Book reviews
Smith, James R. Kelly, Paul E. Dinter, Mary 0 'Neil Good, Karen Sue
H ST. MARTIN'S: WOULD YOU SEND YOUR KID? James R. Kelly CONSCIENCE FIRST, TRADITION SECOND: A Study of Young American Catholics Patrick H. McNamara State University of New York, $14.95, 221...
...The final essay, "The Moral Theology of Silas Lapham" by Thomas L. Shaffer, uses an in-depth look at William Dean Howells's fictional character to expose two common mistakes among business ethicists: assuming from the start that business is morally destructive, and treating successful figures in business as members of a priesthood...
...etc., etc., etc...
...Other sections are more properly strategic without being prescriptive...
...Males and females with the highest grade point average are the most likely to say that premarital sex is immoral and the least likely to say more sexual freedom would be good...
...The alienation of many cultural and scientific leaders in Western societies contradicts the idealized picture the Handbook asks us to accept, a schism that anyone on a campus ("secular" or not) knows and swallows daily...
...Yet another part of me wonders whether some version of YCW might be just what our times need...
...We can call the relationship between conscience and tradition "dialectical" if we want, but in real life, as this volume shows, it is a tricky business...
...a selection of essays from a symposium sponsored by the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Religious Values in Business...
...They have been rejected by their own advertisers, by the city and area politicians, and by their subscribers...
...Many bishops, not approving of YCW's views on social reform, thought the movement was too radical...
...She tells the stories of those she knew or met along the way...
...Huge majorities agree that they should listen to the church's teaching but should also make up their own minds...
...Where the letter was general and theoretical, the Handbook is specific and practical...
...the church is divided...
...From Captain Charles Boycott, "a ruthless land agent in Ireland, who was ostracized by his serflike victims...
...Martin's boys with low grade point averages, no previous Catholic education, and infrequent Mass attenders...
...The church order that is aborning is yet in the future, but its seeds are being sown (even if the outcome of the growth will remain in doubt for some time) in places where the laity is truly "empowered by the Spirit...
...The Pittsburgh newspaper face-off reflects the crunch on daily print publications in a diminished market, but also an aggressive stance by the parent Scripps Company, a Cincinnati-based media conglomerate which is the nation's eighth-largest newspaper publisher...
...Earlier in July, Yale historian David Montgomery had told the Homestead celebrants that the commemoration "entails more 40:11 September 1992 than just romantic nostalgia...
...A part of me is skeptical: the times are so different...
...Both the Catholic Campus Ministry Association and the Department of Education of the USCC have worked hard to create structures that will accomplish this...
...As Palmer tells us more than once, he has suffered lapses of terrible depression and can offer no guarantees for fellow travelers...
...Patrick McNamara is interested in what survives...
...there are already plenty of parish ministries that need help...
...A society which celebrates economic growth at the expense of community values and decent standards of life for all...makes its people the victims of whatever prosperity it experiences...
...Is it possible for those schools that survive to "produce" graduates whose upward mobility does not coincide with religious decline...
...But he has been paying attention to St...
...That battle was over replacement workers," says Pittsburgh labor lawyer Jay Hornack, "and here we are one hundred years later with the management people who believe that is an appropriate, ethical tactic...
...Nevertheless, Unsworth's clarity and talent make the book's brisk surveys of history interesting, informative, and relevant...
...in areas such as poverty, immigration policy, national spending priorities...
...Though very successful in Europe, Cardijn felt that YCW would have to exist internationally to effectively reorder the secular world...
...is a creative byproduct of Palmer's attempt to make sense of the ancient tug-of-war between action and contemplation...
...Caretakers of Creation (Patrick Slattery, ed., $8.95, 118 pp...
...This brief documentary is unadorned with editorial comment...
...While we'll never, Bork-like, penetrate the original intent of Jesus and the Gospel writers, we'll always know at least this powerful negation-affirmation: They did not aim to become the world's biggest sect...
...In the next edition will St...
...The pendulum...
...unemployment too high...
...bserve...
...What parishioner do you know who would race to pick up an article on usury...
...Chapter 8, "The Business of Storytelling and Storytelling in Business," by Dennis P. McCann, is particularly ambitious...
...McNamara's findings will settle no arguments between disturbed conservatives and confident progressives, to say nothing of those among us unclear about whether we want to be "pre-modern" or "post-modern," who are sometimes confident and sometimes disturbed but certainly disagreeable when anyone labels us one or other rather than "all of the above...
