book reviews

Spiritualities of saints

The Church today is experiencing a resurgence of interest in spiritualities of saints. One may readily note publishing houses attempting to foster this interest through a number of series published of the original writings of saints with commentaries in addition to series which introduce readers to the specific text of prayers of saints.

This text has chosen as its focus the gamut of the schools of spiritualities. This treatment is attempted through a series of articles representing these various schools. Traditionally, these "schools" have flown out of the emphases found in religious orders and their rule. Individual saints belonging to these orders often highlighted these emphases in their writings. While this standard approach is taken to the schools of spiritualities, the editor has further included in this treatment lay and priestly spirituality, the spirituality of secular institutes as well as Christian and non-Christian spiritualities. This review will treat only a sampling of these varied spiritualities.

One may readily assume that lay spirituality flows out of the emphasis seen with Vatican II. The author of this article, Donna Orsuto, points out that different spiritualities for diverse members of the Christian community would have been foreign to the early Christians. She follows with a historical development of the thoughts of various authors on lay spirituality, using as her launching point the letter of 1 Peter. This New Testament letter focuses on the call to holiness of all believers as well as the call to live the Christian vocation in the world. Peter encourages members of the Christian community to live a faith that will flow into their daily life, and to exercise a hope in God, especially during times of trial. After traveling through a number of authors and referencing a few Church documents over time, Orsuto concludes her study by stating that the secular character of lay spirituality implies that God is present in temporal realities. The lay Christian does not bring God to secular activities but meets God there. This spirituality is primarily incarnational rather than eschatological. The laity will not experience God in the world without exercising the means toward spiritual growth: prayer, reading of scripture, daily examination of conscience, the sacramental life of the Church. The ecclesial dimension of this spirituality calls them to form a community of love rooted in the Trinity. Finally, the laity are called to discipleship, sharing in the life of Christ, especially in the Paschal Mystery of his death and resurrection.

Fr. Robert Christian, O.P., asks the question as to whether the priest has a spirituality that is specifically different from that of the lay Christian, that is based on his ministerial priesthood? The author arrives at a qualified yes, stating that through ordination, "the nature of a man, through which grace operates and which it perfects, is permanently altered or 'characterized' by the imposition of the bishop's hands and the invocation of the Holy spirit." The author goes on to point out that the "instrumental functions" of presbyters require a "permanent receptivity" to the power of Christ and a "permanent capability" for serving with those powers. The shepherd of souls should see his shepherding (especially in fostering the sacramental life of the Church) as a privileged place for coming into fruitful contact with the Holy Spirit. The spiritual life of the ministerial priest should be seen as "a giving of divine life" to become more conformed to Christ.

While this text covers a number of spiritualities flowing out of various religious orders such as the Benedictines, Franciscans and Salesians, this review will treat only one: that of Ignatian spirituality. Fr. Manuel Ruiz Jurado, S.J., points out that Ignatian spirituality is Christocentric at its core. The image of Christ is One who sent his disciples and friends throughout the world "to help them enter upon the evangelical pathway of poverty and humility." This sanctification of God's creatures is done for the greater glory of God. The constant objective of doing God's will in all things is ever before the Jesuit. This process requires constant discernment, availability and adaptability. The apostolic character of each of the evangelical counsels is reviewed. The apostle, the Jesuit in this sense, is seen as an instrument of divine grace. He is sent forth under obedience, discernment and the good of souls. The Jesuit is called to find God in all things-in faith and in love.

The Compendium of Spirituality is a valuable source book and text for those who wish to delve into the major emphases of the traditional schools of spirituality. It further provides current thinking to the spiritualities of the laity, priesthood, secular institutes and non-Christians. These emphases are vital for any individual who wishes to minister to the various needs of these groups within the Church and beyond, by way of ecumenical concerns.

Sr. Madeleine Grace, C.V.I.

Houston, Tex.

A bishop to his people

The last time I spoke with Cardinal McIntyre was during the Christmas season 1975 in St. Basil's Church where he, now retired, was serving as a curate. We spent three hours that morning talking about New York, and some of my best recollections of him. He roared over one story in particular, which went something like this:

Back in 1947 we chaplains of the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists were told we were in your doghouse because ACTU supported the Wall Street strike, and thereby lost a lot of money for the Catholic Charities Campaign going on at the same time. Later that year, when the Telephone Workers went on strike, you telephoned me at my rectory with a request that I represent the Archdiocese of New York at a strike meeting of 2,000 of what you called "our girls." I agreed, but then said to you: "But, Bishop, I might not say to them what you might say to them if you were representing the Archdiocese." To which you responded: "I don't care what you say. They tell me a Jesuit from Brooklyn is going there, and if anyone is going to get credit for being on the side of the workers, it isn't going to be a Jesuit from Brooklyn!"

