CORRESPONDENCE
CORRESPONDENCE Drawing Linen Chicago, 111 To the Editors: In commenting on m book Abortion: The Development o the Roman Catholic Perspective, Andr Hellegers, Director of the Kennedy...
...I look forward to the day when the parable of the unjust steward or devious employees will sound, not like silver tinkling in the wind, but like tin clanking around the neck...
...The fetus was not considered human until after it was formed...
...Sentences like, "The figure/ground relation between writer and public, or between the artist and his making, is an interplay, a kind of intercourse," send me into ecstasy...
...WILLIAM B. GRAY Mt...
...Actually, if one wants to compare penitential practices, he will have to acknowledge that the position of the early Church with its very severe penances was much more "hard-line" than that of the modern Church...
...REV...
...Our English language seems to be particularly cursed with poor translations...
...You don't have to be a biblical scholar to know that some things may be unseen but not necessarily invisible...
...He goes on to say that the same sexuality applies to medicine as well...
...His letter gives us some hope that Father Connery will now take a less detached position...
...CORRESPONDENCE Drawing Linen Chicago, 111 To the Editors: In commenting on m book Abortion: The Development o the Roman Catholic Perspective, Andr Hellegers, Director of the Kennedy In stitute at Georgetown, said that it "dis pels much nonsense spoken and writtei during the modern debates on abor tion...
...Why this is necessarily so he does not feel compelled to explain to us (but then it must be self-evident, mustn't it...
...receive patients within them before they interject treatment of any sort into their lives...
...23] supporting, more or less, Noonan's crankiness at the translation of various passages in the New American Bible...
...If wisdom can come from the mouth of a babe, arrant nonsense can come from the mouth of a sage...
...The distinction between a formed and an unformed fetus was still reflected in the church's penal legislation as late as the middle of the nineteenth century...
...Father John R. Connery's excellent research shows that beginning with Tertullian until well into the eighteenth century there existed in Catholicism a distinction between a formed and an unformed fetus...
...11], McLuhan has jotted "just a note (which nevertheless bears his copyright, 'McLuhan Associates, Ltd., 1977')" explaining in his inimitable medium-message vernacular how it is that the, "inherent sexual aspect of the priesthood makes the ordination of women impractical and unacceptable to a congregation in their feminine role...
...But this time surely he has missed his mark...
...According to this McLuhanesque syllogism it is ultimately inappropriate for men to be part of a congregation or audience...
...We are not dealing with mere "legal meaning" or with a comparison of "penitential practices...
...His terse "flash" is based on the premise that the "congregation is necessarily feminine to the masculine role of the priest...
...Mary's famous Magnificat has the words "my being rejoices in God my Saviour" instead of "my spirit...
...If we use the figure/ ground rubric in examining the quintessentially female act of childbirth, we see that conscious, unmedicated childbirth is active, projective, and therefore masculine...
...Non-western cultures symbolized their insight that the feminine always exists psychically with a masculine counterpart by showing the destructive feminine with an extruded tongue representing the phallic aspect...
...To the Editors: Bravo for John Noonan's article, "The Devious Employees," in your October 28 edition...
...The basic flaw in McLuhan's argument is imprisoning the metaphorical (therefore spiritual) masculine/feminine figure/ ground relationship in the flesh of concrete men and women...
...They are so distant, so ethereal, so far beyond the capacity of my electron-bombarded mind to cathect them that they must participate in some ground of absolute truth from which I, poor, wall-eyed refugee from his global village, seem forever to have been banished...
...BARBARA J. NICHOLAS Kew Gardens, N.Y...
...In his book Father Connery's discussion of abortion ends somewhere around 1950...
...To the Editors: The box of distortions and faulty logic concocted by Marshall McLuhan for the readers of your November 11th issue reaffirms the implicit corollary of one of our biblical verities...
...The Greeks recognized this by assigning as patroness of childbirth not the wonder mother Demcter/Ceres whose child had to be snatched from her but Artemis, the fierce huntress, patroness of the Amazons, who lets her arrows fly...
...TED THORNTON...
...TESSE HARTIGAN DONNELLY New York, N.Y...
...All English translations of the gospels and epistles have been more stylish than the journalistic, workmanlike prose of the originals...
...It is somewhat disconcerting t< find some of this "nonsense" repeatec by your reviewer, and as the produc of the book that was supposed to dispe it [Sept...
...Perhaps we might say the priest in some way represents not the physical Jesus of Nazareth who sends us on our way, but the cosmic Christ—the filled-out body—toward whom we move and in whom we have our being...
...We are thankful that those sexual images have, like many uninformed traditions of the past, been eliminated in the Episcopal Church where both priesthood and laity are now heterosexual to the glory of God and building up of His (Her) Church...
...REV...
...HENRY WILLIAM GRIFFIN MeLuhan'i Message Oak Park, 111...
