Voices of Which Faithful?

The three models for the Voice of the Faithful outlined by Thomas P. Rausch, S.J., (9/29), are interesting from a merely academic point of view. But his suggestion that the incorporational model may be the most effective in the long term appears nave when a practical application is considered. Does Father Rausch seriously believe that those who might be proponents of a bishop’s resignation or a sharing of power, authority and decision making with the episcopacy (not to mention ordination of women or optional celibacy for priests) would ever be allowed to serve as members of parish councils and diocesan offices...

diocesan committees and advisory boards? I think not.

Those who oppose the status quo or dissent from the policies of those in power will never be given an effective hand in shaping policy. Accordingly, until the day when the laity is given the opportunity to choose episcopal leaders and the authority to set policy, organized groups such as V.O.T.F. must remain independent. This is the only way that allnot somevoices will be heard.

Frank V. Pesce

Sisters Still Say...

As the chaplain at a large motherhouse of Dominican sisters, many of whom are elderly and infirm, I write to thank you for the extraordinary editorial Valiant Women (9/22).

It is a magnificent and well-deserved tribute to all sisters everywhere to whom the church in our country is so indebted. In the name of the Dominican Sisters of Sparkill, I express our/their gratitude.

To celebrate Mass each day and to see in the chapel balcony so many faithful sisters in wheelchairs or using walkers; to sit at table and listen to so many reminisce cheerfully about their years of ministry; to be the beneficiary of countless lived homilies; all this is a special privilege for this aging Dominican chaplain.

Though the sisters may no longer be engaged in active apostolates because of age and poor health, this is still a rewarding and effective ministry of presence.

To this day the Catholic faithful can still profit and grow spiritually because Sister says....

Raymond Daley, O.P.

Memory of Millions

While Nicholas Mele makes some important points in his article The North Korea Conundrum (9/8), he begins with a comparison that fundamentally weakens his overall argument. In the second paragraph of his essay, he states that while the policies of the North Korean leadership have resulted in the starvation or malnutrition of millions, which is reprehensible, Americans should perhaps consider the impact of the current and previous U.S. administrations’ policies on the American poor before stigmatizing the North Koreans.

While the American people and their elected officials have often ignored the principles of social justice in legislating policy that affects the poor and marginalized, in no way can one seriously compare America’s past and present faults with the crimes against humanity perpetrated by Kim Jhong Il, his father and their cronies. Such a comparison does violence to the memory of the millions of North Koreans who have died at the hands of the monsters who have led their nation for the past decades, whose atrocities can rightly be compared to those of Hitler, Stalin and the Khmer Rouge.

Anthony D. Andreassi

Direct Involvement

After reading Terry Golway’s No Questions, Please (8/18), I made an effort to get as close as I could possibly get on a personal basis (for someone that has no direct involvement) to what goes on in Iraq. I did this by reflecting on a house that one passes on the way into town. It’s a modest row home, and the porch is bedecked with flowers, ribbons, pictures, and an R.I.P. notice for Victor with a lettered sign below it: We love you Victor. Victor was a soldier who died during this war in Iraq. I will wait for someone to tell me that Victor’s death was justified. If/when someone does, I will ask the person to accompany me to knock on the door of Victor’s family to ask them if the death was worthwhile. In the meantime, I can only imagine the family’s sense of loss. And doing so reveals that Victor and others should not have been sacrificed. My personal consolation is that they perfectly laid down their lives for their friends, and in this they are privileged to know Christ.

Ignacio J. Silva

Old and New

The Vatican Concordat With Hitler’s Reich (9/1), by Robert A. Krieg, confirms what had to be the case in history. It has always seemed intuitive to me that the Catholic Church must have made a pact with the devil in order to survive Hitler’s grasp.

It was the conclusion of the article that surprised me.

Mr. Krieg’s conclusion asserted that Vatican II redirected a church that was concerned only with the preservation of its political structure without regard to preservation of human dignity and life. The hundreds of victims of sexual abuse might disagree.

In light of the recent revelations regarding the sexual abuse scandals and the tenacious denials by church officials for the first year or two of discovery, how can anyone say the church has changed from 1933? The poster child for the church, Cardinal Bernard F. Law, went to Rome and was not summarily dismissed by the pope in a public statement. How long did it take Cardinal Law to resign? If this wasn’t old church politics, what is?

Most bishops and higher officials knew of such indiscretions for decades, but they chose to look the other way. At the very least it was, Don’t ask, don’t tell. They chose to conceal the perpetrators within the church political structure. This was placing the interest of the institution ahead of the victims of abuse.

The new rules and regulations are in place to make sure perpetrators of sexual abuse do not go undetected and unpunished. Those who look the other way, the rule-makers i.e., bishops and cardinalscontinue to remain outside of the new rules.

