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PAGE 3—November 8,1973
Lack of Funds May Hamper Palestine Refugee Aid
BY KATHLEEN MCLAUGHLIN
UNITED NATIONS, N.Y. (NC) -
John Rennie, administrator of the
United Nations’ aid to Palestine
refugees, informed the UN General
Assembly that unless the crucial
shortage of funds for the program is
relieved, a drastic reduction of services
must be made in 1974.
His annual report as
commissioner-general of the UN Relief
and Works Agency for Palestine
Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)
was written before war erupted in the
Middle East Oct. 6.
He is expected to elaborate on the
more recent situation when he appears
before the Assembly’s special political
committee, to which the agenda item
has been referred. His presentation will
be followed closely by representatives
of a number of voluntary,
nongovernmental organizations who
cooperate in the work of UNRWA,
including the U.S. Catholic Relief
Services (CRS) and the Catholic Near
East Welfare Organization,
headquartered in New York.
Rennie’s report for the fiscal year
ending June 30, 1973, noted that at
that date over 1.5 million persons were
registered with the agency--an increase
of 2.3 percent over the preceding year.
Over 1.3 million were eligible for
UNRWA health and education services,
and 829,000 had received food rations.
There were 256,000 children in 54G
schools, run jointly by UNRWA and the
UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO), which is also
confronting a sizable financial deficit.
The commissioner-general’s report
noted that devaluation of the U.S.
dollar and accelerating inflation have
resulted in an estimated budget shortage
of over $3 million in 1973 and more
than $10 million in 1974, with
prospects of a more acute cash crisis at
the beginning of next year. He said that
any substantial reduction of funds
would have to affect the education
program, which accounts for 47.3
percent of expenditures.
Reduction of funds will cause
hardship, frustration and bitterness
among the Palestinian refugees; will
wreck the hopes of future self-support
of many thousands of young persons,
and will have “ominous implications for
peace and security in the region,” his
report added.
About 644,000 Palestinian refugees
(38 percent) live in the 63 camps in
UNRWA’s area of operations--53
established before June 1967, and 10
emergency camps set up after the
hostilities of that year, the report said.
None are under UN jurisdiction, and
police and other governmental functions
are the responsibility of the host
government or of the occupying power.
U.S. Catholic Relief Services-the
main channel for American Catholic
relief efforts overseas-confirmed
recently that, except for Egypt-where
new groups of refugees have emerged in
the so-called October War-its operations
in the area have been continued at a
normal pace.
In response to an appeal from its
Cairo office for wool blankets for
civilians adversely affected by the
fighting, 10,000 were being airshipped,
and funds collected to purchase food
and clothing for the victims locally.
At the New York offices of the
Catholic Near East Welfare Organization
- which works in the area under the
umbrella of the Pontifical Mission for
Palestine-reported no halt so far in its
activities. In Amman, Jordan, it has for
some time had two medical teams at
work, staffed by the Franciscan
Missionaries of the Divine Motherhood
and Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of
Charity. Both teams had especially
requested not to be evacuated in the
event that their locations were overrun
during the hostilities.
Mother Teresa’s Nuns
Work in Gaza Strip
BY DESMOND SULLIVAN
JERUSALEM (NC) - The group of
Mother Teresa’s Sisters Working in the
Gaza strip near the Sinai desert are in
one of the most difficult areas of the
Middle East conflict.
Their work among the poorest of
refugees in Gaza is with men and
women who have known firsthand the
distress of war. Four times in one
generation armies have clashed around
them. They have lost many of their
men, their sons, their homes and their
land, and 350,000 of them are in camps
on the edge of the desert.
Mother Damien, in charge of the
Gaza foundation, made a hurried visit to
Jerusalem recently for supplies for her
people, who were in great danger
because of the war.
Because Gaza is on the main road to
Sinai, the pressure of war hit them
hard.Ten road blocks control exit and
entry. In fear that supplies would be cut
off, Mother Damien came to Jerusalem
for food, medicine and clothing.
The Gaza strip is technically part of
Egypt, but is under Israel military rule.
Most refugees seem to sympathize with
the Arab position. Mother Teresa’s
nuns, however, have learned to win the
confidence of both the refugees and the
Israeli military.
In their seven-month stay in Gaza the
Sisters have discovered the real poor.
This showed in one strange request of
Mother Damien. She came to the
Jerusalem headquarters of the Pontifical
Mission for Palestine, which helps
support her convent and work, and
asked not only for medicines and food
but also for hot mustard. Mother
Damien explained that her Sisters spend
all day among the poor and sick, and
when they come home in the evening
the taste and smell of dirt and disease is
so strong that they often have little
appetite for food. A sandwich of hot
mustard, she said, cuts away all the
memory of filth and the nuns are soon
able to eat a meal.
Another strange request was for old
heavy winter clothing; yet Gaza is
extremely hot. The Sisters, however,
had discovered many people sleeping on
the damp floors of their huts. A winter
coat, they said, makes a good mattress.
