JOHN COGLEY 1916-1976: A Sampler form Two Decades of Writing in Commonweal
JOHNCOGLEY 1916-1976 A sampler from two decades of writing in Commonweal The Best Defense Jacques Maritain once asked his listeners at a philosophers' meeting to consider what a different world...
...And there is the same human tendency to reject it as no more than a fearsome hypothesis...
...At the time the book came out, the sheer arrogance of that title could be charitably attributed to occupational disease...
...If we accept the position of the dissenters, Catholicism has failed conspicuously on both counts, as mother and as teacher...
...Certainly until recent years many Americans would have felt uneasy at die thought that a member of the Catholic Church was representing them before the world...
...That does not mean, though, that we can go on dunking like pre-atomic age innocents...
...In the strictly Catholic context, it adds up to a distaste for the facile formula or the tricky syllogism which in explaining so much with so little really provides no satisfaction for the man facing these tensions...
...But whether religious people are or are not less open than their neighbors, it would seem that they should be...
...America is great, Mr...
...Not unnaturally, as a member of the minority I hope so...
...But more than that, I hope that the people will change their minds about what kind of image they want their "symbol" to project Up to now, it seems to me, the image they sought was that of a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation, tolerant of minorities but dominantly WASP...
...And I am not talking about diocesan newspaper reporting, the airing of clerical scandals, or anything of that nature...
...But it is to the former that we look for real salvation...
...There is no doubt that the papacy, the magisterium, and the authority of the hierarchy are all being ruthlessly demythologized...
...The Hiss conviction and the Fuchs case shocked Americans profoundly...
...Eisenhower said on one occasion, because America is good...
...I suspect that however valid their qualifications, members of these groups could not, at this time, fulfill the symbolic function which the .people, by and large, have in mind...
...For months now the spotlight has been held by men like Whittaker Chambers and Louis Budenz who speak another language than the one we are used to: men who because of their backgrounds and personal histories accept treason and conspiracy as almost normal social phenomena...
...What we were long led to believe was the product of divine guidance has turned out to be nothing more mystical than the domination of an ecclesiastical power elite which has lost touch with reality...
...I do not think that if Mr...
...What I am talking about is the growing willingness among Catholics to face up to, acknowledge "frankly, and try...
...I would not say that religious people are less candid than others or more given to gentle hypocrisies, though that is a common enough charge...
...I hope for the day when the White House will be open to Americans of every creed and color because the image America wants to symbolize in its President is that of a "nation of nations, a people of peoples...
...It is not unknown among priests and religious and, for all I know, even among bishops...
...Where on earth has the Church ever been more free to do its work than to this country...
...To deny it would be foolish...
...Lithe H-bomb age there are no more total victories: we have to live in a world where the only victory is partial defeat, and that surely is the hardest pill to swallow...
...Before the world, he represents the rest of us in a very special way...
...Those who have grasped the meaning of nuclear warfare may perforce sound timid and wavering in the presence of the men who demand final absolute sola* tions the "total victory," "unconditional surrender," etc...
...Nor will he get the rapturous support of Catholics, pitifully pleased that one of their "own kind" has made it...
...At the same time, the millions who have lived under the old myths clearly don't want to give up the community they share...
...The questions now, then, may be such as these: If the Pope isn't all we were taught to believe he is, precisely what is he...
...The temptation has been to make the accused prove their innocence, to salvage their reputations, before the courts have pronounced them guilty, and to grow weary with judicial procedure...
...But the idea of the Almighty's being assigned to a flight we chart and to assisting in a mission we design seems recently to have become something of a national delusion in this country . . . Column, April 22, 1955 A Catholic for President...
...That is why the present controversy should not be focused so much on birth control as on the Church as Mater et Magistra...
...To try to douse it out of existence by denunciations, anathemas, and restrictions has already proved to be futile...
...Their only contribution so far has been to make life difficult for those who walk with fear and trembling, dreading, as well they might, the one false step that would set off the awful horror, while they seek out the road to peace...