The old Cardinal laid back in his chair and roared with laughter at an incident he had no reason to remember, but warned: "Don't tell that story out here; I'm in trouble enough!"

Msgr. Francis J. Weber's story of His Eminence of Los Angeles: James Francis Cardinal McIntyre (1886-1979) rescues from oblivion one of the Church's most remarkable diocesan pastors.

It is difficult to conceive of any other prelate doing for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles what James Francis A. McIntyre accomplished during his tenure there 1948-1970. His sponsor Francis Cardinal Spellman will loom larger in Church history because of his international prominence, and his own pastoral success in New York, but Spellman could not have done in L.A. what McIntyre did. Spellman's genius was seeing in McIntyre what few others saw (as he did later in tapping John Courtney Murray for Vatican II) viz. as the priest who would turn the Church of Our Lady of the Angels into the largest and best run Archdiocese in the nation. Is this not the specific function of a Good Shepherd?

The first Cardinal on the West Coast is noteworthy for the rich patrimony of Catholic faith and Church services that he bequeathed to his successor on his retirement. He may not have been the choice of the local ecclesial leadership, he surely did not receive the rave notices from the Church's opinionated elites, and certainly he was not a public relations man's dream. But, Cardinal McIntyre was simply an incredible performer as a diocesan pastor.

During his California episcopate, when Los Angeles tripled its Catholic population from 600,000 to 1,800,000, the transplanted New Yorker built 200 schools, churches, and agencies, paid for and staffed them fully year by year until he retired. In that 22 year period, the number of diocesan priests moved from 700 to 1,400, parishes from 221 to 321, seminarians from 312 to 454, Catholic collegians from 3,250 to 9,500, high school students from 9,000 to 39,000, elementary from 45,000 to 117,000, Catholic hospital patients treated from 86,000 to 935,000, teachers from 1,600 to 5,300. Even his antagonist John Cardinal Dearden, at his funeral in 1979, admitted that "McIntyre wrote the book on modern Curial activity."

Critics dismiss this record as mere evidence of a "brick and mortar mentality"; friendly CEO professionals give whatever credit is due to his "financial genius." Neither group understands what a Churchman he really was-a priest with the unusual know-how and determination to build an archdiocese as he remembered legendary pastors of his boyhood built parishes.

When I left McIntyre in 1975, I went on to San Francisco there to meet with a dozen pastors and several curates. At this later session, among men who were considered the finest priests in the country, I asked this question: "What explains the fact that L.A. priests with their curmudgeon Cardinal seem to have better morale than San Francisco with its gentler more permissive Archbishop? Is it because L.A. has more Irish-born pastors?" After minutes of mumbling unsatisfactory diagnoses, one young Sulpician raised his hand: "I was trained in L.A. Many of us frequently disagreed with the Cardinal. But you have to give him credit. He will go anywhere to meet seminarians and priests to explain or defend what he is going to do or what he has done. He is courageous, the first one into chapel in the morning and the last one out of it at night. He's a very holy man."

McIntyre's public troubles, small enough before Vatican II, became serious thereafter. Hitherto, he and his critics collided over the tactics of what became known as procedures of evangelization and inculturization; later the substratum of multiple controversies were the very definitions of Catholicity. In these, the Cardinal, more often than not, had a greater sense of what was right for the Church than his antagonists, most of whom had never in their lives created or maintained a Catholic community.

Specifically, the public controversies which tested McIntyre's mettle were three: (1) L.A.'s Immaculate Heart of Mary nuns; (2) Fr. William Dubay, one of his priests; (3) Confrontations within the Church over political action.

