Editorial
CORRESPONDENCE Sorensen D i s s e n t Washington, D.C. To the Editors: I am an admirer of Frank Getlein's "Washington Report," but I wish to enter a dissent to his article on March 4...
...Of course, universal human rights are a legitimate, vital concern of the nations of the world...
...Overlap into the political order, to mention no other, is almost inevitable, with consequences that sometimes can b e drastic...
...Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 HUMKH RIGHTS By elevating human rights to international political concern, and therefore involving foreign policy, President Carter reverses the coin of moral witness from its religious to its seeular side, and in the process raises the thought whether political leaders can routinely do what religious leaders are expected to do by their calling...
...Small wonder...
...Surely we need more of the latter, but why can't we continue to have the former as well...
...He was far more than a classy speechwriter for John F. Kennedy...
...Inevitably the question must be asked whether, on the political level, the witness justifies the consequences...
...at least twelve of them focus strongly on women...
...NEWS d~ VIEWS: 258 CORRESPONDENCE: 259 EDITORIAL: 259 W~bSHINGTON REPORT: Middle E a s t R e a l i t i e s : Frank Get/ein 260 CATHOLIC VOTE IN FRANCE: Alain Woodrow 261 GLOOMY SPRING: Brian Wicker 263 CARTER'S OCEAN OPPORTUNITY: John J. Logue 265 SECOND CALL TO ACTION: James Finn 269 TRE CATROLIC PRESS: An Exchange of Views 273 VERSE: Roy Scheele 2 6 4 ; loyce Horner 272...
...GERARD S. SLOYAN A CERTAIN MAN by Zane Kotker, Knop[, $8.95...
...Oh my goodness[ Books for Brotherhood [Mar...
...Maybe we could slip in a good word for sisterhood...
...One should serve: "We can cope with the incomprehensibilities of life only if we do not try to master them with that philistine foolishness which often passes for brave lucid wisdom...
...a joy for life...
...A good idea, but limited...
...Copyright _9 1977 Commonweal Peblisldeg Co., Inc.--US and Canada: S17 a year...
...broad intellectual and cultural interests...
...Green) has resuited in some splendid aphorisms...
...He was President Kennedy's closest adviser on a wide range of domestic and foreign policy issues...
...Philip K. Jason 278 PRESS: The Road t o T e l At, iv: Thomas Powers 275 TIlE SCREEN" Colin L. Westerbeck, Jr...
...and in this way he will stay with us always...
...Sorensen was bitterly opposed as CIA director by certain hawkish elements precisely because he is a liberal and a man of peace...
...When can we expect an acknowledgment of 51 percent of the human race...
...John had many human gifts: great personal warmth and charm...
...Sorensen, of course, had nothing to do (Continued on page 287) JOHN BRUBAKER-RJ.P...
...As for Vietnam, Sorensen was increasingly active from 1966 onward as a dove, serving as an adviser to Robert Kennedy's pro-peace candidacy in 1968 and as a leading supporter of the peace plank at the 1968 Democratic Convention...
...Great Britain ALAIN WOODROW: Paris HENRY TEN KORTENAAR: Itome DESMOND FISHER: Dublin EDWARD S. SKILl.IN: Publisher Stag: LINDA F. KAYLER, PAMELA J. FITZGERALD, HAItltlETTE EALSKY COMMONWEAL A review of Public Affairs, LJforafnre and the Arts...
...There is no way to demonstrate the dogmas of Christian faith, hence the author does not try...
...277 T I l E K|NGDOM AND TRE PAPACY: John L. McKenzie 280 ROOKS: Gordon Burnsidd, Ronald De Feo, Gerard S. SIoyan, John Druska, George G. Higgins 281 T I l E IIOLOCAUST AS MEASURE: John Garvey 282 JAMES O'GAU: Editor JOHN DEEDY: Managing Editor RAYMOND A. SOHROTH: Associate Editor ANNE M. ItOBEItTSON, Editorial Assistant COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.: Movies JOHN FANDEL: Poetry FRANK GETLIEIN: Washington BRIAN WICKER...
...Special two-year rate $29.50...
...His intellectual brilliance, energy, and industry would have made him an alert and effective CIA director...
...He asserts them and then reflects on their implications on the assumption that they are true...
...The book has some good things to say on faith, on truth, on prayer, on death...
...The issue then becomes one of means and ends...
...Commonweal 18 Indexed In Iteader's Guide to Periodical Literature, Catholic Periodical Index, and look Review Digest...
...Returning to the Kennedy administration, we should recall that it was Sorensen who drafted the American University speech in June, 1963, leading to the Limited Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty and to the first major sale of grain to the Soviet Union in September, 1963...
...Some are of the opinion that t h e kind of biographical and institutional Church history that he and Ellis have specialized in is of limited value and ought to be replaced by in-depth studies of the Catholic collectivity in this country and its various ethnic strains...
...300 N. Zeeb Itoad, Ann Arbor, Mich...
...telephone: 1212l MU 3-2042...
...churchmen...
...Nothing selfish could be put down, nothing angry...
...It was only after the Bay of Pigs proved a fiasco that Kennedy asked Sorensen to involve himself in foreign as well as domestic issues...
...The answer has to be ambivalent...
...Getlein should weigh down Mr...
...MAGGIE FISHER, RSCJ NATIONAL ASSEMBLY OF WOMEN RELIGIOUS Commonweal: 287...