...She is on the staff of the National Pastoral Life Center...
...Martin's fail the school's Catholic vision about as often as they failed the American dream...
...They have absolutely no lines into the community which any good newspaper should have...
...is a sure recipe for narcissism, not growth...
...each step gave me new abilities and confidence...
...In their rigidity and their pretensions to onto-logical-change-through-ordination, such clergy seek to keep Catholics in the very ghetto out of which any campus ministry worth its salt has coaxed them...
...Martin's...
...Work, as the author uses it, includes both paid and nonpaid activities...
...The city's mayor joined an estimated 15,000 who canceled their subscriptions to the Press...
...The two I have read are collections of first-person stories...
...Only then does he find the perfect tree and create a much admired masterpiece...
...Boldly, he acknowledges the issue of salaries, especially the enormous gaps between some workers, managers, and executives...
...But fortunately for me, in those days what "Father said" carried more weight than a mother's personal or ideological concerns...
...Many YCW members went on to get college and advanced degrees in order to be in positions of influence...
...A serious commitment of time and attention was required of them...
...Campus ministers who have worked for "excellence in liturgy, preaching, and music" and have promoted "new styles of leadership and ministry that no longer depend solely upon ordained priests" can testify to multiple cases in which student leaders upon leaving school have been refused any role in parishes whose clerical leaders do not want competition from uppity laity...
...In this the Handbook represents a professionalism too seldom considered a part of ministry...
...The current effort happily avoids all such parochialisms...
...An important and often neglected aspect of organizing campus ministry is fund-raising...
...First, we should avoid nostalgia rooted in an imagined golden age of American Catholic high schools run by nuns, brothers, and priests that routinely produced heroic and attractive Catholics...
...It would be hard to imagine a greater pressure (greater even than the dread deadline) to produce a satisfactory piece of work than the one the woodcarver faced: a royal command on pain of death...
...As a result, unionism in the steel industry was suppressed for more than four decades...
...Catholics don't agree on issues anymore...
...They realize that before gaining acceptability all doctrinal teaching and moral norms must pass through the gates of experience and Commonweal relevance...
...Yet it inhibits not one bit the carver, who, recognizing the stakes, takes deliberate steps to ensure his inner serenity...
...McNamara concedes that he does not have to invent new terms to characterize these findings: "selective Catholicism" and "theological and moral individualism" might do...
...They seem deeply aware of both maturational and ideological factors at work in their students...
...Diehl emphasizes the positive potential of competition, arguing that cooperation is not always a superior value...
...The ultimate irony of the Scripps confrontation with its workers was that the region, with its long and deep labor organizing heritage, had just completed commemorating the centennial of the Homestead Strike...
...GOING VARIOUS________ WAYS___________ Paul E. Dinter THE GOSPEL ON CAMPUS: A Handbook of Campus Ministry Programs and Resources Michael Galligan-Stierle, editor, United States Catholic Conference, Department of Education, $14.95, 215 pp...
...What an education...
...The section on organization also outlines legal issues, considers goal-development, and recommends evaluation schemes...
...It also occurred to me that while Catholics during their long and winding pilgrim history have built just about everything from cathedrals to brothels, they have never willingly built their own catacombs...
...Instead, Palmer likens it to death and resurrection, making the descent into contemplation sound, at the very least, downright dangerous...
...Most of the fifty-four graduates interviewed ten years after graduation recall that at St...
...After its heyday as a national movement in the fifties and early sixties, YCW along with many other movements and groups suffered a sad demise in the upheaval of the sixties...
...The Handbook's first benefit is its comprehensiveness...
...But the outcome of this creativity raises deeper issues for the future of ministry in a clerical-ized church, an issue that goes beyond the editor's and authors' charge—an issue that I will return to at the end of the review...
...How the church at large accepts the challenges presented by successful campus ministry is the unstated outcome of what the Handbook chronicles...
...What was Mother Jones's real name...
...Diehl is a Lutheran layman who asks his readers to consider how the faith they express on Sunday is exercised during the week...
...But it quickly unraveled in the heat of protest and aggiornamento...
...James R. Kelly CONSCIENCE FIRST, TRADITION SECOND: A Study of Young American Catholics Patrick H. McNamara State University of New York, $14.95, 221 pp...
...We will have to do our own interpretative work here since McNamara devises no neologisms that transcend the usual church and cultural polemics...
...Some became involved in politics and labor unions...
...Mary Harris...
...Mary's, campus ministry has had to professionalize to survive...
