The Desolate City

...Muggeridge constructs skillfully, citing seven conditions and stages of revolution, and showing how each applies to the recent history of Catholicism...

...too many lives were shattered...

...Yet, all in all, the strength of the radical forces was such that there was little need for moderation...

...He] further warns that the alliance of pacifists with the New Left and antiwar groups gives them political and religious clout -'peace at any price'- that could endangerAmerican interests...

...First, the Church has been in much worse straits than current ones many times in the past...

...c) that I don't regard myself as a Marxist (as both Tompkins and Myers would know if they had read more than a fragment of my work...

...The revolutionary faction grasped the power of the new technology and used it to stunning advantage...

...GRAND RAPIDS, MICK 49503 812 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 51...

...11 GUENTER LEWY D. G. Myers astutely says that the forum I presided over on mass culture criticism was "the highpoint" of the Modem Language Association convention in San Francisco last December...

...And to some degree or another, all of us will admire the boy who scolded the king, and many of us will praise him...

...She i,ku `~J I IIH f Norwich, VT 05055 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 THE DESOLATE CITY REVOLUTION IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH Anne Roche Muggeridge/Harper & Row/$16.95 Michael A. Scully 50 notes that the modernist forces now control most institutional strongholds in the North American and European Church, but also that the "revolution" has betrayed many of its early pious supporters, some of whom are now active "counter-revolutionaries...

...By 2,000, 70 percent of Catholics will live in the developing world...

...In her book, Mrs...

...One old cardinal quipped that he could think of no scriptural basis for the notion of ecclesial collegiality except the line "and they all fled...

...This was what Muggeridge calls the "triggering incident...

...my point was that the political polarization of cultural criticism between left and right is a healthy trend but that it has been a factor in the resistance to the incorporation of mass culture criticism by English departments, many of AUTHORS WANTED BY NEW YORK PUBLISHER Leading subsidy book publisher seeks manuscripts of all types: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, scholarly and juvenile works, etc...

...Of course, Myers is too simpleminded to acknowledge that there is a wide diversity of marxist and feminist theorists or-to address any of their substantive points or disagreements among them-let alone to recognize some value in anything they say...

...I'm sure he received a pat on the head from his elders at The American Spectator for having mastered their substitution of repulsive malice for reasoned analysis and their confusion of adolescent snickering with witty repartee...

...Furthermore, the authority of, and public identification with, the Pope will be enhanced by technologies that crave pictures of identifiable leaders in dramatic situations...

...She notes, however, that some of the first liturgical changes were claimed (often erroneously) to have early Christian pedigrees...

...and bishops, especially those in the Rhine countries and North America, who saw Vatican II as an opportunity to reclaim power and autonomy lost in the preceding hundred years...

...Even if he had been right, isn't it feasible that at this point there might be more original things to be said about Chicana and other contemporary culture than about Shakespeare...

...PUBLISHERS WEEKLY "GuenterLewy's careful study of the ways in which four pacifist organizations have abandoned their commitment to nonviolence helps explain much about the wider policy debate over Vietnam, nuclear weapons, and Central America.-It is essential reading for anyone who truly cares about the pursuit of peace and freedom...

...Muggeridge insists the true purpose was "the passionate desire and vital necessity of the revolutionary clerisy to destroy the idea that the hierarchical magisterium possessed supreme authority in the Catholic Church, authority unavailable to any other segment of that community...

...Their knowledge, as it were, would set them free...

...In this revolution, the Bastille was the bedroom...

...Muggeridge writes, "It is clear now that there were in effect two councils, the `conservative' Council, which is now realized to have been a brilliantly clever doctrinal holding-operation, and the radical Council, the enormous media event with its revolutionary stars and its box-office appeal...

...but Myers deliberately neglects to men CORRESPONDENCE tion that her criticisms were in prefato ry contrast to her praise of my new an thology American Media and Mass Cultu>e...

...Television news had come into its own...

...1. An aggrieved class...

...Arguably, the survival of the West requires the Church...

...He quotes me indirectly (without credit) as saying, "Worse yet, conservatives are beginning to develop cultural criticism of their own...

...New ways of gathering and disseminating news and information gave the drift from traditional norms a novel power and supercharged the power of novelty...

...Second, in demographic terms, the Church now truly is "universal...

...Pope John Paul II understands what amazing tools have been given him in satellites and television mini-cams...

...0 "STOP THEM DAMN PICTURES" That's what "Boss" Tweed demanded when he saw the handwriting on the ball (Tammany, that is...

...If "Jane Tompkins is throwing bombshells," as Myers claims "a friend said" (presumably a friend of Myers, not of Tompkins, who tells me she found Myers's account ludicrous), none hit anyone on the dais...

...The religious academics are the Church's information industry and knowledge elite...

