The Bishops Play Monopoly
Morrissey, Daniel
left with one disturbing detail. During the riots he walked with the student corteo, or procession, from the University to the downtown area. When they reached the business area and began passing...
...In the present instance it was not a flash of lightning but the sudden darkness which revealed the landscape, a city divided by frontiers which could not have been more impassable if they'd been marked by barbed wire and checkpoints...
...Was the killer a police officer, an agent of some outside group, a student trying to look like a cop...
...In the case of the Costello prayerbook, American Dominicans additionally are cut off from a common Commonweal: 529 prayer text used'by their co-religionists elsewhere in the English-speaking world...
...Counsel for Rotelle and the bishops has refused to discuss the Costello and St...
...Cloud followed suit by withdrawing his imprimatur although the orthodoxy of the St...
...Only one story broke the pattern...
...The last thing Costello, a faithful Catholic, desired was a confrontation with Rotelle or his hierarchical superiors...
...As a last resort Costello filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against Rotelle and the bishops in Washington, D.C...
...Really...
...However, he and his colleagues are intrigued by the murder of the student from Lotta Continua...
...In short, he put forward a version of the Whirlwind Theory...
...Costello is an unpretentious and immediatelylikable middle-aged business man who has been making his living for a number of years dealing in religious books...
...Royalties To no one's surprise Rotelle the liturgist has shown a marked preference for the works of Rotelle the translator...
...For weeks thereafter every letter from home had a blackout story...
...It's a riddle...
...The Communist city administration had left them alone for fear of ruining its image as champion of students, and defender of the left...
...Cloud, Minnesota, who is a member of the Bishops' Committee on the Liturgy...
...Was the killing a mistake or part of a larger scheme...
...When he got back to his store after the riots, all the windows had been smashed, and in the rubble he found four or five plastic bags filled with rocks...
...The schoolteacher reassured her friend...
...Nothing to worry about...
...For him there was no mystery...
...she lived in the Village...
...The friend was puzzled...
...been ,publishing a shortform breviary suited to lay use since 1940...
...Rotelle's actions, however, had not only wiped out his investment in the Irish prayerbooks, but had also begun to sour his long-standing reputation with Catholic merchants as a distributor of orthodox literature...
...A schoolteacher said she'd been called by a worried friend in Holland...
...John's had...
...Maybe people in the village or in Brooklyn Heights or on the Upper East and West Sides were sharing candles and putting up stranded friends for the night, vignettes which might fit nicely into a novel by Jane Austen, but the scene elsewhere was from The Day of the Locust--kids ripping the gates from storefronts in Harlem and Brook!?~: ~hopkeepers with rifles, thousands of arrests, stripped show windows, women with supermarket carts filled with stolen food, men staggering home with color TVs...
...The American bishops put up approximately 75 percent o f ICEL's initial investment and receive a corresponding share of its .profits from royalties...
...They weren't dramatic...
...Archbishop Joseph Bernardin, the president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, has also told a noted Catholic publishing house not to distribute another prayerbook of unquestioned orthodoxy and literary quality because it might compete in the market of private-devotional material with d similar version producing translation royalties for the bishops...
...Costello proposed several forms of advertising disclaimers designed to meet any ecclesiastical objections that he was trying to pass his prayerbook off as an "approved" text for public worship...
...Pretty clearly something had changed in New York between 1965 and 1977, and the press was not slow to point out what it was...
...John's had to reluctantly accede to this headstart by the bishops' volume because St...
...The great blackout of 1977 inverted an old metaphor an ancient workhorse of literature like the notorious tip of the iceberg which darkly hints of the huge mass invisible beneath the surface of the water...
...nothing like that was going on where she lived...
...I missed it again...
...John's cases while the Costello matter is in litigation and has likewise refused to make his clients available to answer questions about either instance...
...Nobody I knew had been in surgery, or in an elevator, or on the IRT Express somewhere between City Hall and Union Square, but the stories had an air of excitement all the same, something of what children feel in a big storm when the streams begin to rise and trees go down in the wind...
...publishers, the proper application of the imprimatur power and the appointment of Rotelle to two powerful positions engendering a serious conflict of interest...
...John's version had been given an imprimatur by one of its competitor's directors, the Bishop of St...
