Correspondence
POLICANO, JOSEPH D. & MADER, THOMAS F. & TIGHE, WILLIAM & PHILLIPS, CHARLES WM. & RAYMOND, HENRIETTA DANA & FITZPATRICK, RUTH McDONOUGH & Garvey, John & Siegel, Fred & Himes, Michael J. & Himes, Kenneth R.
CORRESPONDENCE A Campbell query Richmond Hill, N.Y. To the Editors: Perhaps Fred Siegel can be persuaded to explain why he describes Joseph Campbell as a "right-wing misan-throp" ["Blissed Out and...
...My major sources for information about the intifada and Israel are the New York Times, New York Newsday, Time, and Newsweek...
...THOMAS F. MADER The authors reply: Mr...
...But the evidence in his book can allow of other interpretations...
...To whom did Jesus say, "Go tell what you have seen and heard...
...What is at issue is whether or how the outcomes of these choices are to be judged by God or man...
...This planet can sustain a finite number of people...
...Siegel did so...
...Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza named it "A discipleship of equals...
...Garvey, with all due respect, your patriarchalism is showing...
...But companionship is an analogous term...
...Interestingly, Martin Buber feared the exact opposite...
...let's go for women deacons...
...Perhaps she was the "angel" who stopped Abraham and spoke for God, as have many women down through the ages...
...The proper place for women in the church is everywhere...
...The pope actually said that during a trip to Scandinavia...
...Who served the meal...
...Traditionally, Americans have been slow to recognize injustices supported and sanctioned by their government: Vietnam, El Salvador, Haiti, South Africa, Chile are just some of the countries where the might of the U.S...
...That is the gospel call...
...Mader expresses concern that extending the "I-thou" relationship to non-human beings may reduce our fellow human beings to "it...
...I keep getting told, 'On the one hand...on the other hand....'" Please, Mr...
...We urged a theocentric perspective...
...To the Editors: Perhaps Fred Siegel can be persuaded to explain why he describes Joseph Campbell as a "right-wing misan-throp" ["Blissed Out and Loving It," February 9...
...They try to make us believe that the male-ness of Jesus is integral to his being Christ...
...John Garvey seems to be trying to say, in effect, "A pox on both your houses...
...He insists on the deadly effect of turning aside from this, or of prostituting one's talents for money...
...We have too much garbage because of overpopulation...
...Where is the guest list...
...With this kind of companionship, we are at least headed in the right direction...
...JOHN GARVEYy no longer occupy, and it is a question which needs addressing...
...I had never heard either term applied to Mr...
...What is missing in John Garvey's article, is the reality of the experience that women are called to the priesthood...
...Which brings me to my third point...
...Since writing my column I have read Martimort's book on deaconesses, and I thank William Tighe for bringing it to my attention...
...To the Editors: I have a number of quibbles with M.J...
...Gill's article led to a widely discussed exchange on the PBS program "The Eleventh Hour" between Gill and Bill Moyers, whose series with Campbell, "The Power of Myth," had brought the Sarah Lawrence professor a national audience...
...Like most bumper sticker-sized thoughts, it is simplistic to the point of being stupid...
...But in deciding what steps to take in preserving ourselves by preserving our environment, we need to be companions to each other...
...Mader's preference for an anthropocentric perspective is something quite different...
...Clearly, they don't have the resources to match Commonweal's...
...To the Editors: Thank you for "Report from Beit Sahour" [January 26], an account of the Palestinian tax strike against the Israeli occupiers and the tactics the Israelis are using to put down the strike there as well as neighboring Bethlehem...
...Third, Mr...
...Of course I had been aware of the dra-conian seizures and arrests by the Israeli military in Beit Sahour and the closing of Bethlehem this Christmas season to outsiders for reasons of security...
...and K.R...
...I have the middle-ground truth...
...terms of companionship, indeed in familial terms, without suggesting that God is a companion in the same way as another human being, or that God is a parent in the same way our fathers and mothers are...
...First, why are arguments from self-interest regarding the ecosystem "fundamentally flawed...
...Ordain Women, or Stop Baptizing Them...
...I am grateful that the article brings up the questions of the maleness of Jesus...
...Will we Americans be able to shrug this one off too, or is our luck going to run out...
...The role of deacon and deaconess changed over the years, from the direct service of the needy mentioned in Acts to a liturgical role...
...The assumption seems to be, once more, that ordination is a form of status or power, or a right...
...Himes's provocative article, "The Sacrament of Creation" [January 26...
