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PAGE 6—January 1,1976*
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THE GERMAN CATHOLIC IMMIGRANT
lifemobile
A /MINNESOTA PRO-LIFE ASSOCIATION PROJECT
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WHEELS FOR LIFE -- This symbol will be seen on the Lifemobile, a
vehicle which will begin touring the highways of Minnesota next spring to
bring the pro-life message to the people of that state. The converted
camper or bus will contain audio-visual equipment, displays, literature and
volunteer personnel to answer questions. Shopping centers, fairs, schools
and churches are the primary targets of the effort. Thus far, $6,000 has
been raised toward the project, the costs of which .are estimated at
$40,000. (NC Photo)
REVIEWED BY JOSEPH R. THOMAS
(NC News Service)
HISTORY AND THE THEOLOGY
OF LIBERATION, by Enrique Dussel.
Orbis Books. Mary knoll, N.Y. 189
pages. $8.95 ($4.95, paper).
Dussel is one of the principal
liberation theology theoreticians in
Latin America. He describes it as “the
protest of dominated peoples” and in
this book, a top-seller in Latin America,
views the U.S. as an oppressor of the
poor, a theme reiterated in an appendix,
on the Chicanos, whom he describes as a
“Latin American nation,” a “dependent
and oppressed people within an
‘imperial nation.”’
SOLZHENITSYN’S RELIGION, by
Niels C. Neilson Jr. Thomas Nelson, Inc.
Nashville, Tenn. 164 pages. $6.95
($3.50, paper).
The convictions, religious and secular,
of the exiled Russian novelist,
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, as gleaned
from his published works by an
authority on Eastern Europe. Choice
reading for anyone seeking to
understand contemporary developments
in Russia.
LAW FOR YOU, by Foster Furcolo.
Acropolis Books. Washington, D.C. 194
pages. $7.95 ($3.50, paper).
A helpful primer on the law - civil
and criminal - by a former
congressman' trial attorney and law
professor who is now an administrative
law judge. An excellent starting point
for anyone with questions about his
rights in any given situation.
DISCRIMINATION AGAINST
WOMEN. World Council of Churches.
Geneva, Switzerland. 150 pages. $2.50
(paper).
Report of a consultation on women
held by the WCC in 1974. Since the
arguments are familiar enough by now,
the main value of this volume is as a
resource book.
CONFESSIONS IN DIALOGUE, by
Nils' Ehrenstrom. World Council of
Churches. 266 pages. $2.50 (paper).
This is a revised and expanded version
of a work first issued in 1972. It is an
invaluable reference book for those
engaged in ecumenical activity on the
official level for it details all interchurch
talks, the scope and background of each
conversation, points of agreement, etc.
RELIGION AS STORY, James B.
Wiggins, editor. Harper and Row. New
York. 203 pages. $4.50 (paper).
Six contributors from as many
different fields within religious studies
explore the relationship between
religion and story (narration) in a book
that may carry little interest for the
non-scholar.
WHY WE NEED THE POPE, by
Karl-Heinz Ohlig. Abbey Press. St.
Meinrad, Ind. 152 pages. $3.95 (paper).
The title implies a popular defense of
the papacy but in fact the author, an
Austrian theologian, offers a speculative
model of the papacy with limitations
not envisioned by the First Vatican
Council which defined) papacy and
infallibility in 1870.
AMERICAN RELIGIOUS
THOUGHT: A HISTORY, by William
A. Clebsch. Chicago University Press.
Chicago. 212 pages. $3.95 (paper).
A purely arbitrary - but provocative
- treatment of a challenging subject,,
with Clebsch focusing on the ideas
espoused by Jonathan Edwards, Ralph
Waldo Emerson and William James as he
attempts to outline what he considers to
be a distinct American spirituality.
AMERICA: ITS PEOPLE, ITS
PROMISE, by Anthony T. Padovano.
St. Anthony Messenger Press.
Cincinnati. 65 pages. $1.35 (paper).
An extended essay based on the
thesis that our religious behavior as
Americans is influenced not so much by
doctrine or Gospel as by our inherited
culture.
ENTHUSIASM IN THE SPIRIT, by
Robert Wild. Ave Maria Press. Notre
Dame, Ind. 176 pages. $2.45 (paper).
Father Wild, a charismatic himself,
writes basically for charismatics, the
intent to help channel their enthusiasm
into a Church-oriented setting to stem a
tendency to drift away from the
institution.
THE SEVEN SISTERS: THE
GREAT OIL COMPANIES AND THE
WORLD THEY SHAPED, by Anthony
Sampson. Viking Press. New York. 334
pages, $10.
