Correspondence Lincoln & Saginaw revisited
JR., GEORGE GALLUP & NICHOLS, RANDOLPH & CUNNINGHAM, DAN & O'NEILL, MICHAEL & McMENAMIN, JOHN & DOHERTY, EDWARD F. & MORRIS, CHARLES R. & WICKES, MARIETTE & FISCHER, PHILIP C. & Woodward, Kenneth L. & Baumann, Paul & Steinfels, Peter & Ahmann, Mathew
Not a feel-good' faith Peter Steinfels's article about Murray Kempton [June 6] hurts me deeply. I am concerned that a respected journalist would attempt to characterize something as deep and...
...EDWARD F. DOHERTY Flushing, N.Y...
...that's why I became a member after the Bruskewitz fatwah...
...In a follow-up piece in Newsweek, I reported that all those interviewed by Bennetts had positive as well as negative things to say about O'Connor, and they were irate that none of the positives were included in her piece...
...john mcmenamin, o.s.f.s...
...They are proof that, the more you try to reform, the less you hold it all together...
...The writer replies: My article did not attempt to characterize Mr...
...Salary range: $28,000-$40,000...
...Perhaps in future analyses of the great Catholic divide, Commonweal might adopt a new editorial motto: It's the aesthetics, stupid...
...Finally, that O'Hare should invoke Abraham Heschel as a closet Tilli-chean does a grave injustice to a man who, like most great theologians and men of deep prayer, was able to address others outside his tradition precisely because he was so deeply formed in his own...
...Mater Dei Institute for Ministry Formation...
...While he was at it, why didn't Carroll mention that the Chief Rabbi of Rome, after seeing what Pius XII did to save the Jews of Rome, converted to Catholicism...
...As Baumann pointed out, papal infallibility has nothing to do with the Holocaust-much less with the list of other concerns, such as women's ordination, that Carroll Coming September 12 Laity & Life of the Church manages to squeeze into his meandering article...
...The author replies: Frankly, I was a bit shocked myself to read in Mr...
...In her editor's column, by the way, Brown puffed the piece by suggesting that O'Connor might be the next pope...
...Gallup's faith from this one occasion, then his letter is a welcome corrective...
...No prophet, he Padraic O'Hare's letter [July 18] commenting on Paul Baumann's critique of James Carroll's New Yorker article [May 23] is astounding...
...For many years, his work has been a major force in combating ignorance and prejudice about religion in the United States, and it has long been clear that this work springs from something far deeper than "feel-goodism...
...No such distinction can be made...
...In this case, I wasn't...
...15 were members of religious orders...
...The author replies: I appreciate the thoughtful letters, and offer only a few comments...
...This is for sure a cultural, not a strictly eccclesiastical, problem...
...PHILIP C. FISCHER, S.J...
...Of the 118 priests active in the Lincoln diocese, 105 were priests of the diocese...
...Gallup's spirituality but Murray Kempton's spirit...
...Manuscripts Wanted MANUSCRIPTS WANTED...
...And, if we fail to do so, the mercy will still be there...
...Financial help available...
...Position Available THE DIOCESE OF LA CROSSE, WISCONSIN seeks a full-time director for the Office for Pastoral Planning...
...I enjoyed Charles Morris's fair treatment of the Lincoln and Saginaw dioceses, but I still came away with a sense of unease...
...Gallup...
...Ahmann winds up convicting the Christian anti-Semite of the same crime as the concentration camp guard and the architects of the Shoah...
...The Right insists on being 100-percent certain/ right, while the liberal Left at least admits uncertainty...
...At this point I suffered my usual paroxysmal seizure...
...But why then, when Hutus committed brutal injustices against the Tutsis, beginning in 1959, did I hear nothing from the archbishop about social justice...
...As a married, hence on-the-substi-tutes-bench, priest, with a lifelong interest in church history and a sufficient acquaintance with past and present ecclesiastical politics, I know plenty about both ultramontane and confused postconciliar Catholicism...
...Box 4004, La Crosse, WI 54602 by September 15,1997...
