WASHINGTON — He campaigned on a pro-life platform, and after eight years of a stridently pro-abortion administration, and a near-miss on another just like it, many pro-lifers were willing to give him a chance.
But at the end of his first year as president, President Bush is getting mixed reviews from pro-life advocates gathering in Washington, D.C., for the Jan. 22 March for Life.
They acknowledge that his presidency has been a sharp improvement from Bill Clinton on life issues, but some are disappointed with his compromise on stem-cell research even as others applaud the Solomonic way he worked out that tough issue.
And while Bush won praise for reversing a number of Clinton administration policies, he drew fire for failing to question the FDA's approval of the abortion drug RU-486.
The war on terrorism has absorbed Bush and the entire country for the past four months, but plenty of pro-life issues are looming in 2002 — including a decision on whether to continue funding the United Nations Population Fund and possible appointments to the Supreme Court of the United States, which could tip the balance against Roe v. Wade.
“We're very proud of his leadership,” said Darla St. Martin of the National Right to Life Committee. “His administration has been a tremendous contrast with the Clinton Administration. If we had Clinton in office this past year, it would have been terrible.”
At press time, the White House had not commented to the Register on its pro-life record. But it may hearten pro-life advocates who question some of Bush's decisions to note that groups such as the National Abortion Rights Action League, the National Abortion of Women and the American Civil Liberties Union are outraged at the direction he has taken.
For example, while Judie Brown, president of American Life League, was distressed that John Ashcroft, during his confirmation hearing last January, said that he accepted Roe v. Wade as “the settled law of the land,” Planned Parenthood president Gloria Feldt called Ashcroft's confirmation as attorney general a “travesty for the civil and reproductive rights of every American.”
Ashcroft said he believed Roe was wrongly decided.
Bush's inauguration Jan. 20, 2001, was followed swiftly by his first executive order as president, announced two days later during the 2001 March for Life. Reversing one of Clinton's first acts in office eight years earlier, Bush restored the Mexico City Policy, which forbids U.S. funding of organizations that perform abortions or promote abortion in foreign countries as a method of family planning.
Still, Brown isn't ready to credit Bush simply for his contrast with Clinton.
“We have to look at the record of the man who claimed to be pro-life,” she said. “We knew Clinton was pro-abortion. I still don't know where Bush stands.”
Brown pointed out that Bush didn't quite restore the Mexico City policy. His version contains exceptions allowing abortion to save the life of the mother or in cases of rape or incest. And she was disappointed that Bush failed to reverse other pro-abortion executive orders Clinton had signed in his early days, including orders to allow fetal tissue research and to ease restrictions on access to abortion in U.S. military hospitals overseas.
But St. Martin argued that Bush's pro-life policies have been limited primarily because pro-abortion Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who calls himself a Catholic, is blocking many of them.
The political situation is also cited as a key reason why Bush could not go further in his key Aug. 9 announcement on funding of embryonic stem cells, perhaps the life issue that drew the most attention in his first year.
Few observers dispute that Bush lacked the political support to declare an outright ban of federal funding of the experiments, which use tissue derived from living human embryos who were killed to derive their stem cells. That's because a number of senators who ordinarily vote pro-life “wanted to allow experimentation on frozen living embryos,” St. Martin said. “It would have been impossible to uphold in the Senate the decision that some were asking for.”
St. Martin said that politics demands compromise. “We agree with the ideal goal, if you could do it. But there are situations where, if you try to demand your ideal, you lose everything,” St. Martin said.
And, she added, Bush's approach, allowing funding for experiments with the 60 or so stem-cell lines already established but banning any future destruction of embryos for their stem cells, helped “bring back a number of senators who were pro-embryonic stem-cell research.”
However, the decision sharply divided pro-life advocates and was characterized as “morally unacceptable” by Bishop Joseph A. Fiorenza of Galveston-Houston, then the president of the U.S. bishops.
Kenneth L. Connor, president of the Family Research Council, believes that the compromise meant Bush “gave up the moral high ground, which may hurt him in holding the line against cloning.”
Connor said the Family Research Council will encourage Bush to take the lead in getting a partial-birth abortion ban through Congress. Such a ban was passed by the House in 2000, but stalled in the face of Clinton's promised veto. In his campaign, Bush said he would sign a partial-birth abortion ban.
Connor also expressed hope that Bush will stick to a campaign pledge to appoint strict constructionist judges — those who interpret the Constitution strictly rather than reinterpreting it broadly, as the Supreme Court did in Roe v. Wade by extending the right to privacy to cover abortion. “If he's faithful, the balance of the Supreme Court will be tipped, and it will no longer be considered a right for a mother to kill her child,” Connor predicted.
But for Brown and others, the fact that some of Bush's picks for top posts have mixed records on abortion does not instill confidence. That's especially true if he has to make a Supreme Court appointment this year, with a Democratic Senate to confirm him. Brown notes that the president's top strategist, Karl Rove, and other Bush advisors “have made it clear that he won't use a litmus test on abortion for any court nominees.”
Connor, who understands that court appointments will have a major influence on the country's direction on abortion, has advice for the president. Bush has proven his mettle in the war on terrorism, Connor notes, earning near-record approval ratings in the process. Now, “it's imperative he show the same guts and grits in leading in
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Hollywood Priest's Delivers Dollars Dollars From the Stars to Skid Row DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:LOS ANGELES — You'll find him here every Sunday among the tattered blankets and cardboard lean-tos.
Here, in downtown L.A., Father Maurice Chase — known to the locals as Father Dollar Bill — comes each week, rain or shine, to give out not pennies from heaven, but dollars from the stars.
For 19 years Father Chase has brought a stack of dollar bills to hand out in front of the Fred Jordan Mission to the denizens of the streets.
To raise the more than $100,000 a year he gives away, Father Chase has turned to the likes of Irene Dunne, Loretta Young, Gregory Peck and Frank Sinatra.
Bob Newhart calls the priest “truly a man of God.”
“It goes back to the phrase, ‘Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me,’” the actor and comedian told the Register. “He's really taken that to heart.” Newhart, a Catholic, has a sister who is a nun.
Two days before Christmas, more than 1,000 people lined Towne Street waiting for a dollar and a chance to talk to Father Chase. That day Father Chase brought an extra treat — ten $100 bills.
“He's the only guy who comes down here,” said Troy Johnson, a homeless man who came to L.A. from Hope, Ark., one of the lucky few who found themselves $100 wealthier. “There ain't nobody like him.”
Johnson said he has been coming down to that corner to meet Father Chase for 10 years. As he spoke, another $100 recipient shouted out: “It's going to buy us dinner and let me take my family to a movie!”
Human Touch
Why has Father Chase made this face-to-face cash disbursement his mission?
“Mother Teresa said to touch the poor,” he said. “It is one thing to give them checks or cash, but another thing to touch them. They come for the smile as much as for the dollar.”
The biggest problem the homeless face, he added, is that “they feel unloved.”
“Money is the least of it,” he said. “You can always give money, but you can't always give a hug or listen to people's problems.” He does all three things each Sunday.
After Father Chase gave out the last of the Christmas $100 bills, the crowd thinned out and local television crews left. Father went back to doing what he does every Sunday.
Many of the $1 recipients wore rosaries around their necks; one man had a Bible in a shopping cart. Many asked for a blessing. Some brought Father Chase a gift — a musical Christmas card, a pair of headphones, whatever they had, to wish him a “Merry Christmas.”
One man, Bruce, brought Father Chase a watermelon.
“Pray for me,” said Bruce. “And you pray for me,” said Father Chase.
“I do!” insisted Bruce. “Every Saturday I pray that you will be here Sunday.”
‘Go to Skid Row’
Father Chase got his start helping the homeless while working in the administration offices at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
Another priest suggested Father Chase “go down to Skid Row” to meet the poor. Father Chase took the advice to heart.
The 82-year-old priest said that what he does is “what priests should do; we should be in places where people need us.” Through the contacts he made while at Loyola and Good Shepherd Parish in Beverly Hills, Father Chase was able to fund his new work.
Some question the efficacy of what he does. Father Chase tells the story of one wealthy couple he had dinner with. “Just as she finished her second scotch,” the wife complained to him that the people he gave the money to were likely to buy drinks with it.
“What I do is much more than hand out money,” he said. As for the potential that the money might go to drinks: “How can I begrudge a poor old soul a little comfort?”
Jim Armstrong agrees that Father Chase gives out more than money. He wrote Father Chase a letter in 1998 to tell the priest that he had been a crack addict and had seen “stabbings or shootings on an almost daily basis over nothing more than drugs or money.”
Of each of his Sunday meetings with Father Chase, Armstrong wrote: “At first it meant nothing more to me than a pack of cigarettes. But after a while, I got to where I was anxiously waiting for this man who, but for a moment, brought sanity into an otherwise inhuman existence.”
Eventually Armstrong got off drugs, went back to school and got a job. “I most humbly thank God and Father Chase for coming into my life when I needed them most,” wrote Armstrong.
Father Chase cites the Catechism of the Catholic Church to explain his ministry: “God blesses those who come to the aid of the poor and rebukes those who turn away from them: ‘Give to him who begs from you, do not refuse him who would borrow from you’; ‘you received without pay, give without pay.’ It is by what they have done for the poor that Jesus Christ will recognize his chosen ones. When ‘the poor have the good news preached to them,’ it is the sign of Christ's presence.” (No. 2243).
To those who doubt that Father Chase is truly helping the people on the street, Bob Newhart explains that, “very simply, it lets the homeless know that there is still someone who cares.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Andrew Walther ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: New York Targets Pro-Life Pregnancy Centers DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:NEW YORK — The attorney general of New York State has launched an investigation of crisis pregnancy centers for allegedly engaging in misleading advertising and the unlicensed practice of medicine.
Eliot Spitzer has demanded the records of at least three centers in New York City and Long Island since Jan. 3 and may subpoena more of the estimated 160 private centers around the Empire State.
Pro-life advocates see the move as harassment aimed at forcing the centers out of business. They also accuse Spitzer of being an agent of the National Abortion Rights Action League, which has published a manual on how to close the centers down.
There are some 3,000 crisis pregnancy centers in the country.
Part of the NARAL strategy is to petition state attorneys general to investigate the centers.
“Just the threat of litigation and enmeshment in the legal system is enough to put some of these centers out of business,” said Kenneth L. Connor, president of the Family Research Center and a former board chairman of Care Net, an umbrella organization for pre-natal care centers.
Spitzer's office declined comment, and telephone messages left at the National Abortion Rights Action League's national office were not returned. A spokesman for the New York affiliate of NARAL denied knowledge of the investigation or any communication with the attorney general about it.
But in an address to a NARAL luncheon in New York City on Jan. 22, 1999, soon after he was elected, Spitzer promised to establish a reproductive rights unit in his office and said it would, among other things, investigate “false advertisements for services.” He made the pledge while decrying what he called the “extremism” of “the opponents of reproductive rights.”
NARAL New York had endorsed Spitzer for attorney general, and he is running for reelection this year.
The woman Spitzer appointed to the reproductive rights unit, Jennifer K. Brown, is involved in the pregnancy center investigation. Brown is a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Clinton administration and former president of the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women. As a fellow for the American Civil Liberties Union's Reproductive Freedom Project, Brown was responsible for litigation of cases challenging state restrictions on access to abortion services, and supporting condom availability programs in public schools.
Receiving subpoenas were the Pregnancy Resource Center on Manhattan's East Side, the Cross Road Foundation, which operates Pregnancy Resource Services on Staten Island, and the Life Center of Long Island in Deer Park. The subpoenas stated that based upon an initial investigation, Spitzer has a “good faith belief” that the centers may have violated statutes by “misrepresenting the services they provide, diagnosing pregnancy and advising persons on medical options without being licensed to do so, and/or providing deceptive and inaccurate medical information.”
The subpoenas also said that the attorney general seeks to determine whether the centers have engaged in deceptive business practices.
The Pregnancy Resource Center in Manhattan issued a brief statement saying, “We are confident that the Pregnancy Center has not violated the laws of the State of New York.”
“We're going to fight this,” vowed John Margand, a founding director of the center, who said it operates within state laws and intends to continue doing so.
Christopher Slattery, who founded Expectant Mother Care and runs five pregnancy help centers in the city, was not yet served with a subpoena when interviewed though he expected to receive one. In the meantime, he was assembling a legal team to fight Spitzer's action. The team includes the American Catholic Lawyers Association, the American Center for Law and Justice and the American Family Association's Center for Law and Policy.
“Ultimately, I think they will try to harass and intimidate us or force us into some kind of consent judgment that will impede access to this kind of help,” said Slattery. If so, though, he said that would violate the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances law, which ironically was enacted to protect abortion clinics from Operation Rescue protests. Spitzer's action would keep women out of crisis pregnancy centers by forcing the centers to make it explicit in their ads that they do not perform abortions.
In New York City and Long Island, 16 centers jointly participate in a Yellow Pages ad campaign. Many of those centers already underwent state scrutiny in the mid-1980s under former attorney general Robert Abrams, who forced the Yellow Pages to create a new category, “Abortion Alternatives.” The centers’ ads now appear with a disclaimer indicating that they do not perform abortions.
Slattery insists that the advertising is clear as to what the centers do and what they offer: free abortion alternatives, confidential counseling, ultra-sound and health and safety information.
But the language of the ads is neutral regarding abortion, and many women who respond to them are considering abortion and may think they are calling an abortion clinic. Counselors refrain from discussing abortion over the telephone and encourage callers to come in for an interview in which they can hear facts that, pro-life advocates contend, they won't hear in abortion clinics.
If the crisis pregnancy centers are forced to put “pro-life buzzwords” in their ads, Slattery fears, abortion-bound women won't respond. “We want to present ourselves as objective about abortion,” he said. “We want to give the pros and cons” on the issue. The other side never gives the cons, the risks. People absorb [the pro-life message] gradually as they come in and meet with a compassionate counselor.”
As for the allegations in the subpoena, Slattery, who until recently also ran the Pregnancy Resource Center in Manhattan, said his centers practice counseling but not medicine. “Counselors are trained not to give out medical advice,” he said.
Women are instructed how to give themselves a urine pregnancy test and can set up an appointment for a free sonogram and consultation with a licensed, board-certified physician. “They sign a form stating they understand that a self pregnancy test is not a diagnosis,” Slattery said.
Expectant Mother Care runs several medical crisis pregnancy centers in affiliation with Our Lady of Mercy Medical Center in the Bronx, and Slattery said they comply with all health department regulations.
Heartbeat International, based in Columbus, Ohio, has provided Slattery's counselors with training, but he fears that Spitzer's investigation might lead to a requirement that the centers use licensed professional counselors. Not only would that be prohibitive in cost, it would also subject those counselors to state control and require them to be morally neutral on abortion and non-directive in their counseling, he said.
Mark Crutcher, founder of Life Dynamics in Denton, Texas, said requiring licensed counselors would constitute hypocrisy on the part of a pro-abortion attorney general.
“The abortion industry puts people without training in there to counsel women,” said Crutcher, who has started a project to help educate abortion clinic workers on the illegal and unethical activities occurring in clinics. Some, he said, are counseling women very soon after being hired and ask clients little more than, “Are you sure this is something you want to do?”
NARAL New York's Robert Jaffe disputed that charge, saying clinics in New York are required to be licensed. “Abortion is an extremely safe procedure,” he said. “It is the second most common surgical procedure in the United States…There is no evidence documenting a widespread problem.”
However, citing the numerous deaths and injuries in abortion clinics, pro-life advocates say attorneys general should investigate the abortion industry, not pregnancy centers. “Abortion clinics typically get a free ride,” said the Family Research Council's Connor. “There's an incredible double standard. They're less regulated than veterinary clinics, which means your dog is safer than your minor daughter.”
Spitzer is requiring the crisis pregnancy centers to produce by Feb. 1 an exhaustive list of documents, including copies of ads and promotional literature, a description of the full range of services provided, names and credentials of staff and training materials and guidelines. That in itself would take the nonprofit centers, which are largely staffed by volunteers, scores of man-hours and interfere with their ability to help clients.
“It's a nuisance,” said Lorraine Gariboldi, director of the Life Center of Long Island. “We're very busy helping poor, pregnant women, many of them homeless.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Bloomberg Makes First Pro-Abortion Decision DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:NEW YORK — State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer was not the only New Yorker who started the New Year with an attack on the unborn. New York City's new mayor, Michael Bloomberg, will make good on a campaign promise to improve the abortion training of interns in city hospitals, Bloomberg's spokesman, Bill Cunningham, confirmed.
Bloomberg, in a campaign Blueprint for Public Health, said he would integrate medical residency training in abortion into the city's Health and Hospitals Corp. network of obstetrics and gynecology programs. The plan, which covers 11 hospitals, includes an opt-out for students who have moral objections.
But it promises to help make abortion more available, as nearly one in seven doctors nationwide is trained in a New York State hospital.
“It is sad that in a city that has just suffered the loss of thousands of lives, the mayor wants to add to the carnage,” said Lori Hougens, a spokes-woman for the New York State Right to Life Committee.
Bloomberg has said he will also require all hospitals to offer “emergency contraception,” which involves the distribution of abortifacient drugs, as a protocol of care for rape victims who are brought into emergency rooms.
— John Burger
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Hear No Evil? FCC Criticized For Lax Against Obscenity DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — Radio shock jocks and foul-mouthed rappers are cheering a Jan. 8 decision by the Federal Communications Commission to drop an indecency ruling against a Colorado radio station.
The order rescinds a $7,000 fine levied against Pueblo's KKMG-FM for playing the controversial lyrics of Eminem's commercially successful 2000 hit, “The Real Slim Shady.”
The radio station's parent company, Citadel Broadcasting Company, had appealed the decision, claiming that the lyrics had been edited acceptably for radio.
The lyrics in question referred to sexual acts and lewd conduct. The lyrics are transcribed in the FCC's enforcement order, available on the agency's Web site.
“The passages in question, in context, refer to sexual activity. Thus the material warranted scrutiny,” wrote David Solomon, the agency's chief of enforcement.
Yet, Solomon concluded, “Based on our review of Citadel's response, however, we concluded that the material broadcast was not patently offensive, and thus not actionably indecent.”
The FCC refused to answer questions from the Register, referring all inquiries to the report itself.
The FCC's ruling comes on the heels of a report released Jan. 3 by Martha Kleder, a former radio broadcaster who works with Washington, D.C.-based Concerned Women for America. Kleder said that given the FCC's repeated failure to take action against on-air indecency, the reversal of the Eminem ruling was predictable.
“Look at the Colorado radio station that got in trouble. Every other rap station in the nation played that song. They would say, ‘Why should you single us out?” Kleder said.
She said such spotty enforcement is not acceptable.
“They have to have regular enforcement, fair and across the board,” she said. “It would put the scare in [radio stations].”
Kleder said that the FCC has a pattern of lax enforcement. In her report, she listed two of the most grievous lapses in enforcement.
Lex, Terry and Mrs. Woods
The “most shocking” occurred in connection with a February 2001 complaint from Angela Woods, a young mother from Hueytown, Ala.
She had been listening to the “Lex and Terry Show,” a program distributed widely across the south, but new to her area.
The program hosts used vulgar and obscene terms to describe female genitalia.
“Woods immediately called the station to complain about the language and was ridiculed on the air by the hosts with still more vulgar and obscene language,” wrote Kleder.
“When Woods arrived at work that morning her co-workers, who had been listening to the same station, reported that the hosts had said they ‘hope she has a wreck and gets killed on the way to work.’”
Yet the FCC dismissed her case, Kleder said, with the federal agency stating that while the hosts’ comments were “certainly offensive, they are not indecent because they are not patently offensive as measured by contemporary standards for the broadcast medium.”
Another case in which the FCC refused to issue a fine involved “Mancow's Morning Madhouse” program on Feb. 23, 2000.
David Smith, of Chicago, Ill., filed three complaints about the show and the FCC took action on two of the incidents.
But Kleder said, “What the FCC didn't take action on is eye-opening.”
According to the complaint, “between 7:50 and 8 in the morning, Mancow and his staff talked euphemistically and directly” about sexual contact between adults and children, claiming that he himself has engaged in such contact.
Gloria Tristani, a Democratic FCC appointee, issued a dissent on both the Woods and Smith rulings, stating both incidents must be ruled indecent.
“Mrs. Woods made a prima facie case for indecency sufficient to survive dismissal,” Tristani said. “Second, a broadcaster owes a duty to handle indecency complaints from citizens without engaging in over-the-air verbal attacks that include expressing a desire for the complainant to wreck her car and die.”
Bill Johnson, president of the Michigan-based American Decency Association, said lax decisions are all too common.
“I really believe that the FCC is, sadly, toothless,” he said.
Johnson said that his organization filed nine different complaints of indecency on shock jock Howard Stern's radio program.
“We've supplied them not only with the actual audio tapes, but the written transcripts as well,” he said. “We never even received a response from the FCC.”
Not content to rely on the FCC, Johnson's group has organized a protest of stations that carry Stern's program as well as advertisers who sponsor the show.
Since the boycott began, CBS has dropped its Saturday night television broadcast of Stern and over 20 radio markets no longer carry his morning radio show.
“We've been busy on several fronts because of our frustration with the FCC,” he said.
Kleder applauds such boycotts and said that her family only watches two television programs: “JAG” and “Jeopardy.”
Indecent programming comes from lax FCC enforcement, she said. The lax enforcement, which she says is embodied by FCC chairman Michael Powell, a Republican, derives from a “let the market decide” philosophy, Kleder maintained.
“Right off the bat, Powell let go Stern's outstanding fines. That was one of the first things he did as chairman” after being appointed in January 2001, said Kleder. “It's the philosophy that has ruled the FCC for over a decade.”
But hope is on the horizon, she said.
Kleder noted that there's a vacancy of the five-member FCC commission. The four members currently on the board, she said, are split down the middle between “let the market decide” and enforcing standards for decency.
“One more vote for decency enforcement and maybe we can see light,” she said.
Johnson warned, however, that the vacancy, which by law must be filled by a Democrat, could be held up by the Bush administration in response to the Democratic Senate's continued stalling on judicial nominations recommended by the president.
Either way, both Kleder and Johnson recommend that concerned citizens stop watching indecent material and contact the White House about their concerns.
“Michael Powell is a bureaucrat. He's taken an oath to enforce our laws — he doesn't have the option to pick and choose on enforcing the U.S. [indecency] code,” said Kleder. “We wouldn't stand for that reasoning from a prison warden.”
Joshua Mercer writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Getting the Word Out DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:He is known to about 1,000 e-mail contacts, who receive his advisories on pro-life initiatives and key votes.
Father Peter West is a priest associate of Priests for Life, the pro-life organization that was founded in 1991, the year he was ordained. He spoke recently with Register staff writer John Burger.
How did you become involved in the pro-life movement?
It was in 1986. I had been away from the practice of the faith for a while. As I grew more intensely in the faith, especially after making a consecration of myself to Jesus through Mary, I was looking at pictures in the back of a church of aborted babies that had been dumped in the trash. I also read statistics about how widespread abortion is. It made me want to do something about the problem.
And through this, I discerned my call to priesthood.
Was it simply the pro-life concerns you had that led you to become a priest?
I felt that the root of the abortion problem is a spiritual problem and can be best addressed by priests, helping people to see that every human being is made in the image and likeness of God, healing people through the sacrament of Penance, teaching them as only a priest can do, through homilies, catechesis, providing spiritual leadership and example.
What do you do as a priest associate of Priests for Life?
I travel throughout the country, preaching, sometimes giving seminars, representing Priests for Life at conferences, being involved in street activism in terms of maybe demonstrating or praying in front of abortion clinics and leading prayer vigils. Half of the time, I'm in the office, taking e-mails from all over country, letters, phone calls, dealing with issues of post-abortion healing, crisis pregnancies and doctrinal questions.
Judging by some of the e-mails you have sent out, you might be seen as being too political for a priest.
If I send out a political email, I don't represent myself as part of Priests for Life. I just represent it as my own opinion.
When Pope John Paul II asked priests to stay out of politics, he does-n't want them running for any political office or being directly involved in a campaign. But as a priest, I still am an American citizen. I have ideas and opinions that I think I have a right to express. As long as I'm not representing my political opinions as being the official stands of Priests for Life or the Roman Catholic Church. The Pope does say that the Church has a right to pronounce on political matters because they're intimately connected with moral questions.
And a priest can't be afraid to address moral questions simply because they have political implications. But when I preach for Priests for Life, I'm laying out general principals by which people should form their consciences and not endorsing candidates or political parties.
How can the Church and the pro-life movement reach those who are far away from believing in the sanctity of human life?
There are various ways we reach out and find common ground.
For example, we say that women don't have abortions because of freedom of choice but because they feel there is no other choice. So we can work together with people who believe in the right to abortion to provide alternatives so women really do feel they have a choice and don't feel pressured.
We can talk about the responsibility of a man to care for the unborn child and the woman and say that abortion is not a simple solution. We can promote programs of post-abortion healing and reconciliation and help people realize that abortion is harmful to the health of the woman.
For example, Dr. Joel Brind points out the relationship between abortion and breast cancer. Many of the early feminists opposed abortion because they believed it is exploitation of women. So the pro-life movement has to be seen as providing real alternatives, reaching out to help women find healing and peace and showing that abortion really harms not helps.
Why don't we hear much about abortion and contraception in church?
Priests often are afraid of upsetting people. Our approach, though, is this: people involved in post-abortion healing, experts in the field, say that in order for healing to begin, the person has to break through their denial.
If the subject of abortion is never mentioned, women will not have an opportunity to break down the wall of denial.
While we must address the issue in a sensitive manner, the issue needs to be dealt with. Whenever a Priests for Life priest is giving a homily, we are instructed to always talk about post-abortion healing and reconciliation. We address forgiveness, alternatives and combating the false logic that regards abortion as a reasonable choice.
Priests for Life runs seminars for priests dealing with this issue. We also provide materials and a clergy resource packet. We have a booklet, “Preaching on Abortion,” with homily ideas; the approaches we need to take and how the defense of life is at heart of the priesthood; the consistent ethic of life and how often we should talk about the issue; seasonal and doctrinal starting points, and bulletin inserts. We have prayer booklets and “Addressing Abortion with Confidence,” which address some issues priests raise.
We have four fulltime priest associates, and all speak in a different parish almost every weekend. We also have two part-time associates.
Father Frank Pavone, the national director, was recently assigned to a parish in the Archdiocese of New York. What is going to happen to Priests for Life?
It will continue and it looks as if he will be able to do some work with Priests for Life.
He remains committed to pro-life work. While he is not national director, he will continue working with Priests for Life. He will spend as much time as he can, while still being faithful to his commitment to the parish.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Father Peter West ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:Planned Parenthood Abortions Skyrocket
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Jan. 8 — Abortions increased more than 1,000% in Bucks County, Pa., in the year 2000, after a Planned Parenthood facility there began performing the procedure, the news service reported.
The facility is in Warminster Township. While the number of abortions in the county increased from 60 to 685, the number of county residents having abortions rose only 26%, from 1,138 to 1,438, according to the state's Department of Health Statistics.
But the increase was in dramatic contrast with the rest of Pennsylvania, which experienced only a 3.3% increase in the number of reported abortions over the previous year. There were 35,630 abortions, which is the third lowest annual number recorded.
Forty-five percent of the abortions were done on women who have had one or more previous abortions, the same percentage as in 1999. That figure disturbed Francis Viglietta of the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, who called the repeat abortions “birth control, plain and simple,” and not the “‘hard cases’ that we hear about.”
Viglietta said Pennsylvania should promote healthy alternatives to abortion, including a state program that promotes adoption.
Nuns Support Jewish Use of Former Convent
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Jan. 8 — The provincial superior of the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth has weighed in on a controversy pitting a congregation of Reform Jews against a tony neighborhood of Abington Township, north of Philadelphia, the news service reported.
Sister Celine Warnilo joined Pennsylvania Attorney General and the American Civil Liberties union in supporting Congregation Kol Ami's bid to use the sisters’ former convent as a synagogue and school.
Neighbors and officials are suing to block the congregation's plans, which they argue would bring excessive noise and traffic to the residential cul-de-sac, the wire service reported.
But Sister Warnilo said the sisters would like to “see God continue to be praised” in the old convent. Said the nun, “It is our desire to see this continue to be a holy place, and Kol Ami will do that.”
Details of Subway Priest's Life Keep Surfacing
Two years after his death at 83, Jesuit Father Francis Cosgrove, a former pastor on Manhattan's upper East Side, was recalled in a Times article as a Spencer Tracy-like priest who spoke or read a dozen languages and was self-taught on old methods of sea navigation.
Father Cosgrove served as a chaplain for New York City Transit for more than 30 years. Joe Cunningham, a subway historian and author who knew Father Cosgrove, said the priest received motorman training and was legally qualified to drive the subway trains. But Joseph Hofmann, senior vice president for subways, who also knew the priest, said his visits to the motorman's cab were not officially authorized, though tolerated.
The New York daily reported that Father Cosgrove once visited a token-booth clerk and relieved him when the clerk had to go to the bathroom. A parishioner who came by was too confused to ask why his pastor was selling tokens and simply said, “Oh, hello Father.”
Later in the day, Father Cosgrove ran into a motorman he knew and persuaded him to let him drive the train. The same parishioner happened to be in a subway station when the train pulled in, and he saw Father Cosgrove beaming as he sailed by. The priest waved, and the man waved back, his mouth open. “Oh, hello Father,” he said again.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Pro-Abortion Lobby Runs Transit Ads Attacking Church on Condoms DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — As pro-lifers flood into the nation's capital for prayer and protest to mark the 29th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the D.C. Metro bus and rail stations will greet them with pro-condom signs courtesy of the pro-abortion lobby Catholics for a Free Choice.
Catholic spokesmen have dismissed the ads as the latest false and misleading salvo from a non-Catholic, pro-abortion organization that has been denounced by the U.S. bishops.
The ads, which read, “Because the bishops ban condoms, innocent people die,” and “Catholic people care. Do our bishops?” have been on display at 50 bus shelters and 134 Metrorail cars in Washington since World AIDS Day Dec. 1. A similar ad appeared in the Washington Post on Nov. 30.
At the start of 2002, similar ads were introduced in several other countries, including Belgium, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Bolivia, Chile and Mexico.
The ads will run through the end of January.
“The Vatican and the world's bishops bear significant responsibility for the death of thousands of people who have died from AIDS,” Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice, said in a Nov. 29 press release. “For individuals who follow the Vatican policy and Catholic health care providers who are forced to deny condoms, the bishops’ ban is a disaster,” added Kissling, who is a former abortion clinic director. “We can no longer stand by and allow the ban to go unchallenged.”
Angry Reaction
Susan Gibbs, director of communications for the Archdiocese of Washington, said that as soon as the ads appeared, complaints began flooding in against them.
“We got so many calls asking what people could do that we put out an advocacy alert briefly explaining the Church's teaching and the claims made in the ads, as well as contact information for Metro board members and lawmakers who oversee funding for Metro,” Gibbs said.
Shortly before Christmas, Gibbs called Metro authorities, who told her the transit agency would not accept ads that were “false or misleading.” Gibbs said the ads are both, as “the bishops do not have the authority to ‘ban’ anything, as the ads claim. They do have the authority and the responsibility to teach.”
Equally wrong, Gibbs added, is the claim that the promotion of chastity is deadly. The Church's teaching against condoms, Gibbs explained, “is part of a broader teaching of abstinence outside of monogamous marriage — the only lifestyle that is completely effective against sexually transmitted disease.”
As for the suggestion that the bishops “don't care” about the AIDS epidemic, Gibbs noted that Catholic organizations currently provide 25% of all HIV/AIDS care worldwide, making the Church the largest provider of this type of care.
Father Frank Pavone, co-founder of Priest for Life, said that it is Catholics for a Free Choice who is endangering public health.
“Catholics for a Free Choice is setting itself up for serious legal trouble,” said Father Pavone. “What happens when people die because of sexually transmitted diseases that condoms fail to prevent? We will see to it that Catholics for a Free Choice take the part of the blame they deserve for misleading people into thinking that condoms provide security that they do not.”
Metro officials maintain that pulling the ads would threaten free speech. Spokesman Ray Feldmann said the transit authority's lawyers determined that “people may disagree with the content and portrayal of bishops” in the ads, but that there was “nothing obscene, pornographic, lewd or offensive” to justify ending their run. “To us, it came down to a First Amendment issue,” Feldmann told the Washington Post. “We're not referees making sure these ads are 100% accurate.”
The Metro agency receives at least $840 million in public subsidies from local and federal governments.
Not Catholic
Catholics for a Free Choice is a 25-year-old independent nonprofit group that promotes abortion, “reproductive health” and “gender equality” according to what it characterizes as a “Catholic social justice tradition.”
However, an article in the Jan.-Feb. 2000 of Philanthropy magazine reported that none of the major funders of Catholics for a Free Choice, including the Ford, MacArthur, Rockefeller, Hewlett, Packard and Buffet foundations, support Catholic philanthropy. Indeed, some of the foundations have specific policies prohibiting any support for religiously oriented groups.
Catholics for a Free Choice has also accepted funding from pornographer Hugh Hefner's Playboy Foundation.
The group spearheaded a recent unsuccessful campaign against the Holy See's Permanent Observer status at the United Nations.
The U.S. bishops have repeatedly denounced Catholic for a Free Choice's claim to be an authentically Catholic group. In a May 2000 statement in his capacity as president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Bishop Joseph Fiorenza of Galveston-Houston said Kissling's group “is not a Catholic organization, does not speak for the Catholic Church, and in fact promotes positions contrary to the teaching of the Church as articulated by the Holy See and the NCCB.”
As annoying as the pro-condom ads may be, Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute, said that the “new assault on the Church will have absolutely no impact on Church teaching related to contraception. Most Catholics have never heard of [Frances Kissling] or her group or her campaign.”
Added Ruse, “She is known and supported by a very small number of pro-abortion zealots and a few fellow travelers in the media. Her impact and the impact of her group is minuscule.”
Kathryn Jean Lopez is executive editor of National Review Online.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kathryn Jean Lopez ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:Vatican Nuncio Advised Irish Government on Unity
Archbishop Gaetano Alibrandi noted that 52% of the children in Northern Ireland at the time were Catholic and that Dublin should work to secure their rights so that they would not emigrate. Combined with a hoped-for proportional representation in elections, this would help put at least three counties under nationalist control, the Belfast daily reported.
Archbishop Alibrandi believed that unity in Ireland was “inevitable.” The papal representative, who spoke with the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Hugh McCann, on Oct. 19, 1971, also said that violence was coming as much from the British army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary as it was from the Catholic minority. He called the British government's attitude toward the north “cynical” and “perfidious.”
The communication about the meeting was released under a rule that makes government documents public after 30 years.
Polish Head Invites Pope and Discusses Economy
PAP, Jan. 3 — The prime minister of Poland, Leszek Miller, briefed Pope John Paul II on the situation in his country and the goals of Poland's foreign policy, according to the Polish news agency. In a private, 40-minute meeting, Miller also invited the Pope to visit his native Poland in 2002.
In a statement, Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said the two men discussed European integration and the international situation. Miller told reporters after the meeting that he focused on economic issues and steps launched by the government to stabilize the situation in public finances. He said he appreciated the support of Poland's bishops for European integration and said it may be of great importance in an upcoming referendum on Poland's membership in the European Union.
The head of Poland's government also spoke with Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Vatican secretary of state, on European integration and relations with Russia.
Indonesians Pray for Peace at Vatican Christmas Mass
ANTARA, Jan. 4 — At a Christmas Mass in the Indonesian embassy at the Vatican, a delegation of Indonesians representing 16 provinces prayed for peace in their country and expressed hope that Indonesia soon would resolve its economic problems and communal conflicts, according to the country's national news agency.
Father Kusmaryanto Putra, in a homily, quoted Pope John Paul's message for World Day of Peace 2002 that there can be no peace without justice and no justice without apology and forgiveness.
Christians and Muslims have been battling in eastern Indonesia for several years. Recent flare-ups have included Muslim attacks against churches.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Song of Eternal Praise DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:Register Summary
Pope John Paul II said Christians should learn to praise God continually and wholeheartedly, a practice he said was rooted in the prayer of “our elder brothers” in the faith, the Jews.
“Praise becomes a profession of faith in God as creator and redeemer, a festive celebration of God's love, which unfolds by creating and saving, by giving life and deliverance,” he said.
Speaking to pilgrims at his weekly general audience Jan. 9, the Pope highlighted Psalm 150, the last in the book of Psalms. His talk continued a series of reflections on the psalms used in the Liturgy of the Hours.
The Pope said the psalm's repeated invitations to praise seem “like an eternal song that will never end, something that also occurs during the famous Halleluia Chorus of Handel's Messiah.”
The hymn that has just sustained us in prayer is Psalm 150, the last canticle of the book of Psalms. The final word that resounds in Israel's book of prayer is the alleluia — a word of sincere and free praise of God. For this reason, the psalm is repeated twice during Morning Prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours, on the second and fourth Sundays.
The brief text is punctuated with a series of ten imperatives, each repeating the word “hallelû” or “praise!” It almost seems like an eternal song that will never end, something that also occurs during the famous Halleluia Chorus of Handel's Messiah. Praise of God becomes like the ceaseless breathing of the soul.
As one author has written, “This is one of the rewards of being human: the quiet exaltation, the capacity to celebrate. Rabbi Akiba expressed it well in a phrase addressed to his disciples: “A song every day, a song for every day” (A.J. Heschel, Chi è l’uomo?, Milan, 1971, p. 198).
Three Movements of Praise
Psalm 150 seems to unfold in a triple movement. In the first two verses at the beginning, our gaze is fixed on “God” in “his holy sanctuary,” in “the mighty dome of heaven,” in “his mighty deeds,” and in “his great majesty” (verses 1 and 2). In the second movement — just as in a movement in a musical composition — the orchestra of the Temple of Zion joins in the praise (verses 3-5) and accompanies the song and sacred dance. Finally, in the last verse of the psalm (verse 6) the whole universe appears on stage, which the original Hebrew words of “everything that has breath” faithfully convey. Life itself becomes praise, a praise that rises from the creatures to the Creator.
We will limit ourselves during this first encounter with Psalm 150 to dwelling on the first and last movements of the hymn. They serve like a frame for the second movement, which is the heart of the composition and which we will examine in the future, when this psalm is repeated in Morning Prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours.
Heavenly Praise
The first place in which the prayerful, musical theme unfolds is the “sanctuary” (verse 1). The Hebrew original speaks of a pure and transcendent “holy” area where God dwells. So, there is a reference here to Paradise in heaven, where, as the book of Revelation tells us, the eternal and perfect liturgy of the Lamb is celebrated (for example, Revelation 5:6-14). The mystery of God, into which the saints are welcomed through full communion, is a place of light and joy, of revelation and love.
Not for nothing (though with a certain liberty) does the ancient Greek translation of the Septuagint and even the Latin Vulgate translation use the word “saints” instead of “sanctuary”: “Praise the Lord in his saints.”
Earthly Praise
From heaven our thoughts move implicitly to earth, with an emphasis on God's “mighty deeds” that manifest “his great majesty” (verse 2). These mighty deeds are described in Psalm 105, which invites the Israelites to “proclaim all [God's] wondrous deeds” (verse 2), and to “recall the wondrous deeds he has done, his signs and his words of judgment” (verse 5). The psalmist then recalls the covenant “which was made with Abraham” (verse 9), the extraordinary story of Joseph, the miracles of the deliverance from Egypt and the crossing of the desert, and, lastly, the gift of the land.
Another psalm speaks of anguishing situations from which the Lord delivers those who “cry out” to him; those who are delivered are repeatedly invited to give thanks for God's wonderful works: “Let them thank the Lord for such kindness, such wondrous deeds for mere mortals” (Psalm 107:8,15,21,31).
So, this is how we should understand the reference in psalm 150 to the “mighty deeds” (verse 2) or, as the Hebrew original says, the “powerful works” that God spreads throughout salvation history. Praise becomes a profession of faith in God as creator and redeemer, a festive celebration of God's love, which unfolds by creating and saving, by giving life and deliverance.
Mankind's Central Role
Finally we come to the last verse of Psalm 150 (verse 6). As I said earlier, the Hebrew word that is used to describe those who praise God refers to breath, but also to something intimate and profound that is innate to man.
Although we can think that all living creatures form a hymn of praise to the Creator, it is more precise, however, to maintain that a position of primacy is reserved in this choir for the human creature. Through the human being, the spokesman of the whole of creation, all living beings praise the Lord. Our breath of life, which also signifies self-consciousness, awareness and liberty (Proverbs 20:27), becomes a song and prayer of all the life that pulsates in the universe.
This is why all of us must engage one another with “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and playing to the Lord” with all our heart (Ephesians 5:19).
An Eternal Flame
When transcribing the verses of Psalm 150, Hebrew manuscripts often depict the menorah, the famous candelabrum with seven branches, that was placed in the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Jerusalem. By doing so, they suggest a beautiful interpretation of this psalm, the veritable “amen” in the ageless prayer of our “elder brothers”: Every man, with all the instruments and musical forms that he has invented through his own genius, “horns, lyres, harps, tambourines, dance, strings, flutes, sounding cymbals, crashing cymbals,” as the psalm says, but also “everything that has breath,” is invited to burn like the menorah before the Holy of Holies, in a constant prayer of praise and thanksgiving.
Joined with the Son, the perfect voice of the entire world he created, we also become an incessant prayer before the throne of God.
(Translation by Zenit and Register)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Austrian Taxi Is Headquarters for International Aid Organization DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:VIENNA, Austria — An international aid agency spanning several continents being run by one man from a taxi in the Austrian capital Vienna, may sound like an unlikely proposition.
But Hannes Urban, a bearded 45-year-old, has made it a reality, building up a small but highly effective network of aid projects in Africa and Latin America in just three years.
Thanks to his efforts, dozens of street children in Nairobi, Kenya, are receiving education or learning a trade; the poorest of the poor in Mexico City's slums are getting free medication; and a remote community in South Africa's Eastern Cape will soon have a properly equipped kindergarten.
This remarkable story of what can be achieved by the faith and persistence of one individual began, without any planning on Urban's part, when he visited a pen pal in South Africa in 1998. He got into conversation with a young woman begging in the street and was moved by her plight.
“It was my first encounter with poverty,” he recalled.
Without any clear ideas about what he could do to help, Urban returned to Vienna, where he told the story to friends. Unprompted, friends and acquaintances showered him with gifts of clothes for the woman he had met in South Africa, which he duly delivered several months later.
On that second visit, Urban learned about a kindergarten in the diocese of Kokstad which operated out of a primitive hut with only the most basic supplies. He resolved to ensure that a new kindergarten was built and properly equipped.
Back in his taxi in the Austrian capital, Urban began telling passengers of his plans and was astonished at their spontaneous willingness to donate money.
“People were enthusiastic,” he said. “No one ever said, ‘This is stupid.’”
God's Kindergarten
The devout Catholic, who also says he has the gift of healing, detected the hand of God behind the unexpected turn his life had taken. “I said to God ‘If you want a kindergarten there, you will have to build it. I will be the tool and offer my labor, you must find the people with money.’ And that's what happened.”
Urban has so far raised around $15,000 for the Kuyasa (“sunrise”) kindergarten, which is slowly but steadily taking shape, and he hopes it will be finished by the end of this year. The Catholic bishop of Kokstad, Irishman William Slattery, is overseeing the project and handling the finances on the ground.
Urban's work has steadily evolved in the last three years, always without conscious planning on his part. He now makes regular visits to Mexico City, delivering tens of thousands of dollars worth of medicines donated by pharmaceutical companies in Austria; and to Kenya, where he is helping Nairobi “slum” children to get schooling and teenagers to train as shoemakers.
He still earns a living driving his taxi in Vienna for about six months of the year. Equipped with nothing more sophisticated than a mobile phone and a bulging contacts book, he is constantly working to raise funds and assemble consignments of goods for his next trip to the developing world.
Urban possesses quiet charisma and an undemonstrative but robust Catholic faith. He also displays a down-to-earth practicality, stubbornness and an unshakeable conviction that God will provide.
He has no firm plans for the future and has no idea where his work will take him next.
“I live in the present and trust in God,” he said. “I just take Jesus at his word. He sent the Apostles out to heal the sick, to bless people, to preach the Gospel. I try to do the same.”
Urban's primary motivation is not merely to improve the material lot of the poor, although that is important. It is to bring the Word of God to as many people as possible, not by explicitly evangelizing but by demonstrating the power of Christian love in action.
‘Embracing Jesus’
He believes that too many Christians, including some bishops and priests, lack true faith and fail to appreciate the power of the Gospel message.
“The Bible says God made man is his own image. That is often forgotten,” Urban said. “If I take that seriously, then every person is like God. If I embrace a poor homeless person in Africa, I am embracing Jesus. If I help a child to get off the streets, I am helping Jesus.”
Christ's injunction to feed the hungry and heal the sick applies to all Christians, he said. “For me that is an official mission from God. He made no distinction between bishops, priests and normal believers.”
Urban has established a charitable foundation named Wir Helfen (We Help) to give his activities an official identity, but it remains essentially a oneman operation. He receives no salary. Several airlines ship his consignments free of charge but he pays his own airfares. The foundation's costs in 2001 amounted to just 5% of donations, meaning that a full 95% reached the needy.
In contrast to large aid organizations with their salaried employees and high overheads, Urban incurs virtually no costs when on the road. He stays with priests and missionaries or local people and shares their food. “I can go to South Africa with $50 and come back three weeks later with $30 left.”
Urban urges Christians not to succumb to the temptation to see only wickedness in the modern world. Citing the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, he says that amid the horror at the carnage, the fact that the death toll might have been much higher is often overlooked.
“No one talks about how many people were saved,” he said. “Even at such a moment of great evil, the hand of God was in play.”
Richard Murphy writes from Vienna, Austria.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Richard Murphy ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:Spainards Balk at Political Correctness
The Jan. 2 celebration, dating to 1516, commemorates the capture of the city in 1492 by the Catholic monarchs Isabel and Ferdinand. The fall of the city eliminated the last stronghold of the Muslim sultans who held power for close to 800 years in Spain.
Since the mid-1990s, the small but fast-growing Muslim community in Spain has been pushing for changes in the “Day of the Taking of Granada,” according to the New York business daily. The military presence in the parade was scaled back, and a proclamation on cultural tolerance has been read in public. And some government officials are referring to the holiday by a new name, the “Day of the City of Granada.”
But the changes have been unpopular. Reading of the tolerance proclamation has prompted catcalls and epithets like “Moors go home.” The Journal quoted a student in Granada as calling it a form of terrorism for a “foreign minority” to change traditions accepted and loved by most people.
Orthodox Celebrate Epiphany In Turkey
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Jan. 7 — Orthodox in Turkey, though a minority in a Muslim country, celebrated the feast of the Epiphany with the traditional retrieval of a cross thrown into Istanbul's Bosporus, the news service reported.
After a three-hour Divine Liturgy, Metropolitan Irineos Gioannides led a procession into a small motorboat. He then threw a gold-painted wooden cross into the icy waters, and a 17-year-old theology student from Greece dove in after it amid swirling snow. About 100 worshipers on the shore cheered as George Kasapoglu held the cross above his head.
The Greek Orthodox celebrate Epiphany with the ceremony of the blessing of the waters, symbolizing the baptism of Jesus.
Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I also celebrated Epiphany in a liturgy in the Cathedral of St. George. Though Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople, today's Istanbul, in 1453, the Patriarchate, dating from the 1,110-year Orthodox Greek Byzantine Empire, remains there.
Bush Said to Take Interest in China Bible Case
The president is “deeply concerned” about reports that China will prosecute 38-year-old Li Guangqiang, said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher. “Reports of a crackdown on religious practitioners in China are deeply troubling,” Boucher said.
China warned foreign governments not to meddle in its internal affairs as it vowed to press ahead with the prosecution. The law under which Li has been charged carries a maximum penalty of death, according to the Times.
Li, a member of the Hong Kong branch of the Anaheim, Calif.-based Local Church, transported more than 30,000 Bibles into China's Fujian Province last spring, according to information from the official indictment obtained by the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy.
The head of the rights institute said the Bibles apparently were headed for an underground Protestant sect known as Shouters, which China banned in 1995 as a cult.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Abuse Crisis DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:Pope John Paul II has done the right thing in making sexual abuse by priests an offense whose gravity requires Vatican intervention. The outrage we naturally feel at abusive priests was best expressed by Christ himself, who chose harsh and violent words to register his disapproval.
“Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble,” he said in Matthew 18:6, “it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.”
There is, and can be, no excuse for abuse of children. The public is right to be scandalized and revolted by it.
At the same time, the tendency in the media to widely publicize cases of Catholic priests’ abuse has given Americans a very distorted picture, as Phillip Jenkins points out in his Oxford University Press book on the subject, published last year.
True pedophilia is extremely rare in the priesthood, he points out. The best estimate is that 0.3% of priests are guilty. The most extensive study, which considered 2,252 priests over a 30-year period, found only one case of pedophilia — and in that case, the abuse happened apart from the perpetrator's role as a priest in the parish; he abused members of his extended family.
Pedophilia is no more common in the Catholic priesthood than it is among other clergy or other trades.
So why is the perception so exaggerated?
For one reason, the Church's hierarchical structure means that Catholic clergy are more attractive targets for lawsuits than other denominations. You needn't sue just a parish; you can sue the entire archdiocese.
There are also a lot of disaffected Catholics who want to make it seem that Church rules cause problems. They say that, if priests married, they wouldn't have the same temptations — but may not realize that pedophilia is as bad or worse among married clergy of other denominations.
But perhaps the most significant reason the perception of the priest-pedophilia problem is overblown, let's face it, is that the very idea of such abuse — even if is extremely rare — is so repugnant and strange that it sticks in one's mind. In the end, even if there is no “crisis” of pedophilia in terms of numbers, even one instance has the feel of a crisis.
Now that cases like Boston's are making headlines, the Church should take the opportunity to re-emphasize a doctrinal principles.
Sexual sins are serious and have serious consequences. There has been a tendency by many Catholics over the past 30 years to de-emphasize sexual sins. It was thought that the Church had too many hang-ups about sex. The truth is, sex is sacred and powerful — and when it is misused, it causes destruction.
The perpetrator priest in Boston said that he was “experimenting” at a time when the culture at large was also “experimenting with sex.” This should be a warning to Catholic colleges and seminaries that fail to teach the whole truth about sex, or who imply that the “experiments” of the culture are alright. The consequences can be disastrous.
Hearing about pedophilia and the priesthood is uncomfortable. But, in the end, bringing these cases to the light can only strengthen the Church.
Such situations only serve to remind us of the perennial wisdom of Catholic doctrine, which teaches respect, chastity and love.
----- EXCERPT: Editorial ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Letters DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:Where Vocations Flourish
The “Third Continental Congress On Vocations to the Ordained Ministry and Consecrated Life” (“Summit Draft Ignores Successes in Vocations,” Jan. 6-12) should be the subject of the sincere prayer of every faithful Catholic — indeed, every concerned Christian. After all, we are enjoined by the Lord himself to pray for workers for the harvest!
I think your article is exactly right — we need to honestly assess the real situation in order to better focus our prayer for the Church and her mission. There simply is no vocations crisis. There may be a distribution problem, but there is no crisis. Let me explain.
In those dioceses where the faith is being lived, proclaimed, demonstrated; where the clergy are living lives of sacrificial love and heroic virtue; where the lay faithful are remaining faithful and families are truly demonstrating what it means to live as a domestic church; where consecrated religious are filled with the joy that emanates from living the evangelical counsels; where the wisdom of the magisterium (the teaching office) is being received as a sure guide and not opposed with a party spirit — in places like this, the seminaries are filled to the brim.
In places like this, old religious communities are being renewed and new ones are being birthed. Deacons are finding a place of service as an order of clergy moving from the altar and ambo into the world. There, spring is breaking out already! In these dioceses, the sacred liturgy is being offered with dignity and reverence, drawing the faithful like the magnet of beauty and the invitation to communion that it is; piety, old and new, is flourishing.
There, new associations and movements birthed by the Holy Spirit are springing up in response to the call to the “new evangelization.” Authentic efforts at Christian cooperation are flourishing. Christians of other communities and confessions are growing in deeper respect for the beauty of the Catholic faith. In fact, many of our brethren are knocking at the door, seeking full communion with the Church to which they are already joined by baptism.
If you do not see it, open your eyes and look around. See the new associations and movements that Pope John Paul calls the “signs of spring.” Some have their own seminaries and they are full. They are dynamically influencing culture with the values informed by faith and leading the renewal of the Church from which they were birthed and to which they are unquestionably faithful.
“Vocations” are a fruit. When the Catholic Church is alive with the Gospel and when dynamically orthodox faith is preached, demonstrated and lived; when people are catechized into the beauty and full splendor of truth that is the Catholic faith and live it with joy — it is there that the fruit falls from the trees and the faithful are fed.
DEACON KEITH A. FOURNIER Arlington, Virginia
The writer is founder of Common Good.
Righteous Redwall
Regarding the letter titled “Harmless Harry,” written by a 14-year-old named Will Gross (Dec. 16-22):
Will stood up for Harry Potter, but condemned the Redwall books by Brian Jacques. He said, “Where violence is glamorized and glorified and made to look honorable” with regards to Redwall.
This is not really true! All the characters in Redwall are appalled at unnecessary violence and only fight when they have to! Isn't it noble to fight for peace and one's country? They don't go off and fight for the sake of fighting. Violence is not good when done for no reason, but sometimes it is necessary.
King Arthur was a hero, and he fought, and so did Robin Hood and Ivanhoe. In the Redwall books, only the bad guys believe in magic, and the good guys are courageous and honorable. In Redwall one of the main objectives is peace. I don't know what book Will read, but I know one thing, everyone I know who has read the Redwall books has not had the same impression as Will Gross.
Here is a poem that is in one of his short books that expresses Mr. Jacques’ intentions:
When others run I stand and fight,
Alone for what I know is right,
Repelling wrong and villainy,
Ready and true I vow to be,
I stand for family and friend,
On my word they may depend,
Respect for young and old I give,
So long as I shall live,
Courage grows with honesty,
Old fears are conquered constantly,
Defending peace I hold so dear,
Ever faithful find me here.
(The Warrior's Code, included with the “Build Your Own Redwall Abbey” kit)
LEAH D’ETTORE, AGE 11 Brampton, Ontario
Let Redwall Ring
This is in reference to the letter titled “Harmless Harry” in your Dec.16-22 issue.
As for Harry Potter, I have never read the books, and furthermore, I feel no desire to do so. However, I was very upset to read the way Brian Jacque's Redwall books were criticized in the article. It was said that in the books, “violence is glamorized and glorified and made to look honorable.”
First of all, I would like to point out that the heroes and heroines are only protecting their loved ones, or trying to stop a spreading evil. These evil characters are completely evil, and try to destroy all things that are good. On the other hand, the good creatures of Redwall are gentle and peaceful, and only rise up in defense against the attacks of evil.
It is never violence being glorified or made to look glamorous, for the gentle Redwallers hate violence. It is in the defense of one's country that force is promoted in the defeating of evil. Martin the Warrior earned his title because he was the courageous protector of Redwall when it was first being built. He followed the warrior's code, a code that sought to protect the defenseless, and to fight evil in an honorable fashion, instead of stooping down to its level.
It would not be a great stretch to compare the heroic action of Redwall's characters to the brave action of Marines, Green Berets and other Special Forces in Afghanistan. In both situations we see evil, and those who try to stop it!
ELIZABETH BARTON, AGE 13 Brampton, Ontario
Taming Tantrum-Throwers
Your Family Matters column regarding misbehaving children is encouraging; however, the commands for a quiet minute without direction is ambiguous as far as the child is concerned (“Time Out,” Jan. 6-12).
Temper is learned from the parents or whomever is responsible for the children's conduct. Just spend a few hours in a store and you will witness the threats and assaults on children by mothers and grandmothers that [require] correcting a situation that should have never been created.
Every parent should take responsibility as a parent. A “no-brainer” “time-out” procedure only [causes] the child's resentment to smolder and come out during the next confrontation. Furthermore, the solutions in your column seem to exclude the male parent and, without his authority, the child will continue to challenge the parent and push the envelope of misbehavior to a point where she will have no control whatsoever.
I think the old-fashioned mother/father, basic, family core-concept is the only solution to help our children to develop into teenagers and adults who respect moral authority that will contribute to the higher quality of life as citizens and productive members of society.
I do not intend to criticize your article. This only an opinion of a father of seven children, grandfather of 13 and great-grandfather of eight.
JIM VONDRAS Florissant, Missouri
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Lord of the Rings in the Ring DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:‘Vaporous’ Opinions …
Regarding your recent coverage of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring:
Both the news article by Tim Drake (“The Hobbits Are Here: Catholics Hope the Movie Lives Up to the Book,” Dec. 9-15) and the movie review by John Prizer (“Frodo Lives!”, Jan. 6-12) were lacking in moral direction and clarity.
Mr. Drake quoted a father who is made to seem virtuous for waiting to take his young sons, ages 5 and 7, to the movie until after he reads the books to them; then he will also let them see the Harry Potter movie.
Mr. Prizer makes a fleeting, vague remark that kids under 12 shouldn't see The Lord of the Rings because the violence is too “intense.”
What both writers should have done is to make a quick trip to the Web site of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (www.nccbuscc.-org). There they would have been able to access the bishops’ review of The Lord of the Rings and would have discovered the rating of A-III, recommending the movie for adults because the images of evil are so sinister as to be inappropriate even for adolescents (not to mention those under 12 — somebody tell that to Dad, quick, before he traumatizes his kids).
After taking into account the bishops’ review, we decided our almost 16-year-old, who has read Tolkien's trilogy twice and belongs to a Tolkien discussion club, would be mature enough to handle the movie. But our younger adolescent and pre-adolescent children were not going to see it at this time.
If Register [writers and] reviewers are not going to use some discretion regarding recommended viewer ages, no matter how great a movie might be, perhaps your readers would prefer to get a logical, well-thought-out opinion from our bishops and spare themselves the uninformed and vaporous opinions of reviewers and the friends they decide to quote for their articles!
PAUL AND PAT HERBERT Racine, Wisconsin
… or ‘Wonderful’ Work?
Thank you for John Prizer's great review of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (“Frodo Lives!”, Jan. 6-12). It is an awesome movie, and stayed quite close to the books.
I have only read the Lord of the Rings trilogy three times, while my brother has read the trilogy 18 times, plus many of Tolkien's other works. And we both have really enjoyed watching The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
Mr. Prizer did a wonderful job reviewing this movie — except for one little point concerning the dwarf: If I was in Middle Earth, I would most definitely be a dwarf, so saying that one of my brethren provides comic relief … well, just watch the next movie and see how many heads “comic relief” takes.
PETER IPPOLITI St. Meinrad, Indiana
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: March for Life 2002 Decodes the Media On Pro-Life Matters DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:Too bad the stuff that makes headlines and sound bites sometimes creates stereotypes.
Take the case of Clayton Lee Waagner, the anti-abortion extremist who is believed responsible for mailing white powder — fake anthrax — to 280 abortion clinics in October and November. Waagner bathed in the mainstream media's spotlight after Attorney General John Ashcroft declared him the subject of a national manhunt. Waagner is also accused of threatening workers in clinics via e-mail earlier in 2001. Authorities nabbed Waagner in the parking lot of a Kinko's copy center outside Cincinnati in December, before the fanatic acted upon his alleged threats.
The media often depend on the outrageous behavior of fanatics to bring something new to old stories. And there's no denying that this criminal's capers make great copy.
In February 2001, while awaiting sentencing on firearms and car-theft charges, Waagner escaped from an Illinois prison. The jailbird then zigzagged across the country in fancy stolen cars and lived high on the hog for months. The outlaw allegedly supported himself by robbing banks. This 45-year-old father of nine lodged in upscale hotels while his family, back in Kennerdell, Pa., remained in their one-story ramshackle house at the end of a gravel road. Waagner's midlife on the lam included visits to bars, where Mr. Big Spender splurged on rounds of drinks for everybody. Then the Marlboro man drank whiskey and chewed the fat about the abortion issue under the clouds created by his cigarette habit.
This hypocrite only poses as a poster child for the pro-life movement.
Most anti-abortion activists abhor violence and feel equal aversion toward those who stoop to it in the name of life. When Waagner was arrested, many right-to-lifers found themselves in agreement for the first time ever with Kate Michelman, president of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL), who said she was “immensely relieved.”
Stories about people who have used violence to oppose abortion have been reported for more than 20 years. Pro-abortion activists at NARAL, the influential group that introduced the more digestible term “pro-choice” to the American vocabulary, gladly provide statistics. Seven murders, 17 attempted murders, 41 bombings, 122 assaults and 165 arsons have been committed by extremists at abortion clinics since 1977, according to a list posted on NARAL's Web site.
Conversely, a total count of pro-life activists in the United States, one that publicizes the pacifist majority, has proved difficult to enumerate. The pro-life movement includes many different groups, some highly organized like the National Right to Life Committee and others with grass roots, such as the Pro Life Union Inc. of South Eastern Pennsylvania. The NRLC includes 4,000 Right to Life chapters with varying numbers of members. The Pro Life Union maintains a mailing list of 40,000 people. Some estimates place the total number of pro-life activists nationwide around 1 million.
Whether or not that calculation is correct, it's obvious that “pro-life” troublemakers like Waagner make up a miniscule fraction of all those identifying themselves among the pro-life ranks. Yet the steady flow of news reports about anti-abortion extremists suggests otherwise.
The publicity generated by anti-abortion extremists has energized the media-savvy types who drive the pro-abortion movement: They have used the sensational stories to create a stereotype of what a pro-lifer looks like.
Meanwhile the immensely larger, peaceful portion of the right-to-life movement has puttered along without fanfare — attending prayer vigils, rallies and fund-raisers. Not the kind of activities that excite the imagination of mainstream news producers and editors.
Thousands of these nonviolent demonstrators will gather this year for the 29th March for Life in Washington on Jan. 22. This date marks the anniversary of the legalization of abortion when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade.
If the annual event does not pique mainstream media interest, perhaps its theme, “Truth Uncovers Abortion Evils,” will. For the March for Life's quest for truth focuses on words, the cherished tools of a journalist's trade.
At this year's march, organizers hope to expose the reality behind various popular “code words” — expressions pro-abortionists apply as a way to gloss over the harsh realities of what takes place in an abortion. Carefully selected words like “choice,” “women's rights,” “privacy” and “reproductive health” help them obscure the fact that every aborted embryo or fetus was once a child in his or her earliest stages of development.
Pro-abortion movement leaders choose their deceptive “code words” with the same deliberation that helped them to fabricate the pro-life stereotype. And everybody knows that people who promote stereotypes are people who fear losing their grip on power.
So, as of Jan. 22, let the truth be spoken with new hope that the mainstream media will listen with fresh ears. Lots of little lives are relying upon it.
Marybeth T. Hagan writes from Havertown, Pennsylvania.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Marybeth T. Hagan ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Searching for Frodo's Faith DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:What is the secret of J.R.R. Tolkien's success with The Lord of the Rings? How did such a strange story, full of imaginary creatures such as hobbits, elves, ents and orcs, emerge as a powerful literary force? How did its author, a quiet and unassuming professor of philology at Merton College, Oxford, become the creator of a mythological world that continues to fascinate and captivate new generations of readers a half-century after its introduction?
These questions are intriguing enough, but even more surprising, perhaps, is the fact that Tolkien was a devout Catholic who often went out of his way to point out that his Christianity was the most important ingredient in The Lord of the Rings.
Who exactly was J.R.R. Tolkien?
Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, in 1892, of English parents, and christened John Ronald Reuel in the local Anglican cathedral. Shortly after his third birthday, his mother returned to England, taking John Ronald Reuel and his younger brother, Hillary, with her. His father, unable to vacate his post as manager of a local bank, was forced temporarily to remain behind. He died suddenly, after suffering a severe hemorrhage, before he could join his wife and children in England.
Her husband's death left Mabel Tolkien in relative poverty, reliant upon her family for financial assistance. In 1900, when J.R.R. was 8, she was received into the Catholic Church — a decision which outraged her family and resulted in the withdrawal of the financial support.
So it was that the young Tolkien became a child convert. Thereafter, he always remained a resolute Catholic, a fact which profoundly affected the direction of his life. The realization that the Catholic faith might not have been the faith of his father, but was the faith of his father's fathers, ignited and nurtured his love for medievalism. This, in turn, led to his disdain for the humanistic “progress” that followed in the wake of the Reformation.
Martyr Mother
Mabel Tolkien was diagnosed as diabetic and, in November 1904, she sank into a coma and died. Tolkien was 12. For the rest of his life, Tolkien would remain convinced that his mother's untimely death was the result of the persecution that had followed her conversion. Sixty years later, he compared her sacrifices for the faith with the lukewarm complacency of some of his children toward the faith they had inherited from her.
“When I think of my mother's death,” he wrote, “worn out with persecution, poverty, and, largely consequent, disease, in the effort to hand on to us small boys the Faith, and remember the tiny bedroom she shared with us in rented rooms in a postman's cottage at Rednal, where she died alone, too ill for viaticum, I find it very hard and bitter, that my children stray away.”
Indeed, Tolkien always considered his mother a martyr for the faith. Nine years after her death, he wrote: “My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it was not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to His great gifts as He did to Hillary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labour and trouble to ensure us keeping the Faith.”
Just how Catholic was J.R.R. Tolkien? And how Catholic is The Lord of the Rings?
Tolkien and his brother were now orphans. Father Francis Morgan, a priest at the Oratory in Birmingham (founded by Cardinal John Henry Newman), became their legal guardian. Each morning, Tolkien and his brother would serve Mass for Father Francis before going to school. Tolkien remained grateful to the priest all his life, describing him as “a guardian who has been a father to me, more than most real fathers.”
So much for Tolkien's Catholic faith. But what of the myth he created? Is The Lord of the Rings as Catholic as its author? Tolkien certainly believed so. “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work,” he wrote to his friend, Father Robert Murray, “unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.”
In another letter, written shortly after The Lord of the Rings was published, Tolkien outlined a “scale of significance” of those factors in his life that had influenced his writing of the book. He divided these into three distinct categories, namely the “insignificant,” the “more significant” and the “really significant.” It was into this latter category that he placed his Christian faith.
“And there are a few basic facts, which, however dryly expressed, are really significant,” he wrote. “For instance I was born in 1892 and lived for my early years in ‘the Shire’ in a pre-mechanical age. Or more important, I am a Christian (which can be deduced from my stories), and in fact a Roman Catholic.”
In what ways is Tolkien's mythological epic imbued with the faith of its author?
First, as is clear from Tolkien's account of the creation of Middle Earth in The Silmarillion, his imaginary world is under the omnipotent guidance of the same God he worshipped each Sunday at holy Mass. In fact, Tolkien's creation myth parallels the creation narrative in Genesis. The world is loved into existence by the One, who invites the Ainur, the archangels, to cooperate in the creative process, much as the musicians in an orchestra cooperate with the conductor. One of these archangels, Melkor, refuses to play in harmony with the others and is intent on “playing his own tune” in defiance of the will of the one God.
Taking his inspiration, no doubt, from the Book of Isaiah, Tolkien says of Melkor:
“From splendour he fell through arrogance to contempt for all things save himself, a spirit wasteful and pitiless. Understanding he turned to subtlety in perverting to his own will all that he would use, until he became a liar without shame. He began with the desire of Light, but when he could not possess it for himself alone, he descended through fire and wrath into a great burning, down into Darkness. And darkness he used most upon Arda [earth], and filled it with fear for all living things.”
Shortly after this description of Melkor, Tolkien introduces Sauron, the Dark Enemy in The Lord of the Rings. Sauron he describes as a spirit and the greatest of Melkor's servants.
No Fear of the Dark
If the evil in The Lord of the Rings is specifically satanic, the actions of the virtuous characters are so rooted in sanctity that they almost appear to be metaphors for the truth of the Gospel. In the unassuming humility of the hobbits, we see the exaltation of the humble. In their reluctant heroism, we see a courage ennobled by modesty. In the immortality of the elves, and the sadness and melancholic wisdom it evokes in them, we can read their dissatisfaction with the incompleteness of the fallen world. Man's sojourn in the “vale of tears” of the natural realm is likewise marked by a desire for something more — the mystical union with the divine beyond the reach of time.
In Gandalf we see the archetypal prefiguration of a powerful prophet or patriarch, a seer who beholds a vision of the Kingdom beyond the understanding of men. At times he is almost Christlike. He lays down his life for his friends and his mysterious “resurrection” results in his transfiguration. Before his self-sacrificial “death,” he is Gandalf the Grey; after his “resurrection” he reappears as Gandalf the White, armed with greater powers and deeper wisdom.
In the true, though exiled, kingship of Aragorn we see glimmers of the hope for a restoration of truly ordained, i.e., Catholic, authority. The person of Aragorn represents the embodiment of the Arthurian and Jacobite yearning — the visionary desire for the “return of the king” after eons of exile. The “sword that is broken,” the symbol of Aragorn's kingship, is reforged at the anointed time — a potent reminder of Excalibur's union with the Christendom it is ordained to serve.
Significantly, the role of men in The Lord of the Rings reflects their divine, though fallen, nature. They are to be found among the enemy's servants, though usually beguiled by deception into the ways of evil and always capable of repentance and, in consequence, redemption. Boromir, who represents man in the Fellowship of the Ring, succumbs to the temptation to use the ring, i.e., the forces of evil, in the naive belief that it could be wielded as a powerful weapon against Sauron. He finally recognizes the error of seeking to use evil against evil. He dies heroically, laying down his life for his friends in a spirit of repentance.
Ultimately, The Lord of the Rings is a sublimely mystical passion play. The carrying of the ring — the emblem of sin — is the carrying of the cross. The mythological quest is a veritable Via Dolorosa. In short, The Lord of the Rings is every bit as Catholic as its author. It is not only written by a Catholic, it is so Catholic that only a Catholic could have written it.
Joseph Pearce, writer-in-residence at Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti, Mich., is the author of Tolkien: Man and Myth and Tolkien: A Celebration.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pearce ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: America, Take The Conscription Prescription DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:We are at war to save civilization itself. Our enemies want to kill all Americans, all Jews and all Christians.
But don't take it from me. Just ask the president of the United States — he has reiterated this point on numerous occasions since last Sept. 11. His words, a reminder of our remaining in a state of clear and present danger, indicate a need for reinstating the draft.
A protracted multitheater war requires a larger military. President Bush has not specifically called for renewing conscription, but he has reminded the American people that “this is a different war from any our nation has ever faced — a war on many fronts, against terrorists who operate in more than 60 different countries.” He has also said this war would be fought on our soil.
The president has spoken of expanded roles for our military in Central Asia and at home. He has applauded our military efforts in Afghanistan and then explained, “We have posted the National Guard in America's airports [and it] has an increased role in surveillance at our border. The Coast Guard has taken on expanded duties to protect our shores and ports.”
Even before Sept. 11, our military was stretched thinly over 140 countries worldwide. The president must either reprioritize the Pentagon's missions or provide the military with more personnel.
In spite of a surge in patriotism and wide support for the war effort, the military's personnel shortages persist. Over the past few years, armed-services recruiters have failed to consistently enlist sufficient soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. Personnel needs will likely increase as the war expands. Recruitment and retention will be increasingly tough as body bags are returned from the war and domestic terrorism continues.
The recruitment problem extends to our reserves and National Guard. Now that Uncle Sam is calling more of these soldiers to active duty, the problem of meeting domestic requirements is getting tougher. Guardsmen are protecting nuclear reactor sites, dams, airports, government buildings and bridges. They are also preparing teams to react to bioterrorism. The Pentagon has activated 55,000 guardsmen and reservists, denying states the use of their services.
Perhaps recognizing that the draft is a political “hot potato,” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said the draft “is not something that we've addressed and it is not something that is immediately before us.” Once the full scope of the war effort is realized, however, the administration may see that the military is undermanned for the job.
It would take congressional action and presidential approval to reinstate a draft. Already, some members of Congress see the need to revisit the issue. U.S. Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., favors some form of conscription. “When we were downsizing,” he says, “the problem didn't show up because we didn't need a lot of new people; now we do, and we can't get them.”
In 1948, Congress passed the modern Selective Service Act to maintain the strength of the armed forces during peacetime. That law was allowed to expire in June 1973, when membership in the military was put on an all-volunteer basis.
President Carter ordered reinstatement of selective-service registration in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Today, federal law requires men, but not women, to register with the selective service within 30 days of turning age 18. Failure to do so is a felony and subject to serious penalties.
Today, the paramount reason for restoring the draft is the military's mission load. The president could reduce commitments such as the 10,000 soldiers in the Balkans or 100,000 stationed elsewhere in Europe. Failing this, we must find the means to attract sufficient able-bodied people to serve our expanding needs. Patriotism, higher pay and inducements such as money for college have not attracted enough qualified young people. The draft may be our only reliable mechanism for filling the ranks during the war.
The draft could provide long-term benefits. It would ensure that future generations of political leaders entered office understanding the military. Today, fewer than half of all senators and fewer than a quarter of the House are veterans.
The draft would also help re-establish a sense of public service. Sociologist David Segal explains: “Now, we have generations coming who don't have to think about what they owe to the nation as citizens.”
Any draft proposal would certainly involve a debate over whether women should be included.
Today, 14% of military personnel are women. After Congress lifted the combat exclusions in 1991, the Clinton administration removed 250,000 combat exemptions for women and a federal lawsuit contesting male-only draft registration would likely win.
The Bush administration must face this highly emotional issue head on.
We must also ensure fair and unbiased selection criteria for the draft. Fortunately, the current law eliminates most of the contentious Vietnam-era loopholes.
The military was overburdened before Sept. 11. The war on terrorism compounds the problem both overseas and at home. There is no better reason to restart the draft than, as the president stated, to “save civilization itself.”
Lt. Col. Robert L. Maginnis (U.S. Army, Ret.) is vice president for policy with the Family Research Council in Washington.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Robert L. Maginnis ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Lebanese Light in Northeast Ohio DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:When a statue of the Virgin Mary was being lifted into place at the National Shrine of Our Lady of Lebanon on July 20, 1965, the crowd present for the ceremony experienced a special moment of grace.
As the enormous stone image came to rest atop a 50-foot tower, a cloud above turned “brilliant shades of the colors of the rainbow,” as they described the extraordinary sight. This many took as an unmistakable sign of the Blessed Mother's approval and her good pleasure with their building this shrine, a one-third-scale replica of the original in Harissa, Lebanon.
Before I turned onto the long drive that leads through the shrine grounds, I lingered on the quiet country road in North Jackson, Ohio, to absorb this idyllic scene.
From this distance, the honor given to Mary is already evident. As I gazed across the long carpet of lawn unrolling toward the shrine, my eyes locked on the prominent, graceful statue of Mary atop the lofty tower. She greets us with open arms like a mother welcoming her children. She beckons us to hurry to the stairs spiraling around the tower up to her.
From the very start, our Blessed Mother made clear her approval to build this shrine, Msgr. William Bonczewski, the shrine's director for 23 years, told me. The hardships and obstacles that needed to be overcome to erect this place, which radiates such tranquility and simple beauty, only increased the people's reliance on Mary for help.
And what obstacles. The 80-acre farmland nearly wasn't sold to the founders because the owner insisted she'd “never sell to a Catholic.” But three days after four priests began a novena for the situation to change, the farmwoman suddenly agreed to an immediate sale. She told them their ‘Lady’ kept disturbing her sleep.
Our Lady's Choice
When Msgr. Peter Eid from Youngstown bought the land in 1961, his brother, Msgr. Maroun Eid, along with Father Maron Abi-Nadir, joined the project. The stamp of approval came from both the local bishop and Pope John XXIII. But as three Maronite parishes of the Eastern Catholic Rite started working together to develop the shrine, new struggles cropped up. For a start, no water was available to the property for four years. Other hardships followed, but nothing could stop the shrine's progress.
What all this reveals, says Msgr. Bonczewski, is that “it was as much a choice of Our Lady as of the people wanting to do the project.”
As another sign of Mary's approval, this shrine was dedicated and blessed by Auxiliary Bishop James Malone on Aug. 15, 1965, on the Assumption, the major pilgrimage feast celebrated every year at the shrine. (The original shrine in Lebanon, dedicated in 1908, was specifically built for the Golden Jubilee of the proclamation of the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception.) On Dec. 8, 1987, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, the Ohio shrine's new Christ, Prince of Peace Chapel was dedicated.
This national shrine may be a one-third replica of the Lebanon original, but it was built from strictly American resources. The 50-foot-high, 3,700-ton tower is a monument of smooth stones from the rivers of Tennessee. The 12-foot-high statue of Our Lady of Lebanon standing atop it is sculpted from over seven tons of solid pink granite from North Carolina.
Deeply devoted to Mary, the Maronites often address the Blessed Mother by the title “Cedar of Lebanon” to acclaim her strength and fidelity. Here, we're visibly reminded that the title comes from the Bible, which hails her as bride and queen. “Come from Lebanon, my bride, Come from Lebanon” (Song of Songs 4:8) proclaims the inscription on the granite pedestal under the statue of Mary.
A reproduction of this statue and tower becomes a splendid surprise as it forms the tabernacle in the shrine's first chapel. I couldn't help but think of it as beautifully representing Mary as the new Ark of the Covenant bringing us to Jesus, and Jesus to us.
The chapel, which is nearly circular because it's enfolded within the base of the tower, holds 40 comfortably for daily Mass and eucharistic adoration. Here, too, we can meditate on the icons of Our Lady of Lebanon, an image of the Divine Mercy, a statue of St. Sharbel and an icon of St. Maron, the fourth-century founder of the Maronites.
The Maronite Rite for the liturgy traces to the church in Antioch, where Christians were first called “Christians,” and to the SyriacAramaic language and culture. In part, the liturgy extends back to the tradition of St. James. But what stands us in awe at this liturgy is that this ancient rite is the only one in which the words of consecration are recited in the Aramaic language that Jesus used at the Last Supper.
Little Harissa
We Roman Rite Catholics feel right at home and can easily participate because much of the liturgy is now in English. But many people don't know that the shrine is a Catholic one (even though Lebanon itself is quite densely Catholic).
Despite the mistaken notion, people do come from far and wide, says Msgr. Bonczewski. Not a few have been non-Catholics who have ended up converting after their visit, he adds.
This shrine acts as a Little Harissa because Maronite Catholics come for weddings and funerals in the same way they do to the original shrine in Lebanon. In the same way, the faithful (of Roman and Byzantine Rites, too) flock to this Ohio site annually in August for a major three-day pilgrimage to celebrate the feast of the Assumption.
“I've always thought of this shrine as a Nazareth,” Msgr. Bonczewski told me. “You can feel a presence here.”
He's right. As at Nazareth, St. Joseph appears as an important part of the picture. He's honored at his outdoor shrine in the St. Joseph Prayer Garden. The courtyard then leads to the Way of the Cross, a Holy Family shrine inspiring more meditation, as well as wayside shrines that include a Pietà, and images of St. Rita and Padre Pio.
The main shrine expands significantly to either side of the tower. To one side, Christ, Prince of Peace Chapel forms a generous-sized cruciform church holding 450. It has an open, light, peaceful feeling. The wood door into the sacristy was hand-carved by a visiting Romanian Orthodox priest with images that include a Lebanon cedar tree and the country's mountains.
Beautiful wood-carved shrines of Our Lady of Guadalupe and Our Lady of Czestochowa grace the chapel. Other shrines also give us constant spiritual food for prayer as they honor the Divine Mercy (blessed and enthroned by Father Seraphim Michalenko from the National Shrine of Divine Mercy in Massachusetts), the Infant of Prague, St. Joseph, St. Thérèse and St. Jude.
This warm and inviting chapel connects to Cedars Hall, which, with its banquet-sized dining facilities, allows the shrine to host sizable pilgrimages and conferences. There's the smaller Blue Room dining room, too.
I found the spacious, bright gift shop outdoing many stores, well stocked as it is with its large variety of religious items, traditional Catholic basics and literary classics.
One thing you're sure to do as I did. Arriving and leaving (at the very least), climb the 64 steps, representing the prayers of the rosary, to the top of the tower. Stand under Our Lady of Lebanon's outstretched, protective arms and, from this lofty height, survey and drink in the serene shrine unfolding before you — a foreshadow of heaven.
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: National Shrine of Our Lady of Lebanon, North Jackson, Ohio ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Battle Plan for Beauty DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:When the history of ecclesiastical architecture is written, it is doubtful it will be very kind to the last half of the 20th century.
In fact, as a Catholic architect, I predict that the previous half-century will be seen as an architectural dark age — and the 21st century as a renaissance. And, just as previous renaissances have gotten sustenance from the architecture of the past, so it must be today.
We are witnessing a growing appreciation for the art and architecture of historic churches and a desire, to preserve them from the liturgists wrecking ball. Another evidence of this rebirth is the fact that, when parishes go to build today, the most common request I hear is that it “look like a church” — which I take to mean having a sense of transcendence, time-honored forms and traditional iconography.
Foremost among those who deserve credit for fostering the new renaissance in sacred architecture as well as the burgeoning Catholic-preservation movement is critic and author Michael Rose. His latest work, Ugly as Sin: Why They Changed Our Churches from Sacred Places to Meeting Spaces — and How We Can Change Them Back Again (Sophia, 2001) is a book that I predict will become the standard text for architects and parishes charged with building new churches. In this passionate and well-illustrated tome, Rose answers the central questions: “Why is church architecture important?” and “What makes a good church?”
Not since J.B. O'Connell's Church Building and Furnishing of 1955 has there been such a complete work on the history, theology and practical aspects of designing the house of God. Ugly as Sin is rich in theological allusion, biblical meaning and church teaching as they affect the architecture of the Church. Accompanying a plethora of images of beautiful and ugly churches is Rose's enjoyable, witty and readable text. Ugly as Sin is happily absent of architectural semantics or liturgi-speak, while being thorough enough to be helpful to both architects and building committees. In fact, if there is any book that a pastor or building committee should read before embarking on a building project, it is Ugly as Sin.
Rose, who was trained as an architect, articulates three principles, or “natural laws,” that must guide church architecture: permanence, verticality, and iconographic content. He believes it is necessary to recover these principles if our churches are to inspire man to worship God and to teach future generations about the faith. In order to enflesh his thesis, Rose takes the reader on visits to a traditional church (or “house of the Lord”) and a modernist church (or “worship space”). This is a brilliant and amusing way for the reader to compare how one experiences various church designs.
“The church building, reflecting the Church herself,” he writes, “should assist us in this eternal pilgrimage by drawing us near, serving as our maternal sanctuary, facilitating the Church's Liturgy, and memorializing the Holy Sacrifice on Calvary.” In these visits to a traditional type and a modernist anti-type, Rose describes the design of the architecture and the sacramental elements with an analysis of theological ramifications. Of particular note is his emphasis on the facade as “face” of the church, the nave as focused on the sanctuary, the use of colonnades or arcades which help create a sense of good proportion, and the choir loft as a legitimate development of the musical tradition.
Many readers will enjoy his treatment of sacred art, which Rose sees as conveying historical, symbolic or allegorical meaning. “In a church, the purpose of beauty is to make the truths represented attractive to the senses,” he writes. One of the aspects in most need of recovery in our modern churches is the design of the sanctuary, which has been abysmal in the past four decades. The sanctuary should reflect the hierarchy of the Body of Christ by the use of fine materials, height, the triumphal arch, an altar rail and, most especially, the altar and baldacchino. The design and central placement of the tabernacle, described by Rose as the “beating heart” of the house of God, should remind us that Christ is truly present in all of our churches.
Ugly as Sin critiques much of what passes today for contemporary wisdom about sacred architecture, including such sacred cows as gathering spaces, immersion fonts, the fan shape, the choir stage and tacky tabernacles. One humorous segment describes the “hunt for the eucharistic chapel,” in which the pilgrim goes down a long corridor past bathrooms and the water fountain before he can find the Blessed Sacrament.
Rose's description of abstract worship spaces and emaciated art as essentially iconoclastic will ring true for many readers. The photos he includes should not be construed as Catholic churches merely done in a modern style, but rather as inversions of sacramental architecture. By including photos of both early and late 20th-century parish churches, Rose makes the point on how far church architecture has fallen in the last 50 years. Even those who do not agree with Rose's critique of modern architecture and liturgy have to admit that there is little to love in most modern churches.
While critical of recent trends in liturgical design, Ugly as Sin is optimistic about the future, and Rose ends with practical recommendations for making our churches Catholic again. He cites examples of churches that are being re-renovated, such as the chapel at Notre Dame College in Baltimore, as well as functionalist designs which are being transformed with sacred art and decoration, such as St. Aloysius church in New Canaan, Connecticut.
Finally, Ugly as Sin highlights a number of new traditional churches by architects who have embraced sacred tradition and sought to work in continuity with it. These include St. Agnes in New York, Immaculate Conception in New Jersey, Our Lady of the Angels Monastery in Alabama, Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary in Nebraska and San Juan Capistrano in California. This burgeoning movement of new sacred architecture is growing exponentially, as recently witnessed by the popularity of the catalog, “Reconquering Sacred Space,” which accompanied an exhibition of new classical churches last year in Rome. Michael Rose's new book Ugly as Sin gives direction and theological grounding for this renaissance of beauty in service of the Most High.
“In the twenty-first century,” writes Rose, “if Catholics are willing to admit that the experiments of the twentieth century are failures, and if they're motivated to correct the situation, a renaissance of sacred architecture will take hold whereby we'll see the great treasures of the past returned to their original splendor and the establishment of new houses of God that are transcendent, enduring, and serve as vessels of meaning for generations of Christians to come.”
This book can help bring such a hopeful scenario about.
Duncan Stroik teaches architecture at the University of Notre Dame and is editor of Sacred Architecture.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Duncan Stroik ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:TR: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt (1997)
America may now be the world's only superpower. But it has only been an important player on the global stage for about a century. President Teddy Roosevelt started it all with his “walk softly and carry a big stick.” This gunboat diplomacy led to the building of the Panama Canal and other nationalistic ventures. TR was also a dedicated protector of our natural resources and a trust-busting regulator of big-business excesses. He took on Wall Street and robber baron monopolies while at the same time preserving the Grand Canyon, Yosemite Valley and millions of acres of forest lands.
TR: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt, from PBS “The American Experience” series, is a four-hour documentary that intelligently captures the contradictions of this controversial personality. TR believed that virtue and strength were not incompatible. Producer David Grubin shows us how this credo benefited the nation despite TR's larger-than-life flaws and failures. The film skillfully combines photographs, movies, diaries and letters with interviews with family members and scholars like David McCullough.
Henry V (1989)
Patriotism can be either a virtue or a vice, depending on the character and the purposes of the nation that embraces it. Shakespeare made the subject one of his primary themes. Henry V, directed by Kenneth Branagh, is a tough-minded, modern interpretation of the bard's most definitive statement. It focuses more on the personal and political coming-of-age of the young sovereign (Branagh) than the pageant or the spectacle. The warrior-monarch turns his back on Falstaff (Robbie Coltrane), the carousing crony of his wild youth, to pursue the complexities of state-craft and courts the French princess, Katherine (Emma Thompson), to advance British interests.
Shakespeare describes Henry as “the mirror of the Christian king,” and the movie re-creates the era's deep religious beliefs. The climax is the famous Battle of Agincourt in 1415, where the French outnumber the British five-to-one.
On the morning before the combat, Henry delivers his “once more into the breach” St. Crispin's Day speech — a sublime evocation of patriotic virtue and trust in the Lord.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
Two of the three biggest box-office hits of 2001 were animated features (Shrek and Monsters, Inc.). Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs invented the genre and, unlike many of his “edgier” imitators, Disney believed that there could be no good without a clearly defined sense of evil.
The Grimm's fairy tale on which this masterpiece is based is well-known. The orphaned princess Snow White (Adriana Caselotti) has been raised as a servant by the wicked Queen (Lucille La Verne). When the Magic Mirror (Moroni Olsen) tells the sovereign that Snow White is “the fairest one of all,” the jealous queen orders her rival killed. But the innocent girl escapes to the woods and the cabin of the seven dwarfs.
There Sneezy, Grumpy, Dopey, Bashful and the others protect her until Prince Charming (Henry Stockwell) comes to the rescue. The movie's magic still works. Who can forget Snow White warbling the lovely “Some Day My Prince Will Come,” or the dwarfs singing the jolly “Whistle While You Work”?
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:All times Eastern
SUNDAY, JAN. 20
American Experience: Mount Rushmore
PBS; check local listings for time
This fascinating hour-long documentary reveals little-known facts about the massive patriotic monument on Mount Rushmore and its unstoppable creator, the sculptor Gutzon Borglum (1867-1941).
MONDAY, JAN. 21
Pro-Life Is Pro-Love (Part I)
EWTN, 10 p.m.
In this four-part series, Father Dan Mode details the popular and effective pro-life program that he started at Bishop O‘Connell High School in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. Father Mode shows how every Catholic high school, CCD program and youth group can implement this plan, which emphasizes prayer, evangelization and student leadership. The final three parts air Tuesday, Jan. 22, at 3 a.m., 9 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.
TUESDAY, JAN. 22
Living the Pro-Life Mysteries
EWTN, various times
International pro-chastity speaker Barbara McGuigan has a gift for reaching hearts, as you'll discover in her deeply moving miniseries on uniting the rosary and the pro-life cause in your spiritual life. The three parts air today at 3 a.m. (set your VCR), 9:30 a.m. and 5 p.m.
TUESDAY, JAN. 22
The Secret Life of the Brain (Parts I and II) PBS; check local listings for time
This five-part series explains recent discoveries in neuroscience. The first part, “The Baby's Brain: Wider Than the Sky,” points out that less than a month after a baby's conception, his or her brain is growing by 500,000 cells per minute. Tonight's second episode, at 10 p.m., is “The Child's Brain: Syllable from Sound.” The final three parts examine the teenage, adult and aging brain; they air the next three Tuesdays, Jan. 29-Feb. 12, at 9 p.m.
WEDNESDAY, JAN. 23
On Assignment
National Geographic, 11 a.m.
Today's edition of this weekday show covers Antarctic exploration and other topics.
THURSDAY, JAN. 24
Planned Parenthood (Part I)
EWTN, 10 a.m.
In this first episode of a two-part “Abundant Life” program, Johnette Benkovic asks Benedictine Father Matthew Habiger and pro-life researchers Charles Donovan and Jim Sedlak about the history and agenda of Planned Parenthood. This group, heavily taxpayer-funded, still embodies the ideology of its racist, anti-Catholic founder, Margaret Sanger; its abortion centers, often placed in minority areas, kill more than 150,000 American babies every year
FRIDAY, JAN. 25
The Greatest Space Explorer: The Hubble Telescope
The Learning Channel, 9 p.m.
Scientists and astronauts correct the orbiting space telescope's serious initial defects.
SATURDAY, JAN. 26
The Human Edge
National Geographic, 8 p.m.
This week's show studies accident-avoiding “smart cars,” portable defibrillators that bystanders can use to treat heart attack victims and military pilots’ new gravity suits.
Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Christopher West Responds: Christian Nuptiality and Nuptial Christianity DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:Theologians will be unpacking John Paul II's “theology of the body” for centuries. Debates over interpretation are a healthy part of the process. So I welcome Mark Lowery's critique, in a Register oped essay, of my tape series Naked Without Shame (Nov. 25-Dec. 1).
I also thank him for his approach. He generously praises my work and even continues to recommend my tape series, despite the flaws he sees in it.
In brief, Lowery applauds me for “Christianizing sexuality,” yet faults me for “sexualizing Christianity.” While I understand his point, I maintain that I do neither. To “-ize” something implies that you're making it something it's not. John Paul's catechesis itself doesn't “-ize” anything. By reflecting on the words of Christ, the Pope calls sexuality and Christianity to “be what they are.” And at the heart of both, according to John Paul, lies the mystery of nuptial communion.
Naked Without Shame was recorded more than two years ago. In retrospect, I agree that some things I said should have been better nuanced. For example, in stressing the importance of “sex,” I should have emphasized more the broader term “nuptiality.” However, even had I chosen my words more carefully and tempered my use of hyper-bole, it seems Lowery (and many others) would still have trouble with the lens through which John Paul views the universe.
As George Weigel writes in Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II, John Paul “challenges us to think of sexuality as a way to grasp the essence of the human — and, through that, to discern something about the divine” (p. 343). This bold proposal doesn't mean that God is “sexual.” Nor does it mean, as Lowery thinks I imply, that “sexuality is the very foundation of Christianity.”
Christ is the foundation of Christianity! But let's not “de-sexualize” Christ. He came in the flesh as a bridegroom to give his body for his bride. Christ's sexuality — his maleness — is of central importance.
Grace and The Body
Lowery believes I fail to keep “the theology of the body rightly ordered within the hierarchy of truths.” Yet this indicates a common misunderstanding. The Pope's catechesis is not merely one aspect of truth in the overall hierarchy. It's a new lens through which to view the most essential theological and anthropological truths of the faith.
The Trinity is the central theological truth. And our creation as male and female in the Trinity's image is the central anthropological truth. In keeping with what John Paul considers perhaps the most important contribution of Vatican II, the essence of the Pope's project is to demonstrate the organic communion between these divine and human truths. And by virtue of the Incarnation, the body is the tangential point of God and man's communion.
Thus, I couldn't agree more with Lowery that at the foundation of Christian truth “we find the Trinitarian life, dwelling in us as grace, through the Incarnation.” This is “the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God” (Ephesians 3:9). But how is this “hidden plan” revealed? John Paul says that the body, “and it alone,” is capable of revealing God's mystery. This is why he speaks of a theology of the body. The flesh, and the “one flesh” union, reveals the divine mystery (General Audience, Feb. 20, 1980).
Lowery is right: Grace belongs at the foundation of Christian truth. But how is grace communicated to man? Without this, grace remains abstract. John Paul stresses that in creation grace was communicated “through the union of the first man and woman in … marriage.” In redemption this same grace is communicated through “the indissoluble union of Christ with the Church, which … Ephesians presents as the nuptial union of spouses” (Oct. 13, 1982).
St. Paul describes nuptial communion as a “great mystery” because it refers to Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5:31-32). This communion is established in baptism and consummated in the Eucharist, which John Paul describes as “the Sacrament of the Bridegroom and of the Bride.” He even goes so far as to say that “Christ, in instituting the Eucharist … wished to express the relationship between man and woman, between what is ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine.’ It is a relationship willed by God both in the mystery of creation and in the mystery of redemption.”
The Spousal Analogy
When grace is understood in its communication, there's no dichotomy between placing grace and nuptial union at the center of the Christian mystery. What John Paul describes as the “Sacrament of the Bridegroom and of the Bride” is, in fact, the source and summit of our Christian life.
Of course, it's an analogy to speak of the marriage of Christ and the Church. Analogies are always inadequate. Yet John Paul believes the spousal analogy is the least inadequate since “in the very essence of marriage a particle of the mystery is captured” (Aug. 18, 1982).
Hence, the Pope says we're justified in applying the spousal analogy in two directions. Primarily, God reveals the truth about nuptial union (Christian nuptiality). But in some way nuptial union also reveals the truth about God (nuptial Christianity).
It's imperative to realize that the Pope's theology of the body is not just about marriage and sexuality. It's the lens through which he views “God's salvific plan in regard to humanity.” Far from peripheral, the nuptial mystery reveals “the central theme of the whole of revelation, its central reality” (Sept. 8, 1982). It “concerns the entire Bible” (Jan. 13, 1982) and plunges us into “the perspective of the whole Gospel, of the whole teaching, in fact, of the whole mission of Christ” (Dec. 3, 1980).
Some have critically described the Pope's view as “pan-nuptialism.” This might be what Lowery, understandably, is troubled by. After all, this is a novel perspective; as George Weigel observes in Witness to Hope, it “has barely begun to shape the Church's theology, preaching, and religious education. When it does, it will compel a dramatic development of thinking about virtually every major theme in the Creed.”
Hope for the Wounded
Lowery also suggests that I hold out false hope to the sexually wounded. It's “one thing,” he says, “to be faithful to absolute moral norms,” but another “to have a full experience of integral sexuality.” I agree that Naked Without Shame could have more clearly addressed the real difficulties to be faced on the road to healing. Still, it seems Lowery doesn't fully understand what John Paul calls “the ethos of redemption.”
The Pope repeatedly insists that this “new ethos” isn't mere conformity to norms. Instead, it involves an interior transformation of the person “such as to express and realize the value of the body and sex according to the Creator's original plan” (Oct. 22, 1980).
I don't see John Paul describing this as a side-issue that Christians can simply put “on the back burner,” as Lowery proposes. Lowery believes the truth of the body is “not the center of Christian life.” Yet John Paul believes it's “the fundamental element of human existence in the world” (Jan. 16, 1980). In fact, for the Pope, living the truth of the body always means “the rediscovery of the meaning of the whole of existence, the meaning of life” (Oct. 29, 1980). For John Paul, this is what growing in holiness is all about (see Feb. 20, 1980).
It's for freedom that Christ has set us free! Why, then, would anyone, as Lowery suggests, prefer to live with his privations? True healing isn't only a hope for heaven. John Paul also stresses what he calls “the hope of every day” (Jul. 21, 1982).
Few preach the “new ethos.” Few counselors understand it. But don't we empty the cross of its power if we claim that some may be so wounded that true healing is beyond reach? John Paul proclaims that “this is the matter under consideration: the reality of the redemption of Christ. Christ has redeemed us! This means he has given us the possibility of realizing the entire truth of our being” (March 1, 1984).
Mark Lowery once told me that this is one of his favorite quotes from the Pope. But I wonder if he fully understands it. It may seem more “realistic” just to cope with brokenness, but John Paul holds out “another vision of man's possibilities” (Oct. 29, 1980). He believes that experiencing God's original plan for the body is a “task” that Christ gives to everyone, a task that “can be carried out and is really worthy of man” (Nov 12, 1980).
Christopher West writes from Denver.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Christopher West ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Theologizing 'With the Mind of the Church' DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:Little-known outside theological circles, the International Theological Commission, or ITC, is one of the Church's more important and innovative postconciliar institutions. The ITC held its annual week-long plenary meeting Dec. 3-7 in the Vatican, discussing, among other items, the state of theological scholarship on the question of the diaconate, as well as how new medical technologies pose challenges to Catholic teaching about the creation of man.
Raymond J. de Souza, the Register's Rome correspondent, spoke with Dominican Father J. Augustine Di Noia of Washington, D.C., an ITC member, at the conclusion of this year's plenary meeting.
Why the innovation, just after the Second Vatican Council, of creating the International Theological Commission (ITC)?
In the preparation for the council, many thought that the Curia consulted too much the theologians who were in the Roman universities. The Curia had produced the schema that was then rejected by the council fathers, many of whom then concluded that the Curia needed to be in contact with theologians from beyond the ambit of the Roman universities. This was particularly the case for the Germans and the French and, to a lesser extent, the Americans, all of whom wanted to get their voices heard. To put it more positively, the idea was to broaden the theological consultation upon which the Holy See depends to include a more international group.
The early ITCs were made up of famous people — Rahner, Congar, Balthasar.
You would have had gathered in that room the most important conciliar and post-conciliar theologians from all over the world. And according to Ratzinger, there were fireworks, because they didn't always agree, and their disagreements were sharp.
Do you attempt to give the best opinion which you hold, or do you attempt to provide a consensus of current views?
That depends. For example, in the case of the diaconate, which is an important issue, that subcom-mission decided to produce a more or less complete survey of the “state of the question.” So, if it is published, it will be extremely useful for that reason. In that case, the goal was to present the “state of the question” magisterially and theologically. That does not mean that ITC members cannot present their own original thinking on the matter.
Certainly, in “Memory and Reconciliation,” the whole topic was new. The Pope was apologizing, and he proposed this as a central part of the Jubilee celebrations. That, as Cardinal Ratzinger said, was the “existential fact” — the Pope was, in fact, doing this, and it was theologically controversial. The ITC therefore had to think through an issue that had really never been thought through before. I think that the document “Memory and Reconciliation” was one of the most important ITC documents ever produced. At the very least, when it was published, it garnered the most attention. And then the Pope was able to use the ITC work in framing how he offered the Church's requests for forgiveness during that famous liturgy of the Jubilee.
What authority do documents of the ITC have?
In general the magisterium is sparing. Even if the encyclicals are long, the actual doctrinal content is modest because it does not want to co-opt the theological act, which is a more ample enterprise. What authority does an ITC document have, which is part of the theological act? It certainly is not a magisterial document. It represents a theological treatise that expresses a consensus amongst a body of theologians who are faithful to the magisterium. If you think of the old “theological notes,” one of the “notes” was the “common teaching of theologians,” and the ITC certainly is that, with perhaps a little added authority because it is approved by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Is the ITC not an example of the magisterium listening only to those it wishes to listen to? Given that the ITC does not include those who dissent from magisterial teaching, can it be said to be an authentic collaboration with theology?
This is a very good question, but one that emerges from the fragmentation of the theology that has been typical of the last 30 years. Thirty years ago, the question would never have arisen. To be a reputable theologian — academically reputable — was to be one who thought with the mind of the Church. The number about whom that could not be said would have been infinitesimally small. All theologians recognized that one of the pillars of theological reflection is the magisterium. Scripture, tradition and the magisterium define what is the deposit of the faith from which theological reflection is supposed to proceed.
So the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in seeking conversation partners amongst theologians, must by definition seek conversation partners amongst theologians who recognize the magisterium as helping to define what the deposit of the faith is.
For the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to say that it will consult with theologians who dissent on some major topic would legitimate a form of theology that the tradition itself does not legitimate. The question touches on the crisis in theology today. Thirty years ago, everyone understood theology to be fides quaerens intel-lectum [faith seeking understanding].
That does not exclude the possibility that the Church could be interested in what a particular dissenting viewpoint holds. But no organ of the See of Peter could give the same kind of recognition to dissenting theology that it gives to theology that is faithful without shooting itself in the foot.
Practically speaking, all the members of the ITC are well aware of dissenting positions, and they are in dialogue with them in their own work. So, in formulating their research, they are aware of dissenting positions, of course.
What is on the future agenda of the ITC?
For example, the subcommission I work on is dealing with the creation of man. We have a rich tradition in the Church of reflection on what it means for man to be created imago Dei [in the image of God]. But now we have all sorts of new issues in biotechnology, stem cells, cloning and conceptions of the universe that seem to suggest that human beings are insignificant. So what you have here is the effort to bring to bear the tradition on very immediate, pressing problems.
You try to show how a tradition that is alive moves up to the next problem and grasps it.
So it shows you how much the Church depends on theology when there is a sense on the part of theologians that their work is a vocation that is ecclesial.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond J. De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: The Spirituality of Sept. 11 DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:Franciscan Father Benedict J. Groeschel has written a book about the “invisible but very real cross that fell on every innocent person” on Sept. 11. In The Cross at Ground Zero, a book based on meditations recorded for EWTN (The Eternal Word Television Network) shortly after the terrorist attacks, Father Groeschel tackles the questioning about the nature and existence of God that inevitably arises in the wake of such tragedies, as well as the nature of evil and the meaning of suffering.
People ask, “Why would God permit this?” and “Why would anyone do this to innocent civilians?”
For Father Groeschel, a question that should also concern us is “What am I supposed to do in this tragedy?” The resounding answer to that question, for this friar, is for America and the West to turn from the “self-destructive road” it has chosen until now, which is characterized by hedonism, paganism and the corruption of youth.
Much of “The Cross at Ground Zero” is taken up with descriptions of that self-destructive road, both the signposts that should have warned us and the body-strewn highway that it has become. It is a road littered with the flesh of unborn babies and the misappropriated flesh used by the porn industry.
Father Groeschel peppers his descriptions of moral decay with suggestions that the Clinton administration did nothing to prevent the terrorism we experienced last fall. When that administration should have been pursuing those who were behind the first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993, and being vigilant to head off more destruction, Janet Reno's Justice Department was hell-bent on preventing pro-life protests, he says. Father Groeschel describes how he, along with an elderly bishop and a young friar, were arrested for praying the rosary in the driveway of an abortion clinic and how the Justice Department attempted to get stiff fines for two of them.
As compelling as Father Groeschel 's arguments are, however, the book does tend to be taken up with the subject of abortion, and one will be disappointed if looking for comfort. He does suggest, though, that a motivation for terrorism against the United States — and hatred of the country by certain groups of people abroad — is due to the country's export of moral decay.
But, ultimately, Father Groeschel's message is that the cross is there to remind us that Christ is with us as we suffer.
“For me Jesus Christ is the God who suffers,” he writes. “He is the God who is here with us in our sufferings. We must see him in the sufferings of others, of all the world. We must come to his aid as he suffers in all who are broken by sorrow.
“That is why his cross must be seen at the World Trade Center. Even if the mysterious steel cross had never been found there, the invisible cross bringing His suffering presence was there. In suffering humanity Jesus remains on the cross until the end of the world. This is the answer of Christ. It should be the answer that Christians give to all the world.”
The Cross at Ground Zero is a somber book, though the pithy preaching style of Father Groeschel comes through in the text, making the slim volume highly readable. As he assures us, it is not a bad thing to ask of God, “Why?” Christ himself asked that question while dying on the cross. But we need to move on to the next question, “What to do in our suffering?” This book helps us move on, and in the right direction.
John Burger is a Register staff writer.
----- EXCERPT: Weekly Book Pick ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:Happy About Vouchers
Rand found that parents using the vouchers perceive private schools to have superior academic programs and better discipline. The report also backs earlier claims that black students on scholarship at private schools in New York and Washington are performing better than their counterparts in public school.
Trusting God
The American Family Association of Michigan, a group that promotes Christian values, has been asking districts to display posters with the motto over a picture of the American flag.
Results have been mixed. For example, reporter Laura Potts wrote that one district “plans to consider diversity in opinion about whether to display the motto before making a decision.”
Lebanon Dreams
Maronite Rite Father John Trad, 85, served his first priestly assignments at St. Anthony of Padua Parish in Barhalioun in northern Lebanon, helping to build a small school there 56 years ago.
He is now raising funds to put the finishing touches on a new school for the 400-year-old parish. “Lebanon is like an island inside the Muslim world,” said Father Trad. “If Christians lose Lebanon, it means Christians will have lost the land of Christ.”
Kmiec Keeps Ks Coming
INSIDE CUA ONLINE, Jan. 4 — The Catholic University of America Law School's new dead, Douglas W. Kmiec is one of the nation's leading experts on constitutional law. He is a leading legal commentator on television, radio and in newspapers and magazines.
He's also a dad with a penchant for the letter K.
The dean and his wife, Carol, are the parents of five children, all of whose first names begin with “K”: Keenan, Katherine, Kiley, Kolleen and Kloe. “Besides the alliterative ‘K,’ “ he says, “we gave each of our children the name of an ancestor — a family patron as it were — to sustain a continuity with the past. The name, Keenan, for example, which we gave to our firstborn, is my wife's maiden name, and since she was one of nine children, there is now an entire clan looking out for his interests.”
Work-Study
Cristo Rey Jesuit High School for boys, founded in 1996 in a largely Mexican neighborhood with a 65% teen dropout rate, has inspired Silicon Valley venture capitalist B.J. Cassin to fund studies by Catholic educators on the feasibility of employing the Cristo Rey model in five other cities.
Working through a nonprofit company, the Cristo Rey students earn salaries to defer the cost of tuition from financial, insurance, and law firms by working in part-time clerical jobs.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Communication Dos and Don'ts DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:Q My wife tells me we need to communicate more. I agree, but between jobs, kids, schools and Church work, we barely see each other, much less have time to talk. Any suggestions?
A Unfortunately, you're not alone. A recent nationwide survey revealed that the average amount of time married couples spend each day in real conversation is four minutes. You read it correctly: four minutes!
Is it any wonder, then, why so many marriages are falling apart? We simply must do better. Here are a few commonly overlooked ways to maintain a strong marriage relationship:
DON't fall for the myth of “quality time” when it comes to your spouse (or your children). Quantity matters.
Think back to your dating days; you went to incredible lengths simply to be together, whether it was staying up all hours after a long day at work, or driving cross-country for just one romantic day. No way would you have settled for the idea of quality time then; don't settle for it now.
DON't let technology monopolize your evenings. Ban mindless channel and Web surfing. Decide ahead of time the shows you'd like to watch each week, if any, and don't turn on the TV until then. Set a strict time limit for yourself on the computer. No more Internet widows and widowers!
DO schedule a specific time each week for catching up with each other, but don't stop there.
Scheduled communication time works well when you need to resolve a specific issue — how to best handle a disciplinary problem with one of the kids, for example. For some, it works well when it comes to maintaining your marital friendship also.
For others, staring at your spouse for your allotted 30 minutes saying, “Okay, now let's talk!” is forced, at best. It can also be very intimidating for husbands: “What am I supposed to say?” is a typical male response. With time you might get the hang of it.
DO have fun together!
You'd be surprised at the number of couples we've worked with who can't answer the question “What things do you enjoy doing as a couple?” It doesn't have to be anything elaborate like ballroom dancing, but every couple needs to have a common interest, hobby, or service project — something that they can look forward to doing together.
If volunteering for your parish is a priority, then consider choosing ministries in which you can serve together, like teaching children's liturgy, working with engaged couples, or being RCIA sponsors.
We are both movie buffs, so we love to rent DVDs for a date-night in our own living room. We also have a few favorite TV shows we follow. To avoid taking away from family time, we record them. Then on an evening when the kids are asleep, we watch our shows. A small thing, yes, but we both look forward to it.
And why not meet for lunch, talk on the phone during the day, or plan a date-night once a month? These are the little things that keep us close.
Tom and Caroline McDonald are co-directors of the family life office of the Archdiocese of Mobile, Alabama.
Reach Family Matters at familymatters@ncregister.com
----- EXCERPT: Family Matters ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tom and Caroline Mcdonald ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Christian and Human Values DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:EVEN PEOPLE who don't believe, often recognize good human values in Christian practices. In Japan, where only 0.8% of the population is Christian, the percentage of weddings modeled on the Christian style continues to grow.
Wedding Ceremony style in Japan 2001
17.8%
1994
36.6%
----- EXCERPT: Facts of Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Juan Diego, First of the Mexican People DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:MEXICO CITY — Rodolfo Beltran, a Mexican-American from Lemon Grove, Calif., felt pride when he learned that Blessed Juan Diego, a Mexican Indian, will soon be canonized.
“I'm happy. Very happy,” Beltran said, “because he represents all the Mexican people.”
Beltran was responding to Pope John Paul II's Dec. 20 approval of the decree of miracle of Blessed Juan Diego, a layman, husband and father to whom Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared on the mountain of Tepeyac outside what is now Mexico City in the 16th century.
To go from being Blessed Juan Diego to St. Juan Diego, the visionary needed to have a miracle attributed to him. That miracle occurred in Mexico City, May 6, 1990, at the exact time when the Pope was beatifying him.
A marijuana addict named Juan José Barragán Silva, in his early 20s, had stabbed himself in front of his mother and then jumped off a balcony about 32 feet high. As her son was falling, the boy's mother, Esperanza, entrusted him to God and the Virgin of Guadalupe, saying, “Give me a proof … save this son of mine! And you, my Mother, listen to Juan Diego.”
Barragán hit the ground headfirst and was taken to the intensive care unit of Durango Hospital in Mexico City. Three days later, he was suddenly and completely cured, with no neurological or psychic damage remaining. Medical specialists called the cure “unheard of, amazing and inconceivable.”
People everywhere, particularly in Mexico, now wait for the Pope to set the time and place for canonization.
Msgr. José Luis Guerrero Rosado, a canon at the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City, who worked on the commission studying the cause of sainthood of Blessed Juan Diego, told the Register, “I was filled with joy when I heard, because Juan Diego is a hero for the Mexican people. He is like a founder of our nationality. It was Juan Diego who made the reconciliation between the Indians and Spaniards possible. We, the Mexican people are Mestizas, both Indian and Spanish. Juan Diego was the instrument of God who made this possible.”
Msgr. Guerrero plans to attend the canonization ceremony, and admitted he and many others hope the canonization will occur when the Pope visits Canada in July. “Our desire is for the Holy Father to come here to Mexico. Many Mexicans are poor and can't afford to go to Rome, or even to Canada. They are hoping the Holy Father will come to Mexico.”
Most of what we know about Juan Diego comes from a literary document called Huei Tlamahuitzoltica (also called El Nican Mopohua) written in the Aztec language by the native Mexican scholar Atonio Valeriano in the mid-16th century.
According to this text, Juan Diego was born in 1474 in Cuatitlan, a small Indian village 14 miles north of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City). His Indian name was Cuauhtlatoatzin, which means “The eagle who speaks.”
A farmer, landowner and weaver of mats, this humble Indian witnessed the conquest of the capital city of the Aztecs by Cortez in 1521, when he was 47 years old.
As a result of the invasion, in 1524, the first 12 Franciscans arrived in what is now Mexico City.
Cuauhtlatoatzin and his wife welcomed them and responded quickly to the message of salvation through Jesus Christ. The couple were among the first to be baptized — he taking the Christian name of Juan Diego; she, Maria Lucia.
Not much is known about Juan Diego's family life; it is accepted that he was a father, though it is not certain how many children he and his wife had.
In 1529, a few years after their baptism, Maria Lucia became sick and died. Two years later the remarkable and well-known events of Mary's apparition to Juan Diego as Our Lady of Guadalupe took place on Tepeyac hill.
News of Our Lady's apparition spread quickly; and in the seven years that followed, 1532 through 1538, the Indian people accepted the Spaniards and 8 million people were converted to the Catholic faith.
Said Daniel Lynch, director of the Apostolate of the Missionary Image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, “An amazing thing happened. Indians became reconciled to Spaniards. And we had a new race of people. Mixed blood. Mestizos. Our Lady of Guadalupe had appeared as a Mestiza. They call her the dark virgin, the little brown one.”
Did He Ever Exist?
In 1666, at a Church hearing called the Informaciones Guadalupana, Juan Diego was called a holy man, and in 1723 a formal investigation into this life was ordered by Archbishop Lanziego y Equilaz.
On Jan. 9, 1987, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints declared Juan Diego venerable, and Pope John Paul II beatified him May 6, 1990, during a Mass at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, declaring Dec. 9 the feast of Juan Diego and invoking him as “protector and advocate of the indigenous peoples.”
Controversy over the historical authenticity of Juan Diego was stirred in 1996 by Father William Schulenburg, a longtime abbot of the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, who called Juan Diego a mythical character.
The Vatican subsequently established a commission of 30 researchers from various countries to investigate the question. The commission successfully proved that Juan Diego had indeed existed, and the results of their research were presented to the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints on Oct. 28, 1998.
Among research documents submitted at that time were 27 Guadalupe Indian documents.
One called the “Escalada,” coauthored by Valeriano and Franciscan Friar Bernardino de Sahagun, contained a death certificate of Juan Diego.
Was He a Noble?
Another controversy arose recently over whether Juan Diego was poor. Said Daniel Lynch, “Though oral tradition has it that Juan Diego was poor, new information says he was noble. Translations of the Nican Mopohua, use the word poor, but some say that might mean poor in spirit. There are other reports out there that he was a prince and had a concubine, but no Church documents support that.”
Lynch puts this latest controversy into perspective, “Whether he was poor or noble is not important. That's just something people talk about in academia. Saints are saints because of their virtues. Juan Diego is a saint because he imitated Our Lady's virtues of faith, hope, love, poverty chastity, obedience and humility.”
Gloria Vincon, from St. Charles Church in San Diego, agrees.
Born in Guadalajara, she recalls: “Ever since I was a little girl, I learned the history of Juan Diego. All my life I have been close to him. When I heard that he was going to be canonized I was so pleased.
“I don't care about the controversy. To me, he not only represents the Indians and the Hispanic generation, but he also represents humility, obedience and patience.”
Mary Ann Sullivan is based in New Durham, New Hampshire.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: The Apparitions of Tepeyac Hill DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:Juan Diego, a pious man and a widower, was prone to long periods of silence.
He walked every Saturday and Sunday to church, and on cold mornings, like other members of his Indian tribe, wore a woven cloth called a tilma, as a mantle.
On Saturday morning, Dec. 9, 1531, as he was walking to church, he heard the sound of birds singing on Tepeyac hill and someone calling his name. He ran up the hill, and saw Our Lady, dressed like an Aztec princess.
Our Lady spoke to him in Nahuatl, his native tongue. She called him “Xocoyte,” her little son. He responded by calling her “Xocoyata,” his littlest daughter.
Mary asked Juan Diego to tell the bishop of Mexico, a Franciscan named Juan de Zumárraga, that she wanted a “teocalli,” a sacred little house, to be built on the spot where she stood.
Juan Diego obeyed the Virgin, and went immediately to the bishop's palace, but the bishop was doubtful and told Juan Diego he needed a sign.
Juan Diego returned to Tepeyac hill and explained to the Virgin that the bishop did not believe him.
He implored Our Lady to use another messenger, insisting he was not worthy. Mary insisted he return to the bishop.
On Sunday, Juan Diego did as Our Lady directed, but again the bishop asked for a sign. Later that day, the Virgin promised Juan Deigo she would give him a sign the following day.
Returning home that night to his Uncle Juan Bernadino's house, Juan Diego discovered his uncle seriously ill.
The next morning, Juan Diego decided not to meet with Our Lady, but to find a priest who could administer the last rites to his dying uncle. When he tried to skirt Tepeyac hill, Mary stopped him, assured him his uncle would not die, and asked him to climb the hill and gather flowers. It was December, and very cold; nevertheless, Juan Diego found an abundant number of roses, collected them into his tilma and brought them to the bishop's palace, at the Virgin's request.
When Juan Diego unfolded his tilma in the presence of the bishop the rare roses scattered on the floor and an image of Our Lady appeared miraculously on the humble Indian's garment.
Yet another sign occurred that day. As Our Lady promised, Juan Diego's uncle was cured.
Within two weeks, the bishop erected a small chapel on the spot where Our Lady appeared, entrusting the image to Juan Diego, who chose to live, until his death — on May 30, 1548 — in a small hermitage near the spot where Mary appeared to him.
— Mary Ann Sullivan
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: 'Vote Life America' Hopes to Mobilize Faithful DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:CHICAGO — After numerous pro-life bills were defeated in the last Illinois legislative session, Arlene Sawicki, chair of family concerns for the Chicago Archdiocesan Council of Catholic Women, said she was ready to throw in the towel.
Instead, she and Catholic pro-lifer Jim Finnegan decided to organize Vote Life America, an ad hoc interdenominational lay coalition. The organization is publicly challenging Catholic and other Christian pro-abortion legislators whom they feel are betraying their Christian principles — and in the case of Republicans, betraying the pro-life planks of their party's platform.
Their strategy is to peacefully and prayerfully demonstrate at legislators’ offices and distribute “report cards” within their districts and at area churches. The report cards detail the legislators’ abortion positions and list their voting records.
Vote Life America is targeting 15 legislators, notifying them in advance when demonstrations happen. They plan to use nongraphic signage as well as graphic pictures of abortion when they picket, because, Sawicki said, many of these legislators have never seen an aborted baby. “Instead they deal with sanitized rhetoric and high-sounding feminist political agendas,” she said.
Sawicki, a mother and grandmother, said she has always been pro-life, but has been most active in the last 10 years. She has served on the board of the Illinois Federation of Right to Life and she joined the newly formed coalition on Abortion/Breast-Cancer Link as vice president, extending her concern to pro-life efforts and to women who have had abortions.
She also worked with the pro-life efforts of the Archdiocese of Chicago. Mary Fiorito, vice chancellor for the archdiocese, told the Register, “Arlene was one of the most involved and committed parish pro-life coordinators in the Archdiocese of Chicago. She could be counted on for any task, large or small, and was always willing to give of her time and talent.”
Sawicki said that 10 or 15 years ago she had nothing but anger toward pro-abortion politicians, and that it took years to overcome her feelings. “It takes time to approach things with love in your heart,” she said.
Sawicki hopes pro-lifers will join her new organization's political demonstrations and contact their legislators on the issues.
Vote Life America plans to organize a legislative-alert information link between various diocesan councils. They want to correct the current situation in which information does not get out in a timely manner.
Sawicki says more pro-life messages need to come from the pulpit as well, but even that is not enough. “I think it comes down to the constituency. It has to take people in the pews, pressure from the folks that are voting for these pro-aborts. We thought after the partial-birth abortion graphics came out that all Catholics would join us, and yet they haven't.”
Jill Stanek, an evangelical who serves on the Vote Life America planning committee, is frustrated with other Christian denominations as well. Stanek was the nurse who helped expose Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Ill., for its approach to abortion, in which babies born alive were left to die. The news made international headlines and prompted state Sen. Patrick O‘Malley to introduce the Illinois Born-Alive Infants Protection Act. The bill was killed in a House committee after being passed in the state Senate.
During the legislative process, Stanek was appalled at how legislators twisted language and even switched their votes. She felt it was time they paid, and she believes Vote Life America is a good solution.
“Legislators need to know that people are not going to forget when they don't vote for life,” she said. “[The Born-Alive] bill simply said that this baby is a human life and has all rights and protection under the law. They've got abortion up to the end of the birth canal, and now they want it even after the baby is born.”
Misleading the Voters
Candidates who claim to be pro-life, but are not, particularly disturb Stanek. One example, she said, is Rep. Maggie Crotty a Democrat and a Catholic, who recently came out as pro-choice after misleading the district on her positions, according to Vote Life America. The organization's report card indicates that Crotty was elected in 1996 by promising constituents she would support a partial-birth abortion ban and support parental notification, but she voted otherwise.
Her office was the first to be picketed, Oct. 27. In response to the demonstration, Crotty told the Sunday Southtown newspaper that she never claimed she was pro-abortion.
“I'm pro-choice. I can't make everyone happy all the time.” (Crotty did not respond to calls from the Register).
Representative Rosemary Kurtz is also on Vote Life America's target list. A Republican Catholic who represents Sawicki's own district, Kurtz defeated pro-life Rep. Cal Skinner in the 2000 election. When pressed about her abortion position, Kurtz said she was “pro-adoption,” and that “she was for life.”
“I couldn't stand being called pro-abortion. I'm for life, but when it comes to labeling me in government, I don't want to be labeled, period,” Kurtz said.
During her campaign, Kurtz received thousands of dollars from Personal PAC, a bipartisan political action committee dedicated to electing pro-choice candidates to Illinois state and local offices. According to its Web site, www.personalpac.org, “Pro-choice Rosemary Kurtz, who defeated anti-choice leader Cal Skinner in the March primary, went on to win the general election and will be an additional pro-choice legislator in the House.”
Sawicki said Kurtz's voting record shows a pro-abortion, anti-family position. She voted against the parental notification bill because it would not allow a teenager to notify a relative or clergyperson instead of a parent.
Sawicki said that such language would have created a “hole in the bill as big as a Mack truck,” defeating its purpose.
Kurtz also voted for a bill that would have required hospitals, including Catholic hospitals, to inform rape victims about availability of post-rape abortifacients.
Kurtz believes it is up to the churches to do something about abortion and that it doesn't belong in government. “There's a division. Render unto God the things that are God's and unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's,” she said. “I don't know any Republicans who even think about this. There are so many other things that we're responsible for — funding for the poor, the elderly, plus transportation. It's just endless, and [it's a mistake] to add one more thing to our plate. So that's the way I feel about it.”
Sawicki responded that it's too late to use that “tired, inane spin.” She said, “The self-endowed imperialism of the United States Supreme Court in the Roe decision not only usurped states’ rights to legislate abortion, but assaulted the very foundation of America's constitutional right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The primary duty of our government is to protect, not legalize the killing of the unborn.”
Sawicki hopes Vote Life America will mobilize more people because the “old reliables” can't be counted on forever, she said. “How do you get people interested in this? How do you get the youth involved; the faithful pro-life pew Catholics to at least call their legislators? If someone has a prescription for how to do this effectively with Catholics, I'd like to hear it.”
Barb Ernster writes from Fridley, Minnesota.
----- EXCERPT: ProLife ProFile ----- EXTENDED BODY: Barb Ernster ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Life Notes DATE: 01/20/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 20-26, 2002 ----- BODY:Preventing Teen Pregnancy
Professor Stammers, a tutor in General Practice at St. George's Hospital Medical School in London, quotes studies saying: “Young people aged 14-17 who live in a two-parent family are less likely to have ever had sexual intercourse than young people living in any other family arrangement.”
Ban on Fetal Tissue Research?
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Jan. 7 — A proposed ban on the use of fetal tissue from aborted babies in research at state institutions in Nebraska promises to cause rancor in the upcoming legislative session.
A pre-session survey of state senators shows that the bill sponsored by Sen. Dwite Pedersen of Elkhorn would likely pass — provided it gets to a vote. Of the 48 senators who responded, 28 were against the practice and three were leaning toward opposition. Five did not respond to the question.
Gov. Mike Johanns, a devout Catholic, has promised to sign the ban if it is passed by the Legislature.
Michigan End-of-Life Care
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Jan. 3 — Michigan Gov. John Engler signed legislation intended to help people as they approach death by improving pain management and offering hospice alternatives.
Pro-life groups hope the measure will help provide positive, life-affirming alternatives to assisted suicide. Much of the legislation is designed to encourage people to tell their families how they want to be treated as they near death.
Pregnancy Center's Surprise
The center offers assistance to women or couples who are pregnant or have just had a child.
The center has been in the same location for more than three years, but the nonprofit group had been leasing the property from Oldham and his company. When it came time to renew the lease this year, he decided to donate the property and building to the group.
Ban on ‘Morning-After Pill’
LIFESITE DAILY NEWS, Jan. 4 — The Bureau of Food and Drugs of the Philippines recently de-listed the so-called morning-after pill, Levonorgestrel (750 mcg.), from its registry of drug products and directed the recall of all existing stocks in the country after finding that it is an abortive drug.
The order, issued Dec. 7, also prohibited further importation of the drug.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Why Catholics Are Cutting-Edge on Bioethics DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:BOSTON — On Jan. 16, President Bush named the members of his new President's Council on Bioethics, seeking advice on cloning and other troubling biotechnology innovations such as manipulations of the human genome that potentially could allow mankind to direct its own evolution.
But a Vatican document released 15 years ago had already announced that cloning is contrary to the moral law. The Vatican instruction Donum Vitae (The Gift of Life), the reply of the Congregation of the Doctrine for the Faith to questions about the morality of certain biomedical techniques having to do with reproduction, said that cloning was opposed to the dignity of human procreation and the conjugal union.
That the Church was pronouncing on such a subject at such a time is astonishing.
In 1987, cloning of humans still had something of the air of science fiction, but the Church was already looking seriously at the possibility that it would one day take place. The Church today is already examining even newer biotechnology developments in light of the timeless moral law.
How has the Church managed to get on top — and stay on top — of such a complex field?
“The Church feels an obligation to point out the direction that Catholics ought to follow,” said Dr. Edmund Pellegrino, professor of medicine and medical ethics at Georgetown University Medical Center. “The Church's stance is, ‘Simply because we can do a thing, must we?’”
“You could say the Roman Catholic Church invented the field,” said Franciscan Brother Daniel Sulmasy, a physician and ethicist at St. Vincent's Medical Center in New York. “As the technology began to take off in the 1950s, people brought questions to the clergy. There was already a well-developed structure to look at questions.”
Pope Pius XII, who wrote about artificial respiration in 1957, “probably deserves the lion's share of the credit for putting the Church in the forefront of bioethics,” said Conventual Franciscan Father Germain Kopaczynski, director of education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Boston. “Some of his works are still being used by Catholic moralists as the gold standard.”
The National Catholic Bioethics Center has been advising the U.S. bishops for almost 30 years on medical and biotechnological ethics. Founded by the Catholic Health Association (then known as the Catholic Hospital Association) and “a few forward-looking bishops,” said Father Kopaczynski, the center at first was intended to advise the health association. “They saw this as such a fast-moving field and felt the Church has to be aware of these issues.”
Officials at the Hospital Association were “concerned about advances in biotechnology they felt had not been investigated by the Church thoroughly,” said Dominican Father Albert Moraczewski, the first president of the center. “We were set up to respond to developments in medicine and biotechnology, apply Church teaching to those new developments and contribute to the process of developing Church teaching where it was needed.”
The center had to address questions about new contraceptive devices, fetal experimentation, life-sustaining procedures, health care and cost containment and “what we mean by health care as a right,” said Father Moraczewski, a pharmacolo-gist by training who is now a senior consultant to the center. “We tried to look at where the medicine and the medical research was going and at new technological developments with an impact on patients and patient care.”
Recently, bishops have asked for the center's input on revising the U.S. bishops’ Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services and for advice on hospital mergers. The center holds regular workshops for bishops, bringing them up to speed on the issues. Leon Kass, chairman of President Bush's Council on Bioethics, was a recent speaker.
“We're the principal place to which they turn in the United States and beyond,” said John Haas, the center's president. “The majority of the bishops in the U.S. are members.”
Meanwhile, the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University in Rome has established the first ever school of bioethics in the world offering bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees — and attracted 100 students, twice as many as expected.
Elsewhere, bioethics has developed as a secular discipline. In 1974, a federal commission was convened to respond to reports of research abuses in medicines, non-consenting persons being subjected to government-sponsored medical experiments and aborted fetuses being used for medical investigation. Another concern was how elderly lives were being prolonged by machines, consuming scarce medical resources.
The panel issued the Belmont Report, outlining three ethical principles that the government could use in resolving such dilemmas: “beneficence,” justice, and absolute respect for the individual.
Dianne Irving, who teaches philosophy at The Catholic University of America, has written critically about these principles, which have become the foundation of secular bioethics. Irving, a former lab researcher at the National Institutes of Health, pointed out that the principles fall short of or are contradictory to traditional medical ethics espoused by the Church.
They also contradict each other, Irving argued. Beneficence, for example, is defined both as the traditional dictate of doing good for the patient but also as doing good for society, a potential conflict.
Justice, meanwhile, is defined in the utilitarian terms as distribution of risks and benefits of research across the social spectrum rather than focusing simply on just treatment for every person. The principle also urges that all citizens take part in experimental research.
The third principle, calling for “absolute respect” for the individual, is blurred with John Stuart Mills’ utilitarian views of personal autonomy, Irving said. Non-autonomous persons are excluded from the community of persons accorded full rights, a definition that puts unborn babies, comatose persons and the retarded at risk.
Secular bioethics is also based on false science, Irving said. It commonly assumes that pregnancy begins at implantation, not fertilization — even though many doctors and scientists point out that every human person has a complete and unchanging genetic nature from the moment of conception onward. Distinctions made between an embryo and a so-called pre-embryo, and the concepts of a mind-body split and delayed personhood, have allowed secular bioethics to approve of destruction of an early embryo to harvest its stem cells, the use of abortifacient contraceptives, the so-called morning-after pill and “emergency contraception.”
Said Irving, “Secular bioethicists would conclude that abortion, the use of abortifacients and cloning are ethical and sometimes morally required.”
Countering the Culture
Countering the trend are the encyclicals of Pope John Paul II, many of which touch on bioethical concerns, and the instruction Donum Vitae. They are based on “correct anthropology,” Irving said, and, like Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae (On Human Life) warn man about “the loss of our humanity with this technology.”
“The Church has always pointed to the anthropological, larger issues and defined who man is — someone with one composite being, body and soul, with a rational nature,” she said.
Jesuit Father Kevin FitzGerald of Georgetown University agreed that the Catholic understanding is competing with a utilitarian bioethics that has a more social emphasis, and with a libertarian, marketplace ethos that holds that one should be able to do what one wants to do. The latter philosophy, he said, is particularly apparent in the reproductive area.
The predominant attitude in society today is the utilitarian one, adds Father Moraczewski, as evidenced in the drive to use embryos frozen after in vitro fertilization procedures for stem-cell research. If they are not used, advocates argue, they will go to “waste.”
The Church's concern about in vitro naturally led to a concern about embryo research. When the National Institutes of Health started studying embryo research in 1994, it caught the interest of Richard Doerflinger, associate director for policy development for the Pro-Life Secretariat of the U.S. bishops. He was appalled at what he was hearing during an NIH panel's meetings and wrote about it for a pro-life newsletter.
“So when the stem cell issue came up, people started looking to us for background,” said Doerflinger, who has a background in bioethics and is an adjunct member of the National Catholic Bioethics Center.
Doerflinger said that the stem-cell debate has at least had the good effect of leading some people to question in vitro fertilization, which has become more and more accepted in spite of the Church's pronouncement that it is immoral. Even among non-Catholics, IVF is being called into question because it involves creating more embryos than can be used, leaving the moral dilemma of whether to destroy the “surplus” or store them indefinitely.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Disney at 100: Not Quite So Wonderful? DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:HOLLYWOOD — Parents anxious to introduce their children to the Disney classics they remember fondly from their own formative years may be in for a surprise when they buy or rent home videos of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Before each classic feature, the video shows an array of previews for more recent Disney offerings which some parents do not want their children to see —Pocahontas and Hercules — because the movies have been accused of inappropriately sexualized characters and post-Christian religion.
For parents and social critics, the videos are an explicit example of how Walt Disney Co. uses its venerable reputation for wholesome family entertainment to promote works that diverge in key areas from that legacy.
This year, the company is invoking its past more forcefully, with celebrations centered around the centennial of the birth of its founder, Walt Disney, which began Dec. 5. (The animation innovator and media giant died in 1966.) The celebrations, called “100 Years of Magic,” are taking place at Disney theme parks as well as through Disney stores and marketing efforts featuring Mickey Mouse's magician's cap as a familiar icon.
In the eyes of many, though, Disney has strayed far from the innocent antics of the world's most popular mouse.
Though the media giant continues to offer some quality pro-family productions on its television channel and in animated films, its promotion of “Gay and Lesbian Day” at Disney World and widely criticized productions by its affiliates ABC-TV and Miramax studios have resulted in boycotts from religious groups and “hate-Disney” Web sites supported by parents’ groups.
The irony is clear: In the mixed bag that is today's Disney empire, the celebration of its founder's birth is promoting themes and values that Walt Disney himself would not have approved.
Former ABC executive (and now Disney president) Bob Iger has cited the cancellation of the trashy talk show Jenny Jones and the avoidance of voyeuristic reality shows as signs that the association with Disney has cleaned up the network. And in a Fortune magazine interview, Eisner claimed that he makes sure shows are “ethical, moral, and creatively of the highest quality.”
“The Disney Channel is good in the morning, with lots of things for preschoolers to learn,” said Kathleen Mylott, a Catholic mother of a 3-year-old daughter in New York. “In the afternoon, the programs for the kids coming home from school can be treacherous. They get into pagan mysticism and New Age spirituality, and send a message that this is the new cultural belief system. I will not turn on the Disney Channel in the afternoon.”
She said even the classic Disney movies have drawbacks, such as some violent scenes, but she and her husband like them because “good triumphs over evil and they reinforce traditional values of family, loyalty, marriage and the sacredness of life.”
James Bowman, a movie critic who has written extensively on Disney, which he calls the “evil empire,” said that recent Disney offerings depict as good the breaking of traditions and familial relationships.
In the studio's treatments of Beauty and the Beast, Pocahontas and Hercules, he said, “you see parable, history and legend, which all have established meanings, simply bulldozed away to make room for the Disney formula story of young innocent with comic animal sidekicks winning out over a foolish and overbearing adult world. This treatment positively precludes the possibility of mystery, learning, wisdom or growth and panders to the popular culture's sense of itself as the only thing that matters.”
Critics focus attention on chief executive officer Michael Eisner for the moral ills at Disney. Among his biggest deals was a merger with ABC, which, like all the major TV networks, airs sexually charged prime-time fare as well as “Politically Incorrect” host Bill Maher, who regularly offends Catholics and other religious believers.
Not only religious-minded parents or conservative critics have a beef with Disney. A New York Times editorial on the founder's centennial laid America's world of commercialization at Walt Disney's door, noting that when Snow White was released in 1937, it was the first film to have a complete line of merchandise to go with it. “We've been living in Walt's world ever since,” the editorial stated.
The extent of Disney's cultural reach was summed up by Time magazine, which named him among the most influential men of the century in two categories, “Artists and Entertainers” and “Builders and Titans.”
The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, which in 1995 was the first group to call for a Disney boycott, has had a number of run-ins with the company and its affiliates. The most notable was over ABC's prime-time show “Nothing Sacred.” Featuring a radical, inner-city priest, the show tended to undermine the Church's teaching on the priesthood, the sacraments, abortion and women's ordination. League president William Donohue led a successful drive for advertisers to withdraw from the show, and it was canceled after a short run and poor ratings.
Donohue also led a campaign against Miramax's Priest, a movie depicting priests who are maladjusted, sexually frustrated or homosexual. Donohue had occasion, however, to congratulate Disney for withdrawing support from the wildly anti-Catholic movie Dogma.
The Southern Baptist Convention and other smaller religious groups also have a longstanding boycott of all Disney products and media productions, citing promotion of homosexuality, graphic sexual scenes in Miramax movies and the glamorizing of teen violence.
Disney's Deafness
Yet the Disney empire seems to be deaf to its critics and immersed in self-congratulation. The media conglomerate's centennial Web site proclaims, “One hundred years ago, Walt Disney was born. And the world was changed forever.” A chronology of events gives the impression that American culture begins and ends with Disney.
Responding to the Register's request for comment in reply to specific criticisms of Disney, company spokesman Ken Green faxed a two-page letter which lauded Disney's box office hits, theme parks and other marketing successes — some of which have generated the very criticisms that he was asked to address.
The letter concluded, “We will continue to do the best we can. We hope that the good we do will continue to exceed any objections people may have to our offerings along the way, and we hope we can continue to coexist in a world where we can be patient with one another.”
Perhaps only economic pressure will be effective, which is the purpose of the boycotts. Indications that something is wrong in the Magic Kingdom are given by company projections for a 50% reduction in revenues for the first quarter of this year. Neil Munro, a contributor to National Review Online, said that the recent animation film Monsters Inc. offers hope that Disney “will produce some good stuff along with all the schlock.” The movie presents right and wrong, a fight against greed, the triumph of good and “personal redemption by innocence,” Munro said.
Severe pressure must be placed on Disney to invest more in these kind of productions, Munro added: “There must be a constant demand for more from consumers and corporations; a demand for more than just profits.”
Brian Caulfield writes from New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian Caulfield ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Congolese Refugees Return to Ruined City DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Though the earth still trembled and redhot magma continued to belch out of an ominous new volcanic fissure, thousands of refugees began pouring back into the destroyed city of Goma, Congo, on Jan. 19, ignoring warnings from disaster relief experts that rumbling Mount Nyiragongo could erupt again at any moment.
Long columns of exhausted refugees, most with a few meager possessions bundled on their heads, were leaving the relative safety of neighboring Rwanda and trudging across cooling lava flows to their devastated homes, aid workers said.
The chaotic return of refugees to the Congo would complicate the humanitarian relief effort in the region, experts said, because the 300,000 to 400,000 people left homeless and hungry by Jan. 17's eruption would have been easier fed in organized camps inside Rwanda.
The return of the refugees also underlined the political tensions between the two countries. Rwanda is deeply distrusted by many ordinary Congolese because of its involvement in Congo's long civil war. Goma was the headquarters of a Rwanda-backed rebel movement in the conflict, and the city's sudden obliteration by lava flows may throw the future of the unpopular rebels in doubt.
“Clearly, it would be better if the refugees stayed in Rwanda, but they want to go home,” said Eirik Trondsem, an emergency coordinator for the humanitarian group CARE in Kigali, the Rwandan capital.
“We don't feel it is safe to go back yet,” Trondsem said. “The volcano is still active and gases coming out of Lake Kivu.”
John Paul II appealed for aid to the residents of Goma Jan. 19. After praying the Angelus with pilgrims at midday Jan. 19, the Pope appealed to his listeners not “to be lacking in assistance to all those who suffer because of this great calamity.”
Relief teams in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo are preparing to receive close to 160,000 refugees fleeing from the area of the Mount Nyiragongo volcano.
The Catholic bishop of Goma was found in a coma a few days later his residence.
Bishop Faustin Ngabu, born in 1935, “was found this morning in a state of coma caused, perhaps, by an emanation of gas,” reported a nun who works with the bishop.
The bishop's home, located near the Goma airport, was just a few meters from the river of lava that devastated the city. The bishop chose to stay at home to prevent looting, the nun said.
“It is a tragedy that was predicted,” a Goma Xaverian missionary, Father Silvio Turazzi, said of the eruption. “Many volcanologists had suggested bombing Nyiarogongo's principal crater, because the lava had no natural outlets. Last week there were strong earth tremors, unmistakable sign of the increase of pressure.”
Noting the fleeing masses, Father Turazzi said: “This exodus reminds me of four years ago, when tens of thousands of Rwandans passed through Goma, fleeing from the fighting in the east of the Congo. It is sad to think that this tragedy comes at a time of relative ‘tranquility’ for the border city.”
The tragedy comes on the heels of 10 years of war by the Rwanda-backed Congolese Rally for Democracy (CRD), which opposes the central government of the Congo. In recent months, CRD has tried to dialogue with young President Joseph Kabila, despite Rwanda's disapproval.
The missionary, Father Turazzi, added: “My appeal is to the international community and all those who love the Congo. These people, who have now lost everything, must be helped, and Goma needs help to develop. The city must be reconstructed in a safer area, farther away from the volcano and the border.”
Goma, once a quaint port city built during Belgian colonial rule in the Congo, sprawls along the shore of Lake Kivu. A lava flow more than 150 feet wide has burned though the city, spilling into the lake in a cloud of sulfurous steam.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Paul Salopek ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: New Marriage Preparation Norms Get Old-Style Results DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:DENVER — For Catholics, the latest major study on American divorce trends is at least as alarming as its contemporary predecessors: 45% to 50% of all Catholic marriages end in divorce, the same rate as non-Catholic marriages, says a study by Rutgers University released last June.
But Steve Weidenkopf believes this trend can be reversed — through better preparation for Catholics considering marriage.
As director of marriage and family planning for the Archdiocese of Denver, Weidenkopf participates directly in what he describes as a growing trend among bishops and archbishops to revise and improve norms for couples seeking marriage in the Church.
In Denver, couples have traditionally spent about six months preparing to wed in the Church. However, new norms that took effect in December 2000 increased the time span for marriage preparation to eight to 12 months in order to give couples more contemplation time and to facilitate requirements for more time in the classroom.
Archbishop Charles Chaput replaced a system that was largely determined by individual pastors with one that includes specific course work, counseling and intense natural family planning curriculum.
The Diocese of Alexandria, Va., has started an almost identical program, as has the Archdiocese of Portland, Ore. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has a list of minimum norms that all bishops are supposed to require—including a minimum six-month preparation period. However, says Weidenkopf, many bishops hope to exceed those norms.
“I think we'll see less divorce among Catholics,” Weidenkopf says. “People going through more rigorous preparation are more likely to weather all that can happen in a marriage. They're also more likely to know, by the end of this process, whether they have indeed found the person who they are called to spend a lifetime with. Whether this reduces divorce for sure? Well, we'll know a lot better 15 to 20 years from now.”
In many dioceses, marriage preparation consists of three basic components:
1. Couples must attend a course that focuses on God's plan for a joy-filled marriage. It's offered as one allday course on a Saturday, or as two three-hour courses during the week.
2. Couples must receive life skills training, which gives them specific, detailed information about how to pay bills on time, how to maintain a household, how to parent children, divvy up responsibilities, and other integral aspects of day-to-day family life. The life skills requirement can be fulfilled by counseling with a priest or deacon, with an approved mentor couple, or by attending an Engagement Encounter or Marriage Preparation weekend at a parish in the diocese.
3. Couples must take four natural family planning courses over four months.
Joe Stong, who will be married this July in Lansing, Mich., said he's grateful for all the added marriage preparation.
“Ignorance is not bliss for those in love,” he said. “The more you do to know your beloved and the more you do to learn about your future life together, the better.”
His own marriage preparation instructor warned couples seriously about what could happen he said. “all this sent a chill down the spines of those present. We bristled and looked nervously at our fiancés,” he said. “If you rush into it, you'll probably rush out of it. The more serious your preparation the more chance a couple has of beating the odds.”
Weidenkopf acknowledged there has been some grumbling about Denver's new standards, but not much. And those who don't want to put in the time and effort, he added, are simply unwilling to grasp how seriously the Church views the sacrament of marriage. In those situations, he said, there should be no Catholic wedding.
“Most people who complain about the ‘hoops,’ a term we hear frequently, are told that this is in place because they need to have a strong relationship with Christ before entering into marriage, and we tell them that this is what we want for them,” Weidenkopf said. “Most couples really understand that. They go from thinking this is just to satisfy some red tape that was invented by priests at the Vatican who want to trip up young couples, to realizing that it's about helping them with a successful marriage. They want that.”
Added Weidenkopf, “People getting married today grew up in the culture of divorce. If their parents didn't divorce, their friend's parents probably did. They don't want that. They want things to improve.”
Surprisingly, some of the most vocal opposition to rigorous marriage prep requirements comes from devout cradle Catholics, Weidenkopf reported.
“I generally get a better initial response from non-Catholics,” he said “They don't necessarily always agree with everything we're teaching, but they tend to get a better understanding of the teachings and therefore a better understanding of their fiancé's faith. They're thankful for that.
“We're more likely to get negative feedback from the Catholic who went through 12 years of Catholic school, and then went through a Catholic university. That person tends to think all this preparation is not necessary, because they think they know all of this. I tell them ‘you've never heard most of this.’ That's because the Church has done a poor job catechizing and educating the faithful on sex and marriage and family. You can spend your whole life as a faithful Catholic and never hear the Church's teaching on sex, marriage and family preached from the pulpit. And unless you attended about one of five Catholic universities I know of that teach this, you didn't hear it at your Catholic university, either.”
The issue of contraception in marriage, says Weidenkopf, provides evidence that even many of the most devout cradle Catholics do not understand the Church's teachings on sex and marriage. It's not uncommon, he says, for a Catholic preparing for marriage to think it's OK to use contraception in marriage.
“They may know through movies and TV that the Catholic Church frowns upon contraception,” he said. “But they don't have any idea why, and for that reason they don't take it seriously. Once they know why the Church disapproves of contraception, they have a whole different attitude and a higher level of respect.”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church emphasizes that artificial contraception, by reducing the sexual act to a selfish quest for pleasure, profoundly injures the capacity for mutual giving between spouses. Quoting from Pope John Paul II's 1981 apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio(On the Christian Family), the Catechism states, “Thus the innate language that expresses the total reciprocal self-giving of husband and wife is over-laid, through contraception, by an objectively contradictory language, namely that of not giving oneself totally to the other. This leads not only to a positive refusal to be open to life but also to a falsification of the inner truth of conjugal love, which is called upon to give itself in personal totality (No. 2370).
In contrast, natural family planning, which requires both spouses to be fully conscious of each other's biology and emotional needs, enhances spousal love. States the Catechism, “These methods respect the bodies of the spouses, encourage tenderness between them, and favor the education of an authentic freedom” (No. 2370).
The Cohabitation Trap
Father James Hudgins, parochial vicar at Queen of the Apostles Catholic Church in Alexandria, Va., said today's young couples come into marriage preparation with alarming misconceptions about marriage.
“Many of them see marriage as a rite of passage, rather than a sacrament,” Father Hudgins said. “Their focus seems to be more on the wedding day than on a life together. We work to help them view marriage as their lifelong vocation.”
Pre-marital cohabitation is the biggest hurdle Father Hudgins faces in getting some couples to respect the marriage preparation norms.
“Too many parishes today don't address this, but we take it head on,” Father Hudgins said. “After I learn about a couple living together, I tell them it's harmful to their future marriage and that statistically they will have a greater chance for divorce.”
“They start out thinking that cohabitation is something offensive to me, or the Pope,” Father Hudgins continued. “I try to show them that it's not about me, or the Pope, but rather their future lives together. I show them how they're only hurting each other, and that gets a pretty good response.”
While Weidenkopf believes the revised marriage norms provide a wonderful tool for engaged couples, he says prayer will be essential if Catholic divorce statistics are to drop in the future.
“When you give people the gift of freedom that comes with truth, and then you pray that they respond to it and live it, then we'll start to see the fruits,” Weidenkopf said. “But if we don't preach it, our future married couples will do what society tells them to do, not what the Church tells them to do. Society will tell them that if the marriage is not going well, simply divorce and find someone else.”
Concluded Weidenkopf, “Society is full of deceptive, quick fixes. The Catholic Church is not.”
Wayne Laugesen writes from Boulder, Colorado.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Wayne Laugesen ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: She Prayed for Wisdom and Got Sight DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:After 30 years of blindness, national disability advocate Mary Jane Owen recently regained vision in her right eye.
A former social worker, professor and artist, she serves as executive director with the National Catholic Office for Persons with Disabilities and speaks on pro-life issues. She spoke recently with Register features correspondent Tim Drake.
How does a Methodist minister's child become Catholic?
My parents were both Methodist ministers. My father died when I was 7 years old, and then my mother filled in as pastor.
I was born in Evanston, Ill., and have one sister who is four years, and one week, younger. I spent all of my summers in Chicago with my grandmother. The family next door included a number of children I played with and I was extremely envious of them. They seemed to have so much fun. As a P.K. [preacher's kid], I was expected to be perfect. Yet, in my heart of hearts I knew I wasn't and I liked the idea of confession and forgiveness. That really appealed to me. The inside of Catholic churches seemed so beautiful and interesting. I wanted to be Catholic too.
Yet, I waited to convert. After my mother quit pastoring she became a school administrator and married an Anglican priest. I wanted to convert for years but he did not want me to do that. I continued to attend Catholic churches, although I was not Catholic. I particularly recall attending a Catholic Church in Aspen, Colo., on Christmas Eve in 1953. I didn't take communion but I knew I was at home. Out of respect I waited to convert until my stepfather died in 1985.
When did you lose your vision?
I lost my eyesight in 1972 while I was teaching at the San Francisco State University.
One- third of the women in my mother's family lost their vision at midlife. It was a hereditary condition that I didn't expect would happen to me. For the first nine months I was very depressed and angry, but I never disconnected from God. I talked to God a lot, but my prayers were angry prayers.
Additionally, I found that the medical professionals I was dealing with seemed to think they had to “cure” me to be successful. They did not offer much comfort.
I had had meningitis as a child. This brought on Meniere's disease — a condition that affects the inner ear and balance. As soon as I could-n't see the horizon, I had difficulty walking. I injured my spine in falls and car accidents, which led to a loss of feeling in my hands and feet. It became impossible for me to read Braille.
How did you cope?
After nine months I went into the Orientation Center for the Blind in Albany, Calif. It was the best place in the world to learn how to function as a blind person.
I was there longer than anyone else was since I wanted to be the most functional blind person in the world. They taught daily living skills and techniques for putting others at ease — things like continuing to use facial expressions and hand gestures so that you communicated as normally as possible. Early lessons involved managing money, dialing the telephone and threading a needle. I even used power-saws to build a table and turned wooden candlesticks on a lathe.
One example I often share resulted from my problem of getting the proper amount of toothpaste on a brush. Squirting the paste into my mouth solved that challenge.
The wonderful thing about rehabilitation is that we learn new ways of doing things we consider essential. In retrospect I consider my blindness as the most important spiritual gift God has given me. It brought refreshing insights into my pilgrimage with him toward eternity.
Late last year you regained partial eyesight. How did that come about?
My eyes were developing blisters that were very painful. I'm a third order Dominican and my spiritual director suggested his eye doctor who tried several things that did not work. He then suggested grafting the inner lining of my eyelid onto my eye. I had agreed to the surgery but a young associate suggested a corneal transplant. He knew I did a lot of public speaking and suggested my eyes would look more normal with such a transplant.
I asked if this would improve my vision, and he responded, “No, no, no — don't expect that. It takes three miracles to make a saint and I'm not headed in that direction.”
None of us expected any return of vision.
I never prayed for a return of my vision. I had proved to myself I didn't need sight; that I could live very successfully and happily without it. I used all kinds of talking appliances, including a talking computer. I traveled extensively, including two trips to Rome. I hadn't needed sight to accomplish many things during the decades of blindness.
It surprised us all when the corneal transplant gave me more light, dark and color for the first time in 30 years. At first I couldn't make out details but subsequent surgeries led to the return of the vision in my right eye. Using bifocals and occasionally a magnifying glass, I can now read.
You attribute the return of vision to Blessed Margaret of Castello, right?
Yes I do, because it is not otherwise explainable. I had seen probably 12 to 14 doctors over the years and none of them held out hope of meaningful improvement. For years I have prayed to Blessed Margaret that she guide me on my spiritual journey and depended upon the Holy Spirit to help me find the right words to highlight the reality that human vulnerability is a part of God's plan for his people.
I think that both Blessed Margaret and the Holy Spirit decided, “Well, she has the insight now. Let's let her get back to a more scholarly base from which she can do her writing and speaking.”
In order to be a scholar I needed to be able to touch the words. During the last three decades, as additional disabilities have become a part of my life, I have lost sensitivity in my fingertips and have focused on the insights available from the thousands of people with assorted disabilities that I have come to know.
I firmly believe that every rehabilitation can be seen as a minor recapitulation of the resurrection — confirming that we are the Easter people, rolling away the stone of despair. I have used my experiences to show that God isn't out of his mind when he gives us the gift of life in such fragile bodies. That is the message that God wanted my life to portray.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mary Jane Owen ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson ----------- TITLE: Boston Archdiocese Creates Child Advocate Position for Annulments DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:BOSTON — Children of parents who are splitting up must bear heavy burdens. They often find themselves caught in the middle of difficult custody decisions, pitting one parent against the other, at the losing end of child-support fights, or worse.
Parents — and society at large — sometimes forget that these kids have questions and worries about the turmoil afflicting their families, and they want to be included in the decisions that are dramatically affecting their lives.
The Archdiocese of Boston recognized that need last year, becoming the first diocese in the United States to appoint a court guardian to advocate on behalf of children involved in annulment cases.
“It's really a way for the Church to show its concern for children who experience the civil divorces of their parents,” said Father Michael Foster, judicial vicar and presiding judge of the Metropolitan Tribunal for the Boston Archdiocese.
Father Foster created the court guardian position, which he says is a “concrete expression” of Canon 1689 in the 1983 Code of Canon Law. Canon 1689 states: “In the judgment [of the tribunal] the parties are to be reminded of the moral, and also the civil, obligations by which they may be bound, both towards one another and in regard to the support and upbringing of their children.”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that annulments are granted when the Church determines that a couple did not enter marriage with the full consent, openness to children and freedom from impediments that the Church requires. “[T]he Church, after an examination of the situation by the competent ecclesiastical tribunal, can declare the nullity of a marriage, i.e., that the marriage never existed. In this case the contracting parties are free to marry, provided the natural obligations of a previous union are discharged” (No. 1629).
The catechism goes on to suggest that better instruction in the Church's requirements is needed to prevent couples from entering marriages improperly. “So that the ‘I do’ of the spouses may be a free and responsible act and so that the marriage covenant may have solid and lasting human and Christian foundations, preparation for marriage is of prime importance” (No. 1632).
The Boston tribunal handles 700 first-instance annulments each year and 800 cases being heard at the appellate level. Of those, 50% involve minor children, said Father Foster, who praised Cardinal Bernard Law for instituting the pilot program that is fast becoming a model for other dioceses.
“This is a way for the Church to really reach out to kids who have gone through divorce,” Father Foster said. “Not to ask a question about the children can send an unintentional message that we don't care.”
Mary-Kate Tracy is the court guardian who is asking those questions. She speaks with or corresponds with parents, witnesses, teachers and children.
“My primary job is to look at all of the information in the lives of these kids and to find out if they are being taken care of properly by all of the adults in their lives, not just in their physical needs but in their spiritual needs, in their emotional needs, in their academic needs as well,” said Tracy. “Holistically I am really looking at these kids and finding out what they are going through and what issues they are dealing with.”
After speaking with all parties, she writes a brief and makes one of three recommendations: She may commend parents for the good care they are providing, recommend that parents or children receive counseling or some other outside assistance, or even recommend that the annulment not be granted until one or both parents meet certain criteria, such as offering proof that child support payments have been made over a six-month period.
Said Tracy, “The response has been very positive in general. The parents are so happy that someone is concerned for the welfare of their children.”
Children's Questions
Tracy's son has asked her questions about the annulment process. “I explained to him the difference between a civil marriage and a sacramental marriage. I prefaced it by telling him that this doesn't affect him within the Church, it doesn't affect him [legally], if he could understand what that meant, but that I certainly know that it affects him because I know that he loves his dad.”
It's not uncommon for older children to have questions. Tracy, a former teacher who has a background in counseling and is getting her master's degree at Harvard Divinity School, said that inevitably older kids will ask if they are considered legitimate in the eyes of the Church, among many other concerns.
The Church teaches that, since the civil marriage existed, the children are not “illegitimate.”
“They want to know, ‘Where does this place me in my own faith life?’ Many of these kids are teenagers and are going through a process of questioning in their own personal faith, and this plays a role in that,” she said.
The Legacy of Divorce
Children are “profoundly affected” in long-term ways by divorce and all that happens in the months and years that follow, said Tracy. She, along with others at the tribunal, has studied “The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce,” a book documenting a 25-year study of how children are impacted by marital breakdown.
The study found that most children would prefer to stay in an unhappy family rather than shuttle back and forth between happier but separated parents. The study also found that divorce is not a temporary crisis but something that affects children over the long haul.
Judith S. Wallerstein, one of the authors of the “The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce,” praised the new court guardian position, saying that divorce and annulment are the “central crises” in the lives of children in this country.
“How important is this? It couldn't be more important. If anybody is still saying that once the divorce is over there's not an impact on the child, they've been living in a cave for the last 30 years,” Wallerstein said. “I am very pleased with the wisdom of the Church in Massachusetts.”
“In this whole domain, there's a fallout, and parents can be helped a lot by somebody like [the child advocate]. Whoever is going to be helping these parents has got a lot on her plate,” Wallerstein added. “She should undertake it with respect and with the recognition that she can do a tremendous amount of good.”
Mary DeTurris Poust writes from Delmar, New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mary DeTurris Poust ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:‘Law and Order’ Episode Stereotypes Pro-Lifers
CWFA.ORG, Jan. 14 — Pro-life advocates are being painted unfairly on NBC's “Law and Order,” Concerned Women for America charged on its Web site. An episode titled “The Third Horseman,” which aired Jan. 6, was filled with pro-abortion rhetoric, anti-right-to-life sentiment and distrustful attitudes toward Bible-reading Christians, the group said.
The plot centered on the murder of an abortionist by an alleged anti-abortion fanatic. Before the murder, the fanatic reads his Bible and prays to God to steady his hand.
Concerned Women for America said that viewers of the episode are left with the message that abortion advocates are reasonable, compassionate, intelligent and helpful, while pro-life advocates and readers of the Bible are ignorant, mean, dangerously radical and hurtful.
Tuberculosis Outbreak at Jesuit College
Associated Press earlier reported that a Mobile Health Department official said that those who test positive will be given chest X-rays and if any signs of the disease are found they will be given antibiotics.
Chicago to Close 14 Archdiocesan Schools
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Jan. 15 — The Archdiocese of Chicago plans to close 14 schools in the city and suburbs because of low enrollment and dwindling finances, the news service reported.
The archdiocese also will consolidate two schools and open three new ones. The moves are expected to affect 2,390 students in the nation's largest Catholic school system.
Archdiocesan officials said changing demographics, smaller families, economic problems that hinder parents’ abilities to pay tuition and the decline in the number of teaching sisters were factors that contributed to the closures. Cardinal Francis George unsuccessfully tried to save the schools through state funding and considered turning some struggling schools into charter schools.
The reduction allows the archdiocese to reduce its direct subsidies to schools to $6 million each year and redirect some money back to the remaining 248 schools. Many of the schools scheduled to close are in poor neighborhoods. The Archdiocese will still serve to the inner city with 91 schools.
Texans Fear Communion Cup After Illness in Town
Public health officials said there was little chance that others were exposed to the disease, but some parishioners were not taking chances. Father Thomas J. Craig, the pastor at St. Vincent de Paul, counseled parishioners that there was nothing to worry about but asked anyone who is ill to refrain from the cup.
A few blocks away, however, at St. Maria Goretti Church, the congregation applauded when Father James Gigliotti, the pastor, announced a one-week precautionary break.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: The Beauty of Chastity: Abstinence Crowns Their Character DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:CHICAGO — Listen up, Gloria Steinem: It's personal freedom, not sexual freedom, that empowers women.
That's a message coming these days from high schools, colleges, juvenile centers — and beauty pageants.
A growing number of beauty pageant winners, with titles like Miss Wisconsin, Miss Nevada and Miss Black USA, who chose abstinence as their platform issue are educating teens nationwide on the straight talk about sex before marriage. And teens are tuning in.
Suddenly abstinence is cool — and beautiful.
Sixteen of these pageant winners gathered Jan. 12 in Chicago to deliver a one-day abstinence seminar to local youth and entertain them at a gala dinner.
Bringing the titleholders and teens together was Project Reality, a Glenview, Ill.-based pioneer in abstinence education that develops curricula and sponsors classroom talks and youth rallies.
The idea originated two years ago when several Illinois pageant contestants contacted Project Reality for materials on abstinence education, explains Kathleen Sullivan, the organization's director. They planned to make abstinence until marriage their platform issue.
Project Reality this year identified 25 pageant contestants who selected abstinence education as their platform issue. The Chicago celebration was the second for Project Reality, which plans to turn the event into an annual affair.
“Adolescents want to have a mature discussion about sex and health,” said Sullivan. “What we're finding in schools today contradicts the belief that most girls say, ‘I can't do it.’”
Back in Control
A clear, uncompromising message dominated the pageant winners’ talks: Abstinence puts you in control of your life. It preserves the freedom and dignity that all youth, but especially girls, need in order to develop a plan of life.
“This is a new sexual revolution,” said Mary-Louise Kurey, Miss Wisconsin 1999. “Abstinence is the choice of the new feminists.”
Kurey is perhaps the most out-spoken titleholder on the abstinence issue. After placing in the Top 10 in the 1999 Miss America pageant, Kurey has taken her message to mainstream America. She has spoken to over 120,000 youth and appeared on “Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher,” “E!” and other television shows. Her first book, Standing with Courage, is due out this February.
“Premarital sex hurts women more than it hurts men,” Kurey said. “We're more susceptible to STDs. We're the ones who get pregnant.”
According to the Medical Institute for Sexual Health, based in Austin, Texas, over 40% of U.S. teens are sexually active; 2,500 get pregnant every day; and over 3 million contract a sexually transmitted disease each year.
“Today so many young girls are emotionally drained and weighed down by the side effects of promiscuity: anxiety, pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, emotional scars,” Kurey said. “As a result, they either take their focus off their goals or never develop them.”
Kurey said the promotion of abstinence restores hope. “Abstinence empowers young women to stand up for themselves and focus on what they want to achieve in life.”
A New Face
In her public advocacy, Kurey confronts the entrenched view that abstinence is a negative term. The stereotypical abstinence advocate is a “dour, middle aged, unpleasant person with a negative message,” said Connie Marshner, a political-training consultant in Washington, D.C.
In contrast, Marshner said, Kurey and other pageant titleholders deliver an overwhelmingly positive message that, “It's not just No to sex, but Yes to love, Yes to human dignity.”
These are inspiring words to Shaina Rozell, a 17-year-old from Riverdale, Ill., who attended the Chicago event and is keeping her own abstinence promise. The pageant winners have the looks, talents and success that most girls desire, she says, but what they really cherish is something even better — the beauty queens’ purity.
“When I see that these girls are older than me and still strong, I know I can persevere,” Rozell said.
She is not alone. Scott Phelps, co-author of Game Plan, a book that presents the abstinence program developed by NBA star A.C. Green, believes self-restraint is becoming very popular among the younger generation.
“Abstinence offers a welcome relief from the constant pressure of sexual activity promoted by the media,” Phelps said.
Erika Harold, Miss Kishwaukee Valley (Ill.) 2000, presents the new face of abstinence to thousands of youth, educators and legislators. But she believes her message is needed most in juvenile detention centers.
Harold spoke to more than 80 girls at the Cook County Juvenile Detention center in Chicago. Heather Francek, a staff psychologist at the center, heard about Project Reality on a local radio station and requested that one of the pageant contestants speak to girls there. Harold jumped at the chance.
Assuming that most of the girls at the center were no longer virgins, she urged the girls not to confuse abstinence with virginity.
“Abstinence is not virginity, but refraining from sexual activity before marriage,” she said. “It's about how you want to live your life beginning today.”
Harold rejects the idea that the abstinence message doesn't resonate with troubled youth. Society views such girls as lost causes, but ignoring them amounts to “missed opportunities,” the pageant winner said.
One of the girls Harold addressed has since asked to be trained as an abstinence speaker, and Francek plans to continue promoting abstinence education at the Cook County facility.
To the Streets
For most of the titleholders, promoting abstinence in pageant circles has created intrigue and drawn skepticism. Lisa Marie Miree, the reigning Miss Black USA, relates, “The judges can't fathom that you'd be happy being abstinent.”
Stephanie Inks, Miss Michigan All-American Latina 2001, experienced criticism from pageant judges. “They think your view is unrealistic and ask tough questions, trying to pigeonhole you,” she said.
Both women, though, say these challenges are miniscule compared to the opportunities their titles afforded them.
Miree recently spoke on abstinence to soldiers at Fort Knox, Ky. She's now planning community and city rallies plus a national march in the nation's capital.
Inks regularly addresses youth on sexuality and is a lobbyist on family issues. She notes that holding a pageant title wins her an instant media audience and the attention of students.
Such opportunities will only increase, abstinence advocates promise. Project Reality is organizing a national speakers’ bureau through which schools, youth organizations and other groups can bring these women to their events. And this spring, Project Reality is taking several of them to Washington, D.C., to speak before congressional representatives.
John Severance writes from Chicago.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Severance ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:Patriarch Sets Conditions for Papal Visit
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, Jan. 17 — Russia's Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II said the Catholic Church must stop proselytizing in Russia and other Orthodox areas before he will agree to meet with Pope John Paul II.
“Right now it's not possible,” while Catholics pursue a policy of “religious expansion on Russian territory,” the French news agency reported the Orthodox leader saying, quoting the Web site of a Polish daily.
The patriarch was reacting to comments Russian President Vladimir Putin made to the newspaper that there were no problems between Moscow and the Vatican and that he was ready to invite Pope John Paul to Moscow.
“But the Pope, if he comes to Moscow, wants the visit to be an important event, a breakthrough in relations with the Russian Orthodox Church,” Putin said. “Unfortunately this does not depend on me.”
Putin also said he is working on convincing Orthodox leaders to welcome the Pope to Russia. “But it is the kind of situation where we have to work without saying much,” he said. “One must have patience.”
Cardinal Martini Ponders Life After Retirement
“I'm sure personal prayer is more important, and silent study will help the world more than many words and actions,” he said.
The cardinal also discussed his reputation as one who might bring about radical changes in the Church, were he elected Pope.
He dismissed interpretations that suggested he favors women's ordination or a Third Vatican Council. He said his remarks had been “much more nuanced” than the press portrayed them.
Holocaust Historian Aims Guns on Church
Martin Peretz, editor in chief of The New Republic, called the 41-year-old Harvard professor “a thorough, relentless and daring historian who has written a devastating piece.” He added that the article is of “tremendous historical importance because the present Pope is trying to get an evil man turned into a saint.” Others sharply disagree with that assessment. Peretz was referring to Pope Pius XII, who is (falsely) accused of World War II silence.
Goldhagen objects to the Vatican's 1998 document, “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah,” saying it tried to show that “anti-Semitism has its roots outside Christianity.” He claims the Church has rewritten history by arguing that discreet actions in World War II saved more lives than confrontation would have done.
But some historians criticize his approach to history, including his sensationalism and his use of specific incidents to make broad-brush generalizations.
“He has a point of view and he looks for something to prove that point of view,” said Gitta Sereny, a leading authority on Nazi Germany.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----------- TITLE: Never-Ending Desire for the Lord DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:Register Summary
Amid an atmosphere of religious indifference and derision, a believer's thirst for God becomes more acute — a thirst that can only be slaked with prayer and the never-ending search for the Almighty, John Paul II said Jan. 16.
Before 2,000 faithful gathered for the general audience in Paul VI Hall, the Pope reflected on Psalm 42, where the person at prayer feels derided in a hostile environment of unbelievers who ask him, “Where is your God?” Within this environment, the psalmist asks God: “Why do you forget me?”
“Will God be able to be silent?” the Holy Father asked.
“Certainly not!” he replied. In prayer, the believer will discover that God never abandons him, and that life is a never-ending search for him, the Pope said.
A thirsty deer, his throat parched, cries out plaintively in the dry desert, yearning for the fresh waters of a stream. This well-known image sets the stage for Psalm 42, which was just sung for us. This is almost like a symbol of the profound spirituality of this composition, which is truly a jewel of faith and poetry. In fact, according to scholars of the book of Psalms, this psalm should be closely studied in relationship with the psalm that follows it, Psalm 43, from which it was separated when the psalms were arranged in the prayer book of the People of God. Indeed, besides being united in subject matter and development, the same antiphon is repeated in both psalms: “Why are you downcast, my soul; why do you groan within me? Wait for God, whom I shall praise again, my savior and my God” (Psalm 42:6,12; Psalm 43: 5). This cry, which is repeated twice in this psalm and a third time in the following psalm, is an invitation that the psalmist directs to himself, hoping to dispel his gloom by trusting in God, who will surely manifest himself once again as Savior.
Thirst for God
Let us return, however, to the image at the beginning of the psalm. It would be a pleasure to meditate on it with some music in the background, like Gregorian chant or Pierluigi da Palestrina's polyphonic masterpiece, Sicut Cervus(As the Deer). The thirsty deer actually symbolizes the psalmist at prayer as he reaches out with his whole being — body and soul — to the Lord, who seems so far away yet whom he needs so much: “My being thirsts for God, the living God” (Psalm 42:3). In Hebrew, one single word, nefesh, denotes both “soul” and “throat.” So we could say that both the body and soul of the psalmist are involved in this primary, spontaneous and essential longing for God (Psalm 63:2). It is no accident that a long tradition describes prayer as “breath,” something that is as original, necessary, fundamental as the breath of life.
Will God be able to remain silent when he sees his parched lips that cry out, this tormented soul, this face that is about to be submerged?
Origen, the great Christian author of the third century, pointed out that man's search for God is never-ending because progress is always possible and is always needed. In one of his homilies on the book of Numbers, he wrote: “Those who spend their time on a journey seeking God's wisdom do not erect houses but portable tents because they are on a constant journey, always moving on, and the more they advance, the more the road opens before them and the more the horizon before them fades into immensity” (Homily XVII, In Numeros, GCS VII, 159-160).
Loving Memories
Let us try now to understand the theme of this supplication, which we might envision as three acts, two of which are part of this psalm, while the third unfolds in the following psalm, psalm 43, which we will consider shortly. The first scene (Psalm 42:2-6) expresses a profound nostalgia that is evoked by remembering the happiness of the past, with its beautiful liturgical celebrations that are now out of reach: “Those times I recall as I pour out my soul, when I went in procession with the crowd, I went with them to the house of God, amid loud cries of thanksgiving, with the multitude keeping festival” (verse 5).
“The house of God” with its liturgy is the Temple in Jerusalem that the faithful psalmist attended, but it is also a place of intimacy with God, “the source of living waters,” of which Jeremiah sings (Jeremiah 2:13). Now the only water that wells up in his eyes are his tears (Psalm 42:4), now that the fountain of life is so distant. Weeping, lamenting and supplication have now replaced the festive prayer of old, which was offered to the Lord during worship in the Temple.
Time of Desolation
Unfortunately, the present unhappiness is in stark contrast to the joy and peace of the past. The psalmist now finds himself far from Zion: the panorama that surrounds him is that of Galilee, the northern region of the Holy Land, as indicated by the reference to the sources of the Jordan River, the summit of Hermon from which this river flows, and to Mizar, another mountain that is unknown to us (verse 7). Therefore, we are, more or less, in the area where the falls of the Jordan are found, whose cascading waters direct the course of the river that crosses the entire Promised Land. However, these waters are not the refreshing waters of Zion. In the psalmist's eyes they are more like the chaotic waters of the flood that destroy everything in their path. He feels them fall upon him like a rushing torrent that annihilates life: “all your waves and breakers sweep over me” (verse 8). Chaos and evil, as well as divine judgment itself, are actually described in the Bible as a deluge that brings destruction and death (Genesis 6:5-8; Psalm 69:2-3).
Hope in God
These rushing torrents are then described by their symbolic equivalent: they refer to the corrupt, to the psalmist's enemies, perhaps even to the pagans who dwelled in this remote region where the psalmist has been banished. They despise the righteous man and deride his faith, asking him ironically, “Where is your God?” (verses 11 and 4). He addresses his anguished question to God: “Why have you forgotten me?” (verse 10). This “why?” that is addressed to the Lord, who seems absent in the day of trial, is typical of biblical supplications.
Will God be able to remain silent when he sees his parched lips that cry out, this tormented soul, this face that is about to be submerged in a sea of mire? Certainly not! Therefore, the psalmist is encouraged once again to hope (verses 6 and 12). The third act, which is included in the following psalm, Psalm 43, is a confident cry to God (Psalm 43:1, 2a, 3a, 4b) that uses expressions of joy and gratitude: “That I may come to the altar of God, to God, my joy, my delight.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----------- TITLE: Argentina's Archbishop Karlic Calls for National Sacrifices DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:BUENOS AIRES, Argentina One week after his appointment as president of Argentina, Eduardo Duhalde held a meeting Jan. 9 with Cardinal Giorgio Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires, Archbishop Estanislao Karlic of Paraná and Archbishop Eduardo Miras of Rosario. During the meeting, Duhalde asked the Church leaders to organize dialogue across society regarding state policies.
Duhalde took office in the face of an economic crisis that forced two predecessors to resign in a space of 10 days. To deal with the crisis, his government announced a 30% devaluation of the Argentine peso and imposed restrictions on bank withdrawals
After the meeting with Duhalde, Archbishop Karlic, who is the president of the Argentine bishops’ conference, spoke about his country's difficulties to the Vatican's missionary news agency Fides.
What is happening in Argentina?
It is difficult to understand even for us. We are living the fruits of a long process what has lasted for years. The problem is moral, religious and deep lying. It came to a head in the last few months upsetting even the usually calm middle classes. Some organized violent groups took advantage of the situation as we have seen, attacking stores and staging demonstrations in Plaza de Mayo, Plaza de los Dos Congressos in Buenos Aires.
Can we say that the worst is over?
What is the worst? If the worst is violence and death, perhaps it is over. If it is what lies in the heart of man, capable of acts of social disturbance, then we can say that the worst is still happening. Hearts have not been changed enough.
It is absolutely necessary for all Argentineans, our leaders in particular, to admit that the crisis is serious. The solution will not be found in a short time nor only with external laws and measures. The necessary change is cultural. Above all, moral. Changes in values, social virtues that can be obtained only with perseverance through education in the family, in schools, in society.
We need to change our hearts. Man and peoples build themselves and destroy themselves from within from the spirit. Political leaders must live their calling as a service to the common good of the nation. Democracy must be sustained, vivified with values. If it lacks values, democracy can turn into dictatorship.
Is the present leadership in Argentina still suitable?
In our recent statement [by the bishops’ conference] we asked our social, political and trade union leaders, to make a serious examination of conscience on their responsibilities. We think that leaders who are not ready to make the sacrifices and efforts necessary to lift up the country, should step down.
Do you think the people, whom you know well, are ready to make those sacrifices?
Many people today are suffering, the have made great efforts, they believed in political decisions reached by the authorities.
Today these people feel they are being treated unjustly, they see that many, although lacking a sense of patriotism, have received great benefits.
For example, those egoists who have withdrawn their capital from Argentina, tax evaders, those found guilty by a court and go unpunished.
Nevertheless many people are ready to make big sacrifices, to renew efforts for the common good, to fight for the future, even at a high cost. Not everyone thinks this way, but many do.
For many in Latin America, Argentina was the country of hope. Now there is an air of pessimism, resignation, desperation. Will good policies be sufficient to restore hope to the people?
Policies and politics are not enough, they never have been, and certainly not now. For the life of society there must be a heart that is pure and good, a new heart. Corruption, incredibly widespread here in Argentina, must be eliminated. We need stronger social ties and we must rebuild them. We must rebuild society with the profound relation inspired by the social teaching of the Church.
Young Argentineans are flocking to European embassies and consulates anxious to emigrate. How would you encourage a young person to stay here in his country?
Some want to leave, others want to stay: they love their country and they want to stay even though they are perplexed and worried.
We must recognize the right to emigrate. But it is very sad to see young people leaving, after all this was once a land of immigrants. But we must continue to call people to build a great country. This is not an easy task: it was not easy for our fathers and grandfathers, but it is possible and it is a wonderful achievement.
I want to ask everyone — and we must do this if we want to keep our nation alive — to pay the daily price of dreams and plans, sacrifices and freedom demanded by the efforts to become a nation. These words are part of the “Prayer for the Homeland,” which we composed and which is recited all over the country.
What can the Church say in a situation like this?
The Church, mother and teacher, must defend her social teaching, which is centered on the person in every dimension. We know that the human person is the image of God. The Church must stand beside her sons and daughters with prayer, offering consolation, the grace of the sacraments. In Italian there is a saying “the Lord sends cold weather according to the clothes his people are wearing.” We know that the Lord will help us to overcome also the problems of today.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:Abortion Legal Again in Afghanistan
AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE, Jan. 15 — Abortion up to the third month of pregnancy is legal again for Afghan women if their health is in danger, but after that they risk a six-month jail sentence if they turn to unlicensed abortionists, the French news agency reported.
All abortions were banned under Taliban rule.
According to some readings of the Koran, Islam leaves the choice of contraception and abortion up to individual families.
Lifesite News reported that the United Nations Population Fund has been attempting to have abortion legalized for several years.
Irish Police Patrol Area After Threat to Teachers
The activity came in the wake of the killing of a 20-year-old Catholic postman, blamed on the paramilitary Ulster Defense Association, and a threat, possibly a hoax, that Catholic teachers could be “legitimate targets.”
There were two overnight arson attacks on Catholic schools in south Belfast and in Lisburn, County Antrim. Walls and cars at the Belfast school were painted with loyalist slogans.
Agnostic Woman to Head British Church Post
Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Birmingham announced that Eileen Shearer, 50, will head the Catholic Office for the Protection of Children and Vulnerable Adults. The office was established on the recommendation of a panel convened by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor of Westminster after a series of sex abuse scandals involving priests.
Shearer said she felt she understood the “Christian ethos,” the Birmingham daily reported, and that her “personal and professional values are consistent with Christianity.”
“I think the value of the fact that I am not a Catholic lies in the transparency of my independence from the Church,” she said, adding that she was confident that she would be able to overrule Church hierarchy when making decisions on child protection.
Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor said he was confident that Shearer's “professional leadership will serve to enhance the work of child protection professionals” in the Church.
Priest, Helper Missing After Boat Capsizes
AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE, Jan. 15 — A priest and an aide were missing after a boat capsized off the central Philippines, the French news agency reported.
The boat was en route to Leyte Island from Camotes Island when a huge wave tipped it over, said a coast guard commander. Father Tito Patacsil and an unnamed helper were missing, while the boat's owner, the only other person on board, survived.
Relatives of Sept. 11 Victims Meet Afghan Families
GLOBAL EXCHANGE.ORG — A group of relatives of the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States arrived in Kabul Tuesday to meet Afghan families, victims of U.S. bombings.
The initiative was organized by Global Exchange, an American nongovernmental organization that seeks to reconcile the two nations, following three months of bombings.
About 2,800 victims died in the Sept. 11 attacks. Global Exchange sources estimate that between 4,000 and 5,000 Afghan civilians have died in the military campaign against Osama bin Laden that followed. Derril Bodley was a member of the group that arrived in Kabul. A Californian music professor, Bodley's eldest daughter, Deora, 20, was a passenger in the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.
Rita Lasar, 70, also in the group, lost her brother in the attack on the World Trade Center, and Kelly Campbell, lost her brother in the attack on the Pentagon. Two other Americans, who lost loved ones in the Twin Towers, were members of the mission to Kabul. During eight days, the group will meet Afghan families who lost loved ones in the war. The group will also visit a Kabul hospital.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Tip of the Coming Iceberg DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:New technologies loom on the horizon and biotechnology will continue to intersect with public policy.
Thus it is inevitable that the Church will continue to be involved in bioethics as well.
“We're at the tip of the iceberg,” said Georgetown's Father Kevin FitzGerald. “What's coming will increase in amount and complexity. We could become numbed to it or we can say more and more, ‘This is becoming a bigger piece of life, and we have to pay more attention to it, wrestle with it and make critical decisions about who we are as a society and what we want to be.’”
Issues likely to come up, Father FitzGerald predicted, include genetic and cellular engineering, in which science will be able to “manipulate the building blocks of our physical nature.”
Richard Doerflinger at the U.S. bishops’ bioethics office said that the issue of stem cells will keep arising, as will designing future generations and making irreversible changes in the human genome. He warned that if cloning is permitted, it will provide “the royal road” to genetic manipulation and making new kinds of human beings.
