NEWS & VIEWS
NEWS & VIEWS Robert Lowei| In his perceptive appreciation of Robert Lowell in the Village Voice a few weeks after Lowell's sudden death last Sept. 12, Tim Mayer recalled an...
...The indiscriminate bombing was a factor that eventually turned Lowell pacifist...
...Several civic groups, however, moved to block the execution through court action and the persuading of public opinion that capital punishment laws actually induced criminal conduct in certain types...
...Mayer is right, and it is one reason why those who knew Lowell intimately from his Catholic years, when he was working at Sheed & Ward and writing for Commonweal, may find a mite abrupt John Druska's handling of Lowell's Catholicism in his piece appearing elsewhere in this issue...
...Mayer was a student of Lowell's at Harvard, and he saw in Lowell dimensions of Catholicism that escaped others...
...As it goes to the printer comes word that 12 well-known Catholic theologians have charged the Vatican's doctrinal congregation with a flagrant disregard of due process in prohibiting McNeil from speaking on sexual ethics...
...Lowell entered the Catholic Church in 1940, the year he graduated from Kenyon College, and was a member of that small band of Catholic pacifists--J.F...
...Lowell shook his head...
...It wasn't Vietnam, although Lowell was an antiwar activist...
...Marjorie Maguire, Father Richard McBrien, Father Richard McCormick, S.J., Dr...
...The 12 have requested a meeting with the U.S...
...In jail he is said to have elicited vast admiration for the courage of that witness, the more so since he was virtually abandoned by the new Church to which he had converted...
...The theory linking commission of a capital offense to a personal death wish is an old one, as Lois Spear noted...
...Lowell wasn't making the observation to inflate Merton, a person he of course admired...
...I think it means ambition," he saidmand for Lowell, it did, said Mayer...
...Odll~ and Emtt m A British Baptist minister, after a visit to Miami, has suggested that British football adopt an American football custom: appoint team chaplains...
...In other words, deathpenalty statutes become as "contracts," guaranteeing to anyone who wants to com= mit suicide, but who hasn't the nerve, that the state will step in and perform the suicide for him...
...He candidly ranked Merton as "a modest, not altogether satisfactory minor poet," but nevertheless "the most promising of our American Catholic poets and, possibly, the most consequential Catholic poet to write in English since the death of Francis Thompson...
...Bish'ops' Committee on Doctrine "to discuss this serious breach of justice and its redress...
...I shared a picket line with him once in the '60s outside UN Headquarters, and he was full of affectionate questions about Commonweal and the old scene...
...From Mayer's point of view, it is not surprising that Lowell's question about the "thorn in the flesh" should have been posed to a Catholic...
...Two of the poems, most representative of Lowell's Catholic period, are reprinted on page 786...
...The underscored Bible verses, he added, were intended to justify Webster's action...
...Maybe it was Biafra and the frightful slaughter that attended its attempt at independence from Nigeria...
...Like they say, the team that prays together beats the spread...
...Sad Footnote Lois Spear's speculations about a North Carolina death-row prisoner in the last Commonweal ["Capital Punishment---Or Suicide...
...As reviewer, he seized on some new verses of Thomas Merton in 1945 to wonder "why the last 40 years of the Catholic literary revival, which have seen the prose of Chesterton, Dawson and Waugh, have produced nothing as lasting as the light verses of Belloc...
...Lowell remained a Catholic until the latter 1940s, and during that time appeared several times in Commonweal as a poet and reviewer...
...Webster, it will be recalled from Lois Spear's article, murdered his wife, confessed, asked for and was granted the death penalty...
...Harry McSorley, Father Christopher Mooney, S.J., Brother Gabriel Moran, FSC, Dr...
...He renounced Catholicism, to use the New York Times' verb, but obviously it was a gentle' renunciation...
...Daniel Magnire, Dr...
...Nothing of the foregoing is written down in order to reappropriate Robert Lowell...
...And he is missed...
...specifically, in disturbed persons who may be tempted to commit murder to fulfill their own death wishes...
...JOHN DEEDY 9 December 1977:772...
...After her articlewent to press, Daniel R. Webster did indeed commit suicide, slashing himself with a razor blade and leaving behind several handwritten notes and a Bible with underlined verses...
...Funny, but I remember the questions and not the issue that brought us there...
...If anything," their statement says, "the Church is called upon to surpass the measure of justice available in civil society...
...Whatever, Robert Lowell is gone...
...He practiced Catholicism for only a few years, Mayer noted, but he "continued to think about it...
...In the case of John McNeill, they comment, the standard norms of iustice have been "ignored...
...He was a good man, a great poet...
...Again, the Catholic context...
...He had actually tried to enlist in the service, but without success...
...Where the theorizing broke down in Webster's case is that he did after all have the nerve to do what he wanted the state to do...
...The 12 are: Sister Elizabeth Carroll, RSM, Sister Margaret Farley, RSM, Dr...
...Powers, Gordon Zahn, etc.m who took a conscientious-obiector's position on World War II and went to jail for their witness...
...The friend replied that the passage was generally taken to be a reference to sexuality...
...Warden Sam Garrison of Raleigh's Central Prison, a recipient of one of the notes, said Webster "had prayed, had communicated with God, and decided to take this way out...
...It's a sad, tragic footnote to a compassionate article and serious human problem, still...
...had a grisly denouement...
...12, Tim Mayer recalled an exchange between the poet and a Catholic friend which took place in a hospital where Lowell was a patient after one of his breakdowns...
...Gregory Baum, Father Charles Curran, Father Robert Springer, SJ...
...The American Catholic Church, under the nationalistic leadership of Cardinal Spellman, looked on the war almost as a holy mission...
...It's the Gary Gilmore syndrome, and Webster was in fact fascinated by Gilmore, even to the point of taunting his jury to give him the death sentence...
...Lowell wanted to know from the friend just what he thought the Apostle Paul was driving at when he spoke of his "thorn in the flesh...
...John MeNeHI Another footnote to another Commonweal article:, Dan Berrigan's piece in this issue on fellow Jesuit Father John McNeill...
Vol. 104 • December 1977 • No. 25
