Commonweal articles from June 2002

Commonweal archives from June 2002

To the Editors.
June 1, 2002... Prove it Peter Steinfels's "The Church's Sex-Abuse Crisis" (April 19) is interesting, but he repeatedly makes use of the assertion that "what we are not seeing is a new post-1993 wave of sexual abusers." He never provides any...

Jewish fears.(Israeli military actions)(Brief Article)(Column)
June 1, 2002... Ariel Sharon was once the right-wing bogeyman of Israeli politics, despised and feared by Jewish moderates and liberals in both Israel and the United States. Sharon first garnered attention conducting "retaliatory" raids against Palestinian...

THE DO-NOTHINGS.
June 1, 2002... The unprecedented meeting of the U.S. cardinals at the Vatican in April revealed significant disagreement on how to respond to the sex-abuse crisis in the United States. Were the differences among the American cardinals or between the Americans...

CATHOLICISM FOR DUMMIES : How the pundits get it wrong.
June 1, 2002... You would think that merely reporting the truth about the sexual abuse of children by priests and the cover-up of those crimes by the hierarchy would be damning enough. The facts more than speak for themselves. Could the church's harshest...

APOLOGY OR EXCUSE? Parsing the cardinals' words.
June 1, 2002... What does it mean to apologize, to express contrition, and to take responsibility for the sex-abuse crisis in the church? Cardinal Bernard Law and Cardinal Edward Egan, among others, have been intensely scrutinized by the media for their...

BORDER CROSSINGS : Where security & human rights collide.
June 1, 2002... The terrorist attacks of September 11 present a fundamental challenge for faith-based immigrant advocates and service providers. As Catholics we identify migrants as our brothers and sisters, see in them the face of God, and recognize a duty to...

School Day.(Poem)
June 1, 2002... No matter what the morning wrote here, no Matter what utterance of sage or fool, Dusk, the custodian, will later go Erasing blackboards in the quiet school.

By Rail.(Poem)
June 1, 2002... Now we've arrived, my foolish trunk and I, At Station Z--myself an x, from Y.

Flawed but Tough.(Poem)
June 1, 2002... Recalling now that Eden lasted Only until The Fall, We may conclude that imperfection Is much more durable.

ONE BOY'S STORY : 'Father M would like to see you in his office'.
June 1, 2002... This is a story about a priest I knew, and what he did to me. I was not molested, exactly. But something happened. The setting is a Catholic grade school I'll call Saint Crispin's, in the early 1970s. I was not a Catholic, but my parents,...

TOWARD A 'CATHOLIC' THEATER : The legacy of Gilbert Hartke.(Critical Essay)
June 1, 2002... Once upon a recent time, there was a man with four hungers who befriended and benefited a multitude while appeasing those hungers. Gilbert Hartke (1907-86) desired to love and serve God; so he became a priest. Besotted with the theater, he...

Solidarity forever?(State of the Union: A Century of American Labor)(Rekindling the Movement: Labor's Quest for Relevance in the 21st Century)
June 1, 2002... State of the Union A Century of American Labor Nelson Lichtenstein Princeton University Press, $29.95, 336 pp. Rekindling the Movement Labor's Quest for Relevance in the 21st Century Edited by Lowell Turner, Harry C. Katz, and...

THE ODD COUPLE.(Church on Sunday, Work on Monday: The Challenge of Fusing Christian Values with Business Life)(Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet)(Faith, Morals and Money: What the World's Religions Tell Us About Ethics in the Marketplace)
June 1, 2002... Church on Sunday, Work on Monday The Challenge of Fusing Christian Values with Business Life Laura Nash, Scotty McLennan Jossey-Bass, $23.95, 316 pp. Good Work When Excellence and Ethics Meet Howard Gardner, Mihaly...

A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories, The Body and the Blood: The Holy Land's Christians at the Time of the New Millennium, Visual Faith: Art, Theology, and Worship in Dialogue and The One Light: Bede Griffiths's Principal Writings.(A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories)(The Body and the Blood: The Holy Land's Christians at the Time of the New Millennium)(Visual Faith: Art, Theology, and Worship in Dialogue)(The One Light: Bede Griffiths's Principal Writings)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories Nancy Mairs Beacon, $23, 195 pp. The Body and the Blood: The Holy Land's Christians at the Time of the New Millennium Charles W. Sennott Public Affairs Press, $30, 479 pp. Visual Faith:...

CROSSING THE LINE.(sexual abuse and professional conduct)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... I must admit I have rather enjoyed watching the bishops and cardinals of the Holy Roman Catholic Church squirm under the glare of public scrutiny lately. When I was a youth, the priests and nuns watched my every move. Neither sinned against nor...