Some feel that the next big thing is preimplantation genetic diagnosis, screening out unhealthy embryos conceived in vitro to keep the severely handicapped from being born. Similarly, some people have already undertaken conceiving embryos in vitro in order to help find a cure for a sibling. This entails the creation of several embryos, selecting the most promising and destroying the rest.
All this points in the direction of eugenics. At The Catholic University of America, Dianne Irving notes that current bioethical literature is filled with such talk.
Already, pregnancies are “being watched with dozens of technologies, all capable of informing women that something can be seriously wrong with their baby.”
Often, although the tests turn out to be wrong, there is pressure on mothers to abort. “It's very sad what it's done to the spontaneous joy a pregnant woman should be allowed to feel,” Irving said. “They worry for nine months. It's now politically incorrect to have an abnormal child.”
Lawrence Roberge, author of The Cost of Abortion, foresees a resurrection of the overpopulation myth and serious attention being paid to questions like, “Should someone who is susceptible to impulsivity disorders have the right to have children?”
“People are now offering $500 for sterilization of crack addicts,” Roberge said. “Once you go down that road, who else do you sterilize or mandate to have an abortion?”
He also anticipates new approaches to getting a woman's immune system to destroy newly created life.
David Byers, executive director of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Science and Human Values, questions whether the Church is really on top of tomorrow's bioethics issues. He said it should try to be aware of the direction genetics is going and how it's becoming more possible to manipulate the genetic code.
“The mapping of the genome provided us with a library,” Byers said. “There certainly will be endless opportunities to manipulate the human genome for particular purposes. Some will touch on pro-life concerns, though most will not. We are now in a position where we can effect our own evolution. We could conceivably produce an 8-foot tall human being in a couple of generations rather than over half a million years.”
This, he said, raises the question of playing God.
“The voting populace will have to listen and see what resonates with what is right,” said Father FitzGerald. “The Catholic approach will resonate with a lot of people.”
And, for Father Kopaczynski, it's important to remember that “God is Lord of life and death, we the in-between.” That's the most important reason to resist the “Promethean temptation” the biotechnology industry and the field of bioethics feel of “taking over more and more who lives and dies,” he said. “This is where the Church has to call humanity back to an understanding of what humanity is and who God is.”
— John Burger
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: President's Bioethics Council Considers Cloning DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:Dr. John Haas, president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Boston, was “absolutely delighted” with the composition of the 18-member President's Council on Bioethics, which was announced Jan. 16. The council took up the issue of cloning in its first meeting in Washington Jan. 17-18.
Congress is considering competing cloning bills, one of which would allow embryos to be cloned, only to be destroyed in the process of harvesting their stem cells. Its head opposes all types of cloning, as does President Bush.
Haas characterized the bioethics council's membership as “balanced” and said many of its scientists, doctors, ethicists, social scientists, lawyers and theologians are “open to and friendly toward the Catholic tradition” in medical and scientific ethics. Gilbert Meilaender, professor of Christian ethics at Valparaiso University, for example, is a strong ethical voice in the Lutheran tradition, he said.
Some members have helped the Catholic Bioethics Center in various ways. The council's chairman, Leon Kass, an ethicist at the University of Chicago, as well as Princeton professor Robert George and Stanford biologist William Hurlbut, have addressed center gatherings. Mary Ann Glendon, law professor at Harvard, is on the center's board.
The council's membership also includes Alfonso Gomez-Lobo, professor of metaphysics and moral philosophy at Georgetown University, and columnist Charles Krauthammer, who on the first day of deliberations, wondered why the American public is not as energized about the “strip-mining” of human embryos for their stem cells as they are about attacks on the environment.
Kass, who is Jewish, said he felt the country is ready for “serious moral reflection” after Sept. 11.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: A Proclamation DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:This Nation was founded upon the belief that every human being is endowed by our Creator with certain “unalienable rights.” Chief among them is the right to life itself. The Signers of the Declaration of Independence pledged their own lives, fortunes, and honor to guarantee inalienable rights for all of the new country's citizens. These visionaries recognized that an essential human dignity attached to all persons by virtue of their very existence and not just to the strong, the independent, or the healthy. That value should apply to every American, including the elderly and the unprotected, the weak and the infirm, and even to the unwanted.
Thomas Jefferson wrote that, “[t]he care of human life and happiness and not their destruction is the first and only legitimate object of good government.” President Jefferson was right. Life is an inalienable right, understood as given to each of us by our Creator.
President Jefferson's timeless principle obligates us to pursue a civil society that will democratically embrace its essential moral duties, including defending the elderly, strengthening the weak, protecting the defenseless, feeding the hungry, and caring for children — born and unborn. Mindful of these and other obligations, we should join together in pursuit of a more compassionate society, rejecting the notion that some lives are less worthy of protection than others, whether because of age or illness, social circumstance or economic condition. Consistent with the core principles about which Thomas Jefferson wrote, and to which the Founders subscribed, we should peacefully commit ourselves to seeking a society that values life — from its very beginnings to its natural end. Unborn children should be welcomed in life and protected in law.
On September 11, we saw clearly that evil exists in this world, and that it does not value life. The terrible events of that fateful day have given us, as a Nation, a greater understanding about the value and wonder of life. Every innocent life taken that day was the most important person on earth to somebody; and every death extinguished a world. Now we are engaged in a fight against evil and tyranny to preserve and protect life. In so doing, we are standing again for those core principles upon which our Nation was founded.
Now, therefore, I, George W. Bush, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim Sunday, January 20, 2002, as National Sanctity of Human Life Day. I call upon all Americans to reflect upon the sanctity of human life. Let us recognize the day with appropriate ceremonies in our homes and places of worship, rededicate ourselves to compassionate service on behalf of the weak and defenseless, and reaffirm our commitment to respect the life and dignity of every human being.
In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this eighteenth day of January, in the year of our Lord two thousand two, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and twenty-sixth.
George W. Bush
----- EXCERPT: From The White House ----- EXTENDED BODY: George W. Bush ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----------- TITLE: Letters DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:Saluting Heroes
Thank you for the magnificent “American Catholic Heroes” issue of the Register for Dec. 30.
The stories, articles and letters about the World Trade Center disaster were most inspiring. Now all of our young people have real heroes to emulate, the police, firemen, medical workers and priests!
What stands out to me is that people with real Catholic faith are truly unselfish.
RICAHARD D. COURNEY
Muncie, Indiana
Navy Wife Draws a Line
I am writing in reference to your Jan. 6-12 article, “Women in Combat: Should U.S. Draw a Line?” You didn't really explore the position of the spouse who is left behind.
I was a Navy wife for 30 years, and in spite of the hardships of separation and moving regularly, I was happy with my husband's choice of careers. The friendship and camaraderie among the squadron members would have to be experienced to be understood.
My husband was a carrier pilot and flew the A-6 Intruder with a bombardier-navigator in the cockpit with him. They flew exciting missions together and had a very close bond. Imagine my chagrin if there had been women in that group! The thought of my husband in a close, exhilarating, daily relationship with another woman for a six- to nine-month deployment would have drastically altered my attitude. (Remember, these men didn't have their families to return to each evening.) I would not have been a happy Navy wife.
The U.S. Navy is spending millions of dollars annually to retain their service members, and in spite of the tremendous bonuses and other incentives, they have not succeeded. The pay in the old Navy, comparatively speaking, was dismal, but the men stayed because they loved what they were doing, and the wives were supportive of the husbands. The Navy now spends millions on family issues, but they take mothers from their infants and children for months at a time, allow out-of-wedlock births, and put men and women in situations that do not respect family or marriage. Many married and unmarried women become pregnant so they won't have to deploy, so the readiness of their outfits is threatened.
I now have the opportunity to observe Navy life through a volunteer job. I can only say that I am very happy to have been a Navy wife then, and not now.
PATRICIAN SHANNON
Bath, Maine
Drubbing Durbin
I subscribe to the Register and thoroughly enjoy reading each issue from cover to cover.
I know you will want to be made aware of a serious factual error contained in a story in your Nov. 11-17 issue. It is the top story of the “Inbrief” column on the front page, and is titled “Catholic Taliban?” That news brief refers to U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin's “pro-life record.” Senator Dick Durbin's record is firmly pro-choice and anti-life. The sentence in the brief is worded in such a way that one could easily perceive the erroneous meaning that James Oberweis, Sen. Durbin's potential political opponent, was criticizing Durbin's “pro-life record.” Again, Durbin is not pro-life (although he is Catholic).
At a minimum, the unclear meaning tends to confuse the reader. The sentence should have read as follows: “James Oberweis, a Catholic, who had planned to enter the 2002 race against U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), criticized Durbin's pro-choice record by reportedly saying …”
It would be a tragedy if any of your readers interpreted the article as labeling Durbin “pro-life.”
Thanks again for your fine publication.
ROBERT KIELIAN
Chicago
Thank You, Father Andrew
Just a note of appreciation for Legionary Father Andrew McNair's column “Find a Stable of Your Own This Christmas.” Well written, full of insight, straightforward style, no excess verbiage — in a word, well-done.
PAUL PEPPLER
Pensacola, Florida
Catholic School Spirit
Regarding “All This and Socialization, Too” (Jan.13-19): I applaud home-schoolers. We, too, struggled with school issues and came very close to home-schooling, but, for us, it wasn't God's plan. We have enjoyed your many “pro-home-school” articles. However, we believe the teachers out there in the Catholic schools who are doing outstanding work need to be remembered and hailed as well.
We have been very fortunate to finally find a wonderful Catholic school (St. Joan of Arc, Lisle, Ill.) with an incredibly loyal and hardworking staff. These wonderful teachers are giving my children far better learning opportunities than I could, and they witness Christ to my children in ways I could not. It is very powerful to be part of a community like that. The principal, Sister Carolyn, said once at a meeting: “Your children are my life.” And her work bears that out.
For these teachers and all the others out there in the Catholic schools who are giving their very best for our children, we are very thankful. I would like to hear more about them!
Incidentally, my children argue that being in a conventional school and dealing with “peer pressure” has made them stronger in their beliefs and in the knowledge of who they really are — it has not made them turn out “the way their friends want them to be,” as suggested [by someone quoted] in the article. So, for each of us, the path to God is a little bit different.
THERESE DANNER
Lisle, Illinois
N.J. Catholic Voters By the Numbers
Drew DeCoursey misses the point in his opinion column of Dec. 16-22, “New Jersey Catholics Picked a Pro-Choice Poster Child — Why?”
According to the Star Ledger's exit-poll information, 47% of the voters in the November election were self-described Catholics. Some 51% of them voted for Jim McGreevey, the pro-abortion “Catholic”; 47% of them voted for Bret Schundler, the pro-life Protestant.
When those people were asked about church attendance, 67% of the weekly churchgoers said they had voted for Bret Schundler. There were 2.1 million votes cast on election day; 47% of the voters, or just over one million, were Catholics.
The Kenedy Directory of U.S. Catholics says there are 3,340,331 Catholics in New Jersey. Around 75% of them should be over 18 and eligible to vote. That's 2,510,258 eligible Catholic voters.
That means that the real problem is that 59% of the Catholics in New Jersey did not vote. We estimate that 686,084 Catholics are not even registered to vote.
Arguably, the governor of New Jersey has more of an impact on the voter's lives than the president will, since the governor controls $220,000,000 in political patronage, including all of the judges and prosecutors and all cabinet officers.
The governor also controls the budget for the schools, where most taxpayers’ money goes in New Jersey.
DeCoursey also misses the fact that the same exit poll says that 74% of the voters made up their minds before the bishops’ letter was published in diocesan newspapers on Oct. 22. He assumes that Catholics read bishops’ letters. Only church-going Catholics read the diocesan newspapers and the letter was not mailed to the pastors; nor was it read from the pulpits. The five New Jersey diocesan newspapers only have a combined circulation of 250,000, so less than 1 in 13 Catholics get the paper, let alone read it.
The Diocese of Metuchen's newspaper, The Catholic Spirit, placed the bishops’ letter as the headline on the front page. The other papers had the letter in the back.
New Jersey's bishops and priests need to invest a lot more time in educating the people in the pews about their responsibility to vote, and to vote as Catholics.
We as lay Catholics have been challenged by our bishops to proclaim the Gospel of Life. The Sunday before the election, volunteer lay Catholics circulated copies of the bishops’ letter along with a voter guide at many churches. I regret that we did not do it at every church and that we did not do it earlier in the election cycle.
I urge your readers to join us in our efforts to get Catholics to participate in the electoral process, and the integrity and accountability of those who seek and hold public office.
LARRY CIRIGNANO
Far Hills, New Jersey
The writer is president of www.Catholicvote.org
Editor's note:93.8% of Register readers vote regularly.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----------- TITLE: By Their Fruits You Will Know Them: What About Islam? DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:In recent months, President Bush has gone out of his way to reassure Americans that Islam is a religion of peace.
At the Islamic Center of Washington, only a few days after the Sept. 11 attacks, the president stated that “Islam is peace. … When we think of Islam, we think of a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. Billions of people find comfort and solace and peace. And that's made brothers and sisters out of every race — out of every race.”
When Americans are told that Islam is a religion of peace and a source of solace, they should understand that peace in the Islamic sense is not the same as peace understood in the Christian tradition.
Considered etymologically, the word Islam does not mean “peace,” as often claimed, but rather “submission.” True peace, from an Islamic perspective, is submission to Allah. The Koran, the normative text of Islam, holds that all people must submit to Allah willingly or by force. The Koran teaches: “Then fight and slay the pagans whenever you find them. And seize them, in every stratagem [of war] … until they embrace Islam” (Koran 9: 5).
Does this mean that the billion-plus Muslims living around the world interpret the Koran literally? No. Many Muslims are not fundamentalist. Nonetheless, there are an estimated 100 million Muslims who do consider themselves Islamic fundamentalists. Moreover, the number of fundamentalists continues to grow.
This mere fact raises an important question: Is there something inherent in the nature of Islam that engenders contentious conflict?
Many Islamic fundamentalists refer to the Koran, the doctrinal heart of Islam, to justify their aggression. For example, the Koran appears to suggest the Muslims should be holy warriors: “Fighting is prescribed for you, and ye dislike it. But it is possible that ye dislike a thing which is good for you, and that ye love a thing which is bad for you. But Allah knoweth, and ye know not.”
Aggression seems here to be elevated to the level of virtue. Consequently, the Koran does provide a theological basis for Islamic belligerence. To fight in order to submit all people to Allah is a moral good for the Islamic fundamentalist. To resist such submission to Allah, teaches the Koran, merits very severe punishment: “For the Rejecters we have prepared Chains, Yokes, and a Blazing Fire” (Koran 5:33).
The faithful Islamic warrior, according to the prophet Mohammad, the founder of Islam, will be rewarded in heaven with 70 virgins for his participation in any jihad (holy war).
Is there any room in the Koran for tolerance?
Is Islam truly “a religion of peace”? It can be. For this we pray.
Mohammad did allow minimum tolerance to non-Muslims provided that they pay a special tax as an expression of their submission to Islam. This tax, which is called Jizya, is mandated in the Koran:
“Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion of true, of the people of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued” (Koran 9:29).
How seriously have Muslims taken the word of the Koran to submit all people to Allah throughout Islam's history? In less than 100 years after the death of the Mohammed in 732 A.D., Muslims had conquered the entire Arabian Peninsula, and dominated militarily most of the Middle East, North Africa and Spain. The military conquest of Islam demonstrated that Islam from its origins was not just a religion but also a political ideology expressed in the form of a theocracy.
Even now, in many parts of the world, Islamic theocracies juridically impose an Islamic lifestyle on all their citizens.
For many Christians today — and other non-Islamic people around the world — living under Islamic rule or in a predominantly Islamic culture means being discriminated against and persecuted.
In Saudi Arabia, for example, the law bans all religious expression other than Islam. Christians may not worship publicly or even privately in their own homes. Any external sign of Christianity, such as a cross, is absolutely forbidden. A few exceptions are made when Christians worship in embassies or consulates. But, outside of these limited cases, those who practice the Christian faith on Saudi soil face the prospect of prison — or an even worse fate.
In his book Crossing The Threshold of Hope, Pope John Paul II expresses deep concern for Christians discriminated and persecuted under Islamic law:
“In countries where [Islamic] fundamentalist movements come to power, human rights and the principle of religious freedom are unfortunately interpreted in a very one-sided way — religious freedom comes to mean freedom to impose on all citizens the ‘true religion,’” the Pope writes. “In these countries the situation of Christians is sometimes terribly disturbing. Fundamentalist attitudes of this nature make reciprocal contacts very difficult. All the same, the Church remains always open to dialogue and cooperation.”
Is Islam truly ‘a religion of peace’? It can be. For this we pray.
Legionary Father Andrew McNair teaches at Mater Ecclesiae International Center of Studies in Greenville, Rhode Island.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Father Andrew McNair ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary ----------- TITLE: Finding Truth in the Fog DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:Love for the truth has been a favorite theme of Pope John Paul II. “Let us seek the Truth about Christ and about his Church!” he writes in his Agenda for the Third Millennium. “Let us love the Truth, proclaim the Truth! O Christ, show us the Truth. Be the only Truth for us.”
The Holy Father's enthusiasm for the truth, however, is not shared by the secular world.
That's an observation worth reflecting on as pundits and observers try to make sense of what has just transpired in Assisi, Italy.
Many members of the general populace, it is clear, harbor a distinct fear of the truth. They fear three things: that the truth would impose unwanted moral responsibilities on them, that any association with the truth would occasion an air of pretentiousness, and that any claim to the truth might expose them to being wrong.
They prefer freedom from moral responsibility, absence of any “holier-than-thou” attitude, and exemption from the possible embarrassment of being in error. Their fears, however, take them from the very light and meaning they deeply long for, and plunge them into a dark void where they are trapped by a misery of their own making. Their flight from the truth is also an entrance into a world of gloom.
The Three Truth Traps
These three fears are ill-fated as well as ill-founded.
1. First of all, truth is our only avenue to real freedom. “You will learn the truth and the truth shall make you free,” Christ tells us in John 8:32. Ignorance may at times be blissful, but it is never illuminating. St. Augustine once remarked that he had met many people who had been deceived, but never anyone who wanted to be deceived.
We have a natural hunger for the truth of things. No one ever asks another for the wrong time. It is always the “right” time and the truth about things that we want to learn. Untruth is not helpful, but truth is like a beacon that shows us the way. This is why Pope John Paul II titled his great encyclical on the freeing function of truth Veritatis Splendor (Truth's splendor).
When we are lost, we want to learn the truth about our situation so that we can be liberated from our confusion. The truth makes us free; untruth binds us to bewilderment. The truth about ourselves awakens us to our moral responsibilities, but we need this awakening in order to become who we truly are, to advance toward our destiny, to build a meaningful life.
We should welcome the truth that illuminates our moral responsibilities with the enthusiasm of a person who is lost in the woods and comes upon a compass and a map.
2. Secondly, the fear that any discovery of truth would make us pretentious is also counterproductive. Truth is not of our own making. Even Christ proclaimed that the truth he illuminated did not spring from himself alone. “My teaching is not mine,” he said, “but His who sent me” (John 17:6). Truth is not subjective. It represents the objective order of things. The person who comes to know something of the truth, then, should experience humility, not vanity, for he discovers something that is not his. Christ was emphatic in his denunciation of pharisees who claimed to know something of the truth but behaved with a pretentious snobbery. Truth is not the cause of pharisaism; vanity is. And both Christ and his Church are unrelenting in their advocacy of humility and in their condemnation of vanity. In fact, it may be said that Christianity is far less tolerant of pharisaism than is the secular world. Consider, for example, the comment “I hate anything fake,” made by Britney Spears, a veritable icon of artificiality and pretense. The secular world awards this kind of duplicity with celebrity.
3. Thirdly, there is the rather spineless fear that, in pursuing the truth, we might fall into the embarrassing predicament of being wrong. Again, there is nothing that can reasonably justify this anxiety. We all make mistakes. Not to try something for fear of making a mistake is akin to a paralyzing neurosis that would discourage one from trying anything. Some people avoid marriage because they fear divorce. Others avoid friendship because they fear rejection. The pursuit of truth presupposes a certain amount of courage. If nothing is ventured, as the maxim goes, nothing is gained.
We should welcome the truth that illuminates our moral responsibilities with the enthusiasm of a person who is lost in the woods and comes upon a compass and a map.
The reluctance to be enthused about truth is self-defeating. The poet A.E. Housman once said that our desire for truth is the “faintest” of all human passions. Philosophy professor Allan Bloom lamented how today's students are systematically misled into thinking that truth cannot be attained.
The author of The Closing of the American Mind found it extremely frustrating in trying to lead his students out of Plato's cave and into the light of truth. “The Republic's story [as told by Plato] of the man in the cave still exercises some of the old magic, but it now encounters a fresh obstacle, for the meaning of the story is that truth is substituted for myth. Today's students are taught that no such substitution is possible.”
The fact that truth is indispensable for a meaningful life does not mean that it is always agreeable. “God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose,” wrote the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. Mounting the bathroom scale can be a breathless ascent, because the anxious weight-watcher knows that this simple piece of machinery tells the truth. But the disconcerting truth that one is overweight may be exactly what one needs if exercising and dieting are to follow. The freedom that health offers may need to be preceded by the disagreeable truth that one is carrying excessive poundage.
The Natural Truth
Truth is as natural to our minds as oxygen is to our lungs and food is to our digestive system. It is a great mistake to regard the teaching of truth as an imposition. The Church does not, nor can she, “impose” truth. Rather, she endeavors to propose truths to those who are disposed to receive them. The Second Vatican Council's Declaration on Religious Liberty states that “The truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it wins over the mind with both gentleness and power.”
The Church as Guardian of the Truth and Teacher of the Word provides food for hungry minds. She does not impose the truth any more than Christians impose food on hungry bodies when they practice this corporal work of mercy. She guards it because it needs to be protected against the contamination of error. She teaches it because it is more nourishing than error.
Moreover, the truth enables her to teach realistically about the truth of Christ, the truth of the Catholic Church, and the truth of man. Apostles are ministers of love, but they are also servants of the truth.
Donald DeMarco is a professor of philosophy at St. Jerome's University in Waterloo, Ontario.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Donald DeMarco ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary ----------- TITLE: Go Soft on Moms Who Care, Hard on Those Who Kill DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:In the Roman Empire, it was an aberration for a mother to seek the death of her child.
What, then, are we to think of 21st-century America, where our much-more “civilized” society is indifferent toward mothers who kill their young?
No, this isn't another offensive against abortion — readers of the Register are well aware of that epidemic. Consider another kind of infanticide. One that mainstream Americans can recognize as cold-blooded murder, regardless of what views they hold regarding abortion. Mothers who, after giving birth, sometimes after living and raising a child for months, even years, intentionally murder their children.
We saw the most brutal example of this last summer, when Andrea Yates drowned every one of her kids — Noah, 7; John, 5; Paul, 3; Luke, 2; and Mary, 6 months — in the family bathtub.
Not only is Yates pleading insanity in the hopes for leniency in court, but the National Organization for Women, the American Civil Liberties Union and other “progressive groups” have jumped to her defense. “Andrea Pia Yates was mentally ill,” an ACLU spokesman said. “It's a travesty her condition wasn't treated.” There was no mention of the travesty the five trusting kids fell victim to. Katie Couric, “America's Sweetheart,” as she's often called, even solicited funds for Yates’ legal defense. Yates’ husband, meanwhile, said he doesn't blame Andrea “one bit” for doing what she did.
Then there's Melissa Drexler, now 23, and now a free woman. At age 18, while at her high-school prom, Drexler went into the women's room and gave birth to a 6-pound, 6-ounce boy. Then she strangled the infant and threw his body into a trashcan. She immediately ate a salad and returned to dancing. Drexler was sentenced to 15 years in jail, but was freed after serving just 37 months. Prosecutors believed she does not constitute a threat to the public.
“Enough is enough,” her father told the press. “She wants to get on with her life.”
But what of the public? The Drexler release was a B-section story in most newspapers. With a war going on, however, there is a case to be made that our own killing of innocents should be in the forefront of our minds now more than ever.
Not only is Drexler released, presumably sorry for her deed, ready for her second chance. Her second chance actually began immediately after her baby was killed. She received her high-school diploma the same year the rest of her graduating class did. (Miracle of miracles: She was not allowed to participate in the graduation ceremony.)
Her jail time consisted of three years of fashion classes; she wants to be a fashion designer. One little murderous mistake isn't going to derail her hopes and dreams.
Drexler wasn't the first young murderer whose life was spared an untimely interruption by her choice to kill her own newborn. Fellow teen Amy Grossberg killed her baby in a motel, with the aid of boyfriend Brian Peterson, in November 1996. Grossberg and Peterson, too, were let out of jail early on good behavior.
Making matters worse than they already are is that women considering such choices have plenty of encouragement from the system to see their infants as monstrous mistakes to put behind them.
One solution, for example, has been so-called safe-haven laws, which allow mothers to abandon their live babies, no questions asked.
Usually they are required to leave them in a drop-off slot on the side of a hospital — sort of like a book-drop at the library — or with an emergency medical technician. So far, 35 states have such programs.
It's hard to argue with a law that seems to save lives, despite the small numbers of women who have actually taken advantage of the safe-haven laws. (Of the first 16 states that passed the laws, there were only six reported safe-haven babies, according to a survey by the National Conference of State Legislatures.) Still, what kind of message are these laws sending to women? You can abort your child. You can also kill him after he is born and not pay too high a price. If you do feel like sparing his life, you can drop him off in a drop-slot, no questions asked.
I know it's naive, but shouldn't mothers want the best for their children? Shouldn't they want to know they have put their kids in good hands? Adoption can be anonymous, and should be if that's what the mother wants. Shouldn't we be encouraging girls to not have sex unless they are prepared for the consequences? Shouldn't we make sure they know the life-affirming options at their disposal before they make their “choices”?
Debbe Magnusen has the right idea. She runs Texas-based Project Cuddle. Within 12 hours of opening the toll-free crisis-pregnancy hotline, Project Cuddle received its first call from a girl in labor. Desperate, she cooperated with Project Cuddle, gave birth and put her baby up for adoption.
“We didn't just save the baby,” Magnusen told me. “We saved the girl and we made a family.” Society “expects that they are going to do the worst thing possible,” she added. “I wish these people would realize these girls can do better than a dumpster.”
Kathryn Jean Lopez is executive editor of National Review Online
(www.nationalreview.com)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kathryn Jean Lopez ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary ----------- TITLE: Orvieto's Cathedral: Scripture in Stone DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:The Umbrian town of Orvieto rises, one of the most attractive spots in Italy, just about an hour north of Rome.
Rises — literally. Orvieto sits about 500 feet up from the plain, on a steep-sided plateau of volcanic tufa, the soft stone that much of central Italy is constructed upon. The town's dramatic setting and its strategic importance as a place defensible from enemies have given it importance through the ages.
I once had the happy task of writing a walking-tour tape recording of the town, and I spent days wandering its streets and walls. People watched curiously as I passed their shops day after day with my notebook, but I didn't look like their tax collector, and so no one seemed worried. Actually, I met enchanting people as I strolled. A man I'll never forget made wooden Pinocchios, and many people were opening craft shops for ceramics, and tasting centers for local wines and cheeses.
At first an Etruscan town, Orvieto has preserved excellent examples of that pre-Christian time in the Faina Museum at the town's center, where a rare sarcophagus and funerary urns from that age are on display.
Orvieto's treasure is a magnificent cathedral, the Duomo (as all major cathedrals are called), one of the finest I've ever seen anywhere. Medieval streets lead up to a piazza, and there you are suddenly greeted with the dazzling facade of the Duomo. Its delicate Gothic features are further enlivened with a rich array of gold and multicolored mosaics. A transitional building between the Romanesque and Gothic styles, the church was begun in 1290 and would later enshrine a sacred mystery, the Miracle of Bolsena. Taking part in the build-ing's construction and decoration were more than a hundred architects, sculptors, painters and mosaicists.
Corpus Christi Central
Thirteen miles west of Orvieto, the town of Bolsena gave rise, one day during the 13th century, to the miracle that would initiate the celebration of Corpus Christi. It seems that a priest was having disturbing doubts about the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist even while he celebrated Mass.
One morning, his doubts would flee because he saw the host spout real human blood, which spilled on to the chalice cloth. This was all verified by the clergy and the bishop of Bolsena, and finally Pope Urban IV would initiate the feast of Corpus Christi to celebrate the event.
Orvieto, with its dazzling Duomo, was chosen to house the bloodstained cloth, and the first procession honoring the miracle was held here in 1337. Orvieto still celebrates this miracle at the feast of Corpus Christi, with townspeople dressing in period costumes and carrying the Blessed Sacrament under a canopy.
From the outside, the cathedral looks like a regal triptych, a reliquary meant to house the jewels and relics of a heavenly realm.
Designed for a preliterate time, the facade is rich in biblical instruction. The bas reliefs that cover the four piers are attributed to Lorenzo Maitani and his workshop (1310). At the far left, the Creation and the Fall are done with great lyric beauty that contrasts with the violent scenes of the Last Judgment at the right, which must have made some passersby think twice about their fate. (Hopefully, they still do.)
But the sculptor passes on some humor too, as God the Father dips into Adam's side to extract a rib with which to fashion Eve and then Eve is seen hiding in the bushes. Farther right, in the Nativity scene, there is wonderful humanity in Mary's lifting an edge of the blanket to check on her newborn while Joseph nods. The souls at the Last Judgment, damned for eternity, show very human misery.
From the outside, the cathedral looks like a regal triptych, a reliquary meant to house the jewels and relics of a heavenly realm.
Bronze emblems of the four Evangelists crown the piers, another fine contribution of Maitani, whose name you will see everywhere in town. Then we can look farther up at the majestic pointed arches, a rose window and statues.
Entering the Duomo, the grandeur continues, as we are swept up into a vast vertical space that is anchored to earth by strong horizontal stripes of black and white marble on the massive pillars. Treasures in painting and statuary abound. In the Chapel of the Corporale (chalice cloth), a celebrated 14th-century silver reliquary contains the relic, which has been exhibited only on Corpus Christi and Easter Day.
The chapel of San Brizio, devoted to horrific paintings of the Last Judgment by Luca Signorelli (1499-1505), may give you pause. The figures being carried off by demons to their miserable fate are said to include a woman the artist knew rather well. Some say she rejected him, and so he sent her off to Hades in the clutches of a hideous creature. Thanks to the artist's great ability in rendering the human form, he is considered a precursor of Michelangelo. On the ceiling, Fra Angelico painted Christ among angels and prophets. Besides the damnation frescoes, Signorelli's portrayal of the Antichrist and the resurrection of the body show the artist at his best.
The Duomo's museum, located on the same piazza, in the Palazzo Soliano, contains some fine paintings of the Madonna by Simone Martini, whose style is famous at the period for almond-eyed Marias.
To the right of the Duomo, notice the Palace of the Popes (now the Archeological Museum), which served as a temporary Vatican often in the Middle Ages when warfare between the Guelphs (pope's side) and Ghibellines (emperor's side) had kept this area in foment for many years, to be followed by the Avignon-Rome strife. Orvieto was tossed about among rulers until in 1448, when it came under the authority of Pope Nicholas V.
A Medieval Ramble
After this turbulence, you may want to explore the gentler aspects of the town, which you can do, if you are prepared for walking, by following the town border around the cliff, which will let you discover a string of beautiful churches. Like many churches in Italy, these are almost ignored because of a superstar cathedral's attraction that dims their brilliance. Among these unsung stars is San Domenico, where the richly decorated monument to Cardinal Guglielmo de Braye (d. 1282) is a gem of mosaics and colored marble by Arnolfo di Cambio, who was one of the original architects for the Duomo. This monument set the style for wall tombs for the next century.
Another church that merits a visit is San Giovenale, at the western tip, which is almost entirely covered in frescoes from the 15th century. Views from here are astonishing. Another church to search out is Sant'Andrea in Piazza della Repubblica, which has a charming, 12-sided campanile from the original 12th-century building
For a change of epoch, stop at the San Bernardino, where the Baroque sweeps theatrically through.
In any case, don't miss via Malabranca, a medieval street that skirts the town, with fine houses and a Renaissance palace. (The tourist office near the Duomo should have town maps that list these and other churches.)
St. Peter's Well was dug into the tufa by order of the Medici Pope Clement VII in 1527, to ensure the town's water supply in case of siege. Antonio di Sangallo created an exquisite structure of two spiral staircases (each 248 steps) winding up and down along interior windows, without meeting, ensuring that man and mule could pass each other easily on the up or down route.
Pope Clement had taken refuge here in 1527 when Rome was sacked by the troops of Charles V.
Orvieto has lots of attractive trattorias for meals and plenty of stores to buy ceramics, cheese and wine from the area. And do take your camera and lots of film. It's a very scenic place.
Barbara Coeyman Hults lives in New York City.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Barbara Coeyman Hults ----- KEYWORDS: Travel ----------- TITLE: Scarred in Somalia DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:The United States’ 1992-93 involvement in Somalia was the nation's most disastrous foreign-policy venture since Vietnam.
Issues of national interest and humanitarian ideals collided, and political concerns trumped battlefield needs. After a commitment of U.S. forces that, at one point, exceeded 30,000 men, we bugged out after a single engagement with Somali forces — even though our military prevailed in the fight. The casualties and the grisly TV images generated too much heat for the Clinton administration to withstand. Some consider this decision to be a stain on our national honor, one that only the present successes in
Afghanistan have finally erased. But, in truth, there are plenty of villains to go around on all sides of the public-policy spectrum.
What was often forgotten in the Monday morning quarterbacking that followed was the extraordinary bravery of the U.S. soldiers involved. Black Hawk Down, directed by Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator) and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer (Top Gun, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor), sets the record straight. It pushes the policy issues to the edges of its narrative and concentrates on its main incident in a vivid, realistic way. The film looks and feels like a documentary. Imagine the brutally brilliant first section of Saving Private Ryan expanded to a feature-length movie.
Scott, Bruckheimer and screen-writer Ken Nolan adapt Mark Bowden's book into an ensemble film where no one character stands out. The drama springs from group dynamics rather than from individual character arcs.
The filmmakers begin by sketching in the complicated political background. During the Cold War, Somalia was a football between the two sides. When the Cold War ends, the government collapses and is replaced by incessant clan warfare. The result is a famine that claims close to 300,000 lives.
Pressured by images of starving children in the media, the American government has to do something. In 1992, the first Bush administration intervenes. Order is restored and famine averted, saving hundreds of thousands of lives.
This is a departure from the usual premises of American foreign policy. Our national security is not at risk. Our actions are being driven by humanitarian impulses that are, in turn, fueled by TV coverage.
The United Nations takes over and expands the mission to include the reconstruction of the Somali nation. The dominant local warlord, a Muslim named Mohammed Farah Aidid, seizes control of the food distribution to increase his power and, in effect, declares war on the U.N.
The United States considers Aidid a political outlaw and sets out to hunt down and capture him. Our posse is made up of the elite U.S. combat units, along with the Rangers and the Delta Force. When the warlord eludes them all, they mount operations to kidnap his key lieutenants. The parallels to the current situation with Osama Bin Laden are obvious.
On Oct. 2, 1993, while Bill Clinton is in the White House, the posse's commander, Maj. Gen. William F. Garrison (Sam Shepard), learns that Aidid's top command is to meet the next day in a hotel in the Bakara Market area of Mogadishu, Somalia's capital. “It's an entirely hostile district,” he tells his staff.
The Rangers and the Delta Force are ordered to grab the bad guys. These two units are rivals, but both strictly follow the battlefield code to “never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy.”
During preparations for the operation, there are occasional references to restraints placed on their tactics and equipment by political higher-ups. No names are mentioned. But when “Washington in all its wisdom” decrees that the AC-130 Spectre gunships can't be used because they would increase the United States’ “visibility,” it affects the operation's prospects for success. These aircraft are ferocious weapons that provide air support as well as transportation for mobile combat units. Instead, the Rangers and the Delta Force are to be ferried to the Bakara district in the less-conspicuous Black Hawk helicopters.
The cast consists of recognizable war-movie types: the desk jockey eager for combat (Ewan McGregor); the wisecracking chopper pilot (Jeremy Piven); the green rookie (Orlando Bloom); and the sergeant promoted on the eve of battle to an officer's command (Josh Hartnett).
The operation is scheduled for Oct. 3 and supposed to last no more than an hour. But everything falls apart when two of the four Black Hawks are shot down by “the skin-nies,” as the Somalis are nicknamed. What was intended to be an offensive commando raid turns into a defensive rescue mission: The downed soldiers can't be left behind.
The filmmakers re-create convincingly the nightmarish experience called “the fog of war.” The audience is viscerally plunged into the horrors and confusion of urban combat. Well-armed militia in civilian clothes ambush our pinned-down, uniformed troops and then dissolve into the background. The violence is intense, but never exploitative.
Eighteen Americans are killed and 73 wounded, but everybody is retrieved from the fire zone. More than 1,000 Somali militia are killed, and Aidid's top command successfully captured. Mission accomplished. But after CNN runs footage of dead Americans being dragged through the streets, congressmen and the public are appalled. Two weeks later, we pull out even though the Somalis expect massive U.S. retaliation. There was an Al Qaeda presence in the region, and Osama Bin Laden is reported to have concluded from our hasty exit that America is weak — and he planned his future terrorist operations accordingly.
The movie shows the courage and camaraderie of our soldiers in Somalia to be impressive. It is much like the spirit displayed by the police and firemen at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.
Viewing this film reminds one that Americans still have the right stuff.
John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: Black Hawk Down re-creates a fierce firefight ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:Rough Riders(1997)
Thanks to a best-selling biography by Edmund Morris and a well-reviewed PBS documentary, Teddy Roosevelt is back in fashion. There are also reports that the White House's present occupant has made TR's life and letters his bedside reading. Rough Riders, a cable-TV miniseries directed by John Milius (Red Dawn), chronicles TR's brave, colorful exploits during the Spanish-American War. The action begins in 1898 when the soon-to-be-president (played by Tom Berenger) is still assistant secretary of the Navy. He picks 560 men out of 23,000 enthusiastic would-be soldiers to form the 1st Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, or Rough Riders. They are an odd mixture of East Coast dandies (Chris Noth), Confederate Civil-War veterans (Gary Busey), cowboy-soldiers (Sam Elliott) and other misfits.
Against all odds, TR whips them into shape and leads them in the brilliant charge up San Juan Hill, Cuba, to defeat the Spaniards. Milius glorifies warrior virtues and masculine friendship — qualities appropriate to the present national security crisis.
Zulu(1964)
The West wages war differently than other cultures. The issues are not courage under fire or the rightness of the cause, per se. Western civilizations combine superior technology with ideas of personal and economic freedom to create warriors who fight smarter under pressure. Zulu, directed by Cy Endfield, dramatizes these principles in the heroic stand of 115 British soldiers against over 4,000 Zulu tribesmen at Rorke's Drift, Natal, South Africa, in 1879.
England is intent on colonizing the region, a less-than-noble cause, and the Zulus are fighting back. Lt. John Chard (Stanley Baker), an engineer assigned to the region to build a bridge, takes command of the outpost over the objections of the aristocratic Lt. Gonville Bromhead (Michael Caine), who feels entitled to the assignment. The two rivals inspire the enlisted men under them to withstand attack after attack, night and day, until the numerically superior Zulus give up. Both sides are shown to be equally honorable and brave. The battle sequences are truly spectacular.
Bambi(1942)
Bambi is said to have been Walt Disney's favorite of all his animated films. The story is a deceptively simple fable about the cycles of life and nature as seen through the eyes of a fawn named Bambi (voice of Bobby Stewart).
The action begins with the deer's birth. His mother (Paula Winslowe) lovingly nurtures him and teaches him to walk. She extols the beauties of the forest and the meadow while warning him of their dangers.
His best friends are the skunk, Flower (Stan Alexander), and a rabbit named Thumper (Peter Behn), who has the best lines.
This natural paradise is disrupted by hunters from the world of humans who kill Bambi's mother. The fawn survives this wrenching, primal separation and matures into an alert, courageous creature who saves his own true love, Faline (Cammie King), from a raging forest fire.
The colors and drawings are lyrical and pure, and the Oscar-nominated songs enchant. Life is shown to be sweet and sometimes cruel. This hard truth still packs a wallop.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----------- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:All times Eastern
SUNDAY, JAN. 27
North American International Auto Show
ESPN, 2 p.m.
Detroit, the Motor City, hosts this exposition of new cars and prototypes.
SUNDAY, JAN. 27
Nature: Yellowstone Otters
PBS, 8 p.m.
This appealing documentary follows a mother river otter as she raises her pups through the seasons among Yellowstone Park's waterways, geysers and hot springs.
MONDAY, JAN. 28
USS Wisconsin: The Last Battleship PBS, 11:30 a.m.
This special features former crew-men discussing the history of their fabled ship, which was in service for nearly 50 years and fought in three wars. First broadcast in 1993.
MONDAY, JAN. 28
Wide Open: Inside the World of High School FootballA & E, 9 p.m.
This two-hour installment of “Investigative Reports” visits two high school teams. The Jefferson Democrats in south-central Los Angeles might have fewer resources than the Stephenville Yellow Jackets in Texas, but both schools’ athletes, coaches and parents strive for the same goals — competing, winning and becoming achievers in life.
TUESDAY, JAN. 29
The Awesome Pawsome
Animal Planet, 8 p.m.
In this documentary, humans raise four Bengal tiger cubs. The cubs are cute and cuddly in their early months, naturally, but later they become formidable.
WEDNESDAY, JAN. 30
Remote Control
A & E, 10 p.m.
“Modern Marvels” calls this world premiere show part of its “Boys’ Toys” Week, but anyone who has ever wielded a TV clicker will enjoy this look at ingenious new remote-control devices for all kinds of uses.
THURSDAY, JAN. 31
Million-Dollar Tech
A & E, 9 p.m.
This “Boys’ Toys” week premiere features the bejeweled Easter Eggs that Carl Faberge made for Russia's czars. Each egg is worth several million dollars today.
FRIDAYS
Friday Devotions
EWTN, various times
Add extra meaning to your Fridays by praying along with the Litany of the Sacred Heart of Jesus at 7:45 a.m. and 3:45 p.m. and the Stations of the Cross at 6 p.m.
SATURDAYS
Shows for Kids
EWTN, 9 a.m.
“Hey, kids, there's no school today,” kindly Andy Devine used to remind the “peanut gallery” — as if they needed reminding — on his pioneer 1950s Saturday-morning children's show, “Andy's Gang.” EWTN makes children's hearts glad, too, and in a nicely Catholic way, with Angel Force at 9 a.m. and The Donut Man at 9:30 a.m.
Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:Vouchers No Panacea
She notes that Notre Dame University now offers a series of one-credit “Know Your Catholic Faith” courses, designed to introduce students to the Church's rudimentary teachings.
“It's not just that they know less stuff,” says Notre Dame theology chairman John Cadadini. “They have less of a feel for the religious and intellectual tradition, less of a feel for Scripture.”
Near Death Perspective
Michael Langley, a 24-year-old convert to the Catholic faith and a student at the Jesuit-run college, is no stranger to adversity.
He worked his way out of a tough neighborhood in Washington, lost his father in a fatal stabbing and helped his mother battle breast cancer.
He joined a youth mission run by the Missionaries of Charity and entered the Catholic Church during high school while living with a Catholic family in suburban Maryland.
Langley says his near-death experience was a sign from God: “Life is that much more precious because I was so close to not being able to enjoy it.”
Rural Nursing
UNIVERSITY OF SCRANTON, Jan. 10 — The Jesuit-run University of Scranton has been awarded a $500,000 grant by a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to fund a three-year recruitment and education project to increase the number of nurse-anesthetists working in rural areas.
The money also will support programs that foster careers in health care.
Hispanic Award
ST. JOHN'S UNIVERSITY, Jan. 7 — Father Jean-Pierre Ruiz, chairman of St. John's University's theology department, is the winner of the 2001 Virgilio Elizondo Award of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States, according to the Vincentian-run university in New York.
Father Ruiz was cited for his writings on theological and biblical studies and his contributions to ecumenical activities.
He is also editor of the Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology and associate editor of the Catholic Biblical Quarterly.
Ratzinger Heeds Christendom's Call
CHRISTENDOM.EDU, Jan. 16 — Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has agreed to serve as the Chairman of the Honorary Dinner Committee for Christendom College's 25th Anniversary Gala Dinner on Sept. 14.
In a letter to Dr. Timothy T. O'Donnell, President of Christendom College, he wrote, “I am well aware of the distinguished record of Christendom College over these past twenty-five years, and of the outstanding contribution which it has made to Catholic life in the United States of America. For this reason, I am particularly honored by your kind invitation and am happy to … associate myself with such a fine Catholic institution of higher learning.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education ----------- TITLE: Characters Count in an Engaging Pro-Life Tale DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:The intricate plotlines snaking their way through this skillfully spun yarn are no mere window dressing on a pro-life preachment. Nor is this a “happily-ever-after” tale. Instead, Kathryn Lively has convincingly created a town in which the drama of human existence unfolds in many of its modern manifestations.
There's murder. Teen pregnancy. Abortion protests. Lonely hearts, scarred souls, dinners at the café. And prayer — especially rosaries. Best of all, Lively shows how each life, and each prayer, touches so many people. The story opens as abortionist Neil Masterson rationalizes his occupation.
“He was not a monster, Neil often assured his sister-in-law. He had never held a gun to the heads of the various women, troubled and confident, seeking the aid of his practice. The choice was ultimately theirs; he was only the doctor in the clinic offering the service.
“Carrie's Aunt Barbara was probably going to be there, in Richmond, thought Neil, hunkered down in front of the picture window at the maternity ward, cooing at the babies and shaking her damn rosary like a rattle. Just as well he stay in Williamsburg, he thought. He didn't need any of Barbara's disapproving stares today.
“He nicked his chin with the last pull of the razor blade, and a small spot of blood surfaced and mingled with the last traces of shaving cream on his face. Neil cursed silently as he ran a damp washcloth over his face. If that were the only blood he saw today, he would consider his shift a good one.”
Masterson, a fallen-away Catholic whose rosary-reciting relative drives him crazy, is far from the only believable character in this cast. His wife, Carrie, has numbed her conscience in an effort to raise their two sons without knowledge of their father's true occupation. Chris and Laura Merwin are fighting an uphill battle to keep their kids on the right path and are unaware they've been losing ground with their two eldest, Monica and CJ.
Therese is very concerned for her siblings and prays for them as she approaches her confirmation. (St. Thérèse certainly receives a substantial amount of business from this teen-ager). Winningham and Larry Jeffries both harbor secrets. Larry's brother, Roy, has an offbeat mission rooted in deep psychological pain; anger over the loss of his wife and child to abortionist Neil Masterson's knife has blinded his soul. Detective Mark Skinner attempts to make sense out of murder and mayhem while protecting human life. Barbara Fitzgerald (Rosie) is a witness to the power of a simple string of rosary beads.
Settings like Café Liseux may not really exist in an increasingly secular culture, but the larger concept at work here — that people's lives are changed through God's mercy and by others’ good deeds and prayers, including those of little old ladies — smacks of real life.
In Lively's world, the forces of contemporary culture are strong, but not insurmountable. Some of the characters develop an understanding of what it means to be pro-life when life grows more challenging through events such as death or unplanned pregnancy. Naturally, not every character develops this way; neither Neil Masterson nor Roy Jeffries is able to break free of the past.
Still, when confronted with evil, the protagonists are able to overcome adversity by reaching into the very depth of their souls to discover a deeper understanding of life's sacredness. Sin changes lives, but God's mercy is greater.
All in all, Little Flowers is a good read that makes a strong pro-life statement. Once begun, like any novel worth the paper it's printed on, it's difficult to put down.
Mary C. Walsh writes from Fredericksburg, Virginia.
----- EXCERPT: Weekly Book Pick ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mary C. Walsh ----- KEYWORDS: Education ----------- TITLE: Family Matters DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:Office Crucifix
Q I debate with myself about having a crucifix or other religious objects in my office. On the one hand, I feel it's out of place and will make people uncomfortable; on the other, I think it's proper to have images of Christ where I spend so much time.
A It would be odd to say that Christ belongs at home, or in our heart, but not where we work. Christ is the one who is with us. He belongs in the workplace as he does in every place where people are gathered. We should acknowledge it and profess it.
But how? It's really difficult to answer that question in general. There are some places where, for example, a statue of Mary or a crucifix would be not helpful; it might even make it more difficult to reach people with an evangelical message. I assume you don't want that.
In other offices, religious objects would be met with joy and increased camaraderie. I would guess, however, that in the vast majority of workplaces people wouldn't say a thing.
If you think religious articles would be too distracting or too upsetting in your situation — or that they would have no impact at all — then you might try to redirect your focus. Instead of thinking about Christian symbols, ask yourself what you could do to help others at work experience Christ.
The best thing we can do is to bring him to our co-workers by charity.
Responding with genuine interest in your colleague's discussions or refraining from condescension towards those who are lower in the organizational chart or bringing a hopeful attitude to stressful meetings or showing a willingness to help on a less desirable project without complaining are all ways to manifest Christ.
Then your co-workers will be saying things like: “The work is so stressful, but he's always full of joy;” “He treats people with patience and respect even if they don't treat him the same way,” “He does-n't get into locker-room humor, or gossip;” “He always tells the truth and listens intently — I can't help wondering why.”
Their wondering isn't meant to stir a discussion of your virtues. It's meant, rather, to point to the source of your joy, patience and respect for others. After all, for Christ to increase, we must decrease — as John the Baptist put it.
It's not that we shouldn't bear witness to Christ when we have appropriate opportunities. For example, when someone asks “What did you do this weekend?” it's a good opening to talk about the homily at Mass or the retreat you attended. This is not imposing; it's answering a question honestly.
Faith is our relationship with Christ. How can others know about it, and how can we make him present? Our manifestation of charity will tell the tale.
Art A. Bennett is a licensed marriage, family and child therapist.
Reach Family Matters at familymatters@ncregister.com
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Art A. Bennet ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----------- TITLE: A Saint for the Workplace DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — Blessed Josemaría Escrivá, founder of the Priestly Society of the Holy Cross and the lay spirituality movement Opus Dei, will likely be raised to the honors of the altar later this year. Although no date has been established, on Dec. 20, the Pope officially approved a miracle that occurred through Blessed Jose-maría's intercession, clearing the way for his canonization.
Blessed Josemaría was a Spanish priest, ordained in 1925. His ministry began with parish work in Saragossa, but within three years he made his way to Madrid to obtain a doctorate in law. There he received the inspiration to form Opus Dei — Latin for “work of God” — an institution of Catholics striving for personal holiness through the ordinary toils of life.
Pope John Paul II has since made Opus Dei the Church's first and only personal prelature, an entity within the hierarchical structure of the Church to which both laity and clergy belong. It is presided over by a prelate, Bishop Javier Echevarria. According to Vatican statistics, Opus Dei presently numbers about 82,500 lay members and 1,750 priests worldwide.
A recent congress in Rome, called “The Grandeur of Ordinary Life” after one of Blessed Josemaría's sermons, focused on the founder's spirituality, which, though as old as Christianity itself, was synthesized and codified in the Vatican II document Lumen Gentium as the “universal call to holiness.”
Opus Dei Father William Stetson, who knew Blessed Josemaría, said the future saint used to relate that from the age of 16, he sensed God had a special calling for him. He entered the seminary in what he thought was a response to that prompting, and would often pray the words of blind Bartimeus: Lord, “that I may see” (Mark 10:52).
Father Stetson, who is chaplain of The Heights School in Potomac, Md., said of the saint-to-be, “God showed him” his true calling in 1928. Blessed Josemaría received the conviction that he was “to spread the message of holiness in ordinary life and to found an institution that would carry [that message] into all sectors of society, all parts of the world, until the end of the world.”
Josemaría's Sons
Kelly Bowring, associate professor of sacred theology at St. Mary's College of Ave Maria University in Orchard Lake, Mich., was introduced to that spirituality while still a college student.
“I began attending evenings of recollection for men, which include fellowship, practical and theologically sound spiritual talks, sacramental confession and adoration of the holy Eucharist,” Bowring said. “This was exactly what I was looking for, and it has since helped me to sanctify my daily life as a husband, father of five, and university professor …. Blessed Josemaría's Opus Dei has taught me how to have an authentic Catholic lay mentality.”
Father C. John McCloskey, a priest of Opus Dei and director of the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C., explained that Opus Dei's charism of striving for holiness through one's everyday labors is fundamental, noting four essential components. The work must be done well and in a spirit of service; it should be undertaken for God's glory and performed “in God's presence” as a conscious offering or prayer.
“If you simply do your work in the presence of God, and offer it up, you're sanctifying your work,” Father McCloskey said.
Opus Dei members also follow a prescribed spiritual and intellectual formation. Father Michael Barrett, an Opus Dei priest stationed at Holy Cross Chapel in Houston, noted that, throughout the institution's 73-year existence, its extensive formation has been unprecedented. Each Opus Dei priest holds a doctorate, he said, and many members with professional degrees, in law or medicine for example, also have advanced degrees in philosophy, theology or canon law. Blessed Josemaría was both a canon and civil lawyer.
Father Barrett said the members share this learning and experience with one another and “raise the level of everybody's grasp as to why and how to integrate faith with everyday life.” The founder, Father Barrett said, would refer to this as “capillary action,” because the knowledge of one member is distributed to the benefit of many others.
Robert A. Best, a former chief economist of the Senate Finance Committee and founder and president of Helpingkids, Inc., which supports inner-city youth programs, also met the soon-to-be saint.
“I met Blessed Josemaría in 1971 when I had to go to a meeting in Paris to accompany a delegation of senators,” Best said. “He had a great love in his eyes and a very quick mind. I recall telling him I had waited 14 years to meet him and he responded, ‘I have waited 44 years to meet you.’ The conversation was stimulating and my openness in the dialogue amazed some of his closest collaborators.”
Opus Dei is not without its detractors. One popular criticism is that the institution is secretive. This opinion escalated with the arrest of FBI agent and Opus Dei member Robert Hanssen last year. Hanssen has since pleaded guilty to selling government secrets to Russia.
“Bob Hanssen led a double life,” said Father McCloskey. “He fooled the FBI, his family. And he fooled Opus Dei too, for years.” Noting some commentators’ assessment that Hanssen likely suffers from a psychological imbalance, Father McCloskey said unity of life is what Opus Dei professes — professional life, family life and prayer life in harmony. “You should be no different in what you do than what you say,” the priest concluded.
The accusation of being furtive is misplaced according to Robert Best: “Opus Dei lives what it calls ‘collective humility.’ It only wants to serve the Church as the Church wants to be served, without fanfare or publicity. Some call it secrecy but it is not; it simply wants to serve unnoticed. Maybe the naturalness lived in Opus Dei leads to suspicion of a hidden agenda, but I can tell you from 44 years in the [institution], there is no political or other agenda.”
More than 1,000 people from varied ethnic backgrounds and social classes, many of them couples with young children, gathered for a Mass in Washington's Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception Jan. 12 to honor Blessed Josemaría.
In his homily, Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo, the papal nuncio to the United States, summarized Msgr. Escrivá's spirituality, saying he “in-tensely believed and taught that each and every individual can and must follow the path toward Christian perfection. This path is wide enough for all of God's children, inviting and beckoning men and women of every background and station in life.”
Kelly Bowring echoed that assessment. “Blessed Josemaría will be for the 21st century what Saints Francis and Dominic were to the 12th century,” Bowring concluded. “He has made holiness attractive and accessible to the laity. He says to me, ‘You too can be a saint, so blaze a trail by letting Christ live through you in everything.’”
Peter Sonski writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Peter Sonski ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----------- TITLE: Facts of Life DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:GIVING MORE
WHEN NEEDS GROW it's remarkable how Americans dig deeper to meet them. U. S. households, for example, have given an average of $134 to the victims of Sept. 11 and concern for the poor has grown since that time.
Source: Market Research Bureau survey conducted for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. *Survey of the Center on Philanthropy of Indiana University.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----------- TITLE: Changing the Hearts of Abortion Workers One at a Time DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:DALLAS — When the new ultrasound technician first saw Paul Robertson standing and smiling pleasantly outside the North Park abortion center where she was hired, she thought he was waiting for a bus. She didn't know he was a pro-life advocate, and she didn't know he was going to change her life.
But today, more than a year since Christie Gatson left the workplace that reduced her to tears every night, she credits the 47-year-old sidewalk counselor with gently and patiently drawing her to a better job and to peace of soul.
“I love Paul. He's been a great lift to my soul and my heart.” said Gatson, a 29-year-old mother of three. “He provides a way out without being aggressive.”
For the past two and a half years Robertson, a husband, father and former human resources manager who has traded the corporate life for the Gospel of Life, has made a curb outside the abortion center on Meadow Road his office, where he offers prayers and a choice for life to the dozens of women coming for an abortion. He has seen more than 200 moms turn away from abortion, and some 30 clinic workers leave the industry.
Counseling and praying every day, Tuesday through Saturday, through chilly winters and blistering summers, Robertson, as dependable as the postman, has become a fixture in the mixed business-residential neighborhood.
“He was there every day,” recalls Gatson, who now works at a regional hospital. “He didn't have a big poster, he wasn't trying to break into my car — things I was used to seeing on TV. He was very nice. He waved to me.”
The rapport Robertson has developed with the abortion workers makes him unique among the 24 regular Catholic sidewalk counselors in the city, according to Fonda Lash, director of the sidewalk counseling program of the Catholic Pro-Life Committee of Dallas, a diocesan ministry. Counselors are trained to pray for and be respectful of the workers, but not all of them have a chance to get to know the workers.
“The workers don't want to chat. It's hard to get them to talk,” said Lash, who counsels three to four days a week. “It really amazes me that Paul seems to be able to get into conversations.”
Arriving early, before any clients, Robertson greets the employees as they arrive. He prays for them by name — people like Elizabeth, the pretty, stony-faced receptionist; Dawn, the sonographer, a young mother who Robertson thinks may be on the verge of leaving; and Margaret, an older woman with whom he has only a “waving” relationship; he doesn't know her job.
The only one who would speak to the Register was Dawn, who simply said of Robertson, “Yeah, he's nice.”
Yet many have shared personal information with Robertson — an upcoming marriage, a pregnancy, a daughter's graduation from first grade; and in turn he shares encouragement, miraculous medals, prayer cards and rosaries. Over time those same people ended up leaving the business. “They just go,” said Robertson.
Gatson said she didn't know the facility did abortions until her first day on the job. But because she had already turned down another job offer, she thought she had no other option for work, she said, so she continued to go in part-time for three months, doing sonograms on the pregnant women primarily to determine how much to charge for the abortions.
Against the advice of her coworkers, she talked with Robertson, and he told her it was not the place for her to work. He offered to meet her at the White Rose, the city's Catholic crisis pregnancy center, whose sonographer turned out to be Gatson's former ultrasound instructor. Within a short time that sonographer helped Gatson get her present job closer to home, at a better pay scale and without moral complicity.
“I feel like somebody took a 10-ton truck off my chest,” said Gatson, who has since talked two cousins out of having abortions.
Robertson has even spoken with all four abortionists at North Park and for a time carried on an e-mail conversation with one of them, who once said Robertson was “a cut above” other pro-lifers. Another has taken note of Robertson's daily witness.
It may seem odd for a pro-lifer to be cordial with abortionists and their staffs, yet according to Msgr. Philip Reilly, founder of the Helpers of God's Precious Infants, that loving outreach is an important part of the pro-life picture.
“If you're there to save the babies, then it becomes a limited focus, a limited goal,” he said. “But if you're there out of love, and you're seeking eternal life for all those involved in the culture of death, then your goal is not simply to witness to the truth but to convert people to the truth.”
The turnover for abortion center staffs is notoriously high, said Reilly. “If day after day you're going in almost apologetically [past the prolifers], you're being drawn slowly from the darkness to this love-life community. When you finally realize this is wrong, you realize there's a place to turn.”
Drawing workers out of the industry is just the first step, but the next step is bringing them back to God, according to Joan Appleton, founder of the Society of Centurions for former abortion workers.
“The biggest reason they don't come out is fear of the pain of the transition,” she said. “Many of them believe they have committed an unforgivable sin. They have the nightmares, the sounds of babies crying they can't get out of their heads.”
Norma McCorvey and Bernard Nathanson have written about their painful journeys out of the industry, and it was their stories that prompted Robertson to pray that he might be instrumental in helping one abortion center employee to leave.
His first effort, he said, was to wave and smile to the workers as they drove in. Then he would initiate conversations with a “Can I talk to you for a moment?” — and some would respond.
One of the first with whom Robertson spoke was a Catholic girl who hadn't been at the center very long and was probably doing lab work and pregnancy tests, he said.
“One of the things I noticed about her was that she was the only one ever to escort the women to their cars afterward,” he said. “I commented on that and we had a chance to talk. She told me she knew she shouldn't be working there, but she needed the job.
“I would pray for her and talk to her occasionally and encourage her to look for other opportunities. Eventually she just left and she was quite happy to leave,” he said.
To Robertson, loving the abortion workers is as natural — or supernatural — as trying to offer a better choice to the women and girls coming for abortion, and as natural as praying for their babies.
“I never feel nervous about asking if I can talk with them,” said Robertson. “After all, I am where I am supposed to be. They are the ones in the wrong place, and most of them know it.”
Ellen Rossini writes from Richardson, Texas.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Ellen Rossini ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----------- TITLE: Life Notes DATE: 01/27/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 27-Feburary 2, 2002 ----- BODY:Embryo Research Ban
“There is currently a debate about the possibility of allowing research on human stem cells taken from embryos that were left over from in-vitro fertilization. In Quebec, this is forbidden. It is not practiced,” he said.
Alan Keyes on MSNBC
“Alan Keyes is Making Sense” debuts at 10 p.m. EST Jan. 21.
His show represents something of a departure for MSNBC, which has run documentaries in that time slot.
Sidewalk Counselor Can Sue
Father Thomas Euteneuer will be allowed to sue under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. He claimed he was threatened at the Lifeline of Martin County office by Hazel Harding, who worked for a Fort Pierce abortion facility.
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found a direct connection between the alleged threat and the pregnancy help services offered by Father Euteneuer.
Maid Fined Over Abortion Pills
Norma Ileno Cortez, a 45-year-old mother of six, admitted in court she sold the Cytotec drugs to Roslan Osman whose Indonesian girlfriend was pregnant.
Cytotec is usually taken to prevent gastric ulcers but it is known to induce miscarriage depending on the dosage consumed and the stage of the pregnancy.
Both Roslan and his girlfriend are serving jail terms after the latter delivered a dead baby boy.
Florida Cloning Ban?
The legislation comes two months after the claim by a Massachusetts company that it had cloned the first human embryo. Scientists say, however, that the six-cell embryo created in Massachusetts is far from complete cloning.
State senator Alex Villalobos plans to introduce the new Florida measure along with Rep. Jim Kallinger.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----------- TITLE: Philly Gets New Saint DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:BENSALEM, Pa.—Blessed Katharine Drexel, the Philadelphia heiress who became an apostle to poor minorities, will soon be declared a saint.
On Jan. 27, the archbishop of Philadelphia, Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, paid a visit to the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament to announce a decree from Pope John Paul II that a second miracle has been attributed to Blessed Katharine.
The Pope's decree is the last major step needed for their foundress' canonization.
“This means that our holy and selfless Philadelphia native will soon be declared a saint of the Roman Catholic Church,” said Cardinal Bevilacqua, according to the archdiocese. “There is no question that God worked through Mother Katharine Drexel and her ministry continues even now.”
The convent was electrified by the news. “We're all very excited,” Sister Louis Francis, who knew Blessed Katharine, told the Register. “She was such a great lady.”
Blessed Katharine will be the second figure from Philadelphia to be canonized. John Nepomucene Neumann, a 19th-century immigrant who became a Philadelphia bishop and one of the city's most famous adopted sons, was canonized in 1977.
Seven-year-old Amanda “Amy” Wall of Bucks County, Pa., is the recipient of Blessed Katharine's miraculous intercession. Amy was born with nerve deafness in both ears in 1992. Amy's family began praying to Blessed Katharine Drexel in November 1993 after they heard about the miraculous restoration of hearing to a Bucks Countian named Robert Gutherman.
By March 1994, a preschool teacher noticed differences in Amy's responses and gave her hearing tests. She was found to have normal hearing in both ears.
“We thank Blessed Katharine for her intercession for our daughter and we thank God for the blessing of this wonderful miracle,” said Amanda's mother, Constance Wall.
Asked by a reporter why she was chosen for this blessing, Amy responded, “Because God loves me, and I love God.”
A medical board for the Vatican ruled Oct. 7 that there was no natural cause for the cure of the young girl's deafness.
Life Devoted to service
Katharine Drexel was born into a wealthy Philadelphia family. When she was 21 she heard her higher calling and, rejecting several suitors, took a vow of virginity.
She founded the Sisters for the Blessed Sacrament on Feb. 14, 1891. Today, the Sisters continue Mother Drexel's legacy of service to minority communities with 48 missionaries in 12 states and Haiti.
Katharine devoted her $20 million inheritance—an enormous fortune in those days—toward educating and evangelizing American Indians in the West and blacks in the South. She built 60 schools for American Indians and 100 for black students. One high school in New Orleans evolved into Xavier University.
Not everyone was excited about her philanthropy to Southern blacks. In one story told about Katharine, the Ku Klux Klan threatened to burn down a school the order opened up Beaumont, Texas. “No, we will not leave,” Katharine said and she started to pray. That same day lightning struck the Klan headquarters.
Mother Drexel guided her congregation for 44 years before suffering a heart attack in 1935. For the next two decades she was confined to the moth-erhouse in Bensalem, just outside of Philadelphia, where she devoted herself to prayer. She died on March 3, 1955, at age 96.
On Path to Sainthood
The news about the saint-to-be was the source of much jubilation for the Sisters.
Sister Louis said the community is looking forward to celebrating the news on March 3, which is Katharine's feast day. She also said that the canonization ceremony will likely occur at the Vatican on Oct. 1.
When Drexel officially becomes a saint, she will join Elizabeth Ann Seton as the only other native-born American saint. Two foreign-born Americans have become saints, Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, an educator and social worker, and Philadelphia Bishop Neumann.That list will likely grow larger. Twenty-nine Americans are now in some stage of canonization.
----- EXCERPT: HEIRESS, FOUNDRESS, MIRACLE WORKER ----- Extended BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: AdiÛs, Liberation Theology? DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:SAN CRISTóBAL, Mexico—Recent changes in the Mexican hierarchy have come as a blow to proponents of liberation theology— a beleaguered but enduring movement in some sectors of the Latin American Church.
For others in the Diocese of San Cristóbal de las Casas in the impoverished state of Chiapas, the retirement of Bishop Samuel Ruiz García and the surprise transfer of his coadjutor, Bishop Raúl Vera López, to Saltillo is a welcome sign that the local Church will move closer to Pope John Paul II's advocacy for the poor that avoids the rhetoric of class struggle and armed revolution.
While coadjutor bishops usually succeed to the ordinary's position once the see becomes vacant through death or retirement, the Holy Father is always free to chart a different course.
And a different course was the last thing desired by many in the chancery offices of San Cristóbal de las Casas, a diocese that had been led by Bishop Ruiz since before the Second Vatican Council.
Bishop Ruiz, who retired in November at age 75 after almost 40 years in office, was a leading proponent of liberation theology — to the exclusion of many other legitimate Church initiatives, critics have long maintained.
They claim that Bishop Ruiz brought intellectuals from think tanks to train catechists in the latest political theories to prepare them to promote the “social gospel” while prohibiting entry to the diocese to ecclesiastical currents that do not strictly follow this approach.
“For a long time we waited for approval to operate in the diocese and only got evasive answers and delays until we decided to move to the [nearby] Diocese of Tuxtla,” said Humberto Rodríguez of the Christian Family Movement.
Leaders of the lay movement Cursillos de Cristiandad met with a similar refusal. “We were not allowed to enter the Diocese of San Cristóbal, because the bishops [Ruiz and Vera] said that the only thing that works there is their own base communities,” said Bernardo Cantu, Cursillors' Mexican president.
Father Felipe Toussaint, the vicar general and head of the diocesan pastoral council, said he could not recall what led to the denial of the Cursillos movement's request to enter the diocese, and explained that “all major movements, either Cursillos, Apostles of the Word or the Neocatecumenals, are welcomed as long as they maintain a close coordination with the diocese and the parishes.”
He said “the problem is that normally these movements try to create a parallel Church.”
The policy of “close coordination” was not only applied to outside groups. Only militant supporters of liberation theology were tolerated as priests and teachers of the faith, said critics.
A Catholic doctor who has practiced in the diocese for the last 14 years, but who asked not to be identified, told the Register that “most of the priests and catechists in the diocese teach the people about the revolution and that they can take from the rich what they themselves don't have, even by violent means.”
The diocese was the site of an uprising against civil authority by the indigenous-led Zapatista National Liberation Army that began Jan. 1, 1994.
A businessman who regularly travels within the diocese who also asked not to be identified reported, “several small farms have been invaded by indigenous people because priests and catechists promote that.”
He added: “As a consequence, in some of those towns, about 50% of the population have become Adventists or Jehovah's Witnesses because they feel abandoned by the priests,” and desire to live more spiritual, Christ-centered lives.
Tight Control
This tight control over the doctrinal positions of the clergy and Church personnel was confirmed by a 76-year-old American priest.
“In 1990, Bishop Ruiz suspended my faculties for not sharing the doctrinal position he had imposed,” said Father Andrew Lockett, who worked in the town of San Andrés Larrainzar for 28 years. “He didn't want to hear me.
“He just said that my faculties would not be returned because I was not willing to change what he called my ‘line,’ which is that of the Pope and the Church,” said Father Lockett, who now works in the neighboring Diocese of Tuxtla.
Another priest, Father Luis Beltran Mijangos, said he was suspended in 1995 “for not supporting the Zapatista guerrilla [movement] and for providing the sacraments to those humble peasants who oppose the highly ideological pastoral approach of the diocese.”
Father Mijangos, a native of San Cristóbal and one of the last priests to be trained in Chiapas before Bishop Ruiz closed the local seminary in the 1970s, said his problems began in 1980 when he criticized the bishop for ousting priests who were critical of liberation theology.
“I still do what [the diocese] doesn't want to do, which is to provide the sacraments to those peasants and native communities opposed to the official pastoral line,” he said.
According to Father Mijangos, despite Bishop Ruiz and the chancery's claim that their approach brings the Church closer to the indigenous people, many communities have been in rebellion against the diocese because of Bishop Ruiz.
While he was reluctant to discuss individual cases of priests who came into conflict with the diocese, Father Toussaint acknowledged that Father Lockett was removed because of “problems he had with … catechists formed by the women religious of the diocese.”
He also celebrate Masses in the chapel of his home without authorization which led to the loss of his faculties, said the vicar general.
Preaching Propaganda
The divisions in the diocese are also evident in urban areas.
“Many people who are good Catholics pray at home or in Chaman Square near City Hall, because they don't want to hear all the political propaganda delivered by the priests in church,” Ana María Rivera, a leader of a lay group in the city of San Cristóbal told the Register.
“We are trying to follow God, but [Bishops Ruiz and Vera] never receive us; we only get closed doors in the diocese,” she said.
When the Vatican appointed Bishop Vera López as coadjutor in 1995, it was widely assumed that he was being tapped to help bring a new focus to San Cristóbal. It is reliably reported that the apostolic nuncio in Mexico at the time, Archbishop Girolamo Prigione, told Bishop Vera, a Dominican: “Remember, you must be a Dominicanis,” a Latin play on words that sounds like Dominican but means “God's hound.”
According to some, Bishop Vera's position on the prevailing thinking in the diocese evolved from a critical stance to an ambiguous one and, finally, to one of open support for Bishop Ruiz's policies.
Diocesan officials who were initially hostile to Bishop Vera became friendlier and more supportive over time, eventually coming to see the coadjutor as the unexpected guarantor of a continuation of Bishop Ruiz's policies.
The working relationship had become close enough that, over several months in 1999, Bishop Ruiz traveled the diocese with Bishop Vera to introduce “the new bishop.” The tour was noted by the present apostolic nuncio, Archbishop Justo Mullor, who last September reminded both bishops that knowledge of “when Bishop Samuel Ruiz will be replaced and by whom is an exclusive prerogative of the Holy Father.”
New Assignment
Few saw the comments as a premonition of what would be announced by the nuncio's office on Dec. 30: Bishop Vera, 54, would replace 78-year-old retiring Bishop Francisco Villalobos Padilla in the Diocese of Saltillo.
Archbishop Mullor energetically rejected suggestions that the Mexican government had put pressure on the Vatican to remove Bishop Vera from San Cristóbal and said the reasons for the move are “purely Church related.”
Bishop Ruiz and his staff reacted with anger. “I will obey, but I am upset and frustrated,” said Bishop Ruiz.
Father Toussaint said the decision “profoundly challenges our faith and our sense of Church.”
Bishops Ruiz and Vera also signed a joint statement accusing the Vatican of making the decision based on “serious information gaps.”
But this was rejected by the other two bishops in the Chiapas region: Felipe Arizmendi Esquivel of Tapachula, and Tuxtla's Felipe Aguirre Franco. “Pope John Paul's decision was neither arbitrary nor misinformed, but taken after a careful examination,” said the bishops in a joint statement.
While much of the diocese's internal establishment is disappointed, many Catholics were encouraged by the move. “We were absolutely discouraged with the idea of waiting for another 20 years,” said Ana María Rivera. “But now we realize that the Holy Father has not forgotten us.”
She added: “We are now expecting a new springtime for the Church in San Cristóbal.”
Observers speculate that Bishop Ruiz and his aides are now trying to figure out how to persuade the Vatican to force the appointment of a successor in accord with their point of view.
“But the mood is gloomy, because they never expected the Vatican would have the nerve to change the coadjutor,” said a Church employee who asked not to be identified. “They worry that it signals the Vatican's resolve to appoint a bishop who will change everything.”
Alejandro Bermudez writes from Lima, Peru.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Alejandro Bermudez ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Bible Study Goes From Gutenberg to Gates DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:Professor and apologist Scott Hahn of Franciscan University of Steubenville jokes at his presentations that he can identify the Protestants and former Protestants. “They are the ones who bring their Bibles,” he laughs.
Since the time of Luther's divorce with the Church, it has been argued that the average Catholic does not know his Bible. Misconception or not, Hahn and colleague Jeff Cavins hope to help change that with what they call the Internet's first Catholic Bible Study, @Home with the Word.
@Home with the Word is one of the services provided by the new Catholic portal, www.e3mil.com. @Home—read “at home—launched last July with a study of the Book of James. “When I first proposed this idea, our board thought I was crazy,” said e3mil founder Daniel Daou. “Now, only five months later, we have nearly 2,000 participants and we have advertised very little.”
Both Daou and Cavins received the vision for @Home at the same time. “When we met, early last year, we discovered that we both wanted to use technology for evangelization and bring Bible study to the Internet,” said Cavins.
Staffed by a team of apologists, the site is attractively arranged to help users find the answers they are seeking. The goal of the study, says the literature, is to “help form mature sons and daughters of God through knowledge of the Word and an appreciation of Catholic teaching.” It is a mission which comes directly from Daou's experience. “When I came back to the Church,” said Daou, “I had a lot of questions, and I had to go on a treasure hunt to find the answers. @Home with the Word is the result of the searching I had to do.”
@Home with the Word can be studied on the Internet, downloaded, or be sent by “snail mail”—regular mail service. According to Cavins, “Participants receive a six-page Bible study each week that is soaked with both Scripture and tradition.” The cost for access to @Home is $7 per individual per month, or $4 per person per month for groups of eight or more. Cavins explained the @Home site for the Register:
“Each study begins with ‘Have You Ever?’These are three questions that set the stage and get the person thinking about their life as it relates to the study. Each study also features a memory verse, leads into a basic introduction, and is followed by @Homework, which are questions meant to personalize the study and get people thinking about their own heart.”
“The meat of the study,” said Cavins, “are the Points to Ponder.” This section includes a commentary on the text for the week. It is followed by Rome to Home, which provides a papal quote on the subject; a Catechism Connection, which links the Scripture passage to the Catechism; and a Word Study, which is an in-depth look into a particular word in the passage.
Whether done individually or with a group, a valuable component of the study is the list of questions. More than just questions, it teaches, said Cavins. “We always provide more questions than a study will have time to get through, but we want them to be able to pick five or six that suit them.”
Each study, Cavins added, concludes with Home Improvements and Spring Cleaning. “Improvements are items that you may need to get rid of as a result of the study,” he explained. “They may include things that you might take to confession. Spring Cleaning are those things that may need to be added onto your life as a result of the study. They are those things that you might start doing as a result of penance, for example.”
@Home includes other components as well. These include a weekly Family Night study, @Home with the Books, Truth Tracts, Live Chat, Daily Words of Encouragement, and the section Cavins is most excited about—the Clergy Gateway.
“We are not trying to work independently of the Church,” stressed Cavins. “In fact, we are giving away access to priests in order to help them to fulfill their vocation more effectively. We see them as our partners.”
Indeed, participation in @Home with the Word by priests is free. The Clergy Gateway features several sections devoted to helping priests. One section allows local priests to customize and run @Home with the Word in their own parish. Priests can welcome their parishioners, post a calendar and communicate with anyone who is participating in an @Home study in their local area.
Furthermore, the section includes a Homily Helps section developed by and for priests. One bishop has already recognized the value of this. Bishop Sam Jacobs, of the Diocese of Alexandria, La., looked at the study on the Book of James.
“It was well done. I liked it,” Bishop Jacobs told the Register. He said he hopes to see his parishes using it and encourages priests to take a look at it. In addition, Bishop Jacobs, who frequently uses the Internet for research, e-mail and Scripture insights, believes that the Clergy Gateway's Homily Helps will be of value.
“Eventually,” said Cavins, “this will grow into a massive database from which priests will be able to develop their homilies.”
Finally, the Clergy Gateway will also include an innovative feature called e-Pastoring. This program will allow priests to e-mail greeting cards, thank-you notes, and other personal communication to their parishioners. Cavins provides an example: “If the priest wants to send a special confirmation note to 700 youth, he can. Nothing else like this exists; it offer priests a nice way to stay in touch.”
Gail Buckley, of St. Vincent de Paul Church in Charlotte, N.C., had always wanted to lead a Bible study, but admits that she didn't feel “worthy.”
“I finally took a leap of faith. I had done all the research, and had started teaching a class on the book of Matthew,” said Buckley, “and then came @Home with the Word. With @Home, all the research was done for me.”
Originally scheduled to meet in her home, the class she organized grew too large. The class of 50 draws from seven of Charlotte's 10 parishes and now meets at two separate times at the church.
“The participants just love learning what the Church teaches about Scripture,” says Buckley. “People are hungry and thirsty for a good Catholic Bible study here in the Bible Belt. There are a lot of Protestant Bible studies going on, and many Catholics were going to them. Many people don't know how to explain what they believe, and as a result they end up leaving the Church. @Home has caught on like wildfire.”
Many participants have said that they have learned practical things from the study—things they can use in their everyday life, said Buckley, a convert from the Methodist faith.
Her parish priest, Msgr. William Pharr has given the study his blessing and teases Buckley that the parish is growing too large because of it.
As for the future, Cavins said, “the Internet, as we know it today, will be obsolete in three years. It will be all video.” @Home, he says, is already at work on a full-video version. Other plans for @Home include releasing its Daily Words of Encouragement in an audio format, a fully interactive @Home forum where people will be able to post comments and insights, and a Palm Pilot version of @Home with the Word.
People have conducted Bible studies for years without the computer. Asked what he sees as the advantage to an online study, Cavins concluded that “it links a worldwide community. So many people tell us that they feel alone … they say, ‘There really isn't anyone else who feels the way I do about the faith or is as excited about it.” We bring these people together, to an arena of sorts.”
Cavins added that there are some other advantages to an online Bible study. “We have brought a massive amount of Church documents and teaching directly to a person's computer, and it's portable. Someone can log onto @Home from anywhere. There is a paradigm shift taking place.” He admitted, “despite a library of thousands of books, almost all of my study is done by computer now.”
@Home hopes to repeat elsewhere what has happened in the United States. The program will launch its Spanish version next year, and four more languages soon after that.
“The renewal that we have seen in the Church has been tremendous. We want to bring this to the rest of the world,” said company founder Daniel Daou.
Cavins agreed. “The Church is receiving so many converts … they are coming to her with great excitement,” he said. “There will come a time when Catholics will be known for their Bible studies.”
----- EXCERPT: @Home with the Word, 'the first online Catholic Bible study' ----- Extended BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Women on Subs—Some Want to Sink the Idea DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON—Has the time come for military women to start serving on Navy submarines?
Not if the head of the U.S. Military Archdiocese has a say in the matter.
“Having women on nuclear submarines is a very naive idea,” said Archbishop Edmund O'Brien, who is pastor to more than 1 million Catholics in the military. “I spoke to Navy Secretary [Richard] Danzig last spring and told him that I just couldn't go along with the idea.”
An influential military advisory committee has recommended that the Navy revamp its existing subs and build new ones with separate facilities that would allow women to serve in one of the military's most storied enclaves.
The debate isn't scheduled to be formally debated until mid-April at a meeting of Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Service. But already it has reignited the controversy over the wisdom—and morality—of allowing men and women to serve in close, combat-ready conditions.
A similar debate was set off last year when Army 1st Lt. Ryan Berry sought an exemption, based on religious convictions, from having to work with women in a cramped, underground nuclear-missile silo. Missile officers may serve one to three days at a time in school-bus-sized silos equipped with a single bath and bed.
The Air Force initially granted that exemption, then redrew it and downgraded Berry's performance review, his attorneys said. He is challenging that decision within the Air Force and will soon file a federal lawsuit, said his attorneys at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.
According to a November New York Times article, Navy Secretary Danzig had warned in a speech to the Naval Submarine League last summer that the “submarine community” risked becoming out of touch with society if it didn't adapt to include women, as well as minor submariners.
But Archbishop O'Brien sees things differently. Service on such vessels “compromises … one's privacy and personal dignity and right to private identity,” he told the Register.
Sharing a similar concern is Lt. Cmdr. Grady Pennell, a Christian Military Alliance Navy chaplain assigned to the naval base in San Diego. “As a married man, I would feel very uncomfortable serving in the close quarters of nuclear subs in today's Navy,” he told the Register.
During the first two of his 18 years as a naval officer before becoming a chaplain, the 45-year-old Protestant minister experienced life aboard a submarine.
“I had always found it terribly cramped and without privacy,” he said. “But I had forgotten about the lack of privacy until recently when I went down into a new generation nuclear submarine.
“They were preparing to get under way on a mission and I went aboard the sub to say a prayer and all the men were aboard ship. I couldn't believe how tightly people were crowded into every bit of available space. I was stunned.”
Pennell wouldn't say whether he believed the submarine policy should change, but noted, “Sometimes we forget the hormone factor of such close quarters. The mature, senior people in the military can handle such close quarters. … But when you put male and females in their late teens or early 20s into such a harsh, demanding environment, away at sea—you have a formula for real trouble.”
Pentagon records show that about 43,000 women are serving in all the U.S. military services in 1971 as compared with almost 194,000 today. In the Navy, the Seals and submarine duty are denied to women.
The Times article on the debate over women being prohibited from serving in the 25,000 positions aboard subs called the tight quarters “challenging for women.”
It described passageways in the submarines “so narrow that crew members have to turn sideways to pass each other chest-to-chest. The enlisted men share two bathrooms aboard the 145-crew member subs, and sleep stacked three deep in racks small enough to make turning over a problem.”
A Defense Department spokes-woman, Lt. Amy Derrick, pointed out to the Register that in a submarine, “every cubic foot of space is accounted for and has multiple uses.”
Father J. Edward Creary, a pastor in Memphis, Tenn., and a former U.S. Air Force chaplain, praised the women he knew in the service as “very professional, very ambitious and very able.”
Father Creary advocates a larger role for women. “Sure, we have to make some changes to accommodate them and provide some privacy between the sexes,” he said. “But the government's done the same thing to make it more livable for other groups.”
All the same, he added, “I have some doubts that women should serve on submarines.”
John Grabowski, faculty ethics expert at The Catholic University of America, agreed.
“I think it is a worst case scenario to try to pretend that there are no differences between men and women,” he argued. “Men and women just can't stop being different sexual beings and be able to put aside the natural sexual attraction between them.”
Archbishop O'Brien commented that “If I had my druthers, I would say each case for women in combat should be looked at individually and from a common sense standpoint—something I don't think is being used today in making these decisions.
“Instead of common sense, I think political correctness is often ruling today.”
Robert R. Holton writes from Memphis, Tennessee.
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: Robert R. Holton ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: What Are You Going to Do for the Poor? DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:A Piarist priest-psychologist, he has been working in the Archdiocese of Miami since 1969. Lately, he has begun a ministry of parish missions and healing Masses for Food for the Poor. He spoke with free-lance writer Joseph Albino for the Register.
Albino: Who founded Food for the Poor?
Msgr. Flanagan: Food for the Poor was founded by Ferdinand Mahfood. He is of Lebanese descent but was born and raised on the island of Jamaica.
Several years ago, while on an airplane flight, he had a conversion experience.
Ferdinand heard in a certain way in his mind and in his heart Jesus asking him, “Ferdy, what are you going to do for the poor?”
It was then that Ferdinand decided that he would start an organization to raise funds and buy food and distribute that food through the churches of the Caribbean Islands.
What occupation was Ferdinand Mahfood in at the time he had this religious experience?
Ferdy and his two brothers were in the import-export business. They were millionaires and are still millionaires. For the first two to three years of the foundation of Food for the Poor, each bother annually contributed a million dollars.
What were the circumstances of his religious experience?
Prior to his taking a flight, his wife gave Ferdy a spiritual book to read. Ferdy himself was a Sunday Catholic. His wife's faith was a little deeper. Before he stepped off the plane, because of what he was reading, he was moved by the Lord and the Lord's question to him. This happened about 1980.
What is your own background?
I was ordained a Catholic priest in 1967 at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., where I had attended the seminary. I joined an order called the Piarist Fathers. What was attractive to me about the Piarist Fathers was that they were a small religious order. They numbered about 60 members in the United States at the time I joined. Today, we are down to about 20 members in the United States.
The Piarist Fathers were founded by St. Joseph Calascintius in 1950. He was a young priest who as he was going between the university and his home would stop on the streets and teach the little urchins. After a while, other seminarians and priests joined him.
The religious order he founded spread wildly throughout Europe, especially through Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia. The first Piarist Fathers that came to America were Hungarians. In 1953 they tried to establish foundation in the United States of America, but the order never really caught on in this country.
When I was interested in going into the seminary, I was reading an issue of Sign magazine which was founded by the Passionist Fathers. I saw an advertisement for the Piarist Fathers, wrote to them, stuck with them, and eventually joined the order in 1963.
The name Piarist means pious. Officially, we are called the Fathers of the Pious Schools. Primarily, it is a teaching order at the high school, college and university level. Here in the United States we have one high school in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and we have one high school in Devon, Pa.
In Europe we are in Hungary, Italy and Spain. We also have schools in Mexico and South America. We have about 2,000 priests throughout the world.
How did you become active in the Food for the Poor's work?
When I was approaching my 25th anniversary as a Catholic priest, I wanted to do something different in my 26th year.
For example, I considered spending a year at a monastery in the Holy Land. However, I was speaking with some friends of mine who gave me their thoughts on what I should be doing.
One of my friends suggested, “Why don't you put together some talks, go out on the road, and preach parish missions as parish missions used to be preached?” Because I liked that idea, I put some talks together and asked different pastors in the Archdiocese of Miami if I could practice on their congregations. Subsequently, I preached several parish missions in Fort Lauderdale and Miami.
Word got to Ferdy Mahfood about what I was doing. He called me in for an interview. Ferdy said, “It might be a good idea if we could use you to go to churches to preach parish missions free of charge and as an act of thanksgiving request members of the congregation to donate money to Food for the Poor.” That's how I started.
What are the logistics involved with Food for the Poor's program?
We package the food and ship it to the islands where it is distributed nondenominationally through Christian churches in the name of Jesus. We ask that those individuals who are going to distribute the food believe in Jesus Christ. And we always let it be known to the poor that the food is distributed to them in the name of Jesus.
Our mission is to help the poor who live in the Caribbean Islands, particularly Haiti and Jamaica. We also try to help the poor of Nicaragua and San Salvador. Most recently, we've been extending help to the poor of Central and South America.
How do you establish your parish missions?
I explain to the pastor that the first way is to preach a parish mission beginning with a 60-minute homily on a Sunday. In addition, I tell the pastor the second way I can bring the parishioners closer to Jesus Christ is to ask them to contribute money to Food for the Poor.
If the parishioners ask me how they can get closer to the Lord by contributing money to Food for the Poor, I remind them about what Jesus said. Jesus said in effect that “if you want to be my disciple, that means if you want to follow me, give to the poor, and come follow me.”
When you give a parish mission do you have a certain theme?
I do have a theme. I usually open on Sunday evenings, and my 60 minutes of preaching is based on the texts: “You are the light of the world.” I open by telling people how good they are in spite of the fact they are sinners. I then speak about being the light of the world. Thus, the entire first evening is very upbeat.
The second evening I emphasize that Jesus who said you are the light of the world also said that he came to give you abundant life.
In my homily, I ask: “Do you have abundant life? You don't even know what it is. How come you don't know? Jesus never told you. That's why he sent the superpriest.
Two thousand years later I'm going to tell you. …
On the third night I explain that the abundant life must include health. And the third night, the entire evening is about healing and health. It includes a healing Mass with anointing.
When did you begin your healing ministry?
I was in the Holy Land in 1979. While I was there, a young girl [back in the United States] whose name is Cindy, and for whom I had performed the marriage ceremony a year before, delivered her first child.
The day I returned to the United States, there were six messages from Cindy waiting for me at the rectory. I didn't pay any attention to the messages.
I thought the messages were simply an announcement from Cindy to let me know her baby had been born.
I waited until the next day. When I called her, she was crying hysterically. Her baby had been born with a disease that the doctors couldn't even name. The baby was dying. I had called at 8 a.m. in the morning. Cindy explained the doctors told her the baby would be dead by 5 p.m. that afternoon.
I went to the hospital, prayed over the baby, and anointed the baby with a vial of oil from the Holy Land. By 3 p.m. that afternoon the baby was healed and released from the hospital.
What other healings have you witnessed?
Let me tell you one funny story. And I tell this to the parishioners at the parish missions. There was a man who wrote me a letter.
He wrote: “Dear Father Flanagan, I want to tell you about an extraordinary experience I had in my life after attending your mission.”
His letter was two full pages, single spaced and typed. He didn't tell me on the first page what the remarkable experience had been.
On Page Two he explained that he came to the parish mission and during the parish healing service he asked for peace of mind. Isn't that a beautiful thing to ask for? In his letter he explained that he certainly did get peace of mind.
For the following week he won the Florida lottery for a quarter of a million dollars. After I tell the parishioners about that letter, I ask them: “Now you are going to be at the parish mission and the healing service, aren't you?”
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: Msgr. Michael Flanagan ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Louisville Doctor Feels Alone in Opposition to Homosexual Ordinance DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:LOUISVILLE, Ky.—Dr. J. Barrett Hyman, an evangelical Christian, struggled with a moral question that has national implications for Christian businessmen and the churches that guide them: What to do when laws run counter to your faith?
Hyman is an obstetrician-gynecologist who employs six people in his Louisville practice. The city enacted a law last year that makes it illegal to deny employment to a person on the basis of sexual orientation. Offenders can be fined up to $50,000.
“Why should I have to leave my beliefs in church?” Hyman asked. “They have a law that is opposing my First Amendment rights, [which guarantees that] we can practice our religious beliefs.”
A member of First Baptist Church in nearby Shelbyville, he is also a trustee at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville.
Hyman decided to sue the city of Louisville and the surrounding Jefferson County when it passed a similar ordinance. Both cases are pending.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union's Lesbian and Gay Rights Project, similar laws are now on the books in 10 states and 165 localities throughout the United States.
The organization has come out in favor of the Louisville law and will help fight legal challenges to its constitutionality. “These [suits] lack merit because our laws and Constitution don't allow people to use personal religious beliefs as an excuse to deny someone a job or place to live,” said Michael Adams in a press release.
Right And Wrong
“This is a big push by the whole gay rights movement,” said Francis Manion, Hyman's attorney. “They've tried to do this on a federal level and have not been successful. It forces an employer to choose between following the dictates of his conscience and going out of business.”
“It's ridiculous,” said Dr. Frank Simon, who practices internal medicine in the city. “It shows what happens if you let people run your country [who] don't know the difference between right and wrong.”
Simon, who is also Kentucky state director of the American Family Association, told the Register that “these are political decisions. You have to vote these people out.”
Dwayne Hastings agreed. He is a spokesman for the Ethics and Religious Liberties Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.
“When a [bad] law is enacted, there is no other way to get around it other than to have it overturned,” he told the Register.
While Hyman has the backing of some national and regional pro-family organizations, including televangelist Pat Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice, the reaction of Louisville's religious community to the law has been muted or favorable, according to Manion, a Catholic, who said the absence of a strong stand “put[s] someone like Dr. Hyman in a difficult spot.”
Religious bodies are exempted from both the Louisville and Jefferson County laws.
Quiet Catholics
The success of the recent homosexual initiate took place after three earlier defeats, beginning in 1992. After opposing the first version of the law—and incurring the wrath of oganized homosexual groups—the Archdiocese of Louisville has maintained official neutrality regarding the legislation.
A statement released by the Archdiocese of Louisville said, “Archbishop [Thomas] Kelly recognizes the moral and legal complexities involving homosexual rights ordinances and their implications within the workplace.”
The archdiocese added that “these complexities will continue to be worked out through the courts and the legal system.”
In a separate but related development, Archbishop Kelly in January announced the arrival of Courage to the archdiocese. Courage is an organization of Catholic homosexuals dedicated to achieving chaste lives through prayer and the sacraments, spiritual direction, and mutual support.
“Instead of getting involved in politics, the archbishop chose to take a pastoral approach to people who must balance homosexual orientation and the teachings of the Church,” said Father Jeffrey Leger, director/chaplain of the new Courage chapter. “He is reaching out to a group that is trapped in the middle and is often forgotten in these discussions.”
He added that the archdiocese's quiet role in the political discussion is a measured response when compared to the reactions of other denominations.
“The religious community was in the forefront on this law—defending it,” he said. “Louisville's churches … are very liberal in their mind-set. The establishment position favors this kind of legislation but the majority of the people are opposed to it because it undermines the family and simply strikes them as wrong.”
As an example, he pointed to the fate of Jefferson County Commissioner Joe Corradino, who championed a bill at the county level similar to the Louisville city ordinance. The bill passed last summer but Corradino was defeated for re-election in the fall, in part, because black voters were offended by the politician's claim that the “gay” rights movement is a modern equivalent of the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and '60s.
The effect of both the county's and city's laws are symbolic, said Father Leger, designed to win social acceptance for homosexuality and not to solve concrete problems. “There was no pattern of homosexuals being denied jobs,” he said. “If there were, we would have heard about it.”
All Alone
Meanwhile, J. Barrett Hyman feels more alone than he would like.
“I have been shunned by a lot of people,” the OB-GYN said. “Some of my friends think I'm being unloving. [But] I think they are unloving for not calling [homosexuals] out of that lifestyle.”
The Southern Baptists' Hastings agreed that “in many communities across the U.S., the people of God have remained silent on these issues. Biblically based churches should be up in arms over this.”
In his public appearances on the subject, Hastings recommends a number of steps that individuals and parishes can take in their own community, including:
l First checking local laws to become better informed.
l Tapping into national resources, including the Web site of the American Center for Law and Justice, www.aclj.org.
l Seeking out support of other Christians, including other denominations.
l Speaking up. It helps even to write a letter to the editor of the local paper.
Silence from the churches isn't helping the effort in Kentucky, said Hastings. “This [kind of legislation] is what we're going to end up with more and more. I'm sure this doctor isn't the only one in Louisville who's going to have problems with this law.”
Clay Renick writes from Martinez, Georgia.
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: Clay Renick ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Rockford and Omaha Find the Formula to Attract Vocations DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:ROCKFORD, Ill.s—When Steve Lange, 34, decided to enter the seminary three years ago, he spoke to three dioceses before finding one that would welcome him as a candidate for the priesthood.
That diocese was Rockford, Ill., where vocations director Father Marty Heinz, 39, was willing to talk to him as a delayed vocation. “Rockford was in pursuit of people. They were interested,” he told the Register.
“You'd think all dioceses would be that way.”
Rockford also did not hesitate to offer a classical model of the priest as a man of prayer and apostolic zeal.
Lange is now a second-year student of theology at Sacred Heart School of Theology in Hales Corners, Wis., where he often reflects on how God called his attention “in a big way” when his young wife contracted cancer nine years ago.
In despair, Lange teetered on the brink of leaving the Church, but his suffering contained the seeds of a conversion from lukewarm religiosity to genuine Christian faith.
With his wife dead at 24, Lange turned to Scripture for consolation and for the inspiration that would eventually flower into what he believes is a priestly vocation.
Eucharistic Conversions
According to Rockfords's Father Heinz, such conversions are not rare. New candidates, he said, are “hearing God call through devotion to the Eucharist,” in a sign that points to “a new springtime in the Church.”
For Rockford, that springtime has already arrived in the form of a steady supply of priestly vocations.
Its seminarians number 39, up from eight three years ago — half of them from the Rockford Diocese, one-fourth from nearby American dioceses, and the rest from Nigeria, Mexico, Poland and the Philippines.
Its ordination class of nine for next May will be the largest since 1959. Father Heinz predicts 60 ordinations in the nine-year period ending in 2004.
It's a prognosis in sharp contrast to the current figures for diocesan priests in the United States, whose numbers are declining at a rate of 400 per year, almost double the rate of 220 per year of a decade ago, according to the Center for Applied Research on the Apostolate in Washington, D.C.
Rockford has used TV and radio commercials and billboards “to say it's OK to think about being a priest,” said Father Heinz.
But advertising is only one piece of a larger promotion of the priesthood as “a joyful thing requiring courage, heroism and sacrifice,” said Father Heinz. “The young are drawn to that. The Marine Corps has no recruiting problem.”
Bishop Thomas Doran has made vocations a priority since becoming the Rockford ordinary in 1994, assigning Father Heinz to be the diocese's first full-time vocations director in 1996.
The bishop regularly gets together with his seminarians and is now considering expanding the formation program to include a year dedicated exclusively to growth in prayer and the spiritual life, and the establishment of a house in the diocese where candidates could complete their college study before beginning formal seminary studies. Those studies are carried out at regional or national seminaries outside of the small diocese that borders the Archdiocese of Chicago to the northwest.
Bishop Doran and Father Heinz also attribute much of the diocese's vocation success to the growing practice throughout the diocese of perpetual eucharistic adoration.
Drawn from Outside
Father Jerome Koutnik, associate pastor of Sts. Peter & Paul parish, in Cary, Ill., was one of the seminarians drawn from outside the diocese. He was expelled from a Midwestern seminary after two years of study for another diocese.
The young priest said he was not bitter as he recalled his experience in criticizing what he called the semi-nary's unstructured formation program and community-oriented liturgy which, he felt, failed to sufficiently emphasize the sacrificial nature of the Mass.
Accepted by Rockford, he entered Mount St. Mary's Seminary in Emmitsburg, Md., where he immediately felt more at home due to the community's emphasis on Christ's real presence in the Eucharist and other traditional elements of Catholic and priestly life.
Father Koutnik's reactions are not unique among today's seminarians, according to Archbishop Elden Curtiss of Omaha, Neb., a former vocations director and seminary rector in Oregon and past chairman of the U.S. bishops' committee on vocations.
Like Rockford, Omaha receives “inquiries from all over,” he said, and “occasionally” accepts such candidates, “especially if he got a runaround” from a diocese that considers him “reactionary” for saying the rosary or for not accepting a “feminist agenda,” and adhering to the Church's teaching on the ordination of women and married priests.
He is convinced there are men waiting “everywhere” to “be invited personally” to the priesthood but are likely to “shy away when there's controversy or agendas” that oppose Church teaching.
They gravitate to places like Omaha and Rockford — dioceses that are “in sync with the Church and the Pope, [and are] orthodox supporters of traditional values.”
Change in the Young
Young Catholics are showing “more interest in religion in general,” and seminarians typically possess a sense of “the mystery of priesthood as sacred calling” and challenge, agreed Father Bob Stiefvater, vocations director for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee.
Father Stiefvater said he did not object to the trend so long as the seminarians are not overly attached to “conservative baggage.”
At Mount St. Mary's Seminary in Maryland, the new seminarians are “not just traditional but evangelical, zealous but not zealots,” said Father Kevin Rhoades, the rector.
His 164 students — up from last year's 157 even after graduating 44, is the largest class in Mount St. Mary history. Dean Russell, one of 20 students from Rockford, has a story that seems to connect with the resurgence of priestly vocations in general.
As an unchurched Southern Illinois University student a few years ago, he went looking for a church that would nourish his religious belief, recently revived by a philosophy course on the existence of God.
He found it in the Newman Center chapel, the first Catholic Church he had ever entered. He found there “the presence of God,” he told the Register.
Sunday night Mass became the highlight of his week. He couldn't wait for it to happen. Now he's waiting for ordination next May, one of Rockford's bumper crop of new-breed seminarians.
Jim Bowman writes from Chicago.
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: Jim Bowman ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:College Dean Answers the Call
THE BOSTON GLOBE, Jan. 26—Robert Kinnally, the 39-year-old dean of admissions and financial aid at Stanford University, has decided to quit his job to answer a call to the priest-hood, the Globe reported.
“Kinnally's move has stunned the Stanford community. One young woman, prompted by his action to wonder whether she, too, had a calling, asked the Catholic chaplain whether she should cancel her upcoming wedding and become a nun,” the article said.
Added Globe reporter Michael Paulson, “Kinnally's decision … illustrates [an] important trend in the Catholic ministry: the average age and the education levels of men choosing to become priests are on the rise.
“The number of older men pursuing the priesthood isn't nearly high enough to address a national shortage of priests, but it is having an impact on seminaries and parishes as men with broad life experiences, sometimes including raising children, join a calling once entered by boys as young as 14.”
Added Paulson: “Kinnally said he has heard the call for years, but only recently decided he was ready to respond. ‘There was no epiphany, no lights, no signs … you don't hear voices, you just have this thing tugging at you,’ Kinnally said. ‘The call … comes to you in different ways, during the day when you're doing your work and also in prayer. My answer was always “Not me. I can't do this. It's too hard.” But it doesn't go away.’”
Kinnally plans to leave Stanford in July to enter the formation program for the Diocese of Bridgeport, Conn., in September.
Religion in Football a Network Taboo
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, Jan. 21—A religious revival in the NFL goes largely unreported by the mainstream media, Journal writer Jay Winik reported.
“When some 140 million Americans tune in for this month's Super Bowl, there is one thing they likely won't see. After the clock runs out, players from both sides—brutal competitors all—will come together on the very ground where they have just clashed … to pray. If the coverage of the regular season is any guide, the TV cameras will quickly cut away. Odd, isn't it?
“The media consensus seems to be that fans can handle most things about their athletes—substance abuse, sexual assault, even murder—but not the fact that an ever-growing number of them attend chapel services or Bible study, and, oh yes, pray.
“ … This veil of silence is a pity. In this age of celebrity worship, we know everything else about these athletes: whom they date, where they vacation, which cars they drive and what trouble they're in—when no grisly detail of the murder charges against Carolina Panther Rae Carruth goes unreported, one wonders why faith in football seems destined to remain one of the mainstream media's last taboos.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Pope Says Church Should Work With Secular Media DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY—The Church must search for ways to proclaim its message in secular as well as religious media, Pope John Paul II said.
While the Church needs to develop its own means of communication, it “must also use the opportunities that are to be found in the secular media,” the Pope said in his annual message for World Communications Day.
The theme for this year's celebration, to be marked June 4, is “Proclaiming Christ in the Media at the Dawn of the New Millennium.”
“The advent of the information society is a real cultural revolution,” the Pope said in the text released Jan. 24 at the Vatican.
Calling the history of communication “a kind of journey,” from the collapse of the Tower of Babel to Pentecost's Christ-centered “restoration of communication,” he said proclaiming the Gospel “therefore leads to a meeting between people in faith and charity at the deepest level of their humanity.”
The Holy Father praised contemporary media for providing information about today's world and said the many satellite broadcasts of Holy Year events “contribute to spiritual enrichment.”
But he said mass media also sometimes “display the indifference, even hostility to Christ and his message that exist in certain sectors of secular culture.”
John Paul called for an “examination of conscience on the part of the media, leading to a more critical awareness of a bias or lack of respect for people's religious and moral convictions.”
As well as informing people about social issues, which the Pope said “can be an implicit proclamation of the Lord,” he urged Christian communicators “to seek out ways to speak explicitly of Jesus.”
Though much has changed in the 2,000 years since the birth of Christ, “the same need to proclaim Christ still exists.”
In addition to spreading the Gospel through personal contact, he said Christians must proclaim Christ “in and through the media.”
“To proclaim Christ in the media at the dawn of the new millennium is not only a necessary part of the Church's evangelizing mission; it is also a vital, inspiring and hope-filled enrichment of the media's message.”
The Pope's call to actively engage the secular media will help settle the doubts of some Christians about the wisdom of utilizing media that is frequently hostile to the Gospel, said Archbishop John Foley, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications.
At a press conference held for the release of communications day message, the American archbishop said the Church must also “take maximum advantage of the opportunities offered to be present in the secular media.”
As an example, he cited the ceremonial opening of the Vatican's Holy Door and Christmas Midnight Mass, an event that was transmitted to 60 countries by at least 77 national and international television networks with an estimated audience of 2 billion people.
He added: “Without a doubt, it was the largest audience that followed a religious event in the history of the world.” (From combined wire services)
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:Polish Movie Brings Pope to Tears
LA REPUBBLICA, Jan. 24—Pope John Paul II wept as he watched Pan Tadeusz, the latest film by renowned Polish director Andrezej Wajda in a Jan. 23 private screening at the Vatican, the Italian daily reported.
The movie, which is a major hit in Poland, is based on an epic poem by the Polish writer Adam Mickiewicz. It is a historical saga set during the Napoleonic era when Poland was divided between Germany, Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Wajda and members of the movie's cast were also at the screening. Vatican sources said the Pope was noticeably moved by the film.
“Tears were running down his face during the final scene of reconciliation” between two of the main characters, Wajda said after the screening. An impressed co-producer Wlodek Otulak, who first suggested a screening with the Pope, called his reaction “unbelievable.”
Orthodox Theologian Admires Pope's Ecumenism
AVVENIRE, Jan. 24—The ecumenical component that Pope John Paul II has introduced into Jubilee celebrations “is an initiative of notable weight that makes me very happy,” Orthodox theologian Father Boris Bolrinskoy told the Italian Catholic paper, adding, “Let's hope all Christians will participate in it.”
But, the Orthodox theologian added, Catholics view ecumenism differently than Orthodox Christians. Father Bolrinskoy said the challenge for the Orthodox is to discover how to “relate the modern world and its progress with the ecclesial tradition of the Christian East … without sacrificing the essentials.”
Father Bolrinskoy, dean of the St. Sergius Theological Institute of Paris, noted that “These problems, which Catholics addressed in Vatican Council II, the Orthodox discuss, perhaps, in less explicit terms within the local Churches.” But, he added, “we have a very lively youth organization that is a great element of hope for the future.”
However, Father Bolrinskoy said, “Among the Orthodox, there is no will or impulse to unity. There are some churches that are more determined than others, because of the force of historical and geographical circumstances and the wounds of the past that are difficult to forget. This is a reality that cannot be ignored.”
Father Bolrinskoy then noted some of the ecumenical hurdles facing Catholics and the Orthodoxy. “To begin with, we must meet and mutually forgive one another for the wounds we have inflicted on one another in the past. The Orthodox often nurse the feeling, whether rightly or wrongly, that Catholics proselytize everywhere. Today the atmosphere is pervaded by negative prejudices, to which are added memories of a very painful past for the Orthodox Church, such as the Crusades, proselytism in the East, parallel hierarchies, and other such things.
Father Bolrinskoy concluded: “Given all of this, some churches are very rigid. We need to meet without preconceived ideas, leaving our positions to one side, and free of instrumental intentions. But, to carry this out, we must be Christians full of love and determined to be saints.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Jubilee Events Set for Journalists and Entertainers DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY—Pope John Paul II will hold audiences with journalists and representatives of the entertainment industry during their respective Jubilee days, the Vatican announced.
Bishop Pierfranco Pastore, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, presented tentative schedules for the Jubilee for Journalists and the Jubilee for the Entertainment Industry at a Jan. 24 press conference at the Vatican, saying the events would be highlighted by papal audiences.
Journalists celebrate their Jubilee June 4, World Communications Day, and members of the entertainment industry celebrate theirs Dec. 17.
Bishop Pastore said the council, which is organizing both events, gave the Pope the choice of either celebrating Mass or holding an audience with each group, so as to keep his schedule as light as possible.
The bishop said the Pope's decision in favor of an audience with journalists reflected “a gesture of friendship and esteem” and was perhaps “more intimate” than a Mass.
Details of the Jubilee for entertainers have not been finalized.
Bishop Pastore emphasized the spiritual aspect of the Jubilee for Journalists, saying the event would “speak more to journalists' souls and hearts than to their pens.”
He said both media Jubilees “offer an opportunity for [the] personal encounter with Christ” that Pope John Paul called a prerequisite for the proclamation of the Gospel in his message for World Communications Day.
The bishop said 300 journalists had already confirmed their attendance. No figures were yet available for the Jubilee for the Entertainment Industry.
U.S. Archbishop John Foley, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, announced that he had “explicitly, specifically” invited Hollywood directors, producers and actors during a spring 1999 trip to California with Cardinal William Keeler of Baltimore.
He said he did not know how many people might attend from Los Angeles.
In addition to the papal audiences, the tentative program for the Jubilee for Journalists June 1-4 includes a prayer service and private visit to the Sistine Chapel, two conferences with Vatican officials on Jubilee themes, an ecumenical service with Catholic and other Christian leaders at Rome's Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, and a closing Mass at the Vatican.
(From combined wire services)
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Religions Can't be Equated, Theologians Told DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY—Citing the spread of a “relativistic mentality” in some theological circles, Pope John Paul II underscored the unique role of Christ and the Church in human salvation.
“In recent years a mentality has emerged in theological and ecclesial circles which tends to relativize Christ's revelation and his unique and universal mediation in the order of salvation,” the Pope said Jan. 28 during an audience with participants in the plenary assembly of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
The same mentality, he added, tends “to reformulate the necessity of Christ's Church as a universal sacrament of salvation.”
“To remedy this relativistic mentality, it is necessary to underline the definitive and complete character of Christ's revelation.”
The doctrinal congregation's plenary assembly Jan. 25-28 chose Christ's unique role in salvation as one of its main themes. Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, the congregation's secretary, told Vatican Radio Jan. 25 that other topics included the revision of norms for disciplinary action and the increasing cultural tendency to blur the differences between men and women.
Before discussion began, the archbishop said, participants reviewed a 262-page report on the congregation's activity since its last plenary two years ago.
In his speech to assembly participants, Pope John Paul said Christ's incarnation in a specific historical period did not limit his universal significance.
For some theologians, the Holy Father explained, the truth about God could not be contained and manifested in its globality and completeness by any historical religion, therefore not even by Christianity.”
Even if Christ's words and actions were historically limited in human terms, “they have as (their) source the divine person of the incarnate Word, and thus carry the definitiveness and completeness of revelation.”
“The truth about God does not get abolished or reduced because it is said in human language,” John Paul said. “Rather, it remains unique, full and complete because the one who speaks and acts is the incarnate Son of God.”
Following from Christ's unique role in salvation is the Church's own uniqueness, the Pope said. The Church is the sole means of salvation because it is Christ's “body, by means of which (Christ) himself works salvation throughout history.”
Nonetheless, non-Christians can attain heaven “if they look for God with a sincere heart.” But “they find themselves in a deficient position if compared with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of salvific means.”
These principles must also take precedence in the search for Christian unity, the Pope said.
“Our burning desire to arrive one day at full communion with the other Churches and ecclesial communities must not, however, obscure the truth that the Church of Christ is not a utopia, to recompose from the current existing fragments with our own human efforts.”
The Second Vatican Council's document on ecumenism, he said, “explicitly spoke of the unity `which we believe subsists in the Catholic Church as something she can never lose, and we hope that it will continue to increase until the end of time.”’(From combined wire services)
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Pope Prays for Victims on World Leprosy Day DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY—Pope John Paul II commemorated World Leprosy Day with prayers for those who suffer from the disease.
“I embrace all those brothers and sisters [who suffer with leprosy],” the Pope said Jan. 30 following his weekly Angelus. “I renew the hope that they, in this Jubilee year, can experience the healing strength of solidarity,”
He reminded those gathered in St. Peter's Square for the Sunday prayer that “the Church, following Christ's example, has always paid special attention” to leprosy victims. “I embrace all those brothersand sisters,” the Holy Father said, and “I renew my hope that in this Jubilee year they will experience the regenerating force of solidarity.”
The Pope has often called for an end to the social marginalization of leprosy victims and greater international attention to the disease.
The Raoul Follereau Association, a nongovernmental organization for helping leprosy victims, held a one-day leprosy seminar at the Vatican in mid-January, in collaboration with the Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers.
The conference looked at challenges facing the eradication of the disease in the new millennium.
According to The Raoul Follereau Association, leprosy, formally known as Hansen's disease, affects approximately 12 million people worldwide. The World Health Organization said leprosy victims in India, Indonesia and Myanmar account for about 70% of cases. Although effective treatment is available, an average of 500,000 new cases are reported each year, mostly due to poverty and lack of health care in developing countries.
(From combined wire services)
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Christians Fleeing Increased Violence in Indonesia DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:JAKARTA—Some 600 Christian refugees fled to Bali Jan. 21 from the Indonesian island of Lombok, fearful of a revival of religious violence in the wake of a three-day rampage against Christians that left five people dead.
The attack on Christians followed Muslim protests on the island demanding that the Indonesian government put a stop to fighting between Christians and Muslims on the country's eastern Maluku Islands, or Spice Islands, where about 2,000 people have died in the past year. Christians once held a small majority in the islands, but an influx of Muslims in recent years from other parts of Indonesia changed the area's religious makeup.
During the three-day rampage on the tourist island of Lombok, Christian churches were burned and their homes and businesses attacked by Muslims, according to the Associated Press. The havoc led to the evacuation of hundreds of tourists from the island's resorts.
Seventeen people were hospitalized, as a result of beatings at the hands of riot police, AP said. Anti-Christian protests were also under way in Ambon, Maluku's capital, where protesters demanded the resignation of local military chief Brig. Gen. Max Tamaela. Protesters claimed Tamaela, a Christian, is anti-Muslim.
Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid announced earlier this month his intention to replace both Tamaela and the region's Muslim governor, both of whom were perceived as biased in favor of their own faiths, but he has not set a date for the replacement.
Wahid said that energetic action will be taken against anyone taking part in violence, the official agency Antara reported. The president said he was optimistic about a prompt solution to the conflicts. (From combined wire services)
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:Cuban Bishops Remember Papal Visit
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Jan. 21—Cuba's bishops commemorated the second anniversary of Pope John Paul II's visit to their island nation by calling for spiritual and social renewal, the news service reported.
In a 13-page document, A New Heaven and a New Earth, the bishops reviewed teachings delivered by the Pope during his historic 1998 visit. It avoided blunt language in most of its criticisms both of Cuban society and the country's critics.
“Moderation, dialogue and gradualness are the guarantee of peaceful solutions and the gestation of a new civilization of truth, justice and love,” it said.
But the document referred to several areas of continuing disagreement between the Cuban state and the Church, calling for officials to permit greater ideological diversity and urging greater freedom for the Church to distribute charity and take part in education. The message exhorted Catholics to openly profess and practice their faith, partly by taking part in open-air masses and other religious celebrations.
Such events have been allowed on a limited basis for the last several years. The bishops' message discouraged emigration from Cuba as a solution for Cubans of faith. “In leaving the country behind there is little we can do to solve its problems. We believe that within our island it is possible to find solutions,” the document said.
It also repeated the Pope's criticism of the U.S. economic embargo, referring to “restrictive economic measures imposed from outside the country” and calling them “unjust and ethically unacceptable.”
Irish Primate to be Cardinal?
THE UNIVERSE, Jan. 23—Ireland will boast two cardinals for the first time in its history if Pope John Paul II elevates Armagh Archbishop Sean Brady to the Sacred College later this year, the British Catholic weekly reported.
Sources in Rome said the Pope will likely include the archbishop, who is also primate of all Ireland, in any group of new cardinals created during the Great Jubilee. The move would reflect John Paul's high esteem for Ireland and Archbishop Brady, said The Universe.
Cardinal Cahal Daly, Ireland's only cardinal at the present time, retired in 1996, four years after reaching the compulsory age of 75. At age 80, he is now ineligible to take part in the election of a pope.
If the Holy Father announces that Archbishop Brady is to be Ireland's 10th cardinal, it will mean that—for the first time in half a century—an Irish primate will have a vote at the next papal election.
While the popes have named leaders of the Irish Church to the sacred college throughout the 20th century, none has been in place at the time of a papal conclave since the election of Pope Pius XII in 1939.
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Healing the Soul of America DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:The Jubilee of health care workers and the sick, observed Feb. 11, reminds us that the advances in medicine are the real story behind many of the world's misnamed “population problems” as the 21st century begins.
People are living longer, healthier lives. That news is very good, not bad.
But advances in medical sciences have also brought new threats. The ability to prolong life has been accompanied by new ways to bring death. Many medical professionals, through abortion, euthanasia and embryo research, have worked directly against their own vocations.
Pope John Paul II has called on the members of the Church in the United States to solve this problem. Following are the words of his ad limina address to the bishops of California, Nevada and Hawaii in October 1998, in which he applied the 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life) to America.
“The work of Catholic health care institutions in meeting the physical and spiritual needs of the sick is a form of imitation of Christ who, in the words of St. Ignatius of Antioch, is ‘the doctor of the flesh and of the spirit.’
“Doctors, nurses and other medical personnel deal with people in their time of trial, when they have an acute sense of life's fragility and precariousness, just when they most resemble the suffering Jesus in Gethsemane and on Calvary.
“Health care professionals should always bear in mind that their work is directed to individuals, unique persons in whom God's image is present in a singular way and in whom he has invested his infinite love.
“The sickness of a family member, friend or neighbor is a call to Christians to demonstrate true compassion, that gentle and persevering sharing in another's pain.
“Likewise, the handicapped and those who are ill must never feel that they are a burden; they are persons being visited by the Lord. The terminally ill in particular deserve the solidarity, communion and affection of those around them; they often need to be able to forgive and to be forgiven, to make peace with God and with others.
“All priests should appreciate the pastoral importance of celebrating the sacrament of the anointing of the sick, particularly when it is the prelude to the final journey to the Father's house, when its meaning as the sacramentum exeuntium, is particularly evident. …
“As bishops, you must continue to draw attention to the relationship of the moral law to constitutional and positive law in your society: ‘Laws which legitimize the direct killing of innocent human beings … are in complete opposition to the inviolable right to life proper to every individual; they thus deny the equality of everyone before the law' (Evangelium Vitae, No. 72).
“What is at stake here is nothing less than the indivisible truth about the human person on which the Founding Fathers staked your nation's claim to independence.
“The life of a country is much more than its material development and its power in the world. A nation needs a ‘soul.’ It needs the wisdom and courage to overcome the moral ills and spiritual temptations inherent in its march through history. In union with all those who favor a ‘culture of life’ over a ‘culture of death,’ Catholics, and especially Catholic legislators, must continue to make their voices heard in the formulation of cultural, economic, political and legislative projects which, ‘with respect for all and in keeping with democratic principles, will contribute to the building of a society in which the dignity of each person is recognized and the lives of all are defended and enhanced’ (Evangelium Vitae, No. 90).
“Democracy stands or falls with the values which it embodies and promotes (cf. Evangelium Vitae, No. 70). In defending life you are defending an original and vital part of the vision on which your country was built. America must become, again, a hospitable society, in which every unborn child and every handicapped or terminally ill person is cherished and enjoys the protection of the law” (Nos. 5-6).
Democracy stands or falls … these are words worth remembering in this election year.
----- EXCERPT: EDITORIAL ----- Extended BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Pope Pius XII in Proper Perspective DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:Pius XII and the Second World War According to the Archives of the Vatican by Pierre Blet, S.J. (translated by Lawrence J. Johnson) Paulist Press, 1999 416 pages, $29.95
Since historical fact is often a casualty in the ongoing debate over Pope Pius XII's role in World War II, the appearance of Jesuit Father Pierre Blet's book is welcome. The author was a member of the editorial staff that produced the 12-volume Actes et documents du Saint-Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale (Acts and Documents of the Holy See Relative to World War II). That work is a massive collection of primary documents dealing with the Vatican's activities during World War II; what has been lacking is a popular and compact synthesis of that work, accessible to interested general readers, not just professional historians. With Father Blet's book that gap has been filled.
Its publication couldn't be more timely. As Father Blet notes in his introduction, “the content of this collection, if not its very existence, has escaped the attention of many who speak and write about the Holy See during the war.” One need look no further for evidence of this shortsightedness than the popularity of such recent works as John Cornwell's 1999 biography Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII. Although Cornwell occasionally quotes Actes, his conclusions conflict with that documentary history. Father Blet may also have been motivated to write by the need for proper historical context in discussions of Pius XII, as his book provides a short assessment of all of Pius XII's efforts to limit the war's consequences, even where the outcomes were not wholly satisfactory.
Father Blet's book deals with all the key problems facing the Pope at that moment in history. The structure of the Actes themselves has been retained only as regards Germany, Poland, Croatia, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary and France. Special attention is paid to the problem of the Jewish Holocaust and the Pope's attitude toward it. The Vatican archives provide a huge number of documents illustrating the Pope's efforts to rescue Jews in those situations where it was possible. In practice, the Pope could extend his protection only to Jews in Italy, particularly those in convents and other Church buildings. Hitler was not going to be open to arguments aimed at stopping the annihilation of the Jews.
The Pope could have publicly condemned Nazi atrocities not only toward Jews, but also toward all persecuted peoples. He didn't; an exact and explicit condemnation was never promulgated. The more probing question is: What would have been the practical consequences of such a course of action? Many, including Cornwell, have neglected to reckon with this crucial angle of the issue.
‘Saving face’ would not have saved a single life.
Father Blet devotes several whole chapters, and parts of others, to examining the extermination of European Jewry (and the Church's reactions to it). He quotes several hundred documents attesting to the involvement of Vatican diplomacy, and that of individual episcopates, on behalf of the Jews. These witness to the intervention of the Holy See in concrete cases, using whatever means were at its disposal, even employing private individuals. Pope Pius XII was convinced that vocal intervention on behalf of the Jews would have been in vain, and may well have added to Hitler's rage. Historians do well to debate his strategy, but they should bear in mind that, when the bishops of the Netherlands condemned the deportation of Dutch Jews by the Nazis, the Nazis responded by setting out to destroy all of Holland's Jews.
Pope Pius XII's opponents, including Cornwell, believe that the Pope should have protested without regard to the consequences. In their opinion, that was the only way he could have “saved face” morally. That is certainly true; but he would not have saved a single Jew. And he did, indeed, rescue many Jews, even on properties belonging to the Vatican.
The size and scope of the materials Father Blet condenses makes it almost inevitable that a few historical inaccuracies crept into the book, particularly as regards Central and Eastern Europe, a terra incognita for many Western historians.
The greatest problem is, of course, the myth that continues to prevail in the West claiming that nobody really knew about the fate of the Jews. (Father Blet, for example, writes about “suspicions” about their fate.) Yet, in fact, the Polish government-in-exile published a document on Dec. 10, 1942, entitled “The Mass Extermination of Jews in German-Occupied Poland. A Note to the Governments of the United Nations” (English text in Z. Zielinski, Polska dwudziestego wieku, 1998).
There are some other minor historical errors in the book as well, such as the place where Auxiliary Bishop Wetmanski of Plock was shot (Father Blet places this at Auschwitz; it happened outside the Dzialdowo transient camp). Elswhere Father Blet writes that Eastern Prussia had been annexed to the Third Reich, but, in fact, it had always been German territory.
These flaws aside, Father Blet's book remains a valuable summary of many thousands of documents, a guide through the 12 volumes of primary source material presenting a clear view of the Vatican's activities during World War II. I recommend it.
Father Zygmunt Zielinski is professor of Church history at the Catholic University of Lublin, Poland.
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: Father Zygmunt Zielinski ----- KEYWORDS: Openion -------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:Compassionate Correctives
I would like to commend the Register for its editorial entitled “That We May Be One” in the Jan. 16-22 issue. The reason for my letter is to invite a certain number of Catholics to incorporate it with their pro-life stance. There are Catholics who take the wrong approach on what to do with our political leaders who refuse to override President Clinton's veto on partial-birth abortion.
Some Catholics will become upset with their legislators when they break the trust they thought they had when electing a Catholic to public office. This is perfectly acceptable, for we are all human and it is normal to become upset when someone breaks a commitment.
However, what is wrong is when upset becomes hate for that person. Not only hate, but the thought of hoping for the politician to change for the better disappears. I cannot think of a worse combination for a Catholic than hate and lack of hope.
With this editorial, there is hope in guiding these Catholics so that they can go about [expressing] a pro-life stance in a Catholic fashion.
The inaccurate stance for some Catholics has been the idea of just banning these politicians for life. The correct way is to have hope and try to continually reach out to them by way of compassionate letters, praying and the desire to forgive.
William G. McKay Mamaroneck, New York
Liturgical Language Arts
Regarding “Liturgical Translations Face Vatican Overhaul,” Jan. 23-29: If John Page, executive secretary of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL), believes that the Vatican's insistence on accuracy in translation is somehow in conflict with Vatican II's demand that “the Christian people … are able to understand … with ease and to take part in the rites fully, actively and as befits a community” (Constitution on the Liturgy, Article 21), then he's obviously part of the problem.
Look at the popularity of such things as the Star Wars movies, the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” TV series and the Harry Potter books among young people. And how about the popularity of wicca—how many teen-agers got involved with this form of ersatz paganism because they found Catholic liturgy too bland? And while the ICELsacrifices theological language in order to bring the “revision” (they don't even call it a translation) closer to spoken English (or so they claim), they insert feminist jargon and “inclusive” language into the revision even though that makes it harder to understand. Theology can be sacrificed, but not ideology.
It bears repeating that a Roper poll published in the March 1997 Catholic World Report revealed that 69% of American Catholics oppose “inclusive” language (47% “strongly”), while only 21% support it (9% “strongly”).
Don Schenk Allentown, Pennsylvania
The Cardinal and the Cosmos
The interview with Cardinal Francis George (“Chicago's Cardinal,” Jan. 9-15) points out that “the Pope has embraced scientific evidence and tells us that it is perfectly acceptable to believe in evolution as long as we understand that God is responsible for the order in the universe and is the continual source of life.”
While the interviewer and the cardinal find no problem here, could it be that many who are taught that evolution is a proven fact find that there is no need for a God to be present at the “big bang” or the creation of the soul?
“Scientific evidence?” Where are the fossil transitional forms? Chaos evolving into the cosmos? What about the second law of thermodynamics?
The Pope did not say we had to believe in evolution. For those who are interested in the issue, there is an easy book to read: the 1999 edition of Creation Rediscovered by Gerard J. Keane (TAN). Better still, visit San Diego County's Museum of Creation and Earth History. For a much more detailed and complex discussion, there is Creation Scientists Answer Their Critics by Duane T. Gish, Ph.D., of the Institute for Creation Research.
Frank Grabarits
San Diego
Editor's note: Catholics interested in this subject would do well to read Did Darwin Get it Right? Catholics and the Theory of Evolution (Our Sunday Visitor Books, 1998) by Register columnist George Sim Johnston.
Abstinence vs. Profits?
It probably should not surprise us that the American Medical Association would reject abstinence-only programs (“AMA Rejects Abstinence,” Dec. 26-Jan. 1). After all, isn't that the American way? Look first to see how it affects the bottom line on the financial statement and proceed accordingly.
Bob Dalton Parker, Colorado
Pro-Life and Presidential Politics
I found interesting the full page ad in your Jan. 23-29 edition by the National Right to Life Committee's Educational Trust Fund comparing the presidential records on abortion of the Bush/Quayle administration and the Clinton/Gore administration. The timing, of course, coincided with the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, and it is understandable this NRLC fund used the occasion to raise money for its efforts. But there are a couple of peculiar things about the ad.
The first item the ad compares is the difference between the two administrations on Roe v. Wade itself. Instead of comparing the voting of the Supreme Court justices which each administration put on the court, the ad instead tells us that Clinton, as we all know, urged the Court to uphold Roe, and that Bush urged the Court to overturn it. What is glaringly absent from the ad is the fact that the one justice Bush himself appointed to the Court, David Souter, supports Roe. We all know that actions count more than words, so in the matter of overturning Roe it is quite interesting that the NRLC chose to ignore the action and focus on the words.
The second interesting thing about the ad, which may help to explain the first, is the focus on a past administration which happens to be that of the father of the current frontrunner for the 2000 Republican nomination. The NRLC could have easily raised funds with a full-page ad focusing on its educational effort, or on the Reagan administration, so why this particular focus on the elder Bush, coupled as it is with the strange ignoring of the most important thing the father ever did concerning Roe?
The answer might be found in the current issue of the NRLC's own flagship publication, the NRL News, where the director of the NRL's Political Action Committee, Carol Tobias, has a lengthy article defending the younger George Bush from criticism by other Republican candidates that his pro-life stance is a very anemic one. Those criticisms have arisen in large part because, unlike three of those other candidates, Bush has refused to commit to naming a pro-life vice president or pro-life Supreme Court justices. Tobias insists in the article that this does not mean that Bush is any less pro-life than his critics.
Now I don't know about you, but to me it is a very strange argument to say that a candidate who will not promise to appoint a justice committed to overturning Roe is just as strong in his stance on abortion as someone who will commit to it. In addition to that defiance of common sense, it is a defiance of basic fairness to try to obscure Bush's differences from those who have taken more courageously outspoken positions. It is very interesting that the NRL News published this article immediately before the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries, where one of the principle strategies of the Davids in the Republican party has been to point out to moral conservatives how anemic Goliath's stand on abortion is.
Many good-willed opponents of abortion are supporting Bush because they believe he is sincerely pro-life and would appoint acceptable justices. They also believe he can be more easily elected. It is their right to hold those hopes. But there is dishonesty and injustice in trying to obscure the very real differences in the candidates'clearly articulated positions. And to do so immediately before those candidates have their first electoral tests cannot help but suggest an attempt to sway voters in the direction of Goliath.
In this context, let us turn back to the ad in the Register. Why did the NRL, at this point in time, choose to ignore the elder Bush's appointment of a pro-abortion justice, the single most important action related to abortion that he ever took, and instead tell us of his nice words about overturning Roe? Wouldn't want to draw attention, I suppose, to what sort of justice the elder Bush appointed while trying to tilt the current nomination in the direction of his son, who quite tellingly refuses to promise appointment of pro-life justices himself.
Mark Gronceski West Melbourne, Florida
Correction
In the Jan. 16-22 Indepth column “Saving Dads From the Masters of Suspicion,” contributing writer Donald DeMarco cited St. John the Evangelist's use of the terms “lust of the flesh,” “lust of the eyes” and the “pride of life.” These were attributed to the Second Letter of St. John; in fact, as brought to our attention by more than one of our astute readers, they are from the apostle's First Letter.
The Register Welcomes Letters
Mention which item you're responding to by headline and issue date. Please include your address and phone number.
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: They Want The Vatican Nixed. Why? DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:Frances Kissling compares the Catholic Church to Euro-Disney. Kissling, president of the pro-abortion Catholics for a Free Choice, said so last year when she announced her campaign to remove the Holy See from its seat at the United Nations. She said the Holy See sitting at the U.N. was like “Euro-Disney sitting on the Security Council.”
When Kissling announced her See Change campaign last March, she received gallons of positive ink from the international press. Seventy organizations joined Kissling in attempting to downgrade the Holy See from permanent observer to a mere nongovernmental organization, like the Girl Scouts, or like Kissling's own anti-Catholic group. Her campaign has recently grown to 400 groups, including International Planned Parenthood Federation.
Kissling's case goes this way. The Holy See is not a real state because the Vatican City state is too small; “in essence 100 square acres of office space and tourist attractions,” she says.
Moreover, she says the Vatican City state does not have a permanent population, and does not have any women and children as “citizens.” Kissling wonders how a group of celibate men from the Holy See could hold sway over the very lives of women and children.
Questions of Holy See statehood have long been settled by the international community. The Holy See, as the government of the Catholic Church, is a state and the whole world recognizes it that way. The Holy See has sent diplomatic legations since the fourth century. This is roughly 1,650 years longer than more than 100 member states of the U.N. General Assembly have even existed. Currently the Holy See trades diplomats with 177 nations, including the United states. The Holy See is recognized as a distinct sovereign personality for all purposes of state, including entering into treaties.
The Holy See joined the United Nations in 1964, not as a member but as a permanent observer, with a signed agreement between U.N. Secretary-General U Thant and Pope Paul VI. This agreement still stands and does not require ratification by the General Assembly. Like Switzerland, the Holy See chose permanent observer status in order to remain neutral between countries and so that it would not have to contribute financially to U.N. military efforts. At any time the Holy See could apply for regular U.N. membership and no one doubts it would be unanimously accepted.
The chances for success in the See Change campaign, therefore, are nil. The Secretary General will not rescind the agreement and no member state will ask him to. Kissling knows this. Everyone knows this. Why does she proceed? Kissling's real intention is purely tactical and political. It is to isolate the Holy See's delegates to the United Nations, to intimidate them, and to frighten away its sometimes nervous allies.
A U.N. conference can be a very intimidating affair, especially when a delegation challenges the reigning anti-family ethos. The United Nations works not by voting but by consensus. This means that every delegation must agree to every word, and means that a small coalition of states can stop almost anything from coming into a U.N. document. All they need do is dig in their heels and speak out.
Since the Cairo Conference in 1994 just such a coalition has gelled around the life and family issues. This admittedly weak, ad hoc alliance, which includes the Holy See and other Catholic and Muslim states, has stopped the United Nations from making abortion an international human “right.” It has also stopped the redefinition of the family to include homosexual couples. It has also stopped the attempt to redefine gender from men and women to include homosexuals and those that are called the “trans-gendered.”
The real purpose of the See Change campaign is to break this coalition apart. At a U.N. conference, it is a very long walk from one pro-life delegation to another. Angry eyes follow the brave diplomat who ventures out to find common cause with the Holy See. That long walk can end a career. Kissling wants to dissuade cooperation with the Vatican, end the concept of consensus at the U.N., and to make abortion an internationally recognized human “right.”
Kissling and her pro-abortion allies have chosen their topic correctly. The world is a dangerous place. And all governments rely upon foreign aid, industrial development and military protection. Only the Holy See neither gives nor receives this kind of country-to-country assistance. Therefore the Holy See is truly independent and cannot be controlled. Kissling wants the Holy See to stay in its foxhole. Kissling wants its allies to stay away. If she succeeds, the world will be an even more dangerous place, especially for families and for the unborn.
Austin Ruse is president of the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute, where he can be reached at austinruse@c-fam.org.
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: Austin Ruse ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: What's in a Maiden Name? In Quebec … Everything DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:Canada has been described as a country built of two nations, one English, the other French. It has also been described as two solitudes: neighbors who often pass by, but rarely speak to each other.
Nowhere are the two solitudes better illustrated than in the gulf between Quebec and the rest of Canada on the laws respecting marital name changes.
Currently, of 10 Canadian provinces, Quebec is the only one to require a woman to retain her maiden name upon marriage, a distinction which has not advanced the province's reputation as a respecter of personal liberty.
In effect, since the Quebec government changed the law in 1982, married Quebec women must use either their maiden name alone, or combine it in a hyphenated version that includes their husband's surname. Those are the only available options.
The result is that women who would have preferred to assume their husband's name upon marriage are left with no choice. The government has, in effect, decided the issue for them.
The stated reason for the law, according to one Quebec government document, is the “principle of equality.” Yet, much seems to depend on the kind of equality you're talking about.
“Well, it's equality according to the dictates of feminist pressure put on the Quebec government,” says Diane Watts, a researcher with Real Women of Canada, a Canadian organization that supports the traditional family. “Because women in Quebec really do not have the choice of using their husband's names. So, it's not like Switzerland, for example, where there's a choice to use your maiden name or your husband's name.”
Watts, a resident of Aylmer, Quebec, says it's also about respect: “It's a lack of respect for women, not to give them that freedom. That's the situation in Quebec. It's painted as equality, but it's not, really. It's the full force of feminism put onto married women by the state.”
Jason Kenney, a Member of Parliament for Calgary, Alberta, with ties to Quebec, has similar concerns. “Look, virtually every woman I know in Quebec with whom I've had a discussion about this, say they wanted to change their names, but couldn't.”
And for many Quebec women, taking their husband's name at marriage remains important. “It's meaningful to a lot of women in Quebec society who would like to change their names to symbolize the unity of their new marriage, but find it bureaucratically impossible to do so.”
Nevertheless, Kenney concedes that there is a process in place to override the law.
“Apparently,” he adds, “it takes hundreds of dollars and numerous visits to bureaucrats to make the (name) change. They've made it as difficult as possible.”
An Agenda?
Like Diane Watts, he feels there is an agenda underlying the law on marital name changes. “It was a deliberate policy of the separatist government of Quebec to undermine that symbol of marital union.” That agenda, he feels, is part of a larger, libertarian philosophy that has been steadily evolving in Quebec since the “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s, a time when most observers agree that Quebec society underwent a fundamental shift, moving from a largely rural, agrarian society, to an urban, industrialized one.
With that shift in society came a basic change in moral and social values. “Part of the Quiet Revolution,” says Kenney, “was this radical egalitarian vision which … involves undermining the institutions of civil society, such as marriage, which were seen as a barrier to this idea of modern equality.” Kenney feels that the act of requiring Quebec women to keep their maiden names upon marriage is part and parcel of the same movement.
‘[T]hey have children, and often, they have one name, and the husband, another. Many of them find that embarrassing.’
Family Cohesion
Watts sees still other problems with requiring women to retain their maiden names. “Many women feel it's a pressure against the cohesion of the family, because they have children, and often, they have one name, and the husband, another. Many of them find that embarrassing.
“It contributes to the erosion of cohesion in the family, and that's reflected in the statistics on marriage in Quebec,” she adds. In recent years, of all the provinces, Quebec has consistently reported among the highest rates of divorce, and, despite significant government incentives for bearing children, among the lowest birth rates in Canada. In 1993, for example, the total number of divorces in Quebec closely approached that of marriages. The net increase in population dropped 38% from 1993 to 1997.
Statistics aside, the name-change issue is not theoretical for many Quebec women, according to Diane Watts. “They want to have the family cohesion, the strength that comes with everyone having the same name. And people assume the couple are not married when the children have a different name than their mother.”
Like other provinces, Quebec is one place where living together or “living common-law” is increasingly the rule. While living together, sharing property, and bearing children, fewer young couples are choosing not to marry. Yet, if and when a common-law relationship unravels, the couple are often quick to enforce their individual rights as common-law “spouses,” rights which did not exist until relatively recently.
A concern for Watts, with others, is that the government has moved to diminish the benefits and privileges attached to being married, while elevating and strengthening the legal benefits for those in common-law relationships.
That the status of marriage is thereby diminished, while husband and wife are reduced to the level of common-law partners, is one conclusion that has been drawn. “In actuality, this is what it does,” says Watts, “and many married women object to it.”
“I think the forces against the traditional view of marriage are so strong that many people just were not able to combat the … feminist forces that put this through at the time. We shouldn't give the impression that this [law] was unanimous in Quebec. They brought this in at a time when there were many changes and much turmoil. I think most Quebec women were quite surprised when they faced this.”
James Mahony writes from Calgary, Alberta.
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: James Mahony ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: A Rose, By Any Other Name … DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:Evelyn Birge Vitz, a professor of Medieval Literature at New York University, spoke with the Register about the factors involved in a name change.
Reasons Women Keep Their Maiden Names
• To maintain your professional identity: “If you already have an identity established in the professional world, it might help to keep that continuity.”
• If you are the last in the family line: “You might want to maintain the family name.”
• You might like your last name better: “I know some women who have done this.”
• They are hedging their bets on whether the marriage will last.
Reasons Women Take Their Husbands' Name
•Sacramental: “A strictly Catholic reason would be that you are accepting the notion that you are one flesh with your husband. You are accepting the sacramental notion of [assuming] a new identity.”
•Six on One, Half Dozen on the Other: “Why should you keep your father's name rather than your husband's? It just means you are looking back to your father instead of to your husband. The more you think about it the wobblier it becomes. If you stick with your father's name, then what happens to your children's last name?”
Reasons Not to Hyphenate
•You Are Just Postponing the Question: “What about the next generation. You are just postponing the issue for one generation, not resolving it. Why force your children to do this?”
•Long and Awkward: “It's too unwieldy to keep everyone's name forever. What if the name is extremely long? One solution that I think is viable is that you change your name personally, but not professionally. You may just keep that name for people who know you. It's all about ego. Basically someone has to give something up. Our tradition has worked.”
Reasons Not to Force Women to Keep Maiden Name
•Freedom: “Why should the rules suddenly change? What about your legal right to change your name? It makes no sense not to be able to change your name to your husband's if you can change it to something else legally. It is an ugly way of maneuvering social change.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Why RU-486 Isn't a “Pill” and Other Facts DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:It is not likely that those who are pushing the chemical abortion technique RU-486 will be any more eager to fully educate the public about this procedure than they are in regard to surgical abortion.
Let's take a moment, then, to pick up the slack.
• It is not completely accurate to call RU-486 an abortion “pill.” It is, rather, a technique involving a combination of powerful synthetic steroids and arrangements for possible backup surgery. RU-486 is taken in conjunction with prostaglandins, which induce uterine contractions. In countries where it is used, women must agree to have a surgical abortion in the cases where this drug technique does not succeed in aborting the baby.
• If RU-486 is permitted, it will increase the numbers of abortions and of abortion providers. The American people believe there are too many abortions as it is.
• RU-486 has been known to harm and kill women. Its long-range effects on women and their later born children are still unknown. They won't be known until at least a generation has passed. The New Republic in a 1986 article said that the entire first generation of users will be the guinea pigs. We may be dealing with a chemical time bomb.
• RU-486 has no proven purpose or benefit except to kill a developing child in the womb. Dr. Bernard Nathanson, upon investigating other claimed benefits of the drug, has said that those claims are built on very shaky scientific ground.
• RU-486 does not privatize or simplify abortion. In countries where it is used, multiple visits to the facility are required. The drug is not taken home, but administered only on the premises, where emergency medical equipment is ready to deal with side effects. The woman must return 48 hours later to take the prostaglandin. Another visit is required to verify that the child is in fact gone.
• Where does the child go? The RU-486 process makes this an open question. The child may be expelled at any time, any place, and the mother is more likely to see her tiny, dead baby. Edouard Sakiz, as president of the Roussel-Uclaf company that made the drug, says that using it is “an appalling psychological ordeal. … It is not at all easy to use.”
• RU-486 will not and cannot replace all surgical abortions. One reason is that it can only be used in a small window of the pregnancy (5-7 weeks, or at most 5-9 weeks). In France, furthermore, only 25-30% of women seeking abortion choose the RU-486 method.
Let us make it clear to physicians who are willing to prescribe this technique that cases in which children are born with deformities because of failed RU-486 abortions will not go unnoticed. One nurse who took part in RU-486 testing saw the surgical dishes with the expelled embryos, and said, “It was like looking at a little row of people. … It was very upsetting. … I hope I never, never have to do it again.”
Don't we all?
Reprinted from the syndicated columns of Father Frank Pavone, National Director of Priests for Life (pfl@priestsforlife.org).
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: Father Frank Pavone ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Psychology That Honors the Spirit DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:Aunique institution in American higher education opened its doors in Arlington, Va., for the start of a new school year this past fall. A graduate program which aims to integrate new and current psychological theories with Catholic understanding of the human person, the Institute for the Psychological Sciences is a badly needed complement to programs currently available for students of psychology. This, at least, was the conclusion of an independent board of reviewers from the state of Virginia who granted the institute its license just four months after it opened for classes. Register staff writer Brian McGuire spoke with the institute's dean, Dr. Gladys Sweeney.
McGuire: Where did the idea for an Institute for the Psychological Sciences come from?
Sweeney: It emerged as an idea in the spring of 1998, from a group of psychologists who saw the immense need for a program that could bring psychology into harmony with the truth and wisdom of the Catholic vision of the human person, human dignity and Catholic moral values. Psychologists that are grounded in an understanding of the nature and dignity of the human person can bring people to deeper levels of healing and, in so doing, contribute to a better society. This need became evident after running postgraduate training for mental-health professionals through the Catholic Institute for the Psychological Sciences, a postdoctoral institute. We felt it was important to focus on training the younger generation, rather than retraining. That's how the graduate program came about. This program is presently offered at IPS, which is a free-standing institute.
How rigorous was the institute's licensing process? What was the state's evaluation of the program?
The application was overwhelming. When it was all done, it was close to 500 pages of paperwork. In November of 1998, we got licensed to enroll students. Seventeen students trusted in the mission, even though we could not promise them that we could grant them a master's degree.
We needed to be up and running before we could schedule the site visit to obtain permission to grant master's degrees. And so, on Dec. 15 of 1999, a group of three professionals, picked by the state of Virginia, evaluated our program on the basis of its faculty, the curriculum and the students. They spent two days evaluating every aspect of the program. Interviews were conducted with the different professors, staff members and the students.
In their final report they wrote: “The institute has great strengths. It is a unique program which has some parallels in a few Protestant universities, but none in secular or Catholic circles. The integration of academic psychology with religious and traditional philosophic teaching portend significant contribution to research, clinical work and teaching that will make their mark not only within, but far beyond the Catholic community.” At the meeting for the final decision on Jan. 18, the reviewer said: “The program looked excellent on paper and the site-visit committee was ‘blown away’ by the quality of the teaching, the faculty and the students.”
Where do your students and professors come from?
Our faculty include nationally prominent scholars, drawn from across the country, who have very enthusiastically accepted our invitation to teach here.
Currently we have two half-time professors who will soon go to full time, along with nine adjuncts. Among the adjunct professors are Dr. Paul Vitz, Franciscan Father Benedict Groeschel and Dr. Wanda Franz. Our doctoral curriculum includes eight integration courses. Consultants involved in the development of these courses include Dominican Fathers Benedict Ashley and Romanus Cessario.
As for the students, we have been impressed by their level of academic qualifications and maturity. Of the 17 students enrolled, two-thirds have advanced degrees already, several with master's degrees and one has a Ph.D. We have graduates from Harvard, Yale, MIT, Oxford, Notre Dame and The Catholic University of America. It is indeed a very rich student population.
What is the mission of the institute and what do you hope it will achieve?
The mission is to foster the development of Catholic approaches to the psychological sciences [as] informed by the view of the human person given in Scripture, Church tradition and papal teachings, with special emphasis on the writings of Pope John Paul II.
We hope to promote research and clinical application of the psychological sciences in a manner consistent with Catholic moral and social teachings.
Plus we want to assist in the intellectual and spiritual formation of mental-health professionals as they seek to integrate a Catholic approach to the psychological sciences with their role as clinicians and researchers.
Why should the Church focus resources on psychology?
Psychology as a discipline studies the human person, who is complex and transcends biology. Unfortunately psychology has tried to follow the example of the physical sciences, which deal with precise measurements and predictability. This emulation has caused a reductionistic approach to the human person, in other words, a tendency to leave out of the realm of study those aspects of the individual that cannot be measured.
Thus, often the person is reduced to behaviors that need to be modified, synapses that need to be medicated, cognitions that need to be reframed, feelings that need to be controlled and so on. The spiritual life, which could be of tremendous importance to an individual, tends to be ignored in research, because it cannot be measured.
Spirituality also tends to be ignored in therapy because of therapists' aim to remain “neutral” and not impose their own values on the client. However, this cautious attitude often means ignoring a very important aspect of the patient's life, an aspect that has been proven by research, is associated with a faster and more enduring healing process. A therapist who can integrate the two realms can recognize a client's particular world-view, respect it and help integrate it in their life by helping them live a life coherent with their principles. Plus our professionals will be trained to work cooperatively with clients' spiritual directors for clients who have them.
If the client is Catholic, the professional will help free the client to grow in the sacramental life of the Church—reconciliation, Eucharist and so on.
The healing that comes from grace is extremely powerful. So, because psychology deals with the suffering human person, more than any other human science, it needs a profound awareness of the person's transcendence and dependence on God's healing power.
How will you train Catholic psychologists to deal with persons who live by other faiths, or by no faith at all?
By training them to understand the different worldviews that exist, including secular humanism.
An integrated therapist needs to recognize where the client is coming from. The psychologist is there to help clients free themselves from unresolved psychological, conscious or unconscious trauma, which prevents them from thinking clearly, from perceiving reality objectively, from making prudent decisions—in other words, from truly exercising their free will.
Often clients who are suffering psychologically cannot even pray. Once they are free from their inner conflicts, the Catholic therapist will help them integrate their own worldviews with their life. If they are Catholic, the therapist might help them to go back to the sacraments, might direct them to a spiritual director so that they can deepen their interior life and thus grow in holiness. When they experience this freedom from within, and open their hearts to Christ the true healer, they stand a better chance to find true happiness. If the client is not Catholic, he or she may still want to become more committed to his or her own particular faith. The integrated therapist will be open to this and be ready to work cooperatively with the person's particular faith.
What else distinguishes a Catholic approach to psychology from the secular one?
The main difference between a Catholic approach to psychology and a secular one is the conceptualization of the human person. A Catholic therapist will be convinced that his or her clients (even if they are not Catholic) have been created by God in his own image out of love, that God has called them to be with him for all eternity.
Even if the clients are atheists, the therapist respects their dignity by virtue of believing that they are also God's masterpiece and that Christ shed his precious blood for them. This insight can be very powerful in the care that you give to clients, even if this insight is never shared with them. The particular techniques used by secular and Catholic therapists might be very similar. However, the understanding of what the person does after the neurosis is overcome is different. The secular therapist will consider his or her work done as long as the client does what makes him feel self-actualized, or feel good. The Catholic therapist will consider his or her work done as long as the client is free to live a life coherent with his principles.
‘The healing that comes from grace is extremely powerful.’
— Dr. Gladys Sweeney
----- EXCERPT: A conversation with Gladys Sweeney, dean of the new Institute for the Psychological Sciences ----- EXTENDED BODY: Gladys Sweeney ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Education Notebook DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:Georgetown Ranked High In Peace Corps Volunteers
GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY, Jan. 28—The Peace Corps released its annual list of colleges and universities with the largest number of Peace Corps volunteers currently serving overseas. Georgetown University ranked 18th in the top 25 with a total number of 51 volunteers and was the only Catholic institution listed.
“I am pleased, but surprised,” said Georgetown University President, Jesuit Father Leo J. O'Donovan. “Service is a fundamental part of Georgetown's educational mission, and we aim to educate ‘men and women for others’ who will work to improve society—whether that work takes place in their local community or half a world away.”
Georgetown University, founded in 1789, is the nation's oldest Catholic university.
Funerals Held for Dorm Fire Victims
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Jan. 24— The young pallbearers cried as they walked into St. Jerome Catholic Church.
In the pews, Frank S. Caltabilota Jr's classmates and friends listened intently to the priest's words, dabbing at their noses with tissues and wiping away tears. His mother sat in a front pew, clutching a teddy bear, her husband's arm draped over her shoulders.
“Why did Frankie have to die so young?” asked Father Frederick Jackiewicz, the school's campus minister. “We have no answers for these questions. We do not understand the ways of God. We try to the best of our limited ability to understand, but we cannot.”
The heartbreaking scene was mirrored in two other New Jersey churches as three Seton Hall University freshmen who died in a dormitory fire Jan. 19 were laid to rest. Like Caltabilota, John Giunta, 18, and Aaron Karol, 18, were remembered as upbeat, promising young men.
University chancellor Thomas Peterson was at St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church in Dunellen to say goodbye to Karol. “We say that Seton Hall is a family, and it is,” Peterson said. “We, like yourselves, have lost a son.”
The fire broke out around 4:30 a.m. Jan. 19 on the third floor of Boland Hall, a six-story dormitory that housed 640 people. Five remained hospitalized Jan. 24, four in critical condition with burns. An investigation into the fire is underway.
‘Yes, Sir; No, Ma'am’Rule
BIRMINGHAM NEWS, Jan. 19—Gov. Don Siegelman announced Jan. 17 that he will introduce legislation that would require the Alabama's 740,000 public school students to address teachers and other adults on school property by the courtesy titles of sir and ma'am, reported the Birmingham News.
While in recent years Alabama law-makers have legislated tougher tests and higher academic standards to meet the demands of the 21st century, Siegelman said what schools also need is a return to “good, old-fashioned values.”
“Some kids, not all kids by any means, have forgotten the value of showing respect for others,” Siegelman said. “When the school bell rings next year, all that's going to change.”
The governor said his proposal should be seen in context of other steps the state has taken in recent years to improve school not only academically, but in other ways as well. He used as an example a law passed several years ago that requires schools to spend a small part of each day teaching lessons about character. A similar law was passed last year in Louisiana, the News reported.
Sun Valley Principal Barbara Stewart said her school's students are already strongly encouraged to be polite and use courtesy titles like sir and ma'am. She said she likes Siegelman's proposal.
“I support it,” Mrs. Stewart said. “It can't hurt and it could help in our efforts to teach our children respect.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Harry Potter, Faith and Fantasy DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:JK. Rowling's Harry Potter series is an adventure-fantasy which takes place during young Harry's seven years spent at Hogwart's School of Witchcraft and Wizardry learning to be a wizard. Each book in the projected seven-book series corresponds to one of his years at Hogwart's. At present, Rowling has published the first three, The Sorcerer's Stone, The Chamber of Secrets and The Prisoner of Azkaban.
An opinion column by Ben Wiker, “Harry Potter's Universe: Nice vs. Evil,” ran in the Jan. 9-15 Register. The Register has by no means endorsed these books. In fact, the opinion column was a critique of them. Readers' concerns and Wiker's response follows.
A Landscape With Dangers
In the Harry Potter books, there are some very grave problems in terms of the moral order of the universe. Should we conclude that, just because Harry Potter is a very nice little boy yearning for a family of his own, this justifies using any tools of power, including the occult, in order to achieve his end?
To my mind, the Potter books are in some ways more dangerous than, for example, the Goosebumps series or Madeleine L'Engle's occult trilogy, because the central character is far more attractive as a role model than the characters in those other books.
Basically, the book continues the phenomenon of destroying the Judeo-Christian world of symbols by making highly dangerous spiritual activity appear to be a good. Evils which appear to us in beautiful packages are far more destructive in the long run to a child's developing sense of spiritual discernment, and of what is ultimately real.
Michael D. O'Brien, novelist and author of A Landscape With Dragons: The Battle for Your Child's Mind Combermere, Ontario
Means to an End
In his effort to present a balanced evaluation of the hot-selling fantasy series, Ben Wiker missed the most disturbing element present in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter stories. His primary issue with Rowling's universe is the absence of a creator and “the implicit or explicit seeking of God.”
While, as Wiker points out, a transcendent source of the white magic would likely have sharpened contrasts between good and evil, the most serious confusion in these stories is found on the moral plane.
Wiker acknowledges that the “plots are not devoid of moral structure” but Rowling's writing is not “infused with such moral depth as J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis plumbed.” In fact, the books present a very clear moral structure which can be summarized as, “The end justifies the means.”
In each of the three books published so far, Harry and his companions bring about important and decisive victories for the good, and seriously disrupt the plans of Voldemort, the most evil and formerly the most powerful wizard of the dark arts. Unfortunately, the plots are constructed such that these victories uniformly are wrought of disobedience and deceitful behavior.
Harry, Ron and Hermione frequently flout their school's regulations but are exonerated from punishment because of the good outcomes of their misconduct. The most disturbing example is found in the third book of the series, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of the Hogwart's School and pre-eminent good wizard, explicitly counsels Harry and Hermione to break one of the fundamental laws of witchcraft and wizardry by using time-travel to alter the events of the past without, of course, getting caught. In the universe of Harry Potter, obedience, honesty and regulations are only obligatory when a higher intention does not render them inconvenient.
A key element of the worldview created by an author of fiction is the panorama of factors that bring about success and failure, for it is from these that lessons for our own world are derived. Rowling's worldview violates one of the most fundamental principles of ethics, and the lesson she offers young readers is a dangerous one indeed. Vigilant parents would do well at least to review these books and point out this distortion to their young readers. My approach has been to use these books as an opportunity to teach my 9-year-old son to analyze what he reads, and to evaluate stories' themes against sound principles.
Mike Williams Via e-mail
Ben Wiker Replies
Many who read my analysis of Rowling and her popularity mistook it for “high praise.” On the contrary, most of the column was directed to the deflating of the inordinate praise indiscriminately heaped upon her by the media, parents and educators. My conclusion: She is certainly not a great writer, nor even a very good writer; she is an enchanting writer who offers us, at best, “a fun read.” Many readers took issue with even this faint praise.
Given the type of controversy, I would like to use the occasion to set an example of charity and humility. I shall begin by setting out two principles of charity in debating such matters of prudential judgment.
In matters of prudence (i.e., matters of practical judgment about things which are not simply self-evident), we ought to be governed by two principles.
First, in things which relate either to morality or to the faith (or both), those who disagree in discussion should do so in such a way as to avoid scandal, “an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil” (The Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 2284).
Second, in these same matters, those of lesser authority should yield to those of greater authority.
My goal in writing the column was to assess the Harry Potter phenomenon, not to endorse Rowling's series against all objections. And, simply put, no one will ever be harmed by not reading the Potter series. As I said in the column, it is not, by any stretch, destined to be a classic. Nor are Rowling's books worth defending, especially if such defense would cause scandal. For this reason, I will not answer any of the specific objections to my column.
Mr. O'Brien, for whom I have the utmost respect, thinks that some or most children will be harmed by reading Rowling's books. My advice is simple: Follow Mr. O'Brien's advice. He is a recognized authority among orthodox Catholics in regard to children's literature. I yield willingly to the greater authority.
Thus, in regard to both principles of charity given above, I withdraw anything which looks like an endorsement of Rowling. Since the focus of the original column was not the offhand faint praise, the removal of faint endorsement leaves most of the column intact.
All I ask for teaching this lesson in charity and humility is … a signed copy of Mr. O'Brien's A Landscape with Dragons. I shall read it from cover to cover and back again.
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Prizer's Picks DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:Waco: The Rules of Engagement (1997)
On April 19, 1993, after a 51-day siege, the FBI raided the headquarters of the Branch Davidians, an apocalyptic, fundamentalist-Christian sect based in Waco, Texas. More than 80 members of the religious group died, including 17 children. The Oscar-nominated Waco: The Rules of Engagement argues that the FBI assault was a botched operation, resulting in unnecessary deaths, followed by a cover-up which destroyed evidence.
To justify these illegalities, the documentary contends, the FBI distorted the sect's behavior and smeared its leader, David Koresh. The Davidians were an offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventists, who believe we are living in end-times as prophesied by their interpretation of the Book of Revelation. Koresh was an angry, self-involved personality who practiced polygamy and stockpiled weapons. The movie suggests he was only a threat to himself and his followers and that the sect's constitutionally guaranteed rights of self-defense, free speech and religious expression were violated. A recently formed congressional committee is investigating the film's allegations.
Wise Blood (1980)
The Southern gothic novels of the late Catholic author Flannery O'Connor are an acquired taste that's well worth the effort. Her flamboyant, eccentric characters struggle with issues of religious faith from unexpected angles. Director John Huston (Prizzi's Honor and The Maltese Falcon) masterfully adapts her 1952 book Wise Blood to the screen with humor and a documentary-style attention to period detail. Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif) is a typical O'Connor misfit, a young military veteran who wants to found his own heretical, fire-and-brimstone religious sect where “the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way.” Preaching from atop the hood of his broken-down car, he has trouble taking in enough money to survive.
A colorful gallery of grotesques gets entangled with Hazel's mission, including Hoover Stoates (Ned Beatty), a glib promoter who wants to make the sidewalk evangelist famous. God is shown to work in mysterious ways as Hazel finds himself on a tortured and unconventional journey to salvation.
True Grit (1969)
John Wayne is usually remembered as a laconic, super-macho action hero. But he also had a flair for comedy and could make himself lovable in a tough, unsentimental way.
True Grit, based on Charles Portis' best seller, features him as Rooster Cogburn, a fat, one-eyed lawman well past his prime. When he accidentally falls off his horse, he claims that's where he always intended his party to camp for the night. Despite his failings, the 14-year-old Mattie Ross (Kim Darby) hires him to track down her father's murderer.
This constantly bickering pair travel into Choctaw Indian country for a series of suspense-filled adventures, including being captured by bandits and falling into a pit of snakes. Veteran studio-contract director Henry Hathaway (The Sons of Katie Elder and the Marilyn Monroe classic Niagara) doesn't neglect the epic chases and shootouts.
But the main emphasis is on character conflicts and laughs as this exceedingly odd couple gradually learn to work together.
The Mask of Dimitrios (1944)
The tangled, bloody politics of the Balkans have been in the news for the past decade. The Mask of Dimitrios, based on Eric Ambler's novel, shows us that the region's Byzantine intrigues are nothing new. Dutch crime writer Cornelius Leyden (Peter Lorre) decides to research a novel about the mysterious criminal and arch-conspirator Dimitrios Makropoulos (Zachary Scott), whose corpse washes up on a Mediterranean beach sometime just before World War II.
While journeying to Bulgaria, Leyden shares a railway compartment with the portly and knowledgeable Mr. Peters (Sydney Greenstreet), who offers to help. “There's not enough kindness in the world,” he tells the writer. “If only men would live as brothers without hatred, seeing only beautiful things.”
Peters' actions belie his words as Leyden uncovers unpleasant facts about Dimitrios involving blackmail, spying and assassination. Against his will, the writer is sucked into a vortex of Balkan scheming and betrayal where his own moral principles are put to the test.
Arts & Culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: 'This Is Not About Discrimination' DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:A recent poll indicated that 52% of Vermont residents oppose the state Supreme Court's plan to extend marriage benefits to same-sex couples. Fourteen percent were undecided in the phone survey by Directions in Research of San Diego. A grass-roots movement led by Burlington Archbishop Kenneth Angell is giving this silent majority a public voice.
In January, the Vermont Legislature was hearing testimonies from people on both sides of the issue. Ruth Charlesworth, director of the Office of Family Life/Respect Life for the Diocese of Burlington, organized a “People's Rally” at the Capitol in Montpelier. She spoke with Register staff writer Brian McGuire about the pro-marriage movement in Vermont.
McGuire: What is the position of the Diocese of Burlington with respect to the Vermont Supreme Court's recent ruling?
Charlesworth: One thing is clear: This is not about discrimination. This is a matter of the preservation of marriage as designed by God, the Creator of life. This is what the Church teaches; we believe it, and we want to defend it. It is not discrimination. We believe what we have been taught as Catholics is not discrimination, especially when Scripture and Tradition teach this.
We believe that marriage is a sacrament instituted by Christ to help a husband and wife gain salvation. Spouses are to help each other. … We ask anyone who feels any kind of hatred toward the homosexual community to please not get involved. This is strictly a matter of defending a Catholic truth. There is no room for hatred. Now, as a Catholic I'm going to talk to you from a moral perspective. The other perspective, and I don't think you can discount it, is the social perspective. People who are not Catholic and who look at this from a social and cultural perspective also have valid arguments [against same-sex marriage].
How strong is the fight against same-sex marriage in Vermont?
We organized a “People's Rally” for traditional marriage for Jan. 25. It was snowed out when the buses refused to drive people [to the Capitol]. But even with the snow, over 1,200 people attended.
What happened here is exactly the same situation that happened in Hawaii. When their Supreme Court decided to pass legislation on same-sex marriage, the people of Hawaii were really upset. They felt they didn't have a voice. When the people realized what was happening in their Legislature, there was a grass-roots movement of Catholics and other groups for the preservation of traditional marriage. What happened was that the people of Hawaii voted.
Nearly 80% of them voted not to keep same-sex marriage, and so the law was reversed.
How have you mobilized Vermonters to speak out against the legislation?
A group of us from various religious denominations—Catholics and various evangelical churches and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and also some individuals who belonged to no religious denomination at all—came together.
We gathered membership to educate people that traditional marriage could be in jeopardy. We now have about 7,000 members in our organization, which is called Take It to the People. We took ads out in the paper, we asked people if they would be willing to sign their names on a petition and make contributions to help with the ads. This is totally grass-roots. There are no professionals involved and it's not funded by the diocese, though the diocese does support its goals and objectives. The response has been very strong in our support. The most recent poll came out strongly in favor of traditional marriage.
Isn't it only fair to offer benefits to all?
We can't just look at special interest groups, especially with marriage. It simply isn't fair that sex should be the criteria of a partnership. If you have a kid who is 18 years old, he can no longer be under his parents' health insurance plan. We have many people who are not covered by insurance. What about senior citizens who cannot be covered by their children's health care? Is that not discriminatory? And what about elderly sisters living together?
It's a false argument to say [homosexual couples] have no rights. Another argument I hear is that ‘I have a partner and I cannot even go into a hospital.’ In my own experience, we had an elderly woman working on our office and I was granted durable power of attorney over her. That woman couldn't have an aspirin without my signature. Usually, hospitals require that the person who signs for durable power of attorney not be related to the patient because of the emotion involved. If same-sex partners really want to be responsible for each other, legally they can. My own experience, in talking with our gay and lesbian friends, is that many don't even want marriage.
What are those who are pushing for this legislation after then, if not marriage?
What are they after? Approval for the lifestyle and their behavior. The one thing that is so important is that we love the person. But we cannot legitimate this behavior. We cannot say that it's on the level of a marriage between a man and a woman. It's not the same. I think they want their behavior approved and accepted—and more than accepted, legitimized. There is a big difference between acceptance and approval. They know there is great approval and celebration for men and women who get married; there has been for time immemorial. Homosexuality has also been around for time immemorial. But it hasn't been approved in the same way as a marriage between a man and a woman.
For information: Take it to the People P.O. Box 4147 Burlington, Vt. 05406 VermontPeople@iname.com
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Marriage Is Up for Grabs From Vermont to California DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:MONTPELIER, Vt.-The question I was asked in front of the Vermont House Judiciary Committee tells a lot about what's gone wrong.
“Why don't we just call them ‘unions’?” asked an earnest state representative. The representative was asking me, in effect, why we need the word “marriage” in our legal codes.
This is the state of the question in Vermont, on the front lines of the marriage wars. But the questions in Vermont are just a more intense version of a growing nationwide debate.
More and more Americans are being forced to ask the question, “What is marriage?” Whether judges, legislators, or ordinary citizens, the answers they give will shape our future.
On Dec. 20, the Vermont Supreme Court handed down a puzzling but landmark decision. Although it did not strike down Vermont's marriage law for being limited to a man and a woman, the court held that this “exclusion” had to be remedied by equal benefits for same-sex couples. It commanded the Legislature to come up with the “how.”
The Legislature is trying. The court has given it “a reasonable time”; no one knows how long that is.
Meanwhile, on the other end of the country, Proposition 22 (“Prop. 22”) is on the March 7 ballot in California. Prop. 22 reaffirms that for a marriage to be valid in-state, or be recognized as valid from out-of-state, it must be between a man and a woman. Prop. 22 would enact a law, by initiative, which the homosexual community had managed to block in the Assembly.
After the Democrats took over the Assembly in 1998, California passed a domestic partnership bill. The marriage-recognition bill doesn't have a chance anymore, so supporters of marriage have taken the issue to the people.
The homosexual community is outraged that Prop. 22 has made it to the ballot, and is doing everything possible to defeat it. Besides the usual bevy of phone banks, precinct organizing, T-shirts and hats, Hollywood is available. Max Mutchnick, the openly homosexual producer of “Will and Grace,” a popular sitcom, has made an anti-Prop. 22 TV ad using the cast of his own show. The honorary president of the anti-Prop. 22 campaign is rock star Melissa Etheridge, a lesbian who most recently made headlines for having a baby with the sperm of rock star David Crosby. Many Hollywood stars are hosting anti-Prop. 22 fund-raisers.
The anti-Prop. 22 forces have sought out endorsements from high-profile political and religious leaders. Al Gore and Bill Bradley both oppose Prop. 22. So do the two Democratic U.S. senators from California, 11 Democratic congressmen and one Republican U.S. congressman, Rep. Tom Campbell. Along with them, a group of religious leaders, including the California Council of Churches, have attacked the Catholics and Mormons for supporting Prop. 22. One member of the San Francisco City Council even urged that the Internal Revenue Service revoke the tax-exemption of the Mormon Church because of its support.
Roller-Coaster Ride
It's been a rock-‘em, sock-’em year in the marriage debate. In November 1998, the states of Hawaii and Alaska passed amendments to their constitutions to ensure that marriage would not be redefined. During 1999, courts of both states admitted the outcomes and ended the cases.
Also during 1999, Louisiana became the 30th state to pass a “mini-DOMA,” the nickname for a state law stating that a valid or recognized marriage requires a man and a woman. These 30 statutes have all been passed since 1995. The federal government joined them in 1996 with the Defense of Marriage Act (“DOMA”), which defines marriage as male-female for purposes of federal law, and allows states to decide whether or not to make the same policy.
But other developments point in the opposite direction. As the amendments were being passed in Hawaii and Alaska, a court in Oregon decided that certain employees in same-sex relationships deserved spousal benefits. Even though Oregon has no definition of “domestic partner” in its law, the court gave it one in the name of the Oregon Constitution. Now the plaintiffs from the original Alaska case are back again trying to use Oregon's decision.
Why Vermont Matters
Then there is Vermont. Vermont's lawsuit was based on the state's Constitution, so its reasoning does not necessarily extend to other states. But the decision has galvanized homosexuals everywhere. According to the Human Rights Campaign, a national homosexual activist lobby, the court's decision showed “wisdom and courage.”On the one hand, the court did not order the Legislature to legalize same-sex “marriage”—although it is free to do so. On the other hand, the court clearly declared that opposite-sex and same-sex couples are “no different” in any respects relevant to marital rights and benefits. That is the really big news. It is also really bad news for those who support traditional marriage.
The Vermont court has totally switched the burden of proof. Instead of the Legislature being free to retain the existing marriage law, and deciding on its own whether to extend particular benefits on a piecemeal basis, the Legislature has to justify any benefits given just to marriage. The presumption is that “special” benefits are unfair, and therefore unconstitutional.
The Vermont court also made it clear that it would not be easy to pass its test. It rejected all seven reasons that the state gave for the uniqueness of the marriage law, including promoting the connection between procreation and child-rearing. It stated that male-female and same-sex couples are “no different” in these areas.
The court seems to have decided that whatever may be unique about male-female couples, it is not enough to justify “special” benefits. Or at least the court can't think of a single reason for a single special benefit for marriage.
Just to make matters worse, the plaintiffs' lawyers have already announced that even if the Legislature gives them every marital benefit, but not a marriage license, they will go back to court and insist that they get the licenses too. Why? They say that “a license is itself a benefit.”
The civil law and the Church's teaching both agree that marriage requires a man and a woman. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that “a man and a woman united in marriage, together with their children, form a family. This institution is prior to any recognition by public authority, which has an obligation to recognize it” (No. 2202).
The law of Vermont takes this definition for granted, so much so that while it uses the terms “bride” and “groom” in various places, it never even states that a man and woman are required for a marriage license. Even the Vermont Supreme Court agreed that this much was entirely obvious.
Why this teaching of the Church and definition in the law? Because men and women, equal yet different, form a unique community of love and life. While certain functions are associated with marriage—sexual intercourse, the sharing of life and the procreation and nurture of children—marriage itself is more than its functions. It is the first and most fundamental form of human community.
What is happening, however, is that under the pressure of an ideology of [equal individual] autonomy, which treats every social institution as merely the creation of equal individuals, marriage is being divested of its functions. Sex, children, commitment and benefits are all gradually being disconnected from marriage and left standing as individual “rights.” At some point the functions may become entirely independent, and “marriage” may just become another form of partnership. For some it already is.
Equal individual autonomy, as an ideology shaping law, also seeks to eliminate differences between men and women, and forbids “judgments” about sexual behavior. In such a climate, any “preference” for heterosexuality becomes portrayed as a defense of “privilege,” and any questioning of homosexuality or bisexuality becomes an attack on “oppressed victims.”
To enact this ideology into law, however, advocates of same-sex “marriage” must overcome a basic resistance. That resistance is not homophobia. Instead, it is a resistance to adopting lies as law. Men and women are different, and male-female communities are unique.
Marriage benefits society in innumerable ways; therefore the state has not only the obligation to recognize marriage, but the right to confer upon it benefits in return. Sexual boundaries are important, and we have no constitutional, not to mention moral, duty to disregard them. Those who picture society as a web of “sexual oppression” appear to believe that everything about sex is just made up. They cannot understand why some of us think that they are the ones playing make-believe. If people understand where they are going, they will not follow.
The Role of the Church
The Church has tried to speak into this very difficult cultural and political situation. Sometimes public leaders have listened, sometimes not.
On Dec. 1, Pope John Paul II reaf-firmed “the value of family and marriage,” and warned against attacks on marriage and family “in the name of ethical relativism.” The Church has spoken clearly and firmly against legalizing same-sex “marriage.” It has also spoken against the enactment of “domestic partnership” bills that create “parallel tracks” to marriage.
In the United States, Cardinals John O'Connor and Anthony Bevilacqua have spoken eloquently to these issues, notably in April and May 1998.
Archbishop William Levada also protested against a domestic partnership ordinance in San Francisco last year. And for the past two years, the French bishops helped lead the campaign against a similar domestic partnership-type law (which nevertheless passed).
In early January, Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles issued a statement on California's Proposition
22. He strongly endorsed Prop. 22, stating that “we must promote the traditional understanding of marriage.” He added that political action for marriage is no substitute for pastoral work with homosexuals, and that we must rejected all hatred, and “cherish each person as a son or daughter created in God's image and likeness, and work together to build up a community of justice, compassion and care for all.”
A lengthier statement was issued on Jan. 14 in Vermont by Burlington Bishop Kenneth A. Angell. Bishop Angell declared that “redefining marriage, expanding it to include other private relationships, will ultimately attack the age-old truth that traditional marriages and stable families constitute the very foundation of our society. … Inevitably, espousal of the domestic partnership concept will be Step 1 toward full acceptance of same-sex marriage.”
Bishop Angell has called Catholics, and all people of good will, “to join me in prayer and political action,” including a rally at the state Capitol in Montpelier on Feb. 1.
In both these states, as in Hawaii and Alaska, the Church is working closely with Mormons, Protestants, Jews and others who share common ground on marriage. The mobilization of citizens, especially where a court has intervened, is the key to any success.
Legislators must understand that they are first of all accountable to the people, not the courts. Then, if neither the courts nor the legislatures will listen, the people must amend their constitutions so that marriage cannot be overruled by fiat.
What Comes Next?
California and Vermont are today's battlegrounds. Supporters of traditional marriage who live in California should be sure to vote March 7. If you're in Vermont, contact your legislators immediately to encourage them to overturn the court's decision through an amendment to the Vermont Constitution. Those in the 20 states without a “mini-Defense of Marriage Act” need another time-tested remedy in situations where a society is threatened: prayer.
David Orgon Coolidge directs the Marriage Law Project at the Columbus School of Law at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
For more information:
Californians for the Protection of Marriage
www.ProtectMarriage.org
(916) 441-1010
Vermont's Take It to the People
www.TakeIttothePeople.org
(802) 644-5564
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: David Orgon Coolidge ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: A Gentle Warrior for Unwed Moms DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:SPRING VALLEY, N.Y.—Chris Bell has been called late at night to pick up pregnant women in crisis on the side of a busy highway, and has spent hours bringing them from the edge of despair.
Gentle and shy by nature, he has faced angry husbands, boyfriends and parents who wanted an abortion for the women who have come to him for help.
He also has seen many women change direction in their lives, give birth to their babies, graduate from school, get steady jobs and set off on the difficult path of single motherhood.
Bell is executive director of Good Counsel Inc., which operates five homes in New York for pregnant mothers and their babies and has affiliated facilities in New Jersey and Connecticut.
The homes serve inner-city and suburban women, those who have no money or hope, those who are fleeing abusive relationships, and a good number who accepted the advice and prayers of sidewalk counselors and turned around at the doors of an abortion clinic.
In the spirit of Our Lady of Good Counsel, after whom the homes are named, all pregnant women are welcomed in the name of the Lord. They are given a room, a bed, a community of other women in similar situations and guidance from trained professionals in setting attainable goals after the births of their babies. They are referred to medical, psychological or legal services as needed.
“It worked in my life,” Felicia Smith told the Register. “It gave me that support and structure I needed.”
Smith came to Good Counsel when she was three months pregnant, in an abusive relationship, and had two other young children to feed and clothe. She is now house manager of the Good Counsel facility in the South Bronx, helping women face the same problems she did.
“When you're going to Good Counsel, you're at a moment of your life when you feel everything is falling apart. What I found is that you find people there who actually care,” said Smith, who has three children in her own apartment in the Bronx. “I would like to give back what I've received. To me, being a house manager here is not just a job. I really do care about these women.”
An Activist Wife
Bell, 43, has been active in the pro-life movement for years, and has engaged in Operation Rescue and sidewalk counseling outside abortion clinics. In 1991 he married fellow activist Joan Andrews, who has been arrested more than 200 times and spent many months in jail for blocking clinic entrances.
She gave birth to Mary Louise a year after their marriage. The Bells have since adopted four children: Emiliano, 10, a handicapped boy from Mexico; Philomena, 20 months, who was born to a Jamaican woman who turned away from abortion; and a brother and sister pair from Russia, Andrey, 4, and Irina, 2.
“When Joan and I got married, we decided that we would adopt if we had the chance,” said the soft-spoken Bell. “God has been very good to us, to provide such wonderful children.”
Bell started Good Counsel in 1985 with the help of Father Benedict Groeschel, one of the founders of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal in the South Bronx. Bell was working at Covenant House at the time and told Father Groeschel that someone should do something for the many homeless mothers. The priest challenged him to be that someone.
The first home was a former convent in Hoboken, N.J., which had room for six women and their babies. As the program grew, the Hoboken house was converted to office space and homes were opened in the South Bronx, Staten Island, suburban Spring Valley, Poughkeepsie and Harrison, and Norwalk, Conn. The Harrison facility began operations last year to work exclusively with women with drug, alcohol or psychological problems. Many services are provided through nearby St. Vincent's Hospital.
Good Counsel has the full support of New York Cardinal John O'Connor, who has written in praise of Bell's work.
Each home has a chapel and the residents, many of whom are not Catholic, are encouraged to pray and have their children baptized. Classes on parenting, child care, housekeeping, money management and other practical matters are given. Chastity is taught as an important virtue.
More than 3,000 women and children have been housed and helped over the past 15 years. About 1,500 calls are handled each year on the national Good Counsel hot line, (800) 723-8331.
Local priests, who provide the sacraments and monthly Masses for Catholic residents and spiritual advice for all, serve the homes. An ardent supporter is Auxiliary Bishop George Lynch, 82, who has done many rescues—often incurring arrest—over the last few years while living in retirement in the Bronx. He gives talks at parishes to tell people about Good Counsel and ask for financial support.
“What Good Counsel does is wonderful and a very necessary work in the pro-life cause,” said Bishop Lynch. “When, by the grace of God, some young woman changes her mind about having an abortion, we want to be able to say we can do everything for her. Good Counsel and other similar homes provide those excellent services.
Brian Caulfield writes from New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: Brian Caulfield ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: New York's Cardinal O'Connor Repeats a Standing Offer DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:NEW YORK—Cancer has slowed the archbishop of New York almost to a halt. But Cardinal John O'Connor, 80, still has plenty of fire in his belly for one issue: pro-life.
He delivered a rousing pro-life homily to a standing-room-only crowd at a solemn pontifical Mass celebrated with hundreds of New York Knights of Columbus at St. Patrick's Cathedral on Jan. 23, to commemorate Pro-Life Sunday.
“I'm grateful to the Knights of Columbus … and all the pro-life leaders in attendance here his morning, who represent all parts of the archdiocese,” the cardinal began, acknowledging the packed cathedral with a grin. “Even those of you who have come just to see if I've grown any hair; I welcome you all.”
The cardinal lamented that he would be unable to attend the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., the next day. It was the first time he didn't participate in it.
Underscoring the archdiocese's ongoing commitment to assist mothers contemplating abortion, Cardinal O'Connor said: “It's a promise I made years ago, that anyone threatened with the possibility of an abortion can turn to the Archdiocese of New York, or personally to me, and we'll do everything possible to support the mother and the birth of her baby. It's a commitment that's been true all these years.”
