Abigail Q. McCarthy, 1915-2001
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
Abigail McCarthy, 1915-2001 Abigail Quigley McCarthy died on February 1 at her home in Washington, D.C. She was eighty-five. Mrs. McCarthy wrote a column in these pages from 1974 to 1999. She had...
...It's exciting to read something like Johnson's refreshing insights...
...It was during the first Bush administration (probably 1990), when I first walked into her apartment building and along the broad, carpeted hall leading to her door (the hall would have done Windsor Castle proud...
...She had been scheduled to offer a comment on James O'Toole's "Empty Confessionals" in this issue...
...and their partnership in Washington, D.C., at the center of the nation's political life...
...Impeccably dressed and coifed, McCarthy sailed right into the classroom and started a conversation that revealed what she surely knew, that beneath the de rigueur punk fashion, these were Minnesota farm girls...
...MOST REV...
...Prescott Bush, George H. W.'s mother, George W.'s grandmother, and wife of Senator Prescott Bush...
...The entire issue of human sexuality and the gospel tradition is, it seems to me, not so much a matter of church versus individual conscience...
...No red hat Luke Timothy Johnson's incisive critique of John Paul II's pronouncements on love, sex, and pleasure should be studied and openly discussed in every Catholi college and Newman Club in the nation—together with Paul Baumann's humorous reflections on George Weigel's biography of our pope ("Crossing the Threshold," December 3, 1999...
...How long can we afford to lose this critically important segment of the Catholic church in favor of a moral theology of sexuality that appears so rigid and static...
...Rather, it is about the church learning from the lived wisdom of her members and having the courage to (here is that word...
...incorporate it...
...Her column (August 15,1997) discusses the group's decision to support only prochoice women for office...
...REV...
...Each time we gather at the Lord's table, I see in his eyes, lo these many years later, the struggling wisdom that is so evident in Johnson's words...
...What I would like to bring with me is a sense of the past, its continuity in the present, and a sense of identity stemming from the past which enables each one of us to withstand the assault of change...
...Margaret O'Brien Steinfels 7 (Continued from page 4) Lived wisdom Luke Timothy Johnson's persuasive article on John Paul II's theology of the body is perhaps the finest article of its kind I have read in forty years...
...The documents issuing from Rome and diocesan offices come across as totally abstract and divorced from real life...
...As a teacher, mother, and wife of U.S...
...These might be considered the qualities of a well-brought-up, old-fashioned lady, except that the propriety included a spirit of unflappability that marked her as a public woman...
...To be sure, Luke Timothy Johnson will not be joining Avery Dulles at the next consistory...
...But I do not wish to have crossed this barrier having brought nothing from the other side, as have so many older people in a kind of headlong rush to join the young...
...The writer is Metropolitan Archbishop of the Orthodox Catholic Church of America...
...What she declined to mention was her own role in the early days of Emily's List and her withdrawal when it became clear that no prolife women candidates would be funded...
...Through it I crossed the barrier into the world of my children and of all the young people to whom this world really belongs...
...That form of Catholic practice is diminished by her passing...
...But, alas, people like him who try to introduce fresh ways of looking at such questions, while preserving the deep values of our faith, often find the welcome mat snatched out from under 23 them...
...Most of them have long ago put aside church teaching on birth control...
...We served together on an advisory committee to the president of Saint Catherine's College in Saint Paul, Minnesota (of which McCarthy was an alumna and a great supporter...
...She believed in conversation, she practiced it, and anyone who happened by was immediately drawn in...
...The traditional women's organizations drew her support, as did those founded for newer purposes...
...24...
...I must admit, sadly, that in my thirty-six years as a priest, most married persons—and those to be married—with whom I have spoken feel that the church doesn't really address the complex problems couples face today...
...Oh well...
...McCarthy's willingness to withdraw for a principled reason and her refusal to make an issue of it is typical of the sharp and disciplined intelligence she brought to matters both political and religious...
...She argued that women's colleges gave special opportunities, lacking in coed settings, for women's leadership...
...In that sense, Abigail McCarthy was perhaps old-fashioned—a Catholic from the Midwest, she is among a dwindling breed of women who knew and embraced their faith, respected church authority, and spoke their minds, nonetheless...
