Correspondence
CORRESPOHPEMCE To the Editors A pertinent poem Though there is no indication of Hank Johnson's home base, his poem "Behind the Basilica" [September 10] is a lyrical and profoundly relevant...
...As a gloss on your excellent editorial, "Expelling Darwin" [September 10], a deeper reading than the national press allows demonstrates that the controversy was ignited not only by the sensitivity of creationists but also by the insensi-tivity of some of the scientists and science teachers who drew up the proposed revision...
...Doyle, clearly an expert on this subject, must know that minorities commit the majority of murders in the United States...
...jack glaser Santa Ana, Calif...
...Kevin Doyle replies: Dudley Sharp goes 0 for 3. First, on race: In Philadelphia an African-American murder defendant, when compared to his similarly situated nonblack counterpart, is 38 percent more likely to receive a death sentence...
...Thanks to Hank Johnson and Commonweal...
...Why can't Catholics learn to disagree without accusing one another of disloyalty to God...
...I agree completely with Father O'Malley's points on the importance of conscience and the need to inform one's conscience...
...Thanks for continuing to do your part...
...Second, concerning class bias, look at the elements of capital murder throughout the country, state by state...
...There is always more than meets the eye in the Holy Land, so it is crucial to know to whom one is speaking and what questions to ask them—the forte of BBC...
...First, this teaching does not, as Ms...
...Doyle's claim that New York state "has wrongfully executed more people than any other state" appears to be derived from a 1987 study whose authors later (1988) stated: " We agree with our critics that we have not proved these executed defendants to be innocent...
...The writer replies: Thanks to Jack Glaser for understanding why I cannot accept the present teaching on homosexuality as eternal truth...
...The primacy of conscience is not a blank check to rewrite God's word to suit modern, secular sensibilities...
...The racist death penalty is a myth used by those willing to adopt any means, however despicable, to do away with this most deserved punishment...
...we never claimed that we had...
...In the future, as in the past, we can expect moral wisdom to emerge from the larger community engaged in conscientious dialogue...
...that from the standpoints of the freedom of the Commonweal 1 ¥ October 22,1999 gospel were not legitimate...
...The writer is vice-president of justice for All, a Texas-based criminal justice reform organization...
...This vacuum may have been partly filled by creation science, but even more so, on a number of occasions, by an overreaching secular science...
...And one should note that only one-tenth of 1 percent of all murderers are executed...
...kevin doyle Take it from Scripture In an otherwise thoughtful essay ["Sexuality and Homosexuality," September 10], Sidney Callahan makes two common errors regarding church teaching on homosexuality...
...placed burdens on people...
...In 1990, Congress's General Accounting Office, after reviewing twenty-eight studies based on twenty-three sets of data, concluded: "In 82 percent of the studies, race of the victim was found to influence the likelihood of being charged with capital murder or receiving the death penalty...
...Rather, the church's teaching that homosexual activity is inherently sinful comes from more than three thousand years of received Judeo-Christian tradition...
...Deal...
...And while sexual love is truly a gift from God, this hardly means that God is obliged to give that gift to everyone...
...Emerging truth Thanks to Sidney Callahan for adding her voice to the Catholic community's struggle for the elusive but deeper truth about homosexuality...
...Notre Dame, Ind...
...Forming a conscience Sidney Callahan questions whether...
...MARK L. CHANCE Houston, Tex...
...Given the centrality of this clear scriptural teaching, no one can in good conscience dissent from it...
...Can or should Catholics dissent from authoritative teaching...
...Commonweal 19 October 22,1999...
...Your editorial notes the vacuum created by the exclusion of philosophy and theology from public education...
...The scriptural standard is marriage, defined by Jesus Christ as one man and one woman joined indissol-ubly by God...
...The scriptural standard for sexual union isn't a mutually self-giving, committed union, which sounds too much like a way to justify fornication...
...In the absence of such correspondents in Commonweal, readers may consult the listserve of the Christian Peacemaker Team—Eptheb@mail.palnet.com— whose prolonged presence in Hebron has allowed its members to develop relationships that would easily reverse our itinerant observer's use of "embattled" to describe the settlers' presence there...