“We have to keep praying and working; we can't let ourselves get discouraged above all,” he continued, explicitly condemning the practice of partial-birth abortion and rhetorically asking of the U.S. Supreme Court: “Where's the justice here? What will be next?”
Anyone [contemplating] abortion can turn to the Archdiocese of New York … and we'll do everything possible to support the mother and … her baby.
Pro-lifer Kathleen Richardson of Long Island said she appreciated the cardinal's homily.
“The virtues and values the cardinal touched on in his homily need to be inculcated at every level of society and in every aspect of our lives,” she said. “Why abortion is seen as a solution in a civilized society is a deep-rooted problem.”
Cardinal O'Connor attributed America's acceptance of abortion to “our indifference to the sacred.”
He pointed to the tremendous influence of television. “What has this done to our children?” he said. “Possibly we've failed to integrate this concept of purity into the totality of life; into the totality of living that must involve reverence.”
Quoting Mother Teresa, he said: “Peace is not a global issue. It is a sheer hypocrisy to even hope for world peace when we as individuals wage war on the most defenseless of God's creatures, the unborn.”
He added, “We can have treaties and words of peace, but there's no hope for it while we're [murdering] the unborn.”
The cardinal concluded by challenging participants to take other words of Mother Teresa to heart: “Jesus is my everything. Now this can change the world!”
Karen Walker is usually based in San Juan Capistrano, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: Karen Walker ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: The Gospel Of Life DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:In imparting the gift of life, God has asks man to appreciate the gift and to take responsibility for it. In his encyclical Donum Vitae (Gift of Life), Pope John Paul asks men and women to keep this in mind as they attempt to solve the moral problems raised by scientific advances that permit artificial interventions on behalf of life as it originates and on the processes of procreation.
Basic scientific research and applied research constitute a significant expression of this dominion of man over creation. Science and technology are valuable resources for man when placed at his service and when they promote his integral development for the benefit of all; but they cannot of themselves show the meaning of existence and of human progress. Being ordered to man, who initiates and develops them, they draw from the person and his moral values the indication of their purpose and the awareness of their limits.
On the one hand, it would 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 will of God. (No. 2)
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: LIFE NOTES DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:Celebrities Who Are Waiting Until Marriage
US MAGAZINE, February 2000—The relationships of athletes and actors are common fodder for the media in our celebrity-craved culture. But some members of the rich and famous are practicing chastity until marriage, according to US Magazine.
A.C. Green, a 14-year basketball veteran playing with the Los Angeles Lakers, is a practicing Catholic is well-known for his abstinence. Green often speaks to students encourage them to remain chaste until they get married.
Latin music star Enrique Iglesias told US Magazine, “I am a virgin, but when you talk about it, please don't make fun.”
Also listed in US Magazine: Gary Coleman, famous for his role in the TV sitcom Diff'rent Strokes, teen heartthrob Jonathan Jackson, young actress Leelee Sobieski, and tennis beauty Anna Kournikova.
Gore Acknowledges Abortion Shift
THE NEW YORK TIMES, Jan. 30—Several days after asserting that he had always favored abortion on demand, Al Gore acknowledged that his position on abortion evolved during his 25-year political career.
Gore's admission came after repeated attacks by Bill Bradley, who accused the Vice President of being pro-life in the 1980s, reported the paper.
At issue was a letter Gore wrote when he was a Congressman in which he said it was wrong to use federal funds for abortion, which he said, was “arguably the taking of a human life.”
Asked about that statement on Jan. 29, the Vice President said, “I used the word ‘arguably,’and yes my position has changed.” He continued, “I would not use that phrasing today,” the Times reported.
Bill Bradley was not impressed with Gore's comments, the Times reported. “It's not an issue you can dance around—that you can nuance,” said Bradley, who is running ads on abortion in New Hampshire.
“When someone makes the change from right to life to pro-choice, that is a profound journey. I believe that there's an obligation on Al Gore to tell us why and how he moved from one position to the other,” said Bradley, the Times reported.
‘Wrongful Birth’ Lawsuit Filed in Ohio
CINCINNATI POST, Jan. 27—A couple from Springfield, Ohio, claim that they would have aborted their daughter, Alicia, had doctors told them she was likely to be born with spina bifida. They want the Ohio Supreme Court to allow Alicia to collect damages, reported the Post.
Lawrence and Patricia Hester say the doctors knew of Alicia's condition when she was a unborn child and failed to inform them. They believe that the daughter, now 6, should be entitled to damages to compensate for the medical and educational expenses of the child.
Michael Lyon, a lawyer for the doctors, said that no damages were due because the doctors did not cause the birth defects and they should not be held responsible for the fact Alicia is alive, the Post reported.
“The inescapable truth is … they are saying the child should be dead. What would have avoided the damages to this child? Death, termination,” Lyons argued. “I can't imagine the child standing here 10 years from now, saying, ‘I want to be dead.’”
The Alicia Hester case should be decided within three to six months, the Post reported. In a previous ruling, also arising in Cincinnati, the Ohio Supreme Court refused to recognize “wrongful life” in the case of an elderly man who was resuscitated against his wishes.
----- EXCERPT: ----- Extended BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Did You Know? DATE: 02/06/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 06-12, 2000 ----- BODY:Depopulation is not just a phenomenon of the West as fertility rates in many developing countries have steadily declined in recent decades. Brazil, for example, has experienced a fertility decline over the past 35 years that is one of the steepest in the world. In 1965, Brazilian families averaged 5.6 children; now they average just 2.3, barely above replacement level. Even families that call themselves “pro-life” have just two or at most three children.
(Source: Human Life International newsletter, January, 2000)
----- EXCERPT: FACTS OF LIFE ----- Extended BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: 'A Shock To Everyone' DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON—The January ordination of five government-selected bishops in China and subsequent reports of crack-downs against loyal Catholics are major setbacks in Vatican-Beijing relations, several U.S. observers say.
The moves surprised many, since news reports in November and December claimed that the Vatican and China were moving toward establishing diplomatic relations. Several wire services had reported the Vatican was ready to end formal diplomatic ties with the Republic of China on Taiwan, and the two sides were negotiating on the selection of bishops, which the Vatican insists must be made by the Pope in accord with canon law.
But instead, a government-controlled church entity ordained five bishops in Beijing on Jan. 6, the same day Pope John Paul II ordained 12 bishops in Rome.
“It was a shock to everyone, and seen as a deliberate affront to the Holy Father,” said Maryknoll Sister Janet Carroll, executive director of the U.S. Catholic China Bureau. The South Orange, N.J.-based nonprofit group is sponsored by religious groups including the Jesuits, Maryknolls, Francis-cans, Columbans and Benedictines.
A U.S. State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, condemned “China's severe violations of the religious rights of Catholics and others.” The source noted that the State Department has designated China a “country of particular concern” for religious freedom.
The press office of the People's Republic of China Embassy in Washington could not be reached for comment.
On Jan. 24, Catholic News Service reported that Chinese authorities had recently arrested a pro-Rome underground bishop and several priests, forced some lay Catholics to join the government-backed Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, and demolished two churches.
Joseph Kung, president of the Cardinal Kung Foundation in Stamford, Conn., said he believes the government is making a push to stamp out the underground church. “They want to destroy the Roman Catholic Church before the recognition started,” Kung told the Register. “Therefore, when there is recognition, there is no more Roman Catholic Church.”
Sister Carroll said it is difficult to tell who is responsible for the uncanonical ordinations and the reported crack-down. She suggested that the ordinations may have been orchestrated by Patriotic Association officials “who are trying to throw a monkey wrench in the movement toward normalization” between the Vatican and China.
There are two Catholic groups in the People's Republic of China: the “open church,” affiliated with the government-sponsored Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association; and the “underground church,” which professes loyalty to the Pope.
The Patriotic Association, founded by the Communist government in 1957, has been ordaining bishops since 1958. The Vatican considers ordinations by the Patriotic Association valid but illicit, meaning the new bishops have the powers of a bishop but are not in communion with the Pope. Vatican officials, however, have avoided calling the division in China a schism.
Dual Membership
But complicating the situation, many members of the Patriotic Association are also believed to be secret members of the underground church. Church sources have indicated in recent years that 20 to 30 or more Patriotic Association bishops are secretly in full communion with the Pope — reports the Vatican has refused to confirm.
On Dec. 15, Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said there had been no breakthroughs in talks with the Chinese government, downplaying unattributed claims of progress reported by Catholic News Service.
But on Jan. 4, after plans were announced in China for the uncanonical ordinations in China, Navarro-Valls spoke of the Holy See's “astonishment and disappointment,” and added: “This decision comes at a time when voices have been raised in many parts which lead one to hope well for a normalization of relations between the Holy See and Beijing.”
The New Bishops
The newly ordained bishops are Peter Fang Jianping of Tangshan, 39; Jin Daoyuan of Changzhi, 71; Lu Xinping of Nanjing, 36; Su Changshan of Baoding, 74; and Zhan Silu of Mindong, 39.
Bishop Liu Yuanren of Nanjing, president of the Bishops' Conference of the Catholic Church in China, was the ordaining bishop, with Bishop Michael Fu Tieshan of Beijing, chairman of the Patriotic Association, as coordainer, according to an Asian wire service quoted by Catholic News Service.
Officials of the “open church” in China were quoted as saying that the ordinations were carried out to fill vacancies, not to spurn the authority of the Pope.
Only about 300 people attended the illicit ordinations, and students at the national seminary in Beijing boycotted the event after going through a rehearsal the day before, according to wire accounts.
Government officials later hauled in the seminarians for three days of political lecturing, trying to find out who instigated the boycott, said Sister Carroll, citing one of her Catholic sources in China. When the students went home for winter vacation, Sister Carroll was told by her source, government authorities questioned and lectured faculty members for another two days.
“We believe the policy of ordinations, independent from Rome, is wrong,” Sister Carroll quoted the source as saying.
‘A Mistake and a Failure’
That shows that the ordination gambit didn’t work, Sister Carroll said. “On balance, it appears to have been a mistake and a failure,” she contended. “It didn’t engage the people in popular support. It received a very negative reaction in China, and an extremely negative reaction internationally.”
In recent years, about 50 Chinese seminarians — considered by Kung to be members of the Patriotic Association — have studied in the United States. Most have already returned to China after completing their degrees here. Just recently, three more priests came from China to study here to prepare to teach theology in a seminary in China.
The remaining Chinese seminarians and clergy, numbering about 10 to 15, gather twice a year for a retreat sponsored by the Maryknolls in Ossining, N.Y.
One of those clerics is Father Peter Shen, 30, from the Diocese of Wei Hui, a six-hour drive south of Beijing. Father Shen sees himself as a potential peace-maker between the two Catholic factions in China.
In this country, he said, “When people ask us which part of the Catholic Church we belong to, my answer is, I am a Roman Catholic priest. I want to do the reconciliation work wherever it is needed.”
He spent six years studying at Mundelein Seminary in the Archdiocese of Chicago before going last fall to the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Mass., where he expects to earn a doctorate in sacred theology in 2002.
He plans to return to China, to teach systematic theology at the national theological seminary in Beijing.
He recently spoke with his family in China at the beginning of the Chinese New Year. “Whenever I talk with my family regarding the Catholic Church in China, my position for them is there is one Church in China,” Father Shen said. “There are different opinions, but we need to be reconciled with each other. …
“I believe the Church in China is one Church. I believe theologically, there is one Church.”
Matt McDonald is based in Mashpee, Massachusetts.
----- EXCERPT: Beijing Ordinations Strike Ablow Against Vatican Ties ----- EXTENDED BODY: Matt Mcdonald ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: AIDS Series Assailed DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:KANSAS CITY, Mo.—A newspaper series claiming a high rate of AIDS deaths among priests is based on shaky research and points to unfounded conclusions, statisticians and Church observers said.
The reports in the Jan. 29-31 Kansas City Star claimed the death rate from AIDS among priests is four times higher than that of the general population. The newspaper tried to link the purported high incidence of HIV/AIDS with Church teaching on sexual morality and seminary formation.
Star reporter Judy Thomas told the Register that her story was the fruit of “several years” of research. The Star's Web site explained that the story was based on a sampling of “scores of death certificates” and hundreds of interviews.
These materials were supplemented by a “sex survey,” circulated by the Star to 3,000 priests last fall. The survey asked priests if they were homosexual and if they knew of any priest with AIDS or who had died of AIDS. Only 801 priests responded to the survey.
After comparing the sampling with the results of the survey, Thomas said, the Star was ready to present its case to the general public: “That hundreds of Roman Catholic priests … are dying of AIDS at a rate at least four times that of the general U.S. population … often in silence.”
“I worked with three separate statisticians,” added Thomas, “so I'm very confident with the way we came up with the death rate.”
That confidence wasn’t shared by one of America's most highly esteemed research analysts, however.
Michael Traugott, the president of the American Association of Public Opinion, said the Star survey leaves some important questions unanswered.
Since only 25% of those who received the survey responded, there is a strong possibility that respondents represent a “self-selecting” group, Traugott told the Register.
“And when the response rate to a survey gets that low,” he cautioned, “we worry about whether or not there is a bias that results from the people who chose to answer being different from the people who chose not to answer.”
In a note to the Rome-based ZENIT news service, Star editor Mark Zieman said the paper devised the number of priests' deaths through interviews with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and AIDS experts and priests who work in AIDS ministries “as well as independent research by The Kansas City Star of death certificates of priests in several states and other data.”
Observed Traugott, “I don’t know anything about the analysis of the death certificates because they [the Star] didn’t disclose much [about them].” He said this leaves readers with only the survey to go on.
Dennis Boznango, a statistician working for a pharmaceutical company in the Philadelphia area, agreed.
“My first thought was that some people are more likely to respond to a survey that's all about sexuality and AIDS,” Boznango said. “You have to be careful when three-quarters of the people don’t want to talk.”
Boznango suggested one reason why the actual figure for AIDS cases among priests is actually lower than the Star's estimate.
“Since the poll was anonymous,” he said, “there isn’t a fear from admitting sexual orientation. However, heterosexual priests are much more likely to see the questionnaire as not being applicable to them and thus not responding. One would have to see the actual document to see if it was ‘loaded’ to encourage one group to respond rather than another.”
The Star's own “explainer” box cautioned: “It is important to note that because this survey was mailed and anonymity was assured, The Star cannot ensure that the priests responding are demographically and geographically representative of all Roman Catholic priests. The priests who chose to respond to the survey may be different from those who opted not to reply.”
Ombudsman's View
That might raise the question why the Star decided to publish the survey in the first place. The series was even taken to task by the Star's ombudsman.
Miriam Pepper, the ombudsman (an employee who acts as an arbiter over the fairness of published stories), wrote that one of the lead paragraphs in the Star's series “was too broad” in its claim.
She also quoted a statistics expert who took note of the relatively small number of returns. “The 800 may not be a random sample because of selection bias,” said Steven Maynard-Moody, a professor of public administration at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
Series writer Judy Thomas contended the Church isn’t doing enough to educate future priests about the power and the perils of sex.
“The focus of the story was that the majority of priests who responded and the majority of people we talked to said that issues of sexuality were not addressed enough in the seminaries,” Thomas told the Register.
In one article Thomas wrote, “Many priests and behavioral experts argue that the church's adherence to 12th-century doctrine about the virtues of celibacy and its teachings on homosexuality have contributed to the spread of AIDS with the clergy.”
At least one seminary's formation director disputed that view.
Msgr. Paul Langsfeld, vice rector of Mount St. Mary's Seminary in Emmitsburg, Md., told the Register, “It's illogical to say that because people violate the rules, that the rules should be abolished.”
Criticism came from other parts of the Church too.
“It appears that the Star is going for a journalistic award,” said Father Norman Rotert, a Kansas City diocesan priest quoted in a statement issued by the Archdiocese of Detroit.
“If they are using the priesthood to win an award, then I resent it very much,” he said. “There isn’t any question that it calls the character of every priest into question and invites the general public to call the character of priests into question.”
Father Joseph Cisetti, associate director of vocations for the Archdiocese of Detroit, and Father Don Farnan, who was vocations director for the archdiocese from 1991-1997, took issue with the Star series' contention that seminarians receive inadequate training and counseling on sexuality.
Father Cisetti said that prospective candidates for the seminary undergo an extensive application process that includes counseling on celibacy and sexuality. “The application process and the seminary formation process [on those issues] is much more sophisticated than it was in the past,” he said.
Catholic League President Bill Donohue said the report rested on “anecdotal commentary,” intended to bolster its shaky methodology. But the methodology wasn’t nearly as troubling to Donohue as what he viewed as the ideology driving it.
“The agenda is evident,” Donohue said. “By citing unnamed ‘experts'who urge the Church to change its teachings, the editors invent support for their position that their own data do not allow. And notice, too, that they even throw in a shot about the male clergy, as if that contributes to AIDS.”
A statement issued by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia countered the Star series with an affirmation of celibacy.
“It appears as though the Star is trying to say ‘here is evidence that priests are sinners,’” the statement said. “But priests will be the first ones to tell you that.
“The vast majority of priests are living out their commitments to be holy and celibate ministers.”
----- EXCERPT: Star on Thin Ice, Critics Contend ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian McGuire ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Father Pat's Online Fishing Expedition DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:PLOVER, Wis.—It's biblical bytes, quick-click catechism and person-to-person e-pistles.
When Father Pat Umberger isn’t ministering to his own Plover, Wis., parish, he's connecting daily through computers to countless souls worldwide.
More than 5,000 have signed up to get his e-mailed daily prayer, Scripture reading and meditation. Some are among his 1,780 parishioner families in Plover; others are just about everywhere else.
What's more, the inspirational e-mail apostolate is merely an outgrowth of the priest's award-winning St. Bronislava Parish Web site (www.StBrons.com). Started in 1996 as a modest method of relaying basic parish information, the site now boasts more than 150 pages of welcoming Catholic faith and facts as well as links to other resources, including his own “Father Pat's Place” (www.FrPat.com).
The site's most recent honor is the CatholiCity Frequent Flyer Award; it also has been cited as a USA Today Hot Site, Web Surfer's Choice Home Page of the Year and given the Golden Grail Award and Catholic Digest's Heaven's Choice Award, among others.
“It's not the glory of the awards, but the award draws more people to our site,” says Father Pat, as he's known on the Web. He's particularly pleased about the latest honor. “If the CatholiCity stamp of approval is there, it tells people they can trust this … that there's nothing not orthodox about our site.”
John S. Ettinger, Webmaster at CatholiCity (pronounced “Catholic City”; www.CatholiCity.com), said, “The award is given to the sites that we feel have enough quality and fidelity to the Church and [general] usefulness that we include them as links in our CatholiCity Airport,” St. Bronislava's is among the handful of parish sites included in the approximately 600 CatholiCity index links.
He Does It Himself
Father Pat, a Mark Twain fan who designs and maintains “every keystroke” of the site himself, offers his inspiration by e-mail and pages on issues ranging from cancer or grief support to resentments, cremation, annulments, Pope John Paul II, vocations, and an ever-changing schedule of holiday, holy day and special theme offerings as well.
Father Pat said many of his design touches aim mainly at netting people into the site. “I often think of [the site] as having a fish hook in the water 24 hours a day,” he said. “The Internet is a pretty non-threatening way to break down barriers and boundaries and reach across them …. There are a lot of people out there, many of them with time to spend and no good goal in mind. Why not give them one?”
And so it is that the 49-year-old pastor/Webmaster applies color and graphics liberally — Oliver Hardy currently is whacked in the face with a snowball in one stamp-sized image — and practically every page offers an automatic sign-up opportunity for the morning prayer package.
“Once you get people signed up for morning prayer, it's amazing what it does to their life,” he said. “It's just a way to give God a little inroad into their lives, a constant reminder every day,” he said.
Some subjects are treated with carefully crafted simplicity and practicality. The Reconciliation Page, for instance, even offers nervous Nellies a “Credit Card to Heaven” to carry into confession so they will know exactly what to expect and say.
“We did that in Spanish now, too,” Father Pat boasted.
For all its warmth, the site — which has seen more than 188,000 visitors to date — presents the Church's magisterial teachings factually and undiluted. Visitors are always urged to return to the sacraments without further delay.
Bishop Raymond Burke of the Diocese of La Crosse, which encompasses Plover, is among those who clicked in to a morning prayer subscription and liked what he saw. He said many people have told him their mornings kick off with Father Pat's e-mailed prayer:
“I admire very much Father Pat's using the Internet to carry out, really, an apostolate of evangelization. He's reaching out to many people — people who are experiencing some crisis in their lives, people who are searching for their faith, also devout Catholics who are looking for knowledge of their faith or looking for some devotional help.”
That Personal Touch
The bishop also credited Father Pat with encouraging his visitors to seek out “a personal encounter with a priest,” sometimes even to the point of making a phone call from his Plover rectory to smooth the way.
Father Pat gets 150 to 200 e-mailed messages daily and responds to many of them personally in the four hours he's at the keyboard.
“Sometimes their intention is to see somebody about an annulment or a vocation or something and I'll say, ‘Let me know if you want me to call for you.’ Sometimes they take you up on that. That's a good thing.”
The personal touch also reaches into such pages as the Cancer Support link for Father Pat, who is coping with a rare strain of cancer himself. Treatments for a tumor in his right eye appear to be successful, but he knows well the stresses cancer patients and their families face.
One author of Internet guides, Brother John Raymond of the Monks of Adoration in Petersham, Mass., said the personal touch at the St. Bronislava's site is evident at first glance, which he called “very visually appealing”
At the same time, however, the author of Catholics on the Internet 2000-2001 (Prima Publishing) said he found navigating among the pages cumbersome, especially because visitors can’t click from page to page without returning to the home page.
Father Pat spoke about his cyber-ministry last year at the annual meeting of the National Catholic Association for Communicators and Pastoral Congress of the Diocese of Brooklyn, N.Y.
“Jesus and his disciples used any means they could to spread the message
… preaching, traveling, writing, etc.,” he explained.
And now, he uses apostles of the Internet.
Roberta Tuttle writes from North Haven, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Roberta Tuttle ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Translation Body Has a Future ... of Some Kind DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:LONDON—The international commission which has been responsible for English translations of the liturgy for 36 years has survived the stiff rebuke of a top Vatican official, sources close to the commission say.
Cardinal Jorge Arturo Medina, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments, issued a hard-hitting Oct. 26 letter to the commission's chairman, Bishop Maurice Taylor of Galloway, Scotland. In the letter, the cardinal called on the panel to rewrite its statutes by Easter and submit to greater Vatican oversight.
Some say that means the end of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy. Father Stephen Somerville, one of the original members of ICEL, said Cardinal Medina's letter looked to him like a delicate way of relieving ICEL of its duties.
“I think it's the end of the ICEL era,” Father Somerville said. “They might keep the name to save face, but [the cardinal's letter] says that ICEL employees are now working on a temporary basis. That … is a free hand to fire everybody without replacing them. It doesn’t say that they will be replaced or reduced, but one suspects that that will be the case.”
But the U.S. bishops' representative to the commission, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, distanced himself from that kind of speculation.
“That's the first I've heard that,” Cardinal George told the Register. “You can imagine anything you want, [but] I don’t see on the basis of what people are claiming that ICEL is through.”
Prompted by Cardinal Medina's letter, the governing board of ICEL met in London Jan. 21-22 to discuss the future of the embattled translation body. No draft came out of the meeting, and the substance of the talks has gone virtually unreported.
This silence led many to conclude that ICEL's situation is indeed dire, but insiders say the bishops are committed to preserving ICEL. Changes in the organization are likely, but, according to Cardinal George, “No one knows for sure what will happen.”
ICEL Executive Secretary John Page, who rarely declines interviews, was tight-lipped about the London meeting. He said attendees had agreed to refer only to a press release in answer to reporters' questions.
Page said the 11 bishops who govern ICEL wanted to be able to discuss the matter without press publicity. He gave no indication himself that the silence surrounding ICEL's current status spelled its doom, and added that talks would be ongoing.
Critical Mass
Since its establishment in 1964, ICEL has drawn mounting criticism for its translations from original Latin texts.
Critics such as Jesuit Father Joseph Fessio, publisher of Ignatius Press and co-founder of a liturgical watchdog group, contend that the translations in most need of correction are those of the Mass.
“The canon is not even a translation,” said Father Fessio. “There's hardly even a relationship [between the original and the texts in use]. ... [T]he offer-tory prayer and the post-Communion prayers are terrible impoverishments of the Latin. It almost makes me want to choke when I read them.”
Another sore point is ICEL's administrative habits. Cardinal Medina pointed to instances when ICEL would not listen to bishops' directives.
“These factors,” concluded Cardinal Medina in his letter, “appear to converge towards the conclusion that the Mixed Commission in its present form is not in a position to render to the Bishops, to the Holy See and to the English-speaking faithful an adequate level of service, nor to produce with appropriate promptness the texts that will be needed in the foreseeable future.”
The letter ended with a list of “considerations” that the revised statutes are to take into account.
Between sessions at the London meeting, the U.S. bishops' representative to ICEL, Cardinal George, conveyed the impact Cardinal Medina's letter has had on the commission.
“The [explosive] point, or one of them,” he told Catholic New Service, “was Cardinal Medina's insistence that the Vatican congregation approve members of ICEL's expert advisory committee and those who work on the translations.”
ICEL's Washington office, meanwhile, acknowledged that the London meeting was convened in order for the bishops of English-speaking countries to discuss “issues arising from [Cardinal Medina's] letter.”
It listed bishops in addition to Cardinal George who took part: Bishops Maurice Taylor of Scotland, Peter Cullinane of New Zealand, James Foley of Australia, Denis Hurley of Southern Africa, John Knight of Canada, Thomas McMahon of England and Wales, and Soosa Pakiam of India.
The topic discussed at most length was the revision of ICEL's constitution, the statement said.
“The bishops of the Board are confident that the revised constitution will strengthen ICEL's ability to continue providing the bishops'conferences with acceptable drafts of English language liturgical texts,” the statement concluded.
The Liturgy Office of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, D.C., is not commenting either on Cardinal Medina's letter or the London meeting.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian McGuire ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: From British Pop to Roman Rock DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:Drake: How did you get started in music?
Solo: When I was 12 years old I thought I would be completely happy if I was a rock star. At age 21, I wrote to my older sister in Canada telling her that I was disappointed that I wasn’t a rock star yet. She told me not to put limits on myself.
“But Michael Jackson is only 12!” I said. I had my first record contract before I was 22.
Not long after that I started in a band called The News, which later became Classix. An Italian rock band I sang in, called the Rockets, sold over a million and a half albums in Italy. From 1981 to 1987, I was the lead singer for the British rock group Classix Nouveaux. We recorded our first album in 1981, toured in 30 countries and earned gold and silver discs.
In 1983 you had a conversion experience which led you out of rock music and into Christian music. What happened?
I thought I had become famous. This was always my dream, yet I wasn’t happy. I knew Boy George, Duran Duran and George Michael and they were not particularly happy either. I had been brought up in Catholic schools and knew all the Catholic prayers, but it was while I was in a motel room that I uttered perhaps the first spontaneous prayer of my life. I said, “God, if you are there, I want to know.”
Within six months my prayer was answered. I knew, in myself, that God was really there. I had been living a very evil, rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, and now I felt as if I had to put on sackcloth and ashes and go live in a monastery. I planned to give up my music, and went on a pilgrimage. While there, a fellow pilgrim told me that the young people of the world were looking for answers and that I could use my music to tell them.
You made a pilgrimage to San Damiano. What was significant about it?
When I went to Italy I'm not sure that I expected anything. In a way, how can you? If you don’t know God, you can’t quite know what it is to know God. The most essential thing of all gets lost ... that God is real, that Jesus is alive and that he wants to affect our life today. That was what I had to learn. My conversion didn’t happen immediately. I opened the door only a little at first. When I saw that Jesus didn’t look too bad, then I opened it wider. Eventually the door was open enough for him to come in.
What was the crossover like?
It was quite a transformation. All of the British newspapers and radio and television stations interviewed me, and I was able to talk about God. I told myself, “This is what I am going to do for the rest of my life.” I found that the message became the all, more than the music. However, by the time my next album came out, the novelty of my conversion had worn off and the media wasn’t interested.
When I had nothing to say, I was asked my opinion on everything under the sun, but when I had everything to say, the platform was taken away.
My parting with the commercial world of rock music began with a pro-life recording I made in 1987 titled “How Was I to Know?” It was the song of an unborn baby. Because of that record I was blacklisted throughout Britain. Stores refused to sell it, saying that the subject was not suitable for a family audience. Rock ’n’ roll, sex and drugs were suitable, but the life of an unborn baby was not. It was a rude awakening. After that experience I didn’t want anything more to do with making records.
I had no expectation of doing any more music, but between 1987-90 when I gave up music, I realized that nothing gets through to young people like the universal language of music. I felt that that had become my new calling. I recorded my first Christian album, Look at Christ, in 1991. The song “San Damiano” became a hit.
What do you hope to do with your music?
The music is only part of what I do. My mission is to preach the Gospel and I use every form of modern technology to do that, especially video. My concerts employ a high level of audience participation and the focus is upon Jesus, not on me. The music, the videos, and participation disarms them. It makes them feel comfortable so that Jesus can enter in. On my passport and visa it says that I am a Catholic youth evangelist. That's what I want to do.
You relocated to Chicago from London last fall. What precipitated your move?
I came to the U.S. because I felt I could reach more people here. While I am quite well known in Britain, only 8% of the population there is churchgoing. I estimate that I am able to reach 2,000% more people here than in Great Britain.
I am here for three years as a Catholic youth evangelist. The youth can’t normally be reached at the parish, because many of them don’t go. I want, primarily, to minister at major youth rallies around the country because that is the best way that I can reach the most young people in the time that I have.
How have you found Catholics in America, as compared to those in Britain?
For one, the Catholic Church in America, as compared to Britain, is incredibly well resourced. In America every parish is likely to have a music minister, a religious education director and a youth minister. You don’t know how lucky you are. Those positions do not exist in Britain.
More than 50% of American Catholics attend Church. More people means more resources, and that means that more is possible. In America, you can find a family bookstore in any mall in practically any town you live. In London, a city of 11 million people, I know of only one place where I could go and buy anything Christian.
We also don’t have Catholic radio or TV. In the U.S. you have students coming out of schools, such as the Franciscan University of Steubenville, on fire with the faith. We don’t have Catholic universities in Britain. In Britain all schools are free, including Catholic schools. Because families have to pay for Catholic education in this country I think it means much more.
Tell us about being selected to perform as part of the World Youth Day in Rome this summer?
There is definitely something symbolic about being at the heart of the Catholic Church at the start of the new millennium. I had applied to perform for the World Youth Days in Denver and Paris, but God's timing is now. The message, and my music, are international. I am particularly pleased that so many young people from America plan to go. When I am performing in Rome I will be able to speak to the Italians in Italian, to the French in French, and to the British and Americans in English.
Tim Drake writes from St. Cloud, Minnesota.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Sal Solo ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Catholic Trade Show Weathers Storm DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:BALTIMORE—Not even a surprise snow storm has been able to slow the growth of Catholic marketing.
Catholic store owners, suppliers of religious goods and other representatives of religious businesses from around the country braved the furies of the season in Baltimore Jan. 25-28 to participate in the first winter trade show sponsored by the Dallas-based Catholic Marketing Network.
Although the storm, which dumped more than a foot of snow, delayed the installation of many displays, some 225 booths were in operation by the event's second day, nearly filling the 80,000-square-foot exhibit hall at the Baltimore Convention Center.
Merchandisers and retailers of Catholic goods such as books, videos, religious articles and gift items were joined at the trade show by new and seasoned musicians, authors, publishers and business entrepreneurs.
“Mother Nature didn’t turn out to be our greatest friend this [time],” said Catholic Marketing Network President Alan Napleton, “but, like all [such] gatherings, this one had more than its share of blessings … Although the weather prevented our usual strong turnout, many key networking relationships were forged.”
The network was organized by Napleton in 1995 and has held trade shows each June since 1996. The Baltimore event was the network's first effort to expand to two shows per year. “It builds on our earlier success and gives buyers the opportunity to see merchandise ahead of the busy Easter/spring season,” said Anne Jackson, the network's assistant executive director and editor of its quarterly trade journal.
The marketing network holds the trade shows “to give everyone an equal opportunity to reach Catholic retailers,” explained Executive Director Cheryl Tucker. “This allows them an affordable way to network with distributors and retailers, and to test their products' acceptance in the Catholic market.”
In another first for the network, the Baltimore event included an extensive art display, A Light to the Nations, that featured the works of some 35 artists. The gallery was coordinated by the Connecticut-based St. Michael's Institute of Sacred Art and highlighted by live, works-in-progress demonstrations by artists, including oil painters and iconographers from the United States and wood carvers from Peru who specialize in the construction of wooden altars.
Holy Spirit Radio, a Catholic station in Philadelphia, offered live reports from the floor of the exhibition while Catholic Family Radio network broadcast taped interviews and musical presentations for listeners throughout the country.
Books to Teddy Bears
The show also included a cooperative booth shared by self-published authors and small publishing firms. The booth featured The Pleistocene Redemption, a book by Dan Gallagher, and works issued by the publisher One More Soul
A similar shared effort showcased new products, including holy water dispensers designed by Father Louis Greving, stickers that feature religious icons that can be accompanied by institutional logos and fundraising pitches by Icon Sticker, Vatican-endorsed Jubilee plates by AAA Viva International, and handmade, framed scripture quotes from Quilligraphy.
The Catholic Marketing Network initiated a similar arrangement several years ago for lesser-known Catholic musicians that has since blossomed into the Catholic Association of Musicians, dedicated to nurturing and promoting Catholic recording artists.
Other new product items at the Baltimore show included Holy Bears, colorful, five-inch-tall plush teddy bears with spiritual names; Angels In Heaven, featuring plaques, cards and certificates in remembrance of deceased infants or children; and the International Memorial to the Unborn, unique gold-leafed wooden and pewter-only replicas of Our Lady of Guadalupe imported from Mexico.
Snow Lamentations
Baltimore's first major snow storm since 1996, however, did make its presence felt. “It's been slow compared to the June ... show,” said Tom Fink of Arkansas-based Hermitage Designs, echoing the sentiments of exhibitors and retailers. “I don’t know if it's the weather or the timing.”
“It's unfortunate we had a big dump of snow,” agreed Canadian retailer Lynne Martin of Cherish House in Ontario, “but ... I found most of the suppliers I was looking for.”
Most exhibitors and retailers agreed. “The amount of traffic was slow, but the quality was good,” said first-time exhibitor Steven LeClair of Houston-based Holy Bears, a company that was launched only a year ago.
“Anyone who showed interest in our product placed an order. I was very pleased with the show in spite of the slow traffic. We picked up more than 26 new retail accounts and made two distribution contacts that would have taken us years to uncover. Those two contacts alone made the show more than worthwhile.”
“Stores ... definitely [came] to buy,” added George Malhame, co-owner of Malhame and Company, an outfit that has participated in trade shows since the network's inception. “Stores are coming here to learn, to see what's happening, to participate in retail seminars and to network. If you want to be part of the Catholic marketplace, you have to be at this show.”
Malhame pointed to commonly acknowledged statistics indicating that Catholics comprise 25% of the U.S. population, or more than 60 million people, less than 5% of whom have ever been inside a religious gift or book store. “This tells us that we are at the beginning of a lot of growth and exposure. We are beginning a new phase of Catholic development in the marketplace. The rapid success of [the network] has proven that need.”
Kim Jordon of St. Athanasius Church Bookstore in Fairfax, Va., summed up the show's impact: “The ... show connected us to [goods that] would have only been available to big stores. That's why we can sell good, quality items. We can offer parishioners items they couldn’t get elsewhere in our area, and we've added 30 new vendors to our product lines. That's mostly due to [the Catholic Marketing Network].”
The organization's June trade show will be held this year in Chicago, a move from Valley Forge, Pa., its location for the last few years.
“I'm very excited about the move to Chicago,” said Napleton, the network's president. “[It] will be the first ...event away from the East Coast, and will provide an opportunity for many individuals from the Midwest, Canada and other locations to more easily attend.
“The Chicago show will also be our biggest event to date and so far pre-registration has been phenomenal,” said Napleton, adding that several vendors, musicians' groups and others have already expressed interest in hosting special events to complement the show.
Karen Walker is based in San Juan Capistrano, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Karen Walker ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:Transgendered Rights?
THE WASHINGTON TIMES, Feb. 3—The city of Boulder, Colo., has extended legal protection to a new minority class: transsexuals, the Times reported.
The Boulder city council, which has already voted to ban discrimination against women, racial minorities, homosexuals and bisexuals, voted unanimously Feb. 1 to amend the city's 27-year-old human rights ordinance to protect transsexuals from discrimination in housing, employment and public accommodations. The vote, which was greeted with applause from the audience, met with little opposition after being first proposed by the city's Human Relations Commission in November.
The law, which takes effect March 1, defines transsexuals, or “gender-variants,” as those having “a persistent sense that a person's gender identity is incongruent with the person's biological sex.”
Boulder, a university town known for its liberal politics, becomes the first city in Colorado and the seventh in the nation to extend human-rights protections to transsexuals, a list that includes San Francisco, Seattle, Pittsburgh and Cambridge, Mass.
Catholics Returning to the Rosary
THE BOSTON GLOBE, Feb. 2—The rosary is making a comeback, the Boston daily said, citing reports from rosary manufacturers that sales have been steadily climbing for years.
“The business fell through the floor after the Second Vatican Council, and for years we had a warehouse full of rosaries,” said manufacturer George Malhame of Malhame & Co. “Now we have a very vibrant marketplace.”
According to two Northeast manufacturers quoted in the Globe story, sales of the beads have quadrupled over the past 15 years. Dealers say sales of high-end rosary beads are up — you can now spend as much as $4,500, or as little as 49 cents — as are sales to two relatively untapped markets: men and Protestants.
People who say the rosary offer a variety of explanations —often a mix of duty and desire, occasionally prompted by a return to faith or a renewed interest in the Church. “I started over a year ago, because of a conversion in my faith,’'said Eric Fraize, 27, of Quincy, who said that after his mother died, she appeared to him in dreams, prompting him to return to the faith he had abandoned. He now recites the rosary daily, and is contemplating becoming a priest. “I noticed a significant improvement in my life, and felt it imparted spiritual blessings and favors.”
Roberta Nelson, 56, of Charlestown, recited the rosary as a child, but drifted away from the Church and only recently returned: “I was returning to Catholicism more intellectually, reading theology books and trying to get in touch that way, but I had been given my mother's rosary beads … and now I say it once a week.”
School Prayer Gets a Push in Virginia
THE WASHINGTON POST, Feb. 1—A Virginia measure which even opponents expect to become law will require public schools to observe a minute of silence for meditation, prayer or reflection at the beginning of every school day. It was overwhelmingly approved by the Virginia Senate.
Some civil libertarians protested the measure, arguing that it crosses the constitutional line dividing church and state. “The big question is: What are we going to do to try and stem the increase in violence in our public schools?” said Republican State Sen. Warren Barry, the bill's sponsor. “This may just be a nibble, but it's a nibble in the right direction,“ Barry said.
Republican Gov. James Gilmore said in an interview that the measure would not infringe on any student rights and that it was a good way to help “instill character in the lives of young people.” Added Gilmore: “I support separation of church and state, and I don’t think this crosses that line.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Suffering Is Source of Jubilee Indulgence DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY—Convinced that “medicine is a ministry,” Church officials say health care and the sick has become m a rapidly growing area of pastoral activity in recent decades.
“Suffering is the Jubilee. It is the source of indulgence,” said Archbishop Javier Lozano Barragán, president of hte Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care workers.
Around the world, Catholic hospitals and dispensaries have increased from about 18,000 in 1980 to more than 22,000 today, and Church-run homes for the elderly and chronically ill have jumped from 9,600 to 12,000. Catholic organizations now account for more than 24% of those caring for people with HIV/AIDS.
Meanwhile, Pope John Paul II has made care for the sick a dominant theme in his teachings and his travels.
For Dora Vassallo, the head nurse at a Rome hospital run by the Hospitaller Order of St. John of God, Catholic institutions put a different spin on health care.
“Here you're not a number, you're not anonymous,” she said Jan. 28.
At St. John Calybita Hospital, Vassallo said such individual attention is evident among staff as well as for patients.
“I have contacts at public hospitals, and the thing they bring up when we talk or when they visit me is the fact that we all know each other here,” she said.
“There's less attention to the sick, a different approach at public hospitals,” she said.
Brother Pascual Piles, St. John of God prior general, said caring for the sick means more than just providing medical treatment.
“Our mission is to bring human values into the hospital,” he said.
On a practical level, their mission translates into making hospital patients feel at home. St. John Calybita's rooms are equipped with air conditioning, telephones, televisions, minirefrigerators, safes and hair dryers. Visiting hours are not restricted, meaning friends and family can sit with patients at any hour of the day or night.
To care for spiritual needs, several brothers actually live at the hospital so that patients have someone to talk to 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“We listen,” Brother Piles said. “But if someone doesn’t want to discuss religious themes, we must respect that.”
Appreciated in China
While the order numbers only 1,500 brothers, St. John of God health care centers are found in 47 countries.
China, whose state-sanctioned Catholic Church does not recognize the Pope, is the latest addition to the order's roster of health care centers.
Although relations between the communist country and the Vatican are tense at best, St. John of God's health care approach has cut across political and religious lines.
“Two years ago, China's health minister went to our hospice in South Korea and was [impressed] by the facility,” Brother Piles said.
After negotiations, the new hospice in China, near the North Korean border, is set to open later this year.
“Chinese officials also discussed spiritual aspects with us. Anyone (at the new hospice) can talk about that if they want to, but we would not impose it,” he said.
Catholic, Not Corporate
As more and more hospitals become corporate-run entities where turning a profit can take precedence over patients, the Church is trying to re-personalize health care and expand the notion of what it means to be “well.”
Father Antonio Guerrero Soto of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers said that his office's greatest challenge in the third millennium is “to humanize health care.”
“First of all, the concept of health must be broader. Health is not only physical and social well-being. There is also the spiritual dimension.”
Archbishop Barragán said Catholic health care workers are set apart from others by their empathy with the sick.
“Being a doctor is almost a religious profession. Catholic doctors must be aware that they have a mission, which Christ entrusted to them, to continue the Lord's work. Medicine is a ministry.”
Humanizing health care also means rejecting certain scientific breakthroughs, such as cloning and some genetic engineering, that go against Church teaching.
“We must utilize the advantages of technological advances that construct life instead of death. We need a culture of life against the culture of death,” said Archbishop Lozano Barragán.
Papal Support
Defending human life and caring for the sick are among the recurring themes of Pope John Paul's 21-year pontificate. He instituted a Pontifical Commission for Health Care Workers in 1985, upgrading it to a full-fledged council in 1988.
But it was perhaps the very first day of his papacy that illustrated just how close the sick are to his heart.
On Oct. 17, 1978, less than 24 hours after his election, he went to a Rome hospital to see his compatriot and longtime friend, Bishop Andrzej Deskur, who had suffered a stroke four days earlier.
It has since been referred to as Pope John Paul's “first pastoral visit.”
In the years since then, between an assassination attempt, five major operations and a debilitating neurological disease, pastoral care for the sick has struck a personal note with the 79-year-old Vicar of Christ.
Msgr. José Redrado, secretary of the council, said the “Pope has experienced suffering very deeply, not only in thought, but also in body and heart. He is a pope marked by lived, experienced suffering; he will be the best teacher because, beyond speaking with his lips, he will speak from the heart.”
(From combined wire services)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:Talk of Papal Resignation ‘Should Be Silenced’
L'OSSERVATORE ROMANO, Feb. 2—A high-ranking Vatican official called for an end to the debate on papal resignation in the pages of the Vatican newspaper.
Archbishop Agostino Marchetto of the Vatican Secretariat of State wrote, “all this buzz on the subject should be silenced.”
The article was not directly related to recent comments about the Pope's health by German Bishop Karl Lehman of Mainz. Rather, Archbishop Marchetto was responding to three recent articles by Italian history professor Alberto Melloni.
The archbishop referred at length to a Jan. 29 opinion piece by Melloni in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in which Melloni said that while Pope John Paul was perfectly fit to continue as leader of the Church, “there will come a day when he or one of his successors will feel unfit.”
In response to Melloni's point that bishops generally resign at age 75, Archbishop Marchetto said such an argument “means losing the sense of the unique position of the bishop of Rome in the Catholic Church.” The last pope to step down of his own accord was St. Celestine V in 1294.
Baptists Applaud Pope's Holy Year Zeal
AVVENIRE, Jan. 27—The secretary-general of the World Baptist Alliance is grateful to the Holy Father for reminding the world of the true meaning of the millennium, the Italian paper reported.
The comments came at the Alliance's 18th World Congress in Melbourne, Australia in mid-January.
The World Baptist Alliance was established in England in 1905, but its headquarters was moved to the United States in the 1940s. The 18th World Congress in Melbourne celebrated the change of the millennium on the theme: “Jesus Christ Forever, Yes!”
Alliance Secretary-General Denton Lotz described the Baptist Catholic dialogue as “very good. We have constant contacts and we have met on several occasions with [Vatican ecumenical officials] as well. The exchange of ideas is really open.”
Lotz said he especially appreciated the symbolism of the opening of the Holy Door. “We are happy with all these celebrations that underline our unity in Christ. The secular world has forgotten the meaning of 2000.
“Many don’t even realize that it marks the anniversary of Jesus' birth. I was unable to go to the ceremony in St. Paul's Basilica because I was still in Australia.
To tell the truth, though, we Baptists have problems with the idea of indulgences. Nonetheless, we are grateful for all the celebrations that attempt to restore the millennium's real meaning.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Theologians Complete Document On Church's 'Sins of the Past' DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY—International theologians have completed their document on the Church's “sins of the past.”
The fruit of three years of work by the Vatican's International Theological Commission, the approximately 50-page document was expected to be released by late this month, in time for a Lenten “day of pardon.”
Pope John Paul II is expected to preside over the March 12 ceremony on the First Sunday of Lent.
The Holy Father has called for the Church, especially during Holy Year 2000, to examine “the sinfulness of her children, recalling all those times in history when they departed from the spirit of Christ and his Gospel.”
Dominican Father Georges Cottier, secretary of the commission, said Feb. 3 that the date of publication was no coincidence.
While he did not say whether the text might influence what the Pope would say March 12, he said the commission decided to release the text a few weeks before the day of pardon on purpose.
“We hope it will help people to reflect before the ceremony,” Father Cottier said.
While the document was not due to go into detail on specific historical events, it was expected to mention themes which the Pope has said merit special focus: actions contributing to the division of Christianity; violence carried out during the Crusades and the Inquisition; anti-Jewish attitudes and the Nazi Holocaust; and inadequate attention to modern-day evils such as communism and other repressive regimes.
Before penning the final document, the theologians responsible for the project submitted the text for approval on two occasions to the 30 members of the International Theological Commission meeting in plenary session. The vote in favor of the document was substantial, reported ZENIT, the Rome-based news service.
“The text was written for purposes of consultation, and is not a papal document,” said ZENIT. “It includes a broad theological reflection on the meaning of purification of the memory.”
There is also an explanation of the doctrinal reasons that make an act of contrition for past sins possible, reviewing a trajectory that goes back to biblical origins, the great confessions of sin by the Jewish people, and continuing with the principles of the Gospel.
The document will also offer many examples of historic requests for forgiveness, such as that of Pope Adrian VI, elected in 1522, who at the time of the Reformation asked for forgiveness for the sins of the Roman Curia, or that of Paul VI, who atoned for the offenses inflicted on Eastern Christians.
But the Vatican has emphasized the distinction between the innate holiness of the Church and the sometimes sinful actions of its individual members, saying the Church as an institution cannot sin.
Appearing on a TV program aired by the Vatican Television Center, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger recently explained that “the idea is not to accuse the past. We are always sinners and we want to understand this with humility and do penance, which renews the Church and each one.”
Father Cottier said Christians need to speak about the past because “the communion of saints exists, by which the Church is one through the ages, and in the Church there is a community of charity and prayer for sins committed.”
He also cautioned that “it is not a question of judging people, as only God can judge persons, but when we recall the past of the Church we realize that there have been events that are an obstacle to evangelization. On this it is necessary to have a purification of the memory, that is, to make a real judgment that is balanced and just.”
(From combined wire services)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: At Jubilee for Consecrated Life, Pope Stresses Benefits of Vows DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY—Religious men and women gain more than they lose when they take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, Pope John Paul II said.
“Far from being a renunciation which impoverishes, [the vows] constitute a choice which frees the person for a fuller realization of his potentialities,” he said Feb. 2 during a Mass in St. Peter's Square celebrating the Jubilee for Consecrated Life.
The vows also give an important message to the world, he said: “Those who vigilantly await the fulfillment of Christ's promises are able to communicate hope to their brothers and sisters, often distrustful and pessimistic regarding the future.”
Attending the Mass under cloudy skies were some 35,000 religious men and women, dressed in a wide variety of black, brown, blue and white habits. The liturgy, celebrating the feast of the Presentation, began with a traditional candle-blessing ceremony.
In his homily the Pope said his worldwide travels had enabled him to see firsthand the good being done by religious in every part of the world, particularly with the poor and marginalized.
“You give thanks to God for the good [you have] done and at the same time you ask pardon for whatever defects have marked the life of your religious families,” he told the religious.
“You interrogate yourselves, at the beginning of a new millennium, regarding the most efficacious ways to contribute, with respect to [your] original charisms, to the new evangelization, reaching the many people who are still ignorant of Christ.”
Climbing down from a vantage point atop a crowd barrier, a young Franciscan nun in full brown habit beamed broadly about her experience at the Mass.
“I enjoyed it so much!” said 24-year-old Italian Franciscan Sister Cristina Banfi.
“It was a real living of the communion of the Church. One thing that the Holy Father said that struck me was his emphasis on the beauty of the variety of charisms” in the Church.
“I also like how he called us to communicate joy to people who are often in such need of it,” she said.
Sister Francine Maas, a member of the Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Africa, said, “I was glad to see so many people here, young people as well.”
In an interview marking the Jubilee for Consecrated Life, Father Timothy Radcliffe, superior general of the Dominicans, said religious communities faced with a serious vocations crisis, should be more concerned with quality than with beefing up their numbers.
“I prefer three vibrant communities to 10 which fight for survival,” he told Avvenire, the Italian Catholic daily, Feb. 2.
“It doesn’t matter if in the future there will be fewer communities or if a congregation sees its current [membership] halved,” he said. “What counts is that the communities are vibrant and seeds of the future.”
At the heart of renewal for religious communities in the new millennium must be a recovery “of authentic simplicity and poverty,” the Dominican said.
“Over the centuries many religious congregations have become rich, a fact which one can always justify with our many ‘important’ projects: but religious life has been more vital and attractive when we have been genuinely poor,” he said.
During the Mass, the heads of international religious unions presented the Pope with a donation for the needy, billed as a “gesture of solidarity and communion.” Augustinian Father Eusebio Hernandez, the Vatican official in charge of organizing the Jubilee, declined in late January to specify the amount collected from religious communities worldwide, but said it was “substantial.”
The papal Mass capped four days of Jubilee events in Rome for religious men and women. Other activities included 10 hours of eucharistic adoration at the Basilica of St. Mary Major and a nationally televised celebration of song and prayer in the Paul VI Audience Hall. The ceremony included a Via Lucis (The Way of the Light), fourteen stations recalling Christ's post-resurrection appearances. (From combined wire services)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:Suspect in Missionary Murder Arrested in India
THE IRISH TIMES, Feb. 1—The main suspect in the murder of an Australian missionary and his two young sons a year ago was arrested in the eastern Indian state of Orissa Feb.1, the Irish daily reported.
Police said Dara Singh, a radical Hindu activist, walked into their trap in the jungles near Gohirta village, 180 miles north of the state capital, Bhubaneshwar, a year after he burned to death Graham Staines, 58, and his sons, Philip, 10, and Timothy, 8, as they slept in their jeep after attending a Bible study meeting in a remote village.
Later, Singh reportedly burned alive a Muslim trader and murdered a Catholic priest in nearby districts. “I am glad that [Singh] has been arrested and is no longer free to kill other people,” said Gladys Staines, the missionary's widow.
The Times called the Staines killing “the most serious of dozens of [recent] attacks on Christians, their property and churches by Hindu fundamentalists linked to the federal coalition government of the Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.”
The fanatics claim that missionaries forcibly convert poor Hindus to Christianity.
Relics Bring Filipino Prisoners to Tears
FOX News.Com, Feb. 3—The relics of St. Thérèse of Lisieux were brought inside the Philippine national penitentiary Feb. 1, moving many death row inmates to tears as they prayed before the reliquary, the on-line news service reported.
The French saint's remains arrived Jan. 30 from Honolulu for a three-month tour of Asia's largest Catholic nation.
The prison chaplain, Father Roberto Olaguer, said St. Thérèse's remains were taken to the prison's maximum-security section where a Mass was celebrated with the help of a 40-member prisoners' choir. A small plane dropped rose petals from overhead.
Inmates formed a long line to touch a glass container protecting the saint's reliquary, bowing their heads in prayer, FOX reported.
The relics were later taken to the prison's death row and inmates inside were allowed to touch and pray before the reliquary in groups of three. Father Olaguer said “most of the death row inmates were crying quietly.”
Christians in the Holy Land Dying Out
THE BOSTON GLOBE, Feb. 7—The number of Christians now living in the Holy Land is dwindling and is in danger of extinction, the Boston daily reported. In the early 1900s Christians comprised 20% of the population of the Holy Land, but has dwindled to 2% as people have fled from violence and sought economic opportunities elsewhere, the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation told the Globe. The foundation is working to maintain a Christian presence in the land where Christianity began.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: AIDS Series: on Thin Ice DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:Arecent Kansas City Star series on the allegedly high incidence of AIDS among priests is neither convincing as good research nor as good theology.
First, the research. The newspaper claimed that, proportionally, four times as many priests die of AIDS as do members of the general population. It based its findings on a survey of 3,000 priests. The problem is that almost three-quarters of those approached never responded, which indicates the survey wasn’t a reliable sample. As one statistician pointed out, if you randomly sent a survey asking people if they are one of a set of twins, it is a fair bet that twins will be the most likely respondents. The results would be skewed.
When questioned by outside journalists, the newspaper failed to back up its claims about priests and AIDS with a clearer description of the key information it used.
Of course, the fact that any priests suffer from AIDS is tragic. Many of these tragic cases could, no doubt, be linked to the crisis in seminary training and priestly identity in the turbulent years after Vatican II.
Indeed, the Church has recognized the difficult circumstances of seminary formation in the modern world, and has taken firm steps to address candidate selection as well (see Indepth on the opposite page). Dioceses that are fully implementing this teaching have solved many of the 1970s problems addressed in the Star series.
But the Star series doesn’t content itself with its flimsy statistical critique of the post-Vatican II era. It goes further, and by doing so, steps onto thin theological ice.
In its first article, the paper attributes the problem of AIDS and priests to “the church's adherence to the 12th-century doctrine about the virtues of celibacy.” Celibacy is unnatural, the argument goes, and bottling up the sexual drive is like trying to keep a lid on a pot that is boiling over. Denied its natural outlet — the argument continues — the sex drive will force its way out one way or another, as often happens in prisons, for instance. But this argument ignores the fact that there are plenty of problems with infidelity and homosexuality among married people. Lasting chastity, in any walk of life, is impossible if it is imposed by force. It only works when it is a freely chosen embrace of a higher love: the love for a spouse, the love for Christ.
Today's culture has too often put flesh before faith. This is all the more reason to reaffirm the basic truth behind the Catholic priesthood's insistence on celibacy. Life isn’t about sex. It is ultimately about Christ. And to love him totally, exclusively, with all one's mind, heart and body isn’t dangerous. It's liberating.
AIDS, while especially scandalous when it occurs among priests, points up the need for more support for celibacy among priests and seminarians, not less.
----- EXCERPT: EDITORIAL ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: A Seeker's Guide to the Scriptures DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:Making Sense Out of Scripture: Reading the Bible as the First Christians Did by Mark P. Shea Basilica Press, 1999 263 pages, $14.99
Maybe you've tried it yourself. You decide you're going to read the Bible cover to cover, a chapter or two at a time, then give up before you've even polished off Leviticus. Mark Shea can relate. He recounts early in these pages how, years ago, his resolve fizzled out in just the fourth chapter of Genesis.
His frustration was so great, he writes, that he gave up on Christianity itself for a number of years. That only changed when, as a young adult, he was recruited by some evangelical Protestants. They helped him establish a living relationship with Our Lord, but, he says, “I also learned from them a deeply mistaken notion. For within a few months of accepting Christ as Lord and Savior, I had also incorporated into my outlook a sort of offhand belief which flatly contradicted not only my own experience but also common sense: namely, I had adopted a blithe certainty that Scripture was simple, clear, and obvious to all, and that anyone can just pick it up and understand it lickety-split.
“Given my previous history, you would think I would have noticed the irony. For in fact, I had gone from one extreme to another; from the notion that Scripture was utterly incomprehensible to the notion that Scripture was so crystal clear that I, alone and without the help of anyone else, could master its depths.”
Following his previous works tracing his conversion from evangelicalism to the Catholic faith — This is My Body: An Evangelical Discovers the Real Presence (Christendom Press, 1993) and By What Authority? An Evangelical Discovers Catholic Tradition (Our Sunday Visitor Books, 1996) — Shea's new book describes how he got out of his Scriptural conundrum.
As a Catholic, Shea has learned to study the Bible in the light of sacred Tradition and under the guidance of the magisterium. Here he lays out the lessons of his re-education as it's developed along two distinct tacks: a review of 20 centuries of Catholic Scripture scholarship, and a growing appreciation of covenantal theology as popularized by Scott Hahn of Franciscan University of Steubenville.
Taken together, the two parts go a long way toward helping the Scriptural do-it-yourselfer get a grip on the Bible as a whole.
Covenant theology emphasizes the covenants which God establishes with man, and how each of them advances their relationship another step. The Old Testament covenants lead up to the “new and everlasting” covenant with Jesus Christ, which is Christianity itself. Shea's discussion of this subject is readable for those unfamiliar with the concept, yet deep enough to be of benefit for more advanced scholars as well.
He includes a chapter on how God prepared the Gentiles for their inclusion in the Gospel message, which of course didn’t turn out to be for the Jews alone. “By his providential care,” Shea writes, “he who is God of the Gentiles as well as the Jews had brought the human race to the point of readiness for something of which the world itself did not guess. Just as Israel was waiting for the coming of the Messiah, so the civilization of Gentiles beyond Israel had arrived willy-nilly at the dim, half-perceived and visceral awareness that it was standing on tiptoe waiting for ... it knew not what.”
The meaning of most Scripture is neither hopelessly hidden nor plain as day.
In the second part of the book, Shea examines the literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical senses of Scripture upon which so much of Biblical interpretation depends. If this sounds like an esoteric topic of interest only to students and professional scholars, then appearances are deceiving. Many of the errors that inform today's erroneous assumptions about what constitutes true life in Christ have their roots in a poorly formed understanding of what the Scriptures are.
On the fundamentalist side, there is the tendency to treat the literal sense as the only one of consequence. Ascribing supernatural significance to everything leads to Christians dying of snake bites, or cutting off their hands or eyes “in what they imagine to be obedience to the literal sense of the text.” An appreciation of literary form is clearly needed, and Shea ably explains why. Some readers may object to his dismissal of any sort of “literal” sense to the first two chapters of Genesis, but just because the sacred author wasn’t writing modern science doesn’t mean that the notion of creation ex nihil has been utterly discredited.
On the modernist (or “progressive”) side, there is the tendency to explain the Bible away, stripping it of any supernatural meaning at all. This error Shea also refutes, especially in his treatment of the allegorical sense. The question of whether Isaiah wrote of a “virgin” or a “young woman” is a case in point.
“Matthew did not, in any event,” Shea explains, “derive his belief in Mary's virginity from Isaiah 7:14. He did not sit down one day, read Isaiah, and say to himself, ‘Let's see. Isaiah says something about a virgin here. So if I'm going to cook up a Christ figure, I'd better make him the son of a virgin so it'll fit with this text. On the contrary, the apostles encounter a man who does extraordinary things like rising from the dead and, when they inquire about his origins — which they could only have known if Mary or Jesus volunteered them — find he was born of a virgin. They then look at their Septuagint Bibles, run across this weird passage in the Greek text of Isaiah, and see him reflected in this verse.”
In readable, common-sense prose, Shea invites the contemporary Christian into the dauntingly ancient world of the sacred Scriptures. In so doing, he makes the roots of the Christian world view accessible in the days of “dot-com.” Never has it made more sense to make sense out of Scripture.
Helen Valois writes from Steubenville, Ohio.
----- EXCERPT: BOOK REVIEW ----- EXTENDED BODY: Helen M. Valois ----- KEYWORDS: Books -------- TITLE: Real Body, Real Soul DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:“Transubstantiation — The Literal Truth”
by Carson Daly Crisis, January 2000
Carson Daly, a New York-based writer, contributes the fifth in a series of articles in Crisis on the Real Presence. “To the unchurched and the unbeliever, many religious doctrines seem far-fetched,” writes Daly. “But few seem more unlikely than those of the incarnation — the doctrine that God becomes man — and of transubstantiation, the Roman Catholic belief that when the priest consecrates the bread and wine at Mass, they actually become, contrary to appearances, Christ's Body and Blood.”
Daly points out that “Even for many Catholics, transubstantiation is an intellectual and spiritual stumbling block — hard to understand and harder still to accept. In fact, this doctrine has proved so difficult that only 33 percent of Catholics (according to a recent Gallup survey) say they believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Even many of these consider transubstantiation a sacred mystery that is fundamentally unrelated to the rest of their faith, the Scriptures, and their daily life.”
But Daly explains that “These intimately related doctrines ... illuminate the way that God deals with man because God is usually thought to be an uncreated Spirit with neither flesh nor physical substance. But a closer look at the way God reveals Himself to man shows that He constantly accommodates His nature to ours. Since we are both spirit and flesh, who ordinarily learn through our senses, God repeatedly incarnates and transubstantiates in His dealings with us.
“Indeed, the Bible describes the very creation of the world as an act of incarnation — or a kind of tran-substantiation — with God transforming His ‘word’ or ‘thought’ into a physical reality. Genesis records that ‘God said, Let there be light, and there was light’ (Genesis 1:1-3). Clearly, His nonmaterial ‘word’ is transmuted instantaneously into the real presence of light. Similarly, according to the Old Testament, in creating the world and all that dwells therein, the Creator performed this kind of transmutation again and again — who with His ‘word’ or ‘thought’ not just symbolizing but actually effecting the creation of what it invoked.”
Daly reminds us of our own human status as spirits incarnate, apt creatures to be redeemed by a Christ whose Incarnation is “the embodiment or enfleshment” of God's promise to send a messiah. Daly traces the relationships between many of Christ's physical and spiritual healings, where we see “that God uses His creative, healing power to transform His word into physical or spiritual cures (which also have a physical element because of man's identity as an embodied soul). One of the cures that most clearly shows Christ's incarnational nature is that of the woman with the hemorrhage.” Daly finds “this miracle particularly interesting because it suggests that to touch the Incarnate Word with faith and humility is to be instantaneously cured and transformed.”
Not just the Eucharist, but all of the sacraments speak to Christ's identity as the Word incarnate, because they all use physical means to effect spiritual results. “The words of baptism and the water and chrism do not simply represent cleansing from original sin; they actually cause it to happen,” notes Daly. “Similarly, the words of absolution spoken in the confessional do not just represent forgiveness, they actually cleanse the penitent's soul of sin. In the Eucharist, the words the priest recites at the consecration not only symbolize Christ's presence in the bread and the wine, they actually change them into His Body and Blood.”
Daly sees “an intimate fit between the deepest desires of the human heart and what actually happens in the sacraments. ... God answers man's desire for union and communion with Him by giving Himself first in His word; then in Christ as the Incarnate Word; and finally, as the Paschal Sacrifice on the cross. After Jesus' resurrection, God gives Himself to man in Christ's glorified body; next, in the Eucharist in which the faithful receive His body, blood, soul and divinity; and finally, in Christ's second coming.
In the arts as well as daily life, man longs for tran-substantiation. And in prayer, “When we pray for a good job, a good spouse, or a good grade, we are asking that God transmute our request into a real position, partner, or percentage. Ours is a God of the Real and of the Good — and both incarnation and tran-substantiation are intimately linked to these facts. ...He is not a God Who only seems. He is, as He told our ancestors in faith, first, last, and always, the One Who Is.”
Ellen Wilson Fielding writes from Davidson, Maryland.
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 ----- KEYWORDS: Books -------- TITLE: Birth of a Debate DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:I'm greatly relieved to learn that Christina Watkins (Letters, Jan. 9-15) is aware that spacing births two to three years apart usually requires a combination of breast feeding and natural family planning (NFP). However, her original letter, at least as printed (Nov. 7-13), contained only a vague reference to “what nature provides,” giving the misleading impression that this “natural” interval can be achieved without any conscious effort or planning by the couple.
Moreover, I doubt that too-frequent conception can be blamed on “the advent of baby formula.” Over the centuries, too many women were told to accept their husbands' sexual demands as “the will of God,” regardless of the consequences for their own health. My mother's great-grandfather (1809-1855) fathered 15 children during 24 years of marriage; and my father's mother, who bore five sons in eight years, had some harsh things to say about “those brutes of husbands who make their wives have a baby every year.” Pope Paul VI encouraged the development of better natural methods because he understood this, and sympathized with the large numbers of devout Christian women who were turning to birth control out of desperation.
Doubtless some users of NFP are motivated by selfishness — but isn’t this a matter between them and their confessors? In my opinion, the decision to renounce artificial contraception and use natural methods will, in and of itself, foster respect for life and a more open attitude toward children. So I agree with Father Serafini (Letters, Nov. 28-Dec. 4) that couples who are “doing their level best to live by the teachings of Jesus Christ and his Church” should be encouraged rather than criticized — even if they don’t produce as many children as Ms. Watkins thinks they should.
Anne G. Burns Cos Cob, Connecticut
We Are Light
Thank you, Mr. George Sim Johnston, for your excellent column “Time Missed the Story of the Millennium” (Jan. 23-29). One thing has not changed since the word “Catholic” was first uttered: Roman Catholicism is not mainstream.
Today, as the “Culture of Death” rears its ugly head in the form of riches, honor and pride, the humble roots of Jesus Christ, namely poverty opposed to riches, scorn or contempt, opposed to worldly honor, and humility opposed to pride are tossed upon the heap labeled, “contempt prior to investigation.”
As a member of St. Timothy's Catholic Community in Arizona, I congratulate you for stepping into the truth and claiming the brilliance that is the Church. As the Roman Catholic Church sometimes, we have forgotten that we are a great light; we do not have to try to be a light, we already are a light.
Mark Schwietz
Mesa, Arizona
----- EXCERPT: LETTERS ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Margaret Sanger's Century DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:Nearly lost amid the media buzz created by the major newsweeklies naming their various choices for “person of the century” was the fact that the 1900s saw as much infamy as progress. To be sure, Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report did not fail to note the rise and fall of the century's most conspicuous villains — Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. But all characterized these, in general, as unfathomable anomalies of history rather than logical products of their times and places.
Who has launched the most thriving crusade against humankind? None other than the founder of Planned Parenthood, a woman who is frequently defended as a shining example of selfless sacrifice for the good of humanity.
Certainly Margaret Sanger, who died in her 80s in 1966, knew what it meant to be poor. One of 11 children born to poverty-stricken Irish-immigrant parents in Corning, N.Y., she rose to affluence when she dropped out of nursing school after only three months to marry a wealthy architect. She eventually settled in New York's Greenwich Village. There Sanger became closely associated with leading figures in the eugenics movement, many of whom played a prominent role in the foundation of Planned Parenthood.
The eugenics circle held that some races and individual members of the human species were genetically superior to others. These superior members should be encouraged to reproduce, while the births of inferior members such as the poor or minorities were to be regulated. Their ultimate solution to the problem of poverty was simple: Eliminate the poor.
In the May 1919 edition of Birth Control Review Sanger wrote, “More children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief aim of birth control.” The November 1921 edition declared, “Birth control: to create a race of thorough-breds.”
Sanger outlined her new philosophy in her 1922 book Pivot of Civilization. In it she sharply criticized philanthropists who provided free maternity care to poor mothers. According to Sanger, these acts of generosity “encourage the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.” These are the words of a model liberal humanist?
The founder of Planned Parenthood saw contraception, sterilization and eventually abortion as the panacea for eliminating all human suffering. In Margaret Sanger: Father of Modern Society, author Elasah Drogin observed: “Through the 284 pages of Pivot of Civilization, there is not one word written about fair labor laws, fair housing requirements, a more equitable distribution of wealth, or even the simple responsibility of caring for one's neighbor.”
Sanger's disdain for certain members of society was not confined to the poor, whom she often referred to as “human weeds.” It targeted minorities such as blacks. In a private letter to Clarence Gamble dated Oct. 19, 1939, she revealed her ultimate goal toward blacks and how it could best be attained. “The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal,” she wrote. “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”
The following lines from Pivot of Civilization allow a particularly telling glimpse of Sanger's “compassion” and her motives. “Remember our motto: if we must have welfare, give it to the rich, not to the poor. ... We are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.”
Sanger's views naturally led her to strike out against the institution of marriage and the family. “The marriage bed,” she wrote, “is the most degenerating influence in the social order.” Sanger advocated instead a “voluntary association” between sexual partners. She thus sought to supplant the family as the most fundamental unit of society with relationships directed toward the sexual gratification of cooperating individuals.
How successful has been the campaign to reconstruct society launched by Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood, her life's cause? A few facts reveal the pervasive influence of Sanger's movement on humanity's course in the 20th century.
As a 1996 U.N. study predicted, by this year the United States, Canada, China, Japan and every country in Europe will have fallen below zero population growth. (Immigration helps boost the numbers in America.) Worldwide, at least 61 countries are failing to replace their populations.
Since the 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion decision, an average of 1.5 million unborn babies have been aborted each year in the United States. Twenty-five percent of white women's pregnancies have ended in abortion, while 40% of minority pregnancies have been aborted. In 1990 more than 70% of the married women in the United States were using contraceptives.
Without exception, all the sad consequences of birth control that Pope Paul VI foresaw in his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life) have come to pass.
Pope John Paul II is well aware of his predecessor's prophetic foresight when he calls the 20th century “a century of tears.”
Can the 21st truly become a century of healing and wiping away tears? Tens of thousands of Americans who marched for life in Washington, D.C., this past Jan. 24 think that it can. So do countless mothers and fathers who still believe that a child is God's most precious gift. And since human history has become the history of salvation with Christ's birth, death and resurrection, there are certainly grounds for hope.
Father Walter Schu is author of John Paul II: His Thought and Mission.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Walter Schu LC ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Celibacy - It's the Answer, Not the Problem DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:The Church understands well the need to form priests carefully in celibacy … and the challenges today's priests face in practicing celibacy. Two apostolic exhortations given by Pope John Paul II on the topic show how the Church has addressed the problems arising in this area.
The Pope's apostolic exhortation Vita Consecrata (Consecrated Life) places the challenge of consecrated chastity in the perspective of today's culture:
The first challenge is that of a hedonistic culture which separates sexuality from all objective moral norms, often treating it as a mere diversion and a consumer good and, with the complicity of the means of social communication, justifying a kind of idolatry of the sexual instinct. The consequences of this are before everyone's eyes: transgressions of every kind, with resulting psychic and moral suffering on the part of individuals and families.
The reply of the consecrated life is above all in the joyful living of perfect chastity, as a witness to the power of God's love manifested in the weakness of the human condition. The consecrated person attests that what many have believed impossible becomes, with the Lord's grace, possible and truly liberating. Yes, in Christ it is possible to love God with all one's heart, putting him above every other love, and thus to love every creature with the freedom of God! This testimony is more necessary than ever today, precisely because it is so little understood by our world. It is offered to everyone — young people, engaged couples, husbands and wives and Christian families — in order to show that the power of God's love can accomplish great things precisely within the context of human love. It is a witness which also meets a growing need for interior honesty in human relationships.
The consecrated life must present to today's world examples of chastity lived by men and women who show balance, self-mastery, an enterprising spirit, and psychological and affective maturity. Thanks to this witness, human love is offered a stable point of reference: the pure love which consecrated persons draw from the contemplation of Trinitarian love, revealed to us in Christ. Precisely because they are immersed in this mystery, consecrated persons feel themselves capable of a radical and universal love, which gives them the strength for the self-mastery and discipline necessary in order not to fall under the domination of the senses and instincts. Consecrated chastity thus appears as a joyful and liberating experience. Enlightened by faith in the Risen Lord and by the prospect of the new heavens and the new earth (cf. Revelation 21:1), it offers a priceless incentive in the task of educating to that chastity which corresponds to other states of life as well (No. 88).
In the 1992 post-synodal apostolic exhortation Pastores Dabo Vobis (I Will Give You Pastors), the Holy Father made the Church's requirements in priestly formation very clear:
The spiritual formation of one who is called to live celibacy should pay particular attention to preparing the future priest so that he may know, appreciate, love and live celibacy according to its true nature and according to its real purposes, that is, for evangelical, spiritual and pastoral motives. The virtue of chastity is a premise for this preparation and is its content. It colors all human relations and leads to experiencing and showing … a sincere, human, fraternal and personal love, one that is capable of sacrifice, following Christ's example, a love for all and for each person.
The consecrated person attests that what many have believed impossible becomes, with the Lord's grace, possible and truly liberating.
The celibacy of priests brings with it certain characteristics thanks to which they renounce marriage for the sake of the kingdom of heaven (cf. Matthew 19:12) and hold fast to their Lord with that undivided love which is profoundly in harmony with the new covenant; they bear witness to the resurrection in a future life (cf. Luke 20:36) and obtain the most useful assistance toward the constant exercise of that perfect charity by which they can become all things to all men in their priestly ministry.
And so priestly celibacy should not be considered just as a legal norm or as a totally external condition for admission to ordination, but rather as a value that is profoundly connected with ordination, whereby a man takes on the likeness of Jesus Christ, the good shepherd and spouse of the Church, and therefore as a choice of a greater and undivided love for Christ and his Church, as a full and joyful availability in his heart for the pastoral ministry. Celibacy is to be considered as a special grace, as a gift, for “not all men can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given” (Matthew 19:11). Certainly it is a grace which does not dispense with, but counts most definitely on, a conscious and free response on the part of the receiver. This charism of the Spirit also brings with it the grace for the receiver to remain faithful to it for all his life and be able to carry out generously and joyfully its concomitant commitments. Formation in priestly celibacy should also include helping people to be aware of the precious gift of God, which will lead to prayer and to vigilance in guarding the gift from anything which could put it under threat.
Through his celibate life, the priest will be able to fulfill better his ministry on behalf of the People of God. In particular, as he witnesses to the evangelical value of virginity, he will be able to aid Christian spouses to live fully the “great sacrament” of the love of Christ the bridegroom for his spouse the Church, just as his own faithfulness to celibacy will help them to be faithful to each other as husband and wife.
The importance of a careful preparation for priestly celibacy, especially in the social and cultural situations that we see today, led the synod fathers to make a series of requests which have a permanent value, as the wisdom of our mother the Church confirms.
I authoritatively set them down again as criteria to be followed in formation for chastity in celibacy: “Let the bishops together with the rectors and spiritual directors of the seminaries establish principles, offer criteria and give assistance for discernment in this matter. Of the greatest importance for formation for chastity in celibacy are the bishop's concern and fraternal life among priests.
“In the seminary, that is, in the program of formation, celibacy should be presented clearly, without any ambiguities and in a positive fashion. The seminarian should have a sufficient degree of psychological and sexual maturity as well as an assiduous and authentic life of prayer, and he should put himself under the direction of a spiritual father.
“The spiritual director should help the seminarian so that he himself reaches a mature and free decision, which is built on esteem for priestly friendship and self-discipline, as well as on the acceptance of solitude and on a physically and psychologically sound personal state. Therefore, seminarians should have a good knowledge of the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, of the encyclical Sacerdotalis Coelibatus and the Instruction for Formation in Priestly Celibacy published by the Congregation for Catholic Education in 1974.
“In order that the seminarian may be able to embrace priestly celibacy for the kingdom of heaven with a free decision, he needs to know the Christian and truly human nature and purpose of sexuality in marriage and in celibacy.
“It is necessary also to instruct and educate the lay faithful regarding the evangelical, spiritual and pastoral reasons proper to priestly celibacy so that they will help priests with their friendship, understanding and cooperation” (No. 50).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Third Millennium, So Far DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:It was a close call, but I made it into the third Christian millennium. I was glad to see the Pope made it also. A small industry of those expecting him quickly to pass from the scene has recently developed. This odd business is composed almost totally of those whose understanding of the Church and the world is, in their view, superior to his. Most of us would just as soon see the Holy Father stick around a bit longer, though we all know, as he knows, that we are each of us mortal, beings who die and know that they die.
When God decided that John Paul II was to be pope this round, he displayed considerable humor. He chose a pope who was smarter and more humanly attractive than any of his critics. These latter never forgave either God or pope. This curious refusal to acknowledge what is good explains more of the dark side of our time than I care to contemplate.
Furthermore, neither a Y2K computer breakdown, nor the end of the world, nor the rapture happened, but we cannot relax our vigil. Michael Novak wrote recently that we rarely heard in the media just what event happened 2,000 years ago. It was kept pretty quiet. We are too sensitive to mention the name of Christ in most public contexts. We are reluctant to know whether Christianity did any “good” in the world for fear it might compromise us. Chesterton used to say that it was a good idea to try to think Christianity out of the world, just to see what the alternative might be like. It is not a pretty picture. Our future may well be our past.
In a previous column, I remarked on the end of Charles Schulz’ Peanuts. Jennifer Roback Morse, in the meantime, sent me a column by Chris Coursey of the Santa Rosa, Calif., newspaper in which he wrote that “readers' polls show that comic strips with a harder humor (than Schulz) are more popular today.” One wonders about this estimate. It would be difficult to find a “harder” humor than Lucy's.
The universities today are full of professors and students who think that the world can be “improved” almost infinitely and quickly, if: A.) most of us go to law school and if B.) we all try harder. The notion of grace is practically unknown except in the form of “benevolence” which is supposedly under our control.
We are, to recall Eric Voegelin, mainly “gnostics,” that is, we think that some special form of knowledge and some sort of volitional eagerness will do it all. Lucy was more realistic about our lot than these incipient utopians.
Lucy van Pelt was also closer to the truth of things, especially to the reality of the Fall. In a 1959 Fawcett collection entitled Let's Face It, Charlie Brown!, we see Charlie Brown with a very concerned, vague face standing with his hands in his pockets. He is listening to Lucy tell him (in a passage in which we only need to substitute the word “millennium” for the word “year” to see how pertinent it is), “Charlie Brown, I think you should resolve to be perfect during the coming year.” In the next scene, Charlie, reasonable man that he is, at first objects to this utopianism, “Good grief! Nobody's perfect! What do you expect of me?” Lucy, of course, with apparent sincerity, replies, “I think you CAN be if you really try … I really do!” With Lucy looking on with a certain sly “hardness” of her own, Charlie buys this exhortation: “All right, Lucy, if you have that much faith in me, I'll try! I hereby resolve to be perfect during the next year.” The last scene shows an utterly dejected, fooled-again Charlie Brown enduring Lucy laughing at him uproariously, “YOU? PERFECT? HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA!”
There is little doubt that, at the heart of so many of our problems, lies the desire to be perfect, not so much as “our Heavenly Father is perfect,” but as we choose to be perfect on our own terms. Each year after Christmas, we read at Mass the First Letter of John. It is sometimes amazing how the Scripture we read is addressed to our very pretensions. On Dec. 29 we read, “We can say that we know Jesus only by keeping his commandments. Anyone who says ‘I know him’ and does not keep his commandments is a liar.”
The growth industry of our time is surely in the “not keeping the commandments.” Not only the “not keeping the commandments” but the redefining them so that what Scripture calls evil is now called good. We are more and more reluctant to say anything of any action that it is clearly “against the commandments.” And when we do not “speak,” we soon do not hesitate to do. It is, in fact, most curious how closely the language and the deeds follow each other.
Now, of course, it is just possible that the end-time did arrive with the third millennium's inception. We are told that we know not the hour, nor are we given any real assurance that we will be able correctly to read the famous “signs of the times” when they appear. I have just finished reading George Weigel's good book on John Paul II. It is astonishing that this Pope's very first words come back again and again: “Be not afraid.” These words, no doubt, are not said of him who tells us “‘I know him’ and does not keep his commandments.” Scripture uses tough words — tougher than we ever hear any more from our pulpits or popular media. The word “liar” is a striking, almost shocking word. It means that we knowingly say something that we know is not true or that we know to be the opposite of the truth. It is a very contemporary word.
The Fall is not the last word. But it is a word that we cannot afford to neglect. There is something touching about Charlie's putting his “faith” in Lucy's word, just as there is something cheering in our calling what is sin to be a “right” or a “duty.” But the fact that Charlie, and hence each of us, is not “perfect” is itself the truth. Lucy's humor is much more “hard” than anything we find in the comic strips today. She does not tell us we can escape our condition, which, as far as I can ascertain, was the main theme in the media I watched “on reaching the third millennium.”
Father James Schall is a professor of government at Georgetown University.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: James Schall SJ ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Character Crusader DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:Upon leaving Stanford University's School of Education in 1996, Patty Farnsworth, energetic wife and mother of two grown children, founded Link Institute, a national nonprofit education group based in Redwood City, California. The organization works with parents, teachers, administrators and policy-makers to distribute ideas, materials and tools designed to foster character development in the classroom. She spoke recently with Register correspondent Martha Lepore.
Lepore: What makes Link different from other education reform organizations?
Farnsworth: We're not about reform. Link Institute is about a vision of using the knowledge we've learned in the last 5,000 years as the basis for primary education. Since the mid-50s, educators have diluted the content of learning and focused on the process of learning, calling it progressive education.
There has been an overemphasis on pedagogy or process and not enough on content. But it hasn’t worked. Our focus is more on the “what” of education, less on the “how.” We seek to promote and support schools that have rigorous academic content and virtue-based character education.
How did you come to position yourself as an in-service resource?
Our view of the dilemmas in education is not original. Many have already decried the loss of educational basics and core values, such as Charles Sykes in Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can’t Read, Write or Add and William Bennett in The Educated Child. Some schools are independently emphasizing basics and fundamental virtues. But we are the first to assure schools with practical support so that they are not out there by themselves.
Our approach is unique — developing ideas, materials and tools for teachers to use in fostering content in such areas as history, science and literature. We founded our program on two main components, the Core Knowledge Sequence, developed by E.D. Hirsch Jr. and the Core Knowledge Foundation; and Core Virtues, a K-6 literature-based program of character education.
The core knowledge concept is based on the research conducted by and written about by Hirsch in his books Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know and The Schools We Need, and Why We Don’t Have Them. Hirsch founded the Core Knowledge Foundation in 1986 and it serves as the hub of a growing network of hundreds of schools in the United States using its curriculum content sequence.
Where does character education come in?
In our view, the standard for character content in education is encapsulated in the core-virtues work of Dr. Mary Beth Klee, a member of our board of directors. She helped pioneer the Core Knowledge Sequence at the Crossroads Academy she founded in Lyme, New Hampshire.
Subsequently she developed Core Virtues for Core Knowledge, which is based on the assumption that, while virtue cannot be “taught,” it can perhaps be “caught,” and uses moving stories to awaken and interest children in a love of the good.
Through her program, we educate children to the fact that they can make a mistake, make a correction for it and go on. They learn it's a struggle to become better and also that the struggle itself is worthwhile. We see this emphasis on virtues as compatible with religion, but not religious.
Link Institute has operated as a nonprofit for less than three years. How are you winning educators to your vision?
In December 1999, we formed an extended partnership with the National Heritage Academies [NHA] in Michigan because our mission to aid teachers aligns with its mission to provide a curriculum that is academically challenging and morally anchored. NHA is a for-profit management group of 22 charter schools primarily located in Michigan, and we will conduct professional development seminars for their teachers this summer.
In 1998, we sponsored workshops for teachers on the core-knowledge concept and on how to establish a charter school. In 1999, we conducted more workshops for teachers on core knowledge and hosted with the Center for Education Reform a symposium, “Education Straight Talk,” on content and character in the classroom. Our featured speakers were Charles Sykes, Kevin Ryan, Connie Jones and William Kilpatrick.
This year our Summer Intensive Institutes for Teachers [SUMMIT] will focus on college minicourses in one-week blocks to enrich the knowledge of elementary teachers in history and science. The SUMMIT will be held in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We are also responding to requests from other school-management groups to furnish in-service education.
How far do you want to take the Link approach?
Since we are not into policy-making, but helping schools stabilize and improve their curricula and ethos, I think we will go on for a long time and actually reach out to schools in Europe and beyond.
How will you measure success?
That's a long-term factor which we are beginning to address. Ultimately the outcome we desire is to have better-educated, morally responsible students who become adults with a desire for lifelong learning and good citizenship. Those kinds of achievements are hard to measure, but, in the short-term, we plan to follow teachers and students involved in the SUMMIT program. We are working with Dr. Erick Hanushek and his company, the Center for Research of Educational Outcomes at the University of Rochester on measurement designs.
Who is supporting the Link Institute?
Several foundations, such as the Bradley Foundation, and private donors fund us. We have a very active board of directors, including Joseph Lane of IBM Global Financing and Credit Corporation and journalist Joan Frawley Desmond. Among our board of advisers are academic leaders Gary Beckner of the Association of American Educators, Dr. William Kilpatrick of Boston College and Dr. Thomas Lickona of the State University of New York.
Link Institute has required a major commitment on your part. What's in it for you?
The satisfaction of knowing I'm helping children. I think children are so important, yet many are not getting what I think is a decent education. My husband and I raised two children and I know it requires a lot of different pieces. I see so many parents struggling to do their duty as primary educators and most are not getting help from the schools. They seem to be without a voice and facing a culture that undermines solid family relations. I like to think we're making an important contribution to helping these parents and their children.
Martha Lepore writes from Coronado, California.
----- EXCERPT: An interview with the founder of Link Institute ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Education Notebook DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:College Freshmen Cut Booze and Classes
THE WASHINGTON TIMES, Jan. 24—College freshmen are losing interest in smoking and drinking beer but also in going to class, an annual survey of first-year students has found.
A little more than half of the nation's freshmen said they frequently or occasionally drank beer — the lowest level in 34 years, reported the Times.
“Colleges have tried very hard to discourage drinking,” said Linda J. Sax, an assistant professor of education at UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute, which has surveyed freshman views at the nation's colleges and universities every year since 1965.
But the good news on substance abuse is tempered with concerns in the classroom, the Times said.
Researchers noted that academic disengagement is on the rise, with a record number of students saying they are frequently bored in classes and often tardy or absent. The percentage of students taking remedial classes has also hit a 30-year high. “Our findings underscore the need for colleges and universities to find more effective ways to accommodate the growing numbers of students who may be coming to college academically unprepared,” said Alexander Astin, a UCLA education professor and founding director of the survey.
While a record number of freshmen say they finished high school with an “A” average, there is mounting evidence that more schools are holding students back in an attempt to end social promotion. More than one-fourth of all students start college at age 19 instead of the traditional 18, the study found.
Virginia Considers ‘Moment of Silence’
RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH, Feb. 2—Senators waved the Constitution and professed their religious faith during debate Feb. 1 before passing legislation that would require every classroom in every Virginia public school to every day observe “one minute of silent meditation, prayer or reflection,” the Times-Dispatch reported. The Senate's 28-11 vote sends the bill to the House, where the newfound Republican majority is likely to receive warmly the legislation already endorsed by Gov. Jim Gilmore, the Richmond newspaper reported.
Yesterday's emotional debate was fueled by what Democrats deemed the bill's invitation to a legal challenge if signed into law. Still, seven Democrats quietly joined the GOP majority in passing the measure.
“I have no illusions about what's going to happen with this,” said Senate Minority Leader Richard L. Saslaw of Fairfax County. “If you want the worst-case application, if you think religion ought to dominate government at every level, then you ought to move to Iran and get your wish.”
“This is not a religious crusade,” countered the bill's sponsor, Sen. Warren E. Barry, R-Fairfax. “It's about helping students reflect on who they are and where they're going — while trying to do something to stem the spread of violence in schools.
Sen. Kenneth W. Stolle, R-Virginia Beach, recounted how being Catholic made him a victim of religious bigotry as a college student in the Bible Belt. Nonetheless, he said, noting the General Assembly's tradition of opening daily sessions in prayer, “If it's good enough for the Senate of Virginia, a moment of silence is good for our children.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Trading With the Persecutors? DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:The U.S. Congress will decide this year whether to grant the People's Republic of China permanent normal trading relations status.
Currently, Congress debates (and approves) the formerly titled “most favored nation status” for China every year, as it has for about 20 years. But the Clinton administration, which also has supported China's entry into the World Trade Organization, argues the yearly vote on most-favored-nation status is divisive and unproductive.
Supporters of the U.S. policy contend that engaging China will help both the United States and Chinese economies, and that the resulting prosperity in China will open up its society and government.
“It will increase the pace of change in China,” said Samuel Berger, Clinton's national security adviser and China expert, in a speech Feb. 2 before the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.
Berger did not mention recent reports of arrests of Catholics and churches being demolished, but he acknowledged that the Chinese government has stepped up interference with religion and expression. The U.S. government has listed China as “a country of particular concern” under the International Religious Freedom Act, and is sponsoring a resolution condemning China's human rights record in the U.N. Human Rights Commission.
“Over the past year, we have seen an increase in its crackdown on political activities and dissent; stepped-up controls on unregistered churches; the suppression of ethnic minority groups, especially Tibetans; and the imprisonment of even more dissidents whose only crime is free speech,” Berger said.
He suggested that Chinese authorities are steadily embracing positive changes that may threaten the country's security in the short run. Berger said that by opening its economy, China is taking the risk that market reforms will “cause more short-term unemployment and the specter of social unrest.”
These fears can, in part, explain Chinese authorities'skittishness about religious movements, especially those they feel are independent from party control, Maryknoll Sister Janet Carroll, executive director of the U.S. Catholic China Bureau in South Orange, N.J., told the Register.
Spokesmen for the People's Republic of China's Embassy in Washington could not be reached for comment.
Berger contended that lowering restrictions to trade and increasing American businesses' contact with China will spur Chinese people to demand a more responsive and just government. In the meantime, Berger said U.S. policy should be twofold: engage China economically, and scold it diplomatically when it transgresses human rights.
“We must and we will continue to speak out on behalf of people in China who are persecuted for their political and religious beliefs,” he said.
U.S. Rep. Bill Archer, Republican chairman of the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee, expressed support for the policy of engagement.
“There is a long way to go before China reaches international norms on religious liberty and other freedoms,” Archer told the Register in a written statement, “but we must not let that obscure that there has been tremendous positive movement in the last 10 years. The greatest opportunity for greater religious and cultural freedom in China will come from increased contact between the U.S. government and its citizens with Chinese citizens and their government.”
Critics of this policy argue the United States is aiding and abetting a brutal dictatorship.
Among current and recent presidential candidates, Alan Keyes, Gary Bauer and Patrick Buchanan have sharply criticized the Clinton administration's policy as callous and driven by greed.
Buchanan has argued that China has simply used trade with the United States to strengthen its currency and consolidate its grip on power.
“China has ignored our protests to pursue cultural genocide in Tibet and persecute Roman Catholics, evangelical Christians, and political dissidents,” Buchanan said in a speech last April in San Francisco. “Mr. Clinton's decision not to permit human rights outrages to interfere with trade has proven a shameful capitulation.”
Joseph Kung, president of the Cardinal Kung Foundation in Stamford, Conn., which monitors and supports the pro-Rome underground church in China, has called on Americans to call their representatives in Congress and ask them to rescind normal trading status. That, he told a conference sponsored by the Population Research Institute in Washington on Nov. 19, “would send a strong message to the Chinese government” that violation of human rights “does not pay.”
—Matt McDonald
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Hold the Wry DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:America has been both a real place and a myth almost from the moment of its discovery. The dream of economic opportunity, along with political and religious freedom, has drawn people here from around the globe for more than three centuries.
A whole body of literature and film has grown up around a subcate-gory of the immigration experience: the hardships of the “old country” as seen in the light of the “new world” (as in the masterpiece of the genre, 1963's America, America by Elia Kazan).
Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prizewinning best seller Angela's Ashes is typical of the Irish variation on this myth, with one important exception. Poverty, alcoholism and English exploitation are the genre's usual themes. But McCourt's autobiographical memoir adds to the mix another villain — the Catholic Church. This he portrays as repressive, uncharitable and elitist.
“The priests lacked compassion,” McCourt told a reporter in an interview with The Book Report that spelled out the perspective that framed much of his book. “They preached poverty, but they never embraced it. The Church had all the answers.”
In the recently released film based on the book, director Alan Parker (The Commitments) and coscreenwriter Laura Jones soften somewhat McCourt's anti-Church bias. At least one of the dozen priests we encounter is shown to be kind. But the audience gets the impression that one of the main reasons for Irish immigration to America was the oppressiveness of the Church.
The movie is structured episodically. It begins not in Ireland, but in Brooklyn in 1935. Frank's parents, Malachi (Robert Carlyle) and Angela (Emily Watson), are poor, even by the standards of the Depression. The first scene shows us their joy at the birth of Margaret Mary, their fifth child and first daughter. Almost immediately thereafter, the baby dies.
Hard times continue to grind the McCourts down. They give up and return to the old country, becoming, according to Frank's voice-over (Andrew Bennett), “the only Irish family in history saying goodbye to the Statue of Liberty.”
Comfort to the Suffering
Some might look to religion as a comfort and guide in the midst of such suffering. But the movie sees it as divisive. The family settles in Limerick, a place characterized by widespread piety and nonstop rain. Angela's Catholic relatives, instead of offering support, enjoy insulting Malachi because he's a Protestant from the North. Whenever the young Frank (Joe Breen) gets filthy like most boys, they taunt: “It's the Northern Ireland in you that attracts the dirt.” And his sloppy manners are described as “eating like a Presbyterian.”
Malachi is addicted to alcohol, “a slave to drink” who's gone “beyond the beyond.” He's unable to hold a job and, when he does work, he spends his paycheck on booze rather than food or rent. His wife and children must live with the consequences, dwelling in a run-down, unheated flat with leaky pipes, infested bedding and an outhouse next door. The filmmakers sometimes rub our noses in this squalor more than is necessary.
However, the movie, like the book, refuses to caricature Malachi, presenting his good qualities along with his flaws. He's a natural storyteller who dreams of the world outside their slum — a gift he passes on to young Frank.
The movie is not overtly anti-Catholic. It never attacks the Church's doctrines or teachings, only its organization and priests. Like all the characters, Malachi's only frame of reference is Catholicism. He brings home a portrait of Pope Leo XIII, whom he admires as a friend of the workingman. But he rarely goes to Mass.
Angela is the long-suffering Irish mother often depicted in movies, books and songs. A believer of sorts, she holds the family together despite extreme poverty and an unreliable husband.
Church charities show her little compassion. When she queues for alms at the St. Vincent de Paul Society, its lay administrators enjoy humiliating her. Her groveling for leftovers outside the parish rectory is also depicted as unnecessarily degrading for her and her children.
Meanwhile the adolescent Frank (Ciaran Owens) finds the Church holds his low status against him. He's coldly rejected by the Christian Brothers when he tries to attend one of their schools and by his parish where he wants to be an altar boy.
Frank's Catholic education is presented with some of the humor for which the book has been widely celebrated. The boy feels compelled to go to confession every time he commits the smallest sin. And he's told that one of the benefits of taking Communion is that “now you can die a martyr if you're murdered by the Protestants.”
At the Jesuit school where he finishes his studies, he writes an essay on Jesus and the weather, arguing that Jesus would never have lived in Limerick because it always rains. Despite their initial shock at Frank's nonconformist attitudes, his teachers recognize his gift with words and encourage him to “stock your mind. It's your house of treasures. No one can interfere.”
Frank takes their advice to heart and becomes determined not to be crushed by his environment, knocking over obstacles with ambition and high spirits. In spite of warnings by his teachers about “the devil's henchman in Hollywood,” he's inspired by the vision of America presented in James Cagney movies. He vows to get back there one way or another.
Lacking the droll verbal descriptions that held the book together, the movie version of Angela's Ashes is rambling and unfocused. Its sledgehammer depiction of desperate poverty and Church cruelty — based on this account, nearly everyone who works for the Church in Ireland has a mean streak — is numbing rather than enlightening.
Arts & Culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: Angela's Ashes is rambling and unfocused ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Prizer's Picks DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:Ever After (1998)
Some classic tales are indestructible no matter what Hollywood tries to do to them. Ever After is a politically correct reworking of the Cinderella story in which the 16th-century heroine (Drew Barrymore) rises from rags to riches on her own without help from a sappy creature waving a magic wand. Like most post-feminist protagonists, she's a liberated young woman who refuses to wait passively for Prince Charming (Dougray Scott) to make his move. Her favorite book is Sir Thomas More's Utopia, which she uses to lecture the prince on a variety of subjects. At times she seems almost too good for him.
The movie retains a convincing wicked stepmother (Anjelica Huston) who treats the heroine like a servant. Also as in the original tale, only the prince recognizes Cinderella's beauty and virtue and makes a special effort to win her heart. The trappings may be trendy, but we wind up rooting for her to find true love.
The Bear (1989)
Contrary to Hollywood conventions, wild animals are not warm and cuddly in their natural habitats, and their behavior doesn’t resemble that of humans. Nature can be cruel, and even the fittest don’t always survive. The Bear, based on James Oliver Kurwood's 1917 novel, vividly dramatizes these facts. The action begins in 1885 with the birth of a young bear cub whose mother dies in a rock slide, forcing him to survive on his own. He's adopted by an adult male grizzly who teaches him to fish for trout and how to protect himself from a puma. Each bear develops his own distinct personality, as consistent with the realities of animal life.
The grizzlies' most deadly nemesis is man, and French director Jean-Jacques Annaud (Quest for Fire) persuades us to take their side when two hunters (Jack Wallace and Tcheky Karys), enter their wilderness, eager to collect pelts. The suspenseful confrontation that follows is framed by Canadian mountains and forests of breathtaking beauty.
Arts & Culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Healing in the Heartland DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:Euclid, Ohio, is home to the National Shrine and Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes
Close to 40,000 people visited the National Shrine and Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes in Euclid, Ohio, last year.
Those who signed the guestbook came from 34 countries and 41 states.
Devotion to our Blessed Mother drew them; peace, grace and healing greeted them — just as those spiritual gifts flowed to a young girl named Bernadette in 1858 in Lourdes, France, when the Virgin Mary appeared before her.
By the time I parked my car in the serene, wooded oasis, I had already forgotten that bustling downtown Cleveland was only 10 miles away.
“Peace” is a very popular word here, say the Sisters of the Most Holy Trinity who administer the shrine. Visitors can’t help telling the sisters how much of it they find at the grotto, in the church and along the outdoor devotional ways.
It rained the day I visited, but that didn’t stop people from praying even in the outdoor areas. I understood why when one nun took the time to explain to me that many pilgrims return or write to tell about healings they've received during or just after visiting this holy site. One sister called such testimonies “ceaseless,” noting that no small number come from non-Catholics.
“One lady with a group from Canada showed me her leg,” explained Sister Anastasia, the shrine's pilgrimage director. The leg was marred by an external cancer, which Sister described as “a hideous sore.”
Sister took the woman to the grotto and encouraged her to stand on a stone that had been brought here from the Lourdes site of Mary's appearance.
“Ask the Blessed Mother for a cure,” Sister Anastasia told the Canadian pilgrim. “I'll pray for you, and you pray too.”
The woman drank the water flowing at the grotto and applied some to her leg.
A year later she returned, sought out Sister Anastasia and cried out, “Look what the Blessed Mother has done for me!” Sister looked to see that the once-diseased flesh was now unblemished.
Sister Anastasia, who has lived here since 1986, also recounted the story of a wheelchair-bound man who said he'd been told by his doctor that he would never walk again. Shortly after drinking the water at the grotto, he got up and walked away, pushing his own wheelchair as he went.
Healthy adults regularly come through, added Sister Anastasia, telling of sick childhoods and total recoveries after being brought here by their parents.
Blessings Abound
The sisters don’t use the word “miracle” much. Instead, they prefer to talk about the “many testimonies of healing.” As one of the nuns said, “We'd need a full-time person to document them” if that's what the site were all about.
“Many graces take place here,” said Sister Anastasia. Pilgrims who do not receive physical healings, she added, receive other kinds of blessings. “Many people are moved.”
The shrine dates to 1922, when Mother Mary of St. John Berchmans McGarvey, the U.S. mother superior of the Good Shepherd Sisters, went on pilgrimage to Lourdes. While there, she was inspired to build a replica of the grotto on the order's land in Euclid, near Lake Erie. The property had been a vineyard that produced award-winning wines before the owners donated it to the nuns.
In Lourdes, the mother superior was handed a major donation; this she and those with her attributed to Divine Providence. A local Dominican priest gave her a precise drawing of the Lourdes grotto, then added a priceless treasure the local bishop had given him — a piece of the actual rock the Blessed Mother stood upon when she appeared to Bernadette.
On May 30, Trinity Sunday, the nuns promised God they'd build the shrine. Four Trinity Sundays later, Archbishop Joseph Schrembs of Cleveland dedicated the shrine. In 1928, it was officially named a national shrine.
In 1952, the local ordinary invited the Sisters of the Most Holy Trinity (the Trinitarians) to administer the shrine. The order quickly began expanding the shrine, building everything from a large chapel to a rosary walk.
That little piece of stone was destined by God to travel from Lourdes to America, say the sisters. “The stone is unique,” one of the nuns told me, adding that the shrine is the only one in America to have a piece of the very spot on which Mary stood during her appearances to Bernadette.
The small rock has been divided into three — a “trinity.” One piece appears with a first-class relic of St. Bernadette in a reliquary displayed in the gift shop.
The second is attached to a white marble prayer book near the statue of Mary at the grotto for people to touch.
The third piece is embedded in marble at the feet of our Lady where a steady stream of water flows over it.
Because of the famous healing properties of the water in Lourdes, it's no surprise to the Trinitarians when people attribute their healings and graces to the use of this shrine's blessed water.
The nuns constantly honor requests to send it all over the country, even Hawaii.
One sister reminded me how the Blessed Mother said the water at Lourdes would be “for the healing of the people.”
Gracious Grounds
The white Carrara marble statue of the Blessed Mother at the grotto is the original placed in 1926. Sister Anastasia told how six men tried to bring the statue to the founding nuns when they moved. But the team could not budge it. The Blessed Mother wanted to stay here, she said.
The statue of a kneeling Bernadette gazing toward our Lady makes visitors feel part of the apparition scene.
The beautiful carved stone is placed where the congregation gathers for outdoor Masses, a constant reminder of Mary's proclamation to Bernadette: “I am the Immaculate Conception.”
Several other Carrara marble statues also grace the grounds, beginning with the Sacred Heart, St. Joseph and St. Ann. Beyond the grotto, a paved path follows the shrine's original Stations of the Cross around the tree-covered hillside to the Shrine of our Resurrected Savior.
This hillside also has the newest addition — a rosary walk following the full 15 decades. Participants in Sunday processions pray the 169 granite beads that wind along the King's Highway and end at the grotto for Benediction.
Near the grotto are a small rose garden and two “houses,” one for votive lights in honor of St. Joseph and Our Lady of Fatima, the other containing crutches and other items from thankful pilgrims.
The story of Bernadette, from the apparitions to her reception into heaven, appears in a unique series of stained-glass windows lining the chapel built in the centenary year of the Lourdes apparitions.
The Trinitarian Sisters believe that God destined this shrine to be right in the middle of the people and easily accessible to them. The prayer, healing and peace they find here keep them coming back for more.
Joseph Pronechen is based in Trumbull, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: The Church In America The Irish DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:First in an occasional series
In 1790, only a year after the U.S. Constitution was ratified, just 35,000 of the new nation's 3 million citizens were Catholic. The addition of Texas and California to the union in the 1800s added large Spanish-speaking Catholic populations. A midcentury famine in Ireland, along with revolution in the German states, would drive the first big wave of Catholic immigrants to these shores. By 1900, there were 12 million Catholics in a country of 66 million.
Then the floodgates opened.
In the first part of the 20th century, up until the early ’30s, the American economy, particularly the manufacturing sector, was the envy of the world. Catholics streamed in through Ellis Island from southern and eastern Europe, along with French-speaking Canada, seeking jobs and the chance for a better, more economically secure life. The flow continued unabated until the Great Depression (Ellis Island remained in operation until 1943) and gathered new momentum in the postwar years.
Many immigrants stayed close to where they landed, transforming New York City into a checkerboard of ethnic neighborhoods, but many others continued on to points west.
In Chicago, for example, by World War II there were more Irish than in Dublin, more Germans than in Berlin, more Italians than in Pisa and more Bohemians than in Prague. Today there are 62 million Catholics in the United States, more than any other single Christian denomination, including, by some counts, 18 million inactive Catholics (they've been called the “second-largest denomination”).
Low-Profile Assimilation
It was in Chicago that the James Mullooly family, a fairly typical Catholic immigrant family, settled. James and Anne-Mary Devaney Mullooly were first-generation Americans, children of parents who left Ireland in the 1850s.
James and Anne-Mary lived on Chicago's South Side in St. Brendan's parish. While 100% Irish-American, they attended daily Mass at Sacred Heart, a German parish, because it was several blocks closer to home.
It was not an especially happy choice. The German congregation didn’t welcome these Irish strangers with open arms, and Anne-Mary found the German sisters in the school stricter than the Irish sisters in her parish.
Like most other Irish of their generation, members of the Mullooly family worked as laborers. James was a house painter for the city of Chicago. Not until the next generation would they enter the ranks of professionals as teachers and managers. In this, they, too, followed the general pattern for immigrants of the time. Catholics did much of the heavy labor in Chicago, the “city of broad shoulders,” as the poet Carl Sandburg called it.
The Catholic Church was the center of their life. Limited resources of money, clergy and religious challenged the Church. In response, it focused its efforts on providing immigrant Catholics with the sacraments as a way of keeping them in the fold.
At that time, the Church didn’t have the time or resources to look outward to the larger society, which viewed Catholics with suspicion and, occasionally, outright hostility. As a result, Catholics sought solace and solidarity among themselves. Something of a “catacomb” mentality developed, and isolated Catholic neighborhoods came to be called “Catholic ghettos.”
In spite of the isolation, some faithful Catholics sensed that the Church needed to reach out to others with the truth of the faith.
In the 19th century, Father Isaac Hecker (1819-1888) founded the Paulist Fathers with the aim of converting Protestants — and, indeed, all of America — to the Catholic faith. Father Hecker was a good man for the job, as he was a convert to the Church from Protestantism himself. But by the 20th century, the pastoral needs were great among those already in the fold, and even the Paulists focused on ministering to Catholics.
Other pioneering efforts were made by Bishop James Gibbons (1834-1921). In 1876, while riding circuit on horseback to minister to the handful of Catholics in the Diocese of Richmond, Va., he preached and wrote to explain the Catholic faith to Protestants. Later, as the much-beloved archbishop of Baltimore, Cardinal Gibbons focused his efforts on saving the Catholic working class for the Church.
Bishop John Keane (1839-1918) was another pioneer who looked outward to the larger society. He helped found The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., as a place of rigorous scholarship and became its first rector. His dream was to help Catholics meet the world and “conquer it” for Christ.
Devotional Spirituality
The needs of immigrant Catholics dominated the Church until after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). The Church was the center of their lives, with their spirituality largely centered on devotions, such as the rosary and novenas, and parish-community festivals. Eucharistic processions at Corpus Christi and Forty Hours were more devotional than liturgical. Marian devotion abounded, especially to the Immaculate Conception. Devotion to the Passion of Jesus, the Sacred Heart and saints such as Thérèse of Lisieux increased as well. May devotions to Mary and rosary-centered holy hours filled out the year.
Immigrant Catholics supported one another through mutual aid societies to provide help in times of sickness and death. Parish missions looked to moral reformation to strengthen the family unit. Many positive aspects of the immigrant spirituality — care for the needy, and men's and women's parish social clubs and confraternities — guarded against abandonment and promiscuity, yet maintained the protection of the “Catholic ghetto.” Catholics were secure in that ghetto and rarely looked out to others who were not part of the flock and who often looked down on them.
When Catholics looked outward during this time, they often did so by building Catholic churches and providing priests for rural America. Church building was the idea of Father Francis Kelly (1870-1944), founder of the Catholic Church Extension Society, and supplying priests the idea of Father William Howard Bishop (1885-1953), founder of the Home Missioners of America, also known as Glenmary. Progress was counted by a new church building or a priest in a formerly priestless county rather than by converts to the Catholic faith. Conversions were the goal of the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, or Maryknoll, established in 1911, but these were converts in the foreign missions.
Out of the Ghetto
Even during this time, some Catholics felt called to come out of the “ghetto” and challenge the Church with a different vision of Catholic life. Others wanted to offer the non-Catholic world the Catholic vision to counter the materialism and depravity they saw in American culture. Dorothy Day (1897-1980) challenged Catholics to embrace social reform through the Catholic Worker movement, which she founded with Peter Maurin in the early 1930s. Her view of Catholicism was a radical one, calling for voluntary renunciation of unneeded goods in order to live in solidarity with the poor.
Day was no stranger to radical decisions. Earlier in her life, she had embraced the Catholic faith while searching for truth and meaning; she was baptized even though her common-law husband and father of her child abandoned her because of her decision. The Catholic Worker movement provided a strong vision for the Church, although it was not always appreciated by the majority. Day's uncompromising pacifism led many to abandon the movement during World War II.
Similar efforts were made through Friendship House, founded in Harlem in 1938 by Russian immigrant Catherine de Hueck Doherty (1896-1985). It later spread to other American cities, including Chicago and Washington, and set up headquarters in Canada. The movement called on Catholics to effect racial change.
A more traditional, but no less radical, approach was undertaken by Mother Katharine Drexel (1858-1955) who founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People (see story on Page 1). Mother Katharine used her family fortune to found and staff vocational and training schools in which the sisters in her order ministered to these struggling Americans.
World War II and the GI Bill opened doors for Catholic Americans, by now the children and grandchildren of earlier immigrants. But, until after Vatican II, Catholics were still considered by many to be “set apart” from mainstream American society because of their loyalty to a “foreign power.”
The Jesuit Father John Courtney Murray (1904-1967) argued for the acceptance of the American system of separation of church and state and was silenced by Rome in the 1950s for his writings. By the time of Vatican II, he was called to Rome at the behest of Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York. Father Murray's thought became a part of Vatican II's groundbreaking Declaration on Religious Liberty, which recognized the right of a nation (such as the United States) to separate church and state. This document made it clear that one could be a good American and a good Catholic at the same time.
Homogeny, for Better and Worse
The Church was not spared from the great social upheaval that marked American society in the 1960s. The ghetto mentality was gone and Catholics became indistinguishable from mainstream America — sometimes with disastrous effects on them and the Church. Sunday church attendance dropped from 80% before Vatican II to 50% after; today it's around 30%.
And what of the Mullooly family of Chicago, whose forebears emigrated from Ireland in the 1850s? Four generations have risen since the first arrivals.
Of the known surviving descendants, almost all are active in their Catholic faith. Only several admit to being inactives, and none has become Protestant or unchurched. As things go, this is a much better record than for the Church in the United States as a whole.
Anthony Bosnick lectures on history and writes from Gaithersburg, Maryland.
----- EXCERPT: Catholic Soul in a New Nation ----- EXTENDED BODY: Anthony Bosnick ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Suicide, 'Health' Bills Halted in Calif. DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:SACRAMENTO, Calif.—Physician-assisted suicide and full-range “health centers” on school grounds won’t be approved this year, following a grass-roots, pro-life lobbying effort.
Pro-lifers feared that if the two California Assembly bills allowing suicide and the health centers were passed into law, they would have become models copied elsewhere in the country.
“I attribute the non-approval of these bills absolutely to a statewide awakening and a response by the public in their respective legislative districts,” said Bob Cielnicky, president of Life Priority Network, a statewide organization which coordinates public action on bills affecting life.
Assembly leaders decided not to bring the bills to a vote after a rash of phone calls, letters and e-mails helped ensure that a majority of the legislature would vote against the bills.
“It took legislators from both parties to stop these two dangerous bills,” Cielnicky noted. “Legislators are listening to their constituents.”
The so-called Death with Dignity Act was introduced by Assemblywoman Dion Aroner, a Democrat, at the initiation of the Americans for Death with Dignity. This bill authorized terminally ill adults who meet certain qualifications to request medication for suicide.
The bill was strongly opposed by the California Medical Association, as well as by hospices, hospitals, the California bishops, pro-life groups and many others.
The medical association emphasized that suicide is rarely a rational decision, but is most often associated with depression, other disorders, or pain. In 1997 and 1998, the Assembly approved two bills granting patients liberal access to a plethora of pain medication, undercutting an oft-used “death with dignity” argument about untreatable pain.
‘Fuzzy Language’
Hans Hemann, press secretary for Assemblywoman Aroner, said the legislator believes a terminally ill person should have a suicide option. “The polls showed over 75% thought people should have the right to end their life if they were within their last few months,” Hemann said.
But opponents say this figure contrasts sharply with the groundswell of opposition to the measure, and to a 1992 vote in which California voters rejected by a margin of 54% to 46% a similar measure, Proposition 161.
“The poll was deceptive,” said Carol Hogan, communications director for the California Catholic Conference. “Fuzzy language was used to blur the issue. For example, ‘pain medication’ rather than ‘lethal injection’ was used throughout. And participants in the poll were routinely asked if they supported physician-assisted dying, not physician-assisted suicide. Who would argue with having your physician assist in the natural dying process?”
Republican Assemblyman Bill Leonard credited the California Catholic bishops' office lobbyists with impacting this year's debate.
“The Catholic Conference did a very good job of lobbying all Catholic members to try to have us vote against it,” Leonard said. “It's a bad policy for the state of California to allow physicians to terminate the life of a patient. It puts the physician in a conflict-of-interest position; he takes an oath to defend and heal life, not to destroy it.”
Back Next Year?
While the bill may be dead for now, the issue is not. Assemblywoman Aroner was made chair of the Select Committee on Palliative Care. “We will use that forum to look at all issues of end of life care, including hospice, end of life and physician-assisted dying,” explained her press secretary, Hemann, who said Aroner's office plans to reintroduce the bill next year.
California Catholic Conference's Hogan explained that the committee analysis on the bill was very distorted. “This issue was struck down in the U.S. Supreme Court, but you would never know that from reading the bill analysis,” she explained.
Life Priority Network's Cielnicky added that Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat, worked closely with Aroner to restructure committee membership in order to speed the bill through two committees and onto the Assembly floor for a vote, which was never taken. Cielnicky and Hogan expect similar maneuvering when the bill is reintroduced next year.
“We [the coalition of opponents] have done some pro-active things on this issue,” said Hogan. “For example, the Hospice Association is sponsoring a bill to create an 800-number for people to call with end of life issues. People don’t know what options are available to them, especially in a crisis situation.” The state would be mandated to print up brochures, for display in every physician's office statewide, informing the public about end-of-life care issues and the 800-number.
School Health Centers
State Senate Bill 566, initiated by the Los Angeles Unified School District and introduced by Democratic state Sen. Martha Escutia, would have allowed “health centers” to be placed on school grounds, offering a full range of health and reproductive services, including abortion referrals, to schoolchildren, ultimately without parental notification.
According to Suzanne Wierbinski, chief of staff for Escutia, amendments reduced the measure to merely a request for funds to have the state's Department of Health Services “look into what can be established for school districts who chose to hook up with Healthy Families,” a state-run insurance program for children of low-income families, funded by federal matching dollars.
“It's hard to reach poor parents to sign up for this program, especially among the Latino communities,” said Wierbinski. “Our goal is to have a school district get reimbursed, through Healthy Families or [other state monies], for services they are already providing.”
Assemblyman Leonard said the bill was written in such a way that school districts could authorize medical services — including mental health and reproductive services — without parents being aware of it.
“That's just wrong,” he said. “We're responsible for our children, not some administrator. There was no parental control.”
But Catholic teaching is opposed to euthanasia, abortion and contraception. Pope John Paul II, in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), quotes the Second Vatican Council:
“‘Whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia, or willful self-destruction ... all these things and others like them are infamies indeed. They poison human society, and they do more harm to those who practice them than to those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are a supreme dishonor to the Creator’” (No. 3).
Cielnicky of Life Priority Network said both defeated measures were attacks against life at its earliest and later stages.
In the health care centers bill, he observed, “young, frightened pregnant girls could be counseled for an abortion without their parents even knowing — resulting in the death of an innocent child, along with other ramifications. In [the suicide bill], the end of life was threatened by allowing physician-assisted suicide, resulting in the killing of innocent elderly or infirm human beings. One need only look to Holland to see what this will do.”
Karen Walker is based in San Juan Capistrano, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Karen Walker ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: He's a Rock 'n' Roll Rebel for Life DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:Bryan Kemper shaves his head and has “Jesus” tattooed on his arm. His nationwide organization Rock for Life is enlisting thousands of teen-agers through rock ’n’ roll music to defend of the rights of unborn children. The Stafford, Va.-based offshoot of American Life League has 50 chapters across the United States. At the Rock for Life Roe v. Wade Anniversary Concert in Crystal City, Va., on Jan. 22, Kemper spoke with Register staff writer Joshua Mercer.
Mercer: Why did you start Rock for Life?
Kemper: It was a vision. I went into an abortion clinic to put pro-life literature into their magazines. Then a door opened and I watched as a baby was killed right before my very eyes. I could see the mother crying. I think God wanted me to see that. It showed me the horror of abortion. I wept for hours. Then I heard God tell me, “Bryan, I want you to save my children.”
What inspired you to become so pro-life to begin with?
When I was 12, I did necromancy. I would conjure up demons in cats and dogs. I would carve 666 on my forehead. I got beat up every day. Drugs were my escape.
In 1989, I was at a Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan concert in Anaheim. I overdosed and was sent to the hospital. Adoctor picked me out of all the people in the group and talked to me about Jesus.
Then the fireman who took me to the ambulance ... I ran into him when I went swimming the very next day. He said, “I want to talk to you.” And he talked about Jesus.
That week I was home ready to get high and I started to shake. I got convicted by the Holy Spirit. I went into a church and I told them, “I'm a drug addict.” They said, “We'll get you some food and a place to stay.”
So I prayed. I said, “All right, Jesus, I need you.” I woke up and I was a new person. I had such a huge desire to learn about God and to read the Bible.
How does it feel like to be on Bill Maher's TV show, “Politically Incorrect”?
It was interesting. [Laughs] I expected them to team up on me, which of course they did.
Why would Bill Maher even have you on the show if you're so pro-life?
He is very respectful with me off-camera. They like me and they're gonna keep asking me back. I've been on three times. If they had everyone they liked on the show, it would be a lame show. It makes for a good show to have me there. They said they like people who talk.
Do you ever get any strange looks with your tattoos, body piercing and your “Abortion is Mean” sweatshirt?
Yes! [Laughs.] I tell you, though, I got these two guys who just starting clapping for me. I had a pilot who thanked me. A lot of waiters and waitresses, too. Over 80% of the comments are positive. People are pro-life.
Any hecklers?
People cuss at me. It helps keep me on my toes.
How big is Rock for Life these days?
We have 72 local chapters. We have booths at 1,000 concerts a year and 30,000 kids have signed our pro-life pledge so far.
How do you see the future of Rock for Life?
I have a vision of hundreds and thousands of young, radical, alternative kids in front of abortion clinics and porno shops. And I know it's going to show up in the media. They'll report it because they won’t believe it.
So you're having fun with this, right?
I love hanging out with these kids. Just knowing that there are kids who say “I used to be pro-choice and now I'm pro-life.” To see thousands of kids standing for the Gospel of life because of Rock for Life. That's where the future is — encouraging the kids to get involved. I feel blessed that I know this is what I supposed to do.
Any other goals?
I'd like to make it on the cover of Rolling Stone. I've already made the cover of their Web site at least twice.
----- EXCERPT: ProLife ProFile ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Journalist Calls the Church a Key to Ending Death Penalty DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:NEW YORK—It's just a matter of time.
Soon, said author Alan Berlow, a convict will be executed in an American prison and later found to have been innocent beyond a shadow of a doubt.
For that reason, Berlow hopes Catholics are listening to Pope John Paul II and will demand an end to capital punishment.
“When a convict is killed, and later exonerated, people will start taking a more serious look at the death penalty,” said Berlow. “Many people who favor the death penalty back off that position when confronted with the very real possibility that we might put to death an innocent person who was wrongly convicted.”
Berlow, a free-lance journalist and author of Dead Season: A Story of Murder and Revenge, wrote a feature in the November issue of The Atlantic Monthly magazine that illustrates alarming flaws in the criminal justice system. He said 80 inmates have been acquitted of their crimes while awaiting executions since states resumed the death penalty in 1976.
Unless dramatic improvements are made to perfect the nation's criminal justice system, he said, innocent suspects will continue to be convicted and, short of a perfect system, he contended, the death penalty must be abolished.
“We're a long way from ridding this country of capital punishment, but we are certainly farther along because of the Catholic Church,” said Berlow, who is not Catholic. “The Pope has been a major, consistent moral presence regarding the death penalty. He's a credible, unmoving force that is of tremendous value.”
If the Holy Father's opinion of capital punishment was not already clear to Americans, he hammered it home during his visit to St. Louis in January 1999. While there, he asked Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan, a Protestant, to commute the death sentence of convicted murderer Darrell Mease to life in prison. The governor agreed.
Poor And Minorities
Berlow's opposition to the death penalty is formed around his belief that minorities and the poor have lesser chances at receiving fair trials in American courts. He describes them as easy targets in a culture that's intolerant of crime.
His Atlantic feature detailed an array of murder convictions in which the “guilty” have later been found to be innocent or were originally tried in what amounted to kangaroo courts.
He tells the story of Aden Harrison Jr., a black man indicted for murder in Georgia. Harrison's court-appointed attorney was 83 years old, aloof, and had once served as imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Dennis Williams, a murder convict who was exonerated after an investigation by Northwestern University journalism students in 1996, was defended by a lawyer who was simultaneously defending himself in an Illinois disbarment proceedings. Another suspect, a retarded man with an IQ of 80, was allowed to defend himself in court.
“How many cases of prosecutor-ial misconduct will it take before the public is convinced our system isn’t working right?” Berlow asked. “These cases of prosecutorial misconduct, coupled with inadequate defense, are easy to find. Yet to the American public, all murder suspects are monsters who deserve to die. In fact, some are innocent people wrongly accused and convicted for political expedience.”
Berlow reported on an institutionalized conflict of interest, in which the same state that wants a murder conviction typically hires and pays the attorney who defends the suspect. The public defenders, or state-appointed defense attorneys, are given precious little money to work with. Some public defenders don’t clear $12 an hour, and work dozens of cases at once.
“By failing to fund counsel for indigents adequately a state or locality not only saves an enormous amount of money but also makes meaningful defenses difficult if not impossible, thus easing the govern-ment's burden in winning convictions and imposing death sentences, and diminishing the likelihood that heinous errors will ever be discovered,” Berlow wrote.
Berlow said widespread support of capital punishment mostly reflects ignorance of the issue.
“[It] is based in a simple desire for revenge,” Berlow told the Register. “People in this country are presented daily with media evidence of horrible crimes against humanity, committed by horrible people who must be guilty. This makes them want revenge.”
Impossible Perfection
Not true, said Father George William Rutler, author and priest in the Archdiocese of New York. Although he credits John Paul for his sincere belief that bloodless ways are available to protect innocent lives from convicted murderers, Father Rutler said the system will never be that perfect.
“It's not accurate to characterize our penal system, in this country, as one generic entity,” Father Rutler told the Register. “We have all sorts of different kinds of prisons, in many different conditions, run by an array of different agencies, all with varying levels of security. Americans rightly do not trust the prison system to keep murderers locked up. So no Catholic needs to suffer a crisis of conscience for supporting the death penalty.”
Dan Misleh, policy adviser on nonviolence issues for the U.S. Catholic Conference in Washington, D.C., said Father Rutler is correct: “It is true that the Catholic Church allows for the death penalty,” said Misleh.
But he said Catholics in America, most of whom support the death penalty, should embrace the Pope's opposition to the death penalty for the reasons Berlow described.
“Because we have a penal system in the United States that makes it possible to keep convicted murderers from ever returning to the street,” Misleh told Register, “there's very little wiggle room for American Catholics to support capital punishment. Bloodless penalties that protect innocent lives, such as life sentences for murderers, are more in keeping with the Gospel of life.”
Education for Life
Berlow thinks education is key to curbing public support of the death penalty. If votes reflected knowledge, rather than emotion, Berlow said political support for capital punishment would wane in response to election and polling results.
“When you present people with very real situations, such as the prospect of innocent people being executed, the support drops off,” he said. “When you ask about the death penalty in the context of it being racially biased, it loses a few more points of support. Considering the current state of our criminal justice system, it's difficult to make a moral argument in favor of the death penalty. Most politicians know this, but they don’t care. They make their decisions based on polling numbers.”
Innocent mistakes and lack of adequate defense counsel account for most wrongful murder convictions. But in his years of journalistic research, Berlow said he has found many murder convictions in which prosecutors ignored exculpatory evidence.
He claims to have seen cases in which prosecutors have hidden facts that would have exonerated suspects. He knows of prosecutors who have fabricated evidence to aid in their prosecutions.
“Sometimes it's because someone is running for higher office, and they need a conviction in an emotionally charged case,” Berlow said.
“Many times the police and prosecutors ignore facts that would clear a suspect simply because they want to believe they have the right guy. They don’t want to face the fact they might be going after an innocent man.
Many times they convince themselves they are prosecuting a bad person, even if he may not be guilty of this particular crime.”
Berlow urged Catholics to arm themselves with facts and examine closely the murder convictions in their own home-towns. He said few Americans, Catholic or not, can support the government execution of an innocent man.
“Innocent convicts on death row are the canary in the coal mine,” said Berlow. They are the red flag saying if this many people on death row were wrongly convicted, how many other innocent suspects are convicted of lesser crimes? Our criminal justice system is seriously flawed, and we have no business killing people unless and until it improves.”
Wayne Laugesen writes from Boulder, Colorado.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Wayne Laugesen ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: The Gospel Of Life DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:In discussing capital punishment in his 1995 enclyclical, Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II outlines the conditions under which capital punishment (see story below) can be considered:
… 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 non-existent.
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.” (48)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Life Notes DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:First Baby Appears on U.S. Currency
PRO-LIFE ACTION LEAGUE, Feb. 3—The latest coin from the U.S. Mint features a mother with her child.
“The new United States gold dollar coin is a sign of the changing attitude of Americans toward motherhood,” said Joseph Scheidler, executive director of the Pro-Life Action League. “This is the first U.S. coin in the 208-year history of the United States Mint to honor an infant.”
The U.S. Mint released the coin featuring the American Indian woman Sakagewea and her infant son Feb. 2. Sakagewea was the teen-age Shoshone woman who served as an interpreter and guide for Lewis and Clark on their exploration through the Northwest Territory in 1804-06. Her son, Jean Baptiste was born on the trip.
“For the past couple of decades motherhood has been treated as a second-rate vocation,” said Scheidler. “But polls show that women are, in increasing numbers, opting to leave the corporate world to take on motherhood as a full-time role. The new coin celebrates the contribution of not only Sakagewea, but of all mothers who focus their time and talents on creating stronger families and communities.”
Schiedler hopes the coin becomes popular. “I hope that the image of the child on this coin will help Americans recognize the value of each and every child, born and unborn. We love it! We are calling it the ‘Pro-life Dollar.’”
Ultrasounds Not Linked to Leukemia Risk
REUTERS, Jan. 28—Ultrasound examinations in early or late pregnancy do not increase a child's risk of getting leukemia, doctors in Sweden said.
They conducted a nationwide study on the effects of ultrasound and possible links to two types of leukaemia, Reuters reported.
“We could not detect any association between exposure to ultrasound during pregnancy and lymphatic or myeloid leukaemia,” they said in a report in the British Medical Journal.
The researchers compared the ultrasound exposure of all the children in Sweden diagnosed with leukemia between 1973 and 1989 and an equal number of healthy children, reported Reuters. Researchers said the risk of leukemia was not influenced by either the number of ultrasound examinations or when they were performed.
Bill Targets Assaults on Pregnant Mothers
DENVER POST, Feb. 2—Unborn children in Colorado are one step closer to legal protection from criminals that assault their mothers, the Post reports.
A bill, passed by the House State Affairs Committee Feb. 1, would make it a felon to attack pregnant women and injure or kill the unborn child. “We have no laws in Colorado for the crime of a fetus dying,” said Rep. Lynn Hefley, the bill sponsor. “If a woman's purse is stolen, that's a crime and there's punishment for that. Stealing away an unborn child from a woman – there's no punishment for that.”
Natasha Bergman, 17, of Colorado Springs told the committee that she had a miscarriage last June after her boyfriend punched her in the stomach when she was more than two months pregnant. She said he was charged with third-degree assault and harassment, but was never sent to prison, the Denver newspaper said.
“Something needs to be done. You need to make a law that will punish guys that do that,” she said after the hearing. “They should have to hurt the way they hurt someone else.”
The bill has several more steps before becoming law.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Did You Know? DATE: 02/13/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 13-19, 2000 ----- BODY:The Alan Guttmacher Institute, which favors the “freedom to terminate unwanted pregnancies,” reports that 12% or 164,400 of the 1.3 million abortions that occurred in 1996 were carried out after 12 weeks of pregnancy, the start of the second trimester.
Even more disturbing, some 13,700 of those abortions took place after week 21, the point at which many babies have been known to survive.
(Source: Priests For Life, January-February 2000 newsletter)
----- EXCERPT: Fact of Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Suicide Video Triggers Uproar DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:EUGENE, Ore.—Alison Connolly couldn't believe her eyes. She was watching NBC's “Today Show” and they showed clips from video that shows people how to commit suicide.
“I've got this on and my kids are eating breakfast,” Connolly, of North Beaverton, Ore., told the Register.
In the video clips, euthanasia activist Derek Humphry demonstrated how to use a plastic bag for suffocation and how to mix deadly pills in with applesauce, said Connolly. As the mother of two young kids, she called this dangerous.
“You have a tough enough time keeping bags away from them,” she said. “Then they might see this adult with a bag on his head. They don't know it's only supposed to be for ‘terminally ill people.’”
Connolly added, “They gave him a free advertisement. They told you that you can buy this video on the Internet.”
The clips came from a video that was broadcast on a public-access channel in Eugene, Ore., by Humphry on Feb. 2. The ensuing debate over the video has placed Humphry onto national TV programs.
After airing the clips, the “Today Show” invited Humphry and Barbara Coombs Lee to debate the merits of showing the tape on cable television. Coombs Lee is executive director of Compassion in Dying Federation, a Portland, Ore.-based group which is also in favor of assisted suicide.
Connolly objected that both panelists were in favor of assisted suicide. “The American people thought they saw a debate,” she said. “But no one on the show was defending the value of human life.”
The “Today Show” initially invited Gregory Hamilton, a Portland psychiatrist, to debate with Humphry on national TV. Hamilton founded Physicians for Compassionate Care in 1994 to respond to advocates of euthanasia.
“They talked for several days about having a serious voice who was opposed to what Derek Humphry was doing,” Hamilton told the Register.
“They told me they would have me on the show on Thursday. Then they said they had news, and the program would be postponed until Friday,” said Hamilton. “They put on Barbara Coombs Lee on Thursday instead.”
He said that the public should not be fooled by Humphry and Coombs Lee. “They're really disagreeing about tactics,” he noted. “They're playing bad cop/good cop.”
The “Today Show” would not return calls for comment.
Hamilton said that the “Today Show” painted the video in an educational and compassionate manner, which is dangerous.
“What's so dangerous is his program's powerful suggestion that suicide is OK and ‘Here's how you do it,’” Hamilton told the Register. “It's very clear that it will influence depressed adults and teen-agers with an addiction as well as impressionable children.”
The psychiatrist added of Humphry: “He has no training in medicine. He has no training in health and hope. He's an expert in making people dead.”
Humphry did not return repeated calls for comment.
National Implications
Robert J. Castagna, the executive director of the Oregon Catholic Conference, hoped that the video would awaken Oregonians to the dangers of assisted suicide.
“I hope it's giving the people pause to think about what the approval of assisted suicide has lead to, and to reconsider the step that Oregon has taken,” Castagna told the Register.
Castagna lambasted Humphry for airing the video on public-access television.
“Does he have a legal right to air this? He may. Does he have a moral right? I don't think so,” he said. “It's highly irresponsible.”
Castagna warns what happens in Oregon could happen elsewhere. Voters in Maine will have the chance to legalize assisted suicide in a November vote.
Last year the U.S. House passed the Pain Relief Promotion Act that would effectively prohibit physician-assisted suicide in Oregon. Castagna hopes that the Senate will take into consideration the tactics employed by Humphry and pass the bill soon.
In his 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), Pope John Paul II criticized attempts to call euthanasia merciful.
“True ‘compassion’ leads to sharing another's pain; it does not kill the person whose suffering we cannot bear,” the Holy Father wrote in section No. 66 of the encyclical. “Moreover, the act of euthanasia appears all the more perverse if it is carried out by those, like relatives, who are supposed to treat a family member with patience and love, or by those, such as doctors, who by virtue of their specific profession are supposed to care for the sick person even in the most painful terminal stages.”
Burke Balch, the director of medical ethics at the National Right to Life, said that Humphry thinks Oregon's law doesn't go far enough. “He said on CNN's ‘Talk Back Live,’ ‘Even the Oregon law doesn't help everybody, it has strong limitations and doesn't include everybody,’” said Balch.
Balch is confident, however, that the U.S. Senate will put an end to assisted-suicide in Oregon by passing the Pain Relief Promotion Act by March.
“We've just added three additional co-sponsors for the bill,” he said. “Daniel Patrick Moynihan also signed up with the bill. He has a lot of stature with moderates in both parties.”
“We're pretty confident that there's a good majority to approve,” he added. “But we need 60 votes,” because of a threatened filibuster by Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden. Balch thinks that the filibuster can be stopped. “I think we have a good shot, but it's not clear yet.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: House Passes Marriage Tax Relief DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON—Jim Crawford of Bryantown, Md., drove to the nation's capital to petition Congress to alleviate a discrepancy in the tax code that penalizes married couples.
Crawford said that he noticed the marriage penalty when comparing his family's tax bite with a similar couple of the same income bracket.
“They were divorced and they were paying $1,000 less than us,” Crawford told the Register. “It seems that every April 15 we get fined $1,000 for being married and it's just not right.”
The marriage penalty refers to the additional taxes paid by many two-income, married couples. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 25 million families pay an average of $1,400 in taxes because of the marriage tax penalty.
Crawford said it's unlikely that politicians intentionally passed laws to penalize marriage, but now that this situation has caught their attention, they should act as quickly as possible to rectify the situation.
“It got this way by accident,” he said, “but it's easy to rectify.”
Crawford's plea didn't go unanswered.
In a bipartisan vote Feb. 10, the U.S. House voted 268-158 to end the marriage penalty, timed just days before St. Valentine's Day. Although 48 Democrats joined all Republicans in favor of the tax change, the vote fell short of a vetoproof majority.
“Today a majority of the House of Representatives said no to the unfair marriage tax penalty, and said yes to the 25 million married couples who suffer this $1,400 tax penalty just because they are married,” said the bill's sponsor, Rep. Jerry Weller, R-Ill.
President Clinton has threatened to veto the bill, but stressed that the marriage penalty must be corrected. At a Capitol Hill appearance he said, “We know we should do this.” Clinton's proposed a $45 billion tax plan to alleviate the part of the penalty that focuses on lower- and middle-class families. The House was bolder, proposing a $182 billion plan to almost completely eliminate the penalty for all married couples regardless of income.
House Speaker Denny Hastert commended the bill. “We need a tax code that recognizes that working families need help,” the Illinois Republican said. “They don't need the federal government picking their pocket and taking money out of their account just because they're married.”
The legislation would:
—increase the standard deduction for married couples filing jointly by $1,450, up to $8,800 beginning in 2001;
—double the standard deduction for married couples to twice that of single filers by 2001;
—expand the lowest tax bracket (15%) to $51,500 from $43,050 for married couples.
—increase the Earned Income Tax Credit by $2,000 to include those who make $32,580 per year.
Questioning the Cost
Democrats worried that the bill would threaten the strong economy and the newfound surpluses.
Michigan Democrat Sander Levin said, “The Republican proposal falls far outside this common sense budget framework. It would drain down surpluses that may be needed for Social Security and Medicare.”
But citizen Crawford from Maryland insists that the marriage penalty tax ought to be eliminated on principle even if it left less money in the Treasury.
“I don't care how much the estimates are,” said Crawford. “The fact is this is a gross injustice. It makes my blood curdle.”
Crawford said his daughter asked him about the penalty before she got married: “She asked me, ‘But does that mean we will pay more this year because we're getting married?’ and I said, 'Yes, Pam, you will pay more this year because you checked the box marked ‘Married.’”
The Next Step
The bill now goes to the Senate where support is strong from both sides of the aisle.
Senate minority leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., told reporters, “There is a real good possibility we'll pass some form of marriage penalty tax relief this year.”
Senate Finance Committee Chairman William Roth, R-Del., said the issue was “a top priority” for his panel. “We look forward to righting this wrong.”
The Senate, known for long deliberation, promises swift action on the bill. Republicans hope to bring the legislation to the floor for a vote by March 10.
This is the fourth time since 1997 that Rep. Weller has tried to end the marriage penalty in the tax code.
During the House debate, Weller recited the number of married couples that reside in the districts of individual Democrats when they came to the floor to oppose the bill.
“You may be able to explain your opposition to them, but I sure can't,” Weller said each time.
----- EXCERPT: But Vote Doesn't Have Vetoproof Majority ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Executions Moratorium Applauded DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:CHICAGO—Catholics on both sides of the capital-punishment debate have welcomed a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois.
Reflecting growing concern about the possibility of executing people wrongfully convicted of capital crimes, Gov. George Ryan halted all executions and will appoint a commission to study the death penalty in his state.
The Republican, who supports the death penalty, cited a “shameful record of convicting innocent people and putting them on death row” in his Jan. 31 announcement. Since Illinois reinstated the death penalty in 1977, 13 men have been exonerated of crimes that had placed them on death row.
The Catholic Conference of Illinois, the public policy arm of the state's Catholic bishops, supports the moratorium.
“We applaud the governor's action, because we've been supportive of the death penalty moratorium for more than a year,”said Doug Delaney, conference executive director. “As we've been saying all along, the evidence shows that there should be a moratorium, just to step back and look at the way the death penalty is being [applied].”
Gov. Ryan has placed no restrictions on his planned commission but said he hopes it will come up with recommendations in time for a legislative proposal in next year's spring session of the General Assembly.
“If nothing else, this will be an opportunity to look at the criminal justice system,” Bill Purcell, director of the Office for Peace and Justice of the Archdiocese of Chicago, told the Register.
“There are fairness issues, especially when it comes to minorities and disadvantaged persons,” he added. “There are problems with adequate legal representation and basic human rights — some of the men were tortured to obtain confessions.”
Catholics support the death penalty to the same extent as the general public — at a rate of 70 to 80%, depending on the poll.
Tom Roeser of Chicago, chairman of the 700-strong Catholic Citizens of Illinois, told the Register that he supports the death penalty but believes a moratorium is needed in Illinois.
“You can't back [capital punishment] with the number of people falsely accused,” Roeser contended. “The validity of the death penalty is transcended by the errors made by prosecutors and the emergence of DNA tests.”
While Illinois is the first state to halt capital punishment for the purposes of studying its fairness, bills that would halt executions are being considered in a dozen states.
President Clinton has also said a moratorium on the federal govern-ment's use of the death penalty should be considered. In a Feb. 9 letter to Clinton, the head of the U.S. bishops' conference, Bishop Joseph Fiorenza of Galveston-Houston, urged such a moratorium on federal executions.
At least six states weighed a moratorium last year but none adopted it. The Nebraska Legislature approved a halt, citing racial bias in sentencing, but the governor vetoed it.
Catholic and Jewish leaders launched a national campaign in December to abolish capital punishment. The National Jewish/Catholic Consultation, backed by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, attacked the death penalty on moral and social grounds. The Catholic and Jewish leaders said executions undermine the sanctity of human life and fail to deter crime.
Illinois Gov. George Ryan cited a ‘shameful record of convicting innocent people and putting them on death row.’
Pope John Paul II's visit to St. Louis a year ago provided a fresh impetus to the movement to end capital punishment. The Pope chastised Americans for their support of the death penalty. “The dignity of human life must never be taken away even in the case of someone who has done great evil,” the Holy Father said during a homily. “I renew the appeal for a consensus to end the death penalty, which is both cruel and unnecessary.”
Gov. Ryan's action against the death penalty came after a series of stories in the Chicago Tribune blasting the state's criminal justice system. The investigation showed that roughly half of the state's capital cases that completed at least one round of appeals were reversed for a new trial or sentencing hearing. The stories detailed what the newspaper described as misconduct by prosecutors and police, dubious forensic evidence and bias against blacks.
Since 1977 when the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, 610 inmates have been executed. Eighty-five people on death row have either been retried and acquitted or saw the charges against them dropped, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
The most recent execution in Illinois was carried out in March 1999. None of the 150 inmates on death row have an exact execution date, though about a dozen may reach the end of the appeals process in the next year or so.
Three of the exonerated men once on death row were freed after journalism students at Northwestern University investigated their cases and showed their innocence. Their professor, David Protess, urged Ryan to end capital punishment.
“The system doesn't work — I'm not taking a moral position,” Protess told the Register. “It's run by people, and human judgment is fallible.”
Cardinal Francis George of Chicago applauded the moratorium. “The justice system should work for all people,” said in a statement on the Archdiocese of Chicago's Web page. “Sometimes people who are poor and people of color do not get adequate help and fair treatment in the judicial system.
“A good response to violence in our neighborhoods is not capital punishment but, rather, the ongoing reform of the legal and correctional systems, the strengthening of family life and other ties, and the fostering of respect for the dignity of all human life.”
Jay Copp writes from Chicago.(Catholic News Service contributed to this report)
----- EXCERPT:PROPONENTS AND FOES BACK ILLINOIS DECSION ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jay Copp ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Sudan Film Captures a Nation's Genocide DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:NEW YORK—A lethal Feb. 8 air-bombing attack on a group of Catholic grade-schoolers in Kauda, Sudan, has strengthened the commitment of a small group of Catholic filmmakers to help reveal the plight of the persecuted Nuba and Dinka peoples of central Sudan to the international community. Many Nubans and Dinkas are Catholic.
The producers of The Hidden Gift: War & Faith in Sudan first heard about the attack on Feb. 10, the day of the film's West Coast premiere at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.
It made the event “very difficult,” said Ron Austin, executive producer of the film.
Austin was interviewed by the Register at the documentary's Feb. 13 East Coast premiere, held at New York's Fordham University Law School.
Some of the children, who were killed by forces loyal to the fundamentalist Islamic regime headquartered in the capital of Khartoum, appeared in The Hidden Gift, said David Tlapek, the documentary's director, producer and co-cameraman. The school the students attended was founded by Bishop Macram Max Gassis, the bishop of the central Sudan Diocese of El Obeid.
Bishop Gassis, a Sudanese national living in exile in Nairobi, Kenya, is the central figure of The Hidden Gift. The 84-minute documentary was edited from 37 hours of footage shot during two apostolic and relief visits he made under extremely difficult conditions to his embattled and isolated flock in the Nuba Mountains and the neighboring Dinka flat-lands. The first visit took place over Christmas 1998, the second over Easter 1999.
The Feb. 8 bombing attack killed 14 children and wounded 17, some critically. One teacher also died, and 10 students are still missing. The students, who were part of the only “well-established school” in the Nuba Mountains, according to Bishop Gassis, had been studying English under a tree when the shrapnel-laden bombs fell.
The Khartoum regime, which assumed power over northern Sudan in a 1989 coup d'état, defended the attack as a legitimate target of war. The regime has been ruthlessly seeking to stamp out non-Islamic religions in central and southern Sudan in the years since it gained control of the north.
A spokesman at the Sudanese embassy in Nairobi also justified the attack, saying that it had been delivered to a Sudan People's Liberation military camp. The SLAP is leading a rebellion for autonomy in the largely Christian and animist southern Sudan.
Bishop Gassis, who spoke at the New York premiere of, decried the embassy spokesman's statement, asking, “How could a person get up to say that it's not an injustice to kill children?”
About 2 million people have been killed in Sudan since the civil war between northern and southern Sudan broke out in 1983 — more than those killed in Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya combined, said Bishop Gassis. About 5 million Sudanese have been displaced since the war started.
Thousands of non-Muslim Sudanese have been sold into slavery, according to William Saunders, the executive director of Sudan Relief & Rescue Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based not-for-profit formed at the request of Bishop Gassis.
Many of the enslaved are Catholic Nubans and Dinkas; some were children and adolescents when they were snatched by the Muslim Arab slavers who have the support of the Khartoum regime. According to figures quoted by Gabriel Meyer, the writer and narrator of “The Hidden Gift” and a former National Catholic Register associate editor, the going rate for adolescents and young adults is $100; children over age 5 are sold for $50.
Several of the enslaved who escaped and returned to their peoples appear in the documentary. They tell Bishop Gassis how they were captured, the brutal treatment they endured, the attempts made to brainwash them into accepting fundamentalist Islam, and their sadness at being forcibly taken from their families.
The bishop heard some particularly poignant stories when he visited one group of hard-hit Dinka refugees. This was the first visit in 30 years that they had received from a bishop or a priest. Yet, in that time, they had remained deeply Catholic.
The refugees were highly excited by Bishop Gassis' visit. Despite their extreme poverty, they held a feast in his honor. They participated with great solemnity in an outdoor Mass that included scores of people making their first holy Communion or receiving confirmation.
The bishop was received with joy and respect everywhere he went during the two apostolic missions chronicled in The Hidden Gift. Great gatherings were held to recognize his visit; these included traditional songs, dances and oratory. Thousands attended his outdoor Masses, listening closely to his homilies of hope.
David Tlapek said he was “very impressed by the reverence and depth in the way they went about their religious ceremonies. It's as if they're so dear, rare and precious that they're embraced with enthusiasm.”
On one memorable occasion, Bishop Gassis was interrupted in the middle of his homily by news that planes were coming to bomb the gathering. The Nubans received the information with quiet, dignity and a lack of surprise. They waited until the threat had passed, and Mass was resumed. The bishop baptized 90 and confirmed 25.
Bishop Gassis is determined to remind the world of his forgotten countrymen. He has testified before Congress, the United Nations, and human-rights groups. He even asked Gabriel Meyer, who had interviewed him for a November 1997 Register article, to accompany him to Sudan. Their December 1998 trip served as the basis for The Hidden Gift.
When Meyer and cameraman Peter Salapatas returned from Africa, the two men, along with Ron Austin and David Tlapek, realized they had the makings of a compelling documentary. But they felt they needed more.
So Meyer and Tlapek joined Bishop Gassis on his Easter 1999 trip. Their new footage allowed them to make a more compelling case for the Nubans and Dinkas.
After careful editing and the financial and emotional support of many who were determined to bring The Hidden Gift to the public, the documentary was finished at the end of 1999. The filmmakers hope to show it to Congress; they're already planning a Washington premiere at Georgetown University. In June, they will probably take it to Europe.
Ron Austin believes that the Holy Spirit has been integral to “The Hidden Gift.” Before he heard about the December 1998 trip, the scriptwriter knew “nothing” about the Sudanese. He feels that the Holy Spirit grabbed Meyer and him by “the scruff of our necks” so they could help the Nubans and Dinkas.
“As Catholics,” he said, “we're called to recognize everybody, including the needy. Who are the most needy? The Sudanese.”
Loretta G. Seyer is the editor of Catholic Faith & Family.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Loreitag G.Seyer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Full Steam Ahead DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:He's president and founder of the newly formed Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C., a research organization dedicated to the study of religion and culture. He's written, translated or edited more than a dozen books on Catholic culture, politics and American society. He recently spoke with Register staff writer Brian McGuire.
McGuire: A recent letter issued by the Faith & Reason Institute outlines its mission. At bottom, the institute seems interested in squaring Catholicism with pluralism. Do you think America provides fertile soil for the faith or not?
Royal: Perhaps the most striking feature of America in the 21st century is the widespread, though still unfocused, sense that we need some kind of moral and spiritual renewal. A large majority of the American people senses that something like the Church's authoritative voice is what's missing. We live in a pluralistic nation, yes, and also face some residual anti-Catholicism. But there are enormous opportunities out there as well. Personally, I believe it would be better for Catholics not to begin with worries over pluralism, but to step forward with greater force and a specifically Catholic message. In the natural course of things, pluralism will emerge as others with strong visions of their own make their own contributions to the public square.
The name of your organization calls to mind the Pope's most recent encyclical, Fides et Ratio. Does his vision for a Christian culture inform the work of the institute?
Absolutely. In fact, John Paul II is a model for all of us as to how to deal with modern societies. Because he is confident in the validity of the faith, he has had no hesitations about sifting out the gold from the dross in contemporary thought and politics. Many more of us should follow his lead. Catholicity means universality.
T.S. Eliot once remarked that we all try to be a little more universal than we really are. That may have been true in his day, but I think that it is a great failing on the part of many Catholics that we do not strive more to bring our rich tradition to bear on science, ethics, philosophy, politics and a host of other dimensions of the culture.
The great figures of the Christian past like Thomas Aquinas and Dante did precisely that. There is a lot more information to be mastered today, but unless Catholics at least try to present a comprehensive vision of how the human prospect currently hangs together, who else will do it?
Why, in your view, has the Catholic politician often become almost synonymous with compromise and betrayal of the faith?
For a long time, Catholics in America behaved like second-class citizens. They had to prove their loyalty, quiet Protestant fears and overcome the perception that they belonged to inferior ethnic groups. Hence, some of the unfortunate phenomena you mention. Today, things are quite different. Catholics are among the most successful religious groups in America. We are a large church, larger than the next 15 denominations combined. Quite a few public Catholics still mistakenly believe that pluralism means they cannot “impose their values” on anyone else. It's clear that if we — perhaps in coalitions with others — do not implement good values, then the current lowest-common-denominator cultural standards will triumph.
Pluralism means letting all ideas compete fairly in the society, not that we pre-emptively withhold the fullness of our thinking lest we offend against some democratic etiquette.
One of your projects at the Faith & Reason Institute is an extensive survey of American Catholics — to see whether or not they apply the faith they profess at the voting booth. I'm sure many people would say a survey like this is unnecessary, that it's obvious most Catholics don't vote with their conscience, particularly on life issues. Why the survey?
Surveys can be nothing better than what the old pagan priests did when they consulted the entrails of birds to probe the future. But properly understood, they may have some value. I have to confess that if the Pew Charitable Trusts, which is supporting our program on Catholics and the American Public Square, had not asked for some surveys, they would not have been a high priority for me. But we have already seen that there are some surprising data out there.
Steve Wagner has discovered, for example, that “active” Catholics, by which he means people who attend Mass at least three times a month … have a very different view of America than their passive counterparts. I hope that our surveys and focus groups will probe more deeply into seeing how Americans are formed in the faith.
Obviously, families play a big role. But what about formal schooling? Do Americans who attend Catholic schools still absorb a different ethos? What about Catholic colleges and universities? I suspect that Catholicism grows more diluted at the higher reaches of the Catholic educational system. But I'm curious about where we get our Catholicism from in year-2000 America.
Would a revitalized religious environment make it easier to live the faith? And is this what we want? On the one hand, you say that we should look to the heroic witness of the martyrs as an example of Christian living and on the other hand, that we should work to create a truly Catholic culture. Are these contradictory pictures?
I've just written a 600-page book entitled The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century, which will appear this spring. So the heroic virtues of martyrs are fresh in my mind. St. Thomas More once said that the times are never so bad that a good man cannot live well in them. He proved it by his death.
We need to remember that since the earliest times, Jesus and the apostles warned us that persecution and martyrdom are the natural reaction of a world that hates the light. Heroic resistance to pressure, I believe, will become more and more important for anyone who wants to remain Catholic, even in supposedly tolerant modern states. But we cannot be content with that. The Church's social teaching clearly recommends both that we respect the consciences of others but seek to create a civilization of love.
To take just one concrete example: Abortion is hard to combat because when an unwanted pregnancy occurs, women and girls have already been habituated to the idea that killing the unborn is an easy out. Anyone who has ever tried to counsel someone in those circumstances knows that the whole weight of a self-indulgent culture emerges at that point. Students take off a year to go abroad all the time, but no one has been catechized to believe that it might be heroically humane to spare the life of an unborn child by temporarily delaying education and career.
We need to start much further back to reform the society — first by pointing out that extramarital sex is already inviting murder. But then by creating a world that does not put massive temptation in the way of weak people like ourselves. I wish I could say that at the end of our three-year program we will have achieved that and could then look into reforming the rest of the world. But this will be a long, though not impossible, struggle. Libertine England turned into Victorian England in a short period. We in America might do the same.
Peter Kreeft has talked about uniting Catholics, Protestants and Muslims in what he calls an “ecumenical jihad” against the common enemy of atheistic humanism. But aren't there significant differences between Islam and Catholicism that would make this union more contentious than the current one? In other words, doesn't pluralism inevitably lead to conflict among competing orthodoxies?
With all due respect to Professor Kreeft's great contributions, I do not like using military metaphors like “jihads” or “culture wars” for conflicts in civil society. They may take an ugly turn. That said, I'm certainly in favor of any possible work with whatever group. The problem today is that when America was founded, it had a sense that a commitment to virtue has to undergird a self-governing people. Some elements of those of this commitment exist in Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism — the Dalai Lama has recently become a forceful proponent of good political principles, for instance. But there are also some difficult issues: Islamic Sharia law seems to me incompatible with democracy, though some Muslims I know think there are different lessons to be drawn from the Koran. We are only at the start of this global dialogue of religion that the present Holy Father has been encouraging.
What other sorts of projects will the Institute be conducting in the future?
My colleagues and I will spend a lot of time on our program on Catholicism and the American Public Square. But we will also be continuing work, if our funding support allows, on science and the environment, law, education and the environment.
I hope that my next book will be a kind of updating of Christopher Dawson's work on the centrality of religion to Western culture. Dawson was a giant, but I have the impression that most people, even Catholics, can no longer read him. They are just not adequately prepared. I'll try to make this material more accessible without dumbing it down.
Within our broad cultural reach, we're also planning on preparing materials to help colleges and universities, schools, and parishes to teach the faith in a way that engages our situation. We'll also be dealing with some policy issues. But many policy issues today cannot be resolved without shifting the culture to a higher, better place. That's where we will focus the greatest part of FRI's energy.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Robert Royal ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: 'Jesus Touched My Heart And Healed My Eyes' DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:COLUMBUS, Ohio—On 3-year-old Jacob Durant's chest is a birth-mark in the shape of a fingertip. Little Jacob says he knows how it got there.
“That's where Jesus touched my heart and healed my eyes,” he told the Register. Indeed, the Durant family of Columbus, Ohio, is crediting divine intervention with the healing of their son's blindness through the intercession of Blessed Margaret of Castello, who is already credited with one healing miracle and needs one more for canonization.
Margaret, a lay person who lived in Italy until her death in 1320, was born blind, deformed and lame. She never grew above 3 feet tall. Ashamed of her hunchback and midget size, her wealthy parents hid her within their home. Later, they abandoned her to wander the streets of Castello until Dominican lay women found her and received her into their ranks as a third order Dominican.
The Durants' doctor, Gary Rogers, a pediatric ophthalmologist specializing in children's eye problems, is not calling it a miracle. But he did say such a cure is “rare,” especially when a child goes from seeing almost nothing to having his vision steadily improve over the years.
The Columbus Diocese has not investigated the case, stating that the parents need to request an investigation through Bishop James Griffin.
“In the event we were asked to investigate we would pursue it, but we take it on a case-by-case basis,” said Tom Berg, communications director for the diocese. “All we know is that we have heard about the case, but have not been contacted [by the family].”
The Durants said they are unsure about the procedure to follow and did not contact the diocese, thinking they had to contact the church where the Blessed Margaret shrine is located. Now they plan to contact the bishop's office.
Improved Eyesight
As for the medical documentation, Dr. Rogers said there is marked difference in Jacob's eyesight today than when he first examined him in 1996.
“When I first saw him he wasn't looking around or seeing well,” Rogers said. “It's a big difference and he is now somewhere in the normal range. I have no idea why he can see better.
“At least 90% of the children who have this do have a visual impairment from the problem. He is an exception.”
The Durants are certain that God answered their prayers through the intercession of Blessed Margaret.
When Jacob was born, Aug. 17, 1996, the Durants noticed nothing different about their second child. They were busy living a routine family life with Deb as a full-time mother. At the time, John was a youth minister. Then Deb began noticing that Jacob would continually become upset if the house became quiet. It wasn't until Jacob was 2 months old that they realized something was very wrong.
“He would look right through you,” Deb said. “I knew something was wrong because my daughter never reacted that way when she was a baby.”
Doctors confirmed the Durants' fears when they took Jacob into a dark room and shined a light in his eyes. Jacob didn't respond. From there, he was diagnosed with optic nerve hypoplasia — a condition that doesn't let the optic nerve grow. Although not legally blind, Jacob was well below average and facing a bleak future.
Dr. Rogers said the eye, acting as a camera, is not getting the electrical impulses needed for it to see.
“We could look at the nerve and see that it was not normal,” Rogers said. Jacob could also have developmental problems and doctors don't know what causes optic nerve hypoplasia.
‘We Stormed Heaven’
The Durants didn't waste any time asking heaven for assistance and began praying to Blessed Margaret.
“We stormed heaven,” Deb said. “I think I needed his sight more than Jacob did. But sometimes the heart can be more blind and this has given sight to a lot of people in our lives.”
The Durants thought that since Blessed Margaret was blind they would pray to her and began using a shrine dedicated to her that sits behind St. Patrick's Church in Columbus.
The shrine, run by Dominican priests, was established in 1950 as a way to promote her canonization and raise money for various programs to benefit the poor and underprivileged. Margaret was beatified in 1680 and needs to have one more miracle credited to her before she is canonized. To become a saint, a person must have performed two miracles after their death.
Blessed Margaret was known for visiting prisoners, the sick and comforting the dying. Her one confirmed miracle is the healing of a sick child. That miracle occurred shortly after her death with Margaret lying in her coffin. Her hand moved and touched a sick child,who was instantly healed.
An interested observer in Jacob's case is Father Kenneth France-Kelly, the director of the shrine at St. Patrick's. He works out of Washington, D.C. where he also oversees other Dominican shrines throughout the nation.
As friends and family learned more about Blessed Margaret of Castello, the Durants brought Jacob to healing services. Jacob's grandfather, a principal at Bishop Watterson High School in Columbus, also had schoolchildren praying to God and asking for the intercession of Blessed Margaret for a cure.
‘Bring Us Peace’
Still, obstacles greeted the Durants as they tried to get answers to Jacob's condition.
“I just keep praying to have peace about this or to heal him totally,” Deb said. Coming up was a brain scan that would tell the Durants if there was brain damage. As they waited for the appointment the Durants didn't stop praying and took Jacob to adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at a Youth 2000 event in Columbus.
There at the call to prayer, the Durants again begged God to “hear us and bring us peace,” Deb said. “Then people laid hands on him.” That next day, Jacob began to watch his mother's every step. He was 5 months old, a mere three months after he had been diagnosed.
“His eyes followed every move I made and they had never done that before,” she said. “I … called the pediatrician and told him my son doesn't need a brain scan, he's healed.”
The response was typical, she said.
“He said, ‘Oh lady, whatever,’” Deb said. “It was too much for him to believe he was healed.” The Durants were undaunted. They knew their prayers had been answered.
The Durants' doctor isn't convinced. Dr. Rogers does not attribute Jacob's better vision to prayers.
“I'm not a deeply religious person,” Rogers said. “This little boy, for his problems, is very fortunate, but I don't think it's prayer that made him better. I think it's the luck of the draw.”
That statement doesn't disturb Father France-Kelly. In fact, he prefers it.
“The best miracles have come through doctors who aren't Catholic or even Christian because they have a non-biased approach,” the priest observed. “He has a skeptic's mind and in these cases that can disprove doubts.”
Still, Father France-Kelly is realistic. He said that if the diocese does investigate the Durants' case, the Dominicans would be interested, but won't do anything until then.
“We are looking for a definite black-and-white case that is not in the natural course of things,” Father France-Kelly said. “If it gets to the point where this child is totally cured, then it could be a case for canonization.”
Jennifer Del Vechio writes from Franklin, Indiana.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jennifer Del Vechio ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:Arson Suspected in Church Fire
THE CATHOLIC SUN, Feb. 3—Authorities have ruled that a Jan. 15 church fire on the Gila River Indian Reservation in Sacaton, Ariz., was caused by arson, the Phoenix Catholic weekly reported.
St. Anthony's Church, built in the late 1920s, was a spiritual center for area families for many years. Father John Hall, vicar for Native American Ministry for the Phoenix diocese, told the Sun, “This is very devastating to the community, but the building was not the community.”
The fire demolished the roof of the building as well as its interior. Its adobe walls were left standing. Part of the church's sacristy was also spared, leaving chalices, vestments and altar supplies untouched.
FDA Set to Approve Abortion Pill
THE WASHINGTON TIMES, Feb. 7-13—After a 10-year ban on RU-486, the Food and Drug Administration is expected in the next few months to approve the French abortion pill, the Times reported.
According to the Times Weekly Edition, the FDA never reveals its approval plans for any medications in advance. One FDA official, however, said the agency will soon be taking some action regarding the pill.
An advisory board to the FDA concluded in 1996 that the drug was “safe and effective” and recommended its approval.
American Life League spokesman Steve Sanborn told the Times, “This will certainly make things more difficult for us, since it brings abortion right into the home.”
Vermont Expected to Rule Out Homosexual Marriage
THE NEW YORK TIMES, Feb. 10—Vermont legislators are not likely to recognize homosexual unions in the state's marriage laws, but are expected to extend homosexuals all other benefits enjoyed by married men and women, the Times reported.
According to the Times, a poll of the members of the Judiciary Committee of the Vermont House of Representatives found eight members who spoke in favor of a “civil rights package” that would create the nation's most comprehensive domestic partnership program, while only three favored including same-sex couples in the state's marriage law.
According to the Times, no members favored defying the Vermont Supreme Court's Dec. 20 decision to grant homosexual couples the same treatment as heterosexual spouses in everything from inheritance rights to health insurance benefits.
Media Watch
Black Pentecostals to Visit Vatican
CHICAGO TRIBUNE, Feb. 7—Members of the Joint College of African-American Pentecostal Bishops will travel to Rome this month to visit the Vatican and possibly meet with the Pope, the Chicago daily reported.
According to the Tribune, the bishops said it is time to recover some of the ancient traditions practiced by the Church. “I think we can learn from each other,” said Larry Trotter of the Sweet Holy Spirit Full Gospel Baptist Church in Chicago said. “We come with a fervor and fire they may be missing, but they come with order and structure we may be missing.”
According to the Tribune, the bishops will attend a three-day seminar at the Pontifical North American College and will attend a general audience and a healing Mass with the Pope. A private audience may follow.
Pope to Seminarians: World Needs ‘Holy Pastors’
L'OSSERVATORE ROMANO, Jan. 26—In a Nov. 29 speech delivered to the faculty and students of the Pontifical Seminary of Umbria, Pope John Paul II spoke of the Church's need for priests who have deep interior lives.
Said the Pope, “The world awaits and asks for holy pastors, endowed with deep priestly spirituality. The effectiveness of pastoral services depends not so much on pastoral organization and methods, but on prayer and the depth of one's interior life. It is only those who grow in a mature relationship with God through personal and community prayer, by meditation on the Word, by participation in the Eucharist, who will then be able to offer themselves freely for the work of evangelization, to use earthly goods with moderation, to be strong and persevering in times of difficulty, to have a heart open to the needs of the poor and the suffering and to respond with humble and joyful docility to the Church's teachings.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Vatican Museums Open New Door, Itself a Work of Art DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY—After opening the Holy Doors of Rome's four major basilicas, Pope John Paul II opened his fifth door of the Great Jubilee: the new entrance to the Vatican Museums.
At a Feb. 7 ceremony, the Pope pushed open the museums' new bronze door to inaugurate the revamped space.
Praising the museums' role as a “temple of art and culture” for all people, the Holy Father said “the museums are, on a cultural level, one of the most significant doors of the Holy See opened to the world.”
The new entrance is not only functional, “but symbolic of a more `capacious' entrance, that is, more welcoming, to express the renewed will of the Church to dialogue with humanity in the sign of art and culture, making its entire patrimony available to all.”
The completion of the project, he said, is a proof of the Church's will for a dialogue between faith and art.
“This is the most ambitious of the architectural projects undertaken by the Holy See for the Jubilee year,” reported ZENIT, the Rome-based news service.
During the 1500s, when Pope Julius II began the Vatican's collection, only papal guests were allowed to view the artwork of the Holy See. At the time of the museums' modern inception in the late 18th century, visitors were restricted to an elite group of nobles and intellectuals.
Today, 3 million people from all walks of life visit the museum each year — more than double the number of just two decades ago.
Over the years, the steep increase in visitors led to daily havoc at the one door used as both entrance and exit. Infamous lines that often wound their way around the block caused many tourists to rise at dawn in hopes of getting into the Sistine Chapel before crowds impeded views of Michel-angelo's masterpieces.
U.S. Cardinal Edmund Szoka, president of the Pontifical Commission for Vatican City State, which financed the $24 million, three-year project, said the new entrance would eliminate lines and speed up the ticket-buying process.
The new bronze door, situated to the left of the old entrance, which will now be used solely as an exit, leads visitors into an ultramodern space capable of handling 2,000 people at a time.
“The new glass and cement structure is reminiscent of a similar addition to the Louvre in Paris,” said ZENIT.
Once visitors have paid the $9 entrance fee at newly computerized ticket booths, a spiral ramp takes them up to a glass-roofed room with a closeup view of St. Peter's dome.
From there, tourists can enter the museum itself, or take advantage of the renovated food court, complete with a pizzeria, and such amenities as bookstores, a ticket office, and a play area for children
Directly inside the new entrance, a statue by Italian sculptor Giuliano Vangi titled Crossing the Threshold depicts John Paul guiding a man into the third millennium.
One of the objectives of his pontificate, the Holy Father said, has been “to help mankind cross the door, in order to leave behind the constrictions of materialism and pass into the freedom of faith.”
The new entrance was expected to be opened to the public a few days after the Feb. 7 inauguration, following last-minute checks of the new security and computer systems.
(From combined wire services)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Solemn Maronite Liturgy for Jubilee Highlights Church's Diversity DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY—The Jubilee of the Maronite Church offered something not often heard at the Basilica of St. Mary Major in Rome: a solemn liturgy in Arabic and Syriac.
“Syriac is the living language closest to the Aramaic that Jesus himself would have spoken,” said John Paul Kimes, a Maronite deacon currently studying in Rome. “So during the consecration, we heard something similar to what the apostles themselves would have heard at the Last Supper.”
During the Holy Year, several days have been set aside for the Eastern Catholic churches as a way to highlight their place in the universal Church.
The Eastern churches are in full communion with Rome while retaining their own ecclesiastical structure, including government and cannon law. The Eastern liturgy — notable for its solemnity and beauty — is also distinctive.
The Feb. 9 feast of St. Maron was the Jubilee day for the Universal Church to focus on the Maronites, who number some 4 million worldwide with 500,000 in the United States. The celebration in Rome centered around the Maronite rite of the Mass, or divine liturgy, which was celebrated before an overflow congregation in the Basilica of St. Mary Major.
The event was an occasion to remind Catholics that the Universal Church is actually several churches that are in communion with the pope.
“These individual churches … are nonetheless all equally entrusted to the pastoral guidance of the Roman Pontiff, who by God's appointment is successor to Blessed Peter in primacy over the Universal Church,” said the Second Vatican Council's decree on the Eastern Churches Orientalium Ecclesiarum.
“Therefore these churches are of equal rank, so that none of them is superior to the others because of its rite.” said the Council Fathers.
The 21 Eastern churches include, among others, the Ukrainian, Greek, Armenian, Chaldean and Coptic rites. These ancient ecclesial bodies remain vibrant, even though many of their regions of origin no longer have many Christians.
The Maronite Church is based in Lebanon, where it is the largest Christian body.
“It is a gift to the Maronite Church to be able to come together as one Church in Rome,” said Kimes, who will be ordained a priest this summer in Birmingham, Alabama. “To come here to Rome reminds us of our valued place in the Church. The Church herself realizes the diversity within her and treasures it.”
He said this is especially important for Maronite Catholics in the United States, “where we are such a small minority.”
The Mass at St. Mary Major was celebrated by Cardinal Nasrallah Peter Sfeir, patriarch of Antioch and All the East, who is the head of the Maronite Church. Joining him were Maronite bishops from around the world, including three bishops from North America.
The ancient walls of the Roman basilica resounded with Arabic chants and were filled with the incense so lavishly used during the Siro-Antiochene liturgy. A choir of Maronite monks from three Roman Maronite communities provided the music for the Mass, which was entirely sung.
“The Maronite College, founded in 1584, has, for more than four centuries, formed for the Church an important number of priests, among them bishops and patriarchs, who have guided their flock with zeal, wisdom and a spirit of true piety,” said Cardinal Sfeir in his homily. “In these conditions, young Maronite seminarians came to Rome to study the sacred sciences and Church culture in the universities of the Eternal City.”
After the Mass, the Maronite College was solemnly re-inaugurated following an extensive renovation carried out in recent years.
The Maronite delegation in Rome for the Jubilee was received in a special papal audience the day after the solemn liturgy at St. Mary Major, in which the Holy Father addressed the ongoing challenges faced by the Church in Lebanon.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond J DeSouza ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Beatification Dates Set for Great Jubilee DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:The Vatican has announced the dates and groupings of Christians who will be beatified during the Great Jubilee. A total of 59 will take the next step towards canonization at three separate ceremonies.
Date: March 5
New Blessed: Sister Maria Stella Mardosewicz and 10 other Holy Family sisters killed in Belarus in 1943; Father Andrea de Soveral and two dozen other priests and lay people in Brazil in 1645; Father Nicholas Kitbamrung, a Thai priest who died in prison during World War II; Peter Calungsod, a lay Filipino catechist killed in 1672 in Guam; and a lay catechist, known only as Andrew, who was killed in Vietnam in 1644.
Date: April 9
New Blessed: Colombian Father Mariano Euse Hoyos; Mother Elisabeth Hesselblad, the Swedish religious who re-established the Bridgettine Sisters in the early 1900s; Mother Mariam Thresia Chiramel Mankidiyan, who founded southern India's Congregation of the Holy Cross; Redemptorist Father Francis Xavier Seelos, a German missionary to the United States; and Anna Rosa Gattorno, who founded the Daughters of St. Anne in Italy.
Date: Sept. 3
New Blessed: Pope Pius IX, Pope John XXIII, Irish Benedictine Abbot Joseph Columba Marmion, Father William Joseph Chaminade, the French founder of the Marianists and Archbishop Tommaso Reggio of Genoa, Italy, the founder of the Sisters of St. Martha.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Catholic Population Up, Number of Priests Rises DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY—The number of Catholics in the world reached 1.045 billion, about 17.4% of the global population, the Vatican reported.
The statistics, from 1998, were included in an updated pontifical yearbook presented to Pope John Paul II on Feb. 5.
The number of Catholics represented a new high, up about 40 million from 1997, and the percentage of the global population marked a slight increase, too.
The Americas, considered as a single continent by the Vatican, had the strongest concentration of Catholics in the general population, with 63.1%. It was followed by Europe with 41.4%, Oceania with 26.9%, Africa with 15.6% and Asia with 3.1%.
Of the total Catholic population, 49.5% lived in the Americas, 27.8% in Europe, 11.4% in Africa, 10.5% in Asia and 0.8% in Oceania, the Vatican said.
The statistics showed a slight increase in the number of priests worldwide, which went from 404,208 in 1997 to 404,626 in 1998.
The number of seminarians also rose, from 109,171 in 1997 to 109,828 in 1998.
“The increase in the number of candidates for the priesthood appears especially satisfactory in the churches in Africa and America, particularly in Latin America.
In Europe the situation has remained unchanged in the western area and has shown a strong resurgence in the east,” a Vatican statement said.
Worldwide, the statistics showed a continuing increase in the numbers of permanent deacons, lay missionaries and catechists.
The number of people officially involved in the Church's pastoral activity in 1998 was 3,692,582. That includes 4,439 bishops, 264,202 diocesan priests, 140,424 religious priests, 25,345 permanent deacons, 57,813 non-priest religious men, 814,779 religious women, 30,772 members of secular institutes, 56,421 lay missionaries and 2,298,387 catechists. (From combined wire services)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:Germany Now Predominantly Catholic
RELIGION TODAY, Feb. 4—Citing numbers provided by the German Evangelical Alliance, the Protestant-run online news service reported that Catholics now outnumber Protestants in the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation.
The Alliance said there were 27.15 million Catholics and 27.12 million Protestants living in Germany in late 1998. The two churches had
27.38 million members each in 1997.
Protestants outnumbered Catholics almost by a 2-to-1 ratio in 1950. Protestants and Catholics together make up about two-thirds of Germany's population of 82 million.
‘Gay Pride’ Parade to Roll through Rome
THE UNIVERSE, Feb. 6—The Diocese of Rome will not intervene to prevent the city from hosting a weeklong international meeting of homosexuals and lesbians in July, the British weekly reported.
According to The Universe, discussions with Church officials in January did not sway city officials from their resolve to host and fund the event, which will include a flamboyant parade through city streets. Rome Mayor Francesco Rutelli defended the city's decision on grounds of free expression.
Rutelli said police and city officials would work with organizers of World Pride 2000 to ensure “maximum respect for and no intrusion into the religious events of the Jubilee.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Breakfast With the Pope DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:America, the land of the free, has had its dark sides. From the slavery to the culture of death, it is easy to point to a legacy of evils. But it is also easy to point to a legacy of good deeds. Pope John Paul II did just that in his words read to the Feb. 5 National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C.
Remembering that he and his countrymen were saved from Nazi darkness in part by American intervention, the Holy Father pointed to the real legacy of America: its founding vision, which gave unprecedented freedoms to people who, in turn, were expected to develop good character through religion.
Americans like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. beat slavery and its aftermath by recalling their country to its founding principles. The Pope hopes that today's citizens, and the legislators whom he addressed, will do the same against the culture of death
“Your nation was built as an experiment in ordered freedom, an experiment in which the exercise of individual freedom would contribute to the common good. The American separation of church and state as institutions was accompanied from the beginning of your republic by the conviction that strong religious faith, and the public expression of religiously informed judgments, contribute significantly to the moral health of the body politic. …
“In the great Western democratic tradition, men and women in political life … are not mere brokers of power in a political process taking place in a vacuum, cut off from private and public morality. Leadership in a true democracy involves much more than simply the mastering of techniques of political ‘management’: Your vocation as ‘representatives’ calls for vision, wisdom, a spirit of contemplation and a passion for justice and truth.
“Looking back on my own lifetime, I am convinced that the epoch-making changes taking place and the challenges appearing at the dawn of this new millennium call for just such a ‘prophetic’ function on the part of religious believers in public life. And, may I say, this is particularly true of you who represent the American people, with their rich heritage of commitment to freedom and equality under the law, their spirit of independence and commitment to the common good, their self-reliance and generosity in sharing their God-given gifts. In the century just ended, this heritage became synonymous with freedom itself for people throughout the world, as they sought to cast off the shackles of totalitarianism and to live in freedom.
“As one who is personally grateful for what America did for the world in the darkest days of the 20th century, allow me to ask: Will America continue to inspire people to build a truly better world, a world in which freedom is ordered to truth and goodness? Or will America offer the example of a pseudo-freedom which, detached from the moral norms that give life direction and fruitfulness, turns in practice into a narrow and ultimately inhuman self-enslavement, one which smothers people's spirits and dissolves the foundations of social life?
“These questions pose themselves in a particularly sharp way when we confront the urgent issue of protecting every human being's inalienable right to life from conception until natural death. This is the great civil rights issue of our time, and the world looks to the United States for leadership in cherishing every human life and in providing legal protection for all the members of the human community, but especially those who are weakest and most vulnerable.
“For religious believers who bear political responsibility, our times offer a daunting yet exhilarating challenge. I would go so far as to say that their task is to save democracy from self-destruction. Democracy is our best opportunity to promote the values that will make the world a better place for everyone, but a society which exalts individual choice as the ultimate source of truth undermines the very foundations of democracy. If there is no objective moral order which everyone must respect, and if each individual is expected to supply his or her own truth and ethic of life, there remains only the path of contractual mechanisms as the way of organizing our living together in society. In such a society the strong will prevail and the weak will be swept aside.
“As I have written [in the encyclical Centesimus Annus, No. 26], ‘if there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political action, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power. As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism’” (No. 4-5). When a man who's lived under both Nazis and communists warns us about totalitarianism, we do well to listen.
----- EXCERPT: EDITORIAL ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: A Jubilee Journey with Dante DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:Dante Alighieri: Divine Comedy,
Divine Spirituality
by Robert Royal
Crossroad Publishing Co., 1999
118 pages, $16.95
Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the great Russian poet who disappeared into the Soviet gulag in 1938, recorded her husband's fatalistic advice to his friends living in that terrible period: Always carry your most precious belongings on your person. That way, when you are arrested, you won't regret not being able to retrieve them from home. Upon his arrest, Osip Mandelstam was carrying a copy of Dante's Commedia (the Divine Comedy).
Evidently, the modern Russian felt a spiritual kinship with the medieval Italian, and he seemed especially drawn to his physical meanderings. In his remarkable essay “Talking about Dante,” Mandelstam wrote: “The question occurs to me … how many sandals did Alighieri wear out in the course of his poetic work, wandering about on the goat paths of Italy?”
Not everyone can follow Dante's lead quite so literally, but anyone who can read can make a spiritual pilgrimage through the Commedia. In this book, Robert Royal proves himself a worthy Virgil to guide you along.
“In the entire history of Christianity,” Royal notes, “no poet has written a more complete vision of Christian life.” If you have read only selected cantos of the Inferno (which is just one section of the larger work), or it's been awhile since you sat with one of the most seminal entries in the Western literary oeuvre, you will find great spiritual riches in exploring the “universe of love” described in the entire Commedia. In a more focused and accessible way than any other modern commentary I know of, Royal's book reveals Dante as a spiritual master, teaching us how to make our own pilgrimage to God.
Dante Alighieri takes the form of a canto-by-canto commentary, with a longish but interesting biographical introduction. Here Royal points out that, just as Thomas Aquinas blended Aristotelian metaphysics with the theological currents of his day, so Dante took the prior century's courtly love poetry and troubadour songs, and transformed them with the same period's spiritual and theological thought.
In the case of Dante, we encounter the extraordinary role of his beloved Beatrice, who inspired much of his writing before dying in the year 1290 (ten years before the fictional date of the Commedia's vision) at age 24. Royal comments, “The idea that the love between a man and a woman can be the entry point into a deep encounter with divine love is, of course, perfectly compatible with Christian theology, though it remains a sort of minority position” — the more celebrated path identifying Christian love with asceticism and denial of earthly desires.
God leads us not by abstract ideas but by particular people.
Dante's way may be more accessible for most people. In terms of later spiritual schools, Royal suggests that Dante would probably have been more at home in the Marian affirmations of a St. Louis de Montfort than, say, the strict asceticism of a St. John of the Cross.
As Dante makes his way through a landscape of sinners, penitents and saved souls, we soon realize that his pilgrimage is our own as well. Moreover, we do not choose this journey; it chooses us.
As we meet not only the emperors and popes of Dante's time but his own neighbors, friends and enemies, we begin to grasp one of the key spiritual principles that Royal derives from this great work: God leads us not by an abstract set of ideas but by a particular group of people.
As the Inferno is undoubtedly the best-known section of the Commedia, the pair of otherworldly figures most familiar to readers are probably the fifth canto's Paolo and Francesca, whose brief story of disordered love so moves Dante that he actually faints away at hearing it. Typically, Royal's excellent comments underline the true spiritual lesson of this couple's self-deception. This flows from their efforts, expressed as beautifully and persuasively here as the greatest love poetry itself can be, to put their adulterous love above Love itself.
Once we traverse the infernal world, we begin to ascend the purgatorial mountain, where we and Dante must learn new humility and patience as we struggle to achieve purification. We are no longer “tourists,” but true pilgrims. (Is it a coincidence that one of the most compelling Christian visions offered to the world today comes from one who has scaled many literal and figurative mountains, one Karol Wojtyla?)
