Washington Report: The Graves of Academe

...First, the moment for a possible genuine Congress of Vienna had longed passed before Kissinger got into the action...

...Some symbolic changes, while emotionaliy disturbing, have been minor: crucifixes have come off the walls...

...The bishop maintained he used the sacrament in an effort to reach out and touch inactive Catholics in his diocese...

...Kissinger, an academic of academics, was preceded in influence by two other academics who showed the same taste: Walt Rostow and Dean Rusk...

...Other changes were more damaging: in some places the curriculum lost its substance and direction...

...But ultimately, once academic excellence is assured, one way always open to make universities more distinctively Catholic is for both the religious and lay faculty to witness the Gospel...

...In Vietnam, Kissinger killed and maimed a quite extraordinary number of American young men, still unknown numbers of Vietnamese men, women and children of all ages, all to a purpose very hard to discern beyond an appalling personal pride and an anything but subtle view of foreign relations as bombs...

...I saw in that revised rite and the doors it opened for the use of general absolution a beautiful way for the church to reach out and invite these inactive Catholics back," the bishop said...

...In addition to his general academic background leading Kissinger to extreme bloody-mindedness once he had the chance, he also had this identity problem: he thought he was Metternich imposing order upon Europe after the Napoleonic-Hitlcrian upheaval...

...5, the bishop's critics and supporters were doing battle...

...Even after that, and after the change of his employers, Kissinger directed the preposterous affair of the Mayaguez "rescue," .about as well-considered tactically and strategically as the earlier "rescue" raid on a prison camp that turned out to be empty...

...What the reader of the record does gasp at is the unchanging, perhaps growing, taste for blood and lots of it...

...In eight years of effectively directing the foreign affairs 21 January 1977:36 of this nation, Henry Kissinger accomplished exactly one thing that unequivocally ranks as a major achievement: he persuaded Richard Nixon to repudiate the entire public career of Richard Nixon and to betray, finally, the solid core of Nixon's constituency, if so strange an American politician can be considered to have had a constituency in the ordinary sense...

...The future shape of the campus Christian community may be very different, but for now religious communities who still live there (Benedictines, Jesuits, Religious of the Sacred Heart, etc...

...38...

...He did so, as far as we can tell, at the behest of Kissinger and that successful persuasion remains Kissinger's outstanding achievement in the field...

...He announced his plans and there followed a six-month program of prayer, instruction from the pulpit, in the diocesan newspaper and in seminars before the Day of Reconciliation liturgies were celebrated...

...The day after the first reconciliation liturgy that attracted more than 11,500 to a civic sports and entertainment area in Memphis last Dec...

...But no more than the Gospels ask or the words Catholic and university claim...

...To anyone who has ever observed, not to say taken part in, faculty politics in a reasonably complex university, it is not at all unreasonable to speculate on some connection between the academic background of those advisors and formulators and the highly sanguinary nature of the advice and formulations they offered...

...Nor can they rely on external formalities--religious dress and cloister--to communicate to a new generation of students that quality by which Jesus said his followers were to be reco~,nized--their love for one another...

...The central mystery of Ford's administration was also inherited...

...no more prayers are said before class...

...But he hasn't been late since when it comes to getting things done...

...There was something sadly appropriate about what must be one of our final images of President Ford: out in Vail, wearing the funny clothes, invoking the snow gods to be kind to vacationists and invoking them unsuccessfully...

...People are still writing and speaking about his peculiar genius in foreign policy...

...It is a diocesan "peace corps" ,aimed at inducting teenagers and young adults recently graduated from high school or college...

...Things weren't going to work that way anymore and of course they have not...

...Some religious orders have had to make their schools legally nonsectarian in order to qualify for state funds and have lost much of their administrative control...

...The debate escalated to the point where Archbishop Joseph Bernardin felt obliged to speak out in a statement on behalf of the nation's hierarchy...

...should see their vows as educative---counter-cultural signs under~ mining the materialism, greed, status-climbing, competitiveness and power lust that characterizes so much of American culture...

...The French began the Indochina war in the last century by invading, then occupying, the three countries administered as French Indochina...

...From his first scurrilous campaigns for the House and the Senate, Nixon spoke to those people and he spoke their language: Communism was absolute evil, not to be trusted, not to be temporized with, not to be given an inch lest it take the world, hardly to be spoken civilly to, since the only language it understood was force...

...He capped his career by betraying that audience in going to China...

