeavor are twins.” …
“For the wise men of old,” he says, “the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike, the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: The solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious. …” If this sounds alarmist, let's remember that eugenics; partial birth abortion; physician-assisted suicide; cloning; cross-species experiments; and genetic manipulation were all just crazy ideas for low budget, B-grade horror films when C.S. Lewis was writing 40 or 50 years ago. Now they're here. Now they're real. …
Listen to these verses from Sirach 1:11 and 12: “The fear of the Lord is glory and exultation, and gladness and a crown of rejoicing./ The fear of the Lord delights the heart, and gives gladness and joy and long life.”
It is natural for the human heart to find joy in “the fear of the Lord.” And by fear I mean the awe we instinctively feel in the presence of something great, mysterious, and beautiful. The universe is more than dead matter and impersonal equations. Wisdom enables us to see this. And wisdom is what we lack when reason separates itself from faith. …
III. I AM THE ALPHA AND THE OMEGA
In his statements on Galileo, evolution, and in a hundred different other environments, Pope John Paul II has recognized the legitimate autonomy science must exercise in its pursuit of truths about creation, and as recently as his Wednesday audience of Sept. 16, he stressed again that the Church is the friend of any sincere and ethical human research. This merely echoes what Vatican II taught so articulately in its Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes):
“[M]ethodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are” (36).
From the perspective of science, of course, the rationalist-materialist prejudices which scientists inherited from the Enlightenment continue to drive many of them away from the deeper truth found in religious faith. But … times are changing as the “argument from design” has gained new strength. Anyone who hasn't seen the August 1998 issue of Scientific American should … listen to the following quotations from the article “Beyond Physics: Renowned Scientists Contemplate the Evidence for God":
“'The science of the 20th century is showing us, if anything, what is unknowable using the scientific method — what is reserved for religious beliefs,’ [says] Mitchell P. Marcus, chairman of computer science at the University of Pennsylvania. ‘In mathematics and information theory, we can now guarantee that there are truths out there that we cannot find’…
“'The inability of science to provide a basis for meaning, purpose, value and ethics is evidence of the necessity of religion,’ says Allan Sandage [one of the fathers of modern astronomy] — evidence strong enough to persuade him to give up his atheism late in life.” …
This brings me to my final point. The way science will regain its soul, the way science and faith will begin one day to work together to serve the truth and advance real human dignity, is through the witness of intelligent women and men of faith, like yourselves. The Fellowship of Catholic Scholars has come a long way in a short time. Believe me when I say that God is using all of you as missionaries to a new Areopagus, where people have a desperate need for God but don't have the language to even ask for your help.
Your faith in Christ crucified — as scholars and writers, teachers and scientists — is a very powerful form of evangelization. You preach the Christ who is Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end of all things; the One in whom the natural and the divine, the spiritual and the material, science and faith, are reconciled. … There's a poem by Rainer Marie Rilke — it's called Evening— which captures so beautifully some of the things we've been talking about tonight. … Listen just to the final verse:
To you is left (unspeakably confused) your life, gigantic, ripening, full of fears, so it, now hemmed in, now grasping all, is changed in you by turns to stone and stars.
This is the human predicament: part clay, part glory; a story told crudely in low budget films and elegantly in high poetry; studied and measured by science; redeemed by God's son … and lived by each of us. The reconciliation of faith and science, I suspect, takes place first in our own hearts. And it begins when we say “I believe” — and we mean it.
Archbishop Charles Chaput has led the Denver Archdiocese since 1997.
----- EXCERPT: Drawing on B movies and high poetry, an archbishop examines the possibility of reconciling faith and science ----- EXTENDED BODY: Archbishop Charles Chaput ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Church Reformers Shouldn't Let Good Work Go to TheirHeads DATE: 10/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: October 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:In recent years I have become much more optimistic about the future of the Catholic Church in America. This has nothing to do with accepting anything heterodox, liturgically improper or goofy, or immoral. Such problems exist, and a rebellion against the Faith by many Catholics who continue to walk through the doors of our churches is still a reality.
However, the two sources of my optimism are observations of the dried-up and tired initiative of dissenters, and the growth and development of various reform movements within the Church. Reading “progressive” or “liberal” dissenting publications is like reading a Japanese or German war report in 1944: a steady collapse of earlier conquests and efforts causes much anger and fulmination. The right-wing dissenters have always been angry, so nothing is new on that front.
