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PAGE 4—The Georgia Bulletin, September 9,1971
WAtUOTA **VB*C II NORTHKH> (m
Most Rev. Thomas A. Donnellan D.D. J.C.D Publisher
Harry Murphy, Editor
Fr. James Maciejewski - Associate Editor
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The opinions contained in these editorial columns are
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Busing And Ox Goring
It all depends on whose ox is being
gored in this matter of busing.
As long as it was little black kids being
bused miles along hot, dusty southern
roads, frequently passing “white”
schools enroute to their “colored”
schools, nothing was heard from the
Lester Maddoxes, Jimmy Carters, George
Wallaces and Richard Nixons.
But now that it’s the white kids
getting bused, wow!
The demagogues argue that students
should be allowed to attend the schools
nearest their homes.
This is another way of saying the
schools should remain segregated for all
practical purposes because housing
patterns in the South are still largely
segregated, although this is changing.
Southern schools were placed in
keeping with these segregated patterns so
that they were either “white” or
“colored” schools.
This pattern is changing, particularly
in large cities such as Atlanta, and busing
is therefore becoming unnecessary.
But in Columbus, Augusta and
Savannah, there is no practical way to
achieve integration except through
busing.
down see a chance to further their
ambitions by feeding on this discontent.
Instead of asking the people to accept
this inconvenience in the name of
brotherly love, if for no other reason,
they cuss the federal judges and urge the
boycotting of schools.
Little Johnny is being bused all the
way across town to achieve integration
because that is the only way it can be
achieved in some areas.
And unless schools are integrated,
white-controlled school boards are going
to continue to pour most of the money
and better qualified teachers into the lily
white ones.
That happened in the past and now
we’re reaping the sad results of a large,
poorly educated black population and its
attendant problems.
A unitary school system where all
schools reflect the black-white ratio of
the total community stands the best
chance of getting treated fairly
throughout by its school board
members.
Busing is a temporary solution to a
perplexing problem and it soon will be
unnecessary if whites quit fleeing to the
suburbs when their neighborhoods
become integrated.
Parents in these cities are angry
because their little Johnnies must start
to school an hour earlier and get home
an hour later due to some federal judge
ruling that they must go to school with
Negroes.
The politicians from the president on
Congrats,
One usually thinks of a diocesan vicar
general as an aging monsignor who
carries the title as a reward for long years
of solid service to the Church. With no
statistical evidence to back us up, we
hazard a guess that the average vicar
general is probably even older than the
average bishop.
And so the appointment of Father
Eusebius (“Zeb”) Beltran to the post of
vicar general, at the tender age of 37,
certainly comes with surprise.
Before making the appointment,
Archbishop Donnellan expressed his
desire to be guided by the insights and
feelings of his priests - a fine example of
collegiality in action. In selecting Father
Beltran after this process of
consultation, Archbishop Donnellan has
demonstrated his faith and trust in the
Meanwhile, busing is a cross which
concerned parents must bear.
It’s heavier enough without a bunch
of politicians, who only became
concerned about busing when whites got
involved, adding a lot of hot air to the
burden. -H.M.
Fr. Beltran
younger generation of priests to assume
leadership roles of the highest
responsibility.
For Father Beltran, this appointment
to the second highest office in the
archdiocese is a confirmation of the hard
work he has done in 11 years as a priest.
Through most of those 11 years he has
held the position of officialis, in which
capacity he has “humanized” the judicial
process of the archdiocesan marriage
tribunal, which is characterized by hard
unfeeling legalism in some other
dioceses.
The pastoral qualities of openness and
sensitivity which have marked Father
Beltran’s career as officialis and pastor
will be a blessing to all the archdiocese in
his days as vicar general. -J.J.M
Jots & Tittles
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FATHER JAMES MACIEJEWSKI
Two well-known area Catholics are being
dismissed from their jobs by the Nixon
administration in a manner that calls into
question that administration’s commitment to
the cause of environmental protection.
John Thoman has been the southeastern
regional administrator of the Environmental
Protection Agency. Paul Traina has been his top
assistant. As of this writing Thoman is gone and
Traina is going.
Between them they offer at least
thirty years experience in the work
of pollution control. Replacing
them are two men without any
experience at all in that field.
Who are the new men chosen to
lead the fight against contamination
of the air, land, and water in the Southeast?
Jack Ravan, 34, is the new administrator. His
background: eight years in the Army Signal
Corps, one year as administrative assistant to
Senator Strom Thurmond, and one year as
assistant to the chairman of the Coastal Plains
Commission.
