book reviews

A man of fire

This life of St. Anthony is excellent. It is written by a lay woman who is a member of the Secular Franciscan Order. She is the mother of five children and has been writing for more than thirty-five years.

Her book is cast in novel form to make it more interesting. Not to be interesting is the cardinal sin of those who wish to reach the general reading public. This author, far from committing that sin, has given us a book that is moving and very readable and enjoyable. May it have many, many readers. St. Anthony is written the way saint's lives should be written.

Our trouble today is that though we are the Church of the saints, we neglect the saints. This is a great loss. The sooner we know about the saints again, the sooner we will be on the right road in these foggy days of confusion.

St. Anthony of Padua is one of the best loved saints. And this fine book is a good place to start learning about him. If another Church had one of our saints they would be talking about him night and day. We have hundreds of wonderful saints and know little about most of them.

Mrs. Nugent dramatizes his exciting life. She has short chapters depicting various episodes of his adventures. We must help the children know the saints. Here is a book that youth can read and find colorful, well written and engrossing.

Anthony was born in Lisbon and joined the new Franciscan friars. He wanted to be a missionary to Morocco, even a martyr, but he ended up being the most famous preacher in all of Italy. His failure in North Africa paved the way for his fiery apostolate in Padua and other cities, converting Christians to Christianity. We could use such saints today.

My only negative thought, small indeed, is the picture on the cover. It makes Anthony look like a wimp, when in truth he was a man of fire. But this is nothing compared to the outstanding story inside.

Fr. Rawley Myers

Colorado Springs, Colo.

Spiritual-somatic medicine

Lester Sauvage is a world-renowned heart surgeon and pioneer of the coronary bypass surgery (using veins). He has performed open heart and major blood vessel surgery for approximately 10,000 patients over 33 years. He is a Clinical Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington School of medicine in Seattle.

The book is more about his patients than it is about Dr. Sauvage. In the first two chapters he gives a brief account of his own life and how he got into heart surgery in the first place back in the 1950s. The key to understanding his approach is that he is just as concerned about the spiritual well-being of his patients as he is for their physical health.

Before he performed surgery he would ask his patients three questions: 1) What will you do with the added years that surgery will bring? 2) How will you find increased happiness in these "extra years"? 3) What is happiness to you?

The surgeon was also a type of spiritual father. He spoke to his patients about God, about talking to him and listening to him. He asked them to honor God by helping their neighbor whenever they could. We have all heard of psychosomatic medicine. Dr. Sauvage practiced a type of spiritual-somatic medicine. He was convinced that spiritual well-being along with a firm grasp on the meaning of life helped his patients to survive the serious surgery and the suffering connected with it.

Sauvage's story is interesting in itself, but the book is not about him. It is about his patients. He asked ten of them to tell their stories-how they discovered their heart disease and what it meant to them to have their heart stopped and corrected by the hands of a mere man-Dr. Sauvage. In the course of his active operating he held the hearts of about 5,000 fellow human beings in the palm of his hand. That is an awesome responsibility.

Each of the ten stories is different. I especially liked the story of Joe Forgione who pushed himself to the limit to make his first million dollars and to achieve monetary success. He did it but in the process almost died of heart failure before he was forty years old. Fortunately for him, he was directed to Dr. Sauvage who not only saved his life but also gave him a reason to live and persuaded him to try to help others more than he had in the past. In Joe's own words; "It is now nine years since my surgery, and I'm continuing to do well . . . . For many years I was lost and unhappy, but through the grace of God, I have found my way back to peace and joy and am thankful for each moment of every day."

Dr. Sauvage gives a short commentary on each person at the end of their story. Finally, at the end of the book he offers a short chapter on the principles that guided him in his work.

I am proud to say that I have met Dr. Sauvage. In 1963 I was working at Providence Hospital in Seattle in the chaplain's office. He used to attend my morning Mass before he went into surgery. Heart operations were something new in those days and he was known as one of the pioneers in the process. In his experimental laboratory he allowed me to watch him do a graft on a large dog-something I remember vividly.

We need more doctors like Dr. Sauvage who is now retired from active surgery and specializes in research on new techniques. He combines the spiritual with the technical and always treated each patient as a unique person. He took a personal interest in each one.

The book is hard to put down once you get started on it. It might be a good gift for a friend who is suffering from heart disease and needs some encouragement. I recommend it.

Kenneth Baker, S.J.

Fairfield, N.J.

The last waltz in Kansas

Perhaps the most interesting and temporarily successful effort to reintroduce liberal education into a large American state university took place during the 1970s at, one is tempted to say "of all places," the University of Kansas. Robert Carlson has given us a vivid account and supporting documentary of the Integrated Humanities Program that was organized by Professors Dennis Quinn, John Senior, and Franklyn Nelick. John Senior's The Resto-
ration of Christian Culture (Ignatius, 1983) is perhaps the easiest way to acquire some idea of the intellectual dimensions of the thought behind these three professors.

