ON LEAVING ROME
Schall, James V.
Ill ON LEAVING ROME JAMES V. SCHALL The only "real" city in the world Rome, according to its most sentimental song, is a place to which we fondly say "Good-bye--Arrivederci" on leaving it. Not...
...The school has become an autonomous social body, cut off from the rest of the country, something which has developed its own ethic and culture . . . . In an Italy institutionally liberal and pluralistic _ 9 we have allowed to grow and settle a plagiarist, class-conscious, sectarian school in which there is no longer place for dissent or debate...
...Now it may well be that the only thing that can save science from ideology is classical faith...
...I knew I was just beginning to comprehend even a little of it...
...The clerk was insulted...
...The roots of the culture, I fear, have yielded up the very Christian and Roman presuppositions that historically grounded Italian culture and made Rome such a pleasant place to live...
...The "bella figura" of the Italian in public is not always his best self...
...And yet, Rome will last...
...If I thought for a moment such a marvelous sign were still up, I should hustle over to St...
...In these is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the ~lory of God, they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God has put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith...
...The last thing he conceived himself to be was a public servant...
...What Stendhal forgot to mention was that the place was sublime and chaotic at the same time--the true sign, I have come to suspect, both of humanity and of Catholicism...
...Yet, as I have just indicated, universities and high schools are caught up in a kind of programmed political violence that has radically changed the intrinsic outlook of the younger generation...
...And Gregorovius quipped of a great French bishop: "Dupanloup d'Orleans preaches every day in the Church of the Gesh--they say he is a 'chiacchierone,' a chatterbox, a yaker...
...We saw the Gesil, Santa Prassede, Santa Maria Maggiore, Santa Maria in Trastevere, the great Arches of Septimius Severus and Titus, St...
...My own feeling about Paul VI is rather that he is the most intelligent pope in modern times in terms of analytic penetration and awareness of precisely the iw...
...No man can comprehend it...
...the third time, one brings him back . . . . ' Indeed, in Rome they have coined for us this catchphrase, 'It would be better not to have seen or known Rome . . . . ' " And the great Horace, who escaped the Great City to his near-by Sabine Farm, wrote in ancient times to his villa foreman: Once, a laborer, you prayed heaven for the c o u n t r y , and now, a foreman, you long for the city, the baths, the circus...
...Malcolm Muggeridge was probably right when he chided that just about the time the world will get around to wanting the essence of classical Christian thought, it will discover that Christian intellectuals no longer know their origins...
...4 longtime contributor, he was recently named a consultor to the Pontifical Justice and Peace Commission by Pope Paul VI...
...Think well on it...
...ll Giornale, 28 Maggio 1977) mon Market (25 Matzo 1977): "The idea of the unity of Europe has lost any sort of attraction among the youth during the past ten years . . . . " This is true, I think, of Italian youth in particular...
...The Epistle to the Romans of Paul of Tarsus remains at the very roots of our civilization...
...Much to my astonishment, practically everyone was in natty suits and ties or sport clothing, if Americans...
...During my last days in Rome, I was fortunate enough to have a surprise visitor...
...Urbi et Orbi...
...They is so prompt wif their mail...
...That meant that in any non-clerical situation, it was optional...
...Stendhal noted in his Journal on June 26, 1828, in words still largely true: "It should be observed that Rome is more of ,a small town than Dijon or Amiens...
...I even recall once a heated debate with some local Jehovah Witnesses, who claimed ominously that the Black Flag of the Roman Catholic Church was flying on some invading fleet or other_9 At the time, I somehow knew that the Papal flag was Yellow and White--and triumphantly told them so--but, alas, I had not a clue as to why there might be a Papal flag in the first place...
...Octogesima Adveniens pulled in his horns...
...The opening out onto the worldmthe themes of John XXIII and the Council--has too often in the meantime come to mean a rejection of an independent, valid Christian tradition and thought that is not "the world...