Cardinal McIntyre's very decisiveness, his churchmanship, and his intimidability by pressure groups, made him appear sterner and less thoughtful than he really was. He was not "the dinosaur" Robert Blair Kaiser thought he was, and journalists who knew him found him approachable, compassionate, even if the disciplinarian in him was always in evidence. He could be diplomatic when he chose to be, but cultivating the image public relations experts might like him to have was not a large priority in his life. People and priests-especially critics of the Church-worried about him, never he about them, if he was defending the Church. He could thunder with words, but he was not impetuous. Indeed, when Cardinal Spellman dug a p.r. hole for himself in 1949 over Eleanor Roosevelt and the Calvary Cemetery strike, McIntyre remarked that those mistakes would not have been made in New York had he still been living on Madison Avenue. Nor was he a trickster, especially in his dealings with fellow bishops. What they saw is what they got. He was not above thinking that his friend San Antonio's Archbishop Robert Lucey tended to overemphasize social considerations at the expense of the religious. He fired off a protesting letter to Chicago's Albert Cardinal Meyer for allowing Fr. Dubay to use Chicago Studies as a platform to denigrate L.A. He did not hesitate to tell good friend Bishop Fulton Sheen to cease and desist soliciting funds for his National Office of the Propagation of the Faith, thus undermining diocesan directors. Cardinal John Dearden was his particular nemesis. McIntyre resented Dearden telling a reporter in Rome (1963) that L.A. was an enemy of labor, especially since he dealt with more labor leaders in L.A., on both coasts, than Dearden ever did. (He was opposed, though, to "labor" priests sounding like labor leaders.) When he and Western bishops discovered (1967) that Dearden, as new NCCB president, wrote to Paul VI expressing concern over Rome's stern directives to L.A.'s IHM's, they equivalently told him to mind his own business. Los Angeles also confronted Detroit on the latter's failure to pass on to the Pope (1968) the Administrative Board's endorsement of Humanae Vitae and Cardinal O'Boyle.

I gave Frank Weber's manuscript to a wise old priest of my generation. He returned it with this comment: "They'd never let McIntyre into today's hierarchy. Nor John Mitty. Certainly not Francis J. Spellman."

Had Bishop McIntyre stayed in New York he would never have been noticed outside, because of the large shadow cast by Cardinal Spellman. On his own, he was one of a kind.

His Eminence of Los Angeles: James Francis Cardinal McIntyre is the story of a bishop being a bishop to his people.

Msgr. George A. Kelly

New York, N.Y.

Loveless egomania

The evidence of two virtues shines through this work, virtues that are rarely found together in such connubial bliss: research and reticence. The research alone justifies the acquisition of No Higher Court. It is extensive, pertinent, and revelatory. Such industrious research is invaluable in exposing the roots of feminist thinking on the abortion issue, for it is considered politically incorrect to bring to light its less than flattering genealogy.

For example, the author cites a text by an Italian scholar (Vallauri's "Abortismo libertario e sadismo") to document the claim that the first person to espouse the absolute right to abortion is the Marquis de Sade. He then cites the Marquis' own La philosophie dans le boudoir to establish de Sade's feminism. Kopaczynski moves easily through important Italian and French sources.

The research shows the inconsistencies in feminist argumentation. But this indictment is far too mild. "Loveless egomania," "insane passion for destructive power," and "mind-boggling incoherence,"-these may be more suitable epithets to describe what passes for feminist thought in promoting the "right" to abortion. Yet these expressions are much too harsh for the polite pen of the good friar. As a Franciscan who emulates the virtue of "Cortesia," Fra Kopaczynski is reticent where he could be devastating. For example, he courteously states that Mary Daly "is open to the charge of being inconsistent." The reviewer or the reader may not feel the obligation to be so mild. Miss Daly brands all men as "necrophiliacs" and identifies all women as "biophilic." But then she castigates Phyllis Schlafly as "a sort of female Doctor Strangelove" who hates all life on earth, except that in fetal form. She does not view her own promotion of abortion as in any way necrophilous; it is the pro-lifers who are necrophiliacs. Miss Daly does not allow either reason or facts to stand in her way. Is there any "higher court" than "man's red heart," to cite the poet, Sylvia Plath? This is the daunting question. Are reason, personal good, natural law, or God's Will higher courts than sheer will? Should the abortion issue be settled in Nietzschean terms? Feminists who war against sheer will when they see it in men, adopt the very thing they detest, translate it into their own jargon, and hail it as an intellectual breakthrough.

What we encounter with such contemporary feminists as Mary Daly better resembles a mind gone mad than rational argumentation. Yet the combination of research and reticence, scholarship and gentlemanliness works admirably. Let the reader decide for himself on the basis of innumerable texts presented what he is to make of the thought of the four major feminists whom Kopaczynski presents: Simone de Beauvoir, Mary Daly, Carol Gilligan, and Beverly Wildung Harrison.

The book is well structured. The author builds the edifice of the feminist pro-abortion position piece by piece. De Beauvoir provides the epistemology (and a defense of killing), Daly supplies the dualistic metaphysics (and an enthusiasm for power), Gilligan offers support from developmental psychology (and the rhetoric of choice), Harrison presents a Christian framework (and a theory of rights).

