To the Editors.

A defense of abortion?

As a loyal reader of your magazine, I was extremely disappointed to see an advertisement for A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion in your March 24 issue. If Commonweal is indexed in Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, under the Catholic Periodical Index, does that mean you claim to be a Catholic magazine? What does Catholic mean to you? There is something disjointed about a magazine that runs an editorial attacking a film about abortion ["Hard Cider," March 24] and then runs the ad referenced above. One would hope that your magazine has a set of advertising guidelines. If so, should they not reflect your Catholic identity? There is nothing Catholic about abortion.

MARY REED
Alexandria, Va.

The editors reply:

Commonweal's policy concerning advertising mirrors, to some extent, how it decides what articles to publish. Commonweal is a journal of opinion edited by lay Catholics. One essential aspect of Commonweal's Catholic identity is its commitment to reasoned debate on disputed questions. Thus Commonweal is open to the views of those who disagree with its editorial positions and even to those who disagree with the teachings of the church. That disagreement, however, must be presented in an intellectually responsible and respectful manner. An advertisement for a book that tries to make a philosophical case for legal abortion from within the Catholic tradition meets that standard; a simple declaration in favor of abortion rights does not. Needless to say, running an advertisement does not imply an endorsement of a book's view.

As it happens, Commonweal's editor, Margaret O'Brien Steinfels, has reviewed A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion for the Internet site beliefnet (www.beliefnet.com). She found the book's argument unpersuasive.

A vast conspiracy

I strongly agree with Wilson Carey McWilliams ["The Great Triangulator," April 21] that we had a right to hope for a lot more from a Clinton presidency than we got. But to characterize Clinton as "guided less by convictions than by an instinct for survival" is to misrepresent both the man and the situation. In the 1990s the nation needed someone to defang a potentially vicious Republican counterrevolution, and after Vietnam, Watergate, and two decades of ballooning deficits, to restore the people's belief that the federal government could act effectively in their best interests. That situation required a leader of both firm conviction and a strong instinct for survival. It seems to me Clinton evidenced those qualities when needed better than anyone on the political horizon then or since.

JOSEPH L. WALSH
Margate, N.J.

Re: Holocaust ethics

Professor Philip Devine [Correspondence, April 21] writes of my review [March 10] of Harry James Cargas's Problems Unique to the Holocaust: "throwing out the rule book, especially the rules restricting the taking of a human life, is about as perverse a response to the Holocaust as [Devine] can imagine." But I did not throw away the rule book. The Nazis did so when they made it a capital offense for a women to be found pregnant in a ghetto or a death camp. The point of the passage that I cited was that the Nazis' systematic contempt for life led observant Jews who believed deeply in the sanctity of life to do things in the death camps that they would never have done otherwise and that--as Rabbi Novick wisely counsels--do not count as a precedent for abortion or suicide outside of that context.

For Cargas, consistency on this matter came from context. It is one thing to refuse to condemn the victims of the Holocaust in the extreme conditions of the death camps. It is quite another for a layman to raise a respectful voice of protest over Pope John Paul II's meeting with Kurt Waldheim after the disclosure of Waldheim's complicity in the killing of Jews as a Nazi officer in the Balkans. Cargas didn't say, moreover, that the pope should not meet with Waldheim. He said that the pope bears the communal responsibility of correcting the teaching of contempt for Jews that led Waldheim and other Catholics to do the awful things they did. As it turns out, the pope quite agrees with that judgment.

EDWARD MCGLYNN GAFFNEY, JR.
Valparaiso, Ind.

That guy with the hankie

Patricia Hampl's article "The Sacrament of Reconciliation" [April 7] certainly brought back memories of that sacrament, as well as her parish, Saint Luke's, and her pastor, Monsignor Cullinan.

I was living in the parish next door in 1959. When my father indicated that he wanted to take instructions in the Catholic faith, we steered him to the classes conducted by Cullinan. Dad and Cullinan had some heated exchanges going back over the past, the Inquisition, etc. When it came to the end of instructions, Dad said he wanted to be baptized, and arranged to go to confession afterward to Monsignor Cullinan (not wimping out and selecting Father Kennedy, as Patricia did).

My wife and I accompanied Dad to the church one Saturday and sat in the back. Dad went into the confessional, and we listened to fifteen minutes of fairly loud whispers and sharp exchanges, which indicated that all the arguments had not been settled. Finally, Dad came out, red-faced, and, shortly after, Monsignor Cullinan hung up his stole for the day, and left. Eventually, they became fast friends, until Dad died a year later.

TONY WIGGINS
Wilton, Conn.

Dumbed down

I retired four years ago after more than thirty years of teaching at Southwest Texas State University. There I was a witness to the inception of the system described in Paul Trout's article ["Teacher Evaluations," April 21], and its disastrous consequences.

In the 1970s a wave of conservatism gained control of college administrations, and the watchword became to operate every university "like a business." In this model the students were viewed as customers, and the faculty became the dime-a-dozen clerks whose main function was to keep the customers happy, as indicated on their evaluations. Unfortunately for the future of the nation, all the administration's attention went to faking the latest glowing balance sheet of the "business," with statistics about the climbing rate of retention and graduation; none went to thinking about the quality of the product coming out of the dumbed-down system that resulted.

How bad does it get? On a final exam I once asked a class in computer literacy to write a paragraph or two describing how the advent of computers had changed the job of managers in business. One senior student's entire answer was: "They could check the computer [sic] work and see how correct it dones [sic]." A couple of days later that student received her diploma from SWTSU and went into the world a college graduate.

It is hard to be very optimistic about the future of a nation that chooses to squander the potential of its young people to achieve and learn. That is what we have done, first in the high schools, and now in our colleges and universities.

ALFRED E. BORM
San Marcos, Tex.