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PAGE 3—December 21,1972
IN CONSTITUTION
Irish Republic Deletes Church’s 4 Special Position
BY JOHN KAVANAGH
DUBLIN (NC) - The Irish Republic’s
voters agreed by an overwhelming
six-to-one majority Dec. 7 to delete the
reference to the. “special position” of
the Catholic Church in the country’s
constitution.
At the same time, the republic’s
voting age was lowered to 18.
Cardinal William Conway of Armagh,
Northern Ireland, primate of all Ireland,
had commented before the voting that
he “would not shed a single tear” if the
reference to the Catholic Church,
Article 44, were repealed. The Cardinal
noted that the constitutional clause did
not give the Catholic Church any special
position in Ireland, but simply
recognized what existed in fact: the
Catholic faith of the vast majority of
Irish men and women.
Nonetheless, a splinter group of
Catholic laymen and a few priests
campaigned against repealing Article 44.
The leader of the group, Desmond
Broadberry, said that the failure of his
group’s campaign was due to the
campaign by all major Irish political
parties backing repeal.
The final voting figures on Article 44,
on the position of the Church, were
721,003 in favor. 133.434 against. On
the vote at age 18 issue, 724,836 voted
in favor and 131,514 against.
Politicians in the republic have been
encouraged by the sweeping majority
supporting the change, but they are
distinctly unhappy about the
unexpectedly low turnout.
Well under half the Irish electorate
took the trouble to vote in favor of a
more secular constitution, and it seems
unlikely that the result will have any
significent impact on the Protestant
majority in Northern Ireland.
Prime Minister Jack Lynch had hoped
for a turnout of up to 20 percent
higher. “I admit to some
disappointment at the low poll, though
I can well understand and appreciate the
factors that led to it, such as poor
weather, the fact that it was thought to
be a foregone conclusion, and the
absence of any element of controversy,”
he said.
Lynch indicated that the latest
change is not the signal for a sudden
overhaul of the entire Irish constitution.
He said, for example that only one of
the three main Protestant churches in
Northern Ireland accepts divorce, and
he has already said that his cabinet has
never contemplated changing the law
banning the sale of contraceptives.
The cynicism of Northern Ireland
Protestants toward the referendum was
expressed by the Rev.Ian Paisley, who
said that the constitutional recognition
of the special position of the Roman
Catholic Church only states “known
facts, that the great majority of citizens
in the south profess their faith.” Even
though this is
done away
with, he
said,“there remain parts
of
the
constitution
which
are
an
insurmountable
obstacle
to
good
neighborlessness
countries.
between
our
two
“The changes do not make any
difference to the question of Irish unity.
If the people of Southern Ireland
thought that a vote to remove Article
44 would be a decisive step toward a
united Ireland they would have voted
overwhelmingly.”
English Anti-smut
Crusader Tours U.S.
BY JERRY FILTEAU
WASHINGTON (NC) - America’s
image of morality crusaders as little old
ladies in white tennis shoes could suffer
a serious blow this December.
On a two-week tour of the United
States is Mrs. Mary Whitehouse,
affectionately described by her English
countrymen as their “most notorious
bluestocking.”
But the “little old lady” image just
doesn’t fit Mrs. Whitehouse. At 62 she is
tall and dignified, with a vigor and
professionalism that belie her age. When
interviewed by NC News upon her
arrival here, she was stylishly dressed in
an attractive gray tweed suit.
A mother of three and former
schoolteacher, Mrs. Whitehouse has
been making headlines in England for
10 years by battling the British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) over
the moral tone of their programming.
Just before she left England to tour
the United States, she created a new
flurry of headlines by calling for a
complete ban of the song “Dingaling”
on British airwaves. Supposedly a song
about children playing with their toy
bells, the song “has obvious
innuendoes,’’said Mrs. Whitehouse.
She told NC News that her interest in
the moral tone of broadcasting dated
from an incident in 1963, when she was
still teaching school. After viewing a
prime-time TV discussion of premarital
sex, said Mrs. Whitehouse, “a group of
my students came to school the next
day convinced that ‘intercourse is all
right after you are engaged.’ ”
“If a single, 45-minute program could
have this effect” on children’s thinking,
said Mrs. Whitehouse, she wondered
what profound effects the BBC’s
over-all programming was having.
Soon she became so enmeshed in a
series of battles over BBC programs that
she had to give up her teaching job to
devote her full time to the flight.
