Correspondence
MULLER, JAMES E. & LOWN, BERNARD & CHIVIAN, ERIC & LONGCOPE, JAMES C. & HETTEL, MARK J. & AESCHLIMAN, MICHAEL D. & HAUGHTON, BENET & STANTON, EDWARD S.
Correspondence Unspent capital Boston, Mass. To the Editors: We are most appreciative of J. Brian Hehir's article "Doctors of the World Unite" [May 8 ] which analyzes our attempts as physicians...
...It may be doubted whether this rejection, now epidemic among Whitman's spiritual grandchildren, has improved American culture or life...
...We believe, however, that the unspent political capital which the Catholic church could contribute to the cessation of the nuclear arms race exceeds that of the medical profession...
...How can it claim to have been especially enlightened by the power of the Holy Spirit in the face of such a perverse history of ignorance in this matter...
...We hope to meet the challenge articulated by Father Hehir to use medicine's unspent political capital in opposition to the arms race...
...Like the magazine as a whole, John Garvey is immensely fair intellectually and emotionally...
...He too will kill himself...
...There are now over fifty thousand nuclear weapons in the world...
...The question between the United States and Israel is not, as Prime Minister Begin portrays it, how much interference Israel can tolerate...
...These people become so consumed by all that is other and different from themselves that they are willing in their hate to ensure even their own destruction...
...The majority of people enter into some personal growth therapy for perhaps one or two periods in their lives in the face of an existential crisis which threatens to destroy them...
...Rightly understood, the two are different aspects of what it is to be a properly functioning whole human being...
...I would have appreciated hearing more from them about napalm...
...Delivery will occur...
...free verse has no metrical norm or regularity...
...It will require complete commitment toy the medical profession, the church and many other influential segments of society to change our course from the disaster toward which we are moving...
...However courageous my unscholarly thrusts, they are necessarily much weaker than Boswell's, who according to Crompton failed in his attempts to defend the church's basic integrity in its handling of homosexuality...
...Forces that make international communities possible, such as International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, don't carry diverse civil polity groups into union on their coattails...
...A part of learning how to do this is taking back one's projections (the splinter in the other's eye, the beam in one's own...
...ERIC CHIVIAN, M.D...
...Israel's unilateral definition of what constituted a mortal danger and its unilateral determination of how to respond has implications which go beyond the Middle East...
...We are working toward the goal described in the title of the article - our second Congress to be held in Cambridge, England in April, 1982 will include physicians from over thirty countries...
...Those of us who have lived with it throughout our lives have also found it just as natural and innocent as that, no more threatening...
...It is a mistake and one which is easily perpetrated through our dualistic thinking patterns to see self-love over against love of others...
...To the Editors: The reason I subscribed to Commonweal was John Garvey...
...EDWARD S. STANTON, S.J...
...The likelihood they will be used is increasing and the fear sustaining the arms race continues to grow...
...Okay, I do not in any sense approve or like the self-indulgent narcissistic preacher, but such people are only a fringe group...
...Ask officials of the AM A if you doubt this point...
...To the Editors: J. Bryan Hehir's challenge to United States physicians to unite and spend our political capital in support of the clinical case against nuclear warfare - we all know - is not at risk of being scooped up in a mad rush toward the barricades [May 8 ]. For one thing, we are not a community but a collection of communities which have been extraordinarily resistant to unification...
...Only by saying and holding true grief for all that we are that we can rise and kiss God's word again in true joy...
...Boston College Chestnut Hill, MA, 02167 Church/worldwatch (Continued from page 450) a different set of issues...
...By comparison to Anderson's work on Whitman (and on Thoreau and Emerson), Borges's essay is puerile stuff...
...This fact should finally compel everyone to face a basic moral consideration: from now on, it is only through conscious choice and a deliberate policy that humanity can survive...
...How about at least a summary attempt to rebut Crompton in Commonweal, within the scope of my Catholic faith...
...It is more often very painful though the end result can be a greater peace of mind and a more out-going, joyous love of others that makes all the pain worthwhile...