The subtitle provides an apt
description of the scope of Sampson’s
work. It is a monumental piece of
research, starting with the discovery of
oil in Pennsylvania, tracing the growth
of the “Seven Sisters” and culminating
in the current chaotic condition of the
industry. Viewed as scholarship,
journalism or just plain good reading, it
is unsurpassed.
(Thomas is managing editor of The
Advocate, newspaper of the Newark
archdiocese.)
Liberty And Justice For All:
American Catholics 1776-1976
BY FATHER COLMAN
J. BARRY; O.S.B.
(NC News Service)
The Catholic Church in the United
States has been in large measure an
immigrant institution. The tide of
millions of settlers to American shores
was a phenomenon unparalleled in the
Church’s history. Peoples of different
races, nationalities, traditions and
prejudices, came to establish new homes
in a strange country. Among these the
German people occupied a leading
place.
Immigrant German Catholics of the
19th century had a firm loyalty to their
religion, sound organizational
techniques, and a strong community
pattern of worship, culture and social
action. From the time of their first
Pennsylvania settlements in the
mid-18th century, German Catholic
leaders had insisted on separate
treatment and recognition as an ethnic
group. Their demands in the following
century for language rights, national
parishes, and proportional
representation in the hierarchy were,
they maintained, defenses against attack
by liberal German Americans after
1848, as well as insurance that their
religious faith would be preserved
intact.
Simultaneously, other leading
Catholic churchmen and laymen were
working to instill devotion to American
constitutional and political ideals among
all segments of immigrant Catholics.
Towards the end of the century the
robust Americanizing and German
elements came into open conflict.
German Catholic leaders and
newspapers, supported by a large
number of French, Polish, and Spanish
representatives, accused the
Americanizers of striving to break down
all traditions and customs among
Catholic immigrants. The Americanizers
were also accused of causing a loss of
religious faith and creating an undue
attachment to American secular trends.
Peter Paul Cahensly, member of the
German Reichstag and active Catholic
lay leader, joined by leaders of the St.
Raphael’s Society in seven European
countries, took the whole question to
Rome. Cahensly was! the pioneer leader
in defense of the human and spiritual
rights of the immigrant.
On their side the Americanizers,
following especially the principles of
Orestes Brownson and Isaac Hecker,
were wedded to the vision of traditional
Catholicism formed in an American
democratic mold and based on a fusion
of all national groups. Led by many of
the country’s most prominent Catholic
bishops and teachers, they maintained
that free political institutions can be
secure only when the people are imbued
with religious ideals, that without
religious sanctions the moral solidarity
which makes democratic government
possible would be broken. They wanted
to show the necessity of the Catholic
religion to the modern world and to
impress on Catholics the necessity of
their being in tune with the age.
This task of creating a religious and
national unity among the Catholic
immigrants reached a climax between
the Civil War and World War I. German
immigration to the United States was
given a new impetus after 1865, and
Catholics made up more than 35
percent of the total German
immigration of that period. They
totaled around 700,000 from 1865 to
1900, becoming the largest Catholic
immigrant group arriving in the United
States.
Germans who came after 1865
generally settled in the same regions as
earlier German immigrants, in
agricultural and metropolitan areas
which in time became known as “the
German belt” - between Massachusetts
and Maryland, westward through the
Ohio river basin to the Great-Lakes, and
into the prairie states beyond the
Mississippi river. But it was in the
triangle embracing Cincinnati,
Milwaukee and St. Louis that the
German population was especially
dense.
Catholic Germans were concerned
not only with their material well-being
in the New World, but primarily with
their spiritual life. Among their first
interests was the erection of a church
and a parish school. Fresh from
Germany and feeling isolated because of
their language differences, the German
Catholics from the outset insisted that
for them separate churches were an
absolute necessity. . They wanted
churches in which their traditional
religious observances and customs, in
their own language, could be carried
out. They held that Irish and English
Catholics, who had no language problem
of their own, could not understand the
bond in German consciousness between
the practice of their faith and these
NEW-YORK (NC) - A group of
hour-long television specials related to
the U.S. bicentennial will be presented
by four religious organizations in 1976
on the NBC-TV network.
The eight specials, which have been
given the collective title “Under God,”
were produced by NBC in cooperation
with the National Council of Churches
(NCC), the Southern Baptist
Convention, the Jewish Theological
Seminary of America, and the United
States Catholic Conference (USCC).
They will be spaced throughout the year
with three scheduled for January and
February, two in the spring, two in
early summer, and one in the fall.