Our final joy is the paradisiacal vision, the end of our pilgrimage with Dante and a kind of Marian shrine in itself. A good guidebook makes us appreciate places where we had little sense of the pleasures and joys awaiting us. Royal's book does exactly that for this, the most difficult and surely least-appreciated section of the Commedia, the Paradiso. Heaven is notoriously hard to imagine unless we strive to understand the nature of its eternal joy and its reality. As Royal shows, this masterpiece of Christian vision, unsurpassed except for the Bible, leads us to know more of that reality, and all things, in our faith in God.
Elias Crim writes from Chicago.
----- EXCERPT: Book Review ----- EXTENDED BODY: Elias Crim ----- KEYWORDS: Books -------- TITLE: YouÃll Be Transformed ó Indulgences Guarantee It DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:“The Fullness of the Father's
Mercy: The Meaning of Indulgences”
by Romanus Cessario, OP (The Magnificat: Pilgrim's Guide to the Great Jubilee)
Writing for the special Jubilee Guide edition of Magnificat, Dominican Father Romanus Cessario explores the Church's understanding of indulgences in light of the special ones authorized by Pope John Paul II for the Jubilee Year.
“[T]he saints teach us that it is not the same thing to remove the arrow and to heal the wound (‘non est idem abstrahere telum, et sanare vulnus,’ St. Augustine, De Trinitate, Bk. 15),” he writes. “This means that it is one thing to forgive sin — to remove the arrow — and another thing to heal the wounds caused in us by sin. The practice of granting indulgences shows that sin is more than the infraction of a divine rule. Since it disregards the in-built purposes of human nature, sin puts us in a state of personal disorder. Sinful actions affect adversely the psychology and character of the whole person. Each sinner therefore needs a remedial discipline that can re-direct his or her human energies toward virtuous activity.
“The ‘temporal punishment’ due to sin can be explained by sin itself. St. Augustine taught that every disordered action brings about its own punishment. Sin conforms our psychological powers to purposes that fall short of those that perfect our lives and incarnate God's goodness in the world.” Therefore, Father Cessario notes, we acquire indulgences by means of acts such as prayer, pilgrimage, self-sacrifice and almsgiving, which represent and help realize in us a greater turning toward God and away from sin.
As with every other part of our religious life, “Healing the wounds that sin causes in the human person is not something that we can do by our own strength. … Indulgences draw upon this spiritual treasure-chest that contains the good works of Christ and the saints.” Our ability to share in the spiritual goods of Christ and the saints is an aspect of the communion of saints, like prayer for others, both living and dead. “[O]ur union in charity with Christ and the saints grounds our sharing in their meritorious and satisfactory works. To put it differently, indulgences flow from the Church's Eucharistic life; they guarantee the transformation that Christ accomplishes in those who eat his Body and drink his Blood.
“But how can an indulgence change our psychological dispositions? The Church teaches that Christ's love remains powerful enough to alter what the sinner himself did not have the occasion (or perhaps even the will) to do for himself. Christ brings the full gift of the Father's mercy. Because he is the very Son of God, the Church recognizes the exceeding value that Christ's sufferings communicate to every member of the Church. A spiritual reading of the Gospels reveals the supreme charity and obedience with which Christ lived his life. An indulgence provides a concrete way to participate in his obedient love.”
Because “the duly indulgenced sinner who rejoices in the gift of the Father's mercy is made ready for ultimate communion, … the indulgence can be obtained on behalf of the souls of the deceased. … The Incarnate Son established a wide communication of divine goodness that can overcome whatsoever indisposition sin may leave in the living or the dead.”
Father Cessario concludes by asking: “What explains the gift of the indulgence? All in all, it is Christ's service of obedient love. Why is pardon for sin through an indulgence less burdensome than ordinary efforts at reform of life? St. Thomas Aquinas gives the reason: ‘the labor of Christ's sufferings suffices.’ In the mystery of a ‘vicarious life,’ the eminent satisfaction of Christ and the super-abundant satisfaction of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the saints become ours. (We receive the fullness of the Father's mercy.) The indulgences of the Great Jubilee provide the opportunity for each one of us to become living signs of this mercy in the world.”
Ellen Wilson Fielding writes from Davidson, Maryland.
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 ----- KEYWORDS: Books -------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:Practice Vigilant Purchasing
I was surprised that the article “Helping Beat the High Cost of Education” (Jan. 23-29) included [encouragement to do business with] such companies as Target Corp. and General Mills. General Mills has been giving to Planned Parenthood for years and just recently limited their funding to “educational” funds for Planned Parenthood. So instead of actually using the money to perform abortions, they use it to educate our youth about how to obtain “services” without parental consent. Target's parent company, Dayton Hudson, has been a generous supporter of Planned Parenthood for years. While Target may promote community efforts, their sales also support abortions.
We as Catholics must exercise prudence in our spending. Parents and educators must form our youth first by example. We will not support those that deny the dignity of every human being from conception to natural death. “Evil can only exist when good people do nothing.”
Please make an extended effort to not allow articles that may mislead your subscribers and unintentionally promote the “culture of death.”
Kris Kanalen Sugar Hill, Georgia
Marriage's True Goal
In his generally excellent essay “The Defense of Marriage Begins at Home” (Jan. 30-Feb. 5), columnist Benjamin D. Wiker makes the unqualified assertion that the “capacity for procreation” is the “true goal” of marriage, adding that “[i]f you remove it, then marriage itself will soon crumble.”
Even granting that Mr. Wiker was not condemning marriages rendered infertile through some natural defect or old age, but referring to marriage intentionally made infecund through contraception or sterilization, some confusion arises with regard to the order of the ends of marriage, and the fundamental reasons for the impossibility of same-sex marriage.
It would be just as easy to identify the “true goal” of marriage within Familiaris Consortio's definition of conjugal love as a “deeply personal unity” that aims at “total mutual self-giving.” This unique, exclusive, complete state of avowed self-gift between a man and a woman aims at an imitation of the perfect love, knowledge and unity of the Father and the Son. It is a good and an end in itself.
As the love between the Father and the Son does not remain static and self-contained but generates a third person, so too does conjugal love achieve a more perfect and complete imitation by producing offspring, who become both immortal product and temporal enrichment of that love. Frustrating conjugal love's ordering to procreation ruptures the union of persons and violates its connection to the divine model, doing violence not just to the procreative end of marriage but to the unitive as well.
A marriage in which conjugal love cannot bear the fruit of a new person does not lose all significance. Husband and wife still enjoy the good of unity and self-giving. In fact, their love can still image the fecundity of Trinitarian love, radiating “a fruitfulness of charity of hospitality, and of sacrifice” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 1654). In either case, the personal union is at the core of marriage; fruitfulness confirms, strengthens and completes it. A conjugal relationship where procreation is naturally impossible retains marriage's meaning; a fertile coupling without total self-giving does not.
Thus the homosexual couple finds an obstacle to marriage deeper than the inability to procreate (indeed, this argument becomes less and less persuasive to the public ear with every advance in reproductive technology). In fact, they suffer a fundamental personal incompatibility. The natural personal complementarity of man and woman (expressed corporeally by the complementary sexual organs, natural drives, etc.) that admits of conjugal love is utterly lacking in a same-sex couple, and can only be approximated by substitutes: close friendship, sexual attraction, mutual support or dependence, or some combination thereof.
Todd M. Aglialoro Office of Family Life Diocese of Peoria, Illinois
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Despite Rumors, Consecrated Life Is Alive and Well DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:Consecrated life teeters on the brink of extinction, or so the story goes. Besides the raw data — vocations have plunged since the Second Vatican Council — some see the crisis as rooted in the nature of religious life itself. The logic is very simple. Religious life, the practice of consecrating oneself to God with vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, is a throwback from an earlier time, a relic of the obscurantism that exalted the spiritual in contraposition to all that was “of the world.” But now the Church has at last outgrown its body-soul, spirit-matter schizophrenia and made its peace with the world.
In this new atmosphere of friendship and mutual appreciation between the Church and the world, the story continues, consecrated life no longer has a place. The vows of poverty, chastity and obedience reflect an antiquated mentality whereby the path to holiness lay in renouncing the world, conceived as evil. What is poverty, after all, if not a rejection of material reality? What is chastity if not disdain for human sexuality, a condemnation of the body and perhaps even a covert misogyny? What is obedience if not contempt for human freedom or an infantile groping for security through submission to another's will? Yes indeed, it is high time that the embarrassing blotch of religious life disappear from the Church's mantle.
The trouble is, nobody told the Pope. Just as some are posting the obituary notice, Pope John Paul proclaims the “Jubilee of Consecrated Life.” In his Jan. 30 Angelus message the Holy Father announced that that Sunday, Monday and Tuesday would be dedicated to preparing for this Jubilee, to be celebrated with a solemn papal Mass in St. Peter's Square on Feb. 2, on the feast of the Presentation of the Lord. In his address the Pope called consecrated life “a canticle of praise to the Holy Trinity” and a “gift for the whole Church.”
Such thoughts echo John Paul's words in his 1996 apostolic exhortation on consecrated life and its mission in the Church and in the world. In that document, besides giving thanks to God for the gift of consecrated life, the Pope declared it to be “at the very heart of the Church as a decisive element for her mission,” emphasizing its value and necessity “for the present and future of the People of God” (No. 3). Far from forecasting the collapse of consecrated life, John Paul declared: “You have not only a glorious history to recount, but also a great history still to be accomplished!” (No. 110).
Many young people continue to respond to Christ's invitation to leave everything and “come follow me.”
So which is it: Has consecrated life seen its day or can we expect it to play a major role in the Church's life in the new millennium? Judging from the throngs of smiling consecrated men and women that flocked to St. Peter's for the Jubilee, many young people continue to feel the attraction of Christ's invitation to leave everything and “come follow me.” The reason seems to be that young people don't view consecrated life as a rejection of the world, but rather as an authentic vocation, a personal calling from Christ to follow him more closely and to serve their brothers and sisters.
The psycho-sociological analysis that sees religious life as an unhealthy flight from society, while rife with plausibility to the modern mind, falls flat when confronted with reality. Young people are embracing the consecrated life not as an escape from the world, but as a deeper engagement with the world in its most profound need: a true witness to Christ and his Gospel. Many embarking on the path of the “evangelical counsels” of poverty, chastity and obedience had plans for marriage and a family, held successful jobs and managed their lives with great independence. Then one day Christ issued an invitation that changed their lives. Like the first apostles, they left everything to throw in their lot with Jesus of Nazareth, not knowing where their decision would take them.
These young disciples of Christ don't conceive of their vows as disdain for the created world, but rather as a necessary condition to love Christ with all their heart and to devote themselves to their brothers and sisters in an unlimited way. Tough? Sure it's tough, and without a special grace from God it would be impossible. But as the Holy Father remarked in his letter on consecrated life, those who have been given the “priceless gift” of following the Lord Jesus in this extraordinary way “consider it obvious that he can and must be loved with an undivided heart, that one can devote to him one's whole life, and not merely certain actions or occasional moments or activities” (No. 104).
As they have done since the dawn of Christianity, consecrated men and women continue to present to the world a sign of contradiction and testify to the greatness of Christ's love. So if anyone has plans for the demise of consecrated life, he should probably tell the Pope first. Come to think of it, he should probably tell the Holy Spirit, too.
Father Thomas Williams is editor of the book Springtime of Evangelization.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Thomas Williams Lc ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Why the New Century Won't Bring Vatican III DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:It is now 35 years since the Second Vatican Council ended. Young Catholics, those under the age of 35, were not even born then, let alone lived through the council and the turbulent times that followed. Yet they, along with those of us who well remember those times, have heard many calls for Vatican III, a council to continue what are considered the progressive reforms launched in the 1960s.
How often one has heard it said that Pope John Paul II, who may well become the first pope since Gregory to be spontaneously given the title “the Great”, has smothered what is called “the spirit of Vatican II”. This spirit, we are told, must be allowed to breathe again through another council, which will finish the unfinished business of Vatican II.
After Vatican I closed in 1870, John Henry Cardinal Newman often said that there would be another council, in spite of the fact that the definition of papal infallibility appeared to many to make another council redundant. (Throughout Church history, most councils had been convened to combat heresies; Vatican I saw to it that these could henceforth be settled directly by the pope.)
Cardinal Newman, of course, was an expert on the early councils of the Church. He was also far too astute and historically minded a commentator to fall for linear predictions. Rather, he saw that the definition of papal infallibility would require placing papal primacy within a larger teaching about the Church — as of course Vatican II did in the most important of its documents, the Constitution on the Church.
Ultramontanes keen on linear predictions would have said that the definition, which disappointed them by what it did not say, would have to be filled out and strengthened by the pope or another council. Ultra-montanism, an emphasis on Church centralization under strong papal authority, did in practice continue to dominate the Church for the next century, culminating in the pontificate of Pius XII. And no doubt many people supposed then that the next pope would give himself the title Pius XIII to continue the tradition.
In fact, of course, nothing of the sort happened, but an aged Italian, who was seen as a caretaker pope, suddenly changed the course of the Church. Liberal Catholics were delighted by the subsequent election of Paul VI, who had been one of the foremost cardinals at the council and on the side of reform. And then, to their horror, towards the end of his pontificate Paul began to show shockingly conservative, even reactionary, tendencies.
Paul, like the great French Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac — who if anyone was the theological architect of the council — was horrified by the way he felt the council had been hijacked by extreme liberals. Still, it was felt to be just a temporary setback. And the election of the smiling John Paul I suggested that business would now be back to usual.
Papal Preferences
I well remember the letter that was sent to The Times (of London) and other international newspapers by Hans Kung and other leading liberal theologians describing the kind of pope they wanted: he should be non-Italian, preferably not from the first world, aware of social issues, comparatively young and able to relate to the young, an intellectual and theologically-minded pope. The late Bishop Butler immediately wrote to say that such a pope would be a “superpope” and not at all the kind of collegial pope envisaged by the Constitution on the Church.
Of course, we now know that Kung and his colleagues got what they asked for, although not quite what they wanted, and that Butler was proved right. For Pope John Paul II has indeed turned out to be the super-pope who helped bring down the communist empire and who has now led the Church into the new millennium.
The Church's new movements and communities will be to Vatican II what the Jesuits were to Trent.
I also remember a newspaper article by Butler after the council in which he said that the council could only be really fully implemented when the old generation of pre-Vatican II Catholics had passed on. It was taken for granted that the future lay with the young, progressive bishops enthusiastic about the council. I think that Butler was obviously right that there was a whole generation that was more or less opposed to the council and more or less reluctant to implement it. But I think he was wrong in assuming a sort of linear progress, as in fact the Vatican II generation were not necessarily at all the generation that would absorb the real meaning of Vatican II.
The trouble was that they, like their elders, took a negative rather than a positive view of the council. For them, what was important about the council was that the Church decisively turned its back on the pre-Vatican II Church. It was as though the whole history of the Church since the time of the New Testament was just a sort of dark age till the new dawn of Vatican II. It was, you might say, a very “Protestant” view of Church history, except that for Protestants the new dawn was in the 16th century. In practice, it meant that almost anything in the pre-Vatican II Church had to be got rid of and everything emphasised at Vatican II had to be so highlighted as to eclipse everything else.
If people used to say their rosary at Mass, then rosaries were to be torn up; if people used to attend devotions like Benediction or Exposition in the past, then from now on the only kind of service that was permitted was to be the Mass; if the Church had been juridical in the past, from now on it was to be freewheeling. The list could be easily lengthened. And, of course, it was a quite understandable reaction. It was, in fact, a reaction against the Tridentine Church — just as the Council of Trent itself was a reaction to the Protestant Reformation. And the Counter Reformation, for all its glories and achievements, likewise suffered from being a reaction. If the Protestants called for a vernacular liturgy and emphasised the Bible, the priesthood of all the baptised and personal faith as against the objectivity of the sacraments, then the Catholic Church had to do the diametrically opposite.
Christocentric Commitment
Vatican II aimed to redress the balance, not only for ecumenical reasons but also to restore what was deficient or lacking in the life of the Church from its tradition. In the event, as might have been predicted, the reaction against the Tridentine Church produced a new imbalance. And instead of the greatest achievement of Vatican II, the Constitution on the Church being appreciated in all its fullness as a recovery of the scriptural and patristic understanding of the mystical and sacramental nature of the Church, only specific parts of the constitution — those on the laity and the college of bishops — were highlighted.
More seriously, the council's commitment to ecumenism, dialogue with other religions and the world, and to justice and peace (in contrast to the old isolationism and intransigence) led to these unquestionably important issues going right to the top of the agenda, even dislodging what the Church is all about: the person of Jesus Christ.
A turning point in the history of the Church was the startling confession some years ago by Cardinal Suenens, who had criticised Paul VI for his failure to implement collegiality sufficiently, that he and others had been far too concerned with Church structures and not enough with faith in Christ. Significantly, it was one of the new so-called movements in the Church — the charismatic renewal — which had led to this change of heart. I also think that the recent humiliating rejection of the call for another council by Cardinal Martini, a well-known critic of the new movements, will also prove to be a turning point.
I am convinced that Bishop Butler was wrong: it was not just the pre-Vatican II generation that had to die off, it was also that generation which was too close to get a proper perspective of it within the whole history of the Church. Not long ago I argued that the new movements and communities within the Church, a few of which pre-date the council, would prove to be to Vatican II what the Jesuits and the other Counter Reformation orders were to Trent.
In particular, the striking way in which priests, religious and the laity live and work together as the baptised members of the Body of Christ with their varying charisms and functions is the concrete embodiment of the first two deeply traditional, deeply radical chapters of the Constitution on the Church. Before Vatican I we had a clericalised Church; since Vatican II there has been a concerted drive to have a laicised Church. But the Church is neither clerical nor laity; it is the community of the Spirit-filled baptised.
That is the other omission in Butler's thesis, for the Person who will implement Vatican II will be the Holy Spirit. And to return to linear predictions, I am quite sure that the Church is neither going back in a straight line to where it was before the council, nor proceeding in a straight line in the opposite direction as the progressivists fondly imagine.
There is no future for the Lefevbrists. But, equally, our ageing '60s liberals are beginning to look increasingly like poor Castro and his fellow revolutionaries in Cuba, where the young aren't interested in a revolution they never knew, but want to go to Miami and buy jeans.
Nor are our young Catholics interested in “the spirit” of a council they never knew; if they're interested in anything, it's more likely to be in finding out about the Catholic faith.
Father Ker teaches theology at Oxford University.Condensed, with permission, from The Catholic Herald, London.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: God, Business and the Super Bowl DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:Should a business firm consider the religious background of a job candidate during the hiring process? When sizing up how much energy and effort the individual will put into the job, ought the company take into account his or her practice of the faith he or she professes?
Consider how these questions have been answered by the Super Bowl champion St. Louis Rams.
The Rams are one of the great turnaround stories of the sports world in recent memory. Until the start of last season, they had lost more football games than any other NFL team during the 1990s. Last year, they won only four games against 12 losses. How did the Rams go from worst to first in a single season?
One lighthearted television commercial points out that, after the Pope visited Chicago and Denver, their NFL teams won the Super Bowl. And the Holy Father visited St. Louis last year. But most serious analysts point to a change in personnel on the team. The Rams added some new players and coaches for 1999. There was a new core of players, some of whom were deeply religious, and their spirit seemed to carry the team throughout the year.
The Rams began their preseason with Trent Green as their new quarterback. He was a graduate of a St. Louis-area Catholic high school, so it was going to be the story of the hometown boy returning to play professional football in the city where his parents still lived. He played remarkably well in the pre-season. But in their final preseason game in August, Green suffered a severe leg injury that put him out for the season.
Green could have become bitter after the injury. Instead, he became an integral part of the team, both on the sidelines and in the community. He helped the backup quarterback learn the plays, and he spent time visiting children at area hospitals.
With Green out for the year, the quarterback job fell to Kurt Warner, a player with almost no NFL experience. After playing college football at a small school in Iowa, Warner tried out for the Green Bay Packers but missed the cut. He ended up working as a stock boy in an Iowa grocery store to support his wife and children. While continuing to dream of being an NFL quarterback, he played in the Arena Football League, considered a honky-tonk wasteland for players of non-major-league caliber, and then he played in Europe. After taking the Amsterdam Admirals to the championship game on the Continent where soccer is considered the “real” football, he earned the backup-quarterback spot in St. Louis in 1998.
After the first few wins with Warner at the helm of the offense, people in St. Louis began to notice that there was something novel about this year's Rams. They had a different spirit. We've all become familiar with stories of professional athletes getting in trouble with drugs, alcohol and prostitutes. But this Rams team seemed entirely different; many of the team members were involved in church, Bible studies and charities. During October, Billy Graham visited St. Louis and held a week of meetings in the TWA Dome, the home of the Rams (and the place where the Pope celebrated an indoor mass with more than 100,000 Catholics a year ago). The Rams were the only NFL team without a loss last fall when quarterback Warner was invited to speak at the Billy Graham crusade, and soon all of St. Louis heard his testimony. He spoke explicitly about his Christian faith and his love of Jesus.
After that, Warner seemed emboldened to speak openly of his faith. Other players followed suit. Wide receiver Isaac Bruce, who is an ordained minister, would regularly thank Jesus during his post-game interviews. By midseason, it became apparent that there was a significant core of players on the team — more than half — who openly professed that religious faith was the most important part of their lives.
The national media seemed uncomfortable with the explicitly Christian slant of the Rams players, but the St. Louis media learned to make religion part of their coverage of these new Rams. There were reports of the religious faith of the players' wives, of player Bible study groups, and of involvement in religious charities. On the morning of the Super Bowl, the local media reported that the Rams had held a church service in their hotel prior to the game.
Was it a coincidence that so many of the Rams were devout Christians and the team won one of the most celebrated championships in all of professional sports? The answer might come from the team's director of player personnel, Charlie Armey.
Armey has admitted that, in selecting players, he is very interested in hiring athletes of sound moral character. Of course, there is no religious litmus test, but Armey claims that good Christians often make for men of good character, and men of good character are what he wants. Likewise, coach Dick Vermeil credits the team's success to the character of his players, saying, “I'm very picky about who I surround myself with.”
No one is claiming that God supernaturally blesses faithful athletes with victories. The question is whether there is a connection between religious faith, moral character and good work habits. After each victory, the Rams shunned overindulgent celebrations. Their team motto became “Gotta go to work.”
It seems obvious that individuals with strong moral character tend to make better workers than individuals who lack direction in their lives. This is as true in business as it is on a football field. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that everyone can make progress in moral virtue, but that Christ's gift of salvation “offers us the grace necessary to persevere in the pursuit of the virtues.” In other words, you don't have to be religious to be a person of sound character, but authentic faith and God's grace sure help.
The dominant secular culture has emphasized that religious belief should be entirely private, having no influence on one's life at work. But is it really that simple? While it is inappropriate to discriminate against potential employees because of their religious beliefs, the NFL Super Bowl champion St. Louis Rams may have figured something out about religious faith, moral character and getting the job done.
Gregory Beabout teaches philosophy at St. Louis University.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Gregory R. Beabout ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Education Notebook DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:Hillary Vows to Fight School Vouchers
THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE, Feb. 7—Hillary Rodham Clinton started her candidacy for the U.S. Senate Feb. 6 by sending the “wrong message to Catholics,” said the New York-based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.
Addressing an audience at the state university in Purchase, Clinton said, “I'll be on your side in the fight against school vouchers, which drain taxpayer dollars from our public schools.” However, the League noted, Clinton had told 100 Orthodox Jewish leaders Dec. 17 that she would back certain “constitutionally correct” methods for government to help private schools.
Catholic League president William Donohue noted that politicians who denounce vouchers sometimes imply that the Church supports vouchers because they provide a way to drain money from public schools.
“Now Mrs. Clinton is at it, only this time her ‘fight against vouchers’ campaign comes on the heels of promising to deliver on offering public assistance to private schools,” said Donohue. “She needs to make up her mind on this issue and she needs to do so without offending Catholic sensibilities.”
By providing educational funds directly to parents rather than to public schools, school vouchers can enable the parents to send their children to the school of their choice — public or private.
Homosexual Groups Sprouting in High Schools
THE NEW YORK TIMES, Feb. 10—A school district in suburban California wants to stop a group of homosexual high-school students from meeting on school property, but so far a lawsuit and a judge have gotten in the way, reports the Times.
Federal district judge David Carter said that the school district in Orange, Calif., could not prohibit the students from their First Amendment right to free speech. The district insists the group is not appropriate for school since it discusses sexuality.
The school district is considering ending all 38 non-curricular clubs in order to adhere to the judge's orders rather than allow the homosexual group to remain on school grounds, the Times reported. The school district in Salt Lake City took such an action in response to a homosexual group and the ensuing lawsuit is in the courts.
The Times reported that homosexual groups are growing rapidly across the country. They cite statistics from a pro-homosexual group, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, which estimates that 600 such groups exist in schools nationwide.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Into the Pigeonhole Again DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:The Catholic Church has become a fashionable target for contemporary filmmakers, judging by the number of movies on the subject released during the past six months. Seven recent films — Dogma, Stigmata, The Omega Code, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, Angela's Ashes, The End of the Affair and now The Third Miracle (all reviewed by the Register) — have in different ways criticized the Church. Some have attacked the hierarchy, others its doctrines or priests. A few have made fun of all three.
This negative stereotyping is diametrically opposite to the more positive perspective found in movies the last time the Catholic faith was a hot Hollywood topic. In the 1940s, films like Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's presented the Church as an example of everything that's good about our culture. While the current films haven't been as financially successful as these classics, two of the more exploitative entries, Dogma and Stigmata, will probably turn a profit.
What's unexpected for our rational-ist, high-tech era is that most of the recent releases accept the Church's belief in miracles. It's the Catholic faith's insistence on transcendent moral values that present-day movie-makers dislike. They seem to be hungry for a spiritual dimension in their lives without the annoying restraints orthodox Christianity places on behavior and desires.
Like The End of the Affair, The Third Miracle is not anti-Catholic. Both movies are the work of serious filmmakers. They treat their characters' crises of conscience and belief with respect. But, sadly, The Third Miracle recycles many of the same crude caricatures found in the anti-Catholic films, which has the effect of seriously weakening its drama and originality.
The plot is surprisingly similar to the trashy Stigmata: A troubled priest who investigates miracles for the Church clashes with a venal Vatican bureaucrat; at the same time he's tempted by a beautiful woman connected to the case.
But there the comparisons end. Despite certain clichés, The Third Miracle's director, Anieszka Holland (Europa, Europa), evokes both the mystery of faith and the gritty, urban environment of the main story with honesty and passion.
The movie, based on Thomas Vetere's novel of the same name, begins in Byrstica, Slovakia, in 1944 during an Allied bombing raid on German factories there. Everyone is fleeing the center of town for safety. But a young gypsy girl grabs a small statue of the Madonna from her home and runs in the other direction, toward a cathedral. She stops and kneels in prayer before another statue of our Lady on the building's facade. A priest tries to persuade her to leave, but she refuses.
Today's moviemakers seem hungry for a spirituality that demands no restraints on desire.
Suddenly, the scene goes silent. Something momentous is happening, but we don't know what. A wounded Nazi soldier stranded nearby watches the gypsy girl intently.
The action moves forward to Chicago in 1979 and the focus turns to Father Frank Shore (Ed Harris), who's dropped out of the Church, living among the poor and working at a soup kitchen. In a series of flashbacks, we learn he used to be a postulator, charged by his local bishop and the Vatican with investigating possible candidates for sainthood. He must determine the truth of alleged miracles and research whether the candidate had lived with “heroic virtue.” At the time the novel was written, proof of three miracles was required for canonization (hence the title).
We see a shorthand version of Shore's most recent investigation in which he refutes the alleged miracles of a local priest. In Shore's mind, his findings have a negative effect, “destroying the faith of an entire community.” Wracked by guilt, he loses his sense of vocation. “How does faith get away from you?” he wonders.
Shore is drafted back into action as postulator by Bishop Cahill (William Haid), a political operator who prefers schmoozing and deal making to spiritual leadership. He also likes to pepper his speech with profanities. The case involves Helen O'regan (Barbara Sukowa), a parish worker born in Central Europe who was known for her selfless dedication to disadvantaged children. After her death, the statue of the Madonna near her church began to cry tears of blood which are said to have healing powers. Helen herself is alleged to have cured a young girl of terminal lupus.
Shore uncovers evidence in support of Helen's cause, which brings him into conflict with Cahill. The Vatican sends a bullying Austrian-born official, Archbishop Werner (Armin Mueller-Stahl), to scrutinize the postulator's findings. Shore's belief in Helen's sanctity is tainted in Werner's eyes when he learns the priest has fallen in love with the woman's angry daughter, Roxanna (Anne Heche).
The movie ties all these plot twists to the hallucinatory opening sequence in a convincing and suspenseful manner.
Which raises the question: Why is it that even today's most gifted film-makers seem incapable of conceiving of the Church hierarchy as anything other than arrogant, repressive tyrants?
And why are nearly all contemporary movie priests depicted as miserable because of their vows of celibacy? Surely, this reflects their writers' and directors'attitudes about sex more than reality.
This tired stereotyping of the clergy dilutes The Third Miracle's dramatic impact, making its otherwise intelligent treatment of faith and miracles ring rather hollow.
Arts & Culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: john Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Prizer's Picks DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:The Mask of Zorro (1998)
More than 50 movies have been made about Zorro, a swash-buckling protector of the poor in old California. This fictional hero has two identities. Most of the time, he's Don Diego, a wealthy nobleman. But when the colonial authorities mistreat the peasants, he becomes Zorro, an avenging swordsman in a mask, leaving his famous mark — “Z” — after each adventure.
The Mask of Zorro begins in 1821 with Don Diego (Anthony Hopkins) as Zorro rescuing three peasants from a hanging, with the help of two young brothers who are bandits. In retaliation, the Spanish governor (Stuart Wilson) kills Don Diego's wife and imprisons him. Eventually, the nobleman escapes and trains one of the brothers (Antonio Banderas) to replace him as Zorro and get revenge. The movie successfully mixes self-deprecating humor with old-fashioned derring-do. It's refreshing to see the Church presented as a friend of the poor rather than as a pillar of an oppressive establishment, a false stereotype Hollywood often perpetuates.
The Elephant Man (1980)
Physical deformity is a heavy burden to bear. Sometimes it can break a person's spirit or turn him into a creature of anger and despair. But, occasionally, such a condition can bring out the best in a sufferer's soul, inspiring those around him who are willing to open their hearts.
The real-life John Merrick, born in England in 1873, was deformed at birth by neurofibromatosis, which left him with a twisted spine, a useless right arm and a head twice the normal size. The Elephant Man, directed by David Lynch (The Straight Story), begins with Merrick (John Hurt) working as a horrible-looking exhibit in a traveling freak show. The kindly, eccentric Dr. Treves (Anthony Hopkins), a celebrated surgeon, rescues the deformed man from a life of ridicule and exploitation, placing him under his care in a London hospital. But Merrick's former promoter (Freddie Jones) wants him back. The deformed man preserves his dignity in good times and bad, radiating a gentle compassion toward all.
Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969)
Not every love story is Romeo and Juliet. Mature romances have their own dynamic that involves mutual compromise and emotional support more than fiery passion. The resulting bonds are usually deeper. James Hilton's novel Goodbye, Mr. Chips has been made into a movie twice. This more recent adaptation is less well-known than the Oscar-winning 1939 version starring Robert Donat, but the addition of some musical numbers brings the love story into sharper focus.
Mr. Chipping (Peter O'toole) begins his long career at Brookfield, an English boarding school for upper-class boys, as a scholarly Latin master. Character formation is as important to him as intellectual excellence. But during his early years he becomes an aloof disciplinarian with few friends. His personality is changed when he marries an attractive music-hall singer, Katherine (Petula Clark). Their life together is marked by triumphs, setbacks and tragedy. Under her loving influence, “Mr. Chips” becomes a model teacher, developing a natural kindness toward his students.
Twelve O'Clock High (1949)
At long last the men and women who lived through World War II are getting their due, with hit movies like Saving Private Ryan and best-selling books like The Greatest Generation. Twelve O' Clock High, based on a novel by Beirne Lay Jr. and Sy Bartlett, is a gripping, suspenseful film made by that generation. It highlights the emotional pressures of combat more than physical bravery. The action is set in 1942 at an American Air Force base in England. The average survival rate for pilots there is 15 missions.
Gen. Savage (Gregory Peck) replaces Col. Davenport (Gary Merrill) as commander of a bombing squadron because the latter has gotten too close to his men. The general institutes a regime of ruthless discipline. But a dangerous mission puts him and his men to some unexpected tests. The movie has been used to teach leadership to corporate executives and Air Force cadets.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: The Register's Jubilee Guide to Rome Resonant Cecilia DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:One of Rome's most evocative pilgrimage routes meanders south from the basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere to the church of Santa Cecilia, passing some of the spots where early Christian martyrs lived, prayed and faced death. The neighborhood itself is fascinating, since to this day they resist gentrification and maintain their own rough exuberance. In other words, they are true Romans.
If you leave Piazza Santa Maria (See Jan. 23-29's Catholic Traveler) and walk along Via della Lungaretta, you'll soon see a parish church, Sant'Agata's.
Though guidebooks rarely mention this church, local residents know it well, for it houses the Madonna dei Noialtri (“we others”), patroness of a very lively neighborhood festival in July. Agata (Agatha), patroness of Sicily, suffered a bloody martyrdom, depicted on one of the altars.
Across from Sant'Agata, San Crisogono's 12th-century facade and campanile (restored in the 17th and 19th centuries) are more imposing. Crisogono (Cris-OGG-o-no) himself was arrested in Rome for his Christianity and later beheaded during Diocletian's reign. The early church on this site was mentioned at the council held by Pope Symmachus during the early sixth century and in the letters of Gregory the Great.
Inside you'll see Crisogono's story on the ceiling and in apse frescoes, perhaps encouraging you to offer a prayer for this rarely remembered martyr.
Although the church is not lacking in the dragon-and-eagle symbols of Borghese power (Cardinal Scipione Borghese sponsored the 17th-century restoration), its eighth-century form is recalled in the nave with 22 columns. Cosmati-inlaid floors of colored stones and glass, familiar in 12th-century Roman churches, were added in that later restoration. The Cosmati were a family of marble workers whose genius sparkles on floors and columns throughout the city. From the sacristy you can descend to excavations of the early church, including a wall with eighth-century representations of Gregory III.
The church is located on a major avenue, the Viale di Trastevere, where Romans huddle precariously on traffic-island bus stops while cars, trucks, buses and trams whiz by on either side. A day in Rome's traffic is sometimes like being in Ben Hur.
Francis Was Here
If you cross the Viale di Trastevere (it does have traffic lights) following Via Francesco a Ripa you'll find a church of that name, built over a Benedictine monastery where St. Francis of Assisi stayed when he came to Rome. This Franciscan parish is very active today and services or festivals are apt to be announced on a bulletin board or banners when you get there. Most visitors come to see the fine Bernini sculpture of the Death of Blessed Ludovica Albertoni, in what at first seems to be a position of mystic ecstasy similar to that of his famous statue of Santa Teresa of Avila in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome. However, the Franciscan Ludovica died of a fever after a life of good works.
Cecilia, a third-century virgin martyr, told her bridegroom of her vow of virginity on their wedding night. Whatever his initial reaction, he was soon converted to Christianity.
According to the noted Bernini scholar Howard Hibbard, it “combines the recumbent tradition of the Santa Cecilia (see above) with Bernini's interest in transitory states: the dying woman revealed above the altar seems to exemplify faith, hope and love of God.”
From here the church of the Madonna dell'Orto (garden) is nearby, along Via Anicia. Built from 1492 to 1577, the church is decorated with Baroque stucco fruits and garlands donated by local guilds during the 18th century. The Madonna dell'Orto on the main altar is an object of veneration; you might want to pray before it. From here follow the Via Madonna dell'Orto till Via San Michele; turn left until you reach the garden in front of Santa Cecilia. Local women are often sitting about here watching over baby carriages and strollers.
Santa Cecilia is patroness of music, an honor inspired by the legend of her listening to a heavenly choir while her wedding march was being played on an organ, and singing during her martyrdom. This building was constructed over the house where she lived with her husband, Valerian. Cecilia, a third-century virgin martyr, told her bridegroom of her vow of virginity on their wedding night.
Whatever his initial reaction, he was soon converted to Christianity. Refusing to offer sacrifices to pagan gods and continuing to use their home for evangelization (more than 400 were baptized there by Pope Urban, according to one account), the couple were killed.
The legend of Santa Cecilia holds that she was tortured by being locked in the hot-steam room (caldarium) of their home (aristocrats, they had Roman baths beneath their home). After three days, she not only wasn't dead, but was singing to the Lord. The soldiers then struck her neck with a sword three times but she still lingered for three days before dying. From the church one can enter the steam bath excavations, where lead pipes can be seen.
The next miracle occurred during the ninth century, when she appeared to Pope Paschal in a dream and told him where she was buried: in the catacombs of San Callisto, where her tomb can still be seen. The Pope and others attested to the perfect condition of her body when exhumed and then reburied her at the church. Her sarcophagus was forgotten again for about 750 years, to be rediscovered in 1599, the saint's body still intact. This time the sculptor Maderno made a sketch of the position of her body, and to him we owe the hauntingly beautiful white statue of her under the altar. Her head, turned away from us, shows the sword marks on her neck, and her fingers symbolizing the Trinity, three extended on one hand, one on the other. The elegant ciborium around her is a masterpiece of Arnolfo di Cambio (1293).
Hitting the High Notes
The Last Judgment, the famous but damaged 13th-century fresco of Pietro Cavallini, can be seen in the convent only from 10:30 a.m. to noon on Tuesday and Friday. The artist knew Roman frescoes and those of Giotto, and his work (also in Santa Maria in Trastevere) has a vitality that comes from them, rather than from the more formal Byzantine past. I have been reading a fascinating account of it in art historian John White's Art and Architecture in Italy 1250-1400, in the Pelican series. Now I want to go back to see all I missed during earlier visits. (I was always so moved by Cecilia's statue that I saw little else.)
White describes the perfect balance of this long horizontal, achieved by turns of heads and draped fabrics coupled with subtle repetitions of color “enlivened by contrast with the outward-facing symmetry of the trumpeting angels in the zone below.” It's a symphony for him of drumbeats (the major compositional elements) and woodwinds (the individual drapery forms and figure poses). The nuns sing Mass and vespers on Sunday in Gregorian chant, and vespers on some weekdays.
The buildings on either side of the basilica are convents. Sisters of a cloistered Benedictine order have a special task. Each year, two lambs decorated with ribbons and flowers are given them from the Convent of Sant'Agnese fuori le Mura (outside the walls).
The nuns care for the lambs until the next Easter, when their delicate wool is woven into long strips that are taken to the Vatican and kept beneath St. Peter's main altar.
The Pope grants its use to archbishops and patriarchs, who only then wear this pallium, a narrow circular band of wool, with hanging strips front and back, marked with dark purple crosses.
From here, if you walk to the left along Via Vascellari (Va-SHELL-ári), at No. 61 you will find the former home of Santa Francesca Romana, now part convent, part hostel. Tours of the saint's quarters are rarely given, however, but the young men at the desk may let you see the courtyard. (A church dedicated to her is found near the Forum, at Piazza di Santa Francesca Romana.)
From here another left will take you to an enchanting sight: the slender, delicate Romanesque campanile (12th to 13th century and still standing) of the church of San Benedetto. According to tradition, St. Benedict lived in the original structure on this site, and his cell, now an altar, can be seen if someone will open it for you. On the porch a 13th-century fresco depicts Benedict, father of monasticism.
Here in the smallest Romanesque basilica in Rome, you can enjoy (usually) the sanctity of the ancients. It's a good place to remember the martyrs who have made our faith possible through the ages.
The adjoining piazza in Piscinula (Pee-sheé-NOO-la), medieval aspects, recently restored, continues the charm of the area. Now you're at the Tevere (Tiber) and can cross back into the center of Rome.
Barbara Coeyman Hults, a former resident of Rome, is based in New York.
DINER's DELIGHTS
Near Santa Maria in Trastevere, along Via San Francesco a Ripa, you'll find several pizzerias and a pastry shop whose wares would tempt a saint. Mornings there is an open-air market at Piazza San Callisto, farther along to the west. For a more substantial meal, the old reliable Mario's, who have made meals for artists and students through the years (closed Sunday, on Via del Moro 53), or the charming Il Fontanone (closed Tuesdays) in Piazza Trilussa (at the Ponte Sisto) are good and not too expensive.
----- EXCERPT: The church of music's patron is an oasis of solitude amid the tumult of Trastevere ----- EXTENDED BODY: Barbara Coeyman Hults ----- KEYWORDS: Traveler -------- TITLE: THE CHURCH IN AMERICA EASTERN EUROPEANS DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:Learning the Liturgy, Leavening Society
Born under the rule of Emperor Franz Joseph in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the men of the Zbosnik family labored in the forests while the women worked in the fields and houses. Peasants all, they hoped for more. In 1908, Anton and Maria set sail for America.
The couple settled in the forested Appalachians of Pennsylvania, where Anton found work near St. Marys, a German Catholic settlement. When the trees had all been harvested, they went to Port Allegheny, where they set down roots and their family grew. Four of their six children survived to adulthood, but Anton died in 1925 in a lumbering accident, leaving his widow and children to face the dark days of the Depression alone.
All were baptized Catholics, but stopped attending church when a German pastor rebuffed them for not being able to offer a stipend for a Mass for deceased relatives.
Meanwhile the predominantly rural Erie diocese struggled to provide pastors to administer the sacraments, let alone find priests who could speak the same language as the members of the members of the parish.
Sustained by the Sacraments
The Catholic Church in the United States was a church of immigrants, and it did what it could to minister to its adherents. From birth to death, in joy and sorrow, Catholics could rely on their Church to administer the sacraments. This is how the Church attempted to keep the immigrants Catholic and in the Church. For several generations, it worked.
The bishops of this era, such as Chicago's “kingmaker” Cardinal Archbishop George Mundelein (1872-1939), Boston's Romanist Cardinal Archbishop William O'Connell (1859-1944) and even Erie's Bishop John Mark Gannon (1877-1968; archbishop after 1954) were brick-and-mortar men. They provided what Catholics most urgently needed: parishes where they could receive the sacraments.
When possible, the parishes were “national parishes” created to meet the needs of the many immigrant groups. Here the language and traditions of the homeland were kept alive, providing the anchor for their Catholic faith.
Where the numbers made it possible, Irish, German, Italian, Slovak, Hungarian, Polish and French parishes were established; indeed, these abounded. Many flourished within blocks of each other. In the cities, it was uncommon for people to attend parishes other than their own, and why should they? A national parish was often close by and provided all they needed to help them through this life into the next. But in many rural areas, especially those with small numbers of Catholics, the Church did not have the resources to establish such parishes.
The system of national parishes would stand until after World War II. Then, as Catholic men returned home from war, they took advantage of the GI Bill; this provided an education, which enabled them to leave the cities for the suburbs as they climbed the ladder of success. There they joined new parishes conveniently established for all the people in the neighborhood, not just for people of one ethnic or national background.
Meeting Materialism
Even as the parish served as the center of the sacramental life for Catholics, some in the Church in America recognized that American culture was becoming increasingly materialistic and faithless. They saw that the Church needed to help Catholics live in a world which threatened to undermine their faith. Some recognized that the Church, too, could help Catholics be leaven in the world.
One among these was Father John A. Ryan (1869-1945). This irrepressible Midwesterner worked to transform American society and the workplace in the spirit of Christ and from the perspective of the Catholic faith. After completing his doctorate in 1905, he became the most influential Catholic social reformer of his era. In 1915, he joined the faculty of Catholic University and later the staff of the National Catholic Welfare Conference (today the National Conference of Catholic Bishops). In these positions, he helped the bishops develop policies which would unite Catholics' faith with their works. The purpose was to transform society and social structures so as to eliminate suffering and poverty. His solutions, however, tended to divide the secular and sacred realms in the minds of some Catholics, which in the long run had a negative impact.
A similar, but more integrative, approach was the goal of Benedictine Father Virgule Michel (1890-1938). As a priest at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minn., Father Michel became a leader in the liturgical-reform movement. Through liturgical reform, he set his goal on bringing the spirit of Christ into everyday life.
For Father Michel and other like-minded reformers, Catholic life began at the liturgy (not at devotions) and was to permeate the home and workplace. He worked to encourage participation by the laity so they would not think worship was something priests did and which laity observed from a distance. Rather, worship should fill their lives and activities in the home, at the factory and on the farm. A man of frail constitution, Michel died before he saw the fruit of his labor in the Second Vatican Council's reforms of the liturgy.
Trappist Thomas Merton (1915-1968), the monk with wanderlust, also tried to forge a unity between the secular and sacred. Merton reflected on the contemplative life and how it could shed light on everyday activities — as well as on great activities such as war and peace — and bring those activities into closer unity with God. Merton recognized the inner turmoil in the modern man and felt the life of God was the solution. He was no stranger to inner turmoil: He converted to the Catholic faith in 1938 after a tortuous quest for truth and, after much interior struggle, entered the monastery in 1941. Merton remained a seeker until the day he died by electrocution in Thailand when an electric fan fell into his bath.
Even though the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, were supposedly central to Catholic spiritual life, for many immigrant Catholics they were often of secondary importance to devotions and novenas. In an attempt to strengthen the Eucharist in Catholic life (something confirmed by Vatican II), the eucharistic movement became a vital renewal movement in the first half of the 20th century. From the mid-1930s on, the movement sought to integrate spiritual life and social reform. Women played a large role in the movement through the Arch-Confraternity of Perpetual Adoration, which gave them a sense of mission beyond the home and parish.
In a similar way, the retreat movement sought to promote an active laity in the mission of the Church. The movement was only possible because Catholic laity had begun to emerge from a state of economic disaster and poverty and enter the relative security of the middle class. Freed from excessive concern for their own survival, many began to find time for other pursuits and interests. The retreat movement touched the lives of thousands of Catholic lay people as it promoted both their fidelity to the Church and the transformation of American society to the Catholic ideal.
Conciliar Clarity
Many of the goals sought by the reformers and reform leaders of 20th-century Catholicism were achieved at and after Vatican II. The liturgy and sacraments underwent renewal in an attempt to better enable them to mediate Christ to his people. The Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (and now Children) has been established and implemented as a way to support the conversion and initiation of people into a Church existing in a largely secular society. And through its social teaching, the Church is trying to reflect on and bring change into the social structures of society.
Even so, today a Catholic faith which integrates the secular and the sacred so that Catholics can be leaven in society sometimes seems almost as elusive as before Vatican II. Perhaps this is nowhere better evident than in the U.S. Congress, which has more Catholic members than ever — but these are far from unified in their positions and viewpoints, and some maintain their Catholic identity while standing in vocal opposition to Church teaching.
And what has happened to the descendants of Anton and Maria Zbosnik? They are survived by 29 grandchildren and great-grandchildren spread across the continent who fill both professional and blue-collar positions. Some 15 are active Catholics, eight are inactive Catholics, and the rest unchurched or inactive Protestants. For the descendents of Anton and Maria, the new evangelization is sorely needed.
Anthony Bosnick lectures on history and writes from Gaithersburg,Maryland.
Editor's note: We misidentified the wedding photo that ran in this space last week as a portrait of the Irish-American Mullooly family. In fact, those were the Zbosniks, who emigrated here from Austro-Hungary and are written about in this week's report. We regret the error.
----- EXCERPT: Second in an occasional series ----- EXTENDED BODY: Anthony Bosnick ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Gene Therapy: Ethics Depend on the Method DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:The death of an Arizona teenager who underwent human gene therapy sent shock waves through the medical community last September. It is also bringing into focus ethical questions regarding this emerging field of treatment.
The death of 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger eventually prompted the Food and Drug Administration to halt gene experiments at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Human Gene Therapy.
The Tucson teen had been taking part in an experiment involving genetic delivery vectors, modified viruses that enter a person's cells to deliver healthy genes to their chromosomes (the blueprints of each person's body).
These genes would then augment existing defective genes. The delivery vectors in this case were viruses similar to the cold virus, which were added directly into Gelsinger's bloodstream. It is not clear why Gelsinger's body reacted so strongly to the treatment.
Science of Life
In light of Gelsinger's death, the Muscular Dystrophy Association announced that it has stopped funding its own gene therapy clinical trial at the University of Pennsylvania Institute. Also, The Washington Post recently reported that there have been several other deaths associated with previous human gene therapy trials.
Gelsinger's tragic death points up the risks of gene therapy: that of curing heritable diseases that are now considered incurable.
In 1990, two young girls underwent gene therapy for a rare blood disease called ADA deficiency, which causes a suppressed immune system. Both girls had remarkable recoveries and are now leading normal lives. Because they also continued to receive conventional medical treatment, the degree to which the genetic repair of their white blood cells was responsible for their health is not certain. Yet the results of these and similar studies seemed to indicate that the risk of negative reactions to gene therapy were minimal, according to an article by Dr. W. French Anderson, in the April 30, 1998, edition of the scientific journal Nature.
Given the potential therapeutic promise of gene therapy, are those calling for a halt to clinical trials overreacting?
Dr. Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania thinks so.
“Some of the concern about gene therapy research is warranted,” the secular bioethicist told the Register. “But calls to bring research on gene therapy to a halt most certainly are not. … Pulling money out of gene therapy basic research is at best stupid, given the promise the field holds for those with incurable diseases.”
He added, “Gene therapy is in its infancy. If we want to apply more oversight to it, that would be very easy to do.”
According to Peter J. Cataldo, director of research of the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Boston, the morality of gene therapy depends on its method and purpose.
“We must distinguish between germ-line genetic manipulation [manipulation of eggs or sperm] and somatic cell therapy [nonreproductive human tissue cells],” Cataldo explained. “The ethical analysis differs in these two.
“Catholic teaching on these is based on the dignity of the human person — the body-soul unity of the human person. Somatic cell genetic therapy, in principle, can be morally acceptable if there is informed consent and the risks are not disproportionate to the benefits.”
Gelsinger's treatment fell under the category of somatic cell therapy, and is considered ethical, Cataldo said.
He continued: “Gene therapy can be a morally good thing in that it is direct therapy to alleviate disease, and it is consistent with the Church's support of science and medicine.”
But, Cataldo added, “Germ-line therapy is not really a therapy at all, as it does not really benefit the individual but the offspring. It is manipulating the genome of the reproductive gametes [egg or sperm chromosomes] so inherited disease can be eliminated in future generations.
“The enormous risks are therefore unacceptable. Catholic teachings have not eliminated the use of gene therapy and knowledge of genetics, but only those uses of this knowledge and technology that do not truly serve the human person.” Germ-line therapy would involve in vitro (test tube) manipulation of human eggs and/or sperm, which is problematic.
A further issue, according to Cataldo, is “genetic enhancement directed at the attributes of an individual, such as memory, strength, intelligence, etc. This kind of manipulation is not therapeutic. The major moral problem of genetic enhancement is that it does not respect the body/soul unity of the human person.”
The Holy Father has spoken about genetic therapy and research.
In his 1983 address to the World Medical Association he states, “A strictly therapeutic intervention whose explicit objective is the healing of various maladies such as those stemming from deficiencies of chromosomes will, in principle, be considered desirable, provided it is directed to the true promotion of the personal well-being of man and does not infringe on his integrity or worsen his conditions of life.”
In an address to the members of the Pontifical Academy for Life, Feb. 24, 1998, the Pope also warned against potential abuse: “It is unlawful to carry out any intervention on the human genome unless it is aimed at the good of the person, understood as a unity of body and spirit; nor is it lawful to discriminate between human subjects on the basis of possible genetic defects discovered before or after birth.
“Furthermore, we ask political leaders and scientists to promote the good of the person through scientific research aimed at perfecting appropriate treatments that are feasible and without disproportionate risks.”
Concluded Cataldo: “Gene therapy can be a morally good thing in that it is direct therapy to alleviate disease, and it is consistent with the Church's support of science and medicine.”
David Beresford, a Ph.D. biology student, writes from Lakefield,Ontario.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: David Beresford ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Linus' Legacy: Bits of Fabric and Yarn DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:“Peanuts” creator Charles Schulz is gone, but at least one of his comic characters will stay busy.
Linus, the world's most famous security-blanket hugger, is working with thousands of volunteers across the country in a program named in his honor.
Project Linus, founded in December 1995, has distributed more than 160,000 handmade blankets and quilts to children and young people who are seriously ill or traumatized.
What started out for Karen Loucks as a personal project to make security blankets for 100 children in the Rocky Mountain Children's Cancer Center in Denver quickly attracted attention and became Project Linus. From that first group, the volunteer organization has grown to more than 350 chapters across the country, and in Canada and Mexico.
Their homemade blankets in child-friendly colors have brightened the lives and the outlook of children in many hospitals, cancer centers and shelters.
Blankets have gone to Hopi and Navajo Indian reservations. They've reached children in a Catholic AIDS orphanage in South Africa, victims of earthquakes in Turkey and floods in Honduras, and youngsters in Kosovo. Blankets given to Kazakhstan orphans were the first item they ever owned.
Volunteers attend no regular monthly meetings or pay dues, but Project Linus keeps growing and thriving because of the “incredible generosity of people willing to open up their hearts and reach out,” said founder Loucks.
Quilting groups often attract extra members who pitch in with the project, which has no age restrictions. An 81-year-old woman in Brooklyn, N.Y., has made 37 blankets. Sister Amadeus and Sister Maurita, retired Sisters of St. Joseph in Concordia, Kan., make blankets regularly. An eighth-grade home economics class in Illinois made 255. Brownie troops donate too.
“The people who get attracted to Project Linus tend to be quality people with huge hearts who really care about children,” Loucks told the Register.
Felicia Copeland and Cathy Tringhese are prime examples. Copeland, who attends St. Peter's Cathedral in Belleville, Ill., organized a chapter in 1997. She wrote to all 129 parishes in the Belleville Diocese to promote Project Linus, then contacted other Christian churches.
To date, this chapter has knitted, crocheted and quilted more than 1,700 blankets. Copeland delivers them regularly to several hospitals such as St. John's Mercy Medical Center and Cardinal Glennon Children's Hospital in St. Louis and to a shelter like Our Little Haven, for babies through age 5 who are abandoned, HIV-positive or drug-addicted.
“We relate as grandmothers to these kids, as if they were our own,” Copeland said.
The nondenominational Project Linus attracts Catholics like Tringhese, who formed the Southern Connecticut chapter. Every Monday, a core group of
24 from different parishes meets at Holy Name of Jesus Church in Stratford, Conn., to make, label and distribute blankets to hospitals including Yale-New Haven Hospital children's units, and organizations such as Paul Newman's Hole in the Wall Gang Camp for children with cancer and serious blood diseases, and Connecticut Burn Camp. Last year, they delivered 2,000.
“I feel it's my mission now,” said Tringhese. “We provide the children with a bit of comfort in a difficult situation.”
People from several area parishes and churches work together with her. Many sew blankets at home. In local convalescent homes, seniors again use their knitting and crocheting skills. “The blankets multiply like loaves and fishes,” said Tringhese.
And they bring the same feelings of comfort and security to the children who receive them as Linus' blanket brings to the world-famous cartoon character.
Rebecca Charleton, child-life manager at Cardinal Glennon Children's Hospital, said that blankets they get monthly have a big impact on the children, their families and the nurses too.
“Every time they come back into the hospital, that's the blanket they bring with them,” she said. “It has great significance for them.”
Donna Beerman, child-life therapist at St. John's Mercy Medical Center, let a sad 3-year-old with a bone disease pick out a cowboy-themed blanket. From that moment, he wouldn't let go of it.
For Big Kids Too
Older teens also find comfort. In Parker, Colo., 18-year-old athlete Reiford King, seriously injured in an auto accident, found a colorful blanket on his bed.
“I thought this was really awesome that people took time out of their day to do this,” he said. He always keeps it on his bed. “I think it speeded up the process of getting better,” King added.
Blankets brought comfort to some Columbine students, according to Loucks, a Mormon. She brought two dozen to a Mormon church used for some counseling sessions, and “every one of the kids went over and picked up a blanket and wrapped themselves in it. The transformation was amazing … the kids calmed down.”
The project has had another kind of ripple effect.
“The camaraderie we've developed with all the churches is the most worthwhile, besides helping the children,” said Copeland in Belleville. “It's the most beautiful ecumenical thing we could have gotten involved with.”
What did Charles Schulz think of Project Linus? “He has been very pleased with Project Linus,” an aide told the Register before the cartoonist's death Feb. 12. “He's received several blankets (himself) … since he's been in chemotheraphy.”
Joseph Pronechen is based in Trumbull, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: The Gospel Of Life DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:As a science, demographics is a modern tale of two cities in which poorer countries seem to have exploding populations while population figures in the industrialized West follow a rapidly declining trajectory (see story on Italy below). In his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), Pope John Paul II warns that the very methods that have brought about declining birthrates in the West are being exported to developing countries:
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.
Contraception, sterilization and abortion are certainly part of the reason why in some cases there is a sharp decline in the birthrate [of the West]. It is not difficult to be tempted to use the same methods and attacks against life also where there is a situation of “demographic explosion.” (16)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: LIFE NOTES DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:Abortionists Gain from Vote by Senate Republicans
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Feb. 3—The Senate Feb. 2 approved an amendment to a bankruptcy bill which would financially benefit groups that bring suit against pro-life protesters under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, the AP reported.
The courts have imposed extremely large fines against pro-life individuals and groups convicted of violating the act, forcing many of the pro-lifers and their families to declare bankruptcy, AP said.
The amendment, introduced by pro-abortion Sen. Charles Schumer, DN.Y., singles out pro-lifers and reduces their ability to seek bankruptcy protection. Republican senators were prepared to vote against the amendment but many changed position and voted for it to prevent Vice President Al Gore from casting a high-profile, tie-breaking vote, reported AP. The wire service added that Gore had hoped to show his opponent, Bill Bradley, and the abortion lobby his support for abortion by voting for the amendment
Planned Parenthood Agrees Not to Perform Abortions
NEWSDAY, Feb. 2—After submitting a written pledge to town officials stating that it would not perform abortions, Planned Parenthood opened a clinic this month in Massapequa, N.Y., reported the Long Island daily.
The facility's application approved by the Department of Health last year listed a number of “services” that it would perform, which did not include abortion.
Nonetheless, said Newsday, Planned Parenthood received the go-ahead only “after Town Supervisor John Venditto received a written promise from the group” assuring it would not perform abortions on site. Venditto, who won re-election on the pro-life Right to Life Party line, said “he had no regrets about slowing the process or taking the unusual step of getting a written promise from the group.”
Under the agreement, Planned Parenthood would have to re-apply to the state Department of Health before being allowed to perform abortions at the location.
‘Choose Life’ Tags Stir Controversy
THE TENNESSEAN, Feb. 4—A state senator wants Tennessee to have a “Choose Life” license plate and give half the proceeds of its sale to adoption facilities and crisis pregnancy centers, reported the state-wide daily.
“I want to educate people that you can choose life,” said Sen. Micheal Williams, R-Maynardville. “I'm not trying to … make a political statement.” Senate Transportation Committee Chairman Tommy Haun, R-Greeneville, said he opposes the plates, said The Tennessean.
The “Choose Life” plate would be patterned after one Florida adopted last year, Williams said. Proceeds in Florida go to crisis pregnancy centers, but the plate is facing a legal challenge from the National Organization for Women.
A Florida judge blocked distribution of the license plates while she decides whether they amount to a political statement against abortion, said The Tennessean. NOW argued that the state improperly approved a “religious motto, which has frequently been used to harass, intimidate and, at times, [to] kill and maim those who seek to exercise their rights, including the right to choose abortion.”
Abortionist Begins 120-day Jail Sentence
ALBANY TIMES UNION, Feb. 8—Controversial Pennsylvania abortion practitioner Steven Brigham, medical director of an abortion facility in Phillipsburg, Pa., has begun a 120-day jail sentence in Albany, N.Y., on a tax conviction, said the state capital's daily.
Brigham, who must make $8,188 restitution to New York state, could be released as early as April 6 for good behavior.
Brigham also was convicted in Albany County in 1998 of a felony count of scheming to defraud, but that conviction was overturned in December by the New York State Supreme Court's Appellate Division.
Brigham's medical license was revoked in New York in 1994 after he was accused of botching abortions.
In 1996, the New Jersey state attorney general filed 14 counts of negligence, gross negligence, malpractice and professional misconduct against Brigham for his abortion activities in that state.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: FACTS of LIFE DATE: 02/20/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 20-26, 2000 ----- BODY:Did You Know?
Several studies have noted that men who undergo a vasectomy, the most common form of male sterilization, have a higher chance of developing prostate cancer, especially 15 to 20 years after their vasectomy.
(Source: The Culture of Life Foundation, Washington, D.C.)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Attitudes Toward Social Injustice, Jews, Disunity and Violence DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:ROME — Many Catholics take Lent as an opportunity to participate in a general confession, in which they recall sins of their past. During this Jubilee year Lent, Pope John Paul II plans a confession of sorts for the entire body of the faithful.
On March 12, Pope John Paul II plans to observe the Jubilee Day of Forgiveness by asking pardon on behalf of Catholics for sins in its the past — including Christians’ attitude toward Jews.
The Church “is not afraid of the truth that emerges from history, and it is ready to recognize errors where they are demonstrated, especially when they concern the respect owed to individuals or communities,” said a special document prepared for the event.
What do Catholic apologies mean to Jews?
Father Peter Stravinskas in dialogue with Rabbi Leon Klenicki, Page 7.
Called “Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past,” the document was prepared by the International Theological Commission, headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, and made public March 1.
It cited examples of historical wrongs that have been identified by the Pope as potential grounds for an examination of conscience: the division between Christians; the use of violence in the service of truth, as by the Inquisition; the failure by Christians to denounce social injustices; and the relations between Christians and Jews.
The Church itself, as the “spouse of Christ,” is a holy institution that cannot sin, it said. In determining responsibility, it said, care must be taken not to blame an entire Christian community for the faults of a few.
“The fault is always personal, although it wounds the entire Church,” the document said of past wrongs.
It also said that the social context of supposed past faults must be carefully considered and without unprejudice.
As regards relations with Jews, the document stated: “The hostility or mistrust shown by numerous Christians toward Jews over the course of time is a painful historical fact.” It specifically mentioned Jewish suffering during World War II.
This fact requires an act of repentance, which should itself spur new efforts toward better appreciating the “wound inflicted on the Jews.”
The document emphasized that the request for forgiveness asked by modern Christians was addressed to God. Its aim, it said, is the glorification of God and his mercy, not to feign humility or repudiate the Church's past.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian McGuire ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Congress to Defend Vatican U.N. Status? DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — The effort to muzzle the Vatican's voice at the United Nations is meeting a new potential roadblock: Congress.
Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., introduced a Senate resolution Feb. 24 condemning the efforts of pro-abortion groups that wants to remove the Holy See from its status as a permanent observer at the United Nations.
Santorum told the Register that keeping the Holy See in the United Nations is “very important” because of its ability “in organizing other countries to oppose the radical, pro-abortion agenda” that currently dominates U.N. policy.
Santorum noted that the Vatican has no vote in the General Assembly, just a voice at the table. Apparently that is too much for abortion activists, he said.
“Again, it's the intolerance of the left,” Santorum said. “When you disagree with them, they just want to shut you up.”
Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., agreed.
“The whole idea is to silence the Church,” Smith said. “It's not at all different from the attempts to remove Israel 10 years ago.” Smith introduced a resolution similar to Santorum's into the House on Feb. 16.
Both resolutions state that Congress wishes to “commend the Holy See for its unique contributions to a thoughtful and robust dialogue in issues of international concern during its 36 years as a permanent observer at the United Nations.”
Both “strongly object to any effort to expel the Holy See from the United Nations as a state participant by removing its status as a nonmember state permanent observer.” The resolutions also say “that any degradation of the status accorded to the Holy See would seriously damage the credibility of the United Nations by demonstrating that its rules of participation are manipulable for ideological reasons rather than being rooted in neutral principles and objective facts of sovereignty.”
The Holy See's office at the United Nations would not comment because the organizers of the effort were a nongovernmental organization.
U.N. activist Austin Ruse called the resolutions “historic.” Such a defense of the Pope “has never come before the U.S. Congress before,” he said.
Ruse keeps a watchful eye on the United Nations from across the street as head of the Manhattan-based Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, also known as CFAM.
“I don't see how you could vote against this,” said Ruse. “Only the most radical pro-abortion activists could vote against this.”
This resolution will pass easily because even pro-abortion congressmen will see through this campaign against the Vatican, he said. “This is a vote for religious tolerance.”
A State or a Religion?
Leading the charge behind the campaign to remove the Vatican from the General Assembly is an pro-abortion organization called Catholics for Free Choice. The organization's leader, Frances Kissling, told the Register that the Vatican represented a religion, not a government.
“The goal of the campaign is to get the U.N. to review the status to make a determination whether the Holy See fits the definition of a state; we don't think so,” said Kissling.
“If it's the government of the Roman Catholic Church, then it is not a state, it is a religion,” she said.
Asked whether 16 centuries of diplomacy with treaties and ambassadors proved that the Holy See was a state, Kissling said, “This is not the fourth century.”
Kissling predicted that the effort to remove the Vatican from the General Assembly “will win in the long run.”
Small, but Influential
Such comments were unconvincing to Santorum. “Well, they are a state,” he said. “They have a geographically identifiable territory.” He said the Vatican is no less a state than other small nation-states such as Monaco or Liechtenstein. He noted that the Holy See has ambassadors in more than 160 countries, including the United States.
Ruse said the abortion activists realize that removing the Vatican will be tough, but he believes there is another motive behind the move.
“The purpose is not to kick the Vatican out of the U.N.,” he contended. “It's to intimidate the Holy See delegation and her allies.”
“We're not trying to kick the Vatican out,” insisted Kissling. “There are many ways that the Roman Catholic Church can remain involved. All of the other religions are active in the U.N.”
Rep. Smith noted that when it entered the United Nations, the Holy See had the opportunity to have a vote in the General Assembly, similar to other small countries such as Luxembourg and Monaco. But it chose not to have a vote, probably to be less controversial, Smith said.
Under the plans recommended by abortion activists, Smith said, the Vatican would be reclassified as a nongovernment organization. Smith panned that demotion. “You and I could form an NGO,” he noted.
Support for the Vatican
Santorum and Smith are looking for additional supporters in Congress and could not yet indicate when a floor vote would occur.
Only days after introducing the resolutions, Santorum and Smith won the support of two Democrats, who, like the sponsors, are Catholic: Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., and Rep. Jim Barcia, D-Mich.
Said Santorum, “We're hoping for strong bipartisan support.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Vermont Legislature Threatens Marriage DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:MONTPELIER, Vt. — For years, homosexual activists have played a highly sophisticated game of legal chess at the state-court level in the United States. After recent developments in the Vermont Legislature, some fear their efforts could have an unfortunate payoff: the destruction of male-female marriage as a legal institution in the United States.
The Judiciary Committee of the Vermont House of Representatives voted March 2 to give marriagelike status to homosexual couples. After a vetting by the House's tax-writing committee, the full House will begin debating the measure March 14. If approved by the House and Senate, it could be signed into law by the state's governor this spring.
In tiny Vermont (its population is smaller than that of El Paso, Texas) homosexual “civil unions” pose a big danger to the legal status of marriage in America, said Gerard Bradley of Notre Dame Law School. After the Vermont Supreme Court first delivered its ultimatum requiring the state to grant all of the protections and benefits of marriage to homosexuals couples, homosexual activists “have intended to extract from the Vermont Legislature whatever is necessary to have their Vermont unions recognized as legal marriages in other states.” In Bradley's view, the Vermont “civil unions” measure may well achieve this key strategic goal of the homosexual activist community.
Other legal and political analysts agree with Bradley's assessment of the potential national impact of the proposed Vermont legislation.
Gerry D'Avolio, director of Massachusetts Catholic Conference, calls the measure “a dramatic erosion of the family as we know it” which could have an impact on the rest of the nation if approved.
David Coolidge, director of the Marriage Law Project, warns that Americans should “be alert for ways in which the advocates of same-sex ‘marriage’ could use this measure as a spring board to challenge the federal Defense of Marriage Act.” For example, Coolidge warns that if the “civil unions” bill is approved by the Vermont Legislature, homosexual couples there may begin to file joint federal tax returns. When these tax returns are rejected by the Internal Revenue Service, homosexual activists may then file suit in federal court demanding that the federal Defense of Marriage Act be struck down on the grounds that it deprives them of the benefits of marriage that they enjoy under Vermont law.
Bishop Kenneth A. Angell held out some hope that the Vermont could still avoid this dramatic step. “I am extremely disappointed in this civil unions bill, which to me sounds exactly like marriage,” he said. “But I do have faith in the people of this great state and I am still praying that this bill will be defeated.”
The legislation approved by the Judiciary Committee of the Vermont House has been described by the national media as the most comprehensive “domestic partnership” measure in the nation. Most legal analysts agree that the bill is designed to ensure that the “parallel” marriage regime which it creates will be only a temporary staging ground for a legal challenge to the historic status of marriage as the union of a man and a woman.
Defenders of marriage in Vermont point to several dangerous features of the bill that go far beyond the type of limited “domestic partnership” schemes adopted by some American cities and municipalities.
Craig Bensen, vice president of the Vermont citizens group Take It To The People, points out that in contrast to most domestic partnership legislation, the “civil unions” bill takes existing marriage statutes and merely substitutes the word “partner” for “spouse.” The bill even includes a provision allowing clergy to solemnize these “civil unions” in exactly the same manner as marriages. As a result, the bill merely eliminates the critical element of the union of two genders as a requirement for the formation of a marriage.
At the same time, the bill attempts to placate opponents by adding to its “civil unions” provisions a limited legal category of “reciprocal beneficiaries” for relatives who live together. However, while granting all but the name “marriage” to homosexual couples, the bill merely accords medical decision-making power and hospital visitation rights to “reciprocal beneficiaries.”
The arguments for and against the Vermont approach pits homosexual activists against defenders of marriage.
Homosexual activists argue that the nature of the family is changing in America, and that the law should be updated. They call it a struggle for equality and basic civil rights, on a par with the struggle of blacks against slavery and legal discrimination in America. An editorial in one of the largest newspapers in Vermont, in fact, recently described a peaceful pro-marriage citizens’ rally organized by Bishop Angell at the capitol as “the equivalent of fire hoses and police dogs that were turned on civil rights workers in the South in an earlier day.”
In response, marriage's defenders say homosexual activists are the ones out of touch with reality. Public opinion polls reveal that most Americans continue to regard the term “homosexual marriage” as an oxymoron. This is because most Americans — as well as most people around the world — acknowledge the important link between marriage as a legal institution and the procreative potential of the union of a man and a woman.
In effect, without acknowledging it in so many words, most Americans still recognize the natural law basis for the social institution of marriage. If the day ever comes when American law refuses to acknowledge the natural law foundation of marriage and the family, the law of the nation will have become substantially untethered from the fabric of social reality itself.
The supporters of heterosexual marriage correctly point to the fact that marriage under American law is not a “right” but rather a privilege accorded to those unions which offer the best environment for raising children. There is an ocean of empirical evidence to support the view that the union of a man and a woman in marriage provides the best social, moral, psychological and emotional framework for raising children. In turn, society has a profound and legitimate interest in encouraging this institution.
With respect to charges of intolerance and bigotry, the defenders of marriage point out that marriage is actually the most multicultural social institution known to mankind. The fact that marriage involves the union of male and female is recognized by virtually all religious, social, cultural and ethnic lines. Indeed, from this perspective, the entire campaign to legalize same-sex marriage can be described as an aggressive effort by an intolerant minority to use the American legal system to practice social and cultural imperialism on a massive scale
Indeed, it is extremely significant that the story of the “civil unions” bill recently proposed in Vermont both began, and will almost certainly end, in the hands of the judiciary. The measure currently before the Vermont Legislature will merely serve as an invitation to the further expansion of judicial intervention in the debate over marriage.
But in Alaska and Hawaii, as well as very recently in California, American voters are increasingly using the ballot box to take the issue of marriage out of the hands of the courts. Assuming that common sense and solid moral sensibilities reign in the long run, this democratic process probably offers the best avenue for protecting marriage.
Matthew Daniels is the executive director of Alliance For Marriage in Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Matthew Daniels ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: A Hero Who Wouldn't Budge in the Face of Nazism DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:ST. RADEGUND, Austria — At a time when Jörg Haider and his far-right Freedom Party are triggering fears in Austrian political circles, a diocese is pushing to have an anti-Nazi canonized.
Franz Jaegerstaetter, a simple farmer who lived not far from the Austrian town were Adolf Hitler was born, sacrificed his life for the belief that a true Catholic could never become a Nazi, researchers said. Jaegerstaetter, who refused to serve in Hitler's army, was sentenced to death by the Reich Military Tribunal and beheaded in August 1943.
Fifty-four years later, in response to a letter from Jaegerstaetter's widow, the government of Germany declared that Franz Jaegerstaetter's trial had been unjust and that he had been convicted “solely for the preservation of the Nazi dictatorship.”
Now, a commission of the Austrian Diocese of Linz has completed work on Jaegerstaetter's canonization cause, and expects to send the documentation to Rome this year.
Said the postulator Manfred Scheuer, on behalf of the diocese: “Franz Jaegerstaetter practiced his faith in piety and charity. He lived as an alert Christian in his political context. With an educated and mature conscience he said a decided no to National Socialism. He was put to death because of his consequent refusal to fight in Hitler's war as a soldier. He died in the clear consciousness of the vocation to be a witness for the King Jesus Christ.”
For more than 20 years after his death, Jaegerstaetter's story was largely unknown outside of his birthplace, St. Radegund, a remote village in upper Austria. Then American sociologist Gordon Zahn, now professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, happened to discover Jaegerstaetter while researching a book on German Catholics’ response to Hitler.
He resolved to tell the story of a single Catholic's heroic resistance to Nazism and in 1964 published In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jaegerstaetter (Temple-gate: Springfield, Ill., reprinted 1986).
Jaegerstaetter's Austrian biographer, Erna Putz, also came upon his story while writing an article on St. Radegund parish in 1979. “I had heard about Jaegerstaetter, but as a slightly foolish person, an eccentric,” Putz told the Register.
Then she was introduced to the church sacristan, who happened to be Franziska Jaegerstaetter, Franz's wife. Franziska showed the visiting journalist some of her husband's writings, and Putz was struck when she opened a notebook and read: “Disciples of Christ, by the salt of supernatural values, should keep others from moral decay, but not spoil their lives with too much salt. Love of enemy is not unprincipled weakness, but heroic strength of soul and imitation of the divine example.”
“I realized at that point,” said Putz, “that this man had a deep experience of God. He was not an eccentric, but a mystic. I had a treasure in my hand that I had to share with others.”
Franz was born out-of-wedlock in 1907 to a poor farmer's maid. His natural father died in World War I. Franz was raised by his devoutly Catholic maternal grandmother until 1917 when his mother married a farmer named Jaegerstaetter, who adopted the boy. He finished elementary school and went to work on the family farm.
During his adolescence Franz was regarded as a wild and boisterous youth who enjoyed having a good time. He did, however, attend Mass regularly and despite his limited education, developed a love of reading and writing.
When he was about 20, he left the village for about three years in order to work in the iron mines in the Steiermark region of Austria. This was a socialist environment, which was quite hostile to Catholicism. Perhaps here, according to Putz, he began to realize how precious his faith was to him. Upon his return, he even spoke to his parish priest of his desire to enter a religious order. But the pastor advised against it, telling Franz to remember his responsibility to his parents and the family farm.
‘Pfui Hitler!’
In 1936 Franz married Franziska, a deeply religious young woman who encouraged and strengthened her husband's faith. “They were very much in love and their unswerving faith in God helped them through many crises,” says Putz, a good friend of Franziska, who at age 87 is still active in parish activities. The couple had three daughters.
As Franz's faith in God continued to grow, he lost interest in many of his youthful pastimes like drinking and gambling. He began fasting until noon and receiving holy Communion every day.
He served his parish church as sacristan and would refuse to accept money from villagers for funerals and other special services. Even though his own family was poor, he often distributed foodstuffs to needy townspeople during the war years. Though generally well liked by the villagers, Franz was regarded by many as a religious fanatic.
It was Jaegerstaetter's unfaltering faith that led him to develop his growing opposition to the Nazi regime. Whenever he was greeted by the inevitable “Heil Hitler!” he would respond “Pfui Hitler!” He withdrew from the powerful Farmers Organization when it began to support Nazism and stopped visiting local taverns in order to avoid political arguments.
In March 1938, Hitler's tanks crossed the border and occupied Austria. On April 10, a plebiscite was held in which Austrians were asked to say yes or no to the Anschluss.
The vote was almost unanimously yes. In St. Radegund, the only person to vote no was Franz Jaegerstaetter. Family members and friends, including priests, had tried to get him to reconsider, saying that his one negative vote would be pointless; after all, German tanks were already in Austria.
Rising Opposition
But Franz followed his conscience, as he would continue to do until his death. His disappointment in his fellow countrymen is reflected in one of his commentaries: “I believe that what took place in the spring of 1938 was not much different from that Maundy Thursday nineteen hundred years ago when the Jewish crowd was given a free choice between the innocent Savior and the criminal Barabbas.”
In the summer of 1940 Franz was first called up for military service and sworn in on June 17 in Braunau. He was allowed to return home after a few days because the mayor of St. Radegund said that he was needed on the family farm.
He did serve in the army, though not at the front, from October 1940 to April 1941. It was during these months in military training that Jaegerstaetter learned what it meant to be a Nazi soldier and he decided that he would have no part of it. Again he was returned to his hometown, after the mayor insisted that he was “indispensable” to his family.
It was at this time that he declared that he would not comply with further conscription. According to his trial records Jaegerstaetter said “that as a believing Catholic he was not permitted to perform any military service” and “that it was impossible for him to be a Nazi and a Catholic simultaneously.”
When Erna Putz first asked Franziska why her husband did not go to war, the answer was simple: “Because they [the Nazis] persecuted the Church.”
In her research, Putz discovered that of the 1,000 priests in the Diocese of Linz, to which St. Radegund belongs, 40 were sent to a concentration camp, 11 were murdered there, and at least 118 served long prison sentences. Even the St. Radegund parish priest was imprisoned for a “seditious” sermon.
Under heavy pressure from the Gestapo, the Nazis’ secret police, the bishop of Linz urged his priests to avoid any remarks about politics in their sermons so as not to risk having to cease all pastoral work.
Although sympathetic to the clergy's plight, Jaegerstaetter wrote: “Are we being helped much by priests who are forced to remain silent when they should speak out? Is one perhaps helped much by a doctor, when he is brought to a person who is bleeding profusely and that doctor is forbidden to put a bandage on that patient?”
Under Arrest
It was obvious to all that Franz's decision to disobey the Nazi army would cost him his life and everyone around him, including his wife, tried desperately to get him to change his mind. But when Franziska saw how deeply Franz was committed to following his conscience, she accepted his decision, though until the end she always hoped, for the sake of their children, that he would reconsider.
To those, including many priests, who criticized his decision on the grounds that he was being irresponsible toward his wife and children, Jaegerstaetter replied: “Again and again people try to trouble my conscience over my wife and children. Is an action any better because one is married and has children?”
In March 1943, Franz Jaegerstaetter appeared at the Enns induction center in order to state his refusal to serve in the army. He was immediately placed under arrest and taken to the military prison at Linz. Franz spent the months before his trial praying, writing and comforting other prisoners. At the beginning of May he was transferred to Berlin, where he was tried before the national court martial and condemned to death for sedition.
On the night before his execution, Franz's confessor made a last attempt to save his life, reminding him that he had just to sign a piece of paper and his life would be spared. But Franz replied: “I cannot and may not take an oath in favor of a government that is fighting an unjust war.”
On Aug. 9, 1943, Franz Jaeger-staetter was beheaded at Brandenburg, the first of 16 executions. Father Jochmann, a priest who had spent time with the condemned man just before his death, was impressed with his inner strength and serenity. The priest later told a group of Austrian nuns: “I can only congratulate you on this countryman of yours who lived as a saint and has now died as a hero. I say with certainty that this simple man is the only saint that I have ever met in my lifetime.”
Jaegerstaetter was cremated and in 1946 his ashes were brought to St. Radegund, where they were buried by the church wall. Gordon Zahn noted that very few people stopped to pray by Jaegerstaetter's grave when Zahn visited St. Radegund in 1961. Most villagers did not view Jaegerstaetter's actions as heroic. In fact, there was even strong opposition from veterans to putting his name on the town war memorial, though in the end it got there. These veterans, explained Putz, posed a very painful question: “If Jaegerstaetter was right, then what about us? Were we all fools for believing that by obeying the law we were doing the right thing?”
Posthumous Honors
But, over time and with the publication of Erna Putz's biography, Jaegerstaetter's reputation as a man of courage and conviction began to grow.
In 1984, the president of Austria, in response to a nationwide popular petition, issued a special posthumous Award of Honor to Franz Jaeger-staetter.
According to Putz, he is now considered a national hero in his country and not a day goes by that a steady stream of visitors doesn't visit his grave. Groups such as Pax Christi, which strongly supports the cause for Jaegerstaetter's canonization, organize pilgrimages on a regular basis.
Franziska Jaegerstaetter is hoping to see the day when the Church officially recognizes her husband as a martyr as well as a shining example of Christian life.
Manfred Scheuer, postulator for his canonization, said Jaegerstaetter “can be considered as a martyr of faith and justice in the sense of the ecclesiastical tradition. He was faced with the alternatives: God or idol; Jesus Christ or Führer.”
Berenice Cocciolillo writes from Rome.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Berenice Cocciolillo ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Executive Theologian DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:As executive director of the Secretariat for Doctrine and Pastoral Practices of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, he is considered the U.S. bishops'top theologian. Three years ago, Pope John Paul II appointed him as one of only two Americans on the International Theological Commission. A Dominican, he was ordained a priest in 1970. He recently spoke with Register national affairs correspondent Brian Caulfield.
Caulfield: How did your vocation to the priesthood come about?
Father DiNoia: I knew at a young age that I was going to be a priest. As I got older, it became clear that I wanted to be a religious, but I wasn't sure with what community. I had Sparkill Dominican Sisters in grammar school who recognized that I had a strong intellectual bent which was in keeping with their charism. This was what I wanted. My calling was confirmed with meeting a Dominican priest, Father William Wallace, who taught at Catholic University for years.
What attracted you to the order?
The Dominican “thing.” That is, conventual or community life dedicated to study and preaching. I knew it was for me. I never had any doubts once I started.
It seems the Dominicans are experiencing a renewal in recent years.
The order is quite alive. Most provinces are reporting an influx of novices in Africa, Asia, certainly in the United States. There has been a tremendous renewal of interest in [St. Thomas] Aquinas and medieval theology in general. Young people are drawn toward the Dominican commitment to doctrinal integrity for the sake of the Gospel. As I tell people, orthodoxy is not an end in itself. We are true because of the One who calls us to the truth and loves us. Young people also are drawn to the commitment to liturgical prayer, a life lived in common. In our [Dominican] House of Studies, we celebrate all the major hours together and many of the minor hours. Wearing of the religious habit has never been a problem with Dominicans, in general. But the habit is understood as a sign of religious consecration, not as a uniform.
Why the renewed interest in Aquinas?
It's connected to our comprehensive vision of the whole truth which young people like. You can't read Aquinas for long and escape that comprehensiveness. Often people make a distinction between pastoral and doctrinal [theology]. As Dominicans, we do not. For us, truth is important for the soul, in the living of everyday life, not just for abstract contemplation or enjoyment. Some might say that St. Dominic founded an order of preachers and St. Thomas made us into an order of teachers. That's not the right perspective. Even in St. Dominic's day, the preaching had a strong teaching and doctrinal content. He encountered the Albigensians, who were teaching an error regarding the nature of man that had wide-ranging social effects. It showed that the power of a wrong idea about human beings or God can be corrupting of the spirit.
Are there examples of this today?
Well, as we see in the case of dissent from Humanae Vitae [On Human Life, the 1968 encyclical that reiterated Church teaching against contraception], ideas have power. Wrong moral thinking can corrupt the soul.
Some people have criticized Pope John Paul's call for the Church to apologize for past sins. As a member of the International Theological Commission which drafted a document on these past wrongs, what's your thinking?
The chief element to keep in mind is that the Church itself is holy and cannot sin, but she can apologize and ask pardon for the sins of her members. It's a subtle point; most people don't get it. The Church and sin cannot really be in the same sentence because of her total unity with Christ.
The terms “doctrinal” and “pastoral” are united in the title of your office, so you must see the two as working together.
Pastoral has sometimes come to mean lying to people. Sometimes it's seen as pastoral when you don't preach the whole truth, so that the sharp edge is blunted. This is a very self-defeating approach because the truth will set you free. So not telling the truth is constraining, confining.
How is the Church combating theological errors?
Since I have come here in 1993 to work with the bishops’ conference, some of the greatest pieces of magisterial teaching have come through Pope John Paul II. There is Veritatis Splendor[The Spendor of the Truth], Fides et Ratio [Faith and Reason] and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. These all hit on themes dear to the Dominicans and Aquinas. Veritatis is a teaching on morals in the light of the life of Christ. It says that morals are not just a matter of keeping the commandments; keeping of the commandments is an invitation to communion with God. They are to transform us into people capable of sitting and enjoying the presence of God. Fides is very much an affirmation of Aquinas that the human mind can grasp the truth.
What is the significance of these teachings in the life of the Church?
I believe this is the most important teaching pontificate in the history of Christendom. It's very hard to find any magisterial output of the quantity and the quality of John Paul II. He has spoken on every major issue. He has made it his life's work to articulate the vision of Vatican II in every conceivable area of the Church. I have been lucky to have a chance to promote it.
What are your main duties with the bishops’ conference?
Our office works with four committees: doctrine, pastoral practices, review of Scripture translations and health care issues. … My job is to work with these committees and advise the bishops. A lot of work is consultation within the conference with all other secretariats. They will ask us to review doctrinal content of documents they're working on.
What's the biggest doctrinal challenge facing the Church?
Sexual morality and morality in general. You can only make sense of it if you see it in the perspective of Christian humanism. None of it makes sense if the teaching is seen as a suppression of the human instead of what it really is — the flourishing of the human good. This is what the Holy Father has been saying in all his writings on morality, especially sexual morality. His whole theology of the body is meant to conceptualize the Christian understanding of sexuality and place it in the perspective of human goods, and as man and woman made in the image of a loving God. There's a lot of confusion over Catholic morality and sometimes theologians make adjustments in an attempt to be “pastoral.” But they tend to drift in the direction of the culture on these issues rather than calling the culture to its truly human possibilities. Our goal is to present the moral life as a consummation of all the human person can be in God.
What is the new evangelization that the Pope has been proclaiming?
It refers to a kind of recommitment on the part of the Church to proclaim the Good News and re-proclaim it to itself. The thrust is ad gentes [to the nations], but also a re-evangelization where the Gospel has declined. The Church needs to be evangelically assertive and culture-transforming. We should not allow the ideology of inculturation to become a one-way street. The Church is itself a culture that can transform the culture around it. Part of the battle in the U.S. is that we've grown so used to the culture framing our agenda that some people have trouble seeing what the Holy Father is saying, that the Church must frame the culture.
----- EXCERPT: Being 'pastoral' doesn't mean hedging the truth ----- EXTENDED BODY: Father J. Augustine DiNoia ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Vaccine From Aborted Fetus Cell Lines Judged Morally Acceptable DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:ST. LOUIS — The St. Louis Archdiocesan Pro-Life Office says using a hepatitis vaccine derived from cell lines developed from an aborted fetus is morally acceptable because it is the only available alternative to the spread of the disease.
The office said it had been receiving inquiries about the ethics of such vaccinations since a law was enacted by St. Louis County ordering food handlers to be vaccinated. Some of them have refused to get the vaccine because of their pro-life views.
Hepatitis A (a viral infection of the liver) is usually contracted by consuming food or drinks handled by an infected person. The vaccination against it requires an initial shot followed by a booster shot.
In making its determination, the Pro-Life Office cited research by ethicist Edward Furton of the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Boston, who concluded it is permissible for a Catholic to receive the vaccine since the individual is not in immoral cooperation with the evil of abortion.
In an interview with the St. Louis Review, the archdiocesan newspaper, Father Edward Richard, professor of moral theology at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary in St. Louis, said he agreed with Furton's conclusions.
“There's no alternative if we want to prevent the spread of diseases and the consequences that flow from that,” Father Richard said.
“The use of the vaccine itself is not intrinsically evil. Certainly the origins are, but the person who uses it wants to do something positive.”
The Church wants to do all it can to promote life and the respect for life, he said. People who believe they should refuse the vaccine because it flows out of abortion “have very legitimate feelings about this — that it sends a message about their respect for life — and that is to be commended.”
However, Father Richard emphasized there is no other option available, not just in the case of the hepatitis A vaccine but also when it comes to rubella, chicken pox and other vaccines.
“No one should have to be put in this position. In spite of the fact that people find this totally abhorrent and want nothing to do with it, the moral principles of the Church always apply. One can morally use the vaccines.”
Father Richard said those who want to make a strong case against the health care industry must consider the protection of others and their own lives. “They cannot endanger the lives of others in the community,” the priest said.
Furton said adults have a moral obligation to provide vaccinations to their children, and operators of day-care centers also have a responsibility to protect children from potentially deadly diseases.
Father Richard said Catholics have “some positive obligations to fulfill in protecting the public, protecting children and protecting ourselves.
“These are serious. We are talking [about] not only potential but the likelihood that the disease would spread. The desire to be moral, in that respect, to protect ourselves when something is available, is the motivation for using a vaccine.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Kenny ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:U.S. Officials Eavesdropped on Pope
“Overseas targets have even included the Vatican,” the British paper said Feb. 27. According to the report, messages sent by the Pope and Mother Theresa of Calcutta have been intercepted, read and passed on to British intelligence officers.
The allegations follow the publication of a European Parliament report Feb. 23 on a U.S.-led communications monitoring network, said to intercept and process up to 2 billion messages a day, including telephone calls, fax transmissions and private e-mails.
Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls declined to comment on the allegations Feb. 29, but noted that judicial investigators in Rome have launched an inquiry into the matter.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Israelis Contend With Objections to Papal Visit DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:JERUSALEM — While Israeli authorities are preparing for Pope John Paul II's pilgrimage later this month, they have had to contend with opposition to the visit from various groups.
In Jerusalem, members of the rightist group Kach issued pamphlets against the visit, calling it “foreign work,” and anti-papal graffiti was found Feb. 27 scrawled along walls of the offices of the Chief Rabbinate.
Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi Israel Meir Lau strongly condemned the attacks.
“We have very bitter memories [of the Church] in the past … but Judaism speaks to us about turning an enemy into a friend, and [this] turning of a friend into an enemy is not acceptable. We need to give the Pope the respect due him,” Rabbi Lau told Israel Radio.
A spokesman at the apostolic nunciature said such opposition was inevitable, but he was not concerned by it. In fact, he was surprised there were not more such responses.
Pope John Paul is to travel on a pilgrimage to Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories March 20-26.
A group of rabbis opposed to the Holy Father celebrating Mass in Nazareth March 25, which falls on a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, met Feb. 24 with the apostolic nuncio to Israel, Archbishop Pietro Sambi.
They presented him with a petition signed by several thousand rabbis asking that the Mass be postponed so as not to force Jewish security personnel to desecrate the Sabbath.
Such use of security personnel on Saturdays is routine for state occasions and the visits of foreign dignitaries.
Meanwhile, in Nazareth, the Islamic Movement retains custody of a plot of land in front of the Basilica of the Annunciation where Pope John Paul is scheduled to celebrate Mass March 25.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Public Security denied media reports that the government would request that the site be evacuated before the papal Mass at the basilica.
Following two years of contention, a cornerstone for a mosque was laid at the site in November, with the understanding that construction would begin only after the Pope's visit.
In separate developments, the Catholic and Jewish communities of Rome will host a number of events later this month in anticipation of the Pope's trip, said ZENIT, the Rome-based news service.
“The events are intended to help Christians learn more about the Jewish culture and religion, and to discover the common roots of Christians and their ‘elder brothers in the faith,’” said ZENIT.
An art and photo exhibit featuring the possessions of Roman Jews will be held at the Gregorian Univerity from March 15 to April 12.
A concert featuring Israeli singer Mira Zakai and musicians Jonathan Zakand and Gilad Hildesheim will be held March 15 at the Caravita Oratory.
The Gregorian will also hold a conference March 20 on “Thirty-five Years of Excavations in Jerusalem,” led by Professor of Archeology Dan Bahat of Israel's Bar-Ilan University.
The Israeli embassies to the Vatican and Italy are helping to sponsor the events.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:Celibacy by Default Rising Among Greek Orthodox
Father Kollas said the problem was not new in Greece. “Women have always been hesitant about marrying priests … Women who marry priests are usually older women, those who are afraid of being left on the shelf,” he said. He also attributed the problem to the fact that priests are obliged to wear cassocks, and to the “despotism” and “lack of accountability” within the Orthodox hierarchy.
“Dozens of our seminary students every year have trouble finding wives,” said Father Vasileios Voroudakis, director of the Athens Ecclesiastical Lyceum. As a result, according to the Greek newspaper, they opt for a vow of celibacy. Many seminarians have serious problems finding a woman before ordination. On the likelihood of a majority celibate clergy, Father Kollas said: “God save the Orthodox Church from such a terrible fate.”
Indigenous Pietà Sparks Controversy in Brazil
The statue is modeled after Michelangelo's Pieta, which shows Mary grieving over the dead body of her son. Paulo Fuhro, one of the designers, said his version symbolized the martyrdom of the native population of Brazil at the hands of European conquerors.
The Brazilian bishops want to prevent the display of the statue during carnival this year, the 500th anniversary of the Portuguese arrival in Brazil, and is ready to take legal action to ban it if necessary.
Said Fuhro: “They say we are denigrating the holy image, that we are violating the Constitution. But if need be, we will also take legal action to protect our freedom of expression.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: What Do Catholic Apologies Mean to Jews? DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:Father Stravinskas is editor of The Catholic Answer in Mount Pocono, Pa. Rabbi Leon Klenicki is director of interfaith relations for the Jewish anti-defamation organization B'nai B'rith in New York. The two have continued their discussions of Catholic-Jewish relations ever since they published A Catholic Jewish Encounter from the Mind and the Heart (Our Sunday Visitor, 1994). A portion of their recent dialogue about the Jubilee year pardon follows.
Father Stravinskas: Certainly, one of the most important aspects of the biblical year of jubilee was the underlying notion of reconciliation or healing. What would you see as issues of importance for Jews and Christians to look at during this coming year?
Rabbi Klenicki: It is very important to talk about reconciliation-healing. Both are stages of the whole process of what in Hebrew is called Teshuvah, that is, confession and reconciliation with God and humanity. It is part of our liturgy, especially in Yom Kippur, to stress the centrality of confession to God and to fellow human beings about the transgressions of the past year. In this manner, the soul is open for the response of God's forgiveness as well, and this is very important, the forgiveness of the other person of faith, Jewish or Christian. The Yom Kippur liturgy stresses the need to open our hearts to the fellow human person, to get his or her forgiveness that will reach the throne of God.
I have to say personally that each Yom Kippur brings back a similar experience. That is, I wonder what would happen to me if a Nazi or a former junta general in Argentina known for his atrocities would come to me and ask my forgiveness. How would I respond to that?
Father Stravinskas: What would your natural response be? What do you hope your response would be under the impulse of God's grace and assistance?
Rabbi Klenicki: I would say that my first response would be of a passionate surprise. There are too many memories in my heart to respond immediately to such a person. But following the Jewish tradition, I would have to listen to the person asking for forgiveness and point out to him the need of a reckoning of the soul and a response.
That is, that that person has to confess to fellow people and to God his transgressions, the crimes of the past, and to give a response.
That response should result in a change of heart and attitude, as well as the obligation to serve others in charity and friendship. Once that person is transformed, according to Jewish tradition, I can forgive, I can forgive that person, and God will accept his confession. What matters essentially is the inner transformation of the person from evil to good.
Father Stravinskas: I find your example very interesting in light of something I just read a few days ago — a story which has just surfaced about [Rudolf] Hess, one of the chief henchmen of [Adolf] Hitler, who, in incarceration after the war, asked to see a priest to hear his confession.
The area in which he was living was Poland, and they couldn't find a German-speaking priest very readily. And as it turned out, the man that was finally uncovered was a Jesuit who had been the provincial of the Jesuits in Poland during the war, and it was he who was asked to come to hear the man's confession, the man who was actually responsible for the deaths of perhaps dozens, if not hundreds of Jesuit priests, men who had been the responsibility of this priest. And yet, it was he who was called upon to reconcile this individual to God, which, of course, he did.
But we don't hear about the psychological and the spiritual journey that that Jesuit priest took, which I'm sure is very similar to what you are describing for yourself, as well.
Rabbi Klenicki: Thus, would the Christian attitude be to forgive right away or to expect a transformation of the other person, the sinner?
Father Stravinskas: The theology of Christianity would encourage us immediately to respond to the overture of the other person without necessarily probing the motivations of the individual. I should stress that's obviously the ideal for a Christian. But Christians don't lose their human nature at the moment of baptism, and therefore, the natural process, I think, has to kick in for most of us at the same time. Even in the sacrament of penance, as a confessor, the Church instructs me to be sure, reasonably sure, that the person is confessing for proper motivations and has the intention of not repeating such sins in the future. So while there is the clear understanding that God forgives the minute the request for forgiveness is given, there also needs to be moral certitude that God and his mercy are not being mocked by people who simply wish to “get off the hook.”
From a Jewish perspective, what do you see as important topics to “put on the table” for the process of healing, but not simply as a rehashing of difficulties from the past, whether from this century or this millennium or two millennia, but with a view to discussing them so as to move on to the future?
Rabbi Klenicki: We need a joint reckoning. By joint reckoning, I mean the need for looking especially at the last 50 or 60 years of our joint history that has been so dramatic and painful for us Jews, especially in Europe. The Holocaust is a reality that we cannot put aside. It showed the diabolic possibilities of the human being without control, and at times I wonder if I, as a religious person, have done enough to face and fight back those diabolic possibilities of the human being expressed in the horror of Auschwitz, the Gulag or Latin American jails.
Father Stravinskas: What I think it is important to highlight, particularly in regard to this century, which I often refer to as the most horrible of centuries, is perhaps the lesson that when man tries to go without God, these are exactly the things that one should expect. Many people fail to realize that the 20th century was the first in history in which there was a formal decision on the part of “movers and shakers” to establish a world without any divine or transcendent horizon.
We can laugh at the superstitious silliness of the Greeks and Romans with their thousands of gods, but at least there was a reference to a reality beyond ourselves, there was some kind of accountability to some kind of divine being, whereas all the absolute horrors of the 20th century, whether from Communism or Nazism or Fascism or the more recent forms of total materialism and secularism, in each of these instances we find the tremendous difficulties and problems which have been inflicted on the human race precisely by people who have lost their reference to a Supreme Being.
What do you think that we as men and women of faith, whether Christian or Jew, can learn from that situation, and how perhaps we can work together to ensure that the 21st century will not repeat the same mistakes?
Rabbi Klenicki: Our process of reckoning with the 20th century has to be done on our own and together. On the Jewish side, we will have to reckon with modernism, a movement that was a blessing and a curse for us. A blessing, because it allowed the Jewish community to enter, though never integrate, into European society, and a curse, because by that illusion of being accepted in a non-pluralistic society, we lost part of our tradition in that dream. And I feel that perhaps Christians would have to reckon with the same problem. This was beautifully portrayed in the [1998] encyclical of John Paul II, Faith and Reason. Afterward, we together have to deal with and measure those diabolic possibilities of the human being, as I pointed out before.
Father Stravinskas: We all know that in the past 30 years, tremendous strides have been made, specifically in terms of Jewish-Catholic relations. It would seem that if we're going to move forward, we have to acknowledge these positive developments first, because that can become a kind of springboard for further positive action. What would you suggest as the most important advances in our common facing of modernity in the past 30 years?
Rabbi Klenicki: I would stress the following: one is the recognition of each other as subjects of faith. We are not any more “the thing Jew,” that is, an object of contempt in Christian theology for centuries, but rather a subject of faith. A similar process is occurring in the Jewish community, though at times, painfully, I've recognized that we carry on at times a theology of pointing fingers. We have reasons for that, but we also have to recognize that much has changed since Vatican Council II in Catholicism, and after the Holocaust in Christian denominations in Europe and the United States.
The second is the fact that, as religious people, we have to face the problems of our time, secularism in its worst dimension, the lack of belief in the young generations.
The third point would be our joint action as religious people, as a people of God acting in our world, and finally, which I consider crucial, is a reckoning of the period 1933-1945, with all its negative dimensions in the Christian-Jewish encounter.
Father Stravinskas:Finally, as we look at this process of reconciliation and reckoning of the soul, as you're fond of terming it, what do you see as issues that Jews need to address in their own hearts in regard to Christians or specifically Catholics?
Rabbi Klenicki:One area that requires our attention is a Jewish understanding of the mission of Jesus and Christianity to the world. Some of our medieval and contemporary Jewish thinkers and theologians have paid attention to this matter. But still for the common Jewish person, though well-educated, it is very difficult to think in terms of a Jewish understanding of Christianity. I don't use the word “theology” because it's not part of our religious vocabulary. But what I feel that is being developed in our community, though not still at a popular dimension, is a process of understanding the Christian and Christianity as ways of God. This was stressed by Franz Rosenzweig, the German-Jewish theologian who wrote about it in the early ‘30s and is very influential in the Jewish understanding of Christianity, and especially in mine personally.
Father Stravinskas:As we conclude, it dawns on me that perhaps we could ask you to close with a prayer for your Christian brothers and sisters at this point of tremendous significance. I ask for it because, as you know, in the Roman Canon of the First Eucharistic Prayer of the Mass, we refer to Abraham as “our father in faith,” and therefore, we should turn to one of our elder brothers in the faith to ask for his prayer and his intercession as we begin this new development in our lives together.
Rabbi Klenicki:I would say, in the tradition of Abraham, a prayer that I hope will inspire our joint witnessing in the world. It is part of the New Union Prayerbook Gates of Prayer.
May the time not be distant, O God, when your name shall be worshipped in all the earth, when unbelief shall disappear and error be no more. Fervently we pray that the day may come when all shall turn to you in love, when corruption and evil shall give way to integrity and goodness, when superstition shall no longer enslave the mind, nor idolatry blind the eye, when all who dwell on earth shall know that you alone are God. O may all, created in your image, become one in spirit and one in friendship, for ever united in Your service. Then shall your kingdom be established on earth, and the word of your prophet fulfilled: “The Lord will reign for ever and ever.”
Both: Amen.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Father Peter Stravinskas and Rabbi Leon Klenicki ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: School Choice: The Saga Continues DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:The U.S. Senate's recent vote to expand tax breaks for private-school tuition is a small, if symbolic victory for Catholic parents looking for a fair shake from the tax code.
A bill approved 61-37 would allow parents to place as much as $2,000 per year, per child, in education savings accounts. Through 2003, it would permit the tax-free interest from those contributions to be used for transportation, tutors, books and any other expenses for K-12 public, private or parochial schools.
Critics warn that the bill would divert money from public schools and chiefly benefit those wealthier families who could sock away money in the education accounts. But middle-class parents are tired of being deprived of government aid simply because it might also help the rich. Given the decay in the nation's public school systems, including the ones that are best funded, we suspect that many middle-classers would be willing to accept the short-term privations for the long-term good of a quality education for their children. Which is something that they are not able to choose right now.
The measure, however, isn't vetoproof. Which means it may amount to little more than an election-year, crowd-pleasing gesture.
But even as a gesture it has value, especially if it puts the Election 2000 spotlight on the whole tax break/school voucher debate. For parents of all faiths, it may be more relevant than debates over state flags and anti-religious Web sites.
Pro-lifers are taking the initiative in Minnesota. A coalition of organizations have collected 40,000 signatures on a petition to stop taxpayer funding of abortions (see Page 16). They hope their move will greatly strengthen future efforts to enact a referendum or constitutional amendment.
The abortion-funding issue never should have come up in the first place, as Jim Tarsney of Minnesota Lawyers for Life pointed out. The state's Supreme Court dictated the funding, from the top down. That was enough to stir up grass-root pro-lifers, who bristled at this exercise of funding-without-representation.
The result is an exercise in Democracy 101. Petitions were circulated, signatures collected, legislators approached, and town meetings planned. The outcome is yet to be seen. But for now it's gratifying to see that mad-as-heck pro-lifers aren't going to take it anymore. Pro-lifers elsewhere, take note.
----- EXCERPT: EDITORIAL ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Women Who Took the Long Way Home DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:Ignatius Press, 1999 400 pages, $14.95
There's a ballerina in Prodigal Daughters. There's also a former New Age therapist. Read all 17 essays, and you'll even meet a one-time member of NOW. What could women from such disparate backgrounds have in common? All longed for home and weren't satisfied until they were securely settled in with the Catholic Church.
All of the prodigals in these pages write of a strong homing urge pointing to the Catholic Church — specifically its fullness as a timeless bastion of truth. This is a collection of stories about the return journey.
The book turned out, says the editor, to be “a portrait of a unique generation of Catholic women” — “reverts,” rather than converts, because the flame ignited in childhood never quite died out. Cradle Catholics born in the ‘50s and ‘60s, they left but made their way back. Compared with the women of their mothers'generation, some of whom are described here as “silent and smiling,” they are vocal witnesses of God's grace. Their hallmark is intellectual and spiritual clearheadedness. Perhaps not coincidentally, they also have a good sense of humor; Kathleen Brown Robbins’ account of popping former Boston Cardinal Richard Cushing's portrait into the closet whenever her faith ebbed is genuinely funny. (Eventually, he came out for good.)
Come to think of it, with their passionate opinions and eloquent expression, these women would make formidable opponents in debate with the outspoken feminists of their generation — the Germaine Greers and Gloria Steinems of the world. And, indeed, a number are now writers and speakers, as we learn from the updates added by the editor.
Who are the women? The ballerina is Diane Yelenosky Spinelli, born into a loving Catholic home in 1955. The discipline of dance kept her away from the temptations of the other prodigals — drugs, smoking, sex and alcohol — but as a teen-ager, she dropped out: “An emotional idealist, I craved knowledge of my ultimate purpose, a stronghold of convictions on which to base my life choices,” she writes. “I was ready to respond to heroic demands, but there were none in the diluted, spineless, ‘feel good’ religion being offered to me.”
During her time at the Royal Ballet in London and back home with the Houston Ballet, Spinelli was supported spiritually by various Protestant churches. Protestant contacts brought her to the pro-life movement, and it was in this way that she became reconnected with a more dynamic Catholicism.
Spinelli represents the daughters who did not wander quite so far, often using Protestantism as a sort of halfway house. New Age therapist Moira Noonan, however, wandered far. Her tale, “Ransomed from the Darkness,” is an eye-opener. Primed by her interest in Eastern religion and disabled after a car crash, Noonan was ripe for the “New Thought” she encountered at a pain clinic in Wisconsin. She subsequently became a psychic and, for a while, believed herself clairvoyant. Providentially, she never lost her love for our Lady.
Pregnant from a short-lived marriage, Noonan, on holiday in Paris, spontaneously consecrated her unborn daughter to the Blessed Mother at the Basilica of Sacre Coeur. This daughter brought Noonan back to the Church. Like other writers, she found she could not give her own child a stone instead of bread. While practicing as a New Age therapist and conscious of her paradoxical position, she sent her daughter to first-Communion classes. Her own “reversion” followed. Now repentant and active, Noonan helps others “escape from the darkness.”
If Noonan was far out, Constance Buck was far in. The one-time NOW member, once listed in Who's Who Among American Women, viewed the world through a feminist lens. Everything had to be redefined. “I began purging my life of both God and family,” she recounts.
Of course, this left her empty, so she took drugs and, as she puts it, “ate macrobiotically.” Crowned with academic honors, she went to work in the U.S. House of Representatives. By chance one Easter, she found herself at Mass. “[A]ll at once I saw my errors quite clearly. … [T]he fact of my salvation or damnation would not rest with me but with Him.” A number of the writers had similar epiphanies.
Most of the prodigals have a distinctly intellectual bent. Rosemary Hugo Fielding, for example, almost driven to despair in graduate school by the philosophy of deconstruction, values the principle of contradiction: “I saw at last that radical feminism contradicts Christianity; one was true and one false.” But the book's essence is spiritual. All the writers see clearly that it is only through God's grace that they are home. Their expressions of love and reverence for the sacraments, particularly reconciliation and the Eucharist, are deeply moving.
These women desperately needed forgiveness. They found it in the Church. Read the stories of Allyson Smith and Rachel T. Wiley, the prodigals who had abortions, and you will never take the sacrament of penance for granted again.
Smith writes that she had not been to confession for 20 years: “I walked out of the confessional feeling lighter than air. … From that day on, instead of dreading the Sacrament of Penance, as I had when I was a child, I have loved it, because now I understand its healing power.”
Each story is unique, yet each fits the prodigal archetype. These women sing a joyful chorus that rises in stark contrast to the sterile feminism exposed by Steichen in Ungodly Rage (Ignatius, 1991). Each can identify with Smith at the moment of absolution: “[M]y Heavenly Father welcomed His prodigal daughter all the way home at last.”
Thanks to Donna Steichen for a book rich not only in spirituality but also common sense and literary elegance. Her introduction and conclusion are gems of spiritual reading. This is a powerful book which should be read by dutiful and prodigal alike, for it will open the eyes of the former and comfort the latter.
Bridget Neumayr writes from Thousand Oaks, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Bridget Neumayr ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:Up With Abstinence
I find it troubling to hear about the American Medical Association rejecting the teaching of abstinence in our schools (“AMA Rejects Abstinence,” Dec. 26-Jan. 1). I am the founder and president of the National Abstinence Clearinghouse, which exists to promote abstinence until marriage as the standard for adolescents and young adults. All across the nation, the message of abstinence until marriage is gaining an exciting reception. The fact is that “safe sex” is a deadly game and saved sex until marriage is a healthy choice. We back abstinence education 100% and are excited for young people who are making commitments to remain sexually pure until marriage.
Leslee J. Unruh
Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Wealthy Catholics
That professional athletes want to engage in prayer is one thing, but I find it ironic that these athletes, many of whom are multimillionaires, are so public with their prayer, yet live a lifestyle in contradiction to the life of poverty that Jesus lived (“God, Business and the Super Bowl,” Feb. 20-26).
My question is this: The Church teaches that Catholics, by the fruit of their labors, or just plain good fortune, are permitted to own private property — but what does the Church have to say about the superfluous wealth of [some] Roman Catholics?
Jesus said it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of heaven. If Jesus asked, “Would you rather win a Super Bowl or go to heaven?,” one would be wise to answer, “I want to be with you, as this world is nothing and your Kingdom is everything.”
Richard Mackin
El Segundo, California
We Have Sinned
I can't even begin to express my disappointment with your paper.
Friday when I received the paper and saw the article on the election and a picture of the presidential candidates Bush and McCain excluding a picture of Keyes (also a candidate) my heart was pierced. This is something I have begun to expect from the secular media, but not the Register. I depend on the Register to give me a well-rounded picture of the national news with perhaps a Christian outlook.
Well, I called the paper immediately to complain and was told that Keyes was sick and unable to comment so they didn't include his picture because it would look funny to have a picture with no comments. I disagree. Would you have excluded Bush or McCain if one of them were unable to comment?
On such an important day as Super Tuesday where so many people have their primary elections, this issue should have included pictures of all the candidates. As I read the article I was even more convinced of this, because the subject of most of the article was anti-Catholicism. The picture with a statement that Keyes was sick and unable to comment would have been much more complete and responsible, and included a very important candidate who upholds the Christian, Catholic view on the issues of this election.
I understand the secular media not including Keyes because of his views on abortion and the moral crisis of this country, but for the Register to omit Keyes is unforgivable — should I even consider using “anti-Catholic”? I feel very disappointed and as one of your most outspoken supporters I feel, for now, less desire to promote and support your paper.
Signed, “Cheerleader who has put down her pompoms.”
Sheila Beingessner
La Palma, California
Editor's Note:Ouch! The writer makes an excellent argument which would have caused us to rethink our coverage. We only ask, in the spirit of the March 12 Jubilee Day of Forgiveness, that readers accept our mea culpa for this omission.
Kill or Be Killed?
The headline in your paper read “Journalist Calls the Church a Key to Ending Death Penalty” (Feb. 13-19). The article does admit that even the final edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church allows that the death penalty may be just in some cases (after all, that's what the Bible says: see Exodus 21:14, Luke 23:39-43 and Romans 13:4). But that doesn't bother the journalist in question, Alan Berlow [author of Dead Season: A Story of Murder and Revenge], because he isn't Catholic and his only interest in the Church is how he can use it to further his political agenda.
If he succeeds in convincing Catholics that the Church bans all executions, that might drive them away from the Church. After all, while crusaders like him have apparently failed to come up with a single innocent man who was executed, plenty of innocent people have been killed by convicted killers.
That's why the Code of Canon Law warns us that the laity have “freedom in secular affairs” and so, when speaking about politics, “they are to heed the teaching of the Church proposed by the magisterium, but they must be on guard, in questions of opinion, against proposing their own view as the teaching of the Church” (Canon 227).
Don Schenk
Allentown, Pennsylvania
Witch-Hunt Warning
The article “Bishops Publish Rules for Complaints About Theologians” (Feb. 20-26) was very enlightening. According to the rules, anyone can make a claim against a theologian. The complaint is sent to a bishop, who forwards it to his experts. The experts then report back to the bishop, who then makes a decision against the theologian. The theologian then must accept the bishop's decision or be disciplined.
Where, in these procedures, does the theologian have the chance to defend him- or herself before the bishop's decision? We've heard about taxation without representation; this is condemnation without representation! Out of the clear blue sky a theologian can receive a letter stating, “You've just been silenced,” signed by the bishop. The Catholic Church sure knows how to resurface its witch-hunt policy in the modern age.
Anthony Stojak
Montgomery, Alabama
Editor's note: The Australian rules for “trustful dialogue” between bishops and theologians are hardly a “witch-hunt” policy, both because the Church always gives theologians ample opportunity to defend themselves, and because the promotion of bad doctrine is a very real — and, unfortunately, common — problem.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Politicians Who Fear Vouchers DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:During his recent presidential primary debate with Bill Bradley at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, Vice President Al Gore was asked a question which he obviously did not want to answer. Why does he oppose school vouchers, which 60% of black voters favor? Gore performed a few verbal arabesques and then changed the subject. As a liberal Democrat, Gore is “pro-choice” on many issues, especially abortion — but not when it comes to making private school options available to our children.
A few weeks prior to the Harlem debate, there was another, far more enlightening forum in downtown Manhattan. Celebrated man of letters Tom Wolfe (The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Right Stuff) addressed an audience of business executives concerned about the quality of education in New York. In a talk titled “How to Rescue American Education Without Spending Another Dime,” Wolfe said that the smartest thing the New York public school system could do is turn the entire enterprise over to the Roman Catholic Church.
Wolfe's words are worth quoting: “Look, I am not a Roman Catholic. I am a lapsed Presbyterian; I have been looking for a religious bone in my body, and I can't find one. But I have eyes and I see what works, and what the Roman Catholic Church is doing in New York works.”
Wolfe was only saying what poor, inner-city families who scrimp and save to pay parochial school tuition already know. The city's public schools are a disaster, while the parochial schools get results. There is no demographic difference between the students in the two systems, yet 85% of parochial school graduates go to college vs. 27% of public school graduates. Parochial school students score much higher on standardized tests and have a much lower dropout rate.
Parochial schools achieve all this with far fewer resources than the public school system. Several years ago, while researching a book called The Growth Experiment, economist Lawrence Lindsey phoned the headquarters of the New York school system and asked a simple question: How many non-teacher employees administer your system? Nobody seemed to know, but the answer turned out to be 10,000.
Lindsey then called the New York Archdiocese and asked the same question. When the woman who answered the phone asked him to “wait a minute,” Lindsey thought he was in for another bureaucratic runaround. But the lady was merely counting the number of employees on a piece of paper. She soon came back on the line and told him: There are 50.
Author Tom Wolfe suggests: give the entire education enterprise to the Catholic Church.
Adjusted per capita, that means the Catholic school system is doing a better — and far more efficient — job with 0.5% (that's one-half of 1%) of the administrative personnel.
Why do so many liberals take such a patently illiberal position on vouchers? First, we are told that, since many parents would use vouchers to send their children to religious schools, government vouchers violate the First Amendment's separation of church and state. Do we need to repeat what the First Amendment actually says? “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Until recently, these words were understood precisely as intended by their authors: The federal government has no business promoting a religion in the manner of the established church in England. But the states could do whatever they pleased with religion; and, indeed, Virginia had an “established” Episcopalian Church in the late 18th century, which nobody considered unconstitutional. The framers of the Constitution would be puzzled by modern arguments that every level of American government is bound by an aggressively secular interpretation of the religion clause of the First Amendment.
Another favorite anti-voucher complaint is that vouchers will drain scarce resources from the public school system, which will make their plight even worse. But the fact is that even well-funded public school systems in rich suburbs often do a lousy job. And the reason is simple: They enjoy a monopoly, and monopolies seldom feel obliged to respond to customer complaints. The public school where I happen to spend my summer vacations is awash in local property tax dollars; it also has something called “outcome-based education” in the classroom, whose object seems to be to retard the intellectual progress of the brightest students. The parents hate it, but there is nothing they can do.
If we look at the third, unspoken reason why a liberal Democrat like Gore opposes vouchers, we get to the truth of the matter. The teachers'unions have 3 million members; they constitute a workhorse for the Democratic Party. In fact, they sent more delegates to the 1996 Democratic National Convention than did the entire state of California. Unions have often been a progressive force in our society, but in this case they represent a vested interest that above all wants to preserve a status quo that doesn't work.
These unions, and their political clientele, wish to deny to poor children a privilege exercised by the affluent, including the large number of public school teachers who send their own children to private schools. Their self-serving anti-voucher campaign ought to be resisted by any politician who is genuinely progressive.
George Sim Johnston is the author of Did Darwin Get It Right?
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: George Sim Johnston ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Will the REAL ST. PATRICK Please Stand Up? DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:Most everyone has heard of St. Patrick and nearly everyone celebrates his feast day, but few know the true facts about his life. For example, he drove the Druids out of Ireland, not the snakes and — hold onto your green derby — he was not Irish, but British.
The most reliable historical evidence on St. Patrick comes from two writings that survived him, Confessio and Epistola (Letter to Coroticus). While these documents do not tell the story of his life, they detail some of his experiences and help explain the theology behind his apostolate. In so doing, they offer valuable lessons for us today.
The man who would come to be known as the Apostle of Ireland was born to a Roman official's family in Britain around 389; it's believed they gave him the name Maewyn Succat. At the age of 16, he was kidnapped by a pagan slave-raiding party, was taken to Ireland, and sold to a chieftain named Milchu. He served his master for six years after which time he escaped and returned by ship to Britain.
The Catholic Online Encyclopedia points out that his time as a slave served as preparation for his apostolate: “During his captivity he acquired a perfect knowledge of the Celtic tongue … and as his master Milchu was a druidical high priest, he became familiar with all the details of druidism, from whose bondage he was destined to liberate the Irish race.”
Humble Shepherd
In response to a vision commanding him to evangelize Ireland, St. Patrick began studying for the priesthood. In 431 he returned to Ireland to assist St. Palladius, who was the first bishop of Ireland.
Shortly afterward he was consecrated bishop by Pope Celestine I. Upon his return to Ireland he traveled the island, evangelizing the Druids, baptizing the Irish and establishing churches.
“I am Patrick, a sinner, most unlearned, the least of all the faithful and utterly despised by many. My father was Calpurnius, a deacon, son of Potitus, a priest, of the village Bannavem Taburniæ; he had a country seat nearby, and there I was taken captive.” So begins Patrick's Confessio.
What we think of as biography today did not exist in St. Patrick's time. The thoughts expressed in his two famous writings were recorded later in his life to share his experiences and offer his opinions. Long considered to be an ill-educated man, St. Patrick emerges in his writings as a man of considerable intellectual stature.
Marie B. de Paor, Irish author of Patrick, The Pilgrim Apostle of Ireland (Veritas, 1998), writes that the elaborate literary structure of Patrick's Confessio parallels line-for-line the Gospel according to Mark. It also draws heavily upon Old Testament imagery and the Psalms, and contains more than 200 references to Scripture.
Paor's analysis compares the literary genre of Patrick's Confessio to the Confessions of St. Augustine. She writes that “while a refutation of both the Arianism of the fourth century and the Pelagianism of the fifth are implicit in Patrick's Confessio, it does not appear to be its overt purpose. … Patrick, after all, was not a professional theologian, nor did he claim to be a philosopher. As priest and bishop, he was pre-eminently a good shepherd, a contemplative in action.”
The Epistola is a completely different kind of document. It is Patrick's denouncement of the British ruler Coroticus for his raid of the Irish coast and his cruel massacre of Patrick's newly baptized Christians.
The letter, which is of great interest to historians as well as devotees of the saint, calls for repentance and the release of the remaining captives of the raid. Of Coroticus, Patrick writes:
“They have filled their houses with the spoils of dead Christians, they live on plunder. They do not know, the wretches, that what they offer their friends and sons as food is deadly poison, just as Eve did not understand that it was death she gave to her husband. So are all that do evil: they work death as their eternal punishment.
“Where, then, will Coroticus with his criminals, rebels against Christ, where will they see themselves, they who distribute baptized women as prizes — for a miserable temporal kingdom, which will pass away in a moment?
As a cloud or smoke that is dispersed by the wind, so shall the deceitful wicked perish at the presence of the Lord; but the just shall feast with great constancy with Christ, they shall judge nations, and rule over wicked kings for ever and ever. Amen.”
Uncommon Valor
St. Patrick is a favorite among Irish and non-Irish, Catholic and non-Catholic.
“St. Patrick has become a symbol of a country more than a person,” says Baptist pastor Ralph Wilson of Joyful Heart Ministries in Rocklin, Calif. “Once you sort through the credible and weed out the incredible, you find a man. St. Patrick was a gutsy guy with faith. I find his fearlessness appealing.”
“Patrick is a man who lived with God a long time and heard his voice,” says Roger Nelson, an actor from Pasadena, Calif., who tours the country portraying St. Patrick in a one-act play. “The fruits of the Spirit were very active in his life.”
As priest and bishop, St. Patrick was pre-eminently a good shepherd — a contemplative in action.
Father Joseph Esper, author of Lessons from the Lives of the Saints: A Daily Guide for Growth in Holiness (Basilica Press, 1999), points out that, for Patrick, being kidnapped is nothing less than a spiritual opportunity. Father Esper quotes from the Confessio:
“But after I came to Ireland — every day I had to tend sheep, and many times a day I prayed — the love of God and His fear came to me more and more, and my faith was strengthened. And my spirit was moved so that, in a single day, I would say as many as a hundred prayers, and almost as many in the night, and this even when I was staying in the woods and on the mountains; and I used to get up for prayer before daylight, through snow, through frost, through rain, and I felt no harm, and there was no sloth in me — as I now see, because the spirit within me was then fervent.”
Father Esper demonstrates that Patrick offers a saintly example of someone whose efforts to serve God bear fruit many years after they were undertaken. Because of his humility, God was able to do great things through him.
“For I am very much God's debtor,” St. Patrick writes, “who gave me such grace that many people were reborn in God through me and afterwards confirmed, and that clerics were ordained for them everywhere, for a people just coming to the faith, whom the Lord took from the utmost parts of the earth, as He once had promised through His prophets. … To Thee the gentiles shall come from the ends of the earth and shall say: ‘How false are the idols that our fathers got for themselves, and there is no profit in them’; and again: ‘I have set Thee as a light among the gentiles, that Thou mayest be for salvation unto the utmost part of the earth.’
“Hence, how did it come to pass in Ireland that those who never had a knowledge of God, but until now always worshipped idols and things impure, have now been made a people of the Lord, and are called sons of God, that the sons and daughters of the kings of the Irish are seen to be monks and virgins of Christ?”
Patrick needs no snakes, no clovers, no myths or legends to prop him up at all. His story of faith and conversion is extraordinary enough as it is. Here is a man whose life was a sign of contradiction, a saint who fearlessly went about challenging the prevailing pagan culture of his day and calling his contemporaries to love God with all their heart, all their soul and all their might.
A glass of green beer each March 17 may do little harm to the memory of one of the Church's great souls — but would-n't it be far better if, instead, Catholics followed St. Patrick's real example? Our own, increasingly pagan culture could stand a strong shot of his brand of evangelical fervor right about now.
Features correspondent Tim Drake can be reached at tdrake@ncregister.com.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: What to Do When a Priest Teaches Bad Doctrine DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:St. Augustine wrote: “[Men who are made vain] take pleasure not only in bad things as if they were good, but in your good things as if they were their own.”
A friend of mine sent the following information. I will describe it in the abstract, no names or places. A couple with several children were taking RCIA instructions in their local parish in preparation for coming into the Church. The couple in question, in good faith, came from a practicing Protestant background. They were educated, informed about what the Catholic Church taught. I believe they had read the Catechism of the Catholic Church and had no problem about basic Catholic teachings. The truth of these teachings was what convinced them to join the Church. This official teaching of the Church is what they expected to hear in the baptismal preparations.
The local parish required a series of catechetical or instructional meetings before reception into the Church at Easter. Midway through the instructions, a guest priest was invited to present the marriage material. In his official instruction to people who intended to enter the Catholic Church, evidently with no objection from the local pastor, the priest explained that it was legitimate for a couple to practice birth control after they had three children. He knowingly told them, thinking to win sympathy, that the Church was old-fashioned and did not understand the modern needs.
The couple obviously knew that this opinion was not what the Church or the Holy Father teaches. They were well-informed. They accepted the teaching of Humanae Vitae, the 1968 encyclical on the regulation of birth, as a better way. They understood what was at stake. Needless to say, they were quite bothered — though they were not naive — that a priest, in an official capacity, unavoidably knowing what the Church did teach, told them the opposite in so serious a forum as preparation for admittance into the Roman Catholic Church. Not only were they not looking for this “out” that the priest thought he was providing, but they were concerned about their obligation to inform proper authorities about this erroneous teaching.
What we are dealing with here, of course, is something not at all uncommon in today's Church, namely, what do we do when a priest, on a given topic, teaches something contrary to the known position of the Church? The Catechism and canon law establish any Catholic's right and duty to bring to the attention of local or Roman authorities teachings that are contrary to the known and public teaching of the Church. (Notice that, in this case, it is not just a question of an individual priest's private opinion, but of his officially teaching about what the Church holds on a given topic.)
The couple did not, in fact, disagree with the Church's teachings; they were content with them. But even if they were not, they understood clearly that what was being taught was not what the Church held. This is the question I want to reflect on. That is, not merely what to do about such a situation, but to understand clearly what is happening. This is why I began with the citation from Augustine about what is good and what is bad. This is the ultimate disorder of soul, especially when taught by a person in an official teaching capacity. In Chapter 9 of the Gospel of Mark, we are reminded of “the man who is the cause of stumbling to one of these little ones.” I might add, or to “one of those who are quite intelligent and well aware of what the Church does in truth teach.”
No priest today can fail to know that this priest's teaching on the licitness of birth control is contrary to the official position of the Church. No matter what he may think of the Church or of its teachings, the fact is that priests are official representatives of the Church. They are to be what they are. They are not there to expound their own opinions. In the case of instructing people who are entering the Church, priests do not speak for themselves or their own wondrous theories. What a priest is obliged to teach is not what he thinks — not his, in this case, erroneous insights — but the vast wisdom of the Church. His very being announces to the world and to those before him that devotion to this official teaching is what justifies his existence. Why else be there?
If the priest (or catechist or whoever) does not choose to explain what the Church teaches, fine. But, in this case, he should simply not put himself forward as an ordained, official teacher. No priest today, as I said, can be ignorant of this teaching, though I admit that some theologians may have confused him. But even there, he knows what the Church maintains. He is aware that the Church does not teach what he is telling the people before him. These people are preparing in good faith to enter the Church. They are willing and eager to know what it teaches them. If they are falsely instructed, it is not just a cause of serious scandal, but of a betrayal of an office.
What should the faithful do on hearing such instructions? Very carefully, very accurately, very simply, they should write to the local ordinary (probably the bishop) what they heard, no more, no less. They should ask him directly if this instruction that they heard is what the Church teaches, since this is not what it teaches in the Catechism.
The text of your letter to the bishop may run something like this: “Father (priest's name), on (date), in an RCIA program in preparation for entrance into the Church, taught that ‘birth control is all right after three children.’ Your Excellency, is this what the Church teaches? Signed, (your name).” The bishop may be slow to act or even investigate. But at that point it becomes a problem of his conscience and his duty to teach.
This is what freedom in the Church means. The faithful are free to practice it. The bishops have a right to know what is being taught in their parishes. Converts have every right to hear what the Church in fact teaches. If they do not like it, they can go away. If they are deceived, everyone is cheated.
Father James Schall is a professor of government at Georgetown University.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: James Schall Sj ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Catholic Campus Crusader DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:Curtis Martin is the president for the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, a 3-year-old outreach program to Catholic students on college campuses. He spent six years as president of Catholics United for the Faith. He spoke recently with Register features correspondent Tim Drake.
Drake: Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Martin: I was raised Catholic and fell away from my faith in high school. I recommitted myself to Christ as an evangelical Protestant while in college and eventually came back to the Catholic faith three-and-a-half years later. I studied under Dr. Scott Hahn at Franciscan University of Steubenville and received my master's degree in theology in 1993. FOCUS was launched three years ago. I am married to a wonderful woman, and we are expecting our sixth child.
Why was FOCUS created?
FOCUS stems from my own experience, as well as the experience of my friends who were taught biblical Christianity with clarity and confidence. College students find this attractive. FOCUS was launched to let college students know they do not have to leave the Church to find Christ. In fact, to follow all that he commanded, they need to join the Church. FOCUS is a national Catholic program that allows Catholic students to go out and share their faith with fellow students. It teaches leadership from a Christ-centered perspective. Its goal is to reclaim college campuses and our culture for Jesus Christ and the Church he founded.
Why do you feel that college students need something like FOCUS?
My own personal experience, as well as that of nearly every Catholic I knew, was that we fell away from the Catholic Church during our college years. It is rare to find a college campus in the country where even half of the Catholic students are practicing their faith.
College is a critical period in young people's lives. It is during college that students begin to make adult decisions. What will they do careerwise? Will they get married? Catholicism ought to be the foundation stone for those decisions. If students make those decisions with Christ at the center of their lives, they will make better decisions.
How is FOCUS similar or different from other campus outreach groups?
While we are very encouraged by the heroic work of groups such as Campus Crusade for Christ and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, frequently when those groups work with Catholics, those students are led out of the Catholic Church. FOCUS shows that the fullness of the Catholic faith can be presented in an equally, if not more, compelling manner. [The Fellowship of Christian Athletes] is effective at reaching student athletic leaders on campus. FOCUS believes that all college students are called to leadership using whatever God-given talents and gifts they have.
FOCUS is a leadership program that stands beside the programs that are already there. Everyone understands that even in the best programs across the country there is still more that can be done. In order to be successful, we need to build up both truth and unity.
How did you choose the college campuses where FOCUS was launched?
Currently we have full-time staff at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kan., the University of Northern Colorado, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the University of Kansas, and part-time staff at Columbia University, Seton Hall University, Belmont Abbey College in Charlotte, N.C., and the University of Colorado-Boulder. We are working with about 750 students on those campuses. Friendships with a professor at Benedictine College and with Archbishop [Charles] Chaput of Denver led us to be at two of our locations. Beyond that, we are spread by our relationships with bishops, priests, Newman Centers or students. The entire framework of FOCUS is working within friendships. We are doing more than running a program; we are trying to strengthen the unity within the Church.
How do FOCUS student leaders reach their peers?
We teach relational evangelization. First, we need to know our faith. We need to be following Christ and the Church he founded. Then we need to equip them with answers to the common questions.
We encourage students to develop and live the virtues of Christian friendship. It is within that framework that we share what is going on in our lives. Through that we provide various means where students are able to share Catholic experiences, as well as inviting their friends to make a commitment to follow Christ.
What kinds of activities are FOCUS members involved in?
Student leaders meet weekly to cover topics of the faith and their application to personal life. Leaders also conduct a small-group weekly Bible study, as well as large group activities we call Prime Time. Prime Time is an evening of prayer, worship, singing, skits, testimonies and a 30-minute presentation on a key teaching of the Catholic faith.
Have you had any success stories so far?
The great thing about this ministry is that there is a wonderful story every day. Last year when we were only on two campuses we had six men enter the seminary from our program.
Two years ago, a young woman shared with her FOCUS group that she was embarrassed by her faith and would lie to her roommates about where she was going when she attended Sunday Mass. Today she is excited about her faith and has brought some of her friends along. One young man whom she brought was a fallen-away Catholic. He is now getting ready to enter the seminary this fall.
Another young man from Benedictine College had converted to the faith and was working in a pharmacy. He told his boss that he could no longer fulfill contraceptive prescriptions. Not only did his boss agree to the young man's conscientious objection, but he was challenged in his own faith as a Catholic.
What is the procedure for getting FOCUS started on new campuses?
We have some basic criteria. First, we have to have the blessing of the local bishop. Second, we raise a portion of our financial support from local benefactors and, third, there needs to be a pastor who is receptive to us being there. If those three things are in place, it is matter of scheduling.
My greatest frustration is not being able to be at more locations full time. Yet, training our staff well takes time. That slows us down. Increasing our size by 50% per year is all we can do.
What are FOCUS’ plans for the future?
Next fall we will be expanding to the University of Denver, the University of Illinois, Eastern Michigan University and Ave Maria Institute of Law. We are currently in campus selection mode for fall 2001. Campus Crusade for Christ has 18,000 missionaries. God willing, we would eventually like to be on every college campus in America. We are also talking with bishops in Australia and look forward to having an international presence. We're eager to grow the FOCUS family and are looking for campuses and those who want to lend their prayerful and financial support.
Tim Drake writes from St. Cloud, Minnesota.
----- EXCERPT: FOCUS sets its sights on students and Christ ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Education Notebook DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:Philly Library Gives Kids Access to Lewd Materials
URBAN FAMILY COUNCIL, Mar. 3—Philadelphia Free Library head Flliot Shelkrot revealed before the Philadelphia City Council hearings this week that the library's policy is to allow children 12 and older access to all library materials, including videos and computer software, regardless of their ratings.
Urban Family president William Devlin said, “Basically the head of the Free Library has said, ‘Let them have pornography and violence.’ … Are there any responsible adults left in the Free Library system in Philadelphia?”
Said Devlin, “One would think that, after all the youth violence we've seen in our urban, suburban and rural areas, that responsible adults would attempt to exercise a fiduciary responsibility with our kids.
“This isn't about censorship; this is about setting an example for our kids and putting them in contact with positive, life-affirming experiences. Do 12 year olds need more violence and sexual degradation of women?”
A New College Hopes to Up Enrollment
Michael P. Farris, president of the Home School Legal Defense Association and founder and president of the Patrick Henry College, said he is aiming for a first-year enrollment of 120 to 130 students at the campus, which is under construction in Purcellville, Va. The eventual target is about 600.
But to do that, Farris needs to attract more than the 75 applications he has received or expects to be filed, the Post reported.
“We frankly would like a few more applicants,” said Farris.
He said the number of applications may be lagging because applications for admission became available only in January, a month after the State Council of Higher Education gave college officials permission to proceed.
Initially, Patrick Henry will offer only bachelor's degrees in government, in keeping with its mission to train a new generation of Christian conservative political leaders. Students will spend part of their time in class and part working in public policy jobs.
Patrick Henry will also have a dress code, prohibitions on alcohol and drugs and strict rules about dating, the Post reported. If an on-campus relationship becomes serious, the boy will be strongly encouraged to ask the girls’ parents for their consent to continue dating.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: ASSISI GRUNGE DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:In 1996 the Vatican's Pontifical Commission for Social Communications published a list of 45 films of special merit. Most of the titles are both artistic master-works and enlightened guides for spiritual development. The exception is Francesco, originally released in 1989. Its message is as challenging as the other selections on the list, but its dramatic execution is rough and uneven. Some may find parts of it offensive.
For almost eight centuries, each generation has found different things to admire in the rich heritage of Franciscan spirituality. Francesco tries a new tack, presenting St. Francis of Assisi (played by Mickey Rourke) as a Generation-X hero. Italian director Liliana Cavani (The Night Porter) and co-screenwriter Roberta Mazzoni depict him as unshaven, short on manners and skeptical of authority. He's always taking chances and pushing things to the edge — a countercultural role model for our times.
But the filmmakers aren't pandering to what's currently fashionable in secular circles. The saint isn't presented as a moral relativist who rebels against Church doctrine and the hierarchy. He's orthodox in all matters of faith. His conflict is with the prevailing culture of his time. His passionate efforts to follow Christ's teachings push him to adopt a radical lifestyle. He and his followers find that the seriousness of their commitment places them in opposition to the norms of 13th-century Italian society.
The movie also departs from the usual stereotypes about the saint's temperament. The filmmakers present him as a rugged, masculine heman, not a fey do-gooder who likes to make nice with the birds.
The story is told in a series of flashbacks after Francis’ death. Those who were closest to him remember when they first met and how he changed their lives. As our current age is concerned with women's rights, the filmmakers emphasize the point of view of St. Clare (Helena Bonham Carter) and the particular problems she faces as a female in medieval times.
The flashbacks begin with the saint as a privileged adolescent doted on by his merchant father (Edward Farelly) who “spends a fortune to bring him up as a gentleman.” We see him as a sensuous, spoiled youth who likes to party, humiliating a leper who disrupts one of his revels.
Giving it All for God
Francis aspires to become a soldier and a knight. His father supports him in this ambition and hopes he'll win a coat of arms, a step up the social ladder for a member of the bourgeoisie.
The movie dramatizes the effect on Francis of his service in a war against Perugia and how its horrors make him more serious and reflective. He's taken prisoner by the enemy and witnesses the flailing of a heretic who has translated the Bible into Italian. The saint reads Jesus’ words in his native tongue for the first time, using one of the dead man's translated texts, and begins to take them to heart.
Back in Assisi, Francis hangs out in the poor part of town where Clare is performing charitable deeds in a sincere but conventional manner, living at home in comfort while slumming during the day. Even so, her work seems more connected to the words of the Gospel than Francis’ own life. Something clicks inside him, and a personality transformation takes place.
His father expects him to sign up for the next war and has outfitted him splendidly. But the saint gives his armor to a soldier from a less prosperous background and decides to go Clare one better, living among the poor while ministering to them. He also sells goods from the family business without permission and distributes the proceeds among the needy. His father retaliates by suing him in court.
This parental estrangement is only the beginning. The movie vividly captures the go-for-broke nature of Francis'commitment and how foolish it can sometimes appear. “The poor live on nothing,” he says. “We can learn from them.”
The saint declares himself a penitent and supports himself by begging. He ministers to the outcasts who live outside the city walls. But his real troubles begin when other members of the youthful bourgeoisie decide to join him, including Clare. When they too divest themselves of their possessions, they're ridiculed and sometimes met with violence. Their kin-folk are enraged; other beggars take advantage of their generosity. Unfortunately, the awkwardness of some of these scenes generates unintentional laughs.
A Man of the Church
But thankfully, the filmmakers resist the trap into which most contemporary movies fall (e.g. Stigmata, The Third Miracle, etc.) and refuse to suggest that this celibate saint is tempted by the flesh. No romantic sparks fly between Francis and Clare. They're both presented as chaste, spiritual seekers whose journeys influence each other.
The local bishop, who's surprisingly sympathetic to Francis’ ministry, warns him that he can't offer protection unless he goes to see the Pope. The saint and his followers travel to Rome, and when Francis humbly promises “to love you without restraint or judgment,” the Holy Father defies his advisers and blesses him.
The saint soon attracts a legion of followers but remains as stubborn and abrasive as ever. He often lives by himself in the woods, receiving there the stigmata which he considers a divine gift.
Francesco is a daring work characterized by hits and misses. It never takes the easy way out by lapsing into whimsical sentimentality. Its tone is rough, raw and passionate, just like the grunge rock that was popular when it was made.
Arts ↦ Culture correspondent
John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: FRANCESCO PRESENTS A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON ST. FRANCIS ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Prizer's Picks DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:Mr. Smith Goes to Washington(1939)
America has always loved populist reformers, outsiders who challenge the special interests and business-as-usual politicians. John McCain and Bill Bradley have tried to assume that role during the current presidential primaries. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington depicts the dynamics at work behind that political archetype better than any other pop-culture creation.
Jefferson Smith (James Stewart) is an innocent country boy who's appointed to the U.S. Senate to fill a vacancy.
He throws himself into a bill to create a national boy's camp and discovers that some insiders plan to use the camp's site to build a dam to enrich themselves. When he threatens to go public, corrupt politicians try to make him seem like the bad guy.
Director Frank Capra (It's a Wonderful Life) believes that our system can be preserved if only good men are willing to stand up and fight — a message that still strikes a deep chord in our psyches.
Rocky(1976)
We're taught that winning isn't everything and that how you play the game is what's most important.
However, nowadays, judging from most sports events, nobody seems to believe it anymore.
Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stal-lone) is the exception. He's a down-on-his-luck club fighter who works for a loan shark but is too soft to use any muscle.
The overconfident heavyweight boxing champ, Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers), hopes to grab some good PR by giving an unknown sure-loser a shot at his title.
Rocky is chosen.
Only his feisty trainer (Burgess Meredith), painfully shy girlfriend (Talia Shire) and dog Butkus believe in him. But when he jogs to the top of the steps in front of the Philadelphia Art Museum and thrusts his arms high into the air, we begin to think maybe he has a chance.
The Oscar-winning Rocky, also written by Stallone, is a classic root-for-the-underdog story about a sweet-tempered hero who craves self-respect more than fame.
A Dog of Flanders(1999)
Who'll stand by you when things go from bad to worse and fair-weather friends take a hike? A Dog of Flanders, based on Louisa de la Ramee's classic novel, suggests that sometimes four-legged companions turn out to be the only ones you can trust. Nello (James Kissner) is an impoverished orphan in early 19th-century France whose ambition is to be a great artist. But he's also got a big heart, adopting an abused dog whom he names Petrache.
Nello's milkman grandfather (Jack Warden) and a respected local artist (Jon Voight) encourage him to compete in a local contest for money and an art academy scholarship. But when circumstances conspire against him, only Petrache is left by his side. Although the film's message isn't overtly Christian, it emphasizes that each person's gifts come from God. The boy learns the connection between faith and destiny and the importance of remaining true to his dreams.
—John Prizer
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: The Power of Paul DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:When Pope John Paul II opened the Holy Door at the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls (San Paolo fuori le Mura) in January, he looked down the nearly 400-foot nave to the altar that covers the tomb of Saint Paul, whose grave has been preserved, perhaps miraculously, through the centuries. Now St. Paul's is one of the basilicas that enjoys the status of “extraterritoriality,” a mini-enclave of the Holy See in the city of Rome. The enormous basilica can be formidable on gray days, as are all great spaces in (often) poorly lighted Rome, but the Jubilee has brought a new glow, in tribute to Paul, the great convert and indefatigable evangelist.
If you take a New Testament with you, you may find a quiet place to read Paul's letters to the struggling cells of Christianity, ever praising and cajoling. The basilica's cloisters are glorious, fortunately protected from a catastrophic fire, an ideal place for God's word on a golden Roman morning.
Although Paul is often depicted (especially by Caravaggio) as a large, muscular man, according to at least one second-century writer, he had “a bald head and crooked legs, his nose somewhat crooked, his eyebrows meeting, but his face full of friendliness … for now he appeared as a man, and now he had the face of an angel.”
Among Paul's friends in Rome, legend has it, was a Christian woman named Lucina, who had Paul buried on her family property along the Ostian Way. His grave, marked by a memorial, was venerated immediately by early Christians and became through the years a place of pilgrimage. Emperor Constantine, constructing a church for St. Paul in Rome (386), as he had for St. Peter at the Vatican, was careful to enclose the saint's remains in a bronze-covered block that was temporarily moved to the catacombs until his tomb was ready. An altar was then built above the grave.
Through centuries of looting and abandonment, the tomb was lost and forgotten. It took a tragedy to return it to us. In the 19th century, a terrible fire devastated the cathedral. During subsequent reconstruction, the tomb of Paul came to light, set amid many graves of those who had wanted to be near him, their heads always placed toward him, like spokes radiating from Paul, their center. The plaque that Constantine had affixed to Paul's tomb, beneath the papal altar, may be seen today with a guide. Lights glow around the staircase you'll descend to see the words Paolo Apostolo Mart. (to Paul, apostle, martyr).
Consecrated Curiosities
Pope Sylvester consecrated the basilica during the fourth century. Then a triumvirate of emperors held power and it was called the Basilica of the Three Emperors, or of Theodosius, since he was the most powerful of the three.
Constantine's church was much smaller than the one we see, but popes and emperors added extensions and embellishments. During the Middle Ages, St. Paul's was the largest church in Christendom and remained so until St. Peter's Renaissance rebuilding. St. Paul's originally occupied an important position, on the Tiber River near ancient Rome's port at Ostia, and such popes as Leo the Great and Gregory the Great contributed handsomely to its splendor and surrounding land. During the 9th century, however, Saracens attacked the sanctuary and later Pope John (Giovanni) VIII made it the center of his fortified town, called Giovannopolis.
“a bald head and crooked legs, his nose somewhat crooked, his eyebrows meeting, but his face full of friendliness”
But when the Abbot of Cluny in France, author of the Benedictine reforms, visited in 936 he found it in ruins and the monks dispersed. As Pope Otto I, he restored St. Paul's. Then, under Pope Gregory VII, a great deal of land was added. When the popes returned from Avignon, the politics of Italy had changed and St. Paul's became a center for studies, not a state basilica.
No assault was as devastating as the fire of 1823, apparently accidentally set by a workman on the roof. Pope Pius VII, who had fond memories of St. Paul's, where he had been a monk, at that moment lay on his deathbed and could not even be told of it for fear of shock. In his dreams a disturbing vision of St. Paul's had appeared, but he died the next day not knowing. The fire was a catastrophe that the world responded to: the Khedive of Egypt sent enormous alabaster columns; Czar Nicholas contributed malachite and lapis lazuli; collections were taken everywhere.
Unfortunately, the rebuilt facade is an awkward blend of columns and mosaics that are not what one would expect in a city where mosaics were a celebrated art form. The palm trees (to make us think of Jerusalem) and the statue of St. Paul don't help the harmony.
However, the ancient bronze doors (the Holy Door) were saved and recently restored with their panels of Biblical scenes: the doors were forged in Constantinople in 1070, back when the Normans had just conquered England.
Once inside, especially when sunlight streams from the high, early-basilica-style windows, the church shows its ancient splendor. We look down the nave of 80 tall columns of granite, “reflected on a marble floor, like trees at the edge of a lake,” according to the late H. V. Morton, the beloved Catholic travel writer. Above the columns, lunettes (round medallions) picture the popes from St. Peter to John Paul II. The walls above were once covered with 13th-century frescoes by Pietro Cavallini, which were destroyed in the fire.
The triumphal arch shows the Salvatore benedicente (the Savior blessing) between adoring angels, while winged symbols of the evangelists and 24 Elders of the Apocalypse look on, with Sts. Peter and Paul below. The Blessed Sacrament Chapel, left of the apse, was designed by Carlo Maderno, famous for his facade of St. Peter's. A statue that survived the fire, St. Bridget of Sweden, celebrates the saint who was recently named one of the Patronesses of Europe. The Crucifix, perhaps by the great Cavallini, in legend spoke to St. Bridget.
Magnificent Mosaics
Beyond the arch stands the brilliant ciborium (canopy) above the papal altar over St. Paul's tomb. Stairs and rows of lights lead down to the saint's crypt, which may be visited with a guide. The ciborium is a masterpiece by Arnolfo di Cambio (1285), its top of Gothic spires and base of classical columns elegantly combining the two styles. A few centuries later, St. Ignatius Loyola stood here and formally founded the Society of Jesus.
The huge (17-foot) paschal candlestick is a curiosity, bedecked with strange animals with human heads, apparently signifying the triumph of Christian thought over animal passions. Women are seen strangling them (the passions, we assume). Odd vegetation entwines. Then it rises into a story of the Passion. At top are a series of monsters. The candlestick dates from the 12th century, when art often depicted a scary life. The more you look at it, the odder it seems.
The mosaics of the apse are wonderful, though only partially restored. Christ judges from his throne surrounded by disciples and angels with a tiny version of Pope Honorius III (1216-26) at his feet; he commissioned it.
In a chapel off the sacristy, the legendary chains that bound St. Paul are kept, and “exposed” twice a year, on January 25, anniversary of his conversion, and on June 30, dedicated to Sts. Peter and Paul (a holiday in Rome).
Now to the cloisters, where a warm sun is sure to attract some locals. Built from 1193 to 1226, this elegant court blends Romanesque and Gothic elements.
Each twisting column is different: some have winding bands of mosaics, some with fluted marble; some are plain. If you visit between April and November, you'll see greenery, something not that easy to come by in Rome. Some of the gravestones brought here after the fire survived from pre-Reformation times in Europe, when England's royals were patrons and protectors of St. Paul's, as France's kings were of the basilica of St. John Lateran, and Spanish kings of Santa Maria Maggiore.
Before you leave St. Paul's, stop in the biblioteca (library) to see the codex paulinus, an illuminated 8th-century manuscript of Charlemagne's time — one of Rome's countless treasures connecting present-day pilgrims with the brothers and sisters in Christ who preceded us.
Barbara Coeyman Hults, a former resident of Rome, is based in New York.
----- EXCERPT: Endearing details distinguish the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls ----- EXTENDED BODY: Barbara Coeyman Hults ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Preven: A Killer Pill in Masquerade DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:FIRST OF TWO PARTS
The facts attesting to the abortifacient aspect of certain contraceptives are often concealed or downplayed in medical literature. This has never been more apparent than it is now with the reports and sales propaganda surrounding the pills known as Preven. Campaigns with slogans such as “You didn't plan for last night, but we did,” created by Planned Parenthood, steer the public into thinking they are being offered a contraceptive. These promotions hide the fact that conception may have already taken place by the time Preven goes to work.
Preven, commonly referred to as a “morning-after pill,” is promoted as a contraceptive that will prevent conception when taken within 72 hours after intercourse. An article in one New York paper suggested that prolifers and abortion supporters are united in their acceptance over post-coital contraceptives.
Where did they get this impression? Although the Catholic Church condemns the use of contraceptives, the pro-life movement as a whole takes no such stand. The pro-life movement, however, does take a definite stand against any procedure or product that causes an already conceived individual to die — in other words, an abortion. All pro-lifers need to know is that Preven is such a product.
Preven prevents not pregnancy, but implantation of a newly conceived life. Medical information sources, even those that are meant primarily for doctors and health professionals, bury this fact. On Preven's Web site, one finds the admission that Preven “alters endometrium, thereby inhibiting implantation.” This disclosure is overshadowed by the more prominent claim that “Preven has not been shown to interrupt an established pregnancy.” The key word here is established. Gynetics Inc., which manufactures Preven, has chosen to redefine pregnancy as not truly occurring until the fertilized eggs have successfully implanted in the uterine wall. By this definition, since an embryo implants seven to 10 days after conception, the first week of life does not “count.”
Pharmacists for Life International (www.pfli.org) documents the truth about the dark side of this “medical breakthrough.” The pharmacists explain how the high doses of oral contraceptives found in Preven have been shown to act as abortifacients, abortion-inducing drugs. They note a clinical embryology text, The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology (Moore and Persaud, 1998), which concluded: “These hormones prevent implantation, not conception. Consequently, they should not be called contraceptive pills. … It would be more appropriate to call them ‘contra-implantation pills.’”
Dr. John Wilke, president of Life Institutes Inc., illustrates why Preven cannot act as a contraceptive when taken after sex. In the October 1998 issue of the organization's newsletter Life Issues Connector, he explains that the passage of sperm through the uterus, tubes and into the ovary takes as little as 30 minutes. “If an egg awaits there, fertilization (conception) occurs immediately. … If fertilization has occurred, and if the woman takes the ‘morning-after’ pill within a few hours or days after the event, the hormones in the pill harden the lining of the womb. When this tiny human embryo reaches the womb, he or she cannot plant and dies. … The effect is a very early abortion.”
A Pregnancy by Any Other Name …
In previous decades, there was disagreement as to whether or not a human being exists at conception. In more recent years, however, science has proved that the microscopic cells hold all the genetic makeup of a human being, and can properly be termed human, albeit developing. Yet much of the medical community has clung to its own definition of a pregnancy as being a fertilized egg that has implanted in the mother's uterine wall. This equivocation suits the makers of Preven, allowing Gynetics Inc. to say that the pills do not cause an abortion, but rather prevent pregnancy.
In the Preven kit, Gynetics instructs Preven users that they must perform the included pregnancy test to ensure that they are not already pregnant from an earlier act of intercourse. Their Web site states: “[T]he test will not confirm pregnancy from sex which took place within the previous 72 hours.” Here is another example of duplicitous equivocation in the use of the term pregnancy. They slip by saying it will not confirm pregnancy from sex which took place within 72 hours, yet they supposedly don't believe that a woman can be “pregnant” before the embryo has implanted.
Once fertilization has occurred, Pharmacists for Life points out that “The high dose of steroids in Preven has been shown to be at least 75.4% effective in killing post-conception children” (Pharmacists for Life's Beginnings, December 1998). Despite the hype, then, Preven must be labeled an abortifacient. It is irrelevant whether the morning-after pill can act as a contraceptive because it also acts as an abortifacient. Furthermore, no one can say for sure when Preven will act as either.
One should not confuse morning-after pills with the drug known as RU-486. The Food and Drug Administration is on the verge of approving RU-486 for use in the United States. This drug was developed in the 1980s by a French company, Roussel UCLAF, for the express purpose of aborting a child. RU-486 is a two-part drug process where the first drug mifepristone (RU-486) kills the child, and the second drug, misoprostol (prostaglandin), expels the pre-born corpse.
Whereas morning-after pills are made up of high doses of contraceptives, RU-486 is actually a complex chemical molecule which affects multiple systems of the woman's body. RU-486 is extremely dangerous for the woman using it. Studies have shown complications such as pain, bleeding, nausea, fever and a significant percentage (8%) of incomplete abortions (Source: National Right to Life Committee).
How Morning-After Pills Work
Understanding the physics of a woman's 28-day menstrual cycle will help to clarify just how morning-after pills really work. In the average model of a menstrual cycle, the woman ovulates on or near the 14th day of the cycle, with day one being the first day of her period. Just before ovulation, the pituitary gland emits a large amount of a hormone known as the lutenizing hormone, or LH. Although the gland produces LH throughout her cycle, there is a surge that is seen just before ovulation.
If you picture a graph showing a straight line that shoots up and then down, forming an upside down V, that would accurately represent the surge. The surge begins about two days prior to her body releasing an egg, reaching its peak at the actual release of the ovum. The purpose of LH is to signal the ovary to release an ovum. LH also stimulates the ovary to begin producing the second female hormone, progesterone.
The idea behind morning-after pills is that the hormones in the pills will send a different message to the pituitary gland, telling it that the woman is already pregnant or has already ovulated. Normally, the level of progesterone begins to rise right after ovulation. It also increases during pregnancy.
The body will not release eggs when progesterone is up, so that they are not wasted. Monthly contraceptive pills work along the same lines. Oral contraceptives normally contain progesterone, or progesterone in combination with other estrogens. By maintaining a slightly elevated level of progesterone, the body sends signals from the brain to the ovaries to initiate the ovarian cycle that lead to ovulation are repressed. Essentially, the body is fooled into thinking it has already released an egg.
The secondary effects of morning-after pills are important, too. The hormones that regulate the release of eggs also regulate things like mucous consistency, which aids sperm and fertilized ovum in their travels. It regulates the texture of the endometrium lining, making it a welcoming environment for the essential latching or implantation of a new life.
The hormones in Preven-type pills disrupt the mucous consistency and cause the lining of the uterus to harden. It is primarily this last action that makes the pills abortifacient.
For a morning-after pill to be effective as a contraceptive only, the pills would have to be taken three to four days prior to ovulation, since sperm only live three days and the ovum only 24 hours. It is quite probable that the pills are much less effective when taken closer to ovulation. In other words, during the three to four days prior to ovulation, when it would have to prevent egg-release to prevent conception, the pills are less likely to work.
Morning-after pills then, for use as contraceptives, are highly questionable. Of course, the main problem is again that there is little evidence that the hormones can prevent ovulation at the time when ovulation would actually pose a chance of egg and sperm uniting following intercourse.
There is clearly a great deal of confusion and ignorance about how the pills known as Preven actually work. Being aware of the threat to life that morning-after pills pose is crucial in the effort to respect all human life from conception until natural death.
Carla Coon is editor of LifeNews, a publication of the New York State Right to Life Committee.
In the conclusion of this report, Carla Coon will examine how misunderstandings about Preven may impact on Catholic hospitals’ protocols for treating rape victims.
----- EXCERPT: Science of Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: Carla Coon ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: 40,000 in Minnesota Say 'No Taxes for Abortion' DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:MINNEAPOLIS — The Minnesota House speaker gets petitions all the time, he said, but never in the numbers he was handed on Feb. 16.
That's when pro-life and civic organizations handed Rep. Steve Sviggum, a Republican, a pile of paper bearing 40,000 signatures of Minnesotans who want to end taxpayer funding of abortions.
Started by Neighbors for Life, the effort's goal is to gather hundreds of thousands of signatures from across the state, said Bob Hindle, the organization's founder.
Sviggum said he would inform both Republican and Democratic legislators about the petitions. “Forty thousand signatures are extremely impressive from the standpoint of people's opinions,” he said. “I think that speaks volumes on how the people of Minnesota feel about their taxes paying for abortions.”
Neighbors for Life's aim is to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot in the fall 2002 legislative election and let the voters decide whether taxes should pay for abortions, said Hindle.
The amendment would need to pass the House and the Senate and then win 51% approval from the voters. A second goal is to increase public awareness about the issue, which many taxpayers believe violates their religious rights.
“People who are opposed to abortion know that it is morally wrong,” said Allen Czech, a resident of Little Falls, Minn., who signed the petition. “It shatters our religious values to have to pay for them. It's a slap in the face to all Christians when the government tells us our moral values don't mean a thing.”
Czech also argued that no one has a right to have all of his or her medical expenses covered.
“We have to go to a certain health clinic, and in many cases can't even choose who our doctor will be or the [health insurance] provider denies coverage,” he observed. “But in the same breath someone can go to Planned Parenthood and get an abortion, and we have to pay for it hands down.”
Another signer, Mark Sibenaller, an insurance agent from Lonsdale, Minn., agreed.
“For politicians to say they are pro-children on one hand and actively finance an abortion industry on the other is wholly dishonest,” he contended. “We have a social safety net and the adoption network in place to take care of these children.”
Pro-Choice on Taxes, Too?
While petitions are not necessary to create a constitutional amendment, Hindle said they can show pro-abortion senators and representatives up for reelection in 2002 that their constituents are against tax-funded abortions. The governor's approval is also unnecessary.
The governor's director of communications, John Wodele, said, “The governor supports Roe v. Wade and respects the fact that the court has decided this issue, and believes these issues should continue to be decided by the courts and not in the legislative arena.”
He added, “I would not offer an opinion on the governor's position on public funding because I don't believe that this is an issue the governor has spoken to previously.”
The ruling that forced taxpayer funding of abortion stems from a 1993 case brought before the Minnesota Supreme Court by the New York Center for Reproductive Law and Policy. In Doe vs. Gomez, lawyers for the center argued that if taxpayer-funded medical assistance was available to qualifying women to pay for prenatal care and childbirth, it should also be available to women who abort their children. Similar suits have been won in other states.
And rightly so, says a key abortion group.
“This is not an issue of subsidizing an industry,” said Tom Weber, chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood of Minnesota and South Dakota. “This is an issue of will we make available tax base resources to women in need of reproductive services, as a matter of equal protection. If this [Doe vs. Gomez] was reversed, we would not have treated the women of Minnesota fairly.”
Don't Forget Democracy
The Minnesota House Judiciary Committee is holding a fact-finding hearing in March because serious questions have been raised about the procedures in the Doe vs. Gomezcase.
Jim Tarsney, an attorney who heads Minnesota Lawyers for Life, a 300-member group of pro-life lawyers, has been studying the case for years.
He argues that, besides the serious ethical and legal allegations raised in the case, the idea of forcing taxpayers to pay for abortions is essentially “taxation without representation.”
“Nobody ever voted to make abortion legal; it was imposed on us by the courts,” said Tarsney. “I think that the pro-life movement has to associate itself much more with the pro-democracy movement.”
The petition drive in Minnesota attracted support from Archbishop Harry Flynn as well as from various groups, including the Human Life Alliance, Pro Life Action Ministries, Knights of Columbus, Minnesota Catholic Bishops Conference, Minnesota Family Council and the Catholic Defense League. The group's next step is to gather support from the evangelical churches, and to conduct a statewide campaign similar to a political campaign, said Hindle.
“We are going to go from town to town and hold town meetings and increase the signatures,” he said. “We need to attach faces to this movement. Humanly, that's always a good thing to do. It's a good thing for the pro-life movement because we don't have any identifiable leaders right now.”
Another goal is to build up pressure in the Legislature and say to the Minnesota citizens, “these guys won't let you decide where your tax money goes,” added Tarsney. “That will appeal to a lot of people, even pro-choice people.”
Barbara Ernster is based in Fridley, Minnesota.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Barbara Ernster ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Beauty Queen Is No 'Cafeteria Catholic' DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:Sylvia Gomes captured the hearts of people in her hometown and across the country when the former Miss Hamden, Conn., made it to the top 10 finalists of the Miss America pageant in September. The daughter of an immigrant who grew up in Bridgeport, Conn., Gomes became the first Miss Connecticut in 19 years to make it to the final 10. A member of Compass, a national campus evangelization group, she is not afraid to talk about her faith and her efforts to promote mentoring programs. She did so recently with Register correspondent Matt Sedensky.
Sedensky: Who is Sylvia Gomes? Gomes: I am a 21-year-old junior at Holy Cross College double-majoring in political science and art. I am the daughter of an immigrant fisherman from Portugal. As far as personality goes, I've always been a pretty calm, patient person, who is quiet and not very outgoing … not one to be in the spotlight. It's kind of funny that I even decided to participate in the Miss America organization where the stereotype is that people are very outgoing and bubbly and like to be in the spotlight.
And you happen to be Catholic?
I am a very proud Catholic. I try very hard not to be a “cafeteria Catholic” who tries to pick and choose the aspects of the religion that they like. I am the older of two daughters in a family that is very tight-knit in comparison to most today. The Catholic religion is one of the reasons that that is so. I want to finish my undergraduate education at Holy Cross [College in Worcester, Mass.] and then go on to grad school for either communications or political science. I'm thinking about either working in the teaching field or in a government office. I think family is not one of the things that young women talk about as being part of their future, but I definitely want to have a family of my own.
How important a role has faith played in your life?
How do I express how much it played a part? It was a really big part because my parents are Portuguese and they always brought me to church growing up. We went every Sunday, and we never missed it. For me, God is the lighthouse. He shows me the way. I'm not a theologian, but reading the Bible, I've learned a lot about what I can do to improve my life and the lives of other people.
Did you ever think that being the daughter of an immigrant fisherman from a very troubled city would have a negative impact on what you wanted to achieve?
If anything, I knew it would have a positive impact on what I wanted to achieve and what I will achieve in the future, because you have to work a little harder. You have to take less things for granted, and you just know a lot more about real life, in a sense, than someone who was maybe raised in an upper-class family. And people do sort of bill you as [an example of how to achieve] the American dream.
What made you choose mentoring — the pairing of adults or older kids with at-risk youngsters — as your Miss America platform?
I worked with mentoring growing up, and I knew that there was a big need for it. … A lot of my friends really needed role models because they didn't have the type of parents who took them to church on Sunday, and I thought mentoring was a really good way that a lot of kids could get their role models. I knew going into this that if I could influence someone to do good, or to go out and be a mentor to a child, that it would be worthwhile. The pageant isn't about the crown and the roses and the gown, it's about reaching out to people.
What would you say to people who don't support the pageant scene?
The majority of people who don't support the Miss America organization in particular don't support it probably because they're ignorant about how it works. … Give me five minutes with somebody that is really antagonistic and really doesn't want to listen, and I'll be able to change their mind about the pageant.
You made it to the group of the 10 finalists in the Miss America pageant. How hard was it to be eliminated?
Part of it has to do with God's will. It just wasn't in his plan, and so I was very happy just being able to get there. [Making] it to the top 10 was the icing on the cake. It got me some extra scholarship money, and a chance to talk about my hometown and my friends and my family on national television. That's what I most especially wanted.
How did you stay calm while you were on stage at the pageant?
At the Miss Connecticut Pageant, one of the questions the person asked me on stage was, “You seem to be so focused on the piano, how do you keep that focus and stay so calm?” Before the pageant I was given a prayer [card] in Portuguese that [included an invocation to the] Holy Spirit and a prayer to St. Anthony. I brought that with me to Miss America. Most people have a four-leaf clover or some necklace charm, but I don't believe in any of that. I'd much rather rely on my faith than some gold or leaf or something.
Who do you think has had the most significant impact on your life?
It's definitely my parents. I know that it's a cliché sort of answer, but they have made me into who I am.
What advice do you have for young people regarding issues of faith?
There's so much to say I don't know how to put it in so few words. It's so important to have faith and the only way you're ever going to be happy is to have faith in God. It's not money; it's not anything else. Faith is really going to help you in school, it's going to help you in life. It's going to help you make the right decisions and the right choices and to be a good person. A lot of people today … want to be different, they … get all these piercings and they'll get purple hair. But if you really want to be different today you have to be a good person. Don't forget everything your family has done to support you. And whether or not you have a supportive family, turn to God. Follow your dreams and don't believe the “I'll believe it when I see it” crowd.
What does your faith teach you?
My faith teaches me to be patient and calm, not to get angry easily, to see the best in other people, not be judgmental of them, and … how to be a good person and choose which path in life is the right one. It is relaxing and calming to turn to God and know that he's always going to be there to listen. I remember to thank him in good times and bad times.
How do you balance being a college student with being a religious person?
For me, it's not hard. I think you just have to surround yourself with the right people and you have to have friends that are more like you rather than the ones who like to go out Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday and drink themselves into a stupor.
Matt Sedensky writes from Bridgeport, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Matt Sedensky ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: The Gospel Of Life DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:In his Angelus message on Dec. 19, 1993, Pope John Paul II called society to respect life from conception and not to simply regard embryonic life as “a mere biological fact” that can be used for research, as the basis for the medical treatment of another or as something that can simply be disposed of.
Science demonstrates that in the fruit of conception from the first instant there is established the program of what this living being will be: a man, this individual man with his characteristic aspects already well determined. From this embryonic existence to full physical and spiritual maturity, there is a continuous organic development.
This evident orientation of the embryo towards its future makes it impossible for it to be treated as mere biological matter, since, in God's plan for man, the precise biological “individuality” received in the maternal womb is also welcomed by the omnipotent love of God who intervenes to endow it with an immortal soul. Indeed, this soul, as the principle of the person, is immediately created by God.
As a result, surrounded by the warmth of his mother's womb and by God's creative love, the human being, although extremely fragile, should be paid the respect due to every human person. (No. 2)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Life Notes DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:High Court to Study Drug Tests on Pregnant Women
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Feb. 28 — The Supreme Court said it will decide sometime in 2001 whether public hospitals can test pregnant mothers for drug use and identify for police those who tested positive, reported the wire service.
The court will determine whether a South Carolina hospital's policy aimed at detecting pregnant women who use crack cocaine violates the Constitution's protections against unreasonable search.
The hospital discontinued its policy after a 1993 lawsuit was filed by the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy on behalf of 10 women who had been tested. A total of 30 maternity patients were arrested for child-endangerment while the policy was in place.
South Carolina Attorney General Charlie Condon said the case will not deter the state's efforts. “South Carolina's policy of protecting unborn children from their moth-er's cocaine abuse will continue even at public hospitals,” he told the AP. “Search warrants can be used as well as consents to search.”
Effort to Reduce Kosovar Birthrate Alleged
ZENIT, Feb. 24 — A new series of documents was released yesterday by the Population Research Institute on the United Nations Population Fund's collaboration with the regime of Yugoslavian President Slobodon Milosevic to reduce the birthrate of Kosovar Albanians, raising concerns about violations of the U.N. Convention against Genocide, reported the Rome-based news service.
ZENIT also reported that a senior U.S. State Department official, Elaine Jones, criticized the U.N. population fund for its work “to promote abortion and outdated contraceptives to Kosovars at the request of the Milosevic government.”
Jones said that UNFPA “reproductive health kits sent to the region include ‘manual vacuum aspirators’ for first trimester abortions, ‘morning after’ pills, and various methods of birth control including the Pill, Depo-Provera, condoms and IUDs.”
According to Jones, citing Population Research Institute reports on the United Nations Population Fund's Kosovo campaign, the effort was administered in a haphazard way which threatened the health of Kosovar women.
Senate Hearings on Unborn Victims of Violence Act
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Feb. 23 — A pro-life bill that would make killing an unborn child during a violent act a federal crime is a “flawed federal response” to assaults against women, the Clinton administration told the Senate Judiciary Committee in a public hearing, reported the news wire.
Eleanor Acheson, an assistant attorney general, said the Justice Department would recommend President Clinton veto the legislation if it reaches his desk. The bill “may be perceived as gratuitously plunging the federal government into one of the most difficult and complex issues of religious and scientific consideration,” Acheson said.
The legislation, passed by the House last September, would make it a separate offense to injure or kill an unborn child in the commission of a crime of violence against a pregnant woman.
Sonja Inge, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said the bill's effect would be “legally separating a woman from her fetus, which is like the beginning step of eroding her right to choose [an abortion],” reported the AP.
Nicaragua Establishes ‘Day of the Unborn’
PRO-LIFE INFONET, Feb. 24 — Nicaragua has officially declared March 25 as the “National Day of the Unborn,” according to pro-life sources at Pro-Life Infonet.
A decree published in the official Nicaraguan Gazette explains the decision was taken because “Article 23 of the Political Constitution of the Republic of Nicaragua declares that the right to life is inviolable and inherent to every human person.”
The document also recalls that the defense of life of the unborn is a commitment adopted by all countries that adhere to the “International American Accord sovereign-ly recognized and ratified,” reported Pro-Life Infonet.
After mentioning that “the right to life, inherent in each of the inhabitants of the nation and the world, is the principal axis of human rights and, therefore, merits the determined attention of the government,” the decree declares “March 25 of every year as the ‘National Day of the Unborn.’”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Facts of Life DATE: 03/12/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 12-18, 2000 ----- BODY:Did You Know?
Blood tests are no better at detecting Down syndrome in unborn babies than other methods, according to a study of some 31,000 pregnancies in Britain. Researchers at Princess Anne Hospital, Southampton, found that such tests did not add to information obtained from ultra-sound scans and knowledge of the mother's age. Certain blood test results, however, are sometimes taken as a certainty of Down syndrome, prompting many couples to consider abortion.
(Source: Guardian and Independent newspaper, March 3, 2000)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Fetal-Parts Trade: Caught in the Act DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — Missy Smith can face her friends again, after congressional hearings and a recent ABC “20/20” exposé.
The Washington, D.C., mother was so upset by November news reports of the fetal parts that she founded WAKE-UP — short for Women Against the Killing and Exploitation of Unprotected Persons — to sound the alarm. But friends would walk away from her when she raised the issue, thinking she was “weird,” she said.
“I could hear the skepticism in their voices when I would tell them about it,” she recalled.
Now, congressional evidence and the undercover “20/20” report confirm that baby body parts are being sold for profit. Said Smith: “It's going to be like Niagara Falls when the code of silence on abortion is broken.”
The U.S. House of Representatives began to hear testimony March 10 on a trade that insiders are calling an illegal $70-million-a-year business.
A day earlier, Commerce Committee Chairman Tom Bliley, R-Va., appeared on ABC's “20/20” newsmagazine program to discuss his findings. He said that since first learning of the trade last fall, his committee had gathered enough evidence to determine that an illegal trade in fetal body parts has flourished in the United States since 1996, the year President Clinton issued an executive order lifting the ban on fetal tissue research.
“20/20” conducted its own three-month investigation into the trade. One of the men the producers interviewed for their March 9 program, Dean Alberti, is a former technician for the Anatomic Gift Foundation, a Laurel, Md.-based company that, according to Alberti, traded fetal body parts for cash.
In his testimony before a Commerce subcommittee, Alberti said profits were made from the sale of baby body parts and that abortions were performed in such a way that the bodies of babies were left intact to preserve their research value.
Alberti said he left the business after one abortionist handed him a live set of twin newborns to deliver to a local researcher. After expressing alarm at the site of the live babies, Alberti said the abortionist submerged one of them in water, then returned with it dead.
After this incident, Alberti began working as a mole for Life Dynamics, a Denton, Texas-based pro-life research organization. Alberti gathered dozens of fee schedules for body parts and documented how the industry operates.
Life Dynamics released its findings to the media at the end of last summer, when Alberti appeared in a video issued by Life Dynamics dressed as a woman to conceal his identity. Since revealing his identity on “20/20,” Alberti says he has received at least one death threat.
The committee gathered enough evidence to determine that an illegal trade in fetal body parts has flourished in the United States since 1996, the year President Clinton issued an executive order lifting the ban on fetal tissue research.
Alberti told the subcommittee that aside from making a profit from the sale of fetal body parts, he was occasionally asked to obtain fetal tissue from women who had not consented to donate their babies for research.
In the “20/20” exposé, one highly placed organ-trader described his business to a “20/20” reporter over dinner. Thinking the man was a potential investor, he told him before hidden cameras that the fetal body parts trade was “the equivalent of the invention of the assembly line.”
A 1993 federal law sponsored by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., made it illegal to sell aborted babies for profit.
One staff member in the House told the Register that “20/20” modified its programming schedule to air its program on organ trafficking one day before the House hearings. “20/20” producers didn't return phone calls from the Register.
Debate Over Hearings
Just two days before the “20/20” program was set to air, Commerce Committee members debated over whether or not to allow press coverage of the hearings.
According to one insider, several pro-abortion congressmen expressed concern that if the names of abortion-ists were made public, pro-lifers would respond with violence.
Michael Schwartz, administrative director to Rep. Tom Coburn, R-Va., said these concerns were disingenuous.
“There is only one person involved in this who has received a death threat,” he observed, “and that's Dean Alberti.”
Schwartz said that at one point in the debate Rep. Ralph Hall, D-Texas, decided he wanted the hearings to remain open. The press then learned of efforts to keep the hearings closed and, according to Schwartz, the lawmakers “all caved” and allowed the press.
Paul Kim, a spokesman for Rep. Waxman, told the Register that there was some concern about potential “inflammatory and inaccurate information” coming out in the hearings, but added that “unless there is a compelling reason” to keep the hearings closed, they will remain opened.
Schwartz said what really concerned subcommittee members about open hearings was the potential damage they would do to the publiC's image of the abortion industry.
“They are embarrassed that their friends in the abortion industry are butchering and bartering human flesh and are bashful about exposing the seamy underside of the abortion industry,” Schwartz said.
Kim called these claims “speculative” and said he would wait to hear what the witnesses said in the hearing before assessing the allegations of an illegal trade.
Schwartz said the subcommittee had enough information to “demonstrate that the Anatomic Gift Foundation made a profit in direct violation of [Waxman's] law.” He said Rep. Coburn hopes the Justice Department will act on the findings and prosecute the lawbreakers.
Use of dead fetuses that indicates complicity in abortions is condemned by the Catholic Church.
In its 1987 instructive Donum Vitae (The Gift of Life), the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith wrote:
“The corpses of human embryos and fetuses, whether they have been deliberately aborted or not, must be respected just as the remains of other human beings. In particular, they cannot be subjected to mutilation or to autopsies if their death has not yet been verified and without the consent of the parents or of the mother. Furthermore, the moral requirements must be safeguarded, that there be no complicity in deliberate abortion and that the risk of scandal be avoided. Also, in the case of dead fetuses, as for the corpses of adult persons, all commercial trafficking must be considered illicit and should be prohibited” (response to Question No. 4).
Pro-Life Response
For all its attention on fetal parts trafficking, the “20/20” report didn't please all pro-lifers.
Rebecca Sande, board member of Pro-Life Wisconsin, expressed disappointment in the show. “The program,” she said, “seemed to insinuate that if the National Institutes of Health pays for aborted babies, its OK, but that if entrepreneurs are paying money for them it's not.”
Sande was not surprised to hear allegations about companies making money from the sale of aborted babies. “If it's OK to kill a child,” she asked, “why shouldn't it be OK to make a profit off of its parts?”
A change in current abortion law can only come incrementally, she added. A bill was recently introduced in the Wisconsin Legislature that would make it illegal for any one to collect money for baby body parts for any reason after the child had been aborted.
According to Sande, this removes the profit motive for abortionists. “What abortionist is going to donate a baby for research — what would be the motive?” she asked. “They are in it for the money.”
The Wisconsin bill has attracted 54 co-sponsors. A Pro-Life Wisconsin statement said that pro-lifers “vastly outnumber” pro-choicers in the state Senate.
According to Sande, the “20/20” producers probably wouldn't like the Wisconsin bill. “They think money could change hands,” she contended. “It's making a profit that they are against. The whole idea that human life has value inside the womb is foreign to them.”
But Pro-Life Wisconsin director Peg Hamill said the program was generating “a lot of interest” in the issue. She added, “A lot of people are outraged at how far it's gone.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian McGuire ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: A Hero Dies In Exile DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:STAMFORD, Conn. — Cardinal Ignatius Kung Pin-mei died in exile from his beloved China.
The former bishop of Shanghai, whose refusal to renounce his faith or his fidelity to Rome led to 30 years of imprisonment and isolation under China's communists, died at his home in Stamford, Conn., on March 12. He was 98. He was diagnosed with stomach cancer in late February.
Cardinal Kung had lived with his nephew, Joseph Kung, for the past three years. Kung said his uncle would be remembered as a hero to underground Catholics in China.
“He should be remembered as a hero, as a confessor of the faith, as a person who devoted extraordinary devotion to his Church, to God, to the Holy Father, and as a symbol of Catholicism in China,” said Kung, 67, president and founder of the Stamford-based Cardinal Kung Foundation.
Harry Wu, a former political prisoner who attended Cardinal Kung's church in Shanghai as a young man, voiced similar sentiments. He told the Register that the cardinal was an inspiration to him during his own time in the Lougai, the Chinese gulag.
Wu, speaking from his home in Los Angeles one day after the cardinal's death, advised Western leaders to reject the advances of China's Communist-sanctioned Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, and to learn from the witness of Cardinal Kung.
“Today some American, Western religious and political leaders are going to recognize the Chinese Patriotic church,” Wu noted. “They should remember Bishop Kung — he would rather stay in jail for 30 years and not cooperate with the Patriotic Association. He was one of the models who never gave up.”
Joseph Kung said his foundation aims to inform the world of the “intensifying” persecution of the 9 million to 10 million underground Chinese Catholics. He added that since the early 1950s the underground Church in China viewed his uncle as its symbolic leader.
Life of a Hero
A press release from the Kung Foundation formed the basis for the following report on the cardinal's life.
Ignatius Kung was ordained a priest May 28, 1930, and consecrated a bishop — the first native Chinese bishop of Shanghai — Oct. 7, 1949, after the Communists had already taken over China.
On Sept. 8, 1955, he was arrested with more than 200 other priests and Church leaders by Communist officials. Months later, Bishop Kung was taken to a dog-racing stadium in Shanghai. Thousands were ordered to attend in order to hear the bishop publicly confess his “crimes.” With his hands tied behind his back and wearing a pajama suit, the diminutive bishop was pushed forward to the microphone to confess.
To the surprise of the security police, he instead shouted: “Long live Christ the King! Long live the Pope!”
The crowd responded immediately with “Long live Christ the King; long live Bishop Kung.”
Bishop Kung was quickly dragged away to a police car and disappeared from the world until 1960, when he was brought to trial and sentenced to life imprisonment.
While still imprisoned, he was created a cardinal by Pope John Paul II, secretly, in 1979. The Holy Father publicly proclaimed him a cardinal on June 28, 1991. At his death, he was the world's oldest cardinal.
In the five years before his arrest, Bishop Kung became one of the most feared enemies of the Chinese Communists, commanding the attention and devotion of the country's then 3 million Roman Catholics.
The Year of Mary
Amid persecutions, Bishop Kung declared 1952 a Marian year in Shanghai. During that year, there was to be uninterrupted recitation of the rosary 24 hours a day in front of a statue of Our Lady of Fatima, which toured all parishes. The statue finally arrived at Christ the King church where priests had been arrested one month earlier. Bishop Kung visited the church and personally led the rosary while hundreds of armed police looked on. At the end of the rosary, leading the congregation, Bishop Kung prayed: “Holy Mother, we do not ask you for a miracle. We do not beg you to stop the persecutions. But we beg you to support us who are very weak.”
