Correspondence
GANS, HERBERT & Flynn, Barbara & FITZPATRICK, NINA & RANSONE, MARGARET & ROBINSON, JOHN & IMBELLI, (REV.) ROBERT P. & HUGHES, (REV.) JOHN JAY & HANSON, BURRILL & KURTZWEIL, TERRENCE J. & HARGRAVE, ROBERT (KIP) & COLLINS, (MSGR.) TIMOTHY S. & Godfrey, A. W. & Englund, Steven & Slavick, William H.
CORROSPONDENCE Funny as hell The October 6 Et Cetera column, "Caped Crusader Conquers Gotham," was a work of art and insight, and it was funny as hell. I have an idea who wrote it, but I won't...
...When many or most of the Catholic schools were in the inner city, I didn't complain...
...Some schools in Madison, Wisconsin, have established such funds, each with assets of more than $500,000...
...In Correspondence, I agreed with the letter from John Maher ("Justices as Legislators") that, since we elect our legislators and can "un-elect" them, judges with lifetime tenure should not legislate...
...Gaillot is still a priest and a bishop, still receives his salary, has not been silenced...
...Current popular culture, however, is ultimately trivial and self-centered with a misplaced sense of the sacred, which certainly is opposed to the essence of Christianity...
...Paying for the schools-II I thoroughly enjoyed "How to Pay for Catholic Schools," by Joseph Claude Harris [October 6], but want to add some other approaches to those he listed...
...As an ideal, it has been proposed that a third of the cost of a school's operation should come from such income, another third from the parish, the remainder from the students' parents...
...1. Create trust funds so ordered that only the income from the trusts can be spent to meet the needs of specific schools...
...Does the Catholic community wish to focus its parish resources so strongly on its parish school...
...On the other hand, popular culture has learned how to use the image effectively, while mainstream Christianity may have lost the ability to use the image as a vehicle for salvation...
...Your October 6 Et Cetera was utterly tasteless and not worthy of Commonweal...
...We can be grateful for Mr...
...To say this is not to say that the Vatican's course of action in his case was in keeping with contemporary standards of due process...
...readers may review the article to judge whether it supplies sufficient reason to justify my conclusion...
...Getting it right Thank you for articles like David Loxtercamp's "In the Midst of Death, We Are in Life" and Eric Bauman's "Conversion on the Job" [September 8...
...Yet, his are invariably positions, as Commonweal readers will appreciate, that his fellow bishops should also have espoused, and that many beyond France have supported...
...But we all must respond to this grace of the Spirit with deeper prayer and generous abandon in our following of Christ, who alone gives the Spirit without measure...
...I am a Quaker...
...Englund's parading of Gaillot's dissents alongside the argument that he was not in solidarity with his fellow bishops implies that Gaillot was often in left field...
...Rather, I claimed that there is enough evidence to constitute probable cause for a.formal and public inquiry of Gaillot by ecclesiastical authority...
...a Catholic school faces a funding vote each week...
...This issue was special, but whenever Commonweal arrives in the mail, I drop everything to read it...
...Rather, in the church of John Paul II-bishops, it means that he is another of the Vatican II breed who, like Archbishop Hunthausen and Brazilian Bishop Casaldaliga, has to be neutralized lest his repeated cries that the emperor is naked give scandal...
...As a Catholic parent of four and as an active parishioner, I read Joseph Harris's article with great interest...
...Please send me another copy (payment enclosed...
...Even in the section making the case for the ousted bishop, Englund is heavily critical, and his case against Gaillot is hardly one that the Commonweal of yore would have espoused...
...If these schools are to remain Catholic, they must retain a serious and regular connection with that event which makes us a Catholic community, an event that provides a foundation and example for our generosity...
...It works...
...Historically, the church has adapted much of popular culture, including relics, the cult of the saints, and holidays...
...This in turn changes the Sunday celebration of the parish community into an occasion for seeking support of all for some in the parish...
...STEVEN ENGLUND The triviality of pop The issue on Catholicism and popular culture [September 22] was interesting, but I feel that Dennis O'Brien really missed the point...
...Is the Catholic community willing to continue, and can it afford, to use its schools for a school-based form of evangelization...
...HERBERT GANS NewYork,N.Y...
...Is it possible...
...The Holy See, after putting up for years with a loose cannon that any rationally run enterprise would have jettisoned at once in the interest of damage control, acted in the end with heavyhanded ineptitude strongly reminiscent of its action against Hans Kiing at Christmas 1979 (a totally different case, yet similar in this one respect...
...But all of this-to go back to union negotiations-means that these negotiations will be conducted in a context which recognizes that the success of the schools' economic arrangements depends upon what parish families voluntarily put into their envelopes each week...
