Holy Siege
Cort, John C.
career he forged a synthesis of Weberian sociology and Heideggerian phenomen- ology (h la Alfred Schutz) that has pro- vided continuing inspiration for his own work and that of an entire generation...
...Many of these essays support my contention that Vidal has, for the better part of his long career, created odd novels which cannot be easily categorized...
...Indeed, this framework has become so familiar that the difficulty sometimes is to question its 1987 & ALL THAT HOLY SIEGE The Year that Shook Catholic America Kenneth A. Briggs HarperSan Francisco, $27, 608 pp...
...Apparently Cardinal Ratzinger and Pope John Paul, who clearly must have approved the opinion, were becoming uneasy with the modest signs of inde- pendent thinking displayed by the American bishops...
...Williwaw, for ex- ample, is one of the most interesting war Commonweal...
...Perhaps few readers re- member that he was our first critic to cel- ebrate Italo Calvino' s fiction...
...he questions, indeed, the very notion of genre--of art itself...
...SUZANNE KEEN is an assistant professor of English at Yale University...
...If we assume that Vidal is unaware of his "acts," we are surely deceived...
...the lucid, aris- tocratic visitor from Rome who appears often on television to attack the medium and American technology in general...
...and through- out the world...
...This is a bias that this writer does not share, having always felt that the church' s and John Paul's defense of the sanctity, indissolubility, and exclusivity of heterosexual marriage was one of its, and his, most admirable features...
...ROBERT WUTHNOW is Gerhard R. And- linger Professor of Social Sciences and director of the Center for the Study of American Religion at Princeton University...
...They must also have been pleased by the Vatican's notifying the University of Fribourg that it could not give an honorary degree to Rembert Weakland, the arch- bishop of Milwaukee, who headed up the committee of bishops that produced the offensive pastoral...
...But it is a mature work, subtle in nuance, redo- lent with insight...
...citizens are enti- tled...
...It terminated the day Pope John Paul II ended his second visit to the United States...
...This meeting great- ly embittered Jews in the U.S...
...career he forged a synthesis of Weberian sociology and Heideggerian phenomen- ology (h la Alfred Schutz) that has pro- vided continuing inspiration for his own work and that of an entire generation of younger social scientists...
...hierarchy, thereby received chastisement that was so "awk- ward and amateurish" that a Vatican spokesman later--too much later--wrote that the whole thing had been a mistake and expressed "regret [for] the pain that you have suffered...
...they use low forms--science fic- tion, popular culture--for high ends...
...It shines with wisdom gleaned from a lifetime of reading in lit- erature, philosophy, theology, and the social sciences...
...John C. Cort he "year" that shook Catholic America, in Kenneth Briggs's subtitle, ran from August 18, 1986, to September 19, 1987--thirteen months actually...
...Both writers are essentially interested in the nature of "reality...
...In Duluth, Myra Breck- inridge, Two Sisters he intermingles genres...
...His most recent book is Rediscovering the Sacred: Perspectives on Religion in Contemporary Society (Eerdmans...
...All that aside, one finishes Kenneth Briggs's year and his fascinating and im- portant book in basic agreement with his conclusion that "the papal capital...
...Perhaps it is time for Vatican Council III...
...Two weeks after the Curran action Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen an-nounced that the pope had stripped him of five areas of responsibility and given them to a newly appointed auxiliary, Bishop Donald Wuerl...
...This chastisement of the highly popular Hunthausen, which Briggs describes as uncharacteristically "awkward and amateurish," led to even louder and more universal protests from Catholics both in the Seattle area and throughout the country...
...There is irony here...
...Vidal is at his best when he employs "camp" for se- rious purposes...
...has] been pretty much depleted...
...JOHN C. CORT is a Boston-area writer, au- thor of Christian Socialism ( Orbis), and con- tributor to the recently published John Courtney Murray and the American Civil Conversation ( Ee rdmans ). IRVING MALIN teaches at City College in New York...
...I must mention a wonderful collection of essays on Vidal edited by Jay Perini (Columbia University Press, 1992...
...His book Walker Percy: An American Search was published in 1979...
...assertions rather than simply seeing how well they apply...
...Es- pecially unfair, or course, if they do not believe in a future life where all these seem- ing unfairnesses are straightened out and compensated...
...This defiance, together with the Vatican's ar- chaic fiscal procedures, did not sit well with the U.S...
...nevertheless, the conclusion seems in-controvertible that Pope John Paul II and his current curia are living in the past, par- ticularly with regard to "due process" and what kind of success can be expected from monarchical methods of persuasion, or coercion, in a world where democratic process and a more egalitarian jurispru- dence have now swept all before them...
...public in general and in particu- lar with the wealthy Catholics who were being asked by the pope to make up the Vatican's $53 million deficit...
...REMBERT G. WEAKLAND, O.S.B., is a grad- uate of Julliard School of Music and Columbia University and was appointed archbishop of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1977, by Pope Paul V1...
...He is, indeed, fas- cinated by the ability of the performer to play different roles so well that he seduces the audience...
...At some point in 1986 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, made the state- ment that individual bishops had teaching authority, but national conferences of bishops did not...
