Correspondence
Correspondence Bishops & the Talmud Livermore, Calif. To the Editors: In their pastoral letter on the American economy the Catholic bishops are teaching our business schools the lesson of the...
...Both thoroughly reject laissez-faire and Social Darwinism...
...the "Conspectus" followed the design of James Q. Wilson of Harvard...
...on economic dynamism, job creation, and invention...
...Such was my reaction to James Carroll's "On Not Skipping the Sermon...
...The church having died, was reborn...
...Surely, it is something of an historical accomplishment to have so many distinguished Americans and Catholics express so forthrightly and publicly their affection and esteem both for Catholic social teaching and for the continuing, unfinished American experiment...
...A small group of thirty-one people cannot, of course, represent everyone...
...But our group did have representatives of government (former high-level officials), business, union, academic, journalistic, legal, and educational communities...
...We all fought consistently for a progressive legislative agenda, although historians, such as Schatz, give us little or no credit for this...
...John Cort is a gentlemanly disagreer...
...I still think Schatz was mostly accurate in describing that battle...
...To the Editors: As a member of the group that produced a lay letter on Catholic social teaching and the U.S...
...As the chief drafter, I served the will of the commission members, not my own...
...both justify an active role for the state in a healthy political economy, especially in matters of poverty and welfare...
...on multinationals, and a host of other issues...
...I am not so sure, that the good nuns and the women they educated, after experiencing the change that Geraldine Ferraro made in the body politic, will wait indefinitely for equality in the church...
...Within ACTU, the Pittsburgh chapter and I were the chief enemies...
...To the Editors: Your editorial ["Shortchanging the Pastoral," November 30] kindly observes that "Some of the major points made by this 'lay commission' could well be incorporated or emphasized in the bishops' letter...
...Finn that their "lay letter" was a genuine group effort, it remains our impression that, whatever the arduous process of composition, the (Continued on page 94) (Continued from page 66) final product very strikingly parallels the other writings of Novak — in its controlling ideas, many of its details, even much of its phrasing...
...CHARLES OWEN RICE Waiting for equality Rowley, Mass...
...One glaring inaccuracy was his reference to me as a Jesuit...
...Finn sees our teasing suggestion that he and his enterprising colleagues had spent a lot of money to reinvent The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, Freedom with Justice, etc., as nothing less than "gutter commentary .'' We think he overdoes his indignation...
...MICHAEL NOVAK Gutter commentary New York, N.Y...
...Elements in every one of the policy sections in Part Three were derivedfrom the separate hearings held on each section...
...To the Editors: After forty-eight years as a Catholic, including sixteen in Catholic schools and eight in the Catholic press, I periodically decide that there is no new thought under the sun that I can have on American Catholicism...
...Invoking "truth in advertising," you imply that to describe ourselves as "a representative group of lay Catholics'' is to depart from that truth, and that your own description of us as a group consisting "almost entirely of corporation executives and political activists linked to the Reagan administration" is more accurate...
...there were no comparable Democrats...
...The long sections on earlier U.S...
...New York waged a noble fight against corruption and suffered grievously from its courageous stand against Cardinal Spellman's breaking of the Cemetery Workers' strike...
...Al Smith may have said that he didn't know what an encyclical is...
...Detroit was out of it by then I think, and I am not sure of New York and the national office but my impression is that they did not do much in that regard...
...It included Republicans and Democrats, supporters of Reagan and of Mondale...
...Approximately half its members are business executives...
...economy, I found some of your comments both misleading and gratuitously insulting to every member of that group ["Shortchanging The Pastoral," November 30...
...Louis Review...
...It went through more than a dozen drafts, in order to achieve the unanimous consent of a very strong-minded, experienced committee...
...But on two points, I'm afraid my view is more pessimistic...
...It is not...
...The National ACTU, the New York chapter, and the Detroit chapter were engaged in the struggle, but not in such depth or ferocity...
...In fact, much too little attention has been paid to the large common ground shared by the two letters...
...ACTU & the scholars Pittsburgh, Pa...
...10, 1984], and disagrees with Schatz's appraisal of the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU), the Communists, and the United Electrical Workers (UE): Schatz is concerned mostly with the UE and with the enemies of its Communist leadership which included ACTU...
...While I have no desire to slight the contribution of Novak in the preparation of "Toward the Future," your statement obscures the fact that much in the letter is due not only to the often intense discussions we held over a period of time but to the contributions of a wide range of witnesses...
...In the McCarthy era we condemned the malign senator, but we were concerned, I am afraid, mostly with his putting the Red tag on those, such as Murray and Reuther, who were not Communists or fellow travelers...
...Then comes my latest Commonweal...
...I know that I did not worry enough about what happened to the Communists and their allies in the McCarthy mopping-iip era...
...Novak and Mr...
