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PAGE 3—January 30, 1975
POPE PAUL SAYS
Man Must Set ‘Scale of Goals’
VATICAN CITY (NC) - Man must
set up a “scale of goals” which includes
new economic and social programs for
improving society but which has as its
first priority establishment of the
CINCINNATI (NC) - A Cincinnati
archdiocesan committee studying
Church responses to the world food
crisis had concluded that “it will be
impossible for our lifestyle to remain
the same if we are serious about
contributing to a solution of this
problem.”
The committee report, approved by
CVF SPEAKER:
HOUSTON, Tex. (NC) - A
proponent of right-to-life predicted here
that a constitutional amendment
negating the Supreme Court decision of
Jan. 22, 1973, legalizing abortion is
inevitable.
Kenneth D. Whitehead, 44, executive
vice president of the national Catholics
United for the Faith, Inc. (CUF) based
in New Rochelle, N.Y., explained that
the members of CUF are advocating
Pope Paul Vi’s encyclical letter
Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life)
through the mass media and in speeches
across the country.
Speaking “In Defense of Human
Life” at St. Thomas University here Jan.
14, Whitehead said, “We are taking a
Catholic position in favor of the moral
teachings of the Church, and last Nov.
18 the Vatican reminded us that the
Church doesn’t recognize the moral
right to kill an innocent, unborn child.”
An additional reaffirmation against
abortion, he cited, can be found in the
Fifth Commandment “Thou shalt not
kill.”
“CUF strongly supports the teachings
of the Church against abortion and CUF
is attempting to implement these
teachings in our society by giving legal
kingdom of God, Pope Paul VI said Jan.
22.
Pope Paul told his weekly general
audience: “We need to establish a scale
of goals to which man can and should
the Arch diocesan Pastoral Council,
recommended three areas for action:
collection and distribution of food and
money, legislative change and
educational and spiritual programs to
keep people aware of the situation.
The committee offered three basic
conclusions:
protection to the unborn. We want a
constitutional amendment that states
you can’t kill an innocent, unborn child
because he has constitutional rights,”
Whitehead said.
Another organization the highest
court in the land must contend with,
Whitehead said is the National Right to
Life Committee. “If we can rally
enough people like we did last Jan. 22
with 20,000 in the capital, we will make
additional impacts on the justices.”
The father of four sons and author of
“Respectable Killing: The New
Abortion Imperative” repeated that
CUF favors a constitutional amendment
which protects the life of the unborn in
the true sense. “We believe that there is
life from the moment of conception,”
he stated.
Whitehead charged that the court
decision legalizing abortion came about
because far too many Catholics were
passive spectators.
“While we were so busy trying to be
Americans a moral erosion took place
and pornography, sexual perversion and
abortion became the in things,” he said.
turn. At the top of this scale is ‘the
kingdom of God and His justice.’”
If this goal is neglected or denied, he
said, the scale fails. “It is then no longer
-- “The food crisis which the world
faces is not a crisis in the sense that it
will be solved or can be forgotten in a
short period of time.”
-- “No single plan or project is
capable of providing a solution.”
-- “As Catholics, all of us are
obligated before God to do everything
we can to alleviate this problem.”
The report praised educational efforts
by diocesan agencies and called on the
people of the diocese to cooperate with
further efforts and offer suggestions and
leadership.
In additon to approving the report of
the food committee, the pastoral
council approved a plan to rate diocesan
programs to help Cincinnati Archbishop
Joseph Bemardin set priorities and
approved increased participation in the
celebration of the U.S. bicentennial.
Dr. Russell Hannen of the council’s
priorities committee called the rating of
diocesan programs “a challenging and
rewarding task.” The council and its
priorities committee will study diocesan
programs, rate them and pass their
ratings along to the archdiocesan budget
committee. s
Programs will be given one of four
ratings:
Level A -- a very high commitm nt
for programs that “meet an urgent
need” or that “fill a long-standing gap in
diocesan service” or are “necessary to
the overall work of the Church.”
Level B -- a high commitment of
personnel and funds for “ongoing
programs” that should be continued
“with some moderate expansion” or
“new programs that deserve a trial.”
