To the Editors.

Bow...

In his "Last Word" column ("God's Best Friend," April 6), Frans Jozef van Beeck mentions that he has never seen a dog at Mass. In Honduras, a group I was with stayed at a girl's orphanage and boarding school for a week. They had Mass in a small chapel with no adornment (not even an altar rail). At Mass, all the girls were present, as well as their house mothers and other adults who were around the premises. We were also joined by two dogs. One lay at the back, and one lay right in front of the altar through the entire Mass. And at the end we were singing a song, clapping, and the dogs barked along with us. MATTHEW SHADLE

Conway, Ariz.

Wow

I enjoyed Father van Beeck's article, and while he mentioned that he has yet to see a dog in church, my own experience in Latin America has included dogs marching into church during Mass and wandering up and down the aisles. This is hardly an interruption, but is a sign of the presence of life in the Lord's house. But I still believe that we don't need Communion rails to keep them out. After all, we allow the Order of Preachers--called the Domini canes, the dogs of the Lord--into our churches.

JOHN DONAGHY
Ames, Iowa

Egan's mirth

As to your editorial accusing Cardinal Edward Egan of little Christian mirth ("All Dressed Up," March 23), believe me, when he headed the education department of the Archdiocese of New York, he brought little mirth, Christian or otherwise, to the Catholic lay teachers. He extolled the benefits of a "bare-bones approach" to financing Catholic education. As always, it is on the bare bones of Catholic lay teachers that the church and its families have placed the responsibility for the religious education of each successive generation. Perhaps the new cardinal will find a way to treat his teachers with some Roman excess in the next contract negotiations.

Your insight into Avery Dulles's rapid turn right and the more than coincidental red hat it earned him is also appreciated. Dulles denounced "triumphalism, clericalism, and juridicism" as the three great threats to the modern church in his wonderful book, Models of the Church, and then went on to defend the ban on women's ordination with argumentation as distressing as these same abuses. I guess consistency is not one of the qualifications for elevation.

THOMAS ROGERS
Tuscon, Ariz.

What's a metaphysician

I haven't yet read Michael Ruse's Can a Darwinian Be a Christian?, but from John Haught's March 9 review, it sounds like a welcome addition to the debate. Still, I wish that Haught had not been so hung up on the distinction between "methodological" and "metaphysical" materialism. To my ears, the latter sounds like an oxymoron, and it is probably to Ruse's credit that he did not address it. Darwinism is a "materialistic theory" to the same extent as are heliocentrism, Newtonian mechanics, or Einsteinian relativity. A fundamental assumption of modern science is that physical phenomena result from physical causes. However, an equally central dogma of science is that of reproducibility--an observation must be made many times before it can be scientifically evaluated. Thus the point that has been made many times that miracles, by definition, are outside the purview of science. The very existence of the universe, and of life itself for that matter, has so far been observed only once, and therefore questions about its origins remain out of reach of materialism--a point Darwin himself appreciated.

CHARLES MURTAUGH
Brookline, Mass.

The reviewer replies:

The source of Murtaugh's complaint lies quite simply in his erroneous assumption that the term "metaphysics" refers literally to what lies "beyond the physical." This is why the commonly used expression "metaphysical materialism" strikes him as an oxymoron.

However, even Aristotle did not understand the term "metaphysics" in such a supernaturalist sense, but rather as a more general approach (than physics) to understanding whatever is, including the physical world. The term "metaphysics" is also used by extension to name what a person or group takes to be ultimately real. For the materialist, what is ultimately real is physical stuff, implying therefore that there is in fact nothing other than matter. This is what is meant by "metaphysical materialism." Michael Ruse, contrary to what Murtaugh thinks, accepts the important distinction between methodological and metaphysical materialism. Ruse knows what metaphysical materialists are, since he explicitly numbers himself among them. So when he calls Darwinism a "materialist theory" he is saying much more than that evolution is just another scientific theory. It is Ruse's conflation of science and metaphysical materialism that I object to. I suspect that Murtaugh would also.