...10001 M rs...

...his successors will not forget it...

...More than half the book is devoted to this argument, which Mrs...

...and then chortles that "Gitlin and Ohmann didn't know what to say in response...

...The bishops desired more autonomy from the Vatican and greater authority in their dioceses...

...7. Consolidation and institutionalization-or counter-revolution...

...That it was stormed by celibates suggests the likelihood that there were stakes involved other than the happiness of Catholic marriages...

...On every occasion, eras of decay, worldliness, and corruption have been succeeded by periods of rejuvenation and renewed spirituality...

...In assessing the Church's future prospects (as though it were a human organization...

...Despite his own preferences, and those of 95 percent of his sixty-plus member commission to study the Church's traditional teachings about sex and procreation, Pope Paul VI-saying that he was unable to find a basis for overruling the Church's traditional teaching-issued the encyclical Humanae Vitae, in July 1968...

...As such, they bear the same relation to those in positions of traditional Church authority as media professionals or academics in secular society bear to those in business or in older professions, such as medicine and law...

...That's about all Myers gets right...

...2. A climate conducive to radical change...

...the reverse cannot be argued as convincingly...

...The sexual revolution was in the foreplay stage...

...He writes for The American Spectator, and many other publications the Church's power structure, they grew resentful...

...Leaving aside their insurance policy, the promise of their Savior never to abandon them (a piece of the Rock, if ever there was one), Catholics and their well-wishers can find much to be cheery about...

...Those words also describe the condition of the Catholic Church, Mrs...

...Left Perspectives (published by the University of California Press) and the articles in it by co-panelists Todd Gitlin, Richard Ohmann, and especially Kate Ellis, whose presence Myers rudely ignores...

...The "worse yet" is Myers's invention...

...B. EEBDMANS PUBLISHING CO...

...Having attended most of the sessions he reports on, I can attest that virtually every sentence in his article is either unfactual or distorts the context of quoted statements in a thoroughly dishonest manner...

...6. A radical phase proclaiming a new order...

...continued from page 9) It is all very well for D. G. Myers to make sport at the Modern Language Association's lefties-fairest of game in more than one way-but then why not add to one's "moral authority," since that is what criticism is supposed to aspire to, by getting one's facts straight...

...The heart of Mrs...

...he is only out to join in the bashing of left academics that has become tiresomely repetitive among the herd of independent neocon-intellectualoid minds...

...Todd Gitlin Professor of Sociology University of California Berkeley, California...

...GEORGE WEIGEL Cloth, $19.95 At your bookstore, or write: WM...

...But, no, it is not funny...

...On critical issues, he frequently offered strong, traditional statements, and then undercut them by allowing inexplicable exceptions and neglecting to enforce his edicts...

...it mixes words whose tones and meanings toll the passing of an age, rather as one hears the surf's crash and pebbles' clatter on Dover Beach in Arnold's "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar...

...HS JEFFERSON AVE...

...It is cheery to think so, and there's more than a chance it's true...

...Thus even these days, with so many of its buttresses asunder, Catholicism's future sometimes seems to lie before it "like a land of dreams...

...For your own, and each gift subscription, send $39.00 to: POLITICAL PIX ~ Box 80411 VISA and Mastercard are welcome...

...I deduce from Myers's pathological antifeminism that the author is a male...

...Even in the best of future circumstances, however, many changes will remain, as the cost of undoing them would be prohibitive...

...She relates, at considerable length, the sad litany of his vacillations...

...Muggeridge ends her book with a moving chapter titled "Roman Remains_" A splendid finish to a lamentation...

...As the theologians demanded respect for their views on moral and theological issues, so the bishops staked their claims for greater autonomy and for a share in the Church's teaching authority, when acting "collegially...

...Some years ago, Irving Kristol offered the maxim: "We must be cheerful, even when we're not happy...

...A nne Roche Muggeridge introduces her moving and beautifully written book with a passage from the Lamentations of Jeremiah on the fall of Jerusalem: "How doth the city sit desolate that was full of people: how is she become as a widow that was mistress among nations...

...Send for free, illustrated 40-page brochure H- 80 Vantage Press, 516 W. 34 St., New York, N.Y...

...My intention in organizing the forum was precisely to air some of the disagreements between leftist cultural critics and non-leftists like Tompkins...

...3. A weakened government...

...His successor, Pope Paul VI, Muggeridge rightly calls the weakest Pope of this century...

...and (e) that I think all kinds of people, even Ph.D.'s, or especially Ph.D.'s, make use of culture, "high" and "low," for all kinds of purposes, including learning and having fun...

...A penetrating contemporary chronicle, always amusing, POLITICAL PIX is custom-made for anyone interested in the events that shape and shake our world...

