Counting By Race

The Public Square

Last fall the nation was seized by a spasm of race-related excitements.
Not really, of course. Most people were going about their daily
business. But the media had elected race as the crisis of the season,
and the chattering classes couldn’t get enough of it. (But then, where
does that put us as we chatter on about the chattering classes?) In
fact, the spasm was not simply the product of media hype, although it
was inseparable from that disease. Among the publicly attentive, even
the most sober minds suspected that some major change in black-white
relations may be underway—or at least a major change in the way we think
and talk about black-white relations. The immediate occasion for the
excitements can be stated briefly: O. J., Farrakhan, Powell.

My friend Jim Nuechterlein has thoughtfully opined on the O. J. verdict
(“O. J. Simpson and the American Dilemma,” December 1995), and most
people probably feel they’ve had enough of that subject. If I could add
but one word, it is that all the post-verdict talk about blacks and
whites “perceiving reality” in incompatible ways was great grist for
second-hand deconstructionists in the media, and played nicely into the
new tolerance for racial separatism in our public discourse. Certainly
Minister Louis Farrakhan was pleased; almost as pleased as he had a
right to be by the more than 400,000 black men who turned out for his
Million Man March. About that event the editorial line was that we must
distinguish the message from the messenger, and it is true that the
mostly middle-class black men who gathered in Washington seemed to be
affirming, in a most welcome way, fairly traditional truths about
personal and family responsibility. Their being there also testified to
their recognition of a racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic,
hatemongering separatist as a legitimate leader of black Americans.
Maybe even the premier leader.

Then there was Colin Powell. One could not help but be amused by the
fervor with which liberal Democrats touted him for the Republican
nomination. Fearing that their political party had self-destructed, they
hoped he would take over the Republican Party on their behalf. Seeing
the game afoot, some conservatives, far from being amused, went into a
frenzy of strident and unfair criticism of Powell, threatening to bolt
if he is on the Republican ticket. As it happened, Powell declined to
run (although not very convincingly foreclosing the number two spot) and
the election was left to the usual suspects. The whole thing was a
marvelous exercise in what Milan Kundera calls the imagology that has
replaced ideology. The O. J. image: Omigod, we really are two nations,
separate and hateful. The Farrakhan image: Blacks are embracing the
separatism they claim has been forced upon them. The Powell image: The
Great Black Hope (not too black, many thought) who will bring us
together again.

A Catalog of Discontents

Always relishing a good show, the gods of public theater contrived to
publish, smack in the middle of all this, Dinesh D’Souza’s The End
of Racism (Free Press), a big, fat, seven hundred-page tract that
provides whites with countless reasons for disliking blacks, and blacks
with as many reasons for disliking themselves. Dinesh is a friend and an
honorable man, and that is not what he intended to write, but sometimes
a project gets out of hand and arguments get hijacked for purposes one
did not have in mind. Anyone who writes regularly on topics in dispute
knows the experience. Some reviewers peremptorily condemned the book as
racist, which is false. But it is easier than engaging arguments and
evidence that must make any thoughtful person uneasy.

Although author and publisher make no secret of their intending the book
to be Controversial!, it has in fact generated relatively little public
debate. Certainly nothing like the furor surrounding the 1994 study,
The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, which
purportedly demonstrated, not to put too fine a point on it, the
cognitive inferiority of most blacks. One reason, no doubt, is that,
unlike Herrnstein and Murray, D’Souza is not an established scholar but
a young journalist with a penchant for the provocative. And provocative
he certainly is.

Among the arguments he makes in detail is that slavery is not some
uniquely American sin about which we need feel eternally guilty. Until
the nineteenth century, slavery was a near universal institution, and it
continues on a sizable scale in parts of the world today. The remarkable
thing is not that the American South had slaves but that the American
North didn’t; and even more remarkable is the achievement of the West in
abolishing slavery. On this question, D’Souza follows an argument that
has been made very effectively by Thomas Sowell over the years.

The end of racism in D’Souza’s title refers to “scientific racism”—i.e.,
the theories developed by some of the best and most respectable thinkers
over the centuries in order to explain why Africans, Asians, and other
“primitive people” lagged so far behind the advanced societies of the
West. The title refers, secondarily, to what is ordinarily called white
racism in this country, which by almost all relevant studies has
dramatically declined and is today effectively ostracized. It is very
much part of D’Souza’s purpose to debunk the myth of white racism and
other notions invoked to support affirmative action programs, which, he
rightly contends, inevitably end up with quotas. Here he is at his
muckraking best in exposing what quotas have done in education and
employment. The quota system also invades business. For instance,
special deals in buying and selling television stations are set aside
for the “disadvantaged”—disadvantage being defined by race. Vernon
Jordan and other civil rights leaders, as they used to be called, have
made big money on such deals. He might have noted that two other
disadvantaged millionaires, O. J. Simpson and Colin Powell, have taken
advantage of these provisions designed to help the alleged victims of
racism.

D’Souza makes much of “rational discrimination,” meaning, for example,
that cabdrivers and storekeepers, whether black or white, rationally shy
away from dealing with black males of a certain age and demeanor. That,
he contends convincingly, is not usefully or accurately described as
racism. And I think no one could come away from the evidence he produces
and still claim that “black racism” is not an appropriate and necessary
term. D’Souza’s conclusion is that there are three possible explanations
for the sad state of so many black Americans, especially the millions in
the urban underclass. It is the burden of the book to demonstrate that
it cannot be explained by white racism. He also rejects—although he does
not argue his rejection—the explanation of genetic inferiority along the
lines suggested by The Bell Curve. And so he comes down on the
side of civilization or culture as the key. Blacks in trouble are
suffering the consequences of a pathological black civilization, and
blacks are chiefly—at points he comes close to saying solely—responsible
for their unhappy plight.

People who really do not like blacks but feel guilty about that will
come away from this book feeling much better about themselves. That is
certainly not D’Souza’s intent, but he could and should have been much
more careful in preventing his book from being used as an apologia for
white racism. The odious racial views of a Mark Fuhrman, the police
officer in the O. J. trial, are relatively rare, but they are not so
rare that we can forget the imperative of stigmatizing them as odious.
D’Souza certainly does not deny that imperative, but neither does it
play a conspicuous part in his depiction of race relations today.

“For all its variety the black community nevertheless maintains a
distinct and recognizable black culture,” he writes. That’s partly true,
and therefore partly false. In his telling, the variety does not come
through nearly as much as it should. Not all the streets of the inner
city are “irrigated with blood, urine, and alcohol.” And that is far
from being the only thing, or the main thing, to be said about those
streets that are. From my seventeen years at St. John’s in Brooklyn, I
know there are honorable, hardworking, courageous people on those
streets as well. And it is by no means the case, as many readers of
D’Souza’s book might be led to infer, that all middle-class blacks are
filled with guilt and resentment stemming from their being beneficiaries
of unjust preferments. Nor do many, perhaps most, blacks share the angry
alienation from America that D’Souza takes to be a mark of “the black
culture.” The End of Racism contains a great deal that is true,
and painful, and necessary to ponder. The enemies of political
correctness may be excused for relishing it. But exposing the falsehoods
and fatuities that distort our thinking about race in America, while a
necessary task, is not sufficient for dealing with the problems that are
upon us.

“Benign” Race Consciousness

Many who have thought hard about these problems have now reached the
conclusion that our original sin—or at least since the civil rights acts
of the early 1960s—was to start counting by race. The usual way of
putting this is to say that Dr. King had it right when he said in his
great “dream” speech of 1963 that people should be judged not by the
color of their skin but by the content of their character. Morality and
the common good have a curious way of hanging out together, and Dr. King
was right, both morally and in terms of public policy. As Glenn Loury,
the distinguished black thinker at Boston University, has observed, once
we start counting by race in order to benefit blacks, we invite those
who do not have the interest of blacks at heart to do a complete count
of the black reality, including much that in the recent past was not
mentioned in polite company.

