CORRESPONDENCE
CORRESPOND Church in Crisis Hollis, N.Y. To the Editors: Your editorial, "The Crisis" [Jan. 2] does a disservice to your readers. It tends to polarize opinion in the church and indulges in...
...To the Editors: The staff of the University of Notre Dame Press was pleased to see two of our books among the Critics' Choices for Religious Book Week [Feb...
...To say that the presence once again of such priests in the Church's official ministries would threaten celibacy is a vote of "No Confidence" in each U.S...
...12, 1975, issue, suggested, there are models for such groups in several communities throughout the U.S...
...We also estimate that 90 percent of these priests are less than 45 years old...
...He cut the girl free, ran off with her, and returned her to her tribe...
...Many resigned/ married because they felt guided by the Spirit to be more in touch with the realities of life . . . marriage, family, labor, economics, politics...
...The Corps Of Reserve Priests United tor Service (CORPUS), of which I am a member, was organized last year to help fill in the gaps in ministerial service Which an aging clergy creates and to share with our brother-priests the experiences we have had with relating the gospel to life and its daily joys and problems...
...There are reasons, and then there are reasons, for this state of affairs...
...Abigail McCarthy (Cont...
...Simultaneously, there has come into being a sort of applied existentialism, of an exaggerated desire for individual fulfillment, of "doing your own thing," that erodes community at the same time that it fills the vacuum created by loss of community...
...Hitler and Stalin considered themselves accountable to no one, with results that are familiar to everyone...
...You know him well...
...Twelve years ago your editorial would probably have stated that Catholics could in good conscience decline to follow the bishops' lead...
...But an essential point that you make is absolutely correct...
...This situation would impose a heavier burden on many in both camps and we need, eloquent, responsible and persuasive voices to bring this (Continued on page 221) delegated to a limited number of individuals who can therefore be held accountable both for failure to control and for failure to maintain secrecy...
...It would have been better to realize that, particularly in these times, bishops also have to face perplexing ambiguities and that any reluctance, hesitancy or inability to respond positively and promptly to the various demands of Catholics, many of them relatively new and somewhat surprising in view of our past history, should not be apodictically termed "refusing to listen to the Spirit...
...michael true Park Ridge, 111...
...This, then, is the challenge with which the Christian community of our time is faced: Is the very idea of authority obsolete...
...ROLAND LAIRD Wilmington, Del...
...Certainly I am not denying the possibility of such a willful misplacement of priorities among individuals, something for which one day they will have to render a strict accounting...
...We can reverse the trend...
...2], I feel I should add some comments...
...allowing the growth of the executive's private legion...
...FRANK J. BONNKE Pastoral Care Department Lutheran General Hospital Critic's Choice Notre Dame, Ind...
...2 editorial is likely to...
...without a language for thoughtful evaluation (criticism), we are not likely to develop a language of celebration either...
...As my brief report, in the Sept...
...Leaks are but the consequence of the failure of Congress to use its proper powers of oversight- it has long been lax and complicit in...
...During the Holy Year in which the Pope and the bishops stressed evangelization and reconciliation, I offered my services to three pastors to contact the non-Catholic spouses of their parishioners to see if they would be interested in Jesus' message and in the Church...
...In the end a young Pawnee of high reputation rebelled against the rite...
...Page 12, col...
...Since 555 of 1750 resigned priests contacted told us they would be willing to function again as priests or to function again in some meaningful ministry, we project that at least 3,000 of the 10,000 priests who have resigned in the United States in the past ten years are available for ministry for as little as a telephone call or a postage stamp...
...I believe that CORPUS members could do a great deal for the Church in a variety of ministries, some as leaders in the types of ministries you suggested...
...There is little room needless to say for the concept of authority or hierarchy in a world such as that...
...That is why the quality of discernment is so important today between true and bogus authority...
...the concept is built into the marrow of human relationships...
...If the House intends to investigate its own ethical shortcomings, let it begin with its failure to carry out its constitutional duties...
...It does not do to blame the government, the CIA, the multi-national corporation-and turn the page...
...We have become disillusioned with the whole concept of leadership, especially as it is reflected in a structured, hierarchical sense...
...His sole area of concern seemed to be the collection basket...
