Newspaper Page Text
PAGE 5
GEORGIA BULLETIN THURSDAY, JULY 22, 1965
LIVING BODY
We. the Church-II
REV. LEONARD F. X. MAYHEW
What is the meaning of “Church"? We speak
constantly of the Church: we are the Church; we
belong to the Church; the Church teaches thus
and so, the Church commands this or that, the
Church has this or that characteristic, this vir
tue, that fault. What do we mean by "Church"?
A simple question? By no means. An overwhel
mingly important question?
For the Christian, the word
| 'Church’ denotes the continuing
| work of redemption, the con-
! tinuing presence of. Christ, his
| word and his grace, the com-
; munity of salvation. Hie Church
is a mystery, a profound truth
and reality of God’s goodness
to men. Our growing grasp of
the meaning of this truth of faith is one of the
most important keys to the personal meaning
of our Christian life. Fortunately, we have the
great privilege of living in a period of the Church’s
development when a profound renewal' in our un
derstanding of the meaning of 'Church’ is taking
place. The Constitution on the Church of the Vat
ican Council is the instrument of this renewal.
One of the most traditional answers to the
question 'what is the Church?* is that it is the
Body of Je.sus Christ. This is the favorite
answer of St. Paul in the letters of the New
Testament where he explains to Christians the
meaning of the new life they have received. It
has returned to an honored place in Christian
theology and preaching in our own day. Surely,
every Catholic has heard from the pulpit or read
in Catholic literature of the Mystical Body of
Christ, The Constitution on the Church devotes
several paragraphs of Chapter I, 'The Mystery
of the Church," to the meaning of the Church as
the Body of Jesus Christ.
THE TEACHING of the Council Fathers reflects
most beautifully the doctrine found in St. Paul’s
Epistles. The accent of their teaching is "per-
sonalist," that is, weighted toward the under
standing of the Church as a community of living
persons, made such by the continuing presence
and activity of Jesus within them. With St. Paul
they see the Church primarily as formed by the
communication of life from Christ to men. “In
that Body," we read, "the life of Christ is
poured into the believers who, through the sacra
ments, are united /in a hidden and real way to
Christ who suffered and was glorified." We share
in Christ’s life, in his obedience to the Father,
in his death and resurrection. This real co
living with Christ is brought about by the Sacra
ments of Baptism and the Holy Eucharist, that is
to say, by the liturgy. These Sacraments make
"Church." "In (Baptism) a oneness with Christ’s
death and resurrection is both symbolized and
brought about...In the Sacrament of the Eucharis
tic Bread, the unity of all believers who form
one body in Christ is both expressed and brought
about."
GOOD NEWS
Giving Thanks, He Blessed
BY-MARY.PERKIN&RYANn^ ZVr’.T'
Many-yearsago, apriestwa® telling us-abouta
play - hewascomppsing-to help high-school students
to understand the Mass. He was planning to begin
with a scene representing the Last Supper. ‘‘And
then," he said, "I think I’ll have the Apostles
meeting together after the‘Ascension and saying to
each other, 'The Lord said to do what He did at
the Last Supper, but how are we going to go
about it?"
The priest’s idea of starting with the Last Sup
per in order to understand the Mass was certainly.
a sound one. But, by now at
least, biblical and liturgical
scholarship has traced fairly
clearly the major stages by
which our present Massrite de
veloped through the centuries
from the Last Supper. It is
safe to say, anyhow, that the
Apostles never had the prob
lem which this play attributed
to them.
Solemn festive meals, above all the yearly Pas
chal meal and the weekly Sabbath meals, were a
regular feature of Jewish life when our Lord lived
on earth, as they are today. And at that time it
was also usual for a group of disciples to have
such meals with their teacher. The Apostles must
have taken many such meals with our Lord before
the Last Supper, and the Gospels record also
that they atdwithHim after His resurrection. They
didn’t have to invent a ritual for celebrating the
Lord’s Supper after the Ascension; they had one
already.
