BOOKS
Phillips, Robert & Dulles, Avery
a civil servant for some 19 years and was on call as a part-time adviser for the next 30 years, most notably as a prime confidant of his older brother. Along the way, Milton Eisenhower...
...Richard Neuhaus' article, "The Dangerous Assumptions," Common...
...ture of the generation before Vatican II...
...Ford, the Ambassador to Saig0n and to Congressman Andrew Young...
...mmcl...
...Another male tells his female student, "Why do you want to he so good...
...In one brilliant passage she cogently charts the impossibility of the situation: I felt how he let me go, how he grasped for me and yet let me go, coming to a quick, private finish himself and not able to imagine me any longer...
...For example, he attempts to prove the Real Presence from "the plain meaning of the words uttered by Jesus within hours of his death on a matter which he had already declared to be a matter of life and death...
...Sheed's judgments on Hfigel and Loisy strike me as excessively harsh, since he seems to accuse them of insincerity and deception...
...While the book is admirably printed and produced, the studious reader will regret that it has no index...
...And the books' titles tell the tale: Williams' females are "ladies," if not by temperament, at least by socio-economic signification...
...The out-dated poet, Sabbatha Duff-Collck, dreams and imagines herself to be America's greatest writer...
...Their goal is to make us reach conclusions...
...Revelation, for Sheed, is primarily a matter of providing the believer with a "map of life...
...Sheed blames the Church of that time particularly for its failure to engage the laity actively in the apostolate...
...He adheres to the rule of sex only within marriage, and exalts the value of selfcontrol...
...and he to substance, to flesh . . . two separate bodies...
...Moreover, Williams and Oates, in these two highly interesting collections, invite comparison for another reason...
...That is, each is a woman of "refinement" belonging to a Victorian culture which long since has gone with the winds of change, each a frustrated Southern gentlewoman, out of touch with the real world about her, living in a private (and often, quite mad) world of her own making...
...Having served on several himself, he skillfully documents which ones work well and why, which ones fail and why...
...The confusion since Vatican II is in his opinion chiefly due to the widespread theological ignorance and consequent devitalization of the clergy and laity...
...Throughout the book women are so man-ipulated by unfeeling men that her women, consequently, do not feel real or even visible...
...Such language begs the question in a disgraceful manner...
...Young will use the tags to dramatize opposition to government funding of the jailing and torture of peaceful ~ ~le...
...He is open to the idea of a married clergy, at least if the celibate clergy cannot be maintained, and argues persuasively for a more benign treatment of divorced and remarried Catholics in the Church...
...In the present eddy of diverse ecclesiologies, it is difficult to be critical of Sheed's...
...In the last seventy pages he totally renounces the narrative form to give a disquisition on what it means to be a Catholic...
...For me the above harkened back to Rev...
...Henry James comes immediately to mind, as does any writer of the Jane Austen persuasion: take away the "big scenes" and you still have a portrait of Emma complete...
...He apparently accepts the I1 April 1975:58 teaching of Humanae Vitae, though he regards the rhetoric of that encyclical as unpersuasive...
...Oates has been associated by some critics with the women's movement, this book seems her first deliberate statement on the subject...
...For those already acquainted, these pages will provide a welcome overview of his wit and wisdom...
...rl I'd like to know more about the F.O.R...
...There is no future for you to he like men...
...One anecdote leads to another, and the stories fairly sparkle with witty repartees...
...And the method is not restricted to the novel...
...He makes his reader well aware of the fragility of that institution, of what it can do well and of what it cannot do...
...The Release of Political Prisoners Could be the KEY TO PEACE in Vietnam Attach an old key to a tag aeldng, "Could this key UNLOCK a prison door...
...In a very sensible chapter on "The Church and Sex" Sheed sets forth (with some minor exaggerations) the deficiencies of the standard seminary teaching on that subject, while opposing, no less strenuously, the permissiveness of the "new morality...
...Personally I would have liked to see more attention given to the Church as a mystery of grace and as a sacrament of encounter with Christ...
...On the other hand, there are fiction writers who are in essence poets, identifying each character with a passion or an idea...
...A writer, say, of the George Meredith conviction, whose novels often appear "worked-up" from abstract material...
...One from another in their stories they create scenes to which we can attach abstract names, almost titles for Victorian paintings--The Loss of Innocence, Man's Inhumanity to Man, etc...
...Even the earlier sections of the book are heavily laden with historical and theological reflections growing out of the author's experience as an apologist...
...Frank Sheed would make no pretense to being a creative thinker or a literary giant...
...When they succeed, the brilliance of both writers lies in their capacity to imagine these symbolic acts for their characters, acts which will trip a universal chord in the reader...
...Possessed and mortal, these ladies are also sexist and racist projections...
