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PAGE 4 - The Georgia Bulletin, January 21, 1971
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The Georgia Bulletin
Most Rev. Thomas A. Donnellan D.D, J.C.D Publisher
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Buslnesi Office
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The opinions contained in these editorial columns are
the free expressions of free editors in a free Catholic press.
Spiro And The Super Race
v.
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Vice President Spiro Agnew of
foot-in-the-mouth fame has done it
again, this time putting a price tag on
life.
Speaking in Sacramento, Calif., last
week, he said someone must be willing
to make “tough decisions in order to
solve the nation’s welfare dilemma.”
Among these tough decisions, he
included telling a welfare mother she
can’t have any more children.
Another, he added, would be whether
a man on public health insurance with a
terminal illness should “be kept alive an
extra month at the cost of $20,000 to
$30,000 to the taxpayers.”
“Who decides that care is to be
continued?” he queried. “We get up here
so frequently at these meetings and talk
about the superficialities of these same
problems.”
Agnew said anyone who made such
decisions probably wouldn’t last long in
public office “because we would then be
in a position to be victimized by the
demagogues who seek office and who
seek always to mouth the platitudes and
say the good things.”
The Vice President said things have
got to change, however.
“We must reject the fuzziness that
often accompanies great causes, the
pontificators and pundits who write with
such assurance and knowledgeability
about these problems,” he opined.
There it is, folks. All of the mystery
has been stripped away from these
problems over which men have pondered
down through the ages.
It’s all very simple. When a person
goes on welfare, he loses his right to have
children and even to live, if the state
decides otherwise.
Everyone knows all welfare recipients
are a bunch of bums, so why should
hard-working, God-fearing, tax-paying
citizens have to finance their babies and
breathing?
All taxes are supposed to be used for
is national defense, snooping on private
citizens and such.
Weed out the weak and you create a
super race, perhaps a heartless super
race, but a highly efficient one.
Everytime a weak member pops up,
you kill him. That’s how they breed
cattle. Why not humans?
Abort every unwanted, or possibly
deformed fetus.
That way, folks won’t have to waste
their time in caring for and loving the
unwanted and imperfect. They can
devote all their time to loving their
perfect selves and other objects of
perfection.
There likely won’t be any time to love
or worship God. He couldn’t be much
with the upbeat anyway, since he
advocated loving everyone, particularly
the unfortunate lepers, prostitutes and
such.
But Agnew has solved so many of
society’s perplexing problems, from
non-objective news media to campus
unrest, that he certainly has the answer
to welfare.
*
Just because wiser men have chosen to
peck away at the problem gradually,
being careful to exercise compassion at
the same time they accomplished
reform, makes no difference to the Vice
President and his instant answers.
Spiro is our hero.
THE OFFICE OF BISHOP
Tracts For The Times
BY REV MARVIN R. O’CONNELL
Here, St. Paul wrote to Timothy, is “a
faithful saying: if a man desire the office of
bishop, he desireth a good work. .It behoveth
therefore a bishop to be blameless.” There must
be many an American bishop today who reads
those inspired words with some reservations.
Confronted as he is with crises of every
conceivable kind, pummeled by attacks from
the right and from the left, challenged by a
disgruntled clergy and an increasingly restive
and disaffected laity, a bishop in
1971 might be excused if he
wondered what was so good about
his work. Blameless, he might think
ruefully, is a word full of irony
when applied to me, since I am
blamed for everything.
This is sadly true, but even
though much blame for our present
distresses should be perhaps placed on other
tnan episcopal shoulders, the burden of
responsibility remains the price of leadership.
Bishops are bishops because they wanted to be
and because, according to the canons of
selection presently in force, they deserved to
be. Leadership was no more thrust upon them
unwillingly than upon people in similar
prestigious positions in government and
business. The fiction that bishops are dragged
kicking and screaming to the altar of
consecration should be relegated to the same
obscurity as the pious legends of the Second
Nocturn.
There is nothing in the least dishonorable
about a churchman seeking a leadership
position when he is confident that he has a
contribution to make to the common good.
Another more recent translation of the Pauline
passage quoted above goes like this: “There is a
popular saying: to aspire to leadership is an
honorable ambition. Our leader, therefore, or
Dishop, must he above reproach.” In either
version this statement expresses an idea! to be
striven for rather than a practical realization,
for no man, however lofty his office, can escape
blame or reproach. Which should bother
nobody, since the essence of the Christian
vocation, as followed in this imperfect world, is
striving, not realizing.
