Rules for liberals

...Consider for a moment to what policies such a premise would commit the public...

...declaring that the book could no sion of Rome to forbid the use of the book These questions are good ones, but longer be used as a catechetical introduc- primarily the result of lobbying by one there are other important questions which 21 September 1984:487...

...I concede that this does not logically follow, but it does follow for all practical purposes...

...But at present and for the remotely foreseeable future, at least in the United States, the argument that personhood begins at conception plainly will not do as a premise for public policy...

...Abortion in hard cases, especially when performed early in the pregnancy, we'll just have to live with as best we can...

...I am interested in legitimizing pluralism," he said...

...In face of such an assumption the anti-abortion liberal must never tire of repeating what seems so obvious: that as a citizen objection to abortion is based on reason, not on faith or church discipline...

...conservative group, Catholics United for the Faith...

...Hence the premise from which these hypothetical policies and metaphysical conun- drums are derived --namely, that personhood begins at con- ception --is likewise politically unrealistic, no matter how meritorious it may be from a logical or metaphysical point of view...

...Does the fact that the author, Anthony Wilhelm, is a former priest have anything to do with Rome's objections to the book...

...In Johnstown he initiated a credit union ("Man does not live by bread alone, but by credit as well") that today includes 7,000 members...

...Weekly, for over two years, he met with other cancer patients at the Washington School of Psychi- atry for attitude therapy sessions...

...but, adds Nina Polcyn Moore, "her survivors are all who were moved by her example, her eloquence, and her overflowing dedication to the precept: 'Love one another.' " i Abortion debate RULES FOR LIBERALS MAKING THEIR VOICES HEARD T HE VICE PRESIDENTIAL candidacy of Geraldine Ferraro who is simultaneously a Roman Catholic, a liberal Democrat, and the defender of a pro-choice position on abortion --has assured that the abortion issue will remain front and center throughout the election season...

...When wealthy parishioners chided him for his outspokenness, warning such forwardness would limit his ecclesiastical rise, Fr...

...You can panic, be fearful, wary, and distressed, or you can go on...

...The anti- abortion liberal must maintain that opposition to abortion is not an isolated pro-life position...

...Her friend Nina Polcyn Moore recently wrote to us about her, "She was a white woman committed to change the face of the earth from that little begirming place in a black neighborhood...

...Friendship House had no chart or formula, recipe or manual...

...There was a ~ boldness in this approach...

...He was concerned for their sense of rootedness and continuity...

...They are giving up identity with those values and goals traditional to the church, and consequently are causing a crisis within themselves...

...You've got to have both...

...The two really loud voices in the political debate on abortion are of course the conservative pro-life camp (captained by Ronald Reagan) and the liberal pro-choice camp (led by virtually the entire top leadership of the national Democratic Party...

...David R. Carlin, Jr., is a senator in the Rhode Island state legislature...

...He was ordained in 1956, and soon stationed in a Johnstown, Pa., steel-mill parish where...

...What more probable moment, then, for the commencement of personhood...

...Geno Baroni, 53, who died in Washington, D.C...

...9 Remember that abortion on demand is the real political issue...

...Rather it is part and parcel of an opposition to all those forces which either eliminate, threaten Commonweal: 486 or diminish human life --the arms race, war, capital punish- ment, poverty, ignorance, disease, cultural deprivation, ra- cism, sexism, etc...

...Abortion on demand is the great scandal, the colossal national disgrace --that no society can live with which has not abdi- cated either its decency or its moral intelligence...

...Didn't Rome abuse its author- ity (or at the very least behave rudely) when it made its decision about the book without consulting any American bishop...

...His own last illness, after repeated bouts with cancer, was the mark of his own mettle...

...In the 1960s Baroni became the pastor of a racially diverse parish in Washington, D.C...

...u So a good rational case can be made that a human person is present from the moment of conception...

...9 Underline the faith~reason distinction...

...decided by moral reason --makes perfectly good sense: While she personally, as a result of her religious beliefs, disapproves of abortion, she doesn't feel entitled to force those beliefs on others...

...She was survived by three children...

...Baroni wryly responded: "Me, a bishop...

...Nor is that all: how do adherents of full-personhood-at-conception regard the vast number of spontaneous abortions and spontaneous failures of implantation in the uterine wall...

...But given the degree of current attention to the abortion question, there exists the chance --a slim chance, no doubt, but still a chance -- that some notice will be given to this third, apparently eccentric, position...

...After all, what moment is more likely to mark the inception of personhodd...

...I'm just an Italian kid lucky to be ordained at all...

...Just as it is t of bounds to justify public policies with arguments drawn from revelation, so it is out of bounds to justify them with rational arguments that are so abstruse or so problematical that they cannot hope to command even the grudging assent of public opinion...