...I am disappointed, but not surprised, that the article contained no mention of and showed no concern for murder victims—innocent human beings who had loves and lives willfully destroyed, regardless of economics, race, or ethnicity—destroyed by our most heinous human-rights violators: capital murderers...
...One way this happens is through a reinterpretation of scriptural texts...
...Why since 1988 have 74 percent of those targeted for federal capital prosecution been minorities...
...The writer is Theodore M. Hesburgh Professor in Arts and Sciences at the University of Notre Dame...
...There is simply the continual, ubiquitous crisis caused by people who, often with very good intentions, help pave the road to hell...
...I pray that I am not in error...
...Death penalty defended It is unfortunate that an interesting profile ["Doyle for the Defense," August 13] included misleading information on the death penalty...
...JEAN GARTLAN Baltimore, Md...
...And white murderers are executed seventeen months more quickly than are convicted black murderers...
...The most notable exception was Gabriel Said Reynolds's insight into the ecumenical monastery Mar Musa in Syria ["Where Islam and Christianity Meet," March 12...
...Alfred cavanaugh Kenwood, Calif...
...She is quick to state that the answer is...
...All in all, there is no "crisis in the development of doctrine," as Ms...
...SIDNEY CALLAHAN Missing: the Middle East One hopes that Commonweal readers have other means of access to reflective pieces on the situation in the Middle Commonweal 18 October 22,1999 East, for a cursory look at the past year's issues can only reveal how desultory is your coverage of this region, concentrating two cultures and three Abrahamic faiths...
...Our tradition is clear that even if your conscience is in error you must follow it...
...that is, those who murdered whites were found more likely to be sentenced to death than those who murdered blacks...
...lending with the intention to profit from the loan...
...More typical was the latest "Last Word" ["The Promised Land," September 24], Hebron through the eyes of an innocent American, a self-styled "secular Jew" who joins "an entourage of American Orthodox Jews who are making a religious pilgrimage...
...An act of homosexual sex is sinful not because the church says so but because God says so...
...o'malley Caldwell, N.J...
...Third, my reference to New York's wrongful executions relied, in part, on the published work of two scholars ?£ 3." ~ * who indeed, given time's passage, could only show the grave reasons to doubt the guilt of persons long dead...
...Further, white murderers are twice as likely to be executed for the crime as are black murderers...
...The middle-class fellow who kills the person he once promised to "love, honor, and cherish" does not ordinarily face the death penalty...
...Callahan also engages in some gratuitous boo-hooing by stating that "experiencing erotic love and sexual joy in committed unions of mutual self-giving is uniquely human and a gift from God...
...m.f...
...Then there is the impact of the victim's race...
...yes and hardly needs to be reargued with references to the hierarchy of truths and the sacredness of conscience...
...But to say one cannot dissent from authoritative teaching would mean that conscience is no longer free...
...But reading statistics is boring, so let's make this more interesting...
...Catholics have the right in good conscience to dissent from teaching that is authoritatively taught but not infallibly defined...
...I assure Mark Chance that many scriptural scholars today think that the biblical references to homosexuality have been inappropriately interpreted to shore up a shaky moral argument...
...Perhaps what is needed is greater effort placed on the education of one's conscience, which, as the Catechism relates, "is indispensable for human beings who are subjected to negative influences and tempted to prefer their own judgment and to reject authoritative teaching" (# 1783...
...Sharp agrees to donate twenty-five cents to Alabama's Equal Justice initiative for every current capital appellant I can point to who has assigned or volunteer counsel...
...When I went to Alabama that (Continued on page 4) Commonweal 1 October 22,1999 (Continued from page 2) same year, I wasn't surprised to find a death row on which roughly 80 percent of the death sentences arose from the killing of white people—even though most homicide victims in Alabama were black...
