An Alley in Chicago/Geno/The Last Priests in America
Cort, John C.
INDELIBLY MARKED AN ALLEY IN CHICAGO The Ministry of a City Priest Margery Frisbie Sheed & Ward, $13.95, 298 pp. GEN0 The Life and Mission of Geno Baroni Lawrence M. O'Rourke Paulist Press,...
...THE LAST PRIESTS IN AMERICA Conversations with Remarkable Men Tim Unsworth Crossword, $19.95,281 pp...
...And some of the anecdotes scattered among five "interludes" are hilarious...
...about an intriguing literary curiosity...
...Baroni first made news in 1960 as a curate at St...
...Under President Jimmy Carter, Baroni became assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, attaining the highest government rank of any priest ever to have served the U.S...
...sick, above all, of the individualism in international life that has left the world a shambles...
...His family gave him a Catholic education and a sense of irony about things Iberian...
...Box 1046 Notre Dame, IN 46556 Tel: (219) 239-7132 The Catholic Press Association's statement of award in the category of General Excellence, Scholarly Magazines, 1991" The judges laud Communio for its "excellence of articles and presentation...
...Most certainly, the two are not easily compatible, and the incompatibility probably contributed to his death of cancer at the early age of fifty-three...
...The year was 1928...
...As father of a large family, I could never question the common sense of St...
...Those of us who are old enough must have noticed that the priesthood used to be an excellent career ladder for impoverished young men who wanted a good education and a job that assured them security, prestige, and, finally, pastoral authority and power...
...And children...
...The man was flawed perhaps (who isn't...
...Felipe Alfau, a Spanish writer born in Barcelona in1902 and raised in Guernica and Madrid, emigrated to New York City in 1916, at age fourteen...
...The move to the United States was painful: he felt misplaced, lonely...
...It was an immediate sensation...
...The format is similar to that made famous by Studs Terkel, mainly taped interviews, not exactly "conversations" because you don't hear Unsworth's voice except in the introductions...
...Perhaps because of its avantgarde technique and its Iberian English, people felt uncomfortable with the book...
...He observes that "we still have 53,000 priests in the United States and just over 19,000 parishes...
...The latter is by Tim Unsworth, a colunmist for the National Catholic Reporter...
...Read before the Second World War, while John Dos Passos, E Scott Fitzgerald, Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, and Raymond Chandler had their fingerprints on every kind of narrative, the book is an extraordinarily compelling experiment...
...The volume is titled Sentimental Songs (The Dalkey Archive Press...
...California residents please add 7% sales tax...
...When the book comes out I'm going to review it and give it a bad review...
...What I fell in love with, all unknowingly, was the modernist novel as detective story...
...Unsworth is a good reporter and a readable writer, and his selections include some of the best, if not the last, priests in America...
...One can see Alfau's style in Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Spain's novelist Luis Martin-Santos, and the Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges...
...Very much of a cross section, but most of them come off as highly admirable men...
...Succeeds admirably in its desire to promote rational dialogue among all factions in the Catholic Church...
...This conviction is further confirmed by the other two books, biographies of the late Monsignor Geno Baroni and the still living and lively Monsignor John Egan, who is covered in Frisbie's book...
...Alfau includes REVIEWERS NANCY M. HAEGEL is an associate professor of materials science at UCLA and a Kellogg National Fellow...
...F~ LOST IN QUEENS LOCOS A Comedy of Gestures Felipe Alfau Vintage International, $8.95, 206 pp...
...But Egan was right and Hillenbrand was wrong, in my opinion, and nothing speaks more eloquently in Egan's behalf, or in behalf of Cardinal Samuel Stritch and his doughty chancellor, Monsignor Edward Burke, who backed him, than the losing fight those three put up against the city and the university...
...ILAN STAVANS, a Mexican novelist and scholar, has recently translated Felip AIfau's collected poetry...
...And many of the other priests confirm my conviction that if you want to be happy, and almost never lonely, devote yourself to the pursuit of justice...
...Meanwhile, in 1929 Doubleday published his children's book, OM Tales from Spain, a compendium of invented stories about bullfighting and the Spanish way of life and imagination...
