America, Lost & Found

...It isn't supposed to happen that way in this country...

...FATHER JAMES HEFT, S.M., 15 a member of the faculty of the University of Dayton...

...The courage of Archbishop Hurley's call invites the church in the West to do its part so that our nation will not celebrate or support (as we presently do in various forms) what can neither be celebrated or supported in South Africa...

...JOHN A COLEMAN S.J...

...I believe policies must respect the fragile links of the ecosystem and the fundamental bonds of humankind...

...Catholic reluctance to face issues of conflict and power politics head-on has to be overcome before its social theory will get the attentive audience it deserves...

...Occasionally, though, you find an Adolphus Busch who founds the brewery, endows the Harvard chair and enunciates liberal sentiments impeccably in several languages...

...Tony Spaeth became not only Tony Bailey's inseparable friend but also his principal guide to the intricacies of that part of American culture of interest to pre-adolescent youths-baseball, boxing, the aesthetics of motor car design, slang, camp life, model trains...

...If that makes him sound, God help us, like what was once called a Commonweal Catholic that is exactly what he and Eloise and the entire Spaeth family are and were in good times and bad, in spades, no apologies, and a pleasure they are to behold, found, and refound, and let us hope to be found again many more times, striding along any street or in the pages of other magazines and books, under any title or address...

...The church would not participate because "the great majority of the people in South Africa" cannot approve of its policies and laws, and cannot celebrate the society as it presently functions...

...All of this in the forties, the thirties, the twenties...

...At any rate, when it happens the result is an extremely fascinating, highly-complex, utterly original character...

...Nevertheless, sufficient attention to the issue of increased productivity remains a gaping lacuna in Catholic social thought...

...Somehow social Catholicism-like Catholicism itself-is often more glorious in what it preaches than what it practices...

...J. BRYAN HEHIR...

...Catholic social thought has been too long on principles and ideology (its strength), much too meager on concrete strategy, programs and imaginative evocation of alternative forms to embody its principles...

...Tony Spaeth's parents, Eloise and Otto, knew precisely where pre-adolescent culture left off and true culture began...

...On the contrary, I remain committed to basic liberal values...

...Out of context, the author gave his shorthand version of my attitude toward productivity, oil profits, nuclear power, and Bella Abzug...

...For example, an Otto Spaeth, Bavarian-American, founder of a beer fortune (involved in the founding of Pabst), a liberal Democrat in politics, a patron of art and music and culture in general, a founder of the Americans for Democratic Action, the Catholic Interracial Conference and various other liberal organizations...

...Last year I began writing a book on how we must apply these values to the urgent problems of the 1980s and 1990s...

...Church/worldwatch (Continued from page 395) nounced that the church and its institutions would not participate in the "Republic Festival," a celebration of the independence of South Africa...

...Eloise Spaeth was the world-class instructor in heel-and-toeing and with Bailey all lessons seem to sink-in permanently: Dayton walks in the forties put the reader in mind of Bailey's later walks around the circumference of Manhattan or up the Connecticut coast and the memorable New Yorker pieces they inspired...

...Very devout and extremely rich, Otto Spaeth possessed a mind fine enough to appreciate the inevitable tensions between God and Mammon and to distinguish without difficulty between God and Francis Cardinal Spellman and Mammon and the decent pursuit of the good life...

...What needs explaining is why-when in a crunch-Catholic political parties and bishops almost always used them to defend non-socialist (or to use a more neutral term, non-economic democracy) ways...

...PAUL T. TSONGAS U.S...

...For that part of the trip, they were the guides, through catechetics and table manners and appreciation of music and art and the character-building possibilities of candor and eggplant...

...Otto Spaeth was one of those rare men who seem not merely many-faceted but multi-generational as a fortune-founder...

...If it was as difficult for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven as for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, well that was, among other things, a problem of tool-and-dye making, of innovations in eye-design for Otto and his favorite inventor of the moment to tackle on the jig machine at his Dayton Tool and Engineering Company...

...REV...

...STEPHEN DARST has written for the New York Times, Harper's and other journals...

