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ON CONFERENCE
True Goals, Ends Of Man
THURSDAY, AUGUST 5, 1965 GEORGIA BULLETIN PAGE 5
ARNOLD VIEWING
BY REV. LEONARD F.X. MAYHEW
Last week’s Conference for Southern Catholic
Leaders, co-sponsored by the Archdiocese and
the Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice,
was a thrilling and stimulating experience in many
ways. Because it was not a massive convention
but rather a gathering of a more or less select
group, contacts among the delegates were per
sonal and easy. The gathering was truly catholic:
laymen, Sisters, priests and bishops; Negroes and
whites; Catholics, Jews and Protestants.Thetheme
of the gathering could not have been more impor
tant — the role of the Church in the constantly
changing and expanding movement for Negro
rights and equality. Important
as the theme is, though, the dis
cussions actually verged on an
even more important and pro
found issue: die Church’s role
in the nurture of all human
rights and in the creation of a
truly humane life for all.
The struggle o f the American
Negro for the right to physical
safety and for social and civil equality is the face
of an historic social evolution. If America has
not yet decided whether a Negro’s life is as val
uable and important as a white man’s, the impli
cation is that we have not yetdecidedon the value
of human life period. A society which will tole
rate violence, arson, mayhem and murder against
a minority, has a faulty-grasp of the dignity of
every man, of the value of peace, of the worth of
life. The Negro campaign for safety, dignity, equal
opportunity is a campaign for America's soul, a
campaign to lead our national conscience to the re
spect due every human being. When the Negro has
achieved his own goals, he will have contributed
much to our cure, to our respect for ourselves
and all our fellow men and, hence, for our
Creator.
THE CHURCH is immediately and directly con
cerned. It is the Church’s task to lead men to
recognize — and achieve — their unspeakable
dignity as children of God in brotherhood. The
Church is to be always, as the Gospels fore
warn us, involved in a tense relationship with
secular society. The Church is not leading only
to the just society, but to the "beloved society,’’
the kingdom of God in which we love each other
as ourselves. The Church, the Christian people
of God, is not then to follow secular society. It
is to lead, to move ahead, to exemplify and teach
the true goals and ends of man.
This emerged as the general consensus of the
Conference. In every facet of the Church’s life,
the clear imperative of equality, justice and love
should be exemplified. The primary area of
concern was the Church institution. The Chur
ches in America are one of the largest employers
of the country. Employment of teachers, nurses,
managers, social workers, etc. must be com
pletely on the basis of qualifications. At the
same time, we have to recognize and remedy the
vicious circle of poverty and segregation which
prevent individuals from becoming qualified and
then reject them because they are not qualified.
The Church, through her clerical, religious and
lay members — most of all through the last —
must be in the forefront of the effort to combat
the evils of dis crimination and the ills that ac
company it. The Church will be untrue to its
mission, if it merely conforms to accepted stand
ards or legal minimums, rather than being a leaven
of brotherly love in society.
The liturgical celebrations of each day of the
Conference were the cement which bound them to
gether. Each day a bishop of a southern dio
cese, a father of the family, acted as chief cele
brant of the Mass. Several other priests, Negro
and white, concelebrated with him in a most mov
ing sign of the unity of the Christian people. The
congregation actively participated in the Masses
as a real church, an assembly called into being
by the presence of Christ in our midst. As we
prayed, sang, responded, learned, offered our gifts
and, above all, received Holy Communion in joy
ful harmony, there could be no doubt that this
was the pattern our Christian life ought to as
sume. As Bishop Victor Reed pointed out in his
homily, we are all equals in the Church, each
with our particular function, but all equals. This
is the vision of life that the Holy Spirit reveals to
us in the liturgy. It is the very same vision of
human life that the Church is called upon to
teach, exemplify and promote in the world. The
Negro struggle is the immediate-battle for this
cause. It is the major present effort toward a
Christian social order. For the Christian, the
liturgy will be the source from which his effort
to achieve this goal will flow as well the summit
toward which it will lead back in his experience
of worship through, with and in Christ Jesus.
