Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE No sauce for the gender New York, N.Y. To the Editors: I am deeply hurt after reading about the U.S. Catholic bishops' pastoral letter on women. I want to tell them that if God...
...There is, for example, not "a certain amount of racism," but quite a lot and it now flows in all directions and permeates much of American life...
...John F. Kennedy said it all...
...and restoration of the church's charitable works...
...What Carlin describes is no assertion of populist wisdom...
...I urge your readers to support the national collection, which will continue next year...
...Mrs...
...it is faith that dominates here, not archaeology...
...A "sense of community" and being "highly individualistic" are most emphatically not antithetical, and one person's "moral absolutism" is another 's "moral relativism...
...O'Halloran's story of her daughter's enlightenment was one of the finest things Commonweal has printed...
...They are not Bible illustrations...
...MSGR...
...For our part, we need to learn from their faith in the midst of suffering and oppression...
...The Stations seen in Commonweal are unusual in that they give a reportorial account of this commemoration as practiced today...
...As our sisters and brothers begin to experience the joys and challenges of freedom, we have an opportunity to learn, and to help...
...Batts says she would never hold up Maura as a role Commonweal 5 June 1992: 29 model...
...Rather, he might inquire why, instead of accepting traditional alliances and at least tolerating cultural differences, the groups whose disaffection with the Democrats he describes should instead vote for another party that wrecks their industries, busts their unions, blocks a proper health-care system for them, robs their children of meaningful job prospects and a viable environment, and does not even offer decent unemployment insurance unless kicked by a Democratic Congress...
...Consultants in management, bookkeeping, computer literacy, organizational development can be immensely useful...
...After money, professional and technical experts are needed—people with skills who can volunteer some of their time to share their expertise in these countries...
...O'Halloran, who obviously is disturbed by what she called her daughter's "defection...
...Upward mobility, Catholic and otherwise, which he cites, tends to lead to more secularism, another of his menaces, as many socioeconomic studies of religious commitment indicate...
...JOHN E. ULLMANN The writer is professor of management at Hofstra University...
...People in these countries also need continuing moral support from ethnic groups in the U.S...
...GEORGE SARAUSKAS The writer is executive director of the Office to Aid the Catholic Church in Central and Eastern Europe, 3211 Fourth Street, N.E., Washington, D.C...
...Emphasis is mine...
...Louis, Mo...
...I'm going to help the nuns...
...analyses and other nations show monopoly can be avoided...
...The public schools are open to all...
...We managed to have a thriving parochial school system during the depths of the depression, when people had next to nothing...
...To the Editors: Your coverage of developments in Central and Eastern Europe encourages me to call your readers' attention to efforts being made by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) to assist in the restoration of the church's pastoral ministry in the countries of the region...
...No one is forced to go to private schools...
...it is nothing more than the old politics of making people consent to being hurt, provided objects of their hatred are hurt worse...
...They are simple, straightforward redirection of tax dollars from monopoly finance distribution via public schools to distribution via parental choice...
...The staffing of these private schools was based upon the unlimited supply of religious teachers...
...To the Editors: Professor Quentin L. Quade's "Prochoice on Schools" [April 10] is as far off the mark as one can get...
...Continued on page 29) 2: 5 June 1992 Commonweal Wilkinson...
...Clergy are few, and materials— books, copying machines, tape recorders, even clothes—are scarce...
...Joseph Wilkinson's letter is a nearly perfect illustration of one of the main confusions besetting contemporary educational policy...
...Right now I am engaged in reading the journal of Maura-san and find it more inspiring than any spiritual book I have encountered in a long time...
...Applied to the question of education financing, what this means is as follows: tax dollars provided to parents to purchase education where they deem appropriate is unrelated to the "establishment of a church...
...John F. Kennedy's Houston description of the relation of religion and politics was one of the great misunderstandings of contemporary politics...