...Recent months have been filled with university riots, shootings of police and independent journalists...
...The scene was glorious, except that during the whole ceremony, the loudspeaker system broadcast so much heavy static that not much could be heard, not even the bands...
...Peter...
...The reason for this is ultimately spiritual...
...When I was a boy back at Knoxville High, I might have heard something of Rome...
...Rome will look wrong or distorted to anyone who deviates in the slightest from the wholeness of Christian truth and practice...
...Thus, here in Rome, no one can walk around the corner without being conscious of a good part of mankind's history...
...The condition of man's spirit is part of this city...
...And in this case, with much superficial analysis, he is seen to have been wrong...
...I, 14) FA'rHEX .)AMES V. SCHALL, S.Z., who teaches part of each year at the University of San Francisco and part of the year at the Pontiflcai Gregorian University in Rome, will loin the Government ]acuity at Georgetown in January...
...Peter's was sublime in magnificence, and beauty...
...Martin Luther, for instance, who stayed at the Augustinian Convent on the Piazza del Popolo, had this to say in 1520 in his Appeal to the Ruling Class: "The Romanists themselves have coined the saying, 'The nearer Rome, the worse the Christians...
...The Servile State may be much more to the point today than when it was written at the beginning of this century...
...Peter's on Palm Sunday, 1860, for the procession which had to pass through two notices of excommunication posted on the main gate pillars...
...My manuscripts which were deposited in the Archives of the Embassy and which were humid, I have exposed to dry out so tomorrow I will begin again my eternal work in the Eternal City...
...Service is thus a function of clout, not a practical politics based on effective popular sovereignty...
...Now I have already reordered everything...
...The old Roman notion of the client--"I'U take care of you"--is one of the most abiding facts of life in these parts...
...And it remains true that Italy's greatest single "natural" resource is the artistic heritage of the popes...
...Finally, from the opposite angle, Paul has been increasingly held to be too weak...
...The most vivid memory of how ecclesiastical Rome works was during my first year here...
...Showing Rome to someone who has never been here is itself one of the pleasures of being here...
...I cannot help but admiring such a quality, and I am not at all sure Paul is not correct...
...Yet, dreams are often of much less wonder than reality, while reality itself is something of a dream, something that might not have been...
...The commander called the massed troops to order: "Brigate, Presenta Armi in Honore del Capo dello Stato...
...context of Italian life...
...And even Europe as a series of truly "democratic" There is no doubt that this violent, anti-democratic attitude dominates Italian scholastic and cultural llfe...
...Yet, in many ways, Christendom and what it means is being rediscovered...
...If I have anything sharply negative to say about the trends in the Church in recent years, it has to do with its practical giving up of Christian metaphysics as the basis of the intellectual program taught in the universities and seminaries ostensibly controlled by Catholics...
...During my first year in Rome too (1965), I clearly recall the scene in St...
...not everything is told, bu~ everything is found out...
...the Englishman asked with what he thought was the ultimate logic...
...Peter's to find it before I left, even though I do not consider blasphemy to be one of my major vices...
...the second time, one finds him...
...There is a dogged instinct about the sane and sensible in our lot as well as about our openness to God...
...I somehow do not doubt that the political and intellectual fate of what happens here during the remaining years of this century will largely determine the next century...
...Destroy these--by strikes, inconvenience, inefficiency, or neglect--and Italy becomes just another Mediterranean country...
...There seems less joy and vitality, more fear...
...When the kind of ideas and practices classically defined as non-Christian become the modus procedendi of the universities, no amount of warning will suffice...
...Pope Paul greeted numerous people from various nations and walks of life during the Offertory of the Mass...
...Classical Rome, no doubt, also remains in remains, whereas a pope still lives in St...
...The slogans of the university scholars are as intellectual as the blood, death and hatred they repeat ad nauseam...
...The Italian State has yet to build in Rome anything that comes close to the grandeur and style of the buildings of papal Rome...
