Correspondence:
GREEN, PETE & IMPASTATO, DAVID & RIPPINGER, JOEL & REILLY, BERNARD F. & HICKEY, ANDREW J. & SCANLON, VERA & MANISCALCO, (MSGR.) FRANCIS J. & ELIZABETH, PHILIP BERRIGAN & RUSSO, (REV.) ANTHONY DI & MAR, JOSEPH P. LA & WEYHER, HARRY F.
CORRESPONDENCE We're glad we asked Broomall, Pa. To the Editors: In the winter issue of the Commonweal Associates Newsletter, you asked its readers what they thought about the special issue on...
...Joe McMahon [Correspondence, March 24] cites my "Postscript" in the Religion & the Media issue [February 24] incorrectly...
...McMahon's and my common diocese, I made some happy contacts in the world of secular journalism, based on similar professional interests...
...Henry Garrett, whom Fischel names with a triumphant air as if unmasking a villain, was in fact one of America's most prominent scientists...
...I've never been able to stay awake with Karl Rahner...
...You guys do not have an easy time of it, I'm sure: needing to be both faithful and wide awake...
...BERNARD F. REILLY Stimulating...
...it doesn't show whether she asks for or obtains absolution...
...the union of all those who profess the faith of Christ, partake of the same sacraments, and are governed by their lawful pastor under one visible head...
...A help to devotion...
...But nobody here has seen the film...
...Even if they thought of investigative journalism as their primary task, diocesan newspapers are hardly equipped in terms of personnel (legal as well as reportorial) and even frequency of publication to deal with the kind of breaking news situations involved...
...It is clear that a U.S...
...Human rights groups, church officials, and we missioners knew what was going on, and protested as loudly as we could...
...Like trying to be honest with a woman whom you wish you loved more...
...The difficulty of this kind of reporting is evidenced by the fact that even the secular press, with its far greater resources, is rarely timely with its revelations, as shown by Mr...
...A help to devotion...
...Its kind of in-depth treatment of religious issues would be emulated by secular newspapers and magazines to their benefit...
...Upsetting...
...We see no reason why the confessor would be bound by the seal not to reveal this episode...
...A decade or so...
...too difficult...
...So perhaps the editors should have said, "the papacy's failure to respond...
...Such writing is more suitable for a supermarket tabloid...
...Thibodeau that it represents an opportunity for a wider incorporation in the church's liturgy...
...But they're just as certain that the Eucharist is Jesus.We celebrate Mass on the stained oilcloth of the kitchen table...
...I would hazard a guess that these homilies shaped the questions asked and directions taken in the postgraduation pursuits of my classmates...
...As one of the Columbia College undergraduates fortunate enough to be able to attend Sunday night (10 p.m...
...DAVID IMPASTATO From the editors: We are glad that our correspondent did not find the material in the issue too difficult...
...We have $45,000 and need another $40,000...
...Clarifying...
...It is only because Mike Devine was an American that the record is now being reported in the United States...
...To the Editors: For twenty-two years Jonah House has rented space in the shadow of the nation's capital to make present a different vision...
...2. The 1989 London Independent "letter" was in fact a statement signed by several preeminent scientists and unrelated to any "positions" of Pioneer...
...Upsetting...
...It might have been more to the point if the editors had spoken of "the hierarchy' s failure to respond...
...Perhaps the canonists should critique the movie...
...McMahon claims to be its parallel in "union newspapers...
...Some readers did...
...To reconcile with my Catholic faith, yes...
...To the Editors: I am no canon lawyer, but I seem to remember that the object of the seal of confession is sin confessed with a view to absolution...
...I am preparing a book on poetry and theology for Oxford University Press...
...In other words, the church can best relate to professionals in these fields by having professionals of its own...
...Surely not the definition some of us learned as children from the Baltimore Catechism, which, as I recall, went something like this...
...Father Dinter engaged us not so much in the "Lux et Veritas" (Yale's motto) as in the Catholic challenges implicit in the Columbia University motto, "In luntine tuo vide-bimus lumen" ("In thy light we shall see light...
...To the Editors: It was refreshing and rewarding to read Ralph Thibodeau's comments ["Chant around the Clock," March 24] on the success that has greeted the Gregorian Chant CDs of the Benedictine monks of Santo Domingo de Silos...
...If it did not, what does that tell us about the CIA's power and its use of power...
...We note that the review describes a later scene, in which the father enters the confessional not to ask forgiveness but to brag about his actions and threaten the priest...
