REVIEWS

...His is an intelligence of notable vigor and integrity, acute and patient in debate...

...It was estimated in 1865 or thereabouts that 1,500 Negro Catholics lived in New York, not one hundred of whom were attending Catholic worship...

...The sympathetic ward leader, the parish undertaker-counselor to thousands-the old type pastor, priest and friend to all under God, final arbiter of all things in heaven and on earth, with all reins by necessity in his own hands, all have gone the way of the Irish wake, which despite justified strictures, also had made its positive contribution...

...Nouns are easy, conjunctions are tite problem...

...This i social history at its best...

...The Catholic immigrants had come to the United States with high hopes, but the culture and customs of- the country were foreign to them and the religious faith of their American-born fellow-workmen and neighbors was not their own...

...Pondering the relation between theology and narrative, he argues that "philosophical theology in the empiricist tradition needs to be married to a structural understanding of narrative if it is to take full account of the place that stories have in the religious understanding of experience...

...With mock seriousness and a humor completely disarming, these future ensigns would quip with the prieitt tfae'nrtfhborinf parfch that the (Starch in New York was not Catholic but Irish...

...The second part of Mr...

...The consideration of the liturgy and special devotions aside, however, the thesis of The Immigrant Church will stand, namely, that the ethnic parishes were a godsend-spiritually, intellectually, socially, and in any other way that can be named...

...Wicker writes of that fiction as though such an account had already been convincingly given...

...I do not feel secure when I find myself disagreeing with him...

...Wfcfcer is a patient critic, and he has done his homework on the official themes, but he has taken a subject on which, no amount of homework is enough...

...Wickejt's lodgments upon the several authors are severe, and after a while I began to wonder whether this severity arose from the nature of the authors or from the particular criteria imposed upon them...

...Alphonsus, at this time, with the employment of a bit of ingenuity, seems to have solved for the two groups even the language problem...

...But it is a chief merit of his book that it rehearses relations which are rarely acknowledged, and forces die theory of fiction to extend itself in several directions...

...Critics evidently feel that it should be jwssible to emphasize the social and persona...

...The ideals and moral values once shared almost in their entirety by Protestant, Jew and Catholic and to a marked degree by the unchurched of that day are no longer a shared treasure...

...Wicker also needs a few hard pages on the idea of mediation...

...The Immigrant* C/mrt the author shows how this racial assessment made In 1944 could have seemed to be true (in fact it never was) in 1844...

...The last chapters of tins book abound in significant observations and deep insights, e.g., one chapter has to do with the conflict in the Church between German and Irish Catholics and intergroup conflicts within . the group...

...Wicker's Joyce with the author of Ulysses, a book I find increasingly moving in its sense of human life, meetings and partings...

...Every Catholic they met pr beanif siace coming to the Academy, they would say, from die Archbishop at the Cathedral to die last yoang woman they bad dated was of Irish - background...

...The crux of the problem was racial discrimination...

...According to this version, Joyce was concerned only with an autonomous art, and deliberately withheld any commitment on his part to moral standards...

...The Church that continued to minister to the Irish people was a superimposed French Church with Jansenistic and puritanical undertones...

...REVIEW University of Noti* Dame Press, $1235 Brian Wicker's hot*, h a contribution to ibe cuiireBt debate on die theory of fiction/and it is especially welcome for the ta<i with watch i( brings fiction and-metaphysics into explicit relation, the theory of Action cannot go very far or very Seep without adverting to metaphysics, but normally die reference is relucjtant and somewhat embarrassed...

...When he says that 'Hie disappearance of Nature" is one of the central themes of modern fiction, 1 find myself assenting and yet troubled by the meaning of "disappearance" in that sentence.-I understand the few technical terms which Mr...

...This branch drew its future ensigns principally from the Great Lakes' area...

...The recent program of the committee for the Bicentennial of the National Conference of Bishops would in those years have been incredible...

...If this thesis holds, it would account in part for certain features of American Catholicism...

...It is not surprising that parish structures that go back to the Tridentine era should be in need of replacement...

...The Irish priests had been educated in France during this time...

...TWa ittportant and fest-rate book is a study in depth-169 pages of text bjittrtased with 33 pages of footnotes' phis a 7-page essay on sources -ol two early Manhattan ethnic parishes, ewe Irish, tiae other German...

...The idea is "interesting," but extraneous to the literature...

...Cardinal Newman is credited with the dictum, "Nothing that is of yesterday preaches...

...Bear* ing in mind that it was not the European custom,to preach at low Masses one is inclined to ask what was the difference between a Latin low Mass in Ireland and Germany...

...Despite their small number they posed a problem to the white Church...

...Dolan rightly comments that the...

...Wicker speaks of the reading of fiction as having an important role to play "in any modern understanding of theological, and especially of Christian claims...

