Editorials
Onward As anniversaries go, sixty-fifths rank third; quarters and halves of centuries count for more. But it happens that at the same time as Commonweal observes its 65th anniversary, a first rank...
...On the evidence of his first ten months, the answer is not clear...
...It took the U.S...
...Meanwhile, the Bush administration was at odds on U.S.-Soviet policy, Messrs...
...For example, he seemed genuinely moved by his visit to Poland and Hungary this past summer, yet his response to their pressing requests for assistance was remote and inadequate...
...Baker sometimes from another...
...but the church as the people of God cannot...
...Bush has let hesitation rule too long...
...need for a more authentic expression of our incarnational theology, linking the life of faith to our work in the world...
...On both sides of the church-world equation the "established disorder" is often disheartening even to those fully committed to the tensions of being American Catholics...
...Our paralyzed politics, brittle culture, mean-spirited public life can hardly attend to questions of the common good, the commonweal, the demands of justice that cry out for redress and redistribution...
...The possibilities seem endless and thought-provoking...
...But it happens that at the same time as Commonweal observes its 65th anniversary, a first rank anniversary is being celebrated: the Catholic church in the United States is having its bicentennial...
...Such public abuse of authority demands a public solidarity movement of resistance from the local churches...
...But only something...
...The main feeling of everyone else is: let's get on with the game...
...The contents of this 65th anniversary issue can be seen as an agenda for that: concern for the future of faithfulness, especially but not only among younger members of the people of God...
...Foolish thought...
...Yet our individualistic, libertarian, and avaracious society has hardened its heart against these criteria of community and justice...
...We ought to help it...
...Individual acts of compassion or charity are dwarfed by the systemic reduction of the poor to begging and sleeping on the street...
...society are deeply in need of the distinctive and corrective orientations each has supplied the other...
...policy weighs critically in the outcome...
...Yet even as we question the capacity of our economy and our government to help support a decent life for all, citizens of other countries vote with their feet...
...At the current moment nothing seems so necessary or so difficult...
...starving it is another...
...Losing faith is one thing...
...624-30), David O'Brien traces and analyzes that history, ending with the query: Will we finally accept our full responsibility for public life as Catholics and Americans...
...These are the very standards that the best of the Catholic tradition espouses for civil society...
...Imagine the potential of such a policy world-wide...
...It is a modest triumph for Western liberal democracies in Europe and North America but one that calls for greater generosity and better coordinated global policy than the U.S...
...The laity must come to believe that the future of the Catholic church is our responsibility and to act in accord with this belief...
...Appropriately a Polish pope provides in the encyclical, On Social Concerns, a framework for analyzing the moral choices now to be faced in the disintegration of the Soviet empire, the reduction in East-West tensions, and the growing gap in economic resources between North and South...
...discarding it out of petulance is something else again...
...American life, religious and secular, has been enriched by the tensions and achievements of the ensuing collisions and collaborations...
...And only temporarily...
...The laity and clergy will hear from bishops, sotto voce, how difficult a time it is and that patience is the order of the day...
...The changes in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev have been as unmistakable as they are dramatic...
...American Catholics must not go on living as easily as we do with that imbalance in our political and personal lives...
...And the side effects elsewhere, just as improbable and just as remarkable: the dismantling of chunks of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the pledge of nonintervention in the affairs of others, and the unilateral reductions of troops and weapons systems...
...The main thing is not to conceal," he told the deputies, but to "acknowledge and correct mistakes...
...What might be the effect on U.S...
...bishops were presented with two documents, on the Middle East and on international debt, both useful instruments for assessing moral issues in areas where U.S...
...The American Catholic church and U.S...
...These achievements were encapsulated in Shevardnadze's unprecedented remarks before the Soviet legislature last month...
...While confession has always been seen as beneficial for individuals and for those around them, what might it mean for nations...
...AS THE WORLD TURNS "We want to see perestroika succeed...
...they also constitute the threads of argument that have woven their way through Commonweal's sixty-five years...
...Paradoxical then, that these well-honed skills, rigorous moral analysis, and urgent calls for justice should elude the pope and bishops when it comes to the life of the church itself...
