Correspondence: Saint Augustine, 'Will & Grace,' and 'Ground Zero'
CORRESPONDENCE To the Editors Sex & friendship Regarding M. Cathleen Kaveny's "Friendship & Desire" (September 27), reflecting on the TV series Will & Grace: Were it not for Will's homosexuality,...
...ELIZABETH G. JOHNSTON New Haven, Conn...
...Heroism, if it exists at all, exists only in the acts of men and women doing the job set before them...
...DAVID KUBIAK Crawfordsville, Ind...
...Caped crusader It might interest Fr...
...The engineers headed by Burton and Holden were not the antiheroes of the September 11 story, as Steinfels states, but the heroes...
...They should listen to all, wait for the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and do what needs to be done...
...peter j. riga Houston, Tex...
...A group of curial cardinals later approached Pope John XXIII, telling him that they felt their dignity had been abridged in 1952 along with their trains, and asked permission to revert to the older form...
...Blessed Pope John, so badly and consistently misunderstood by historians of the church, was happy to comply, adding: "Un po' di vanita fa bene alla Chiesa" ["A little bit of vanity is good for the church...
...Bish-(Continued on page 4) CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 2) ops' wives pale in comparison...
...Steinfels collapses the police and firefighters into one group, set against the engineers and technical experts she chooses to label antiheroes, whereas it is clear from Langewiesche's account and news accounts from the time that the main conflict was between the police and firefighters, mainly over the belief that the latter were solicitous only over the recovery of their fellow firefighters...
...Grantly...
...Missing the point Margaret O'Brien Steinfels's comments ("Honoring the Dead," September 13) on William Langwiesche's three-part essay in the Atlantic Monthly ("American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center") seem to miss the point...
...SNAP corrections Grant Gallicho's "Voices of the Faithful" (August 16) contains a couple of errors that have been hurtful to our organization...
...It's a very curious thing that the cappa magna escaped being suppressed altogether in the 1969 edict Ut sive sol-licite, in which so many items of prelatial vesture were consigned to the dustbin...
...Friendship between men and women, the norm for me, is something of a novelty for my husband, one that Augustine, a fellow African man, might or might not be as willing to explore if he were alive today...
...Slope, and the bishop's archdeacon, Dr...
...There is nothing infallible about their moral conclusion-they agree with the Vatican on this issue-but this view is one of a moral dimension derived from their moral authority as bishops in the Catholic Church...
...The author replies: Arthur Austin began his address by telling the audience that he would explain why SNAP members were protesting outside the Haynes Convention Center...
...The length of the cappa's train was shortened in that year, and the train of the prelatial choir cassock abolished altogether...
...SNAP leaders Phil Saviano and Barbara Blaine also spoke...
...The thirty-foot train remains to this day as a legislated option for any prelate with the right to wear it...
...By the way: if we are using fiction as evidence, we surely must consider Loretta Young and Whitney Houston (in the remake) who as movie wives certainly used their influence to get their bishop-husbands to do the right and necessary things...
...I apologize for the error...
...Some bishops are vain, timid, silly, incompetent, and proud men...
...As for 911, it is a poetic metaphor that compares a public event to personal distress and evokes the palpitations we felt watching the news...
...Susan Renehan was identified in the story as a member (not a leader) of SNAP...
...We all have the capacity to be heroic by completing the tasks that are set before us-and we all have the capacity to fall way short-even the day after our most heroic moment...
...DAVID clohessy Saint Louis, Mo...
...Langwiesche's account also notes what Steinfels does not: the prevalence of serious looting among all three groups, with hostility toward the firefighters being so great that the uncovering of a fire truck loaded with looted garments was greeted with raucous and scornful laughter by police and construction crews on the scene...
...Parsing strange Regarding Tim Townsend's "Watch Your Language" (September 13): Is it disrespectful to say WWII or D-Day...
...Arthur Austin is not a SNAP member and has never been...
...Just say 'no' The conclusion of Bishop Wilton Gregory's September 16 letter to President George W. Bush is that any unilateral invasion of Iraq by the United States would be disastrous, illegal, and unjust (editorial, October 7...
