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In “The Supreme Court 2000: A Symposium” (October 2000),your six contributors recount the damage recently done by the Court to innocentlife, to the Court itself, and to the nation. Each writer in turn describesanother peak in the mountain range of error by which we now are almostsurrounded.
Yet one of the Supreme Court’s June 2000 decisions goesunmentioned, and its potential for wreaking havoc should not escape our watch.Viewed as a criminal law decision, Dickerson v. United States is unremarkable.Given the chance to curtail or overrule Miranda v. Arizona, the Court opted forno change. Before Dickerson, we had Miranda warnings, and we have them still.So what? But Dickerson is also a decision regarding constitutional law”adecision of colossal importance to, say, a member of Congress who imagines thatpartial“birth abortion can be made illegal by a statute of the sort seeminglyinvited by the Court in Stenberg v. Carhart. Sorry, Charlie.
We learn in Dickerson that the powers of Congress arelimited in a way not previously imagined. We discover that a rule invented bythe Supreme Court for the putative purpose of enforcing constitutional rightsis immune to congressional limitation or modification. It is a “constitutionaldecision,” a category now indistinguishable from the Constitution itself.Justice Antonin Scalia offered in dissent the view that Dickerson “convertsMiranda from a milestone of judicial overreaching into the very Cheops Pyramid(or perhaps the Sphinx would be a better analogue) of judicial arrogance.” Withall respect to our era’s Great Dissenter, it is Dickerson, not Miranda, thatnow must be feared. We should expect that the next time Congress attempts tohonor the will of the people by legislating some minor restriction on abortion,Dickerson will be invoked to strike it down. Roe v. Wade or Casey v. PlannedParenthood will be awarded the title “constitutional decision” as protectionagainst congressional oversight of the Court’s favorite right.
Michael Murray
Mason, Michigan
From Manhattan to Boston
In Ronald Herzman’s account of the Manhattan College of histime and the Boston College of his son’s time (“Catholic Educations,” October2000), he says relatively little about religion at Manhattan, or about how theAmerican Catholic academy got from the Manhattan of the sixties to the BC ofthe nineties. I was a year behind him in the Liberal Arts Program, and perhapsmy recollections will help fill out the picture.
When I got to Manhattan College in 1962, practicallyeverybody went to Mass, but practically nobody cared much about it. Thesecularization that everyone started talking about a few years later wasalready dominant among both the students and the faculty, although very few yetthought in those terms. Most of the Christian Brothers shied away from muchpersonal contact with the students, because they sensed”and not infrequentlyshared”the students’ half“conscious contempt for the mission epitomized intheir official name, the Brothers of the Christian Schools. I believe that onlyone classmate of Professor Herzman’s became a priest; none of mine did. One ortwo left Manhattan to enter the Brothers, but none of them stuck. I don’trecall anyone saying a dozen words about Vatican II during my college years,even though it convened in the first semester of my freshman year and concludedin the first semester of my senior year. Nobody touted the excellent devotionaland ascetic works that had been written or translated in the previous twenty orthirty years. Devotional life meant old ladies saying the rosary or attendingnovenas. The yearly retreat was a joke. We knew little and cared less. Some ofthe faculty presumably knew more; but either they didn’t care any more than wedid, or were too afraid of our scorn to talk about it.
In the theology department, most of the new lay teachershired in the push for professionalization were seminary washouts whoseprofessionalism consisted of a Master’s degree, more or less informedenthusiasm for the current fads, and ignorance of and contempt for everything else”thatis, for the Church’s intellectual and devotional patrimony. As the fads gotmore heterodox, so did they.
I majored in philosophy, and it was much the same story. Thedepartment consisted mostly of lay products of Fordham’s graduate philosophydepartment, the most popular of whom shared their teachers’ (and theirstudents’) hunger for secular intellectual respectability. Ironically enough,the only figure in Fordham philosophy with any claim to big“league status,Dietrich von Hildebrand, was far too Catholic for serious consideration; he wasonly good enough for women and nuns. We all knew better than Augustine andAnselm and Aquinas, not to mention the twentieth“century figures like Maritainand Gilson and Marcel who’d had so little sophistication as to take onphilosophy from a Catholic perspective.