...It is, rather, how much passive acquiesence the United States can afford...
...I have to go to Mass next Sunday, as usual, to worship in spirit and in truth...
...is left with actions which it presumably opposes, but which could be repeated...
...Second, is the church's concept of a ' 'just war'' applicable in the nuclear age...
...Now it is the whole planet that has come under threat...
...However, it is npt clear that the k message of the Holy Father has reached Catholics in their personal contacts with the church...
...Naive and uninformative Montagnola, Switzerland To the Editors: As one who has sometimes enjoyed and benefited from Jorge Luis Borges's fiction and criticism, I wish to comment on his remarkably naive and uninformative essay on Walt Whitman [May 22 ]. First, a crucial factual mistake, which may simply have been a translator's error but is a regrettably important one: Whitman did not write in "blank verse," but in "free verse," and there is a world of difference between the two...
...Blank verse, the measure of Milton's "Paradise Lost," is un-rhymed iambic pentameter...
...This statement by Pope John Paul II against nuclear weapons provides the basis for action by the church on many levels...
...Those guys will just have to line up with other claims for priority status...
...The reason I keep looking forward to Commonweal is John Garvey...
...LaFarge...
...the great poetry is small in amount, squeezed out by the fattening ego...
...Loving oneself is arguably perhaps the only way we can actually heal ourselves in a world so busy destroying our identities and alienating us from our roots...
...The U.S...
...Second, perhaps the press is now free enough to say something uncomplimentary about Whitman's homosexuality and its effect on his poetry and philosophy of democracy...
...J. BRYAN HEHIR...
...BENET HAUGHTON The Lothlorien Trust Author's request To the Editors: For a biography of Fr...
...Israel argued that the reactor was near completion and that the consistent enmity of Iraq toward the state of Israel justified a preemptive strike even though Iraq had signed the Nonproliferation Treaty and Israel could have requested inspection of the reactor...
...How many people do we know who but for the time they spent in retreat or with a therapist would still be living their lives struggling with un-healed childhood wounds...
...And whether homosexual aestheticism has encouraged political justice, truth, or personal decency in the modern world may at least be doubted...
...Finally if we do not do this, we will never be able to get down on our knees and develop a passionate theology about anything because in the end it is only by getting down onto our knees that we can live again...
...How many obsessive navel-gazers do we know, if not literally dead then almost...
...During his visit to Hiroshima Pope John Paul II stated: "In the past it was possible to destroy a village, a town, a region, even a country...
...only the date is unknown...
...He knows how to use singular, truly original insights not to tear down positions but to build up new ones...
...It is ironic that a Catholic journal, no matter how liberal, should celebrate Whitman or summon us to Borges's celebration of him...
...Rightly viewed, these therapies are merely tools to be used and laid down after use...
...Loving oneself is not a narcissistic occupation but an absolute essential, nowadays especially...
...NAME WITHHELD BY REQUEST Loving oneself Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland To the Editors: I find John Garvey's piece, "Theology on the Knees" [April 24], a mite too hasty in its judgment of those who would love themselves...
...Moral challenge Acton, Mass...
...On the doctrinal level it would be useful for Catholics to know official church position on two important questions: First, is it wrong for a Catholic to help finance, build, deploy, or fire a nuclear weapon - an instrument of destruction designed to kill millions of innocent people in an instant...
...How many prayers are offered- publicly for nuclear disarmament...
...To the Editors: We are most appreciative of J. Brian Hehir's article "Doctors of the World Unite" [May 8 ] which analyzes our attempts as physicians to work for prevention of nuclear war...
...A human being cannot go out eternally and never come back...
...Proliferation of nuclear weapons and methods of preventing it is a global question...
...If the Israeli-response is accepted as normative, the international system faces a qualitatively new threat to peace...
...MICHAEL D. AESCHLIMAN Church & homosexuals Chico, California To the Editors: Louis Crompton's commentary on Boswell's book on homosexuality [June 5 ] was enough to break the faith of every Catholic homosexual decisively...
...We offer these provocative questions in hopes of aiding the movement within the church to address these issues...
