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PAGE 4 — The Southern Cross, January 2,1969
Most Rev. Gerard L. Frey, D.D. President
Rev. Francis J. Donohue, Editor John E. Markwalter, Managing Editor
Phone 234-4574
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Year Of Hope
Hope is to the future what memory is
of the past, the anticipation of good
things which are to come compared with
the remembrance of often bad times
past. Simply because man is by his
nature a forward looking animal, he is,
too, by his very being a hopeful creature.
Bom of the earth, he stretches for
heaven.
\ '
If the year 1967 could be recalled as
one of reform and renewal, perhaps this
past year will have to be remembered as
one of dissent and revolt. Certainly there
is good reason to be thankful that 1968
is now “that was the year that was.” For
it was in many ways marked by turmoil
and tribulation--war in Vietnam, the
invasion of Czechoslovakia, starvation in
Biafra, revolt in colleges across the land,
the assassination of Martin Luther King
and Robert F. Kennedy and dissent in
the Church over Pope Paul’s encyclical,
“Humanae Vitae.”
In both the country and the Church
there was much more than the usual
confusion and contradiction. So many
Americans and even many Catholics
must feel that a sense of direction has
been lost, a spirit of dedication has
disappeared. The nation seems destined
for a new administration which will ask
for a pause, a time to retrench and
rethink the meaning and purpose of
America. The Church, in turn, has
entered in many ways an anti-Conciliar
period, a time many claim for slowing
down renewal and taking stock.
That both country and Church are in
constant need of change is a universally
accepted dictum now--something
wonderful itself to behold, considering
the dogged defense of the eternally fixed
status quo once so popular. The real
problem now seems to be not whether
we will have to continue renewing our
institutions but rather just how fast or
slow we shall move on refashioning
them Hence, even in the darkness of
these times both liberals and
conservatives have some reason for light,
and for hope.
Meanwhile, 1968 will also go down in
history as the year which marked man’s
first real flight in space, a symbol of
things that, are to come. It will also be
remembered in theological circles as the
“Year of Hope” because of the great
popularity of Moltmann, Pannenberg,
Metz et al following upon last year’s fad,
the “Death of God Movement.”
In his Christmas message Pope Paul,
who has certainly spoken his share of
pessimistic words this year, commented
too upon the “active hope” of our time,
“It is even characteristic of (our age’s)
most salient aspects. Everything today
moves and changes under the sign and
with the strength of hope. Today man
thinks, acts and lives by virtue of hope.”
And so the year 1968 is dead. Long
live the year 1968. For the greater and
better future we will make under God
for Church and country in 1969 will
have to be made of raw materials taken
from 1968. In truth as Martin Heidigger,
perhaps the greatest philosopher of this
age, has said the future comes to man
out of his past. We will be what we will
be because we can take what we have
been and transform it into what we
should be.
This is man’s glory. Gifted with
intelligence and freedom, he is
commanded from the beginning to
increase, multiply and take charge of the
earth. From his infancy he learns how to
pick himself up from the ground and
walk forward once again. The “Year of
Hope” accentuates this insight into man.
From the darkness and uncertainty, the
turmoil and trial of this past year, this is
certainly a lesson well worth taking with
us into the new year ahead.
—Scranton Catholic Light—
CITY PROBLEMS AND NEW ADMINIS I II I TION
The Backdrop...
By John J. Daly, Jr.
It seems possible to me most areas of the
nation will find that President-elect Nixon’s
approach to city problems will dovetail very
nicely with the effort stressed by the outgoing
Johnson administration. The South will remain
an exception, however.
Mr. Nixon’s stance, outlined repeatedly
during the campaign, is that the federal
government has done too much of the planning
for urban poverty fighters and has relied too
heavily on big
outlays of federal
funds.
The President
elect has spoken of
programs used in
the past adminis
tration as “custo
dial” in dealing
with urban poor. He has said his proposals to
Congress will be based on a remedial approach,
“one that will involve the poor in th? rebuilding
of their own communities and in the fostering
of self-reliance.”
This will mean an attempt to get more out
of business, and perhaps other segments of
nongovernmental life, but it also will mean that
Mr. Nixon will assign a larger role to state and
local governments. Their hand will be greatly
strengthened in the mapping out of
federally-aided attacks on urban problems and
they will direct most of the spending of federal
funds.
At one point in the campaign, Mr. Nixon
said: “In the ruins of Detroit and Watts and
Newark lies the philosophy of a government
that has outlived its origin and no longer speaks
to its time.”
It was widely feared in the past that an
approach such as Mr. Nixon’s would be
ineffective. Who could expect a city
government which has tolerated slums and
inequality for its black citizens to suddenly
turn over a new leaf? Who didn’t fear that new
and expensive antipoverty programs would not
simply become patronage plums for machine
politicians?
