Correspondence
THOMAS, DAVID M. & HAYES, MIKE & MARINO, JOHN A. & WOODWARD, KENNETH & PHAYER, RICHARD & DINNER, PAUL E. & SCHICK, JOSEPH & Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
Family values Commonweal is to be commended on publishing an in-depth study relating to the sexual-abuse crisis ("Catholics after the Scandal," November 19). The research conducted by James...
...True, Clinton and Ross blamed Arafat (they were unlikely to blame themselves...
...The church does not belong to any political party...
...Over the next several years, Bill and I had a wonderful friendship...
...But Ross's account suggests that there is plenty of blame to go around for that failure...
...KENNETH L. WOODWARD Briarcliff Manor, N.Y...
...Before he became a priest and member of the Oratory in Pittsburgh, Bill Clancy spent a year as religion editor of Newsweek, a venture he told me he did not much enjoy...
...She also asserts that "[Ehud] Barak's refusal to prepare another interim agreement, should his offer fail, signaled the demise of the peace process...
...European priests Eamon Duffy's essay on the de-Chris-tianization of Europe ("The Mass Bells of Maremma," November 5) rang true to me during a recent visit to see my daughter in Spain...
...The big question is how much damage has it done...
...Let me admit that, as a resigned and married priest, it's not possible for me to be objective...
...The strategy of framing abortion as a moral issue that outweighs all others, such as war, poverty, and the death penalty, did not emerge to defeat Kerry by mere coincidence...
...It is up to the greater Catholic community- from the lay parishioner to the archbishop-to make sure that a radical few don't hijack the church, as they did in this election...
...For a magazine that celebrated Joseph Lieberman's nomination four years ago, that is most unfortunate...
...My faith has led me to support leaders who promote programs that help the poor instead of the wealthy, who fight to protect the environment, and who believe in true social and economic equality for all people, locally and globally...
...Bad timing, ill-considered diplomatic maneuvers, and the failure of Barak, and Netanyahu before him, as well as Arafat, to meet the conditions of the Oslo agreement all contributed to the lack of trust and good-will necessary for any final settlement...
...Hijacking the election Regarding "Bush Redux" (November 19): The U.S...
...In fact, as Ethan Bronner's recent review in the New York Times Book Review makes clear, the Ross book puts almost all the blame on Arafat, with Ross concluding that "A comprehensive deal was not possible with Arafat...
...And as Arthur Gelb recalls in City Room, his memoir of his life at the New York Times, Cogley was hired by the Times to be religion editor, not simply to write about ideas...
...but Ross's minute-by-minute account implicitly acknowledges that Arafat was not solely responsible for the Camp David failure and the end of the Oslo Accords...
...The research conducted by James Davidson and Dean Hoge indicates that most Catholics have heard about the scandal...
...According to the New York Times, the White House began a highly organized campaign four years ago to reach out to conservative Catholics...
...Could Barak have stopped Sharon...
...The writer is associate director of Paulist Young Adult Ministries and managing editor of BustedHalo.com...
...MARGARET O'BRIEN STEINFELS...
...The failure of the 2000 Camp David talks was a tragedy...
...I was particularly taken by Wilfrid Sheed's sketch from memory of Jim O'Gara, John Cogley, Bill Clancy, and Jim Finn ("Christian Gentlemen...
...In fact, Oslo's acceptance of Arafat was intended by Israel to marginalize Hamas and have it disarmed...
...That is contradicted by Barak's November 2000 offer of an interim deal that would recognize a Palestinian state...
...their sense that their faith permeates each moment of their life...
...touches on the heart of the matter: "Perhaps it has something to do with the witness of family and friends...
...Arafat rejected that offer, as well as the December 2000 Clinton plan for a final status agreement...
...He could live with a process, but not with a conclusion...
...I noticed then, as I have in trips to Europe over the last fifteen years, the growing disconnect between the continent's rich Christian heritage and the faith of its inhabitants...
...Continued on page 4) (Continued from page 2) Friend & mentor In his remembrance of his colleagues at Commonweal, Wilfrid Sheed said that Bill Clancy was "our most spiritual" and that "his whiskey-jar chuckle won hearts right and left...
...He had his demons, as we all have, but the memory of Bill Clancy is something I will cherish...
...mike hayes New York, N.Y...
...To round things out, Sheed's successor at Commonweal, Richard Gilman, joined Newsweek as its theater critic in 1964, the year I arrived there as religion editor...
...For brevity, I mention only two of several examples...
...After decades of negative pieces, isn't it time for Commonweal to publish something remotely positive about Israel...
...My own reading of Davidson and Hoge's analysis: less than many might imagine...
...JOSEPH SCHICK Flushing, N.Y...
...I had never read Newsweek but I had read Commonweal and I figured if Newsweek was good enough for Gilman it would be good enough for me...
...We sometimes fly and we sometimes fall on our face...
...RICHARD PHAYER Hackensack, N.J...
...But neither did...
...My bet is that the family has once again helped to save the church...
...JOHN A. MARINO Bedford, N.Y...
...At one of Madrid's principal basilicas on the first Sunday of Advent, with the church relatively full of middle-aged and elderly worshipers, the liturgy of the Word was lead exclusively by the priest...
...He was a gentle friend and a sagacious mentor...
...John Cavadini's thoughtful analysis ("Many Truths...
...I quote Amos Oz writing in a recent New York Review of Books Quly 15,2004): "Hamas first came into being as a social-welfare organization in the Gaza Strip in 1970 with the tacit support of the then military commander Ariel Sharon...
...The writer is codirector of the Bethany Family Institute...
...Stein-fels repeatedly gets history wrong...
...Unfortunately, the diversity of ideas usually found in Commonweal does not appear when the subject is Israel...
