'A LOSERS' BRIEF?'
Hoyt, Robert
'A Losers' Brief?' ROBERT HOYT One morning in 1949 I picked up the phone in the Chicago office of The Morning Star and found myself in a one-sided conversation with an assistant chancellor of...
...Yet to me the Declaration has about it a certain air of asking permission...
...JOHN garvey, a regular columnist for Commonweal, is an editor with Templegate Publishers in Illinois...
...We weren't going to specialize in religious news and we would not be speaking for the Church...
...Now if you'll just put that in writing we'll think about it...
...I hope the job is not left to the curia or the charismatics...
...Consider also the direct ties between the bishops and the right-tolife movement...
...But Ralph Nader Commonweal: 111 can't make that happen...
...In those days getting banned in Chicago was a rare event...
...Reverting to the principal emphasis in the Declaration, I will suggest that attention to "internal affairs of the Church" isn't always a distraction from proper lay concern for "the world...
...He said we didn't need permission: We proposed to start a daily paper reporting the news of the world, using such "lay experience, political wisdom and technical expertise" as we possessed...
...it had to mean that somebody in the chancery thought you were ultra-rotten...
...It will be what faithful Catholics who attend to its inner life make it to be...
...after that one would begin revising circulation estimates...
...Attention should be paid...
...Anyway, we wouldn't have taken it...
...The job needs to be done for the sake of the whole women's movement, and it can only be done from the inside...
...In my reading there is not much hint of that in the Declaration, except for the inconspicuous placing of an address to which one may write for more information...
...We asked, and got, an audience with the Cardinal, but I don't remember much about it except that the carpeting throughout the chancery was somber in hue, deep in pile, and that though we groveled most earnestly it made no difference...
...they must have thought we might be good enough to bring our rotten plans to pass...
...Vincent Lovett had as much to do as anyone with starting the National Catholic Reporter, but by mutual agreement he became only an ex officio (non-voting) member of the board of directors...
...Catholics are preoccupied with internal Church affairs and not enough Catholics are pursuing the appropriate lay role in the world, what is the point of merely deploring the situation...
...That's not a criticism...
...On the whole I think the fuzzing of what is lay and what is clerical is a good thing...
...But if too many lay Robert hoyt was founding editor of the National Catholic Reporter...
...Maybe more reformism is in order...
...rosemary radford ruether is a member of the faculty at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Illinois...
...None of them is usurping my place or imposing an agenda on me...
...Another emphasis in the Declaration calls forth another memory...
...A Losers' Brief?' ROBERT HOYT One morning in 1949 I picked up the phone in the Chicago office of The Morning Star and found myself in a one-sided conversation with an assistant chancellor of the archdiocese, Monsignor Somebody or Other...
...Absence of initiative is to be overcome by supplying some...
...Their attention was out there where the problems were...
...given the tight discipline then prevailing any such counsel would have been a plan for disaster...
...maybe Christian socialism or liberation theology...
...The reason: he was then a priest of the diocese, subject to obedience, hence his presence as a voting member would compromise the lay character of the enterprise...
...Consider the Vatican statement on women priests...
...So it wasn't his business to grant or deny a seal of approval...
...In the light of the Declaration the most interesting aspect of the story is the reply O'Hara gave us when we asked permission to infest his diocese...
...or, at least, of arguing a losers' brief...
...It was different in the Dark Ages...
...Yes, some clergy and religious should specialize in energizing lay people for the pursuit of justice, but not all of them are good at it...
...But I suspect that to many signers of the Declaration the birth control encyclical demonstrated that the Church is not what it says it is...
...As the Declaration says, it especially prevailed in Chicago and today it is the accepted wisdom, canonized by Vatican II...
...The reason for calling up this memory in connection with the Chicago Declaration is to measure how 17 February 1978:110 times nave changed...
...It badly needs to be recalled to the factory before it causes any more emotional or intellectual accidents...
...Though we thought the Cardinal mistaken, we still saw his decision as a sign from on high that The Morning Star was not meant to light Chicago...
...maybe the small-is-beautiful crusade...
...At this time, though, the call was purely dismaying...
...So we went shopping for a pennissive bishop, found one (Edwin V. O'Mara) in Kansas City, Mo., got the paper started (as The Sun Herald) and ran it into the ground in seven months...
...Agreed: It is to yawn...
...O'Hara was smarter than most other bishops (also nicer), but he didn't invent that approach to lay enterprise and lay responsibility...
...He is presently an associate editor of Christianity & Crisis...
...Anybody (well, practically anybody) getting such a phone call today would be likely to reply: "Right, Monsignor...
...That will be regarded as a (or the) Catholic position and its propagation will be financed largely by Catholic money...
...Though Monsignor Cantwell was on the scene then, along with other Declaration signers...
...though the Baroness's Friendship House was flourishing, Dan Herr had just taken over the Thomas More bookshop, John Cogley and Jim O'Gara were running Today and Ed Marciniak was putting out Work, and though we were on friendly terms with most of these people, I can't recall that anyone advised us to ignore the Cardinal or to go forth in search of headlines...
...The next step would be to consider whether to give the story first to the New York Times or to N.C.R...
...The message needs more in the way of content...
...Today it seems dubious that lay Catholics are going to be turned on by vague invitations to be responsible for the world...
...Finally, though I yield to no man, woman or Declaration in the depth of my distaste for churchiness, I will argue that people should not be called away from considering the nature of the Church and its processes, specifically including papal infallibility and authority, until the full implications of the issuance of Humanae Vitae have...
...I don't want a clear definition that will bar Robert Drinan from sitting in Congress, Daniel Berrigan from sitting in jail, Mary Luke Tobin from rallying the sisters, Andrew Greeley from counting noses...
...Reading the Pittsburgh Catholic the other day (it was an accident), I noted a declaration by a pro-life leader that Congressional approval for Medicaid abortions when the life of the woman is in danger is "simply a giant loophole for women to obtain abortions at taxpayers' expense...
...father john a. coleman, s.j., assistant professor of religion and society at the Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley, is currently a research fellow at Woodstock Theological Center in Washington, D.C...
...Perhaps that is unfair...
...So what is it...
...Twentyfive years ago Chicago's Catholics would have agreed that the Gospel dictates no political specifics, but they would not have called for lay initiative merely to redress an imbalance in the Church...
...It's time to organize...
...As the Church now is, nobody is stopping anybody from doing anything...
...The Declaration itself is an initiative, of course, but given all its emphasis on the distance between gospel truth and social programming, it's not exactly a clarion call...
...Monsignor Other read a statement purporting to emanate from Cardinal Stritch in which my associates and I were instructed to cease forthwith what we were doing: trying to start a Catholic daily newspaper...
...Now that I think about it, there was also some kind of compliment implied...
...been faced and dealt with...
...If the Declaration is right in saying that some nuns and some priests are manipulating or upstaging the laity, its indictment needs to be more clearly drawn...
...Upward...
...If we persisted to the point of getting the paper on the streets, we would incur excommunication, no less, and the paper would be denounced from every pulpit in the archdiocese...
...That view of things has dimmed as developments in the Church have restricted the power of bishops and enhanced the self-respect of priests...
Vol. 105 • February 1978 • No. 4
