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PAGE 4—The Southern Cross, February 1,1973
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The Southern Cross
Business Office 225 Abercorn St. Savannah, Ga. 31401
rtev. Francis J. Donohue, Editor • Jonn E. Markwalter, Managing Editor
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Editors Hit Ruling
Editors of Catholic newspapers across
the nation said that the time has come to
do more than express shock and
indignation over the Supreme Court
decision on abortion. Action must be
taken they said.
“Glib and emotional responses to the
court’s decisions are definitely not
needed,” declared the Idaho Register.
“We are now involved in a highly
specialized field of constitutional law.
The court’s decision should be read in its
entirety, recourse should be had to
competent members of the legal
profession.”
The Register’s reaction was like those
of many Catholic newspapers over the
court’s 7-2 decision that makes abortion
during the first three months a
pregnancy solely the business of the
woman and her doctor. The court’s only
consideration for the life of the fetus
comes during last three months of
pregnancy. During these final months
the state, if it chooses, may regulate or
prohibit abortions except to preserve the
life of the expectant mother.
“We shudder to think how some
states, our own included, may interpret
this decision of the court,” wrote the
Witness of Dubuque, Iowa.
“Quite simply,” said the Morning Star
of Lafayette, La., “every American is
involved. No one should doubt for a
moment that the U.S. Constitution
should in principle protect human life in
all its forms, its earliest beginning and its
latest ending. If the Constitution does
not do this, it should be changed.”
In Portland, Ore., the Catholic
Sentinel, said that the Supreme Court’s
decision will make little difference in
Oregon because “we now have
practically abortion on demand.”
But, continued the Sentinel, those
who value human life “must continue to
speak out for the rights of the unborn.
They must forcefully underline a truth
that seems to elude many Americans:
Everything that is legal is not necessarily
moral.
“The excellent work of Birthright
must go forward and be expanded.
Women with problem pregnancies must
be able to see that there are alternatives
to abortion,” the Sentinel concluded.
The True Voice of Omaha, Neb.,
said the Supreme Court’s decision now
“makes the helpless a special target of
concern, a special object of love.”
“We are faced with a pastoral problem
of making the Christian way of life a
good deal more real and a good deal
more attractive than we thus far have
succeeded in doing,” said the True
Voice.
The Albany, N. Y., Evangelist
suggested that there are several avenues
to be taken to counteract the Supreme
Court’s ruling.
“First, we must continue to correct
the ignorance of people on the subject of
abortion and the rights of the unborn
child.” the Evangelist said. “Second, we
must give support - in time and money --
to agencies which counsel women
through difficult pregnancies without
advising abortion...Third, we must join
any effort to pass a constitutional
amendment to guarantee the rights of
the unborn.”
The Catholic Bulletin of St. Paul said
that a campaign to reverse the Supreme
Court decision “will require massive
political and educational effort.”
“Unless the Supreme Court is
overturned at the ultimate bar of public
opinion, this nation will soon find deaths
by abortions outnumbering live births.
Why can’t we learn from the mistakes of
other nations?” the bulletin asked.
The Michigan Catholic of Detroit
noted that the government of East
Germany last March began granting
cost-free abortions to any woman up to
the third month of her pregnancy.
“In any case,” said the Michigan
Catholic, “the doctors of East Germany
were faced with a similar life-or-death
decision that United States doctors now
must make: Whether to work to preserve
life under every ordinary circumstance
or whether to inflict selective and
premeditated death.” said the Michigan
Catholic. “At this time,” said the Boston
Pilot, “we need to renew our belief in
the sacredness of all human life from the
first moment of conception up to the
time of a person’s death....The court’s
decision may be permissive, but we
should be determined in our moral
position against abortion.”
The Number One
Problem in the World
Mary Carson
About a month ago I asked readers who were
facing an impossible situation and felt they
needed a miracle, to write to me, tell me about
it, and I would pray for them.
Letters poured in from all over. Do you
know what the number one problem is among
people who need a miracle?
It’s loneliness!
There are widows who miss their husbands
and widowers who are lost without their wives.
There are girls looking for Mr. Right and boys
looking for the girl of their dreams.
There are parents who worry that their
children will never find the right mate. And
young people wrote because they are unable to
communicate with their parents.
And there are couples whose children have
grown and married. Suddenly they find a
stranger in the partner who shared the trials of
raising a family. A marriage of 25 years is
threatened.
There are elderly people living alone, many
with failing eyesight or other infirmities, who
long for a visit from a son or daughter who
never comes.
Even letters about other problems frequently
end with the comment that the writer had no
one else to tell their troubles, and that was why
they wrote to me.
The world is full of lonely people . . .people
who want to be loved . . .people who want to
love someone . . . people who don’t know how
to love or be loved.
I will pray for all those who write to me, but
there must be something more we can do to
cure all this loneliness. It’s incredible that in a
country constantly reminded of
over-population, in cities crowded twenty
stories high, many have no one to talk to.
