Newspaper Page Text
PAGE 4 — The Georgia Bulletin, January 14,1971
atEXBMtH'.USr. or ATLANTA SEHVINC GEORGIA S 71 NORTHKNN <<N \T1I.H
The Georgia Bulletin
Most Rev. Thomas A. Donnellan D.D. J.C.D Publisher
Harry Murphy - Editor
Member of the Catholre>Pre9s Association
756 Welt Pe*chtree, NW and Subscriber to N.C.W.C. News Service
Atlanta, Georgia 30308 Telephone 875-55 36
U.S.A. $5.00
Canada $5 00
Second Clan Postage Paid at Waynesboro, Ga. 30830
Send change of address to 756 West Peachtree, NW, Atlanta, Ga 30308
Foreign $6.50
Published weekly except the second and last weeks
in June, July and August and the last week in December.
At 202 E. Sixth St., Waynesboro, Ga. 30830
• The opinions contained in these editorial columns are
• the free expressions of free editors in a free Catholic press.
Seeing It
We note with interest one particular
trait of incoming Gov. Jimmy Carter’s
prisons chief, Ellis G. MacDougall.
As Connecticut corrections
commissioner, he has his employee
training center in an old jail and requires
trainees to spend time there to get the
feel of inmate life.
This bodes well for the man’s
compassion quotient and for an end to
the widely held opinion in Georgia that
prisoners can be treated any way.
“Remember,” a state senator once
caustically remarked, “none of them are
in there for singing too loud in church.”
This attitude has resulted in the state’s
rehabilitation record amounting to zilch.
But the new director, who has compiled
admirable records in South Carolina as
well as Connecticut, stresses
rehabilitation instead of punishment and
we wish him well in his endeavors.
An insight into inmate life is essential
before an effective rehabilitation
program can be designed.
Judge Richard Kelly of Dade City,
Fla., even insisted on gaining such
experience so he could intelligently
sentence those convicted in his court.
He spent a night in a one-man cell in
the maximum security area of the
Florida state prison at Raiford and
visited with many inmates, including
some he had sentenced.
“This is something I should have done
a long time ago,” Judge Kelly said. “I
want to understand exactly what the
conditions are at Raiford.
“Many of those men are a tough
bunch of people and they deserve to be
punished. But if everyone of us was
punished for every transgression we
commit . . . well it’s like the old saying,
‘Let him who is without sin cast the first
Like It Is
stone.’ ”
Kelly was among 23 judges who spent
a night at the Nevada State Penitentiary
at Carson City last July while attending
the National College of State Trial
Judges in Reno.
This desire for actual experiences in
problems is growing.
South Carolina Sen. Ernest Hollings
changed his attitude about hunger after a
Charleston nun took him on a tour of
the slums on a cold, rainy day and let
him see the situation first hand.
We remember a Monsignor who
dressed up like a bum and lived a
vagrant’s life for a week as part of a
course he was taking.
Attempts have been made in Atlanta
recently to have families live for one day
on the same food budget as welfare
recipients.
Bishop Juan Carlos Ferro and 20 of
his priests have challenged public
officials in Concepcion, Argentina “to
give up a day of your customary meals
and eat at the table of a working family,
to give up your bed and sleep on the
mattress of a group of poor children.
“If we . . . had to suffer the plight of
the poor for just one day, we would be
at the very least ashamed to pray the
Our Father.”
The group cautioned the officials not
to confuse tranquility with peace, saying
there can be no peace until jobs are
available for all and all are able to earn a
just wage.
All of these efforts are good and we
encourage them.
For as we have said repeatedly,
“Don’t criticize an indian until you’ve
walked in his moccasins.”
‘THOU SHALT NOT STEAL’
Tracts For The Times
BY REV. MARVIN R. O’CONNELL
One of the less pleasant aspects of the recent
holiday season was the high incidence of
shop-lifting reported all around the country.
The figures available are not altogether clear,
but they seem to reflect a pretty consistent
pattern: everywhere petty thievery has reached
such colossal proportions that by the end of the
year, after the rush of Christmas shopping, it
could be measured only in billions of dollars.
There is something terribly grotesque that such
a statistic should emerge as part of
the accounting for the celebration
of Christ’s birthday. ’Tis the season,
apparently, to be stealing.
This social and moral
phenomenon presents several
arresting sides. I’m no economist,
but surely one doesn’t need much
expertise to see that retail prices
reflect the staggering losses which stores suffer
from casual thieves. Of course there are more
profound factors at work fueling the inflation
that is gradually strangling us all. Still, the retail
merchants are not going to absorb the loss due
to theft; their customers who don’t steal are
going to pay for it and pay also the cost of
off-duty policeman and sophisticated detection
equipment without which the loss would be
even greater.
I think this kind of dishonesty also provides
evidence of the moral numbness and confusion
which are the unhappy marks of our time.