...To the Editors: Two cheers for John T. Noonan's "The Devious Employees" [Oct...
...Another inaccuracy is in the new translation of the Nicean Creed, which gives us "all things seen and unseen," instead of the former "all things visible and invisible...
...Apparently these translators have a bias against the word "spirit...
...28] and one cheer for the two letters [Dec...
...This statement has some legal meaning, but from the standpoint of morality it is very misleading...
...Sing a dirge for the most celebrated panegyrist the holy phosphorescence ever enjoyed...
...In fact, he explicitly states that he "had no intention of entering into the current debate...
...McLuhan has correctly perceived that many congregations (female) have been screwed by their priests (male) [Nov...
...It is not an extroverted, physical, genital fact which determines whether a person is appropriate as a Please allow four to six weeks for change of address...
...While the masculine-active / feminine-passive or yin/yang relationship ultimately derives from the paradigm of physical in20 January 1978: 62 tercourse, it is a metaphor, a psychic reality experienced in the soul...
...Loyola University Reply Princeton, NJ...
...I was recently in Spain and France, and their translations are more accurate...
...Both metaphors refer to an introverted reality not an extroverted fact...
...In surgery, a field factually and psychically dominated by die masculine, men or women surgeons, who are psychologically stuck in the phallic/masculine/active mode certainly have their part in the increase in unnecessary operations...
...Reflecting on the church's present abortion position, which opposes direct abortion from the moment of conception, one can not help but notice— even without probing—that there has been a shift in Catholic thought...
...Charles Williams, in his poem about The Grail Legend, TaUessin in the Rose Garden, puts the question in a more positive light when he creates the image of Gallahad rising in the flesh of the woman Dindrane...
...Tucked neatly into one corner of a page in a recent issue of this magazine [Nov...
...REV...
...I am referring to his state ment that "Connery's research show: that Catholicism's present hard-lint position dates back only to the seconc half of the nineteenth century...
...Your reviewer could hardly have missed this . . . even without probing...
...Forget it, friends...
...But then he always did say it was the medium itself which contained the message, didn't he...
...It is a metaphor dealing with modes of being human experienced by all of us because we have souls in which the physical world finds a spiritual counterpart...
...It is a question, in personalistic Christian communities, of the priest's ability to evoke a sense of the inner psychic completeness of the Christ in whom dualities are reunited, who is all in all, in whom there is neither male nor female...
...Whole doctors, whole teachers, whole people, whole priests move between the feminine and masculine modes...
...Marshall McLuhan, the revered high priest of the living surrogate, has, alas, finally blown bis mind on the little blue, red, and green dots...
...Confusing introverted reality with extroverted facts leads not merely to faulty thinking but to harmful action...
...Some theologians allowed the direct abortion of the unformed fetus in order to save the life of the mother...
...What is the relationship, using McLuhan's imagery, of the homosexual priest to the congregation...
...GERARD J. MCCARRON, O.S.F.S...
...For example, in the Mass where the priest says The Lord be with you," the French still say the answer, "And with your spirit" (votre esprit...
...Were we to accept the logic of McLuhan's note on the ordination of women, we should have to castrate our boys in order to fill the parts of Aida, Isolde, Lucia, and so on...
...however, here he grants with a shrug that the surgeon may "exceptionally" be female...
...We are dealing with two significantly different views about when abortion is morally permissible and when it is not...
...Princeton Theological Seminary Transitory Verbs Manhasset, N.Y...
...Public situations harmonizing with our symbolic sensibilities should have all the men on stage and all the women in the audience...
...Woe to patients whose physicians cannot move into the feminine mode so as to...
...What none of these gentlemen mentioned, and what indeed seems to me mentionable, is that the Greek and the Greek-Berlitzed-into-Latin texts are not models of prize-winning prose...
...and this latest transmission seems more clouded with interference than any of his previous ones...
...enclose label symbol for Jesus Christ...
...JOHN R. CONNERY, S.J...
...What my research showed was the basic continuity ol Church teaching on the morality oi abortion right from Apostolic times...
...The reason McLuhan belabors the poor medium so is that after all is said and done he hasn't any message at all...
...He has a way with words...
...At the consecration, where the Latin says "pro multis," the French say "pour la multitude," which is not the same as "for all men...
...He implies it is never symbolically appropriate for women to be active, projective (ergo masculine) in relation to a passive, receptive (ergo feminine) audience...
...To the Editors: Pundits of die tube, the flickering effulgence—shed a tear...
...Hermon, Mass...
...Now I've long been fascinated by McLuhan...
...I've never really known how to respond to McLuhan...
...It is reassuring to know that Andre Hellegers, who had a lot to do with the underwriting of the book in the first place, approves of its contents...
Vol. 105 • January 1978 • No. 2
