To the editors. (Correspondence).

A glorious inheritance

Apropos Peter Quinn's engaging discussion of "The Catholic Novel" (November 8): The attempt to use a "mark" of the church--namely Catholicity--to characterize a class of novels might turn out to be too equivocal to succeed. Still, a certain family resemblance unites those novels that are imbued with elements of Catholic tradition, whether these elements belong to "intrinsic" tradition, that is, tradition intrinsic to the deposit of faith (such as the apostolic tradition) or to "extrinsic" tradition (such as magisterial teaching).

Such "Catholic" novels are relatively common today. Compare, for example, the situation described by Timothy Dwight in his Travels in New England and New York (1823): "Between the Bible and novels there is a gulf fixed which few novel readers are willing to pass. The consciousness of virtue, the dignified pleasure of having performed one's duty, the serene remembrance of a useful life, the hope of an interest in the redeemer, and the promise of a glorious inheritance in the favor of God are never found in novels."

JOHN F. MAGUIRE
Berkeley, Calif.

Pious trash?

Putting aside questions of war and ecclesiastical corruption for the moment, I was much taken with Peter Quinn's article on Catholic novels, whether such things actually exist, and if they do, how to define them. Quinn is quite right that, if the "Catholic novel" exists, it is defined by a particular sensibility, which is neither the exclusive preserve of Catholic writers, nor necessarily reflected in the work of writers who are Catholic. That sensibility means taking seriously questions of sin, grace, suffering, and redemption. And also carnality, that is, the actuality of the Incarnation, rather than simply dismissing it as metaphor.

It also means taking seriously the communion of the saints (here, he points to the opening of William Kennedy's Ironweed). A good term, the communion of saints, and one that I've only begun to understand in recent years, particularly in pondering over the question of why we Catholics pray for the dead, while Protestants don't (or at least claim not to). Their argument, of course, is that the dead are in the hands of the Lord, whose mind is not apt to be changed by prayer, and while I fully agree with that, I think it rather misses the point. Our prayers, rather, acknowledge their continuing existence, recognizing a continuum in which we all, living and dead, are participants (reflecting that carnality which is part of the Catholic sensibility). So we don't just stuff Uncle Joe underground, forget him, and get on with life (as we might, when driven by a Weberian spirit of capitalism), or even say (piously) that true immortality is simply his living on in our memories, as if that were it, over and done with.

Quinn's piece calls to mind Flannery O'Connor's considerations of the same questions in Manners and Morals, that wonderful collection of her essays on writers and writing. O'Connor, however, raises a question Quinn doesn't: the problem Catholic novelists have with a Catholic readership, that is, a readership (whether formally Catholic or not) that's willing to try to understand and to engage such questions. And, as she says, too many formal Catholics want the sort of quick answers that good fiction isn't going to give.

Hence, "when the Catholic novelist closes his own eyes and tries to see with the eyes of the church, the result is another addition to that large body of pious trash for which we have so long been famous."

NICHOLAS CLIFFORD
New Haven, Vt.

Oil & Iraq

Regarding Jay Mandle's "A War for Oil" (November 8): On the one hand is a crippled old enemy that spits hatred for America from its global isolation. On the other is a country ruled by despots and that numbers among its citizens the head of Al Qaeda, fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, and the financiers of the terror war. Which do you attack? For George W. Bush, the answer is the former, Iraq, not the latter, Saudi Arabia. Jay Mandle goes a long way in explaining Bush's otherwise incomprehensible shift of attention from Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein.

In 1991, Iraq had one of the largest armies in the world. It was well equipped and battle-hardened from its war with Iran. In the Gulf War, that army was crushed in a matter of days. Iraq has been under a crippling embargo for a decade. No-fly zones exist over much of the country. Its ability to stage an offensive attack against its neighbors or the United States is negligible. Months of intense efforts by U.S. intelligence have failed to show an Iraqi role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. If the evidence points back to any nation, it's Saudi Arabia.

So why Iraq? Theories proliferate: Is it a way to deflect criticism from the ailing U.S. economy? Is it simple revenge after the "guy who tried to kill my dad"? Is it unfinished business for Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney? Is it a product of the administration's frustration that it can't find Osama? Or is it, as Mandle suggests, an effort to establish a new alliance that moves us away from the Saudis and toward another, more pliable, Saddam-less oil producer?

Maybe all of these theories contain some truth. What is truly disheartening is that Mandle's theory is probably the best single explanation of why we're about to go to war. And that's tragic.

MIKE BURKE
Cheverly, Md.

Israel & anti-Semitism

Regarding Arthur Hertzberg's letter in the November 22 Correspondence column: Hertzberg strikes an increasingly familiar note when he implies that Christians criticizing Israel are skating dangerously close to anti-Semitism. I have seen similar comments, in the Forward for example, blatantly saying that we Christians are anti-Semites for criticizing Israel. Why do some of us zero in on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while seeming to ignore the horrors in other areas of the world? For the same reason that Hertzberg will write about the horrors of the Holocaust without mentioning the Nazi slaughter of 6 million Soviet prisoners of war; the rape of Nanking or the Bataan Death March. I am sure Hertzberg grieves for the murdered Soviet soldiers, the brutalized Chinese, the tortured Americans, but like the rest of us he can only focus on one horror at a time.

For many of us, at the moment at least, Israel's brutal suppression of Palestinians, largely paid for by American taxpayers' money and protected by American diplomacy, is the horror we are trying to end. Parenthetically, let me note that the war between Serbs and Croats and the suffering in Rwanda (Hertzberg's examples) were ended by outside armies who forced a peace on the warring parties. Israel has refused to allow a United Nations force to come between it and the Palestinians (again with America's backing). Israel claims that such a force would be ipso facto anti-Semitic and once that claim is made all discussion ends.

Of course, as Hertzberg says, some Christians may be upset by the return of Jews to the Holy Land but others, evangelicals and fundamentalists, for example, are blissful because that anticipates the Second Coming of Christ. Others, myself included, welcomed the creation of the state of Israel as a fitting end to the suffering Jews have endured for thousands of years. Who could have imagined that this "beacon to the world" would elect governments that would turn into brutal oppressors of a defenseless minority?

We Americans have paid a fearful price for our support of Israel, a support that originally came from the heart but is now given out of fear by politicians who know the power of the American Israeli lobby. One has to be brainwashed or brain-dead not to believe that the tragedy of September 11, the bombing of the World Trade Center ten years ago, the attacks on the U.S.S. Cole and American embassies in Africa were not in part a protest against our one-sided support of Israel. And that belief is also denounced as anti-Semitic by those who are threatened by this truth.

JOSEPH D. POLICANO
East Hampton, N.Y.

Hail, Caesar

Your response (Correspondence, November 8) to my letter about the October 11 cover, on which George W. Bush appears in war paint, explained that the cover was a take-off on Mel Gibson's Braveheart, not a Native American stereotype, as I had written.

I contend that the analogy is not as powerful as it might have been. Recall that the Scots were rebelling against a powerful British tyrant. President Bush does not fit that paradigm. Actually, it is inverted.

Bush would be better represented with the image of a Roman general, or of a member of the U.S. Delta Force--camo grease paint, helmet, with all the attendant paraphernalia.

RICHARD RUSZKAY
Newark, Del.