Newspaper Page Text
I
PAGE 2—The Southern Cross, January 16,1975
The Southern Cross
Business Office 225 Abercom St. Savannah, Ga. 31401
Most Rev. Raymond W. Lessard, D.D., President
Rev. Francis J. Donohue, Editor John E. Markwalter, Managing Editor
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Time to Speak up!
If we’re reading the signs correctly,
the battle to increase public concern for
the right to human life -- in all of its
stages -• seems to be failing.
A document circulated among the
bishops of the United States last week
estimates that there were almost two
million abortions in this country during
the year just past.
A rising tide of violent crime seems to
have stemmed a growing wave of
revulsion toward capital punishment. In
several states during the election
campaign of 1974, candidates for office
made an issue of the Supreme Court
decision striking down the death penalty
laws of the several states, promising to
frame new laws which would enable
their states to once again impose the
penalty of death on persons convicted of
certain crimes.
We are opposed to capital punishment
because we believe that human life is too
precious to be destroyed. But we can
understand, even if we do not share it,
the fear and outrage which is at the heart
of the drive to reinstate capital
punishment.
What we do not understand is the lack
of public outrage in the face of the
calculated and cold-blooded destruction
of almost two million innocent infants
who were destroyed in their mothers’
wombs in a single year.
Certainly, one reason for the high
percentage of Americans who accept
abortion as an acceptable alternative to a
pregnant woman’s problems, or to the
possibility of mental or physical defects,
or to growing world population, is the
high-pressured, massive and well
financed brain-washing job being
financed by such organizations as Planned
Parenthood, Inc.
Through their efforts and the efforts
of similarly oriented organizations, a
distressingly large number of Americans
have come to believe that the
destruction of a human ‘fetus’ is not the
destruction of a human ‘person.’
Such a concept of the continuum of
human life has absolutely no scientific or
religious foundation. It is founded in
misplaced emotions, just as is the desire
to destroy human life at any other time
during its natural existence.
It has been almost two years since the
Supreme Court decision which made
possible the legalized deaths of the
millions of unborn infants who have
been killed since then.
It’s high time that Catholics and
others who are convinced that the
deliberate slaying of innocent persons is
a crime in the sight of God to become as
vocal and as insistent as the
pro-abortionists. It’s time for them to
‘kick the habit’ of conforming to
majority opinion just because they have
been led to believe that it is majority
opinion.
It’s time for them to show by uniting
-- in word and action - behind the
enactment of a constitutional
amendment which would void the
damage done by the Court two years
ago, that the majority of Americans DO
respect life in all of its stages.
-F.J.D.
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Eroding Time
Rev. James Wilmes
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Nathaniel Hawthorne spins a yarn about a
mysterious stranger who opened a
Lost-and-Found Agency in a New England
Village. The villagers are at first suspicious of
the outsider. But curiosity gets the better of
their caution and they patronize the stranger,,
many of them under cover of darkness. Some
come seeking the obvious: lost articles. But a
few want the recovery of intangible and more
elusive possessions - lost youth, a once fair
name now in disgrace, a former sensitivity to
conscience, lost innocence - and so on.
With rare insight, Hawthorne pictures that
characteristic of the sorry, who seek recovery
of values which they themselves let slip away
through want of appreciation. And thereby he
spins a little parable of life. Namely, the things
we lose are two kinds: the losses we miss at
once, and those we never miss till years later.
In the first class are material goods, friends,
loved ones. In the second are the values of life
which slip away, or fade or change form subtly,
with our never knowing. For example, how
easy we lose ideals and never sense the loss.
How gradual is the dimming of enthusiasm,
until there is no trace left. How subtle is the
lowering of standards, until we come to stand
for nothing. . . and so with one’s former
resolutions, noble impulses. These can fall away
as quietly as Autumn leaves, until we stand bare
of any higher motives than an animal.
“Life is not lost by dying,” writes Stephen
Vincent Benet. “Life is lost minute by minute,
day by dragging day, in all the thousand small
uncaring ways.”