...Thus, it is not our perception and appreciation that give nature significance...
...It is a fascinating and careful work, and Martimort does indeed conclude that women should not be ordained to the diaconate...
...To the Editors: John Garvey's article ["Women's Ordination: Another Go at the Arguments", January 26] reminds me of a bishop who once said: "Give me a one-handed adviser...
...Women and men are deprived of ministry, although in many creative ways women are in fact ministering...
...RUTH McDONOUGH FITZPATRICK The writer is national coordinator of the Women's Ordination Conference...
...HENRIETTA DANA RAYMOND The author replies: I described Joseph Campbell as a "right-wing misanthrope" because Mr...
...May I offer the suggestion that Garvey read a book which seriously questions whether there ever were "women deacons" at any time or in any place in the early church...
...In the locked Vatican archives...
...JOSEPH D. POLICANO I-Thou, I-It Huntington, N.Y...
...If the pope and the bishop really believe in the cult of the male priesthood, the question must be raised: "Did Jesus redeem only men...
...Garvey writes that there never have been women priests...
...Mader's second point, we certainly do not intend to equate plants and persons...
...When people are quite sure that their strong feelings can be associated with a divine call I feel the same discomfort I felt when a fundamentalist woman told me that the Lord had told her to paint her house pink...
...Campbell's claims for asserting, in his words, "libido over credo," is fundamen tally at odds with the demands of JudeoChristian ethics...
...He concedes that there is a good deal of uncertainty about the use of women deacons in the early church and in various regions, and he cites a Syriac version of the Didascalia in which we find this: "The deacon stands in the place of Christ and you should love him...
...On Mr...
...To the extent that it is seen that way it is a corruption and no Christian should seek it...
...When you consider Abraham, you neglect to mention Sarah...
...in the Roman Catholic church, no noncelibates are...
...At another point Garvey inquires (I hope not simply rhetorically): "But what argument could possibly be offered against women deacons...
...We need to discourage people from having too many children, but we need to do this not by pointing to environmental necessities but to the value of human life itself...
...published originally in French by the Edizioni Liturgiche in Rome in 1982...
...But in either case, since he was unable to refute Gill's charges, his judgments and Campbell's reputation were effectively called into question...
...probably we can figure out what that number is...
...Obviously, that is not our intention and, were it likely, we would be very much opposed to it...
...The church is impoverished because of the present situation...
...Women as deacons Allentown, Pa...
...But male children are baptized without being sworn over to the church's service...
...CHARLES WM...
...Mader makes three points, which he describes as "quibbles" with our article...
...it is our perception and appreciation that give nature any significance...
...After all, we speak of God in Second, although Buber's philosophy acknowledges the possibility of our having an I-Thou relationship with nature, I can't envision him suggesting that this relationship be equivalent to companionship...
...Mader that we can determine the optimal or maximal number of human beings which the world can support...
...JOHN GARVEY...
...It is also assumed that the call to ordination, for either men or women, comes from God...
...that is what Thomas Aquinas meant by analogical...
...They should be able to have that call tested like any male...
...There is no reason it needs to become static, or clericalized, today...
...FRED SIEGEL Rare coverage Laurelton, N.Y...
...since I have never come across a serious review of the book, I cannot say...
...Now Israel uses American arms and money to enslave a population...
...It was hard to tell whether Moyers was sincere or simply furious at having been played the fool...
...The history just happened to be written by males...
...They are trying to say that it was in the mind of Jesus to have the cult of the male priesthood...
...That is why today we try to remember to mention Sarah along with Abraham, Miriam with Moses, etc...
...Phillips might want to look at the September 28, 1989, New York Review of Books, where Brendan Gill lays out part of the tawdry story, including Campbell's indifference to Hitler...
...We urged a shift in perspective from envisioning non-human nature as our environment to recognizing it as God's creation...
...Of course, their answer would be like the rest of their arguments, such as: "There were no women at the Last Supper, and that is why women cannot be priests...
...Sure, I water my plants (although I don't talk to them) and walk my dog, but I would sacrifice plants and dog to preserve my relationship with a human being...
...It is our most popular selling button today at the Women's Ordination Conference...
...The deaconess should be honored by you as the Holy Spirit is honored...
...Most find the catacomb paintings she refers to more ambivalent than that...
...With whom did Jesus sit and theologize while Martha complained and worked in the kitchen...
...The great majority of men are not ordained to the priesthood, and it is assumed that they will not be...
