EDITORIALS
CORRESPONDENCE Phraseologv Berkeley, Cal. To the Editors: I read Noonan's ''The Devious Employees" [Oct. 28] last week and thought it a sort of fun article: good sense of humor, proper...
...I take "mean" to indicate Jesus's intention, his desire...
...Maybe the managers of the world economy will keep Humpty Dumpty propped up another year...
...Behold, an instant Noonan convert...
...I l l and I 1 5 , detail /ram sixth-century Egyptian tapestry, Icon o] the Virgin, The Metropolitan Museum o/ Art, lent by The Cleveland Museum o/ Art, Leonard C. Hanna, Jr...
...Foreign $33.S0 000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ASSL SME]NT AND ANTICIPATION Once again we slouch towards Bethlehem...
...The word "must" occurs frequently in both Lk's Gospel and Acts...
...Maybe the Middle East will lurch into peace...
...23 December 1977:804...
...In the main, though, we share the sentiment inspiring the Chicago Declaration...
...Maybe the keepers of the gulag archipelagoes and the apartheid archipelagoes will blanch before the deeds they inevitably assign themselves...
...Thorman was a valued friend and journalistic colleague...
...The Christian tradition looks back to one Coming and awaits another...
...The NAB has clouded over the point completely with its presentation of Zacchaeus who "was tryirtg to see what Jesus was like," and of the "Son of M a n . . . come to search out and save what was lost...
...We are deeply concerned," they write, "that so little energy is devoted to encouraging and arousing lay responsibility for the world . . . . We fear that the almost obsessive preoccupation with the Church's structures and processes has diverted attention from the essential question: reform for what purpose...
...In the original Greek, Lk has enclosed it with'~n a neat pun...
...lude, now called U.S...
...Fifth, the signers regret the absence of the variety of organizations and networks that once supported the laity in their secular, occupational vocations...
...Thonnan, 52, died Nov...
...In the weeks before Christmas two remarkable assessments-anticipations have caught our attention...
...The second assessment-anticipation comes from a very different quarterqfrom a group of veteran Catholic activists in Chicago, disturbed by an apparent slackening or clericalizing of Catholic lay initiative...
...Fourth, the signers evoke "the mainstream of Catholic social thought" and a "sophisticated body of [Christian] social wisdom" as means of mediating between the Gospel and concrete, secular realities without converting the Gospel into political ideology...
...Although it would appear that Zacchaeus was seeking (ezetei of 19:3) Jesus, it really was Jesus, the Son of Man, who had come to seek (zetesai) Zaccbaeus, to seek and to save the lost (19:10...
...Second, in recent years "many priests have acted as if the primary responsibility in the Church for uprooting injustice, ending wars and defending human rights rested with them as ordained ministers...
...His years at NCR capped a long and distinguished career...
...Not like Yeats's rough, apocalyptic beast but like tired commuters, our feet aching, our arms full of the plain parcels in which we have wrapped our modest hopes...
...9 . . That same vision produced national movements and networks which generated a dynamic lay leadership . . . . Shall we passively accept that period of history as completely over, and with it the vision that proved to be so creative...
...Then came my own preparation for the Sunday homily, the story of wee Zacchaeus in the sycamore...
...Toward both the permanent diaconate and the Detroit "Call to Action," the signers, accordingly, express some ambivalence...
...Two-faced Janus guards the gate to another year...
...Thorman leaves a void in the field of American Catholic journalism, and of Catholic scholarship...
...DON THORMAN-.R.I.P...
...One was by George Steiner, surveying the whirl and bluster of religious and not-so-religious phenomena that seem to have materialized in answer to the poet Philip Larkin's question, "And what remains when disbelief is gone...
...Along with the visitors from outer space and the manipulators of inner space, there is, writes Steiner, a "striking renaissance of theological thought and argument . . . . So much of what intuition now compels us to recognize as indispensable, and compels us to revert to even in disagreement, draws its powers from sources implicitly or explicitly theological . . . . It would be foolish to predict a religious revival in any formal and dogmatic sense (though there are significant pointers in just that direction in both the Jewish and Christian worlds...
...It is worth noting, however, that Steiner is impressed with the accomplishments of theology...
...And despite the signers' awareness of the danger, they may have allowed a certain nostalgia to obscure the unresolved difficulr of the creative vision they invoke...
...28] last week and thought it a sort of fun article: good sense of humor, proper amount of outrage, a couple of good points scored...
...For decades, the Church in Chicago nurtured a compelling vision of lay Christians in society...
...The death of Mr...
...Catholic, and at Ave Maria, and also as a member of the faculty at Loyola University of Chicago, Mr...
...Second class postage paid at New Far/K, N.Y...
...Perhaps we could align the secular observer with the Chicago signers in a resolution that these be the standards for our intellectual endeavors in every field...
...Maybe our native Scrooges will be haunted even a mite before they pronounce their sophisticated "humbugs" on all our sentimental notions of equality and fraternity...
...NEAL FLANAOAN, O.S.M...
...Commonweal extends its sympathy to his family and to the staff of NCR...
...Printed in the USA and published hi-weekly by Commonweal Pub/Is/flag Ca...
...The NAB misses agsin in the middle of the story with its, "I mean to stay at your house today" (19:5...
...It emphasizes, not Jesus's de#ire, but the fulfillment of God's plan...
...Washington, D.C...
