DAY OF INFAMY, 1971:
Toolan, David S
BOOKS DAY OF INFAMY, 1971 A Time to Die TOM WICKER Quadrangle/New York Times; $10.00 I remember that morning well- September 13, 1971. One of those slate gray Buffalo days as bleak as the...
...Perhaps he wanted "What kind of white man are you...
...On the Anglican side, it disconcerted the militant Protestant-minded, capable of ominous reminiscences from Foxe's Book of Martyrs, to find their Church's cause undertaken by zealous Anglo-Catholics like Lord Halifax and Father T. A. Lacey...
...Robert Phillips is completing a book-length study of the fiction of William Goyen...
...Withheld from publication at the time, its epochal nature derives from being "the first formal joint statement of the faith we rejoice to share...
...But the opportunity was not seized-for equal dealing between men is not the way armed might plays the game with those it does not acknowledge as human...
...norms merchant lectures on philosophy, mysticism and comparative religions at the Cooper Union and Hofstra University...
...Vladimir Soloviev was perhaps premature in receiving the Sacraments as both a devout Orthodox believer and a professed Roman Catholic, simultaneously, regarding these bodies as mystically one...
...It is in the light of such early reckonings that Anglican/Roman Catholic Dialogue, the newly published account of the Churches' 'Joint Preparatory Commission' meetings in 1967 and 1968, may be fully appreciated...
...The 'Conservative Party at prayer' had become, among the Anglo-Catholic corps, the Socialist Party at Mass,' according to a critic writing in The Churchman, 1932...
...He felt himself free, for once, of his pride-ful sense of individuality...
...The sequel to Attica confirms the point...
...That way, so the lesson runs, lies confession of weakness...
...Negotiation was possible...
...Nevertheless, in the twentieth century, these phenomena may appear less scandalous than preliminary...
...In the space of three days, Wicker had been catapulted out of his spectator "press box ethic" and into the role of participant in a "deadly game" well over his head...
...BOOKS DAY OF INFAMY, 1971 A Time to Die TOM WICKER Quadrangle/New York Times...
...That being so, "the bloodiest one day encounter between Americans since the Civil War" (McKay Commission) was predestined...
...Picked up for driving without a license (a parole violation), L. D. Barkley-dead at 21-gets sent to the maximum security facility at Attica...
...Only to call it an encounter "between Americans" is perhaps to beg the terrible issue-and Wicker heaps up overwhelming evidence that his clean America refuses to prisoners title either to "American" or "human...
...From where the observers stood, the ominous impatience of racist troopers armed to the teeth made "massacre" imminent, but the etiquette of dealing with distant Power in sylvan Westchester prevented the revelation of what they recognized...
...Oxford U. Press, $3.25 NORRIS MERCHANT The ecumenical cause often found great, if unintending, champions in the nineteenth century...
...Or as Wicker dryly observers, "hell hath no fury like a bureaucracy defending itself...
...Can the two countries ever meet...
...He put his arms around the youth and held him fast, held him hard, believing he had overcome the deepest fears his life had given him...
...Bishop Charles Gore of Oxford, the most controversial contributor to the next Anglican-Roman exchange, the Malines conversations of 1921-26, exemplified that hybrid Anglo-Catholicity...
...Wetnursing those convicts won't do it," yelled one of the hostage's fathers, "We have to get our son back or just bomb the hell out of the place...
...Unlike Assemblyman John Dunne, one of the observers, Phil didn't have a little black phone book with the private number at Pocantico Hills where Rockefeller was sequestered...
...At the end of this road, as the dialogists, abetted by a combined statement from the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury, make clear, they hope to find, in a beginning, institutional way, that fuller human harmony in the Divine plan, known already by penitent hearts of many suasions, and eras...
...Like many of the Russian professoriate who preceded him in ecumenical theorizing, Gore argued for an 'essential,' 'substantive' Catholicism based on the classical fathers and early East-West councils, but allowing for divergences regarding later theological formulae stemming from the epochs of sundering...
...One of those slate gray Buffalo days as bleak as the winter to come...
...That illogical but lifelike Anglican 'comprehensiveness,' graphically described by J.H.R...
...And so it goes...
...Wicker was forewarned by the sagacious Dunne: "Rocky's not going to give an inch because there are more of them out there [gesturing beyond the walls] than there are in here...
...Here, where the threads of Malines are picked up again, it is Roman Catholic contributors, basing themselves on Con-ciliar openings, who have taken the lead in venturesomeness...