...Ann Harrigan Makletzoff reflected on her Friendship House experience six years ago in Commonweal ("Living a Revolu- tion," Dec...

...Marcy Kaptur of Ohio recently recalled that at a meeting of community leaders from around the country she discovered "that the thing we all had in common was that we became involved in public life because of Geno...

...What follows are some suggested rules for liberal anti-abortionists should they join the current debate...

...He conducted healing services at his old parish, and told friends, "There's a great tension between the will to live and the will to die...

...5, 1978...

...As Pope John XXIII would have put it,' 'Ah, what a good life, and what a fine death...

...I think that the sense of identity and heritage is very important to the life of the church," he told the Notre Dame Journal of Education in 19"~3...

...It is contended with a. good deal of plausibility that the personhood of the fetus from the moment of conception is a reality accessible to reason, not a pure datum of faith...

...Though an elementary blunder, there exists the widespread belief that the wrongness of abortion is not supposed to be a rule discoverable by moral reason but is rather a kind of in-house morality peculiar to religious communities, e.g., Catholic~, Southern Baptists, Orthodox Jews --akin to the Moslem prohibition on eating pork...

...But not simply an activist or social mover, his concern was genuinely pastoral, for the life of parishes and his fellow workers...

...We have now had both --his life and his death...

...This involvement was presumed by Baroni...

...It would have to prohibit not simply abortion on demand but abortion in all cases, even the hardest of the hard cases...

...Once it is granted that abortion ought to be debated as a matter of common moral reason, not as a matter of super- natural revelation, it follows that the real political issue is not whether abortion should be allowed in "hard cases" (rape, incest, the life and safety of the mother, etc...

...but whether it should be allowed "on demand" --that is, for any reason, no matter how trivial, and at any time, no matter how late in the pregnancy...

...9 Maintain a generalized pro-life context...

...DAVID R. CARLIN, JR...

...In recent times, she was encouraged by friends to complete an account of her work...

...So he marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., founded the Campaign for Human Development, estab- lished neighborhood development groups in over forty-five cities, and served as undersecretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development...

...last month after a long struggle with peritoneal mesothelioma cancer...

...It would have to forbid all birth control devices which function not by prevent- ing conception but by preventing the fertilized ovum from implanting on the wall of the uterus...

...Ordinary white people met ordinary black people and became friends...

...He was rightly known as one of the most effective and innovative Catholic social ac- tionists of this generation, and we shall miss him...

...Once this is assumed, it seems plainly absurd for Catholics and others to attempt to "impose" the special rules of their faith on the public at large...

...Precisely where the shifting boundary line lies at the moment between acceptable and unacceptable rational justifications I am not sure...

...Born of an immigrant coal-mining family in Acosta, Pa., Baroni brought the stamina of the laborer to all he did, and a relish for ethnic variation...

...You can say, 'I have to learn how to live,' and not let something die within you while ygu're supposed to be waiting for the end...

...He called these sessions "the best medicine I've got...

...they are hoping to have it published soon...

...Lost in the din of these voices is the wee quiet voice of the liberal anti-abortion camp...

...in this vein Geraldine Ferraro's defense of her pro-choice position --a defense that would be merely silly if the morality of abortion is something that can be...

...9 Ann Harrigan Makletzoff died of cancer in Toronto last June 23...

...Many of our priests and nuns are . . . moving away from their heritage, their culture, and their traditions...

...this is a discussion the morally and philosophically sensitive citizen will want to continue...

...He recalled that in high school, "When I took my salami sandwiches to school, the teacher fussed about the smell...

...The leap from non-personhood to personhood is so vast, metaphysically speak- ing, that it must be marked by some correspondingly dramatic leap in the physical order...

...But this is also a case which in 1984 and for the indefinite future will surely be more successful in a ilOsophical seminar than in the political arena...

...But gradualism is the mark of every moment of embryonic development except the first, the moI II I II Of several minds: John Garvey I 'CHRIST AMONG US' A CLOSER LOOK AT THE CRITICISMS ment of conception...

...Is collegiality dead...

...the pastor spoke for the company, and I spoke for the union...

...It is at this moment that our genetic identity is fixed, that our histories begin...

...Is it right for the Vatican to suppress a book withB Y ORDERING the imprimatur re-tion for adults, the Vatican raised a out saying what it finds objectionable in moved from Christ Among Us and number of good questions: Was the deci- it, as was done with Christ Among Us...

...A volunteer in the interracial apostolate of Baronness de Hueck's Harlem Friendship House, in 1942 she went to Chicago at the invitation of Bishop Bernard Shell to become one of the founders of a Friendship House there...

...SEEKERS AFTER JUSTICE .9 "Ah, what a good life, and what a fine death...

...Such diversity was salt to him, and his naturally cheerful spirit combined with a tactical gift for building concordances...