...Pluralism" for which we argued and fought for years has come largely to mean a single option...
...This is a place of the most annoying pettinesses and equally extraordinary vistas...
...No ideology is immune from it, least of all marxism...
...The effect of the dome especially seemed to me wonderful (in his day, it was lighted with many oil lamps...
...It is no accident that the Russian exiles have the greatest difficulty in speaking here...
...In any case, whatever the attractions of Washington by contrast--Professor William O'Brien at Georgetown had his doubts if there were any--I do not doubt that Rome and San Francisco are the loveliest dwelling places our kind has fashioned in its wisdom--and its folly...
...There is no Catholic social doctrine so why not opt for the method that is taking over anyhow...
...And when something finally is done for someone, he goes away with the feeling that he received a "favor," not his due as a citizen...
...The expelled Stuarts of England lived in the Palace at the far corner by the Dodici Apostoli, while Napoleon's mother one block over on the Corso had her residence...
...There has always been a certain civil violence in Raly, to be sure, though far less in terms of, say, murder than the average American can possibly imagine...
...Yet, what is frightening about Humanae Vitae is not how wrong it was but how right...
...But I never understood a word of it...
...I have had many delightful discussions with ordinary Italians trying to convince them that, even in a Roman Collar, I was a Roman Catholic like themselves...
...We went up the Michaelangelo Steps to the Campidoglio to see Marcus Aurelius on Horseback, then into the Museum to see the Dying Gaul, the heads of Cicero and Homer and Tiberius, the Boy with the Thorn...
...We went into the Ara Coeli where a German Mass was just beginning to see Pinturicchio's magnificent Death of Bernadine of Siena...
...Peter's at the Easter Vigil, by some foible to remind me that I am still in via...
...On this day it is customary to distribUte a medal: the one today bears on one side tl~ portrait of the Pope (Pius IX) and on the other, the significant effigy of Daniel in the Lion's Deft...
...Here it is easy to be a romantic and a cynic in order finally to glimpse the wisdom beyond both...
...h is prevalent not just in the schools but also in the media, publishing houses and unions...
...Twelve years ago, still the most difficult persons to convert to marxism were young army officers and Roman Catholic seminarians...
...A Gibbon sitting on the steps of the Ara Coeli, one-sidedly judging the decline of Rome was due to the faith, would receive a shock to his thesis looking not South to the Forum but North to the Monumento Vittorio Emmanuele...
...Yet, here I stand, rather unlike the way Martin Luther used that same phrase, graduate of the Class of '45 from KHS now in the Summer of '77, ending a seemingly short but also long period of twelve years at the Gregorian University in the heart of classical Rome, just up from the Trevi Fountains, a few blocks from the Forum and the Campidoglio, down the hill from the Palazzo Quirinale, Renaissance and Enlightenment home of popes, present home of the Italian Head of State...
...One of the sobering things about living in Italy over the years is the brutal realization that the ordinary citizen is too often at the mercy of the bureaucrat...
...In this elephantine apparatus in which a million public employees work, there has been effected a systematic action of cultural disintegration that has no precedent...
...The number of times Paul returns to this notion that truth should be believed for its own sake is remarkable...
...Plus IX has been roundly condemned for a century for daring to say that the Church could not be reconciled with "modern civilization" as understood in such philosophies...
...As it turned out, it was neither...
...6 May 1955) Today, ideas of distribution, small and medium technology, nature and person-oriented economics are reappearing everywhere...
...These have been the years of Giovanni Battista 25 November 1977:748 Montini...
...I was almost as much a believer as a Roman...
...Gregnrovius, who did not at all like Pope Plus IX, tells of being in St...
...Not everyone who has ever left this "Eternal City," of course, has preserved a sense of nostalgia about it...
...And if any American city after six p.m...
...But Christianity is itself, with its own sources, methods and moods...
