Newspaper Page Text
National PEARL Called
PAGE 7—The Southern Cross, January 24,1974
Anti-Catholic Coalition”
WASHINGTON (NC) - Officials of
Catholic and non-sectarian organizations
have accused the newly formed National
Coalition for Public Education and
Religious Liberty (PEARL) of religious
bigotry and of a strong anti-Catholic
bias.
“I fail to see how PEARL can do
anything good for American
education,” said Father C. Albert Koob,
president of the National Catholic
Educational Association (NCEA), “since
it has a negative philosophy and is made
up of organizations known for their
bigoted attitude toward Catholic
education.”
Stuart D. Hubbell, executive director
of the Catholic League for Religious and
Civil Rights, called National PEARL
“nothing more or less than an
anti-Catholic coalition.”
Msgr. Edward F. Spiers, executive
director of Citizens for Educational
Freedom (CEF), a non-sectarian
nonpublic school aid group, noted that
National PEARL has its headquarters in
the National Education Association’s
(NEA) government relations office here
and includes among its officers the NEA
president.
The new coalition is “an effort on the
part of the public school bureaucracy to
keep all funds under their own control,”
Msgr. Spiers said.
National PEARL is a coalition of 28
educational, religious and civil liberties
organizations opposing government aid
to nonpublic schools. Its president is
Episcopalian Suffragan Bishop John T.
Walker of Washington, D.C., and its
vice-presidents include NEA president
Helen Wise; New York PEARL vice
chairman Florence Flast; Jefferson
Fordham, former dean of Rutgers
University Law School and Rabbi
Robert Gordis, professor at Jewish
Theological Seminary. The executive
committee includes representatives from
the American Civil Liberties Union,
Americans United for Separation of
Church and State, and the Baptist Joint
Committee on Public Affairs.
Rabbi Morris Sherer, executive
president of Agudath Israel of America
and chairman of Citizens Relief for
Education by Income Tax (CREDIT),
pointed out that the Jewish
organizations in National PEARL did
not include the American Jewish
Committee, which he called “the most
prestigious of all” Jewish organizations
in the United States.
Hubbell, the Catholic civil rights
league official, called it “tragic” that
“the recent protestations of the Jewish
community for ecumenism and
Minority Priests—
(Continued from Page 1)
segregated seminary or an integrated
one. That kind of arrangement avoids
segregation in the traditional sense of
the word.
“The second suggestion would be to
ordain more bishops immediately from
the ranks of minority priests to better
reflect the percentage of Catholics in
these minority groups.”
Another aid to a more effective body
of priests in a diocese, Father Rohloff,
would be a better “working relationship
in the local church between the
diocesan and regular (religious order)
clergy.”
In some dioceses, he said, this
relationship “is very good, in others not
so good, in all it could be better.”
Religious order priests, he continued,
should be “made to feel a part of the
presbyterate, and they should offer
themselves just as freely as any other
priest to the service of the diocese
within the charism of their religious
community.” He declared that religious
order priests should be represented on
the priests’ senate, and that while “for
the most part this is being done,” in
some dioceses their representation does
not approach the percentage of those
actually working in the diocese. “This,”
Fr. Rohloff said, “smacks of tokenism
and should be corrected.”
He deplored the lack of bishops from
religious orders, but attributed the lack
to a tradition among religious order
priests of not accepting ecclesiastical
honors. “I believe this springs from a
false humility,” he said, adding that
“religious communities are thereby
depriving the Church of an element that
could be very beneficial to the hierarchy
and could do much to improve
relationships between the two clergies in
the presbyterate.”
For a more effective presbyterate, Fr.
Rohloff also called for common prayer,
common study, common work and
common liesure pursuits among the
priests of a diocese.
interfaith dialogue in the context of the
Middle East-Israeli conflict should be
marred by the refusal of the American
Jewish Congress to refrain from
continuing its long and unrelenting
attack upon the rights and just needs of
Catholic school children and their
parents in education.”
“If it is true, as Yale professor Peter
Viereck has said, that Catholic-baiting is
the anti-Semitism of the liberals,”
Hubbell said, “what can Catholics
themselves conclude about the action of
such Jewish groups as the American
Jewish Congress and the Jewish
Anti-Defamation League, in lending
their names to this new anti-Catholic
coalition dedicated to such outright
discrimination against Catholic school
children and school cMldren of other
faiths who happen to attend
religious-operated schools?”