She started a national Clean Up TV
Campaign which eventually resulted in
almost 500,000 signatures on a petition
to Parliament urging that “the BBC be
asked to make a radical change of policy
and produce programmes which build
character instead of destroying it, which
encourage and sustain faith in God and
bring Him back to the heart of the
British family and national life.”
From this campaign came the
National Viewers and Listeners
Association (VALA), which Mrs.
Whitehouse said is trying to develop
“structures for viewer participation” in
TV programming.
Constantly accused by British
newspaper columnists of trying to
impose “censorship” on television, Mrs.
Whitehouse vigorously denies it.
She told NC News that VALA is
attempting to develop an independent
advisory council for the BBC. “There
are advisory councils for television in
our country,” she said, “but the
broadcasting company appoints them.
Naturally, they are under the company’s
control. They must be completely
independent.”
She said accusations that she is
representative only of a narrow,
sectarian group are totally false. “We
have organized a nationwide petition for
public decency,” she said.
“It’s really a question of the degree
to which people who are concerned are
willing to get involved - there is only a
small percentage that will get actively
involved.”
Mrs. Whitehouse helped organize the
“Festival of Light” demonstration
against pornography in London last
year, which attracted 35,000
participants in Trafalgar Square and
60,000 in Hyde Park.
Asked about counterdemonstration
charges that the Festival of Light
ignored larger moral issues such as war
and economic imperialism, Mrs.
Whitehouse said:
“I meet that question on college
campuses wherever I go. My answer is,
‘yes I think these are serious issues, too.
But what are you doing about the war
or these other evils? If you’ve donated
as much time and effort to fighting
some other evil as I have in my fight,
then you deserve a hearing, too.’
“You delude yourself if you speak of
‘private porn’,” Mrs. Whitehouse
continued. “The quality of a nation’s
cultural and moral life will profoundly
affect it’s political life.
“I’m concerned as anyone about
pollution, housing, the tragic war in
Vietnam,” she said. But she added that
she saw the breakdown in sexual
morality and the family as a central
issue to be dealt with.
Is she opposed, then, to sex
education in the schools? “No,” she
answered, “but it should be taught in
the context of chastity before marriage
and fidelity within it.
“I was responsible for pioneering a
sex education program in the ’60s. But
it was a program of education for living,
with sex education as part of it, and it
required the involvement of the parents.
“The right place for sex education is
in the home,” she added, “but we need
a generation of children who are able to
give it.”
Mrs. Whitehouse said she thought
America and England could each
contribute to the other in the battle
against pornography and obscenity. Her
trip here, sponsored by the U.S.
organization Citizens for Decent
Literature (CDL), covers New York,
Washington, St. Louis and Los Angeles,
with numerous press conferences, TV
appearances and meetings to generate
more grass-roots interest and in the
anti-smut fight.
“In England we have the grass-roots
support,” said Mrs. Whitehouse, “but
we haven’t developed the legal
organization and skills that CDL uses
over here to fight obscenity in the
courts and legislatures.”
NCEA Acting President
WASHINGTON (NC) - The National
Catholic Educational Association
(NCEA) here has named Father John F.
Meyers as acting president to replace
Father C. Albert Koob, NCEA
president, who is recuperating from
injuries suffered in a fall.
The appointment was made by
NCEA’s board of directors at a meeting
here. Father Koob is making steady
progress from multiple injuries he
received when he fell through a grate in
a shopping center on Oct. 28.
Father Meyers will serve as acting
president until April 24, when the
NCEA board will meet in New Orleans.
A priest of the diocese of Dallas, Texas,
is NCEA’s vice president for
fundamental education ana executive
secretary of the department of Chief
Administrators of Catholic Education
(CACE).
Following his appointment, Father
Meyers said: “I will try to continue on
the progressive course charted for
NCEA by Father Koob. We will
continue to emphasize NCEA’s
leadership role in the total Catholic
educational mission, in religious
education, in schools, and in adult
education.”
In other actions at its meeting, the
NCEA board approved the
establishment of a standing committee
on minority concerns, to be composed
of at least three board members as well
as representatives from various minority
groups.