...What American Catholics cannot afford is the sheer energy being expended in the realm of thought and spirit for an anti, largely rhetorical enterprise...
...Whv would a Jewish candidate receive scant consideration...
...the maddening, frustrating disappointments of "diplomatic methods" rather than the full clean sweep of armies surrendering unconditionally...
...Fighting Communism has become in America a popular and exhausting pastime for all kinds of people (some Catholic veterans have been heard to complain like Jimmy Durante that now everybody is trying to get into the act...
...Most of us don't know and won't until the bishops and the rebellious theologians reach some kind of agreement...
...Eisenhower had in mind...
...These rationalizations persist...
...A have-not nation may be godly...
...Symposium, October 11, 1968...
...But it is an expensive occupation, too...
...Since this whole controversy began, I have read dozens of elaborations on how, and why, the modern theologians and laymen are right about this issue and the Pope and the bishops who support him are wrong...
...But I hope for a better day...
...If we accept the position of the disciplining and anathematizing bishops, its record is not fundamentally flawed: however stern its guidance, it is still behaving like a mother...
...as pastimes go, it may be less harmful than others...
...Loyalty Oaths Granting all the difficulties and dangers, I believe that emphasis on more honesty in the Catholic community is a good thing, a very good thing...
...To ask the Church to take this second course is admittedly asking a lot But why doubletalk about it, especially at a time when ecclesiastical credibility is already in such bad estate...
...I suspect, rather, that it has something to do with the symbolism of the office...
...That perhaps can be justified by the demands of national security...
...It can continue to hold on to its traditional teaching on, authority and act vigorously on it as Cardinals O'Boyle and Mclntyre, for example, are doing...
...A sincere but self-deluded relic of another age...
...however incredible its teaching to modern men, it is still acting as a teacher the rest of Christendom is wrong on contraception, not the Church of Rome...
...As I see it, the real question is whether America has become sufficiently pluralistic for a member of a minority group, albeit a large one, to perform the symbolic functions of the Presidency...
...Has the time yet come...
...That means often that we have to be satisfied with less-than-totalities along the way partial military victories, for instance...
...But it is there-growing ever stronger and more widespread...
...The A-bomb and now the H-bomb-introduced a new absolute, and they never lose sight of that fact...
...The enemy may be anyone, anywhere, and the temptation is to swing out wildly and blindly, forgetting the safeguards provided by the maddeningly slow, laborious processes of law...
...Al Smith ruefully acknowledged this when he said that the time had not yet come when a man could say his beads in the White House...
...Why are women virtually eliminated...
...Ask your neighbor why he would not want to see a Catholic (Jew, Mexican-American or Oriental) President of the United States and you will hear one of these rationalizations...
...Of course, the Anglicans never pretended to be right in the authoritarian way Pius XI and Pius XII did...
...This is the big question mark of course...
...But I am afraid that his maxim was generally interpreted to mean that American greatness, measured in material wealth and political stature, was somehow a reward* for American godliness...
...Kennedy is nominated he will receive the bigoted battering that Mr...
...Smith had to take...
...An atheistic nation may be great...
...Our work, then, is to preserve liberty while we stave off total death...
...But the newspapers are right, of course...
...First Editorial, Oct...
...The most-sure-of-themselves, according to the dissenting theologians, invested the prestige and power of all ecclesiastical authority in their own error and, for that matter, they are still doing so...
...No one we know seems very panicky...
...Some arguments are subtle, some inventive, all are presumably sincere...
...Something, it is clear, has to give and soon...
...But the outlay of cold cash is not the greatest expense...
...Column, May 22, 1964 God and Caesar . . . I take it that any relationship between Church and State, from the Church's point of view, exists so that the Church can be about its holy business...
...The desire, for "honesty" in this sense is being felt throughout the Church, though it has not been sufficiently articulated yet...
...A primus inter pares bishop...
