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4 THE GEORGIA BULLETIN, THURSDAY, AUGUST 10, 1967
BULLETIN
ARCHDIOCESE OF ATLANTA SERVING GEORGIA'S 71 NORTHERN COUNTIES
Archbishop Paul J. Hallinan
Chris Eckl
The Rev. R. Donald Kiernan
Publisher
Managing Editor
Consulting Editor
2699 Peachtree N. E.
P. O. Box 11667
Northside Station
Atlanta, Georgia 30305
Member of the Catholic Press Association
and Subscriber to N. C. W. C. News Service
Telephone 231*1281
Second Class Permit at Atlanta, Ga.
U. S. A. $5.00
Canada $5.00
Foreign $6.50
Published Every Week at the Decatur-DeKalb News
The opinions contained in those editorial columns are
the free expressions of free editors in a free Catholic press.
Catholic Universities
And 4 Changing 9 Truth
“The whole world of know
ledge and ideas must be open
to the student; there must be
no outlawed books or sub
jects. Thus the student will
be able to develop his own
capabilities and fulfill him
self by using the intellectual
resources presented to
him.”
This paragraph is part of
a “Statement on the Nature
of the Contemporary Catho
lic University,” issued last
*week by 26 members of the
I Catholic clergy and laity in-
f eluding university presi-
. dents.
The statement also said
jjthat the Catholic university
Ho perform its teaching and
research functions effec
tively must have a true au
tonomy and “academicfree
dom in the face of authority
of whatever kind, lay or
dle»ricaii eseternai' to the aca
demic community.”
The statement comes at a
In Spain...
The Spanish Bishops’
Committee on the LayApos-
tolate met late in July out
side Madrid to draw up Cath
olic Action bylaws. No lay
people attended the closed
meeting.
Earlier in the summer, a
meeting of the committee
ended in sharp disagreement
between the bishops and lay
leaders. However, Arch
bishop Casimiro Morcillo
Gonzalez of Madrid promis
ed that the laity would have a
hearing before the bylaws
were drafted.
This is another example of
the reign in Spain.
most appropriate time in the
life of Catholic universities
in America. In recent
months, we have witnessed a
drawn-out dispute on aca
demic freedom and authority
at Dayton University and an
even more widely publicized
disagreement involving Fa
ther Charles Curran at Cath
olic University of America,
The two disputes could
have been tempered or may
never have arisen if the at
titudes outlined in the recent
statement prevailed at all
Catholic universities.
Since the Second Vatican
Council, many men in the
Church have rediscovered
the elusiveness of truth.
This has been reflected in the
ideas and theories that have
seen the light of day after
years of suppression.
Admittedly, this flood of
new ideas has shaken many
Catholics, who thought the
Church had unchanging truth
locked in a box.
And the only way to prevent
this shock treatment is to
follow what the statement
said about the critical re
flective role: “The Catho
lic university should carry
on a continual examination
of all aspects and all acti
vities of the Church and
should objectively evaluate
them. Catholic universities
in the recent past have hardly
played this roll at all...”
Think how much better off
we would be today if open
critical examination had
been carried on through the
years in place of an almost
unbending orthodoxy.
United Church Is Said Goal
LONDON (RNS)--Finn support of the
goal of a united church for Christians —
and not a form of federation among sep
arate Churches — was expressed by
Anglican Bishop Kenneth Sansbury, gen
eral secretary of the British Council
of Churches, in a sermon here.
He spoke in the City Temple, historic
"shrine'’ of Nonconformism in central
London, He declared:
"Voices have been raised recently,
both north and south of the Tweed,"
(the river dividing England and Scotland)
"questioning the concept of one united
church which has been the goal of the
whole ecumenical movement and of the
Anglican Communion within it, and ad
vocating instead either just friendly re
lations or a form of federation.
"To such proposed solutions I believe
we must say a firm ‘no.’ They are in
my view contrary to the teaching of the
New Testament about the church.
*They would mean the continued waste
ful duplication of manpower and plant.
And at deepest level they would keep us
from sharing fully in the rich heritage
of traditions other than our own and ob
scure our common witness to the Gospel
of reconciliation.
"We must continue to work and pray
THIS STRIKING photograph of Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch
Athenagoras was taken as the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox leaders
met in Istanbul. The visit by the Pope was the first to the See of Con
stantinople by a Roman pontiff in a thousand years. (RNS PHOTO)
■GEORGIA VINES-
Thanks, Monsignor
— By R. Donald Kiernan,
for the full realization of the vision of
the Lambeth Fathers of 1920 and for the
union spoken of at New Delhi of "all
in, each place* in a fully unified church
that knows how to hold diverse modes
of worship and live together within the
fellowship of the one body.”