...The RotelleCatholic Books version was quite similar to Costello's in form and content except that it used a different English translation of the original Latin text, a translation promulgated by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL...
...These two events do not raise questions about the bishops' ultimate authority to decide which English texts will be used for the Church's public worship...
...It holds the copyrights to those translations and receives royalties from the companies who obtain licenses to publish and sell them...
...The blackout eerily revealed in 19 August 1977:530...
...ICEL was created after the Second Vatican Council by the Catholic Episcopal Conferences of the Englishspeaking countries to translate liturgical texts...
...The interesting thing about blackout coverage was the speed and the unanimity with which people got the point...
...He shook his head: "E un rebus...
...It may also have gratified Rotelle, who fancies himself a literary scholar, to know that all the simplified breviaries were using his approved translation...
...Likewise, the Rotelle-ordered boycott of Costello's prayerbook and the sale of the Catholic Books-ICEL substitute which he promoted enriched the bishops' royalty revenue...
...The distinguished liturgical publisher, St...
...Since Costello's prayerbook used a translation copyrighted by the Irish and British bishops, they, not the American bishops, were entitled to royalties from its sale...
...the bishops have completely accepted ICEL's texts for the official worship of the church...
...This was all to be expected...
...He is curious to know who the students were, if they were students, who broke the windows, what the techniqtie was they used, and why it was they were so well prepared and cool, while the others were furious at the death of one of their number at the hands, it seems, of the police...
...The negotiations, however, proved to be a one-sided experience...
...He'd heard there was looting, mass arrests, the city aflame...
...I THE BISHOPS PLAY MONOPOLY DANIEL MORRISSEY The traditional independence of Catholic publishers is at stake The Catholic hierarchy is trying to monopolize the religious books market in this country and has been violating federal antitrust laws in the process...
...In March, 1977, six months after the RotelleCatholic Books "official" version was published, St...
...charging two basic combinations in restraint of trade: the Rotelle-ordered boycott of his praycrbook and a larger scheme between the North American bishops and the Catholic hierarchy of Ireland and the British Isles to divide up the world market for religious books, particularly the market for abridged breviaries...
...This ecclesiastical monopoly stifles not only economic and scholarly competition but also literary and artistic variety...
...John's Abbey Press of Collegeville, Minnesota, suffered a similar fate at the hands of Rotelle and his boss Archbishop Bernardin...
...For a day or two after the blackout the fat headlines of the New York Post seemed more than a nervous tic, and it's even possible that no one in the entire city picked up his morning's Times with the old complaint that it was too fat, too full, too much ado about nothing...
...John's prr to distribute its edition bttt was informed by Bernardin that the bishops would not allow the book to be sold at all The Bishop of St...
...The last time I was in Rome, tearing copy from the UPI European wire when a flash came through that New York City had gone dark...
...This time I was in Vermont, and the stories friends told were pretty much the same--dinners interrupted, a game of bakgammon finished by candlelight, streets earlier dark, trouble getting home, a reminder of what life had been like before the invention of the air conditioaer...
...Three days later on May 29, 1976 Rotelle sent a memo to all the independent merchants telling them to stop selling the "unauthorized" prayerbook and promis19 August 1977:528 ing them a marketable substitute approved by the American bishops which would soon be distributed by a rival publisher, Catholic Books Publishers, Inc...
...Costello imported the prayerbook and placed it for sale with various church-goods dealers and religiousbooks stores throughout the country...
...Costello and St...
...Everyone recognizes in a dutiful way that the poor are always with us...
...All the royalty revenue from the sale of those liturgical books finds its way, of course, back to the bishops through ICEL...
...1975, it was told by the bishops to hold up publication until Six months after the similar Rotelle-Catholic Books version hit the market...
...Perhaps no one had quite forgotten the riots of 1967 and later years, but no one had been talking much about them, either, and certainly nothing was being done about the problem, if indeed there is anything which can be done...
...Shortly thereafter, Rotelle telephoned Costello to tell him that his prayerbook did not have official approval and could not be sold...
...The air of excitement lends urgency to deadlines, returns journals squarely to the center of community life, and makes sense of the custom that they come out every day...
...He noted that when students are incensed, they usually break windows by dramatically throwing rocks...
...The bishops' attorney rejected all such submissions and insisted that the Church could do nothing to relieve Costello of "a bad business deal...
