Editorial
CORRESPONDENCE Bay Saint Louis, Miss. To the Editors: In reference to Mr. Christopher Vescey's article "Black Catholics" [May 27], I would like to point out that the Society of the...
...10016 Telephone: (212} MU 3-2042 A review of Public Aflalrs, LJteraturo and the Arts...
...I, 1924, to date available through University Microfilms...
...And, as Rutgers psychology professor Edith D. Neimark pointed out in a letter to the New York Times [August 18], Berkowitz has become a victim of the public's willingness to let all kinds of psychotic behavior go unreported because we all learn to "mind our own business," and to allow easy access to guns and all kinds of dangerous drugs because guns and drugs are big business and big money is involved...
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...Great Britain ALAIN WOODROW: Paris HENRY TEN KORTENAAR: Rome DISMOND FISHER: Dublin RDWARO S. SKILLIN: Publisher RUTH E. TAYLOR: Advertising Manager Staff: LINDA F. KAYUER...
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...And we must respond...
...of Lafayette, La., and Clarence Howard, S.V.D., of Oakland, California...
...It is not unfair to assume that under Helms and under his much too revered predecessor, Allen Dulles, the method of the agency in dealing with Congress was exactly that: to lie and to keep on lying as a matter of operating procedure...
...Terry Steib, S.V.D., Bay St...
...it was said to have been destroyed...
...On another level, the killings have been almost equally terrible in what they have dramatized about human nature under stressmwhether the stress comes from fear of being gunned down in your parked car or on your neighborhood street corner...
...Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y...
...Tom McKeown, lames Finn Cotter 555 NOVELS O i l WAIl NOVELS?: Mark Taylor 5N SACCO AND VANZETTI: John Deedy 571 BOOKS: Gordon C. Zahn, Bernard Cooke, Dorothy Dohen, Stu Cohen, Ralph Mclnerny 572 _9 ILLUSTRATIONS: Front cover: Antonio Fransconi/Folkways/LN$ JAMES O'GARA: EdDor JOHN DEEDY: Managing Editor RAYMOND A. SCHROTH: Associate Editor ANNE M. ROBERTSON, Editorial Assisfaat (:OLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.: Movies JOHN FANDEL: Poetry PRANK GETLEIN: Washington BRIAN WICKER...
...He is a human being with a demand Commonweal: 547 on our understanding and love...
...Thus to understand David Berkowitz in a way that would allow us to deal with what he has done we must see him both as an individual and in the way that his reign of terror has characterized the growing violence and desperation of city life itself...
...Thus the blood of the victims is also on the hands of those who permit the conditions that produce psychotic killers to grow...
...Commonweal is Indexed in Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, Catholic Periodical Index, and look Review Digest...
...we have no different name for it, but for the head of any government agency to lie or commit perjury 2 September 1977:$48...
...Despite self-serving statements by Helms and other murderous and felonious agents and "ex-"agents about nothing having been done without prior presidential approval, there is certainly a strong possibility that Helms and DuUes lied to Presidents as blithely as they lied to Congress...
...Copyright C) 1977 Commonweal Publishing Co., Inc.---US and Canada: $17 a year...
...at Dan Schorr~ the television newsman to whom we owe a lot of our knowledge about the spookiness of the spooks, that someone had had the wit to cry, "Liar Helms...
...Christopher Vescey's article "Black Catholics" [May 27], I would like to point out that the Society of the Divine Word is an international, interracial society of over 5,000 priests and Brothera composed of Europeans, North-and South Americans, Asians, Africans, Australians and Polynesians, working in 35 countries of the world...
...Killer Schorr...
...Our goal is to continue to develop Black leadership at all levels . . . today, one of the four provincials in the U.S.A., is a Black, Very Rev...
...Why not...
...Where is the perjury inquiry...
...Augustine's Seminary in Bay St...
...or from the terrifying, violent, vengeful, juices boiling away inside otherwise ordinary citizens who now exclaim to newsmen how they would love five minutes alone with the suspect, or how they would tear him to pieces, or who stand outside the Brooklyn Central Court Building yelling, "Kill, kill...
...Augustine's...
...Liar Helms...
...Bishop Carlos Lewis, S.V.D., of Panama...
...As we should have foreseen, a sick, pathetic man...
...Prominent Catholic laymen, such as Ambassador Wilbert Lemelle of Kenya, Prime Minister George Price of Belize, are among the many outstanding black leaders who attended St...
...PAMELA J. PITZGERALD, HARRIBTT| BALSKY COMMONWEAL 23~ MADISON AVE., NEW YORK...
...and Bishop Joseph A. Francis, S.V.D., of Newark (mentioned later on in his article...
...As Robert Lipsyte wrote in the New York Post: "So long as he was faceless, a specter in the city, a terror, a demon, there was no need to deal with him...
...Leonard Olivier, S.V.D., and two Vicars, the Reverends Mark Figaro, S.V.D...
...To acknowledge the commonness of David Berkowitz is to confront the community's common responsibility for his year of terror...
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...To lie is a sin, to commit perjury a crime...
