To the Editors - Letter to the Editor

Those covers!

The cover designs for both the November 23 and December 21, 2001 issues were crude and unappealing. It is not clear what you wish the message of the covers to be and how you want prospective readers to perceive your magazine. A colleague has referred to the illustrations as "disrespectful and disturbing." Please consider your readers' sensibilities when selecting your covers.

MONICA TROJNIAK
Roseville, Mich.

The editors reply:

We of course suspected that some readers might be offended by the November 21 cover (our "young Catholics" issue) with the winking "Buddy Christ." The picture, however, was intended to poke fun at certain fashionable ideas about how to make Jesus a "regular guy," easily accessible to the young.

Some reactions to the December 21 cover have surprised us. The painting of the bound lamb, taken from the cover of the British edition of Jack Miles's Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, is the work of the great Spanish painter Francisco de Zurburan. It is titled Agnus Dei and was painted around 1635. We thought the image powerful and its theology unimpeachable. It may have been disturbing, but it was not disrespectful.

When not in Rome...

Archbishop Rembert Weakland's "The Liturgy as Battlefield" (January 11, 2002) was excellent and thought provoking, and I can agree with him on almost all his points, save one. He, the popes, and the restorationists share an assumption that none of them has established as reasonable in principle: the basic value of the Roman rite itself.

The argument between the traditionalists and the Novus Ordo supporters is about what is a more authentic expression of the Roman rite. It makes no real difference. Why are there nineteen rites in the Eastern Church, but only one in the Western? The Roman rite is derivative of the Latin culture. Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, North and South America, Africa, Asia are not Latin cultures. Why should we have the Roman rite, old or revised?

On this point even Vatican II seems schizoid. In the decree on the Eastern Churches it states that if more rites are needed they will be established. But in the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, liturgy means the Roman rite. Which is it?

Related to the unwillingness of those in authority to allow rites to evolve is the poor attitude the authorities have of the Anglo-Saxon culture. We hear about the need for acculturation in Bolivia, Nigeria, and India, but never North America. The English-speaking culture has had a four-hundred-year history of elegant Bible English. But now we are told that Koine Greek was vulgar and common and so shall be our translations, even if this means long clumsy sentences that any English teacher would strike out. And now we even have to render the Latin of the sacramentary with slavish exactitude, no matter how awkward and foreign it sounds. But again, why should the Latin sacramentary be the standard for the whole world?

All this goes back to the alleged, but never demonstrated, foundational value of the Roman rite. Pope Paul VI was supposedly concerned that a multiplicity of rites would lead to division. Has the uniformity of rite led to unity? So far it looks as if in the halls of the Vatican and in the gatherings of bishops there's far more fear than trust, far more anxiety than vision.

(REV.) PAUL A. HOTTINGER
Downers Grove, Ill.

Just war? No

Your December 7, 2001 editorial, "War & the Common Good," states that, "so far U.S. actions appear to be morally justified." But the United States has bombed residential neighborhoods and villages, convoys of refugees, and--twice--warehouses of the Red Cross. These actions are not in accord with either Catholic moral principles or such norms of the just-war tradition as noncombatant immunity, proportionality, and probability of success. We Catholics talk seriously of just wars, but as the virtually unquestioning Catholic compliance with the state and military in recent months indicates, such talk is meaningless. Howard Zinn has asked, "How can a war be truly just when it involves the daily killing of civilians, when it causes hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children to leave their homes to escape the bombs, [and] when it may not find those who planned the September 11 attacks?"

We can reaffirm just-war criteria all we want, but unless we allow those principles to shape our actions, they become nothing more than hollow rhetoric.

KYLE SMITH
South Bend, Ind.

The editors reply:

Kyle Smith assumes what his argument has the burden of proving. Good intentions do not excuse all military "mistakes," but intention is crucial in any assessment of whether or not a war is just, and we have seen no evidence that the United States has purposefully targeted civilians, let alone the Red Cross. As the deaths of American servicemen by friendly fire in Afghanistan remind us, accidents and mistakes are inevitable in war. Success in the war against terrorism seems possible, though hardly inevitable, now that the Taliban regime has been destroyed and Osama bin Laden's forces captured or dispersed. Crucial to that long-term success, we would argue, will be the proportionate nature of the U.S. response.