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book reviews
FIGHTING FOR LIFE. By Robert P. Casey (Word Publishing, Park West II, 1501
L.B.J. Freeway, Suite 650, Dallas, Tex. 75234, 1996). 255 pp. HB $21.95. The second “Fight for Life” was legislative. In 1988 and 1989 Pennsylvania lawmakers passed and the governor signed Abortion Control Acts to place stronger restrictions on the abortion industry. The laws required informed consent, a 24-hour waiting period, notification of the husband (or the parents of a minor) and the filing of a report to the state by the abortionist. The Pennsylvania laws were challenged in the courts; Casey fought this battle all the way to the Supreme Court. The third “battle” described in Fighting for Life is the day-by-day struggle of hard-working people to earn a living, to support their families, to offer their children better opportunities than they themselves had had. Governor Casey’s father had been a child laborer in the coal mines of Northeastern Pennsylvania, yet he succeeded in earning a law degree and became an advocate for working people. His son, the future governor attended Holy Cross College on a basketball scholarship, married after graduation, and, as the children began arriving, worked his way through law school as a part-time legal clerk. The author’s sympathy for the Pennsylvanians left unemployed by mill and factory closings is real and deep; on the day after his inauguration he visited the steel town of Monessen to present his economic recovery plan. Fighting for Life is the autobiography of a Catholic husband and father, who has spent most of his career in public service but who characterizes himself as “a private person.” He writes simply but with great affection about growing up in an extended family in Scranton, with aunts, an uncle and cousins under the same roof. His unabashed devotion to Ellen, his wife, is expressed in a few words during the moving account of the preparations for surgery. Casey, more a man of action than a rhetorician, allows actions to speak for themselves. He tells how his eight grown children all managed to travel to Pittsburgh in a matter of hours the night when a donor was found for the transplant operation, so that they could be beside their father. Chapters describing Casey’s medical odyssey alternate with chapters about his family history and his political career. It is as though the events of the author’s life were passing slowly before his eyes as he journeyed toward the operating room. The flashback structure transforms the book from a chronological narrative into “a richer and more engaging story.” Incidentally it allows Governor Casey to postpone in-depth discussion of the abortion issue until Chapter 13, when the reader is better acquainted with the author. Fighting for Life is a splendid Catholic biography; the book is also a summary of the former governor’s political memoirs, with several extended passages of well-reasoned political philosophy. His arguments for moderate government involvement in remedying social ills are not footnoted, but they are informed by the Church’s teachings on social justice. Casey on tax breaks and job training for the unemployed: “As governor, I tried to put family formation on par with capital formation.” He insists that the right to life of the preborn is a humanitarian issue: “not a question of church and state but of conscience and state.” Fighting for Life could provide illustrations for sermons on family values, on the virtues of honesty, persistence, generosity, and loyalty, on the role of the Church in forming public policy, on social justice, and even on bioethics (the questions of waiting lists and donor types in transplant operations). The book reprints as appendices “A New American Compact: Caring about Women, Caring about the Unborn,” a 1992 statement signed by Governor Casey and dozens of other leaders and officials; also the texts of three speeches that Casey gave during his second term (to politicians at the 1992 Al Smith dinner, to the 1994 graduating class at Steubenville and to academics at a St. Louis conference on abortion and public policy). These appendices are a gold-mine of pro-life arguments. The author views his chronicle of three generations of Caseys as inseparable from the saga of the working people of Pennsylvania. Despite his landslide victory in 1990, Governor Casey found himself “on the bottom rung” because of his medical crisis; he acknowledges that he owes his life to the skill of his doctors and to the generosity of the mother from Monessen who donated the heart and the liver of her son, who had died violently in a drug-related incident. “Why can’t we bring the same [medical] resources, the same mercy, to helping young mothers and their children?” the author asks. Biography, memoirs and political philosophy reinforce one another in Governor Casey’s book because the man and his beliefs cannot be detached from each other; his values are not replaceable parts. Michael J. Miller HOOKED ON PHILOSOPHY. Thomas Aquinas Made Easy. By Robert A.
