Correspondence
Correspondence On the waterfront New York, N.Y. To the Editors: I enjoyed John Logue's "The Law of the Sea at Low Tide" [Aug. 28 ]. As a longtime observer of the Law of the Sea Conference, I...
...11 editorial on "The Monastery...
...Mark me down-I stand with Dr...
...Ambassador Pardo echoed President Johnson's call in 1966 for using the oceans "for the benefit of all mankind...
...For the past seven years I've lived in Seattle...
...Men and women join these monastic communities freely...
...No effort was made, however, to alert the audience to the distinction between the celibacy of priests and that of monks...
...The Conference should not leave the initiative to the Reagan administration...
...It adds up to more than five thousand years of wasted TV time...
...But monks freely choose celibacy as an integral aspect of the lifestyle they desire...
...Marquis cites as having a low murder rate and "little mixing of races...
...I suppose that if I was to put my own prejudices to work, I too could come up with some oddball theory on regional and racial tendencies toward violent use of guns...
...The TV program in question showed little or nothing of this...
...What is so remarkable about that...
...It should do its best to make the treaty what it was supposed to be: a significant force for economic and social progress...
...I was stationed there with the Air Force from 1961 until 1964 and one of the sordid memories I have of the place is that each time a group of us GIs went into town to have a few drinks at one of the local ginmills, we could count on being asked to leave if one of our number was black...
...Many priests in the Roman Catholic church do not choose celibacy as such...
...It helped to underline the relationship between monastic life and all human life...
...This does not mean that they find celibate life easy...
...I do not, however, know what he means by a "gospel" that is somehow separate from the human response to the event of God in the world...
...11 ]. In fact, thousands of other monasteries all over the world are equally alive and well...
...The very fact that so many were interested in the topic is encouraging...
...For some candidates celibacy is merely a price to be paid...
...I was raised on the east side of Detroit...
...RICHARD HUDSON Executive Director, Center for War Peace Studies Editor, Disarmament Times Strange seabedfellows Wilmington, Del...
...They are not running away from anything, but they are running after something: an environment in which every detail is geared towards a single-minded quest for God...
...At least in a church bound by the teaching of the first chapter of Genesis (that humankind is made in the image and likeness of God) and by the doctrine of the incarnation, to assess church institutions "in the light of the gospel" is precisely to take their history and anthropological structure seriously...
...Seattle has been called America's most livable city partly because of the low crime rate...
...Marquis may want to check out the homicide statistics for the amount of "Black-on-White" crime...
...This is exactly why I suggest we are on the eve of reformation...
...The monastery at Spencer offers living proof of this, but the TV version of it did not...
...The point was lost in the script," you admit...
...Here the races do mix...
...Perhaps there is a lesson monasteries must learn about the media...
...To the Editors: According to the latest news, "the Monastery" is alive and well at Spencer, Massachusetts, in spite of ABC's sorry TV program shown under that title on August 20 [Editorial, Sept...
...ELLEN COLLESANO, O.S.C...
...I have lived in several different re-gionsof the country, including Montana, which Mr...
...My own sense at the time was that these men were stretching their hearts and their vocabularies to find words to describe a reality they know...
...We cannot escape the ambiguities and paradoxes of our lives, but we can own them, hold them, and move with them, and know that others have the same paradoxes . . . some even spend their entire lives looking at them "face to face...
...There were few murders in Montana, certainly, what with slightly more than one hundred thousand people spread over the fourth largest state in the Union...
...I've not carried out any surveys as he has...
...The monks of Spencer Abbey spoke from the hurricane of their own hearts and their words fell on an audience forced to walk into the stormy headwinds...
...So my theory is to outlaw guns in the old Confederacy, and keep them out of the hands of women and Palestinians living in California...
...And Christians continue to find in monasteries not an abstract idea of God, but a meaningful life, a scope for their talents, and a way of serving the human family...
...Monasteries have come and gone, national boundaries have broadened or disappeared altogether, but the same words are heard: "O God, my God, for you I long" (Ps...