...What he does offer is a model, an imitable way of using stories as the focus of contemplation, going over and over each one until its layers of meaning become clearer, if not fully clear...
...McNamara surveyed (with both fixed and open-ended questions) and interviewed 2,295 graduating seniors from 1977 through 1989...
...The Press is one of the largest of its nineteen daily properties (Scripps also has ten television and five radio stations...
...While this presentation of the church's social teaching might seem elementary to some Commonweal readers, the book is intended to be used as a primer for adult education...
...hierarchy has been more supportive than the hierarchy in many European countries...
...Interestingly enough, only 18 percent of all students agree that abortion is acceptable if a baby is likely to have serious birth defects...
...The last, in particular, should help some campus ministers fend off the prejudicial measuring of their work by church officials with little experience or sympathy for campus ministry...
...Although the Handbook tries to situate ministry within the "total world of higher education," it repeats the idealized picture of the 1985 Pastoral: "Throughout its history, the church has been instrumental in cultivating the intellectual life...
...His response upon landing was cryptic, "I was just doing my job...
...or child labor...
...Judge...
...Mary Irene Zotti shares her own understanding and commitment to a YCW way of life...
...Since about 20 percent of them did not complete college, we might say that the 1978 and 1979 graduates of St...
...He himself wonders if he has simply uncovered another instance of "selective Catholicism...
...Still, I found myself looking for an analysis of the ethical dimensions to the story...
...politics are controlled by big interests...
...The creativity of campus ministry can subvert what remains of the precon-ciliar Catholic subculture...
...Palmer's reflection on this same story also turns to the role of God, who, by allowing the angel to fail becomes an accomplice (or worse) to the disaster...
...How can we ever grasp the paradoxical truth about life—that death is the necessary prerequisite...
...They are, he observes, receptive to the church's social teachings and do not reject a church role in the formation of conscience about sexual issues...
...Why did the garment workers withdraw from the CIO...
...The two latest volumes concern law enforcement Commonweal officers and teachers...
...The Handbook does not speak of the church's need to listen and learn from universities and their constituencies, does not acknowledge that they, too, are a province where the Spirit acts without waiting for permission...
...The book ends with the results of an informal survey taken by the author (610 former members responded...
...contains testimonies by members of various occupations, from computer developer to artist, and personal descriptions of how each tries to make the Monday connection...
...Having flown by the seat of my ministerial pants in a campus setting throughout the seventies, I envy those now tilling the academic vineyard this succinct review of programs and resources...
...While very few seniors say the church has "no business" in these issues of justice and peace, McNamara found that seniors are far more likely to agree when church positions mesh with the dominant liberal discourse...
...in the same format and style, is a collection by Christian farmers...
...XXIII elevated him to cardinal and he participated in the preparation of the Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity...
...This is what he refers to as the Monday connection...
...For all the Handbook's strengths, there are also weaknesses—some of them are as much the larger church's failures of resolution as those of the church-on-campus...
...The Christian at Work in the World and The Spirituality of Work, two different series (the former are books, the latter pamphlets) published by ACTA, deserve mention...
...It's a bit like Alice traveling down the rabbit hole: the reader actually begins to see a much more complicated, and probably truer, picture than before the trip...
...Pittsburgh department stores and food chains, knowing the depth of community support for the strikers, ignored the "scab-produced" editions...
...Most seniors attend church weekly...
...Originally published as a series in Salt magazine, the book is a collection of articles, each followed by two pages of group discussion questions and suggested activities prepared by Jean Unsworth...
...Having positioned the essay midway through the book, after several essays applying "virtue ethics" to the problems of business, the editors must have felt that it needed no comment...
...and casts it as anything but rhetorical...
...And what stories...
...Because it was perceived as so much on the fringes of both church and society, it was the entry point in ministry for many women religious and laity...
...The Christian at Work series now has four volumes in print...
...Does his evidence support this move...
...Even after nine passengers had been sucked through a hole in the plane's side as a piece of the fuselage ripped off in flight, the pilot skillfully saved the rest of his passengers...
...Prophecy and wisdom make valid claims, but they are not the same ones...
...Only 11 percent thought that "no authority has the right to influence the formation of anyone's conscience...
...efore Vatican II, the anti-Vietnam war movement, and the counterculture had their say, the national Newman movement was a growing component of the U.S...
...McNamara is particularly interested in whether St...
...Joseph Cardijn, a Belgian priest, observed in the first decades of this century that young workers in his country were leaving the church in large numbers...