Of course we are told by voices on all points of the political spectrum
that “color-blindness” is a naive ideal. What is naive and not at all
ideal, however, is the idea that the government should continue to count
by race. People cannot always be color-blind, and one can make the case
that sometimes taking race into account is appropriate and necessary.
But the government can and must be color-blind—as in “equality under the
law.” Part of the problem with governmental race counting is that the
government can’t do it and doesn’t do it. How does the U.S. Census
decide who is white and who is black? It doesn’t. You do, by saying you
are black or white or whatever.

Yet great interests are at stake in race counting. Government grants,
voting districts, school transfers, and much else is determined by the
race count. If your claim is contested, the “one drop rule” of any blood
other than Caucasian gets you counted as a minority, with attendant
entitlements. The 1990 census says 80 percent of Americans are white, 12
percent are black, about 9 percent are Hispanic, and nearly 3 percent
Asian. Recognizing the arbitrariness of the count, Census officials are
talking about adding other categories, including “multiracial.” Not
surprisingly, minority activists strongly oppose this, fearing any
dilution of their numbers and their consequent claim on benefits aimed
at compensating them for their “disadvantage.” This state of affairs,
more and more Americans are realizing, is simply crazy; and dangerously
crazy because it inevitably exacerbates the race consciousness that has
so plagued our history.

The civil rights movement under Dr. King was largely successful in
fighting malign race consciousness. The great mistake since then was to
institutionalize a supposedly benign race consciousness that has
generated new and potentially greater racial suspicion and hostility
than we had before the Montgomery bus boycott of 1956. Jorge Amselle of
the Center for Equal Opportunity, a Washington think tank headed by
Linda Chavez, the former director of the U.S. Commission on Civil
Rights, says, “You don’t cure the problem of people treating each other
differently because of race by having government treat people
differently because of race. If you want a color-blind society, you have
to have color-blind public policy.” That puts it very nicely.

It may be that there will always be racial discrimination in America,
and most of it not very “rational.” Some have suggested that real color-
blindness requires racial intermarriage almost as the national norm, but
that doesn’t seem to be in the offing. The census says that in 1990
there were 242,000 black-and-white couples, double the number in 1980,
and up 375 percent since 1960. But that is still only 2.2 percent of the
married population. The most basic discrimination in America, despite
laws against it, is in housing—in the dynamics that determine where
people live. And it may not be accurate to call this discrimination.
Nobody has studied these matters longer or more intelligently than
Harvard social scientist Nathan Glazer.

Then and Now

In the Fall 1995 issue of the Public Interest, Glazer notes
that the overwhelming majority of blacks, both poor and affluent, live
in overwhelmingly black neighborhoods. At the same time, the
overwhelming majority of blacks and a majority of whites say they would
like to live in an integrated neighborhood. One problem is that blacks
define “integrated” as 50-50, while “whites have little tolerance for
racial mixture beyond 20 percent black.” It has been the case for years,
both in the city and in suburbs, that anything above 25 percent black is
the tipping point at which neighborhoods begin to become resegregated as
black. The residential racial mix that people, both black and white,
prefer inevitably will have a strong bearing on the racial configuration
of neighborhoods.

Glazer invokes a demonstration by Thomas Schelling that he calls
“elegant and decisive.” “Take a checkerboard and distribute nickels and
dimes on it at random, with ten percent of the coins nickels and a few
spaces empty. Then move one coin at a time into an empty space, with
only this rule: The nickel would like to have at least one of its
neighboring spaces occupied by a nickel and the dime would like to have
one of its neighboring spaces occupied by a dime. In a relatively few
moves, the nickels begin to concentrate in one section of the
checkerboard. If the preference is for two neighboring nickels, or two
neighboring dimes, the concentration will occur faster.” Is this a
result of prejudice or of preference, and how do you tell the
difference? Experience counts. “It is not easy to separate out from
prejudice the influence of fears that, with an increase in black
occupancy, crime will increase, schools will decline, and house values
will drop.” People prefer not to live in neighborhoods where these
things happen. On these matters, there is no difference between whites
and blacks on what constitutes a “bad neighborhood.” Those who can move
out do move out. And the checkerboard effect remains relentlessly in
play.

Glazer’s is a melancholy reflection on what he hoped for thirty years
ago and what he has learned since. “Government action can never match,
in scale and impact, the crescive effects of individual, voluntary
decision. This is what has raised group after group, this is what has
broken down the boundaries of ethnicity and race (yes, race, when it
comes to some races) in the past. But these effects have operated
excruciatingly slowly when it comes to American blacks. They have
operated to some extent, as we see by the greatly expanded number of
blacks making middle-class incomes, by the creation of integrated
middle-class neighborhoods. It is the scale that has been so
disappointing. Why our expectations were so disappointed is still
obscure to me, and all the research does not make it clearer. We have to
go to the disaster that encompasses the black family, the failure to
close educational achievement gaps, the rise of worklessness among black
males, the increase in crime, and, behind all these, there are other
factors in infinite regress.

“This failure leads many to propose larger-scale government action,
unlikely as the prospects for such are in the present and foreseeable
political climate. But even if that climate were better, it is hard to
see what government programs could achieve. They would be opposed by the
strongest motives that move men and women: their concern for family,
children, and property. However wrong I was in expecting more rapid
change to result from the civil rights revolution, a greater measure of
government effort to promote residential integration directly was not
the answer, and is still not the answer. The forces that will produce it
are still individual and voluntaristic, rather than governmental and
authoritative. To adapt the title of Glenn Loury’s book, it will have to
be ‘one by one,’ individual by individual, family by family,
neighborhood by neighborhood. Slowly as these work, there is really no
alternative.”

Bliss It Was To Be Alive

I, too, look back. More than thirty years, to when I first began to
march with Dr. King. The manifestos, the demonstrations, the vigils, the
arrests and jailings, it all seems like only yesterday. Those of us on
the cutting edge of the movement were called prophetic, and were praised
for the sacrifices we made and the risks we took. Little did people
know. It was the joy of being part of something grand and indubitably
good. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very
Heaven.” With Dr. King, I believed that what Gunnar Myrdal had called
“the American dilemma” was turning out to be something like the
redemption of the American experiment. I recall Dr. King saying over a
leisurely lunch, “If we die tomorrow, we will know, and history will
know, and God will know that we did our part.” Heady stuff, that. But it
was not yesterday. It was a long, long time ago.

The O. J. verdict, Farrakhan, and the widespread desire, even a palpable
yearning, for a leader such as Colin Powell. The rubble of broken
dreams, the stark terror of broken lives in the urban underclass. It is
a very different time. Books such as The Bell Curve and The
End of Racism add to our awareness that it is a different time. It
is a time of candor when thoughtful people who do not have a racist bone
in their body are exposing the lies of a civil rights establishment and
its liberal claque that have no legitimate claim on the luminous moment
that was the civil rights movement of Dr. King. It is also a dangerous
time when permission slips are being issued to say things heretofore
forbidden. The haters, white and black, are taking heart.

But for most Americans it is probably a time of disappointment mixed
with relief. They feel that over these thirty years they have done what
they were supposed to do, and it did not work out at all the way they
hoped. So now they have decided that, unless they or their families are
threatened by it, they are going to stop worrying about race relations
in America. They have decided to stop even thinking about it. One feels
one should argue against that decision, but it is hard to know just how.

For those of us who will not, maybe because we cannot, stop worrying and
talking about it, several resolves are in order. When we speak about
black America, and especially about the underclass, we must speak with
respect for the humanity of others. The dope-pusher, the rutting
teenager who is father of five and father to none, the thug who kills
the Korean grocer, they are all, nonetheless, created in the image of
God. That is not liberal sentimentality. That is hard-core Christian
doctrine. People who want to get back to basics must want to get back
also to that. As much as possible, we must think and speak in a color-
blind manner. Social problems in America are human problems. They are
not only “their” problems, they are also our problems. Yes, there are
important differences in culpability. But as the late Abraham Joshua
Heschel frequently observed, “Some are guilty, all are responsible.”
That maxim is not without its ambiguities, but the alternative is to
accept the end of one nation under God.

