Commonweal articles from April 2005

Commonweal archives from April 2005

Reporting sexual abuse.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 8, 2005... Regarding "The Color Purple" (March 11): I participated in the National Review Board audit of my diocese. During the process, it became clear to me that the audit system is flawed, perhaps fatally so. The auditors are not investigators. They...

I remember Merton.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 8, 2005... I couldn't agree more with your March 11 Et Cetera on the last-minute exclusion of Thomas Merton from the new U.S. catechism ("Merton: Persona Non Grata?"). I am a twenty-five-year-old Catholic and dedicated subscriber to Commonweal, and it...

Merton & the bishops.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 8, 2005... The International Thomas Merton Society is campaigning to reverse the decision by the U.S. bishops to remove Merton from the new catechism. We have drafted a letter to Bishop Donald Wuerl and Bishop William Skylstad, the president of the...

Merton & Wuerl.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 8, 2005... There is more to Pittsburgh Bishop Donald Wuerl's rejection of Thomas Merton's inclusion in the new young-adult catechism than his statement that "the generation we were speaking to had no idea who he was." Since the mid-1960s, one of the most...

Three cheers for VOTF.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 8, 2005... In "Calls to Action" (March 11), Thomas Baker compliments the "valuable role" that Voice of the Faithful has played "as a watchdog over the bishops' mishandling of the sexual-abuse crisis." Then, after listing the plethora of issues facing the...

Three cheers for CTA.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 8, 2005... In his review of Common Calling (March 11), Thomas Baker notes that while Voice of the Faithful has played a valuable role as a watchdog over the sexual-abuse crisis, there is a need to focus on other issues. This is what Call to Action has...

Twice blessed.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 8, 2005... Marybeth McCartin was twice blessed: first with a beautiful and peaceful death ("End Time," March 11), and second with a son able to render her experience into one of the most moving stories I have read in years. JO McGOWAN Dehradun,...

Opus Dei in the senate?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 8, 2005... Your February 25 issue was excellent, especially Alvaro Silva's article on Opus Dei ("My Life in Opus Dei"). Do you know if Senators Sam Brownback (R-Kans.) and Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) are members of Opus Dei? I have speculated about this for...

Broken vows.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 8, 2005... Regarding "A Gay Priest Speaks Out" (January 28): I was a priest for many years, and many of my good friends are priests. I am well aware of the existence of a "gay subculture" in the clergy. I have no problem with gay priests--as long as they...

Extraordinary means.(From the Editors)(Editorial)
April 8, 2005... The passions of those on either side of the Terri Schiavo tragedy are not hard to understand. Still, whether Michael Schiavo was right to have his wife's feeding tube removed is not a judgment that people outside the family should second-guess...

Clint's world: the trouble with 'Million Dollar Baby'.(Editorial)
April 8, 2005... Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, which won the Academy Award for best picture this year, has also been praised by the nation's film critics. A. O. Scott of the New York Times called it a "work of utter mastery" and Roger Ebert dubbed it...

Teenage sex: why more young people are waiting.(Columnists)(Column)
April 8, 2005... The popular portrait of teenage sexual behavior can leave many parents with the disquieting sense that American teens are becoming sexually experienced at ever-younger ages. The media depicts an adolescent culture where casual sex is the norm,...

Lethal prescriptions: Peter Singer's flawed Ethics.
April 8, 2005... A recent issue of Princeton Alumni Weekly focused on "Exploring Ethics" and featured a profile of Peter Singer, who holds the university's Ira W. DeCamp Chair in Bioethics. The general tone of the piece was quite positive. According to the...

Culture matters: Americans through Japanese eyes.(Short Take)
April 8, 2005... Oh, she's such a nothing!" a friend exclaimed as we sat in a coffee shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan discussing Charlotte, the heroine of director and screenwriter Sofia Coppola's 2003 film Lost in Translation. As an American expatriate...

The economics of health care: it's going to cost a lot more.(medicare)
April 8, 2005... Everyone knows about Social Security's financial problems. At some point in the future, payroll taxes and trust-fund surpluses will be insufficient to cover benefits, so absent other action, benefits will have to be cut (see "Just the Facts,"...

'Et Papa tacet': the genocide of Polish Catholics.
April 8, 2005... Much has been written about Pope Pius XII and the Jews. His unwillingness to speak out explicitly against the murder of Jews in occupied Poland during World War II is well known. Less well known is that before the killing of Jews in death camps...

