Opposing Estrada

It appears obvious that John W. Donohue, S.J., (Of Many Things, 1/5) missed the fundamental reason for the refusal of Senate Democrats to allow the confirmation of Miguel A. Estrada to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The D.C. court is one of the most important courts in the country and is often a stepping stone for Supreme Court appointments. Estrada’s slim record shows him to be an extreme conservative, some say an ideologue. Yet the White House refused to release information on Estrada that would provide the Senate with adequate information necessary for its advice-and-consent responsibility.

His appointment was opposed by the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, as well as the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund, and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. President George W. Bush was catering to Hispanic voters in much the same way as his father, former President Bush, did when he sought to replace Justice Thurgood Marshall with Justice Clarence Thomas.

Leo J. Jordan, Esq.

Sustaining Life

The commentary by John F. Kavanaugh, S.J., Food for Terri Schiavo (11/24), was right on the mark. As a permanent deacon, a medical oncologist and a father of four, I applaud his clear and cogent discussion of the issues involved.

Why must our society confront this issue over and over and over? Despite previous debates about Karen Ann Quinlan, Nancy Crouzon, Hugh Finn and now Mrs. Schiavo, we continue to argue over the lengths to which medical and social science must go to maintain life. And it seems that each of these discussions becomes more fractious, difficult and painful for all parties involved. In the most recent debate, a grieving, suffering husband is even being accused of ulterior motives when he merely tries to honor his wife’s final wishes.

It seems to me there are two basic issues involved in these discussions.

First, with recent advances in medical care, miraculous things are possible and almost commonplace. Septuplets who could have never survived in an earlier age, now do. Heart and lung transplants are commonplace. We remove half the brain of children with uncontrollable seizures and they develop normally. Over half of all Americans with cancer are cured of their disease, and we even replace people’s livers destroyed by alcohol. So one could fairly ask, why can’t we cure Karen and Nancy and Terri?

Second, the Right to Life movement has had a tremendous impact on our society, and more and more Americans are rightfully asking if abortion for any reason, at any time is acceptable or justifiable. As Americans, we increasingly accept the need to protect the lives of the unborn, the retarded, the innocent and those incapable of speaking for themselves.

As a result of these advances, it has become more difficult to determine when any medical intervention is excessive or extraordinary. However, just as we are called to respect life; so too, are we called to respect death. The two are a continuum and cannot be separated.

(Deacon) P. Gregory Rausch, M.D.

Facts, Fiction and Faith

The refutation by your reviewer Gerald O’Collins, S.J., (12/15) of the mass of misinformation in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is probably useful. But why do we need a distinguished scholar like Father O’Collins to refute a work of fiction? Fiction is just that, fiction. Why do we sense the need to refute Brown’s Code when we don’t take on the facts in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein or L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz or a thousand other imaginative pieces?

When Brown replies on his Web site to questions about how much of his novel is based on fact, he writes, The paintings, locations, historical documents, and organizations described in the novel all exist. Read his answer carefully. Places and articles are real. The book is a novel. Add only that a novel is fiction, which is literally not true.

Brown is an excellent writer despite his lack of basic character development. His Code is a page-turner thriller. For the development of his story, he dredges up every sort of half-truth, supposition and myth from the past 2,000 years.

What about those who may accept Brown’s fiction as truth? Many look for any and every justification for their prejudices or diminished faith. They jump at reports of the priest who fondles young boys, or of a cardinal who dies in the bed of his mistress or the reduction of the female to less than the male. Are any of these acts worse than God’s chosen Apostle who gave that kiss of affection as betrayal? These people may need a reminder that fiction is no more than fiction, no matter how it is written, how it is packaged, how it is hyped. Wishing fiction to be truth does not make it so.

What about the age-old allegations that Christ was in love with a woman or even married? We need to recall that Jesus was both human and divine. We believe that Christ was human like us in all matters except sin. Is it a sin for a man to love a woman, to be married? Surely our faith does not hinge on the celibacy of Christ.

Most of us in this day and age are blessed to have sufficient background and understanding to cope with the multitudinous challenges to our faith. Conspiracies, secret revelations, false doctrines, all pepper church history. But we do not allow them to degrade our gift of faith. Our theology is sacred and secure.

Brown’s novel is not to be missed, but to be enjoyed and accepted for what it is, fiction.

Rex Reynolds

False Problems?

Frederick W. Gluck’s article, Crisis Management in the Church (12/1), is flawed by several statements that are not supported by the available data.

The church’s traditional sources of revenues are drying up. Some weeks ago I finished writing a report that analyzed contributions to Sunday collections and diocesan annual appeals in the years 2001 and 2002. I found that Catholic household giving in the Sunday collections increased from $5.573 billion in 2001 to $5.846 billion for 2002, an increase of $273 million or 4.9 percent. This increase happened in the midst of high unemployment, a recession and the painful and lengthy revelation of the sexual abuse tragedy.

