Editorials
Contents Volume CXIII, Number 3 Correspondence 66 Editorials 67 Where welcome waits: Karen Sue Smith 69 Etiquette of ignorance: David R. Carlin, Jr. 70 In defense of managed...
...Here we were, sitting in a house with no windows in it," said co-founder Mary Ruth Weir, "talking about what we could do to help the boat people...
...As in South Africa, as in the Philippines, Washington has at last had to admit to realities others have been warning about for years...
...The whole world exalted...
...10016...
...The situation changed in 1982...
...and to the health clinic...
...I I HURRICANE WARNING The report of the overthrow of President-for-Life JeanClaude Duvalier was greatly exaggerated...
...In the case of refugees from Guatemala and El Salvador, the U.S...
...Marines did not leave democracy in its wake but only the Duvaliers...
...to nearby farms and small businesses...
...But carefully, and with respect for the dead...
...As refugee groups of up to twenty-five persons at a time arrived on the twenty-sixacre site graced with woods and lakes, the "partners" developed a flexible program of education to ease the transition to a new culture...
...Now, to obtain political asylum, each refugee had to prove the precise political nature of his or her reasons for departure...
...When St...
...commonweal . ' l l l i l l J 9 .m._..-ma' .~lm...
...T=o, "' ~ m m '69a)sv, 9 . - - . J J I/ LESSONS FROM SPACE I I III I U ONDAY, January,, . 27, 1986...
...At that time the U.S...
...Behind those gestures, however, there has been no real will to loosen a dictatorial grip...
...Scarcely had the death penalty been abolished for political crimes last November, for example, when the army opened fire on demonstrators, killing several high school students, bystanders as well as participants...
...Mary's College, South Bend, Indiana, held a three-day symposium on "Women in the Church," some of the results surprised even the meeting's leaders, Nancy Schwoyer and Rosemary Haughton...
...Indeed, talk of heroism at such moments has a flat ring...
...There had been no escape mechanism...
...The land has suffered with its people, its countryside ravaged by deforestation and erosion...
...some had overcome discrimination, sexual and racial...
...But now, all of this has stopped dead...
...Kennedy Space Center, Florida...
...Who would settle for mere limits...
...9 that "widows [and] elderly women, particularly the poor, single parents without family resources, and immigrants" deserve our particular attention...
...It is intended to mute self-recrimination, to deflect conscience from the lessons of death...
...No country in the Western Hemisphere is poorer, or more ridden by disease and ignorance...
...gr.db.~ aw 9 9 .~176 "=.n.-IIIInnu...
...Even as Jubilee Partners hammered away to construct a welcome center of residential cottages, classrooms, and a thrift store, refugees from Central America -- particularly from El Salvador and Guatemala -flooded across the Rio Grande River into Texas...
...That these statements were made by this particular, loosely formed group of women also shows how far the church has come...
...Most of us went about our work and our coffee breaks as usual, as if the love of life we saw in the astronauts rendered them and us invincible...
...9 that the church should take a more realistic stance on family planning and.., aggressively foster research in birth Commonweal: 68control . . . . Families broken by divorce, death, abuse, or incest should no longer be invisible in the faith community but should be supported by the church...
...Eventually, each of these refugees found a permanent home, and most found employment as well...
...All Canadian and foreign subscriptions must be paid in U.S...
...This time the culprit was not the weather, but a small, recalcitrant handle bolt...
...dollars by International Money Order or by check on a U.S...
...The inquiry panels wilt proceed: to review, revise, and finally to renew...
...The Duvalier regime has responded with various gestures, ordering an end to torture, abolishing the death penalty for"Communist activities" (i.e., all political protests), and appearing to tolerate an embryonic domestic opposition...
...Stories of tortured or murdered relatives and neighbors...
...Apparently no one expected a group of St...
...Now it has been undergoing genuinely political uprisings...
...rape at the hands of military (whether army or rebel...
...The meeting's participants certainly weren't representative of Catholic women generally, or perhaps even of the St...
...It was a moment of truth...
...bank...
...Human life, frail but infinitely valuable, had miraculously endured...
...Canada, $53...
...Yearly subscriptions, U.S., $28...
...foreign, $59...
...The seven who died were among the brightest and the best...
...It was a Genesis-like appraisal...
...The "Challenger Seven," as President Reagan has called them in his eloquent eulogy, taught us more than heroism...
...We had forgotten that Florida's Sooty Terns, not we, were meant for flight...
...Challenger's m-ll mission had been delayed again, its sixth operational postponement...
...somewhere in the process, they lost the spontaneous ring and freshness of new voices in the discussion...
...But tomorrow would be different...
...January 28 dawned with cobalt clear horizons...