GOOD NEWS
Giving Up, Or Making One
.noiJEtevsfl lo 3ii a bns nosssT lo aiJin: nesw:
BY MARY PERKINS RYAN
In one of her early books, published many years
ago, the English writer, Caryl Houselander, de
scribed how a husband might feel if he came home
from his day’s work and his wife began to tell him
how uncomfortable she had made herself all day,
and said that she had done it to show her love for
him. "I pricked my finger ten times on purpose
when I was sewing... I put salt in my coffee and
some pebbles in my shoes...’’ Surely he would
think drat his wife had a very odd idea of him and
of what would please him. And, Caryl Houselander
said, "Perhaps God feels the same way about
many of the "sacriflces" we make in order to
olease Him.’’
Actually, the biblical idea of sacrifice does not
stress the idea of giving up for its own sake, or
even of giving up for the sake of
[getting. The Psalms and the
Prophets keep insisting that the
[ Lord does not need sheep and
! goats and bulls, and that offer-
■ ing them to Him in sacrifice in
order to win His favor does not
please Him gt all.
For the purpose of all the sac
rifices prescribed in the Old
Testament was to bring the People into God’s
Presence, doing away, if necessary, with whatever
had caused them to lose it, whatever had alienat
ed them from Him. As the Bible keeps saying,
these sacrifices made no sense unless they were
signs of the worshippers' desire to be atone with
God by doing His will. What they had to give
up, then, was not a sheep or a bullock or what
ever, but their own ways that were opposed to
His — their idolatry, their lack of justice and
mercy to one another. And what they had to give
were their "hearts", their desire to live in
God’s Presence and be at one with Him.
THE SACRIFICES were signs of this will and
desire. In a holocaust, for instance, in which a
whole bullock was burned, the idea was to trans
fer it from the sphere of human life to that of
God, by turning it into smoke. And many of the
sacEjficqp included a meal taken by the worship
pers in theTemple, as a sign that the Lord had ac
cepted them into His friendship and intimacy.
In many of the sacrifices also, blood was sprink
led on the worshippers and on the altar. For blood
was seen to be a sign of life, the bearer of life and
so in some way peculiarly related to God the
Creater of life, and fitted both to purify and to con
secrate. At the first Exodus, for example, the
blood of the Paschal lamb was used to mark the
homes of the Hebrews, thus setting them apart and
consecrating them to Him. And when the Coven
ant was made on Mt. Sinai, after the people had
heard God’s Law and accepted it as the law of
their lives, blood was sprinkled both on them and
on the altar as a sign of the union of life now exist
ing between God and His People.
All the Jewish sacrifices, in fact, had in view the
same purposes as those of the central event in the
Old Testament, the Exodus from Egypt—to bring
the people out of their state of being far from God,
scattered among idol-worshippers, to their life as
His own People, living in His Presence and by His
laws. Every sacrifice was in some way a renew
al, a recommitment to the Convenant.
WHEN WE THINK about sacrifice, then, we
should be thinking along the same lines. By going
from our human life through death to His Risen
Life with the Father, Our Lord realized every
thing that all the Old Testament sacrifices sig
nified and attempted to achieve. He brought out
human nature into the very life of the Son with the
Father in the Spirit. When we take part in the re
presentation of His great "exodus" at Mass, we
go with Him as His members into the Father’s
presence — trying to leave behind our sinfulness
and self-centeredness that keep us from Him.
And when we "make sacrifices" in our daily
lives, these should have the same purpose — to
bring ourselves and others closer to God. When
our giving-up is an act of going-out-of-ourselves,
an act of love offered with Christ’s great act of
love and obedience, then it is a truly Christian
sacrifice. God does not like our discomfort for
its own sake — only if it brings us out of our
selves and toward one another and Him.
RIGHT TO KEEP THE PEACE
Your World And Mine
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 4
United Nations. We can assume that a regional
force in which the United States was the domi
nant power would not bje used for purposes con
trary to justice. But what about the other reg
ional forces which would undoubtedly be formed,
if the principle was generally accepted?