The NEA’s “professed commitment
to the equal educational advancement
of each American school child” is
questionable, Hubbell said, in the light
of its “joining this anti-Catholic
coalition” that opposes aid to nonpublic
schools.
Hubbell called one of the new
coalition’s principal members,
Americans United for Separation of
Church and State, an “unabashedly
bigoted and anti-Catholic organization”
which “has established a thriving,
profitable business of exploiting the
social disease of anti-Catholicism in this
country.”
Msgr. Spiers characterized National
PEARL as an effort on the part of “the
public school bureaucracy” to “squeeze
out the nonpublic parent and child.” He
said the bureaucracy is “not willing to
give parents a fair shake.”
“There’s a growing dissatisfaction of
people in this country with public
school funding, curriculum and
achievements and not just from the
religious angle,” he said. “There is a
movement to get back in the hands of
people their own tax money. The NEA
senses increasing anger with the whole
public school bureaucracy.”
NCEA president Father Koob
expressed similar criticism in saying:
“One can only wonder what has
happened to the movement for values in
education . Apparently the only values
acceptable to PEARL are those which
are dear to public school personnel.”
Rabbi Sherer said, “Now that PEARL
has gone national it is all the more
reason for the nonpublic forces to
accelerate their activities and not just to
lick their wounds.”
Portrait of Jim Foley, Foreign Missioner
Nanhlaing, Burma -- If your car
breaks down on the primitive road to
this town in northern Burma, Jim Foley
is the man to call.
If you’re a student at the central
school here from one of the villages in
the surrounding Kachin hills, Jim Foley
is the man to see about a place to stay.
And if you need a Catholic priest,
Columban Father Jim Foley will be
right there. After 35 years in Burma, he
has learned that, in order to be an
effective missionary here, one must be
versatile.
First and always, Fr. Foley is a priest,
ministering to his people in 10 villages
scattered through the Kachin hills. The
parish used to have a boarding school,
one of the finest in Burma.
In 1965 the government took all
schools into the state educational
system. With religion no longer a part of
the school day, a Christian environment
outside of class was more important
than ever.
That’s why the doors to the boarding
hostel remain open wide. With the
students growing most of their own
food, the cost is only about $2 a month,
Fr. Foley reports in Columban Mission.
Even this amount is too much for some
families, but he sees to it that no
student is turned away for lack of
money.
To travel to his mission stations, Fr.
Foley uses a jeep. There are hardly any
other motor vehicles in Nanhlaing, and
so no mechanics. Over the years, Fr.
Foley has become such an expert in
repairs that his grease pit is famous.
Neighboring Columbans regularly enlist
his help with faulty carbureators and
broken shock absorbers.
Burma’s government no longer
permits foreigners, including
missionaries, to come here to work. So
Father Jim and tweleve other veteran
Columban missioners in the Kachin hills
must carry on as long as they are able.
They are working to train more
catechists and encourage more young
local men to become priests.
Spare time has never been a problem
for this missionary. Maybe that’s the
explanation for the giant-sized smile he
always wears.
BOARDERS at Columban Father Jim Foley’s hostel
in Nanhlaing, Burma, grow their own food. They live
here while attending the state-run school. The Sisters
help the missionary care for the students.
How Can Catholic People Know What to Believe ?
BY CHRISTOPHER DERRICK
(NC News Service)
What interests me in this title is the
word “today.” The problem of belief
was always difficult; we may need to
remember that faith is a gift from God,
not a subjective hunch of our own, nor
yet the end product of a chain of
reasoning. But what’s so special about
“today?” Has the problem suddenly
become more difficult?
Objectively speaking, I don’t think it
has. We are to believe the revelation of
God, as mediated to us through
Scripture and the Church; and while this
“develops” (in the technical sense) it
doesn’t otherwise change. Nor has it
been refuted by any new knowledge of
scientific or similar kinds.
But subjectively, in many people’s
minds, the question is confused and
complicated today by three widespread
but erroneous habits of the mind.