Knowing that he and his priests would soon be arrested, Bishop Kung trained hundreds of catechists to pass on the faith. The efforts of these catechists, their martyrdom and that of many faithful and clergy contributed to the underground Catholic Church in China today.
The night before he was brought to trial, the chief prosecutor asked once again for his cooperation to leave the independent church movement and to establish the Patriotic Association. His answer was: “I am a Roman Catholic bishop. If I denounce the Holy Father, not only would I not be a bishop, I would not even be a Catholic. You can cut off my head, but you can never take away my duties.”
Shortly before being released from jail in 1985, to serve an additional 10 years of house arrest, Cardinal Kung was permitted to join a banquet organized by the Shanghai government to welcome Manila Cardinal Jaime Sin, on a friendship visit.
He and Cardinal Sin were seated on opposite ends of the table and separated by more than 20 Communists. During the dinner, Cardinal Sin suggested that each person sing a song to celebrate. When Cardinal Kung's turn came, he is reported to have looked directly at Cardinal Sin and sung, “Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram aedificabo Ecclesiam meam” (You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my Church).
Cardinal Sin soon after carried Cardinal Kung's message to Pope John Paul II.
Cardinal Kung was released from prison in 1987 and allowed to come to the United States for medical treatment. His nephew received permission to bring him to Connecticut, where he lived until 1997 as the guest of Bridgeport's late Bishop Walter Curtis in a retirement home for priests.
When the Pope presented Cardinal Kung with his red hat in June 1991, the 90-year-old raised himself up from his wheelchair, put aside his cane and walked up the steps to kneel at the feet of the Holy Father. Visibly touched, the Pope lifted him up, gave him his cardinal's hat and stood patiently as Cardinal Kung returned to his wheelchair to the sounds of a seven-minute standing ovation from 9,000 guests in the Vatican audience hall.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian McGuire ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Good Friday Holiday Dragged Into Court DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:INDIANAPOLIS — Paul Dietrich won't be working at his job with the Indiana Air Guard on April 21. He'll be playing his guitar at the Good Friday services at St. Aloysius Parish in Yoder, Ind.
That's because the U.S. Supreme Court decided March 6 to let stand a lower court's decision to uphold Indiana's state holiday.
“I'm glad I have the day off,” said Dietrich. “I can go play my guitar and worship.”
The Supreme Court's refusal to hear the case is good news, say religious freedom watchers.
“Indiana can celebrate free of judicial harassment — for now,” said Kevin Hasson of the Washington, D.C.-based Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. Good Friday has been a holiday in Indiana since 1941. He added that the action doesn't preclude the court from deciding against a similar law in the future.
Russell Bridenbaugh, of Bloomington, Ind., had challenged his state's law on the grounds that it violated the separation of church and state by establishing religion. He called the Supreme Court's decision “dangerous.”
“I don't think justice was served, nor was the Constitution,” Bridenbaugh told the Register. “One has to be vigilant when this happens. I take it seriously.”
But Hasson said the battle over Indiana's law is just the latest attempt to erase any aspect of religion from public life. Other Christian holidays have been targeted in recent court battles. The Becket Fund last year successfully defended in the 6th U.S. Circuit Court in Cincinnati the federal designation of Christmas as a holiday.
“This is the logical extension of challenging menorahs and Nativity scenes,” said Hasson. He also mentioned that citizens have had to remove Christian symbols, like the cross or the fish, from their city seals due to court challenges.
“The radical secularists never miss an opportunity to remove whatever religion they can find in public life,” he said.
Bridenbaugh sued Indiana in 1997, but a federal magistrate threw his case out without a trial. He brought the case to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the law with a 2-1 decision on July 21.
In the majority opinion, Judge Daniel Manion wrote: “No court has ever held that the [First Amendment] is violated merely because a state holiday has the indirect effect of making it easier for people to practice their faith.”
But Judge Thomas Fairfield dissented, concluding that the selection of Good Friday was a “direct” bow to religion.
“It is a day of solemn religious observance, and nothing else, for believing Christians, and no one else,” wrote the dissenting judge. “Unitarians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists — there is nothing in Good Friday for them, as there is in the other holidays we have mentioned [Thanksgiving and Christmas] despite the Christian origins of those holidays.”
Judge Manion countered that Indiana had secular reasons to give the holiday to its employees.
“Indiana does not celebrate the religious aspects of Good Friday; for Indiana, the holiday has absolutely no religious significance,” wrote Manion. “To Indiana, Good Friday is nothing but a Friday falling in the middle of the long, vacationless spring.”
Why Is It a Holiday?
Bridenbaugh said that the state is trying to ignore the obvious: that the holiday was established for religious reasons, not for the secular explanations offered by Indiana.
“If they had said, ‘Because many … employees are Christian and would take the day off anyway,’ at least that would be more honest,” said Bridenbaugh. But he added, “It would still be unconstitutional.”
Hasson also expressed concern about a solely secular defense of the Christian holiday, saying Bridenbaugh and other critics carry the separation of church and state too far.
“I think it's appalling that we can have holidays for National Catfish Day and National Jukebox Week and mean it,” said Hasson, “but we can't recognize that large numbers of people want to celebrate a religious holiday and simply give them the day off.”
Indiana had to argue the secular reasons behind the holiday, Hasson said, because the 6th Circuit Court overturned Wisconsin's Good Friday law in 1996.
The Wisconsin statute stipulated that “On Good Friday, the period from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. shall uniformly be observed for the purpose of worship” and required state offices to close after noon.
Since it's in the same circuit court as Wisconsin, Indiana was left to defend the secular benefits of giving its workers a day off.
Said Hasson, “That was the only option available to allow the Indiana law to stand.”
In 1988 the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments issued a letter on Holy Week celebrations for Catholics.
The letter begins by stating the importance of Good Friday, which is not a holy day of obligation: “On this day, when ‘christ our passover was sacrificed,’ the Church meditates on the passion of her Lord and Spouse, adores the cross, commemorates her origin from the side of Christ asleep on the cross, and intercedes for the salvation of the whole world.
“On this day, in accordance with ancient tradition, the Church does not celebrate the Eucharist: Holy Communion is distributed to the faithful during the Celebration of the Lord's Passion alone, though it may be brought at any time of the day to the sick who cannot take part in the celebration. Good Friday is a day of penance to be observed as of obligation in the whole Church, and indeed through abstinence and fasting” (Nos. 58-60).
It adds: “The Celebration of the Lord's Passion is to take place in the afternoon, at about 3 o'clock. The time will be chosen which seems most appropriate for pastoral reasons in order to allow the people to assemble more easily, for example shortly after midday, or in the late evening, however not later than 9 o'clock” (No. 63).
----- EXCERPT: Supreme Court Lets Indiana Day-Off Stand ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Keeping the Faith on Capitol Hill DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:A leader in pro-life legislation, he and his wife, Karen Garver Santorum, have five children. A small gold cross stands on his desk in the U.S. Senate, where he represents Pennsylvania. Next to it is a carved wooden sign that says, simply, “PRAY.” A book about St. Vincent, patron saint of the Benedictines, sits on a table by his desk. On the mantel, porcelain angels. He spoke recently with Eleanor Kennelly and Victor Gaetan.
Kennelly and Gaetan: We see many symbols of faith here in your office. It's not common to see a cross so prominently displayed on an elected official's desk.
Santorum: I say I came to the U.S. Senate and found the Lord. My spiritual direction was incredibly altered and accelerated in the last five or six years through the loss of our son, Gabriel, in 1996, and through some of the things I have gotten involved in here, like the partial-birth abortion fight. Our spiritual life has really gotten more meat on the bones. Our personal relationship with God and our Catholic faith have blossomed.
How did you lose your son?
I don't show many people this, but here is a picture of him [picking up a framed photo of an infant]. He was just a little baby, two hours old. We knew there were complications in utero. God prepared us for this. We didn't know it at the time but we believe God grounded us before it happened. He is a great blessing. Gabriel has had a profound impact.
In what way?
When you love a child, and he dies, the first thing you ask is, “Why is God doing this to me?” But, not immediately, eventually, you see some purpose.
Gabriel has had a profound impact on our family and on my work in the Senate. My wife Karen wrote a book titled Letters To Gabriel (CCC of America, 1998). Karen always writes letters to our children. In this case, she wrote the majority of them after he died, directing all of that grief into prayer and the letters.
Reading the book has been a wonderful healing tool, especially for people who lost children but never went through the grieving process. The book is also an instrument of faith. Each chapter begins with a Bible quote, and the foreword was written by Mother Teresa. There isn't a week that goes by when someone doesn't mention the book to me. And Gabriel has been a great inspiration in the fight against partial-birth abortion.
Through my work, and through Karen's book, I can think of at least seven or eight children who are alive today. The mothers decided not to have abortions. So, we know we have our little son in heaven and he has been used in a very powerful way.
Were you brought up as a Catholic?
I've been a Catholic all my life. I was an altar boy. I went to Catholic grade school from first through eighth grade. I have the scars from rulers slapped on the backs of my hands! While growing up, I was involved in our church, for a child, in a profound way. My faith was important to me.
Going to college in the 1970s, well, it had its impact. It was not the place to find faith and I didn't. I stopped going to church regularly and really fell away, never completely, but faith was not central to my life. It wasn't driving me. I was as mixed up and restless as any time in my life. I had no direction. I thank God some guardian angel was looking after me — had to be — because I wasn't looking after me.
I survived that time. I got out of college in 1981 and said, “Now it's time to grow up! Now I'm beginning my life.” I began to figure out that I needed to do what God wanted me to do not what I wanted to do. My parents planted a seed and I slowly began to nurture that and feel a hunger for that.
When did you meet your wife Karen?
I met my wife in 1988. That was a time … it's interesting, how these things happen.
I was beginning to go to church again and growing closer to my faith. She was going through the same thing and we helped each other. We made sure we went to church, followed the holy days, became more prayerful and more faith-centered. The pre-Cana program also served to bring these things into focus.
How did your election to Congress in 1990 affect your spiritual life?
I had been making progress. I felt that I was getting grounded again. But during my four years in Congress, I wasn't exactly “in a rut,” that's not fair, but I wasn't experiencing much spiritual growth. I was always running for office. I was always between two places [Washington and Pennsylvania]. I was doing so many things. I just carved out the time for faith, and it wasn't much.
Did this change when you got to the Senate?
When I came to the Senate, I sort of stepped back and asked, “Where am I with God these days?” I committed myself to seeking him out.
And you've been successful …
I don't know how successful I've been, but God is much more central to my everyday life than he has ever been and it's something I'm conscious of. That's why I try to go to Mass daily. That's why I have my little sign here: “PRAY.”
Through your church here in Washington, and in Pennsylvania, do you sense a rededication to God among many Catholics, a new vibrancy? Do you feel a growth in evangelization?
Absolutely. I feel it in a broader context beyond my parishes. As a national senator, because of the issues I'm involved with, I meet many Catholic leaders and I feel an amazing energy among Catholics across the country.
The Clinton administration keeps trying to increase the budget for international contraception and abortion programs. In a country such as Romania today, where these “family planning” programs have grown exponentially, there are now some 1.4 million abortions a year.
There seems to be a strong relationship between the so-called family planning programs and increased abortions, even when U.S. funding supposedly does not advocate abortion. What can we do about this?
We have tried to veto that. It's genocide. It's an issue we're aware of, we fight, and with this president, it will always be a fight.
Promoting personal responsibility has been a theme in many of the issues you champion, such as welfare reform. You first came to national prominence around the House banking scandal, when you discovered that members of Congress were abusing the U.S. House bank, overdrawing their accounts with no penalty. Several members lost their seats as a result. Do you think they were acting unethically or were they just careless?
In so many ways, people fool themselves into thinking that something they are doing which is not right, is not that bad, until right and wrong are clearly drawn. In the case of the House banking scandal, a group of us were coming in new, from outside, so we could see right and wrong.
There is a seduction here in Congress. You get treated differently. You have to be constantly mindful of who you work for — the people. Among the members overdrawing money, for most it was a self-indulgence. A few were actively ripping off the system, but for most it was an indulgence.
What message do you have for those Catholics who feel the way you did in the early ‘80s, weak in faith and without strong spiritual direction?
I would rather offer a message to those Catholics who have re-established a strong religious practice — may God give you the gift of the Holy Spirit to reach out to others who have not experienced a return, who are not watering the seed of faith. A major reason my faith was strengthened was the fact that someone reached out to me.
Whom are you thinking of?
First, obviously, my wife. Also, Senator Don Nichols [of Oklahoma]. He encouraged me to go to a Bible study group when I got into the Senate. He pestered me until I did. And what I got out of it was so important, because I recognized I had to focus my life around the word. So you need to go out and reach out to your friends, and we all know them, we all have friends who need to work on it, but we don't reach out.
My message is this: Ask for the Holy Spirit. I pray, “Give me the gift of prophecy. Give me the words, to touch this person's heart, to get them to talk to God.”
----- EXCERPT: A leading pro-lifer found his way back to God ----- EXTENDED BODY: Senator Rick Santorum ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Marriage Wins --- For Now DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:SACRAMENTO, Calif. — It's only 14 words long, but in the battle for marriage in the United States, it will make an enormous difference.
California voters overwhelmingly agreed March 7 to this definition of marriage: “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”
The 61% to 39% vote means that marriage in California will continue to be a contract that only a man and a woman can enter. Despite a pitched battle against Proposition 22 — the California Defense of Marriage Act — all California counties voted to pass the measure, except for five in the San Francisco Bay area. About 70% of Hispanics supported the measure, reported CNN.
“Thirty-one states have already passed protection of marriage acts,” said Ned Dolejsi, executive director of the California bishops’ lobbying wing in Sacramento, the state's capital. “California needed to join that list of states.”
Janet Parshall, spokeswoman for the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., said California's victory would have an enormous impact on marriage debate around the country.
“If the liberal states of Hawaii, Alaska and now California can [honor marriage's definition], then the 19 other states without statutory protection for marriage can and must do it, too,” she said in a written statement.
The bishops’ California Catholic Conference donated more than $350,000 to the “Yes on Proposition 22” campaign. It also issued bulletin announcements and fliers to each parish in the state. “The bishops feel strongly that it is in the best interests of the people of California to protect the definition of marriage,” explained Dolejsi.
The effort was ecumenical, Parshall added.
“As we have seen in California, the defense of marriage is a cause that transcends most others, joining together a vast array of people from many different faiths,” Parshall said. “Mormons, Muslims, evangelicals, Catholics, and others may disagree on religion, but all can agree that the heart of family life is marriage, the foundation of our civilization.”
A Federal Debate
The flurry of states which have adopted protection of marriage acts came on the heels of a 1996 federal law which defined marriage as being between a man and woman only for the purposes of the federal tax code, immigration, Social Security and other federal services. The law, however, invited each state to set its own definition of marriage.
The 14-word-long definition of marriage Californians read on their ballots was “pretty simple,” said Dolejsi.
So was the message of the campaign to pass it.
“We've presented a strong, aggressive and positive campaign,” Dolejsi added. “But the other side wanted to make it complicated, claiming it's about discrimination, bigotry and scapegoating.”
Indeed, the issue has been hotly contested in California, as in Hawaii, Alaska and Vermont, by homosexual activist groups who claim that any reservation of marriage to a man and a woman is discriminatory. Opponents claim further that it would cause unnecessary government interference into an individual's private life and deny hospital visitation rights to homosexual partners.
California Gov. Gray Davis, a Catholic, issued a statement against the Defense of Marriage Act calling it a “wedge-issue … that divides one Californian from another and makes scapegoats of certain groups of our citizens.” He referred to Proposition 22 as an “emotionally charged issue [which] serves mainly to stir up prejudices and hostility.”
State Sen. Bill Campbell, also a Catholic, disagreed.
“We have to be very careful how we honor marriage in this state so that we don't end up honoring something we don't want to,” he contended. “The Catholic Church has always taught the sanctity of marriage, the importance of a man and wife staying together throughout their marriage, and that husband and wife both be there to help train and develop their children in the love of God.”
The purpose of marriage throughout history has been the propagation of children, he said, and it is “only natural that a man and woman should be the ones in the family unit to raise and nurture the children.”
Part of a Bigger Issue
Matthew Daniels, executive director of Washington, D.C.-based Alliance For Marriage, predicted, “The debate our society is now entering over marriage will be as traumatic and deeply divisive as earlier debates over abortion and slavery.”
Daniels’ group is a national organization which is building an interfaith alliance to help further defend marriage. “The outcome of this debate will have political, social and moral ripple effects that will last for generations,” he maintained.
Proponents of same-sex marriage vowed to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act with an amendment to the state Constitution.
The proposed amendment would read: “Two people of the same sex may lawfully marry in California,” and will be on the November ballot if the qualifying 1 million signatures are collected by April 20.
“Prop 22 was a wake-up call, especially to the gay and lesbian community,” said Tom Henning, a spokesman for Californians for Same-Sex Marriage. “Many people thought it would-n't pass. But we have a chance to undo it in the November election.”
Emphasizing that the fight for a same-sex marriage ballot initiative will continue even if the April 20 deadline is not met, Henning added, “The time for this initiative has come. If we don't make it this time, we'll be back with a new campaign.”
Daniels said that proponents of same-sex unions are tenacious, planning to eventually win a string of court battles claiming civil-rights discrimination against states which refuse to recognize a same-sex, state-approved “marriage” from another state. The hope of these homosexual activists, he said, is that civil recognition of same-sex “marriages” ultimately becomes mandated by the U.S. Supreme Court, in a landmark case that parallels the dynamics of Roe v. Wade years ago.
“One of the greatest ironies,” observed Daniels, “is that homosexual activists, who are overwhelmingly white, have borrowed freely from the language and symbolism of the civil rights movement in order to provide a moral cover for their socially destructive agenda ….
“[Yet] the belief that marriage and the family involve the union of male and female cuts across all race, class, ethnic, religious and cultural lines. … It is the single most multicultural social institution known to mankind.”
Other states considering Defense of Marriage Acts this year include Colorado, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Vermont and West Virginia.
“In light of the size of California,” said Daniels, “the vote on Proposition 22 in March has been carefully watched as a bellwether of future events in the emerging debate over marriage in America.”
Karen Walker is based in San Juan Capistrano, California.
----- EXCERPT: Homosexual activists vow a new drive in California ----- EXTENDED BODY: Karen Walker ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Bush Labels Gore as 'Extreme' on Abortion Issues DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:DULLES, Va. — In the wake of Super Tuesday victories, GOP candidate George W. Bush and Democratic candidate Al Gore began sparring with one another.
Just before Super Tuesday, Register correspondent Mary Claire Kendall spoke with Bush about the 2000 election.
Mary Claire Kendall: At the end of his life, Republican campaign strategist Lee Atwater converted to Catholicism and apologized to Michael Dukakis for the rough tactics he employed against Dukakis on behalf of your father in 1988. Will you seek this kind of healing after this primary season?
George W. Bush: I have nothing to apologize for. I stand by what I've campaigned on. I've campaigned in the way I believe is right. And that's why so many people are pouring out … to support me.
What will you do to reach out to Reagan Democrats, a large number of whom are Catholics?
I think one of the reasons Ronald Reagan got the Catholic votes and Reagan Democrats was because he wanted to cut taxes. I want to cut taxes. The tax burden on the people is high. Secondly, the life issue matters. But, thirdly, the reason why many Democrats are going to vote for me in the general election — not Gore Democrats but Democrats in the general election — is because they know I'll bring honor and dignity to the office.
What would you most like to say to the readers of the Register?
I want their vote. And, when they vote for me, I'll be a person that leads our country in a way that is positive and hopeful — that I will bring out the best in America.
Do you believe in the sanctity of human life from conception until natural death?
Yes.
Can you tell
Yes. I accepted Christ in 1986 and quit drinking shortly thereafter. I haven't had a drop of alcohol since 1986. That's 14 years. And I'm a better person for it. I would not be running for president had I not quit. I was not clinically an alcoholic, but alcohol was competing for my affections and my time.
What would a President Bush do to encourage strong families and the values that support strong families?
Well, first and foremost, remind people of the importance of family — honor my oaths.
Secondly, remind people on a regular basis that being a mother or dad is the most important thing we can do in society.
Thirdly, give people a tax cut so they've got more money in their own pockets to be able to dream and save for their families. Fourthly, you should have education savings accounts so that families can make more choices.
Theodore Roosevelt said it's better for the government to help a poor man make a living for his family than to help a rich man make a profit for his company. How relevant is that statement to today's politics?
I think it's very relevant. And I come from the school of thought that [says] by cutting the taxes it will help encourage economic growth. The taxes are the highest they've been since World War II on people and these people are working really hard and they're paying a lot of tax. And I come from the school of thought that says government ought to be limited in its scope, and that people ought to be allowed to put more money in their pocket the harder they work.
Analysts say the three most important issues to Catholics are the life issue, school vouchers and reversing the moral decline of our country. What would your Administration do to work on these issues?
Well, I'm a pro-life candidate. I've been a pro-life governor. I'm going to set the goal that all children born and unborn ought to be protected in law and welcomed to life. I will sign a ban on partial birth abortions. I will encourage adoptions. I understand the hope and promise of crisis pregnancy centers. In terms of [school choice], in my state of Texas, I supported vouchers particularly when it was tied to an accountability system. At the federal level, since I believe in local control of schools, the best policy will expand what I call education savings accounts from $500 to $5,000 per filer per year so parents can save tax-free for their children's education no matter where they want to send them.
How can a president help improve the moral climate of the country?
It's a matter of having a president who goes into office who brings honor and dignity to the White House and then works to lift the spirit of America — to call out the best. I believe we ought to have faith-based initiatives that encourage people of faith like the good Catholic charities and other groups to help people in need. The government ought not to fund churches but we ought to fund people who are trying to help or programs that can make a difference in people's lives.
Al Gore and the Democrats have positioned themselves in favor of abortion on demand. Are they or are you and the Republicans more in tune with the voters?
I'm pro-life and they are extreme. I would sign a ban on partial birth abortion and they would not. That shows the difference of opinion.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mary Claire Kendall ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:Prison Rehabilitation Through Prayer
The program, called InnerChange, was founded in 1997. Since then, only 15 of the 120 prisoners who were released after going through its training have gone back to jail. For Texas as a whole, the recidivism rate is nearly 50%.
The magazine notes that “two of the main candidates in this year' s presidential race have taken up the argument for “faith-based” groups like InnerChange.
“Admirers claim that such organizations are better than the state at fighting drug addiction, illiteracy and poverty. They say that the enormous secular system built up to deal with such problems, much of it during Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, has produced 35 years of failure.”
Robert Woodson of the Washington-based National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise told The Economist: “A new Great Society can be built on the foundations of religious faith.”
Perplexed Protestant: Truth Is Up For Grabs
Spong, whose perplexing denial of many of the central claims of the Christian faith have made him a media celebrity, delivered his National Cathedral talk to cap off a 17-city book tour for his just-released autobiography, Here I Stand.
Dissenting from Spong's lecture was evangelical Methodist scholar William J. Abraham.
“The breakup of modern Protestantism is in the cards and the trip-wire is sex,” Abraham said, referring to the rise of homosexual rights and the dissolution of marriage in the West.
Early Show Provides Platform for Catholic Bashing
THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE, March 8 — CBS’ Early Show, hosted by Jane Clayson and Bryant Gumbel, became a platform for mocking Catholic Lenten discipline on the eve of Ash Wednesday, the Catholic League reported.
During the course of a conversation between the show's hosts and meteorologist Mark McEwen, Clayson and Gumbel admitted they were raised Catholic but were no longer practicing. “I was born Catholic and I got a problem with it,” McEwen said.
On an earlier show, on Jan. 31, co-host Julie Chen joined McEwen in jokes about Catholic guilt, nuns “ready to take you out,” “being scarred for life,” saying Hail Mary's, etc.
Said Catholic League president William Donohue, “besides showing their ignorance, Gumbel, Clayson, Chen and McEwen display a troubling double standard: they are ever so careful how they talk about other segments of society.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Tom Wolfe: Catholic Schools Are The Right Stuff DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:NEW YORK — Best-selling author Tom Wolfe calls himself a “lapsed Presbyterian” but said he knows a good thing when he sees it. In addition to the moral formation Catholic schools give children, “parochial schools work.”
“I'm not Catholic, but I have eyes,” the author of The Right Stuff and Bonfires of the Vanities said in an interview. Wolfe spoke to the Register prior to a March 1 dinner that raised over $1 million for an organization that helps inner-city elementary school students to go to private or parochial high schools.
“The Catholic system has kids from the same demographics as the public school system — and teaches 10% of all the students in [New York] city. The difference in the results is very striking.”
He said 85% of the city's Catholic high school graduates go on to college, compared to 27% of public school students. He added that the parochial school system gets the job done at a fraction of the administrative costs.
Defenders of the public schools point out that Catholic schools are not required to accept all those who wish to attend as public schools must, and they are also free to expel problem students. Parents who make the sacrifices to send their kids to parochial schools also tend to emphasize education to their children and provide them with discipline at home.
Wolfe is having none of it. “The obvious lesson of all this is that [New York City] should hand the whole thing over to the Catholic Church — and do it tomorrow,” he said.
Wolfe admitted that he was exaggerating, but said his plan would alleviate a lot of problems very quickly. “We talk so much about root causes,” he said. “We don't have time to live with root cause.”
In his dinner appearance on behalf of the Student/Sponsor Partnership, Wolfe couldn't stop pointing out the benefits students derive from Catholic schools. He admires the “higher purpose” for which Catholic schools strive. They teach, among other things, what he calls “bourgeois values,” including honor, duty, patriotism, peace, order and educational initiative. “What more could you ask for?”
Religious Protection
As for any church-state constitutional conflicts, Wolfe said he “would remind the Supreme Court that the purpose of that amendment is to protect religion from the state, not the other way around,” he told the 600 people at the dinner.
While state funding for students in private and parochial schools through vouchers remains mired in politics, Wolfe and other members of the business and philanthropic communities support private voucher programs to give usually poor and minority students a choice about where they go to high school.
This invariably helps Catholic schools, which are widely recognized for not abandoning even the worst inner-city neighborhoods.
Most of the 20 New York schools attended by the beneficiaries of the Student/Sponsor Partnership are Catholic.
That includes Cabrini High School in upper Manhattan where 52 students are assisted by the program. Jannett Santana, a senior, has two sponsors, one of whom is Philip Purcell, chief executive officer of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. He not only pays part of her tuition, but he stays in touch on a regular basis. The school also provides him with a copy of her report cards so he is aware of Jannett's academic progress.
That's the formula Peter Flanigan envisioned when he founded the partnership in 1986, ensuring that benefactors not only help pay students’ way but also get involved in their lives as role models, mentors and tutors.
Flanigan, an investment adviser at Warburg Dillon Read, and John Hennessy, chairman of Credit Suisse First Boston and one of the partnership's first sponsors, were honored at the dinner.
Building Confidence
“I've become a lot more confident because of the sponsors,” Jannett told the Register. “When I get a little worried about doing well on a test, I think of how they tell me about how proud they are that I've done so well, and that helps me.”
Her classmate, Nathifa McGill, believes that without the partnership, she would be like many of her public school friends who haven't applied for college yet, even though they are seniors. Nathifa has been accepted at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and she credits counselors and teachers at Cabrini for pushing students to strive for higher goals.
“Education is the greatest resource or attribute anyone can gain,” Danforth Starr, a former investment banker with Dillon Read, told the Register, explaining why he has sponsored students in the past.
Discipline
Anthony Llano, a 1994 graduate from Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx with the help of a sponsor, told dinner guests: “Inner city youths don't lack the desire to succeed; they don't lack intelligence. They have the potential to think and to learn.
“What they are in dire need of is structure and discipline, two qualities parochial schools have been able to offer.”
Anthony's point registered with Wolfe because it was the Catholic schools’ emphasis on discipline that first got his attention.
In preparation for an earlier talk to business leaders on the role of computers in education, Wolfe interviewed public school students and teachers about a host of subjects. “I talked to a young woman who, out of a sense of altruism, started teaching the fifth grade in the North Bronx, and she quit after a month and a half. She couldn't get the class quiet for a month and a half,” Wolfe told Investor' s Business Daily in January.
“She was told by the administration the following: This is not a hierarchical structure that we have here. You are not a teacher in the old sense; you are a facilitator. This is an open classroom. You are not an authoritarian.
“She went over to a parochial school in Spanish Harlem to observe, and here were those rigid desks that she had been warned were so inimical to learning. There was absolute order in the classroom. That got me interested in parochial schools.”
John Burger writes from New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: In Mea Culpa, Pope Embraces Crucified Christ DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — The most controversial ceremony of the Jubilee Year took place in rather understated fashion at St. Peter' s Basilica on Sunday, March 12.
The papal mea culpa, as it was widely referred to, or the “Day of Pardon” as it was officially called, was celebrated during the Mass for the First Sunday of Lent and included the Holy Father and senior cardinals asking forgiveness for the sins of Catholics in seven broad categories.
In contrast to the noisy commentary that had preceded the event, with many groups clamoring for specific apologies from the Church, and with not a few Catholics raising questions as to the pastoral wisdom of the initiative, the actual ceremony evoked the solemn General Intercessions of the Good Friday liturgy.
The Mass began with a moment of prayer in front of the Pietà, to emphasize the Church's embrace, like Mary, of the crucified Christ, who died for sin. The Holy Door of St. Peter' s took on special significance for the ceremony too, adorned as it is with panels that depict biblical scenes of forgiveness.
The panels highlighted by the ceremony included the denials of Peter, the prodigal son, Jesus’ instruction to forgive ‘seventy times seven,’ the good thief, and the woman whose many sins were forgiven after she anointed Jesus with ointment, washing his feet with her tears.
“They seem a paradox and, in fact, they are,” said the Holy Father in his homily, commenting on the words of the second reading: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).
Said John Paul, “How could God, who is holiness himself, ‘make to be sin' his only-begotten Son, sent into the world? We are in front of a mystery: a bewildering mystery at first glance, but written clearly by divine revelation.
“Christ, the Holy One, being absolutely without sin, accepted to take upon himself our sins,” he continued. In the mystery of the Incarnation, it is possible for God, who is all-holy, to take upon himself sin. Likewise, the Church, who as Christ's body, is always holy on account of him, can also do penance and ask forgiveness for the sins of her members — all her members, including both the lay faithful and the hierarchy.
After the homily, the request for forgiveness took place in seven parts, corresponding to the sevenfold categorization of sins chosen. Each part was briefly introduced by an official of the Roman Curia, and then followed by a short prayer requesting forgiveness by the Holy Father. The request for forgiveness was always addressed to God.
The first category, for all sins in general, was introduced by Cardinal Bernardin Gantin, dean of the College of Cardinals. The second category was for sins committed in service of the truth, introduced by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Subsequent categories included sins against Christian unity, those committed against the Jewish people, those against peace and the rights of cultures and nations, sins against the dignity of women and the unity of the human race, including racism and ethnic discrimination, and sins against the fundamental rights of the human person, specifically including the right to life.
The confession of sins and request for forgiveness did not include references to any specific historical acts. Earlier in the week, Vatican experts drew a distinction, echoed in the Holy Father' s homily, that this request for forgiveness touched upon the objective evils that Catholics have done throughout history. It was not a judgment upon the subjective moral culpability of any particular person, as it is impossible to know the conscience of another person, especially a person long dead.
At the conclusion of the Mass, the Holy Father indicated that the request for forgiveness was also to have the effect of changing current attitudes and behavior, saying that the “purification of memory” involves a “duty to be faithful to the perennial message of the Gospel.
“Never again actions contrary to charity in the service of the truth,” he prayed at the end of Mass. “Never again acts contrary to the communion of the Church, never again offenses toward any people, never again recourse to the logic of violence, never again discrimination, exclusion, oppression, or con-
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Pardon Is Also Sought for Sins of Today DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — “We confess, all the more, our responsibilities as Christians for the evils of today,” preached Pope John Paul II in his homily requesting forgiveness for the sins of Catholics.
“In the face of atheism, religious indifferentism, secularism, ethical relativism, violations of the right to life, and a lack of interest in the poverty of many nations, we cannot avoid asking ourselves about our own responsibilities. For the part that each one of us has had in these evils, contributing thereby to sullying the face of the Church, we humbly ask forgiveness.”
Often missed in the commentary about the “Day of Pardon” was that this was not only about history. The request for forgiveness certainly included the objective sins of Catholics long since dead, but also included contemporary forms of Catholic counter-witness to the Gospel.
The Second Vatican Council indicated that Christians, in failing to live in accord with the Gospel, often contribute to contemporary evils, foremost amongst them atheism (cf. Gaudium et spes, 19). The Jubilee request for forgiveness embraces that same judgment, asking to what extent Catholics are responsible for the prevailing evils of our day. In the American and European context, it is a fact that Catholics have contributed mightily, if not often decisively, to the prevalence of the culture of death. For that, the Pope asked forgiveness on Sunday.
The ceremony presented a face of the Church rarely seen in previous centuries. It is not possible to gainsay the historical import of hearing the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — heir to the specter of the Grand Inquisitor with which Dostoevsky has haunted our literary imagination — confess that “even men of the Church, in the name of faith and morals, have sometimes used methods not in keeping with the Gospel in the solemn duty of defending the truth.”
As the Church acknowledges what is sinful in her past, her voice is calling to be heard as she points out what is sinful in the present. She insists that the Catholics of today also ought to live in accord with their faith. The Jubilee “Day of Forgiveness” was not only about the previous millennia. It was about the millennium just beginning.
— Raymond J. de Souza
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: John Paul Says Priests Must Lead by Example DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — Priests are called to lead their congregations by example, including the example of going to confession, Pope John Paul II said.
“The priest himself, minister of God's forgiveness, needs to receive this forgiveness in a spirit of faith, humility and profound trust,” the Pope told priests from his own Diocese of Rome.
The March 9 audience for priests, an annual appointment with the bishop of Rome, was expanded to become the Jubilee for Roman Clergy and included a procession into St. Peter' s Basilica, a penitential prayer service and individual confessions before the Pope arrived.
Priests must be the first in their parish to heed the Lenten call to conversion, repentance, charity and reconciliation.
Going to confession, he said, is a “great help for overcoming indulgence in those forms of self-justification, part of the mentality and culture of our day, which make one lose a sense of sin and prevent one from experiencing the consoling joy of God's forgiveness.”
Although it is easy for a priest to get buried under a pile of pastoral commitments, he must not forget the importance for his personal and spiritual life of fostering a sense of communion with the bishop and his brother priests.
Pope John Paul said supporting continuing education programs, reaching out to priests who are undergoing difficulties, offering support and friendship to elderly priests, “openness to dialogue and meeting those who have left the priesthood” all demonstrate a commitment to “the ways of communion and reconciliation.”
“A united and harmonious presbyterate able to work together is a strong witness for the faithful and multiplies the effectiveness of ministry,” John Paul said. Nothing can replace personal witness and contact.
Even if they need to rely on using lay missionaries and foreign priests studying in Rome, he said, parishes should continue the practice of visiting every home in the parish boundaries during Lent.
“The visit reinforces the sense of belonging of many people who frequently live at the parish's margins” and are awaiting a sign that someone is willing to listen, to offer friendship and to help them rediscover their faith.
The Holy Father said the priests must make a special, personal effort to reach out “to families in difficulty, those who are estranged from the Church and those who have serious problems of faith or morals.”
The Holy Year, he said, “offers everyone the possibility of being listened to, accepted and encouraged to find the path of reconciliation with the Lord and with their brothers and sisters, even where everything seems lost or irreversible.” (From combined wire services)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Vatican Gave $1.2 Million to '99 Relief Efforts DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — Pope John Paul II gave more than $1.2 million to emergency relief efforts in 1999, including a gift of $30,000 to help a group of handicapped in mainland China after their residence burned.
The Pontifical Council Cor Unum, the Vatican's charity promoting and coordinating office, said the Pope also gave $555,000 for “human and Christian promotion” projects in 1999.
The annual report from Cor Unum on papal charitable giving was released at the Vatican March 8, the same day the Vatican announced the Holy Father was sending the council's president, Archbishop Paul Cordes, to Mozambique.
During his March 9-12 trip to the cyclone- and flood-stricken African country, Archbishop Cordes was scheduled to meet with officials of Mozambique's Catholic charities and representatives of the foreign relief agencies working with them.
In addition, the Vatican said, the archbishop will give Mozambique Caritas $140,000 for relief aid, a gift from the Pope and from the Vatican's Holy Year committee.
The Vatican said Catholic agencies working through the international Caritas network have already collected $1.65 million for Mozambique, an amount that “is only a start” toward what will be needed.
In the Cor Unum report on papal donations to emergency relief efforts in 1999, the Vatican listed 32 donations ranging from $10,000 to $197,600 to help the victims of war, flooding, earthquakes, drought and volcanic eruptions.
The money used for the papal donations comes from private gifts to Pope John Paul, from Lenten collections in several countries and from religious orders.
The Cor Unum report also said the Holy Year initiative, “100 Projects of the Holy Father,” supported by dioceses around the world, had raised about $20 million for what are now more than 200 “spiritual and corporal works of mercy,” including hospitals and schools.
The smaller Panis Caritatis project, which involves selling bread and giving a portion of the proceeds to Cor Unum, raised about $350,000 in 1999 and was distributed to food-related projects in Congo, Rwanda and Sudan.
ZENIT, the Rome-based news service, reported that the papal foundation Populorum Progressio financed 215 micro-projects for Indian and African American poor rural communities in Latin America, amounting to a total of $1,705,900. The other papal institution created for such purposes, the “John Paul II Foundation for the Sahel,” which is concerned with droughts and blighting of the 9 countries of that region, allocated $5,500,000 to the area.
These figures do not include the direct aid the Pope gave to Eastern churches and the missions. The previous year this amounted to $189,618,000. (From combined wire services)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Holy Father Calls forAid to Mozambique DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — Pope John Paul II urged international aid to flood-stricken Mozambique, where thousands were feared dead in the wake of a cyclone.
As aid agencies scrambled to provide emergency food and medical assistance to hundreds of thousands of survivors, the Pope praised the international response but said more was needed.
Speaking at a Sunday blessing March 5, the Holy Father said his thoughts were with “the people of Mozambique, who are experiencing a tragedy of unprecedented proportions caused by the serious flooding that has stricken a vast portion of the country.
“International solidarity has come forth without stop in recent days, but there is still much to do. I encourage everyone to continue generously in the relief efforts, in order to ease the dramatic burden of our brothers.”
The worst areas of flooding were in Mozambique's Limpopo River valley, about 100 miles northeast of the capital, Maputo. Despite deliveries of emergency supplies by helicopter, aid workers said they risked running out of safe water in camps where more than 200,000 people were being temporarily sheltered.
ZENIT, the Rome-based news service, reported that Archbishop Janusz Juliusz, Apostolic Nuncio in Mozambique, said that the “gratitude of the Mozambican people to John Paul II is immense. His appeals and concrete help are an important support in the tragedy afflicting the country.”
On March 7, the Mozambican bishops published a statement expressing their gratitude to the Holy Father for the constant assistance given to the country and his repeated appeals for aid to Mozambique. (From combined wire services)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:Why the Pope Cancelled February Trip to Iraq
The Pope's plan to visit biblical spots in the Middle East and Asia was supposed to have brought him to Iraq in early February.
In early December, the Pope cancelled the trip, making instead a “spiritual” pilgrimage to Abraham's birthplace on the eve of his February trip to Egypt.
The official reason for the cancellation was announced by Vatican spokesman Joaquín Navarro-Valls on Dec. 10. “The Iraqi authorities,” he explained, feel unable to “organize adequately the Pope's visit to Ur of the Chaldeans.”
“Behind all the dispositions of the Iraqi government there was a very specific calculation,” reported Avvenire.
“They thought that, in spite of the Pope's repeated affirmations about the spiritual nature [of the pilgrimage], it would not preclude [Iraq's] re-launching of this country, decimated by the embargo, on the international scene, and scoring a political success.”
The Vatican considered the above conditions “unacceptable,” and, according to the Italian newspaper, cancelled the journey.
Pope Meets With Grandson of Former Landlord
Ron Balamuth, whose father survived the Holocaust and moved to Israel, has been struggling for years to regain his family's title to the house, which now serves as a papal museum.
Balamuth said he wants a plaque placed at the door of the house which explains that it was home both to the Pope and to the Balamuths, many of whom died in concentration camps during the war.
In his March 12 meeting with the Pope, arranged by Aharon Lopez, the Israeli ambassador to the Holy See, and Jerzy Kluger, a Jewish boyhood friend of John Paul's, Balamuth asked the Holy Father what he remembered about his family.
According to Balamuth, the Pope stood and held his hand throughout their 15-minute discussion.
“That was very moving,” he said, adding that the Pope lit up when he showed him an old photograph of the storefront beneath the house.
“I asked him about my father, who died in 1969, whether he got into mischief,” Balamuth recalled. At this, the Pope “looked at me and said, ‘No, he was a good boy,’” adding that the Holy Father was almost reproachful, as if to say, “Don't be disrespectful to your parents.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:Israelis Angered Over Defense of Pope Pius XII
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Feb. 28 — Comments by the Vatican's top diplomat in the Holy Land have angered some Holocaust historians in Israel, the news service reported.
Archbishop Pietro Sambi said Pope Pius XII kept silent about the Nazi genocide during WWII because he wanted to save Jewish lives. The defense outraged some Holocaust historians and was used as ammunition by Israeli nationalists who called for a boycott of Pope John Paul II's upcoming visit to Israel.
The Vatican has said that Pope Pius had not been informed of the extent of Hitler' s purges, which killed 6 million Jews. In defending Pope Pius‘silence, it has cited a 1942 incident in which, after Dutch bishops spoke out against the deportations of Jews, the Nazis sent 300 Catholic converts of Jewish families to Auschwitz. The news service said the archbishop's nationally broadcast comments and the bitter reaction they have drawn could overshadow hopes for reconciliation during the pilgrimage.
Christians Lead Rebuilding in Sierra Leone
RELIGION TODAY, March 6 — Christian compassion is helping to rebuild war-torn Sierra Leone, the online news service reported. “Churches are at the heart of the West African nation's efforts to rebuild its society after a brutal civil war,” said Ian Gary of Catholic Relief Services. Protestant and Catholic churches are caring for refugees, pursuing long-term development programs and working to promote peace and reconciliation ministries in the nation.
“Christians are making the biggest contribution” to the rebuilding efforts, Sierra Leone President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah told World Relief's Clive Calver. Most of the country's residents are Muslim, but Kabbah said the churches “consistently outperformed the Muslims in terms of their commitment to the people,” Calver said.
People are scarred from the war, in which 200,000 died. Rebel soldiers maimed civilians, including women and children, by chopping off their limbs with machetes, news reports said. As many as 3,000 people lost arms and legs, World Relief said.
About 2 million people lost their homes or were forced to flee because of the fighting. According to Religion Today, Catholic churches are feeding displaced people, caring for orphaned children, and rebuilding homes. More than 5,000 young people are cared for at 27 centers supported by Catholic Relief Services, and the ministry has helped build 1,500 homes.
New African King Remembers His Catholic Education
More than 6,000 people filled a stadium in the capital city of Maseru to watch the 38 year old King Letsie, who was educated by Benedictine monks in England, marry Karabo Motsoeneng. Maseru's archbishop, Bernard Mohalelefi, performed the ceremony. Nelson Mandela was among the guests, as were the presidents of Botswana, Malawi and Mozambique, along with former Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda, the Universe said.
Letsie functions as a chief of state in this poor, Belgium-sized country of 2.1 million that lies within the borders of South Africa. The nation's politics have been paralyzed since South African and Botswanan troops invaded in 1998 to dislodge opposition protesters from the royal palace and quell an army revolt after a disputed election.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Evil Shoemaker DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:Once upon a time there was a good shoemaker. Business was booming, until a competing shoemaker began to saturate his market. This competitor was evil. He curtailed his workers’ prayer lives to make his shop their all. He forced women workers to kill new children if they already had one. And he exploited child labor.
One day, the evil shoemaker offered the good one a deal: The two could work in partnership in perpetuity, trading one part of the market for another. The good shoemaker shook the evil shoemaker' s hand. The two became very wealthy and lived happily ever after.
Huh?
This morality would never hold in a story. But the Clinton administration is urging that it can do fine in real-world dealings with China. The White House and congressional Republican leaders want to give China permanent most-favored-nation status. The status (which, because of squeamishness about China, has been renamed “normal” trade status) is currently reviewed every year by Congress in a controversial vote.
The U.S. State Department's latest Country Report, released in February, confirms that during 1999 the despicable behavior of the Chinese communist regime has gotten worse in virtually every category of human rights concern.
The Register has carried several reports on China's religious persecution, including attacks on Catholic churches, priests and bishops faithful to Rome. Its forced abortion policy means that, after a woman has had one child, if she gets pregnant again, she will be grabbed and pulled, sometimes kicking and resisting, to an abortion machine.
Chinese labor activists are regularly jailed or imprisoned in re-education camps for advocating free and independent trade unions, for protesting corruption and embezzlement, for insisting that they be paid the wages that they are owed and for talking to journalists about working conditions in China. A variety of products exported from China are made in political prison camps to profit the Communist regime, Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., points out.
President Clinton recently said that if the United States rejects China as a favored trading partner, it would be making “a mistake of truly historic proportions.” Putting China in the World Trade Organization, he says, “represents the most significant opportunity that we have had to create positive change in China since the 1970s, when President Nixon first went there, and later in the decade when President Carter normalized relations.”
We would point out that, for all the symbolism that surrounded both those presidential overtures to China, they did not create the kind of “positive change” in China that prevents government-sponsored killing.
And it is worth noting that, in just three months, Clinton plans to make a momentous national security decision — whether and how to go forward with plans to develop a more sophisticated form of national missile defense, much like President Reagan's “Star Wars” system.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, against whom do we need to defend ourselves? Smaller rogue nations, certainly. But also, say military experts, from an aggressive China.
China has yet to honor a single treaty made with the United States. Why are Clinton and Congress so eager to add yet another non-binding document to the list of trade agreements China has broken with impunity? Clinton went out on a limb in Seattle to be sure that protections of workers’ rights and the environment were included in the World Trade Organization's legal framework. Why, if these rules will immediately have to be waived, for China?
The surrender of our yearly review of China's trade status ought to be unthinkable right now. When it comes to workers, religious believers, torture victims and others in China, the leverage this yearly review gives us could become a lifesaver.
----- EXCERPT: Editorial ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: How Birth Control Begot Abortion DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:Last fall, we were inundated with warnings as the 6 billionth person was born — and reminded again and again that the gospel of family planning needs to be spread now more than ever. By the end of the year, both the United Nations and the U.S. Census Bureau had issued reports on population growth during the past century, suggesting that the warning had been mostly hype. Indeed, the Census Bureau predicts a serious population decline in the coming few decades, the result of falling birthrates — in large part courtesy of a well-funded, organized family-planning movement. As St. Louis University history professor Donald Critchlow documents in Intended Consequences, apocalyptic warnings about the menace of a booming population are old hat; in fact, it's been a full-time business since the end of World War II.
Critchlow's narrative history tells the story of “a small group of men and women, numbering only a few hundred, [who] set the context of the debate.” Some of the early players are familiar: the Population Council, under the watchful eye of John D. Rockefeller III; the Ford Foundation; Hugh Moore, founder of Dixie Cup Corp. and author of the 1954 Population Explosion; and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, under Alan Guttmacher and, of course, Margaret Sanger. But the family-planning movement of 1946 wore a much different face than it does today — the Patricia Irelands of the world might only faintly recognize their roots.
Critchlow shatters the myth that the modern family-planning revolution was a feminist baby. As he explains, all brought their own concerns to the table: birth-controllers, eugenicists and population controllers came together to sell their common message. In the movement's infancy, many were even indifferent to women's rights. As he points out, “the primary impetus for federal family-planning policy came initially from those who believed that overpopulation threatened political, economic, and social stability in the United States and the world.” This new ideology, Critchlow reminds us, was to be a solution to all of our social ills: poverty, welfare dependency, and outof-wedlock births.
It didn't hurt that the movement players knew Washington. President Dwight Eisenhower became the first president to openly endorse a federally funded family-planning measure, supporting financial assistance for family-planning programs in underdeveloped nations through military-assistance programs. The U.S. Catholic bishops, however, kept it from happening during his administration. President John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, avoided becoming the first, although he entertained family-planning advocacy throughout his administration. A National Institutes of Health report issued in 1962 called for more research on “the physiology and control of human reproduction” and warned the Catholic Church that its opposition to birth control was a losing battle.
Fewer babies were supposed to cure poverty, welfare dependency and single-parent homes.
The real political manna, however, came with the Great Society. But Critchlow won't let the reader walk away thinking President Lyndon B. Johnson deserves the bulk of the blame. As he documents, Congress was a willing accomplice. In fact, in 1967 Rep. George Bush of Texas helped clear the path for federal funding of family-planning programs through state agencies and private organizations like Planned Parenthood with an amendment to the Social Security Act.
And so, Intended Consequences reminds the reader that this was never a specifically liberal or Democratic project. Elected on a GOP platform that stated, “the worldwide population explosion in particular with its attendant grave problems looms as a menace to all mankind and will have our priority attention,” Republican President Richard Nixon, it might be said, sealed the deal. The 1970 Family Planning Services and Population Research Act further institutionalized federal population control, increasing funding and creating two new agencies. By the time Nixon distanced himself from the issue in 1973, as part of a “Catholic Strategy,” enough damage had been done — policywise, in the courts and culturally. And Roe v. Wade promised another legal form of birth control for a long time to come.
Critchlow's point, as the title suggests, is that the family-planning revolution was intentional and successful; its leaders and adherents got just what they intended. “As more Americans began to use artificial contraception as a means of limiting family size and spacing children, it became easier to persuade them that the poor deserved the same right to control the size of their families,” he writes. The movement wanted widespread use of artificial contraception. Done. By 1990, 50% of couples worldwide used contraceptives. In the United States, artificial contraception and sterilization are the methods of choice for 80% of couples. Abortion wasn't a goal for most of the early planners, but, as state legislatures liberalized their abortion laws, the issue became a plank of the movement. Although all their policies were cemented in, none of them did what they were supposed to do — “reduce the number of people living in poverty or the number of out-of-wedlock births.”
Critchlow's history is valuable and useful to those on the front lines of the pro-life movement today, though it's far from flawless, as revealed in a libel suit filed by Pro-Life Action League founder Joseph Scheidler. According to Critchlow, Scheidler “has advocated violence as a political strategy”; Intended Consequences counts him among a “dissident minority of anti-abortion extremists [who] turned to violence” in the 1980s. The opposite is true. Scheidler, who has reportedly praised the book otherwise, filed the suit against Oxford University Press in January.
While his coverage of the pro-life movement may leave something to be desired, his study, made possible by exclusive access to papers of population-control pioneers — the Population Council, John D. Rockefeller III's papers and other previously untouched archives — makes Intended Consequences an unprecedented reference work, providing the important function of documenting just how we got to be where we are today.
Kathryn Jean Lopez is associate editor of National Review.
----- EXCERPT: Book Review ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kathryn Jean Lopez ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Feminism Is Its Own Worst Enemy DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:“How Abortion Has Failed Women”
by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese Crisis, March 2000
In an article appropriate for the March 25 Jubilee Day for Women, Elizabeth FoxGenovese, Catholic convert and professor of the humanities at Emory University, writes: “Like the stone crosses that once stood at crossroads, abortion marks the convergence of the most portentous social, political, and moral questions of our time. … The point of convergence between the [culture of life and the culture of death] lies in their common understanding that abortion has proven a powerful force in the sexual and social liberation of women. The point of divergence lies in whether one believes that liberation has benefited women and society and even whether it can sustain a just and decent society at all.”
The women's movement has made abortion rights its nonnegotiable demand, a “fundamental liberty” about which feminists may not disagree, and to that end they have been relentless in attacking pro-life arguments based on the humanity of the unborn. “Recently, however, one unusually candid feminist, Cynthia Daniels, has urged women to acknowledge the life of the fetus. This, she argues, does not weaken the case for abortion but strengthens it. In Daniels’ reasoning, the fetus is living, uninvited, off of the woman's private resources and must, therefore, be viewed as an aggressor.”
Though most feminists do not consider this argument tactically useful, it “nonetheless exposes the core of the movement's unyielding attachment to abortion as the foundation of women's freedom.
The view of the fetus as invader of the woman's body and plunderer of her vital resources offers a chilling vision of women's autonomy. More disturbing is the vision it offers of the human person. For this vision separates each of us completely from all others, unless we voluntarily suspend a measure of our autonomy by entering into a contractual relation with another. And, in the case of women, it separates us from our embodied selves.”
By “insisting that no woman may be compelled to bear a child, the movement has sought to liberate women from the handicap of their bodies. … This strategy rests on the disquieting premise that for women to achieve full dignity and freedom they must become as much like men as possible.” Though women have made great strides in achieving public parity with men in employment, education and politics, they have generally “secured their positions in the public world by adapting to the prevailing male pattern. The real adaptation has occurred in women's private relations with men and children, and not all of it has been to women's advantage.”
The feminist scenario on liberated male-female relations “rests on the assumption that girls — for they are the ones at highest risk — have the same sexual agenda as boys, namely, no-strings-attached adventure for its own sake. Typically, they do not. Girls and, for that matter, young women are much more likely to seek love and connection. Improbable as it may seem in our current cultural climate, surprising numbers still half-consciously hope that an unintended pregnancy will lead the boy to marry them.
“However unrealistic, these dreams compound the emotional trauma of an abortion, which represents not merely the death of the child but an assault on the girl's sense of herself and her trust in others.”
Fox-Genovese traces the relationship of abortion, marriage and gender equality in the secular feminist worldview which influences many women who might not apply the feminist label to themselves. “Increasingly, sex is viewed as an end in itself, and sexual unions — or better, liaisons — are treated as temporary arrangements, entered into for immediate gratification and abandoned for new objects of sexual desire. In this climate … [a] woman who knows that, at any moment, her husband may forsake their marriage without penalty or sanction, has scant reason to sacrifice her career to the marriage and children — or even to subordinate her interests to those of the family as a unit. Failure to protect her own earning power would be economic suicide for herself and perhaps her children. And the more open she had been to the gift of children, the more daunting the prospects would be.”
Fox-Genovese concludes: “Abortion provides many women with a quick solution to immediate problems. It does not improve the conditions that produced the problems in the first place. … But we should not delude ourselves: Women's freedom to bear and nurture children is expensive. And, under present conditions, we should not expect the private sector to shoulder the entire cost. Having permitted the disintegration of marriage, we must now pay the taxes to underwrite support for single mothers. The great challenge will be to meet the needs of single mothers without encouraging the further erosion of marriage.”
Ellen Wilson Fielding writes from Davidson, Maryland.
----- EXCERPT: Article Digest ----- EXTENDED BODY: Ellen Wilson Fielding ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:Ungrateful Aid Recipients
In your Feb. 27-Mar. 4 edition, you published an editorial criticizing the lack of response by the United States or the United Nations to the atrocities against Christians and other minorities that are taking place in Sudan (“Walk the Talk in Sudan”). In light of brothers and sisters in Christ being raped, killed and enslaved, your criticism is justified; however, the lack of response is at least understandable if you read an article in the very next issue: “NATO and U.N. Forces Blamed for Violence” (March 5-11).
The NATO and U.N. forces in Yugoslavia are a group of men and women far from their homes and vastly outnumbered by factions that have been fighting viciously for the last millennium. You might think that blaming the continuing violence in that country on these men and women would be absurd. Yet the same pattern of pleas for intervention, followed by accusations of malice or incompetence, has haunted every involvement of the United States, United Nations or NATO in troubled regions of the world.
I have no doubt that U.N. and NATO forces make errors in judgment, that they fail to live up to their highest ideals as peacekeepers, or that there are individual soldiers who are insensitive to human suffering. Like all the descendants of Adam and Eve, the members of the U.N. and NATO forces are imperfect. Furthermore, these imperfect people (and the imperfect citizens of their home countries who finance their efforts) find it difficult to continue being enthusiastic helpers when they are continually subjected to this humiliating pattern of invitation and rejection.
If those who plea for intervention in Sudan really want aid, they need to indicate that they will be merciful in their judgment of the imperfect efforts of those who help.
John H. Fogarty Lake St. Louis, Missouri
Keyes Is Key
George W. Bush is being bashed by the media for speaking at Bob Jones University, which has expressed anti-Catholic views and racial prejudice (“Election 2000 Heats Up,” March 5-11). Doesn't it seem odd that the media conveniently omits the fact that Republican presidential candidate Alan Keyes, who is both Catholic and black, also spoke at Bob Jones University on the same occasion?
Keyes delivered a polite, but powerful speech. He pointed out that the school's religious bigotry and racism are contrary to the Declaration of Independence and the principles set down by our founding fathers. Alan Keyes is the only candidate who radiates leadership and courage.
Stephen J. Conway Banning, California
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: There's Something About Mary DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:Growing up evangelical Protestant in an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic town, I memorized at an early age the differences that at the time seemed to represent an unbridgeable gulf between my faith and that of my friends. I “knew” that Catholics would rather talk to saints than Jesus, confess to priests than God, recite formulaic prayers than prayers from the heart, endure fires of purgatory than be sanctified on earth, play bingo than read the Bible and go to church on Saturday night so they could sleep in on the Lord's Day. Most disturbingly, I knew that Catholics would rather worship Mary than Christ.
Something must have gone terribly wrong between the death of the last apostle and the posting of Luther' s 95 theses at Wittenberg, and whatever that something was had pulled the wool over the eyes of a billion people. The wrong, I thought, was best represented by the disproportionate role Mary seemed to play in Catholic life.
In fact, for evangelical Protestants, misunderstandings about Mary may prove to be the most difficult — and last — obstacle to reuniting with Rome. It was for me, perhaps because she was more than an intellectual problem, she was an emotional one. Marian devotion, as I had mistaken it, seemed to dilute the very core Christian belief in the sufficiency of Christ's sacrifice, especially in assigning her titles such as Coredemptrix and Mediatrix of all graces. Mary was a shoal in the waters of faith, I believed, and many ships had wrecked upon her.
When I began exploring the Catholic faith, I made up my mind that I would remain open-minded at least long enough to really try to understand terms like the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption. In his book The Catholic Church and Conversion, G.K. Chesterton quips that “the old traditional [Protestant] version of the terrors of Popery was almost always wrong, even where it might possibly have been right.” The same might be said of the imagined “terrors” of Marian doctrine. None of it was as scary as I thought.
In fact, my greatest fears of Catholic “mariolatry” were dissolved almost as soon as I understood the difference between veneration — or deep reverence and respect — and worship — the adoration reserved for God alone. (For Catholics who want to reach out to Protestants, a simple explanation of that slender but profound distinction is one way to dynamite a huge roadblock to discussion.)
Protestants sometimes find it difficult to understand the nuance in Catholic prayer; that what Catholics say is often not what the outsider thinks he's hearing; that rococo devotional language has been crafted and gilded over centuries by saints who have tried to express in words inexpressible groanings and joys. So when Protestants hear Mary described in the Salve Regina as “our life, our sweetness, and our hope,” they fail to recognize that she is that only insofar as she can point the way to her Son. Mary is not, ultimately, the point of Marian devotion: The fruit of her womb is.
I knew that Catholics would rather worship Mary than Christ.
When I first realized this, I felt, as I often have on this journey, that I had stumbled into yet another vast storehouse of spiritual treasure, as I had in discovering the lives of the saints or the whole lost history before Wittenberg. Growing up, we didn't talk much about Mary in our churches and camp meetings, Sunday Schools and Bible studies. She might make an appearance in a sermon about the Cana wedding or about the time when Christ seemed to rebuke her by asking, “Who is my mother?” She might be seen scurrying about the Temple looking for her lost 12-year-old. Only at Christmas did she play more than a cameo role.
During the past 18 months of RCIA — instructions for adults entering the Church — my appreciation for Mary, Mother of God, has deepened as I've come to better understand her role as Mother of the Church. That's not to say I've embraced Marian devotions yet — the rosary feels uncomfortably foreign on my tongue, like practicing subjunctive clauses in German — but I have found in Mary someone to admire and follow during the homestretch toward my first Eucharist.
At first glance, the Annunciation on this month's calendar (March 25) looks like a celebration out of season, a day belonging more to festive Advent than to sober Lent. Yet Mary's act of faith, her willingness to let God breathe divine life into the world, is the consummate Lenten message, and it serves as an encouraging model for those of us preparing to enter the Church — indeed, for the whole Church preparing to renew its baptismal vows.
Mary knows what her “yes” required and how difficult that word can be to say. She was skeptical of what the angel promised, asking “How shall this be?” In a similar way, we in RCIA have peppered our catechists and priests with questions about the inscrutable aspects of faith. Mary must have feared the reaction of her community to a pregnant, unmarried girl. Many of us have wondered: How this will change our relationships at work or home? Mary “treasured” and “stored up” what she saw and heard, and what she promised (Luke 2:19, 51). The long preparation period for catechu-mens and candidates has given us time to do the same. Most of all Mary, full of grace, shows what it means to empty oneself in order to make room for God.
David Gordon, a former Newsweek editor, writes from Cambridge, Massachusetts. He will be received into the Church this Easter.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: David Gordon ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Two Jewish Fathers DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:Ilive about two blocks from my parish. Nothing unusual there except that, on my way to noon Mass on Sundays, I have to pass in front of Sigmund Freud's house. The home is now a museum which opens at the same time as my Mass begins. The true believers are usually lined up, often in the London rain, waiting to visit the Maresfield Garden sanctum where Freud spent roughly the last year of his life.
Passing that house en route to Mass is a paradox. In a sense, the two faithful remnants lined up — at Freud's and at St. Thomas More's — represent the secular and the sacred, the cultural war between the Judaeo-Christian tradition and the new world order of a self-styled “completely godless Jew.”
A.N. Wilson, the British author whose books about Jesus and Paul have given him a certain name recognition, summed up Freud's “contribution” to modernity in the 1999 book God's Funeral:
“Freudianism was a cultural revolution. … [Freud] created a generation who not only believed that the virtues of his ancestral religion — to honor father and mother — were vices; but who also subscribed to the view that our inner selves were inescapable: the story which we believe might be alterable by effort or luck has already been written in the forgotten or half-forgotten years of infancy.”
Therein lies the paradox. Judaism and Christianity endorse filial piety, not just as a natural virtue of justice but as a divine injunction (the only commandment with an explicit blessing attached). For Freud, the Fourth Commandment's blessing of long life represents just that much more repression. Jews and Christians, on the other hand, recognize in fatherly obedience not just a natural debt of justice toward one's progenitor, but also some share in that divine Fatherhood from which all paternity in heaven and earth derives its name (cf. Ephesians 3:15).
That's not to say that fathers should be paternal dictators. Both the Old Testament (in Sirach 3) and the New (Ephesians 6:4; Colossians 3:21) warn fathers to give their children good example “lest they lose heart.”
A father as father is worthy of respect, but he should also make himself worthy of that respect. There's truth in a recent advertising slogan aimed at discouraging teen-age boys from engaging in sexual intercourse: “Any guy can be a father; it takes a man to be a dad.” A father should enfold his child in the love which father-hood represents.
Hugging the Killer
One of the press stories that ran in the wake of the recent Michigan school shooting quoted the prosecutor as saying that the 6-year old boy who killed his classmate should not be prosecuted because he had no sense of right or wrong. His moral impoverishment was due largely to the boy's coming from a fractured family produced by a loser of a dad. The prosecutor' s sentiment going in to the case was something along the lines of, “We need to hug him and put our arms around him.”
With all due respect, district attorneys are not hired to hug our 6-year olds. That is supposed to be Dad's job. Children, honor your fathers. Fathers, make yourselves worthy of that honor.
Freud led Western civilization down a dark path the day he opined that most human ills are traceable to unresolved conflicts with Father. His particular attack on fatherhood, however, also undermined another aspect of his Jewish heritage: the conviction that man is a free moral agent.
God does not control us. Our destiny is the consequence of our free choices to embrace or reject the Father' s covenant, to be his people, to share in his divine creative parenthood.
In lieu of this uncompromising proclamation of freedom, Freud offered us a declaration of dependence: we are the determined products of our rearing, launched in life on neurotic paths which only some measuring of dishonoring our fathers and mothers might ameliorate. “Don't blame me — I had lousy parents,” cries the juvenile delinquent. And his father, all-too-ready to wallow in his own blamelessness, fails to live up to the nobility his paternal vocation gives him. Pass the bottle — or the joint.
Across London from St. Thomas More parish and Freud's home, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, there is a medieval Italian pulpit. It depicts the early life of Jesus. There, in a corner, away from the pulpit's central focal points, stands St. Joseph. He is focused on his family. He is not distracted; nor is he preoccupied. His full attention is on his wife and his foster son, whom he clearly loves as his own.
In the next scene, he's leading them away from Herod.
As his March 20 feast nears, I wish I could introduce the ‘God-filled’ Joseph to followers of the ‘godless’ Freud.
That “completely God-filled Jew” doesn't get too much New Testament press. In fact, all he seems to get besides near-anonymity is blisters: en route to Bethlehem or Egypt or in the Nazarene carpenter' s shop.
And Joseph's boy was “obedient unto” him (Luke 2:51).
As the March 20 feast of St. Joseph nears, there are some people standing in the London rain — all wet — whom I'd really like to introduce to that Jewish dad.
John M. Grondelski is a moral theologian living in London.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John M. Grondelski ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: More Than Three Ways for the Economy DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:People sometimes read the papal encyclicals on economics like the stereotypical economist. (You've heard the joke about the mute, one-handed economist: He couldn't say anything because he couldn't consider what was “on the other hand.”)
On the one hand, the papacy criticizes socialism. On the other, the popes criticize capitalism. So, the two economic systems are equally bad, and we need to find a “Third way” between capitalism and socialism.
A careful reading of the Catholic social encyclicals will show that the popes do not consider the two systems morally equivalent.
These documents roundly condemn socialism as being inconsistent with human nature and at war with human society. By contrast, the papacy endorses the core institutions of a free market, such as private property, the right of free association, risk-taking, profit-seeking and entrepreneur-ship. The popes’ criticisms of free markets and capitalism are not attacks on these key institutions, but on the excesses which sometimes flow from them. These excesses, in turn, are the result of fallen human nature, which every social system must face.
The modern tradition of Catholic social teaching begins in 1891 with Pope Leo XIII's magisterial Rerum Novarum (Of New Things). This encyclical attacks socialism in no uncertain terms: “Socialists, exciting the envy of the poor toward the rich, contend that it is necessary to do away with private possession of goods. … But their program is so unsuited for terminating the conflict [between employers and employees] that it actually injures the workers themselves.” Pope Leo goes on to endorse the right of private property as consistent with natural law and the good of society.
Pope Leo also condemns one of the cardinal teachings of socialism, namely that economic inequality is prima facia unjust and that it can and should be eliminated. “Let it be laid down in the first place that a condition of human existence must be borne with, namely that in civil society the lowers cannot be made equal with the highest. … If any promise the poor in their misery a life free from all sorrow and vexation and filled with repose and perpetual pleasures, … they perpetuate a fraud which will ultimately lead to evils greater than the present.” If only people had heeded these prescient words, what nightmares born of utopian dreams we might have avoided!
In 1991, Pope John Paul II celebrated Pope Leo's seminal work with the encyclical Centisimus Annus (On the Hundredth Anniversary of Rerum Novarum) which reaffirmed the right of private individuals to own property. The Holy Father went even further than his predecessor, acknowledging “the legitimate role of profit as an indication that a business is functioning well.” His endorsement is qualified, however: “Profit is a regulator of the life of a business, but it is not the only one; other human and moral factors must also be considered, which, in the long term, are at least equally important for the life of a business.” Centisimus Annus also explains the importance of human creativity and entrepreneurship in the modern business economy.
These endorsements of key aspects of the market economy do not prevent the popes from leveling serious criticisms against modern economic life. They criticize the First World from excluding the countries of the Third World from fully participating in the international system of trade and exchange. They criticize employers who take advantage of their position of strength against their subordinates. They criticize workers and consumers who become immersed in the consumerist mentality, and come to value having above being.
As an economist, I would summarize the papal criticisms as falling into two categories. One type of complaint is against varieties of monopoly power. If a person can find no alternative sources of employment, or a country can find no alternative market for its exports, extreme vulnerability results. Every economist since Adam Smith has understood the vulnerability created by monopoly power. The papacy stands on solid moral ground when it encourages countries to work to eliminate these kinds of situations, and to challenge those countries and businesses in more powerful positions to use their power with restraint.
The second category of complaint is against some of the choices people make within the market. People can become consumed by consuming. People sometimes view possessions as more important than relationships. In this observation, too, the popes are wise in raising this issue. The free market is a consumer-oriented economic system. It is very efficient at giving consumers what they want. When our wants are twisted or selfish or just plain immoral, the market will satisfy them just the same.
The papacy is doing its job when it points out the particular ways in which we abuse our freedom by choosing products that are harmful, or by our attitude toward commodities in general. The pope is supposed to provide us with moral guidance in helping us to shape our wants and desires. The Church helps us to see where the deepest longings of the human heart really lie, and that material goods and physical comfort are not the ultimate ends of human existence.
The “first way” — capitalism without any restrictions — is not an option for Catholics. The “second way” — socialism — is irredeemable. We need private property, of which profit-seeking, reasonably restrained by law, is a natural outgrowth.
Human creativity and entrepreneurship can flourish in the business economy and deserve to be celebrated. The core institutions of the free market are indispensable, even though some of their applications are indefensible.
It is up to particular communities to adapt these institutions to their situation. That is how there can be not only a “third way,” but also a “fourth way” and a “fifth way” — and as many different communities as there are. Each community needs to use its own legal system and political culture to shape the market economy to its own needs, to encourage the full participation of everyone and to help ensure the dignity of every human person.
Jennifer Roback Morse, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, welcomes e-mail at jmorse@jps.net.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Church's Model Father DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:The Church calls upon Joseph as her protector because of a profound and ever-present desire to reinvigo-rate her ancient life with true evangelical virtues, such as shine forth in St. Joseph.
Recalling that God wished to entrust the beginnings of our redemption to the faithful care of St. Joseph, [the Church] asks God to grant that she may faithfully cooperate in the work of salvation; that she may receive the same faithfulness and purity of heart that inspired Joseph in serving the incarnate Word; and that she may walk before God in the ways of holiness and justice, following Joseph's example and through his intercession.
One hundred years ago, Pope Leo XIII had already exhorted the Catholic world to pray for the protection of St. Joseph, [whom he declared] patron of the whole Church. The encyclical epistle Quamquam Pluries appealed to Joseph's “fatherly love … for the child Jesus” and commended to him, as “the provident guardian of the divine Family,” “the beloved inheritance which Jesus Christ purchased by his blood.”
Since that time … the Church has implored the protection of St. Joseph on the basis of that sacred bond of charity which united him to the Immaculate Virgin Mother of God, and the Church has commended to Joseph all of her cares, including those dangers which threaten the human family.
Today we still have good reason to commend everyone to St. Joseph. May St. Joseph become for all of us an exceptional teacher in the service of Christ's saving mission, a mission which is the responsibility of each and every member of the Church: husbands and wives, parents, those who live by the work of their hands or by any other kind of work, those called to the contemplative life and those called to the apostolate.
This just man, who bore within himself the entire heritage of the old covenant, was also brought into the “beginning” of the New and eternal covenant in Jesus Christ. May he show us the paths of this saving covenant as we [enter the third] millennium, in which there must be a continuation and further development of the “fullness of time” that belongs the ineffable mystery of the Incarnation of the Word.
From the 1989 apostolic exhortation Redemptoris Custos (Guardian of the Redeemer).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Pope John Paul II ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: 'No-Brainer' Drug Plan Applauded and Jeered DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:MEMPHIS, Tenn.—A decision on how to cope with any illicit drug use by students in the all-male Christian Brothers High School was so obvious to the principal, Brother Chris Englert, that he called it “a real no-brainer.”
But it wasn't until lengthy consultations with the school's administrators, teachers, pupils, parents and alumni that he issued a mandatory drug-testing program, which will start next September, for all of the school's almost 900 students.
Using a hair from each student's head, lab technicians will test for marijuana, cocaine, opiates (including heroin), PCP and methamphetamines. (Alcohol abuse cannot be detected by the test.) Though applauded by most people connected with the schools, some say the program could see deleterious effects by treating all students like criminals.
The Memphis school will become only the second of 48 Christian Brothers high schools in the United States and Canada to make such a concerted anti-drug effort.
Officials of the other school, De La Salle High School in New Orleans, are expecting the Memphis move to stimulate their own successful 2-year-old program. Brother Frank Carr, director of education for the Midwest district of the Christian Brothers, headquartered in Illinois, was reluctant to back the idea when he first heard about it.
“Having been a school administrator for some years, I questioned whether it could be done,” he told the Register. “But when it was explained in full to me, it sounded more and more possible. I am on the Memphis board and I eventually voted for it after I was given all the information.”
Brother Carr was quick to note that the program “definitely is not a punitive one — but rather one in which the students who are found to have a problem are given a time period of 100 days to continue in school while they and their parents work with professionals to control or resolve the problem.”
$60-a-Year Assessment
Brother Englert, the Memphis principal, explained that under the program, parents are assessed $60 a year to cover the cost of the hair scanning, which is done at random annually. The dean of students, who heads the program, is the only school official with access to the test results.
“This is not a zero-tolerance program, because the students who are found to have used drugs are given more than three months to get help and clean up their acts before they are tested again,” Brother Englert explained. “But if drugs are detected after the 100 days or any time following that, the student is summarily expelled.”
What surprised the school administrators in New Orleans and Memphis, Brother Englert added, was the “tremendous reception from all quarters — parents, teachers, the general public and even constitutional-rights advocates who normally might challenge the testing as an invasion of rights.”
“I was taken aback by the overwhelming praise we have heard for the planned program,” said the Memphis principal. Although officials of the two other Catholic high schools in the Diocese of Memphis also expressed agreement with what the Christian Brothers school planned to do, a diocesan spokesman said, “We're not making any plans to implement anything like that at our other schools.”
Among the Memphis-area private school leaders quoted in the Commercial Appeal newspaper was Thomas Southard, headmaster of St. Mary's Episcopal School, who said, “I think it is a policy that [the Christian Brothers school] thought long and hard about, and I think you will find that, in the long run, it is something parents will greatly appreciate.”
Not everyone is convinced, however.
“Are they running into actual, serious drug problems on their campus?” asked Dennis Teti, a government professor at Regent University, contacted for comment by the Register. “If so, there's a rationale. But if this is just their way of addressing a general problem in society, that's no justification for demeaning the students' human dignity. It makes everyone a suspect; it implies that they believe they have criminals for students.”
Random drug testing also undermines parents’ efforts to raise their kids with self-respect, added Teti. “If you catch my kid doing something wrong at your school, by all means, punish him according to your policies. But please don't mistrust or suspect him for no reason whatsoever. Treat him as responsible and that's how he'll tend to behave.”
The Christian Brothers program, noted Teti, follows suit with similar programs enacted by the federal government and many businesses over the past several years. “It's really a sign that we admit that we took a wrong turn in the '60s and '70s,” he said. “But creating a police state isn't the right way to correct our past mistakes; if anything, it concedes that we've failed as a society. The solution is instilling kids with good values and teaching them right from wrong.”
Gives Students an ‘Out’
Christian Brothers schools throughout the country operate with the blessing of each diocese, but are not as strictly guided by individual diocesan regulations, as are the diocesan parochial schools.
“The best thing about the program is that students who are pressured by peer groups to get involved in drugs have a way out with this drug-testing by being able to tell their neighborhood friends who are doing drugs that they can't, because of the testing,” said Joseph Hines, dean of students, who supervises the drug-detection program at De La Salle in New Orleans.
“It gives the kids a way out by providing them with an excuse they can give their peers without having to lose face,” he added. “That way, they have the best of all worlds by not having to use drugs and still not look like wimps.”
The drug testing is done by extracting fluids that flow through the cortex of human hair and then chemically analyzing those fluids, said Hines.
Under the New Orleans and Memphis programs, when a student comes up positive on the test, he is not forced into any counseling program. His parents are informed and meet, along with the student, with the program director to discuss counseling. The student resumes regular attendance at school until he is tested again in about 100 days (by which time the markers of the drug should have worn off).
“If the student comes up clean, he will continue in school and take the drug test once a year until graduation as long as he keeps clean,” said Brother Joel McGraw, assistant principal of the Memphis school.
“We are looking at this as a positive matter, because, if a student is using drugs, we detect it, call it to the student's attention and to the attention of the parents,” he added. “We put it to them this way: ‘Here is the problem; here is the student; here are the parents. Now, let's work together to remedy this situation.’”
Robust Response
“The problem of drugs at CBHS here in Memphis, of course, existed for a long time, as it has everywhere else in the country,” Brother McGraw added. “But, for the past five years, we have wrestled with what to do about it — until last February, when we pretty much settled on using the hair test.”
A similar program was considered, but rejected, at the De La Salle College/Oaklands high school in Toronto. Brother Dominic Diggini, principal, said, “It is something that is not a possibility in Canada. We've had a legal opinion on drug testing and it is certainly not a possibility here.”
In Memphis, Brother Englert pointed out that the hair drug-testing program was but one of several ongoing efforts by the school to eliminate drug use by its students. He maintained that drug testing was only “a small part of a larger substance-abuse prevention program at the school,” which has a 60% Catholic enrollment.
“The school has a mandatory meeting for all freshmen and their parents once a year to hear formal presentations on the dangers of alcohol and drug use,” he added.
Moreover, he said, the administrators of the school meet with students before dances, proms and other large social gatherings to present short lectures on how to behave properly.
Brother Englert also emphasized that students enroll at Christian Brothers High “because they choose to be here.”
“That gives them a reason not to do drugs,” he added. “They say no because they don't want to be kicked out of CBHS. I compare their saying no because they don't want to be kicked out of CBHS to a policeman sitting on the expressway. If we know he's there, we're going to drive a lot slower.”
Regent University's Teti remains skeptical. “In a self-governing society, we're citizens, not criminals,” he said. “Constant checking up on everyone creates what it attempts to overcome — a society of suspects. That's just not healthy for a free society.”
Robert R. Holton writes from Memphis, Tennessee.
----- EXCERPT: While popular, testing by two schools raises questions ----- EXTENDED BODY: Robert R. Holton ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Education Notebook DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:Xavier Celebrates 75 Years
XAVIER UNIVERSITY, Feb. 29 — Xavier University of Louisiana is celebrating its 75th anniversary this March with a Mass, jazz brunch and a street dedication. The anniversary officially starts with a special Mass to be celebrated at St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans on Mar. 19. Mass is followed with a jazz brunch in the French Quarter.
On March 24, Palmetto St. was scheduled to be renamed Drexel Drive, in honor of soon-to-be-saint Katherine Drexel, who founded Xavier University in 1925.
Notre Dame Students See Racism in Arrest
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Mar. 9 — Two off-duty police officers working security at a Denny's restaurant acted improperly when they arrested four black college students over a sign that fell off the wall, restaurant company officials said.
Denny's officials said March 8 they fired the security officers, who allegedly used pepper spray on a handcuffed student and slammed the head of another into a car trunk, bloodying her nose, the AP reported.
“We weren't doing anything,” said April Allen, one of the four Notre Dame students. “What they did was not logical, so you have to think [race] was a factor.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: And the Winner Is ?. . . DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:It's Oscar time once again, and this year Hollywood is feeling especially proud of itself. But not for the usual reasons. The March 26 Academy Awards will be one of the most-watched TV shows around the globe as always, and the media feeding frenzy gets crazier each time around. But most of the coverage focuses on handicapping the winners as if the Oscars were a sporting event. Less attention is paid to the content of the films nominated and what this might tell us about the current state of popular culture.
What's new is that, even on this latter issue, the industry is bursting with self-satisfaction. “It's a pretty powerful year for serious films,” best-actor nominee Kevin Spacey (American Beauty) told reporters. “On a scale of originality, this is one of the best years we've had in a long time.”
“Audiences and filmmakers are interested in pushing the boundaries of subject matter,” best-supporting-actor nominee Kevin Law (The Talented Mr. Ripley) said in a Los Angeles Times interview. “It proves that subversive films are making money.”
These views reflect the thinking of the industry as a whole. So it's instructive to examine the nominations from this perspective and learn what themes present-day Hollywood considers “serious” and “subversive” — and what it believes characterizes “originality” and “pushing the boundaries.”
Pushing the Boundaries
The Cider House Rules can rightfully be described as “pushing the boundaries.” Based on John Irving's novel, it's the first Hollywood film to have an abortionist as its hero. A dark-horse favorite for best picture, it received seven nominations, much to everyone's surprise.
The plot revolves around a maverick physician (Michael Caine) who runs a New England orphanage during World War II. He trains one of his charges (Tobey McGuire) to be his successor. At first, the young man refuses to emulate his mentor and perform abortions, which were illegal at the time. But after some difficult experiences in the world outside, he has a change of heart regarding the procedure and returns to the institution that raised him. The movie's pro-abortion message is so strong that Planned Parenthood Federation of America is organizing screenings to promote it.
“Blame Canada,” nominated for best original song (it's from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut), is also attracting notice for “pushing the boundaries.” Never before have network censors objected to the performance of a nominated song on the awards show because of profanity. But the show's producers claim to have devised “clever” ways around this problem.
Also for the first time, there are several Oscar-nominated films with homosexuality-related themes. The Talented Mr. Ripley got five nominations, including one for Jude Law, who plays the object of a homosexual crush. It chronicles the murderous relationship between an impoverished, ambitious homosexual (Matt Damon) and the expatriate heir to a shipping fortune (Law).
Another “subversive” departure from the usual choices is the number of acting nominees whose characters have lesbian affairs. Hillary Swank is up for best actress in Boys Don't Cry for her performance as a teenage girl who passes herself off as a man in order to seduce other women. Chloe Sevigny received a best-supporting-actress nomination for playing Swank's main love interest. Catherine Keener is up for the same award for portraying a manipulative yuppie who has an affair with a co-worker' s wife (Cameron Diaz) in the surreal Being John Malkovich.
American Beauty has received critical kudos for its “originality.” It's garnered the most nominations of any film (eight, including best picture) and is the odds-on favorite to sweep the awards. Its hero is a suburban advertising executive (Kevin Spacey) who suffers a midlife crisis. Its story makes light of dope-smoking and adultery and praises homosexual relationships.
Good News
Any good news? A little. After a long dry spell, Hollywood is once again embracing as “serious” spiritual subjects with positive points of view. Two of the five movies up for best picture have supernatural themes that don't challenge the basic tenets of Christianity. The Sixth Sense, with six nominations, tells the story of a child psychologist (Bruce Willis) working with an 8-year-old (Haley Joel Osment) who claims to see ghosts. The Green Mile, with five nominations, dramatizes the relationship between a kindly prison guard (Tom Hanks) and a death-row inmate (Michael Clarke Duncan) with miraculous powers.
While these two films’ spiritual underpinnings aren't exactly orthodox, they don't fly in the face of Church teachings, either. Unlike most films dealing with mystical subject matter, they're both well-made and heartfelt, affirming God's existence and linking morality as well as miracles to a divine presence.
The End of the Affair, which also has a spiritual strain running through it, grabbed two nominations, including Best Actress (Julianne Moore). Based on Graham Greene's novel, it examines a World War II adulterous romance involving miracles and Catholic faith from a sincere, albeit unorthodox, perspective.
Hollywood's rediscovery of the spiritual also has its dark side, with the recent release of several horror films of excessive violence (e.g. Scream 3). But, thankfully, none of last year' s anti-Catholic moneymakers (Dogma and Stigmata) garnered any nominations.
‘R’ Rated Awards
During Hollywood's golden age, almost all of the Oscar-nominated films could be enjoyed by the whole family. But no longer. Four of the five best-picture nominees are rated R, as are 10 of the 12 movies which received more than two nominations.
When queried about the films up for awards, best-supporting-actor nominee Osment, who's a preteen, told reporters: “I haven't been allowed to see them. I'm not old enough.”
Maybe Hollywood shouldn't be so pleased with itself after all.
Arts & Culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: What will the Academy Awards say about the popular culture this year? ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Prizer's Picks DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:The Sixth Sense (1999)
This summer blockbuster, nominated for six Oscars, may be the beginning of a welcome trend away from the excessive blood and gore of most contemporary horror films.
Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan (Wide Awake) makes sure that most of the terror takes place in the viewer' s mind, not on screen.
The drama is created by its characters, with scary moments that don't depend on flashy special effects. It assumes an ordered, transcendent universe where the forces of good have power as well as the evil ones. Charity and compassion are shown to make a difference.
Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) is a child psychologist whose disturbed patient, 8-year-old Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), claims to see ghosts.
Cole is being raised by his mom, and Crowe becomes a surrogate father-figure, slowly winning his trust.
The Sixth Sense explores the connections between spiritual and psychological disorders and comes down on the side of the spiritual as the prime behavioral determinant.
Anne of Green Gables 1985
An orphaned girl never has an easy time, especially when the couple which adopts her continually suggests that they could have done better.
The orphan, Anne Shirley (Megan Follows), is raised by Marilla (Colleen Dewhurst) and Matthew Cuthbert (Richard Farnsworth), an elderly sister and brother who own a farm on Prince Edward Island, Canada. The action takes place in the early 1900s, when the rules for children were strict.
Marilla claims she always wanted a boy to help work the land and takes out her disappointment on Anne.
The girl's energetic, youthful behavior disrupts the Cuthberts’ ordered life as she links up with a kindred spirit (Schuyler Grant) and acquires an enemy (Jonathan Crombie).
Unhappy with her freckles and red hair, Anne dyes her locks green to assert her individuality.
Anne of Green Gables, a TV-movie based on Lucy Maud Montgomery's successful series of novels, is a funny, heartfelt, coming-of-age story with a strong moral framework.
Becket (1964)
“Who will rid me of this meddle-some priest?” cries the ambitious political leader when his naked grab for power is challenged by a man of God. The age-old conflict between Church and state was often a life-and-death matter for medieval rulers. England's King Henry II (Peter O'Toole) is always having trouble with the Church and decides to appoint his chancellor and drinking buddy, Thomas Becket (Richard Burton), archbishop of Canterbury. He assumes his old friend will be loyal to him rather than to Rome.
There's talk of war with France and the inevitable corrupt wheeling-and-dealing by the kingdom's rich and powerful. But Thomas proves to be a more formidable adversary to Henry's interests than his pious, bureaucratic predecessors. The Oscar-winning Becket, based on Jean Anouilh's play, is an exciting, subtly drawn study of a personality clash with tragic consequences. Even though it's always clear who's right and who's wrong, both men engage our sympathies.
John Prizer
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Many Masterpieces and Mary, Too DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:St. Mary Above Minerva is one of my first memories of Rome, and it's to that church's neighborhood that I return every time I'm in the city. In the mid-'60s, my mother and I took a mini “grand tour of Europe” and friends who had lived in Rome recommended the Hotel Minerva, on this same piazza. The hotel was then old-fashioned, creaky and charming, even though the carpeting had more than one threadbare patch.
That hotel now sparkles with Venetian chandeliers — and room prices have risen 10 times. Across the piazza, the Gothic-style church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva now revels in Jubilee splendor.
I did not know in those days that this church was the focus in Rome of devotions to St. Catherine of Siena, patroness of Italy. This deeply spiritual and remarkably intrepid woman lived nearby while both supporting and criticizing Pope Urban VI, attempting to end the schism after the “Babylonian exile” in Avignon. The walls of the room where she died on April 29, 1380, were transported to the church, where they are now on display, and this spot has long been the destination of pilgrimages.
Usually quiet, the altar here is a good place for a silent prayer or to leave her a flower. The saint's body (minus her head, which is in her church in Siena) was interred here and a lovely, reclining figure of Catherine has been placed under the main altar, illuminated, and graced with her lily of purity, as if for her wake. Near the altar (at right) lies the grave of the gentle genius of the Dominican order, Fra Angelico, simply marked with a stone. For the transcendent images this holy friar-artist has given us, this “angel” merits a prayer too.
To the left of the main altar, a magnificent statue of the risen Christ triumphs over the cross. Often attributed to Michelangelo, the statue was indeed begun by the great Florentine, but, as frequently happened, the master left it to apprentices and others to finish. According to art historian Howard Hibbard, it was sent from northern Italy to Rome in 1514, almost finished. Michelangelo's assistant, Pietro Urbano, saw it through customs but had difficulty because “They wanted Christ to pay duty to enter Rome.” (Italy, of course, became a united country only in the mid-19th century.)
Tourists and scholars seek out Santa Maria sopra Minerva mainly for its rare quality as a Gothic church in the Eternal City. Rome, a bastion of Classical form, especially that of the basilica, never ceded to the high pointed arches of the Northern Gothic style. Already well-supplied with churches in the 13th century when Santa Maria was built, the city did not have papal treasuries to permit much new construction anyway.
A Visual Feast
There is so much to enjoy visually in this church that only recently did I discover its amazing past. Perhaps no church in Rome saw so much of the history of the Catholic church. For example, in a hall of the Dominican order, which occupied the then adjoining monastery from 1266 onward, Galileo was tried (1630) by Inquisition courts for continuing to publish the Copernican theory of the universe. (The Church has formally said that it erred in its treatment of Galileo; all the documents in the case have been made public.)
The history of the actual foundation of “the Minerva,” as this church is sometimes called, began much earlier, at least as far back as 50 B.C., when Pompey the Great had a temple erected here to celebrate the Roman goddess Minerva. This section of Rome was then home to many temples to pagan gods and goddesses.
The plain facade of the Minerva in no way prepares us for the church that we enter. Rome's only Italian Gothic church, its tall arches rising gracefully, the structure was designed about 1280 by architects, under Pope Nicholas III, who used sketches for the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence as a model. Restorations through the ages, especially in the 19th century — not all of them helpful — added marble veneer and painted ceilings, which might be fine in themselves but counteract that soaring Gothic reach for the infinite. However, if you saw the Christmas special on television with tenor Andrea Boccelli singing beneath a blue-painted ceiling with golden stars, you know how lovely the church is, anyway.
Along the side aisles, chapels filled with fascinating treasures culminate at one (near the right transept) where the frescoes are of astonishing beauty, the work of Filippino Lippi. The very unpopular Carafa family, for whom this chapel was built, included Pope Paul IV, formerly Gian Pietro Carafa of Naples, who created the Index of Forbidden Books and segregated Italy's Jews and Protestants into ghettoes that were locked at night. Paul IV (1555-59) came to the papacy when almost 80, during the turbulent years of the Counter-Reformation, when the demand for reform of the clergy was at its height.
When he died, Pius IV, a Medici and not from the reform wing of the Church, was elected.
Whatever its history, you might first appreciate this magnificent chapel and LippI's 15th-century Assumption of Mary over its altar while standing outside, in the aisle, where its overall effect can be felt. Then, standing in its midst and turning toward its three frescoed sides and ceiling, we are moved by a kaleidoscope of form and color. The Dominican Order, to which the artist's father belonged, had, about a century earlier, created masterful frescoes in Florence, using this medium to educate and to instill reverence. In this chapel St. Thomas Aquinas is seen, typically, triumphing over heretics.
Continuing south along the aisle toward the main entrance, one comes to a chapel containing a delightful Annunciation (1508) by Antoniazzo Romano. The Virgin is shown giving dowries to poor girls presented to her by the cardinal of the confraternity of the Annunciation, Juan de Torquemada, uncle of Tomas de Torquemada, the Inquisitor. Cardinal Juan is buried here.
Because churches like this have such treasures, many works are apt to be overlooked, although most of the altars here have exceptional artwork, for both the pilgrim and the art lover. As they say about Rome, “Non basta una vita” — a lifetime isn't long enough.
Don't Miss the Details
Circle back now to the left transept, where the chapel of St. Dominic stands, a minicathedral all its own. Built on directions of Pope Benedict XIII in 1725, the chapel is an elaborate tribute to the founder of this great order. The Dominican Benedict XIII is buried here.
One of my favorite paintings in the Minerva is an extraordinary face of Christ attributed to the artist Perugino, in the third chapel along the left aisle. He always seems to have just looked away as you look at him, his expression a mixture of amusement and bemusement, as if reflecting on the centuries he's seen pass by in this church. I always stop to pray here.
Because there is so very much to absorb, the pilgrim or tourist, I think, is better served by just looking carefully and not just taking in the “don't-miss” moments of the guidebooks — especially during the Jubilee. Children may especially enjoy the baby angels, putti in Italian, that appear in the most unexpected places, often with impish expressions or lolling about with a pudgy leg hanging over a ledge. Everyone may want to try to identify saints by their symbols, or to look closely at facial and body language in the art, or at the decorative elements, animals and birds, fruits and flowers. The art of the sacred, which leads the viewer into another dimension, can inspire some of the most rewarding contemplations.
Barbara Coeyman Hults, a former resident of Rome, is based in New York.
----- EXCERPT: St. Mary Above Minerva is a great spot for March 25's Annunciation feast ----- EXTENDED BODY: Barbara Coeyman Hults ----- KEYWORDS: Travell -------- TITLE: 'Stop U.S. Executions,' Religious Leaders Urge DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — Representatives of more than 30 church-based groups are joining in a plea to President Clinton to impose a moratorium on use of the death penalty by the federal government.
Meanwhile, the New Hampshire House voted to abolish the death penalty, and Illinois Gov. George Ryan established a commission to review his state's use of capital punishment, which he suspended in January.
In a March 9 letter, religious leaders told President Clinton that “our nation is slowly realizing the truth of capital punishment: the death penalty, as applied in America today, threatens to shed innocent blood.”
“There are too many death penalty cases where questions remain — or even arise — after the execution has occurred,” the letter said. “And there are too many death penalty cases where the understandable desire for punishment overshadows the impartial pursuit of justice.”
It was signed by leaders of Baptist, Quaker, Episcopal, Lutheran, Greek Orthodox, Jewish, Presbyterian, United Church of Christ and Methodist organizations, among others. Columban Father Michael Dodd, director of the Justice and Peace Office of the Columban Fathers was among the signers.
At a Capitol Hill press conference, Bishop Ricardo Ramirez of Las Cruces, N.M., noted that the president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, Bishop Joseph A. Fiorenza of Galveston-Houston, had written a similar letter to Clinton a month earlier.
Although the U.S. bishops were not among the signers of the March 9 letter, Bishop Ramirez said they join with the other religious leaders in their call to end the death penalty, with a moratorium on execution of federal prisoners as a first step.
“We oppose capital punishment primarily because of what it does to us as a society,” Bishop Ramirez said. “It perpetuates a terrible cycle of violence and the notion that we can settle our most intractable problems by resorting to violence.”
Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., whose office hosted the press conference, said he hopes President Clinton can be persuaded to call a moratorium. Clinton has asked the attorney general to review how the death penalty is applied under federal law.
The first federal execution since 1963 could be scheduled at any time. Convicted murderer Juan Raul Garza has exhausted his appeals and is awaiting an execution date. He was convicted under a federal drug kingpin statute.
Feingold said that if Clinton does-n't call for a moratorium, he's prepared to introduce legislation to force it. Feingold already has introduced a bill that would end use of the death penalty for any federal crimes.
The call for a federal death penalty moratorium has gained strength since Ryan announced in January that he was suspending all Illinois executions pending a review of how the state applies the law. On March 10 Ryan announced the formation of a 14-member panel to study the system.
The panel will be headed by former federal judge Frank McGarr, director of the Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University, and former U.S. Attorney Thomas Sullivan. Also on the panel will be retired U.S. Sen. Paul Simon, D-Ill., and lawyer-novelist Scott Turow.
New Hampshire's 191-163 House vote March 9 would repeal the state's death penalty law. New Hampshire's last execution was in 1939 and there is nobody on the state's death row.
Gov. Jeanne Shaheen vowed to veto the bill if the state Senate should approve it. She has previously been unsuccessful in attempts to increase the number of crimes for which the death penalty is an option.
Opponents of the bill argued that New Hampshire does not have the problem of wrongful convictions for capital crimes that prompted Ryan to impose a moratorium in Illinois. They also argued that the penalty is useful in persuading suspects to accept a plea agreement for life imprisonment rather than risk execution.
Supporters of the New Hampshire bill noted that the Catholic Church's strong opposition to the death penalty had been helpful in persuading some former capital punishment supporters in the Legislature to change their opinions.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Patricia Zapor ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Red Flag Raised on Assisted-Suicide Report DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:SALEM, Ore. — The agency responsible for investigating and reporting on the practice of assisted suicide here is not doing its job, said Dr. Gregory Hamilton, a Portland-based physician.
Hamilton, who started Physicians for Compassionate Care in 1994 to mobilize opposition to Oregon's assisted-suicide law, said the report recently issued by the state Health Division fails because it only interviews the doctor and family members of each suicide “patient.”
“They asked the wrong questions to the wrong people,” Hamilton told the Register.
Independent doctors are needed, Hamilton insisted, to talk to patients before assisted suicide is chosen, to make sure patients really want to end their lives.
According to the Health Division, 29 patients ended their life through assisted suicide in 1999, up from 16 in 1998. Oregon voters legalized assisted suicide in 1994.
“The Oregon Health Division says there's no problem,” said Hamilton. “But in Oregon, we know there are problems.”
He cited the case of Kate Cheney as an example of why further investigation is needed. Cheney was diagnosed with dementia, which would leave her ineligible for assisted suicide under Oregon law.
“Her daughter put her under pressure,” said Hamilton. After some “doctor shopping,” a doctor willing to end Cheney's life was found, Hamilton suggested.
The case received widespread news coverage in Oregon and raised concerns that assisted suicide was becoming euthanasia.
“Let's get an objective, third-party investigator to talk to them before they kill them, not after they kill them,” said Hamilton.
Lack of Funding?
Katrina Hedburg, one of the authors of the Oregon Health Division's report, said that her agency does not have the authority or the funds to investigate cases like Cheney's in the manner that Hamilton suggested.
“The law requires that the Oregon Health Division keep track of who participates,” Hedburg told the Register. “They fill out the forms and we match them with death certificates.”
Hedburg acknowledged that many people thought that Oregon was expected to investigate the cases, but she insisted that that is not the agency's responsibility.
“We're not a regulatory agency,” said Hedburg. “Our mandate is to get the records at the time a prescription is written.”
Hedburg also said the Cheney case was not conclusive. “People get second opinions all the time,” she noted.
But when asked whether such a case would warrant an independent investigation, Hedburg said the agency didn't have that authority.
“We don't have the power to look into these matters on an individual basis,” she contended. “We have no staff to pay for this. We have no investigators for this. We have no money.”
Excuses, Excuses
Oregon state Sen. Eileen Qutub disagreed strongly with Hedburg's comments.
“Traditionally, when an agency does not deliver, their excuse is always that they don't have enough money,” Qutub told the Register.
Qutub said that Gov. John A. Kitzhaber insisted that the Legislature leave the Oregon Health Division responsible for the regulations for assisted suicide.
The governor didn't want the Legislature micromanaging the rules, she explained. “The Health Division was responsible for creating the rules to gather the information on assisted suicide.”
Qutub said that it appears that the Oregon Health Division is preventing responsible reform. “They're very closed about it,” she maintained. “They don't seem to be responsive to physicians who want to see the … records.”
Qutub insisted that the state Health Division is trying to make the Legislature a scapegoat. “The Legislature did everything they could,” she said. “The Health Division blaming the Legislature is simply irresponsible. They just need to do their job.”
Offer to Help Extended
If money really is the problem, Hamilton said he would find the necessary money to finance an independent investigation.
The department “could collaborate with other groups to pay for a study,” said Hamilton. “I could get a grant to do this. We could get objective, third party, out-of-state investigators. It's not an expensive study.”
Hamilton presented his offer in a letter to Hedburg last year.
Hedburg refused Hamilton's offer, saying her agency didn't have the authority to investigate the cases and that she had “grave concerns” about collaborating with outside organizations that may be associated with the “highly polarized” issue of assisted suicide. In a letter, she also mentioned a concern over maintaining patient confidentiality. She didn't mention a lack of funding.
Hamilton said that if the Oregon Health Division does not want to work with Physicians for Compassionate Care, it could opt for any independent organization. He also maintained that patient confidentiality could easily be protected using standard medical record procedures.
Hamilton said the report and the response from the agency were disappointing. “The Oregon Health Division basically discredited itself this year again.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Reversing Sterilization's Effects DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:DAYTON, Ohio — A simple brochure, sitting in the rack at the back of church, first attracted Ruth Bushman's attention.
It asked, “Are you angry, depressed, or isolated?” Bushman was, so she took one. The brochure addressed the feelings of post-abortive women. While Bushman hadn't had an abortion, she had undergone tubal ligation, and wondered if the aftereffects of sterilization might not be similar.
Bushman, of Melrose, Minn., is one of a growing number of sterilization patients who are questioning the emotional costs of sterilization.
A report issued by the National Center for Health Statistics states that among married U.S. women aged 15 to 44, the prevalence of surgical sterilization was 41% in 1995 — almost triple the percentage in 1965.
Worldwide, tubal ligation is the No. 1 form of birth control for women over the age of 30, according to Susan J. Bucher, founder of the Coalition for Post Tubal Women. She estimated that more than 140 million women have been sterilized for birth control purposes.
Among them is Ruth Bushman. While pregnant with her second child, Ruth said she began wrestling with the possibility of sterilization. Her husband was skeptical, however.
“Earl thought it was unnatural and that I shouldn't do it,” Ruth Bushman recalled. “I didn't seek counsel because, inside, I knew I was doing something unnatural. I rushed into it.”
Their daughter, Emily, was born in 1992. Six weeks later Ruth underwent a tubal ligation. “We had a boy and a girl,” she explained, “and I was fearful that we would not be able to take care of any more children.”
Within six months, the mother started having regrets. “While breastfeeding Emily I realized that I was never going to have this experience again,” she lamented. “I experienced a loss … it was something I did, but could not undo. I entered a very dark period of my life.”
The Aftermath
Bushman said that the sterilization affected her physically, emotionally, spiritually and maritally.
“Spiritually, I had said ‘no’ to God,” she acknowledged. “I was telling him, ‘I don't trust you; I'm going to take care of this myself.’ I threw away his precious gift of fertility and felt separated from the Church.”
The sterilization affected her intimacy with her husband as well. “Mentally, there was the feeling that this was no longer what it was created to be,” Ruth Bushman said. “Something was missing. I did not feel whole.”
Medical evidence exists both for and against what has come to be known as post tubal syndrome. Post tubal syndrome is described as being brought on by the rapid decline of estrogen/progesterone hormone levels caused by the blood supply to the ovaries being damaged during surgery. Its symptoms are associated with a hormonal imbalance and can include depression, anxiety, loss of libido, and heavy, painful periods.
In a systematic review of medical literature, the medical research team G.P. Gentile, S.C. Kaufman and D.W. Helbig concluded that there were no significant increases in incidences of “post-tubal ligation syndrome.” Separate studies, however, such as those by G.R. Huggins and S.J. Sondheimer point out that a percentage of women experience gynecological or psychological problems as a result of sterilization.
While the medical research is mixed, there are many individuals who attribute their physical or emotional pain to their sterilization.
Susan Bucher doesn't need convincing about the fallout from sterilization. She described the lack of information women are given about possible side effects as the “malpractice crime of the century.”
Even organizations typically in support of contraception have recognized the potential effects of sterilization. In September the Illinois National Organization for Women's state conference unanimously passed a resolution calling on physicians to inform women of the possible hormonal side effects of tubal ligation.
Until January, Peggy Powell had answered One More Soul's sterilization-reversal hot line in Dayton, Ohio. She said that feelings of emptiness and loss of closeness to one's spouse were common occurrences among the hundreds of phone calls she received.
“So many people expressed sadness,” Power said. “They cried and grieved the loss of their fertility.”
Indeed, the National Center for Health Statistics has reported that nearly 25% of women who had a tubal ligation in 1995 expressed a desire for reversal of the operation.
Men also experience regret. Take Army Col. John Long, who had his own vasectomy reversed after seven years. He said that the feelings of regret over sterilization are “quiet, deep and slow to manifest themselves.”
“Men are told that a vasectomy is great for marriage,” Long continued. “It is snip-zip and everything is going to be sexy and wonderful. Later they discover how empty it is. It can cause tremendous hurt, and by the time men figure out the cause, it's too late.”
He added, “There's an almost uniform experience of regret … remorse comes from both spouses.”
The Bushmans looked into having the sterilization reversed, but found the cost prohibitive.
“Insurance companies pay for the sterilization,” Ruth Bushman said, “but they will not pay for the reversal.”
Bushman said she has confessed her sin and received reconciliation, but admitted that she continues to have a difficult time forgiving herself.
“I cheated my children out of brothers and sisters, and I cheated Earl and myself out of sons and daughters,” she said. “I will live with that decision until the day I die.”
The Catholic Church condemns sterilization as a means of birth control and considers it disrespectful of a person's bodily integrity. The Catechism of the Catholic Church goes so far as to list sterilization among various forms of violence to be avoided. No. 2297 reads, in part: “Except when performed for strictly therapeutic medical reasons, directly intended amputations, mutilations, and sterilizations performed on innocent persons are against the moral law.”
Although the Church, through the sacrament of reconciliation, offers hope and forgiveness to those who have been sterilized voluntarily for reasons of birth control, for some it is not enough.
“The idea of reversal popped up on my radar screen every six months,” said Long. “It just wouldn't go away.”
“One of my first calls,” recalled Powell, “was from a man who couldn't afford a reversal. I counseled him to go to confession, but he countered, ‘Yes, but if you broke a window you would say you're sorry and then you would pay to have it fixed.’ Although the Church does not require a reversal, many want to do more. There are many good doctors who as a ministry are willing to do reversals at cost. Many couples have spoken of the renewal that reversal brings to their marriage.”
Certainly, not everyone is able to obtain a reversal.
“I tell those individuals that they have received a great gift,” said Powell. “Their eyes have been opened to the truth. Many cannot see the truth, and their blindness leads to separation and divorce.”
Long and Powell are editing a book of sterilization reversal stories which will be published by One More Soul later this year.
“Reversals are a growing, but still exceptional event,” said Long. “People need to know that reversals are possible, highly successful and not as rare as you think.”
Both Powell and Long stressed that there is a need for counseling. Ruth Bushman is working with the St. Cloud Diocese's Office of Natural Family Planning to form a support group for couples dealing with the grief that accompanies sterilization.
Organizations such as One More Soul, and the Protestant groups By His Mercies and Blessed Arrows are also filling the sterilization ministry void. The latter two provide limited financial assistance to individuals unable to afford reversals.
When reversals do occur, they offer the potential for new life. Said Powell, “I was 38 when my husband had his reversal, miscarried at age 40 and had my daughter Maria at age 42.”
Tim Drake is based
----- EXCERPT: ProLife ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: First Pro-Life Movement Arises in Cuba DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:HAVANA — The scene could be the downtown of any American town or city. A small group of pro-life protesters, banners in hand, picketing in front of an abortion facility.
But in Havana, in February 1999, such an event was unprecedented, even shocking. It was the first organized opposition to the 1977 law that legalized abortion in Cuba.
Any type of protest against official Cuban policy is certain to invite arrest and countless forms of unofficial intimidation and harassment in the communist country.
Yet, on that sunny morning last February about 20 protesters dared to do just that, publicly demanding an end to abortion at Hijas de Galicia Hospital, one of the largest abortion practitioners in the capital.
Oscar Elías Biscet, a physician, and Migdalia Rosado, a Catholic mother of four, led the group, convoked by the dissident Lawton Foundation for Human Rights founded by Biscet. The group held its ground before coming under assault by a communist mob as police looked on. Arrests followed, and both Biscet and Rosado spent the next 17 days in jail without due process or any explanation of their status.
“I have full confidence in God; I trust my life to him and I accept whatever he has for me,” Rosado said in a recent interview with the dissident Cuba Free Press, an Internet news service. “I trust in God that the best will come out, but I am prepared for the worst.”
An Opening
The collapse of Soviet communism, while not bringing down the regime of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, has emboldened dissident organizations. Only the Lawton Foundation, however, has made the defense of the unborn a priority.
The foundation began its work with a letter-writing campaign to the government that included formal proposals for the banning of abortion and the death penalty.
The proposals were ignored by Cuba's bureaucracy, and Biscet and his colleagues, including Rosado, were verbally and sometimes physically harassed by members of the Communist Party's Committee for the Defense of the Revolution.
Refusing to be intimidated, the Lawton members decided early last year to take the bolder step of staging a protest outside one of Havana's largest hospitals.
According to Rosado, what most infuriated officials was the fact that it took police and party employees more than 40 minutes to disrupt the protesters because of the interference of a number of passers-by who were sympathetic to the protesters.
Rosado and Biscet were accused of “anti-revolutionary conduct,” a felony, and the “promotion of violence,” crimes that are usually punished in Cuba with no less than seven years in prison.
They were surprised, then, to be set free without a court date after only 17 days.
Biscet was again surprised to discover, after inquiring about the status of any charges against him, that the case was closed. The authorities, however, balked at putting this in writing.
Rosado and Biscet doubted that this was the end of their ordeal.
“We always knew that our fight would imply risks, and we had decided to take it because the cause of life cannot be abandoned in Cuba, especially if we want to aspire to a better future,” Biscet told Cuba Free Press soon after his release.
Social Consequences
Biscet argued that abortion is not just a grave personal sin. It — along with many of the government's other policies on life issues — are a threat to the country's long-term viability.
Cuba is the only Latin American country in which abortion is legal and, not surprisingly, the one with the lowest birthrate.
The potential for disaster this implies has not been lost on at least some of Cuba's state agencies. The Center for Population Studies warned in 1998 that Cuba could become a country of older persons by 2020.
Juan Carlos Alfonso Fraga, director of the population center, explained that, due to birth control policies, which include free abortions, the population rate dropped to an anemic rate of 1.5 child per woman, well below the 2.5 that Cuba needs to maintain its population of 11 million. At the current birthrate, one of every four Cubans will be over 60 by 2020.
According to Fraga, the over-60 segment of the population already exceeds 13%. The authorities acknowledge that, due to the availability and promotion of birth control and abortion, the youngest segment of the population has become conditioned to think of small families as the norm and even in the best interests of society.
Aware of the trend, Pope John Paul II denounced birth control and abortion during his 1998 visit to the island. “The family, fundamental cell of society and guarantee of its stability, suffers a crisis that affects the larger society,” said the Holy Father during the Mass for the Family celebrated in Santa Clara.
Pope John Paul denounced abortion as “not only an abominable crime, but an absurd impoverishment of the human person and society itself.” He also said that it “leaves deep and negative traces in the young, who are called to incarnate the authentic moral values to consolidate a better society.”
A few months later, during the feast of Our Lady of El Cobre, patroness of Cuba, Cardinal Jaime Ortega y Alamino, archbishop of Havana, used the occasion of his first radio broadcast — a concession to the Church following the papal visit — to defend the right to life.
“In Cuba, we want to recover the values that forged the nation and made it grow and develop,” said the cardinal. “May God bless the efforts of those men and women in Cuba who are fighting for the cause of life.”
A decisive “summit” of dissident organizations was convoked for last November to coordinate policies in order to bring democracy to Cuba. Still at large after his brief jail stay in February, Biscet planned to attend the meeting and push for the inclusion of pro-life issues as part of a common agenda with other dissident groups.
He never made it to the meeting.
Biscet and Rosado were suddenly arrested Nov. 17 in connection with the February protest. The sword that had been hanging over their heads had now fallen.
While both defendants were facing the possibility of seven years in prison, Biscet received three years for his participation in the protest while Rosado was granted her release outright.
The Cuban authorities would not respond to the Register's requests for interviews, explaining that the newspaper's correspondent is not a registered journalist in Cuba, and does not have the right to make inquires.
Police arrested Biscet's wife, Elsa Moreón, last month following a visit to her husband in jail.
She was accused of “smuggling anti-revolutionary propaganda,” for carrying out of the prison a towel in which Biscet had written a message urging the United States to grant custody of the Cuban refugee Elián Gonzalez to his relatives in Florida.
He argued that Eliá n, a 6-year-old, normally should live with his father in Cuba, but explained that there is no respect for the rights of the parents or the family in Cuba. If he is returned to the island, Elian would only become “property” of the state, said Biscet in his message.
Elsa Morejón was released 14 hours later.
Biscet and Rosado insist that the pro-life fight must and will continue. According to Biscet, there are many young people awakening to the pro-life cause and becoming involved with the Lawton Foundation.
As for the risks, Rosado is prepared even to pay the price of being separated from her children.
“Everything that I have done is correct, God knows,” Rosado told Cuba Free Press. “I chose this fight and I have told God that I am ready to pay the most ultimate price and I have the support of my children in this.”
She has also rejected revenge or event resentment of her captors: “They [the communists] have families too, and I would never do to them and their families what they are doing to me and my family.”
Alejandro Bermudez is based in Lima, Peru.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Alejandro Bermudez ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: The Gospel Of Life DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:At a 1983 Mass for families in Panama, Pope John Paul II placed sterilization among those acts that impede procreation and are to be avoided by Christians (see Prolife Profile). This can be especially difficult in a day and age in which procedures like sterilization are accepted, even expected. It will require courage, said the Holy Father.
Always remember that the authentic Christian, even at the risk of becoming a “sign that is opposed,” must be able to carry out well the practices chosen in conformity with his faith. For this reason, he will have to say no to unions which are not sanctified by marriage and to divorce; he will say no to sterilization, above all if it is imposed upon any person or ethnic group for deceptive reasons; he will say no to contraception and he will say no to the crime of abortion, which kills innocent beings.
The Christian believes in life and in love. For this reason he will say yes to the indissoluble love of marriage; yes to life responsibly created by legitimate marriage; yes to the protection of life; yes to the stability of the family; yes to the legitimate living together which promotes communion and favors the balanced education of children, protected by a paternal and maternal love which complete each other — and which are fulfilled in the formation of new persons.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Life Notes DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:Oregon Court: Accidental Abortion Not a Wrongful Death
ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 2 — Oregon's wrongful death law cannot be used to collect damages for the death of a baby who was mistakenly aborted, the Oregon Court of Appeals ruled, reported AP.
Citing a 19th-century dictionary definition stating that “person” is a term “applied to infants from their birth,” the 10-member panel unanimously ruled that a 16-week-old unborn child “was not considered a ‘person’ under the law that permits civil damages to be sought for deaths caused by wrongful acts,” AP said.
The case involves a 1997 incident in which Oregon resident Mary LaDu underwent a hysterectomy because doctors believed she had a pelvic tumor. The pelvic mass turned out to be a 16-week-old fetus, prompting LaDu to sue Portland's Oregon Clinic for $500,000 in damages for the loss of the baby.
LaDu's attorney said they will appeal the decision to the state's Supreme Court.
‘Life of the Mother’ Exception Is Bogus, Doctors Say
AMERICAN LIFE LEAGUE, Feb. 29 — American Life League's medical advisors and many other doctors across the country agree that the “life of the mother” exception found in abortion discussions is “bogus.”
The league this month began circulating a statement concerning this position to a select number of doctors around the country. Already, more than 100 physicians have signed the statement — including former abortionists Bernard Nathanson and Beverly McMillan — and it is anticipated that hundreds more will sign in the coming weeks.
The statement reads, “I agree that there is never a situation in the law or in the ethical practice of medicine where a preborn child's life need be intentionally destroyed by procured abortion for the purpose of saving the life of the mother. A physician must do everything possible to save the lives of both of his patients, mother and child. He must never intend the death of either.”
Teen Charged In Assisted Suicide
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Feb. 29 — A 16-year-old who watched his troubled girlfriend shoot herself to death as part of an apparent suicide pact has become the first person charged under Maryland's new law designed to check assisted suicide, the AP reported.
Kristen Riggin, a spokeswoman for the state's attorney's office, said the boy provided the .38-caliber handgun that Jennifer Garvey, 15, used to kill herself on Oct. 18. The gun had been stolen from the boy's stepfather, Riggin said.
Oregon is the only state that allows assisted suicides. Maryland's law, which took effect Oct. 1, was aimed at preventing the practice. Under the law, anyone who provides the physical means to another person to end his or her life faces up to a year in prison and a $10,000 fine.
Jennifer, who was being treated for depression, went through with the suicide pact. Her family and friends believe that the boy held sway over the impressionable girl, reported the AP.
Teacher Challenges Union Dues for Abortion
ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 3 — A Massachusetts teacher is challenging his union dues, saying it helps support abortion on demand, AP said.
The teacher, Gerard O'Brien, is Catholic and pro-life. He won the first step in his challenge earlier this month when the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination called for a full hearing on the question, said AP.
O'Brien filed the complaint in 1995 when hee was suspended for five days for not paying the required fee.
He said union affiliates, including the National Education Association, back abortion and does not want his union dues to pay to promote abortion.
Some pro-life teachers have formed the Ohio-based Teachers Saving Children, a pro-life group that works to counter the pro-abortion bias in the teacher' s unions.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Facts of Life DATE: 03/19/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 19-25, 2000 ----- BODY:The present U.S. rate of natural population increase — from new births rather than immigration — is only about one half of one percent annually and is dropping radpidly. By 2030, barring either a significant increase in the birthrate or a massive increase of immigration the U.S.population will be in absolute decline.
(Source: U.S. Census Bureau)
----- EXCERPT: Did You Know? ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Pope's Visit Eye-Opener For Israelis DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:JERUSALEM — In Pope John Paul II, the Jews and Muslims of the Holy Land encountered a personification of Christianity that may begin to erase centuries of ignorance and distrust.
While the full impact of the Pope's six-day visit to the Holy Land will not be apparent for some time, Jewish and Muslim leaders were, with few exceptions, touched by the Pope's compassion and desire to build bridges among the three monotheistic religions. They also agreed that the Holy Father opened a new chapter in relations between Israelis and Palestinians.
“I believe the visit of the Pope to Israel [was of] immense historical importance,” said Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, following John Paul's giant outdoor Mass on March 24 by the Sea of Galilee. “It became a major step toward reconciliation between the Jewish people and Christianity.”
The pilgrimage, Barak said, “will help make the atmosphere much better in the world … between Jews and Christians, and in this region in regard to the peace process.”
The Pope and Church activities do not often make the headlines in the Mideast, where most people acknowledge that they know little about Christian beliefs and practices, much less about the Church's ecumenical overtures and efforts to promote understanding among the various faiths.
Not in late March. During John Paul's visit, Israeli newspapers tried to help readers understand the Church and changes in Catholic-Jewish relations.
Even the 79-year-old Pope's March 20–21 visit to Jordan, the first stage of his seven-day pilgrimage, was given front-page coverage in Israel's major daily newspapers.
Ma'ariv, one of Israel's two major dailies, gave the visitor-pilgrim a front-page welcome March 21 in Hebrew and Latin, greeting the Pope in large type with Salve Pontifex.
Ha'aretz, the other major daily, published a 56-page special supplement in English offering a smorgasbord of articles, beginning with a brief introduction to Vatican City State.
So This Is Christianity
Rabbi David Rosen, president of the International Council of Christians and Jews, said he believes that the biggest impact of the pilgrimage was on Israeli public opinion.
Until the visit, the rabbi said, the vast majority of Jewish Israelis “had no contact with modern Christianity” and “knew nothing about the changes that have taken place in the Church since the Second Vatican Council. This visit really captivated them and opened up their eyes, not only to these changes but to the fact that this Pope is a genuine friend of the Jewish people.”
Like most Jews, Rabbi Rosen, who also heads the Anti-Defamation League's Israel office, found the Pope's visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial particularly poignant.
“At Yad Vashem it was clear that he felt this was not just some tragic event that had taken place in a distant land,” he said. “It was part of his own personal experience and pain.”
The trip was also important from another perspective, Rosen said. “If Yad Vashem was the spiritual high point, the official state receptions epitomized the transformation in the Church's attitude toward its relationship” with Israel. Until relatively recently, he noted, the Vatican was “opposed to Zionism and the Jewish state. During his 1964 visit to the Holy Land, Pope Paul VI didn't acknowledge the state of Israel. When Pope John Paul visited the president's [official residence] in the state of Israel, you saw how far we've come.”
Father Michael McGarry, rector of Jerusalem's Tantur Ecumenical Institute, agreed.
“For the Jewish people of Israel, the Pope's visit was an incredibly moving and powerful event,” he observed. “Far beyond any particular sermon or talk that his Holiness gave, the images of the Holy Father touching the land of Israel, the Jewish state, going to Yad Vashem, greeting the survivors of the [Holocaust] and going to the Western Wall where he prayed are indelibly marked in their corporate memory.”
Christians Strengthened
While the pilgrimage was an educational experience for Jews, Father McGarry said, it was a deeply emotional and spiritual experience for the Holy Land's tiny Christian community, which comprises less than 3% of the population.
“For the Roman Catholic community, his being here was a profoundly important and heartfelt moment of encouragement for them to remain the living community where Jesus began his movement,” Father McGarry said. “For some other Christians — the Orthodox and Protestant communities — his presence was a sign of solidarity and eagerness for ecumenical dialogue.”
Noting the long-standing theological and other divisions that have characterized relations between the Catholic Church and other Christian denominations, Father McGarry observed “some ambivalence,” especially among Orthodox Christians here.
“Memories in the Middle East are long,” he cautioned. “Many Orthodox communities remember other trips to the region made by Western Christians as being marked by the violent Crusades or vigorous missionizing.
“Nonetheless, the Pope's consistent call for dialogue and his support for all Christian communities in their own integrity in the Holy Land encouraged new hope among this otherwise cautious community.”
Jesuit Father Donald Moore, head of the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Jerusalem, described the visit as “a great boon to the local Catholic Church, being that we are such a small minority in the Holy Land, and that Catholics are a minority in the Christian community. For us, this has been an overwhelming experience.”
Additionally, said Father Moore, the knowledge that the Pope would be making a pilgrimage to the region paved the way for numerous interfaith dialogues:
“There have been any number of meetings involving Muslims, Jews and Christians, with some important questions being raised, for example, ‘How do we want others to view us?’ These meetings were sparked by the Pope's recent request for forgiveness.”
Which is not to say that all inter-faith events, even the one attended by Pope John Paul during his Holy Land visit, lead to instant peace and brotherhood.
Religion and Politics
Reflecting the fact that, in the Middle East, religion and politics are deeply enmeshed, the leading local Muslim leader, the mufti of Jerusalem, refused to attend a special interreligious meeting at Notre Dame, in Jerusalem, reportedly because Israeli Chief Rabbi Yisrael Lau would be in attendance.
The Muslim cleric who did attended, Sheikh Tatzir Tamimi, head of the Palestinian religious courts, used the occasion to condemn Israel for a long list of offenses. He said that Israel has a long history of “genocide” and “shooting and wounding Palestinian children.” Sheikh Tamimi walked out of the gathering when young members of Muslim, Jewish and Christian choirs joined together in song.
Rabbi Lau also injected politics into what was billed as a purely religious meeting by thanking the Pope for “his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's united eternal capital.” In fact, the Vatican has never embraced this view.
Refusing to enter the fray, the Pope took the high ground: “Religion is the enemy of exclusion and discrimination, of hatred and rivalry, of violence and conflict,” he declared.
Referring to the political undercurrents that characterized the event, Father McGarry said, “It's evident that much work still needs to be done. There is much we must do, with humility, patience and love.”
Despite the somewhat sour tone of the interfaith session, Sheikh Mazen Ahram, a Jerusalem cleric in the audience, felt that something good had come out of the meeting, and from the Pope's visit as a whole.
“The first step in any discussion is meeting one another face to face,” the sheikh said. “The fact that the Pope came to the Holy Land encouraged dialogue. Without this, the three religious leaders in this room might never have met one another.
“The door to peace is more difficult to open than the door of war. The Pope helped open this door, just a bit.”
Michele Chabin writes from Jerusalem.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Michele Chabin ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Free Speech: Abortion's Forgotten Casualty? DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz isn't usually considered an ally of the pro-life cause. But when it comes to free speech he is.
“As a civil libertarian who strongly believes in a woman's right to choose, I am outraged by the limitations on the free-speech rights of those who take a different point of view,” he said.
Dershowitz, a member of American Civil Liberties Union, acknowledged that often for the ACLU, it's “free speech for me and not for thee.”
On this point, Joseph Scheidler, head of Chicago's Pro-Life Action League, found himself in rare agreement with Dershowitz.
Local and state laws, Scheidler said, restrict pro-life protesters in many ways, from the distance they must keep from abortion facilities to the size of the signs they can carry.
On the federal level, he cited the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act passed by Congress in 1994, permitting anti-racketeering laws to be applied to pro-life protesters. He said the law would make Martin Luther King Jr. a mobster, as the civil rights leader's own Southern Christian Leadership Conference has argued. Scheidler is embroiled in his own racketeering lawsuit for pro-life activities.
Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice called laws restricting pro-life speech “the abortion exception” to the ACLU's usual free speech advocacy.
In one case challenging buffer zones around clinics, the ACLU filed an amicus brief in support of the protesters. But the ACLU is not always on the side of free speech when it comes to abortion, Sekulow said.
His colleague Walter Webber attributes the apparent inconsistency to a split within ACLU ranks among old-time liberals and “abortion-first types, who believe that the right to abortion trumps free speech.”
Victor Rosenblum, a Northwestern University law professor and past chairman of the Chicago chapter of the Anti-Defamation League, agreed.
“They've waffled and it's understandable given their otherwise activist position on abortion,” he said. “Nonetheless, it is puzzling given there was no hesitation in their support for the American Nazi Party.”
He cited a 1978 case in which the ACLU defended the right of the American Nazi Party to protest in Skokie, Ill., a Chicago suburb that had a sizable Jewish population.
Alan Dershowitz offered his explanation of the reason for the apparent double standard: “The ACLU has been captured by the pro-choice movement. They make more money supporting women's rights … than in supporting free-speech rights.”
‘No Hypocrisy’
The ACLU denied any hypocrisy. “I emphatically reject the notion that the ACLU applies a different First Amendment standard to abortion protesters than we apply to other protesters,” argued spokesman Steve R. Shapiro. “The ACLU has consistently, and I believe properly, maintained that the Constitution requires the government to preserve both freedom of speech and abortion rights.”
In the case of NOW vs. Scheidler, Shapiro said, the ACLU's brief “in support of neither side” was “consistent with our views … of clearly distinguishing between First Amendment speech and unlawful behavior.”
They are also consistent on other cases restricting protesters, Shapiro argued.
Citing the case of Schenk vs. Pro-Choice Network of Western N.Y., Shapiro said the ACLU “concluded that the buffer zone was justified because it was embodied in an injunction targeted against specific defendants who had engaged in previous behavior designed to interfere with access to abortion clinics.” In a Colorado case, however, he said the ACLU determined the buffer zone “went further than necessary to preserve clinic access, which was its stated goal.”
Robyn Blumner, a nationally syndicated columnist who is pro-choice, gave the ACLU credit for its support of the defendant in Hill vs. Colorado, and for being “one of the only civil-liberties groups that actually tries to be politically neutral.”
Nonetheless, she said, the organization has been “equivocal and even hostile to the free-speech rights of anti-abortion protesters.”
She pointed out that the battle at abortion clinics “is between the right of free speech and the government interest in keeping the peace and restraining lawlessness. Traditionally, the ACLU has been on the free-speech side of the equation.” Not so here.
Media's Blind Eye?
One media watchdog called Blumner an exception to the media rule, which has been to ignore the free speech double standard. Tim Graham of the Media Research Council said the issue “really shows the ideological bias” of the media.
He said there has only been one case of anti-abortion free speech that has received significant notice: America Online's shutdown and fining of the Nuremberg Files Web site. That was the site which featured “wanted” notices and personal information about abortion practitioners. The media's concern in that case, he said, was Internet law rather than the restricted speech rights of those who oppose abortion.
Clarke Forsythe of American Life League said the slanted coverage has set up a vicious circle. “Media coverage is key,” he noted. “It makes or breaks the public view of it all.”
It is difficult to present a positive view of the pro-life movement to the public, if a peaceful, prayerful sit-in is ignored and the only coverage is given to jostling. “In the media, ‘pro-life’ gets transformed from Mother Teresa to anarchists,” he said.
That hurts the movement legally, said Walter Webber at the American Center for Law and Justice. “It's a given that we're criminals when we walk into a courtroom.”
Reason for Hope?
Will pro-lifers ever get a fair shake?
Ironically, the fact that “the court will bend over backward to accommodate the speech of left-wingers” offers hope to pro-lifers, Webber said.
Following the precedent set against pro-life protesters, racketeering charges have been brought against anti-fur protesters in a handful of states, including New Jersey and California. And, so, as it is meant to, the free speech cause has made for some strange bedfellows: People for Ethical Treatment of Animals recently filed a brief in support of the pro-life defendants in a Colorado buffer-zone case.
And, 14 years after he was first sued by the National Organization for Women on racketeering charges — a case that's still in appeal — Joseph Scheidler hasn't given up hope.
“They've put some people completely out of business,” he said. “But we're going on. We've still got our office. We're still doing our stuff. We're putting up billboards and handing out leaflets.”
Abortionists have quit, clinics have shut down, and abortions have decreased, said Scheidler, despite the lawsuits. “They don't know how to stop us.”
Kathryn Jean Lopez is associate editor at National Review.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kathryn Jean Lopez ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: 'Lighten Up, Catholics' Says Man With a Mission DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:LITTLETON, Colo. — Doug Brummel thinks Catholics need to lighten up.
“God wants us to lighten our spirits and not take ourselves too seriously,” said the Catholic comedian, musician and storyteller. “A smile is one of the first gifts we give each other after we're born.”
Smiles, laughter and spiritual renewal are at the heart of Brummel's three-night “Lighten Up” parish mission, which he is bringing to Catholic churches all over the United States.
“Doug uses humor to bring people to a deeper relationship with Jesus Christ,” said Francis Maier, chancellor of the Archdiocese of Denver, where Brummel makes his home. “He is a very good evangelizer, and he uses humor to make evangelical points.”
That humor is clothed in a cast of nine amusing characters, all played by Brummel, who share their stories of life and faith from their own quirky perspectives.
“Estelle” is a purple-loving lady on her quest to become Catholic through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults.
“Andrew” is a Catholic college student looking for answers to the challenging questions posed by his non-Catholic friends.
“Timmy” is a charming kindergartner who loves his dog, plays happily in a refrigerator box, and learns about God from his priest.
“Sister Simon” is a “Bene-Dominican” nun (“Half Benedictine, half Dominican. Couldn't decide — long story,” she says) who takes her students through an update on the holy days of obligation.
“My intent with the characters is never to make fun of anyone. It's to help us laugh at ourselves,” said Brummel, 36. “My own sister is a Dominican nun, and has been in the convent 30 years. I grew up playing hide and seek in church. I give the good sisters credit for helping me feel so at home in church.”
Transfiguration Church in St. Petersburg, Fla., recently hosted a “Lighten Up” mission. Its pastor, Father Steven Rosczewski, said, “I saw Doug perform at a conference and I liked his enthusiasm for the faith. I liked his approach — helping people to laugh and understand our faith at the same time.”
Father Rosczewski said his parish was at “a critical time” when he heard about Brummel. “I received such wonderful feedback from youth at the conference that I knew we were onto something, so I invited Doug to our parish,” the priest added.
Brummel said the mission is a big change of pace for most parishes.
“This mission has a whole different texture from a more traditional, devotional mission,” he observed. “We invite all generations to attend. It's very family-centered. We feel passionately called to bringing families together, so they can see each other laugh and pray and just physically be near each other.
“If we want to light up, we need to spend some time looking at the gift and the blessing of our family ties.”
A Clown for God
Although Brummel's wife Jennifer, 28, is not often on the road with him, she is always in his thoughts. “My wife and I are partners,” he said. “She handles the office management and bookings. It's a balancing act when I'm on the road, with its pros and cons.
When our babies [Benjamin, 3, and Jacob, 8 months] are really little, the pro is that I get a full night's sleep!”
Audiences respond well to him, too.
“I like the way Doug talked about his wife during the mission,” said Frances Jones, 68. “If more men thought like he does, there would be less divorce. He has such a way of expressing everything with comedy. I thoroughly enjoyed it.”
Echoed Joe Batcheller, 39: “It was a great mission. I went home and started reading the Bible.”
Even children enjoy the show. “He taught us different ways to think about our faith,” said Matthew Orozco, 14. “I'm going to remember how much God loves us, and that he loves us every day.”
The Characters
Brummel's characters grew out of his experiences in high school and community theater, followed by his work as a youth minister at St. Anne's Church in Oswego, Ill., and director of retreats at Christian Brothers La Salle Manor Retreat House in Plano, Ill.
“I was in charge of mandatory confirmation sessions with kids and their parents,” said Brummel. “I came up with a couple of characters that I used in those sessions, and I noticed what a good time we could have while we were still learning about our faith.”
Word spread about Brummel's successful approach, and other parishes were soon requesting him. “The characters started developing, and over time the mission has just kind of taken shape.”
“Lighten Up” also includes inspirational music written and performed by Brummel, as well as quiet prayer time at the close of each evening. Brummel has taken “Lighten Up” to more than 40 states, from the dioceses of Rochester, N.Y.; San Jose, Calif.; the dioceses of Juneau, Alaska; and San Antonio.
“At the end of the mission, I always say, ‘The real story is out there,’” he concluded. “We're all a bunch of characters and we're called to share our stories and listen to each other.”
Dana Mildebrath writes from Seminole, Florida.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Danamildebrath ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Ambassador to the Catholic Vote DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:After serving as mayor of Boston for almost a decade, then as ambassador to the Vatican from 1993 to 1997, he became president of the Catholic Alliance in March. He commutes regularly between his Boston home and his job with the Washington-based Catholic voter-activist organization. He recently spoke with Register staff writer Joshua Mercer.
Mercer: Unlike your generation, young people today do not easily identify with a political party. What do you have to say to faithful young Catholics wary that the Democratic Party lost its soul when it embraced abortion back in 1974?
Flynn: I believe that good, young Catholic people in this country almost don't have a political party that they can identify with. One party has turned its back on them; the other takes them for granted.
It's really sad what has happened. The Democratic Party used to be the party of working class, Catholic families. Democratic people felt that the Democratic Party was going to be there for them — that they were going to be their political voice in the community, as the Catholic Church was their moral and social voice in the community. And they worked well together, building strong families, strong churches, strong communities and a strong country.
Unfortunately, the Democratic Party is now the party of the Hollywood elite and the powerful and the well-connected. The same as the Republican Party is.
When you were ambassador, you criticized President Clinton for his stance on abortion. Did that earn you enemies in the administration or back in Boston?
It did earn me some enemies, particularly in the White House and the State Department. It was the partial-birth abortion bill that I encouraged the president not to veto.
As I told the president, the bill that was passed by the House and the Senate was not only good policy for our country but good politics for him as well. So, I felt that I was being loyal to him and to my country and to my religious beliefs. I believed it then, and I believe it now. I wasn't looking for any kind of red ribbon to be any kind of hero. I just felt an obligation to tell him.
I didn't say it in a public way that would embarrass him. I just said it. The information got out. And I stood by it. There was some serious questioning over the prudence of it. There were several of my enemies that I had built up over the years that wanted to see me recalled, removed, impeached, reprimanded. They settled on a reprimand because they felt anything stronger than that would probably make me a hero or something.
Do you think that abortion is the most compelling issue of the day? And should Catholics base their votes on this issue?
Yeah, I think it's the most compelling issue of the day. I feel very strongly about the issues of social and economic justice, poor and working families, as well. I don't think either party addressed those issues. The Republican Party is certainly pro-life. The Democratic Party is more committed to the poor.
What we need to do as Catholics is boycott both parties until we get both parties sensitive to our political philosophy. Why should we compromise in what we believe? Let them change their positions if they want our vote.
Was your faith life strengthened when you served as U.S. ambassador to the Vatican?
It gave me an opportunity to really get to know [Pope John Paul II]. … Before I really just loved the man for who I thought he was. Then, I had the opportunity of really getting to know him and love him more.
When the Pope visited Denver in 1993, you were right there by his side. What did you learn from the Holy Father?
Just before the Holy Father went to Denver, I had the opportunity to have a long conversation with him at Castel Gandolfo at which time we talked a lot about the situation in the Middle East. At that time, diplomatic relations had not been established between the Vatican and Israel. And we talked about that.
I pointed out how important the role of the Catholic Church is helping bringing about peace in the Middle East. … And here we are looking at it now on television and it finally comes to fruition.
We talked about that and we talked about a number of other issues. That was in July of 1993. The Holy Father was just getting ready to go to Denver, Colo., for World Youth Day. At that time there was a lot of trouble in the United States, in major cities including Denver. … In New York, the homicide rate for young people was skyrocketing. The cities were full of violence and disrespect and disregard for other people.
… The Holy Father had obviously heard all of that. I found him to be extraordinarily astute as to what was going on and asking those very questions.
I said in my experience as mayor of Boston, almost 10 years, I find the overwhelming majority of young people, particularly young people in the minority communities, are very fine, law-abiding, hardworking youngsters. They play by the rules and they work hard. The problem is the American media really doesn't give those folks much credit. What they focus on is the negative; they focus on the sensational. As one prominent Boston editor told me, if it bleeds, it leads.
What were the Pope's impressions after he met so many young people in Denver?
I was with him practically every step of the way. On the way back, on the plane to Rome, Msgr. [Stanislaw] Dziwisz, his secretary, said, “The Holy Father would like to speak with you in his private apartment” — in the airplane.
I went to the front of the plane and I spoke to the Pope for 20 minutes on the way back. He was just telling me how pleased he was to see the real youth of America. He said to me that the future of America is strong and very promising. He saw that in the youth of America. It was empowering for him, as well, to feel so positive, so good about the young people of America. That part of it was extraordinarily moving.
----- EXCERPT: Democrat Wants To Help Make Both Parties Better ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond Flynn ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson ----------- TITLE: Boy Scouts 'Wait and See' on Homosexual Court Case DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:MEMPHIS, Tenn. — The Boys Scouts of America is in better shape than ever before in its 90-year history, leaders said. Scouts' honor.
But a dark cloud looms over the organization in the form of a state court ruling that requires the Scouts — known for the formation of moral character in boys and young men — to admit avowed homosexuals into the ranks of its members and scoutmasters.
The Scouts have appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is expected to hand down a ruling this summer.
In the meantime, most scouting supporters and participants interviewed by the Register were hesitantto discuss the case and how it might impact the nation's almost 5 million members.
The New Jersey State Supreme Court ruled last year that the expulsion of James Dale as an assistant scoutmaster in 1990 because of his homosexual lifestyle violated the state's anti-discrimination law. Critics say the ruling would open the way for homosexuals to overtly or discreetly promote their lifestyle to the young men they would be leading.
For Catholic youngsters, they say, it would be an obvious contradiction to have role models who, through their most important life choices, flout the teachings of the Church.
Evan Wolfson, an attorney for the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund which is representing Dale, said the case gives the Supreme Court “a chance to hear that scouting is about honesty, community service, self-reliance and respect for others — not discrimination.”
Scout spokesmen have avoided media debates on the issue, restricting their arguments to court briefs.
Some of the rank and file voiced opposition to homosexuals as role models for boys, and predicted a rough road ahead for scouting if the ruling goes against them.
Bishop Gerald Gettlefinger of Evansville, Ind., chairman of the U.S. bishops' Committee on Catholic Boy Scouting, told the Register that the committee has filed an amicus brief with the high court objecting to the lower court ruling.
“Now we will just have to wait to see what the U.S. Supreme Court verdict is,” the bishop said, “and take it from there.”
Catholic Scouting
Boy Scout troops can be chartered through civic or religious groups. When a church sponsors a troop, the members are expected to live up to their religious obligations as a member of that church, earning merit badges for just that.
Scouting under Catholic auspices is thriving, according to Bishop Gettle-finger, who has 40 years of experience with the organization.
“I am very excited about what the Boy Scouts of America provide to us from the Roman Catholic Church point of view. I feel scouting is a very strong and wonderful vehicle that spans from boyhood to manhood in something that a scout voluntarily does and is not forced to do.”
Robert Oldowski, chairman of the National Committee on Catholic Scouting, sees the program “the best it has ever been in the history of scouting — there is no doubt about that.”
He said membership rolls are up, the troops are active, and the programs are well developed and working smoothly.
Catholic Boy Scouts and leaders number 350,650 — the highest number in history — and are the third largest denominational group behind the Methodists (424,102) and the Mormons (415,630).
The Scouts were founded in England in 1907 by a British army officer who found young men recruited for the military were “not prepared to live outdoors and otherwise take care of themselves under battle conditions.”
The idea was exported to the United States in 1910 with the first Catholic charters granted soon thereafter. Civic and fraternal groups also hold charters in scouting programs with nominal annual charter and membership fees paid to support the national network.
“In some senses, scouting also gave me the opportunity to have my religious vocation affirmed and it taught me how to compete in a fair and sportsman-like way,” said Archbishop Daniel Buechlein of Indianapolis, an Eagle Scout who spent his summers as a youth working in Scout camps. He added, “it was a great way to socialize with good companions.”
He declined to comment on the homosexual issue now before the Supreme Court.
Scouting Today
As for scouting's strength today, the archbishop provided a graphic example:
“We had them hanging from the rafters in our cathedral,” for a March awards ceremony. “Next to the [Holy Thursday] Chrism Mass and some of our other large, cathedral celebrations, [the annual scouting event] is one of the largest of our gatherings.”
The numbers of adults and boys active in the Scouts today in the United States is the largest ever in the organization's history, said Donald G. Oberlander, the Boy Scouts'director of public relations.
He said the steady growth of the organization was based on what he called a “value-based program that parents want their children from six to 18 years of age to be part of.”
On the impending court case, Oberland told the Register, “We are merely asking the U.S. Supreme Court to certify us as a private, non-profit organization that has the ability to set our own membership standards. We are not going to criticize anyone else.”
The Boy Scouts of America have experienced a number of scandals in recent years involving pedophiles serving in the role of scoutmaster, prompting the Scouts to adopt a “two-deep leadership” standard that requires the presence of at least two adults at all times in scouting activities that include children.
Father Joel Wiggs, active in Catholic scouting in Tennessee for more than 40 years before his retirement, described the scouting movement today as “continuously growing in numbers, strength and enthusiasm.”
But, he said, “I don't think [homosexuals] need to be in the Scouts.”
Robert R. Holton writes from Memphis, Tennessee.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Robertr. Holton ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Scouting's Love of Nature Inspires Love of God DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:Through scouting, Chip Schadrack found a new way to enliven his Catholic faith.
“Everything about the outdoors has to do with my faith and keeping it stimulated,” the 19-year-old Eagle Scout told the Register.
“Just walking in the outdoors and looking at everything in nature, you have to realize that no man, or pure coincidence, could have thrown nature together,” he said, his voice filled with awe.
“And so it's then that you have to realize that a greater power than we can understand had to have brought it all about.”
Membership in a troop at his Catholic high school in Memphis, Tenn., has offered other benefits that support religious practice.
“You get not only leadership,” he said, “but social skills, survival skills and many other things all rolled up into a lot of enjoyment and self-satisfaction.”
Chip's parents and two sisters supported his efforts and he credits them with helping him to achieve the rank of Eagle Scout.
“I certainly am proud of him,” said his mother. “It was a lot of real work getting Chip to [reach] Eagle Scout. Like all the other kids his age, heneeded lots of pushing to keep moving ahead. But he did it.”
She said scouting takes on an added meaning when it is provided under the auspices of a church group.
Chip's father, William, a mechanical engineer, was a scout in his youth and rejoined the troop as a scoutmaster in order to collaborate with his son.
Although scouting has changed a great deal over the years, the elder Schadrack observed that the organization has grown in size and added new programs while discarding elements that no longer serve a purpose — but always with the true aims of scouting in mind.
While healthy diversions and fun activities help to ignite and sustain interest in scouting, “the main purpose when I was a boy and today isn't to camp, cook out, swim, fish and backpack,” he said.
“The real purpose of scouting is to develop moral and ethical character, leadership and citizenship.”
—Robert R. Holton
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Robert R. Holton ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:Son of Famous Atheist Defends School Prayer
William J. Murray, an evangelical Christian activist, testified in favor of a bill before the Maryland General Assembly that would allow student-led prayer at public-school graduations.
Murray was a teen-ager when his mother filed the 1960 lawsuit challenging the prayer required in her son's Baltimore school. Three years later the Supreme Court ruled that voluntary prayer of any kind was unconstitutional.
Murray now says that his mother, who vanished in 1995 at age 77 along with two family members and $500,000 in gold coins, was “a Marxist” and a “sinner like the rest of us” who “wanted her sin to have a stamp of approval from the federal government.”
Cardinal Kung Hailed as Freedom Fighter
“Four centuries after a brilliant Italian Jesuit named Matteo Ricci sought to cultivate a Christianity that was authentically Chinese, one of the finest fruits of those labors, Cardinal Kung, found himself deemed such a threat precisely because he was Chinese. Like Chinese holy men of many persuasions, to taste freedom this Roman Catholic cardinal had to leave China.
“Inside China, the cardinal's willingness to suffer and his refusal to bend inspired countless others in similar circumstances. Outside China, his story reminds us that religious freedom remains an excellent test case for measuring regimes. As the cardinal realized early on, governments that do not recognize a man's autonomy over his own soul are not likely to recognize his autonomy over anything else.”
Author Anne Rice Supports Cause of New Orleans Priest
Pope John Paul II will declare Redemptorist Father Francis Xavier Seelos blessed — the second-to-last step toward being named a saint — at an April 9 ceremony in Rome.
Father Seelos, a 19th century missionary from Europe who died during a yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans, was renowned for his sanctity and his gifts as a healer. He will be the fifth person who served mainly in the United States to be declared blessed or a saint.
Rice wrote in a March 23 Statement: “Father Seelos is especially dear to me because my ancestors include both Irish and Germans who lived in St. Alphonsus Parish, people who no doubt had to cope with the scourge of yellow fever, and some who may even have known Father Seelos personally.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: How to Heal a Wounded Culture DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:DENVER — The key to stopping violence on the street and in the school is to strengthen families, Colorado Gov. Bill Owens told a gathering sponsored by the Heritage Foundation Feb. 29.
Owens was on hand to deliver a talk, A Year After Columbine: How Do We Heal a Wounded Culture? to commemorate the first anniversary of the shooting spree by two Columbine High School students that took 13 lives in the small community of Littleton.
Owens, a Catholic, does not hesitate to call for a stronger role for religion in the public and, especially, the private lives of Americans as a way to improve society.
He spoke with the Register Radio News several days after the address.
Rich Rinaldi: How has Columbine High School been last year?
Gov. Bill Owens: I think Columbine is in the process of healing. The students and faculty and parents and the entire community have been trying to move on, paying proper respect to those who died while realizing that the survivors all have lives to live. I think they are doing as well as you can expect under the circumstances.
Have there been any changes such as metal detectors, etc. in the schools themselves?
The school itself has changed in the sense that they had to renovate a lot of the destruction that was caused. They have built a new library because most of the killing took place in the old library, which they have decided not to reopen as a library. The shootings took place right at the end of the school year so they were able to use the summer to do this work and get it ready for the fall semester.
What can you tell us about the victims'families?
Following the shootings, it really became apparent that the children murdered at Columbine were good kids that their moms and dads could be proud of. These were kids who, in many cases, had deep religious faith.
The teacher who died, the 13th victim, was a gentleman who put his life on the line and actually saved many lives. The students were normal American kids who represented all that is good about this country.
It's just a real tragedy that we've lost them.
Wasn't there yet another loss forone of the families?
One young lady was injured fairly severely [in the shooting] and is in a wheelchair. Her mother, who had an apparent lifelong problem with depression, committed suicide several months ago. I think most of the other families are doing as well as you can expect after the loss of a child.
While government and other institutions do play a role in bringing up children, do you agree that parents must play the primary role in bringing up their children?
I do, and at the Heritage Foundation I pointed out that the traditional family is the most important bulwark to inoculate against many of the social pathologies that we see today. A child who has two parents at home is much more likely to have a good education, to be raised in a healthy and moral atmosphere, and is less likely to be a violent child or have some of the problems that so many of our children face. I really made a pitch for less focus on some of the typical solutions that many have proposed to solve and prevent future “Columbines” and more of a focus on strengthening the American family.
On the subject of a “wounded culture,” a phrase taken from the title of your talk at the Heritage Foundation, I know that one of the killers, Eric Harris, was so absorbed in a violent video game that he sketched something about it on his Web site. Is the culture too violent?
I'm very concerned about just that. I look at the level of violence, the level of raw sexuality, the corrosion in some of our mores, and that concerns me. I think that it actually reflects on some of the problems that we are seeing in terms of youth violence.
But I'm also an optimist and, as I look out on our society, I see that the number of abortions is dropping, the number of children born out of wedlock is starting to drop, the rate of attendance in many of our churches is increasing. Crime is down by a third. Gun deaths are down by a third in the last six years.
There are a lot of indicators that can give us hope for the future. Having said all of that, when 30% of America's children are born without a father [at home], that's still a real cause for concern.
God and religion were mentioned quite a bit in the recent primary elections. Is religion playing a more vital role in public life?
I hope so, because I think that there is truly an important role for religion in our national discussion — be it in politics or in society as a whole. I happen to have known Gov. George W. Bush of Texas since 1970. I know that he is a man of God. I know that he actually believes and feels what he says. I hope that we continue to have this discussion and I hope we don't look down upon those candidates who are willing to speak of their religious beliefs.
What can the federal government do to better support families?
I think there are many things that government can do. I think that government can try to support families by not punishing them from a tax standpoint. We have a marriage penalty in the United States in the federal tax code.
We charge a married couple more in taxes than we would have charged those two same people living together without benefit of being married. That's silly and self-defeating. In Colorado we did away with the state's marriage penalty last year but we need to do more nationally.
I think there are other things that the federal government can do to support families in terms of using faith-based institutions to provide social services — in terms of not being antiseptically anti-religion.
I think that the federal government should try to be friendly to religion. And by religion I mean all religions: Jewish and Muslim and Christian. Religion is kind of a tempering force in society, so I'm in favor of religion and I'm in favor of trying to increase its role in our society in a way that's consistent with our Constitution.
----- EXCERPT: One year after Columbine, Governor says it's time to strengthen families and religion ----- EXTENDED BODY: Rich Rinaldi ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Jesuit Calls '60 Minutes' Spin 'Dishonest Journalism' DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:ROME — A prominent Jesuit historian accused Canada's state television network of taking his remarks out of context and portraying him as anti-Semitic.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. aired a clip of an interview with Jesuit Father Peter Gumpel in which he said it was “an undeniable fact” that “the Jews have killed Christ.”
The March 16 clip was also played the following day in the United States on ‘CBS Evening News.’
“This phrase was maliciously and malevolently taken out of context and significantly distorted my position,” said Father Gumpel, who was appointed by the Vatican in 1984 to prepare the beatification cause of Pope Pius XII.
Father Gumpel also criticized CBS' ‘60 Minutes’ news magazine program for a segment on Pope Pius, which included a separate interview with the priest March 19. Father Gumpel called the report “dishonest journalism.”
Frequently sought out for media interviews, Father Gumpel has gained a name as one of Pope Pius' foremost defenders against accusations that the wartime Pope did too little to save Europe's Jews from Nazi death camps.
ZENIT, the Rome-based news service, speculated that the North American networks took “Father Gumpel's words out of context for the purpose of launching a campaign against the Catholic Church on the eve of the Pope's trip to Israel.”
His remark to the Canadian TV crew about Jews killing Christ, he said, was a response to an impromptu question about how he explained historical antagonisms between Christians and Jews.
In attributing the start of tensions between Christians and Jews to Christ's death, he was simply making a historical observation, Father Gumpel said March 20.
“You have to see this always in history — there is an action and a reaction,” he said.
“And of course what happened was that, in fact, Jews were responsible for the killing of Christ, for the stoning of St. Stephen, for the persecution of St. Paul, and that started it. As a reaction, which you get in a historical context, people defend themselves,” he said.
Among the Christian overreactions, he said, were “several Church fathers who came out with statements which [went] beyond the limit.”
This context of Father Gumpel's comments was dropped in the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. clip, he said, making it appear he blamed Jews en masse for tensions with Christians in the past 2,000 years.
In a statement to the press, Father Gumpel explained, “I sought to present the teaching of the Second Vatican Council on this matter. In its document Nostra Aetate (No. 4), that Council stated: ‘Although the Jewish authorities and their followers pressed for the death of Christ, what was done in his passion, however, cannot be indistinctly imputed to all Jews then living, nor to the Jews of today.’
This is the position to which I fully and unreservedly adhere. I firmly reject and disassociate myself from any other interpretation of my words.”
Father Gumpel told ZENIT that the accusation of anti-Semitism “is totally out of place, as my family was harshly persecuted by the Nazis and, as a result, I myself had to spend the years of my youth outside my country to avoid being killed.”
A spokeswoman for Canadian Broadcasting Corp., Sandy Genelius, told the Associated Press, “We feel very strongly that quote was not taken out of context and we stand by our story.”
Regarding his interview with ‘60 Minutes,’ Father Gumpel said the program ignored his “precise and documented refutations” of Pope Pius' detractors, like John Cornwell, British author of Hitler's Pope.
“I think it is not honest to omit all this,” he said.
Given his recent negative experiences, the Jesuit said he is likely to be more careful in granting future television interviews.
“I think I'll take some more precautions,” he said.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:Jewish Man Recalls Childhood With the Future Pope
“This is the kind of man he is,” Bienenstock, a retired clock-maker, said. “He grew up with us and he never forgot us. That's why he demanded from the Christian world to understand that the Jews of today cannot be held responsible for the crucifixion … I don't understand what more people want from him.”
Bienenstock recalled his famous neighbor's personality as a young boy. “He was known to be a genius, not that we ever thought he would become pope or anything. We treated him the way he treated us, always with gentleness … At night, I used to run over and he'd let me copy his homework. For a period at school, we shared a bench, which was very profitable for me. I hope they don't cancel my degrees for saying so.”
Jewish Philosopher Asks: What More Do Jews W ant?
Disturbed by recent harsh statements issued against the Pope in various publications, Levy noted that the Pope decried the Holocaust in Auschwitz in 1979, Mathausen in 1988, Majdanak in 1991 and during a visit to the synagogue in Rome on April 13, 1983.
“What more can be said?” Levy asked. “Is there a more profound way for a pope to weep over a metaphysical tragedy?”
Levy, born in Algeria to a wealthy industrial Jewish family, further addressed the problem of Pius XII's alleged silence during the Holocaust.
“What do we know about these silences? In light of recent history, are we sure that Pius XII was pro-German, including a pro-Nazi whose portrait was glossed in 1963 by Protestant writer Rolf Hochhuth in The Deputy?
“The only sure thing is that John Paul II, the present Pope, even before the recent solemn penitential act, has not ceased to ask forgiveness for ‘our passivity in face of the persecutions of the Jews and the Holocaust,’ for the ‘insufficiency’ of the Church's opposition to the Nazis, for the criminal thoughtlessness of guilty Christians ‘for not having been sufficiently strong to raise their voice’ against ‘the horror of the disappearance of their Jewish neighbors.’”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----------- TITLE: Working Fathers Should Follow St. Joseph DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — Pope John Paul II urged artisans, in Rome for their Jubilee day, to follow in the footsteps of St. Joseph.
“Regard him as an example of industry and honesty in daily work,” the Pope said at an outdoor Mass in St. Peter's Square March 19, the feast of St. Joseph.
St. Joseph, who taught his son Jesus carpentry, is the patron saint of artisans.
“In the course of his earthly existence,” said the Holy Father, “Joseph became the humble and hardworking reflection of the divine paternity that was revealed to the Apostles.”
By learning the lesson of God's love for humanity as expressed through the sacrifice of his Son, the Pope told 35,000 artisans from all over the world, “You bring strength and a concrete sense to the values which have always characterized your work: the qualitative aspect, the spirit of initiative, the promotion of artistic abilities, freedom and cooperation, the correct relationship between technology and the environment, the attachment to the family, good relations between neighbors.”
Praising artisans for their ability to blend culture and faith, John Paul called St. Joseph the “icon of this wonderful synthesis between a life of faith and human work, between personal growth and commitment to solidarity.”
The feast of St. Joseph is also celebrated as Father's Day in many countries, and the Pope called attention to that day's Scripture reading about Abraham and his willingness to follow God's command to sacrifice his son Isaac.
“It is by virtue of the extraordinary witness of faith, offered in that circumstance, that Abraham obtains the promise of numerous descendants.”
The Pope has often preached on the figure of Abraham as a spiritual father for Christians, Jews and Muslims.
Unable to make a pilgrimage to Ur, Abraham's birthplace, in modern-day Iraq, John Paul made a “spiritual” journey there instead, on the eve of his trip to Egypt in February.
After the Mass, at the weekly Angelus, the Holy Father prayed that fathers around the world follow St. Joseph's example, “ready for any sacrifice for the good of their families.”
Pilgrims from several countries, including more than 1,500 from Poland, traveled to Rome for the March 19 Mass. Representatives of various professions, from carpenters to typographers, attended.
The Prayers of the Faithful, recited in various languages, were “for the persons all over the world who suffer abuse in their work and live in inhuman conditions,” and “for all those who live in insecurity about tomorrow, for those who do not have work, and for the many youths who are looking for their first job.”
Wearing clothes and uniforms associated with their various professions, artisans presented the Pope with gifts ranging from a brick, representing plans for a school for artisans in Ethiopia, to a lamp, the symbol of one organization's project to build centers of religious formation and vocational training in India.
Later in the day, one association of artisans from Deruta, a town in central Italy renowned for its ceramics, erected a display area near St. Peter's complete with kilns, pottery wheels and paint.
Sergio Ficola, the association's president, called the celebrations “splendid.”
Gesturing with blackened hands toward his wood-burning oven, he said he traveled all over the country to show people “how hard this job really is.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----------- TITLE: The Sudan Tragedy: A Slaughter of Innocents DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:KAUDA, the Nuba Mountains, central Sudan — The sun was already high by the time we had trudged up to the ridges of the hills that ring the fertile Kauda Valley. Visitors to this Scotland-sized highlands learn quickly that even the simplest errands in a land without roads and vehicles require half-day treks over rugged terrain.
This early morning hike occasioned little if any of the banter that ordinarily accompanied such excursions. Today, we constituted a party of mourners paying our respects to the families of the youthful victims of last month's Sudanese air force bombing raid on a Catholic school in the Nuba Mountains that left 19 children dead, along with an adult teacher, and a mother of one of the fatally injured girls, whose heart failed at the scene.
Five of the 17 wounded in the attack later died of their injuries, while three children required amputations.
Our team, consisting of Dr. David Coffey, of Montgomery, Ala., representing the Bethlehem, Pa.-based Catholic Medical Foundation, myself, a journalist, and photographer James Nicholls of San Francisco, had been dispatched to the area by Bishop Macram Max Gassis, of the local El Obeid Docese in central Sudan, traveling in the United States at the time of the attack, to conduct a fact-finding mission on the Feb. 8 tragedy. We were also there to deliver a personal letter from Bishop Gassis, a legendary human rights champion in Sudan, to his besieged flock.
Bishop Gassis initially denounced the attack in a Feb. 11 press release calling the bombing of children “the true face of this war.” For nearly two decades, ethnic African peoples of central and southern Sudan have resisted attempts by northern Arab elites to impose religious and cultural hegemony on the whole country. The conflict has only intensified since the National Islamic Front seized power a decade ago. Since 1983, more than two million people have died as a result of the war, mostly from man-made, or “political,” famine.
Our first stop that morning had been to the grave of Roda Ismail, 22, the school teacher who had perished trying to shield her students from the three shrapnel-laden blasts which a Russian government plane unleashed on a schoolyard full of children.
Not from the Kauda area, she had been buried within hours of the bombing in a hollow near the school — a simple mound of earth covered with thorn bushes to protect it from wild dogs. She was due to be married this month.
The other victims were buried, as is the custom among the Nuba, near their families, in the courtyards of their stone and thatch dwellings, or in secluded spots known only to relatives. One grave along the side of a footpath was capped by a child's bloodied exercise book.
Il barraka fikum (Blessing be upon you), we said in the traditional Arabic greeting of condolence to Nuba farmer Omar Kharshiet, the first of many grieving parents we would meet that day. Like many in this wind-swept valley, Omar had heard the bombing echo through the hills. Soon, relatives appeared, bearing the lifeless body of his youngest son Hydar, 11, up the slopes.
Government disclaimers notwithstanding, all the evidence on the ground underscores the deliberate nature of the attack. While under the control of the Sudan People's Liberation Army, the anti-Khartoum insurgents, Kauda is a civilian settlement. There are no garrisons or guerrilla training facilities nearby. The school could not have been mistaken for anything else. According to local eyewitnesses, helicopter gun ships conducted reconnaissance missions in the area three days before the attack.
Second of a Series
Not that bombing raids are anything new for the Nuba, an ancient African people which has been resisting government attempts to drive them off their ancestral land for a decade — and at a staggering human cost. According to estimates published by the U.S. Committee for Refugees two years ago, the Nuba have lost more than 250,000 in the past ten years to Khartoum's campaign against them, a third of their entire population.
Kauda itself has been a frequent target of the government's planes. Only last July 17, a random bombing of the area killed eight Nuba children tilling fields.
Given that, the regime's bombing of civilians, especially children, has a kind of horrific logic. “Truly,” as Bishop Gassis said in a Feb. 11 statement on the bombing, “this attack is an unbridled attempt to destroy the Nuba's hope, and, indeed, their future, by destroying their children,” and, ultimately, sapping the population's ability to resist.
Beyond that, the fact that the target was a Catholic school associated with the work of Bishop Gassis is hardly a coincidence. The most well-established school in the area, with more than 200 students, a sizable minority of whom are Muslims, Kauda's Holy Cross school reflects the Church's commitment not only to provide aid to Sudan's war-torn minorities, but to help restore the social fabric, the institutions of normal life destroyed by decades of deprivation and war.
“There's no doubt about it,” said Roberto Bronzino, a relief coordinator for Bishop Gassis, based in Nairobi, Kenya, “the Church and its mission is on the regime's target list.”
The regime's military “logic” has been on grand display since the Kauda bombing. Afew days after the attack, and on the day after U.S. condemnations of Sudanese air attacks on civilians, government planes attacked civilian concentrations in Panryang, south of the Nuba Mountains. And on March 3, the government bombed a hospital compound in Lui, near the southern Sudanese city of Juba, killing three and injuring scores of civilian patients and staff.
This, despite the fact that Khartoum has been engaged in what many observers have aptly called a “charm offensive’ in the Arab world and the West since last summer. President Clinton, for example, sent his new special envoy, Harry Johnston, a former Democratic congressman from Florida, to Khartoum earlier this month to pursue “dialogue” with the regime, and to discuss reopening the US embassy closed in the wake of the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The Lui bombing occurred while Johnston was meeting with Sudanese officials in Khartoum.
Kauda, however, is a world away from the geopolitics the attack on its children has inspired.
“For much of the outside world,” Bishop Gassis wrote in a Feb. 19 call for a Day of Prayer for the Kauda victims, “the young students of Kauda are war statistics. But, for us, they are much more than that: They are our children, whose struggle for education in the midst of war was itself a sign of extraordinary courage and hope.”
But on a wind-swept hill in the Nuba Mountains, I heard something even simpler: Amourning father say, as we parted company, “You understand that we will never leave here now, no matter what [the regime] does to us. We will never leave the bones of our children to them.”
Gabriel Meyer writes from Los Angeles
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Gabrielmeyer ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:Anti-Defamation League Praises Pope
Over a stenciled drawing of a pensive Pope, the headline read in bold letters: “We salute Pope John Paul II on his historic visit to Israel.” Beneath the headline, in smaller print, the advertisement continued, “As pope, John Paul II has dedicated himself to reconciliation between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people. He has established full diplomatic relations between the Vatican and the State of Israel.
“He has shown his solidarity with victims of the Holocaust in his speeches and sermons on numerous occasions, and has denounced anti-Semitism as a sin. He has also called upon Christian scholars to avoid any anti-Jewish interpretation of the Christian scriptures, further demonstrating his belief that the Jewish people ‘are our dearly beloved brothers.’ The Anti-Defamation League shares his goal of making the world a better place to live for people of all religions and races.” A March 24 editorial in Ha'aretz, one of Israel's major newspapers, said the Pope's visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial was “in the spirit of genuine brotherhood.”
“The visit of Pope John Paul II to Yad Vashem yesterday represented the climax of a historic process and the opening of a new chapter in the relationship between Christians and Jews.
“The Pope did not deviate in his speech from statements he has made in the past, but the historic event will be engraved in the annals of human history beyond the meticulous analysis of exactly what was and was not said there.”
Yedioth Ahronot, Jerusalem's largest daily, in a commentary said the pope's remarks “opened a cornerstone to a new relationship between the Catholic Church and Judaism.”
President of Philippines Halts Executions for Jubilee
DESERETNEWS.COM, March 24 — Philippine President Joseph Estrada has approved a request made by the Filipino bishops for a moratorium on executions to mark the Holy Year, the online edition of the Salt Lake City daily reported.
The Philippines has executed seven men by lethal injection since the death penalty was reinstated in 1994. The moratorium will effectively commute the sentences of at least 18 inmates to life in prison.
Father Roberto Olaguer, a prison chaplain, said death row inmates at the national penitentiary clapped their hands and jumped for joy when he announced the moratorium. They later sang a thanksgiving song.
One inmate, Renato Robles, who was convicted of rape and murder and had been scheduled for execution April 5, stood up in his cell and slowly tore up a farewell letter he was writing to his mother, Olaguer said.
Presidential Executive Secretary Ronaldo Zamora said the moratorium will mean at least 18 prisoners will see their sentences reduced from execution to life in prison because officials will not be able to put them to death within the state-prescribed six-month period from the time of conviction.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Vaccines and Abortion DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:One letter begins this way: “You goofed!”
It sums up many comments on the story “Vaccine from Aborted Fetus Cell Lines Judged Morally Acceptable,” about the St. Louis Archdiocesan decision (by Joseph Kenney of the Catholic News Service, in the March 12–18 Register).
“This is like saying abortion is OK if it is used for a good purpose,” continued the letter. “Or the end justifies the means. Anybody taking theology 101 knows that the end does not justify the means.”
The tragic reality is that the use of aborted children is linked, in its past, to the hepatitis-Avaccine in question. But the immorality of using it is not as clear-cut as it may appear.
The principle that “You cannot do something evil so that something good may come from it,” is certainly true. Work that destroys a human life, at any stage and for any reason, is certainly wrong.
But, once such work has been done, and has produced a beneficial vaccine, should that vaccine be avoided? Not on the ends-and-means principle.
After all, if we were to avoid using any good that was the result of evil acts, we would find ourselves condemming the adoption of the child of an unmarried mother. We would also find ourselves shunning things we use every day: technological developments originally made in producing immoral weapons, etc.
Still, in the case of an evil so great and so pervasive as abortion, many find good reason to oppose the vaccine.
The U.S. bishops' point-man on human life questions is Richard Doerflinger. In battles in the National Institutes of Health and Congress, he has provided a great service to the pro-life cause. His answer on the question of vaccines, speaking to our sister publication, Catholic Faith & Family (Nov. 21-Dec. 4), is perhaps the best.
“Certainly, the abortions [for research] were immoral, but the idea that a person is complicit in that act many years later is a difficult argument to make. Nevertheless, it's worthwhile to insist to the vaccine manufacturers that they produce these vaccines in other ways in the future.
“ACatholic may want to make a moral statement by refusing the vaccine, but the people who analyzed the issue didn't feel that was a moral requirement.”
Nonetheless, he added, “If there are alternatives available that don't use fetal tissue from abortions, it would be vastly preferable to use those.”
* * *
When Ted Turner promised a $1 billion donation to the United Nations, it was hailed as a humanitarian gesture. He set up his United Nations Foundation to give out the money in yearly sums. But, as its March 23 press release makes clear, the group's main interests aren't really humanitarian: Its programs eliminate people through population control and endanger lives by removing the social stigma from sexual immorality.
The $17 million in the newest round of donation breaks down as follows:
$6 million for condoms in Southern Africa.
Curbing the Spread of HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa is a noble and reachable goal. We already know how to prevent AIDS: Stop extramarital sex. But the foundation's plan to sponsor condom promotions will give high-profile approbation to extramarital sex and only contribute to a risky sexual climate.
$3 million for abortion and contraception for Bangladesh girls. Education in life-skills for women is important, and a bit of that will be in two grants from the foundation. But a main recipient is the U.N. Population Fund, which plans to stress “issues of adolescent reproductive health care.”
$2.5 million for abortion clinics in Honduras.
Sadly, though Hondurans have many basic needs, Turner's foundation only offers them abortion — which amounts to cultural imperialism in a Catholic country.
Finally, one of the foundation's major grants is made for a good cause — $1 million to relief efforts in Mozambique.
Why can't the foundation designate more money to eliminating the sufferings of the poor, and less to eliminating the poor themselves?
----- EXCERPT: Editorial ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----------- TITLE: A Suffering Mystic Whose Faith Bore Miracles DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:by Renzo Allegri Servant Publications, 2000 270 pages, $14.99
Many people drawn to Padre Pio are attracted not so much by the Capuchin friar's famed stigmatic wounds, but by the sublime mystical life the wounds point to. Journalist Renzo Allegri seems to recognize this, for his focus is on the recently beatified Italian as a patient spiritual father who cures, converts and lures lax Catholics back to the Church. He sees Padre Pio as a “man of hope” because of the priest's propensity to constantly look to God for all good things — a quality which enabled him to see the positive even in the darkest hours. And many of his hours were dark, indeed.
Allegri's biography spans Padre Pio's life, from his obscure beginnings in remote Pietrelcina through his family trials, schooling, novitiate and priestly life. A loner by nature from very early on, he is misunderstood even in his own religious community. At San Giovanni Rotondo, where he spent his entire adult life, his fellow friars keep their distance from him because of his nightly brawls with demons, who beat him — physically — until he bleeds. He keeps the entire house awake with fear and no one gets any sleep. In words more chilling than any a Stephen King character might come up with, Padre Pio tells another priest: “If you saw what I saw, you'd be dead.”
Allegri delves into an incredible aspect of Padre Pio's mystical life when he documents the case of a wealthy nobleman whose wife unexpectedly bears a daughter in the family courtyard while the nobleman lies dying. Padre Pio mysteriously arrives upon the scene to see the baby, Giovanna, delivered in most unusual circumstances. The silent friar watches the event, much to his own surprise, and then he is suddenly whisked away. But Padre Pio had never left the monastery at San Giovanni Rotondo. How could he be in two places at the same time? The writer calls the occurrence bilocation, yet Padre Pio would not have any clue at all about such a foreign word. He only knows that he is in the monastery one minute and witnessing the birth of a child the next.
To add to the mystery, the Virgin Mary appears in the garden as well, and her message to Padre Pio is very clear: “I am entrusting this child to you. Now she is a diamond in the rough, but I want you to work with her, polish her, and make her as shining as possible because one day I wish to adorn myself with her. Do not doubt. She will seek you out, but first, you will meet her in Saint Peter's.” Our Lady vanishes. Padre Pio is back at the friary. Allegri's story is certainly curious, but typical for the friar. Even Padre Pio remarks, “I am a mystery to myself.”
He set out to be a poor friar who prays — and ended up a great man of hope.
Now the author moves to St. Peter's Square, where Padre Pio meets Giovanna Rizzani in 1922 as the young woman walks with a friend. She has doubts about the faith and would like to confess. Padre Pio mysteriously appears before her; she unburdens her sins and confesses her unbelief in a nearby church. Then he disappears. The next year, when Giovanna visits the monastery for the first time, Padre Pio stops in a crowd and cries out, “My daughter, at last you've come to me. I've been waiting for you for so many years! I was present at your birth and you will be present at my death.”
Allegri goes on to detail how, on Padre Pio's final night, Giovanna has a vivid dream about her spiritual father's last hours. The last sacraments, the furnishings, even the small photos on a dresser — Giovanna describes them all just as they are, in spite of the fact that no woman has ever gained access to a cell at the monastery.
Later, the Capuchins affirm the accuracy of the scene in her dream, and Allegri relays the turn of events as only a detective with a dogged eye for detail could. Allegri points out that, in adulthood, Giovanna was personally trained by Padre Pio to become a Third Order Franciscan; it was only after this that he revealed his secret to her: “The Virgin Mary entrusted you to me, and now I have to take care of your soul.”
For 50 years, Padre Pio gives himself to “God's suffering children.” He is a living, bleeding crucifix who humbly accepts the embarrassment that comes with bearing his strange wounds.
When Jesus comes to call his servant home, Padre Pio asks his attending friar, again and again, for the time. Then he whispers, over and over, “Jesus, Mary,” until his death in the early morning hours of Sept. 23, 1968.
As with any individual of extraordinary humility and piety, Padre Pio has his detractors. Some have tried to paint him as a grumpy old friar who threw penitents out of the confessional and snubbed pilgrims who traveled far to touch his stigmatically wounded hands. Those looking to substantiate such myths will have to look elsewhere than to Renzo Allegri's biography.
Meanwhile, those seeking to increase their understanding of — or devotion to — this widely beloved, often misunderstood man of God will find much to feed on in these pages.
Regina Marshall writes from Hamden, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Reginamarshall ----- KEYWORDS: Education ----------- TITLE: Letters DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:Vaccines and Abor tions
I am shocked and saddened to see the St. Louis Archdiocese make the statement that the use of the Hepatitis-A vaccine, taken from aborted fetus cell lines, is morally acceptable (“Vaccine From Aborted Fetus Cell Lines Judged Morally Acceptable,” March 12–18). And Ted Furton from the National Catholic Bioethics Center should know better than to take such a stand when, less than a month ago, he cried out for Catholics to protest the National Institutes of Health (NIH) request for federal funding of stem cell research involving human embryos.
The two moral atrocities are really not different from one another. By [quoting Father Edward Richard's] statement that “the use of the vaccine is not intrinsically evil … certainly the origins are,” the message you are sending is that abortion is OK as long as the outcome produces something good. And such a statement is no different from the convoluted theory used by the NIH in attempting to procure federal funding, which is that the actual funding would not be used to destroy the embryo, so the research could be divorced from the destruction itself. In both cases, human babies must be destroyed to produce the desired results.
Since 1973, Roe v. Wade has decided that embryos or fetuses are not persons and therefore are not entitled to legal protection or rights. And so we go about treating them as such, by using human remains of deliberately killed babies to create pharmaceutical products. Instead of being a precious gift from God, human life is treated as a commodity. How can you expect any good Catholic to buy into that? I will quote two sources that do not support what the Archdiocese of St. Louis is saying. The first comes from the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “Research or experimentations on the human being cannot legitimate acts that are in themselves contrary to the dignity of persons and to moral law” (No. 2295). The second comes from Dr. Edmund Pellegrino, director of bioethics at Georgetown University: “You cannot do something evil so that something good may come from it.” Need I say more?
Debi Vinnedge Clearwater, Florida
Please tell me this is a mistake. This is Nazi Germany revisited. We have had a noncontroversial vaccination for years — even before abortion was legal. I pray God you correct this error. This is the crack in the door our enemies are looking for. Please give arguments against using aborted babies to benefit someone else. In your article on the first page [of the same issue], Franz Jaegestaetter gave his life rather than help a Nazi dictator even when clergy were asking him not to follow his conscience. God help our priests teach as Jesus taught. Please, National Catholic Register: Stay on track.
Ruth Sweeney Springfield, Ohio
Editor's note: We received many letters on this question. Our response is in the editorial, above.
And the Winner Is …
Re: “And the Winner Is ..” (March 19–25):
Michael the Archangel defeated the angel of many names — Devil, Satan, Legion, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Father of Lies, Serpent — and barred him from the heavenly hosts. But the Devil won the next round in the Garden of Eden, when he seduced God's children with guile. Seeking the ruin of more souls, he slithered through Sodom and Gomorrah. Later, with wiles and wickedness, he corrupted an empire. But that was not enough. He needed a wider victory. In roaming the world, he came to a place called Hollywood, Calif., and there, in the early part of the 20th century, he settled.
There was a new phenomenon called moving pictures. He wouldn't loose his legions in a rush to use this made-to-order medium. He would co-opt it with cunning, with patience, with allure. He would create his “smoke” by combining awesome acting and a plenitude of pathos. His prize would be an Academy Award in the year 2000 for a picture called Cider House Rules. If you listen closely in the darkened theater, you can hear the master of deceit whispering slowly and seductively through his cupped hand: “But did God really say…”
John F. O'Brien Ocala, Florida
Whose Hug is it, Anyway?
Could John Grondelski possibly have chosen a worse example — a prosecuting attorney's decision not to file murder charges against a 6-year-old — to illustrate his otherwise important point that Freud has been too widely used as a pretext to exempt some from criminal punishment (“Two Jewish Fathers,” March 19–25)?
Whatever point one wants to make about Freud, does Grondelski seriously think 6-year-olds should be tried for capital offenses? If so, Grondelski should at least consider that the Catholic Church's Code of Canon Law, which also prohibits homicide by its members and bans prosecution for any criminal offenses, no matter how heinous, when committed by anyone age 15 or younger. Perhaps canon law is too generous, but in choosing such an extreme example for his [Indepth] essay, Grondelski just made it a little easier for people to dismiss his (and indeed, the Church's) warnings not to let pop psychology supplant society's basic moral sense.
Edward Peters San Diego, CA
John Grondelski responds: Edward Peters has rightly noted my main point: “not to let pop psychology supplant society's basic moral sense.”
I argued that fathers have a duty to be fathers, and that their hugging and disciplining responsibilities are nontransferable to society. Residing in a country where 10-year-olds are occasionally tried for crimes (a practice the European Court of Human Rights challenged just this month), I am certainly not in favor of prosecuting 6-year-olds for murder. My criticism was of prosecutors and politicians who let “big-hug” remedies substitute for calling people to account for their moral agency — even when they're a lot older than 6.
History Lesson
“The Church in America: Teachers and Leaders” (Feb. 27-March 4) is more, I believe, presented from the writer's personal view of Catholic American history rather than a pure historical presentation.
I take issue with [the writer's] statement that “Catholic higher education institutions were often criticized, even by Catholics, as second-rate when compared to many public … institutions. … They were seen as one of the reasons for the anemic state of Catholic intellectual life in the United States in the ‘50s.”
This may have been the view of Msgr. Tracy at Catholic University, but it was not, I believe, the general consensus at all [among] either the secular or religious high educators at that time.
Rather, the current “anemic state of Catholic intellectual life” began in full swing in the mid-1960s — culminating with a group of prominent Catholic educators who declared in their 1967 Land O'Lakes statement: “The Catholic university must have true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.”
Far from “creating much-needed stability in the Catholic colleges and universities,” it destabilized and deconstructed the true mission of Catholic education. That is to educate in truth the whole person in a truly Catholic environment.
Ruth E. Kern Tulsa, Oklahoma
Who Has Sinned Against Unity?
I was shocked to see Martin Luther's picture with the others that the Church has sinned against (“We Have Sinned,” March 12–18). Please … explain why his picture was included.
John Vernile Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania
Editor's note: Martin Luther, who was a Catholic priest, illustrates the main concern Pope John Paul II cited in his Jubilee Day of Pardon address: Catholics who caused disunity. The graphic in question appears again opposite this page.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----------- TITLE: Don't Let 'Geniuses' Blind You With Science DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:Please let this be a lesson to any and all who believe that they are not equipped to go up against some of the big names opposing us in our defense of the culture of life: Don't be intimidated. (Or in the words of Christ, so often repeated by Pope John Paul II, “Be not afraid!”) Our opponents may be loud, they may possess impressive vocabularies, and they may even be quoted regularly in the prestige media. But, really, their arguments are the same ones you've heard again and again. In other words, pretty pedestrian and noticeably lacking in moral insight.
You would think I would have learned this by now, after 10 years “out there,” debating the big names in the abortion industry. But still I suffer before every debate with the idea that my opponent is smarter, or smoother, or has more Ivy League degrees or experience than me.
Recently, I was asked to debate one of the leading voices on the opposite side of the debate concerning the new reproductive technologies. My opponent had degrees from several of the best schools in the country, including Harvard for his doctorate. He has worked at some of the most famous hospitals in the country and published one of the leading books in the field of new reproductive technologies. His thoughts are duly quoted in the major media whenever there is breaking news from the labs of biogeneticists around the world.
My early mornings and late nights were ruined from the moment I agreed to debate this man. I read about 20 books over the course of 12 weeks, trying to play “catch-up” in the field in which he has labored for decades. I consulted with three experts in the field and badgered them to figure out the toughest questions I might be asked. I read my opponent's book twice and his past congressional testimony three times.
And what did I find at the debate? Not a whole lot. A man who knew a tremendous amount about manipulating human embryos in the lab — but little when the questioning turned from what can be done through technology to what ought to be done, and why.
At bottom, his “moral framework” was nothing more than this: People's desire to have biologically related children is too deep to frustrate. How they go about getting such children is not important so long as their “intent” is good. So if they want to get donated eggs and sperm, and hire a surrogate to gestate the baby, fine. If two homosexual men want to hire a surrogate and get a donor egg, fine. If a couple or an individual wants to clone someone, fine. If people want to buy custom-made embryos — whereby they can pick the qualities of the father and the mother at the same time — fine. People send their children to the best schools to give them an advantage, so why can't they buy them prenatal advantages? The morality of the act is determined by the intent of the individuals involved. If all “mean well” according to their own, individually defined moral codes, then all is well.
