To the Editors.

A merry man

Your editorial "All Dressed Up" (March 23), about the recent consistory in Rome, characterizes New York's Cardinal Edward M. Egan quite inaccurately as having "yet to convey much warmth or pastoral vision, let alone Christian mirth."

Last January our relatively new archbishop began a series of meetings in each vicariate with the priests, deacons, religious, and parishioners. It is quite obvious that he enjoys this pastoral interaction with people, and they with him.

He has begun a monthly schedule of Masses: two Sundays in the cathedral and two Sundays out in a parish, where he offers two Masses, meets with the parishioners at a reception, and then has lunch with the clergy.

Last December, he gave a day of recollection at Dunwoodie Seminary for the priests of the archdiocese. He prefaced one of his talks with two stories. One, he said, was true. It was from the Gospel. The other, he said with a shrug, may or may not be. But, he added, rattling off a few words in Italian and then translating them, "If it's not true, isn't it a shame." Each story made its point, the second with a touch of Italian humor.

At the Friendly Sons of Saint Patrick dinner, Egan prefaced his invocation by referring to his fellow cardinal, Jesuit Avery Dulles. In Rome, he observed, he had told the Jesuit superior that he himself had been exposed to Jesuit education and felt that he was three-quarters Jesuit. The superior shrugged and said, "It's the fourth quarter that really counts." The crowd enjoyed the humor and after the main course, Egan left the dais and worked the tables with obvious pleasure.

I am sure that the editorial writer has not had the opportunity to experience such examples of the pastoral warmth and humor of New York's new cardinal archbishop.

(MSGR.) HARRY J. BYRNE
New York, N.Y.

Priestly crisis

Your editorial "All Dressed Up" well describes the sartorial elegance and the Vatican's provident largesse in the February consistory of cardinals. Delicately, too, it limns the denial of "a position of authority in the official structure of the church" to women.

Unmentioned, though, in the bountifulness of the occasion is the nagging and ominous worldwide decline in the number of Catholic priests. The pope's refusal even to discuss the ordination of women, as well as the current limitation of married priests in the Latin rite to the exceptional trickle from a few other traditions of married clergy who wish to convert, seem to presage, in the midst of the pageantry, the worsening of a critical situation.

E. LEO MCMANUS
Venice, Fla.

'Image' maker

Congratulations on the March 9 issue of Commonweal. I am particularly impressed with Greg Wolfe's "I Was a Teenage Conservative." It is a positive antidote to some of the problems many of us face in trying to live in this society. Image is an amazing magazine.

L.D. COLLINS
Newton, Pa.

Information on Image can be found at www.imagejournal.org.

Too hot a house

It was a venial jolly to read in the morning paper that a member of Opus Dei was caught as a spy in employ of the Russians. It shook up the American superior of Opus Dei who quickly announced that Robert Phillip Hanssen was a stingy financial contributor to "the Work." His discomfort tickled liberal Catholics who are always being criticized for our lack of moral rectitude.

However, I was made uncomfortable by Paul Baumann's March 23 "Agent Hanssen," expanding on the little we know about Hanssen's motives, and the way Baumann relates Hanssen's religious and social views to spying. The author creates a lengthy analysis of his own and is long into his article before he admits, "But that's all speculation..."

Baumann seems to be using the incident to suggest that Opus Dei is a baroque hothouse that attracts unhappy American Catholics and turns them into countercultural fascists and spies. If that seems to be a stretch of Baumann's intent, I hope he will realize how his article inspired it.

(REV.) BILL FLAHERTY
Winnetka, Ill.

The author replies:

I think Opus Dei is a baroque hothouse that is likely to attract people with a very low opinion of liberal democracy. I find that worrisome. However, I was careful not to suggest that there existed any cause and effect relationship between Hanssen's membership in the organization and his alleged crimes.

PAUL BAUMANN

An inspiration

As general superior of the Sisters of Charity of Saint Elizabeth, Convent Station, New Jersey, I would like to recognize an amazing woman who has served in our community for seventy-six years. I am referring to Sister Mary Carita Pendergast whose "At Bayonet Point," February 23, spotlights her ministry in China. Sister Carita has been a lifelong advocate of our "vision statement" and has been an inspiration to those who were fortunate enough to have crossed her path. On behalf of the general council and our community, the Sisters of Charity of Saint Elizabeth, I would like to express our gratitude to Sister Mary Carita for her ongoing courage, compassion, and dedication. Kudos to Commonweal for publishing her article! Your publication continues to be a bright spot on the church horizon.

BARBARA CONROY, S.C.
Convent Station, N.J.

Correction

Gordon Marino's "Avoiding Moral Choices" [March 23] raised interesting questions about the increased emphasis on ethics committees and ethicists in health-care delivery. Only one thing marred the article: the date of Henry Beecher's "whistle-blowing article" in the New England Journal of Medicine was 1966, not 1996.

ROSEMARY FLANIGAN, C.S.J.
Kansas City, Mo.

