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

The Housing Challenge

Your editorial Low-Income Housing Crisis (11/10), uncritically accepts the conclusions of a housing advocacy group, responding to a supposed crisis, that are based entirely on arbitrary standards. They state that minimum acceptable housing is a modest two-bedroom unit, and for that people should pay no more than 30 percent of their income. The authors say these standards require an income of $15.21 per hour. That would amount to more than $31,600 per year, not including benefits, even for entry-level workers.

While decent housing should be available at affordable prices, these are totally unrealistic standards. Why do you support them? Had I written such an article for my high school Jesuit teachers, they would have put my youthful idealism into realistic perspective. What would Jesus do? Surely he would help the truly needy. But might he not ask, for example, what is wrong with a one-bedroom apartment for a single occupant? Or for two or more roommates to share housing? Or for unmarried young adults to remain with their parents a while longer? What about living in a boarding house? (It would be useful for America to explore why boarding houses are virtually extinct, despite the apparent need.) Jesus might also ask married couples, what is wrong with both partners working and halving the housing percentage bite? Jesus might go further and ask whether high minimum wages help some people but result in fewer employed, and whether rent control laws help the needy or the savvy, while such laws play havoc with housing markets.

As a faithful subscriber for over 40 continuous years, I have become increasingly distressed over your leftward drift. While the church and faithful expect you to be an advocate for the poor, you have moved into the Looney Left, rarely tempering social concerns with those of individual responsibility. I just cannot bear any more of this addlepated thinking, so please cancel my subscription.

Larry Dacunto

Season of Remembrance

The sensitive reflection by George M. Anderson, S.J., about renewing on each November day, with deep gratitude to God, the memory of some recently deceased friend (Of Many Things, 11/3) constituted, I am sure, his daily act of faith in life eternal. As a valued fringe benefit, his column nudged me and, no doubt, many other readers back to basic sanity. Yes, Frank Sheed’s striking observation in The Church and I came to mind: By sanity I mean seeing what’s there. Who doesn’t? you ask. Who does? I answer. If a man starts seeing things that are evidently not there, we call him insane and do what we can for him. But a man may fail to see the greater part of reality and cause no comment at all. He may live his life in unawareness of God, of the spiritual order, of the unnumbered millions of the dead, and nobody thinks of him as needing help....

Thank you, Father Anderson, for nudging me back to spiritual sanity. My Novembers will be a bit different from now on.

Larry N. Lorenzoni, S.D.B.

Rightly Ordered Loves

The headline of your interview with Archbishop Sean O’Malley, O.F.M.Cap., of Boston, To Love and to Pray (10/27), is inaccurate. The archbishop actually said, To pray and love. Getting our loves in order, keeping the sequence of the two tablets of the Commandments and remembering that first we love God and then all our neighbors is the heart of the religious endeavor. The bishop was quoting the office of the day and, if you check, you will see that St. John Vianney devoted his whole sermon on the prayer part of to pray and love. I think the good saint knew the order was important. I suspect a Franciscan archbishop appreciates the same.

David Pence, M.D.

Educational Values

Thank you, Thomas McCarthy, for your direct and honest comments on our schools in Swimming Upstream (10/6). The amount of time, energy and implied worth that is given to supporting the prevailing cultural values has increased at a disturbing rate, and in direct opposition to what we say Catholic education is all about. Using fund-raising rather than stewardship as a model, we are doing little to model the Eucharist, countercultural values or the creative awe and wonder that are so significant to a child’s faith formation. You are not alone in your reactions, simply more courageous than far too many parents and administrators.

Mary Therese Lemanek

Catholics and Politics

Msgr. Thomas J. Shelley, in his article Vatican II and American Politics (10/13), evokes a most interesting interlude in American history involving the candidacy of Al Smith. If many Americans wondered whether Catholics would impose an official religion if they became a majority, Catholics themselves had no need to speculate concerning their Protestant neighbors in that regard, since they already knew the answer. As Martin Marty, Robert Handy, Philip Hamburger and others have shown so well, Americans for more than a century had imposed a de facto establishment of nondenominational Protestantism that denied true religious liberty to Catholics and other outsiders.

What James Madison feared actually came to pass. He knew that a Bill of Rights represented only parchment barriers against majority oppression. However, the advent of Catholics in great numbers brought what he saw as the necessary pluralism of opposite and rival interests that would inevitably supply the checks and balances necessary to preserve true liberty. By their fidelity, opposition and persistence, Catholics contributed immensely to the creation of modern religious liberty, and in doing so they transformed this country. In 1960 the United States, by a hair’s breadth, acknowledged that transformationthat Catholics could be and were truly Americans.

