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PAGE 4—The Southern Cross, July 15,1971
The Southern Cross
Business Office 22S 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 Postage Paid at Waynesboro, Ga. 30830
Send Change of Address toP.O. Box 10027, Savannah, Ga. 31402
Published weekly except the second and last weeks
in June, July and August and the last week in December.
At 202 E. Sixth St., Waynesboro, Ga. 30830
Subscription Price *2.76 per year by Assement Parishes Diocese of Savannah Others $5 Per Year,
Demarcation Line Dim
“Candor compels acknowledgment,
moreover, that we can only dimly
perceive the lines of demarcation in this
extraordinarily sensitive area of
constitutional law,” wrote Chief Justice
Warren Burger in the majority opinion of
the U.S. Supreme Court decision
Monday outlawing state aid to
church-related schools in Pennsylvania
and Rhode Island. The high court was
speaking of the difficulties in deciding
among different kinds of aid to
church-related grade and high schools,
but we confess that we can only dimly
perceive the line of demarcation between
the court’s approval of aid to
church-related colleges and its
disapproval of aid to church-related
elementary and secondary schools.
We are elated at the court’s 5 to 4
decision upholding the U.S. Higher
Education Facilities Act of 1963 which
authorizes grants of church-related
colleges and universities for constructing
non-religious facilities. But we wonder
how the court came to its conclusion, in
Mr. Burger’s majority opinion, that
“Since religious indoctrination is not a
substantial purpose or activity of these
church-related colleges and universities,
there is less likelihood than in primary
and secondary schools that religion will
permeate the area of secular education.”
If this is an accurate appraisal, we think
serious study of the role and need of
Catholic colleges is called for.
Our greatest disappointment in the
Supreme Court decisions is the emphasis
laid on the question of “excessive
government entanglement with religion.”
This issue was critical in both higher and
lower education decisions; it was found
excessive in the Pennsylvania and Rhode
Island cases and minimal in the Higher
Education Facilities case. The court
chose to ignore the fundamental issue:
whether or not these educational
institutions are or are not performing a
fundamental public service-the
education of the nation’s
youth--regardless of religious
“indoctrination. ”
Most of the free world provides
government aid, including school
construction, teacher salaries and
teaching supplies, to religious schools
and colleges as well as government
educational institutions. Nevertheless,
the high court got hung up on the old
“wall of separation” dogma, although
the Burger opinion for the court
admitted that “the line of separation, far
from being a wall, is a blurred, indistinct
and variable barrier depending on all the
circumstances of a particular
relationship. ”
Extracting from these decisions what
little hope we can, we believe that the
judicial door is still open to certain types
of government aid. The court has not
foreclosed aid in the form of
scholarships or tuition grants which go
directly to the student, or tax credits or
vouchers going to parents or taxpayers
so their children can attend schools of
their choice. In the light of Monday’s
far-reaching decisions, it appears that
these legal and legislative paths are the
routes to follow in the difficult years
that lie ahead.
It took a long time for the social
legislation of the New Deal and civil
rights laws for minority groups to win
the approval of the highest court in the
land. We hope that justice to children
attending schools where religion is
taught>-and not ignored-will not take
quite so long.
- Catholic Bulletin,
St. Paul, Minn.
Tracts For The Times
y
BY REV. MARVIN R. O'CONNELL
I have been abroad only once. That was
seven years ago for a three month period which
was extremely pleasant; even though there was
more work to it than play, it was the kind of
historical work I most enjoy doing. I saw the
lush green countryside of my Irish ancestors,
and was flattered to hear that I have some
resemblance to Daniel O’Connell, still revered
in Ireland as The Liberator. I exulted in the
austere beauty of Edinburgh and saw the gothic
wonders which are the medieval
English cathedrals. I lived in
London for awhile and then in
W j Oxford. I met a host of fascinating
people and stored up enough
3 fascinating memories to last me a
fck *+ J lifetime. Yet the most thrilling
moment of my trip came at the
very end. After I passed through
customs at Kennedy airport, a
stocky, uniformed guard checked my passport.
Handing it back to me, he said, “Welcome
home.” Perhaps it was a prefunctory greeting;
perhaps he had said it a thousand times that
day. But to me it was the sweetest music I had
ever heard.
I am an incurable romantic when it comes to
this country. For all its faults I have no doubt
thatit is the land of the free and the home of
the brave. It seems to me a good thing that
Americans especially since World War II have
shed some of their more naive illusions. Our
painful coming of age only reinforces, in my
judgment, the basic rightness of our institutions
and of our spirit. We have had to leave not a
few of the more cherished American legends in
the rice paddies of Vietnam and in the dark
streets of Selma. But with all that is amiss with
us, there is much more that is good. The great
experiment that began in 1776 goes on.
is far from unblemished. But just as often their
motivation is petty and rude, growing out of
jealously or chauvinism.
