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PAGE 2—The Southern Cross, June 4,1981
AMERICUS FIRST COMMUNION - Eight CCD Children received
First Holy Communion during Mass on Sunday, May 10th at St.
Mary’s, Americus. Those receiving were: Lynn Vasbinder, Kenneth
Phillips, Kevin Walton, Charlene Phillips, Andy Harper, Lange Bone,
Brian Shope and Phillip Exley. Mrs. Judy Exley is the instructor.
Father James Schwantner, OFM - Pastor and Sr. Ruth Marie Hensler,
O.S.F. - Co-ordinator.
CHURCH SERVICE RECOGNITION - Parishioners attending a
Covered Dish Supper at Holy Family, Columbus, applauded the
presentation of more than 30 Church Service Awards by Father
William O’Neill, Pastor, to church members whose sustained
contribution to the parish community warranted individual
recogniton, Mr. Leroy Burnham, Past Chairman of the Parish Council,
received award (shown above) for his outstanding leadership and
service during the preceeding year.
f \
A Positive Approach To TV
s *
BY HENRY HERX
NEW YORK (NC) - “The
Shakespeare Plays” ends its third
season with one of Shakespeare’s last
dramatic works, “the Winter’s Tale,”
airing Monday, June 8, 8-11 p.m. on
PBS.
The first part of the play is a dark
and brooding tragedy of a king driven
to blind revenge by unfounded
suspicions of his wife’s infidelity, the
outcome of which leaves him a broken
and repentant ruler bereft of wife and
all heirs. Almost all comes right again,
however, in the romantic second half
of the drama which takes place in the
sunny countryside of another
kingdom where youthful love reigns
and robust rustics add some welcome
comic relief.
The play’s two very disparate parts
are linked mainly by themes
underlying both, such as the need for
harmony and reconciliation in a
disordered world and the old
generation’s mistakes being righted by
the young. In effecting the plot’s
happy but utterly implausible ending,
Shakespeare relies upon the viewer’s
acceptance of some outrageous
theatrical devices -- a lost princess,
disguised identities, fortuitous twists
of fate. It is a fantasy to be enjoyed for
its playfulness rather than its
profundity.
Emphasizing this fantasy aspect is
the production’s visual design which
makes creative use of a single abstract
set consisting of two ramps, serving
both for court and country scenes
suggested by a few simple props and
evocative lighting effects. Befitting a
world that exists only in the
imagination, the costuming is a rich
jumble of Elizabethan finery.
The British cast is first rate but
Jeremy Kemp as the red-bearded
tyrant, Anna Calder-Marshall as his
long-suffering queen and Margaret
Tyzack as her outspoken champion
should be singled out for their
performances. Directed by Jane
Howell and produced by Jonathan
Miller, this production of “The
Winter’s Tale” provides viewers with a
fascinating version of one of
Shakespeare’s least familiar and
uncharacterictic plays.
“THE AMBASSADORS,
” PBS, JUNE 10
The clash between the values of the
Old World and those of the New is the
theme of this BBC dramatization of
Henry James’s novel, “The
Ambassadors,” airing Wednesday,
June 10, 8-9:30 p.m. on PBS.
Paul Scofield plays the New
Englander sent to paris to rescue his
wealthy employer’s son from a
romantic entanglement. He is assisted
in this mission by Lee Remick, an
American expatraite who volunteers
to be his guide to the strange ways of
the continent because die has a
romantic interest in him. He fails in his
task but returns to Massachusetts a
wiser and more compassionate
individual.
The production is a painstaking
reproduction of the 19th-century
world that exists on the pages of the
novel but that one doubts ever existed
in reality. Making us believers,
however, are the performances by
Scofield as the man true to his
old-fashioned values and Remick as
the more worldly and tolerant woman
of the future. It’s not for everyone but
if you are at all familiar with Henry
James and his work, don’t miss it.
TV Programs of Note
Sunday, June 7, 9-11 p.m. (CBS)
“The 35th Annual Tony Awards.”
Broadcast live from the Mark
Hellinger Theater in New York,
co-hosts Ellen Burstyn and Richard
Chamberlain will present the
Antoinette Perry (Tony) awards, the
most coveted honors bestowed in the
Broadway theater.
Wednesday, June 10, 9:30-10 p.m.
(PBS) “A Rainy Day.” Mariette
Hartley stars as screen star who
returns home for her father’s funeral
and gains some insight into why she is
unhappy with her career after
spending an afternoon reminiscing
with her mother in this film by Beth
Brickell.
