Editorials
Contents Volume CXI, Number 11 Illlll Correspondence 322 Editorials 323 A lay apostle: Joseph P.Fitzpatrick 325 Religion & reflex: John Garvey 327 Focus on policy, not embassy: J. Bryan...
...I step back and wait...
...But we know it...
...Her life and death reflect the spirit, the effort, the achievement of all of them...
...Each of us has known, as well, moments of seemingly total abandonment...
...Torture terrorizes...
...II II Dorothy M. Dohen A LAY APOSTLE REFLECTION OF AN ERA O N JANUARY 3, Dorothy M. Dohen died of cancer at her home in New York...
...In a recent shattering account of personal torture and imprisonment in Argentina, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, Jacobo Timerman wrote unforgettably of seeing another prisoner's eye through a peephole left ajar one night in April or May 1977...
...It marks all persons as superfluous, something even its victimizers intuit...
...Torture continues despite a growing international consensus against its use because, the report concludes, governments lack the "political will" to stop it...
...And we are saturated with flashbacks...
...And then return to the peephole...
...But the effort has shown significant progress in the last decade...
...The Brazilian Bar Association has courageously denounced disappearances since the mid-1970s...
...9 Actions by national legislatures...
...Whence political will...
...The Amnesty report suggests a variety of responses to shatter this silence...
...A telephone call in the night awakens the startled horror of arrest...
...Love of democracy does not necessarily prevent torture...
...A limited victory, the report notes, where any victory is significant...
...And not just through literature, history, and beastly newsreels...
...But when a human eye appeared at another peephole similarly left ajar and directed itself at Timerman, Timerman experienced an overwhelming sense of triumph...
...The report singles out statements by the Vatican as well as specific protests by Paulo Cardinal Arns of Sao Paulo in 1975 which diminished the use of torture at a military prison...
...He is doing the same . . . . That night we conquered death...
...9 Actions by national groups...
...It is a long-term prospect...
...THE VERY WORD tears open a horror deep within each one of us...
...9 Actions by international non-governmental organizations...
...Unlike generalized terms of human suffering -- war, revolution, Armageddon -- "torture terrorizes us because of its perfidious, precise assault on us as individuals...
...They had caught a vision of the meaning the Gospels gave to their young lives...
...It documents ninety-eight countries (more than a third of the world's 1 Jane 1984:323 Commonweal: 324 governments) which presently use or tolerate torture, governments in every geographical locale and of every ideological stripe, governments which often facilitate torture as an integral part of the security apparatus...
...The Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes, which was formed in Moscow in 1977, questioned the use of psychiatric institutions and mind-altering drugs in the Soviet Union...
...Its leaders have all been exiled or imprisoned since 1980...
...We have experienced the humiliation of bodily dysfunctions, "the terror upon entering an operating chamber...
...Contents Volume CXI, Number 11 Illlll Correspondence 322 Editorials 323 A lay apostle: Joseph P.Fitzpatrick 325 Religion & reflex: John Garvey 327 Focus on policy, not embassy: J. Bryan Hehir 329 Liturgical renewal -- twenty years later: Patrick W. Collins 330 Responsorials: Helene O'Shea 332 On the white-collar assembly line: Marc Levinson 334 Is Irish Catholicism dying?: Peadar Kirby 336 Screen: Tom O'Brien 337 Music: Robin H. Bidgoocl 339 I Books The Witches of Eastwick: Phillip Corwin 340 Inquest on the Shroud of Turin/ Report on the Shroud of Turin/ Portrait of Jesus: Michael Zeik 341 One Writer's Beginnings: Margaret Wimsatt 342 Inside Prime Time: Gaye Tuchman 343 In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens/ Mr...
...Dorothy made an 1 June 1984:325...
...We are reminded repeatedly: "This is my body, given up for you...
...Its means are seemingly endless, sometimes verging on the point of the exotic...
...She was editor of Integrity from 1952-56...
...It continues to know us...
...Office of Public Safety and to the closing of the International Peace Academy in Washington, institutes which allegedly trained practitioners from abroad in the arts of torture...
...That eye continues to look at us...
...Integrity unfortunately was terminated in 1956...
...9 Actions by inter-governmentol organizations...
...I.suddenly realize that the peephole in the door facing mine is also open and there is an eye behind it...
...Amnesty International's recent report, Torture in the Eighties (distributed by Dodd, Mead, $5.95), gives little solace about the pervasive application of torture in these 1980s...
...Its contagion is uncontrollable, once initiated...
...It is the Eye of the Last Judgment, the Eye of absolute justice and infinite compassion...