I am tempted to review this book under many different aspects-to give an account of the program itself, a program based on a careful study of medieval and general philosophical and literary texts, texts which necessarily included studies of the Fathers of the Church and of the great medieval thinkers. Or else, I might refer to the drama of the intellectual closed-mindedness that we find in large (and small) universities. The early machinations of what later became known as "political correctness" are already here, early on, in full bloom at Lawrence, Kansas. What can be said in this university's favor, as compared to most other similar universities, is that at least it allowed such a program to begin and show signs of flourishing before it suppressed it.

What I will concentrate on is rather the kind of shock that one finds in reading this book about the extent of anti-Catholic bias that will inevitably appear in most places in this country when it appears that there is a case to be made for the Christian component to Western civilization. That such a case can be made and that it might have intellectual integrity will be seen as threatening, as outside the bounds of what can be politically considered. Generally speaking, Catholics themselves will not insist that what they stand for be presented in a fair and objective manner so they will not exert the kind of political counterbalance that might be necessary even to state honorably what they hold about their own history. The trouble with the program at the University of Kansas, as it turned out, was not that it was somehow proselytizing or religious, but that it was seriously academic, scrupulously following classic academic canons of honorableness and academic freedom.

The program ran into public opposition when several of its students became Catholic and a very few entered a French Benedictine Monastery. The fact that most of the students did not become Catholics or enter monasteries was not sufficient to counteract the sort of argument that began, "How can a state supported institution tolerate this?" The only conversion allowed at public institutions evidently is when religiously trained students become relativists. No intellectual challenge to the relativist position will be tolerated within the "open" university.

Had this small incidence of conversion not happened, no doubt the humanities program would still be flourishing. What happened instead was a gradual bureaucratic closing off of access to the program, petty things like stopping advertising, forced moving to smaller quarters, arguments about credits. The fact that there was a problem of academic freedom involved did present problems in closing the program but this was eventually overcome. As Alice von Hildebrand writes in the introduction of this book "The fact is that academic freedom is the exclusive privilege of those whose educational aim is to debunk all objective values." Quinn, Senior, and Nelick were professors of classics or English. They were respected scholars in their own right, Catholics, as it happened. Their courses in this program were evidently team taught in a unique and inspiring way, one that almost all the students in the program admired.

The program included reading poetry aloud, engaging in extended conversations about important literature, including pagan, monastic, and Christian literature. The institute had a semester program in Ireland. Several of the students evidently on their own, interested in the classical monastic traditions, not unlike the young Henry Adams in his Mt. St. Michel and Chartres, chanced to enjoy the hospitality of French monasteries. These were evidently normal and good students, sincerely wondering what life was about. Normally, there ought not to be anything wrong with this; indeed its encouraging is what universities were traditionally about.

Anyone familiar with Christianity will know, of course, that any vocation to the priesthood or religious life is likely to be opposed by parents, relatives or friends. There are warnings of this resistance already in the New Testament. But what is interesting about the developed opposition to the program at Kansas was the effort to suggest that anyone who might become a Catholic or religious must somehow be brainwashed or otherwise under undue pressure. The only terms in which conversion or vocation can be imagined by many otherwise intelligent people are those of psychic disorder. Everything is questioned except the theory of psychic disorder.

Evidently, it is inconceivable in many quarters that a young man or woman can honestly find truth and an ordered life in the monastic or Catholic tradition. Consequently, in universities, nothing can be taught or presented within its own terms as true. A program must never be anything but a congeries of conflicting opinions. This is the only security for the established order. If three professors are exciting and excellent teachers, the solution is to find someone who holds just the opposite view, usually not a difficult thing to do, and impose this on the program, never letting it be itself.

The humanities program at Kansas had many charming things about it. It had the interest of students and their parents. It became known as intellectually provocative and stimulating. The students were encouraged to know the stars and music, to be well-rounded. There were annual picnics and fairs. Evidently, it was decided that a certain yearly elegance was to be encouraged with an evening of waltzing in Lawrence. The students would dress up, ride to the ball in formal garb, sometimes in carriages. In short, we find an awareness of a whole, of how things might fit together, that moral life and intellectual life, the life of the mind and the gracefulness of the waltz are not necessarily in opposition but in harmony.

There is a kind of poignancy about this book, a kind of intimation that good things will not be permitted to exist or flourish. The last waltz in Kansas, the last time that this program was allowed to exist on its own terms, with its own coherent view of the whole, is symbolic of how frightened universities must be today of any truth. Can such things also happen in Catholic universities? Of course, the same relativist ethos is generally predominant. When the history of the St. Ignatius Institute at the University of San Francisco, the nearest Catholic equivalent I know, comes to be written, I suspect, it will sound almost exactly like this account at Kansas in terms of principles involved and methods of treatment.