THE LAST SUPPER, scholars tell us, like all
such solemn meals had three main features: the
introductory prayer and distribution of bread, the
meal itself, and the solemn blessing over thelast
cup of wine. It was at the beginning of the meal,
then, that our Lord took the bread and blessed
and broke it and gave it to His disciples, saying:
‘This is My Body...’’. And it was at the end that
He said the solemn blessing over the cup of wine
and said, ’This is My Blood....’’
The first Christian communities celebrated
what is called in the Acts "the breaking of bread"
in the same way, with a meal coming between the
PLAYING WITH FIRE
Your World And Mine
66
The Constitution on the Church, continuing to
follow St. Paul, explains that the Church is form
ed by the Holy Spirit, who is sent by Jesus into
his brothers. It is the Holy Spirit, living in the
persons who believe , are baptized and share the
Eucharist, who molds us into one body, a "com
munity of faith, hope and charity." The Church
is, then, a communion — nourished by the body
of Jesus in Holy Communion — among those who
have received the gifts of redemption. It is the
sharing of these gifts that makes us into the
Church. The greatest of these gifts, bestowed
on us by the Spirit, and also the sign of our hav
ing received them, is the love for one another
that Christ exemplified and commanded.
THE EXTREMELY practical implication of this
basic teaching of the Constitution on the Church
is that we need to dispose ourselves to experience
the Church in this personal fashion. We have all
experienced the Church as an organization, as
hierarchical authority, as a society with visible
structure and laws. It is not so deeply felt with
in us as a communion with Christ and one another
in the Holy Spirit, as the Body of Jesus made up
of living members. In concrete terms, Church
exists as the body of Christ in the particular
local congregation at worship. The Church is
formed and exists most perfectly in the liturgy
in our Sunday celebration of the Holy Eucharist.
It is there that we can best grow in the under
standing of ourselves as the Church and of the
myriad practical implications of this truth. We
need to see the liturgical celebration as a vital
inter-action of Christ, our fellow-members of
His Body and ourselves. It is Christ who speaks
His present and living word to us personally in
the Sunday liturgy. In the Eucharist-meal He
makes us share pesonally in His saving death
and rising. It is this that makes us a "commun
ity of faith, hope and charity,” to be the sign of
Christ’s presence in the world and to go forth
from the Mass continuing this living-with-Jesus
in the remainder of our activities.
consecration of the bread and that of the wine.
But very, early, even before the year 40 it is
thought,. tjie two consecrations were placed togeth
er at the end of die meal in the context of one
solemn blessing still modelled on the traditional
Jewish grace-after-meals.
Later on, and apparently sooner in some com
munities than in others, the Eucharistic celebra
tion was completely separated from a fraternal
meal, and usually preceded by a service of read
ings and prayers like the Jewish synagogue ser
vice. It is conjectured that this major change
came about mainly as a result of the growth of
Christian communities — it simply wasn’t prac
tical to serve complete meals to so many partici
pants. This change, in turn, led to a change in the
setting for the Eucharist: only a table for the
celebrant was needed. The way was opened up
for the later development of altars and churches
bearing no resemblance to tables and dining
rooms.
BUT THE MAIN LINES of the Eucharistic
Prayer remained the same (up until the fourth
century, the celebrant improvised the exact,
wording). One can trace them now, in the litur
gies of East and West, beneath the complex de
velopments and formalizations of later centuries.
Presumably the experts who are revising our
Roman Mass rites are working to bring these
main lines out more clearly once again, A be
ginning has already been made: the celebrant now
says or sings the wonderful final summary of the
whole prayer, “By Him, with Him..." aloud, at
the end of the Canon.
The purpose of all this isn’t archeologising;. It
is, as die Constitution on the Liturgy says, to en
able the texts and rites to “expressmore clear
ly the holy things which they signify." Obvious
ly, serving a whole meal in connection with the
Eucharist is not one of the "immutable elements
divinely instituted” or the Church would not have
done away with it centuries ago. But the meaning
of the Eucharist, as sacrifice and sacrament, is
bound up with its being the celebration of the
Lord’s Supper. We cannot understand and take our
part in the Eucharistic Prayer unless we realize
its character as a meal-prayer, the supreme
meal-prayer of Christians gathered together to
meet with their risen Lord and eat at His table.
