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A
Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta
Vol. 19 No. 18
Thursday, April 30,1981
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PROTESTING outside the Peachtree Plaza
Hotel, where American Home Products Corp. was
holding its annual stockholders meeting, are from
left, Mary Maynard of Trinity United Methodist
Church, Adelle Kushner of Atlanta Clergy &
Laity Concerned, Robert Randall of Clifton
Presbyterian Church and Kristine Ann Azzarello
Of Georgia State University’s Newman Center.
Infant Formula Policy Protested
The annual stockholders’ meeting
of American Home Products Corp.,
held last week at the Peachtree Plaza
Hotel, was marked by
demonstrations concerning the
company’s position on the marketing
of infant formula.
Some 25 to 30 demonstrators
handed out 1,000 leaflets outside the
hotel, while the meeting was in
progress. Inside, representatives of
several religious organizations,
including two members of the Sisters
of Charity of New York, addressed
the stockholders’ meeting.
Sisters Mary Kay Finneran and
Mildred Azevedo addressed the
gathering on behalf of the order, the
Sisters of Charity of New York,
which holds shares of stock in
American Home Products Corp.
Sister Finneran also spoke for six
other orders or religious groups.
The issue addressed concerned a
draft proposal, drawn up by the
executive board of the World Health
Organization, which would provide
an international code for the
marketing of infant formula.
Marketing techniques in the Third
World, particularly by the
Swiss-based Nestle organization, have
come under strong attack from a
variety of health, consumer and
religious groups who argue that
promotion of infant formula in poor
countries discourages breast-feeding
of babies. Because of unsanitary
conditions, lack of water and other
problems in Third World countries,
substituting infant formula for breast
milk can lead to malnutrition, illness
and death among babies, those
protesting say. Charles Mingle,
spokesman for Atlanta Clergy and
Laity Concerned, said American
Home Products Corp. is the second
largest marketer of infant formula in
the Third World, behind Nestle, and
the largest U.S. based company in
that market.
The WHO draft proposal,
attempting to provide a code to
regulate marketing techniques in the
Third World, is being opposed by
three American manufacturers,
including American Home Products,
according to a March article in The
Washington Post. At the Atlanta
stockholders’ meeting, the company
declined to act on a resolution,
proposed by the Interfaith Center on
Corporate Responsibility, that would
have supported the World Health
Organization’s code.
John R. Stafford, incoming
president of the company, said, “Our
position is that the code would
unduly interfere with our ability to
communicate with the medical'
profession about the need for this
product (infant formula).” The draft
code is scheduled to come up for a
vote in May at the 34th World Health
Assembly in Geneva.
Brother Hugh - - Ninety Years
BY THEA JARVIS
Ninety years ago this May, a
red-headed Irishman laid claim to life
mid the salty breezes of Newport,
Rhode Island. For 36 of those 90
years, Brother Hugh Reardon has
graced the Monastery of the Holy
Spirit with his friendly, thoughtful
presence.
“Most people say they want to be
home for Christmas,” said Brother
Hugh in the monastery parlor a few
weeks before his birthday. But on
that Christmas day 36 years ago, “I
wanted to be here.”
Actually, he explained, he had to
settle for the day after Christmas,
1945, to enter the monastery as the
foundation’s first candidate for the
brotherhood.
“We were two hours late leaving
Penn Station and a sleet storm in the
Carolinas put us another seven hours
behind. But I was ‘the first one who
came who stood here,’ as they say in
Brooklyn,” he recalled, cherishing his
notoriety as the monastery’s first
postulant.
Brother Hugh, who entered
religious life at the age of 54, had
visited the South during World War
I and liked what he saw.
“They treated us (the soldiers) so
well. When I read that they were
beginning a Trappist foundation in
Georgia, I was interested. I felt they
needed the Catholic Church down
here,” he said.
What is needed and what is
welcomed may not always be the
same thing.
“There were only 300 people
living in Conyers when we first came,
and our neighbors, the Cleve
Morrissons, were the only Catholic
family around,” said Brotner Hugh.
“There was a law in the state that
any institution such as ours was
subject to an annual investigation by
the authorities. Once a year, they
would come and look us over.”
While the local community was
satisfying its curiosity about the
strangely-dressed men who had taken
over Rockdale’s old Honey Creek
Plantation, Brother Hugh and his
brethren turned to the task of
putting the young monastery on its
feet.
