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PAGE 4 — The Georgia Bulletin, November 13,1969
16 «,RORWV<i 7i NORmEH> CAA StJEfS
Most Rev. Thomas A. Donnellan D.D, J.C.D. Publisher
Harry Murphy - Editor
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Atlanta, Georgia 30308
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Hie opinions contained in these editorial columns are
- '■ — the free expressions of free editors In a free Catholic press. ———
Selling The ‘Soul Man’
The personnel committee of the
Newark Archdiocese’s Priests Senate is
holding public hearings on how more
affluent, parishes can aid inner-city ones.
More than 150 persons attended the
first hearing and some 20 priests, nuns
and laymen gave their views. Speakers
included inner-city residents and
professional social workers.
We have championed both public
hearings and the rich parishes helping the
poor, so we view with envy what is
taking place in Newark.
There is equal potential right here in
Atlanta, ‘ however, and it already is
bearing fruit.
Father Alan Dillmann has taken over
the Archdiocesan Office of Urban
Affairs and an advisory board has been
activated to consult with him.
Sister Marie Bodell has been added to
the office’s staff.
We hold high hopes for the office’s
success and; hope that the staff will take
soundings among both the rich and the
poor as to what should be done. This
pulse taking should include public
hearings in the parishes.
$ii i - *>- .b it m o
^^no-There are an awful 4Qti-af,iCawQftQg»
wishing to bear Christian witness. They
have ideas and want to listen to those of
others. The best place for such dialogue
is at a public hearing.
No .telling what would be discovered.
Newark’s hearing found:
-There are definite needs which are
not being met in the inner-city
apostolate.
-Parishes and people to be helped
should have an opportunity to express
themselves on the help needed.
-Needs should be spelled' out more
clearly than is the practice at present,
and priorities should be established.
-There is a need for communication
with those in a position to help
inner-city parishes.
-There should be a central point for
information so that needs can be easily
identified.
-There is a certain amount of
dissatisfaction with the present system
of providing aid and its effectiveness.
Many speakers at the hearing also
urged that assistance programs respect
the wishes of the people being served.
In simple terms, the Church should
tell the poor that She wants to help and
ask them what kind of help they need.
The rich should then be told what is
needed and asked what they are willing
to do. This help should not be limited to
money.
The Atlanta Archdiocese has made a
late start in this area and She has a lot of
catching up to do. There have been
efforts by the St. Vincent de Paul
Societysand other organizations, but the
^'^feseneri' of the Official Church in the
ghetto has been woefully lacking.
We’re reminded of the words of a new
song that is popular, especially among
the young:
“Jesus is a soul man,
“And I’m sure sold on Him.”
In the nitty-gritty world of Atlanta’s
ghettoes, the Church has a selling job to
do.
We had best get busy.
TEEJSACERS AND DRUG USE
The Backdrop...
By John J. Daly, Jr.
Robert H. Finch, Secretary of Health,
Education and Welfare, complained recently
that efforts by his Federal department to
encourage informational programs about drugs
in schools have encountered “much resistance.”
Finch remarked at an unusual White House
session on drug control that local school boards
would rather ignore the problem of drug use
among junior and senior high school students.
“But they’ve got to
face up to it,” he
'IfluAt 0 ?etce
7*
said.
This warning
was given at a
Cabinet Room
meeting in the
White House
convened by
President Nixon to hear entertainer Art
Linkletter tell how LSD caused the recent
suicide of his 20-year-old daughter and how he
decided to “shock” the nation by speaking
widely about his child’s tragedy. Listening to
him was a hushed audience led by the
President, several Administration officials and
Congressional leaders from both parties.
In pleading for a national educational
program against drugs, Linkletter said that his
daughter, Diape, had taken LSD once. The
drug’s after effects, he said, upset her mental
balance for months. She went through periods
of “despondency and panic,” he said, and
“feeling that she was losing her mind, she killed
herself by jumping from a building.
Linkletter argued that almost every teenager
is exposed to drugs today. He cited 25,000
letters received within 10 days after his
daughter’s death from other parents expressing
fear about their own children. The entertainer
urged that anti-drug courses begin as early as
the fourth grade.
