Church & world-again:

...But Kennedy was not denying his church or its authority to define the moral law...

...grass roots are sometimes poisoned," wrote Brogan in 1956 apropos of the American bishops' then strengthening stand against racism...

...And in the years since then there have been slots for Catholics in the cabinet-better slots than the once token PostmasterGeneralship like Justice, Labor, and HEW-even if not until now the office of secretary of state...

...CHURCH & WORLD-AGAIN THE CATHOLIC CITIZEN & CONCRETE SOLUTIONS THE USES of ritual are never more clear than at the end of an administration in Washington...

...There are laudatory editorials and parties to honor the outgoing as well as the incoming...

...The House-well, yes, it could not be helped-but the Senate, never...

...In these last twenty years Catholic office-holders and Catholic citizens have grown more certain in insisting on their right to formulate the concrete solutions...

...Or that it was about to do so for the second time with the appointment of Alexander Haig...

...And he could go so far as to say that it was fortunate that the post-World War II retreat to the "old isolationism, the old village intolerance" was led by an Irish-American Catholic...

...What is more, in doing so they seem to be in conformity with Vatican II's statement that secular duties and activities belong properly to laymen, and that laymen should know that it is "generally [by] the function of their well-formed Christian conscience" that right is done...

...John F. Kennedy in his statement to the Houston ministers was, John Cogley tells us in his book, Catholic America, making "a kind of declaration of lay independence...

...Mindful of the independence, of the Catholic citizen, mindful of the past (perhaps still lingering) distrust of the church in the arena of foreign policy, should the church not seek concrete solutions for complicated problems with the help of those whose responsibility those problems are or have been...

...Why make a point of it...

...And Buckley concedes that there are times in history when the church must command opposition to an overriding evil and he cites Hitler and Nazism as an example...

...We like to think that all that is behind us because of the election of 1960...

...A 'dry,' evangelical McCarthy would have had more effect and have lasted longer...

...Rather, enlightened by Christian wisdom . . . let the layman take on his own distinctive role" (Constitution on the Church and the Modern World...

...The well-being of many-even their lives-can be at stake...

...The city has what might be called a ceremonial heart...

...There is even a sense that it is not particularly good taste to refer to it...

...As citizens they must cooperate with other citizens, using their own particular skills and acting on their own responsibility" (Decree on the Laity, italics mine...

...It is worth noting that those first most insistent on rejecting concrete solutions to social problems as advanced by churchmen, even in papal encyclicals, were the conservatives who today back Haig...

...It was at such a party honoring now ex-Secretary of State Edmund S. Muskie that a bishop approached him and said,' 'I want you to know, Mr...

...Most Catholic office-holders today, consciously or unconsciously, hold this autonomy as their right...

...Little more than twenty years ago D. W. Brogan could still write in trying to explain America to Europeans and to Americans themselves: "But it is unfortunate that the American Catholics are, by their training, so ready to suspect the worst of their neighbors and that their neighbors suspect the worst of them . . . It is especially a strain in the field of foreign policy...

...Amazingly enough, it had gone unremarked, even by the office-holder himself, that the United States had formally entrusted its foreign policy to a Catholic for the first time-twenty years after the election of our first and only Catholic president...

...he was, rather, insisting on the layman's responsibility to make political decisions on the basis of his own conscientious judgments...

...How best can the church exercise her prophetic role...

...But authority must find its channels...

...Only a few days ago Archbishop Hickey of the Washington archdiocese felt it necessary to defend the right of the church to speak on public affairs...

...There is something to be said for a church in which authority does not come from the grass roots...

...But it is often not the right which is in question but the manner of its exercise...

...But the rural masses that feared and hated everything foreign ranked the pope high among the dangerous foreign elements.'' But the pope has now been in the White House, you say, invited by an evangelical president...

...William Buckley evoked such a storm by his reservations, about Mater et Magistra -summed up in the flippancy, "Mater, si...

...We have almost forgotten that only twenty-five years ago the election of Catholics to the United States Senate was opposed by commentators, some of them serious political scientists, on the grounds that the Senate had more to do with foreign affairs-that its powers "to advise and consent'' were often crucial in such matters...

...Today, at long last, the church espouses with a clear voice the cause of the poor and the oppressed, and the question of human rights would seem as compelling as the problems of racism and Nazism...

...The point is that it is important what teaching strategy is adopted by the church in the years ahead...

...Secretary, that we were very pleased that you were the first Catholic secretary of state...

...ABIGAIL MCCARTHYIGAIL MCCARTHY...

...Or to recall that part of the price for that election was Kennedy's questioning by the Houston Ministers' Conference and the unequivocal statement he made there- "I do not accept the right of any ecclesiastical official to tell me what to do in the sphere of my public responsibility as an elected official...

...Magistra, no"-that Garry Wills, then still a conservative, wrote Politics and Catholic Freedom in his defense, seeking to establish a theological ground for such dissent...

...The secretary was genuinely surprised as were the people standing by...

...Let the layman not imagine that his pastors are always such experts, that to every problem which arises . . . they can give him a concrete solution, or even that such is their mission...