...the blackout was a reminder of something more, that the cities of America harbor not simply a mass of people who fall below federally determined poverty levels (e.g., $5,500 for a non-farm family of four) but an underclass of violent, chaotic, unattached people who won't go away...
...When the bishops and their publishing consorts "become the sole sellers of ,prayer material they can set their price which every consumer, Catholic or not, must pay...
...John's was only toldthat its book would not contribute to the "uniformity of prayer which the bishops desire...
...He said that this was done by students who had been warming up for over a year with similar shenanigans, although on a smaller scale...
...I asked a store-owner who broke his windows and why...
...They do, however, reveal dictatorial measures by the bishops and their agents to-control and profit from the distribution of material used for private worship~ At issue also are the traditional independence of Catholic DANIEL DIORRISSEY, former editor of the Georgetown Law Weekly, is a Washington lawyer...
...John's, of course, are only the initial victims of the bishops' anti-competitive agreements, boycott orders and ecclesiastical strong-arming...
...This prayerbook was recommended by the Dominican Order for worldwide devotional use by its lay members and had received an imprimatur from an Irish bishop...
...When it was set to bring out its fifth edition of that work entitled Book o/ Prayer in November...
...The retailers reacted predictably to this not-to-subtle hierarchical pressure and told Costello with regret that they were compelled to boycott his prayerbook...
...The immediate victim of this first case of ecclesiastical market-cornering is Harry Costello, the proprietor of a self-described "Morn and Pop" religious publishing house...
...A cop who did not assist at the riots, but who keeps his eyes open, had some different thoughts...
...When they reached the business area and began passing in front of the various stores, the windows seemed to begin smashing themselves as if by magic...
...Costello contracted with an Irish publisher to purchase and distribute its simplified version of the breviary entitled Morning, Evening and Night Prayer...
...it will probably take the bishops a while to learn they don't control independent merchants here as they did in metlieval Europe...
...But the bishops continue to resist Costello in court with dilatory and complicating maneuvers including the intervention of the Anglo-Irish bishops with a trumped-up claim against Costello's Irish printer for breach of their licensing agreement...
...But by his interference in the open sale of Costello's prayerbook, Rotelle stepped from directing internal church worship to monopolizing a market for a commodity being sold to the general public...
...the lights were off and the milk was turning sour in the icebox, but that was all...
...Personally he abhors any thought of a conspiracy...
...Even from the distance of Rome it was clear that the great blackout of 1965 had been a special event, a bit like V-J Day, when New Yorkers all experienced the same thing at the same time and would not have missed it for the world...
...Of course...
...I asked him if he thought there were some link between the persons (police officers or not) who shot that student, and the other cool-headed .persons who walked with the angry students and inconspicuously headed their bags of stones...
...As one of Costello's fellow publishers commented on the case, "The Church has never considered itself bound by the economic laws of this country...
...The executive secretary of ICEL is the self-same John E. Rotelle who doubles as the executive director of the Bishops' Committee on the liturgy...
...The marching students did not slow up, they stayed in the middle of the street, a certain distance from the windows...
...Newspapers love big dramatic events in which editors can rise to the occasion in the manner of generals directing a battle, dispatching reporters across the map, laying out their stories, assigning roundups and sidebars, bringing out the big type for banner headlines...
...Which was just the point...
...John's breviary or its literary quality was never questioned...
...Soon thereafter they were supplied with Rotelle's promised substitute published by Catholic Books...
...From his vantage point at the rear he could see no thrown object, yet each large plate of glass seemed of its own accord to disintegrate...
...Rotelle banned the prayerbook in America because its sale here breached the English-speaking bishops' cozy agreement not to compete with one another across the Atlantic...
...The Bishops' Committee on the Liturgy, through its executive, Augustinian F.ather John E. Rotelle, has instructed independent Catholic religious goods merchants not to sell a private-devotional prayerbook bearing an Irish imprimatur...
...Was she all fight...
...With reluctance, then, Costello engaged legal counsel to present his economic grievances to the bishops and possibly work out some way that he could sell his prayerbook...
...A crisis justifies the hugeness of the enterprise, and journalists find nothing so bracing as knowing that what they write is going to be read with more than the usual sense of dull and grudging obligation...
Vol. 104 • August 1977 • No. 17