Yet the processes of history do not conform very well to the order of logic. The book's structure adds to its readability and development. But feminist theory in defense of abortion is scattered, subjective, disorganized, incoherent, and most embarrassing of all, influenced through and through by a potpourri of male thought. Sartre influenced de Beauvoir, Tillich influenced Daly, Lawrence Lader influenced Betty Friedan, and so on. Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, and other male philosophers have dominated the origins of the feminist claim that abortion is a woman's right.

The last chapter of the book, "Pro-Life Feminism" could be much stronger and longer. But this may very well be Fr. Kopaczynski's next project, an amplification of the position adopted by numerous contemporary women that there are more positive solutions to a problem pregnancy than the violence of abortion.

Donald DeMarco

Kitchener, Ontario, Canada

Showing us the way to heaven

Dominican Father Peter John Cameron writes a brief introduction to fourteen of our greatest spiritual books. He has chosen the best, which includes the Confessions of St. Augustine, The Cloud of Unknowing, the Imitation of Christ, the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, the Interior Castle of St. Teresa of Avila, The Introduction to a Devout Life by St. Francis de Sales and The Story of a Soul by the Little Flower.

When Catholics these days say they are confused, one knows at once that they have never read any of these books. The saints were not confused. They are tried and true guides to the feet of Christ. But because many Catholics evidently would rather complain than read, we hear endless criticism and very little that is positive.

This sickness can be cured by reading one of the books previewed in this volume. They are all outstanding. And Father Peter John's introduction to them is well done.

The saints tell us the importance of prayer, belief in God's love, the need for the Church and the sacraments. They show us the way to heaven.

We live in a day when Catholics complain about poor homilies and about how religion classes are inadequate. Well, "God helps those who help themselves." If one cannot get good spiritual instructions from others let him do some reading on his own. Or are people too lazy to do this?

Sincere Catholics will know that this is a time when they have to help themselves. A good first step is to get this little book and learn about the writings of the saints, in order to choose which book or books might most appeal to them.

Catholics today have to grow up and be mature enough to help themselves. If in their area there is no one they know who can help them, then let them read and rejoice in the great books of the saints.

Rev. Rawley Myers

Colorado Springs, Colo.

Philosophy at its very best

Brendan Purcell is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at University College Dublin. He is a Roman Catholic priest, who studied at Louvain and the Lateran in Rome as well as at UCD. This book is a remarkable philosophical endeavor to pursue a line of thought that comes to our attention in modern times from both Eric Voegelin and Bernard Lonergan, but ultimately from Plato, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas about the unity of mankind in history. Basically, what Purcell is interested in is whether there is anything that unifies into one humanity, into one "drama of humanity," as he entitled this excellent book, such that we can discern a common basis or endeavor that would identify precisely human activity and human activity as seeking a similar goal or purpose. This important subject matter is not unlike that little book of Joseph Owens on Human Destiny and more recently of John Paul II's encyclical Ut Unum Sint.

Purcell ranges widely through literature, theology, psychology, philosophy, and science. The book is full of brief "readings" or "citations" illustrative of the point he is making from a poet or an author-we find Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor and Emmanuel Levinas and David Walsh. This is a masterful endeavor by any standards and I am particularly impressed with the energy and intelligence that Purcell has put into this effort. It is an example of philosophy at its very best, dealing with a difficult, yet vitally important topic central to the understanding of what mankind is about in this world.

As Voegelin himself has pointed out, the classical text from which such reflections begin is probably St. Thomas's question in the Tertia Pars about "Whether Christ Is the Head of Mankind?" The significance of this seemingly erudite and theological question, however, is not to be missed because it addresses itself to a question of momentous concern both to philosophy and to Christian theology, namely, what is the factor that causes the abiding and highest activity whereby mankind moves and moves itself to its highest purposes? What, in other words, is, to use Voegelin's words, "the ground of being" that everyone searches for in all his searches.

Purcell, in pursuing this drama, begins at the very beginnings with what we know about primitive man, what we know of what he was doing in his cave paintings or in the artifacts that we have found to remain. Purcell works his way through the understanding of Greek tragedy, with its powerful realization that man learns by suffering, to the Platonic corpus about the meaning of the philosophic life, to Aristotle's treatise on friendship, to Job's seeking of God's face, to the Trinitarian implications in the Gospel of John.

The central issue of course is the modern turning away from this seeking of a transcendent source that grounds our finite reality towards the alienation that would find the explanation only in ourselves, in autonomous man. Purcell finds Alexander Solzhenitsyn to be the contemporary figure who has most clearly and most personally understood what is at stake when mankind alienates himself from God, from the only thing that can ground and explain the common humanity of our race from its very beginning.

