THE LEVELING OF JODN McNEILL
Berrigan, Daniel
THE LEVELING OF JOHN McNEILL DANIEL BERRIGAN Silencing a man and a book While a passionate age storms ahead, setting up new things and tearing down old, raising and demolishing as it goes,...
...A marginal church, not in the Pauline sense of "unconformed to this world...
...McNeill's response, whatever its merits, runs true to form...
...dead principles invoked despite the cries of the living, women literally "put in their place" by a male blow...
...Kierkegaard's image is the opposite of a legitimate sensitive order of things, in which the proper dignity and grace of all are respected, nurtured...
...He (she) has a simple project in the world, a project which arose from walking in the world and observing events there...
...We must not go in their direction hang dog, like dogs to their own hanging...
...Let things stand at that, forever...
...but we must do these things with all our passionate heart, for our own reasons, for our people, knowing our cause is just and worthy and speaks for all...
...He has held a hand in his own, has sensed human suffering, has witnessed injustice, psychic destruction, stigma, rejection...
...Even the enemy would admit this is rare...
...And when we are lucky, as in the outcome of the above lamentable grotesqueries, the agents do their little (or large) worst, and pass from the scene, chastened or defiant as the case may be, but on their own...
...when to push and pull, when to rock gently with the grain...
...Alas for the poor blokes that we are, and our hopes...
...They are not cogs...
...This is after all our church, male to the crotch, white to the real estate, pure to the very conception...
...since the 12th century, this unmanageable question of homosexuality has been managed quite well, through a tactic of queasy silence, eyebrow raising, public and private defamation, corporal punishment, auricular confession and forgiveness, the amendment of dark minds and darker acts...
...He is, as I suggested, one of Kierkegnard's en/ants terribles, a "religious individual," out of tune, out of step...
...Homosexuals will continue to be regarded in the church with that cute cast of the eye which signals more eloquently than a blow, that a creepy citizen has somehow gotten into the compound...
...In February last, I was placed in durance once more by the United States for standing at the Pentagon along with some friends...
...in more senses than one...
...Snakes, dragons, other biblical and/or allusive figures haunt Lowell's pages...
...The letters, to coin a cliche, run the gamut...
...He was encouraged to expand his ideas in a book...
...Storming some purported barricade might win him a feverish following...
...Inthe early poems of Land ol Unlikeness and Lord Weary's Castle he writes at his most emblematic...
...We shall have to make our way as best we may in the mine fields, McNeill and many others, marginal to a church which itself is marginal to human hope...
...i ASPECTS OF ROBERT LOWELL JOHN DRUSKA For some...
...Consider the case...
...The war decade seems to me to have been a judgment scene, in which old pretensions were utterly destroyed, old suppositions derided...
...One Jesuit lately held up his pain (and ours) before the befuddled pub/ic gaze...
...Once and for all, the new community was to be born, sprung, mature and purposeful, ready for passion and action in the world...
...That vocation, peculiar in nature, is popularly supposed to call one out of the crowd to become a crowd-pleaser...
...But to speak out, to act out, to translate good intentions into sensible acts...
...The organization "Dignity," which he helped found for homosexual Catholics, grew to some 56 chapters in as many cities...
...America, now...
...To this day, I am trying to absorb and understand it...
...Today we are acculturated to more and more violence, spent as to spiritual energies, disoriented as to our own direction, frivolous or nostalgic as the whim takes us, ready for more degraded law and order...
...Lest one be leveled...
...I am not Sure I find McNeill's response to my crude taste...
...The principle is honored in anthropology, under some rubric like "The Law of Survival...
...But apart from all that, I honor him...
...that in this matter as in so many others that have surfaced these past years, the church seems to have lost its bearings...
...I would like my silence in some way to symbolize the defenseless silence through the centuries, and even today, of hundreds of thousands of gay Catholics...
...And there are worse outcomes...
...And if they push things, their destiny can become their crime...