Carlson remarks that he does not consider this to be a pessimistic book, though one cannot help but be somewhat shocked at the way otherwise good men yield before the truth. We are reminded in this, as we are reminded in so much of the failure to attend to the Holy Father, of Burke's famous remark that evil usually comes about when good men fail to do something, something often rather insignificant, at least at first sight. Carlson sees this as a testimony of the attractiveness and truthfulness of liberal education if it is ever given a chance to be heard. He is right in this, I think. This latter chance, no doubt, is the issue too often before us.

We do not live in a time in which truth is unattractive or unknown. We live in a time that desperately strives, in its official institutions, to prevent it ever being clearly and properly presented. We live in a time of academic doubt and of administrative support of this doubt as the only "truth." The last waltz in Kansas, under stars that the students of the humanities program had studied both in telescopes and in poetry, is a reminder that if we would waltz, if we would know the truth, if we would seek the whole, we will not find it sponsored by our leading institutions secular and, alas often, religious.

James V. Schall, S.J.

Georgetown University

Washington, D.C.

Pius XII, Hitler and Stalin

Fr. Robert A. Graham, S.J., probably knows more about the relations between the Vatican and the Nazis and Communists during World War II than any living person. For thirty years he has been doing research in the Vatican Archives and has published extensively in the field. He is the author of Vatican Diplomacy, Pope Pius XII and the Jews, and co-editor of Acts and Documents of the Holy See Relative to the Second World War, in several volumes. The material developed in this book is derived mostly from articles published by the writer over the years in the Rome-based Italian fortnightly, La Civiltà Cattolica. What this means then is that he is highly qualified to write on the topic of this book.

The book contains nineteen chapters; most of them deal with the relations between the Vatican and Communist Russia. There is also much material about Nazi Germany-relations between the Vatican and Hitler.

What stands out in the treatment is the great hostility of both Nazism and Communist Russia to religion of all kinds, and especially to Catholicism. There were many rumors during and after the war that Hitler and Pius XII had entered into a "secret pact" in 1941 to the effect that Catholic priests would be allowed to evangelize in Russia in the areas conquered by the Germans. Fr. Graham shows that this was a fabricated lie. There is no evidence anywhere of such a pact; in fact, the evidence points rather to a concerted effort on the part of Hitler to keep priests and all Protestant ministers out of Russia. In spite of that, some did get in such as Fr. Walter Ciszek, S.J., who wrote about his experiences in the popular book, With God in Russia.

The Nazis made several attempts to make it appear that they were the defenders of Western civilization against the Communist barbarians of the East, especially after Hitler's defeat at Stalingrad in 1943. Some German diplomats tried to get Pius XII to come out in support of Germany against Communist Russia, but the Pope was too shrewd for them. Since both ideologies were hostile to the faith he carefully avoided supporting either one side or the other. Hitler himself, as Graham shows, had nothing but contempt for the Vatican and never sought support from the Pope.

Communist propaganda was the source of many of the rumors and lies about the relations between the Pope and the Nazis. Fr. Graham puts all such theories to rest.

There is a fascinating chapter about Fatima and the prediction of the Blessed Virgin Mary that "Russia will be converted." Prayer services in Germany connected with the Fatima revelations caused great consternation among the top-ranking Nazis. They did not know what to make of it but they were terrified to think that it was a prediction of the ultimate victory of Russia over the West.

Here is a fresh view of how the Vatican dealt with Hitler and Stalin during World War II. Fr. Graham blows Nazi and Communist myths out of the water. You will not find anything like this in your local newspaper; you will not find it in Time or Newsweek or the New York Times. But if you are interested in the history of World Was II you will find Fr. Graham's book a delight.

Kenneth Baker, S.J.

New York, N.Y.

All lives involve suffering

Fr. Benedict Groeschel writes his book to help individuals use the unavoidable dark times in life as means to spiritual growth. Even though society may try to create the illusion that everyone's life is sunshine, the truth is that all lives involve suffering. The message of the death and Resurrection of Jesus is that with faith we may use defeat and loss as an opportunity to challenge God's grace to help us survive. We are called to trust in God, believe that whatever happens, God is there with us.

The author refers to a number of people within the Church who actually found the cross they had to bear came from churchmen. Many of these people today are listed among the saints or on the road to sainthood today: Padre Pio, Solanus Casey, Alphonsus Ligouri, Joan of Arc. How can the Church founded by Christ fail us? The answer is found in the Gospels, for the Apostles failed Jesus. Fr. Groeschel uses the examples of Francis of Assisi and John of the Cross who placed their trust ultimately in God.