The trouble is that travelling American
academics, with their peculiar guilt feelings,
justify to a certain extent the lower kind of
foreign criticism. It is as though the
self-conscious American wants to say something
nasty about his country before his hosts can do
so. I recall during my sojourn in England a
dinner at Cambridge University at which a
prominent physicist and I were the only
American guests. This scientific gentleman
proclaimed, to the approving nods of the
English intellectuals present, that if the
American voters were stupid enough to elect
Senator Goldwater president (it was the
summer of 1964) the whole university
community would leave the U.S. and go into
exile.
“What nonsense,” I said, red-faced, “Where
will they go?” “Anywhere,” he retorted, “to
get away from that warmonger.” Before I could
reply (and I’m not sure I had the courage to do
so) a cultivated English voice was heard at the
end of the table. “I have always marvelled,” it
said, “at the American miracle. Imagine making
a democracy work, even imperfectly, over
millions of square miles and for two hundred
million people. Quite a difference from little
Athens, what? or Holland. Or even this tight
little island. Oh, of course, the American
system has enormous faults. But then nothing
so bold, nothing of such tremendous scope has
ever been tried in the history of the world. I
rather think it can survive Mr. Goldwater or
that other fellow, what’s his name, from
Texas.” The conservation was then steered to
other, less flammable topics.
One of the youthful habits which I hope we
have outgrown is our almost neurotic concern
that the rest of mankind think well of us. I am
not saying that we should not try to deserve the
good opinion of others; rather it seems to me
that we should do the best we can and let
foreign judgment reach its own conclusions.
For in fact, as you may know, it is fashionable
for people all over the globe to criticize
Americans very freely. Not only Mao Tse-tung
attributes all the universe’s ills to the United
States; others, even our formal allies, do the
same. They often have considerable reason, for
our record in dealing with the rest of the world
The English have an admirable weakness for
the underdog, and that may be why the
gentleman quoted above came to my defense.
In age and eminence I was a mongrel puppy
compared to the physicist. But I would like to
think that besides that he grasped something of
the wonder of the American dream which I, in
my awkward way, was so anxious to protect
and of which I was so proud. And I am proud
of it still. It is not, I hope, the pride of the
jingoist who refuses to see what is wrong. It is
the exhilarating astonishment that in an
imperfect universe, among sinful men and
women, so much is right.
If the Court Please
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[t Seems To Me
Observing the departures
of priests--and even of a
couple of bishops-from the
priesthood and the Church, I
can only conclude that they
never understood the Church
and the priesthood in the first
place.
I am
reminded of a
paragraph in
an article by
James J.
Phillips which
appeared in
the National
Catholic News
Service’s
“Know Your
Faith” feature
section.
“Faith that is merely
inherited and never
personally chosen,” said
Phillips, “is not Faith. It is
just a habit.”
Precisely so. And of late
we have been discovering that
it has been “just a habit” for
more Catholics than we
would have supposed.
In announcing a few weeks
ago that he was resigning
from the priesthood,
Auxiliary Bishop Bernard
Kelly of Providence, R.I., said
he was doing so because he
saw “no hope of the U.S.
bishops updating their
attitudes and policies.”
I want to be charitable to
people who do this sort of
Joseph Breijr
thing. But I want also to be
charitable to the bishops and
to the Church. Further, I
want to be honest. The sort
of behavior typified by
Bishop Kelly, and before him
by Bishop James A. Shannon
and many priests, is simply
childishness.
True Christianity can be
childlike, but it can’t be
childish. As Jesus Christ said,
true Christianity never looks
back. When we put our hand
to the plow, we go on
plowing no matter what. We
enlist for the duration. Like
marriage, true Christianity is
until death do us part-except
that not even death can
separate a Christian from the
Faith.
The mature Christian sees
things through. If he thinks
things are going wrong in the
Church, he pours himself into
the labor and the self-sacrifice
involved in trying to set them
right, with God’s help. And
he never forgets the
possibility that it might, after
all, be he, rather than other
people, who is mistaken.
The true Christian, too, has
charity. Even though other
people don’t see things his
way-even though he thinks
them fools or worse-he goes
on loving them in the charity
of Christ. And in the charity
of Christ he voices his own
view while trying to
understand the views of
others.
Bishop Kelly said that the
U.S. Bishops “are more
concerned about internal
trivial affairs than about the
greatest moral issue facing
out country today-the
Vietnam war.”
The Vietnam war is a
moral issue, all right>-but
there are any number of
people (I am one) who are
convinced that the weight of
morality is on the side of the
U.S., not of the Viet Cong
with their numberless
atrocities going back more
than 10 years, and not of
North Vietnam. There are no
South Vietnam military
forces in North Vietnam;
there are a great many of
North Vietnam’s soldiers in
South Vietnam.
But be that as it may, no
true Catholic would walk out
of the Church even if
everybody else in the Church
held a view contrary to his
about the war. And if Bishop
Kelly wants a truly immense
moral issue, let him look at
the countless murders of
unborn infants in abortions.
And at the proposals for the
“mercy” murder of the aged,
the ailing, the handicapped.
Whatever his issue may be,
he’ll never solve it by
departing from Christ in the
Church.
