THE CARDINAL AND THE JUNTA
Quigley, Thomas
called 'Wittgenstein's razor,' and insist that if the question can't be clearly asked it had better not be asked at all. But to say that the question is ill-formed, or too general to be...
...The Cardinal's introduction is but a single sentence saying that he offers this Christian reflection in an ecumenical spirit to all Chileans of good will, making his own the following words of Pope Paul...
...Arrested at the same time was Joel Gajardo, a wellknown Presbyterian theologian who, like Charles West and others in this country, was in dialogue with the Prague-based Christian Peace Conference...
...I suspect that this is partly why most of us feel that, whatever the technical shortcomings of his work, a man like Solzhenitsyn is intrinsically a greater artist than any of our latterday social plastic surgeons, for all their skill in diagnosis and the baring of its collective skull beneath the skin...
...We saw five plays in three days...
...I have ,just returned to Birmingham from a short spell in Lon'don with a party of adult students...
...The point rather is that the only way of putting questions as large and unmanageable as these into a discussable shape is by dramatizing them...
...The first-J.B...
...866) in which he condemns the practice of extorting admission of guilt by use of force...
...We had gone to see a sample of current West End theater productions and to discuss them...
...Or perhaps it is that the dramatists themselves are not sufficiently passionate, not entangled enough, to convey the necessary sense of shock and healthy indignation...
...Although the Cardinal has since followed through with two subsequent and unmistakably clear declarations-his Easter Vigil homily and the pastoral letter of late April--the UDHR publication served as a kind of pre-pastoral letter...
...When the just rule, the people rejoice (Prov...
...The Chilean Embassy in Washington thought highly enough of the letter to I include it among its handouts but the Junta has not otherwise been caught with its Bible open...
...Each of the thirty articles of the UDHR is emblazoned like commandments across the top of each page: Every person has the right to life, liberty and security of person...
...It is almost a particular study of The Waste Land's sense of directionlessness: 'In the mountains, there you feel free...
...61,1...
...For as soon as you confront two new plays by English writers, like Peter Nichols' Chez Nous or David Storey's Li]e Class you begin to realize how much English drama is still basically Ibsenite...
...Yet both he and his wife were summoned for questioning by the army in March and, on April 19, he was arrested, brought to the now infamous Estadio Chile, and remained there without charges until April 29...
...Samuel Araya, pastor of Santiago's Providencia Methodist Church, founder and former director of Chile's ecumenical seminary and one of Latin American Methodism's most respected figures was an author of the Social Credo...
...that have made scripture-quoting by the oppressors of this world a nearly obsolete form...
...That's a risky statement to make in Chile, even if you are just quoting the Pope...
...The first of these two plays is a dramatization of the false values and attitudes best described as those of the Sunday Times color-supplement: a glossy offering of middle-class 'culture,' advertiser's fantasy and professional man's rootless cosmopolitanism...
...He is now free and has been "strongly encouraged" to accept an offered post in the United States...
...Much the same could be said of Life Class, a brilliantly observed and acted study of a seedy provincial art-school, and dominated by the figure of a posturing pseudo-avantgarde teacher who in fact has nothing to give to anyone --neither his students, nor his wife, nor the school itself...
...Lawrence, these contemporary unmaskings seem rather routine, like the illusions themselves...
...Called simply "Christian Reflections on the UDHR," the handsomely printed 32-page booklet published by the Catholic archdiocese is interesting for several reasons...
...Theologically progressive but far from radical, he was not politically active nor was he a member of the Junta's ecclesiastical bSte noire, Christians for Socialism...
...29,2...
...Catholic Conference...
...25,10...
...But what follows is unlit dynamite...
...20,13...
...Given the Junta's total censorship of all media, this issuance of a basic UN document, now some six months after its 25th anniversary date, constitutes a major "statement" by Santiago's Cardinal Silva...
...Commonweal: 279...
...and from a 1971 document called the Social Credo of the Methodist Church...
...2,13...
...In mode and manner it is very dated: but in its implications, it is surprisingly up-to-date...
...he was expelled on May 2. The social teachings of the churches, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Bible--any one is evidently too much for Chile's ruling powers but all three are enjoying something more than a certain succ~s d'estime in Santiago today...
...The former are mostly from recent encyclicals and Vatican II although there's a marvelous quote from Pope Nicholas I (A.D...
...One of Carl Mclntyre's missionaries to Chile sent back a panegyric on the golpe last Fall beginning with I Timothy: "I urge that entreaties and prayers, petitions and thanksgivings, be made on behalf of all men, for kings and all who are in authority...
...Cowardice is not peace...