Peace Prayer
TORONTO, Ont. (RNS)--The Anglican
Church of Canada contributed $2,000 to
help victims of the rioting in Detroit
and asked all Canadians to join with the
U. S. in a day of prayer, July 30, for
racial peace and reconciliation.
The Anglican gift will be used to send
food and supplies from Windsor to its
ister city across Lake Erie.
After President Johnson’s plea for a
day of prayer, the Rev. R. M. Bennett,
acting general secretary of the Canadian
Council of Churches, said Canadians have
no cause to feel smug about racial har
mony.
"There is no reason to believe that
Canadian Christians are more willing to
integrate than are Americans," he said
in a statement Which was delivered to the
nine member denominations of the CCC.-
It all started some thirty years ago in
Washington, D.C. A young college student
who used to make extra money by deliver
ing the New York Times in the faculty
residence was approached by a priestwho
was inquisitive about the young man’s fu
ture. Theyoungman told the priest that
he was considering the seminary but he
thought that he might wait a year or two.
The very next day another priest sat down
for a very serious talk with this young col
lege student. It seems that priest num
ber one had put priest number two on the
trail of this prospective seminary candi
date. During the course of conversation
priest number two
talked about his own
life. He told how
he had waited a year
or two between the
time he had finish
ed college and ac
tually entered the
seminary. He also
said it was wasted
years and his advice “PR. KIERNAN
to the young college student was to enter
the seminary immediately and if it were
not his vocation, then leave.
Today priest number two and the young
college student are both serving in the
church in Georgia, Priest number two
is Msgr. P. J. O’Connor, pastor of Deca
tur’s St. Thomas More Church; and the
young college student is Father Walter
Donovan, pastor of Most Blessed Sacra
ment Church in Atlanta.
My reason for writingthls shortaccount
on the eve of Msgr. O’Connor’s retirement
is to show the dedication to vocations that
he has had for some thirty years. A dedi
cation, I might add, that has increased
the ranks of the priesthood in Georgia, by
some thirty young men.
Following his ordination to the priest
hood Monsignor O’Connor served the
church in Savannah, Augusta and Atlanta.
The famed Dominican preacher, Father
Ignatius Smith O.P. had sought to bring
this young priest to Catholic University for
three years. Finally, in 1936, the late
Archbishop Gerald O’Hara consented and
released Father P.J. O’Connor for service
at the Catholic University. But Georgia
was Father O’Connor’s home and he never
forgot it. Immediately he Used his new
territory to recruit candidates for the
church in Georgia. Father Donovanwas the
first and simultaneously he interested the
late Msgr. Cornelius Maloney of Winstead,
Conn, who at that time was a young college
student attending the University,
I was number three and the late Father
Jim Boyce was number four and so goes
the line that now totals over thirty. It
was no wonder at all that His Holiness, the
late Pope Pius XII, honored Father P.J.
O’Connor because of his vocation work
when in 1951 he was made a domestic
prelate with the title of right reverend
monsignor.
To make a chronological list of the
things he has done and the positions he
has held in the Church in Georgia would
be but to repeat the wonderful tribute
Msgr. O’Connor was paid in a recent is
sue of this paper. Rather I would like to
recall the personal interest, the kindness
and the thoughtfulness Msgr. O'Connor had
for all the young men he interested in
Georgia. It suffices to say that he never
forgot you.
More than once I enjoyed a "free-day”
from the seminary because of the folding
money I had in my pocket, thanks to Msgr.
O'Connor. A visit to the university was
like going ■•home for the day; he had the
knack of making the young seminarian
at home. But most of all, even as a young
seminarian, Msgr. O’Connor made you
feel that you were part of the team; a
team that has the greatest esprit- corps
of any diocese in the world.
Though living in Washington, D. C., he
was so Georgia minded that he would even
visit seminarians during the summer time
to make sure that they hadn’t forgotten
Georgia. I recall one visit he made to me
While I was vacationing at my farnily's
summer home on Marthas Vineyard, off the
coast of Massachusetts. The monsignor
was up in Boston where he had moved
the Preachers Institute for six weeks at the
invitation of Cardinal Cushing for the
priests of the Archdiocese of Boston. He
drove from Boston down to Woods Hole.
