Bare Ruined Choirs

...This is what Americans quaintly call 'freedom of religion,' and what the Bible calls idolatry...

...Now, whom does Senator Weicker think he's kidding...

...And, alas, when this occurs, observes Wills, "the divine is subordinated to the human~ serves Caesar...

...As Wills points out, for the mass of Catholics Vatican II and its aftermath "threatened psychic ruin for them personally, as well as institutional jeopardy for the church...

...rather, he is talking about a ghetto mentality, "an isolation from the intellectual currents of this country...

...Mathematics may have replaced patriotism as a last refuge for scoundrels, at least in the social sciences...

...He believes that the Church has for much too long contributed to a "Catholic ghetto...

...D. H. Lawrence once remarked that our civilization's "dirty little secret" was sex...

...Not that I would have you read Andreski's book uncritically...

...so the truer liberal--i.e., Adlai Stevenson~had, at the outset, a stronger claim on him than a fellow Catholic with Jack Kennedy's dubiously liberal past...

...If faith was a virtue," observes Wills, "and doubt was opposed to it, then doubt was a sin...

...It was a delightful campaign...

...Visiting other states, one heard such pleasant recognitions: "Oh, yeah, that's where nuclear submarines come from" or Colt firearms or ball bearings...

...While Weicker went about portraying him as a one-man Weatherman bomb-and-orgy squad, poor Duffy devoted his scanty energies to refereeing staff disputes over whether or not to bill himself as The Reveren~, Dodd, meanwhile, bumbled along with chin up and smile bright and every hair in place, looking more like an embalmer's chef d'oeuvreevery day...

...I mean...

...It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest...

...Several crises later, Mr...

...No more...

...David Bowie, the English androgyne, and Mr...

...By the "Catholic ghetto," Wills is not referring to a ghetto of a racial or economic kind...

...Last year, computer simulations of population growth and resource depletion were the rage, typified by the work of Forrester and Meadows reported in Limits to Growth, which predicted catastrophic collapse of the world economy in a few decades...

...Wills takes the disarray of the Catholic Church as a model of institutional breakdown, tracing parallel agonies in church and state...

...The willingness to gore the oxen (or sacred cows) of liberals and conservatives alike is a persuasive token of his honesty...

...Not only does he suggest that friends are rewarded with good reviews and boat-rockers dismissed with unfavorable ones (or worse, silence), but he comes close to misleading our youth when he warns, "one must never assume without good evidence that the reviewer knows better than the author...

...Surveying rot and corruption on every side, poor Mr...

...But sin is in the will--so intellectual objection to the faith must be willed away by virtue, by one's faith . . . . Letting the intellect dwell on any doubt was like entertaining impure thoughts . . . . So at times one had to ignore one's faith in order to retain it . . . . " This ghetto mentality was largely responsible for the attitude of many Catholics regarding the change that came about because of Pope John and the Second Vatican Council...

...Nixon has the better case...

...And if one were to have a Catholic president, it was better to have Kennedy than Gene Mc20 The Alternative November 1973 Carthy...

...Professor Andreski is critical of such simulations, whether growth games or war games, because they focus on outcomes at the expense of analyzing the assumptions on which the model is built...

...Soon even Harvey Cox would be writing: "I used to believe, and even hope, that mankind might someday outgrow the religious phase and live maturely in the calm, cool light of reason...

...The rest of the book is excellent...

...Nixon must have concluded, in his rather simpleminded way, that he might as well have a little fun along with everybody else...

...For those Catholic intellectuals who supported Pope John and Vatican II, John Kennedy represented the kind of Catholic liberalism that would revamp the political and social orders according to their blueprints...

...Recently, the ForresterMeadows doom scenario has undergone withering attack on its assumptions...

...Some of us with long memories recall how he made his way into the U.S...

...Tuning in the Top Forty, he hears h/s kind of music: The Andrews Sisters singing "Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy," only to be told it's not Patty, Maxine, and Laverne but Ms...

...Expectorate it, please, like Micawber in the comeuppance scene reiterating "Heep!') His Lachrymosity, please believe me, is not universally beloved out here...

...Consider--he is an impressionable boy from the hinterlands...

...It becomes "a social ornament and buttress, not changing men's lives, only blessing them...

