Editorials

...They were labeled "SOVIET" and sported a grey leather, or leather-like, label printed in Cyrillic letters...

...the third world's debt burden could be greatly lightened...

...Like ours, they are oriented far less to community than to consumption, unconcerned with moral meaning or national purpose, bureaucratized and atomized...

...Much of the civil rights legislation of the sixties represented the interests of a justly aggrieved minority...

...Given those complexities, it is understandable why many public officials would like to avoid the issue of abortion...

...But those who criticize sweeping pronouncements by incautious bishops ought also to hold lay people to a standard that respects the theological, moral, and political complexities of the times...

...not distrust, leading to watchfulness and participation, but cynicism, and with it passivity, indifference to "the public thing...

...In turn, laws enforce moral views...

...and church architectural plans...

...Return then to the position of Superintendent Keenan...

...the issue won't go away...

...But the majority is not always averse to imposing sanctions on a minority: witness the stringent regulation of smoking, or the requirement that motorcyclists wear helmets, laws put in place to control the self-destructive behavior of a few...

...Meinrad's Abbey, Indiana...

...And not all ethical judgments that agree with religious teaching are thereby barred from consideration in the public forum...

...Bishops have a responsibility to teach and even to enforce the moral law...

...Abortion may present a uniquely perplexing political problem, but the issues it raises-of law and morality, morality and religion, personal belief and public policy-fall into well-mined categories on which both the Catholic and American traditions have much to say...

...77-80) confronts and undercuts simplistic assumptions about the meaning of the ongoing collapse of Communist regimes in the Eastern bloc...

...Schomburg Center...

...it rises out of precedent, political and ethical reasoning, local and national tradition...

...In the view of many, of differing religions and none, these are highly debatable propositions...

...MOSCOW ON THE HUDSON During a brief shopping tour of Manhattan, a couple of Aussie friends found a pair of jeans being marketed in a tin box, a sort of tea chest...

...Abortion policy is an intellectually and emotionally demanding issue...

...But, ultimately, law coerces...

...A distinguished advisory council has been selected to assist with the collection, including Albert Raboteau (Princeton) and Brother Cyprian Davis (St...

...Bishop Curtiss asked Superintendent Keenan to consider the impact of her position on Montana's young people, whose consciences may not yet be fully formed...

...As we've noted before, it is precisely Vaclav Havel's concern for truth, his love and fear of language (with Aristotle, Havel holds that words make us human) that make his emergence on the world stage relevant to our situation...

...Contact: Victor Smythe...

...When Jimmy Carter spoke of a "malaise" in our society, he drew jeers as an inept politician...

...optimism sells, he was told, and downers don't inspire...

...But not all conscientiously held views are constitutionally protected...

...One reason is that law teaches right and wrong...

...but their office does not confer the power to read souls, or to make apodictic judgments about how a particular moral principle is to be translated into law and public policy...

...With only a little editing, that passage and others in the same speech could have been addressed to the American people...

...citing Ms...

...So also when Ms...

...Keenan's letter was a civil answer to a civil question...

...far more likely are experiments in social democracy on West European models, some of them more productive and many of them far more equitable than ours...

...Not, however, as long as we heed all the gurus (not just Joseph Campbell) who tell us to "follow your bliss...

...If our own politics is to be redeemed, we need practitioners of whom such things can be said...

...That is a lesson, Havel has said, well taught by totalitarian regimes: "Thanks to this regime we have developed a profound distrust of all generalizations, ideological platitudes, cliches, slogans, intellectual stereotypes, and insidious appeals to various levels of our emotions, from the baser to the loftier," Our own cultural "regime"-with its atomization, the corn-modification of every aspect of our lives, and the vulgarizing of our politics-seems to have taught something different...

...The Center's archives will eventually be accessible to seminaries, scholars, and other researchers...

...If we are to have them, we must nourish a recovery (or discovery) of politics as human and humanizing...

...as may have been clear from previous remarks in this space, he is currently our favorite prisoner-turned-president, as well as scribbler-become-statesman...

...there could be housing for our homeless...

