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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