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PAGE 6—December 11,1975
CATHOLIC HIGHER EI)l(4TI()\-(RISIS IN 20TH CENTURY
Liberty And Justice For All:
American Catholics 1776-1976
LENTEN WORKSHOP - Although Advent is just beginning the
Liturgical Conference of Washington, D.C., conducted a Lenten Workshop
at Loyola University of New Orleans. Father Robert Hovda of the
conference’s editorial staff, speaking to the group here, said parishes
should use the six weeks of Lent to prepare to serve the community for
the rest of the year. (NC Photo by George Gurtner)
BOOK
VIEWS
INDEX THOMISTICUS, by Father
Roberto Busa, S.J., Frommann-Holz-
boog. Bad-Connstatt, West Germany. 40
volumes, $140.00 per volume.
Reviewed by Father
William J. Mehok, S.J.
(NC News Service)
This review is written with the
general reader in mind. “Index
Thomisticus” is a concordance of 10.5
million words used in the works of St.
Thomas Aquinas, whether they be
written by him, attributed to him, or
written by other authors who developed
his thought. As a scholarly tool, it is not
approached in size or accuracy by
anything hitherto undertaken. Scholars
have been informed of the content,
purposes and utility of the work in
various professional journals, so that
aspect will not be stressed here.
What is of general interest, however,
is the use of the electronic computer in
literary analysis. For several years after
its invention, the computer was used as
an accounting machine, fast typewriter
and mathematical slave. In 1946, Father
Roberto Busa, an Italian Jesuit and
teacher of philosophy, conceived the
idea of having the computer do in
minutes what he had struggled to do in
years when he wrote his doctoral
dissertation on a few words used by St.
Thomas.
What is involved is analogous to
harnessing the gyroscope. For a long
time this device was an important
teaching device and engrossing toy, but
otherwise of little practical utility.
Finally, someone got the idea of using it
as a compass. Since then scarely a ship
or airplane travels without one, and the
trip to the moon would have been
impossible without it. So the computer,
thanks to a break-through of such
far-seeing persons as Father Busa, was
put to the drudgery of compiling a
concordance or dictionary.
This is only the tip of the iceberg.
Already, the early non-written German
language is being reconstructed from
glosses penned into Latin manuscripts,
The Dead Sea Scrolls have been
deciphered; the authorship of individual
Federalist Papers has been positively
established and portions of St. Paul’s
Epistles have definitely been rejected as
written by him. Not even Shelly’s
poems nor Homer’s epics have escaped
the tireless effort of the computer and
the ingenuity of scholars. In an age that
spews out printed material at a rate that
defies the energy and wakefulness of the
most energetic scholar, the computer is
making abstracts and indexes, and is
even trying to translate from one
language to another.
On the computer, 1 is always 1, 2 is
always 2 and 3 is always 3 but by no
stretch of the imagination can it equate
“ferro,” “tuli” and “latus”'as forms of
the same Latin verb nor distinguish
between “ferro” the verb and “ferro”
the noun unless much thought has been
exerted. Even if St. Thomas is suffering
a temporary or permanent setback
today, “Index Thomisticus” will go.
down in history as one of the first and
certainly largest literary application of
the electronic computer ever attempted
and completed.
(Father Mehok is a research worker at the
Center for Applied Research in the
Apostolate and has written several books
(non-literary) with the help of computers.)
BY PHILIP GLEASON
(NC News Service)
Catholic colleges and universities
passed through a spiritual crisis in the
1960s and many of them face an
economic crisis now. Although the
outlook for the future is uncertain, a
glance at the past may give some reason
for encouragement. Catholic colleges
were in serious straits when the century
opened, but they came through that
crisis and enjoyed a long period of
relative stability and growth, And 20
years ago new strains began to show up,
bringing on the new identity crisis that
is still not resolved. .
The first period extended from 1900
to about 1925. At that time, the
difficulties were primarily
organizational. Catholic colleges were
badly out of step with prevailing
American patterns. They had to get into
line or face extinction. And a good
many did go under.
Catholic collegiate education for
women was just beginning and most of
the men’s colleges were very small. Of
the 84 colleges for men existing in
1916, only 11 had 200 or more
undergraduate students. More than a
third of them had fewer than 50
collegians. Although they called
themselves colleges, these places were
really high schools since they depended
on their preparatory departments to
keep them going.
Such marginal Catholic colleges were
especially weak in scientific and
technical studies. Unable to compete
with the growing state universities or
leading private institutions,'they began
to lose their clientele. Increasing
numbers of Catholic students turned to
non-Catholic universities for higher
education.
The growth of public (and Catholic)
high schools and the development of
accrediting associations brought the
problem to a head. As the accrediting
bodies developed strict standards for
different levels of education, Catholic
institutions had to make up their minds
which they were going to be, high
schools or colleges.
A number of the “colleges” did drop
down to secondary level, but the
stronger schools gradually eliminated
their prep departments and
concentrated on meeting the standards
for accredited college work. The
Catholic Educational Association,
formed in 1904, helped mightily in this
effort by bringing Catholic college
people into closer contact with what
was going on in the world of American
higher education.
