Editorials

...NOT WITH MY MONEY A year ago, the director of Washington's Corcoran Gallery canceled an exhibit of works by Robert Mapplethorpe, which included photos with homoerotic and sadomasochistic motifs...

...As for closing down the Endowments altogether, that would be a sorry loss to our already limited and constricted support of public life-much as paving over city parks would be a terrible loss to urban dwellers...

...This reading spells slow death...

...Now it has ruled the federal statute protecting the flag invalid...

...More surprising, while seeming to uphold the role of bishop, the instruction would in practice reduce it to that of a beadle, a sort of ecclesiastical sergeant-at-arms...

...Considering the demagoguery inherent in the issue as well as the longstanding commercial exploitation of the flag, it is difficult to generate any real enthusiasm for amending the Bill of Rights to outlaw flag desecration...

...It leaves us with two classes of theologians: those who are most closely associated with the teaching church and who will have the task of educating the next generations must be publicly silent on the theological quandaries most troubling the People of God...

...For great numbers of Catholics of all ranks, the choice will be to fall silent, dissemble, or take their leave of the Roman church...

...It has stirred the perennial yahoos and the populist demagogues, but it has also demonstrated how many live-and-let-live citizens now doubt whether the artistic norm-setters have lost all touch with moral sensibility...

...Symbols are as meaningful as the complex social and moral allegiances sustaining them...

...hard-core pornography on cable TV and a steadily increasing amount of soft-core on network TV...

...The question, "Why should tax dollars go for art that many taxpayers find patently offensive...

...The second and more distressing thing about this battery of arguments is that they completely ignore the properly ecclesial reasons for dissent, the concern that the integrity and power of the Gospel are being harmed by error and the whole people of God has, in admittedly a complex way, a role to play in the process of discerning the truth...

...If clever but empty words were taxed in proportion to the folly and suffering such rhetoric encourages, political speech might rise above the level of a Clint Eastwood-Ronald Reagan one-liner...

...A pending bill, if it does not fail outright, may include significant cutbacks and restrictions...

...they are indispensable in creating the social energy to confront problems...

...Would that there were more media executives with a fraction of the sensitivity about frivolous trashing of people's sexual and religious values of the kind they have (quite rightly if belatedly) developed about racial stereotypes...

...Had only the Mapplethorpe exhibit encountered a curator with similar independence of judgment, capable of making moral distinctions rather than acting out of fear of Jesse Helms or dogmatic adherence to the code of art above all...

...And that is where the heart of the current controversy should really be examined, not in a narrowly political debate about funding mechanisms...

...So far, so good...

...In the end the authority of Jesus Christ becomes the property, subject to the pope, first of the curial bureaucracy, then of one committee within it: the Congregation itself, author and source of the Instruction...

...they are recast as, at best, supercatechists or, at worst, mouthpieces for whatever curial theology is in place...

...Nor are theologians alone in turning to, or being pursued by, the media for help in interpreting and explaining events, and therefore in forming public opinion...

...Further, by asking theologians to speak to "magisterial authorities" about personal disagreements with church teaching, the Instruction gives to disagreement some color of legitimacy...

...There are positive statements that deserve applause, puzzlers that beg for clarification, admonitions that prompt self-scrutiny, and assertions that demand vigorous criticism...

...READ MY LIPS:" thundered the entire front page of the tabloid, "I LIED.'' More sober headlines and analysis followed...

...here, the development of doctrine is implicitly acknowledged...

...But there are no less plausible readings that have already alarmed even cautious Catholic scholars who have habitually stood apart from the liberal/conservative divisions in the church...

...The history of the Modernist crisis reminds us of the toll this path took in secrecy, hypocrisy, and the intellectual deformation of three generations of clergy and bishops...

...There is an important distinction between idolatry and the power and efficacy of the symbolic...

...Congressional Republicans, who face the ire of the electorate this November, are threatening mutiny, fearing Bush has deprived them of an issue that has crippled the so-called tax-and-spend Democratic party for nearly twenty-five years...

...These narrowly reasoned and alienating decisions will hinder, not help, communication between antagonistic groups...

...A minimalist reading of the document is possible...

...The media can be a problem not only for the church, but for politics, the economy, and cultural life generally...

...Go ahead, make our day.nald Reagan one-liner...

...Republicans Fear a Kiss of Death As Bush Moves His Lips on Taxes," wrote an inspired New York Times copy editor...

...What the flag stands for, namely the Constitution and freedom of speech, is what really counts...

...The question of funding the Endowments has become a question of confidence in the country's cultural elite...

...Not in self-defense, but in defense of the church and of truth, it is time for those among them with any sense of what might be at stake to make their anguish heard...

...The cultural elite, made up of the artistic and scholarly peers to whom it seems prudent to delegate these decisions, is saying, in effect, "Trust us...

