Editorials
commonweal NATIVITY & SENSITIVITY Once again , we approach the season of Christ's birth, a time of peace, joy, and rancorous disputes between neighbors over the public display of...
...By then either the Senate's Gramm-RudmanHqllings bill or the House revision of it (or some hybrid yet to be worked out) will need to be acted upon...
...Unable to deny the fact, South Africa has again been forced to Commonweal: 660 delay the repayment of its foreign debt...
...Compared to that controversy, public Nativity scenes are, no doubt, a minor matter...
...That can happen in more ways than one, however...
...The IRA has declared: "too little, too late...
...At the same time, the new body is only advisory, and the agreement states that the North's status cannot be altered except by majority consent...
...and most recently one might say that the Supreme Court has been trying to balance the election returns...
...At the same time, religious faith should particularly welcome opportunities to be present in public without any governmental connection...
...Their angry voices indicate how distant Northern Ireland remains from true justice and reconciliation...
...It is the latest edition of the ancient story: "Messenger Blamed for Message...
...everything else, we presume...
...These findings are now more than a year old...
...federal funds will be supplied until December 13...
...Enoch Powell has accused Margaret Thatcher of treachery...
...The messengers did not invent the report, even though the South African government has gone out of its way to suggest they did...
...and indeed Christians might better serve their own beliefs and their non-Christian neighbors' sensibilities by taking those life-sized figures off the public payroll and installing them on church property, minus the reindeer, clowns, and six-foot candy canes...
...The agony of South Africa will smolder until apartheid is removed...
...The issue happened to be a municipal Christmas creche...
...It could have been the recognition of Christmas as a national holiday, the exemption of religious institutions as well as other charitable bodies from taxes, the study of religion in state universities...
...Dooley's point was that quite apart from the finer points of constitutional argument, the Court is affected by public opinion...
...Blacks and Poles made some gains, but the numbers remain so small as to be derisory, e.g., there was a sevenfold increase in the number of blacks holding top corporate offices — from one individual to seven...
...Those objectives, however, are just a little bit closer than before...
...Not surprisingly, Congress passed a stopgap bill...
...Not all of the Court's reasoning was persuasive, we wrote ["From Poland to Pawtucket," April 6, 1984], but the decision was welcome overall because it recognized concrete historical circumstances and refused to take a "rigid, absolutist view" of churchstate separation...
...29 November 1985: 661...
...If that is true, then the disadvantaged children who have been further disadvantaged by the Court's latest decision owe their plight not only to the dogmatists of absolute church-state separation, but also to the aggressive proponents of a "Christian America" and "bringing God back into the schools...
...The agreement is London's first official acknowledgment of Dublin's proper stake in the North...
...With the government a nearly unavoidable presence in practically every dimension of life, an absolutist abhorrence of any contact between state and religion will work an unfair penalty on the latter...
...Frankly, commercial Christmas displays complete with stable, oxen, and baby Jesus do not rank among our favorite things...
...It will not work...
...We plead guilty to missing a significant updating of an important report issued in 1972 by the Chicago-based Institute of Urban Life in cooperation with the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs...
...Second, while both bills are clear about exemptions — Social Security, interest on the national debt, and existing military contracts — neither distinguishes which programs are actually subject to cuts...
...Such a convenient resolution is not always available in these matters...
...REMOVE YOUR LENS "We are here to tell you the truth," states the sober advertisement for a local TV news program...
...Let them do this not because of a "wall" of separation between church and state, but because of a bond of sensitivity and respect 29 November 1985: 659 between them and their non-Christian neighbors...
...All groups, as it turned out, had only a minuscule representation...
...Not "all the truth" or ' 'the whole truth...
...The flames may no longer be visible to proscribed long-distance lenses, but everyone who is not blind knows the heat is on...
...Th' supreme coort follows th' iliction returns...
...Religion will survive, though society may be deprived...
...No person may now photograph, record, or even sketch what is happening without police permission...
...That's still our view, one which seems worth underlining at this moment...
...Taken as part of a pattern, however, they are worth defending...
...There has been a iQt of discussion recently of the place of religion in American public life, some of it provoked by even more recent Supreme Court decisions on First Amendment matters...
...It could have been "In God We Trust" on our coins...
...That is the good news...
...Ian Paisley has threatened "an aftermath too horrible to contemplate...
...These four groups constitute almost half the Chicagoarea population — but only 5 percent of these corporations' directors and officers...
...Following reports in October, however, of violence finally sweeping into white areas of Johannesburg and Cape Town, the government pulled the plug, particularly on photographers and journalists of the electronic variety...
...Third, even given a precise slate of programs headed for the shearinghouse, what is fair or promising about a "flat cut" which would take the same percentage from school lunches, military salaries, and cancer research...
...For Pretoria to think the facts will simply fade away is to bemuse itself with slightly less than the truth...
...FISCAL AUTONATION It was never a serious scare: President Reagan flying off to the Geneva summit meeting with the U.S...
