A FAREWELL:
Novak, Michael
A FAREWELL MICHAEL NOVAK For over three years, this space in Commonweal has been dear to me. To appear here regularly, with freedom to write what I wished, fulfilled a kind of dream: let me do...
...It can hardly escape notice that Catholic universities, publishing houses, and journals operate rather more heavily within the world of Irish-American culture than within, say, that of black, Hispanic, Italian, Slavic, French, German or Greek Catholic cultures...
...Theologically, my hope has been to give as much care to images, sentiments, and events as our tradition has long given concepts...
...and sapiens (as in homo sapiens) more penetrating than homo cogitans...
...Catholics are numerous, concentrated in the electorally potent states, including Florida, Texas, and California as well as the northeastern and midwestern states, and politically at the very heart of such sustained and successful progressive politics as this nation has known in this century...
...I love the Democratic party, not in itself but as the vehicle of the practicable progressive purposes of the nation...
...John Tracy Ellis wrote his famous essay many years ago, of course, matters have much improved...
...Intellectuals of standing like Daniel Moynihan, Garry Wills, Wilfrid Sheed, John Leonard, Daniel Calla-han, Andrew Greeley and others have made a visible public mark...
...Often since, I have ruefully remembered his words...
...All the great traditional strengths of Roman Catholicism-its social sense, its realism, its diversity and cultural sensitivities, its cynicism and stringent realism, its emphasis on sights and smells and colors, its "analogical imagination" (David Tracy), its particular "exercises in religious understanding" (David Bur-rell)-need once again to be re-lived, reflected on...
...My colleague "Sisyphus" may smile sagely at the frailties of Democrats...
...My column here does not now reach these Catholic cultures...
...It is not even sufficiently represented among them...
...Three tasks, in particular, governed this column's scope...
...The other Catholics-in their sense of God, nature, sin, family, authority, community, etc.-are comparatively unknown, even to their fellow Catholics...
...but that a slightly new way of seeing may have become available to all...
...My long-range aim is to produce a theology of culture...
...Looking at America from a Catholic horizon -rather than a horizon borrowed from liberal Protestantism-also yields refreshing insights: a harsher, tougher world emerges...
...Before the erotic revolution, comparable inhibitions made sex a guarded subject...
...Once fear has been dispelled, speech and understanding flow easier...
...and enlightened thought-I have tried, not least in later years, to listen again to the more ancient music of the self...
...Severe inhibitions, intellectual and emotional, ring it round: I mean ethnicity...
...On cultural matters the subject hardest for some readers to bear- and for that very reason-had to be voiced...
...I wish it had left no one unconvinced: not that anyone should wholly have agreed with me...
...Democrats fall out under pain of losing progress for us all...
...openness, he said, is ambiguous, and may allow all sorts of nonsense to escape rigorous critique...
...It rejoices me to see how Catholicism captures the imagination of my children...
...To be an angelic doctor is to reflect too little the perishable earth, love it as one might...
...After the "opening" of the Church in the Vatican Council, I for one turned my attention more and more to social and political analysis, leaving liturgical, church, and theological reform to others...
...The Catholic quarter, however, is not sufficiently studied by the nation's intellectual elites...
...It is far from completing adequately all that must be done...
...beneath that, around that, other warnings sound...
...To do that well, one must learn the feel of the ephemeral artifacts of culture: organizations, movements, forms, manners...
...That the factions of this party have been unable to see each other's role, and to respect each other's agenda, seems to me the most dangerous political weakness in our society...
...In recent years, I find myself more and more attached to Catholic traditions and teachings on nature, the sacraments, the family, and other matters...
...To appear here regularly, with freedom to write what I wished, fulfilled a kind of dream: let me do what I had loved to see in others from my youth...
...expressed in the fleeting idiom of our time...
...Since Msgr...
...I know full well the liberal and enlightened view to take...
...Those other warnings seem to me, increasingly, more trustworthy and finally as intelligent: As though the phrase seat of wisdom were, after all, more exact than head of wisdom...
...But this "generation of the breakthrough" has had many tasks to face, many masters to please, many skills to learn...
...Daniel Callahan once chided me for being too uncritical of an "open church...
...Those on the Right fall out at the pain of losing elections for themselves...
...one might have guessed at least twice that many...
...The Irish side of the Catholic experience in America has been far more artfully and brilliantly articulated than any other...
...Yet only 17 percent of American Catholics are Irish...
...Moreover, I had specific purposes and, now that it is time to close, perhaps it may be permitted me to sketch them...
...I wish this column had been better these three years...
...I would be delighted if he united them...
...I see in the millions silent now so long fruitful hope of future creativity...
...They help, as well, to explain why I am moving now to another space, with the National Catholic News Service...
...Their position with respect to Irish Catholics is a little like that of Irish Catholics with respect to the nation as a whole, circa 1956...
...Whereas most education in America seems aimed at consciousness-raising-at teaching one's mind the hygiene proper to liberal, progressive, (Continued on page 255) Michael Novak (Cont...
...The pivotal community in the social texture of these United States- so goes my premise-is the quarter of our population that is Catholic, more than fifty million strong...
...And so, from this space at least, farewell...
...Reacting, let us say, to the Mayaguez incident, my head goes one way, my other instincts yet another...
...The first was political, the second cultural, the third theological...
Vol. 102 • July 1975 • No. 8