Because of such questions, the Johnson
administration’s abortive “Great Society”
sought to avoid local governments in many of
its major programs. It favored dealing directly
with nonpartisan, community-wide agencies
into whose antipoverty activities it poured
millions-until the soaring cost of the Vietnam
war took its toll.
Perhaps the biggest success of this effort was
the encouragement given to the participation of
poor people and of the general community in
facing the urban problem. True this has been a
mixed blessing. Undoubtedly it has played a
role in the appearance and the platforms given
many militants and black racists, but it has also
developed responsible grassroots leaders and
organizations whose voices are heard loudly on
urban and racial issues. It has also stimulated
the direct involvement of many outside the
ghettoes, including the churches.
One can conclude, therefore, that the
Johnson administration has provided a sort of
check-and-balance system for many cities.
There is less fear that politicians will abuse Mr.
Nixon’s expected assignment of them to more
important roles because there exists in most
areas experienced private groups prepared to
speak out on the direction of programs and to
challenge potential misuses of energies and
funds. One hopes the churches will be among
them.
My expectation is that Mr. Nixon will find a
sympathetic ear in Congress for his approach.
The past Congress voted, for example, to
weaken the hand of the Office of Economic
Opportunity in dealing directly with private
groups. It required that municipal and other
arms of non-federal government will be the
sponsors of community action programs unless
they specifically waive the right to private
groups.
On the other hand, it seems certain that
developments will be far less than ideal in some
areas, notably the Deep South. Some local
governments simply cannot be expected to
become advocates of break-throughs for the
disadvantaged. Mr. Nixon and the Congress are
going to have to find some way to either force
such advocacy or to provide a legislative
formula that will bypass these bodies.
Feast of Holy Family
‘WHO IS A JEW?”
GUEST EDITORIALS
Who Goes?
CHURCH ATTENDANCE is usually
considered a rather good gauge of the vitality of
religious life; a nation with its churches filled is
considered to be one of strong spiritual
reserves. With these sentiments in mind it wJl
come as a shock to many people to find,
according to a Gallup poll, that there is not a
country in the world where even half the
people regularly attend church. Of course, Mr.
Gallup did not poll every nation, so we may
allow that there may be some exceptions, but
the broad picture is there for everyone to see.
The United States leads with 43% attendance,
and Finland is last with 3%.
The United States figures in themselves are
interesting. Sixty-five percent of the Catholics
attend regularly and thirty-eight percent of the
Protestants; thirty-nine percent of the men and
forty-eight percent of the women; the
non-Whites attend better than the Whites; and
the more educated the population, the more
likely to be churchgoers. Moreover, there is also
an age pattern; the thirty to forty-nine age
group attends more often than the twenty-one
to twenty-nine, and even better than the “Over
fifty” group. It also appears that the higher the
family income the more they are apt to be
regular church worshippers.
There are some notes that are disquieting.
The total United States church attendance has
dropped six percentage points in the last
decade, but this is a drop from a peak in the
Fifties; just before World War II slightly more
than one third of the population attended
church regularly. For Catholics the decrease in
the last ten years was nine percentage points as
against five percentage points for our Protestant
neighbors. It is not clear whether the postwar
years represented only a temporary
phenomenon which is now leveling off, since
the polls have only been conducted since 1940
and no long range patterns are available for
study.
It Seems To Me
Strangely and yet not
strangely, the question, “Who
is a Jew” is a topic of lively
discussion among the world’s
Jews - including those of
Israel.
Is one simply born a Jew?
Must one subscribe in some
way to Jewish
religious faith
and practice?
And what
about converts
to Judaism?
At lunch in
Jerusalem’s
King David
Hotel one day, I introduced
what is perhaps a new view
on the subject. Smilingly and
yet not unseriously, I said to
two thoughtful Jewish
companions that as for
myself - believing as I do in
the Covenant and in the
fulfillment of the Promises
and Prophecies in the person
of Jesus - I felt that I might
describe myself, at least in
the religious if not ancestral
sense, as a complete Jew; as
the most Jewish of Jews.
“Whereas,” I concluded,
“You and other Jews would
not consider me a Jew in any
sense.”
I was both surprised and
touched when my friends,
almost in the same breath,
responded, “Well . . .
technically.”
They recalled, then, the
case of Carmelite Father
Daniel O. Rufeisen, a bom
Joseph Breig
Jew wno naa become a
Christian and a priest, and
later appealed to Israel’s
Supreme Court to accept him
as a Jew by nationality.
After much deliberation,
the court, decided that a
person who embraces a
religion other than Judaism
ceases, by that fact, to be a
Jew in the eyes of Israeli law.