...I was obliquely reminded of this not too long ago when down by the Trevi, I ran into a large number of slightly tipsy German soccer fans from Moenchen-Gladbach in town for the European Cup of Champions against Liverpool...
...Many will doubt if we should have such an intelligent pope precisely because the intellectual tends to rely too much upon persuasion and the appeal of truth by its own force...
...And yet, when I read Gregorovius, I cannot help being reminded of those classical lines of Horace in which in a Roman scene, he depicted forever the nature of a bore: Walking along the Sacred Road, as is my habit, I was reflecting on some trifle, quite engrossed when up comes somebody known to me only by name, and grabs my hand . . . . Perhaps that is part of Rome's grandeur, even bores are wondrous figures along the Via Sacra, while distinguished bishops are chatterboxes in the GesiL Changes But life goes on in Rome...
...Too, when Italy was formed in the time of Plus IX, it was believed by the liberals and progressives of the era that science, democracy of an indifferentist hue, evolution and secularism would solve all...
...3:14-15) Thus, to leave Rome is to leave a place that has seen the world grow and go by...
...This should not be over-stated, to be sure, but the distinct tendency is there...
...And so we have even here no lasting city, as the Scriptures tell us...
...The valid side of this effort to relate Christianity to all knowledge is obvious enough...
...This is the key, I think, to why he does not Commonweal: 749 "exercise" authority...
...Twelve years later, Maritain is looked upon by too many as reactionary, while the cause of religious liberty is mostly a dead letter...
...There are remarkably few centers of specifically Christian learning left and these are under tremendous pressure to teach developmental ideology as the Christian dogma...
...Our ideals differ then . . . . (Ep...
...It would not have been better not to have seen Rome...
...Almost exactly one hundred years after the death of Pins IX, it is not the pope but the whole modern culture that is shouting that modern civilization is failing...
...What seems new is the attention given, especially by the marxists in the tradition of Gramsci, to culture...
...The apparent gains in Spain and Portugal are offset by the growing power of the French and Italian left...
...This is one of the reasons, I think, why I have most appreciated it...
...There are cities older than Rome perhaps, Chinese and Indian ones, cities once more famous--Athens, for instance, and even Jerusalem --but none has its constant world-historic significance in almost every age and generation, for almost every people...
...On almost any theological or cultural issue on which he is criticized, Paul reveals much more insight than his critics...
...Meanwhile, the sentiments about the hearts left in San Francisco and the good-byes spoken in Rome are mostly true...
...Both are worldly and spiritual, simultaneously provincial to a fault and international-cosmic, even...
...In the very moment of your blasphemy you will be tossed down into hell...
...In the distance I could hear a band...
...Rome is the only city that has been constantly lived in and constantly been important for most of its 2730 years...
...To my univocal mind, this seemed either defiant or amusing...
...Indeed, I would hold that, more and more, a valid, independent Christian rectaphysics is the only thing that can justify and save modern "science," once thought to be the enemy of faith...
...Italian vices, for the most part, when they are not ideologicalpolitical, are petty ones--pickpocketing, cheating a bit...
...This has been voluntary on our part...
...I wondered if I was seeing it all for the last time...
...Even the Communists are worried about it, as well they might be, since they are its major cause and hoped to be its major beneficiary...
...According to L'Osservatore Romano, as I understood it, Paul reaffirmed that the "traditional" garb of the cleric in Rome is the cassock, which I wore as little as possible...
...We must look to that no man's land which the Italian school has become in recent years...
...Even Rome must be added to this truth...
...We must look elsewhere to comprehend such a widely diffused refusal of life and history...
...Eventually, I will return to the Government Faculty at Georgetown University in Washington, where I did my doctoral studies during Mr...
...Coming as he did immediately during and after John XXIII and more especially after the Myth of John, Paul has tried to exercise papal authority in primarily an intellectual way...
...Even though this much abused shrine is not all that bad, Gibbon today would be much more hesitant in deciding what was falling and what rising...