New wineskins

Thank you for the "dueling versions of Vatican II" by James Hitchcock and John O'Malley [March 9]. We need that kind of dialogue to help penetrate the meaning of the most significant religious event of the twentieth century.

When most Catholics hear "Vatican II," they think of changes in the liturgy, but Vatican II was a council by the church about the church. The topic was ecclesiology. A change in the understanding of the church necessitates a change in the liturgy, since the liturgy is "the outstanding means by which Catholics express in their lives and manifest to others the mystery of Christ and the real nature of the true church" (Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, 2).

Karl Rahner observed that Vatican II was the church's first self-actualization as a catholic (universal) church. At Vatican I, there were about eight hundred bishops from the whole world, but they were almost all Europeans. At Vatican II, there were over two thousand bishops truly representative of the areas from which they came. Their experiences helped to shape the council's view of the church. Before Vatican II, the church was a European entity--made up of the pope, the bishops, and priests--to which the people belonged. Vatican II recognized the church as the universal people of God. Its theme document is Lumen gentium. The key chapter is the second one, "The People of God." Strong forces are determined to keep the church European and clerical, but the Holy Spirit--who moved the council to become a new Pentecost--is still acting within the church.

Hitchcock is off the mark in thinking that the pertinent topics are liberalism and conservatism in their political and sociological meanings. O'Malley presents the matter concisely when he writes, "Vatican II was a doctrinal council. It taught about the church. It called for conversion from an old style of being church to a new style."

(REV.) CHARLES E. MILLER, C.M.
Camarillo, Calif.

The light is Christ

James Hitchcock ["Version One," March 9] finds regrettable a "misunderstanding" of Gaudium et spes that has been partly the result of undue emphasis on the opening words used as its title. While "joy and hope" sound "an optimistic note...the next few words ('grief and anguish') immediately recognize the negative side of modernity."

In fact, the clear intent of the opening sentence is to emphasize the solidarity of Christians with their contemporaries: "Gaudium et spes, luctus et angor hominum huius temporis...gaudium sunt et spes, luctus et angor etiam Christi discipulorum," means "The joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the people of the present day are likewise the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of Christ's disciples." It seems a bit of a stretch to read into this statement some kind of monitum about modernity.

Be that as it may, Hitchcock's cautionary words about misreadings of introductory phrases make his subsequent comment about Lumen gentium all the more remarkable. That decree, he writes, is "itself 'triumphalistic' (the church as the light of the world)." But the words that follow the first two make it quite clear that it is Christ who is the light: "Lumen gentium cum sit Christus," which translates as "Since Christ is the light of nations." If Christ is the source of light, the church is authentically church only to the extent that it reflects that light. Affirming papal authority in that context is a far cry from triumphalism.

JULIAN IRIS
Davis, Calif.

The author replies:

The entire context of Lumen gentium is inescapably "papalist," including an affirmation of papal authority stronger, if possible, than even Vatican I. The "triumphalism" of Gaudium et spes is in the fact that the church expresses solidarity with the human race but in terms of the vital truth which humanity needs and which the church represents.

JAMES HITCHCOCK

More than style

Congratulations are in order to Commonweal for embodying true dialogue (rather than just lamenting the lack of it) when it published "Dueling Versions of Vatican II" by James Hitchcock and John O'Malley, both of whom were forthright yet civil. Both authors are also historians by training, and what struck me about both essays--for all their real differences--was their consistently historical frame of reference.

As someone who plies his trade as a systematic theologian, and does so mostly from the perspective he learned from Hans Urs von Balthasar, I wonder if I might add a Christological point to the debate. According to von Balthasar, Jesus in his lifetime made a claim to "absolute singularity" (not so much, perhaps, in his words as in his behavior and whole demeanor). This claim by its very nature had to represent a provocation, one that led to his death. Only then, and only by means of the Resurrection, could God validate Jesus' identity and affirm him as the one who was what he claimed to be (Acts 2:36; Romans 1:4). For von Balthasar, this same drama continues in the career of the church, for the core theological reality of the church is to be the Body of Christ inside world history.

Therefore, nothing the church can do will ever obviate, in any ultimate sense, the scandal and provocation represented in the person and death of Jesus (1 Corinthians 1:23). For this reason (and therefore not for reasons of left/right ideological tensions in the church today!), I think Hitchcock got the better of the debate, for he was the only one of the two to keep consistently in view the scandal of the church. If I read O'Malley correctly, he seems to think that the more pastoral tone of the documents of Vatican II has somehow removed the main source of the neuralgic tension between gospel and world. But if von Balthasar is correct (not to mention the Gospel of John), that will never happen.

Moreover, O'Malley's essay seems to suffer from internal contradictions. His argument concedes the point often made by art critics about Mannerism or literary critics about the aesthetes of the nineteenth century like Oscar Wilde or Walter Pater: "style over substance," they would complain. But for O'Malley that would seem to be a compliment, not a sign of decadence! And to compound the confusion, he seems to be using the word "style" idiosyncratically. As the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner said in a recent essay, "The Philosophy-Science Continuum," in the Chronicle of Higher Education (March 9), "scientific analysis may explain what stylistic features attract or repel our attention in general. It is likely to fail in attempts to account for the individuality of the person, the individuality of the work of art, and, above all, the individuality of each person's experience of a work."