The Liberal Arts Program was everything that Prof. Herzmansays of it and more. It’s still a matter of wonderment to me how much I got tolearn by comparison with friends, grad school and law school classmates, andcolleagues who were condemned to pass their undergraduate years in places likeHarvard and Yale. But a necessary condition of the Program’s existence was acertain reverence and docility rooted in traditional Catholic sensibility andultimately in the Catholic faith. That reverence and docility still existed inthe early and middle sixties despite the atmosphere described above; but it wasmostly vestigial and inertial. The secular spirit just kept expanding itsinfluence, and ultimately those administrators, faculty, and students whocouldn’t comprehend liberal education as meaning anything but taking thecourses you damn well felt like taking (outside your major, of course) killedoff the Program.
So there wasn’t much left of the Catholic spirit atManhattan College when the explosion sparked by publication of Humanae Vitaefinished off the old regime. Emboldened by the laity’s anger at Paul VI’sattack on the sacred right to kid“free copulation, the Catholic academy andecclesiastical bureaucracy rose up, bullied the terror“stricken episcopate intocomplicity or silence, and took over. By the time Prof. Herzman’s son startedat Boston College, the new regime had been in full operation for better thantwenty years. Manhattan, which was run by an order without much intellectualprestige and had an almost entirely lay faculty, did not bother with theself“congratulation with which the Jesuit colleges or Notre Dame celebratedtheir defection. It simply followed its betters.
John A. McFarland
Ellicott City, Maryland
How to Sing Unto the Lord
I was delighted to see Father Richard John Neuhaus (“Singingthe Lord’s Songs,” October 2000) going for the jugular of a beast that I thinkall Christian churches are going to have to face down before it does us gravedamage”contemporary church music.
Born and raised a Southern Baptist in northern Missouri, Iwas recruited into the church choir in 1936, almost at the very moment when myvoice had gone from soprano to youthful bass. My mother, rest her fun“loving, devoutly Christian soul, was organist and choir director, and she provided uswith anthems published by the Lorenz Company. In those quarterlies Ellen JaneLorenz took anthems by the great old masters and simplified them so that yourrun“of“the“mill volunteer choir could handle them. But in fact her simplifiedversions were much more difficult to sing than the originals, because althoughthe harmonies and melodies in anthems by the great composers might often takesurprising turns, they never took turns that were puzzling or illogical orimpossible to sing, even for relatively untrained volunteer choirs. After manyyears mother discovered this fact, moved out of the Lorenz milieu, and thechoir blessed her for it and sang good music, sometimes not very well, butalways with joy.
My career in government has taken me and my family to avariety of locations, and I have listened to choirs in a number of churchesboth in the U.S. and abroad. As the years passed all these choirs haveconcentrated more and more on contemporary composers, who, with a few notableexceptions such as John Rutter, have yet to produce music that can compare withthat of Haydn, or Bach, or Palestrina, or any of the other greats of thedistant past. Moreover, I think one could select, say, twelve of the greatanthems of all time and sing them one by one, over and over again, without evertiring or boring a congregation. As it is, choirs these days sing a brand newand immensely forgettable anthem every Sunday morning.
I have on occasion made a pest of myself by railing at choirdirectors who refuse to bring out the great old anthems that are in ourlibraries, and instead of “Lo How a Rose E’er Blooming” prepare things like“What’s Your Question, Lord?” sung to a sort of calypso beat. The response tomy complaints is almost invariably that “we have to give the congregation thetype of music it wants to hear.” (Woe to the pastor who approaches his dutieswith that kind of attitude.) Well, whereas one might drive home with thestrains of “The Heav’ns Are Telling” still resonating in the heart, it isdifficult to imagine singing “What’s Your Question, Lord?” while waiting for atraffic light to change.
What happens, in fact, is that when the choir has sung thelast note of “What’s Your Question, Lord?” the congregation doesn’t sit inreverent silence, moved by music and text, but instead bursts into applause fora rollicking performance. I think applause in a church service is anabomination, and am deeply dismayed to see that the practice is spreadingthroughout many denominations, including the Catholic Church. It says somethingdisturbing about what the people seem to be seeking. God is in His Heaven andI’m enjoying the heck out of Him.