(1 might add that the road on weekends
looks like the Northeast Expressway every
day at 5:30)* It was a tiresome, trip and
to make matters worse a storm had blown
up so that the boat ride over to the Island
was anything but calm. As the bbatpulled
into Vineyard Haven Harbor the monsignor
was standing on the top deck. When he
saw me on the dock standing next to some
girl he turned to the priest next to him
and said, ‘‘If I drove through all that
traffic and took this rough boat ride just
to hear that young man say he will quit the
the seminary, so-help-me I’ll throw him
off the dock into the ocean’’.
Congratulations, monsignor, and I know
that I speak for all the thirty priests here
in Georgia, when I say "thank you" for
introducing us to Georgia.
‘The Sand Pebbles’
Is Above Average
ARNOLD
By James Arnold
"The Sand Pebbles" has its faults,
but it also has a cinematic and moral
stature far above the common run of
American films. Well up on the list of
national box-office favorites for months,
it is one of the reserved-seat road show
attractions worth a serious adult two or
three bucks.
“Pebbles" represents producer-direc
tor Robert Wise's ef
fort to cope with the
complexity of Richard
McKenna’s novel about
an American gunboat
caught in central China
during the chaotic
birth throes of nation
alism in the 1920’s.
It compares the re
sponses, of two disaf
fected men, the mili-
tariat-patriot captain (Richard Crenna)
and a non-conforming sailor (Steve Mc
Queen), and besides their personal story,
obviously intends to tell a parable about
American involvement in the Far East.
Despite the skill of Wise, one of the
elite of Hollywood-bred directors, ('The
Haunting," "West Side Story"), the movie
staggers on both levels, mainly because
we are ignorant of all but the broad out
line of what is going on inside Crenna and
McQueen.
The captain comes through as a single-
minded (if decent) symbol of old-fasjiioned
power politics, duty and national pride,
who is crushed when in a crisis he finds
himself reacting as a human being rather
than as an instrument of national policy.
He then ‘‘atones” for himself and his ship
with a bold, glorious but foolish gesture,
all wrong outside of a Kipling context
that results in disaster in several di
mensions.
McQueen is the quiet, non-involved
‘ private" man who relates only to the
engines he cares for; anti-authority by
nature, he has been hurt early in life
and opted out of human concerns. But
he is too compassionate to escape in
volving himself with other people, and
finally, ironically, dies bravely in Cren-
na’s senseless battle, the victim of his
- own best impulses.
These interpretations - Crenna as the
rigid, deluded imperialist who brings only
the temporary [peace: of the graveyard,
and McQueen as perhaps the Peace
Corps-type who represents the best hope
for success in Asia - make sense, if at
all, only after heady contemplation, and
not during the film itself. Director Wise
is perhaps too economical: onemusfcatch
every gesture ■ and inflections! .wid 'Sctiorr
is- constantly overwhelming- 1 'subtleties.
•As a result, the audience tends to stay
on the surface, and especially toward the
end, is puzzled and unmoved.
The occupational disease of parables
is that theme tends to obstruct the human
story. This is most noticeable in the
final confrontation at the mission, where
an American missionary (Larry Gates),
previously only hastily sketched, sud
denly delivers a tirade against all nation
alisms and then, too patly, is shot down
by the Chinese while waving his non-citi-
zenship papers.
Crenna is convincing enough in his first
major screen role, though partly sub-
erted by the script, he eventually be
comes more ludicrous than tragic.
McQueen is perfectly cast as the noble
inarticulate whose deepest feelings are
held tight behind a facade of Cool, and
there is vast help from Richard Atten
borough as Frenchy, the kindly sailorwho
pities and then falls in love with a vic
timized Chinese girl (Marayat Andriane).
Candice Bergen is just right as the gentle
missionary who reaches out to McQueen:
she looks like an angel and suggests depths
of feeling and intelligence.
The gunboat and its crew are splendid
ly real, with subtle overtones in the men
of the physical and moral fat of military
life. These sailors may be the least
patronized, most honestly observed in the
history of Navy movies, with Simon Oak
land especially brilliant at avoiding the
stereotype of the beefy sadist while ful
filling the requirements of exactly that
role.
If fuzziness exists elsewhere, ‘‘Peb
bles’’ is refreshing in the moral sense,
McQueen and Attenborough are differed
from the other sailors chiefly by their
moral attitudes, and the big scenes (the
rescue of Miss Andriane and Frenchy’s
decision to marry her, the shooting of
the tortured coolie, Crenna’s defying
everyone to save McQueen, Steve's risk
ing his life for the others, and the coolie’s
gutsy fist fight victory over Oakland) all
clearly involve free will and moral choice.