All the same, my luncheon
companions understood my
point - that a complete
Christian, seeing that he holds
to the Old Testament as well
as to the New, can look upon
himself, not unreasonably, as
both a Jew and a Christian.
I observed also that Jews
and Christians alike believe in
Messias--the Jew in a
waiting-anticipating way, the
Christian by convinced
realization. Is it not therefore
a deep truth that, when all is
said and done, Judaism and
Christianity, in essence, are
really one indivisible divine*
thing?
Another view of this
question was given to me by
Dr. Yona Malachy, whom I
have already introduced as
director of Israel’s
government Department of
Christian Affairs.
In Dr. Malachy’s eyes,
Jewishness is a threefold
matter of “the People, the
Land, the Book.”
A Jew is born a Jew, says
Dr. Malachy. From his
mother’s womb he enters into
a Peoplehood descended from
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. This
is a Peoplehood with a special
mysterious destiny, and a
divine and human history; a
Peoplehood forever drawn
toward the Promised Land
the Holy City of
Jerusalem . . . toward “The
Land.”
Finally, the Jews are the
“People of the Book” -- of
the Old Testament, the
Covenant which God made
with Abraham, and which
Abraham sealed by his heroic
willingness to sacrifice what
was dearer than life: the life
of his only son.
Dr. Malachy holds that
this Peoplehood is something
so mysteriously real and
strong that if a Jew should
forget, the world, by its
treatment of him, will remind
him.
Like Anglican Pastor Peter
Schneider, to whom I have
referred, Dr. Malachy is a
member of Jerusalem’s
“Rainbow” Jewish-Christian
dialog group.
He believes that if
Christians will understand the
Jewish selfunderstanding as a
matter of “The People, the
Land, the Book,” dialog can
progress faster and farther. In
that light he says, discussion
could proceed free of all
proselytism, and of the
notion of the Church as “the
spiritual Israel” in a sense
that neglects the Jews and
their divine destiny hidden in
the inscrutable wisdom of
Jehovah.
It is notable that Catholic attendance fell off
during a period when Catholic worship itself
was undergoing rather drastic change and
unfamiliar church services were introduced. At
the same time the vernacular language came
into widespread use, and in many areas the time
for worship was made to include evening Mass.
In some places, indeed, the Sunday obligation
has been widened to include Saturday, thus
offering two days for formal weekly public
service. Many people feel that there is a mood
among Catholics which tends to take the
Sunday obligation somewhat less seriously than
formerly, and the figures might possibly
support this. The pollsters seem to believe,
however, that the disinterest on the part of the
young accounts for the changes of the last
decade, and the other factors are more or less
constant. Perhaps what the poll suggests is that
we should know a good deal more than we do
before we jump to any hasty conclusions.
Anxious as we may properly be, we really need
more information to find effective remedies.
Boston Pilot
Thomas
Merton
Thomas Merton is dead at 53, his search for
God ended. From the seclusion of a Trappist
monastery in the Kentucky hills he had exerted
for 27 years his extraordinary gifts of devotion
and beautiful and inspiring expression for his
own spiritual advancement and for the
consolation and encouragement of others.
Few men have come to the Faith through
more labyrinthine ways. The child of a Church
of England father and an American Quaker
mother, Thomas Merton was born in a little
French town in the Pyrenees near the border of
Spain. There was little stability in his early
years and in the pursuit of learning he went
from France to Bermuda and to England and
the United States, where he earned a master’s
degree at Columbia University.
“Your questioning my authority took lots of nerve, so I’m assign
ing you to a run-down parish that should be a real challenge to a
man of your courage.”
While without deep spiritual convictions and
firm religious allegiance, Thomas Merton in his
early years followed a life unrestrained by rigid
restrictions. An experience with communism
was one of the factors that completed his
disillusionment and his decision to change to a
way of life holding the promise of peace of
mind and soul.
The story of his struggle toward spiritual
excellence was presented in one of his early
writings, The Seven Storey Mountain, which
describes a hard spiritual pilgrimage with
sanctity as its luminous objective. It proved to
be a classic of its time and, read by thousands,
turned countless men and women from
preoccupation with things of the world and
moved them to new views of old virtues of
piety and prayer.
Even while living the life of solitude to
which members of the Trappist order are
dedicated, Thomas Merton -- Fr. Louis,
O.C.S.O. -- continued to exert a beneficent
influence in deepening the faith and devotion
of large numbers of people and bringing
comfort to their lives. His books and articles
and poems were numerous and all were
designed to make the road to sanctity clearer
and easier.
In his autobiography Thomas Merton said
the whole work of man in this life is to find
God. It is a purpose which he pursued faithfully
and to which he brought many followers.
Trenton, N.J. Monitor
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