...The homosexual shakes us up, tumbles us out of this world...
...His manuscript was scrutinized by enough experts to sanitize the Augean stables...
...It is not that he is ignorant, that he does not know he is on thin ice...
...He takes the measure of the world, the measure of church teaching, the measure of his own soul, from there...
...How does one act normally before the "abnormal...
...an optimist to the core, a 'redemptive' optimist, just to get the language straight...
...they are masters of the shifts and tides of this world...
...Indeed, a furious and illiterate enemy of Rome could have done no worse...
...We would do what we had purported to do, it was simple as that...
...Gays have now been served notice (even as women previously were), in terms silken or devious, that they are of no account, or of lesser account, or niggers, or irrelevant, or back pew citizens, or unfit for ministry, or sexually unfortunate, or emotionally inferior, orN The degradation is wonderfully inventive, the intention is by now clear...
...And a warning served on others...
...On the one hand, the Levelers...
...Or perhaps a silly enchantment with mass media frenzy, as in the concocters of The Exorcist...
...First of all, we must continue to slip the chattels and cuffs from our hands (and feet and tongues and souls...
...a radical, abstract inversion of right order...
...That which should foster distinction, variety, passionate conscience, levels...
...It is a time of leveling...
...That which should raise the dead, the equivalent dead, the presumed dead, the sentenced to death, the outcast, the victimized--levels...
...Alas, the wave subsided, the surfer went under, head over heels...
...In the matter of John McNeill, I have pursued all available documents...
...how hard it would be in such a time, for individuals cursed with a conscience, or determined on plain speech, or laboring Under galling maltreatment, or passionate concerning the fate of others 9 December 1977:782 --how foolish for such to seek a hearing...
...He waited, he questioned, he was rebuffed, he waited, once more he was told to walt, he was counseled to be patient by millennial-minded authorities...
...Rather he makes small account of such things...
...and therefore blesses while it wounds --wounds against justice, against charity, against common sense, against reason itself...
...Here was a Jesuit who escaped the lamentable common fate, when our garden became a spoiled playground...
...A straightfaced letter came back in due course, thanking me...
...all of them both clumsy and sore, a redundancy of pain...
...To wit...
...I can only report they are not much, qualitatively speaking...
...Everything was possible to us, even a reborn culture...
...God's will) assigns them...
...We were declaring, however symbolically and mildly, that the destruction of the world by ever bigger and newer nukes, seemed a not good idea...
...all well and good...
...Now this activity approaches the dangerous, and some people wince, and sounds of disaffection are heard...
...He was amiable and alive in the mind, certainly we were both great innocents, with the dreadful messy uncharted future lying out there, and we bemused, thinking our lives would go straight as the arrow of God's (purported) will...
...We got on well...
...It lived along the wave like an ecstatic surfer...
...After some twenty years of bare survival in the order and the church, one feels entitled to propound a principle--into the void, or into the west wind...
...Through it all he was unfailingly, exasperatingly courteous, a gentleman ad unguem...
...Roman churchmen...
...This character, it is said, niftily redeems the times by going with the times, not against them...
...But these, I am relieved to report, are instances of Ours at their determined worst...
...Letters from Rome, in this case as in the preceding centuries of decrying and decreeing, are not exactly Star Wars for scintillation or Kojak for bite...
...It is bitter to be reminded of it...
...Besides, what machines would give that nice inhuman turn of a blade which has, so to speak, a cross on its hilt...
...It was always my hope and dream that through my scholarship and efforts, I could make some contribution to a reconciliation of the church with the gay community, and of the gay community to the church...
...In Christ, he says, there is neither hetero nor homo, but one Body, His own...
...This is the alchemy, the witch's brew that once taken, levels our stature...
...homosexuals eased into outer darkness, out of sight, out of mind...
...Hayden Carruth dismissed the motifs in Lord Weary as lifeless tokens and many of the poems as "set pieces in a high style," a young poet's homage to his older masters...