“The monks were housed in the
old wooden monastery that had
replaced the original bam. I worked
around the farm and took care of the
dairy cows, growing and grinding the
corn that was their food,” he
remembered. “When we began the
main buildings, I helped the
bricklayers.”
Brother Hugh was sent to
Gesthemani Abbey in Kentucky for a
short apprenticeship as a shoemaker
when his own monastery lacked one.
It was there he met that most famous
of contemporary Cistercians, Father
M. Louis - Thomas Merton.
“I looked at him and he looked at
me - we didn’t have speaking
privileges. The only thing I can say
about him is that he seemed to have
an extra inch above his forehead!”
said Brother Hugh, struck by the
memory.
But Brother Hugh Reardon is
perhaps best known as Holy Spirit’s
gatekeeper. This job he held from
1948, when the Conyers foundation
AT THE MONASTERY OF THE HOLY SPIRIT in Conyers,
Brother Hugh Reardon, 90 years young this May, stops by the
gatehouse to visit with his old friend, Brother Pius.
CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS
Doctors Define Life
BY JIM LACKEY
WASHINGTON (NC) - What
promises to be one of the most
thorough congressional explorations
of the issue of abortion opened in
Washington April 23-24 with several
doctors testifying that conception is
the point at which human life begins.
The hearings were called by the
Senate separation of powers
subcommittee to examine a proposal
that Congress reverse the Supreme
Court’s 1973 abortion decision by
declaring “that human life shall be
deemed to begin from conception.”
But the subcommittee’s chairman,
Sen. John East (R-N.C.), said on the
second day of hearings that the
whole range of U.S. policy on
abortion would be examined.
“I would hope that whatever
happens to (this bill) or whatever
happens to a constitutional
amendment or whatever else is down
the road that at least we have been
allowed now to begin a public
discussion on a very vital and critical
and important matter of moral and
ethical and sociological
consequence,” said East, one of the
Senate’s crop of freshmen
Republicans.
Responding to charges that the
hearings were one-sided since seven
of the first eight witnesses testified in
favor of declaring the beginnings of
human life at conception, East
pleaded with a largely hostile
audience not to judge the
subcommittee’s examination of the
issue until all aspects had been
considered.
He said the hearings would resume
about May 20 and go at least into
June as the subcommittee considers
the statutory, constitutional, ethical
and other implications of the
proposed legislation.
Young
became an abbey, until his sight
failed him 11 years ago. As official
welcomer, he had the opportunity to
greet visitors from all over the
country and around the world.
“It was quite a job,” recalled
Brother Hugh. “But before I came to
the monastery I had been up and
down the country doing contract
work. And when the Depression
came I had gone to work for the
Railway Mail Service in Penn Station
in New York where I had plenty of
experience meeting people. So I was
the man for the job!”
Brother Hugh’s memories of his
gatekeeper days are warm and vivid.
Children were a great part of his life.
“My friend Mrs. Peacock came
over one day from Covington with
some friends. She had her three
young children with her - one was
just an infant who rested on my
shoulder. She asked if I would take
the children over to church to be
blessed,” he remembered.
“Of course, I did, and asked the
Lord in the Blessed Sacrament to
watch over them. Mrs. Peacock was
so grateful. I told her not to think so
much of me - I was just part of the
furniture.”
Mrs. Peacock, like so many friends
of Brother Hugh, is not a Catholic.
After his eyesight began to fail,
Brother Hugh was able to maintain
some duties at the gatehouse, now
expanded to include a well-stocked
bookstore, with the help of his
friend, Brother Pius.
“A little nine-year-old girl
plumped down beside me on the
couch one day in the gatehouse. She
asked me if I wanted a coke,” he
said, a smile playing on his lips.
“I told her I didn’t care for one,
but knowing how smart little girls
are, I asked if she would like one.
She said sadly that she would but she
didn’t have any money. I told her I
would see if I could find a dime in
the cash register. When I was
reaching for the dime, she told me
‘Get three. I have two friends who’d
like a coke too!”’
Children weren’t the only ones to
(Continued on page 6)
A famed French geneticist, Dr.
Jerome Lejeune, led off the parade
of doctors by declaring that while
life has “a very, very long history,”
every life has a “very neat beginning,
the moment of its conception.”
Continued Lejeune, professor of
fundamental genetics at the Medical
College of Paris, “As soon as the 23
SUPREME COURT:
NEW LONDON, Conn. - Seven
demonstrators, including 24-year-old
Capuchin Brother Jacob Mersberger
of Chicago, were to appear in state
Superior Court, New London, April
27 following arrests at a weekend
demonstration protesting the
launching of a nuclear submarine, the
USS Corpus Christi (“body of
Christ” in Latin), in Groton, Conn.