...And so Weicker went to Washington, giving the last laugh to Dodd, who must be laughing still as he beholds the pompous clowns who censured him yawning and squirming through his successor's weepy tirades...

...God's death had been the death of mystery . . . . But Kennedy's death signaled the rebirth of mystery-the mystery of evil...

...tin secular society," wrote Cox, "politics does what metaphysics once did...

...Since it is power, not money or orgasms, that amuses him, he did, or permitted to be done, or was too busy to notice, all those things that so outrage Senator Weicker, whose indignation is marvelously limited, missing as it does every permutation of lewdness, debauchery, fraud, perversion, and simony in its singleminded The Alternative November 1973 21...

...Other things came and went, Great American Series The Nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave...

...Alice Cooper, who simulates fornication with a snake on stage (a spectacle hitherto reserved for sailors passing through the Panama Canal...

...And I no longer seriously believe it will happen, nor do I hope it will...

...they were required to conform blindly to Church teachings, for there was never any room for doubt...

...But the gates of hell would not prevail against the church . . . . We have yet to learn all the good wrought by 'Vatican Two', and all the damage...

...Indeed, so secular was Kennedy in his judgments regarding political affairs that when Protestant theologian Harvey Cox sang the praises of The Secular City, he claimed that Kennedy epitomized all the virtues of that City...

...But, alas, although Kennedy's tragic death signaled the rebirth of mystery, it did not end the confusion regarding the secular and spiritual realms, for increasing numbers soon began viewing politics as not only the proper instrument for achieving "The Great Society," but also as the means of our deliverance...

...Religion, then, becomes nothing but a vehicle for the maintenance of order in society...

...Now and for the foreseeable (and just when we'd finally lived down those phony nutmegs), the name of Connecticut is hopelessly coupled with that of--Weicker...

...Ironically, 'tAll those who had been glad at the death of God were sad at the death of Kennedy...

...There is a part in which the astute professor seems to lose his usual clear-sightedness: in discussing the dearth of meaty books in the social sciences, he casts aspersions on the level of book reviewing in general...

...He knows perfectly well that Morality, Decency & Co...

...We must no longer, Cox answered, speak of Him in terms of mythology or metaphysics, for they are dead too...

...Catholics, Wills contends, were forced to accept on faith answers that failed to satisfy them intellectually...

...But people have been predicting the death of God for centuries...

...George Washington captive to history...

...Wills tells us that "the church's secret, hidden away in official teaching, minimized when it could not be ignored, was change...

...In a parody, Andreski offers "a mathematical model of jargon-mongering: (A/K) - 1 = V; the verbiage produced (V) equals the ratio of the author's ambition (A) to his knowledge (K) minus one...

...Daniel Ellsberg turns to crime and finds it not only profitable, but the key to all the best salons...

...He nails Alger Hiss, and while his own putative friends breathe their relief and turn to other matters, Hiss' chums launch what amounts to an industry...

...He finds much of value in Marxism, but repudiates its dogmatism...

...Politics, as Wills observes, became "the only way left to talk of reality...

...Bette Midler, just now the rage of Manhattan's gay bathhouses (she goes right in and sings, you see, and the boys crowd around, chastely wrapped in their towels, you should have been there the night Mick Jagger stopped by...

...After all, Wills sardonically observes, "such criticism would be 'politics,' in which churches should not meddle...

...The mechanistic, cybernetic view of society as a goal-seeking machine ignores the competition within society over what goals are to be achieved...

...There he sits, pouting and prating of Morality, Decency, Fair Play, and the American Way...

...Goal-questioners become merely malfunctioning parts...

...not telling men to do this or omit that, just congratulating them for whatever they do or do not do...

...But agreeing with the state--to congratulate and celebrate it--is not 'politics.'" Thus religion is trapped, frozen, in its "perpetual de facto accommodation of power...

...Religion is invited to "praise our country, our rules, our past and present, our goals and pretensions, under the polite fiction of praying for them all...

...Although critical of the hucksterism in the book business, he understands the market "often constitutes the chief (or even only) bulwark against an orthodoxy imposed by a bureaucratic machine . . . . " It is his opinion that money is corrupting the social sciences and that governments should give less rather than more support...

...Itis vain opponent ga,~ in, not wishing to reveal his befuddlement by the mathematics, although we now understand that this does not prove the existence of God unless the process of exponentiation is commutative...