James Westlake is to be the assistant
administrator. He has been Republican state
representative from DeKalb County with a
record distinguished only for party loyalty. He
was a leader of the Ronald Reagan-for-President
forces in the South. He is also a realtor (like
Fulton County Commissioner “Shag” Cates).
Certainly no political realist denies the right
of an administration to appoint its friends and
supporters to lucrative and. prestigious
government positions. It’s a time-honored
practice since the presidency of Andrew
Jackson. But couldn’t less critical positions
have been found (or created) for Ravan and
Westlake?
Ravan, say, with his experience in the Signal
Corps, could have been assigned to the U.S.
Printing Office’s nice new book store in
Peachtree Center. Westlake, as a real estate
man, would make a fine supervisor for federal
buildings and properties in the Southeast.
Buy why, Mr. President, inflict them on the
Environmental Protection Agency? At a time
when our earthly resources are being depleted,
our nature preserves despoiled, and our air and
water poisoned, we need tough men with
technical training, wide experience, and earnest
commitment to do the work of the
Environmental Protection Agency, before it’s
too late to save anything.
As Governor Jimmy Carter, who made a
commendable effort to save Thoman, said:
“I’ve never met Mr. Thoman. I don’t know
whether he’s a Democrat or Republican. I only
know he’s a professional who gets the job
done.”
Sadly, Mr. Ravan and Mr. Westlake are
non-professionals with no training and no
experience and, perhaps worst of all, no
discernible commitment to the cause of
environmental protection.
On the contrary, their background suggests
that their allegiance and sentiment may lie with
the big commercial and development interests
that cause most of the pollution that the
Environmental Protection Agency is supposed
to clean up.
President Nixon may have hired the foxes to
guard the chicken coop.
Power to the People
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It Seems To Me
y
The nonsense which is
talked by a few priests
nowadays on radio and TV,
and in the public prints, is
surely one of the reasons for
the decline in the number of
persons becoming Catholics
in this country. Why should
any sensible person want to
enter a Church which doesn’t
know what it
8 believes or
what God
demands of
the impression
On one
program in recent weeks, a
priest proceeded to go in
circles when asked about
papal infallibility, about
abortion, and about
contraception.
On infallibility, he talked
airily to the effect that the
subject is being “rethought”
in our time. What, he
inquired with a great show of
profundity, is the Church;
who is the Church? Does the
Church consist of the pope
and the bishops? How about
the People of God?
Never, apparently, has it
occurred to this priest to ask
himself how on earth you
would go about getting an
JOSEPH BREIG
infallible decision on
anything from half a billion
persons. Never, it seems, has
he noticed in the Scriptures
that Jesus, who is God,
founded the Church, and in
so doing made Peter the head
of it and enjoined him to
teach the brethren. Never,
apparently, has this priest
heard of the First Vatican
Council’s declaration of papal
infallibility as an essential
article of the Faith of
Catholics - an article
universally accepted among
them for 20 centuries. Never,
it would seem, has he noticed
that all through history, it
was to the pope that
Catholics everywhere turned
for the last word, when a last
word was seen to be
necessary.
Then the priest was asked
about contraception; and
with a fine air on infallibility
he announced that the next
pope will reverse the teaching
of Pope Paul in the encyclical
Humanae Vitae -- a teaching
handed down from the
beginning of the Church, and
reaffirmed not only by Paul
VI, but by John XXIII, Pius
XII and Pius XI in this
century.
And of course the priest
was asked about abortion,
and proceeded to give the
audience the standard
superficial slop about how
Catholics should not impose
their religious views on others
by law. And nobody pulled
him up short by noting that
forbidding the murder of
children before their birth is
no more an “imposing of
religion” than is the
prohibiting of their murder
after they are born. Or, to
put it another way, every
good law is based upon
religious truth; either a law is
derived from, and an
application of, the law of
God, or it is a bad law and
cannot command the consent
of right consciences.
It is too bad that nobody
thought to go back a bit in
history and ask this Daniel
come to judgment whether he
approved or disapproved of
the action of the popes who
forebade people to have
anything to do with duelling,
under penalty of instant
excommunication from the
Church. That was what
delivered us from the blood
lust of duelling. Now the
Church is trying to deliver us
from the blood lust of
abortion and from the flesh
lust of contraception; and in
doing so, the Church is
speaking, as she has done
through the centuries, with
the voice of the pope.