In other words, O'Malley's thesis is bound to bleach out, and eventually obliterate what is most distinctive about Jesus. And what is most distinctive about Jesus is also what is most provocative, a provocation that is bound to continue in the life of Christ's followers. As a historian, Hitchcock points out how that continued provocation has been verified in church history. As a theologian, I would also insist that Catholics must continue to expect the same scandal-taking in the future as well--the "stylistic" innovations of Vatican II notwithstanding.

EDWARD T. OAKES, S.J.
Denver, Colo.

The author replies:

I appreciate Edward Oakes's criticism, but I think both he and James Hitchcock address different questions from the ones I did. Hitchcock takes "modernity" as his point of reference and correctly points out how anti-Christian and anti-Catholic it was in most of its manifestations. I tried to deal with a different, but no less difficult, subject: what "turn," if any, did the council take, even regarding certain "modern" phenomena. I meant to show that the council took a significant turn, which is not to deny its even deeper continuity with the Catholic tradition. Not to acknowledge this turn is to render the council insignificant. Vatican II's documents--in comparison with almost all other official ecclesiastical documents, especially for the century and a half before the council--are strikingly conciliatory. This does not mean that the council renounced its prophetic mission. I have never interpreted it that way.

Style? My point is that you simply cannot have "style without substance." The two are inextricably intertwined. For that reason, I cannot privilege substance over style. I think that the reality of their inseparability is consistently manifested in the documents of Vatican II. The council, for example, expresses the "substance" of collegiality in the language of reciprocity, in language that forgoes threats of punishment for those who disagree with it. Oscar Wilde, by the way, seems to have survived fairly well for the past hundred years for not having any substance.

JOHN W. O'MALLEY, S.J.

Conspiracy theory

Some months ago, C-Span broadcast a meeting between Israeli religious leaders and yeshiva students in Washington, D.C. Midway through the program, one young man asked about Israeli torture of Palestinian prisoners. With ferocity, a rabbi gestured toward the camera and said, "We don't talk outside the family!"

We Commonweal Catholics have no such inhibitions, as your reviews of Michael Phayer's and Susan Zuccotti's books by Richard Cohen (March 9) show. But featuring Phayer's book jacket on your cover, with its depiction of a cardinal and Nazi storm trooper equally oppressing a Jew is too harsh even in this mea culpa age when the sin of silence more than sixty years ago has taken on the meaning of active participation in the Holocaust.

We condemn Pius XII for his failure to protest while Jews were being gassed in concentration camps, yet we give him a free ride for his silence while more than 5 million Soviet POWs were systematically shot or starved to death by their German captors. Was he silent because they had been warriors defending a hated and feared Communist government? If so, what are we to make of Pius's ignoring publicly the organized massacre of 3 million Poles in work camps or in their villages, a pogrom of Catholics that seems to have been erased from the history books outside of Poland?

I believe Pius XII was aware of the horrors happening in Europe during the war. I also believe the Vatican chose not to denounce those ongoing crimes because it would have been useless and might have destroyed the church itself.

Of course there were Catholic officials who favored the Nazis; one does not capture purity or wisdom by putting on the collar (witness the number of American Catholic religious figures who spoke out in favor of the Vietnam War), but the pope was never pro-Nazi.

Making Pius XII the point man whose inaction augmented the Nazi ferocity is a ploy by a network of unconnected and interconnected interests who wouldn't be unhappy to see a diminished Catholic church. Sounds paranoid? Perhaps. But then, can you name another mainline religion that is so roundly abused so often in public?

JOSEPH D. POLICANO
Luquillo, Puerto Rico

National champion

Just a thank you to William Portier for his tribute ["Queen of Victory, Pray for Us," March 9] to the late Coach Al McGuire.

I have no connection to Marquette and never knew McGuire other than through a television screen when he was coaching, and later as a commentator. But something about him, probably his accent, his speaking style, and what I thought it said about his perspective on life and sports, appealed to me.

Though he has gone on "to the Big Dance" to meet his Queen of Victory face-to-face, I was sorry to hear he had died and I felt an inexplicable disappointment that no one in the TV sports world seemed to have noticed. Now, that seems quite unlikely actually. I can't imagine Digger Phelps, for one, not having a kind word of public farewell to say. Surely, I was just not tuned in when those who coached, played, or did commentary with McGuire spoke about his contributions, his wit and wisdom, and his faith and love for the church. He displayed those latter two loves for all the world to see as proudly as anyone who ever wore a basketball uniform.

Portier's essay made me feel a whole lot better and think that probably a whole lot of people really did notice the coach's passing, and cared!

RITA K. HESSLEY
Cincinnati, Ohio

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