JEWISH AGENDA, CATHOLIC AGENDA
Novak, Michael
JEWISH AGENDA, CATHOLIC AGENDA MICHAEL NOVAK Writing in the Village Voice [May 23], Ellen Willis describes eloquently what it its like, internally, to be Jewish in the United States. The...
...The great buildings, the great homes, the great monuments are almost always Protestant...
...lrias, Brevity is still the soul of wit...
...Let them work for their beliefs, as others work for theirs...
...and so on...
...What I find outrageous is the refusal of pro-abortionists even to see that there is another side to the issue besides their own...
...For details write: "Colloquy," The Divinity School Swift Hall THE UNIVERSITY OF C~IlCAGO Chicago 60637 Commonweal: 367...
...November 4-22 No admission charge...
...even undergo conversion...
...Thus I, for one, would let the judicial and electoral process decide the legal issue...
...Although our society is in theory a pluralistic culture, it is in factwboth in economic and in symbolic power--an insensitively one-sided culture...
...Only in Europe is the aesthetic identification reversed...
...The "Protestantizing" of the church is a kind of flattery, isn't it...
...Symbolically, too, the basic symbols of the nation's self-understanding are still, far more than they ought to be, Protestant...
...Is that movie studio in the same poem as careless of its stockholders' interests as it is of the humanity of the actress...
...Commonweal welcomes letters on subjects treated in its pages...
...Ellen Willis feels insecure about how lasting the positive respouse of America will 'be to the two items on the Jewish agenda...
...Adam Walinsky and some others have written eloquently about the legitimate needs of parochial schools, more than a third of whose pupils (in some cities) are black and Latino...
...on the other, it replied with some grace to critics who expected no reasonable reply...
...Thomas Aquinas and St...
...From human powers, we should expect nothing less...
...Two items have also .been on the Catholic agenda: aid to parochial schools and removal of the deep affront of legalized abortion...
...That is what it means to share in majoritarian biases...
...Even to reply is already to concede too much...
...Noeah (Cont...
...They too bear some resemblance to The Girls o/Slender Means...
...The scene has in fact been shot, exploited, only once: "la escena ya rue tomada," not "ya se habia tornado...
...It is, I am sure, regarded by many as perfectly rational...
...Some Anglo-American political traditions, and the ways of perceiving and feeling that are their cultural presupposition, represent, for example, true advances over some traditions of other countries...
...And as it is with air, so with earth, water, fire, plain words full of beauty and danger...
...Since so many in our society desire --and will have--abortions, I cannot bring myself to support legislation that would bar abortion outfight...
...The translator has been misled by the word "ya," which means "already" but must often be left untranslated (cf...
...Or, rather he didn't write that...
...It was an insult...
...Much that springs from assimilation may, indeed, constitute genuine human advance...
...There may be a Polish mayor in Buffalo and an Irish mayor in Chicago...
...But many Catholics feel frustrated beyond measure by the intense hostility their agenda reaps as its reward...
...But there is no hope of persuading some, whose consciences are quite different, to give up the practice...
...Marion K. Sanders' recent article in Harper's spoke with all the nativist power of that magazine's hoary nineteenth-century anti-Catholic traditions...
...Like Jews, Catholics may also assimilate--yield up much that was distinctive...
...Ultimate economic power in city after city, and in the nation as a whole, is Protestant...
...Letters o/ not more than 250 or 300 words naturally have a better chance o! being published...
...Other examples might be cited: the capricious translation of "no culpar~s" as "You will not punish" instead of "You won't (or can't) blame...
...There are, moreover, fairly small elites in the United States called in the news magazines "the molders of public opinion," "the decision-makeers," and the "trend-setters...
...But influential leaders in our society have not, so far, taken a generous and large-minded approach to this question...
...they are reporters, editors, publishers, producers...
...Latin "jam"): "because the scene has been (is now) shot...
...These are the boards of directors and overseers of universities, institutes, corporations and foundations...
...the flabby rendering of "dulces" by "mellow...
...The "disintegration" of the Roman Catholic Church in recent years confirms their own sense of solidity...
...And few readers in the U.S...
...Today the task is much more difficult...
...Individually the violations are petty, even trifling...
...You may not know if I don't tell you, for example, that I omitted the first stanza, which anchors in particulars the otherwise suspect universals of the second (but those particulars are less accessible here than where they were experienced...
...It is not suitably translated by "beam of light...
...That's why we poets burnish a poem so carefully And why my love poems are important...
...Practically everyone has some best friends who are---or once were~ Catholic . . . . Two items have in recent months been on the Jewish agenda before the American public: help for Israel and relief for Soviet Jews...
...Seldom in the United States does an American Catholic experience anything that is really first-rate, really beautiful, really of highest taste, status and aesthetic truth...
