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PAGE 7—The Southern Cross, August 16,1973
SHIP ON PARADE - The annual blessing of the
fleet in the Mobile, Ala., diocese includes a parade of
ships, elaborately decorated. This one has a religious
theme - “I will make you fishers of men.” Bishop
John L. May officiated at the blessing and at a
memorial ceremony for dead fishermen in Bayou La
Batre. Governor George Wallace spoke before the
parade. (NC Photo by Wilber F. Palmer)
Knights of Claver Convene
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (NC) -
Resolutions on Watergate, the Supreme
Court’s abortion ruling, and a request
that Pope Paul VI appoint more black
bishops were approved at the 58th
annual convention of the Knights and
Ladies of Peter Claver here.
The Knight’s auxiliary also cited
three other concerns: pornography, aid
to parochial schools and conditions in
penal institutions.
The resolutions were announced at a
news conference by Edward James Ray
of Sunset, La., the organization’s
deputy Supreme Knight.
The Watergate resolution says that
the scandal “has dimmed the spirits of
the American people,” and that “it
could be many years before we regain
our leadership as a world power.”
It calls on the organization to “go on
record as condemning the actions of
persons involved,” asks that the “guilty
be punished,” and urges prayers that
America, “will regain her respect and
continue to be the great country that it
has been.”
The abortion resolution declared that
the “right-to-life is God-given,” and that
“from the moment of conception a
fetus is a living, human being.” The
organization condemned the Jan. 22
Supreme Court abortion ruling.
Concerning support for a
constitutional amendment which would
reverse the ruling, Ray said that in
Louisiana the Knights are, “very active
in this issue and the national
organization will be as well.”
A resolution on black bishops stated
that the Knights request “Pope Paul VI
to appoint more black bishops in the
United States in charge of diocese rather
than on an “auxiliary status” in diocese.
Commenting on the resolution, Ray
pointed out there are now two black
auxiliary bishops, both of whom are
serving in the South. Bishop Harold R.
Perry in New Orleans and Bishop Joseph
L. Howze in Natchez-Jackson, Miss. Ray
added that of the 20 million Catholics
in the United States, one million are
Black.
Other resolutions condemned
sterilization of black women and using
human life in experiments. The
organization said it will “continue to
speak out on issues in regard to human
dignity,” and the “worth of a human
being.”
Mrs. Elise L. Morris of Houston,
Texas, the organization’s Vice-Supreme
Lady, said that the women delegates,
“spoke out against” pornography and
called for state aid to parochial schools.
Mrs. Morris also said that women are
“concerned about our penal
institutions” and urged that young
offenders be separated from hardened
criminals.
Ray announced that a sickle-cell
anemia division of the Knights has been
established on a nationwide basis. It is
headed by Dr. Earl Belle Smith of
Pittsburgh, the Knights’ national
physician.
Murray J. Frank of Beaumont, Texas,
national public relations director,
explained the purpose of the division is
to launch a public information program
on the disease and to aid in the
examination of children. He said plans
call for medical treatment to be
provided children who are found to
have the disease.
The organization, which has councils
in 14 states and claims a membership of
18,000, will hold its 1974 convention in
San Antonio, Texas. Eight hundred
delegates attended this year’s
convention.
“Best Jail I’ve Ever Been in”—
(Continued from Page 1)
work out their own destiny. The
sacrifices of Chavez and his associates are
unknown to a vast proportion of the
people of this country.
“One has only to visit Cesar’s home
and his family to understand the
situation, an old frame house in a poor
part of the town. There is no sign of the
opulence normally attached to the
homes of other leaders of labor unions.
Chavez’s salary is well below the
poverty level and his associates,
including the union attorneys, exist
under the same substandard conditions.
Whatever money comes into the union
is used mainly for its members, not for
its leaders.”
Miss Day said that the current dispute
is simply a question of the powerful
Teamsters Union trying to gain control
of agricultural labor, aided and abetted
by the growers.
The Teamsters already control the
packing houses and the tractor and
truck drivers. If they have the field
workers, they control everything,” she
said.
“The United Farm Workers,” Miss
Day said, “mainly represent the
Mexican-American minority who, in
previous times, have been exploited by
the farmers and the growers. It was not
until Cesar Chavez came along to
organize them that any attempts were
made to give them decent wages and
decent housing. They have not yet
reached the point where they have a fair
share of the fruits of their labor, but
under Cesar Chavez they are getting
there. They are able to better realize
their dignity as human beings with more
incentive to aspire to the better life. I
am no novice in this situation. I have
visited the farm areas many, many times
over the years and know what the
conditions were like in the past and
what they could be in the future if good
will and understanding and love are
present.