No New Issues
Coming Up
Reverend John Reedy, C.S.C.
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Comes the New Year, most columnists and
editorial writers go through a finger exercise of
trying to identify those issues which will
occupy public attention and energy during the
next 12 months.
Naturally, religious journalists take a
particular look at the issues of religious
concern, an effort which has been giving me an
attack of galloping frustration during recent
days.
This year, for the first time, I can’t identify
any religious issues which are going to get
people very excited in the near future -- with
the one exception of the continuing struggle
over the law on abortion.
I would hope that the growing awareness of
maldistribution of food and other essential
resources would excite us enough to demand
substantial change in our national policies. But
at this time I See^rflWridicdtion that such a
demand is developing.
Most of the familiar “movements” will
continue their efforts, largely on the energies of
the relatively few passionate partisans.
While many people are generally sympathetic
toward efforts to end injustices against racial
minorities, women, farmworkers and
homosexuals, there seems to be little
excitement, momentum or public outrage on
any of these causes.
These efforts will continue, but they will
probably be the slogging battles of the trenches
rather than dramatic breakthroughs.
In spite of my hopes, I see little likelihood
that the ordeal of the whole Watergate mess
will sustain a demand for political reform.
Particular legislators will undoubtedly try for a
voting record in favor of virtue, but the popular
interest and indignation have been stretched to
the limit. Though legal appeals will keep the
matter alive for years, most people seem
satisfied and relieved with the judgment of the
Sirica jurors.
In affairs Catholic, it has been enlightening
to me to see how little public response has been
generated by matters like the battle between
parishioners and the new pastor in Arlington,
Virginia.
That conflict over “democratic procedures,”
“creative liturgy,” the use of women in the
distribution of communion and the like had all
the ingredients for an ideological tug-of-war. A
few years ago, the Catholic press would have
been filled with editorials plumping for one side
or the other. We might have expected a call for
a national rally, at least paid advertising listing
the names of all the people on one side or the
other.
In fact, none of this had happened; nor is it
likely to happen. The events have been reported
as straight news which generated little interest
outside the area involved.
The same thing was true of the recent firing
of the priest-editor of the New Orleans diocesan
paper. He ran his own opinion that it was time
for the Church to publicly change the birth
control teaching of HUMANAE VITAE. He was
replaced. And that was that. No anguished
defense of free speech in the Church. No long
editorials explaining that a diocesan paper
belongs to the community of the Church, not
to the bishop alone. Not even a protest from
members of the Catholic Press Association (the
kind I used to help organize.)
Oh, there will be local bitter conflicts if
communities continue to pit one angry,
suffering group against another, the way Boston
has, but it’s not likely that we can come up
with many “solutions” as foolish and
insensitive as that one.
What does all this lack of response signify?
To me, it signifies we are for now past the
time when you can hope to effect change by
appealing directly to public opinion. We’ve
been barraged by too many appeals of this
kind, too many media events.
Those who still hope to bring about change
will have to use other, more professional means.
They will have to become as skillful and as
persistent as are the lobbyists for major
industries. They will have to target their
persuasion to those people who control
decision-making.
But I fear this pattern also signifies a massive
loss of confidence in the sensitivity of many of
our institutions. It’s doubtful that these
institutions, public and ecclesiastical, were ever
very sensitive, but people assumed that they
were. Now they know better.
The danger is that such disillusionment can
become explosive when too many people are
hurting too badly. That combination has the
potential for bringing about changes too
unpleasant for my forecasting.
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What’s
With
Reader’s
Digest
Joe Breig
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For many years I have had a special
admiration-indeed affection-for Reader’s
Digest magazine, because of its decency, its
sanity and its promoting of the best things in
American and human life.
As I have tried to do in my career as a writer,
the Digest has used the printed word With
respect and reverence, for right and good
purposes.