...Allende...
...This is by way of saying that I, for one, learned much about American Catholicism by reading Gaffey's carefully researched biography of Archbishop Patrick Riordan who, in addition to his low-key but effective administration of the Archdiocese of San Francisco before and after the disastrous earthquake of 1906, played a significant role in national and international ecclesiastical affairs as a behind-the-scenes member of the Gibbons-Ireland-Spalding team of liberal U.S...
...1924, to date available through University Microfilms...
...However, for several reasons, including inherent weaknesses in the world body, concern for human rights cannot be left there, as if UN membership satisfied all obligations to see justice done in the world...
...As much as its hero, perhaps because of him, Zane Kotker's A Certain Man wavers between preciosity and the practice of revelation...
...I hate to quibble about an otherwise excellent study, but the publisher and his myopic proof reader ought to be ashamed of themselves for letting so many typographical errors find their way into the text...
...Soapoperatic chords sound through the book: a brief, coyly prophetic flashforward after the Judea High Class of '21 defaces Red Rock with its signature, or the hero Arley's clich6-ridden vision of his shining pastoral goal...
...Another is the scene of Arley's ecumenical triumph during a summer assignment from seminary...
...We mourn the loss of John Brubaker, our colleague and friend, our Advertising Manager for 40 years, who died suddenly but peacefully at home with his family on Wednesday in Holy Week...
...and real enthusiasm for his profession...
...a love of literature and music--particularly Mozart and Beethoven...
...Mlcrcdllms from Vol...
...The diary would have to be like an Indian's knotted string, tied to remind only him of what unspoken things were meant...
...National Serials Data Program No.: ISSN 0010-3330...
...At least twelve of the books advertised in the March 4 issue were written by women...
...But since written words belonged to God, he would have to be careful...
...Religious leaders learn this anew in Uganda, the Congo, Rhodesia and other countries, some to great pain, some at the expense of life itself...
...You are not a national great man, but you are a very humble pers o n . . . ' " JOHN DRUSKA CITIZEN OF No MEAN CITY: ARCHBISHOP PATRICK RIORDAN OF SAN FRANCISCO, By James P. Gagey, Consortium Books, Wilmington, NC...
...Sorensen's publie record with Vietnam, Cambodia, the Bay of Pigs, Chile and the fall of Dr...
...Above all he loved and was loved by his family--his wife Mary, his four children and 12 grandchildren--and his friends...
...Unlike Kotker's first novel, Bodies in Motion, where we're able to penetrate, through minute details in a limited temporal scope, the psychospatial world of Sonya's exhausting daily trivia, Man calendars years of quickly-eclipsed episodes that shape Arley's life, an emblematic chronology that moves us but a hurried life, especially through its last decade, tfiat leaves much undeveloped and us often at a distance from its actors...
...President Carter discovers this with the problems to d6tente brought on by his pointing up of human rights conditions in the USSR...
...But through the novel, too, Kotker achieves passages that create the aura of Arley's ingenuous character, and make him genuinely likable...
...Single copies 75c...
...Pr/nted is file USA and published hi-weekly by Commonweal Publishing Co., 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y, 10016...
...To the Editors: I am an admirer of Frank Getlein's "Washington Report," but I wish to enter a dissent to his article on March 4 insofar as he comments on Theodore Sorensen...
...The translator's skill (V...
...In its developing contexts, the witness to human rights has seldom ever been one-dimensional...
...Father Gaffey, who is currently researching the life of the late Bishop Francis C. Kelley, founder of the Catholic Church Extension Society, is a professionally trained historian in the tradition of his mentor, John Tracy Ellis...
...And because we come to like Arley, despite his scrupulous excesses, we expect more of Man--whether or not the book's elliptical surface is Kotker's attempt to find a narrative match for Arley's self-effacing life style...
...He was part of our own family spirit...
...48106...
...It is ironic that Mr...
...There have to be other efforts on behalf of human rights, and direct dealings between nations provide an obvious avenue for expressing one's concern...
...One occurs when the eleven-year-old Arley, story collector and judge-undertaker's son growing into a storytelling minister, receives a diary for Christmas: "Words would hold time forever...
...The technique is bound to put off the mentality used .to demonstration until it sees that surrender is at work and not a "well-tempered synthesis of all of life's disparate insights...
...Concern for human rights must be more than preachment, and, if only to escape cynicism, there must be Commonweal: 259 credible by its socio-political and sociocritical commitment...
...He made an indispensable contribution to Commonwears effort to keep alive one voice of the layman and the relationship between religion and social justice in the Church...
...WILLIAM V. SHANNON Personhood Books Chicago, Ill...
...The difference when moral witness on human rights is translated by political leaders to political levels is that mere words can become as threatening to the fabric of peace and stability as the most violent negative reactions of regimes to the positive witness of clergy...
...Foreign $33.50...
...At least Kotker does convince us that what a friend writes to Arley near Man's end is, as well, her book's welcome revelation of the man: " 'If unselfishness is the core of religion~and I believe it is--then your .whole life expresses it and stands as a testimony to it...
...Foreign $19...
...This is, in fact, a principle upon which the United Nations rests, and one to which countries attest by their UN memberships...
...To the Editors: Oh my...
...GEORGE G. HIGGINS OQQQOQOOQ CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 259) with the Nixon administration's activities in Cambodia and Chile...
Vol. 104 • April 1977 • No. 9
