Cardinals, spies, historians
CORRESPONDENCE To the Editors A merry man Your editorial "All Dressed Up" (March 23), about the recent consistory in Rome, characterizes New York's Cardinal Edward M. Egan quite...
...The superior shrugged and said, "It's the fourth quarter that really counts...
...Style...
...I am referring to Sister Mary Carita Pendergast whose "At Bayonet Point," February 23, spotlights her ministry in China...
...Perhaps...
...Its theme document is Lumen gentium...
...Image' maker Congratulations on the March 9 issue of Commonweal...
...Be that as it may, Hitchcock's cautionary words about misreadings of introductory phrases make his subsequent comment about Lumen gentium all the more remarkable...
...I also believe the Vatican chose not to denounce those ongoing crimes because it would have been useless and might have destroyed the church itself...
...The light is Christ James Hitchcock ["Version One," March 9] finds regrettable a "misunderstanding" of Gaudium et spes that has been partly the result of undue emphasis on the opening words used as its title...
...It is a positive antidote to some of the problems many of us face in trying to live in this society...
...At Vatican I, there were about eight hundred bishops from the whole world, but they were almost all Europeans...
...paul baumann An inspiration As general superior of the Sisters of Charity of Saint Elizabeth, Convent Station, New Jersey, I would like to recognize an amazing woman who has served in our community for seventy-six years...
...Image is an amazing magazine...
...The crowd enjoyed the humor and after the main course, Egan left the dais and worked the tables with obvious pleasure...
...I am sure that the editorial writer has not had the opportunity to experience such examples of the pastoral warmth and humor of New York's new cardinal archbishop...
...I can't imagine Digger Phelps, for one, not having a kind word of public farewell to say...
...Not to acknowledge this turn is to render the council insignificant...
...Strong forces are determined to keep the church European and clerical, but the Holy Spirit—who moved the council to become a new Pentecost— is still acting within the church...
...I think Hitchcock got the better of the debate, for he was the only one of the two to keep consistently in view the scandal of the church...
...He prefaced one of his talks with two stories...
...But something about him, probably his accent, his speaking style, and what I thought it said about his perspective on life and sports, appealed to me...
...The other, he said with a shrug, may or may not be...
...RITA K. HESSLEY Cincinnati, Ohio...
...One, he said, was true...
...It called for conversion from an old style of being church to a new Style...
...But then, can you name another mainline religion that is so roundly abused so often in public...
...Denver, Colo...
...But for O'Malley that would seem to be a compliment, not a sign of decadence...
...If Christ is the source of light, the church is authentically church only to the extent that it reflects that light...
...It was from the Gospel...
...New wineskins Thank you for the "dueling versions of Vatican II" by James Hitchcock and John O'Malley [March 9...
...This does not mean that the council renounced its prophetic mission...
...I tried to deal with a different, but no less difficult, subject: what "turn," if any, did the council take, even regarding certain "modern" phenomena...
...He has begun a monthly schedule of Masses: two Sundays in the cathedral and two Sundays out in a parish, where he offers two Masses, meets with the parishioners at a reception, and then has lunch with the clergy...
...But the words that follow the first two make it quite clear that it is Christ who is the light: "Lumen gentium cum sit Christus," which translates as "Since Christ is the light of nations...
...But featuring Phayer's book jacket on your cover, with its depiction of a cardinal and Nazi storm trooper equally oppressing a Jew is too harsh even in this mea culpa age when the sin of silence more than sixty years ago has taken on the meaning of active participation in the Holocaust...
...Was he silent because they had been warriors defending a hated and feared Communist government...
...At the Friendly Sons of Saint Patrick dinner, Egan prefaced his invocation by referring to his fellow cardinal, Jesuit Avery Dulles...
...For this reason (and therefore not for reasons of left/right ideological tensions in the church today...
...But if von Balthasar is correct (not to mention the Gospel of John), that will never happen...
...REV...