...ET CETERA PURSED LIPS The revocation of President George Bush's nonirreformable stand on taxes may have given Republicans apoplexy but it was a godsend for headline writers...

...Still, amending the Constitution to reverse the Court would be a hyperbolic reaction...

...If directors of museums and other "gatekeepers," producers, reviewers, editorialists, teachers, and "peers," performed their critical functions, we would be smarter about fine lines to be drawn between the legitimately shocking, the morally challenging, the erotic, the obscene, and the degrading...

...Laws prohibiting flag desecration are attempts to promote and give expression to that deeper loyalty...

...They are not to be denigrated or dismissed as superfluous...

...She was the ventriloquist who put those not so eatable words "Read my lips: no new taxes" on Bush's patrician lips during the 1988 Republican National Convention...

...This conservative tendency in allocating funds is debatable, but it has been the lesson of experience that decisions about grants for the arts and humanities, as well as science and medicine, should be carried on largely among peers and insulated from governmental lobbying, log-rolling, andjob-mongering...

...All informed Catholics must press the bishops to respond...

...It is within this social and political context that laws penalizing those who desecrate the flag should be understood...

...The jingoistic fallout from the flag debate underscores the need for those who bravely defend individual rights to find some way to champion symbols of the community's collective conscience...

...The first thing distressing about this approach is not its critical stance toward moral relativism and the secular worldview, but its swift and sweeping rejection of what constitutes much of the framework of human consciousness in the twentieth century...

...Go ahead, make our day...

...On the contrary, it strikes us that such a question about the appropriate or moral use of tax dollars is unexceptionable, having previously been raised about the war in Vietnam, abortion funding, and an array of other government expenditures...

...Finally, it must be acknowledged that a great deal of enduring art and thought was initially shocking, even offensive...

...But a maximalist view is also possible...

...The Rev...

...To begin with, such declarations by this Congregation are no paper tigers...

...At the most literal level, respect for the flag is seen as evidence of a basic commitment to the American enterprise as a whole above and beyond the discrete rights that flow from democracy...

...a judgment that by means of this Instruction-in combination with Canon 812, the revised oath of office and profession of faith, and further Instructions from the Congregation-a much larger group of Catholic thinkers will fall under the Law of Silence...

...But the cold hand of the Instruction will only stay the careful and increase the power of the careless...

...And after reading and rereading the Instruction, discussing it among ourselves and with knowledgeable others, we felt a foreboding that ruled out silence...

...Either a minimalist or a maximalist reading of the new Instruction calls for a concerted reaction of an informed, intelligent, persistent kind...

...The New York Post, in its fashion, was more blunt...

...Symbols such as the flag are not archaic vestiges of a primitive or "unenlightened" citizenship, any more than a Catholic's reverence for religious images is a sign of irrational credulity...

...Since then, the country has been embroiled in a nasty debate about pornography, art, freedom of speech, and taxpayer support of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities (NEA and NEH...

...The Congregation's concerns cannot be dismissed out of hand...

...The flag is, finally, just a scrap of cloth, and when pressed about its intrinsic value people imagine it can be dispensed with easily...

...We doubt that the public is clamoring for an end to the Endowments...

...Our distress should not prevent us from acknowledging the Instruction's positive side...

...The maximalist interpretation also notes the Instruction's claim that "It is a doctrine of faith that...

...When we read that "magisterial teaching, by virtue of divine assistance, has a validity beyond its argumentation," or "the fact that the procedures [for investigating theologians] can be improved does not mean that they are contrary to justice and right," we have the sense of drifting into a zone where the rules of discourse are gradually being bent to make official opinion impregnable even to the most reasoned challenge...

...Chesterton said that we must love something before we can hope to reform it...

...Enough" to the steadily eroding barriers against obscenity and human degradation in the public sphere: to wit, the song lyrics of 2 Live Crew...

...That is cause for alarm, for prayer, and for an appeal to that handful of Catholics, above all the bishops, who alone are able to intervene effectively...

...Unfortunately not far enough...

...SYMBOLIC VALUE For some the recently concluded-or is it merely postponed?- debate on the flag amendment was a source of vexation, even embarrassment...

...But Americans, and Catholics in particular, should be suspicious about such a devaluation of the symbolic, should be leery around talk that subordinates the value of symbols to the supposedly self-evident authority of explicit speech and glorifies speech over nonverbal communication...

...While claiming to honor theology as a vocation, the Instruction betrays a deep distrust of theologians...

...and Canadian theologians, who have recently prepared a response to the oath of office, ought to give this document equally careful scrutiny...

...If you want to wage war-on communism or on poverty-you need a moral consensus...

...The nastiness of the debate stems not from asking such a question but from the arrogance of many in the country's cultural elite, who no longer feel required to reason with their fellow citizens, preferring to demonize them as enemy forces threatening to bring about the joint reign of Torquemada and Queen Victoria...

