Editorials

...Approved bodies, such as the Lithuanian Catholic church and the Russian Orthodox church itself, know similar restrictions...

...Exactly what would Curran the Christian social ethicist say in class that Curran the moral theologian would not-or vice versa...

...The antireligious laws of 1929 are still in effect, the persecutions of In keeping with Commonweal's usual summer schedule, only one issue is published each month during July and August...

...Behind this delicate argument lurk two cruder realities...

...Stanislovas Muraukas, a Lithuanian Catholic, is presently serving a three-year sentence for printing religious postcards...

...Gleb Yakunin, a Russian Orthodox priest, has known many such nights...

...There are other departments at CU which do not require the canonical mission, and Curran was willing to move to one of them...

...In the last year over eight thousand Ukrainians have openly petitioned the Supreme Soviet to legalize the Ukrainian Catholic church, an act of remarkable daring...

...In the Curran case, CU has failed the test...

...The Ukrainian Catholic church has operated as a "church in the catacombs" since Stalin liquidated it in 1946...

...At a party convention in April, the ailing Duarte called on both to step aside in behalf of party unity...

...Indeed, he was willing to accept a position in the sociology department as a professor of Christian social ethics, and he was willing to refrain from teaching in the controverted area of sexual ethics...

...in reality, the victims are the university and the church...

...The problem is that Catholic University's three-man committee wants Curran to take this equivocation for his own, to bear all its burden and to take all the risk...

...The second problem is cruder still...

...It is supposed to operate in precisely those exceptional cases when special pressure is exerted from outside the university community to silence unwelcome views...

...Despite recent signs of growing tolerance for matters religious under Gorbachev's leadership, the Soviet Union does not abide by its obligations in this area under such formal agreements as the UN Declaration of Human Rights...

...The Curran case is not simply a struggle for the vindication of an individual's tenure rights or even an institution's academic freedom...

...Much of the conversation dealt with the current state of the Christian Democratic party...

...The university has committed itself to a power play...

...In God's sight, but as a watch in the night...

...Other churches are simply outlawed...

...To accede, he said, would have been a denial of who he is and what he is trained to teach, and-although he did not say so-would have invited a witch hunt...

...The distinction simply can't bear the weight...

...He was released last year...

...Nowhere is this clearer than in the loyalty oath that the committee demanded of Curran...

...It is easy to imagine that the main loser in all this is Charles Curran...

...First, as long as the university maintains that it can respect Curran's tenure with an appropriate post somewhere in the university but extends the Vatican's stricture against Curran's teaching theology beyond Vatican-accredited programs to the entire university, then Catholic University is equivocating...

...Then, she adds, "God himself found me...

...Chesterton wrote that orthodoxy was a whirling adventure...

...Clearly, however, an ARENA victory will not end the hostilities in El Salvador...

...But the greatest loser is the church itself...

...He is familiar with the ancient liturgical chant: Vidite vy grob i urazumeite/Spas bo voskrese ot groba...

...Today, Ukrainian Catholics cannot openly celebrate their millennium, educate their children in the Catholic faith, ordain clergy, or copy religious materials...

...On national TV he declared that the party was being torn apart from within...

...The country remains at civil war...

...But the main losers are actually Catholic University and the church...

...ET CETERA DOWNWARD CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATS A correspondent friend who covers Central America recently brought us up to date on events in El Salvador...

...It is a church trapped between those who, on the one hand, do not really understand the church of Christ's need for continuing reformation and self-correction, and those who, on the other hand, will surrender that process to the shifting moods of the day...

...The next issue published will be dated July 15...

...What he was not willing to do-and what the university's three-man committee insisted upon-was to sign a statement agreeing not to teach Catholic theology, the breach of which would be cause for dismissal...

...It has attained a force that can no longer be simply vanquished by the government's will...

...Stalin and Khruschev still strong in believers' memories...

...The juxtaposition was telling...

...This he rightly refuses to do...

...Look at the tomb and understand/The Savior has risen...

...It is the mark of his gracefulness that he has refused to do so...

...Neither man budged...

...Academic freedom, however, is not simply a protection against routine abuses...

...The university's claim to have made Curran a fair offer-and to have respected its own commitment to academic freedom-hangs on a fragile distinction between Christian social ethics and theology...

...The civil war is likely to grow more intense from all sides as room diminishes for political initiative and compromise...

...Unless it can get its house in order before the presidential election next March, the vote is likely to go against it in the same way...

