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PAGE 2—July 17,1975
CATHOLICS IN LOUISIANA -- The old Ursuline convent, built in
1745, is the oldest building now standing in New Orleans and the only
French colonial structure in the city’s French Quarter. When it was
founded in 1727 the convent was the only one in the area of the
present-day United States (NC Photo by Frank Methe)
a
LIFE IN MV SIC
BY THE DAMEANS
Sadie
In today’s world it’s a rare
occasion to be able to see young
mothers like the ones that were
around when I grew up. But they
live on in memory to quite a few of
us, and this song is dedicated to
those who cherish that memory.
g: Early one Sunday morning
| Breakfast was on the table.
There was no time to eat, she said
;$ to me.
$• “Oh, hurry to Sunday school.”
Filled with the Lord of glory,
;j:| We learned the holy story.
|iji She’ll always have her dream
Despite the things this troubled
world can bring.
y.
Oh, Sadie, don’t you know we love
% you?
$5 Sweet Sadie, place no one above
$ you,
$• Sweet Sadie, living in the past.
j:j; Sometimes it seems so funny—
No money will turn your life
around.
Sweeter than cotton candy;
•$ Stronger than papa’s old brandy—
•$ Always that needed smile,
•:j; Once in a while
She would break down and cry.
$• Sometimes she’d be so happy,
Sing with us and daddy,
Standing the worst of times,
:£ Breaking the bonds with just a
$: simple song.
Oh, Sadie, don’t you know we love
you? '
Sweet Sadie, place no one above
$ you.
•jj: Sweet Sadie, living in the past.
•j: She’s never sinning,
In love she’s always winning.
Sadie, don’t you know we love
;j:J you?
ij: Sweet Sadie, place no one above
| you.
;$ Sweet Sadie, living in the past.
C*: If there’s a heaven up above,
I know she’s teaching them how to
:•:« love.
By J.B. Jefferson, B. Hawes
and C. Simmons
% (Copyright 1974
Atlantic BMI)
$; The Spinners’ new song isn’t
really noteworthy in itself. The
melody is, at best, okay. The lyrics
X; are definitely trite, and the
*$ introduction is downright insulting
when applied to today’s mothers.
# Why choose to comment on this
% ^
song? Why pick a tune that has so
little to recommend it?
The answers to the questions are
that “Sadie” stands out when it is
put into the larger perspective of
the entire pop market. Where most
of today’s songs talk about lovers
discovering new love, or maybe
breaking up, this song airs a tired
sort of theme. It says: Where are
the good old loves like my mother?
What has happened to people who
were constant, unchanging, never
sinning, always optimistic? Why is
it that people can’t be simple and
yet great like my mother was?
“Sadie” startles you when you
stop to ask: What other pop singers
dare to say such “uncool” things
today? How many of the top 100
songs say they place no one above
their mother? Every tune you hear,
on the contrary, sings about the
new springtime, or at least, the
frost that is fading on the
windowpane . . . but your mother?
There is, in fact, something
rebellious in the tone of “Sadie.” It
holds appeal for the person who
wants to recognize a deeper and
more constant love. It speaks to
those who have had too many
shallow loves, here today and gone
tomorrow. It comforts those who
have grown cynical about the
selfishness of lovers and the games
they play. It says that love does not
have to be too fast, too hot, too
complicated, too selfish.
“Sadie” surprised me. It made
me wonder if the recent years with
nostalgic songs may be calling up
the simpler life -- when loving and
living were seemingly easier. It
made me ask if we no longer feel
the permanence of love or the time
necessary to grow deep and
constant, as in the “good old days.”
It forced me to question whether
we have lost the trust in the “never
sinning,” “no money will turn your
life around” days.
“Sadie” is not really a song deep
enough to offer answers, but it
raised those questions in my mind.
Maybe each one of us needs to ask
how much we find ourselves
rebelling against the speed of
relationships, and the mobility of
our households. Very possibly we
are losing consciousness in the
present, and we are at the point of
“living in the past.”
“Sadie” makes me wonder if we
are all a little trite in talking about
constant, selfless love. “Sadie” -- a
bit rebellious in the pop scene.
(All correspondence should be
directed to: The Dameans, P.O. Box
2108, Baton Rouge, La. 70821.)