...Impossible to fail, only watch us...
...Albeit capable of sternness at times, with a nice critical edge...
...I think he is unafraid of the cross...
...Thus they (and we) take risks...
...John is unacceptable in his field, ethics, to any Catholic university in the land, Jesuits included...
...The Sore Thumb The latter is the burden of these reflections...
...And when his book was finally cleared, and The Church and the Homo9 December 1977:780 sexual appeared bearing its croix de guerre, the Imprimi Potest, McNeill took to the road like a shot...
...Such a fever of anticipated triumph...
...THE LEVELING OF JOHN McNEILL DANIEL BERRIGAN Silencing a man and a book While a passionate age storms ahead, setting up new things and tearing down old, raising and demolishing as it goes, a reflective and passionless age does exactly the contrary...
...Everything is seemly and normal and above board...
...We maintain a certain minimal flame of spirit---or we do not...
...In New York, the archdiocese has consistently opposed an ordinance that would guarantee civil rights to gays...
...that it will hear what the Holy Spirit has to say to the church from its gay brothers and sisters in Christ...
...his silence brings us up short, leaves us perplexed, at sea...
...a Jesuit, they say, can make the worse argument appear the better, whenever the worse argument redounds to a measure of corporate benefit...
...moreover, the imprimi potest had been issued on the suppositio n that the book would be restricted to the community of scholars--but in consequence of McNeill's strenuous travels and many media appearances, Catholic gays were being deluded as to their true state_9 In consequence of all this, the imprimi potest was to be removed from future printings of the book, and McNeill was forbidden to speak henceforth on matters of sexuality or sexual ethics...
...Jew or gentile, homo or hetero...
...Or in the inelegant but telling phrase of one Jesuit authority in this matter, "Kiss them off...
...Our paths crossed briefly, as I recall in Paris...
...On release in March, I sent this folkloric device as a gift to our Father General Arrupe, who was then celebrating his golden jubilee as a Jesuit...
...In those months and years, I saw a new side of McNeill, the strength of absolutely marmoreal patience...
...We're surprising to ourselves, we don't know how we made it ashore, couldn't tell if asked...
...The other four may or may not do, one cannot be sure...
...So far, simple...
...gnat or camel, they could find nothing to stick at...
...But what followed is probably one of the most extended eking out of reluctant approbation in all the slow turning of Roman mills...
...Take one learned and passionate Jesuit out on a limb, take an obscure Roman Cardinal armed with a snicker snee...
...Mere prudence, a sense of survival, dictate that in the age of leveling, one keep a low profile...
...As we were rounded up, I ~,as able to slip from my wrists the plastic cuffs wherein I was held, and conceal them on my person...
...This one is named Sweet Reason...
...a gaze which quickly, in official eye sockets, has darkened with horror...
...To the contrary, a church all too conformed, all too powerful, all too fearful, all too prudent...
...It was a little like the heady romanticism that bubbled up in American society in the '60s...
...And this is what gives us hope...
...But to resume...
...The same law has much to say to experts in other fields...
...a dark target is harder to hit...
...It appears that Rome was less than comforted by this successful delivery, a book that was bound to go loud and kicking into the world...
...That which should confer faith and hope and charity, poisons us with bad faith, diminishes our hope to the needle's point, comes toward us small and sour of mind...
...Lowell's first works, for which he was lionized by much of the critical establishment, might I JOHN DRUSKA is a writer who currently teaches high school in Indianapolis...
...there is no status in the American church worth talking about, worth tasting, worth trying with all one's poor energies to understand, except it be edgy, blurred, under suspicion...
...Dear brother John McNeill, we shall have to content ourselves with perhaps two simple acts, which I take it are nearly all we can do today...
...And what of the homosexual community...
...He does a classic thing, wbich a few Jesuits have done for centuries, in such circumstances...