...If serving in the footsteps of the Suffering Servant isn't enough reason to become a priest, then no amount of elevation will do...
...For two years I worked in a refugee camp set up for Tutsis who had fled their homes in the first wave of ethnic violence...
...When she was at Vanity Fair, Brown published a notorious profile of Cardinal John O'Connor, in which journalist Leslie Bennetts interviewed a whole range of Catholics, including Peter Steinfels and Eugene Kennedy...
...What all these liberal reformers want they can have right now by strolling out of the Church of Rome and into any one of the 17,000 or so Protestant sects that already practice what the reformers preach...
...I trust it matters to God as well...
...graduate degree with studies in sacred worship and related experience in sacred music, sacred art and architecture...
...implementing strategies for long-range planning on all levels of the diocese, and cooperating with various offices, councils, and commissions in recommending planning efforts...
...Position Available THE OTHER SIDE: the Christian magazine of peace, justice, and spirituality, seeks a Director of Operations to coordinate overall management, long-range planning, personnel, and board development...
...How about this: to carry on the spirit and work of the one who thought so little of being elevated that he stooped down to wash feet, including the feet of those who would exercise authority in his name...
...I am concerned that a respected journalist would attempt to characterize something as deep and personal and precious as my spirituality on the basis of a press conference held some fifteen years ago, the details of which he admits to having difficulty recalling...
...Social and legal discrimination are not venial sins while only extermination is a mortal sin...
...Can I imagine him doing it better...
...Like Carroll, I too have lunched at L'Arbuzzi with Gerry O'Collins...
...Robert Schuller and Mr...
...In defending his untenable thesis, Mr...
...Saint Louis, Mo...
...Director is consultant to the diocesan bishop on liturgical matters, prepares diocesan liturgical celebrations and diocesan guidelines relative to sacred worship, serves as Executive Secretary of the Diocesan Sacred Worship i Commission...
...Even the use of the term "precondition" draws a line that cannot be drawn...
...5 were "externs" (priests from other dioceses...
...Lincoln had 3 ordinations and 39 seminarians...
...Subsidy Publisher with 75-year tradition...
...responding to particular needs in parishes which are developing new leadership models, serving as a primary resource in the development and effectiveness of diocesan, deanery and parochial pastoral councils...
...Providing theological degrees and pastoral leadership preparation...
...The Common Ground Initiative or any other project aimed at reconciliation within the church faces a major obstacle in the intolerance of the Catholic Right...
...designing processes which empower responsibility for pastoral ministry...
...Schuller or Mr...
...The subtext of that article, like the one by Carroll, was the church's retrograde position on abortion and other matters dear to professional feminists...
...Thanks to Sister Miriam's book, many will do so with less of a blur, with a bright joy that hurts and is still joy...
...Indeed, the whole article is stitched together with such artificial travelogue segues in the service of dishing up as fresh what is really an old and discredited smear of Pius XII, a la Rolf Hochhuth's infamous notes to The Deputy...
...Lincoln is not "conservative," unless the term is used for a relatively recent (nineteenth-century) tradition...
...It seems to me a real problem that the church has to deal with somehow, although preferably without banishing the side that loses the argument...
...Was the silence of the missionary church in those years one of the factors leading to the far more monstrous events of 1994...
...Now this ever-so-sensitive child of the '60s has given us a tedious book about himself and his father that manages only to harden the impression that the era he celebrates was not so heavenly after all, precisely because it preserved, as in emotional aspic, an adolescence that too many of his agemates are loath to leave behind...
...My faith happens to be about as far away from "feel-goodism" as is possible, and has been formed through much pain and suffering in my life, as well as an ongoing conviction of being sinful by reason of my humanity...
...Discounts 5 percent, 3 times...
...Send letter of introduction, resume, and three letters of reference to Search Committee, Office for Pastoral Planning, P.O...
...like Carroll, I have lunched with Hans Kiing in his home in Tubingen...
...While it may be that today the official position of the Catholic church does not condone anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic teaching still goes on...
