Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE The answer is silence Paris, France To the Editors: It is understandable that Rev. Edward W. Mullen [Correspondence, December 15,1989] would be still horrified by what he...
...There, between 1.35 and 2 million Jews were killed...
...To be Catholic has always demanded tremendous sacrifices both from married people and even more from single women, many of them unmarried not by choice, who were condemned to sexual abstinence in order to remain in the church...
...I could further ascertain from biology that the human zygote grows and effects a metabolic action, and could therefore conclude that this is human life, a living human being...
...It was at Auschwitz II-Birkenau that the biggest massacre took place, hence the Jewish memory focusing on Auschwitz...
...It demystified nature and set us free to think about it and, in the present instance, to bring to the question of contraception the insights afforded by biology and the human sciences in the seven centuries that succeeded it...
...Now I know why...
...Louis, and Burns and Oates, London, 1905...
...It revolutionized theology in every area...
...Edward W. Mullen [Correspondence, December 15,1989] would be still horrified by what he heard-face to face-from a representative of the Goebbels propaganda ministry in 1944...
...I really think that unless one has such faith, one can degenerate spiritually just as I did...
...Why should this be more difficult for homosexuals than for heterosexuals, which is the message we seem to be getting...
...John Tracy Ellis's gem of a letter and to be buoyed by his hope...
...Your reviewers do a fine job...
...Yet what happened to them and to the Jews is not on the same register...
...Commonweal, January 26], many Catholics including myself are utterly confused...
...I soon came to have a kind of fortress mentality...
...SEBASTIAN MOORE Insular science New York, N.Y...
...This week [February 9] you got me in the Correspondence...
...REV...
...Ian Jessiman in the London Tablet last year: "Theologians seem to ask themselves, 'What is it in the nature of contraception that caused the ancients to regard it as so evil (as evil as homicide)?' Surely an equally valid and logically prior question is, 'What was it in the ancients' understanding of conception that led them to regard any interference with it as so evil (as evil as homicide)?'" The ancients, Aquinas of course included...
...Mullen's opinion, the Jews have never "claimed exclusive rights to Auschwitz...
...Hence it is clear that every emission of the semen is contrary to the good of man, which takes place in a way whereby generation is impossible...
...O'Malley interpolates "person" into the argument only to stumble over it as well...
...He then whips out his slide rule and prescribes that "the property of belonging to a category is the counterpart of a binary variable...
...I also resonated with John Breslin's review of Mary Gordon's The Other Side...
...The only Jewish demand is that Auschwitz be left bare of any appropriation...
...This is a mistaken view...
...It was good to read Msgr...
...Horror...
...Until just a few years ago, I was rector of a downtown parish in one of our large collapsing cities where the demands of charity were not so much daily as hourly...
...This is a term that can be defined only by philosophy, never by science...
...An insular physicist can only come to an insular conclusion: "When the church speaks on abortion, using terms like 'life,' it is using a language that my discipline has generally left behind...
...An excerpt...
...This change in our understanding was brilliantly highlighted by Dr...
...the case of the woman being barren being a case in point...
...The greatest sin used to be giving scandal to others...
...When we ask [about the fetus]' is it alive...
...I mean a way in which generation is impossible in itself, as is the case in every emission of the semen without the natural union of male and female: wherefore such sins are called 'sins against nature.' But if it is by accident that generation cannot follow from the emission of the semen, the act is not against nature on that account, nor is it sinful...
...It should not be forgotten that the Polish suffering exceeded that of any other occupied country...
...Nothing...
...Nobody...
...Aquinas's theorem of a supernatural order...
...No one seems to take that seriously any more...
...Yet, it is that very vulnerability which makes love possible...
...Over the years I found that my own attitude toward those who presented themselves and their various needs, as well as toward those who made a nuisance of themselves inside the church buildings, came to change for the worse...
...Is it possible that American society has a higher ratio of self-involved people than other parts of the world...
...Until recently, at least-I know it by personal experience-it was possible to visit Auschwitz without ever hearing the Polish guides mention the Jews murdered there...
...I didn't know that, and I'll bet you didn't (Continued on page 164) CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 130) either...
...Herder & Co., St...
...JOHN Sullivan The author replies: The insight of Aquinas that distinguished between the natural and supernatural orders was simple and genial...