Miss Caroll Hunnybun and Miss Helen
Breen, who direct the Jerusalem office
of the Pontifical Mission, emptied their
personal wardrobes of winter clothing
for the poor of Gaza.
The founding of the convent in Gaza
in March of this year has brought hope
to the refugees in a way they had never
expected. With the coming of the Sisters
the Church took on a new meaning for
them: women of spirit had come to
share their lives.
The people of Gaza are always getting
surprises from the Sisters. The people
were astonished first that the Sisters had
come, and even more surprised that
they stayed, in spite of the war. And
they are amazed at the way the Sisters
can search out the real poor.
In September they got a different
kind of surprise as Msgr. John Nolan,
the American priest who heads the
Pontifical Mission, brought down to
Gaza a group of 10 American priests
who concelebrated Mass in the little
church.
An old woman said: “That will
make-up for 10 Sundays when we had
no priest.”
Investments for Social Justice
MADISON, Wis. (NC) - Seven
Wisconsin-based Religious communities
have formed a coalition to use their
investments to seek social justice.
The coalition was set up at a meeting
here sponsored by the Justice and Peace
Center of Milwaukee and Area IX of the
Leadership Conference of Women
Religious.
Included in the coalition are the Eau
Claire Benedictines, the generalate of
the School Sisters of St. Francis, the
Midwest province of the Capuchin
Franciscans, the Sisters of the Divine
Savior, the Sisters of St. Joseph (Stevens
Point), the Society of Mary and the
Society of the Divine Savior.
These communities will share
investment knowledge, vote stock
together and continue to research
investment areas.
“The Church must examine its own
conscience and actions to see if its
efforts and resources are being used in a
just manner before speaking to other
organizations about their promotion of
human rights and social justice,”
Capuchin Father Michael Crosby told
representatives of 35 religious
communities at the meeting.
He added that joint action at
stockholders’ meetings and “if there is
no success, litigation must be used to
confront those companies whose
products, production techniques,
personnel practices and advertising
policies oppress other people.”
Father Crosby suggested five basic
criteria for measuring the social
responsibility of corporations:
-Participation: Does the corporation
have the largest possible number of
people taking an active part in directing
development at every level?
-Human Rights: Is the operation of
the institution based on the individual
human rights of every person, including
women and minorities?
-Foreign Investments: What are the
policies and practices of a North
American company in a foreign
country, especially in less developed
nations?
-Peace: Does the company promote
peace based on a just order both
internally (avoiding write-offs, payoffs,
price-fixing, etc.) and externally
(refusing to perpetuate the arms race as
a way of promoting peace for the
United States in the world)?
-Right to Life: Does the corporation
support life by promoting a healthy
environment?
JOY OF READING ... IN BRAILLE . . . Yvonne Smith reads in braille
to Sister Ruth Knappel, RSM, at the Mercy Society for the Blind library
in Cincinnati. The organization has more than 700 braille volumes, 1,700
records and a growing list of tapes. About half the material is religious.
(NC Photo by Anne Bingham)
STILL SPRIGHTLY AT 106 -- Mrs. Catherine Ward,
a resident of the Mary Manning Walsh Home in New
York City, looks back cheerily on “surviving” the
hoopla which accompanied her 100th birthday ... six
years ago. Bom in Ireland, Mrs. Ward came to the
United States in 1883. She was active in women’s clubs
and was once fired from a factory job for trying to
help form a union (NC Photo by Jo-Ann Price)
Still Sprightly — at 106
BY KATHLEEN MCLAUGHLIN
NEW YORK (NC) - “When I had my
100th birthday party, they made me
awfully nervous,” laughs Mrs. Catherine
Ward, reminiscing at the Mary Manning
Walsh Home here. “Because Cardinal
Cooke - who wasn’t yet a cardinal, then
- came to the party along with four or
five monsignors and they made me give
the speech of welcome, up on the stage.
But I survived, and they said I did all
right!”
She did indeed survive. That was six
years ago. Today, at 106 years, Mrs.
Ward is a petite, white-haired, animated
personality alive to the world around
her, and in regular correspondence with
a host of friends and relatives. Easily the
cheeriest and chattiest among more than
300 residents of the community
maintained here by the Carmelite Sisters
for the aged and infirm, she appears to
be no more than in her early seventies,
and with her lively conversation and
comments she generates smiles wherever
she ventures in the institution.
VATICAN CITY (NC) - The
Vatican’s top official on Christian unity
has issued an explanatory note to
correct “inexact interpretations”
surrounding the reception of
Communion by non-Catholics in
Catholic churches.
Dutch Cardinal Jan Willebrands,
president of the Vatican Secretariat for
Promoting Christian Unity, restated
Oct. 31 the conditions under which there
is allowed an interchange of
Communion, conditions originally laid
down by the secretariat’s instruction of
June 1, 1972.
At that time, the Vatican granted
permission to non-Catholic Christians to
receive Communion in a Catholic
Church if their belief in the Eucharist
conforms to Catholic teaching, if they
had serious need of “eucharistic
sustenance,” could not receive the
sacrament for a prolonged time in their
own church and spontaneously asked
for the sacrament.
