Newspaper Page Text
PAGE 4—The Southern Cross, December 6,1973
The Southern Cross
Busines. Office 225 Abercorn St. Savannah, Ga. 31401
Most Rev. Raymond W. Lessard, O.D., President
Rev. Francis J. Donohue, Editor
John E. Markwalter, Managing Editor
Second Class Postage Paid at Waynesboro, Ga. 30830
Send Change of Address to P.O. Box 10027, Savannah, Ga. 31402
Publish?>i weekly except the second and last weeks
in June, July and August and the last week in December.
At 601 E. Sixth St., Waynesboro, Ga. 30830
Subscription Price $2.76 per year by Assement Parishes Diocese of Savannah Others $5 Per Year
The Newsweek Article
The following editorial was written for the Dec. 5
issue of The Vermont Catholic Tribune, the
Burlington, Vt„ diocesan newspaper.)
Newsweek has done itself as grave a
disservice this week as it has done to the
American priesthood.
A priest by definition and by vocation
is vulnerable and people who take cheap
shots at them individually or collectively
deserve our pity.
In its piece on priests who date, the
magazine declares that “thousands of
U.S. Catholic priests are experimenting
with what they call ‘the third way’ - a
priestly life style that includes close
personal relationships with women,
leading sometimes to sex, but seldom to
marriage.”
The piece appears credible since it
quotes Father Eugene Kennedy, the
author of an extensive psychological
study on the American priesthood.
Father Kennedy has written to
Newsweek to protest the sensationalsim
of the article and to suggest that the
article “got out of hand” in focusing
attention on isolated cases of obvious
immaturity on the part of priests.
Of course, there are priests who are
immature and priests who sin and there
will be until they ordain angels, but the
impression that this is becoming general
practice flies in the face for all available
evidence and common sense.
Just recently, a study of doctors
indicated that a deplorable percentage
said they had sex with patients. One can
just see an earnest editor scratching his
head and saying “Could this be true of
other professional people?”
It won’t be long before someone
surveys the legal profession, if it hasn’t
already been done. And nurses, and
teachers, and bookkeepers, and editors,
and maybe you.
As Father Kennedy points out,
immaturity is a common problem for
American men.
Ordination or marriage-or
non-marriage-can’t always solve it. It
takes grace-divine grace-and that
doesn’t necessarily come in a horizontal
position.
Phyllis McGinley has written a
wonderful, warm and understanding
book about the human relationships
among some very strong individuals who
became saints. It’s called
“Saint-Watching” and it tells about how
St. Francis de Sales helped St. Jane
Chantal and how St. Francis of Assisi
found strength and wisdom in St. Clare.
Maybe it’s old fashioned to talk about
saints and saintliness but enough of us
have been privileged to know saints in
our own day and even in our own
family, so that this sleazy kind of
journalism leaves us sick in our stomach.
For the cynics in the profession, the
Newsweek piece is the kind of story that
gets exhumed when circulation is
dipping.
Education For Women
Been Relevant?
Mary Carson
It’s just taken for granted that a woman is
born knowin’. What logical reason is there to
believe a woman automatically has the talent
and expertise to raise a family just because she’s
given birth?
I believe that if we’re going to advance
womanhood, we must require extensive,
realistic school training in raising a family. It
should start in kindergarten, and if there is any
aptitude, continue through graduate study.
A prime course, in the advanced studies,
would be speed reading. Unless you can breeze
through 750 to 1000 words a minute you
cannot possibly keep up with all the “urgent
messages for parents” that will come home
from school with your kids.
A second subject would be
music .. .majoring in orchestration. This would
provide the selective hearing training that you
need. You must be able to turn off in your
mind radios and record players, and above it,
hear the scratching of a toddler’s pencil all over
the report that Daddy stayed up all night
completing.
A crash session in military logistics would be
invaluable. . .just to prepare you to move the
troops to all the required Saturday activities.
In political science, the course would cover
diplomacy between estranged nations. How
invaluable such training would be in explaining
to the optician why your child has broken
guaranteed eyeglass frames three times; or to a
neighbor why your child has broken her picture
window twice.
Some philosophy would also prove useful in
the last situation. With that throwing arm your
son could become a great ballplayer.. .if he
will just learn better aim.
Aside from the basics in homemaking, the
course would include mechanics, plumbing,
carpentry . . .and naturally, minor surgery.
Final degrees would be offered only after a
simulated exercise in mock-motherhood, to be
held from November to the end of March.
This session would require controlled
conditions. The candidate would be given half a
dozen children, aged 16 down to a new infant.
There must be at least one bout with a
communicable disease, which the “mother”
never had.
Aside from colds, homework, flu, slush, and
a first crush, one major appliance will break and
take ten days to be fixed, the car won’t start
when the children are late for school, and a
snowflake costume will be made on 12 hour
notice.
I’m sure many girls taking the course will
flunk .. .or decide that’s really not the career
they want for the next thirty years of their
lives. And better they find it out ahead of time.
