Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Rest in peace Washington, D.C. To the Editors: Your editorial on the death of Jackie Kennedy ["R.I.P.," June 3] is one of the best short pieces of writing I have seen in years....
...Rowley's points as he raises them: 1. When the TV announcement was made, the invasion had already begun, and that was two days after Secretary of State William P. Rogers had assured the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that no such action was contemplated...
...clear sky...
...During this same "peace," new expressions entered the American lexicon: "autogenocide...
...We could see Kennedy without bias...
...If you attend Sunday Mass in a Catholic church in most places around the world, you will most likely find that from 60 to 70 percent of those present are women...
...EDWARD IRUETZ Nixon revisited Lafayette, Ind...
...less of comfort and more of poverty...
...it was announced by Presi(Continued on page 28) 2. CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 2} dent Nixon on national television...
...They sit in the pews while the sanctuary is inhabited by males (now, with the possible exception of an altar girl...
...At all these levels, all decision making, even on issues involving marriage and family, is made by ordained male celibates...
...to Japan...
...Society has the right to protect women and itself from unwanted pregnancies and children, on a strictly voluntary basis, and I know of no purer exercise of conscience than that of a potential mother, deciding this most intimate of questions...
...Finally, whenever a pope dies, his successor is chosen at a conclave attended only by ordained male celibates who have been appointed to the College of Cardinals by a male celibate pope...
...Lead us by giving people justice, and there will be no need to break the law, no need for civil disobedience...
...Let our bishops and religious superiors think less of buildings and more of people...
...If the Catholic church addresses the issue of equality and power-sharing between men and women, the ordination of women will become a moot question...
...less of casuistry and more of the beatitudes...
...And equality is not an issue precluded from discussion by Pope John Paul IPs apostolic letter, Ordinatio sacerdotalis...
...5. In all of Lersky's references to Indochina nowhere is there any admission of the real conditions of "peace" there...
...2. Nixon was neither the first nor the last president or candidate to employ racism in quest of political gain...
...We mourned "our" president...
...less of legal rituals and more of human rights...
...Given the timing, moreover, one can be forgiven the suspicion that Nixon was moved not solely by geopolitical insight but also by the desire to divert national attention from a certain "third-rate burglary...
...These 114 ordained male celibate bishops voted to "oppose what they portrayed as a pervasive feminist influence at the...conference, saying measures on abortion and women's rights sponsored by the United States reflected 'cultural imperialism'" [South Bend Tribune, June 15...
...KENNOSUKE TACHIBANA The issue is power South Bend, Ind...
...less of America and more of the world...
...he simply realized that the rift between the two Communist great powers could be exploited by the U.S...
...Nixon was hardly alone in ignoring this advice, but his failure hurt more than that of most of the others, joe lersky No body there West New York, N.J...
...Domestically, Nixon saw Communists everywhere, especially among his political opponents, and branded them as evil subversives...
...On the international level there are frequent synods of bishops and occasional ecumenical councils...
...many students were on their way to classes...
...less of authority and more of service...
...3. Alger Hiss's reputation was destroyed, not by Nixon, but by the testimony of Whittaker Chambers and the physical evidence (State Department cables, microfilm, an old typewriter, etc...
...It was morning...
...In my diocese there is a presbyteral council to advise the bishop...
...3. My essay did not mention Alger Hiss or anyone else by name...
...JOHNTOMASIN From the editors: Robert G. Hoyt comments on this letter in a "Notebook," page 4. Sex & salvation Summit, N.J...
...2. Nixon's 1968 "Southern strategy" was "divisive" only in the sense that all elections are divisive: the candidates divide up the voters and states to determine the winner...
...But to admit this by using gender-inclusive language opens the door to the possibility that other situations that are exclusively male on their face in the text, such as the priesthood, are in fact open to both genders...
...The news had been transmitted by satellite...
...But let us look realistically at how this assertion of equality is lived out in the Catholic church...
...Become a Commonweal Associate Take John 11:25, for example, Jesus is quoted as having used a masculine pronoun to say, "He who believes in me, though he die, yet he shall live...
...Presumably, Jesus does not intend to confine eternal life to men...
...Let lawmakers, judges, and lawyers think less of law and more of justice...
...Seldom has the state of the nation been summed up so briefly and so well...
...RAYMOND A. SCHROTH, S.J...
...Such coerced motherhood is an immoral horror...
...in fact it was the first such broadcast from the U.S...
...for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis...
...From 1975 to 1979, 1 to 2 million people died of unnatural causes in Cambodia alone (of a total population of 7.1 million...
...If there are female representatives at any of these gatherings, they are carefully chosen women who can only advise but have no power to vote on the issues being decided...
