Newspaper Page Text
PAGE 6—November 6,1975
NEW CATECHISM - This is the cover of a new Catholic catechism for
adults which will-be published Jan. 1. It is a book written by theologians
to explain the basic doctrinal and moral teachings in light of developments
since the Second Vatican Council, said Father Donald Wuerl, one of its
editors. (NC Photo)
BOOK
| REVIEWS
J
AmrCATHOLIC MTIHSM BEFORE OVIL WAR
Liberty And Justice For All:
American Catholics 1776-1976
THE FORGING OF A REBEL, by
Arturo Barea. Three volumes in one,
THE FORGE, THE TRACK and THE
CLASH. The Viking Press. New York.
751 pages. $15.
REVIEWED BY BARRETT McGURN
(NC News Service)
A puzzle for many is how such a
Catholic country as Spain could have
had so savage an anti-clerical Civil War
as that of the 1930s. Arturo Barea
provides some answers in these three
books in one.
The author’s first volume, “The
Forge,” describes the writer’s boyhood
in Madrid and in the small towns of
Castile. The second tome brings the
autobiography forward through the life
of a threadbare clerk in the Spain of the
1920s. The final volume, “The Clash,”
is an eye-witness report on the Civil War
as seen from the side of the “Loyalist,”
those who supported the Republic,
opposed Franco and took part in the
slaying of many clergy and the
destruction of churches and other
ecclesiastical properties. It is all a first
person story but what Barea reveals
with often pitiless candor about himself
surely was true of millions of others.
Barea was “a rebel,” a foe of much of
the established order in the Spain of the
first third of the century and of Franco
Spain since then, but the front line
dividing the two Spains ran through his
own mind and heart as it did through
his family. One grandmother was a
self-professed atheist and enemy of the
“bigots,” her name for the bulk of the
devout. An aunt, on the other hand, was
devoted to the clergy and proud of her
three sets of rosary beads, agate from
Lourdes, Olive wood from the Holy
Land and silver from Madrid.
Early instruction was in Church
schools and the future writer’s first
published compositions, at the age of
10, were chronicles of the saintly, done
for his academy’s publication.
Then the balance tipped toward the
other Spain, the Spain of rebellion.
Arturo’s mother was a washerwoman,
supporting him and his siblings in a
garret. Life was hard but the most
painful part was to behold his mother’s
tribulations. Arturo’s father, as a
soldier, had been in an insurrection
which nearly had cost him his life. The
son’s reverent memory of the father had
a deepening influence. As a bank clerk
and then as an office worker Arturo
drifted to Socialism.
He organized a white collar union and
found himself by that fact a
collaborator of communists and
anarchists. Drafted into military service
as a sergeant in Morocco and watching
from afar the rise of a daring young
general, Francisco Franco, Arturo Barea
took the reverse road from that of Gen.
Franco. Appalled by the mutual
slaughter of Moors and Spaniards and
scandalized by peity embezzlements
which he witnessed among fellow
non-coms and among officers, Barea’s
fury against the establishment mounted.
Demobilized back in Madrid he was
ready for the Loyalist cause when Civil
War began.
Barea was ready to serve as the censor
for Hemingway and other
correspondents who were covering the
Republican side of the war, but he was
not prepared for what he saw as the
senseless destruction of libraries merely
because they were part of Church
properties. He was also unable to
sympathize with anarchist murder
squads which roamed Madrid hunting
for “bigots,” or even just for members
of the white collar and middle classes.
Barea barely escaped with his own life
on one occasion when his neat clothes
suggested that he was not a sympathizer
of the laboring class, When one old
friend, a devout layman, was picked up
to be executed Barea again risked his
own life to plead successfully for the
man, arguing that he was “unpolitical,”
and that his life had been a model of
charity and brotherly love.
As Madrid neared its fall the constant
cannonading and the unending stream
of deaths brought Barea close to
breakdown and it also imposed a deep
change. No longer consumed with the
desire to strike down an iniquitous
establishment, the writer’s one hope was
that Cain, afoot in both camps, could be
stopped and that there could be peace.
Barea decided that the two best friends
he had known in the course of his long
travail were both priests, one who was
his sole confidante in his teens, the
other a Basque who listened to his'
anguish in the final days of Republican
Madrid, interrupting the dialogue only
to hear Confessions and provide
Communion to those under fire. His
ideal in the long human history, the
writer concluded, was St. Francis.
