Correspondence: Oscar Romero, gay marriage & Andrew Greeley
Romero & the pope Father John Jay Hughes, who, the editors underline, is a "church historian," charges me with a lack of candor in treating Pope John Paul II's response to the assassination of...
...The incisive humor of the piece allowed Baumann to tell the truth: Many church historians and theologians do not care about good writing, and it hurts their work...
...Where do you stand...
...For this reason, in my book (The Catholic Family) I estimated intermarriage rates with another data set--the "National Survey of Families and Households" (NSFH...
...Lord, I wish CornCorrection i The author of "Lord, When Did I Smell You...
...The group will exchange messages dealing with articles and topics presented in the magazine...
...Data on first marriages indicate that about one in two Catholics intermarried, although the rate is lower for older Catholics...
...More surprising is the increasing number of Catholic/non-Catholic couples who express some interest in participating in RCIA when one wishes to become Catholic and/or the other party wishes to complete his/her sacraments of initiation...
...The ceremony was not a Mass so there were no inhibitors to full participation of all people present from both sides of our two families...
...What choice do we have...
...As she turns it over and over on her lips, it becomes a cry from the heart--a prayer...
...That Pope John Paul II's reaction to the assassination of Archbishop Romero was "very muted" (as Hughes puts it) is a myth...
...WILLIAMS ANDER Chicago, I11...
...Again, on the next New Year's Eve, he said: "The church is holy because it has God's spirit giving it life...
...Why he doesn't have the courage to finish the job remains unexplained...
...After Catholic young people marry Protestant young people, sometimes they worship in Protestant churches...
...To join, simply send an e-mail message to commonweal-subscribe@egroups.com Happy e-mailing...
...To the conundrum of human existence--the longing for love hindered by fate, or compromised by our sinful nature---there is one saving grace, even if it can be summoned only by default...
...Nothing in what he said would stand in the way of logically concluding that gay marriage was the best alternative...
...We regret misspelling her name...
...River Forest, Ill...
...Sometimes they worship in Catholic churches...
...LAURA PANGALLOZZI Maplewood, N.J...
...It reminds this reader of the story of Jacob's ladder...
...And in the moment that she utters that prayer, she believes that she finds God...
...What about divorce...
...And believe me, for every young person like me who does persevere, there are several like my fianc6 who don't come back, except for maybe Christmas or Easter...
...For the complete rules and style sheet, please contact: New Theology Review Prize e/o The Liturgical Press EO...
...The moral question Barbara, Alex, and Andrew all face is how to find meaning in their human helplessness in the face of life's caprices...
...Having opted for heterosexual marriage, I see no reason not to grant cer(Continued on page 4) Commonweal 2 February 11, 2000 (Continued from page 2) tain civil rights and recognition to various sorts of domestic partnerships and households...
...January 14, 2000] writes that the Vermont Supreme Court decision that affirmed identical civil benefits for same-sex couples that are currently afforded married couples was "a model of judicial prudence worthy of national attention...
...He then concludes that "domestic partnership" is a better vehicle than marriage to award these benefits to gays...
...Alex and Barbara struggle to sort out their love for each other, which is "all wrong, but...the only right, the only possible, thing in all the universe...
...GEORGE WEIGEL Washington, D.C...
...The writer is president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights...
...Romero on repentance Re: Richard McBrien's "A Repenting Church" [November 19, 1999]: Archbishop Oscar Romero did not hesitate to admit sin and error on the part of the church...
...Dennis O'Brien ["Gay Marriage...
...JULIA SOTO FRAZER West Hollywood, Calif...
...If that is the case, intermarriage rates for married Catholics do not give the whole picture...
...Barbara argues for moral action as the only choice, though quite possibly a futile one: "'All there is in the end,' she said, ' i s - - i s - - simply--trying to keep one's hands clean--and it's difficult.'" Alex counters with a moral doctrine of relatedness, whatever the cost: The best thing we can hope for in life is to connect, really connect, to another soul, he says...
...He says this while acknowledging that the "common benefits" provision of the Vermont Constitution, upon which the ruling was based, says absolutely nothing about marriage or sexuality...
...O'Brien's position that domestic partnership is the better vehicle is, however, nothing more than his preference...
...His clients, mainly undergraduates, came On-line discussion group II Commonweal will be sponsoring an e-mail discussion group from February 15 until July 1, 2000...
...JAMES FINN New York, N.Y...
...I tried to start the annulment process at my previous parish...
...Heterosexual marriage connects the couple to humanity's longest saga, connects to the family from which every homosexual emerges but to which he does not finally return, connects back to the ultimate fecundity of nature...heterosexuality expresses a wonderment, a tension in difference, that eludes or transcends the simple gaiety of sex...