...Both books are somewhat unusual in that the protagonist of every story in each is a female...
...His managerial suggestions merit widespread attention...
...Rather than as autobiography in the conventional sense, this book might be described as a series of anecdotes and excursuses...
...Despite the similarity of fictional method and the apparent similarity of subject, however, the protagonists are actually vastly different...
...Sheed's view of the Church, which permeates this volume, stands in the tradition of the "Mystical Body" litera...
...It owes much to Karl Adam and Edward Leen---two theologians who, as Sheed points out, lay under a cloud of suspicion in their own lifetime...
...While on occasion Ms...
...In some cases his reporting of Vatican II is oversimplified...
...The functions of the Church, Sheed maintains, are "to do the work for which Christ founded her--teaching doctrine and morals, giving us Mass and sacraments...
...Occasional bishops and cardinals (such as Bourne, Hinsley, Spellman and Cushing) appear here and there in the book, often to have their foibles exposed...
...re-natal life is denigrated as a "piece of tissue," "a woman's mistake," or "vegetating unborn matter...
...Zip...
...Miss Oates is one of America's best writers of short stories...
...In this book he appears as what he has been for fifty years--a sensible, articulate and dedicated lay apostle...
...Commonweal: 59...
...For example, he begins one chapter by mentioning a heckler's charges regarding the Inquisition...
...Unlike Rather and Gates, Eisenhower has plenty of ideas for making the presidency more effective, chief of which is that a President must make much better and extensive use of advisory commissions...
...A few statements in the book seem questionable...
...the ancient Principessa Lisabetta dances to imngin...
...Of blood and brain and stress and ferocity both Tennessee Williams and Joyce Carol Oates are particularly possessed...
...The Chureh and i FRANK SHEED Doubleday, $7.95 AVERY DULLES In an autobiographical vein, the celebrated street-coruer apologist, lay theologian, and publisher, Frank Sheed, here records what he calls "my experience of the Church...
...Yet we fully comprehend what committing it did to Maria...
...On balance, the easily read (yet glib) Rather and Gates book offers less understanding of the modern presidency than do the long and sometimes tedious reminiscences of Milton Eisenhower...
...Otherwise, these simplistic Williams females have not been granted the compassion and felicitous complications of his earlier women such as Amanda and Blanche...
...Engaging characters in significant acts or crises, these writers symbolize and make abstract large issues...
...Both retain a keen sense not necessarily of the complexity of character, but of the splendor of the symbolic scene...
...a civil servant for some 19 years and was on call as a part-time adviser for the next 30 years, most notably as a prime confidant of his older brother...
...weal, June 30, 1967...
...As one who suffered from the limitations of the Catholicism of the first half of this century, Sheed knows how to be properly critical of the defensive clericalism, the isolated seminary training, the unreal casuistry, the flaccid sermons, and the rigid ecclesiastical censorship of the period...
...Suddenly I realized a truth: that he could not love me and I could not love him~ love was not possible unless people imagined one another fully, ceaselessly, unselfishly...
...ary Waltzes with imaginary lovers...
...This becomes the occasion for a thumbnail history of the Inquisition, proving that, though bad enough, it was not quite as bad as many suppose...
...21100 30r oooooeooooooooooooeooo oooooooooeo 1110 Fellomhip o( Reconcililtion Bo0(271, Nyack, New York l__n~o__ 1:31=18...
...He argues too, albeit unpersuasively, for the creation of a single term six-year presidency...
...The Principessa, for instance, attempts to satisfy her insatiability by forcing the (Continued on page 57) ed," is an effective story of one woman's inevitable entrapment...
...Most of the men who have been effective Presidents have also been highly political--in an open, rather than covert, sense of that term...
...As a total, The Goddess and Other Women is a thought-provoking document on love, hate, and pain in women's lives...
...They tell us about notable figures of the "Catholic revival" ---Chesterton and Belloc, Martindale and Knox, Dawson and Watldn, Henri Perrin and John Courtney Murray...
...And, since I could not be imagined by him, I returned to substance . . . to flesh...
...Few Scripture scholars today would speak so confidently about the historicity and interpretation of the words of Jesus as given in the Synoptic account of the Last Supper and in John's discourse on the "bread of life...
...It must be said that this latest gallery of Williams women are all projections of an unsympathetic if not highly misogynistic imagination...
...Eisenhower concludes that the presidency is a near-impossible job, certainly too big and exhausting for one person...
...These stories counterpoint beautifully, though the long book at times seems unrelieved by humor or optimism...
...His book offers personal descriptions of Presidents from Coolidge to Nixon with special attention to his own advisory work with each President since Hoover...
...000000| CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 35) classical situation of "begging the question...