What strikes me as doleful about the
leadership crisis within the contemporary
Church is the iack of evidence that anybody is
striving much to solve it. And indeed only the
episcopal college, so solemnly and elegantly
charged in the documents of Vatican II, can
solve it. Perhaps some of the criticism levelled
against the bishops is petty and misplaced, but
it seems very significant to me that Catholics
who agree'about little else are at one in their
complaints about episcopal leadership. And
when you boil those complaints down-the valid
ones, I mean, the ones from people who
reverence the apostolic succession and readily
admit that most bishops are nice men-the end
product sounds like this: our bishops have been
trained not to lead but to rule. As long as the
ecclesiastical system traceable back 400 years
to the Council of Trent remained intact, they
were by and large skillful managers and
adequate caretakers. But that system no longer
prevails, not because it was wrong, but because
times change and systems, which are
expedients, have to change too. By “system” I
mean of course administrative procedures,
political arrangements, the apparatus for getting
the Church’s supernatural work done. The
bishops-so the complaints go-have for the
most part confused the system, the apparatus,
with the permanent and sacred elements of
Catholicism, as though the faith and the
sacraments of faith--and indeed the episcopal
office itself which is part of the unchangeable
essence of the Church- depended for their
existence upon a particular set of clerical
procedures.
Obviously we need a system and to jettison
the one we have without careful thought of the
consequences and careful planning of
alternatives would be the height of imprudence.
And in one who directs others, let us
remember, imprudence is the gravest of all sins.
But timidity is a kind of imprudence too, a
particularly destructive kind, because it can
mask itself as benignity, it can busy itself with a
host of nit-picking activities while essential
matters are left undone. When a system
becomes a refuge for the men who preside over
it, the sort of timidity I refer to, the fear that
forceful action will be destructive, the
desperate hope that soon things will be back to
“normal,’’-all these characteristics invariably
emerge.
I would like to return to this subject next
week.
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HONEST BOOK
It Seems To Me
“I am very far from
disapproving of contraception
simply or chiefly because the
Church has condemned it. My
mind works the other way
around. My faith in the
teaching Chu rch is very
considerably fortified by the
fact that it does stick so very
obstinately to the clear but
painful truth
in this matter,
rejecting the
easy evasions
and the cheap
popularity
that they
might bring . .
.despite the
enormous
pressure that was put upon
the pope to make him tell the
desired indecent lie
The quotation is from
pages 147-148 of an
extraordinarily good book,
“Honest Love and Human
Life: Is the Pope Right About
Contraception?” by
Christopher Derrick (Coward
- McCann, New York).
Derrick, an author, critic,
editor and lecturer currently
working in the U.S., was a
Royal Air Force pilot in
World War II. Maybe it was
through his facing of death in
the skies that he acquired the
uncompromising honesty and
realism with which he writes:
“ . . .Contraceptive
Joseph BreiR
lovemaking is the enactment
or pretense of a total
surrender which is — in point
of fact — very carefully
prevented from taking place.
Each person enacts the
openness, the unreserved gift
of self that we most rightly
call ‘love’ but without
sincerity: there is, instead, a
central refusal or
withholding. . .
“We shall be debasing the
verbal currency if we dignity
such a hypocritical
performance with the sacred
name of ‘love’ . . .any kind of
contraception must always
and inherently be a sin .. .a
sin against the integrity of
one’s own self . . .
“The defender - 0 f
contraception has a difficult
task. He has to justify a
lie. . .the pretended giving
of something that is in fact
withheld, the performance of
something not intended; he
has to reconcile this
hypocrisy with some
not-too-degraded concept of
‘love” ...
“Neither honesty nor love
is likely to be easy at all times
and immediately rewarding to
ourselves — not in connection
with sex, or anything else.
But if we settle for lower
values, let us at least admit
our serious moral failure.”
OUR PARISH
At that point, Christopher
Derrick puts his finger on the
crux. We all sin at various
times and in various ways:
but when we try to justify
sin, when we try to represent
it as not sinful and even as
virtue — it is then that we are
preserving our deepest selves.
And this is frightfully
dangerous; it can be deadly.
As Derrick writes:
‘‘Sex is about
babies .. .Fallen man has a
very imperfect appetite for
reality, finding it painful and
burdensome; he therefore
tends to prefer the constructs
of his own fantasy to the
constructs of God’s creative
finger; he likes to pretend
that things are other than
what they are.
“Contraception, in its
various kinds, is a technique
for enabling one version of
that pretence to be
maintained.”
One more quotation from
this thoroughly honest book:
“The word ‘conscience’ has
a terrible ambiguity, which
cannot be by-passed by a
kind of bland assumption
that we are always acting
with clear minds and pure
hearts. We are not.”