...As a theologian, I would also insist that Catholics must continue to expect the same scandaltaking in the future as well—the "stylistic" innovations of Vatican II notwithstanding...
...3S In other words, O'Malley's thesis is bound to bleach out, and eventually obliterate what is most distinctive about Jesus...
...Sounds paranoid...
...Delicately, too, it limns the denial of "a position of authority in the official structure of the church" to women...
...With ferocity, a rabbi gestured toward the camera and said, "We don't talk outside the family...
...The key chapter is the second one, "The People of God...
...Moreover, O'Malley's essay seems to suffer from internal contradictions...
...The author replies: I think Opus Dei is a baroque hothouse that is likely to attract people with a very low opinion of liberal democracy...
...I have no connection to Marquette and never knew McGuire other than through a television screen when he was coaching, and later as a commentator...
...However, I was careful not to suggest (Continued on page 4) 1 (Continued from page 2) that there existed any cause and effect relationship between Hanssen's membership in the organization and his alleged crimes...
...Baumann seems to be using the incident to suggest that Opus Dei is a baroque hothouse that attracts unhappy American Catholics and turns them into countercultural fascists and spies...
...Only then, and only by means of the Resurrection, could God validate Jesus' identity and affirm him as the one who was what he claimed to be (Acts 2:36...
...BILL FLAHERTY Winnetka, III...
...It shook up the American superior of Opus Dei who quickly announced that Robert Phillip Hanssen was a stingy financial contributor to "the Work...
...Hitchcock is off the mark in thinking that the pertinent topics are liberalism and conservatism in their political and sociological meanings...
...one does 17 not capture purity or wisdom by putting on the collar (witness the number of American Catholic religious figures who spoke out in favor of the Vietnam War), but the pope was never pro-Nazi...
...Information on Image can be found at www.imagejournal.org...
...Unmentioned, though, in the bountifulness of the occasion is the nagging and ominous worldwide decline in the number of Catholic priests...
...Oscar Wilde, by the way, seems to have survived fairly well for the past hundred years for not having any substance...
...Each story made its point, the second with a touch of Italian humor...
...Conspiracy theory Some months ago, C-Span broadcast a meeting between Israeli religious leaders and yeshiva students in Washington, D.C...
...But, he added, rattling off a few words in Italian and then translating them, "If it's not true, isn't it a shame...
...The council, for example, expresses the "substance" of collegiality in the language of reci16 procity, in language that forgoes threats of punishment for those who disagree with it...
...Hitchcock takes "modernity" as his point of reference and correctly points out how antiChristian and anti-Catholic it was in most of its manifestations...
...It seems a bit of a stretch to read into this statement some kind of monitum about modernity...
...At Vatican II, there were over two thousand bishops truly representative of the areas from which they came...
...Kansas City, Mo...
...It taught about the church...
...And to compound the confusion, he seems to be using the word "style" idiosyncratically...
...JOHN W. O'MALLEY, S.J...
...And what is most distinctive about Jesus is also what is most provocative, a provocation that is bound to continue in the life of Christ's followers...
...As the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner said in a recent essay, "The Philosophy-Science Continuum," in the Chronicle of Higher Education (March 9), "scientific analysis may explain what stylistic features attract or repel our attention in general...
...Both authors are also historians by training, and what struck me about both essays—for all their real differences— was their consistently historical frame of reference...
...REV...
...He displayed those latter two loves for all the world to see as proudly as anyone who ever wore a basketball uniform...
...That decree, he writes, is "itself 'triumphalistic' (the church as the light of the world...
...On behalf of the general council and our community, the Sisters of Charity of Saint Elizabeth, I would like to express our gratitude to Sister Mary Carita for her ongoing courage, compassion, and dedication...
...According to von Balthasar, Jesus in his lifetime made a claim to "absolute singularity" (not so much, perhaps, in his words as in his behavior and whole demeanor...
...As someone who plies his trade as a systematic theologian, and does so mostly from the perspective he learned from Hans Urs von Balthasar, I wonder if I might add a Christological point to the debate...
