Washington Report: Clashing Symbols

...FRANK GETLEIN 0 0 O O O O O O O 0 0 0 0 0 RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL REPBESSION IN HR GENTINH I know that I shall never forget the anguish which I experienced on Sunday, November 14, 1976, in the City of Cordoba, Argentina...

...I don't know whether we have yet fully worked out what he recommended in the course of the discussions: to recognize "the distinction between the Church making up its mind for the Church and the Church making up its mind for the nation on what it wants done...

...One has only to think of Jacques Maritain, Georges Bernanos and the liturgical pioneering of Father H. A. Reinhold among others...

...His district received an assortment of military construction not really comparable to that granted the late Mendel Rivers for his, but quite substantial...

...Defense contractors and Pentagonians were all over the House in the days before the vote and their principal argument was not about what a crackerjack committee commander Sikes was, but almost exclusively about what Sikes had done in the line of military installations for Members' districts...

...A world without nukes...

...As Father Hesburgh said in his eloquent funeral homily, George Shuster was a "great and gentle man...

...on the previous evening, Josefa Martinez, a 25-year-old student of architecture, had visited the representatives of Amnesty International who were in Argentina to make a report on the number and condition of political prisoners...

...Ford's furs: what the hell, her hubby's pension is over a hundred grand a year, if not she, who...

...The other unremarked symbolic note on The Day was also a reply across the years, although fewer of them, to a rather less than Lincolnesque historical figure...

...We immediately went to the top officials at the U.S...

...The number of important activities in which George Shuster was actively engaged over the years is overwhelming...

...Still, the hymn was the more or less official Northern view of the enterprise considered as theology and it was gracious for the inauguration of the first Southern President since the Hymn led the Top 40 to be accompanied by those strains...

...That winter walk down the avenue may have started us all on the long march back to sanity in these matters...

...Peron after a presidency that brought about massive political corruption and an inflationary rate of 550 percent pet year...

...And the government's obsession with security, aided and abetted by people making money out of it, is what has brought us where we are: fiscally a garrison state...

...He served as Land Commissioner for Bavaria, chairman of the Industrial Areas Foundation of Chicago, director of Notre Dame's Society for the Study of Man and as United States Representative on UNESCO...

...Although I happened not to be present with the threeperson group from Amnesty International when Ms...

...The more paranoid of the government officials theorize that the Marxists desire to make Argentina a stepping stone for the conquest of the southern cone of Latin America for Communism...

...Rather, this: we have always approached disarmament, arms limitation and d6tente--insofar as we can be said ever to have approached any of these things with a straight face-we have approached them with the assumption that there will indeed always be nukes and plenty of them...

...It was a policy eagerly continued by the new editors with George's help...

...Rightly fearing he was outclassed not only by Bob Williams but even by Louie, Nixon dolled the thing up with a ladies-ready-to-wear number: Pat, he told us, had never had a mink but was happy to wear a plain Republican cloth coat...

...Last year the House reprimanded Sikes not so much for being on the take as for failing to report his interest in military-fiscal projects he was hustling through subcommittee, committee and Congress...

...At the time of our Fortieth Anniversary in 1964 he took a leading part in a symposium among our past and present editors...

...What it was was a flouting of security of the highest order, that of the person of the new President...

...Sikes went back home and got re-elected handily, turned up for the organization expecting to stay in business...

...Mignone's home and kidnapped his 24-year-old daughter, Monica, a schoolteacher in a poor district...

...all of us asked: Can there be any justification for a government engaging in such cruel practices...

...When the departed monster, Nixon, was having his first, or was it his second...

...WASHIHQTON REPORT CLASHING SYMBOLS Sure it's all been symbolic so far, but the symbols, on balance, have been good...

...In all, he was the author of more than twenty published books...

...Whoever was responsible for it, the choice was brilliant, a reply, in kind, across the years, to Lincoln's inspired request at the celebration of Appomattox, "Let the band play 'Dixie.'" The words of the Hymn are, of course, theologically offensive to many Southerners and properly so...

...The government argues that it must suppress the violence in the streets and mobilize against what it regularly calls a "civil war...

...The point is not that there honestly seems much hope to attain that state in Carter's lifetime or ours...

...The disappearance of Josefa was one among thousands since a three-man military junta seized power on March 24, 1976, following the ouster of Mrs...

...I saw Dr...

...It is not possible to cite them all...

