Civility revisited
McCarthy, Abigail
No, what we're complaining about are the more subtle forms of prejudice--for instance, the offending cartoon in the Philadelphia Daily News." I see. But (pardon me for saying this) the cartoon...
...To achieve this civility and charity requires constant vigilance in regard to vocabulary and practice...
...Commonweal and magazines like the Atlantic, Harper's, and the New Republic must decide on whether the discussion is worth continuing or whether the author or editors should defend the original thesis against attack...
...Are manners that important...
...He writes,"...the word neurotic, unless used as a clinical diagnosis, is an insult, plain and simple...
...Perhaps my own liking for Waugh and deep respect for Newman, a literary mentor for much of my youth, prevented me from seeing the possibility...
...I am faced with the editor's problem in responding to my friend's question...
...Catholics United for the Faith are dedicated to defending the church against attack...
...Browne used the terms "Antichrist," etc., only as examples of the "usual satires and invectives of the pulpit" which he was urging the clergy to avoid...
...Score one debating point for Signe Wilkinson, the artist who drew the cartoon...
...He finds, he says, that the discourtesy in Catholicism centers more on the "left/right" divide than on the lay/clerical divide "and this discourtesy., seems to affect all Christian churches...
...Why don't you crusade for parental choice among public schools and vouchers for children going to private schools, including Catholic and other denominational schools...
...In Judith Martin's definition, etiquette consists of the voluntary restraint a society agrees to in the area between the obedience to selfish impulse on the one hand, and conformity to what is legal on the other...
...The demand for respect is deep and apparently innate...
...For instance, the Wilkinson cartoon cuts both ways...
...It is, in that sense, a regulative system that allows us to live peacefully together...
...But (pardon me for saying this) the cartoon does not strike me as being insulting or bigoted...
...You don't have to be anti-Catholic to say that...
...But I do not think, by using it, Ruland meant to say that Waugh or Newman were neurotics, the inference that letter-writer Hyde seems to have drawn...
...Sullivan compares Browne's refusal to use the terms for the pope common to his Protestant contemporaries to tactics of the present-day political candidate who says "while my opponent has descended to the level of the gutter to attack me I will not retaliate by raising old charges, etc., etc., etc...
...His question highlighted one of the problems of all journals of opinion--how to provide continuity in discussion when there is a significant time lapse between the ini1 June 1991:359 tiation of the subject and the responses--in this case, two months between the column and one letter, and three months between it and the second...
...The former can challenge the latter: "I see you support the right to abortion because you believe choice to be something like an absolute value...
...Every day, every night, young black men add to the nation's homicide rate not only because of drug wars but because of"dissing" that is, because other young men have been perceived as showing them disrespect...
...Where it is lacking, that which offends pushes us toward conflict...
...If Catholics and others who are prochoice on schools while being antichoice on abortion can be called to account for their apparent inconsistency, so they in turn can call to account for those Americans who are in favor of choice in abortion but not when it comes to schools...
...By way of atonement, it might be a good idea to spend the next few centuries on the other side of the fence...
...They feel that bigotry is so rampant in the land that strenuous campaigns to intimidate others from speaking their minds are warranted...
...In fact, I think it is rather clever, pointing out, as it does, an apparent inconsistency in the Catholic position on choice: pro when it comes to schools, con when it comes to abortion...
...And such campaigns often succeed: witness the great number of writers, politicians, and academics who bite their tongues lest their words be misunderstood and they find themselves accused of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, etc...
...Certainly wars will not break out or exe"He's looking for trouble~" cutions occur as they did in the past because of a lack of civility and charity in the church, either in Catholics' relationships to each other or to those beyond the church's authority--the lack about which I wrote in "Mending Catholic Manners...
...I can't get the point...
...When it comes to being a prejudicedetector it helps to have a very thin and sensitive skin,, like the princess who felt the pea under ninety-nine featherbeds...
...360: Commonweal...
...They evidently identify enemies everywhere, even if it means reaching into the seventeenth century to impugn the motives of reasonable, peaceable Thomas Browne, the Anglican layman and scientist I cited as a pioneer in religious civility...
...We are far from civility when we take up cudgels against the dead...
...Hence, the frequency of such headings in their letter columns as "The Editor Replies" or "John Smith Answers" or "The Editors Reply" (cf...
...In such an exchange you would have to score a point for the bishop...
...Bishop McHugh, instead of complaining about dirty pool, might have responded with something along these lines...
