Editorials
Contents Volume CXL, Number 3 Correspondence 66 Editorials 67 Winnowing PPSSCC: Jeremiah Baruch 69 Amateur hour: Nancy Amidei 71 Ideology vs. the IAF: Alexander Wilde 72 When words go...
...We will miss both the man and his work...
...Going _ ,, 0 From Commonweal t w e n t y - f i v e y e a t s a g o : "It seems to me that the spirit of Catholicism is based on an openness of mind and of vision that militates against everything that is petty, sectarian, pietistic or tainted with puritanism...
...The pope's visit to the cell of Mehmet Ali Agca caught the world's imagination --- like so much of what the pope does...
...He is certainly fight...
...COHmODWHI RACE TO THE FINISH ~1~ UR WORK is not finished," Ronald Reagan explained in announcing his U candidacy for reelection...
...Here is found the area of utmost freedom...
...It was hard not to sympathize with Greeley's complaints, for whatever one may think of him as a polemicist and fiction-writer, as a professional sociologist Greeley has been outstanding...
...Looming above these claims and counter-claims about policies, is of course, Ronald Reagan's own personality and his incomparable talent for articulating his plans and dee~s in terms of deep-rooted national sentiments...
...Canada, $26...
...Republican governors in the 1960s favored a "good government" device of inducing businessmen to undertake wellpublicized management studies of their state bureaucracies and then claiming the results as great savings to the taxpayer...
...10 February 1984:67 ON THE POPE'S .GESTURE Nineteen Eighty-Four, the novel, ends with a flash of images in the mind of the gin-drenched hero: from the white-filed corridor of the Ministry of Love to the enormous face of Big Brother...
...On the first two of these points, the experts (the "naysayers," President Reagan would call them) certainly share a lot of the Democrats' fears...
...But isn't this only the tired carping of a kind of postconciliar Catholic, reflexively looking for the ungenerous interpretation of whatever the papacy and Vatican do...
...There are commission proposals that have been around from time immemorial and very little has been done about them...
...As observed in the weighty final report, the president had decided to establish the PPSSCC because he "has always had a long-standing philosophical commitment to the goal of conducting the affairs of government according to principles of sound business and fiscal management . . . . " The question arises as to whether the principles of business are applicable to governmental operations...
...c) war, in Central America or the Mideast or even worse...
...I think it was an admirable gesture," a Catholic woman at a post-holiday gathering declared, "but would the pope have visited Hans Kiing...
...Reagan on January 16 by Chairman J. Peter Grace after more than two thousand "private sector volunteers," led by a 161-member executive committee (which constitutes "a major segment of the business leadership of the U.S...
...But the various techniques that Monsignor Ligutti developed and so happily exemplified would be, if greatly expanded, a boon among many of the hard-pressed peoples of the third world today...
...Item: Congress prevents closing bases the military wants to eliminate (savings $3.1 billion...
...Item: the panel observes that more than a third of the nation's post offices (12,469) serve one hundred or fewer customers (savings $272 million...
...The president referred to his California experience with satisfaction at a March 1982 luncheon inaugurating the venture of new Commission Chairman Grace and his executive committee...
...Monsignor Ligutti rounded out his productive and distinguished career as the Vatican's permanent observer at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization from 1949 to 1970...
...Special two-year rate: U.S., $43...
...It is the Democrats' contention that we are not digging a basement but a hole in the ground and that the rewards of recent sacrifices are threatened by (a) another economic recession once the deficit triggers fight money...
...Their readiness to deal with the deficit is not all that apparent...
...John Paul and Hans Ki~ng, our friend and the pope --how about us...
...There is reason for some skepticism that such a saving could be realized -- even if the proposals were politically feasible, which some clearly are not...
...foreign, $53...
...One would think, then, that the Democrats would be in fine shape...
...The PPSSCC's final report, the press release, and Grace's press conference were replete with good anecdotal material on inefficient and costly governmental practices...
...After telling a couple of good stories about finding "fantastic savings," he noted that 1,600 of the business executives' 2,000 recommendations were implemented in his administration...
...Commonweal: 68 _9 Some years ago, Andrew M. Greeley publicly expressed a great deal of bitterness about being refused tenure at the University of Chicago...
...Are we willing to hold out a reconciling hand not merely to those no longer able to create difficulties for us but to, well, a Michael Novak...
...Guatemala: a new form of totalitarianism...
...dollars by International Money Order or by check on a U.S...
...could be abolished (savings $1 billion...
...Reagan's, the way they have swung back and forth on Lebanon suggests they offer no more direction for that tinderbox +region than does the administration...
...The president promised lower taxes, a balanced budget, and economic recovery...