...Along with the important ideas and events set out in journalistic style, the book contains interesting trivia: Where does the word boycott come from...
...Don't be put off by the book's excess of prefatory material, which ought to have been placed at the end...
...For example, he gives the church mixed marks for its support of labor unions because he includes its resistance to organizing within its own institutions, yet he notes that the U.S...
...McNamara "is tempt[ed] to wonder whether tradition has simply yielded to the culture...
...Although the methodological logic of McNamara's survey framework, which has "actors negotiating meanings and outcomes," suggests an "ethnographic" study of students and teachers grappling with issues of "conscience" and "tradition" in the sweat and confusion of closely observed everyday life, "all" we and the author have got to go on are thirteen years of survey answers by graduating seniors, some written-in comments, and several dozen thirty-minute structured interviews...
...In his explication of "The Woodcarver," Palmer comes closer to the pressures of the active life most of us experience at work, though he exaggerates them...
...I thought everything was pretty okay with the world when I sashayed into my first YCW meeting...
...For the Handbook to engage in a prophetic challenge to church leadership on this neuralgic issue of listening to the laity would probably have meant biting the hands that fed its authors...
...Overall, his approach is pragmatic and patient, urging nonconfrontational 38: // September 1992 Commonweal styles of persuasion whenever possible...
...McNamara's statistical analysis is straightforward and by reading the three appendices full of frequencies, bivariate cross-tabs, and multivariate analysis, readers can be their own sociologists...
...35 percent agree that more sexual freedom is a good thing...
...The Spirituality of Work pamphlet series ($2.95 each, less than 50 pp...
...Neither academic nor ecclesiastical authorities knew quite what to expect of campus ministry, or who should do it...
...The Active Life: A Spirituality of Work, Creativity, and Caring (Harper & Row, $15.95, 160 pp...
...What's more, it has excellent ideas and suggestions about initiating contacts, promoting volunteer work on campus, planning liturgy and music, developing peer ministry, forming conscience, evangelizing, educating for justice and peace, working ecumenically (never easy in any setting...
...His account of how St...
...He also interviewed their religion teachers...
...If some practice in society is unjustly harmful to people and I do nothing to oppose that practice, then I share responsibility for the harm done" (74 percent agree...
...He doesn't regard that relationship as one to be kept in balance like a seesaw or held in tension like a guy wire...
...If they are not permanently alienated by a still-resistant episcopal leadership and by a younger, more Commonweal conservative clergy, these lay leaders threaten to subvert the hierarchical order on which the immigrant church's subculture thrived...
...I highly recommend A Virtuous Life in Business: Stories of Courage and Integrity in the Corporate World, edited by Oliver F. Williams and John W. Houck (Rowman & Littlefield, $18.95, 185 pp...
...When the Handbook's predecessor came out in 1976, it was so exclusively focused on ministry on a traditionally Catholic campus that it virtually disenfranchised everyone working in other settings (in fact, the majority...
...Second, the Handbook tries to have its cake and eat it too when it speaks of the "prophetic yet reconciling voice" of campus ministry and its role in building the "wisdom community...
...The inference is that the Catholic church in all its members has always done this, a generalization that overlooks some painful chapters of suppression in more than the modern era...
...There are a few select, still fresh tales by Chuang Tzu and Martin Buber, two Commonweal familiar stories about Jesus (the desert temptation and the multiplication of the loaves), and a poem by the contemporary Guatemalan teacher Julia Esquivel called "They Have Threatened Us with Resurrection...
...Reverend Paul E. Dinter was director of Catholic Campus Ministry at Columbia University and Barnard College from 1973-1988...
...Priests, in the role of chaplains, were essential to the YCW...
...I easily managed my first action, which was to choose two friends at work with whom I could talk about my faith...
...This professionalism also extends to the question of personnel involved in campus ministry...
...He or she might even appreciate McNamara's first chapter summary, "From Ghetto to Suburbs," of earlier sociological studies and fictional recollections about the loss of an innocent and optimistic Catholicism with its clear direction and clean definitions...
...Because human suffering cannot and, here's the rub, ought not be eliminated in this world...
...It sounds unnecessarily complicated, but he further compares these with classical examples—Mary's Magnificat, the Exodus, the City of God, and Augustine's Confessions...
...Indeed, McNamara's survey data (apart from the seniors' comparatively high church attendance and their reservations about elective abortion) echo the dominant American upper-middle class moral culture: Religion is acceptable when it is tolerant, compassionate, not too vocal about injustice, and mostly quiet about sexual morality...