CHURCH IN LOUISIANA - 1776
Liberty And Justice For All:
American Catholics 1776-1976
BY FATHER CHARLES
EDWARDS O’NEILL, S.J.
Louisiana in the 1770s was a French
colony trying to become Spanish -- or,
rather, trying not to become Spanish, at
least not too Spanish. This Catholic
neighbor protected the backdoor of the
13 Colonies, and aided the Revolution
in a striking measure too little
recognized in American textbooks.
Settled by the French in 1699,
Louisiana included the Mississippi,
Missouri, Ohio and Red River valleys. In
addition to Illinois country villages, the
towns were Natchez, Natchitoches,
Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Biloxi
and Mobile extended Louisiana
eastward along the Gulf Coast. For
several decades French Jesuits
evangelized the Indians, and French
Capuchins served as the pastors of the
settlers.
At the end of the Seven Years’ War
(1763), when England asked her
American colonies to pay new taxes for
defense expenditures, a much more
radical demand was laid upon the
almost 8,000 French subjects in
Louisiana. By treaty all of Louisiana
east of the Mississippi was yielded to
England. All of Louisiana west of the
Mississippi, with New Orleans attached,
was ceded to Spain.
Some Louisianans thought of
declaring independence. Some united to
send the first Spanish governor back
home. Resistance, however, was futile.
Independence for so small a population
was impossible.
Without haste and without eagerness,
Spain accepted Louisiana as a buffer to
protect Mexico and her borderlands
against the multiplying English colonists
to the northeast. With a policy of easy
trade and with respect for the local
population, the Spanish monarchy set
about absorbing this French-speaking
region.
France had theoretically intended all
colonists in Louisiana to be Catholics,
but in reality a tolerant policy had
admitted Protestants. Indeed the
percentage of Protestants in French
Louisiana (between 5 and 10 percent)
was higher than the percentage of
Catholics (one percent) in the English
colonies on the Atlantic Coast.
The French government, motivated
by a mixture of Bourbon absolutism,
Gallican anti-Romanism, and Jansenist
anti-Jesuitism, had recalled the Jesuits
from the Indian missions and brought
them back to France in 1764 to live as
secular priests. This action cut
Louisiana’s Catholic clergy by half, and
left only the Capuchins, who served in
the French towns and outposts.
During the French regime
(1699-1766) Louisiana had been a part
of the vast diocese of Quebec which
covered the St. Lawrence Valley, the
Great Lakes, the Mississippi Valley and
the Gulf Coast between Texas and
Florida. When Spanish civil authority
replaced French, there was also a change
in Church jurisdiction. Louisiana passed
under the Spanish king’s patronage
(patronato real), and in 1771 was placed
under the bishop of Santiago, Cuba.
Spanish Capuchins began serving in
Louisiana in 1772. Pere Dagobert from
Longwy in northeastern France was
succeeded as vicar general and father
superior of the Capuchins by Padre
Cirilo of Barcelona in Spain. When old
Father Dagobert died in May of 1776,
an era came to an end: of the seven
French friars present at the beginning of
the Spanish regime, only two or three
remained. The Spanish clergy, usually
about 10, were assisted later by several
Irish diocesan priests who ministered to
English-speaking settlers. The clergy
traveled widely to minister to a
population thinly scattered over a vast
region.
The Ursuline nuns continued caring
for orphans and teaching in the school
founded in New Orleans in 1727.
Meanwhile the Spanish government
subsidized a school in which religion
was taught along with other subjects -
in Spanish. Attendance there was low,
for the Creoles preferred French tutors
and their academies.
The Church in Louisiana in 1776 was
unusually polyglot and multi-ethnic for
such small numbers. The French
colonists, mostly males in the first two
decades of settlement, had married
Indian women in upriver posts, and also
fathered children out of wedlock.
German farmers had arrived in 1719.
Simultaneously the black slave trade
reached Louisiana. From the same era a
population of “free persons of color”
steadily developed.