...FRANCIS J. MANISCALCO The writer is director of the Office of Media Relations, United States Catholic Conference...
...I was so encouraged that I sent them to one of my sons, a man of forty honestly searching for some meaning in this "charnel house" but unable to go back to the "simple" faith he left years ago...
...Because of my twenty years of military experience prior to ordination, I agree with the premise that we require intelligence data...
...Add to these the millions of Catholic men and women who died fighting the Nazis in the occupied territories (notably Poland), and one can't help wishing the editors of Commonweal had done better than this unfortunate choice of words...
...To the extent of possibly clarifying how the 33 percent of American Catholics who still believe in Real Presence can join the 66 percent who don't...
...no greater moral failure sprang to mind than the church's failure to respond to the Nazi Holocaust...
...I hope it is extended to all the CIA's activities and that the top-secret stamp, so easily used and abused in such circles, doesn't block the deepest of reviews...
...Very...
...Would you let us know...
...Would that be possible without getting hip-deep into jargon...
...I find poems the only (barely) adequate way to deal with such complexity...
...I really don't think that you could do anything much more valuable than to devote a series of articles, one to each of the major topics touched on briefly in that survey...
...If you had, it is reasonable to assume that you would not have been around long to carry on the fight, not only against the Nazis but against the nihilistic ideas that gave rise to nazism...
...Though Benedict does detail the singing of hymns in the liturgical code of his Rule (chapters 8-20), there is no specific mention of a community Mass...
...I am not alone in that...
...Lastly, while it may not break the news, the Catholic press certainly does report it...
...He said the seal of confession binds if the penitent comes to ask absolution, even if the confessor does not believe the penitent is guilty of sin...
...To understand, no...
...costly Yonkers, N.Y...
...I subscribe to The-ological Studies...
...These extraordinary lay people living in voluntary poverty are prophetically, some would say fanatically, in love with "the liturgy of the world...
...ANDREW J. HICKEY Benedict & the chant Aurora, Ill...
...President Clinton has rightly called for a wide review of U.S...
...The writer is a retired lieutenant colonel who, after ordination as a Maryknoll priest, spent eight years in parish work at Poptun, Peten, Guatemala...
...Aye, there's the rub...
...REV...
...Reviewer Richard Alleva says the scene in question leaves a fuzzy impression that the daughter feels personal guilt for what her abusive father has done to her...
...Jesus is everywhere...
...McMahon, from the evidence of his examples, seems to take investigative journalism as journalism's primary form...
...Clarifying...
...Clarifying...
...Needs some time "in the field...
...we get to the table, and what happens to us once we're there...
...At best, it is only alluded to and would take place weekly rather than daily...
...That one actually drove me to the new Catechism and to Vatican II documents to see if I still qualified as a Catholic...
...5. Dr...
...Pioneer took no position-it never does...
...PHILIP BERRIGAN, ELIZABETH McALISTER, et al...
...Where were the ears to hear us then...
...To help you evaluate, I'm seventy-ish, forty years a university professor (history), a father of ten and grandfather of seventeen, and, as you may have guessed, Catholic...
...We have tried to live the gospel in serving the poor and teaching nonviolent resistance-the needs of others our single concern...
...If I am correct, the plot of Priest would be mistaken, since the daughter was not herself a sinner but a victim of her father's sin [review, April 7...
...3. The statement in the Charles Lane article (a secondary source) that I was recruited to "wage scientific battle" against the Brown case is untrue...
...ANTHONY DIRUSSO From the editors: We asked a canonist...
...To the Editors: To answer the questions about the issue on Eucharistic Presence that were put in the winter issue of the Associates Newsletter...
...I argued against that in my article and would continue to argue against it...
...His weaving of the recent revival of interest in chant with a history of its liturgical use in the church is a service to both liturgists and musicians...
...Masses celebrated by Father Dinter in the John Jay Hall lounge, I can assure reviewer Dennis O'Brien that Father Dinter seemed to "thunder" Catholic faith and social justice during his homilies...
...Upper Montclair, N.J...
...What of the reported 110,000 Guatemalans who were slaughtered in the '70s and' 80s, and what of those who still suffer oppression...
...4. The Kiihl book (still another secondary source) doesn't cover any of Fischel's points...
...This is our first appeal in all those twenty-two years...
...Commonweal itself is an example of a successful journalistic enterprise that does not emphasize breaking news, whether scandalous or not...