...Yet in 1969 the bishops praised priests who would assist resigned priests to use their talent and experience for the Church...
...A civilizing process must start somewhere...
...It tends to polarize opinion in the church and indulges in recrimina-tions against the bishops...
...I am strongly opposed to abortion...
...Again the result often was despotism...
...and I believe this reflects what most people think about priests...
...One feels that the editors could have been more mature in trying to understand the episcopal position even though they had to criticize it sharply...
...There is no question that the concept of hierarchy within the Church has been falling more and more into disfavor with the laity...
...They comprise some of the most dedicated men the Church has...
...To the Editors: Your January 2 issue highlighted the facts that we have fewer functioning [News & Views] and fewer relevant, articulate priests [Edit...
...They had had an annual custom, surrounded by much ritual, of sacrificing a captured maiden just as the morning star rose...
...That relatively mild attitude would have probably brought you more opposition and abuse than your Jan...
...But I feel that one is skating on thin ice by implying that as universal principle...
...To the Editors: Having read your editorial "The Crisis" [Jan...
...1...
...Perhaps for the time being only an uneasy coexistence is possible between the staunch pro-lifers and the more tolerant and less dogmatic among us...
...Obviously, this was neither necessary nor probable, but merely providing for 7 billion would have been immensely expensive...
...The possibilities, I am sure you will agree, of misinterpretations of actions and motives are so great that we can never really be certain in any individual case...
...it can and must be a means of finding our way in the world...
...Authority I feel there will always be...
...2: "Truly, with soaring violence, alcoholism, gambling, private and public indebtedness, drug addiction, inflation, unemployment, suburban sprawl, racial tension, and rotting cities, the American scene could only be described as a state of siege...
...You also called for a believable leadership in the Church, one in touch with the people, one that recognizes the Spirit acting through others...
...She was kept in ignorance of what was happening to her, and was shot by an arrow through the heart at the same time she was clubbed from behind so that death was instantaneous...
...The point-and this is my final zag-is that the whole problem hangs together: control and a capacity for secrecy, on the one hand...
...I love them, each of them, but that doesn't mean I will always follow them, especially if they are out of touch...
...failure to control and a necessary resort to publicity, on the other...
...There is a real disintegration of community that has been occurring in affluent societies, due among other things to high residential mobility and distractions created by the mass media...
...A great deal of what is wrong with the world has come about because of surface impressions, stereotypes and emotional responses that fall wide of the real issues...
...One of many creative solutions to the problems cited would be to utilize in ministry, whether in a sacramental way or not, priests who have resigned...
...priest...
...To limit our focus to certain specific issues that have been in the public limelight-divorce, birth control, Papal authority, etc.-is begging the question...
...Because of events inside and outside the church shouldn't we be more modest in charting the movements of the Spirit...
...After she was dead all the warriors of the tribe took turns shooting arrows into her body...
...james r. langford Director Correction Two typographical omissions occurred in "April 20, 1989: Fascism Comes to the United States" by Robert Alan Cook (Jan...
...The difference between the healthy exercise of authority and tyranny is accountability...
...Additional insights and guidelines are discussed in Cyrille Vogel's "An Alienated Liturgy," Liturgy: Self-Expression of the Church (Herder and Herder, 1972) and in the other excellent volumes edited by Herman Schmidt, S.J., in the Concilium: Religion in the Seventies series...
...toward practices that "spring less from external pressures and more from inner needs and convictions...
...In liturgy, one might begin with the positive suggestions in that editorial, for worship that is less "priest-centered" and "with smaller groups...
...Instead you succumbed to facile opportunism, blamed them for the loss in church membership and attendance, and chastised them for a woeful lack of leadership without demonstrating how their actions and statements have been the chief cause of people leaving the church...
...To the Editors: As one who periodically despairs of Commonweal's ever facing seriously the tragic condition of the American Catholic Church, I was greatly heartened by the superb editorial, "The Crisis" [Jan...
...There are important sociological factors also at work...
...The growth of the terrible inhumanity of torture, now widespread, excused, and aided by technology, is not inevitable...
...Page 15, col...
...As 'The Crisis" so clearly demonstrates, criticism is not and need not be an exercise in cynicism or apologetics...