...Continued on page 217) Official atrocity was common knowledge at the college where I teach since many of our students were there as National Guardsmen but again, few if any of these witnesses were questioned until two and a half years after the event when they could remember no faces...
...In microcosm, it had begun to happen among the incredibly diverse observers themselves, and haltingly between the observers and the inmates...
...The autobiographical digressions Wicker weaves into the Attica tragedy were, for me, a point of insertion, a way of traveling with him into D-yard and that immense journey toward understanding and brotherhood that makes Attica a collective tragedy -and also collective revelation for those who can go the distance with him, to that moment in embracing one of the "brothers" when he found himREVIEWERS FATHER DAVID S. TOOLAN, S.J., teaches Religious Studies at Canisius College in Buffalo...
...After all, you don't expect the defendant to hire his own hangman...
...mark taylor teaches in the English Department at Manhattan College...
...jan B. Gordon teaches in the English Department at S.U.N.Y...
...Bishop J.G.M...
...A group of continental Roman Catholic theologians, too, involved themselves in an early exchange with Anglo-Catholics about the possible reunion of Rome and Canterbury, a subject that proved upsetting to the local hierarchies...
...Since these foundational discussions, the permanent Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) has been established, and has issued statements on Eucharistic doctrine (1971) and the Ministry (1973...
...someone screamed, while he spoke...
...Learned Russian and Greek scholars of that era had begun the patient examination of the credentials of Anglican Christianity, often to the irritation of certain insular Anglicans who felt they knew the Church better than its possible misrepresentation by ecumenists to friends abroad...
...We got This Man listenin'" boasts Herb Blyden to the exultant citizens of the D-yard republic-perhaps the most significant act of rehabilitation miserable Attica had ever given birth to- but he was wrong...
...In the prison yard, before the onslaught, for the first time in his life he sensed that nothing racial stood between him and a human being who happened to be black...
...On both sides, that telephone conversation is chilling...
...That was what the Attica "uprising" was all about, a claim to humanity still unrecognized...
...Despite documentation by the McKay Commission of official overkill, brutal reprisal, and criminal neglect of the wounded and dying, to date not one law officer has been indicted-though to be sure, Malcolm H. Bell, one of the prosecution team, has resigned charging in a 106-page report that his inquiry into official misconduct was "aborted...
...It is miraculous how quickly the law turns magnanimous when the case involves a high priest of American Shinto, and no less remarkable how inexorable it is for the poor, powerless and dark-skinned...
...My friend Phil Smith, with his extraordinary knack for lost causes, had spent all day Sunday trying to get in touch with the Governor...
...On the other hand, among Anglo-Catholics, 'Modernism,' in attenuated English form, already visible in such theological compilations as Lux Mundi (1889) and, later, Essays Catholic and Critical (1926), lived on to become, with socialism, a respectable, even expectable, orthodoxy among an articulate clerical sector...
...And so it goes...
...self "free, free at last...
...Rocky knew his constituency, and played to their worst fears- which Wicker knew well enough in himself as son of a southern counterpart to the sleepy village of Attica, New York...
...the sanctuary of The Man behind the barrel of the gun lay beyond his reach...
...Several friends were outside Attica's walls that morning hoping for that "gesture to decency and humanity" that Tom Wicker had hoped for too-good "limousine liberal" that he was (until then), trusting compromises could be worked out among "reasonable" men, believing as the inmates naively did that the state would hold human life, at least hostage life, dear...
...in Buffalo...
...And yet that moment of promise was to be shattered on emerging into the violence outside the walls, the terrible "order of things" that was to rule the day...
...Wicker was listening and learning-and regaining in the process some of his failing spirit-but The Man was not (albeit his agent Oswald tried hard...
...I did not know then, as I do now thanks to Wicker's book, that the state mistrusted the negotiators risking their lives only a little less than inmates...
...The rules of the game, you see, are different for "us" and "them...
...Still, the end result of such adventurous audacities might have been predicted, given the political and theological fears of the time...
...Standing on a platform with a nigger . . . helping niggers against your own...
...Vietnam policy in western New York-the only way we know...
...In that moment, for at least that moment, he knew himself to be at last an equal part of the great human brotherhood-no more, no less...
...Unity is not uniformity now any more than it was then," as Bishop Willebrands put it with reference to Byzantium, "and diversity may well become richer within a more striking and edifying unity...