Level C - a continued commitment
for “ongoing programs that we do not
want to see expanded.”
Level D - a reduced commitment.
known for whom and for what reason
man lives,” he added.
Other goals and values are sometimes
substituted at the top of the scale, the
Pope said. These goals “can animate
human activity and give it great power
and operating capability, but the result
lacks what counts even more: true
order, wisdom, happiness, peace, and
that inestimable gift of compensation
for all present deficiencies, the gift of
security, of joy in work and in life. That
gift is eschatological hope, or the
certainty of future life.”
The Pope said that the man who
makes the search for the kingdom of
God his life’s priority feels “a
detachment and a liberation from
temporal goods and a relative
devaluation of the worth of riches and
of insatiable desires which made men
egoists, often greedy and cruel, enemies,
exploiters and antisocial beings.”
Such a man also feels a poverty of
spirit which “makes us rich and
attentive to our needy and suffering
brothers, and also predisposes us to
those economic and social innovations
undertaken to bring justice and greater
brotherhood on earth,” the Pope noted.
Despite great progress in many fields,
the Pope continued, mankind’s need for
food, education and fundamental rights
has been imperfectly satisfied. “The
so-called order resulting from our age’s
economic and social progress documents
an unjust disorder,” the Pope said.
He said that this disorder has
produced in modem man, “distrust, to
the point of confrontation and
revolution, social hatred, expressed even
in institutional ways between classes,
parties, tribes, peoples and civilizations;
boredom and cynical disgust over life;
ideological indifference -- ‘what do I
care?’ -- scepticism instead of a
speculative liberalism, a refined and
total form of pessimism, which one
would call a kind of suicide of the
idealized man, as if utopia were
dangerous and a pack of lies.”
The Pope also lamented “the
pseudo-intellectual recourse, which is
really mad and desperate, to instinctive
and immediate pleasure, to egoistic
hedonism, together with the recourse to
inhuman means for planning and
limiting the statistics on human
growth.”
True renewal of all facets of the
world, the Pope said, can only be found
in the Gospel of Christ.
CINCINNATI ARCHDIOCESE
Change in Life Styles Asked
6 Amendment Inevitable’
MARCH FOR LIFE - Sen. James Buckley (top) of New York tells the
March for Life rally at the Capitol that he will reintroduce his Human Life
Amendment to the Constitution. Archbishop William Baum of
Washington, D.C., gives an invocation at the demonstration.
EPISCOPAL
■
■
PRAYER BREAKFAST -- Mrs. David Armin of Two Harbors, Minn.,
holds daughter, Mary, 7 months, during the Prayer Breakfast for Life Jan.
22, at the Statler Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. At the meeting
Barbara Breuer-Sipple sings “Hold My Hand I’m a Child of God.” At far
right is Marjory Mecklenburg, president of American Citizens Concerned
for Life, Inc., sponsor of the breakfast, which preceded the March for Life
but was not part of it. (NC Photos by Thomas N. Lorsung)
Deans To Meet in Rome
WASHINGTON (NC) - Dean Francis
B. Sayre, Jr., of Washington (Episcopal)
Cathedral announced here that the
annual conference of Episcopal
cathedral deans will meet in Rome and
Assisi, Italy, April 22-30.
During their stay in Rome the 36
U.S. and Canadian deans who are
expected to attend the conference will
have an audience with Pope Paul VI and
will meet with other Vatican officials to
discuss Roman Catholic-Episcopal
relations.
Among the topics they will discuss
with Catholic officials will be
ecumenical affairs, Christian liturgy and
Christian ministry. They will meet with
Cardinal Jan Willebrands, president of
the Vatican’s Secretariat for Promoting
Christian Unity; Cardinal James Knox,
nrefect of the Congregation for Divine
Worship and of the Congregation for the
Sacraments; and Cardinal John Wright,
prefect of the Congregation for the
Clergy.
Accompanying the deans as
theological consultants will be
(Catholic) Archbishop William W. Baum
of Washington and the Rev. Canon
Clement Welsh, warden of the College
of Preachers at Washington Cathedral.