The first is the habit of intellectual
scepticism. In religious matters and
elsewhere, many people have lost all
faith in the relationship between
language and reality; they distrust and
even dislike the possibility that any
verbal proposition could be simply true
and false.
teaching Church, the apostolic
hierarchy, the Catholic episcopate,
defined as such by its unity with the
Holy See, and with the Pope himself as
leader and referee. To reject this
principle, while still calling oneself “a
Catholic,” is to play silly games with
words. But all such notions fill many
would-be Catholics with immediate
horror; Christ, they feel, cannot really
have intended anything so
undemocratic, so incompatible with the
social and political sentiments of the
1970s!
These three habits of the mind prevail
widely; and quite unnecessarily, they
make the problem of belief seem harder
today than at most periods in the past.
They are compatible with belief in God,
but not with any real belief in God’s
actual revelation. Their clearly visible
effect is to knock the bones out of our
faith, reducing it to a vague religiousity
which soon declines into an equally
vague humanitarianism.
The great practical remedy is to
recognize them for what they are:
hang-ups of this generation, or of some
noisy people within this generation,
and, I suspect, of chiefly neurotic
origin. They are certainly not
philosophically respectable positions.
Against them, we need to remember
r
Dialogue
In Print
V. - J
and assert that reality is real and exists
independently of our minds, religious
reality included; that true statements
can be uttered about it, untrue
statements too, so that one man’s belief
is not always as good as another’s; and
that unless we prefer to remain in the
dark, God’s revelation has to be
accepted, and on God’s terms, which
involve us in the “scandal of
particularity,” the related scandals of
dogma and authority, too.
These may be painful nettles to grasp.
But thus and not otherwise, within the
limitations of this life, men can emerge
“from shadows and fantasies into the
truth” and solve the problem of belief,
provided always that they must pray for
the gift of faith, and look after it when
they’re got it.
BY DONALD THORMAN
(NC News Service)
Two decades ago, I attended a
three-day seminar with 10 or 15 other
Catholic laymen and priests working in
the Catholic press. The subject of our
concern was “What can we demand
from our readers?” In particular, we
were concerned with setting up some
kind of guidelines to follow in the
writing of editorials which would be fair
and just to the consciences of our
readers.
For example, could we say, a good
Catholic must believe in unions, be
against racism, for civil liberties, against
violence, in favor of the United Nations,
against communism, and, even, ask if a
good Catholic could be a Republican?
After three inconclusive days, as I
recall, it was all summed up by a Jesuit
priest who said: “If we really are going
to arrive at any authoritative
conclusions to our primary question, we
should have present as resource persons
at least a Scripture scholar, moral and
dogmatic theologians, a canon lawyer
and a Church historian.”
Twenty years later, I have a feeling of
“deja vu” in addressing myself to the
question of how we can know what to
believe today.
We have to begin with the premise
that no one person on this earth is
capable of knowing and being certain of
all the truth. Truth does indeed exist
out there, apart from us. But it is an
intimate part of the human condition
that most of our lives are spent in the
search for the ultimate reality which
exists outside our subjective
personalities.
Infallibility may well reside in the
Church, but it does not reside in each of
us individually. Far from it! We are
always engaged in the struggle to find
out what the truth really is - about our
own inner selves, our political and
economic systems, other persons, and
even about our own ultimate religious
beliefs.
Let us take something as relatively
simple as the Apostles’ Creed. What
does it mean to say, “I believe in God?”
Once a week we stand around the
altar in a congregation and recite our
Responses
Then there is the related habit of
what I would call “exaggerated
ecumenism.” By this I mean a powerful
reluctance to believe and say that
anything actually is the case, because if
we do, we shall be implying - in
horridly unecumenical or “triumphal”
fashion -- that those who think
otherwise are mistaken.
Finally, there is a habit of similarly
exaggerating the important principle of
human equality. In the Church, as St.
Paul tells us, there is a diversity of
ministeries, and one of these is the
ministry of authoritative doctrinal
teaching. There is a limited sense (highly
congenial to the mind of our time) in
which this ministry is diffused
throughout the whole people of God.
But there is another and overriding
sense (much less attractive to those in
whose minds the concepts of
“democracy” and “equality” have run
to seed) in which Christ saw fit to
concentrate this ministry in particular
and specialized hands - the hands of the
BY DONALD THORMAN
(NC News Service)
In this brief space there is only room
for two comments about Mr. Derrick’s
presentation.