Purcell searches for the resolution of the problem of the community of mankind throughout the ages in a community, a community which the personal relation of each to all is seen as the expression of a love that recognizes a common origin in love. The last lines of this moving book are from Ciara Lubich: "Love gives us our being. We do not exist only because of love; we exist because we love. If we do not love-and in all the moments in which we do not love, we no longer are-we do not exist." The plural personal pronouns are set in bold face in the text and emphasized by Purcell.

My only problem with the overall argument, as I read this penetrating book, was whether, on the human side, it did not underestimate the importance of Aristotle's remark that in this life we can only have a few good friends. At times, I felt that the famous passage "friends of everybody, friends of nobody" applied to what I was reading. I do not think that is what Purcell intended, but I think there is some of this in Buber and other I-Thou type writers, something that Leo Strauss, I think, worried about. The point is not that we are not to be friends to God and to one another, but insofar as we deal with humanity still in this world, both the effects of the Fall and the realities of finitude make a multiplicity of many, many friendships and not a kind of common one, the real context of our lives. And I do not think that the perfection of this reality in the transcendent order changes this lesson.

Brendan Purcell has written with force and seriousness about the most exalted of topics. His work is a fine example of the judicious philosopher who can see how revelation addresses itself to obscure and hitherto unresolved human issues. We should not underestimate the scope of Purcell's endeavor. He is literally addressing himself to the question of whether mankind is one and if so, how and why. His scholarship is truly "catholic," wide-ranging and curious about truth wherever he finds it. The Drama of Humanity is a splendid example of a philosophical quest that takes all sources of knowledge seriously, including revelation. I found the book demanding my attention and constant reflection. Can I say, as I do say, that it is a product of the Irish philosophic mind at its best?

James V. Schall, S.J.

Georgetown University

Washington, D.C.

Primer of Catholic ecclesiology

Catholic books on ecclesiology are usually not noted for their brevity. Fr. de Lubac's rambling, encyclopedic essays amass quotations from dozens of patristic and medieval writers in fine-print footnotes. Fr. Bouyer's table of contents is neatly arranged, but many of the chapters are speculative and verbose. Fr. von Balthasar did his thinking in multi-volume series. In the years after Vatican II one made allowances, given the complexity and far-reaching implications of the theme.

Now, at last, in 150 concise pages, we have a "primer of Catholic ecclesiology" by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. The Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has also served the Church as a professor of dogmatic theology, as a peritus at the Second Vatican Council, and as an Archbishop (and therefore a member of the Magisterium) and so is eminently qualified to teach Catholic ecclesiology.

The five chapters and the epilogue of Called to Communion were originally written to be delivered viva voce. The various occasions on which these talks were given are themselves instructive. Chapters I - III, concerning the essence of the Church, the primacy of Peter and the role of the Bishops, were lectures in a theology course offered to a South American bishops' conference. The next chapter, on the priesthood, was an address presented at the opening of the Synod of Bishops on priestly formation later that same year (1990). A talk on the proper nature of renewal, given to a Communion and Liberation gathering, diagnoses the dissatisfaction with Church structure sometimes expressed by laypeople. The epilogue is a homily preached at a seminary in the U.S. on the problem of factions and on the Church's unity in Christ.

In Called to Communion Cardinal Ratzinger often cites modern New Testament scholarship, including studies by Lutheran or Orthodox writers, when their findings shed light on the subject. The book, however, is not an attempt to resolve or even summarize academic debates. The author presents at the outset an "aerial view" of three main exegetical hypotheses of the past century in order to reaffirm Catholic principles of Scriptural interpretation and to sketch an accurate map of the disputed Biblical territory.

Particularly interesting in this regard is Ratzinger's approach to the Scriptural evidence for the papacy (Ch. III). He saves for last the classic proof-text, Matt. 16:13-20, and examines first the New Testament tradition as a whole. Every strand of it, whether Synoptic, Johannine or Pauline, gives witness, some of it implicit, to the primacy of Peter.

In similar fashion in Chapter IV, "On the Essence of the Priesthood," a reconsideration of the biblical vocabulary for sacred ministries demonstrates that the Catholic priesthood was instituted by Christ and is inextricably bound up with apostolic succession. Theories about "developments by the second-century Christian community" or "later additions to the sayings of Christ" are simply at odds with the New Testament tradition.

Called to Communion was translated into smooth and often elegant English by Adrian Walker. It may be providential that the English edition appeared this year, when widely publicized movements are afoot to change the Church by means of signature campaigns or by talking about and tinkering with her structure.