...Politics and economics are left aside in this revisionism which gives Italian marxism its claim to be the real wave of the future...
...You know I am consistent...
...And yet, when Gregorovius himself arrived back in Rome from Germany in the Fall of 1863, the great historian also was moved by the spell of the City: "I arrived in Rome yesterday at 12:30...
...were as orderly as the most "violent" Italian one, the local police would feel they had already entered into the peaceable kingdom...
...Presently trotted into the piazza some two hundred mounted Carabinieri in full dress on their brown and white matching horses...
...And yet, when I read in Stendhal's Roman lournal, a book I love, what he wrote on Christmas, 1827, I can even still agree with him without hesitation: "I have never seen anything so imposing as this ceremony...
...Peter's...
...True, I was one of the few Roman Catholics in town so I must have had some conception of the then far-off place...
...And there is something nice about this quality which insists that we should always look our best with whatever nature, grace and style might have bestowed on us...
...I suspect the Outline of Sanity is stillmore radically pertinent than all of our modernization theories which opt for socialist mobilization and ideological conformity...
...Mule riding up to Dogpatch to shout to L'il Abner, "Special Delivery from the Govamint...
...When the period ends, the one who does not is more and more held to be violating a woman's "right...
...The "social" has come to be seen as the vital area of struggle and change...
...I do not intend ~o throw a coin in the Trevi Fountain, and yet, I hope I will come back...
...The Biblical Institute is just across the Piazza as 25 November 1977:744 is the lovely Church of the Twelve Apostles, where Clement XIV, the man who once suppressed the Jesuits still lies, along with the great composer Frescobaldi, and I do not know who else, its crypt is full of the bones of martyrs...
...Then gradually into the Venezia marched some 3800 troops from the various units of the Italian military, myriads of colored uniforms and steps...
...Of course, during many of these same years, I have also spent the Fall Semester at the University of San Francisco, so I may not be totally "Romanized," the ultimate clerical sin...
...Undoubtedly, one of the mysteries not resolved this side of Paradise is how much of my correspondence did not get through...
...During the years I have been in Rome, I would judge that the most important theological movement has been the increasingly successful effort to convert Christianity into a kind of social action, phrased generally in terms of marxist categories...
...We have seen in these past twelve years, laws and mores come about pretty much as Paul predicted...
...The metaphysics of "making ourselves to be men," the metaphysics of atheism, is ultimately the force behind so much of our development and ecological movements...
...Salvatore Scarpino has graphically described a situation not sufficiently appreciated outside Italy, e~rtainly not by current American policy: In the great majority of cases, then, the youth do not suffer any real need...
...I always leave with a sigh whenever loathsome business drags me back to Rome...
...Happiness and beauty are ever much harder .to bear than sadness and p a i n - o f such is the mystery that these cities teach us...
...Grace does build on nature, and this means it is not nature...
...There are things that are truly our own business--ways and friendships and prayers and ideas we do not have to share with the world...
...These now suddenly civilianclad clerics informed me that the Pope had said that the traditional garb is to be maintained on clerical occasions...
...2J November 1977:750...
...No one who reads carefully the vast and remarkable work he has produced--and all say he does most of his own writing --can doubt that here we have one of the most underestimated men of our time...
...when it seemed the Papal States would finally be lost, he remarked: "Today is the Vigil of the Feast of St...
...And if we take the trouble to read with attention E. F. Schumac .her's list in Small Is Beautiful of !9thCentury ideas that tragically dominate the minds of educated people, even yet, they will sound like nothing so much as the Syllabus o/Errors...
...Peter's and Santa Maria degli Augeli...
...Schumacher's central point is not social, but ontological and religious...
...According to varying ideologies and presuppositions, there are several clashing views about him...
...The day after this seemingly somber talk, I walked into my class, usually filled with cassockand habit-wearing priests and seminarians...
...And there are these questions...
...Our first problem is not social action but speculative metaphysics, which can establish our being as both real and finite, given and structured, permanent in its passing...