...Weakland, one of the most impressive, popular, and outspoken members of the U.S...
...This pastoral greatREVIEWERS ROBERT COLES is a child psychiatrist who teaches at Harvard, and the author, most re- cently, of The Spiritual Life of Children...
...We must view Vidal as a self- conscious actor of subtle roles...
...They play seriously...
...the sage of the inner workings of the government...
...A few weeks later the Vatican issued a statement on homosexuality that raised a storm among gay and lesbian groups, as might be expected, but also aroused crit- icism from some orthodox Catholics...
...But I hasten to add that Vidal is certainly aware of the nature of performance, of artistic creation...
...Vidal is, if you will, so brilliant that he makes us believe that he is "fake...
...economy for produc- ing a degree of poverty that was "a social and moral scandal...
...PAUL ELIE, a frequent Commonweal con-tributor, also writes for the New Republic and Lingua Franca...
...This curious opinion was later dispatched to the U.S...
...Kenneth Briggs, a Methodist himself and formerly an award-winning writer on reli- gion for the New York Times, does not deal with this barbarity, but he does deal, month by month, with the items summarized above plus a host of other items and per- sonalities of interest to American Catholics, plus vignettes about eleven Catholics with pseudonyms--including a bishop, a college president, and an aged nun--of whom we learn much more than we really want to know, for it's a long book already...
...Whatever you may think of Archbishops Hunthausen and Weakland, whatever you may think of Father Charles Curran and the insistence of 110 out of 225 Catholic college presidents that the Vatican and/or the local bishop should have nothing to say about who teaches Catholic theology, an- other position with which I do not agree, A FIENDISH GOSPEL LIVE FROM GOLGOTHA Gore Vidal Random House, $22, 232 pp...
...He has, in- deed, played many roles: the nineteen-year-old wun-derkind of Williwaw...
...So, of course, does Calvino...
...Irving Malin ore Vidal has always been interested in performance and duplicity...
...FRANK McCONNELL, Commonweal's media critic, teaches English at the University of California, Santa Barbara...
...Perhaps it was the ovation and this minor change that moved the Vatican, six months later, to remove Bishop Wuerl and restore the archbishop' s authority...
...In this sense, A Far Glory does not break new ground...
...He cannot, however, conceal his dislike of most of the positions, notably on sexual morality, taken by the pope, and especially that on homosexuality, which receives continual battering...
...It began the day the Vatican notified Father Charles Curran that he could no longer teach theology at The Catholic University, an action that led to protest from nine past presidents of the Catholic Theological Society and the College Theological Society, signed by 750 other theologians...
...In February 1987, the Vatican defied orders from the Italian government for the arrest of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the American head of the Vatican Bank, for his involvement in the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano, Italy's largest...
...Commonweal 6 November 1992:37 ly irritated the rich Catholics to whom the Vatican was appealing for financial aid, though these have now been profoundly pleased by John Paul's 1991 encyclical, Centesimus annus...
...And he is at his best when he mixes roles...
...The bishops did not, however, really support Hunthausen, who protested that the process by which his authority had been stripped from him bore no resemblance to the kind of due process to which U.S...
...This stems from the conviction that human nature is so tricky and so determined to do whatever it wants to do that it is essential for any kind of decent life and society that moral laws should be as absolute as possible...
...their meditations are so- phisticated, subtle, subversive...
...In June, 1987, John Paul met with Kurt Waldheim, president of Austria and a man charged with collaborating with Hitler's massacre of the Jews...
...For a Methodist Times reporter Briggs is more evenhanded than I expected and in the fifty-odd pages he devotes to the pope's ten-day visit in September 1987, he treats John Paul very fairly and pays tribute to the pope's warmth and compassion for the poor, the sick (including AIDS victims), the old, and the young...
...The most his sympathetic colleagues felt able to do was to strike the word "just" in the resolution describing the process and say simply that it was "in accord with general principles of church law and pro- cedures," leaving aside, as Briggs points out, "the question of whether those prin- ciples were themselves just...
...At the same November meeting, though obscured by the smoke and fire created by the Hunthausen affair, the bishops voted 225 to 9 to approve a pastoral letter that castigated the U.S...
...That is a statement to which Pope John Paul II, our many-ways admirable Holy Father, might well give some serious thought...
...Less modest was the standing ovation that the bishops gave Archbishop Hunthausen when he ap- pealed for their support at their meeting in November 1986...
...This 38:6 November 1992 means that those with a hopelessly ho- mosexual orientation must feel that God is not treating them fairly, just as he does not seem to be treating fairly all those who for a host of other reasons do not find it possible to enjoy sexual fulfillment...
...Conference of Bishops, which rejected it by a vote of 205 to 59, which is reasonable, since the Vatican position seems to be based on a new kind of math by which one times one equals one, but 200 times one equals zero...
...Christ did not found an entirely demo- cratic church, granted, though the church of the Acts seems a good deal more demo- cratic than anything dreamt of in the cur- rent Vatican's philosophy, but a Vicar of Christ, Pius XII, on Christmas Eve, 1944, told the world that democratic government "appears to many a postulate of nature im- posed by reason itself...
Vol. 119 • November 1992 • No. 19