...Also attached to the jeans, an alternative label with similar lettering but colored red, and a small plastic screwdriver for use in changing from one label to the other...

...But, in one way or another, push will come to shove...

...Killea's prochoice position on legislation, he barred her from Communion...

...Abortion is a moral issue about which we can all reason and make judgments, and our conclusions need not depend on a faith commitment...

...On abortion, they were agnostic: we can't know when human life begins...

...AH honestly held religious beliefs are personal, and some have an inescapable bearing on public life...

...It may be the case that public officials cannot rapidly narrow a court ruling that allows 1.5 million abortions a year (and that is far more indulgent to abortion than other countries, including Western liberal democracies...

...That is why it is essential for public officials to assess with care the consequences of what they say and to test out in full the principles that underlie the positions they take...

...Has she thought through the consequences of her position if it were applied to Montana parents opposed to compulsory education...

...People living under Communist regimes such as Czechoslovakia's endured much worse conditions...

...Conversation closed...

...But consider Havel's New Year's day speech to his people: "The worst thing is that we are living in a decayed moral environment...

...Aristotle said that political society exists not just to prevent crime and foster exchange, but "for the sake of noble actions...

...Havel approaches politics in the same spirit: wary of it, committed to it...

...It doesn't signal a triumph of U.S.-style capitalism...

...ideally, it expresses a shared sense of the common good...

...75-77), Fred Siegel describes a society, our own, that is "already awash in individualism," where New Age prophets nevertheless prescribe cures for "excessive selflessness," where politics is reduced to horse trading, ethics to health, religion to therapy, and all things are governed by market criteria...

...10037...

...We hope Ms...

...The citizen's first duty," she said, "is distrust...

...What if she were state health commissioner faced with a parental refusal to allow a blood transfusion for a mortally ill child, a refusal based on the parents' religious belief, as Jehovah's Witnesses, that such transfusions are forbidden by God...

...Notions such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, and forgiveness have lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represent merely some kind of psychological idiosyncrasy, or appear to be some kind of stray relic from times past, something rather comical in the era of computers and space rockets...

...Our pointless proxy war in El Salvador could end...

...we need thoughtfulness to understand it, civility to understand one another...

...Thus it will not do to argue, as Nancy Keenan does, that "depriving women of the right to follow their conscience is the same as imposing a religious belief...

...The words are those of Nancy Keenan, state superintendent of schools in Montana and a Catholic personally opposed to abortion...

...For him (as, again, for Aristotle) to be apolitical is to be less than human...

...In this case, we believe, the law is conveying indifference toward what should be sacred, irresponsibility where there should be care, permissiveness where there should be restraint...

...Wallace Katz ("The Flawed Triumph of Social Democracy," pp...

...Would they get a hearing...

...When a citizen refuses to pay a certain tax, or to register for military service, are public officials inhibited from enforcing the law because the citizen is acting on grounds of conscience...

...ETC HONING AN OLD SAW An ancient adage, having been deconstructed and then reconstructed in our wordshop, emerges with a new edge: Flattery is the imitation form of sincerity...

...Recently an East German woman was asked by a television interviewer why people were still mounting protest marches when the government had already moved so far toward democratizing itself...

...And they should be debated-particularly by people with some special responsibility for the common good...

...Our current abortion law (embodied in Roe v. Wade) was written by men who reached a particular philosophic position on the nature of abortion and who applied a particular juridical understanding of constitutional law...

...Without moral men and women, laws would not be observed...

...For meanwhile, something mightier than he has seized hold of him, something that goes beyond him, something that Havel calls responsibility...

...Ms...

...Both Bishop Maher and Bishop Austin Vaughan-who has voiced a public judgment that Governor Mario Cuomo has put himself at "serious risk of going to hell" because of his position on abortion and public policy-may properly be challenged, and not only for the simple pragmatic reason that such statements are more likely to serve "choice" rather than "life...

...We are getting to be fanatical about (at least, fans of) Czechoslovakia's Vaclav Havel...

...Were she to enforce the law in such a case, would she be imper-missibly imposing the state's and presumably her own moral views on the dissenting parents...

