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PAGE 4 - The Southern Cross, February 5,1970
Published at Waynesboro, Ga.
Business Office 225 Abercorn St. Savannah, Ga. 31401
Most Rev. Gerard L. Frey, D.D. President
Rev. Francis J. Donohue, Editor
John E. Markwalter, Managing Editor
Second Class Postaqe Paid at Waynesboro, Ga. 30830
Send Change of Address to P. O. Box 10027, Savannah, Ga. 31402
Published weekly except the second and last weeks
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Subscription price $5.00 per year.
Population Control
And Environment
Whatever else the decade of the 70’s
may bring, it is certain to contain
mounting pleas for population control.
But unlike previous campaigns based
upon fears that birth rates would
outstrip man’s ability to feed himself,
the new crusade will center on the
complaint that allowing more of God’s
children into the world will create an
insoluble “environmental” crisis.
The evidence is mounting rapidly that
mankind in its quest for technological
success has succeeded in fouling its nest.
Once clear waters are being poisoned by
industrial wastes. Smokestacks are
spewing filth into the atmosphere. The
testing of nuclear weapons drenched the
skies with gene-disturbing residue. Public
parks and streets are made grotesque by
the casual tossing of gum wrappers, beer
cans and numerous other by-products of
a canned and packaged civilization.
But all of this being true, why should
some scientists and politicians conclude
that the solution lies in controlling births
rather than controlling and eliminating
the sources of pollution.
David Sills, head of the demographic
division of the Population Council, and
an advocate of family planning, admits
that the answer to curtailing and
eventually eliminating pollution lies with
business executives and technologists,
not individual families.
The present “scare seminars” linking
population control to pollution
elimination are reminiscent of similar
laments heard during the late 50s and
early 60s. On these occasions when
demographers, social scientists and
public officials gathered they would
issue communiques warning about the
dire consequences facing civilization
from famine.
That tactic apparently has been
abandoned. And for good reason.
Scientific ingenuity and improved
agricultural methods have turned an
apparent liability into an obvious asset.
British economist Dr. Colin Clark
reveals that the pendulum has taken a
pronounced swing from scarcity to
surplus. The worry now is that there will
be more food available than people to
consume it.
Even the once agriculturally-depressed
economies of India and Pakistan have
shared in this regeneration. Strains of
wheat and rice have been introduced
which will provide yields 60 percent
higher than what had been possible
previously.
“India and Pakistan are cheerfully
looking forward to becoming food
exporting countries within a few years,”
Dr. Clark said.
Nor is this the only paradox present
in the population control puzzle. Dr.
Norman Ryder of the University of
Wisconsin believes that trends toward
smaller families must be stabilized or
reversed if the U.S. expects to avoid an
economic crisis about which little has
been said.
Noting that the average family size is
currently 2.8 children and falling, the
UW sociologist warns that if it tumbles
below 2.2 children, “economists tell us
we would have a problem of excess
capacity, like ghost towns. We would
have an older population which could
dampen the zest and ambition of youth
this country has been noted for.”
No one interested in improving the
quality of life on this earth will deny
that there are many wrongs crying for
righting. Among them pollution deserves
a high rating. But what should trouble
Christians and all men who value human
life is the constant propaganda that these
deficiencies will be corrected only if
people stop being bom. — T.J.S.
(The Catholic Herald Citizen - Milwaukee)
HOUSING CRISIS MOUNTS
T he B ackdrop...
By John J. Daly, Jr.
It is not news to millions of average
Americans who have looked for new homes in
the past year or so, but the housing
construction industry is in a crisis -
skyrocketing costs have cut very deeply into its
production.
In 1968, in the landmark National Housing
Act, Congress said this nation must meet a goal
of 2.6 million housing starts each year for the
next decade to
accommodate our
population in
decent shelter.
Last year, one
year after adoption
of this priority,
production was far
below target,
running about 1.2 million housing starts. It
tumbled downhill as the year progressed and is
continuing today.
In fact, Paul M. McCracken, chairman of the
Council of Economic Advisers at the White
House, conceded to questioning newsmen at a
recent press briefing that it is fair to say that
“the housing industry is in a recession.”
Concern over the slump and its potentially
disastrous consequences have been apparent in
the capital for months. Who can forget, for
example, George Romney, secretary of the
Department of Housing and Urban
Development, trying to let the air out of the
moon by saying that the collapse of housing
was more important?
Romney, at the time when Vice President
Agnew was talking of sending men on to Mars,
said it was better to “revise and reserve
priorities” after the success of the Apollo space
effort and put “the goal of a decent home for
every American” at the top of national
priorities.
President Nixon’s concern thus far has been
confined to exhortations to the private sector
of the industry and allied fields to be thrifty.