The good news is that hundreds of new religious orders are being founded, many of which are flourishing. Of course they have their own problems, but young people are open to devotion to our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, to the reading of Sacred Scripture, to understanding the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which contains concepts new to many who grew up in the last thirty years, and to a deep love of the Church and our Blessed Mother Mary. Call to Holiness conferences attract Catholics across the age spectrum; Youth 2000 attracts young Catholics to eucharistic adoration; large crowds attend debates where the Catholic Faith is defended against its attackers; many new converts join the Church each year. The truth of the Catholic Faith is simply much more attractive than the claims and partial truths of its attackers and detractors. At this point, I believe that the dynamism is with Catholic orthodoxy, not with dissent.
The next decade will probably see growth in religious life, seminary enrollment, and families. However, these first glimmers for a hope of a Catholic future contain potential problems which could undermine the good that is happening today.
Most especially, the pride of reformers can become a tool of the Evil One to undo God's work. This pride could originate in an attitude whereby a Catholic thinks that he or she has accomplished something great in ending an abuse. Instead of perceiving how God's grace moves to convert you first, and then your neighbor, the reformer might take the credit for a job well done.
Claiming credit, even privately, for what God is doing, can easily lead to the sin of party spirit, whereby a person politicizes the good deeds accomplished by the grace of God. Politicizing Church renewal leads to the formation of cliques and power groups within the Church. Certainly, such groups have existed, still exist, and will exist in the future. However, they generally receive censure from both historians and from our Lord, who considers such part spirit and factionalism a fruit of the flesh (Galatians 5:14–21).
If a victory of Catholic orthodoxy is looming larger on the American horizon, we would do well to learn the lessons of the victories won earlier in this century. Will orthodox teaching and practice triumph as at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 or will there be a Marshall Plan at the end? Will there be a vengeful pursuit of indemnities from the defeated, as occurred at the end of World War I, or will a loving, sympathetic effort be made to rebuild what has been lost and destroyed, as happened after World War II?
In today's Catholic Church, will personal pride and party spirit seek vengeance and indemnity from those who abused the liturgy, textbook, and classroom to promote a politicized religious agenda through the 1970s and 1980s? Or will Christian charity pursue the truth, and seek opportunities for conversion, forgiveness, and reconciliation with Christ and his Church?
The humiliating defeat and indemnification of Germany in the 1920s is still seen as a major cause for the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. A mean, vengeful, conservative (that is, politicized) party spirit within the Church over the next decades will only serve to restore the angry protests and silly shenanigans of a politicized Catholic left. We would do well to imitate the steady, hard work and self-sacrifice of the World War II and post-war generation. The task at hand is education in the Catholic Faith, reform towards upholding the dignity of the liturgy, revitalization of the priesthood, religious life and lay movements, and growth in holiness, for which the biblical norm is God's own holiness (Leviticus 19:2; 1 Peter 1:15–16: “Be holy as the Lord is holy"; see also the divine norm for perfection in Matthew 5:48 and for compassion in Luke 6:36).
This task requires the grace of God. For this reason, St. Augustine prayed, “Lord, command what You will, but give what you command.” We can be as holy, perfect and compassionate as God, only if he gives us the grace to do so. We can be his instruments of renewal and reform, only if we pick up our crosses and follow the steps of Jesus. In so doing, the reform will avoid the dangers of prideful party spirit, because the reformers have sought not the flesh, but the Lord, the one true good of life.
Jesuit Father Mitch Pacwa is a professor at the Institute for Religious and Pastoral Studies at the University of Dallas.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mitch Pacwa SJ ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Inside and Out Avila's Famous Walls DATE: 10/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: October 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:Of all the pilgrimage destinations in Europe, Avila offers one of the most authentic medieval atmospheres. With its 11th-century walls and cobblestone-lined streets, the Spanish city is filled with age-old churches, Gothic palaces, and a fortified cathedral. Adding to the feeling of 16th-century Spain are the open markets and the ringing of the bells for the midday Angelus.
It is not Avila's antique atmosphere, however, that draws pilgrims from around the world, but a much-admired saint. As the birthplace and religious training ground of the famous St. Teresa of Jesus, the city has quickly developed into one of the most sought out pilgrimage sites in Spain.
