Editorials
Looking toward the next millennium, we should take stock of the Holy Spirit's presence in this otherwise most destructive of centuries. Clearly, Vatican II stands out as a striking manifestation...
...in redressing historic failures...
...in the inviolability of conscience...
...Four years and tens of millions of dollars have produced no indictment of Bill Clinton in the Whitewater case...
...His Republican colleagues pretend fury, and his committee's chief investigator is tossed off stage...
...There being few limits on what Start can investigate means there are no limits to what partisans like Burton and Gingrich will try to do, and thus no limits to what Clinton will do in repulsing their attacks...
...Ladies and Gentlemen, we are paying these people good money for a very bad show...
...Representative Dan Burton (R-Ind...
...As a consequence, the church committed itself to renewing the life of holiness: as manifest in its liturgy...
...Independent counsel Kenneth Starr closed his investigation before the Little Rock grand jury by hauling back Susan McDougaI1, in shackles and prison garb, and by indicting, for the second time, Webster Hubbell, this time along with his wife, his accountant, and his lawyer...
...Watergate was a political drama that transfixed the nation, slowly building to its denouement--the disgraced Richard Nixon's offering a stiff-armed salute from an airplane door...
...Though the bloody details are missing, the analogy fits our current situation...
...While the council's documents refer to tile Spirit more than 250 times, more remarkable still was the council's tenor of openness and hope...
...Before his death, he managed to rehabilitate himself in some measure because the Constitution provided a process for an investigation and his political friends judiciously urged him from office, thus making the system whole again...
...Bring back the Constitution...
...Whitewater is a vaudeville show with clowns tumbling onto the stage for brief appearances...
...The appearance of McDougall and the indictment of Hubbell produced nothing, except perhaps an implicit threat to the yet-to-be-indicted Monica Lewinsky...
...We have farce instead of tragedy because no limits are imposed on the clowns...
...Commonweal 6 May22,1998...
...Richard Nixon now seems a tragic character fatefully caught up in his own paranoia and machinations, ensnared in the traps he laid for others...
...when called to account for this selective editing, gets even and releases all the tapes...
...and in reaching out to other churches, faiths, and people of good will...
...THROW OUT THE CLOWNS "The first time as tragedy, the second as farce," so said Karl Marx contrasting Napoleon's 1799 seizure of power in France to that of Louis Bonaparte in 1851...
...Members of Congress had to be convinced, and only when convinced did they indict...
...Whitewater is to Watergate as farce is to tragedy...
...in authority exercised as a charism of service...
...The extra-Constitutional office of independent counsel is one cause of this interminable nonsense...
...To live with this open-ended reality, while avoiding the temptation to retreat to previous but now inadequate securities, will be a test for both hope and inspired wit...
...The slow unraveling of his presidency was governed by constitutional procedures with a Congress and party system capable of restraint as evidence of his treachery accumulated...
...The church's subsequent encounters with Orthodoxy, with Judaism, and with mystical traditions, East and West, as well as the rich ferment within its own house from the competing insights of traditionalists, liberationists, feminists, and charismatics, all attest to the Spirit's presence...
...Today, we see the consequences of a system largely without procedures and men without restraint...
...McDougall and Hubbell are crooks, but they have served their time and their crimes were peripheral to the primary investigation...
...Nixon resigned rather than undergo trial...
...it is farce verging on soap opera...
...Meanwhile, the Republican Congress plays to its groundlings, releasing ineptly (perhaps fraudulently) edited transcripts of conversations taped while Hubbell was in prison...
...With a grand jury sitting in Washington, the independent counsel now focuses on sexual scandal, perjury, and suborning witnesses, charges originally rising from the Paula Jones case, thrown out of court two months ago...
...in works of justice and solidarity with the poor...
...Clearly, Vatican II stands out as a striking manifestation of the Spirit at work...
...Meanwhile Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich struts about whispering of crime in the White House and impeachment of the president...
Vol. 125 • May 1998 • No. 10