JOHN F. HAUGHT

Mislabeled

I enjoyed William Galston's advice ("Contending with Liberalism," April 6) for Catholics, but I have some advice of my own. Prolife advocates have permitted the opposition to label them incorrectly "conservative." If the fetus is human, prolife advocates are "liberal." My advice is: don't let others label you.

TOM HOLDER
Westminster, Md.

Expert disagreement

Gordon Marino's critique of ethics experts and of the applied ethics industry seems to me to diverge into two possibly inconsistent lines of argumentation ["Avoiding Moral Choices," March 23]. On the one hand, he questions the very idea of expertise in ethics; on the other hand, he questions whether a Ph.D. in ethics qualifies a person as an expert. But could we not answer the second question negatively and the first positively? Aristotle, as Marino remarks, had no truck with the sophists of his day and age; yet he believed in ethical excellence and thought it worthwhile for mature persons to reflect upon basic questions of how to live. My strong suspicion is that Marino, as a teacher of philosophy, agrees on both these counts, and that what really irks him about ethics experts and the applied ethics industry is that they can sometimes if not often be all too unreflective (while putatively excusing or even disempowering us laypeople from thinking for ourselves).

An alternative diagnosis to what is wrong with ethics today is that it has become too theoretical, or, from another perspective, not theoretical enough. As Marino knows, introductory ethics courses often present students with one theory after another: first a little Aristotle, then perhaps some Hume, next to Kant, and finally John Stuart Mill, or even Kierkegaard or Nietzsche. What such survey courses rarely communicate is the genesis of the theory in question: in other words, how it belongs to a more general understanding of the cosmos and our place in it, the fundamental questions to which the practice of philosophy is dedicated. (Compare Thomas Shannon's "The Human Genome," March 23.) Kant's ethics, for example, cannot be understood apart from his system; he does not mean by "autonomy" doing whatever one likes, but abiding by the dictates of reason--as elucidated in his several critiques. My question to Marino is how he thinks we should discuss ethics. More precisely, if the applied ethics industry is here to stay, and if there is even a role for ethics experts in our hospitals and laboratories and boardrooms (as he grudgingly acknowledges), what should an ethics curriculum look like?

BERNARD G. PRUSAK
Boston, Mass.

The author replies:

I am grateful to Bernard Prusak for opening up the questions that he does; however, my concerns about the ethics industry do not stem from my qualms about the smorgasbord approach to ethics education he aptly describes. In the most general terms, I am, as I tried to express in my essay, skeptical about the claims to authority made by ethicists and by the growing tendency to think of ethical questions as though they were best left to the experts. Prusak is right to suggest that the ethicists have found a niche and are here to stay. While I am clear about what I take to be the temptations of professional ethics, I need to give more thought to the question, "What might be a positive way of relating oneself to ethicists?" Now, if it turned out that professional ethicists were essentially poseurs, this would be a difficult homework assignment.

GORDON MARINO
Pius, again

The controversy in the April 6 Correspondence pages over the actions of Pius XII during World War II revealed one item agreed on by both sides--that Pius preferred a diplomatic approach to Nazi crimes. It might be proper to ask what would have been a worst-case scenario if he had taken a more courageous action. It could have been that Saint Peter's and the Vatican were bombed to rubble and the pope dead or held captive. We can also imagine the effect of this on the German prelates who were telling their people to support the war, the nations debating whether to join the Allied war effort, and since the Nazis were obviously trying to keep the details of their Final Solution secret, the effect of worldwide publicity in stopping or slowing the killing.

Yes, Christ himself could probably have avoided the Crucifixion if he had toned down his rhetoric, confined himself to a personal morality, and stopped speaking truth to power. But all Christians have to realize that we are not above our master. True Christianity is a risky business!

I remember an incident from the history of the early church, when Leo I, who had just faced down Attila the Hun, marched out with his whole retinue to meet the invading Vandal armies. Another, even earlier tale, probably apocryphal, tells of a Peter who lost his nerve and was fleeing the Roman persecution when he met Christ on the road walking in the opposite direction. His famous question, "Quo vadis, Domine?" was answered, "To Rome to be crucified a second time."

HUGH RUMBALL-PETRE
Simi Valley, Calif.