...It has challenged the academic religious leaders to examine themselves, to return to their roots, and rediscover the values they have to offer students...

...on the other, even on those slopes, he was powerless to do anything at all about the conditions that prevailed at Vail...

...This is the adulation of Henry Kissinger...

...But in six years, Kissinger did absolutely nothing to bring the war to an end, went through meaningless maneuvers in armisrice negotiations, meanwhile steadily increasing the military commitment in one way or another, including the incredible invasion of Cambodia, was finally hauled out of the war by a United States Congress which was a long time losing patience but did eve~tualiy turn off the military credit...

...Nixon began his career by playing shamelessly--and probably cynically--to that simple-minded audience and made himself its leader in the Hiss-Chambers case...

...Someone is always hoving into the picture, or departing therefrom, to upset the balances...

...On the one hand, he seemed, as ever, infinitely more at home, more rightly placed, as a middle-aged American enjoying the sport of his choice than as a statesman grappling with the problems, foreign and domestic, his caretaker administration inherited...

...Although he did not dispute the bishop's decision to grant general absolution in the manner he did, the archbishop indicated that he would go the route of individual confessions...

...The more so in the light of immediately subsequent events: Kissinger was no sooner out of Indochina as a failed militarist than he turned his attention, at long last, to Africa, once more doing so with military and paramilitary methods, once more restrained by Congress, once more announcing petulantly that he could hardly be expected to preside over the destiny of a great nation if he were not allowed to bomb a few blacks...

...leadership--plus economic problems aggravated by inflatiou, the unbridled expansion of competing public higher education, and a decline in the college-age population-have raised new questions about what makes a university specifically Catholic in a way that a secular campus with a Newman Club is not...

...Last spring, the revised English version of the sacrament of confession---reconciliation-was issued and an idea was born...

...Kissingcr did not, of course, "begin" Vietnam...

...There is a 21 ~ 1977...

...Augustine, Dante, Bernanos, the social encyclicals, Teilhard de Chardin, Barbara Ward and Dorothy Day--as well as Marx, Tolstoy and Thoreau--but has theology credit for Science Fiction 202 and Magic 101 on his transcript...

...Mere classroom presence is not enough...

...Like Macbeth before them, the academics all learned eventnally that as a matter of fact sometimes when you kill people, they don't stay dead at ali, but revive to fight another day...

...the annual mass of the Holy Spirit is celebrated to a very thin group of faculty and students...

...FRANK GETLEXN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 AN UNUSUAL DIOCESE BECONCI IA TION IN IqEI PHIS On a bitter cold day in early January six years ago, a cluster of church and community leaders milled impatiently around one of the debarking areas of the airport in Memphis awaiting the arrival from Norfolk, Virginia, of the man who in a few days would be ordained as the first bishop of the Diocese of Memphis----Monsignor Carroll Thomas Dozier...

...The reconciliation crusade did not give Bishop Dozier his first exposure to the burning rays of the national spotlight and the problems its warmth can hatch...

...The trouble with faculty politics, in such a speculative fancy, is that it never holds still, no true equilibrium ever is established for very long...

...After the two liturgies---the second being in Jackson, Term.rathe bishop said he was "overwhelmed" by not only the turnout but by the change in attitude for good noticed among the people during the weeks leading up to the liturgies...

...After a two-and-a-half-hour storm delay, the commercial jet carrying Monsignor Dozier touched down at Memphis ~and within minutes he was wading into the midst of his welcoming party, apolo~zing profusely for inconveniencing his welcomers and good-naturedly blaming the Wright Brothers for the whole mess...

...Teachers should be seen in their personal and social lives as happy, creative and fulfilled men and women...

...Insofar as Nixon did have a constituency, it was, of course, among the hard-headed, rock-bottom, do-or-die anti-Communists...

...He wasn't Metternich and the troubles with thinking he was were two...

...The rest of his record suggests that the proper question to he asked as his career in statecraft ends and that in literary bargaining begins, is not the common one, Why was he so brilliant...

...This of course is asking a lot...

...But in some ways this loss of political power has been healthy...

...The Austrian statesman brought peace to Europe at the expense of an unceasing war against subject nations from the Baltic to the Black Sea and he maintained peace of a sort at home by an elaborate system of domestic intrigue and espionage...

...With a background in such a finally uncontrollable situation, an academic might be expected to breathe a great sigh of relief when at last endowed with a11 the resources of the mightiest arms establishment in the history of the world...

