Editorials
Volume CXI, Number 21 Correspondence 642 Editorials 643 Fairness gets a break: Nancy Amidei 645 A socialist witness: Harry Fleischman 646 The third branch: Abigail McCarthy 648 The church &...
...None of this is to imply that the draft pastoral cannot be improved...
...Budget Director Stockman is readying the next round of budget cuts and policy changes, and the assault will not be held off by any abstract numerical edge...
...This, we are told, is bad economics...
...But of course it is not...
...Special two-year rate: U.S., $43...
...The result in the U.S...
...A CBS exit poll found support for increased federal spending "to aid the poor...
...It allows plenty of room for pluralism in the church, for dissent and debate...
...For now, however, we direct our readers' attention to his article and invite their reactions...
...bank...
...It is for everyone to speak out -- business, bishops, everybody...
...It also skews political power and regularly derails even the most widely accepted government efforts to guide or cushion the marketplace...
...II II CHURCH & STATE (CONT...
...Telephone: (212) MU 3.2042...
...As in other years, incumbents tended to be reelected, including those with strong positive records on civil rights and poor people's programs...
...To the American business community he said recently: "What we have to say to those who invest in South Africa is that your investment is a moral as well as an economic issue...
...Hurley pied not guilty to the charge, conviction for which could lead to an eight-year sentence, and/or fines of up to $12,000...
...Peter Steinfels Assistant Editors: David Toolan, Karen Sue Smith, Patrick Jordan Production Editor: Anne Robertson Poetry: Rosemary Deen, Marie Ponsot Columnists: John Garvey, J. Bryan Hehir, Abigail McCarthy Staff: Karen F. Silva, Harriette Balsky, Patricia Mazzola Advertising Manage...
...Economics, however, can never be wholly value-free, and the question is whether the bishops' letter makes sense as a prescription for a more humane set of policies...
...His grandparents were strongly anti-slavery...
...Botha's implied affront in not issuing a comment on Bishop Tutu's selection is not without precedent...
...The other new senators: Gore of Tennessee, Simon of Illinois, and Harkin of Iowa, have good records on social issues and (particularly in the case of Harkin) replace incumbents with less favorable records...
...economy in the nation's distinct political accomplishments and on proving that, would you believe it, our economy works better than the economies of Argentina, Tanzania, and Poland, that it provides little guidance to the problems America faces in the eighties...
...the enormous impact of our economy on the well-being of less developed nations...
...Perhaps the bishops are a topic not worthy of elementary logical distinctions...
...Rabbi Hertzberg has labored long and constructively in the fields of religion and public policy...
...he has an excess of personal credentials to qualify for a hearing on this matter...
...These gifts are detailed by the pastoral, and their strengths and variety are evident in the composition of the letter itself_9 As the bishops state, "we learned to celebrate in the midst of sorrow, to hope in the depths of despair, and to fight for freedom in .the face of all obstacles . . . . This is the responsibility that freedom brings: to teach to others its value, and work to see that its benefits are denied to none...
...In every aspect it is one of good news, full of the strength and deep joy that spring from the unique experience of black Americans_9 The letter echoes Paul VI's admonition to the people of Uganda: "You must now give your gifts of blackness to the whole church...
...Other criticism was yet further off target...
...There will be seven new senators, only one of whom has a record of support for the president's tax, budget, and other social policies, and that's Phil Gramm of Texas...
...As they stood in a body before their Franciscan superior, there was a simple, tangible, significant bond among them...
...Apparently, it was merely coincidence that the group consisted almost entirely of corporation executives and political activists linked to the Reagan administration...
...Three days after the Nobel selection, the South African government charged Bishop Tutu's Catholic counterpart, Archbishop Denis Hurley of Durban, president of the South African Catholic Bishops' Conference, with revealing police information...
...10016...
...It can and will be...
...To a Roman Catholic witness, the startling nature of the ceremony lay not in the fact that both the deacon and sub-deacon at the ceremony were women who fulfilled their duties in the solemn rites with such prayerful completeness, nor the eloquence of the bishop's own homily, but the disarming simplicity with which Bishop Tutu renewed his own promises at the side of this fellow Tertiaries...
...Some of the major points made by this "lay commission" could well be incorporated or emphasized in the bishops' letter...
...This sense that the bishops' letter helps restore some needed balance to the political-economic debate in the wake of Mr...
...Ruth E. Taylor Publisher...
...They will applaud the bishops for hitting so hard and challenging the nation to rethink its policies in the name of the weU-being of all people...
...Skillin Commonweal, [ISSN 0010-3330] A Review of Public Affairs, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, is published biweekly, except monthly Christma~New Year's and July and August, by Commonweal Foundation, 232 Madison Ave., Ne~, York, N.Y...
...It is no wonder that such a small, energetic, bright man as Bishop Tutu can send tremors through a government...