“I WONDER . . .WHAT’S UNDER THERE? - A little boy’s curiosity gets Archbishop Timothy Manning of Los Angeles as the prelate speaks to
the best of him and he takes a peek under the flowing robes of preschool children at an orphanage Christmas party. (NC Photos)
POPE PA UL:
“World Unity to Be Found in Christ”
VATICAN CITY (NC) - The unity
and universality that the whole world is
desperately seeking is to be found in
Christ, who came among men at
Christmas, Pope Paul VI told a general
audience Dec. 13.
In what amounted to a sermon on the
significance of the liturgical period of
Advent, the four weeks preceding
Christmas, the Pope said that the world
is confronted with “the messianic
prophecy’ of Christ, which is
historically continued in His Church and
which obliges us to higher, newer and
more trusting thought” than man can
find in humanism or in himself.
Man today generally tends “to
exclude God from his thoughts and
actions,” the Pope said. “The man of
today affirms, secure in himself, that he
can ignore the recognition of the name
of God and the celebration of His glory.
The legitimate, secular limits of the
various fields of knowledge and action
tend to result in the exclusion of God
from every area of human life.”
Nevertheless, the Pope continued,
modern thinkers, even those who
espouse humanism tend to put man in
the place of God and then find that
humanism itself “is nothing more than
an aspiration toward life, being and
desired ideal . . .”
The exaltation of man and the
suppression of religious feeling toward
God, the Pope said, ends in “anarchistic
and uihilstic delusion” to be found in
ideas of Herbert Marcuse, an American
Marxist philosopher.
“Modern man is forced to declare
himself to be a poor person, a person
MRS. MARY WHITEHOUSE, 62, of Birmingham, England, gives her
views on the fight against pornography during an interview with NC News
in Washington. (NC Photo)
made poor by exasperating, illusionary
or deceptive ideas.”
Despite all this, the Pope said, man
still tends to hope and to look to the
future. Throughout the Old Testament
there is the expressed awaiting of the
coming of the Messiah, of God among
His people, the Pope recalled.
The Pope affirmed that the hopes of
mankind are to be found in Christ, the
God-made-man, and that man today, as
in the past, still is looking for him.
“Does not the world today seek
unity, justice and peace?” the Pope
asked. “Isn’t the world talking about -
perhaps confusedly but clearly -
freedom? Isn’t this continuous seeking
after novelty and progress a movement
toward a shining and regenerating
tomorrow? . . .Is there not a messianic
wind blowing?
“What we are trying to say is this: Is
not our hour, more than times past,
predisposed, if not already formed for, a
messianic mentality. At the same time,
isn’t the message of Christ of Bethlehem
nothing more than the anticipating of
the highest hopes of our century - unity
and universality, peace and
brotherhood, the nobility and salvation
of man, love and freedom for every
unhappy man?”
Advent is here, the Pope concluded,
“may men prepare themselves for a new
and happy Christmas!”
After his general talk, Pope Paul
extended special greetings to Father
John Musinsky, superior general of the
Society of the Divine Word and
members of the society’s general
chapter, meeting in Rome.
Church’s Right to Make,
Enforce Laws is Defended
VATICAN CITY (NC) - Pope Paul
VI has once again defended the
Church’s right and duty to make laws;
and enforce them.
He also criticized what he called
“false opinions” that the Church is by
nature “purely charismatic” and that its
“spiritual part” has been
overshadowned by “juridicism.”
Pope Paul also denounced the notion
that law “cannot be reconciled” with
love, “as if justice, founded inlaw, were
not itself a virtue strictly tied to
charity.”
The Pope, speaking in Latin, was
addressing participants in the second
renewal course in canon law given by
Rome’s Gregorian University for
diocesan legal officials. At his Dec. 13
discourse were vicars general, diocesan
judges, chancellors and canon lawyers
from 22 countries.
He ctied the Second Vatican
Council’s Constitution on the Church
(Lumen Gentium):
“Christ, the one mediator, established
and ceaselessly sustains here on earth
His holy Church, the community of
faith, hope and charity, as a visible
structure . . .which is governed by the
successor of Peter and by bishops in
communion with him.”
From this Pope Paul concluded:
“Since, therefore, the Church is a visible
society, she must have the power and
the duty of writing and administering
laws.”
Members of the Church, he said, have
the “obligation of conscience” to obey
such laws.
Explaining Church law, the Pope
said: “Canon Law is the law of a society
which is indeed visible but also
supernatural, which is built up by the
Word and by the sacraments, and whose
aim is to lead men to eternal salvation.”