...Peter Steinfels Assistant Editor: David Toolan Editorial Assistant: Anne Robertson Columnists: John Garvey, J. Bryan Hehir, Abigail McCarthy Poetry: Rosemary Deen, Marie Ponsot Staff: Karen F. Silva, Harriette Balsky, Sheila Tanksley Advertising Manager: Ruth E. Taylor Publisher: Edward S.,Skillin TORTURE: TO SHATTER THE SILENCE 1 I I T ORTURE...
...True, we may not have experienced torture...
...Bedford and the Muses/ Pitch Dark: Jo-Ann Mort 345 The Burger Court: Isidore Silver 346 The Amazing Race/Multinationalism, Japanese Style/Why Has Japan Succeeded?: Peter Kovler 347 Transfiguration: David Toolan 348 Rice, Rivalry, and Politics: Patrick Jordan 349 Staff Editor...
...He is doing the same...
...It enforces oblivion...
...9 Actions by the church...
...It is radical evil, premised on absolute power...
...I' m startled...
...spent some time with the Grail and the Young Christian Workers...
...A teeming subway car instantly becomes a transport to Bergen-Belsen...
...We know it because we have all experienced its elements: our skin has at one time been burned...
...It closed about the same time that Dorothy's mother died...
...These include the anti-torture charters ratified by members of the Organization of American States and the Organization of African Unity...
...and Amnesty International itself with thirtythousand volunteers in forty-seven countries, have brought their leverage to bear...
...Initially, just to look out of his cell caused a rushing sense of freedom: "An entire universe has been added...
...She remarked to me shortly thereafter: "The Lord has placed a heavy burden on me, giving me two deaths to bear at the same time...
...She graduated from the College of Mount Saint Vincent in 1945...
...Denis Elliott, Senior Medical Officer at Gough Prison, Northern Ireland, who by drawing attention to prisoner abuse at Gough in 1978 caused significant reforms and prohibitions to be institutionalized there...
...9 Actions by individuals...
...It is, in Hannah Arendt's term, organized oblivion...
...Abuses by chartered adherents persist, but conscious liability has been intensified by criticism from other charter members...
...Its address is 300 West Apsley St., Philadelphia, Pa.-19144...
...Looking through the peephole is forbidden, and they've seen me doing it...
...She died as peacefully as she had lived, a humble servant of the Lord, completely committed to the lay apostolate, a remarkable example of the thousands of young people who created the lay Catholic movements of the post-World War II period of the Catholic church in the United States: Young Christian Workersl Young Christian Students, the Grail, the Catholic Action movements of the 1940s, the many dimensions of the lay apostolate...
...But she chose writing as her major apostolic work, articles in The Torch, Integrity, Commonweal, Blackfriars, and others...
...the Helsinki Watch...
...When he anticipated a pilgrimage to the cell at Puesto Vasco he wrote with burning dread: " I would have to relive that night when another eye looked back at me through the peephole.., an eye I never saw again but have carded with me as an integral part of my b o d y . . , so that something of the owner of that eye will continue to live...
...There is behind the main altar in one of California's old Spanish miss!0ns, an image of God's all-seeing eye, el ojo de Dios...
...Even the Skin touch of a loved one turns at suddenly unripe moments into the rent touch of one "disappe'ared...
...I wait longer...
...Timerman recently asked before an Argentine commission investigating systemic torture in the Argentine: "The real question has not been answered -- why were people silent...
...In the United States, American Christians for the Abolition of Torture, an ecumenical group founded in 1975 which emphasizes prayer, education, and local action, has joined its aims to those of Amnesty International...
...A central preoccupation of the young lay apostles was the development of a spirituality of the laity...
...The event took place at the prison called Puesto Vasco where Timerman and other Argentines were being tortured...
...Its aim is to kill the essential self of the victim by obliterating all legal and moral standing of the person...
...She published her first volume on spirituality, Vocation to Love, in 1950, and her second, Journey to Bethlehem, in 1958...
...W e have known, however briefly, interludes of exhaustion and hunger, ridicule, failure~ and spite...
...It is the Eye O f Judgment, of Presence...
...The report states that actions are needed on all these fronts and before world bodies...
...they had a sense of vocation to bring that vision to others, but to bring it as lay persons remaining amid the challenges and complexities of the every-day world...
...They've laid a trap for me...
...It was the efforts of Dr...
...Integrity announced itself as a journal "published by lay Catholics and dedicated to the task of discovering the new synthesis of Religion and Life for our times...
...Groups of unionists, jurists, and physicians...
...When Jacobo Timerman returned to Argentina recently from his new home in Israel, he was struck by the "surprising devotion to democracy that I find in the people who greet me on the streets...
...Dorothy Dohen was one of them...
...congressional hearings in 1971 and 1974 on torture in Brazil led to the abolition of the U.S...
...It was just that, a penetrating analysis of the social and cultural situations which either challenged the lives of Catholics or offered a promise of a richer and more meaningful expression of Catholic life...
Vol. 111 • June 1984 • No. 11
