To the Editors.

A heart broken

When I march this year in the "ashen parade," I will be carrying a heart broken by the death of my wife Margaret, who died on December 27 of a malignant brain tumor. "Marchers in an Ashen Parade" (February 23), so beautifully written, helps me to focus more deeply on the meaning of this tragedy as seen with the eyes of faith. A most sincere "thank you" to Commonweal and to David Loxterkamp. God bless the work!

ROBERT JOHNSON
Wallingford, Conn.

Confession & remorse

The sacrament of penance is more than ever at a crossroads ("Empty Confessionals," February 23). True, we have become a culture of public confession; and truer yet, we are lost somewhere at the boundary between what has been confessed and how to be even more alive to the collective treachery we may have little capacity to remedy. Following years of teaching graduate courses in pastoral counseling, I have learned that while behaviors and intentions oscillate, true remorse barely beckons. Just being "good" is a behavioral category. Remorsefulness, on the other hand, is a steady, yet uneven process that humanizes as it precedes and follows the most dastardly of our actions. Authentic remorse deepens the human capacity to weep in response to the violations of the helpless; to lament our numbness in the wake of holocausts and wars; and to despair as the earth is ruthlessly depleted of its rich biosphere. Perhaps the sacrament of penance is not so much lost as it is an unceasing event of our remorse within the mystery of an overriding divinity.

E. MARK STERN
New Rochelle, N.Y.

What was missing?

By chance, I was reading Herbert Vorgrimler's Sacramental Theology when the February 23 Commonweal discussion on confession arrived. He articulates a theological principle germane to our ongoing discernment. "Self-surrender to the liturgy, whose basis and bearer is always Jesus Christ, means in every case (and thus in every sacrament) remembering Jesus. Participation in the liturgy is a celebration of the memory of Jesus, and its intensity depends on the Jesus-mysticism of the human being who is taking part."

This principle certainly does not resolve all the important issues of ecclesial mediation. But it illuminates the foundation and criterion that must be the measure of the church's decisions.

Thirty-five years after Vatican II, we have barely begun to fathom the reality signified by the title of the "Constitution on the Church," Lumen gentium. The reference, of course, is not to the church, but to the church's Lord, Jesus Christ. Symptomatic of our failure is that, in the Commonweal discussion of reconciliation, the name of the one who effects our reconciliation is nowhere mentioned. Whether the slant be "liberal" or "conservative," the ecclesiocentrism of the pre-Vatican II church seems, alas, alive and not so well.

Karl Rahner once wrote, prophetically: "The Christian of the future will be a mystic...or will not be." At the dawn of the new millennium, we'd better begin to figure that out. Much more than going to confession is at stake. (rev.)

ROBERT P. IMBELLI
Newton Centre, Mass.

Tax-cut compassion

Regarding your February 9 editorial "Taxing Rhetoric," George W. Bush's tax cuts benefit taxpayers only, not those too poor to pay taxes. The more you have, the more compassion you get--that's what the poor believe. A more compassionate option might be to divide the $1.6 trillion in tax cuts among the 40 million Americans without health insurance. Each would receive $4,000 a year for ten years--more than enough for excellent health insurance.

NOEL KREBS
Goshen, N.Y.

In fairness to the pope

I share some of Luke Timothy Johnson's misgivings about Pope John Paul II's gender language and biblical exegesis, but was disappointed by Johnson's shallow treatment of the pope's ethics ("A Disembodied 'Theology of the Body,'" January 26).

Particularly in light of Johnson's strong charge of complicity with genocide, I cannot fathom why he misrepresents John Paul II's views, assuming that they represent an "act-centered morality." A cursory reading of the pope's corpus (particularly Love and Responsibility and The Acting Person), reveals a sophisticated ethic of personhood bearing little resemblance to this "act-centered" caricature.

In his Theology of the Body lectures, the pope grounds human dignity in the image of God. Humans are precious because they can emulate the self-giving love of the Trinity. Analyzing this love, the pope links acts and virtues, maintaining that we should never use persons merely as a means to an end. This defense of the value of personhood undermines the utilitarian reasoning pervasive in debates about artificial contraception.

By resurrecting an outmoded ethical category, Johnson does little to further the debate about Humane vitae. As he suggests, we ought to revisit this encyclical, and we may end up concluding that John Paul II's personalism cannot support his opposition to artificial contraception. Nevertheless, before drawing such a conclusion, we ought to at least represent the pope's position fairly.