...markets open to the goods of the third world...
...HYMAN OLKEN Not by Novak alone Washington, D.C...
...Governor Cuomo's recent praise of "A Lay Letter" (not "The Lay Letter") illustrates the achievement of the commission in implicitly legitimating both the Democratic and the Republican parties as natural exponents of the proper tension in our political economy...
...Detroit was hung up on the UAW and was close to being an appendage of Walter Reuther's caucus...
...Every page was argued out, line by line, in our difficult drafting sessions ("Thirty-one Excedrin," they seemed to me...
...that will never again be good enough...
...one tends to stress the polity, the other the economy...
...But he does not address the question of what happened to clerical dissent between 1968 and 1984...
...To the Editors: In their pastoral letter on the American economy the Catholic bishops are teaching our business schools the lesson of the Talmud: even when competing against your fellow man in the race for self and power, you still are your brother's keeper...
...Indeed, both have remarkably similar positions on protectionism and keeping U.S...
...On a hopeful note, the ad was signed by 49 religious women...
...The names of many of the lay signers were familiar to me as those of liberal Catholic leaders in St...
...We were the church...
...It is a shame and a betrayal of true scholarship that the current specialists have neglected to consult Cort's files and the files of the ACTU since these are available in public libraries...
...Misleading: You state that the document "owed far more to the recent writings...
...Actually it ceased to be a factor after Reuther took over the UAW...
...Carroll's excellent article gave me a whole new way of thinking about the dichotomy between men and women in the Roman Catholic church...
...To the Editors: John Cort's letter of Nov...
...Or any with the courage to voice their dissent...
...MSGR...
...Certainly he overdoes his effort to defend his group as, in any serious sense, "representative...
...The opening pages spring from a suggestion of John Cort...
...But even that hope — and the dramatic change in the church it shows — casts some doubt on the validity of one of Carroll's points: that no matter how the clergy resist ending the man-woman dichotomy, "they will always have us, and with luck our children, at their Masses...
...ACTU fought on many fronts...
...Having said that our lay commission spent $100,000 and got mostly what Novak had already published you say that this "was perhaps all too revealing an example of the kind of entrepreneur-ship they praised so highly.'' This is gutter commentary, unworthy of the issues, our serious attempt to deal with them, and Commonweal's well-deserved reputation for civility in argument...
...Sections on labor and education were suggested by Robert Spaeth and James McFadden (former Labor Commissioner of New York...
...30,1984 disagrees with things I wrote in the review of The Electrical Workers by Ronald Schatz [Aug...
...The group was studded with GOP political figures linked to the Nixon and Reagan administrations (Simon, Haig, Luce, Hickel, Flanigan, Shakespeare, and Ture...
...JAMES FINN The editors reply We are happy to register the reports of Mr...
...The time may not be so far away, that Catholic women barred from the altar (and those men who love them and do hold them equal) may feel conscience-bound to worship elsewhere, saying, as the narrator in Carroll's Prince of Peace does at the Episcopal funeral for his friend denied the rites of the Roman Catholic church: "And yes, we were alive...
...Carroll speaks of the priests who dissented to Humanae Vitae, and he also discusses the "peculiar anger" displayed by some leading bishops toward Ger-aldine Ferraro in the recent campaign for her "uppity" woman views on abortion...
...The group's two union officials resigned...
...Are there any dissenters left among the American clergy...
...on concern for the poor as the measure of a just society, and on the principle of welfare reform...
...of black and Hispanic communities...
...Indeed, the handful of Democrats included those like Novak and Finn who have supported President Reagan...
...A number are tied to conservative foundations...
...The sections on "social justice" and "virtue" were guided by Brian Benestad, Ralph Mclnerny and others...
...The commission was helped in this respect by the strong concerns of the approximately one-third of its members who are Democrats, others being Republicans and Independents...
...MARGARET M. CARLAN...
...Among the 192 signers were only 6 priests, and 4 of the 6 were members of religious orders...
...Those questions were best answered for me by an advertisement placed by Pro-Life Citizens for Mondale-Ferraro in the November 2 issue of The St...
...November 2-16...
...The priests who used to stand among them were missing, some from the ranks of the clergy, and others only from the ranks of those willing to take a public stand...
...He is worth listening to because he was not only a valiant ACTU member but has been a good trade unionist all his life, and a fine liberal...
...of Michael Novak than to anything else...
...We helped in the great union drives of the late thirties, and we continued to help unions in a positive fashion...
...others serve on corporate boards...
...bishops and Tocqueville were suggested by James Finn...
...I may have been Jesuitical in a pejorative sense, but not the real thing...
...Louis when I covered the church there in the late 1960s and early 1970s...
...on cooperative forethought...
...Again, I wish I could say that Toward the Future was solely my own work...
Vol. 112 • February 1985 • No. 3