...Anyone who has spent a leisurely pranzo in an Italian ristorante or a quiet coena in the evening will appreciate not only the freshness and goodness of Italian pasta, fruits, vegetables and wines, but also the sense of friendly atmosphere that makes the Roman trattoria one of the world's great cultural events---and this mostly because it is private, even when there is conversation, laughter and a sense of belonging...
...Beauty betrays its most divine origins, I thought after the manner of Augustine, at the precise moment it is most fragile, most likely to be ruined...
...Not so long ago, AI Capp showed the old postman on the U.S...
...He continued: By chance above these notices, there were two others, earlier ones, in which we were encouraged not to blaspheme...
...Existentialism, logical positivism, structuralism, evolutionism, language analysis and Protestantism have largely seen their intellectual forces dissipated...
...There is a thesis in Italy that sees the family being rediscovered in the fight of the radical decline of male and female religious orders which have historically supplied much of the religious...
...Indeed, the great two-century battle to accept the civil principle of religious freedom has been largely set aside by current ideological movements which claim to work for "this-worldly" development...
...And Abner, in return, weeps, "O, Bless the Govamint...
...Rome gives us one of the great freedoms known to man, the freedom to escape the pressure of the present, to rediscover the past of almost any period of man, the joy of knowing a real privacy, without which, as Hannah Arendt once remarked, there is no public...
...Paa~ has not seen the wave of the future...
...For research is substituted indoctrination, naturally revolutionary and progressivist, for teaching is substituted idle talk on themes imposed by minority factions...
...At that time, Maritain was still considered the model of Christian intelligence, the spirit of the liberalizing movement that incorporated humanism into Christianity, religious liberty into Catholic thought...
...And Rome is still a place whose value, on going and coming, depends upon our ideals...
...So if Rome is sublime and mysterious, it is also small and narrow-minded too...
...This, of course, is the exact symbolic status we Christians have in Christian theology...
...These are the heritage of certain strands of medieval economics and the central line of modern papal social thought...
...Finally the tall Quirinale Guard lined the steps leading up to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier...
...On leaving Rome, I know I shall be gone from an infinite city, the Eternal One symbolic of our lot and our condition...
...Probably the first is that he has been too liberal...
...The massed bands played the stirring Italian National Anthem, while Giovanni Leone, the President of the Republic, climbed to place a wreath on the Tomb...
...No one has dared to trust anyone beyond his own narrow circle...
...Don't you know you are a public servant...
...So much for an economic view of history...
...To the Italian, it is Protestant...
...Later, on a clear Sunday in June after a heavy rain, I walked unsuspectingly into the Piazza Venezia for a cup of coffee...
...Ben Wattenberg's long collection of contemporary condemnations of modern civilization in the first chapter of The Real America deserves reading Commonweal: 747 in this light...
...In another sense, however, there is something truly mysterious about the humanity of the Church, something that seems to touch this city in a special way...
...This comes at a time when the best and most widespread testimony from within actual marxist states, especially Russia and Eastern Europe, indicates that few if any believe in this ideology...
...He has not disciplined his own house, so that the faithful no longer know which theologians, doctrines and practices are right or wrong...
...Over twenty years ago, I wrote a short essay in Commonweal on "The Future of Distributism...
...The idea that I might actually live in Rome for over a decade never crossed my midwestern mind, which at the time had never been beyond East Dubuque, Illinois...
...The Italians, of course, have always reserved their real selves for their families and intimate friends...
...Ironically, almost the very day that development became the catchword of modern political thought, religious freedom began to fall on hard days--and it has never had very easy ones...
...The state has always been "the enemy," even the Italian version of the democratic polity...
...9 . .' Another saying runs, 'The first time one goes to Rome, one has to look for a rogue...