...JOHN C. CORT is a Boston-area writer and frequent contributor to Commonweal...
...They are sick of individualistic, subjective piety because it lacks depth and vision...
...Please enter a subscription to Communio for: [ ] 1 Year (U.S.--$21.00...
...Admittedly, Alfau did both texts not because he wanted to become a professional writer but in order to earn money...
...government...
...sick of the stinking individualism in our economic life that has denied to the worker his rightful place in industrial life...
...Nor am I convinced that all the resignations are necessarily a bad thing...
...They discuss many topics: panhandling and theft, love and violence, metaphysics and music, all parading in intertwined anecdotes, recollections, and philosophical dissertations...
...The study brings the range as well as the organic unity of de Lubac's work clearly into view...
...If there's anything missing in the church today, it's a sense of justice...
...Paul's words in I Corinthians (7:32): "The unmarried man is busy with the Lord's affairs, concerned with pleasing the Lord...
...Margery Frisbie suffers heavy going with some of the material, but her story picks up drama and excitement when she gets into Jack Egan's finest and one of his most painful hours, namely, his battle in 1958 with Mayor Daley the First and the University of Chicago over the shafting they gave the poor black community that bordered the university's sacred precincts...
...Outside U.S.--$46.00) Amount Enclosed (Please make checks payable to Communio...
...Includes articles by H. de Lubac, W. Kasper, L. Dupr~, J. Ratzinger, P. Henrici, C. SchonbOrn, K. Lehmann, and Pope John Paul I1o Hans Urs von Balthasar prepared this overview of the theology and spirituality of Henri de Lubac (1896-1991 ), whom he calls friend and master, on the occasion of the latter's eightieth birthday...
...And after a few years, picking up the native tongue in the street, he wrote a novel in English...
...Lawrence O'Rourke, a competent D.C...
...newspaperman, does a good job with Baroni, the first Catholic priest to join the '65 march from Selma to Montgomery...
...I can't give it a bad review...
...Later he gravitated more to promoting the interests of white ethnics and trying to spread oil on the rough water that separated them from the blacks...
...Many of Unsworth's priests testify to the pleasure that may be gained from the latter by those who apply themselves, men like Dan Cantwell, Jack Egan, Dennis Geaney, Bryan Hehir, and Bishops McManus and Lucker...
...John C. Cost e have here two books, each about one priest, and one book about fortytwo priests...
...Please send the form (at right) with your check to: COMMUNIO P.O...
...New from Communio Books This collection of essays represents the most wide-ranging study to date of the life and work of Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988...
...Tel: (914) 835-8406...
...Remarkably few complain about loneliness or lack of job satisfaction, although Unsworth is clearly eager to hear their confessions...
...When trying to sell it, he found that nobody quite understood its labyrinthine structure and metafictional devices...
...The price of Locos, which finally got published in 1936 by Farrar & Reinhart, was $2.50...
...Or so Unsworth seems to think His solution, also repeated again and again, either in his voice or that of interviewees, is to drop the celibacy requirement and ordain women...
...People are sickofthe individualism that has made of political life an unspeakably sordid thing...
...but nobody today says it any better...
...but the married man is busy with this world's demands and occupied with pleasing his wife...
...The title of his volume, Locos: A Comedy o f Gestures...
...Readers who dared to open it found that it had no conventional plot...
...This was the battle that split the 756: Commonweal Communio International Catholic Review SUMMER 1991 Balthasar and Rahner on the Theology of Nature and Grace: A Discussion Articles by: Angelo Scola, Roch Kereszty, Thomas O'Meara, David Bal,~s, Marc Ouellet also in this issue: Francis Martin Feminist Hermeneutics Louis Dupr~ Ignation humanism and its mystical origins Kenneth L. Schmitz Selves and Persons Free Copy of this Summer 1991 issue with your one or two year paid subscription...
...Like Bishop McManus and so many Chicago priests of that era, he was inspired by Reynold Hillenbrand, rector of Mundelein Seminary in the late thirties and early forties...
...There we are reminded again and again that vocations are decreasing, resignations are continuing (by 2005 we should be down to 21,000 diocesan priests from a high of 35,000 in 1966), and even God is helpless to do anything about it...