Mark D’Agostino

Ambiguity

I found Robert A. Krieg’s highlighting of the ambiguity of The Vatican Concordat With Hitler’s Reich (9/1), a very interesting and important consideration. I find it all the more ambiguous because Pius XI was certainly not a pope whose principal aim was the preservation of ecclesiastical structures and religious activists to the neglect of social justice. Six years before he signed the concordat with Hitler, he had condemned the ultra-right French political movement Action Franaise, whose aim was to destroy the French Republic and restore the monarchy, at least for a time. The anticlerical laws aimed at the French Catholic Church in the early 1900’s would have given Pius XI a good excuse to use politics in the service of religion; for the monarchy, or an authoritarian government like that of Napoleon, always accorded a privileged position to the church. But Pius XI condemned the movement because it used religion in the service of politics. At the end of his life Pius XI asked the American Jesuit apostle of interracial justice, John LaFarge, S.J., to prepare an encyclical on the Jews and anti-Semitism. He died before it was made public, and Pius XII never saw fit to promulgate it.

Mr. Krieg points out clearly that the ecclesiology of the time was dominated by the conception of the church as a perfect society, the protection of whose institution and organization was the principal duty of the hierarchy. The French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who, to his profound regret, had let himself be duped into an ambiguous and distant relationship with Action Franaise by his conservative and traditional spiritual directors (Dom Delatte, O.S.B., Father Clerissac, O.P., Father Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., and others) came to realize and to admit his navet, and supported the pope’s condemnation of the movement. He was never forgiven for this by the powerful members of the traditional ecclesiastical hierarchy.

In his last book, On the Church of Christ: The Person of the Church and Its Personnel, Maritain maintained that the person of the churchwhich Krieg identifies as mystery or sacrament, as people of God, as the body of Christ, as collegial community and as servantthis church is indefectibly holy; but, Maritain added, its personnel is not. It is composed of fallible, imperfect men, who, as Mr. Krieg mentions, all too often placed protecting the institution and its reputation above its mission to proclaim the truthor defend the victims of sexual abuse. Recently a French scholar of Jacques Maritain wrote to me that the present tendency of Catholic neoconservatives (like Michael Novak, George Weigel, Deal Hudson and others) to use religion to promote certain political programs of the present American administration on economic justice, war and sexuality strikes him as a kind of maurrassisme amricain, and I think he’s right.

Bernard Doering

Certain Uniformity

Among the items in Signs of the Times on Aug. 4 is a notice that the Vatican says flexibility allowed on posture after Communion, even though the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, No. 43, states that all are to remain standing until the end of Mass. The reason given for this statement by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments is worth noting and should be observed as a principle regarding other postures at Mass, such as standing for the eucharistic prayer: The mind of the prescription of the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, No. 43, is intended, on the one hand, to ensure within broad limits a certain uniformity of posture with the congregation for the various parts of the celebration of Holy Mass, and on the other, to not regulate posture rigidly....

That explanation is in accord with the much-ignored principle of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, No. 37, which insists that even in the sacred liturgy the Church does not wish to impose a rigid uniformity in matters which do not involve the faith or the good of the whole community.

Charles E. Miller, C.M.

Core Reality

Patricia McCann, R.S.M., has provided an excellent, sweeping overview of what has happened to religious life among women religious in the United States since the Second Vatican Council (Catholic Identity, New Age and Women Religious, 7/21). Her knowledge of history is undoubtedly what made possible her judicious synopsis of the decline of religious life, arguably one of the most confusing phenomena in the postmodern world and one that has plagued the church to the present day. Indeed, what will happen to religious life, that rich gift to the 19th- and 20th-century American Catholic Church?

Of particular interest to me is Sister McCann’s willingness to admit the degree to which New Age action and perspectives have invaded the life and thinking of so many active religious congregations today. This is an honest and correct observation, yet it is ignored as a major reason for the obvious problems within congregations and the consequent decline in religious vocations. If not accepted by religious sisters as occasioning points of confusion, it has certainly not been understood by our lay sisters and brothers.

Here is where I wish that Sister McCann had been more emphatic. She says, for example, that we were not yet ready to focus on an evaluative analysis of these changes and suggests, Now it is time for a dialogue between Catholic faith tradition and New Age thought. To my mind, it is time for dialogue to give way to action. It is time for women religious to recognize that a certain New Age secularity has taken priority, one that must be re-evaluated in terms of its consequences for the future of religious life.

In this time of diminishment and mounting secular ridicule, it is time to face the larger questions Sister McCann also poses. The first question she suggests could alone set us all on the path we need to considernamely, Is faith in God made manifest in Jesus and articulated through the Catholic Church and its theological tradition still our core reality? My hope is that the challenge Sister McCann presents in her insightful article will not be left unexamined by today’s women religious.