If we understand that, we have no choice but to condemn and stigmatize
as effectively as we can separatisms and racisms in whatever form.
Pusillanimous academics who have been intimidated by radical shuffles
must find the courage to challenge the racial separatism now so deeply
entrenched at most major universities. People who say they are speaking
“as a white male” or as an “African American female” are to be told in
no uncertain terms that they have nothing interesting to say unless they
are prepared to speak as themselves. They should know that, if they are
to claim serious attention, they cannot demean themselves by reducing
their identity to a contingency over which they have no control.

If we understand what is at stake, in every forum on every subject there
will be zero tolerance of the abdication of personal responsibility.
Nothing will do but a frankly moral condemnation of crime and vice,
whether the vice be drug addiction or everyday sloth. The old excuses
are out. Victim politics is finished. The American people have simply
turned a deaf ear to all that. They’ve had enough, they’ve had more than
enough. That seems harsh, and it is, unless joined to the hope that
there is still a will to overcome the American dilemma, as in “We shall
overcome.”

If we want to overcome black-white hostilities, we will have to do it
the old fashioned way: blacks befriending whites and whites befriending
blacks, and learning to trust one another and work together. Undaunted
by the checkerboard effect, we can do what we can do. As Loury puts it,
change comes one by one and from the inside out. This is a different
kind of affirmative action that can make a difference for the better. In
many parts of the country, black and white local churches, one by one,
can form real partnerships, and stick with it. Will the white churches
usually be more affluent and therefore tempted to patronize the black
churches? Maybe so, but so what? The temptation can be resisted, and the
important thing is that what is done is done together as equals in
Christ.

Not the End of Public Policy

Nor, despite all the public policy disappointments, are we bereft of
political remedies. Leave it to others to argue that welfare reform is a
fiscal imperative. Welfare reform is a moral imperative. Those who claim
to speak for the poor but don’t know any poor people stand exposed as
the frauds that they are. Hundreds of welfare experiments in all fifty
states must get underway, and must be carefully tested not-or not
chiefly—by whether they save money or cut down the size of government
but by whether they help people take charge of their lives and enter the
mainstream of American opportunity and responsibility.

Then there is adoption. In recent years all kinds of policies and
procedures have been put into place making interracial adoption
impossible or extremely difficult. Such policies must be called what
they are. They are racist. Hundreds of thousands of children have their
lives blighted by being shuffled from place to place in foster care
while millions of American couples yearn to adopt them. Couples pay many
thousands of dollars to have people search out children in Asia and
Latin America, while ideologically driven social workers and
psychologists here at home tell us it is better for a child to die in a
drive—by shooting than to have his “black identity” confused because he
is adopted by white people. This is madness, and cruelty, of a high
order.

And we can institute real school choice. Parental choice in education is
a matter of simple justice, and for many poor parents it is a matter of
survival. Government monopoly school systems in New York and every other
major city are an unmitigated disaster. They cannot be fixed, they must
be replaced. The monopoly is defended by what is probably the most
powerful political lobby in America, the teachers’ unions. Whatever the
noble intentions and heroic efforts of many teachers, these unions are
the enemy of the children of the poor. With very few exceptions, nobody
in these major cities who can afford an alternative sends their children
to the public school.

In New York City, it is generously estimated that one out of ten poor
children beginning first grade will graduate from high school prepared
for a real college education—”real” meaning not majoring in “black
studies” or some other pseudo-discipline, and not dropping out in the
first or second year. Ninety percent of the students in the parochial
schools of the city—drawn from the same population—go on to college or
technical training for a real job. The government school spends $9,000
per year per student, the parochial school considerably less than half
of that. Middle-class and wealthy Americans have school choice. They pay
tuition or move to where the schools are better. In opposing vouchers
and other remedies, the government school establishment invokes the
separation of church and state. What we need, what the poor most
particularly need, is the separation of school and state.

The O. J. verdict. Farrakhan. A Great Black Hope who declines to save
us. Thirty years of mostly well-intended policies that have turned upon
us with a vengeance. It’s not what we had in mind back then; it’s not
what we had in mind at all. But now we know where it started going
wrong. It started going wrong when we tried to remedy malign race-
consciousness with benign race-consciousness, when we started counting
by race. So what is to be done? Perhaps just a few things in public
policy, but those few things need urgently to be done. For the most
part, it is a matter of one by one, from the inside out.

Subjects Both Big and Important

Catholicism, Liberalism, and Communitarianism. Big subjects,
those. The book of essays by that title is edited by Kenneth L. Grasso,
Gerard V. Bradley, and Robert P. Hunt and is published by Rowman &
Littlefield (271 pp., $26.95). The subtitle is The Catholic
Intellectual Tradition and the Moral Foundations of Democracy, so
you can see the subject
is, to say the least, comprehensive. You know I
would not have written the foreword to this book if I didn’t think it
was very important. Herewith what I wrote:

This book makes a very ambitious proposal. The proposal is that Catholic
social thought can contribute significantly to revivifying the American
experiment in liberal democracy. That there is a need, an urgent need,
for such a revival is today widely recognized by thinkers across the
political and philosophical spectrum. Some of the essays here are
polemical and others apologetic, but the book taken all in all is a
proposal. As such, it must make its case sometimes in conversation with
and sometimes against other proposals that are advanced in the public
square of democratic discourse.

The fact that it is a Catholic proposal does not give it privileged
status. Indeed, in the opinion of many, that fact may make it distinctly
suspect. Catholicism and democracy, after all, have had a rather rocky
history. For many readers, the arguments pressed in these essays will
have to win acceptance despite, not because of, their Catholic
provenance. Part of the ambitiousness of this project is to demonstrate
that Catholic also means catholic; that Catholic social thought is truly
comprehensive of the truths and concerns important to those who are not
Catholic, and that its being comprehensively catholic is fully faithful
to its being authentically Catholic.

Readers would be suspicious, and rightly so, of Catholics presenting an
otherwise convincing public philosophy that does not square with the
teaching of the Catholic Church. Just as rightly, they would have slight
interest in an argument that does no more than demonstrate that
democracy is compatible with Catholic teaching. That argument was of
great concern to an earlier generation of Catholics, but it is chiefly
of interest to Catholics. On the far side of the older argument over the
compatibility of Catholicism and democracy, this book seeks to convince
us that the principles and practices of the free society are made
necessary by Catholic teaching. Beyond that, we are asked to examine the
claim that Catholic teaching proposes the most compelling understanding
of a society that is both free and just.

Something New

There could not have been a book like this fifty years ago. And maybe
not even fifteen years ago. Fifty years ago, a self-consciously
immigrant Catholicism was still in a largely defensive posture,
uncertain about its place in the American experiment, and even more
uncertain about the fit between Catholic teaching and the constituting
principles of the American public order. Fifteen years ago, also in an
essentially defensive mode, Catholic thinkers were eager to demonstrate
that they could be good liberals just like everybody else—it being
assumed that everybody else defined what it meant to be a good liberal.
Of course, both fifty and fifteen years ago, there were exceptions, but
as a rule Catholics had neither the confidence nor the inclination to
propose Catholic social thought as a critical and constructive resource
for putting the American experiment on more solid philosophical and
moral foundations.

The new moment of which this book is one evidence is made possible, in
large part, by the much-discussed “crisis of liberalism.” As more and
more secular intellectuals became aware that they could not offer a
philosophical defense of the liberalism that they cherished, an opening
was created for substantively different arguments. Aside from those who,
like Richard Rorty, are content to say that the liberal society is their
“ironic” preference, thoughtful citizens recognize that this kind of
experiment must be philosophically and morally legitimated if it is to
be sustained. The crisis of liberalism coincided with the dramatic
development of Catholic teaching on the free and just social order. The
Magna Carta of that development was the Second Vatican Council, and it
has been vigorously advanced and elaborated by the pontificate of John
Paul II. One edges only a little distance out on the limb by saying that
this book could not have been written before Centesimus Annus.