...Cancel my subscription When I started to read the Et Cetera piece on the papal itinerary, I had to turn to the cover to verify that I was not reading a supermarket tabloid...
...Neither was the heroically outspoken Bishop Willy Romulus in solidarity with his fellow Haitian bishops or the Vatican during the Cedras terror...
...It was not...
...Gaillot Steven Englund's article on Vaffaire Gaillot is superb: balanced, fair, and elegantly written...
...That vote will steadily force the Catholic community to ask itself hard questions: Is parity for its teachers realistic...
...JOHN ROBINSON Eastchester,N.Y...
...To this point many of these questions are answered in the schools' favor, but the schools are no healthier...
...For example, the Catholic families using the school provide it with two forms of income: their tuition and some percentage of their income contributed to the parish...
...TERRENCE J. KURTZWEIL La Valle, Wis...
...The real question is where others in the church are when Gaillot is in the prisons, in the homeless community, with homosexuals, or with war resisters...
...I am often accused of being too happy, and of showing it...
...Englund's central argument is that Gaillot's personal failings and his lack of solidarity with fellow French bishops warrant his removal, when hundreds of quite secure bishops have greater personal failings, including betrayal of one or another of their priests and failure to honor their word...
...Good on Gaillot Many thanks for Steven Englund's excellent analysis, "L'Affaire Gaillot" [October 6...
...A community sense of ownership of the good the parochial schools accomplish will encourage their future...
...Utterly...
...Until we can get our bishops really interested in innovative thinking about financing and operating our schools, we might as well just give up on the schools, because no satellite parish will simply volunteer to support a school over which it has no control and that is out of sight in another community...
...These schools are really private schools with a religion class once a day...
...The point is Gaillot's suitability for remaining ordinary of a diocese...
...JOHN JAY HUGHES Saint Louis, Mo...
...Meantime, here and elsewhere, inner-city schools are being closed...
...It was the kind of diatribe that might spew forth from that very vulgar commentator, Rush Limbaugh...
...From the non-Catholic family there is only the tuition payment (albeit sometimes set at a higher rate than that charged the Catholic family...
...As another recent Commonweal article-Eric Bauman's "Conversion on the Job," September 8-movingly reminds us: there is simply no substitute for personal conversion...
...One is reminded of Napoleon's exchange with Cardinal Consalvi during the 1801 Concordat negotiations in Paris...
...And the unions have a real agenda: They want to move toward parity of salary and teaching conditions with teachers in the public schools...
...Harris's article...
...Keep it up...
...Yet, public school busing is available to all these rural parishes to get their students to the public schools of the central community...
...It seems to many of us that Gaillot acts as Jesus would if he were with us...
...In most cases neither the regular nor the higher tuition covers the cost of educating a pupil...
...2. All Catholic schools should be made into district schools supported by all the parishes within a given public school district...
...ROBERT (KIP) Syracuse, N.Y...
...WILLIAM H. SLAVICK Portland, Maine Gaillot's vision I was disappointed in Steven Englund's piece on Jacques Gaillot...
...GODFREY Stony Brook, N.Y...
...The author replies: I hope William Slavick gets more exercise than by jumping to conclusions...
...The current hymns may have a sound scriptural and theological basis but they focus on ideas and sentiments rather than images...
...Impatience is not unknown...
...Harris rightly notes that the cohort of religious women teachers has by now been almost completely replaced by lay teachers who are more numerous and more expensive...
...Many of my friends in the religious community see Gaillot as a searchlight focusing our attention on issues that touch the conscience of a greater community...
...Equally troubling about Englund's article is the long list of Gaillof s dissents from the views of his fellow French hierarchs-on nuclear arms, underpaid Catholic school teachers, immigrant voting rights, haven for Palestinian refugees, disarmament, condoms to control AIDS, the competence of Rome to judge the homosexual condition, nuclear tests, President Aristide, the Treaty of Maastricht, the Gulf War, the Vatican's disrespect for due process, the admission of divorced and remarried persons to the Eucharist, married priests, and, it would seem, in his public support for criminals and the poor...
...Englund doesn't seem to realize that Gaillof s vision is far larger than that of the Roman church in France...
...Seeking to increase contributions, even for so good a cause as paying the teachers of the parish's children, is perforce to affect the content and style of what is said from the pulpit...
...But there are financial consequences which have not always been thought out...
...I have an idea who wrote it, but I won't tell the Inquisition, should the Holy Father decide to bring it back...
...ROBERT P. IMBELU Chestnut Hill, Mass...
...Barbara Flynn Eggerstville, N.Y...