...If such notions are to be more than stray relics from the past, we must bring not only integrity and courage to the work but also irony, skepticism,.discernment...

...Keenan and Bishop Curtiss go on talking...

...Being skeptical, our friends looked closer, discovered that the jeans were made in Hong Kong, and bought them anyway...

...Many laws are based in whole or in part on moral assessments communally made, and without that link between law and morality we would have relatively less observance of either...

...Funded by the Lilly Foundation, it will document the spiritual dimension of the African-American religious heritage...

...Churches and religious organizations are being asked to contribute the papers of church leaders...

...On law, they were libertarian: where there is doubt, let privacy reign...

...She was defending her prochoice views in response to questions put by Bishop Elden Curtiss after she voiced her position at a rally in Helena last fall (Origins, December 14,1989...

...Ordinarily the views in question are widely shared-against murder, theft, and rape, for example-but not always...

...When eloquence is added to the mix, as in Havel, redemption may cross borders...

...For Havel, distrust does not justify withdrawal, or indifference, or exclusive self-concern...

...Milan Kundera, writing in the New Republic (January 20), says of Havel: "He would prefer to do other things (write plays, for instance, or poetry), to be rid of his destiny, but he cannot...

...The law takes form in legislative acts and judicial decisions...

...A question that could be put as well to the whole troop of Catholic politicians, like Anthony Celebrezze of Ohio and Nicholas Spano of New York who have searched their consciences and found that, at least at election time, their opposition to abortion has become strictly personal...

...We have many freedoms but even more distractions...

...STRATEGY TIME II "As a public official, there is no question in my mind that depriving women of the right to follow their conscience is the same as imposing religious belief...

...Nontheless, those who are opposed to abortion, or who want to draw the line at a point before viability, can contribute to an honest discussion, can help build a consensus for some modifications in our law, can stop ducking for cover behind the notion that somehow what they believe, and say they believe, about abortion is not fit for public consumption...

...Few debated whether what Carter had said was true and important...

...Keenan depoliticizes her agreement with the church's teaching on the ground that it is the view of "a private Catholic citizen...

...We have become morally ill, because we have become accustomed to saying one thing and thinking another...

...Maher put no questions and did not ask an answer...

...and that both of them go on thinking...

...Only by looking 'outward,' by caring for things that, in terms of pure survival, he needn't bother with at all, by constantly asking himself all sorts of questions, and by throwing himself over and over again into the tumult of the world, with the intention of making his voice count-only thus does one really become a person...

...The point: we are a nation of laws...

...515 Malcolm X Boulevard, N.Y., N.Y...

...Yet, Katz points out, the societies molded by social democracy are far from healthy...

...materials from conferences and outreach projects...

...In a companion article on the decline of public life in the eighties (pp...

...photographs...

...FOCUS ON BLACK RELIGION The New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is mounting an ambitious project...

...minutes of meetings of boards, trustees, and committees...

...Keenan is on shaky ground again when she makes her own opposition to abortion into an irrelevancy because it is a "personal religious belief...

...It can be doubted...

...it is hard to think of any laws regulating behavior that do not in some way (a) narrow our options and (b) derive in some part from ethical/legal/juridical/constitutional judgments of how human beings should act toward one another...

...These qualities are too often absent from the abortion debate, including that segment of it featuring exchanges between public officials and the bishops...

...Wouldn't the commissioner be legally required to seek a court order mandating the transfusion-thereby violating the parents' consciences...

...Ideally, religious and moral teachers seek to persuade, and so do those charged with enforcing the law...

...We have learned not to believe in anything, not to have consideration for one another and only to look after ourselves...

...in that respect, Bishop Curtiss's letter was a welcome contrast to the one Bishop Leo Maher sent to California Assemblywoman Lucy Killea...

...Two contributions to this issue of Commonweal helped bring Havel back to mind...

...we use our political rights so seldom and so feebly that we have few options...

...Any office-holder who tried to enforce Trinitarian views on Unitarians, or impose Christian rituals on Jews, would violate both Constitution and consciences...