A lay apostle
Fitzpatrick, Joseph P.
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...
...Father Joseph P. Fitzpatrick, S.J., is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Fordham University...
...She was also aware that, if she and her former colleagues at Integrity were to discover a new synthesis of religion and life for our times, they would have to understand our times...
...These include the anti-torture charters ratified by members of the Organization of American States and the Organization of African Unity...
...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...
...Her death, as was her life, was a hymn to Christian hope and joy and love...
...He lived with the tension between faith and scientific knowledge until death came to him, as it will'to us all, as the final tension resolver...
...She sought to do this through a study of sociology...
...She was at ease with believers of other faiths, an active member of the Ecumenical Commission of the New York archdiocese...
...Her first major sociological work was Woman in Wonderland (1960), a sociological analysis of the changing role of women in modem society...
...to live with his face to the existential winds that blow across the great void which modern science has opened up before us in many spheres, then it cannot really be Christian faith" ("Tensions Between the Believer and the Sociologist of Religion," Sociological Analysis, 1977...
...Sensitive to the way symbols of the sacred penetrate the simplest of our human acts, she cautioned against tearing these away before something could be put in their place...
...Certainly, this view of the matter seems to be a necessary one for American Catholics to take . . . . " . . . It is not only that we have disregarded the Negro's own claims, on merely natural grounds -- the grounds of their status as human beings -- to be relieved from their present position as an ostracized and exploited minority.., worse than that, we have disregarded the teachings of our own Church which tell us that beyond any doubt the Negro is entitled to our love and our justice because supernaturally he is, as much as the white man, the son of God, and our brother...
...They had caught a vision of the meaning the Gospels gave to their young lives...
...The desire to correct injustice led some lay apostles to become militants, others, active participants...
...She was deeply aware of the difficulties of faith in our modem world, aware of the corrosive effect of modem science and technology on the sense of the sacred, and the difficulty all of us have to keep our faith in this kind of environment...
...Dorothy made an 1 June 1984:325 _9 Going _ ~ From Commonwocd f i f t y y e a r s a g o . "To single out any one of the many grave social problems that are perplexing us today by describing it as the most important of all, may easily lead us into dangerous exaggeration, yet we think it is lrue that the problem of the Negro has more claims to be considered in that light than any other...
...The secular hero dies once...
...in sociology at Fordham in 1959, her Ph.D...
...Therefore, she dedicated her life intensively to prayer, and insisted that we pray also...
...When I entered college the Mass was in Latin...
...Although I have attended only a few synagogue services, I have noticed the same combination of inattention and ritual taken seriously...
...But unbelief remained a problem.She knew persons who were extraordinary human beings, sometimes with cultivated natural virtues beyond that of many of her Catholic acquaintances...
...Torture continues despite a growing international consensus against its use because, the report concludes, governments lack the "political will" to stop it...
...The Brazilian Bar Association has courageously denounced disappearances since the mid-1970s...
...She represents an era that may someday be seen as a golden age...
...Its leaders have all been exiled or imprisoned since 1980...
...That sort of complaint isn't uncommon...
...But she felt reform not deeply rooted in love would be either futile or destructive...
...9 Actions by international non-governmental organizations...
...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...
...She expressed the tension in a more personal way in a quote she used from her great teacher and colleague, Thomas F. O'Dea, on the occasion of his death...
...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...
...this was only one aspect on a professional level of the tension she felt between the believer (faith) and a secularist society...
...9 Actions by individuals...
...Its address is 300 West Apsley St., Philadelphia, Pa.-19144...
...Abuses by chartered adherents persist, but conscious liability has been intensified by criticism from other charter members...
...she saw it as the central problem of faith and belief in the modern world...
...It was the efforts of Dr...
...She had little confidence that we could set the world aright sin~ply by manipulating social processes and institutions, unless these were carried forward by a vision beyond this world...
...the Helsinki Watch...
...A limited victory, the report notes, where any victory is significant...
...It continues to know us...
...What we are losing is the lack of selfconsciousness, a lack which drives some people crazy whenever they encounter traditional religion or popular religious devotion...
...Groups of unionists, jurists, and physicians...