St. Teresa, the great reformer of the Carmelite Order, was born into a noble family on March 28, 1515. From her earliest years, she was religiously inclined. At age 7 she wanted to escape with her brother to convert the Moors and suffer martyrdom. When she was 12 and her mother died, Teresa turned toward the Blessed Virgin Mary for maternal care. At age 19, Teresa left home to enter the Carmelite Order in her hometown.
Unknowingly, she entered a convent that had relaxed its rules, and the nuns were living more like people in the outside world. After reading St. Augustine's Confessions, she embarked on a reform of the order. Finding the prayer life of the convent contrary to the Gospels and to the order's rule, she began curbing many of its abuses.
She traveled endlessly throughout Spain, reforming old convents and founding new ones. During one of her journeys, she met St. John of the Cross, who became her spiritual adviser. Together, they worked for the reform of the Carmelite orders, of both men and women.
Both saints reached the heights of mysticism and are world-renowned for their spiritual writings. Both experienced many heavenly visions. The several books that prompted St. Teresa to be named a Doctor of the Church are her autobiography, The Way of Perfection, and The Interior Castle.
Suffering from ill health, Teresa died on her way to her convent at Alba de Tormes on October 4, 1582. She was never to lose her miraculous powers or favored gifts, and when she died her cell was said to be filled with a heavenly fragrance. When her body was exhumed more than 330 years later, the coffin emitted the same sweet-smelling heavenly fragrance (known as the odor of sanctity). In 1622 Pope Gregory XV canonized her, along with Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier, Isidore, and Philip Neri.
Probably the most extraordinary grace she received was the “transverberation of the heart.” In her autobiography, St. Teresa spoke of the angel who thrust an arrow into her heart, leaving her “on fire with a great love of God.” After her death, when her body was examined she was found to have had a perforation of the heart. Thus, science confirmed one of her greatest mystical experiences. The saint's heart now rests in a glass reliquary at the Carmelite Convent in Alba de Tormes.
As there are a number of sites in Avila related to the life of St. Teresa, the city serves as a great Spanish pilgrimage destination. Among the most prominent places to visit for pilgrims is the Monastery of the Incarnation. It is here that the saint spent most of her religious life, and here that she began her reform of the Carmelite convent. Along with visiting the abbey museum, pilgrims can also take a guided tour of the monastery which includes seeing the cell in which the saint resided for many years, as well as places where she received a number of mystical graces and visions. One of the highlights for visitors is seeing the “Staircase of the Apparition.” According to the convent's tradition, this staircase was the scene of the apparition of the Child Jesus to St. Teresa. From an adjacent window, a nun saw and heard a beautiful child ask the holy Mother Teresa: “What is your name?” The saint replied: “Teresa of Jesus. And you, little Child, what is your name?” The Child's answer was: “Jesus of Teresa.”
Another favorite place to visit for pilgrims is the Convento de Santa Teresa, a 17th-century convent and church built on the site where St. Teresa was born. Today, it is staffed by the Carmelite Fathers and features a museum with a number of relics from the lives of St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross.
While in Avila, some pilgrims choose to visit the cathedral. Although the sanctuary has no direct link to St. Teresa, it has played a large part in the lives of local Catholics. A quick stop here can provide the visitor with an inside look at some of Spain's finest examples of religious architecture and artwork.
Medieval Avila was encircled by its famous walls. Today, there are actually “two parts” to the city. Buildings and structures are either referred to as lying “within the walls of Avila,” or “outside the walls.” As regards the pilgrimage sites, the Monastery of the Incarnation lies outside the city walls, while the cathedral and convent of St. Teresa lie within them.
Avila is located just about in the center of Spain, and is easily accessible by car, train, and bus. In traveling there from Madrid, head northwest on A6, then, at the junction of N110, turn left and continue heading west to Avila. By rail, there are frequent daily departures to Avila from Madrid and other major Spanish cities. There is also regular bus service from Madrid to Avila.
For more information on making a pilgrimage to Avila, contact one of the many Catholic travel organizations or contact the Avila Tourist Office at: Avila Oficina de Turismo, Plaza de la Catedral, 4, 05001 Avila, Spain, tel 011-34-920-21-13-87, fax 011-34-920-25-37-17.
Kevin Wright, author of Catholic Shrines of Western Europe, writes from Bellevue, Washington.