Settling accounts: 'The Merchant of Venice' & 'Downfall'.(Screen)(Movie Review)
April 8, 2005... The Merchant of Venice is a fascinating headache of a play and didn't Shakespeare intend it so? He clangs two worlds together, the Venice of early cutthroat capitalism and the fairy tale kingdom of Belmont. In the former the merchant Antonio...

Religion Booknotes.(Book Review)
April 8, 2005... Four Cultures of the West began as a series of lectures at the University Notre Dame. I had the privilege of attending the lectures, but despite my best efforts, I could not write fast enough to note down John O'Malley's many excellent points....

Against the current.(The Last Word)
April 8, 2005... Last summer I turned forty. I am embarrassed to admit that I experienced the classic angst associated with reaching that fateful milestone. I had the stereotypical feeling of beginning to run out of time. When I was introduced to...

Schiavo redux.(End-of-life decisions, 'Scandal 101')(Letter to the Editor)
April 22, 2005... Your editorial "Extraordinary Means" (April 8) captures the careful nuances of Catholic moral reflection on end-of-life care. It is unfortunate that this nuance has not been present in the general discussion of the tragic case of Terri Schiavo....

Papal hack.(End-of-life decisions, 'Scandal 101')(Letter to the Editor)
April 22, 2005... I was surprised and troubled by Luke Timothy Johnson's sympathetic review of John Cornwell's The Pontiff in Winter ("Tragic Flaws," March 25). In my opinion, Cornwell is a fabulist and a hack who delights in doing "hatchet jobs" on popes he...

Teaching the scandal.(End-of-life decisions, 'Scandal 101')(Letter to the Editor)
April 22, 2005... Plaudits to Paul Lakeland for his insightful, trenchant, but respectful "Scandal 101" (March 25). It took courage and delicacy to lead his students through the morass of this dark night of the church, and Lakeland did it marvelously with an...

Hang on, Steve.(End-of-life decisions, 'Scandal 101')(Letter to the Editor)
April 22, 2005... Paul Lakeland writes that one of his students ("Steve") had his faith shaken by Lakeland's class on the sexual-abuse crisis. I want to say, "Hang in there, Steve; you'll make it." I am a seventy-six-year-old cradle Catholic. When I was a...

Dreyer's gem.(End-of-life decisions, 'Scandal 101')(Letter to the Editor)
April 22, 2005... Bravo to Richard Alleva (March 25) for bringing the art of Carl Dreyer to light. I've long thought that The Passion of Joan of Arc is the best film rendering of a religious subject. Through the expressions of Maria Falconetti's face, Dreyer was...

The coming crisis.(End-of-life decisions, 'Scandal 101')(Letter to the Editor)
April 22, 2005... I'd like to see politicians, bishops, and Vatican officials respond to Douglas Roche's compelling article about our "coming nuclear crisis ("Our Greatest Threat," March 11). Considering George W. Bush's nuclear policy, it's astounding that so...

Literal-minded.(End-of-life decisions, 'Scandal 101')(Letter to the Editor)
April 22, 2005... In her review of Eamon Duffy's new book, Sr. Elizabeth Johnson describes "Faith of Our Fathers" as "an old patriarchal hymn that ignores the faith of our mothers." This is a startling embrace of literalism. One wonders how Sr. Johnson remains...

What a virtue.(End-of-life decisions, 'Scandal 101')(Letter to the Editor)
April 22, 2005... Regarding Gregory Maguire's and Laura Sheahen's articles on Catholic hope, "Hopeful Still" (February 25): Hope is a must, from God on down. The daily readings for Lent remind us: God hopes we will listen, not drift further away from him and...

What about Arnold?(End-of-life decisions, 'Scandal 101')(Letter to the Editor)
April 22, 2005... William Byron's article on Catholic politicians ("Prolife & Prochoice," February 11) was most interesting. I wonder why the bishops have condemned prochoice Democrats while remaining silent about prochoice Republicans. In my mind, the bishops...

Peter's successor.(From the Editors)(Editorial)
April 22, 2005... Pope John Paul II was a force of nature, a man of iron will and passionate spirituality, who was also blessed with a quick wit, a magnetic personality, and a fearless moral temperament. There can be no gainsaying his extraordinary...

