Editorials
Straight talk The president won't be needing a speech writer, thank you. Not in Czechoslovakia, anyway. Vaclav Havel has been called to serve as interim president until elections this spring. A...
...It is a miracle to which we owe the fact that we are human," declares Havel...
...Such promise-and the hope it engenders-will only endure because of our honest tending to our words: that is, by our saying what we actually and honestly mean...
...and his New Year's Day address to the Czechoslovak nation (Washington Post, January 3, 1990...
...But our loss involves considerably more than that of an able editorial collaborator...
...If such a document does materialize, it could frame the terms of the abortion issue, at least as far as Catholics are concerned, not only for the approaching 1990 election campaigns for Congress, state houses, and local offices, but for years to come...
...But frustration at this moral obtuseness should not goad the bishops, or any of us, into rash responses that will wilt in the glare of intellectual examination or boomerang in the heat of political contests...
...Our congratulations and best wishes to Church and to Karen as she moves on to a new stage in her editorial career.ditorial career...
...And yet, while in the grip of this moral malaise, the nation turned from it...
...STRATEGY TIME This is a pivotal moment for the American Catholic church's role in the national struggle of conscience about abortion...
...Yet it was not these statements but Bishop Maher's November decision that took the headlines...
...How and why...
...and by our really doing what we say...
...After a series of post-Webster setbacks stunned the prolife forces, the Catholic bishops stepped forward as champions to put a halt to the prochoice momentum, and promptly stumbled...
...But it started with words...
...The recent defections of heretofore prolife politicians, including many Catholics, are instances of political expediency...
...We have become morally ill because we are used to saying one thing and thinking another...
...what before had been bound was unfettered...
...That formula still leaves a lot of complex questions to be addressed, on the connection between law and morality, between morality and religion, between personal beliefs and public policy, between the individual's right to follow one's conscience and the society's right to restrict or direct behavior...
...Havel is no less candid in his presidential speech...
...Commonweal, too, will attempt to address those questions editorially in issues to come...
...He laments the economic, political, and environmental pollution of the country...
...Americans may be troubled about voting against fetuses, but they have no compunction about voting against religious authority-figures who seem to push themselves unwarrantedly into the political arena-and that goes for Catholics...
...watered as if by underground springs, they at last came to flower...
...when they degenerate, they have the power to enslave...
...A playwright, dissident, founding member of the opposition that peacefully toppled the Communist regime last month, and a prisoner for five years out of the past twenty, Havel speaks with the lucidity, candor, and authority that mark those willing to give up freedom for truth's sake, but not ever to sacrifice truth...
...Havel answers: first, because human beings are never merely the product of the world around them...
...In the beginning of everything is the word...
...Perhaps what is operating (in harness with old-fashioned vote-counting) is a mental flabbiness that yields without resistance to the pervasive catchwords of American individualism...
...In the meantime, it is not hard to understand the frustration of the bishops...
...Second, in Czechoslovakia, humanistic and democratic impulses were handed down quietly from one generation to the next...
...On the contrary, we must accept this heritage as something we have inflicted on ourselves...
...Havel's speech to the booksellers dealt with the mysterious power of the word, as both flaming torch and two-edged sword...
...Happily, in her new post she will be nearby, keeping in touch with her former colleagues...
...As much could be said for our readiness to invoke the terms liberty and democracy while invading other countries...
...Whatever the bishops say will be heard because there are so many politically engaged forces that will want to make use of it to further their own causes...
...In a discussion evocative of the late Andrei Sakharov, Havel warns that the term "per-estroika" can be turned on its head and used to justify the silencing of others: "Isn't the word perestroika starting to resemble the word socialism, particularly on the odd occasion when it is discreetly hurled at people who, for so long, were unjustly lambasted with the word socialism...
...Consequently, attention is focused on the the eleven-member Bishops' Committee for Prolife Activities which has indicated its desire to develop some guidelines on the responsibilities of bishops and Catholic citizens and officials in the current public debate...
...It would be very unwise to think of the sad heritage of the last forty years only as something foreign," he tells the Czechoslovak peoples...
...Perhaps that is too strong a judgment...
...Richard Cohen, the Washington Post columnist and self-identified "prochoicenik," eyed these recent converts with a certain skepticism: "For everything there is a season-even hypocrisy...
...For Havel, the responsibility for words, "a task which is intrinsically ethical," belongs to each of us...
...This is an unusual occasion...
...The Czechoslovak revolution of 1989-typified by a sea of people chanting in unison and jingling their keys in Wenceslas Square-triumphed happily and nonviolently...
...Bishops in Wisconsin, Montana, and Ohio have issued effective statements on abortion, some of them published in response to statements by local politicians, without applying ecclesiastical penalties or even hinting that they would...
...What kind of recovery will the bishops make...
...Bishop Leo Maher of San Diego, claiming to be inspired by a resolution passed in November by the bishops' conference, barred a Catholic prochoice candidate for the California state legislature from Communion, thus, according to many observers, assuring her victory and the emergence of a prochoice majority in the legislature in place of a prolife one...
...but even more insidious is the "spoiled moral environment...
...If the bishops' real goal is to prevent abortions rather than to live up to some preconceived idea of their exercise of authority, then it seems obvious that a teaching rather than punishing strategy, however humbling it may be, is likely to have the greater long-term chance of success...
...Words have the power to liberate...
...If we accept it in such a way, we shall come to understand it is up to all of us to do something about it...
...Two recent striking examples: his speech last fall when presented the Peace Prize of the German Booksellers Association ("Words on Words," New York Review of Books, January 18, 1990...
...We are capable of striving for something higher...
...AN EDITOR MOVES ON After five-and-a-half years as an associate editor of Commonweal, Karen Sue Smith, a graduate of Notre Dame University and Harvard Divinity School, has been appointed the editor of the distinguished quarterly, Church...
...In their statements, they want to signal their moral rectitude and preserve at least an appearance of consistency ("I am personally opposed to abortion") while placating prochoice voters ("I respect a woman's right to choose...
...We shall miss her deft editing of manuscripts, her fruitful contacts with the magazine's authors, her perceptive and timely editorials, articles, and book reviews, as well as the impact of her original ideas...
...But at the same time, it is a pitfall and a test, a snare and a trial...
...What before had been spoken only in secret was thundered forth to the housetops...
...her good spirits and warm friendship have often supplied a bracing tonic for us to start the day...
...We shall indeed miss her stimulating presence...
Vol. 117 • January 1990 • No. 2