Thursday, June 11 p.m. (PBS) “El
Teatro Campesino.” This
documentary is a film portrait of the
Farmworkers Theater and the art of
playwright-director Luis Valdez from
the agricultural fields of California to
the making of his first feature movie,
“Zoot Suit.”
TV FILM FARE
Wednesday, June 10,9 p.m. (CBS)
- “Uptown Saturday Night” (1974) --
Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby get
caught in the middle of a Harlem gang
war when they try to enlist the
services of gangster Harry Belafonte to
get back some money stolen from
them. A pleasant, moderately
entertaining comedy with some very
good acting. A-III - morally
unobjectionable for adults.
RELIGIOUS BROADCASTING
HIGHLIGHTS
(Compiled By Father Joseph Fenton)
TELEVISION
Sunday, June 7, 12:30-1:00 p.m.
(ABC) “Directions” presents the story
of 81-year-old Lila Bonner-Miller, a
practicing psychiatrist, church leader,
artist and great-grandmother. (Please
check local listings for exact time in
your area.)
Sunday, June 7,10:30-11:00 a.m.
(CBS) “For Our Times” - Selections
from the Berlioz “Te Deum” highlight
the 50th anniversary of the
magnificent Riverside Church on
Manhattan’s Upper West Side. (Please
check local listings for exact time in
your area.)
Radio:
Sunday, June 7 (NBC)
“Guideline.” Marist Father Joseph
Fenton, host of the series, interviews
Penny Lemoux about the political
scene in Latin America. Ms. Lemoux
is the author of the highly acclaimed
book “Cry of the People,” the study
of terrorism against the church in
Latin America and of American
foreign policy. (Please check local
listings for exact time in your area.)
Father Fenton and Herx are on the staff
of the U.S. Catholic Conference
Department of Communication.
THE CHURCH:
TV-MOVIES-ART
CARDINAL STEFAN WYSZYNSKI - 1901 - 1981
Indomitable Primate Of A Church At War
BY JOHN MAHER
NC News Service
Since World War II, he led the Catholic Church in a
country which had been declared an official atheistic state.
The dominant figure of the Catholic Church in Poland, a
country with an overwhelming Catholic population,
Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski had been primate and visible
head since 1948 when he was chosen to lead the Archdiocese
of Warsaw and Gniezno. His enormous personal strength
marked the Church’s relationship throughout the next 33
years with the Polish Communist government. In the 1950s
he was placed under house arrest for three years, and he was
a central figure and negotiator during 1980 and 1981 when
labor strikes threw Poland into turmoil.
When he died May 28 of cancer, an official church-state
commission announcement said the nation would observe
four days of mourning.
One measure of the stature of Cardinal Wyszynski is a
conversation that is said to have occurred in Milan, Italy,
where Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Cracow, later to become
Pope John Paul II, the first Polish pope in history, was
attending a meeting.
“What percentage of Italian cardinals ski?” Cardinal
Wojtyla asked. Told that none of the Italian cardinals skied,
he said, “That’s a pity. Forty percent of the Polish cardinals
ski.”
“But how can that be?” his Italian confrere asked.
“There are only two cardinals in Poland.”
“Wyszynski counts for 60 percent,” the future pope
replied with a smile.
The affection between the two men was evident at Pope
John Paul’s inauguration in St. Peter’s Square. In a break
with normal ceremonial precedence, Cardinal Wyszynski
was the second of the cardinals to pledge obedience to the
new pope. The pope arose as the cardinal approached and
when Cardinal Wyszynski knelt at his feet, the pope knelt
also and held the cardinal in a strong embrace.
At Czestochowa, during the pope’s triumphal return to
his homeland, he praised Cardinal Wyszynski as the driving
force behind the Polish church.
Cardinal Wyszynski had three lifelong loyalties: his
devotion to the Catholic Church, to the Polish nation and to
Our Lady of Czestochowa.
ANTITHESIS OF COMMUNISM
The primate, as he was always called, lived at a centrally
located Warsaw residence at 17 Miodowa (Honey) Street,
rebuilt after its total destruction during World War II. From
that residence the son of a village organist exercised a power
that some observers considered unrivaled in the universal
church.
He was head for life of the Polish Bishops’ Conference,
which meets six times annually, more often than any other
bishops’ conference. The Vatican policy was to name no
bishop in Poland without prior consent of the primate.
Cardinal Wyszynski’s personal strength and the “cult of
personality” built up around him were major factors that
kept the faith in Poland strong while the church in some
other Eastern European nations was dying.
“Think of the absolute antithesis of communism and
that’s Wyszynski,” a Polish-American priest who knew the
primate well once said.
The casual American visitor was sometimes put off by a
kind of pre-Vatican II awe which the figure of the primate
inspired. “I had to keep reminding myself that he’s on our
side,” said one American after a visit with the cardinal.