Cardinal Willebrands did not inject
anything new in his explanatory note,
but rather confined himself to reviewing
the conditions laid down in 1972.
Referring to the conditions of the
1972 instruction, the Cardinal warned
that “it is not licit to ignore any of
these in the context of an objective and
pastorally responsible examination” of
individual requests by non-Catholics.
Cardinal Willebrands emphasized that
such admission to the Eucharist is
indeed granted on an individual basis
and cannot be granted en masse.
For the last year or so her rounds
have been more circumscribed than
previously, as she now depends on a
light-weight walker to get about, in lieu
of her customary open-air daily
promenades. Her hearing has also
diminished, although hardly noticeable
in her flow of reminiscence about her
intensely active past as a Catholic wife
and mother.
Born Catherine Teresa Bree on May
5, 1867, in Ireland on a farm outside
the town of Sligo - adjacent to that
where the poet William Butler Yeats
spent much time with his grandparents
- she was one of nine children whose
mother died at 38 but whose father
lived to be “very, very old.” In 1883,
when she was 16, she was put alone
aboard a ship for the long voyage to the
United States, at the urging of a
wealthy, widowed grandaunt who had
begged her companionship for her only
child, a daughter. Two years later, at her
estate in Morrisville, Pa., the elderly
relative died.
The Eucharist cannot be a sign of full
unity if full unity itself does not exist,
the Cardinal said, and therefore “such a
practice (of admitting non-Catholics to
Communion) cannot be considered a
means of leading to full ecclesial
communion.”
This sentiment has long been the
rationale of ecumenical leaders, both
Catholic and Protestant; namely, that
total interchange of the Eucharist
should only be practiced as the
culmination of genuine and total unity
of the Christian churches.
The 1972 concession was granted to
provide for a sincerely felt need of
non-Catholics who were deprived of the
sustaining force of the Eucharist in their
own churches, not as a sign of unity.
The cardinal did not specify any areas
of abuse of this concession, but did say
that after publication of the 1972
instruction there sprung up “various
interpretations in which some moved
from the letter and the spirit of the
instruction.”
“To avoid such inexact
interpretations and their consequences,”
the cardinal said, it would be useful to
review the essential elements of the
original instruction.
General principles of common
worship between Catholics and
non-Catholics were laid down by the
Second Vatican Council.
In 1967 the Vatican issued its
directory on the implementation of the
council’s statements on ecumenical
matters.
Catherine’s home thereafter was in
New Haven, Conn., where she lived with
a childless sister of her mother, and her
husband; met and married a young
marine engineer and surveyor, John F.
Ward; and bore a son and two
daughters. One of the latter, Mrs. W.Neil
Conroy, is still alive at 77 and still visits
her mother thrice weekly, from
her apartment on Riverside Drive.
Mrs. Ward, whose education in a
one-room schoolhouse in Sligo had
equipped her for teaching - students
were both boys and girls, Catholic and
Protestant, she reports - never worked
outside the home except for a
short-lived job in the J.B. Sargent
manufacturing plant in New Haven.
(She was fired when her employers
discovered that at the wheedling of
labor organizers, she had been
advocating the formation of a union.)
After marriage, she proved herself a
powerhouse of energy in leadership of
women’s clubs - typical of the era -
besides her chores as wife and mother.
t
“No matter which club she joined,
mother went right up to the top,” Mrs.
Conroy says. “At church, she always ran
the annual fair, and made lots of money
for St. Francis parish.”
The only available parochial school
was too distant to enroll her children, so
Mrs. Ward drilled them thoroughly at
home, in every phase of their religion.
The family archives are replete with
annals of their Catholic participation,
Mrs. Conroy comments, even to the
prayer-books they used and the
programs of ceremonies attended.
In a close-knit family whose living
members span five generations, she
added, “these records have become
precious to us, and we are trying to fill
in the gaps for the younger ones; for
instance, we have written to try to
establish just how old mother’s father
was when he died.”
Mrs. Ward, who nursed her husband
through a prolonged final illness from
cancer, was widowed 40 years ago.
After that she lived for years in
Englewood, N.J., with her older
daughter who died in 1963. In 1967,
approaching her century mark, she
decided that she wanted a change of
environment - that she had lived too
long with her family.
She telephoned for information
about the Mary Manning Walsh Home;
was told that she might have to wait
two years for admittance, but “by some
miracle” was admitted only a week
later. She has been as snug as a bug in a
rug, she proclaims.
Of her reaction to contemporary life,
Mrs. Ward says that she cherishes the
older days, but there are certain phases
that she approves in the present era.
One of them is airplane travel.
Her first airplane trip was made 10
years ago, when she flew to Seattle on a
visit. How did she find the trip?
“Wonderful! 5 ’ she breathed,
“Wonderful! I loved it.”
— FOR NON- CA THOLICS —
Communion
Rules Restated