To see the day!
McCarthy, Abigail
Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy TO SEE THE DAY! THE BISHOPS & NUCLEAR WAR I KEEP THINKING these days of the time Dorothy Day came to breakfast and the baby-sitter quit. Dorothy and Ammon...
...To me," he went on, according to the report in the Washington Post, "it's still good theology that we have in the Declaration of Independence, that the Creator did mean us to have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...
...Arthur Jones, National Catholic Reporter correspondent, put satirical words in the mouth of a mythical interviewer, "You mean Catholic bishops . . . are urging insecurity and anxiety on others without first preparing the way to sustenance...
...He went on to say that the church in the United States is becoming a peace church and that the revolution in thinking this entails "is being waged painfully in the hearts and minds of Catholic thinkers and leaders.'' He expressed gratitude that American bishops were taking responsibility for this revolution "at times to the chagrin and vocal opposition of their flocks...
...She dwelt on the crowded conditions in the women's prison and the inhumane way in which prisoners were subjected to indignities like body search...
...That was, I suppose, twenty-odd years ago...
...The practical responses to these principles have been suggested by various of the bishops who have been speaking out...
...And she probably hadn't...
...He defended nuclear deterrents-Europe wants them and deterrents have worked in the past...
...They were arrested, as they expected to be...
...We were still in the cold war eravery much so- and Dorothy was just out of jail...
...It failed to address "the basic question," he is reported as saying, "the question of freedom under God and the dignity of man and human rights"-all things nations have the responsibility to go to war to protect...
...Dorothy and Ammon Hennacy and others from the Catholic Worker house in New York were in Washington for the funeral of Alice Roosevelt Longworth's daughter, Paulina Sturm, who had lived with them for a time...
...He cited poison gas as an example...
...Perhaps Archbishop Hannan of New Orleans spoke for many of his brothers when he criticized the report in the ringing rhetoric of the past...
...At least, that is how I remember it...
...When all that is said, however, we must welcome the growing peace leadership from the bishops...
...Bishop Hunthausen of Seattle asked his people to consider refusing to pay half their income taxes as a protest...
...never war again...
...During World War II and the Korean war there was no church support for those Catholics who registered as conscientious objectors...
...Wherever I spoke during that war there were always priests and nuns who did not think that possible and who had never heard of Pope Paul VI's passionate plea of the time-" No more war...
...At the time there probably wasn't a single bishop in the United States and very few members of the clergy who approved the stand against nuclear weapons taken by the editors of the Catholic Worker...
...The changing stance of the bishops has been swift, almost sudden...
...Once Dorothy and the others had gone, she gave notice...
...They practiced civil disobedience by seeking an open and public place and staying as visible as possible when dutiful citizens took to shelter at the sound of the sirens...
...The story bespeaks the long yearning felt by people who have suffered the anguish of modern war-the yearning to be led in the ways of peace...
...Yzermans...
...That morning Dorothy recounted the details of her arrest and stay in prison in her matter-of-fact way...
...And soldiers burst forth from the trenches answering him, and singing Christmas hymns...
...Catholics were much better known for flocking to the colors, for their "fighting padres," and for the visits to the troops of our most prominent cardinal, the military vicar...
...These are families you 'Catholics are dealing with...
...Our babysitter, a pleasant middle-aged woman who had just come to "live in," listened, evidently in horrified silence...
...She and others had been arrested for refusing to take part in a Civil Defense alert-specifically for refusing to take cover in a simulation of defense against nuclear attack...
...And, like Dorothy, they might go to jail with the members of their flock...
...It is no wonder then that a prominent Catholic scientist called me to express excited and delighted amazement at the Reverend Vincent A. Yzermans's article in the New York Times on the eve of the recent meeting of the American bishops...
...she concluded witheringly, "I'm sure I never heard of Catholics like that...
...There is a story-and it is only a story-that during World War I Benedict XV, called the Pope of Peace, appeared, a solitary white figure, between the lines calling out to both sides...
...Bishop Matthiesen of Amarillo called on the workers in a local armament plant to seek other work and eleven other bishops joined him...
...It wasn't until the Vietnam war that a few conscientious objectors were allowed to base their stand on the peace tradition within the church...
...The peace position, Dorothy Day wrote long ago, is bound, sooner or later, to force people to make decisions personally and to act upon them...
...Something is stirring in the Roman Catholic church in the United States that portends an explosion between church and state that will make the abortion issue, the school-aid controversy, and the tax-exempt status of churches look like a child's sparkler on the Fourth of July," wrote Msgr...
...Even bishops...
...It is not only the flock but some of the shepherds who , are expressing chagrin and opposition...
...It is also no wonder that at the bishops' meeting sharp debate broke out in response to Archbishop Bernardin's progress report on the work of the hierarchy's year-old-committee on war and peace...
...Catholic students who talked of taking that stand were asked to leave some Catholic colleges...
...And columnist Colman McCarthy, man of peace though he is, was moved to ask Archbishop Hunthausen if he himself will join the tax resistance movement, and reported the archbishop as "edgy" about it, and saying that he would do "hard thinking" before April 15th...
...She did not intend to stay in a house where people who went to jail were welcome guests, especially those who went to jail for such unpatriotic reasons...
...Not only most lay Catholics but also Archbishop Hannan and presumably other bishops seem unaware that Cardinal Krol spoke for the majority of American bishops when he testified before a Senate committee as long ago as 1979 and held, among other things, that the use of strategic nuclear weapons even in response to prior use by the enemy is morally indefensible and that the church requires of its members unilateral renunciation of the right to use, or the threat to use, strategic nuclear weapons...
...The Worker position was that the horror of such weapons made the whole idea of "just war'' absurd and that to participate in any kind of preparation for it was wrong...
...I invited the Worker group home for coffee after Mass...
...And to think they call themselves Catholic...
...Abigail McCarthy Abigail McCarthy...
...Or go homeless and abandoned with them...
Vol. 108 • December 1981 • No. 23