...I am particularly impressed with Greg Wolfe's "I Was a Teenage Conservative...
...I find that worrisome...
...Midway through the program, one young man asked about Israeli torture of Palestinian prisoners...
...The two are inextricably intertwined...
...BARBARA CONROY, S.C...
...Their experiences helped to shape the council's view of the church...
...We condemn Pius XII for his failure to protest while Jews were being gassed in concentration camps, yet we give him a free ride for his silence while more than 5 million Soviet POWs were systematically shot or starved to death by their German captors...
...Kudos to Commonweal for publishing her article...
...CORRESPONDENCE To the Editors A merry man Your editorial "All Dressed Up" (March 23), about the recent consistory in Rome, characterizes New York's Cardinal Edward M. Egan quite inaccurately as having "yet to convey much warmth or pastoral vision, let alone Christian mirth...
...In fact, the clear intent of the opening sentence is to emphasize the solidarity of Christians with their contemporaries: "Gaudium et spes, luctus et angor hominum huius temporis...gaudium sunt et spes, luctus et angor etiam Christi discipulorum," means "The joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the people of the present day are likewise the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of Christ's disciples...
...Karl Rahner observed that Vatican II was the church's first self-actualization as a catholic (universal) church...
...His argument concedes the point often made by art critics about Mannerism or literary critics about the aesthetes of the nineteenth century like Oscar Wilde or Walter Pater: "style over substance," they would complain...
...I think that the reality of their inseparability is consistently manifested in the documents of Vatican II...
...CHARLES E. MILLER, CM...
...Last January our relatively new archbishop began a series of meetings in each vicariate with the priests, deacons, religious, and parishioners...
...E. LEO MCMANUS Venice, Fla...
...Sister Carita has been a lifelong advocate of our "vision statement" and has been an inspiration to those who were fortunate enough to have crossed her path...
...Correction Gordon Marino's "Avoiding Moral Choices" [March 23] raised interesting questions about the increased emphasis on ethics committees and ethicists in health-care delivery...
...Making Pius XII the point man whose inaction augmented the Nazi ferocity is a ploy by a network of unconnected and interconnected interests who wouldn't be unhappy to see a diminished Catholic church...
...MSGR...
...The author creates a lengthy analysis of his own and is long into his article before he admits, "But that's all speculation...
...I have never interpreted it that way...
...If that seems to be a stretch of Baumann's intent, I hope he will realize how his article inspired it...
...HARRY J. BYRNE New York, N.Y...
...Last December, he gave a day of recollection at Dunwoodie Seminary for the priests of the archdiocese...
...Surely, I was just not tuned in when those who coached, played, or did commentary with McGuire spoke about his contributions, his wit and wisdom, and his faith and love for the church...
...COLLINS Newton, Pa...
...The topic was ecclesiology...
...We Commonweal Catholics have no such inhibitions, as your reviews of Michael Phayer's and Susan Zuccotti's books by Richard Cohen (March 9) show...
...EDWARD T. OAKES, S.J...
...We need that kind of dialogue to help penetrate the meaning of the most significant religious event of the twentieth century...
...I meant to show that the council took a significant turn, which is not to deny its even deeper continuity with the Catholic tradition...
...It is quite obvious that he enjoys this pastoral interaction with people, and they with him...
...Vatican II recognized the church as the universal people of God...
...As a historian, Hitchcock points out how that continued provocation has been verified in church history...
...A change in the understanding of the church necessitates a change in the liturgy, since the liturgy is "the outstanding means by which Catholics express in their lives and manifest to others the mystery of Christ and the real nature of the true church" (Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, 2...
...Too hot a house It was a venial jolly to read in the morning paper that a member of Opus Dei was caught as a spy in employ of the Russians...
