Newspaper Page Text
THURSDAY, MARCH 18, 1965 GEORGIA BULLETIN PAGE 5
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WITNESS AT SELMA
‘Why Did You Come?’
REV. LEONARD F.X. MAYHEW
“Why did you come to Selma?’* This was the
frequently asked question put to us, clergy, nuns
and laymen, by reporters and interviewers. It
was at once the simplest and the most incis
ive question possible. During the hours at the
police barrier, facing the steely hatred of the
posse men and the troopers, there was plenty
of time to consider it. “Why did I come?’* It
is an important question.
It was important to me— and
I sensed that it was important
for many others also—to weigh
and evaluate the reasons for
being in Selma. Coming there,
cognizant ofthevery real threat
of physical danger, had to be a
moral act. Therefore, its value
could only come from its moti
vation. For the vast majority
of us, the physical danger was a negative con
sideration which had to be either over-ridden
or ignored. There certainly was no evidence of
childish larking or neurotic martyr complex
es among the hundreds of mature and dedicat
ed religious persons who flocked to Selma from as
far away as Hawaii and Canada.
THE genesis of our solidarity with the Selma
Negroes had to be in a general sympathy and
admiration for their efforts to change the hund
red year old pattern of systematic exclusion
from voting. This evil state of affairs has been
the rule throughout the Black Belt of Alabama
and Mississippi. In the county where Marion, Ala
bama is located, for example, the first Negro
ever to be approved for registration was put on
the list this past Monday. This is the county
where Negroes were clubbed by troopers as they
knelt to pray and Jimmy Lee Jackson was shot
to death by a trooper as he tried to protect
his mother. This typifies the second element of
our motivation.
The main thing that sparked the pilgrimage to
Selma was certainly the outrage at the bridge
in Selma two Sundays ago. The picture of troop
ers clubbing and riding horses into peaceful
people marching to protest generations of gross
injustice was too much of an effort to our cons
cience. Cruelty, which is common enough, be
comes critical, when it exists in such propor
tions. Such a crisis demands more than ver
bal expressions of sympathy and solidarity. It
creates a situation where the words of one of the
freedom songs apply simply and immediately:
“Which side are you on, brother?" Such suffer
ing must either be shared or else it is being
contributed to.
THE clergy and religious must certainly have
felt the need to put themselves to the test of sin
cerity when so many others were placing their
safety and lives on the line. After preaching and
professing a conviction of the dignity of man and
his rights, a situation evolved in which this
conviction was being nakedly opposed to raw and
ruthless power. Three arrived the time for ac
tion— and, if need be, for suffering. Inner
peace would be impossible without testing the con
viction.
The message of the minister of the Christian
gospel is that of Christ: love, real love, which
withers without expression. One of the most ur
gent motives impelling us to Selma was the need
to witness with our presence and our bodies
that Christ’s love is here and now concerned
with the poor, the Suffering and the oppressed.
With such as these he identified himself and he
had to be found and served where he could best
be found, in the deprived and brutilized Negroes
of Selma, Alabama.
It; has been implied that the murder of a white
man, the Reverend James Reeb, accomplished
what the murder of a Negro could not do. Em
phatically, I deny that this was true for the
vast majority of the white clergy, religious
and laity who journeyed to Selma. Reverend
Reeb’s murder was a piece of senseless and stu
pid savagery. It typifies the extremes of the con
flict: love versus hate. It was not the principal
motive, however, for our presence in Selma.
GOOD NEWS
Translation Sour Note
BY MARY PERKINS RYAN
A correspondent writes: "You say that in the
Epistle and Gospel God speaks to us through the
human voice of Christ’s minister as he reads the
inspired words of Holy Scripture. Tliis is the
way I used to feel— but the 'New' Scripture
translation doesn't sound ’holy’ and not even
‘pleasing’— in fact, offensive, common, trite,
juvenile. It just isn’t possible to imagine God
telling us to 'fasten our belts,’’ and 'Get up, girl'
sounds like 'Giddy up, horsie’. . . I am not an
intellectual, I do not claim to be theologian.