In the 1760s Acadian refugees,
scattered by the English genocidal
expulsion (from present-day Nova
Scotia) treked and sailed their way to
French Louisiana just when it became
Spanish. Interestingly, the same
Edmund Burke who defended the
Anglo-American colonists’ cause in the
British Parliament condemned the
“inhumane rooting out of this poor,
innocent, deserving people,” and
insisted that England had “no sort of
right to extirpate” them. Uprooted
whites, uprooted blacks peopled
Louisiana.
In the late 1760s some Maryland
Catholic families, who observed the
erosion of the religious liberty their
ancestors had planted in America,
petitioned Spanish authorities for
permission to enter Louisiana.
Following Spanish civil and military
officials, there also came immigrants
from the Canary Islands who farmed,
fished and trapped in the coastal
marshlands and waterways. Today, two
hundred years later, their descendants
still speak Spanish in localities twenty
miles from New Orleans.
BY JAIME FONSECA
Anti-Castro Cubans in the United
States feel vindicated by the
confirmation in a June report by the
Organization of American States (OAS)
that the Havana regime has engaged in
systematic violation of human rights.
While large sectors of public opinion
and several international organizations
have condemned violations of human
rights in Brazil, Chile and other
dictatorships of the right, anti-Castro
Cubans felt reports of torture and
arbitrary imprisonment in Cuba were
being ignored.
The OAS report came out as the OAS
was preparing for a July meeting at San
Jose, Costa Rica, to amend an
inter-American treaty on mutual
security. It should open the way to a
lifting of the sanctions imposed on Cuba
in 1964 for exporting revolution
through the guerrillas it trained.
It will mean the OAS no longer
regards the Castro regime as a danger to
other governments in the Americas.
That is a point of view many Cubans
abroad and conservative leaders in Chile,
Uruguary and other nations contest.
They point to the mid-June meeting
in Havana of 24 top communists from
Latin America who resolved to fight
“American imperialism” as the main
common enemy, and to continue to
struggle for revolution in each of their
countries.
There were two significant changes
over past meetings of the same
leadership. The June declaration spoke
of using “legal opportunities” in the
struggle, and of accepting an alliance
with socialists and others if they
respected the communist ideology. It
praised actions by nationalist
governments to take control of their
country’s natural resources, such as oil
in Venezuela.
Present-day Louisiana is unusual in
that the state’s counties are called
“parishes.” The riverbank “civil
parishes” (counties) bear the names of
churches that in the 18th century served
the settlements on either side of the
Mississippi. In common speech on into
the 19th century, these church parishes
remained the easiest place references
and became the official nomenclature
for civil districts in the state of
Louisiana.
Spanish Louisiana Catholics played a
major role in the War of American
Independence. Irish-bom merchant
Oliver Pollock had come from
Philadelphia to New Orleans at the
beginning of the Spanish regime. From
the start of the American Revolution he
persuaded the Spanish governor to lean
to the colonists’ side as far as he could
without inviting British retaliation.
Pollock, named agent of Virginia and of
the Continental Congress, spent his own
fortune, borrowed further sums from
the Spanish governor, and went deeply
into debt to other merchants in order to
supply George Rogers Clark, who seized
from the English the trans-Appalachian
The leaders said “the unity of all
leftist forces is more essential than
ever.”
However, the June declaration
approved of armed violence if necessary
to fight what it called counter
revolutionary violence. It spoke of the
“Fascist brutality” in Brazil and Chile.
Exiled anti-Castro Cubans now feel
vindicated by the OAS human rights
commission report.
Basing its conclusions on detailed lists
presented to the Castro government in
April and October of last year, the OAS
commission wrote that such evidence
“constitutes a most grievious case of
violations against the right of life, to
freedom, to the security and integrity of
the human person.”
It also denounced practices by Cuban
authorities in violation of “equality
before the law, of common justice, of
protection against arbitrary arrest and
imprisonment without due process.”
Some exiled Cuban sources claim that
Cuban prisons and camps hold from
5,000 to 10,000 political prisoners. In
gathering evidence for last year’s lists,
Cuban writer Humberto Medrano said:
“Imprisonment in Cuba is
characterized by murders, torture,
scarcity of food, lack of medical
attention, forced labor, denial of mail
and food deliveries, arbitrary
reinstatement of sentences already
served. . . walled-in cells where
prisoners sleep on their own excrement
and never see the sun, compulsive
communist indoctrination, biological
and psychological experimentation,
beatings, bayonet thrusts, and
prolonged nakedness.”