...The author replies: The entire context of Lumen gentium is inescapably "papalist," including an affirmation of papal authority stronger, if possible, than even Vatican I. The "triumphalism" of Gaudium et spes is in the fact that the church expresses solidarity with the human race but in terms of the vital truth which humanity needs and which the church represents, james Hitchcock (Continued on page 35) 4 CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 4) More than style Congratulations are in order to Commonweal for embodying true dialogue (rather than just lamenting the lack of it) when it published "Dueling Versions of Vatican II" by James Hitchcock and John O'Malley, both of whom were forthright yet civil...
...O'Malley presents the matter concisely when he writes, "Vatican II was a doctrinal council...
...However, I was made uncomfortable by Paul Baumann's March 23 "Agent Hanssen," expanding on the little we know about Hanssen's motives, and the way Baumann relates Hanssen's religious and social views to spying...
...Convent Station, N.J...
...L.D...
...Now, that seems quite unlikely actually...
...Therefore, nothing the church can do will ever obviate, in any ultimate sense, the scandal and provocation represented in the person and death of Jesus (1 Corinthians 1:23...
...JULIAN IRIS Davis, Calif...
...For von Balthasar, this same drama continues in the career of the church, for the core theological reality of the church is to be the Body of Christ inside world history...
...Before Vatican II, the church was a European entity— made up of the pope, the bishops, and priests—to which the people belonged...
...Camarillo, Calif...
...Of course there were Catholic officials who favored the Nazis...
...For that reason, I cannot privilege substance over style...
...If I read O'Malley correctly, he seems to think that the more pastoral tone of the documents of Vatican II has somehow removed the main source of the neuralgic tension between gospel and world...
...Vatican II's documents—in comparison with almost all other official ecclesiastical documents, especially for the century and a half before the council—are strikingly conciliatory...
...If so, what are we to make of Pius's ignoring publicly the organized massacre of 3 million Poles in work camps or in their villages, a pogrom of Catholics that seems to have been erased from the history books outside of Poland...
...It is likely to fail in attempts to account for the individuality of the person, the individuality of the work of art, and, above all, the individuality of each person's experience of a work...
...The author replies: I appreciate Edward Oakes's criticism, but I think both he and James Hitchcock address different questions from the ones I did...
...Your publication continues to be a bright spot on the church horizon...
...I believe Pius XII was aware of the horrors happening in Europe during the war...
...While "joy and hope" sound "an optimistic note...the next few words ('grief and anguish') immediately recognize the negative side of modernity...
...In Rome, he observed, he had told the Jesuit superior that he himself had been exposed to Jesuit education and felt that he was three-quarters Jesuit...
...JOSEPH D. POLICANO Luquillo, Puerto Rico National champion Just a thank you to William Portier for his tribute ["Queen of Victory, Pray for Us," March 9] to the late Coach Al McGuire...
...ROSEMARY FLANIGAN, C.S.J...
...Portier's essay made me feel a whole lot better and think that probably a whole lot of people really did notice the coach's passing, and cared...
...The pope's refusal even to discuss the ordination of women, as well as the current limitation of married priests in the Latin rite to the exceptional trickle from a few other traditions of married clergy who wish to convert, seem to presage, in the midst of the pageantry, the worsening of a critical situation...
...Affirming papal authority in that context is a far cry from triumphalism...
...Though he has gone on "to the Big Dance" to meet his Queen of Victory face-to-face, I was sorry to hear he had died and I felt an inexplicable disappointment that no one in the TV sports world seemed to have noticed...
...Priestly crisis Your editorial "All Dressed Up" well describes the sartorial elegance and the Vatican's provident largesse in the February consistory of cardinals...
...This claim by its very nature had to represent a provocation, one that led to his death...
...My point is that you simply cannot have "style without substance...
...His discomfort tickled liberal Catholics who are always being criticized for our lack of moral rectitude...
...Romans 1:4...
...Only one thing marred the article: the date of Henry Beecher's "whistle-blowing article" in the New England Journal of Medicine was 1966, not 1996...
...When most Catholics hear "Vatican II," they think of changes in the liturgy, but Vatican II was a council by the church about the church...
Vol. 128 • April 2001 • No. 8