Dolores Liptak, R.S.M.

Balanced Approach

The article by Drew Christiansen, S.J., (5/19) drew my immediate attention, because I had spent October 2001 to June 2002 in Jerusalem and on more than one occasion had met and listened to Patriarch Michel Sabbah speak or preach. I first met him in December 1987 in Rome, when he spent his days of preparation for his episcopal ordination in the house where I then lived, and I have followed his work, at a distance, since then. I have always found him to be very balanced in his approach and in his words.

I do agree with the general thrust of the article.

I was taken aback by the statement that George Cottier, O.P., the papal theologian, and other French churchmen supported the idea with vigorous attacks on Patriarch Michel Sabbah in the French Catholic press. Other than an article by Father Cottier in the periodical Nova et Vetera, I have found nothing and am unaware of anything in the French Catholic press. Thus my questions: who else? and where?

Considering where it originates, Switzerland, Proche-Orient Infoat least to me as a Canadiancan hardly be included in the French Catholic press. Further, was what was printed in Proche-Orient Info on Dec. 10, 2002, signed by Father Cottier, or was it a reprint from elsewhere? (I’m sorry, I don’t have access to back issues of Proche-Orient Info.)

Father Cottierand othersmay have done a grave injustice to Patriarch Sabbah, but there may also be a perceived injustice to the French Catholic press.

(Most Rev). John Stephen Knight

Rectification

I only just learned of an article by Drew Christiansen, S.J., that appeared in America on May 19, A Campaign to Divide the Church in the Holy Land, where I am personally cited in a manner that does not conform to the truth. We read: Georges Cottier, O.P., the papal theologian, and other French churchmen supported the idea with vigorous attacks on Patriarch Michel Sabbah in the French Catholic press.

This phrase contains several inaccuracies. I am not a French churchman; I did not write in the French press; to criticize a position in an argumentative manner is not to attack the person who defends that position.

Father Christiansen bases his remarks on an article published in Proche Orient Info. This publication reprised, without asking our permission, large extracts of an editorial, Resistance et Moralit des Moyens (Rsistance and the Morality of Means), published in the review Nova et Vetera, 2002/4 p. 5-14 (see also Terre Sainte, 2003, 1-2, p. 159-161), which is a Catholic review of French Switzerland, founded by Cardinal Charles Journet. Moreover, the reproduction is preceded by several lines of introduction that mislead the reader.

These are the facts:

1. The editorial of Nova et Vetera is signed by the editorial staff and not by me, though insofar as I am director of the review, I assume full responsibility for it.

2. Proche Orient Info, which attributes the editorial to me personally, prefaces it by several lines of commentary which suggest that it concerns an indirect intervention, via my person, of the Holy See toward Patriarch Sabbah. This interpretation is gratuitous; it is false.

I continued my directorship of the review upon coming to Rome. What I write and publish is not connected to my position as Theologian of the Pontifical Household. Our readers are under no illusion about this.

3. The editorial, which Father Christiansen should have read with greater attention, does not treat, either directly or indirectly, the question of ecclesiastical jurisdiction for Hebrew-speaking Catholics in Israel. It treats, by way of a critique of the positions taken by the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, a question of the ethics of war.

4. The editorial recognizes the justice of the cause that Patriarch Sabbah defends. Based on a declaration made May 8, 2002, and on a book of interviews (Michel Sabbah, Paix sur Jerusalem, Propos d’un vque Palestinien [Paris, 2002]), it criticizes his position on terrorism. The editorial is not a support for terrorism, but an excessive comprehension with regard to the actions of Palestinian suicide bombers. An interview in Newsweek of Dec. 23, 2002, summarizes well this position: Q: Do you see suicide bombers as true martyrs? Patriarch Sabbah: According to Islam, they are. It’s necessary to treat each one according to his own principles. As Muslims see it, suicide bombers are giving their lives for their country, to gain their liberty. As a Christian, suicide is not permissible in any case, even for your country. You may not kill yourself.

Nothing in these lines is said about terrorism as an action that deliberately brings about the death of innocents in order to destabilize the adversary. The response relativizes the condemnation of suicide, making it a cultural problem, when it is in fact an act contrary to the universal moral law.

5. It is this precise point that the editorial critiques. It does so through a carefully argued analysis of the notions in play: right to resistance, legitimate defense, reprisals, terrorism. It questions the morality of means: a just cause cannot justify recourse to intrinsically immoral means.

If it is true that the distressing situation into which the Palestinian people have been thrown creates fertile terrain for the phenomenon of suicide bombers, it cannot be considered as its necessary cause and its justification.

I ask you to publish this rectification, because the affirmations of Father Christiansen do not conform to the truth and constitute an offense to my person.

Georges Cottier, O.P.