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ATOMIC
ATTACK:
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SIGNS OF THE TIMES: In the event of atomic attack: all rules against praying in school are
suspended. (NC PHOTO)
The
Yardstick
Msgr. George G. Higgins
Director, Division of Urban Life. U.S.C.C.
A TIME FOR GOOD WILL,
NOT RECRIMINATION
Newsweek made a very good point, I think,
when at the end of its June 28 cover story on
the controversy regarding the famous Pentagon
papers, it cautioned its readers to bear in mind
that there are deep issues involved here which
cannot be settled by any court of law, including
the Supreme Court of the United States. What’s
really involved, the Newsweek story points out,
is “the quickening impulse somehow to settle
accounts for a war that is now running down to
its bitter ending. ”
The editors of Newsweek are realistic enough
to recognize that this primitive impulse to settle
political accounts, and to do so rather
self-righteously, is almost inevitable.
Nevertheless they are seriously concerned about
the possibility of its being carried too far and
eventually getting out of hand. “The impulse to
judgment is strong,” they conclude, “as the
furor over the Pentagon papers has made plain.
Yet unless that impulse is tempered by reason,
the time of accounting may prove a tragic
aftermath to a tragic war.”
The editors of Newsweek suggest that one
way of tempering “by reason” this potentially
destructive “impulse to judgment” is to try to
force ourselves to realize that the principal
players in the Vietnam drama were - at least
according to their own lights - honest and
conscientious public servants trying to do their
job as well as they could. But if they were
honest men, the editors point out, “they were
limited men as well They served the
orthodoxies of their era and waged their war
accordingly. Their failure was that while they
did a great deal of soul-searching, they did not
finally question its orthodoxies.”
Newsweek ’s sensitive and rather
magnanimous approach to this highly volatile
controversy strikes me as being more balanced
than that of James Reston, for example. Mr.
Reston -- who, as a senior editor, reportedly
had a lot to do with the New York Times’
historic and, from my point of view, highly
commendable decision to break the story of the
Pentagon papers - normally writes as a man
whose “impulse to judgment” is under the tight
control of reason. In this case, however, he has
stepped out of character, at least momentarily.
In his New York Times column of June 13,
he says, for example, that “One of the many
extraordinary things in this collection (the
Pentagon papers) is how seldom anybody in the
Kennedy or Johnson Administrations ever
seems to have questioned the moral basis of the
American war effort.” In the same context, he
refers to W.W. Rostow (a leading foreign policy
adviser to both Kennedy and Johnson) as one,
among others, who “concentrated on pragmatic
questions.. .rather then whether they were
justifiable for a great nation fighting for what it
proclaimed were moral purposes.”
Mr. Rostow, as a man of integrity, really had
no choice but to take issue with Mr. Reston’s
sweeping and highly moralistic indictment of
the Kennedy-Johnson “pragmatists.” In his
op-ed essay, “Morality and the War,” published
in the June 22 issue of the New York Times,
Rostow points out -- and properly so - the Mr.
Reston has distorted the issue by drawing a
vastly oversimplified distinction between
‘morality” on the one hand and “pragmatism”
on the other.
Mr. Rostow’s point is that there are, indeed,
a number of very serious moral issues involved
in the pursuit of the national interest -- our own
or anyone else’s - but that they are not simple
issues by any means. He himself, he says - Mr.
Reston to the contrary notwithstanding - has
earnestly wrestled with these issues over a long
period of time and is still wrestling with them.
He lists five such issues, by way of example,
and, in the course of analyzing them, tries to
show that there is no easy “moral” solution to
any of them.
It seems to me that Mr. Restow has the
better of the argument with Mr. Reston. This is
not to suggest that he is right about the war in
Vietnam and that Mr. Reston and the New
York Times are wrong. Quite the contrary, in
fact. Nor is it to suggest that Rostow and the
other Kennedy-Johnson “pragmatists” are
without fault and should not be held
accountable for their stewardship as the
architects of and apologists for our Vietnam
policy.
That’s not the point at all. The point is that,
unless we, as a nation, are willing to give these
men credit for being honest and sincere public
servants - men who did, in fact, struggle,
however unsuccessfully, with the great moral
issues in the field of foreign policy - there is a
real possibility that our primitive “impulse to
judgment” will lead us down the blind alley of
self-righteous political recrimination.
The temptation to give in to the vice of
sanctimonious self-righteousness in the field of
political morality, especially in the area of
foreign policy, is nothing new in American
history. Unfortunately our record as a people in
resisting it hasn’t been very creditable. Many
Americans gave into it with a terrible vengeance
after the so-called “loss” of China following
World War II. Completely ignoring the
complexities of international relations, and
virtually intoxicated by the excitement of the
McCarthy witch hunt, they went on a veritable
rampage looking for scapegoats and found them
in the person of such distinguished patriots as
the late General George Marshall, for example.
We have paid a heavy price for the
oversimplified moralistic fervor of that
“nightmare decade.” History may well record
that part of that price was our tragic
involvement in Vietnam. Be that as it may. we
(Continued on Page ‘6)