Newspaper Page Text
PAGE 3 - November 9.1972
Simplicity, Ecumenism to
Mark Eucharistic Congress
BY PATRICK JOYCE
THE YARRA RIVER meanders through Melbourne, Australia,
where the 40th International Eucharistic Congress will be held
Feb. 18-25. This is a view from the outskirts of the city of 2.3
million, showing traffic on one of its main freeways. The city’s
airport is considered a gateway to Australia’s Outback, home of
the Aborigines which will be a subject of Congress concern. (NC
Photo)
New Method to Select Bishops
Approved by Canon Law Society
BALTIMORE (NC) -- Simplicity and
ecumenism will be two outstanding
qualities of the 1973 International
Eucharistic Congress, according to
Cardinal Lawrence Shehan.
“This will be the first congress to have
an ecumenical flavor,” said Cardinal
Shehan, president of the Vatican’s
Permanent Committee for the
International Eucharistic Congress.
“When they began preparing for it, the
Australia bishops had an ecumenical
service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in
Melbourne at which Dr. Eugene Carson
Blake of the World Council of Churches
was a speaker.”
WASHINGTON (NC) - The Justice
Department has asked the Supreme Court
to approve the constitutionality of a
Pennsylvania law providing payments
from state revenues to parents of
parochial school students.
In a memorandum signed by Daniel M.
Friedman, deputy solicitor general, the
Justice Department said the Pennsylvania
system is constitutional because it does
not “entangle” Church and state.
The 1971 Pennsylvania law provides
direct cash payments of $75 for each
elementary school child and $150 for
each high school child. Twenty-three
percent of revenues received under a
cigarette tax support the payments of,
about $47 million a year.
A three-judge court in Philadelphia said
the law is unconstitutional because it aids
sectarian schools and helps parents
provide a religious education for their
children.
The Pennsylvania attorney general J.
Shane Creamer and a group of parochial
school parents have filed appeals.
The cardinal said that Protestant
churchmen are continuing to cooperate
with Catholics in the planning for the
congress, which will be held in Melbourne
Feb. 18-25, and they will participate in
some of its activities.
Cardinal Shehan will lead a pilgrimage
from his Baltimore archdiocese to the
congress and he will participate in the
ceremonies as president of the
committee.
The committee suggested Melbourne as
the site of the 1973 congress and also
suggested the theme: “Love one another
as I have loved you.” Detailed
arrangements have been made by
The Justice Department memo said
that the payments do not violate the First
Amendment’s provision for separation of
church and state because they are made
to the parents.
The memo also said the system avoids
“entanglement” between church and
state because the state does not examine
or evaluate the education provided in
church-run schools.
“The crucial question is not whether
some benefit accrues to some religious
institution as a consequence of a
legislative program, but whether its
principal or primary effect advances
religion,” the memo said.
“We submit that the principal or
primary effect of the Pennsylvania act is
not the advancement of religion but the
advancement of education.”
The Supreme Court is expected to
decide before the end of the year whether
it will review the Pennsylvania decision.
Last month, the Supreme Court struck
down an Ohio law providing
reimbursement of expenses to parents of
children in nonpublic schools.
Archbishop James R. Knox of Melbourne
and his fellow Australian bishops and
“they have gone to extraordinary
lengths” in preparing for the celebration,
Cardinal Shehan said.
The ecumenical aspects of the congress
represent a great change from earlier days
when Protestants tended to view the
Eucharistic Congress as a prime example
of Catholic triumphalism.
“The very fact that it does have this
ecumenical aspect indicates a certain
reapproachment,” Cardinal Shehan said.
“It indicates an increased understanding
of what the Eucharist means - while
realizing at the same time that this is one
point where we are most sharply
divided.”
Like other recent International
Eucharistic Congresses, the cardinal said
that the Melbourne congress will have less
pageantry and greater emphasis on social
issues that had earlier congresses.
“This is an indication of the change of
the character of the congresses
themselves,” said Cardinal Shehan, who
had attended three congresses - in
Munich in 1960, Bombay in 1964 and
Bogota in 1968 - as a member of the
Vatican committee.
“In Munich great emphasis was placed
on the existence of the concentration
camps,” he said, “and one day was
devoted to a service at Dachau. That
showed that even then the congress had a
tendency to get away from triumphalism.
“It was even more so at Bombay. With
the evidence of poverty so great, the
emphasis was on visiting the poor and
recognizing the need of going out to the
poor. This was demonstrated by the
Pope’s trips.”