...It is true that the speaker, as woman and wife, had a number of grievances against John Paul II, but she knew that her point cut more than one way: "Am I willing to be reconciled with him,even though he keeps encouraging policies that I believe injure me and my daughters...
...Single copy, $1.25...
...i I IIINillNil/I I l i e J Washington report WINNOWING PPSSCC SOME SKEPTICISM IS CALLED FOR ~~I~USlNESS WIn-lOUT profit is not business anymore i ~ than a pickle is candy...
...Item: all the military commissaries in the continental U.S...
...A lot of Americans suspect that the country and the world don't really work the way that their apple-cheeked and crinkly-eyed leader, by maxim and anecdote, insists...
...Given the absence of profit as an objective of government, if one were to take to heart the words of Charles Fredcrick Abbott, they might be serving pickled jelly beans at the White House...
...The navy task force, for 10 February 1984:69...
...It is on this frontier, as I see it, that the opinion-journalist must take his stand, even at the cost of being a controversial figure, which is a cheap enough price to pay...
...90 + _9 . m i l i i . . . ' , . l . . . . ; . = I i . ,.,,.'I'.,,.' llP+dL.'q _9 '&'I,I+.'S ,II l , . :..l,,nill'i" | ~ aunnD,, o . . . . l l , - i r . . . . . , . i 1 0...
...From many different quarters came the acknowledgment that a lesson had been taught...
...Unfortunately, the reflecting, once started, does not stay put...
...it is seldom one encounters a deed that nourishes the future in itself and yet is so deliciously savored with irony...
...And the durability of recovery, unquestionably here at last, appears to depend heavily on how the tangle of taxes, spending commitments, and deficits gets straightened out...
...not of Big Brother's triumphant gaze but of the Holy Father's bowed head...
...It is here, too, that the ultimate argument against a party-line mentality is to be found...
...bank...
...The commission's thirty-six task force reports and eleven special studies provide the support (together with 1.8 million pages in background materials) for the final report's 2,478 recommendations and a claimed total savings potential of $424.4 billion over three years...
...President Reagan announced the creation of the commission on February 18, 1982, and signed the executive order officially establishing what has come to be known as the PPSSCC or the Grace Commission on June 30, 1982...
...Unsolicited manuscripts are welcome but cannot be considered or returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...Well, okay, if John Paul II were not a master of the media, then no one, not Time nor Commonweal either, would have been provoked into writing, or reflecting...
...He was buried in Iowa in the countryside he so greatly loved...
...and though their approach to Central America and Moscow might be far more modulated than Mr...
...Whether he was motivated by pure affection for alma mater, by a desire to promote Catholic studies, or by an irresistible urge to heap coals of fire, altogether this was a classy act...
...Yet great lessons -- the parables of Jesus or the dialogues of Socrates -- are not like catechism questions...
...Roger L. Bowen 76 Thorn in the flesh: Isabel Rogers 79 The gift of Alvin White: Lawrence D. Hogan 81 Scroen: Tom O'Brien 84 Dance: Don McDonagh 86 Stage: Gerald Weales 88 Books The Politics at God's Funeral: Gregory Baum 89 An Admirable Woman: David Tracy 92 Ethnic Dilemmas: 1964-1982: Fred Siege!94 Staff Editor: James O'Gara Executive Editor...
...Telephone: (212) MU 3-2042...
...Canada, $47...
...The pope's gesture provoked Time magazine, for instance, into running a rather unusual cover story on forgiveness, but one that wandered into uncomfortable questions about personal reconciliation and social justice...
...By reconciliation she did not have in mind an abandonment of convictions that were crucial to her, an intellectual I'mOK/You're OK that would trivialize in sentiment or good cheer differences worth struggling over...
...It was a grass-roots movement that also concerned this magazine in the 1940s and '50s when Monsigner Ligutti was the director of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference...
...Doubtless the successful family farm, while still an ideal, is more difficult than it was to achieve in this country now...
...ETC: ' " ' " ' _9 Over the 3~ears no visitor brought greater pleasure or stimulus to the Commonweal office than Msgr...
...How much harder forgiveness is when one is not so thoroughly in control...
...Taking into account the iacreases in Social Security, most Americans have heard more talk about tax cuts than actually benefited from them...
...Father Greeley and Commonweal have had their differences...
...His establishment of the worker-built Granger Homesteads, each home with its own fertile vegetable plot, was one of his best known achievements...
...Obviously, it's not so...
...they do not simply trigger single, prepackaged responses...
...This exercise was successfully conducted by Ohio's James A. Rhodes, Oklahoma's Dewey Bartlett, and California's Ronald Reagan...
...Luigi Ligutti, who died in Rome at Christmastime at the age of eighty-eight...