...And we would be wiser about the line that will necessarily be drawn in allocating public moneys for the arts and humanities...

...Lay people ought to read and analyze this document to better understand the issues we face (for text, see, Origins, July 5,1990...

...We believe this spells disaster...

...moral norms can be infallibly taught by the magisterium...

...Bush's sore lips go back to Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan...

...The Congregation's conclusion is that in controverted matters theological correction and development can only take place out of hearing of all but a few privileged Catholics...

...The human sciences and the surrounding culture are described as important instruments for understanding the mysteries of faith...

...If so, a gauntlet will be thrown down defining Catholicity to include formal, unquestioning acceptance of (or total silence about) official Roman teaching in matters of sexual morality, particularly artificial contraception, regardless of the many statements by individual bishops and episcopal conferences (as well as theologians) recognizing the claims of conscience in this matter...

...Rather, the issue is one of a hierarchy of values, not an either/or choice between free and censored speech...

...the appearance of Andrew "Dice" Clay, a foul-mouthed and abusive comedian, on "Saturday Night Live...

...Martin Luther King, Jr., recognized the need for demonstrating such loyalty when challenging authority...

...Perhaps that is only poetic justice...

...The majority of Americans who instinctively feel protecting the flag is a "reasonable" imposition on individual autonomy are not confusing it with a magical object that requires obeisance...

...They help us organize experience and communicate with each other at a profound level...

...an explosion (the proper word) of gratuitous violence in films...

...At a deeper level, the Instruction strives to rebut the justifications that it believes are offered for dissent in the church...

...Above all, the Instruction consistently cites a sense of history as a critical tool of theological inquiry...

...A great nation, beset with complex economic and social problems, was diverted by a petty squabble over an emblem...

...Dissent is ascribed to philosophical liberalism and its exaltation of individual judgment, to sociological argumentation for a consensus view of supernatural faith, to the application of democratic practices to the church, to the overvaluation of individual conscience in respect to the magisterium...

...rather, it found in the Endowment debate a place to deliver a message...

...He had to foster the idea of legal obligation even as he challenged it...

...More importantly, coming fast upon the announcement of a required profession of faith for theologians and a draft of a universal catechism ignoring Vatican II, the Instruction may be the prelude to further steps that could provoke-we choose our words carefully-forced schism, forced apostasy, or widespread hypocrisy...

...Inch by inch, step by step, the authority of the church is circumscribed and constricted...

...Given the success of Ms...

...In doing so he acknowledged the legitimacy of the system as a whole and could therefore demand accountability within that system from his adversaries...

...It will be resolved, rather, when much of this middle-of-the-road public sees that the media are capable of treating the issue in a more even-handed way, not simply framing it from the perspective of the offended artists, their agents, and supporters while portraying critics of Mapplethorpe, rock lyrics, and blue movies as petty puritans if not outright Nazis...

...Even so, we see difficulties...

...None of these propositions are exceptional and none are new...

...Declarations by the Congregation tend to follow a certain pattern, and the "Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian" is no exception...

...It recognizes the validity of theology as a "scientific" pursuit...

...Symbols of public honor and obligation are not ignoble...

...Both have, in fact, expended the bulk of their resources on well-established institutions and on projects rooted in serious artistic and intellectual tradition, and this funding has helped to maintain public access to exhibits and performances that otherwise might have never been mounted, or would have been priced beyond the means of most people...

...That message is "enough...

...The truth is that in our world, outrage has become routinized in art-outrage has become the very product of art rather than a byproduct...

...So it becomes ever more difficult for the public to know whether a particular funding decision recognizes a valuable though highly disturbing new work, or follows the path of least resistance and indulges the latest enfant terrible...

...Local and world leaders, bankers, artists, marketers, why even bishops, cardinals, and popes use the media-and are used by them...

...The result will probably be more defiance than acceptance, but in any case an effective discrediting of Catholic intellectual life...

...instead, these problems will be openly confronted only by those at a distance from Catholic institutions, who may be but need not be cognizant of or in conformity with the mind of the church...

...The Congregation's way of setting up this argument is deeply revealing...

...In a very real sense, he made white America pledge allegiance to the flag, and in doing so established a coherent if grudging dialogue with his oppressors...

...Wherever you intend to lead the troops, you can't get them organized without a flag...

...This is a question that won't be resolved in Congress...

...ultimately, it puts their role and authority as teachers in question...

...As to proposals that funding be conditioned on pledges not to do things that the law already forbids, these gestures strike us as precedents to be avoided even while we are hardly convinced that they are the death knell of artistic freedom and creativity...

...In this sense, it expresses a healthy, pragmatic understanding that there are no rights without larger duties...

...It will also be resolved as the public sees more examples of individual moral judgment, neither employing the law's power to censor nor citing its limitations to avoid responsibility...