But ignorant as I am, I loved the musical ca
dence of the old translation where Christ
spoke to the soul and the soul answered 'Christ.’*
This letter brings up a pro
blem, which I am as troubled
by as is my correspondent. I
have been avoiding it in these
columns both because it is a
very complex one and be
cause I don't enjoy criticiz
ing the hard-working scholars
who did their best, under great
pressure, to produce the
present translations of the Epistles and Gospels.
But if these translations are an obstacle to hear
ing God’s Word to people like my correspon
dent as well as to people who might call them
selves intellectuals, then it should be discussed
here.
FIRST, IT SHOULD be said that If you have
been really familiar with one of the old trans
lations of Scripture from your earliest years,
if you have mediated on cherished phrases and
let them resound in your mind in times of stress
and of joy, if they are a part of you— then you
aren’t going to welcome any new translation
easily. (In St. Jerome’s time, when the "com
mon people’’ really knew Scripture, there was
a real fuss at his changing, in his new trans
lation, even the kind of bush that Jonas sat un
der.) But there is a real need, in the Church,
for new translations whenever existing ones be
come archaic. God's Word needs to be render
ed in language that makes it seem of urgent
and immediate import to each generation, "as
sharp as a two-edged sword’*— and it doesn't
seem so to most people today when it is in seven
teenth-century English, however beautiful. So we
older people must- be open-minded about new
translations even,though we, personally, are quit?
happy with the old ones'.
BUT IT IS sad indeed that, just when the Church
is calling us to a "warm and living love for holy
Scripture,” we should be given what we are being
given. The scholars who produce the current
translations know the ancient language; they are
experts on the "literary forms’’ of Scripture.
But because of the defects of our educational
system and general lack of culture, they don’t
really know English, with its wonderful var
iety of resources, its different levels of "col-
loquiality”, its many possibilities of spoken
cadence. (As a friend of mine said of the Con
fraternity version of the Psalms, "Its like rid
ing in a car with broken springs.’*)
THE SCHOLARS who produced the present
Readings for the Mass were trying faithfully to
render the original in clear, smple English.
But they have never had the opportunity to ac
quire the "ear” for spoken and written English
needed to achieve their aim. A scholar in the
'20s, Rev. C. F. Burney, wrote a book called
"The Poetry of our Lord” showing how His dis
courses, as set down in the Gospels, are case
in the form; of Hebrew poetry. You would cer
tainly never suspect anything of the kind from
the present Gospel Readings. It is hard to see
how the crowds could have cried out in admira
tion that no man had ever spoken like this Man,
if He had used the inept, semi-colloquial, semi-
pedantic style characterizing so many of the
Readings we are now hearing at Mass.
DUTCH GUIANA
Your World And Mine
Vi
to Latin America per person under the Alliance
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 4 for p rogre ss.
hydroelectric project, a refinery to transform
bauxite into alumina, and a smelter to complete
the process by manufacturing aluminum. Constru
ction will be completed in about six months.
Right now, everyone is praying for rain. Two re
cord dry years in a row have leftthe water level
in the dam way below schedule.
A SURVEY OF national resources shows more
bauxite and low-grade iron ore close to hydro
electric potential. Current efforts seek to at
tract capital for a new project even bigger than
Suralco’s.
Natural forest covers most of the country and
offers another logical area to expand employ
ment. Since World War II, a Dutch firm has
built a plywood and pressedwood factory em
ploying 1,200 , with many more hundreds in
logging. Markets are Latin America, the Unit
ed States and Europe.
SURINAMERS ADMIT freely that political asso
ciation with the Netherlands played a major part in
this progress. It gives preferential entrance to the
European Common Market for their bauxite,
aluminum and plywood, and anything else they
produce. The Netherlands is generous with tech
nical aid and money. It gifted onethird of $107
million for the just completed Ten-Year Develop
ment Plan, loaned another third. Projected
aid for the next two years exceeds $20 per
person yearly, about three times the U. S. aid
Whatever the theoretical relationship, Surina
mers know that they are still junior partners in
the Kingdom of the Netherlands . However, the
Dutch do all they can to ease the situation. Most
of the officials from Holland have left, and new
appointments go exclusively to Surinamers. Since
I arrived, an extremely reluctant businessman
has been persuaded to accept the post of gover
nor, the Queen’s representative. He was the one
person on whom all interested parties could agree.