...The crusade---including special confession stations on weekends--will continue through Easter Sunday...

...Here, surely, is the surety so inevitably lacking in those tentative rapprochements before the fire at the Faculty Club...

...One way to reestablish a Christian intellectual tradition is through a strong liberal arts curriculum, reinforced by science and the creative arts, built around both the religious and secular classics, modeled perhaps on the Great Books program and deeply concerned with social justice...

...Later, explaining hi~ thinking on the overall crusade, Bishop Dozier said: "For years I had been hearing about those who 'no longer walk with us.' Well, I began to think that it was time something be done about those people---not just talk...

...He was praised as lavishly by some as he was condemned severely by others for his use of general absolution...

...Actually, all those who received the absolution and took communion were reminded in the printed program passed out at the liturgy that they were expected to "visit your counselor/confessor within a year as a result of general absolution...

...It has properly increased the influence of lay faculty and administrators who are assuming more and more of the presidencies of schools once "owned" by religious orders...

...The news media zeroed in on only one aspect of the general absolutionmthat it was given to divorced and remarried Catholics as a sort of "free ticket" to reenter the full sacramental life of their church without confessing their sins to a priest and then setting their marriage situations in line with canon law...

...That happened in Vietnam perhaps more often than ever before because of the Body Count system of killing people...

...but it remained alive through the Vail interregnum and still manifests itself in the speculation and reflection of press and politicians...

...A number of innovative things have been happening in the Diocese of Memphis, and much more is coming, including one program that is sure to be something of a national precedent-setter...

...Nor is there any assurance that common educational values are shared within the religious community itself...

...Commonweal: J7 Like Kissinger himself, Metternich was widely and incomprehensibly regarded as a great bringer of peace to a warring world...

...His critics contended he had no canonical right to do what he had done...

...second, it had long passed even before it passed, if you follow...

...At least when you bomb people, they stay bombed...

...The two together are summed up today as bugging and bombing, the main fields in which the departing Secretary excelled...

...The outward strength of formal Catholicism on the campuses has been weakened in several ways...

...Nor is mere liturgical presence: even Pharisees could pray in public...

...That genius so moved one normally rational senior Democrat that he seriously and publicly proposed that the President-elect insure domestic tranquiliity by announcing he would retain Kissinger in office, rather as, in the old days, new presidents made it their first business to re-appoint J. Edgar Hoover and Allen DuUes, with the results we have only begun to learn...

...There is something wrong if the student can graduate without having read the Gospels, St...

...but rather, Why was he so bloodthirsty...

...It took the Indochinese a long time to fight back effectively, but eventually they did and at the moment of final French failure, Dienbienphu, the Americans took up the lost cause, the keeping of Indochina out of the hands of the Indochinese...

...it was a minor mystery in Nixon's, easily outclassed by more towering ones...

...You might say the bishop almost didn't get to the church on time," quipped one of the members of the group that met the incoming plane back in 1971...

...On the record of what they did, not necessarily on what they said, all three believed deeply in the efficacy of bombing and all other forms of military force, despite the fact that all three constructed the most elaborate failure of American foreign policy in the history of the Republic and did so largely out of their shared belief, almost mystical when you rehearse it, in bombs...

...there was either a loss of vision or a failure of nerve in which the institutions, perhaps lacking a clear understanding of their own mission, watered down their programs to the point where too much of the basic Christian intellectual tradition was lost...

...Not only was Kissinger bimmlf 20 years late, the settlement he was 20 years late for was itself a good hundred years late...

...Two weeks after the liturgies, priests reported a marked increase in the number of confessions and "a changed +attitude among the people---a new attitude prevails of more tolerance and more concern and more love for one another...

...It is not an uninteresting record, but it is certainly not a record to cause the reader of it to gasp in amazement at the brilliance of the man running it up...

...WASHI]NGTOH REPORT THE GRAVES OF ACADEME The old administration winds slowly down into welldeserved oblivion...

...That remark was made several months before Bishop Dozier launched a diocesan reconciliation crusade last July that eventually attracted widespread national and considerable international attention for its unique use of general absolution as the keystone of an effort to woo inactive Catholics of the area back into the full sacramental life of the church...

...In fact, he's usually early...

...They can no longer freely hire and grant tenure to their priest and nun colleagues without the cooperation of the faculty at large, only some of whom may share the traditional values of the school...