...It measures that performance by standards which some might find obvious and unassailable but are nonetheless quite different from those by which our economy is daily judged: human dignity...
...Black American Catholics have countess gifts and strengths they are willing to share...
...Not all the reaction was so favorable...
...The Gramm election, like John Kerry's in Massachusetts and Jay Rockefeller's in West Virginia, probably represents no real change because in each case they are much like their predecessors...
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...those who have studied a little more economics are likely to give the bishops a serious hearing...
...Volume CXI, Number 21 Correspondence 642 Editorials 643 Fairness gets a break: Nancy Amidei 645 A socialist witness: Harry Fleischman 646 The third branch: Abigail McCarthy 648 The church & the economy: Paul Steidi-Meier, F. Byron Nahser, Rachel A. Willis, Rady Oswald 650 i The case for untidiness: Arthur Hertzberg 655 Putting the famine in context: J. G. Donders 658 Screen: Tom O'Brien 659 Books Critics' Christmas choices:Jane Howard, William F. May, Elizabeth Shannon, John Calvin Batchelor, Marie Ponsot, Irving Louis Horowitz, Russell McCormmach, Evelyn Eaton Whitehead, Richard E. Hage, Margaret R. Miles 662 Ill Illll IIIllll Staff Editor...
...The Reader's Digest declared: "He Never Got Elected_9 But He Altered Our Government...
...Will's own argument can be seen from his conclusion that since the bishops morally censure the present distribution of wealth in America, they are morally condemning "the most successful society the world has known...
...On page 655 of this issue, Arthur Hertzberg challenges not only our view on this question but the whole natural law framework which supports much of the Catholic church's -and not only the church's -- approach to linking morality and public policy...
...Other capitalist economies outperform ours in many respects, and yet feature far more equitable distributions of income...
...But as Bishop Tutu would point out, neither does the "Quiet Diplomacy" of the United States...
...One might question whether these executives had gotten their money's worth...
...dollars by International Money Order or by check on a U.S...
...And, an electorate that was supposedly going for greed in a big way, elected and re-elected members of both parties with strong public records in favor of civil rights, social justice, and programs for poor people...
...That may also prove to be the case with Mitch McConneU, the newly-elected moderate Republican from Kentucky who beat Walter Huddleston -- not for his votes on social issues, hut for votes he missed...
...Similarly, President P.W...
...has read last week's book on the poverty problem and he is certain that the bishops have not...
...If they have spoken strongly, there is every sign they have done so after deliberation...
...The bishops' draft has been welcomed in many quarters...
...The draft pastoral letter on the American economy is actually modest in scope but uncompromising in stance...
...David Gergen, former Reagan adminiscation press official, wrote in a syndicated column for the Los Angeles Times that "the bishops have spoken up at exactly the right time and in the right way: at a moment when the nation is about to make crucial economic decisions, the bishops have said we must focus once again on the rising tide of poverty...
...The bishops "hurl clichts," are guilty of "childlike innocence," commit "sloppy writing," "confuse exhortation with argument," and "never entertain a doubt about government programs...
...It is the question of whether the creativity we prize in regard to material products can also be applied to social and economic institutions -- or whether we have abandoned that creativity somewhere in America's past...
...The quality of Mr...
...An American State Department official stated last week that violence does not hold the solution for the complex situation in South Africa...
...The make-up of the Congress holds out the promise of real progress on the fairness front, but realizing that promise will depend on the willingness of the politics-weary to stay involved...
...But, the pastoral notes, without guidance and support from the church, "the wealth of black giftedness risks being lost...
...Their attitude of economic knowingness is only part of their defenseworks...
...Reagan's landslide was not expressed only by liberals...
...Single copy, $1.25...
...It is concerned with performance more than structures...
...It is amusing to see individuals who are silent about J. Peter Grace's dubious claims of government "waste," about the president's fantasies concerning the deficit, and about the hocus-pocus of Laffer curves now cavil at the bishops' lack of economic s e r i o u s n e s s . Consider one of the bishops' most controversial points...
...The letter, published in September, is the first of its kind from America's black Catholic bishops, and we hope only the In'st...
...As for truth in advertising, the letter was accompanied by a press release claiming that its organizers had sought out "a representative group of lay Catholics...
...They have been fully exposed to all the currents of opinion in favor of shifting resources to the "productive" and cutting back government assistance to the unemployed and the poor...
...The New York Daily News, while disagreeing with the bishops on several points, called their letter a "remarkable document.., a sermon that enriches the American consideration of economics and morality...
...The Economist of London was quick to point out (October 20) that in its view Bishop Tutu is not a peacemaker but simply a "man of good will...
...In the final analysis, we continue to disagree with Rabbi Hertzberg...
...So it is not all bleak, as some feared, but the real challenge posed by the election is to us...