CATHOLICS SAY that as yet there is no notice
able pressure to transfer Church administra
tion to Surinam personnel. This would be difficult
at short notice. Almost all priests are Dutch
and the only seminarians are a handful at high-
school level.
The Moravian Brethren, the principal Pro
testant denomination, faced such a crisis in
World War II, when it had to replace its many
German pastors. The Brethren, who have been
in Surinam for several hundred years, no lon
ger depend on foreign clergy.
Relations between the Brethren and Catholics
are good. The Catholic bishop recently attended
the ordination of one of their clergy, as an ecu
menical gesture. Catholic mission work began
about a century ago, and Catholics are now the
most numerous Christian denomination. Surinam
has, however, the peculiarity of being the only
American Cuntry with a non-Christian majority,
principally Hindu and Moslem.
ARNOLD VIEWING
‘How To Murder Your Wife’
Q. Ten years ago I lost my husband. He was a Protestant
and he was buried in Rose Hill Cemetery, which is non-sectar
ian. Six years ago I was converted and I am now a Catholic. Per
haps you will tell me what to do.
When my husband died I had a head-stone marked in both our
names, and had the grave dug extra deep, so when my time comes
I’ll be with him again. However a lot of Catholics tell me the
Church will not allow this. What shall I do? I am crowding 70
years old now. The rest of the family are still Protestant and
would not know what to do.
Do I have to get special permission to be buried there?
A. My problem in answering your letter
is that I do not know the regulations of your
particular diocese. The general law of the
Church is stated very simply: Catholics are to
be buried in a blessed cemetery. From such
law exceptions can readily be made for suffi
cient reason. And in your case the reason is
far more than sufficient.
However, some dioceses have made very
rigid rules in this matter. In some cases
these rules seem designed to protect the
financial interests of Catholic cemeteries
rather than for the welfare of souls. But in
a case like yours even the strictest imag
inable rules will surely be relaxed. But I
would suggest that you call on your pastor
and talk the matter over with him. Then if special permission
be needed it can be obtained and your worries eliminated. I
hope you need not make use of the permission for many happy
years.
Q. Is it true that an adopted child may not be allowed to be
come a priest or a nun? If so, what sin do they hold against the
child? Certainly he did no wrong.
A. Church law states that only legitimate boys may be admitted
to the seminary; and that illegitimacy is an "irregularity"-—
or impediment to the reception of Holy Orders. Church law
declares a child legitimate if its parents were properly married
at the time of its conception or birth. A child is "legitimated,”
in most cases, if its parents marry subsequent to its birth.
For most purposes, in church law, a legitimated child has the
same rights as a legitimate one.
The general law of the Church does not prevent an illegi
timate child from entering a religious order; but many orders
have special rules banning such a person.
Canon law is in process of revision. Let us hope and pray that
it will be truly modernized, eliminating the archaisms which
it now retains in abundance! And may this stigma of illegiti
macy, as it affects spiritual matters, be the first fossil to be
placed in a museum!
Whenever I mention the existence of this law I receive many
letters of protest against it, and several note that, "there are no
illegitimate children; only illegitimate parents.”
In former centuries the handicaps of illegitimacy existed for
social purposes; to encourage legitimate marriage, and to show
strong disapproval of extramarital arrangements. The same pur
poses are laudable today, but die means are wrong. It is only
though injustice to the innocent -^person that we achieve our so
cial goals. This is contrary to modern concepts of human rights
and the equality of men.
Article 2 of the Universal' ’ ‘ Declaration of Human Rights
states the ideal of equality which inspires moral men of today:
"Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth
in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race,
color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national
or social origin, property, BIRTH ‘ or other status.” (Emphasis
added.)
BY JAMES W. ARNOLD
When the humor is visible through the bad
taste and flying spaghetti sauce, "How to Mur
der Your Wife” is funny in a comic strip sort
of way. Reuniting agile farceurs director Rich
ard Quine and actor Jack Lemmon ("Opera
tion Madball”), the film is about a playboy
cartoonist who gets married in a drunken stupor,
finded wedded bliss intolerable and is accused
of dropping his beautiful blonde
spouse into a vat of cement.