...He was referring to letters from the Reverend Robert Hyde [March 8, 1991 ] and James A. Sullivan, vice-president of Catholics United for the Faith [April 19], commenting on my column, "Mending Catholic Manners," in the issue of January 11...
...It is only the other day, remember, that Catholicism emerged from several centuries of hostility to intellectual freedom-centuries marked by the Inquisition (both Spanish and Roman), the trial of Galileo, the Index of Prohibited Books, the "Syllabus of Errors," and a general spirit of defensive authoritarianism...
...But some people see things differently...
...Let American Catholics be happy intellectual warriors, l I OF SEVERAL MINDS Abigail McCarthy CIVILITY REVISITED CATHOLICS UNITED FOR THE FRAY friend who had been out of the country called me from New York the other day to ask, "Whatever did you write to bring on those letters to the editor in Commonweal...
...Commonweal, April 5, 1991...
...Weekly news magazines do not have the same difficulty...
...instead you punch back...
...When there are no social forms to prevent it, violence breaks out...
...Provided we are free to respond, we should relish attacks made on us by our critics...
...The reader can see, however, from this give and take, how hard it is to use effective words without giving offense...
...Of course, neurotic is a pejorative word, and perhaps I could have excised it from the quotation without harming its thrust...
...The bishop could defend his apparent inconsistency by saying: "I consider choice to be a very great value, but not so great that it should take precedence over what I believe to be a human life...
...The proper response to a hit made in a debate is to attempt a counter-thrust...
...Should I prolong the discussion of civility in the church by connecting the letters to the column which initiated the discussion...
...Then why don't you direct your attention to elementary and secondary education, where choice is very limited...
...An occasional editor's note may follow a letter questioning facts...
...Nor do I think that my citing of Ruland was an "appalling lack of courtesy...
...Their editors publish snippets of letters commenting on the reporting of the news and content themselves with juxtaposing letters of crit - icism and approval...
...Judith Martin, etiquette columnist (who now lectures on the philosophy of manners at such institutions as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and The Philadelphia Philosophical Society), compares the phenomenon to the practice of dueling in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries...
...But if we do not accept the constraints of courtesy we exacerbate tensions, deepen fissures, and divide those who should be united...
...American Catholics, including bishops, ought to be the friends of rational debate...
...Consider just one fact...
...This is reaching for offense...
...In fact it is arguable that it has become too tolerant about certain matters of elective behavior...
...This is a more convincing reply to the inconsistency charge than the reply the abortion prochoice person would have to make: "I believe choice to be so important a value that it even takes precedence over what may possibly be a human life--though of course choice is not so great a value as to take precedence over the public school monopoly of elementary and secondary education...
...You don't shout "low blow" every time someone lands a punch...
...The law alone was not then, and is not now, strong enough to prevent killing...
...Letter writers not only write to criticize but often also to introduce another aspect of the subject under discussion...
...At all events, it seems to me that America today is on the whole a remarkably tolerant country...
...I think he minimizes the lay/clerical divide but he is right about the "left/right" divide and expands the subject by including it in the continued discussion provided by the letter column...
...in both cases there were then, and are now, few appropriate social forms in the subculture to head off the violence...
...I have spent so many years in local and state politics, where abuse, whether veiled or open, is the stock in trade, that I must have developed a thick skin...
...let others disgrace themselves by resorting to intimidation...
...The first letter writer, the Reverend Robert Hyde, was right, I feel, in pointing out that I had fallen into less than civil discourse myself when I endorsed by quotation Vernon Ruland's characterization of Evelyn Waugh and John Cardinal Newman's contemptuous descriptions of the Anglican church as stemming from "a neurotic [italics mine] hankering for absolutes...
...Let's not toss the charge of antiCatholicism about too casually, thereby adding Catholics to the list of those who refuse to debate, who prefer to silence their critics by charging them with some psychological infirmity or moral depravity...
...And so with Father Hyde...
...On reflection I think they are...
...Browne held that wise believers "know that a good cause needs not to be patron'd by passion...
...I'm afraid that is the case with James A. Sullivan...
...And then there are letter writers who have an agenda of their own and latch on to the ongoing discussion in order to advance that agenda...
...In the vigorous give-and-take that ought to characterize public debate in a democratic society, the blow delivered by the Daily News cartoon falls well within the Marquis of Queensberry boundaries...
Vol. 118 • June 1991 • No. 11