*DeAfcite
His budget for the 1971 fiscal year should make
clear what he intends the government to do.
In mid-January, Mr. Nixon called on labor
and industry to join Federal agencies in
stimulating more construction. But he balanced
this appeal with a warning that he is “firmly
committed” to cutting back growing
inflation-presumably even if this means
cutbacks in Federal housing expenditures and
continued tight money policies.
Mr. Nixon urged that the private sector
increase the amount of savings available in the
economy by cutting back on business
expansion and expenses. Many economists hold
that the diminishing amount of savings,
especially in commercial banks, is a principal
factor in the housing slump. The argument is
that money to finance homes is in short supply,
leading to ever-higher costs of borrowing from
what is available.
Where are the savings? They apparently have
gone into channels other than the 13,000
commercial banks in the nation. The banks
reportedly have suffered an outflow of savings
deposits estimated at as much as $18 billion in
1969 alone. The suspicion is that the money
has been diverted into other investments to
earn higher interest payments than banks can
give, such as Treasury notes which return nearly
8%.
Millions of Americans are being frustrated
by the housing crisis. To ease the burden for
those whom it can most directly benefit, the
Department of Housing and Urban
Development recently said it hopes that in
1970 it can step up construction of low and
moderate income public housing-perhaps as
high as 350,000 units as compared with the
production of 165,000 units last year.
But even if this comes to pass, it does not
directly help the private housing market and,
indeed, would be far below the goal of 600,000
public housing units called for in 1968 by
Congress.
ON PILGRIMAGE - Almost everywhere you go, people are caught up in the motion-commotion
of a world of rapid change. They are on pilgrimage, exploring, searching, wondering and sometimes
worrying about where their own lives ought to lead next in this ever-changing world. The Church
too is on pilgrimage, exploring, searching, wondering and sometimes worrying about where the
Christian task ought to lead next. This is explained further in our know your faith series on page 5.
4 SAINT FOR JOURNALISTS
It Seems To Me
One of the ugliest and yet
most beautiful, most
shameful and yet most
glorious periods in history
was the one that saw the rise
of Stalinism in the Soviet
Union and, in terrified
reaction, of Hitlerism in
Germany.
8 This was a
time of devil-
liness; of huge
wickedness
and splendid
holiness; of
cruelty and
sets the teeth
on edge and,
in contrast, of heroic love and
tenderness.
The Stalinists slew human
beings in the millions,
starving them, machine-
gunning them, filling obscene
prisons and bitter Siberian
concentration camps with
them, so that they died
slowly. The nazis matched
atrocity for atrocity, vileness
for vileness.
Over against that
hideousness, which wrote
pages as damnable as any
since the dawn of human
records, stood the almost
incredible goodness of
countless victims - of
immense throngs of Jews and
Christians who did not lose
their faith in God even when
the very skies seemed to have
turned hell-red forever.
One of these was a Dutch
Carmelite priest, Father Titus
Joseph Breig
Brandsma, whom death freed
at last, in 1942, from the
torments and infamies of the
Hitler concentration camp at
Dachau.
Father Brandsma had been
spiritual director of the
Society of Catholic
Journalists of the
Netherlands. In 1941, the
nazis, after overrunning his
country, started putting
pressure on editors of
Catholic papers, demanding
that they publish nazi
propaganda.
Father Brandsma said no.
He told the Hitler officials
that a Catholic newspaper
could not print material
which contradicted the
teachings of the Church and
the leadership of the bishops.
Further, he sent a letter to
Catholic editors, appealing to
them to sign pledges not to
publish articles favoring the
anti-human, anti-God
philosophy of nazism.
In January 1942, the nazi
secret police hauled Father
Brandsma off to Dachau. Six
months later he died from
brutal beatings and severe
illness. He lived on not only
with God, but in he
veneration of fellow-prisoners
inspired by his great charity
and his unbreakable
confidence in the mysterious
divine goodness which, in its
own way and own time,
rights all wrongs and dissolves
all evils.
Somewhat less than two
years ago, I am sorry to say,
the Dutch Carmelite Fathers
of our day announced their
intention to drop their efforts
to have the Church proclaim
Father Brandsma as a saint.
It would be more in
keeping with Father
Brandsma’s spirit, they said,
to give to the poor the money
that would be needed for
assembling and presenting to
Rome the evidence of his
holiness.
This is typical of a certain
superficial and essentially
materialistic notion which
afflicts many persons
nowadays. It is of a piece
with the error of those who
objected, saying, “The
ointment could have been
sold and the money given to
the poor,” when the weeping
woman anointed Jesus.