Somehow it is assumed that, to steal from a
large department store which sells countless
Confession Stays
VATICAN CITY (NC) - Without any
thought of ending private individual confession
of sins, the Vatican is reportedly conducting a
general review of sacramental rules -- including
those for penance. Prompted by news
dispatches from Rome stating that private
confession might become optional and that
Pope Paul has asked the world’s bishops to
study that recommendation, the chief press
officer at the Vatican said the Vatican might be
studying the updating of several concepts
surrounding various sacraments. Asked what
specific changes would be made in giving
general absolution, Federico Alessandrini, the
press spokesman, told NC News: “I do not
know under what circumstances they are
planning to extend this privilege.”
' <
articles each year is not wrong. I suspect such a
perverse attitude is closely related to the view,
so fashionable in Catholic and I imagine other
circles just now, that sin means to “hurt”
somebody, that if you don’t “hurt” anybody
you aren’t guilty of anything. And how can you
“hurt” Macy’s or Dayton’s, a large impersonal
corporation? The fact that stealing hurts one’s
own moral fiber does not seem worth
considering. Nor is the good of the community,
gouged by ever higher prices, taken into
account.
Perhaps we should emphasize more that only
big business - like big government and big
labor unions - can provide the services and
products that we constantly clamor for. Mass
markets presume massive organization, and the
material blessings which have been showered on
us Americans are not unrelated to the
achievements of the much-maligned business
community, I don’t know many people who are
willing to turn back the clock to simplier times
when the craftsman worked in his little shop
and served an aristocratic clientele with his fine
silver or linen or glass products. Those were the
days, let us remember, when nine people out of
ten lived in shacks with no windows and with a
dirt floor. I for one could not survive more than
20 minutes in such a system, and I’ll bet you
couldn’t either. Indeed, those who stole their
Christmas presents this year have, in their
twisted way, paid tribute to the miracles
wrought by American businessmen in the last
several decades.
The old moral theologians, so much scorned
and neglected today, had a great deal of
wisdom to dispense. Perhaps they did get
obsessed too much with the definition of sin in
quantitative terms; I don’t suppose it was very
helpful to define a 89 theft as a venial sin and
$10 a mortal. But that was a flaw easily enough
corrected. The important thing was (and is) the
distinction itself. To steal a little is not as bad
as to steal a lot; stealing from a poor man is
worse than stealing from a rich one. But
stealing in any case is wrong, because by
definition it deprives from one who has worked
and worried for the sake of one who has not.
Moses thundered from Mount Sinai, “Thou
shalt not steal;’’ he did not offer any
qualifications, because he knew, and we know,
that you cannot steal from an abstraction. A
department store, after all, is people too.
i
Students of What?
- dT i0N IS MURDER-- -
* oR as. BISHOPS
mm
W.WM
r I
***** 'SHO Micioe
P0pf ^ a -,
^ cpCOND
vA t,c an
COUHCVV
i - $ 7
lit
P&-.
I
U.S.
fc
SINS OF YOUTH
It Seems To Me
The generation gap, if it is
a sin, is a sin of omission and
not of commission; of
thoughtless neglect to do
things that ought to be done.
Younger people are every bit
as responsible for it as their
elders; but that truth is
obscured by the fact that it is
the young who
do most of the
accusing.
When I was
a youth, I
sometimes
grew weary of
hearing older
folks criticiz
ing the young and asking one
another, “What is the world
coming to?” I have lived to
become weary of the same
sort of complaining and
finger-pointing among the
young.
I am speaking, let me
emphasize, of the young
people who get all the
attention in the press and on
radio and TV. I am. fully
aware - and glad -- that they
are a minority. These are the
youth who grumble that their
elders do not communicate
with them; that their parents
are always out somewhere
partying, or absorbed in
watching TV, or busy making
money, or whatnot.
Meanwhile, what are the
younger people doing? When
they aren’t in class, they are
poring over their books, or
preparing term papers, or
swimming or skating or
Joseph Breifc
going to the movies, or (God
give us patience!) yammering
on the telephone.
The one thing the “kids” -
I mean the complaining
youths - almost never do is
to try to communicate with
their elders whom they
accuse of not trying to
communicate with them.
They don’t ask questions
about what their parents have
been through, they don’t tap
adult experience, and when
they occasionally pick up a
newspaper they generally
look only at the comics, the
sports and the movie ads.
Not long ago, a reporter
for National Catholic News
Service interviewed four of
the leading Catholic youth
delegates attending the White
House Conference on
Children. The Church, they
complained, doesn’t
communicate with the young;
does little about poverty;
ignores such minorities as
black people, Mexican
Americans and Indians, and
does not take a strong stand
on racial justice.
After listening to all that
and more, the reporter began
asking questions, and
discovered the young men -
who had been selected to
attend the White House
Conference because they held
positions of youth leadership
- were pitifully uninformed
about the life of the Church
in the U.S.
