News & Views
NEWS & VIEWS Feeney & O'Rourke The chapter excerpted by Publisher's Weekly from Frank Sheed's new book, The Church and I (Doubleday), combined wit and wisdom in typically generous Sheed...
...the wit sometimes nearclassical...
...No surprise...
...Yet repetition serves a purpose...
...The Ford Foundation, we've read everywhere, has suffered a portfolio loss of from $3 billion to $2 billion over the past year...
...These parallels have been cited before...
...The Economist, as a consequence, looks for grants from foundations to decline by as much as one-third in the near future, if not immediately...
...On Oct...
...Crumbling Foundat~on~ The Economist of London has taken a look at American philanthropic organizations, and finds all foundations in trouble...
...2, the resignations began to come, but like that of D r . / F r . John McLaughlin, they were coming from second- and third-level personnel...
...The complaints against the accused were disparate, but, oh, the parallels of tactic: secrecy...
...What about the future...
...History is prelude, they say, but must it be forever so with respect to the exercise of authority in the Church...
...But Ford's woe is everyone's woe, according to the magazine...
...Summing up, it is one thing to repeat the Feeney mistakes...
...During the conference, American oil companies were blamed for cooperating with Arab nations in hiking prices to unprecedented levels, and several speakers demanded a tax on excess oil profits...
...resort to device (adherence to a vow) for achievement of purpose...
...The wisdom was pervasive...
...NEWS & VIEWS Feeney & O'Rourke The chapter excerpted by Publisher's Weekly from Frank Sheed's new book, The Church and I (Doubleday), combined wit and wisdom in typically generous Sheed measure...
...Predictably, impact came not in what was said, but in ensuing debate over whether the speaker was worth the price--a perennial topic it seems, at Fordham...
...Frank Sheed's service is to remind that the depressing business goes back to Loisy, Tyrreli and Von Hiigel, to say nothing of earlier history...
...Rather, a Nixon-made celebrity, drew a standingroom-only crowd at Fordham, but, as is so often the case with professional media people, he offered a minimum of hard news...
...A recovery in market values will help," sums up The Economist, "but the erosion in [the foundations'] wealth has gone so far that the future of philanthropy in the United States is now in question...
...It was speculation with which most of us are well familiar...
...If Fordham's purpose was to generate media publicity for the university from the Rather talk, it didn't have a chance from the start, at least not by way of coverage...
...divinization of authority...
...On this particular matter it still awaits us...
...One understands the desire to avoid confrontation, which would involve the admission that earlier statements of authority need amplifying or correction, but experience suggests that confrontation can only be postponed," Sheed continued...
...Particularly poignant - - and timely - - were some paragraphs dealing with Father Leonard Feeney, the Boston Jesuit who initially went afoul of the Society and the Church for teaching what had once been taught about the exclusivity of salvation, and who eventually found himself heaved out of Society and Church both...
...Their common malady: the erosion of wealth through the drop in the stock market...
...Note, for instance, the Commonweal editorial of Sept...
...No big media outlet is paying its staffers to explode news breaks beyond the outlet...
...Mott, Kettering, Duke and Luce, as much as 50 percent...
...The overall reduction in grants "may leave little or nothing" for them, says The Economist...
...A Rip.Off...
...That on Sept, 30...
...Speaking recently at Fordham University, CBS newsman Dan Rather termed the Ford pardon of Nixon "a blunder of the first order," and speculated that it was issued as precipitously as it was in order to head off the imminent indictment of the former President and subvert complicated legal proceedings which might have lasted into the 197.6 Presidential election...
...The paradox for history is that as the Feeney case heads towards a happy denouement, another Feeneytype case is being created...
...Odds and Ends Not the smallest irony of the economic summit conference, in the eyes of the Boston Globe, was that the Public Service Broadcast network carried the proceedings live across the nation wi~h a grant from the Exxon Corporation...
...The most notorious hustlers were still around...
...The comment is irrefutable...
...unwillingness to open issues raised to discussion in the wider community of believers...
...Again this year the issue was raised by The Ram, the student newspaper, in posing to the sponsoring student organization, American Age, the possibility that it might have obtained someone less well known to give an equally good speech at a more economical price...
...Rockefeller, one-third...
...In the handling of Father Feeney, Sheed caught--this didn't make PW--"a troubling echo of the handling of the Modernists at the turn of the century...
...Rather's talk was warmly received...
...Rather's fee was $2,500...
...Like them he was condemned but not answered . . . . Everybody would have been helped by a full-length discussion...
...The toll extends to some of the new foundations "which were counted upon to boost foundation largesse," among them Clark (based on the Avon Products fortune) and Rowland (Polaroid...
...From Evans and Noyak, no less: "So many Nixon aides remain as the walking dead, drawing pay but doing no ~vork, that the White House today is a political charnel house...
...For almost at the same time that Bishop Bernard Flanagan of Worcester was confirming a Boston Globe report that Feeney had been quietly "reconciled" to the Church some months earlier, Church officials were completing the decisive steps a g a i n s t Father Joseph O'Rourke, hounding him out of the Jesuit order...
...Hit harder will be "the more venturesome": environment and civil rights groups, for instance, who depend on foundation support for their solvency...
...Another aspect of the new morality: Roselia Maternity Hospital in Pittsburgh, one of the largest and most modem Catholic facilities for unwed mothers, has become the new headquarters of the Pittsburgh St...
...Certainly, the golden age of the foundations is over...
...Vincent de Paul Society and will be used also as a low-income boarding home for older men and women...
...The Carnegie establishment--"one of the oldest and the best," in The Economist's words--is contending with a decline of 40 percent in portfolio value...
...media people--whether reporters, commentators or documentary anchormen - - a r e sensitive to the point...
...JOHN DEEDY 18 October 1974:50...
...e.g., the discovery made upon launching into book publishing in America: "discounts are to the clergy what sex is to the laity, an itch and a constant preoccupation...
...Hit will be the orthodox recipients: colleges, universities, hospitals, welfare agencies...
Vol. 101 • October 1974 • No. 3
