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Letters
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Broader Context

Thanks for your forthright editorial regarding Ordaining Gay Men (11/11). In the broader context of today’s church, I would add married men to your conclusion. Preventing the ordination of gay and married men would deprive the church of many productive, hard-working and dedicated ministers and would, moreover, ignore the promptings of the Holy Spirit, who has called these men to holy orders.

Lee P. Kaspari

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Difficult Questions

Regarding An Isolationist View of the International Criminal Court, by Brian Farrell (11/25): I am surprised that the editors would print such an unbalanced criticism of the Bush administration’s position with respect to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court of July 17, 1998.

The I.C.C. treaty was written at a conference attended by the Clinton administration. The United States voted against the treaty because provisions it sought were voted down. Quixotically, President Clinton both signed the treaty and said that his successor should not submit the treaty for Senate ratification in its present formfor good reasons.

The I.C.C. treaty extends worldwide jurisdiction over war crimes, crimes against humanity and the yet to be defined crime of aggression. Nationals of countries that do not ratify the treaty are, nevertheless, subject to the court. Countries that do ratify the treaty are obliged to surrender persons charged before the court found in their territories (which is why the United States sought an exemption from the Security Council for its peacekeeping forces dispatched to Bosnia and Herzegovina in July 2002).

The United States is now the world’s principal peacekeeper. American forces are being called upon to serve all over the world. American servicemen are subject to, and protected by, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, with final review by the United States Supreme Court. This would not be the case with the I.C.C., which will develop its own set of rules.

Because of international missions, American forces are more exposed to events of war than forces of any other country that is a party to the treaty. Most of the countries that have a vote in the treaty assembly equal to that of the United States are not as big as many of our cities and are unlikely to provide peacekeeping forces. The assembly will adopt procedures, elect judges and define what is meant by the amorphous term aggression. Many of the treaty countries do not share our understanding of criminal procedure or evidence, and many are not friendly to the United States. They, however, will elect the court and have a voice in the selection of, and the work of, the prosecutor.

The United States unsuccessfully asked at the treaty conference that at least at the outset, cases be sent to the court by the U.N. Security Council on a case by case basis. The United States did not know what the procedures would be, what investigative activity the prosecutor would undertake or who the judges would be.

There are other problems with the treaty, including the important question of whether it would be constitutional to subject Americans to a court not established under the United States Constitution.

Whether the United States should ratify the treaty is surely debatable, but any article about opposition should at least acknowledge the difficult questions involved.

William T. Hart

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Church Blessed

The editorial on Ordaining Gay Men (11/11) does not want to come to grips with the fact that the overwhelming number of priestly sexual abuse cases that have come to light have been committed by gays. It does no one any good to pretend there isn’t a problem here. This does not, however, mean that the church hasn’t been blessed by many priests who are gay. No doubt it has.

The editorial struggles to say that it would be ill-advised to ban gays from the priesthood. Of course it would be, and for one very good reason: no sooner would the ban go into effect when we would learn that a great gay priest, who is celibate, got past the radar. What then? The scandal that would erupt by bouncing this priest would be nothing compared to what we’ve been going through all year.

The answer, then, is to screen more carefully so that immature men are not allowed to become priests.

William A. Donohue,

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Protecting

I commend you on the most timely and relevant editorial on domestic violence (11/18). My experience is that one of the best-kept secrets in the Catholic Church is the bishops’ document When I Called for Help: A Pastoral Response to Domestic Violence Against Women. Very few pastors talk about this issue from the pulpit. Often the women who come to our center, Woman’s Place, are told by their pastors, Just be a good wife, try harder, pray more. The pro-life stance of the church must be proactive in protecting women and their children from the abuser in their family. Your editorial should be available to all pastors and pastoral councils as the first step in the education process of our parishes.

Jeanne Meurer, F.S.M.

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Barefoot in Rome

Practicing the Faith, by John F. Kavanaugh, S.J.(11/4) gave me some comfort, the kind that comes from finding that one is not alone. Almost like Father Kavanaugh’s student-friend, I am connected with Catholic history and tradition and sought a truth worth understanding, a good worth loving and a faith to die for. Unlike the student, I believe that I have found it. (I am also some 50 years older than she is.) I have opposed capital punishment all my adult life, regard abortion as a moral and social evil, abhor the School of the Americas, the evil (yes, Mr. Bush, evil) practices that it teaches so well and the hypocrisy that allows our government to sponsor it. I also regard Bush’s obsession with war on Iraq as his own personal grudge match, no casus belli in any language. I regard many of my country’s foreign policies as bullying and its domestic policies as shortsighted and oblivious to the needs of the poor.