...Anti-Catholic sentiment is once again on the increase...
...Many, in good conscience as they see it, hold abortion to be moral...
...the ancient and traditional nativism has never died and has not faded away...
...but symbolic and economic power in both cities is Protestant...
...Gabriela Mistral praised El Sef~or Presidente, also by Asturias, as a "phenomenal work" which seemed written "with the ease of a drawn breath and of the movement of blood through the body...
...Let Linda Kuehl amend Muriel Spark's bibliography to include The Group...
...There are now so many articulate and "successful" Catholics, who sit loose in respect to their institutional affiliation, that being talented and being Catholic is no longer considered an anomaly...
...Fun's fun, after all, and most of your readers should know better...
...I do not know whether the editors would agree, but in this context it seems to me that magazines like Commonweal have a new role to play...
...In the old days of virulent antiCatholic conviction--the days of early Paul Blanshard and almost total intellectual hostility (represented in the 1958 conference sporBored by the Fund for The Republic)--Commonweal represented a sane, reasonable, intelligent voice...
...Why take the scene of the "kiss with closed eyes" again if "the scene had already been shot...
...I found Ms...
...on the contrary, the attitudes of many are niggardly and narrow...
...Abortion is, to my mind, one of the most calculated and coldest forms of egotism and cruelty...
...Pneumatic metaphors range from Pentecostal exaltation to the bathos of Colonel Blimp...
...may ever know the work of Ernesto Cardenal unless better translations are available...
...Still, like many Jews, many Catholics also see this nation in the perspective of outsiders...
...The assumption of gentiles, she finds, are often so radically, so structurally, anti-Jewish that conversation is hardly possible...
...Those who are in various minorities in the United States--Catholics, Jews, blacks, others--need to know how to hear the fears and anxieties of others like themselves...
...Christ once dismissed Viento Fuerte, a novel by Miguel Angel Asturias, read in translation, as "hot air" which left him "winded...
...But if we would more intelligently organize ourselves, and more sensitively help one another out at points critical to each of us, we might be able to check and to chasten monolithic power and make it as pluralistic in practice as it is in rhetoric, as accountable to all groups in America as it is to its own interests...
...What such elites approve of in Catholic circles are "liberalizing" tendencies, assimilationlst tendencies...
...Why not also Little Women and The Valley of the Dolls...
...mute and modify...
...And let Dennis O'Brien call Chesterton a "forgotten writer" who has left only "fragments," in disregard of nearly two full columns in the current Books in Print and of quotations and citations by such dissimilar authors as John Updike, Konrad Lorenz, and Bruce Vawter...
...To have found a home here is a gift...
...Like Jews, Catholics too may succeed in the United States...
...Featured lecturers include: RICHARD McKEoN, BERNARD LONEROAN, KARL RAHNER, PAUL RICOEUR, JOHANNESBAPTIST METZ, "I'DoM HELDER CAMARA and at least fifteen other international scholars...
...Continued on page 367) Commonweal: 351 the shower of gold...
...but let them give their opponents dignity, too...
...The English I just chose, including the clumsy fourth line, asks you to believe that it has recreated the sense, feeling, tone, and intention of the Spanish he did set down...
...RONALD CHRIST OOOOOOOOO Miehae...
...Willis' analysis a parable for my own experience as a Catholic in this society...
...The law must sometimes tolerate immoralities, especially when consciences differ (as they do in this case) concerning what is moral...
...Many Jews, like many Catholics, have not only found here a hospitable culture but, more than that, have extolled some of its remarkable historical achievements...
...The young Ernesto Cardenal wrote: They plunder the people's language And falsify the words of the people (Just as they do the currency of the people...
...Both of these levels--the economic and the symbolic--are deeper and more determinate than politics...
...grow...
...But for God's sake see if you can get Ronald Christ to quit mucking around with Nicaraguan poetry...
...The powerful minority uses the less powerful minorities against one another, to cancel one another out...
...JULIAN J. IRIAS Dear Mr...
...So for critics no less than for novelists and poets the spirit blows where it will...
...that meaning would have been carried by "foco" or "reflector" or "proyector" or perhaps "rayo...
...These elites, too, are overwhelmingly Protestant: often a kind of secular Protestant...
...On the one side, Commonweal worked for reform in the Church...
...Please...
...there, I always felt, the Catholic sensibility breathed its natural air, and American Protestants felt uneasy, a little out of place, not quite approving...
...Bonaventure November, 1974 Public Lectures on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays...
...Together, they can determine for the worse "what we often" perceive in a poem...
...A Colloquy on Medieval Religious Thought The Septieentenary of St...
...A number of cultural events and receptions are also planned...
Vol. 100 • June 1974 • No. 15