...Martin's" is a Catholic high school somewhere in the Southwest that recruits very intelligent girls and boys (especially after 1983 when admission test scores went up and some measures of religiosity went down...
...Those with primary school contact with Catholic teaching, those who say religion is important, those who rate their religious instruction highly, and those who are frequent church attenders are likely to affirm traditional sexual morality...
...What invention led to fixed working hours...
...Having enfranchised these baptized, campus ministry has created ecclesial monsters...
...All these topics are treated here...
...feudalism...
...The book is not only valuable, it is readable and gets progressively better, featuring three sterling chapters toward the end...
...The Press went to federal court August 4 to challenge Pennsylvania's antistrikebreaker law...
...Besides giving us things to remember, maybe a tradition is also important in reminding us of what we never learned and why we never did...
...No one should idealize the academy in reaction, but ignoring the split that virtually defines academic culture is a weakness, both in the church and in the Handbook...
...Martin's religion teachers describe their work in the required four years of theology is both sympathetic and intelligent...
...Those most likely to reject the traditional Catholic sexual ethic are most likely to be St...
...Yet, this is the dangerously creative work that campus ministry, at its best, is engaged in today...
...They are publishing a four-days-a-week shopper written without bylines by newspeople who remain on the payroll (a Guild contract was rejected by newsroom staff last year...
...For example, "How can a lawyer ever find God in the rough and tumble environment of a county court system, a downtown office firm, an arbitration board, or amid the hundreds of phone calls and letters coming into the hectic office...
...Most of them, especially after 1983, come from affluent homes, almost one-half attended Catholic primary schools, and another one-third attended CCD...
...Jocists" belonged to "cells" organized under a "central committee" and worked to influence their "milieu...
...The goal is inclusive, to connect as much work as possible to one's life of faith...
...The observe, judge, and act method is a proven way to do it...
...Between editions, for most people the real life-test of McNamara's judgment might be their answer to the question: "Would you send your child (or a kid you didn't actively dislike) to a place like St...
...Martin's as broadly representative of trends in Catholic secondary school education, what would we conclude...
...Transplanting and adapting a European organization to American soil was a slow and arduous process...
...But just over 50 percent agree that the church should "help Catholics form their consciences on the moral dimension of economic decision-making...
...McCann doesn't stop there...
...Of Human Hands (Gregory F. Augustine Pierce, ed., $8.95, 124 pp...
...John 36:11 September 1992 Commonweal H church and academy as "two wisdom communities," the authors seem to be trying to bridge the divide I just described...
...I once received a directory of persons working in campus ministry in my diocese that listed those of us on "secular" campuses as "Non-Catholic Campus Ministers...
...Monsignor Hillenbrand's conviction that Catholic Action was a moral imperative and his love for the liturgy became the foundations of the American YCW...
...Ninety per30: 11 September 1992 Commonweal cent affirm a teaching role for the church regarding world hunger, racial discrimination, and nuclear arms...
...17 percent said they never went...
...This book is a witness to grace in action...
...An effective presence demands organization lest campus ministry be some vague hand-holding operation for students who find the atmosphere intimidating...
...For those schools, and the sermons that went with them, often promoted self-improvement and American citizenship...
...James R. Kelly is professor of sociology at Fordham University...
...On almost all items measuring social justice and the importance of religion, Hispanic students who speak English at home are closer to their Anglo classmates than to those who speak Spanish at home...
...church was divided on the merits of the YCW...
...Maybe young adults today would be eager to learn how to connect their faith to the rest of their lives...
...the problems of homelessness, hunger, race relations are too complicated...
...Commissioning this Handbook was a specific attempt to put flesh on the bones of the bishops' 1985 pastoral letter, "Empowered by the Spirit: Campus Ministry Faces the Future...
...BOOKNOTES: FAITH & WORKS Karen Sue Smith eaders familiar with Parker Palmer's much discussed book The Company ¦ of Strangers, which stressed the public nature and public obligations of the church, will find his latest volume much more personal in content and style...
...The YCW prayer includes the words "....May Your kingdom come in all our offices, workshops, factories, farms, schools and in all our homes...
...Laypersons were recognized as having their own important work to do in the Lord's vineyard...
...But, to presume that the concerns of "prophecy" (especially when justice is concerned) and those of "wisdom" will be the same fuses two very different modalities both on the biblical horizon and in contemporary culture...
...This may not always be so desirable, but the future of church leadership will not be what it once was...