Maybe part of the reason is that no one can
cure loneliness for us. We must do it for
ourselves. And it’s difficult. Most people have a
tendency to be reserved.
Even if there is a group they would like to
join, they find it difficult to go, put out their
hand to someone else, smile, and introduce
themselves. But, if they really want to, with the
grace of God, it can be done.
Widows and widowers can join organizations
like the Naim Conferences, where they can
meet others who have lost their spouses.
A Marriage Encounter can help other couples
find a revitalization, a renewal of their love.
Many people have found deep happiness
working as hospital volunteers. They find
purpose in their lives by helping others.
One woman I know visits a nearby nursing
home once a week, bringing magazines, and
reading to those who have lost their eyesight.
Even some shut-ins have found ways to cure
loneliness. One man got the phone numbers of
several other shut-ins from his parish priest. Each
day he calls them, checking that they are all
right, and chatting for a few minutes. He is
curing his lonliness . .. and theirs as well.
I know an aged man who is doing wonders
for himself, and the local school. He goes to the
school each morning and listens to little ones
who are working on remedial reading.
Want a mini-cure for loneliness? Think of
two people you know who might be lonely too.
Write two letters to cheer them up. You’ll
brighten the lives of three people . . .yours as
well as theirs.
Nothing to write? Send a story from the
paper which they might enjoy.
No one to write to; all your friends are gone?
How about a grandchild or a niece or nephew?
Children love to get letters.
No children either? No one in the world you
can write to? Then write to me, care of The
Southern Cross.
Or, if you have cured loneliness yourself, tell
me about it. Maybe your suggestions can help
others who haven’t been able to help
themselves.
Bigots Who Cry “Bigotry”
Reverend Andrew M. Greeley
Copyright 1973, Inter/Syndicate
There is quite a debate raging among my
academic colleagues about the Gage Park
disturbances on Chicago’s South Side. The
majority of them are convinced that the
“ethnics” in Gage Park are racist bigots, and
they roundly denounce the city adminstration
for not keeping them under control. A
minority, however, point out that the people in
Gage Park have valid fears of both crime and of
the loss of much of their life’s savings invested
in their homes.
Some members of both groups turn to me as
one who sounds off frequently on the subject
of “ethnics” and ask whether in fact the people
of Gage Park are really bigots. My answer -
hardly one designed to win me very many
friends among academic liberals - is “what
difference does it make whether they’re bigots
or not?”
Let us leave aside the question of whether
Hyde Park -- the University of Chicago
neighborhood -- may have its own bigots, who
seem to mostly be anti-Catholic. Let us further set
aside the question of whether there is not a
little bit (and sometimes a whole lot) of bigot
in each of us. The pertinent issue in Gage Park
and Canarsie and Forest Hills and every other
“threatened” neighborhood in the country is
not whether such neighborhoods have a
substantial nunber of bigots; they undoubtedly
do. The issue that must be faced by the rest of
society is whether the people in such
neighborhoods may have legitimate complaints
against the rest of the society at being singled
out by the immoral real estate market or by
government bureaucrats to pay an inequitable
share of the costs of racial change.
The most extreme and racist of nonwhite
militants must be listened to very carefully on
the grounds that despite his style and his anger
and his hatred, he is saying something very
important. But a white bigot - particularly if he
is Polish or Italian - has forfeited all rights to a
hearing. Small wonder that the inhabitants of
Gage Park or Canarsie or Forest Hills think
their liberal enemies are bigots too.
Unlike most of my university colleagues, I
lived for a long time in a community where
there were very many racists bigots - the sort
of bigot who would be thought to be extreme
even in South Africa. Such people hated blacks
with an irrational vehemence. Most of the
citizens of the community were not of that
sort, but frequently the bigots were the loudest
and the most effective voices in the
neighborhood. I opposed their bigotry and paid
a heavy price for it -- something that most of
my university colleagues have never done. It is
easy to denounce racial bigots from the security
of the University of Chicago. (But try
denouncing the religious bigotry of some of
your fellow academics . ..) It is more difficult
when the bigots have the pastor’s ear. So, I am
under no illusion about either the prevalence or
the virulence of racial bigotry in American
society.
But I don’t think a man forfeits his rights to
equitable treatment under the law because he
happens to be a bigot or a racist (and racists
come in all colors). As long as the intellectual
establishment thinks that you can justify
dumping some groups in the society because
such people are bigots, we will not begin to face
the fact that grave injustice is indeed being
done and continues to be done to blacks and to
many whites too.
Somehow or the other, my university friends
seem to think that if it can be established
that the protestors from such neighborhoods are
bigots, then it is all right to impose
disproportionate costs on them. Bigots, in other
words, have no rights. It is a peculiar
assumption, utterly destructive of a democratic
society; but it is nonetheless the basic
assumption of much of the argument about
threatened neighborhoods. When it is
established that some of the leaders of the
protest are bigots (as they unquestionably are),
the academic and the intellectual (and
frequently the religious leader, too) all heave a
sigh of relief. They no longer have to take those
bigots’ protests seriously.