The seven were arrested April 25
after they had blocked a sidewalk
outside the General Dynamics-
administration building on the
Groton waterfront where the
submarine’s launching ceremonies
were being held.
Placing a large wooden cross on
the sidewalk, they poured a red
substance on it (believed to be
animal blood), prayed “Blood of
Christ, heal us; Corpus Christi, bring
us peace,” and refused to move when
asked to do so by police. The arrests
followed.
At a later similar pray-in on the
sidewalk, other demonstrators were
paternally derived chromosomes are
united, through fertilization, to the
23 maternal ones, the full genetic
information necessary and sufficient
to express all the inborn qualities of
the new individual is gathered.”
Lejeune and others also
commented that the successful
(Continued on page 6)
arrested, bringing the total of arrests
for the activities to 21.
The prayer demonstrations were
part of a larger, peaceful protest by
more than 600 persons, including
Catholics and members of other
religious denominations, who
opposed the naming and launching of
the USS Corpus Christi, officially
named after the city in Texas.
Navy Secretary John Lehmann Jr.,
at the christening of the submarine,
said it was “an instrument of peace,
of justice and of freedom.”
The larger demonstration included
a march and was kept away from the
christening ceremony. Protest
speakers included Notre Dame de
Namur Sister Carolyn Jean Dupuy, a
physicist who teaches at St. Thomas
Aquinas High School, New Britain,
Conn. Episcopal Bishop John
Burgess, retired professor at the Yale
Divinity School, also addressed the
protesters.
Initial Tally Shows
$22,000 For Day Camps
BY GRETfHEN REISER
An initial tally of contributions to a Palm Sunday collection for the
Archdiocese’s summer day camp program shows that $22,085.16 was given. A
number of parishes are in the process of forwarding contributions, however, so
the figure is not complete.
The collection will go toward the cost of a day camp program to be held at
Ss. Peter and Paul parish in Decatur and St. Paul of the Cross and St.
Anthony’s parishes in Atlanta from mid-June to late August. The programs are
being planned to serve from 600 to 700 children when school doses in June.
In addition to the money gathered from the second collection,
approximately $4,300 has been given to support the program from
contributors in other parts of the country, including donations from school
children, religious orders, and individuals.
While the day camp program is to be held at the three specific parishes,
pastors of 22 other parishes in the Archdiocese have been invited to link up
with one of the three day camp sites in a “sister parish” arrangement. The 22
other parishes, which are those within Atlanta, the suburbs and surrounding
perimeter, are being asked to cluster their support toward one of the three
sites. Prayer support, volunteers and supplies could then be provided for each
site from a cluster of sister parishes.
Those willing to give time as volunteers at one of the day camps, or able to
donate supplies, access to a recreation area, or housing to someone coming
from out of town to work at the camps, will find a form to fill out on page 7.
Forms have also been distributed to all the churches in the Archdiocese.
Late Abortions May Be
Restricted To Hospitals
WASHINGTON (NC) -- The Supreme Court ruled April 27 that states may
outlaw abortions performed outside of hospitals for women more than three
months pregnant.
By a 6-3 vote the justices upheld an Indiana law in the case, Gary-Northwest
Indiana Woman v. Orr. The affirmation was not accompanied by an opinion
and Justices William J. Brennan, Thurgood Marshall and Harry A. Blackmun
dissented.
The controversy arose in Indiana shortly after the 1973 Supreme Court
decision, based on a woman’s right to privacy, which legalized abortion in most
cases. The 1973 decision said state governments cannot interfere with a
woman’s choice to have an abortion during her first three months of
pregnancy.
The ruling said states may seek to protect the woman’s health during the
second trimester and may move to protect fetal life only during the final
trimester.
The Indiana legislature later in 1973 passed a law that required parental
consent for abortions performed on unwed minors and prohibited abortions
outside a hospital for women more than three months pregnant.
That law made it a felony for a doctor to perform an abortion, other than a
first-trimester one, away from a hospital.
The Gary-Northwest Indiana Women’s Service’s Inc., an abortion clinic, and
a woman then 16 to 18 weeks pregnant challenged the law in a federal lawsuit
filed in 1974.
21 Arrested In Protest
At Conn. Sub Launching
ARCHDIOCESAN
When We Need The BEST-We Ask For YOU
See Page 7
SUMMER
'81
DAY
CAMPS