BOOKS
Mutkoski, Barbara & Silver, Isidore
The Courage tit Chooge: Ah Amelleun film'* Story MARY GRIFFIN Little, Brown, $7.95 BARBARA MITKOSKI A certain time lag inevitably intervenes between peak experiences and their translation into...
...My father, though properly respectful of his intellectual and moral stature, does not shrink from de-clothing die Emperor...
...They reflected the optimism, passion and honesty of a unique era in our history...
...Trailing clouds of glory as they entered the classroom, the nuns represented a chosen few who had been singularly "called" by God...
...Given the prevalence of both mediocrity and corruption in our generation, one can only envy the life of the mind and the vision of a national destiny that animated both men...
...Although Muy Griffin1* book fa autobiographies scope is generic: the American nun's experience-pre-and post-Vatican H, the Civil Rights marches, the Vietnam war, and the Women's Movement...
...Despite the doctrinal disputes between the two-engendered, as Frankfurter's passionate denunciation makes clear, by Black's "break" in 1943 on the issue whether Jehovah Witness school children were required to take the oath of allegiance to the flag in violation of their religious beliefs- their personal friendship endured...
...He's been telling religious congregations how dead they are for the past four years...
...In the hushed chapel, amid sanctuary lamps flickering in cut-glass amber bowls, and die incense of enedfctioa spiraling upward, in tint otherworldly atmosphere, the seeds of many a religious vocation were sowed...
...They are not marrying, establishing families with all the attendant responsibilities...
...Having been a Sister of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary for thirty-one years, she has, somewhat like Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury, "seen the beginning and the ending...
...Frankfurter, as revealed in his diaries, was a vigor* out, perceptive man with a bitter andv even spiteful personal streak (Lash's brilliant 87-page "biographical essay" serves the Justice better than do his own writings...
...Well, despite the cantankerousness and frequent pettiness of the Diaries, we are fortunate to have a vivid portrait of a devoted public servant who, for decades, was, as Brandeis put it, "the most useful lawyer hi America...
...Frankfurter thought it could be attained by judicial self-restraint and judicial support for greater political democracy...
...She is be-coming...
...If Black, the "absolutist" who read the First Amendment literally and averred that 14A Amendment required tbe sutes to fufly adbefa to die Federal Bill of Kafete in the siraggte, it was only by the narrowest of .margins...
...Through half a dozen tgnatian retreats I had heard the call of the Master, 'Come follow me.' Jesuit spirituality sped arrowlike to my receptive mind...
...Lash's essay not' only reprieves Frankfurter from justified charges of irascibility and vindictiveness...
...As Mary Griffin suggests, the post-Vatican II nun cannot be captured in a static metaphor...
...The sisters, sociology students at Loyola University, were protesting die refusal to admit a black student to the Club's pool...
...His attitude toward women is summed up in a chapter entitled, "Women Are Just Better than Men," and both his and Frankfurter's idolatry of their talented wives must have been suffocating indeed...
...Daniel Berrigan says no, not unless it opens itself to the reality of a radically new mode vf existence...
...Certainly, as an ex-politician (and prosecutor), he knew that the law could be used for political ends-"The founders knew that libel and obscenity had been used as excuses to tyrannize free speech...
...In films like Come to the Stable and Lilies of the Field, Hollywood had done its job well...
...In an interview with the author, Betty Friedan confided her optimism about the position of women in the Church...
...Activist nuns suddenly made headlines, and "proper" Catholics were incensed by this public display...
...Whatever Frankfurter's personal quirks (diminished by his willingness, not chronicled in the Diaries, to forgive and forget), they scarcely match the insensitivity and overbearing narrow-mindedness of Hugo Black...
...and they deliberately tried to live a life focused not on this world, but on tile next ("Thomas Merton would be our beckoning star, not Teil-hard de Chardin...
...Miss Griffin characterizes the novices of her generation as "innocent, messianic, insular, naive, and full of goodwill...
...Norton, $12.50 My Futher HUGO BLACK, JR...
...This book grew out of my attempt to confront my own experience and to discover its meaning...
