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PAGE 4—The Georgia Bulletin, February 1,1973
Most Rev. Thomas A. Donnellan - Publisher
Rev. James J. Maciejewski - Editor
Michael Motes - Editorial Assistant
Marie Mulvenna - Editorial Assistant
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The opinions contained in these editorial columns
the free expressions of free editors in a free Catholic press.
Peace Now--and Later
The ceasefire in Vietnam is one
week old - and throughout America
there is a positive reaction ranging from
relief to rejoicing that armed American
involvement there is ended.
But as our firearms are cooled and our
bases are dismantled, there is a danger
that Americans will shake off the
disturbing moral questions posed by the
war, like the memory of a nightmare
which fades with the busy work of the
morning.
Yet this may exactly be the time for a
re-assessment of the moral issues of the
war, for now perhaps serious questions
may be raised and discussed without the
diverting considerations of partisan
politics.
Some of these questions were raised
last week by James R. Jennings, director
of the justice and peace division of the
U.S. Catholic Conference.
Asked Jennings:
“Have we learned that the use of
American military power, no matter how
technologically advanced, is inadequate
to resolve complex internal political
conflicts in Third World nations?
“Have we realized that some evils
existing in the world cannot be corrected
by the use of American military force?
“Have we learned that American
influence, if it has any justifiable place in
the affairs of Third World countries,
must be directed toward overcoming
injustices, rather than counteracting
those whose ideologies differ from
ours?”
To these questions we might add a
couple of our own:
Granted the malice of Communist
activity in Vietnam, did not the
American reaction of obliteration
bombing finally show itself the greater
evil before the cessation of hostilities?
Or, to put it another way, was not
American retaliation way out of
proportion to Communist provocation?
We happen to think it was, but, our
opinion aside, the important thing is for
Americans of good conscience to set
themselves discussing such questions,
especially as more of the facts about our
involvment become known through
declassification of official records and
Ellsberg-type disclosures.
Men usually do take a lesson from
history, and if our consensus moral
judgment about our involvment in
Vietnam will be harsh, then history will
make it hard for us to make the same
mistake again.
It’s time again to take heed of the
urgent appeal to mankind made by Pope
Paul when he came before the United
Nations meeting in New York.
“War no more... War never again,” he
said.
We Americans cannot be responsible
for the war-making policy of other
nations, but we are responsible for our
own. We can keep our own house in
good order, and perhaps our moral
example will be a beacon to the rest of
the world.
Christians, in particular, are charged
with the responsibility of bringing the
moral teaching of Jesus Christ to bear
upon national policy.
And it was He who said:
“Love your enemies. Do good to
those who hate you. Bless those who
curse you. Pray for those who mistreat
you.”
In His spirit, the Christian should be
one who tries to constrict as narrowly as
possible the conditions under which his
country will be drawn into war.
~ JJM
Take Seriously
Any Threat of Suicide
Doctor Armand DiFrancesco
Johnny N. was thought of by all who knew
him as a good-looking, intelligent young man,
the kind that every mother would want as a
son-in-law. In college he had a brilliant,
academic career and earned three letters in
athletics. Those close to him admired his
kindness, tolerance and unstinting honesty.
Johnny had a sense of humor and a drive for
perfection.
In his last semester, he began to become
more moody and withdrawn. He complained of
being nervous to his father. His father took him
to a psychiatrist for consultation. The
psychiatrist told his father that his son was
suffering from a deep melancholy and that he
might kill himself if he were not watched
carefully, and that his son should go to a
hospital for treatment.
Mr. N. scoffed at the idea that so intelligent,
capable and composed a person as his son
should do such a thing. Two days later, at 4:30
a.m., Johnny N. quietly hung himself from the
rafters of the attic.
Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in
the United States. Every two minutes someone
tries to kill himself in this country and every 20
minutes someone succeeds. These are not
confined to adults alone as about 150 children
under 14 take their lives annually. Worldwide,
over 500,000 fatal cases are reported each year.
Suicide is uniquely a human problem for
while animals can kill, only the human animal
can kill himself. It most certainly is not true
that people who threaten suicide never do so
for most people who do attempt suicide
actually tell someone, often their doctors,
beforehand.
At one time the common law in England
confiscated the suicide’s property in the name
of the Crown, suicide then being considered a
heinous crime. Even the Church once denied
the last rites and burial in hallowed ground to
suicides.
A hundred years ago, it was blamed on
reading trashy novels. In the 1930’s, a blues
ballad called “Gloomy Sunday” was banned
from the radio because it was reported that a
rash of suicides always occurred after it was
played. Later it was blamed on the depression,
heredity and still later, on unconscious
conflicts.
