CORRESPONDENCE
CORRESPONDENCE Jobs for the Jobless Cferemont, Calif, To the Editors: All thanks and a salute to Commonweal for publishing the article entitled "The Real Welfare Chiselers." Al Sheahen did an...
...Keifer calls Renter's book a "disciplined" study...
...It should be resisted and condemned: by every thoughtful American, and especially by any who dare to call themselves Christians or followers of die Christ...
...The attempt to bold political power by such tactics is dangerous and reprehensible...
...And the road to fascism is wide and open...
...This movement has galvanized the laity as no movement has since the Middle Ages, and it therefore deserves serious attention...
...The entire remainder of the "review" is a mixture of Keifer and Fichter...
...Does this immediately make it less valuable...
...35,000 people, some having traveled many miles, showed up to apply...
...As a result of what seems to me nothing short of cruel, presidential vetos of Congressional legislation that would have put hundreds of thousands of jobless back to work, that percentage is larger now...
...But the most serious aspect of this matter lies in the phrase so often used by Richard Nixon-"the great silent majority...
...A displaced line on page 372 of the June 4 Commonweal resulted in a garbled section in Saul Maloffs commentary on the book Letters Home, by Sylvia Plath...
...Sheahen points out, the prevailing attitude of the affluent is one of regarding those who are out of work as being somehow themselves responsible for their joblessness...
...It is because they have been deliberately denied their right to do so...
...How could Fichter make such an error as to omit having a control group...
...JUDITH C. TYPINGS REPLY: Re Hamilton's book: any book (pro or con) which projects an unage of the movement as a tongues-speaking devotional phenomenon projects a caricature...
...The second point I want to make is mat Mr...
...Shu is an editor at Croft-NEI Publications in Waterford, Conn...
...And the Nixon-Ford administration has faithfully served the interests of those major employers...
...Yet, as Mr...
...The issues are not the emotive quality of charismatic prayer or the legitimacy of speaking in tongues, nor is the issue the spiritual uplift of a Cardinal of the Roman Church...
...But not because the overwhelming majority of able-bodied welfare recipients don't want to work...
...The three books by Kilian McDonnell, Cardinal Suenens and Elizabeth Hamilton, with the exception of three later mentions of McDonnell's name, and one of Suenens, are dismissed with one sentence apiece in the first paragraph...
...A survey of a few years ago in Los Angeles County showed that well over half the people dependent on welfare payments were little children while another large block of them were blind, disabled, infirm and very old people...
...One of the excellent articles in that book is by Krister Stendahl, Dean of Harvard Divinity School...
...The issue is the potential for good or ill that the movement as a whole presents to the church...
...In column one, the first sentence of the third paragraph should read: Sylvia Plath's "letters home," (all save a handful written to her mother Aurelia from the time she left home in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1950 for Smith College to die week before her death in 1963) are truly appalling...
...RALPH A. KEIFER Corrections Joanne Barkan Proctor was mis-identified in the note accompanying the article co-authored by her, "Dilemma of the Communist Party," in the May 21 Commonweal...
...JERRY voomas Charismatics Potomac, Md...
...Even Andrew Creeley, hardly one sympathetic to charismatic renewal, was put in the embarrassing position of having to say when he reviewed Filter's book that it was a bad book...
...If that comfortable majority can be persuaded to blame all their problems on the poor, the young, and the minorities-worse still, if the affluent ma-jority can be made to fear those three groups, then the spirit of tolerance, understanding and decent compassion which must mart: any really civilized society is threatened...
...Michael Hamilton's book is summarily dismissed in six sentences...
...Keifer fail to be aware of the lack of scientific validity of Fichter's book...
...Thousands of unemployed people stood in line all night so as to be first in line to apply for those jobs...
...I think in all fairness Mr...
...At that time only 2 percent of those seeking welfare payments were able-bodied men...
...I would like to add one more dimension to the story...
...Just recently the Park Service in a Southern California county announced that it would be hiring some 30-odd workers...
...Keifer...
...Al Sheahen did an outstanding job in that article, contrasting as he did the tiny 4/10 of one percent of all welfare cases where fraud has been found with the incredible waste in military contracts...
...It is to be remembered that largescale employers like what they call a "loose" labor market...
...How could Mr...
...Keifer should have made mention of Fichters lack of a control group...
...First, what was written was less a review than it was Ralph Keifer's own view of charismatic renewal which seems to be in sympathy with that of Joseph Fichter...
...It looks very much as though any book that was sympathetic to charismatic renewal would get short shrift from Mr...
...Keifer, in one of the six sentences, tells us there is little in the book about the Catholic phase of the movement...
...If that attention is to be truly serious, it must be critical as well as sympathetic...
...Correspondence 1950-1963 (Harper & Row...
...The presence of names like those of Josephine Massyng-berde Ford and Krister Stendahl in the collection does not save the collection from this inadequacy...
...A few months ago the city of San Francisco gave notice that a small number of street maintenance jobs were to be filled...
...While I was aware of the shortcomings of Fichter's study, I reviewed it as significant because it pointed to aspects of the movement which have received too little public attention...
...For in the United States that majority consists of reasonably affluent people who are neither young, poor, nor members of minority groups...
...To the Editors: I would like to make two comments about Ralph Keifer's review of five books dealing with charismatic renewal in the March 26 Commonweal...
Vol. 103 • July 1976 • No. 14