...Now that laws prohibiting religious practice have been changed, many people expect the church to play a key role in the development of their nations and the continued growth of democracy...
...When seen as the end rather than a means, they cannot be evaluated and compared...
...Churches are reopening, seminaries and convents are filled with candidates, religious materials are eagerly read, and children are being taught the faith...
...Leading voters astray Hempstead, N.Y...
...To the Editors: Regarding Quentin L. Quade's "Prochoice on Schools" [April 10], I've always felt that if tax revenues are available for education, they should be spent on the public schools...
...To the Editors: I confess I was angered by the letter from Kay Siemssen Batts [Correspondence, April 24] responding to Ruth O'Halloran's article on the enlightenment of her daughter [February 28...
...And we did it without picking other people's pockets...
...The church has credibility with the people because under repressive regimes it was an instrument in the struggle for liberty, democracy, and human rights...
...all of American education would be better off if monopoly were ended...
...She was following the path of Meister Eckhart and the medieval mystics...
...The truth is simply this, as logic and experience show: education is the goal...
...Patrick's Church in Lake Forest...
...Most deplorable is Carlin's contrast of "old groups [of] locals rooted in a place" with the bad new ones of "rootless cosmopolitans"—a term both wrong and offensive in a country constantly on the move, where we are all citizens of the whole country rather than bound to some part of its soil...
...First she was insensitive to the plight of Mrs...
...JOSEPH L. WILKINSON Kennedy on school aid St...
...category so much in vogue today...
...Voucher systems are not "thinly disguised tax supports...
...Rather than considering this decline and other changes in the crucial task of making a living, Carlin tries to establish a sociopolitical dichotomy that effectively cuts our society in two...
...To the Editors: John Deedy's reactions [Correspondence, April 24] to our report on the Stations of the Cross in Jerusalem today [March 271—his idea that this perpetuates a myth, and his singling out certain stations that are no longer recognized as valid—deserve consideration...
...As a devoted Zen practitioner for ten years, as an active member of Rochester and Montreal Zen centers, and having struggled with the koan mu myself for a very long time, I found Ms...
...To the Editors: As I am quoted in Murray Polner's fine article, "The Threat of Peace" [May 8], allow me to note that the decline of manufacturing to which I alluded has serious bearing on the cultural-political split that David R. Carlin, Jr., writing in the same issue ["Blame the Messenger], seeks to blame for Democratic failure to elect a president...
...Perhaps a means test would be necessary...
...Because of these problems and opportunities, the U.S...
...In his address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on September 12, 1960, then presidential candidate John F. Kennedy said, "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote where no church or church school is granted public funds or political preference—and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him, or the people who might elect him...
...It is further proof that you can fool some of the people all the time, and if you can do it to 51 percent of them, you get elected...
...development of catechetical programs, materials, and teachers...
...By failing to distinguish between church and believer, Kennedy miscast the religion-politics issue, and ushered in the remarkably silly "personally opposed, but...
...There are those who advocate such financial aid because public school systems don't measure up...
...By the way, whatever happened to us that we can no longer adequately support our Catholic schools...
...Money is a very important help...
...The only exception I would make to the use of public funds for private education is to help poor children attend private schools, if that is their choice...
...Batts displayed both ignorance and insensitivity in her comments...
...Thus, only the affluent parishes can afford parochial schools...
...That is an excellent argument for making more funds available for public schools, rather than diluting whatever tax revenues are available for education...
...As to "whatever happened to us," well, there is little secret there...
...As for across-the-board vouchers or similar financial aid regardless of income— no...
...He effectively equates the end—good education—with one of many means: state-owned public schools...
...20017...
...for their countrymen...
...Still, these fourteen stations are the ones honored in Jerusalem every Good Friday and other Fridays by diverse groups of people from all over the world...
...Indeed, she is not a role model for young women in middle-class Catholic suburbia...
...I do not consider Maura's embracing of Buddhism to be a defection at all, but simply the culmination of all that her earlier Catholic education had prepared her for...
