Working for the common good
AN INTRODUCTION TO CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING. By Rodger Charles, S.J. (Ignatius Press, [P.O. Box 1339, Fort Collins, CO 80522] and Family Publications, Oxford, 1999), 112 pp. PB $9.95. 

For those without the time to read Rodger Charles’s complete two-volume work on Catholic Social Teaching this shortened version is an excellent, if severely abbreviated, introduction to the topic. The book is “. . . a general introduction to the ethics of decision making in the civic, political, and economic spheres of human society.” As such it provides a basic outline of otherwise complex and oft-times convoluted processes that impact on all people.

The purpose of the book is “. . . to open up the social teaching of the Church to a wider audience.” For anyone interested in the topic, the book does just that through the judicious use of key passages from the Church’s major social documents. In all, Charles refers to twenty-one documents throughout the text. Beginning with Diuturnum Illud (Leo XIII, 1881) and closing with Veritatis Splendor (John Paul II, 1993) he weaves their central message into an explanation of the circumstances from which each flowed. In short he highlights the civic, political, and economic circumstances to which each encyclical responded and from which each evolved.

Chapter titles include Ethics and Civil Society, Ethics and Political Society, and Ethics and Economic Society. The first chapter reminds readers that the human person is the end and purpose of every social organization, the family is the foundation of both Church and society, and, subsidiarity is an essential aspect of community and civil society. The second chapter addresses the origins, purpose and nature of political society. This chapter is particularly well written as it focuses on such things as solidarity, subsidiarity, the common good, law, morality, justice, human rights, political dissent, right to revolt, the relationship between Church and State, justified war, and international relations! Despite the complexities inherent in such topics the author presents each in a way that invites readers to reflect on them and to read further. Finally, the third chapter addresses such topics as the purpose of the economy, labor, property, capital and capitalism, and the failure of Marxism.

The book’s Conclusion section opens with the following statement: “The social teaching of the Church is an essential part of her teaching on the life of man; Christians are to be fully involved in human society, and guided by the principles of the Gospel in the moral choices that they have to make as social beings.” That this charge is a daily challenge to Christians is axiomatic. That the Church has provided sufficient guidance through the centuries for the laity to find their way to holiness through direct involvement in worldly matters is equally clear.

Our responsibility to civic society involves the basic obligation to show solidarity with others. Our responsibility to political society includes respecting the authority of the state while defending human rights and working for the common good. Finally, our responsibility to economic society must be based on “responsible freedom” to choose fulfilling work, to “own productive goods” and “work them for profit.” By following the guiding principles outlined in the Church’s myriad documents on social teaching, Christians can transform the civic, political, and economic realities in which they live and work.

Rodger Charles sums up the core of Catholic social teaching in the final paragraph as follows: “Success in the social apostolate can only come to those who are prepared to discipline themselves so as to live their lives in accordance with eternal and unchanging moral principles: such a discipline produces a generous spirit of self-sacrifice which enables people to win the love and trust of those with whom they are working for the good of society. It is this approach and no other that will enable Christians to confront the many social problems of the age we live in, and of the ages yet to come; to confront them and to win.” This is not the time to mount the barricades! Rather, it is time to live the conscious commitment to charity and justice in each of our lives. This little book reminds us of this responsibility and provides concrete directions for fulfilling that moral obligation.

Michael G. Allen
Georgia Southern University
Statesboro, Georgia


CHAMPION OF WOMEN AND THE UNBORN: HORATIO ROBINSON STORER, M. D. By Frederick N. Dyer (Watson Publishers International, P. O. Box 493, Canton, MA 02021,1999), 614 pp. HB $39.95

One often hears it said that the state abortion laws which were struck down in 1973 by the Supreme Court had been enacted shortly after the Civil War by the influence of the American Medical Association. The motive force behind the lobbying efforts of the “physicians’s crusade against abortion” was Dr. Horatio R. Storer (1830-1922), whose forceful personality lives again in Dyer’s biography.

Storer began medical practice in Boston in 1855. His training in embryology at Harvard under Louis Agassiz and Jeffries Wyman had brought him to the solid conviction that induced abortion at any time after conception was the taking of an innocent human life. His father David Humphrey Storer taught obstetrics and medical jurisprudence at the Harvard Medical School and had written on the injurious effects of induced abortion on women’s health. What Horatio Storer found in his practice was that his own patients had nowhere near the ratio of stillbirths that were generally being reported, and the reason was near at hand: “stillbirth” was but a euphemism for the induced abortions that were then common among the married Protestant women of Boston. At that point in his life still a Protestant himself (for he eventually became a Catholic), he ironically warned that Protestants would be vastly outnumbered by Catholics if this were permitted to continue.

