Editorials

...the media are by nature conflict-oriented, the more so when the conflict is within the Catholic church...

...Finally, sound and persuasive moral argument is an important part of the political debate...

...No doubt these proposals will be effective to the extent that they are followed...

...It is perhaps less than candid in assessing the specific contribution of Lebanese Christians to their country's agony, less than forthright in calling for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse without quite daring to use the term...

...Less predictably, the American Jewish Congress praised the bishops for their "genuine sensitivity to Israel's real security concerns...

...They knew they would be greeted with open arms, West German citizenship, jobs, cash, and a democratic future...

...Its recommendations will work only if received in the spirit they are offered...

...Unfortunately, its brevity precludes other than very general suggestions for practical solutions...

...But perhaps, after decades of don't-give-an-inch sloganeering on all sides, it is impossible for the ordinary citizen to detect exactly where the moral issue could be usefully raised and debated, or, given the current range of public opinion, how a political compromise might be framed...

...Yet these young people-fleeing the most prosperous country in the Eastern bloc, abandoning homes, cars, and vacation houses...

...Bishops have no business commenting on economic or political questions that are not properly 'religious.'" That view depends on a conception of religion so bodiless as to be un-Catholic...

...Their indebtedness to the developed world has increased from $400 billion to $1.3 trillion in that time...

...By taking the bishops (and themselves) seriously enough to publish a sort of counterpastoral, William Simon, Michael Novak, & Co...

...This has had the effect of letting the lid rise on the growing demands for reform of those who have stayed behind...

...for the same reason, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith said it was "fundamentally flawed...

...And some of its parts-sentences, paragraphs, some whole passages-are jewels of compression and clarity...

...This criticism most often comes from people who dissent from the findings of a particular episcopal document...

...The bishops have decided publicly to proclaim the moral law as they see it, while omitting any reference to the pastoral wisdom now applied by ministers of the Catholic church to those who knowingly or unwittingly fall short of its ideals (or who, on the matter of contraception, conscientiously disagree...

...The new government led by Egon Krenz may yet be tempted to turn to repressive measures, a la China...

...Subsequently he has joined eight other governors in an amicus brief (Turnock v. Ragsdale-an Illinois case contesting hospital-level standards for abortion clinics) asking the Supreme Court not to allow states to restrict the right to abortions before viability...

...What business is that of ours...

...and there has been a massive transfer of capital from the underdeveloped to the industrial world: $43 billion in 1988 alone...

...This draft seems certain to satisfy Vatican objections to the 1987 document, "The Many Faces of AIDS: A Gospel Response," adopted by the NCCB administrative board (see "Getting the Point," Commonweal, January 15,1988...

...Yet, with this summer's violent crackdown on the student-reformers in China, they could not be certain of their own government's reaction: it might have been merely a tightening of border patrols...

...bishops say that is intolerable ("Relieving Third-World Debt: A Call for Coresponsibility, Justice, and Solidarity," Administrative Board, NCCB...

...It may soon be forced to initiate the reforms it has stubbornly resisted until now...

...The statements on nuclear arms and economic justice have had impact (certainly on us, demonstrably on leaders and troops of other denominations...

...By holding public hearings and stimulating broad discussion, the cry of the poor might finally be heard, understood, and responded to by the major (and minor) players...

...As they packed the embassies of Eastern Europe, they renounced Honecker's paralysis and headed for West Germany, which shares their language, history, and kin, the country that has subsidized the East German economy for forty years...

...In our brief assessments below, we find the first two admirable, the third problematic...

...it is men who have always favored the most liberal abortion laws...

...and Illinois gubernatorial candidate Neil Hartigan (Dem...

...According to the board, more than a little: at least 30 percent of third-world debt is owed to U.S...

...For the moment the National Abortion Rights Action League (N ARAL) and other abortion rights advocates have managed, at least in Florida and the U.S...

...to service our own gargantuan debt and deficits...

...That's an empirical judgment...

...The U.S...

...they had little hope for freedom of expression, free elections, or more democratic pol-icymaking...

...In this election year, New York mayoral candidate Rudolph Giuliani (Rep...

...So far, it's the former...