...The question of a causal relation is pondered, but not the prior question of relation itself: what precisely it means...

...I mention these moments only to indicate the scope and direction of his interests...

...However, the German Cathoitp .jarotgomfe were jo vastly outnumbered in those years especially in the Mafcoptan area that it is easy to uadwstaod how casual observers would equate Irish and Catholic...

...The meditations are suggestive rather than definitive...

...The Immigrant Church suggests some questions outside its own scope but of significance and relevance...

...Puring the last fifty years national parishes have been gradually phased out When the code of Canon Law promulgated in 1918 was being codified, one group of Canonists in Rome, among whom was Eugenic Pacelli, later and better known as Pius XII, recommended that territorial parishes be abolished...

...Patrick's Cathedral in New York City could scarcely have occupied a more advantageous site than die one it has occupied-a tribute to the unrivaled foresight of John Hughes...

...Nothing is to be gained by concealing the difficulties in either case...

...Would it be crude to answer: "well, we are in real trouble if we can fend off chaos only by retaining a reassuringly sane narrative voice...

...Negroes were not welcome either in the Irish or German Churches...

...But I think his book rigid rather than strong in its logic, and I wish he would yield himself more daringly to the literature he studies...

...The strategy is never convincing...

...If we speak of "fiction and metaphysics" we concentrate upon die nouns and dunk we have given due measure when we have done whatever we can with them, but "and" is die hard word in our phrase...

...Wicker has allowed his reading of Joyce to be intimidated by a logic he needs for other purposes: it is of little use to him in his response to Joyce's fiction...

...Wicker upon these matters honestly...

...Vicr's aim is to examine some of the*" relations between fiction and metaphysics, and...

...that is to say, a world ordered and Intela subject to discernible natural tendencies'' inherent in things themselves...

...The governing idea is that Joyce escaped from the oppressiveness of Irish Catholicism by translating its imperatives into secular terms, taking the harm out of religion by treating it as art, where its severity may be decently retained...

...The Irish community also manifested an open dislike for the Negro and one historian has observed that "the antagonism between these two peoples was undoubtedly one of "the harshest of intergroup hatreds of American history...

...Wicker is glum in the chapter on Beckett, I find: A study of Beckett's work seems to me to lead to the following conclusion: that the progressive disappearance of the reassuringly sane and rational narrative voice inevitably involves an equally progressive deterioration of the world into chaos...

...Tfce Immigrant Church JAY P.DOLAN Johns Hopkins Press, $10 E. HAROLD SMITH During World War II the U.S...

...His book is rich in crucial nouns, but it is insecure in passing between die words, taking hold of the nouns with the aid of connectives and conjunctions...

...Fiction arises from the freedom of creativity, and it,plays a crucial rote in the understanding of human feeling: its terminology, featuring such concepts as those <jf form, structure, time, and space, is.just as, difficult as the strictly metaphysical terminology of being, existence, essence, and ** forth...

...These latter, too, were always territorial parishes, while all the others were national...

...Still he does net neglect this Side of Catholic life in any limiting way...

...But there is a rift between the general i arguments and the specific analyses, the critiques of particular authors endorse the arguments only at the cost of obliquity, they do not present themselves as convincingly natural accounts of the work...

...My difficulties here begin with "asserts," and ate exacerbated by "relation," "properly," "wo," and "in-herent" I am more deeply troubled by these seemingly innocent words than fey the big ones, "man" and "Nature...

...I would meet Mr...

...Again in the chapter on Joyce Mr...

...The book observes that there was as much difference between a Mass, at Transfiguration and one at Most Holy Redeems* and a Mass in Dublin and one m Munich...

...Last November at the General Conference of Bishops in Washington, D.C., Auxiliary Bishop Albert Ottenweller of Toledo spoke frankly...

...The Church accepted capitalism as it had feudalism...

...Wicker has many interesting ideas, and arguments which are potent generalizations...

...I think I can explain this situation...

...However, he did not and could not foresee that in a little more than a century after his death the American hierarchy would be engaged in an all-out uphill battle for the right to life of the unborn and that in this struggle a Black woman physician and a non-Cfttholic would be a most effective ally...

...The pairings are interesting: for instance, Robbe-Grilkt and Mailer are juxtaposed for their rival attitudes to metaphor...

...indeed they are necessarily inoomplete, and in some intt&sces hantty more than a few hints...

...There is also a sense of missing terms: it is hard to do much with the chosen terms unless you include eipially fundamental counters, such words as being, reality, life...

...Perhaps it was premature...

...However, the sixty-four dollar question is twofold: what structure or structures should replace territorial parishes and secondly, how long can this replacement be delayed?g can this replacement be delayed...