“I have always adhered to the
principle of non-violence. It is therefore
natural that I would be here, supporting
Cesar Chavez, whose cause is predicated
on this principle. He has insisted on
peaceful picketing and peaceful
methods to attain the goals of his union.
Whatever violence has taken place in
this current struggle has come through
the actions of the Teamsters and their
supporters. The Farm Workers are a
group dedicated to peaceful means. In
that regard there is a kinship between
the Catholic Worker Movement and the
United Farm Workers Union.”
Miss Day said she felt the Church
should be involved in this struggle for
the basic rights of farm workers and that
it should do more.
“It is good to see priests, nuns,
seminarians and novices joining the
pickets. They are getting a first-hand
experience of what it means to work in
the fields and what a long way the farm
workers still have to go before they
enjoy the benefits of the rest of our
society,” Miss Day said. “I hope they go
back to their rectories and convents and
colleges, and tell the story. I hope that
they can encourage their superiors to
divest themselves of unnecessary riches
in land, buildings, stocks, and so on, and
that such assets be put to the use of the
poor.
“I hope more bishops will come to
the valley and to other areas of the
country where the farm workers are
struggling for their rights, ministering to
them - putting themselves squarely on
the side of the poor and the oppressed.
“The farm workers here gain great
inspiration on seeing their religious
leaders joining them in their struggle to
be free men and women, directing their
own lives through their own God-given
talents. I am happy and contented in
being among them. I just wish there
were more bishops, priests, and religious
who would join us at this moment of
the Farm Workers struggle for survival.”
This frail lady said her health was
holding up “quite well” in spite of her
age and the obvious scars of forty years
in the role of prophet among the poor
and the needy. Like Chavez, she, too,
has that charismatic aura about her. It
was never more magnificently
manifested that when she stood up at
the end of the visit.
She took hold of her cane,
straightened up, and signaled to the
guard that she was ready to be taken to
the dormitory cell in a barrack-like
building a hundred yards away. Her
prison garb was replete with Farm
Worker slogans inscribed by magic
maker in Spanish and English. The green
dress was also inscribed with the
signatures of the nuns and farm workers
who are her fellow prisoners. When the
guard joined us to take her back, she
said:
“You know, I hope to take this jail
dress with me when I leave. I know it’s
against regulations, but I am going to do
it.” As the guard led her away, he
replied, “Well, we might make an
exception in your case. We’ll have to
see, when that day arrives.”
The jailers at Fresno County
Industrial Farm seemed to understand,
as do her legion of friends around the
country, that Miss Dorothy Day is
someone special. They’ll probably never
see the likes of her again.
GENERAL CHAPTER MEET
Sisters of Mercy Study Mission
The plight of the migrant worker, the
power of sisterhood, education toward
justice, and opposition between
consumerism and Christian life values
were among the issues seriously probed
by almost 500 Sisters of Mercy of the
Union during their 1973 session of the
institute’s Eighth General Chapter, held
August 3 - 11 at Mercy Center in
Farmington Hills, Michigan. The Sisters
staff several schools and hospitals in the
Savannah diocese.
Regarding the migrant worker, the
Chapter took an official stand “to
publicly recognize the suffering of the
migrant farm worker and express active
support and pursuit of efforts which
will enable the farm worker to reach his
self-determined goals.”
Commissioned by the delegation to
speak out on issues related to the
migrant worker, the National Planning
Committee of the Social Action
Conference of Mercy, a unit of existing
within the membership of the Sisters of
Mercy, announced on the final day of
the Chapter public endorsement of the
boycott of head lettuce and grapes not
bearing the Aztec Black Eagle label of
the United Farm Workers.
The General Chapter is the highest
decision-making body of the Mercy
institute, numbering over 5000
members in the United States, Central
and South America, and Jamaica.
Chapter delegates included six elected
representatives from each of the
institute’s nine provinces-Baltimore,
Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit, New York,
Omaha, Providence, St. Louis,
Scranton-as well as provincial
administrators and generalate officials.
Besides the 71 delegates, over 400
observers participated in the week’s
deliberation regarding their service as
apostolic women.
Sister Mary Concilia Moran,
administrator general of the institute
and president of the Chapter, told the
assembly that the power of
“sisterhood”-- the discovery of which is
evolving among women everywhere
today-is something which “we here
gathered have known all our adult
lives.” Sisterhood, she said, flows from
shared dreams, shared hopes-from the
common pursuit of an ideal.”