...We are now deep into preliminaries to building at Saint Peter's Cemetery in the heart of inner-city Baltimore: negotiating with the Planning Commission, preparing garden beds, planting trees, studying alternative building methods...
...Jonah House expands Baltimore, Md...
...In that, it is distinctly different from what Mr...
...Outside is the clash of Skid Row...
...HARRY F. WEYHER The writer is president of the Pioneer Fund...
...Citing Aquinas, Mitchell stresses the need to recognize that "[i]n the Eucharist two bodies meet: The risen body of Jesus (present now 'sacramentally' and 'substantially') and the 'corpus Christi quodest ecclesia.'" In our reading, Mitchell's article gives no support to the remark Mr...
...To the Editors: The "Et Cetera" feature in your issue of February 24 includes the line...
...Fitz Patrick...
...Let me close by sharing my experience of the Catholic Worker in Los Angeles...
...Can anything more be done to kill devotion after two millennia of "not disturbing the faith of the little ones...
...activity in Guatemala...
...A reader a century from now, combing through the files of the Catholic News Service or most diocesan newspapers, would find an accurate picture of the lived experience of the church in our times, warts and all...
...The CIA recruited Guatemalan army personnel who served at the highest levels of strategic planning...
...Nevertheless, I trust that Benedict himself would beam at the current retrieval of chant, and agree with Mr...
...JOSEPH P. LA MAR, M.M...
...We certainly were aware of the structural oppression (read: extermination) of any who would seek freedom for themselves, their families, and their communities...
...HARRY F. WEYHER The writer is president of the Pioneer Fund.for a supermarket tabloid...
...Interested readers may wish to judge for themselves, at the risk of offending the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, which finds the movie anti-Catholic...
...PETE GREEN The really Real Presence Alexandria, Va...
...We think most readers who try this process will find that the kind of theology offered by Nathan Mitchell and P.J...
...Always we have supported our work with the labor of our hands...
...I must, however, take issue with his connection of the Mass and the Divine Office in reference to the Rule of Benedict...
...I feel marginalized by the kind of theology being done by Mitchell and P.J...
...JOEL RIPPINGER, O.S.B...
...Too difficult...
...Did I find the articles difficult...
...Similarly, for Nathan Mitchell it is less important to understand how Christ "gets into" the bread and wine than it is to grasp "how...
...To the Editors: Mr...
...At that table we do not believe-we (Continued on page 27) CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 2) know...
...A bit compressed, perhaps...
...I cannot help wondering what definition of the church the writer had in mind...
...The use of chant with daily community Masses came only several centuries later with Carolingian and Cluniac monasticism...
...Priest' plot errs North Walpole, N.H...
...But here again, I ask the editors what they would have done if Wehrmacht troops had been encamped on Dutch Street during the Holocaust, as they were in Saint Peter's Square...
...Homeless people, AIDS victims, Salvadoran refugees, and volunteers crowd the room flooded with sunlight...
...To the Editors: In the winter issue of the Commonweal Associates Newsletter, you asked its readers what they thought about the special issue on Eucharistic Presence [January 27...
...It is unfitting that a theological magazine, Commonweal, was furnished by a "historian" with a trash article filled with serious errors...
...Apparently Fischel relied on someone else's description of the "letter"-a tertiary source...
...To the Editors: I was pleased to read your review of Paul Dinter's Beyond Naive Belief: The Bible and Adult Catholic Faith ["Let the Thunder Roll," March 10...
...But he is also, for each of us there, in the half-stale loaf of white bread and bottle of Gallo wine in the middle of the table, present in true body and blood, the source and sustenance of our Catholic Christian faith...
...I am replying because you seemed a little defensive, even embarrassed...
...Hurrah...
...But then one thinks of Cardinal Faulhaber of Berlin, and of other notable bishops who stood up to the Nazis...
...I said something more modest than that the church media help make the church credible...
...What Father Fitz Patrick questions is not the "realness" of Christ's presence in the Eucharist, but what he considers the misapplication of Aristotelian terms (substance and accident) in the effort to explain that presence...
...Counter rebuttal New York, N.Y...
...Well, you did ask...
...It's in line with what I heard last fall at a major liturgy conference in Philadelphia: Reception of Eucharist is merely a "reminder" that the congregation is the "primary" Presence of Christ...
...They believe with Dorothy Day that a homeless person is not "like Jesus, she is Jesus...
...As the Newsletter confessed, it was hard going for all of us and became more or less fully accessible only after repeated readings and much back-and-forth between editors and authors...