...The result of that exaggeration was an admirable discipline, but the present dissenters imply even if they hold off from spelling it out the discipline was purchased by increasing human misery in the world, creating false consciences among the faithful, and misreading the will of God for mankind...
...There has been a tendency in the last few years bolstered, I am sorry to say, by the President himself to identify greatness and godliness...
...One more bad theologian...
...panic would be disastrous...
...The natural first reaction was near panic and consequently the temptation to lose faith in ourselves and our own ways...
...When we say "Give me liberty or give me death" now, we should know whereof we speak...
...Protestants have changed...
...and expect to lose many followers and accept some version of the diaspora situation that some prominent theologians were talking about a few years ago...
...It is part of the Age of Irony that their critics who like to set themselves up as the besieged "moralists" surrounded by shabby "relativists" would have served neither end...
...police actions" instead of total wars...
...Now I am not talking here about outright lies or blunt denials of the truth...
...The Pope and his bishops say no...
...God Is My Co-Pilot was the title of a war hero's memoirs...
...The only ones who speak in extremes are those nuclear scientists, sober men, who keep trying in vain to impress upon the rest of us the full terror that has come from their laboratories...
...make it clear to the layman that when his conscience tells him that the Pope is wrong, it is his conscience not the Pope's that needs straightening out...
...I see two possible general directions in which the Church can move...
...Why not say that the Anglican and Protestant, Churches were more correct in their ecclesiology, their moral teachings, and their faithfulness to the spirit of the Gospel than the Church of Rome, which for so long made the kind of claim its own best theologians are now rejecting...
...We can bo longer use that noble sentiment as a mere rhetorical flourish total death is too imminent a possibility...
...Column, September 6, 1957 Humanae Vitae The Catholic Church is going through something whether a passing crisis, a revolt, a profound transformation, or a last agony remains to be seen...
...But the advice seems unnecessary...
...to deal with the problems that confront the man of faith, specifically the Catholic faith, in the contem-porary world...
...It is clear, however, that none of them is based on the same idea of the papacy that the Pope himself has of his office...
...But the popular tendency is to anticipate the courts, to pre-judge the accused, in the public press and the public forum, on the basis of what may turn out to be coincidence, circumstantial evidence, non-conformism or mere assertion...
...America has changed a great deal in the last thirty years...
...I suspect that the argument about a Catholic President is really not very rational...
...JOHNCOGLEY 1916-1976 A sampler from two decades of writing in Commonweal The Best Defense Jacques Maritain once asked his listeners at a philosophers' meeting to consider what a different world we might be living in if a Thomist had written Das Kapital...
...Whatever the failings of Catholics, and they are many, no one can say that the principle of separation is to blame for them...
...An American President is not merely a Chief Executive...
...There is a full share of mendacity in religious circles of course, but it is generally recognized as a deviation from the accepted norm...
...If, as a distinguished Vatican prelate has said, the Church in America should be an example to Catholics everywhere, let it not be forgotten what a great part of the success story was written in 1791 when the Founding Fathers wrote the first ten Amendments to the Constitution...
...At the same time it is sometimes harder for them to be, especially when they know themselves to bear a responsibility for the faith of others...
...It has been a time of confusion and general suspicion, such as must exist in the always-threatened police state, and of frustration...
...The emphasis on fear and suspicion found everywhere might well be transformed into hope and vision and hard work...
...This difficulty is understandable, but it does bear heavily on the question of honesty...
...An alarmingly high percentage of the national income is going into the fight...
...They all add up to the same message: the claims of the magisterium have been dangerously escalated over the centuries, they still are, and it is time to bring them down to size...
...As yet, the movement toward it is' still a kind of undercurrent of Catholic Life...
...The barrage of criticism he received in the Catholic Press a few weeks ago, even if it does not convince the die-bards that there is no Catholic plot to put a papist in the White House, does indicate rather conclusively that Catholic sectarianism is breaking down...
...I cannot say just what Mr...