...No one could have been less pretentious, less interested in his own standing in the church...
...I was excited, if a bit nervous, to meet one of my old heroes...
...I think that young Catholics are forming a new age of Catholicism-one that merges the church's best contemplative traditions with the communal spirit of Vatican II...
...Jesus mentioned something like this around the dinner table that he shared at the end with his friends...
...One question worth further investigation is how the church has been able to survive this terrible hit...
...Hamas was ostensibly unpolitical at the time, concentrating on education and social welfare...
...There was no reason to be anxious...
...I was a Benedictine seminarian in Kansas in the late 1950s, very much in tune with Commonweal and those like Clancy who were trying to bring a breath of fresh air to the church...
...In the end, the church will survive, no, it will flourish because of the love that is among us...
...Can't a Catholic magazine that examines Pope Pius's conduct during the Holocaust and Catholic relations with Jews also take a serious look at both sides of the Middle East conflict...
...Could Arafat have stopped the outbreak of violence...
...But as a parent, I desperately want my daughter's generation to weather the crisis of de- Christ-ianization...
...PAUL E. DINTER Cortlandt Manor, N.Y...
...But we're not off the hook...
...The new faithful Cathleen Kaveny makes some excellent points in her article "Young Catholics" (November 19...
...There's work to be done...
...They knew that abortion was the key to eliminating any Democrat from the competition...
...their need for some certainty in an ambiguous world...
...Did Israel encourage Hamas as a means of thwarting Arafat...
...their belief in a strong welcoming faith community...
...Yet over and over again, I encounter priests (whose principal role is to interpret and pass on our tradition at the liturgy) unable to connect the past to the present imaginatively...
...Catholic hierarchy is laying the groundwork for its own demise by allowing a handful of bishops to alienate faithful Catholics, suffocate Catholic candidates who would advance a broad spectrum of Catholic social values, and most troubling of all, manipulate and distort the church's teaching according to a shrewdly devised political strategy...
...Sharon expected it to counter the growing influence of Arafat's PLO...
...I will get to that, but let me respond first to his criticisms of the review...
...I would urge Schick to actually read Ross's The Missing Peace, which does convey the infinitely complex and wholly tragic nature of the Israeli-Palestinian embrace of death...
...I would only note two minor details...
...In my opinion, the clergy are a key reason for this divide...
...That the opposing candidate would turn out to be Catholic, giving Team Bush the opportunity to twist Kerry's own faith against him, was just an ironic bonus that they exploited to full effect...
...Archbishop Raymond Burke told the St...
...The latest example is Margaret O'Brien Steinfels's review of three books about Israel ("What a Mess," November 5...
...The reviewer replies: Joseph Schick's basic complaint- Commonweal is negative toward Israel-is extraneous to my review...
...Does Arafat bear the primary responsibility...
...Steinfels's review of Dennis Ross's book suggests that Ross-Clinton's chief negotiator in the Middle East- assigns equal blame to Israel and the Palestinians for the failure of peace efforts...
...But then, his accusation of bias in Commonweal's stance toward Israel suggests that he sees what he wants to see, and not necessarily the facts of the matter...
...Glory days Your eightieth anniversary issue (November 5) was indeed special...
...This is not to say that Catholics could only have supported Kerry, or any Democrat...
...The obliviousness of such priests to the people-centered-ness of the liturgical reforms of more than a generation ago has become their surest legacy to what Duffy calls the church's uncertain future...
...It certainly won mine...
...Louis Post-Dispatch that while in theory there could be issues that outweighed abortion, he found it "difficult to imagine" what those issues could be...
...The church is a community of ordinary people...
...Commonweal' & Israel An observant Jew, I enjoy the broad range of ideas offered by Commonweal, which I find to be an excellent read for religious people of all faiths...
...Steinfels writes that in the 1990s, after Oslo, "Hamas, with Israeli encouragement, grew as Arafat's homegrown opposition and today it is a major source of terrorism...
...Several years later, I learned that Clancy would be coming to the Oxford college where I would be studying...
...I think that, some years later, it was another Commonweal editor, John Leo, who was hired to write about ideas...
...The "whiskey-jar chuckle" was there, but there was also much more...
...david m. thomas Highlands Ranch, Colo...
...As a practicing Catholic, I can imagine a few...
...Steinfels wonders whether "Ross was Likudized," ignoring the contempt of Ross by Likud members, who saw his support for Israeli withdrawal from 96 percent of the West Bank and the division of Jerusalem as anathema and a betrayal...
...I also believe that starting a preemptive war that cannot be justified in any way by Catholic guidelines is worth serious moral consideration...
...Steinfels questions whether Ross can be "an honest broker" given that he is Jewish and believes Israel must be secure...
...The writer is the former chairman of the New York State Democratic Party...
...That said, I think that all Catholics can learn from the spiritual longings of young adults: their stillness and quiet contemplation during the liturgy...
...She rightly notes that young conservative Catholics need to dispense with their rigidness and young liberal Catholics need to see the wisdom in church tradition...
...Bingo...
...he was the one who said no...
...Does Barak's November 2000 offer refute Ross's view, and not my mere assertion, that the demise of the peace process followed Barak's unwillingness to prepare another interim agreement...
...Probably yes to both...
...By November, it was too late: Ariel Sharon's provocative September 28 "walk" on the Temple Mount with Israeli police was followed almost immediately by the outbreak of the second Intifada, which continues to this day...
...Standing at the lectern, he shouted the scriptural passages in the same monotone that he used both to read from the prepackaged notes introducing the readings and to lead the mumbling congregation in the respon-sorial psalm...
...While the final status talks were going on in the summer of 2000, Barak had no fallback position, at least in Ross's telling...
Vol. 131 • December 2004 • No. 22
