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PAGE 7—The Southern Cross, November 1,1973
Campaign for Human Development Helps the Poor
On one of the Sea Islands on South
Carolina’s coast, a pick-up truck jolts
down the narrow, winding roads of the
dusty farm land.
The truck is there because the
Campaign for Human Development
(CHD), the anti-poverty program of the
U.S. Catholic Church, is concerned with
helping the poor. This year, CHD has
allocated $4,614,600 to 149 programs,
which are managed by poor people.
The pick-up truck on that South
Carolina road was bought with money
given to the South Carolina Sea Islands
Farm Cooperative in Adams Run, S.C.
The cooperative is a self-help program
of 115 farmers who cultivate, process
and market their produce to compete
with the bigger, more mechanized
farms.
CHD funds, said Elijah Green,
director of the co-op, are also helping to
build an addition to the cooperative’s
open-air market. Besides selling its own
snap beans, lima beans, cabbage,
cucumbers, okra, com, squash and
tomatoes, the cooperative also buys
produce from other areas and sells it,
thus providing a greater variety of fresh
vegetables.
Over 1,500 acres are now being
farmed by co-op members.
But access to all those acres was not
easy, Green said. The co-op’s big truck
was too big to negotiate the small roads,
so the small pick-up was purchased. It
can haul the produce out of the fields
and down roads, Green noted, which are
unnavigable for the bigger truck.
In rural Vermont nearly every child
suffers from tooth decay or gum
disease. But half of them do not see a
dentist before the age of 15. The reason
is lack of transportation.
“We work with the welfare kids and
the poor, working kids,” said Sid
Gerstemblatt, executive director of the
Vermont Dental Care Program. The ages
range from 3 to 19, Gerstemblatt said,
but anyone will be treated in an
emergency.
Last year, the program was given
$50,000 by the CHD, which enabled it
to expand its care.
Five hand-portable units and one
mobile dentistry units are working in
rural Vermont, and over a year’s time,
the entire state is covered. The CHD
money, Gerstemblatt said, paid for one
of the portable units.
Now approximately 60 percent of
Vermont’s rural, poor children, the
CHD reported, have received dental care
under the program. The dental care
program, Gerstemblatt said, has been so
successful that the state legislature
recently passed a bill to provide
CAMPAIGN FOR HUMAN DEVELOPMENT ~
Three scenes show some of the different kinds of
projects funded by the upcoming Campaign for Human
Development collection Nov. 18. Top left: Children in
rural Vermont open wide for teeth inspection when a
mobile dentistry unit arrives in town. Botton left: A
farmer on one of the Sea Islands in South Carolina
inspects peanuts grown on a cooperative farm. Right:
A young man in Philadelphia’s inner city takes part in
a neighborhood cleanup effort. The three projects are
among 149 grassroots programs which received $4.6
million in CHD funds this year. (NC Photos by Valerie
Imbleau)
state-subsidized dental care for every
child in kindergarten through the sixth
grade.
The families of the children receiving
care, he explained, are required to pay a
certain percentage of the costs,
depending on family income. For
instance, a family earning $5,000, he
said, pays 75 percent of the costs.
“There’s no rip-off,” he added.
But the communities must become
involved, Gerstemblatt said. They are
required to provide a place for the
dentists to set up their equipment.
Sometimes they set up in schools,
sometimes in churches, he added.
Besides providing dental care, the
program also trains dental assistants,
Gerstemblatt said. So when the unit
packs up and moves to the next town, it
has left behind a trained dental assistant
ready to enter the job market.
“If the commitment is there,” he
said, “you can do things.” However, the
five units now in operation are not
sufficient to meet the demand. “We
need 15 units,” Gerstemblatt said.
But he added that the Department of
Health, Education and Welfare had cut
its funding programs, and there was
little possibility that the program would
obtain funds from the federal
government.
Part of the blame for the poor dental
care, Gerstemblatt stated, had to be laid
on the dentists of Vermont. One third
of the dentists, he said, live in the city
of Burlington. They “don’t want to go
into rhe rural areas,” he added. Many of
the dentists, he said, look upon the
program as “socialized medicine” and
are frightened by it.
However, he added that the program
is attracting many young dentists just
out of dental school.
The program, he said, had received
“100 applicants for five slots” from
young dentists still in dental school.
“We’re proving that (the rural, poor
children) can get medicalcare,”
Gerstemblatt said. “We’re proving that
it can be done anywhere.”
