Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Betrayal of the faith? Taylor, Pa. To the Editors: In your "Challenges Facing U.S. Catholics" [November 17, 1989], Father Andrew M. Greeley points to the clergy's poor quality of...
...While recognizing that formidable fact, I feel no deep pessimism about the church's future here...
...There are growing numbers of voters and taxpayers who believe that the standards launched by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison ought to be improved in the interests of increased democracy, and not permitted to fail by creeping default...
...Benedict's Monastery in Snowmass, Colo., do this several times a year...
...Take a risk-and a rest...
...Dramatic evidence that the Spirit is not picky about the status or the gender of the individuals to whom she gives a voice...
...In "provincial" Taylor, Pennsylvania, our parish priests preach that to love thy neighbor as thyself includes our "prochoice" sisters as well as fetuses...
...yet I am not daunted by that fact...
...Yes, more serious homiletic training is needed both during and after seminary years...
...Indeed, only by acting upon our always limited grasp of this word can we continually refine and enrich our lived experience and understanding of it...
...In a shrinking world, there are hopeful signs-that Thatcherism and Reaganism are inadequate to solve contemporary problems...
...The two have seemingly irreconcilable differences...
...To the Editors: If further evidence were needed that David O'Brien is one of the prime interpreters of the American Catholic past, his splendid article, "Join It, Work It, Fight It" [November 17], would provide the evidence...
...Examine the content of your homilies in the light of Romero's statement: "Those preachers who avoid every thorny matter so as not to be harassed, so as not to have conflicts and difficulties, do not light up the world they live in...
...I felt a special attraction for the closing paragraph of the O'Brien essay, with its cautious warning against facile prediction and generalization...
...Most important, we cannot wait upon an impossible clarity, straightforwardness, and unambiguity before we act upon that word...
...His threefold approach of republican, immigrant, and evangelical Catholicism is historically valid, for each of the three has exercised and will continue to exercise influence on the development of Catholic thought and actions in the time ahead...
...Yet her perspectives also read like a Rorschach on addressing social ills today: A few scapegoats are identified and underlying causes evaded...
...The Trappists at St...
...Thus he called for "a preaching that awakens, a preaching that enlightens...
...since 1789 as proof that she has lived through two centuries in this American environment, and though she has known undoubted rebuffs and failures, she has risen above these reverses and has emerged on the two hundredth birthday of her orga-nized life a living body of nearly 55,000,000 members, bruised to be sure, here and there, but basically intact, with acknowledged grave losses since the 1960s, yet far stronger than most of her sister branches of the universal church in the Western world...
...I would state the caution as follows: If there is anything that appears to be evident after two thousand years of Christianity and five thousand years of Judaism, it is that the word of God cannot be given "clearly, straightforwardly, unambiguously...
...According to Cardinal O'Connor, the request was: "give us the word of God clearly, straightforwardly, unambiguously, and we will use it to address every other need...
...Try a dialogic homily...
...Given the profound nature of the societal revolution that swept through the Republic in the aftermath of the 1960s, one could hardly expect any different result...
...and that because there have been-and will be-a sizable number of women and men who will answer Newman's question as to how truth has been maintained, a question to which he gave this answer: "it has been upheld in the world not as a system, not by books, not by argument, not by temporal power, but by the personal influence of such men [and women] as...
...Our children will receive the care that is their birthright only when adults demand a humane society and sacrifice to bring it to pass...
...What we must never do is identify our historically, culturally, and psychologically conditioned understanding and articulation of this word with the word itself...
...A "depth" which after the greatest of the mystics, theologians, and philosophers have done their communicative best can only be expressed as mystery...
...Finally: Consider the inclusive pronoun "you," as in, "the church is all of you...
...Discover what the other half of your congregation, the women, yearn for in a homily...
...JOHN TRACY ELLIS The Catholic University of America Missing element Spokane, Wash...
...Should I be asked what in my judgment may be the most severe challenge facing the American Catholic as we near the year 2000,1 would hazard the guess that it will be the ability of this religious community to remain true to the church's basic teachings while the Catholic American continues to be an active participant in American secular society...
...ANN WALL MILLER 'Reeling but erect' Washington, D.C...
...The results...
...In the author's demonology, one finds culprits including "case-hardened adults in foster care for the money," "parents' use of drugs," and "impersonal government social programs...
...CHARLES J. ORLOSKI, JR' Tips for preachers Bailey, Colo...
...It has been said that eight years of Reaganism have set this country back a century...
...But what other initiatives might our priests and pastors exercise...
...A few suggestions...
...To the Editors: Columnist Abigail McCarthy displays a refreshing concern for the childhood of degradation that many unwanted children confront in the U.S...
...26) was inadvertently dropped...
...In your discussion on the correCorrection: The last line of "Booknotes" (Jan...
...HENRY D. ELLIS Deeper malaise Northampton, Mass...