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“Worst generation gap I’ve ever seen, Father.”
OLD-FASHIONED WAKES
The
Yardstick
By
Msgr. George G. Higgins
Director, Division of Urban Life, U.S.C.C.
The January 1971 issue of U.S. Catholic and
Jubilee features an article on “Death in
America” by Kenneth Woodward, Religion
Editor of Newsweek. It’s one of the most
perceptive articles I have ever read on the
contemporary American approach to death.
In the same issue of U.S. Catholic and
Jubilee, Patrick T. Reardon-in a kind of
personalized follow=up editorial-argues that
“the way we Americans are burying our dead is
an exercise in vanity and pomposity” and
concludes that “it is time for us to develop and
put into practice a new approach to our
treatment of the dead, a Christian approach
that is more in tune with what we believe and
profess.”
To this end, he has proposed a three-part
program “as a starting point for other creative
programs rather than a cut and dried final
system”:
1. The elimination of wakes.
2. The establishment of a Church policy
advocating cremation.
3. The establishment of non-denominational
cooperative funeral associations.
For present purposes, I have no opinion to
offer, one way or the other, on the second and
third of these problems, but I must say that the
first one strikes me as being rather doctrinaire.
For my own part, I don’t see anything wrong
with wakes, and I certainly can’t agree with Mr.
Reardon when he says that “the wake tends
only to put off the inevitable sorrow, rather
than make it any easier” and that “with the
elimination of wakes, the emphasis would be
shifted from the body to the religious meaning
of death.” I find this to be a rather narrow and
somewhat antiseptic definition of religion and a
very abitrary way of distinguishing between the
religious and secular.
I don’t know what kind of wakes Mr.
Reardon has been attending recently, but I get
the impression that if he has ever had the
experience of attending a typical old-fashioned
Irish wake, he really didn’t get into the spirit of
the thing and apparently didn’t understand
what the “mourners” were trying to tell him in
the midst of all their gaiety.
An authentic wake of the kind I am referring
to (and the Irish, of course, are not the only
“ethnic” group that have held on to the
tradition) certainly doesn’t concentrate on the
“body” to the neglect of the religious meaning
of death. On the contrary, since the only
authentic religious meaning of death is one of
joy-the Resurrection theme-I think it must be
said that a good old-fashioned Catholic
wake-because of and not in spite of its relaxed
sense of gaiety-is a deeply religious
phenomenon in the very best sense of the word.
Rather than argue the point theoretically, let
me cite some impressive testimony (on my side
of the argument, of course) from a new book
entitled “American Journey: The Times of
Robert Kennedy”-a marvelous collection of
taped interviews with many of the people-rich
and poor, famous or otherwise-who were
privileged to be on the train which brought
Bobby Kennedy’s body from New York to
Washington on the day of his funeral.
Chapter 3 of this fascinating book brings
together the recollections of several of Bobby’s
closest associates-Protestants, Catholics and
Jews-who were asked to tell what they were
thinking about, from the point of view of
religion, as they took part in one of the most
celebrated and certainly one of the longest
wakes in American history. To my surprise
(although I really shouldn’t have been
surprised) a number of those who were
interviewed-Catholics, Protestants and
Jews-though that Bobby’s “wake on wheels”
was a profoundly religious experience at least
for many of the people on the train.
To save Mr. Reardon and the readers of this
column the trouble and the inconvenience of
locating a copy of the book I am talking about,
let me quote briefly from three of the
interviews in question.
Budd Schulberg, a well known Jewish
author, says that those people on the train who
had no faith in an after life were in terrible
shape. “You could just go down the aisle,” he
says, “and pick them out. For those who have
trouble about a concept of Paradise, it’s much
harder and all these strong men (the men
without faith in an after life) were messes. I
think it’s a sublime faith. I would look at
someone and say, ‘Gee, I didn’t realize he was
Catholic.’ You see they felt that Bob was in
Paradise.”
Mr. Schulberg’s wife, who goes by the name
of Geraldine Brooks, was deeply impressed by
the “courage” which Bobby’s relatives and so
many of his friends displayed during the long
drawn-out journey from New York to
Washington. “I have never been exposed to that
kind of courage before,” and I said, ‘God, I
wish I had that kind of faith.’ We’re Jewish. I
said ‘I swear to God, If I could convert today I
would.’ It was such a godsend to me. You could
look around and absolutely SEE which of those
people were strong Catholics.”
And last of all, a perfectly marvelous
statement from a Catholic lady, Helen Keyes,
who was closely associated with Bobby
Kennedy in all his political campaigns and is
(Continued on Page 6)
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