Along with the late Malcolm Muggeridge, I would like to see Christ walking barefoot through the Vatican. Christ was a radical, and oddly, the older I get the more radical I seem to become. At least I’m not alone!

Conchita Collins

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Most Respected

Avery Dulles, S.J., as the only American theologian ever to be raised to the College of Cardinals, is arguably, at least in the eyes of the Vatican, the most respected theologian in the country. Yet when he submits an article to your magazine on the important question of evangelization (10/21), you not only submit it to others for a comment to be published in the same issue, but print a response that is longer than his original article. It would seem to me America’s editors should swallow their bias and treat a brother Jesuit with greater respect.

Lou Baldwin

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Truth and Feeling

I’d like to commend Gerard Quigley’s lovely, evocative illustration for Some Basics About Celibacy (10/28). It is a beautiful example of how symbols communicate both truth and feeling.

William J. O’Malley, S.J.

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A Dreadful Mistake

It seems, if I correctly understand the authors responding to Cardinal Avery Dulles, S.J., (10/21) that I may have made a dreadful mistake. Whatever was I thinking when I responded to Jesus’ gracious invitation and entered the church? Whatever was God thinking? Didn’t he know that I, as a Jew, didn’t need to be evangelized?

Of course, I wasn’t a practicing Jew at the time. Does that matter? Is the Gospel to be irrelevant to Jews as individuals, or to Jews as a people? Perhaps agnostic or atheistic Jews might appropriately be evangelized, while only observant Jews should be exempted from hearing about Jesus? Now, would that be just Orthodox observant Jews, or perhaps also Conservative Jews; what then about Reform Jews? Or are we talking issues of genetics and ethnicity here? (Non-practicing baptized Catholics are part of the covenant toodo they then not need evangelization either?)

St. Edith Stein, help me! Or did you make a dreadful mistake, too? Oh, yes, you died before the rules changed, so you’re O.K.

Of course God’s covenants (plural, please) with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David et al., have never been revoked. But when did Catholic tradition begin to set aside inconvenient biblical truths, rather than learn to live with the tension between seemingly incompatible precepts? We used to call these mysteries.

Cardinal Dulles, always polite, terms the views expressed in Covenant and Mission ambiguous, if not erroneous. To this observer, they appear deficient, defective and distorted. I think it is clear who is making a dreadful mistake. Perhaps evangelization (as opposed to proselytization) might be best understood as proclaiming the Gospel, forthrightly and honestly, to everyone who is willing to listen.

Robert V. Levine

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Ubiquitous and Protean

Buried in the substantial disinformation throughout the Rev. Andrew R. Baker’s Ordination and Same Sex Attraction (9/30), old chestnuts about allegedly effeminate affective manners and proper masculine behavior most alerted my historian’s antennae. As Carolyn Dean shows in her fine recent study of sexuality between 1918 and 1940 (The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France [2000]), the crushing evidence of World War I trenches forced postwar medical doctors to abandon their fin-de-sicle belief that a male’s feminine appearance indicated same sex attraction. As a consequence, anxiety ran rampant among cultural critics throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s: if effeminate men might be heterosexual while masculine men might actually be inverts, then appearances could no longer be relied upon. Anyone might be passing for straight, raising the specter that inversion was both more ubiquitous and protean than previously thought. (The example of the burly rugby-playing hero of Sept. 11’s Flight 93, Mark Binghama gay mannicely illustrates the present-day anxieties over prudent doubt and moral certitude.) In several ways, Father Baker’s essay reflects the very latest in 19th-century thought: fascinating reading for the professional historian, but perhaps not more widely helpful.

Stephen Schloesser, S.J.

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Fewer Whiners

Congratulations on the choice of articles for the Sept. 23 issue. These were real articles about the daily problems that people encounter. It is encouraging to hear that good people are still working so hard for the church. Fewer articles by whiners, nit-picking theologians and about the politics of the clergy would be appreciated. Maybe there is still hope for the church.

Michael F. Melloy