First, I don’t think he really addresses
himself to the question of how we can
know what to believe today. I just
cannot believe he can be satisfied with
the catechism type of observation that
we are to “believe the revelation of
God, as mediated to us through
Scripture and the Church.” The very
point we are grappling with here is how
to know what to believe.
Most of what the Church has said
over the centuries is not infallible or
certain beyond any doubt. But we do
have a tradition and some kind of
consensus of what our religious
forebears have believed and followed.
We ourselves are the religious
forebears of yet unborn generations,
and they are going to draw on our
insights and our interpretations of the
living faith. We cannot pretend we are
going to be handing on (especially after
the Second Vatican Council) the same,
identical faith without our historical
mark on it.
Second, of course, “reality is real and
exists independently of our minds.”
Again, the point is, how can we grasp
that reality and internalize it into our
own belief? That is the hard part; that is
the part no one else can do for us. We
are free to choose, to use our free will,
but how can we do so intelligently,
given our human limitations and our
obviously limited time on earth?
These are the issues and I do not
believe Mr. Derrick deals with them.
BY CHRISTOPHER DERRICK
(NC News Service)
Mr. Thorman seems to me to confuse
belief itself with our developing (but
always imperfect) understanding of
belief; and in so doing, he seems to
dodge the question.
We certainly cannot hope to know all
truth in this life - nobody ever thought
we could - nor can we hope to
understand fully such limited truth as
we do know. But the big question
remains, ignored by Mr. Thorman:
Where do we get religious truth from,
and how are we to know that it is truth?
There’s always the inward voice of
God, but this is notoriously hard to
distinguish from our own fantasies and
desires, unless we can refer also to
something more external and objective.
Is anything of that sort available? Apart
from our individual guesses and hunches
and visions, is there any answer - even a
limited answer - to this question of
what we are to believe?
To my way of thinking, there is. As I
said before, “we are to believe the
revelation of God, as mediated to us
through Scripture and the Church.”
This does not mean, of course, that all
ecclesiastics have always been right
about everything! There’s always much
hard thinking to be done, much
“development” to be undertaken.
I still don’t know what Mr. Thorman
thinks of that centrally “Catholic” idea.
He flirts with it sometimes, but
cautiously. More often, he writes as
though in the hope of finding some
tenable middle position, between the
awkwardly dogmatic Catholicism of the
Church and the centuries on the one
hand, and frank agnosticism on the
other. Maybe I do him an injustice. But
if he does entertain any such hope, I
think he’s going to be disappointed.
basic beliefs. The priest at the altar,
assuming he has an excellent theological
education, would have one concept
which this phrase would bring to his
mind.
The college student struggling with
his first theology and philosophy
courses might have a confused and
inchoate idea filled with many new
thoughts and possibilities. The
seven-year-old has likely given it no
thought. And the aged, little-educated
grandmother whose life has been built
on a sturdy belief in a loving God who
has intervened daily in her
multitudinous years and seen her
through many crises knows what she
means from the perspective of long,
human experience.
But no one person there completely
comprehends the meaning of what it
means to believe in God. We all have our
little, limited apprehension of the total
truth, but we do not possess all that
truth. Nor shall we ever.
It has ever been thus and so it shall
ever be. We ordinarily build our beliefs
over many years. Some things we accept
on faith and authority; after all there
simply is not time in one lifetime to
reinvent the wheel. Others we test
against our own experience. Still others
we develop as we grow and learn and
become more educated. Our catechism
knowledge of God gives way to a
different way of viewing the
transcendental being who exists “out
there” apart from us and yet is
somehow so intimately linked to our
lives and final end.
Some persons simply cannot stand to
live with this kind of uncertainty.
They feel they must know, beyond a
shadow of a doubt, every detail of their
faith. And yet this is a physical and
intellectual impossibility for any human
being. Isn’t this what faith and belief are
all about? We put our trust in another,
for belief is a matter of trust; in every
area of our life we must have faith
involving others.
To survive as religious beings we must
have belief in belief and faith in faith
itself. Lord, to whom else shall we go?