...If there is a moment in history when this gift, in the United States as well as in Africa, must not be squandered, it is the present_9 Norman Thomas centennial A SOCIALIST WITNESS GOD, GOODNESS, & QUIET HEROISM N OVEMBER 20, 1984 marked the one hundredth birthday of Norman Thomas, the six-time presidential candidate of the Socialist party from 1928 to 1948...
...Those who have read a little economics may shrug off the bishops' concern with equitable income distribution as moral naivett...
...Finally, in light of the attention lavished on recent American pastorals on peace and the economy, we would fail utterly if we did not voice fitting appreciation for the recent pastoral letter of the American black bishops on evangelization: "What We Have Seen and Heard" (St...
...Voting against the president, while the networks' election.night maps remain vivid in people's minds, will take considerable courage -- and strong evidence of suppport from the voters back home...
...It isn't just that the choices made November 6 were relatively less bad than might have been...
...Silk has already observed that "many will seek to dismiss the bishops' report as sentimental or ideological...
...Unfortunately, too much of the criticism encountered by the bishops has been of distinctly poor quality, what Gergen does not hesitate to call "a caterwauling among otherwise thoughtful observers that is dismaying if not disheartening...
...SHORTCHANGING THE PASTORAL T HE BISHOPS HAVE SPOKEN the right word at the right time...
...lhe election debate over religion and pOlltaCS was sometimes silly, sometimes scarey, sometimes substantial...
...What strikes us about so many of these reactions is their air of unearned knowingness...
...All Canadian and foreign subscriptions must be paid in U.S...
...The House of Representatives is a more complicated matter, but there too, the election was not a rout for the fairness crowd...
...Canada, $47...
...Writing under his own name in the Washington Post, Novak directly distorts the bishops' letter, claiming that it calls for federal government limits on personal income and wealth, that it finds recent job creation in the U.S...
...The president's coattails were so short that Bob Michel, Republican leader in the House of Representatives, called the president "a son of a buck" for his selfish focus on a big personal win and an unwillingness to work for state and local candidates...
...there are only shortages of good will...
...Appalled by the deplorable slum conditions in New Commonweal: 646...
...for most of what he wants to do he'll need the support of the Congress, and there the news is surprisingly good...
...GIFTS SEEN & HEARD On October 16, one day after representatives from the government and warring factions met in La Palma, stirring the slightest embers of hope for some resolution to El Salvador's bloody civil war, the Nobel Committee announced the recipient of its 1984 Peace Prize, fifty-three-year-old Bishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu of South Africa...
...Although they invested $100,000 to hold hearings like the bishops', their final document owed far more to the recent writings (mostly available in paperback) of Michael Novak than to anything else...
...Born in Marion, Ohio in 1884, Norman Thomas was the son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers...
...It does not pass any final judgment on capitalism or oven attempt a full-scale analysis of the nation's economic system...
...Canada, $26...
...Even before the letter has been adopted by the council of bishops, it is having a powerful effect on the national economic debate, shifting the burden of responsibility for further cuts in social spending to those who advocate such cuts...
...For these reasons, we welcome this article (as well as the author's willingness to state his position on an admittedly complex matter in so brief and direct a fashion...
...If these responses were tendentious, George F. Will was supercilious...
...But the commission's own document is itself so bent on wrapping the U.S...
...to he morally unacceptable, and that it is "whiney" in tone...
...The bishops, he wrote, believe "there are no intellectual difficulties, no insoluble problems...
...The bishops do not pull their punches on what they believe is right," wrote New York Times economics columnist Leonard Silk...
...It does not reveal that economy's inner cotitradictions, as radical critics might have hoped, nor does it celebrate the springs of that economy's successes, as enthusiastic boosters have urged...
...According to news agencies, thousands of blacks have been forced from their homes, many have been imprisoned, and 155 have been killed since the first of the year...
...Meanwhile, South Africa has recently experienced the greatest degree of civil unrest since the 1970s, this following the implementation of the new South African constitution in September...
...Economic growth -- and therefore the well-being of the needy -- is dependent on those disparities...
...more to the point, he seems to toss out more than a few cliches himself, trading heavily on the handy stereotype of clerics as preachy naifs...
...Will is demonstrably wrong on many of these particulars...
...The preemptive letter issued by a group of prominent Catholics was perhaps all too revealing an example of the kind of 30 November 1984:643 entrepreneurship they praised so highly...
...Since all have been in Congress, their I several churches being imposed on those of other persuasions in violation of the First Amendment" ("Religion & Politics: Clearing the Air," Sept...
...My fears are the fears of so many that we could very well have a blood bath...
...Overall, the Republicans gained only fourteen seats, and the ideological mix is thought to have changed little...
...Many economists will answer this question affirmatively, holding +that the bishops have brought together competent economic analysis and a clear-eyed view of actual conditions in the United States and other countries...