----- EXCERPT: The Spanish city of St. Teresa of Jesus invites pilgrims to step back into medieval times ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kevin Wright ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: One True Thing's False Message DATE: 10/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: October 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:The culture of death is slowly becoming mainstream. An example is the quiet embrace of pro-suicide, pro-euthanasia attitudes in mass entertainment. Only a few movies or television shows choose this kind of material for their primary subject matter. More insidious are those productions whose dramatic focus is on other issues, but sneak in pro-death propaganda through the back door.
A case in point is One True Thing. Based on the best-selling novel by former New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen, One True Thing devotes most of its screen time to the twists and turns of a mother-daughter relationship. But the movie begins with the mother's death from a morphine overdose, and most of the story is told in flashbacks as the daughter is interrogated by the local district attorney.
Director Carl Franklin (Devil in a Blue Dress) and screenwriter Karen Croner (Cold Sassy Tree) tease the audience throughout the film about how the older woman died: Was it a mercy killing executed by either her husband or daughter? Or did she take her own life? The movie implies that all of these means of dying are morally acceptable, but none of the relevant issues are explored in any depth. Instead, the situation is used as a whodunit device to spice up an otherwise straightforward and slightly turgid melodrama.
The action is set in 1987 and 1988. Ellen Culden (Renee Zellweger) has had her attitudes about career and family formed by contemporary feminism. A Harvard graduate in her late 20s, she's a staff writer with a high-profile New York magazine. She defines herself by her professional success, and her personal relationships take second place to her ambition. Although she has a boyfriend she sees occasionally, it doesn't look like she'll be getting married anytime soon.
Her mother, Kate (Meryl Streep), is the stereotypical pre-feminist housewife. Her primary commitment is to her husband and children. She gets intense satisfaction out of making a home for her family. She's a good cook and a supportive wife and mother who's also active in local volunteer charity work.
Ellen, like many of her generation, has great contempt for her mother. “The one thing I never wanted to do was live my mother's life,” she proclaims. Yet Kate loves her daughter anyway and is proud of her professional accomplishments.
Ellen's father, George (William Hurt), is a professor of English at a campus in a small town about a day's train ride from New York. When Ellen returns home for his birthday, she learns Kate has cancer. Ellen's father asks her to move back to take care of her mother. Reluctantly, she agrees.
The filmmakers and novelist Quindlen analyze their subject from a 1990s feminist perspective. Professional women of Ellen's generation were instructed at elite universities like Harvard that they “could have it all,” meaning both a successful career and an emotionally rewarding family life. In recent years, some feminists have come to realize that this is unlikely, if not impossible, and the various trade-offs have been examined.
Ellen and Kate symbolize versions of the two different lifestyle choices available to women from the feminist point of view. As such, One True Thinghas an ideological purpose. It wants to help its female viewers see the strengths and weaknesses of both positions. For this reason, a full-time wife and mother like Kate is given more respect by the filmmakers than she would have been accorded 20 years ago. But even so, the movie can't resist indulging in a favorite feminist sport — male-bashing.
All the men in the film are weak and emotionally clueless. Both Ellen and Kate are depicted as strong individuals in different ways, and as Ellen becomes more accepting of her mother's lifestyle, her power as a woman is increased.
Ellen's father, from whom she got her writing talent and ambition, is self-centered, out of touch with his feelings, and a philanderer. Ellen's brother, Brian (Tom Everett Scott), flunks out of Harvard where she excelled, and he doesn't even have the courage to tell his parents of his failure. When compared to the women in the family, the Culden men are both losers.
But the movie's most harmful message is its suggestion that the willingness to commit suicide, or to assist a loved one in the act, is proof of psychological strength and maturity. Even though this point of view seems at times artificially grafted on to the mother-daughter melodrama, it overpowers the rest of the story, leaving one to speculate whether feminism and pro-death ideology aren't somehow inextricably intertwined.
Arts and Culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Washington.
One True Thing is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America.
----- EXCERPT: Mother-daughter melodrama presents assisted suicide as a noble choice ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: An Old Man's Second Chance at Life DATE: 10/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: October 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:Each of us is going to die. As we get older, if we're wise, we face up to the fact and use it as an opportunity to examine our life and its meaning. For some, this becomes a time for spiritual growth. For others, there's only fear and denial.