In 1857 Storer began the “physicians’s crusade against abortion” and obtained the support of the fledgling American Medical Association, which appointed him the chair of a new Committee on Criminal Abortion (the name then common for induced abortion). With the aid of seven prominent physicians from other parts of the country, Storer developed a report that was adopted by the unanimous vote of the AMA at its Louisville meeting in May 1859. The resolutions accepted by the convention were unambiguous: the “duty of this association” to protest against “the prevalence and increasing frequency of the crime” that “physicians have long been united in condemning, and a call for the enactment of laws in each state against “the crime” of induced abortion.

To support this initiative approved at the AMA convention, Storer composed nine scientific articles for publication in the course of 1859 in the North American Medico-Chirurgical Review. His essays covered the real nature of the act of inducing abortion and the frequency with which abortions were being performed, the means used and the types of people involved as perpetrators, victims, and unknowing abettors of the crime, and even the deficiencies of the laws then existing and the obstacles which the medical establishment had often put in the way of obtaining convictions. He vigorously urged the creation of laws that forbade abortion except to save the life of the mother or the child (in the latter case apparently envisions Caesarian sections and other surgeries to remove a child from the womb for the child’s good as well as the mother’s). The laws enacted under this campaign were in many states those in force until struck down by Roe v. Wade.

Besides these legal and political efforts, Storer recognized the need to change the minds and hearts of those who sought or acquiesced in abortion. In 1865 he published a popular book entitled Why Not? A Book for Every Woman designed to convince the reader of both the criminality and the deleterious effect of induced abortion upon women. A year later he produced Is It I? A Book for Every Man, and both volumes sold in the thousands. James Mohr’s Abortion in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978, pp. 240-41) credits these books with a significant decrease in the number of abortions among married women.

Dr. Storer, argues Dyer, can also be accounted the founder of modern gynecology. Since physicians in the early days of his medical practice tended for reasons of propriety not to examine women, they had little accurate knowledge of what was normal or abnormal and often left the field to the care of midwives or the treachery of “quacks.” But following the lead of his father and other physicians like Walter Channing of Boston and James Simpson of Scotland, Storer bucked the opposition of the medical establishment to any specialization, let alone specialization in this area. In 1869 he founded the Gynaecological Society of Boston and began a journal devoted to the diagnosis and treatment of women’s diseases.

Much of the energy for this research arose from the sufferings of his own first wife, but his writings reveal a deep human concern for all women and a conviction that better specialized care could remedy illnesses that, left untreated, often brought insanity and emotional upheaval as well as pain and death.

Never shy of controversy, Storer’s efforts to champion women as well as the unborn brought him into all sorts of other disputes. To diminish the “agony” of childbirth (and later for general surgery), he argued vigorously for the use of the anesthetic chloroform which Simpson had discovered in 1847. But another anesthetic, ether, had been first shown to be useful in Boston in 1846, and Storer’s lively praise for chloroform angered much of the Boston medical community as unacceptable disloyalty! Likewise, his vigorous efforts at the reform of medical education (supported by the new Harvard President Charles Eliot but opposed by powerful figures such as the Doctors Jacob and Henry Bigelow) put him into a conflict that lasted for decades. Dyer’s biography traces the wars that raged in the medical journals of the day.

The year1878 saw Storer’s conversion to Catholicism, especially under the influence of Frances MacKenzie two years after their marriage. That he had been for so many years before this conversion such an ardent leader of the opposition to abortion on medical and biological grounds is significant for setting the historical record straight on the religious roots of the AMA’s participation in the creation of strict abortion laws in most states. Illness of various kinds dogged Storer himself from 1872 until the end of his long life in 1922, and the hope of better recuperation by a change of climate took him to Europe for years. When he came back to the US, other medical, civic, and scholarly concerns largely held his attention, but he returned to the abortion campaign in 1897 with a new paper on the evidence of abnormally high rates of stillbirth, the issue that was so decisive for the choice of paths earlier in his medical career. 

Dyer’s fine volume on this largely forgotten physician makes for edifying reading in any number of areas, but particularly compelling is the portrayal of Storer’s particular combination of sympathy with women’s suffering and his willingness to brook all sorts of contention for the defense of the innocent life of the unborn.
Joseph W. Koterski, S.J.
Fordham University 
Bronx, N.Y.


Like Father Flanagan
SAINT JOHN BOSCO. By F. A. Forbes (Tan Books & Publishers, Inc., P.O. Box 424, Rockford, Ill. 61105, 1941/2000 reprint), 209 pp. PB $8.00.