Pope Paul VI also attended the
Eucharistic Congress in Bogota where, the
cardinal said, “the needs of the poor were
again stressed.”
“Australia seems to be a rapidly
developing nation,” Cardinal Shehan said.
“Nevertheless the emphasis is again on
people, the importance of family life and
parish life.”
“This is not to be a congress of great
display,” the cardinal said. “There is an
attempt to have it as simple as possible
and to stress as much as possible the
underprivileged and those in need.”
Congress sessions will deal with social
development and ecology, with the
aborigines, Australia’s original
inhabitants, as well as with ecumenical
and other religious topics.
Eucharistic celebrations will open and
close the congress and religious
ceremonies will be held in parishes
throughout the Melbourne archdiocese,
but Cardinal Shehan said that in all of
these there will be efforts to avoid costly
displays.
“The simplicity of the congress will
help reduce the cost,” he said. “This can
be a very good influence on future
congresses. It can show that a Eucharistic
congress can be put on with simplicity
and with not too much expense.”
SEATTLE, Wash. (NC) - The Canon
Law Society of America has proposed a
new method of selecting bishops that
would broaden significantly the role of
diocesan-level priests’ and lay groups in
choosing new bishops in this country.
The society, meeting here Oct. 23-26
also approved a resolution urging the U.
S. bishops to ask Rome for the right to
adjudicate at the diocesan level the cases
of priests who want to return to the lay
state and marry.
In addition, the 200 Catholic
ecclesiastical lawyers asked the bishops to
petition the Vatican not to issue new
rules against “good conscience” marriage
procedures formerly used in this country,
unless such practices were shown to
offend Catholic doctrine.
The society’s proposal on the selection
of bishops will be presented to the U. S.
bishops meeting in Washington in
November. At their meeting, the bishops
are scheduled to select members to a
committee authorized to implement
Vatican rules on choosing bishops issued
during the spring.
Those rules allow the bishops of an
archdiocesan region to consult informally
- although “not collectively” -- with
clergymen and laymen in choosing a
bishop. The Vatican regulations also
permit the prelates to forward their own
list of qualified candidates to Rome
through the country’s apostolic delegate,
and the list does not have to reflect the
opinions of the diocesan level groups or
individuals.
Under the society’s proposal, each of
the country’s 156 dioceses would have a
committee of priests, Religious and
laymen - named by the diocesan pastoral
council - that would draw up a list of
episcopal candidates based upon the
diocese’s needs.
The list would be screened by the
diocesan priests’ senate and forwarded to
the local bishop with comments from the
priest’s group which it deems necessary.
The bishop, said the society, would
then send the list - usually of ten names,
although the bishop may reduce the
number -- to the regional bishops meeting
on the selection of new bishops. The
society’s plan does not allow the local
bishop to add names of his own choice to
the roster of candidates dispatched to the
regional meeting.
This meeting, according to the society,
would submit the names of candidates to
the National Conference of Catholic
Bishops’ committee on bishops’ selection,
which is expected to be formed in
November. Unlike the current practice,
the country’s apostolic delegate is
excluded from the selection process
proposed by the society.
To be implemented the society’s
system would have to be approved by
both the American bishops and the
Vatican. Observers predicted that the
bishops will not be warm to all provisions
of the society’s plan for choosing
prelates, particularly the one excluding
the local bishop from proclaiming his
own candidates for promotion.
In addition to approving the resolution
on selecting bishops, the canon law group
passed a resolution highly critical of the
Vatican’s Doctrinal Congregation’s recent
letter on laicization. The society said that
the document “tended to further
complicate the reasons for which
dispensations from the priestly ministry
may be sought.”
The congregation’s letter said that the
“simple desire to marry” was not a
sufficient reason for laicization.
The resolution also provided that the
American bishops should ask the Holy
See to grant them the right to decide the
status of priests who want to marry.
In another resolution to be submitted
to the bishops, the law group considered
the “good conscience” controversy which
arose last summer. Under the procedure
several dioceses were allowing some
divorced and remarried Catholics to
return to the sacraments if they believed
in “good conscience” that their second
marriages were valid. The Vatican
subsequently disallowed the practices
pending a study.
The law organization’s resolution urged
the U. S. bishops to petition the Vatican
to “take no action contrary to such usage
(‘good conscience’ procedures) unless and
until it can be shown beyond doubt to
offend against Catholic faith concerning
marriage.”