The film, a steal of the black
comedy idea in "Divorce,
Italian Style,” reveals key dif
ferences in comic approach.
The Italians told their joke
amid the mores of a real town
and real people and set one
oddball husband against one de
cidedly murderable wife. Hollywood drowns its
feeble tale amid the lush pipedream decor of
Manhattan’s Very Rich (the sets seem only re
cently vacated by Doris and Rock), and makes the
couple stand for Everyman and Everywoman.
Thus the target becomes Every Marriage.
WHILE THE Italians carry their mad logic to
the end, the Americans typically weasel out. It’s
bad box-office to have an unhappy ending, much
less at the expense of womanhood, so we fade
out on boy and girl reconciled, doing the One
Thing we know marriage is good for.
If patrons can Ignore the labored gags (a
drunken jurist keeps saying, "I’m sober as a
judge”), the abolescent peeping at Vima
List, and the glamorization of tawdry morals,
they may enjoy Quine’s magical use of the
zoom lens, the spoofing of movie clinches,
Lemmon’s extraordinary ability to get his body
to look anyway he wants it to look, and a live
ly, inventive score by Neal Hefti. They may
also have a few seconds to ponder the film’s
only serious question: what kind of shape is mar
riage in, anyway? Has Dagwood had it? Is he
really read; to murder Blondie, who has been
too smug, too slick, too superior to long?
READERS BITE BACK DEPT.:
Q. : I think you goofed on "TTie Pumpkin Eat
er.” Why do you feel this picture is in favor of
babies? She has the abortion, doesn't she?
It’s the solution to their problems, isn’t it? And
along the way, aren't we treated to many other
evils, like divorce, adultery, jealousy, if-you-can-
do-it-so-can-I, etc.?
A.: Many perceptive customs missed the point
of this film. The crucial question: who was res
ponsible, the film- maker or the customers?
Was it a failure in message-sending or in mes
sage-receiving?
Certain points are assumed as rules of the
game: One, it is often necessary to portray evil
incidents. Without sin, stories could be neither
realistic or have dramatic conflict. Two, the
evil must seem desirable to the characters, or
they’d be out doing something else. Three, the
evil should not seem objectively desirable, or the
basic integrity of the work is corrupted.
"Pumpkin Eater” detractors need t o notice
more keenly the attitude of the film-makers to
ward the characters and the nasty things they
do. Visual images keep insisting: this woman has
hold of a certain truth. These other people are
foolish, and they will change her and ruin her
happiness. One evil must lead to another and
finally to disaster. But this need not be the end.
These are humans, and they can and will try
again.
YOU CAN TELL what a director thinks of adul
terers by the way he photographs them, of abor
tion by the emotional response he forces you to
make to it, of parenthood by the way he pre
sents the interaction of mother and children
and compares it to the values of others. Divorce
and marital instability bring the heroine mis
ery; abortion is the ultimate horror she endures
out of selfless love. The film may never win a
Good Cheer award, but it is hardly immoral.
Q.: You list "Black like Me” as a 1964
film which is an effective treatment of the race
question. I live in the South where I’ve heard of
the. question but not of the picture. What gives?
A.: "What gives” is that, without even knowing
it, you have been denied the right ot see a film,
which is equivalent to the right to read. The fact,
according to Variety, is that "Black Like Me”
has received little exposure in the South outside
of Texas. (Grand total: One date in Florida,seven
in North Carolina).
IN WASHINGTON D. C., many regular theat
ers did not want to book the film for fear that
"Negro patrons might get in the habit of attend
ing their theaters.” It was shown only in (ex
cuse the euphemism) "mixed” neighborhoods.
In Virginia, censors have demanded so many
cuts that the angry producer has taken the matter
to the courts.
Reapings Continued
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 4
one, would not have missed the experience for
anything. It gave me a good feeling about the
Church. As long as we have such priests and
religious, we have nothing to fear about the future.