But the Poles said that, given the subtle but omnipresent
war against religion waged in Poland, a strong unifying
figure was essential for survival. “In a communist country,”
a Polish bishop said, “a church divided is a church dead.”
Polish church leaders admitted that there were strong
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nationalist overtones in the image the primate projected.
“For centuries,” a Polish seminary professor said, “the
Polish primates ruled when there was no king. We often joke
that Wyszynski still believes in this concept of ‘inter-rex’
(interim king).”
For the tall, big-boned, handsome Cardinal Wyszynski,
the Polish nation and the Catholic faith were indivisible.
That mystical link was crystallized at the Jasna Gora
(Beautiful Mountain) Shrine to Our Lady of Czestochowa,
where he was consecrated bishop in 1946. His devotion to
the Black Madonna was all-inclusive.
In 1956, when Cardinal Wyszynski emerged from three
years of house arrest for not endorsing the government’s
imprisonment of another bishop, he attributed his release to
the Black Madonna. Leaving the train in Rome on his way to
receiving the red hat promised while he was under arrest, he
said, “I bring you the blessing of Our Lady of
Czestochowa.”
OVERTURES TO GOVERNMENT
Despite vestiges of triumphalism, a strong Marian
devotion and ardent nationalist feelings, the cardinal was
not an immovable conservative.
On the political front, he tried early to reach a modus
vivendi with the Communists. In 1950, he signed an
agreement in which the church recognized the Communist
government in return for liberties that were never fully
granted. When Wladislaw Gomulka came to power in 1956,
the cardinal emerged from arrest and initialed a similar
agreement, with similar lack of results.
Even critics said that his hard-line stance against the
government, clearly voiced in his periodic hour-long
sermons, was the fault of the authorities. “The primate is
always provoked, he never provokes,” said a liberal Polish
priest.
“The cardinal does not believe that you should wage
campaigns in the streets and he is not going to,” said a
Western diplomat in Warsaw. “But he stands up for things
that are important in Polish life.”
There were critics of Cardinal Wyszynski’s approach to
dealing with the Polish Communist government. Reacting
to the 1950 agreement with the government, the aged
Cardinal Adam Sapieha of Cracow said: “This is not a
modus vivendi, but a modus moriendi (a way of dying).”
But despite the government’s failure to remove
restrictions on the church, more than 90 percent of Poland’s
32 million people are Catholics, Polish churches are open,
catechism is taught, young men enter seminaries and a
Polish Catholic press, though limited, exists.
Defending his approach, Cardinal Wyszynski said in
Rome in May, 1957: “We must not build castles in the air. It
isn’t always possible to come by 100 percent of what is
good. But if we have even a possibility of obtaining 70
percent, let us stretch out our hand with the hope that God
will add more.”
Cardinal Wyszynski, on innumerable occasions,
protested in the strongest possible terms against Communist
violations of the agreements he had negotiated so painfully
on behalf of the church’s freedom. But he was careful not to
put the church in a position where there was no alternative
to martyrdom.
The cardinal did not shirk martyrdom, nor did he urge
Polish Catholics to shirk it. But - and this is perhaps the key
to his policy - neither did he seek martyrdom for
martyrdom’s sake.
TEACHER IN UNDERGROUND
Stefan Wyszynski was born in the village of Zuzela in
northeastern Poland on Aug. 3, 1901. He studied for the
priesthood at the seminary at Wloclawek, where he was
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ordained on Aug. 3,1924. He then studied for four years at
the Catholic University of Lublin, where he received
doctorates in social science and canon law.
After a tour of Western Europe, he became a professor of
social sciences at the Wloclawek seminary. He edited a
scholarly journal for priests and wrote a number of books
and articles on social questions. He also held posts with the
marriage tribunal of the Wloclawek Diocese.
During World War II, Father Wyszynald carried on his
apostolic activities clandestinely. He taught social ethics in
an “underground university” and organized secret spiritual
retreats for lay leaders in public life and nuns.
After the war, he helped reopen the Wloclawek
seminary, took over editorship of the diocesan weekly and
resumed editorship of the journal for priests he had edited
before the war. He also published a book, “The Holy See
and the Postwar World.”
On March 4,1946, he was named bishop of Lublin. On
Nov. 12, 1948, he was made archbishop of Gniezno and
Warsaw, a post which traditionally carries the title “primate
of Poland.”
He then devoted himself to postwar reconstruction. His
efforts were hampered by a clergy shortage, because many
priests had been killed during the war, and by the hostility
of the Communist regime imposed on Poland by the Soviet
army.