Catholic scholars appreciate the development of doctrine and the fact that Catholicism is a historically conditioned religion. But they have not yet been able to apply the same thinking to American religious liberty, which they tend to see as springing full blown from the First Amendment. In the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Liberty (1965), the church declared that it would not impose an official religion if Catholics became the majority. But with the election of John F. Kennedy, America had already affirmed that it would not and could not continue to maintain the official religion it had established when the majority of Americans were Protestant.

Historians can see how the United States influenced Catholicism, but they can perceive much less clearly how Catholicism transformed the United States. When American Catholic historians are able to grasp the interrelationindeed interdependenceof these two developments, they will be far better able to find a significant place for Catholicism in the history of the United States than is currently the case.

(Most Rev.) Thomas J. Curry

Right Here

One of my duties as a newly ordained religious priest working in another diocese was that of offering the Eucharist and hearing confessions every Saturday morning in a state-run institution for about 1,300 troublesome girls, age 13 to about 25. I was reminded of those years, 1950 to 1954, as I read the review of The Magdalene Sisters by Richard A. Blake, S.J., and recalled that right here in the United States the girls in those state-run institutions had their heads shaved for major infractions of the rules, as in Ireland. For lesser violations, and far worse in my eyes, they were forced to take a pill that would make them sick to their stomachs for three or four days. Moreover, if the state officials decided that the girls were unfit to bear children, they would mutilate the girls’ bodies to that end. If someone wants to make a movie about the misuse of authority in such institutions, is it really necessary to go to Ireland and pick on Catholic sisters who, by and large, gave their lives for the well-being of young girls?

Edward V. Griffin, O.S.A.

Voices of Which Faithful?

The three models for the Voice of the Faithful outlined by Thomas P. Rausch, S.J., (9/29), are interesting from a merely academic point of view. But his suggestion that the incorporational model may be the most effective in the long term appears nave when a practical application is considered. Does Father Rausch seriously believe that those who might be proponents of a bishop’s resignation or a sharing of power, authority and decision making with the episcopacy (not to mention ordination of women or optional celibacy for priests) would ever be allowed to serve as members of parish councils and diocesan offices...

diocesan committees and advisory boards? I think not.

Those who oppose the status quo or dissent from the policies of those in power will never be given an effective hand in shaping policy. Accordingly, until the day when the laity is given the opportunity to choose episcopal leaders and the authority to set policy, organized groups such as V.O.T.F. must remain independent. This is the only way that allnot somevoices will be heard.

Frank V. Pesce

Sisters Still Say...

As the chaplain at a large motherhouse of Dominican sisters, many of whom are elderly and infirm, I write to thank you for the extraordinary editorial Valiant Women (9/22).

It is a magnificent and well-deserved tribute to all sisters everywhere to whom the church in our country is so indebted. In the name of the Dominican Sisters of Sparkill, I express our/their gratitude.

To celebrate Mass each day and to see in the chapel balcony so many faithful sisters in wheelchairs or using walkers; to sit at table and listen to so many reminisce cheerfully about their years of ministry; to be the beneficiary of countless lived homilies; all this is a special privilege for this aging Dominican chaplain.

Though the sisters may no longer be engaged in active apostolates because of age and poor health, this is still a rewarding and effective ministry of presence.

To this day the Catholic faithful can still profit and grow spiritually because Sister says....

Raymond Daley, O.P.

Memory of Millions

While Nicholas Mele makes some important points in his article The North Korea Conundrum (9/8), he begins with a comparison that fundamentally weakens his overall argument. In the second paragraph of his essay, he states that while the policies of the North Korean leadership have resulted in the starvation or malnutrition of millions, which is reprehensible, Americans should perhaps consider the impact of the current and previous U.S. administrations’ policies on the American poor before stigmatizing the North Koreans.

While the American people and their elected officials have often ignored the principles of social justice in legislating policy that affects the poor and marginalized, in no way can one seriously compare America’s past and present faults with the crimes against humanity perpetrated by Kim Jhong Il, his father and their cronies. Such a comparison does violence to the memory of the millions of North Koreans who have died at the hands of the monsters who have led their nation for the past decades, whose atrocities can rightly be compared to those of Hitler, Stalin and the Khmer Rouge.

Anthony D. Andreassi