But then one quickly edges back again, lest the impression be given that
these essays subscribe to the pernicious notion that there are two
Catholic Churches, the preconciliar and the postconciliar (or the pre-
John Paul II and John Paul II churches). The Catholic intellectual
tradition and, more specifically, Catholic social teaching long predate
our historical moment, as, for that matter, does reflection on “the
moral foundations of democracy.” The singular nature of this moment may
be that it provides the opportunity for a less inhibited engagement of
Catholic teaching and democratic theory—less inhibited from the Catholic
side because of the historical ascendancy of democracy in the framework
of the Anglo-American experience, rather than the French revolutionary
framework with its powerful animus against religion in general and
Catholicism in particular. And the engagement is less inhibited on the
side of the friends of democracy because it has become evident also to
many non-Catholics that, at the edge of the Third Millennium, the
Catholic Church is, intellectually and institutionally, the world’s most
influential champion of human freedom.

That the Catholic Church is such a champion may not be self-evidently
true to some readers. These essays may not convince them of that claim,
but they are surely a persuasive invitation to entertain the possibility
of its being true. In his encyclical Redemptoris Missio, John
Paul II writes, “The Church imposes nothing; she only proposes.” A
critically important question is whether that is a statement of
principle or only an acknowledgment of limitations upon the Church’s
power under contemporary circumstances. John Paul clearly intends to say
that, even if the Church could impose, she should not and would not. The
free society is composed of free persons who are called to respond
freely to the truth proposed by the Church. No other kind of response is
desired by the Church or pleasing to the Church’s Lord. In Catholic
teaching, human freedom is not grudgingly acknowledged but theologically
imperative. Freedom is ordered to truth but freedom can never be coerced
to truth.

This book should be viewed, then, as a proposal. It proposes a more
secure moral foundation for liberalism, community, and democracy, and it
proposes better ways of understanding liberalism, community, and
democracy. Put differently, this is not just a case of Catholicism
coming to the moral rescue of liberal democracy in crisis. It is
catholic thought in the service of better understanding of how the
crisis came about, and it is Catholic thought proposing a different,
more morally compelling, and more enduring idea of the democratic
experiment. To be sure, a few of the essayists perhaps are not entirely
untouched by a suspicion that the democratic experiment was and remains
a misbegotten idea. In that sense, these pages reflect a reciprocal
testing—a testing of democratic theory and practice by Catholic thought,
and a testing of Catholic thought by democratic theory and practice. For
a few participants in this discussion, the suspicion may be that one or
the other must prevail; for most, the clear hope is that both will
emerge stronger by virtue of their mutual and vigorous engagement.

A Mole Self-Exposed

Conservative Catholics in this country are frequently unhappy with
political and economic statements issuing from the United States
Catholic Conference (USCC), the action arm of the U.S. bishops. And it
is true that all too often the staff of the USCC—with exceptions, such
as the splendid pro-life office—sounds like an auxiliary of the
Democratic Party. But whatever the justified discontents of Catholics
here, they are small compared with the complaints of Catholics in
Canada.

For seventeen years Tony Clarke, an Anglican, directed the Social
Affairs department of the Canadian bishops conference, working in tandem
with liberation theologian Gregory Baum. Now Clarke has written a book
about that experience, Behind the Mitre: A Mole in the Chancery
(HarperCollins). Clarke, a champion of class struggle who has been
enamored of almost every lefty cause that has come down the pike, exults
in the fact that, with the help of a few friendly bishops, he was a very
successful “mole” in undermining a conservative hierarchy that is
captive to the “corporate agenda.” He writes, “By the end of the
[1980s], the Canadian bishops were producing between 8 and 10 percent of
the world’s output in Catholic social teaching documents, far beyond our
proportional representation in the global church. . . . Our world-wide
reputation in the social justice field [had been] growing since the
sixties.” What a curious boast of quantified productivity; he sounds
almost like one of those despised capitalists.

The mole’s greatest victory was the 1982 manifesto by the bishops
conference, Ethical Reflections on the Economic Crisis. He
writes that it garnered nineteen editorials, mostly favorable, and even
the Washington Post and New York Times took note of
it. Small town socialist makes it big. By this time, however, some
bishops were beginning to suspect that Mr. Clarke’s economic reflections
posed an ethical crisis. After failing to get the bishops to oppose the
North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA), Clarke took a leave of absence to
fight it himself, and at the 1992 NAFTA signing ceremony stood up and
called Prime Minister Brian Mulroney a liar. The bishops were not
amused, and refused to give him his old job back. Another victory for
the “corporate agenda.”

Grumbling that moles get no respect, Mr. Clarke is by no means prepared
to call off the revolution. At the end of the book he is looking for
other institutions that might fill the moral vacuum left by the
abdication of the bishops. It is reported that the Canadian percentage
of “the world’s output in Catholic social teaching documents” has
sharply declined in the last few years. A pity, some might think. It was
nice to have a neighbor to the North that made the USCC look so very
sensible.

Humor on the Crusty Side

In the Church of England, in the Episcopal Church, and, soon, in the
entire Anglican communion, it seems that Anglo-Catholic convictions and
their proponents are being thoroughly routed, and rooted out. A century
and a half ago, John Henry Newman concluded that Anglicanism as a
via media between Catholicism and Protestantism is a delusion—a
“paper church” he called it—and his judgment now appears to many to be
vindicated beyond reasonable doubt. The long-standing Anglican concern
that Rome recognize the legitimacy of Anglican orders is now largely a
thing of the past. The dominant view among Episcopalians in the U.S.
appears to be that this is “our church” and we can arrange things,
including ordered ministry, as we think best. That, in unmistakable
contrast to the Anglo-Catholic claim that Anglicanism is, along with
Rome and Orthodoxy, a branch of the one Catholic Church.

It is difficult to overestimate the sense of betrayal felt by Roman
Catholics and Orthodox who have over the years been so ecumenically
engaged with Anglicanism. In response to Anglicanism’s declaring itself
to be one more Protestant denomination among others, there are signs of
crustiness among their former ecumenical partners. One Roman Catholic
prelate, for instance, recently found himself on a platform with several
Episcopal bishops, including a woman bishop. In the course of the
meeting, he several times referred to her as Bishop _________, and
afterwards a very conservative Catholic questioned the propriety of
lending credibility to the claim that a woman could be a bishop. “Why
not?” responded the prelate, “She’s as much of a bishop as the rest of
them.”

Also on the crusty side is the story told by another Catholic bishop and
ecumenist who has been intimately involved in Anglican relations.
Several years ago, he says, he visited a priest friend who was in the
hospital. Asked how things were going, the bishop mentioned the enormous
ecumenical difficulties posed by the likelihood that the Church of
England would vote to ordain women. His bed-ridden friend rose on his
elbows and declared, “But why on earth should that be a problem? They
can’t ordain men, can they?”

Anglicans will probably not find these anecdotes amusing, and a few
years ago ecumenically minded Catholics would not have laughed at them
either. But things have changed, and behind the humor is a great
disappointment among Anglicans and Roman Catholics who not so long ago
thought that they sighted on the horizon at least a glimpse of the
possibility of reunion. Some Anglo-Catholics have left the Anglican
communion to join new groups professing to be orthodox Anglicanism, many
others are entering into full communion with Rome, and Rome has declared
that disappointments and setbacks require a redoubling of ecumenical
effort. As for the eclipse of the prospect of reunion, it seems not to
phase those who now seem to be in charge of the Anglican communion.

The Way of Honor

There is hardly a more civilized voice in contemporary public discourse
than that of Glenn Tinder. He is a person whose arguments, also in these
pages, hold out hope that old-fashioned liberalism, understood as
intelligence and decency, is not entirely dead. Tinder, who for many
years taught political science at the University of Massachusetts, wrote
a book some twenty years ago called Tolerance: Toward a New
Civility. Now a much rewritten version has been published by the
University of Missouri Press under the title Tolerance and Community
(247 pp., $39.95

).

Then Tinder was writing against radical intellectuals such as Herbert
Marcuse and Robert Paul Wolff, on the one hand, and against liberals of
an historically optimistic cast, such as Mill and Locke, on the other.
As reflected in the title, the new edition takes up many of the themes
associated with “communitarianism,” a movement that gained considerable
attention a few years ago. Tinder’s argument turns importantly upon the
distinction between society and community; a reasonably just society
makes community possible, the latter being defined in terms of
engagement, attentiveness, and openness to others. And, finally, to the
Other. “The most conspicuous difference between the present work and
anything I would write now on tolerance,” Tinder says, “is probably that
it is not related explicitly to the principles of Christianity. Although
I was a Christian when I wrote the earlier work, I had not yet learned
to write as a Christian.”

