Inside NCR
At press time, we were watching the
battle lines deepen over George W. Bushs cabinet nominations. Linda
Chavez, the nominee for labor secretary, had withdrawn because she had housed
an illegal alien in the early 1990s. It was downright eerie to hear someone who
had worked for the Reagan administration justify harboring a Guatemalan
refugee. Demetria Martinez has an interesting take on that angle. See her
column on page 18.
Many of Bushs appointments -- Chavez, John Ashcroft for
attorney general, James Watt protégé Gale A. Norton for interior
-- seem a drop back in time. This is Reagan without the acting lessons or the
passion. This time theres no great communicator to convince
most of the country that the right people to appoint to cabinet-level positions
are those most virulently opposed to the very purpose of the departments they
are charged to oversee.
It could be a long four years.
Claire Schaeffer-Duffy moves the
awful issue of the death penalty from the theoretical realm to bitter reality
in this weeks cover story. It was a difficult story to do, she said,
after spending two days with the family of Mark Andrew Fowler, witnessing the
charade of a clemency hearing and hearing the agony of the victims family
members, some of whom have been waiting for years for what they believe will
finally bring justice.
Schaeffer-Duffy, whose work on prison conditions and the use of
solitary confinement appeared in earlier issues, lives with her husband, Scott,
and their four children, Justin, 15, Grace, 12, Patrick, 9, and Aiden, 5, in
the Ss. Francis and Therese Catholic Worker House in Worcester, Mass.
Not all was bleak in Oklahoma, she said. She was particularly
moved by the people who came to support Fowlers family. They were
giving all they could. They didnt flee from something that it would have
been natural to flee from. I was touched by everyones fidelity.
It was quite unintended, but putting
together the Ministries section gave some of us a taste of the frustration of
communicating in a world where not all works as we sometimes presume. Deacon
Patrick Graybill was gracious enough to speak the performed
language on the cover. In trying to make certain we had the correct images in
the correct order, our limitations became painfully evident. It was, indeed,
difficult to hear this expressive language. We hope we got it
right.
-- Tom Roberts
My e-mail address is troberts@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, January 19,
2001
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