Editorials
Contents Volume CVI, Number 19 Correspondence 578 Editorials 579 The Pope & politics: Desmond Fisher 581 Name of the Game: Frank Getlein 583 A married man on celibacy: John Garvey 585 Single...
...But it seems quite clear that Soviet troops in Cuba have been there for some years, perhaps as many as seventeen--as Mr...
...By UN decree, this is the year of the child...
...In an age of fads and media oversimplification, it is not hard to divine some truth in a phrase about "the right.., not to be troubled...
...The second category of papal statements, those directed essentially to Catholics, leave us deeply troubled...
...In 1976, Sar.A...
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...If the Soviet Union had newly introduced combat troops into Cuba in an unprecedented move, there would have been cause for national and international concern--much as if the United States had received and accepted an invitation from Poland to station troops inside that country...
...Moreover, previous studies of social mobility in the U.S...
...Faced with this right-wing challenge at home, Senator Church now seems intent on running'against Castro the next time around, giving all aid and comfort to those fellowsenators who would hold the SALT treaty hostage to an impossible-to-achieve solution in Cuba...
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...Proposals tO restructure the system deserve hearing and debate, which they will receive in these pages...
...Unless the church presents better reasons against such ordination than have so far been adduced, it is hard to see why human rights are not pertinent any less than if the priesthood were denied to members of certain races or if the church revived its traditional teachings on slavery...
...If, as several good reporters concluded, the diplomats at the UN were somewhat perfunctory in their reception of the pope's message, that is not because he said too little but because their diplomatic antennae told them that the papal argument offered no easy comfort for anyone, East or West...
...It is not the specific positions taken by the pope on these issues and others--some of which this journal supports, some of which we have long dissented from--but his vision of the teaching church that gives us the most concern...
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...Given all this, President Carter's eventual address to the nation was useful enough even though he did not even try to explain the intelligence-gathering failure that was at the root of the crisis...
...These judgments of modest success in equalizing power and experience surely do not justify complacency...
...The release of priests from their Vows, for example, is not the same issue as the future of the celibate priesthood in the Roman rite...
...It was enough that he was there with them: what he was saying in his slow, measured addresses could be thought about later...
...The answer, of course, is all of the above...
...Here is a writer in the current issue of Harper's: "The present rebellion against 26 October 1979:579materialism and bigness, however understandable its origins, shrivels the human spirit...
...But neither does the mixed record of the Great Society warrant the timidity and negativism that currently retard needed and possible progress in achieving equal opportunity for all young Americans...
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...insofar as it encourages a teaching church that is not equally a learning one, the huge promise of his papacy may go unfulfilled...
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...Contents Volume CVI, Number 19 Correspondence 578 Editorials 579 The Pope & politics: Desmond Fisher 581 Name of the Game: Frank Getlein 583 A married man on celibacy: John Garvey 585 Single blessedness?: Mary Jo Weaver 589 Testing our ear drums T and our civility: Walter Donway 591 The permanent refugees: James I. Wasserstrom 593 Dance: Don McDonagh 595 Screen: Colin L. Westerbeck, Jr...
...SMALL FUTURE...
...But insofar as his vision minimizes the continuing struggle not only to communicate old truths effectively but, in the light of experience, really discover what the old truths mean...
...If they were truisms, however, so is much of the Gospel...
...Thus far, the evidence simply does not support this conclusion, nor the picture of American social immobility...
...The only thing that has changed, apparently, is the U.S...
...Levitan and Robert Taggart reassessed the data and analyses of 1960s programs and concluded, much against their original suspicions, that the results were impressive...
...FROM CHARISMA TO LEADERSHIP N IO ONE within reach of a television or a newspapercould have passed the first week in October unaware of the extraordinary personal magnetism of John Paul II and of the intense and enthusiastic response produced by his visit to the United States...
...Repeatedly John Paul invoked the image of the "deposit of truth" to be safeguarded and effectively communicated as though it were a static, reified reality, a treasure protected and at most given a different display.case for every age, rather than a living and growing tradition rooted in history and experience...
...That is why his chosen words are so important...
...Others, in contrast, asked whether the pope's words were not merely truisms...
...One of the most important things about this pontiff is the extent to which the message is the man...
...Holy Father, we're for you...
...But it won't be the same as with a remote pope speaking in Rome...
...The greatest danger to all the nations of the world--including the United States and the Soviet Union--is the breakdown of a common effort to preserve the peace, and the ultimate threat of a nuclear war...
...We don't like to see Soviet troops receiving jungle training ninety miles from the U.S...
...What are the institutional implications of this vision of the teaching church...
...He received poor advice...
...Useful as the president's address w~, however, the great 9 Cuban scare has done serious damage to this coOntry's rational handling of foreign policy and has demonstrated the growing power of the new Right in this country...
