Labor & the nukes
Wicker, Brian
Contents
Volume CVII, Number 18 Correspondence 578 Editorials 579 Labor & the nukes: Brian Wicker 581 The emperor's planes: Frank Getlein 583 Another kind of witness: John...
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...They came from unprecedented consultation with the laity on the part of the bishops' Ad Hoc Commission on Marriage and the Family (headed by Bishop Francis Stafford of Baltimore...
...foreign, $39...
...In his address to the Board of Governors on September 30, McNamara was trying to convince the member governments and their bankers that even by standards of strictly economic self-interest, even without figuring the moral imperative, planning and programs for economic growth in the age of energy scarcity must address the issues of human resource development--and hence the struc- tural social inequities in the distribution of education (espe- cially for women), primary health care, basic nutrition...
...The concurrence of these two events draws attention to what may be the real loss in the American church's preoccupation with the relatively narrow issues raised by Humanae Vitae...
...poverty can...
...But in terms of the consequent social "destabilization" and lowered productivity (without which the poorer world 6annot pay back its borrowing from the rich), says McNamara, nationalistic austerity policies toward overseas aid make no sense...
...More, the fact is that capital formation explains less than a third of the variation in growth rates among developing nations...
...Poetry: Rosemary Deen...
...Exploding population in so many of these lands undercuts all efforts at achieving even minimal economic development for masses of the destitute...
...Unsolicited manuscripts are welcome but cannot be considered or returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...Our nation, the richest in the world, remains, relative to GNP, the lowest donor of foreign development assistance among all the industrial nations...
...With an eye toward the demographic charts, some Third World bishops greeted the Quinn statement with a sigh of Excedrin relief...
...Bishop Robert E. Sanchez's straight talk about racism and the problems of immigrants and the "undocumented workers...
...The great temptation of industrial, oil-importing nations at the present juncture is to say deficits can't wait...
...It should ~nspire them to return home and put that message across in their local churches...
...People whose brains are damaged by malnutrition, who can't read or write, who are chronically sick and weak, do not produce--and also bear more children than their healthy, literate, well-fed counterparts in the developed world...
...foreign, $22...
...The system of consultation may be, undoubtedly is, far from adequate...
...The other more than two-thirds is accounted for by differences in human resource development...
...The term "absolute poor" is that of World Bank president Robert McNamara...
...Telephone: (212) MU 3-2042...
...Under McNamara's tenure, the World Bank has downgraded its lending for high technology projects and enormously in-creased its lending for less splashy projects in primary educa- tion, rural health delivery systems, and "appropriate" small- scale technology for the rural poor...
...The mixed Third World response to Archbishop Quinn's call for reexamination of 24 October 1980:579 the birth control issue is more important than the reaction of Cardinal Pericle Felici that the conservative Quinn was (ff la Hans Kfi'ng) "sowing confusion among the faithful...
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...According to the ecclesiology of Vatican 1I, a bishop is responsible, not just for his own diocese, but for the whole church...
...James O'Gara Executive Editor: Peter Steinfels Assistant Editor: David Toolan Editorial Assistant: Anne Robertson Columnists: John Garvey, Frank Getlein, Abigail McCarthy, Thomas Powers Movies: Colin L. Westerbeck, Jr...
...Put simply, this means we cannot talk of building the kind of family Christ- ianity finds essential without addressing the economic and political issues of unjust and just societies...
...Dissatisfaction with an Ml-male and celibate clergy speaking for and to the experi- ence of families throughout the world should not blind us to this larger issue...
...There have been reports of four American interventions so far: Archbishop John A. Quinn's demand that the church face the "good faith" dissent from the teaching of Humanae Vitae and improve its consulta- tive dialogue with theologians...
...JOfpF WORLD CHURCH IN THE MAKING ~-IE CURRENT Roman synod of the world's Catholic bishops serves, among other things, as a test of how well the church is doing in shedding a parochial lilt Western European outlook on the way to becoming a genuinely world church...
...Setbacks, bureaucratic inertia, and just plain human fallibility should not blind us to the fact we've come some distance since that observation was made...
...at the same time, it has one of the most parochial leaderships in that world...
...So far, that's been a bright idea awaiting a programmatic follow-through...
...As Jean Bethke Elshtain so well pointed out in our pages recently [Aug...
...But the point is, continued Elshtain, "parents who are frus- trated and demeaned, rendered helpless in worklife and citi- zenship, will have great difficulty instilling such bedrock beliefs, ways of being, inside the family...
...In preparing for the synod, our bishop-delegates heard this, and heard it strongly put, by the directors of diocesan Family Life bureaus: that Humanae Vitae has unfortunately distracted us, and wasted an enormous amount of energy, on a bedroom choice-- when it is the deteriorating state of the public world that makes the Christian project of the family so difficult to live out in the modern world--for very different reasons in different geographies...
...Faced with 800 million "absolute poor" "people so iitriited by malnutrition, illiteracy, disease, high infant mortality, and low life expectancy as to be below human decency--McNamara's sins of haste are forgivable...
