Drinan’s Record
Although I often disagree, I always look forward to perusing your provocative and readable journal. Might I be permitted a somewhat different appraisal of the political contribution of Fr. Robert Drinan, S.J., whom Patrick Henry Reardon mentions in his review of Lacouture’s Jesuits [July/Aug.]?
Reardon claims that Father Drinan’s service in the House of Representatives “was chiefly distinguished by voting invariably against every piece of pro-life legislation ever brought to the floor of the house.” Reardon then goes on to imply that perhaps the voters in Drinan’s district might have thought twice about returning him to Washington (as they did time after time until his retirement) if they had realized he was being pressured by some of his ecclesiastical superiors to step down.
First, Father Drinan was elected to Congress principally as an articulate and informed critic of the Vietnam War. This was the main plank in the platform he ran on. This is what he was known for, and when he got to Washington he became one of the war’s most effective congressional critics. He continued to be elected term after term in a district which contains more Jewish and Protestant than Catholic voters, and displayed an admirable example of how a Roman Catholic, and indeed a Jesuit priest, can represent a religiously heterogeneous constituency. I do not live in that district, but I am glad he was part of our congressional delegation at this trying time in our history. After Robert McNamara’s recent belated apology for not opposing the war, which he now concedes was “a dreadful mistake,” many of us continue to be thankful that Drinan took the courageous position he did. Several Christian thinkers and writers who are now rightly viewed as conservatives—including Michael Novak and Richard John Neuhaus—were part of the original group of clergy and laity who publicly opposed the war. It is important to remember what the central issue of the day was when judging Drinan’s record.
Like many of us, Father Drinan believed that the emergency of the Vietnam War created a situation which demanded an unusual response. He also felt he had a deep responsibility to the people who had elected him as well as to his church. He often anguished over this dilemma, but made the response his informed Christian conscience required. When the ecclesial pressure eventually became sufficiently serious, he graciously stepped down rather than disobey. He was never at any time in danger of public disciplining from the Vatican or from the Society of Jesus.
Christians deserve a somewhat more balanced account than Reardon gives of Father Drinan’s attempt to be a responsible American citizen as well as a loyal churchman, a tension all of us feel at times, and that he felt even more intensely.
Incidentally, Reardon confesses that he has “a twinge of misgiving that President Clinton holds his law degree from a Jesuit university.” Not to worry. The fact is that the president got his law degree from Yale which—despite occasional rumors at Harvard—is not really a Jesuit university.
Harvey Cox
Harvard Divinity School
Cambridge, Mass.
Inequality and Injustice
Thank you for the opportunity to comment upon Books & Culture. As a subscriber to many periodicals (including Time, The Atlantic Monthly, and Christianity Today, in addition to professional journals in the field of music theory), I can say without qualification that Books & Culture is the magazine that I read with the greatest pleasure. It also informs my thinking more than any other periodical. Congratulations on a job well done. I offer my prayers that you will be sustained in the hard work ahead of maintaining this quality.
My only quibble is a very occasional one. The strength of your magazine is the Christian perspective from which your authors speak. Unfortunately, every now and then you include an article that does not clearly display such a perspective—for example, Amy Sherman’s piece on inequality and injustice [July/Aug.].
There wasn’t much that was wrong-headed or offensive about this article—although I wonder if Sherman’s underlying message might not have been to try to excuse the wealthy for their failure to feel compassion for the poor, a failure that is of course inexcusable. Certainly she could have gone much further in exploring the role of greed and envy in our society, especially the dependence of certain types of economic structures on the maintaining of a high enough “envy-level”–along lines laid out years ago by Dorothy L. Sayers. The real problem with the article was simply that there just wasn’t anything especially Christian about it, as there might well have been if Sherman had dealt with how we are all (rich and poor alike) manipulated into desiring, acquiring, and hanging on to things we don’t need. In the end, it seemed like nothing more than the sort of article one might find in National Review, or even the American Spectator.
I understand that it is easy to allow your contributors to drift away from their Christian moorings in this way; after all, to write clearly about any subject is terribly difficult, and to think through the implications of Christian principles while doing so is almost impossible. (I can attest to this difficulty in writing about music.) Nonetheless, I hope you can resist the temptation so to drift
Charles J. Smith
SUNY at Buffalo
Buffalo, N.Y.