...People begin by searching for an inner peace, and end by staring vacantly at sunsets . . . . "To thai[ view, the pope's "truisms" are direct contradictions...
...The visit was a cascade of dramatic moments--solemn, effervescent ("Rack'em up, stack'em up, break'era in two...
...Each of them deserves consideration in its own right...
...What's in a Name Award" to Religious News Service for its report that at Trinity College's chapel the pope was "escorted by Cardinal Gregory Baum, archbishop of Washington...
...9 9 "" JOg" Books The Genesis of Secrecy: Richard J. Dillon 598 Re-creating the Experience of Life-change and Religion/Sexual Dimensions of the Celibate Life: Rosemary H. Balsam 599 Blood of Spain: George Woodcock 600 The Study of Liturgy: Robert W. Hovda602 The Grammar of Faith: George H. Tavard 604 In Brief: Thomas E Quigley/ Michael F. McCauley 606 Staff II Editor: James O'Gara Executive Editor: Peter Steinfels Assistant Editors: D arqiel M. Murtaugh, David Toolan Editorial Assistant: Anne Robertson Columnists: John Garvey, Frank Getlein, Abigail McCarthy, Thomas Powers Movies: Colin L. Westerbeck, Jr...
...Was this an expression of genuine religious feeling--or the adullttion of a superstar among superstars...
...He wants to take things firmly in hand now so as to be able to exercise greater flexibility later...
...I don't think I'm going to like everything he said," one of the stewards remarked as the papal plane left...
...I II I I PAPAL PROSE The "Diligence in Research Award" goes to Time for the following sentence: "His white hair wet and plastered down, John Paul led 300 priests, who waded through ankle-deep mud to hand out 60,000 Communion wafers that twelve nuns in Marlborough, Mass., had baked in a week of twelve-hour days starting each morning at 4:30...
...Poetry: John Fandel Staff: Karen F. Silva, Harriette Balsky, Jacqueline Reeves ~ Advertising Manager: Ruth E. Taylor Publisher: Edward S. Skillin Commonweal, A Review of Public Affairs, Literature and the Arts, is published biweekly, except monthly Christmas-New Year's and July ahd August, by Commonweal Publishing Co., 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...The pope's pronouncements fell into two categories, his moral, social and political statements directed toward the world at large and his moral and disciplinary statements directed toward the church...
...by Stephen Thernstrom and again by Peter Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan point to the significant effect of education in enabling children to transcend their social origins...
...For if the number of the other America is now down from 39 million in 1960, there are still 25 millions suffering from chronic impoverishment...
...It is true that our society has always preferred practicing materialism to preaching it, but the new era of tough-mindedness may reverse even that...
...But a document like the UN address, with its careful explication of the interrelationship between spiritual and material rights, is totally beyond the exhortatory...
...If you had doubts of the U.S.inteUigence ability vis-a-vis the Soviet Union, would any part of the Cuban affair reassure you...
...For the children of the current 25 million poverty-stricken Americans, these programs, we are informed, achieved "small future" (the study's title...
...Abortion, homosexuality and contraception are separate 9 questions--and the pope h.as probably contributed to the difficulties already existing in the public debate by appearing to treat them as a piece...
...In some ways, to be sure, John Paul II has been less specific, even .though no less emphatic, in his appeals for peace and social justice than were John XXIII and Paul VI...
...A pilgrimage that was magnificently inclusive will reinforce what, in the church, is militantly exclusive...
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...Accordingly, Richard H. deLone, a former associate director of the Carnegie Council on Children, has written for his former employer a stinging attack oh Great Society educational programs...
...But the man has departed, and his message will now be communicated through institutions and persons of a much less electrifying sort...
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...IAmerican readers who saw the U.S...
...intelligence perception of these troops...
...If his words are taken as approval of closed and authoritarian church institutions, then the link between charisma and leadership will have been lost...
...But aside from this failure, the address was good, calm in tone and non-belligerent, explicitly eschewing a return' to the Cold War and rattling the saber no more than he apparently thought was absolutely necessary to appease assorted fire-eating senators...
...In asking that question, we do not want to draw a sharp line between what the pope did--or is--and what he said...
...It could be worse--the way the rhetoric in Washington was escalating, they could have been storming ashore at the Bay of Pigs...
...certainly the pope did not suggest the importance of the reverse process...
...The magnetic Pole," as a television production assistant called him, won all hearts...
...challenging, reflective ithe intricately constructed address at the UN), humorous and symbolic (a Southern Baptist president and the Roman pontiff emerging together from the White House...
...The solution: more government intervention to redistribute power and experience in the social system...
...From the first irresponsible reaction of Senator Church linking the matter to SALT to the later hyperfervent bombast of Senator Jackson, the "Cuba crisis" seems in fact to have been artificial, existing largely in the minds of the president and other of our leaders in Washington and mishandled from the very fn'st...
