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A Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta Vol. 19 No. 18 Thursday, April 30,1981 $8.00 per year 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