Editorials
commonweal A FAIR DAY'S WAGE WHAT'S A PERSON'S labor worth? A report in Business Week (May 6) on the compensation of the top managers in 259 leading corporations showed that the average chief...
...his manner was formal, unafraid of old-fashioned eloquence, sometimes saying as much by his pauses as by his phrases...
...A VOICE TO REMEMBER Having suffered a severe stroke last January 30, Philip J. Scharper died on Sunday, May 5. Phil Scharper had been an editor at Commonweal in 1955-57 but that was, so to speak, only a warm-up for an extraordinary career in religious publishing...
...Why were their good offices not employed in this desperate situation...
...Was this not the Quaker city of brotherly love...
...The startling thing is the madness was not relegated to the sect's members, but like the fire which ensued, had spread at some critical moment before to engulf without their knowing it those charged with civic authority...
...and then by the discussion of "comparable worth" (pp...
...Is it not the seat of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends, and the American Friends Service Committee, both expertly qualified in the rudiments of nonviolent conflict resolution...
...In the United States particularly there are feverish efforts to incorporate democratic structures within the life of the church...
...How different from the fruitful resolution Mario Cuomo salvaged at Ossining in 1983...
...As the founding editor of Maryknoll's Orbis Books, he brought to the U.S...
...It's done by directors and compensation committees — in other words, by associates, peers, and insiders — and both shareholders and the famous market are at a goodly remove...
...MOVE, a backto-nature collective with a history of lunatic and violent exploits, had brought itself and Philadelphia — its citizens and authorities — to the near point of primitivism...
...Although a man of the written word, Philip Scharper made an unforgettable impression as a speaker...
...The same day Philadelphia lay smoldering, a front-page headline in the New York Times declared:' 'Gains Reported on Use of Laser for Space Arms...
...But in practice humans have always resisted being treated as raw material, and only extraordinary pressure can make labor conform neatly to the laws of supply and demand, a fact that, as Lester Thurow showed in Dangerous Currents, has always been a stumbling block for pure market economic theorists...
...Sixty homes razed, and hundreds of West Philadelphians made homeless following a bunker Shootout and police helicopter bombing gone astray...
...And what about the yearly income of Michael Jackson ($35 million), of Dan Rather ($2.2 million), or the starting salary for young Patrick Ewing (yet to be determined...
...he was a director of the bishops' Commission on Ecumenical Affairs...
...Whenever we insert another cultural or political factor into the existing mish-mash of forces that determine hiring, promotion, and compensation — say, notions of affirmative action or comparable worth — we are certainly adding new complexities and, possibly, new problems...
...That included income from stock options and other "long-term" compensation, and was a jump of 22 percent in a year when inflation ran at 4.3 percent...
...But even these two great dialogues — between European and American Catholicism, between the churches of the developed and developing nations — did not exhaust Phil Scharper's gift for facilitating the moral and intellectual exchanges demanded by our times...
...It was Mayor Goode, quoted in the same edition, who said that, "Everything worked until the bomb was dropped...
...Phil Scharper is no longer breathing, but his words, like his life's work, still speak to us — and will for a long time to come...
...Hadn't he been told...
...What is the point of noting such extreme differences, which don't even extend to the millions of Americans who work full time and nonetheless end up below the poverty line...
...an elevator operator against a computer operator...
...senator's salary, of course, is $75,000 — leaving aside the fact that so many senators are millionaires before they run for office...
...He indicated that he would approve the bombing again "in a similar situation," although not if he had known of the gasoline...
...The church, not Christ, has always been the great trial of a Christian's faith and I, for one, see his lineaments in those of the church more clearly every day...
...One recalls Nelson Rockefeller's choice of response at Attica in 1971...
...The mayor's rationale was clear: "People want a strong, decisive leader," he said...
...The statue of William Penn which looks down from Philadelphia's City Hall must have paled as the sky flamed over Osage Avenue...
...Not, then, that all is well, but so much is better...
...Research Is Said to Find Way to Raise Power...
...He will not answer for now...
...A U.S...
...Mayor W. Wilson Goode has said, "I don't know that we could have done anything differently...
...In 1962, as the opening of the Council approached, Phil Scharper wrote in Commonweal of the need to renew the church so that she would stand before the world "not as we Catholics have made her by our pride and folly, our apathy, our hardness of heart, our confusion of national interests and cultural constructs with the essence of the church — but as she is in the design of Christ: the splendid City on the mountain, its walls and towers constantly aglow as they faithfully reflect the Light of the Sun...
...Actually, our thoughts had less to do with outrage than with a question raised elsewhere in this issue, first by Governor Cuomo (p...
...what is needed, however, is the instilling . . . of democratic values, and these are not always guaranteed by democratic structures___Many still search for consensus and are alarmed by conflict within the church, as though major changes in any human grouping were ever wrought without conflict...
...Not, of course, that all is welL Too many in the church still ache for conformity and fear pluriformity...
...He was a pioneer of ecumenism...
...The maelstrom was so devastating in life, property, and reason even the New York Post recognized it as a "Night of Madness...
...church the works of Gutierrez, Segundo, Boff — indeed, hundreds of voices from the churches in Latin America, Africa, and Asia...
...The median family income is a little above that — but is often based on more than one salary...