...Yet none of them knew about Alfan...
...Little was left but the pain and pleasure of "pleasing the Lord...
...288 pages, $14.95 125 pages, $9.95 Sewn Softcover Sewn Softcover Co-published with Ignatius Press To order, send payment plus postage and handling charge ($2.00 for orders up to $10.00, $3.00 for orders from $10.01 to $25.00) to Ignatius Press Distribution Center, 15 Oakland Avenue, Harrison, NY 10528...
...Unsworth is honest enough to quote retired Bishop William McManus, "That's an awful title...
...It was my fatal type," she wrote...
...GEN0 The Life and Mission of Geno Baroni Lawrence M. O'Rourke Paulist Press, $11.95, 315 pp...
...That means some of the teaching or monastic priests might have to do parish duty on the weekends, but that's not too bad a thing either...
...Although Locos was enthusiastically reviewed by Mary McCarthy and others, it disappeared from the literary scene without a trace...
...None of us who were ever moved, even mesmerized, by his lofty eloquence will ever forget him, and I cannot help but close with a quote that sums up the best in the men covered in these books, from a talk of Hillenbrand's at the National Liturgical Week in 1945: People the world over are sick of individualism, of being sundered from others, of the tragic loss that comes from thinking and acting alone...
...The bishop also contributes a clue as to how to derive more pleasure and less pain, and loneliness, from the priesthood...
...Outside U.S.--$26.00) [] 2 Years (U.S.--$38.00...
...Hillenbrand priests in two, with Hillenbrand giving Egan a tongue-lashing at a meeting of the group...
...In all three books the figure, or shadow, of that amazing and tragic man, Reynold Hillenbrand, distracts one's attention...
...But he doesn't sell me on the death-knell of celibacy...
...It is obvious that many of the priests who quit did not belong in the priesthood...
...A New Yorkercritic said that although "Alfau wrote with a confidence astonishing in a twenty-sixyear-old, beneath the comedy and the surrealistic effects, and the glare and shadows," the pages were inhabited by a"whispered secret," a mysterious light--as if the author was "gestur[ing] to his public from his side of the peculiar one-way mirror that is reflexive art...
...Augustine's, a black parish in Washington, D.C., where he established a multiservice center for his multineedy parishioners...
...CHROMOS Felipe Alfau Vintage International, $11,348 pp...
...Today, it's a revelation...
...Over half his priests are from the Chicago diocese and they include a cardinal, two bishops, several who quit and one, a convicted pedophile, recently released from prison...
...A charismatic but disorganized type, both in thought and action, Baroni was not always a happy man, and part of this was the result of trying to reconcile the strains and stresses of public office with the strains and stresses of priestly office...
...He says, "We have to make justice our paramount virtue...
...Indiana and Washington resident, please add sales tax...
...During his youth, he was for a while a music critic for La Prensa, an up-and-coming Spanish-language newspaper in Manhattan...
...Monsignor Egan seems to have had a happier time of it...
...I l a n Slavan$ ere is a short c.v...
...Name (Please print) Address City State Zip L...
...The author himself meets the characters--Lunarito, Gast6n Bejarano, Don Benito, Juan Chinelato, Dofia Micaela, Garcfa, Don Graciano Bdez, Sister Carmela, and Father Inocencio--in a bizarre gathering place in Toledo, Spain, called Caf6 de los Locos...
...758: Commonweal...
...They are sick of the individualism that has undone so many homes...
...McCarthy herself, in one of her final essays, wrote an epilogue for the 1988 edition in which she explained how, when she first read Locos and reviewed it for the Nation, it changed her way of perceiving literature...
...Bishop McManus is one of those who strike the positive note...
...It was clearly ahead of its time...
...The publisher paid Alfau $250 for the manuscript and included it as the first title of the new series "Discoverers," distributed in autographed copies to a select club of subscribers...
...That is, until the Dalkey Archive Press, an imprint in Illinois, rediscovered it more than fifty years later in 1988 and brought it back to light...
...funds only, please...
...When the prestige, authority, and power faded, and that's not too bad a thing either, the job lost much of its appeal...
...Otherwise, these are samples of "the last priests in America...
Vol. 118 • December 1991 • No. 22