...It is true, of course, that they had not at first been ardent for Kennedy's election, for as Wills explains, "the Catholic liberal wanted liberalism in politics, not Catholicism-that was the very point he strove to make...

...Andreski is more effective than most polemicists because he is hard to pigeonhole...

...The assumption that organizations pursue exclusively the goals for which they were first organized naively ignores the variety of motivations of organization members...

...are mere suitable-for-framing rumpus room curios, no longer traded on the American exchange...

...It brings unity and meaning to human life and thought...

...to the mass of Catholics, however, this experience of change engendered not rejoicing, only shock and disillusionment...

...Yet, as Wills claims, despite their initim doubts, Catholic liberals came to see that Kennedy better served their purposes, for "his defense of the secular realm's autonomy had more impact becausehe was a Catholic...

...But apparently the Church, too, had its own "dirty little secret": change...

...for instance, the market response by increasing prices for scarce goods was ignored...

...Over on the cultural front, Nixon beholds children swooning over the likes of Mr...

...the endorsed Democrat was a free-lance clergyman and ADA paper-shuffler named Joseph Duffy, but a great many unreconstructed Democrats preferred an independent candidate, the moribund Thomas Dodd...

...Thus, much was written about how to avoid the coming "catastrophe...

...Andreski tells how, long ago, the great Swiss mathematician Euler silenced an argumentative Voltairian by writing on the blackboard in the debating hall: "(x+y) 2 == x~' +2xy+y 2, therefore God exists...

...If the forces of change can make it crumble, then what social institution can hope to stand...

...Some of the changes ushered in by Vatican II were transformations in lit u r g y - t h e introduction of the vernacular into the mass and the simplification and shortening of the mass--the introduction of a "questioning spirit" and a "spirit of democracy" into the Church, more autonomy on all levels of the Church, and more power and responsibility for lay persons...

...If he is not silenced, I fear, the television audience will rise up as one and go on a rampage of wifebeating, poor-box-robbing, lynching, sodomy, and ticket-fixing unprecedented in the annals of the Republic...

...For this he blames Richard Nixon, even more stridently than Mr...

...It forced upon Catholics, in the most startling symbolic way, the fact that the church changes...

...It was, Garry Wills points out, "the extreme taken as a type, the most fixed part of religion's stable landscape...

...Nixon blames the drugged jugend who lately shambled through the pages of the Luce publications...

...Politics was, for him, a world separate and quite different from religion...

...Haven Bradford Gow Time was when I liked being from Connecticut...

...But the main point about the Council can be put quite simply: it let out the dirty little secret...

...Douglas W. Cooper Bare Ruined Choirs by Garry Wills Doubleday $7.95 "The Catholic Church," I~nny Bruce once observed, "was the only the Church...

...In the Catholic liberal's scheme of things, Kennedy's detachment from religion was his main virtue and advantage, since "Kennedy represented the first tenet of a Catholic liberal by being so exclusively secular in his political judgments...

...He even hits the sawdust trail, joining a burgeoning crew of thieves, rapists, murderers, Indians, sworn overthrowers of the Constitution, and imported navel-contemplators, each and all of whom coin money by assuring the rubes that Nixon is a monster...

...Politics, that is to say, soon became absolutized, for in Harvey Cox's "secular City" God was dead and thus politics was forced to perform what only religion can and must do...

...According to Cox, only politics had stayed alive...

...He points out that disillusionment and a crisis of authority have followed on the shallow optimism of the Second Vatican Council, just as it did on the empty hopes of President John Kennedy's "Camelot" and Harvey Cox's "Secular City...

...Mr...

...Senate: He ran as a Republican...

...What developed from this confusion concerning God and Caesar was, in the words of Wills,"a very one-sided arrangement, based on mutual aggrandizement--the state will leave the church alone, so long as church never criticizes state...

...The real purpose of Cox's book is revealed in the last chapter, which addresses itself to Dietrich Bornhoffer's question, "How do we speak in a secular fashion of God...

...To many Catholic intellectuals, these changes were not only in the right direction but also long overdue...

...All in all, I cannot help believing Mr...

...The former was not only free in his Catholicism, but free of it...

...The ramifications of this relationship are left as an exercise for the reader...