Editorials

...BLOOD SUPPLY "We have so enjoyed Commonweal these past months," writes a young couple from Chicago, both recent graduates of Notre Dame Law School, "especially in light of the debates that continue to rage within the church and between the church and the outside world...

...for better or worse, as everyone knows, the amount the government is taking in taxes does not match outlay, and the current and projected Reagan deficits are ominous...

...In 1955, a family of four making half the median income faced an average tax rate of 4 percent...

...How fairly is the income tax burden distributed...

...That is bad enough, but Congress under Mr...

...This is especially true of the imperialist Met, where despite all the ingenuity the Vatican's art did not show up...

...The Tax Foundation did a study on the subject using the figures for 1978, before the Reagan tax cuts...

...Or to put it another way, the rate for the more prosperous family slightly more than doubled, while the poorer family has seen its tax rate go through a five-fold increase...

...On this point you have to look at what people have left after the tax collector takes his bite...

...In other words, despite a bigger tax, the portion of national income people had to spend or save doubled...

...Thus the tax rate for the more affluent family was slightly over three times that of the poorer family - an example of progressivity as it was...

...That same year a similar family making twice the median income had a tax rate of 12.4 percent...

...Some time ago presidential counselor Edward Meese assured an interviewer that a progressive income tax was immoral...

...such stuff may quicken our senses, shock into recognition, wake us to the dreams of which we are made...

...at the same time almost everybody in all places and in all times considers them to be too high...

...But the point is not to single out the post-Tridentine popes for opprobrium in this regard...

...A general conclusion, documented in any number of sources: painful as most of us find our taxes, taxpayers in the United States do not pay an inordinate share of their income in taxes, as compared with citizens in most other countries...

...What her art misses, of course, is its home-based adjacency to the West's central liturgical stage-where this sample of our patrimony is ceremonially and ritually bonded to generations of the human passion story that God made his own.tory that God made his own...

...Nor, for different reasons, had Rome lost awesome power even in the sixteenth century...

...Once upon a time, Rome's mysterium tremendum had been enough to stop Attila the Hun in his tracks (outside Mantua...

...Yes, a museum setting often obscures the mystery of creativity, reducing art to glittery stone rather than bread for the soul-starved...

...taxes going for armaments, they think taxes are too high...

...Somehow the show dismantles more effectively than Luther's polemics do...

...But by this time, however, a more distressing shift had occurred, not a shift so much as an introversion...

...The Met's catalogue, and the rush of other publications promoting the show, let us understand the withdrawn, fortress church mentality through the visual prism of art-where seeing is believing, or ground for disbelieving...

...The throbbing heart of that clandestine search for the mysterium tremendum-so palpable in Pollock, Barnet Newman, Rothko, or Clifford Still-is nowhere evident...

...was ranked seventeenth among twenty-three comparable nations, with our taxes equal to 30.2 percent of the gross national product...

...Are we still living up to that ideal...

...True, government on all levels is now taking an additional 9.4 percent of the GNP, compared with its take in the 1940s...

...It's the most economical way we know of to keep "vital spirits" flowing in the blood...

...As most readers probably know by now, even a quick look at the figures demonstrates that the ideal of progressivity is being systematically weakened...

...For we are also such stuff as da Vinci and Michelangelo were made of...

...It does not...

...Whence and how do they come...

...Literalism and nostalgia...

...Rome cannot be moved...

...Because there is a ceiling on how much earnings are subject to the tax, the rate for the lower-income worker is higher than for the well-to-do, and the social security tax takes a sizable amount out of the paycheck of lower-income workers, in many cases coming to more than their income tax...

...asks Mozart in speaking of the miracle of his compositions, "I do not know and have nothing to do with it...

...There is no nineteenth century art in the Met show...

...It asks us to focus attention on the popes themselves as patrons and collectors...

...What people usually look at, though, is whether taxes are too high as compared with past years...

...Just in the nick of time, we'd guess...

...And now, remembering itself, the Holy See sends us ancestral gifts, the heart of it a sample of Renaissance color...

...We ask your pardon," said a magnanimous Pope Paul VI addressing a group of artists soon after his election in 1963...

...RONE IS NOT MOVED The Vatican's Rome, the sacred navel of the West: Roma non transferendum - it cannot be moved - and yet it has been...

...Give the new graduate a year's subscription to Commonweal...

...One would like to say the Vatican's start at a modern collection dislodges, unbinds, these impressions...

...The Laocoon complex fascinates...

...Nonetheless, his act proved ominous because, with the subsequent help of Descartes's dualism and Newton's mechanism, it set the course toward a trivializing estheticism-art as an object to be warehoused in museums, out of the public forum where the action is...

...That they hoarded, guarded, and buried treasure, as it were in a bank vault, is parabolic...

...While secular Europe took off on commercial and revolutionary adventure, an increasingly insular Holy See dabbled in the secret arts of Etruscans and Egyptians (though those Egyptian temple-guardian lions are worth the current exhibit...

...There is much revealed in the Vatican exhibit that confirms the providential window-opening of the Good Pope John...