Tinder certainly writes as a Christian now, and the reader may be
excused for thinking that, although not so explicitly, he wrote as a
Christian then. For instance, this from his conclusion: “It may seem
that the tolerant society thus sketched—careful of its cohesion, even to
the extent of limiting tolerance, yet attentive, democratic, and
pluralistic—is incomplete, somehow in need of rounding off.
Incompleteness, or tentativeness, however, is precisely the quality I
have intended to suggest. No society is a community and no institution
speaks with absolute authority concerning the requirements of community;
practically every major argument in this essay has led us in the
direction of these conclusions. What they imply is that we must resist
our desire for a complete, rounded-off social ideal. We must bear the
discomfort of a world in which no social arrangements, not even
arrangements that are merely theoretical, can be wholly trusted.” To
which today’s Tinder might add the observation that “we have here no
abiding city.”

Civility is today often judged to be a wimpish virtue or no virtue at
all. For Tinder, it is the difficult achievement of the disciplined
soul. “Here we find ourselves drawing together some of the main threads
in these reflections—attentiveness and openness, veracity and
responsibility. It is unnecessary to try to describe all of the
correlations among these virtues, which are numerous. What matters to us
here is that these virtues provide a general definition of civility—of
the stance of a person who, as far as possible, is deliberately and
carefully related (attentively and openly, veraciously and responsibly)
to all members of the human race, so far as they are encountered in
one’s life, yet makes these relations the substance of a resolutely
critical and independent personality. Such a person—a civil person—
stands apart from the impersonal forces of society and history,
maintaining a certain integrity of soul. Yet this integrity arises from
recognition that personal being is not single and self-contained but
consists in relationships that implicitly comprise all human beings.
Civility is personal independence achieved through resolute
attentiveness to others and openness to all truth.

“Civility is a stance for all times, but it is perhaps one particularly
suited to our own times. This is partly because it counters political
despair. It rejects the temptation, arising powerfully from the
tragedies of our time, to turn away from the life of humankind and to
look for refuge in private life. It denies that the self can be saved by
withdrawal, whatever the violence and senselessness reigning in history.
What is more, it rejects the temptation, also arising powerfully from
recent experiences, to sacrifice the self to a leader, a party, a
political dogma, or some other idol. It is based on the Socratic-
Christian conviction that your primary responsibility is in some sense
not for history but for the state of your own soul—a conviction
expressing, not indifference to history, but rather a sense of the
limits of an individual’s wisdom and power. Yet it acknowledges that
caring for your soul depends on taking a responsible place in history,
for a human being cannot achieve humanity in a state of abstraction from
the human species.”

Achieving humanity, also known as saving your own soul, is very much at
the center of Tinder’s concern. “But tolerance is mainly to be
recommended not for its consequences, since a realistic tolerance must
acknowledge that these are uncertain, but for its inherent fitness. It
is truer to the obscure and trying character of reality and the
limitations of human beings than are the ideologies. Above all, it is
truer to our supreme responsibility, that of keeping ourselves facing in
the direction of humanity and truth in times that tempt us to despair of
everything but immediate pleasure. Tolerance is the practice of this
fidelity; it is a readiness for speaking and hearing ‘the truth in
love.’ In maintaining such a state of readiness you will probably not
save humankind and the world, but at least you will see to what is your
main concern—your own communal and truthful bearing in an age of
tribulation and despair.”
Remember when people would say of someone that he is an honorable man?
Meet Glenn Tinder.

In Defense of Strangeness

I knew Hannah Arendt slightly and admired her greatly. Her writing on
totalitarianism, in particular, had a powerful influence on my being an
unapologetic anti-Communist even in my days as a young man of the left.
I therefore share a measure of the disappointment expressed by so many
upon the publication of Elzbieta Ettinger’s book examining the
relationship between Arendt and Martin Heidegger. Writing in the New
York Observer, Anne Roiphe summarizes the tale: “The Hannah Arendt-
Martin Heidegger story is about a professor who slept with his student,
used her, sent her away, lied to her, joined the regime that wanted to
kill her, and then used her again to rehabilitate his reputation.”
That’s about it. Roiphe then adds, “A sorry tale, but not so strange.”

Then she goes off the deep end. “When I read about the recent column in
the Columbia Daily Spectator by a black student saying that
Jews were responsible for spilling African blood, I felt a chill. My
father, brother, husband, and daughter are Columbia graduates. Just down
the street on Broadway, somebody is using the dehumanizing language of
leeches and bloodsuckers again. Of course, times are different. The
Million Man March hasn’t turned into Kristallnacht, not yet.

“But I don’t feel friendly. I don’t accept excuses. I know that fear is
a healthy response. I hate this black kid back. I’m not ashamed to hate
my enemy. What worries me: Could I be Hannah Arendt, foolishly in love
with a seductive America? Will I be reading the New York Review of
Books when the next pogrom starts? My illusion of safety may be a
delusion. Will I be quoting Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Emerson as they
come for me? The black student on the Columbia campus is not Martin
Heidegger, though Cornel West and the others who clapped their hands for
the Washington march may be. I hope at least I’ll return the flowers
sent by my enemies.”

Leave aside the risible suggestion that Cornel West’s agitprop might be
taken for world-class philosophy, what’s wrong with this is the
hysterical self-dramatization laced with paranoia that refuses to let
the strangeness of the Arendt-Heidegger tale remain strange. The facile
identification of America with the Germany of the 1930s, of ugly
expressions of black racism with the Holocaust, and of a bright young
journalistic self with the intellectually formidable Hannah Arendt—all
this is the enemy of clear thinking. Roiphe says the case of Arendt is
“not so strange.” Her explanation is that Arendt didn’t fear enough and
didn’t hate enough. Fear and hate, presumably, will keep Roiphe and
others from making Arendt’s mistake. Heidegger’s Nazi friends might have
agreed. The sorrow and the strangeness is in Arendt’s disordered love
joined to a respect for philosophical genius, also for genius shadowed
by evil. The ways of love are always strange. Hatred is easy to explain.

While We’re At It

• If it seems odd, it is because it is odd. It happened this way.
Professor Stanley Fish submitted his article on why we can’t get along
together in this liberal society, and we were greatly interested in it
for two reasons. First, because it very provocatively addresses the
question of truth, and specifically religious truth, in public
discourse. And second, because Stanley Fish is a person of considerable
influence in current debates about, inter alia, the nature of
liberalism. The problem was that his argument is, in our view, quite
wrongheaded. So we thought it might clarify some questions of central
importance to FT if we published an exchange, with Professor Fish having
the third and last word. Of course on such matters there is no really
last word, and one of the nice things about being Editor-in-Chief is
that I do not lack opportunities to resume the discussion in these
pages. For the moment, I will only say that it is most agreeable to note
that Professor Fish now seems to think that, if we work at it, maybe we
can get along together after all. At least his response does not press
the original claim that we cannot get along together. But there is much
more to be said on all this, and no doubt it will be said—in these pages
and elsewhere, by myself and others.

• The Dutch medical profession, without exception, heroically refused to
cooperate with the Nazi killing programs imposed under German
occupation. That was a long time ago. In the last forty years, one of
the most staunchly Christian (Calvinist and Catholic) countries in the
world went secular with a rapidity that has astonished sociologists of
religion. And, of course, now the Dutch have their own killing programs.
Although the killing of thousands of the old and sick each year is not,
technically speaking, legal, the government has provided official
guidelines on how to do it with legal impunity. In more than half the
euthanasia cases, doctors kill without the patient’s knowledge or
consent. Recently, the Dutch medical association has issued guidelines
for killing handicapped newborns and mentally incompetent adults. Last
October, however, a Dutch court did convict a physician of wrongdoing in
the death of a sixty-three-year-old coma patient. The doctor violated
every “safeguard” in the book. Neither the patient nor his wife had
asked for euthanasia (though their children had!); there was no
“unbearable suffering” because the patient was unconscious; and other
physicians were not consulted. The convicted doctor was given a three-
month sentence, suspended.

