Correspondence
follows, A review draws fire; a counterattack
CORRESPONDENCE To the Editors Sexuality & selfhood In his letter published in the January 17 issue, Michon Matthiesen uses the phrase "sacramentalize your isolation." It is rich with...
...daniel l. schlafly, jr...
...With regard to Professor Schlafly's letter, I can only say that I did not make up the statistics...
...See Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (University of Washington Press, 1974...
...Nor is McBrien right in saying that until 1939 "nearly a third of Polish citizens were non-Catholics...
...I think Matthiesen's reading of my essay ["Homosexuality & the Priesthood," November 22,1996] as demonstrating a "prejudicial narrowness" regarding sexuality is a distorted reading, a view of the whole through a truly narrow prism...
...To leave it unmentioned would be palliative, superficial, cowardly...
...Postwar Poland was created by the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union at the Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam conferences, without, I might add, any real Polish say in the matter...
...RICHARD P. MCBRIEN...
...If you are going to venture into virtual reality by recreating what was going on inside people's heads, what they "must have thought and felt," then you essentially relinquish any claims to doing history-or, for that matter, journalism...
...I have been assured by an expert in Polish history here at Notre Dame that the preparti-tioned Polish state (the Polish and Lithuanian Commonwealth of 1771) did indeed contain about 30 percent non-Catholics, including Jews...
...embassies regarding the abortion and other planks which the White House knew the Vatican would oppose...
...I thought the book more balanced and more reliable than he did...
...One of the truths reflected in it is the habit of our God to choose those whom we might demean and reject to bear the message, to experience its power...
...As I see it, our sexuality is one of the central, energizing gifts of the Creator, an important definer of our humanity and of our spirituality...
...He notes in particular the book's account of the pope's private meeting with Nafis Sadick, undersecretary of the UN Conference on Population and Development, at the Vatican prior to the conference...
...KENNETH L. WOODWARD New York, N.Y...
...Virtual journalism In his review of the pope on the occasion of Bernstein and Politi's His Holiness, Richard P. McBrien cites the latter in support of the former...
...That, in fact, is what triggered the pope's strategy: he was handed loaded dice...
...Is he not aware of the political directives the Clinton-Gore White House sent out to all U.S...
...In fact, after the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany finished their brutal implementation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, there was nothing left of Poland...
...The point of the Sadick episode in the book is to add dramatic weight to the authors' own contention that this "pope has problems with women" (Bernstein is expert on men with woman problems, as we have learned from his ex-wife, Nora Ephron...
...If McBrien were also able to recognize intransigence in the Clinton-Gore White House, then I might, as the current political cant puts it, "feel his pain...
...Indeed the book has Sadick coming (Continued on page 27) CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 4) away from the meeting muttering "the pope hates women...
...It is rich with connotations, some joyous and sanctifying, some frightening and destructive...
...by the hands of Stalin and Hitler...
...The reviewer replies: I have often heard of authors or their friends writing letters to complain about a negative review of a book, but surely it must be rare for individuals, unrelated to the author, to complain about a review's being too positive...
...Woodward does in his letter...
...I disagree with Matthiesen's understanding of the reality of sexuality: how it helps to form and fashion our psyches, our lives, our families, our cultures...
...john shekleton Minneapolis, Minn...
...Regarding the Bernstein-Politi story of the Sadick-pope meeting, McBrien seems not to have heard the "two-source" rule (remember Bob Woodward and Bernstein on Watergate...
...Since Bernstein talked to only one of the two people who were in on the conversation between the pope and Sadick, we have only her view of what was said...
...Large numbers of the Germans and all of the Lithuanians were Roman Catholics, while many of the Ukrainians and some of the Belorussians were Eastern Rite Catholics...
...My point is that what makes the book a "good read" is also what makes it unreliable...
...The White House was using the nation's diplomatic corps to line up UN member-nations behind the Clinton-Gore pro-abortion position- and against the Vatican...
...But perhaps it is not permitted under the neoconservative dispensation to be anything less than totally supportive of the policies of the current bishop of Rome, especially in matters affecting women...
...for journalists...
...While almost a third of the population was non-Polish, a sizable percentage of these national minorities was Catholic...
...How dare the pope do such a thing...
...A remnant, the General-Government, was not directly incorporated into the USSR, the Reich, or Lithuania, but this was nothing but a Nazi administrative convenience...
...For an academic who claims to love politics, McBrien is "shocked, shocked," as Claude Raines famously put it in Casablanca, when he sees intransigence in the Vatican...
...Kenneth L. Woodward, of course, has already had his say about His Holiness in Newsweek [September 30,1996], where he faulted it for, among other things, neglecting to translate the "Majorem" in the well-known Latin motto, "Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam" ("To the greater glory of God...
...Does he not know that the preparatory conferences were put in the hands of International Planned Parenthood, which is nothing if not political...
...Says McBrien: "If this report is essentially accurate, the meeting may help to explain the politically intransigent posture the Vatican adopted in Cairo, where it forged an alliance with some of the world's most extreme Muslim fundamentalist nations...
...That may be the view from South Bend, too, but it has the odor of special pleading...
...One wonders where McBrien was in the year leading up to and including the Cairo conference...
...Mapping Poland Richard P. McBrien's review of the Bernstein-Politi biography of John Paul II (January 17,1997) claims that Poland's "present borders were created...
...I also would not have thought it appropriate to take a personal swipe at one of the authors, Carl Bernstein, as Mr...
...As it happens, however, there were more than two people in on the interview of Sadick by Bernstein: her public information officer, who was quite surprised by Bernstein's incessant questions to her about what the pope was doing when she spoke to him, how he looked-did the veins in his neck stick out-that sort of thing...
...By the way, when I last checked, Sadick's staff is still looking for the memo which Bernstein claims as an additional source for his recreation of her meeting with the pope...
...Saint Louis, Mo...
...The writer is associate professor of history at Saint Louis University...
...a force, a filter, a landscape, sometimes quiet and unobserved, yet ever present as we breathe and pray...
...No matter, Bernstein seems to have forgotten it, too...
Vol. 124 • February 1997 • No. 3
