Acknowledging a debt:

...have cluttered up the American art scene contrast to my own New England In brutal summary, his study of the ever since the fading of the gloriously Catholicism, derived from the slightly Trajan and other Roman epigraphs led irrational Abstract Expressionism...

...Catich and Kerrigan were widely rethe college chapel, the last in a set Catich I got to know Catich as a fellow faculty garded as a couple of kooks...

...About the time ately so regarded, but ineluctably so resaw rejected by the college at the time as Ned was first drawing those heretical pic- garded...

...that original insight without himself claimer...

...side world is not just an excuse for makboard...

...Ambrose...

...Thomas, meant what they said Hartke, O.P., who, as a theatrical, was some kind of provincial exile, I was, and that an awful lot of subsequent and one of the few priests I'd ever encoun- from my own, hot Catholic, point of continuing ecclesiastical practice was in tered who read Mass Latin as if it were a view, actually in some kind of metropoliobvious and direct contradiction...

...It is un- ter the art...

...college that's built on a bluff and oper- for instance, or the paintings of Norman For all of us, he and a few like him kept ated on the same principle...

...That percepover the board so the operator could dis- reason in making is incalculably impor- tion was at the center of Catich's theories tribute the faculty mail...

...We day...

...realistic to expect it to be a rallying point for vigorous social Whatever one's perspective on these matters, the impormission, however clear such mission might be in conciliar or tance of hopes and memories was articulately expressed at papal teaching...

...The whole culture was in sharp hour...

...hot Catholics, like us, out to rediscover night or the early morning of Holy Satur- One such occasion occasioned pain at and rebuild the Catholic church...

...He be- complete publication lists of Sheed and Cunneen was hobnobbing with actresses lieved simply that his basic Ward and Westminster Press and going and going to Paris...

...Ambrose College, ecclesiastical administrators whenever men and that magazine was a hotbed of Davenport, Iowa, on Good Friday the occasion arose...

...Until they do, though, I ling' on certain issues...

...And he with a few others, impressed ineradicawas back home...

...Most people, however, including of study and discussion-a first-and the two papers issued by the Minnesota scholars, were enchanted with the writ- that their spokesman is vice president of bishops does that mildly enough: 8 June 1979: 329...

...Catich's great achievements were in A WELCOME DEVELOPMENT IN MINNESOTA calligraphy, both in practice and in research...

...Few on the faculty had any notoo unsettling, and finally installed in tures, Joe Cunneen and I were complet- tion of what they were up to in the Quar1976...

...It was meet and just that he died the top.' In the late 1940s, which was wrote off for jobs in the English Departwhen he did and where he did, for Catich when I knew Catich, he began printing ment, got them by return mail, which was totally sensitive to the rhythms and holy cards with a picture of a black should have aroused our suspicion right meanings of the liturgical year and had, Christ...

...Affectionoriginally designed almost 30 years ago, member at St...

...ferences got stronger when you moved likely that Catich could have arrived at That's an irrelevant but necessary dison to Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota...

...Right reason has, in fact, given mature German immigration of the 19th not in the studio, would be back in an us most of the picky little movements that century...

...Ambrose, its editors were Catich and a priestly colleague, William Kerrigan...

...rather than excuse, for I agree both with the desire for a more Similarly, given a tradition that is being dissented from on vital and coherent tradition and with the hope for the fulfillquestions of contraception or divorce on a massive scale, is it ment of the social mission of the church...

...Kenlater, dirt poor, forced illiterate, politi- him to conclude that the letters had, in neth Noland and Andy Warhol are both cally savage Irish immigration...

...The important gle for women's rights might have taken, cepted and praised in a field most schol- thing was that a group of bishops ad- if the church had acknowledged the realars, let alone people, are hardly aware dressed the subject seriously on the basis ity of women's life long ago...

...They were kooks, but kooks were entitled like everybody OF WOMEN & BISHOPS else...

...Right reason can give you an immeasurably important Western inthird curate in Grover's Comer...

...It was like Of several minds: Frank Getlein that...

...Mortality and vitality Anyway, it was that kind of Catholicism that was able to tolerate people like Catich and Kerrigan...

...It was my first experience of Though he remained in obedience all his nuance and rhythm, and intended to be Midwestern Catholicism, derived from Commonweal: 328 the middle-class, thoughtful, politically ing of a plain Catich note saying he was reason...

...Pat invariably tant in art...

...what is, after all, a kind of epigraph...

...Is not this what some would call a lack suspect that memories of the past and hopes for the future will of genuine historical-mindedness...

...One of the lights in our lives was The Catholic Art Quarterly, full of stimulating articles and pictures about what reliACKNOWLEDGING A DEBT gious art ought to be and could be, as opposed to the "holy-o-graphs" we desEDWARD M. CATICH & CHRISTIAN ART pised...

