Correspondence
DOLAN, WILLIAM V. & MITTLEMAN, RABBI DR. ALLAN & KAVENY, M. CATHLEEN & RENOFF, RICHARD & Zahn, Gordon C.
CORRESPONDENCE The task at hand Phoenix, Ariz. To the Editors: The editorial ["Anniversary Waltz," July 15[ hit the mark. The lack of credibility in official church teaching caused by Humanae...
...That Zahn has done so shows the extent to which the meaning of the Holocaust has been lost...
...On September 18, 1938, Chornock, a widower, was consecrated bishop in the Cathedral of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople...
...In the fall of 1936, Father Orestes Chor-nock of Bridgeport, Connecticut, the leader of the anti-celibacy movement, and five other priests were excommunicated nominatim by Pope Pius XI...
...It's possible...
...Must the Jews on only the fiftieth anniversary of Kristalnacht argue that they were the primary victims of Hitler's evil...
...It is an abandonment of both political and moral sanity to make such an equation...
...Transforming the Holocaust New York, N.Y...
...Yet these are precisely the sentiments which they allege will be inculcated by the readers in question...
...Thus Jews are concerned about what the shape of memory will be in Europe and America a hundred years from now...
...The universality of which I speak relates to any act or program which dehumanizes both victim and perpetrator, reducing the one to an anonymous cipher in a category- religious, racial, national, tribal, ideological or whatever-and the other to a mere instrument of destruction...
...But when groups such as the fundamentalists become marginalized, their capacity to educate their children in religion increasingly depends upon the will of an unsympathetic populace...
...To the Editors: Eric Jorstad's essay, "What Johnny Can't Read" [June 17] betrays a blithe naivete about the compatibility of religious belief with the mores of our increasingly secularized society...
...The universalization of the tragedy suggested by Gordon Zahn, as well as its "Catholi-cization" practiced by John Paul, distort the past...
...The state does require broad authority to set a uniform curriculum for its public schools...
...Let others find their own words and names for their tragedies, but let them not transform the Holocaust...
...Which raises the interesting question: Are those who plan, command, or merely participate in today's reprisals against Palestinian "partisans" tomorrow's "international diplomatic pariahs...
...The preeminence claimed for Hitler's "Final Solution'' may be justified on grounds of sheer number (though there have been (Continued on page 574) CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 546) greater) and, even more, because of the diabolical efficiency of planning and operation, but, even granting this, it does not stand alone in the history of human atrocities...
...RICHARD RENOFF...
...To the Editors: I am truly shocked by Gordon Zahn's article ["The Pope in Austria," August 12...
...Why this concern...
...The strongest case against him relates to providing information leading to reprisals against Jugoslav partisans...
...The attempted murder of every Jew might be attempted again...
...Like Lefebvre, Chornock was judged "different because he remained the same" since Eastern rite secular priests were far more often married than celibate...
...Therefore, this church has canonical legitimacy...
...During the 1930s, a major schism occurred in America in the Byzantine Rite Ruthenian Eparchy (then called Greek Rite Ruthenian Catholic Eparchy), an Eastern rite church in union with Rome...
...The essential fact of that tragedy-that it was a genocide of the Jews-has been marginalized...
...God forbid that the selective and distorting memory of Gordon Zahn prevails...
...Yet the point of our constitutional protections is precisely to insulate certain basic rights, including religious freedom, from "the tyranny of the majority...
...Often called the "Celibacy Schism," it also involved lay trusteeship and forced Latinization of this Eastern rite...
...If the Holocaust becomes a "normal" wartime event-and the Waldheims of this world hope as much-the possibilities of its recurrence are increased...
...GORDON C. ZAHN Curricular judgments New Haven, Conn...
...When the term is broadened it is attenuated, flattened, and corrupted...
...Familiar with Zahn's work on Franz Jaegerstaetter, I anticipated a fair and balanced analysis of a papal journey which made many of us in the Jewish community sad and perplexed...
...He is also implicitly self-contradictory: surely the tolerance of divergent worldviews which he believes public schools must teach is fostered by both subtle and explicit means, by character formation as well as intellectual training...
...The equation of Waldheim's wartime activities as a loyal servant of the Third Reich with those undertaken by representatives of democratic Israel or democratic America is shameful...
...ALLAN MITTLEMAN The author replies: While I respect and regret Rabbi Mittle-man's objection to my article, I think my position is valid...
...To the Editors: Professor William D. Dinges's assertion ["Lefebvre Abandons Ship," August 12] that the schism led by Archbishop Lefebvre constitutes the first official schism in the church since the formation of the Polish National Catholic Church constitutes an error of omission...
...As Elie Wiesel reminds us, not all the victims were Jews, but all the Jews were victims...
...RICHARD RENOFFn married than celibate...
...Jorstad's final alternative raises other worries...