...My continuing experience is that this ignorance (and the prejudice that flows from it) is still very widespread among otherwise quite literate Catholic people...
...The only thing I can think of that might be described as a kind of "Christian" anti-Semitism is the view of some Christians that the birth of Jesus ended the covenant God made with the people of Israel, and that de-(Continued on page 29) CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 4) nial of the enduring covenant is where anti-Semitism begins...
...Contra O'Hare, it is Carroll who is theologically challenged: I found his article morally naive, historically one-eyed, and narratively contrived...
...I've never been in Saginaw, either, but I'm sure their lack of concern for elevation has something to do with their high Mass attendance...
...Box 4004, La Crosse, WI 54602 by September 15,1997...
...CLASSIFIED RATES: $1.10 per word...
...Contact: Search Committee, 300 West Apsley, Philadelphia, Pa...
...I recall co-leading a workshop on the issue at a post-Vatican II Catholic Charities meeting, when a member of a religious order of women privately expressed amazement, and relief, at my statement during the workshop that the covenant endures...
...15 percent, 12 times...
...In my experience, most American Catholics will have to muddle through the confusion and try to tolerate the ultramontane, as long as other options are available in nearby parishes or dioceses...
...Position Available THE DIOCESE OF LA CROSSE, WISCONSIN seeks a full-time director for the Office of Sacred Worship...
...Gallup, and I stand by my recollection...
...I once asked him how he had shifted from the Calvinism of his upbringing to the gospel of positive thinking, and I frankly expected to hear only about self-esteem...
...GEORGE GALLUP, JR...
...formal education in pastoral planning...
...Nichols fakes all those paroxysms just so his wife will administer slow sips of $40 Scotch, charles r. morris A first-time shocker I was truly shocked by Commonweal, for the first time in fifty-some years of reading the magazine, by Paul Baumann's effort to draw a line be-twen "Christian anti-Semitism" (or "religious anti-Semitism") and "racial anti-Semitism" ["Re: James Carroll," May 23...
...But I do have an answer to his question concerning why one would sacrifice to become a priest if the priesthood is not an "elevated" position...
...of that diocese...
...After describing the marriage of church and state throughout Rwanda's missionary history, Salzman implies that Perraudin's support of the Hutus at the time of independence was inspired by the church's social teaching...
...Teambuilding skills...
...Andrew Lloyd Webber/ Stephen Sondheim sound...
...There now exist "Christ-centered" churches that fit any reformer's wish list...
...In his poignant piece in Commonweal [April 25], Aaron Godfrey shows how deep and pervasive it can be...
...In Carroll's case, we get something worse: a kind of puerile rejection of "hierarchy," of all things, from an ex-priest who tells us, in his interview in the May 23 issue, how "heavenly" it was to be young, ordained, and given a pulpit to preach against the war in Vietnam while daddy was a general in support of it, and how little the priesthood meant to him once the clerical soapbox that was his by virtue of ordination, not insight, was no longer needed...
...This book, difficult to review, he reviews succinctly and well...
...They are both base perversions of justice, as well as of the commandment to love...
...However irenic those of us who would be more comfortable in Saginaw rather than in Lincoln might try to be about the latter, it is doubtful that there would be any reciprocity...
...ALL TYPES...
...Ministry Program WANT TO BE A PRIEST, RELIGIOUS, LAY MINISTER (MALE OR FEMALE) IN THE CHURCH...
...12 word minimum...
...10 percent, 6 times...
...What I found journalistically contrived was the hokey, faux New Yorker way Carroll had of connecting these two lunches-mentioning a Kiing interview in an Italian newspaper as an excuse for mortising Kiing, with his predictable tirades against infallibility and John Paul II, into his piece...
...What common ground...
...paul baumann Silent complicity I appreciated Todd Salzman's article on the church's failure in Rwanda ["Catholics & Colonialism," May 23...
...James Carroll Reports on the Church, the Holocaust and Fifty Years of Silence...
...These data do not tell the whole story, but they add a deeper dimension to Charles Morris's interesting article...
