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Contents © 2000
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

May 2000 CLIPS

Why, then, did Ken Burns remove from "Not for Ourselves Alone" Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's passionate descriptions of abortion as "child murder" and "infanticide"? And why did none of the reviews of the documentary I saw in the mainstream press mention this distortion of the record of these original feminists?

--Nat Hentoff, "Why the censoring of feminist history?" The Village Voice, March 27, 2000


THE PURPOSE OF THE CRISIS REVIEW section is not to help our readers create a Catholic ghetto with a "G" rating. Yes, we will continue to provide guidance to parents with young children, but more importantly we will equip those parents whose teenage and young-adult children express opinions about films like American Beauty, Eyes Wide Shut, and The End of the Affair.

--Deal W. Hudson, "Catholic Journalism As If Beauty Really Mattered," Crisis, March 2000


I SUSPECT THAT THE HARM which Raymond Brown has unwittingly done to the Church and to souls has been more grievous than that done by theologians more outspokenly liberal than Brown himself, precisely because the "moderation" and "nuances" with which he sugar-coated his pernicious doctrinal principles made his work seem responsible and orthodox to many high-ranking bishops and cardinals who would never have been swayed by the more blatant (although perhaps more logically consistent) biblical skepticism of those such as Küng, Boff, Schillebeeckx, Knitter, or Drewermann.

--Letters from our readers, Rev. Brian W. Harrison, O.S., Ponce, Puerto Rico, Homiletic & Pastoral Review, March 2000


QUESTION: IS THERE ANY JUSTICE obligation for those who take off work days for which he is paid for "sick days" when in reality he is quite well. Since some are allowed a number of "sick days" each year some say this is only lying, not a justice question.

Answer: To my mind, "only lying" never improves any situation. Consider the sober treatment of "lying" in the Catechism (#2482-7). Significantly, the Catechism teaches that every offense against justice and truth "entails the duty of reparation" (#2487).

Now, it is true that some contracts and employment policies provide for a certain number of sick days, some even provide for "personal days." It seems to me that when one claims a sick day when he is quite well he should convert that to a "personal day" as a form of reparation.

--Msgr. Wm. B. Smith, Homiletic & Pastoral Review, March 2000


"I POINTED OUT THAT IN DEALING with the March 24, 1944 Rome massacre he accuses Pius XII of having had prior knowledge of plans for this massacre. I reminded him that he [Cornwall] knew this was an old lie which had long ago been disproved, and that he not only repeated the falsehood but compounded it with new falsehoods. His book states that Pius XII's sister and nephew sued perpetrators of this lie in a Roman court.

"It was not the pope's sister and nephew who brought this to court, it was his niece! She brought suit for defamation against film producer Carlo Ponti, author Robert Katz and director Cosmatos. After the trial and appeals, the producer, author, and director were found guilty of calumny against Pope Pius XII on February 7, 1981.

"When I accused Cornwell of totally twisting the Roman court's decision in this famous case, he heatedly insisted that he had not falsely reported the verdict. I quoted to him from his own book, Hitler's Pope, p. 380: 'The Pacellis lost, but appealed, and the case was eventually judged inconclusive.' Even then he would not admit that the Pacellis had won, that the court had ruled in their favor and found Pope Pius XII had been falsely accused. He would admit nothing. He was silent."

-- Margherita Marchione, "The Nun versus the Spin Master," Homiletic & Pastoral Review, April 2000


IN A VICTORY FOR FREE SPEECH, Life Legal Defense Foundation attorneys have knocked down a city law deliberately designed to dilute an abortion protester's message. LLDF lawyers also won more than $65,000 in court costs and fees from the City of Menlo Park, whose leaders had passed a sign ordinance aimed at pro-life posters.

The fees and costs have been paid by the Northern California city, with about $50,000 of it going directly to LLDF, the largest "contribution" in LLDF's history.

(S)ome citizens complained about graphic signs carried by demonstrator Ross Foti. His signs of large color photographs showed aborted babies. The biggest was about three by five feet in size. He carried one sign and put others on his car parked near a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic within the city limits of Menlo Park. Foti credits these signs with saving the lives of several children whose mothers have stopped to thank him -- and undoubtedly many others he never saw again.

After hearing people complain about the signs, the council passed an emergency ordinance changing the city's sign laws so that Foti's signs were outlaws. LLDF attorney Katie Short said that the introduction to the ordinance included sections saying that Foti had disturbed the peace of the public by displaying large graphic signs, and then went on to outline a sign ordinance that was strictly aimed against those signs.

"The City Attorney did realize that the city could not pass an ordinance against this type of picture, so he went for size and said people could carry signs no larger than three square feet in the public right of way," Short said.

Short remains concerned about size restrictions on signs, noting that in one case against abortion protesters in San Diego, a court had reduced the size of allowable pictures to only eight and a half by 10 inches, the size of one sheet of binder paper. [That case, Wilkerson v. Scott, is presently on appeal.] No matter what the topic -- abortion, political comment, labor disputes -- passersby will learn nothing from a sign that small, she indicated.

-- Lifeline, Volume X, No. 1, Spring 2000

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