...Wicker uses, including "paradigm," "syntagm," "metaphor," and "metonymy" as denned by current linguists, but I am rarely convinced by the evidence the words are asked to sustain...

...Wicker is not a professional philosopher, and I am sore he does not claim to have solved any of the problems he reches...

...Their recommendation was rejected...

...I have suggested some missing words in Mr...

...For more than a hundred years St...

...If the account of Lawrence culminates in a pretty gruff critique of ''St...

...Language (even more than nationality) was always an important binding force in all the other ethnic parishes...

...Mawr," perhaps the particular, responsibilities loaded upon Lawrence are the wrong ones...

...At one point he says: Metaphor asserts a relation between man and a world 'which is properly called "Nature...

...he is particularly in-tenssted in showing the extent to which metaphor is comprised by implications ultimate and metaphysical < The first part of him took i theoretical, a series of: meditations on such terms as fiction, analbgyi metaphor, Natare, and God...

...An account of the metaphysics of Lawrence's fiction would have to be much more thoroughgoing than Mr...

...Another treats of Social Catholicism...

...Granted that, despite such considerations, these parishes were to all intent and purpose Irish, what type of Catholicism did the early immigrants from Ireland, bring with them...

...In the 1950s Padraic Colum, distinguished Irish litterateur, was defending the thesis that the historic Irish Church died during the penal years...

...However, in a sense Dolan has broken new ground for his focus is primarily on the man and1* woman in the pew rather than on the priest at the altar or more remote ecclesiastical figures m the official life of the Church...

...Wicker gives an account of the fiction in terms which I find misleading and unresponsive: he produces the old familiar Joyce paring his fingernails while Rome burns...

...The primary structure of the parish is faulty and the current structure should be studied by the bishops to find a model more adaptable to our times and the vision of the Council" (Vatican 0...

...Hie author writes in the tradition of the ejanaseot Church historian, John Tracy Ellis...

...Wicker's terminology...

...lir|New Mvfc, Negroes believed that Archbishop Hughes does not consider the Black race to >e part of his Jock...

...Elsewhere he remarks the close connection between the rhetoric of Christian belief and the rhetoric of fiction...

...Extraneous logic, not a full response to Beckett's fiction, makes this judgment...

...Wicker means, but not the decisiveness of his meaning...

...Navy operated a Midshipmen academy at Columbia University, New York City...

...The kepk m concerned with Trans-Bjion-ntearmed £he Irish parish, founded in 1896-and Most Holy Redeemer (German) established in 1844 with reference to St Alpboasus, 1847, a mixed parish (German and Irish...

...crusade was one of charity not of social change...

...Wicker's chapter claims to be, but on the other hand Mr...

...I cannot square Mr...

...Even with his chosen words he can hardly hope to be content...

...Warmth" is ambiguous, but an appalled sen*, of human life, its exposure and vulnerability, is on virtually every page of Beckett, unless I have been grossly deluded all these years...

...I do not see why it should retain our attention unless in addition to being interesting, it were true...

...In the case of most, only in the ethnic parish did they feel completely at home...

...affiliations of die novel without engaging the metaphysical questions, and they try to keep the discussion a strictly secular affair...

...First, were the Irish parishes in New York and elsewhere ever Irish in the same sense mat the other national parishes were, , e.g., German, French* Italian, Polish, etc...

...Both the Irish and the Gennan Catholics made * separate and substantial contribution to the growth of the Church not only to New York City but in almost every section of the United State...

...I see what Mr...

...Lastly and more, importantly, has the parish as we have known it a future...

...It played no part in what have been termed Irish parishes...

...Nor could he have foreseen that possibly by the year 2000 his See City may be predominately a non-white city and that his successor there may be the spiritual leader of a predominantly non-white flock...

...Wicker's logic which insists on saying that in Beckett's fiction, apart from Murphy, "there is virtually no warmth of human feeling anywhere to be found...

...The neighborly spirit of the tenements, especially in times of illness and death, has all but disappeared...

...What he says of modern fiction in general is always lively and often true...

...Wicker's book a a series of practical essays on modern fiction, applications of the terminology be has deployed in the first chapters..The authors chosen are Lawrence, Joyce, Waugh, Beckett, fcobbe-Gtet, and Mailer...

...In the European tradition of the time, Catholics never sought to challenge the economic system...

...Relation," for ex-amplel is used on virtually every page, and it is obviously indispensable, but it is never defined...

...It is my impression that Mr...

...Some will team here for the first time that the sense of ethnic identity was so deep that there were no marriages in those years between Irish and German Catholics...

...Hence, the Catholic quota was predominately of Slavic and German extraction...

...Most of Mr...

...The milieu in which it made its invaluable contributions to Church and country has changed beyond recognition...

...It is Mr...