• A reader who apparently feels some sort of moral obligation to keep on
reading, despite all, the New Yorker sends us a letter received
from an Andrew Solomon who wrote in that magazine an encomium to doctor-
assisted suicide and related escapes from the curse of life. In response
to our reader’s objection, Mr. Solomon writes: “While I would not wish
to oversimplify the case, and though I recognize that there are many
liberal Catholic thinkers who are tolerant on this subject, the Catholic
Church as an institution remains singularly and aggressively
antagonistic on the subject of euthanasia, and does more than any other
organization in the world to stand in the way of death with dignity.”
Thank you, sir.

• As everybody knows, the progressive position is in support of assisted
suicide. Thus a recent national poll shows that voters aged eighteen to
thirty-four are in favor (56 percent to 40 percent). People sixty-five
and over are against (55 percent to 37 percent, with 48 percent strongly
opposed). Older folk are the supposed beneficiaries of a legal “right to
die.” Funny they don’t see it as being in their interest. Young people,
of course, are not at all sure that they are going to die, or even grow
old. On this question, as on almost everything else, religion is a
powerful variable. A majority of mainline Protestants support assisted
suicide, while Baptists and Catholics are generally opposed. Far more
important than denomination is regular church attendance: 65 percent of
weekly churchgoers oppose legalization (with 56 percent strongly
opposed), while 70 percent of those who rarely or never attend church
think it a good idea (with 47 percent in strong support). The Hemlock
Society people are right in saying that the question is, Whose life is
it anyway? They just have difficulty in grasping the fact that there’s
another answer to the question.

• Methodists of the Wesleyan persuasion (it cannot be assumed that all
are) will be interested in the Aldersgate, a quarterly
newsletter published by the Wesley Studies Society (c/o Christ Methodist
Church, 410 N. Holden Road, Greensboro, NC 27410). Subscriptions are $8
per year. The Society is closely associated with Duke Divinity School.

• Whether in defense of orthodoxy or in opposition to tackiness—or more
likely both—there have been numerous criticisms of what is called the
church growth movement and the inroads it has made among oldline
Protestant churches. (There are also inroads, or at least inpaths, among Catholics.) Up there with the best of the analyses of this phenomenon is
Frank C. Senn’s “ ‘Worship Alive’: An Analysis and Critique of
‘Alternative Worship Services’” in the May 1995 issue of
Worship, a journal published by Liturgical Press in
Collegeville, Minnesota. While Senn is a Lutheran, his account
encompasses current worship patterns in almost all the sectors of
Christianity in America. Drawing on history, theology, and the social
sciences, Senn demonstrates that the working assumptions of the church
growth movement and its forms of worship have their roots in European
pietism and rationalism of two hundred years ago. What matters is
experience and what “works”—both in generating religious experience and
building the religious institution. It was Charles G. Finney (1792-1875)
who combined these dynamics in American “revivalism,” and that,
according to Senn, makes him “the ‘church father’ of the church growth
movement.” Church growth folk—who commonly abandon denominational
identity in their “community churches”—promote what some call
“entertainment worship” in order to draw the crowds (and they do draw
them). Senn notes that it is a very appealing model for oldline
denominations (Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, et al.) who have been
on the institutional skids for a long time. He cautions, however, that
these “alternative” worship forms, self-consciously designed in
opposition to historic liturgies, are visiting havoc on orthodox
Christian teaching. The old maxim lex orandi lex credendi—as we
pray so we believe—still holds true. “Orthodoxy,” says Senn, “means
‘right praise.’ The praise is ‘right’ not just if we feel that we have
had a genuine encounter with God by doing it, but if it is directed to
the right God—the God who has revealed himself precisely
through his word and sacraments.” Orthodoxy is Trinitarian,
Christological, incarnational, and eschatological—the last meaning,
among other things, that it readies us for the final judgment. What is
being widely done in Protestant churches today is sorely deficient on
all these scores, Senn believes. And it does not matter much whether
such churches think of themselves as conservative or liberal—or whether
they join the “Beyondists” (David Frum) in claiming that they are beyond
such conventional categories. Senn also has some sharp things to say
about why “contemporary music” in these theaters of religious showbiz is
not really very contemporary at all. But enough. It’s an article worth
going to the library for.

• At its twentieth anniversary convention in Arlington, Va., the Women’s
Ordination Conference was still able to draw about a thousand
participants, despite the 1994 statement by Rome that the Church is not
authorized and therefore cannot ordain women to the priesthood. Taking a
new turn, many of the women announced that the grapes of ordination were
toxic in the extreme. Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Harvard Divinity
School feminist, declared, “Ordination means subordination [to] an
elite, male-dominated, sacred, pyramidal order of domination.” So who
wants that? Sister Maureen Fiedler of the Quixote Center in Maryland
demurred. Abandoning the goal of ordination, she protested, would be
handing a victory to the hierarchy. “We need spokespersons outside the
walls,” Sister Maureen said. “We also need people with chisels inside,
chiseling away at that institution, or it’s never going to come down.”
(I love Sister Maureen because, among other things, she gave the editor
of catholic eye such a lovely line. A while back Sister and I
were on a television program discussing the state of the Church,
including women’s ordination. The editor reported, “Neuhaus Romed while
Fiedler burned.” The man is shameless.) Also in favor of sticking with
the Conference’s founding purpose was Sheila Briggs, who teaches
religion at the University of Southern California. She said, “To ordain
women is to give this rotten totalitarian system that the Roman Catholic
Church has become the push into the grave.” Feeling somewhat uneasy
about the goings on was Jackie Hawkins, editor of The Way, a
London-based journal of spirituality. “The role of Christ here is
entirely ambivalent,” she said. “He is my God, He is the person I wish
to be ordained to serve. Who are we disciples of? My feeling is that the
god has become equality itself.” The planners of the meeting seemed to
have precisely that in mind. They proposed that the goal should now be a
“discipleship of equals,” and set out an elaborate plan for a church
without hierarchy or priests endowed with special power to administer
sacraments. Catholic traditionalists can be counted on to grumble that,
if that’s what these women want, they should go join one of the
Protestant churches that fits the bill. But that is to miss the point.
To sustain the excitements of being part of a global feminist revolution
against religious totalitarianism, you have no choice but to be
Catholic. Unless you want to take your chances with the Imams of the
Middle East. The Arlington meeting included the rituals now standard at
gatherings of religious feminists. American Indian rites were blended
with a Jewish seder and something like a Christian eucharist, and at the
end there was an all-around laying on of hands that one of the
organizers, Diann I. Neu, said could be taken as ordination by those who
so wished. And so it is that after twenty years the Women’s Ordination
Conference has, as they say, come a long way. Those who as little girls
once played at being priests have in middle age turned bitterly against
an institution that did not accede to their demands and now are playing
priests again. Flannery O’Connor famously said that Catholics must
suffer much more from the Church than for the Church. She knew that
there is no escape from the burden by making up your own church. One
hopes that there were at Arlington also many other women who, although
deeply disappointed by the Church’s decision on ordination, know that
Jackie Hawkins had it right. For women and for all of us, the question
is: Whose disciples are we, anyway?

• “This Ain’t No Circus: It’s Transgender Reality.” That’s the heading of
an announcement from Episcopal Divinity School (EDS), Cambridge, Mass.,
for a panel discussion with Laurie Jean Auffant, who is identified as a
“Unitarian Universalist Activist,” and Dan and Yvonne Cook-Riley, who
are connected with the International Foundation for Gender Education.
The “Mistress of Ceremonies” is listed as “David L. P. Carter, Prudence-
Moon.” Don’t ask. In the good old days, Unitarian Universalist activists
would try to get you to believe in almost nothing. There’s no telling
what they try to cram down people’s throats today. (Recall Chesterton’s
bon mot about the problem with people who don’t believe in God.) The
affair in Cambridge is sponsored by the Transgender Caucus of EDS, the
Feminist Liberation Theology of EDS, and the Office of Student and
Community Life of EDS. Given the tiny size of EDS, belonging to all
those caucuses must cut terribly into study time. But then, who needs to
study when you’re living in transgender reality?