...Filled with vitamins, free, socially respectable, emancipated, many students of the schools only, in these confused days, succeed in expressing a desperate desire for violence and death, stylized in their paramilitary uniforms, in their light knapsacks of books, a military-syndical language of struggle, attack, strategy, and swelling with funereal 25 November 1977:746 and scatological images . . . . And words become deeds . . . . No, the economic crisis cannot explain by itself their attitudes, nor can anxiety and the desire of change, attitudes proper to all youth...
...After years of watching university students--"the sons of the rich in the left universities battling the sons of the poor in the police," as the present Interior Minister bluntly put itmmarch down the Corso or the Via Nazionale or into the Piazza Navona, all in red with signs of "Death to This...
...Peter's Square on the last day of Vatican II...
...The older Christian customs and ideals are being replaced by confrontation, mass indoctrination, ideological slogans, a brutality that is contrary to the classical Italian character...
...This last spring, I attended the Easter Vigil Service in St...
...The number with clearly marxist presuppositions grows each year...
...Thirdly, there is the anti-Humanae Vitae school, which judges the validity of the papacy on this one issue...
...Paul has been too kind, too easy, especially on freethinking intellectuals, ever to exercise the necessary kind of public authority that would serve to keep the basic content of the faith clear and authentic...
...Paul Vrs Lenten Address that year touched on wearing clerical garb...
...But there is more...
...Perhaps the best test of my thesis in any case in Europe, America and the Third World, is to look at book publishers and reviews published under apparently "Catholic" auspices...
...As I leave Rome, it is such a scene that will most probably remain with me, this almost perfectly beautiful scene marred, as in St...
...Do Penance...
...In this he is more Thomist and rational than Augustinian...
...The Sane and Sensible But Rome, even religious Rome, is more than the papacy...
...There is something, I think, to the old spiritual principle that what comes out of the mouth is more important than what goes in...
...The "public servant" owes his job to the party and to union power...
...Immediately above the Pope's excommunication (for those at war against the fastdeclining Papal States), we read: "Blasphemers...
...Rome, in spite of Garibaldi and Count Cavour, is still in many ways the papacy, even when it is not...
...We are not loved because we are first lovable but rather we are lovable because we are first loved...
...No one has taken our mind from us...
...There has never been less religious liberty in the world, in many ways...
...The Document on Religious Liberty and Gaudium et Spes had just been signed...
...Reporting on Rome by the secular media often tends to reduce what goes on here to questions of pure power, ambition and personality...
...The paradox is that we Catholics in social and political fields have in the meantime mostly abandoned our central tradition in favor of a kind of chic keeping up with the radical left ideologies of the past decade, only to find the ideas we abandoned to be proposed more and more as the key to the Third World problemmthe ostensible reason why we abandoned specifically Catholic social thought in the first place...
...One hundred years may not be enough for a fair comparison, of course, but the real reason is that modern liberal and marxist Italy does not believe in beauty or its civil causes as the papacy did...
...When the period began, the doctor who induced abortion was illegal...
...And our relation to truth is undoubtedly more than intellectual...
...Rome, consequently, is an infinite place...
...We had, nevertheless, for some now unaccountable reason, two years of Latin from Miss Cooper...
...The remarkably gracious style that once characterized the Italians is clearly eroding...
...Today, I suspect, especially if they are Latin, they are the easiest...
...my, "Political Theory and Political Theology," Laval Tl~ologique et Philosophique, F6vrier, 1975...
...Populorum Progressio (1963) is seen to be merely a baptism of P~re Lebret's antiAmericanism...
...This city is full of men and women who do seek to do God's will...
...Public service has nothing to do with it...
...And so, compared with Rome, San Francisco and Washington, Paris and Berlin are but of yesterday...
...telligence aspect of the faith...
...And even more Commonweal: 745 maliciously on July 3, 1861...
...For the ability of Catholicism to remain itself is the drama of Rome and, as I suspect, of the world itself...
...We heard Traviata at the Opera and went to the Papal Audience on Wednesday...
...A second view, then, is that Paul has not gone far left enough...