Dean Sayre, coordinator of the
conference, said the group “will go to
Rome not in any sense as official
delegates, but as one tradition of
Christianity learning about another
tradition.”
Dean Sayre has led in planning the
dean’s conferences since the first one
held in 1954.
Cardinals Attend Installation
VATICAN CITY (NC) - Three
cardinals and the apostolic delegate in
Great Britain attended the
installation of Anglican Archbishop
Donald Coggan as archbishop of
Canterbury on Jan. 24, Vatican Radio
said.
Dutch-bom Cardinal Jan Willebrands,
president of the Vatican Secretariat for
Promoting Christian Unity; Cardinal
Francois Marty of Paris, president of the
French Bishops’ Conference; Cardinal
Leo Joseph Suenens of Malines-Brussels,
Belgium, and Swiss-born Archbishop
Bruno Heim, apostolic delegate in Great
Britian, attended the ceremony in
Canterbury Cathedral.
The report added that Cardinal John
Heenan of Westminister, president of
the Bishops' Conference of England and
Wales, was still convalescing from a
recent ilness and was unable to attend.
CMSM President,
Bishop Call for Unconditional Amnesty
WASHINGTON (NC) - The president
of the Conference of Major Superiors of
Men (CMSM) and Bishop Francis
Mugavero of Brooklyn have issued
separate calls for an unconditional
amnesty for Vietnam war resisters to
replace the Ford administration’s
clemency program, scheduled to end
Jan. 31.
Divine Word Father Joseph Francis,
CMSM president, called the clemency
program a “failure” and repeated a call
for unconditional amnesty issued by the
conference in May, 1973.
He called on Congress to enact
legislation creating unconditional
amnesty. Rep. Bella Abzug (D-N.Y.) has
introduced such legislation in the
House, and Sen. Philip Hart (D-Mich.) is
preparing similar legislation in the
Senate.
The Ford clemency program “has
been a failure not only because of the
extremely low percentage of eligible
people who have taken advantage of it,
not only because of its complexity, but
basically because it is not and never was
intended to be a true amnesty,” Father
Francis said.
Bishop Mugavero said in a pastoral
letter calling for a “non-punitive
amnesty” that the clemency program
had been ineffective for two basic
reasons:
“First, most of those covered by the
policy consider it punitive. It is difficult
for those who acted in conscience to
return to a society which sees them as
outcasts who must prove their allegiance
by taking an oath or performing two
years of alternate service.
“Second . . . the program labored
from the beginning under the decision
to limit severely the number of eligible
participants.”
“According to recent government
statistics,” Bishop Mugavero said, “a
mere 163 of 6,300 known draft evaders
whose cases have not been previously
settled have reported to the Justice
Department. Only 2,627 of 12,500
eligible unconvicted deserters have
chosen to report to the Department of
Defense.
“Most significantly, of the more than
500,000 Americans who received less
than honorable discharges during the
Vietnam war era, only 100,000 were
declared eligible to apply to the
President’s Clemency Review Board and
of these only 890 have actually
applied,” he said.
Father Francis said the clemency
program offered war resisters less than is
available to them in the courts. “To the
burdens already borne by some
offenders it adds the further difficulties
of alternate service and a renewed
pledge of allegiance, the latter being a
particularly odios requirement for those
who in good conscience objected to the
Vietnam war.”
The President’s program, Father
Francis said, “cannot contribute
significantly to the binding up of the
nation’s Vietnam wounds; it can only
prolong the process of healing.
“The overwhelming number of
individuals concerned, the brevity of
the time allotted and the complexity
and inequality of the three-part system
(Clemency Board, Justice and Defense
Departments) all militate against simply
extending the present program.”
Father Francis said he realized that
some people might call unconditional
amnesty “dishonorable and even an
injustice.” But, he said, “We believe that
there is no more honorable way of
reverencing those who served in
Vietnam than by striving to build back
into the American system the ideals
they fought and suffered and died for.”
Father Francis’ letter was sent to all
superiors of men’s religious orders in the
U.S., all members of Congress and to
President Ford.