...he also believes that a renew al of deaconesses would be extremely inad visable.WILLIAM TIGHE The writer is a member of the faculty of the department of history, Muhlenberg College...
...Finally, we are much less sanguine than Mr...
...Martimort coneludes that women cannot be ordained to the diaconate...
...it is a direct rejection of our fundamental point...
...Who cleaned up...
...The subject is shared decision making, and working in true mutuality between women and men in the church and the world...
...To me it seems clear in context that he was advising people to follow their deepest inner calling-what we Catholics would call our vocation...
...Until I read Commonweal, I was unaware that the seizures and planned pauperization of the Christian population were continuing and, by inference, that the closing of Bethlehem was really to hide from the world's view the brutal suppression imposed by the Israeli military...
...The Women's Ordination Conference does not wish to see women ordained as deacons unless the celibacy question is dealt with as well as the question of opening the church to women to be present at the full meal, the entire table...
...The author replies: It's too bad that the slogan "Ordain Women, or Stop Baptizing Them," is so popular...
...MICHAEL J. HIMES & KENNETH R. HIMES Women as priests Fairfax, Va...
...That is historical fact...
...That is the message of Jesus...
...But then, how could I have known...
...The book's thesis, supported by a great deal of patristic and liturgical material, is that whatever the deaconesses were that were to be found in some parts of the early church, they were not deacons-not, that is, in holy orders as these were understood in the early church...
...The danger in focusing on our I-Thou relationship to nature is that we may reduce human relationships to I-It status...
...The women mentioned in Scripture must have been very exceptional women to have made it into the accounts at all...
...My own eyes have seen early Christian wall paintings in the catacombs of Naples, Italy, depicting women presiding at the eucharistic meal...
...I don't think anyone would argue with Henrietta Raymond's statement that Campbell was "advising people to follow their deepest inner calling...
...Moyers' outburst in defense of his own injured innocence-he claimed to be entirely unaware of Campbell's sympathies-led to an article in the New York Times...
...But I believed the former had been ended and the latter was genuinely necessary for safety...
...Third world countries will never develop economically until they take birth control seriously...
...To call nonhuman creatures companions in finitude is both real and nonunivocal...
...The danger, he suggested, is that human beings are more readily reduced to "it" when we decline to engage with non-human beings as "thou...
...Campbell was well known among his Sarah Lawrence colleagues for his racist and anti-Semitic sentiments...
...The grandmother of our movement, Sister Elisabeth Carroll, R.S.M., once said, "What is the proper place for women in the church...
...The scholarly apparatus aside, Campbell was just another hustler in the already overcrowded byways of the higher selfishness...
...To the Editors: Before attacking Joseph Campbell's advice to "follow your bliss," I think Fred Siegel should reread Campbell to see what he meant by "your bliss...
...What Campbell, who insists that good and evil are indistinguish able, is preaching is a freedom for selfaggrandizement regardless of the conse quences and beyond all possibilities of judgment...
...came down on the wrong side...
...It is] Deaconnesses: A Historical Study, by Aime-Georges Martimort (Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1986...
...the diaconate to women...
...To the Editors: John Garvey's reflections on women's ordination [January 26] end with the suggestion that since "there was in both the Eastern and Western churches the order of women deacons," Rome ought to open (reopen...
...Animistic implications aside, we treat companions as equals, we do unto them as we do unto ourselves...
...We agree with Buber...
...My major point is that women once occupied important symbolic roles in the church which they no longer occupy, and it is a question which needs addressing...
...Remember the button the Episcopalians sported before their 1974 ordinations in Philadelphia...
...In the terms of Genesis 1, it is God who looks at nature and sees that it is good-and that before the human being is created...
...The primary perceiver of creation is the Creator...
...His first point is much more than a quibble...
...No serious scholar I know of is as certain as Ruth McDonough Fitzpatrick seems to be that women once presided at the Eucharist, only to have that fact suppressed by male historians...
...PHILLIPS A Campbell quote New York, N.Y...
...To advocate the safeguarding of the environment (our environment) for its own sake is the kind of romanticism the authors complain about...
...Alfred North Whitehead observes somewhere that nature is inherently dull...
...There may be equally eminent patristic and liturgical scholars who disagree with Martimort's conclusions...
...Campbell before Mr...
...Who first announced the Good News...
...The pope talks about it, as does Bishop Elden Curtiss in a recent reflection...
...It is just not recognized...
Vol. 117 • April 1990 • No. 7
