The helicopter that lifted Richard Nixon from the White House lawn nearly three years ago seemed an angel of mercy, rescuing the nation from the long, painful nightmare of Watergate. As it turned out, however, the bad dream had its afterglow, and books and articles by the dozen promised the inside story of the final days and a psychological profile of the man at the center of the scandals. The former President has till now maintained a dignified distance from Watergate post-mortems.
The silence could not last. Richard Nixon is a personality both born and destroyed in the media. His series of conversations with David Frost, on reflection, was inevitable. He has always been compelled to bring his case directly to the people, from the time he defended his campaign expenses in the "Checkers" speech in 1952 to his long and tortured explanations of Watergate. Now, once again, he is confronting the cameras in an attempt to salvage his reputation and, perhaps, even begin a retum to public life.
The careful staging of the media event points out once more that tragic lack of a sense of propriety which seems to haunt the man and those he chooses as his associates. In fact, he is allowing his potential confession to be marketed by the show-business entrepreneur, David Frost, in the same way he allowed his Presidency to be marketed by admen, Messrs. Haldeman, Erlichman and Ziegler. None of the networks would air the series, since "checkbook journalism," the competitive bidding for personality news, is generally thought to devalue news departments. When commercial sales lagged, a few leaks hinted at startling new revelations, and the spiciest segment, dealing with Watergate, was moved from the last of the four evenings to the first, to generate press coverage and advertising revenue. It succeeded. Mr. Nixon will earn close to $1 million and Mr. Frost about twice that amount. Time, Newsweek, The New York Times and CBS all gave feature space to the series.
Beginning in Advent of 2011, the U.S. church will be using a new English translation of the Roman Missal. The current translation was promulgated in 1973, and for the past past several years the International Commission on English has been working on a new text. The controversy surrounding this translation, including the decision not to use a text proposed by an earlier iteration of ICEL, has been well documented in America. Here we offer a selection of our coverage from both our print and online editions. Cardinal Roger M. Mahony's essay on the new Missal, "A Graced Moment," appears in the May 23 issue.
"Liturgists Worry About Upcoming Implementation," Signs of the Times, February 14, 2011
"An Open Letter to the U.S. Catholic Bishops," Anthony Ruff, O.S.B., Web Only
"Bringing Liturgy to Life," Steven P. Millies, February 7, 2011
"For You and Who Else?" Paul Philibert, January 3, 2011
Examples of the new texts, Web Only
"Liturgists Prepare for Coming Changes in Mass Text," Signs of the Times, August 2, 2010
"Welcoming the Roman Missal," Arthur J. Serratelli, March 1, 2010
"Defending the New Missal," Peter M. J. Stravinskas, Web Only
"What If We Said, 'Wait'?" Michael G. Ryan, December 14, 2009
"How Accessible Are the New Mass Translations?" Donald W. Trautman, May 21, 2007
"The Quest for Authentic Liturgy," Donald W. Trautman, October 22, 2001
James Martin, S.J., presents two extreme ways of looking at the saints in the November 7 issue of America. Here we offer past articles on the saints from Fr. Martin and other contributors.
Darwinism and Popular Science
From April 24, 1909
The April number of The Popular Science Monthly contains a series of articles on Darwin and Darwinism, most of them addresses delivered on the hundredth anniversary of Darwins birth, February 12th, 1909. The impression that will be derived by the ordinary nonscientific reader, or even by educated people who are not closely in touch with present day thought in biology, will be inevitably that Darwinism is still a great force in the scientific world, an almost universally accepted theory that now has risen almost to the higher plane of a scientific doctrine. Of course any such idea is utterly false. Darwinism is not evolution, but an attempt to explain evolution. Darwin was not the first to make such an attempt of explanation; but literally hundreds of thinkers before him made the effort and at least half a dozen of them came as near making a successful explanation as his has proved to be.
In all of these addresses there is practically no hint that at the present moment the great leaders of biological thought in Europe, the professors of the biological sciences at the Universities of Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Strassburg, Tiibingen, Erlangen, Amsterdam and Heidelberg have in the last ten years written books against Darwinism. English speaking scientists still continue, apparently from national motives, to cling to Darwinism, but even such distinguished American biologists as Cope, perhaps the greatest of American zoologists, Packard of Brown, and Thomas Hunt Morgan of Columbia, wrote against the Darwinian theory. The greatest investigating scientists of the nineteenth century were almost without exception antiDarwinians. The "antis" include Von Baer, the greatest of embryologists, though from embryology Darwinism is supposed to derive its strongest confirmation; Wigand, the botanist, though botany is supposed to have furnished most evidence for the transmutation of species; Agassiz and Sir William Dawson, the greatest of paleontologists, though it was the study of fossils that was expected to furnish the missing links; and Van Kolliker Nageli and Virchow, the great human and comparative anatomists, whose knowledge of anthropology should make their opinions of great weight. Prof. Driesch of Heidelberg, Haeckels greatest disciple, declared last year in the Gifford Lectures at Edinburg, that "Darwinism fails all along the line." Of all this growing protest against Darwinism there is almost no hint in this symposium on Darwin, published in The Popular Science Monthly, except a halting sentence or two from Prof. Morgan, who declares that "it is the spirit of Darwinism and not its formultion for the genuine scientist. Evidently this case is no exception. The centennial of Darwin has not made evolution more certain than he left it.
Darwins Place in Biology
From January 22, 1910
