Editorials
commonweal BOAT PEOPLE WITHOUT BOATS' NATIONAL BLACK LEADERS gave a party in Richmond last month and nobody came—or at least no presidential candidate came. Thomas Morgan of the Washington Post...
...of the abandoned, homeless soul in ourselves...
...It was blown up...
...But the repression continued...
...Jesse Jackson delivered a blistering attack on all presidential candidates for evading crucial domestic issues, appealing to the politicians to "stop clowning...
...If Jews are today unwilling to serve any longer as passive victims of this horror show, if the Israeli homeland is their symbolic declaration of independence from it, Christians need to do more than meekly honor that fact with liberal tolerance, guns, and butter...
...Of the governmental option we might add that it is something like the Grand Inquisitor's...
...It's as if, in being touched by these individual lives, we were enabled to feel the raw nerve, perhaps hear the voice, of the abandoned soul secreted away in ourselves...
...Jordan and the Urban League cite...
...Apparently his remarks accurately reflected the sense of pessimism about the current politicalsocial scene felt by the assembled 1200 black leaders...
...But in a mixed but predominantly gloomy report, the National Urban League said that the general progress that marked the sixties did not 25 April 1980: 227 continue into the seventies for black families rather than individuals...
...No wonder black leaders are pessimistic...
...He did not rush to the cause of resistance...
...Twenty years ago, for example, the median income of black families was only a little better than half that of white families...
...As pointed out by Benjamin Hooks, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, blacks have a long way to go...
...population, but they are less than 3 percent of the lawyers and judges, 2 percent of the physicians, 2.3 percent of the dentists, 1.1 percent of the engineers, and 2.5 percent of the college and university professors...
...When a reformist junta took power last October, Archbishop Romero wished it well...
...Paradigmatically, the sin of the western world is revealed there...
...But the Jewish experience, the living memory of it, is indispensable to this quest for deeper roots—and even interpreters of that experience like Leo Beck, Elie Weisel, Andre Schwartz Bart, and others, can only approach the thing obliquely...
...Between the lines of B'nai B'rith's courteous protest, and behind similar Jewish demurrers in the past, the linkage is already implicit...
...not do this...
...Blacks must have a transcendental agenda so that whoever is in the White House in November, we will not be in the outhouse in December," said Jackson...
...No, says that folly of the Cross, it's precisely in the middle of the bloody mess that revelation cracks open...
...But that is only part of the reason, and another part may be found in the fact cited by Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in the Bakke case and quoted by Mr...
...Whites, by contrast, had a $17,189 median in 1970 which rose to $18,368 in 1978 (about 6.8 percent...
...Ten years later it had gone up sharply, to 61 percent of the white level...
...To be specific, black median family income in 1970 (in terms of constant 1978 dollars) was $10,544 and rose to only $10,879 in 1978 (3.1 percent...
...Conference organizers had hoped that the meeting would attract the major political candidates and force them to discuss such issues as unemployment, housing, inflation, and affirmative action...
...And central to the complex psychological functions the Jewish "outsider" stands for in Western history is the arrangement whereby Jews served as paramount scapegoats upon whom "good" Christians unloaded the fear and guilt they could not face in themselves—primarily that sense of primeval abandonment gnawing at even the most "successful" in our society...
...Such a man had to die...
...His plea has been endorsed by an ecumenical group of religious leaders just returned from El Salvador, by the U.S...
...Today, in an era of heightened international tension and increased defense spending, the national trend is toward shutting our eyes to pressing domestic social problems and toward cutting the budget sharply on programs to help the poor...
...budget cuts in national programs to aid the disadvantaged...
...And not any word or truth, but the word and truth of the Gospel, the good news of each person's dignity before a saving God, the good news of that necessary liberation which precedes liberation...
...By 1978, however, the last year for which such statistics are available, it had actually dropped, to about 59 percent...
...He was not an incendiary mover of masses...
...For both Jews and Christians, any public re-enactment of the Passion of Jesus, filtered as it must be through a halting interpretation of the meaning in suffering, opens the.deepest wounds—which is perhaps exactly the point...