For those reasons, I have refrained from
saying anything publicly about the cancer
which in recent years has appeared in this
splendid literary body. I refer to the Digest’s
pro-abortion attitude.
As a longtime subscriber, I have protested
privately. A year or two ago, I wrote to the
editors to suggest that they re-read, and
re-publish, an article which appeared in their
November 1965 issue, reprinted from McCall’s
magazine.
The article is titled “The Secret World of the
Unborn,” and was written (with Beth Day) by
Dr. Margaret Liley.
In a footnote accompanying the article, the
Digest identified Dr. Liley as a practicing
pediatrician and mother of five children, and as
the wife of Dr. William Liley, an internationally
known New Zealand obstetrician.
Dr. William, the Digest said, was the father of
“the startling new field of medical practice
called ‘fetology’-the diagnosis and treatment of
babies still in the womb.”
Now that is literary honesty. “The diagnosis
and treatment of babies still in the womb.”
Precisely so. Medical people in recent years
have been diagnosing the state of health of
infants in the womb, and have been
administering treatment when needed.
In short, the unborn child-the fetus--is a
patient. He or she is an individual human being
whose ailments, if any, can be diagnosed and
treated, directly. In no sense is he or she “a part
of the mother” like a tonsil or appendix, as the
proabortionists, ignorantly or falsely, try to
deceive us into believing.
The Reader’s Digest was right about unborn
children when it published “The Secret World
of the Unborn.” The Digest is wrong on the
subject today.
Whether the Digest editors re-read that
article, I do not know. If they did, they did not
so inform me. The Digest’s pro-abortion
attitude has persisted, and has now been
publicly attacked by Richard E. Scheiber,
editor of Our Sunday Visitor.
The Digest, Scheiber wrote, equates abortion
with something good like medicine but does
not “inform its readers that many of the
techniques being used to kill babies are illegal
for slaughter houses to use in killing animals.”
A Digest spokesman, Charles Pinchman,
replied that the Digest is “pro-birth control,
pro-population control,” and added, “but so, I
believe, is the Catholic Church.” That response
is an evasion of the issue so blatant as to be an
insult to the intelligence of readers.
In the 1965 article, Dr. Margaret Liley wrote,
“By the third month of his mother’s pregnancy,
the unborn baby is a perfectly formed little
creature about the size of a man’s thumb ... a
sort of astronaut and underwater swimmer,
living in a balloon of fluid.”
Emphasizing the individuality of the unborn
child, Dr. Liley wrote that even if the mother
were unconscious from a brain or spinal injury,
the baby “would go right on developing inside
her... He is a tiny individual human being, as
real and self-contained as though he were lying
in a crib.”
Why won’t Reader’s Digest give such facts to
its readers nowadays? Why, instead, does it
publish articles defending the abortion killings
of unborn children?
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The Christ Who Reconciles
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BY TITUS CRANNY, S. A.
The theme for the Week of Prayer for
Christian Unity for 1975 is the text from St.
Paul to the Ephesians: “It is the Christ who
liberates, unites, and reconciles.” It is surely in
harmony for the Holy Year since its theme is
that of reconciliation - of man with man and of
man with God.
Fr. Paul of Graymoor founded the Week of
Prayer many years ago, in 1908. He was an
Anglican at the time and appealed to Anglicans
and Catholics to offer prayers for the unity of
Christendom. We like to think of him as an
apostle and a prophet of unity. He was an
apostle because he labored so unceasingly for
the promotion of prayer for the holy cause. He
was a prophet too, in many ways, but especially
when in 1910 he said that Reconciliation is the
sacred phenomen of the twentieth century.
We have another twenty-five years to go
before the completion of this century. Much
has been achieved for Unity over the years, but
not nearly enough. The chasms and the barriers
of disunity made or widened by the rebellion of
man have continued. Reconciliation must
somehow become the primary concern of all
the Christian churches, the burning thirst that
cannot be satisfied.
It is not enough for us to agree that this
should be so. It must become part of our lives,
personally and as members of various churches.