When Russian tanks overwhelmed Hungary less
than ten years ago, it was at least perfectly clear
that the action was in violation of the UN Charter,
and the United Nations went on record as con
demning the outrage. Soviet Russia at the head of
a "regional police force” could repeat its ac
tion without even that danger. And what would
stop Red China from forming its own regional
Q. MAY I ask why our superiors cut the prayer at the end of the
Mass? I am not sure, but it seems it was our good Pope Pius X
who had us say the prayer for the conversion of communist coun
tries. Now we have quit saying it and we sure have not converted
anyone; it seems.
A. THE PRAYERS after Mass have an interesting history. They
are usually called the prayers of Leo XIII, or the Leonine prayers,
though they really began with Pius IX. In
1859 the Papal States were in grave danger
of being gobbled up by a united Italy; so all
through the area which he ruled as a secular
prince, Pope Pius ordered that special pray
ers be said after Mass. Even after the
Papal States had totally disappeared in 1870,
these prayers continued to be said. In 1884
Pope Leo extended these prayers to the whole
Church. Leo’sprimaryconcernwasthefree-
dom of the Church in Germany where Bis-
mark was waging his Kulturkampf. But even after freedom was
restored there, the prayers continued to be said, and the popular
notion was that there were for the settlement of the Roman ques
tion: so that the Pope would be liberated as prisoner of the Vati
can and receive again his rights as temporal sovereign.
In 1929 Pope Pius XI and Mussolini achieved a happy solution
of the Roman question, but still the prayers were continued. In
1930 Pope Pius XI asked that they be said for Russia, for the
peace and freedom of its Christian people. He did not speak of
conversion; in the prayers we ask for the conversion of sinners.
The nucleus of the prayers come from Pius IX; Leo XIII added
the prayer to Michael the Archangel; and Piux X permitted the
triple invocation of the Sacred Heart be added.
The Instruction for the Proper Implementation of the Constitu
tion on the Sacred Liturgy, issued by authority of Pope Paul VI on
Sept. 26, 1964, became effective on the first Sunday of Lent, 1965.
It abolished the Leonine prayers completely, along with the last
Gospel. These prayers never did properly fit the Mass. They
were added for special crises and became an enduring habit.
The present hymn of praise and thanksgiving for special inten
tions are now said before the Offertory, as Prayers of the Faithful.
Q. QUESTION of Social Justice: In the case of Americans liv
ing or visiting abroad, in conjunction with "servants’ . and pro
ducts purchased, by paying prevailing rates or prices asked, is
not one participating in the prevention of social justice?
A. YOUR question is much better than my answer can be. In
the foreign countries I have visited recently I often had the im
pression I was being gouged. However, I know that in poorer
countries the handiwork of the people is often sold at prices which
allow them only a miserable income. I don’t know what the in
dividual tourist can do about it. A higher price he might pay for
the product would hardly be passed on the poor peasant who made
it. An entire social and economic structure is involved; and in
many cases a revolution must be the ultimate answer, since evo
lution is powerfully resisted.
As regards wages paid to servants the process of justice can
be more direct. We are never justified in paying a full-time
workman anything less than a living wage, even if a glutted labor
market makes cheaper services available.- The 4aw of supply
and demand is not just When we are dealing witifitouman lives."
Satirical ‘Hallelujah Trail’
BY JAMES W. ARNOLD
"The Hallelujah Trail” is probably the best
film I have seen this year, although it does have
a sadistic urge to poke one endlessly with a fig
urative elbow in the ribs, and it runs perhaps
20 minutes too long (160 minutes plus intermis
sion).
A Western satire, it aims really at humanity,
regardless of story form or locale. It is visually
'inventive and funny. Its closest
ancestor is "Mad, Mad World,”
but it is less exaggerated, less
formally comic (nobody in the
cast is a professional comed
ian), less imitative of silent
screen slapstick. It also avoids
the barely disguised bitterness
of Stanley Kramer’s film. Rare
ly has a movie had so much
wild fun and at the same time
caused so little pain.
"Hallelujah" is unique in the current flood of
screen satire in that it is utterly without cyni
cism. It spoofs neither the Western hero nor
the Western legend; it does not suggest that those
we have always admired were really fools or
charlatans. In making us laugh, it doesn’t rob us
of anything Good.