...Church history contains corruption and corruptibility on the part of some bishops...
...I therefore took him to be a member...
...Wives (one or more) are useful to African men, necessary for carrying on the all-important institution, the family, whereas friends from school and age-mates from that extended family are the bonds that will sustain throughout life...
...The fictional Bishop Proudie is a vain, timid, silly, incompetent, and need it be said, proud man...
...peter j. riga Houston, Tex.e this coming war...
...Historic events-yes, that is the correct term-are remembered in many ways: by the names of buildings (the Alamo), places (Pearl Harbor), and dates (the Fourth of July...
...As president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Gregory speaks on behalf of the U.S...
...But it does remain, for use "on very solemn occasions outside Rome...
...I think Tim Townsend is "just parsing words...
...The task that was set before the engineers and other technicians was a fraction as demanding as that of the passengers on Flight 93, but like those passengers, they got their job done...
...In my reading, such corruption is the result of two factors...
...Contrary to Steinfels's review, in this there is no difference between firefighters and engineers...
...Holden and Burton stepped in from their obscure office and got the job done, as Steinfels notes, without further loss of life...
...A contrasting view of heroism is one that seems implied in Steinfels's review-that "hero" is a status that one is indefinitely imbued with...
...He is vulnerable to the influence of everybody...
...We have used those abbreviations since I was a schoolgirl in the 1950s...
...KATHERINE ELLIS New York, N.Y...
...Pearl Harbor was a "day of infamy" whose date few now remember, but calling this event September 11 will honor it like no other date in American history, except July 4. For the millions of Americans who were at work that morning and saw the World Trade Center fall not on television but on their computer screens, the figures 9/11 are burnished in memory along side the images of the buildings...
...Undue episcopal influence cannot be reserved to episcopal spouses...
...If a Catholic comes to the same conclusion in conscience with his Catholic bishops, he or she must oppose this coming war...
...The writer is national director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP...
...CORRESPONDENCE To the Editors Sex & friendship Regarding M. Cathleen Kaveny's "Friendship & Desire" (September 27), reflecting on the TV series Will & Grace: Were it not for Will's homosexuality, I think that the belief to which Kaveny attributes the popularity of the show would also play well in other parts of the world...
...Willard Jabusch ("Lord of the Ring," September 27) to know that had he been Cardinal Samuel Stritch's trainbearer before 1952, he would have had thirty feet of watered silk to deal with...
...And some such bishops are all too open to undue and bad influence by emperors, kings, mistresses, assorted family members, popes, the curia, secretaries, and advisors, and more recently, lawyers and psychiatrists...
...GRANT GALLICHO Bishops & wives Regarding J. Thomas Meyer's letter in the September 27 Correspondence column: Surely anyone who has read Trollope's Barchester chronicles would also find that the machinations of Bishop Proudie's wife are deliriously matched by the machinations of the bishop's chaplain, Mr...
...Susan Renehan is a SNAP member (not a leader), but made it clear she was speaking only for herself...
...bishops...
...Without identifying the other SNAP members who spoke, I wrote that their presentations were "moving, honest, and brief...
...My husband is Nigerian, so I spend quite a bit of time in Africa, where even as marriage moves away from its former polygamous model, it is not the emotional "peak experience" it is seen to be here in the United States...
...STEPHEN JOHNSON Baltimore, Md...
...Celibate or not, bishops need to be prayerful pastors, decisive leaders...
...There is an interesting historical footnote to this...
...The tenor and content of their remarks were radically different from Austin's and Renehan's...
...Langewiesche's article describes the dark side of the rescue effort: the conflict that developed between the three groupings at the site...
...Women, too, spend more time with one another than with their husbands, and polygamy, though no longer economically viable, was supposed to involve older wives becoming the friends and household managers of their husbands as younger wives enjoyed the "discretionary capital" that produced children...
...BARBARA CORTESE El Cerrito, Calif...
...Although the thought of a bishop wearing it while the congregation is singing "Gather Us In" does rather boggle the mind...
Vol. 129 • October 2002 • No. 18