...But we hope the conversation will not proceed on the mistaken assumption, shared by all toomany tired liberals, conservatives and radical critics, that the war on poverty was a failure...
...gatherings, either personally or on television, will have no need for descriptions of the Irish occasions--the huge crowds (it is reckoned that half the 4.6 million people in the whole island attended one or other of the ceremonies), their patient good-humor, theirrapport with the pope, the moving incidents which brought tears to lais an/d many other eyes, such as when he told 250,000 young people at Galway that he loved them and they cheered him deliriously for 12 solid minutes...
...I have seen the pope here and felt very 26 October 1979:581...
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...So emotional was the welcome given the pope that, not surprisingly, some observers were troubled...
...That is the way it ought to be for a religious leader, and that such is the pope's opinion as well is revealed not only in his deliberate actions but in the way he preaches, above all, not church nor a set of doctrines but Christ...
...but if such a phrase has a ring that seems more fittim~ to the Polish Communist party than a dissenting Polish religious leader, it is because the institutional behavior based on such phrases more commonly resembles that of authoritarian societies than communities of free and mature believers...
...concern over the troops in Cuba "artificial...
...foreign, $39...
...At atime when the possibility of slower economic growth may move people to hold hard to what they possess and avert their gaze from those in need, the pope's admonitions seem particularly appropriate...
...Would the normally responsible Senator Frank Church of the Foreign Relations Committee have taken the chauvinist tack he did if he were not facing a despicable right-wing campaign against him in his bid for reelection in Idaho--a campaign financed by big money raised by the new right-wing masters of direct-mail fundraising...
...Did it signify deep attachment to Christian belief--or the spiritual emptiness that provokes quick intoxication with any number of psychological and religious "uppers...
...Carter conceded in his address to the nation--training Cubans and perhaps themselves receiving training in jungle warfare for possible Third World use...
...The pope's visit was many things, and indeed its real meaning may only be established by the answer to the question he left us: how will this charisma be translated into leadership...
...The insistence of the pope on human rights in his addresses on the secular order found little echo in these statements: only a dismissal of them in connection with women's ordination and a declaration of "the right of the faithful not to be troubled by theories and hypotheses that they are not expert in judging or that are easily simplified or manipulated by public opinion for ends that are alien to the truth...
...Engineered by liberals who focus blame or help on individuals, such policy, deLone argues, ignored harsh economic reality and racial lines which doom millions to a fixed class and make equal opportunity an hallucination...
...There are ready explanations for the pope's attitude...
...I I Report from Ireland THE POPE & POLITICS TWO SALLIES INTO SENSI3P/E AREAS l IN ALL ITS EXTERNALS the pope's visit to Ireland, as his I subsequent one to the U.S., was an incredible success...
...Whether the ordination of women poses a question of human rights depends entirely on the grounds for disallowing such ordination...
...But the likelier possibility is that he is clearly articulating his particular, heroic vision of the church...
...coast any better than the next man, but it seems that Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko was correct in calCommonweal: 580ling the extreme U.S...
...God knows he spoke the sober truth when he said, "the greatest danger to American security is certainly not the two or three thousand Soviet troops in Cuba...
...As Carl Sandburg observed, "A child is God's opinion the world should go on...
...The validity of the Christian testimony of masses of believers and of disparate local churches seemed to be affu'med only when it matched the view from the top...
...The characteristic note of the pope's personal appearances was a loving openness to human cares and experience...
...So caught up were the crowds with the emotion of the occasions that, for the most part, the content of the pope's messages did not register...
...Concerning the first, William F. BuckIcy, Jr., rushed to tape a TV show expressing his distress that the pope--in urging Americans not merely to share the crumbs from their table with the nation's and the world's poor--was treading in economic matters where he had neither expertise not authority...
...That Christ must be central, that love is demanding, that faithfulness requires sacrifice, that drift should be resisted--this should be readily endorsed, however hard to live by...
...To the extent that the medium is the message, the pope's own personality will inevitably play some part in the way his words will be studied and applied...
...All in all, the Cuban affair obviously represented a failure in intelligence, and in more than one sense of that word...
...The pope dealt with a range of issues, often in a swift and assertive manner...
...The 1960s programs and policies and their continuation had a massive, overwhelming beneficial impact and.., the weight of evidence convincingly supports this view...
...The vitality and spontaneity of John Paul II seem to be as essential a statement about the life of love he urges as any of the specific norms of behavior, whether sexual or economic, he insists upon--and this point the crowds grasped intuitively...
...THE CUBAN CRISIS True, we are sending the Marines to Cuba, but only to the Americanized enclave of Guantanarno...
Vol. 106 • October 1979 • No. 19