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‘This is our twenty-third long, hot Sum
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MSGR. GEORGE C. HIGGINS
In 1950 the French theologian, Father Yves
Congar, O.P., published an important book
entitled “Vraie et Fausse Reforme dans
L’Eglise” (True and False Reform in the
Church). A remarkably foresighted preview of
things to come 12 years later in the Second
Vatican Council, but too controversial for the
jittery ’50s, it was almost immediately ordered
off the market and shortly thereafter went out
of print and became a kind of collector’s item.
This was unfortunate for a number fo different
reasons. In any event, Fr. Congar’s reputation
has long since been amply vindicated (notably
by Pope Paul VI himself) and his ill-fated book
is now back in print. Let’s hope it will soon be
made available in English.
Though it was written largely against the
background of what was happening within the
Church in France more than two decades ago,
“True and False Reform” has much to teach us
with reference to some of our own problems
within the post-Vatican II Church in the United
States.
This is particularly true of the very last
section of the book which deals with the
problem of how to preserve unity (not
uniformity but unity) within a given local
Church (the Church in France, for example, or
the Church in the United States) at a time when
there is such a sharp division of opinion among
the clergy and the laity alike on a wide range of
debatable issues in the area of pastoral practice
and socio-economic reform.
Father Congar is not one to panic in the face
of this problem. At the same time he is frank to
say that the possibility that a given local
Church might be torn apart by intra-mural
bickering and might be split into two churches
(a “traditionalist” Church and a “progressive”
Church, or one of the “right” and one of the
“left”) should not be written off too lightly.
Fr. Congar’s warning is well taken in the
particular case of our own local Church in the
United States. On the one hand, while we
obvisouly have our share and perhaps even
more than our share of intra-mural bickering, it
is not my impression that we are in any
immediate danger of being split asunder into
two separate and irreconcilable camps.
On the other hand, there are certain danger
signals on the horizon. In some cases the
dialogue between so-called “traditionalists” and
so-called “progressives” in the American
Church seems to be degenerating, at least in
certain conservative circles, into a kind of
theological witch hunt or a new form of heresy
hunting which is much too spiteful and far too
vindictive in tone and fails to make the
necessary distinction between those matters
which are essential to the faith and those which
are open to free and frank discussion and lend
themselves to quite legitimate, not to say
wholesome, differences of opinion.
On the other side of the fence - in the
so-called liberal or progressive camp -- while
theological witch hunting, for the most part, is
taboo, fraternal charity is sometimes in short
supply. Ridiculing the “opposition” or judging
the other fellow’s motives and putting the
worst possible interpretation on them is a
human enough failing, to be sure. But it is one
thing to err in this regard and something else
again to pretend that hitting below the belt or
going for the juglar vein, so to speak, is a virtue
and that the practice of fraternal charity in the
liberal-conservative dialogue is a sign of
weakness or of a lack of commitment to the
truth.
If there is one man writing for the Catholic
press in this country who has managed to steer
clear of these two extremes and to keep his
Christian wits about him it is Msgr. George
Casey, author of a syndicated weekly column,
Driftwood, which originates in the Boston
Pilot. Msgr. Casey, a pastor in the archdiocese
of Boston, is well into his 70s.
I don’t know the Monsignor well enough to
be able to say what it is that makes him tick,
but, as a faithful reader of his column, I would
judge that he has three things in particular
going in his favor: He has a keen sense of
history, he genuinely likes people, and he is a
man of simple but profound Christian faith.
Perhaps it is these three qualities taken
together that account for his serene optimism,
which is typically reflected in the following
excerpt from one of his recent columns on
“The State of the Church”.
“The reform and the renewal and the return
(of the Church) to the world had to come
sometime. God so loved the world that He sent
His only begotten Son into it; but the
Reformation, the enlightment, rationalism,
Freudianism, and Modernism so estranged His
Church that it all but abandoned it.
“The reentry of the Church into the
contemporary world by way of collegiality,
subsidiarity, the liturgical reform, parish and
diocesan councils, due process .. .the liberation
of the Sisterhoods, the new focus on the social
gospel and the servant church has been a bit
painful. Old ways become cherished just
because they are old, and old habits become
canonized. Feelings and affections get tom up
along with them. But it has been
accomplished . . .
“This storm has been good for the Church. It
got rid of some old baggage. It was reminded
unforgettably of its true role and the prime
concern of Jesus for it: Not itself, not a code of
canon law, but people, the sort of people and
their needs as carefully described in the 25th
chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel.”
A system that can produce this kind of
youthful optimism in a man who was born
before the turn of the century can’t be all bad.
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