NEW8 & VIEWS
NEWS & VIEWS Uncommon Cause "Why should any business-and-arms oriented party or politician want to return to the 'bad old days' of political fund raising when they have such 'good new days' ahead...
...So this is a plea that your identifications of McCarthy be put in order, with the most current, 'independent Presidential candidate,' first...
...Nor is the picture any brighter in New England...
...Odds and Ends -The 1976 Nobel Peace Prize sweepstakes are under way...
...First Things First A plaintive request to the media from James Yeager, press secretary to Eugene J. McCarthy: "Of course, he is still a former Senator, as well as a former Democratic Presidential contender, a former hockey center-ice man, a former first baseman, and a former child...
...The others should follow as appropriate to the story...
...The constitutionality of the Campaign Act is now being challenged before the Supreme Court, although a protracted and belated judgment is thought possible, as no fewer than 34 constitutional questions are involved, including freedom of speech and association, right of privacy and due process of law...
...171,284...
...Youth Drain A survey of more than 11,000 boys and girls attending Catholic and secondary schools in the Southwark diocese, a large area of southeast England, reveals that nearly half are lapsing from the Church by the time they are age 15...
...Washington Watch fingers liberal and reform-minded groups, but particularly Common Cause, which, it says, "takes the major credit throughout its own millions of member-solicitation letters for getting the so-catted Campaign Reform Act through Congress...
...Where fix blame for the travesty...
...An ad in a diocesan newspaper asks help for the New England Jesuits, one-fourth of whose members are 65-years or older...
...How much is that...
...There's no doubt about it," said Father Jeremiah McCarthy, vocations director...
...Common Cause is faulted for not successfully pressing the case for federal matching funds for congressional candidates, and for letting slip by, presumably, the corporation-fund provision, which, among other features, apparently allows employees to pool contributions in the company's name, where it can be managed by political-action committees, its allocation timed and its political effectiveness thus maximized...
...He was canned after 13 weeks by Bishop Daniel Cronin for not promising to kill a letter-to-the-editor that "might come" from certain people...
...There are 82 religious-order priests...
...The American Friends Service Committee, a nominator as a Nobel laureate (1947), has proposed the Committee for Cooperation for Peace in Chile, an inter-religious group which the Chilean government has ordered to disband...
...If the religious orders were to decide all of a sudden to pull their priests out of Tucson, we'd be hard-pressed to carry on...
...JOHN DEEDY...
...Who holds the brevity-of-record-term as a diocesan editor...
...Said Washington Watch: "With this one 'reform' provision alone in the Common Cause-conceived Federal Election Campaign Act of 1974, erstwhile Republican Cabinet Member, now Common Cause Chairman John Gardner, couldn't have done a more useful job for the Grand Old Party and for Ford, Reagan, Rockefeller, Connally et al-even if he were the Republican National Chairman himself...
...Gene McCarthy said it wouldn't in an article in the Jan...
...Since his announcement as an independent, he is even a former Democrat...
...But there's still the other side of the coin...
...In the Archdiocese of New York, meanwhile, the smallest group of candidates in the history of the archdioc-esan seminary (founded in 1898) was ordained last month by Cardinal Cooke: eight...
...Tucson has 73 diocesan priests, a 19 percent drop from its 1968 total...
...AFSC said the honoring of the Chilean committee "would lift the hearts' of those suffering from political oppression in Chile and around the world...
...The statistic is cited in a report on the "alarming rate" at which those between 14 and 30 are dropping out of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, and rejecting Christianity apparently permanently, and not just as a passing phase...
...Another observation from the Gaine report: Adolescence is a more important period for religious commitment than is young adulthood, since it is the time when people either become converted or decide to abandon their childhood faith, if they had one...
...According to Washington Watch, the 1974 Campaign Reform Act actually "makes it easier, more direct and legal for corporate cash to flow into the campaigns of special-interest-minded candidates"-a detail seemingly confirmed by the recent Federal Election Commission ruling clearing the way for corporations to invest mil-Jons in contributions from their stockholders and employees in the political campaigns of "friendlies...
...Before 1969, the ordination class had always been 20 or more...
...Probably Father Edward Byington of Fall River, Mass...
...NEWS & VIEWS Uncommon Cause "Why should any business-and-arms oriented party or politician want to return to the 'bad old days' of political fund raising when they have such 'good new days' ahead of them under die new law...
...The Diocese of Tucson, Arizona has revealed that half of the 20 churches in the see city's metropolitan area lack resident priests, and that the diocese must lean more heavily on ordained married deacons...
...The report-drawn up by Father John Gaine, secretary to the Bishops' England and Wales Secretariat for Non-Believers-finds that of children baptized as Catholics three in ten do not make their first communion, and four in ten are not confirmed...
...If the bishop wants to direct the news and content of the paper, then he should be the editor," said Byington...
...17, 1975 Commonweal...
...It adds that it is becoming "increasingly unlikely" that the children of mixed marriages will be brought up as Catholics,, and warns that the Church leadership must get out of its cultural "ivory tower" and meet the people "where they are," if the situation is to be salvaged...
...Clerical Figures The Vatican's Central Office of Statistics of the Church recently announced, with satisfaction, that the rate at which priests are leaving or resigning from the active ministry is dropping (down 1.8 percent in 1973 compared with 2.1 percent in 1972), and that 414,000 priests are presently serving 695 million Catholics worldwide...
...Finally, a tear drop for Supreme Court nominee John Paul Stevens, who told the Senate Judiciary Committee that . he found it "somewhat embarrassing" to acknowledge that his net worth was "as small as it is...
...Washington Watch, a weekly newsletter, poses the question in zeroing in on the 1974 Campaign Reform Act, which was supposed to take the "dirty money" out of presidential politics, but won't, it is suddenly being widely discovered...
Vol. 103 • January 1976 • No. 1