...Much later, in Australia, homesick and still despairingly in love with Alex, Barbara remarks to a friend on the casual use of the phrase, "Oh, God...
...I mean, of course, the idiom itself...
...When Protestant or Orthodox young people marry Catholic young people the intraChristian dialogue is advanced at a fundamental level, helping the cause being discussed at higher levels of church leadership...
...For example, only about 30 percent of men and women in their sixties intermarried...
...Barbara nails him here...
...The stairway to paradise does not incline straight up, but dips and shifts, making crazy and unpredicted turns...
...The writer is professor of economics at DePaul University...
...In France, a variety of domestic partnerships are recognized by civil law including the domestic partnership of a priest and his housekeeper...
...Submissions must be original work, not previously published, accessible to professional pastoral ministers, lay and ordained, provide new insight or synthesis of a pressing pastoral issue, and contribute to the ongoing theological reflection of pastoral ministers...
...I have also found that, even though collegeage, marrying Catholics do have reservations about certain church teachings and practices, they still consider themselves Catholic and will choose to marry in the church as long as they are treated with common respect...
...There are no tidy endings here...
...The word, indeed, becomes flesh...
...God may deliver us," Barbara says to Alex, adding, "There's no one else who can help us here...
...In "Just the Facts, Man," Andrew Greeley uses data from the National Opinion Research Center's "General Social Survey" (GSS...
...For those who worship, the antagonisms evaporate that once made Catholic-Protestant relations less than friendly...
...Having stripped his argument of any principled defense of marriage as it has been understood by all the world religions from time immemorial--O'Brien now wants to stop short of aligning himself with advocates for gay marriage...
...All choices in a moral universe are related...
...The author replies: I have written at length in Commonweal rejecting "gay marriage...
...We have not started the process yet because I am in the middle of an annulment...
...I can also report that many of them have become active worshiping members of the parish...
...He urges Barbara not to reject the possibility of such a heavenly union "for the sake of a mere scruple...
...From the editors: Correction noted...
...The Catholic church is now in dialogue with the Orthodox churches and with various Protestant denominations because there are essential doctrines they share...
...Not our fault...
...Or, as Andrew says, "We're all just stumbling around in the dark...
...Entries are due by May 1, 2000...
...I understand my Jewish friend's concern better than I understand Davidson's...
...In the days of John Milton, Thomas Hobson was a coach driver between Cambridge and a London inn...
...Apart from the filioque, we believe the same Nicene and Apostles' Creeds...
...A close Jewish friend has a like concern, calling the marriage of Jews to Christians a "loving holocaust...
...The connection cannot be real, she declares, as long as the scruple exists...
...ROBERT J. MILLER, O.P...
...to realize Hobson would insist that they would accept the mount nearest the door, which they came to label Hobson's choice...
...I am a young thirty-something practicing Catholic engaged to be married to a young thirty-something lapsed Catholic...
...Romero & the pope Father John Jay Hughes, who, the editors underline, is a "church historian," charges me with a lack of candor in treating Pope John Paul II's response to the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in my book Witness to Hope [see Correspondence, November 19, 1999...
...WILLIAM A. DONOHUE New York, N.Y...
...Box 7500, Collegeville, MN 56321-7500 Phone:1 -800-858-5450e, xt...
...For Catholics forty-five to sixty-four, the rate is even higher--almost one in three...
...It meant, for them, no choice...
...Some of the best theologians of our time--Ki~ng, Schillebeeckx, Guti6rrez--are easier to read than many of their lesser counterparts...
...Greeley's point regarding clergy not making younger Catholics feel welcome is, in my experience, right on the money...
...A note about the idiom's genesis, its original and still useful meaning, may help to restore this much battered expression to its former high status...
...There, I explore Archbishop Romero's role in the murderously tangled situation in E1 Salvador in the late 1970s, drawing on, among other sources, Teresa Whitfield's Paying the Price: Ignacio Ellacuria and the Murdered Jesuits of El Salvador, a lengthy interview with the Roman postulator of Romero's beatification cause, and some documentation from the Congregation for the Causes of Saints which I imagine Hughes has not had the opportunity to examine...
...For "Hobson's choice" does not mean a choice between Scylla and Charybdis, nor for the lesser of two evils, nor--as your editorial seems to imply--between Hillary Clinton and Rudolph Giuliani...
...Keep it light...
...If an adjustment is made for the respondent and/or spouse converting to Catholicism at the time of marriage, the intermarriage rate is much lower--about one in three marriages...
...THE EDITORS monweal printed more like it...
...Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill is co-author with Joseph Papp of Shakespeare Alive...
...One of the problems with GSS is that it does not include information on the religion of previous spouses...
...Paul Baumann's "Crossing the Threshhold" [December 3, 1999] on George Weigel's biography of the pope was a howl...
