Correspondence
Correspondence MONUMENTAL THOUGHTS CONGRATULATIONS for publishing Catesby Leigh's "Our Monuments, Our Selves" (March 5). It's no secret that The Weekly Standard is based upon certain intellectual...
...By taking the older monuments seriously, not merely as historical relics, but as guides to living artists, Leigh has shown us the way back to an art and a politics that are in sync...
...The twin theories, of art and of politics, were inseparable for centuries...
...Certainly not the death of a man who lived a decent life, harmed no one, and brought pleasure to millions who enjoy auto racing...
...LINDA OLIVER Bolivar, TN DE MORTUIS NIL . . . EACH WEEK, I look forward to reading the parody...
...The agenda is the papacy and Church doctrinal, moral, and sacramental teaching, as well as traditional Church practices...
...I have always felt shame about the Catholic Church's past (the Inquisition, Galileo, etc...
...ROBERT IP LOCKWOOD New York, NY DAVID DALIN'S defense of Pius XII is the best I have read...
...He hit the nail right on the head...
...THERESA MUDGETT Plymouth, PA I WISH TO THANK YOU for publishing David Dalin's article on Pius XII...
...But sometime in the 19th century (with the deaths of Ingres and Delacroix), the theory of classical art was abandoned in favor of modernism...
...With the support of The Weekly Standard, perhaps he will...
...It so happens that the ancient world gave us a theory of art that was also much concerned with the concept of nature...
...Capitol, for example, were manifestations of an art and a politics that were complementary...
...A predecessor of Leigh, Henry Reed, made the same observations back in 1959 in The Golden City...
...The attacks on Pius from these books are the last at-bats of 1960s-era Catholic revolutionaries at an old-timers' game...
...Yes, the hapless victims deserve a discreet plaque somewhere, but this overblown grief park permanently memorializes Timothy McVeigh's hideous act as much as it honors the dead—thus the very idea of it is indecent...
...Their real topic proves to be an intra-Catholic argument about the direction of the Church today, with the Holocaust simply the biggest club available for liberal Catholics to use against traditionalists...
...They might be good for nostalgia, but they are meaningless to everyone but a few players gone long in the tooth...
...Let's hope that Leigh has better luck...
...ELLIOTT BANFIELD New York, NY THE PHOTOS accompanying Catesby Leigh's article certainly make his case regarding the dismal state of memorial design in our time...
...It's no secret that The Weekly Standard is based upon certain intellectual traditions, one of which is the study of classical political philosophy...
...Given the obvious dearth of talent out there, not to mention the overcrowding of Washington with monuments to the hobbyhorse of every special interest, bigger would not be better...
...G.R...
...Let them sink their designs even deeper below grade and shroud them with even more shrubbery...
...Smaller is definitely the thing for these lackluster designers and sculptors...
...The argument is not over the actions the Church took during the Holocaust...
...PATERSON Wilmette, IL POPE PIUS ABSOLVED DAVID DALIN'S PERCEPTIVE REVIEW of the current spate of anti-Pius XII books solidly presents the historical record ("Pius XII and the Jews," Feb...
...To have The Weekly Standard remove this dark cloud is an absolute mercy and relief...
...That modernism, unchallenged, is the cause of the nuttiness Leigh documents so thoroughly...
...Leigh should consider that the Oklahoma City National Memorial ought never to have been built at all...
...I have found them to be clever, timely, and humorous—until the March 5 one, "Dale Earnhardt, White Male, Dead at 49...
...The great monuments Leigh cites, the U.S...
...That is why Garry Wills's theories of "structures of deceit" and James Carroll's bewildering agenda for Vatican III leave non-Catholic readers unfamiliar with the turf at a loss to understand the purpose of the books...
...Let me just amplify one point in the antiPius campaign that Dalin acknowledges but cannot be expected to analyze fully...
...As for the appallingly crude FDR statue, the face of which looks like something from a claymation film, ivy might usefully be employed to cover it completely...
...That book stirred some debate, but it was overwhelmed by the crassness of the last four decades...
...Says Dalin, "Almost none of the recent books about Pius and the Holocaust is actually about Pius and the Holocaust...
...But I cringe at his recommendations for greater monumen-tality and verticality...
...When I heard about the books calling Pius "Hitler's Pope," my shame was not only renewed but intensified, since this was not ancient history, but rather very recent, almost contemporary...
...And the real enemy is the papacy of John Paul II...
...That philosophy, which had great influence on the Constitution, is much concerned with the key concept of nature...
...JOAN MCCLAIN DuBois, PA...
...They misuse the history of the Holocaust to wage war on celibacy, a male-only priesthood, the papacy, the role of the Church as teacher— the laundry list of the old-fashioned dissenting Catholic agenda...
...Of all the subjects that make good material to parody, death should not be one of them...
...As Dalin notes, what underlies most of the anti-Pius thesis is an exploitation of the Holocaust to score points in an intramural Catholic debate...
Vol. 6 • March 2001 • No. 27