...Nor does he save his insights for those at home...
...He and a small group of fellow Franciscan Tertiaries were renewing their annual promises as members of the Third Order with its special vocation of peacemaking...
...What faces this society as its economy undergoes major changes is not the question of leveling capitalism for some state-directed monolith...
...Meanwhile, it is important that the discussion not end with the first Tuesday in November...
...Anthony Messenger Press...
...Peter's Episcopal Church...
...foreign, $53...
...NANCY AMIDEI (Nancy Amidei is the former director of the Food Research and Action Center in Washington, D.C., and has just been awarded the Kenny and Marianne Rogers 1984 World Hunger Media Award...
...Norman Podhoretz took the same tack -exaggerating the bishops' proposals in order to more easily dismiss them...
...It will be a while before observers sort out,how much of each...
...the opportunity of all, and especially the poor, to participate in the life of the community...
...The truth is that many of the critics who dismiss the bishops as trapped within a set of uncritically adopted clichts, are themselves walled up behind a set of unexamined assumptions...
...The first black person elected general secretary of the South African Council of Churches and now the fLrSt black Anglican Bishop of Johannesburg, he has said, "Jesus Christ is involved in the liberation struggle...
...One of the controversial points in that discussion was abortion...
...Thomas studied for the ministry at Union Theological Seminary...
...As Michel and other House members from both parties quickly grasped, that leaves them without a coalition in place to finish the Reagan agenda...
...And, when Norman Thomas died in 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson, whom Thomas criticized on the Vietnam War, said: "With the passing of Norman Thomas, America loses one of its most eloquent speakers, finest writers, and creative t h i n k e r s . . . He was a humane and courageous man who lived to see many of the causes he championed become the law of the land...
...The text, the footnotes, and the hearings undertaken by Archbishop Weakland's committee all suggest that the bishops have reached their conclusions in full awareness of the complexities of employment policy, poverty programs, and income distribution...
...But it is also true that, particularly as regards abortion, his views are representative of a wide body of opinion...
...We have seen a similar phenomenon in Brazil's Dom Helder Camara...
...To a government based on apartheid, he makes human barriers seem to dissolve_9 He displays as well a secret, compressed, inner joy and self-confidence which utterly baffle his powerful opponents...
...For people on the fairness front lines, November 6 was not Armageddon...
...He liberated us from the bondage of sin -- and oppression is an expression of sin...
...The evidence is quite otherwise...
...He lost every race but, in the words of United Auto Workers' president Walter Reuther, was the "unofficial president of the better society that had--and still has--to be created...
...The~y argue not only in favor of a minimal provision for the needy, but they add that our society's disparities in income and wealth are morally unacceptable...
...Following the Civil War his maternal grandfather, Stephen Mattoon, was president of a Presbyterian college for Negroes in Charlotte, North Carolina, now known as Johnson C. Smith University...
...Archbishop Hurley's trial is to begin in Febmary, and stems from a 1983 news conference at which he released a report on South African troop atrocities against civilians in Namibia...
...II imposing "religious" beliefs provokes in many fellow citizens of intelligence and good will...
...POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Commonweal, 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...Senate was a net plus, and in the House of Representatives virtually no change, except that liberals and moderates of both parties sound more inclined to stand up to the lame-duck president...
...George Will is too good a thinker not to know the difference between condemning a part and condemning the whole...
...Reagan was able to do a lot of damage in his first term, but second term or first, he cannot impose his views by fiat...
...Such views were voiced last year in Eastern-bloc publi30 November 1984:645 cations over the selection of Poland's Lech Walesa for the 1983 prize...
...This journal has long argued that abortion was not a religious issue, not, that is, in the specific sense that opposition to abortion was "a religious 'doctrine' of a single church or Commonweal: 644 THE FAIRNESS FRONT NOVEMBER WAS NOT ARMAGEDDON A FI'~R WEEKS of dreading that election day might . bring a death blow to politicians (of both parties) bwith good records on the "fairness" issues, November 6 has come and gone and things don't look so terrible...
...an equitable distribution of goods...
...It is extremely important for Catholics, and for opponents of abortion generally, to recognize the incredulity which their claim not to be pro-fairness positions were a matter of public record...
...One can argue that that maldistribution skews the markets that economists prize so highly and creates all kinds of inefficiencies...
...9 . . This is our last peaceful chance...
...foreign, $29...
...Scarcely two weeks before the Nobel announcement, Bishop Tutu had taken part in a ceremony on the feast of St...
...Francis held at Manhattan's St...
...EdwardS...
...In fact, its most important immediate impact may be to open up a space in the present climate of opinion where alternatives to Reaganism and Thatcherism can get a hearing...
...William F. Buckley, Jr...
Vol. 111 • November 1984 • No. 21