Real progress is measured by how well we treat the weakest among us.
How could anyone get to this position? By a complete disdain for the integrity and the physical reality of the human body.
In the view of this scientist, fully formed human embryos, guided by inner processes completely directing their development, are not human life worthy of their own existence. They're human and alive. But not “human life” in the same way as older unborn children or those already born. Again and again, my opponent commented on the similarity between the gestational patterns of humans and animals. (In fact, in 1988 congressional testimony, after predicting that apes might, in the future, be able to carry human babies to full term, he lamented that this could hurt the endangered apes!) He seems to see the human body in a demeaning way, vastly inferior to the mind, and fit even for destructive experimentation at certain stages.
You don't have to be a genius to win points against this view of humankind. I simply pointed out to my audience that this scientist's own description of the beginnings of human life reveal the tiny person's membership in the human race and his or her marvelous, intelligent, self-directed progress toward full development.
I asked the audience if the very fact that embryos are being destroyed by the thousands in the name of scientific research didn't, by itself, indicate our initial mistake in “manufacturing” life in the lab (or, in the words of the great Leon Kass, making man “simply another man-made thing”). I refused to allow any scientist to make “progress” synonymous with “technology discoveries” and insisted, instead, that real progress is measured by how well we treat one another — especially the weakest among us.
There's real appeal in this view of human life. Appeal that even the cleverest scientific trick can't disguise. And you don't have to be a scientist to understand it.
Helen M. Alvaré is director of planning and informa tion of the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Helen M. AlvarÈ ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: The Strength of the Pope on His Knees DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:The Church is a human reality with its mistakes: Its greatness is that it admits it.
To see the Pope, beaten like Christ the prophet and humiliated for the whole Church, asking pardon for the faults committed by Christians, moves me profoundly, as it has moved many in these times.
This request for forgiveness seems to me the most resplendent and the most telling witness to the newness of Christianity, thus marking the irremediable difference between the Christian and the non-Christian.
It is difficult for us to understand the importance of this papal gesture, which could easily be reduced to the parameters of revisionist history. What moves the Pope is not a merely political or propagandistic aim; I believe, rather, that John Paul II, provoked by a favorable circumstance — the celebration of the 2,000th anniversary of the Incarnation — wants to demonstrate the truth of Christ and of the Church. This truth is carried by people of flesh and blood, because this is the method that God chose in order to make himself known within history. For the mystery, otherwise unknown, communicates itself by means of a human factor: God came into the world as a child in the womb of a young Jewish girl, born in the flesh exactly like each one of us.
Thus no disproportion, no inadequacy, no error on the part of man can be an objection to Christianity. The existential limitation — the Bible calls it “sin” — that man experiences is not an objection to the handing-on and the translating of Christianity in history, because no wretchedness could eliminate the paradoxical nature of the instrument, the human factor, chosen by God in order to make himself known.
The Church is a human reality in which can be found unworthy people, rough people of little worth, sometimes violent, fragile and presumptuous individuals, inadequate parents and rebellious children. But the Church does not stand on the other side, that of the Pharisees and the sinless. Thus the Christian knows he is a sinner, and exactly the awareness of being a sinner is the first and most honest step that can be taken as regards oneself and others, if one doesn't wish to become presumptuously intolerant and violent.
This is why the request for forgiveness from others and from God is the purest act for the man who believes in God and cries out to him, as all the Psalms of Israel make evident to us every day.
It is therefore in order to affirm a positivity, the positivity of Christ present in history — and victorious — that man asks forgiveness. And it is in order that this positivity be for the whole world that the Pope goes down on his knees, taking upon himself the faults of all and of each one. Precisely not judging them in the name of an abstract morality or laws imposed by humans, but renewing the dynamics of conversion and forgiveness — this is not a yielding, but rather a strength, one that re-creates man before the Great Presence. Here is the difference.
The Christian is attached to no one but Jesus. All the ideologies have an aspect by which the follower is sure of at least one thing that he himself does, and that is what he will never agree to give up nor allow to be challenged.
The request for forgiveness seems to me the most resplendent and the most telling witness to the newness of Christianity.
On the other hand, the Christian knows that his efforts and all he possesses or does must always yield before the truth. So he is the only true fighter for the purification of the world and for jus tice.
Because justice is relationship with God, justice is God's plan; so whoever has met Christ does not wait an instant before helping the world to be better, or at least more bearable. He is also deeply convinced, though, that the world will always persecute him and accuse him of all kinds of evil.
The Pope on his knees does not suggest to me an image of weakness. It reminds me rather of [Roman slave revolt leader] Spartacus of old, who rises up with all the stature of his humanity in a supreme gesture of freedom, as an example offered for the always-desired happiness of each and every person. This Pope renews in me and in my friends the courage necessary to support the hope of men.
Father Luigi Giussani, founder of the Communion and Liberation move ment, published this first as a letter to Rome's La Repubblica newspaper.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Father Luigi Giussani ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: 'A Time of Purification' DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:POPE JOHN PAUL II'S ANGELUS MESSAGEOF MARCH 12
Dear Brothers and Sisters:
Today we have celebrated the Day of Forgiveness in the framework of faith of the Great Jubilee. This morning in St. Peter's Basilica, I presided over a moving and solemn penitential act. On this first Sunday of Lent, in the name of all the Christian people, bishops and ecclesial communities in different parts of the world, I have knelt before God to implore his forgiveness.
The Holy Year is a time of purification: The Church is holy because Christ is her head and spouse, the Spirit her vivifying soul and the Blessed Virgin and the saints her most authentic expression. However, the children of the Church know the reality of sin, whose shadows are reflected in her, darkening her beauty. For this reason, the Church does not cease to implore God's forgiveness for the sins of her members.
This is not a judgment on the subjective responsibility of brothers who preceded us — that is something that corresponds only to God who, unlike us human beings, is capable of “searching the heart and mind.” Today's act is a sincere acknowledgment of the faults committed by the children of the Church in the remote and recent past, and a humble supplication for God's forgiveness. This will undoubtedly awaken consciences, enabling Christians to enter the third millennium more open to God and his plan of love.
As we ask for forgiveness, we forgive. This is what we say every day when we pray the prayer Christ taught us: “Our Father … forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” May this Jubilee day bring all believers the fruit of reciprocal forgiveness given and received!
From forgiveness, reconciliation flowers. This is what we desire for the whole ecclesial community, for the ensemble of all believers in Christ, and for the whole world.
Forgiven and ready to forgive, Christians enter the third millennium as more-credible witnesses of hope. After centuries characterized by violence and destruction, and, after this particularly dramatic one, the Church presents to humanity, which is crossing the threshold of the third millennium, the Gospel of forgiveness and reconciliation, as the premise to building an authentic peace.
Be witnesses of hope! …
Beginning now, I thank those who will accompany me in these days of prayer, and I invoke the Blessed Virgin, Mother of Divine Mercy, to help all of us to live Lent fruitfully.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Beyond the Catholic Inferiority Complex DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:Catholics have been slandered for many different reasons in America. Probably the most damaging claim, however, was that Catholics here, supposedly like Catholics everywhere, are poorly educated and blindly submit to priestcraft. Real Americans boldly question, according to the standard view. Catholic Americans weakly obey. These charges, of course, have a long history beginning in the Protestant Reformation. When Protestantism was still the dominant religion of the American elites, Catholics were mostly poor immigrants. The combination of those two factors seemed to confirm the old case.
But America has changed a great deal in recent years. The old Protestant hegemony, which had quite a few good effects on this country's government and culture, has passed, and mainline Protestantism seems to be hemorrhaging adherents without wishing to turn to the one proven remedy: Christian orthodoxy.
The position of Catholics, however, has changed quite a bit as well. Arecent survey conducted by Steven Wagner of QVC Analytics revealed that active Catholics (defined as those who attend Mass at least three times a month) now have higher education levels, on average, than either evangelical/pietistic Protestants or members of the old, mainline Protestant denominations as a whole. (Episcopalians or other specific denominations, usually small in numbers, may still rank ahead of Catholics.) Active Catholics also have higher income and stock-ownership levels than these other groups.
This is remarkable news, but the word seems not yet to have gotten out to academics or our political class. In the past, allegedly value-free social science was used to make it appear that, besides their religious handicaps, the ethnic groups that formed the largest part of American Catholicism were themselves culturally stunted and stunting. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once criticized the “relative failure of the Irish to rise socially.” Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer believed that Italians stemmed from a culture where “intellectual curiosity and originality [are] ridiculed or suppressed” and their children were not “raised for new adventures.”
America's freewheeling economy and society have doubtless reshaped the old Catholic ethnics to a certain extent, but that hardly accounts for the spectacular success and achievement of groups that only a few decades ago were spoken of in terms of cultural pathology. As we now know, strong values and close-knit families can also be a great boon when a culture turns from mere individualism to outright hedonism and self-destruction.
Yet, if the old slanders were demonstrably wrong, there remains one clear failure among American Catholics: a proportionate influence on the culture. In many ways, it is understandable that, instead of journalism, education and other culture-forming professions, Catholics have chosen to go into law, medicine and business in large numbers. Given the anti-Catholicism that was, and still is, rampant among elite opinion-makers, Catholics have understandably preferred to tend their own gardens in honest callings.
Politics, too, has never been a strong suit for Catholics in America, except in the major cities where machine politics were often tied to Catholic communities. In the past, Catholics were intimidated or discriminated against by the Protestant elites.
But, whether we look at the culture or politics, why are Catholics, given their demonstrable successes and educational levels — to say nothing of sheer numbers, since Catholicism is the largest denomination in the United States, larger than the next 15 denominations combined — not more visible in America today?
This is a much more difficult question. There are many gifted Catholic writers and thinkers in this country. America knows — if not consciously, then subconsciously — that it needs something like the authoritative moral and cultural message that the Church possesses if it wishes to keep from slipping into social chaos. People all over the country have been telling pollsters in this election year that they are less worried about the economy or foreign threats than they are about what seems to be the undermining of the nation's moral foundations. No president or political party is capable of doing very much to shore up the American ethos.
So the renewal has to come from another source than politics. Catholics score high in patriotism and belief that government is important to good national life. They do not seem likely to abandon the country to forces that will destroy it. So what holds back a stronger Catholic influence? Perhaps the best way to describe the problem is to list the virtues that have been missing until the present moment:
Public courage. Most active Catholics draw a sharp line between what they are willing to tolerate in the public realm and what they desire for their own families. But, whether we look at the Internet, television, rock music, films, public schools or universities, the day has passed when that old public-private distinction could be maintained.
If you do not fight in public, you will lose what you hope to preserve in private.
An urgent prudence. Today the battle line has shown itself everywhere. Catholics who are students in medical and law schools, mature physicians and lawyers, business men and women, teachers and all of us in every walk of life will inevitably encounter things every day that to some degree challenge our faith and our commitment to others. Under the circumstances, not every confrontation will be successful or even advisable. But we have to recognize how urgent a task faces us to live faithfully as Catholics in America today.
Asense of vocation. Of ourselves we can do nothing. And choosing to work at changing America's public culture is likely to be unsettling, costly and socially isolating in many ways. But, if we acknowledge that we are being called to be faithful public witnesses in this difficult moment, we may find that, like the martyrs of every age, we are given the courage and power to do things we could never have imagined. At least a sizable minority of Catholics have to begin to think of this task as exactly what it is — a vocation.
Active American Catholics have the means and the opportunity to make an enormous difference not only in this country, but in the world. American culture today reaches to every part of the globe. Certainly one of the most urgent tasks for the new evangelization that Pope John Paul II has called for in this century is to make sure that America's immense influence, still a beacon of light for many people, does not go out and lead the world into even worse darkness.
Robert Royal is president of the Washington-based Faith & Reason Institute.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Robert Royal ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: 'Yes, We Are a Catholic School!' DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:The first word many of his colleagues use to describe him is energetic, yet many college presidents have that quality. What seems to set apart Jesuit Father Robert Spitzer of Gonzaga University is an uncanny ability to not waste a single ounce of his dynamism. “It's in his chemistry,” says Colleen McMahon, the school's associate dean of arts and sciences.
Since becoming president of the 112-year-old Jesuit institution in Spokane, Wash., in July 1998, Father Spitzer has launched more than 80 initiatives and projects. All of them flow from a vision that began forming when he, himself, was a Gonzaga student — a vision fine-tuned over the years by his spiritual and professional development.
“When I first came to Gonzaga, I was looking to make a lot of money,” admits Father Spitzer. “My faith had been important to me, but I was floating in a materialistic flux. Gonzaga turned my life around. I would not have recognized my vocation to the priesthood, or even to the practice of business ethics had I not gone to this Catholic school.” Now, he's not only at the helm of his alma mater, but also teaching the courses that shaped his own formation. His students seem to have picked up on the “vision thing”: They've taken to calling themselves “Spitzerites.”
Background
Father Spitzer earned a bachelor's degree in public accounting and finance from Gonzaga and entered the Society of Jesus in 1974.
He received master's degrees in philosophy from St. Louis University, in theology from the Gregorian University in Rome, and in New Testament studies from the Weston Jesuit School of Theology before earning his doctorate in philosophy from The Catholic University of America in 1989.
He began his teaching career as a graduate assistant at St. Louis University in 1978, followed by a two-year assignment at Seattle University and a six-year post at Georgetown.
In 1990, he returned to Seattle University, where he taught until his 1998 appointment at Gonzaga.
“Except for my family and the Jesuits, Gonzaga has formed me more than anyone else,” Father Spitzer told the Register. “Gonzaga encouraged just about every focus in my life and in the lives of so many others with whom I have been associated. The Masses, the atmosphere here, and the deep, deep friendships I made still influence me today. Gonzaga gave me a great gift. Now I can pay it back.”
Man with a Mission
As an alumnus, Father Spitzer has a love for Gonzaga that is evident in all he does. From the beginning of his tenure as president, he stated that his primary aim was to “help Gonzaga enhance its already profound mission.” Paul Buller, professor of business management and one of three faculty representatives on the board of regents, says Father Spitzer has built Gonzaga into “a national leader in developing leaders.”
He's done that by overseeing a wide array of initiatives. These include the construction of new science and performing-arts buildings, the securing of sizable endowments and the establishment of national institutes and conferences such as the Institute on Christian Philosophy and Natural Sciences, the Institute on Business Ethics, and the Institute for Faith and Reason (not to be confused with the institute recently founded in Washington, D.C).
Father Spitzer has also introduced a mission-centered hiring initiative. “I want people here who believe in our mission,” he says. “We want people who are good in their fields, but we also want people who want to develop faith and service in their students. It is the mandate I have been given by the trustees. It is a truth-in-advertising policy. It's our way of saying ‘Yes, we are a Catholic school!’”
Graduate business-school student Darren Sekiguchi is a student representative on the board of regents. He describes Father Spitzer as “every embodiment of what a Jesuit priest is. He is active at Mass, in the classroom, as an administrator and as a friend.”
Gonzaga alumnus Cindy Omlin admits that, for many years, she did not donate financially to the university. Now she is giving again, she says, in large part because of Father Spitzer and the vision he has brought to the university.
Having heard Father Spitzer speak several times, she says, “Father Spitzer is on fire for the Catholic faith. He articulates his passion for Christ and the meaning of our lives in Christ in an incredible way. He is seeking to re-establish the Catholic identity of the university as a way to transform individual lives and the culture.”
Catholicity on Campus
Father Spitzer's vision goes beyond merely secular initiatives. He also hopes to enhance Gonzaga's Catholic identity. Father Spitzer takes seriously the mission which states that “we are inspired by the vision of Christ at work in the world, transforming it by his love, and calling men and women to work with him in loving service of the human community.”
‘I want faith experiences that will speak directly to [students'] hearts so that they will respond to God poignantly with both heart and mind. As a student, I first needed the mind to liberate my heart.’
— Jesuit Father Robert Spitzer, Gonzaga University president
To that end, Father Spitzer named yet another Gonzaga alum and Spokane native, Jesuit Father William Watson, as the university's first vice president for mission.
“Father Spitzer's fivefold plan includes faith, ethics, service, leadership and justice,” says Father Watson. He adds that the plan is guided by Pope John Paul II's 1990 apostolic constitution on higher education. “Ex Corde Ecclesiae [From the Heart of the Church] states that those values are part of what a Catholic university has to impart. My job is to connect the various initiatives and projects in each of these areas.”
Father Watson founded the retreat programs at Georgetown University in 1986 and served as their director for 12 years. “Faith and spirituality have been, at best, extracurricular activities, existing only on the periphery of the intellectual and social cultures of most Catholic colleges and universities,” he says. “Father Spitzer envisions spiritual development being an integral part of the university experience for students and faculty in order to raise up leaders to transform culture.”
Father Watson's hope is to help students develop a life of prayer and faith. “We need to take faith formation as seriously as we take recreation,” says Father Watson. “We want to deepen their faith so that they may bring their particular Catholic vision to journalism, bioethics, medicine or whatever field they find themselves in.”
Father Watson explains that Father Spitzer is positively disposed to Ex Corde Ecclesiae. The president sees the strong connection between faith and reason in a society which desperately wants to separate the two.
Of his efforts, Father Spitzer says: “I'm not looking at everything and wanting it to be just like it was when I was a student; I want it to be even better than what I had.
I want faith experiences that will speak directly to [students'] hearts so that they will respond to God poignantly with both heart and mind. As a student, I first needed the mind to liberate my heart.My courses in metaphysics, ethics and Scripture liberated my heart so that the liturgies, retreats, campus culture and prayer groups deepened my love for God and others. This love, in turn, liberated my mind.”
Not everyone shared Father Spitzer's enthusiasm for Ex Corde Ecclesiae. The Spokesman-Review in Spokane thought he should take a “stronger position” in an article last year. They meant one more in line with presidents' fears that the document went too far.
“We need to dialogue on this,” Father Spitzer countered in the newspaper, “not draw lines in the sand.”
Whatever is happening at Gonzaga, the school's projected enrollment is up by 200 over last year. “We could easily have an incoming freshman class of 1,000,” says Father Spitzer, “but we capped it at 800.”
Was that decision an example of Father Spitzer's ability to know when to say “when” on his own high energy? Maybe. Maybe not. “Father Spitzer has started 81 initiatives as of today,” says Father Watson. “Tomorrow it might be 83.”
Features correspondent Tim Drake can be reached at tdrake@ncregister.com.
----- EXCERPT: Gonzaga University's President leads from the heart of the Church ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: Education ----------- TITLE: Education Notebook DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:Education Savings Accounts Move For ward
ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 23 — House Republicans are steering an education savings-account bill toward passage despite the threat of a presidential veto and the opposition of most Democrats, reported the Associated Press.
The tax-writing Ways and Means Committee on March 22 approved by 21–16 a five-point bill to give tax relief to parents and encourage spending both for public and private schools. The vote split along party lines except for Republican Rep. Nancy Johnson of Connecticut, who voted against the measure.
The bill would allow parents to place as much as $2,000 per year, per child, in education IRAs. Tax-free interest from those contributions could be used for transportation, tutors, books and any other expenses for K-12 public, private or parochial schools. It would expand an existing program that allows contributions of only $500, and only for college students.
The bill, which could reach the House floor by the end of March, parallels a measure passed by the Senate earlier this month by 61–37, six votes short of what would be needed to override a promised veto by President Clinton. The president has vetoed two bills that contained similar education savings account legislation.
$35 Million Windfall for Notre Dame
NOTRE DAME UNIVERSITY, March 21 — Computer industry executive and Notre Dame alumnus Thomas F. Mendoza has given Notre Dame $35 million, the largest single gift the school has ever received.
The donation will benefit Notre Dame's highly regarded college of business, recently ranked by Forbes as one of the top 20 in giving MBAstudents the best return on their investment and by Business Week as the provider of the best business-ethics curriculum in American higher education. It will be renamed the Mendoza College of Business.
What Would Wesley Say?
The encouragement comes in the form of naked Frisbee games played at a communal house founded as an experiment during the 1960s. Student Matthew Lerner, 18, said: “It's the idea of not judging anyone, of respecting one another's beliefs. It does not have sexual undertones,” reported the Telegraph.
The London daily also noted that the frivolity of “clothing optional” gatherings on Wesleyan's campus belies the school's name: John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, once gave a sermon entitled On Dress in which he argued that neither religion “nor any text of Scripture condemns neatness of apparel.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Education ----------- TITLE: Timeless Truths from a Top-Notch Tunesmith DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:Redemptorist Father Michael Barrett is a composer, musician and producer. Since 1990, he has sold more than 20,000 copies of his six albums. He recently released My Favorite Hymns and Sacred Melodies and a jazz collection, Collecting Shells. Legally blind, Father Barrett serves as director of the Archdiocese of Boston's office for persons with disabilities; he is also executive director of the Kolbe Association for the Sight Impaired. He recently spoke with Register features correspondent Tim Drake.
Drake: How did you get yourstart in music?
FatherBarrett: I grew up in a musical family and have been playing music since the age of 6. My mother played the piano and taught me my first piece — “When the Saints Go Marching In,” which I played with one finger. Because my fingers were not big enough for the piano, I studied the accordion for two years before returning to the piano. As a high school student, I played in a couple of different pop bands and studied with renowned Boston jazz teacher Charlie Banacas. At the age of 19, I was pondering the possibility of making music my livelihood and doing it full time. However, as I reflected on my experience as a traveling musician, I decided that if I were going to be a tramp, I would rather be a tramp for the Lord. I also studied organ while in seminary.
What led to your becoming a priest?
I always enjoyed going to church, especially if there was music. This brought me to the organ bench when I was 19 years old, and I began conducting the young adult choir. At that time I became much more interested in spirituality and went through an adult conversion experience. I was anxious to know more about my faith. In 1974, at the invitation of some friends, I got involved in the charismatic renewal. This led to my seeking out information on the religious life.
I initially began my search for religious community with the Franciscans. I also visited the question of vocation with the Jesuits, but I did not feel compelled to pursue either at that time. I completed my undergraduate degree in philosophy and theology at Boston College. It wasn't until I heard the words of Pope John Paul II on the Boston Commons in 1979 — “You young people, follow Christ; become priests!” — that I was compelled to complete my application for the Diocese of Manchester, N.H.
I began my studies for the priesthood at Mount Saint Mary's Seminary in Maryland in 1980. My years at “the Mount” were very special and very blessed. I was impressed when visiting because I would always find someone praying in the chapel at almost any hour of the day.
Has your visual impairment helped shape your music?
Because I was unable to participate in sports, I spent more time studying music. It has always been a release for me. It did not provide an escape, but an opportunity for me to grow interiorly. I wasn't distracted with all kinds of activities. Other children were not always kind to us because of our disability. They didn't understand why we could not see as well as they could.
My ear, however, was trained by what I could not see. Many who study in conservatories have to train their ear. I have good relative pitch, close to perfect. My ear was trained to hear so that I can hear music and replicate it.
What led to you recording your first album?
In 1990, I saw the need to integrate the Catholic message of our faith into a contemporary genre of music. The contemporary Christian music marketplace was already established by that time, but unfortunately with its evangelical and Southern Baptist influences, it did not lend itself to accepting many of the teachings of the Catholic Church, such as devotion to Mary, Jesus in the Eucharist, and the communion of saints. So I felt the call to get the ball rolling to get Catholic artists involved in contemporary Christian music.
As Catholics, the only Christian music that we are generally exposed to is that of sacred music in the liturgy and, as a liturgist, I appreciate this musical genre. But outside the liturgical celebration, contemporary Christian music with an emphasis on Catholic doctrine can fill a void for teens and young adults.
With John Michael Talbot setting the pace for Catholic artists, I still saw a greater need to provide a music venue that was a little more upbeat, something in the family of rhythm and blues, and Christian rock. This led to my first album, Worship in Spirit and Truth, a contemporary gospel album.
‘Contemporary Christian music with an emphasis on Catholic doctrine can fill a void for teens and young adults.’
What do you hope to accomplish with yourmusic?
One of my goals in producing music is to establish an ambiance where the listener can find respite and relaxation while at the same time enjoying inspirational melodies that have been tested by time. In choosing to do Angels Upon Ivory as my first solo album, I utilized sacred hymns which I interpreted in creating piano meditations such as “Immaculate Mary” and “Agnus Dei,” and to intersperse these meditations with segments of Gregorian chant.
Prior to the release of Angels Upon Ivory, I used these piano meditations as background music for a healing service. After the service, many people approached me and shared that this music was both therapeutic and calming. That is the primary goal of the music I now produce. However, I still enjoy working with contemporary artists such as Bernie Schoiner, whose most recent single was accepted as the theme song for Pilgrimage 2000, a youth-based apostolate in the Archdiocese of Boston, and will be performed before 30,000 people at Fenway Park on April 29.
Your journey to becoming a Redemptorist also inspired
Subsequent to my ordination, I still had a longing to embrace the religious life. After eight years of priesthood, I approached my bishop and shared with him my desire. In 1994, I joined the Redemptorists. My postulancy began on Jan. 5, the feast of St. John Neumann, at San Alfonso Retreat House in Long Branch, N.J.
Subsequent to my postulancy, I made my novitiate at Mount St. Alphonsus Retreat Center on the Hudson River in Esopus, N.Y. During my canonical year of novitiate, I recorded the piano meditations in Woodstock, N.Y. Simultaneously, I had a Gregorian chant choir record several tracks at the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Boston, where I now reside.
After my novitiate, I was assigned to the National Shrine of St. John Neumann in Philadelphia. It was during this assignment that I conceptualized and developed Angels Upon Ivory. The Gregorian chant segments which I had recorded earlier are those now heard on the album.
Being at the shrine and wanting to make St. John Neumann better known, I dedicated the album to my fellow Redemptorist. Thousands of copies have been sold, thereby making his name better known around the world.
What do you have planned next musically?
Musically, I'm hoping to release a new album entitled Garden Reflections at Grand Cateaux. Grand Cateaux is where I made my 30-day directed retreat in February of 1999. In keeping with my attempt to utilize sacred melodies, the album will feature hymns written in America. The featured instruments will include piano, flute, acoustic guitar, string arrangements and hammer dulcimer.
Tim Drake can be reached at tdrake@ncregister.com.
----- EXCERPT: Father Michael Barrett is called 'the singing padre' ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----------- TITLE: Prizer's Picks DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:Star Wars: Episode I —
The Phantom Menace (1999)
Western culture has often generated popular myths that combine Christian traditions with elements of pre-Christian spirituality.
Classic Christian fairy tales and the Arthurian legend depend on supernatural powers with no scriptural basis.
George Lucas'Star Wars films do the same with intelligence and imagination. His heroic Jedi knights are a cross between medieval Knights Templar and a New Age version of Tibetan warrior-monks.
In The Phantom Menace, a prequel to the original trilogy, two Jedi (Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor) travel to the planet Naboo to settle a trade dispute. As they accompany Naboo's queen to the Galactic Assembly, they're forced to land on a desert planet.
There they sense a young slave boy, Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd), has a special affinity with “the Force” and work to set him free.
Lucas' “Force” is closer to an impersonal, Eastern understanding of God than an orthodox Christian one. But the movie still poses worthwhile questions about the relationship between divine grace and power.
The Black Stallion (1979)
PBS and the cable channels regularly cough up appealing nature films, but none has captured the interaction between a wildlife environment and humans more poetically than The Black Stallion, based on Walter Farley's novel.
Young Alec Ramsey (Kelly Reno) befriends a high-spirited stallion stabled on an ocean liner on which he and his father (Hoyt Axton) are voyaging. When the boat is sunk during a fire, Alec is rescued by the horse and the two find themselves on a remote island where they bond.
After their return to the United States, the horse runs away. Alec locates him on a farm owned by retired horse trainer Henry Dailey (Mickey Rooney).
The boy and the stallion embark together on a racing career as Dailey trains him to be a jockey, with their sights set on a big victory.
Director Carroll Ballard doesn't manipulate the audience's emotions as expected in this kind of sentimental genre, concentrating instead of his story's visual beauty.
Like Black Beauty, this story has appeal for audiences whether they like horses or not.
Hoosiers (1986)
Basketball tournaments are top of the evening news right now, and Hoosiers shows us the inner workings of a high-school team where hard work and training are combined with generosity of spirit to produce a championship contender. New coach Norman Dale (Gene Hackman) has had some hard knocks in his past and would seem to have nowhere to go but up. However, his highly disciplined but unorthodox methods alienate the towns-folk, particularly after he hires the alcoholic father (Dennis Hopper) of a player as an assistant coach.
The movie is a Rocky-like drama about a likable underdog and his path to redemption against the background of some well-staged basketball games. Surprisingly for a Hollywood film of its era, Dale's team prays before each contest and respects its players' religious faith.
Arts and Culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----------- TITLE: In Honor of Mary's Mother DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:Vacationers en route to Cape Cod via Interstate 195 can't help but notice twin church bell towers rising over the hilly seaport city of Fall River, Mass. For decades, they've guided the faithful to St. Anne's Church and Shrine.
Founded in 1869, just as Fall River was becoming a major producer of cotton textiles, St. Anne's became the city's first French parish (by now the city is known throughout the region as an enclave of Portuguese-Americans). The Dominicans were entrusted with the church in 1887, and the second Dominican pastor had a vision to build this present edifice as both a local parish and a national shrine for pilgrims. The structure as it now stands was completed in 1906.
The first sight of the church can take visitors by surprise. In front of it, Kennedy Park unrolls like a green carpet, accentuating the grandeur of the turn-of-the-century architecture. I had to pull the car over to appreciate this vision in blue Vermont marble rising majestically from a granite foundation.
The style reveals a happy mix of Romanesque and French Gothic influences. Beneath the identical octagonal bell towers, which feature graceful domes topped by stately crosses, two prime marble statues grace the facade. A statue of the Good Shepherd hovers over the main entranceway; three stories above, between the bell towers, St. Anne stands with her daughter, Mary.
Inside, images of St. Anne appear in both the basement shrine church and in the grand upper nave and sanctuary. Both places are treasures.
Imposing Dimensions
This is no simple parish church. The nave is 273 feet long by 90 feet wide (120 feet at the transepts). Because St. Anne's can seat 2,000, all the diocesan events too big for the cathedral are held here. Near the sanctuary, the larger-than-life-size statue of St. Anne, holding her immaculate child, is patterned after her image in St. Anne de Beaupre church in Quebec. Her gold cloak has intricate designs; Mary's blue dress adds fleurs-de-lis. Anne looks lovingly at her child; Mary gazes at her mother intently. Carved from a single block of wood and decorated by Maestro Stalzenburg in Belgium, the image was blessed in 1893 and loaned to the Chicago World's Fair. The magnificent statue has been here since the church's dedication in 1906.
Looking at it, we can't help but be reminded of St. Anne's importance in the Holy Family — mother of Mary, grandmother of Jesus, wife of Joachim, mother-in-law of Joseph. Many saints must have pondered this. Images of some line the sanctuary and the nave's galleries like an honor guard. High above, St. Joachim faces the sanctuary, looking every bit the proud grandfather. Sts. Peter, Paul and the four Evangelists circle the sanctuary. Rows of other saints in the nave's triforium surround us as a sign we're meant for a supernatural destination. Their names, written in French, reflect the faith of the immigrants who built St. Anne's: Jeanne d'Arc, Jacques Maieur, Philippe, Hyacinthe, and St. Pie V (Pius V, a Dominican Pope). Overhead, the coffered ceiling vault is a forest of decoratively patterned red oak.
The stained glass windows, installed between 1959 and 1961 and recently refurbished, were crafted in France. Their modern designs list Old Testament events (La Creation du Monde), the sacraments and liturgical symbols. When the sun sets, the nave is bathed in vibrant red and orange from the west windows over the choir loft.
The massive Casavant organ here was custom-built for the church. With 4,518 pipes, it is considered the biggest and best in southeastern New England. The huge crucifix by the sanctuary represents one of the grand traditions here. On Good Friday, the church overfills as the figure of Jesus is taken from the cross, its arms folded, and the corpus processed around the church.
It's not an exaggeration to say that every spot you stop at inspires prayer. The ambulatory around the sanctuary has votive chapels with beautiful statuary.
Two honor the Holy Family and John the Baptist. The Rosary Chapel occupies the traditional place of the Lady Chapel directly behind the sanctuary. All 15 mysteries appear around a domed apse, where statues depict Mary and the Child Jesus giving the rosary to Sts. Dominic and Catherine.
Evidence of Devotion
The primary shrine to Good St. Anne is in the large basement church, where it holds a prominent place in the center of the nave. Here Ste. Anne et Marie stand before bursts of radiant glory. This is the popular image that has drawn the most fervent devotions ever since the shrine's opening. The double rows of crutches on either side of Good St. Anne are testimonies from thankful petitioners healed through her intercession. One of the Dominicans kept unofficial books of their grateful responses. The ocean of vigil lights around the shrine gives more evidence of the visitors she receives.
The St. Joseph chapel reveres St. Anne's son-in-law with the Child Jesus and, in a wooden altar bas-relief, reflects on his happy death with Jesus and Mary at his side. In another, three Dominicans who worked at this shrine are interred. One is Father Vincent Marchildon, who spent nearly 60 years here and began the perpetual Tuesday novena to St. Anne in 1928. Another side chapel is devoted to perpetual eucharistic adoration. The monstrance is a replica of one St. Clare used to chase the Saracens from Assisi.
Visitors are apt to stop in any day or night, and people also walk to the adoration chapel and shrine any hour from St. Anne's Hospital, directly across the street. Founded by a Dominican, it's still run by the Dominican Sisters of the Presentation of Tours.
This shrine is a haven to pray for solace, strength and serenity before Jesus and to his grandmother, good St. Anne.
Joseph Pronechen is based in Trumbull, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: St. Anne's Shrine distinguishes the skyline of an old New England mill town ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: Travel ----------- TITLE: Unsung Martyrs Saved The 20th Century DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:More Catholics were probably persecuted, tortured and martyred in the century just ended than in any previous century. And their deaths occurred all over the globe, on every continent except for Antarctica. In part, these deaths reflected the sheer size of the Church at the close of the second Christian millennium — over a billion people. Still, in the 20th century, Catholics also suffered under regimes the likes of which had not been seen since the brutalities against the first martyrs in ancient Rome.
Martyrdom is not a common notion today, even for Catholics. The recent retrospectives on the past century, for example, highlighted political or social events. But thousands of Catholics were martyred in the 20th century either for refusing to deny their faith or because Catholicism threatened dictatorial regimes advancing virulent anti-Christian ideologies such as Nazism or communism.
The stories of these brave men and women, almost all of whom peacefully accepted their deaths, forgiving their persecutors, need to be recovered because they are a living witness to a permanent feature of authentic Christian life. Contrary to the impression many people in prosperous countries have of a Church at peace with the world and perhaps even a little soft, persecution and martyrdom everywhere in the 20th century revealed a rock-hard faith beneath apparent ease.
In his encyclical preparing for the 2000 Jubilee Tertio Millennio Adveniente (As the Third Millennium Draws Near), Pope John Paul II wrote that those who are willing to die for the truth become like Christ himself and, throughout history, helped the Church to survive and grow. The Holy Father pointed out that to overlook the modern martyrs would be to neglect a crucial aspect of God's action in our time: “At the end of the second millennium, the Church has once again become a Church of martyrs. The persecution of believers — priests, religious and laity — has caused a great sowing of martyrdom in different parts of the world. … This witness must not be forgotten.”
The Pope himself will commemorate all the religious martyrs of the 20th century, Catholic and non-Catholic, at the Colosseum in Rome on May 7.
But even the Holy Father will only be able to name a small percentage of those martyrs. Most are unknown and will probably always remain so. Catholics know something of Maximilian Kolbe and Edith Stein (who both died at Auschwitz), or of Jesuit Miguel Pro, whose holy death was photographed, to the great embarrassment of his Mexican persecutors. But not many can name others. This is part of the reason why, for the Jubilee Year, dioceses on every continent have forwarded names of martyrs to the Holy See. In some countries, such as Spain, the Church has documented almost 8,000 people killed for the faith during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). In other countries, where the persecution and death continued over several decades, and in many cases still continue, tens of thousands died without a trace.
Across the Globe
From the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to Africa, Asia and Latin America, thousands of Catholics have disappeared into gulags, been gunned down by dictators, had their heads cut off by anti-Catholic fanatics, been thrown once again to savage beasts and, in some cases, been crucified. In Sudan, which is engaged in the most insidious anti-Catholic campaign in the world, there have been reports not only of martyrdoms and crucifixions, but Christians in the Nuba mountains in southern Sudan being sold into slavery.
Such outrages occurred throughout the 20th century. China, for example, has produced large numbers of martyrs. In the 1900 Boxer Rebellion alone, 30,000 Catholics died, including several dozen bishops, priests and religious. Since the Communist takeover in the late 1940s, thousands more have died in brainwashing camps and under laojiao, virtual slave labor. Almost every week brings more stories of disappearances, arrests or deaths.
In India, Catholic churches are regularly burned by Hindu fundamentalists, and both Hindus and local animist groups have harassed and killed Catholic converts. In Pakistan, which disagrees with India about everything else, an fundamentalist Islamic government persecutes Catholics. Even great charity is no protection. Mother Teresa's Sisters of Charity have been threatened in India and three of them were murdered in Yemen in the 1990s.
‘They Will Persecute ’
All this might seem merely the unfortunate byproduct of a sad century now passed. But we have it on Christ's authority: “They have persecuted me and they will persecute you.” The early Church thought persecution the usual course of affairs in a world that does not appreciate Christ's truth. St. Peter writes: “Beloved, do not be startled at the trial by fire now taking place among you to prove you, as if something strange were happening to you.” St. Paul agrees: “All that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution.”
Those of us living in mostly Christian societies like the United States think that persecution and martyrdom are things of the past. But they are going on all the time, and holy men and women all over the world are paying the ultimate price to keep the faith alive.
The Second Vatican Council reminded us: “The Church considers martyrdom, which makes the disciple similar to the master in the free acceptance of death for the salvation of the world and which makes them equal in the shedding of blood, as a splendid gift and as the highest proof of love. Even if there will only be a few, all must be ready to acknowledge Christ before all and to follow him in the persecutions that the Church will always encounter on the way of the cross” (Lumen Gentium, No. 42).
In the 20th century, however, the numbers were many and their value to all of us in the new Christian millennium now beginning is great.
Crossroads will soon publish Robert Royal's book The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Robert Royal ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Combat Training Comes In Handy DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:A former Army chaplain in Vietnam, Father Daniel McCaffrey now fights a different battle. Since 1996, Father McCaffrey has traveled in the United States and abroad to educate the public about the Church's teaching on birth control. On behalf of NFP Outreach, a ministry of his Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, Father McCaffrey has conducted hundreds of seminars and parish missions on the new, effective forms of natural family planning. He recently spoke with Register features correspondent Tim Drake.
Drake: What is the mission of NFPOutreach?
Father McCaffrey: The program's goal is to make people alert to [scientific] methods of natural family planning, and also to bring to their attention the moral precepts that underlie natural methods of family planning. The point is to bring the good news … in order to dispel the darkness of contraception and sterilization.
How is your message being received?
I always joke with my audiences that I bring a shield and have a car running outside in case they should decide to start stoning me. Frankly, I find that the message is being very warmly received. I have been very encouraged by the responses I get when I am on the road. Quite often, the audience will clap when I am finished.
In the last year or two things seem to be turning around. I think that people see that this is part of the new Catechism and that it is not going to go away. They have to accept it. I have been booked solid since January, and am hopeful that I may be able to bring another priest on board.
What do you tell parishioners during yourweekend missions?
On a weekend I start by giving the homily. I begin with the Scripture of the day and then go through what has been happening in the Church and what contraceptive use has done.
I talk about the basic teaching of the Church with regard to contraception and that the unitive and procreative aspects of marriage cannot be separated. To separate the two is an offense not only against marriage, but also against the Sixth Commandment. Contraception degrades the union between a husband and wife.
I tell couples that a man must love his wife just as Jesus loves his Church. Our Lord's love is not a contraceptive love; it is a fruitful love and we, as children of God, are a product of that love. Ahusband and wife must never be closed to that.
Between 80–90% of Catholics practice contraception and sterilization. This is a scandal! Politicians do not pay attention to us because we do not pay attention to the Church and the Pope.
Then I tell them about sterilization. This is a serious violation against the Fifth Commandment — Thou shall not kill. Mutilating one's body or the organs through which new life comes offends this commandment just as much as drinking or eating too much. It destroys the sacred powers of God.
Christ said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” If we are breaking those commandments and follow that to a logical conclusion then we are a Church filled with spiritual midgets. How can we be followers of Christ if we aren't even followers of Moses? We may have the rosary. We may have perpetual eucharistic adoration. But without the Ten Commandments it's like putting a gold cap on a rotting tooth. If we do not follow the teachings of the Church our eternal salvation is jeopardized.
[Natural family planning] can be used with a contraceptive mentality, so I also encourage those with large families. The great saints usually came from large families, and so I salute them along with the Church and the Pope for their generosity.
Tell us about the others you bring in during a weekend.
I invite the parishioners to an afternoon seminar with a physician, and invite in local physicians and health-care workers as well. The physician helps to show that the God who gave us the Ten Commandments is the same God who gave us the laws of physics and nature. God is not going to do anything contradictory in nature. I encourage the doctors and health care workers to set aside their excuses and practice true “Catholic” medicine.
The two most common excuses I receive from those in health care are: “If I don't do it someone else will,” and “I can't foist my morals on somebody else.” In response I tell them, “If someone else wants to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge or commit murder what has that got to do with you?” and “Others should not be able to foist their morals on you.”
It is a disgrace for any Catholic doctor to be a part of this culture of death. I say, if you are a Catholic doctor, then give the Gospel to your patients and do not be ashamed of it. Good medicine and good religion go together.
I also bring in witness couples from each of the various [natural family planning] methods so that those who are interested can sign up to learn more.
What do you see as the consequences of embracing a contraceptive mentality?
Bishop John Nolan once told me that “contraception is a cancer which is eating at the guts of the Church.”
Contraception also eats away at the marriage relationship. When couples contracept, a mutual coldness sets in. When women are degraded from a person to a thing, and are told to be ready whenever they are “needed,” a certain coldness sets in. This does not enhance couple communication or intimacy. It wears on a marriage and sets up a situation for divorce. Is it any surprise that the divorce rate among Catholics is approaching 60%?
Furthermore, it degrades spiritual life among our people. We have watered our faith down so much that it doesn't mean anything any more. [Jesuit] Father [John] Hardon has said that if we continue to contracept we are going to lose our faith.
Finally, our bishops are presiding over burial societies. The average age of a priest is 63. We are faced with vocation shortages and the closing of parishes. When will people wake up and smell the coffee? Thirty-five years of contracepting our brains out has resulted in the vocations crisis. Contracepting people are selfish by nature, whether they know it or not. They will not breed the generous children that give themselves to the religious life.
Why aren't parishioners hearing this from the pulpit?
There are many reasons, among them fear and ignorance. I always tell people that I am not there to blame or criticize them. The clergy has been silent on this issue for 35 years. I ask people to pray for their priests, that they may be able to stand up and give the full Gospel to the people. I had one priest in Scranton, Pa., who stood up and said, “I'm one of the priests that Father McCaffrey has been talking about, and I'm very sorry for my silence and that this has been a part of my life.”
Tim Drake writes from St. Cloud, Minnesota.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Father Daniel McCaffrey ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----------- TITLE: The Gospel Of Life DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:The Church's teachings about contraception are very much opposed to the prevailing opinions of the time — some consider them an affront (see Prolife Profile, this page). But Pope John Paul II, in his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, answers a journalist 's question about contraception by saying the Church will often be opposed to its times:
Is it true that the Church has come to a standstill and that the world is moving away from it? Can we say that the world is only growing toward a greater freedom of behavior? Don't these words perhaps hide that relativism which is so detrimental to man? Not only abortion, but also contraception, are ultimately bound up with the truth about man. Moving away from this truth does not represent a step forward, and cannot be considered a measure of “ethical progress.”
Faced with similar trends, every pastor of the Church and, above all, the Pope must be particularly attentive so as not to ignore the strong warning contained in Paul's Second Letter to Timothy: “But you, be self-possessed in all circumstances; put up with hardship; perform the work of an evangelist; fulfill your ministry” (2 Timothy 4:5).
(From the chapter titled,“The Reaction of the World”)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----------- TITLE: Did You Know? DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:Crime has risen 77% among youth in Canada over the last 10 years — a statistic in stark variance with youth crime in the United States, now at a 20-year low. While some American researchers have claimed a link between declining crime and the availability of abortion, no Canadian analysts have linked that country's rising crime to the country's policy of abortion on demand.
(Source: Statistics Canada)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----------- TITLE: Life Notes DATE: 04/02/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 2-8, 2000 ----- BODY:Call for Investigation of USAID Over Forced Abortions
COMBINED NEWS SER VICES, March 14 — GOP lawmakers called on the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to investigate allegations that the Peruvian government is using USAID money to force poor Peruvian women to undergo sterilization, the news service reported.
The Population Research Institute brought the abuses to lawmakers' attention.
Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-KS, is the principal sponsor of a measure signed into law in October 1998 that prohibits U.S. funds from going to non-voluntary foreign family planning programs, said news services.
Tiahrt called on USAID to send their own investigators to the Latin American country to examine allegations that Peruvian agencies are using U.S. taxpayer dollars to promote programs that coerce poor women into sterilization or contraception, regardless of beliefs.
N.H. House Votes to Abolish Death Penalty
ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 10 — Despite a veto threat from the governor, members of the state House in New Hampshire have voted to abolish the death penalty, the wire service reported.
New Hampshire has no death row inmates and has not executed anyone in 61 years. Supporters of the bill nonetheless argued the death penalty system was inherently unfair and that life in prison is a more just punishment.
The bill now moves to the state Senate, where its fate is uncertain. Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, has said she would reject it, reported the AP.
Also this month, Indiana Gov. Frank O'Bannon, also a Democrat, asked a state commission to review the death penalty in his state to make sure it is being imposed correctly and fairly.
In a letter to the chairman of the Criminal Law Study Commission, O'Bannon requested “an in-depth look” at the law “in light of the problems that have surfaced in other states.”
Neb. and Wis. Legislatures Debate Fetal Tissue Sales
The measure was introduced in response to reports last November that the University of Nebraska Medical Center was conducting research into neurodegenerative diseases using fetal cells obtained by LeRoy Carhart. He operates a Bellevue, Nebraska facility where abortions are performed.
Pro-Life Wisconsin reported that a bill they helped draft to prohibit the trafficking of body parts from aborted babies passed out of committee in the Wisconsin State Assembly and was expected to be approved by the full assembly.
Peggy Hamill, president of Pro-Life Wisconsin, said, “The fact that we are even discussing the issue of human body parts as commodities is astounding.”
Oregon Nursing Home Patients Overdosed With Morphine
ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 15 — Prosecutors are investigating a nursing home that has been fined $6,000 by the state based on accusations that a probationary nurse gave four terminally ill patients excessive doses of morphine before they died, the news service reported.
No autopsies were done and there is disagreement over the cause of the deaths in late 1997 and early 1998 at the Sheridan Care Center.
AP reported the fine was assessed Feb. 23 by the state Senior and Disabled Services Division following a belated investigation triggered by a yearlong campaign by a daughter of one of the residents who died.
Oregon officials said the state has revoked the license of the probationary nurse, who was supposed to get permission of a registered nurse before giving medication.
There were signed physicians' orders for administration of morphine to all of the residents in question, who were terminally ill.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Indy Putting Faith to Test - Literally DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:INDIANAPOLIS — A new diocesan program is holding Catholic schools and directors of religious education accountable for what they are teaching students about their faith.
It's called Faith 2000, a multiple-choice test mandated for all Catholic school and parish religious-education students by Indianapolis Archbishop Daniel Buechlein. The test is aimed at identifying areas that students in grades three, six, eight and 10 don't grasp about their Catholic faith. Teachers then adjust their curricula based on the four pillars of the Catechism: creed, sacraments, prayer and faith.
If Jaret Binford, 14, is any indication, it seems to be working.
He recently took the Faith 2000 test for his eighth-grade religious class at Our Lady of the Greenwood Catholic Church in Greenwood, Ind.
“There are so many questions on the faith,” the youth noted. “Our faith needs strengthening and this makes us reflect on what our faith is about.”
He said the test shows him that the Church is serious about teaching his generation about their faith. “I want to know why so many people put such great faith in … God,” the teen said.
Binford's father, Jim, said the test is helping him learn new things about the faith.
“I'm glad to see there is more explanation,” Binford said. “It's helping me understand it a lot more. I learn from him and that's a good thing.”
The test asks questions such as “What is virtue?” or “What is the central act of worship for Catholics?” It also tests religious attitudes and practices, its administrators say.
Archbishop Buechlein, the chairman of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops' committee that is responsible for squaring all religious textbooks with the Catechism, said that it is very specific because Catholic identity in young people is at issue.
“There has to be an intellectual context of understanding what we believe,” Archbishop Buechlein said. “If we don't know what we believe we are in deep trouble. We have a whole generation that felt they were shortchanged in their religion. We need to do a better job of presenting content, not methodology, to our students.”
Indeed, Father Joe Brown, who teaches religion to students at Chatard High School in Indianapolis, knows his students don't grasp certain concepts. Father Brown has high school students who don't know what the act of contrition is, much less how to say it.
“They just don't know what the Church is about in general,” Father Brown said.
Archbishop Buechlein's test aims to change that by showing teachers where student knowledge is weak.
‘More Meat’
The idea is different because it “puts more meat” into the programs, said Judy Koch, the director of religious education at Our Lady of the Green-wood.
Koch said that after the Second Vatican Council, students weren't taught the basics. She calls her religious education book one of the most traditional in the diocese because it doesn't “whitewash anything.”
“It talks about basic things like sin and real traditions of being a Catholic like Benediction, adoration, the saints, rosary,” Koch said. “The pendulum is swinging back. We had a whole generation who were just taught to love everyone and be a nice guy.”
The move to Faith 2000 means a more centralized curriculum. That's because the test is used for accountability, but not as a way to compare schools to one another, said Sister Michelle Faltus, director of curriculum assessment for the Archdiocese of Indianapolis.
“It's great,” she said. “It really shows if we are teaching the basics of the Catholic faith.”
Results aren't released; instead the archdiocese identifies weak areas, and schools are then required to implement changes in the curriculum to teach the Catechism, she said.
Some Opposition
Janis Dopp, the director of religious education at St. Charles Catholic Church in Bloomington, Ind., said redefining the curriculum in terms of the Catechism has met some opposition.
“I know that the criticism I've heard of the test is that people are reluctant to switch over what they are doing and there is a general reluctance,” she said. “You have teachers who have been teaching a certain way for years and now they have to change. But that happens with any new program because you have people who like the way they are doing things.”
Dopp thinks the test is a good idea and said that there has been no trouble initiating it at her parish.
“It's pointing us to where we need to target our energies,” she said. “I see it as positive. I consider myself a middle-of-the-road Catholic. I'm not liberal or conservative, but for too long we have allowed too much flexibility, but losing our identity is a strong way to put it.”
Sister Faltus said the main concerns she's heard have been with changing the number of questions for certain grades.
She said the test has been accepted and is a way to test whether students understand what it means to be Catholic. What makes this test so different from other assessment tests it allows teachers to gauge individual student performance and then “reteach” what was missed, Sister Faltus said.
Testing Knowledge
The archdiocese had used ACRE, a test given by the National Catholic Education Association. At least 163,000 students across the country take ACRE each year.
ACRE doesn't test individual student knowledge. Instead, it's a program assessment tool, said Robert Culvert, executive director of the NCEA. Faith 2000 does both.
Culvert said ACRE is being revised to include that component. Having a test like Faith 2000 doesn't surprise him because there is a shift to help students know what it means on an individual basis to live out their faith, he said.
“There was that period in the Church and society where there was a lot of experimentation on the faith,” Culvert said. “There was this social justice domain and de-emphasis on the knowledge component of the faith.”
More Dioceses on Board
Faith 2000, having only been on the market for one year, is already making headway into other Catholic schools across the nation. Dioceses in Indiana, New Jersey, Illinois and Missouri are using the program.
Pope John Paul II, in his 1999 post-synodal apostolic exhortation, Ecclesia in America [The Church in America], encouraged just such efforts as Archbishop Buechlein's.
“Well realizing the need for a complete catechesis,” the Pope wrote, “I made my own the proposal of the Fathers of the 1985 Extraordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops to compose a ‘catechism or compendium of all Catholic doctrine regarding both faith and morals,’which could serve as a point of reference for the catechisms or compendia that are prepared in the various regions.
“This proposal was implemented with the publication of the typical edition of the Catechismus Catholicae Ecclesiae. In addition to the text of the Catechism, and for a better utilization of its contents, I intended that a General Directory for Catechesis should also be compiled and published. I heartily recommend the use of these two resources, of universal value, to everyone involved in catechesis in America” (No. 69).
Paula Howard was instrumental in writing the test for the Indianapolis Archdiocese.
A convert, she said it was the Church's tradition that drew her to Catholicism and she wants to impart that heritage to her students. She said the test also allows her to introduce themes into her other lessons when she learns that students might be weak in one area.
“You need to instill in students love for the Church,” Howard said. “They have to understand what the Church believes because there is a lot of anti-Catholicism out there. They have to know why they believe it.”
Jennifer Del Vechio writes from Franklin, Indiana.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jennifer Del Vechio ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Holy Man of New Orleans Newest U.S. Blessed DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — The news that Redemptorist Father Francis Xavier Seelos would be beatified April 9 in St. Peter's Square came as a surprise last December.
That's when Pope John Paul II declared the heroic virtues of Father Seelos and approved a reported miracle attributed to his intercession.
Both steps are necessary for beatification, but it is highly unusual for both to be approved on the same day. The surprise means that the causes of two Americans will be advanced during the Great Jubilee — Father Seelos and Blessed Katharine Drexel, who will be canonized on Oct. 1.
Father Seelos was known as a kindly confessor, formation director and dynamic mission preacher who galvanized Catholics even beyond his death from yellow fever in New Orleans in 1867. Yet, outside of that city and perhaps the South, he is not well known to American Catholics.
Francis Xavier Seelos will be the second American male to be raised to the altars, joining his fellow Redemptorist priest and friend, St. John Neumann, the fourth bishop of Philadelphia.
Known as “the holy man of New Orleans,” Father Seelos'career can be read as a summary of the growth of the Church in the United States in the 19th century.
He was born in Füssen, Germany, about 60 miles south of Munich, on Jan. 11, 1819. Raised in a devout Bavarian Catholic family, he went on to study theology at the University at Munich and prepared to be ordained for the local clergy.
The Church in the United States was growing explosively at the time due to immigration from Europe, principally from Germany and Ireland. Francis Xavier Seelos — perhaps destined to be a missionary given his name — joined that wave of immigration.
“Today we will not study; last night the Blessed Mother told me that I'm to become a missionary in America,” the young Francis told his brother Adam. Convinced of his vocation in this unusual manner, Seelos decided to sail for America to join the Redemptorist novitiate in Baltimore. Taking leave of his parents and eight brothers and sisters by means of a farewell letter, he set sail for New York on St. Patrick's Day in 1843.
A Parish's Saintly Pair
Seelos arrived in the United States at age 24. He professed as a Redemptorist and was ordained a priest. The following year, his was possible because of the studies he had completed in Europe.
Father Seelos spent the first nine years of his priestly ministry at St. Philomena's in Pittsburgh, a German immigrant parish where the pastor was a young Father John Neumann. The bishop at the time used to call Fathers Neumann and Seelos the “two saints of St. Philomena's,” an intuition that has been confirmed by the Church.
“I was John Neumann's subject, but was more like a son who needed help,” said Father Seelos. “In every respect, he was a remarkable father to me.”
In addition to their shared work in the parish, the two preached missions together.
Father Seelos'kindly reputation as a confessor attracted many Catholics to him from surrounding towns. Because of the constant smile on his lips, he was known as “the Cheerful Ascetic.”
Long lines would form outside his confessional as many penitents said that he could read their souls, and that he made confessing one's sins easy, even a pleasant experience. Father Seelos allowed only that he encouraged his penitents to tell their own story.
From the beginning, Father Seelos was also sought out for physical healings. Especially devoted to the Blessed Virgin, he would often direct those who sought him out for healings to pray at her altar in the church. He often prayed together with these sick people, and many of whom reported cures after asking Father Seelos to pray for them.
Work and Piety
Father Seelos made an impression as a man of hard work and deep piety who did not hesitate to laugh. He told jokes, and was always ready with a smile and folksy comment. He also loved to sing, and was not shy about singing in full voice his favorite Marian hymns, often repeating the same ones over and over, saying to those who objected to the repetition, “Once beautiful, always beautiful.”
Father Seelos' subsequent assignments reflected the burgeoning pastoral needs of a vast continent that was becoming a single country. In 1854, he was transferred to Maryland, first at St. Alphonsus Parish in Baltimore, and then, in 1857, he moved to Annapolis to serve as the Redemptorists' novice master. That assignment lasted but a few months, and Father Seelos moved on to Cumberland, where he directed the order's seminary.
After five years preparing future priests for the local “missions” of the United States, Father Seelos returned to Annapolis in 1862. With the Civil War raging, the Redemptorist seminarians were in danger. Father Seelos moved them all to Annapolis where they would be less risk. But his problems remained.
Seminarians were liable to be drafted into the Army, and Father Seelos met with President Abraham Lincoln to request an exemption. He was denied, given that only ordained clergymen were excused from service. Ever a practical man, Father Seelos did not take long to solve the problem. He persuaded Baltimore's Archbishop Francis Kenrick to ordain all 20 men ahead of schedule.
In 1865, Father Seelos was assigned to Detroit, but was soon sent south to New Orleans. Arriving in September 1866, Father Seelos was appointed pastor of St. Mary's in the Irish quarter of town.
By the 1860s, a German priest handling an Irish parish in the former French colonies of the now United States was a sign of the ability of the Church to thrive under a whole new set of circumstances in North America.
At St. Mary's, he was known for his availability to all people and worked among the yellow fever victims. In September 1867, he contracted the fatal disease, and after several weeks of enduring his illness, he died on Oct. 4 at the age of 48. He lived 24 years each in Germany and the United States.
Still Healing
The miracle the Holy Father recognized for Father Seelos' beatification was the cure of Angela Boudreaux, a Gretna, La., woman who was diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer in 1966. She was told she had two weeks to live after her surgeon saw the size of the malignant tumor and decided he could not operate.
She said she prayed constantly for the intercession of Father Seelos and recovered completely, an event the doctors said could not be explained medically.
She has worked for the more than three decades since her cure at the Seelos Center in New Orleans, which gathers information in support of Feather Seelos'cause. Arecent CTscan, done in conjunction with the final details of moving toward beatification, showed Boudreaux's healthy liver. For Father Seelos to be declared a saint, a second miracle will be needed.
In his formal request for the beatification of Father Seelos, Archbishop José Saraiva Martin, prefect of the Congregation for Sainthood Causes, told the Pope that Father Seelos “died, surrounded by a great fame of holiness. Europe and America rejoice knowing that soon he will be counted among those beatified.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond J. De Souza ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Beijing Under Scrutiny DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON —With Congress poised for a May debate on the question of trade with the People's Republic of China, the U.S. government knows of at least half a dozen Catholic bishops either imprisoned or under house arrest in China.
In its first report on International Religious Freedom, the State Department could verify the release of only one bishop under detention in China last year. “In May 1999, auxiliary Bishop Yan Weiping was found dead in Beijing shortly after being released from detention,” the State Department reported in February. “The circumstances surrounding his death are unclear.”
Many priests and parishioners were detained last year as well, according to the State Department, the Cardinal Kung Foundation and Freedom House, a human rights watchdog organization in Washington. Those same sources found that China has yet to document the release of many of them.
Spurred in part by the reports, unions and religious groups have planned rallies April 9 and 12 in Washington, D.C., to protest trade relations with China. With high-level trade talks scheduled this spring in the nation's capital, some expect the protests there to rival the intensity of December's “battle in Seattle” for intensi ty and violence.
“If these were people arrested a long time ago and still in prison, they would be cause enough for concern but this is a continuing pattern,” China-trade foe Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., recently noted. “Catholics across the country are con cerned about the arrests of the bishops.”
Both Reps. Bill Archer, R-Texas, and Christopher Smith, R-N.J., tried to inves tigate the arrests of the bishops without much cooperation from the Chinese Embassy. Archer chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, which deals with trade policy, and Smith the House International Relations subcommittee dealing with human rights.
Archer said he asked the Chinese ambassador directly about the arrests. The ambassador promised to look into it, he said.
President Clinton himself and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright brought up the case of one bishop in their meetings with leaders of China, the State Department reported.
Despite the evidence of persecution of Catholics, advocates of trade with China point to other trends that indicate greater religious freedom in China. “You've got Rev. Billy Graham's son over there distributing Bibles,” Dan Griswold of the Cato Institute pointed out. “That wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago.”
In 1994, the Clinton administration “delinked” China trade policies from human rights concerns. The president argued that human rights concerns, such as religious freedom, should be pursued in other forums, a position key Republicans agree with.
Congressional backers of trade with China say they are seeking other ways to address human rights issues.
“We have a full-time staffer in our embassy there in Beijing,” said Don Carlson, chief of staff to Archer. “That staffer meets with all kinds of religious groups.”
The Clinton administration tried to introduce a resolution addressing China's human rights problems at the United Nations, but China blocked it from discussion. “I told the secretary of state, in as friendly a way as I could, either the Chinese are outsmarting us or we aren't trying hard enough,” Rep. Pelosi said.
That day, March 23, the secretary of state tried harder. She flew from India to Geneva to deliver a speech condemning China's human rights violations at the U.N. Human Rights Commission meeting. Most of the Chinese delegates walked out
Pelosi said China employs a double standard on trade issues. “In the past, the Chinese government has used trade issues to lobby other nations to support its position,” Pelosi noted. “The Chinese who say we must not mix economics and human rights do exactly that at the U.N.”
A Better Way to Better China?
Some advocates of opening up trade with China say that this policy will lead to other freedoms as well. These considerations, those proponents of trade with China point out, underlie proposals to give China Permanent Normal Trade Relations status, a benefit of membership in the World Trade Organization that sets floors and ceilings on tariffs.
President Clinton himself also encourages this viewpoint. “While we will continue to have strong disagreement with China over issues ranging from human rights to religious tolerance to foreign policy,” Clinton wrote in his recent proposal to Congress, “we believe that bringing China into the World Trade Organization pushes China in the right direction in all of these areas.”
For their part, many Republicans in Congress agree. “Trade is a blunt instrument, but we do not have a whole lot of instruments,” Sen. Tim Hutchinson, R-Ark., said. “I hope that China's [World Trade Organization] membership will give us leverage.”
Others remain skeptical. “While the U.S. has claimed an intention at least to speak out on human rights, the substance of U.S.-China relations — trade, military contacts, high level summits — go forward while Chinese leaders continue to crack down on dissidents throughout the country of 1 billion,” Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., recently said.
Decades-Long Crackdown
April 14 is the anniversary of President Richard Nixon's 1971 decision to lift the trade embargo with China. Trade foes say China hasn't improved enough in the nearly three decades of commerce to justify lessening restrictions.
In fact, the actual number of bishops recognized by the Vatican who are under some form of detention may be higher than the half-dozen reported by the State Department. “Almost all underground bishops are either in jail, under house arrest, hiding with or without arrest warrant, in labor camps or under severe surveillance,” according to the Cardinal Kung Foundation.
The foundation is named for the late archbishop of Shanghai, Cardinal Ignatius Kung Pin-mei, who died last month in exile in Stamford, Conn. His death, after a priestly life spent persecuted by Chinese communists, put a national spotlight on human rights in China.
The Cardinal Kung foundation lists 14 bishops who are under some form of detention or surveillance in China. The total number of underground bishops arrested in China, in turn, make up a sizable portion of the Church leaders recognized by the Vatican.
The Hong Kong-based Holy Spirit Centre puts the number of bishops in the underground Church at 60 and the number of Catholics in China at 10 million. According to the State Department, 4 million Catholics belong to the official church not recognized by the Vatican.
In his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus (On the Hundredth Anniversary of Rerum Novarum) Pope John Paul II wrote that it will take more than economic means to change Marxist regimes.
He said of Pope Leo XIII's ground-breaking encyclical on social teaching, “He was convinced that the grave problems caused by industrial society could be solved only by cooperation between all forces. …
“Pope Leo, however, acknowledged with sorrow that the ideologies of his time, especially Liberalism and Marxism, rejected such cooperation. Since then, many things have changed, especially in recent years. The world today is ever more aware that solving serious national and international problems is not just a matter of economic production or of juridical or social organization, but also calls for specific ethical and religious values, as well as changes of mentality, behavior and structures” (No. 60).
And pro-trade voices in the United States say that, apart from trade status, it is still possiblefor the White House to use religious freedom conventions to pressure China.
But trade foes say more the leverage is needed. Rep. Smith said, “The only way we could go further is to give the president the freedom to do absolutely nothing in the face of severe, widespread and ongoing human rights violations and persecutions.”
Malcolm A. Kline is editor of the National Journalism Center in Washington.
----- EXCERPT: BISHOPS' IMPRISONMENT SPOTLIGHTS TRADE ISSUE ----- EXTENDED BODY: Malcolm A. Kline ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Surviving? Thriving? DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:MEXICO CITY— Not many years ago observers of the Latin America predicted that most of South and Central America would become Protestant or highly secularized by the first years of the third millennium.
They reasoned this way: Social and political upheavals of recent decades, the arguments over liberation theology and the aggressive tactics of evangelical Protestant denominations would greatly diminish the numbers of Latin Americans who call themselves Catholic.
But things haven't turned out quite that bad. The Millennium Poll on Religion, a massive survey carried out throughout Latin America by a pool of leading pollsters from various countries, has found that the Church remains a resilient — and majority — force in the religious identity of Latin Americans.
The survey's results, released in late March, reveal hard religious data and point to important trends in 10 Latin American countries, from Mexico to Argentina, with Brazil the only major country not included.
According to the survey, some 82% of Latin Americans claim to be Catholic.
Mexico is the most Catholic country in the continent, with 88% of those surveyed claiming Church membership. The figures are similar in most of the remaining countries: 86% in Paraguay, 83% in Ecuador, 82% in Argentina, and 81% in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. Uruguay is the least Catholic country in Latin America with 62% of those surveyed in the Church fold.
Said Manuel Torrado, Spanish-born director of Datum International, one of the agencies responsible for the survey, “Latin America's Catholicism shows a significant degree of consistence, especially as regards religious convictions.”
The poll, he said, revealed “a still-strong Catholic approach to beliefs.”
One True Religion
Torrado saw particular importance in the level of conviction among Latin Americans that there is only one true religion. This statement was affirmed by 66% of those polled in Bolivia, 65% in Peru and the Dominican Republic, 57% in Mexico and 51% in Colombia.
Torrado said this was impressive when compared to the results of a worldwide Gallup poll that included the identical question. The statement was embraced by 35% of Eastern Europeans, 34% of Americans and Canadians, and only 15% of Western Europeans. In Africa, 46% believed there was one true religion.
The results of the recent survey also demonstrate slippage in Catholic identity. Probably more than 90% percent of Latin Americans in the 1940s would have called themselves Catholic.
Weekly Mass attendance has also been slowly but steadily falling in the last half-century: The population attending Mass one or more times a week is 58% in Mexico, 47% in Colombia, 42% in the Dominican Republic, 40% in Ecuador and Bolivia, and it can go as low as 27% in Argentina and 18% in traditionally secularized Uruguay.
Still, even secular analysts believe that the state of the Church at the end of a tumultuous century should satisfy Catholic leaders. “It is clear that not only the majority of the population, but the identity of Latin America is still Catholic, despite the dramatic social changes of the last decades,” said Torrado.
God Didn't Die
At the end of the 19th century, several Latin American intellectuals, including José Enrique Rodó in Uruguay, Mariano Cornejo in Peru and José Vasconcelos in Mexico — before he embraced the faith — predicted that the 20th century would be an era dominated by the “light” of knowledge, science and technical development, in which organized religion would be replaced by strong secular ethics of work and progress, and that this would be accomplished though literacy and higher levels of education. “Organized religion” could only mean the Catholic Church in the Latin context, they speculated.
This opinion continued to be held by the cultural elites through most of the century, and was manifest in anti-clerical movements in countries such as Uruguay, Ecuador, Venezuela and especially Mexico, where the blood of numerous martyrs was shed during the 1920s and '30s.
“Despite all this, Latinos generally never stopped celebrating countless religious feasts and traditions, deeply embedded in their culture,” said Torrado. “Even now, each town has its patron saint and, in many places, its feast is one of the most important yearly events. Very little has changed in the Catholic ‘flavor’of Latin American culture.”
His opinion is shared by Argentine anthropologist Harold Hernandez Lefranc. Aspecialist in religious anthropology, Hernandez was invited by Datum International to analyze and offer commentary to accompany the results of the survey.
“How distant seem the days in which intellectuals, ideologists and even politicians announced the disappearance of religion from the life of the human being,” Hernandez wrote. “This conviction was still very much present in several theories of secularization that became popular during the 1960s.”
In contrast, he continued, the recent survey confirms that “the ‘death of God’ never took place and today is even less likely that it will become true,” at least in Latin America.
No Easy Road Ahead
The anthropologist also believes that God's failure to “die” does not mean that organized religion, and Catholicism in particular, have an easy road ahead. “Historically, a certain gnosticism has followed the failure to change the world with pure secular politics,” he wrote.
This gnosticism, according to Hernandez, is translated into a tendency to find individualistic ways of “personal illumination,” which is seen in the rise of new, multiple forms of less organized cults.
For the anthropologist, the growth of evangelical Protestantism in Latin America is a response to the cultural disarray that follows secularization. The poll seems to support this opinion, finding that, in many countries, the number of nonbelievers or those believing in other, non-Christian religions are as numerous or even larger than the number of evangelicals. More than a “protestantization” of Latin America, the region has suffered from religious dispersion, he ventured.
In Chile, for example, evangelicals number 13% of the population while another 13% describe themselves as nonbelievers. In the Dominican Republic, the nonbelievers are 10%, compared to 9% evangelicals. And in Mexico, nonbelievers are at 4%, 1% more than the evangelicals.
Hernandez, himself a nonbeliever, thinks that the tendency to religious individualism and dispersion could create a sort of “hybrid” religion, similar to what he witnessed in the United States at the Episcopalian Church of St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco. “This new temple has Orthodox icons, a Shintoist temple and a Tibetan gong,” said Hernandez. “Ministers wear vestments in lively African colors and the rite is open to anyone, not only Christians.”
Chile's Pedro Morande, a Catholic sociologist and member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, said this scenario is not likely for Latin America, “where common, strong Catholic roots have clearly shaped the culture. Catholicism is expressed in multiple cultural manifestations which make that kind of secular syncretism not only unimaginable, but unnecessary.”
Nevertheless, Morande is convinced that secularism is, in fact, presenting a challenge to the Catholic Church. “Militant atheism has failed, but it is still to be seen how corrosive practical agnosticism can become, especially now that economic reforms are bringing new social organization,” he warned.
Catholic Renewal
In his 1999 post-synodal apostolic exhortation, Ecclesia in America (The Church in America), Pope John Paul II said shoring up popular piety can be a good bulwark against secularization (No. 17). He also pointed to Protestant inroads being made in the Americas.
“The success of proselytism by sects and new religious groups in America cannot be ignored. It demands of the Church on the continent a thorough study, to be carried out in each nation and at the international level, to ascertain why many Catholics leave the Church. Pastoral policies will have to be revised, so that each particular Church can offer the faithful more personalized religious care, strengthen the structures of communion and mission, make the most of the evangelizing possibilities of a purified popular religiosity, and thus give new life to every Catholic's faith in Jesus Christ, through prayer and meditation upon the word of God, suitably explained. …
“To this end, it is more necessary than ever for all the faithful to move from a faith of habit, sustained perhaps by social context alone, to a faith which is conscious and personally lived. The renewal of faith will always be the best way to lead others to the Truth that is Christ” (No. 73).
Archbishop Estanislao Karlic, president of the Argentine Bishops' conference and one of the authors of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, told the Register that the Latin American cultural terrain is promising for just that kind of Catholic renewal.
“The difference is that, in the past, many Catholic leaders took Catholicism for granted. Now, we know that it is a treasure, a gift that we carry in earthen vessels. Now, the spiritual and pastoral renewal launched by Pope John Paul with his call to the new evangelization is creating a new apostolic era,” said Archbishop Karlic.
“And the polls show what we already knew — that despite losing some ground because of our faults, the soil is still excellent for the seed.”
Alejandro Bermudez writes from Lima, Peru.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Alejandro Bermudez ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Online Matchmaker DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:To date, 25 couples have married after meeting through his Web site Single Catholics Online. He recently moved his family from Princeton, N.J., to Ann Arbor, Mich., to become president of the anticipated Catholic book recommendation service TiberRiver.org. Buono recently spoke with Register features correspondent Tim Drake.
Drake: Tell me about your upbringing. Have you always been a Catholic?
Buono: I grew up in Philadelphia as a cradle Catholic. My upbringing was typical of the 1970s. It was very culturally oriented. We went to Church on Sunday, but our faith was not practiced in the home. I grew up in a single-parent household and so my mother worked a lot. We went to CCD, but the faith was never impressed upon me. Confirmation was the last time I went to confession or Mass, if I could help it.
After I got into college I started having pangs for Jesus again, but I never thought of coming back to the Catholic faith. During my search I started asking a lot of questions that no one was able to answer and so I bounced from Protestant denomination to denomination. My older brother Alex encouraged me to do some reading. I trusted him because he had gone from being an anti-Catholic to a Catholic. So, I started reading about the papacy and, at age 21, fell back into the faith. I went from being an anti-Catholic to someone who takes the faith very seriously.
How did you get where you are at today? What is your professional background?
I didn't get married until I was 27. When Bridget and I were first married it was hard going. I jumped from job to job. While at a mutual friends' daughter's first Communion, I met the president of Scepter Publishers. I boldly asked him if he was looking for help, and a month later, at age 30, I was working for Scepter in Princeton, New Jersey.
Up until that point I had been doing computer and office management work. At Scepter I started embracing computers and the Internet. There were only two of us there, so I did everything … administration, computers, packing books. It gave me a big taste of the Catholic world, and it was very encouraging. Working there gave me hope and got me excited about what I was doing. I became general manager.
How did Single Catholics Online get started?
With Scepter, I would travel all over to various conferences. I would continually meet single devoted Catholics and it was always the same story. They would say, “It's so hard to meet someone else who takes their faith seriously.” Finally, I just got sick of it.
I had started something similar, using the mail system in Philadelphia. People could correspond anonymously by mail through our service and request profiles by mail. Then they would send the letters to the people they wanted to send them to, through me. I had a young family then and it grew too large for me. After one year, I handed [the service] over to one of the members.
Three years later, Shannon Brown, Jerry Yandoli and I created a similar service using the Internet, with the same logo. I took out a second mortgage on our house so we could get the money to develop Single Catholics Online and it was incorporated as a for-profit corporation in March of 1998. The site was up and running by May. We figured that if it grows, we will make money servicing the Church and helping us provide for our families.
Does Single Catholics Online stem from yourown experiences as a single person?
Absolutely. It is a subject very close to my heartbecause I remember what it was like to be single. It was very hard to meet people dedicated and attracted to sharing their faith. I never liked being single because I was always anxious to get into my vocation. However, it is not that easy. We live in a culture where you meet many Catholics who are Catholic in name only. I have come across couple after couple in mixed marriages that have broken apart. In many relationships there is an imbalance between one person who practices their faith and another who does not. The Holy Father is calling us to raise up strong Catholic families so that we can witness to others.
What is the goal of Single Catholics Online?
Single Catholics Online is for those with a vocation to marriage interested in building friendship towards that goal. That is why I prefer SCOL to be called a “marriage” service rather than a “dating” service. When people today hear the term “dating,” they realize that it is constrained to people getting together, going out and then going their own way. There is no commitment to looking at the other person with long-term vision. They do not look at the person as a possible person that they could court and eventually marry.
We are not a pen pal service or simply a place to find friendships. We have created a “neighborhood” full of people who are discerning the vocation tomarriage and are serious about trying to find their future spouse. Our primary goal is to get people together who are answering God's call to be married and get on with building up society through strong family life, people who are faithful to the Church's mission and the Holy Father.
The fundamental tragedy today is that so many people do not want to make or keep commitments. They do not take the permanence of marriage seriously. This is the culture we are trying to deal with.
Single Catholics Online is for people who want to, are ready, or are capable of making a commitment.
We try to impress that this is for the serious-minded.
What makes your service unique?
First, members have to pay $59.95 up front. No other service does that. Other services offer a free trial period, which tends to attract the curious who ruin it for the serious. Being on the Internet is already intimidating. People cannot treat this kind of service like a “supermarket” experience. God can use a service like SCOL, but in his time. We are not a forum for people who want to be pen pals. Our members are putting their trust in God, and as a service we need to have other serious people for them to meet.
We are overt about our commitment to the magisterium of the Church. Our company is dedicated to the Holy Father because he has been a great rejuvenator of what relationships and family are to be. Our literature makes it very clear that we are faithful to the Church. We attract members who are as well.
Our profile questionnaire is unique in its length and the questions it asks. Not only does it ask common personal things such as hobbies, but it also addresses many Catholic questions. It asks members their favorite saint and Scripture passages, and it asks for essay answers to questions regarding members' views on the authority of the Pope, contraception and the sacraments. The questionnaire serves to offer comfort to our members and exposes those members who may not take their faith seriously.
People want to talk about these things. Our system allows people to present what is in their hearts and minds. Each member is anonymous throughout the search process. They can view and read a profile before they make a contact. When they do make contact they already have a lot of information about each other. This serves to remove the common barriers in meeting others. It removes the chitchat about the weather and offers couples a starting point. A member may say, “I see you like this. I like that too.”
Single Catholics Online also offers visitors the opportunity to e-mail a priest. How do couples use that service?
“Ask Father” is a feature which is available to any visitor to our Web site. It provides access to Catholic priests for anyone who has questions that only a priest should answer. We get people who have moral dilemmas asking questions about divorce, annulments and their faith. This feature has become so popular that after the first six months we added a second priest. It is almost time to add a third.
How large is Single Catholics Online?
Our membership grows daily, and it's for people of all ages. We have people anywhere between the ages of 18 and 70. We currently have 1,617 members. Most members heard about us by some form of word-of-mouth (a friend, a parent, a successful couple who met on the site, etc.). We have members in all 50 states and Canada. We also have members from Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Colombia, Kenya, Mexico, Germany, Sweden, Nigeria, Trinidad, South Africa and Venezuela. The only two members from England we had, both met one another on our site. We offer first-year memberships free to those outside the U.S. and Canada because there are so few members online from those countries.
What sort of interesting stories have come out of the work of SCOL so far?
So many of the stories make me smile, because there are so many interesting things that go one between the time a couple first meets online and the time they meet in person.
Our first marriage is one of our most interesting stories. We had a young man, John, from Wyoming and a young woman, Janice, from Kentucky. Neither of them had computers. Both of their parents knew their children would never sign up on their own, so both sets of parents went online and set up accounts for their children, without their children knowing it. In both cases after doing a search, the parents, acting as their children, ended up finding each other. They didn't tell their children this until later.
Eventually John and Janice borrowed their parents' computers and went online. As it turned out they each found the exact person the parents had found online earlier. Nine months later they were married, Janice moved to Wyoming, and they just had their first child in February of this year.
They have stories of traveling long hours by train and bus through ice storms, and of the monetary sacrifices of giant phone bills. Yet, when asked what they would say to other skeptical people, they say that it was completely worth it. “What else can you do when you meet the person of your dreams? Love makes you do crazy things,” they say.
Most of our successes come from couples in different states. … Singles exhaust their network of contacts among family, friends and co-workers in the local area and need to be open to stepping outside their state in many cases if they want to meet that “right person.”
What do you have planned next?
Up until September, SCOL was earning enough to pay our bills each month. In September, I met with Tom Monaghan, founder of Dominos Pizza and wonderful Catholic, to pitch a new idea I had for an Internet company. While looking through my portfolio he saw Single Catholics Online. He had never heard of it, but when he saw it he just fell in love with it, saying, “I have been looking for a way to bring single Catholics together for a long time.”
He said he wanted to purchase the company. At first, I was hesitant, because SCOLis my baby in so many ways. Then I realized that he could put a lot of financial backing into it which can benefit not only the members, but also the Church a lot faster than I would have been able to do.
I continue to run Single Catholics, but Mr. Monaghan owns the company and is supporting its growth. Consequently, I'm now living in Ann Arbor, not Princeton. We are in the process of creating a new marketing plan, and plan to do more promotion. Our goal is to hit 10,000 members or more within two years.
In addition, we are set to launch TiberRiver.org on March 25. TiberRiver.org will evaluate, recommend and sell Catholic books on the Internet. It will be the most trustworthy place to find Catholic books in print in the world that are faithful to the magisterium of the Church. TiberRiver.org will evaluate each book's authenticity and will recommend only those that are in union with the Church. While there are many great Catholic books, we will be able to recommend appropriate books based upon learning about each visitor first, treating them as a person, and then assisting them to find the best books for their needs.
Tim Drake can be reached at tdrake@ncregister.com.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Anthony Buono ----- KEYWORD: Inperson -------- TITLE: Kids on Drugs - With Their Doctors' OK DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:WALNUT CREEK, Calif. — The patient that came into Dr. Lawrence Diller's office had a drug problem. He was also just 5 years old.
“Before he came to see me, he had eight different psychiatric drugs offered to him over the previous 12 months,” Diller told the Register.
Some patients with similar histories are even younger.
“A 2 1/2-year-old [was on] on lithium — that's a drug for manic depression — and wound up on Zoloft, supposedly because the child was depressed, and also Respirol, which is a major tranquilizer,” said Diller, a physician practicing in behavioral pediatrics.
“I just talked to the doctor, I tried to understand what he was thinking — a 2 1/2 -year-old on three different kind of drugs?” Diller recently wrote a book, Running on Ritalin, to notify parents about the misuse of prescribing psychotropic drugs to young kids.
While the widespread use of powerful drugs such as Ritalin and Prozac on young children has recently caught the attention of the media and politicians, health care professionals have been dealing with the problem for some time.
Gladys Sweeney, who heads the Institute of Psychological Services in Crystal City, Va., pointed to modern lifestyles, which discourage parents from spending time with children, as a reason why adults are quick to resort to powerful medications.
“If they both work, they come home tired. They don't want to give themselves to their children. It's just easier to medicate them,” Sweeney told the Register. “The parents aren't even aware that they are putting themselves first.”
At a March 20 press conference following a meeting with teachers, psychiatrists, family doctors and drug companies, first lady Hillary Clinton observed that “some of these young people have problems that are symptoms of nothing more than childhood or adolescence.”
But in announcing the effort to curb the use of such drugs by children, she was careful to mention that the medications can help those children who really need them.
“We are not here to bash the use of medications. They have literally been a godsend for countless adults and young people with behavioral and emotional problems,” said Clinton, who is also a candidate for the U.S. Senate from New York.
A program of President Clinton's administration calls for a $5 million study by the National Institutes of Mental Health to research the impact of psychotropic medication on children under 7 and a national conference on treating children with behavioral problems in the fall.
“There are no long-term studies at this point,” Crystal Yard, a spokes-woman for the Food and Drug Administration's Office of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, told the Register. “We're trying to get a handle on the long-term effects of psychotropic drugs.”
The White House initiative comes in part as a reaction to the February issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association that reported a doubling in the number of children on psychotropic drugs from 1991 to 1995.
Research Needed
The $5 million study is needed, observers said, because almost no data or research exists on the effects of psychotropic drugs on children under 6.
“Eighty percent of all drugs that kids take have not been approved by the U.S. government, by the Food and Drug Administration,” for use on children under 6, Douglas Pasternak, senior editor of U.S. News & World Report told the Register. Pasternak recently led an exposé published in the magazine on the effects of these drugs on young children.
“Now you have a situation where lots of kids are given this medication and there's no scientific information on how the medication works,” said Pasternak.
The Food and Drug Administration has long wanted to test the effects of these drugs on children, but was impeded by ethical concerns. “The FDA raised the issue and said that they needed to look at this issue, but everyone was fearful of testing drugs on kids,” said Pasternak.
As drugs like Prozac received federal approval for adults, a demand quickly surfaced for their use on children. This occurred without research that doctors could rely on. Doctors started to dispense the medications for teen-agers, then children, and now toddlers.
“Doctors legally are allowed to … dispense the drug to a child even though it's not government-approved for use in kids,” explained Pasternak.
‘If you're considering these medications … you better be certain that the symptoms are quite severe, that they merit this kind of intervention, and that you really have exhausted alternative approaches …’
He also noted that things are changing. “To the FDA's credit, they're starting to mandate” testing, Pasternak said. “And pharmaceutical companies are starting to do clinical trials on children.”
Doctors in the Dark
Pediatrician Diller said most of the doctors writing out the prescriptions for these children are family physicians and probably don't have much background in the neurological effects of such drugs on young people.
Often, he said, doctors spend little or no time with a child before writing a prescription for powerful drugs.
“People tell me the 15-minute diagnostics of [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder] is alive and well in America.”
This is dangerous, he said, because no doctor can make a proper judgment in such short time. “So many of these diagnoses are made just by talking to the mother, and they spend almost no time with the child.”
Cost-cutting care might be responsible for some of this.
“It's a little cheaper, at least initially, to spend less time with the child and offer him or her a medication that, admittedly, on the short term may be beneficial, but may not be the most appropriate intervention for this kid,” Diller said.
Pasternak said that managed care groups are applying pressure on doctors as well.
“The HMO doesn't want to pay for children going to therapy, so they believe it's cheaper to medicate children. There's been at least subtle pressure on doctors to do that,” he told the Register.
Another problem, critics said, is a lack of training in identifying whether behavior is truly a disorder or if it's just anti-social behavior or even youthful exuberance.
“To diagnose a psychiatric disturbance, in general, there is no biological or psychological test. There is no brain scan or no blood test,” said Dr. Diller.
This leads to variations in diagnosis from region to region. Some communities have 20 times more diagnosed cases of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder than other cities.
Why Now?
Four million children currently receive Ritalin for treatment of disorders. Use of Ritalin has doubled in just five years. Production of the drug is up 700% since 1990, and America consumes 90% of the Ritalin manufactured worldwide.
“It's difficult to ascertain: are there more [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder] kids,” Diller wondered, “or is there more of it simply because our tolerance for temperamental diversity” has been reduced so much.
He also stressed that today's children are under more pressure: “The demands on children's performance and behavior have increased over the last 30 years while the supports relative to them, their families and their schools, have decreased.”
Another problem, he said, is an educational theory that insists that all children have to learn the same things and at the same rate.
In a March 6 Time magazine article, Dr. Ian Smith, a New York psychiatrist, told parents to watch for environmental changes that can be stressful for children.
“Has there been a disruption in the daily routine? Amove to a new house? The arrival of a new sibling? Understanding what is causing the stress is the first step to resolving the problem,” wrote Smith. Only after those factors have been examined should parents and doctors consider resorting to Ritalin.
Be Cautious
While Dr. Diller is concerned by the overuse of Ritalin and other drugs, he said that these drugs do provide genuine help to children in need.
“I don't want to give you the impression I'm against medication,” because there are some kids who really need such drugs, he said. “So many children would otherwise look normal, but in our culture they are getting treated.
“If you're considering these medications for your children, you better be certain that the symptoms are quite severe, that they merit this kind of intervention, and that you really have exhausted alternative approaches … with the family and working with the school.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Richard Rinaldi and Joshuamercer ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:Journalists Seen to Be Out of Touch With Mainstr eam
“It's a very clear picture of people who live lives differently than their customers,” said Peter Brown, editor of the Sunday Insight section of the Orlando Sentinel.
“It doesn't make a difference if the guy who repairs your air conditioner lives the life you do. But journalists' view of the world determines not just how they cover a story, but what stories they cover,” Brown said.
Brown said he first became aware of the distance between journalists and their subjects a decade ago when he was interviewing suburbanites in the Detroit area. Not only did the mass media not understand the people, the antipathy was mutual, he said.
“What struck me was how much people disliked the news media and felt it condescended to their views and lifestyles,” Brown said. He cited the following case to illustrate his point.
When the Dayton Daily News brought in a consultant to rebuild its circulation, she realized that, in Dayton, many blue-collar workers carried lunch buckets and ate food seasoned with Hamburger Helper. But the paper's food editor insisted on articles on salmon, artichokes and asparagus.
“There is a gap,” the consultant later said, “between what one could refer to as normal people and journalists.”
The results of Brown's survey revealed details about the nature of the people who gather and interpret the news for the country's 1,489 daily newspapers and thus exert considerable influence on American perceptions of reality.
In terms of salaries, only 18% of the public earned $50,000 or more, whereas 42% of the journalists in these medium-sized cities did. Thirty percent of the journalists said they had to make $40,000 just to make ends meet, compared to 12% of the public who said so.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Cardinal George Urges Higher Profile for New Movements DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:CHICAGO — Cardinal Francis George called on members of new ecclesial movements and communities to establish higher profiles in his Archdiocese of Chicago and the universal Church in order “to bring the world through Mary and through the Church to Christ.”
After addressing some 500 representatives of the new movements at a meeting in River Forest, Ill., Cardinal George told the Register that many bishops and pastors are open to the movements but are unfamiliar with them and concerned about their potential for dividing the Church into camps.
He said the work of converting the world to Christ has been entrusted to the laity by the Second Vatican Council and by Pope John Paul II's New Evangelization.
The new movements serve that goal by forming “genuine friendships” that lead others to Christ and his Church.
Movements and communities participating in the Chicago meeting included Charismatic Renewal, Communion and Liberation, Cursillo, Focolare, L'Arche, Marriage Encounter, Militia of the Immaculata, Neo-catechumenal Way, Regnum Christi and Schoenstatt.
Cardinal George observed that the movements are yet to be “fully received, not entirely active and visible. That's why I want you to become more visible in this local Church of Chicago.”
Asked by the Register if his fellow bishops share his positive view of the new movements and communities, Cardinal George said he senses “curiosity and openness,” but said that many bishops are wondering if the movements will divide or unite their dioceses.
“Bishops are a sacrament of unity in their dioceses and so must be a point of unity.”
Cardinal George also told the Register that he has not made a point of promoting the movements with his pastors because the groups must first grow and become more visible.
“The pastor, like the bishop, is the point of unity in his parish,” Cardinal George said, “so pastors have many of the same questions as the bishops.”
The cardinal's meeting with groups active in the archdiocese was held in response to Pope John Paul II's call for bishops to get to know and take advantage of what the new movements have to offer.
The Pope conducted a worldwide gathering of more than a quarter million leaders and members of the movements in St. Peter's Square at Pentecost 1998. At the Holy Father's urging, similar meetings have since been held in dioceses throughout the world.
He urged the movements to press ahead in the following of their unique vocations because it's “not just individuals turning away from Christ, but whole societies, whole cultures, once Christian, that reject the Gospel because it is no longer ‘good’ for them and it is no longer ‘news’ for them.”
Cardinal George outlined five areas in which he hopes the movements will help the Church: building unity among Catholics, providing Christian formation for adults, strengthening marriages and families, bringing Christ to the workplace, and ecumenism.
• Unity: For the movements to build the Church, they must reach out “to know each other well and be at each other's service.” They must refrain from any “sense of competition,” he said.
“The cardinal is 100% right,” said Larry Chapman, who is active in the Neo-catechumenal Way in Joliet, Ill. “We can't get caught up in our individual groups and miss out on the big picture,” said Chapman.
“As each movement goes deeper into its own charism, the more we find we come together,” said Tiziana Cova of Chicago, a member of Communion and Liberation.
• Adult formation: Since the 1960s, the cardinal noted, “we have a generation that is not truly catechized.” With the laity called to evangelize, he said, “ignorance of Christ and his Church paralyzes the mission.”
He said many in the Church stopped teaching Christian apologetics, believing that, following Vatican II, “We had no enemies, but that's not true.” He called for a new apologetics to engage not only those who “don't like us,” but those who “don't like Christ either.”
John DeRoche, a member of Regnum Christi, said he found the cardinal's words “inspirational,” especially for some of Regnum Christi's apostolates, including door-to-door parish missions and small faith-sharing groups that give parents an in-depth understanding of the Church's teachings.
• Marriage and family life: The cardinal described marriage and family life as experiencing “a greater crisis than what's facing the priest-hood or religious life.”
He said “the division between life and love is the sin of our age. It makes people deaf to the word of Christ, for Christ is love, and love means to give your life for others.”
“He's calling us to teach the love and wisdom of the Church,” said John Welch, a Focolare member from Indianapolis. “He doesn't mince words. He understands everything.”
• The workplace: On the call for members of lay movements to be “the leaven of Christ,” Cardinal George called on the movements to maintain their sense of mission and not to become inward-turning organizations that exist for their own preservation, as often occurs in other sectors of the Church, including diocesan chanceries.
• Ecumenism: The cardinal urged the movements not to accept a false or superficial unity with others. “We must suffer the pain of division so unity will be the unity of truth.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jay Dunlap ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: REMEMBERING THE HOLY LAND DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:After the commemoration of Abraham and the brief but intense visit to Egypt and Mount Sinai, my Jubilee pilgrimage to the holy places led me to the Land that saw the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the first steps of the Church. The joy and gratitude that I bear in my heart for this gift from the Lord, which I longed for so much, are inexpressible. Having been in the Holy Land during the Second Vatican Council, I have now had the grace to go back there, together with some of my colleagues, in this Great Jubilee Year, bimillennial of the origins, the roots of the faith and of the Church.
The Promised Land
The first stop, on Mount Nebo, was in continuity with Sinai. From high atop this mountain Moses contemplated the Promised Land, after having accomplished the mission God entrusted to him, and before offering his soul up to God. I began my journey, in a certain sense, from this very gaze of Moses, taking note of the intimate suggestion that crosses the centuries and millenniums.
This gaze focused on the Jordan Valley and the desert of Judah, where, in the fullness of time, the voice of John the Baptist, sent by God as the new Elijah to prepare the way for the Messiah, would resound. Jesus wanted to be baptized by him, revealing himself as the Lamb of God who took upon himself the sin of the world. The figure of John the Baptist started me in the footsteps of Christ. With joy I celebrated a solemn Mass in the Amman stadium for the Christian community living there. I found this community rich in religious fervor and fitting well into the social milieu of the country.
Bethlehem
Leaving Amman, I stayed overnight at the Apostolic Delegation in Jerusalem. From there, the first stop was Bethlehem, that city which was the birthplace of King David three thousand years ago. Athousand years later, according to the Scriptures, the Messiah was born there. In this year 2000, Bethlehem is at the center of the Christian world's attention. It is from there that the Light of the Nations, Christ the Lord, emanates. From there ushers the announcement of peace for all who love God.
Together with my colleagues, the bishops from the region, some cardinals and numerous other bishops, I celebrated the Holy Mass in the central square of the city, which is attached to the grotto in which Mary gave birth to Jesus and laid him in a manger. In this mystery the joy of Christmas and of the Great Jubilee was renewed. The prophesy of Isaiah seemed to be heard again: “Achild is born for us, a son has been given to us” (Isaiah 9:5), together with the angelic message: “I am bringing you news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord” (Luke 2:10-11).
That afternoon I knelt with emotion in the grotto of the Nativity, where I felt the entire Church was spiritually present; all the poor of the world, among whom God chose to make his camp. This is a God who made himself an exile and refugee to bring us back to his house. This thought accompanied me while, before leaving the Autonomous Palestinian Territory, I visited in Bethlehem one of the many camps, where for too long more than three million Palestinian refugees have lived. May everyone's efforts finally lead to a solution to this sorrowful problem.
Jerusalem
The memory of Jerusalem is indelibly written on my heart. Great is the mystery of this city, in which the fullness of time was made, so to speak, “fullness of space.”
Jerusalem, hosted the central and culminating event of salvation history — the Paschal Mystery of Christ. In Jerusalem, the purpose for which the Word took flesh was revealed and realized: in his death on the cross and in his resurrection “all was accomplished” (cf., John 19:30). On Calvary the Incarnation was made manifest as Redemption, according to the eternal plan of God.
The stones of Jerusalem bear silent and eloquent witness to this mystery. I began at the Upper Room, where I celebrated the Holy Eucharist in the same place that Jesus instituted it. There, where the Christian priesthood was born, I remembered all priests, and I signed my letter to them for this coming Holy Thursday.
The olives and rock of Gethsemani testify to the mystery where Christ, seized by mortal anguish, prayed to the Father before his Passion. In an entirely particular way, Calvary and the empty tomb, the Holy Sepulcher, bear witness to those dramatic hours.
Last Sunday, the Lord's Day, I renewed there the proclamation of salvation that crosses the centuries and millenniums: Christ is risen! This was the moment when my pilgrimage reached its culmination. That is why I felt the need to stop again in prayer in the evening on Calvary, where Christ shed his blood for humanity.
In Jerusalem, a holy city for Jews, Christians, and Muslims, I met the two chief rabbis of Israel and the grand mufti of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. I then met with representatives of these two other monotheistic religions, Judaism and Islam. In spite of its many difficulties, Jerusalem is called to become the symbol of peace among those who believe in the God of Abraham and put themselves under his law. May we be able to hasten the accomplishment of this destiny!
At Yad Vashem, the Memorial of the Shoah, I paid my respects to the millions of Jews who were victims of Nazism. Once more I expressed my profound sorrow for this terrifying tragedy, and I confirmed that “we want to remember” to take the responsibility together — Jews, Christians, and all men and women of good will — to overcome evil with good, to walk the path of peace.
Today numerous churches live their faith in the Holy Land, as heirs of ancient traditions. This diversity is a great richness, provided that it is accompanied by a spirit of communion in full adherence to the faith of the Fathers. The ecumenical meeting, which took place in the Greek-Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem with intense participation on the part of all signaled an important step on the path toward full unity among Christians. It gave me great joy to be able to talk with His Beatitude Greek-Orthodox Patriarch Diodoros of Jerusalem and with His Beatitude Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem Torkom Monoogian. I invite everyone to pray that the process of understanding and collaboration among Christians of various churches will solidify and develop.
Galilee
Aspecial blessing of this pilgrimage was celebrating Mass on the Mount of the Beatitudes near the Sea of Galilee with crowds of youth coming both from the Holy Land and from all over the world. What a hope-filled moment!
As I proclaimed and delivered to the young people God's Commandments and the Beatitudes, I saw in them the future of the Church and of the world.
Still on the shores of the Sea, I visited with great emotion Tabgha, where Christ multiplied the loaves, the “place of primacy,” where he entrusted to Peter the pastoral guidance of the Church, and finally, in Capernaum, the ruins of Peter's house and of the synagogue in which Jesus revealed himself as the Bread come down from Heaven to give life to the world (John 6:28-58).
The memory of Jerusalem is indelibly written on my heart. Great is the mystery of this city, in which the fullness of time was made, so to speak, “fullness of space.”
Galilee! Homeland of Mary and of the first disciples, homeland of the missionary Church among the peoples! I think that Peter always held it in his heart, and the same is true for his successor!
On the liturgical feast of the Annunciation, as if returning to the source of the mystery of faith, I went and knelt in the grotto of the Annunciation in Nazareth. Here, in the womb of Mary, “the Word was made flesh and came to live among us” (John 1:14). Reflecting on the Virgin's fiat, it is possible to hear, in adoring silence, the “yes” full of love of God and men, the “amen” of the eternal Son, that opened to every man the way of salvation. There, in the reciprocal self-giving of Christ and Mary, are the hinges of every “holy door.” There, where God was made man, humanity found again its dignity and highest vocation.
Register Summary
The Holy Father recalled his thoughts and emotions at the major stops in a journey that was clearly a spiritual highpoint of his papacy.
The Pope also recounted his important meetings with Chris tians, Jews and Muslims in Jeru salem. Especially moving was his visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Vatican -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:Vietnamese Communist Praises Pope's ‘Mea Culpa’
In an article appearing in the Ho Chi Minh City daily, Ben Nghe called the Pope's public apology “an unprecedented act on the part of the Catholic Church.”
In a March 12 ceremony at St. Peter's Basilica, the Holy Father asked God's pardon for “the sins of the sons and daughters of the Church.”
Nghe wrote in the paper of Ho Chi Minh City's Communist Party committee: “I wish that all the members of the Church hierarchy and all the Catholic faithful support Pope John Paul's good will.”
“Changes in the world have been such that each individual, each socio-political organization, each nation and each religion should examine not only their strengths but also their weaknesses,” Nghe said, adding, “it is important to look at past wrongdoing because this will help further consolidate a person's strengths so as to achieve fulfillment.”
Noted Ngha, “Over the last two centuries, patriotic and philanthropic people, including communists, who have fought for liberation, justice, equality, and against racism and religious discrimination, have been the first to foster criticism and self-criticism.”
Church observers noted that while opinions and comments about the Church appearing in Vietnam's state-run newspapers are extraordinary, commendations of Pope John Paul's acts are even more exceptional.
The Dollars and Cents of a Papal V isit
According to the report, the Pope's visit and the pilgrims who came in his wake generated some $50 million for the Israeli economy, with half of that amount going to Israeli airlines.
Next in line were the hotels, which generated $11 million in revenues. Pilgrims spent $6 million on food. The national bus carrier also benefited from the influx of tourists, generating some $2.4 million.
It cost the state of Israel some $3.6 million to prepare for the Pope's visit.
Vendors in Nazareth complained that the 20,000-30,000 pilgrims who streamed through their city during the week of the papal visit brought packed lunches with them and so did not spend “a dime” in Nazareth.
Crucifixes, skullcaps, menorahs and prayer shawls topped the souvenir list for the visitors, said the article. Still, the real effect of the Pope's visit on the Israeli economy has yet to be seen.
“Two months from now we will know if tourists are looking to go to places that the Pope visited,” Ha'aretz quoted Tiberias Mayor Benny Kiriati as saying. “As of now it cost us thousands of shekels more than it brought in. The volume of sewage and garbage was driven up by tourists with very small buying power.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Vatican -------- TITLE: Archbishop Apologizes to Child After Priest Denied Him Confession DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:ROME — An Italian archbishop asked forgiveness of an 11-year-old boy with Down syndrome after the boy's parish priest refused to hear his confession.
Archbishop Giovanni Marra of Messina-Lipari-Santa Lucia del Mela visited the boy's home in the Sicilian village of Venetico March 27, saying he apologized “in the name of the whole Church.”
Venetico's 80-year-old parish priest, Father Nino Romano, had refused the sacrament to the handicapped child, identified only as Piero, during a March 25 first confession ceremony.
"You don't give flowers to dogs,” the priest reportedly said, paraphrasing Jesus' injunction against “throwing pearls to swine.”
ZENIT, the Rome-based news service, reported that “The boy stood staring, with a candle in his hand, confused over why he was not being treated like his friends. The faithful left the Church one by one until it was empty and Father Romano sought refuge in he sacristy.”
The priest later explained that the sacraments should not be received “without understanding.”
Though Piero cannot read or write, he was reported to be well-integrated in the local school's fifth-grade class.
The sacraments should not be denied to people who have “at least a minimal use of reason” enabling them to distinguish right from wrong, said Father Thomas Fucinaro, an official at the Vatican's Congregation for the Sacraments.
"In those cases where there's a question, you'd want to err on the side” of granting the sacrament, he said March 28.
Archbishop Marra, during his visit, is reported to have heard Piero's confession. He also made the boy a peace offering: a rosary blessed by the Pope John Paul IIand a Bible.
ZENIT reported the bishop's words to the child: “The Pope has asked the world for forgiveness, and I now ask you. I ask you for forgiveness on behalf of the whole Church.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:Feminists Desecrate Montreal Cathedral
Seven were arrested — three women and four men — after they spray painted slogans on an altar, turned over flowerpots and attempted to overturn the tabernacle.
Sister Rejeanne Poulin, who witnessed the vandalism, said: “They came in yelling things against religion. They said they were claiming the right to abortions and freedom of speech.”
The words “Neither God Nor Master” were spray painted in foot-high letters at the altar, on the frame of a 19th-century painting. Outside, another slogan, “Religion, A Trap For Fools,” was painted on a pillar at the front of the cathedral.
Anglicans Re-Consider Rationalizing Divorce Laws
The document would have to be approved by the Church of England's ruling synod of bishops to be put into effect. Victoria Combe, religious affairs correspondent of London's Daily Telegraph told the Monitor that she expects the bishops to support the document.
Last September a Church of England spokesman admitted publicly that all 43 dioceses in Britain do allow second marriages. The new report is an attempt to rationalize the present situation in Great Britain, where the divorce rate is nearly 1 out of 2 marriages.
Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey is reported to be sympathetic to change in the divorce laws.
Added Monitor writer Alexander MacLeod, “If put into effect, the proposed change in doctrine on remarriage after divorce will further distance the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church.”
N. Ireland Inquiry Opens on Bloody Sunday Massacre
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS , March 27 — The 1972 “Bloody Sunday” shooting of 13 Catholic protesters by British soldiers in Northern Ireland is being opened to a public inquiry after three decades of controversy and grief, the news service reported.
“Relatives and friends of the victims filled Londonderry's Guidl Hall for the biggest public inquiry in British legal history. The hearing, before three judges, is expected to last two years and will take evidence from 500 people.
“The soldiers claim they fired after being provoked by IRA gunmen — an assertion that has long infuriated Catholic residents of Londonderry, who insist the soldiers fired first and killed only unarmed people.
“The killings were a defining moment in Northern Ireland's past three decades of conflict, engendering a deep-rooted bitterness toward the British and driving scores of Catholics to join the Irish Republican Army.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Pius XII, Pray For Us DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:We may be witnessing the birth of a new anti-Catholic myth. The CBS news program “60 Minutes” recently presented what looked like an airtight case proving Pope Pius XII aided and abetted the Nazi cause by refusing to denounce them — presumably because he was anti-Semitic.
Like many myths about the Catholic Church (the popes turning a blind eye to New World slavery, for instance) this one isn't true. And like others, it's based on one historian's erroneous research being endlessly repeated but never checked.
In this case, John Cornwell's 1999 book Hitler's Pope, which has been thoroughly discredited by scholars who examined the same sources he did, continues to get favorable media attention around the world. (Last week's Register reported Jesuit Father Peter Gumpel's strong critique of the “60 Minutes” episode.)
In the interest of accuracy — and of the papacy — it is time to once again correct the record. Here are some headlines from The New York Times during World War II, and quotes from each article, as cited by John McLaughlin on his syndicated program the McLaughlin Group March 24:
Jan. 23, 1940: “Vatican Denounces Atrocities in Poland.” “Jews and Poles are being herded into separate ghettoes, hermetically sealed and pitifully inadequate.”
Jan. 24, 1940: “Vatican Amplifies Atrocity Reports: Weight of Papacy Put Behind Exposure of Nazi Excesses in Poland.”
On the same day, in an editorial entitled “Poland's Agony”:
“Now the Vatican has spoken with authority that cannot be questioned, and has confirmed the worst intimations of terror which have come out of the Polish darkness.”
March 14, 1940: “Jews'Rights Defended.” “That's how The New York Times described the Pope's words when meeting with a Nazi foreign minister,” said McLaughlin.
Christmas Day, 1941 and 1942: New York Times editorials said Pius XII is, “a lonely voice,” in his intervention on behalf of Jews and other victims of the Nazis.
Aug. 27, 1942: “Vichy Seizes Jews. Pope Pius ignored.” “These arrests are continuing, despite appeals to Marshal Henri Philippe Petain by leading Catholic clergymen, with the support of the pope.”
Dec. 4, 1943: While Germany occupied Rome and martial law prevailed, the “Vatican Denounces Decision to Intern and Strip all Jews in Italy.”
Oct. 1958: On the death of Pope Pius XII, then-Foreign Minister of Israel Golda Meir: “When fearful martyrdom came to our people, the voice of the pope was raised for its victims.”
Added McLaughlin, “Are these New York Times headlines and the stories from the Holocaust less trustworthy than some alleged modern scholarship? Which is the more suspect, would you think?”
Pope Pius XII's canonization is being pursued by the Holy See. We hope his heroic acts on behalf of the Jewish people will help raise him to the altar.
----- EXCERPT: Editorial ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Opinion -------- TITLE: Science Discovers God the Artist DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:by MARYTHOMAS NOBLE
by Thomas Dubay, SM Ignatius Press, 1999 365 pages, $14.95
Far from opposing one another, science and theology converge on their way to arriving at the same conclusions about truth and beauty. Father Thomas Dubay — Marist theologian, retreat master, spiritual director and bestselling author (Fire Within, Authenticity, Faith and Certitude) — shows us how the disciplines get there, focusing particular attention on how beauty points us to truth.
To show how scientific minds have increasingly ventured into these theological waters, Father Dubay has lined up an impressive collection of recent statements by leading scientists. James Watson, biologist and Nobel Prize winner (with Crick and Wilkins) for his monumental work on DNA, describes how the three of them were guided in their discoveries by beauty, exclaiming to each other one day during a lunch break that “a structure this pretty just had to exist.” Another Nobel Prize winner, Richard Feynman, one of the 20th century's most noted physicists, famed for his work on quantum electro-dynamics, remarked that “you can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity.” And Werner Heisenberg, founder of quantum mechanics, wrote that the truth of his theory “was immediately found convincing by virtue of its completeness and abstract beauty. … In exact science, no less than in the arts, [beauty] is the most important source of illumination and clarity.”
In fact, “[a]ll of the most eminent physicists of the 20th century agree that beauty is the primary standard for scientific truth,” conclude Robert Augros and George Stanciu in The New Story of Science.
On the theology side, Father Dubay translates the convergence of science and theology on the theoretical plane into descriptions of everyday human experiences. His delight in finding all the evidence he needs right there is apparent.
“Every human person is drawn to beauty … but few of us seem to be aware that the beautiful packs a power not only to fascinate but also to convince a mature and honest mind of solidly grounded truth.” With this opening, the theme of the book is sounded, to be taken up in movements ranging from the centrality of a vibrant appreciation of beauty to any person's human development all the way to the pinnacle of that development as experienced in the heroically holy man or woman.
“Just what is the beautiful? … Is it mainly in the eye of the beholder, as is often said? … Is there something subjective about it, or is it only objective, that is, ‘out there?’… What are the characteristics of an elegant object? … What does science say about the nature of beauty? Why do we men enjoy and even thrill in the beautiful, whereas mere animals give not the least hint of appreciating a rose bloom or a Straussian waltz? Why is the theme of our book so immensely important for you and me, while it seems to have no significance for squirrels and ducks?”
Why don't ducks waltz to Strauss?
The second part, which Dr. Dubay has titled “Savoring the Symphony,” offers intriguing chapters on things like macromarvels, midimarvels and micromarvels. This means we are treated to a tour of galaxies, solar systems, pulsars and supernovas, then through numberless varieties and incomparable performances of animals, trees and flowers perceivable to the senses, and on into the incredible, invisible complexities of the atomic world. Contemplating life at the cellular level, he writes: “Imagine a city so tiny that it cannot be seen by our naked eye and yet having millions of opening and closing gateways. It possesses a transportation system, libraries of information, manufacturing plants, computers and much else. Imagine each of these micro cities making others like them in an afternoon.” Our guide goes on to remark that wonder “is an awesome awareness. It is a compliment to God and an enrichment of the person.”
Beyond wonder lies the normal conviction that such marvels cannot have come about by chance, but point infallibly to a designer. Father Dubay shows on purely scientific grounds the absurdity of a theory of materialistic evolution. “Recent developments in biochemistry and microbiology,” he notes, “conclusively demonstrate that gradual changes by natural selection and random chance are impossible. … This is not a theological statement; it is the conclusion of scientific experts in the two fields. In addition, there is the negative conclusion of paleontology: the geological strata are embarrassingly empty of transitional forms. Darwin himself honestly admitted that if his theory were correct, there would have to be innumerable transitional developments.”
Introducing the next section, “Divine Glory,” Father Dubay presents the anthropic principle of science and the theological principle of providence, again a startling convergence of the two fields. “In current cosmology, the science of origins, anthropic principle refers to the conclusion that physicists and astronomers in growing numbers have reached in recent decades, namely, that from the very first microsecond of the Big Bang the universe has developed according to astonishingly precise requirements that point to the final appearance of man.” Man, the human person, is seen as the pinnacle and crown of the cosmos. Jumping to a loftier level, that of revelation, we get the same message in the Genesis story of creation. Neither discipline is used to prove the conclusions of the other, yet the independent accounts are “mutually confirming celebrations of the evidential power of beauty.”
The fact that the concept of divine glory is at best a vague and unfamiliar one in today's world makes the third part of this volume a stunning gift to the average reader. Father Dubay unfolds the beauty of God's life as it floods the human person and shows the meaning of holiness as the person's being filled with the very fullness of God. The marvels we have pondered throughout the book are merely foretastes of the splendor to come. “Within the beautiful the whole person quivers,” he writes.
This is vintage Dubay — and a powerful thing of beauty in its own right.
Dominican Sister Mary Thomas Noble
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mary Thomas Noble ----- KEYWORD: Education -------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:Praise of Our Penitent Pope
Pope John Paul II stood up before the world and did what very few in high places would do: ask forgiveness for crimes committed against Jews and others now and long before his time. Can you imagine even after this profound act of humility someone could say, “He didn't go far enough?”
Apparently they assumed he was going to take the blame for Adolph Hitler's crimes even though it took the compound efforts of the free world to defeat him. The Pope could have asked: Now, who among you will do likewise and take the blame for all the wrongs committed against Catholics for the last two thousand years? But he's content to leave that up to the One who reads hearts and will be the final judge of us all.
[The Pope], like the One he represents, taught a profound lesson of humility and courage. In imitation of Jesus, he took on the faults of all Catholics. But, as with the enemies of Christ, they wanted blood.
I'm quite sure the Lord is well pleased with our Pope. He stands head and shoulders above men of the world. No doubt he'll be remembered long after those who find deficiencies in this profound act fade away from the pages of history.
Jim Ziegler Georgetown, Texas
Many Things About Mary
I enjoyed David Gordon's column “There's Something About Mary” (March 19-25). However, I would like to point out an error. In speaking of the Annunciation, Mr. Gordon stated that Mary “was skeptical of what the angel promised, asking ‘How shall this be?’” Mary was not skeptical. If she had been, something similar to what happened to Zachary when he expressed doubt would probably have occurred. On the contrary, Mary's faith in God's power was complete. Her only question concerned what she was to do. After all, she had vowed virginity. Did God want her to repudiate her vow? No doubt she was willing to do that if God so willed.
However, the angel made it clear she would remain a virgin. She need only agree and God would do the rest. Her response was unhesitating: “Be it done unto me according to thy word.”
Mary Irving Port St. Lucie, Florida
I am writing about the headline of the March 19-25 column by David Gordon — “There's Something About Mary.” When I first noticed it, I expected to read about the movie There's Something About Mary, which is a vulgar, adolescent film that seeks to regularize and make humorous perversity and immorality.
Imagine my shock in realizing that the column was about the Blessed Mother! To link the two by using the title of such a disgusting film is a serious sacrilege. Our dear Blessed Mother is known by so many beautiful titles — Mystical Rose, Throne of wisdom and many others. Furthermore, as our Lady is known to be an example of purity, modesty and obedience to God, the comparison to a movie filled with tawdriness and obscenity is vastly disappointing.
Mary Alexander Norton, Massachusetts
Reader Shrugged
In the March 26-April 1 issue, you ran a three-quarter page rambling tribute to the arrogance and narcissism of Ayn Rand written by Donald DeMarco. Seemingly questioning the resurgence of her popularity, he himself devotes much too much space trying to make us understand her philosophy. Her absence of warmth or love for her fellow human beings, her selfish attitudes and life glorified in her writings is not something I expect to read about in the Register.
There is no redeeming value to her life or her writings, so why tell us about them? Or pretend to wonder why people are reading about her while writing about her? The place where Ms. Rand rests in eternity is surely her just reward for such a selfish life. The only warmth surrounding her has come posthumously.
Surely, there are more worthy authors to be written about. Mr. DeMarco's piece just serves to keep her name in the public eye longer than it deserves to be.
Lorraine Mutschler Scottsdale, Arizona
No Catholic Stands Alone
“What do Catholic Apologies Mean to Jews?” (March 12-18) was very thought-provoking. In describing the Holocaust, Rabbi Leon Klenicki said, “It showed the diabolic possibilities of the human being without control.” Father Peter Stravinskas called the 20th century the most horrible of centuries and said it is important to highlight the lesson that “when man tries to go without God, these are exactly the things that one should expect.”
One of the Jewish commentators said on television that, if Pope John Paul II were Pope during the time of the Holocaust, there would not have been a Holocaust.
Perhaps, if history taught us anything, it is that [a] pope cannot do it alone. We know that Pope Pius XII did speak out and did all in his power to prevent the Holocaust, and who should know better than Pope John Paul II of this leadership?
From the many Catholics who were killed during the Holocaust, we know that his words were heard. What we do not know is how much support he had from the members of the Catholic Church and leaders of the other faiths. Today we see that all our modern day popes have been condemning the “culture of death” at least since 1968, and violence is worse than at any time in history, not the least of which is the 40 million babies killed by surgical abortion. Let us all join in the prayer shared by Rabbi Klenicki so that “The Lord will reign for ever and ever.” Amen.
Bernie and Elaine McHale Greensboro, North Carolina
Liturgical Fires
Brian McGuire's report on the activities of the International Commission on English and the Liturgy (ICEL) was informative and welcome (“Liturgical Translations Face Vatican Overhaul,” Jan. 23-29).
The purpose of liturgy, as I understand it, is to afford the faithful the means of jointly expressing their love for God in union with their faithful.
The constant tinkering with and changing of the liturgy has left those of us in the pews thoroughly confused and amazed.
Confused for obvious reasons and amazed that those in command would tamper with something that has been so successful and rewarding. The folly of the past 30 years can be substantiated by checking [declining] Mass-attendance figures.
Rome has apparently finally realized that, if control is loosened and authority not expressed and enforced, we shall encounter situations like the resistance by the Catholic college presidents to Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the drop in Mass attendance and 45 minutes per week for confessions.
We love the Church and shall follow its dictates, but if there is confusion amongst the leaders, what can you expect from the rank and file? The activities of the ICEL remind me of the man whose house is on fire and, instead of training his garden hose on the burning house, he decides instead to water his garden.
John M. Flynn, Jr.
Covington, Louisiana
The Register Welcomes Letters
Mention which item you're responding to by headline and issue date. Please include your name, hometown and phone number.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Opinion -------- TITLE: Young Catholics Reshaping The Church DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:If something sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't. That's what came to mind when a friend told me on the eve of my return to the United States after 12 years of study and pastoral service in Europe that things have improved enormously for the Church in America.
Enormously.
Really? I asked myself. What about the shortage of vocations? The aging clergy? The Catholic identity crisis? Religious indifference? The breakdown of the family? Just to mention a few challenges American Catholics face. I wasn't expecting to encounter the Garden of Eden on my arrival home. Despite my reservations concerning the state of the Church, I tried to keep an open mind.
Last summer, I began a tour of parishes across the country to promote missionary activities and was able to see firsthand how things were going for the Church. What I discovered was that my friend's optimistic appraisal of the States was fairly accurate. Why? Let's look at a few facts.
Take the Church of St. Boniface in Cleveland, the first stop on my missionary tour. I arrived to celebrate the 5 p.m. Saturday Mass. The pastor asked me to be there 45 minutes beforehand for confession. Forty-five minutes? That's a lot of time, I thought, considering that confession has fallen almost into extinction.
Yet on my arrival at the confessional, I saw at least 10 people waiting in line. Is it possible that confession is making a comeback? I think so. This experience repeated itself in other parishes I visited during my mission appeal. Father Augustine Nguyen, St. Boniface's pastor, told me over dinner that “people are searching to experience Christ in the sacraments. It's no longer something mechanical, but personal.”
Fine. But perhaps this renewed interest in the faith was an old-folks thing. I didn't want to be a doubting Thomas, but piety does appear to increase in many with the passing of time. I knew one woman who didn't start praying regularly until she was 70.
The Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Lancaster, Pa., shattered my senior-citizen theory. I refer to this stop as the “youth connection.” When I stepped into the sacristy to prepare for Mass, I met young, smiling faces. The readers, altar servers and extraordinary eucharistic ministers were all under 30. What a difference from the chapel I worked at in Switzerland, where the youngest person in the community was 68 and the person who normally did the reading was 80. Maybe this was the youth Mass, I told myself. But youth participation was heavy at all the Masses I celebrated in this parish that weekend.
This would be a trend I noticed in other places as well. Despite the devastating effects of secularization in American society, many young people want to know Christ. Our young people are searching for serious values. So who's motivating this reform effort among the Catholic young of America?
Nearly everywhere I went, I ran into someone who was thinking about the priesthood or religious life.
The Pope, says Deacon Robert Weaver. Deacon Bob, as he likes to be called, points out that the Holy Father's youth encounters are working wonders. “Kids want to get involved and do something positive for others and themselves by following Christ,” he said.
I think he's right. Young people perceive that they are John Paul's special friends. As one young woman put it: “We love him and he loves us.” John Paul's friends are making a difference. They offer hope for the present and leadership for the future.
The Holy Father seems to be turning the tide in another important area as well: vocations. Nearly everywhere I went, I ran into someone who was thinking about the priesthood or religious life. In a parish in Ohio, when I asked a young man what he wanted to do after high school, he readily responded: “I'm thinking about going to the seminary.”
In Rhode Island, I teach dogmatic theology to a group of young consecrated women who are dedicated to promoting the new evangelization. Their example demonstrates that young people aren't afraid of commitment. When I first inquired how many would be attending my lectures, I was told around 30. Incredible! I wasn't expecting so many. All my students are between the ages of 18 and 30.
All this explains another phenomenon: younger priests and religious. No one can deny that the vocation shortage represents a serious challenge for the Church. But there are signs of hope. One is my priestly ordination class of 1997 — 31 religious, all of them under the age of 40. It seems just a matter of time before we begin seeing many younger priests in our parishes. To ensure that this momentum continues, many parishes across the country are promoting eucharistic adoration for vocations. There's a long way to go yet, but things are clearly getting better.
Does all this sound too good to be true? Maybe. But that's the way God works: making the impossible possible.
Father Andrew McNair teaches at the Mater Ecclesiae international center for studies in Greenville, Rhode Island.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Andrew McNair LC ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Science and Religion DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:The recent decision to award the Templeton Prize for religion to a scientist — and an agnostic one, no less — means that the relationship of science and religion is once more in the news. Is science in mortal combat with religion? Prize-winning physicist Freeman Dyson doesn't think so. Neither does another leading agnostic scientist.
In his latest nonfiction best seller, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (Ballantine, 1999), Stephen J. Gould, the popular paleontolo-gist and evolutionary biologist, expounds on the case that science answers how and religion answers why. Just as religion cannot and should not judge scientific truth, he says, science cannot and should not judge moral truth. In arguing for this perspective so persuasively, Gould places himself in the tradition of some of history's best and most thoughtful scientists — and expresses from a “purely scientific” vantage point what the Church has always taught.
What does this mean for the friction between science and religion? Was the whole thing just an unfortunate misunderstanding on both sides all these years? Is it over now?
The potential for heated debate between scientists and theologians is still with us, and it has to do with the object each group pursues and the assumptions each makes along the way. The purpose of religion is to know and love God, and the purpose of science is to understand the world around us. Cardinal John Henry Newman pointed out in The Idea of a University (1852) that religion and theology start with God and revelation, while science, by necessity, does not. For example, when a scientist examines what causes the weather, it is understood that angels are not going to be part of the explanation. In this sense, scientific research is irreligious, or better yet, materialistic. It is this absolute materialistic focus of science that often makes religious people uncomfortable, yet scientists are correct in being vigilant against invoking nonmaterialist agency in their examination of how nature works.
The Catholic teaching is that science must be free to judge its findings based on the empirical evidence, not constrained by a priori conclusions dictated by theology or religion. For those who think science conflicts with faith, this is a difficult idea. The reasoning, unaltered since St. Augustine examined the question, is that God's revelation taught by his Church and known by faith will not contradict his handiwork, the created universe. And the way we learn about creation is through reason applied to observation.
Much of Gould's book is spent tracing the history of science and religion in order to demonstrate that the two have always been distinct, with past conflicts between science and religion owing to incursions into each other's domain. Gould rightly insists that the need for distinction cuts both ways, and that the scientific method cannot answer the ultimate questions of purpose which religion addresses.
Evolution Revolution
Gould examines the history of science and religion in that potentially most-destructive interface between the two: evolution. The Catholic Church has never condemned evolution of the human body, and a recent statement by Pope John Paul II reaffirmed what the Church had already said. Yet this subject still captures the imagination of many devout people who think that evolution compromises God's role in creation; it also excites many non-believers who claim that evolution is evidence against the existence of God.
Both of these points of view are simplistic, and neither has the support of evolutionary biology or Catholic theology. First, science cannot tell us anything about the human soul, for the soul is a spirit and outside of the materialistic domain of science. Second, the use of animate rather than inanimate matter to create the human body is immaterial to the question of whether human beings are made in the image of God. That image, according to St. Augustine, is in the human ability to reason — to “seize truth by the intelligence.” However, John Paul II points out taht man is an “image of God” precisely in the body as male and female.
If science and religion can be distinguished in the abstract, in the human person they are impossible to segregate, for human beings are moral beings and no one can evade the question of purpose. Even the agnostic answer, that the purpose of human existence cannot be known, creates its own ethical climate. Just as personal piety does not enable a scientist to dispense with rigorous and objective experimentation, good scientific methodology is not a justification for unethical or immoral research. It might be good science to let rats infected with the bubonic plague loose in Detroit to observe its epidemiology, but it is bad ethics.
In the matter of religion, Gould inadvertently demonstrates this fact. Clearly a man of honesty and candor, Gould explains the reasons for his own agnosticism and his profound respect for religion as a phenomenon of the human experience. Yet in spite of his sincere civility, he displays a prejudice that religion demands the ability to believe in contradictions, which in turn requires a suppression of reason. In an uncharacteristic research error, Gould explains in a footnote that the doctrine of the Trinity is based on the three natures of God — Father, Son and Spirit. Of course, this is precisely what the doctrine of the Trinity does not say. Catholic teaching, consistent through the centuries, maintains that there is only one God comprised of three persons, all three of whom share the same divine nature.
The purpose of science is to know about creation; the purpose of religion is to know the creator.
Three persons in one nature is not a contradiction; it is a mystery. That the inner life of God should be a mystery is reasonable; that it is a contradiction is absurd. Gould's mistake is like accidentally flying the flag of a foreign country upside down. Such a mistake is understandable, but it betrays an ignorance of certain fundamentals of the Christian faith.
In Search Of …
Gould's lack of religious learning does-n't hinder him from articulating a thoughtful appreciation of the contributions of both religion and science. But are the two equals, like heads and tails, or poetry and prose? No. The ways faith and science seek an understanding of reality are divergent from one another. Science proceeds from the realm of the physically observable. Theories about how things work change as new observations come to light. Faith is open to the possibility that things not seen may yet exist. Understanding of how creation operates may deepen, but no finding can change the basic belief, for example, that God is active in people's lives.
For example, in the Middle Ages human life was known to be in the womb at the moment of quickening, when the unborn child was first felt by the mother. What happened in the womb between intimacy and quickening was a mystery. The study of biology revealed that human life begins at the moment of conception. This fact advanced the Church's understanding of the Immaculate Conception. The Church did not add to what faith already knew about Mary's sinlessness, but was able to refine that understanding with the insights provided by science. (A curious corollary is that the Church continues to insist on the scientific fact that human life starts at conception, while many scientists are quite prepared to perform mental and linguistic gymnastics in order to deny this fact in pursuit of political or economic agendas.)
There are two manners by which Catholic scientists can approach the dichotomies between faith and science. One is to be a bench-top scientist, performing a day job competently while reserving their Catholicity for their private life. The Catholic philosopher Etienne Gilson said that the highest compliment to be expected from this approach is, “Although he is a Catholic, you would never know it.”
This lacks the missionary action demanded by our baptismal commitment to bring Christ into the world. It is based on the idea that holding the Catholic faith somehow compromises scholarship, as if St. Thomas Aquinas were less of a philosopher because he is also a theologian, or Pascal less of a scientist because of his faith or Gregor Mendel's genetics were compromised because of his monastic life.
The Catholic approach to science, as with any human endeavor, is to strive for excellence in that endeavor. Catholic scholars must be excellent scholars; Catholic scientists, excellent scientists. To offer one's work to the service of Christ is to demand that it be more than just competent. Although the realms of religion and science are distinct, science serves religion by striving for scientific excellence. No amount of good intentions would have made up for poor architecture when designing the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages, and no piety would have revealed the principles of genetics to Gregor Mendel if he did not couple original experimentation with careful observation.
If science can instruct faith, can faith instruct science? Yes — not as science per se, but in the way scientists see reality. The insight Gould gives us into the agnostic mind is very illuminating. Agnosticism breeds a vision of things living so that they might die, with all being futile in the final analysis. The Christian religion is quite clear on this point. Life itself is good, existence is good, just being is good: “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Genesis 1:31).
Wolves, spiders, lice, mosquitoes and mildew are all good. This fundamental belief in the goodness of life — the deep sense that life is a gift which is not negated by death — stems from faith in the Incarnate God. For the Catholic scientist, this faith animates the quest to know and understand nature, demanding a rigorous application of the tools of reason. Thus science done badly is not just bad science, but an insult to the gift of life itself. And faith is the best safeguard against the temptation to be satisfied with mediocrity.
David Beresford, a biologist, writes from Lakefield, Ontario.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: David Beresford ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Why I No Longer Want What I Don't Have DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:The woman I work for has been richly blessed. I should know. I see her in the mirror every morning and clean her house each week.
There are much grander homes. The downstairs bathroom needs a new carpet, the front doorjamb is cracked, the windows leak a bit when it rains. But the roof is good and it's warm inside.
Her furnishings are certainly not anything to brag about: Everything in the home was handed down or bought at garage sales. But the way it's come together makes God's hand clear. Everything almost matches, it's all in perfectly good shape and most of the world's people have far less.
In the morning, all you have to do is push a button on a machine and coffee comes out. It makes the whole house smell like morning. I whip up muffins or eggs or pancakes to send the children off to school. The children are healthy and bright. The little boy often wears out the knees of his pants; the teen-age girl occasionally puts on too much makeup and gets sent back to the mirror to remove it. But their parents have no serious complaints about them.
I smile as I watch them shut their eyes and pray before they dive into their breakfast. The husband reads in the morning. When the wife kisses his balding head, he says, “Oh, thank you.” He seems genuinely grateful for meals, for laundry, for the kids doing their chores. He lives every day in sincere thanksgiving for God's grace and his happy attitude is contagious.
In the basement, the washer and dryer hum away as water whirls in the dishwasher upstairs. Music plays while I fold and sort the family's clothes. I could watch the TV while I work if I wanted to, but today, I choose Mozart. Later I will write a letter or call my mom for a chat.
This is a humble home, but I love it. It's the perfect place to reflect on what I have to be thankful for. There are many who have much more than you'll find in this home. Why do so many seem to worry about what they don't have? I suppose it's just too tempting to look upon what the neighbors have and think, “Some day we'll have that, too.” In fact, I know from personal experience that, when you fret over what you don't have, you invariably fail to appreciate what you do have.
I love toiling here, and not just because I am both the “buyer” and the “seller” of these services. The main reason I find my work — my vocation — so fulfilling is that God, for some reason I do not deserve or understand, has given all this to me.
I didn't always look at things this way. I grew up thinking of myself as a have-not because I wore hand-me-downs and ate at a table with seven siblings. It took me a long while to see the wisdom in Mother Teresa's view that one of the worst forms of poverty is the poverty of the materially rich who starve for love.
When I became a parent, I stayed home with my children until they entered school and then yoked myself to the cart of provisions. I actually thought my children would be better off with a mother who could help provide them with the best clothes and all the play-junk they could think of.
I found myself feeling superior to my own stay-at-home mom, doling out stuff to my children in the hope it would make them happier than I had been.
One night, as I was rushing to beat a deadline, my son was trying to show me the latest book he'd finished reading. I paused, listened, then dove back into my work. He walked away saying, “I wish we could have read it together.”
His words shot through my heart like a hot bullet. I remember thinking how much easier it would have been to tell him I didn't have a new toy for him rather than that I didn't have time for him. The next week, I gave my notice to quit my job.
My goal this Lent, as I look toward living more simply — and sparsely — is to notice all my real blessings and learn not to want. If I really want Lent to work its power in my life, I will give up longing for what I do not have and learn to desire what God has already given me. After all, I have all I need.
Sure, the car has 200,000 miles on it. Sure, I bounced a check last week. And sure, it's easy to covet my neighbor's new sport utility vehicle, my editor's laptop computer, my best friend's wardrobe. But my husband loves me, my children are healthy and happy and God is at my side. How blind would I be to ask for more?
Susan Baxter meets her occasional Register deadlines from Creede, Colorado.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Susan Baxter ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Spirit and Norms: The Pittau Discourse DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:On Feb. 1, the secretary of the Vatican Congregation on Education, Archbishop Giuseppe Pittau, S.J., gave a lecture to the U. S. Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities. Archbishop Pittau began by emphasizing the importance of the U.S. Bishops' implementation of Ex Corde Ecclesiae (From the Heart of the Church), the Pope's 1990 apostolic constitution on Catholic higher education. With some shrewdness, Archbishop Pittau compared two streams: St. Ignatius Loyola's explanation of the need for a formal constitution to guide the spirit of all Christian endeavors — and the similar need Catholic colleges have for not only good will and genuine spirit, but also for norms and principles. The latter make the inner spirit visible and genuine. “The two must go together: the spirit and the norms,” he said.
The “incarnational” thrust of Catholicism implies that graces, ideas, abstractions and spirits need to be transformed into concrete reality for them to be effective in this world, pointed out Archbishop Pittau. “They would remain mere ideals,” he added, “if they were not brought down to the operative level by concrete norms and practices in the choice of students, faculty and staff — in the curriculum, in research, in campus ministry, and in the whole range of extracurricular activities.”
Archbishop Pittau, former rector of the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, continued with the idea of “communion” and how it relates to colleges and universities. The Church is a worldwide, historical community. It is not an abstraction. It was from “within its heart” that universities first arose in the West.
“A president of a Catholic college and university should know that the universal Church, the local bishop and the local church are also a most important constituency,” said the archbishop. “One does not wait for an emergency to contact the bishop. At the same time, the bishop should not feel uncomfortable calling the president for an exchange of views on one of the most important apostolates in his diocese: the intellectual apostolate of the dialogue between faith and reason, between faith and culture.”
One forgets, I think, that, among other things, the Church itself is an institution directed to and concerned about reason. It does not stand outside of intelligence, looking in, as it were. This attention to intelligence is not the exclusive property of a Catholic, or any other, university, however important such may be. Even though they deal in mind, universities do not have a monopoly on mind.
To have precisely a Catholic college, Archbishop Pittau suggested (very carefully, following the Church's position), a Catholic university must retain and establish an “influential core,” as he calls it, of Catholic faculty members. No Catholic college without Catholic minds! Seems logical enough. Just how many this “core” would comprise, the archbishop leaves to prudence and historical or cultural circumstances. He is concerned with the principle.
High Aims
The solicitude of Catholics for what they hold, Archbishop Pittau thought, does not imply unconcern for what others hold. But it is not necessary to neglect what is specifically Catholic. Archbishop Pittau was especially anxious about carrying out the noble purposes for which Catholic universities were founded. They were not established to become secularized or something other than what those who sacrificed for them intended in their founding.
Archbishop Pittau next, as an instructional aside, painted a surprisingly pessimistic picture of contemporary European societies. They have, he thought, “become almost entirely secular.” He remains more optimistic about the United States, but many will recognize in his description of Europe the very same features in our culture.
“They (Europe) are societies where God and religion have almost disappeared,” he pointed out. “Religion is no longer talked about on the radio, on television, or in the media in general, except when there is some scandal or some special event which becomes a show. Religion has become a private issue; it is something done in private and not talked about in public.” When religion is talked about in the media, he noted, it is often presented as something old and outdated, as something against freedom and as something that causes division and conflict.
One does not have to look too hard to see that, increasingly, the same observation fits the media in the United States.
Archbishop Pittau does not think the university question is one of requiring lower academic standards, though he seems somewhat unaware of the degree to which such “standards” have been used to eliminate genuinely Catholic concerns within universities. The making and calculating of academic “standards” are not neutral enterprises. Recalling an ancient debate, Archbishop Pittau did think Athens and Jerusalem have mutual interrelationships, something taken for granted in most classical Catholic thinking.
The most “supernatural” element in Archbishop Pittau's address was a citation from Hugo Rahner, in a book comparing Christian mystery and Greek myth. “Only he who knows by faith that there once was a man who is God has the valid yardstick for determining the true nature of man. Only such a one as this knows just why we cannot discover true man and what pertains to him if we seek for man alone.” This is a constant theme of John Paul II from Redemptor Hominis to Fides et Ratio.
Catholic at the Core
The main thing I wondered about while reading Archbishop Pittau's address was his notion, derived from his experiences in Japan, that a culture should be “baptized” before stress is placed on conversions. If a Catholic university needs an “influential core” of Catholic professors, so it seems a culture needs an “influential core” of converted, believing Christians before any culture can really be confronted. It seems difficult to imagine how we could have a Catholic culture with few or no Catholics. But of course the Catholic natural law and philosophic tradition do claim to address themselves to the foundations of any culture or society.
Archbishop Pittau's final remark had to do with the ever present “pluralism” that has justified so much cultural relativism in the university and in society. “Not everything could be accepted and used in formulating a new Christian culture,” Archbishop Pittau rightly remarked. “We need prophets who know the absolute truths that transcend all cultures. Pluralism has to be respected, but it does not mean that all ideas and all religions are true. The right to express freely one's own opinion does not mean that any opinion is right.” He concluded with a remarkably pithy phrase: “It is not always morally correct to be political ly correct.” That is very well-said.
This is clearly not a “hard-hitting,” “intemperate” Roman “imposition” on the freewheeling Americans. But neither is it wishy-washy. It gets its main points across: Norms are needed; Catholics make things Catholic; not all things are true; others are important; Catholic universities ought to have Catholic standards.
How this can be “unreasonable” or “harsh” is quite mystifying. Or to put it the other way, the higher organs of the Church are likewise seats of reason and intelligence. It is not irrational to acknowledge the fact. “The two must go together: the spirit and the norms.”
Father James Schall is a professor of government at Georgetown University.
----- EXCERPT: Vatican education secretary calls for a “Catholic core” at Catholic colleges ----- EXTENDED BODY: James Schall, SJ ----- KEYWORD: Education -------- TITLE: Education Notebook DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:Trinity College Dis-invites Gloria Steinem
Steinem had been invited last year to speak at the Catholic college's “Peace and Justice” lecture series. They recently reversed their decision in part because they feared that some of her views, particularly those regarding abortion, might trigger widespread protests, said Kathleen O'Dell-Thompson, Trinity's vice president for institutional advancement, in the Chronicle article.
O'Dell-Thompson said that Trinity, which is this year celebrating its 75th anniversary, had recently overcome financial problems and was fighting to reverse declines in its enrollment. The college's officials must focus on solving those problems, not stirring up controversy, she said.
Not everyone approved of the college's move. The Chronicle reported that Vermont State Rep. Mary M. Sullivan, a Democrat, quit her part-time job as communications director at Trinity College because the institution rescinded the speaking invitation.
Bush and Gore Spar Over Education
Bush's “Reading First” proposal, intended as one of the major initiatives of his campaign, would seek to ensure that all children read by the third grade by providing instruction for about 900,000 kindergarten and first-grade students in low-performing schools as well as mandating testing and additional teacher training.
“Too many of our children cannot read. Reading is the building block, and it must be the foundation for education reform,” the paper quoted Bush as saying. “Others have proposed throwing money at the problem. I'll spend more on schools, and I'll expect more from our schools.”
Advisors to Vice President Al Gore were quick to criticize Bush's program, the Post reported. They called Bush's initiative an echo of a program already enacted during the Clinton administration, while the vice president, in an interview with the Associated Press, charged that Bush's tax cut plan would leave no new money to invest in education. Gore said the Bush tax proposal “puts a huge cloud over everything that he says about education.”
Gore has proposed an education plan that would use $115 billion of the federal budget surplus over 10 years to fund universal preschool, hiring and testing of new teachers, reducing class sizes, building schools and repairing crumbling ones, noted the Post. He also wants to triple the number of charter schools, make preschool available to every 4-year-old and expand Head Start.
Keyes Speaks at Steubenville
FRANCISCAN UNIVERSITY, March 7 — Radiant and hopeful despite the darkness of a national media blackout, Republican presidential candidate Alan Keyes addressed over 1,700 students and faculty March 6 at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio.
“We don't need to start off as strangers,” said Keyes, a 1996 recipient of an honorary degree from the school. “This is a special place for me and a reservoir of spirituality.” The Franciscan University Student Association (FUSA) sponsored Keyes'address.
Keyes addressed America's moral situation, making frequent references to Christian and Church teachings. “We should not have to show shame in recalling our country back to our Creator,” he said in reference to abortion, materialism, racism and other social ills.
“There is no other basis for moral discipline than to acknowledge the limits of freedom to prevent a literal ‘hell on earth,’” Keyes said to a packed floor of students and visitors. “This is not speculation of what will happen; this is an observation of what is happening.”
The sentiments of the students, who lacked no enthusiasm at the rally, were expressed well by FUSA president Tom Buck in his introduction of Dr. Keyes: “Our work is not just to watch someone like Alan Keyes go out and fight alone. We all must individually fight for the values we espouse at this university.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Education -------- TITLE: The Boys Of Summer Are Back DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:by Mike Lupica Penguin Putnam, 1999 209 pages, $23.95
Every culture needs a liturgical calendar, broadly understood. Rituals and ceremonies impose order on the passing time, giving significance to this day or this week in an otherwise unending stream of days and weeks. Liturgy — literally the “public work” of a society — is the means by which communities are formed and truths handed on from one generation to the next. Liturgy means Mass on Sunday, but it also means Thanksgiving dinner and Mother's Day, and it also means sports.
Ask any family with growing children, especially boys. The seasonal rhythm of sports regulates to a great extent the rhythm of family life. Early-morning hockey practices, after-school basketball games, weekend softball tournaments — all these impose a certain order on the passing time. Swimming lessons mark the summer vacation, and give way to football try-outs when school starts again.
Where were you when McGwire hit No. 62?
Sports, especially professional sports, provide part of the secular liturgy of North American culture, and their health is critical to our common life. Even for those who have no interest in sports, the move from Super Bowl Sunday to the Masters to Wimbledon to the World Series has the important background effect of providing a common set of reference points. Every year at the same time the conversations around the water cooler turn to the same subjects, and photographs of men at play appear on the front pages on the newspapers, mercifully displacing politics and crime for a few days.
Fathers and Sons
Summer begins in a certain sense for Americans with opening day, the first day of the new baseball season. Baseball, more than any other sport, shapes American culture. Mike Lupica, sports columnist for the New York Daily News, has written a beautiful book about how we all watched baseball the season before last, the Summer of '98, the summer of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, of the Yankees and Roger Clemens, of Kerry Wood and David Wells. But what Lupica really writes about is how baseball, cleansed of the sour memories of the strike of 1994, returned to its noble place as the nation's secular liturgy. Lupica writes about baseball and about fathers and sons — his own father and his own sons.
“I cannot tell you for sure why baseball is passed on the way it is, more than other sports,” writes Lupica. “I just know it came first with me. It was something I shared with my father, and still share today. It was a special language that we had, at the ballpark, in the front seat of a '56 Dodge, watching on television. Talking on the telephone the night McGwire hit No. 62, all that time after we had watched Maris hit No. 61. Alove that fits inside of a bigger love, like a ball in a mitt.”
McGwire, No. 62. Maris, No. 61. Those are magical numbers in baseball. Mention them to a fellow fan, and nothing need more be said; there is already a bond developed. The Summer of '98 really begins in the summer of '61, and Lupica shares with us how a boy who was transfixed along with his father by baseball in 1961 grew up to be transfixed all over again with his sons in 1998.
All Those Years Ago
Mike Lupica was 9 years old in 1961, in his first Little League season, and along with his father and the whole nation he watched as Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle went after Babe Ruth's record of 60 home runs in a single season. Little Mike was too young to stay up until the games were over, so when his father sent him to bed, he promised to leave little notes in his bedroom, so that as soon as he got up he could read: “Maris hit another one. 42. Mantle 1-for-4, no home runs. Yankees win.”
Thirty-seven years later, and now Lupica's three boys, Christopher, Alex and Zach, are too young to stay up to watch the games with their father. So they go to bed, and he leaves them little notes: “Zach: He did it! No. 62, baby! Your dad.”
Lupica writes of that incredible season through the eyes of a fan, and a father — a father whose sons are fans too. And while the subject is baseball, the home run race and the Yankees' incredible season, the story is about a father and his sons sharing an innocent and magical summer.
Asummer that unites generations so that when McGwire finally breaks the record, grandsons call their grandfather, who cries. It is a moment that son, father and grandfather with remember. It is a moment connected to other moments, like when Maris broke Ruth's record on a Sunday afternoon in 1961. It is a moment that baseball gives to fathers and sons to share, and what is important is not that it is baseball, but that it is shared.
The Sentimental Game
It's a sentimental book. But baseball is sentimental. And for fathers and sons, it is true that sometimes sports allow room for words that otherwise would go unspoken and for sentiments that would go unfelt. Baseball in 1998 brought fathers and sons together the way baseball is supposed to do. Lupica observes that, in the summer of Clinton-Lewinsky, baseball was a necessary diversion.
But sports are not a diversion. They are not an ancillary part of common life that is a distraction from the stock market or foreign policy. They are not mere recreation. At their best — whether the 1998 World Cup in France or the 2000 America's Cup in New Zealand — they enliven a culture with their potential to make patriots out of citizens, to make communities out of strangers, and even to make friends out of fathers and sons.
In the summer of '98 baseball was at its best. Writing about it all, Lupica too is at his best.
It's April, and the seasons are changing once again. College basket-ball's Final Four marks the last days of spring. The seasons change. It's time for baseball. Anyone who is not convinced that that is important needs to read Mike Lupica.
Play ball.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond De Souza ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Vacationing with God DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:Happy family vacations are all alike — just look at the sunny, fun-filled faces in the magazine advertisements for beach getaways.
But every unhappy family vacation is unhappy in its own way. Just fill in the details of misery from your own past vacations — arguing kids, feuding adults, flaring tempers, sunburn, hot afternoons, rainy afternoons, surly waitresses, indigestion, chocolate ice-cream on the back seat of the car. And don't forget the missed trains, late planes and no-show rental cars.
Suffice it to say, family holidays don't always deliver the unrelieved happiness that the vacation industry promises.
Deep down, we know this. Experience tells us so. Yet, we continue to hope our vacations will be times of harmony, unblemished joy and spontaneous happiness. Even though we pride ourselves on being rational adults, somehow, we feel let down with the reality of vacationing.
We might ask: Why? Why in our culture of conveniences, labor-saving devices and easy travel do we suffer this strange malaise?
Digging beneath the surface frustrations and the usual mishaps, could it be that the roots of our discontent lie gnarled around our philosophy?
Philosophy — as in how we think about vacations. Our attitude.
This is where Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper would place the problem of vacation blues. Western culture has forgotten how to be leisurely, he says in his small classic, Leisure: The Basis of Culture. To vacation well, he adds, we must know how to be leisurely.
Pieper, drawing on Plato, Aristotle and the Scholastics, observes that modern man, unlike the man of antiquity, no longer works to live. We now live to work.
Work has become our life, who we are. We have absorbed too much of the utilitarianism of our culture, internalized the totalitarian claims of the world of work rather than the worldview of Christ, and, as a result, we're spiritually impoverished and diminished humanly. Because we've become fettered to production and value ourselves by how much money we make, we're often wholly consumed by work.
According to Pieper, modern man can often no longer act significantly outside his job. Because of this “religion of work,” we distrust leisure. Free time makes us uneasy and vaguely guilty.
For many Americans, vacations must be “useful” in some way, such as hauling the kids off to a Civil War battlefield, touring the Baseball Hall of Fame, or chasing amusement-park thrills.
“The ancients maintained that there was a legitimate place for non-utilitarian modes of human activity,” Pieper writes. “Leisure, it must be clearly understood, is a mental and spiritual attitude — it is not simply the result of external factors, it is not the inevitable result of spare time, a holiday, a weekend or a vacation. It is, in the first place, an attitude of mind, a condition of the soul. Leisure implies an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm, of silence; it means not being ‘busy,’ but letting things happen.”
But our immediate reaction is to fill empty time. Our attitude is that we must be busy, useful, productive. The reason, according to Pieper, is deep spiritual insecurity.
“Leisure is only possible when a man is at one with himself, when he acquiesces in his own being,” he says. “Only when we are secure with our Creator and our own creatureliness, can we enter into leisure and be refreshed.”
Pieper describes this rejuvenation: “When we really let our minds rest contemplatively on a rose in bud, on a child at play, on a divine mystery, we are rested and quickened as though by a dreamless sleep.”
The Soul's Needs
So, a successful family vacation is much more than just taking the kids to the shore, traveling to a mountain resort or splurging on a luxury cruise. As incarnate beings, both our bodies and souls have “vacation needs.” While any travel agent can cater to the physical, we must look to the wisdom of our Catholic tradition for the soul's needs.
Genesis says that the Lord God created the world in his awesome sovereignty and tender love. Then, on the seventh day, he ended his work and rested.
“God saw all he had made, and indeed it was very good” (Genesis 1:31).
In other words, the secret of leisure lies in contemplating — looking with love and with attention — at creation in all its beauty and majesty. Such contemplation is an act of reverence. As such, it is an act of receptivity, not passivity.
To be leisurely, we cannot blindly consume creation in a frenzy of filling ourselves with pleasurable vacation experiences. Another trip to the beach, another train ride, another parachute jump won't do it.
We need to mentally stop and appreciate the experience we're having here and now. Take time to point out to the children how green the grass is, how golden the sand. Really taste the lemonade. Really hear the seagulls.
The underlying problem with vacation blues is metaphysical. We must be contemplatives, not consumers. This internal attitude is what makes vacation happiness possible.
Contemplating creation draws our attention to the Creator. Then our spirit can rejoice in his reality and celebrate his generosity.
“Like the gift for contemplative absorption in the things that are, and like the capacity of the spirit to soar in festive celebrations,” says Pieper, “the power to know leisure is the power to overstep the boundaries of the workaday world and reach out to superhuman, life-giving existential forces that refresh and renew us before we turn back to our daily work.”
Ultimately, leisure must be linked to worship.
“The celebration of divine worship,” says Pieper, “is the deepest of the springs by which leisure is fed and continues to be vital — though it must be remembered that leisure embraces everything which, without being merely useful, is an essential part of all human existence.”
But, he adds, the modern religion of work is blind to divine worship and often inimical to it. We must overcome this tendency and expand our capacity for true leisure.
Contemplating Nature
Carmelite monk Father William McNamara teaches that contemplation begins with looking and with wasting time with our Creator and his creation — including our family members.
“Long, loving, leisurely looks take time,” Father McNamara writes in The Human Adventure: The Art of Contemplative Living. “The real engages us and consumes our energy. If God is real, he must absorb us, each one of us, for a good part of every day. That means time must be wasted. Until I waste time prodigiously I do not take God seriously. If Christ is real, he must hold and captivate me for a lifetime; and I must dwell with him. If the persons and things around me are real, then I must take time to notice and enjoy them.”
If we take time — waste time — looking, really looking, at our family members, we will find that family vacations become an experience of family. If we learn to look at the people we live with and see them as persons, contemplating the gift that each one is, delighting ourselves in their presence, then vacation problems will become less important and less taxing. We might even find ourselves enjoying our time away together.
This article is reprinted from Catholic Faith & Family, another Circle Media publication.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: UnaMcmanus ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Tips for Family Holidays DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:The following suggestions, which were adapted from Family Vacations That Work (LifeJourney Books) by Tim Hansel, will help your family better enjoy their leisure time:
1) Have reasonable expectations . A vacation won't make you a new person, solve all your problems, salvage your marriage, or transform your kids into angels. But a vacation can be refreshing.
2) Examine past vacations, including the disastrous ones. But don't vilify yourself. Rather, think of ways these vacations could have been improved. Carry those lessons into your next vacation.
3) Relax. Remind yourself to slow down, take it easy, not to rush. Don't hurry to be happy! You don't have to fit everything in. Don't feel guilty about taking it easy. God created rest for our enjoyment and well-being.
4) Expect obstacles. It's Murphy's Law that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, probably at the worst time. Don't give in to anger or gloom. Keep a positive attitude. Make an adventure out of mishaps. Remember, your children will imitate your behavior.
5) Eat and drink in moderation. Enjoy food. But don't make it the whole vacation. Plan to eat healthily. Take along fruit and low-calorie snacks for long drives instead of candy and chips. Fatigue, frustration, even boredom can lead to overindulgence. Remember, you don't have to eat or drink it just because it's there.
6) Get regular exer cise. Exercise will help you feel better, help keep your appetite in check, and help your digestive organs do their work. Exercise also can give adults some quiet time together. Make exercise a priority, especially if you've been traveling all day.
7) Realize that you may have difficulties with family vacations. Admitting you have difficulty is a big step in improving the situation. Rather than being an admission of defeat, it opens you up to new ways of thinking and doing.
8) Don't wait to take a vacation until you desperately need one. If you're physically and emotionally exhausted, or ill, it's impossible to fully enjoy a vacation.
— Una McManus
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Una McManus ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: 'Bob' And Other Lenten Offerings DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:Should anyone decide to launch a worst-timing awards competition, NBC ought to be the odds-on favorite to win for 2000. In early March, just as Lent was getting under way, the network premiered a prime-time animated sitcom called “God, the Devil and Bob.” Its pre-release promotional “teasers” hinted at flippant tweaks of basic Christian beliefs. No fewer than 18 of the network's affiliates either refused to air the show outright or said they wouldn't broadcast it before midnight.
Yet even in markets where the show did make it to air, it received lukewarm ratings and drew complaints. Which is why it was cancelled at press time in the U.S. — though NBC says other countries will show all 13 inaugural episodes. In the show, which is more bluster than blasphemy (more on that later), God considers destroying the world, but instead decides to give humanity a chance if only one person can prove worthy of saving.
Enter Bob, a guy swigging a beer from a barstool. “Folks, meet your last chance for salvation,” says the voice of God. “I wouldn't make any long-term plans.” God, who sips beer himself and looks and sounds like a sartorial 1960s hippie, matches wits with the devil, who dresses and speaks like an erudite Englishman.
For a medium that assiduously avoids issues of faith, and works even harder to avoid references to organized religion, what is NBC thinking with this one — on the eve of Easter, no less?
The bottom line is that “God, the Devil and Bob” reflects a calculated business risk. It's part of a trend which has gathered momentum as viewers' attention has been diverted from a few traditional networks to myriad cable stations. Each of the networks has attempted to detonate some wildly innovative program idea that would appeal to viewers' insatiable appetites for “something different.”
Real-Life TV
For CBS and Fox, this has meant, among other things, the advent of “real-life TV.” CBS will premiere two programs in late spring in which a group of regular folks — that is to say, non-actors — are placed in close proximity to one another (in a house and on a desert island, respectively).
The group must then “nominate” one person for expulsion until only one is left. That individual, of course, wins a fabulous prize. Even though these ideas are borrowed from European TV, they're completely new and novel to American audiences.
Which brings us back to NBC and its quest for can't-miss audience bait. “God, the Devil and Bob” sailed into March with high hopes. It came with an impressive pedigree (Carsey-Werner, which has produced bankable hits like “The Cosby Show,” is behind it).
It has some star power (James Garner supplies the voice of God). It also wears on its sleeve an air of controversy, which never hurts a show's immediate prospects. Plus animated shows help networks attract a coveted audience: teens and young adults.
Instead, the show has fizzled. Why? As it turns out, “God” is not particularly groundbreaking. The show basically trumpets safe, middle-class values: Take care of your family, help your children, be a faithful husband. “Been there, seen that,” many viewers have said. But NBC continues to try to scare up the Next Big Thing. Maybe now we really should be worried.
As for what's worth clicking to this month: Holy Week always brings out the best in EWTN; watch for the Catholic cable network to present some especially memorable, Jubilee-inspired programming this year. Here are some other worthwhile shows to look for in April (all times EDT):
APRIL 9-13
The American Pr esident
PBS, 9-11 p.m.
An intelligent and visually intriguing look at the history of the presidency, this gargantuan undertaking draws on the talents of Peter Kunhardt, a former network news producer considered one of TV's pre-eminent history specialists. The shows are organized into hour-long blocks exploring various themes. For example, one studies presidents who succeeded those who died in office; another examines presidents from famous political families.
Ten hours will provide more detail and information than many viewers will care to absorb. But American history buffs will be licking their chops over the fascinating flow of trivia. (Did you know that President John Tyler forged a close tie with his second wife after her father and his secretary of state were killed aboard a ship during a weapon demonstration?) Those who stay with the series to the end will see, in the final hour, Bill Clinton discussing his impeachment trial.
SUNDAY, APRIL 16
Walking with Dinosaurs
Discovery Channel, 7-10 p.m.
This will rank as one of the must-see programs of the year for science lovers. It is truly a remarkable program; I can honestly say that I have never seen anything quite like it. The show's producers have used computer animation and animatronics (robot animals) to re-create Triassic and Jurassic ecosystems — along with many of the creatures believed to have inhabited them (Coelophysis, Placerias, Stegasaurus, Diplodocus and friends). Discovery is boasting in its promotional press kits that this is “one of the most ambitious television ventures” ever undertaken. Well, it turns out they're not exaggerating. The creatures' lifelike movements and incredibly detailed features will have you rubbing your eyes and thinking you're looking at the real thing.
SUNDAY, APRIL 23
The Miracle Maker
ABC, 7-9 p.m.
If you watch television on Easter, this is one of the best choices you can make. A combination of animation and claymation, its visuals may strike some as off-putting at first. But in the hands of producers Christopher Grace and Elizabeth Babakhina, it is often compelling and moving — and the eyes quickly adjust to the imagery. The film does not attempt to tell the entire Gospel story from beginning to end, but instead draws heavily upon Jesus' parables.
This approach may point young viewers toward the meaning of Christianity. At the very least, it will provide an “in” for family discussion on the true meaning of Easter. Best of all, even though “The Miracle Maker” is fit for the kids, grown-ups should enjoy it as well. In other words, the whole family can enjoy this one together. How often can you say that about a contemporary television show?
Verne Gay also covers television for Newsday.
----- EXCERPT: April TV brings real life, presidents and dinosaurs ----- EXTENDED BODY: Verne Gay ----- KEYWORD: Arts & Culture -------- TITLE: Prizer's Picks DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:The Insider (1999)
Media conglomerates and big tobacco are everyone's favorite bad guys, and the Oscar-nominated The Insider takes its shots at these fashionable targets with precision and style. Muckraking writer-director Michael Mann (Miami Vice) turns a real-life story about “60 Minutes” producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) and tobacco whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) into an atmospheric thriller where the stench of evil comes from the executive suites of CBS News and Brown & Williamson, a Kentucky cigarette manufacturer.
Wigand, a former head of research for the tobacco company, has an attack of conscience about the corporation's use of nicotine and its lies about the substance's addictive powers. However, a legally binding confidentiality agreement keeps him from going public. Bergman persuades Wigand to go on the air anyway only to be double-crossed by his network bosses, who see the story as threatening their corporate interests. Tension builds, and we begin to root for this unlikely duo as they struggle to do the right thing
The Civil War (1989)
Our War Between the States has never ceased to fascinate. Ken Burns' acclaimed nine-part documentary successfully recreates for contemporary audiences the drama of this epic struggle. The visuals are mainly still photos from the period and the soundtrack successfully combines readings from participants' letters with music of the time. The historians interviewed are passionate about their material and all the key figures are all brought to life, from Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee to Frederick Douglas and Stonewall Jackson. Also explored with incisive intelligence are the issues that ignited the conflict — slavery, states'rights and each side's competing financial interests.
But The Civil War's greatest strength is its presentation of the ordinary soldier. Neither side has a monopoly on heroes or villains. We watch the casualties mount and see the pain and suffering in both North and South until we experience the war's tragedy as if we are there.
Marty (1955)
Finding the right mate is always difficult, and pressure from family and friends to get married when there aren't any prospects sometimes only makes things worse. Marty Piletti (Ernest Borgnine) is a lonely, overweight, middle-aged bachelor who wrestles with these problems. He lives with his mother and works as a butcher in the Bronx. Desperate for some kind of relationship, he goes to the Stardust Ballroom, where he hits it off with a plain, unmarried schoolteacher, Clara Snyder (Betsy Blair), who's been dumped after a blind date. But when he introduces her to those who are near and dear, they all say she's not good enough.
The Oscar-winning Marty shows us through laughter and tears the conflicts within a close-knit Italian Catholic community in the 1950s. Despite its many shortcomings, its way of life looks good when compared to the present day. Attending Mass on Sundays was the norm, and communities agreed on what was right and wrong.
The Adventur es of the Wilderness Family (1975)
At one time or another every big-city dweller dreams of chucking it all and heading back to the country where life is simpler. The Adventures of the Wilderness Family dramatizes this fantasy with good humor and charm. Blue-collar worker Skip Robinson (Robert F. Logan) and his wife Pat (Susan Damante Shaw) have had it with Los Angeles' crowded freeways and smog. They move to a log cabin in the Rocky Mountains with their son Toby (Ham Larsen), their chronically ill daughter Jennifer (Hollye Holmes) and a dog.
At first this journey back to nature seems idyllic. The fresh air is healthy and the scenery magnificent. Toby and Jennifer make friends with a raccoon. But when they decide to look after some motherless bear cubs, they're menaced by a vicious grizzly and a pack of wolves. This low-budget success was followed by a pair of sequels and a slew of unsatisfactory imitations.
Arts & Culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORD: Arts & Culture -------- TITLE: Where Mary and Joseph Raised Their Son DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:The Nazareth where Jesus grew up was a backwater village of around 475 people. Cosmopolitan Jews from Jerusalem looked down their noses at it. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” asked Nathanael when presented with the proposition that the man who might be the Messiah hailed from there (John 1:46). As Pope John Paul II saw firsthand during his historic Holy Land pilgrimage last month, today the city of 70,000 bustles with cars, loud radios and shop after shop whose merchants stand outside genially hawking their goods.
The Basilica of the Annunciation, at which the Holy Father celebrated Mass on the feast of the Annunciation, commemorates the good that came out of Nazareth.
Pedestrians in Nazareth must dash across the street to dodge speeding cars. I saw two schoolgirls, about 5 years old, waiting vainly to cross the street. Losing patience, they finally burst into the road. The fast-approaching driver hit his brakes and wanly smiled at the girls as they skipped across the road.
Nazareth is an Arab city. Some of its citizens are Christian, but most are Muslim. The sidewalks of the city are crowded with Arab men in traditional attire drinking powerful coffee and smoking Eastern-style pipes. Radios in Muslim shops blare sunset prayers. The hustle and bustle eases on Friday, the holy day for Muslims.
Nazareth is a lot like Chicago, where I live. It is busy, crowded, overheated much of the time. The historical Jesus is relatively easy to imagine in Bethlehem or Jerusalem, where the past is more recognizable. Finding Jesus in Nazareth is more of a challenge. The city's only obvious scriptural vestiges are the occasional donkeys that drivers skillfully swerve around.
The Basilica of the Annunciation, at which the Holy Father celebrated Mass on the feast of the Annunciation, commemorates the good that came out of Nazareth. The mammoth church, built in 1969, is the largest church in the Middle East. The present church is the fifth to occupy the site, constructed above what is believed to be the home of Mary. The heart of the beautiful, spacious church contains an underground grotto where history was forever altered. Layer after layer of Nazareth has been stripped away to reveal the cavelike dwelling where tradition says Mary met Gabriel.
Holy Ground
Mary's home, surrounded by a tacky fence, is not much to look at. But it does wonders for the imagination. “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you,” the angel Gabriel greeted her. Marking the spots where the two faced each other are two granite columns, known as the “column of Gabriel” and the “column of Mary.”
Is this truly where Jesus learned to walk and talk? Where Mary took him in her arms and held him close to her heart? Where Jesus grew in wisdom and knowledge, according to the divine plan? The earliest Christians believed so. And so have Christian pilgrims through the ages. The spot is certainly holy ground, even if only for the millennia of faith witnessed here.
The Basilica of the Annunciation is a testament to the world's love of Mary. The side walls are decorated with huge panels depicting Mary and Child from dozens of cultural perspectives. Each image, paid for by Catholics in its country, lovingly places Mary in a specific cultural context. From Japan is a kimono-clad Mary with beautiful eyes. Our Lady of Africa, a gift from Cameroon, depicts women offering the fruits of their labor to Mary and Jesus.
The American panel is a highly modernistic cubist version of the Blessed Mother. Mary's face is obscure. It's not black or white, old or young, full of innocence of youth or the wisdom of age. It's an image appropriate for the United States, a land of diversity whose Catholic faith is fueled by people of many origins.
St. Joseph's Shop
The small but graceful St. Joseph Church is next to the basilica. The church marks the traditional site of Joseph's carpentry shop. Beneath the church is a rock-hewn chamber believed to be the Holy Family's home. Sunk in the floor are pits that served as cool storage for meat. A smooth circular slab of rock functioned as a crude table.
The storage pits and table are obvious re-creations intended to increase the site's historic authenticity. The wonder of such sites is not the actual evidence of antiquity, but the realization that Mary and Joseph once walked this earth, breathed this air, kept a home and experienced the joys and sorrows of the rest of us. Visiting the sacred sites does not allow us so much to touch history as to feel it. Pilgrimages to these places touches us with the sacred past more through the heart than the eyes.
After my visit to St. Joseph's, I left the church and walked past a garden toward a quiet back street. A group of Arab Catholic children, dressed in school uniforms, carried bundles of books. I heard their laughter and watched the boys tease the girls, who waved off the boys' playfulness.
The youths paid no attention to the basilica, a building they passed every school day. Like all youth, their frame of reference was the momentous present. But they stood in the shadow of the church, too. On that holy ground 2,000 years ago, Mary began her journey toward God. I left with a strong sense that, like Mary and like me, those children, though they envisioned Mary's face differently than I did, were on their own pilgrimage of faith.
Jay Copp is based in Chicago.
----- EXCERPT: … and where the Pope celebrated Mass on the 2,000th anniversary of the Incarnation ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jay Copp ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Young Pro-Lifers Protest at Oscars DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:HOLLYWOOD— When movie stars exited their limos to attend the Academy Awards, they expected to see photographers, reporters and adoring fans. At this year's ceremony on March 26, they also saw a group of young people protesting the movie The The Cider House Rules.
Carrying signs as shown in the photo at right, the protesters were members of a group called Survivors, which is the name they give to people born after abortion was legalized in 1973.
And they had a message for the actors and actresses of Hollywood.
“They can't hide behind their limousine tinted-windows and pretend that this doesn't happen in America,” said Danielle White, 16, spokeswoman for Survivors.
The problem with The Cider House Rules, White said, is that “an abortionist is treated just like a foot doctor. But knee surgery is not the same thing as having a child removed from the womb.”
In addition to their Oscar protest outside the Shrine Auditorium, the young activists protested at the home of Michael Caine, who played an abortionist in The Cider House Rules. They also stood outside the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where Miramax held a pre-Oscar party for its movie.
“We saw Michael Caine, Toby McGuire and Charlize Theron. We saw all the actors and actresses” who starred in the movie, said White. “I'm sure they were quite angry.”
Votes for the Oscars were cast long before the award ceremony, so the protest could not affect the vote. The Cider House Rules won two awards: Best Supporting Actor went to Caine for his portrayal of an abortionist and Best Adapted Screenplay went to John Irving who also wrote the 1994 novel of the same name.
In accepting the award, Irving said, “I want to thank the academy for this honor to a film on the abortion subject and Miramax for having the courage to make this movie in the first place.” He also thanked Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights Action League, who have been promoting the movie.
“We're always happy to see someone standing out and speaking out for a woman's right to choose,” said Colleen McCabe, spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood.
McCabe didn't have kind words for the protesters, though.
“We understand that they weren't very effective,” McCabe told the Register. “They didn't get much of a rise” out of anybody, she said.
White disagreed. “Not from the reaction we got from people,” she countered. “Many people got very angry. They said some choice words.”
Speaking to reporters after the ceremony, Michael Caine had only kind words to describe the role of the abortionist in the movie: “This man was, to me, the most compassionate creature I'd ever played.”
Jim Sedlak, director of Stop Planned Parenthood, a division of American Life League, took issue with Caine's words.
“Compassion is killing babies?” Sedlak told the Register. “It's absolutely outrageous. It really shows the devaluation of human life in the entertainment industry.”
John Leo, social commentator for U.S. News & World Report, said that The Cider House Rules was dangerous because it advanced the abortion agenda in such a subtle manner. “It was a stealth movie. No one really figured it out until the end of the movie,” Leo told the Register.
White agreed that people could accept certain wrongs after watching movies like The Cider House Rules. “Even me, with my huge convictions, I almost start to think that this is OK. It's easy to get influenced.”
“All these great powers that be,” said White about the movie industry, “are trying to get teen-agers to think abortion is OK.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORD: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: The Gospel Of Life DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:In October 1978, shortly after becoming Pope, the Holy Father challenged Christians to do more than analyze movies or complain about their lack of merit. He said that Catholics, long the leaders in the arts, should also make movies as part of the new evangelization.
The challenge of evangelization … should also bring forth more numerous initiatives in this field of cinema.
It is a question of creating films, even modest ones with a short running-time, to bear witness directly to the faith of the Church. Many interesting productions have already appeared — and we congratulate their authors. But Christian communities, in spite of the poverty of their means, should not hesitate to invest more in this important sector, at a time of the “civilization of the image.”
In the past, our sanctuaries were filled with religious mosaics, paintings and sculptures, to teach the faith. Shall we have enough spiritual strength and genius to create “moving images,” of great quality, and adapted to the culture of today?
—From a letter to Father Lucien Labelle, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the International Catholic Film Organization.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Did You Know? DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:A recent nationwide Zogby poll of 1,031 Americans found that only one in three — 30.4% — would opt for assisted suicide if confronted with a painful terminal disease. The March poll found a much larger 63.5% would prefer to die naturally, and 6.1% were not quite sure what they would decide if put in this situation.
----- EXCERPT: Facts of Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: LIFE NOTES DATE: 04/09/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 9-15, 2000 ----- BODY:Number and Rate of U.S. Births Rise
Both the total number of births and the birthrate were up for the first time since 1990. This was true for all women between ages 15 and 44, but the overall trend appeared to be driven by an increase in births among women in their twenties.
The number of women aged 20 to 24 is rising for the first time since early in the 1990s, which “is an important shift in itself,” said Stephanie Ventura of the National Center for Health Statistics, who is the report's lead author. That age group also is experiencing a higher fertility rate. Together, the two changes are pushing births upward, reported the Post.
Defending Vatican From Pro-Abortion Ef forts at U.N.
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE , March 27 — The Catholic Task Force of the Republican National Committee called on Democratic presidential contender Al Gore and Senate hopeful Hillary Clinton to denounce political supporters pushing to take away the Vatican's non-voting status at the United Nations, the committee announced in a press release.
Led by Co-Chair Bonnie Livingston, wife of former Rep. Bob Livingston (R-La.), the task force said that the campaign to “kick the Vatican out of the United Nations offends Catholics … because the permanent observer status gives the Catholic Church a chance to ‘at least raise its pro-life position on abortion to the representatives of the world's nations.’”
Woman Sues Virginia Abortion Facility
Chloe L. Ott filed a lawsuit in Norfolk Circuit Court stating that Virginia law allows second-trimester abortions only at licensed hospitals, and that Hillcrest is not such a facility, the Pilot reported.
Ott is suing the clinic and the abortionist for $500,000 in compensatory damages and $350,000 in punitive damages.
A Hillcrest spokeswoman denied that second-trimester abortions are performed at the facility. “We're very clear about what the legal restrictions are in Virginia,” spokeswoman Suzette Caton said, reported the Pilot.
At its website, http://gynpages.com/hillcrest/2.html, the clinic advertises “second trimester abortion services through 20 weeks of pregnancy” and lists a 20-week abortion as costing $1,000.
Court Upholds Abortion Practitioner's Murder Conviction
ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 23 — A state appeals court upheld the 1995 murder conviction of a Queens abortion practitioner who killed a mother after a botched abortion — the first case of its kind in New York state, the wire service reported.
David Benjamin, 63, will continue serving his 25-year-to-life sentence following the decision by the Appellate Division.
Guadalupe Negron, a 33-year-old mother of four, bled to death from a 3-inch rip in her uterus following the abortion at Benjamin's Queens abortion facility on July 9, 1993.
“The victim, who had been anesthetized and sedated, bled profusely over a one to two-hour period, during which time the defendant failed to adequately monitor her,” the court said according to AP.
The abortion facility's receptionist testified that the abortion practitioner ignored the woman for more than an hour after the abortion, reported AP. She died a short time later at a nearby hospital.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Pharmacists Must Dispense With Their Conscience? DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:CALGARY, Alberta — When it comes to prescribing drugs they consider immoral, pharmacists have always relied on “conscience clauses” that give them an out.
Safeway grocers seem poised to put a stop to that in its Canadian stores.
The corporation stated in a new policy that it will attempt to accommodate pharmacists who object to dispensing such drugs, but not at the expense of losing business.
The document “Conscientious Objectors and Accommodation” begins by referring to “certain prescriptions, e.g. euthanasia drugs, RU486 (‘morning after pill’).”
It continues, “Safeway Limited has the right to see that its employees promptly serve its customers. The Company does not have to turn away business or direct a customer to a competitor under such circumstances. Further, the customer has a legal right to the prescription requested.”
The document also states, “The objecting pharmacist must make the request (not to fill certain prescriptions) in advance (as opposed to deciding on the spot) and may be asked to provide documentation to support the request for accommodation.”
Canada Safeway Limited's parent is Pleasanton, Calif.-based Safeway, Inc. The chain has 211 stores in Canada and 1,448 in the United States.
A Safeway pharmacist leaked the confidential document to Ted Gerk, who is director of Pro-Life Resource Center in Kelowna, British Columbia. The pharmacist told Gerk that he felt his job would be at risk if he talked to the press.
“Safeway was being very protective of this document,” said Gerk in an interview with the Register. “It's almost as if we picked up a rock and watched them run for cover.”
Gerk made the document public in Canada on April 4. The American Life League simultaneously notified media outlets in the United States. The Register obtained a copy of the document from the American Life League.
Gerk found danger lurking in the corporation's new pharmacy policies.
“It would appear that Canada Safeway is preparing for the day when euthanasia is legal in Canada,” said Gerk. “To blatantly mention ‘euthanasia drugs’ alongside abortion drugs proves our concerns and warnings were correct all along.”
He added that the corporation expects its employees “to act like well-trained robots, setting aside their ethical beliefs in the advancement of profit.”
Gerk also took issue with the policy that states that pharmacists might be required to provide documentation to support reasons for an accommodation.
“This sounds like employees will be asked to prove they have a conscience,” he said. “Exactly how one does that on paper, I don't know.”
Canada Safeway confirmed that the document obtained by the Register was current company policy.
“It is our company's document,” acknowledged Toby Oswald, vice president for the public affairs at Canada Safeway.
Oswald said she understood that pharmacists could be confused about the new procedures. “We looked at it and realized that it needed some clarification,” the spokes-woman said. “We are going to revisit those guidelines.”
Asked whether revised guidelines would protect the “conscience clause” of pharmacists, Oswald said, “We certainly do respect their beliefs.”
Asked why “euthanasia drugs and RU486” were listed when both are illegal in Canada, Oswald said, “That is one of the areas we are looking at. We wouldn't be asking our pharmacists to do what is illegal.”
“The reference was one made to identify what might be a concern,” she said, “not what would happen.”
Oswald didn't directly answer whether the corporation would apologize for the policy, but she said that the company's pharmacy director met with pharmacists in British Columbia to discuss changing the policy.
“We are going to be putting back what guidelines … should have been policy,” she said.
The director of pharmacy operations for Safeway Inc., Rich Canilla, told the Register that he knew of no such policies for Safeway stores in the United States, but refused any further comment.
American Life League spokesman Steve Sanborn said Canada Safeway needs to explain how the new guidelines ever became company policy. “It's got to go public with an apology to the customers and the employees.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Film Bucks Trend, and Hollywood Notices DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:HOLLYWOOD — Following an Academy Awards trumpeting family-unfriendly winners, Hollywood can look like an unstoppable Goliath to Catholics interested in the cinema.
Goliath, meet David.
The Basket, a family film produced by a group of Catholics in Spokane, Wash., is demonstrating the promise of the independent film market.
The movie, about World War I-era anti-German prejudice in a small town in Washington state, opened Aug. 20 to record-setting audiences in Spokane, where it played for 34 consecutive weeks, ending in March. The Register reported on its early success in September. A limited release last October in Denver and Colorado Springs proved that the movie could do well outside Spokane. Now, it is set for a national release on May 5.
Sharon Lester, director of distribution for Privileged Communications in Los Angeles, receives videotapes to look at every day in the mail. It was a call from her mother, Kay, in Spokane, that alerted her to The Basket. “She told me that there was this film playing in Spokane, that it was done by a local company, and that people were really liking the movie. Who says ‘no’ to their mother?” asked Lester.
After seeing The Basket, Lester, who has 10 years of experience in the industry, said she was “stunned” by the film.
“Not only was it an incredible movie with a fantastic story, but its production value was exceptionally high. It was very compelling,” Lester told the Register. Lester followed the film's progress in Colorado and then met with producer and director Rich Cowan over Christmas. “That's when everything came together,” she said.
Praise for the film has come from such diverse sources as film critics, the clergy, sportswriters, teachers, elementary students and senior citizens, causing many to wonder: What's the appeal?
Lester explained, “My family, from ages 5 to 65, watched the film together. The adults thought it was superb. What's more, the children under age 10 all wanted to come back and watch it the next day.”
Barbara Nicolosi wants to hear more words like that from Hollywood. “The only way to change Hollywood is to renew it from the inside out,” she told the Register. She is executive director of Act One, designed to teach aspiring writers with a Judeo-Christian worldview to succeed in Hollywood.
She thinks The Basket is a good example of what can be done, and is setting up a Los Angeles benefit for the movie.
Warren Stitt, executive producer of The Spitfire Grill, agreed. He is currently working on a motion picture adaptation of Catholic novelist Jon Hassler's North of Hope.
“Popular culture is no easy club to break into.” said Stitt. “The way to change popular culture is to compete directly with it.”
“Rather than complain about the poor selection of movies, we can improve the selection. Rather than bemoan the media's treatment of the Church, ministers and priests, we can create positive portrayals.”
The Spitfire Grill was another breakthrough story — an independent film with a Catholic message and box-office appeal, which won awards nationally, notably at the Sundance Film Festival, and was released in overseas editions as well.
Stitt said that with more theater screens than ever and an exploding “aftermarket” in video, pay TV, payper-view TV, hotels and an expanding foreign market there has never been a better time for the value-based film.
“If you can write the check, you cannot only make the movie you want to make, but also get it distributed and make money.”
He argued that audiences today don't care if a film, such as The Basket, is produced by an independent. “Theatergoers do not care or know an independent film from a studio film. Pope John Paul II shares this enthusiasm for using the movies to bring people closer to sound morals.
In a 1978 letter, the new Pope wrote to Father Lucien Labell of the International Catholic Film Organization.
“The challenge of evangelization … should also bring forth more numerous initiatives in this field of cinema,” he wrote.
“It is a question of creating films, even modest ones with a short running-time, to bear witness directly to the faith of the Church,” he continued. “Many interesting productions have already appeared — and we congratulate their authors. But Christian communities, in spite of the poverty of their means, should not hesitate to invest more in this important sector, at a time of the ‘civilization of the image.’”
The Pope concluded, “Shall we have enough spiritual strength and genius to create ‘moving images,’ of great quality, and adapted to the culture of today?”
Nicolosi's Act One, a nonsectarian organization, tries to do just that. It offers a month-long seminar, with the goal of placing Christian writers in the movie industry over the next few years. Already, Nicolosi has 14 different production companies asking to see the best work produced by her students. While the program began only last year, it has already had success.
“We are getting one call a week from production companies looking for writers from a Judeo-Christian worldview,” Nicolosi told the Register.
The Success
The Basket shares some similarities with other independent-market success stories, like The Blair Witch Project. A low-budget independent movie, it attracted its audiences through a promotion campaign based on word-of-mouth, advertising, glowing reviews, e-mails and a Web site, www.TheBasket.net.
Produced at a cost of $3.3 million, The Basket was born through the talents of writers Frank and Tessa Swoboda, Don Caron and Rich Cowan. “The writing team began working on the project nearly five years ago,” explained marketing director Marc Dahlstrom.