...It was the task of the Christian to confront this world with the love of Jesus, to seek to give it the order in which the image of God could be seen...
...Love of democracy does not necessarily prevent torture...
...Whence political will...
...She was editor of Integrity from 1952-56...
...She was an outstanding teacher and scholar in the field of sociology, and edited Sociological Analysis, the Journal of the Association of the Sociology of Religion, from 1970-72...
...It closed about the same time that Dorothy's mother died...
...congressional hearings in 1971 and 1974 on torture in Brazil led to the abolition of the U.S...
...Dorothy knew that the important aspects of her life -- her vocation to love, to the lay apostolate, to virginity, her positive acceptance of death as an integral part of the Christian mystery -- all this made no sense at all except through faith...
...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...
...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...
...A central preoccupation of the young lay apostles was the development of a spirituality of the laity...
...consciousness...
...That eye continues to look at us...
...What have we done if we no longer affirm the cross and resurrection?' ' T HROUGH THE influence of her friend Ivan Illich, she became aware of the increasing place of the social sciences in theology...
...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...
...It is the Eye of the Last Judgment, the Eye of absolute justice and infinite compassion...
...But, as for me, I seem to know what the atheist knows, and feel what the most arid secularist feels, what troubles me is the terrible plausibility of unbelief in our modem world...
...She repeated the prayer of Jesus for Saint Peter: "Simon, I pray for thee that thy faith fail thee not...
...Heroism as she described it consisted in the effort to make every smallest action of our day as perfect as possible in the love of Christ...
...and Amnesty International itself with thirtythousand volunteers in forty-seven countries, have brought their leverage to bear...
...9 Actions by national groups...
...and we dii~ in the Lord...
...Timerman recently asked before an Argentine commission investigating systemic torture in the Argentine: "The real question has not been answered -- why were people silent...
...Don't these people pay any attention to what they are doing...
...Yet they had no faith...
...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...
...the saint dies dally," was her theme...
...blessed be the name of the Lord...
...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...
...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...
...in 1966...
...But she chose writing as her major apostolic work, articles in The Torch, Integrity, Commonweal, Blackfriars, and others...
...to follow in the unknown, the traces of meaning accessible to his mind...
...many seeking to live the vocation to love in the hidden world of family and friends...
...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...
...In some people these gestures, done as a repeated part of ritual observance, smooth out over the years until they become stylized, one flow like the line at the edge of a piece of driftwood...
...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...
...But Dorothy Dohen was never completely at home in sociology...
...The report states that actions are needed on all these fronts and before world bodies...
...But they served to bringthe church into the modem world and created the envirohment in which Gaudium et Spes of Vatican II was possible and even anticipated...
...The Editors, "The Negro Problem" June 1, 1934 effort to articulate this...
...spent some time with the Grail and the Young Christian Workers...
...Thomas O'Dea personally experienced the religious dilemmas he wrote about with such great analytic power: especially the dilemma of the church confronting secular culture, and the dilemma of the Christian attuned to the demands of the absolute trying to live out his commitment to the here and now...
...9 Actions by inter-governmentol organizations...
...The many who were part of it are scattered today: m~nY like herself, called to the Lord...
...She was outspoken and persistent in her protests, often creating uneasiness among associates and friends...
...She graduated from the College of Mount Saint Vincent in 1945...
...She published her first volume on spirituality, Vocation to Love, in 1950, and her second, Journey to Bethlehem, in 1958...
...But she wrote to me of her fears: "I wonder if the leftist-oriented pastors and theologians realize what they are doing if they (in practice and perhaps unwittingly) take away the hope of the poor in the word to come (My Kingdom is not of this word...
...some shifted out of social activism into a quiet family life...
...She used to remark: "Saint Theresa (of Lisieux) referred to unbelievers as sinners...
...WAS IN AN Orthodox church in a small southern Illinois coal town when a middle-aged woman came in, crossed herself, kissed the icon at the end of the aisle, and walked back to a pew...
...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...
...The struggle is evident iri Dorothy's own experience...
...We live in the Lord...
...and, being strengthened yourself, strengthen the brethren...
...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...
...Living as a friend within one's family, serving a neighbor generously, struggling to correct injustice out of love for Christ: this would add up to a daily heroism that would eventually change the world, an achievement not of ourselves but of God working within us...