Wilson Carey McWilliams, R.I.P.(ET CETERA)(Obituary)
April 22, 2005... As Commonweal was absorbing the fact of John Paul II's passing, we received the sad news of the sudden death, at seventy-one, of our long-time contributor and good friend Wilson Carey McWilliams. Carey, professor of political science at...

Catholic (little) League.(ET CETERA)(Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights)(Brief Article)
April 22, 2005... It would take the patience of Job and a lifetime as long as Noah's to correct all the errors and calumnies perpetrated by William Donohue and his so-called Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. Donohue claims to speak in defense of...

Something does not love us: the reality of evil.(Columnists)(Column)
April 22, 2005... Evil is a word that disturbs most of us. Secular people are put off by its theological overtones; many religious people are rightly concerned with the way it is too frequently used about others, and seldom about ourselves. And this discomfort...

Being & doing: Aristotle & John Paul II.(Columnists)(Column)
April 22, 2005... The pagan philosopher Aristotle argued that the acquisition of virtue is the proper objective in life, since a life is intelligible only when directed toward some end or good. For the human person, that involves exercising one's reason--the...

Looking ahead: my hope for the next Pope.(Short Takes)
April 22, 2005... The death of Pope John Paul II has unleashed an out-pouring of grief and gratitude for a man who may well have been the most widely recognizable human being of our time. This pope's virtually unparalleled charisma and productivity and the...

On the Relative States of Alienation (with a line from Hamlet).(Two Poems)(Poem)
April 22, 2005... Ophelia tells him, I think nothing, suggests he cannot, will not, see. Though absence is patently apparent--skylark, margin. Mother.

After Reading Stein a Certain Truth Comes Out.(Two Poems)(Poem)
April 22, 2005... This is how it's done. You slow down and listen, I mean really listen to the sentence, to what it is the other mouth is saying. You must read aloud, and mutter, over and over until the sense reveals itself. In the paper's margin a...

Sex & the seminaries: what really ails them.(Short Takes)
April 22, 2005... Later this year, the Vatican is expected to begin an apostolic visitation of U.S. seminaries. The visitation comes in the wake of the clergy sexual-abuse scandal, a scandal some in the Vatican attribute to the alleged lack of discipline or...

John Paul II: assessing his legacy.(Biography)
April 22, 2005... The death of John Paul II, and the outpouring of affection and admiration it has brought forth from every corner of the globe, has reminded all of us what a remarkable individual he was and what a singular institution the papacy is. Commonweal...

The cost of justice: John Patrick Shanley's 'doubt'.(Stage)
April 22, 2005... Playwrights and screenwriters have had a several years to mine the clergy sexual-abuse scandal, but it is only with John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Doubt that someone has written something of lasting artistic value. Doubt,...

Not bleak enough: 'The Office' emmigrates to U.S. TV.(Media)(The Office)(Television Program Review)
April 22, 2005... Is there something intrinsically funny about Jell-O? That quivery texture? Those see-through Crayola colors? The legacy of tacky recipes--Jell-O salad, Jell-O vodka shots, and the like? Certainly when Dwight (Rainn Wilson, the...

A master.(Books)(Collected Poems 1943-2004)(Book Review)
April 22, 2005... Collected Poems 1943-2004 Richard Wilbur Harcourt, $35, 608 pp. In his introductory note to this handsome and in every sense weighty volume, Richard Wilbur, surveying the fruits of sixty-one years of poems, announces with some...

On the front lines.(Books)(Witnessing to Peace: In Jerusalem and the World)(Bethlehem Besieged: Stories of Hope in Times of Trouble)(Book Review)
April 22, 2005... Witnessing to Peace In Jerusalem and the World Munib Younan Fortress Press, $16, 169 pp. Bethlehem Besieged Stories of Hope in Times of Trouble Mitri Raheb Fortress Press, $17, 157 pp. Can peace break out in...

Say it like you mean it.(Books)(On Apology)(Book Review)
April 22, 2005... On Apology Aaron Lazare Oxford University Press, $24, 306 pp. Who's sorry now? And will they apologize successfully? Dr. Aaron Lazare, professor of psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, makes a convincing...

Ashes to ashes.(The Last Word)
April 22, 2005... Her name was Vikki. She was fifty-four years old. She lived alone in a little house on our hill. Her house was so reticent and mossy and shouldered by brooding trees that you didn't notice it from the street. She had two cats. She never...