The end of World War I witnessed a
rush of students into colleges and
universities, a phenomenon that would
recur on a larger scale after World War
II. The boom in students facilitated the
dropping of prep departments. As
enrollments increased, Catholic colleges
also had to improve their administrative
machinery and modernize their
curricular offerings. More systematic
appeals to the alumni, often aided by
success in athletic competition, helped
finance these improvements.
With these developments, the period
of organizational crisis shaded off into a
second era, stretching roughly from
1925 to 1955. It was marked by
tremendous growth - a 14-fold increase
in enrollment between 1920 and 1950 -
and by a high level of self-confidence on
the part of Catholic educators. Growth
itself bolstered morale, but Catholics
were also convinced that they had had a
distinctive intellectual position which
happened to be the correct one. The
contemporary Catholic literary revival
in Europe, and especially the revival of
Scholastical philosophy represented by
such men as Jacques Maritain,
supported this view. These movements
enhanced the intellectual prestige of
Catholicism at the very time that
totalitarianism and war were
undermining secular liberal optimism
and paving the way for a religious
revival in the 1940s.
In the third era this Catholic
confidence waned. Paradoxically,
growth contributed now to the
weakening of confidence. A Catholic
university with several thousand
students and a predominantly lay
faculty, mostly trained in secular
graduate schools, differed radically from
the small liberal arts college of old. It
had a different and far more skeptical
spirit.
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 14 - 9:00
p.m. (ABC) - CHARLY (1968) - Cliff
Robertson plays the title role as a
mentally retarded man, and is quite
convincing in a dramatic part that
undergoes the startling changes
demanded by the plot. The rest of the
cast is equally good especially Claire
Bloom and Lilia Skala. Ralph Nelson
directed the Stirling Silliphant script
and adaptation with obvious care,
although his use of split screen devices
seems pointless and unnecessary. It is an
above average film with an intriguing
plot which will please many including
those who might profess publically that
they really don’t care for “sentimental
pictures.” (A-III)
MONDAY, DECEMBER 15 - 9:00
p.m. (NBC) - CANCEL MY
RESERVATION (1972) - Bob Hope,
an American institution, is pushing
seventy, and perhaps it is not unkind to
suggest that he has simply outgrown the
movies. The inspiration for his latest
vehicle of comedy-intrigue seems to
have come from the wastebasket of his
television writers. Ill-suited to the big
theater screen and immediately dating
the picture are Hope’s wisecracks,
peppered with an occasional DOUBLE
ENTENDRE, which are meant to
ridicule famous personalities, sports
teams, and television commercials,
among other things. The flimsy story
has Hope, the henpecked half of a
husband-wife TV talk-show team,
Sharp criticism of Catholic
intellectual life in the mid-1950s
marked the first important symptom of
the coming identity crisis. Soon colleges
were included with parochial schools
among the “ghetto” institutions whose
continued existence was challenged. As
Catholic educators more and more
accepted Harvard or Berkeley for
models, it became increasingly difficult
to specify what was distinctively
Catholic about a Catholic college. When
academic freedom problems erupted in
the early 1960s, Catholic professors
were heard to say that the expression
“Catholic university” was a
contradiction in terms.
The Second Vatican Council and its
aftermath intensified the identity crisis.
According to some of their own
professors and students Catholic
institutions of higher education were
outmoded structures of the past which
should be abandoned. Many of their
religious faculty members — priests and
nuns - did leave. The confidence of
those who remained, and of concerned
lay professors, was badly shaken.
Indeed, the old self-assurance of the
past was so completely lost that it was
embarrassing even to be reminded that
vacationing at his Arizona desert cottage
and falling victim to a land-grabbing
scheme hatched by murderous Ralph
Bellamy and his henchman Forrest
Tucker. Wife Eva Marie Saint races to
Hope’s rescue and ultimately leams that
a woman’s place is in the home having
babies, not competing with her
husband. Anne Archer plays Bellamy’s
fearful stepdaughter and likes to hide in
Hope’s empty bed; Henry Darrow and
Chief Dan George appear as stubborn,
cunning Indians who counsel Hope in
order to further their own interests;
Doodles Weaver and Keenan Wynn keep
popping up as stupid, venal cops bent
on frustrating our paunchy hero. Paul
Bogart, who directed a very appealing
Western called SKIN GAMES last year,
slaps everything together hurriedly here,
and he employs some dreadful process
photography to speed the action along.
(A-H)
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 20 -
9:00 p.m. (NBC) - ZEPPELIN (1971) -
Remember the punch line about the
lead zeppelin? - well, here’s the rest of
the joke. While the Kaiser’s dirigibles
bomb London from heights out of range
of early biplanes, British intelligence
agents decide to slip a spy into the
Zeppelin works. On a test flight of the
latest model an agent learns it is to be
used in a secret mission that will destroy
British morale decisively. As the plot
situation suggests, it is all derring-do of
the most romantic sort with no
it had ever existed. It smacked too
much of triumphalism.