Arturo Barea strains to be honest as
he takes his reader on his painful
pilgrimage. In the baring of himself he
reveals much of the mystery of the
Spain of the Thirties. This is a moving
story with an important lesson for all
who are concerned with the ongoing
Spanish narrative.
(McGurn was for' 15 years a foreign
correspondent and diplomat in the
Latin countries of the Mediterranean
and is the author of “A Reporter Looks
at the Vatican” and of “Decade in
Europe.”)
BY ROBERT F. HUESTON
(NC News Service)
On the evening of May 8, 1844, a
huge mob in the street shouted
encouragement as incendiaries gained
access to St. Augustine’s Catholic
church in Philadelphia. Within minutes
the building was engulfed by smoke and
flames. Frenzied shouts of approval rose
from the crowd as the large cross atop
the church steeple crashed to the
ground. Within hours nothing remained
but charred ruins.
The burning of St. Augustine’s
culminated three days of anti-Catholic
rioting in the Philadelphia area, leaving
several Catholic churches, other Church
property and more than 40 homes
(mostly owned by Irish Catholics) in
ashes. More than 50 people were killed
or wounded, and hundreds of homeless
refugees wandered about the suburbs of
the city.
The Philadelphia anti-Catholic riots
of 1844 (another followed in July) were
a dramatic manifestation of a generally
more subtle phenomenon in American
life known as “nativism” - hostility to
aliens and, especially in the 19th
century, hostility to Catholics. Hatred
of Rome had its roots in colonial
America when, with the embittered
feelings of the Reformation still running
deep, the overwhelmingly
Anglo-Protestant colonials lived in
recurrent fear of their French and
Spanish Catholic neighbors in North
America.
The most serious outbreak of
anti-Catholic nativism occurred in the
three decades before the Civil War. The
Philadelphia riots, the destruction of an
Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Mass.,
in 1834, and the spectacular growth in
the mid-1850s of a secret political party
called the Know-Nothings attracted the
widest attention. But other less
publicized anti-Catholic activity flared
up sporadically throughout the young
American republic. Catholic churches
were damaged, priests were harassed,
and Catholics were discriminated against
in public institutions and excluded from
some state offices. Lurid “No-Popery”
publications, the most famous being
“The Awful Disclosures of Maria
Monk,” streamed from the presses.
There is no easy explanation for the
intensification of nativist bigotry during
this era. To indict blind hatred, as many
Catholics did, begs the question. It was
only when Catholicism threatened
established ways of life that nativism
became widespread. And the “Romish”
Church did become more imposing. A
miniscule institution at the turn of the
19th century, it mushroomed after
1830. Churches, for example, multiplied
from 80 in 1808 to more than 200 in
1830 and almost 2,400 by 1860.
This hitherto insignificant institution,
now gaining in strength and influence,
confronted an American society which,
though theoretically secular, was
actually permeated with Protestant
values and customs. Protestantism, in
fact, was considered essential to
republicanism. When Catholics exerted
pressure to gain respect for their creed
in the army, the public schools, and
other governmental institutions, they
stirred up beehives of nativist
resentment. The 1844 Philadelphia
riots, for instance, were ignited by a
local attempt by Catholics to have their
children excused from compulsory
reading of the Protestant Bible in the
public schools. The Know-Nothing
movement of the 1850s arose, in part,
from a widespread Catholic crusade to
acquire state funds for parochial
schools.
Immigration, while it accounted for
most of the Church’s growth,
compounded anti-Catholic nativism.
The American Church found the most
controversial of the pre-Civil War
newcomers, the Irish, within its fold.
These Hibernians, who immigrated in
large numbers in the 1840s and 1850s,
antagonized established society by
clustering together in the cities, filling
local jails and utilizing public welfare
institutions in disproportionately high
numbers, voting in political blocs,
working for low wages, and maintaining
an irritating identification with the
fortunes of the “old sod.” Orestes
Brownson, though a convert to
Catholicism, reflected Yankee
sentiments when he referred to the Irish
as the “most drunken, fighting, thieving,
lying and lascivious class of our
population.” Animosity toward Celts
blended with that toward Catholics, and
the “Irish Papists” became the prime
targets of pre-Civil War nativism.