...Critical to the abortive two-day publication termination, however, was the absence of any significant advertising...
...William E. Diehl, a retired director of sales for Bethlehem Steel, is the author of The Monday Connection: A Spirituality of Competence, Affirmation, and Support in the Workplace (HarperSanFrancisco, $15.95, 200 pp...
...Hispanic students are 28 percent of this sample, and another 12 percent are from Anglo-Hispanic homes...
...But finally, he does not stand among the pessimists, inviting the reader to move with him among the hopeful...
...One lawyer sees the law as "a service profession," another entered it "in order to change society...
...One format he has found helpful is a monthly meeting at which one member presents an actual case from the workplace for group discussion...
...He emphasized the social encyclicals as necessary and relevant for Christ-like living...
...Not only that, it sets a standard for defining and describing the components of ministry in an academic setting that could well be emulated for other chaplaincy and pastoral activities...
...Martin's tries to show its students how to get into the better colleges, how to understand the Catholic tradition, how to be better human beings, and how to act more justly...
...These are the worlds that lay people are called to transform...
...Twelve percent of these alumni/ae said they were either alienated from the church or had "serious doubts about Catholic teaching and/or moral precepts...
...Unlike parish ministry, which often muddles along under the same premises that Bing Crosby portrayed so idealistically in Going My Way and The Bells of St...
...Too often pastoral presence is lumped together as campus ministry in so many differing settings that we often make the task more difficult for those working in it...
...Or is it just his temperament to be optimistic...
...It took nine years from the first tentative meetings (in 1938) for the Young Christian Workers to begin in earnest in the United States...
...rom 1964 to 1984, roughly 40 percent of the nation's Catholic high schools closed...
...Nor does the church today have a corner on the market in either area...
...It takes a whole lot of wise patience to keep a teleology afloat in what now appear to be permanently stormy seas...
...The section on "spirituality" panders to an adolescent rather than an adult model of faith ("If I invite God, the-perfect-lover, as my partner...
...Many of the chapters are reprinted from a Commonweal series on faith and work that readers may remember...
...Or about hope—that, although it is a gift, it is always hard-won...
...Now they see the possibility of a conservative judiciary providing them the opportunity to again publish nonunion...
...It contains a compelling critique of an earlier Houck and Williams book called Full Value, a groundbreaking look at Christian ethics and business, which McCann appreciates but also faults for its "evangelical bias...
...In order to get into St...
...The U.S...
...The most valuable chapter is the one on competence...
...Martin's become St...
...The result is a lively, basic survey course...
...Bemoaning the lack of business heroes, Shaffer describes Silas as one who practices the virtue of the "middle way...
...This makes it hard to tell how much selectivity from how much tradition is rooted in an informed but dissenting conscience and how much is simply "expressive and utilitarian individualism...
...While each of these is written by one author whose aim is to link the sacred with the secular, anecdotes and quotes sprinkled throughout lend a personal touch...
...Encouraging critical judgment is now one of the major works of American Catholicism...
...We eventually attempted to establish a union (thwarted when management painted the ladies' room—pink at that...
...Second, the stakes offered by the post-Vatican II church are higher, more interesting, and far riskier...
...Each step required more knowledge and know-how...
...Most say their religion is important to them...
...His business experience leads him to acknowledge that government may have to oversee that competition is open and fair, but that does not weaken his endorsement of competition...
...Mary Irene Zotti records the people, events, successes, failures, heroes, and villains that comprise the history of this important movement in Catholic Action...
...short...
...Letters, minutes of YCW meetings from New York to Chicago, talks, newsletters, and conversations with former members fill out the picture...
...It begins with the true story of a veteran pilot who successfully landed a severely damaged plane...
...When I left home in 1959 to work full-time for the YCW national office in Chicago, my mother, afraid our Brooklyn neighbors would think I had joined a Communist organization, told people I was working for the YMCA...
...and developing leadership for the church...
...These stories are immediately engaging...
...We learn that Pius XI and Pius XII encouraged Cardijn...
...A comment by Rosemary Trump, the president of a service employee union and one of the area's most respected labor leaders, and co-chair of the committee that commemorated the Homestead Strike Centennial for five days earlier in the month, may have cut to the real issue as understood by most Pittsburgh people...
...that God "experiments, succeeds, fails, changes, learns, suffers," takes risks, and needs other people...
...No meeting took place that was not prepared in advance with, and attended by, a chaplain...