...When it became clear that, instead of her husband, Vice President Hubert Humphrey would gain the nomination, McCarthy writes, "I began to live out the role for which I had been preparing the last month...
...In my congregation there is a man who left his position as an active priest in the wake of Paul VI's Humanae vitae...
...McCarthy found this "not awfully bold at the end of the twentieth century, but heartening...
...She completes her memoir with this reflection: "Despite the fact that the campaign brought almost unbearable emotional strain and disaster to our family, I cannot wish that the campaign did not happen...
...This was offered neither in anger nor protest...
...On different planets Luke Timothy Johnson's critique of Pope John Paul II's reflections on sexuality was the most theologically cogent and pastorally persuasive commentary I've read in years about Catholic sexual teaching...
...When Senator Eugene McCarthy took up the dark-horse challenge of the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination in the midst of the protests over Vietnam, she met the challenge with him...
...One wonders in what spatial reality their authors live...
...I found Mrs...
...After the extended political analysis, it was simply the logical conclusion of the discussion...
...Both of these Commonweal articles are priceless and full of wisdom from men who have actually "been there and done that...
...The importance of Catholic women's colleges was one of the recurrent themes in McCarthy's Commonweal columns...
...6 The hour's conversation ranged over a number of political persons and topics, culminating in the statement, "Peggy, never trust a man...
...This was what I had been trained to do, not only by the demands of political life but by my heritage—from those daughters of the pioneers, my grandmother, my aunts, my mother—to face disaster with as much dignity as possible, to affirm whatever was positive...
...Perhaps most dramatically she did so after she and her husband separated in 1969, and she made a life of her own as writer, columnist, and public leader...
...Bush—that is, Mrs...
...Have they ever had any firsthand, practical experience with marriage...
...she had many opportunities to put her own education and leadership to work...
...E. BRIAN CARSTEN Angola, Ind...
...She wrote in Commonweal of Emily's List, established to finance women's campaigns for national office...
...ocktail hour at Abigail McCarthy's Connecticut Avenue apartment was quite a treat, not because of the liquid refreshment, but because of the hostess herself...
...In her 1972 memoir, Private Faces/Public Places (Doubleday), she tells the story of the extended Quigley-McCarthy courtship in Mandan, North Dakota...
...Is anybody listening to them...
...May she rest in peace...
...Through our intermittent encounters and phone calls, I came to admire McCarthy's sense of form and propriety leavened with a sharp wit...
...When the request was denied by the Vatican because of its potentially deleterious effects on other cultures, McCarthy reflected: "Never mind that it is pretty hard to think of a late-twentieth-century culture (outside of the ayatollah's) where representatives of the majority of the baptized serving in the sanctuary or pulpit would be too unsettling" (December 4,1987...
...She was an independent thinker...
...a happy marriage in Saint Paul, Minnesota...
...GEORGE R. FITZGERALD, C.S.P...
...ANDREW GALLIGAN Tracy, Calif...
...She praised their past achievements in providing Catholic women, like herself, solid and serious education, and applauded their current spirit of adaptation, focusing on educating women of all ages and races who might otherwise be left out...
...I see the world now as they see it...
...Of course, both will be decried by those who believe Catholics should all walk in lock step with any current papal teaching, especially in matters of sexual ethics...
...McCarthy and her friend newspaperwoman Mary McGrory in a discussion about that wonderful woman, Mrs...
...During one visit, we were ushered into a theology class peopled by young women decked out in black punk garb set off by neon hair, nose rings, and the inevitable surfeit of earrings...
...At the 1987 Synod on the Laity, Archbishop Rembert Weakland requested that women be allowed to serve in nonordained ministries...
...Maybe that's why there is such massive apostacy among young people of marrying age, as well as so many who are married...
...Vail, Colo...
...I feel a sense of surprise that it is so easy to lay aside what once were rocklike basic assumptions as I look at injustice in the fierce light of their outrage...
...And so she went on for the next three decades...
...Efforts to open the public world to women were both the story of her life and the achievement of her life...
...The tone of regret and restraint expressed in both her political and religious commentary are fast disappearing from world and church...
...Senator and 1968 presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn...
...There is in that sentence and many others in the book, the straightforward and poignant memories of a woman who knew herself and where she came from...
Vol. 128 • February 2001 • No. 4