...Nonetheless, we think the decision was unfortunate...

...Nor is it a women's conscience, as the governor would have it, that can be our legal or moral standard...

...It does not attempt or pretend to offer a detailed plan for Middle East peace...

...government, the Vatican, the American and other Catholic hierarchies, the United Nations...

...What Representative Shelley's head, rather than heart, shows is that "personally opposed, but...

...So much for political seriousness...

...It may well be that the refugees of summer, who left in despair of reform, have set it in motion...

...Given the chance openly to debate more restrictive abortion laws, perhaps the nation would rather evade it...

...abstain from all intravenous (IV) drug use...

...Hungary's bold gesture last May-of taking down the barbed wire fences along its Austrian border-eased but did not cause the East German exodus...

...Bob Martinez, a prolifer and a Republican, called a special session of the Democratic-dominated Florida state legislature to consider various restrictive measures...

...Before Webster, it could be argued, as the governor has, that abortion on demand was "the law of the land" and that as a public official he had to uphold the law embodied more...

...Who decides...

...It does matter, of course, how committed individual bishops are to what is called "implementation," but at least as much depends on the response of individual pastors, editors, educators, pew-persons-emphatically including those who disagree with a particular stand...

...The administrative board has consulted widely and addresses all the major players: governments of both creditor and debtor nations, commercial lending institutions, multilateral agencies (the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund), and the elites in both lending and debtor nations...

...House of Representatives, to turn the focus on our national antipathy toward politicians...

...Through it a human drama unfolded, full of irony: while East Germany prepared to celebrate its fortieth anniversary, some 40,000 of its citizens prepared to get out...

...So there is a special irony in the possibility that by drawing on the methods carefully honed by liberals and leftists in the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam movements, Operation Rescue will completely derail any hope for reaching legislative compromises on the abortion issue...

...living standards have fallen more than 25 percent in large parts of Africa and 15 percent in Latin America...

...The fetus now has an acknowledged standing in the legal arena...

...I'd be a fool not to listen to my constituents...

...Because it calls for Palestinian sovereignty, the statement was greeted by the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee as a "historic development...

...What advice would they give to those who cannot give up IV drugs or will not abstain from sex outside of marriage...

...After a brief exchange with a New York Times reporter (September 11, 1989) in which he spoke of his discomfort as a male and a member of the male establishment over making judgments about abortion, prochoice supporters welcomed him definitively to their ranks...

...Its stalwarts continue to block abortion clinics in the face of court orders, jail sentences, and crushing fines...

...it has to be considered on its merits, document by document...

...Yet when abstinence is not practiced, these are the most effective efforts now known to prevent the spread of this fatal disease...

...Since the document is correct in pointing to both the need and responsibility to develop such solutions, perhaps the full body of bishops should tackle that larger project...

...it would be difficult indeed to gather data sufficiently subtle and broad-based to prove or disprove it...

...All this having been said, the draft statement is a notable achievement...

...The liberal-left prochoicers' recourse to a libertarian strategy is but one political irony leading us astray...

...Finally, there's the waste-paper critique: "the statements, regardless of their merits, don't make any pastoral or political difference in the real world and so should be discontinued...

...With a hundred thousand protestors in Leipzig on October 16 peacefully chanting, "We are the people" and "Gorby...

...In a state that has tended toward strict abortion laws, the governor failed to develop a real strategy for getting the bills through committee, galvanized prochoice advocates, and got a predictable political drubbing for his inept political organizing...

...In effect, the bishops have left the job of protecting those who will not or cannot abstain to the government, the advertising agencies, and the public schools.ising agencies, and the public schools...

...For the critical issue is not simply "Who decides...

...The current draft says that traditional Catholic teaching is the only morally correct and certain way to stop the spread of AIDS: abstain from all sexual intercourse outside of marriage...

...This neurosis was well nourished during the anti-abortion Reagan administration, and now has been given real vitality in the image that abortion rights advocates hold up of a woman forced to bear a child through the political power of the likes of Jesse Helms or his equally antediluvian counterparts in state legislatures...

...The bishops are playing in the right ballpark but out of their league...

...The statement is a compelling reflection on the human costs of third-world debt...