According to Dr. Karl Menninger, suicide is
an act of self-murder and the person involved
must have the wish to kill, the wish to be killed
and the wish to be dead.
People who commit suicide have
been classified into four general groups: 1.
Those whose beliefs induce them to view
suicide as a transition to a better life or to save
“face” (hari-kari). 2. Those who escape old age,
pain or terminal illness. 3. Those who are insane
and kill themselves in response to delusions or
hallucinations. 4. Those who kill themselves to
spite others, i.e., “they’ll be sorry when I’m
dead.” Most suicides occur in men over 40 who
suffer from alcoholism.
Catholic countries generally have lower
suicide rates than non-Catholic countries.
Ireland has a suicide rate of 2.5 per 100,000
citizens whereas Sweden’s rate is 10 times
greater, 20.1 per 100,000. In the U.S., the rate
is higher among Protestants than among any
other religious group.
As the age level goes up, so does the rate.
Between 15 and 19 years, suicide is the third
ranking cause of death and in college students,
it is the second ranking cause of death next to
accidents. For those 85 years or older, the rate
is 26 per 100,000.
Bigots Who Cry “Bigotry”
Reverend Andrew M. Greeley
Copyright 1973, Inter/Syndicate
There is quite a debate raging among my
academic colleagues about the Gage Park
disturbances on Chicago’s South Side. The
majority of them are convinced that the
“ethnics” in Gage Park are racist bigots, and
they roundly denounce the city adminstration
for not keeping them under control. A
minority, however, point out that the people in
Gage Park have valid fears of both crime and of
the loss of much of their life’s savings invested
in their homes.
Some members of both groups turn to me as
one who sounds off frequently on the subject
of “ethnics” and ask whether in fact the people
of Gage Park are really bigots. My answer -
hardly one designed to win me very many
friends among academic liberals - is “what
difference does it make whether they’re bigots
or not?”
Let us leave aside the question of whether
Hyde Park -- the University of Chicago
neighborhood - may have its own bigots, who
seem to mostly be anti-Catholic. Let us further set
aside the question of whether there is not a
little bit (and sometimes a whole lot) of bigot
in each of us. The pertinent issue in Gage Park
and Canarsie and Forest Hills and every other
“threatened” neighborhood in the country is
not whether such neighborhoods have a
substantial nunber of bigots; they undoubtedly
do. The issue that must be faced by the rest of
society is whether the people in such
neighborhoods may have legitimate complaints
against the rest of the society at being singled
out by the immoral real estate market or by
government bureaucrats to pay an inequitable
share of the costs of racial change.
Somehow or the other, my university friends
seem to think that if it can be established
that the protestors from such neighborhoods are
bigots, then it is all right to impose
disproportionate costs on them. Bigots, in other
words, have no rights. It is a peculiar
assumption, utterly destructive of a democratic
society; but it is nonetheless the basic
assumption of much of the argument about
threatened neighborhoods. When it is
established that some of the leaders of the
protest are bigots (as they unquestionably are),
the academic and the intellectual (and
frequently the religious leader, too) all heave a
sigh of relief. They no longer have to take those
bigots’ protests seriously.
The most extreme and racist of nonwhite
militants must be listened to very carefully on
the grounds that despite his style and his anger
and his hatred, he is saying something very
important. But a white bigot - particularly if he
is Polish or Italian - has forfeited all rights to a
hearing. Small wonder that the inhabitants of
Gage Park or Canarsie or Forest Hills think
their liberal enemies are bigots too.
Unlike most of my university colleagues, I
lived for a long time in a community where
there were very many racists bigots - the sort
of bigot who would be thought to be extreme
even in South Africa. Such people hated blacks
with an irrational vehemence. Most of the
citizens of the community were not of that
sort, but frequently the bigots were the loudest
and the most effective voices in the
neighborhood. I opposed their bigotry and paid
a heavy price for it - something that most of
my university colleagues have never done. It is
easy to denounce racial bigots from the security
of the University of Chicago. (But try
denouncing the religious bigotry of some of
your fellow academics . . .) It is more difficult
when the bigots have the pastor’s ear. So, I am
under no illusion about either the prevalence or
the virulence of racial bigotry in American
society.
But I don’t think a man forfeits his rights to
equitable treatment under the law because he
happens to be a bigot or a racist (and racists
come in all colors). As long as the intellectual
establishment thinks that you can justify
dumping some groups in the society because
such people are bigots, we will not begin to face
the fact that grave injustice is indeed being
done and continues to be done to blacks and to
many whites too.