...Yes, but only in a blur...
...The precondition of the Holocaust was the anti-Semitism of Christians...
...RANDOLPH NICHOLS Lincoln, Mass...
...More could be said about Mr...
...Ahmann will get no argument from me about the sinfulness of Catholic anti-Semitism...
...2-4 years administrative experience required...
...Write: Mater Dei, Gonzaga University, 405 E. Sinto, Spokane, WA 99202-1849...
...Oklahoma City, Okla...
...Can we your readers imagine the fullness of God's mercy...
...After this shocking action he asked: "Do you understand what I have done...
...KENNETH L. WOODWARD New York, N.Y...
...Schuller's faith, too, has deeper roots in both theology and suffering than his presentations often suggest...
...DAN CUNNINGHAM Aurora, Colo...
...Instead I was treated to a remarkable lunchtime conversation about the Heidelberg Catechism and the Canons of Dort...
...Send letter of introduction, resume and three letters of reference to Search Committee, Office for Sacred Worship, P.O...
...For additional information call 212-662-4200 or write COMMONWEAL, 475 Riverside Drive, Rm...
...MARIETTE WICKES Santa Cruz, Calif...
...MATHEW AHMANN Washington, D.C...
...The first shall be last Though I have never been in Lincoln, Nebraska, and have never met Monsignor Leonard Kalin, I have no doubt that he is doing wonderful things to advance the kingdom of God in Lincoln...
...1-800-633-2252, ext...
...Other activities include assisting parish and deanery liturgical ministers and sacred worship committees, acting as a consultant and teacher in the Diocesan Lay Ministry, Permanent Deacon, and Leader of Prayer Programs, assisting j parishes in renovation of liturgical spaces...
...Advance payment required...
...But if some readers are susceptible to reaching any conclusions about the nature of Mr...
...But despite his concern, the prospect that the church will dwindle into a small sect of "true believers" may not be so bad...
...A question I had after reading Carroll's piece is whether he proposed it or editor Tina Brown ordered up a piece attacking the church...
...In the same year, Saginaw had 2 ordinations and 4 seminarians...
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...We offer excellent benefits and work on a common salary structure-currently $18,740 per year for individuals (plus generous stipend for dependent children...
...administrative, organizational and supervisory skills...
...administrative, analytical, and organizational skills...
...peter steinfels Dangerous reading I read Charles Morris's "A Tale of Two Dioceses" [June 6] with great interest and enjoyment up to the description of the Saginaw church's "carpeted floor" and its bent toward a "modern and attractive...
...In fact, it was roundly criticized for being, among other things, anti-Jewish...
...Accustomed to such attacks, my wife repaired me to a state of respectable equilibrium by administering slow sips of $40 Scotch, muttering all the while that, though I'm old enough to know better, Commonweal really should start issuing warning labels for sensitive readers...
...consulting with the bishop and college of deans in planning and collaboration at the ' deanery level...
...19144, 215-849-2178, TOS.PA@cunet.org...
...Ahmann, but I can assure him that it matters a great deal to the victims...
...It can be argued that what the Protestants hate-the medieval Catholic church-they have become...
...Yes, but only in a blur...
...And the former Catholic reformers can try to reform the questionable use of money and amour by some Protestant thought leaders...
...We can and must try...
...Keep it Catholic Charles Morris is a talented reporter and writer...
...Qualifications: a person in full communion with the Catholic Church...
...Excellent book & review Thank you for Lawrence S. Cunningham's review [June 6] of Sister Miriam Pollard's unique, excellent, and relevant book, The Other Face of Love...
...To do that, I recalled one incident involving the Rev...
...1-800-695-9599...
...The book also includes some of the data Father McMenamin cites: The Lincoln model is clearly more successful in attracting priests, while dioceses like Saginaw face real staffing issues...
...If O'Hare thinks Carroll prophetic, he should read Heschel's The Prophets...