TT ALSO MANAGES to float above its material.
Many pseudosatires of violence and sex (e.g., the
Bond epics, "Cat Ballou") are violent and sexy.
"Hallelujah," in which there are no villains,
nobody dies, and the women are interested mainly
in keeping men sober, may be the most doggedly
wholesome movie since "Love Finds Andy Har
dy."
For all its wacky sight gags and situations (e.g.,
Indians trying to get a decent gulp from madly
fizzing champagne bottles while rocketing along in
runaway wagons), the film's finest quality is its
subtlety. Things are funny because they are just
barely distorted, just a pound or two larger than
life. Everyone is brightly sincere, impressively
real, but not quote: fate messes up every cool
calculation, sets every scheme hilariously on its
head. This is a Parable of Man, and man at his
best, laughing at himself out of sheer love of be
ing human.
"Hallelujah" is a comedy of frustration. A
caravan of 40 wagons carrying nothing but booze
moves across the parched prairies to Denver.
The Indians and thirsty Denver mines want it.
The army (led by Burt Lancaster) wants to protect
it. Hooch-hating suffragettes (Led by pretty Lee
Remick ) want to stop it. The encounter, in which
everyone is 90 percent defeated, is reported in
deliciously straight-faced documentary style, by
a narrator who sounds like Robert Benchley de-
n ScHb&ife- the iShttte ‘■bfi Waterloo*
OLD AND NEW
Doctor King’s Homework
THE STORY WANDERS into two possibly dan
gerous areas. But it doesn't ridicule the virtue
or the religious motivation of the "gin is sin”
girls and it doesn’t lean heavily on drunkenness
as a source of humor.
The mood is established early when Indians
argue in sign language over the right to attack
the train, a Sioux party finally embarks under the
command of chiefs named Five Barrels and Walks
Stooped Over, and Lancaster’s cavalry dashes
fiercely into what they think is a burning fort to
discover a lively torchlight rally of Miss Remick’s
Ladies Temperance Society.
Director John Sturges, who has made memor
able straight westerns ("Bad Day at Black Rock,’
"The Magnificent Seven”) as well as last year’s
exuberant “The Great Escape," gives this film
not only zest but brilliant attention to minor de
tail. There is the Army interpreter who under
stands the Indians but not quote accurately; the
clean-up crew that disturbs the hung-over Lan
caster with its loud raking, then proceeds to rake
quietly; the desperate Indians who put their wagons
in a circle and find the soldiers whopping around
them.
STURGES IS PROBABLY too optimistic about
the humor in interminable bathtub scenes, and
clearly overlabors the messy usiness with the
Indians and the champagne. On the other hand,
few films have ever approached the high satire
of an Indian temperance revival and an elaborate
exchange scene (three ladies for each wagonload
of spirits).
Much also depends on the casting and per
formances in secondary roles, especially Brian
Keith as the intensely single-minded owner ofthe
embattled whiskey, Donald Pleasence as an alco^
holic backwoods oracle, John Anderson as a thor
oughly dedicated and confused top sergeant, and
Martin Landau as the sly slouching Indian whose
cleverness never gets him anyplace.
At least two sequences may go down in his
tory for their sheer inspired visual insanity* In
one, all the contending groups (at this point there
are roughly seven) meet in an obliterating sand
storm, hear shots, and in the enormous confusion
form protective circles within yards of each oth
er. Highlights: an Indian peering where the sky
should be to see if the sun is yet two-hands high
over the mountain, Keith irately shouting orders
to a wagonmaster who seems congenitally unable
to hear him, and the Indian chief boldly leaping
from his horse to fall 20 feet into an unseen
canyon.
The second sequence involves quicksand and the
ultimate gurgling, slow-motion fate of the wagon
train, which can only be half-imagined. Sturges’
taste, timing and magnificent use of cutting leave
one .breathless.. With Scenarist John Gay he also
adds an ending that gives his harrassed charac
ters a straw of dignity and the last laugh. But
these are the sort of people who will open every
new door gingerly.
police force in South East Asia? And Nasser in
the Arab world?