Pope Pius XII named him a cardinal in January 1953. But
he did not go to Rome to receive the red hat, because he was
afraid the Communist authorities would not allow him to
return to Poland.
HOUSE ARREST
In September 1953, Cardinal Wyszynski refused to
condemn Bishop Czeslaw Kaczmarek of Kielce, who had
been sentenced to 12 years in prison. The cardinal was then
arrested, charged with violating the 1950 church-state
agreement and imprisoned. For the next three years he was
held at various times in four different convents in widely
separted parts of Poland. His whereabouts were not made
public.
In June 1956, workers’ and students’ riots erupted in
Poznan, and the entire country was in ferment. In October,
a bloodless palace revolution overthrew the hardline
Stalinist regime and Wladyslaw Gomulka, who had spent
several years in prison for “Titoist deviation,” emerged as
the new Communist Party leader and ruler of Poland.
Cardinal Stefan Wysznyski
But revolution was in the air and Gomulka and other
Polish Communist leaders, fearing a loss of power and
Soviet intervention, turned to Cardinal Wyszynski and
offered him his freedom in an effort to pacify the country.
While exacting new guarantees of church freedom as the
price of his cooperation, Cardinal Wyszynski urged Polish
Catholics to be moderate. “We forgive, and the church
forgives, all the wrongs inflicted upon her in the recent,
past,” he said in a sermon soon after his release.
But permanent improvement seemed impossible and
throughout the early 1960s Cardinal Wyszynski and
Gomulka engaged in sharp, public, mutual recriminations.
Even the Second Vatican Council, of whose central
preparatory commission the cardinal was a member, served
as an occasion for the regime to show hostility toward the
church. Only about 25 of Poland’s nearly 70 bishops were
allowed to attend the council’s first session and they were
permitted to take with them the equivalent of only about
$5 each. Pope John XXIII and the bishops of other
countries gave them financial assistance, but Cardinal
Wyszynski protested this state of affairs in December 1962.
Cardinal Wyszynski was one of three cardinals who
participated in the conclaves that elected Popes John XXIII,
Paul VI, John Paul I and John Paul II.
Pope Released From Hospital
,
STAFF AND NC NEWS
VATICAN CITY -- On
Wednesday, June 4, Pope John Paul II
returned to the Vatican following a
three-week hospital stay. The pope
had been at Rome’s Gemelli Polyclinic
since he was taken there, May 13, for
surgery following the assassination
attempt on his life irf'Saint Peter’s
Square.
The dismissal from the hospital
came as a surprise, as only last
weekend Dr. Emilio Tresalti, medical
director at the Gemelli Polyclinic, said
it was premature to talk about the
pope’s release saying it would be “at
least seven or eight more days.”
Following his return to the
Vatican, a group of several hundred
Polish pilgrims serenaded the pope
under his apartment windows hoping,
in vain, for a glimpse of John Paul II.
The pope’s return to the Vatican
brightened prospects that he might
take part in the Pentecost celebrations
on June 7. Hundreds of bishops from
throughout the world are scheduled to
come to Vatican City for the
ceremonies.
Cardinal Ugo Poletti, papal vicar
for Rome, fueled hopes that the pope
might attend part of the celebrations
when he wrote in a letter to the Rome
ecclesial community: “We trust that,
on that happy occasion, we will be
able to see him in person for the first
time since his illness.”
The letter also said Pope John Paul
had wanted the Pentecost plans to
continue despite the attempt on his
life, and that he was “waiting to be
able to decide in what form and
measure he may be able to
participate.”
The special Pentecost celebration
of the Holy Spirit in Rome called for
by the Pope will begin with first
vespers and benediction June 6 in St.
Peter’s Basilica.
On June 7, Pentecost Sunday, the
centerpiece event will be a morning
Mass in St. Peter’s concelebrated by
bishops from around the world. The
observance will conclude that evening
with second vespers and Marian
devotions at St. Mary Major Basilica.
At the end of March Pope John
Paul issued a letter calling on the
national and regional bishops’
conferences of the world to send
representatives to Rome for Pentecost
in order to mark the 1600th
anniversary of the Council of
Constantinople and the 1550th
anniversary of the Council of Ephesus.
The two councils developed key
formulations of Christian belief
regarding the Holy Spirit. The feast of
Pentecost in the church’s liturgical
calendar commemorates the descent
of the Holy Spirit on the apostles after
Christ’s ascension, which is considered
the starting point of the life of the
church.
The Marian aspect of the Pentecost
observances is related to the
anniversary celebration of the Council
of Ephesus, which formally applied
the title “Mother of God” to Mary.