Newspaper Page Text
A
A
w
PAGE 4 — The Georgia Bulletin, April 2,1970
or AtlANTA SE«VINC (.EOKCIAS 71 VVRTHFHN <:<H XT1KS
The Hand of Herod
Most Rev. Thomas A. Donnellan D.D, J.C.D. - Publisher
Busina** Office
756 West Peachtree, NW
Atlanta, Georgia 30308
Harry Murphy - Editor
Member of the Catholic Press Association
and Subscriber to N.C.W.C. Newsservice
Telephone 875-5536
Second Class Postage Paid at Waynesboro, Ga. 30830
U.S.A. $5.00
Canada $5.00
Foreign $6.50
Send change of address to 756 West Peachtree, NW, Atlanta, Ga. 30308
Published weekly except the second and last weeks
t in June, July and August and the last week in December.
At 202 E. Sixth St., Waynesboro, Ga. 30830
■v The opinions contained in these editorial columns are
- i the free expressions of free editors in a free Catholic press. ——
Sheen Vs, Catholic Press
DETROIT (NC) - The Michigan
Catholic, archdiocesan weekly here, has
challenged Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen’s
recent statement that the Catholic press
is too critical and no longer what it
should be.
“The United States bishops once
wrpte that +h e right to be informed is
God given and no lesser authority can
either grant or withhold it,” the
newspaper said in an editorial in its
March 19 issue.
“Whether the information is positive
or negative, one must assume that if it is
important then all God’s people have a
divine right to know it.”
s Archbishop Sheen, who retired last
fall as bishop of Rochester, N.Y., and
now lives in New York City, said early in
March in a New Jersey talk that the
Catholic press was in a new phase in
which it is highly critical of the Church.
He said it has been “printing barbed
-views, exciting controversy and
considering itself as almost outside the
Church.” The famous television preacher
of the 1950s said the Catholic press was
like “a child who grew up to spank its
own nurse.” He said that by stressing
controversy it had gone wrong.
Commented the Michigan Catholic
editorial:
“Unlike Vice President Agnew,
Archbishop Sheen did not suggest that
‘ifo'cflsk ahd demagogues be banned from
the front page. Rather, the archbishop
seemed to imply that criticism should be
eliminated from every page of the paper.
“Whether or not bishops can
sympathize with editors, editors
generally can sympathize with bishops.
“Bishops, and all who share their
authority, scarcely can be blamed if they
become gun shy. This simply is no longer
a day when authority goes unchallenged.
While this long has been true of other
forms of government, only lately has it
spread to the Church.
“But responsible criticism, even if it is
undoubtedly unpleasant, is an absolute
necessity in any society dedicated to a
measure of freedom.”
The Detroit newspaper observed that
an uncriticized society becomes corrupt
or is “prone to continued blundering
with impunity.” It said evidence of that
could be seen in dictatorships and
military regimes where news is managed
by government.
“It may be true that a silent majority
does not want to know what is wrong in
the world.” said the Michigan Catholic.
“But if it is true, then the silent majority
is making a tragic error.”
The newspaper concluded its editorial
by saying that if the Catholic press must
return to what it once was, “we would
have to agree with the archbishop’s
closing remark, ‘I am not so sure we
should have a Catholic press.’”
In New York, James A. Doyle,
executive director of the Catholic Press
Association (CPA), had said after
Archbishop Sheen’s views became
public:
“It should be noted that Pope Paul VI
himself has urged the press to be a
mirror of the world, telling things as
they are, in truth, and has pointed out
that the professional conscience of the
press can impose a duty to report
untoward happenings in the Church, as
long as they are kept in perspective and
not exaggerated.”
Doyle said Catholic publications are
and should be open to criticism.
“But we suggest,” he added, “that
such criticism ought to be specific and
detailed if it is to be most useful to all
concerned.”
AS I SEE IT,,,
The Backdrop...
By John J. Daly, Jr.
This column marks ' the end of my
contribution to the diocesan press through the
NC News Service. The growing press of my
regular journalistic work and several other
factors make it necessary to beat a retreat at
this time from my weekly obligation.
I am unhappy to withdraw, I confess,
because retreat and withdrawal seem orders of
the day for too many in our society. There is
spreading across
our nation a
misplaced trust in
disengagement
from the threaten
ing social issues we
face. It is no
solution, but rather
an irritant.
To readers, and for the sake of the record
(such as it is) of the past few years, I would like
to leave with an explanation of the perspective
I have allowed to shape many of my past
comments.
I have selected subjects and written about
them from the point of view of a Catholic
journalist who resides in an inner-city
neighborhood with his family and has been
committed to the potential value of city life.