...Bizarre goings on are transpiring, not isolated indeed, but in the midst of a crazlfled culture and time...
...We can only reconstruct events and motives here...
...The tactic here being political clout in harness to rampageous ego, as in the case of McLaughlin huckstering Nixon's war...
...on homosexuals who seek ordination or membership in religious orders--on all in fact, hetero, homo, or plain human who hoped, had been led to hope, that the church was becoming an advocate of victimized people...
...They urge repentance, submission, withdrawal, the conduct generally befitting rechildren snatched by adult hands from lapse or silence, pentant lunacy...
...Authority in service, symbol and reality, rite and follow through, one seamless conscience, one body of love...
...Let such people be...
...One holy, indivisible, color blind, age blind, sex blind...
...Where was his rancor, exasperation, his coil and recoil, the sweat and bruises we all bear into the public arena...
...On the one hand, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is not to be confused in method or ethos with the defunct crusher that preceded it, the Holy Office...
...The official church went with the bloody tide, went down with it...
...For as soon as it tries, the law of the leveling process is again brought into play...
...We are indeed being leveled off...
...He refuses to play the loser or victim, to lie down on command and die...
...well be saying, "Nothing but within my ideas of things": . . . I fear That only Armageddon will suffice To turn the hero skating on thin ice When Whore and Beast and Dragon rise for air From allegoric waters...
...Leveling can only be halted by the individual attaining the religious courage which springs from his individual religious solitude...
...Only a few objections have been recorded...
...A leveled church indeed, in a leveling time...
...And to that degree, the pain of one member is to the honor of all, a sign to be winced at...
...And at sea is where we are, in any case...
...But the security, the credit cards, the sound ID, went down in the catastrophe referred to above...
...Thus a meeting of humans is sexualized, abnormalized, inflated out of all recognition...
...safe, sound, bell, book, candle, cassock, rule, long black line, classroom, rec room, womb to tomb security...
...We thought really, we had done with all that...
...The Seper-Arrupe document was, as they say, "unavailable...
...I forgot to ask John if the figure would fit him...
...he has the look we all wear, except for a few chic hangers-on, the look of bare survivors, a wreck that went under like a stone...
...9 After a great deal of prayer and consultation I have personally made the decision to obey the directive...
...I met John McNeill years ago, in Europe...
...He takes a few of these people by the hand, and leads them into the very center of the circle, the circle let us say, of worship, of brother- and sisterhood...
...Which may be so, or may not...
...That is their sad destiny...
...cold but wholesome, with a cross cut into their flab to render them less indigestible...
...He did so, and duly submitted the manuscript to the scrutiny of superiors...
...He has, moreover, no hesitation in embracing the culturally meretricious...
...I'm somewhat less immediately notorious, the University of Detroit brought me in for one semester two years ago...
...The gamut is predictably narrow...
...No, in every case the message and the media are more purgatorial...
...He was undergoing the grueling obstacle race honoris causa at Louvain...
...but then, at least it is given us to know it, and with a vengeance...
...The Jesuit McNeill, on the threshhold of distinction, an expert in ethics, a man well loved, held in respect--such a one begins speaking up on behalf of--homosexuals...
...The documents went bravely about it, they were a raiment of poverty decked in ribbons for a holiday, our baptismal robe...
...Just about everything else is hogwash, illiteracy, folderol, captivation...
...I sense that it was the Vietnam war that brought matters to this pass...
...somewhat the way the incurably ill do, the dying, the unmentionable and marginal, all those who show us our own future, our own secrets, our own throttled humanity...
...Now we live by our wits, so to speak...
...The unsayable was said, the ghosts were out of the closet...
...We can go along with their silencing us, we can go along to their jails...
...Their cause, their presence, their gifts, are unwelcome...
...A Doctor of Philosophy in the time-honored mold, teacher, writer, counselor...
...Not to speak of simple 9 December 1977:778 folk who would prefer by and large, to survive until sundown...