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 4
labor’s unreasonable demands. At the last mom
ent, it saw the red light and decided to negotiate.
The labor leaders proved eminently reasonable if
determined. They agreed to suspend their de
mands until a commission established the extent
to which industry is capable of meeting them eco
nomically.
THE AGREEMENT avoided a strike by bypass
ing the politicians. But they remain in the driver’s
seat. The findings of the mixed commission re
quire legislative implementation, and this is cur
rently being held up while Congress squabbles
with itself and with the President.
Why, everyone asks, do Colombia’s politicians
ARNOLD VIEWING
The Train” Suspenseful
Q. WOULD YOU please explain why~in the new liturgy—the
world "died" has been deleted from the Nicene Creed? ("cru
cified ... and was buried.")
If taken literally, could this not help to substantiate the her
etical view that perhaps Christ was not really dead when He was
laid in the tomb?
The change has caused me a great deal of consternation, per
haps more than warrented.
'died'
A. THERE HAS been no change—no deletion. The word
was never in the Nicene Creed. Get the old
est missal you can find and look it upl It is
in the Apostles Creed that we make explicit
expression of our faith that Jesus died. It
would seem that in the late 4th or early 5th
century when the Nicene Creed was in pro
cess of development no one was foolish
enough to deny the death of our Lord; so
there was no point in making special men
tion of it.
Certainly the fact of our Lord’s death is clear
and evident in the Gospels. His obedience unto death is an essen
tial feature of our redemption, and so of allChristianity.
Q, LAST NIGHT I went to. confession. When I had confessed
about half of my sins Father interrupted and said, "that is
enough, say an act of contritiion.” Was this a valid confession?
A. IT WAS indeed, Maybe Father needed more patience, but
on the other hand, we should not string out a whole list of venial
sins or minor faults. When you have committed no serious
sin, it might be better to concentrate attention on one or another
of your more prominent faults and see what progress-, or retro
gression — you have made in this regard during the past week.
We should never make confession the routine recitation of a litany
of sins, practically unvarying from week to week. And above all
do not confess how often you have missed your morning prayers, i
your prayers before or after meals. If you have neglected pray
er, just say so simply, and resolve to be more careful about it.
And maybe find out what causes you to miss them: laziness, or
weakening faith.
Even counting the number of lies you have told, or the num
ber of times you have been impatient, is a waste of time and a
mechanization of your preparation for confession. Just ask your
self how truthful you are, or how deceitful; and try to find out
what makes you lose patience. If you make your confession a
meaningful evidence of your love for God, and an honest asking
for His sign of loving forgiveness, Father will have more patience.
BY JAMES W. ARNOLD
"The Train" is another action-suspense film
(like "Von Ryan’s Express”) about good guys
vs. Nazis on a moving train in occupied Europe
during World War II. This time the Nazis are
trying to escape (with a cargo of priceless art)
and the heroes (French partisans led by Burt
Lancaster) are trying to stop them.
Both in its conflicts and cine
ma style, however, “The
Train” is more complex. It
alternately drags and moves
like a whiplash; motives are
often puzzling. Lack of sim
plicity and clarity may blunt
some of its immediate impact
but leaves the mind more to
chew on.
There are two main threads of irony. One, that
the chief Nazi villain (Paul Scofield, in his first
film since his stage success as St.Thomas More)
is the art “lover/ whereas Lancaster is a tough
activist who thinks Picasso is a kind of cheese.
Two, the suggestion, first rejected then apparently
accepted, that the art is not worth all die lives
spent for it.
FRANKENHEIMER tries hard for realism.
There is contrasty black-and-white photography in
normal screen size ("Von Ryan," the glossy
adventure, was in wide-screen color), meticu
lous detail is grimy railyard scenes, careful re
construction of the looks and moods of 1944, and
generous use of extras that helps the backgrounds
through with life. The women (including glamor
ous Jeanne Moreau) look as if they’ve been scrub
bing floors and overeating, and die closest thing
to a romantic gesture is a hand on the shoulder.
Some of this painfully built credibility is lost
when Lancaster becomes an indestructible one-
man army. The suspense dwindles with Burt’s
aura of omnipotence and-the other odds against
Scofield. The only doubt is in how the Nazi will
react to mounting 'disaster; it is like watching
Annette Funicello bat against Sandy Koufax.