...How often are sermons devoted to the need for elimination of nuclear weapons...
...Whitman was a homosexual aesthete, the first open one in a long line of modern aesthetes whose sexual proclivities determined their politics and morals: Swinburne, Hart Crane, Gide, Forster, and Ginsberg are others...
...Likewise a person cannot go into himself and never go out...
...MARK J. HETTEL, C.S.P...
...He will kill himself...
...Pathologies such as these are very common in our society where the rules against achieving equanimity with our own emotions and especially our sensuality and anger abound...
...Whitman's free verse is a direct consequence of his democratism and of his hatred of restraint and norm...
...If I hate the Russians perhaps it is because I also despise that aspect of myself that I imagine is bad in Russia...
...John LaFarge, S.J., I would appreciate hearing from friends, relatives and associates and receiving reminiscences, copies of letters, photographs etc., concerning Fr...
...How many utterly self-sacrificing and self-effacing bores do we know...
...He is one of the "big daddies" of modern egotism...
...On the other hand, the prospective clinical autopsy of a nuclear attack does carry the case against nuclear warfare directly to the doorstep of those who are united in belief and commitment to support moral vision such as is contained in, say, the just war doctrin If limited and nuclear ai incompatible adjectives, certainly "limited nuclear war" and "non-combatant immunity" or "proportional use of force" are incompatible phrases...
...I need insights...
...Loving yourself in this sense is far from an easy, happy process...
...There are highly reputable authorities on the homosexual preference who consider it almost completely comparable to left-handedness...
...REV...
...If I despise self-idolaters, perhaps it is because I also despise that aspect of myself that craves for love but never received enough...
...His latest excellent piece, "Beyond Proof and Disproof" on "The Religions of Pro-Choice and Pro-Life" [June 19 ], simply cements that relationship even more...
...His passion for the victims of El Salvador, the cancer victims, the victims of Nagasaki, is absolutely correct...
...I must also, however, remind him that the horror of these things is caused by people who do not love themselves at all...
...The greatest of all the lovers of mankind saw his own dark side as we will never see ours, but unless we recognize the need to see ourselves as capable of the most frightful atrocities, how will we be able to forgive ourselves even our small sins let alone the enormous ones committed by others...
...All of this has been brilliantly documented by Columbia's Quentin Anderson in his critical classic The Imperial Self (1971) and in his introduction to Leaves of Grass (NYU Press), "Whitman's New Man," where he writes that Whitman "was not least a genius in his understanding that a rejection of Christianity on behalf of an emotional egalitarianism would have to begin with a rejection of the idea that the self was internally structured by conscience...
...response to both raids has been to suspend delivery of aircraft...
...capital punishment, and death, were not looked at in the same light in those days...
...JAMES c. LONGCOPE, M.D Immensely fair Minneapolis, Minn...
...It is way past time we understood Christ's life and work more in such terms...
...It would be quite wrong though to deny people access to them by that argument...
...Are the facts about nuclear weapons taught effectively in Catholic schools...
...It is however inevitable because they are very powerful tools, and also new, that people will abuse and misuse them and even, as is suggested, create pseudo-religions out of them...
...But before I am misunderstood I must say that I wholly applaud John Garvey's sentiments...
...JAMES E. MULLER, M.D...
...REV...
...the church's view of human expressions of love, and sexuality within them, has changed greatly in recent years...
...Hence, the U.S...
...It is, as Robert Frost said, like playing tennis with the net down...
...No serious observer will judge this suspension to be anything more than a symbolic gesture...
...I can think of some reasons to fall back on, in desperation, such as: half of what medical science knows today it has learned in the last twenty years...
...Several situations are at least comparable to Israel's dilemma if not identical with it...
...Will the United States Catholic Conference accept the challenge to synthesize traditional moral wisdom with modern destructive capacity and speak to our statesmen on the moral status of limited nuclear war...
...Is it possible that the church murdered people for centuries for being left-handed...
...BERNARD LOWN, M.D...
Vol. 108 • August 1981 • No. 15