All this took place against a larger
national background of turmoil - racial
strife, war, militant protest, campus
riots. Not only the Catholic university,
but higher education itself was called
into question.
By 1970 a semblance of calm
returned, but almost immediately new
difficulties arose in the area of finances.
A combination of skyrocketing costs,
recession, and fewer jobs for their
graduates threatened to push private
colleges over the brink. Indeed, the
country’s Official Catholic Directory
recorded a decline from 292 Catholic
colleges in 1970 to 258 in 1974.
The Catholic institutions of higher
education that survive in 1976 have a
challenging task before them. They
must assimilate the teachings of the
Council, the reflections of scholars in
various fields, and the lived experience
of recent years in order to reformulate
the meaning of faith.
(Prof Gleason teaches in the department of
history at Notre Dame University, Notre
Dame, Ind.)
pretentions at being anything but an s y
entertainment. Michael York, Elke
Sommer, Alexandra Stewart, and the
rest of the cast are pleasantly relaxed as
they go through their paces. Director N
Etienne Perrier has paced his action -j
with humor, suspense, and some quite
good special effects work. (A-I)
CYNTHIA A. ROBERSON, 33,
has been named executive director
of the Washington, D. C.,
archdiocesan Secretariat for Black
Catholics. She is the first black
woman to head an agency of the
archdiocese. (NC Photo)
Twenty years later, after a journey
that took him from Gallarate (near
Milan) to Pisa in Italy, to Boulder,
Colo., and finally to Venice, the work
contained in the 10-foot shelf of 40
volumes, each about the size of “The
American Heritage Dictionary,” was
nearing completion. Apart from the
seven man-years needed for compiling
the Latin machine dictionary, most of
the work was done either by persons
who did not understand what they were
doing, such as keypunches, or by the
computes themselves. Even the type
that resulted in the accurate, legible and
beautiful pages that made up the
volumes was set by computer.
J* LIFE IN MUSIC
BY THE DAMEANS
The Last Four Years
This week we, the Dameans, have decided to depart from our usual format.
Instead of a comment on a particular song, this column is devoted to our
reflections on four yeas producing this article.
In one way it is difficult to believe that it has been four yeas since we began
writing for NC News Service. In another way, it seems as if it has been much
longer. The column has been such a prominent part of our schedules. It has
come during vacations, in the middle of tous, when the daily schedule in our
individual parishes was stacked with marriage cases, retreats, counseling, Masses,
and sickness. The deadlines are a constant pressure coming with frightening
regularity.
Still, there is a balance in that we derive real good from the column. Not only
is there the fine response we get from readers, but there is also the personal
perspective that comes in working with the fast-changing youth scene. We feel
that we have learned pop songs and singers, and even more importantly, the
mood of the times as it progressively evolves.
People often ask us how we choose songs to comment upon. There are three
overall criteria.
First, we choose songs that will be heard. This is not always easy as it sounds
since there is a five to six-week lag between choosing a song and the article’s
release date. We use Billboard Magazine and are necessarily confined by the few
songs which are moving well enough to surely be receiving air-time when the
article is published.
Secondly, we choose songs that merit comment. More often than not we pick
songs that say something which is truly insightful and good. Periodically it
happens that we choose a song which merits a negative comment. When we put
this latter type of song in the column, we always get responses - from people
who think that the song was better than we interpreted it to be, from those who
object to including the lyrics for us to criticize, from those who would have
rejected the song more forcefully, and finally from those persons who think that
it is we who write the songs.
Thirdly, we choose songs which give a sense of the mood of our times. When a
person looks at the Top 100 songs, the commentator can see what types of
themes are speaking to youth at any particular time. A few years ago, there was
a strong tendency towards social comment, probably brought on by the war and
political stresses. Now there is an incredibly pervasive sexual comment and
individual groping for purpose. We believe that we have both the opportunity
and responsibility to write about this larger view of the pop market.
In all, we are guided and moved by the basic belief that this column is a
service which enables people to stop and think about the powerful medium of
the radio and the pop music scene. In fact, if there is a specific goal that we have
set for ourselves, it is to encourage serious discernment in the use of that
medium for classroom or pleasure. Music becomes the vehicle by which we can
come to recognize Christianity or its counter forces in life.
We offer you this reflection of these four years because we want to convey
our genuine respect for both the medium and the public we serve. We are
sincerely thankful for the support that so many of you have provided as our
work has continued to mature.
(All correspondence should be directed to: The Dameans, P.O. Box 2108, Baton Rouge.
La. 70821.)
TV Movies
USCC DIVISION FOR FILM AND BROADCASTING
A
A - Section I - Morally Unobjectionable for General Patronage
A - Section II - Morally Unobjectionable for Adults, Adolescents
A - Section III - Morally Unobjectionable for Adults
A - Section IV - Morally Unobjectionable for Adults, Reservations
B - Morally Objectionable in Part for All
C - Condemned