O’Donnell, Ph.D. (Alba House, 2187 Victory Blvd., Staten Island, New York 10314,
1995), 110 pp. PB $7.95. In true Aristotelian-Thomistic fashion, and in keeping with the rightly repeated axiom, “All knowledge originates from the senses,” Fr. O’Donnell provides contemporary everyday sense-experience examples that enable one to arrive inductively at the universal concepts at the basis of all our thinking. In so doing he distinguishes between the Platonic notion of actually existing universals, such as a separated universal “man,” model of all existing men, and universals that are only words in the mind (nominalism) with none but the singulars really existing. Initially Fr. O’Donnell would appear, while affirming the existence of universals, to confine them, while real, to the mind. Subsequently, however, in his final summation (p. 77), on realism versus idealism, he founds universals in the real natures (essences) of things, which while in the concrete individual, are similarly found in all the members of a given species, thus identifying that species. In the course of his exposition Fr. O’Donnell introduces scientific information and contemporary updates, such as the historic confirmation of Einstein’s predictions during the total eclipse of 1919 and Pope John Paul’s recent clarification on Galileo. From the above one knows that relativity works (whether true or not) and that Galileo was ecclesiastically misjudged. Fr. O’Donnell’s contribution, in addition to his refreshing examples, indispensable to the formation of permanent unshakable universal ideas, is his accompanying footnote references to the appropriate passages in St. Thomas, nearly all of which are to his Summa Theologica, Part One, whose use as a source book is duly explained by Fr. O’Donnell after brief and readable summaries of the lives both of Aristotle and St. Thomas. Fr. O’Donnell periodically exploits his knowledge of the career of Babe Ruth. In the same vein one can view his made-easy explanations as batting practice leading, by follow-up assimilations in the actual indicated texts of St. Thomas, to home runs in the ball park of contemporary discussions of God and creation in the media and the sciences. By way of illustration, and utilizing the same First Part of the Summa Theologica, and turning to Q. 116, “On Fate,” one will find a definitive perspective on today’s ongoing “evolution” debate. On the terms of science and the media, there are only two options: “natural selection” (evolution through random mutation) or “creationism” (separately created species, as visualized in an exegesis of Genesis). “Natural selection” prevails unless refuted by “creationism.” For a Catholic who has followed Fr. O’Donnell into St. Thomas (S.T. I, q. 116) no such dilemma exists: the same God is responsible both for the regular course of events upon the discovery of which science depends, and for humanly unpredictable chance events (the random mutation of genes leading to “natural selection”). The same God provides on the one hand for the order of the universe discernible in the “laws of nature” upon whose discovery human science depends and which operate always or for the most part, and the unpredictable chance events familiar to all—e.g., winning a lottery—which happen for the lesser part (one ticket holder wins) in things which happen for the most part (the remaining ticket holders lose). (See “Plain Jane,” HPR, Aug.-Sept., 1994.) Such chance events brought about by God, the determinate controller of all effects, whether predictable by us or unpredictable, would constitute the “natural selection” of evolution should God choose to bring about new species or varieties in a given case in this fashion. Such a comprehensive outlook depends, not on a science-satisfying exegesis of Genesis, but on the belief in God as the creator, from nothing, of heaven and earth. When St. Francis Xavier baptized the natives of Goa, in India, he did not make knowledge of Genesis, and even less an exegesis thereof, a requisite. What was necessary, then as now, was belief in the Trinity and the Incarnation, expressed in the Apostle’s Creed, which he taught them, along with the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the Commandments. One cannot begin to think of someone as “having all the answers” if he does not first “ask all the questions.” Darwin finds this of Aristotle. On the first page of the Origin of Species he cites Aristotle’s Physics (upon which St. Thomas has a Commentary) as dealing with “natural selection”! The asked question is also answered. (However Darwin did not read on, simply publishing the initial excerpt supplied by a friend.) Pierre Conway, O.P. THE SYNOPTIC GOSPEL TODAY. By Rev. Joseph Kudasiewicz (Alba House, 2187