...Again, these unthinkable events, the greatest stumbling blocks to faith in our time, may be the theological point of our time...
...It is an old pattern...
...If there is a certain amount of hyperbole in that statement, as critics might charge, and if there are obviously many individual exceptions to the general rule, it is also obvious that there is nothing cheering about the facts and figures Mr...
...What will happen once the revolutionary potential is bloodily eliminated...
...Even in its own terms, this option is fatally flawed...
...By 1970 that proportion had improved sharply, to one-third...
...But today there are more blacks living below the poverty level than at the start of the 1970s...
...But the candidates failed to appear, and the mood of the assemblage was apparent when Detroit Mayor Coleman Young was booed when he said he was supporting President Carter for reelection...
...Not, to be sure, by the world's standards...
...We Christians, if invited to enter here must doff shoes, enter as if walking on soul-ground that will shatter all our illusions about who we are—and who shall dare say what we shall find in this abandoned dark...
...Archbishop Romero was powerful and dangerous...
...His power was the power of the word...
...It's as if Christians continually miss the passion of the Jewish experience in our time and, failing that, paradoxically miss the bloody point of our Christ...
...For it is Jewish history after Jesus which shows the dark underside of Christian history...
...He did have, not long ago, a radio station over which his homilies could be broadcast to all of El Salvador...
...And failing to understand that darkness, we keep the light of Christ from breaking through our most stubborn illusions...
...Understandably, Jews who have "been there" guard the unspeakable pain of this place as sacred—nameless...
...In retrospect, we think future historians will credit the Holocaust (and Hiroshima) as the behind-the-scenes motive for all of the really serious efforts of today's Christians to get beneath the standard brands of post-Reformation Christianity, to see through our shallow muscular idealism and private consolation-prize religiosity, and to reach deeper into the mystery of our humanity for roots that will stand even this shaking of our foundations...
...Add to all this the fact that black unemployment remains at a most discouraging level...
...Part of the reason for the decline in black family income may be traced to the increase in the number of one-parent families in this country, among blacks as well as whites...
...We think it would be beneficial for both Jews and Christians if attempts to understand the central mystery of Christian faith, the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus, were explicitly linked to attempts to fathom the Holocaust, and vice versa...
...In a letter to President Carter sent a month before his death, Archbishop Romero pleaded that the U.S...
...They represent almost 12 percent of the U.S...
...He strove to prevent bloodshed—but not on terms that denied human dignity...
...The nation faced three options: oligarchical, governmental, popular-democratic...
...Further, the black economic picture is far from bright, with Mr...
...Jews stand, and survive with affronting bitterness, grace, and forebearance, as a constant reminder of the degree to which the Messiah has not come at all, or only superficially, for Christians themselves...
...Oscar Romero was a moderate conservative when called to be archbishop of San Salvador...
...In short, the fact seems to be that it took the boom of World War II and the rapid national growth in the sixties, plus affirmative civil rights action, to help blacks in this country substantially...
...A larger percentage of young blacks are being admitted to college and universities, a growing number of them are moving into business and the professions, and it is obvious that there are an increasing number of individual blacks who are beginning to make it in this society...
...Federal grant and procurement policies should be restructured, said the black agenda, to place greater emphasis on direct funding of black community-based organizations, setting aside a minimum of fifteen percent of federal development and procurement funds specifically for black institutions...
...Bread, but not freedom...
...The danger was the danger of truth...
...Yet there's something about it, in the hands of a wise Jewish guide, that brings us savingly down to earth...
...BLOOD OF MARTYRS...
...The United States is putting its money—literally, $5.7 million in military aid—on the governmental option, on the ruling junta...
...Why...
...For there are certain enormities of suffering, like Auschwitz and Hiroshima in this century, which to the reflective seem past redeeming...
...reforms were to be bought with the annihilation of political opposition...
...Jesus's own people take his bloody place as victim, bringing repeatedly to light and in the flesh the heart of darkness that "pure" Christians tried to conceal...
...Archbishop Oscar Romero was killed because he was a powerful and dangerous man...
...bishops...
...Black unemployment today stands at 11.3 percent (with black youth unemployment rates in inner cities going sharply higher...