...It says little if anything that has not been said before but it assembles its parts into a coherent and comprehensible whole...

...His opponents point out that in a regular session of the legislature, where abortion regulation would have been one among a number of issues, some of the measures would have passed...

...The statement on third-world debt is already "official" policy, having been prepared and published by the fifty-member administrative board of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops...

...All this in 9,000 words filling forty-one typewritten, double-spaced pages...

...After trying to crush the initial protests in Leipzig and Dresden, the East German Politburo has reversed itself...

...abortion on demand need no longer be the only "law of the land...

...multiplied the attention given to Economic Justice for All...

...AIDS "Called to Compassion: A Response to the HIV/AIDS Crisis," is a clear and direct statement on AIDS...

...Our political leaders, rather than engaging in that debate, seem to be evading it...

...INTERNATIONAL DEBT In the last decade, the coal-miner's refrain, "another day older and deeper in debt," has become a chorus for much of the third world...

...All three responses confirm our judgment that the drafting committee and their assistants have achieved the kind of tone and balance indispensable for useful discussion of the Middle East...

...commercial banks and the U.S...

...Nor is it an imposition of religious vie ws to try to incorporate the interests of a developing human in the law...

...have blown about in the same wind...

...more substantively, it far better reflects the spirit of collegiality, which has turned all too evanescent since it floated about the aula of St...

...they condemn violence against gays and urge those infected to inform sexual partners...

...is their slogan: "women or politicians...

...They left, not by scaling the wall, but by car, on foot, by train, still toting picnic baskets and suitcases packed for the holidays...

...But you've got to balance between your constituents and what your heart tells you...

...Half of September's emigres were too young to remember the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 or Erich Honecker's role in erecting it...

...The East German refugees saw themselves as victims of their leaders' refusal to embraceperestroika...

...spouses, parents, and friends-described their futures as hopelessly constricted...

...In a letter to Catholic New York, the archdiocesan paper, he then denied any change in the position he set forth in his 1984 Notre Dame speech...

...There is another irony here...

...The bishops reject, without benefit of data or documentation, clean-needle-exchange programs for addicts and dismiss as "the safe-sex approach" the promotion of condoms in AIDS education campaigns...

...as NARAL has it...

...EAST GERMANS GO WEST During September the eyes of the world were fixed on a tear in the Iron Curtain...

...No doubt this message needs to be proclaimed...

...Nor is it an issue from which men can or ought to withhold judgment-or deny responsibility...

...To do so would risk provoking another, more humiliating exodus, fueling its internal opposition groups, and incurring a cut-off of revenue from West Germany...

...THE MIDDLE EAST The draft statement touches on the religious and political history of the region, sources and causes of the long-running tragedy of Lebanon, the competing needs and claims of the Israelis and the Palestinians, the roles being played by the Arab states in general, Syria and Egypt in particular, the Soviet Union, the U.S...

...TRIPLE PLAY The Middle East, third-world debt, AIDS-the U.S...

...Though Webster has not withdrawn the right established in Roe, it did finally acknowledge what was also stated in Roe-the state may have an interest in the protection of a viable fetus in the third trimester...

...The bishops offer sound and sensitive positions on AIDS testing and the need for drug treatment programs and outreach services to AIDS sufferers, their families and caregivers...

...What of moral seriousness...

...Florida legislator Robert J. Shelley explains his shift from the prolife to the prochoice camp: "I've always been personally in favor of right to life and still am...

...seventeen nations are unable to meet their debt agreements and the list is growing...

...As we have previously argued (August 11), in the end it is not legislation that will stem the tide of abortions, but changing the hearts and minds of women and men about the value of nascent human life-for its own sake, for the sake of those who protect it and the social bonds that tie us all together...

...But first, a comment on the recurring complaint that publishing such statements is (take your pick) inappropriate, useless, counterproductive, and that the bishops would do better to tend their own weedy ecclesiastical gardens...

...the Politburo ousted Honecker...

...Now a second spectacle is beginning to unfold...

...The process of preparing and debating episcopal affirmations on policy questions has certainly and usefully educated one constituency within the church: the episkopoi themselves...