...What is a serious scare, however, is that both bills provide for automatic acrossthe-board spending cuts (with certain protections in the House version) which would be effected by the president if Congress and the executive were unable to agree upon an annual budget within that year's ceiling...
...In the spring of 1984 we editorialized on the Supreme Court decision allowing a municipal Christmas display including a Nativity scene...
...commonweal NATIVITY & SENSITIVITY Once again , we approach the season of Christ's birth, a time of peace, joy, and rancorous disputes between neighbors over the public display of Christmas creches...
...The prompt denunciations come from those who see the other identity as constituting only a threat and not a right, from those who would trust to coercion and continuing violence rather than compromise...
...Let Christians willingly and reverently mark the birth of Jesus publicly, but on their own sites...
...The agreement is a limited but path-breaking attempt to do justice to both the unionist and nationalist identities that divide the Northern Ireland population...
...The conclusion: "Poles, Italians, Hispanics, and blacks in 1983 continue to be virtually absent from upper echelons of Chicago's largest corporations...
...Taken individually, we said, none of these things may matter so much...
...One situation in which no such convenient path of resolution was available, it seems to us, was the federal program of remedial education for disadvantaged children that involved sending public-school teachers into parochial schools...
...government embarrassingly in default, unable to meet the interest payments on its skyrocketing national deficit...
...They simply present Christians with an opportunity to demonstrate, by restraint and sensitivity, a different outlook...
...Hispanics "in high-level, decision-making positions" remain "almost non-existent...
...In 1983, the same researchers repeated the exercise, and published the results last year...
...Both plans work backwards beginning with the ceiling rather than with a convincing delineation of national priorities...
...Italians were slightly better represented to begin with, but have made no gains...
...That report, which made its way into hundreds of articles, books, and government documents, had surveyed the directors and officers of over a hundred major Chicago corporations to see the extent of Italian-American, Polish-American, blackAmerican, and Hispanic-American presence at high decision-making levels...
...A compliant Congress opted for fiscal irresponsibility by accepting the president's tax cut and military buildup in 1981...
...All too often, important social research is not followed up with later studies, and when it is, all too often the follow-up findings don't get the attention of the original study...
...Let us take advantage of it when we can...
...What's the fuss...
...First, both bills ride on a debt-ceiling bill (increasing the 1986 debt ceiling to $2.1 trillion) which is subject to the same basic defect as its rider(s): namely, that to pronounce a debt ceiling, limits on the annual deficit, or percentage cuts in spending is a cheap substitute for responsibly determining which programs need funding, why, and to what extent...
...In a great portion of the earth, that sentiment is simply laughed out of court...
...In this discussion, it is not always easy to chart a course by which religion is neither politicized nor privatized...
...but at least the direction is the right one...
...Every town has church property, often as centrally prominent as any municipal building or park...
...It has even ceased the production and sale of its alluring Krugerrands...
...But it doesn't seem like things are changing very fast...
...etc...
...Now, crusading against the resulting deficits, Congress refuses to combine all the obvious options — taxing Social Security and/or gasoline, initiating a progressive tax reform that also raises revenue, proposing a schedule of gradual farm subsidy reductions as part of a new farm bill, discreet cuts in military and social spending — and instead, substitutes reductionism for leadership...
...Christmas creches are an almost too easy example...
...Christianity can stand without municipal Christmas creches...
...And reporters may face up to ten years in prison for doing so...
...The Supreme Court decision declaring this program unconstitutional, despite the strict procedures instituted to distance any publicly provided instruction from the schools' religious identities, was uncalled for, a hardship worked upon needy children in the name of rigid theory...
...Nonetheless, there is this to be said about the Court's decision: Just as the Pawtucketcase may have signaled the Court's reaction to aggressive efforts to remove all religious symbols from the governmental sphere, no matter how peripheral their role, the latest decision may signal the Court's reaction to a rising clamor for state legitimation of religious belief, especially through the school system...
...In this," we wrote, "the Court has set itself firmly against that view which seems to demand an absolute scouring of all religious references from the public forum.'' The Court, it seemed, was drawing a line against that determined secularism which would ultimately put religion at a positive disadvantage in its public existence...
...But until November 2, foreign and domestic journalists had managed to report the disturbances rocking the country with surprising maneuverability...
...Both current bills would incrementally decrease the annual deficit so that the entire deficit theoretically would be eliminated by 1990-91...
...A simmering volcano eventually has its day...
...Even the government knows that both at home and abroad the news is not good...
...Statements like that add up, in truth, to a sort of reverse endorsement of the agreement between Britain and the Irish Republic establishing an Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Conference to advise on Northern Ireland's political, legal, and social problems...
...For years, South Africa has had over one hundred laws for governing the exercise of press freedom...
...It could have been — indeed, in an earlier case it was — the appointment of chaplains to state legislatures...
...The issue, in other words, was not Nativity scenes...
Vol. 112 • November 1985 • No. 21