...The history of Jewish enforced homelessness and dispossession is stitched into the psyche of Western Christianity like the lost soul in us that never quite got the point of Jesus's suffering...
...Anyone who doubts this fact has only to look around him...
...The archbishop spoke out again...
...Land reform, but rule from the top...
...His denunciations of repression earned him the bitter enmity of El Salvador's oligarchy...
...DARKNESS VISIBLE The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith recently demurred, amid faint praise, to the portrait of Jews presented in the Good Friday CBS-TV airing of Edward Anhalt's The Day Christ Died...
...But he could do this because people trusted and believed him—and that, in turn, rested on the fact that he lived and spoke the Gospel...
...one is somehow compelled by the presence of the dead here to go through this pit one by one, with each man, woman, and child's face and family history, planted unforgettably in imagination...
...But for the vast majority of black people, they're all boat people without boats, cut adrift on an ocean of discrimination, poverty, and other social ills...
...There is no evidence that Congress or the president is listening...
...Jewish history, then, ought to be mandatory reading for any current adult Christian catechesis...
...The main business of the conference was to shape an agenda by which all candidates could be judged, and it did exactly that...
...Hooks in Richmond: the black male who completes four years of college can expect a median annual income only $ 110 more than a white man who has only a high school diploma...
...We owe it to both Jews and ourselves to fathom the mystifying terror of primitive abandonment which haunts our soul's depths—and which, denied, promises to devastate the human race with the kind of stupefying carnage Commonweal: 228 that modern technology puts so readily at our witless disposal...
...He was not a revolutionary in the usual sense...
...Black leaders discussed issues and strategies with a sense of urgency about eroding civil rights gains, affirmative action programs, housing, unemployment, voter registration, health care, and U.S...
...Catholic Conference in testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, and most recently by Archbishop John Quinn on behalf of U.S...
...National Urban League president Vernon E. Jordan Jr...
...Archbishop Romero had an analysis of El Salvador's fate...
...He had no arms, led no troops...
...The Messiah has not come," say the Jews, and point to the bloody rites of the Crusades, ghettoization, pogrom, and periodic exile, preludes all to the Holocaust...
...It made it easier to assert "the Messiah has come, and we are new creatures" if we had handy an objectification (handling "filthy lucre," "consuming the blood of children," etc...
...He went there reluctantly, shocked by the deaths of his priests, drawn into the sufferings of the poor whom he was meant to shepherd...
...Authentic Christianity, we think, is neither Hindu nor Buddhist with their promises of serene transcendence of historical conflict, nor is it that crypto-Gnostic idealism which gets us out of bloody messes...
...We think, though, that there's a truly great agenda here for both Jewish and Christian teachers, begun to be sure, but only just begun...
...As usual, the world's standards were wrong...
...Finally, into the staggering enormity of that unforgivable sin we'd all like so much to avoid, the Holocaust...
...But these outrages need to be understood psychologically...
...The matter is delicate...
...One cannot enter this door with statistics...
...Such a man had to die...
...Archbishop Romero helped those in need, informed and represented them...
...Thomas Morgan of the Washington Post did attend, and he reported that the Rev...
...Twenty years ago, more than half of all blacks had incomes below the federal definition of poverty...
...This is more than twice as high as white unemployment and much higher than it was at the start of the seventies, when it was only 8.2 percent...
...It has been provoked only by the threat of revolution, and only the threat of revolution can give it the force to overcome oligarchical obstacles...
...summed up his feelings about blacks and the past year this way:' 'For some, a few, it's a little better...
...And there's no better way of doing that than poking our noses directly into Jewish history, as seen in the first instance by Jews...
...Hooks commenting that "the economic decline of the late seventies has all but wiped out the steady economic progress that blacks made in the sixties"—a contention supported in the recently issued annual report on "The State of Black America" by the National Urban League...
...In fact, the presidential forum was only one part of the meeting...
...At the risk of offending all sides in a most sensitive issue, we think it is time consciously to join what courtly irenicism often avoids linking...
...25 April 1980: 229...
Vol. 107 • April 1980 • No. 8