Nativism also drew sustenance from
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 9 - 9:00
p.m. (ABC) - WALKING TALL (1973)
-- One of the most phenomenally
popular “bad” movies of all time now
comes to television with its
super-violent footage toned down
somewhat, but its noxious message of
‘ ‘ t ake-the-law-into-y our-own hands”
more or less intact. Hulking Joe Don
Baker stars in the role of Tennessee
sheriff Buford Pusser, whose true life
story laid the groundwork for this
heavily fictionalized film. The plot is
about a big man (Baker) who walks tall
and clubs freely in his campaign to close
down rural vice in the Tennessee county
where he lives, and to root out the
accommodating political corruption
that allows the vice to flourish. Nice
objectives, but the means used in the
film to obtain them are ignoble, ugly,
and vicious in themselves.
(Condemmed)
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 10 - 9:00
p.m. (NBC) - ERIC
Made-for-television adaptation of the
best-selling book by Doris Lund, which
detailed the heroic struggle of her son to
fight the leukemia he and his family
knew would kill him. In real life, Eric
was seventeen when doctors diagnosed
his terminal illness and gave him six or
eight months to live. Eric took up the
challenge - he simply refused to die -
and went through seven remissions over
the course of five years before he could
fight no more. The experience told in
Mrs.' Lund’s book is at once
heartbreaking and inspiring. The film,
however, injects far too much
psychological factors buried deep in the
spirit of the age. Strife and dislocation
grew in the pre-Civil War decades as the
country urbanized rapidly and as it
fought a divisive war with Mexico and
acquired gigantic stretches of new
territory, thus raising the emotional
question of the future of slavery in the
West. What was happening to the older,
simpler America? Into this unstable
picture marched unprecedented hordes
of foreign-born with their alien customs
and religion. Many Northern reformers
also objected to the Celtic immigrants
because the latter opposed the abolition
and temperance movements. Here,
indeed, were perfect scapegoats.
Restrict their influence, it was thought,
and American society could be restored.
These various forces converged most
completely in the middle 1850s,
resulting in the creation of the
Know-Nothing (or American Party)
movement. At its core
Know-Nothingism was a secret society
dedicated to the exclusion of Catholics
from all public offices. Startling
outsiders with their ability to organize
electoral victories clandestinely, the
Know-Nothings and their allies soon
controlled about 75 Congressional seats
and a half dozen state housed, and they
were looking confidently toward the
1856 presidential election.
The American Party vanished almost
romanticism in the story and glosses
over too many of the harsh details of
Eric’s struggle. For example, we see very
little of the ravages on Eric of the
program of chemotherapy he underwent
-- submitting to drug after powerful
drug, each with generally awful side
effects, to combat the cancer in him. We
do see, however, much of the love he
shared with a nurse who was part of the
team treating him in the last years. This
is a fact rendered nearly meaningless by
being overdone in the TV production.
On balance, however, the story is one of
a young man’s courage and
determination, and the struggle of his
family, especially his wise, knowing
mother, to support his effort to look
death squarely in the eye.
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 13 -
9:00 p.m. (CBS) - FOSTER AND
LAURIE - Special drama broadcast.
This is a tough, tangled story of the
events surrounding the murder a few
years ago of two police officers on
patrol in the Lower East Side of
Manhattan. Foster and Laurie, black
cop and white, were gunned down in
cold blood by militant liberation army
members who viewed them not as black
or white or even as humans -- rather,
saw them as “the pigs.” The tragedy
touched us all, anfl the point here about
the value of human life and trusting
relationships is an important one. This is
a solid, well-acted drama, but one
uncompromising enough to warrant
some parental guidance where young
viewers are present. Perry King plays
Laurie, Dorian Hare wood is Foster.
as rapidly as it had appeared. Always a
minority, soon riven by internal dissent
and humiliated by ineffectiveness in
office, the organization dwindled
rapidly after 1855, as the slavery issue
superseded all other political
considerations.
Pre-Civil War nativism left no
significant legislation on the statute
books, but it did make its mark on
American history. It forced Catholics,
especially immigrants, to define their
attitude toward America. Despite some
bitterness, most responded with
affirmations of loyalty (although a
certain “seige mentality” in religious
matters gained strength - evidenced,
notably, in the proliferation of
parochial schools). At the same time,
Catholics invoked the Constitution in
support of their claims, and they lined
up votes in local elections. Among
natives prejudice persisted. Yet, the
more thoughtful, surveying the ashen
ruins of St. Augustine’s and similar
scenes, reflected on the chasm between
American ideals and practice.