...Stephen Dorct IT was serialized in The New Yorker as "630 Runnymede Drive" and appears as a book as "America Lost & Found," but it is not about an address, which is too narrow, nor about a country, which is too sweeping, but a family, the Spaeths, the whole Bavarian-Celtic lot of them, Debbie, Mama, Mimi, Tony and, especially, Otto and Eloise...

...As Gregory Baum suggests in his recent book, Catholics and Canadian Socialism, the encyclicals can be read in either a socialist or a non-socialist way...

...Diamant also remarks that in rejecting class warfare as- a thing inevitable, Catholic thought conjures up a naive harmony unlikely in a "modern society with its bewildering multitude of groups pursuing different and often conflicting aims...

...Perhaps it has something to do with Bavarian culture...

...Secondly, in his review of Catholic social thought in Germany and Austria, Alfred Diamant (Austrian Catholics and the'First Republic) remarks that the strength of social Catholicism lay in its ability to criticize the injustices and inhumanity in both liberalism and collec-tivist socialism...

...It will be published this fall by Alfred A. Knopf...

...Systematic slippages into defense of capitalism by those who propound the theory, however, demand some explanation...

...27 ] devoted one sentence to specific ideas of mine...

...Without these latter, any ideology is bound to seem airy and ethereal, as from another world...

...REVIEWERS jean bethke ELSHTAIN is associate profes-sor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst...

...Mimi was a baby, Mama and Debbie were away at school or moving in a slightly more mature Dayton social circle, and so the member of the family Bailey came to know best was Tony Spaeth, a year his junior...

...Senator from Massachusetts Correetion In Abigail McCarthy's column "Still Reaching" [June 5], a typographical error occurred in the quote from Mary Burke's book Reaching for Justice...

...his politically-liberal son and culturally-inclined grandson were all rolled into one...

...Correspondence (Continued from page 386) There are plural ways to induce increased productivity, some of which include the Catholic concern for just distribution...

...Because neither wished to relinquish rights to the name "Tony," they became, for good purposes of good household order and quick identification, Tony Spaeth and Tony Bailey...

...He believed that the Republican Party was the party of some other rich man, labor unions were perfectly welcome in his plant, blacks at his table and artists were to be listened to, befriended, encouraged...

...Who knows, maybe even Catholics might start listening...

...Yet he notes "the almost complete inability of Catholic critics to prescribe successfully for the ills of transition and to propose workable alternative institutions and ideals...

...A final point...

...Thus he purported to "quickly dismiss" my ideas as "indistinguishable from the old conservatism...

...To the Editors: Jim Chapin's article, "What the Democrats should do," [Mar...

...J. BRYAN HEHIRted in South Africa...

...He fit in, a friend once said, like a rattlesnake among the Roosevelt-haters at his Dayton Country Club...

...I hope that my ideas will receive a more comprehensive review in Commonweal at that time...

...But this sort of concretion might just embarrass the desire of the popes- and other Catholics-to find someplace to stand "above politics...

...Still and all, I agree strongly with Hux that social Catholicism is an ideology well worth preaching today...

...Phyllis Schlafly, for example, is as much known for her stand on women's issues as is Betty Friedan...

...The Lewis and Clark of Bailey's expedition into the New World were, however, not contemporaries...

...Fellow, The Woodrow Wilson Center of International Scholars Basic liberalism still Washington, D.C...

...Fortune-founders curse their sons' liberal professors and shun the museum-trotting grandchildren...

...Bailey joined the Spaeth family in 1940 as a seven-year-old refugee from wartime England, was separated when he returned to his homeland in 1944 and refound them on later visits to the United States of America, Lost & Found touches on Bailey's English family but the true focus is the family he knew at 630 Run-nymede Drive, Dayton, Ohio, from October 1940 to October 1944...

...The last two lines of the quote should have read: "In addition, the public activities of some women in the group make them very much a part of the women's movement...

...The right shoes, comfortable, sturdy, practical, and a breakneck pace...

...I believe government can and must act to increase economic, social, and political justice...

...Or with the beer business...

...There was a lesson to be learned even from strolls-which was that in this life, at least in this household, there was no such thing as a stroll...