...Karl Rahner (Schriften zur Theologie 13,1978): "But it is part of the tragic and irreducibly obscure historicity of the church, that in both theory and practice it used bad arguments to defend moral maxims based on problematic, historically conditioned pre-con-victions, 'prejudices'....This dark tragedy of the church's intellectual history is so burdensome because we are dealing here, in all or very many cases, with questions that penetrated deeply into the concrete lives of human beings, because such false maxims, which were never objectively valid...
...With a matter as sacred as conscience one might have hoped that the author would spare a few lines on the need to form and inform one's conscience in accord with church teaching, a word to two on the possibility of having an erroneous conscience, and some recognition that the task of conscience is to discover truth, not create it...
...DAVID BURRELL, C.S.C...
...It is this divinely inspired, and thus infallible, moral teaching of Scripture that true Catholic exegesis both refuses to diverge from and attempts to explain in rational terms...
...I don't think faithful struggles over difficult moral issues help "pave the way to hell," as Mark Chance has it...
...Science as religion Commonweal readers interested in the controversy about science education standards in Kansas may wish to look at a special report from the Kansas City Star, available on the Web at www.kc-star.com and also at the old and new standards at www.ksbe.state.ks.us...
...Sharp will agree, I will give one dollar to his organization for every current capital appellant he finds represented by retained counsel, on the condition that Mr...
...I've read everything I could supporting the church's teaching...
...In America (April 3,1999), John Noo-nan sketches five areas of moral change in Catholic teaching where "the impermissible becomes permissible (certain marriages, once classed as adulterous...
...Kevin Doyle, New York's chief capital defender, is concerned for the poor and minorities "who will inevitably line death row," claiming he believes the punishment is racist because more minorities than whites are on death row...
...Callahan writes, derive from the church's view that biological procreation is the defining characteristic of human sexuality...
...Typically, the eighteen-year-old product of chaos and poverty who panics holding up the 7-11 is capitally liable...
...So shows a study published last year in the Cornell Law Review...
...Though the church's constant teaching regarding the morality of homosexual activity has not been inf al-(Continued on page 27) Commonweal 4 October 22,1999 CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 4) libly defined by an act of the extraordinary magisterium, it is infallibly taught by means of the ordinary and universal magisterium, described by John Paul II as "the usual expression of the church's infallibility...
...it is firmly based on both Old Testament law and Pauline discourse on what it means to live as a Christian...
...Dudley sharp Houston, Tex...
...Even assuming minorities commit a majority of murders, how is it that our federal death row is not even a quarter white...
...Really...
...With more knowledge of Scripture new meanings are discovered in God's word...
...Nor are we alerted to the fact that Baruch Goldstein's massacre of "Muslims at prayer" was a premeditated action undertaken during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and executed on Purim, as a ritual enactment of the final chapter of the Book of Esther...
...As for poverty, there is no evidence that wealthy capital murderers are less likely to be executed than their poorer ilk...
...Callahan says...
...the permissible becomes impermissible (slaveholding, the common use of the death penalty...
...If Mr...
...We uninvolved Catholics should at the very least be sympathetic to the reactions of fellow Christians to issues about which we may have become too insensitive...
...Ours is an ever-reforming church that in its history has changed its moral teaching...
...Admittedly, I think it wrongful to execute people when there is substantial doubt about their guilt...
...REV...
...I don't think so...
...A little preliminary briefing would have informed him that this community of settlers had nourished the "faith" of Rabin's assassin, and that the words of David Wilder, the "fortyish former American who is the spokesperson for the embattled Jewish community in Hebron": "We want peace, but we're not leaving...
...We're here to stay," are belied by the graffiti on their walls, in Hebrew, reading "Death to Arabs...
...rev...
...She reminds me of two other Catholic voices reflecting on our history of moral development...
...and the obligatory becomes forbidden (state repression of heresy...
...CORRESPOHPEMCE To the Editors A pertinent poem Though there is no indication of Hank Johnson's home base, his poem "Behind the Basilica" [September 10] is a lyrical and profoundly relevant comment on the current controversy concerning the removal of the soup kitchen "Our Daily Bread" and its unsightly guests from its location next to, if not behind, the Basilica of the Assumption in downtown Baltimore...
Vol. 126 • October 1999 • No. 18