...This is somewhat the tone of the McNeill file...
...He sets to work at a thorny, all but untouchable, urgent human issue...
...The project of course makes little sense in an age leveled off to hot crowds and shifty crowd-pleasers...
...Something other indeed...
...To this point, no pain...
...This Jesuit refuses to follow that way...
...While he waited and waited for a Roman decision on his manuscript, McNeill's patience was an uncommonly active virtue...
...Leveling...
...I hope also that my silence itself will be eloquent...
...In Kierkegaard's phrase, the Passionate Age was succeeded by the Great L~veler...
...Homosexuals should be content with their crepuscular status...
...The bible was coming alive in us...
...even (God help us) the rebirth of defunct political arrangements...
...not creatureliness, nor a Commonweal: 781 befitting modesty before the universe and God...
...One does not write from Rome in the ordinary course of things, to express jubilation, or thanks for a work well done, or a poem turned, or a jail sentence survived...
...I do not know why this is so, I am unhappy that it is so...
...Anything, that is to say, which amounts to moral limpness, silence, the city morgue...
...At the same time, he will not go away, thereby solving a dilemma which is not so much his as Rome's...
...Never again secret character assassinations secretly arrived at, no more suffocations, immurations, exiles, dismissals, enforced silencings, no more midnight burials at crossroads, no more stakes through the heart of prophetic purpose...
...He has moreover been nearly leveled himself on several occasions, living as he does under the gun sights of the Roman curia...
...We hitch up our purported bumptious normality, we come on tougher than ever, more macho than ever...
...On the other, the out of tune, out of joint, out of step character named by Kierkegaard, 'the religious individual.' This one has no sense of right timing, cannot read traffic signs, has indeed no interest in reading them, is utterly and incurably irrelevant (to all but one thing), speaks up when everyone urges equivocal prudence, is silent in the midst of hot contention, has no authority beyond the useless currency of human concern...
...A closing of ranks, a closing of minds, a narrowing of the range of inquiry open to believers...
...That church became a pure American invention, a tool of polity, a blessing on unutterable violence...
...His humanity breaks through, in ways we have seen before, on happier occasions...
...I watched and marveled and began to think the Pelagians wrong...
...McNeiU's book took a position contrary to the common teaching of the church...
...His latest book is A Book of Parables (Seabury...
...You realize why Romans never need machines to turn Commonweal: 779 out their letters, they have the services of ecclesiastics who write as well, or as badly as machines, but less expensively...
...Simply...
...What's good for one of Ours is good for all of Ours...
...as though the Vatican had a corner on the construction of vertical coffins for uppety gays...
...More...
...And secondly, we must offer strange gifts to authority...
...Their fine tooth comb declared him again and again tick free, lice free, dandruff free...
...We would turn everything over, we would turn out all the rascals, we would begin anew...
...I hope it will join the silence of those many theologians of pre-Vatican II, Teilhard de Chardin, John Courtney Murray, Henri de Lubac, whose obedience eventually led to their vindication...
...Or so we heard...
...The best gift I can think of is our own rebirth, our liberation...
...I feel like saying to John McNeill with an irony that passes expression...
...I am absolutely confident that this represents only a temporary setback in the cause of justice for gay Catholics and that, eventually, with God's help, the church will learn to deal openly and lovingly in dialogue with the gay community...
...In a good time, a good man may be both adroit and easefully large of spirit...
...And the punishing fallout fell not merely on the Vietnamese...
...The will was the grace, the grace blessed the performance...
...A "time of leveling...
...Not content with keeping closet matters where in decency they belong, and keeping such people where they belong, and urging contentment with their lunatic lot--no, he refuses that way, which is the time-honored way, the way the church has invariably gone, so that matters that belong in the light may stand in the light, and other unlovely barely mentionable matters may dwell where fate (correction...
...Nor need we envision a lurking special interest...
...It might be put like this...