AN EVEN MORE concrete argument, it seems
to me, has been overlooked by those urging a force
under the control of the Organization of American
States. This Organization cannot be counted on to
move swiftly and decisively in the kind of emer
gency which President Johnson had in mind. The
major Latin American states were opposed to our
intervention in Santo Domingo, and that included
even firmly anti-Communist governments like
those of Venezuela and Chile, The outlook, as I
see it, is for ever greater resistance to United
States initiatives on the part of the other Amercan
states. This leaves us with the choice of working
through the United Nations or going it alone.
BY GARRY WILLS
Some men, including NAACP director Roy Wil
kins, take the position that leadership in the civil
rights movement does not give one any special ex
pertise in foreign affairs. Dr. Martin Luther King
does not seem to share this opinion. Although he
is kept very busy with his proper (and properly
overriding) concern, the civil rights movement, he
. feels well enough informed about Vietnam to lec
ture national leaders on the subject.
But perhaps he has not done his homework in
this new field. After all, when he brooded over''
the nuclear threat in Boston, he
revealed that he was almost a
decade behind the times in his
grasp of the problem (he still
thinks it is a matter of stron
tium 90 in our milk. At that
rate, it will take him some
time to come abreast of anem-
broglio as baffling as our Viet
namese commitment.
It should not surprise men that Dr, King is a
little weak on homework outside his field. He is
weak on it in matters directly affecting his work.
Take his eloquent, illogical "Letter From Birm
ingham Jail," for instance. Thatishis most im
portant, orderly statement of the case for civil
disobedience. It is justly famous for its fine dis
tillation of Negro grievances, its ability to com
municate the urgency of the present situation.
It makes a masterly, lapidary statement of the
evils arising from segregation: "It gives the
segregator a false sense of superiority and the
segregated a false sense of inferiority." But the
letter also contains as wild, random, and irra-'
tional statements as one can find in any docu
ment of comparable length.
SCRIPTURE, ST. THOMAS, St. Augustine are
quoted or alluded to in weirdly caricatured form.
To correct these errors of interpretation takes
some time and care (time and care I am expend
ing in an essay that will appear elsehwere);
but there are, as well, simple misstatements of
fact in the letter. Dr. King, for instance, says
that his kind of civil disobedience is nothing new,
and rattles off a list of precedents. Yet every
case cited is defective in two or more of the
three points Dr. King himself gives as essential
characteristics of his civil disobedience.l
And then the cases themselvesl He manages
somehow to suggest that the early Christian mar
tyrs were executed for political agitation against
"such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiator
ial contests." Strangest of all, he writes "So
crates practised civil disobedience." It is clear
from another sentence in his letter that he means
the Socrates of the West’s intellectual iconography
— Plato’s Socrates — not the elusive "histori
cal" Socrates tenuously (and variously) recon
structed in scholars’ hypotheses. But it does not
matter. Not even in those hypotheses does So
crates practise civil disobedience of the sort Dr.
King defines by his three notes. And Plato’s
Socrates is so doggedly docile to the law that men
suspect Plato must have exaggerated the point
in order to counter the sophistic notion that law
is mere convention. No one, they feel, could be
that law-abiding. Consider, from many examples,
this passage from Plato’s Crito. Socrates is re
fusing to leave the country, a common way of
avoiding execution:
One must honor and obey and please one’s
country, in its harsh mood, more than a
child would its father; and one must either
persuade it or do what it commands, and
submissively bear any punishment it de
crees, whether it be the last or imprison
ment; and if it sends you to war, you must
face wounds and death — all this must be
done, this is where justice lies. And one
must not yield while standing in its ranks,
or retreat, or desert, but in war, in liti
gation, in all aspects of life, one must do
what the city commands, if one cannot per
suade it where justice lies.
TO CALL SOCRATES — who ridiculed his ac
cusers because they could not find a point where he
had disobeyed the law — a practitioner of civil
disobedience overshadows even Dr. King's earlier
achievement (the finding of strontium 90 in
Boston).
How could Dr. King so grossly misrepresent
a clear position? I can find only one answer.