Besides passing the resolutions, the
society chose new officers. Father Donald
E. Heintschel, vicar for Religious in the
Diocese of Toledo, Ohio, was elected
president. Father Bertram Griffin,
chancellor of the Archdiocese of
Portland, Ore., was hamed vice president.
ANIMAL SKIN is the only clothing for
this young man in Ethiopia. The annual
Thanksgiving Clothing Collection,
conducted by Catholic Relief Services
Nov. 19-25, will offer needy persons like
him in 70 countries a chance to dress
more protectively. (NC/CIRIC Photo)
vssemsset
A RIGHT TO HOPE
By Staff, Campaign for Human Development,
United States Catholic Conference
If you lived in a big city and earned $4,137 a year to support
yourself, your spouse, and two children, you would be living at
the government’s “poverty level,” which according to federal
calculations, will get you by. But in reality, such a salary will
allow you to spend $1 a day for food for each of your
dependents, about $100 a month for rent or mortgage, and
about another $100 for doctors, clothing, furniture, utilities,
transportation, school expenses, meat, fruit and an occastional
cultural activity. If a more realistic poverty standard were used
$5,145, which is one-half the median family income in the U.S.,
the number of poor in this country would be 35 million.
Poverty in America is very simply not having. It’s the absence
of things that make life secure and comfortable . . .things like an
interest-drawing bank account, workman’s compensation, skills,
education, life insurance, paid vacations. If you’re poor, though,
chances are you’re too busy trying to survive with the little you
do have to be worried about opening a bank account or getting
away for a long weekend.
Unfortunately, the poor are going to continue to “get by”
just surviving unless somehow those of us who are more richly
endowed in this life can begin to feel a human empathy with
men who suffer, and in the light of this recognition, strike an
alliance with the poor, one based on justice and brotherhood.
Poverty as an American issue has been vaporized into many
related and distracting issues in the last decade: welfare,
militance, riots* law and order, tax burdens, Viet Nam, busing,
scatter-site housing and more. Despite all the talk poverty still
continues. How do we create this solidarity, particularly across
racial and class lines, in a country that is both race - and
class-conscious? Perhaps what are needed are education and
action programs that are at work in both the communities of
the poor and the affluent at the same time, for the same
purpose: to bring people together.
The Campaign for Human Development is bringing people
together and it’s doing this through education and action. The
Campaign, begun over three years ago at the request of the
American Catholic Bishops, has been embraced by the Catholic
community, which supports it at collection time on the Sunday
before Thanksgiving, and by the poor community, which has
begun to benefit from the sharing.
Since the Campaign took up its first collection in November
of 1970, over $16 million has been raised and over 400 self-help
projects have received funding.
This year the annual collection will take place on November
19, in every Church in the U.S. Campaign funds have given these
poor the most precious of opportunities: the chance to decide
how they themselves will break the poverty cycle that frustrates
their human development. Some of these decisions have taken
the form of day care centers, job training programs, education
centers, drug rehabilitation projects, care for the aged and the
sick. The most significant feature of each of these projects is
that the poor have determined their direction and the poor are
those who benefit from their own efforts.
While none of the Campaign’s work would be possible
without the generous offerings of American Catholics each year,
the Human Development Campaign has not assigned top
priority in fund raising. It has not done this because no work for
human development can be possible without first an internal
change of heart within each of us; a conversion that seeks justice
for all men whoever, wherever they are, one that thinks in terms
of “us together” rather than “me alone.” If Christ’s message of
salvation through brotherhood and love means anything to us,
then we will believe, along with St. Paul, that when one member
of this human family hurts, we all suffer because through Christ
we are one.
There are 35 million poor people suffering in this country.
The Campaign is asking us to create a union with them, if only
an ideological one, one of a lifestyle for social justice and the
human development of all mankind. The Campaign believes,
too, that living for social justice is not just a temporary or
peripheral aspect of Christian life. It is an inherent condition in
those who call themselves followers of Christ. Hopefully, our
response on November 19 will give witness to this fact.
ST. PATRICK’S CATHEDRAL, MELBOURNE, Australia, is in the background as
Archbishop James R. Knox (right) and Father Brian Walsh discuss the upcoming
Eucharistic Congress. Archbishop Knox will be the host and Father Walsh is executive
director of the event. (NC Photo)
Government Requests Court
To Approve Parochial Aid