In Philadelphia, the North Central
Community Organization (NCCO) is
working to organize the poor by
establishing grassroots community
power bases that reflect neighborhood
needs. The NCCO received a grant of
$50,000 from the CHD for its program
of giving technical assistance to other
organizations which attempt to provide
the poor with self-determination and
control of their neighborhoods.
Mrs. Sandra H. Williams, director of
the NCCO, said that the organization
runs no programs itself and does not
dispense any money. The NCCO, Mrs.
Williams said, “provides technical
assistance” to community organizations.
Some organizations the NCCO has
aided, she said, have been able to
rechannel the energies of street gangs
into weekend recreational and
educational activities.
The NCCO was able to gather
information on health care in the
neighborhoods, she said, and used the
data to petition public health agencies
for improved services. This project
helped elect a neighborhood resident to
a regional committee of a national
health care program.
The aim of the NCCO program, she
said, is the “redistribution of
decision-making authority.” Money
from the CHD, she said, enabled the
NCCO to increase its work of “selling
the concept of community action.”
Perhaps the main goal of the
organization, she said, is bringing
“people together who normally are not
talking.”
When people know each other, she
added, they work together better.
The NCCO is indebted to the
Campaign for Human Development,
Mrs. Williams said, because the CHD
“dared to risk to invest in us.”
EDUCATION HEADS CONVENE
Get Back to Running Schools, Says CACE
BY RICK CASEY
BOSTON (NC) - While disappointed
with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling
banning any substantial public aid to
Catholic Schools, diocesan school
officials are glad the issue is at least
settled.
That was the concensus at the annual
meeting of the Chief Administrators of
Catholic Education (CACE), which
brought more than 200 diocesan school
and religious education directors and
their top staffs here.
Father Patrick J. O’Neill, director of
education for the Fall River, Mass.,
diocese and newly elected CACE
president, said, “I sense the feeling of
‘at least it’s over. Now let’s get back to
running the schools.”
Citing a spirit of hope among his
fellow administrators, Father O’Neill
said, “we have the resources to continue
to do a good job-certainly in people,
VATICAN CITY (NC) - Betty
Friedan, widely accredited with
launching today’s woman’s liberation
movement, visited Pope Paul VI Oct. 24
and presented him with a medallion
signifying the equality of the sexes.
Ms. Friedan, author of the “feminine
mystique” and hailed by the New York
Times as the “mother superior” of
women’s lib - a term she said she
deplored -- was received by Pope Paul in
a speical audience that she called
“surprising, at least to me since he knew
who I was.”
Ms. Friedan said that during her
five-minute private visit with the Pope
he thanked her for her efforts in helping
women in the world but stressed that
the Church has always honored women.
The Pope also said, Ms. Friedan told
reporters after her visit, that the
Church’s recent greater absorption of
women in Church roles does not mean
that the Church is planning at this time
“for a radical” new approach to
the problem.
Pope Paul presented Ms. Friedan with
a bronze medallion of his pontificate.
She, in turn, gave him a gold-washed
brass adaptation of the traditional
symbol of women (a circle with a cross
at the bottom) that also bears an
“equal” sign.
The cross, she said, “is simply
coincidental.” She said that during the
and I think in finances. I don’t think
we’ve tapped them all yet.”
In a banquet address before the
group, Cardinal Humberto Medeiros of
Boston stressed the need for hope
among Catholic school officials.
Listing reasons why officials might be
discouraged, the cardinal called for a
hope deeper than political optimism.
“I do not mean the kind of hope
which focuses on definite and highly
concrete objectives,” he said. “Such
hope is often based on an almost
presumptuous exaggeration of the
accuracy of our own perception of a
problem. Such hope is a kind of wish
fulfillment that too often paves the way
for great disappointment. I mean the
kind of hope which has its basis in an
appreciation of the omnipotence of a
totally loving God.”
Robert Lynch, who headed the drive
for federal tax credits for parents of
audience she told the Pope: “As you
see, it makes a different kind of cross.”
Ms. Friedan said she told the Pope
she was impressed with the efforts of
the Catholic Church in recent years to
meet the “needs of women today.”
