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Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta
Vol. 20 No. 2
Thursday, Janaury 14,1982
$8.00 Per Year
FOR POLAND
6 Submission A Spiritual Trial’
S.M., PH.D? - Father William Seli earns a few more initials to
add to his Marist designation, at least in spirit. Following
rededication of the renovated Our' Lady of the Assumption Church
in Atlanta, Father Seli was presented with an honorary
Doctor of Architecture degree by Crawford Murphy, denoting no
doubt, the lessons well learned during the parish project. For the
story on the renovations and photos, see page 2.
EVANGELIZA TION:
PARIS (NC) -- Poles submitting peacefully to marital law in their country
are undergoing a spiritual trial like the Passion of Christ, said Archbishop Jean
Marie Lustiger of Paris.
He said the sufferings of the Poles were caused by the West’s betrayal of
Poland after World War II and their only way out today would be suicide.
“The choice is not between liberty and death - for a freedom sought by
armed force would be death -• but between death and life,” the archbishop
wrote in the Paris daily, Le Monde, following the imposition of marital law in
Poland.
He asked people to pray for Poland and to “pray to understand that the
Poles are paying the price of our peace, bought by us over 35 years ago, not for
30 pieces of silver, but by their slavery.”
Archbishop Lustiger was born in Paris but has his roots in Poland. He is the
son of Polish Jews and a convert to Catholicism.
In his article he analyzed the political options open to the Poles as coming
down to two: despair and suicidal revolt, or submission to martial law and
living through their trial by the strength of their spirit and their faith.
When the Polish hierarchy preached calm to their people after the
crackdown, it was not a cowardly compromise with state power, he said, but a
decision that was “politically realistic and above all spiritually inevitable.”
“1 would like to remind you of one fact: If today the Poles are driven to
despair, this despair does not date from today,” he wrote. “It dates from 1939,
from the time when other Europeans did not want to die for Danzig; from the
time Poland lost 6 million people; from the time when Yalta divided up the
world and (Poland) lost the possibility of democratic life.
“Today, when the strictly legal efforts of Solidarity find themselves up
against force, pure and simple, Poland does not have any political solution
before it. I say there is no political solution since the situation is blocked
within the country by martial law and outside the country by a division of
Europe that the West neither wants to nor can modify,” he wrote.
Archbishop Lustiger said that from a human viewpoint the situation leads to
despair and death, “A death brought about by revolt crushed in blood, death
from the normalization of a police state, and in individual cases death by
suicide.”
But he said that the Poles cannot choose death because “if today the Poles
decide to die for Poland, then they will cause Poland to die. “Poland will never
die while we live,’ says the national anthem.”
He asked rhetorically whether in choosing to live Poles would be choosing “a
life without liberty, which is surely a subhuman life.”
He answered by saying that “any political analysis of the situation including
the one I have just outlined is far from the reality. If Poland since 1939, and
especially in the last year and a half, has not died, it is because it has lived a
spiritual life.
“It is the kind of life that (Soviet dissident Alexander) Solzhenitsyn and
others have experienced individually, the power of the Spirit, the force of
authentic morality, the salvation that God gives in death itself.
“In Poland, with Solidarity and the Black Madonna of Czestochowa this
experience has been lived by an entire people,” he wrote.
He said that the non-violent response of the Polish people “Is the exact
spiritual and practical opposite to the German pacifism of ‘Besser rot als tot’
(Better red than dead). What is demanded of them is not to placate the unjust
but to overcome them by the powerless force of the innocent, of the victim
who outlives his executioner.”
“The passion of Poland today is to have the spiritual courage not to die but
to live,” he wrote.
Dr. King’s Spirit Still Prods A Forward March
Phone Calls Touched
Lives At Both Ends
BY GRETCHEN KEISER
Sitting in a circle, near a living room fire, the men and women gathered
about St. Thomas Aquinas rectory meeting room didn’t look the part of
evangelists.