...While the Lincoln model has a nostalgic appeal to those who have no bad memories of the 1950s American Catholic church, and the Saginaw one is a brave effort to model a post-Vatican II church, I fail to see how we can have complete honesty and integrity in the church until papal monarchy is somehow constitutionalized, colle-giality becomes the preferred organizational model, and the celibacy law and exclusion of women from the priesthood change...
...The difference between bigotry and murder may not matter to Mr...
...The church would be much more focused-truly one, holy, catholic, and apostolic-if it were not cluttered up with millions of cultural Catholics who are Protestants at heart...
...At the same time, it is through pain and suffering that I have felt most intensely God's presence, love, grace, and forgiveness, and have thus, like multitudes of other Christians, gained a new sense of self-worth (or self-esteem) as a child of God...
...Responsibilities include research, analysis and evaluation which promotes the quality of ministry to the people of the diocese...
...After all, it was Lincoln's Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz who decreed excommunication for Catholics in his diocese belonging to the Call to Action movement, which has not urged change in fundamental church teachings but in reformable ecclesiastical laws...
...O'Neill is right that liberals do not typically try to excommunicate conservatives, I did find disconcerting, when researching my book American Catholic, the degree of distaste, and even contempt, that both liberal and conservative partisans often expressed toward each other...
...Judged on purely journalistic grounds, Carroll's piece was such a transparent effort to vilify two popes that O'Hare's effort to elevate the exercise into a serious theological statement is rather like teaching a course on the hermeneutics of Hustler magazine...
...Princeton, N.J...
...the more historically correct word is "ultramontane"-the papal monarchy pyramid, with strict observance of all Vatican decrees, "creeping infallibility," and the "ahistorical orthodoxy" Michael Novak lamented before becoming neoconservative...
...Apparently Lincoln, Nebraska, and the good Monsignor, need to ask themselves if indeed they do...
...If Carroll were really up on intellectual life in the church he has so loftily risen above, he would not have committed the gaffe of citing Kiing's book, Judaism, which he seems not to know was negatively received by Jewish readers...
...Michael o'neill De Land, Fla...
...I don't see the Bishop Unteners excommunicating anyone, or Call to Action demanding anything but tolerance for all points of view, (Continued on page 4) (Continued from page 2) and open debate...
...While Mr...
...Pick your favorite reform: local autonomy over the pastor, women prelates, casual grape-juice-and-bread ceremonies, abortion without guilt, married priests (many of whom find conjugal bliss is not enough after all and stray into the arms of others, whether women, men, or boys), etc...
...I wonder: Did Carroll complain to the New Yorker for the outlandish promo piece that appeared on that issue's come-hither coverflap: "What Sacrifice Is John Paul II Making to Preserve the Doctrine of Infallibility...
...Qualifications: a person in full communion with the Catholic Church...
...Brown has a long track record, first at Vanity Fair, and now at the New Yorker, of printing unflattering pieces about Catholics and their church by people who manage to get everything wrong...
...Finally, I'll bet Mr...
...My attempt to distinguish degrees of culpability concerning the Holocaust was not about avoiding responsibility, but properly affixing it...
...Schuller as well...
...The Holocaust is almost as unimaginable as the anti-Semitism of Christians is horrifying...
...I worked as a Grail lay missionary in Rwanda from 1959 to 1963, serving at the invitation of Archbishop Andre Perraudin, then the country's leading prelate...
...Ahmann's letter that there are no distinctions to be drawn between the sin of discrimination and the sin of murder, let alone mass mur-der...
...Is this not itself a "perversion of justice...
...405, New York, NY 10115...
...The correspondent is a senior writer and religion reporter at Newsweek magazine...
...13 (12 religious and 1 extern) were from outside the diocese...
...Those are points I would make if I were writing an entire article about Mr...
...The writer is chairman of the George H. Gallup International Institute...
...Ought we former missionaries to acknowledge our own complicity through silence...
...Thus, it appears that in that year Saginaw was drawing almost twice as many priests from outside the diocese as was Lincoln, and that Lincoln had almost ten times more candidates for the priesthood than Saginaw...
Vol. 124 • August 1997 • No. 14