...Aims of the program include formation and training of priests and religious...
...I am sure she would never have wanted to be...
...Carlin is doing no favors for the constituencies whose cause he attempts to espouse...
...mass media and communications...
...Teachers of every sort are needed—in theology, philosophy, sociology, social work, history, economics, English as a second language...
...What should always have been—parental freedom via vouchers—must now be for Catholics and for all...
...Zen Buddhism is not a cult and the Zen master is not a cult leader...
...JACQUELINE LUDORF Private means private West Roxbury, Mass...
...REV...
...The rationale that private schools take a substantial financial load off the taxpaying public and therefore deserve financial support just doesn't wash...
...Roman Catholic schools were started because it was thought that Catholic students were discriminated against in public schools...
...IRENE McMAHON Commonweal 5 June 1992: 31...
...Yet there are great obstacles...
...The effect, in terms of lost jobs of working people everywhere, was terrible, engulfing not only the white Southerners and ethnic Catholics that concern Carlin, but black men and others as well...
...Voucher systems are thinly disguised tax supports...
...JAMES B. FINN The author replies: The first paragraph of James Finn's letter is essentially correct until its last sentence, which is both a non sequitur and erroneous...
...Executed in ceramic tile, these Stations are now permanently affixed in St...
...Batts's references to Zen so uninformed as to be offensive...
...Those days are gone...
...That is no longer the case...
...The self-sacrifice of generations of Catholic religious gave American Catholics their own system of educational choice...
...only by historical accident have we moved to a finance monopoly...
...Former Communist party members are still in administrative positions through which they can and do obstruct church initiatives...
...I want to tell them that if God has shown them through their great hermeneutical insights that people of my sex were not meant to aspire to the priesthood, I can't see why the funds I earn in a nonsexist environment should be given to them...
...Batts displayed a distressing ignorance of Zen...
...there are many alternative vehicles for achieving it...
...30: 5 June 1992 Commonweal Praying the Stations Lake Forest, Ill...
...Those nuns eliminated most of the financial penalty for having our own system...
...To suggest alternative methods is said to be an attack on "education" and "the children" in this view...
...JOSEPH G. BAILEY Aid for a broken church Washington, D.C...
...The decline has largely eliminated the middle-skill jobs that once provided a continuum between low and high incomes and educational levels...
...If parents prefer a private school education, Catholic or otherwise, for their children, fine...
...Church leaders want information on ways to organize, ways to develop pastoral ministry in the post-Vatican II church, ways to enlist and inspire the laity...
...For that believer-ascitizen, religion may be a source of primary political values, but those values are as legitimate as any other values from any source...
...It is a major reason for the widening gulf and conflict between what Carlin calls "the old groups [who] are working class and lower-middle class [and] the new [who are] upper-middle...
...And I humbly acknowledge Maura-san to be a true role model for this old, retired Catholic priest...
...QUENTIN L. QUADE This topic is discussed further in "An Editor's Notebook," page 4. Maura-san as model Hammond, N.Y...
...But his argument comes across mainly as an ill-tempered roundup of Spiro Agnew's "usual suspects...
...He simply had, or at least showed, no realization that in a democracy religion enters the political arena via the believer-as-citizen, not via a church hierarchy...
...In Central and Eastern Europe, American dollars can make many resources available...
...They are obviously different things, and, indeed, one can say those public schools are suffering in part because they have achieved the status of end for such people as Mr...
...All manner of Catholic institutions and structures were all but destroyed in the decades of state atheism...
...Catholic bishops have established the Office to Aid the Catholic Church in Central and Eastern Europe and have authorized a national collection for a three-year period to provide funds...
...From firsthand observation, I can report that, while there are differences from country to country, the church is very much alive in Central and Eastern Europe...
...But they should not expect others to pay for it as long as a public school system exists...
Vol. 119 • June 1992 • No. 11
