ROMA REVERSED:
Novak, Michael
shown excessive zeal in reaching into grand-jury proceedings to ferret out matters that should be kept confidential. Mr. Jaworski, the Special Prosecutor, Rep. Rodino, chairman of the House...
...when populists require a symbol for opulence...
...I do not often go to church...
...What more obvious symbol have we of medievalism, darkness, mediocrity, corruption, venality...
...It turns out, instead, to require endurance of hatred and opposition...
...When liberals desire a symbol for illiberalism...
...I do not wholly understand and, whatever it is, perhaps it tells against me...
...Institutional evils the Church carries with her-dishonesty, oppression, greed, indifference and worse...
...Freedom, you imagine, is doing what you please...
...19 April 1974: 154...
...three Gods...
...God made bread is not so humiliating as God made sentimental speech...
...You pitch your life to "realism," only to discover days that are ecstatic, astonishing...
...when scholars seek a symbol for obscurantism...
...Richard Rovere, recently writing in The New Yorker magazine, senses a surliness in the atmosphere here in Washington...
...Will women change power...
...Sometimes I imagine myself Jewish...
...Exclude, though, the misery of sermons...
...True image of the human race...
...Love is supposed to be transporting...
...A pull like gravity holds onto me...
...it turns out, instead, to be steady...
...If only the Eucharist did not include the Word...
...salvation and corporeal flesh...
...celibacy . . .), must seem the most incongruous and ugly of institutions...
...plough that makes the soil shine...
...Norman O. Brown remarked once that there is wisdom in noticing what Roma spells, reversed...
...Why am I not like them...
...Life is ignorant of logicloves a logic of its own...
...As if liberation did not entail the ambiguities of power...
...Such practices...
...yet when I do, I go with joy...
...Or will power change women...
...The intellectual apparatus cracks...
...Some of these persons, very much in the center of investigating the scandalous affair, believe that the undertaking to determine if there is any Presidential responsibility should be conducted "more in sadness than in anger...
...No institution in the world is easier to criticize than the Church of Rome, to a chorus of nodding heads...
...Even those disposed to believing in the President's complicity in "Watergate" are offended on the grounds that there comes a time in such a momentous episode that it may be argued rightly that the President, whatever his presumed transgressions, is more equal than others in being afforded the right of suspended judgment and fair hearing and fair trial...
...The procedures of her thinkers and her officers are less divine than simply of another century, another place...
...Such beliefs...
...Newsmen recently had a birthday party for Judge Sirica, whose conventional juridical outlook was offended by the deceits and outlandish tales told by defendants in the burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Apartments...
...SISYPHUS ROMA REVERSED MICHAEL NOVAK Just where you look for something, it isn't...
...love and Rome...
...when women want a symbol for oppression...
...souls...
...Sometimes I imagine myself in the shoes of Charles Davis, or John Cogley, or countless other friends or acquaintances who, in one form or another, drift away, turn away, or find a better path...
...Unfortunately, an air of gaiety seems to be a more prevalent mood, whatever that found in the Oval Room of the White House...
...The formulae in which her doctrines are encased are, like certain dictionary modes of speech, archaic...
...The Catholic Church, I then perceive (eating the "flesh" of God...
...Resurrection and death...
...I read Feuerbach, Freud, Russell, Ayer with a head nodding in agreement...
...No false promise in her conduct...
...Is any sport easier than to mock the Catholic Church, especially in the United States...
...Where, then, would you look for the perfect city of human life, reflection of justice, wisdom, intelligence, and grace...
...to demand swift and painful decisions, from which no appeal is possible...
...when popula tionists desire a symbol for obdurate stupidity-there stands Mother Church, open to a thousand arrows...
...Sometimes I imagine myself an atheist...
...great buildings here, great works of art, homes, monuments, memories, are almost always Protestant, not Catholic...
...The parish priest whose arrogance hides his insecurity, the impossibility of his role...
...I only know that, as year passes into year, I find myself more Catholic than the year before...
...Imagination has too little purchase...
...The tilt of English culture is against her, almost every modern movement defines itself by opposition to her...
...A lawyer played a Watergate tape at a party...
...The banality of the Catholic parish-its ordinariness, boredom, bad taste, inertial force of habit-is its coercive splendor: ashen embers that explode...
...Penthouse attacks her chastity, Ms, her chauvinism...
...Rodino, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and members of the special committee investigating the Watergate Scandals have appeared on television repeatedly to argue their case...
...when playwrights construct a symbol for philistinism...
Vol. 100 • April 1974 • No. 7