...Jane Tompkins was indeed critical of some varieties of academic marxism, "Charging thatAmerican pacifism since the Vietnam War has lost its conscience abandoning the principles of nonviolence, Lewy, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, critiques four leading pacifist organizations...

...New authors welcomed...

...The Vatican, like other corporate home offices, will benefit greatly...

...Paid subsistence wages, without influence in Michael A. Scully co founded the journal This World...

...Muggeridge says that when Pope John XXIII realized, during the first session of Vatican Council II, that events were out of control, he attempted to organize a movement among the bishops to bring the proceedings to a close...

...would have heard the responses Ohmann and I did, in fact, deliver...

...Boss" Tweed met his maker in the Ludlow Street Jail and Thomas Nast put bitingly eloquent political cartoons squarely and permanently in the middle of American political life...

...There are larger matters at stake between Jane Tompkins and myself than can be crammed into a letters column, but for the record, I said (a) that Tompkins, who has written an impressive study of nineteenth-century popular fiction, was building herself a straw elitist...

...Religious academics are the Church's "new class," and the tremendous expansion of Catholic institutions of higher learning in this century greatly expanded their numbers...

...Muggeridge tells us, which is nowadays "like a city ravaged by war...

...5. A moderate phase stressing continuity with the old order...

...Their breath was fairly taken away...

...the old hymns were sung no more, replaced by Father John Pepsicola strumming his latest tunes...

...so do maxims...

...b) that contrary to one of her charges I don't regard emotion as lowgrade stuff harnessed to low IQ's...

...If Myers had done the minimal research worthy of a graduate student at Northwestern, he would have counted five on the former and eight on the latter...

...Tompkins's praise was tempered with some disagreements with Gitlin, Ohmann, and me, but Myers's claim that "Gitlin and Ohmann didn't know what to say in response" is nonsense-both responded at length, as did Ellis and I, in an amicable manner and agreeing with many of her criticisms of the more arcane and doctrinaire varieties of marxism, as the enclosed text and audiotape verify (note, for example, Gitlin's statement that he is not a marxist...

...The old nun was stripped of her habit...

...the missal became a weekly throwaway...

...Muggeridge contends that there were, indeed, two aggrieved classes: religious academics, of whom theologians were the most powerful and prominent...

...Myers delights in Jane Tompkins's blast at Richard Ohmann and myself for condescension, moral smugness, etc...

...The spires have fallen, the wells are poisoned, the government is in exile...

...d) that I'm-all for studies of how people watch television, and have, in fact, been involved in some such research...

...Modern mediaa benefit popes and presidents at the expense of congresses and bishops' conferences...

...Unlike earlier factions who attempted to "update" or "modernize" Catholic teaching and practice, the disaffected faction in the 1960s had the spirit of the times on their side...

...A sampling of Myers's further errors: He claims, "There were as many sessions on `Chicana' writers as on Shakespeare...

...Y et the theologians could have done little without the help of bishops, who had their own axes to grind...

...Lamentations serve a function...

...By the early 1960s, it had started to make sense to talk about "the media...

...But the pictures didn't stop...

...Muggeridge's argument is that in the 1960s and 1970s, during and after the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church suffered what amounts to a successful revolution, quite like the upheavals that transform secular societies...

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...How this came about and, secondarily, the likelihood of repair and reconstruction, are the themes of The Desolate City...

...Secularization in the West was well along, and with it the privatization of morality...

...Precisely, the knowledge and consequent Council influence of theological experts, to whom the bishops turned for guidance on Council issues and on whom all parties later relied for interpretations of Council documents, made possible the implantation of ideas and phrases subsequently useful in justifying a radical agenda...

...Tweed aside, we think Emerson had it right when he said, "Caricatures are often the truest history of the times...

...Myers is identified as a graduate student of criticism, but his article reads more like fiction than criticism...

...4. A triggering incident...

...the national newsmagazines had influence far greater than they retain today...

...Muggeridge believes that for the most part the moderate phase of the revolution ended when the Council ended, late in 1965...

...Had Myers paid attention rather than swooning into insensibility at the spectacle of one leftie bashing another, he (she...

...Now, for the first time ever, the best of today's political cartoons from all over the country will be featured each week in POLITICAL PIX, a six-page broadside published 50 times a year and delivered by First Class mail...

...He failed at this, and was dead before the opening of the second session...

...Consider, by way of example, that defender of "the moral authority of great writers," D. G. Myers, who chooses easy entertainment value over serious clarification...

...in truth, she thinks it more than that), Mrs...

...Third, the "revolution" in telecommunications and information-services will encourage unprecedented organizational centralization and "corporatization" (while rendering unnecessary geographical centralization-i.e., physical proximity...

...Muggeridge commits neither the sin of presumption nor despair...