...To do so is to fall into that idolatry which, as the Scriptures seem to warn us, is the ancient and continuing temptation of human beings in their effort to participate in that reality which is at once, and paradoxically, radically present and radically other...
...She has seen and survived infinitely worse storms than the one through which she is now (Continued on page 94) CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 66) passing, and it is, indeed, a genuine storm...
...Invite a member of your congregation to preach...
...First: Research content...
...In light of Romero's words, bad preaching is indeed what Greeley terms "an injustice...
...spondence page about Catholics and racism you do not touch on the heart of the matter-socioeconomic reform-without which racism and attendant degrees of crime will continue...
...To his people he said, "Each of you must be God's microphones, each one of you must be a messenger, a prophet...
...are at once the teachers and patterns of it...
...Should I be asked what prompts this confidence, I could adduce the history of the Catholic church in the U.S...
...Nevertheless, the implication that we ought to ask our religious leaders to give us the word of God "clearly, straightforwardly, unambiguously," and that they should attempt to do so is fraught with danger and must be cautioned against...
...From constant, grassroots education, and ultimately through the Congress, effective legislation will modify the capitalism-cum-excessive-profit-motive system which deprives citizens of job opportunities and the nation of needed public works...
...Rosenthal's preaching is another example of the Catholic intellectual's betrayal of the faith...
...Precisely how that will happen, Professor O'Brien has the good sense not to predict, for if there is a more treacherous terrain for the historian to try to venture upon, I do not know which that might be...
...To the Editors: Cardinal O'Connor's contribution to your splendid sixty-fifth anniversary issue [November 17] was so generous in its effort to listen and respond to the participants in the archdiocese of New York synod that I hesitate to raise what might appear to be an intellectualistic cavil concerning the request of the participants in this synod...
...Fourth: Reflect on The Violence of Love: The Pastoral Wisdom of Oscar Romero (Harper and Row, 1988...
...Take up a second collection-of thoughts from the congregation on "what I want in a homily...
...EUGENE FONTINELL...
...3, 1989), but the whole deserves a reading for its comprehensive overview of a movement that has been a shaping force in contemporary Christianty...
...Her compassion is a stark counterpoint to our commodification of Christmas...
...If we, the laity, are tired of pap and pulp-and we are-then, as Greeley points out, it is our responsibility to demand change...
...Now the cardinal's response in terms of our belief in the "worth and dignity and sacredness of every human person," is most commendable...
...To the Editors: As a longtime subscriber to Commonweal I want to express my gratitude and admiration for the courage and intellectual forthrightness of the magazine...
...today ["The Least of These, " December 1,1989...
...Catholics" [November 17, 1989], Father Andrew M. Greeley points to the clergy's poor quality of preaching...
...He understood that "a Christian community is evangelized in order to evangelize...
...R. JAY allain Dangerous clarity Bronx, N.Y...
...Until then our most vulnerable population segments will be dismissed as the weak links in an otherwise exceptional society...
...The historical record of the American Catholic community since 1789 is filled with surprises, e.g., the emergence in a striking way of Catholics' arrival in the mainstream of national life in this last generation...
...Third: Read "In the Tongues of Men: Homilies for Women" by Kathy Coffee {America, December 2, 1989...
...My second concurs with Andrew Greeley's: improving the quality of preaching...
...Such considerations do not exonerate callous adult behaviors which impact on children but hint that such neglect is symptomatic of a far deeper malaise in the nation...
...Do include not just family-focused images of women and men, but ones which speak to the professional, the divorced, the widowed, those who are single by choice...
...Catholics: The Next Ten Years" [November 17], my first choice is the adoption of a committed stance on equal rights for women...
...The sentence should have read: "Readers of Commonweal have received a sample of McGovern's book (Nov...
...To the Editors: Among the "Challenges Facing U.S...
...Oscar Romero, martyred archbishop of San Salvador, had much to say that was both wise and practical on the subject of preaching...
...The sixty-fifth anniversary issue has just arrived...
...Like Chesterton's "wild truth," she has come through "reeling but erect...
...In Greeley's spirit, I cannot withhold indignation for intellectual Peggy Rosenthal's assertion that the Catholic prolife campaign is a logjam in the flow of the wisdom and love of the Holy Spirit...
...That this "arrival" has proved costly to the faith of many Catholics, I have no doubt...
...Yet she could have added that society itself is mesmerized by money, that openings in drug rehabilitation programs are rare pearls, and that few of us think to challenge the government to improve its services...
...We must ever act in fear and trembling, continually striving to discern the authentic dimension of the word of God and distinguishing it from our own inevitable distortions...
...It can only be given indirectly with the ambiguity, confusedness, fragility, elu-siveness, and tentativeness that characterize the particular moment within which it is given, and the psychological-spiritual condition of those who are struggling to receive it...
...Our understandable effort to express this presence-otherness in modes more congenial to ourselves too often leads us to empty this reality of its depth...
...Second: Take a risk...
Vol. 117 • February 1990 • No. 3