Bundled up in sweaters, slacks, turtlenecks and jeans against the late
December cold, only a hint in the conversation betrayed that one is a salesman,
another a woman with young children at home. They were drawn together to
hash out the strengths and weaknesses of a program in which they had been
evangelists for a month, and a willing ear to hurting people who called a phone
number they saw in the newspaper. Those in the room, husbands and wives,
had each taken two 24-hour phone shifts during the month, talking to people
who had seen ads inviting questions about the Catholic Church and visually
extending the “Peace of Christ” to those in need.
The impression, to be determined precisely by logs kept of the 500 or so
calls, was that at least as many non-Catholics as Catholics had called the
number during the month-long program, conducted under the auspices of the
archdiocese’s Evangelization Committee.
Perhaps the most joyful were the reconciliations several encountered as
Catholics, who had mistakenly thought themselves barred from sacraments,
learned through a phone call that they were not. These calls, from divorced
Catholics who had not remarried, but believed they were barred from receiving
the Eucharist because of their divorce, brought great joy, said one man who
had been part of the phone team. “They were just overwhelmed when they
found out they could (receive the sacraments),” he said. One woman who
phoned had been attending Mass for a year and a half, but had not been able to
take the step of asking anyone in her parish about receiving the Eucharist. Her
phone call and conservation broke the barrier, leading her to a meeting, and the
sacrament of reconciliation.
Other phone calls came from Catholics who had not been in a church “for
anywhere from a year to 25 years,” another team member said. “Almost every
call I got from a Catholic, they said they felt abandoned,” wondering whether
anyone cared that they felt strangers in a changing Church.
Weaknesses in the program raised at the meeting, which was held while all
those participating kept fresh memories, were coordination between the
phone-answering team and parish follow-up teams who were to receive the
names of any callers in their parishes who were willing to identify themselves
and need further support. One of the proposals raised was to involve parish
volunteers in the preparatory meeting which the phone team had during the
(Continued on page 2)
BY MSGR. NOEL C. BURTENSHAW
He’s an engineer now. And his
family is grown. He lives in
Southwest Atlanta in a
middle-to-upper-class black
neighborhood. His life is good and he
- let’s call him Bill - and his wife
have few complaints.
But Bill remembers the South of
the forties and fifties. He remembers
growing up in the pre-King days.
“It was bad,” remembers Bill. “It
wasn’t slavery, it wasn’t the cotton
fields. But it was bad. You would
meet the cop on the street or some
other nasty white guy and he’d call
you ‘boy’. ‘Hey boy’ he’d say and
you would want to scratch his
sneering eyes out. In your gut, you
would want that awful
condescension to stop and you knew
it was never, ever going to stop. The
frustration was so bad.”
“It was bad to have to sit On those
buses in the back seats. It was a
problem to go downtown, even to
the stores. What if you needed to go
to the bathroom? You could not use
just any convenience.”
“I loved the movies and yet I
hated them. Why did my people,
why did I, have to make that climb
to the balcony? Once I went to a
Georgia Tech game. We were herded
into a fenced-off part of the stadium
like cattle. I never went back. It was
like South Africa.”
“I remember going for my driver’s
license. There were two entrances,
one marked ‘white’ and the other
‘colored’. The sight of those
entrances and so many like them in
this city lit fuses of fury and pain in
___ ^ >>
me.
“I hated them each and every one.
Then along came Dr. King and led
Americans of all colors to demand an
end to the unjustice. The bus
boycott in Montgomery was the
Mute Bishop Of Joliet
Sets Example In Death
JOLIET, Ill. (NC) - Bishop
Romeo R. Blanchette, retired
bishop of Joliet, who for nearly
three years maintained his humor
and courage despite a disease that
reduced him to immobility and
muteness, died Jan. 10 at St.
Joseph Hospital in Joliet.
On Jan. 6, he celebrated his 69th
birthday at the hospital, where he
had been confined for more than a
year and a half.
Three years ago, the Mayo Clinic
in Rochester, Minn., diagnosed his
illness as “Lou Gehrig’s disease,” a
terminal, incurable illness of the
motor nerves technically called
amyothrophic lateral sclerosis.
On two radio call-in programs in
Joliet in January 1979, Bishop
Blanchette announced his
resignation and bade farewell to the
people and the diocese he had
served for 30 years.