Wild Strawberries, originally released in 1957, takes us inside the consciousness of Professor Isak Borg (Victor Sjostrom), a 78-year-old physician who's about to receive an honorary degree for his work. A series of dreams and chance encounters forces him to wrestle with his own mortality. His shortcomings are cruelly laid before him, and he begins to come to terms with the dark side of his personality.
As the movie opens, Borg is a hard-headed rationalist who has devoted himself to science and, in his own words, “withdrawn from all social intercourse.” His wife died 30 years ago, and his only son, Evald (Gunnar Bjornstrand), also a physician, hates him.
The night before the degree ceremony, he dreams he's on a deserted city street where the clocks have no hands. In an imaginative, disturbing sequence, Swedish director Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal) shows the professor watch a horse-drawn hearse lose one of its wheels and a coffin fall out. The corpse inside is Borg himself.
These images upset the professor and, on a whim, he changes his plans and decides to take a car to the ceremony instead of flying. His daughter-inlaw, Marianne (Ignored Thulin), who doesn't much like him, agrees to go along and share the driving.
The journey becomes a spiritual odyssey which triggers memories buried deep in Borg's soul. He and Marianne first stop at the lakeside villa where he spent his summers as a child. There he has a reverie in which he sees his first fiancée, Sarah (Bibi Andersson), flirt with his ne'er-do-well brother in a wild strawberry patch. He hears himself described as emotionally arid and straight arrow. Sarah later dumps him to marry his earthier sibling — a rejection which drives the young doctor deeper into himself.
Back in the present, Borg and his daughter-in-law pick up a trio of hitchhikers, a young woman (Bibi Andersson) and her two suitors. By chance, she has the same name as his first fiancée and looks exactly like her. This makes Borg and the audience look for parallels between her life and his. One of the boyfriends, Victor, wants to be a physician; the other, Anders, is studying to be Protestant minister, and as the two fight over her, Borg discerns reflections of his own repressed inner conflicts.
“How can anyone be a parson today,” Victor wonders. His atheistic views are an exaggeration of what Borg's have become. As Anders defends his calling, we can see his arguments represent the professor's religious side which he has allowed to wither away in his pursuit of science.
Their car passes a couple whose vehicle has been overturned in an accident. Borg offers them a lift. This husband and wife so despise each other that they can't restrain from quarreling in front of others. Their resentment and pain remind the professor of his own loveless marriage.
But there are also some good things in Borg's past which he has forgotten. They drive through the rural area where he had his first practice. A local gas-station owner remembers Borg's kindness and generosity to his patients and refuses to let him pay. The professor wonders if he should have remained a country doctor.
Borg also pays a quick visit to his 95-year-old mother. Marianne remarks on her cold and controlling behavior, and he sees with new clarity the psychological damage she inflicted on him.
The professor nods off near the end of the drive and experiences a set of humiliating dreams in which he appears to be on trial. He's told by his accuser that “a doctor's first duty is to ask for forgiveness.” As Borg has always been too proud to do that, he's given a punishment — “loneliness.”
In the waking world, the professor does not have a religious conversion as the result of his interior adventures. But he is willing to contemplate spiritual matters for the first time since childhood. He also comes to understand the Christian teaching that if you forgive others, you yourself may be forgiven.
Wild Strawberries dramatizes the hollowness of a life that denies itself love. In so doing, Borg has been guilty primarily of sins of omission which can be as harmful as any other kind. But the movie shows it's never to late to start over if a person is honest in his repentance. The truly sweet things of life are always there to be savored if one's heart is open and pure.
Arts and Culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Washington, D.C.
In two weeks: Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life.
----- EXCERPT: In Wild Strawberries, Ingmar Bergman shows it's never too late to start over again ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Educators Re-Emphasize Catholic Contribution to Western Civilization DATE: 10/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: October 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:Agroup of Catholic educators and academics has united to promote a new appreciation for Catholic content and social teaching in school textbooks and related teaching materials.
The Catholic Educators’ Resource Center (CERC), established in 1996 and based in Mission, British Columbia, includes prominent representation from a number of U.S. and Canadian Catholic academics and educators. Originally known as the Catholic Social Studies Project, the center is hoping to counterbalance a prevailing secularism which many perceive in the teaching materials used in most North American schools, and to improve the general perception of Catholic education throughout the continent.