Cardinal Ratzinger is not one for writing sound-bites, yet the clarity and depth of his theological reflections on the nature of the Church makes Called to Communion quotable and the insights in it memorable. A good example can be found in the opening paragraph of the Foreword, which states the purpose of the entire book: ". . . Today, as always, the will to take action in regard to the Church must find the patience first to ask about her nature, her origin, her destination . . . ."

Michael J. Miller

Glenside, Pa.

Suffering leads to wholeness

In a society in which an increasing number of individuals are seeking suicide as an end to pain, Fr. Cornelius van der Poel provides marvelous tools and insights for the caregiver who works with those in an environment of suffering. This review will survey only some of the tools offered to the reader.

Fr. van der Poel, who has served as the director of the health care program at Barry University in Florida, points out that when suffering is present, people look at religious values in different ways. One person may assume that God is punishing him; a second wonders why God allowed this to happen and a third sees this circumstance as a new challenge by which God is asking him to respond. It is important for the caregiver to recognize the perspective present.

When illness strikes and disables the normal function of the person, it usually throws the individual back on an earlier defense mechanism. As Fr. van der Poel states, "A healthy early self-image will offer a solid basis for readjustment; a poor early self-image may make readjustment very difficult."

In discussing grief, the author establishes his base by pointing out that grief is the experience of having something torn away from one's being. The person feels incomplete and disabled. The loss causes a new situation to develop that may necessitate a rebuilding of the personality.

If one accepts creation as having come from the hand of God and is aware of the fact that all of human history experiences suffering, then there must be a relationship between creation and suffering. While suffering escapes human understanding, religion involves that search for meaning in life with full awareness of suffering.

Fr. van der Poel illustrates Erik Erikson's eight stages of human psychosocial development by referring to individuals who are experiencing some form of pain-physical, psychological, spiritual-within those stages. After reviewing these stages, he submits that suffering is "an unavoidable and indispensable element in human self-realization." Suffering leads one into a process of integration in which one faces the material reality and at the same time reaches to the divine.

The development and maintenance of personality is "interwoven with human interaction." Family life lies at the center of this development. In referring to the role of the caregiver toward the family of a patient, it is essential that the caregiver attain certain vital information: the importance of bodily integrity for the individual in the case of physical illness, the place of the person in the family unit, the patient's attitude toward life, the importance of a sick child to a parent, the age of a sick child in relation to other children.

As van der Poel closes his treatment, he reiterates that suffering leads to wholeness, that is, integration, for suffering focuses on the recognition of a power beyond one's control. The person ultimately is forced to take a stand with regard to this power. Suffering builds a realistic self concept and may likewise help a person to develop hidden talents. A personal joy can be found from these new awarenesses. Suffering calls forth a spiritual growth. It is ultimately a sharing in the redemptive process. The example of Jesus is forever before us.

Growing through Pain and Suffering is a valuable tool for anyone who is in a caregiving role. The text may likewise provide personal insights for those who are experiencing suffering or loss. The author illustrates a wealth of knowledge and experience which is beyond the scope of a brief review.

Sr. Madeleine Grace, C.V.I.

University of St. Thomas
Houston, Tex.

Piltdown skulduggery

One of the popular myths of our modern scientific culture is that science is self-correcting in the sense that if any serious errors are committed by scientists those errors will be quickly winnowed by peer examination before any serious harm can result. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the near calamity at Three Mile Island remind us that science is not always as self-correcting as we should like. The history of Paleoanthropology in this century offers a particularly dramatic example of how a scientific discipline can be stymied in its progress through lack of vigilance and failure to insist on rigorous scientific methodology, to wit, the Piltdown caper.

Piltdown is a tiny village in east Sussex, about forty miles south of London. There, at a small gravel pit used for the repair of roads, Charles Dawson, a country lawyer and amateur geologist, "discovered" Piltdown Man. In 1908 a workman at the gravel pit handed Dawson a portion of a human skull. In late 1911 the gravel pit yielded several other pieces of the skull. In early 1912 Dawson took his finds to Arthur Smith Woodward at the British Museum, suggesting that perhaps the finds would rival Heidelberg Man (Mauer Mandible) which had been discovered in Germany in 1907. Smith Woodward, keenly aware of the number of human fossils that had been discovered on the Continent and the lack of any worthy British equivalents, was interested. The stage was set for the debut of Piltdown Man.

In early June of 1912, Dawson, Woodward, and the thirty-one-year-old Jesuit priest-paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was studying at nearby Hastings, began a series of digs at the Piltdown pit. More pieces of the skull were found, and then the lower jaw of Piltdown Man was discovered. In December, Dawson and Woodward officially announced the discovery of the "earliest Englishman," Eoanthropus dawsoni, i.e., Dawson's Dawn Man, a.k.a. Piltdown Man.