...With remarkable insight, Miss Griffin examines the impact of the events of the sixties which burst open this "essentially closed society...
...Mary Griffin chose in the end to leave her formal religious life...
...The reader is left, however, without an explanation of her final choice...
...We've got to face it while we still have enough concerned people left in the movement to crystallize new, living forms of community.' For Rosemary Rueth-er, one thing at least is certain: new forms of community will not grow out of the celibate rectory or the convent...
...In anticipation of Frankfurter's treatment of his father, Hugo Mack Jr...
...Perhaps the most controversial of these emerging views is expressed in her chapter The Ethic of Chastity," which explores with candor the paradoxical issue of sexual celibacy...
...Friedan believes that substantial changes will be made in the Church, "only when women get into the offices where their own fate is determined...
...Theologian Gabriel Moron agrees...
...The Courage to Choose From now on, responding to die needs of die world as they saw them, they would themselves largely determine die direction of die congregational aposto-late...
...Her account of the atmosphere of convent life and training pre- and post-Vatican II traces one of the most dramatic evolutions in the Church...
...The theology of the time emphasized separation, a turning away from the world, and an embrace of a mystical otherworldliness...
...They see no contradiction between their vow of celibacy and such love relationships, even if these express themselves sexually...
...Six of the faculty were nuns, and Mary Griffin was among them...
...To Lash, "[History has vindicated Black's ab-johrtism and activism...
...Her Preface affords an insight: "But all of us, those who left and those who stayed, carry our pre-Vatican II formation in our bones...
...Anyone 'seeking perfection had clearly only one way to go...
...Deep-rooted values, patterns of thought, vestiges of ritual cling to us still...
...From now on, BVM's would no longer be deployed like troops...
...Both were strong-minded and strong-willed, bbth sought disciples (Frankfurter won the battle for the academics while Black, the cannier politician, won the "hearts and minds" of the Justices), and both interpreted Rooscveltian liberalism differently...
...Hitherto commit' ted exclusively to teaching, die Order opened itself to a variety of aposto-lates...
...bakbara Mimosa is an assistant professor of English at Bergen College in New Jersey...
...The Courage tit Chooge: Ah Amelleun film'* Story MARY GRIFFIN Little, Brown, $7.95 BARBARA MITKOSKI A certain time lag inevitably intervenes between peak experiences and their translation into the written word...
...His endless conversations with REVIEWERS c. peter Wpley is Lecturer in History and Afro-American studies at Yale University...
...In her final chapters, Miss Griffin examines the effect which the Women's Movement has had, and continues to have, on religious communities...
...The treatments should be read together, for, like Supreme Court opin-- ioas in complex and divisive cases, each sheds light on the other...
...At the end ot die march, she recalls: "I was at dw farthest remove from die crisp, immaculate Hollywood nun...
...Black was an egomaniac (his nickname among Alabama lawyers was "Old Ego"), a consistent hypochondriac, something of a physical coward (who may have well just "given up" in the face of a death which was not inevitable), and, finally, was always demanding of, and often cruel and even vicious to, his children...
...it also sensitively portrays the development of American Progressivism in the 20th century...
...The Courage to Choose is more than a book about nuns, however...
...I A variety of speakers, Elizabeth Mc-AMster and Philip Berrigan among them, ate quoted on their changed perception of the vow of chastity...
...The author's silence on this decision, raises, I think, the book's ultimate question: What is the nature of religious life...
...It is a book about the vision of mid-century Catholic Americans, their attitudes, and their special definition of "religious'* life...
...Was Black wrong when be condemned the disgraceful movement to impeach Jaatk * Douglas by observing Oat If they fan' peach, they'll do it just because he is champion of the weak against the strong, and that's just wrong...
...Black, the judicial revolutionary who followed his "Constitutional star" to revitalize the Bill of Rights, the unremitting defender of the poor, the most liberal New Deal Senator in the country, may well have been the single most decisive force in the 1954 desegregation decision...
...The office of Cardinal is obviously one of them...