...There is a puzzling reference to "God's own infallibility," in which the church is said to share...

...Ostensibly the Instruction is addressed to them but they are ignored throughout...

...The Instruction's failure to deal explicitly with this point is either a calculated ambiguity or an indication of a gap between its authors' world and the one many Catholics inhabit...

...As some libertarian conservatives warn, we must not make the flag an object of worship...

...Many whose lives are the life of the church-pastors, theologians, teachers, women and men-have been deeply dispirited by the Instruction, and we feel a scruple that rehearsing familiar lines of criticism may only add to a demoralization that is becoming one of the most serious problems in today's church...

...We are told that "the pastoral task of the magisterium is vigilance...

...CHAPPED LIPS" was the title of a July 30 Sidney Blutnenthal piece in the New Republic...

...the task assigned to the Apostles was to preach the good news, a rather different thing...

...Bush will need plenty of lip gloss to survive...

...The refusal of Nora Dunn and Sinead O'Connor to appear with Andrew "Dice" Clay on "Saturday Night Live" spoke courageously to his antiwomen obscenities...

...in issuing this one, Cardinal Ratzinger gives himself marching orders, explicitly approved (the document says) by the bishop of Rome, and thus a new source of authority to be cited in support of particular disciplinary actions...

...Noonan's book {What 1 Saw At the Revolution), she is destined belatedly for the higher income-tax brackets where Reagan's budget-busting rate decreases are expected to be rolled back...

...This impression is further encouraged by the common notion that the flag is only a symbol, after all...

...It ascribes dissent to essentially secular rationales, posing them against its own ecclesial concerns...

...In his use of nonviolent civil disobedience, King sought out the legal penalty for dissent...

...It is also a question to which a reasonably adequate answer can be made...

...It is unwilling to admit that authentic ecclesial commitment and loyalty may lie behind expressions of dissent just as much as behind its own defense of official teaching...

...In subtle but indispensable ways, symbols such as the flag hold us together even while we battle each other...

...Blumenthal heralds a seismic political shift with the aftershocks of Bush's recantation...

...Words-truth, reason, faith, revelation, the magisterium- become things and are talked about as if they had an existence apart from human culture and the human sciences, human history and, above all, human persons...

...That banner should be grasped, not rendered meaningless...

...In the Instruction, however, they are so hedged about that the splendid raiment they once constituted has been reduced to patches on quite another set of clothes...

...On this reading, the document will apply only to those with canonical mandates-seminary professors and faculty in pontifical institutes...

...Perhaps some similar sympathy has led several leading prelates to stress the declaration's positive aspects while minimizing its disciplinary reach...

...The strictures against disagreement with established teaching will not, it is assumed, apply to scholarly literature, although how such disagreement is then to be kept out of the media is left unexplained...

...Indeed, given the tendency to manipulate patriotic sentiment for partisan gain, talk of "protecting the dignity" of the flag seems disingenuous...

...If only theologians did not insist on confusing things...

...is taken as sufficient evidence of a fatal philistinism...

...The passage of time and the filtering process of history allow the theologian to distinguish between the necessary and the contingent...

...Because the National Endowment for the Arts funded both the Mapplethorpe exhibit and another including a photo by Andres Serrano of a crucifix suspended in a beaker of urine, popular pressure has grown to cut or control NEA funding as well as that of the NEH...

...But perhaps more important, "enough" to a curious marriage of morally obtuse culturati and of media in search of sensation...

...Is this a forerunner of a papal encyclical on the infallibility of moral norms to be proclaimed or already proclaimed(e.g., Humanae vitaej...

...Such prohibitions, provided they are not onerous, are no tyranny or denial of basic rights...

...Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has judged such traditional measures, long on the books in many states, unconstitutional...

...To some observers, it is the very existence of the pressure that makes the current debate a nasty one...

...In the U.S., hamhanded or biased media approaches to religious questions keep many responsible and thoughtful Catholics from the TV screen, leaving all the more room for the strident, for dubiously authentic spokespersons who all too happily bolster the media's mischaracterizations and misstatements of religious beliefs and ideas...

...We do not favor such a sanction...

...It simply does not examine any of the reasons why this is not only impracticable in today's world but ecclesially undesirable...

...Thus, one might reasonably conclude, better to shrug off an occasional Serrano than transform the funding of arts and letters into something resembling the pork barrel of defense contracts...

...The reasonable answer to the question of tax funding for the arts goes like this: First, controversial grants of the Mapplethorpe/Serrano sort account for a tiny percentage of the two Endowments' efforts...

...Which brings us to "The Problem of Dissent," the Instruction's overriding concern and target, and to the role of the mass media in disseminating dissent...

...But the overall message, once more, is disheartening...

...The bills incurred by Reagan's make-believe politics are finally coming due, he argues...