The "He Who" idea, from Nikos Kanzant-
zakis’ novel, suggests that if Christ lived today,
Christians would crucify Him. This is precisely
what happens in a small village when a shepherd,
appointed to act the Christus in a passion play, be
gins to. take his part seriously.
Dassin carves this film with a chisel and sledge
hammer, filling it with rage and conviction, a
sense of the universal and concrete (sun, rocks-
dust, awesomely real peasants and poVerty). Miss
Mercouri, as the village Magdalene, is just window
dressing. Since 1957 interesting things have hap
pened to affect audience reaction to it.
Aggiomamento, for one. Some key points-that
the saint, inevitably conflicts with the institutions
of his time, including organized religion, and that
the Church, enmeshed in superficial pieties, can
become irrelevant to the real needs of the people
- certainly do not shock as they once might have.
On the other hand, the heavy-handed plea for
violence - the implication that force is a pre
ferred Christian means for loosening the strangle
hold of military, economic and allied religious
power - seems strangely embarrassing in this
era of non-violence.
DASSIN ALSO SEEMS to do more than put true
religion on the side of social reform and charity,
where it clearly should be. He seems to make it
entirely a man-to-man thing, and leave out man’s
relation to God. And in stressing the symbolic
immortality of his Christ figure ("He is the best
in all of us, and that will never die”), he neg
lects, and perhaps rejects, actual immortality.
Without that, religion becomes merely politics
and philosophy.
Reapings Continued
CONTINUED FROM PACE 4
terially decisive way. But all this does not mean
that there is anywhere in the Church any such
monopoly of real power—that is to say, in this
case, in the Church's hierarchy. This is so not
merely because such a monopoly is not feasible,
but because it is contrary to the very nature of
the Church. For the Church is a Hierarchical sys
tem, but only because its summit is God, and
one of the most bitterly power— likewise a system in which power and authority
Frankenheimer (last film: "Seven Days in
May") is one of the better U.S. directors, and
half the fun is observing his style.
CATHOLICS now have another chance to see * “He
Who Must Die,
ful films about religion in movie history. The
1957 drama, an allegory of Christ’s passion set in
the Turkish-occupied Greece of 1920, is being re
issued, probably to exploit Americans’ increased
fondness for Jules Dassin and Melina Mercouri,
the director—actress team who went on to such
non-religious films as "Phaedra" and "Never
on Sunday."
OLD AND NEW
Primer on Conservatism
are distributed."
POPE PAUL has shown us all the way to real
understanding of authority. He points to the facr
that respect and obedience are spiritual acts which
nurture that inner unity so necessary in the
Church today. He pleads for "compassion and
understanding for all those who have the office of
priest, of teacher and of shepherd in the Church of
God." But the Pope has not called for blind obed
ience or subservience. The only source of free
dom of discussion within the Church, is a love
lof the Church; a love which willembolden a faithful
son to speak his mind to authority in charity and
in the bond of unity; a love which will enable au
thority to listen in charity and in the bond of
peace.
behave in this irrational and obviously suicidal
way? Anyone who has lived and worked with
them, as I have, knows that they are not stupid.
Rather, they are intelligent, educated and sophis
ticated, but victims of their experience and their
pride.
Their experience is that a small self-perpetua
ting group has always run the country according to
its whims and for its own benefit. For 150 years
since Independence, it has been able to afford the
luxury of stylized internal conflict for which the
country — not the contenders — pays, a conflict
which in modem times has taken on the appear
ances though not the reality of democracy.
ECONOMIC PRESSURES alone will not change
this situation.
BY GARRY WILLS
You all know who “the conservative" is. He is
the authoritarian personality, the crypto-fascist,
the superpatriot who wants the state to control
thought. He is also—believe it or not — the ex
treme individualist who does not want the state to
collect taxes, dispense welfare, or fluoridate wat
er. In short, "the conservative” accomplishes
the neat trick of being, simultaneously, a totali
tarian and an anarchist. Of course, this "con
servative’ ’ of the name-callers
i does not exist.