...Because the environment of higher education has become more homogeneous since Catholic campuses were "mainstreamed" after Vatican II, they represent a unique context for the church's ministry...
...The first of these, chapter 6, is a straightforward account of the Exxon Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska in 1989...
...Diehl describes the ministry of "presence" in the workplace, i.e., being attentive to the personal needs of colleagues and subordinates, which may sometimes lead to other actions: pressing for changes in personnel practices, such as discriminatory hiring and promotion...
...The general reader of a nonsocio-logical bent will find a relatively uncluttered text...
...Its members were about the business of transforming the world, action by action...
...His views are balanced, too...
...Hard to say...
...Palmer concludes that God has "the same unfulfilled yearnings" as we do...
...His most original idea is that churches sponsor support groups for members of various occupations...
...Little did I realize I was establishing a "team" and would begin to see the world around me through new eyes...
...That classic confrontation marked the bloody battle won by labor against the hired Pinkerton security agents of Andrew Carnegie on July 6, 1892—only to lose the war with the arrival of the Pennsylvania militia...
...Homestead became a symbolic watershed for labor in the twilight years of the nineteenth century, one of many violent confrontations that signaled the supremacy of concentrated capital and its reliance upon the armed force of the state in labor disputes...
...It does stand alone and as it is can be used by teachers, discussion leaders, and environmentalists...
...What would you do with the following...
...Fifty-two percent disagree that premarital sexual relations are immoral...
...Pretty clearly lots of Catholic sensibility seems to have gotten through...
...That may seem excessively modest, an echo of what the woodcarver in Chuang Tzu's story said to admirers of his bell stand, yet Diehl makes it his bottom line: the first requirement of the Christian at work is to perform one's job as well as one can...
...Martin's for more than a dozen years and is reluctant to rush to a dismissive judgment...
...We meet giants in Catholic Action along with ordinary young women and men...
...Martin's girls are less certain (although convergence can be discerned) than its boys about the morality of premarital sexual relations...
...Fifty-nine percent of the girls doubt that more sexual freedom is a good thing...
...now includes nurses, business people, homemakers, teachers, and lawyers...
...Martin's they felt part of a "community" where they gained an ennobling sense that life is more than "making it" and a confidence that critical open-mindedness to other beliefs should make one more "catholic...
...This is hardly the traditional image of omnipotence and omniscience, yet it calls to mind Jesus' question to Peter—"Do you love me...
...Tim Unsworth is responsible for Upon This Rock: The Church, Work, Money, and You (ACTA Publications, $8.95 paper, 119 pp...
...But there were exceptions: Cardinal Samuel Stritch of Chicago gave the YCW (as well as Young Christian Students [YCS] and Christian Family Movement [CFM]) a home and assigned Monsignor Reynold Hillenbrand to serve as national chaplain...
...What is happening to the Catholic "tradition" among the next generation...
...They worked with individuals on personal spirituality and leadership formation...
...The result: false hopes and worse misery...
...This is not going to be resolved in the courts,'' said Joseph Molino, president of Local 221 of the Teamsters...
...Questions added in 1987 seem sharper: "It is the church's business to help Catholics form their consciences on the moral dimensions of economic decision-making, for example, in areas such as unemployment, poverty, immigration policy, national spending priorities, etc...
...It is such a good read that one is drawn to Howells's own book...
...In fact, by speaking of both 34:11 September 1992 Commonweal The gift that so many of the laity, and the Spirit that moves them, bring to the renewable life of the people of God is the gift of subverting the clergy's insistence on their privileges...
...But the attempt to overturn the twenty-year-old Pennsylvania Strikebreakers Act was rejected on August 15 by United States District Court Judge Donald Ziegler...
...The last chapter asks students and teachers "to speak for themselves...
...Assimilatio and the book be retitled, Me First, Conscience Second, and Tradition Third—for Marriages and Burials...
...young people don't go to church...
...I found myself checking the annual tuition (in 1987-8, it was $2,075) and wondering if the basketball team was about to recruit a tall and agile center...
...The Press and the parent company who are really calling the shots have totally lost the war for the 'hearts and minds' of local people," Trump said...
...As I describe the Handbook's benefits, I hope its creative contribution will be made plain...
...Campuses and students can present a real challenge for what is often a poorly handled activity, but this resourceful book bites the bullet and outlines fund-raising tasks as well as its rationale...
...These teachers know what the sociologist knows, that dominant patterns of our individualistic and secular culture shape and thus distort all religious norms...