...What calls forth such impassioned language and what is clear to all, especially the laity, is the steady erosion of the spirit of reform that promised to make of Catholicism an adult faith fit for (not fitted to nor set against) life in a fragmented and often heedless world...
...Bush now has the opportunity to look beyond political expediency and generously encourage others...
...Our independence and dual perspective have allowed both editors and readers to express a deep commitment to and a deep discontent with the church and the society in which the church has ultimately flourished...
...Why is it, though, that nearly a quarter into his term, the first question that sprang to mind with the announcement of the nonsummit summit was, "Can George Bush handle it...
...Even Mr...
...For sure, not yet a second Russian Revolution, and for sure, still many miles to go-individual human rights, multiparty democratic structures, the sheer opening of the Soviet mind, to begin...
...However unjust, however brutal American life may seem at times, these immigrants (over 12 million in this decade) see something better than they have in the lands of their birth...
...Herriot (in the London Tablet, Sept...
...Something is to be said for this...
...yearning for a distinctive Catholic sensibility in the midst of a bourgeois culture...
...It took George Bush ten months to say that publicly, ten months that have been shaking the geopolitical world...
...In Eastern Europe, the failure of state socialism and soviet-style governments has turned Poland, Hungary, and the Baltic states toward experiments with mixed and market economies and multiparty politics...
...Bush has started talking about ships in the night...
...seems prepared to develop...
...Indeed, the style of governance we have witnessed these past eight years has not only ignored those cries, it has put at risk our very ability to provide the most basic of civic necessities: personal security, housing, education, and health care...
...Congress to double our aid...
...Finally, after his trip to the Wyoming mountains in September with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, Baker prodded administration policy out of its persistent reexamination mode by finally declaring, "It would be folly indeed to miss this opportunity...
...We have so much and are prepared to reapportion so little...
...And will not...
...Bush will meet Mikhail Gorbachev one-on-one, somewhere off the coast of Malta...
...The church has a useful contribution to make here...
...Quayle, Cheney, and Gates speaking from one side, Mr...
...At their annual meeting in Baltimore this past week, the U.S...
...23), usually so moderate, signal the growing impatience: "The time for quiet diplomacy is past, and so too, at every level of the church, for 'obedience,' 'meekness' and 'discretion' as a cover for what is in fact sheer spinelessness...
...The decision to meet with Gorbachev bodes well for taking a definite direction...
...In his essay, "Join It, Work It, Fight It: American Catholics and the American Way" (pp...
...Our rough calculation, somewhat to our surprise, shows that for one-third of that two-century span, Commonweal has been a part of the story...
...Perhaps the church as an institution can survive on the narrow and inflexible views that Rome enforces...
...Those minority views quickly became the received wisdom in the post-Vatican II American church, so much so that it seemed at times that a Commonweal might no longer be necessary...
...Italy offered virtually as much...
...And so next month Mr...
...In what the New York Times called a "highly unusual act of national contrition," he admitted that the invasion of Afghanistan had been unlawful and that the Krasnoyarsk radar station in Siberia was an "open violation" of the 1972 ABM Treaty and would be dismantled...
...It cannot be a question, however, of using past institutional crimes and misdemeanors as easy alibis for opting out or of endlessly feeding our anger...
...The great expectations following Vatican II have after twenty-five years come up against a solid barrier of fear and insecurity, created to a large degree, we believe, by Roman overreaching and highhandedness...
...We shouldn't just want to see perestroika succeed...
...Folly indeed...
...The words of John F.X...
...But unpredictably and undeniably creative nonetheless...
...Despite the minority views propounded here, certainly before Vatican II, we have been able to bring a religious perspective to "the great issues of the day" (as we were wont to say) and a worldly perspective to the great issues of the church...
...In both its liberal and conservative variations, Catholic assimilation to the American way of life has brought accommodation to public philosophies of declining substance and vigor...
...Watching his administration has been like watching the video replay judges on Monday night football dither over an obvious touchdown call...
...We ought to help it...
...We have departed not merely from liberality and liberalism but from more basic norms: the social nature of human beings, their rights and responsibilities within an attentive community, the reasoned discourse that governs and sustains such communities through a vigorous politics...
...relations with Vietnam or Cambodia if we were to admit our mistakes in Southeast Asia...
Vol. 116 • November 1989 • No. 20