...I realized in time that my motive for helping them wasn't to serve Christ in them, but to get rid of them, and that quite automatically I would assume that anybody who looked even the least bit down-and-out was dangerous...
...The problem of loneliness also is surely the same for all priests, no matter what their sexual orientation...
...It distresses me to see the church I love beginning to look like an unreasoning fundamentalist sect...
...To love one's neighbor is always a risky business, but it is the same risk that Jesus took when he opted for love as against power...
...To the Editors: Thomas E. O'Malley's response [Correspondence, December 1, 1989] to Carlin's "A Tragedy without Villains" [October 6] is one of the most salient examples you are ever likely to find of the insularity that overcomes a scientist when he proceeds to apply the methods of one discipline to the problems of another: "As a scientist I can only see [the church's] reasoning on [abortion] as something from a different century...
...To the Editors: Commonweal always stimulates and challenges me...
...I was protecting the church and its staff all the time, and every time the doorbell rang, my stomach would tighten into knots...
...One of my favorite authors, she left me feeling disappointed...
...MICHAEL R. BECKER Stimulus & response Niagara Falls, Ont...
...So I pray for the gift of faith to be vulnerable in the face of fear...
...I had always thought if I wanted to know about life I could go to an encyclopedia where a biologist-O'Malley is "a physicist"-would tell me that "life is a form of existence characterized by the functions of protoplasm, as manifested in metabolism and growth...
...Hey, wow...
...Indeed the Nazis had planned to enslave the Poles after they had exterminated all the Jews, including children...
...My article is an essay in theological reflection, guided by Aquinas as the main watershed of Catholic theology...
...To the Editors: Despite or perhaps because of the proliferation of articles on homosexual religious [cf...
...Is it possible that biologists might feel the same way about the jargon of physics...
...CLAIRE HUCHET BISHOP Aquinas & contraception Lackawanna, N.Y...
...WILLIAM TALBOT The sin of scandal Brooklyn Heights, N.Y...
...Silence...
...The tremendous emphasis on self-fulfillment and the "American dream" undoubtedly play a part in this...
...To the Editors: In his article entitled "Ratzinger's 'Nature' Isn't Natural" [January 26], Father Sebastian Moore says that the church's ban on contraception is ascribable to its failure to recognize "Aquinas's insight...
...Some of them undoubtedly were, but not infrequently it would be nicely dressed folk-even one couple in their evening dress-who would steal things...
...As to lesbian nuns-there are many possibilities today of being of service to others without joining a religious community of women dedicated to chastity and obedience...
...Sol understand Caughwell 's definition of charity very well indeed, that it is not so much compassion as it is a leap of faith...
...Seminarians entering the priesthood know that they must live a celibate life, and that it will not be easy...
...What exactly is the problem...
...The text appears in Summa against the Gentiles, III, 122, reproduced in Of God and His Creatures, translated by Joseph Rickaby, S.J...
...While I'm at it, kudos to Tom O'Brien, your movie critic, whom I find to be an excellent guide...
...I had lost the ability to have any faith at all in these people, and their presence drew out of me a response more of fear than of compassionate love...
...we are setting up categories...
...JOAN M. COOPER Faith versus fear Philadelphia, Pa...
...To love certainly makes one terribly (in the original sense of that adverb) vulnerable...
...BEN HOGAN, O. CARM...
...To the Editors: The December 15, 1989 issue contains many good things, but I was particularly moved by Thomas Craughwell's story of his experience ["Should I Have Let Him In...
...They spoke only, and at length, about the Polish resisters (300,000) killed there between 1940 and 1942...
...To enslave a people is hideous, to murder it systematically is diabolical...
...Contrary to Rev...
...Aquinas, in the exercise of his insight, produced a precise and stern condemnation of contraception, touching incidentally on the legitimacy of coition in a condition of sterility...
...As a matter of fact the Poles are the ones who not only claimed it, but have exercised their claim...
...What I am deploring is a remystification of nature in order not to have to face this kind of question...
...Another misapplication of scientific methods...
...I was less concerned to advocate my view on contraception than I was to point to the theological illiteracy implied in the escalation of the ban on contraception to the status, virtually, of divine faith...
...and if this is done on purpose, it must be a sin...
Vol. 117 • March 1990 • No. 5
