Satisfactory Return

I read Michael McGreevy’s letter (5/3) about the editorial Trading Jobs (4/5), and I think the mind-set expressed by Mr. McGreevy is outrageous. It is, however, typical of investment bankers and lawyers.

Those of us who manage a business in manufacturing, as well as our friends who manage a service business that renders a genuine service, really do not feel that our function in running a business is primarily to make a profit and to provide this profit to the investor. Our prime responsibility is to manufacture a good product or supply good service and to provide constructive and satisfying careers.

Clearly everyone, whether owner, manager, salaried employee or hourly employee, recognizes that we must make a profit to maintain and grow our business, but I challenge Mr. McGreevy and those in their ivory towers with similar mind-sets to go onto the shop floor and ask the individuals there whether they feel the primary purpose of their career is to make a satisfactory return for the investor.

Carl C. Landegger

Means to Solidarity

How is it possible that so few Americans are aware of the horror in northern Uganda: since 1988, nearly 20,000 children abducted, more than one million civilians living away from their homes in squalid camps? Thank you for trying to inform them (Child Soldiers and the Lord’s Resistance Army, 3/29).

Thanks too for Rwanda Ten Years Later (4/19) and your editorial urging the need for the American public to be better informed about African politics. The U.S. bishops argued for such self-education and involvement in public policy in their November 2001 A Call to Solidarity with Africa. Unfortunately, very few American Catholics, even professionals in ministry, seem to have heard of this. A student in our Jesuit school in Bukavu, Congo, recently asked me, Why do your people know so little about us, when we know so much about America?

To counterbalance the usual bad news, your authors also highlight the hopeful antidotesso many beautiful, faith-filled people here who struggle daily to combat the heavy forces against them (including, too often, some from the civilized world). I long for the day when Africa begins to get the good attention that so many Americans gave to Latin America in the 1980’s. Africa also has heroic witnesses to the faith, even martyrs worthy of canonization. At a recent Mass in Rwanda, I heard the large, mostly young adult congregation singing, You are at the center of our lives; you are alive. Immediately after the genocide in 1994, the Africa bishops proclaimed, The Risen Christ Is Our Hope.

The U.S. bishops remind us of the power of prayer but go on to advocate more diocesan/parish twinning (including Catholic schools and retreat houses). For those to whom it applies, they call for more corporate responsibility and responsible investment. Could my company/investment somehow be making things even worse for those who are already poor? What about my country?

Finally, I have come to learn that there is no better means to solidarity than personal contact, trying to get to know some Africans in the United States or, even better, somewhere here.

Tony Wach, S.J.

cartoon by pat byrnes

Natural Method

I was exceedingly pleased to read in Signs of the Times (4/5) that Pope John Paul II said, The administration of water and food, even when delivered using artificial means, always represents a natural method of preserving life and not a medical act. What a relief. All these years I thought the church held that things artificial were not naturalas in artificial birth control.

Michael Ducar

Unleash the Capitalists

How disillusioning to read your editorial Trading Jobs (4/5). I expected something better from a Jesuit publication than this stale diatribe on American capitalism.

To begin, let me compliment you on your initial observation on the outsourcing phenomenon. The loss of jobs due to their exportation is indeed a very small portion of the overall job losses in the current economy. This is as true now as it has been throughout our history. Currently, because of its emotive power, outsourcing is a lightning rod for political purposes.

As to your further observations on the American economy and your prescriptions for job creation, let me offer the following counsel. It is not the role of any business to create jobs. It is the responsibility of a business to make a profit (within an overall defined legal, moral and ethical milieu) and to provide this profit to the investors in the form of a return on their capital. The creation of jobs is an ancillary byproduct of American business. Although employee considerations should be an important factor in any business decision, no businessperson who wishes to stay in business long can translate this consideration into a mandate for job creation or retention. To do so would be economic suicide.

As to your recommendation for the inclusion of labor unions, community organizations and environmentalists in the negotiating of trade agreements, we should remember that these are international economic compacts, not political ones. Unless you are a proponent of the creation of an international economic quagmire instead of a global marketplace, these institutions would be better served at the local and national negotiating tables.

Your two-part prescription for government intervention in the form of increases in new taxes on business and increases in public funding for job re-training are quite frankly tired, old and ill conceived. Historically, raising taxes and/or increasing the government bureaucracy are steps toward stagnation and decline, and have been no solution for any economic problem.