Amy L. Sherman’s article on the relationship of inequality to injustice prompted me to think of a question that has troubled my sense of simple justice for a long time: Why is there only one ethnic, national, or cultural group on Earth whose name is not capitalized? Why is the synonym for Negro—black—not capitalized when we capitalize Latino, Indian, Anglo, etc.? I would feel the same sense of injustice if for some strange reason we did not capitalize hungarian.
Here is a case of both inequality and injustice that could be corrected almost merely with a stroke of a pen. A change in the stylebooks would establish a typographical uplift to the image of a significant segment of the American populace.
Would there be objections if white was not capitalized as well? Perhaps, though white does not fall into the same category as black. Rather than referring to a single ethnic, national, or even cultural group, the term white essentially means nonblack. But if it seems necessary in order to make more acceptable the reversal of the “decapitalization” of black, we could also capitalize white with no harm to anyone.
As Amy Sherman says, “nothing rankles quite as much as perceived unfairness.”
Frank W. Jennings
San Antonio, Tex.
Jesus and the Holocaust
Jacob Neusner’s review [July/ Aug.] accuses my book Jesus and the Holocaust of “unrelieved blasphemy” because of the linkage I make, in what were originally Good Friday sermons, between Jesus’ crucifixion and the Holocaust. Professor Neusner is entitled to his theological opinion, but he is not entitled to distort what I say. I do not equate the Holocaust with Jesus’ crucifixion, as he claims; nor do I engage in a “calculus” that pits “one man against six million”–words that suggest the sort of reduction of suffering to a repulsive mathematical formula that I reject throughout the book. I do link Jesus’ passion with that of his Jewish brothers and sisters, but this is not a case of one man against six million but of one man in solidarity with six million, and with millions of others of innocent sufferers throughout history. Neusner asserts that “Christians of other-than-Jewish origin cannot find pertinent” such a comparison, and that “Jews who have not apostatized from Judaism cannot concede [it].” But this assertion does justice to neither group. As I chronicle in the book, modern Jews such as Marc Chagall and Chaim Potok have seen a significant likeness between the suffering of Jesus and the sufferings of the Jews, including the Holocaust; I am not the first one to have done that. And Neusner’s assumption that Gentile Christians will find such a likeness irrelevant to their faith is already being belied by some of the reactions to Jesus and the Holocaust.
Finally, in one part of his review, Neusner quotes from the dust jacket of the book, not identifying the source of the quotation but introducing it with the misleading phrase “If Marcus maintains that … ” I am not the author of the dust-jacket material, nor indeed did I see it until the book had been published. I would prefer to be judged by my own words.
Joel Marcus
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, Scotland
Justice and Forgiveness
A brief response to Mark Amstutz’s “After the Death Squads” [July/Aug.]. Mr. Amstutz seems a little confused about the Christian doctrine of forgiveness. He claims that the reception of forgiveness does not require reparation, and that this is what distinguishes acts of forgiveness from acts of justice. But this isn’t quite right; Amstutz hasn’t sufficiently distinguished the offer of forgiveness (which is justice-free) from its acceptance (which isn’t). An index of the extent to which sinners (whether individuals or collectives) have accepted forgiveness is the extent to which they attempt restitution for what has been forgiven them. The offer of forgiveness requires no reparation; its acceptance does, and that this is so has important effects upon a properly Christian understanding of the role of forgiveness in public life—which Amstutz is quite right in thinking an extremely important topic for Christians to think about.
Paul J. Griffiths
University of Chicago
Chicago, Ill.
In reading Mark Amstutz’s review of my book, An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics, I was reminded of Desmond Tutu’s simple illustration: If you steal my pencil and then apologize for doing so without handing the pencil back to me, your apology is hypocritical.
The first critical issue in dispute between Amstutz and me is whether transactions of forgiveness should be conceptually distinct from transactions of justice. At stake here are conflicting ways of thinking about classic passages like Micah 6:8, where biblical ethics are articulated: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?”