Getting back to the Edmundites-- they also op
erate the Good Samaritan Hospital in the Negro
section. Staffed by the Sisters of St. Joseph of
Rochester the Hospital also opened its doors to
house and feed the influx of clerical and lay de
monstrators. They went out of their way to be
more than helpful. All in all, not only the Selma
Negroes but also the rest of the country have
been given a lesson in community spirit. It takes
courage to do what the Edmundites and the Sis
ters of St. Joseph havedone. Mimy of us in Sehtla ;
wondered what would happen when the so-called
"outside agitators” had left. On the basis of
what I saw of the attimdes of some of the city
fathers and the white population, St. Elizabeth's
Mission anfl its priests are in for a hard time.
We must pray for them.
OLD AND NEW
On-The-Spot Expertise
BY GARRY WILLS
I RECALLED, DM a recent column, the myth
ical newspaperman of the 30’s— alcoholic,
incorruptible, independent, indispensable. We
still have a soft place in our hearts (and heads)
for that myth, but the more recent journalistic
legends are a shade more sophisticated. One of
these is the myth of on-the-spot expertise. A
special veracity and sacredness haloes a jour
nalist’s opinion about Russia if the opinion is
presented under a Moscow date
line.
The reporter with no other
credentials can become an ex
pert on anything by the use
of mere locomotion-- by cros
sing the magic frontier that
puts him "on the spot.” He
does not, of course, have to
know the language spoken by
those who live on the parti
cular spot he has chosen;
most of his conversation will ! probably
be with other newsmen, anyway. Reporters did
not go to Vietnam so much to interview Pre
sident Diem as togetthewordstraightfrom David
Halberstam (not secondhand from his Times
stories).
BUT OCCASIONALLY one finds evidence of
real knowledge acquired on the spot. An ex
ample of this occurred in the November 2, 1964
issue of The Nation. That issue came out, you
will notice, less than two weeks after Nikita
Khrushchev’s fall from power, and it drew on
the knowledge gained by Alexander Worth during
a two-month visit to Russia last summer. Mr.
Werth, who was Russian correspondent for the
London Times in Stalin’s day and has written three
books on Russia, is a typical expert; but in his
article he seems to show that a good newspaper
man can pick up many hints about the future
course of events. Here is what he found out dur
ing his stay in Russia: "The working class
openly attacked Khruschev as a 'windbag.’ An
industrial executive in Moscow went so far as to
tell me in August 'You have no idea how our wor
kers hate Khrushchev. . . I was told often in
Russia last summer that he (Khrushchev) had
never quite recovered from the (Cuban) epi
sode. . . (workers) blamed him for shortages,
and high cost of living and the mess in agricul
ture. . . Khrushchev had got himself in a com
plete jam over China. . . His position was un
tenable in the first place because of the Chinese
problem. He had played his hand badly.”
Sounds prescient, ■ eh? Though everyone else
seemed surprised at the Premiere’s ouster, Al
exander Worth had seen the handwriting on the
wall months beforehand. By his own showing,
Worth must have felt Nikita would fall from
power before he could get back to London.
BUT WAIT a minute. This was written just
after the downfall of Nikita. And Mr. Worth had
published a long account of his findings in Rus
sia just ten days before that fall. In fact, he
published it in the same place (The Nation)
that quickly found room for a second report on
his fruitful summer of objective observation.
It is no wonder The Nation made room for
Mr. Worth’s palinode. Read in conjunction with
the earlier article, the amazingly prescient
observations of November 2 become an em-
barassed attempt to cover up the wrongheade
dness of October 5. One would not guess the
articles were by the same men. The earlier
analysis went this way: "nobody is worried
any more about his personal security 'so long as
Nikita’. . . Khrushchev’s attempts to develop
closer political and economic relations with
West Germany will continue. . . the threat of
Goldwater has already initiated a rapprochement
between Russia and Western Europe.”