The distinction between love and lust,
human and inhuman use of sex, permeates
the film. There is plenty of violence,
but each time its horror and animality
are emphasized so that one feels its
tragedy and stupidity. In the fight scene,
human and sadistic values get equal atten
tion (the caustic observation of the spec
tators is reminiscent of Wise’s old box
ing classic, 'The Set-Up”),
Purely in cinema terms, Wise is con
sistently masterful: e.g., the visual build
up of the relationship between McQueen
and the coolie (Mako), which makes the
Chinese's brutal death unbearbly'power
ful; the tender Bergen-McQueen love
scene in the church; and the final battle
in the desolate darkness of the mission,
where we are made to feel McQueen’s
tension as alone he carries on an absurd
fight out of years of ingrained military
reflexes. This is the human look of com
bat, which edifies morally instead of
merely thrilling us with loud bangs and
falling bodies.
There is also the careful attention to
color tone: faintly golden in the church,
icy gray at French’s death, the Navy
whites vs. the Chinese blacks and browns;
the repeated association of the image-
^njindecL captain with the flag; Jer^y Goldi (
.Srpit&’g, moving agd undergtated.grnus.ic;
and of course, the scenic locales (Hong
Kong and Taiwan), with shots of the
ship against the water and hills, the
mission with its terraced paddies silver
in the sun, teeming city streets, and the
undertone of unpredictability in a people
alternately friendly and savagely hostile.
In sum, where cinema can be made rele
vant, Wise succeeds with typical virtuo
sity and memorable image-making; where
motivational and political complexities are
crucial, the film cannot do as well- as
the novel. If ‘‘Pebbles’’ is a failure,
it surely is an honorable and often fas
cinating one.
The Bishops Meet
With bitterness almost equal that ot
General de Gaulle’s stance against En
gland’s entry into the European Common
Market, the influential Italian press has
expressed grave misgivings about the
now-historic European bishops’ synod,
held early this month in The Netherlands.
The press sees something sinister (anti-
Italian) in the choice of location.
For the first time there appears to be
emerging a viable European bishops con
ference, like those in South America and
Africa. The 70 bishops from 19 nations
in Europe, noting general satisfaction
amounting almost to enthusiasm attheend
of the week-long session, agreed to meet
again within two years.
The following impressions were among '
those gained by observers who followed
the various sessions of the meeting:
There is a great fraternity and sin
cerity and a common discovery of posi
tive values arising from the changes
taking place everywhere.
Bishops are earnestly seeking to end
the isolation in which they have some
times found themselves, not because of
uncertainty about the updated view of the
Church as the community of faith in the
modern world but more because of pre
occupation with administration and man
agement.
There is a new desire for closer con
tacts between the secretariats of the
national bishops* conferences in all Eu
ropean countries, east and west.
Similarly, there is a growing recogni
tion of the Church's vitality in an age in
which the great problem is that of con
serving unity and at the same time allow
ing for the widest possible plurality.
There is also a new appreciation of the
bishops’ problems in implementing the
decrees of the Second Vatican Council,
particularly as regards pastoral councils.
The chief difficulty in this area is the fact
that bishops have no precedents in setting
up organizations designed to assist them
in diocesan management.
The fact that the European bishops chose !
The Netherlands to gather for their his
toric meeting is significant. The Dutch
eagerness to innovate and experiment has
invited the stern stare of less adventure
some churchmen. At its conclusion one
bishop opined: "We have seen now that
there is not much wrong here, that the
Dutch Church is very alive and that all
talk about a schism in that country is
complete nonsense.’’
Concerning the distinct national flavor
of the universal Church in evidence
throughout Europe, Cardinal Alfrink of
Utrecht (The Netherlands) defended the
position that the national churches have
the right to be the one and only Church
of Christ in their own local way.
The national churches have their ownlo-
cal responsibility to judge and to decide
within the context of the necessary unity,
it was maintained by a conference spokes
man.
Famed Dutch theologian Father Edward
Schillebeeckx, writing a commentary for
a Dutch weekly, called the synod an indi
cation of "a fraternal entirety of Pope
and bishops (which) is the most supreme
government of the Church. This entirety
must be subservient to the community of
the Church. It is not right to isolate
the Pope and to place him outside the
fraternal college. The Pope is the last
binding factor within the most supreme
and fraternal government of the Church.”
‘The college of bishops is strictly
speaking not subservient to the Pope,
but together with the Pope the bishops
are subservient to the whole Church,”
he said.
At long last the European bishops as a
group seem to be rising to the same high
repute as their outstanding theologians
have enjoyed.
The Criterion (Indianapolis)
4
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