...His reflection on contemporary society's "deep need of the transcendent" and the unique resources of the church's tradition to speak to this need clearly applies to the United States as much as to France...
...A.W...
...Where is the religious focus on the French nuclear tests if it was not brought to us by Gaillof s presence...
...Finally, perhaps especially difficult, is a teachers' union the best vehicle for raising within the parish religious, academic, professional, and economic questions concerning the schools...
...Which Catholic schools...
...I enjoyed the other columns of commentary as well...
...Be it noted that, often, they are also unionized...
...Paying for the schools-I Re: Joseph Claude Harris's "How to Pay for Catholic Schools" [October 6]: In some dioceses, particularly in their inner-city parishes, the number of non-Catholic families using parochial schools can be significant...
...BURRILL HANSON Milwaukee, Wis...
...It was unfortunate that the saccharine Victorian images did so much to form pre-Vatican II piety, but the hymns effectively conveyed images that stayed with people for a long time...
...It helps us along...
...Better to use the money collected at worship than to rely on money brought in by fundraising...
...That said, I am, paradoxically, deeply convinced that the parish school and its funding must be connected with the prayer life of the parish...
...What I see now, though, is a Catholic school system that almost exclusively serves an affluent suburban population that has chosen to escape the poverty and the ethnic mix most of us confront...
...Its carefulness, balance, and insight make it a model that, to our great loss, is seldom the norm in our polarized and often superficial Catholic debates...
...Fuzzy" my analysis may be, but it does not call for Gaillof s "removal...
...My wife and I contribute annually to our parish (which doesn't have a school) and annually to the diocese...
...Please cancel my subscription to your tabloid...
...and no doubt how costly this is...
...If I see the Catholic schools recommitting themselves to serving those most in need, I will feel better about increasing my support...
...MSGR...
...As for solidarity, Cardinals O'Connor, Law, and Krol have been notoriously at odds with the agreed position of the United States Catholic Conference against engaging in single-issue (abortion) politics...
...Practically all rural parochial schools are located in a central community, are used by all the rural parishes to some extent, but are not generally supported by these satellite parishes in any way...
...Gaillot as threat While appreciating Steven Englund's information about Bishop Jacques Gaillot, especially with regard to his mistreatment of his vicar general, I am troubled by Englund's stance, which strikes me as somewhat fuzzy...
...TIMOTHY S. COLLINS New York, N.Y...
...A perishable issue There is a problem with your issue of October 6: It was so good I had to cut out this part, that part, and so on to send to my children and friends...
...That may be a very serious mistake...
...No one appreciates more than I do that the bishop of Evreux's positions are largely ones that Commonweal readers would find congenial, but that is not the point at issue...
...Catholics who stoop to ad hominem attacks on any church leader besmirch themselves...
...To the French emperor's threat that if he did not get his way he would destroy the church, Consalvi responded laconically that the clergy had been trying to do this for centuries and had not succeeded...
...Concerning Burrill Hanson, again, while I appreciate that Gaillot may be regarded as a visionary by people within, as without, the Catholic church, the matter at hand concerns less the content of his vision per se, than his leadership position in Evreux and, in the light of that, his membership in the French episcopate...
...Whatever his personal shortcomings, like Hans Kiing and Leonardo Boff, Bishop Gaillot represented a threatened breach in the wall of comfortable and eminently safe hierarchical power now under siege in all progressive church quarters-and doomed...
...Gaillot makes his fellow lightweight, Matthew Fox, look, by comparison, like a veritable Thomas Aquinas...
...Find others to write for us on this man of such great Christian vision...
...MARGARET RANSONE New Orleans, la...
...Pope John Paul's recent visit to the United States spoke eloquently to this need...
...I especially enjoyed Sidney Callahan's article, "Let a Smile Be Your Ontology (So Sue Me...
...REV...
...Indeed, in Gaillof s new position as bishop without portfolio, freed from administrative and pastoral duties, one might argue that he will be better able to bring attention to various national and international causes...
...These demands and their implementation can have repercussions within parishes...
...Contemporary church art is often abstract and beautiful but does not provide the faithful with permanent or lasting images...
...An approximately 100-square-mile area just east of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, has no public schools, only district Catholic schools, which are serviced by public school busing...
...NINA FITZPATRICK College Point, N.Y...
...These schools are a worthy, even noble, expression of the Catholic community's concern for the poor and, often, a dignified form of evangelization...
...A public school faces a tax vote at most once a year...
...REV...
...They cut through all the bickering and controversy and show what life is really like for American Catholics in the 1990s...
...Vatican vs...
...There is no need to reargue the question...
Vol. 122 • November 1995 • No. 19
