Who Owns What?

Forgive me if I am confused on the current question of who owns and/or controls assets of Catholic parishes. Two items in the Signs of the Times section (2/6) seem to express contrasting viewpoints on this issue.

First, Archbishop John G. Vlazny of Portland, Ore., asserts that the archdiocese has no authority to seize parish property or assets to satisfy claims against the archdiocese.

Second, the Vatican has denied appeals from members of parishes that were closed by Archbishop Sean P. O’Malley, O.F.M.Cap., of Boston. While there were other reasons given for these closings, the financial distress of the Archdiocese of Boston is an underlying cause. Did the parishes and the parishioners receive the benefits from disposing of these assets, which were claimed without their consent?

The Wall Street Journal of Dec. 20, 2005, reports the situation of St. Stanislaus Kostka parish in St. Louis, which has been placed under an edict because the parish board will not turn its assets over to Archbishop Raymond L. Burke to be under his control. These assets reportedly include a cash fund of some $9 million.

Do the parishioners, who have paid for parish assets, have control except when the local bishop wants those assets? It seems to me that the bishops are working both sides of the street.

John L. Coakley Jr.

Elucidation

Professor Lawrence S. Cunningham’s vignette on St. John of the Cross presented a streetwise poet-mystic-reformer (1/30). John’s friendship with St. Teresa of vila and her influence on him were also nicely presented. But St. John’s connections to the Society of Jesus and its influence on him were conspicuously absent.

Before entering religion, John of the Cross was Juan de Yepes, son of Gonzalo de Yepes and Catalina lvarez. Catalina was widowed and in 1551 had to move the family from Toledo in New Castile to the commercial town of Medina del Campo in Old Castile. She hoped that Gonzalo’s wealthy relatives would be of assistance and that her silkweaving trade would make enough money to support the family. The widow Catalina’s family did not receive all the assistance she might have hoped from the Yepes family, and they were often on the verge of starvation.

In the early 1550’s, a number of prominent merchants of Medina del Campo heard Peter Faber, one of the first Jesuits, preach at the court of Philip II in Valladolid. So impressed were they with his erudition and spirituality that they petitioned him to bring the Jesuits to Medina. In 1553 St. Francis Borgia, then comisario, or superprovincial, for the Spanish provinces of the Jesuits, laid the cornerstone of the new school. As with many Jesuit schools of that time, the philosophy of instruction was the modus parisiensis, or the pedagogical style of the University of Paris, which under the influence of humanism stressed, among other things, eloquentia perfecta in the spoken and written word through frequent and varied rhetorical and oratorical exercises.

Juan de Yepes, the future St. John of the Cross, was a scholarship student at that school from 1559 to 1563. The Jesuit school at Medina also stressed, following the pedagogy of the Fourth Week of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, that gifts freely received should be freely shared with others, that its students accompany their Jesuit teachers in catechizing the town’s poor children and helping at the local hospitals, where the town’s sick poor were housed. These were all beneficent institutions that the young Juan knew all too well from having spent time in them as a destitute boy.

It is curious how the influence of the three great Spanish mystics of the 16th century, Ignatius, Teresa and John, cross-fertilized one another’s lives and spiritualities and how the suffering that the child of an impoverished widow, Juan de Yepes, a scholarship student at a Jesuit school where he learned eloquentia perfecta in the written and spoken word, would one day blossom into that streetwise poet-mystic-reformer. As St. Teresa would say, God does indeed write straight with crooked lines.

Claudio M. Burgaleta, S.J.

Imperial Presence

I write to commend the effort of Peter J. Donaldson (A Century Behind, 1/16) to present the situation of poverty and illiteracy in Burkina Faso, the former Upper Volta. His account gives urgency to the concerted effort to make poverty history in Africa. Africans are grateful for such efforts undertaken to alleviate their travails. The account, however, cuts both ways. Let me explain.

From an African point of view this account perpetuates the impression well described in Stan Nussbaum’s recent book, American Cultural Baggage (2005)namely, everyone should adopt our values. It is unfortunate that Africans now tend to read Western reports about their continent with a hermeneutic of suspicion. The writer failed to mention, for example, that Burkina Faso is part of the historic pre-colonial kingdom of Songhai, with a bustling commercial and educational center at Timbuctu. This area controlled the famed trans-Saharan trade and was able to enrich ancient North African potentates, until the combined predatory imperialism of France and the encroachment of the Sahara desert reduced it to penury. A self-confident civilization was certainly developing in this region before historic and natural disasters intervened. There were no Great Walls erected, as was the case in China and on the Mexican borders of the United States to hold off the incursions of European fortune hunters during the scramble for Africa. More than summoning the compassion of America, the author should have brought French colonialism to judgment. The situation of the Africans of this region is not very much different from the situation recently uncovered by Katrina in the Gulf region of the United States.