Once the idea was born, the team committed to regular evening and weekend meetings to see the project through. The film itself was shot in 1998 and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year.
Its production company, North by Northwest, enlisted local talent for the film. Several of the individuals, such as writer and musician Don Caron, writer and producer Frank Swoboda, baritone singer Jim Swoboda, and art director Vincent De Felice are alumni of Spokane's Catholic elementary schools and Gonzaga Catholic Preparatory school.
To date, the film has had more than 50,000 admissions and has grossed $300,000 in Spokane, Denver and Colorado Springs.
During its run in Spokane, The Basket grossed more than $135,000 on just one screen, consistently beating the industry standard per-screen average.
Buoyed by its success, North by Northwest took the film to Colorado Springs and Denver for a test run outside of its own locale. Again, the film out-performed major studio releases, scoring a first-place position in Colorado Springs, proving that it was something more than a regional phenomenon.
Add to that the various film festival awards the film has garnered and it was just a matter of time before a distributor took notice.
Said writer and producer Frank Swoboda, “Hollywood could redis-cover a way to make money. Parents are bringing not only their children, but also their grandparents. Many have said they've never been able to do that with a film before.”
He may be onto something, judging from the praise the movie has gotten.
“It's an uplifting film, virtuous in tone and beguiling in the home-stretch,” wrote Mike Pearson of Denver'sRocky Mountain News. “And guess what — not a swear word in sight.”
Dick Rolfe, president of the Dove Foundation, which endorses family-friendly films, said, “The basket is a story with integrity, artfully told, without jarring special effects, sex or violence. It is entertainment with a heart for the needs of the family.”
Privileged Communications plans to open the film on 100 screens in about 30 major markets starting May 5. The film will open in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, Portland, Ore., Miami, Dallas, Phoenix and Chicago.
“I am passionate about this film,” said Lester. “Our goal is to eventually open it in every major city in the U.S. This film has so much merit that word-of-mouth will carry it if enough people go to see it opening weekend.”
Tim Drake can be reached at tdrake@ncregister.com.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Anti-Slavery Boycott Hits Amoco DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:NEW YORK — Advocates of persecuted racial and religious minorities in Sudan have announced that they will boycott Amoco gasoline.
Human rights groups, led by the Boston-based American Anti-Slavery Group, are targeting BP Amoco because it agreed to buy a 20% stake in PetroChina, China's largest oil and gas producer, which operates in Sudan.
Amoco has defended the move, saying it will encourage PetroChina to adopt “progressive policies which meet international standards.” It did not comment on the boycott by press time.
At an April 8 rally outside the United Nations in New York, human rights advocates claimed that the company will profit from a situation in which some 2 million people have been killed and others enslaved or forced off their land in a 17-year Sudanese civil war.
The Anti-Slavery Group, which has a chapter in New York, joined with other human rights, labor and environmental-ist groups to persuade several pension funds not to invest in PetroChina.
The group, headed by Charles Jacobs, believes consumers’ dollars ultimately will aid the Khartoum government responsible for the abuses in Sudan. It has also called for Talisman Energy of Canada to withdraw from Sudan.
In Sudan's war, the fundamental-ist Islamic government wants to wipe out other cultures and religions, said Samuel Cotton of New York, author of Silent Terror: A Journey Into Contemporary African Slavery. Troops are told that they are waging a jihad, or holy war, he said; slavery is used as a political tool and a form of payment for loyal troops.
Many of the slaves have been women, who have been raped by their masters, he said. Boys are routinely captured and taken to “peace camps,” where they are forcibly indoctrinated into Islam.
Curtis Sliwa, an ABC Radio talk show host and leader of the Guardian Angels in New York, pointed out that a debate is raging in South Carolina over the flying of the Confederate flag, which he called a symbol of slavery, while ongoing slavery in Africa is largely ignored.
Officials of the Diocese of El Obeid, Sudan, said in an April 3 statement that Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir's regime “may be mounting its most significant attempt yet” to clear populations from lands in the south where oil could be drilled. It reported that government forces are continuing to encroach on civilian targets, including schools and hospitals and a relief center run by Concern Worldwide.
A Feb. 8 air attack on Holy Cross Catholic School in Kauda left 20 people dead, mostly children. The Register is the only Western newspaper to have carried a first-person account of the devastation there, by senior writer Gabriel Meyer, who visited the site.
In a recent statement, El Obeid Bishop Max Macram Max Gassis said, “They want to clear [the region] once and for all. All this is because of the oil.” He is based in Nairobi, Kenya, and restricted from entering Sudan.
Demonstrators at the United Nations held signs reading “Free the Slaves Now” and “Stop the Oppression and Persecution in Sudan” and calling for action by the United Nations and the U.S. government.
“When Clinton visited Africa about two years ago, he promised that what took place in Rwanda would not be allowed to happen again,” said speaker Sabit Alley, a coordinator of a South Sudanese community in New Jersey. “We challenge the president to make true his promise of ‘never again.’”
The White House did not return phone calls for comment.
Demonstrators included high school and college students and 10 members of a Westchester County, N.Y., parish. “I came to bring more awareness to the public about this issue,” said Dorothy Pantano of St. Joseph's in Croton Falls, whose pastor also participated in the rally.
The parish started a “Southern Sudan Connection” ministry after learning of the plight of Sudanese from a visiting priest. Father Akio Johnson Mutek returned to Sudan in 1996 and become bishop of Torit. St. Joseph's sends medical, school and athletic supplies to the diocese, which St. Joseph's considers a “sister parish.”
Organizers are planning a march from New York's Central Park to the United Nations in September.
John Burger is based in New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: ACLU Puts Fear of God Into Kanawha County School Board DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:CHARLESTON, W.Va. — A growing number of scientists are saying that the complexity of nature suggests that there must be an intelligent designer behind it all.
But don't tell schoolchildren in Kanawha County, W.Va., that. You're not allowed to.
Public school teachers and school board members were thwarted last month in their efforts to add a book based on the latest intelligent-design theories to school science curricula.
School board members say the American Civil Liberties Union intimidated them into dropping the 1996 book Of Pandas and People by threatening a lawsuit if the text were adopted.
The ACLU has called the book “religion masquerading as science.”
Hillary Chiz, director of the group's West Virginia chapter, said, “The ACLU maintains that anti-evolution material should not be adopted for science texts.
“This is an attempt by the people who believe in creationism to move their agenda forward. The ACLU believes that the only books that should be taught in classes should be science textbooks and not religious books parading around as science textbooks. That would be illegal.”
The ACLU cites the U.S. Constitution's prohibition on a federally established religion to argue its case.
But supporters of the book call it a widely respected alternative to evolutionary theory that should be available to teachers working with an already evolution-heavy curriculum.
David DeWolf, a law professor at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., has followed the West Virginia controversy closely. He said the ACLU will have a hard time demonstrating that Of Pandas and People is a religious text. The real issue, he said, is whether the courts will continue to allow competing scientific theories into the classroom.
“Intelligent Design Theory does not fit the Supreme Court's definition of religion,” DeWolf wrote in a legal analysis of the controversy. “Rather, it seeks to answer the same question raised by Darwin as well as contemporary biologists — that is, how do biological organisms acquire their appearance of design?”
DeWolf told the Register, “The Supreme Court has approved teaching alternate scientific theories. What the ACLU wants to say is that anything that supports a religious view is unscientific.
“The ACLU is saying that [Of Pandas and People] might lead some people to consider religious explanations as compelling or persuasive. We are saying that you can't foreclose scientific inquiry just because you don't like where it leads.”
Betty Jarvis agreed. The Kanawha County School Board member has three granddaughters in the schools. A believer in creationism, Jarvis said that as a board member she's more interested in education than indoctrination.
“I would never ask anyone to accept creationism based on my faith — that's ludicrous,” Jarvis said. “But you should be exposed to all theories so you can make an intelligent and reasonable decision. If I only teach you one thing then I am indoctrinating you.”
Jarvis explained that the conflict over creationism began in her county months ago when a high school science teacher came before the school board asking if teachers had a right to teach something that was contrary to evolution. The board drew up a resolution and submitted it to an attorney, who said it passed constitutional muster. The ACLU reacted by publicly threatening a lawsuit and the resolution fell by a vote of 4-to-1.
“We had support for it, but several board members folded because they didn't want to put the county at risk” of a lawsuit, said Jarvis, the only vote in favor of the resolution.
The issue was resurrected in March, when a committee of teachers teamed up with a committee of citizens to select new science texts. A member of the citizens committee selected Of Pandas and People as a supplementary text for science teachers.
“Both committees looked at it and we thought it was an excellent book,” Jarvis said. “It had been reviewed by top scientists and science educators around the world and they had positive remarks about it. Everyone was in agreement.”
But within in a matter of days after the book was approved, Jarvis said, two people from the state Department of Education scheduled a meeting with the science supervisor Bob Seymour. Citing three court cases, they told the book selection committee it would be illegal to distribute Of Pandas and People to Kanawha teachers. The panel quickly dropped the book.
Steve McBride, in charge of textbooks for the Department of Education, said he didn't pressure anyone on his March 17 visit to Kanawha County school officials.
“We did not communicate that there was a danger of being sued. He may have deduced that after reading the information that we had given him,” McBride told the Register.
Jarvis said that one board member who supported Of Pandas and People told her he wouldn't fight to keep it. “He said a lawsuit would tie up our resources forever,” Jarvis recalled.
One teacher has filed a grievance against the school district for dropping the book. Also involved is the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, a research organization with strong ties to the intelligent-design movement. A March 27 press release issued by the institute said bluntly:
“The West Virginia chapter of the ACLU is calling for Kanawha County school board members to ban the availability to teachers of a science textbook, promoting censorship and trampling academic freedom.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian McGuire ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Solid Ground, on the Air DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:He is the father of 10 adopted children, a clinical psychologist and author of two books. His energetic approach, witty style and wise counsel about raising children have earned him fans of his talk show on Catholic Family Radio and his column in Catholic Faith & Family. He spoke with Register correspondent Barb Ernster recently in Minneapolis.
Ernster: Your background as a psychologist includes appearances on “Oprah Winfrey,” “CBS This Morning,” and other national and local shows. How did this come about?
Guarendi: It's not unusual for a local producer of an affiliate station to become a national producer at some point in time.
If they like you as a guest, they have their little Rolodex, and they'll call you. I also did a book tour with my second book, which brought me into contact with some of the show producers.
And I learned quickly two things. Get your point across in sound bites and throw in a lot of humor. Those two things seemed to fit a television medium.
How did you come to have a show on Catholic Family Radio?
I had done a number of interviews for a Cleveland radio program and was approached by Catholic Family Radio to be a host. I flew out to San Diego to tell them my plate was full. But two things sold it for me. One, it was Catholic. Had it not been Catholic, there was no way I would have taken it. Second, I was allowed to talk the faith.
If I would have been told to just be a psychologist and present “morality” or “your own opinion,” I would have said no. I wanted to relate this to the truth of the faith.
Even though your parenting ideas might be considered counter to the pop culture?
They are probably not yet countercultural. They are countertrend, counterconventional wisdom. They touch a cord somewhere deep in what most parents realize still, and they think, “There's truth to what he says.” Even though many parents might not be practicing that.
You mentioned that 20 years of “experts” have messed up parenting. What has happened in your field of psychology?
“Media experts” have essentially reshaped the whole face of parenting. We have our theories and our ideas, and have thrown away traditional wisdom that people have gathered over the centuries. There is an arrogance when we say, “We now know better in the latter half of the 20th century than all of the people who went before us.”
We have abandoned a traditional view that children need to have a firm hand to be guided, shaped and taught. The reigning wisdom now is that children are by nature good and here to cooperate, and therefore they don't need that much parental force to keep them in line. They just need to be channeled, gently guided along the path, and they'll find their own way to mature adulthood. You, the parent, need to follow the lead of the child. That kind of notion has taken over the majority of the helping profession — social workers, counselors, mental health people, college professors — and that is the relentless message now aimed at parents.
How large an impact has the breakdown of morals and spirituality had?
Massive. Its impact is almost inestimable. The cultural forces at work are so many and so entrenched and so pervasive that much of my message has changed in the last 10 years as a psychologist.
I now am focusing the heart of my message on getting faithful Christians to stand strong in a culture that no longer sees faith the way they do. Where the more seriously you take your faith, the more of an oddball you are. And getting them to stand strong against all of their psychological insecurities. Because all but the most incredibly strong parent will take in these ideas and will doubt themselves, question their own parenting, become wavy in their standards. I draw the analogy that parents who want to raise citizens for the Kingdom of heaven now feel like they are standing in the middle of the Mississippi River with their hands out trying to stop the tide.
Have your ideas on parenting made an impact among your peers, or is there a trend developing in your field?
I think that in the area of therapy, where psychologists have to work with real people, you are seeing many psychologists come to the realization that we had better reassess the way we've been thinking. At the levels of college instruction, media psychology, or in the vernacular ivory towers, no, it hasn't happened. But you can't work with real people and not see that many of the ideas we've bought into just don't work.
You are a supporter of home schooling, and your wife home-schools your children. There are a lot of parents who are home-schooling and others who feel that perhaps our kids need to be in the public schools to help turn the tide.
Jesus never sent out children as missionaries.
Do you believe that parents should home-school?
It is an individual choice.
We are a cliché-thinking culture and so much of our thinking is dominated by very shallow notions. For example, home schooling is bad because children need socialization. What a shallow idea. What is socialization? If it is the imparting of morals and character, that is the parent's job. It is not a group of 8-year-olds’ job. …
Again, that's another expert idea that says you immerse children in this diversity of opinions, feelings, attitudes and worldviews and let them negotiate it. That's crazy. You don't throw somebody in a 20-foot-deep pool who can't swim. All of history has always protected its children. All of history has recognized that one of the standard ideas of a parent is “protect.” Protect until they are sturdy enough to deal with life as it is. We have abandoned that idea.
The idea now is, “Well, your little 8-year-old has got to fend off those sexual advances, and your little 8-year-old has got to learn how to negotiate her way around that kind of language and that kind of sexual titillation and that kind of coarse conduct. She needs to develop strength through dealing with that.”
That's one of the big reasons why I say to parents, “If you want to home-school, by all means do it, because probably the biggest plus of home schooling is the protection of innocence and the buying of time to add stability of the moral base.”
Tell me more about your family.
We have 10 adopted kids from 8 months old to 12, all adopted. Our most recent child was an “unplanned adoption,” a “change-of-life adoption.” We wanted to have a fairly decent-size family and we couldn't conceive, so it was like potato chips. We just kept eating.
My wife was a staunch evangelical when I was starting my drift back to the faith. When we met, I was the Catholic and she was the nominal nothing. She was a woman of great morality, but she had never been raised with a whole lot of faith, so she let me take the lead. Well, she had a resurgence of her Protestant roots and became very involved in her faith. I drifted into the evangelical world with her, attracted by much of the fervor that I initially saw. She started having her own spiritual struggles. So she studied the early Church and a little bit about the Catholic Church and found that she had fed off a lot of the misperceptions and raw nonsense. She converted to Catholicism three years ago.
Besides your psychology background, you also have a very strong Catholic background. Sometimes on the air you sound like an apologetics expert. Where does this come from?
I had a “dark night of the soul” in my late 30s, early 40s. [Guarendi is now 47.] I didn't just wrestle with doubts about my faith; I wrestled with doubts about it all.
So I prayed to God to take this from me: “Just please let me believe.” I would tell him, “You said if somebody seeks you, you would reveal yourself.”
And as is my approach to most things, I dove into it intellectually. I started reading and gobbling up everything I could get, not only on the Catholic faith, but on the debate of the existence of God.
Who was Christ? What evidence is there for Christ? What evidence is there for God, scientifically, archaeologically, the Bible?
In the process, not only did my faith come back, but my Catholic faith re-emerged. What I found after a seven-year excursion into the evangelical world was that the depth of the Catholic faith is beyond anything that I've experienced out there — biblically, logically, philosophically, liturgically, morally. It is a depth beyond anything I ever understood, and it alone answers the great questions of life. I have great respect for my evangelical brothers and sisters, but I couldn't get answers from within the evangelical world. So I turned to Catholicism for answers, and I found over and over again that the Church was mind-dazzling.
Do you know much about your radio audience?
We have a high percentage of very faithful Catholics. A disproportionate percentage of home-schoolers, and a disproportionate number of larger families. Most of my audience is women [80%] between the ages of 30 and 50.
You don't feel like you're preaching to the choir?
I realize now that much of what I do has been shifting into shoring up the choir. When our Lord says, “Let him who has ears hear,” he was speaking to those who were open to hearing what he has to say. I've discovered that most of what I offer is to help the strong parents be even stronger. Because if this culture is going to turn around, it's going to be by a determined minority, not an apathetic majority.
Is this a turning point in your career?
I don't know where God is going to take me. I would hope at some point to be able to have a broader apostolate in apologetics. Nothing is more important than talking the faith. It's the only thing that's eternal.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Ray Guarendi ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Support for Ban on Partial-Birth Abortion Grows DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — A new poll revealing widespread public support for a ban on partial-birth abortion was announced just days before the U.S. House voted to ban the procedure on April 5. In a lopsided 287-141 vote, the House passed the ban for the third time in four years.
While the House vote had the two-thirds majority needed to override a promised presidential veto, it appears that supporters of the ban will fall two votes shy of attaining that threshold in the Senate.
The MarketFacts poll found that 68% of Americans support a ban on partial-birth abortions. Fewer than 20% oppose such a ban and about 13% said they didn't know or refused to answer.
The poll shows a 4-point increase from a January CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll, in which 64% of respondents supported a ban.
“There is no mistaking how strongly Americans reject partial-birth abortion,” said Helen Alvaré, director of planning and information for U.S. bishops’ Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, which commissioned the poll with the Knights of Columbus.
“Year in and year out polls have shown enormous support — in the upper 60 percentiles — for a bill banning this procedure,” said Alvaré. “Still, these numbers must be translated by Congress into a vote sufficient to overcome an expected presidential veto.”
Under the procedure that would be outlawed by the ban, a baby is delivered feet-first until only the head remains inside the mother's body. The abortionist then slices the baby's neck and mechanically removes the brains, collapsing the skull. The abortionist then finishes the delivery of the now-dead baby.
Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., said the ban on the procedure was an essential step to save “at least some of the children.”
“This is about putting to an end a horrific procedure in which live babies are killed during childbirth.” Said Smith: “This is a practice that if done two minutes later and one inch further, would legally be considered murder. This is murder.”
Little Support
Smith noted that defenders of partial-birth abortion find little support from Americans for their stance.
“Opponents of this ban claim that we are radical in putting forth this legislation, yet seven out of 10 Americans support this bill,” said Smith. “So evidently, it is those who support this horrific procedure that are radicals.”
Seventy-seven Democrats joined 209 Republicans in supporting the ban while eight Republicans voted with 132 Democrats in opposing the ban. One independent voted for the ban and one independent voted against it.
Those who voted No focused less on the partial-birth abortion ban than on the presumed political tactics of the bill's sponsors.
“Proponents of this bill are not just chipping away at the right to choose, they are taking a jackhammer to it,” said Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y.
The bill would not reach President Clinton's desk until the fall because the House and Senate must first iron out the differences between two bills they passed. The Senate version of the ban also contained nonbinding language affirming Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that helped legalize abortion nationwide.
Republicans remain hopeful that by sending the bill to Clinton close to the election, Clinton might sign the ban into law.
“Clinton vetoed welfare reform twice before finally signing the Republican bill — and he has taken credit for the results ever since,” said Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson. “He could do the same here. The Clinton-Gore administration and the congressional Democrats have allowed this brutal practice to go on for too long.”
Clinton has vetoed two previous bans on partial-birth abortion.
“But for the president's veto,” Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee, told the Register, the federa l ban would already be law since 1996.
He added that partial-birth abortion demonstrated the importance of the upcoming presidential election.
“With a pro-life president, we could ban this brutal practice,” said Johnson. “As president, Al Gore would continue the era of partial-birth abortion.”
Battle Moves to Court
The Clinton administration had hoped to express its support for partial-birth abortion by having the Justice Department defend the procedure before the Supreme Court in an upcoming case, Stenberg vs. Carhart, which will be argued April 25. The case concerns Nebraska's attempt to ban partial-birth abortion. It will be the first time the court has taken up abortion since 1992.
It is not uncommon for the Justice Department to make such a request. The high court usually allows the government's representatives to speak.
But the court on April 3 refused the request.
Said Johnson: “The Clinton/Gore administration is using every power at its command. Now they are trying to hinder the attempts of 27 legislatures.”
Johnson noted that while 27 states have passed bans on partial-birth abortion, only eight are currently in effect because of court challenges.
The Justice Department did submit an amicus brief in late March in which the U.S. solicitor general argued that the Nebraska law is unconstitutionally vague and “fails to provide an exception to preserve the pregnant woman's health.”
Life of the Mother?
Johnson said that the concerns over the woman's health were effectively refuted by the American Medical Association, which endorsed the ban in 1997.
In a letter to a senator, the association's president, John Seward, noted that partial-birth abortion was “a procedure we all agree is not good medicine.”
The association could endorse the bill, he said, because it “would allow a legitimate exception where the life of the mother was endangered, thereby preserving the physician's judgment to take any medically necessary steps to save the life of the mother.”
Some pro-lifers took issue with that exception, which remains in both the Senate and House bills, because it could be abused to allow partial-birth abortions to continue.
Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, said “any mother will be at liberty to apply her emotional, psychological, familial situation to the ‘life of the mother’ exception and thereby qualify for this abhorrent act of infanticide.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:Drexel Needed Today More Than Ever
Though the Inquirer acknowledged that few of us are able or willing to follow in the soon-to-be-saint Drexel's footsteps, the paper said Drexel remains a hero to many.
“People starve for models of human goodness,” the paper said. “Few of us speak of it — it seems so kid-stuff, so school-days — but the hunger for goodness burns on.”
“Mother Drexel's example feeds the hunger,” the paper added.
What is so special about Drexel, who will be canonized Oct. 1?
“In the 1890s, a Philadelphia high-society heiress turns her back on her father's banking fortune and dedicates her life to God,” said the Inquirer about Drexel. “Years before it was fashionable, she devotes herself to the service of poor blacks and Native Americans.”
Saintly people like Blessed Katharine Drexel is just what the world needs now, the Inquirer said.
“Mother Katharine Drexel exemplifies the notion of a saint,” the paper said. “She's the second saint Philadelphia has given the world — a world much in need of them.”
No Joy in Florida's Anti-Voucher Ruling
“Jeb Bush's plan was, I am convinced, a serious attempt to make things better. But his effort, with its focus on vouchers and non-public schools, put him, in the minds of many, on the side of the enemies of public education,” said the columnist.
Even though such enemies do exist, that doesn't mean all supporters of the Florida voucher program hate public education, said Raspberry.
“The supporters of vouchers and other experiments also include — I suspect in greater numbers — people whose commitment is not to an ideology but to getting children educated.”
Supporters of public education, Raspberry said, must be more open-minded to change.
“I get nervous when well-meaning supporters of public education automatically oppose any new scheme that involves nonpublic approaches. The condition of our schools is serious enough — particularly in schools serving the urban and rural poor — that we need to be willing to try anything that shows real promise of improving the lives of our children. That's why I'm not celebrating Jeb Bush's courtroom defeat.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Religion and Science, Allies in Quest for Truth DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:NEW YORK — This year's recipient of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, Freeman J. Dyson, is a physicist who strives to understand the universe and improve the lot of his fellow men and women, especially the poor.
Dyson says he utilizes two windows — science and religion.
His writings deal with technical scientific matters and the impact of science on the human condition, particularly questions of social justice.
Dyson, a Presbyterian, recently spoke with the Register about his work, especially how science and religion can support each other in the search for truth.
Rinaldi: The Templeton Award for Progress in Religion, which comes with a $948 thousand purse, was once given to Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
Dyson: Yes. I don't know what I am doing in that company but there it is.
The award “is given to a living individual for outstanding originality and advancing the world's understanding of God or spirituality.” What has your work had to do with religion?
I don't really call it work. What I've done is write books for the general public, quite distinct from my “work.” The books are much more literature than science. I tell stories and some of them have religious themes.
In your book,
That is certainly true. Religion is definitely a part of the human condition. It's in all societies. Science is comparatively a rare bird because science has only originated recently in certain parts of the world. While [science] is in human history as a whole, religion certainly plays a more important role.
In your most recent book,
That is certainly true.
You also argue that technology ought to be used to help the poor. Tell us a little about that.
There are two very powerful technologies that are going ahead very rapidly at the moment that can help mankind: the Internet and the World Wide Web in communications on the one hand, and biotechnology with all its applications to medicine on the other.
You say the Internet can be an important tool for poorer countries.
It certainly could be. It has to be more widely accessible, and that is something we have to work at.
You claim that entrepreneurs and scientists must join forces with religious leaders for the advancement of man.
Yes, by pushing gently. We can't decide how the world is going to go. We are not omnipotent. There is a clear social problem at the moment: a gross inequality both between the rich and the poor inside each country and between [rich and poor] countries. This kind of gross inequality is something we can try to reduce through gentle pushing. It's something that religious organizations or environmental movements and medical and scientific organizations could work together on. It's not that we have the power to decide how the world goes, but that we can exert a gentle influence. In the long run it can be extremely important.
You call for a spreading of knowledge and wealth. This is offered in opposition to our preoccupation with science and technology as ways to build toys for the rich.
They are not totally in conflict with each other. The world can deal with both. There's nothing evil in building toys for the rich as long as you take care of the poor at the same time.
In your book,
The problem is: how can we keep our weapons under control and how we can reduce stockpiled missiles? These are political problems, not technical problems.
How do you see science and religion working together for long-term moral and social solutions?
You had a clear example this year when the Senate voted not to ratify the [United Nations’ nuclear] test ban treaty, which I considered a disaster. They did that for petty political reasons without paying any attention to the big picture and the great importance of this test ban in history.
I think that's a case where political process could have been influenced by religion. Just the way the vote was taken, of course, didn't give anybody any time. It was deliberately done in a rush so that people couldn't have the chance to think. [Many] scientists and religious leaders felt strongly that the test ban was a good idea. I think we might have gotten together on this and talked to the politicians.
You also suggest that scientists should be less attached to profitability.
I'm not against profits. Profits are absolutely necessary. If you run a business, you better make a profit or you're in trouble. Profits are not evil but there must be a balance between the necessity of making profits and the desire to do something useful.
Are American companies getting it right?
A lot of industrial research is too concentrated on short-term profits. It is a question of balance. Emphasis on the short-term, the next quarter's earnings, is bad for science and, in the end, probably bad for the company, too.
Does this play out on the level of the individual employee as well?
The people who work for industry are faced with this all the time: On the one hand you work for the company and, on the other hand, you would like to do something that is good for the society. Everybody lives in that kind of a tension.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Rich Rinaldi ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Pope Declares Father Seelos of New Orleans A Blessed DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY – Father Francis Xavier Seelos, Redemptorist mission preacher, parish priest and novice master was beatified Sunday in St. Peter's Square by Pope John Paul II.
He is the second American male to be beatified, joining his fellow Redemptorist, St. John Neumann, with whom he worked at St. Philomena's parish in Pittsburgh from 1844-1850.
Blessed Francis, who was born in Germany in 1819 and immigrated to the United States as a seminarian, was beatified by Pope John Paul II along with four others, Mariano de Jesús Euse Hoyos (1845-1926), a Columbian priest; Anna Rosa Gattorno (1831-1900), Italian foundress of the Institute of the Daughters of St. Anne; Mariam Thresia Chiramel Mankidiyan (1876-1926) of Kerala, India, foundress of the Congregation of the Holy Family; and Maria Elisabeth Hesselblad (1870-1957), a Swedish convert who came to Rome and founded the Order of the Most Holy Savior of Saint Brigid.
While Blessed Francis spent most of his priestly life in Maryland and preaching missions all across the United States, he died in New Orleans in 1867 only a year after arriving there. Nevertheless, his reputation for holiness encouraged a cult to develop in New Orleans, and he was formally proposed for beatification to the Holy Father by Archbishop Francis Schulte of New Orleans, who led a archdiocesan pilgrimage of about 200 people for the ceremony.
“I had the rare privilege of standing up before the Holy Father in front of tens of thousands of people, and requesting the beatification of one of my priests – and that's an extremely rare privilege for any bishop to have,” said Archbishop Schulte.
The Mass was celebrated on an overcast, cool and windy morning in Rome, with a crowd of some 40,000 in St. Peter's Square. The ceremony was more colorful than usual, with the inclusion of Blessed Mariam Thresia of India's Syro-Malabar rite. The gold, pink and red vestments of the Syro-Malabar bishops contrasted with the otherwise Lenten purple.
Present for the beatification were Matthew Pellissery, whose club feet were miraculously healed in 1970 through the intercession of Blessed. Mariam Thresia, as well as Angela Boudreaux of New Orleans, whose inexplicable cure from terminal liver cancer in 1966 was the miracle approved for the beatification of Blessed Francis Seelos. Boudreaux, along with her husband Melvin, took part in the procession of the gifts, presenting to the Holy Father a donation for the pontifical missions.
After the Pope proclaimed the formula of beatification, the traditional tapestries were unveiled on the façade of St. Peter's Basilica. The image of Blessed Francis evoked the many different aspects of his life. In the foreground was Francis himself, holding aloft a mission preacher's crucifix in his right hand, and a map of the United States, his adopted homeland, in his left.
In the background appear representatives of the different groups to which he gave pastoral care, as well as a Mississippi river-boat, a symbol of New Orleans. Most striking of all though, is the image of a young Father Seelos in conversation with Bishop John Neumann, highlighting the extraordinary fact that both of the United States’ male saints were once in the same rectory.
“This man was a very simple devoted priest,” said Archbishop Schulte after the beatification Mass. “He didn't write any books, he didn't establish any colleges or institutions. But he tended to the poor immigrants, he was a very devoted former of seminarians, and he was a great preacher of missions.
“What an example this will be to the New Orleans seminarians, to have a saint who devoted so much of his time to their formation! What example this will be for the immigrants still coming into New Orleans, that we have a man who is a saint partly because he tended to the immigrants, and he was an immigrant himself.”
Blessed Maria Elisabeth Hesselblad also has an American connection.
Having left Sweden for New York in 1886 in order to search for work, she attended a nursing school at the Roosevelt Hospital. It was at this time that she began to search more intensely for religious truth, and embraced Catholicism. On Aug. 15, 1902, she was received into the Church at the Visitation convent in Washington. Not long after she went to Rome, where she was confirmed, and it was then that she discovered her vocation to stay in the Eternal City, and re-establish there the Order of St. Brigid, devoted to prayer for Christian unity.
The Archdiocese of New Orleans plans to have its first Mass of thanksgiving for the beatification on April 29.
When a new reliquary containing the remains of Blessed Francis is ready, there will be a Mass at St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans after which the relics will be carried in procession through the streets of the city to the Church of St. Mary of the Assumption, where a permanent shrine will be established at the parish that was the blessed's final assignment. The event is scheduled for Oct. 7.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Number of Bishops Up 20% Since 1978 DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — The number of Catholic bishops worldwide grew by almost 20% over a 20-year period, according to the Vatican's statistics office.
From 1978 to 1998, the number of bishops jumped from just more than 3,700 to more than 4,400.
The statistic is just one of thousands contained in the Annual Statistical Yearbook of the Church, which was to be published in mid-April, the Vatican announced April 3.
Even before its official release, the Vatican's statistics office offered a sneak peek at the information, reflecting data for the year ending Dec. 31, 1998.
The yearbook put the total number of Catholics throughout the world at about 1 billion. It said the Catholic population grew at a rate of 1.29 percent, which is just below the 1998 growth rate of 1.3% for total world population.
The Americas boasted the largest numerical increase in bishops since 1978, from more than 1,400 to more than 1,670, but Africa registered the biggest percentage jump — a 33% increase over the two-decade period.
Bishops’ geographic distribution remained largely the same, however, with the largest percentage of bishops, almost 38%, in the Americas.
Europe represented 33% of the bishops, followed by Asia with 14%, Africa with 12%, and Oceania with 3%.
The statistics office reported an overall downward trend in the number of priests since 1978, from more than 416,300 to more than 404,600, mostly due to a decrease in religious-order clergy.
But the number of diocesan priests increased worldwide from nearly 262,500 to more than 264,200, with Africa registering a 182% jump, from about 5,500 in 1978 to more than 15,500 in 1998.
Europe and North America reported decreases in diocesan and religious clergy. While the total number of priests declined, the numbers of permanent deacons, lay missionaries and catechists rose significantly over the past two decades.
“Such tendencies thus favor the manifestation of different choices in the pastoral worker corps,” said an April 3 press statement from the Vatican's statistics office.
In Africa, for example, catechists outnumber priests by more than 13-to-1; in the Americas, the ratio of lay missionaries to religious brothers is 3-to-1.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:Jewish Woman Recalls Pope as Good Samaritan
“Fifty-five years ago, recently liberated form a Nazi work camp, the 14-year-old girl had walked as far as she could toward Krakow and then had lain down, expecting to die of exhaustion. ‘I was with swollen feet and with nothing to continue in my heart,’ she recalled. Suddenly a priest [actually a seminarian] appeared, dressed in brown, 'strong and tall and very handsome … It was as if someone from the heavens had been sent down to me.’ He brought her tea, bread and cheese, then carried her on his back three kilometers to a train station. He called her Edita — the first time since her deportation that anyone had called her by anything but a number.
“When they reached Krakow, some other Jews told her to abandon the priest lest he try to convert her, and she hid. But she remembered his name and that he was from Wadowice. Reading a story on the new Pope in Paris Match in 1978, she said, 'This is the man who saved me! 'Today she came to Yad Vashem [the Jerusalem Holocaust Memorial] to thank him. And she did, tears streaming down her face as that strapping young priest — now the frail, elderly Pontiff — laid his hand gently on her arm. After meeting Zierer and five other survivors in the memorial's Hall of Remembrance.”
Non-Catholic Christians and Repentance
“'There are lots of religious groups that have lots to apologize for,’ said John P. Gunnemann, a professor of religious ethics at Emory University … In the United States, Gunnemann pointed out, it was often powerful Protestant leaders who failed to forcefully condemn the American slave trade, who provided religious endorsements for the murderous war against American Indians in the late 19th century, who avoided condemning the exploitation of religious and ethnic minorities during the immigration boom at the turn of the century, and who often said or did little about the rising power of racist and anti-Semitic groups before World War II.
“It is clear that the church has been a force for good, consistently offering courageous, forward-thinking visionaries to counter its lesser elements. Yet theologian Robert M. Franklin Jr. argues that ‘Institutionally sanctioned social evils have been of such magnitude that even churches that have entered an era of greater awareness owe an apology for their history of failing to do the work of Jesus Christ.
“Franklin, president of the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, said he did not accept the frequently heard argument that Protestant churches lacked the hierarchical structure that would give their apologies the historic significance of the papal mea culpa.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Confessors Urged to Prescribe Indulgences DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — Calling a priest's ministry in the confessional “among the most significant expressions” of his vocation, Pope John Paul II urged confessors to witness God's mercy to penitents.
“This will not fail to increase trust [in the sacrament] among the faithful,” he said.
In a message to U.S. Cardinal William Baum, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, the Pope also encouraged priests to promote indulgences by prescribing them in the confessional as penances.
ZENIT, the Rome-based news service, reported that the Pope's April 3 message coincided with the completion of an annual course on reconciliation that was attended by seminarians in their final year of study, deacons en route to the priesthood and junior priests. The course “is of irreplaceable help to these young men beginning their ministries,” said ZENIT.
The Holy Father said the “proclamation of the truth, especially in the moral and spiritual order, is much more credible when he who proclaims it is not only an academic doctor of it, but above all an existential witness of it.”
He encouraged reception of the sacrament and urged individuals to “overcome a rather widespread tendency to refuse any salvific mediation, putting the individual sinner in direct contact with God.”
With the Jubilee Year's emphasis on reconciliation and repentance, the Pope prayed the Holy Year would mark “a general return of the Christian faithful to the sacramental practice of confession.”
He encouraged Catholics to take advantage of the special opportunities to earn indulgences — a remission of the temporal punishment for sins — during the Jubilee.
“I heartily exhort priests to educate the faithful with appropriate and intensive catechesis, in order that they take advantage of the great good of indulgences.”
He said priest-confessors could very usefully assign the practice of indulgences to their penitents as sacramental penances, subject of course to the criteria of equal proportion with the wrongs confessed.”
Indulgences, he said, “far from being a kind of ‘discount’ from the commitment of conversion, are instead an aid to a readier, more generous, more radical commitment.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: CELEBRATING THE TRINITY DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:Register Summary
Far from being abstract and irrelevant to believers’ daily lives, faith in the Trinity is the central mystery of Christian life, Pope John Paul II said during his weekly general audience April 5 in St. Peter's Square.
The Pope said the glory of the Trinity manifests itself throughout time and space in the whole of creation, reaching a high point in the Incarnation.
God's sending of his own Son to take on human flesh reveals his love for humanity and enables humans to become his children.
“A single font and a single root, a single form filled with the triple splendor. There, where the profundity of the Father shines, breaks forth the power of the Son, wise creator of the entire universe, fruit generated from the fatherly heart! And there shines out the unifying light of the Holy Spirit.”
Sinesius of Cyrene sang these words at the beginning of the 5th century in Hymn II, celebrating the Holy Trinity at the dawn of a new day, as one in source and triple in splendor. This truth of the one God in three persons, equal yet distinct, is not limited to the heavens; it cannot be interpreted as some sort of “heavenly arithmetic theorem” from which nothing comes for the existence of humanity, as the philosopher Kant supposed.
In Luke's account, the glory of the Trinity is made present in time and space and finds its highest manifestation in Jesus — in his incarnation and in his story. The conception of Christ was seen by Luke in the light of the Trinity: it is the words of the angel that attest to this, words directed to Mary and pronounced within a humble house in the Galilean village of Nazareth.
In Gabriel's announcement, the transcendent divine present is made manifest: the Lord God, through Mary and in the line of David's descendants — gives the world his Son.
The word “son” has two meanings here, because in Christ the filial link with the Heavenly Father and that with the earthly mother are intimately united. But the Holy Spirit also takes part in the Incarnation, and it is his intervention that makes that generation unique and unrepeatable: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God” (Luke 1:35).
The words the angel proclaims are like a small Creed, which sheds light on the identity of Christ in relation to the other Persons of the Trinity. It is the choral faith of the Church, which Luke already asserts at the start of the time of the fullness of salvation: Christ is the Son of the Most High God, the Great One, the Holy One, the King, the Eternal One, whose generation in the flesh is completed by the work of the Holy Spirit. Thus, as John says in his first letter, “No one who denies the Son has the Father. He who confesses the Son has the Father also” (1 John 2:23).
The Incarnation stands at the center of our faith. In it the glory of the Trinity and his love for us are revealed. “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we have beheld his glory” (John 1:14). “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son” (John 3:16). “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him” (1 John 4:9). Through these words of the Johannine writings we are able to comprehend how the revelation of the glory of the Trinity in the Incarnation is not just a simple illumination that tears through the darkness for an instant, but rather a seed of divine life deposited forever in the world and in the hearts of men and women.
A declaration of the Apostle Paul in the Letter to the Galatians is emblematic here: “But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So through God you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son then an heir.” (Galatians 4:4-7, see Romans 8:15-17). The Father, Son and Spirit are therefore present and act in the Incarnation to bring us into their own life.
“All people,” confirmed Vatican Council II, “are called to this union with Christ, who is the light of the world; we come from him, we live through him, we are directed toward him” (Lumen Gentium, No. 3). As St. Cyprian affirmed, the community of the children of God is “a people assembled by the unity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit” (De Orat. Dom. 23).
“To know God and his Son is to accept the mystery of the loving communion of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit into one's own life, which even now is open to eternal life because it shares in the life of God. Eternal life is therefore the life of God himself and at the same time the life of the children of God. As they ponder this unexpected and inexpressible truth which comes to us from God in Christ, believers cannot fail to be filled with ever new wonder and unbounded gratitude.”
(Evangelium Vitae, Nos. 37-38).
With awe and vital acceptance, we must adore the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity, which “is the central mystery of Christian faith and life. It is the mystery of God in himself. It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith, the light that enlightens them” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 234).
In the Incarnation, we contemplate the Trinitarian love that unfolds itself in Jesus, a love that does not remain closed within a perfect circle of light and glory, but radiates into the flesh of men and women, into their history; it pervades men and women, regenerating them and making them children in the Son. For this reason, as St. Irenaeus said, the glory of God is the living person: Gloria enim Dei vivens homo, vita autem hominis visio Dei; this is so not only for his physical life, but especially because “the life of a person consists in the vision of God” (Adversus Haereses IV, 20, 7). For seeing God transfigures us into him. “We shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: With Calm Restored, Nigeria Looks for Answers to Religious Tension DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:ABUJA, Nigeria — Following an outbreak of violence earlier this year, Nigeria's government and religious leaders have taken steps to resolve tensions between Christians and Muslims.
At issue has been the place of Islamic law, known as Shariah, which has traditionally been used by Muslims in Nigeria to settle civil suits among themselves, but has recently been proposed or enacted in several states for use in criminal matters.
The Islamic initiative provoked rioting in a several northern cities that left more than 400 civilians dead, prompting the government of President Olusegun Obasanjo to revoke the imposition of Shariah in three states, and to suspend plans for its introduction in another three.
The move was hailed by the nation's Catholic bishops who, in a statement, condemned the violence on all sides and said the Church is “committed to one Nigeria, where persons of different religious and ethnic traditions can live together in peace and harmony.
“We do not countenance the breakup of Nigeria,” the statement continued, “neither are we in favor of a split of Nigeria into different pockets, where one state lives under the constitution and a neighboring state lives under another law.”
They cautioned that their opposition to Shariah legislation “does not in any way diminish our respect for Islam and its adherents.” While noting the overall good relations between Christians and Muslims, the bishops also pledged to strengthen interfaith dialogue.
The bishops also called for a constitutional reform to insure that the state does not favor one religion over any other. While religious tensions are not new in Nigeria, they have never caused anything like the violent clashes that have lately been seen.
During his 1998 visit to Nigeria, Pope John Paul II beatified the Trappist Father Cyprian Michael Iweni Tansi in a ceremony that was witnessed by more than three million people, and which was viewed with pride by both the Christian and Muslim communities.
The Holy Father used the occasion to encourage peaceful relations between the two main religions: “When we see others as brothers and sisters, it is then possible to begin the process of healing the divisions within society and between ethnic groups.”
But national unity suffered during the recent promotion of Shariah, which is the rule of law in Muslim states such as those in the Middle East.
Riots between Christians and Muslims were especially fierce in the northern city of Kaduna following that state's attempt to introduce Islamic criteria in criminal cases. There was even an attempt to burn down the Catholic cathedral.
In the three northern states where it was briefly imposed, Shariah produced such penalties as 100 lashes for adultery and 80 lashes for drinking alcohol. Under the law, motorbike taxi operators could have gone to jail for carrying women on their vehicles
But a spokesman for the Nigerian Embassy in London, told the Register, “This is not about religion; it is about poverty. In Nigeria there is no problem between the Christians and the Muslims. It is easy to give a poor man a cause to riot.” He added: “We have had Shariah law as part of our constitution [for civil matters between Muslims] since independence and there is no problem. Our real problem is poverty, and countries such as Britain should do all they can to stop this debt which is killing our country.”
Nigeria has a population of more than 100 million, making it Africa's most populous country.
There are no reliable figures that break down the religious composition of the country but it has been estimated that Christians make up 50% of population, Muslims 40% and others 10%.
Muslims, however, dominate the political culture and the military, which has ruled the country for most of the 40 years since Nigeria gained its independence from Great Britain.
The recent crisis has been the most serious threat to the West African nation's unity since the end of military rule last May.
On the issue of a religious favoritism, the bishops said the government “should desist from favoring one religion over others” in such areas as granting permits for pilgrimages, the building of new places of worship, and allowing more than one religion to have access to the media and to provide religious instruction in public schools.
They warned that politicians “should refrain from playing on people's religious sentiments as they [seek votes], knowing how this can easily erupt into violence. We strongly urge Nigerians to be vigilant and not allow themselves to be exploited in this way.”
Archbishop John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan of the capital Abuja, told Fides, the Vatican-based missionary news agency, that “some circles dislike President Obasanjo's programs and they are exploiting religious differences to cause trouble for him.
“In Kaduna armed civilians were seen.” the archbishop said. “But they have no money to buy arms. Who supplies the weapons? Who is behind these riots?
“The anti-Obasanjo circles have army contacts, and the question of the Shariah is being used to incite enmity.”
Iqbal Saria, chairman of the Economic Development Committee of Britain's Muslim Council, said the political mischief has been the work of former members of the military regime.
“Like in Bosnia, these people need a new power base as they have lost their power, money and influence,” he told the Register.
According to a British-based Nigerian priest, religious and tribal tensions have been simmering just below the surface of Nigerian society since the Biafran War of the late 1960s – the civil war that nearly resulted in a Bosnia-style division of the nation.
Father Augustine Ihedinma, who coordinates the network of Nigerian Catholic communities in Britain, said, “Since the civil war the tensions have always been present.”
He said the Islamic bloc within the Organization of Oil Producing and Exporting Countries, are increasingly trying to forge stronger links with Nigeria, an oil-exporting nation.
“There are good relations in some parts of the country between Christians and Muslims but I also believe that Christians are right to be worried about the Muslims,” said Father Ihedinma.
All parties see the suspension of Shariah as a temporary lull, but Catholic leaders are optimistic about a long-term solution:
“All that is required is that our laws should give enough room for everyone, Christians, Muslims and others to follow their consciences in searching for and carrying out God's will in their lives.” said Father lhedinma. “To ensure a permanent solution to all these problems, we are convinced that Nigeria will now have to review our Constitution along these lines. There should no longer be room for special provisions for any religion in our Constitution.”
Paul Burnell writes from Manchester, England
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Paul Burnell ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:Catholics Press for Church Rights in Mexico
“The Mass will be celebrated in the evening of May 6, followed by a procession.
“There is no record of a Mass or religious procession in the plaza over the past 140 years,” said the Herald.
“The event is part of a gathering of Church leaders that is expected to outline guidelines for Church policy in Mexico, focusing on issues such as whether the clergy can speak out on political, social and economic problems.
“The event is a landmark for the Church, which has been restricted in Mexico since constitutional reforms of 1857-58 that stripped it of much of its properties and previous rights.
“The restrictions were tightened with the post-revolutionary constitution of 1917 and a string of anti-Catholic measures led to a virtual halt to Church services and the outbreak of the 1926-29 uprising in which tens of thousands died.”
Added the Herald: “After a gradual thaw in relations, the government in 1991 reformed the constitution to ease limits on religious worship. The church has gradually become more assertive in speaking out on social and political issues.”
Mountaineering Monk to Take On Everest
Father Grant-Feris hopes to celebrate Mass at Mount Everest's base camp at 18,000 feet. He turned 67 on April 9.
“In 1989 I had to stop on Kilimanjaro in Tanzania on reaching 16,000 feet, because there was not enough oxygen,” Father Grant-Feris said.
“Everest will be quite a challenge in September. I'll celebrate Mass for world peace as I've done on 40 of the world's highest mountains over the years.” The monk's most dramatic adventure was in 1981, when he got lost after climbing the 22,834 foot-high Mount Aconcagua in Argentina. He survived by sucking glucose and wearing four pairs of British-made thermal underwear. He was found eight days later on what he called a “killer mountain” where no-one before had survived more than three days in the frigid temperatures.
Father Piers climbs to the Lady Chapel at Mount Grace, in North Yorkshire, England, every day. The 14 stations of the cross — plus one on the Resurrection — run along the track leading to the chapel.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Eucharist 2000 DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:The Jubilee Year 2000 is an “intensely Eucharistic year,” Pope John Paul II reminded the Church in the Letter to Priests he signed in the Upper Room in Jerusalem, traditional site of the Last Supper. His words for Holy Thursday, from Nos. 14-18, follow.
My dear brother priests, who on Holy Thursday gather in the cathedrals around your pastors, just as the presbyters of the Church in Rome gather around the Successor of Peter, please accept these reflections, my meditation in the evocative setting of the Upper Room! It would be hard to find a place better able to stir thoughts of both the Eucharistic mystery and the mystery of our priesthood.
Let us remain faithful to what the Upper Room “hands on” to us, to the great gift of Holy Thursday. May we always celebrate the Holy Eucharist with fervor. May we dwell long and often in adoration before Christ in the Eucharist. May we sit at the “school” of the Eucharist. Through the centuries, countless priests have found in the Eucharist the consolation promised by Jesus on the evening of the Last Supper, the secret to overcoming their solitude, the strength to bear their sufferings, the nourishment to make a new beginning after every discouragement, and the inner energy to bolster their decision to remain faithful. The witness which we give to the People of God in celebrating the Eucharist depends in large part upon our own personal relationship with the Eucharist.
Let us rediscover our priesthood in the light of the Eucharist! Let us help our communities to rediscover this treasure in the daily celebration of Holy Mass, and especially in the more solemn Sunday assembly. Through your apostolic labors, may love for Christ present in the Eucharist grow stronger. This is a particularly important goal in this Jubilee Year. I think of the International Eucharistic Congress to be held in Rome from 18-25 June, which has as its theme Jesus Christ, the one Savior of the World, bread for our life. It will be a highlight of the Great Jubilee, which is meant to be “an intensely Eucharistic year” (Tertio Millennio Adveniente, No. 55). The Congress will emphasize the profound link between the mystery of the Incarnation of the Word and the Eucharist, the sacrament of Christ's real presence.
From the Upper Room, I embrace you in the Eucharist. May the image of Christ surrounded by his own at the Last Supper fill each of us with a vibrant sense of brotherhood and communion. Great painters have employed their finest gifts in depicting the face of Christ among his Apostles in the scene of the Last Supper: How can we forget Leonardo's masterpiece? But only the saints, by the intensity of their love, can enter the depths of this mystery, leaning their head, as it were, like John, on the Lord's breast (see John 13:25). Here in fact we come to the height of love: “[H]aving loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”
----- EXCERPT: PERSPECTIVE ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Jesus' Final Words Challenge Post-Moderns DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:Basic Books, 2000 288 pages, $24.00
A well-educated, successful business woman once told Father Richard John Neuhaus that she liked the Catholic Church, moral teachings included, but had trouble understanding one thing: the cross of Christ — “this whole business about sacrifice and blood.”
In his new book, Father Neuhaus places the cross at the center of human history, where men and women of all nations, of all times, must confront it and make a decision for or against the crucified. He urges us not to hurry on our way to Easter joy, but to stay for a while at Calvary and contemplate the death of God for mankind.
In an age called post-Christian, he warns against generalizing the meaning of Calvary and falling into the same error as academics who seek to absorb the cross into the sacrifice rites of other religions. “Specificity is all,” Father Neuhaus states repeatedly: this Jesus born of Mary, this time of Roman history, this city of Jerusalem, this Jewish race, this day, this time, this spot upon a hill. Only by placing it in a definite time and place will the cross resist the mythmakers and syncretists; only by remembering its specifics can we understand the universal nature of its significance.
“If what Christians say about Good Friday is true, then it is, quite simply, the truth about everything,” he states. “I have written this for people who are convinced of that truth, for people who are open to thinking about whether it may be true and for people who are just curious about why so much of the world thinks Good Friday is the key to understanding what Dante called 'the love that moves the sun and all the other stars.’ “
A New York priest, Father Neuhaus is president of the Institute on Religion and Public Life and editor-in-chief of the monthly First Things, which examines the relationship between religion and the social, political and cultural milieu. When he was a Lutheran pastor in the 1980s, he wrote The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America, in which he states that with the removal of religion from public life has gone the concept of the common good. As a result, politics and culture in general have become power struggles among special-interest groups which fail to voice timeless truths that speak for the weak and the poor.
He was received into the Catholic Church by Cardinal John O'Connor in 1990 and ordained by him a year later. His preaching talents, marked by traditional Protestant training, have been in high demand within the New York Archdiocese and beyond. This book is a melding, in many ways, of the Lutheran training that formed him and the Catholic perspective that now inspires him.
To reach a wide audience, Father Neuhaus has chosen a secular publisher, Basic Books. Yet the book does not soft-sell its theme. On the jacket is a Goya painting of Christ on the cross in agony, looking up to a darkened heaven that seems to give no answer. The seven chapters, one devoted to each saying of Jesus from the cross, are meditations on this dramatic scene, drawing on a wealth of sources, some of them surprising: St. Augustine and Carl Jung, the “Cur Deus Homo” of St. Anselm and Joseph Conrad's “Heart of Darkness.” Arius, Pelagius and gnostics past and present are studied along with Church councils, from Nicaea to Vatican II. Sacred Scripture is given primacy, with an appendix listing nine pages of biblical references.
If Good Friday is true, then it is the truth about everything.
This is a book that guides deep contemplation on life's most important issues. Unlike most contemporary tomes of introspection marketed by the mainstream press, Death on a Friday's depth is not bottomless. Plumb deep enough, Father Neuhaus shows, and you'll see Christ crucified for our sins. Much like the late Archbishop Fulton Sheen, another New York preacher famous for his spellbinding Good Friday sermons, Father Neuhaus shies from broad themes and overstatements to bring faith's greatest mystery to the level of the average Catholic. He speaks to our Me-centered culture on its own terms, planting the cross in the midst of the public square of dot-commerce, pop psychology, TV millionaire shows and media-made images — all to show that the crucifixion has a place not only in history, but in daily life.
This approach will surely make the book useful and appealing to general audiences, but it also seems to have led Father Neuhaus to give in, to a degree, to pop theology. In a chapter titled “Judge Not,” a meditation on Jesus’ words to one of the criminals crucified at his side — “Today you will be with me in paradise” — Father Neuhaus seems to support the notion of universal salvation, that everyone in the end will be in heaven. He admits that he is challenging traditional interpretations of the strong words of Jesus about the narrow way and the fires of hell, and says he hopes that he is not guilty of trying to outdo God in mercy. He asserts that we should pray that all be saved, since Jesus made the same prayer and died to bring it to fulfillment. Yet, in doing so, he gives the impression that God will forgive in spite of grave, unrepented sin.
“[W]e must take seriously the many statements in the New Testament that some, perhaps many, might be damned,” he writes. “At the same time, we must inquire into the nature of such passages. Are they predictive, telling us what will certainly happen in the future? Or are they warnings — admonitory and cautionary statements directed to each one of us, alerting us to the consequences of rejecting the truth?” After a lengthy analysis. Father Neuhaus concludes that the passages are admonitory.
But for this concession, this is an immensely satisfying and challenging work. The meditation on Mary at the cross is a masterful weaving of the human and divine elements in the lives of mother and son. Father Neuhaus can be heard softly to appeal to his Protestant colleagues as he writes: “To say that Mary's way is not our way is to say that Christ's way is not our way, for Mary was in every way a disciple of her son.” This is highly recommended reading for Holy Week.
Brian Caulfield writes from New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian Caulfield ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:Baxter Fan
I thoroughly enjoyed Susan Baxter's reflection on “Why I No Longer Want What I Don't Have” (April 9-15). Her musings echo some of my own feelings and observations in the last year, but she expressed those thoughts so much better.
We often blind ourselves to the great blessings right in front of us by wanting more and more things. “Man when he prospers, forfeits intelligence” we are warned in Psalm 49. We Americans need reminders of this truth. Let's hear more from Susan Baxter.
Gary Gibson,
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Biased Reporting?
I am a recent subscriber who is aghast at the partial /slanted reporting that I have observed. One example is your attempt to portray the reporting on AIDS among Catholic priests (“AIDS Series Assaulted” Feb. 13-19) … a well-documented and tragic event that is made all the more tragic by your paper's efforts to deny the polling done by a non-objective [sic.] polling group.
To cover up this situation is to endanger these and other priests who need the counseling on sexuality so denied in their seminary training. You are depriving readers of the truth — keeping in mind that in the arena of free ideas, truth will out. Please be objective.
Bill Wellington,
Silver Spring, Maryland
Editor's Note: Our editorial on the Kansas City Star's priests-with-AIDS story called the situation “tragic” and looked at seminary training. The front page story looked at the training problem also. So did the week's Indepth feature and a March 12-18 follow-up story. At the same time, we did find it important to correct the record of a survey that even the Star acknowledges was insufficient.
Serra Slighted
Just thought that it should be noted that Father Junipero Serra is also an American Blessed.
The article (“Holy Man of New Orleans Newest U.S. Blessed” April 9-15) says that Father Seelos (whom I love) will be the second male … Father Serra beat him to it. Think it is worth noting in an upcoming edition as we do not have many to brag about.
Anthony Gavin
via e-mail
Editor's Note: Father Serra's Southwest mission territory was not officially a part of the United States at the time of the life. But perhaps he should still “count.”
Torturous Vaccine Analogy
You come up with an analogy that is both tortured and wrong when you compare the “good” of using vaccines made from aborted pre-birth children to the “good” that comes from adopting children conceived out of wedlock (“Vaccines and Abortions,” editorial, April 2-8). The “good” of adoption comes, at least in part, because it serves the wronged child. Using vaccines from the bodies of killed children in no way serves those wronged innocents, but makes us profit from their loss of life. Thus, the use of such vaccines wrongs those children twice!
If these vaccines were derived from, say, murdered kindergartners, would their use be less acceptable? Why?
Once upon a terrible time, people used lamp-shades and soap made from the bodies of butchered Jewish children. The consumers of these products may have been removed from the actual murders by many years, but we would think of them as ghouls if they knowingly accepted these products. Would our opinion of them be different if those products had included vaccines?
Patricia Sette
Concord, Massachusetts
Pope Saint Pius XII?
Father Peter Gumpel, SJ, who is preparing the beatification cause of Pope Pius XII, is certainly correct in calling the CBS “60 Minutes” program on Pius XII “dishonest journalism” (“Jesuit Calls ‘60 Minutes’ Spin ‘Dishonest Journalism’,” April 2-8). Father said the program ignored his “precise and documented refutations” of Pope Pius XII's detractors.
It was obvious to anyone who has a passing familiarity with all Pius XII said and did on behalf of the Jews, and watched the program, that they were smearing Pius XII. At one point they did come near to the truth. Ed Bradley, the CBS reporter, asked the leader of a Jewish organization: If the Pope failed the Jews or was antiSemitic, then why did they praise him at the end of the war? “All politics,” was the Jewish leader's reply.
Those in the media who wish to discredit Pius XII are now saying, falsely, that Pius XII was silent when the Nazis were practicing genocide against Jews and his silence implied at best weakness or indifference and possibly antiSemitism. They continue saying that they have to find out what he did during the war and, to do that, the Vatican must open its archives of the period and there is no way he should be made a saint until they inspect the archives.
Catholics must reject the idea Pius XII was silent and become familiar with the many times he spoke on behalf of the Jews Karl Keating wrote an excellent Register column on what he did for Jews (“Jewish Group Warms to Pius XII,” March 26-April 1). There are many good books on the subject which show that Pius XII was a hero to contemporary Jews and they acknowledged his help after the war and on his death in 1958. Members of the media should study a little history on the era.
Catholics should reject out-of-hand the idea that the Vatican is trying to hide records from the media. The Vatican has already opened archives to scholars (Register, “Catholic and Jewish Scholars Will Study Vatican Archives,” Dec. 12–18, 1999).
Catholics should reject the idea that we need journalists to tell us who our saints are. While the Church labors mightily through proponents’ and opponents’ (devil's advocates) arguments about the candidate. God through his miracles has the final say on who achieves sainthood.
John Naughton
Silver Spring, Maryland
Indulging in the Jubilee Indulgence
Karen Walker's “Five Steps to Gain Your Indulgence” (March 26-April 1) is not as comprehensive and accurate as one would like.
She does not clearly state what “true conversion of heart” is needed for a plenary indulgence. If the least attachment to the least venial sin still remains in our hearts, no full remission of the temporal punishment is gained, simply because we are still guilty of that sin; we are still consenting to it in some measure, however small.
“What could be more fruitful … than gaining one or more Jubilee indulgences?” she asks. The answer is, any good work we do, most especially receiving any of the sacraments, preeminently the Eucharist. Why? Because we can grow in sanctifying grace (our everlasting sharing in God's Trinitarian life) if we are free of mortal sin even if we are still committing fully deliberate venial sin (hazardous as this can be to our state of grace and our relationship with God) or if we have not totally repented of every least sin. It is easier to grow in sanctifying grace than to gain a plenary indulgence!
Remission of temporal punishment (an indulgence) is just a temporal gain. Sanctifying grace is forever, unless we ourselves deliberately choose to turn away from God by mortal sin during the days of our earthly life. In heaven, of course, we will be so overpowered by the presence of God that we will no longer be free to turn from him. In this life we find the attraction of sin more overpowering than the love of God.
Rev. Vincent Hogan
Fort Scott, Kansas
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Campaign Dollars And Sense DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:The issue of campaign finance reform is a perennial political question with some large implications for freedom of speech in America. Talk of reform is to be expected after the Clinton era of accepting political contributions from the Chinese government, Buddhist nuns and White House overnight guests. The main message from self-proclaimed reformers like Vice President Gore and erst-while Republican candidate John McCain is that money, in itself, is a corrupting influence in our political process and must be constrained by limiting the amount voters can give to any candidate. If all citizens, rich or poor, give in small amounts and there is no “soft money” (funding given to a candidate indirectly, such as that donated to his party as a whole), the whole process of electing candidates who represent our views will be more honest. Or so they say.
But the reformers’ strategy overlooks a basic point of politics: Elections are about the expression of common values through collective decision-making. One of the ways we exercise our freedom is to financially support the candidates who best represent our views. In 1975, in Buckley vs. Valeo, the Supreme Court allowed a limit of $1,000 per person, which, when adjusted for inflation, today is worth about $350. The years since this ruling have seen the development of pronounced apathy and lack of participation in the political process. Why? Because to limit the ability of individuals to make political contributions is to limit their ability to support the issues and candidates of their choosing. In other words, contribution caps block citizens from participating as fully as they can in political dialogue.
McCain and Gore further argue that, since the “taint” is in the money, it is better for the government to hand out the required allotment to campaigns than it is to allow citizens to freely express their views through political contributions. Gore is proposing a “Democracy Endowment” — a federal endowment fund to underwrite elections, effectively ending the relationship between giver and politician. Creating a new government bureaucracy which decides how much money goes to candidates would do something antithetical to giving voters the right to exercise political freedom: It would advance a form of socialism.
Sever the link between the voter and the candidate, and there will be only more apathy.
In a democracy, money is speech, the modern equivalent of a soapbox. Author Mark Helprin said in The Wall Street Journal, “Put the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, the NEA, the AFL-CIO, People for the American Way, Emily's List and the Sierra Club on budgets of $2 million per annum, and let's see if money is or is not speech.” These organizations do not want to give up their soapboxes; neither should individual voters be forced to give up theirs.
In a democracy, the goal should be to create a dynamic political debate, especially on the occasion of electing individuals who will serve for several years and make many important policy decisions.
Pressing for smaller expenditures from party coffers, McCain and Gore assume that government financing of elections will get rid of corruption. But any move that takes political freedom away from the individual is detracting from the integrity of the democracy. More government control of elections means more regulations and control of information.
Private funding, meanwhile, means less government control and more initiatives like that of George W. Bush, who did not accept government money for his Republican presidential-nomination campaign and, as a result, had no limit on how much he could raise. Reformers view with horror Dallas businessman Sam Wyly, the Bush friend who spent about $2 million on TV ads critical of McCain's environmental recor. This man used his own money to exercise political speech and put information on an issue he cared about into politcal debate.
Restrictions on money do not eliminate the influence of special interests, but merely shift power to another set of interests — labor unions that provide door-to-door campaigning and man phone banks, activist students with time on their hands, and the media. The beneficiaries of “reform” are all liberal.
The role of money in the political life of a democracy is never without problems. But making citizens less free for the sake of more government control is, in the long run, counterproductive and dangerous. Money provides people with a voice to support their candidate, to fight for their issues. Sever the link between the voter and the candidate, and there will be only more apathy about politics, more uninvolved citizens.
Limiting citizen contributions is not real reform, but a denial of legitimate avenues of speech to private individuals.
Now that America is wealthier than at any time in its history, spending money on political speech and moral causes would make for a more dynamic political culture — one in which people overcome inertia and feel part of a working democracy. Let's have more freedom and less government control of citizen choices.
Mary Ellen Bork, a board member of the Catholic Campaign for America, writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mary Ellen Bork ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Where You There? DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:The trial of Christ in the Gospel of John is a good text to assign students thinking about the nature and limits of political authority. Certain resonances exist between the trial of Christ and the famous speech “Against Verres,” which Cicero directed against a Roman governor in Sicily. Cicero used this trial to reform the Senate, itself accused of being corrupt and open to bribery. Cicero had himself been a governor of Sicily. He and Verres occupied a position equivalent to that of Pontius Pilate in Roman Palestine. Cicero, like Christ, assumed that it was both right and possible for a Roman governor to govern justly.
There are parallels with another important trial as well — Pope John Paul II in several places has mentioned the similarities and dissimilarities in the trials of Christ and Socrates.
The trial of Christ, like Socrates’ trial, was formally legal. The states conducting the trials were, by comparison, rather good states, by no means the worst states of their time. However, we can have a trial that is formally “legal” but still somehow unjust. Students often think that, because a political action is “democratic,” that fact alone is sufficient to decide whether the action under the democracy's jurisdiction is just.
A student, commenting on the trial of Christ, argued that Pilate, in giving the people a democratic choice between Barabbas and Christ, did what he had to do in executing Christ. That is what the people “wanted.” Alas. Most people, in reading of Pilate's famous alternative, realize that Pilate himself was weak. A Roman governor had the power of clemency to pardon the guilty. Custom allowed, on certain occasions, that the people could choose who was to be pardoned. In principle, of course, no choice exists between someone guilty of crime and someone who is not. Pilate's very presentation of this choice was itself a violation of his duty, even in Roman law.
Who Is Subject to Whom?
Pilate and Christ have a famous discussion about the nature and origin of authority. Christ does not deny that Pilate, a Roman governor, has authority over him. Civil authority is itself legitimate. Pilate and Christ do not discuss the morality of capital punishment. Christ does not say, “Look here, Pilate, don't you know that capital punishment is wrong?” Rather, Christ indicates that all authority, including that of a Roman governor, is ultimately from God. At a minimum, this source means that Roman political authority, all political authority, is limited to its immediate purpose. Pilate is not rebuked for being a governor or for exercising the authority of a governor.
St. Paul, moreover, teaches that we are to “be subject to the governing authorities” (Romans 13:1-7). Some readers think that, in accepting Pilate's permission of the crucifixion, Christ is simply being obedient to civil authority. But this approach avoids the sticky question of obedience to unjust laws. Christ, if we forget for a moment the band of angels he could send, had little choice but to follow the physical coercion of Pilate's troops in charge of his execution.
Pilate himself initially worried that Jesus of Nazareth might in fact be a petty revolutionary. On examination, he found that the accused did not aspire to any political office. His Kingdom was “not of this world.” While grasping this distinction, however little he may have pictured the whole of Christ's teachings, Pilate understood that this man was not guilty of the crime for which he was being charged; in no way was he making himself a political “King of the Jews.” John records Pilate telling the crowds: “I find no case against him.”
No Way Out
Under the surface, of course, Pilate knows that Christ is brought before him because of problems having to do with Jewish, not Roman, politics. Pilate tried every way he could think of to extricate himself from this mess. His very awareness — his washing of his hands, his wife's warnings — indicated that he knew Christ was not guilty. At this point, the distinction between authority and its exercise comes in. In acknowledging that Pilate had “authority,” even from God, Christ is not approving the manner in which Pilate proceeded. Quite clearly, Pilate should have cleared him, not washed his hands or delivered him over to Roman, not Jewish, punishment — that is, to crucifixion, not stoning.
Pilate is not the most guilty party in the whole sordid procedure. He just happened to be the man in charge. He could not disentangle himself from it. Still he bore considerable guilt. The several Jewish officials (not the whole people, then or now) that managed the whole affair thought Christ was a threat. The crowds are even reported as saying, “We have no king but Caesar,” which, in other circumstances, few Jews seriously would have shouted.
When we step back a bit from the immediate, graphic circumstances of the trial of Christ, we see it as part of the drama of sin and of our redemption. Christ was the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. He was true God and true man. Those few individual Jewish officials of the time who pressed Pilate were the ones who bore guilt. The principle that “it is better that one die than that the people perish” has become infamous as a cover for political leaders sacrificing the innocent. Surely, neither Pilate nor the Jewish officials involved recognized Christ for what he was, the “Son of God,” as the Roman centurion put it after he was dead. All involved are guilty of sacrificing a good man, no matter who he was, for political purposes. And our sins make all of us present.
But the true identity of the person sacrificed remains. Christ was “obedient,” obedient to death, even to the death of the cross. The emperor, the governor, Barabbas, the local officials, the crowd — all played their part in a drama of whose depths they had no real idea.
“So in the end Pilate handed him over to them to be crucified. They then took charge of Jesus and, carrying his own cross, he went out of the city.” It was the great Russian novelist Feodor Dostoyevsky who suggested that, had Christ appeared in any other polity, in any other time, the same thing would have happened to him. We don't like to believe it. In any case, we know what did happen to Christ. More important still, we know now who he is.
Father James Schall is a professor of government at Georgetown University.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: James V. Schall, Sj ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Trial of Christ In the Gospel of John DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:Therefore Pilate entered again into the Praetorium, and summoned Jesus and said to Him, “Are you the King of the Jews?”
Jesus answered, “Are you saying this on your own initiative, or did others tell you about me?”
Pilate answered, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests delivered you to me; what have you done?”
Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, then my servants would be fighting so that I would not be handed over to the Jews; but as it is, my kingdom is not of this realm.”
Therefore Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say correctly that I am a king. For this I have been born, and for this
I have come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.”
Pilate said to him, “What is truth?” And when he had said this, he went out again to the Jews and said to them, “I find no guilt in him.
“But you have a custom that I release someone for you at the Passover; do you wish then that I release for you the King of the Jews?”
So they cried out again, saying, “Not this man, but Barabbas.” Now Barabbas was a robber (John 18:33-40).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: On the Threshold of the Church DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:Though my father died years ago, I see his face a lot these days as I explain to him in imaginary conversations why I am about to enter the Catholic Church. In my mind, he looks disappointed as he mistakenly regards this step as some rejection of the loving, devoted guidance he and my mother gave all their children. It is that imaginary face, not to mention that of my mother — who is alive, well and baffled over my decision — that has prompted me to ask, on the eve of my reception into the Church this Easter: What am I leaving behind by leaving Protestantism?
As an energetic, young evangelical pastor in an overwhelmingly Catholic state (Rhode Island), my father was never shy about proclaiming his belief that popes, purgatory, confessions, rosaries and other aspects of the Catholic faith turned the Christian life into a frantic obstacle course, requiring frightened souls to jump through a series of fiery hoops to win heaven. He was a man of great love, and love for truth, and I like to think that the latter never diminished the former. He was always more sweet on Christ than sour on the Catholic Church, as evidenced by the fact that his daily religious radio program and weekly newspaper column won him a considerable following among Catholics as well as Protestants.
My parents encouraged their children to pursue true and honest answers to whatever questions arose. Our house was full of books, our dinnertime full of debate and discussion about theology, politics and, most religiously, about the Red Sox-Orioles rivalry. (A native New Englander, my father had converted to Baltimore fandom after finding unendurable the Sox’ chronic self-destructiveness.) Neither parent trusted a complacent or unquestioning faith, and I've often thought that their respective pursuits of God's own heart must have contributed to their attraction to each other. The legacy they have left is not a Protestant faith but the Christian faith — and with it a sense of obligation to find out where that faith is most fully realized.
Last month, my RCIAclass (for adults entering the Church) went to Holy Cross Cathedral in Boston for the Rites of Election and Calling to Continuing Conversion. In a stirring ceremony, Cardinal Bernard Law formally welcomed more than 1,000 converts and catechumens to full communion with the Church. When he turned his attention specifically to the candidates who had already been baptized, but outside of the Catholic Church, the cardinal gave us a brief but impassioned defense of the primacy of Peter and his successors as vicars of Christ. And he addressed the question I had been asking for months.
“What are you leaving?” he asked rhetorically. “Nothing. You bring it all with you. We thank God for those churches that taught you to love him and that taught you to love and know the Scripture. Bring that with you. We need that.”
I was reminded from his remarks that, from the Catholic perspective, the Reformation was a one-sided fight and that the “separated brethren” are welcome to lay down their theological arms any time and rejoin the apostolic community.
In the Boston Archdiocese, candidates are accepted into full communion with the Church on the second week of Easter, not at the Easter Vigil. The vigil is reserved for baptizing those completely new to the Christian faith. When I first learned this, I felt a pang of petulant disappointment. Why should only catechumens get to take part in the dramatic, unforgettable Easter Vigil ceremonies? Why should we candidates have to wait a week longer than they for our first Communion? Cardinal Law's remarks made me realize we weren't being left out of the Vigil; rather we were being invited to join the whole Church in welcoming those who are new to the faith.
By entering the Church, we candidates are climbing from wind-tossed rafts back onto the deck of a great ocean liner which moves with protected confidence and comfort to its final destination. It is a ship we climbed off of at some point in history. By contrast, the catechumens are thrown life-savers from the stern of that same ocean liner and pulled from the roiling waters of the world. Candidates are returned to the Church; catechumens are rescued into the faith.
The sense that I was returning to the Catholic Church, rather than newly joining, came to me very strongly just a few days after the cardinal's welcoming ceremony. While traveling on business, I had the opportunity to attend Mass at St. Peter Claver Church in New Orleans. This African-American church in a desperately poor part of town provided a great mix of vibrant gospel music, fiery preaching and a friendly, familylike congregation. For the reading of the Gospel, actors played the parts of Jesus and the Samaritan woman. The congregation sang the Our Father with great enthusiasm. Later, when the parishioners began to file forward for Communion, the choir sang the dramatic black gospel hymn “I Don't Know Why (Jesus Loved Me)” by Andrae Crouch.
I couldn't help but think of my parents. Growing up, my favorite record album was Andrae Crouch and the Disciples'Live at Carnegie Hall. Dad had gotten the record as a demo copy at the radio station. I listened to that album, which opens with “I Don't Know Why,” hundreds of times as a kid and hundreds more since. Some years, Andrae Crouch at Carnegie Hall was all the church I got. Hearing that hymn in a warm, packed church where people said “Amen” during the homily and spontaneously rose to their feet during songs resembled more the church services of my youth than the formal Catholic Masses I have experienced back in Cambridge.
Yet this was also a very Catholic Mass; absolute reverence was shown for the form and sanctity of the liturgy — evidence that an “expressive” or “popular” style of worship doesn't require tampering with liturgical truth. In that service, past and present coalesced in the soulful, familiar strains of “I Don't Know Why” and the profound, now-familiar petition of the Eucharistic Prayer.
What am I leaving behind? Not the primary lessons my Protestant parents taught: to restlessly search for what's true, to have the spiritual and intellectual courage to admit when one is wrong. I remember my father telling me once that real courage is marked not by an ability to fight but by the willingness to admit wrong and to say “I'm sorry.” I'm leaving behind a Reformation fight that should have been settled centuries ago. The rest, as the good cardinal says, is coming with me.
David Gordon, a former Newsweek editor, writes from Cambridge, Massachusetts.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: David Gordon ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Passion Of Christ DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:The Christian visiting the Holy Land today continues a tradition started by early followers of Jesus many centuries ago: stopping at places associated with the Lord's passion and death. The pilgrim traces the steps of Jesus from the Garden of Gethsemane to the Tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Through the noisy, narrow, crowded streets of the walled city of Old Jerusalem, the pilgrim wends a prayerful way, following Christ.
The starting point is usually the Rock of the Agony inside the Church of All Nations, on the lower slopes of the Mount of Olives. There, eight ancient olive trees, said to date from Christ's time, still stand. The word Gethsemane means “olive press” in Aramaic, and the area is carefully tended by the Franciscans.
The pilgrim is amazed at the close proximity of the Holy Land shrines. “Why, you can stand here on the Mount of Olives and look right across the way, and see — there's Jerusalem before you,” exclaims a surprised tourist. “Jesus didn't have to go far at all to get to Pilate.”
It is true. The Via Dolorosa, or Way of Sorrow, is directly across the way within the walled Old City of Jerusalem. The morning sun colors Jerusalem a golden yellow as the pilgrim enters the square-mile city. Upon entering by the Damascus Gate, the most handsome of Jerusalem's eight gates, a guide explains that this was the main entrance to the city during Roman times.
The visitor is stirred to awe at a city 40 centuries old, the nerve center of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths. Jerusalem is layer upon layer of civilization, each layer a coveted city once fought over, destroyed and rebuilt. Jerusalem, full of tensions, full of holiness, the home of the three great monotheistic religions, reflects this tension, this holy demeanor, in some of the monuments and rubble that have withstood these 40 centuries of spiritual foment and world-ly turmoil.
To the Christian, however, making the 14 Stations of the Cross, the tomb of Jesus, in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher at the end of the Via Dolorosa, is the final goal.
At the start of the Via Dolorosa is the Convent of the Sisters of Zion. The convent's vaulted basement covers the remains of an ancient Roman pavement (Lithostratos) made of large flagstones that were specially etched to prevent horses from slipping. It is in this area that the Fortress Antonia stood 2,000 years ago. Here Jesus was brought before Pilate, then scourged and mocked by Roman soldiers. The Sisters of the Convent conduct guided tours of the Lithostratos and offer excellent explanations of the events surrounding Jesus’ crucifixion.
The Ecce Homo arch, near the spot where Pilate is believed to have spoken the words “Behold the man!” when he presented Christ to the mob, washed his hands, and condemned Jesus to death, is also a part of the Lithostratos area the Sisters purchased in 1857.
Sometimes pilgrims, individually or in groups, carry large wooden crosses while praying the Stations of the Cross. There are some interesting stories behind this old practice.
During World War II, a 12-year-old German orphan named Alfred Winkler vowed that one day he would carry a cross all the way from his homeland to Jerusalem. He would fulfill his vow 35 years later.
On Jan. 6, 1977, Winkler picked up a large wooden cross in Griesbach, Germany, and set out for Jerusalem. He arrived in the Holy City on Friday, Aug. 5, 1977, at 3 p.m., just in time to participate in the official procession of the Way of the Cross that day. Before he returned to Germany by plane, he donated his cross to the Chapel of the Second Station (Jesus Takes Up His Cross). Today it is under the care of the Sisters of Zion, who make it available to pilgrims for their devotions along the Via Dolorosa.
The third station, marking the spot where Jesus fell the first time, is at a corner in El-Wad Road, where a chapel built by Polish Catholics marks the spot. Above the entrance door is a high relief that depicts the scene.
The fourth station, where Jesus met his mother, is marked by a small oratory near the entrance to a church called Our Lady of the Spasm, honoring Mary's help of the infirm.
The fifth station, where Simon of Cyrene helped Jesus carry the cross, is marked by a Franciscan oratory at the site where the Via Dolorosa ascends steeply to Golgotha.
The sixth station, where Veronica wiped the face of Jesus, is marked by a fragment of a Roman column embedded in a wall of St. Veronica Church. The church, beautifully restored in 1953 on the traditional site of St. Veronica's house, contains ancient remains, thought to be from the Monastery of Sts. Cosmas and Damian, built in 546-63.
The seventh station, where Jesus fell the second time, is marked by a great Roman column which is housed in a Franciscan chapel. The second fall occurred as Jesus was about to leave the city of Jerusalem through a gate. Tradition has it that Jesus’ death notice was later posted here after the crucifixion. Hence the Christian name for the gate, Judgment Gate.
The eighth station, where Jesus consoled the women of Jerusalem, is marked by a Latin cross on the wall of the Greek Monastery of St. Charalambos.
The ninth station, where Jesus fell the third time, is marked by a Roman column in the Coptic monastery near the apse and roof of the Holy Sepulcher Basilica. It reminds the pilgrim that Jesus collapsed very near the place where he would die.
The next five stations are within the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher. This fact is not always realized until the pilgrim traverses the Via Dolo-rosa and completes the first nine Stations of the Cross — out on the street, so to speak.
The site of Calvary, then, and the site of the tomb of Jesus are both contained indoors, in one church. They are, in fact, about 125 feet from each other, consistent with St John's account: “In the place where Jesus had been crucified there was a garden, and in the garden was a new tomb in which no one had ever been buried” (John 19:41).
The 10th station, where Jesus was stripped of his garments, is marked by a mosaic design on the floor of Calvary.
The 11th station, where Jesus was nailed to the cross, is represented here also. Considered a main Latin shrine, it was beautifully redecorated in 1938.
The 12th station, the spot where Jesus was crucified, is marked by a Greek altar beautifully ornamented in Eastern style, and built over the spots where the crosses of the two thieves and the cross of Jesus were erected. In the bedrock beneath this area is a large crevice, said to have been caused by an earthquake on the day Jesus died.
The small altar between the large main ones on Calvary marks the 13th station, where Jesus was taken down from the cross. Mary's grief at this place is reflected in a beautiful statue, the Stabat Mater Dolorosa, fashioned in the 16th or 17th century and sent from Lisbon, Portugal, in 1778.
Finally, the 14th station, marking the most sacred spot in Christendom — the site of Jesus'burial and resurrection — occupies its own chapel. Here, of course, is the focal point of the entire Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher. Jesus was placed in the tomb and then, on the first Easter Sunday, rose from the dead.
To stand in the very place where the redemption of the entire human race took place is to experience the sublimely spiritual. Unfortunately, it must also be said that this holy place is not without its distractions.
The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is sometimes a source of dismay and confusion to pilgrims. Dark and oftentimes in disrepair in certain sections, it is constantly filled with jostling tourists. But one big disturbing problem is an ongoing one. It is the jealous possessiveness exhibited by the six groups that own the various sections of the Church. Armenians, Copts, Ethiopians, Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholics and Syrians — all eye each other suspiciously throughout the day, every day, to make sure that rights are safeguarded.
Each group performs separate services and maintains distinct altars and chapels. Sometimes the rivalry and pettiness can be over-looked, however, when the high vaults, the Eastern grandeur of the Church, and the very complexity of the edifice are considered.
The altar over the tomb itself is divided into forward and rear sections officiated over by the Greek Orthodox and Copts, respectively. Many lamps and ornaments embellish the area. A Franciscan from New York explains to English-speaking pilgrims that the Greeks allow the Franciscans to say Mass on the tomb at 4 a.m. The Greeks and the Copts, owners of this particular site, offer their Masses at more reasonable hours.
The Franciscan chapel in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher contains a section of the column or sacred pillar at which Christ was scourged. The Franciscans also have glass wall cases in their chapel that contain items dating from the time of the Crusades.
The late poet and president of St. Mary's College in Notre Dame, Ind., Holy Cross Sister M. Madeleva, captured the color, the tumult, the confusion and the jubilation that is Jerusalem in a poem she called “Gates.”
She wrote: The oranges at Jaffa gate Are heaped in hills; men sell and buy Or sit and watch the twisted road Or David's tower against the sky. The world has narrow gates and wide;
Men seek their loves through all of them.
And I have come here, seeking mine, Jerusalem, Jerusalem!
Virginia Morrow Black writes from South Bend, Indiana.
----- EXCERPT: Retracing Jesus' Steps in Jerusalem: Visiting the Via Dolorosa ----- EXTENDED BODY: Virginia Morrow Black ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Prayer on the Plateau DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:The Stations of the Cross Shrine is the visual and spiritual high point of San Luis, Colo., a tiny town that is the oldest in the state. Here lifelike, life-size meditations on Christ's final hours, created by local sculptor Huberto Maestas, walk the visitor through the painful moments at the pinnacle of salvation history in a most compelling and memorable way.
Each station sculpture is finished in bronze and each, on its own, is a treasure. Indeed, 2-foot renderings of each were presented to Pope John Paul II for the Vatican Museum; he received them with great warmth and enthusiasm. The site is popular not only with Catholics, but also Protestants and not a few pensive nonbelievers in search of meaning in their lives.
The hill on which the shrine was built is now called La Mesa de la Piedad y de la Misericordia, (The Plateau of Piety and Mercy), and hosts some 30,000 visitors each year. A parishioner of the nearby parish, Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ), explained the power behind the San Luis shrine experience: “You're going uphill, and you're surrounded by nature. The land is arid, and it's not an easy climb. With each station, you feel the immediacy of the sufferings of our Lord. And when you get to the top, you sense what it must have been like for him to be crucified on Calvary. It isn't like looking at the pictures on the wall of the church. You are there. You see what our Lord has done for us.”
Spiritual Summit
The trail leading visitors along the way of sorrows is less than a mile long. Its leeward side ends at the Grotto of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which features pink sandstone carvings of the Virgin Mary and Juan Diego.
Work began on the shrine in 1988; the 14th station, the Burial of our Lord, is still under construction. Already completed is a stunning “15th station” that depicts Jesus ascending from his cross, one hand on the top of the cross and the other reaching up as though to his Father.
Maestas, whose studio is at the foot of La Mesa, is in steady demand for commissioned religious art projects across the country. He recently completed the Respect Life Memorial for the John Paul II Center at the Denver archdiocese pastoral center.
At the “summit of our salvation,” as visitors have taken to calling the area between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, there is a recent addition: La Capilla de
Todos los Santos — All Saints Chapel. Designed by local architect Arnie Valdez, the 1400-square-foot adobe structure was built by artists from the San Luis valley with assistance from workers who traveled from Mexico to lend a hand.
La Capilla seats about 70 people. It features an outdoor cloister with pink stonework from Mexico, carvings of saints important to San Luis.
To the west of La Capilla, the sunlit Knights of Columbus Education Building offers information on the religious and cultural history of the area, as well as details about the envi ronmental resources and ecological aspects of the region.
During pilgrimages and Lenten celebrations, there are processions from Sangre de Cristo Church in town, up the hill to La Capilla. Just west of the town is La Vega, or the commons, rich open space that will never be developed because it belongs to the people of San Luis, most of whom can trace their family lineage back farther than the town's charter in 1851. La Vega was the last of four land grants decreed by the king of Spain.
Latter times have been lean for residents here. Facing a future with limited resources (Costilla County, in which San Luis sits, is one of the poorest in the country), the people of San Luis built their remarkable shrine on faith.
“They are a people of few resources but strong faith,” explains Father Pat Valdez, Sangre de Cristo's pastor. “This shrine is an example of what can happen when people say Yes to God.”
Local Heroes
Intensely proud of their heritage, San Luis residents will tell you quietly that not everyone responded to the shrine idea the same way. “You have to remember that the people who live here belong to the same families that were granted this land 150 years ago,” says a local businessman. “Some really didn't like the idea of having more visitors at first; they thought the town would change. But the people who come here are good, religious people. They are here to have a quiet experience. They're good folks to have in town.”
Ermino and Martha Romero, who were raised in the area but now reside in Colorado Springs, Colo., say they never miss a chance to pray at the shrine. “Before there was a shrine, there was nothing here,” says Martha as she stops to catch her breath on the rocky hillside. “Now people come here from all over the world.”
“This is not a wealthy town, by any means,” adds Ermino. “A lot of the people who are still here are struggling. But the Church and faith are at San Luis’ center, and it's been that way since the town began.”
After experiencing the power and beauty of the shrine, along with the faith and love of the locals, the Catholic traveler comes away wondering why anyone would call this one of the poorest towns in the country.
Seems to me it's one of the richest places in the world — and it's sure to be one of the holiest during Holy Week.
Susan Baxter is based in Creede, Colorado.
----- EXCERPT: The stunning Stations of the Cross Shrine at San Luis, Colorado ----- EXTENDED BODY: Susan Baxter ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Procession of Faith DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:The elaborate Catholic beauty of Holy Week processions in Spain is not what I expected to see on my first excursion to the American Bible Society's New York Gallery.
I've known for many years that the society has the imprimatur from the Catholic Church to print Catholic Bibles. (The society distributes some 63 million Bibles yearly.) But this charming and effective exhibition of about 50 photographs and brilliant sculpture — Images in Procession: Testimonies to Spanish Faith — turned out to be a rare treat indeed.
The Hispanic Society of America is a co-presenter of the exhibit, which runs until April 29 in the society's spacious quarters near Columbus Circle.
As old traditions die with the rise of our one-size-fits-all culture, it's encouraging to see these precious moments preserved as living witnesses to the faith. Best of all, it's not only about the past: Even today, at St. Anthony's Church on Sullivan Street in New York, a neighborhood procession for their patron (held in June on his feast day) features his statue on a float, with devotees following him, and in Brooklyn men still carry statues on their shoulders on poles during festivals — but these events continue traditions of Southern Italy and Portugal. Many fervent followers of St. Anthony come from miles around to take part in his feast, but the crowds are more apt to be stunned SoHo residents or tourists with camcorders, thinking Godfather IV is being filmed.
There were no movies and no television when Ruth Anderson, then photographer and curator at the Hispanic Society of America, traveled through Zamora, Villa-campos, Jerez de los Caballeros, and La Alberca in northwestern Spain during the 1920s. Her pictures and words bring that region to life for us. The living tableaux that everyone attended in the plaza in Villacampos (pop. 922 in 1920) during Holy Week brought the priest, the schoolteachers and other villagers together to re-enact Christ's passion on small platforms. Towns people's faces in the photographs show profound dignity and respect for the “performers.” Even the children stop playing as their neighbors solemnly re-enact the Last Supper, the Agony in the Garden, the Scourging, the Crucifixion and the Pietà. Executioners wear bright-colored, garish costumes, contrasting with the simplicity of Christians.
In towns where the figures were carried about, their progress was not always smooth. As Anderson wrote, “When a paso goes under a telegraph wire … the men crouch down and scrape the corner posts of the paso against the ground.
‘Arriba!’ [Up!] The cramped muscles spring at the word and the crucified Christ rises too far. The wire catches on the nail in one hand … the paso totters and tosses under the efforts of the men to free the cross from the wire. The director perspires and shrieks. Two dozen feet shuffle obediently backwards and forwards with knees crouching. The crowd watches intently as the wire slides off the nail, a few more inches, another foot forward, and the paso is clear, the wire saved.”
The celebrations Anderson witnessed were popular during the Middle Ages, when public and private confessions of faith blended in the drama. Later, during the 16th century, Holy Week processions in Spain developed into two sections: the pasos , or multifigured floats of religious statues designed specifically for the occasion, and the hooded penitents who accompany these figures. Townspeople who belonged to the confraternities, religious brotherhoods dedicated to charitable acts, commissioned the pasos.
In this exhibition, splendid works of art are set at intervals amid the photographs. The Vir gin in polychrome and gold cloth; a charming Corpus Christi figure; a very beautiful Deposition with sorrowful women; the Ecce Homo, in which glass eyes are added to make Christ's pain seem more real — all are exceptional. It's not difficult to imagine mayors and town councils kneeling as they passed.
In a 19th-century Spanish travel book in my collection, author John Hay describes a similar event held in a theater: “The scene lasts nearly an hour. The theatre was full of sobbing women and children. At every fresh brutality I could hear weeping spectators say ‘Pobre Jesus!’ [Poor Jesus!]. ‘How wicked they are!’ The bulk of the audience was people who do not often go to the theatre. They looked upon the revolting scene as a real and living act. One hard-featured man near me clenched his fists and cursed the cruel guards. Apale … girl … fell back, fainting in the arms of her friends.”
This year, in Spain and Sicily, Mexico and points south, towns will join in to see the ancient drama relived through their neighbors, perhaps not as passionately as the pre-television generations, but filled with reverence for the Greatest Story Ever Told.
Barbara Coeyman Hults writes from New York.
----- EXCERPT: Spanish testimonies light up the gallery at the American Bible Society in New York ----- EXTENDED BODY: Barbara Coeyman Hults ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: New Spanish Martyrs DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:Most Americans who have even heard of the Spanish Civil War have been led to believe that it was a conflict between democratic, freedom-loving Republicans on the one hand and Fascists led by General Francisco Franco on the other. Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia portray the war in that light, though both have the decency to admit that widespread murder of Catholics took place. Thousands of idealists from other nations volunteered to fight on the side of the Republicans in “International Brigades.” Franco's forces were characterized as reactionary and authoritarian Catholics. But at the time, no western nation supported the Republicans, precisely because of their anti-religious atrocities. Only the Soviet Union, then closely allied with the Spanish Republicans, and Mexico, itself perpetrating atrocities against its own church at the time, backed Republican Spain.
The other countries of the world were right. In Spain, one of Europe's most staunchly Catholic countries, large numbers of Catholics were butchered during the 1936-1939 Civil War solely for being Catholic. Unlike the martyrdoms in most parts of the world, whole sectors of the religious community were liquidated. At least 6,832 priests and religious were martyred, including 13 bishops. In the 20th century, probably no country witnessed so much bloodshed among its clergy.
The male religious martyred included 259 Claretians, 226 Franciscans, 204 Piarists, 176 Brothers of Mary, 165 Christian Brothers, 155 Augustinians, 132 Dominicans, and 114 Jesuits. The toll among the female orders was lower, but still shocking when we recall that these women could have had virtually nothing to do with the political struggle: 30 Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, 26 Carmelites of Charity, 26 Adoratrices, and 20 Capuchins, along with many others.
But perhaps the greatest fury fell upon diocesan clergy, though it varied a great deal from one place to another. Pamplona, a Nationalist and pro-Catholic stronghold, had no diocesan casualties. Barbastro in Aragon saw 123 of its 140 priests lost to the violently anti-clerical Republican anarchists. Elsewhere, too, the pattern reflected the fortunes of war. Seville was captured early by the Nationalists and therefore lost only four priests. But the other large cities that remained in Republican hands for the duration of the war had far higher casualty figures: Barcelona, 279; Valencia, 327; Madrid-Alcalá, 1,118. In percentage terms, these represented 22%, 27% and 30% of the diocesan clergy in those cities, respectively.
Remarkably, most of the murders were carried out in only the first six months of the war. Probably half of all clergy were, within a week of the uprising, protected in areas controlled by the Nationalists. Without the Nationalists, the slaughter could have been much greater. As it was, about a quarter of the male clergy in Republican-controlled areas disappeared.
Almost none of them gave up the faith when they were threatened with death. Their steadfastness is even more remarkable in that they were subjected to almost unprecedented tortures and abuse. At times, these took bizarre forms: besides the usual mayhem, in several instances priests were killed and had their ears cut off and passed around as trophies — as if they had been bulls killed in a Spanish bullfight. Their witness indicates that the claims that the Spanish Church was corrupt and deserved harsh treatment were false. In fact, it seems, they were quite sincere and heroic.
Nor were lay people spared. One of the most impartial analysts of the Spanish Civil War, Jose M. Sanchez, has described their plight as follows: “An incalculable number of lay persons were killed because of their religious associations, either as well-known church-goers, members of fraternal and charitable religious organizations, or as the fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and friends of clerics.
Some were killed because they professed their faith by wearing some outward symbol of belief, perhaps a religious medal or scapular. Some were killed for acts of charity, for granting refuge to clerics attempting to escape the fury. It is impossible to determine the number of these lay persons who were slain for their faith. … Nor was the anticlericalism limited to killing. Thousands of churches were burned, religious objects were profaned, nuns'tombs were opened and the petrified mummies displayed to ridicule, and religious ceremonies were burlesqued. Indeed, practically any imaginable anticlerical act was not only possible but likely.”
Of the 20th-century martyrs beatified by Pope John Paul II, it is no surprise, then, that the great majority resulted from the civil war in Spain. In 1996, before the wave of beatifications and canonizations associated with the Jubilee year began, of the 266 he beatified, 218 were Spaniards.
Whatever might be said about the complex politics on either side in the Spanish Civil War — and in fairness it ought to be mentioned that Franco and the Nationalists were certainly not Fascists nor the Republicans simply Communists — it is a simple fact that this massive slaughter of Catholics within supposedly civilized Europe has never received the attention it deserves. Some intellectuals who defend the Republican cause have unfortunately tried to excuse the anti-Catholic violence as somehow a merely symbolic reaction to centuries of Church dominance in Spain. Even George Orwell, author of 1984 and normally a decent observer, tended to play down these wholly unjust murders.
The historical injustice continues. Many religious people have been the object of murderous hatreds in the 20th century. All deserve proper recognition of the abuses they suffered. We should not forget that Catholics in Spain figure prominently among them.
Crossroads will soon publish Robert Royal's book
The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Robert Royal ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Vouchers: Textbook Case of Temptation DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:When the American Civil Liberties Union says something reasonable, we should be suspicious. But when the ACLU claims to be protecting Catholic education, it's time to worry.
At a recent debate on school vouchers hosted by the University of Maryland's Brody Forum, ACLU President Nadine Strossen argued that Catholic education cannot receive vouchers and remain Catholic. That, she said, would be unfortunate. Strossen's concern for Catholic education seems disingenuous, but the potential threat of secularizing Catholic education is real enough.
In recent years, the secularizing threat has come primarily from the ACLU itself, so Strossen's point was a case of the fox reminding the farmer to guard the henhouse. The ACLU's activist lawyers seem more inclined to remove all religion from publicly funded education.
Catholic schools make themselves a prime target for the ACLU because they provide the best alternative to failing inner-city public schools. Thus we have seen the ACLU set its attorneys upon existing school-choice programs in the states that have them — Ohio, Wisconsin, Arizona and Florida. It is because of the ACLU's aggressive anti-voucher activities that Catholics need to make sure any new voucher legislation is crafted in such a way that it protects the religious mission and content of Catholic education.
It's noteworthy that, in cities with voucher programs, only faith-based schools have stepped forward to participate. Fully 97% of participating private schools in Cleveland and 92% in Milwaukee are religious, and the vast majority of these are Catholic. Parochial and a handful of Protestant schools have stuck by inner-city students while non-sectarian private schools in the suburbs have declined to accept voucher students. But can the religious schools continue to serve these students under pressure from the ACLU?
During the debate, Strossen warned that, should public vouchers stand, the ACLU's strategy would include pursuing litigation against Catholic schools that would force them to adopt federal hiring practices. This would mean they could no longer select teachers on the basis of religious belief; next, the ACLU would seek to force the schools to remove all religious content from the curriculum so that impressionable children would not be subjected to “religious indoctrination.” If the ACLU can't defeat vouchers, it will settle for destroying the schools that would most benefit from the programs.
This is a heartless strategy for desperate times, but a radically secularist interpretation of the separation of church and state is one of the surest constitutional bases the ACLU can stand on, given court rulings in the past several decades. Maine and Vermont already have successful voucher programs for K-12 education, but courts in both of those states rejected the participation of religious schools in the programs. This past December, the Cleveland voucher program was halted by a federal judge precisely because he said it was biased toward religious schools.
Coerced Catholicism?
The crux of the ACLU argument goes something like this: Since inner-city parents have no choice in education outside of religious schools, vouchers coerce desperate parents to use Catholic schools, which constitutes an establishment of religion. This is spurious, because parents in these cities may choose among charter schools and better public schools. But it does highlight the fact that a private education the poor and middle class can afford is usually a Catholic education. Nonsectarian private schools frequently cost more than $10,000 per year. Vouchers are valued at $1,500 to $3,000 per year depending on financial need.
The bishops in these dioceses will face an excruciating choice: turn away the children stuck in deplorable public education who would like to use public vouchers, or water down the religious dimension of the curricula in order to continue doing the heroic job of educating the urban poor.
Should we turn away inner-city children who would like to use public vouchers to attend Catholic schools — or remove the religious dimension from our core curriculum?
During the past decade, bishops of inner-city dioceses have been under enormous financial pressure to close parochial schools in parishes that can no longer support them. Some have closed, but many have been saved to serve their more than 75% non-Catholic students. The subtle shift to a less-religious curriculum would be done with the best of intentions.
In Milwaukee, Catholic schools may receive vouchers on the condition that students be permitted to opt out of the religious portion of the curriculum. In 1996 the U.S. Congress came very close to passing a citywide voucher program for the District of Columbia with similar language until some of its supporters defected when Cardinal James Hickey's silence on the plan was interpreted as disapproval. Attempts since then for a voucher program without the opt-out clause have failed to garner enough support to pass.
But Catholic education has already made a Faustian bargain if it is possible to opt out of the religion class and if literature, biology and history classes are stripped of religious content. (It is bad enough when they do this without government pressure.) ACatholic philosophy of education always recognizes that knowledge is holistic.
Should a Catholic school teach history without any reference to Christ or the tradition of the Catholic faith in America? Should science class be free of any discussion of the unique human dignity of every human person as created by God? And if we relegate these to “religious instruction,” what are we teaching our children about the world? We are saying that truth is compartmentalized and may be taken a la carte, and that morality and theology have nothing to do with science and technology — which is the very world that children today already grow up in.
Secular Stipulations
Textbooks provide a perfect example of the temptation. Maryland passed a bill this March, after rancorous debate, that will grant parochial schools $6 million to be used for textbooks, provided none of the books has religious content. Other states have similar textbook programs and the federal government dispenses money for remedial education, teacher training and technology upgrades so long as none of the money is used for religious purposes. Teachers will have to go to extra lengths to incorporate Catholic teaching they won't find in the materials provided by the government.
And Catholic school teachers themselves may fall prey to secularization if the National Education Association has its way. The national teachers union has already been holding workshops on how it might unionize private-school teachers whether or not public money begins to roll in. Given the wide salary gap between private and public school teachers, the unions will have an exploitable grievance. It is hard to imagine that a unionized, private-teachers association will be guided by the highest ideals in Catholic social thought.
But the loss of the “Catholic” in Catholic education can be even more subtle. Boston University professor Charles Glenn has studied six countries in Europe where private schools receive public funds and has concluded that, over time and in every case, these schools have “been assimilated to the assumptions and guiding values of public schooling.”
Catholics shouldn't oppose vouchers under the threat of ACLU litigation. The lives of the children involved are worth battling for. But Catholics should consider opposing the kinds of vouchers that would water down the vital religious content of schools that we have saved at so great a cost.
Most of the teachers and administrators I have spoken with about vouchers express concern that their Catholic identity would in some way be compromised by public assistance. They want to help as many children as they can in the inner city, but not at the expense of that key component, the Catholic component, which they see as the difference between success and failure.
By letting students out of the religious portion of the curriculum, we would be saying that religion is a dispensable part of education. But can Catholic education do without Catholic faith? Surely not. It's the specifically religious character of these schools that distinguishes them; that distinction is what keeps teachers and students alike coming back. Catholic schools create an environment of love and respect for the dignity of every person. It's an environment well worth fighting for — and fighting is an imperative at a time when several forces would love nothing more than a chance to tear down Catholic education's very foundations.
Jason Boffetti is project coordinator for the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jason Boffetti ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Education Notebook DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:College Condones Cohabitation
ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 31 — Haverford College will allow unmarried men and women to share bedrooms next year in the college's apartment-style dormitories, the Associated Press reported.
The decision by the small college, located just outside Philadelphia, came partly in response to demands by homosexual students, the news service said.
“There are a number of men and women who are friends and who would like to live together, just as there are gay and lesbian students who have difficulty finding people who they're comfortable living with,” said Robin Doan, the college's director of student housing. The new rules will not apply to one-bedroom apartments or to dormitories for freshmen.
According to AP, Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., and Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., already allow men and women to share dormitory rooms.
Student Fired For Criticizing Lesbian Stage Show
CARDINAL NEWMAN SOCIETY , March 31 — Student newspaper columnist Robert Swope did the unthinkable: He criticized Georgetown's production of “Vagina Monologues,” Eve Ensler's feminist play which approvingly features a lesbian, pedophilic rape of a 13-year-old girl.
For this he was fired by his editors at The Hoya, the leading newspaper at Georgetown University, the Cardinal Newman Society said. In addition, all his previous newspaper columns were removed from the newspaper's Web site. Swope is a junior from California.
“If Catholic morality cannot be reflected in a Georgetown University-funded newspaper, where will it be heard, the Harvard Crimson?” asked Manuel Miranda, president of the Cardinal Newman Society. He also mentioned that this decision comes on the heels of the suppression of a pro-life Catholic student publication in mid-March by Villanova University.
“I've seen this happen at so many campuses,” said University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Charles Kors, co-author of The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses. “A paper solicits its token conservative columnist, and then when he speaks his honest mind, the editors run for cover. The editors should be ashamed of themselves.”
Antioch College Condemned For Inviting Mur derer to Speak
FRATERNAL ORDER OF POLICE , March 29 — Gilbert G. Gallegos, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, called on Antioch College to rescind its invitation to have Mumia Abu-Jamal address its graduates at the school's commencement on April 29.
Abu-Jamal murdered 26-year-old Philadelphia police officer Danny Faulkner in 1981 and has been on death row since his conviction. The college plans to play a tape-recorded speech by the killer, the organization said in a statement.
“It amazes me,” Gallegos said, “that an institution of higher learning would give a platform to a murderer preaching violence as a means to an end. Abu-Jamal's message is about hatred and racism — not the positive impact that young people can have in our society.”
Gallegos was particularly bewildered by the college's choice of speakers after learning that two Antioch students were recently shot to death in Costa Rica. “I find it incredible that Antioch would choose someone to address their graduation who is guilty of a similar crime. Like the killing of Danny Faulkner, the murder of the two students is a tragedy, but I wonder if the graduation speaker would agree if the motive behind the murder was revolution?”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Eulogy for The Dead DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:Early on in James Joyce's The Dead, the narrator says that humanity is like a frozen lake beneath which is “an unimaginable depth.” This musical adaptation of the Irish novelist's short story turned out to be an unimaginable depth beneath which was a frozen play.
The Dead died an untimely death at Belasco Theatre in New York, where its run is scheduled to end April 16. Yet there was much to commend in the production. It was one of the few works of this (or any) season that focuses primarily on humanity and seriously contemplates the inner desires of the human heart. The lofty goal of the work may not have been fully realized, but the effort was obvious, and it resulted in some inspired direction, fine performances — and a subtle commentary on the Catholic faith.
Set entirely in the parlor of the aging Morkan sisters in turn-of-the-century Dublin, The Dead invited us to look in on an annual Yuletide sing-along instigated by Aunt Julia (Sally Ann Howes), Aunt Kate (Marni Nixon) and their niece Mary Jane (Emily Skinner). The guests include a pair of drunks, some old maids, an opera singer and the lead characters: the Conroys, a disillusioned, drifting married couple.
The husband, Gabriel Conroy, was played by the production's marquee player, Christopher Walken (he won a best-supporting-actor Oscar for his role in 1978's The Deer Hunter); he also narrated the story. From his entry onward, Walken seemed to have stumbled in from a bar. Eyes watering, he wandered about the stage introducing the other characters in that halting, distracted manner that has become his trademark in the movies. There were moments during this lifeless litany of facts when even his attention seemed to wander. He gazed at the floor, then up to the balcony and, after a scratch and a sniffle, he continued his expositional recital as if trying hard to recall his lines. Was the mental lapse part of his characterization of Conroy or was it just that Walken hasn't rehearsed? It's impossible to tell, but either way the lack of focus was an off-putting way to start a play.
But Walken's co-stars more than made up for his confusion. In particular, on the night I saw the show, Blair Brown (of “Molly Dodd” TV fame) breathed loads of life into Greta Conroy, Walken's (much) better half in the piece. With grace, elegance and understated charm, Brown put some real meaning into a rather skimpy role. Clearly immersed in the part, she revealed her character's interior life even in the long lapses between her lines. A slight tilt of the head here, a slow shift of the eyes there, and Greta's loneliness and bittersweet regret filled the theater. When she finally gave herself over to song, it was, thanks to Blair's earnestness, an achingly beautiful moment. Her performance was a great example of an actress transcending a script. Unfortunately, she has since left the cast.
Picking up the slack, the ensemble behind the foundering couple did yeoman's work here. Nixon (the film singing voice of Natalie Wood in West Side Story and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady) was heartbreaking as Aunt Kate. Howes beautifully projected the disappointment of Aunt Julia, recently bounced from her church choir. Stephen Spinella, in the tipsy personage of Freddy Malins, provoked some much-needed laughs. And Alice Ripley truly shone as Molly Ivors, presenting an instantly believable flirt without benefit of much spoken dialogue.
Undercurrent of Faith
One of the striking things about this piece is its subtle commentary on the Catholic faith in the time and place of its setting — and maybe in our own time and place. With the exception of one character, all seem to be Catholic. Aunt Julia is a regular vocalist at Immaculate Conception Parish. Another character is planning a retreat at a monastery.
It is these fleeting references that unlock the mystery and depth of The Dead, as the Catholic faith is a backdrop to all that happens. It is everywhere and nowhere. As in many Catholic cultures, faith is an afterthought. Still, at this party, beneath the reverie, there is a sense that judgment is just around the corner and none will escape. In one of the rousing group numbers, the entire party sings, “Wake the dead / They've slept long enough and they'll soon be asleep again.”
These are people who are, each in their own way, already dead. Dead in faith, dead in works, they aimlessly repeat their set of ritualistic activities as they creep inexorably toward the grave. Well-fed yet starving for meaning, they're recognizable as some Catholics of our own time. Unfortunately, this theme is so well camouflaged that the average Catholic theatergoer will likely miss it.
Outside Looking In
If The Dead achieved anything significant, it may be the most unexpected way in which it connected a performance with its audience.
Defying convention, director Richard Nelson has created an impenetrable, imaginary “fourth wall” between players and patrons. Directing the actors to sing their songs to one another, Nelson frequently had them turn their backs to the audience. Even the scenes are played without regard for the crowd. Yet, where one might imagine this would alienate viewers, it actually added to the mystery of the piece and created an intimacy that forced the audience to look and listen more closely. At one point I found myself actually staring at an actor's scapular, hoping it would tell me something about the scene. (It did.)
And it wasn't just me. You'd be hard-pressed to find a more attentive audience. They sat rapt like hungry hounds beneath a dining-room table, waiting for any scrap of information that might fall their way. Part of this owed to the bare-bones script, which tells very little about the people we're looking at, but I think it owed even more to Nelson's decision to have the action itself play “hard to get” with the audience. Very clever, and quite effective.
On the down side, the show was about as uplifting as an orphanage on Mother's Day. Shaun Davey's maudlin music, written to some antique Irish poems, failed to take flight. Similarly, Richard Nelson's script never escaped the ghost of the Joyce story. Like all Joyce's work, “The Dead” is deeply interior, finding its movement in interior realizations rather than in any bold actions on the part of the characters. To substitute for the lack of dramatic action in the short story, Nelson allows the musical to wallow in an atmosphere of melancholy.
Though a sense of genuine sadness filled the theatre, the audience really couldn't quite connect with these people because they did so little. Like John Huston's 1987 film adaptation of the same story, the play is a grand attempt at a work that may defy dramatization. Still, its delicacy, sense of faith and excellent ensemble work made the death of James Joyce's The Dead sad news.
Raymond Arroyo, news director of EWTN, writes from Birmingham, Alabama.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond Arroyo ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Abortion: A Tool of Male Oppression? DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:On April 4, the Feminists for Life President celebrated her sixth year at the helm of the Washington, D.C.-based pro-life advocacy group. She argues that the early American Feminists were unanimous in their opposition to abortion, which they viewed as a tool of male oppression. True feminism, then and now, she says, would never force women to choose between a career and a child. She spoke with Register staff writer Brian McGuire about feminism and her work at Feminists for Life.
McGuire: How did Feminists for Life get off the ground?
Foster: Feminists for Life was started in the ‘70s by two women who were active with the feminist movement and were both very upset that abortion was becoming a part of it. It basically came out of the environmental rights, anti-nuclear, anti-war protests and civil disobedience that grew up beside the women's movement and was held together for the last 10 years before I came on board by a women named Rachel McNair. It wasn't as focused as it could have been. But they wrote some really good philosophical articles, especially by a woman named Frederica Mathewes Green. She doesn't identify herself as a feminist anymore, but during the time that she was at the Feminists for Life she wrote some great articles.
In 1994, Feminists for Life decided that they needed to become politically active — to do something rather than just exist. They were going to move to Washington and make a big difference. They brought me on in 1994 and said “We are going to quit and just join the National Organization of Women or we are going to do something different and become Feminists for Life.” We established a mission statement, identifying areas of interest and prioritizing goals.
What areas did you decide to focus on?
We have five areas of interests. One is a consistent life ethic. That is in and of itself enormous. The other area is women and children and family issues. Number three is violence against women, and the fourth is sexual exploitation of women and children. The fifth would be economic issues that effect women and children, like not having enough social security when your husband dies, that sort of thing.
Your literature suggests that a growing number of women who once favored abortion are beginning to give it a second look. What evidence do you have to support this claim?
There are a couple of things to indicate this. First, anecdotally, a lot of our members were coming from the pro-choice side. Feminists for Life was becoming the bridge path for former pro-choice women. A woman who has had an abortion is sometimes distanced from her church. For her to sit there and go right back into religion sometimes doesn't work. But she could sit there and think about whether or not abortion was right or wrong as a feminist. We had a call from one woman during the fight over partial-birth abortion.
We were out there with a pro-woman voice, saying this hurt women. One woman called and said “I am so glad I found you because all my life I have been a pro-choice feminist and when I heard about partial-birth abortion I just started wondering, at what second would this be a person worthy of life and rights like any other? Because I couldn't figure out any time when I could know for sure that this person didn't have rights, I decided I couldn't be pro-choice any more.” She didn't feel comfortable just joining any other group. She was so thrilled that there was a pro-woman group doing this.
There are also a number of women who come back to the pro-life movement through Feminists for Life who have had abortions; some publicly, some privately.
Thirdly, a study conducted last year by former Planned Parenthood President Faye Waddleton on the attitude of women indicated, to her dismay, that more and more women are rejecting abortion. The same thing is happening with college freshmen. More and more of them go into college pro-life. The problem is, they come out pro-choice. According to another poll, 47% of women are pro-life when they graduate from high school. But by the time a woman goes through two years of college the acceptance for abortion goes to 56%. By the time she graduates from a four-year institution it's 73%. Men — their attitudes don't really change with education.
Why do you think the numbers change so dramatically during the college years?
What happens is that women go into college and they find that they have no resources for themselves or their friends to have a child even though the whole campus is highly sexually charged. Between that and some very hostile women's study programs, you have a culture that is very much in support of abortion. So what we do is go in to schools and talk with students about feminist history — how, for 200 years it really has been pro-life history, starting with Mary Wollestonecraft and going through the early American feminists.
How did feminism go from being pro-child to pro-abortion?
The number one goal of feminism in the ‘70s was to have equal rights with men in the workplace. Initially, Larry Lader and Bernard Nathanson had been going around the country saying that they wanted to repeal outdated anti-abortion laws. I don't even know if they knew that the anti-abortion laws that were enacted in 48 states were the result of work by feminists. The male-dominated medical profession and the media got together in the 1800s to make these consumer protection laws for women, as well as for children, because women were being coerced into abortions. [Also], because they believed in the rights of all human beings, including the unborn, to-be-born. Women were very loud, especially in the 1800s about how abortion was wrong and that this was an evil crime. These two thought that anti-abortion laws should be revoked — Nathanson because he had seen botched abortions and Lader because [of a fear of overpopulation].
I remember my mom told me that there were these two kooks running around saying that women should be able to kill their unborn babies. Because they weren't getting anywhere and were seen as pariahs by the governors, they went back to the drawing board. They went to these women and told them, “If you want rights like a man, you have to pass like a man in the workplace.” They basically sacrificed their children to gain entrance the executive wash-room. When Betty Friedan started hearing that 100,000 women had died from illegal abortion she said, “Oh, then we'd better do it to have it safe.” That number was simply made up by Larry Lader and Bernard Nathanson after they met with resistance from Betty Friedan initially. I mean, we notice when 36 kids die of a car seat that was not installed properly. We would have noticed 100,000 dead people. But nobody questions this stuff.
What makes you a feminist?
I believe in the rights of women — that we can do anything. My philosophy is based on 200 years of feminism that supports the rights of all human beings. It's not the same as womanhood or a matriarchy. Feminism properly defined is about the rights of all human beings, and that genuine equality doesn't come at the expense of anybody else. It was originally about the expansion of rights of people and that included the rights of the unborn, to-be-born. The early feminists talked about abortion in the most scathing terms as a reflection of women's weakness.
Also, abortion violates the tenets of feminism, which are non-violence, nondiscrimination and justice for all. The National Organization for Women replaced a patriarchy, which the early feminists would have chosen to reject, with a matriarchy that said women were more important than men. It wasn't even that men and women were equal for the feminists of the early ‘70s. Women were more important, because if you have life-and-death decision-making over your child, and you don't have to include the father in that decision-making, then you have total control. This is the illusion. In reality we know that women have abortions out of desperation, not because women are in control, but because they are not in control.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Serrin Foster ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Ken Burns and Feminism's 'Fore-Mothers' DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:In a March 27 article called “The Censoring of Feminist History” Village Voice columnist and jazz historian Nat Hentoff criticized a series on the early feminists by documentarian Ken Burns entitled Not for Ourselves Alone for not telling the whole truth about the early American feminists.
“I asked Ken Burns if he had known of their [the early feminists'] pro-life views. ‘Yes,’ he said unhesitatingly. ‘But I thought it really important to show the connection between the women's and the abolitionist movements. How Frederick Douglass, for instance, so strongly stood up for a woman's right to vote.’
“‘But in your research,’ I told Burns, ‘you couldn't have missed how often and fiercely they fought against abortion.’ Burns did not deny that they did, but he insisted that what he calls 'the largest social transformation in American history’ should not, in his documentary, have been ‘burdened by present and past differing views on choice.’
“I respect Burns a great deal, but his use of the word ‘choice’ indicates to me where he's coming from on the subject of abortion. Both [Susan B.] Anthony and [Elizabeth Cady] Stanton believed unequivocally that in an abortion the unborn child does not have a choice of whether to continue living. Feminists for Life of America … has protested this exclusion of a belief that meant so much to Anthony and Stanton.”
—Cited by Jewish World Review, March 27
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Susan B. Anthony ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Women Deserve the Truth About Abortion DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:The following editorial, titled “‘Woman's Right to Know’ is an offer of community help” appeared in the March 23 issue of The Catholic Messenger, newspaper of the Diocese of Davenport, Iowa.
After a contentious struggle, the Iowa House finally passed a bill last week requiring that certain information be given to women seeking an abortion. The bill, called “Woman's Right to Know Act,” has already been reported out of committee in the Senate and awaits action.
It faces strong opposition. Why? Because proponents of legal abortion on demand continue to interpret any regulation or restriction of abortion as a wedge intended to bring down a “fundamental” right possessed by women.
The bill in the Iowa Legislature is being attacked as unnecessary and unfair. We are told that women who plan an abortion have thought long and hard about it. Many abortions are indeed undergone after serious consideration of all issues. Whether this includes most abortions is debatable. But even if that were the reality, this is not a mere matter of medical procedures. The issue is the termination of life that everyone must acknowledge is human at least potentially. The state ought to treat an approach to such a decision with extra seriousness.
The bill requires “voluntary and informed consent” for an abortion. To insure that a woman is informed, the Department of Public Health would provide material which shows fetal development at several stages, describes adoption and pregnancy assistance services and how to contact helping agencies, describes the medical risks of abortion and the liability of the father for child support. Then a 24-hour waiting period would be required before an abortion could be performed.
For someone who wants to approach an abortion with as little discomfort as possible, this is a great bother. It demands confrontation with realities one might wish to ignore. It can place a great weight on one's conscience. The fact that women alone must too often bear that weight is one tragic aspect of our struggle over abortion. Women do not become pregnant alone, but when they do find themselves pregnant and unprepared for motherhood, far too often the man takes no responsibility — or is the first to propose abortion. Since the law is unable to force equal responsibility here, it is unfair that women are left lone decision-makers in the life or death issue of abortion.
But that is no reason for the state not to help with good and balanced information for women. In fact, it is a reason why there should be emphasis on all the help available to a pregnant woman from both private and public sources. At a time when a woman may feel too much alone, the community has both physical and emotional resources ready for her. She deserves to know.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Fetal Tissue: No Panacea for Parkinson's DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:It has been 15 years since doctors first plucked brain tissue from an aborted human fetus and transplanted it into the brain of a Parkinson's disease patient with the hope of curing the disease.
Since then, more than 360 patients in at least 17 centers worldwide have undergone variations of the controversial experiment, but none has been cured. Media headlines occasionally tout “progress” and “promise” in the field, and fetal tissue experimenters continue to recruit Parkinson's sufferers for tax-funded surgical research. But the public rarely hears about the documented side effects of fetal tissue transplants, including at least one death.
Experiment Gone Awry
Astudy published in the May 1996 issue of Neurology describes the case of a 52-year-old American man who traveled to China for fetal transplants to treat his uncontrollable tremors and frequent freezing spells. Just six weeks after surgery, he and his wife were convinced he was getting better — his speech was less slurred, his expression more animated, his gait steadier. Twenty-three months later, however, he woke up feeling very tired one morning. He went back to sleep and his wife noticed his “funny halted breathing.” She sent for an ambulance. When it arrived, he was pronounced dead.
A brain autopsy revealed to the study's authors — Drs. Rebecca D. Folkerth of Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital and Raymon Durso of the Boston Veteran's Administration Medical Center — that the transplanted fetal tissue had indeed survived, but not as was hoped for. Instead of remaining neural tissue, it had grown wildly, differentiating into hair shafts, skin, cartilage and bone. Glistening nodules studded the man's ventricular system and, the doctors speculate, eventually compressed his brainstem.
“He died of multiple tumors that were surely a product of that [transplant] surgery,” remarks William Landau, head of neurology at Washington University in St. Louis.
The study's authors contacted him, he says, when the esteemed New England Journal of Medicine declined to print the material and he referred them to Neurology where its publication was expedited because of its importance.
Dr. Landau says he is not opposed to the use of fetal tissue but thinks that risky experiments have been carried out with inadequate pretrials in animals. “The problem with putting in cells that are still dividing is, do they have the mechanism to stop? If not, by definition, that's cancer.”
Few Benefits
Curt Freed of the University of Colorado Medical Center dismisses the case as a “therapeutic misadventure” by a rogue Californian doctor who would profit from the experiments. He surmises the Chinese tissue source was “contaminated” and not just brain tissue. In his own continuing studies, only one in 10 aborted 7- to 8-week-old fetuses provide useful tissue, he says. He adds that each patient requires the brain tissue of four aborted babies.
Dr. Freed and Stanley Fahn of Columbia Presbyterian have finished the only transplant study to use a control group — a set of patients who have a sham surgery — to compare to those who receive the tissue. (Thomas Freeman at the University of South Florida is currently doing a similar study.) They announced their findings a year ago but have yet to publish them.
University of Toronto neurologist Paul Ranalli calls the results of the National Institutes for Health-funded study “hugely unimpressive,” however. The control group claimed the same benefits as the transplant recipients, he says. Some transplant recipients under 60 years old reported limited benefits, he adds, but most Parkinson's sufferers are senior citizens.
What's more, Freed at Colorado says about 10% of transplant recipients, especially younger ones, suffer unexplained runaway involuntary muscle tics — worse than pre-surgery.
“Fetal tissue transplants don't work,” concludes Toronto's Ranalli. “It's a failed experiment. I can't say I would recommend it for anyone.”
Celeste McGovern writes from Victoria, British Columbia.
----- EXCERPT: ONE DEATH, NO CURES, MANY ATTEMPTS ----- EXTENDED BODY: Celeste McGovern ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Life Notes DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:Abortion Advocates Decry Catholic Hospitals’ Policy
KAISER FAMILY FOUNDATION, April 3 — The New York state affiliate of a pro-abortion organization launched a phone campaign targeting two Catholic hospitals in Manhattan that do not provide so-called emergency contraception to rape victims in their emergency departments, reported the pro-abortion Kaiser Family Foundation.
The National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League urged its activists to call the presidents of St. Clare's Hospital and Cabrini Medical Center to pressure them to provide high level doses of the birth control pill to victims of rape, Kaiser reported.
If the birth control pill fails to prevent ovulation, it can prevent an embryo from implanting in his mother's womb.
Susan Fani, director of legal research at the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, said that while rape is a tragedy, offering emergency contraception will only make matters worse for the patient. She said, “Rape is a disruption. Bad things happen but there is no point in doing another evil,” reported the Manhattan Resident in their 3/21 issue.
British Doctors Let Elderly Patients Die
REUTERS, April 2 — Doctors in some British hospitals have allowed elderly patients to die unnecessarily in order to make beds available for new patients, the news service reported.
“I have witnessed doctors who want to keep beds clear by withdrawing treatment or actively assisting in death to the point where it becomes involuntary euthanasia,” a junior doctor told the Sunday London Times, according to Reuters.
Some elderly patients were allowed to die merely on the basis of their age, while others were given high doses of diamorphine, a heroin-based drug, to accelerate their death, Rita Pal, 28, told the wire service. Pal said she was leaving the profession because of such practices, and said she intended to present the General Medical Council with a dossier listing several incidents of abuse and neglect of elderly patients.
Office Building Locks Out Abortion Practitioner
ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 28 — A New Jersey condominium association changed the locks on a set of suites bought by an abortionist because he owes $15,000 in membership fees, AP reported.
Steven Brigham bought six suites for $50,000 last fall in an Erie office building to open an abortion facility. Brigham is finishing a 120-day work alternative program in Albany, N.Y., for failing to file corporate tax returns, reported AP.
“Just because he wants to operate an abortion clinic, that doesn't mean he doesn't have to follow the rules,” said condominium association president Eugene Ware. Brigham said he and his partners have refused to pay because the fees are not itemized.
Nebraska Abortionist Before Supreme Court
ASSOCIATED PRESS, April 4 — The U.S. Supreme Court will hear abortionist Leroy Carhart's challenge to Nebraska's ban on partial-birth abortion on April 25, AP reported. The case will be the high court's first major decision on abortion in eight years.
Carhart maintains the ban is written in such a way that it could be used to ban all abortions, reported AP.
People on both sides of the issue agree that the decision in Carhart's case could have a major impact on abortion in the United States, the news service reported. Similar laws against partial-birth abortion are on the books in 30 states, but courts have blocked enforcement of most of them.
The high court took the case because of conflicting decisions by federal appeals courts. One court struck down the Nebraska law along with measures in Iowa and Arkansas, saying the law was vague and too broad.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: The Gospel Of Life DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:In his 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae (Gospel of Life), Pope John Paul decried the tendency of many to misuse language in order to describe as good what is really evil. Abortion is less disturbing if it is referred to as the “termination of pregnancy” or “dilation and extraction.” Partial birth abortion (see story page 2), for example, can be considered a euphemism for infanticide.
Today, in many people's consciences, the perception of its gravity has become progressively obscured. The acceptance of abortion in the popular mind, in behavior and even in law itself, is a telling sign of an extremely dangerous crisis of the moral sense, which is becoming more and more incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, even when the fundamental right to life is at stake. Given such a grave situation, we need now more than ever to have the courage to look the truth in the eye and to call things by their proper name, without yielding to convenient compromises or to the temptation of self-deception. In this regard the reproach of the Prophet is extremely straightforward: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness” (Is 5.20). Especially in the case of abortion there is a widespread use of ambiguous terminology, such as “interruption of pregnancy,” which tends to hide abortion's true nature and to attenuate its seriousness in public opinion. Perhaps this linguistic phenomenon is itself a symptom of an uneasiness of conscience. (No. 58)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Did You Know? DATE: 04/16/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 16-22, 2000 ----- BODY:Women who have an abortion are five times more likely to report subsequent substance abuse compared to women who carry to term , according to a new study, the 16th published study connecting a history of abortion to subsequent drug or alcohol abuse. Each year, in the United States alone, there are at least 150,000 new cases of abortion-related substance abuse. The actual number could be as high as 500,000 cases per year, researchers found.
----- EXCERPT: Facts of Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Suicide Law Linked to Deaths of 4 Unwilling Victims DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:SHERIDAN, Ore. — A nurse may have killed four people against their will under Oregon's assisted-suicide law, a state report suggested.
An Oregon nurse may have killed the first of four victims just weeks after the 1997 law went into effect, said the report by Oregon's Senior and Disabled Services Division.
“It's not a coincidence that this started right after assisted suicide was implemented,” Dr. Gregory Hamilton, of the Portland-based Physicians for Compassionate Care, told the Register.
“Once assisted suicide was accepted in the Netherlands there developed a rash of unwanted and unrequested overdosing of patients,” said Hamilton, who is a practicing psychiatrist. “It's happened in the Netherlands. Why should we be surprised [if] this is happening in Oregon?”
Assisted suicide is an issue in several states. An assisted-suicide referendum will be on Maine's November ballot. The Supreme Court in Alaska is currently considering making it a state constitutional right. The Alabama House has recently passed a protective law reaffirming the illegality of assisted suicide. Michigan voters and New Hampshire legislators rejected assisted suicide bills recently. An assisted suicide bill in California was tabled last year by its supporters after a public outcry.
In the Sheridan, Ore., case, four patients died and one survived after nurse Michael J. Coons allegedly gave them heavy doses of drugs, said the Oregon government report.
The deaths started on Nov. 29, 1997, and came from overdoses at the Sheridan Care Center, said the report. Coons' last day on the job was Feb. 7, 1998, just days after the fourth death.
Some of the patients tried to refuse the drugs, the report stated. Yamhill County District Attorney Brad Betty is conducting an investigation into the deaths. Coons, who has denied doing anything outside of doctor's orders, refuses to talk publicly about the report.
Clarence J. Summerfield's case was the first mentioned in the report. On Nov. 26, 1997, he was admitted to the Sheridan Care Center for lung cancer.
According to the report: “[Coons] was observed to keep [Summerfield] heavily sedated despite [the patient's] wishes to remain alert of his surroundings. Coons was observed to intentionally administer [morphine] … when [Summerfield] was not exhibiting any pain.”
Just three days later, on Nov. 29, Summerfield died.
Two months passed and then three more patients died under the nurse's care in January 1998, said the report.
According to the report, Coons administered multiple doses of morphine to John R. Avery on Jan. 18 of that year when the patient was “totally unresponsive and/or experiencing a narcotic-induced coma.” His daughter, Alecia Juber, found out about the overdose from a health-care worker and pressured the authorities to investigate the case, reported The Oregonian, a Portland daily.
Bonnie Langford received four doses of morphine in four hours before dying on Jan. 22, 1998. The report said that witnesses observed Coons carrying a packet of morphine earlier that day.
James M. Orzalli died nine days later after receiving morphine. Coons “knew, or should have known that [Orzalli's] primary diagnosis of hepatoma would prevent the morphine from being processed by [Orzalli's] body and could result in death,” the report said.
The report stated that Coons, who has since relinquished his nursing license, suffered from memory lapses and multiple personalities and gave excessive doses of morphine that were not documented.
Linda Johnston, owner of Sheridan Care Center, told The Oregonian that the State Board of Nursing did not disclose information to her about Coons' mental health. The state's Senior and Disabled Services Division handed the Sheridan Care Center a $6,000 fine — the maximum allowed by law.
Dana Tims, who reported on the story for The Oregonian, said that the criminal investigation is moving slowly because it is unlikely that the nurse will ever be indicted.
“It'll be hard to indict him. He'll probably just say [he] was following doctors' orders,” Tims told the Register.
“The lives of the seriously ill have been stigmatized by the label ‘terminally ill’ and because of that,” he said, “their lives are in danger.”
In his 1998 ad limina address to the bishops of California, Nevada and Hawaii, Pope John Paul II spoke about American efforts to legalize assisted suicide.
“The Church likewise offers a truly vital service to the nation when she awakens public awareness to the morally objectionable nature of campaigns for the legalization of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. Euthanasia and suicide are grave violations of God's law; their legalization introduces a direct threat to the persons least capable of defending themselves and it proves most harmful to the democratic institutions of society.
“The fact that Catholics have worked successfully with members of other Christian communities to resist efforts to legalize physician-assisted suicide is a very hopeful sign for the future of ecumenical public witness in your country and I urge you to build an even broader ecumenical and inter-religious movement in defense of the culture of life and the civilization of love.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: In Chiapas, A Chance For Change DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:MEXICO CITY — Mexico City's Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera, a strong defender of papal teaching, and former Chiapas Bishop Samuel Ruiz García, a proponent of liberation theology, are not expected to agree on much.
But they do see eye to eye on one thing — Bishop Ruiz's recently named successor as head of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de las Casas, the scene in recent years of much civil and religious strife.
The surprising unanimity among Mexican Catholic leaders is due to the new man in San Cristóbal: Bishop Felipe Arizmendi Esquivel of Tapachula, also located in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.
Bishop Arizmendi told the Register that he was told of his appointment directly by Pope John Paul II: “The Holy Father asked me if I would be willing to assume this challenge. After recovering from my surprise, I responded: ‘Holy Father, I am a man of faith, a man of the Church, and I would accept whatever the Lord wants me to do.”
The appointment of Bishop Arizmendi, who also served up until his new appointment as general secretary of the Latin American bishops' conference, puts an end to almost three months of constant speculation.
Interest was especially heightened after Bishop Ruiz's coadjutor and heir apparent, Bishop Raul Vera, was passed over for San Cristóbal, assigned instead to head the Diocese of Saltillo.
Reflecting the importance the Mexican hierarchy places on the integration of the San Cristóbal Diocese into the larger national Church, the bishops' conference issued an unprecedented statement April 2 on Bishop Arizmendi's appointment, applauding “the Holy Father for his love and care for the Mexican people” as demonstrated by his choice of successor for Bishop Ruiz.
The statement, signed by bishops Luis Morales Reyes and Abelardo Alvarado Alcántara, respectively the president and secretary general of the conference, also offered the frank caution that Bishop Arizmendi was accepting a pastoral mission “that presents particular challenges.” But it did not identify those challenges.
Right Man
Bishop Ruiz expressed his “deep joy” at the eventual selection of Bishop Arizmendi, and issued a statement calling “all priests, religious, catechists and pastoral agents to give their warmest welcome and unconditional support to my successor.”
Speaking at his cathedral following the announcement of the Vatican's appointment, Cardinal Rivera said Bishop Arizmendi was “the most appropriate decision” because “the new bishop of San Cristóbal is a man of dialogue and reconciliation who possesses the great skills to establish good relationships.”
At the March 30 press conference announcing his appointment, Bishop Arizmendi demonstrated those very skills. “It is very clear that I am not going [to San Cristóbal] to antagonize or confront,” he said. “I am going to complement what has already been done.”
At the same time he let it be known that changes in policy and pastoral practices are inevitable: “The Holy Spirit provides different riches to different people, and I am called by God to provide my own riches for the good of the Church, so certainly there must be things that have to be totally new.”
There is a strong consensus that Bishop Arizmendi has an ideal background for probably the toughest job in the Church in Mexico.
Born on May 1, 1940, at Chiltepec, a poor town in the state of
Toluca, Arizmendi studied at the Toluca seminary and at the University of Salamanca in Spain, where he specialized in liturgy and dogmatic theology.
Ordained a priest for his home diocese, he worked as a pastor in several parishes before becoming rector of the Toluca seminary. In 1985, he was elected president of the Latin American Association of Seminaries, and was named an adviser on vocations for the Latin American bishops' conference.
He was appointed bishop in 1991 of Tapachula, a poor diocese in the southern portion of Chiapas, alongside Bishop Ruiz's San Cristóbal. Both dioceses have large populations of indigenous Indians.
In 1995, Bishop Arizmendi was elected head of the bishops' Commission for Native Peoples, and a member of the Commission for Peace and Reconciliation in Chiapas.
Despite Bishop Ruiz's support for the new ordinary, they haven't always seen eye to eye on key issues, and Bishop Arizmendi has never hesitated to express his disagreement when he felt it was necessary.
In one instance, Bishop Arizmendi took sharp issue with Bishop Ruiz's 1998 initiative for the formation of a “Chiapas Tribunal,” an organization backed by the supporters of the Marxist Zapatista Army of National Liberation that would serve as a “grass-roots tribunal” to denounce government activities that it did not agree with.
‘[H]elping the poor, without confusing them with the Zapatistas, who only exploit the poor.’
— Bishop Luis Reynoso on the challenge awaiting new San Cristóbal Bishop
“Our mission as bishops is to be men of God and not political leaders,” said then Tapachula Bishop Arizmendi, who also asserted that the tribunal would be “very negative for the country and for the peace process in Chiapas.”
On the other hand, he never failed to defend Bishop Ruiz when he was attacked by federal and state officials or politicians, including when the government accused him last year of siding with the Zapatistas.
“Nobody can doubt Bishop Ruiz's good will and his strong desire for peace,” Bishop Arizmendi said at the time.
He consistently supported Bishop Ruiz's leadership in peace negotiations until they were derailed by both the government and the Zapatistas.
Bishop Arizmendi is known for his polite manner and his care to avoid unnecessary confrontations. That is, of course, until a serious matter is at stake. On life and family issues, for example, he once warned that Mexican Catholics would need to engage in “civil disobedience” in the event that abortion were made legal.
Outgoing Bishop Ruiz's call to his followers to welcome and support Bishop Arizmendi may be critically important to the new ordinary's success, especially as it gets him off to a good start in a diocese were most of the clergy objected to the reassignment of Coadjutor Bishop Vera to Saltillo.
Bishop Arizmendi is well aware of the challenges he faces as the new bishop of San Cristóbal. Despite the complex situation, he said, “We have a clear frame of reference: the doctrine of the Church, the teachings of the Vatican Council, the Pope's magisterium, the social doctrine of the Church.”
“My task,” he told the Register,“will be to apply this doctrine in close cooperation with my collaborators in the diocese.”
Of the difficulties, he said, “San Cristóbal de las Casas is a region marked by conflict and poverty, with 75% native population, much of which doesn't speak Spanish. It is a change in my life that implies new, very different challenges, but I trust God and the support of the Catholic community.”
The Establishment
After 40 years in office, Bishop Ruiz leaves behind a structure of priests, deacons, religious and catechists that is deeply committed to liberation theology and the so-called Indian Theology.
So far at least, Bishop Arizmendi has the tacit approval of the Chiapas establishment.
Father Felipe Toussaint, the vicar general of the diocese and a close associate of Bishop Ruiz who openly criticized the Vatican for reassigning Coadjutor Bishop Vera, told the Register that the selection of Bishop Arizmendi “could not be wiser. It is definitively a happy ending to weeks of uncertainties.”
Still, by all accounts, the new bishop faces an uphill road.
A month before the appointment of Bishop Arizmendi, Bishop Luis Reynoso, who oversees the legal affairs of the Mexican bishops, said in a press conference that “the next bishop of Chiapas will have to face the challenge of helping the poor, without confusing them with the Zapatistas, who only exploit the poor.”
Bishop Reynoso added: “The next bishop will have to be a man of God, yet conscious of human rights and willing to be impartial … to solve the internal problems of the Church.”
A source within the Mexican bishops' conference, who asked not to be named, told the Register that by “internal problems of the Church,” Bishop Reynoso was offering an observation similar to what the leaders of the bishops' conference indicated in their statement of April 2 in which they acknowledged that Bishop Arizmendi faced “particular challenges.”
“In other words, Bishop [Arizmendi] will face problems not only in the social field, but within the Church,” especially his own chancery, the source told the Register.
He said it is “no secret” that “deep ideological divisions” have discouraged the poor but traditionally devout Catholics of Chiapas. These rifts have “almost paralyzed true pastoral initiatives” that have helped enlivened other sectors of the Church in Mexico and which could be effective in stemming defections to evangelical groups, and in checking the temptation to violence and apathy, especially among the young.
No wonder that Bishop Arizmendi has renounced his post with the Latin American bishops' conference in order “to devote all my energies to my new diocese.” As he told the Register, “there is no way I could do a good job unless I fully commit to this task.”
Alejandro Bermudez is based in Lima, Peru.
----- EXCERPT: New Bishop Welcomed by All ----- EXTENDED BODY: Alejandro Bermudez ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Anti-Catholic Legacy Blocks School Choice DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:BOSTON — Nineteenth-century anti-Catholicism is helping keep poorer families out of private schools in Massachusetts.
As a May 10 deadline looms, Thomas F. Reilly, the state's attorney general, refuses to allow a “school choice” effort to go forward, citing a constitutional clause that opponents say has anti-Catholic roots.
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty on April 6 asked a federal court to order Reilly to certify a petition so that a vote can be taken by the state Legislature before the deadline.
Promoters of plans to gain government help for private school tuition say that prohibitions against funding Catholic schools are at the root of the problem.
The saga began two years ago, after Susan Wirzburger and other parents heard of the success of government voucher programs for private school tuition in Cleveland and Milwaukee. They gathered tens of thousands of signatures on a petition calling on the Massachusetts Legislature to act.
“We thought, why not look into this for Massachusetts?” said Wirzburger. “But you can't do it in Massachusetts because of the … state constitution.”
She said the state's constitution includes an “Anti-Aid Amendment” that prohibits the use of state money for “sectarian” schools.
The provision is a throwback to the 1850s, she said, when Protestants reacted to the waves of new German and Irish Catholic immigrants by passing a variety of anti-Catholic laws. One law prevented immigrants from voting until they had lived in the state for 20 years.
The state constitution was amended again in 1917 to allow only legislators to challenge the Anti-Aid Amendment in the future. Another change that same year expanded the Anti-Aid provision to include religious colleges and charity organizations, even religious hospitals.
Wirzburger and her friends enlisted the Washington, D.C.-based Becket Fund and filed suit in U.S. District Court in March 1998, claiming the Massachusetts Constitution violated their constitutional right to due process and their First Amendment right to petition government. Their case, Boyette vs. Galvin, is still in court.
With the case in court, the parents earned the right last fall to collect the signatures necessary to put a school-choice proposal on the state ballot.
On Dec. 15, Secretary of the Commonwealth William F. Galvin certified the validity of 78,342 signatures — well above the 57,100 needed. That's when Attorney General Thomas Reilly stepped in. He said the Anti-Aid Amendment disallowed the move.
If the Becket Fund succeeds in persuading the court to override Reilly's decision, the school-choice initiative will still have a long road ahead.
It will need one-fourth of the Legislature's support this year. Then, it will need a second such vote after an intervening election. After that, the question could be put on the ballot in November 2002. If the deadline is missed, the initiative will not be on the ballot until at least 2004.
Arguments about lingering anti-Catholicism don't convince everyone. Shiela Decter, coordinator for the Boston-based Citizens for Public Schools, said that the state constitution has been ratified and amended several times, most recently in 1970, to remove any remnants of anti-Catholicism.
“It's not like you can't have a second school system or that you can't have a Catholic school,” Decter told the Register. She said that some scholars believe the Legislature enacted the Anti-Aid Amendment as a means of protecting religion from state influence.
Decter also said the Anti-Aid Amendment could be circumvented another way. That would require a state representative to introduce the initiative and win a majority vote of the Legislature twice, once before and once after an election.
That route was taken in the 1980s, she said, when school choice lost twice, with 67% saying no the first time and 70% voting against it the second time.
Said Decter, “The public said in those two years: ‘No way!’”
Legacy of Bigotry
Kevin Hasson, president and general counsel of the Becket Fund, took issue with that account.
He said while many anti-Catholic laws have been removed, the state constitution retains some anti-Catholic remnants because parents who decide to send their children to Catholic school can receive no financial help whatsoever.
“The history is a Puritan hegemony trying to keep out Catholics,” Hasson told the Register.
The prohibition against changing the Anti-Aid Amendment through citizen action was not inserted accidentally, he contended.
“They were trying to prevent a populist grass-roots revolt from changing the constitution,” said Hasson, who is also a Register columnist.
He said that Protestants figured that by requiring a majority of the state's representatives to endorse the Anti-Aid Amendment, it would be safe from removal or alteration. “When was that ever going to happen for Catholics in 1917?” Hasson said.
Blaine's Bigotry
The ban on public moneys going to religious institutions has its roots in the sentiments of James Blaine who held a number of high-level positions in the U.S. government in the late 1800s and was known for his strong anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic agenda.
Backed by President Ulysses S. Grant, and supported by the Know-Nothing party (so called because members were sworn to secrecy about their activities), Blaine failed to push through a federal law barring public money from going to religious institutions — but succeeded in inspiring many states to write such provisions into their constitutions.
Even those who oppose state funds being used for religious education admit that some of the amendments of the Blaine era were motivated by animus against Catholics. Steven Green, general counsel for Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, told the Register last year that anti-Catholicism was an “unfortunate part” of such laws.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: New Orleans' Miracle Family DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:After praying to Father Francis Xavier Seelos, a 19th-century Redemptorist, Angela Boudreaux was miraculously cured of cancer. The miracle was approved in October, clearing the way for Father Seelos' beatification. She and her husband Melvin now work at the Seelos Center in New Orleans. They spoke to Rome correspondent Raymond de Souza shortly after the April 9 beatification.
De Souza: What was the highlight this morning?
Angela Boudreaux: I'm still on cloud nine — why not? To be up there with the Pope was wonderful. To go up there and have him speak your language and know your name.
Melvin Boudreaux: He held us with both hands — her hand and my hand. And he said, “It's nice to meet you.” Now she says that she heard our names, but at the moment, I have to tell you, the mind goes blank. But I remember him holding her hand and my hand, and then he gave us a blessing together.
What is it like to be a “walking miracle”?
Angela: I am glad I am here and that I can help spread the news about Father Seelos. It gives people hope. And without hope and love, you can't get along. You have to think that you are going to get the answer, not always the way you want it, but we hope for the best. We have to be accepting of whatever God sends; it's easy to say that, but it's tough to live it, and a lot of people can't.
Melvin: Angela had much more faith than I did — believe you me, she had great faith. I had faith, but she really passed it on to me — a thousand percent! I always said that after Angela's miracle, that while the Church had not yet made Father Seelos a [blessed], my family and I knew that he was a saint. And that's the way I always prayed to him, as St. Seelos. That's the way I did it.
When did you get the news that your cure had been approved and that Father Seelos would be beatified?
Angela: When I first got the news of the beatification — which was only announced in January — it was an exciting time, but everything was happening so fast. A few weeks after that announcement, I found out from the Redemptorists that it was last October that my case was accepted in Rome. That was the day that Melvin was operated on for his back — that's another story. He could hardly walk, but he said that he was not going to Rome in a wheelchair! [He now walks unaided.]
How did you first come to know about Father Seelos?
Angela: I first heard about Father Seelos when I was 12 years old; that was long before there were any booklets or prayer cards. We knew he was buried in St. Mary's Church in New Orleans because the word got around that many miracles had been happening through his intercession. So people prayed long before anything was distributed.
An old relative of mine — Aunt Emma we called her — had diabetes in the worst way. Every time she wound up in the hospital they wanted to cut off her toe, her foot, part of her leg. But she would say, “Oh no, Father Seelos is going to take care of me.” There wasn't any formal prayer at that time, but she would visit the tomb. She was a brave lady, with lots of prayer and a great spirit, and that stayed with me.
How did you feel this morning when you saw the image of Father Seelos unveiled on the facade of St. Peter's?
Melvin: It was a great moment. We knew that we were going to see him up there, and it was wonderful when that drape went up — he made it! That portrait was done by an Italian artist, but Angela and I decided to commission a lady back home to do a 7-foot-tall portrait of Father Seelos for St. Mary's in New Orleans.
For all the things that he has done for me, I thought it would be outstanding to have another portrait in the church.
You both attribute another miraculous healing in your family to Father Seelos.
Melvin: Our son Andre, who is also here, got shot in the face by a mugger in the French Quarter, and his teeth were blown out, his tongue ripped apart.
We were called to the hospital, and I was using all kinds of foul language that I shouldn't have been using on the way down there. Angela was with me. When we got there, the doctors told me, “We don't think your wife should come in right now, but you can come in.”
Andre's head was about three times the normal size, he couldn't speak, and there were all these suction tubes. And that time, the doctor wouldn't allow Angela to go in — it wasn't real nice to see, his head was all distorted and the shrapnel from the bullet was still lodged in his face.
But now he is in perfect health.
And he was discharged only four days afterward?
Angela: He was shot on Dec. 19, 1983, and he went to midnight Mass with us that Christmas. He was shot on Monday, and they didn't allow me to see him until Wednesday. He still looked terrible. He couldn't eat and couldn't swallow. The bullet hit the tongue and so they expected him not to speak at all. He was scared to death, and I was a wreck seeing what he looked like. I heard from the nurses that he had not been able to sleep since the shooting.
I told him that he was going to be all right — Father Seelos somehow had assured me of that. He wrote me a note, asking how I knew that he would be all right.
I said to him, “Don't say a word. I have been told that you are going to be all right. Just listen — let go and let God do his thing. You are going to be fine.”
I prayed with him, and then 15 or 20 minutes later he went into a deep sleep.
Thursday morning they took all the equipment away, and he could eat, speak and swallow. The next morning! And he came home the next day, Friday.
What are you going to do tonight, after this long day of ceremonies and celebrations?
Angela: I'm going to rest my feet …
Melvin: I most probably am going to have a couple of drinks!
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Melvin and Angela Boudreaux ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson ----------- TITLE: In Cincinnati, 9,000 Catholic Men Answer the Call DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:CINCINNATI — It was on a sunny April 1 morning that 9,000 Catholic men recently left home, women and children for this city's downtown sports arena.
Having decided to spend the day listening to talks, singing, making a good confession and sharing with other men the difficulties and triumphs of being Catholic in a troubled world, they kissed their wives goodbye, grabbed their bagged lunches and left.
April fools, right?
Wrong.
“I heard comments like, ‘I don't know why I hadn't come before. I was amazed with how much I missed,’” Chris Kneuven, a construction manager and father of three said.
Kneuven said he started coming to the conferences three years ago. The speakers “spoke to [me] directly” and to the “needs I have,” he told the Register.
Kneuven said he was moved this year by several first-timers who told him they wanted to keep the spirit of the conference alive after they left and were eager “to help their faith grow.”
This year's conference — the first that didn't highlight a major sports figure — included talks by Prison Ministries founder Charles Colson, a Protestant. Also on hand was the popular preacher and author, Franciscan Friar of the Renewal Father Benedict Groeschel; retired admiral and prisoner of war Jeremiah Denton; 26-year-old Australian author and speaker Mathew Kelly; and Columbine, Colo., youth minister Jim Beckman. Accompanying Beckman was a male survivor of last year's Columbine High shootings whose experiences led to a life-changing conversion.
In addition to the day's high-profile speakers, 160 local priests heard confessions and concelebrated a closing Mass. To event organizer Kevin Lynch, it's the sacraments that distinguish Answering God's Call conferences from similar ecumenical men's gatherings.
Lynch said he got the idea for the convention a few years ago, after he and some friends had attended a mainly protestant Promise Keepers rally.
“When we came back, we said there aren't many Catholic men at these events. We thought, we ought to be able to do this. [Promise Keepers events] are a wonderful work to build the Christian faith; we just felt barren at the end of the day because there were no sacraments.”
Lynch got his wish.
Not a ‘Catholic’ Promise Keepers
The Answer the Call effort is not a “Catholic” Promise Keepers.
The conferences may have been inspired by Promise Keeper conventions, but the soul of Answer the Call, Lynch said, is the network of men's prayer groups from the area that meet regularly for prayer, scripture reflections and mutual support. These groups, Lynch said, predate the founding of Promise Keepers by several years.
“The primary vision we have had … is men's faith groups,” Lynch said.
He started Cincinnati's first men's prayer group 15 years ago with three other men and Marianist Father Ken Sommer. The idea, he said, was to create a forum for men to “be together, pray and support each other.” Called the Catholic Men's Fellowship, the organization now boasts 110 small groups in the Cincinnati archdiocese alone.
“It just got clearer and clearer to us that we had something special going and that we were not supposed to keep it to ourselves — that we had to share this idea of praying together, like our Protestant brothers did.”
Lynch, a retired marketing executive for Procter and Gamble, acknowledged that for many cultural Catholics, the thought of sharing one's faith with other men is repellent. But those who have tried it are eager to dispel doubts.
Catholic Men's Fellowship is not without it's critics. Father Harry Meyer, pastor of St. Susanna Church in Mason, Ohio, said that “to my way of thinking” it has “too much of a conservative spirituality.” Father Meyer said he was happy to have men's prayer groups in his parish, but added that he did not think it was “the be all and end all of spiritual renewal.”
But participants like Kneuven said the group has been a real source of strength since his wife was diagnosed last year with cancer.
“The group has helped me to see my faith as a support,” Kneuven said.
Lynch explained what he views as the secret to the Fellowship's success:
“Ninety percent of our problems are in relationships — with God, with yourself through some sin you are battling, with your family or with your community.
“What a guy is going to hear [in these groups] is other guys discussing an area that they are dealing with and how they are solving it … When you hear that other guys are having similar challenges — guys you thought had their stuff together — you reach out. We have men who come and hardly ever open their mouths, but they keep coming. They are fulfilling a need.”
A National Movement
Similar men's prayer groups have formed in several other dioceses around the country, most notably, Rockford, Ill., Manchester, N.H., Oklahoma City, New Orleans, Chicago and in the Boston Archdiocese. Sixteen of these have scheduled or held annual conferences of their own.
The Fellowship's Web site says, “We believe that Catholic men are really hungry for close male companionship. We began to realize that the backslapping, everything-is-OK attitude begins to be a big lie. We realize we don't have the answers, but we want to pray together. This brings us closer to the Lord. The greater the relationship you have with the Lord, the more successful your life will be. The message isn't that we should run out and try to save the world, but to take this back to your own family. That's where the saving has to begin.”
Lynch said that another benefit of the conference was its ecumenical spirit. He quoted from a letter sent to him after the event by Colson: “What a wonderful privilege it was to address your conference … It was inspirational to look out over that stadium and see 8,000 Catholic men gathering in fellowship to worship together.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian Mcguire ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:Conservative Questions Death Penalty
This episode is not uncommon, said columnist George Will, who recounted Miller's story in a column. The conservative commentator noted that a new book, Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches from the Wrongly Convicted is replete with similar stories.
The authors — Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld and Jim Dwyer — fill their book “with such hair-curling true stories of blighted lives and justice traduced.”
Will said that the book provides a compelling lesson for conservatives: “Capital punishment, like the rest of the criminal justice system, is a government program, so skepticism is in order.”
The problems with capital punishment, said Will, are numerous: forensic fraud, mistaken identifications, incompetent defense representation, criminals who fake “admissions” to earn reduced sentences and the “normal human craving for retribution” by jurors and prosecutors.
The numbers are even more compelling, said Will.
“In the 24 years since the resumption of executions under Supreme Court guidelines, about 620 have occurred, but 87 condemned persons — one for every seven executed — had their convictions vacated by exonerating evidence.”
Kids in a Clinton Culture
She noted that a recent episode of the teen hit “Popular” on the WB network provided an example. When a popular cheerleader is sent to the principal's office for cheating on a test, she proceeds to defend her actions by claiming that lying pays.
The cheerleader “proceeds to lecture the principal in an unapologetic defense of our everybody-does-it culture. Nicole cites her lying parents, fibbing friends and tax evaders as evidence,” wrote Malkin. “President Clinton lied to our faces, [the cheerleader] points out smugly, and ‘his approval ratings went through the roof.’”
It's not just Hollywood, the columnist said. “In my suburban Maryland neighborhood three weeks ago, seven honor students were arrested after making false accusations of sexual abuse against a teacher who had disciplined them for bad behavior.”
Malkin quoted what one of the girls told the Washington Post: “We thought it would be fun. The whole idea of being the center of attention, going to the office, and everyone in school knowing. Everyone thought it would be cool.”
“Cool?” Malkin asked. “The teacher's reputation was destroyed, he was suspended from his job and lived under virtual house arrest for a month.”
The implications are clear, Malkin said: “President Clinton's message reverberates with the high achievers of the echo Boomer generation: Telling the truth is for nerds, suckers and losers. Life is a popularity contest, not a character test. Principles just get in the way.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: New Study Explores How to Keep Your Kids in the Faith DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — The saying goes that “actions speak louder than words,” but in the case of parents wanting their children to share their religious beliefs, words may be just as important as actions.
That was the finding of a Purdue University study, released April 1, that looked at parents' influence on the religious beliefs of their young adults children. The study was published in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.
The study asked 84 college students about their religious beliefs and what they perceived their parents' beliefs to be. The parents of the subjects answered questions about their own religious beliefs and their child-rearing goals and practices.
The study, led by child development professor Lynn Okagaki, showed that the accuracy of a student's perception was affected by how much his or her parents talked about their beliefs.
It also found that a warm, open parent-child relationship improves the chances that children will want to embrace their parents' beliefs as young adults.
Okagaki, a Protestant, said a majority of the study subjects were from Christian backgrounds, and that 83% came from intact families. She recently discussed her findings with the Register.
Rich Rinaldi: Tell us about the difference in parenting styles, authoritarian vs. authoritative.
Lynn Okagaki: Authoritative parenting is a parenting style in which parents set expectations and standards for their children, but they explain the reasons for these rules. They also develop a warm relationship with their child. With this type of parenting, children are more likely to want to follow or adopt their parents' values as opposed to authoritarian or … autocratic parenting. In that style the parents also have standards and set expectations, but they don't work on developing a warm relationship with their child. Without that warm relationship the child doesn't tend to develop the intrinsic motivation to want to be like their parent.
What is the proper “warm” relationship?
A warm relationship is one where the child knows that the parent is there for him or her, that the child can trust the parents. The parents basically love them unconditionally. The child and the parent both know that if the child makes a mistake, the child can turn to the parents. That's how you develop a strong, warm nurturing relationship with the child.
Why does “warmth” make such a difference?
Two things have to happen for a child to adopt [his] parents' beliefs. First the child has to develop an accurate understanding of what the parent believes. Then the child has to make a decision as to whether or not [he] wants to accept their beliefs. Wanting to accept the parents' belief or wanting to be like the parents, has to do with the quality of the relationship. If you have a warm relationship, your child is simply much more likely to want to be like you.
You use the term “scaffolding.” What does that mean?
For example, most parents will sit down with their children and assist them to read. When the child is stuck, the parent starts to fill in some of the letters or the sounds for the child. That's scaffolding — trying to make the task a little easier.
How can this be applied to religious beliefs?
You can help your child learn how you think about a belief or a value by talking through a situation. Most parents want their children to be kind to others. What kids have to learn is the kind of thing you would do in a [particular] situation.
‘I want my child to be honest because God is truth and we are supposed to reflect who Christ is.’
Please give us an example.
Let's say a new [student] comes to your child's class. The parent can ask the child what are some of the things [he] can do to make the new child more welcome. Maybe other kids aren't talking to the new kid. What might you do to make him feel more welcome? There may be times when the new child is alone, in need of a friend. So, by asking questions, it breaks it down to smaller tasks and allows the child to really generate some ideas, some solutions.
You also propose ‘“modeling” and “reasoning” as the other two ways to pass on parental beliefs. Modeling, for example, would be bringing the child to church?
Right. When you're modeling something, explain to the child what and why you're doing it. You want to explain as much as possible, make visible to the child your thinking, the cognitive part of believing.
I ask lots of parents what their goals are [for their children]. Honesty almost always comes up. Many parents will say “my children know that if they tell a lie the consequences are always worse. It makes life harder.” On the other hand, I can have a parent who will say “I want my child to be honest because God is truth and we are supposed to reflect who Christ is.” That's a very different reason for being honest.
So, if possible, the deeper reason should be emphasized.
They need to know the reasons why its important to the parents. Let's take a parent who thinks honesty is pragmatic, that it makes life easier. We have a lot of people in life who are not honest, in part because it works for them. If your child has this sense that to tell the truth is important simply because it works better, and then finds out that that's not the case, why should they be honest?
They will then simply adopt whatever works.
Right, but if your reason for being honest has to do with a reflection of who God is then it doesn't matter if telling the truth makes that immediate situation more difficult or easy. That child has been brought up to know that [his] life is a reflection of who Christ is, and that that is what is important. It doesn't matter if this truth made [his] life more difficult or not.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Rich Rinaldi ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: On Palm Sunday, Pope Urges Youths To Follow the Path of Jesus Christ DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — Pope John Paul II opened Holy Week with a colorful Mass on Palm Sunday, leading a procession through St. Peter's Square in front of some 100,000 Holy Year pilgrims.
Preceded by lay people, bishops and cardinals dressed in brilliant red vestments, the Pope rode on a white jeep through the packed square April 16 as faithful from all over the world waved palm fronds and olive branches, in remembrance of Jesus' triumphal entrance into Jerusalem a week before his death.
Among those at the head of the procession were groups of young people — including five from the United States — who squinted in the sunshine as the 79-year-old Vicar of Christ prayed at the start of the liturgy.
“You young people who have conquered evil … follow the Lord, do not be afraid to be saints, and with the olive and palm branches you hold in your hands, proclaim him the Lord and Liberator of all.”
During the two-hour liturgy, which included the reading of the Gospel account of Christ's Passion, the Pope said he was convinced that young people today are thirsting for truth and peace, and will find it in Christ.
“Follow him! He does not promise illusory happiness. On the contrary, he invites you to follow his demanding example, so you can reach authentic human and spiritual maturity,” he said.
At his blessing after the Mass, the Pope addressed English-speaking youths, saying Easter should be a time of “prayerful closeness to Christ, and of renewed commitment to the church's mission.”
“The new evangelization needs your energies and enthusiasm!” he said.
The Pope also invited young people to attend international World Youth Day celebrations in Rome in mid-August. More than a million youths are expected for the weeklong event.
The Palm Sunday Mass opened the most important week in the Christian calendar, and the Pope, who recently returned from a historic pilgrimage to the Holy Land, spoke about the significance of Christ's last days.
On one hand, the Church recalls the jubilance at Christ's entry into the holy city among a people awaiting the Messiah.
But it also opened the start of the drama of Christ's passion and death on the cross.
“Sorrow and exultation: This is the key to understanding the Easter mystery, and the key to understanding the admirable economy of God, which is carried out in the Easter events,” he said.
Pilgrims arriving for the Mass passed through metal detectors installed earlier in the month, into a square decorated with flowers and potted olive trees.
Jubilee officials said hundreds of thousands of pilgrims were expected to flood the Vatican area during Holy Week.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----------- TITLE: Jewish Views Of Catholicism After JPII Visit DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:JERUSALEM — Pope John Paul II's visit to Israel has had a positive effect on the way Israelis view the Catholic Church, according to a recent survey.
Though the change is only slight, researchers at Bar Ilan University outside Tel Aviv said Israelis view the March 21–26 visit more favorably than they did before the visit, and they view the attitude of the Catholic Church toward the Jewish people more favorably. As a result of the visit some 58% of the more than 500 people polled viewed the visit as positive, compared to 53% prior to the visit.
The political recognition of the State of Israel afforded by the trip was the most significant aspect of the visit, said 44%, compared to an earlier 41%. Another 28% said the religious recognition of the Jewish people was the most important aspect of the papal visit.
(From combined wire services)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----------- TITLE: Cardinal CastrillÛn to Head Latin Mass Panel DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — Pope John Paul II named the Colombian prefect of the Vatican's clergy congregation to also head a commission that cares for Catholics who prefer the celebration of the old Latin Mass.
Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos' appointment as president of the Ecclesia Dei Commission was announced at the Vatican April 13.
Cardinal Castrillón, 70, succeeds 80-year-old Italian Cardinal Angelo Felici, whose resignation was announced the same day.
Established in 1988, the commission helps facilitate the celebration of the traditional Mass for those who prefer it, and to reconcile followers of the late schismatic Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who refused to accept certain teachings of the Second Vatican Council, especially in liturgical matters.
It was estimated at the time of the commission's foundation that at least 1 million Catholics worldwide had joined Archbishop Lefebvre's movement and that another million were sympathetic to some aspects of it, especially the desire to retain the use of the Latin Mass, known as the Tridentine Rite.
The French archbishop, who died in 1991, was excommunicated in 1988 for ordaining as bishops four members of his Society of St. Pius X without the approval of the Holy See.
A group of Society priests immediately broke with Archbishop Lefebvre over the ordinations and were restored to full communion with the Church as the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, the first of a number of new religious communities of men and women that are dedicated to the Latin Mass, and which have experienced rapid growth.
The Society of St. John was formed in 1998 from a second group of former Society of St. Pius X priests.
In 1984, the Vatican gave permission — at the discretion of the local bishop — for the use of the pre-Vatican II Mass as revised in 1962.
Following the illicit ordination of bishops by Archbishop Lefebvre, Pope John Paul II established the Ecclesia Dei Commission and expanded the conditions for the celebration of the old Mass, urging bishops to grant “wide and generous” permission for its use. Of the 184 dioceses in the United States, 111 have authorized the regular celebration of the old Mass. (From combined wire services)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----------- TITLE: Vatican Speaks Against Child Soldiers DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — While applauding an international effort to raise the minimum draft age to 18, a Vatican diplomat pressed for a broader law prohibiting children under 18 from even voluntarily enlisting in the armed services.
“In many cases, it is difficult to recognize a truly voluntary and free decision,” said Archbishop Giuseppe Bertello, the Vatican's permanent observer to the United Nations in Geneva.
The papal diplomat spoke April 12 in Geneva during a meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, which discussed new rules to prevent child soldiers and the sexual exploitation of children.
The text of his speech was released at the Vatican April 14.
“While it is true that sometimes children are ready to enroll [in the military] of their own accord,” Archbishop Bertello said, “other times they are pressured by the culture of violence which surrounds them or by the desire to avenge their family.”
The participation of children in armed conflicts was “often conditioned by the economic, social and cultural situation of their families and communities, which deteriorate in the course of a conflict,” he said.
Any solution must take into consideration not only the needs of children, but also of the family and community in which they live, he said.
Addressing child prostitution and pornography, Archbishop Bertello said governments have a particularly acute responsibility “to insert young people in the social and economic network to reduce the marginalization of a growing number” of children.
“The sexual exploitation of children is a dramatic social plague,” he said, caused in part by sexual discrimination, violence, unemployment, corruption, and lack of health care services.
The Vatican representative suggested that the international delegates question themselves on the possibility that this phenomenon — which takes place in societies in which there is growing indifference toward adult pornography and prostitution — is also due to the erosion of family and community values.
Archbishop Bertello concluded with a question that has been proposed by Pope John Paul II on a number of occasions: “Is it possible to call a society human that does not insure the dignity and rights of future generations?” (From combined wire services)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:Cardinal Sodano to Attend Brazil's 5th Centenary
According to the paper, Cardinal Sodano and other bishops both Brazilian and foreign will celebrate Brazil 2000: 500 Years of Faith.
Representatives from a number of different ethnic groups will perform for the guests, according to Bishop Jayme Chemello, president of the Brazilian Bishops. Bishop Chemello also confirmed that the Brazilian Church has invited Pope John Paul II to visit Brazil in the year 2001, the paper reported.
Should the Holy Father accept the invitation, it is hoped he will preside at the closing of the Jubilee Year in Brazil and the final celebrations for the 500 years of Catholicism in the country that boasts the world's largest Catholic population. To date, the Vatican has not commented on the invitation. John Paul II has visited Brazil on three previous occasions: in 1980, 1991 and 1997.
Hindu Paper Comments on Beatification
“Mother Mariam Thresia, whose real name was Chiramel Mankidiyan, came from a devout Catholic family from Kerala. Born on 26 April, 1876, she founded the order in 1914 and died in 1926 at the age of 50.
“Sister Mary Pasteur, Superior-General of the Order told The Hindu: ‘Chiramel Mankidiyan was a remarkable person. She came from a family that had lost all its wealth paying the dowry of seven aunts and she grew up in poverty. Her work lay with families affected by drink, immorality and violence. She worked at a time when women were not encouraged to go outside the home, so in many ways she was a social reformer as well.’”
“Chiramel founded the order with three of her friends who took care of the poor and needy. ‘There was a great deal of objection to their work in the beginning. But she persisted and the accent of her work was on families, mainly poor, suffering families,’ Sister Mary said.
“Her congregation, which runs hospitals and schools in India, Ghana and Germany, has 1,584 nuns today. Mariam Thresia has been described as a precursor to Calcutta's Mother Theresa. She is said to have suffered the stigmata, or had wounds like those received by Christ on the Cross and has been described as a great mystic.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----------- TITLE: River Of Divine Light DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:The essential role of the Trinity in bringing salvation to all was revealed when Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River, Pope John Paul II said April 12 at his weekly general audience for 30,000 visitors in St. Peter's Square.
The voice of God the Father proclaiming his love for Jesus and the descent of the Holy Spirit set the seal of authenticity on the mission of Jesus, the Holy Father explained.
Through baptism, Christians enter this mystery of salvation.
Today we stop spiritually on the banks of the river that runs between the two biblical testaments to complete the great epiphany of the Trinity on the day in which Jesus presents himself at the forefront of history, in those very waters, to begin his public ministry.
Christian art personified this river under the semblance of an old man who witnesses with astonishment the vision that is fulfilled in his aquatic bosom. In it, as the Byzantine liturgy states, “Christ the Sun bathes.”
On the morning of the day of the Theophany or Epiphany of Christ, this same liturgy imagines a dialogue with the river: “Jordan, what have you seen to be so intensely shaken? — I have seen the Invisible naked and I was shaking with tremor. Indeed, how can one not be agitated and submit before him? The angels tremble when they see him, the sky runs wild, the earth shakes, the sea moves back with all the visible and invisible beings. Christ appeared in the Jordan to sanctify all waters!”
The presence of the Trinity in that event is clearly affirmed in all the evangelical narratives of the episode. The broader description by Matthew introduces a dialogue between Jesus and the Baptist. The figure of Christ emerges at the center of the scene, the Messiah who completely fulfills all justice (see Matthew. 3:15). He is the one who fulfills the divine plan of salvation, placing himself humbly in solidarity with sinners.
His voluntary acceptance of humiliation obtains a marvelous elevation for him: on him resounds the voice of the Father who proclaims him “My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Ibid., verse 17). It is a phrase that combines in itself two aspects of Jesus' messianism: the davidic, through the evocation of royal poetry (see Psalm 2:7) and the prophetic, through the quotation of the first song of the Servant of the Lord (see Isaiah 42:1). Therefore, one has the revelation of the intimate bond of love of Jesus with the heavenly Father together with his messianic investiture before the whole of humanity.
The Holy Spirit also erupts on the scene under the form of a dove that “descends and rests” on Christ. We can have recourse to various biblical references to illustrate this picture: from the dove that indicates the end of the flood and the beginning of a new era (see Genesis 8:8–12, 1 Peter 3:20–21), to the dove of the Song of Songs, symbol of the beloved (see Song of Songs 2:14, 5:2, 6:9), to the dove that is almost a coat of arms to guide Israel in some Old Testament passages (see Hosea 7:11; Psalm 68:14).
In keeping with Genesis (see 1:2), an ancient Jewish commentary is significant, which speaks of the tender maternal hovering of the Spirit over the primordial waters: “The Spirit of God fluttered over the surface of the waters like a dove that flutters over its offspring without touching them” (Talmud, Hagigah 15a). The Holy Spirit descends on Jesus as a super-abundant force of love. In referring to the Baptism of Jesus itself, the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches: “The Spirit whom Jesus possessed in fullness from his conception comes to ‘rest on him.’ Jesus will be the source of the Spirit for all mankind” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 536).
Therefore, the whole Trinity is present at the Jordan to reveal its mystery, authenticate and sustain the mission of Christ, and point out that with him the history of salvation enters its central and definitive phase. It also involves time and space, human ups and downs, and the cosmic order, but primarily the three Divine Persons. The Father entrusts the Son with the mission to bring “justice” to fulfillment in the Spirit, namely divine salvation.
The whole Trinity is present at the Jordan to … sustain the mission of Christ.
In the fourth century, St. Chromatius, bishop of Aquilea, states in one of his homilies on the baptism and on the Holy Spirit: “As our first creation was the work of the Trinity, so our second creation is the work of the Trinity. The Father does nothing without the Son and without the Holy Spirit, because the work of the Father is also of the Son and the work of the Son is also of the Holy Spirit. There is but one grace of the Trinity. Therefore, we are saved by the Trinity because in the beginning we were created by the Trinity alone” (Sermon 18A).
After the baptism of Christ, the Jordan also became the river of Christian baptism: the water of the baptismal font is, according to a cherished tradition of the Eastern Church, a miniature Jordan. This is proven by the following liturgical prayer: “We pray to you now, O Lord, so that the purifying action of the Trinity may descend on the baptismal waters and give them the grace of the blessing of the Jordan in the strength, action and presence of the Holy Spirit” (Great Vespers of the Holy Theophany of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Blessing of the Waters).
St. Paulinus of Nola seems to be inspired by a similar idea in some verses conceived as an instructive inscription for the baptistry: “This font, generator of souls in need of salvation, emits a living river of divine light. The Holy Spirit descends from heaven into this river and unites the sacred waters with the heavenly source; the wave becomes impregnated with God and from the eternal seed generates a holy progeny with its fertile waters” (Letter 32:5). Coming forth from the regenerating water of the baptismal font, the Christian begins his itinerary of life and testimony. (ZENIT Translation)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:Double Standard Charged in South African Experiment
The research project has triggered a furor among doctors in South Africa who claim it uses different standards than those that would be applied in the developed world. The trial resulted in 90 potentially preventable new cases of HIV among the participants, the Mail and Guardian said.
The study was published in a recent edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.
According to the news story, researchers tracked 415 heterosexual couples where one partner was infected with HIV and the other not. Although the HIV-positive individuals were advised to tell their partners, the researchers did not ensure this was done. Free condoms were supplied but were not often used.
An editorial in the Journal said: “It is important to be clear about what this study meant for the participants. It meant that for up to 30 months several hundred people with HIV infection were observed but not treated.
“In addition, many people who were found to have other sexually transmitted diseases were left to seek their own treatment. Such a study could not have been performed in the United States where it would be expected that patients with HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases would be treated.
In addition, in most states it would be expected that caregivers would see that partners not infected by HIV were informed of their special risk.
“The ethical standards, then, were indeed different from those that would govern research in developed countries.”
Greek Orthodox Synod Condemns Homosexuality
ANSA, April 10 — The Holy Synod of the Greek Orthodox Church severely condemned homosexuality and couples of the same sex living together, Italy's largest news agency reported.
The Greek bishops said homosexuality is not part of nature as it was created by God, adding that the Greek Orthodox Church considers homosexuals sinners, who can be forgiven if they repent, “just like all repentant sinners receive forgiveness,” the news service reported.
The Holy Synod also condemned the non-binding proposal of the European Parliament to guarantee homosexual couples the same rights as heterosexuals. Archbishop Christodoulos of Athens and all Greece made similar statements in a recent homily.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Anti-Suicide Bill Stalled in U.S. Senate DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:One U.S. senator's attempt to block a bill that would criminalize assisted suicide may be broken by an April 27 vote.
The Pain Relief Promotion Act, which passed the U.S. House last year, would make assisted-suicide illegal by criminalizing the use of federally controlled drugs to end a patient's life.
On April 6, Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, used a rare parliamentary procedure to prevent the Senate Judiciary Committee from working on the bill. Oregon is the only U.S. state in which assisted suicide is legal.
Wyden's spokeswoman, Lisa Sinkle, defended the senator's action. “Sen. Wyden voted against the Death with Dignity Act twice as a private citizen,” Sinkle told the Register. But “he doesn't think that bureaucrats 3,000 miles away should be making decisions regarding health care.”
Dr. Gregory Hamilton of the Portland-based Physicians for Compassionate Care said such rhetoric ignores the current plight of Oregonians.
“They're dying out here,” he said. “What we need to do is get this bill to the president's desk.”
According to Burke Balch of the National Right to Life Committee, he may soon have his wish.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch of Utah hopes to break the hold on the bill with a committee vote.
— Joshua Mercer
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Easter and Modern Skepticism DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:On the second Sunday of Easter in April 1979, the new Pope called “doubting Thomas” a kind of representative of modern man. John Paul II's Regina Caeli remarks follow:
“Faithless” Thomas became, in a certain way, an extraordinary spokesman of the certainty of the Resurrection. As St. Gregory the Great affirms, “the faithlessness of Thomas was far more useful to us, as regards faith, than the faith of the other disciples. While, in fact, Thomas is brought back to faith through touch, our mind is consolidated in faith with the overcoming of all doubt. Thus the disciple, who doubted and touched, became a witness to the reality of the Resurrection.”
We live in an age in which the human intellect and its achievements are greatly appreciated, and therefore also scientific-consultative methods, its critical attitude. And it is also an age in which the principle of freedom defines the fundamental right of the human person to behave according to his well-founded convictions. Hence freedom of conscience and religious freedom.
The figure of Thomas has become, in a way, particularly close to contemporary man.
The Declaration of the Second Vatican Council on religious liberty stresses with all firmness that neither faith nor non-faith can be forced on man; that this must be a responsible and voluntary act.
“One of the key truths in Catholic teaching, a truth that is contained in the word of God and constantly preached by the Fathers is that man's response to God by faith ought to be free, and that therefore nobody is to be forced to embrace the faith against his will.
“The act of faith is of its very nature a free act. Man, redeemed by Christ the Savior and called through Jesus Christ to be an adopted son of God, cannot give his adherence to God when he reveals himself unless, drawn by the Father, he submits to God with a faith that is reasonable and free.
“It is therefore fully in accordance with the nature of faith that in religious matters every form of coercion by men should be excluded. Consequently, the principle of religious liberty contributes in no small way to the development of a situation in which men can without hindrance be invited to the Christian faith, embrace it of their own free will and give it practical expression in every sphere of their lives” (Dignitatis Humanae, No. 10).
All that, however, does not cancel Christ's program in any way. It is not equivalent to indifference. It does not mean indifferentism. All that proves only that religion draws its importance, its own greatness, both from the objective reality to which it refers, that is, from God revealing truth and love, and also from the subject; from man, who confesses it in a way worthy of himself: in a rational, responsible and free way.
Today is the day on which the Church lays special emphasis on this maturity of faith.
Christ says to Thomas “noli esse in credulus sed fidelis.” — Do not be faithless, but believing.
Faith is — and never ceases to be — Christ's program with regard to man.
“Blessed are those who have not seen (like Thomas). . . and believe (John 20:29). Faith is the purpose of the Resurrection. It is its fruit.”
----- EXCERPT: Editorial ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----------- TITLE: Jewish Roots of an Easter Faith DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:by the Navarre University Theology Faculty Scepter Publishers, 2000 820 pages, $39.95
John Paul II's remarkable Jubilee pilgrimage to the sites of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus once more displayed the prophetic style of his teaching. Like the camera crews trailing the “popemobile,” we continually find ourselves running to catch up with this great, constantly moving, figure. Among the many things the Holy Father's journey accomplished, one of the most important was reminding Catholics of the proper place of Judaism in our catechesis: It is one of the essential mysteries of our faith and a great source of spiritual inspiration.
In a 1980 address to the Jewish community of Mainz, Germany, the Pope compared the contemporary dialogue between the Church and the Jewish people with the relationship between the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. He called it a “dialogue … between the first and second parts of her Bible.” The Pope has also reminded us that our relationship with Judaism — and the Hebrew Scriptures — is not merely a historical footnote, but rather an enduring aspect of our faith.
We may, therefore, turn to the Hebrew Bible in hopes of understanding better, for example, how its teachings in many ways resemble and complement those of the Sermon on the Mount. The Navarre Bible Pentateuch proves an important aid to this effort.
Like the other volumes in the standard edition of the Navarre Bible, this volume contains the full biblical text of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) in the Revised Standard Version and the New Vulgate, together with extensive commentaries.
In the commentaries, we quickly discover not only a respect for the independent integrity of these books as the Jewish Scriptures (i.e., the Torah), but also a large sampling of the richness of our Catholic tradition's reflection on and use of those Scriptures. The latter dimension is the principal and outstanding virtue of the Navarre commentaries in general: Nowhere else will you find Scripture comments from so wide a range of great figures, from early rabbis and Church fathers, through the great scholastic teachers, down to Cardinal Newman, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and Blessed Josemaría Escrivá (founder of the personal prelature Opus Dei, whose university in Spain produces these volumes).
Another value in this series is its usefulness as an aid to ongoing conversion. “The secrets of Holy Scripture are not unlocked only with the aid of linguistics, archaeology, sociology or psychology or any other human science,” as the preface explains, “but rather by a desire to achieve personal holiness.” Reading again the great stories of the Jewish patriarchs contributes exactly that good effect, as each of them (the Navarre commentators note) demonstrate a particular virtue, from Abraham's obedience to Joseph's chastity.
The secrets of Holy Scripture are unlocked by a desire to achieve personal holiness.
Another good reason for repeated readings of Scripture is to seek understanding of the history of our salvation. The very reason we needed a Messiah was our human failure to keep the series of covenants mediated with God by Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and David. Thus the history of these covenants is also the history of the gradual revelation of our salvation, of which the Hebrew Bible might be called Chapter 1.
Compared with other world religions, Judaism is anchored in history rather than in fanciful mythologies. “Faith in God, according to the Bible,” comments one of the Navarre editors, “is not something theoretical or based on philosophical reasoning: It is something practical and based on experience; one believes in God because he has experienced his powerful protection; one knows that he alone saves in a loving way.”
Despite movements among some early Christians to either allegorize away the Hebrew Scriptures or to abandon them as useless for salvation, the early Church decided that the literal, historical sense of Scripture was valid, thus protecting our link with the traditions of Judaism.