...There are Enthusiasts and Levelers, there are Icemen and Firemen, Indians and Chiefs, Manicurists and Sore Thumbs...
...That which should elevate and enhance, levels...
...there are Jesuits and Jesuits...
...No age, and therefore not the present age, can bring the~ scepticism of that process to a halt...
...Kierkegaard: The Present Age The episode had all the whacked out improbability of a grade C dog day movie...
...other societies, other times, have known how to deal with them, not in grudging toleration, but condignly...
...one raises nothing, not the dead, not a few questions of life and death...
...those that are exploitive, irresponsible, disrespectful, or destructive of the true good of either party, must be judged immoral...
...Not the end, by any means...
...Something embarrassing, something sublime...
...Something is indeed wrong...
...We were canceling out the evil in our history, recovering from blindness, taking a new turn, indeed rising from the dead...
...He knew the germ on every flower, and saw the snake is a petty, rather pathetic creature.' Whether or not the speaker is Lowell~the poem is a direct quote, perhaps a letter to himmthe sentiment is surely his...
...It hinders and stifles all action...
...We were to become, I FATIH~R DANIEL ~BERRIGAN, S.J., poet and peace activist, is a member o] the New York West Side 7esuit Community...
...It would appear to follow that the same moral rules apply to homosexual as to heterosexual attitudes and behavior...
...The past suggests another direction...
...I hope by my silence to be of service both to the church which I love and the gay community with which I have become so closely identified...
...Uncommon courage, uncommon travail...
...Or The Greater Good...
...You can all but hear the gears revving up...
...it demeans everyone, it stains everything...
...T~he difficulties they posed to be puzzled through impressed...
...In any case, our religious individual is the very opposite of a stereotype, even of a stereotype Jesuit...
...I presume of course that one is standing somewhere, on behalf of human suffering...
...Money-makers know how tO lie low, when a bullish market goes sluggish...
...It's all gone, for good...
...Roma locuta...
...Behold, in midst no more macho or macha...
...shortly and radically, a new sort of spectacle unto the world...
...In any case, Assembled in Italy...
...At this time and under these circumstances, I now judge that the best contribution I can make to that dream is by my silence...
...come along, that freedom road...
...It levels . . . . Enthusiasm may indeed end in disaster, but leveling is eo ipso the destruction ol the individual...
...not for an exile rescinded, a Roman crime admitted and atoned...
...To Peter Taylor on the Feast of the Epiphany;' Lord Weary) The self-assurance of Lowell's poems in Lord Weary impressed...
...American society, and the American church, will tolerate us as parasites, or peaceniks, or good abstract paper-pushing academics, or hapless citizens with grievances to be referred to Congress or polls or votes or bread or circuses or confession or good works...
...though the Jesuits might admit it is too unrare for comfort...
...The issue I had hoped to raise, the deadly and doughy silence of American Jesuits and American Christians, with regard to the likely annihilation of all who walk the world, was of course not engaged...
...to save or aid one other person, or a few...
...as for myself, a beneficiary of Cosmic Welfare, I live off the universe, an edgy way, never a dull moment...
...though among the purely "sententious" specimens Carruth discovered poems that include, under their "high gloss of artifice," urgent and moving autobiographical elements ("A Meaning of Robert Lowell," Robert Lowell: A Portrait of the Artist in His Time, Commonweal: 783...
...To wit...
...Could the Roman officials have known that they have silenced McNeill at a most dangerous time, when homosexual rights are under fire, and domestic fanatics are tuning up for a war on deviants7 One wonders, one is appalled...
...but Arrupe's heroism is of a sterner cast, harder won...
...the book showed disrespect for the magisterium, appearing as it did just at the time the church had reaffirmed its position on the immorality of homosexuality...
...He introduces them to other Christians, he blesses them, shrives them, communicates them, just like the others...
...Those that are responsible, respectful, loving and truly promotive of the good of both parties are moral...