...We were wrong...
...Special two-year rate: U.S., $49...
...Canada, $30...
...But they did come from backgrounds not usually associated with outspoken Catholic feminism...
...foreign, $33...
...Human life, once lost, is not recaptured...
...I I I A STITCH IN TIME Can anyone continue to claim that deep dissatisfaction about the situation of women in today's Catholic church -- and demands for thoroughgoing change -- are limited to sinai1 circles of unrepresentative feminists...
...Ever since the Garden, our lot has been to strive beyond ourselves: to test the broad seas, to scale the skies, to erect ceaseless towers, to unlock all secrets...
...Now a laywoman was simply going along, too...
...Indeed, if there is a complaint to be made of the symposium results as recorded in this report, it is that they often come expressed in "fairly routine" feminist phrasing...
...This assumption accounts for over forty thousand Salvadoran deportees since 1980...
...Year after year, the White House has smiled and certified a supposedly gradual improvement in Haiti's human-rights record...
...Commercial enterprise will prosper in space," we were told...
...A forceful lesson...
...Elevated by technology before our admiring eyes, propelled by o~r hearts' passion to reach beyond earthly gravity, assured that the endless technicalities were meticulously solved, they trusted, as did we, and the button was pressed...
...The Haitian people are not so complacent...
...9 that "women are equally gifted . . . and qualified to participate in all decision-making.., roles of leadership...
...And yet in a moment they were gone...
...And when the button was pushed that Tuesday morning, disaster was in exile...
...Legality itself posed no obstacle at this time...
...We had witnessed so many uninterrupted successes in space...
...Since these refugees had wound their way north through other countries, notably Mexico, en route to the U.S., INS chose to assume that economic opportunity rather than political necessity had motivated their migration...
...From Gander to Cape Canaveral, the American soul has been seared this winter, our hearts cut through and wrenched...
...How could we think of failure when we saw such graceful limbs, such shining faces...
...Parents, musicians, warriors, holders of many advanced degrees...
...At this juncture, Jubilee, now supported by growing numbers of local townspeople, might have joined the newlyformed "sanctuary movement" in order to grant privately the asylum denied to Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees by the U.S...
...Telephone: (212) MU 3-2042...
...Mary's graduates from the 1940s and '50s -- Catholic women who are middle-aged, generally financially secure, established in their communities, and educated in preconciliar Catholicism -- to state their beliefs 9 that Scripture "understood in a non-historical perspective reinforces male domination...
...It was just" not II~ our day, saxd Bob Sneck, director of shuttle operations...
...The event took place . . . . ") But who of us will ever dislodge the distilled misery of the moment we learned of Challenger...
...70 In defense of managed integration: J.S, Fuerst & Roy Petty 72 Under the Peruvian volcano: Ernest W. Ranly 78 The virtuoso pianist: Robert H. Bell 82 Screen: Tom O'Brien ~4 Stage: Gerald Weales ~2 I Books The American Cathofic Experience: David J. O'Brien 87 Religious booknotes: David Toolan 88 The Theory of Communicative Action: Dennis P. McCann 89 Funny Money: Daniel Morrissey 91 Excess: Eros and Culture: David Toolan Staff 92 I Editor: Peter Steififds Assistant ~rs: David Toolan, Karen Sue Smith, Patrick Jordan Production Editor: Anne Robertson Poetry: Rosemary Doen Movies: Tom O'Brien Staff: Karen F. Silva, Harriette Balsky, Patricia Mazzola Advertising Manager: Ruth E. Taylor Publisher: Edward S. Skillin Commonweal, [ISSN 0010-3330] 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 Foundation, 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...The plan was for fifteen missions in 1986...
...They taught us the significance of life...
...But Jubilee's successful two-year pattern of extending to refugees hospitality, education, and sponsors no longer seemed plausible...
...For a time we will live without it...
...The space agency would refer to it later as "an event...
...Mary's graduates of that time...
...Too bad...
...Jubilee pledged itself to find sponsors...
...In an awful moment, our whole world stood naked and still: human aspiration ceased, the computers froze, stock markets fell suddenly worthless...
...We had all gone out that morning carrying our shields, our hearts high with anticipation when we thought of a teacher going into space...
...Jubilee Partners, Inc., founded in 1979 by three couples and their six children, welcomed its first group of refugees even before the founders' had finished building their own modest homes...
...government...
...Since the bloody revolution that substituted a black republic for French plantation colonialism at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Haiti's political history has been chaotic and cruel...
...Soon it was to be twenty-four...
...Single copy, $1.50...
...Years from now, should a young child direct our eyes overhead to the white line of a highstreaking jet, what sights might flash across our ruthless inward eye...