S Any attempt to cram conSer-
1 vatives into a single type is
| doomed to failure. The very
* word "conservative" has been
I stretched — like the "right
wing” -- to cover a vast range
: of positions. Since this fact is
not widely understaood, I shall
engage in a bit of name-calling myself. My aim is
neither vituperation nor apologia; it is simple
taxonomy, the sorting of separate things too often
treated as one.
TAKING THE conservative "right wing” to
cover all those elements that, for their own rea
sons, supported the Goldwater candidacy, one finds
two main poles of thought among them. The first
is the traditionalist position, which lays all its
stress on the preservation of religious and cul
tural treasures. Its strength lies in its memory,
its sense of continuity with the past, preserving
us from an historical provincialism. Its weak
nesses are a certain unwillingness to say fare
well to obsolete things, a tendency to Erastianism
(the identification of state and religion), an admi
ration for aristocratic standards that our non-
monarchical system cannot accommodate. Among
Catholics, this position can merge with Roman
"curialism” or with a "Spanish” opposition to
the religious liberty schema.
The other pole is libertarian. The libertarian
is a nineteenth-century liberal, opposed to the
state’s growth, believing in the resources and no
bility of the individual, determined to preserve
the historical achievements of the free market. His
strength lies in his realism, his stress on skill
and expertise (the brightest college students I
have seen in recent times have been libertarians).
His weakness is an indifference — sometimes a
hostility — to tradition, religion, social cohesive
ness.
EVEN WHEN "conservatives" from these two
poles agree on some practical action, they do it
for different reasons. The traditionalist opposes
Communism because of its militant atheism, its
ability to fuse all forms of hatred for our civili
zation; the libertarian opposes it for its state
machinery of repression. The traditionalist op-
i poses/- eqalitarianism because it atomizes so
ciety, destroying social articulation; the liber--
tarian opposes it because it involves a sterili
zing governmental control of all economic trans
actions. The traditionalist has not had much
sympathy for "the Negro revolution" precisely
because it is a revolution; the libertarian has con
siderable sympathy for it, except in those areas
where economic freedom is denied as a short-cut
to the accomplishment of its aims.
Traditionalism draws its strength from many
different sources — from natural law philosoph
ies, from evangelical Protestantism, from an aes
thetic of local tradition (in the Southern agrar
ians and people like Faulkner), from Tory Anglo-
Catholicism and MainstreamRoman Catholicism.
The libertarians are, by contrast, the rationalists
of the conservative movement, the practical stu
dents of economics, of strategy, of day-to-day
realities. Traditionalists in general love Burke,
but not Mill; libertarians love Mill, not Burke.
They meet, or criss-cross, on such pivotal figures
as Acton and Tocqueville.
TYPICAL OF THE several streams in recent
traditionalist thought are the poet T. S. Eliot and
his interpreter Hugh Kenner; scholarly roman
cers C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, J. R. R. Tol
kien; Tory litterateurs Evelyn Waugh, Arnold
t .nnn, Christopher Hollis; philosophers of his
tory Eric Voegelin, Christopher Dawson, Russell
Kirk; political philosophers Leo Strauss, Bertrand
de Jouvenel, Harry Jaffa, Willmoore Kendall; aes-
theticians and philologists Eliseo Vivas, Richard
Weaver, Mario Pei; editors Henry Regnery, Neil
McCaffrey; journalists Whittaker Chambers,
Arthur Krock, David Lawrence, Elspeth Huxley,
Claire Luce, William Buckley MainstreamCatho-
lics Thomas Molnar, Frederick Wilhelmsen,
Brent Bozell, E. V. Kuehnelt-Leddihn, and Fran
cis Graham Wilson. As one would expect, the
traditionalist group has many men of letters,
Anglo-Catholics, and Roman Catholics (many of
them converts. -— Waugh, Lunn, Kenner, Kirk,
Kendall, Luce, Bozell). A strong preoccupation
of the group is with natural law philosophy (es
pecially in Strauss, Voegelin, De Jouvenel, Jaffa,
Kendall, Wilhelmsen, Weaver — one might and
Ross Hoffman, Peter Stanlis, Heinrich Rommen
and John Courtney Murray to thispartofthe list).
