Correspondence:
CORRESPONDENCE 'Liberals & Catholics' Washington, D.C. To the Editors: I agree with your editorial [November 18, 1994] that we need to give a fair account of liberalism's virtues. But, as...
...1. Michael Buckley's book, The Origins of Modern Atheism, may offer a pertinent lesson here...
...As you recognize, a hefty issue, too hefty to tackle in a single statement or commentary...
...Until the reality of the health-care crisis is grasped, another conversation on abortion is a bit frilly...
...DAVID L. SCHINDLER The writer is editor of Communio (North American edition) and Gagnon Professor of Fundamental Theology at the John Paul II Institute...
...The horror...
...Oddly, secular media typically buy into traditional Catholicism and in the process reflect bona fide Catholic revulsion better than archbishops, who are less easily scandalized...
...The result was what Buckley calls the Christian contribution to atheism...
...It's upsetting to me to see such a silly piece of writing in your pages...
...I have been reading Commonweal, with lapses, since age sixteen (I'm now sixty-four...
...The achievements of liberalism are linked with presuppositions that have led (also) to the problems associated with consumerism and individualism...
...ELIZABETH ORTON The media & Fr...
...The "paraphernalia" such as prob-abilism, ordinary magisterium, and "all the other categories....used to identify the settled or unsettled state of the church's mind" should not be dismissed but explained in modern terms so that the development of doctrine can be understood and the place of dialogue and dialectic honored...
...But, as Commonweal's editors recognize, this is hardly an uncomplicated matter...
...I think not, of course...
...It demonstrates how, as traditional Catholics, liberal or conservative, we are not radicals or fundamentalists...
...In our rightful concern to praise liberalism's achievements, therefore, we need to be careful not to arrive too late with our criticisms...
...As for the preachments of John Wesley, I suspect Mrs...
...Buckley points out that Christians in the modern period, while developing arguments in defense of theism, often employed the rationalistic patterns of thought that had undermined claims of a genuine theism in the first place...
...Trosch Chicago, Ill...
...How big and for how long is a legitimate question...
...This, then, was the burden of the statement ["A Civilization of Love: The Pope's Call to the West"] and my commentary thereon that your editorial addressed: Not that we should not acknowledge liberal virtues, but that we can assess these properly only as we first become clear about the founding presuppositions of both liberalism and Catholicism...
...Clinton not only knows them but has gone about putting them to use, and will not cease...
...Somewhere in Spain, still To the Editors: Regarding the confession of faith I exacted from Hillary Rodham Clinton, mentioned by Margaret O'Brien Steinfels in your issue of December 2, 1994: Actually, it wasn't the thumbscrews that finally did it but the threat of canceling Ms...
...He asks why such coverage...
...That was a great step forward, as was the action of various bishops' conferences that counseled continuing reception of the Eucharist by couples practicing contraception in good faith, thereby making clear that the liceity of artificial birth control was at least a safe probable opinion that could be tolerated by confessors and followed by lay Catholic couples...
...To the Editors: Margaret O'Brien Stein-fels's article on "Dissent & Communion" [November 18,1994], in its sobering clarity and fruitful reflection, belongs alongside Chesterton's paradoxes and is worthy of Newman's insights on the development of doctrine...
...2. Again, as Wolfhart Pannenberg puts it in a recent lecture, "[t]he further secularism advances the more urgent it is that Christian faith and Christian life be seen in sharp contrast to the secularist culture....What is needed is a strong reaffir-mation of the central articles of Christian faith against the spirit of secularism, and then a joining of that to a renewed commitment to rationality and ecumenical openness...
...Surely there are more significant issues to be addressed...
...To the Editors: I beg to differ with Archbishop Oscar Lipscomb's questioning the media attention given to Father David (Continued on page 29) CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 2) Trosch, his murder-advocating priest, as reported in your engaging "Et cetera" feature [December 2,1994...
...We look forward to your help in responding to it...
...To the Editors: Re: "A New Role for Hillary," by Margaret O'Brien Steinfels [December 2,1994]: A woman who totally wowed Congress with an unprecedented analysis of the American health-care "system," after an arduous research effort, should not be relegated to a "wifely" shade stuck in the lotus position...
...But Catholics can't emphasize the special character without recognizing the presumed horror involved in its violation...
...I ask, why not...
...I've sat in a room with George Shuster, Jacques Maritain, and others discussing matters of real substance...
...Clinton has done much to make this clear...
...This man is one of an elite elevated by traditional church practice and attitude to very high status...
...Christians, in other words, bracketed what is specifically Christian in their evidence and experience, adding these only after some of the crucial assumptions of their opponents had already (however unwittingly) been imported into their own arguments...
...JIM bowman We need these nuances Queens, N.Y...
...He's a priest forever and all that, lifted out of the common herd and established as something special...
...Does this insistence that the times call for us to be radical (i.e., "to go to the roots") indicate an "integralist rhetoric...
...Clinton's subscription to Newsweek...
...Many hospitals are now dangerous places as greedy administrators attempt to replace professionals with marginally educated "caregivers...
...FRANK C. ARRICALE...
...TOMAS de TORQUEMADA Don't belittle Hillary Hobart, N.Y...
...Until there is universal, properly financed health-care coverage, this trend will only intensify...
...Permit me, however, to express one criticism...
...Paul VI made clear that its anticontraceptive teaching was not irreformable teaching...
...and invites others to assist in discerning the concrete implications of this call for our civilization in this critical (post-1989) period of cultural transition...
...it tries only, with Pope John Paul II and the Second Vatican Council, to (re-)center our thinking on the requirements of the universal call to holiness and thus of the sequela Christi...
...We must take care to identify correctly the nature and source of "liberalism's current troubles," if we are to appropriate liberalism's achievements in a way that will not in the end serve mainly to collude in extending its flaws...
...But the statement is only a beginning...
...So it's big news when he preaches murder...
...Liberals as well as conservatives seemed to miss the nuances of the encyclical, and both seemed guilty of a papal fundamentalism that is as debilitating as scriptural fundamentalism...
...An example is Humanae vitae...
Vol. 122 • January 1995 • No. 1