As for your proposed formula of improvements by the business community, they are similarly misguided. Contrary to your opinion, the unequivocal fact is that high-stakes gambling is not the economic function of options and derivatives. Risk-aversion, however, is. Risk-aversion is a fundamental economic principle. Corporate takeovers do generate enduring health for the companies involved, although not necessarily in their original form. Preoccupation with quarterly returns, although a factor in business decision making, is but one of many variables considered in making decisions on long-term investment.

In conclusion, let me concur with your observation that only the business community can bring major improvements in employment prospects. The purpose of these improvements, however, should not be, as you say, to rein in aggressive capitalism. Rather, they must be for the purpose of unleashing American capitalism. Only free markets can create jobs.

Michael McGreevy

Peer Review

Regarding Bishop Emil C. Wcela’s title query, What Did I Miss? I should like to suggest that the missing category about which he is puzzled is the use of peer review (3/15). If seminarians had been polled regularly, perhaps some weeks before the seminary authorities met to discuss and vote on the candidates for priesthood at the end of each academic year, much more could have been learned about the candidates and their ability to relate effectively and appropriately. While peer review never tells the whole story, it does add another dimension. Ordained in 1965, I too, like the bishop, wish I could have been more effective, but there was no way at the time to help.

(Rev.) Stephen F. Duffy

Center of Our Lives

I am writing concerning Presiding at the Liturgy of the Eucharist, by Keith F. Pecklers, S.J. (3/15). I do not find an abundance of words in our reformed liturgy. I like to hear the work of human hands to recall my gift of life. I want to hear that the Spirit is changing these gifts into the body of Christ. We no longer have copies of the text in our hands, so we need to hear the words being said in our name.

I realize that it is not the intent of this article to speak about the role of the assembly. But I would love to see the Mass viewed from the perspective of the person in the pew, written for us the assembly. I believe it is different from that of the presider. Thank God, we are one in so many ways.

I appreciated Sacrifice: the Way to Enter the Paschal Mystery (5/12/03) and Running to Communion (10/27/03). We need more essays like them to bring the Mass to the center of our lives, where it truly belongs.

Jane Day, S.S.J.

Neo-Nativism

Some things never change. Terry Golway, in Return of the Know-Nothings (3/29), aptly takes Harvard professor Samuel Huntington to task for contending that Hispanics, and in particular Mexicans, are somehow a threat to the values that made America great. But as Mr. Golway notes, much the same was said about the Irish and Italians in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Yet history shows that none of these predominantly Catholic groups ever challenged the American creedthey absorbed it. What seems to be bothering Huntington is the challenge to WASP hegemony, not the failure of Catholic ethnics to assimilate.

In 1986, the main sponsor of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), John Tanton, wrote a private memo (subsequently leaked to the press) expressing his concerns about Latino fertility rates and their Catholicism. Now Huntington is sadly on board. Fortunately, most Americans understand that Little Italy and Spanish Harlem are very much a part of the American mosaic. So, for that matter, is Chinatown. I would have thought that social scientists employed at Harvardwhich once had a quota for Catholics and Jewswould be beating the drums of diversity, not division. But, alas, some things never change.

William A. Donohue

Much Sadder Sentence

My friend Sam almost died last week. That was the first sentence of my article Growing Old in Prison, published in America last Nov. 10. Today I must write a new, much sadder sentence: my friend Sam died yesterday afternoon.

Five days ago, during a spell of unusually cold weather, Sam began to feel congested and weak, andquite sensibly for a 63-year-oldhe reported to the prison infirmary. In my earlier article I compared penitentiary medical care to penitentiary food: the operative motto is as little as possible, as cheap as possible. True to this guiding principle, the nurses told Sam that he had the flu and that he should simply ride it out in his cell. No one thought it strange that he had to be taken back to the cellblock in a wheelchair.

The following day Sam was too weak to report to pill call or to walk to the chow hall. Thanks to a kindhearted fellow inmate, however, he was at least brought a tray with food. The guards on duty told this prisoner, Wilbur T., to keep an eye on Sam, in lieu of proper medical care.

The next morning, a Sunday, he had trouble breathing, so two other inmatesSylvester F. and Meredith S.persuaded the watch commander, Lieutenant M., to move Sam to the infirmary. Unexpectedly, this watch commander followed up on Sam’s progress so resolutely that the nurses called an ambulance and had him moved to the prison ward at a major hospital in Richmond, Va. I heard that at this stage the official diagnosis was still influenza, but I do not know this for certain.