God Love You
MOST REVEREND FULTON J. SHEEN
The anti-Christ has cornel His black wings are pressing upon
us. His advent hastens because he has already convinced us that
he does not exist. In the days of Christ, we had to send mis
sionaries to the naked in far-off lands. In the days of anti-
Christ, we have to send missionaries to clothe the naked in
America. Satan tears Christ from the cross and then flings that
cross-less Christ to a spineless Christian West and throws the
Christ-like cross of discipline to the Reds. He then erects the
anti-cross, the twisted cross, on a "rock” that is not Peter and
"roll” that is not bread. He denies immortality, but stuffs Lenin
with immortal pardffin and wax. He draws paintings of paint, that
man may never see himself as an image of God. He roots out of
the soul compassion for the raped and the martyred and bids his
sob sisters show compassion for the rapist and the mob.
Michael! Draw thy sword once more.
Mary! Lift thy heel to crush the serpent!
You faithful! Save souls where souls are
saveable. Repent! De-mamonize yourself!
Evil is a parasite which feeds on goodness —
once on morsels, now on chunks. God gave
us two weapons: knees and hands. Knees -
to spend an hour a day in reparation for sins.
Hands - to reach alms to Christ starving on
a thousand streets. With this column, we be-
a national plea for one hour a day of continuous prayer before
Blessed Sacrament (the laity may include Mass). How many
you will answer? How many will open their hands too?
Typical figures on the libertarian side are Gold-
water’s principal economics adviser Warren Nut
ter, the whole Chicago group of economists draw
ing its inspiration from the Roepke-Hayek-von
Mises tradition (men like Milton Friedman,
George Stigler, Yale Brozen); Cold-War strate
gists like Henry Kissinger, Herman Kahn, Stefan
Possony, Robert Strausz-Hupe, Edward Teller;
journalists John Chamberlain and Henry Hazlitt;
literary mavericks like John dos Passos and Max
Eastman; phychiatrist Ernest van den Haag; and
— out on the fringe — anarchic individualists
like Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand. The group,
as you see, draws heavily on the "social scien
ces.”
Unless one has read representative books by a
majority of these figures, he is not in a position
to understand the extraordinary intellectual fer
ment taking place in young conservative circles.
And, a fortiori, he is hardly in a position to crit
icize the movements). Yet, strange to say,
though young conservatives are very well read in
liberal sources, liberal criticism of the conser
vative movement usually shows that the critic has
done no more homework than the perusal of two
or three articles (or books) on Robert Welch and
the John Birch Society.
gin
the
of
GOD LOVE YOU to a teenager for $50 "to express my thanks
for making me more aware of suffering mankind and the needs of
the Church. You helped me to see Our Blessed Savior’s cross in
the crumbling adobe homes that house an impoverished Latin
American family; to see Our Lord’s bloody sweat over those who
slaughtered the Congo missionaries; to see Christ’s tears for
sinner over Catholics who harden their hearts and refuse to gaze
upon the crucifix. But most of all you helped me look at my soul
as it is and inspired me to say, 'Lord, help me to be an instru
ment of your peace, I, the sinner.’ " ...to a convert for $300 "
want to offer some of what I’ve come to know to others. I have
accepted a tremendous gift, I hope to return at least a small one,
What I am is God’s gift to me; what I become is my gift to Him.*
Do you know what die 30th parallel is? It is an imaginary line
that girdles the globe. Below it are Central and South America,
Oceania, India, half of China, most of Africa. Above are the well-
endowed, the well-fed; those below live and die in wretchedness,
Those above cannot envision the horror and anguish of those be
low. Hunger is not merely an economic problem; it is a moral
and spiritual one — a greater danger to our future than atomic
warfare. It is around this searing theme that Bishop Sheen has
fashioned his new movie, "The 30th Parallel.” It runs 26 min
utes and is available through your local Diocesan Director. For
more information, write your Diocesan Director of theThe Socie
ty for the Propogation of the Faith, 366 Fifth Avenue, New York,
N.Y. 10001.
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 At
lanta 5, Georgia.