The author gets credit for mentioning the initiative taken by the natives in changing the colonial name Upper Volta to Burkina Faso. That is a clear indication that they have, after political independence from France, taken their future into their hands. The effects of imperial presence cannot be expected to be wiped out overnight. It would have been interesting to readers to have been told the meaning of this new name given the country by its leaders, just as it would have sated their curiosity if they knew the source of the optimism he discovered among the Burkinabes in the midst of their present misery. Without this balanced treatment, Africans will see such accounts as Donaldson’s as a continuation of the colonial policy of the white man’s burden.

Luke Mbefo, C.S.Sp.

Now There’s a Fourth

Peter Heinegg’s perceptive review of Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature (1/2) reminded me of an incident almost a half-century ago. I grew up a few miles from Talcottville, the upstate New York village where Wilson spent part of each year. As a Princeton undergraduate, I had learned about Wilson and wrote a review of his memoir, A Piece of My Mind: Reflections at Sixty for the local daily in Watertown. In the course of the review I referred to his prolific and catholic mind (lowercase c’), but the editor at the paper changed this to Catholic mind (capital C’)a major distortion, to say the least.

When the review appeared, I was off in Army basic training at Fort Dix, N.J. My mother wrote to say that Edmund Wilson called and wants to have dinner with you. I followed up on the invitation instantly on my first furlough home. The two of us Princetonians had a long, convivialvery convivialevening solving the world’s problems: the c problems, not the C ones.

It was for me an extraordinary encounter that ended with Wilson’s jocular pontification: You know, Duffy, there are only three people from upstate New York who’ve ever amounted to anythingyou, me and John Foster Dulles, and I have grave doubts about him. It was nice of Peter Heinegg to bring back this memory.

James H. Duffy

Open to God

John A. Coleman, S.J., is rightly concerned by a theory of civil law that is excessively entangled with theological doctrine (Religious Liberty, 11/28). The official Catholic position on the numerous moral issues to which he refers certainly is theological doctrine. But it is also the objective teaching of human, moral reasoning. If not based on such reason, civil law runs the risk of a tyrannical positivism with no determining criterion other than the wish of the most powerful (which is not necessarily the majority).

Furthermore, if objective moral reasoning is not to be the content of civil law (in matters, of course, which evoke morality), then what else is to replace it? Legislating immorality or amorality seems to be, as experience proves, the only alternative. There is no moral neutrality. While that might save us from distasteful theories of too much God in civil law, it might well lead to irrational or nonrational law and to a society that follows suit. The fact that a society is open to God does not mean it is bereft of reason. Indeed, the opposite is more likely.

(Msgr.) Peter Magee

Embarrassed and Offended

We were embarrassed to have readers call our attention to the offensive advertisement that escaped our unknowing eyes and appeared in the Dec. 5 issue. Like them, we were deeply offended.

The offense was compounded when we learned in the advertisers reply to a concerned reader that he had intended his art as an assault on Catholic faith and devotion.

We have taken several steps to tighten our advance review of advertising and express our outrage to the artist.

Our thanks to our readers and their friends for their sensitivity and forgiveness.

The Editors

Humanitarian Emergency

This is late, but thank you for the Rev. Donald H. Dunson’s article, A War on Children, (10/10) about northern Uganda. We who are here can hardly believe that this could happen, much less that it has been going on since 1986. I can imagine the incredulity and paralysis of those who are just hearing about the largest neglected humanitarian emergency in the world, as the United Nations described it.

Readers who want to learn more and perhaps pray and take some action could check www.ugandacan.org, associated with the Africa Faith and Justice Network in Washington, D.C. Walks and prayerful witness took place recently in 40 cities worldwide, including several in the United States.

Carlos Rodriguez, a Comboni father, whom you pictured, has made the church here proud, and the government often upset, as a fearless advocate for peace and for more relief to the 1.6 million people trapped in horrendous protected camps. Archbishop John Baptist Odama of Gulu and other religious leaders there, united ecumenically, have been no less inspiring.

And am I the only reader touched by the haunting cover photo by Don Doll, S.J. (10/31)? He wonderfully captures the dignity of southern Sudanese youth and their determination still to find a future despite the destruction of their country. I am proud that the Jesuit Refugee Service has been with them in Uganda and is now accompanying them home.

Tony Wach, S.J.