...Moorman of Ripon, becomes complementary rather than exceptional to various patterns of Catholicity envisaged...
...Joint clergy conferences between the two communions have gotten well underway, in a score of dioceses...
...Apostolicae Curae (1896), in which the Pope found Anglican orders invalid, can probably be understood in terms of the logic of a much longer sequence of pronouncements, now largely discredited, culminating in Pius X's Pascendi, and dictated by the threatening atmosphere of 'Modernism.' Pius XI's Mortatium Annos (1928), further delaying discussion, may in fact have been only denouement to that fin-de siecle cataclysm...
...The inmates, bitter as they were, were hungry for such meeting, such mutual hearing...
...If, from that point on in ecumenist reasoning, the Orthodox thinkers had tended to pose against Roman Catholic 'juridical' theology their revival of Palamite mysticism and that Platoniz-ing disposition they shared with the classic Anglican divines, the typical Anglo-Catholic, for all his imputed emphasis on superficies of ritual, did tend to see in lex orandi, the Liturgy, the basic lex credendi, the realized belief, however it was to be interpreted...
...A Time to Die Rocky to comprehend what Bobby Seale had meant when he'd told Julius Hoffmann that "George Washington is not the father of my country...
...Thus liturgical and, especially, Eucharistic praxis often became for him the embodied faith, the language of worship his central decree and confession, to be so employed in interfaith discourse...
...The Church of England may also have appeared odd in beginning to encompass devotees of the Rosary and the Sacred Heart, or of Eucharistic cults, and in certain places even, of a fullscale Tridentine liturgy, coexistent-sometimes in the same person-wth enthusiasm for social revolution or the most advanced Biblical criticism, balanced, in other quarters, by exhortative, sometimes angry evangelicals...
...He did not want the Governor to get away with averting his face from this heart of darkness that Rockefellers as much as any had created...
...Willebrands' frank recital of the historic obstacles ecumenism encountered from authority offers one of the surest signs of their diminution today...
...It irritated Cardinal Vaughan, and Westminster, so recently having found rebirth and a respected place in English life, and a remarkably distinguished roster of converts, to see the Anglican ministry evaluated from a distance by men like the Abbes Portal and Duchesne, who argued its priesthood to be valid...
...Anglican/Roman Catholic Dialogue: The Work of the Preparatory Commission ALAN C. CLARK & COLIN DAVEY, eds...
...With a rat gnawing inside, I went about my business, waiting to hear whether the state would ignore the 'observers' pleas and storm the yard...
...It would not believe-assured as It was by tweedy aides that the main point was not time to save life, but armament to regain control of an institution whose function was to break the human spirit...
...And so it goes...
...Amnesty is constitutionally prohibited in his case, say the scribes-but lo and behold, see what wonders of legal amnesia they draw forth from unyielding law for an Agnew or a Nixon or a corporate executive dispensing laundered funds to underpaid public servants...
...Among its practical suggestions awaiting fuller implementation are the call for an extensive exchange of preachers, for explorations of new forms of extra-Eucharistic worship together, and for joint retreats, and the coordination of texts of shared liturgical material, in contemporary revisions...
...Early ecumenical approaches that accompanied such dialectical ventures likewise turned out to be more trailblazing than the immediate disappointments they occasioned...
...It was perhaps inevitable, for instance, whatever its original inspiration, that the Oxford Movement, in reviving sacramental consciousness, and monastic life, in the Anglican Church, naturally moved it in the direction of greater aspiration towards unity, just as among the Orthodox, theologians like A. S. Khomiakov, who found a responsive echo among Anglicans with his emphasis on "free unanimity," a universal Church with multiple elements, suggested to Eastern Christians new possibilities of synthesis...
...Privy to the DAVID S. TOOLAN secret of Dunne's little book, Tom Wicker did get through, and for his trouble was rewarded with a Gold Star Mother speech about the duty not to "undermine the basic tenets of our society...
...Wicker wanted a simple human gesture, a gift of presence and time to that "other America...
...The latter presented Leo XIII with a dissertation in flawless Latin to elucidate the apostolic continuity and priestly intent of Anglican ordinations, profiting beforehand by careful briefiings from Portal and Duchesne...
...The Malta Report, of January 2, 1968, which concludes this book, prepared ground for these encouraging innovations...
...So he couldn't get through...
Vol. 102 • June 1975 • No. 7