...Part of the reason is that in countries (India, for instance), bearing lots of children represents the only available form of old age security...
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...it is nonetheless a promising step forward--and the message our bishops seem to be giving in Rome shows that promise...
...Virtually coincident with the opening of the synod, McNamara was delivering his farewell speech, a cri de coeur for the world's forgotten poor, to the bank's Board of Governors...
...The irony may be that former Defense Secretary McNamara studied Pope Paul Vl's encyclical Populorum Progressio ("The Development of Peoples") more diligently than most American Catholics have...
...They came from the pre-synodal consultation organized by the National Conferences of both American and Canadian bishops and Notre Dame University last June 15-18...
...As one American Protestant observer at Vatican II remarked in genuine awe and bewilderment: "The Roman church clearly represents the most cosmopolitan body in the Christian world...
...But others, especially from middle- income developing countries, resisted Archbishop Quinn's appeal...
...For it is poverty, not OPEC or the Communist bloc, that constitutes the principal source of the world's social instability--and the trend to violent eruption...
...In particular, we hope the American delegation will have heard their brothers in the Thii'd World speaking out for people "with no voice," and returndetermined to set an agenda of global responsibility for American Catholic families--the kind of agenda that a successfully assimilated, and yet dispirited, American church has been waiting for since the close of Vatican II and the election of a Catholic president...
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...Marie Ponsot Staff: Karen F. Silva...
...Most likely, the American bishops at the synod are hearing the same message...
...Bishop Joseph L. Bernardin's claim that devastating poverty, not permissiveness, caused the epidemic of teen-age pregnancies...
...And of course the enormous increase in lending for such projects, and McNamara's impati...
...There is every sign in what we have heard so far from Rome that never before have the bishops there come so well prepared by preliminary consultation, study, and planning in their home regions as now...
...None of these speeches came out of thin air...
...Without such bio-psychological communi- cation at an early stage of growth, Christian faith, and eo ipso Christian sacramental marriage, become a virtual dead letter...
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...and finally, by an as yet unidentified speaker, the insistence on the equality of women and men...
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...More, his challenge to the industrial and OPEC nations to realize that anti-poverty programs will-not wait for, but are indeed integral to the solution of the world's financial dislocations, makes sense...
...In fact, when that encyclical ap- peared in 1967, McNamara had copies distributed to every division of the World Bank as the "best rationale" he had yet seen for the bank's work and goals...
...The family is thus a superb topic for seeing and understanding the in.tersection of spirituality and social action--and we expect the bishops to return home with an awakened sense of this interconnection...
...Harriette Balsky, Jacqueline Reeves Advertising Manager: Ruth E. Taylor Publisher: Edward S. Skillin Commonweal, A Review of Public Affairs, Litera- ture and the Arts, is published biweekly, except monthly Christmas-New Year's and July and Au- gust, by Commonweal Publishing Co., 232 Madi- son Ave., New York,,N.Y...
...Education, it turns out, serves as a better constraint on the birth'rate in underdeveloped countries than does the Pill...
...594 Stage: Gerald Weales 595 Media: William Lee Miller 596 Verse: Joseph Payne Brennan 585 Books Discerning the Way: Gregory Baum 598 Thunder on the Right: Joe Holland 601 Tenebrae: Gary Zebrun 602 History of the Ideas of Progress Rosemary Radford Ruether 604 Christian Hope: K~lian McDonnell 606 A Stopping Place: Irving Malin 606 I Staff Editor...
...the ban on artificial contraception serves as a weapon against over-eager state birth control prog- rams that are not complemented by effective primary educa- tion and health care.in the rural areas where the masses of the "absolute poor" live--or better, scratch out existence...
...1 ], the genesis of a human being depends on the capacity of parents to instill in the nerves and-blood of a child a basic trust in life...
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...ence to launch them, have incurred sharp criticism--on the score of the "sins" of haste, inadequate pre-planning, and assessment...
...The American bishops may not be using Father Andrew Greeley's figures to portray the situation and needs of the American family, but they are obviously not ignoring the data of social science, nor the insistence of lay colleagues in the ministry that the difficult questions be openly addressed...
...Nor should specifically American preoccupations, the trauma of reaction to Humanae Vitae, concern for more liberal rules regarding divorce and remarriage, the rights of women--nor Vatican displeasure with these concerns- none of this need distract us from the significance of the synod as a still rudimentary and groping attempt on the part of church leaders to shed the tradition of a Western superiority complex and embody a catholicity which has never been before...
...Commomveal: 580...
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...Contents Volume CVII, Number 18 Correspondence 578 Editorials 579 Labor & the nukes: Brian Wicker 581 The emperor's planes: Frank Getlein 583 Another kind of witness: John Garvey 584 A Kennedy delegate in Carter's Camp: Thomas E. Cronin 586 A switch to Reagan: for a strong America: Michael Novak 588 Throwing my vote--to Anderson: Richard C. Wade 590 Screen: Colin L. Westerbeck, Jr...
Vol. 107 • October 1980 • No. 19