Part of the dynamic of the Chapter
was the examination of the gifts of the
apostolic woman-both as an individual
and as a member of the group-in order
to deepen the understanding of how the
group can do together what the
individuals alone can not do.
Participants were introduced to group
processes by which they might assist
those who did not participate in the
Farmington Hills meeting with a study
of their personal giftedness and its
potential for Christly service.
The delegates challenged their entire
membership to recommit themselves
“to simplicity of life style” and to the
search for “more effective means of
remedying the problems of the poor and
the dispossessed of the world.”
In addition to 73 hospitals, 10
colleges, 80 high schools, 370
elementary schools, and 51 catechetical
centers, the Sisters of Mercy of the
Union operate residences for the aged,
residences for women, child-care homes,
and schools of nursing. An increasing
number of their members are becoming
involved in social service and pastoral
ministry apostolates.
The next General Chapter of the
Sisters of Mercy will be held at the
Generalate, located in Bethesda,
Maryland, June 21 - 27,1974.
SISTER MARY CONCILIA MORAN (left), administrator general of
the Sisters of Mercy of the Union, converses with Sister Mary Karl George,
Detroit Province administrator, hostess for the 1973 session of the
institute’s Eighth General Chapter. The Chapter, held at Mercy Center in
Farmington, Michigan, Aug. 3-11, focused on the service of an apostolic
woman. Two Savannah nuns, Sister M. Cornile Dulohery and Sister M.
Charlene Walsh, attended as elected delegates of the Baltimore Province.
Pope: Conscience not Enough
CASTELGANDOLFO (NC) - Pope
Paul VI, protesting against “the decay
of the moral sense which characterizes
our age,” warned that for the Christian,
conscience alone is not enough.
Speaking to visitors at his general
audience (Aug. 8) about the difficulties
of living a Christian moral life today,
the Pope said, “Observance of moral
norms, which we believe can be called
Christian, constitutes one of the
principal difficulties to that strong and
genuine affirmation of ethical-religious
modem life which is expected of us.”
For example, he explained, the
Christian cannot exclude from his
morality the “sense of sin. We cannot
do so because sin cuts into our
relationship with .God. It is one of the
basic truths of our ethical-religious
conceptions . . .Today the radically
a-religious mentality of our times
cancels out the first and most generic
moral responsibility, denying or passing
over the relation between our actions
and God’s view, the especially negative
relation which is an offense against
God.”
Pope Paul also challenged those who,
particularly since the Second Vatican
Council, have argued that Christian
morality can be determined by the
Christian following his own conscience.
The Pope granted that “the moral
conscience is certainly the proximate
and indispensable criterion for the
honesty of our actions” and that “God
wants conscience always to be respected
in the development of human
personality.”
But, he added, “conscience must be
educated, informed and guided in regard
to the objective good of courses of
action; the instinctive and intuitive
judgment of conscience is not enough.”
The Pope stressed that “conscience
needs norms and laws; otherwise its
judgment can be impaired, by the
influence of passions, interests or by the
examples of others.” Moreover, he
added, without norms and laws,
conscience leads to “a moral life that is
submissive to exterior circumstances
and situations, with all the
consequences of relativism and servility
which result, and finally to the
compromising of that direction of
conscience which we call character,
making men merely a mass of reeds
shaken in the wind.”
The Pope then noted that many claim
men must be sincere. But by
“sincerity,” he said, is meant giving
“freedom to impulses of real animal
nature, to a real frenzy of enjoyment,
without higher or logical inhibitions,
and to a real, ignoble selfishness.
human and Christian.”
“You hear today the declaration that
the fortress of traditional morality is
crumbling because of the changes
brought about by modem life and that
the directive criterion of our conduct
must be anthropologic and social; that
is, that it must conform to the
dominant criterion, whether it
corresponds or not to the higher criteria
of good and evil.”
Lastly, said the Pope, challenges are
launched against “traditional
faithfulness,” whether it be, the natural
law, the existence of which is even
questioned, or the magisterium
(teaching authority) of the Church
when she speaks out to defend the
fundamental and sacred rights of life
and morals which still merit the title of
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Christians will see the conflict
between “firm Christian morality and
amoral permissiveness,” Pope Paul said.
The imitation of Christ must once again
become the “directive criterion of our
consciences,” the Pope concluded, “and
must draw from baptism, by which we
have been made to live again as sons of
the living God, its original norm and its
supernatural energy for the new life to
which we have been called and to which
we are pledged.”
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