A New Secretariat
McCarthy, Abigail
A NEW SECRETARIAT ABIGAIL MeCARTHY It could have been a cause for rejoicing. It could have been a cause for alarm. But, in actual fact, the action of the bishops at their May meeting in...
...But she (or he) may blend into a chorus the varied voices and arrive at an authentic expression of the mind of the laity...
...And yet a great deal of what Callahan found at the beginning of his study still obtains...
...In its search the committee on the laity has been remarkably open...
...So far--in contrast--the American bishops have laid their stress on the new secretariat as a place where the laity can be heard and find response (Continued on page 606) 16 September 1977:586 Mercier gets down to the particulars of discussing Beckett, he is able to provide some fresh perspectives...
...One virtue of a good literary critic is to uncover passages in which the writer can speak for himself illustratively...
...To the Editors: We are in debt to William L McGill for calling our attention to the remarkably God-directed poetry of Anne Sexton, for the economy of his argument, and for his fine selection of the poet's own words [May 13...
...Specially, his assertion that "Beckett's tragicomic figures are downto-heel gentry rather than Lumpenproletariat'" is the kind of stuff that good criticism is made of...
...eye/ear...
...The latter remains a painful mystery of motive and act, and this would remain largely true even if we possessed more of the proximate biographical data than we do...
...Furthermore, the wording of the purpose of the council was much less encouraging than the wording of the Action Item of the American bishops...
...The poems, however, are public docu16 September 1977:606...
...They also hope to find a person sensitive to special contemporary family problems including the problems of divorced and remarried Catholics...
...1"o judge from the attention paid him, he might just as well not have existed . . . what he thought about, how (in fact rather than fiction) he got along with the clergy, how his understanding of Catholicism shaped his reaction to non-Catholics, how he interpreted his duties toward Church and society--these things are rarely mentioned...
...For .the pleasure to be found in coping with Beckett's profound pessimism is perhaps the most puzzling contradiction of all...
...This happens in two related ways...
...PHILLIP CORWIN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 A b i g a i l MeE~'thy ( e o m ' t ) to their needs...
...There really was cause for rejoicing in the intent of the American bishops expressed in their Action Item Number 1 in the discussions at the general meeting in November 1976...
...This continuing situation has been worsened by the fact that information about the teachings of the Church, and the pronouncements of popes and bishops, reaches the laity not through what used to be considered the normal channels of communication in diocese and parish, but through the channels of the press and media...
...But, in actual fact, the action of the bishops at their May meeting in establishing a secretariat for the laity went almost unremarked...
...The search committee is primarily made up of lay advisors...
...The Boss hecomes a modern day Coriolanus with scars of intellectual wars equal to the scars of Coriolanus's physical wars...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 CORRESPONDENCE (Continued Irom page ~79) like Brecht...
...They are looking for a person with sensitivity to minorities in the Church, sensitivity to problems of the youth and the elderly, and with "extreme sensitivity" to the role of women in the world today...
...Perhaps the best reward to be had from this highly overpriced, slim volume is that one is enticed by Professor Mercier into re-reading Beckett...
...Grass has weaved a mental web of artfully juxtaposed historical facts, Shakespearean and Brechtian quotations, witty respect for the depth of the worker's needs, and an intimate understanding of the artist's plight...
...The council was to foster lay participation in the fields of catechetics, litmgy, the sacraments and education, keeping in mind the roles of other Vatican bodies in these areas...
...This constitutes a communication problem of the gravest import for a church seeking one voice in applying the teaching of the gospel to the problems of a chaotic world...
...But the play is more than thatmIt is a modern day tragedy with classic proportions and should be recognized as such...
...what concerns a layman in Boston or Peoria may be different from whar concerns him in New Orleans or Los Angeles...
...It was to see that the Church's laws regarding the laity are observed and, in addition, should have a special interest in pastoral councils...
...They hope, most of all, to find a woman...
...Everythingmit would seem at this point---depends on the choice of executive direction for the secretariat for the laity...
...RUIS WOERTENDYKE Director of the N.Y...
...The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising is more than a portrait of one man's life---the play explores the revolutionary consciousness of the common man from the legends of ancient Rome to 20th Century Germany...
...painting/music...
...Any applicants...
...There is a watchdog quality to this description...
...Is this an expression which really holds only for secular, democratic, pluralistic societies...
...I n the ensuing years since Vatican II, the American Catholic laity has caught the imagination of pol!sters and sociologists...
...No persons in our body politic have been more interviewed, commented upon, and exhaustively studied...
...gentleman / tramp...