• Two pregnant women. The one is told that her baby has Down’s syndrome,
and the other that her baby is just fine. The first woman has an
abortion. Then it turns out the lab had mixed up the tests. The child of
the second woman, a Miss Michelle Woods, had Down’s syndrome, so she,
too, has an abortion, at twenty weeks of pregnancy. The British
Daily Telegraph reports the reflections of Miss Woods on all
this: “I don’t know if the other lady already had children or if this
was her first and they’d been trying for ages. I feel ever so sorry for
her because she suffered much more than I have. If she hadn’t had the
termination, she would have had a perfect baby—and I would have had a
Down’s syndrome girl in January when I was expecting a healthy boy.”
Missing from the report is any word of sympathy for two dead babies.
They “had babies” and then they “had terminations.” The story is all in
the possessive case. Absent are the verbs of action. Nobody killed the
babies. Dread is the language by which we disguise our deeds.

• Fritz Eichenberg (1901-1990) was a refugee from Nazi Germany and master
wood engraver who illustrated Russian literary classics and whose work
appeared regularly in Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker. Orbis
Books has put together A Portfolio of Prints containing twelve
of his best-known works, including the magnificent “Christ of the
Breadlines” and “The Peaceable Kingdom.” Available from Orbis (Dept.
S95, Box 302, Maryknoll, NY 10545) for $20

. Toll-free number: 1-800-258-
5838.

• Since journalists are not exempt from the sin of sloth, it is not
surprising that religion reporting, like all reporting, follows
conventional story lines. Peter Steinfels of the New YorkTimes offers a
list of Basic Religion Stories:

• Religious leader reveals feet of clay (or turns out to be
  scoundrel).
  
• Ancient faith struggles to adjust to modern times.
  
• Scholars challenge long-standing beliefs.
  
• Interfaith harmony overcomes inherited enmity.
  
• New translation of sacred scripture sounds funny.
  
• Devoted members of a zealous religious group turn out to be warm,
  ordinary folk.
  

Readers are free to suggest their own favorite story line.

• Oops. In the November issue we said some nice things about Image: A
Journal of the Arts and Religion, and gave a phone number for
people interested in subscribing, 800-815-2997. That’s the wrong number.
The right number is 800-875-2997. The people at Image gave us the wrong
number, but we won’t mention that.

• There are perhaps eight million Gypsies in Central Europe, with the
biggest concentration in Romania. In her book Bury Me Standing: The
Gypsies and Their Journey (Knopf), Isabela Fonseca tries hard to be
sympathetic, but she does not try to deny that they are, with
exceptions, a lazy, lying, thieving, and extraordinarily filthy people.
Nobody wants them around. Reviewing the book for the New York
Times, Annette Kobak notes that Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic
has said that the defense of the civil rights of Gypsies is a “litmus
test of a civil society.” No decent person should disagree with that.
Ms. Kobak continues: “Gunter Grass in Germany took the thought one stage
further, saying, ‘We need them.’” That is not taking the thought one
stage further; it is a very different thought. But it is a very
different thought that Ms. Kobak finds agreeable. “We need them . . . as
a measure of our tolerance of the other, of ambiguities, untidiness, and
unsettledness in ourselves—all vital but troubling forces, the Gypsy in
us, which humanity in its most threatened and control-mad incarnations,
like the Nazis, cannot bear to face up to, and so projects onto handy
scapegoats.” This is the intellectual and moral untidiness of an
unsettled mind. If it means anything, it would seem to mean this: We
need the Gypsies and their pathologies in order to face up to our own
pathologies and thus prevent ourselves from being hostile to the
pathological, which turns out not to be pathological at all but only the
troubling but vital force of the Gypsy in us. Such contortions of the
liberal mind are apparently necessary in order to justify praising a
book that makes it depressingly clear that Gypsies are exceedingly
disagreeable people to be around. To suggest that they should give up
their lying, thieving, filthy ways might imply that they should become
more like us, and that would violate every canon in the multiculturalist
code. Better to say that we must face up to the fact that we are really
like them. Which, in the case of a good many intellectuals who think
that way, may well be true. I do hope I have not been unkind.

• If you’re serious about rearing Christian children, where do you find
literature that really helps? One Catholic mother whose judgment I trust
sent materials from Bethlehem Books, and they appear to be just the
thing many parents are seeking. To have a look for yourself, ask for a
catalog from Bethlehem Books, P.O. Box 2338, Ft. Collins, CO 80522.

• James Trott of Philadelphia writes to correct one of our contributor’s
claim that Exodus 21:22-25 says that the deatth of a fetus is a
relatively minor offense compared with injury to the mother. This, he
insists, is a mistranslation and in support of his position he sends
along an extensive discussion of the passage in Christianity
Today (March 16, 1973) by Jack W. Cottrell, professor of theology
at the Cincinnati Bible Seminary Graduate School. As the encyclical
Evangelium Vitae notes, the judgment regarding abortion does
not rest on any one or any several Bible passages but on the entire
teaching of revelation about life created in the image of God.
Nonetheless, readers who come across the invocation of the Exodus
passage in support of abortion might want to have recourse to the
Cottrell article.

• “For Peace in God’s World.” The printed version of the twenty-four-page
social statement says it was “adopted by more than a two-third majority
vote.” Very considerably more, one notes, the vote at the assembly of
the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America being 803 to 30. It is
altogether a remarkably sane and sober statement of what is and is not
possible in securing a world without war. The characteristic Lutheran
distinctions between law and gospel, between sin and grace, between
saving redemption and social responsibility are all prominent, as is the
employment of the classical “just war/unjust war” criteria. Some will
cavil at the assertions about peace and economics, since the statement
gives a very large role to government regulation and emphasizes the
distribution of wealth at the expense of the production of wealth. But,
all in all, it is a solid piece of work and the overwhelming support for
it is a refreshing change for a church body that in the last few years
has had enormous difficulties in speaking its mind on much of anything
of consequence. We don’t know how many of the 803 delegates who voted
for it (or how many of the 30 who opposed it) actually read the
statement, but they should, as should Christians in other churches who
are pondering what needs to be said about war and peace. (Copies of “For
Peace in God’s World” are available from the ELCA, Division for Church
in Society, 8765 W. Higgins Road, Chicago, IL 60631.)

• Protestants, including those now so intensely engaged in the pro-life
movement, were slow to recognize the great evil of what thirty years ago
was called “liberalized abortion law.” That was before the Supreme Court
in its Roe dictate simply abolished abortion law in fifty
states. By the early eighties, however, evangelical Protestants had not
only been alerted to the abortion question (largely through the work of
the late Francis Schaeffer) but were indispensable in the leadership of
the pro-life movement, which remains the case today. Very slowly, some
Protestants then began to think about the connections between abortion
and contraception. In the past several years there have been a number of
articles in evangelical publications suggesting that contraception and
the moral assumptions attending it are not so innocent as many had
assumed. Now here is a flyer announcing an organization called
Protestants Against Birth Control (PABC). I haven’t had a chance to
examine the materials they offer, but interested readers can contact
PABC at P.O. Box 07240, Milwaukee WI 53207. Telephone: (414) 744-8221.