Senate Democratic Leader Mike Mansfield of
Montana and Speaker of the House John
McCormack of Massachusetts promised the
President, in Linkletter’s presence, that they
would work to speed up Congressional action
on Mr. Nixon’s narcotics control measure.
Despite staged drama such as the White
House meeting, heavy publicity, government
crackdowns on distributors of drugs and the
increasing visibility of a “drug
culture”--especially in rock ‘n’ roll records
aimed at the teenager market-there is little
evidence that the general public takes the
problem seriously. Finch’s report of the
resistance of educators is but the latest sign
confirming this attitude.
Yet, the copyrighted Gallup Poll recently
found in interviews with persons in their 20s
that 12 in every 100 have tried marijuana, that
22% of all college students have consumed the
drug and that 10 in every 100 young adults
who have not tried marijuana would do so if it
became available. Gallup said such polls have
convinced his organization that at least 10
million Americans have tried marijuana.
In the Meantime, in the absence of a
effective informational program, the hopes of
those concerned about drug use lean heavily at
the moment on the Nixon Administration’s
controversial crackdown on narcotics smuggling
from Mexico.
Administration spokesmen claim growing
success in the continual effort. They said
marijuana prices have been driven up to $2 a
cigarette in some cities and have become
unavailable in others. It is estimated that more
than 80% of the marijuana in this country has
been smuggled across the Mexican border.
The government said it has opened talks in
Mexico City to discuss the Mexican
government’s participation in the concentrated
border inspection launched on Sept. 21.
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NO <NATIONAL REFERENDUM’
It Seems To Me
A Vietnam moratorium
speaker alleged that the
demonstrations were “a
national referendum” and
“the vote is overwhelmingly
against the war.”
Bosh, A referendum is a
sober, orderly proceeding in
which the nation’s qualified
voters, alone
in the voting
booths with
their cons
ciences and
c o nsi dered
j u dgments,
calmly express
their convic
tions about a
public problem.
The Vietnam moratorium,
in contrast, was a series of
street gatherings of persons —
largly students taking time
out from classrooms-with all
kinds of motives for
participating — including
curiosity and the irrepressible
human compulsion to be
where other people are, and
where something (it matters
not what) is happening.
Lest we be unduly
impressed by this sort of
thing, let us remember that
each New Year’s Eve,
hundreds of thousands
assemble in Times Square,
New York, to stand in bitter
winter cold for an hour or
more, merely for the privilege
of yelling when a lighted ball
on top of a building is
Joseph Breig
lowered to signify the
beginning of another year.
And this past summer,
something like 300,000
youths converged on a farm,
without sanitary facilities, for
a rock music festival.
Millions of other
Americans, meanwhile, sit in
warm homes watching such
strange performances by way
of television, and wondering
vaguely what makes those
folk tick.
I will hazard a prediction
that 15 years hence, today’s
young people, who are so
quick to assemble in herds,
will be a generation of strict
parents, reacting — even
over-reacting — against the
brainless permissiveness of
their own parents, and of
their professors and college
administrators.
This much is certain — one
way or another there will be a
return to discipline; and I pray
that it will be the discipline
of the thoughtful self-control
that is worthy of America,
and not the discipline of a
dictatorship, whether fascist
or communist.
Parents, professors and
students might well read up
on how Adolf Hitler
manipulated mobs of
youngsters, terrifying the
people by brutal bully tactics;
and in the end brought down
upon mankind a catastrophe
of frightful proportions.
Not in any sense were the
OUR PARISH
Vietnam demonstrations “a
national referendum.” The
truth is that the American
people devoutly desire peace,
not only in Vietnam but
everywhere; but not at the
price of betraying our great
moral and civic obligations, as
the most powerful of nations^
to help to uphold
international justice and
human rights, and to
continue to resist the
insatiable communist lust for
world conquest.
The moratorium speaker
said one more thing. “Unless
the national leaders stop this
war,” he said, “then we will
just say they face the same
consequences as their
predecessors.”
I see only one possible
interpretation of that
statement. It is a naked threat
to use street demonstrations
and disorders to overthrow
our elected government
unless the government does
the will of the loud minority.