...Not welcome I read with interest Andrew Greeley's article on Catholics marrying Catholics...
...Unfortunately, some don't worship at all...
...The 1998 GSS indicates that one in four of every married respondents with a Catholic upbringing ages twenty-five to forty-four are currently divorced or separated...
...Awaking from a sleep during which he has seen the angels of God ascending and descending on a ladder, and has received God's blessing and promise, Jacob said, "Surely the Lord is in this place and I knew it not...
...I gave this man a year and then left for warmer climates...
...He also kept what is generally believed to be the first livery stable in England...
...The only reservations I could detect came from certain folk from our side who had concern about one of our children marrying a Catholic...
...I quote the last paragraph of my article of January 28,1994" "Heterosexual marriage as a cultural institution (not necessarily in its obvious historical flaws and failures) has a special, larger-than-life meaning that cannot be captured even by loving, stable homosexual couples...
...From the trenches Andrew Greeley's observations regarding why Catholics still marry Catholics ["Just the Facts, Man," December 17, 1999] affirm what I have experienced over the past dozen years of ministry (five of those as pastor of a Newman Center parish): Well over half the young couples whose marriage I witness are Catholic/Catholic...
...When young people sense the congruence of the traditions in which they were reared, and REVIEW Prize in Theological Reflection Encouraging New Ideas, New Voices, and Skillful Ministry This prize honors the best new article in theology on pastoral ministry...
...I mentioned Milton with intention, for on the death of Thomas Hobson in 1631, Milton wrote a sonnet usually tiffed "On the University Carrier...
...But too many halfpage sentences in theology tomes use complication to mask tangled thinking...
...In this deftly-written and delightful novel, God lurks just out of sight...
...For one example, in a homily preached on December 31, 1978, he spoke of "certain economic interests, which the church, lamentably, served," that this was "a sin of the church, deceiving and not telling the truth when it should have...
...The winner will be announced September 15, 2000...
...ORRESPONDENCI (Continued from page 4) and/or spouse changed religion in conjunction with marriage...
...REV...
...We can't possibly know what we're doing...it's the way we're designed, basically...
...The priest who officiated at the wedding welcomed me equally as a co-celebrant...
...Therefore, if there is any choice for the person who would like to make a choice it is not Hobson's choice...
...The big picture I appreciate the concern James Davidson and others have about Catholics marrying outside of the Catholic church [see "Outside the Church," September 10, 1999...
...May I direct historian Hughes's attention to the discussion of these issues on pages 451-452 of the book, with special reference to endnote 38 on pages 906-907...
...Certainly, a writer can be difficult to read because his thought is elaborate and his language reflects an underlying complexity, as was the case with Rahner...
...All submitted articles should focus on some aspect of pastoral ministry relevant to the audience of New Theology Review...
...but it is sinful and it needs conversion, because we make it up---humans tending toward evil and at times perhaps with a past that shames us...
...I can only respond that this is my faith...
...Essays should be no longer than 4,000 words in length and written according to the style sheet of the New Theology Review...
...I rush--metaphorically speaking--to the defense of, indeed, the restoration of "Hobson's choice" [Editorial, January 14, 2000...
...My new priest once asked why I keep returning to the church...
...Each year the winning essay is published in New Theology Review and, along with the award, the author receives $2000...
...Our own dear daughter, Hillary, was married to Harry, a fellow from a strong Irish/Italian Catholic heritage...
...PERRY KAVOOKJIAN Fresno, Calif...
...my calls were never returned and my approaches to the monsignor strangely rebuffed...
...2223 Commonweal 3 7 February 11, 2000...
...It provides information on the religion of previous spouses and whether the respondent (Continued on page 37) Commonweal 4 February 11, 2000 life is, in Alex's words, "an irredeemably irrational construct...
...Presumably they would not want that to be labeled a "marriage...
...DENNIS O'BRIEN Hobson's choice...
...For Barbara, metaphor becomes reality, just as in her relationship with Alex the phrase "with my body I thee worship" was transformed from a dry phrase written by a Tudor clergyman to the ultimate expression of love and connection between two people...
...Research by Professor Gary Becket at the University of Chicago indicates that divorce rates are higher for those who intermarry...
...Historians, as I understand the term in its contemporary usage, ought not to propagate myths...
...My new parish has been most helpful and I'm keeping my fingers crossed...
...In the evil days that have fallen upon us, when even our language has come under heavy assault, when even the most innocent and useful expression may be subjected to abuse and degradation, we cannot stand idly by and not come to the defense of a very useful idiom...
...Until more understand that graceful sentences can be instruments of grace, American Catholic theologians and church historians will continue to have little impact in the pews...
...And the church is lucky they do that...
...in the January 14, 2000 issue is Valerie Schultz...
Vol. 127 • February 2000 • No. 3