The author frankly admits that there are times when we are our own worst enemies. Some of these moments would include keeping alive all kinds of hurt feelings, denying obvious dangers and walking into them, ultimately failing to organize our behavior around our everlasting goal. As Christians we are supposed to step out in faith, but it is quite easy to sit down in confusion and do nothing. We can pray very fervently and still make mistakes, but even in honest mistakes, good things happen. God is there working with our self-destructiveness, for he is infinitely merciful and kind.

When one is experiencing intense disappointment or great sorrow, the remedy which always works is to get out of oneself and help another: "Save another's soul and it will save your own."

Fr. Groeschel reviews the meaning of death as taken in a Christian perspective. Ultimately, the experience of the loss of a loved one should lift our eyes to eternity. When it is a painful death, it is all the more important that we pray. One of the most loving and beneficial things we can do for the deceased is have Masses offered for them. This worthy practice draws to mind the example of the death of Monica, Augustine's mother. While her two sons were quite concerned about her burial on the native soil of Africa, she was interested in prayers and having Christ's Body and Blood offered for her soul.

The main focus of each chapter is encapsuled in a prayer at the end. The last chapter is a very appropriate collection of prayers for those who are experiencing difficult times.

The author has taken what may be for some a topic to be avoided-suffering-and approaches it in a Christian perspective-but likewise in a very practical and witty fashion. His experiences of years past are shared in delightful but powerful stories which keep the reader moving with the text. Fr. Groeschel's style makes an otherwise avoidable topic inviting and spiritually enriching.

Sr. Madeleine Grace, C.V.I.

Houston, Tex.

Manipulating human persons

"The manipulation of human embryos inescapably accustoms people to complacency in the face of murder of whatever kind. If I can dispose of the existence of a human being just conceived, one whom I can scarcely imagine but to whose presence science attests, why should I refrain from disposing of the existence of any other human being? Why should I not obliterate regions judged to be overpopulated, when that technique would be less burdensome than massive abortion and sterilization campaigns?" (III, 20).

Professor Schooyans' challenge is to each and every one of us who have fought against the tragedy of surgical abortion to see clearly and distinctly that until the smallest of these human beings, the human embryo, is protected by law and science, there will be no end to the destruction of innocent human beings that plagues our nation and our world.

He teaches, rightly so, that the combined force of science and politics, working in tandem with deceptive rhetoricians, can wield an immense amount of de facto power, even though the "legitimacy of this de facto power is questionable in its very principle." What example could we better use to illustrate his point than that of the United States government and its persistent use of tax dollars to fund ghoulish research and experimentation of human embryos, not only recently but during the entire time of an alleged moratorium during the Reagan and Bush years. Without hesitation and with apologies to no one the national attitude in politics, science and much of philosophy has been that the value of a human being is debatable, not to mention the reality of when a human being is a human being. The culture ignores the millions of tiny boys and girls destroyed by various forms of birth control, simply arguing that these are nothing more than "pre-embryos," a preposterous concept which Professor Schooyans puts to rest once and for all in his book.

Americans, including many Catholics, tout the value of in vitro fertilization while ignoring the fact that children are killed during such processes simply because they are either "extras" or because they fail "quality control." The grave moral overtones inherent in this practice, and its eugenic implications, should be reason enough to abandon the practice.

Schooyans teaches "from the moment of conception the new being is individualized principally by its genetic code: commanded with precision by this code, the human being will develop in a continuous fashion." And it is very clear indeed that Schooyans defines conception as fertilization, not the politically correct version which deceptively focuses on implantation, thus dismissing only God knows how many tiny boys and girls from our memory.

This book sets the record straight on exactly what must be done in the scientific community, the philosophical community and the political community-truth must be accepted for what it really is and not what the spin doctors tell us it is. The time has come to defend all innocent human beings, and to accept as fact "Like all human activity, scientific activity is subject to moral norms. No claim relative to academic freedom can take away from the unconditional respect that is due every human being. No man, no matter what his concrete condition might be, may be used as a guinea pig for scientific ends. Science is at the service of man, man is not at the service of science" (III, 4).

This book is a landmark publication, and the contents cannot be ignored. For as Schooyans warns, ". . . when we act as creators and proprietors of the genetic patrimony that we solely transport, then the sense of finiteness, the sense of creation and the sense of Providence vanish."

"When through his actions and thought man has extirpated from mind and heart all idea of loving, parental, fraternal and existential relationships, he finds himself naked and in the tragic condition of a solitary individual that is vulnerable and exposed to the power of his rivals-and at the same time as a lord without pity, to the degree that he can wield his power over others" (III, 28).

Judie Brown

American Life League, Inc.

Stafford, Va.