Newspaper Page Text
(fya/iCtceA, - ScumLcuj,, ‘Tft&icA, 6
i
orgm
Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta
Vol. 15 No. 5
Thursday, February 3, 1977
$5 Per Year.
Roots
Eric Severeid, the CBS News
overlord, says that “it’s audience
has waited 300 years for
ROOTS.” Although his
appearance each night is beamed
like a divine revelation, in this case
he may be right. With a creeping
uneasiness we have all waited for
this confrontation. Black and
White have buried the hatchet
without wanting to know how it
ever got into their hands in the
first place. ROOTS reminds us
how.
Do-gooders and do-baders of all
types and shapes have talked and
written “their fool heads off”
about injustice. Only rarely have
we all readied our thoughts to
look the ugly beast square in the
face. ROOTS and its clever
author, Mr. Haley, brings about
one of these unwilling
confrontations. We have a chance
now to settle this nagging score, to
heal this old wound.
From primitive blasphemous
acts of body snatching that we
called slavery, to un wieldly,
sometimes unlawful public
displays that we called marches,
the friction has been there. Like
the Berlin Wall it divided. We
called it by names we dreamed,
concocted and borrowed, never
caring about truth. We called it
inferiorness, an economic
necessity, benign care of the weak,
God’s plan for the races, states’
rights, communism and on and on.
We called it everything that the
Queen’s English could translate
negatively. But we never found
the real handle. ROOTS helps us.
Steam rises from the hotbed of
injustice and the hospital of pain
that generations endured. The sick
relationship created and enforced
by sheer numbers using the
weapons of denial was a disaster,
and doomed from the beginning.
It denied freedom to people born
to be free, knowledge to people
who found out and hope to a
people stripped naked of
everything except hope. But it left
the mark of intense agony. Only
Paul Robson, himself a bitter
product of this bitter relationship
could interpret the “darky’s” song
from “Showboat.” “I’s git weary
and sick of tryin, tired of livin and
scared of dyin.”
ROOTS tells us clearly that the
suffering ran deep but reminds us
that the divisions of generations,
so insufferable and so
insurmountable, were destroyed in
just one decade. That’s all it took.
One small ten years. Black and
White together and the dream was
fulfilled. The barrier torn down.
The agony recognized. The
divisions began a mending period.
We are far from being “one
nation under God” but we are on
the way. As the old slave preacher
said “we ain’t what we should be,
but Lord God Almighty, we ain’t
what we was.” And ROOTS told
us that too.
ARCHBISHOP DONNELLAN (left) chats with Father Jeremy Miller,
Dr. Justo L. Gonzalez of Emory University, and Dr. Jose Miguez-Bonino,
one of the featured speakers, during the recent Ministers Week hosted by
Emory’s Candler School of Theology.
Church’s Best Investment
Found In Catholic Schools
GREEN BAY, Wis. (NC) -- Catholic schools are probably the best investment that
the Catholic Church has made for its future, William McCready, senior study director
at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center (NORC), said here.
McCready argued that losing this investment on the ground that there is not enough
money to meet the payments would be foolish.
Coauthor with NORC researchers Father Andrew Greeley and Kathleen McCourt of
“Catholic Schools in a Declining Church,” published last year, McCready contended
that their research shows that Catholics are not giving, proportionately, as much
money as they could to support Catholic schools, and that, at the same time, an
overwhelming majority of Catholics thinks that Catholic schools are worthwhile.
Addressing a five-day institute for principals cosponsored by the National Catholic
Educational Association and the Green Bay diocese, McCready said Catholics are
“much too quick to say” that Catholic schools are “expensive, that they’re messy and
a problem, that they take a lot of time and a lot of concern.”
“You people know that better than anyone else, but you also know what the
payoffs are. You know the payoffs to the students and I would hope that most of you
are aware of the payoffs to the community because that is also something that needs
to be talked about.”
The NORC study showed that Catholic schools '
than they were a decade ago,” McCready said.
‘are more important to the Church
fiSSSSii!
a«u*w- oftic ; „
Atlanta. Oeorg
12 is a week in which tbe Catoolic Community ^
is a Catholic Schoo tem to our
ates celebrates thollc School system ^
nogram means to the w
ie community. values that it
mnity, the QUr Ca tholic
vou r whole-hearted support them
dTnvfte you to know them better V ^ h00 ts
said: “1 am come that y
a.
Most Reverend Thomas A. Donnellan
Archbishop of Atlanta
■
MINISTERS’ WEEK
World Council Leader Speaks
BY FR. JEREMY MILLER, O.P.