He is so convinced that all right and justice and
truth are attuned to the civil rights movement,
that he reaches out toward anything that calls
up the noble emotions — in this case, the famed
"martyrdom" of Socrates — and appropriates
it without further thought. But even if his group
is the nodal point of history, some regard for dis
tinctions must be preserved when one asserts
this. Otherwise, the voice of the movement be
comes an empty sloganeering, hindering thought
instead of helping it. The letter gives many
examples of this kind of sloganeering — the
Statement that Christ died for "the crime of
extremism," for instance, or the assertion that
opposition to his movement implies “a strange,
un-Biblical distinction between body and soul."
He presumably means that the distinction clearly
there in the Bible — e.g., in Matthew 10.28
("Do not fear those who kill the body, but those
able to kill the soul"), and in the strong language
about plucking eyes out, etc. if the body hinders
the soul’s passage into eternal life — should not
be distorted to make men neglect the social or
der. But his slogan-style suggests that the
distinction is not in the Bible at alll
Perhaps Dr. King is capable of nothing more.
Perhaps he was meant to be the inspired sloga
neer of the movement. If so, then some of the
clergymen who devote their efforts to his cause
should contribute some calm and careful reflec
tion to the problems of civil disobedience. Until
they do, we must live with a situation in which the
major statement on the subject is marred by an
— 1 . 1 nnlr A £ i n to! 1 Ol-tl I ol T^ICTOT*
God Love You
MOST REVEREND FULTON J. SHEEN
Fifteen years of working for the Missions has convinced us that
they are supported generally by those who have little but who make
great sacrifices. Why is it that those who have, give their money
to institutions that already have much, while those who have-not,
i v e their money to the poor? With what ease institutions which
ilready have millions receive gifts of hundred thousand and honor
each giverl But our poor missionaries and the sick in the slum
streets of Hong Kong and Calcutta have to rely upon the self-
denial of good souls who write letters like the
following: "Dear Bishop Sheen, I have just
finished reading your little MISSION booklet.
I am a widow with heaps of worries. Most of
them center around three sons who drink
heavily, have bad tempers and curse. Two
of them don’t attend Mass anymore so you
know they don’t receive the Sacraments,
These two keep company with divorced wo
men. I had always hoped to have a son who
would become a priest, but since this does not
seem possible, I am sending you $1,500 for the complete education
of a native priest. Enclosed please find my check and please pray
for a much troubled mother. I have just sold my home and am
looking for some rooms to rent within my means and near my
daughter and a church, God bless you."
Perhaps those who have (I mean the rich who have great
investments) would like to join the ranks of those who give to the
have-nots. For if you give to those who can give to you in return,
you already have received your reward. But if you give to the
poor, the Lord Himself must repay you since the poor cannot. This
is the spirit in which so many older people send us sacrifices
from their pension checks; so many children give carnivals, pup
pet shows and plays to raise money for the poor; so many ordi
nary, everyday Christians deny themselves the luxury of the un
necessary to buy the necessary for their dying brothers in mis
sion lands. Will you join them? God Love Youl
GOD LOVE YOU to N. S. for $30 “sent in thanksgiving for hav
ing successfully completed summer school, "...to B.D, for $100
"For almost a month now, I have been hostess for a number of
foreigners who are visiting America. This is what I probably
would have spent on food if I had not dined out with them. Please
use it to feed the hungry of the world." ...to K.O’S for $1,000
“I am sacrificing my summer vacation."
A perfect birthday, anniversary, wedding or Ordination gift, THE
POWER OF LOVE, Bishop Sheen’s latest book, is now available
in both paperback and deluxe slipcased, hardbound edition. Based
on His Excellency's nationally syndicated column and including ma
terial never published before, THE POWER OF LOVE shows how
love belongs in every major area of our lives; how it can give us
direction in the complexities and distractions of our time. This
will be an important contribution to your daily life and the lives
of all to whom you give it -- Catholic and non-Catholic alike. It
is available for $.60 in paperback; $3.50 hardbound, by writing
the Order Department of the Society for the Propagation of the
Faith, 366 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 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, Atlanta 5
Georgia. ____