...If it passed this information on to higher authorities, how could we go on supporting a government engaged in large-scale slaughter...
...To the Editors: In answer to your questions about the Eucharistic Presence articles: I found Fitz Patrick lively enough to move me into buying his book, In Breaking of Bread [$60...
...Quite the reverse...
...The other fellow I thought a shade callow...
...Some of us did...
...MSGR...
...On the other hand, I am most enthusiastic about what you did in that issue...
...To the Editors: I am pained to the point of tears by what I have been reading concerning activities of the Central Intelligence Agency in Guatemala...
...Now, when our community includes eight adults, three young folks, and three babies, the walls must expand, elsewhere: Jonah House must move, and we turn to our friends for their trust and generosity...
...And just as upsetting, perhaps more so, was Nathan Mitchell's nu-anced and qualified reply to Father Robert Imbelli [Correspondence, March 10...
...Serially, it was difficult, but not excessively so...
...Why is Catholic theology so set against us...
...Without attempting to assess the ultimate tenability of any of the positions advanced in those brief essays, they did at the very least show a serious and honest effort to have Christian belief find some purchase in a universe no longer statically conceived and a humankind liberated from the round of the "sacred year...
...Mike Devine, tortured and murdered in Poptun, was a personal friend of mine...
...At a time when meanness and exclusivity increasingly dominate public policy, a larger home will allow us to expand our services to the poor and to the wider national community, until the weapons are destroyed, war is outlawed, and the poor receive justice...
...These three cite themselves and each other in a comfortable back-scratching circle...
...How we get such information and what we do with it pose different questions...
...This was failure...
...Dear God...
...To our correspondent, and other readers who share his reading of the essays, we urge a second look, followed by a third and maybe more...
...But stimulating rather than upsetting...
...In my post in the diocesan newspaper of what appears to be Mr...
...It is also stupid, since I was neither a scientist nor a litigator and no one would have offered me that task...
...Understand, I am a Commonweal Catholic-not an Opus Dei reactionary...
...The CIA in Guatemala Maryknoll, N.Y...
...I did say they make the church credible in the world of the secular media in the way Catholic schools make it credible in the world of education and Catholic Charities in the world of social service...
...To the Editors: In your issue of March 24, Jack Fischel's reply to my letter contains more erroneous statements based on secondary sources and gutter pieces: 1. It is Fischel himself, not the Pioneer Fund, who makes a political conclusion about Headstart based on scientific research at several universities...
...I am ecumenical, justice-oriented, supportive of church reform, especially with regard to the ordination of women...
...Your questions: "Did you find the articles difficult...
...policy of protesting the slaughter of innocents would not have compromised agents of the CIA...
...Dinter can thunder New Haven, Conn...
...A help to devotion...
...Over the years our work has included international efforts to resist America's warmaking, intense nonviolent resistance in the United States, support for the scores of Plowshares witnesses, years of jail presence and testimony, weekly sharing of tons of food with our impoverished neighbors, teaching nonviolent resistance at a local college, lecturing nationally on nuclearism and interventionary war...
...Gifts may be sent to Jonah House at 1933 Park Avenue, Baltimore, MD, 21217...
...He the innkeeper and I the missioner shared many a conversation about our hopes and dreams for the people there...
...VERA SCANLON What church media do Washington, D.C...
...Would you have risked martyrdom...
...McMahon's own examples...
...And Fischel must have noticed that Kuhl, like Lane, relies heavily on the railings of Barry Mehler, an insignificant figure in academe but who sometimes surfaces in his chosen role of ideological agitator, sometimes called "swastika-painting...
...Impastato quotes from the Philadelphia conference, and is wholly supportive of the kind of Eucharist he describes at the Catholic Worker house in Los Angeles...
...I attend a Jesuit parish that's SRO for every Mass and at fifty I'm the oldest worshiper there...
...Fitz Patrick isn't set against belief in the Real Presence but works in support of that belief...
...I would further comment that Mr...
...With God's grace, your help, and the assistance of many volunteers, we plan to start construction this spring...
...Moreover, I learn that he did not, as Fischel erroneously claims, testify in the Brown case...
...It had to know what was going on...
...overhead, the everpresent LAPD helicopter...
...We did...
...By this definition, the literally tens of thousands of Catholic men and women who gave their lives in combat against the Nazis give the lie to any suggestion that the church failed to respond to the Nazi Holocaust...
Vol. 122 • May 1995 • No. 9