...Martinez visited, her disappearance caused me anguish as if a member of my own family had met such a fate...

...Sometimes, there just isn't any gratitude in the world...

...Anyway, after the ceremonies at the Capitol, we all watched the Fords gang agley for one more helicopter ride, one more Air Force One grand luxe voyage to the golfing match...

...George was too anti-Franco to go along with him and the other editors of the American Catholic Press at that time, who were on the Franco bandwagon to a man except for the archdiocesan New World of Chicago and The Catholic Worker...

...for he saw the German troops march into Vienna to the pealing of the church bells of St...

...At that moment in the talk, the Commonweal: 101 television director cut to a shot of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, steeped in gloom and incredulity...

...For that reason, they have dissolved the Congress, suppressed the political parties, controlled the press and militarized the courts...

...Might as well say a world without air...

...Thomas Aquinas...

...But she is still missing ----one of a number of such persons who, since the new government took over on March 24, is estimated as between 4,000 and 14,000...

...There were interesting implications in the claim, among them the suspect qualities of women in mink, a class that surely included the consorts of many of the most princely supporters of the Ike-and-Dick team, but Nixon's attention focused narrowly on the truncated syllogism that since Pat had no fur coat, he, Dick, was clearly not a crook...

...That family stroll down Pennsylvania Avenue, from the Capitol to the White House had a little something more to it than the widely noted effort to get, or keep, in touch with the people...

...George was a leading light on the Fund for the Republic, the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace and the National Conference of Christians and Jews...

...We had no hard information until December 15 that Josefa had in fact been released...

...There were a couple of other minor symbolic notes on the grand occasion which seem to have escaped comment and shouldn't, The last number the band played just before the oath was administered was the Battle Hymn of the Republic...

...By hoofing it, Carter shrugged, all that off, implicitly gave it the horse laugh it has long deserved...

...There is, of course, nothing remotely reprehensible about Mrs...

...Around 10:00 p.m...

...He gave us a clear picture of the magazlne's original objectives and the obstacles it encountered at the time...

...Believing as it does that one good turn deserves another, the Pentagon over the years has seen to it that Sikes himself, in person and as representative of his congressional district, did very well indeed in return for his good and faithful service on the shovel...

...For a month we experienced some share of that agony endured by Josefa's parents, her friends and her employers...

...The ideal presidential security would have been inside the limousine, the limousine lined with steel plate, the presidential image projected onto two, or perhaps four, Advent screens on the roof, it being still a few years early for a mobile, roof-top hologram...

...Early the next morning the mother of Josefa Martinez phoned to say that Josefa had never returned home...

...This was serious, like Roland losing Oliver or Quirt losing Flagg...

...She had been arrested by the police or abducted by fight-wing terrorists simply because she dared to speak to a group inquiring about Argentine citizens detained by the junta government without being charged with any crime...

...To some, George Shuster's greatest contribution through Commonweal was his enrichment of the American Catholic cultural scene by introducing to American readers a number of leading representatives of contemporary European Catholic thought...

...And in the House...

...It was most fitting, I believe, that his Mass of the Resurrection at snowbound Notre Dame should have been offered on the feast of St...

...What the Joint Chiefs may discover is that you can't count on corrupting a Mormon the way you obviously can some one whose very region is called a Panhandle...

...Stephen's Cathedral...

...After Sikes subsided, the Democrats of the full committee nominated his successor, Gunn McKay of Utah...

...His Like a Mighty Army told of the rise of the Hitler movement as a cult that was sapping the strength of the various German Christian churches (1935...

...Anyway, that was that...

...It was on the issue of the Spanish Civil War that George Shuster broke with Michael Williams's Commonweal...

...Emilio Mignone may be one of those whose indignation at the government can bring about a turn of events in Argentina...

...That probably accounted for the heavy vote against him, better than two to one...

...If the Joint Chiefs were disturbed at the Inaugural references to a world without nuclear weapons, they must have been rattled roundly by something that happened right there on Capitol Hill within the first week of the new administration...

...May he rest in peace, l~Dw^l~ s. SgaI.LIN (Edward S. SkiUin, who joined the Commonweal sta~ in 1933, become Editor in 1938 and has been Publisher since 1967...

...As chairman of the appropriations subcommittee on military construction, Robert L. F. Sikes wielded one of the heavier shovels and did so with gusto...

...In March of 1938, of course, Commonweal changed hands and direction...

...Betty Ford was wearing mink...