Anyone who has had even a brief brush with the study of medieval literature may recall the older teaching of the fourfold meaning of Scripture — not only its literal meaning but also the moral, allegorical and anagogical ones as well. The Navarre editors recall this traditional mode of interpretation when, for instance, they quote the Catechism (No. 1094) to show that the manna eaten by the Israelites in the desert “prefigured the Eucharist, ‘the true bread from heaven.’”
Similarly, the Exodus event itself has always been taken as a symbol (or better, a figure) of liberation, both within the Church and without. The essence of this type of interpretation is contained in St. Augustine's dictum Novum in Vetere latet, et in Novo Vetus patet (the new is hidden in the old, and the old is made manifest in the new). While figural interpretation can be a little dizzying to anyone accustomed to a strictly historical approach, its spiritual riches are very great. Fortunately, the Navarre editors include a good amount of such interpretation.
Reading this volume, one is struck by how important a source of truth the Hebrew Bible continues to be for the Church today. For example, John Paul's groundbreaking formulation of the theology of the body draws substantially from the first three chapters of Genesis, as the Navarre editors well note. The love of neighbor enjoined in the second Decalogue (Deuteronomy 5:16–21) is a key text underpinning John Paul's exposition of the dignity of the human person in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor(The Splendor of Truth). And so on.
No other commentary on the Bible in English brings such breadth and wisdom to bear on Scripture — and in a highly readable style — as the Navarre series. As they say on Saturday morning television: Collect them all.
Elias Crim writes from Chicago.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Elias Crim ----- KEYWORDS: Education ----------- TITLE: Letters DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:Pharmacists and Conscience
Regarding “Pharmacists Must Dispense With Their Conscience?” (Register, April 16–22):
Canadian pharmacists who conscientiously object to filling death-dealing prescriptions have the great majority of their fellow citizens on their side.
A special committee of the Canadian Senate recently held numerous hearings on whether Canada's present law prohibiting euthanasia should be changed. The hearings were open, and so the testimony was not limited to that of pre-selected specialists. On the basis of these hearings the committee concluded that there is a majority opinion against changing the law. Furthermore, almost all of the Senate committee members themselves condemned voluntary euthanasia.
You neglected to include information for Canadian pharmacists alarmed at the possibility of a conflict between their conscience and the company policy of their employers. They can contact:
Pharmacists for Life International
P.O. Box 1281
Powell, OH 43065-1281
(614) 881-5520
www.kuhar.com
Michael J. Miller Glenside, Pennsylvania
The article on the front page of the Register of April 2–8, entitled “‘Lighten Up Catholics,’ Says Man with a Mission,” was very interesting. However, the gentleman who says this seems to be living in a world far removed from reality. He never mentions the terrible evils that are eating the soul out of America and, for that matter, of the rest of the so-called advanced nations, such as abortion, euthanasia, sodomy, artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, etc.
I remember that the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, when confronted with the advice that some psychiatrists were dispensing to their clients, to “stop worrying and rid yourself of guilt,” would counter with: “If you're living in serious sin, start worrying! Let yourself feel guilty!”
A number of surveys have indicated that only about a third of Catholics still believe in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist; that attendance at Sunday Mass is at an all-time low; and that as many Catholics as non-Catholics procure abortions. A speaker who merely mentions pious platitudes and ignores or sweeps under the rug all serious evils, could be setting his congregation up for laughing all the way to hell.
Harry F. Rohmer Washington, D.C.
Reined-in Liturgy
I read with great joy the article about the Vatican taking a hand in the translation of Lectionary into English (“Translation Body Has a Future … of Some Kind,” Feb. 13–19). Many of those on this ICEL [International Commission on English in the Liturgy] project weren't theologians, nor did they have any special training in the ancient languages. I had a feeling of trepidation many times as I heard the holy words changed into modern jargon, giving a different spin than the one I'd always heard. At one time, one could go to any church and it would be the same Mass [you would hear everywhere else]. Besides the doctored lectionaries, there are innovative priests who wing it. We can't follow along, and are confused about what we hear. I hope the Vatican not only takes a strong hand with directing ICEL, but emphasizes the priests' responsibility in saying the Mass correctly. I also hope they can do damage control on the illicit books and Bibles that ICEL released without Vatican approval.
LaVonne Birge Omaha, Nebraska
What's It All About, Alfie?
I was disgusted to read Michael Caine's remark that the abortionist he portrayed in “Cider House Rules” was “the most compassionate creature” he had ever played. And I recalled how Michael Caine always seemed to play unpleasant people in his movies — all the way back to “Alfie.”
Does anyone remember what happened near the end of that movie? Alfie procures an abortion for one of his lovers, and this abortion is a turning point for him, when he sees the aborted baby that would have been his son.
It's only then that you start to feel anything like compassion for or from Alfie. (By the way, you may have noticed that they never show this movie on television anymore.)
In “Alfie” it's very clear that the abortion is a matter of expedience, not compassion. Back in 1966, when this movie was made, I would imagine that Michael Caine would have thought it unfathomable to call an abortionist “compassionate.” But I recall, too, reading an interview in which Mr. Caine told about his humble Cockney roots and how he would take a part — any part — just for the work. So it seems his convictions are simply in accord with whatever side his bread is buttered.
Celine McCoy
San Diego
God the Trinity
David Beresford's “correction” of Stephen Jay Gould's understanding of the Trinity is itself in need of correction. The three persons of the Godhead most emphatically do not “share the same divine nature.” Only baptized Christians who are in a state of sanctifying grace share in, or participate in, the divine nature.
Each divine person of the Trinity possesses the divine nature entirely unto himself, “each of the divine persons is that supreme reality … the divine substance, essence or nature” (Catechism, No. 253).
Beresford's misstatement of Trinitarian dogma is extremely common today; it can be found even in many of the newer catechisms “spun-off” from the Catechism. Sadly, many a censor librorum has missed this small but important doctrinal error and inadvertently issued a nihil obstat. Correct understanding of the relationship between the divine persons and the divine nature is essential to correctly understanding both the effect of the sacraments on human persons and one of the four central purposes of the Incarnation: our divinization (see Catechism No. 460, 1988, 1999, etc.). If we don't get the Trinity right, we won't get anything else right either. So, to sum up, human persons share in the divine nature, each divine Person owns the divine nature.
Steve Kellmeyer Norfolk, Nebraska
Sudan Corrections
The April 15–22 article “Anti-Slavery Boycott Hits Amoco” should have read “BP Amoco … agreed to buy a 2% stake in PetroChina.”
Photo credits were left off of recent Sudan photos. The Feb. 27-March 4 Inperson photo of Bishop Macram Max Gassis was by Odette Lupis. The photos accompanying Gabriel Meyer's two stories (“Sudan: After the Bombs,” March 26-April 1, and “The Sudan Tragedy: A Slaughter of Innocents,” April 2–8) were by James Nicholls.
The Register Welcomes Letters
Mention which item you're responding to by headline and issue date. Please include your name, hometown and phone number.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----------- TITLE: Earth Savers Don't Toss In The Towel DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:April 22 is “Earth Day,” a day we'll all be implored with special urgency to help “save our earth.” My internal warning system goes on red alert whenever somebody tells me to help them “save” the earth. “From what? For what?” I wonder. Theologically, I thought earth was already saved — on Easter Day, not Earth Day. I suspect undisclosed theological overtones whenever I encounter such enigmatic exhortations.
Actually, today you can find out a lot about someone if he is worried about saving the earth. You become doubly suspicious when a prominent hotel chain is asking its customers to help it “save our earth.” Recently, I was at a conference on the West Coast held at a local Radisson Hotel (nice place, actually). A card on the stand next to the bed caught my eye. “Save Our Earth,” it encouraged me. For many moderns, the “earth” is all there is. The closest they come to anything transcendent is to imagine the earth as it now is, or presumably as it was before human beings appeared to pollute it, floating on down the ages with no one doing anything to use or disturb its drift through the eternal pathways.
The plastic card, I was informed, is to be put on the pillow if you are interested in helping to “save our earth.” If you are a clod, however, you will leave it on the desk. The card reads: “In an effort to conserve water and energy, and to minimize the release of detergents into the environment, we invite you to participate in our conservation program.” Then it adds, in italics, presumably for emphasis, “You can make a difference!” You perk up reading this imposing claim that you can fulfill in a Radisson hotel room, no less. Who doesn't want to make a difference that can help the whole earth?
The card goes on: “Please Understand … As a new guest, your bed linens are freshly laundered. … As part of our commitment to the environment we offer you the option of reusing your bed linens.” So the burden of saving our earth is not really on Radisson's shoulders — it is on yours. True to the “choice” language of our time, the card goes on: “You Decide … If you place this card on a pillow, we will remake your bed but not change your bed linens. Otherwise, we will gladly change your bed linens daily.”
The card ends with these noble words: “Thank You for helping us conserve our natural resources.” A similar card appears in the bathroom about the towels.
If one examines this same card from the point of view of the free market, it sounds something like this: A small portion of the bill for a room in any hotel is set aside for laundry. Let's say, for the sake of argument, $5. According to the Radisson offer, I can request clean towels and linens, in which case the hotel will “happily” provide them. The hotel does the laundry and pollutes the earth according to my choice. Or I can reuse old towels and linens. In this latter case, the hotel presumably saves the money that I would otherwise have had to pay for this service, which is not free.
Theologically, I thought the earth was saved on Easter Day, not Earth Day.
If this analysis is valid, then what Radisson should have done is to place a sign on my pillow to say that, if I did not want my linens and towels washed, the hotel would offer a $5 rebate on my bill. Or, conversely, when I checked in to the hotel, the clerk could propose that the room costs $100 with fresh linens but $95 without. I would have had an economic choice that meant something, not a cosmological choice that had no real tangibility. While I am not exactly clear on how not doing the laundry “saves our earth,” I am quite certain that Radisson pockets the savings if I sleep in slightly used sheets.
The logic of the “save the earth” thesis would be, I suppose, that the fewer showers I take or the fewer times I change bed linens, the better off the earth will be. I need not carry on this logic to its extreme wherein we have no bed linens or towels, but a very healthy environment indeed.
If, in fact, doing the laundry contributes to polluting the earth, the best way to solve the problem would be to invent a soap or detergent or some fabric that did not have contaminative effects. If there is no demand for such a product, probably no one will invent it. If Radisson tells the soap inventors, for example, “don't bother, men, we do not need so much soap because our guests are saving the earth,” then the problem, if there is a problem, will continue in presumably attenuated form.
In short, I doubt if the way to “save the earth” is to cut down on fresh laundry. If that is in fact a problem, I suggest that the best way to solve it is to inaugurate a price incentive into the cost of a hotel room. I also suggest that the good folks at Radisson read, for their amusement, Julian Simon's last book, Ultimate Resource II. The ultimate resource is the human brain. The earth will be saved by using it, not by drying ourselves with three-day-old towels.
Father James Schall is a professor of government at Georgetown University.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Father James Schall ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: The Word in Pictures DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:Anyone searching the Scriptures for a description of the moment of Christ's resurrection soon finds himself confronted by the fact that the Bible is silent on that point. How can that be? The Resurrection is, after all, the central event of our faith.
The Bible speaks of the fact of the Resurrection, but not its how. It describes Jesus' death (Matthew 27:45–50; Mark 15:23–41; Luke 23:44–46; John 19:28–37). It speaks about how the women prepared perfumes and oils to anoint his body after the Sabbath. It recalls that Pilate had dispatched guards to the tomb, who secured it and placed a seal on the stone enclosing it (Matthew 27:62–66).
Then what happened? The Bible speaks only of the empty tomb the women found on the first day of the week (Matthew 28:1–8; Mark 16:1–8; Luke 24:1–12; John 20:1–10).
From whence, then, come the pictures which we frequently see, depicting Jesus arising from his tomb, ascending over his suddenly empty grave? The profound faith that Christians have in the resurrection of Jesus Christ gave birth to its representation in Christian art. The depiction of that moment, however, derives not from any literal biblical description but from the artists' imaginations. Those paintings are efforts to translate the history of Christ into a simple human visual language. Human beings, who encounter the world through their senses, need not only to hear the word, they need to see it.
All Glory
Many artists have tried to depict the Resurrection. One of the best is a piece of Northern Renaissance art, Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altar. That altar, dating from 1512–15, can today be found in the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar, France (in the northern region of Alsace).
The face of the resurrected Christ gazes upon us from one of the altar's wings. His face is extraordinary. An inner radiance and peace illuminate it, exuding harmony and gentleness. It is a face whose lines melt away into a circle of golden light. It is the light of him who is “the light of the world,” whose “light enlightens every man” (see John 1:1–8). It is the illumined Body of Christ, freed of all earthly burdens, rising in dignified triumph over the empty tomb. His hands, feet and side bear the marks of his wounds, but it is precisely from those members that brightness radiates. His face and entire body say: “Look. It is fulfilled. I am the life which conquers death. I am the vanquisher of human suffering, injury, scoffing, denial and deception. I am the victor over human sin. I am the joy of God's fulfillment of his promises.”
The figure of Christ is partially covered by shining red and white garments. They seem heavy, reaching down to the grave itself. But they are no longer Christ's shroud. The translucent figure within a golden rainbow — the symbols of divine mercy and witness to divine glory — appears in contrast to the very dark background. We see an empty grave and a stone rolled back. The soldiers are blinded by the radiance of the resurrected. They look to be paralyzed with fear. Their figures, cast around the scene, dressed in heavy armor with large swords in their hands, are ironic. They mirror humanity's smallness, its limited capacity to grasp the divine plan, the impotence of human powers. Everything takes place amid a rock-strewn landscape, against dark skies covered with stars.
There are no other witnesses to this scene except us, the viewers. We become unique for Christ. It is as if he is saying to us: “Do not be afraid. I am the light and joy of the Resurrection. In me, you can conquer your sufferings.”
‘Why do we suffer? How long must we be subjugated by physical or spiritual suffering?’
St. Anthony's Fire
Grünewald's altarpiece was intended for the chapel of St. Anthony's Hospital in Isenheim, Alsace. Those who were sick with the “St. Anthony's fire” skin disease were cared for there. Skin ulcers that turned red and often became gangrenous characterized the disease. When those ulcers broke, they caused spasms throughout the entire body and convulsions. Oftentimes, the diseased members had to be amputated. Still, death often ensued.
Jesus, too, has such a broken, greenish-gray body, full of ulcers and punctured with thorns. A depiction of the crucifixion appears on another panel of the Isenheim Altar. There he hangs, powerless, in convulsive spasms, covered only by torn garments. The head crowned with thorns hangs heavy, his half-opened blue lips whispering: “I thirst.” The distorted fingers on his pierced hands appear themselves to cry out in agony. This is the body of a humiliated man, stretched out on a cross amid nocturnal darkness. Christ's sufferings are so immense that even those on the left side of the cross — Mary, Mary Magdalene and John — are incapable of mitigating them. This unrelieved, humanly shocking pain is in no way downplayed. On the right of the cross, St. John the Baptist is shown as the fulfillment of the prophets. Between him and the cross is a lamb (symbol of the Lamb of God) and blood flowing into a chalice.
For those suffering in St. Anthony's Hospital, such an image of Jesus' sufferings was most understandable. Suffering with him was comprehensible. But the idea of resurrection had also to be made understandable. Grünewald's Resurrection gave the sick faith and hope to conquer their own horrible sufferings. It should also comfort those of us who, having just meditated on Christ's passion during the Easter Triduum, find ourselves in situations where there is suffering and incurable disease. We, too, face questions about the sense of suffering. We grapple with the human fear of death. We ask ourselves: “Why do we suffer? How long must we be subjugated by physical or spiritual suffering?”
The answer stares back from the altar.
Dorota Kostrubiec Grondelski, an art historian, writes from London.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dorota Grondelski ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: He Is Risen! DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:On the first day of the week, Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning, while it was still dark, and saw the stone removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and told them, “They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we don't know where they have put him.” So Peter and the other disciple went out and came to the tomb. They both ran, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter and arrived at the tomb first; he bent down and saw the burial cloths there, but did not go in.
When Simon Peter arrived after him, he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths there, and the cloth that had covered his head, not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place. Then the other disciple also went in, the one who had arrived at the tomb first, and he saw and believed (John 20:1–8).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Can the Rich West Help the Third World? DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:Catholic social teaching endorses the core institutions of free societies in broad outlines. The Church endorses the right to private property, to voluntary association, to entrepreneurship, and even to profit. This is not a blanket endorsement of each and every market-based economy, since these basic building blocks can be abused or misused. At the same time, each society must work out the details that are suitable to its own situation.
For example, most modern industrial societies have minimum-wage legislation. The universally cited purpose of this legislation is to guarantee basic living standards for working people. However, different countries set that minimum standard at different levels. Virtually no one in the Third World has the capital equipment that so enhances the productivity of American workers. If the minimum wage in Bombay, India, were set at the same level as the minimum in New York City, few people in Bombay would be legally allowed to work.
Some economists object to the concept of the minimum wage because it can contribute to unemployment. But even accepting the idea of a legally set minimum wage does not by itself tell us how high or low to set the wage. Each local area will have different needs. The Church's teaching that enjoins employers to pay a living wage does not attempt to specify the wage level for any particular time, place and circumstance.
The Church had the opportunity to use her nuanced social teaching herself in her comments about the meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle. You may recall that this meeting burst onto the media radar screen when protesters disrupted downtown traffic and destroyed property. The demonstrators came from all over the map, making mutually contradictory demands about job security, labor standards, the environment and poverty. President Clinton added to the confusion by saying that he sympathized with the protesters, even though he has endorsed any number of fast-track trade agreements that are beneficial for certain U.S. businesses and of dubious value for the rest of the country.
Above the cacophony, the Holy See's statement offered a clear and balanced analysis (it's available on the Internet at www.zenit.org/english/archive/documnets/holysee-wto). In a statement written by non-economists, the Holy See showed more economic and political sophistication than many of the so-called experts. At the same time, the Vatican communicated its concern for the poor and marginalized in realistic and unsentimental terms.
The document begins by praising the earlier international trade agreements that allowed developing countries to adopt “policies of market liberalization,” even while acknowledging that “poverty and marginalization have not been defeated.” The Holy See fully realizes that trade alone is no panacea to the problems of extreme poverty. Nonetheless, the document points out that the less developed countries actually have a smaller share of international trade than in 1990. Therefore, “further efforts are needed to ensure that all partners have the opportunity to benefit from open markets, and the free flow of goods, services and capital.”
Echoing the concerns Pope John Paul II expressed in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus(On the 100th Anniversary of Rerum Novarum), the Holy See's intervention to the WTO continues: “The poor ask for the right to share in enjoying material goods and to make good use of their capacity to work, thus creating a world that is more just and prosperous for all.”
In other words, the first priority for alleviating poverty is to bring poorer countries into the circle of productive market exchange.
The Holy See suggests several ways to increase the participation of poorer countries in the world trading system. Poor countries often lack the skilled personnel necessary to comprehend and comply with the complex world trade regulations already in place. Often the countries do not have the legal expertise to use the mechanisms for resolving the many disputes which inevitably arise under a complex set of trading rules. The rich countries need to give technical assistance to lower these implicit barriers.
But the demonstrators in Seattle were not especially focused on economic development for poor countries. Many of the demonstrators were profoundly afraid their interests would be harmed by increasing economic activity in poor countries. Labor unions fear competition from workers in poor, low-wage countries. Environmentalists fear that hard-won environmental regulations in rich countries would be undermined by increased participation of the poor in the world economy.
The Holy See mentioned these concerns toward the end of its statement. “There are some sensitive questions concerning developed countries, as well as middle-income and poor countries, such as human rights, labor questions, environmental degradation, biotechnology and health, which, notwithstanding their links with trade, will have their full solution beyond the confines of the WTO. All of these need to be handled in a spirit of prudence and cooperation, while seeking a broad and long term consensus on the basics of human sustainable development.”
But the Vatican cut to heart of the matter in a terse statement: “Rich countries need to avoid any kind of protectionism in the guise of (these) principles.”
The rich countries have the power to cut the poor countries out of the circle of production and exchange by imposing First World labor and environmental regulations on Third World countries.
Taking that course would consign the poor countries to permanent underclass status. “Prudence and cooperation” in such a context would mean handouts from rich countries to governments of poor countries, a policy that has already failed.
We in the wealthy West take our advantages for granted. When people are living at the barest level of survival, environmental quality and working standards are not, and should not be, the highest priority.
When living standards rise, people have the wealth and the breathing space to begin to demand environmental protection, each country in its own time, and in its own way. The Vatican's statement reflects its desire that the poor countries receive the opportunity to develop economically. Only then will poor countries have the luxury of making these decisions for themselves.
Love and Economics,
by Jennifer Roback Morse, a fellow at the Hoover Institute, will be published soon by Spence.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jennifer Roback Morse ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Water, Water Everywhere DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:When friends return from their first visit to Rome I always ask them the highlight of their trip. For Catholics, and many others, St. Peter's ranks first, as its spell can be irresistible. But the second favorite is apt to be Piazza Navona, that glorious oval-shaped piazza where fountains and statues, churches and palaces, artists and tourists and pigeons chased by little children seem to bring joy from dawn to moonlight. It is a piazza for all seasons.
In spring, the sun-loving Romans linger here in this pedestrian-only zone where the only decisions one need make are whether to sit on a bench and watch the clouds or stand near a fountain and enjoy an ice cream. Summer adds an ocean of tourists, but somehow the splashing fountains maintain the languid charm of the place no matter how crowded it gets. The cool loveliness of the Church of St. Agnese in Agone is ever more welcome in the heat of midday. Fall, of course, brings bluer skies and a quicker pace and school-children showing off their new zaini, or backpacks. At Epiphany, the piazza is strewn with lights and a large crèche (presepio, in Italian) is erected. Merchants set up stalls with toys, candy and ornaments.
At any time of year, the dutiful pilgrim might pause from more serious pursuits and meander about the piazza, exulting in one of the finest creations of Baroque Rome, when the talents of Bernini and Borromini were ever-present to assure a masterpiece on command.
But the popes who lived here did not live in peace, for the most part. In fact, the papal history of Piazza Navona has all the drama of Gone With the Wind, and much of its vanity, glory and tragedy. Few of the tourists who blissfully stroll past the fountains and palaces that grace the piazza are aware of its strange and haunting past.
Famous Fountains
Piazza Navona's history began with the Roman emperors Julius and Augustus Caesar, who used the site for athletic competition. Then, in A.D. 86, emperor Domitian had a stadium built here for gymnastic events, horse races and other contests, with benches for 30,000 spectators. Then known as the Circus Agonalis (from the Greek agon, or contest), its name was blended to n'Agona, then Navona.
In the eighth century, the inns and towers of medieval Rome were erected, but it was not until Sixtus IV (1471–1512) that the piazza began to be a favorite meeting place. He began this project unconsciously by transferring a market from the nearby Capitoline Hill to this area. This led to paving and clearing the ancient tiers of seats. Building projects were the hallmark of his papa-cy.
But it was the Pope of the Pamphili family, Innocent X (1644–55), who was responsible for the Piazza Navona we see today. Giovanni Battista (John the Baptist, a common name) Pamphili was elected at 72 to the papacy as Innocent X. Just how his sister-in-law, Olimpia Maidalchini, became the ruling influence in his life and even at the Vatican, is not clear. By some accounts he was a gentle man whose fatal mistake was nepotism, a not-uncommon problem in those days. He had the large palace, the Palazzo Pamphili, built on Piazza Navona for his family and gradually ceded more and more power to his relatives and to Olimpia, his brother's widow.
His sickness and death are almost unbelievable today, when we watch the Pope's health so carefully.
This story is so bizarre that I've checked many sources; all seem to point to this account: It seems that when the 82-year-old Innocent fell ill and death was imminent, Donna Olimpia fled the papal residence to avoid blame for seizing and abusing power. In the ensuing chaos he was left alone for days, dying and ill, with only one coat and a blanket. When she was sure he was dying, she took the last coins he had saved for emergencies. When officials came to the Palazzo Pamphili on Piazza Navona to see her about the funeral, she claimed that she was just a poor widow and could pay for nothing. A valet finally came up with the money, but in the meantime the Pope's body was left in a storage room.
When you visit the Galleria Doria-Pamphili, not far away, you'll see a portrait of Pope Innocent by Bernini, who knew him very well. His gentleness is apparent here. A bust of Olimpia nearby suggests a woman with none of that quality. But the portrait by Diego Velasquez of Innocent X, the pride of the gallery (and considered one of the finest portraits in the world), shows a man who'd brook no nonsense. However, Velasquez, the most celebrated painter of the Spanish school, was in Rome only a few days with the Pope.
Before these ghastly things happened, Innocent X wanted the palace on Piazza Navona (now the Brazilian Embassy) built for his family, with a fountain in front. Water was piped in and Bernini was engaged. The most famous of the three fountains he planned, set in front of the Church of St. Agnese in Agone, was built between 1649 and 1651. At the Pope's request, an obelisk from the original stadium of Domitian (some say a copy) was incorporated into its design.
The theme of the main fountain (restored for the Jubilee) is the Four Rivers, each of which represents a continent. The Nile, with a lion, has a veiled face, indicating that its source was unknown; the Danube has a horse that Bernini himself made (the rest he planned); the Ganges has a large figure; the Platte is a giant with coins on its back, symbolizing the untapped riches of the then unexplored Americas.
The figure of the Platte has an arm thrown up, as if sheltering himself. Tour guides say he's afraid the church (designed by Borromini, Bernini's rival) is going to fall on him. Actually, St. Agnese in Agone was built after the fountain was erected (1653–57), but one of the Pamphili clan fired Borromini for what he claimed was shoddy workmanship, which might have been the source of the story.
Bernini's Antics
A happier day for Innocent X was the fountain's unveiling. The Pope arrived with his cortege and, at a sign from Bernini, its veiling fell. After the “oohs” and “ahs” had subsided, the Pope noticed that no water was flowing. He chatted with Bernini, but did not wish to embarrass the artist publicly for this failure. At last, Innocent went to the fountain and turned his back to it, to address the crowd. As he began to speak, Bernini gave the sign and the fountain spurted with water. “Cavalier Bernini,” the Pope said, “with this gesture you have added 10 years to my life.” Actually, the Pope lived only four more years.
The other two fountains of the piazza are simpler, one called the Moro (whose face is rumored to be that of a cardinal who was not a friend of Bernini) and the other shows Neptune with an octopus. Both were built in 1576.
Because this glorious piazza was built almost as a single entity, it is more harmonious than most of Rome's piazzas, and has the rare advantage of lack of traffic. Come in the morning when the street sweepers swoosh by and at night to enjoy a tartufo (a ball of ice cream mixed with chopped cherries and nuts, then chocolate-dipped and frozen) at Tre Scalini, a famous cafe on the piazza.
I have a special feeling about the church of St. Agnese in Agone. Last winter I walked in one gray day when I was feeling a bit lost. It was drizzling and the piazza was partly boarded up for the Jubilee reconstruction.
The church was more beautiful than I remembered and I noticed the tomb of Innocent X, glad that he has a final home here, even though his monument is not in a prominent position, but over and inside the main door. Beneath the church, some excavations date back to the stadium era: An arch is preserved from those days, entered from a staircase.
I had walked, alone, through the low-ceilinged, ancient passages for a while when I suddenly looked up just above my head, for no reason, and saw wide eyes looking lovingly back at me. A frescoed angel was beaming encouragement down upon me. I had to check more than twice to believe it was really there.
Fortunately I had a little flash camera in my pocket, and I was relieved when it turned out. Frescos on the side walls depict scenes from Agnes' life. I like to think it was Agnes, a Christian martyr during the reign of Constantine, who told me to look up.
Barbara Coeyman Hults, a former resident of Rome, is based in New York.
----- EXCERPT: Popes built the crowd-pleasing Piazza Navona ----- EXTENDED BODY: Barbara Coeyman Hults ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Vatican Rock Concert to Target Debt Relief DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — Pope John Paul II will share a stage with Lou Reed, the Eurythmics and Andrea Bocelli at an outdoor Great Jubilee Concert for a Debt-Free World.
The Jubilee Day of Workers on May 1 will include a Mass. The event will draw at least 200,000 people devoted to the causes of unemployment and Third World debt, the Vatican said April 14. The concert will benefit the world's poorest countries.
The Jubilee day will kick off with Lou Reed, former lead singer of Velvet Underground, performing with Noa, Khaled, the Eurythmics and other stars at a televised rock concert dedicated to the debt relief campaign.
The announcement that Reed would be included caused a brief media stir. The Brooklyn, N.Y.-born singer gained his widest fame in the ‘60s and ‘70s with songs like “Take a Walk on the Wild Side” and the Velvet Underground's “Heroin” — songs considered by many radio stations too risky to air.
Howard Rubenstein, the U.S. spokesman for the Vatican Organizing Committee, told the New York Post that the Church is looking past Reed's days of debauchery.
“In the Church, there is a spirit of forgiveness,” Rubenstein said. “He's repented and he's living a very decent life now.”
Patrick Scully, a spokesman for the Catholic League, told the paper, “I'm sure the Pope doesn't even know Lou Reed from the Eurythmics from any other of the performers.”
The debt relief issue has brought the Pope into rock-star circles before. In September he met with U2 lead singer Bono and other entertainers promoting the Jubilee 2000 “Cancel the Debt” campaign.
Organizers of the Rome University event said they would rather focus on the cause, not the concert.
Popular Solidarity
Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, president of the Vatican's Central Committee for the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000, said the Pope wants May 1 to be “an event of popular solidarity.”
The cardinal noted that May 1 observances originated with “the blood spilled in the worker's struggle at the end of the 19th century — born with the era of industrialization and development.”
“At the dawn of the third millennium, in a completely different cultural context, the first of May is more topical than ever, and the Pope wanted to give it a particular importance, making it one of the great events of the Jubilee year,” Cardinal Etchegaray added. “Today, more than the condition of the working man, it is the condition of the man without work that is worrying because he becomes a man amputated from his own personality.”
Deploring the large number of jobless people “wounded by the modern economy,” he continued. “The employment crisis has become a structural fact.”
Monsignor Giampaolo Crepaldi, undersecretary of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, said May Day celebrations also will focus on the campaign to cancel or drastically reduce the debt owed by developing countries.
“The debt problem is one facet of the problems linked to development,” the monsignor said. “But you can't have development without resolving the debt problem. Debt is emblematic of lack of development and extreme poverty.”
The Mass
On May 1, the Pope will celebrate an outdoor Mass at Tor Vergata on the outskirts of Rome and deliver what the Vatican said will be “a strong message on the world of work and the dignity of man.”
Tenor Andrea Bocelli will sing a selection of sacred music, accompanied by the Orchestra and Chorus of Rome's Academy of Santa Cecilia, directed by Myung-Whun Chung, and will join pop singers Noa of Israel and Khaled of Algeria in “Life is Beautiful,” the Jubilee theme song.
Vatican officials said their estimate of a crowd of 200,000 at the Mass and concert was a conservative one. The Tor Vergata space can hold 300,000 people, but some 600,000 attended Rome's union-sponsored May Day concert last year. (RNS contributed to this report.)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Register Staff ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Oklahoma City and Columbine Look to Easter DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:The April 19 statement “Choosing Life: A Joint Pastoral Statement on Violence” by Oklahoma City Archbishop Eusebius J. Beltran and Denver Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, OFM Cap.
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts; neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord” (Is 55:8).
These words from the Old Testament lie at the root of this week, which, for Christians, is the holiest time of the year. Over these next few days, in private prayer and public liturgy, we remember the story of our salvation. We remember the violence we did to the Son of God, and the love God returned to us in bearing it. We remember that we are each of us murderers — and yet each of us is forgiven and redeemed. We who fashioned the cross are saved by it. We who shaped the iron nails and hammered them into the wrists of Jesus, are delivered by his blood. The very name of Christ proclaims his mission: He is Yeshua, Jesus, which means “God saves.”
This is the lesson of Holy Week. God is not merely “good.” He is holy in the ancient Hebrew sense of the word — he is other than us, and his ways are other than our sinful ways. And he calls us out of our own ways and into his. God transforms the hatred in the world by the love for us which he offered in his own suffering. He invites us to do the same through his Holy Spirit, and by doing so, to share with him a new and eternal life.
Five years ago today, Oklahoma City families experienced Golgotha firsthand in a bombing without precedent on American soil. Tomorrow, Holy Thursday, we observe the first anniversary of yet another bitter tragedy, the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton. The people of Oklahoma and Colorado are linked by a common experience of burying the innocent. But we are also linked by our faith in a God who showed us how to love, and now asks us to be agents of his love in a violent world.
We offer these thoughts in that spirit:
The killings in Oklahoma City, Littleton, and elsewhere in the time since, are heartbreaking, but they are not senseless. In a way, they make perfect sense. They are the fruit of a culture which is rapidly losing its reverence for the sanctity of human life and the dignity of other persons. A culture which already ratifies violence through abortion on demand and capital punishment. A culture which methodically erodes its own sense of community by marketing self-absorption in order to fuel sales and profits . . . and then wonders why the result is impatience, leading to anger, leading to more violence.
Art, music, drama, law and architecture are windows on a people's soul. So is advertising. So are video games. So are films and television. Therefore, we must ask: If American young people see 8,000 murders and 100,000 other acts of violence on television before they leave elementary school; if they're offered a steady diet of virtual reality and simulated sex and brutality; if they're told relentlessly that they deserve what they want, right now; and if more than 200 million guns now circulate around the country, why is anyone surprised at the bloodshed?
Without ever intending it, we have created a culture in which community has been displaced by personal consumption; where pre-teens carry guns in their backpacks to protect themselves at school; where the median for teens who receive an allowance is $50 a week; where TVs and computers can absorb more than five hours of the typical child's day; where only a quarter of our families are intact and “traditional”; where “Choose Life” license plates are attacked for being a political statement against a woman's so-called right to choose; where scientists can map an entire human chromosome but remain ignorant of the secret yearnings of the human heart.
Without ever intending it, we have confused freedom with mere choices, and turned individual rights into a kind of idolatry. Some argue that we need easy access to deadly weapons to guarantee our freedom. This is a lie. Some argue that if we ban pornography and violence from our entertainment media, we undermine the liberties guaranteed by our Constitution. This is an even more cynical falsehood. In fact, we are already unfree — tyrannized by our lack of courage, concern for one another, and common sense. And we are paying the price for this unfreedom with the lives of minority children gunned down in the inner city, middle-class children shot dead in the suburbs, and average citizens murdered by terrorism. The glue holding us to together as a nation is coming undone through our own selfishness, and nothing has demonstrated it better than the cover story of a recent Sunday news magazine entitled: “The New American Consensus: Government of, by and for the Comfortable.”
But comfort, as we have so bitterly seen, is not safety. No culture can finally outrun the conflicts in its heart.
For Christians, Holy Week is a time to look honestly at our own sinfulness, to repent, to turn to God, and to “choose life” (Deut 30:19). For 200 years, Americans have been a great people, a nation committed to the sanctity and dignity of the human person, born and unborn. It is not too late to be so again — to walk away from a culture of violence and death and to embrace what Pope John Paul II aptly calls the “culture of life” . . . the “civilization of love.”
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts; neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord.”
The families of the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing and the Columbine High School massacre have carried the cross of Jesus Christ as few of us ever will.
May we help to give meaning to their suffering by a conversion in our own lives — a conversion which becomes an example and leaven for others, so that our ways join in Christ's way of salvation, which leads to Easter and to life.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: The Horror of Death and the Hope of Easter DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:Have you noticed that cookbooks and diet books perennially produce bigger sales figures than books in other categories? The one will tell you what to make, the other why you shouldn't eat it.
Meanwhile books about death and dying tend not to be quite so popular. I know that firsthand, having lately written one myself, sales of which have yet to take the reading public by storm. Of course there is the possibility that my entry is so wretchedly written that no one wants to read it. But I have at once dismissed that theory as unthinkable, which is why I incline to the alternative hypothesis: As most people simply don't want to think about the subject, even the most scintillating treatment is not likely to get them to go out and buy the book.
In any case, some months ago, I left several copies of my book, The Last Things (Ignatius Press, 1998), in the care of an enterprising bookstore manager whose shop is located amid the most affluent homes in the area. She told me she would be delighted to showcase my work. Since then, I have discovered, only one copy has sold. (I suspect she bought it.)
What do you suppose is going on here? Might there be some connection between income and interest? Could it be that, the more affluent the neighborhood, the less the appetite for reminders of eventually losing everything to the old guy? Death being, after all, the ultimate impoverishment, who wants a sneak preview? Is that it, I wonder?
What a strangely perverse silence fills the air the moment the subject of death is brought up. While our pagan ancestors incessantly reflected on the nature of the next world, having wisely intuited the impermanence of this passing one, hardly any self-respecting modern appears the least bit interested in the “hereafter.” Respice finem, which means “look to the end,” is an ancient pagan motto whose message Christianity early on embraced. Jesus himself enjoined his disciples to watch and wait, mindful always of the End: “Therefore you also must be ready; for the Son of man is coming at an hour you do not expect” (Matthew 24:44). But, for most self-styled, enlightened folk, it is hardly the thing to which they care to look at the moment.
Ah, but the irony, to be sure, is that, by the time they finally do turn their minds to the end, it will very likely be the end. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” says T.S. Eliot.
I am reminded of that wonderful Edwardian saga of the Forsytes, an impenetrably complacent upper middle-class family, told by John Galsworthy. “When a Forsyte was engaged, married, or born, the Forsytes were present,” wrote Galsworthy. “When a Forsyte died — but no Forsyte had as yet died; they did not die; death being contrary to their principles, they took precautions against it, the instinctive precautions of highly vitalized persons who resent encroachments on their property.”
Given the extent of modern man's flight from death, from the “hereafter,” one has got to ask in all seriousness whether the human hunger for Heaven has become some sort of vestigial organ. Is it possible that the wings of the human spirit could atrophy for want of use? Nowadays to speak of man's pilgrim status, of his promised homeland in Heaven, of the travail of the world and hope for life beyond the grave, is to invite a blank stare of stupefaction among the many for whom eternity has lost all attraction.
Of course, such silence about the end exacts a heavy price. We instinctively know the last act will prove bloody, however pleasant the intervening play. None of us, including the most fatuous of the Forsytes, is exempt from that final nightfall, through the silence of which we shall all someday pass. Alone, we shall walk through the door of Death, which admits only one at a time; we've all been scheduled to go through it.
“Some day,” Karl Barth writes, “a company of men will process out to a churchyard and lower a coffin and everyone will go home; but one will not come back, and that will be me. The seal of death will be that they bury me as a thing that is superfluous and disturbing in the land of the living.”
Asked once by an interviewer what bothered him most about life, the poet Robert Lowell answered bitterly, “That people die.”
“It is the blight man was born for,” says the narrator of Gerard Manley Hopkins' haunting poem “Spring and Fall,” to the young child who has wandered innocently into the late autumn woods where, weeping but not knowing why, she sadly observes that all the fallen leaves die. He asks,
“Margaret, are you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving?/Leaves, like the things of man, you/With your fresh thoughts care for …”
Alas, he tells her with brutal finality: “It is Margaret you mourn for.”
We must all die and so, like young Margaret, we are given over to grief at the loss even of the leaves since, in nature's passing, we glimpse the clearest prefiguring of our own. But we are not resigned to die — or to suffer, or to remain always alone — and so we rage against the dying of the light. Death, solitude, suffering. These things are a problem to us, an outrage even, against the heart of what it means to be human, which is the yearning to live always and in communion with others and without pain.
If to be human means always to be in relation to others, and to God who is most wholly other, then death, to the degree it severs that web of relationality, can only be an outrage. A blight which God never intended from the beginning.
How to escape this thing that rudely intrudes upon and destroys those we love — that is the trick. The smirking skull beneath the skin whose first appearance stains the opening pages of the book of Genesis: Who will unmask it? Only the one who himself suffered to enter such a history bloodied by sin in order to deliver and redeem us from it.
That is the deepest meaning of the deliverance wrought by the event of Easter. Because when Christ died, only to rise again in three days, something extraordinary happened to death that fundamentally altered the whole dismal equation of sin and death. Thus death itself, as St. Paul reminds us in a stirring passage, is swallowed up in victory. “Where then, death, is thy victory; where, death, is thy sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:55–56).
In death, God calls each of us home to himself. We can, therefore, experience a desire for death like the one Paul records: “My desire is to depart and be with Christ.” And so for the Christian whose life is an effort to cleave to Christ, to anchor all hope in him who came to vanquish sin and death, the “victory” of death is only apparent.
“So death will come to fetch you?” asks St. Thérèse of Lisieux, whose own was most terrible. “No, not death, but God himself. Death is not the horrible specter we see represented in pictures. The catechism teaches that death is the separation of the soul from the body; that is all. I am not afraid of a separation which will unite me forever with God.”
One short sleep past, we wake eternally;
And death shall be no more; death thou shalt die.
— John Donne, Sonnet X
Regis Martin is a professor of theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Regis Martin ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Strike the Shepherd DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:On Oct. 27, 1947, Bishop Teodor Romzha, head of the Mukachevo-Uzhorod diocese of Trans-Carpathian Ukraine (or Ruthenia), was returning from the reconsecration of a restored church in the small village of Lavky to the diocesan seat. Two priests and two seminarians from the village accompanied him in his horse-drawn cart — the Soviets would not allow him to use a car. At a relatively deserted point between two small towns, the cart had an “accident” with a Soviet armored vehicle. Everyone survived the crash; however, soldiers jumped out of the vehicle to finish the job with rifle butts. The clergymen were tough, though. Peasants took them to a nearby hospital where they were treated and began to recover.
Bishop Romzha had his jaw broken in two places, almost all his teeth knocked out, and severe bruises all over his body. He had to be fed through a tube and regretted that his injuries prevented him from receiving communion. After about a week of normal convalescence, he died suddenly in the early morning hours between Oct. 31 and Nov. 1, 1947. A nun who worked in the hospital later recounted what happened. The Communist hospital director, Dr. Abraham I. Bergmann, ordered everyone out of the ward where the bishop was being treated. A special nurse was brought in to take care of the bishop. Her “treatment” consisted of a dose of poison that brought about the bishop's departure from this world.
The Soviets had their reasons to fear Bishop Romzha. A young, energetic and absolutely unyielding leader, Romzha had denounced the pressures being put on his people by the combined efforts of the Soviet authorities and the Russian Orthodox Church. The Orthodox themselves had suffered terrible persecution at Soviet hands and, no doubt, quite a few of them deplored the persecution of their Greek Catholic brothers and sisters. But the Moscow Orthodox leadership had been used by Stalin beginning in 1943 to help rouse the people for the “great patriotic war” against the Nazis. After the Germans were repelled, Stalin decided to continue manipulating the population by bringing as many believers as possible under the sway of the co-opted Moscow Patriarch Sergei. In much of Ukraine, this led to violent acts against Catholics who refused reunion with the Orthodox and the state-imposed substitution of Orthodox leaders in Catholic dioceses and parishes.
On Good Friday of 1947, in the Uzhgorod Cathedral, Bishop Romzha had publicly denounced these measures as “the lawlessness of the dark forces of hell.” He was not exaggerating. Soviet agents organized an illegitimate sobor (council) of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, which no true bishop attended. All but Bishop Romzha, including the great national leader Metropolitan Joesph Slipyi, were imprisoned and several (M.M. Budka, H.L. Khomyshyn, Gregory Lakota, Petro Verhun) died under detention, as did many priests, nuns and lay people. Those present at the sobor were manipulated into liquidating the Ukrainian Catholic Church by making it part of the Russian Orthodox system. In a single stroke, the Soviets had eliminated more than 4 million Catholics together with the whole Church hierarchy within their post-World War II holdings. The Ukrainians became the largest suppressed group of believers on earth until they arose again after the 1989 fall of Iron Curtain regimes.
Crossroads is publishing Robert Royal's book
Reason to Fear
To an outside observer, it might seem strange that the Soviet Union would fear these Catholics. But the attention they paid Bishop Romzha is indicative of the strategy the Soviets adopted to stamp out all potential centers of resistance to their totalitarian dominance of the peoples under the regime. Pavel Sudoplatov, who directed the operation against Bishop Romzha, has since revealed that then Ukrainian Communist leader Nikita Khrushchev and Stalin himself knew of the plot, which was intended to clean out the “terrorist nest of the Vatican in Uzhorod.” An often-repeated remark of Stalin's presents him as scoffing, “The Pope! How many divisions has he got?” But, in fact, he and his cronies thought of the Holy See as their most challenging moral foe before, during, and after the Second World War.
That is why the “nurse” who administered the poison to Bishop Romzha was a KGB agent. In the various parts of Western Ukraine, the Soviet strategy aimed at liquidating the Greek Catholic Church, the traditional religion of many of the people and, in certain areas, a faith that claimed almost the entire population. The deputy director of the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine had visited the bishop and told him bluntly that the “Greek Catholic Church cannot exist in the Soviet Union.” Romzha replied: “I would sooner face torture and death than betray the true Church of Christ!”
‘Do Not Give In!’
His outburst reflected the attitude of his whole people. Bishop Romzha told his clergy: “Do not give in for anything in the world!” They listened: both clergy and lay people in Ukraine vigorously resisted Soviet pressures to convert and flocked behind the bishop. In 1945, 50,000 faithful made a pilgrimage on the Feast of the Assumption to hear him preach. In 1947, when the Soviets tried to co-opt the populace by taking possession of the site of the pilgrimage and installing subservient Orthodox clergy there, only 3,000 made the pilgrimage. Instead, 80,000 showed up at Bishop Romzha's celebration near Mukachevo. After that, the authorities kept him under close surveillance and would not allow him to leave his residence. His death came when, a few months later, he chose to go to Lavky anyway, despite all warnings.
Bishop Romzha was only one of many brave believers who paid the ultimate price for their loyalty to the faith in Ukraine. As horrible as their experiences were, their commitment bore rich dividends. When the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was allowed to resurface in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it showed that it had maintained a remarkable underground existence. Eight covert bishops appeared along with 1,000 priests and 1,200 nuns — all in a church that had not existed officially since the 1940s. Thanks to the faithful acceptance of much suffering and not a few heroic martyrs, the Ukrainian Catholic Church endured a half-century of persecution and arose from apparent death to quite vibrant life.
----- EXCERPT: A hero-bishop died because he rallied the masses ----- EXTENDED BODY: Robert Royal ----- KEYWORDS: News ----------- TITLE: Beyond Cute DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:Ambitious movies vary widely in their ambitions. Some, like Schindler's List, tackle important subject matter. Others, like Being John Malkovich, undertake formal experimentation with cinematic techniques.
My Dog Skip is an awkward, low-budget, independent film about a boy and his dog, a well-established genre. Its narrative unfolds in a straightforward, traditional manner. But in a quiet way, it too aims high.
Based on Willie Morris' memoir of growing up in Yazoo, Miss., in the 1940s, the movie is narrated by the protagonist as an adult looking back at his childhood. Over one of the first frames, he says that “memories of the spirit linger” more than simple recitations of the facts. In part, this statement offers a rationale for the few liberties the movie takes with real-life characters and events. But, more importantly, it also declares an unusual ambition.
Its “memories of the spirit” are comprised of those moments in an otherwise ordinary life that recall openness, compassion and unfeigned love. They're more than carefully calculated tugs at the view-er's heartstrings. They spring from a deeply felt but unexpressed moral code that's linked to eternal things.
The story begins in the summer of 1942. The 8-year-old Willie (Frankie Muniz) is no good at sports, and the local bullies, led by Big Boy Wilkinson (Bradley Coryell), pick on him. His only pal is his next-door neighbor, Dink (Luke Wilson), a star high-school athlete who, before he can teach Willy how to throw a baseball, is drafted to fight Hitler.
At Willie's 9th birthday party only adult family members turn up, and they give him presents like a clip-on bow tie. But his mother, Ellen (Diane Lane), has decided “he needs a friend” and gives the boy an English fox terrier named Skip.
His father, Jack (Kevin Bacon), who lost a leg in the Spanish Civil War, is opposed. A withdrawn and overly protective man, he refuses to let his son keep Skip, warning his wife that dogs die and are therefore “a heartbreak waiting to happen.” Ellen surprises the family and stands up to her spouse, insisting the dog must stay. Taking responsibility for a pet, she asserts, will help the boy grow up.
Ellen's single act of defiance turns out to have been a moment of grace. Her birthday gift changes Willie's life in ways that no one could have anticipated. “He opens my eyes to the wisdom of life,” the boy says of the dog.
Skip is not without calculated tugs at the heartstrings, but even these seem to flow from a deeply felt reverence for an eternal moral code.
With an inborn sense of possibility and adventure, Skip forces his bookish, introverted master to get out of himself. The dog wanders freely throughout the Delta town and the woods around it. Everyone knows him, especially the butcher who sneaks him slices of bologna.
Even Big Boy Wilkinson and his followers are impressed with the terrier and, as a consequence, they invite Willie to join their gang. But first he must prove his manhood in a nighttime initiation rite at the local cemetery. It's the kind of test that looks foolish to adults, but is important to boys of that age.
Through Skip's eyes, which make no skin-deep distinctions about people, Willie's eyes are opened to the cruel segregation around him. As his terrier makes friends with all sorts of people, the boy begins to notice that, in movie theaters, blacks must sit in the balcony and that black athletes, although often more gifted, are never allowed to compete with whites.
At times director Jay Russell and screenwriter Gail Gilchriest fall into the trap of making things too cute. They have Skip wag his tail adorably around the prettiest girl in Willie's class at school, Rivers Applewhite (Caitlin Wachs), so that his shy master will have an opportunity to meet her.
But in one striking sequence, the filmmakers cleverly take cute in an unexpected direction. Willie has finally developed enough self-confidence to try out for the baseball team and win a place in the outfield. During a close game he makes several errors, and Skip runs onto the field to help him. Everyone laughs, including the viewer. But when the terrier refuses to return to the stands, the boy is so embarrassed he slaps him. It's a gut-wrenching moment. You feel Willie has done something terribly wrong and will have to learn from his mistake.
The boy also begins to lose his innocence. His former idol, Dink, comes back from the war a changed person. Now secretive and ashamed, he's rumored to have been a coward in battle. “It isn't the dying that's scary,” he tells the boy when they finally meet up. “It's the killing.” Willie must decide whether to remain loyal to his once-proud friend whom the rest of the town now shuns. Skip, of course, will be key to the resolution of this issue.
As the terrier ages and slows down, Willie leaves to attend England's Oxford University on a scholarship and eventually becomes the youngest editor in the history of Harper's magazine. In retrospect, it's clear that Skip was his best boyhood friend, functioning almost like a force of nature in his life. Most of Willie's “memories of the spirit” revolve around the dog who helped him mature into a man of some accomplishment. In small and unexpected ways, Skip also contributed to his understanding of the difference between right and wrong.
Arts & Culture correspondent
John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: My Dog Skip transcends trite ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----------- TITLE: Prizer's Picks DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:Planet of the Apes (1968)
At its best, science fiction looks at what happens to the human soul in the quest for technological progress. Planet of the Apes is an excellent cinematic version of this moral questioning — a sci-fi adventure with a bizarre premise that cleverly avoids self-parody. George Taylor (Charlton Heston) is the commander of an outer-space mission that crashes on an unknown planet ruled by apes. Humans are mute slaves who resemble cavemen, sustaining themselves by foraging in a Stone Age forest. Taylor is captured by gorilla hunters and thrown in a cage. Non-violent chimpanzee scientists (Kim Hunter and Roddy McDowall) believe he shows unexpected signs of superior intelligence and help him escape. But their orangutan leader (Maurice Evans) knows that humans once ruled the planet with disastrous results and ruthlessly pursues him.
Taylor is depicted as a kind of new Adam with heroic stature. In a crude, entertaining way, the movie explores the relationship between man's sinful nature and his stewardship of creation.
The White Rose(1982)
What would we have done if we had lived in Germany under Hitler? Would we have resisted or remained silent? Hans Scholl (Leno Stolze) is a medical student and a believing Christian in Munich in 1942 who organizes one of the few groups within Germany to protest Nazism. As a child, he joined a Hitler youth group, but doubts about fascism began to gnaw at his conscience. He comes to believe that failing to act against the regime is, in fact, to support it. He persuades other students, a professor and his sister (Anja Kruse) to write and distribute pamphlets critical of the Nazis. At night they also paint “Down with Hitler” graffiti on building walls. Their example encourages others in different cities to take similar action.
Eventually, he and his sister are caught by the Gestapo and executed. Their fearless commitment is inspiring. The White Rose makes us wonder if we would have the courage to do the same.
My Fair Lady(1964)
Edwardian England was a time when it was thought that manners made the man — or woman. Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) is a phonetics expert on the cutting edge of his profession. He brags that he can pass off any ill-kempt member of the working class as an aristocrat with only three months of linguistic training.
The choice for his experiment is a Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn), a very rough diamond indeed. She soon learns the proper way to pronounce “the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain” and is the hit of a starchy embassy ball. But the strong-willed female wants more than just a pat on the head from her mentor.
Songwriter Alan Jay Lerner and librettist Frederick Loewe add their own magic to George Bernard Shaw's classic stage play Pygmalion. The Oscar-winning My Fair Lady reaffirms the power of love and human understanding over intellectual brilliance and social cunning.
Shadow of a Doubt(1943)
Evil comes in all forms. Director Alfred Hitchcock dramatizes its power in masterful suspense thrillers which place ordinary people in extraordinary situations. Most of the terror and violence that results is suggested rather than shown.
Shadow of a Doubt makes the agent of evil an attractive, well-mannered, clean-cut gentleman who's fully conscious of his sins but seemingly without guilt. Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten) is a romantic figure in the eyes of his namesake niece, Charlie Newton (Teresa Wright).
She's been raised in a decent middle-class household which bores her. When her uncle pays a visit, the local townsfolk lionize him. But she discovers the evil secret behind his wealth, and her life is placed in jeopardy. Hitchcock's clever domestication of evil is unsettling even today.
But unlike many contemporary filmmakers, he's not a relativist. Hitchcock was educated by the Jesuits, and his films, not always family-friendly, nonetheless affirm the existence of moral absolutes rooted in a Catholic worldview.
Arts & Culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Los Angeles
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----------- TITLE: Education Notebook DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:Boston College Catholic Revival
The paper, Crossroads, is both an expression of faith as well as a reaction to the concern expressed by U.S. bishops that Catholic colleges need to be grounded in faith, the Globe reported.
“This is our answer to Ex Corde,” said Sara Davidson, a contributor to the newspaper, referring to the Pope's 1990 document on Catholic higher education. She told the Globe: “Every one of us can say we are Catholic, and this is what we are doing about it.”
The Boston Globe reported that students and school officials say the paper is part of a revival of the Catholic faith on campus.
In one dorm, a group of students meets nightly to pray the rosary; other students have instituted a weekly 24-hour adoration of the Eucharist, the Globe noted. AWednesday noon Mass led by a popular theologian is standing-room only, the first Latin high Mass in decades will be sung at the campus later this month, and next month students will sponsor an outdoor Marian Mass after which they will crown a statue of Mary with flowers.
The paper's editor-in-chief, Brian M. McAdam, told the Globe that the increased activity at Catholic events inspired the founding of the paper. “People were on fire with faith, and we wanted to invite more people into that excitement.”
Tourist Towns Prefer Families to Students
But small business leaders in such former student hot spots as Port Arkansas, Texas, now court families, The New York Times reported.
“Give us the families and let the students go to South Padre,” said Larry Stimson, who has lived in both cities. “The families will come with a set amount of money and spend every bit on beer, hotels, restaurants, fishing trips and other tourism stuff.”
He added, “The students bring their own beer, sleep on the beach and just might buy a loaf of bread and some bologna. They don't have any money, so you can't get any out of them.”
That's what Fort Lauderdale, Fla., realized a few years ago. In the mid-‘80s, it was the spring break mecca, attracting up to 350,000 students. By rigidly enforcing laws and dis-inviting MTV, the number of students dropped to 15,000, The New York Times reported. The city determined that the family market was five times more profitable than the rowdy collegiate crowd.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Education ----------- TITLE: Wanted: A Million Spiritual Foster Parents DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:Roger Mays' future is in the cards.
Three years ago, a friend who had just returned from Rome asked Mays of Denver if he'd distribute some prayer cards that the friend had received on the trip. Mays looked ata the cards, saw the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and agreed.
It wasn't until he had handed out all but one of the cards, that Mays decided to read what was printed on the back — a brief prayer, written by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen not long after the legalization of abortion.
The prayer was an invitation to “spiritually adopt” unborn children so as to protect them from abortion. After Mays distributed his last card, he ordered more. When those ran out, he decided to have them printed himself.
Last year, the financial planner's prayer card apostolate really took off. In June, the Knights of Columbus ran an article in their magazine Columbia suggesting that every member spiritually adopt an unborn baby.
The response was so great that Mays hired a part-time secretary and went into partial retirement to keep up with the demand. Since the Columbia article appeared, Mays has mailed out more than 700,000 cards.
Mays' new goal is to distribute commitment sheets to be set out with the prayer cards in the backs of churches for people to sign after Sunday Mass. His plan is to get every church-going Catholic in the country to enroll in the spiritual adoption program. Mays recently talked with Register staff writer Brian McGuire.
McGuire: When did it first occur to you that the Knights of Columbus should spiritually adopt unborn babies?
Mays: First, I went to different Catholic schools and asked the principals if they would like to do the prayer, before they start the day, over the intercom. That got me going.
After that, I went to the Knights of Columbus because there are 1.5 million Knights and there are 1.5 million abortions each year. I said, “Gee, isn't this a coincidence.” We can put a stop to abortion overnight if each Knight would spiritually adopt a baby.
I ended up visiting with the editor [of Columbia magazine]. He went ahead and ran the article in June ‘99. And as a result of this article, I had to print an additional million prayer cards just to keep up with the demand.
Who paid for the cards?
Well, I was down to my last few dollars, as most nonprofits go, and I said “Lord, where am I going to come up with the money to pay for a million prayer cards?” The cost was close to $6,500. When I finished praying, I got a call from a friend who had just won the Lotto. I do some financial work for her, and the money she gave me covered the cards. I told her she was indirectly responsible for saving thousands of lives. She didn't want to hear it. She's not pro-life.
I can't imagine you send the cards out individually. How are they distributed?
We mailed out the cards over a period of about three or four months. It started out with the Knights of Columbus calling. Anybody who read the magazine just started calling. As a result of this, I got the idea to call every pro-life director in the Knights of Columbus. The Knights have a total of 60 states, including provinces in Canada and Guam, and all that. Each one has a pro-life chairman or chaircouple. I would call each one, and get three key names in each state. Then I would call each one and ask if they wanted some cards. On average, I would send out 10,000 to each. Multiply 60 and 10,000 and that's 600,000.
Have you had any interesting calls for card requests?
I had a call from a legislator in Virginia. “Art,” he said, “we've been trying to promote bill after bill and they just get shot down.” He said, “I'm going to promote prayer from now on.” I think I sent him about 5,000 cards. Usually, when somebody calls in for a few prayer cards I talk them into distributing some at their parish. They will say, “Send me some for my family.” Then I ask them how big their parish is. If they say 2,000 or 3,000 families, I'll say, “Why don't I send you 2,000 or 3,000 prayer cards. … Take these to your parish priest and ask him if he can hand these out at Sunday Mass.”
What are your goals?
One of the immediate goals is to set up more [distribution] groups, to set up regional or state directors. The Knights of Columbus each have pro-life directors. As of March 9 we have applied for nonprofit status. Right now we are operating out of my basement. So our goal is to set up an office and call it Crusade for Life International.
Once we do that, we would like to find a director in each state to sponsor parish enrollments. Each time we go to a parish we do about 80%-90% enrollment. Everybody just gets with the program. The cards are all out and people say, “Gee, 10 seconds a day to save a baby's life?”
Our goal is to get everyone involved. We need to find key people that will be the state directors for the Crusade for Life. I don't feel like asking people who are already involved in pro-life work. They are already so busy. The doers are already doing something.
The key is to get one person in every parish to do an enrollment. There are 20,000 parishes. It is just a matter of calling every parish and finding out who the pro-life person is in that parish. A lot of people want to put an end to abortion, but not everyone wants to go that extra mile. The key is that this is so simple.
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I love you very much. I beg you to spare the life of the unborn baby that I have spiritually adopted who is in danger of abortion.’
—Spiritual Adoption Prayer
We get letters by the dozens. I keep the good ones. They say, “Thank you for making this card available.” They know the card comes from the late Archbishop Sheen, and has the picture of our Blessed Mother on the front — that I have nothing to do with it except for printing the card. But they thank my family because they realize that we are the ones printing and distributing it.
How do you manage all of this out of your basement?
This has taken up about 80% of my time. I just keep doing it and just keep praying that somehow or other I can make a living. And I do. Just out of the blue when I get a little short somebody calls and says, “I have a half a million dollars and I want you to show me where to put it.” And I'm off again for three or four more months.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Roger Mays ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----------- TITLE: The Gospel Of Life DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:In his 1991 letter to all bishops On Combating Abortion and Euthanasia, Pope John Paul II recalled the efforts of the Church at the close of the 19th century on behalf of workers and their rights and dignity. He said the 20th century should close with the pastors of the Church raising their voices on behalf of the innocent life that is taken in abortion and euthanasia(See Story, page 1):
The centenary of the encyclical Rerum Novarum … suggests an analogy to which I would like to draw everyone's attention. Just as a century ago it was the working classes which were oppressed in their fundamental rights, and the Church courageously came to their defense by proclaiming the sacrosanct rights of that worker as person, so now, when another category of persons is being oppressed in the fundamental right to life, the Church feels in duty bound to speak out with the same courage on behalf of those who have no voice. Hers is always the evangelical cry in defense of the world's poor, those who are threatened and despised and whose human rights are violated. The Church intends not only to reaffirm the right to life — the violation of which is an offense against the human person and against God the Creator and Father, the loving source of all life — but she also intends to devote herself ever more fully to concrete defense and promotion of this right.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----------- TITLE: Did You Know? DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:Population control advocates often site famine and declining food sources as a reason to follow their policies. However, in 16 of the last 30 years, the world has set records in crop yield and production, and food surpluses are routine. Famines and food shortages are more often caused by political regimes through mismanagement or the deliberate denial of food to their own people.
(Source: Population Research Institute)
----- EXCERPT: Facts of Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----------- TITLE: Life Notes DATE: 04/23/2000 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 23-29, 2000 ----- BODY:Canadian Pro-Life Pharmacists Fear Pill Backlash
Preven became available in January after receiving Health Canada approval. It's called the morning-after pill because a woman takes it within three days of intercourse to prevent fertilization or implantation.
Maria Bizecki, spokeswoman for Concerned Pharmacists for Conscience, said Preven works mainly as an abortifacient by preventing the implantation of the embryo in the uterine wall rather than a contraceptive. Believing that life begins at conception, the group sees the pill as a form of abortion, the Calgary paper reported.
The Alberta Pharmaceutical Association's code of ethics allows members to decline to provide a service on moral grounds, but job protection is not guaranteed.
“We want our rights of conscience respected without worrying about being terminated, being harassed or being demoted,” Bizecki told the Herald.
Abortionist Pleads Guilty in Patient's Death
ASSOCIATED PRESS, April 6 — A California abortion doctor pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter for a surgical mistake that wounded a patient and caused her to bleed to death, reported the wire service.
Bruce Steir, 69, was originally charged with second-degree murder after Sharon Hamptlon, 27, bled to death in 1996 after Steir performed an abortion in a Moreno Valley clinic, AP reported.
An autopsy determined that Hamptlon bled to death on the ride home after her uterus had been perforated during the abortion.
As a result of a plea bargain, the murder charge will be dropped when Steir is sentenced for involuntary manslaughter, Deputy District Attorney Kennis Clark said, as reported by AP. He faces up to a year in jail and five years' probation.
British Bioethics Council Supports Stem Cell Research
The expert committee's report argues that “the reasons for an abortion should be kept separate from the need for ‘cadaveric fetal tissue’ so … abortions are not justified to create tissue for research,” and that “the removal and cultivation of cells from a donated embryo does not indicate lack of respect for the embryo,” reported the Telegraph.
Peter Garrett of the pro-life group Life said, “This is effectively a recommendation for therapeutic cloning and that is a form of technological cannibalism. These tiny embryonic copies of an individual sick patient are to be plundered for their valuable embryonic stem cells then jettisoned once the parts required for the treatment of the patient have been removed,” as reported by the Pro-Life Infonet.
Colorado Pro-Life Advocate Has Free Speech Rights to Hold Sign
U.S. District Judge Edward Nottingham said Denver police violated Wendy Faustin's First Amendment rights when they tried to stop her from holding a banner saying “Abortion Kills Children” on the sidewalk above a freeway.
Denver police tried to stop Faustin at least four times, since 1997 when she began holding the sign with friends once a month. Officers on one occasion thumbed through a city manual in search of a law Faustin might have broken, the Denver paper reported.
The judge said Faustin gave up holding the banner for several months for fear Denver police would charge her with a crime. That restraint was proof that the police had encroached her First Amendment right to free expression, Judge Nottingham ruled.
Catholics Criticize Sen. Kennedy For Accepting Award
CATHOLIC ACTION LEAGUE OF MASSACHUSETTS, April 4 — The Catholic Action League of Massachusetts criticized Senator Edward Kennedy, D-Mass, for accepting the “Champions of Choice” Award from the National Abortion Rights Action League.
In a press release, the League called Kennedy's decision to receive the award “a reprehensible betrayal of his faith, his heritage, and of the Catholic community which propelled his family into political life.”
League Executive Director C. J. Doyle said the National Abortion Rights Action League “is not only committed to the ongoing mass destruction of innocent, pre-born human life, but has a history of anti-Catholic bigotry comparable to Bob Jones University.”
Among those greeting Senator Kennedy at the award reception was Dr. Kenneth Edelin, who was once prosecuted for allegedly killing a child delivered alive during a botched abortion.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----- TITLE: Vermont On the Verge DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:BURLINGTON, Vt. — The Vermont Senate's approval of a “civil unions” bill for same-sex couples means “democracy itself” has been wounded, said Bishop Kenneth A. Angell of Burlington.
The Legislature is carrying out the request by the state's Supreme Court to give marriage benefits to homosexual sex partners who live together. Meanwhile, polls in the state indicate widespread public disapproval of the Legislature's action.
Bishop Angell said the civil unions bill, approved April 19 in the Senate by a 19-11 vote, “is just a steppingstone for same-sex marriage. It is a very sad day for the majority of Vermonters.”
The legislation would move Vermont well beyond the position of any other state in granting legal recognition, protection and benefits to homosexual couples.
It would entitle homosexual couples to some 300 rights and benefits available under state law to married couples. It would not affect their federal tax and Social Security status.
“Our last hopes now pass on to the House,” Bishop Angell told the Catholic News Service. He was referring to the fact that the minor differences between the Senate version and an earlier House-passed version still had to clear the House, which planned to take the matter up April 25. Gov. Howard Dean has said he would sign the bill into law as soon as it reached his desk.
David Coolidge, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Marriage Law Project, said he and other marriage activists have been “basically living in Vermont” since the state's Supreme Court ruled in December that it was unconstitutional to deny homosexual couples the legal benefits enjoyed by Vermonters.
Coolidge called the votes in Vermont “historic.”
“There is an enormous amount at stake here,” he warned. “Vermont is confronting America with a new claim — that you can have traditional marriage and civil unions at the same time and in the same way without harming marriage. No one has ever tried that and there is no reason to believe it will work,” said Coolidge, whose organization was established in 1994 to defend marriage's definition.
Beth Robinson, one of the three lawyers who argued in favor of “civil unions” before Vermont's Supreme Court, said the state Legislature has acted appropriately at all stages.
“I can't imagine many issues on which this Legislature has spent more time,” said Robinson, who also chairs an organization called Vermont's Freedom to Marry Task Force.
Perhaps, said Ruth Charlesworth, but Vermonters haven't had sufficient time to process the court's December decision. Charlesworth heads the grass-roots organization Take It to the People. She said the public needs several months to become educated on the bill and to talk with elected representatives about their concerns.
“The judges have created a brand new constitutional right without going through the process of a constitutional amendment — an arduous process meant to take time to achieve the consensus necessary to allow dramatic steps like civil unions to be initiated peacefully,” Charlesworth said.
In the days before the final vote, Take It to the People lobbied 12 state representatives they had identified as possible swing voters. The group wants to delay the bill's final passage until December. They hope to win support in the Legislature for an amendment to the state constitution that would define marriage as the union between one man and one woman.
On Super Tuesday, voters in all 50 of Vermont's towns that held straw polls registered their opposition to homosexual “marriage” at the ballot box by ratios ranging from 60-40 to 80-20. In 30 towns where domestic partnership proposals were on the ballot, 26 opposed the measures. A non-binding proposal for a constitutional amendment to preserve traditional marriage passed wherever it was on the ballot.
Tom McCormack is one Vermonter who opposes the bill. A lawyer and a father of seven, he said he was much more concerned about his children's generation than his own.
“The loss is for the future,” he lamented. “You can predict how it will affect the way students are taught in school. There will be no principled basis for treating heterosexual marriage any differently. It will affect how health classes are taught. And what happens at school dances?”
Robinson disputed the claim that most Vermonters oppose “civil unions” legislation.
“We know from neutral polls by various media that both sides of the debate are at about [the same] percentage,” she said. She added, however, that the focus should not be on polls: “I hesitate to focus much on that because … questions of fundamental constitutional rights aren't simply subject to majority rule.”
But McCormack said that the public has made its position clear even apart from the polls.
“There has been no issue like this that has consumed the public,” McCormack said. He told the Register that legislators have received phone calls, e-mails and letters expressing opposition to “civil unions” by a ratio of 10-to-1.
Critics of the bill say the legal recognition of marriage was intended to protect vulnerable parties like women and children. By widening the field to include homosexuals, they say vulnerable parties will only end up being marginalized again.
The Vermont Legislature — representing a state whose population of about 594,000 is smaller than that of El Paso, Texas — is “asking for the creation of a new institution which has not been recognized anywhere in the country or anywhere in the world,” McCormack said.
“The long-term concern is what will happen with our own rights and freedom. It will affect my kids because marriage is for children,” he added. “It is through marriage that values are transmitted and discipline inculcated. These values will suffer to the extent that the institution of marriage is devalued.”
Matt Daniels, executive director of Alliance for Marriage, an advocacy group in Washington, D.C., said he fears the spread of legislation similar to Vermont's “civil unions” bill, which he called “court-driven” throughout the rest of the country.
“What is ultimately going to happen is that couples in Vermont are going to use these unions to export so-called same-sex marriage by suing in federal courts,” Daniels said. “This entire debate was started by the courts and it is going to end in the courts.”
More than 30 states have tried to prevent homosexual unions through the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman and allows states to not recognize unions established in other states.
Noting that the Vermont vote occurred during Holy Week, Bishop Angell said, “It is ironic that this holiest of weeks has been marked by the Senate's approval of a bill that mocks God's most basic plan for his children: marriage between a man and a woman.”
----- EXCERPT: HOMOSEXUAL 'MARRIAGE' ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian McGuire ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Raid Hits Raw Nerve DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:MIAMI — Christian leaders strongly objected to U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno for ordering the armed seizure of Elian Gonzalez over Easter weekend.
“They are atheists. They don't believe in God,” said Miami Mayor Joe Carollo of the raid on April 22 — Holy Saturday.
Patrick Scully, spokesman for the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, said the timing of the assault was “abhorrent.”
“The same president who held off the bombing of Iraq because of the Muslim holiday of Ramadan was not phased that this was the holiest weekend on the Catholic and Christian calendar,” said Scully.
Armed federal agents used pepper spray to disperse a crowd outside the house of Elian's relatives in Miami during the 5:15 a.m. raid. News reports said agents burst into the house, shouting obscenities — “Where's the [expletive] kid?”
An agent then broke down Elian's bedroom door and wielded an automatic rifle at the boy, who was held by Donato Dalrymple, the fisherman who had rescued him from the sea. During the raid, agents also knocked over a statue of the Blessed Mother.
“This is a day of shame,” said Charles Donovan, executive vice president of the Family Research Council. “Americans will never forget, the world will long remember the dark day when armed men brutalized a child. An investigation of the pre-dawn raid in Miami is in order.”
U.S. Senator Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat, said he had been assured that there would be no nighttime raid.
“The president of the United States made that commitment to me, that there would be no taking of this child at night,” said Graham at the press conference.
The Justice Department didn't return calls for comment.
In a statement made the day of the raid, President Clinton said:
“The Department of Justice, under the leadership of Attorney General Reno, went to great lengths to negotiate a voluntary transfer.
Even yesterday, the attorney general worked very hard on this late into the night, showing great restraint, patience and compassion. When all efforts failed, there was no alternative but to enforce the decision of the INS and a federal court that Juan Miguel Gonzalez should have custody of his son. The law has been upheld, and that was the right thing to do.”
Elian was rescued off the Florida coast on Thanksgiving Day after the boat he was in capsized and sunk. His mother and several other Cubans in the boat died. Until the raid by federal agents, Elian had been living with relatives in Miami since the rescue. His father was seeking custody of the child to return with him to Cuba.
In a sharply worded essay before the raid in the Boston Globe, Cardinal Bernard Law had called on those involved in the Elian Gonzalez case to “let the circus end and allow the return of Elian to his father.”
“Enough ink has been spilled on the complexity of this case,” he wrote. “For me, it is rather the simplicity of the case which is so overwhelming. … Absent clear evidence of the father's unsuitability as a parent, Elian belongs with his father.”
Cardinal Law's comments appeared on the op-ed page of the Globe April 19, as Elian's Miami relatives continued to press a court appeal in their fight against a federal order to yield custody of the child.
Essayist Peggy Noonan believed that the timing was no accident.
“The quaint Catholics of Little Havana would be lulled into a feeling of safety; most of the country would be distracted by family gettogethers and feasts,” wrote Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. “It was to the Clinton administration, a sensible time to break down doors.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Gonzaga Divided Over Ban DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:SPOKANE, Wash. — Are the words “Catholic” and “university” mutually exclusive?
Some students and faculty at Gonzaga University here have said so after a decision by the school's president to disinvite a Planned Parenthood speaker just hours before she was to appear on campus.
Jesuit Father Robert Spitzer's decision comes in the wake of a November vote by U.S. bishops on guidelines to implement Pope John Paul II's apostolic constitution on higher education. The 1990 document Ex Corde Ecclesiae (From the Heart of the Church) spells out what Catholic universities must do to keep their Catholic identity strong. The Vatican is now reviewing the bishops’ plan.
According to senior and Women's Studies Club member Mike Quieto, the decision to invite a Planned Parenthood speaker was made during the club's weekly meeting on March 28. The event was planned for April 12.
Quieto told the Register the topic was to be “reproductive freedom, the 2000 presidential election and clinic bombings.” He said Gonzaga policy states that fliers must be cleared by the university before being posted on bulletin boards.
“This process,” Quieto contended, “takes too much time for a weekly club meeting, and so members began ‘chalking the boards’” to announce the upcoming presentation. He added: “Writing announcements on classroom blackboards has been going on long before Father Spitzer became president.”
But Gonzaga freshman Nathan Macklin said that the campus announcements were underhanded in that they included no sponsoring organization or contact phone number. Macklin is acting secretary for the student pro-life group Gonzagans Organized to Affirm Life.
“As a member of numerous student clubs, I know that it is a rule for student activities to include this information on all advertisements,” Macklin said. “The Women's Studies Club did not.”
He added that he was not surprised by Father Spitzer's actions. “Father Spitzer is the founder of the Life Principles Institute in Seattle,” he noted. Father Spitzer also sits on the board of directors for Human Life of Washington and is the founder of University Faculty for Life.
Associate Dean of Students Peter Williams notified club members that the administration had canceled the invitation to the speaker. He also notified Laurel Kelly, education director for Planned Parenthood of the Inland Northwest, that she was not welcome to speak on campus.
In the ensuing campus debate, Father Spitzer released a statement to students and faculty clarifying his position.
“I denied Planned Parenthood access to this campus not because of what they say, but because of what they do,” Father Spitzer wrote. “They are one of the largest abortion providers in the United States and have an aggressive political agenda. … The Catholic Church interprets abortion as ‘the killing of an innocent.’”
He went on to quote Gonzaga's Guest Speakers Policy which states: “The President reserves the right to deny usage of Gonzaga's facilities to any person or groups of persons whose values are blatantly contrary to those of the University or whose presence would, for some reason, seriously embarrass or compromise the University.”
Father Spitzer told the university community, “Inasmuch as Gonzaga is a Catholic and Jesuit university, and Planned Parenthood's actions are blatantly contrary to this Catholic and Jesuit identity, I exercised my right as president to deny usage of Gonzaga's facilities to them.”
Kelly of Planned Parenthood said she was surprised to be invited to Gonzaga because of controversies encountered there in the past. She told the Register she was “discouraged to not be able to come speak at all. I think students should have the right to discuss those topics that they want to discuss.”
Kelly extended an invitation, through Williams, to the 50 students who had gathered to hear her. They could meet with her at Planned Parenthood's office just off-campus, she said. None did so.
“Reproductive rights was only part of what I was going to discuss,” said Kelly. “There is a misconception that Planned Parenthood only provides abortions. Planned Parenthood encompasses much more. We provide contraception, teen-age access to services, education about infection, and we provide access to cervical and breast cancer screening.”
Quieto, who said he finds “abortion a morally problematic practice,” said that he shared Kelly's concern that an educational speaker was refused space at a university.
“The only way that the university could violate their responsibility is if they were providing abortions in the university health care center,” said Quieto. “There can be no harm in talking about reproductive health. That isn't killing anyone.”
But student body president Laura Boysen strongly disagreed.
“I can understand why Planned Parenthood would not be welcome on Gonzaga's campus,” she said. “If a Nazi soldier, involved in the Holocaust, were invited on campus to express their beliefs I do not think they would be welcomed. In the Catholic view, this can be seen as parallel. Gonzaga cannot be seen as supporting the actions of Planned Parenthood. Father Spitzer was well-founded in his decision.”
Alumna Cindy Omlin said that Catholic schools had a duty to stand up for life.
“As a Catholic educational institution, Gonzaga supports intellectual inquiry grounded in the truth and dignity of the human person,” said Omlin. “Planned Parenthood is an enemy of that truth. It is the leading provider of abortion in America. It supports partial birth abortion.”
The Concerns of All
Quieto said he worried that similar action could be taken against speakers which they bring on campus to speak to their clubs.
“This event has served to rally discontent that has existed among students and faculty under the current administration, and has encouraged activism,” he said. “There has been a long-standing feeling that student and faculty concerns are not as important as the concerns of trustees.”
Law faculty professor, David DeWolf, who supports Father Spitzer's decision, said there is a great deal of “pain and anger among faculty. If a poll were taken, perhaps only 40% of the faculty would support Father Spitzer's decision.”
“What is jarring to many people is that the vision of the university in Ex Corde Ecclesiae requires us sometimes to be different — quite different.”
A Policy Change?
Gonzaga faculty members voted April 17 to seek a change in the university's policy that gives the president sole authority to cancel guest speakers. The faculty is also sponsoring a panel discussion on issues of academic freedom for May 2.
Father Spitzer, for his part, has held firm. He told about 60 students who had gathered for a forum April 20 that his actions were not an act of “censorship,” but rather an act of “non-sponsorship.”
“When you bring a person to not just your campus, but to your organization and to your home, what is going on is a form of acceptance, toleration and sponsorship,” Father Spitzer told the students.
According to DeWolf, students at the forum weighed in on both sides of the issue. Some challenged his decision while others said that the reason they came to Gonzaga was because of its commitment to certain values.
Father Spitzer argues that, in the long run, the decision will help Gonzaga more than hurt it.
“We are history in the making. Gonzaga might have a real influence on what Catholic schools are doing,” said Spitzer.
DeWolf agreed. “Father Spitzer has been wildly successful, the school is bursting at the seams, and the trustees love him. He's on a roll.”
Tim Drake can be reached at tdrake@ncregister.com.
----- EXCERPT: JESUIT PRESIDENT DEFENDS BARRING PLANNED PARENTHOOD ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: New Saint's 'Divine Mercy' Gains Respect DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:METUCHEN, N.J. — James and Colleen Dimino can't wait for April 30. And not just because the Second Sunday of Easter is Mercy Sunday, according to Blessed Sister Faustina Kowalska, to whom they have a special devotion.
This year, April 30 is the day Pope John Paul II will declare Sister Faustina a saint.
The canonization will be the most momentous in a string of recent developments in which the Diminos have seen the Church give its approbation to their work.
Their Metuchen, N.J., group is the first apostolate officially commissioned by a diocese to spread Blessed Faustina's message of Divine Mercy, which is based on apparitions recorded by the Polish nun who died in 1938.
The founding couple said the Diocese of Metuchen Divine Mercy Apostolate began in 1991 when the diocese's bishop gave permission to hold the Divine Mercy devotion at Blessed Sacrament Shrine in Raritan. For that first celebration, 350 people packed the chapel.
As the devotion grew, a lay group at the shrine asked Bishop Vincent DePaul Breen, the next bishop, for permission to form the apostolate.
Granting it in September 1998, he requested that the group spread the message of Divine Mercy to all 108 parishes in the diocese, explained James Dimino.
“As far as I know, he's the first bishop who assigned anybody to spread this to all parishes,” said Father S. Seraphim Michalenko of the Marians of the Immaculate Conception, who is rector of the National Shrine of the Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, Mass.
Father Michalenko was also vice postulator for North America in Blessed Faustina's canonization cause.
Father Anthony Dandry, one of two priests working in the apostolate, described the group: “These are ordinary Roman Catholic men and women from different walks of life who are on fire with zeal for this devotion because of love for Christ and the salvation of others and because their lives have been so deeply influenced by the mercy of Christ.”
In a written statement for the Register, Bishop Breen recalled the “impressive history” of the devotion in his diocese which began with the backing of his predecessor, Bishop Emeritus Edward T. Hughes.
“It is my firm belief,” he wrote, “that any devotion that leads the faithful to a more frequent and fruitful celebration of the sacraments — especially reconciliation and the most holy Eucharist — deserves to be supported.”
To spread the message, the Metuchen apostolate speaks to priests attending meetings of the diocese's deaneries, talks to church groups and produces radio messages. The group has also produced a video.
“The video is a good tool, a good starting point,” James Dimino said. It explains both the group and the message of Divine Mercy: from Jesus’ revelations to Blessed Faustina, called the Apostle and Secretary of Divine Mercy in apparitions; to the image of Divine Mercy the devotion promotes; to Pope John Paul II's personal devotion to Divine Mercy.
At deanery meetings, the apostolate shows a condensed version of the video and provides a packet with full details on the Divine Mercy devotion.
“One thing we stress to priests,” Dimino said, “is that we know how busy they are during the Easter season.” To lighten their load, the apostolate shows how to celebrate Mercy Sunday in simple form.
“And we constantly stress the involvement of dedicated laity in each parish,” said Dimino. “They're the ones that help the priests get the information out to others on what Mercy Sunday is all about.”
Two are Albert Alimena of Sayerville, N.J., and Marie Berardi of Old Bridge, N.J.
Alimena was so moved by the Divine Mercy message he learned from Father Dandry that he himself began distributing pamphlets about it to Catholics in New York, Mexico and Portugal. In addition, he raised money through family and friends, and through canisters he placed in diners and pizzerias. The canisters raised money in New Jersey, Staten Island and Brooklyn to build a church for the poor in Ecuador. Named the Church of Divine Mercy, it is nearing completion.
Alimena said he has been inspired to “reach out to souls for God” to tell them that “God's mercy and his love is there and to … keep asking for forgiveness.”
Marie Berardi of Old Bridge had been away from the Church a decade when she went to confession and was given a card explaining the Divine Mercy devotion. When she finally read it, she began praying the Divine Mercy chaplet. “Things started to get better,” she recalled. Her depression lifted.
Then, her devout uncle, going into the hospital, was “extremely afraid to go before his Lord” and frightened of purgatory. He began praying the chap-let of Divine Mercy. He died, but “the day I saw him,” Berardi said, “his head was high, his chest was out, and he was not afraid to die.” Now she is very active in her parish with the Divine Mercy devotion year-round.
Nothing special is needed to celebrate Mercy Sunday, Dimino explained. “You don't have to do an elaborate ceremony that day.”
Because the liturgy can be the Mass of the day, he said this essentially means everyone can celebrate Mercy Sunday and fulfill the request made to Blessed Faustina in her apparitions of Jesus.
In the Metuchen Diocese, the first gathering of 350 devotees has grown to 5,000 people celebrating Mercy Sunday at 20 different churches last year. Because of Blessed Faustina's canonization, this year's celebration is focused at St. Francis Cathedral in Metuchen. The homilist will be Father Andrew Apostoli, a Franciscan Friar of the Renewal and EWTN host. The bishop, who will be the main celebrant, will be presented a first-class relic of Faustina.
“If you approve the messenger, you approve the message,” Father Apostoli told the Register.
“As we celebrate it,” Dimino noted, “we're finding people coming back to the sacrament of reconciliation who've been away 15, 20 years.”
Father Dandry offered a vivid description of the promise that day offers those who go to confession within eight days, sincerely repent and practice acts of mercy: “This is an executive pardon from Christ himself.”
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Mercy Sunday's Promise DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:According to the Diocese of Metuchen Divine Mercy Apostolate, to gain the promised benefit of Mercy Sunday (the Second Sunday of Easter), one must:
1. celebrate the feast,
2. sincerely repent of all sins,
3. place complete trust in Jesus,
4. go to confession, preferably before that Sunday (confession during the feast can be eight days before or after Mercy Sunday, or even, say some, during Lent. At any time, all mortal sins must be confessed prior to the reception of Communion)
5. receive holy Communion,
6. prominently display and venerate the Image of the Divine Mercy,
7. be merciful through spiritual and corporal works of mercy in thoughts, words and deeds for others.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Eyes on the Goal DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:With 817 goals to date, the player-coach of the Dallas Sidekicks is one of the all-time leading scorers in the history of the World Indoor Soccer League. Recruited at age 14 by a premier Brazilian soccer club, the 38-year-old native of Mairinque, Brazil, turned pro at 17 and began playing in the United States in the 1980s. The father of three young children recently spoke with Register correspondent Kathy Vilim DaGroomes.
DaGroomes: How do you describe yourself?
Tatu: Sometimes people look at the athlete and say, “You're different,” and they put you in a different place than you're really supposed to be. To me, I'm just a regular person. I have a gift from God, a talent, and I can play a game of soccer, and that's basically it.
Where does your nickname, Tatu, come from?
In Portuguese, tatu means “armadillo.” Daddy used to work in a train station, so he was always under the train, checking the brakes and things like that. An armadillo is always under the grass. So people started calling my father Tatu.
They called my older brother Tatu. They used to call me Tatuzinho, which is a small armadillo. So all three in the family are Tatus. And now, in Brazil, if you call me Antonio Carlos, my given name, I will not answer. Tatu; that's it. And there were a lot of jokes in Brazil when I was playing, because “armadillo” was a strange name, but it helped me.
At what age did you decide you wanted to play soccer professionally?
I've played soccer since I was a kid. But when I really decided, everything was kind of by accident. For one thing, I had a teacher in school who asked me to do a project: “What are you going to do when you grow up?” I did a paper on engineering, but when I presented it, he turned to me and said, “Ah, you're going to be a professional soccer player.”
The second thing was how I got my junior tryout, which was on a Tuesday. My cousin came to me Monday night, saying: “Look, I'm going to São Paulo; I have some business to do. Would you like to come with me? I'll drop you to try out with São Paulo.”
I said, “Fine, no problem.” So there was never the thought, “Hey, I have to make this team.” No. It just happened. And, to me, it was more a situation like, “I really don't want to do this, but I'll just do it.” But then the guy at the tryout asked me to get back with them. It was my favorite team — São Paulo Futbol Club — and eventually I played for them.
How old were you when you began playing in the United States?
It had always been a dream. Growing up in Brazil, the United States was the best country in the world and still is. So having the opportunity to come to America was, to me, something unbelievable.
I was 19, 20 years old, when I first came [to play in Tampa Bay, Fla.]. I was the first one to come, and it was a very good agreement. They needed a kid with a head on his shoulders — who didn't do drugs, didn't drink, and things like that, and who also was a decent soccer player. So I was the one they chose.
Has your faith in God played a role in your success?
Without God, there's no way I would be here. I think that our life is a book, and God writes it. But the beautiful thing about that is, you make the decisions on which way you go.
So it's not like, it's already been decided that you're not going to do drugs. There's a chapter that says you could do drugs — but you will get to a point in your life where you'll say, “Well, I want to go on this road; this is the chapter I want to follow.” But I think the beginning, the middle, and the end of the book are there already; it's up to us to choose the proper way to get to that end.
You coach high school girls’ and boys’ soccer at The Highlands, a Catholic school in Irving, Texas, directed by the Legionaries of Christ. The boys’ team won its league's state championship two of the last three years. What's behind the success?
I've been at The Highlands three or four years, and, yes, we've done well. But you have to give credit to the kids. They work hard. We're not a big school; normally, we are 30-some boys at the high school — 20 were on the soccer team, and some of them had never played soccer. You basically start from zero, from the basics. You build it up; you motivate them.
You place them on the field where you can block and cover some of your weaknesses; you put the talented players on the right spots; and you succeed. We won two out of the three years; and the one we didn't win, we finished third — that's not bad also. So we've been going to the state championship finals the last three years.
But soccer at The Highlands is not, “we have to win.” Soccer, for us, is another tool, the idea being, “Sports and life are no different.”
In life, you have to have discipline; in sports, you have to have discipline. In life, you have to work hard; in soccer, you have to work hard, and have team-work. And you have to have teamwork at your job when you work. You need leadership in soccer and leadership at your job. So almost everything soccer-wise applies on the job.
If you're late for your job, you get fired. If you're late for training, there are consequences: You're not going to play, or you're going to run. So we try to use all these concepts and say: “This is the way it works in life; this is the way it works on a soccer field.”
And it works well here. We teach them, if you're negative — negative goes around and brings more negatives. And positives bring more positives. So we don't want to bad-mouth anybody; we want to be positive. If you see somebody talking bad about the other guy, turn around and say, “No, don't do that.”
So we do a lot of things here, not to build a soccer player, but to build a person. And we've been lucky to get both. And I'm very pleased. Those kids — they're not just good soccer players; they're good kids.
What advice would you give a young person who would like to play professional soccer?
Well, first of all, it is extremely important for them to carry through on their studies. They have to go to school; they have to get their degree. That's the first thing. Then, having the first door open, one can open the next door. If you are good enough, you work hard — those are a couple of things that are extremely important.
And you have to make sure you pray a lot; you ask for God to help you; and you just give it your best shot. First of all, though, make sure you get your degree. Then you go from there.
Do you have a philosophy of life, that is, a principal thought or idea that defines who you are and what you do?
I believe I'm nobody if I don't have God. I think God is the center of everything. You know, God gave me the talent; God gave me everything; and he can take at away at any time. So without God, I'm nothing.
Kathy Vilim DaGroomes writes from Dallas.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tatu ----- KEYWORD: Inperson -------- TITLE: Quest to Know Human DNA Is Good - Only Some Uses Are Bad DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — For two years public and private scientists have been racing at breakneck speed to decode man's full genetic blueprint, or genome.
In November the government's Human Genome Project announced that it had completed mapping the first billion “letters” — or basic chemical units in the human DNA alphabet.
In early April the Human Genome Research Institute, an international consortium of public- and foundation-funded laboratories, announced that it had decoded another billion letters. The group said it is now two-thirds of the way toward its goal of wrapping up the entire genome of 3 billion letters, and that a “host of disease genes” have been identified.
In order to guarantee that all scientists have access to the information — and to avoid patent lawsuits in the future — the institute is daily placing its research findings on the Internet.
In an effort to better understand the genome research and the moral implications that it may offer, the Register recently spoke with Dr. David Byers, executive director of science and human values at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Rich Rinaldi: What is the human genome?
Dr. David Byers: The human genome is the genetic makeup of the physical body, everything from your skeleton to [your] biochemical reactions. The genes make your body go and they provide the information to specify everything in your body from blue eyes to whether you can run fast or not.
Are there a certain amount of genes in the body, or is there a gene in every cell?
Identical copies of DNA exists in every cell. We have somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 genes.
Have you and the bishops been in touch with any of the people who are driving this?
I've had some contact with the government project through the bishops’ committee on science and human values. Dr. Francis Collins, the head of Human Genome Project, was a speaker in 1997 at one of the workshops we provide to the bishops on a regular basis. He was able to provide some information directly to the bishops on the progress of his project.
Both the government and private groups are trying “sequence” our genetic material. What does this mean?
The most basic level of our genetic material is made up of nucleotides. There are a total of about 3 billion of them in the DNA in each cell in your body. The sequence is the way the nucleotides are ordered along the DNA.
There's another term, “mapping.” I ask because we keep hearing that mapping the sequence of the genome will provide information about the human body regarding disease, etc.
Down the road, yes, that could be the case. But a fundamental distinction must be made. There's a great difference between knowing the sequence and knowing what the genes do. There's several jumps there. Even knowing the sequence of the human genomes, you still don't know where the genes are because a lot of the genetic material doesn't appear to code for anything. It's just there. So you still have to identify the sections that are actual genes and then you have to figure out through a very long and arduous process what those genes do.
I understand the mapping could be done by June and that it will be available on the internet. Whom will this benefit and why do it on the Internet?
It's certainly a step in the right direction. It will provide the raw material for other researchers. It's not going to tell you much about the gene, or why you have blue eyes. I don't know if the gene for blue eyes has even been identified yet. Nearly all human traits are coded by more than one gene, perhaps by hundreds or even thousands in some cases. It's rare that you will find “a” gene that does “a” thing. Most physical traits are caused by a multiplicity of genes so not only do you have to go from knowing the sequence to knowing what a gene does, you have to go from knowing the sequence to identifying a number of genes and then figuring out not only what they do, but how they relate to one another.
What are the moral implications?
Information is good. We are the Catholic Church, and the Church is preeminently the intellectual Church. Knowledge is a good thing, we seek the truth and this is part of truth. Knowing the sequence of our genes is knowing something about ourselves that we did not know before. Like any information it can be used for good or for ill.
Is there cause to wonder about the motives of the people behind this work?
The purpose of the people who are attempting to sequence the genome, of course, is good. They want to develop cures for disease. Perhaps there are ways for eliminating handicapping conditions through genetic research and intervention.
Yet, this can also be used for evil purposes.
It is possible to imagine evil uses for some of this information. For example — and this is science fiction at this point — a government might be able to control certain genetic traits through selective abortion or other population control techniques to sort of mold the population, maybe make it more docile, easier to control, something along those lines. Power can be used for good or ill. The sequencing project in itself is really just finding out stuff. We are not at the point yet where you're talking about a technology that can be used for certain purposes. You're talking about a body of data which can then be further investigated.
Is it unusual that governments would work together on something like this, as the United States and England have? President Clinton and England's Prime Minister Tony Blair have recently announced their governments’ cooperation on the genome project.
It doesn't surprise me. The scientific community is, by definition, international and, ideally, scientific information of this importance would be shared globally. I suspect that's the context in which President Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair were speaking.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Rich Rinaldi ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:N.J. Transit Agency Turns Catholics Away
THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE, April 19 — Officials at New Jersey Transit denied a Catholic group the right to sing at a celebration of a new light rail system April 15 while allowing a gospel group the right to perform, said the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in a statement.
Up until the day before the event, a Catholic group was told that it could participate in the celebration, the League reported. But then the head of the group, Father Kevin Ashe, was told on April 14 that his group sould not sing at the event because of concerns over separation of church and state.
The League noted that the Monumental Baptist Church of Jersey City was still permitted to sing. A Transit spokeswoman, Penny Bassett Hackett, said: “Gospel music is widely accepted as a mainstream category of music in the music industry and by the public.”
But Catholic League President William Donohue called the decision a “blantant” double standard.
“The reasoning advanced — that gospel singers are mainstream and therefore don't trigger church-state problems, but Catholic singers do — is so transparent as to be laughable. After all, what exactly is the source of gospel music if not the Gospel?” said Donohue.
He added, “Moreover, since when did singing songs — religious or secular — become anything other than a free speech issue? According to the perverse logic as entertained here, Catholic singers can't sing at state events but it would be perfectly legal for Marilyn Manson to belt out one of his satanic songs,” said Donohue.
Young Adults Take Their Cues From TV
“I was surprised at how much 18- to 20-year-olds are still affected by media's messages about sex,” Ward told The Washington Times.
Ward's study, published last fall in The Journal of Sex Research, examined the sexual attitudes of 314 men and women in the 18-20 age category. She found that the more TV that viewers watched, the more believable the TV characters and their attitudes about sex became, the Times reported.
She said that those who watch a lot of TV agree with the stereotypical sexual roles often found on TV, namely that men are sexual predators and that women are objects to be ogled at by men.
In addition to TV, the Times noted that young adults are saturated with sex elsewhere. Cosmopolitan magazine targets young adults and focuses many articles on how to heighten sexual pleasure. T-shirts reading “Future Porn Star” are frequently worn by kids in high school, and some even as young as 8 years old.
Rick Schatz, president of the National Coalition for Protection of Children and Families, told the Times that this evidence points to a “porn culture.”
The messages, Schatz said, promote, “Sex with anyone, under any circumstance. Second, women have only one value, and that is to meet the sexual demands of men. Third, everyone is involved in it. Fourth, the only sex that is exciting is outside of marriage. We believe those are the fundamental lies of porn.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Ecumenical Statement on Environment Puts Humans First DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — A new statement issued April 17 by Catholic, Jewish and Protestant leaders urges that “sound theology and sound science” guide decisions on the environment.
The Cornwall Declaration, as it is called, was spearheaded by the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty in Grand Rapids, Mich., headed by Father Robert Sirico.
The Washington-based Interfaith Council for Environmental Steward-ship, for which Father Sirico is an advisory committee member, said on its Web site the perspectives arising from the Cornwall Declaration “will provide a credible alternative to liberal environmental advocacy.”
The Cornwall Declaration, named after the Connecticut town where the statement was first developed last fall, says that “certain misconceptions about nature and science, coupled with erroneous theological and anthropological positions, impede the advancement of a sound environmental ethic.”
It listed three “areas of common misunderstanding”:
• “Many people mistakenly view humans as principally consumers and polluters rather than producers and stewards. … The tendency among some to oppose economic progress in the name of environmental stewardship is often sadly self-defeating.”
• “Many people believe that ‘nature knows best,’ or that the earth — untouched by human hands — is the ideal. … Denying the possibility of beneficial human management of the earth,” it said, “removes all rationale for environmental stewardship.”
• “Greatly exaggerated” or unfounded environmental concerns, among them global warming, overpopulation and “rampant species loss.”
The declaration said, “Since the fall into sin, people have often ignored their Creator, harmed their neighbors and defiled the good creation.”
In a series of what it calls “aspirations,” the declaration said it hoped for a world in which “right reason — including sound theology and the careful use of scientific methods — guides the stewardship of human and ecological relationships.”
It also hoped for “a world in which liberty as a condition of moral action is preferred over government-initiated management of the environment.”
The declaration also hopes that “the relationships between stewardship and private property are fully appreciated, allowing people's natural incentive to care for their own property to reduce the need for collective ownership and control of resources and enterprises, and in which collective action, when deemed necessary, takes place at the most local level possible.”
Signers to the declaration said they were “speaking for ourselves and not officially on behalf of our respective communities.”
“I've read it, and I think we welcome any focus on the religious dimension of the environment. And this effort is part of that. We share of a lot of the concerns they raise,” said John Carr, of the U.S. Catholic Conference Department of Social Development and World Peace.
“I think our teaching on the limits and responsibilities of both government and the market is a little more sophisticated,” Carr added.
Giving an example, he said, “The one thing that struck me was they warned against identifying the creation with the Creator; they say people are tempted to worship creation when they should worship the Creator.
“There's another temptation, which is to confuse the workings of the market with the kingdom of God. And so getting the balance right is the ethical task.”
Still, Carr said, “it's a good thing when religious leaders focus on the moral dimensions of the environment.”
Catholic signers of the Cornwall Declaration included Father Richard John Neuhaus, president of the Institute on Religion and Public Life; Father Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life; Robert Royal, president of the Faith & Reason Institute; and Father Sirico.
Among Protestants signers were Charles Colson, president of Prison Fellowship Ministries; James Dobson, president of Focus on the Family; William Bright, president of the Campus Crusade for Christ; Diane Knippers, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy; Marvin Olasky, University of Texas journalism and history professor; Methodist Rev. Donald Wildmon, president of the American Family Association; and Presbyterian Rev. D. James Kennedy, president of Coral Ridge Ministries.
Jewish signatories included Rabbi Daniel Lapin, president of Toward Tradition; Rabbi David Novak, director of the University of Toronto's Jewish studies program; Herbert London, a New York University social studies professor and the Conservative Party's 1990 New York gubernatorial candidate; and radio talk show host Dennis Prager.
(From combined wire services)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Rome Poised to Be the Youngest City in the World DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — This year's World Youth Day celebrations in Rome will feature three encounters with Pope John Paul II, special Masses and catechetical services, and plenty of opportunities to build international friendships, Vatican organizers said.
As many as 1.5 million young people are expected to participate in the Aug. 14-20 celebrations, with some arriving as early as Aug. 10 for several days of hospitality in Italian dioceses.
“During the week of Aug. 14-20, Rome will be the youngest city in the world,” Cardinal Camillo Ruini, papal vicar of Rome, told a press conference April 10.
U.S. Cardinal Francis Stafford, head of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, said the event will be an extraordinary moment of evangelization, Church communion and personal renewal.
“The Pope will be a main catechist with his sermons, words and gestures in front of the whole world, while numerous cardinals and bishops will speak for three days on fundamental themes of the faith to participants in various language groups.”
Cardinal Stafford said World Youth Day would once again serve as are an expression of John Paul II's special charism to communicate with youth, and they are one of the ‘prophetic gifts’ of his pontificate.”
The Holy Father has described past 14 World Youth Days as “providential moments for stopping” of the young generations on the road of faith toward the new Christian millennium.”
The Pope will preside over two welcoming ceremonies the evening of Aug. 15, at the Basilica of St. John Lateran and St. Peter's Basilica.
While organizers have avoided gathering the youths in the city center on most days, Cardinal Ruini said Rome could put up with a few logistical problems Aug. 15, the feast of the Assumption and a public holiday in Italy.
“The city should experience this day in a positive, not negative, way, as an opportunity of encounter,” Cardinal Ruini said. He said history has shown that World Youth Day participants are never a troublesome crowd.
The Pope will lead a prayer vigil the evening of Aug. 19 at a main gathering site on the outskirts of Rome, then return there Aug. 20 to celebrate the closing liturgy.
During the week, youths will take turns making their pilgrimage to Rome and the Vatican, walking in procession up an avenue to St. Peter's Basilica and passing through the Holy Door there.
They will also attend Masses celebrated in the Circus Maximus, the site of an ancient Roman racetrack, where special tents will be set up for confession. In morning sessions, they will hear talks on the World Youth Day theme dedicated to the mystery of God made man: “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.”
On Friday, Aug. 18, many of the youths will participate in a Way of the Cross that will end at the ancient Roman Colosseum, the site of Christian martyrdom.
Organizers said a special effort was being made to invite young people who are not necessarily members of lay associations or the most active in their parish.
Protestant and Orthodox participants are expected from several European countries, and a delegation from India will include members of non-Christian religions.
(From combined wire services)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Vatican -------- TITLE: Christ at Work Throughout History, Even in Worst Events, Says Holy Father DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — Christ is always at work in history, even in the worst of human events, Pope John Paul II said.
“The Holy Year we are celebrating underlines in a special way the fact that Christ is the center and meaning of all that happens, even when, humanly speaking, events seem to elude the rule of his providence,” he said.
The Pope made his remarks April 17 in an address to 5,000 students and professors — representing more than 60 nationalities — from 400 universities. The students were participating in an annual UNIV Congress in Rome sponsored by the personal prelature of Opus Dei.
Noting that their gathering focused on “The Image of Man 2000 Years Later: Faith, History, Science, Culture, Conquests,” the Pope told the students that “the centrality of Jesus is not just a question of measuring the passage of time.”
“The Word made flesh is the true protagonist of history,” he said.
“And the redemption, always at work in the often intricate flux of human events,” is the key to interpreting history, he added.
“Every moment of time belongs completely to” Christ, the Holy Father said, because by his death he “conquered evil once and for all.”
The efforts of Christians are “never in vain,” he said, because Christ works in them to complete his plan of salvation.
“Never forget this! Each believer is an instrument of God,” he said.
The Pope urged the students to let themselves be “conquered” by Christ, and to pass Christ on to other young people.
“May you be profoundly convinced that society needs to find in your coherent witness as young Christians an important stimulus for a strong spiritual and social renewal.”
(From combined wire services)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Vatican -------- TITLE: Vatican to Issue Collection of Papal Writings Prior to New 'Catechism' of Social Teaching DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — As a step toward releasing an official synthesis of Catholic social teaching, the Vatican was expected to publish a collection of papal writings on social doctrine before the end of April, a top official said.
The collection draws on papal teachings from Popes Leo XIII through John Paul II, said Archbishop Francois Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.
Work was also progressing on the official synthesis of the Church's social teaching, informally known as the “catechism” of Catholic social doctrine, but it was still too early to say whether the document would be ready for release by the end of the year, he said April 18.
Pope John Paul II, in his 1999 document on the Synod for America, endorsed the idea of a “compendium or approved synthesis of Catholic social doctrine, including a `catechism.”’ He entrusted the document's preparation to the Vatican's justice and peace council.
Archbishop Van Thuan said the document would probably not be officially titled a “catechism.” A more appropriate name, he said, “may be a `compendium,’ because we would like to reserve the name of catechism to the `Catechism of the Catholic Church.”’
Asked whether a “compendium” carries less teaching authority than a “catechism,” he said, “Not exactly. [The choice of a different name] would be so there is no confusion between the documents.”
The compendium is intended “to orient” Catholics, in particular lay people, as they encounter a host of new social challenges at the beginning of the third millennium, he said.
“It is necessary because the Church … embraces the whole man and woman, the whole purpose of the human being.”
After a treatment of the dignity of the human person, the compendium will address specific topics including life and labor issues, war and peace, finance and economy, and international debt.
Another section, he said, will examine the roles and responsibilities of Catholics in specific professional fields, urging “formation for engagement of social problems.”
The archbishop said the social compendium will insist on “how the human person is ennobled and fulfilled when he collaborates to improve the created, since in this way he assumes a central and just condition in the vertical relation with God.”
Despite the document's vast scope, the Vietnamese archbishop said he expected the compendium to be roughly 200 pages long.
Archbishop Van Thuan declined to estimate when the document would be completed. He said his office, under a heavy Jubilee workload, would try to finish the document by the end of the year, but there were no guarantees.
(From combined wire services)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Vatican -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:Russian Historian Defends Pope Pius XII
In 1941, under threats from Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, Vatican Radio was obliged to suspend its transmissions because just listening to the programs could provoke persectuion.
To have protested by naming the Catholics and Jews who were arrested or deported would have been a sure way of eliciting even worse consequences. Tokareva said that, by 1943, there were 2,644 priests from 24 countries registered in Dachau.
Moreover, “information on the genocide of Jews was very limited. The Vatican could not even contact Poland, which was invaded. On innumerable occasions Nuncio Orsenigo requested permission … to go there, but not one possibility opened,” the Russian historian said.
Priest Defends Church Teaching on Homosexuality
Franciscan Father Gino Concetti, a moral theologian and staff writer for L'Osservatore Romano, said people who had wanted or expected Pope John Paul II to apologize for the way the Church has treated homosexuals do not understand Catholic moral teaching.
“A distinction between the person and his actions or concrete behavior is fundamental in the Catholic Church,” Father Concetti wrote.
“A person is always to be loved and helped to grow in humanity and freedom,” he said. But, an error “being a negation of the truth is always to be refuted because it is detrimental to justice and to right.”
Father Concetti's article responded to homosexual rights organizations which said the Pope should have apologized to homosexuals during the March 12 liturgy in which he asked forgiveness for the sins committed by members of the Church in the past.
The claims of some groups that homosexuals formed a disproportionate number of the victims of the Inquisition “are exaggerated,” he said.
Father Concetti said scholars at a Vatican-sponsored symposium on the Inquisition concluded that “the category of homosexual persons was not a particular target of Inquisition tribunals.”
However, he said, “this certainly does not justify” the actions of anyone at anytime who attacked or unjustly discriminated against homosexuals.
At the same time, the Franciscan said, the Church has always and will continue “to disapprove of homosexual activity as a deviation against the nature and dignity of the person and against the true, authentic love which God has placed in the heart of every human person.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Vatican -------- TITLE: The Victory DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:REGISTER SUMMARY:
The liturgical celebrations of Holy Week offer a key to living moments of loneliness, worry and uncertainty, when God seems distant, Pope John Paul II told thousands of pilgrims during the weekly general audience on April 19.
The Holy Father recalled that Christ, dying on the cross, felt abandoned by God but was actually guided by the Father in obtaining the victory over sin and death.
The contemplation of the Lord's passion — and the imitation of his complete acceptance of the will of God — offers believers a key to understanding their own suffering and to achieve a share in Christ's victory.
The Lenten journey, which we began on Ash Wednesday, reaches its climax in this week, justly called “Holy.” We are getting ready to relive the most holy events of our salvation over the next few days: the passion, death and resurrection of Christ.
Before us in these days, as an eloquent symbol of God's love for humanity, stands the cross. At the same time, the invocation of the dying Redeemer resounds in the liturgy: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34). Often this cry of suffering is “ours” in the various painful situations of existence, which can cause deep discomfort and generate preoccupations and uncertainties. In moments of solitude and loss, not infrequent in our lives, the exclamation can surge up in the soul of the believer: “The Lord has abandoned me!”
The passion of Christ and his glorification on the tree of the cross, however, cast a different light on such events. On Golgotha, the Father, in the fullness of the sacrifice of his only-begotten Son, does not abandon him. Instead, he is bringing the plan of salvation to completion for all of humanity. In his passion, death and resurrection, he reveals to us that the last word in human existence is not death, but rather the victory of God over death. Divine love, made fully clear in the Paschal Mystery, conquers death and sin, which is its cause (see Romans 5:12).
In these days of Holy Week, we enter into the heart of the saving plan of God. The Church wants to remind everyone in a special way during this Jubilee Year that Christ died for each man and each woman, because the gift of salvation is universal. The Church shows the face of a crucified God, which does not cause fear, but communicates only love and mercy. It is impossible to remain indifferent to the sacrifice of Christ!
In the soul of those who pause to contemplate the passion of the Lord, sentiments of profound gratitude spring up spontaneously. Spiritually climbing Calvary with him, we are able to somehow experience the light and joy that come from his resurrection.
We will relive this with the help of God in the Easter triduum. By means of the eloquence of the rites of Holy Week, the liturgy will show us the undeniable continuity that exists between the passion and the resurrection. The death of Christ already carries within itself the seed of the resurrection.
The prelude to the Easter triduum will be the celebration of the Mass of the Holy Chrism tomorrow morning, Holy Thursday, which will see the priests gathered in their diocesan cathedrals around their respective shepherds. The oils of the sick, of catechumens, and the chrism will be blessed for the administration of the sacraments. This rite is dense with meaning, accompanied by the particularly significant act of the renewal by the presbyters of their priest-ly commitments and promises. It is the day of the priests, which brings us, the ministers of the Church, each year to rediscover the value and the meaning of our priesthood, gift and mystery of love.
That evening, we will relive the memorial of the institution of the Eucharist, sacrament of God's infinite love for humanity. Judas betrays Jesus; Peter, despite all his affirmations, denies him; the rest of the apostles abandon him in the moment of the passion. Few remain at his side. But still, the Lord entrusted his testament to these fragile men, offering himself in his body given up and his blood poured out for the life of the world (see John 6:51). It is an incomparable mystery of presence and of goodness!
On Good Friday, the narration of the Passion will resound, and we will be invited to venerate the cross, extraordinary symbol of divine mercy. The crucifix points out to us, who are often confused when distinguishing between good and evil, the only way that gives meaning to human existence. It is the way of total acceptance of the will of God, and of generous giving of ourselves to our brothers and sisters.
On Holy Saturday, a day of great liturgical silence, we will pause to reflect on the meaning of these events. The Church will keep careful vigil together with Mary, Mother of Sorrows, and with her will await the rising of the dawn of the resurrection. At the dawning of the “first day after the Sabbath,” the silence will be broken by the joyful Paschal announcement, proclaimed in the festive hymn of the Exsultet, during the solemn liturgy of the Easter Vigil. The triumph of Christ over death will shake, along with the stone before the tomb, the hearts and minds of the faithful, and bring them deeper into the same joy experienced by Mary Magdalene, the holy women, the apostles, and those to whom the Risen One appeared on Easter Day.
Dear brothers and sisters, let us prepare our hearts to live this Holy Triduum intensely. Let us permit ourselves to be filled with the grace of these holy days, and as the holy bishop Athanasius exhorted: “Let us also follow the Lord, that is, imitate him, and so we will have found the way to celebrate this feast not only exteriorly, but in a more real way, that is, not only with words, but also with works” (Easter Letters, letter 14, 2).
(ZENIT translation)
----- EXCERPT: Register Summary ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Vatican -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:Ransacked Indian School Reopens
“Too young to understand what really happened in their school, [students] know something is amiss as they tip-toe past Father Varghese Kunnath who is managing the school. Also missing are the familiar faces of two nuns who — traumatized by the experience — have shifted to their mother house nearby,” said the paper.
She continued, “The presence of police personnel within nearby St. Theresa's Mission and some other Catholic institutions in Kosi Kalan is reassuring to the missionaries, but their presence speaks about the sense of insecurity that has gripped the missions in the wake of what the district magistrate has described as ‘three unrelated attacks’ in less than a fortnight.”
Maintaining that the attack on St. Theresa's School was a “purely criminal act” and just a case of robbery that turned violent, government officials said there was no evidence to suggest that the assailants were motivated by religious fundamentalism.
“Because of the absence of concrete evidence pointing to involvement of fundamentalist organizations in the three incidents, even the archbishop stops short of pointing an accusing finger at anyone,” the Hindu reported. The paper added, however, that what has not been lost on the Church and many others is the fact that these incidents began less than a month after a Kosi Kalan-based religious group called for an “awakening” against “the conspiracy of conversion” by Catholics in the town.
Irish Bishops Say Religion Teachers Must Embrace Faith
The bishops said religion classes should be entrusted to “those who are committed to the faith” and professionally qualified, the Times reported. “The teaching of religion is not a soft option,” they said.
These and other views on education are included in a new set of guidelines from the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference.
The bishops state that teaching religion “requires a competent knowledge and understanding of the scriptures, systematic and moral theology, liturgy and the ability to communicate these from the perspective of the teacher's own faith commitment.”
Catholic schools should “phase out” the practice of getting “non-formally qualified personnel” to teach religion, the bishops said. They added that the teaching of religion should be given a minimum of two hours a week in the school timetable. “It is not acceptable for any reason that this requirement be reduced in schools where the education of Catholic students takes place.”
The responsibilities of publishers of texts and materials for the teaching of religion is also addressed. Said the bishops, “Those publishers who intend to produce texts and resources for the religious education of Catholic students are required to keep the contents of this document in mind.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: The Holy Saturday Raid DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:The picture of a gun-toting immigration officer confronting 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez on Holy Saturday morning says a lot about the disregard today's society has for the Catholic faith. The officer, in full riot gear, his trigger finger extended, was part of a team that stormed the Miami home of Elian's caretakers to retrieve the Cuban boy.
In the past, the Clinton administration has been careful to avoid violent acts on religious holy days. On Dec. 17, 1998, President Clinton ordered an attack on Iraqi sites, saying he timed the bombing to come before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Why wasn't the same consideration shown Catholics during the Easter triduum?
The Catholic faith of Elian and his supporters became a central focal point of the boy's saga soon after his mother and stepfather drowned in an attempt to escape Cuba with him in November.
While adrift at sea, said the boy, he continually prayed to his guardian angel to rescue him. Catholic fishermen eventually found him and brought him to the Little Havana section of Miami.
As soon as Elian was rescued, dictator Fidel Castro demanded the boy be returned to Cuba, to the custody of his biological father. The Cuban government then used the case to begin a new anti-Catholic campaign, reported the Vatican missionary news agency, Fides.
For example, Cuba's state TV ran a commercial targeting U.S. Dominican Sister Jeanne O'Laughlin, the nun who hosted a January meeting between Elian and his grandmothers in Miami Beach. She became convinced that the boy should stay with his relatives in Florida. Cuban television depicted a photograph of her face being transformed into a demon, Fides said.
Protests in Miami were kept peaceful in large part due to the efforts of Catholics who worked to channel the frustrations of the Cuban exile community into peaceful activities, reported the Catholic News Service. Protests over the boy's predicament featured Cuban-Americans, praying, holding rosaries and placards with Catholic images.
Catholics made high-profile pleas for Elian to be returned to his father, as well. Cardinal Bernard Law wrote in the Boston Globe that “For me, it is … the simplicity of the case which is so overwhelming. … Absent clear evidence of the father's unsuitability as a parent, Elian belongs with his father.”
The Vatican went so far as to offer its embassy in Washington as a place to transfer custody of Elian from his Miami relatives to his Cuban father.
This kind of Church support probably meant it was only a matter of time before the boy's transfer would be made peaceably.
But to take the child the way federal agents did and when they did showed a chilling disregard for the Catholic faith on the part of the immigration service — and the Clinton administration that ordered the raid.
----- EXCERPT: EDITORIAL ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Opinion -------- TITLE: What Matthew Meant to Convey, Then and Today DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:Apologetics readers may recall Edward Sri, assistant professor of religious studies at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kan., as one of the contributors to the same publisher's Catholic for a Reason.
Here Sri examines the exegetical highlights of the good news according to St. Matthew in 11 concise chapters. “The King's Anointing,” “Putting the Kingdom into Action” and “Keys to the Kingdom” are among the topics he focuses on, emphasizing Matthew's presentation of Jesus as the true king of Israel for whom the oppressed Israelites had been waiting since the collapse of the Davidic dynasty. That the restored kingdom goes beyond the Israelites’ every expectation is the point of the book, and of that Gospel. The restored Kingdom is, in fact, the Roman Catholic Church.
In a direct, highly readable style, Sri familiarizes the reader with the first-century Jewish mentality which, sculpted by the Old Testament and the historical experience of the people of God, constituted the context in which Jesus taught and acted. What he did and said can't really be grasped apart from that mentality. Sri shows exceptional awareness of this, and of the fact that the modern reader of Matthew brings to the text his own set of contemporary assumptions.
The Son of God was raised by Joseph of Nazareth, a workingman, and his wife; Sri keeps us focused on this simple reality as he sets out to explain how the whole of Matthew's Gospel must have impacted ancient Jews. “Ever since the first sin, when Adam and Eve ‘hid themselves from the presence of the Lord’ (Genesis 3:8), God has been working to restore communion with sinful humanity,” writes Sri. “And God planned to use Israel as His chosen people and the Davidic king as their leader and representative in order to reach the nations and gather all people back into communion with the one true God. But without their kingdom, without a Davidic king, and still suffering under foreign domination, some first-century Jews might have wondered what happened to God's great promises for their nation and felt somewhat abandoned.”
Moving adroitly from Matthew's worldview to ours, Sri sets the staggering meaning of Jesus’ words and deeds in sharp relief. He notes, for example, the way the Evangelist gets the contemporary reader to envision what a Jew at the time of Jesus would have experienced in Jerusalem: “Imagine gazing upon a building which makes up about one-fourth of an entire city and occupies an area equivalent to thirty-five football fields. That's what Jewish pilgrims would see when they approached the gigantic Temple to worship the one true God.” Not even the big-budget cinematography in Franco Zefferelli's Jesus of Nazareth, where Jesus as a youth looks with knowing eyes at the entrance of the Temple, leaves one as awestruck as this factual description.
The Son of God was raised by Joseph of Nazareth, a workingman, and his wife.
Sri extends his description of the first-century Jews’ theology, as well, commenting on Matthew 9:2, where Jesus tells the paralytic that his sins are forgiven: The scribes “believed that only God could forgive sins and He did so through the Temple priests and the Temple sacrifices. ‘Who does this man think he is, forgiving sins apart from the Temple?’ they would ask. Thus, in the simple action of saying, ‘your sins are forgiven,’ Jesus claimed to do only what God could do. And He was saying to the Jews, ‘What you used to get at the Temple in Jerusalem and the levitical priesthood you can get right here, right now, with Me.’ In one broad stroke, Jesus bypassed the Temple system altogether and proclaimed Himself the source of forgiveness of sins. Jesus made Himself the new Temple, hinting that the days of the Temple in Jerusalem might be coming to an end. No wonder the scribes were so upset!”
Sri uses this technique of “translation,” of restating for the modern reader what Jesus’ remarks meant for their original hearers, frequently. “When Jesus is understood in His historical context,” Sri insists, “we will see more clearly that practically every move He made is charged with great meaning and sheds light on His overall plan to build His kingdom.”
Sri proves this thesis ably, and the book provides a worthwhile guide on that score alone. However, he has added study questions at the end of each chapter — some to reinforce the history lessons, others to stimulate thought and discussion on how Christ can build his Kingdom in our lives and hearts today. The questions seem to hit the mark squarely on the history side, where reiterating points can aid in memorization, but they meet with mixed results on the life-application front. The problem with the questions in the latter category is that they seem oversimplified vis- a-vis the treatment they're given in the text. For example, following an examination of Jesus’ habit of eating with sinners, a detail rich with evangelical and ecumenical implications, readers are asked to consider: “Specifically, how can you challenge yourself to extend fellowship to those who might not share the same values, interests, and ideas as you do?”
In spite of these shortcomings as a life-application guide, Sri's Mystery is a useful aid to understanding Catholic heritage — and a worthy addition to Emmaus Road's growing catalogue.
Helen Valois writes from Steubenville, Ohio.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Helen M. Valois ----- KEYWORD: Books -------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:The Means of Vaccines
Your editorial comment “Vaccines and Abortions” (April 2-8) is astounding! I cannot see how you have come to the conclusion that the cold-blooded murder of a baby by abortion, coupled with the obvious, advanced knowledge of a pharmaceutical firm in need of cells from such a victim, somehow can be equated with “adoption of the child of an unmarried mother.” What?
You refer to something called “ends and means.” Well, according to Father John Hardon, SJ, in The Catholic Catechism, “good intentions alone are not enough, as though we could do moral good by using evil means. This is the error that the end justifies the means. We may never do evil to attain an otherwise good end.”
No one is arguing that a parent is complicit in the act of murder because he wishes to have his child vaccinated. However, as Catholic physician Christopher Kahlenborn points out regarding patients who request such vaccines, they should “be informed of the source of the cell line that is used to make the vaccines so that they can make an informed choice based on knowledge and faith.”
Author Steve Kellmeyer has written: “Drug companies use these cell lines because the cell lines make money. The cell lines will only be discarded when market pressures demonstrate they do not make money.”
It is up to us, the consumers, to make that happen by standing up in defense of life, refusing to accommodate the drug firms’ lack of desire to develop alternatives that do not rely on cell lines taken from murder victims and trusting that God will protect us, our children and the souls of those whose eternal health is in jeopardy if we remain silent. The end, in this case, cannot justify the means, sir!
Judie Brown American Life League Inc. Stafford, Virginia
Editor's note: Please see “Vaccines and Abortion: Cooperation or Cop-out?” on page 10.
Flynn Spin?
Your interview with Raymond Flynn (“Ambassador to the Catholic Vote,” April 2-8), rightly extols Mr. Flynn's dedication to his faith over many years. We thank him for his efforts and pray he'll be effective in making both political parties better. What bothers me is the seed of confusion he planted in one of his answers. When he was asked if he thought abortion was the most compelling issue of the day, and whether Catholics should base their votes on this issue, he said, “Yeah, I think it's the most compelling issue of the day. I feel very strongly about the issues of social and economic justice, poor and working families, as well. I don't think either party addressed those issues. The Republican Party is certainly pro-life. The Democratic Party is more committed to the poor.” Then he advises Catholics to “boycott both parties” until both become “sensitive to our political philosophy.”
If Democrats are more committed to the poor, why are they fighting to keep abortion-on-demand in place? By virtually equating these two issues, Mr. Flynn provides an escape hatch for pro-abortion politicians, “pro-choice” Catholics and others who claim to be helping the poor. We all know there are different opinions on the best way to help the poor. If the Republicans are wrong in their approach, how does Mr. Flynn's advice to boycott both parties assist Democrats or Republicans in helping the poor and, more importantly, to stop abortion? I'm sure Mr. Flynn did not intend to be contradictory, but it's clear that he is guilty of ignoratio elenchi— the fallacy in logic of offering proof irrelevant to the proposition in question.
Mr. Flynn's last comment — “Let them (Republicans and Democrats) change their positions if they want our vote” — is the opposite of the kind of advice we need. As Catholic voters we need to get more involved in the political process by first setting our priorities logically, and then by rolling up our sleeves to fight the horror of abortion — the issue around which all other issues revolve. We must write letters, make calls and vote if we are to put pressure on both parties to debate the facts of abortion.
We know that when the truth becomes known people convert to the pro-life position. A conversion to the pro-abortion position today is rare because the growing evidence is overwhelming. We know we must do more to help the poor, but that fact is no reason to diminish and/or complicate our most important priority: to stop abortion. The consequences of abortion prove our barbarism. What do we see around us? Social suicide, dump-bin babies and partial birth infanticide to name a few acts of inhumanity. If all Catholics were actively involved, the overturn of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton would be inevitable.
Charles N. Marrelli La Puente, California
Women in Control
Thank you so much the interview with Serrin Foster, president of Feminists for Life in your April 16-22 issue (“Abortion: A Tool of Male Oppression?”). I have heard that the early feminists were pro-life but was unaware of the history. The truest statement sums up the whole abortion problem when Foster says, “women have abortions out of desperation — not because women are in control, but because they are not in control.”
This extends to all areas of women's lives. Our worth is measured by our paycheck. Homemakers get “bored” or “go crazy” because their contributions are not recognized. Breastfeeding is devalued and we are further disempowered. Women are virtual laboratories for birth-control drugs so that men can have unlimited sex, then we pay the physical and psychological consequences. The world would be a much better place for women, men and children if more women recognized what really gives us control — embracing the gifts only women have been given instead of trying to be just like men.
Sylvia L. White Phoenix
The President's Example
President Clinton has said he will again veto the ban on killing a baby during delivery, known as “partial-birth” abortion. This will be the third time he has vetoed the ban on this barbaric procedure, despite overwhelming public and congressional support for the ban (“Support for Ban on Partial-Birth Abortion Grows,” April 16-23).
The president, along with less than 20% of the people in the U.S., supports this violent procedure which even many pro-abortion legislators agree is infanticide. The president falsely claims that the procedure is necessary to preserve life and health, but even medical groups which support abortion say that the procedure is never necessary. The president, by his support of killing in the womb (abortion) and killing during delivery (infanticide), has built a foundation of violence for our society.
In May the president will host a conference on teen violence with the objective of finding ways to reduce violence. The conference is doomed to failure because, through legally sanctioned attacks on human life (abortion, infanticide and assisted suicide), our society teaches teens that violence is the way to solve problems. The president can reduce violence by signing the ban on infanticide and giving a good example to all that life is precious.
Carolyn Naughton Silver Spring, Maryland
Praise for a Candid Commentator
Thank you for the piquant interview of Ray Guarendi of Catholic Family Radio (“Solid Ground, on the Air,” April 16-22). Although my wife and I are strong supporters of the Catholic media, we had never encountered the sharp and candid wit of this columnist/radio commentator before. Bravo!
Mr. Guarendi's responses regarding home-schooling (home formation) were particularly well-chosen. It is fruitless to throw our children into an academic situation in which the playing field is not only uneven, but grotesquely distorted. Your paper succinctly reports on the front-page article, same issue, a situation in which the American Civil Liberties Union bullied a school board into compromising the truth to be offered our children for the sake of avoiding a lawsuit (“ACLU Puts Fear of God Into Kanawha County School Board”). Where is our courage as Christians? Where is our faith?
Salutations to all of you who home-school your children for the love of God, who adopt and love the unwanted, who stand prayerful and dauntless in front of abortuaries, and you in the media who cry out like John the Baptist the truth that is written in your hearts. For it is here that the threshold of hope lies. You are the sower of seeds of future priests and religious, the guardians of the family, the ambassadors of the kingdom. God bless you!
Robert J. Brett Roslyn, Pennsylvania
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Opinion -------- TITLE: These 'Catholics' Are Heaven Sent For Gullible Press DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:A few TV seasons ago, there was an episode of “Seinfeld” in which Jerry's dentist was a new convert to Judaism. With a hand firmly planted in Jerry's mouth, he cracked one insulting Jewish joke after the next. Finally Jerry objected, but the dentist insisted that, as a Jew, he was entitled. Anyway, he added, humor is how “our people” have always made it through difficult times. Jerry was not amused.
I find my own sense of humor lacking while the Catholic version of this scenario plays itself out at the United Nations and in your local paper these days: Catholic-bashing from a group calling itself Catholics for a Free Choice (CFFC). The occasion is CFFC's current efforts to have the Holy See stripped of its permanent-observer status at the United Nations.
Headed by a former abortion clinic manager and founder of an abortionists’ trade association, CFFC gets away with caricatures of the Catholic Church, its bishops and its pope, that would simply not be tolerated from a source that did not have the word “Catholic” in its name. Ordinarily, the apparently intrachurch nature of the squabbling would put the news media to sleep. You'd expect them to say, “It's just an internal Catholic squabble, and that means big-time boredom.” But — hello! — we're talking about abortion and family planning and sex here. (How do you spell r-a-t-i-n-g-s?) Furthermore, thanks to careful strategic positioning by CFFC, there's the appearance of a struggle between some scrappy, progressive women and the male hierarchy. News media heaven!
What seems to have escaped otherwise-intrepid reporters, however, is the fact that CFFC is not a Catholic outfit. At least, not in the sense that its operators are Catholic, nor that it has a Catholic membership, nor, perhaps most importantly, in that it has Catholic funding. A former spokeswoman/Ph.D. theologian for CFFC, after her departure, offered a revealing look at the organization's leadership: “When I was involved with CFFC, I was never aware that any of its leaders attended Mass,” she admitted. “Furthermore, various conversations and experiences convinced me they did not. I myself did not. Today, I see this failure as proof that I was not actually a Catholic for a Free Choice. … I now see CFFC's agenda as the promotion of abortion, the defense of every abortion decision as a good, moral choice and the related agenda of persuading society to cast off any moral constraints about sexual behavior. I don't think this is a Catholic or pro-woman agenda whether you are liberal or conservative, pro-life or pro-choice.” Later, CFFC acknowledged that it is not a “membership organization.” In fact, fewer than 400 recipients of its magazine even pay for their “subscription” and no one has any idea if any of these are Catholic.
As for funding, the heart of the matter, it comes from wealthy foundations which support overseas population control, plus a group that supports the Chinese Family Planning Association (long associated with the brutal practice of forced abortion), and even at one time from the Playboy Foundation.
There is nothing the least bit Catholic about Catholics for a Free Choice.
And so it appears that CFFC's statements about ousting the Holy See from the United Nations shouldn't receive any of the deference accorded to Church “insiders” who are presumed to care at least something for the well-being of the group to which they say they belong. CFFC is comprised of individuals who care nothing at all about the Church — and everything, as it happens, about advancing a pro-abortion agenda.
With this veil removed, it is infinitely easier to see their remarks for what they are: demeaning anti-Catholic bigotry.
Imagine how you'd react if a non-Catholic uttered, or reproduced in printed materials, quotes like these. “If the Vatican is a state, then Euro Disney deserves a seat on the Security Council.” … “If [the Holy See] had its way, a million people would get the HIV virus, there would be more and more unwanted pregnancies, more and more illegal abortions, and more and more mothers dying as a result of illegal abortions. That is the position they are trying to work for.” … “Booting the Holy See out of the U.N. will save women's lives.” … “The Holy See doesn't truly support the rights of woman as fully equal, competent moral agents.” … “The Holy See is comparable to the Politburo of the old [Communist] Soviet Union.” … “The Holy See's denunciation of violence against women is made vacuous by its praise for service as a Christian female vocation; such a message enables domination and makes women vulnerable to exploitation.” … “For the Church, submissiveness is what counts.” …
Only a deep distrust, even loathing, of the Church enables a group to so twist Catholic statements on women, family planning and human rights. And only the most ignorant or the most gullible reporter (and I believe there are very, very few of these) would reprint this sort of stuff uncritically. Those who say such things and those who recklessly repeat them play and root for the same team: the Anti-Catholic Bigots.
Helen M. Alvare is director of planning and information of the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Helen Alvar… ----- KEYWORD: Commentary -------- TITLE: Nuns Who Saved Polish Jews DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:As the world commemorates Yom HaShoah Day, remembering the Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazis during the Holocaust, a Polish priest recounts the heroic rescues of Polish Jews by Catholic nuns.
Poland was attacked from two sides in 1939. Nazi Germany attacked her Sept. 1; Soviet Russia followed on Sept. 17. The Soviets occupied one-third of Poland, all the way up to the River Bug (now Poland's eastern boundary). Nazi Germany seized the rest of Poland, dividing its lands into two parts. Part of Poland was directly annexed to the Third Reich (the seacoast together with Bydgoszcz and Torun, Great Poland with cities like Poznan and Lodz, Silesia together with Katowice). The other part formed an entity called the “General Gouvernement” (which included Warsaw and Krakow).
In those areas which the Nazis and Soviets annexed directly, the occupiers had two goals: the permanent acquisition of those territories and the elimination of any local leadership and intelligentsia including (except in Silesia) the clergy. The General Gouvernement was supposed to serve as a reservoir of Polish labor until Germany's final victory. It was wholly under German administration. Poles were allowed to receive only an elementary or basic vocational education. All other schools were closed. Underground teaching was treated as a crime.
Jews, who made up 10% (3.5 million people) of Poland's prewar population, were concentrated in the General Gouvernement. Jews living in those areas directly annexed to the Reich were either deported or summarily killed at the start of the war. The large Jewish population of eastern Poland, which first found itself under the Soviet flag, came under German rule with the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941.
The Germans first imprisoned Jews in ghettoes. Later, they either transported them to concentration camps or killed them on the spot.
The Lot of Poland's Nuns
In those areas the Germans annexed (except Silesia), convents of women religious were almost completely wiped out. They continued to exist, however, in the General Gouvernement and, to some degree, in the territories under Soviet occupation.
The existence of convents provided an opportunity to help the Jews. Amid a total population of 16,820 Latin-rite nuns (this article will only consider the Roman rite), about 14,000 had any possibility of aiding Jews. It should be remembered that these numbers come from 1937, prior to the war, and undoubtedly declined during the war years.
In 1937, there were 1,686 houses of women religious. About 1,400 were located in areas where they were reasonably able to function during the war years. Of the 63 female Latin-rite religious communities existing in 1937 Poland, about 55 gave assistance to Jews. Nuns ran the more than 300 institutions which sheltered Jews. These included 118 convents, 60 nursery schools, 51 schools, 40 orphanages, 16 poorhouses, eight pediatric hospitals and six adult medical centers.
One can say that almost 1,000 sisters helped Jews. It is hard to say exactly how many Jews were rescued by nuns, but the number certainly exceeds 1,200. Because adult Jews often received advice from convents about where to find hiding places and other types of assistance, it becomes even harder to fix an exact number of beneficiaries. Among the 70 persons killed for having helped Jews, several dozen were nuns. To date, 14,704 people have received the “Righteous Among the Gentiles” medal from Israel for saving Jews. Of that number, there are 4,954 Poles, including 16 nuns and five priests.
Crushing Conditions
In remembering these times, one should keep in mind the conditions created by the Nazi occupation of Poland. Poland was the only place where German law rendered any assistance to Jews punishable by death. That punishment was severe and collective: It was meted out not only to the rescuer but also to his entire family and to anyone else who knew about such activities but did not report them. Almost 1,000 Poles were killed this way, including entire families whose children were not spared. Homes that sheltered Jews were burned.
Every sister in a convent sheltering a Jew was deemed personally responsible. It should be remembered that, at that time, there were often several dozen Jewish children who might be in schools or other institutions run by nuns. In order to keep secret any effort to hide a Jew, it was the sister superior who made the rescue decision. Oftentimes, a Jew captured by the Germans, hoping to save himself, would reveal where he had been hidden. The nuns knew of this risk; nevertheless, they not only hid Jews, but they often transported them to safe havens, concealing Semitic-looking faces under bandages along the way.
Boys were particularly at risk because of circumcision and, therefore, required special hiding places. Nuns obtained false papers for children, including baptismal certificates. Instances of the baptism of Jewish children were frequent so as to facilitate their concealment among Christian children. Although there were some charges of proselytism by the parents of children rescued in this way, those children had total freedom after the war to return to their own faith.
The manner in which Jews were rescued was often unconventional. Daniel Rufeisen, who recently died as a Carmelite, was rescued by the Resurrectionist Sisters in Belarus who, at one time, hid him by dressing him up in the order's habit.
It was easiest to help assimilated Jews who spoke Polish and knew Polish customs. Many, despite a Jewish presence in Poland that dated back centuries, knew neither. Furthermore, someone pretending to be a Christian had to know some prayers, the basic truths of faith, and had to go to church. Nuns thus had a difficult task before them, making sure that a Jew could hide not only from the Germans but also from gossips and szmalcownici. The latter blackmailed Jews, sometimes exposing them, in the hope of material gain.
Today one often hears in some Jewish circles the epithet of “Polish death camp.” That phrase is unjust. It is especially unjust in the case of Poland's religious. There was no group in occupied Poland who, proportionately, did as much to help Jews as Polish priests and nuns.
The quest for exact numbers, however, is illusory: The facts cited here are necessarily incomplete and will always remain so. That's because the rescue of Jews had to take place under strictest secrecy, without any records. Those cases we can document represent but the tip of the iceberg.
Father Zielinski is professor of Church history at Catholic University of Lublin, Poland.
----- EXCERPT: A Yom HaShoah Remembrance ----- EXTENDED BODY: Father Zygmunt Zielinski ----- KEYWORD: Commentary -------- TITLE: What Should Catholics Think About Globalization? DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:I recently came across a flier that said: “The majority of the earth's inhabitants and the earth herself are not doing very well at all as globalization moves forward.” A pamphlet handed out by magenta-haired, nose-ringed adolescents at the Seattle or Washington, D.C., anti-world-trade protests? No — this was an insert in a Sunday parish bulletin.
So there is a contingent of Catholics who think globalization is intrinsically harmful. Is it?
I just returned from a conference in South Korea on “The Effects of Globalization on Politics, Society and the Family,” attended by scholars from more than 70 countries. In my presentation, I explained John Paul II's account of the moral impact of globalization. Of course, the Pope notices elements for moral concern, but also much that is positive in the growing integration of markets. He has been forceful in his rejection of a moral vision found in one aspect of globalization, but he shows signs of hope in other aspects of the new global economy.
The Pope has been quite critical of the worldwide spread of lifestyles aimed at acquisition. A form of materialism pervades certain advertisements, movies and electronic media. Some people use the term “globalization” to mean the worldwide expansion of this materialist moral vision predicated on secular consumer culture. This includes a monolithic culture of Hollywood movies, MTV and fast food. It is a vision of moral libertinism and material consumption. The cultural message of this way of imagining the good life is global in a peculiar sense. It is a message of radical, universal individualism. Morally, each individual is conceived of as autonomous, accountable to no one, free from the strictures of societal norms, tradition, religion, class and familial obligations. In other words, the moral vision of secular consumerism emphasizes individual differences, making the individual the ultimate authority in moral matters. Each consumer is told, “You are free to choose whatever you want.”
At first, this emphasis on individualism might appear to result in widely different individual desires. However, it actually ends up producing a rather monolithic consumer culture. Teen-agers in Chicago hear the same music and wear the same style clothes as those in Warsaw. Cut free from traditional mores, the atomized self looks for a moral vision, often turning to the modern globalizers rather than traditional social institutions such as the family and religion. The market is quick with advertisements to tell the atomized self what should be desired. This includes an entire moral vision of how to live and what to buy. What looks like freedom to the individual becomes instead the slavish pursuit of consumer desires perpetuated by clever marketing.
At the same time that John Paul II has been critical of the consumerist moral vision (which is widely associated with globalization), the Pope has advanced a positive assessment of some aspects of our new global situation and the increasingly integrated world economy. Globalization is an opportunity for deeper awareness of the interdependence of human beings across the globe — an awareness that can enrich our sense of the universal dignity of human persons and our responsibilities to the various levels of social associations in which we participate, including the solidarity of all humankind.
In an address to the International Catholic Union of Business Directors in October 1999, Pope John Paul II said: “We must promote solidarity in all economic endeavors. Globalization must allow for greater participation by people, not their exclusions or isolation; it must apply a greater capacity to share, not to impoverish a large part of the population for the benefit of a few. Nobody must be excluded from economic circles; on the contrary, each and every one should benefit from technological and social progress, as well as from the fruits of creation.”
In an address last September, the Holy Father clarified his understanding of the moral vision that can accompany globalization. “Globalization will have many positive effects if it can be sustained by a strong sense of the absoluteness and dignity of all human persons and the principle that earthly goods are meant for everyone,” he said. “There is room in this direction to operate in a fair and constructive way, even within a sector that is much subject to speculation.
For it is not enough to respect local laws or national regulations; what is necessary is a sense of global justice, equal to the responsibilities that are at stake, while acknowledging the structural interdependence of the regulations between human beings over and above national boundaries. … As a result of the Jubilee, there may be a new culture of international solidarity and cooperation where all — particularly the wealthy nations and private sector — accept responsibility for an economic model which serves everyone.”
The moral vision presented by John Paul II emphasizes the fundamental dignity of every human person. It envisions a society of free work, where businesses are understood as communities of persons who voluntarily join together to provide goods and services for the common good of society. This is a moral vision which recognizes that human beings aspire for quality: in the goods we produce and consume, in the services we enjoy, and in the environment in which we dwell. But this pursuit of quality is a pursuit of human flourishing; it is a pursuit of an authentic life in accord with our humanity rather than one that is damaging to physical and spiritual health.
As the Pope puts it, “It is not wrong to want to live better; what is wrong is a style of life which is presumed to be better when it is directed toward ‘having’ rather than ‘being,’ which wants to have more, not in order to be more but in order to spend life in enjoyment as an end in itself. It is therefore necessary to create lifestyles in which the quest for truth, beauty, goodness and communion with others for the sake of common growth are the factors which determine consumer choices, savings and investments” (Centesimus Annus, 36).
Contemporary globalization offers a positive opportunity for a more global awareness of this moral vision. With John Paul II, Catholics should be critical of the consumerism that narrows us while seeing signs of hope in the positive effects of globalization, including the deepened sense of interconnectedness that is alive in our time.
Gregory Beabout teaches philosophy at St. Louis University.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Gregory Beabout ----- KEYWORD: Commentary -------- TITLE: Vaccines and Abortion: Cooperation or Cop-Out? DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:The thought that Catholic leaders could approve the use of a vaccine developed from an aborted fetus cell line appears, at first glance, shocking. Yet this is exactly what the St. Louis Archdiocese and the editor of Ethics & Medics at the National Catholic Bioethics Center did recently. The question that their approval raises is whether they have placed themselves on the same path that connects a tragic past with a dangerous future. So whose side are we on?
Science of Life
The moral ramifications of the issue are, indeed, highly complex. What may initially seem shocking may turn out to be, if not permissible, then at least less shocking.
My personal sense is that the private and medically indicated uses of vaccines derived from aborted fetuses, such as WI-38, which was developed from a 3-month aborted female in 1961, can be viewed as “remote material cooperation” and morally permissible. Where no alternative is available, cooperation in immoral acts admits to a variety of important moral distinctions. Not every kind of such cooperation is morally equal.
At their general meeting in November 1994, the Catholic bishops of the United States approved a revised and expanded text of their Ethical and Religious Directives, a document summarizing much of the Church's teaching regarding health care. At the end of the Directives, in an appendix, the bishops provide a statement intended to clarify the terms pertaining to different degrees of cooperation in immoral acts.
The first important distinction they make is between the “action of the wrongdoer” (whom we might call the “operator”) and the “action of the cooperator.” It may prove helpful here to note that the notion of “cooperation” can be so limited and tenuous, in certain circumstances, that it may be more accurately represented by the word “involvement.” “Cooperation” suggests willful complicity, whereas “involvement” leaves room for a person being “drawn into” a situation in which his degree of consent is significantly weaker.
According to the bishops, if the cooperator intends the object of the wrongdoer's activity, he exemplifies formal cooperation (which is always morally wrong), whereas if he does not, he exemplifies material cooperation (which may or may not be morally wrong). With regard to the medically indicated, private use of the vaccine in question, it is clearly not a case of formal cooperation (explicit or implicit) where the agents neither intend, approve, nor condone either the act of abortion or the acts by which fetal tissue was used to generate the vaccine.
Delicate Distinctions
The second important distinction that the bishops make is between immediate and mediate material cooperation. One is guilty of the former when his object is the same as the object of the wrongdoer (the collusion of the pharmacists and the abortionists, for example). Here, immediate material cooperation is tantamount to implicit formal cooperation. In the case of mediate material cooperation, the object of the cooperation is not the object of the wrongdoer. Concerning the vaccine, the object of the user is health and not the abortion of the fetus or the cultivation of a cell line. The bishops state: “When the object of the cooperator's action remains distinguishable from that of the wrongdoer's, material cooperation is mediate and can be morally licit.”
Over the years, Catholic moral-ists have employed a further refinement, dividing mediate material cooperation into the proximate and the remote. While it is difficult to draw a clear line that would separate the two, the distinction can be useful.
Here is an example. A secretary is aware that some of the statements that she types for her boss are lies. She may be disturbed by this and may feel that, if she protests, she risks losing her job. At the same time, she has no prospects for another job and has a child who is dependent on her. She cooperates materially, but not formally (she does not assist in crafting more convincing lies). She does not intend the object of her boss's deception. Her cooperation is proximate. But the cooperation of people in the mailroom (who also know about the lies) is remote. And that of the mail carriers who deliver the mail is so remote as to be clearly morally inculpable. As material cooperation becomes increasingly remote, it passes from cooperation to increasingly diluted forms of involvement, through loose association to complete dissociation.
Many churches have been built and maintained thanks to Mafia contributions. But it would seem that church attendance would exemplify an extremely remote (and therefore morally inculpable) material involvement, especially where the participant does not affirm in any way how the donors acquired their money or even the fact that they made their contributions. Nor would a store clerk be morally cooperating in wrongdoing by selling merchandise to a member of the Mafia whom he has good reason to believe derives his income from illicit activities.
Wrongdoing leaves its fingerprints virtually everywhere. Can a person stay at a hotel that provides “adult” entertainment for its patrons without cooperating illicitly with an evil? It would seem that such cooperation is sufficiently remote as to be innocent of any moral censure.
The bishops also advise that the “object of material cooperation should be as distant as possible from the wrongdoer's act,” and that any act of material cooperation requires “a proportionately grave reason.”
The grave reason for using the vaccine may very well be the health and continued life of one's children, surely a grave reason. But is such a reason “proportionate,” that is, does the good of the vaccine outweigh whatever evils might be unleashed as a result of its use?
Purifying
One must take into consideration the possibility of scandal, the charge of hypocrisy, further institutionalizing the abortion-vaccine industry, and so on. These potential evils, however, can, at least theoretically, be effectively opposed. One can publicly denounce abortion and the cultivation of vaccines from aborted fetuses, lobby to encourage scientists to cultivate vaccines from non-human sources, and still use the vaccine. On the other hand, not to use the vaccine could be interpreted as an abdication of parental responsibility and could bring considerable stress into a marriage relationship. In short, the use of such a vaccine may be understood as a form of morally acceptable cooperation that is material and remote.
Can it really be morally permissible to benefit from something whose genesis is morally impermissible? Surely a child conceived by rape can enjoy the benefits of human existence without endorsing the nature of the act that brought him into being.
It can be permissible to enjoy such a benefit if there is a proportionate reason to use the benefit and the degree of material cooperation is so remote from the wrong-doing that the cooperator does not incur any moral culpability for the wrongdoings that were initially committed. In particular cases, however, where one is able to defend his actions, one may even be obliged to do so. One is not morally bound to refrain from performing a good action because others, who are ignorant, may voice censure or disapproval. The obligation to educate may be very strong. A moral choice with an explanation is better than inaction combined with a fear of the opinions of others.
Part of the meaning of the “global village” in which we live is that the contamination from various acts of wrongdoing has seeped into almost every corner of our existence. Given what is shown on television these days, can anyone justify owning one? Many food items one purchases at the grocery store have a genesis that involves worker-exploitation or even slave labor. Is one even allowed to watch an NBA game, given the stories that exist concerning the making and selling of certain sneakers? We pay taxes to governments that subsidize abortion and other crimes. Too scrupulous a moral attitude can lead to paralysis and, as a consequence, leave a great deal of good undone.
The notion of excusable, remote material cooperation allows us to be involved in a morally contaminated world without contributing to that contamination. The medically indicated use of vaccines cultivated from aborted fetuses can be morally licit. And it can be done without giving approval to the way they were developed, and without necessarily contributing to any of the associate evils that we rightly denounce. There are distinctions that must be made so that we can live with a clear conscience and cooperate with others in our problematic world — so that that we can be effectively in the world without being of it.
Don DeMarco, a philosophy professor at St. Jerome's University in Waterloo, Ontario, is a member of the American Bioethics Advisory Commission.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Don Demarco ----- KEYWORD: News -------- TITLE: Keeping St. Paul Warm in Spirit DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:During the height of news reports that New England was suffering through a real cold snap this past winter, I called my sister, who lives in northeastern Massachusetts, and asked just how cold it was. “Ambient or wind chill?” she asked.
“Ambient,” I replied quickly.
“Minus 1.”
The next thing she heard was laughter — loads of uncontrollable laughter. Then she told me the wind chill was 60 below zero. “OK,” I said, trying to contain myself. “That can be serious.”
Of course, the joke was that 1 below zero can be a mild winter day in Minnesota. But Minnesota has other seasons as well. Contrary to popular belief, the North Star State is not part of the arctic tundra and, in the summer of 1987, we had about 14 days where the mercury topped 100 degrees.
What's more, Minnesota is always warm with its spiritual — and specifically Catholic — heritage.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the foundation of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, the most famous landmark of which is the Cathedral of St. Paul. Begun under the leadership of Archbishop John Ireland, this magnificent sanctuary, with its distinctive green copper dome, is situated on one of the highest points in the city.
A Pope Prayed Here
Archbishop Ireland was determined, after there had been three previous cathedrals, to build something grand, glorious and majestic, which is exactly what he got. This building is rich with ecclesiastical and secular history. Pope Pius XII once came within its walls, as did President John F. Kennedy. (The pew where Kennedy sat is marked by a plaque — it's in the second row of pews on the right facing the altar, fourth pew back.)
With bronze grilles depicting the life of St. Paul lining the sanctuary, a great bronze sculpture set atop shiny black marble pillars for a baldachino, larger-than-life size statues of the four Evangelists set in the corners of the church, numerous chapels with exquisite statuary and marble work, this cathedral is an art lovers’ paradise.
If you come to visit, be sure to arrive well before the 10 a.m. Sunday Mass to hear the great bronze bells intone the call to worship and then attend what is arguably one of the best Novus Ordo Masses in the country. The sound of Gregorian chant and organ with choir in that great space is something not soon forgotten.
Other churches to visit in St. Paul include St. Louis in downtown, sometimes referred to as “The Little French Church.” A recently restored and enhanced interior is a fitting testament to the faith that permeates this parish.
One aspect of the restoration that is wonderful to see as well as hear is the new organ. Though it looks as though it could be domineering, its designers did an excellent job at keeping the sound from overwhelming the congregation and choir. In fact, St. Louis has an organ recital every Tuesday at noon.
Orchestral Maneuvers
Just a little north of downtown is St. Agnes, a famous place among Latin Mass enthusiasts. Msgr. Richard Schuler is pastor there. The editor of Sacred Music magazine and author of numerous articles relating to liturgy and the post-Vatican II era is also a conductor, a skill he uses almost every Sunday as members of the Minnesota Orchestra provide accompaniment at Mass. The church itself is a marvelous example of French baroque architecture, also renovated within the last few years.
A very Catholic town compared to its more Lutheran twin, St. Paul also has such churches as Assumption in downtown, one of the oldest in the state, and St. Mark and Nativity of Our Lord churches, both on the western end of town. Leaflet Missal, whose catalog many readers may know, is located not far from St. Agnes.
While you're here, you may as well enjoy the great cultural benefits offered. The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra's concerts are given, not just at the Ordway Theater, but in other locations around town. It is the only full-time chamber orchestra in the country and is considered to be one of the best in the world. There are numerous theater productions here as well, including Garrison Keillor's “A Prairie Home Companion” at the Fitzgerald Theater.
Other sights to see are the Minnesota Museum of Modern Art in the Landmark Center; the Minnesota History Museum, which is just down John Ireland Boulevard from the cathedral and, a little further down that same road, the Minnesota State Capitol with its own unmistakable dome.
In fact, one architecture critic has said that if the domes on the cathedral and the Capitol were together in Europe, people would be constantly flocking to see them.
Oh, and there are also a few things to see and do in that other town (Minneapolis). The Minnesota Orchestra resides there (its plays at the Ordway in St. Paul), along with the Guthrie Theater, the Minneapolis Museum of Art, a great system of trails around the five lakes within the city limits and the Basilica of St. Mary — the first minor basilica in the United States and the co-cathedral of the archdiocese.
Thomas A. Szyszkiewicz is editor of the Times Review, newspaper of the Diocese of La Crosse, Wisconsin.
----- EXCERPT: One-half of Minnesota's Twin Cities is something of a Catholic hot spot ----- EXTENDED BODY: Thomas A. Szyszkiewicz ----- KEYWORD: Travel -------- TITLE: Public TV Gets Religion, Respectfully DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:Television news is embarrassed by religion. It can't touch it, can't see it, and — foremost — can't take pictures of it, so the topic is assiduously ignored on most newscasts most nights. There is a sense (or perhaps bias) among news executives that spiritual matters are deeply personal or somehow exist in a realm far removed from the daily pull and tug of human life, which after all is the grist of nightly news show.
And so, for the most part, it is not covered (unless, like the Pope's recent visit to the Holy Land, it can't not be covered). Which is why public TV's “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” is one of the great ideas in TV news of recent years. (In New York, the show airs from 6 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. on Sundays; otherwise, check local listings.) The program premiered three years ago, but has barely made a ripple in the huge muddy pond of television news. In structure, the program is resolutely traditional: There is an anchor (Bob Abernethy), and straight, no-nonsense news reports which methodically and carefully parse various stories that have virtually no reliance on usual crutch of TV news — namely, pictures.
Indeed, the show is filled with talking heads, but not the usual ones who shout and scream at one another over The Issue of the Day. They are priests and rabbis, doctors and people (“ethicists?”) who spend their days and nights wondering about the intricacies of difficult issues — religious freedom in China, the rights of babies born with severe disabilities, the growing field of bioethics. This is a show that takes its title seriously.
Ironically, and sadly, “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” had its own ethical scrap recently. The show's founding producer, Gerry Solomon, was forced out by executives at New York's WNET/13. They wanted someone who was closely allied with the head office (the show is produced in Washington). But, fortunately, Solomon laid a strong base. He brought in some pros from NBC News (where he formerly was a top producer) — people like Mary Alice Williams and Betty Rollin. He and Abernethy also established a program that steadfastly refuses to violate journalistic ethics: It is fair and balanced to a fault.
The show exudes compassion rather than a sense of religious direction or suasion, but the Catholic faith seems to come in for especially fair treatment here. Last October, for example, the show reported a superb piece on Roman Catholic persecution in China, where the Church is divided into a state-sanctioned official church and an underground church loyal to the Pope. Television has covered religious persecution in China, but the detail in this report was particularly deep and rich.
The show also tackled — and dismissed — the sensationalized Kansas City Star report on AIDS among American Catholic priests (which, based on a sample of 3,000, reported that the death rate among priests is four times that of the general population). The program contacted Warren Mitofsky, the standards chairman of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, the dean of network TV news political polling, who called the Star study “seriously flawed.”
A deep and abiding respect for Pope John Paul II comes through on “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly,” along with the sense that he is the closest thing the world has to a true moral leader. Of the recent trip to the Middle East, Cardinal William Keeler, archbishop of Baltimore, observed on the show that “he is showing himself to be a splendid pilgrim, to take on the challenge of visiting places that I know are going to bring a great deal of joy into his heart, and it's going to be very meaningful for us who follow it.”
Perhaps the same could be said for a show that most of America still does not know exists. Register readers looking to get a sense of the context of their faith in the secular world would do well to find out when this show airs in local areas and put it on their schedule each week.
Here are some viewing highlights to look for in May:
Why so much television on Christ, and why now? In mid-April, ABC aired “The Miracle Maker,” a nicely done claymation movie that helped heal the breach between ABC and the Southern Baptist Convention, which launched a boycott against ABC's owner, Disney, three years ago. One wonders: Was this ABC's motive? (For the record, ABC says it wanted an Easter movie to complement “The Ten Commandments,” which has aired around Easter for many years.)
But why CBS’ interest? The answer: sheer, brute economics. The network figures the Gospel story — supplemented here with an amazing array of computer-generated graphics — will attract a wide audience, and that figuring may well be right. The good news is, based on a partial viewing, CBS’ “Jesus” is intelligent and well-produced and, while Jeremy Sisto doesn't break with the usual screen stereotype of the title character, he does bring warmth and humanity to his subject. It's a solid performance. (Jaqueline Bisset plays Mary.)
But there are some interesting innovations here as well. This “Jesus” attempts to link the Gospel to modern times in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. For example, Jeroen Krabbe's performance as Satan should get an interesting reaction: He is Armani-clad, wing-tipped, blow-dried and looks exactly like a stock version of a Hollywood agent.
The unusual portrayal may say more about what the producers, Lorenzo Minoli and Judd Parkin, think about show business than about evil (which they may well be equating here). Will viewers go for it? My prediction: absolutely.
What's missing from the story of Pinocchio? The last time we checked, music. What Drew Carey (executive producer; and Geppetto) has done is odd, but oddly effective as well. A musical is one of the rarest creatures in prime-time television and, while this lively production will not spark a musical renaissance on TV, it should-n't hurt either. (Music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz.) Also starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus in her first starring role since “Seinfeld” as the Blue Fairy.
Something television has not been remiss in presenting of late has been the big, expensive, sprawling, special-effects extravaganza, by those masters of the genre, Robert Halmi Sr. and Robert Halmi Jr. Both of these minis-eries are eyefuls: gorgeously produced with first-rate casts (Frank Langella, Sir Derek Jacobi, in “Jason” Alan Bates in “Nights”). This is what television does especially well when it has a mind to.
The only problem is that the Halmi style has fallen on hard times recently. Audiences flat-out rejected February's “Tenth Kingdom.” But these minis — based on familiar stories — should catch a big wave.
Verne Gay also writes about television for Newsday.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Verne Gay ----- KEYWORD: Arts & Culture -------- TITLE: Prizer's Picks DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:Galaxy Quest (1999)
Sci-fi mania is about more than special effects.
One of the reasons movies and TV series like Star Wars and Star Trek have developed huge, cultlike followings is that their futuristic exploits are set against a well-ordered moral universe. Good and evil are clearly defined in a way that no longer seems possible in our ever-changing, present-day world.
Galaxy Quest is a clever action-comedy about the cast of a 1970s hit series who support themselves by personal appearances and autograph signings at fan conventions. But a real-life nation of aliens called Thermians have interpreted the show's tacky melodramas as “historical documents,” basing all their moral and scientific laws on the programs’ content. They ask the show's leader, Lt. Cmdr. Taggart (Tim Allen), to help defend them against an evil intruder. The washed-up actors who make up Taggart's crew (Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman and others) must now live out for real the heroic roles they played on the tube. Most of the laughs to be had here are good-natured, but, as reflected in the Register Ratings below, some of the content is not appropriate for kids.
Gettysburg (1993)
The Civil War was fought for moral, economic and political reasons. Academic historians have tended to de-emphasize the struggle's moral component — the abolition of slavery — because of their own materialistic biases. Gettysburg, a four-hour TNT minis-eries, restores religious belief to the proper role it played on both sides of the conflict. Based on Michael Shara's novel The Killer Angels, it focuses on the bloody battle itself, in which 158,000 men fought and 43,000 were killed the first three days of July 1863.
The firm commitment of some Union soldiers to the moral rightness of their cause is effectively dramatized by the awesome bravery of the troops from Maine commanded by Col. Chamberlain (Jeff Daniels) during an early skirmish. On the Confederate side, we watch Gen. Robert E. Lee (Martin Sheen) decide to launch a suicidal attack against superior numbers because of an almost mystical faith in his own forces. When it's all over, you'll feel like you were actually there.
Hoodlum Priest (1961)
St. Dismas is the name traditionally given to the repentant good thief who was crucified with Christ (Luke 23:39-43). The Hoodlum Priest, directed by Irvin Kershner (The Empire Strikes Back), is a moving, documentary-style, low-budget feature about Jesuit Father Charles Dismas Clark, whose real-life ministry is connected to his middle name. Billy Lee Jackson (Keir Dullea) is an ex-con for whom Clark (Don Murray) finds a job in a produce market. The young man is wrongly accused of a crime by the market's manager and unjustly fired. Determined to get even, Jackson robs his former bosses. But during the heist an employee is killed. The ex-con is convicted and sentenced to death.
Clark continues to try to save the young thief's soul. “I want you to keep thinking of St. Dismas,” he counsels as they walk to the gas chamber. “Remember the only person who went to heaven right away was a convict just like you.”
Pride and Prejudice (1940)
A firm sense of moral values can go awry and become overly judgmental when not allied with reason and compassion. This is the lesson Elizabeth Bennet (Greer Garson) must learn in this Oscar-winning version of Jane Austen's witty novel of late 18th-century manners. Elizabeth is one of five daughters whose country home and estate are bequeathed to a distant cousin (Melville Cooper) by quirk of inheritance. As a result, their scheming mother (Mary Boland) insists they all must marry well.
The Bennets’ fondest dreams seem about to be realized when the rich, handsome, haughty Mr. Darcy (Laurence Olivier) falls for Elizabeth. However, the independent-minded woman spurns him because of ugly stories she's heard about his past. Later developments prove her judgment wrong, but it looks like her change of heart may h a v e come too late. The movie recreates the novel's brilliant mix of romance and satire with an elegant, classic style that audiences still find appealing.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Arts & Culture -------- TITLE: Canadian Showdown DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:Like all students at Trinity Western University in Vancouver, British Columbia, education majors pledge not to smoke, drink, swear, take drugs or fornicate. Does this make them unfit to teach Canada's children?
Yes, says the British Columbia College of Teachers, the professional regulating body for educators in this western province. Now that group is taking its case against the evangelical Protestant institution to Canada's Supreme Court.
It's a case that has Canadian bishops worried about implications for Catholic education — indeed, for the concept of religious freedom — in the country. The bishops are seeking to have a voice in the defense of the school before the Supreme Court.
According to the College of Teachers, Trinity Western's Bible-based behavioral restrictions on such practices as premarital and homosexual sex discriminate against homosexuals; the College of Teachers says Trinity's standards also incline graduating teachers toward prejudice against any homosexually active students they might end up teaching. The school's executive vice president, Guy Saffold, says such charges are unfounded. Not only are Trinity Western students taught to respect the dignity of those they may not agree with, he says, but the behavior of the College of Teachers is “an intrusion into religious freedom and civil liberty” in Canada.
Located in Langley, just east of Vancouver, Trinity Western has operated a four-year degree program in teacher education since 1985. Education students must take their fifth and final year of teacher-training through a public, secular university before gaining certification.
In 1995, the school applied to the College of Teachers to offer the required certification year on campus. Despite approval from the College of Teachers’ own program-approval team, it eventually rejected the application on the grounds of discrimination. A frustrated Saffold says, “They ignored the evidence and then chose to go with a vague fear rather than anything specific.”
Doug Smart, registrar of the College of Teachers, says the organization is concerned about whether Trinity Western is an “appropriate setting to be preparing teachers for the public school system.” The basis for the concern, he adds, is the statement Trinity Western students and faculty must sign which “essentially condemns homosexuality as a sin.” He points out that homosexuality is a protected right under the decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada.
Fourth-year education student Kerby Court says that's the real crux of the problem. Court, 28, who commutes to the campus each day from Bellingham, Wash., also says students are “very aware” of the upcoming court case. “You're under the watchful eye of many people,” he says. There's a certain irony in this, he notes, because “Trinity Western is probably more open to talking about issues” than most other universities.
Trinity Western appealed to the British Columbia Supreme Court to have the College of Teachers’ decision overturned, and both that court and the British Columbia Court of Appeal have sided with the university.
Justice W.H. Davies of the British Columbia Supreme Court ruled that no evidence had been submitted that Trinity Western graduates were biased. Justice Michael Goldie, writing for the appeal court, noted that many Trinity students already teach in public schools and there is “not one bit of evidence that any one of them has behaved in the classroom in a manner incompatible with the standards of the Canadian community.”
Both the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association and the Catholic Civil Rights
League have intervened on Trinity Western's behalf in court. Even the Vancouver Sun, which rarely misses an opportunity to castigate religious practitioners, advised the College of Teachers in a Jan. 4, 1999, editorial to “give up [the] fight” against Trinity Western and “find better things to do.”
Digging Heels In
Yet, instead, the College of Teachers has decided to appeal the case to the Supreme Court, spurring the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops to apply to intervene in the case, which is expected to be heard this fall. If their application is accepted, the bishops will argue with several other faith groups that, if the College of Teachers is successful, attacks on Catholic education in Canada will follow. These would surely include a demand for Catholic schools to cease giving Catholic preference when hiring to fill teaching positions.
“The case has wide implications for the Catholic Church and Catholic education right across the country,” says Bill Sammon, a lawyer for the Canadian bishops in Ottawa. Seeking intervenor status along with the Catholic bishops is the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Canada and the Christian Legal Fellowship, as well as civil-liberties organizations.
Supporting the College of Teachers are a homosexual lobby group and a group of Ontario high school teachers who claim Trinity Western students are being indoctrinated in a racist and sexist world-view. This is supported by a dissenting opinion from an appeals-court judge, Justice Anne Rowles, who wrote that teachers educated at Trinity could be perceived as discriminatory and the public interest may require “something more than mere tolerance.”
Sammon asks, if that were true, then why are Trinity Western students in such high demand in the public school system that the university can't turn them out fast enough?
The Canadian bishops’ apprehension is that teachers trained in the Catholic system might similarly be regarded as intolerant of homosexuals, says Sammon. “It's an assumption that is made on no evidentiary basis, and it's a real concern when you have a public body making decisions, based on their own perception of what might be, without any evidence of it at all.”
Whether the Supreme Court of Canada will follow the lead of the lower courts is anyone's guess. The court has in recent years ruled that homosexuality is an “immutable characteristic” like race or sex and is therefore protected from discrimination under Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In another case, it ordered the province of Alberta to extend protection to homosexuals under its Human Rights Act.
Religious Liberties
Saffold agrees the Trinity Western case could impact religious freedoms across the country, including Catholic education. Legal decisions have a way of becoming generalized, he says, giving room for applications in unexpected areas.
If the Canadian Bishops’ Conference is granted intervenor status, Catholic and evangelical lawyers will argue together before the court — a once-unusual scenario that is becoming increasingly common. In recent years, Catholic and evangelical lawyers have argued that a pregnant, glue-sniffing woman should be jailed for the protection of her unborn baby, and that a child should be able to sue his mother for injuries sustained while she was carrying him in her womb.
Later this year, Catholic and evangelical lawyers will argue a case that could affect euthanasia law in Canada. The issue involves a Saskatchewan farmer who killed his physically disabled daughter by placing her in his truck and running an exhaust hose into the cab.
Saffold agrees that the relationship between evangelicals and Catholics is warming. He noted that, after years of discussions, Trinity Western and the Archdiocese of Vancouver reached a deal to establish a Catholic college on campus: Redeemer Pacific College opened its doors last September.
In a society that more often sees people with religious faith as intruders, Saffold says evangelicals and Catholics are recognizing that they share a “common worldview and moral framework.”
Paul Schratz writes from Vancouver, British Columbia.
----- EXCERPT: Catholics show solidarity with evangelical college under fire for imbuing teachers with religious values ----- EXTENDED BODY: Paul Schratz ----- KEYWORD: Education -------- TITLE: Mexican-American Center Goes High-tech DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:SAN ANTONIO — Two years shy of its 30th anniversary, the Mexican American Cultural Center has opened a new $6 million campus with 11 new buildings equipped to bring the center up to date with the computer age.
The Mexican American Cultural Center was founded in 1972 to provide ministry training grounded in the Mexican-American culture. Its programs now are multicultural and include various pastoral ministry courses and intensive language training.
Among the projects the center will be involved with at its new location is a three-year national project in collaboration with the Hispanic National Alliance of Evangelical Ministries.
The project “Hispanic Churches in American Public Life,” will study the impact of religion on politics and civic engagement in the Latino community.
Funded by a $1.3 million grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts, it will examine the impact of Latino Catholic, mainline Protestant, Pentecostal and new religious communities on civic engagement, politics, education, business, social programs and community activism.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Education -------- TITLE: Education Notebook DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:Georgetown Suppression Called ‘Obscene’
Editors for The Hoya fired senior Robert Swope for writing a column that they said was not “constructive.” Swope had written that the play, which approvingly features a lesbian, pedophilic rape of a 13-year-old girl, was not appropriate for showing on the Catholic campus.
The Journal also noted that the firing caught the attention of a famous alumnus.
In a letter to The Hoya editors, William Peter Blatty, Class of ‘50, wrote: “With all that the demon says and does in my novel and film The Exorcist, never until I read of The Hoya's and [President] O'Donovan's support of ‘The Vagina Monologues,’ and their suppression of Robert Swope's article, have I truly appreciated the meaning of the word ‘obscenity.’”
Ave Maria Law to Host Conference on Natural Law
ZENIT, April 16 — Scholars will debate and discuss St. Thomas Aquinas and natural law at a conference to be held at the new Ave Maria Law School in Ann Arbor, Mich., June 2-4.
The conference, called “St. Thomas and the Natural Law Tradition,” will feature Janet Smith of the University of Dallas, Robert George of Princeton University, David Novak of the University of Toronto, Father Robert Sirico of the Acton Institute and William May of the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family. Ave Maria Law School, launched by Domino's Pizza founder Tom Monaghan, will officially open its doors in August.
Students Support Diversity But Not Affirmative Action
The finding came from a poll of 1,004 students commissioned by the New York-based Foundation for Academic Standards and Tradition. The poll also found that 84% considered ethnic diversity important, though 79% said that lowering the entrance requirements to achieve diversity was unfair to students, the Chronicle reported.
And 77% said it was not right to give preferential treatment to minority students, if it meant denying admission to other students.
The Chronicle also reported that a recent survey of the nation's freshmen by the Higher Education Research Institute, at the University of California at Los Angeles, found that nearly half believe that affirmative action should be abolished.
Priest Reviews Friar's Efforts To Save Jewish Kids From Nazis
CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE, April 12 — When the Nazis occupied France, Father Jacques Bunel, a French Carmelite, had “only one moral, human course or action” — to help save Jewish children, said a priesthistorian April 11, the Catholic News Service reported.
Father Francis J. Murphy, a professor of history at Boston College, told the story of the friar, better known as “Pere Jacques,” in a lecture at the Catholic University of America to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth.
Father Murphy said, “The Lord did not propose the parable of the good Samaritan or the new command of love as options.
The fact that the majority of his compatriots and even his own government did not follow this ideal was for him both sad and sinful, but in no way diminished his duty,” the Catholic News Service reported.
The Carmelite hid Jewish boys and others in the school he helped found near Paris, Le Petit-College, where he also was headmaster. He was arrested in January 1944 and sent to a concentration camp in Germany.
He was liberated by Americans at Mauthausen in May 1945, but he died less than a month later.
On the 40th anniversary of Pere Jacques’ death, the state of Israel posthumously awarded him the Medal of the Righteous Among the Nations, a recognition of those who saved Jews from the Holocaust, the Catholic News Service reported.
In 1997, he and other Catholic rescuers were honored by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Said Father Murphy, “For Pere Jacques, the Jews were, in theological terms, God's chosen people, and in spiritual terms his brothers and sisters.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Education -------- TITLE: Modern Myths About Cohabitation DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:Nearly 4 million couples were living together outside marriage in 1990, eight times as many as in 1970, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Linda Waite, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, has done several studies on cohabitation and marriage. She spoke of modern myths about the lifestyle recently with Register correspondent Jay Copp. Her book, The Case for Marriage, will be published in the fall.
Copp: What is a major drawback of cohabitation?
Waite: People who cohabit are more likely to get a divorce. We know that's true in every society where it's been studied — Sweden, Canada, the United States.
People who cohabit say they do so to find out more about the person before they marry them. It doesn't work that way. If it worked that way and if people who lived together got more information to make a better marital choice, then people who cohabit should be less likely to get a divorce than people who married. In fact, it works just the opposite.
Why is divorce more common in cohabitation?
It's pretty clear that cohabitation changes people's attitudes toward marriage and divorce. It makes them more accepting of divorce and less positive about marriage as an institution. People who think divorce is an option invest less in their marriage. Because they think marriage is something they can get out of, they keep their exit doors open.
I think a lot of people who cohabit don't want marriage. What they want is something with lower costs, and it may be the benefits are commensurate with the costs.
There's a little bit of evidence that cohabiting is really bad for women with children. The uncertainty about the future of the relationship has big costs in emotional well-being for the children — depression and so on.
What about the rates of domestic violence?
Seventeen percent of cohabiting couples who had no plans to marry said their arguments became physical over the last year. It was 14% for cohabiting couples who plan to marry and 6% for married couples.
How about faithfulness?
Both men and women who are cohabiting are substantially more likely to report they had a second sex partner in the last year, although almost all married partners and cohabiting couples expected the relationship to be monogamous. You have to be careful about cause and effect. But a study at Brigham Young followed women over time and found that when women got married, the chances they had a second partner went way down. So their argument is that marriage causes a change in people's faithfulness.
So what exactly are the benefits of marriage, according to studies?
Longer life, better physical health, better emotional health, more satisfying sex life, better options for kids, improved career prospects for men. Marriage delivers benefits in different ways for men and women.
How's that?
Women tend to manage the family's emotional life. Women also manage health care and health behaviors in families. So married men have someone who has a big investment in what they're doing and watches out for their health. They also have somebody who is watching out for their emotional well-being.
In what way is men's health better?
Married men are less likely to drink, less likely to drink and drive. Drug usage goes down. Emotional health seems to get better.
So wives nagging their husbands is a good thing?
I think it's true. The reason that men's health improves when they get married is they sort of clean up their act. They reduce drinking and smoking. They live more orderly, healthy lives. One of the reasons they do so is because their wives won't put up with them coming home at midnight from the bar with their buddies. They have a home, a family, someone who matters to them. They do things they wouldn't otherwise do. They sit down for dinner with their wives instead of grabbing a cheeseburger and a six-pack.
Tell me about the financial benefits of marriage?
They're pretty striking. Any two people living together and working will have a better standard of living. This benefit is available to both cohabits and married people. But marriage improves men's career prospects. So they earn more. And something about marriage encourages people to save and invest. All these differences mean by the time you reach retirement-age the difference between married people and single people in terms of assets and wealth is huge.
An influential study by sociologist Jessie Bernard in 1972 basically concluded that marriage is good for husbands but bad for wives. True or false?
False. Recent studies don't support her conclusions. She did no original research. Most of her results were from the mid-1960s. She reinterpreted people's results and said, “Oh, look at this.” She focused only on psychological well-being. And she didn't look at changes in psychological well-being when marital status changed.
She found that married women had higher levels of psychological symptoms than single women, which studies now do not support. She mostly compared married men to married women, and women always report more psychological symptoms and distress than men do. She didn't look enough at married women compared to single women.
Is marriage as an institution declining?
USA Today does a poll every year and asks young adults what their life goals are. Having a happy marriage is the No. 1 goal. Young adults may be more worried about achieving this goal but they still hold it.
Jay Copp writes from Chicago.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Life Notes DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:Web Site Goes After Morning After Pill
AMERICAN LIFE LEAGUE, April 13 — American Life League is launching http://www.morningafterpill.org, a new Internet site designed to counteract widespread misinformation about so-called emergency contraception, better known as the “morning after” pill.
“Calling these pills ‘contraceptives’ is a lie,” said ALL president Judie Brown. “It's not contraception. It's abortion.”
Morning-after pill manufacturers freely admit that the pills can act to stop implantation of a fertilized egg.
“These spin doctors then try to tell us that ‘pregnancy’ does not begin until implantation, and therefore this action is not an abortion,” said Brown. “Life has already begun at fertilization and any chemical agent that acts to end that life is abortifacient. The morning-after pill is a killer.”
The facts on the site are backed up by medical and scientific endorsements, including links to physicians’ statements, journal articles and textbook excerpts that point out the clearly abortifacient nature of emergency contraception.
Japan Aims to Ban Human Cloning
BBC NEWS ONLINE, April 14 — The Japanese government has proposed new laws to outlaw human cloning, the BBC reported.
A bill before parliament would make it an offense to implant a cloned human embryo inside a woman. It would also ban the creation of hybrid embryos containing human and animal genes.
Research into cloning will still be allowed, but only under strict conditions. The bill marks the first attempt by Japan to impose legal restraints on gene technology.
Countries of the European Union have already imposed similar restrictions.
Hungarian Tries Ethnic Cleansing Via Contraceptives
LIFE SITE DAILY NEWS, April 11 — A Hungarian official is in trouble for proposing the distribution of free contraceptives to the country's Gypsies, known locally as Roma.
A news brief in the British Medical Journal of April 1 noted that Peter Szégvári, deputy state secretary in the Hungarian prime minister's office, had approved a proposal for supplying free contraceptives to the country's 500,000 Roma population to combat “excessive multiplication.”
The government is considering legal action against him for the violation of laws that protect minority rights.
Thousands of Unwanted Embryos Perish in England
REUTERS, April 14 — Tens of thousands of frozen human embryos have been destroyed in Britain because couples are not using them for fertility treatment and they are not being donated to childless couples, the news service reported.
Under British law, frozen embryos must be thawed after five years unless the couples or donors request a five-year extension.
A study at two fertility clinics in Manchester, published in The Lancet, a medical journal, showed 904 of 1,344 frozen embryos had been thawed because couples had not requested an extension or donated them to other couples or for research, Reuters reported.
“We are extremely concerned at the high rate of embryo destruction highlighted by this study,” said Dr. Brian Lieberman of St. Mary's Hospital in Manchester, who conducted the study.
The Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, which regulates the country's 120 fertility clinics, said it was difficult to know how many embryos have been destroyed because it is a rolling program and the authority is not notified when embryos are thawed. But it estimates that 51,000 embryos were thawed between April 1997 and March 1998, reported Reuters.
The government is considering lifting a ban on using embryos for therapeutic cloning research to develop treatments for diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson's.
Doctor Attempts Forced Abortion With Syringe on His Lover, Police Say
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, April 17 — An abortionist was arraigned on charges of assault, abortion and criminal possession of a weapon after a bizarre syringe attack on a nurse outside a Bronx hospital, the wire service reported.
Prosecutors say the attack was an attempt to abort the nurse's unborn baby by injecting her with methotrexate, a drug used to induce labor or an abortion, AP reported.
Dr. Stephen Pack, 44, reportedly had been romantically involved with the woman. The nurse, 31, was stabbed five times in the leg and once in the buttocks. She was admitted to a hospital in stable condition. The New York Post reported she was undergoing treatment to counteract the drug.
According to the Bronx district attorney's office, Pack shouted, “I'm giving you an abortion!” and forced the woman, who is six- to eight-weeks pregnant, to the ground. He was arrested minutes later.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: The Gospel Of Life DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:Pope John Paul II addressed the problem of couples living together outside of marriage (see this week's ProLife Profile on this page) in his apostolic constitution Familiaris Consortio. Instead of condemning or cutting off coupling who live in “unions,” he urges pastoral outreach and efforts to prevent young people, through formation and good example, from even considering such a lifestyle.
The pastors and the ecclesial community should take care to become acquainted with such situations and their actual causes, case by case. They should make tactful and respectful contacts with the couples concerned, and enlighten them patiently, correct them charitably and show them the witness of Christian family life, in such a way as to smooth the path for them to regularize their situation. But above all, there must be a campaign of prevention, by fostering the sense of fidelity in the whole moral and religious training of the young, instructing them concerning the conditions and structures that favor such fidelity, without which there is no true freedom; they must be helped to reach spiritual maturity and enabled to understand the rich human and supernatural reality of marriage as a sacrament. (No. 81)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Did You Know? DATE: 04/30/2000 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: April 30-May 6, 2000 ----- BODY:Across all age groups in the United States, there has been a 45% increase in cohabitation from 1970 to 1990. It is estimated that 60 to 80% of the couples coming to be married are cohabiting.
(Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1995)
----- EXCERPT: Facts of Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORD: Culture of Life --------