DEREK S. JEFFREYS
Green Bay, Wis.

Eureka moments

I trust that Luke Timothy Johnson is too good a scholar not to be profoundly embarrassed that he failed to read Wojtyla's Love and Responsibility before penning his "A Disembodied 'Theology of the Body.'" In this 1960 work, the future pope convincingly establishes the "embodiedness" of his teaching on human sexuality, including a positive discussion on the role of pleasure in the conjugal act, the sheer candor of which was considered by many contemporaries as beneath the dignity of a prelate. Johnson's failures to contextualize the pope's thought within its corpus as a whole and to understand the purpose of a catechetical address seem to be at the root of his embarrassingly off-base criticisms and misunderstandings. Moreover, I have witnessed too many joy-filled "Eureka!" moments among young engaged and married couples not to be convinced of the Theology of the Body's great pastoral utility.

(REV.) ROGER J. LANDRY
Fall River, Mass.

The joys of Catholic sex

Luke Timothy Johnson's article left me with a nagging unease. Without taking up the philosophical issues behind his "deductive theology," I would push Johnson on his concluding claim that "we must, in all humility, be willing to learn from the bodies and the stories of those whose response to God and to God's world involves sexual love."

In point of fact, has the author actually been willing to listen to and learn from people who give witness to the magnificent grace available to those who follow the church's teachings on sexuality? For example, Johnson's focus on the use of the rhetoric of self-control causes him to miss the larger point: many of us who follow church teachings do so joyfully and find that it has brought greater, not lesser, pleasure and happiness to our lives. As couples, we communicate more, not less. We are more in tune with one another's desires. And we still love our partners and rejoice in our ability to demonstrate that physically.

Certainly, not everyone who uses natural family planning will find it easy. In the end, some might well agree with Johnson. But even in his analysis, a dismissal of current theology would have to involve a serious attempt to confront the realities behind the church's teachings. This, it seems to me, would go beyond repetition of the platitudes about access to a lover's body and the benefits of sexual enjoyment to a discussion about the real experiences of people who have made a serious attempt to conform to doctrinal standards. My experiences lead me to believe that the answer would not be as dismal as the author assumes.

JENNIFER POPIEL
Green Bay, Wis.

Disappointed

As someone who believes in Humanae vitae but also agrees there is room for further development in this teaching, I found Luke Timothy Johnson's essay disappointing. Johnson wants church teaching to be based in ordinary life experience, but let him consider this basic problem: If a population of 1 million couples is using artificial birth control, one year the normal failure rate will result in at least fifty thousand unwanted pregnancies. Since these couples have already decided to separate childbearing from sexual pleasure, abortion becomes the natural solution. This is borne out by documented facts: a high percentage of women seeking abortions were using birth control methods that failed. It is precisely the connection between birth control and abortion that Johnson seems to disregard. Until the critics of Humanae vitae address this, John Paul II will continue to win the philosophical argument while much of the population simply ignores him. This to me is the real problem of modern sexual ethics. I'm still looking for answers.

(REV.) MATTHEW KOWALSKI, O.S.B.
Marvin, S.D.

Consistent ethic

Luke Timothy Johnson does offer some salient points in his critique of Pope John Paul II's theology, which he describes as "abstract" and idealistic. This is true enough, but I wonder if Johnson has really offered an alternative. His thinking leads to a very confusing ethical point of view. He is more in a position to address these issues than the pope. Why doesn't the professor provide a consistent ethic of sexual behavior taking into account the experience of married people, homosexuals, and those who are single "yet whose erotic desires find no legitimate or sanctified expression"?

Finally, in regard to the Theology of the Body, I found one of Johnson's principles rather hard to accept: "Human bodies are part of God's image and the means through which absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us." In what way is God's image connected to the human body? Is Johnson sure that "absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us" from our bodies? I wonder what the mystics would say about this. I wonder how this squares with the experience of believers.

PAUL A. HOTTINGER
Downers Grove, Ill.

The author replies:

Derek Jeffreys and Roger Landry think that I have misrepresented Pope John Paul II because I did not take into account his other writings on the subject of human love, or grasp the "purpose of a catechetical address." Jeffreys says that the pope does not really have an "act-centered morality." Well, if he does not, then his persistence in supporting Humanae vitae becomes even stranger, for that composition is strictly act-centered.