Each of the four religious groups
took responsibility for two of the eight
programs and worked independently
with NBC in their production. But they
have joined forces in publicizing the
specials and distributing related
educational materials. Assisted by a
grant for this purpose from the Lilly
Endowment, the groups have begun a
large-scale promotion campaign to draw
attention to the programs throughout
their respective communities.
The USCC will present its first
“Under God” program, “Mexican .. .
and American” Feb. 15. The
documentary describes the richness of
the Mexican-American culture and
society, with emphasis on the Spanish
colonial experience and the
contributions made by
Mexican-Americans to a pluralistic
society.
traditional customs. Catholic Germans
in particular, already considered
hyphenated Germans because of their
allegiance to Rome, realized they would
be open to cynical attack if they did not
try to preserve “das Deutschtum” in the
New World.
The German Catholics eventually
came to accept the position of the
Americanizers, as did the other
immigrant groups. Their mother tongue
was dying out, American national habits
were being assimilated. German parishes
gradually became mixed parishes,
national parishes slowly gave way to
territorial parishes. Interest in the
appointment of bishops of German
ancestry and tongue became an
academic question as the American
Germans took their own place in
national life.
At the same time, tne Amencamzers,
seeing their ideals fulfilled by this
process, ceased their intemperate
charges about a conspiracy and came to
realize the valuable contribution of
Germans to life in the United States.
The parochial school system, so
vigorously defended by German
Catholics, was accepted as a policy of
the Church. Several points of the
program urged by Cahensly and the St.
Raphael Society, such as colonizing
projects and care for immigrants and
displaced persons, were also
incorporated into American Catholic
practice. Much was learned from the
German examples of a strong press and
vigorous society activity.
Perhaps, as more and more educators
are now saying, the pluralistic linguistic
The second USCC presentation will
depict the role of land in shaping the
American experience, from its appeal to
early pioneers seeking space and
freedom to America’s present crises of
urbanization and land use. Tentatively
entitled “The Land,” the program will
be broadcast in the fall of 1976 at a
date to be announced.
Speaking for the USCC, Bishop James
S. Rausch, general secretary, said
“Catholics welcome the unique
opportunity of joining with other
Christian and Jewish fellow citizens in
these ‘Under God’ programs.” Noting
that Catholics have chosen the theme of
Liberty and Justice for All for their
bicentennial observances, Bishop
Rausch said, “Our two parts of this
project treat this ideal as it applies to
our fellow Americans of Hispanic origin,
and to the use and abuse of our beloved
land.”
NBC will broadcast the first program
Jan. 18. Entitled “Where We Came
From,” produced in cooperation with
the Jewish Theological Seminary of
America, it features prominent
American Jews and illuminates the
connections between their traditional
backgrounds and the values, actions and
goals of present day American Jewish
life.
The second presentation by the
Jewish seminary, scheduled for
broadcast May 30, "is entitled “A
Woman of Valor.” It tells the true story
of Jessy Judah and her family who
settled in New York City at the end of
and cultural values contributed to
American life by the immigrant groups
were recognized and respected too late.
The record of German Catho’
contributions has been limited, and
rewarding study could be made as to
whether too hasty Americanization was
a serious cause. Why has there been a
slow and reluctant response to the ideals
of community worship, of the liturgical
movement, of a respect for the Catholic
traditions of participation, singing and a
scripturally centered life? What
happened to the ancient Catholic
tradition of the arts and crafts in
American Catholic life? Such aspects
could have received real impetus from
immigrant groups like the Germans if
they had not been uprooted and fnom
of their true identity so rapidl> and
completely.
Apart from these considerations, the
leaders of the Catholic Church in the
United States who had encouraged
Americanization made a contribution to
the nation. Some nine million Catholic
immigrants from more than 20
countries had come to American shores
in the century from 1820 to 1920.
These settlers from diverse cultures were
encouraged by their new spiritual
leaders to practice American democratic
ideals. They were encouraged to
amalgamate and adapt themselves. As a
result a significant number of Catholic
immigrants from Europe learned to live
together as Americans.
(Father Barry, author of numerous books
on Catholic history, is dean of the School of
Religious Studies at the Catholic University of
America, Washington, D.C.)
the 18th century during an epidemic of
yellow fever. The story also traces the
roots of the first Jewish settlers in
America in 1654 and the establishment
of the Spanish-Portuguese synagogue.
The Southern Baptist Convention will
present its fijst offering, “Faces of
Hope,” Jan. 25. A documentary filmed
in Yugoslavia, the program studies
religious life in that communist country
as well as the historical role played by
Balkan countries in the spread of
Christianity to Europe and the United
States.