...It is hoped that he or she will know what it means to be a participating lay person in the Church, especially as envisioned by Vatican II and with a good background in Vatican II theology-not necessarily formally acquired...
...Premiere, The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprixlng Se~t~ mind @od San Francisco, Cal...
...It is a play about us...
...the layman has both a sense of participation in the work of the Church and its reality--then the Church is truly an open society of the profoundest kind...
...We cannot know and we cannot be known...
...The apparent drawing back of many of the hierarchy from the ventures and initiatives of Vatican II can in part be attributed to the alarm engendered by Catholic defections heralded in our excitable press...
...As fast as the layman confronts one challenge, another is there to take its place, and no two laymen are alike...
...The artist is active, but negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extra-circumferential phenomena, drawn in to the core of the eddy...
...He assumes that because we can know the testimony and meaning of her deliberately crafted poems, we can know the same for her act of suicide...
...It is almost fifteen years since Daniel Callahan wrote in The Mind o/ the Catholic Layman these hopeful words: Much has been written in our day of the "open society"--a society open to the talents of all, the contributions of all, the personalities of all, the beliefs of all...
...Has it not pertinence to the Church as well...
...The first order of businses is to be a national conference or gathering of the laity which will include lay organizations, lay movements and individual lay persons, in the words of Archbishop Edward McCarthy, chairman of The Bishops' Committee...
...Here, for example, are some choice words from Beckett's Proust (1931), quoted by Mercier, in which Beckett sets out what is perhaps the central theme in all his writing: The only fertile research is excavatory, immersive, a contraction of the spirit, a descent...
...For this thfy recommended a national level focus on lay concerns, where individual members of the laity as well as lay organizations can be heard and receive a response to their needs...
...Those who view The Boss and Brecht as interchangeable necessarily come to the conclusion that Grass is judging Brecht and such conclusions miss the point and purpose of Ihe play...
...They are in search of a lay person who is a committed Catholic with lay involvement...
...Whoever they find will have an almost impossible taskmbut an unparalleled challenge...
...This is meant to be a listening conference as much as it is a conference to set up channels of communication...
...And therein lies an interesting phenomenon...
...Often, long before a lay person hears his bishop's letter read from the pulpit, long before the papal encyclical reaches him--if it reaches him at all --via a parish study club or diocesan publication, he has heard it discussed, analyzed, interpreted by commentators and secular reporters of the religious news...
...The Vatican's ten-yearold laity council became a permanent Vatican body known as the Pontifical Council for the Laity--headed by a cardinal president and a presidential committee of three cardinals...
...if the Church is opened out into the world to serve and redeem the world...
...They want a person with-awareness of the Protestant and non-Christian world, one with ecumenical attitudes and experience...
...classicism / absurdism...
...What troubles one may be of no consequence to another...
...First, the author passes too easily from her published poems to her life, and back again...
...Report) There was also cause for alarm, or at least dampened hopes in the December 10th motu proprio of that same year...
...The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising is not a play about Bertolt Brecht...
...Listening to Gtinter Grass's advice as to the direction of the play served only to support what I had already felt...
...His chapter titles present, so to speak, seven ways of looking at a blackbird: the world/Ireland...
...Thinking of the Plebeians as a portrait of Bertolt Brecht greatly diminishes its scope and confines its import to that of a topical didactic drama...
...He cannot practice friendship, because friendship, is the centrifugal force of self-fear, self-negation . . . we are alone...
...if the prophetic voice can be heard clearly amidst the voice of authority...
...Mercier does this frequently...
...and, man/woman...
...She (or he) must work for the bishops in what is, after all, a bureaucracy with all that that implies...
...What should be even more troubling to Pope and bishops is that a great deal of what they know about the problems, concerns and thinking of the laity comes to them only through this indirect and incomplete way...
...At the time Callahan wrote it was very true, as he said, that the American Catholic layman had gone relatively unrecorded through our history...
...philosopher/ artist...
...His essay does oversimplify, however, creating a distorted perspective on her late work...
...They "indicated serious concern for developing the role of the laity in the Church...
...If the Church is a free community of men bound to one Lord and faithful to those who have authority in the Church...
...As fast as the Church changes, America changes...
...Although both members and consultors of the council were supposed to be, in the majority, lay people, the chance that t h e y would have real voice seemed slim...
...if the clergy and the laity are joined together as coworkers respectful of the rights, prerogatives and sensitivities of each other...
...These concepts are all central to Beckett's work, and Mercier's treatment of them is enlightening when it is not bogged down in pedantry...
Vol. 104 • September 1977 • No. 19
