Newspaper Page Text
The Southern Cross
DIOCESE OF SAVANNAH NEWSPAPER
Vol. 56 No. 18
Thursday, May 1,1975
Single Copy Price — 15 Cents
DISPLACED VIETNAMESE
Church in U.S. Asked to Help Refugees
MASS FOR REFUGEES -- Vietnamese refugees
receive Holy Communion in Tent City at Orote Point,
Guam. The emergency housing area was set up for the
thousands of persons fleeing South Vietnam as
Communist attackers closed in on Saigon. (NC Photo)
Donalsonville Chapel Dedicated
A new Catholic chapel was dedicated
at Donalsonville April 20th. The chapel
is a double unit, mobile-home type
structure which also serves as a mission
center.
According to Father Conal O’Leary,
O.F.M., pastor, the entire Catholic
community had been involved for many
months in readying the chapel and
landscaping the area.
“They leveled off the ground and
planted grass. They put shrubbery and
flowers around the building, painted
and hung an identification sign and
planned the logistics of a fish fry for an
estimated two hundred persons.
“Over a long period of time they
practiced the hymns to be sung at the
dedication, trained teenagers to serve as
usheretts, sent out the invitations and
marked off spaces for parking cars. It
was a total community effort.”
Present for the ceremonies were Msgr.
Daniel J. Bourke, diocesan comptroller;
Fr. John Kenneally, chancellor; Fr.
Herbert Wellmeier, pastor of St.
Teresa’s, Albany; Fr. John O’Brien,
associate pastor of St. Teresa’s; Fr.
Frederick Kirschner from Thomasville;
Fr. Raymond Govern from Tifton; Fr.
Francis Gorman from Moultrie; Fr.
Zachary Callahan of the Franciscan
Mission Union, New York City and Fr.
Mark Sterbenz from St. Benedict’s,
Columbus.
Also in attendance were all the Sisters
from St. Teresa’s school, Albany, and
Sister Ruth Hensler, O.S.F., area
coordinator for religious education.
Not all lay participants in the
dedication rites were from
Donalsonville, either, said Father
O’Leary. “Some came from Iron City,
Bainbridge, Blakely, Thomasville,
Colquitt, Pensacola and even Mobile,”
Fr. O’Leary said.
Following the dedication Mass,
participants were invited to a fish fry.
The bill of fare consisted of various
types of fish found in nearby Lake
Seminole.
IN INDOCHINA
WASHINGTON (NC) - The president
of the U.S. Catholic Conference (USCC)
has appealed to Catholic dioceses in the
United States to help meet the
“desperate need” for homes and jobs
for refugees from Sbutheast Asia.
In a letter to all U.S. bishops, the
USCC President, Archbishop Joseph L.
Bemardin of Cincinnati, said:
“Obviously, our domestic economic and
social needs are pressing. Yet, the needs
of those who are fleeing, many due to
fear of oppression because of their
Catholic faith, cannot be ignored.”
Archbishop Bemardin said he had
asked John McCarthy, director of USCC
Migration and Refugee Services and
coordinator of the U.S. Catholic
Church’s Southeast Asia Resettlement
Program, to work with diocesan
representatives to provide the homes
and jobs the refugees need.
Noting that primary responsibility for
any refugee movement to the United
States rests with the U.S. government,
the archbishop said the USCC expects
that funding for expenses incurred in
this effort on the diocesan level will
come from the government.
At a briefing session at USCC
headquarters, McCarthy noted that the
U.S. government has anticipated that
about 130,000 Vietnamese refugees will
come to this country. He said he
expects U.S. Catholic agencies to handle
from 60 to 70 percent of the refugees.
The U.S. State Department has said
that there are 75,000 Vietnamese
relatives of U.S. citizens who are
entitled to come to the United States
and that about 50,000 other
Vietnamese whose lives might be
endangered by remaining in Vietnam
under communist rule have been
authorized to come to the United
States.
McCarthy said that, although about
10 percent of the Vietnamese
population are Catholic, Catholicism has
been the religion of the educated class,
many of whom cooperated with the
United States in the conflict there.
The operations director of the
International Catholic Migration
Commission in Geneva has been asked
to go to Guam in an effort to make it
possible for many refugees from
Southeast Asia to go also to other
countries, McCarthy said.
The USCC Migration and Refugee
Services is acting as a coordinator of
voluntary agency efforts to resettle
Southeast Asian refugees, and has been
given a desk in the State Department’s
Southeast Asian crisis center to
DONALSONVILLE CHAPEL. Shown with Fr. Conal O’Leary, O.F.M.,
pastor (far right), and Bishop Raymond W. Lessard are some of the
parish’s families. They are the Custer Claytons, the Jack Burtons, the Bob
McDuffies, the Billy Wade Lewises, the H.E. Felders, the Charles Burkes
and Mrs. Mary Hunter.