They had never heard of
the $50 million Campaign for
Human Development,
sponsored by the U.S.
bishops. for which a
collection had been taken a
few weeks earlier in every
parish in the nation -- a
collection publicized in the
press, on posters and in the
pulpit. The purpose of the
fund is to finance projects to
help the poor to help
themselves to break out of
what Pope Paul has called
“the hellish circle of
poverty.”
Neither were the four
youth leaders aware that for
generations the U.S. bishops
have been condemning racism
as sinfut, and that they led
the nation, through the
Catholic schools, in
combating racial segregation.
And of course most of our
young people do not know
that long before anybody else
was talking about black
people and Indians and
Mexican Americans, Catholics
and Protestants were working
to help them by means of
missions, clinics, hospitals
and schools, and that these
efforts were supported by the
contributions of financially
hard-pressed Christians.
Oh, well, I guess when 1
was young 1 too sat around
grousing about the failures of
my elders. Then I grew up
and went to work and
married, and started finding
out that talk is cheap and but
that really helping costs time
and money and effort.
OUR PARISH
//
c■ titrc / '
“I still say we went too far, too fast, Sister.’
ELITIST SNOBBERY
The
Y ardstick
By
Msgr. George G. Higgins
Director, Division of Urban Life, U.S.C.C.
I have always thought of The Christian
Science Monitor as being, by all odds, one of
the best newspapers in the United States but,
frankly, have never thought of it as being
particularly sensitive to the problems and needs
of middle and lower-middle class Americans
who work with their hands for a living. On the
contrary-to be completely open about the
matter-it has always struck me as being rather
aristocratic, not to say elitist, in its editorial
point of view.
This is no longer true of the Monitor,
however-if indeed it ever was-as witness its
lead editorial, "Elitist and Hard-Hat,” in the
issue dated Monday, Dec. 28, 1970. The point
of this editorial is that a new form of snobbery
appears to exist on a very broad scale in the
United States.
“It exists,” says the Monitor, “on the part of
many of those in America whom it pleases to
believe that they work solely with their minds
and operates against those who work with their
hands. This snobbery has come to be described
as ‘elitism’, a term increasingly applied to the
fairly broad spectrum of those engaged in
specifically intellectural activity of whatever
nature.”
The result of all this, the Monitor concludes,
“is a rising resentment, discomfort and
frustration ion the part of those not included in
this elite class and who therefore believe that
they are looked down upon.”
The Monitor’s point is well taken. In other
words, there is no doubt in this writer’s mind
that the sense of alienation being experienced
today by many of the working-class poor in the
United States stems, in large measure, from the
justifiable feeling on their part that they are
being looked down upon by the so-called
intelligentsia.
The Monitor is not alone in deploring this
phenomenon. A number of liberal
spokesmen-who themselves are generally
thought of as belonging to the intelligentsia-are
currently speaking out very forcefully against
this new elitism referred to above. Michael
Novak, for example, in a recent review in
Commonweal of Charles Reich’s best seller,
“The Greening of America,” pointedly reminds
his liberal peers that “one key to our failure lies
in the huge perceptual gap that separates us
from the American people and especially from
the worker.”
Our phantasies about the working-class poor,
Mr. Novak continues, are “vile.” To illustrate
this point, he then cites a passage from “The
Greening of America” which caricatures “the
plumbers, gas station attendants, and truck
drivers around us” in the most patronizing of
terms and leaves the impression that the typical
hard-hat is some sort of fascist moron who “has
fled all hs life from consciousness and
responsbility ... is in turmoil against his own
nature . . .(and) in his agony . . .has recoiled
upon himself.”
In short, Mr. Reich concludes, the subject in
question “is what the machine left after it had
its way.” Mr. Novak says that the margins of his
copy of “The Greening of America” carry an
anguished exclamation mark at the “ignorance”
displayed by this passage. And this, it seems to
me, is putting it as mildly and as charitably as
possible. In other words, ignorance is hardly a
strong enough word to characterize the
incredible snobbery of Professor Reich and
many of his fellow-apologists for the so-called
“counter-culture.”
The December issue of the distinguished
Jewish monthly, Commentary, in a series of
three related articles, pays its respects to these
self-appointed members of the new American
elite and lets them have it with both barrels.
Norman Podhoretz’ introductory editorial sets
the tone for this entire series.
Q_VG)
By its own account, Mr. Podhoretz points
out, the counter-culture ‘opposes the
predominant values of the American middle
class. It has every right to do so. But the fact
that it describes these values in terms that are
drenched in an arrogant contempt for the lives
of millions and millions of people, the vast
majority of whom are considerably less affluent
and less privileged in every other social regard
than the typical counter-culture loyalist, is to
me sufficient indication of the ludicrousness of
the claim of superior humaneness which it is
always making on its own behalf. . .1 would
have thought that epithets like insensitive,
incurious, unimaginative, and smug would be
somewhat more precise.”
More power to Mr. Podhoretz. It’s about
time that someone of his stature in the so-called
intelligentsia had the nerve to blow the whistle
on the new elite.
i
I
I