...That stance sabotaged the possibility of rational policymaking toward the Communist powers—except, as it turned out, for himself...
...RICHARD ROWLEY The author replies: Taking Mr...
...Suddenly a ripple of whispers emerged, and then a big wave: "Kennedy is dead...
...incursion" into Cambodia wasn't secret...
...On the national level, there is a National Conference of Catholic Bishops...
...But to be on that council or to be the bishop in charge you must be an ordained male celibate Catholic...
...I was on the campus of Tokyo University...
...which convinced a jury that Hiss had perjured himself...
...Former South Vietnamese soldiers languished for up to thirteen years in "re-education centers" and other gulags...
...As you point out, the overriding issue concerning women in the Catholic church is equality, not the ordination of women...
...Its reference to destroyed reputations and lives was intended to be more generic, covering the sundry loyal Americans impugned over the years by Joe McCarthy and his Nixonian acolyte...
...To the Editors: The flaw in Robert G. Hoyf s argument opposing health care abortion funding ["Subsidies for Abortion...
...WILLIAM M. PETERSEN 29...
...It is quite clear that in the early stages of pregnancy a group of that woman's own developing cells, without a sex, a brain, or a soul, cannot possibly be another "body...
...To be a member you must be an ordained male celibate Catholic and consecrated as a bishop...
...REV...
...Tokyo: Nov...
...Blaming the carnage on the domestic antiwar movement is simply absurd...
...To the Editors: The church's refusal to use gender-inclusive language in the new catechism ["The Manly Version of Catholicism," June 3] may be connected with its refusal to consider ordination of women...
...killing field...
...There can be no real equality in the Catholic church until women can voice their opinions openly as members of these councils and join the males in decisionmaking...
...That doesn't make such political strategies morally defensible...
...In an apostolic letter a few years ago on "The Dignity of Women," the same pope wrote that "[BJoth man and woman are human beings to an equal degree, both are created in God's image...
...5. The Cambodian tragedy was monumental, though its stage was set at least in part by Nixon's prolonged propping up of the ineffectual Lon Nol government...
...Let President Nixon do what his predecessors failed to do—let him obey the rich less and the people more...
...The shock of a widened war in the face of Nixon's repeated promises to seek a negotiated settlement produced a new round of national protests (including the one at Kent State), along with the Senate's first-ever action (the Cooper-Church Amendment) aimed at limiting presidential stewardship of a war in progress...
...he was almost a world president...
...Eisenhower was the commander of the Allied forces that overcame us...
...To be a member of a synod or council, you must be an ordained male celibate Catholic, consecrated as a bishop...
...There were no women present to discuss or vote upon the issues...
...boat people...
...22, 1963 Tokyo, Japan To the Editors: Though I might question some of the praise you gave her, I was impressed by your "R.I.P...
...4. My problem with the China opening was not the act itself but (to quote my piece) "the twenty years of political charlatanism" that preceded it...
...May 20] is his statement that a woman's right to control her body is lost "when the fate of another body is in question...
...It is relevant here to quote Phil Berrigan's statement to the court on the day of the Catonsville Nine sentencing, which occurred after Nixon's election but before his inauguration: "We have but one message for our leaders, in whose manicured hands the power of this land lies...
...And during his three years we could see America itself without prej - udice...
...This male dominance was clearly illustrated at a meeting of cardinals with the pope on June 14 to discuss the forthcoming United Nations population conference...
...Yet all power in the church—the ability to make decisions affecting both men and women— is vested in totally male-dominated councils and other institutions within the church...
...to hinder the expansion of either of them...
...let him thinkless of the privileged and more of the poor...
...On that very day the president had been scheduled to send live messages to our people...
...In any event, given the impossibility by 1973 of a new and greater U.S...
...The question is much more complex, and to many (not necessarily Hoyt), such opposition is really a method to enforce the choice of strangers, forcing women to undergo pregnancy against their will, and to spend their lives raising children they cannot afford, because they happen to be poor, often with existing children—even though lives are lost and other lives are ruined...
...To the Editors: Allow me to dissent on a number of points made by Joe Lersky about the late Richard Nixon ["Differing Legacies, June 3]: 1. The U.S...
...To the Editors: From my perspective as a Catholic priest, I would like to comment on your June 17 editoral, "Don't Even Think of It...
...Lead us...
...4. Nixon's detente with the Soviets and opening to China did not contradict his longstanding anticommunism...
...From our perspective, Truman was the prime author of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
...Leaving that aside, let me tell you our side of the story of November 22, 1963...
...war, I don't see how anyone in Washington could have prevented the tragedy...
...When Lersky credits war opponents with "saving lives," one has to question his judgment and his arithmetic...
Vol. 121 • July 1994 • No. 13