...it is a desire to face up squarely to all that one believes to be true and to acknowledge candidly that the acceptance of so many truths and different kinds of truths as are open to modern man can be, and frequently is, the source of tensions...
...That, it strikes me, is the heart of the present controversy...
...Can a Catholic...
...There are Negroes fully qualified for the office...
...21, 1949 The Long Read The London Economist has referred to the first half of 1950 as our "months of degradation...
...Where there is fear and suspicion the tendency is to react emotionally and blindly, and in time, if the mood persists, the voice of reason is stifled forever . . . Editorial, June 2,1950 The New Absolute Like the doctrine of hell, infinitely horrible, the fact of nuclear warfare, for most of us, is hard to grasp...
...They won't accept the old myths but are ready to remain with a demythologized version of Catholicism...
...Perhaps he was simply talking about moral grandeur...
...The ascent of these deadly serious informers who have emerged from the conspirttorial darkness, and of Senator Joe McCarthy in the role of reckless, irresponsible bogey-man have set the mood of the day...
...It may even be that when a great nation begins to think of itself as godly because it is great, it has gone a long way toward losing its claim on godliness...
...Editorial, Aug...
...when America ceases to be good it will no longer be great...
...By insisting on the principle so doggedly, some have implied, the magazine shows less concern for the work of the Church than it should...
...Attempts at suppression only backfire and increase the tensions...
...Is that possible...
...Taking this course, the hierarchy will have to discipline rebellious priests and theologians...
...It is a desire to be a whole person, in public as well as in private...
...If, for example, the Anglicans were right about contraception all along and the Romans were wrong, who are the surer moral teachers...
...While their critics bitterly find fault with them as "appeasers," "compromisers," etc., they are the ones who have held the free world together, betraying neither the cause of liberty nor yet courting total death...
...A Commonweal writer receives a certain number of letters complaining that the magazine makes too much about keeping Church and State separate...
...Catholics have changed...
...And in total death there is no liberty...
...The American courts in every case have been scrupulously just in dealing with those accused of betrayal or treason...
...To sustain that image, a series of rationalizations were employed one for Catholics, another for Jews, another for Negroes, Hispanics, Orientals...
...Why, at this point, is a Negro President out of the question...
...Money, after all, is only money...
...Who he is and what he is, therefore, has much greater significance than the identity of a Senator or even of a Justice of the Supreme Court...
...That is an interesting, if somewhat tragic consideration for today...
...Column, April 10, 1959 Honfesty vs...
...he is the closest thing we have to a living symbol of the nation...
...There may be similar considerations tomorrow, with equally tragic overtones, unless at least some of the seemingly limitless energy going into the ancient and wearying anti-Communist crusade, which has usually been notoriously long on rhetoric and short on reason, isn't diverted into more positive channels...
...21,1953 All This and Heaven Tee...
...We, who never feared before, learned for the first time what a fifth column could mean in terms of betrayal and survival...
...I doubt it, though, if only because some of the most self-deceiving people I know are the first ones to make the charge...
...But I don't think I have ever seen anyone give any credit to our system of Church-State relationship for the health of American Catholicism...
...I catch strong hints of its presence and sometimes outright statements of the need for it when articulate laymen get together...
...The second choice is for the Church to admit that its claims for the magisterium were in the past wildly, and even perniciously, exaggerated...
...The youthful enthusiasm given to a negation might be given to genuinely Christian social reconstruction...
...Such credit is long overdue...
...Still, if one studies Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then multiplies that horror by a hundred, by a thousand, perhaps soon by a million, the mind begins to grasp dimly what the instincts and emotions reject "This is not the time for panic," the newspapers are forever telling us...
...Thirty years have passed...
...the ambiguities of political warfare rather than the absolute superiority that goes with unquestioned military power...
...It is time for American Catholics to tell the world how well our system works...
...What is at stake in the "search for honesty," though, is a larger, more total commitment to truth than the mere avoidance of lies...
...the theologians say yes...
Vol. 103 • May 1976 • No. 10