...Both men sought a permanent as well as a humane Constitution...
...We conformed...
...As die book traces material change, it deals with conceptual change as well...
...Less visible, yet perhaps more significant, are the changing perceptions of the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience...
...She admitted, however, that she was shocked to see the views of women represented at the Vatican only through men...
...Once a comfortable otherworldly sign of unalterable faith, she functions today as a prickly, frequently unwelcome reminder of what society would like to forget-the disjointed post-Christian character of our times and the responsibilities we all share for the...
...The most powerful influence on these young women were the nuns who taught them...
...In October of 1962, Pope John XXIII...
...Some of that mix-perhaps much- might yet endure...
...When we contemplated the Three Classes of .Men, I knew that I should throw my krt, with..the young man who sold all and went in poverty to follow Christ...
...for three years and to accept a position as an English professor at Alcorn A & M, an all-black college in die South...
...Sroaght up in a totally Catholic milieu, they were essentially docile ("We absorbed doctrine...
...Miss Griffin quotes from a variety of sources on these changing attitudes, and her account is balanced and forceful...
...In August of 1964, a handful of Franciscan nuns joined demonstrators outside the Illinois Club for Catholic Women...
...Black countered with the notion that only the clear enunciation of Constitutionally protected rights would prevent reactionaries from misusing judicial power "when they recapture the Court, which they, inevitably will...
...hi-" '" the politically great and near-great, his public battles for justice in the Tom Mooney and Sacco-Vanzetti cases, and his belief that education married to vitality can achieve the promise of humane democracy were awesome...
...At the sac* ramental level of ministry, nuns have made little progress, even though an increasing number of theologians propound that there are really no Biblical or doctrinal objections to ordaining women...
...moved from separation, to active participation in the world...
...In March of 1964, Martin Luther King appeared on national television and urged every citizen outraged by the blatant violation of civil rights in America to join him in his freedom march from Selma...
...In the meditation on the Two Standards, I unhesitatingly ehose the Standard of Christ...
...Not only were they our cultural heroines, but their lives constituted an almost irresistible invitation in an essentially closed society...
...Get involved in the solution to twentieth-century problems of war and poverty and overpopulation...
...As her memoir recreates the metamorphosis of a milieu, it also recreates her own personal metamorphosis...
...as conscienticized, individually responsible, willing to take risks in the name of Christian commitment, the nun as one "With the existential courage to choose...
...Several years later, a number of formal ' writings concerning nuns in the modern world found their way to our libraries...
...Gradually, a new image of flje nun takes shape-the nun...
...These books roundly and sympathetically depict the great adversaries' professional and personal lives-and, it appears, another near tie has resulted...
...his unflagging energy in pursuit of a "more perfect" democracy disdained worldly riches...
...Both shared a. sense of mission, a passionate devotion to the Constitution or rather to its fundamental values (differently interpreted, of course), and an intellectual and personal honesty and moral courage that transcended then* differences...
...To Frankfurter, the political reformer, all ideas were exciting and often valuable...
...from convent to small community, or apartment living...
...Throughout the course of three chapters, the "why" gradually unfolds...
...To reject its finest and best merely because they choose to marry is, in his opinion, to express an unconscious death wish...
...Lamentably, neither of their hopes has been fulfilled, although it is clear that things would be worse had the Republic not had the benefit of Frankfurter's reform political passions and Black's ntot so revolutionary judicial doctrines...
...Sixty-five law professors and deans, evidencing their own self-restraint, were content to call the matter a standoff and duly admitted both men to the Pantheon of judicial "greats" in a recent poll...
...What is so refreshing about Mary Griffin's study, is that her account of conventual metanoia k personal, sensitive, and told in the vernacular...
...At Mundelein College, a busload of students and faculty headed South...
...They are committed to the life they are in: they want to live a simple, communal, Christian life in service to the Kingdom...
...Will the institution of religious life survive into the twenty-first century...
...ruefully adds that TF unfortunately did not destroy his notes...
...Although he loved mankind in the abstract, he was, as his son gently put it, "not extraordinarily sensitive to what made a particular individual tick...