CERC officials are concerned that, without a return to the “unity of truth” concept in traditional Catholic education, news of salvation and the Gospel message will increasingly meet with popular indifference. According to CERC executive officer J. Fraser Field, the inspiration for the establishment of the center was a growing recognition that the Catholic contribution to the teaching of history and Christian culture in general has become woefully inadequate.
Much of this shortcoming has been ascribed to an increasing secularism in public education curricula. Many of the textbooks and teaching materials currently used in North American elementary and high schools downplay or ignore altogether the Catholic contribution to Western civilization. Unfortunately, Field said, many of these secularized teaching materials have found their way into Catholic schools.
A professional educator in British Columbia, Field said CERC is aimed at helping teachers fill in the gaps in their own education, especially with regard to teaching the Catholic-Christian contribution to the social sciences. Many teachers employed in North American elementary and high schools are products of state universities where there is little emphasis on Catholic values and sensitivities, he said.
Field noted a study by the National Institute of Education in the United States which suggested that Christianity's impact on the study of history and civilization has steadily declined in recent decades. The most glaring example, he suggested, is seen in the fact that the word “Christian” rarely appears in modern school texts and related teaching material.
Many of the textbooks and teaching materials currently used in North American elementary and high schools downplay or ignore altogether the Catholic contribution to Western civilization.
Field noted that many Protestant faith groups have made efforts to produce their own teaching materials, but that Catholic educators have been slow in following suit.
CERC is now working to produce Catholic-centered educational resources for the elementary and high school levels, especially in social studies and history. In addition, CERC has been working closely with the Society of Catholic Social Scientists to identify areas of weakness in teaching materials. The group is now gathering lesson plans and teaching units which more adequately reflect the Catholic perspective to liberal arts education.
CERC will take advantage of the Internet not only in the gathering of materials, but also in the dissemination of such materials to interested parties.
“The Catholic Educators’ Resource Center provides an Internet library of journal articles, essays, book excerpts, and other texts chosen for their objective, concise and clear presentation of Catholic teachings, history and culture, particularly in those areas in which the Church's role is unknown or misunderstood,” Field said. “These texts have been selected to assist teachers in Catholic schools [and] home-schooling parents, as well as other interested educators, to supplement and refine their current texts and curricula, as well as provide them with scholarly yet accessible resources for themselves and their students.”
Field said CERC is eager to expand and refine its resource center through contributions and input from interested parties. The center now provides between 60 and 70 teaching-related articles, but it hopes to expand on this number as time, resources, and technology permit.
“We would like people to help us by sending in their favorite stories about the early days of Catholicism in their respective state or province,” Field said. “We want to post a good number of such stories from each region, so that Catholic students can come to know the proud history of the Catholic missionary effort in both the United States and Canada. While students usually know the main stories of the major saints, the events surrounding the establishment of the Church in their own area, inspiring stories of faith and self-sacrifice of a more local interest should also be part of the Catholic student's foundation.”
Field said the resource center is eager to increase the material it makes available to educators, home-schooling parents, and other interested parties. “While before we were concentrating on history and social sciences, our categories now include art and literature, politics and government, ethics and religion, and science,” he said.
The Catholic Educators’ Resource Center has received operating grants from the New York-based Homewood Foundation and from the Knights of Columbus. The organization is seeking additional benefactors.
CERC officials are guided by a number of major principles, including contacting individuals and organizations to establish existing suitable resources, maintaining a library of material which gives proper treatment to the Catholic-Christian contribution to social studies and history, and developing and distributing such a teaching plan to Christian educators.
In addition, CERC is inspired by Vatican II's Declaration on Christian Education, which defines a Catholic school as one “striving to relate all human culture eventually to the news of salvation, so that the life of faith will illuminate the knowledge which students gradually gain of the world, of life, and of humankind.”
While CERC has the support of a number of Canadian clerics and academics, including Archbishop Adam Exner of the Vancouver, British Columbia archdiocese, and Professor Thomas Langan, president of the Catholic Civil Rights League (Canada), Field said it would be misleading to suggest that the organization is a predominantly Canadian initiative. Don D'Elia, professor of history at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is a member of the CERC advisory board. He said the creation of CERC is well timed to take advantage of the Internet and its ready access to information and the exchange of material. “I see it as putting communications technology at the service of the Holy Spirit,” he said.
D'Elia said any effort to divert education from its current secular course should be welcomed by anyone concerned about the future of Catholic-Christian education.