Several nations - notably Venezuela,
Costa Rica, Colombia and Mexico - are
in favor of lifting the economic and
diplomatic blockade of Cuba, arguing
that times have changed since the Cold
War; that the embargo is being broken
i
area north of the Ohio River. When
Spain joined France in alliance against
England (1779), Governor Bernardo de
Galvez, with his Spanish regulars and
heterogeneous local militia, boldly
captured Baton Rouge, Mobile and
Pensacola. These military victories
ended English presence on the
Mississippi River and on the Gulf Coast.
Unusual Louisiana would in the
future be attached to the United States
of America, but her distinctive blend of
faith and culture has to this day resisted
homogenization « a testimony both to
the locals and to the nation whose
independence their ancestors helped
win.
Recommended reading: “Church and
State in French Colonial Louisiana,” by
Father Charles Edwards O’Neill, S. J.
(New Haven, Conn., Yale University
Press, 1966).
(Father O’Neill, a professor of history at
Loyola University, New Orleans, is
particularly interested in the French and
Spanish history and culture of Louisiana.)
by several OAS members already, this
weakening the inter-American security
treaty; and that Western overtures to
Red China and the Soviet Union should
include Cuba as part of the detente
between East and West.
The United States seems to be
undecided on the embargo. It has
backed moves to amend the security
treaty knowing this will result in lifting
the sanctions against Cuba; but it
abstains from taking the lead or
changing its pro-blockade position.
Two years prior to the 1964 OAS
sanctions, the U.S. Senate passed a
resolution supporting a trade embargo
on Cuba.
DIES -- Msgr. Josemaria Escrive
de Balaguer, 73, founder and
president general of Opus Dei,
died in Rome. Opus Dei claims
56,000 members in 80 nations, its
priests and lay members operating
schools, universities, clubs and
training centers. (NC Photo)
Says Ordination Of Women Demands
“New Self-Understanding Effort”
CINCINNATI (NC) - The ordination
of women is an issue that demands a
“new effort at self-understanding”
and more than a study of traditional
practices and beliefs, according to an
Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue
group that met here June 22-25.
The group - 20 theologians - met as
special consultants to the permanent
U.S. Anglican-Roman Catholic (ARC)
dialogue group.
The meeting was convened by the
two chairmen of the permanent ARC
group, Bishop Charles H. Helmsing of
the Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo.,
Catholic diocese, and Episcopal Bishop
Arthur A. Vogel of the Episcopal
Diocese of West Missouri.
The U.S. ARC consultation has been
devoting itself to discussions concerning
the possibilities of inter-Communion. It
was for that reason that the specialists
met to discuss the ordination of women.
It was emphasized that the
consultation was not called to exercise
any influence on the decision-making
processes in either the Anglican or
Roman Catholic Church.
In a statement issued at the end of
the meeting, the group said that
considerations other than tradition must
be involved in any discussion of the
ordination of women, Any decision,
they said, “whether for or against the
ordination of women, will in fact
require the Church to explain or
develop its essential tradition.”
The “central tradition” of any
Church is subject to different
interpretations in the light of “inquiry
and change within the Church” and
“intellectual, social or political
movements in the world,” the statement
observed. It noted that the question of
the ordination of women is one of the
“novel issues” the Church faces from
time to time which demands of it a
“new effort of self understanding.”
According to Dr. Peter Day,
ecumenical officer of the U.S. Episcopal
Church, and Father John Hotchkin,
director of the Catholic Bishops’
Committee for Ecumenical and
Interreligious Affairs (BCEIA),
participants in the consultation have
agreed to prepare a series of position
papers on a number of issues that
surfaced at the meeting. The papers will
be given to members of the permanent
ARC group before their full meeting,
which is tentatively set for Oct. 21-24 in
Cincinnati.
Representatives on both sides of
the ordination of women issue were
represented at the consultation. Among
the issues discussed during informal
moments of the consultation were the
ordination of 11 women to the
Episcopal priesthood last summer and
the recent approval of women’s
ordination by the Anglican Church in
Canada.
Many Contest Any OAS
Action On Cuba Blockade