...That had ended with V-E Day forty years a week before...
...But it would be wrong to measure these things against some fiction of market efficiency, as though the present scheme of things, which awards the chairman of Ford $4 million for his 1984 compensation, a firefighter $25,000, and an aide in a nursing home for the elderly $10,000, were an expression of Platonic reason...
...What happens at the top also happens all the way down the line...
...Yes, the market plays a part, but so does power — the relative strength or weakness of trade unions, for instance...
...OSAGE & OSSINING We were all surprised to see a picture of Dresden in ruins on the front page of the morning paper...
...Does anyone believe that the directors of IBM, Ford, and General Dynamics are constantly on the lookout to see whether they could replace their chief executives with an equally competent individual for a half a million or so less compensation...
...333) when he asks "How do you measure your job at Commonweal with a Howard Johnson's clerk's job...
...And later, "It worked perfectly according to plan...
...One of the central elements in the great capitalist revolution of modern times was to treat human labor as another commodity, to be freed from traditional attachment to the land or from guild regulation...
...His voice was resonant...
...Ten years later, in December 1972, following the exhilaration of the Council and the turmoil of the post-conciliar years, Scharper was asked for a retrospective comment by Commonweal's editors...
...336-42...
...Theologians trivialize the Good News less than did most of their predecessors-----Somuchtriumphalism[has] been sapped, so much legalism been supplanted, so many real questions raised where before there were only firm irrelevant answers...
...This was hardly the Sikhs' Golden Temple...
...To hear the squeals produced by the Catholic bishops' comments in their draft pastoral on gross inequalities, one would think that only demagogues or people consumed by envy might be set to thinking by the vast sums paid our hard-working captains of industry...
...After an acute analysis of the "nomadic church" and its new international dimension, Phil shifted to the personal — and one can hear that solemn voice in his affirmations: "I can say 'credo in unam, sanctam, catholicam ecclesiam' more firmly than I could ten, or twenty, years ago...
...Even Business Week grouches when it sees T. Boone Pickens, Jr., receive almost $23 million last year for his takeover gymnastics while his company's stock has halved in value since 1981...
...Again and again we are told that the market determines what people earn, and to tamper with it in the name of equality is to proceed down the primrose path to economic irrationality...
...In Philadelphia, Dresden, and elsewhere, Mayor Goode may have spoken the epitaph of our times...
...he served on the New York Board of the National Conference of Christians and Jews...
...Aren't they the creators of wealth for the rest of us...
...Average pay for top union officials, by comparison, was $98,000 in 1984, less than one-tenth of what the CEO's received...
...At one time in the not so distant past Quakers had trained Philadelphia police personnel in nonviolent tactics...
...Who would bomb a mental hospital, except in Grenada...
...Need the distance between Ossining and Osage Avenue have been so great...
...A Pentecostal wind has risen, and like countless others I find this brief day of sun and frost an exciting one in which to be baptized and breathing...
...yet the process of 31 May 1985: 323 determining executive compensation is essentially the same even when it's carried out much more responsibly...
...But the top executives' salaries reveal the theory's absurdity...
...So do the historical and cultural assumptions we have about certain kinds of work — that they are "menial" or "lifesaving" or "women's work...
...There may be an adequate market device for showing that Michael Jackson is really worth $35 million to his fans, i.e., record and ticket sales...
...But even where a corporation has performed impressively, who's to say that it is the genial genius of a Lee Iacocca that should get the millions in reward rather than the men and women of Congress who voted the Chrysler bailout, or the workers who cut back their incomes, or the consumers who paid higher prices thanks to the limits on Japanese imports...
...An average school teacher's salary is about $21,000...
...If there is one quality which more than any other characterized the noble soul of Phil Scharper,'' Father Robert Drinan declared in the funeral homily, "it is his love for the church...
...Then we realized it was Philadelphia, the night after Mother's Day 1985, and we were fire-struck...
...The thing we did not anticipate in that was the fact that there would also be a resulting fire...
...As editor-in-chief at Sheed & Ward between 1957 and Commonweal: 324 1969, he presided over the introduction to a wide audience of Americans such theologians as Schillebeeckx, Kiing, Rahner, and of course America's own John Courtney Murray...
...he edited books on Protestant and Catholic views of Catholicism, on Torah and the Gospel...
...Whether speaking to college audiences on "sainthood' ' in the early 1960s, introducing Martin Luther King, Jr., at Riverside Church in 1967, addressing a publishers' group opposed to the war in Vietnam, appealing for understanding between Catholics, Protestants, or Jews, or defending the insights of liberation theology, the Scharper manner seemed to express perfectly the moral urgency and intellectual seriousness that were guiding threads in all his work...
...With his wife Sally he wrote over thirty religious documentaries for network television, winning more than twenty awards, including four Emmies...
...Counting salaries and bonuses alone, these executives still averaged $653,000 a year, up 12.7 percent...
...Why would anyone attempt to bomb a fortified bastion in such a densely populated residential area, particularly when the authorities had previous reports of containers resembling gasoline cannisters having been raised up to the very rooftop they now contemplated bombing...
...A report in Business Week (May 6) on the compensation of the top managers in 259 leading corporations showed that the average chief executive received $1.1 million in 1984...
Vol. 112 • May 1985 • No. 11