Nuns Missing
INSIDE STORY
Amnesty, Clemency Pg. 2
Bicentennial Pg. 3
Entertainment Pg. 6
Housing Needs Pg. 7
LONDON (NC) - Early reports to
reach London of the fate of Catholic
institutions in the rout of South
Vietnamese troops convey a picture of
wrecked convents and homeless nuns in
the teeming masses of refugees.
Seventeen of the 18 convents of the
Lovers of the Cross, a largely
Vietnamese congregation of Sisters,
have been destroyed in Cambodia and
South Vietnam. About 200 of the
Sisters struggled into Saigon on
foot. The fate of the other 3,800 nuns is
not known.
Noel Charles, an official of the
Catholic Fund for Overseas
Development (CAFOD), said in
reporting the arrival of the 200 nuns in
Saigon: “We do not know the fate of
the other 3,800 nuns.”
Foreign Catholic workers have left
the war zones in Cambodia, but about
300 Cambodians were still working with
Catholic relief agencies in Phnom Penh
just before the Cambodian capital fell to
the Khmer Rouge.
CAFOD, the Church’s official
group in Britain for aid to the Third
World of developing nations, was asked
by Caritas Intemationalis, the Vatican’s
coordinating agency, to appeal to the
bishops of England and Wales for special
collections for aid to Cambodia.
The goal for Cambodian relief was
the equivalent of $600,000 for
immediate relief of destitute refugees
who are pouring into Catholic Churches
and centers. About half the sum has
been sent, and the rest is promised. But
this is for immediate needs, and not
long-term relief.
facilitate that coordination, McCarthy
said.
After receiving clearance for
emigration to the United States at the
processing centers on Guam, Wake
Island or in the Philippines, McCarthy
said, the refugees will be flown to Army
bases in the United States. Local
Catholic diocesan resettlement
personnel will then begin to assist them
in finding homes and jobs.
McCarthy said an effort would be
made to spread the refugees around the
country and to avoid having them settle
in ghettos or in areas of high
unemployment.
Discussing the controversial babylift
of orphans from Vietnam, McCarthy
said that only about 2,000 children
were involved. Of those about 300 were
handled by Catholic agencies and had
been cleared for adoption prior to the
emergency. They were, he said, children
for whom adoption out of the country
was the best alternative. He pointed out
that some of them were handicapped
and others were children of mixed
U.S.-Vietnamese parentage.
ARMENIANS PROTEST -- Armenians rally at the United Nations’ Dag
Hammarskjold Plaza, protesting the Turkish massacre of their
countrymen 60 years ago. The U.S. Catholic Conference took part in a
three day meeting in New York discussing “Religion’s Role in a Violent
World” sponsored in part by the Diocese of the Armenian Church of
America. (NC Photo by John Lei)
HEADLINE
ff
If
HOPSCOTCH
Holy Year Influx
VATICAN CITY (NC) -- Few of the rich may be making the European grand tour,
but the Holy Year has brought to Rome a great influx of people of modest means,
especially young people and workers. That was the message which the secretary
general of the Vatican’s Central Committee for the Holy Year gave journalists April 23
in a press conference on the Jubilee Year, now about a third over. Bishop Antonio
Mazza also announced that the flow of pilgrims was so great that papal general
audiences and Masses celebrated by Pope Paul VI after May 1 will take place in St.
Peter’s Square.
Gen. Lane Dies
WASHINGTON (NC) -- Maj. Gen. Thomas A. Lane, a proponent of many
conservative views on public and religious affairs, died of cancer at Walter Reed
Hospital here on April 20 at the age of 68. Lane was the author of a syndicated
column that was carried by The Wanderer, a conservative Catholic weekly published in
St. Paul, Minn., the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and other newspapers across the nation.
Priest Protests to IRS
JERSEY CITY, N. J. (NC) - In a letter to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) a
pacifist priest with a long record of involvement in social causes has stated his
intention not to file an income tax return. Father John P. Egan of St. Boniface’s
church here informed the IRS that he would not file the required tax form as a protest
over what he called the “war-making” policies of the U.S. government.
Bishops Rap Ford Plan
NOTRE DAME, Ind. (NC) - Three Chicano bishops here branded the U.S.
government’s proposals to bring thousands of South Vietnamese to the United States
and the government’s insistence on deporting illegal aliens already here as
“inconsistent.” In a sharply worded telegram to President Gerald R. Ford, the three
bishops joined with the Midwest Council of La Raza and the Spanish-speaking Catholic
Commission, a Midwestern group, in opposition to the government’s proposed action.
The bishops were here to participate in a University of Notre Dame symposium on
“Human Rights and Social Justice and the Church.”
Contributions Increase
VATICAN CITY (NC) -- Despite an economic recession, U.S. Catholics upped their
contributions to the missions in 1974 by three percent to more than $21 million. The
Vatican’s Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, which oversees and helps
fund the Church’s worldwide missionary effort, said the 1974 contribution of
$21,219,598.33 was $610,708 above the 1973 contribution from U.S. Catholics.