The skull of Piltdown Man was quite large and quite "modern" or man-like in shape, but the lower jaw was very "primitive" or ape-like. Some experts doubted the association of the two fossils. Paleontologists said that what was needed to resolve the strange association was the canine tooth. The following August the canine tooth was discovered at the feet of Teilhard de Chardin as he sat on a gravel refuse pile beside the pit.

Still there were skeptics, so in early 1915 at another gravel pit a few miles from Piltdown, a site that would come to be known as Piltdown II, more fossils were "discovered," amazingly the exact pieces that were needed to confirm Piltdown I. Some experts thought the whole pattern of discoveries to be too neat, too amazingly "coincidental" not to be contrived. Others, like the great anatomist Sir Arthur Keith, became enthusiastic Piltdown partisans. Verily the Piltdown fossils had become "bones of contention," in the phrase of Oxford anthropologist Sir Wilfred Le Gros Clark. But gradually the vast majority of paleoanthropologists worldwide came to accept the Piltdown fossils as authentic and legitimate, and between 1912 and 1953 more than five hundred doctoral dissertations were written on Piltdown. A few holdouts however, Hrdlicka and Weidenreich among others, persisted in their dissent-to their lasting credit.

In 1953 Kenneth Oakley, Joseph Weiner, and Wilfred Le Gros Clark, discovered incontrovertible evidence that the Piltdown fossils had been tampered with by an unknown agent who had filed the teeth, and who had stained the fossil bones to make them look old. The British Museum issued a statement announcing that the Piltdown fossils were fraudulent.

Since 1953 a great many papers have been published inquiring into the question of who perpetrated the Piltdown fraud, and no less than twelve suspects have surfaced, including Teilhard de Chardin and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. But to date, more than forty years after the fraud was revealed, no definitive investigation of the evidence has solved the mystery of "whodunit."

James Walsh's book, Unraveling Piltdown: The Science Fraud of the Century and Its Solution, claims to be that definitive investigation, the one that finally unmasks the real culprit, exculpating in the process eleven persons whose reputations have been tarnished by clouds of acid suspicion. The climax of Walsh's well-researched investigation is a chapter titled "Return to the Pit-How It Was Done," in which he provides a fascinating re-enactment of the fraudulent "discoveries" at the Piltdown gravel pit. Walsh's scenario is more than plausible and may well prove to be compelling.

Fr. David R. Becker

Shade Gap, Pa.

Reformation by brute force

"My main interest has been in the religious aspect of the Rebellion and I have accordingly tried to enter the mind of the people who took part in the rising and understand the strength of their attachment to their religious practice and faith which alone can account for the desperation with which they fought to the end against overwhelming odds" (intro. p. 3).

In his latest work, Caraman who has hitherto written extensively on English Catholics during the reign of Elizabeth I and in the seventeenth century focuses upon the Western uprising in Cornwall which was in response to the introduction of the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549. This book is part of a growing corpus of recently published works, the most prominent being Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars, which argue for a revaluation of the English reformation. Contrary to the hitherto dominant interpretation that late medieval Catholicism was a decayed superstition which was easily swept aside by a much desired Protestant reform, more and more scholars are now arguing that Catholicism was a vibrant religion, whose demise was bitterly resented; Protestantism was unpopular, and was imposed on the ordinary people. A fresh analysis of the western uprising in particular has been long overdue. It has been largely passed over by historians, only one complete study having hitherto been made of it which was published in 1912.

Caraman clearly demonstrates in The Western Uprising that the uprising was caused by religious grievances. The Book of Common Prayer and its accompanying iconoclasm represented an attack upon late medieval Catholicism which itself was the basis of the average English person's conception of reality. The Western Uprising is structured as a chronological narrative of the events of that uprising. The early chapters deal with emergence of the rebellion. It was sparked off by the introductory celebration of Holy Communion on Whitsunday in the village of Sampford Courtenay and quickly spread. Caraman emphasizes repeatedly that the rebels' demands were all religious. In them they demanded a complete restoration of traditional religious practices.