...We have had in these last unamiable years, some ten thumbs on our two American hands...
...it fell on us, broke us apart like tinder...
...Kierkegaard implies it...
...For dramatizing this unusual thought, I was sentenced to thirty days...
...If he does hear them, he grants them no attention...
...He puts to work his skills and discipline and conscience...
...This idea is too simple to need developing...
...I suspect his sense of history is sound, and this not merely as a tactic...
...It is somewhat too mystical, it takes refuge, it is not angry...
...Their frith gospel, like a fifth wheel, is always ready, in case, just in case...
...Vatican II had solemnized the resolve Pope John had given over his short and happy life to the prospect...
...to inflict it, to conform to it...
...I hope he is not too resigned, just as I am sure he is not hateful...
...The point of all this is to suggest a contrast...
...He was informed that a letter from Father General Arrupe conveyed a decision of Cardinal Seper, head of the Sacred Congregation for ,the Doctrine of the Faith...
...But these reflections are meant to be an act of love...
...It should be added in justice that the hand of Father General Arrupe is generally not equal to his task...
...In any case, the bearing of a book or a baby into our world is in the nature of things, a beginning of trials, misadventures, ogres and angels...
...He visited some thirty cities speaking on behalf of gays, advancing the thesis of his new book...
...An emotional apparatus is then set in motion, somewhat as though a gorgeous dish were sailing past a knot of thugs on some midtown street...
...a kind of American Yeats 1. His Career The speaker of Robert Lowell's "In the American Grain" (History) announces at the close of the poem (')I am not William Carlos Williams...
...He fives in a time of leveling, he salvages what he can...
...In 1970, for the Homiletic and Pastoral Review, McNeill wrote three watershed articles entitled, "The Christian Male Homosexual...
...We staggered out of that decade scarred...
...Or The Lesser Evil...
...In August, John was summoned to New York Jesuit headquarters by Father Eamon Taylor, the provincial authority...
...it swept everything before itmfor awhile...
...Now he's grizzled as Zero Mostel...
...One has a sense he writes such letters with two-thirds or even half a heart, that in such matters as lie in contention here, he has been pushed to the wall, and acts under duress...
...that we have few landmarks...
...No ideas but in things," Williams proclaimed...
...For it is the Sore Thumb that tells us the condition of the body...
...The latter is the rub, he is not the typical bankrupt academic, he is incapable of the betrayal of silence...
...they have the quality of fire to the touch...
...interpose one einbattled Jesuit General, hiking up, abetting said Cardinal...
...the stigma of America, whose chattel we had become...
...Indeed the Great Leveler plays a sad charade, in a sad time of disaffection and ill feeling--an atmosphere which church authority, in spite of all, seeds in the air...
...welcome aboard...
...In any case, alternately kissed and kicked by fate, McNeill and his saga are far from ended...
...What this comes down to, is an old skill first outlined by Socrates...
...A new tactic is thereupon called for...
...or at least (there is no point in creating a fiction here, a human without fear) he makes less account of personal danger than of the untended and unmerited suffering which his 'prudence' would only worsen...
...The stereotype is the exception in real life...
...He takes another step...
...Such functions do not befit the functionary...
...And so he walks from there, one step further...
...Or we do not...
...in the shadow...
...Today, when every conceivable question is politicized out of its reasonable skull, he places a sure, patient, obscure sense of soul above some crude confessional tactic...
...Down comes limb, Jesuit, passion and all...
...We had done with all that...
...Politicians learn the difference between an open and an off season on speaking up, the difference between a good but bootless issue versus a juicy if spurious one...
...As in a scene played under water or in outer space, exaggerated, even grotesque gestures, movements, come into play...
...They are more like, gustatorially speaking, last week's omelet...
...John seems not to hear them...
...McNeiU promptly and predictably obeyed, sending off a message to Chicago, where he was to address the opening session of the Dignity convention...
Vol. 104 • December 1977 • No. 25