...9 that "hierarchical rifles are divisive to the people of God who are called to be friends . . . . Hierarchical structures should be dismantled and restructured to include men and women...
...Let the shuttle program proceed again...
...evidence of bodily injury...
...For just short of three decades, Haiti has been under the fist of Duvaliers, p~re etills, and of their entourage of thugs...
...For reporting on such events, both Catholic and Protestant radio stations were temporarily put off the air...
...Such views may be "fairly routine" among Christian feminists, write Schwoyer and Haughton in their report on the symposium, but, given these participants, were of a "radical nature...
...About a third of Haiti's half-billion-dollar budget comes from overseas aid, and those donors -- prodded by informed people more than by the diplomats -- have indicated their desire for reform...
...In 1984 when astronaut Judith Resnik reached orbit on the shuttle Discovery, she immediately radioed back her first impressions: "The earth looks great...
...We are heaped with a "repining restlessness" which might, in Georger Herbert's image, one day pulley-like toss us exhausted on God's breast...
...Death is an absurd thing," wrote Nicholas Berdyaev following the death of his wife, "but there is also something luminous in it: the revelation of love, obscured by everyday life...
...Yet, despite their whole-hearted support of that movement, Jubilee conceived a different plan, one resembling the Underground Railroad devised during the Civil War period to help runaway slaves from the South reach free states in the North...
...Haiti's "boat people" drew the attenrion of outsiders...
...But Challenger and it seven-member crew would ascend too far and too quickly from its Florida base this day, and end with a different Bolt...
...Let her words persuade us of our grandeur...
...Two decades of occupation by U.S...
...government was permitting large numbers of Cuban refugees and "boat people" from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to settle here on condition that American citizens volunteer to sponsor them...
...Unwittingly, we were delivered up helpless before fate, exposed, in Simone Weil's phrase, with nothing to separate us from tears...
...9 that "single women and men have been ignored, neglected, and alienated.., and need an equal place within the church...
...This sphere must be enhanced, not jettisoned, lived with and nourished, preserved and returned to with new keys for human peace...
...Anticipation on the launching pad was crisp and electric...
...Last year in Mexico City, forty-one babies were recovered, still alive after a week beneath the earthquake rubble...
...Indeed, over the course of recent years, the Catholic church has become an increasingly outspoken source of criticism in Haiti as well as of aid to the poor...
...That the sentiments expressed by these alumnae were so surprising, even to their tried and true leaders, may show how far the church still has to go...
...and the Air Force would requisition a third of all shuttle flights...
...men and women of unusual character...
...And then, in the flash of an eye, a piercing orange ball, more billiant than the comet, and death wrapping all seven in its cloud...
...POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Commonweal, 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...We put aside the possibility...
...Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) required more than it had of the "boat peoples...
...Don Mosley, a co-founder of Jubilee Partners, and Eric Drewry, a partner and specialist in immigration law, visited 14 February 1986:69...
...Perhaps we will learn that a greater part of our space exploration can be accomplished without jeopardizing precious lives...
...Now she is gone...
...10016...
...Undocumented aliens WHERE WELCOME WAITS JUBILEE'S NIGHT RIDE TO CANADA ~ e THE trial drags on in Tucson, Arizona -- for en persons accused of providing sanctuary to unmented Central American aliens -- a Christian community in Comer, Georgia offers safe haven to a lucky few...
...14February1986:67Given the imperfection of all things not divine|y wrought -including our era's reverence-inspiring space and military technology -- it was but a matter of chance and time before some fatal failure visited a shuttle...
...In Armero, Colombia, a seventy-five-year-old woman was rescued twenty-four days after her house had been entombed in a volcano's mud...
...We would watch it again and again, in stunned repetition: the rocket's red glare, its powerful thrust, a swiftly growing trail of mountainous vapors...
...Indeed, the two authors are scrupulous in warning against overgeneralizing from the meeting's results...
...Last May, Haiti experienced food riots...
...Nonetheless, the general veracity of the report cannot be doubted...
...and episodes recounted of personal danger could not, in most cases, be documented to the satisfaction of the INS...
...They took the newcomers on field trips: to the local police station where officers were friendly enough to help them overcome deep fears of armed police...
...Thus anger, frustration, and opposition have swollen while the government searches for a suitable cosmetic in place of the needed surgery...
...If only a little, Haiti has been feeling the pressure of the human-rights movement...
...Who of us will ever forget the cheers gone to shrieking wails, the white trail suddenly a shattered wishbone in the Atlantic sky...
...We did not wish to think of it...
...Partners taught English, grocery shopping, and money exchanging skills...
Vol. 113 • February 1986 • No. 3