Are the three principles here so many separate pearls, or are they facets of a single jewel of religious integrity? Micah is not here a Plato carefully delineating virtue from virtue; he is summarizing a style of life and piety that is relational, a coherent whole. In this context, one is bound to be struck by the oddity of Amstutz’s description of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission as “trading justice for truth-telling.” In any ordinary courtroom, not to speak of the Hebrew Bible, is truth-telling no part of justice-seeking? Not the whole of justice, it is surely an indispensable ingredient of it.
This is abundantly clear when one moves to the New Testament and the teachings of Jesus. Amstutz believes that in the New Testament “forgiveness involves the cancellation of debts and the forgoing of reparations.” Are we then to believe that Jesus was not including Zacchaeus’s return of “half my goods to the poor” as integral to the “salvation” that came to pass in that notable dinner party (Luke 19:1-10)? Where reparation is possible, it is mandatory: Tutu was right on that one.
In what may be our most substantive difference, Amstutz finally places hope for political change in the hands and hearts of individuals: “if forgiveness is to play a more important role in politics, the doctrine must first become a part of the attitudes, rhetoric, and actions of individuals.”
It is an important half-truth. Am I not committed to the importance of half a truth as better than none? But the other half, especially in a democratic context, is that the life of a political society consists of interchanges between citizens and their representatives. The latter—as Edmund Burke said long ago—have the double responsibility of representing the interests of the parts to the whole and of the whole to the parts.
I would never underestimate the calling of individual Christians, in any country, to struggle for a proper expression of moral principle in its affairs. But at times official leaders should and do initiate that expression, so that constituents (including Christians) are educated into “the better angels of their nature.” When a president of the United States apologizes to a group of African American survivors of the infamous Tuskegee medical experiments of the 1930s, he ushers in a new level of political reality—and a new possibility of forgiveness.
Correlative to this view is that collectives and their leaders have some unique responsibilities not reducible to the sum of individual behaviors. Will it not strike most observers as strange that Amstutz would contend that it is impossible to hold “the Afrikaners’ National party responsible for past human-rights violations”? Some in that party are more responsible than others, but almost all are in some measure responsible, with the possible exception of a heroic few who may have stayed in the system to overcome its evils. Citizens and leaders construct each other’s mix of goods and evils—or so members of democratic societies must be the first to say. That is why all of us deserve some credit for the political good that we do, and need some forgiveness for the evil.
Donald W. Shriver, Jr.
Union Theological Seminary
New York
Mark Amstutz replies:
Whether defined as an act, a process, or a virtue, forgiveness normally involves a transgressor, a victim, contrition by the transgressor, and the victim’s acknowledgment of repentance by qualifying or even annulling the moral debt created by the original transgresion. Forgiveness does not demand justice; rather, it creates the opportunity for reconciliation based on the atoning for past transgressions and the renunciation of future evil.
Paul Griffiths correctly notes that my interpretation of forgiveness is greater justice. But the justice rooted in forgiveness is a byproduct of authentic repentance; it is not the consequence of claims by a victim against a transgressor. As I observed in my review, authentic repentance is expressed in a variety of ways, “including restitution for prior wrongs.”
Donald Shriver, Jr., suggests that my interpretation of forgiveness is unnecessarily individualistic, not holding society accountable for collective evil. But since collective culpability is especially difficult to ascertain in political life, I suggested that the incorporation of forgiveness in politics could best be realized by focusing on governmental officials.
This does not mean that groups and societies are absolved from responsibility; rather, it means that the primary concern should focus on those persons most responsible for the evil of regimes. That is why I observed that “holding the Czech Communist party, the Chilean military, or the Afrikaners’ National party responsible for past human-rights violations is difficult, if not impossible,” but why “holding political and military officials accountable for decisions and actions is not only morally necessary but also potentially conducive to reconciliation.” Thus Argentina was morally correct to bring to trial the military leaders most responsible for the disappearance of some 10,000 persons, and the Czech Republic was correct in barring Communist officials from public office in the new democratic government.
If forgiveness is to be institutionalized in countries like the Czech Republic, Chile, and South Africa, the individuals bearing the greatest culpability need to acknowledge their transgressions, express contrition for evil, and give victims an opportunity to forgive. The South African experiment in trading amnesty for truth may or may not be conducive to reconciliation, but it is not forgiveness.
Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@booksandculture.com.
Nov/Dec 1997, Vol. 3, No. 6, Page 6