...The draft-debate-amendment-vote procedure, especially if preceded by public hearings, is much more likely to draw attention than a routine distribution cum press release...

...It was a male Supreme Court, after all, that decided Roe...

...all were quickly defeated...

...Political and moral debate can contribute to that conversion of mind and heart...

...As "authentic teachers" of morality, what would the bishops say to a married couple, one of whom has AIDS...

...Meanwhile, the legislative efforts of the National Right to Life Committee to introduce more restrictive laws at the state level seem to have been eclipsed by Operation Rescue...

...The tactics, the statements, and underlying philosophy of Operation Rescue and its leader, Randall Terry, evoke the deepest fears of feminists, prochoicers, and many ordinary citizens that anti-abortionists not only want an end to abortions but want to roll back the equal opportunities and rights that women have achieved over the last twenty-five years...

...government...

...We hope the draft will pass substantially as drawn, and that the final document will then be put to wide use...

...The visceral antipathy among Americans to government interference in their lives lies deep in the national history and the national psyche...

...In contrast, the other two statements exist in draft form, and are to be debated, amended, and voted up or down at the bishops' general meeting next week (Nov...

...In the death penalty debate, Governor Cuomo has used his powers of discernment and eloquence in an attempt to move the citizenry toward his own views opposing capital punishment, views based on moral as well as political principles...

...But most disheartening: our politicians have yet to demonstrate the moral and political seriousness that the abortion issue requires...

...In a previous editorial (August 11), we expressed the hope that the debate would give consideration to developing human life, would work toward implementing mechanisms and policies encouraging women to weigh the interests of the fetus and give birth, and would have the effect of changing the minds and hearts of men and women on the abortion question in order to reduce the unconscionable number of abortions we see each year in the U.S...

...It has embarked on a critical self-examination and has publicly called for a discussion of "the basic questions of our society...

...Catholic bishops have written and are circulating statements on these critical issues...

...Mario Cuomo of New York...

...The debt statement, we're given to understand, did not receive this full treatment because there wasn't enough room on the agenda for discussion of three major statements in one meeting...

...And so, it would appear, has Gov...

...People are literally dying in the streets as a consequence of the debt...

...The Czechs, beginning to feel the winds of change, let the East Germans pass through their territory without rushing to join them...

...good moral and political arguments can be made on their behalf...

...and in some important respects, it is men who benefit as much as or more than women from the present laws and the present moral climate...

...Some of the current proposed restrictions do so...

...Compared with the life-and-death choices faced by previous generations of East Germans, by the Indochinese and Haitian boat people, and by Latin Americans dependent on "coyotes" to guide them across the deserts of Mexico, the East Germans risked little...

...Yet the statement is readable and, taken as a whole, persuasive...

...After all, the Hungarians remain at home, materially less comfortable than the East Germans, but enthusiastic about the potential of political (and constitutional) reform and economic independence opening to them under glasnost...

...Peter's during Vatican II...

...The problem...

...Gorby...

...It refers to the origins of Lebanese nationhood, to the Crusades, the Holocaust, Israel's wars of survival and its invasion of Lebanon, the intifada, the relevant Security Council resolutions, the status of Jerusalem, above all to Israel's need for secure borders and the Palestinians' need for territory with sovereignty...

...6-9...

...It could have been truncheons, tear gas, or gunfire...

...The document-as with the 1983 pastoral letter on nuclear war-brings sorely needed attention to the ethical dimension of the question...

...is a straw in the wind in a rising political storm...

...it's beyond the competence of these particular churchmen and their staffs to balance all the factors involved in, say, nuclear deterrence...

...few could recall the toll of Germans shot climbing over it...

...The mainstream prolife movement has kept a careful distance from Operation Rescue and its disruptive tactics...

...And perhaps there was some thought to influencing the current and continuing discussion within the administration, and between the banks and debtor countries...

...At this juncture of the national debate, we are sorry that the governor seems to stand back from using those considerable talents to engage the body politic in considering the value of developing human life...

...There's also the matter of process...

...Not only is third-world capital being siphoned off to service those debts, but capital that might otherwise be available for development in third-world countries is now being usurped by the U.S...