MR. WORTH labors to erase the inconsist
ency between his two reports. In the first one, he
stated that Nikita was less popular with the
workers than with the peasants; on the basis of
that, he tries to maintain, in the second article,
that he had told the world the Russian worker
hated Khrushchev. In the first piece he had a
cabdriver shake his head ominously over the
growing power of China and remark of his hero
Nikita that he was facing the "biggest crisis of
his life"; in the second piece, he artfully doc
tors the quotation to make it refer to Chinese
sympathizers in the Kremlin (of which there had
been no mention in the first article). In he
first piece, "Russians want to live in peace with
everybody," and if they are uneasy at all over
Cuba, it is because it disturbs their pacific
designs; still, they r. cognize that their leader is
"honor bound to defend Cuba in the event of an
American invasion." In the second piece, Khrus
hchev is blamed for his softness on Cuba. In
the first piece, "nobody is worried any more
about his personal security” and Western rap
prochement is assured. In the second, Khrus
hchev has good reason to worry about his
personal security, and the Cold War is decided
ly on again. And both positions, all these impres
sions, were emphatically gained on the spot.
BELIEVERS in the mythical expertise of jour
nalists must sometimes suspect that if one
carried a bowling ball across the border-of a dist
ant country it would start emanating political wis
dom. But it won’t. Neither will the skulls of
Messrs. Halberstam and Worth.
God Love You
BISHOP FULTON J. SHEEN
Money, as Our Lord spoke about it in the Scriptures, is
sometimes translated as “the Mamon of Iniquity." If one
did not know Our Lord’s life well, and was told to guess what
He had said about money, the guesses would range from:'
"He called it 'filthy lucre’,'* "He said ‘Don’t touch it’,"
“It will damm you," "Give it up” or "There will be no peace
until the power of money is destroyed." But He actually said
none of these things. He told a parable about an unjust manager
who used his money to do good. While the Lord condemmed
his chicanery, He praised him for using
money to "make friends and influence
people." There is a world of difference bet
ween giving money the place of a god
(which is what Mammon means) and using
its godlike powers to clean up our dirty
past. It is good to own money; it is bad to
be owned by it. In the parable, the unjust
trustee had only a short time left to continue
managing the estate. So he let the money fly.
He gave it to those in debt; he turned his
dollars into works of mercy to make "good contacts” when
he no longer had a job.
Our Lord applied the parable by saying, "Now, My advice
to you is to use money, tainted as it is, to make yourselves
friends, so that when your life comes to an end, they may re
ceive you into eternal habitations." In our modern language
this means: "Do not give your money to the rich who put it
into their pile. Give it to the homeless, the lepers, the poor
missionaries , the slum dwellers, the refugees, the orph
ans. By doing this, you will make them your advocates, your
intercessors on the Day of Judgment. Do not think we go soli
tary and alone to God for judgment. We bring with us some
one we have pulled from the gates of hell, or the hungry in
Latin America, the starving in India, the leprous in Africa.”
Then the Lord will say to you, "You have made your unright
eous Mammon righteous because you saw Me in the Hungry
and naked. Enter into My joy.” -
Why not put some of those stocks you have in vaults to work
NOW? If you need the income, the Holy Father’s Society for the
Propagation of the Faith will pay it to you during life without
any deduction for service—- and at death your money goes to
the Holy Father to be distributed by him to the poor of the
world. Write, to me concerning your will or your annuity.
Your pocketbook can get you into heaven or into hell more
quickly than your hymnbook. Blessed are ye rich who help the
poor! You may send your letter for our pamphlet on annui
ties, including the date of your birth, to Most Rev. Fulton J.
Sheen, National Director, The Society for the Propagation of
the Faith, 366 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y 100001.
GOD LOVE YOU to M. B. for $50 "Please use this for the
Missions- no strings attached. In this Holy Season, I feel that I
get more out of spending it this way than anything else I
can think' of." ... to Anon, for your offering of $5 for the
lepers. .. to T. A. M. for $25 "This is from stock in the com
pany where I worked for 52 years. No I want the company to
work for the Missions."
Cut out this column, pin your sacrifice to it and mail it to Most
Rev. Fulton J. Sheen, National Director of The Society for the
Propagation of the Faith, 366 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10001,
or to your Diocesan Director, Rev, Harold J, Rainey, P.O, Box
12047, 2699 Peachtree Road, N.E., Northside Station, Atlanta 5, Ga.