...Yet, through his writings this monk influenced the lives of countless people beyond the confines of the church, because he spoke to the monk in each of us...
...They find it not easy, but fulfilling...
...Logue is an honest man who has held fast to this truth: that the God-given wealth of the oceans must be used to feed the hunger of all of God's human creation, not just for the appetite of the rich few...
...Where was Ronald Eyre of BBC's "Long Search" when "Monastery" happened...
...Many of us who watched the showing of "The Monastery" squirmed in our seats, trying to avoid the shocking contact with a pneuma that couldn't be missed...
...People come from far and wide to refresh their hearts by the joyful singing of psalms and by the Eucharistic celebrations at St...
...To the Editors: Thank you for the Sept...
...They could find it with the Trappists, to be sure, but hardly on TV...
...To say the races "mix" in Murder City is ridiculous, and Mr...
...They put up with it, simply because they want to serve as priests...
...It is true that the setting of a monastery, with all of its routine and its character, allows the quest to be more explicit...
...LEO BRADLEY...
...Every day I see interracial couples of every kind imaginable...
...Monks want to be celibates...
...I applaud the daring of ABC to show such an agonizing attempt to share a bit of monastic life...
...Today we find the Reagan administration trying to grab the only thing left as the "Common Heritage," the mineral nodules in the deep ocean more than two hundred miles from shore and under fifteen thousand feet of water...
...It no doubt causes anxiety to look into the eyes of other human brings who, like ourselves, are searching for the reality that will propel us forward...
...Why did we see so little of it on TV...
...And what of the "authentic, earth-moving experience" for which so many are looking to the monks, as you say...
...25 ] that my assessment of Schillebeeckx's Ministry is based on anthropological assumptions (though not to the exclusion of the historical, as he appears to imply...
...It was past time," you wrote in Commonweal, that a network should give to a Christian monastery equal time with "oriental gurus, cults, and the spirituality of hot tubs.'' Well, your wish was fulfilled...
...I also share his skepticism about the workability of an International Seabed Authority which gives each of thirty-six nations a veto with respect to some of its most important functions...
...Predictably, a disproportionate segment of the show catered to a prurient curiosity concerning monastic celibacy...
...RALPH A. KEIFER TV runs amonk West Redding, Conn...
...But you should have wished also for a capable producer to fill that slot of prime time with a worthwhile program...
...An honest man can no more give sanction to these grabs of the "Common Heritage" than he can say that a rotten fish does not stink...
...And it is Good News to hear the ageless, boundless cries of humanity...
...28 ] that the God-given wealth of our world's oceans is on the verge of being "ripped-off" by the fat and the greedy...
...PHILLIP JOHN COLLINS Who's orthodox...
...Poor Clare Monastery Guns & race Seattle, Wash...
...I would immediately point out that Lee Oswald, John Hinckley, and Mark David Chapman are all male WASPs, born and raised in Texas...
...The thirty million who watched "Monastery' ' share this instinct with those whom you might be writing off a bit too glibly as followers of "oriental gurus...
...I am convinced, however, that the words spoken by each of the monks were words echoed by all humanity throughout the centuries of time and toil...
...Garth Gillan [Letter, Sept...
...he'll find it insignificant...
...To the Editors: I agree with Dr...
...Given ninety unsuspecting monks, forty hours of taped interviews, and the most commonplace misconceptions about monastic life, most anybody could have produced this program, which, taken at face value, amounts to the monastery's official declaration of spiritual bankruptcy...
...This is precisely the central issue which contemporary theology joins...
...stitutions is based on the recognition of their full humanity...
...Maybe they will turn to more authentic reports, like Thomas Merton's Sign of Jonah, Henri Nouwen's Genesee Diary, or Basil Pen-nington's O Holy Mountain...
...that James Earl Ray is a male WASP from Tennessee...
...28 ]. As a longtime observer of the Law of the Sea Conference, I share his indignation at the greed and shortsightedness of many if not all of the geographically fortunate nations in the conference...