...What the leadership of Catholic University has done is, at worst, to discourage that adventure, at best, to exile it to other institutions that do not give Catholic tradition so prominent a presence...

...He has been displaced not, as his opponents would like to believe, to the gain of orthodoxy, but through a sorry failure to compromise by the board of trustees, a failure of prudence and imagination...

...Yet when he was asked to speak before President Reagan at Spaso House last month during the Moscow Summit, the comparison he chose to make was between the short, seventy-year hiatus of Soviet atheism and the millennial celebration this month of the birth of Christianity in the lands of the Ukraine and the present-day Soviet Union...

...he is a patient man...

...Soviet Religious Affairs Minister Konstantine Kharchev said in April that present Soviet religious laws are unlikely to change...

...What it sought was no mere practical arrangement but a psychological and moral victory-to make Curran say "uncle," and thereby validate, in this matter, the authority of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith...

...It was another poet, the great Pasternak, who wrote in 1949 that "the centuries will float out of the night like a string of barges toward the Judgment...

...Our friend described the bitter rivalry betwen Julio Adolfo Rey Prendes and Fidel Chavez Mena for the party's presidential nomination...

...At first glance, the victim of this obduracy is Charles Curran...

...Like the medical prognosis recently handed down to Salva-doran President Jose Napoleon Duarte, the situation of the Christian Democrats, of whom Duarte is the head, is not a good one...

...Curran now, intends to proceed with his civil suit charging the university with breach of his tenure contract...

...On April 12, 1988, the trustees of the university removed Curran's canonical mission to teach in an ecclesiastical faculty...

...Duarte's more recent appeals are likely to penetrate just about as deeply...

...In March, the Christian Democrats suffered a stunning electoral defeat at the hands of the right-wing ARENA party...

...According to our friend, there is no end in sight for the hostilities...

...For some reason, I was never able to accept the Soviet religion," she writes, "although I knew no other...

...The young poet, Irina Ratushinskyareleased from prison herself on the eve of the Reykjavik Summit-has indicated why such a resurgence has taken hold...

...At least so says the psalmist...

...Things appear less promising still for the Christian Democrats when one considers the deep fissures in the party...

...For many years, Catholic University has met the criteria of academic freedom-and for most of its faculty, undoubtedly still does...

...A THOUSAND YEARS How long is a thousand years...

...Places of worship, even in officially approved bodies such as the Russian Orthodox church, can be closed at the government's will...

...It is a struggle for the sake of the church itself...

...Vladimir Rusak, a deacon in the Orthodox church, was sentenced in 1987 to seven years in a labor camp for having complained to the World Council of Churches about state intrusion in the Orthodox church...

...Yakunin is not only a dissident...

...It is the state alone that looses and binds in policies religious...

...On the contrary, Duarte's own vice-president and now acting president, Rudolfo Antonio Castillo Claramount, was hooted out of the convention...

...The same cannot be said of the future of the Christian Democrats...

...The more they bicker, the fewer their days...

...The stone remains yet to be rolled back...

...The millennial celebration of Christianity in the lands of the Soviet Union should remind our times that the night can pass, and that with our effort the barges can yet float steadily toward the dawn...

...The possibility of a judicious compromise seemed at hand...

...They cannot attain positions of responsibility in the Communist party or in society in general...

...Some think Charles Curran should now accept the situation and depart gracefully...

...Such a turn of events in the future is less likely with the capital in ARENA hands...

...Charles Curran has charted a responsible course between these unhappy alternatives, not the only possible course, but one which should be honored rather than despised...

...Not only did they lose control of the National Assembly, but, for the first time in twenty-four years, they failed to maintain the mayoralty of San Salvador...

...He served nine years in prison for protesting Soviet antireligious policies...

...Certainly, life has its equivocations...

...But notwithstanding such laws and even outright persecution, the vitality of religious faith-whether it be Jewish, Muslim, or Christian-is clearly evident today in the Soviet Union...

...Their hold on the capital had served them well, particularly in 1984 when the ARENA presidential candidate won ten of the country's fourteen provinces but failed to carry San Salvador and lost the election...

...The vote against the Christian Democrats in March was a voto de castigo, a "vote of punishment" against the party for its ineptitude and corruption...

...Believers are discriminated against in education, the army, the workplace...

...The board also said that this action did not remove his tenure at the university and it directed the university's chancellor, then-Archbishop James A. Hickey, the university's president, the Reverend William Byron, S.J., and the chairman of the board, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, to discuss with Curran "an alternative teaching assignment within an area of his professional competence...