Others will thrive on it. . .will
succeed . . .and go into motherhood prepared
and pre-trained for what all previous
generations have had to learn along the way
with on-the-job training.
“Do you have a card for someone
who is too late for the old Church
and too old for the new?”
My Children Understand?
Reverend John Reedy C.S.C.
“ ... the more people talk about religion,
the more concrete it gets to be and the less it
reflects that thing which they most love.”
That’s one of those observations which leap
out of the river of routine reading which flows
across my desk, the sort of thing that makes
something in my mind go “click.”
Part of the reason for the “click” is my
recognition that this judgment rings true to my
experience - not just my logic - and will keep
coming back into my thoughts as I try to
understand its implications and its relationship
to other things I believe.
(For the record, this came from a ST. LOUIS
REVIEW interview with Dr. George Benson, a
psychoanalyst who was lecturing on the
psychological dimensions of the way in which
men know and respond to God.)
(Dr. Benson lead into this remark by saying,
“ .. . people always try to talk about
transcendentals without realizing that
transcendental phenomenons, something like
the concept of God, lose their transcendental
quality the moment that you start to talk about
them. When you try to talk about a
transcendental phenomenon, it becomes a
psychological phenomenon.”)
There are a lot of questions involved in this
observation - for example, what does it mean
in our efforts to formulate prayer? How are
people to feed their religious life except
through reading, talking, hearing? How does
personal religious experience of a mysterious
God relate to all of the concrete realities of
Church organizations and structures?
Yet, from my own experience, I feel sure
that what Dr. Benson says is true and
important.
I know that the deepest religious moments in
my life have not been the things I talk about in
my endless discussion of religion and Church.
Those are moments which are protected and
kept private like the moments of greatest
intimacy between lovers. We know that public
exposure and efforts to reduce such profound
experiences to words somehow profane and
cheapen them.
This, I suspect, is one of the big problems of
the “generation gap” in the efforts of parents
who want to share their religious values with
their children.
It’s not that they want to brainwash their
sons and daughters, satisfying their own vanity
by making their youngsters carbon copies of
themselves.
Rather, their love moves them to share an
element of their lives which has been rich and
rewarding to them.
However, if the faitji and experience of God
has been deep and fundamental in their lives, its
reality probably owes much more to their
experience than to the formulations and
teachings they have received.
But in their minds the two components slide
together and merge. They no longer separate
catechism lessons and pulpit sermons from the
religious insights which have come from quiet
moments of prayer, from the experience of
tragedy and loss, from the sense of God’s
sustaining presence in suffering and confusion,
from their conviction that all the happy
“accidents” of their lives are really part of the
providential plan designed by a loving, personal
God.
Their children have not yet had these
experiences and the parents, no matter how
hard they try, cannot adequately convey the
reality which they have lived in formulas such
as, “to know, to love add to serve God in this
life and to be happy with Him in the next.”
Poets try to express such experience in
mind-stretching images, some mystics make the
attempt in difficult, frustrating books about the
dark night of the soul and the prayer of quiet
union. Perhaps this same effort is behind the
“speaking in tongues” of the Pentecostals.
All these thoughts, unfortunately, don’t lead
me to any practical suggestions about what
parents can do to overcome the problem.
However, I suspect our realization that some
experiences - especially religious experiences -
are incommunicable, even to those we love
most deeply, might alleviate some of our
disappointment and sense of failure.
In an era dominated by disappointment and
failure, such a gain is not to be despised.
Words of Life
Rev. Joseph Dean
Ehy 1: We find ourselves in a world that has
something seriously wrong with it. Daily we
read about wars, murders, poverty, racial
conflict, exploitation. Daily we see in others
and in ourselves loneliness, depression, anxiety,
boredom, suspicion, mistrust, quarreling,
hatred. Yet God did not create the world to be
this way, nor does he want it to be this way.
Day 2: Many offer to us plans for
making the wetfM a better place. Better
4
education, more technical skills, new political
programs, sociological wisdom, drugs, are all
offered as solutions. Man-made religions
(Buddhism, Bahai, Zen, Yoga, and many
others) are presented to us as the hope of the
world. Some even tell us that a Christian moral
code without Christ is the solution. But all
these are human thoughts, man-made plans.
The Lord says:
“Yes, the heavens are as high above the earth
as my ways are above your ways, my thoughts
above your thoughts.” (Isa. 55:9)
Day 3: We need more than human ideas
and human power. We need the wisdom and
power of God. We are facing a power that is
greater than human power.
“For it is not against human enemies that we
have to struggle, but against the Sovereignties
and the Powers who originate the darkness in
this world, the spiritual army of evil.” (Eph.