...A 1929 Papal decree, Cum data fuerit, enforced mandatory celibacy for all newly ordained North American priests of this rite as well as future emigr6 priests...
...The loss of Jewish specificity-a real danger, given trends in Europe and at the Vatican-will domesticate the Holocaust in the memory of future generations...
...Instead, I found assertions that made me even sadder and more perplexed...
...Rather, it was a way of viewing the world which could alienate them from the religious tradition of their parents...
...Democratic processes are effective for those who have a numerical majority or political power...
...Jorstad's essay does not acknowledge the cost of these political exigencies in terms of parental religious freedom...
...Thus the Court held that the Amish children must be released from their obligation to attend high school until age sixteen, in part because it recognized that what they would be taught was not "objective," "neutral" information which they could use however they wished...
...Zahn's comparison of Waldheim with American or Israeli officials is alarming...
...To redefine it in universal terms or to integrate it into a historiography of Christian martyrdom, into a time of trial and triumph for the church, wounds Jews deeply...
...The fundamentalists in Mozert do not hold the radical objections to the whole of modern living voiced by the Amish...
...It seems so, for Zahn tells us that he would argue against "the tendency of some to grant the international Jewish community something approaching 'monopoly rights' to the Holocaust, ignoring the near universality of the human beings who perished in its horror.'' Who ignores what here...
...All three schisms were triggered by attempts to produce uniformity rather than pluralism within the church...
...2) educate their children at home...
...How many people have the time or training to educate their children at home...
...Others were murdered, others were martyred, but the "Holocaust" remains a uniquely Jewish tragedy...
...He claims, for example, that "the students [in Mozert] were only being informed about a variety of ideas, not compelled to act them out or believe in them.'' Is the education of the young merely a matter of presenting them with ideas, or does it not involve the inculcation of a certain perspective...
...M. CATHLEEN KAVENY Rites & wrongs Garden City, N.Y...
...As for Waldheim, it does not exonerate him of guilt to say his participation was (at least to the extent firm evidence is at hand) peripheral...
...In implicitly avowing the former option, Jorstad is not merely at odds with the Yoder court, but also with such cultural critics as Alisdair Maclntyre and Robert Bellah...
...Gordon Zahn's confused and contradictory whitewash/ critique of that performance further batters the cause...
...Yet what about the hard fact that private schools are often extremely costly...
...In this respect, Yoder and Mozert differ only in degree, not in kind...
...But the judiciary is ill-equipped to serve as a national school board...
...The Polish and Carpatho-Russian schisms were preceded by very harsh attempts by English-speaking prelates to Americanize Eastern European immigrants...
...In contrast to Justice Berger, Jorstad tends to depict religious belief as a matter about which one's head can reason, influencing the sentiments, habits, and attitudes of one's heart...
...The schism was permanent because it led to the formation of the Carpatho-Russian Greek Catholic Diocese which this year celebrated its golden jubilee...
...It will remove its scandal and sting...
...He notes that parents could (1) send their children to private schools...
...Secondly, Jorstad's identification of the three options open to those with religious objections to public school curricula ignores present political realities...
...The lack of credibility in official church teaching caused by Humanae vitae hurt its life-defending position on abortion...
...To dull the edge of Holocaust memory is to smooth the way toward anti-Semitic insanity...
...RABBI DR...
...This can be seen, first, in his failure to pay sufficient attention to the general approach of the Court in Wisconsin v. Yoder, and its implications for the subject of his essay, Mozert v. Hawkins County Public Schools...
...The cause of Catholic-Jewish relations has been battered by John Paul's omission at Mauthausen...
...And Jews feel obligated to keep the primary memories-the memories of the survivors-alive...
...Nevertheless, they cannot, for example, construe religion as a matter of taste, or religious tolerance as indifference in the face of equally good alternatives...
...Does he really mean to suggest that this international diplomatic pariah, condemned both at home and abroad for his complicity in the Holocaust and his years of cowardly dissimulation, has more moral credibility than officers of our government or Israel' s ! Has the pendulum of '' moral sensitivity'' swung so far against Israel and the U.S...
...The task now is to better articulate the promotion of human life in medical ethics...
...WILLIAM V. DOLAN, M.D...
...In the abstract, these are all tenable options...
...Holocaust" refers to the outcome of that anti-Semitism: the genocide of six million Jewish men, women, and children, and the eradication of European Jewish civilization...
...Anti-Semitism was the engine that drove Nazism...
...Writing for the Yoder majority, Chief Justice Berger emphasized the importance of education in forming not only the capacity of a child to reason, but the very perspective from which later reasoning will take place...
...This is certainly the case in the Celibacy Schism because pressure from American clergymen prompted the celibacy decree...
...or (3) use the democratic political processes to alter the school board's decision...
Vol. 115 • October 1988 • No. 18