...The ordinary mind doesn't believe it hears that, when it is spoken, but that is precisely what the Joint Chiefs, their congressional agents and captive reporters have been saying for years and still do...

...It was then that his Commonweal article about the Nazi takeover expressed the h~3pe that, whatever happened, forces of destruction would not emerge in America "to victory through the Catholic gate...

...But this reign of terror might conceivably be galvanizing the people of Argentina to fight for those rights carefully spelled out in their constitution, all of which have been suspended by the pres,mt government...

...It is just possible that if we start with Carter's new assumption that a no-nuke world is conceivable, we may get some disarmament that involves disarming rather than what we've been getting, disarmament by way of super-armament...

...In May, 1976 four military men appeared at Dr...

...The Senate has been known from time to time to have a passing thought about the wisdom of the arms race so avidly conducted by the Joint Chiefs, but you could always count on the good old House to brace up, salute smartly and shovel out the megabucks...

...indeed, my own thoroughly Northern ears are made a little uneasy at the verses, with their militant and absolute self-righteouness, much prefer the untheologized original soldiers' ditty, "We will hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree," which so blithely ignores the fact that it is impossible to hang anyone to a sour apple tree if he is more than a foot and a half high...

...His Education and Moral Wisdom (1960) was one of the several studies George produced on educational subjects...

...Jump cut back to Pennsylvania Avenue and the walkathon: Rosalyn Carter was wearing what I suppose, can only be called a Plains Democratic cloth coat, powder blue, trimly cut, very pretty...

...He didn't...

...The publication of such authors as Karl Adam, Romano Guardini, Baron Von Huegel and the Jesuits of the NouveUe Revue Catholique brought enlightening theological and sociological ideas to what was a decidedly arid terrain over here...

...These things have happened before in the 13 governments which have controlled Argentina in the last 20 years--but the sweep of the total Commonweal: 103...

...Happily, George was also always willing to contribute to the pages of Commonweal down through the years...

...Sikes himself had a private bank going on a military reservation...

...As early as 1922 he brought out The Catholic Spirit in Modern English Literature...

...Mignone, former Deputy Commissioner of Education for Argentina and former Ambassador for Education at the OAS, has had access to the highest levels of government, but no one is able or willing to tell him anything about Monica...

...It's O.K...

...They weren't the only ones rallying around Sikes, who, incidentally, with shaven pate and waxed moustache, actually looks like an actor got up to play a military man, not quite the von Stroheim role in "Grand IUusion," but easily the General in "The Waltz of the Toreadors...

...Embassy who protested to the highest official in charge of internal security in all of Argentina...

...When the House of Representatives organized itself, they lost Sikes...

...That possibility was strengthened by a reference in the reassuringly lackluster speech: the new President looked forward to a world without any nuclear weapons in it at all and hoped to take a first step toward that state within the year...

...It is not difficult at all to predict that the Pentagon will quite soon reveal that the Great Salt Lake is virtually undefended, wide open to Soviet seizure by way of the polar-Canadian route, needs a flotilla at least, perhaps a couple of shallow-draught carriers, with appropriate short-line support systems all the way round...

...But the juxtaposition of images wiped out one more Nixonian juggling of the truth, restored our traditional national perception of mink as something for Republican ladies, cloth quite good enough for Democratic women...

...crisis, he handled the charges of mishandling funds by doing the best dog act that side of Bob Williams & Louie...

...The Democratic caucus turned him out in spite of the support he had from the Speaker, the Majority Leader and, of all people, the chairman of the 18 February 1977:102 House so-called Ethics Committee, John Flynt...

...Working from that assumption, we have, with a perfectly straight face, adopted and apparently believed the Orwel, lian proposition that the only way to achieve disarmament is to increase armaments...

...if you take, but you're supposed to let the fellows know how much you took and where you found it: it serves as a general guide, no doubt, for colleagues wondering how much to venture...

...Q.E.D...

...The regime of allegedly moderate General Jorge Videla apparently thinks that it can solidify its position by eliminating every potential political dissident by his disappearance, his imprisonment, or his death...

...Mignone three different times during my 12 days in Argentina and collected from him every relevant fact about Monica's disappearance...

...He was president of Hunter College for twenty years and assistant to the president of Notre Dame for a dozen more...

...George Shuster's published books branched out into many fields...

...The next day I went personally to the Papal Nuncio asking him to intervene on behalf of Josefa...