...The Civil Rights Movement provided one impetus for change...
...The chapel may indeed be bare, the sweet birds flown, but what is of the essence remains: commitment, community, Christianity...
...Amid the varying perceptions of the vow of chastity, What emerges clearly is die ambiguity of the matter...
...But they also want the wholeness of deep involvement with another...
...In die author's own community, the most radical change undertaken in die sixties was TOPA (totally open personnel application...
...And I was undeniably happy...
...Within the course of one explosive decade, the life-style of these women would undergo radical transformation...
...An attempt, essentially, to understand my own nature, as well as the cultural and spiritual climate which largely accounts for me...
...Feminist writers such as Mary Daly and Betty Friedan have penetrated the think of nuns, yet eertain visible changes are still pending...
...Random House, $8.95 ISIDORE SILVER To the Constitutional historian, Justices Hugo Black and Felix Frankfurter were legal mammoths locking tusks in titanic battle for two decades...
...The effect of John's dictum upon religious communities was nothing short of catastrophic...
...Rosemary Ruether states that there is simply no way to take the old skins of institutionalized celibacy found in today's priesthood and religious orders and " 'pour a new wine of sexual liberation into them, keeping on die form of celibate communal life, but no longer demanding that it be a sexless life.'" lia$ stance, Ruether predicts, will lead to " total institutional disaster.'" Miss Griffin speaks of a small number of priests and nuns whose attitude concerning celibacy stands in marked contrast to Ruether's and whose position seems to have been carefully and responsibly thought through...
...presiding at the qpening session of Vatican II, called on the entire Catholic world to undertake an aggiorna-mehto-to bring itself fully into the twentieth century...
...Vatican II said: Change all that...
...from full habit to coders dress...
...The book deals with personal and communal choice in a time of radical change...
...The circular reasoning by which a male-dominated Church maintains its obviously sexist position vis-avis the priesthood has long since been exposed...
...But, the public record and "usefulness" of both stand apart from the inevitable personal costs to their families...
...The overt purpose of her study is an attempt at understanding what caused the metamorphosis from the Brides of Christ, set apart from the world, and dutifully obeying their Divine Right superiors to the modern-clad activists, dutifully obeying their own consciences...
...that institution was used by the privileged to put the underprivileged back in their place...
...That master psychologist, Ignatius of Loyola, spoke as unerringly to me As to Francis Xavier...
...From the Diaries of Fell* Frankfurter JOSEPH LASH, EDIT...
...I remember coming to the realization," writes Mary Griffin, "that lots of people (even people who loved us) didn't really know who nuns were...
...Mary "Griffin's own response to TOPA was to take leave from her deanship at Mundelein...
...understood his colleague's tendency toward pee* vishness-"Felix just gets mad quick and gets over it...
...Embrace the world, all men, all faiths...
...Hugo, Sr...
...but Frank-farter's conception of judicial self-restraint was developed "with such scholarship, coherence, and intellectual power that the corpus of his opinions represents a shading energy hi legal thought and practice...
...Why in the forties and fifties did American girls by die thousands turn their shoulder-length bobs on life, kick off their saddle shoes, and disappear into novitiates over the length and breadth of die land...
...We are shocked to learn, as the younger Black says, that "I think it can be fairly said that until my father was appointed to the Supreme Court...
...There must be a radical and ' thorough-going thinking through of a new world view in all its dimensions, and the development of a new social form of human relationships that will really be adequate and suitable to contain such a world view...
...To many Catholics, the nun's traditional habit connoted all that symbolized the pre-Council Church: authoritarianism, separatism, a ghetto mentality...
...Why did we enter the convent...
...The initial chapters of .her memoir recreate the milieu of convent life in mid-century America and analyze the characteristics of the young women who joined it...
...Whatever the answer, at least Black forced the society to confront its legal neglect of the poor...
...Isidore silver teaches Constitutional Law and History at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York...
...Has he cut through much Constitutional cant or is he simplistic...
Vol. 103 • January 1976 • No. 3