It is to say that crowd rule
is to be subtituted for the
orderly processes of
representative democracy,
and that decisions about
complex national and
international problems are to
be made on the basis of
which group can muster the
biggest mobs, make the
loudest noise, and cause the
most turmoil.
Is that what these people
have in mind for America?
ST. AGAPETUS
ANNUAL
"Turkey owner
Today'
“I’m glad to see some things remain the same.”
Tracts For The Tiawt
The Emerging
Layman
BY THE REV. MARVIN R. O’CONNELL
During recent ye ars lots of nice things
have been said about Catholic lay
people. Some of the nice things have
been said in these columns. Such
statements are well-deserved and long
over due. Indeed, given the present state
of the Church and given, particularly,
the paralysis which seems to grip
ordinary ecclesiastical leadership, it is
almost a truism to say that only an
enlightened, grace-filled laity
is likely to see us through
these difficult times.
Having paid this proper
tribute, let me suggest
however, that the age of the
emerging layman is not a
golden age-at least, not yet. A
good deal remains to be done
on several levels before we shall know
precisely and concretely what the
layman’s creative role in the Church
should be, what responsibilities fall upon
him in virtue of the sacraments of
baptism and confirmation. A theology of
the laity is only now beginning to appear
and as we wait impatiently for its full
developement we shall have many
problems to live with.
Among these, one, at the present
writing, appears especially difficult to
solve. The laymen’s (and of course I
mean to include here always the
lay woman) family and business
obligations must come first and this
necessarily makes him relegate his
church activities to the end of a trying
and often exhausting day. This I suppose
has ever been so-even in the age of
bingo-and I frankly see no way around it.
And it leads to some other difficulties
which complicate the emergence of the
laity. Since, for example, participation in
the process of parish decision making
mu st be left to the scant time and energy
ordinary lay people can spare, it is
inevitable that only the very interested
minority will become engaged in that
kind of activity. The result often is that
the articulate left and right on the
ideological ’spectrum are heard in the
parish councils, while the vast silent
center remains vast and silent. .
The parallel with political affairs,
should not be lost on us. Ways will have
to be found to give a voice to the
ordinary layman whose endurance or
speech skills are not equal to the
interminable meetings and committee
work involved in active participation in
contemporary parish life. Perhaps too it
could be argued- that, afflicted as every
society is with compulsive talkers and
people who like meetings for meetings’
sake, the Church in this new era will
need most next to the Holy Spirit, clear
agendas, a thorough grasp of Roberts
Rules of Order and a strong chairman. In
any case, the silent center is beginning to
stir in some parishes in an ominously
negative way: as new parish boards
mount new and ambitious programs,
parish income is steadily going down.
There exists, I think, a serious danger
that the renaissance of full lay
participation in the life of the Church
might be stillborn. If the clerical
autocracy of earlier times is replaced by
a clique of laymen, I cannot see any
advantage. What we must avoid at all
costs is the blurring of the different roles
which different members of the
community have. In other words, we
don’t want laymen playing at being
priests or vice versa. Th present climate,
healthy as it is from many points of
view, does give rise easily to the
ex-seminarian syndrome (which is not
restricted to ex-seminarians nor indeed
found in most ex-seminarians), a
layman’s hankering, that is, after the
altar and especially after the pulpit, with
the conviction that whatever the priest
does, he the layman, can do better. (One
shudders at the prospect for pastors if
the present trends continue and former
seminarians are joined in the parish by
laicized priests.)
But don’t misunderstand me. Cliques
and power plays are potential dangers,
not realities. So far as I can see we have
made a splendid beginning. I could not
admire more the zeal and unselfishness of
the lay people who have begun the
arduous and largely unprecedented task
of giving full scope to their baptismal
inheritance. And I think pastors deserve
a great deal of credit too, because all of
this demands a harrowing and sometimes
heroic pyschological adjustment from
them. Of course what we have to worry
most about is apathy. Granted, we have
been so indoctrinated with the “leave it
to the priests” idea in our religious'lives
that we can hardly expect over night an
enthusiastic response to a sudden call for
widespread lay participation. Yet
reasonable people must realize that
recriminations about the past never solve
the problems of the present. The age of
the emerging layman is upon us; ready or
not, here he comes.
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