...WASHINmTON REPORT THE MIND CONTROLLERS Before you even consider the alarming substance of the recent revelations about the CIA's 25-year, 25 million dollar quest for methods of mind control to be exercised over its own agents, foreign agents and anybody else the agency thought profitable to brainwash, hypnotize or otherwise fiddle around with, it is important to think about the way these horrendous facts became public...
...Also, 20 pastors in parishes staffed by SVD's are black...
...The only way you stop that is to hold them for downs and Helms is as good a place to start as any...
...He is a "nobody" who suddenly became the most famous man in the world --until Elvis died and forced him off the front page...
...A blank-faced, innocuous, perpetually smiling, pudgy, little composite of so much that is both good and sad about the urban culture that made and feared him: Italian, Jewish, Baptist, "Jesus freak," satanist, exsoldier, volunteer fireman: auxiliary policeman, postman, drug-abuser, strange neighbor, forsaken yet loved, free as any citizen to own a .44 caliber revolver and to walk in and buy a .45 caliber, 30-shot semiautomatic rifle in a neighborhood gun shop...
...In short, somebody lied, including, in high probability, the long-time agency director, Richard Helms...
...One only wishes in that incredible moment when Richard Helms, of all people, leaving a congressional hearing to which he had lied and crying "Killer Sehorr...
...or from the journalists who lust to grab a "scoop" and sell more newspapers, no matter what the truth or consequences of spreading the "scoop" across the page (such as the New York Post's "MOBSTERS JOIN HUNT, GODFATHER ORDERS: GET SAM" and its "HOW I BECAME A MASS KILLER By David Berkowitz," which was actually some letters he had written years before...
...O.K., they lie...
...or the exceptional thirst for the buck that would make men with the God-given talents of Jimmy Breslin and Dick Schapp say yes to a publisher's offer to produce a Son of Same novel within a few months...
...But the hardest aspect of the tragedy to respond to is the person of the killer himself...
...Some of them came out in testimony by new CIA director Stansfield Turner, more in files obtained by the New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act...
...300 N. Zeab Road, Ann Arbor, Mich...
...Presidents, like members of Congress, are merely elected officials, not inside "The Company," not really appreciative of the desperate stakes for which the game is played nor of the need to fght fire with fire, to subvert the Constitution in order to save it and so on and so on in that style for pages, chapters, years: you can read all about it in the novels of Howard Hunt: the agent as self-pitying, self-sacrificing hero, taking upon himself the awful burdens of secrecy and illegality to save a nation that will never understand what it has been saved from nor by what methods, let alone by what lonely bero---unless, of course, it reads his novels and believes them...
...For their families and friends the pain is deep and foreverm more painful in its irrationality, since the killer killed for no other cause than the experience of killing itself...
...Bishop Harold R. Perry, S.V.D., of New Orleans...
...However, the seminary has been integrated since its beginnings in the '20s, although "officially" only since 1950, because of existing laws...
...He psyched out everyone for a whole year...
...Forelan S33.50...
...There, as he planned to climax his year of madness by shooting up a Long Island discoteque, there was little between Berkowitz and his potential mass-murder weapon but the gun dealer's judgrnent that she would not sell it to a "ding-a-ling" but that this was a "very nice fellow...
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...Continued on page 575) N~S & VIEWS: 546 CORRESPONDENCE: 547 EDITORIAL: 547 WALSIIlNGTON REPORT: The Mind C o n t r o l l e r s : Frank Getlein 54a PROPHETIC MINORITY: lames Baker 550 A BLOW TO MINORITIES: Herbert Hill 552 'ON T i l e ORDINATION OF WOMEN': An Exchange of Vie~s 550 TIlE STAGE: William T. Liston 564 VEIISE" Lewis Turco 551...
...Most of the material was found in a report which had previously been represented to Congress as no longer in existence...
...THE DAVID BERKOWITZ STORY The most obvious level of the tragedy in this summer's Son of Sam shootings that reduced so much of the once optimistic and glamorous New York to panic is immediate and personal: the sudden, senseless deaths of five young women and one young man and the paralysis, blinding and wounding of seven more...
...or from the politician's need to get reelected, to somehow demonstrate through hastily called press conferences that he is in control when the city seems to be losing its collective head...
...Louis, Mississippi as is the Rector of our Divine Word College in Epworth, Iowa, the Very Rev...
...It has produced four black bishops, namely Bishop Joseph O. Bowers, S.V.D., of Antigua, West Indies...
...Louis, Mississippi, opened in the '20s for the training of black candidates for the priesthood and brotherhood for leadership roles in the Church...
...National Serials Data Program No.: ISSN 0010.3330...
...Of the more than 400 SVD's in the United States, there are less than 70 black SVD priests and Brothers...
...He was the psychological master of a city already approaching a despair brought on by blackout looting, unemployment~ street crime, noise and heat...
...Now he is suddenly a man, with a face and a history and even a joke---a parking ticket...
...Otherwise he is just another celebrity, a character in a TV series who, as one neighborhood kid said, "had some year...
...It is not a segregated order, as he contends...
...It is true that St...
...This is hardly a surprise but here it is established once more...
Vol. 104 • September 1977 • No. 18