Man does not live by bread
alone but by every word
which comes forth from the
mouth of God. We need those
words more than we need
anything else whatever. And
one of God’s greatest words is
the holiness of the martyrs
who, in this vaunted 20th
century, have stood
immovable against two of the
most frightful tyrannies the
world has seen.
What the Dutch Carmelites
ought to do is to proceed
with the sainthood cause of
Father Brandsma, trusting in
God to provide money not
only for that, but also for
helping the poor. Or do they
imagine that God’s arm has
been shortened?
“He keeps saying things like ‘Vanity, vanity, all
is vanity’!”
4 Your Drum
Is Heard
Everywhere’
BY ELSBETH CAMPBELL
MEXICO CITY (NC) - How should
missionaries bring the message of Christ to
peoples whose culture is so different from their
own?
This is a question that Christian missionaries
have been trying to answer for centuries.
The Church in Mexico is now trying to solve
its communications problem with the 50 widely
divergent Indian communities in this country
that have kept their own cultures. And at a
meeting in the small town of Xicotepec de
Juarez, in the state of Puebla, the Church
gathered (Jan. 25-28) anthropologists,
sociologists, missionaries and theologians to
help it study and understand the Indian
cultures for the purpose of evangelization.
“We have begun to realize that we need a
specific apostolate for this type of missionary
work,” Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garcia of San
Cristobal de las Casas told NC News Service.
The bishop-whose diocese is in the state of
Chiapas-is president of the department of
missions of both the Mexican Bishops’
Conference and the Latin American Bishops’
Council (CELAM).
As an example of the problems missionaries
to the Indians face, he said: “We translated the
Lord’s prayer, but when we said, ‘Thy kingdom
come’ to the Indians in their own language, it
did not seem to mean a thing to them. They did
not respond at all. They remained cold. So, we
used one of their own figures of speech and put
the translation this way. ‘Your drum is heard
everywhere.’ That did mean something to them.
They responded.”
“In Mexico-where there are 50 widely
divergent Indian communities living usually in
utter poverty and subhuman conditions-we
find that, despite all their lacks, these people
have kept their own cultures, which in many
ways are entirely different from our own,” the
bishop said. “How should we carry the
Christian message to them?”
Bishop Ruiz emphasized the need to respect
the dignity of man. “If we set out to destroy
his culture and try to impose our own upon
him instead, it is an offense against his dignity,
his right to his own way of thinking. We have
become convinced that the thing to do is study
Indian cultures, ourselves; that we should
discard our former paternalistic attitude toward
them, so that we can understand the people we
are trying to help.”
The study of indigenous cultures, the bishop
said, can be a twofold thing: it can help the
missionary to teach and it can teach him a good
deal.
Catholic missions undertake three things,
Bishop Ruiz explained: preaching or
evangelization, social development and
sanctification.
“We come along, and sometimes we mean
well, but we do the wrong thing. For instance,
there was a village which had no running water,
so we brought engineers, technicians, plumbers.
We urged the people themselves to help with
the work and they did. The pipes were installed
in their homes. Shortly afterwards, however, we
began to notice that the people of that village
were sad. Why? Because with all our good
intentions we had taken away their one way of
communicating with each other; we had
eliminated their former need to meet at the
place where there was water. They no longer
had to go there, they had running water in their
homes and therefore they no longer had an
excuse to meet and talk to each other at the
place where there was water.
“We had taken away their one means of
communication. The village-you could scarcely
call it that; it was a few scattered huts--had no
newspaper, no radio, nothing, just a few
people.”
In the work of sanctification, the bishop
said, sacramental rites have a much deeper
meaning to indigenous people than they have
for European cultures. Indians, he said, search
for specific ties, for deeper ritualistic meanings,
and this needs to be understood by the
missionaries.
Bishop Ruiz claimed that the first
missionaries in Mexico revealed a much greater
capacity to communicate with Mexican Indians
than present Catholic missionaries. “From the
Spanish conquest to Mexican independence,”
he explained, “the Church in Mexico was
Indian-minded, but from independence (1822)
on, the Church here became Europeanized, so
that today, instead of integrating-or helping to
integrate--the 3.5 million pure-blooded Indians
there are in this country today, we are pushing
them even further away from the rest of us.”
Mexican Catholic missions also try to help
the development of the human person, but the
bishop asked: “How can we help a person to
develop if we do not understand him?
“In recent years, we have changed our own
attitude. We used to ask ourselves what they
think they need, what their spiritual-as well as
their material-needs really are?
“We stopped being paternalistic. Instead, in
missions in chiapas, we began to ask Indian
elders to tell us their needs, their points of
view, and then we asked them to help with the
missionary work. In this new way, we
accomplished more in two weeks than formerly
we had accomplished in four years. Why?
Because they and we had suddenly discovered
that we were equals.”
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