...Priestley's Eden End-- is a National Theater revival of~bne of his plays of the thirties: a play built around the irony of viewing, from the perspective of 1934, a family living in 1912 and not noticing that the world was about to go up in flames...
...everyone has the right to leave and to return to his own country...
...I have been sent to announce liberation to the captives, freedom to the prisoners (Is...
...Perhaps one has to say 'yes and no': but even this is a kind of answer...
...You either The Cardinal And the Junta While not quite rivaling the sale a couple of years ago of the Secret Documents of ITT, a new edition of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is moving briskly in Santiago these days...
...It is indeed true that peace will accept obedience to just law and legitimate authority, but it will never be 24 May 1974:278 need an obsessional and passionate (and, of course, extremely intelligent) commitment to the idea of life as a wilderness of mirrors (as with Pirandello), or you need a sense of personal involvement in the wilderness itself (as with Williams) to justify the continued dramatization of disillusionment itself...
...For in so far as even part of the answer has to be 'yes, the world is a kind of cosmic concentration camp,' the conclusion has to be drawn that the sort of commitment which alone enables one to stand the test of survival under extreme conditions is itself a virtue...
...THOMAS Qr0mLEY (Thomas Quigley is on the staff of the Division for Latin America, U.S...
...everyone has the right to participate in the government of their country either directly or by means of representatives freely chosen . . . . After each article, superbly selected biblical quotes underscore the ancient basis for the supposedly modern UDHR: You shall proclaim freedom on the earth to all of its inhabitants (Lev...
...A settlement which is purely external and imposed by fear is not peace...
...So each of these two major plays from the recent past gives an answer to the question I posed at the beginning of this article, for each of them dramatizes the proposition that the world is more like a prison than it is like an eighteenth-century drawingroom...
...By comparison, not merely with Ibsen but even with, say, the early plays of D.H...
...To ask of them, 'Is life really like this?,' is to ask that question in a precise and thus answerable way...
...Most of the Protestant citations are from World Council of Churches assemblies (Evanston, Geneva, Uppsala, etc...
...Thou shalt not kill (Ex...
...in case of persecution, everyone has the right to seek and receive asylum in whatever country...
...no one can be arbitrarily detained or imprisoned...
...The ironies of these two plays are, like Priestley's, refleeted in their sardonic titles: but the question remains whether the combination of exceedingly skillful observation (a kind of plastic surgery in reverse, done not to hide but to reveal our social disfigurements) with a prevailing and all-encompassing sardonic irony is enough...
...And this is where another of my recent experiences comes in...
...What follows is a lengthy excerpt from the Pope's December 8 message for the Day of Peace, concluding with these words: "Repression is not peace...
...it said that at least in the area of basic human rights the church was in no way going to back away from its commitment to the poor and oppressed--those whose human rights are most violated in today's Chile...
...alien to considerations of the common good and man's moral freedom...
...To see Pirandello's Henry IV or Tennessee Williams' Streetcar Named Desire only helps to prove the point...
...Gajardo is also out of jail and out of Chile, but his exit was even less "voluntary...
...True peace must be based on a sense of the untouchable dignity of the human person, from which arise inviolable rights and corresponding duties...
...BRIAN WICKER (Brian Wicker is Commonweal's correspondent in Great Britain...
...no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment...
...But to say that the question is ill-formed, or too general to be answerable, is not to say that it is intrinsically unintelligible or is incapable of being put into any kind of words...
...As it happens the present menu in the London theaters is quite appetizing (though you never know how soon it will be before some of the best dishes are 'off...
...In its heavily 'well-made' way, the play is rather bitter under its surface realism: not only about the good Edwardian Eden that is ended, but also about the illusions and hypocrisies and roleplaying antics that seemed necessary to sustain even that nostalgic vision...
...I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.' The permissive 'adult' figures who move about their taxhaven in the Dordogne have most of their illusions torn away as the play progresses: but in the end, I feel, we discover that the unmasking of illusions is not enough...
...That is to say, is still concerned with the unmasking of illusions, the exposure of people who are merely 'acting' a part...
...all are equal before the law and entitled to equal protection of the law...
...Most of us felt, I think, that these contemporary illusions were just not big enough, or perhaps were too familiar already, to justify the effort devoted to their unmasking...
...Where, we feel, are the positive values in the name of which the masks are to be torn off...
...Rise up and take the child and his mother and flee into Egypt . . . because Herod is seeking to kill him (Mt...
...I am still not sure how to answer it myself...
...It's selections like these (and the Radical Bible, Quotations from Chairman Jesus, etc...
...After the Scriptures come equally well chosen excerpts from Catholic and Protestant church documents...
Vol. 100 • May 1974 • No. 12