The rebels soon attracted a large following from all classes within society and they were led by the Cornish gentry. The rebels had the support and sympathy of the vast bulk of the population, evidenced by the speed and easiness of the territorial gains the rebels made, coupled with the lack of support the government troops under the command of Lord Russel had. The rebels almost succeeded. Caraman argues that the rebels made the tactical blunder of besieging Exeter. Had they marched on London, they would have amassed a sufficiently large following en route to defeat the government troops. The government had to resort to Genoese (who were ironically Catholic) mercenaries in order to quell the rebellion. The government's treatment of captured rebels was merciless, because the rebellion was a serious challenge to its existence. This uprising, as Caraman notes throughout the book, was the largest and most successful of a number of uprisings and acts of resistance that were caused by the imposition of the Book of Common Prayer. Caraman for example makes reference to the fact that those who resisted it included bishops particularly Bonner of London.

The last chapter of The Western Uprising deals briefly with the recusancy in Cornwall. Caraman makes the observation that although the Cornish remained loyal to the old faith, evidenced by the large number of Cornish Seminary priests, Catholicism ultimately died out in Cornwall because of a lack of landowners who sheltered priests. By contrast, Catholicism survived in York and Lancashire because of the existence of Catholic landowners in these parts.

The Western Uprising contains a good bibliography and a useful index. Perhaps the only criticism of the book is that the account of the course of the rebellion is a little tedious in places. It would also have been useful to have included the full text of the rebel's demands. The book, however, is an adequate modern treatment of the western rebellion, an event which arguably more than any other event in the English Reformation demonstrates the fact that the reformation only succeeded because Catholicism was eradicated by brute force.

Michael Daniel

North Fitzroy, Victoria, Australia

Answers to questions

In this book Newman gives answers to questions about God, ourselves, evil in the world, sin, grace, heaven, faith, love, happiness, peace, prayer, the purpose of life, the Mass, the Church, Christ, Mary, death and other such topics. As we know, Cardinal Newman was one of the most gifted thinkers in modern times. And his style is among the most beautiful in the English language. These are combined in this presentation, which amounts to a splendid catechism of Christian thought.

It might be best to use several examples. Under a section on Self there is the question, "What is a method of calming an agitated mind?" Newman answers that one way is to ask the question: What will you feel about this matter a year hence? He states: "It is very plain that matters which agitate us most extremely now, will then interest us not at all; that objects about which we have intense hope and fear now, will then be to us nothing more than things which happen at the other end of the earth."

Another question is what is the purpose of life. Newman gives this answer: "The one thing that lies before us is to please God. What gain is it to please the great, nay, even to please those we love, compared to this? What gain is it to be applauded, admired, courted, followed, compared with this one aim, of not being disobedient to a heavenly vision? What can this world offer comparable with that insight into spiritual things, that keen faith, that heavenly peace, that high sanctity, that everlasting righteousness, that hope of glory, which they have who in sincerity love and follow our Lord Jesus Christ?"

Still another question asks who satisfies completely the desires of the human heart. The great Cardinal replies: "We have most of us by nature longings more or less, and aspirations, after something greater than this world can give." He relates that while our hearts are unsettled Christ comes to us and points the way to heaven.

Fr. Rawley Myers

Colorado Springs, Colo.

St. Paul in sharp relief

The author is a priest and a journalist, with a gift for bringing characters and events into sharp relief. His object here is not simply to write a biography of St. Paul-that has already been done-but to make him real and familiar to readers, and to make vivid the story told in the Acts of the Apostles and the apostle's letters.

Reading this book will send the reader back many times to the Bible itself, to see just how Luke, and Paul himself, tell the story, and this may be done very easily, for Fr. Cremona provides the appropriate references as he goes along. And in addition to recounting occurrences vividly, he brings out the personality of Paul.

Fr. Cremona follows Scripture faithfully, but this reviewer must disagree with him on one point. He says that Paul, unlike the other apostles, never married. There is much support for the belief that none of the apostles except Peter ever married. Peter was apparently a widower at the time of Jesus' ministry, for only his mother-in-law is mentioned, not his wife; and no wives of other apostles are ever mentioned, although if they had existed, they would have been of greater importance than other women who are. Moreover, Jesus would hardly have chosen men who, to follow him, would have had to abandon wives and children. But that is a minor point so far as St. Paul is concerned.

Not being a Scripture scholar, Fr. Cremona does not go into the authorship of the epistles, except to say, correctly, that the author of Hebrews is uncertain. He assumes that the letters that claim Pauline authorship were written by St. Paul. But a page at the back of the book by an unnamed "editor" tells us that three of the letters were "probably written by a disciple of St. Paul," and three others are "pseudonymous letters" written at a later time. I think he might have done better to say, as the commentary in the Navarre Bible does, that while "some scholars doubt the letters' Pauline authenticity, many others meet the objections they raise."

In the back of the book there is a chronology of the life of St. Paul, and useful maps showing his missionary journeys.

Edith Myers