...While Diehl frankly admits that not all work can be considered ministry, he argues that Christians ought to keep the list of forbidden occupations (drug trafficker, porno queen, etc...
...Mary O 'Neil Good continues to observe, judge, and act in New York City...
...But his measures of "social sensitivity" seem too "soft" to me: "It is my responsibility to share what I have with those who have less" (86 percent agree...
...Russell W. Gibbons, continued from page 10) they are fighting harder than ever for their jobs...
...The men and women who fought for hearth and home in 1892 provided a lesson as important for our age as it was for their own...
...If we were to decide to accept St...
...So "necessity became the mother of pastoral invention" and a ministry uniquely collaborative, nonauthoritarian, col-legial, and peer-oriented was born...
...Its methodology of formation through action involved observing a situation, judging it by the standards of the Gospels, and acting to restore all things in Christ...
...John L. Lewis endorsed Willkie for president...
...Even the assurances of our chaplain, Daniel Berrigan, S.J., could not assuage her doubts...
...Martin's students have a head-start in becoming smart and successful while remaining Catholic...
...Finally the Handbook does not point to some of the unanticipated consequences that flow from the promotion of lay leadership in campus ministry and the larger church's reluctance to benefit from it...
...Martin's students are receptive to the themes of social justice and peace found in Vatican II documents and the pastoral letters of American Catholic bishops, The Challenge of Peace and Economic Justice for All...
...32:11 September 1992 Commonweal The publication of such a substantial handbook only twenty years after everything about campus ministry went up for grabs, is no small feat...
...He asks "Is Lee Iacocca's $16 million a year in compensation worth the equivalent of one thousand teachers or nurses...
...What formation...
...This basic tenet of the Young Christian Workers' Movement (YCW) shaped the lives of several thousand young adults during its thirty-year existence in the United States...
...Interviews with fifty-four alumni/ae a decade after their graduation round out his data...
...His tone helps: "These seniors," he writes, "do not 'come off as self-centered and uncaring of others...
...GRACE IN ACTION Mary O'Neil Good A TIME OF AWAKENING: The Young Christian Worker Story in the United States, 1938 to 1970 Mary Irene Zotti Loyola University Press, $24.95, 333 pp...
...Catholics are all over the map politically...
...Martin's they had to pass a competitive entrance exam...
...How labor can define itself in the Press dispute may hold some insight into the future of unionism in an era where the erosion of good jobs in the private sector has depleted much of the ranks of organized labor, and which may now be cutting into the middle class that once saw itself as apart from traditional workers...
...Does its observe-judge-act methodology offer possibilities to the United States as we approach the twenty-first century...
...According to the Wall Street Journal, Scripps is now "playing hardball with organized labor" and is investing in a costly strategy of replacement workers, expanded security, and even out-of-town publication to wait out the union...
...Third, the paradoxical and theologically trained among us certainly will point out that it is the tradition itself that first teaches us "conscience first...
...Every meeting contained gospel and social inquiries that required studying (for example, an encyclical, labor laws, a bill in Congress, a United Nations report), and concluding in some action...
...The Handbook offers an analysis of this context, describing the different settings and challenges for a ministry of presence to higher education...
...A little more than one-half attended Mass at least monthly...
...Since the collapse in the late sixties, campus ministry for and by Catholics has had to struggle mightily to redefine itself...
...Which one of us hasn't felt like the angel in Buber's story, who wanted to rid the world of human suffering and to that end had the temerity to ask God for permission to intervene...
...When Americans were preoccupied with the threat of communism during the 1950s, YCW terminology made many people suspicious of it...
...This booklet brings up a host of other questions on the spirituality of practicing law, including the "mommy track" and the expectation of spending very long hours on the job if one is to succeed...
...Each chapter concludes with quotes from former YCWers about their experience and its continuing impact on their lives...
...He uses four contemporary secular narratives to demonstrate the more full-bodied approach to ethical issues he espoused in his critique...
...But ironing out the kinks, weeding out the kooks, and providing leadership for campus communities then became a priority...
...there's a shortage of priests...
...But it's not easy for teachers and students to be critical about the enveloping society and then turn it off when they talk about the church...
...McNamara does not speculate much about the causal directions in these patterns...
...He is presently associate professor of New Testament at the Maryknoll School of Theology, Maryknoll, N.Y...
...fully aware that most executives would argue that it is...
...Catholic subculture...
...His response, to train them to be Christian leaders in their places of work, was the beginning of the Young Christian Workers...
...the economy is messed up...
Vol. 119 • September 1992 • No. 15