The Forty-Second Annual Ministers’
Week of Emory University was held
from January 17-19 on the campus. The
three-day colloquium attracted about
500 participants and a panel of
international scholars. Ministers’ Week is
an effort by the Candler School of
Theology to meet the increasing need of
on-going education of the clergy in the
Southeast to recent trends in theology,
Church and mission. A majority of the
participants at this colloquium, whose
theme was “Changing Mission, Changing
World,” were themselves graduates of
Candler.
American culture, is not the proper
place to begin one’s reflection on
mission in Latin America. One must
begin with the idea of “solidarity in
suffering” and the struggle for a new
life, a more human life, in Latin
America. God calls all to liberation from
all forms of oppression. The question to
the missionary is, “how can you assist
Gospels “exalts the poor,” is the
“liberator of captives.”
This is a starting point for thinking
out missions, not a proposed solution.
The call to liberation is a way of looking
at the problem more accurately,
according to Bonino. “But liberation is
also your problem,” he told
For Related Story On Ministers’ Week At Emory,
See Page 8 Of This Week’s Issue.
The missionary experience of the
Church in Latin America was a central
focus to the theme of Changing Mission.
Dr. Jose Miguez-Bonino, recently
elected President of the World Council
of Churches and a member of the Joint
Working Group (WCC-Vatican
Secretariat for Christian Unity) was a
keynote speaker along with Mortimer
Arias, former Methodist Bishop of
Bolivia, who resigned the episcopacy to
minister to Bolivian tin miners.
Archbishop Donnellan delivered the
opening benediction at the address by
Bonino.
Bonino is one of the foremost
interpreters of Latin American
liberation theology, a movement in
theology to which Catholic theologians
such as Juan Luis Segundo of Uruguay
and Gustavo Gutierrez of Peru have
contributed greatly. Bonino outlined for
the participants the general lines of the
concerns of liberation theology by
analyzing a particular crisis faced by
North American missionaries to Latin
America, namely, ministering to a very
different culture from the highly
technological American and Canadian
settings, and an uncertainty among
many missionaries as to what should be
the foremost concerns of the gospel.
The missionary is often caught in a web
of suspicion. He may be suspected by
his Church Mission Board at home
when he shares certain “new ideas”; he
is often suspect by the Latin Americans
as a representative of a colonializing
power.
Thinking mostly of Protestant
missionaries, Bonino mentioned that the
early mission to Latin America brought
along with it the “progressive” ideas of
the American ethos such as ideas of
democracy and free enterprise. Christian
ideas expressed within American
cultural overtones were welcomed
initially, but then a reaction against
“Americanization” set in and with it a
resistence to the Christian missionary
effort. This has fed the crisis of identity.
Christianity, as understood within
us, from the gospel, in our struggle
toward human dignity?”
The Church must participate in
God’s liberating project in the human,
political, and moral sphere. Until issues
are understood through the filter of
liberation, the missionary focus in Latin
America is blurred with North American
concerns and values. The Christ of the
the audience. You too are part of a
system which puts one in bondage. “We
in Latin America have nothing to teach
you. But you may have something to
learn from us.” The way liberation
theology would define mission, Bonino
ended, “is availability for the struggle
for liberation.” We all need to be
liberated. Are we, as Christian
ministers, available?
BVJ LJ-ft i r\s
■ .. .
TV Mass February 6
Father Noel Burtenshaw will be celebrant of a televised Mass airing Sunday,
February 6, at 10:30 a.m. on WSB-TV Channel 2.
Violation Charged
WASHINGTON (NC) - A Catholic political action group has asked a branch of the
Organization of American States (OAS) to condemn the United States for violating the
terms of the 1943 Bogota Declaration of human rights by legalizing abortion.
Violence In Spain
MADRID (NC) - A new wave of rightist-leftist violence has broken out in Spain,
raising fears that King Juan Carlos’ attempts at gradual democratization may be
derailed by a military coup. Toward the end of January an apparently rightist band
machinegunned a group of left-wing labor lawyers here, killing three and wounding
seven. Two of the seven died later.
Natural Death Bill Opposed
BALTIMORE (NC) - The Maryland Catholic Conference (MCC) has issued a
statement opposing enactment of a natural death bill and reinstatement of the death
penalty in the state. The MCC board of governors - the bishops of Maryland, Delaware
and Washington, D.C. - said they opposed the natural death act because it is “neither
necessary, effective or desirable” in protecting a person’s right to refuse extraordinary
means to preserve his or her life.
GOVERNOR GEORGE BUSBEE recently signed a
proclamation declaring Catholic School Week in
Georgia February 6 through 12. At right, Sister
Valentina Sheridan, Superintendent of Catholic
Schools, and Sister Patricia Geary (left of Governor
Busbee), Curriculum Consultant for the archdiocese,
join a group of students in the Governor’s office to
witness the signing. This week we salute our Catholic
School System on pages 2 and 4.