Victory Blvd., Staten Island, N.Y. 10314, 1996), 342 pp. PB $18.95. Father Joseph Kudasiewicz in The Synoptic Gospels Today, corrects that kind of professor with whom I jousted many years ago in the shadow of Catholic University. Shadow is the correct word because many students were hearing strange teachings in the nineteen seventies. The author tells us: “Research according to the method of redaction Criticism has revealed the evangelists to be authentic writers and theologians. In this way some of the deficiencies and distortions of form criticism have been overcome so that it is no longer considered the last word in research on the gospels.” In the chapter on “Overcoming Historical Skepticism in Research on the Gospels,” Father Joseph says: “The basic factor in the rise of the evangelical tradition was not the faith of the community but ‘the One alone who is your teacher’ (Mt. 23,8).” This was in accord with the practice of the rabbi having his pupils memorize. He argues that the early Christians were not ignorant dreamers who made up fantastic tales. Many were intelligent leaders of society. Also the priests and bishops would not have tolerated fantasies. The early Christians were instructed about facts about Jesus, not fantasies. The apostles were witnesses, not receptors of fantasies of an imaginary community of dreamers. The evangelists were true writers and theologians. The argument for an anonymous creative community clearly falls apart. The author tells us the synoptic gospel writer was not
giving us something like a tape-recording. He was presenting Jesus in such a way as to
indicate that he was the Messiah, the Savior. Each aimed his writing at a particular
audience. The Jesus presented was true, but presented in such a way as to appeal to a
particular audience, as a preacher might do it. St. Mark’s gospel is greatly
dependent on St. Peter. His style is lively, picturesque, somewhat crude. Mark spoke
through deeds, Matthew through words. Matthew systematized the deeds and words of Jesus.
The five books composing the gospel of Matthew show his orderly arrangement. This makes
Matthew’s gospel popular. Perhaps that is why St. Dominic carried a copy of it as he
went about as an itinerant preacher. At one point our author gives a thorough analysis of Matthew 25:31-46, on the end of the world and judgment. He says there are two extreme positions on this pericope. 1) Jesus didn’t say these things. They were written by Matthew exclusively, deriving his ideas from the Old Testament, Judaism and early Christian tradition. 2) They are the authentic words of Jesus himself. The author then gives his view. Examining the text he finds clear traces of the wording and style of Matthew and the authentic words of Jesus himself. Part of the value of this book is in its balanced view. It needs to be read by students today and by students of too exuberant yesterdays. It needs to be read with Bible at hand, so numerous are its scriptural citations. I wish it had appeared in the nineteen seventies when errors were rampant, but better late than never. Matthew V. Reilly, O.P. FLAWED EXPECTATIONS. The Reception of the Catechism of the Catholic
Church. By Msgr. Michael J. Wrenn and Kenneth D. Whitehead (Ignatius Press, P.O. Box 1339,
Ft. Collins, Colo. 80522, 1996), 418 pp. PB $17.95. The volume is a scholarly study of the virtual stranglehold “professional religious educators” and neo-Modernist theologians have had on American (and other English-speaking nations’) catechesis. Flawed Expectations demonstrates the determination of this “new knowledge class” of professional theologians and catechists to preserve their hegemony by subverting implementation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) in their dioceses. Constituting “the Catechetical Establishment” (Yes, Virginia, it does exist!), this claque of “new theologians, new exegetes, and new liturgists” (who network on an international level) has been responsible for the spread of “significant errors, omissions, and distortions” of Catholic doctrine that have wrought havoc in Catholic religious education. As our authors observe:
The evidence for the truth of the above statements is scrupulously documented as recently published neo-Modernist commentaries on the CCC are dissected. No reader of the Wrenn-Whitehead study can fail to acknowledge that the present era of “cafeteria Catholicism” has been in large part the result of the collusion between dissenter theologians and revisionist catechists who no longer believe the Catholic Creed. Their doctrinal rebellion against the Magisterium received impetus from the rejection of Humanae Vitae. As our authors remind us:
With the Church in the West plunged into a “crisis of faith” from which it has not yet recovered, the Church has seen fit to issue its magnificent CCC to dispel those fumes of the “Smoke of Satan” which swirl about religious education texts and materials evidencing the erosion of Catholic doctrine. Our authors note:
Severely critiqued by our authors are the following manifestations of the “anti-Roman complex” at work in the Church: 1) the Universal Catechism Reader edited by Thomas J. Reese, S.J. stemming from a symposium held at the Woodstock Theological Center, Georgetown University; 2) the 1993 Symposium sponsored by the School of Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America; 3) Commentary on the Catechism of the Catholic Church edited by the British ex-Jesuit Michael J. Walsh (Liturgical Press, Collegeville); 4) The Catechism: Highlights and Commentary written by Brennan Hill and William Madges (Twenty-Third Publications, Mystic, CT); 5) Exploring the Catechism edited by Jame E. Regan (Liturgical Press, Collegeville, MN); 6) The New Catechism: Analysis and Commentary edited by Andrew Murray (Catholic Institute of Sydney, Australia); 7) The People’s Catechism: Catholic Faith for Adults. ‘By the People of God for the People of God’ edited by (Bishop) Raymond Lucker, Patrick J. Brennan and Michael Leach (Crossroad, N.Y.). Flawed Expectations is invaluable for its exposing the inroads dissent has made in the life of the Church because of the false teachings being perpetrated by certain theologians and catechetical writers. Their heresies have been committed in the name of “inculturation” and “modern scholarship.” The book is indispensable for identifying the dissenters and contestators from various countries who have been engaged in doctrinal revisionism. Bishops concerned with safeguarding the “deposit of faith” will find of interest that the same dangerous “theology of reception” used to negate the doctrinal authority of Humanae Vitae is now being used to subvert the CCC as the authoritative (and binding) teaching of the Magisterium. James Likoudis HOW THE IRISH SAVED CIVILIZATION. By Thomas Cahill (Anchor Books,
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 1540 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10036, 1995), x + 246 pp.
PB $12.95. I think this best-seller is a bad book, not unlike many other popular histories (and most best-sellers). It seems to me a collection of disparate historical, archeological, linguistic, and religious bits cobbled together and often misinterpreted so that they seem to support the author’s thesis, which is that the Irish saved civilization because their religion and character are incurably anti-“Roman.” The author, whose frank claims to scholarship are belied by his performance, finds archeological evidence of the vigorous and unruly sex life of the pre-Christian Irish and suggests that it reflects the true Irish genius that saved civilization. It seems that living wild and free, with plenty of fornication and divorce and so forth, is the way to preserve high culture. The acceptance of “Romanism” in Ireland, Cahill avers, was a nineteenth-century phenomenon caused by the austere influence of Queen Victoria. It was an aberration, and the Irish are finally recovering from it. If you thought that the Irish were generally true to the Church and that their current spiritually suicidal plunge into the pathologies of American culture is a fault, Cahill says you are wrong. In the final analysis, this is just another book about how bad the Church is and how good sin is. For purposes of contrast with the premedieval Irish, Cahill uses St. Augustine, whom he treats as the epitome of repressive and destructive “Romanism.” He discusses the bishop of Hippo in order to assert that the Irish saints Patrick and Columban were a great deal less concerned about sexual sin and such matters than the gloomy old “Romans.” The Irish genius, according to this author, really lies in ignoring the moral teaching of the Church. Though his comments about the place of the Confessions in world literature are astute (if unoriginal), his conclusions about St. Augustine are the merest anti-Catholic clichés. They can be corrected, I believe, by a better reading of the City of God. Cahill even has the chutzpah to say that the Gospels do not mention sex. On this account, the Lord’s admonition about looking lustfully at women must be about something else: a strange and, one would think, unscholarly view. In fact, the Gospel teaching about sex is far more stringent than the Old Testament teaching, for Christ condemns sins of thought as well as actual deeds. Cahill suggests that the Church’s teaching about sexual morality is a “Roman” concoction. The sad thing is that most of his readers, like him, have never read the Gospels with any attention (if at all) and will probably believe what he says. Finally, the author of this incoherent book wonders whether civilization was worth saving anyway—a question that knocks the sap out of the imputed Irish achievement. Then, as if forgetting what he has just written, he says that our current civilizational crisis can be solved only by saints. He fails to say whether they should resemble Augustine or the genial, morally lax, but imaginary Patrick. But I think we can guess. Roy R. Barkley |