• Few people have contributed so much to Catholic ecumenical thought over
the years as Father George Tavard, now teaching theology at Marquette
University in Milwaukee. In a recent issue of Ecumenical
Trends, Tavard examines the Vatican’s new “Directory for
Ecumenism,” comparing it with the 1967 version. In general, it is fair
to say, he liked the 1967 version better. In the course of his
discussion, he comments on women’s ordination: “On the other hand, one
cannot avoid reflecting that if indeed the ordination of women in the
Anglican Communion has posited a ‘new and grave obstacle’ (Paul VI’s
formulation) to ecclesial reconciliation, the Holy See’s reiteration of
its position on the matter (apostolic letter Ordinatio
sacerdotalis, May 22, 1994) constitutes another obstacle. Whatever
else one may say about it, the question does belong in the arena of
ecumenical debate. Discussion of major issues is a condition for
progress in the quest for unity as elsewhere. One does not solve a
problem by being silent about it.” The suggested theological equivalence
between “obstacles” seems strange. If one party unilaterally departs
from two thousand years of tradition even though the other party says—as
it said many times before but with particular emphasis in Ordinatio
sacerdotalis—that the Church does not have the authority to depart
from that tradition, who has created the “obstacle” to reconciliation?
Ordinatio does not say that Catholics must remain “silent”
about women’s ordination. Catholics who are engaged in “ecumenical
debate” with other Christians who disagree on the matter—and, as the
ecumenical encyclical of 1995 (Ut Unum Sint) makes clear, such
engagement is not optional for the Catholic Church—will of course find
themselves debating the question. From such debate and study the
historic position maintained by the Catholic Church may become more
persuasive to those, including Catholics, who are not now persuaded. It
does seem, however, that ecclesial reconciliation is not possible unless
this “new and grave obstacle” is overcome. Such reconciliation requires
mutual recognition of ministries, and it is unlikely that this could
mean the recognition of the priesthood of some (men) and not others
(women). Moreover, Ordinatio leaves no doubt that the Catholic
position is “irreformable,” which is to say that it cannot be changed in
the future. So the obstacle created by the ordination of women casts a
very serious shadow over hopes for the restoration of full communion,
especially between Anglicans and Roman Catholics. And yet Fr. Tavard is
surely right to end his article with John 3:8, “The Spirit blows where
it wills.”

• “Women and Religion” was the theme of the meeting of the Society for the
Scientific Study of Religion last October in St. Louis. About five
hundred academics, mainly sociologists, heard papers suggesting, inter
alia, that ordained women are finding more positions in the Protestant
oldline churches, but the positions are typically part-time and
marginal. This, according to Edgar Mills of the University of
Connecticut, means that women are being “ghettoized” in declining church
bodies that are themselves increasingly isolated from the more vibrant
sectors of American religion. Nancy Ammerman of Hartford Seminary said
the evidence suggests that there is an inverse relationship between
female leadership and religious orthodoxy. In the more liberal churches,
women’s participation is “as much a rejection of traditional religion as
an affirmation of feminist identity.” Roger Finke of Purdue noted that,
among female religious orders in the Catholic Church, the more
traditional orders are twice as likely to be recruiting members than
those orders that have relaxed the vows of poverty and obedience and
played down the community’s distinctive way of life. Because many black
denominations do not ordain women, Delores Carpenter of Howard observed,
black women who want to be ordained have moved into mainly white
churches, especially Presbyterian and United Methodist. There are no
surprises in all that, I suppose, but I thought you might want to know.

• You’ve heard it a thousand times, at least: “Ideas have consequences.” I
even saw it once on a bumper sticker, which is surely a consequence of a
bad idea. I suspect that Richard Weaver, who died at age fifty-three in
1963, would have been appalled. His 1948 book, Ideas Have
Consequences, is a closely reasoned and elegantly argued
conservative classic that devastatingly assaults everything that public
discourse by bumper sticker represents. Transaction has just brought out
a book of essays edited by Joseph Scotchie, The Vision of Richard
Weaver (239 pp., $39.95

). It includes Weaver’s wonderful essay, “Up
From Liberalism,” which is the account of a young man leaving his
liberalism behind as he discovers that “we are inhabitants of a fruitful
and well-ordered island surrounded by an ocean of ontological mystery.
It does not behoove us to presume very far in this situation.” Weaver is
an intellectual saint in the conservative cult called Southern
agrarianism. We have had our problems with some who today claim to
profess that creed, but in Weaver’s thought it is undeniably attractive,
often compellingly so. Weaver’s break with the myriad conceits of
liberalism was occasioned by his study of the Civil War, especially by
his reading of the first-hand accounts of the soldiers who actually
fought the war, and especially by the accounts of Southerners. Herewith
a brief excerpt from “Up From Liberalism” that will, I hope, inspire
some subscribers to read Ideas Have Consequences, the book, and
maybe pick up a copy of The Vision of Richard Weaver: “I am now
further convinced that there is something to be said in general for
studying the history of a lost cause. Perhaps our education would be
more humane in result if everyone were required to gain an intimate
acquaintance with some coherent ideal that failed in the effort to
maintain itself. It need not be a cause which was settled by war; there
are causes in the social, political, and ecclesiastical worlds which
would serve very well. But it is good for everyone to ally himself at
one time with the defeated and to look at the ‘progress’ of history
through the eyes of those who were left behind. I cannot think of a
better way to counteract the stultifying ‘Whig’ theory of history, with
its bland assumption that every cause which has won has deserved to win,
a kind of pragmatic debasement of the older providential theory. The
study and appreciation of a lost cause have some effect of turning
history into philosophy. In sufficient number of causes to make us
humble, we discover good points in the cause which time has erased, just
as one often learns more from the slain hero of a tragedy than from some
brassy Fortinbras who comes in at the end to announce the victory and
proclaim the future disposition of affairs. It would be perverse to say
that this is so of every historical defeat, but there is enough analogy
to make it a somber consideration. Not only Oxford, therefore, but every
university ought to be to some extent ‘the home of lost causes and
impossible loyalties.’ It ought to preserve the memory of these with a
certain discriminating measure of honor, trying to keep alive what was
good in them and opposing the pragmatic verdict of the world.”

• A James Jackson of Jacksonville (of the founding family?) writes, “Why
do you sometimes use the first person singular and sometimes the
editorial ‘we’? Is it because some items in the Public Square are
written by other editors?” No, that’s not it. The answer is that
sometimes one sounds right and sometimes the other. A good rule is
always to write to the sound. Anyway, inconsistency is the bugbear of
people who took a writing course.

• I don’t know why Marc Stern of the American Jewish Congress was looking
it up in the first place, but he was, and he sends along what he found
in the Manhattan telephone directory under “Cathedral Church of St.
John, The.” The Episcopal cathedral lists numbers for the following:
“Box Office, Gift Shop, Greg Wyatt Sculpture Studio, Office, Security,
Visitor Info, After Hours, School & Group Tours, Space Rentals.” I can’t
quite put my finger on it, but there seems to be something missing
there.

• The sexual revolution—more accurately, the sexual regression—continues.
The New York Times has this story on changing sexual mores in
nursing homes. In truth, there’s not much new in the story, except that
what people who work with the elderly have always had to cope with is
now dressed up as a cause, along with the required clinical jargon. At
the Hebrew Home for the Aged up in the Bronx, administrators talk very
solemnly about the sexual fulfillment of octogenarians. There’s the
problem of folk with dementia and Alzheimer’s forgetting whom they are
having sex with, or even that they are naked and in a strange bed for
the purpose of having sex. Then there’s the awkwardness of public
masturbation and groping the neighbor in the dining room, about which
Dr. Philip Sloane says, “A lot of time, the activity we think of as
sexually deviant behavior is just reaching out for intimacy.” Well yes,
that is what people say, isn’t it? Clinical psychologist Antonette Zeiss
explains that we find it “difficult to confront” sex among the elderly
because “it’s the conjunction of two taboos about sex. The first is that
sex is for the young. The second is that sex is for the cognitively
intact.” Sex is limited to the cognitively intact? Were that the case,
the human species would have disappeared millennia ago.

Sources:

Data on race census, Investor’s Business Daily, October 30, 1995. On Tony Clarke, Gravitas, Summer 1995, Anne Roiphe on Hannah Arendt’s “foolish” love of America, New York Observer, November 13, 1995. While We’re At It: On Dutch doctors who kill, Life at Risk, October 1995. Data on support for assisted suicide, Life at Risk, June/July 1995. On Women’s Ordination Conference, New York Times, November 14, 1995. Tale of two abortions, Daily Telegraph, November 7, 1995. Peter Steinfels on Basic Religion Stories, Christian Century, November 1, 1995. Annette Kobak review of Bury Me Standing by Isabelle Fonseca, New York Times Book Review, October 22, 1995. Father George Tavard on women’s ordination, Ecumenical Trends, October 1995. On “Women and Religion” conference, Religion Watch, November 1995. On sex among the very elderly, New York Times, November 6, 1995.