Lately, that commitment has been made
increasingly difficult by the pressures of
polarization in society dong racial, political,
economic and sociological lines. I now share the
opinion of many urban commentators who
warn that our cities are headed in the direction
of armed camps and perhaps battlegrounds.
Consequently, I took very seriously
documents issued by the Kerner Commission,
the Eisenhower Commission on the Causes and
Prevention of Violence, the U.S. Civil Rights
Commission and others which saw growing
threats of internal problems as outweighing
international concerns.
I have come to regard the myth of public
education as the “melting pot” of our society
as now thoroughly exposed. It has failed to
accomplish racial integration in most of our
cities and even failed to assist racial harmony in
areas where there was an initial disposition and
some good will on which biracial cooperation
could be built. \
For this reason, I wrote frequently about
education and public welfare issues, including
the explorations now being made of the
possibility that tax-.assisted private education
could be an “option” for poor and rich alike
who view public education as incapable of
responding to what the nation must have to
meet its current social crisis.
Finally, I function within the official church
structure and have tried to make clear my
conviction that organized religion, especially
Catholicism, has abundant wisdom and a
system of social resources that must be put to
the direct service of society even when this
involves a sharp twist in the path of American
Church history and a strong “backlash.”
I believe American Catholics face a heavy
“penance” for indifference to social problems. I
don’t know what form that penance will take
(and I am not speaking of “reparations” asked
by black extremists), but I suspect we are
seeing the beginning of it in the difficulties of
our parochial school system and the hostility
being exhibited toward it by even moderate
black groups, such as the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People.
For this reason, I have written extensively on
parochial school issues, including concern about
them in the Nixon administration and the
' growing number of legal challenges to state aid
for them in which their stance on racial issues
and integration were important. Several
columns were devoted, for example, to the
obvious intent of the U.S. Department of
Justice to include them in suits against de facto
racial segregation in northern cities, based on
their pupils’ participation in tax-paid school bus
rides and shared-time programs.
All in all, it has been rewarding. Thank you
for your attention to one man’s small voice.
MORALITY: THE SAME
It Seems To Me
A phrase that is much
bandied about nowadays is
“the new morality.” Like
anything else that seems to
promise to make things
easier for folks, it has a
certain popularity. But there
is no such thing as a new
morality, and there never will
be.
Moral
truth can
not change.
What chan
ges is not
morality,
but our
apprehen
sion of it,
and our observance.
The “new morality” is
either the timeless morality
applied to problems of our
time, or it is not morality at
all,
Human beings (of which,
God help us, the Church is
composed) either go forward
or backward - either progress
or retrogress - in their
understanding of moral
principles and their
application of them to
particular situations.
Over the long haul, over
the centuries, and the
thousands of years, the great
general movement is
gradually forward and
upward, because the Holy
Spirit does lead mankind.
He leads us almost
imperceptibly, with exquisite
respect for our freedom of
will, and with infinite pity for
our darkness of intellect. But
Joseph Breig
lead us he does.
As the poet Francis
Thompson said in “The
Hound of Heaven,” Christ
pursues us down the
labyrinthine ways of our
stupidity and sinfulness, and
brings us*at last to bay.
Bb’t over the gftbrter
distances, we go forward in
some ways and backward in
others. We seesaw.
Just when we are beginning
to preen ourselves on our
humanism, the world is
inundated with the cruel tides
of Hitlerism and Stalinism.
Just when we are growing
toward maturity in our
concern for the
underprivileged and the
discriminated - against we
become morally stunted
about the rights of the most
helpless of all human beings -
unborn children in the
wombs of their mothers.
Just when we are rebelling
against puritanical attitudes
toward our God-given
sexuality, we lose sight of the
sublime virtue of chastity,
and start trying to justify
sexual laxity with all kinds of
self-serving excuses.
All the time, moral truth
remains unchanged and
unchangeable. There it
stands, challenging us to be
honest. We change, for better
or for worse (or for both at
once) but divine truth
unalterable.
is
Some people say that over
the centuries, morality
changed concerning (for
instance) slavery. Nonsense.
The truth stared us in the
face at all times. From
Genesis to the last word in
Scripture, God teaches us the
truth about human dignity,
human 'rights, human
freedom, human
responsibilities.
“Let us make man to our
image and likeness, and let
him have dominionn.. .over
the whole earth.” How can
anybody justify human
slavery, as we understand it,
in face of those words in the
earliest paragraph of God’s
Word in the Bible?
Another claim is that
morality changed with
respect to the taking of
interest on loans. It did not
change. What changed were
circumstances. The moral
principle stood like a
mountain, immovable.