From all this, the notion that the
United States was a “Protestant nation”
received an irreversible shock, and some
discriminatory barricades began to fall.
Thus American institutions edged a bit
closer to the promise of the founding
fathers.
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14 - 9:00
p.m. (ABC) - HUSTLING - This is one
of the season’s top entries in the “How
Daring Can You Get” category,
“Technically antiseptic” division. The
made-for-TV film, starring Lee Remick,
is fashioned out of the prize-winning
series of magazine articles (later a book)
by Gail Sheehy, about the life and bad
times of New York’s street-walkers. The
articles described the hustlers as young,
mostly black girls who were physically
debilitated and aged by the time they
reached their mid-twenties; Miss Remick
is a classy looking white woman of
forty-ish radiance -- and therein lies
your cue about the movie’s
authenticity. Nonetheless, theme,
treatment and subject matter, ipso
facto, suggest a mature audience.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 15 -
8:00 p.m. (NBC) - SARAH T. -
Made-for-television drama about
teen-age alcoholism, starring Linda Blair
in the title role. This is the fact-based
but fictionalized story of a young high
school girl who tries to overcome her
shyness at a new school by seeking
fortification from the bottle. Her little
trick proves successful, and within a
short time the girl is a full-fledged
drunk. Much to the horror of her
mother and new stepfather, who simply
get frantic about their daughter’s
problem. Peers for the most part prove
little better at either understanding or
helping. The film is generally a downer,
although there is the standard ray of
hope at the finale - but it’s just a
glimmer.
La
t* LIFE IN MUSIC
BY THE DAMEANS
It Only Takes A Minute
Fourteen hours of the day, we throw at least one away
Walk the streets half a year trying to find a new career.
Now if you get a flu attack, for 30 days you’re on your back
Through the night I’ve seen you dance
Baby give me half a chance.
It only takes a minute, girl, to fall in love, to fall in love
It only takes a minute, girl, to fall in love, let’s fall in love.
Now in the unemployment lines, you can spend your life reading signs,
Waiting for your interview, they can shoot the whole day for you
Now winter’s going to turn to spring and you haven’t accomplished a thing
So baby leave a little time cause you never know what’s on my mind.
By D. Lambert and B. Potter
ABC-Dunhill Music
One of a Kind Music Co. BMI
The pop charts always have songs about how easy love is. Tavares gives us a
variation on the “love at first sight” theme when they sing “It only takes a
Minute.”
The song is different from others with similar themes in that it doesn’t come
across greedy like those which claim that love is whatever is good for me. The
singer seems to be searching for something meaningful in life. All he seems to
find is hassle from other people because he can’t get a job, and from other forces
around him: “if you get a flu attack, for 30 days you’re on your back.”
The person who has encountered adversity naturally looks for something to
make him happy. He can’t help feeling that life was meant to be more than pain
and suffering, that he was destined for happiness in some form.
The danger which such a person faces is the temptation to mistake the first
pleasant thing that comes along for love and to run after it and hold on to it for
dear life. The girl who has been hassled by her parents thinks marriage is the way
out because the guy is cool. The person burned trying to love and not being
loved in return cherishes the attention of the first person who shows care and
concern.
To want to be rid of a bad situation is only natural, but to think that love
happens quickly and easily is a deception. To claim it only takes a minute to fall
in love speaks more about falling than loving.
No one denies that sometimes you don’t know why people are attracted to
each other. Something which you might not be able to explain clicks between
you and someone else and it’s a good feeling. It could even be the beginning of
friendship but it’s not love yet.
Love needs time to take root, it cannot be rushed to bloom on demand.
People in love (or better — in the love process) need time to get to know each
other, to accept the weak points as well as the strong points of the beloved. To
deny that the loved one has any faults or weak points is a sure sign that the
relationship hasn’t reached the love level yet.
I guess what frightens me the most about the statement “it only takes a
minute to fall in love,” is that it implies that you can fall out of love just as fast,
or faster. When there’s no depth of commitment or concern for the other, it’s
easy to break a relationship whether you call it friendship, love or marriage. God
save us all from people who would treat us like that and call it love. Then again,
it shouldn’t take much more than a minute to realize what’s going on when a
person does try that type of thing with us.
TV Movies
USCC DIVISION FOR FILM AND BROADCASTING
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