“If our culture is at variance with the truth of our faith, then we can become a divided or nihilistic people,” D' Elia told The Register. He suggested that, as products of state and public universities, many of today's teachers have only partial or distorted views of history and the social sciences. As a result, it can be difficult for even well-meaning teachers to impart to their students a proper understanding of the Catholic contribution. “Unfortunately we are getting a number of teachers who have been grounded in a pseudo-reality,” he said. “What we need is a way of bringing a greater Catholic perspective to our schools and teaching methods.”
Similarly, Dominic Aquila, chairman of the Department of History, Humanities, and Catholic Culture at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, believes the creation of CERC can help offset the pervasive secularism in schools and textbooks.
Aquila, who also sits on the CERC advisory board, suggested that a certain intellectual laziness has contributed to the diminished role for Catholic education among today's academic elites. “I wouldn't suggest that there is a conspiracy to suppress the Catholic contribution in the teaching of history and the social sciences,” Aquila said. “It is probably more the result of indifference than anything else.”
Nonetheless, Aquila agreed that the marginalization of authentic Catholic-Christian teaching in public schools and institutions poses problems for a culture in search of meaning and significance. He expressed hope that CERC and related efforts will help students, teachers and parents re-emphasize the Church's role in relating all human culture to the news of salvation.
CERC can be found on the Internet at www.catholiceducation.org. Submissions can also be forwarded by e-mail at info@catholicinfo.org
Mike Mastromatteo writes from Toronto.
----- EXCERPT: Group seeks to counter secular materials in public - and Catholic - schools ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mike Mastromatteo ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: New D.C.-Area Black Group Vows to Fight for Life DATE: 10/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: October 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:Through adoption, education, and promotion of strong family life, black Catholics can defeat abortion, speakers said at a Sept. 19 pro-life conference in Washington, D.C., under the patronage of Venerable Pierre Toussaint.
“The value of human life is not determined by the circumstances of conception,” said Dr. Mildred Jefferson, past president of the National Right to Life Committee. Although a Methodist, Jefferson is worlds apart from her coreligionist Hillary Rodham Clinton on abortion. “All life does have value, even that which is conceived as the result of rape or incest,” Jefferson told the audience.
Human Life International and St. Joseph Catholic Church of Alexandria, Va., co-sponsored the first Pierre Toussaint Pro-Life Conference at St. Luke Catholic Church. About 50 people attended the daylong event, which took place the day after the U.S. Senate failed to override President Clinton's veto of the ban on partial-birth abortion.
Toussaint was a 19th-century Haitian slave who came with his masters to New York and later lived as a freeman. The Catholic Church has declared him venerable, and Toussaint could become the first canonized black American. “He was called not to be a successful hero in the eyes of the world, but to be a saint,” said Auxiliary Bishop Leonard Olivier of the Archdiocese of Washington, in his opening remarks for the symposium.
Rather than feel dejected by the political defeat the day before, the symposium's participants appeared enthusiastic, giving standing ovations to three speakers.
At times, those speakers addressed pro-life issues bluntly. “A lot of black people see abortion as a white people's issue,” master of ceremonies Al Anderson told the audience. In the pro-life movement, he added, the presence of former segregationists and others whom black people have regarded as political enemies makes some African-Americans reluctant to join the cause.
‘God did not take us out of slavery … out of Jim Crow (laws) … to have us abort our unborn babies … ‘We look at the medical community and think they're gods … I'm glad that God gave me a mind, so I can research what I believe in.’
But the abortion industry has targeted blacks and other minorities, Bishop Olivier declared. Approximately 70% of abortion clinics are located in minority neighborhoods, the prelate said. Unborn minority children are aborted at more than twice the rate of white children, according to 1988 figures compiled by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood.
Anderson mentioned speaking with a young black man in his parish who told him, “I don't have a problem with pro-life, but I have a problem with some pro-lifers.” Anderson, who is chairman of St. Joseph's pro-life committee, said he responded: “I have a problem with some individual Catholics, but that doesn't mean I'm going to leave the Catholic Church.”
Akua Furlow, executive director of Life Education and Resource Network of Houston, which bills itself as the largest black evangelical Christian pro-life organization in the country, said, “God did not take us out of slavery … out of Jim Crow (laws) … to have us abort our unborn babies.”
