Correspondence
Correspondence The Catholic Worker Detroit, Mich. To the Editors; Ed Marciniak's letter [Sept. 9] pointing out the influence the Catholic Worker had in the field of interracial justice ought to...
...Clement Kern in Detroit...
...MARIE CONTI ORESTI Vice-President, Catholic Interracial Council tember 23) letters on Catholic Worker influence and the founding of Friendship House need just a few more clarifications...
...He's regressed from blind rage into catatonia...
...Scripture scholars do not have to risk the original objects of their studies writing them letters...
...In Zelig he is able to disguise his self-pitying artist bit, through the use of a clever conception, but there's a big problem: there's no protagonist...
...Just as Chaplin's early two-reelers were superior to his later work, which sacrificed humor for bathos and philosophy, Allen's films from Annie Hall on have been one long night of unfunny self-indulgence...
...These questions will be dealt with more definitively by Louise Sharum, OSB, who is revising her 1977 dissertation on Friendship House for publication...
...Also, if Allen's later work bears any comparison to Chaplin, it is with the mawkish little man of City Lights and the pretentious artiste of Limelight...
...Fields, the Marx Brothers, Mack Sennett, Mae West, Joe E. Brown, Buster Keaton, Fatty Ar-buckle, the Ritz Brothers, Laurel and Hardy and Preston Sturges...
...He practiced ecumenism, the works of mercy including prison work, ethnicity, a special apostolate to the Spanish-speaking...
...Allen's career failed to take a Keatonesque direction, not because he had greater talent than that comedic legend, but because his skills as a physical comedian and cinematic technician were clearly inferior to the master's...
...No wonder everyone talks about the look of this picture, it's all there is...
...His comedy of "be-musement'' is alien to the spirit of American life exemplified by such "gut busters" as: W.C...
...It would truly be a service to learning to compare the growing number of studies of Catholic movements of the 1930s and '40s to recent studies of ancient Christian communities, which have to work with much less evidence, and yet whose findings have a great impact on our Christian practice...
...We should be grateful to contemporary historians like Piehl and Sharum who take that risk...
...From the date of Father Kern's death, August 15, to his burial August 20, front page headlines and daily TV coverage documented the outpouring of thousands of Detroiters who testified to his love of the poor, or anyone in need...
...Woody Allen no longer has an emotional center we can identify with...
...Father Kern was one of a half-dozen "labor priests" in Detroit who encouraged Catholics to join unions...
...The early days of the Catholic Worker provided a special excitement for all of us who were a part of it (as were Father Kern, Lou Murphy, Ed Marciniak, Jim O'Gara, etc., etc...
...Suddenly, the man who had made us laugh out loud, thought that comedy was "the grade school of art" and remaking Bergman movies was a much more worthy calling...
...Once Father Kern met you, you were his "personal friend...
...9], Mr...
...Ann Makletzoff herself had been Dorothy's friend and CW volunteer since 1933 by the time she joined FH in 1938 in Harlem...
...9] pointing out the influence the Catholic Worker had in the field of interracial justice ought to have added that Peter Maurin was listed as one of the founders of the Catholic Interracial Council in New York...
...According to Catherine de Hueck Doherty's Fragments of My Life (Ave Maria Press, 1979) it was not long after she began feeding the poor in Toronto that Archbishop McNeil told her of Dorothy Day and paid her way to visit Dorothy in New York...
...ALBERT SCHORSCH Friendship House Woody gone arty Los Angeles, Calif...
...If the audience didn't appreciate his holier-than-thou approach, he made it clear it was their fault...
...There is ample documentation of Catherine's separate religious conversion and call to serve the poor, but there also have been many friendships among the people of CW and FH ever since 1934...
...To the Editors: Contrary to Colin L. Westerbeck's critique of Woody Allen ["The Invisible Man," Sept...
...More documentation can be found in the FH archives at the Chicago Historical Society and at the Madonna House archives in Combermere, Ontario...
...Another example of the influence of the Catholic Worker is found in the work of Msgr...
...Recently when I had asked him what influence the Catholic Worker had had on him, he said, "Everything . . . All...
...In them, Allen became Prince Myshkin to a corrupt world...
...DAN O'NEILL...
...The fact that the histories of the Catholic Worker and of Friendship House have proven increasingly complicated should make us all a bit more cautious...
...He seemed ashamed of his past work and became a misanthrope...
...I am sure Father Kern would have been a wonderful priest without the Catholic Worker, but the Worker gave him the channels into which he put his boundless energies...
...It is good to see its many fruits forty and more years later...
...The CW and FH connections have been well known, not so the differences...
...He was a strong supporter of our Catholic Interracial Council...
Vol. 110 • December 1983 • No. 21