...But they haven't yet encountered an alternative that comes as close to matching their instincts...
...The deficit appears to be launched, like one of our satellites, into outer space...
...Or held out his hand to Agnes Mansour...
...E.S.S...
...In fact, skepticism has followed Grace's efficiency task forces as they have released certain of their recommendations throughout the past eighteen months...
...Back of his geniality and wit, and modest though imposing presence, was confidence in the cause he warmly championed, a populist cause suggested by such elements as the family farm, "back to the land," one foot in agriculture, the other in industry, credit unions, and cooperatives...
...John Cogley, "Reflections of a Controversial Figure" February 13, 1959 _9 I l l I l l I l l l l But why stop there...
...But she did know -as all of us do -- how easily those honest differences build up their coating of toxic anger, ready stereotyping, suspicious questioning of motives...
...The requirements of military preparedness, inthe administration's view, seem to balloon constantly, while the breakthrough to agreement with a chastened Moscow recedes further and further into the distance...
...Reagan's America is a giant little house on the prairie, struggling through the locust years, fighting off the Indians, always fh-m in prayer and song around the family hearth...
...But at least it is a vision, and it will have to be met with a vision of equal power, not with the picture of the country as an endless social-welfare agency or a hi-tech marvel of economic competitiveness...
...conducted an eighteen-month study on :how to improve the management of the executive branch and reduce federal costs...
...the IAF: Alexander Wilde 72 When words go private: John Garvey 74 White House literary life: David R. Carlin, Jr...
...Nineteen eighty-four, the year, began with quite a different image, not of a white-tiled prison corridor but of a white-walled prison cell...
...Yet the usually sympathetic Business Week characterized such task forces as the PPSSCC as having an "uneven record," and observed that the 1967 effort of Governor Reagan "found only $25 million in actual savings...
...We recalled Greeley's harsh words about his treatment at Chicago when we read that the priest-sociologist has given the university $1.1 million of his fiction royalties to endow a chair in Catholic studies...
...b)a fiscal crisis that would require deep cuts in basic social spending, not only for the poor and near-poor this time but for the average wage-earning household as well...
...Is magnanimity easy, in other words, when the offender is convicted before the world, locked in prison, and no longer any threat to one's person or position...
...These hallowed words of ImlllFthe American industrialist Charles Frederick Abbott would not find a receptive audience within the Reagan administration -- at least with regard to the principles underpinning the recommendations of the President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control (PPSSCC...
...This may only bespeak the president's ability, as The New Republic put it, " t o infect others with his illusions...
...Peter Steinfels Assistant Editor: David Toolan Editorial Assistant: Anne Robertson Columnists: John Garvey, J. Bryan Hehir, Abigail McCarthy Poetry: Rosemary Deen, Made Ponsot Staff: Karen F. Silva, Harriette Balsky, Sheila Tanksley , Advertising Manager: Ruth E. Taylor Publisher: Edward S. Skillin Commonweal, A Review of Public Affairs, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, is published biweekly, except monthly Christmas-New Year's and July and August, by Commonweal Publishing Co., 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...Yearly subscriptions, U.S., $24...
...10016...
...And it is here that there is room for healthy debate and vigorous disagreement among Catholics...
...We think not...
...The president promised peace through military preparedness...
...we don't know if he thinks we've treated him as badly as the University of Chicago did, but we're beginning to hope so...
...All Canadian and foreign subscriptions must be paid in U.S...
...Now who's buying...
...For the pope to visit Hans Kiing, or vice versa, would not be to deny the conflicts of principle they may have but to repudiate the animosities that surround those differences and to pledge that the confrontation Of beliefs will not lead to the dehumanization of opponents...
...This presidential commission's final two-volume, 656-page report was formally presented to Mr...
...The pope does not leave his media coverage to chance...
...On the thirdlpoint, iris the public that is deeply uneasy...
...Perhaps this forgiveness stuff is getting out of control . . . . All fight, all fight, we'll all meet for a drink -- thepope, our woman friend, Hans Ki~ng, ourselves, and Michael Novak...
...Still, it is the president's contention that his administration has led the country through the hard work of.laying a foundation -- and his next term will bring the rewards...
...Time may have also made some readers uncomfortable by reminding them that if you could have pulled back far enough on that picture of pope and assassin hunched together, you would have brought into view a still photographer snapping away and a television crew, all brought along from the Vatican...
...foreign, $29...
...The Catholic, almost by definition, should be engaged unceasingly in relating the many aspects of current reality to the one overwhelming Reality that is the center of faith...
...This is the frontier, the meeting of ancient principle with new fact...
Vol. 111 • February 1984 • No. 3