The head of a Chicago suburb recently wrote
a letter to the members of the board of a
certain Catholic college, complaining about
students parking their cars in front of the
homes of his constitutents. I suppose there
might be some valid point in his complaint, but
his electorate lives off the city of Chicago and
its industrial and labor force base. Because of
the legal fiction of suburban boundaries and
because his people have enough money, they
have been able to move away from the racial
problems of the city and have the time and
freedom to worry about student cars in front of
their houses. Good for them. The people in
Gage Park should be so lucky.
“Dred Scott”
Revisited
Joseph A. Breig
Clearly, the U.S. Supreme Court is poorly
informed -- depressingly so - about the facts of
human life in its beginnings and early
development. I see no other explanation of the
court’s incredible action in constituting itself a
super-legislature and wiping from the books the
laws of the states restricting abortions.
Justice Blackmun and the six who concurred
in his opinion spoke as if all they knew about
human life in the womb was what they had
read in the newspapers and heard on radio and
TV - a compendium, by and large, of ignorance
that must be termed, at best, medieval.
The court showed not the slightest awareness
of the facts established in the 20th century by
the sciences of genetics, gynecology, obstetrics
and microbiology.
Only persons who either are ignorant of
those facts, or stubbornly refuse to face them,
can doubt that human life is an unbroken
continuum from the time of the fertilizing of
the ovum by the sperm. At that moment, as the
geneticists and microbiologists have
demonstrated, there comes into existence a
unique human being whose characteristics -
even including susceptibility to certain ailments
- are programmed by a marvellous genetic
code.
It is you and it is I, in all our separate
individuality and recognizability, who are
conceived in our mothers. And precisely at this
point in medical history, when geneticists are
talking about treating our illnesses and
deficiences that early in life, the U.S. Supreme
Court talks as if we did not so much as exist
during the nine months of our pre-birth life.
Once that life begins with conception,
destroying it is the killing of a particular human
being. It is in no essential way different from
strangling a baby after it is born, or fatally
stabbing an adult. Yet the seven justices talked
as if nothing is involved in abortion but the
convenience of a woman - and what they
termed her “health” and “privacy.”
It boggles the mind to try to imagine what is
“private” or “healthy” about a mother hiring a
physician to put to death her own child,
conceived in her womb. The truth is that both
mental and physical health are always
endangered by abortion.
It boggles the mind also to try to puzzle out
what motivated the justices to divide the life of
the (to them non-existent) unborn child into
three periods of three months, and then to
make, concerning those periods, legal
distinctions without any real difference - for
when all is said and done, the court’s ruling
would allow the brutal surgical butchering of an
infant at any time prior to birth.
Altogether, it is an almost unbelieveable and
grossly immoral and ignorant decision - as
wrong and ignorant as another repellent
decision -- that of an earlier Supreme Court, in
the Dred Scott case, denying the humanity and
the human rights of human beings who
happened at the time to be helpless “property.”
Like that decision, this one must somehow be
reversed or overriden. Americans must not rest
until that is accomplished.
Rugged
Individuals
Rev. James Wilmes
We do not know when the adjective
“rugged” first became attached to the noun
“individualism,” but the wedding has been a
long and happy one. The lifestyle called
“individualism” has its rewards and its
penalties, and both call for a sturdy disposition
well described as “rugged.”
Individualism as a stance in daily living calls
for a clarity of thought and speech. It demands
a degree of self-respect, and an unwillingness to
be stampeded, intimidated or manipulated. It
leads a person to do the unexpectedly honest
deed, to side with the unpopular cause or
group.
Individualism rewards its faithful with
freedom of mind and spirit, of feelings and
deeds. It penalizes them with occasional
lonliness, the isolation of (he pioneer, the
questioner of things-as-they-are.
A certain ruggedness, a toughness (but not a
harshness) of make-up is required. For
individualism means more than just an
impulsive, spontaneous “doing your own
thing.” It seems rather a purposeful, confident,
good-humored living of life as it comes your
way . . . Purposeful in the sense of creative: to
“make” ideas and insights, or friendships and
human fellowship, or peace and justice, or
sound structures or shining beauty. Individuals
create, and this is the meaning of our being
alive. All hail to those who are cheerfully and
firmly doing just that.
RESOLUTION: Think for yourself but think
correctly. Pray daily to be truly a saint of God,
but know this means daring to be different, like
Jesus, whose life of selfless service and suffering
was a mystery.
SCRIPTURE: “Woe to you when all men
speak well of you, for such did they to false
prophets.” Lk. 6, 26. “You shall be hated by all
men for my name’s sake.” Mt. 10, 22. “Master,
we know you teach the way of God in truth
and care not for the person on men.” Mt.
22,16. Be perfect as your heavenly Father is
perfect. Mt. 5,48.
PRAYER: Dear God, You who can do all
things, make us saints quickly, together.