...It was a life completely of faith, but also a hidden darkness in which she faced alone the terrible mystery of unbelief...
...The Amnesty report suggests a variety of responses to shatter this silence...
...She understood Liberation Theology and respected many of the people involved in the radical movements of South and Central America...
...I f the Christian faith cannot enable a man to face the unknown without blinding himself to the fact that the mystery is there...
...She quoted her favorite saint to indicate what she 'meant: "As Theresa of Lisieux convinced her sisters of the soundness of her 'little way' by the demonstration of her heroic charity, we shall convince the world of Christ, and transform our environment by love" (Integrity, November 1952...
...But taking away what they call 'The pie in the sky approach' and substituting the hope of a successful social movement is not the answer either...
...Gradually Dorothy Dohen ceased to write serious sociological material...
...some have been lost...
...Dorothy Dohen was one of them...
...JOSEPH P. FITZPATRICK, S.J...
...Do they think these repeated actions will save them...
...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...
...At any rate, there is a self-consciousness which comes of this experience which makes us self-conscious even about self-consciousness...
...Dorothy was one of the early members of Pax Christi...
...But the effort has shown significant progress in the last decade...
...9 Actions by the church...
...Not only the physical world but the world of men and women was groaning under the burden of evil...
...Of several minds: John Garvey I RELIGION & REFLEX CAN FAITH SURVIVE SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS...
...Moreover, it cannot be isolated from those other problems, for it is part of all the primary political, economic, racial, and religious questions which in their totality make up the crisis of our civilization...
...How to relate the faith to such a society was not only a deeply troubling personal experience...
...She received her M.A...
...she was a consistent advocate of social justice...
...My children have relatively little connection with the church of my~childhood...
...A lot of Catholic liberals and fundamentalist Protestants are embarrassed by the old lady who moves her lips when she says her prayers, or by signs of the cross which are done rapidly and which seem to the non-participant's eye 1 June 1984:327...
...He did not resolve these dilemmas...
...Integrity unfortunately was terminated in 1956...
...She lived and died in the deep peace of the presence of the Lord, repeating near the end the line from Julian of Norwich: "Don't worry...
...within recent years a, generous volunteer for the care of the homeless in her parish...
...Maybe this is apparent only to someone whose liturgical experience is as varied as that of my generation (which is to say, those of us who are in our late thirties or early forties...
...The woman in the Orthodox church made me wonder about religions in the industrialized West these days (as a columnist it is my job to soar in this way from the particular to the grand) and about what we may be losing...
...She continued in a statement which reflects her own life as well as that of O'Dea, "The sociology of religion can involve the believer in agony -- true...
...She often quoted the passage from Romans (8:18-25), "The whole of creation has been groaning in one great act of giving birth...
...It is a long-term prospect...
...She devoted herself rather to a life of teaching and counseling students at the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University where she found her great satisfaction among the students and colleagues whom she loved and who came to love her...
...many still heroically active in the service of God and neighbor...
...I hope you know me well enough that you realize I am not saying we should not hunger and thirst and work for justice and a just social order here...
...The blind do not have to suffer garish sights, but their relief is the result of a handicap...
...Her more significant sociological study was Nationalism and American Catholicism, an analysis of the efforts of Catholic leaders in the United States to work out a relationship between the church and the dominant culture of the new nation...
...9 Actions by national legislatures...
...but not to be Commonweal: 326 forgotten is that this is a consequence of the fact that it is the believer who can 'see,' who has an intuitive understanding of the religious phenomenon he is studying...
...Her private life with the Lord was a life of profound spiritual experience, a life kept hidden from even her closest friends...
...Her life and death reflect the spirit, the effort, the achievement of all of them...
...There is something now which makes us uncomfortable around such traditional practices, with their ancient and familiar mix of prayer, attention, devotion, habit, inattentiveness, and lack of self...
...The Lord said to me: you shall see yourself that all manner of things shall be well...
...Her gesture had the swift and easy quality I have seen in Catholic churches when people enter, touch the water in the font and cross themselves as they move to their pews...
Vol. 111 • June 1984 • No. 11