...The best of Presidents have been those who understood the importance of political parties and who listened to the rank and file of their parties, and did not condescendingly view the American common person as childlike and dependent on omniscient leaders...
...Deadline: May 1, 1975 Order quantities for your school, church or community group: $2011,000...
...Joyce Carol Oates' females, on the other hand, are women rather than ladies---and women of the here and now in the women's lib era...
...Biology and everyday experience teach us that life is to be understood in continuity with life...
...However, his call for separation of the presidency from party leadership and his urging of the six-year single term seem to misunderstand the role of a President as politcal coalition-builder, necessarily engaged in political bargaining and negotiation...
...First, there are those psychological writers, artists who feel their way, patiently and surreptitiously, in and out of the mind, rendering each character different in minute yet complete ways one from another...
...In these twenty-five stories, far more subtle and probing than Williams' latest, we are given a succession of vital occasions in the lives of women of all classes and mentalities, often pitting the dichotomies of passivity versus destructiveness...
...He accepts the Council's ecumenism, perhaps a little reluctantly, hut feels that its declaration on the Jews was a disappointment...
...In the Council documents he welcomes the new emphasis on active participation in the sacraments and in the apostolate...
...In one story, a man symbolically blindfolds his niece, as--Oates seems to he sayingmmost men attempt to handicap women in order to take advantage of them...
...In spite of his words of praise for the social encyclicals of John XXIII and Paul VI, his dominant thought would seem to be that no skill in sociology can make a good society out of bad men...
...In story after story, Oates' women desperately attempt to get free, free from the paradox that a woman cannot feel like a woman without a man, yet a man will not let her feel like a person...
...Yet there are no full-length portraits, for the author's interest and talent impel him to concentrate on doctrinal questions...
...the big scene of revengeful murder in Katherine Anne Porter's fine story, "Maria Concepcion," is never shown...
...Some might argue her last novel, Do With Me What You Will, also addressed women's problems overtly...
...and send one to Pres...
...You must marry, you must have babies...
...tags...
...He summarizes his Communism and Man, and then adds several more pages of reflections about Communism--a system in which he finds little merit...
...Eight Mortal Ladles Possessed TENNESSEE WILLIAMS New Directions, $6 The Goddess and Other Women JOYCE CAROL GATES Vanguard, $8.95 ROBERT PHILLIPS It was Virginia Woolf who first said that, among the many distinctions which can be made, there are two types of fiction writer...
...He is able, as few others are, to span the abyss that separates the complacent, static pre-concillar Church from the turbulent Church of our own day...
...But perhaps the greatest charm as well as strength of the Eisenhower study is his appreciation of the limits of the presidency...
...The second, "Happy August the Tenth," explores human dependence and sexual ambivalence in a fresh and moving way...
...In another chapter Sheed explains how his lifelong interest in Communism was aroused by his father's conversion to Marxism by some able outdoor speakers...
...He tells a rather typical story about how, when asked to speak on '1"he Church in the Underdeveloped Countries," at the Bombay Eucharistic Congress, he used the occasion to describe Catholicism in the "spiritually underdeveloped" countries of Australia, England and America...
...In a few passages, rather apologetical in tone, Sheed argues too fundamentalistically from the Bible...
...For those unfamiliar with his previous works, this will be an excellent introduction to the man...
...Their goal is to make us realize individuals...
...He is apparently unaware that this sentence in the Constitution on Revelation is a quotation from Leo XIII and Benedict XV, and that it expresses a commonplace of medieval scholasticism...
...Quite naturally Sheed was led into lecturing on Communisim, and these lectures soon led to a book...
...For instance, he states that to find any parallel for the Council's statement that "the study of the sacred writings is the soul of sacred theology" one would have to go back almost to the time of Jerome...
...Along the way, Milton Eisenhower served as an assistant to a cabinet officer, chairman of several presidential commissions, special representative to Latin American countries, and in a handful of additional diplomatic and management consultant roles...
...Others will be dissatisfied by Sheed's relative "indifference to the reconstruction of the social order...
...And unlike most documents, it is art of a high order...
...The sacraments he views as means of supernatural life, and the Eucharist, in particular, as spiritual food...
...Reading Tennessee Williams' and Joyce Carol Oates' latest collections of stories reminds this reader how totally Commonweal: 55 the work of each agrees with Meredith's serf-proclaimed creed for his own fiction: "My method has been to prepare my readers for a crucial exhibition of the personae, and then to give the scene in the fullest of their blood and brain under stress of a fierce situation...
...He views a strong presidency as one that relies on a strong cabinet and that would have the additional help of two appointed vice presidents...
...Later Sheed encountered the Communists as the chief rivals of his own Catholic Evidence Guild...
Vol. 102 • April 1975 • No. 2