Reconciliation is not a catchword or a slogan. It
was a way of life. That is what the Holy Father
has meant when he announced the Holy Year
of reconciliation. This is the first time in
history that other Christian churches are taking
part in the program for the spiritual unity of all
mankind.
In the autumn of 57 a.d. St. Paul wrote to
the Christians of Corinth: “If anyone is in
Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed
away, behold the new has come. All this is from
God who through Christ reconciled us to
Himself and gave us the ministry of
reconciliation. That is, God was in Christ
reconciling the world to Himself, not counting
their transgressions towards them and
entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.
So we are ambassadors for Christ, God making
His appeal through us. We beseech you on
behalf of Christ: be reconciled to God.”
The words of the apostle are fitting at this
time. All the tension in the world, the wars and
ruptures, the arrogance and pride of man, the
hatred of one people against another. Even the
hostility among those who are called Christians.
And the alienation is more personal as well -
families and relatives and those who should love
one another in the name of Christ. But the
separation and the enmity are present; hence
the urgent need, the desparate need, for God in
Christ to reconcile.
This is the theme and the need of the Week
of Prayer for Christian Unity and the purpose
of the Holy Year. But do I put it off as though
it is not part of my life in Christ, that I am
called to reconciliation, that I am an
ambassador of Christ to promote and facilitate
peace and unity with God and man? The holy
burden is upon all of us. In the votive Mass for
the holy year we pray that God may give “your
spirit of reconciliation that we may be your
instruments in making all things one in Christ.”
And again: “Lord remember Christ your son
who is our peace and reconciliation and who
has taken away the sins of the world with His
blood. Because you look with love on these
gifts of your church may the grace of this year
help us to extend the freedom of Christ to
mankind . . .”
We have to become convinced of the need of
reconciliation; that is inescapable, unavoidable,
inevitable. But we take life for granted, its
problems as well as its blessings. But Christ
came to change the world by changing men’s
hearts. Bethlehem and Calvary and all the holy
events between them were not just incidents of
history. They were charged with the life of
God. We cannot brush Him aside or His
mysteries of salvation. They impinge on us
today; His words and actions are meant to
challenge us, to make demands on us, to make
us open wide our arms and our hearts to the
need of our brothers and sisters who may be in
want, materially and spiritually.
To reconcile - to make at-one, to bring peace
and harmony, to unite in love. All these ideas
are contained in the task and dignity of being
ambassadors of reconciliation. When we think
of Christ we recall His compassion, His
kindness, His consideration. And so
reconciliation means repentance, forgiveness,
sorrow for sin, peace, harmony, and atonement.
And so the Week of Prayer during January
18-25 is a kind of providential way to begin and
to take part in the Holy Year. It should remind
us that reconciliation is not just a matter for
individuals, but for the entire Christian family,
and for all mankind.
All of us need to pray for unity and
reconciliation much more than we do. It is not
the burning issue that should inspire and
concern us. It is too much taken for granted or
given a kind of token observance. But Jesus
died for unity, gave us the Eucharist as the
sacrament of unity, formed the Church to unite
all men with Himself. How then can we be
passive or negligent toward so great a cause?
One final word - about Maty. She is the
model of reconciliation who by her holiness
and association with Christ shared in the whole
mystery of salvation. She is inseparable from
Him in heaven even as she was while on earth.
She is Our Lady of the Atonement, of
Reconciliation and of Unity, as Father Paul
honored her. It is not just a coincidence that
one of the readings for the feasts of Our Lady
should be from Romans 5 and the concluding
verse is; “We glory in God through our Lord
Jesus Christ by whom we have now received
reconciliation.” (V.ll) For in the prayer for
the Holy Year we ask that “with the help of
Mary our Mother may your Church be the sign
and sacrament of salvation for all men and
women so that the world may believe in your
love and in your truth.”
This is the purpose of reconciliation - it
demands the very best from all of us, as
followers of Christ and children of Mary.