Two days later, Sam passed away because of kidney failure. Because he, unlike most prisoners, still had contact with his family, civilian hospital staff were able to call his two daughters to his bedside at the end. His son is a military officer on active duty. Sam is survived by his children and a large passel of beautiful grandchildren.

Many of his fellow convicts also mourn his loss. On our side of the razor-wire fence, there are few men like him: generous, patient, funny, intelligent and stoical. Sam was always ready to give a roll-up cigarette or two to the crazies from this penitentiary’s mental health unit, and he taught other inmates how to read and write in a remedial literacy class organized by two Presbyterian teachers. Certainly his line-by-line edits and detailed critique of the manuscript of my first book helped significantly to make it publishable.

Even in Sam’s last months, he always maintained his sense of humor, arguing fiercely at the breakfast table that Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction would eventually be found, even if the United States had to invade Syria to track them down. But those days were very difficult for him. After the two mini-strokes I described in Growing Old in Prison, Sam experienced another mini-stroke, as a result of which he broke his wrist. No doubt those episodes contributed to the kidney failure that eventually took his life.

And the usual stresses of prison life surely played a role in Sam’s death as well. At the end of 2003, the Department of Corrections ordered all inmates to cut their visiting lists so drastically that he had to choose which of his many relatives would still be allowed to visit him in the future. What a decision to make: do I give up the right to see my grandchildren by my eldest daughter? Or do I give up the right to see my youngest grandson, by my son? And how do I explain all this to my family?

Supposedly, Sam told another prisoner three days before his passing that he was ready and prepared to die. Perhaps that is true, perhaps not. Many of us have spent so much time behind bars that we envy Sam his final release. At least he got out; we are still here.

Of course, all of us earned our trips to the penitentiary even Sam, even me. Sam, you may recall from my first article, shot an intruder twice inside his townhouse, a death that might have been prevented by firing a warning into the ceiling. So he deserved to go to jail; but did he deserve to lose his own life in a hospital’s prison ward?

Jens Soering

Resurrection Faith

Many thanks for the fine article by John W. O’Malley, S.J., on Anna Katherine Emmerich and the Mel Gibson film (3/15). His historical sketch of the Passion tradition prompts two thoughts regarding the relationship between that tradition and the post-Vatican lI emphasis on the Resurrection. That emphasis makes sense theologically, of course, but liturgically it has generated zingy church songs (I hesitate to call them hymns) in which we Catholics now celebrate ourselves as the finger-snapping people of God who, it seems, are so lucky to know that God loves us, thanks to our Resurrection faith. Fortunately, that is hard to do during Passion Week, one of the few times a Catholic is likely to hear a classic hymn in Latin. It also occurs to me that unlike Good Friday, or for that matter the Jewish Day of Atonement, Easter, which (as we might say) celebrates the fact that the last words of Jesus on the cross were not God’s last word, must compete with chocolate bunnies, egg-rolls, pagan sunrise services and other insipid rites of spring. Without the somberness of Passiontide, Easter these days would be unbearable, just as Good Friday without Easter would be meaningless.

Kenneth L. Woodward

Something Great

Of Many Things (2/23) honoring the life and the work of Jim Santora was one of the nicest tributes I have ever read. I hope and pray that you said all these same things to him not only on his deathbed but also 10 and 20 and 30 years ago during the middle of his tenure at America.

By way of background: I, like Jim, am a C.P.A., and like many others I have heard for years that I must remember my Christian values and live them in my professional life. I was lucky. During my years at LeMoyne College I took courses in corporate responsibility, religion and philosophy, so I actually had an idea what it meant to be true to my Christian values while running a business and trying to make money. You cannot believe how many businessmen there are out there, good people, who just don’t understand that Christian values and acceptable business conduct can be reconciled and demonstrated.

I am one of the leaders of a youth group at our church, 8th, 9th and 10th graders. I have been talking to the kids for two years about leading their lives with Christian values, being idealistic, trying to do something great. I knew I was not getting through to them. I handed out your article last Sunday night, and we all read it as a group. The lights went on! They finally understood what I have been talking to them about. Jim may not have been a saint; he wasn’t even a Jesuit. He was not the president of the United States, nor was he C.E.O. of I.B.M. Jim was a working guy, a father and a husband, and he touched everyone’s lives and made the world a better place as a result of his work.

I loved your closeyou asked Jim to pray for us. Thanks from my kids. I am hopeful that because of your article at least one of them will grow up to be another Jim Santora.

David W. Morris