...Paul raps the knuckles of an insignificant Archbishop Lefebvre but does nothing about the marxists in the fold...
...The Italian always likes to appear well...
...This cannot render comprehensible a cult so crude, irrational, and distinctive as the revolution understood as violence without end...
...When I ask myself what is the most striking change in Italy during the years I have been here, I think I would have to say it is a distinct change in the manhers, especially among the young...
...Vanity is not the worst of vices...
...Perhaps Solzhenitsyn is not wrong in claiming that many must first suffer an evil to know it...
...Perhaps the most touching moment for me was his being introduced to Jacques Maritain...
...There is an unaccustomed harshness in present Italian culture...
...Struggle against That," "Away with the Other Thing," it is hard to escape the impression that the bloody rhetoric has had its somber effect on the sign-bearers...
...This violence comes directly from a generation healthier and better taken care of than any previously in Italian history...
...Luther was wrong...
...In Rome, too, I have Often wept over the mail, but never because it was prompt...
...Though I enjoy the countryside as much as Horace, I must say I am more touched by this vital "Babylon," as Peter called it in his Epktle, this place that was not, as Chesterton said, first loved because it was great, but became great because men first loved it...
...Almost any two major American cities have more murders per year than all of Italy combined...
...Rome, it strikes me, is the only "real" city in the world...
...Eisenhower's second administration...
...From that day forward, I had a new respect for the legal mind...
...Angelo Sterrazza, commenting on the total decline of democratic, European-oriented youth organizations founded optimistically after World War II, wrote in II Popolo's Issue on the 20th Anniversary of the Comsocieties is declining...
...Thus, this year, at that precise magnificent moment when the huge basilica should stiff have been in complete darkness at the last "Lumen Christi" so that the whole vast interior would glow and dance in the light of the thousands of candles held by the faithful, someone prematurely turned on the bright-as-day overhead flood lights to destroy the whole effect...
...Certainly, it was not a pressing topic of conversation in Marion County, Iowa...
...Paul VI, who will be 80 in September, has been severely judged by my contemporaries...
...The Eternal City seems to me justly symbolic of my own finiteness, a place where I could live out all my allotted years and days and still barely begin to comprehend it all...
...The so-called "Roman" Collar, in any case, is not Roman...
...He is reluctant to believe that men, especially Christians, more especially academics, clerics and religious, will not be convinced by clear argument...
...Europe, as a Christendom, finds few followers...
...Peter's...
...But the cure of the world's ills lies supposedly in marxism and socialism...
...Peter Nichols, in a recent issue of that phenomenal Famiglia Christiana ---by far the largest circulating magazine in Italy--tells in an article on the Italian post of an Englishman in frustration going up to an Italian postal clerk and chiding him for his inefficiency and lackadaisical attitude...
...I suspect, as the years pass, we will come to wonder how we had such a perceptive pope and why it was that a good part of the Catholic world wasted its energies disagreeing with him, when history is proving him basically right...
...The Papacy Too, after living in Rome for a time, the automatic and, I suppose, logical question is where does the papacy fit into it all...
...We really do not expect to have such an "intellectual" as pope...
...A drink at the Top of the Mark on a clear late afternoon with the Bay or Golden Gate Bridge below on the horizon leaves no doubt that few other places are worth even bothering with...
...And certainly going to class at the Gregorian was a non-clerical function...
...They are ignorant of what malnutrition and unhealthy environment mean, the very elements that have conditioned the youth of millions of Italians of earlier decades...
...Indeed, if Christianity means anything at all, it means that our relation to goodness and truth is something of a gift...
...Moenchen-Gladbach was the famous Catholic Social Center from which Professor Heinrich Rommen, who directed my thesis, finally came to Georgetown after escaping Hitler's growing power...
...Catholics as a group have done practically nothing for fellow Catholics suffering precisely from lack of religious liberty...
Vol. 104 • November 1977 • No. 24