...Capyriglrl O 1977 Commonweal Pub/lshleg Co., Inc.~US aud Canada: S17 a year...
...It would be one of the great ironies of history if the era of Vatican II which opened the windows of the Church to the world were to close with a Church turned in upon herself...
...So, too, he must enter Zacchaeus's home as a sign that, in the Father's plan, his loving salvation is offered also to sinners...
...We learn with regret of the death of Donald J. Thorman, publisher of the National Catholic Reporter...
...These points are all open to further discussion...
...They rest on theological and political premises that the Declaration does not explicitly state or defend...
...It is an impulse forgivable at this time of year...
...30 in Kansas City from the lingering effects of a disease contacted several months ago on a professional visit to China...
...The translation has missed two of Luke's points...
...Thorman helped shape the new times of the American Catholic Church and its members...
...Expressing their thoughts in a document entitled "A Chicago Declaration of Christian Concern," these Catholics justifiably evoke a local tradition well known to historians and observers of the Catholic Church in America...
...Third, the ordinary social roles of the laity have been depreciated, as though one could serve justice and peace "only by stepping outside of these ordinary roles as a businessman, as a m a y o r , . . , or as an active union member"mand change society only as an "outsider...
...The signers of the "Chicago Declaration" offer a tempered criticism on several points...
...The Metropolitan Museum o/ Art, lent by The British Museum, London...
...In his eyes, its recent giants---Bultmann~ Barth, Rahner, Kting---have matched or excelled most modem philosophy and literature "in terms of sheer force of insight, of adultness, of the gravity that honors the reader by taking his mental and moral capacities seriously...
...lames Finn Cotter 15115 THIS SIDE OF DEATH: Winston Weathers ROOKS: Robert Emmet Long, W. S. DiPiero, lohn B. Sheerin 122 INDEX TO VOLUME CIV: 1526 ILLU~RATIONS: Front cover, Archangel, Constantinople, sixth century...
...His article "The Devious Employees" [October 18] calls attention, at long last, to the shoddiness of the Confraternity Version of the (Continued on page 831) NEWS & VIEWS: 802 CORRESPONDENCE: 803 EDITORIALS: 803 WASHINGTON REPORT: A Star in the East: Frank Getlein 80S TRE SADAT INITIATIVE: Wilson Carey McWiiliams 806 IN A SOUTH AFRXCAN PRISON: Ran Javers 808 MANY ADVENTS, ONE MARY: Abigail McCarthy I I 0 GOD aE~aOMES MAN: Norbert F. Gaughan 811 IffAN BECOMES GOD: John Garvey 1515 TDE ANGEL GARRIEL DIS$1ENTS: Peter Stein]els 1510 THE SCREEN: Colin L. Westerbeck, Jr...
...As one of the oldest "networks" expressing the concerns of the laity, we are determined to continue in this task...
...Many ties, historical and personal, link Commonweal with the experience the Declaration reflects, More important, this journal and its readers have long insisted on the relative autonomy of the secular sphere, and on the need to realize the Christian revelation, in politics, in literature, in culture generally, in ways that do not pretend to deny that autonomy...
...Bequest JAMES O'GARA: Eclltar JOHN DEJEOY: Ma, glng |d/tar RAYMOND A. SCHROTH: Associate Editor ANNE M. ROSIERTSON: Rd/teflal A~istent COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.: Movies JOHN FAN01EL: Poetry FRANK @ETLEIN: Washington BRIAN WICKER: Oracrl Britain ALAIN WOODItOW: h r / s HENRY TEN KORTENAAR: Rome DESMOND FISHER: Dab/ia EDWARD S. SKILLIN: Pub/lobar RUTH E. TAYLOR: Advartlsbg Manager Stat: LINDA P. KAYLER, PAMELA J. FITZGERALD, HARRIETTR IIALSKY COMMONWEAL 232 MADISON AVE., NEW YORK, N.Y...
...The demise of such structures and the failure to devise new ones "may have resulted in the loss of a generation of lay leadership...
...Jesus must suffer, he must announce the good news of the kingdom, he must be handed over...
...But the hunger is obvious . . . . " Commonweal: 803 Brilliant essayist and scholar of language and literature, obsessed by the Holocaust and the destructive powers revealed at the heart of Western civilization, possessed of an almost febrile intelligence, and uneasy in his secularity, Steiner is a representative voice of our "post-modern" sensibility...
...As an editor at Voice o] St...
...1520 VERSE: Edmund Pennant 1514...
...It was The Emerging Layman, published in 1962...
...He wrote several books, one of them under a title which celebrated the new role of the laity in the American Church...
...It is a time of assessment and anticipation...
...To the Editors: Three cheers for John T. Noonan, Jr...
...But that is not Lk's point, nor his Greek which translates literally, "For today I must remain in your house...
...Priests and religious have sought to impose their political agendas upon the laity, at the worst threatening "a revived clericalismm on the left...
...Special two-year rate $29.S0...
...Foreign S i t . Single copy 7So...
...10016 TelepImae: (212) MU 3-3042 A review of Public Aflairs, Literature and the Arfs...
...First, the valuable involvement of lay people in explicitly churchly ministries and the concentration on issues of internal church reform have devalued the laity's "unique ministry" through secular tasks...
...It is too soon to tell...
...REV...
Vol. 104 • December 1977 • No. 26