In “Golden Spring,” which the
Baptists will present June 6, Alexander
Scourby narrates an examination of the
Renaissance and the creativity and
religious intensity of an era that shaped
every age to follow. The program was
filmed in Florence, Venice, Rome, and
at the Vatican.
“Strangers in the Homeland,” which
the NCC will present March 21, is a
drama whose theme is social justice as
seen through the eyes of a fictional
family enmeshed in the controversies
surrounding first the American
Revolution, then pre-Civil War times
and finally the Vietnam War.
“A Gathering of One,” scheduled by
the NCC for June 20, is a dramatic
portrait of the 18th century theologian,
Jonathan Edwards. The program focuses
on the attempt of Edwards’
congregation to expel him from his
pulpit on the grounds that his standards
for Christian commitment were too
rigorous and demanding.
/ ^
Four Bicentennial TV Specials Set
L . /
1976: The Catholic People In America
(Part 1)
BY MICHAEL NOVAK
The most important part of the American population at the time for the
Bicentennial is the nation’s Roman Catholics. They are also among the nation’s
most politically ineffective groups. Why?
First, there are so many of us. At least one out of four Americans is Roman
Catholic. There are approximately 50 million of us, in official figures. But if you
count 16 million Spanish-speaking Catholics, rather than the official 5 million -
and the larger figure seems more plausible - then there are about 60 million
Catholics. In addition there are millions who are Catholic in culture, even if they
no longer go to church.
Secondly, our location is politically potent. Catholics are concentrated in the
10 states with the greatest number of electoral votes. Most of us live in a triangle
from Maine to Minnesota-Missouri. But we also number 20 percent or more in
states usually thought of as “Protestant,” like Florida, Texas, and California.
There are almost a million Slavs in Texas, besides the great numbers of Chicanos,
and sizable numbers of Irish and German Catholics there (like Sissy Farenthold’s
family).
Thirdly, Catholics are more concentrated than Protestants in and around cities
of 250,000 or more. In cities like Boston, Providence, Newark, Pittsburgh,
Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago - Catholics and blacks are virtually the
only ones left in the cities. ,,
Fourth, Catholics vote heavily. Polish Catholics vote at a level (84 percent)
second highest only to Jews. Other Catholics (except the Spanish-speaking) also
vote at a rate higher than the national average.
Finally; in elections for the presidency (and even for the senate) Catholics
tend disproportionately to be independent voters. Catholics used to be solidly
Democratic. But since Eisenhower’s second election (1956), Catholics have
voted sometimes for Democratic and sometimes for Republican presidents and
senators, splitting their tickets. Catholics describe themselves as Independent in
higher proportions than either Protestants or Jews.
In a word, Catholics are numerous, concentrated in politically potent ways,
urban, vote regularly and form a decisive independent body.
Thus decisions made by Catholics individually, but cumulative in their force,
will be the most decisive force in determining the direction of the nation in the
third century.
. i
Catholics alone are not strong enough to carry the nation. But they are clearly'
the largest swing vote. They outnumber blacks about three to one. They
outnumber the entire Republican party.
On almost every measure, even when we control for class, region, education
and income, Catholics tend to be less conservative than Protestants, more
progressive, more independent.
Yet the Catholic people have been politically disorganized, ineffective, and
unsophisticated, when compared to groups like the Quakers, the Jews, black
Protestants, and Ivy League Protestants. (Twenty-eight of 100 Senators have Ivy
League degrees.) Issues important to Catholics -- from social issues like unions
for Chicano migrant workers, or an end to the Vietnam War in which so many
sons of working-class families fought and died, to institutional issues like
parochial schools and moral issues like abortion - do not receive a very
sympathetic ear from most non-Catholics.
Often, Catholics are maligned falsely for holding positions they do not hold.
For example, support for George Wallace in 1968 was often attributed to
Catholic workers. Yet fewer than 8 percent of all Catholics supported Wallace in
November of 1968. Sixteen percent of Protestants did.
At other times,Catholic views on moral or political issues are ignored,
misperceived, or treated as unenlightened, particularly on moral issues related to
family life. The problems of working-class Catholics are ignored in the media.
The relative absence of Catholics at high levels of various financial, corporate,
academic, and media institutions does not awaken general cries for “affirmative
action” in favor of greater Catholic participation. (In President Ford’s cabinet,
there is only one Catholic. On the boards of trustees and faculties of most
universities the proportion of Catholics is almost as low.)
As 1976 approaches, the Catholic people are a politically silent, disorganized,
amateurish, and ineffective socio-political force. Yet they are strategically
situated and bear heavy responsibilities. The Bicentennial is an occasion to
explore the situation of Catholics in America.