This is a very good book. It is written well, interesting, inspiring, and is nicely printed; no pietism or super-human parts. Just an ordinary story of an extraordinary man, the Father Flanagan of Boys Town in Italy in the last century. Don Bosco is a most appealing person. His work was down-to-earth, highly practical and direct, saving the souls of wayward boys. He got to them at an age when he could change them. Father Flanagan in Omaha started with winos and old derelicts. He found he could never really mend their ways, so he changed to youth, where he was highly successful.

The author here just tells the story of this great priest. That is all that is necessary for a saint. They are such splendid individuals one does not have to try to make them greater than they were. Making saints angels takes away our inspiration. The saints are given us by God to give us humans new hope, so we will not despair.

Don Bosco is a saint we can identify with and admire. He was human, very human, and he loved God very much. Saints don’t have to levitate to get our attention. A decent, holy man fills us with awe.

The saints looked around and saw Christ’s work to do. We are big talkers today. Talking exhausts us. We cannot see what Christ wants us to do right under our noses. Christ’s work is making this world a more loving place. Don Bosco did this every day.

Anyone who has taught the young knows that the most important thing is “be there for them.” Too many of the learned, safe in their libraries, give us grand theories that do not work. You have to take time for the young and show them that you respect them as individuals. This Don Bosco did instinctively. He lived with his orphans. Every day he talked to them and played games with them and told them about Jesus.

In our age of experts we are attracted by abstract theories. They are useless. Don Bosco’s “being with them” worked well.
Rev. Rawley Myers
Colorado Springs, Colo.


A journey to avoid
A JOURNEY THROUGH REVELATION: A Message for the Millennium. By Bertrand A. Buby, S.M. (Alba House, 2187 Victory Blvd., Staten Island, NY 10314, 2000), 158 pp. PB $14.95.

This book is a good example of why Catholics should avoid books on Scripture which do not have ecclesiastic approval. In this work, the author, who is a Marianist priest and an Associate Professor of Biblical Theology at the University of Dayton, attempts to interpret the book of Revelation for the average reader. To this end, he presents the text of Revelation a chapter at a time in his own “interpretative” translation from the Greek and then follows it with his commentary. Although Fr. Buby presents some interesting insights into the symbols and events of Revelation, especially its allusions to the Old Testament, he offers the reader an overall interpretation which is private rather than Catholic.

One of the first problems with the book is the way in which Fr. Buby handles the question of who wrote Revelation. Although this matter has been debated in the Church since the third century, tradition holds that St. John the Apostle is the author of Revelation. However, Fr. Buby flatly denies this and states that “John of Patmos,” a first century Jewish-Christian, was really the author. He does not offer any evidence or arguments to support his assertion, he simply puts forth his opinion as fact. He then composes “soliloquies” which he puts into the mouth of “John of Patmos” in order to make this fictitious character seem real. By avoiding a real discussion of this issue, Fr. Buby implies that this matter has been settled and that tradition has been proven to be incorrect.

He also has the unorthodox opinion that Revelation applies only to the first century and to the seven local churches to whom it was addressed. He does not think that the symbols and events of Revelation should be applied to other times, especially the future, and he strongly rejects millenarianism. Unlike traditional exegesis which interprets Rev. 4-22 as applying to the trials of the Church throughout history, the end of time, and the events of the first century, Fr. Buby believes that the passages preceding Rev. 20:11 pertain only to the first century, and the passages afterward to the end of time. This certainly limits any meaning that Revelation would have for anyone living after the first century and before the Second Coming.

However, the most serious weakness of the book is its vague ecclesiology. Fr. Buby states repeatedly that the message of Revelation is “Worship God,” but he never tells the reader how one is supposed to worship God, namely in the liturgy of the Church. He overlooks almost all of Revelation’s allusions to the Mass and the sacraments, including such obvious references as Rev. 4:1-11, 7:2-4, and 19:9. Although he says that the liturgy in heaven is “what should be happening in the seven churches when the community is gathered for worship” (p. 34), he never connects this with the Catholic Church and the Mass. Yet it is precisely this connection which is the key to understanding Revelation and which makes this enigmatic part of Scripture as timely today as it was in the first century.

If Fr. Buby had actually consulted the works of the best theologians down through history as he claims to have done, he would not have missed this point. However, his bibliography, which lists no works published before 1968, shows that he has been primarily influenced by contemporary, and in some cases, non-Catholic exegetes. Similarly, his use of “horizontal” inclusive language, as well as of the dechristianized terms C.E. and B.C.E. to number the years, show that he has also been affected by feminism and political correctness. Readers who want a Catholic book about the Apocalypse which does not leave them stranded in the first century, should avoid making this “journey through Revelation.”
Mary R. Schneider
Cleveland, Ohio

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