“Death is really the beginning of
eternal life. It should be a cause for
joy,” he told the radio listeners. “A
terminal disease is not something
that should bring despair. Rather it
is a reminder to make us re-examine
our lives.”
Bishop Blanchette eventually
became immobile and voiceless, but
communicated by using a method
he had devised before reaching that
stage. The procedure divided the
alphabet into vowels, the first half
of the consonants and the second
half of the consonants. When the
right letter was pronounced, the
bishop blinked his eyes until the
correct word was formed. Through
that long and tiring method, he
wrote several articles published in
the diocesan newspaper, the Joliet
Catholic Explorer and also run in
National Catholic News Service.
In one, last June, he said, “When
I became ill with a disease that
would render me immobile and
without voice, I decided that I had
a choice of being angry, grouchy,
irritated, rebellious or just plain
ornery. Another choice was to
laugh at myself, be cheerful, and
try to see humor whenever possible.
“The second was my choice,
which with the help of God, I have
tried to follow to the best of my
ability.”
Last November, he said he had
received letters from people around
the United States and in other parts
of the world offering prayers,
seeking his prayers, and telling him
of their own lives and the
difficulties they face. He added that
many said his articles had given
them courage “to try harder, to
accept more gladly their crosses.”
Though continual severe pain
accompanied his paralysis, Bishop
Blanchette did not complain. He
often said he wanted to set an
example for dying just as he
attempted to be an example for
living.
beginning and I remember thinking it
is more than just a beginning. It is
the beginning of the end.”
And so it was for Bill and his black
brothers and sisters. The voting rights
legislation, the public
accommodation legislation, school
desegregation all destroyed an old
order, dripping with corruption and
bitterness. A new day dawned.
“But the new day was not easy,”
says Bill. “Resentments were
rampant. Whites resented the change
and we resented our history of
segregation and terror. Often down
the years we have faced each other -
unyielding. Both sides have had to
learn many things and mostly learn
to compromise.”
“I look back and see that at one
time, few professional positions were
open to blacks. In some cases, after
the King era, ONLY blacks could
successfully obtain many of those
same positions. Accusations were
hurled back and forth. The efficiency
of black workers was questioned.
Reverse discrimmination was a
phrase often used. These were tense
times. And there are still tense
situaitons.”
“But, I want to make this point,”
says Bill. “Until now the march to
freedom persevered. The difficult
path to acceptance proceeded, uphill
perhaps, but in an optimistic way.
This Reagan thing wants to destroy
all that. I can’t believe it after all our
pain, our suffering to make it work,
this man takes it apart.”
Bill was agonizing over the Reagan
administration’s decision to reverse
an 11-year policy of the federal
government to deny tax-exempt
status to private schools practicing
racial discrimination.
“It’s not these right wing
religions,” says Bill. “They will fade
from sight. But Dr. King gave his
young life to rid us of senseless
injsutice, we struggle for years to put
it together, we are beginning to see
some results and Reagan comes along
and says we must go and do it all
over again. It’s not just racist, it’s the
ANNIVERSARY ~ Mrs. Coretta Scott King steps to the
microphone amid applause at the opening of a week of ceremonies
marking the 53 rd birthday of her late husband and the dedication
of the Freedom Hall Complex at the King Center. Archbishop
Thomas Donnellan was among those speaking at an interfaith
service Sunday at Big Bethel A.M.E. Church. Keynote speaker,
pictured below, was the Rev. Jesse Jackson, founder of People
United To Save Humanity (PUSH). (Photos by Don Tortorella)
height of stupidity.”
“And, Lord knows, as we
celebrate the birthday of Dr. King,
this insensitive policy is an insult to
his memory. However, let it be,
maybe blacks are losing the spirit he
gave us. It might be time to renew
the march.”
All the terms used by Bill recall
the pressure packed days of the
sixties. They were days of marches
and speeches and optimistic new
eras. They were days of battles won
peaceably, for the most part, on the
streets. They were days of real
revolution that, hopefully, will never
have to be lived again.
However, let no one be fooled, the
spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
- “We shall overcome” -- lives on.