The head of a Chicago suburb recently wrote
a letter to the members of the board of a
certain Catholic college, complaining about
students parking their cars in front of the
homes of his constitutents. I suppose there
might be some valid point in his complaint, but
his electorate lives off the city of Chicago and
its industrial and labor force base. Because of
the legal fiction of suburban boundaries and
because his people have enough money, they
have been able to move away from the racial
problems of the city and have the time and
freedom to worry about student cars in front of
their houses. Good for them. The people in
Gage Park should be so lucky.
“Dred Scott”
Revisited
Joseph A. Breig
Clearly, the U.S. Supreme Court is poorly
informed - depressingly so - about the facts of
human life in its beginnings and early
development. I see no other explanation of the
court’s incredible action in constituting itself a
super-legislature and wiping from the books the
laws of the states restricting abortions.
Justice Blackmun and the six who concurred
in his opinion spoke as if all they knew about
human life in the womb was what they had
read in the newspapers and heard on radio and
TV - a compendium, by and large, of ignorance
that must be termed, at best, medieval.
The court showed not the slightest awareness
of the facts established in the 20th century by
the sciences of genetics, gynecology, obstetrics
and microbiology.
Only persons who either are ignorant of
those facts, or stubbornly refuse to face them,
can doubt that human life is an unbroken
continuum from the time of the fertilizing of
the ovum by the sperm. At that moment, as the
geneticists and microbiologists have
demonstrated, there comes into existence a
unique human being whose characteristics -
even including susceptibility to certain ailments
-- are programmed by a marvellous genetic
code.
It is you and it is I, in all our separate
individuality and recognizability, who are
conceived in our mothers. And precisely at this
point in medical history, when geneticists are
talking about treating our illnesses and
deficiences that early in life, the U.S. Supreme
Court talks as if we did not so much as exist
during the nine months of our pre-birth life.
Once that life begins with conception,
destroying it is the killing of a particular human
being. It is in no essential way different from
strangling a baby after it is born, or fatally
stabbing an adult. Yet the seven justices talked
as if nothing is involved in abortion but the
convenience of a woman -- and what they
termed her “health” and “privacy.”
It boggles the mind to try to imagine what is
“private” or “healthy” about a mother hiring a
physician to put to death her own child,
conceived in her womb. The truth is that both
mental and physical health are always
endangered by abortion.
It boggles the mind also to try to puzzle out
what motivated the justices to divide the life of
the (to them non-existent) unborn child into
three periods of three months, and then to
make, concerning those periods, legal
distinctions without any real difference - for
when all is said and done, the court’s ruling
would allow the brutal surgical butchering of an
infant at any time prior to birth.
Altogether, it is an almost unbelieveable and
grossly immoral and ignorant decision - as
wrong and ignorant as another repellent
decision - that of an earlier Supreme Court, in
the Dred Scott case, denying the humanity and
the human rights of human beings who
happened at the time to be helpless “property.”
Like that decision, this one must somehow be
reversed or overriden. Americans must not rest
until that is accomplished.
Rugged
Individuals
Rev. James Wilmes
We do not know when the adjective
“rugged” first became attached to the noun
“individualism,” but the wedding has been a
long and happy one. The lifestyle called
“individualism” has its rewards and its
penalties, and both call for a sturdy disposition
well described as “rugged.”
Individualism as a stance in daily living calls
for a clarity of thought and speech. It demands
a degree of self-respect, and an unwillingness to
be stampeded, intimidated or manipulated. It
leads a person to do the unexpectedly honest
deed, to side with the unpopular cause or
group.
Individualism rewards its faithful with
freedom of mind and spirit, of feelings and
deeds. It penalizes them with occasional
lonliness, the isolation of the pioneer, the
questioner of things-as-they-are.
A certain ruggedness, a toughness (but not a
harshness) of make-up is required. For
individualism means more than just an
impulsive, spontaneous “doing your own
thing.” It seems rather a purposeful, confident,
good-humored living of life as it comes your
way . . . Purposeful in the sense of creative: to
“make” ideas and insights, or friendships and
human fellowship, or peace and justice, or
sound structures or shining beauty. Individuals
create, and this is the meaning of our being
alive. All hail to those who are cheerfully and
firmly doing just that.
RESOLUTION: Think for yourself but think
correctly. Pray daily to be truly a saint of God,
but know this means daring to be different, like
Jesus, whose life of selfless service and suffering
was a mystery.
SCRIPTURE: “Woe to you when all men
speak well of you, for such did they to false
prophets.” Lk. 6, 26. “You shall be hated by all
men for my name’s sake.” Mt. 10, 22. “Master,
we know you teach the way of God in truth
and care not for the person on men.” Mt.
22,16. Be perfect as your heavenly Father is
perfect. Mt. 5,48.
PRAYER: Dear God, You who can do all
things, make us saints quickly, together.
A
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