Landry praises what the pope had said about pleasure and the rest in 1960. But if these are the pope's sentiments, why is there no trace of them in the multiple addresses making up Theology of the Body? May it not be precisely because the "purpose of a catechetical address" was to support, as I suggest, Humanae vitae?

Jeffreys connects my poor grasp of the pope's overall position with my suggestion that the church may be in danger of colluding in genocide. But my point about genocide was linked to the absolute prohibition of condoms, including for people with aids. What is pertinent is a reexamination of the moral issue in light of medical disaster, not a reexamination of the pope's entire corpus to justify the church's present stance.

Roger Landry and Jennifer Popiel offer testimonies concerning the joy brought to couples who are introduced to papal teaching on sexuality or who practice natural family planning. I am pleased to hear them. I would not be surprised to find them multiplied. I have no more objection to those who choose this path than I do to those who choose celibacy, in or out of marriage. But there are other stories, voiced by people of equally deep faith and love for the church but with quite different experiences, and I would like them to be heard as well.

Just a small point in response to Popiel: I think that I called the pope's theology "deductive," whereas I would prefer a theology that was more "inductive."

Matthew Kowalski makes the point that allowing artificial birth control would lead inevitably to abortion, since for people whose sexual activity already excludes the thought of having a child, "abortion becomes the natural solution." But why should we assume that using a condom is different than periodic abstinence with respect to intention concerning childbirth? Why can't the consensual use of a condom be as holy an act as the consensual avoidance of fertility? If natural family planners, surprised by pregnancy, are then open to God's will concerning a birth, why should we assume that those using condoms who are surprised whould then seek an abortion?

Paul Hottinger asks why I don't work at all this stuff I said needed doing, since the pope is a busier guy than I am. Maybe I will.

LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON

Large families & ideas

I was pleasantly surprised by two pieces in the February 9 issue of Commonweal. Jo McGowan's "Corporal Punishment" and A.W. Godfrey's "Crowd Control" reimpressed on me how disparate elements can join to strike a blow to the solar plexus.

McGowan, by juxtaposing the general chaos of India's earthquake with the particular and personal moral challenge of a public interrogation, managed, for me at least, to convey how bewildering our world is and how great events find reflections in our everyday life.

Godfrey's opening sentences prepared me for a sentimental look at his ordeals as a single parent. Instead he offered a gentle argument for the large family, that carried all the more weight for avoiding the hectoring arguments of church apologists.

Perhaps it's the general intellectual numbness of coming off a hotly contested election with its high polemics, but I find personal reflections by such sensitive narrators more persuasive these days than the closely reasoned certainty of experts.

ROBERT HANNON
Fairbanks, Ark.

Alleva's rapture

It is irenic of Richard Alleva ["Beam Me Up," January 12] to seek no quarrel with the idea of the Rapture or even with the LaHaye-Jenkins interpretation of it. Since Alleva's own concerns have to do with the verisimilitude of the Left Behind series as thrillers, he is certainly entitled to be selective in his quarrels. But Christians reading the New Testament as a source of divine revelation may demand more of a proposed exegesis than that it be sincere and interesting. Readings of Scripture that force it into a fortune-telling role do not have a good track record. By the way, though certain passages of the book of Revelation are commonly used to support interpretations of the Rapture, the notion itself is drawn from 1 Thessalonians 4:17.

JULIAN IRIAS
Davis, Calif.

Carroll's irony

The ultimate irony of James Carroll's theories [see Robert Wilken's review of Constantine's Sword, "Dismantling the Cross," Janurary 26] about the inevitability of Christian anti-Semitism is that those Christians who risked their lives to save Jews did so not in spite of their faith but because of it. They did so in response to the belief that Christ died to save all of us--Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and the handicapped as well. I think of Jan Korski skiing across the Alps, a consecrated host in a pendant on a chain around his neck, to tell the Allies who couldn't have cared less what was happening at Auschwitz. I think perhaps with more admiration about an incident recounted in a letter to the New York Review of Books by an Israeli who survived the occupation of Poland. An old woman on a crowded trolley in Warsaw, at a time and in a place where one could trust almost no one, replied to the anti-Semitic diatribe a fellow passenger was delivering by saying, "Hush up. God will hear you!" I have no reason to think I would have had such courage. I rather doubt that this generation's revisionists would have either.

MARIAN BURKHART
New York, N.Y.

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