Furlow, who has seven children, told the audience that Planned Parenthood Federation of America started over 80 years ago with the primary intent of limiting the births of minorities, the poor, and the handicapped. She urged audience members to scrutinize civil rights leaders, the medical community, and politicians to find out their convictions on abortion.
“We look at the medical community and think they're gods,” she confided. And many black people almost automatically vote for black candidates, without paying close attention to their stances on issues, she added. “I'm glad that God gave me a mind, so I can research what I believe in.”
She denounced Jesse Jackson for repudiating his pro-life convictions to gain acceptance as a Democratic presidential candidate, and she urged pro-life blacks to reject the beliefs of Faye Wattleton, former head of Planned Parenthood, and Joycelyn Elders, Clinton's first surgeon general, and other black leaders who promote abortion rights.
“There are those who would exploit the difficult circumstances” of an unplanned pregnancy, said Jefferson, who has been involved in the pro-life movement for more than 25 years and is president of Massachusetts-based Right to Life Crusade Inc. “These are elitists because throughout history, there have been people who felt they knew how the lower classes should live,” said Jefferson, a graduate of Harvard Medical School. Unlike Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader who has also identified the racist intent in Planned Parenthood's eugenics strategy, the speakers mentioned the importance of reconciliation and forgiveness. “In a way, you should be angry … but don't direct your anger towards your white brothers and sisters,” Anderson told the symposium audience.
Many black families, when confronted with an unplanned pregnancy, say “Let's resolve it,” through abortion, said Josephite Father Armand Manuel, associate pastor of St. Luke's. Conversely, when he grew up in New Orleans, Manuel recalled that “the whole family would take care of a child” born out of wedlock, rather than seeking to abort him.
Dr. Reginald Grier, a professor at William Patterson University in Patterson, N.J. recounted how he and his wife adopted two biracial children from Korea, where he had served in the military. In his speech, he addressed the concerns that some people have about adoption, such as the health of the children and the possibility that birth parents could come back years later to try to reclaim them.
Furlow recounted how she and a biological sibling were adopted by a biracial woman who herself was conceived as the result of a rape.
While sidewalk counseling with other members of the Knights of Columbus outside an abortion clinic, Grier was recently asked by a 16-year-old girl planning to have an abortion, “Who will care for my child?” He told her about Catholic Charities adoption program and she turned around and walked away from the abortion facility, he said.
Life Education Network's Furlow endorsed transracial adoption, which occurs when parents of one race adopt a child of another race. “Children don't care about the race of adoptive parents when they're in foster care,” she declared. Furlow recounted how she and a biological sibling were adopted by a biracial woman who herself was conceived as the result of a rape. If Furlow's mother were conceived now, she said, there is a good chance she would have been aborted.
The Black Coalition for Life, the newly formed Washington area organization launched at the symposium, will hold monthly meetings at a Josephite seminary in the city. The Josephites, who have dedicated their ministry to working with African-Americans, staff both St. Joseph and St. Luke churches.
William Murray writes from Kensington, Maryland.
----- EXCERPT: Abortion is not ‘a white people's issue,’ says one leader ----- EXTENDED BODY: William Murray ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: The Gospel Of Life DATE: 10/04/1998 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: October 4-10, 1998 ----- BODY:The Church's position on the death penalty is complex but clear. In Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II addresses capital punishment in the light of the contemporary situation:
On this matter [of the death penalty] there is a growing tendency, both in the Church and in civil society, to demand that it be applied in a very limited way or even that it be abolished completely. The problem must be viewed in the context of a system of penal justice ever more in line with human dignity and thus, in the end, with God's plan for man and society.
The primary purpose of the punishment which society inflicts is, [as St. Thomas writes,] “to redress the disorder caused by the offense.” Public authority must redress the violation of personal and social rights by imposing on the offender an adequate punishment for the crime, as a condition for the offender to regain the exercise of his or her freedom. In this way authority also fulfills the purpose of defending public order and ensuring people's safety, while at the same time offering the offender an incentive and help to change his or her behavior and be rehabilitated.
It is clear that for these purposes to be achieved, the nature and extent of the punishment must be carefully evaluated and decided upon, and ought not go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. Today, however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.
In any event, the principle set forth in the new Catechism of the Catholic Church remains valid: “If bloodless means are sufficient to defend human lives against an aggressor and to protect public order and the safety of persons, public authority must limit itself to such means, because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.” (56: 1–3)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life --------