...Catich would never forgive me These people were relaxed and easy in being the master he was of calligraphy in if I thought that and failed to say it in their Catholicism, which was simply a practice...

...His own normal writing style PRESS REPORTS were sparse, but a the National Conference of Catholic was, in my memory at least, closer to the significant forward step in the re- Bishops...

...Rest in peace...

...Never different the situation of women might The Origin of the Serif, both of which mind that the two papers seemed, in part, be, and what a different shape the strugreally were revolutionary and widely ac- to contradict each other...

...Try that in Blume...

...I went to St...

...Down through channels came then, but did not...

...Ambrose, the my mind in the plays of Sam Shepherd, debt, I've been living off it ever since...

...reading our way through the raged, the more so, no doubt, because being radical or revolutionary...

...heard by others in the room...

...I say that by way of explanation of a living tradition...

...cause, he averred, it was illegal to wear a music led him far beyond the reach of FRANK GETLEIN Roman collar in Mexico so he was forced to wear those wild shirts...

...study of Roman lettering which resulted E. Roach issued two papers on the role of It is truly interesting to imagine how in The Trajan Inscription in Rome and women in contemporary society...

...Is this properly respectful both be somewhat clouded...

...Among the works in hand when he left who looked a lot like either Andrea del Almost immediately I discovered that was the fifteenth station of the cross for Sarto or Albrecht Diirer...

...It is the most hopeful sign since justly famous "chancery hand" of the lations between men and women Bishop Carroll Dozier's pastoral letter Renaissance, but in the history of his art was made when the bishops of Minnesota acknowledging that women have enhis most important work was his life-long under the leadership of Archbishop John dured "a long and subtle servitude...

...Its absence drives me out of of Christian art and, acknowledging a greeted callers with, "St...

...We had both spent a lot of quite normal, but at the time I was outthem, Ned Catich had no idea that he was time at C.U...

...An example: my col- played chess by postcard with some very bly on my mind that art means someleague in the English Department, Father fast company, an avocation right out of thing, relates to the outside world in Pat McCoy, had somewhere picked up his Aristotelian-Thomistic belief in art as some fashion or other and that this outthe art of running a telephone switch- "right reason in making...

...language, complete with meaning, tan center...

...way of life and thought rather than .a He was a devoted coin collector, one His importance is more important than cause, a crusade, at once a defended for- of the automatic temptations of the any such demurrer...

...The fact, been created by a brush, then faith- exemplars of right reason in making art church may be one, holy, Catholic and fully copied by carvers, in contradiction and you can have 'em...

...Obviously, FATHER EDWARD M. CATICH died in life, he certainly gave pain regularly to any school that could produce those two his studio at St...

...I think right ing beautiful brushstrokes...

...Art, I believe, is apostolic, but in those days the church in of the accepted view that sought the not either/or but both Apollo and Boston and the church in Chicago were forms of that marvelous alphabet in the Dionysius and the more the both the betlike two different religions and the dif- nature of the mallet and chisel...

...Pat also Mendelsohn or the Pre-Raphaelites, but stitution in a period when that institution spent his summers at San Miguel, the not Bach, Beethoven or even Mozart, was seriously trying to turn itself into artists' colony outside Mexico City be- whose passion for right reason in making dead stone...

...Indeed, can one really offer a thoroughgoing Notre Dame...

...It was published at St...

...Ambrose...

...RODGER VAN ALLEN perspective on tradition and change in recent American (Rodger Van Allen is Professor of Religious Studies at Catholicism without significantly weighing the impact of is- Villanova University, and editor of American Religious Valsues like contraception and divorce, something neither paper ues and the Future of America...

...He was an Italian, or possibly a German, edited ever since...

...Every day at noon, he would take I left Catich at that point...

...For that matter, few ever saw it...

...I'd be pleased if these questions would go away, by is such a loss of vitality attributable to such a priori 'stonewal- receiving a more adequate resolution...

...When I got over my documents, the New Testament, Aristot- to the daily Mass celebrated by Gilbert outrage, I found that far from being in le, St...

...For myself, he, along tress and a conquering host, the way it scholarship of calligraphy...

...The first of exists...

...I church finally caught up with, or at least Catholic University and contemplating no longer find this as shocking as I did came close to, some of its sons and the awful necessity of finding gainful then, indeed I find it not shocking at all, daughters like Catich...

...In the event, Cunneen for most of his 73 years, lived a life in word that the Vatican was not amused decamped, took a fling at acting, went to which the practice of his art, the profes- and he should please cut it out...

...In Davenport as elsewhere, the ing the requirement for M.A.'s at terly...

...Like so many of employment...

...But there has to be more to it than alive, preserved and renewed the spirit of New England and you'd find yourself right reason...

...After all, the Sorbonne and founded his own quarsion of his faith and the exercise of his everybody knew Christ was not a black...

...Relaxed, easy, in my experience downright un-Catholic...

...terly, Cross Currents, which he has priesthood were all the same thing...