Inside
NCR Sensus fidelium is a woman on the cover
Mary Anne Ramerman, on the front
cover, is not a woman priest. But she is a woman. In the church. And last week
our front cover showed the intriguing shadow of woman falling over St. Peter's
Square in Rome. The Woman Question, that headline said. It won't go away, the
headline elaborated.
This week, the cover story is about a parish. A rare one. Still
it's not just hype putting the woman on the cover, but recognition of an
emerging phenomenon: At Corpus Christi in Rochester, N.Y., and nearly
everywhere else, women are, for a fact, becoming more and more the soul of
their Christian communities.
There was no secret NCR strategy here, no conspiracy to
promote a cause. And yet -- might there not be here something of the sensus
fidelium trickling through in one more way? Like it or not, this is where the
church theologically is. Despite all the discouragement from the Vatican these
several years, more energy swirls around women's issues than any other aspect
of the church.
Historians will have a great old time disentangling the elaborate
theoretical and practical skeins we wove so feverishly late in the old
millennium. Recent articles, beginning with that of Margaret Murphy
(NCR, Jan. 31), show that the mind of the faithful, on this as on so
many other matters, is not neatly packaged. On the contrary, the mind of the
faithful seems to be expressing a tumult that will either elevate the church to
a higher level for the new century or let it slide into irrelevance. And we are
part of that history-in-the-making. It's practically scary.
History is strewn with evidence that
the enemy within is more ornery than the far-off foe with whom we will never
lock horns or even rub shoulders. Interreligious wars of all kinds illustrate
the point. Christ said the world will know we are Christians by our love, which
makes Christ a tough act to follow.
Anyway, in the February issue of a magazine called The Catholic
World Report, James Hitchcock, a history professor at St. Louis University
and fairly well known on the conservative circuit, in an article critical of
the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, took a couple of added swipes at
NCR. For example, "It is a journal where, for example, it is almost
routine for Vatican officials to be referred to as Nazis. ..."
Surprised at such a claim, we asked Hitchcock for evidence. And
back came several NCR pages. All but one were from our Repartee
(letters) section. One letter quotes Hitler as author of a document praising
celibacy in the church. The non-Repartee reference was an editorial that
mentioned that the Italian press had dubbed Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger the
"Panzer-Kardinal."
The "Panzer-Kardinal" tag was picked up by a number of letter
writers who disagreed with Ratzinger about one thing or another. We the editors
added to the indignity by using the term in a couple of Repartee headlines. We
were frankly surprised at the number of such references. We regret any hurt
such reference to that wretched epoch might cause, however unintentionally.
Soul-searching ensued.
I know of no one who hates Ratzinger or even dislikes him
personally. At a time when conflicting theologies and ideologies are causing a
shiver in the church, the least we ought to do is treat each other with
respect. And maybe on good days go beyond that to the love the Founder said was
the Christian sine qua non.
Hey, let's get this straight. Jesuit
Fr. Robert Drinan, to take just one well-known example, may not, by order of
the pope, be an elected representative in the U.S. government. But San Salvador
Archbishop Fernando Saenz Lacalle can be a brigadier general in a government
that has been in the hands of the military and wreaking terrible havoc for the
last generation. What's going on here?
-- Michael Farrell
National Catholic Reporter, February 28,
1997
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