6:19)
Day 4: God’s answer to the world’s need is
Jesus Christ. Jesus was sent into the world to
save us, to free us from the power of Satan and
of the world, so that we might live a new life
now and forevermore. (Jn. 11: 21-27)
Day 5: Our freedom costs something. Jesus
had to die so that we might live. But God loved
us enough to send his son, who willingly died
for us. As Paul says:
“It is not easy to die even for a good man
though of course for someone really worthy, a
man might be prepared to die - but what
proves that God loves us is that Christ died for
us while we were still sinners.” (Rom. 5: 6-8)
Day 6: Jesus died and rose from the dead so
that we might have new life. If he had not died,
if he had not undergone the sufferings he did,
we could not have been freed from sin. (Isa. 53:
4-6)
Day 7: When Jesus rose from the dead, he
had defeated the power of death. Now He can
free you from the power of darkness and the
hold of Satan’s kingdom. He can give you a
whole new life, if you are willing to leave the
old:
He has taken us out of the power of darkness
and created a place for us in the kingdom of the
Son that he loves, and in Him we gain our
freedom the forgiveness of our sins. (Col. 1:13)
STUDY: This week study the new life Jesus
brings and the gift of the Holy Spirit that
makes it possible. (John 3, Acts 2)
What
One Person
Can Do
Reverend Richard Armstrong
It’s a long way from the fifth grade at
Meadowlane Elementary School in Melbourne,
Florida, to a subcommittee of the United States
Senate. But Dawn Ann Kurth, an 11-year-old
television critic, made it.
Like most grammar school children, Dawn
Ann used to watch Saturday morning kiddies’
shows. And she would ask her mother
sometimes to buy the products advertised.
After her sister ordered a phonograph that
didn’t work, she began listening more closely.
Later, as a special school project, she conducted
a poll of 1,500 other youngsters. The replies
uncovered many complaints about the quality
of the products offered by sponsors.
Dawn Ann sent her findings to Washington
and received an invitation from Senator Frank
Mass (D., Utah) to testify before the consumer
subcommittee of which he was chairman.
The lf-y ear-old warmed up after a nervous
start. She cited misleading claims for products,
vitamins disguised as candy and cereals that
were little more than sugar. The youngster
added that, by the age of 10 or 11, children
grow cynical about commercials and the adults
behind them.
Her conclusion: “I hope now that I can tell
every kid in America that when they see a
wrong that needs to be right they shouldn’t just
try to forget about it and hope it will go away.
They should begin to do what they can to
change it.”
One person can make a difference - provided
we don’t just close our eyes to wrongs in the
vain hope they’ll go away. With God’s help, we
can make them go away.
For a free copy of the Christopher News
Notes, “Children are People, Too,” send a
stamped, self-addressed envelope to The
Christophers, in care of this newspaper.
Two Who
Offered
Their Sons
Joe Brieg
Holy Land memories thronged upon me
while I was reading “Behold Your Mother,” the
pastoral letter of the American bishops on
Mary. In imagination, I was in Israel once again,
descending a great stone stairway laid by the
Crusaders.
Into deeper and deeper darkness I went with
my guide, out of the blazing Mediterranean
sunlight. The steps ended, and I groped my
way, by the light of a candle handed to me by a
monk, to the tomb to which the early
Christians confided Our Lady in apparent death
-- the tomb from which God took her to be
with her Son forever in Heaven.
Mary did not belong in any tomb, because
neither sin nor the heritage of sin ever touched
her; and because also, in her heart-crushing
offering of her Son on Calvary’s terrible cross,
she had earned a special sharing in his
resurrection.
Another memory awakened in me by the
pastoral letter was of my visit to the Mosque of
Omar, “the Dome of the Rock,” which stands
in quiet beauty on the site of the great Temple
of Solomon, which the Romans, when they
crushed Jerusalem, razed and removed, stone
by stone, some 30 years after the death of
Jesus.
Under the blue and white and gold dome is a
tremendous rock which, tradition says, was the
altar on which the Patriarch Abraham, our first
father in faith, was about to sacrifice his
beloved son Isaac until his hand was stayed by
an angel.
The vast sweep and scope of God’s revealing
of himself, and of his covenant with humankind
through the Chosen People, is woven together
in a seamless garment of Scriptural history by
those two rendering sacrifices - Abraham’s
offering of his only son, and Mary’s of hers.
Fathers and mothers, I think, are best able to
feel the anguish of those offerings. Often in my
meditations, I have placed myself and my
children beside Abraham and Isaac, and with
Mary and Jesus on Golgotha, asking myself
whether I could ever have given what they gave.
I do not know; but I do know something of
what they suffered.
They, principally, gave us Jesus. By their
loyalty to God even to the fearful extreme of
giving the life of an only child into whom they
had poured all of themselves, they opened the
way for the entrance of God Incarnate into our
fallen human family.
“There are remarkable likenesses,” the
bishops write in Behold Your Mother,
“between Abraham and Mary, especially in the
accounts of the birth of Isaac, child of promise,
and the virginal conception of Jesus, holy Child
of Mary. Abraham, Old Testament man of
faith; illuminates our understanding of Mary,
New Testament woman of faith. Abraham, our
father in faith, can teach us much about Mary,
our mother in faith.”
In the Holy Land, as I have often remarked,
one deeply feels the inseparable oneness
between the Testaments; between Israel and the
Church.