...Harvard population expert Roger Revelle, for example, calculated that if all the world's arable land were cultivated with the techniques, equipment, irrigation, and fertilizer used on most American farm lands in the early 1970s, the world could support some 30 to 40 billions...
...The examples of Hitler and Stalin and their ilk and, in our own country, of the recent debacle of Watergate, have produced confusion in discerning between authentic leadership and the abuses thereof...
...The underlined words in the following excerpts were inadvertently omitted...
...incident among the Pawnees which gives us some hope about human nature...
...It is to tasks like this one that the House of Representatives ought to be bending its efforts, not to baiting the media...
...It is irresponsible to lump all the unresolved issues in the contemporary church together and then to lay blame for all the resulting ill effects at the feet of authority...
...The people seem to have been relieved to drop a cruel practice, and it ended there...
...scene could only be described as a state of siege...
...These, I feel, are the tip of the iceberg, rationalizations if you will, of something more general and fundamental having to do with how the mind of Western society has been evolving in recent years...
...As a corollary, and one not observed in previous flings at congressional control, such a small group of individuals should be neither permanent nor self-perpetuating...
...When he returned, he was not punished, but admired for his courage...
...The assassinations of the Kennedys, and of Martin Luther King, seem to point out that truly charismatic individuals always manage somehow to be stolen from our midst...
...We agree that John Dunne's Time and Myth should be in paperback...
...Seldom has a writer so succinctly, directly, but affectionately described the situation that American Catholics face at the present moment The liturgical crisis the writer describes can be traced, in part, to a crisis of language...
...A certain kind of pastor comes to mind that people, justly or not, associate with the pre-Vatican II Church...
...Are we in other words the prisoners of sociological and historical imperatives, or do we have at our fingertips the means for freeing ourselves of these imperatives through the Truth which sets us free...
...The old adage about the baby and the wash water holds true as much today as ever...
...ROBERT W. MEDEIROS Worcester, Mass...
...You picture them perhaps as a group whose overriding thrust is toward personal power as an end in itself-or so it would appear to me and possibly to others...
...That would have been the way to argue the weaknesses of their "Pastoral Plan for Pro-life Activities" and to indicate, in your considered judgment, what harm would result from attempts to implement that statement fully...
...However, if the bishops expect people to rally to the causes they espouse or expect people to have confidence in their capacity to lead, they first have to demonstrate that they have confidence in the ability of their married brothers (including priests) and sisters to reflect life as it is and to minister as team members to genuine needs...
...Each feared what the bishop might think and would not give me a list of people to contact...
...in that context, the question of leaks would find an imporant but subordinate place...
...The Vietnam fiasco has downgraded the military, eminently a hierarchical organization, in the public eye...
...It involves different members of the church, including the bishops themselves, differently and in varying degrees of directness and intensity...
...Could one of these questions be that the appropriate subject of debate is not authority, but rather accountability...
...One goes even further out on a limb by collectively tarring a whole group with the same brush...
...her heart was cut out and eaten...
...But we can only do it by accepting personal responsibility...
...The cynicism that all of this has produced with regard to leadership and authority is bound to rub off on other areas, including not least of all the Church...
...In fact, it is now available in paperback for $2.95 from the Notre Dame Press...
...CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 195) realization to the bishops' attention and temper their present moral and political zeal...
...The implication of your comments is of the hierarchy of the Church as a group of essentially political individuals whose spiritual mission has become compromised by worldly and self-seeking interests...
...Abortion is a specific issue...
...While such as he was in theory accountable to his God and to his Bishop, in practice he was also accountable to no one...
...To suggest that such priests would not be accepted again by the laity because they now have a wife would also be a vote of "No Confidence" in our people, especially women, and would run counter to all opinion polls...
...We need more shared ministry, not more isolated clerics...
...They also warned that unless such gifts were used within the authority of the Church, schism might result...
...In other words, in order to arrive at the right answers, we must first ask the right questions...
...What I have suggested about the utilization of resigned priests is obviously not the only solution to the many problems besetting worship, the world or the Church, but officially recognizing and utilizing 3,000 "priests on the bench" and a far greater number of the laity in ministry could be a Spirit-inspired way of saving many a losing game in our nation's parishes...
...Obviously, over the years the sacrifice had been little by little cleansed of its aspect of torture...
Vol. 103 • March 1976 • No. 7