The applicable moral
principle is justice to, and
love of, our fellowmen. In the
economic situation of* the
ancient Jews and the Middle
Ages, to charge interest was
to take advantage of the
desperate need of one’s
neighbor. Today, the lending
of capital at reasonable rates
is a service to a fellowman,
enabling him to buy a home
or a farm, or to start a
business or an industry.
“New morality,” when all
is said and done, is a
contradiction in terms.
OUR PARISH-
I
lh
/AM©
mm
Tracts For
The Times
By Rev. Marvin R. O’Connell
“When you don’t die of a trouble, somehow
you begin to convert it~make use of it, I
mean.” Have you had the experience df
encountering a phrase which serves to
crystallize a jumble of half-articulated
throughts, even though neighter the phrase
itself nor its context has anything really to do 1
with what you’ve been thinking?
This is what happened to me just now as I
read the above-quoted sentence in
Saul Bellow’s wild, brilliant,
sometimes barely intelligible fable
called “Henderson th,e Rain King.”
Mr. Bellow is famous for the range
of ideas which richochet across the
characters and through the plots in
his novels--
I suspect he is one of the most
widely learned men alive-but even he might be
surprised at the interpretation which I
immediately attached to the notion that people
make use of the trouble that fails to kill them;
it describes exactly, I think, the plight which
the leaders of black militancy find themselves
in at this particular moment.
I suppose, as I reflect on it, that three recent
preoccupations of mine are responsible for this
presumptous interpretation. First, I have been
pondering lately the “benign neglect” memo of
Daniel P. Moynihan, the president’s counsellor
on urban affairs, who is of opinion that the
spectacular progress achieved by American
blacks during the past decade should now be
consolidated by a policy which accents the
thorough assimilation of the advantages already
won rather than one which presses for lots of
new legislation in the racial field.
The eminent good sense of Mr. Moynihan’s
suggestion was at first somewhat obscured by
pundits and political cartoonists who wrung
their hands over the alleged cynicism of the
expression “benign neglect,” as though Mr.
Moynihan had proved himself a kind of racist.
But such distortion evaporated the moment the
full text of the memo became available and the
moment its author’s credentials were recalled;
for nobody-certainly not the whole world of
joumalists~has done as much, in terms both of
educating us and in providing practical policies,
to resolve the racial troubles in America as Mr.
Moynihan.
Indeed the original criticism of the memo
might have made more sense if it had fastened
not on ‘benign neglect” but upon the word
“progress.” For what Mr. Moynihan -means by'
“progress” is the crux of the present problem.
It is precisely this assertion that the militant
leadership denies-the Seales and Cleavers and
their strident ilk-and I wonder if they don’t
deny it because black people’s progress in
education, job opportunities and housing is
what will leave them without a constituency.
How else can one explain the cries fer black
separatism, raised by those who only a few
years ago were demanding instant integration?
I was talking not long ago-and this is the
second of my three preoccupations-to an
enlightened, activist, white liberal whose heart
and soul have been in the civil rights movement
for years. He is now on the verge of
withdrawing from that struggle which has given
meaning to his life; and he is oppressed not
only by a sense of defeat but of guilt, because
his Negro friends now tell him that all along his
toil for justice has been a low form of
patronization, that he has been trying to
incorporate blacks into a white middle class
culture which blacks despise.
How about that? and how about the “Black
Symposium” that was held last week at the
college where I teach. Subsidized by the college
administration, these three days of panels,
seminars, and speeches reached their climax
with an address by Floyd McKissick, who said
in effect that since Negroes had won nothing so
far the time has come to overturn the rotten
society which turned a deaf ear to their pleas
for justice. He spoke to a half-empty
auditorium while cute little kids sold Black
Panther literature at the door.
I don’t think any fair minded man, black or
white, can refuse to see that the Negro has
made great strides in recent years, thanks first
to his own efforts, but thanks also to the good
will of the huge white majority. And of course
that progress has been a heightened share in
white middle class culture, with its virtues and
its faults, simply because there is nothing else
the black man can ask from American society
and there is nothing else that society can give
him. Mr. Moynihan knows, and Mr. McKissick
knows it too, that any other demand is sheer
fantasy.
Or, it may be, a power delay. Which brings
me back to Saul Bellow and my interpretation.
Let me say it straight out: if the black militant
leaders, with their call for the empty dream of
separatism, are making use of the terrible
trouble suffered for so long by the Negro
people in order that they-the leaders-can
maintain their own power, then they are guilty
of a crime and betrayal far worse than anything
perpetrated by a red-neck southern sheriff or a
northern ghetto landlord.
CATHOLIC CONGRESS ON WORSHIP
THE ATLANTA CONGRESS
The banners are a nice touch, don’t you think?”
ATLANTA CIVIC CENTER AUDITORIUM
April 16,17,18,1970