NEWS & VIEWS
NEWS & VIEWS More from Mexico The presiding council of the Mexican Bishops' Conference has formally reproved Bishop Sergio Mendez Arceo of Cuernavaca for pro-Marxist statements...
...Fesquet says that in some respects the Church in France is reaping what it has sowed--because of "sketchy training, superannuated parish structures, and a naive view of the faith...
...Thus, too, the agenda for the upcoming plenary meeting of the French hierarchy at Lourdes...
...Then, again, how can he he given a crucial statistic of his report: two-thirds of all French priests are over age 50...
...It's a question of survival," Fesquet comments...
...The correct version, according to Mendez Arceo, appeared in Correo del Sur of Cuernavaca...
...He's got to be...
...NEWS & VIEWS More from Mexico The presiding council of the Mexican Bishops' Conference has formally reproved Bishop Sergio Mendez Arceo of Cuernavaca for pro-Marxist statements [News & Views, 4/28/78...
...That is false," he wrote...
...Never before has the priest's job been held in such low esteem," he wrote...
...Thus the special emphasis placed on World Vocation Day last April 16...
...Detective ,Brown...
...And here on earth there is no other way to express it than in human ideological terms...
...The age pyramid of the French clergy is upside down...
...Excelsior quoted Mendez Arceo as follows: "The realization of the Kingdom of Gad in the modern world cannot be achieved without Marxist thought...
...Chesterton's) : Who's Saint Hereticus...
...Francis de Paola...
...This is an analysis not easily discounted, much less, dismissed...
...Saint Hereticus came onto this discovery through a New York Times revelation that Marty was the author, most recently, of Turning East...
...Is he who he thinks he is...
...Now just one challenge awaits our favorite detective (next to the other Rev...
...He gives no direct evidence of being so...
...The circumstances place Mendez Arceo .is position of having been censured by the presiding council of the Mexican Bishops' Conference on the basis of a newspaper story, and without the courtesy of a formal hearing...
...Accordingly, "today few French citizens enter a church unless for a christening, a marriage or a funeral...
...The statement carried the signatures of Cardinal Jose Salazar of Guadalajara, the Archbishop of Mexico City, Ernesto Corripio, and four other prominent prelates...
...Furthermore, it would seem he never said those words...
...Each bishop has likewise been invited to devise a plan of action for his own diocese...
...Porfirio, Miranda immersed himself in the 43 volumes in German of the complete works-of Marx in search of the realization of the kingdom of God in the world, since it is evident that the transformation of the modern world cannot be achieved without Marxist discourse...
...Mendez Arceo, meanwhile, alleged that he was misquoted, and he sent a reotification to Excelsior, the source of the story...
...Other observations by Fesquet: "Priestly celibacy, under the influence of science and the breaking down of sexual barriers, has lost so much of its aura that very few young men ever think of entering the seminary or accepting the conditions of parish life...
...Those who do are looked on as either heroic or unwitting...
...We'll be watching for confirmation...
...Fesquet is perhaps France's most astute and respected religious commentator...
...JOHN DEEDY 12 May 1978:290...
...The Times "buries its scandalous discoveries discreetly within the cavernous bowels of its Sunday edition...
...This brought a stinging rejoinder in Proceso from the Jesuit writer Enrique Maza...
...Speaking of Porfirio Mirada's Marx and the Bible, he said: "This book on Marx will unblock many mindsets of Marxists and of Christians...
...The French hierarchy is not blind to conditions, Fesquet remarks, and in fact is beginning to fight back...
...At Vatican II, his pressconference questions were sometimes as important as the answers they elicited, and of course he wrote one of the very best histories of the Council, The Drama o[ Vatican H (Random House...
...He's no cynical crank...
...Further, "the priest is now suspected of being a useless and archaic leftover...
...Mendez Arceo ostensibly proposed in a Sunday homily that Marxism may provide a method of analysis offering a useful interpretation of the situation of exploited people...
...It would not print a correction...
...Mendez A'rceo says the telescoped version of Excelsior does not represent his thought...
...A British Catholic journal seized on that literary deviltry as the hardest of hard news...
...Is Fesquet hopeful...
...A committee of bishops and priests has been named to sum up the situation and draw up plans for the future...
...Missionary orders attract fewer and fewer young candidates who persist to ordination...
...S t a t e o f t h e Clergy An alarming assessment of the priesthood in France has been published by Henri Fesquet in Le Monde...
...The Claretians "are facing a shortage of personnel, older men, sickness, etc...
...They'll also leave the cathedral's mission of St...
...said Archbishop Furey...
...This does not mean the creation of false infallibilities, btrt the condemnation of unchristian condemnations...
...Or is he really Martin Marty filling in that daily 30-minute lacuna in his life as professordeanauthoreditorleoturercolum nist.trendspotterhusbandfatherandLutheran...
...Once revered and privileged, it is currently relegated to a limbo not so much of disdain as of indifference...
...continue to demonstrate...
...The vulgar Washington Post tends to make frontpage headlines out of its discoveries, remarked Saint Hereticus...
...when they do, they look for the kinds of responsibility which will more or less assimilate them into the life of a layman...
...Odds and Ends --I n the April 3 Christianity and Crisis, Saint Hereticus reveals the astonishing news there may be no distinct "Harvey Cox" after all, but rather a Martin Marry turning out books under Cox's name, thus relieving himself of the charge by professional colleagues that he's writing too much...
...There follows a nifty bit of literary detective work by Saint Hereticus--on a par with that of a dozen or so years ago when the shade of Saint Hereticus proved that Xavier Rynne was really the pen name of a certain woman poet at The New Yorker magazine...
...The Gospel is not preached on the moon...
...France's clerical age and numbers problem is not unique, as conditions in the U.S...
...The Claretian Fathers, Western Province, recently notified the Archbishop of San Antonio that as of June they will relinquish the staffing of San Fernando Cathedral, a responsibility they have fulfilled since 1902...
...The council responded that "the Gospel of our Lord is not linked to any socio-eeonomie ideology or system...
Vol. 105 • May 1978 • No. 10