To the Editors.(Letter to the Editor)
June 14, 2002... By the rules Commonweal is correct in calling for Cardinal Bernard Law's resignation ("Lawless in Boston," May 17). To put the matter in perspective, consider the leadership standards established by the U.S. military and Saint Benedict. In...

Other wars.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2002... Hypnotized by the impasse the United States faces between starting a war with Iraq and dampening the one in the Middle East, we easily overlook the other wars that are brewing. The most alarming and dangerous is the continuing confrontation...

REMBERT WEAKLAND : The archbishop apologizes.(homosexuality and the Catholic Church)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2002... In Thursday, May 23, Richard Ostling of the Associated Press called to ask what I made of the "Weakland story." What Weakland story? Ostling then e-mailed the first accounts. On ABC's "Good Morning America," a man had claimed to have been...

ZYGOTES & BLASTOCYSTS : Human enough to protect?(Brief Article)
June 14, 2002... As debates over stem-cell research and cloning roil on, proponents of scientific research ask their opponents: "But why do you want to protect human zygotes, blastocysts, and embryos from manipulation or loss? How can you care about the...

WELFARE REFORM : Don't forget the poor.
June 14, 2002... In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed a landmark welfare reform bill to fulfill his campaign promise to "end welfare as we know it." For decades, the country's safety net for low-income families with children had been debated and often...

DID JUAN DIEGO EXIST? Questions on the eve of canonization.
June 14, 2002... Devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe offers one of history's outstanding examples of the fusion of religious devotion and national identity. It is based on the story of the appearances of the Virgin Mary to Juan Diego in 1531. The Virgin directed...

CLERICAL SEXUALITY : A former priest looks back in sorrow.
June 14, 2002... As a former Catholic priest and a currently practicing Catholic, I find myself answering questions from people of all religions about the daily seamy headlines. They want my take on the situation. They want to know if I have seen, firsthand,...

LEGAL DEFENSE : When sued, how should the church behave?
June 14, 2002... How can the Catholic Church justify defending itself against lawsuits brought by those who claim to be the victims of sexual abuse by priests? Should not the church, in all honesty and humility, and in the spirit of penitence, work things out...

FLORIDA'S FORMER FELONS : You can't vote here.
June 14, 2002... The historic presidential election of November 2000 is long over, and in the wake of September 11, few are inclined to reexamine yet again the contested electoral process in Florida that put George W. Bush in the White House. Still, one aspect...

THE SET'S THE THING : 'Thoroughly Modern Millie' & 'Fortune's Fool'.
June 14, 2002... What child is here," the sixteenth-century poet Sir Philip Sidney wondered in a moment of theater-related skepticism, "that, coming to a play and seeing 'Thebes' written in great letters on an old door, does believe that it is Thebes?" ...

The Announcer.(Poem)
June 14, 2002... On a balmy night my brother hunched over an empty glass on the kitchen table bringing us the Dodgers and Phils from the Ebbets Field of his imagination, my younger brother and I in pajamas settling in with chocolate...

Kyrie O'Connor.(At the Jim Bridger)(Bear v. Shark)(Claire Marvel)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2002... Reading in summer is a delicate thing. I've never understood the concept of "beach book"--I don't suddenly lower my literary expectations in summer. But it's true that it's not the right moment for Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities...

Catherine Tumber.(The Good Men: A Novel of Heresy)(Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance over Time)(Mary and O'Neil)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2002... Talking with a friend a while back, I ran through a short list of books I thought I might recommend for Commonweal readers' summer fare. After hearing a brief description of each book (one was Paula Fox's 1970 Desperate Characters, reissued in...

Andrew Moravcsik.(A Season of Opera )(Tosca's Rome)(Mawrdew Czgowchwz )(Brief Article)
June 14, 2002... Operatic plots are notoriously silly. Many people dismiss outright such melodramatic melanges of improbable coincidence, mistaken identity, lurid villainy, poisoned chalices, magic flutes, and magic swans. Yet those who have heard Father Owen...

Anne-Marie Slaughter.(Comfort Me with Apples )(Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly )(The Tuscan Year: Life and Food in an Italian Valley )(Brief Article)
June 14, 2002... I am a vicarious eater, often preferring a description of a meal to eating it. I hoard the Wednesday food section of the New York Times, savoring it as my late-night reading, finishing always with the restaurant review. If reading...

William Gould.(Making Patriots )(On Hallowed Ground: Abraham Lincoln and the Foundations of American History)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2002... In the wake of the attacks of September 11--attacks that were clearly motivated by hostility toward the United States and what it represents--there is growing interest in understanding what it means to be American. Several new books,...

A GOOD PRIEST.(in memoriam for Monsignor John Egan)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2002... When a kid named Jack Egan graduated from Chicago's Quigley Preparatory Seminary in the 1930s, it didn't look as if he would ever be ordained. Latin and Greek were simply too hard. Only through the kindness of a professor who remembered Jack...