...And then he asked, "Will the pope again become the artist's friend?'' The question still hangs in the air-and will continue to hang so long as the collector mentality dominates the issue...

...Comparable examples could be drawn from all other tax brackets...

...Look around you, at the homes and public buildings we raze and build...

...And you sometimes wonder how it's going to happen that the conversation, that circulatory system called the "Catholic tradition," will survive and flourish in a culture which blurs and fuzzes all distinctions and edges...

...Nobody but its creator takes the Laffer curve very seriously these days, but everybody will agree that taxes should not be so high as to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs...

...It shook the scrupulous young Luther so much it took schism to regain his composure...

...income rose much faster than the inflation rate, contrary to many people's notions...

...A modest proposal: how about putting the two quandaries together...

...Pastors put out to pasture by enlightened despots and industrialists, it's as if they no longer recollected how to touch and awaken grace in human limb, eye, ear, and hand-craft-as if the Grail secreted in earth and body eluded them, had to be covered over like Michelangelo's naked saints on the Sistine wall...

...Certainly the whole thrust of the Reagan three-step tax cut was to tilt the income tax structure strongly in favor of the rich over the poor and the middle class, in the process significantly eroding the historic principle of a tax based on ability to pay...

...Whatever the merits of other complaints about the income tax - and we realize you may have many good ones - this is the one that should receive our first priority...

...Unlike income tax, this tax even in theory is regressive, with the effective rates higher for the poor than for the rich...

...In these years average U.S...

...And as Edmund Burke put it, "To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.'' Franklin and Burke were both right.Taxes are inevitable, if there is to be any kind of organized community at all...

...He should have trained his fire on Pope Julius II's inauguration of hoarding the Belvedere Torso out of public sight, hidden in his private garden...

...No doubt it was a sign of the Renaissance's psychological expansion that Pope Julius began the process of privatizing artswallowing old and new worlds whole as it were...

...A good many people we run into feel that our present level of taxation might not be too much if only taxes were spent primarily to help the poor and for other socially useful projects...

...There still remains, of course, a fundamental question: how much tax is too much...

...as it is, however, with such a high percentage of U.S...

...But back in that period real disposable personal income, calculated in terms of 1982 dollars, averaged $4,709 per person...

...Rome is too much...

...it should...

...Carter and even more under President Reagan has made it worse by also whittling away at the progressive principle of the income tax...

...After seeing the exhibit, one wondered whether Luther didn't have it all wrong to make such a fuss over trade in indulgences...

...Here the figures are encouraging...

...None of that creative chaos out of which emerges the great amen of the Mass...

...The conclusion: the U.S...

...Japan with 24.1 percent was the only major industrialized nation with a lower tax burden than the U.S., at least in part because of minimal defense expenditures and the fact that its elderly constitute a much smaller proportion of the population, thus requiring less expenditure on social services...

...Among the nations studied, Sweden hit a high of 53.5 percent of the national GNP, while Turkey was low with 22.5 percent...

...Percentages in West Germany and France were in the upper 30s, and the figure for Great Britain was 34.5 percent, maybe all this will make the wounds you suffered on April 15 smart a little less...

...Instead, the popes began, like the magnates they were, to collect art-objects-like so many emblems of lost grace...

...The criterion of selection seems to have been a big (safe) name doing something churchy-literally, like the Derain color experiment of that forlorn church at Carrieres-Saint-Denis, or something vaguely connected with traditional iconography like Matisse's cut-out, "the tree of life...

...From its inception, the income tax was always planned to be progressive in nature, that is, to levy taxes according to ability to pay...

...they are Everyman-made of the same forgetful carbon as the rest of us are...

...Apparently in saying this he expressed the real views of the administration...

...Benjamin Franklin said,' 'In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes...

...Granting that, though, how do our taxes compare with those in other industrialized nations, and how do the benefits from recent tax-cutting stack up...

...What had been a three-to-one ratio of the difference between the two families had fallen to a 1.3-to-one ratio...

...The Vatican show is full of paradoxical irony...

...Part of the problem is the Social Security payroll tax...

...Political rhetoric aside, who has benefited most from recent tax cuts...

...The Vatican's treasure of art, symbol of the "deposit of faith" it keeps, is about to move to Chicago from Fifth Avenue's Metropolitan Museum...

...By 1982 the poorer family still making half the median income had a tax rate of 20.1 percent, while the more comfortable family had a tax rate of 25.95 percent...

...The rich have benefited from recent tax cuts far more than the poor and the middle class...

...That figure has now risen to $9,363, partly because of real gains and partly because a larger proportion of the population now works...

...You say you're stumped at what to give that college graduate in your family this month...

...what there is no agreement on is when we reach that point...

...In our own time, Carl Jung passed out at the moment of trying to buy a ticket to Rome...

...Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pontiffs became great innovators in this museum craft, opening their treasures to the public and thus correcting Julius's egocentrism...

...Great patrons of art up through the sixteenth century, the popes largely ceased, by the seventeenth, to commission art as the proper humanizing soil for seeding the Gospel's word into the citizen's public square...