She told reporters: “I told His
holiness that I hoped and expected that
the Catholic Church will come to new
ADULT ED. PROGRAM
Adas Yeshuron Jewish Synagogue
was host Sunday to the class on
Comparative Religion currently
presented in the Adult Religious
Education program of St. Mary’s on the
Hill, Augusta, by Sister Patricia Van-
denberg.
Rabbi Michael Teplitsky enumerated
the major and minor Jewish holy days
and described the deep meaning they
hold for the Jewish people. He
emphasized the importance of prayer in
a Jew’s daily life, saying “God is a 24
hour day activity.” He said that the
answer to practically all of man’s
contemporary problems can be found in
the great writings. He showed the Torah
to the group and explained its use in
Jewish observances.
In other classes held at St. Mary’s
William -Beatty spoke on “Receiving
nonpublic school children, warned that
until there is a significant change in the
membership of the U.S. Supreme Court
there is no hope of getting substantial
public aid for Catholic schools.
Lynch recommended a strategy of
judicial activism along the same lines as
previous legislative activities. For
example, he said, public officials,
including senators and the President,
must be held accountable for their
appointments to the federal bench.
Nominations of persons who are not at
least neutral on the school aid question
ought to be fought vigorously, he said.
In addition to Father O’Neill, Father
Russell Bleich of Dubuque, Iowa, was
elected vice-president.
In a paper given before his election as
president, Father O’Neill made a series
of recommendations regarding the
financing of Catholic schools. The
suggestions included:
-Catholic schools must become more
and profound understandings of
women . .. That in doing so, it will
be able to find solutions to many of the
problems facing women today,
problems which are also facing the
Church as a whole, and that from this
there will come a theology and
approach in which women and their
problems will be seen in different terms
from the traditional Church and
Christian theology.”
God’s Gifts.” He said “Faith means
relying on what God has promised.
When one relies on God’s promises as
Abraham did he will see Him work in a
new way in his life.”
Father Barry Stanton in his class on
Scripture said “As Christians we must
probe deeply Christ’s meaning through
prayer and meditative readings, and as
Polonius advised his son Laertes in
Hamlet, ‘grapple them to our souls with
hoops of steel.’”
Dr. Edward Cashin gave the first of a
three part lecture on the Catholic
Laymen’s Association. Other talks will
be November 4 and November 11.
These four classes are held each week
simultaneously and are attracting a large
number of adult parishioners.
fiscally independent, and “not simply
hope to pass on their costs to the
Catholic people by some sort of vague
tax.”
-While scholarships must be made
available to the needy, “those who
make use of these schools should bear
the chief responsibility of supporting
them.
-General subsidies from the diocese
and parish should be replaced by
scholarships and special purpose grants
“as the number of students served by
Catholic schools decreases, it becomes
more difficult to justify a general
subsidy.”
-Expenses must be controlled.
“Perhaps we must ask more of our
employees, and use volunteer help when
possible. In any case, we must return to
that spirit of poverty that characterized
the Catholic schools of our youth and
gave the feeling of high purpose to those'
who worked for them.”
-Parents must be given more control.
“All too often boards of education have
been used to enlist the support of
parents while denying them a real fiscal
voice in policy making.”
Also addressing school fiscal
practices, Father Emmet Harrington of
the National Catholic Educational
Association recommended that teaching
Sisters be paid the same as lay teachers.
Arguing that systems under which
Sisters are paid low salaries but are
provided with housing and other
benefits hide the true costs of
employing Sisters. Father Harrington
cited several studies indicating that total
compensation for Religious teachers is
“very close to the present lay teacher’s
salary, at least at the elementary level.”
Father Harrington said that knowing
what they are really paying the
Religious would decrease the feeling of
panic among parents and administrators
when they face the loss of teaching
Chief
Sisters. He also argued that the present
compensation packages make Religious
childishly dependent upon the pastor or
parish council.
Religious teachers who are paid full
salaries can arrange their own affairs and
voluntarily donate back to the school
the portions of their salaries they don’t
need.
And not only would such an
arrangement dissolve the “unfair
argument” that lay teachers are the
cause of financial problems, he said, but
also it would make clear that Religious
teachers are wanted not simply because
they come cheap, but for the special
qualities that they bring.
Father Harrington said such an
approach is working successfully in
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INNKEEPER: MARGUIRITE FITZGERALD
Rabbi Teplitsy talks to St. Mary’s Group
Women’s Lib Leader Visits Pope Paul
BY JAMES C. O’NEILL
Augustans Visit Synagogue