Catholic giving to diocesan annual appeals declined from $650 million in 2001 to about $635 million for 2002. About half of that national drop happened in Boston. The decline in the other 175 geographic dioceses averaged a more modest 1.1 percent, not surprising in a troubled economy.

The church’s ability to recruit has declined dramatically over the last 40 years. I happened to be working on church staffing data recently and found that the number of professional parish ministers increased from 54,055 in 1995 to 63,065 for 2002.

In addition, the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, at Georgetown University, has reported that there are approximately 35,000 students in graduate programs of religious studies and religious education.

I think that we need to find some negative numbers before we can rightly declare a staffing crisis.

A number of other statements in the article mystified me. Mr. Gluck stated, for example, that the plant is rapidly becoming obsolete. Perhaps so, but I would like to see the data supporting such a statement. I am familiar with the current rebuilding program in Chicago, where the archdiocese raised in excess of $200 million to repair its buildings.

While discussions of management issues in the church can be fascinating, we should be careful that we are discussing solutions for problems that do in fact exist.

Joseph Claude Harris

Church Management

I appreciate the observations of Frederick W. Gluck in Crisis Management in the Church (12/1). There are, however, some special circumstances that should be kept in mind in discussing management policies in the church.

First, church members and clergy are volunteers, and they cannot be managed by the same principles as those applied to salaried employees.

Second, shortly after the Second Vatican Council, a number of religious orders made use of management firms to attempt to plan their future ministry, but the results of careful planning by consultants unfamiliar with the church brought great disturbance to parishes and schools that were left out of the planning process. (They were often consulted, but with no real input).

Third, the theology of the church, which supports both our present hierarchical structure and the special character of the clergy, militates against the kind of accountability that good corporate management sees as necessary.

Finally, a national conference of bishops, according to Canon Law, cannot make the strong public commitment to managerial change that Mr. Gluck suggests. There is only one C.E.O. of the church, and he resides abroad and will not share his authority with the U.S. bishops.

I hope, nonetheless, that the church in the United States can begin to take steps toward better management in this difficult time. There are many initiatives that could contribute to a turnaround.

(Msgr.) Frank Mouch

The Path to Peace

The interview by George M. Anderson, S.J., with Claudette Habesch, Obstacles to Peace, A Palestinian-Christian Perspective (11/17), demonstrates how the Israeli security wall is really a weapon of war. When completed, this wall, referred to by some as the apartheid wall, will be 220 miles long, 25 feet highthree times as long and twice as high as the Berlin Wall. Instead of guns, tanks and planes, cement and steel are used as weapons of dispossession and human brutality.

In the words of Neve Gorday, a teacher of politics and human rights at Ben-Gurion University, It will stand as the largest open-air prison known in the world. It will separate villages from water supplies, children from schools, farmers from their lands. Families will not have access to some of their ancestral cemeteries. Other Palestinian parents will even be cut off from their adult children. The tens of thousands of trees that are being removed in the process will have disastrous effects on the watershed.

This wall does not separate Israel from Palestine; rather it divides Palestine from itself, and will imprison more than 210,00 Palestinians, 76 villages, towns and cities, according to the Israeli human right group B’tselem. Bulldozers are building barriers between the sick and their hospitals. More than 10 Palestinian women have already been prevented from getting to hospitals to deliver their children. A human rights group reports that Israeli soldiers would not let an ambulance, just 10 meters away, transport a woman giving birth to the hospital. This resulted in her delivering the child at the checkpoint.

Does anyone really believe that this will add to the security of Israel or promote the waning road map of peace plan? Former President Reagan shouted: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall, referring to the Berlin Wall. President Bush and our elected officials raise little more than a whimper against this wall. Each day the media adeptly reports single acts of violence committed by the Israeli military or a Palestinian terrorist while failing to report the longer-term and far more severe human consequences of building this wall. Could it be that the blood and body count over so many years has rendered us too numb for any sensible reaction? Or worse, have we been conditioned to think that Palestinians are less than human and deserve such treatment? The silence of churches and citizens and governments is deafening.

This week the Red Cross announced that it will end its food program to the Palestinians, stating that it is now the responsibility of Israel. The United Nations declared that Israel has created an inhumane disaster. When will it stop?

Israel’s desire for security is understandable, but imprisoning the Palestinian people and degrading their human dignity will only prove a source of more violence. Only a just peace will provide security both for the Israeli and Palestinian peoples now, and for their children in the future. Only a sensible and sane plan that is based on a just solution will ensure a peace that will last.

(Rev.) Richard Broderick