...John Logue's analysis in "The Law of the Sea at Low Tide" [Aug...
...Yet, present church legislation links the priestly office with celibacy...
...Logue and the Common Heritage...
...LEO BRADLEY women and Palestinians living in California...
...Joseph's Abbey, seen in "Monastery," but not heard from...
...What came through, clear to me, was that we were also given a mirror image of all human life - agonizing as that might be...
...Perhaps the agony is to own what belongs to us...
...Perhaps it is actually a bit of the divine that we are sensing...
...Today we find that the coastal nations, aided and abetted by the oil companies, have laid claim to two hundred miles of ocean, calling it an "Exclusive Economic Zone," with no obligations to anyone...
...Thirty million viewers are supposed to have wasted ninety minutes watching "Monastery...
...It is a choice perfectly compatible with what you call "cheerfulness and love of the earth...
...It was Merton who called monasticism "an instinct of the human heart...
...To the Editors: I agree with Dr...
...It does not refer to the celibacy of monks...
...The ultimate issue of orthodoxy is not the issue of the orthodoxy of theologians, but whether the defenders of ecclesiastical institu-, tions are themselves orthodox as long as they refuse historical and anthropological critique of those institutions...
...They are still "out on strike" because their demands have not been met...
...DAVID STEINDL-RAST, O.S.B...
...A generous law of the sea treaty could do a great deal to bridge the dangerous gap between North and South and to set the stage through major international cooperation for real disarmament...
...They seek-and find-God in a lifestyle cultivated in the church since before even the Apostles' Creed was formulated...
...what I do find difficult to believe is his statement that "This is one of the few times I find myself in disagreement with Commonweal...
...Basil is a monk of St...
...If the conference incorporates the Common Heritage Fund proposal in the draft convention at next spring's New York session it would mark a major turning point in the international system...
...To the Editors: I wish to respond, briefly, to E. G. Marquis of New Smyrna Beach, Florida, who finds himself in disagreement with Commonweal on the question of gun control [June 19 ]. I will not begin by saying that I find it difficult to believe that there are people out there who actually think that the one "consistent factor" determining a relatively high or low murder rate in the different regions in the country is "different races living together...
...Park Forest, 111...
...Where was Roy Bonis-teel of CBS's "Man Alive...
...The world of sex would be far less thrilling than God made it, if we humans were deprived of this free choice...
...What Commonweal calls a "well-known crack in modern Catholic apologetics" may refer to clerical celibacy...
...This spring the Reagan Law of the Sea treaty negotiators were instructed to "go out on strike" from the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea over the demand that the world give moral, and legal, sanction to unilateral exploitation of the deep seabed minerals by American mining companies...
...The doubt, the passions, and the personality quirks belong to us...
...Let's remember that the historic Jesus is both guru and oriental, though we can come to discover that he is even more than that, if we dare follow that monastic instinct of our heart...
...no more so than householders find married life easy...
...Agony & ambiguity Minneapolis, Minn...
...Anyone from that city can tell you of the hard-and-fast racial boundaries you will find there...
...For thousands of years, men and women within and without the church have found the celibate path a way to human happiness and wholeness...
...Joseph's Abbey...
...Again and again the voice of the interviewer insisted on bringing the conversation back to this topic...
...Thomas Merton was not even mentioned...
...Perhaps the showing of "The Monastery" failed to explain in a logical way the contemplative life or the rich heritage and traditions of the Cistercians, but it did explain the human way of life...
...The critique of ecclesiastical in...
...As your review pointed out, the reality is the human, existential condition within which we all find ourselves-or get lost...
...Fortunately, we tend to see what we'd like to be there, and many of my friends found something or other that raised the show above a total loss of time...
...Well, too bad...
...What a sea change has occurred since 1967 when Arvid Pardo inspired the world with his landmark UN speech calling for ocean wealth to be used as "The Common Heritage of Mankind," especially for the poorest peoples...
Vol. 108 • October 1981 • No. 19