John R. Cassidy
Plantation, Florida
As we search for a church after a recent move it isimpossible not to resonate with elements of Richard John Neuhaus’ most recentharangue against the simultaneous excesses and shortcomings of muchcontemporary church music. If historian Nathan Hatch is to be believed,however, the “worship wars” in American Christianity are at least two hundredyears old, and suggest a rather direct link between the political democracythat Father Neuhaus so eloquently champions and various manifestations of an accompanying“cultural democracy” for which he seems to have little patience. The ideal thatchurch should serve as an occasion for literary and aesthetic uplift for peopleof “lower” tastes did not long survive the revolution, and continues to fightan uphill battle against those who prefer to worship in the vernacular. Whyshould it be surprising that, in our democratic society, people would develop achurch music that is simple, visceral, often defiant, and geared towardself“expression? Can the leveling instincts behind such cultural expressionsreally be separated from the ethos that created and sustains politicaldemocracy?
Steven Jensen
Canton, Ohio
I fear that Richard John Neuhaus, in his thunderings againstthe state of contemporary church music, has yet to learn the basic lesson of“the perfect shoe.” In vain have I long searched for the perfect shoe: good fortown and country, durable at sporting events and well“turned out at the countryclub soirée. It is only with reluctance and the dawn of middle age that I havecome to accept this lesson: it does not exist. As with shoes, so with worshipstyles: it takes all kinds.
I too like classical music, but I will never surrender myshrieks of “Jeeesus” set to the thunderings of a rock anthem. Let Nietzscheexplain: he made a useful distinction in pointing out that the Greeks made roomfor both the Apollonian element”classical, measured, balanced, reasoned”and theDionysian”abandoned, instinctual, romantic. A church given over only to theApollonian, as Father Neuhaus urges, would be measured, balanced, beautiful . .. and a dull thing indeed.
Taking another angle, we could say that Fr. Neuhaus isaltogether too Jamesian and insufficiently Chestertonian or Bellocian. I thinkhere of Henry James’ visit to G. K. Chesterton with Belloc attendant,disheveled from having just come in from a long trip. Chesterton observed:“Henry James had a name for being subtle; but I think that situation was toosubtle for him. I doubt to this day whether he, of all men, did not miss theirony of the best comedy in which he ever played a part. He left Americabecause he loved Europe, and all that was meant by England or France; thegentry, the gallantry, the traditions of lineage and locality, the life thathad been lived beneath the old portraits in oak“paneled rooms. And there, onthe other side of the tea“table, was Europe, was the old thing that made Franceand England, the posterity of the English squires and
the French soldiers; ragged, unshaven, shouting for beer,shameless above all shades of poverty and wealth; sprawling, indifferent,secure. And what looked across at it was still the Puritan refinement ofBoston; and the space it looked across was wider than the Atlantic.”
If the Greeks don’t convince, and if Nietzsche in tandemwith Chesterton fails to persuade, perhaps it would not go amiss to recall thatwhen David’s wife Michal “saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord,she despised him in her heart” (2 Samuel 6:16), and she did so in the name ofrefinement, good taste, and “behavior appropriate to one’s station.” She wasApollonian all the way, but she was wrong.
I write all this only because I am convinced that Fr.Neuhaus has much to offer us evangelicals and charismatics, but to despise usfor our worship styles is to build walls where bridges are necessary; moreover,it is to build walls over microscopic issues of personal taste. Why magnify anissue of personal taste into a theological issue of cosmic proportions as hedoes when he tags the rock style of worship as “personal poison”?
I am sure he must feel better, bolstered by the notion thathis tastes are anchored in deep theological undercurrents unlike these shallowother fellows, but to give way to this feeling is to give way to the veryself“indulgence he condemns in the music of others.
Paul M. Miller
Bellevue, Washington
RJN replies:
I stand reproached by Mr. Miller but not, I think,corrected. Neither Apollo nor Dionysus is a model for Christian worship, andBelloc did not sprawl in church. Distinctions are difficult in practice, butthe difference I was addressing is between the worship of God and emotionalexhibitionism, between the musical offering of beauty honed by disciplinedtalent and the self“indulgent display of enthusiasm. While on Belloc, there isthis lovely story which I’m told is true. At St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NewYork he stood, as was the French custom, where the Americans knelt. An ushertugged his sleeve and whispered, “We kneel at this point, sir.” Belloc tousher, “Go to hell.” Usher to Belloc, “I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t know you were aCatholic.”
To Mr. Jensen: If by democratic one means attuned to andloved by the people, neither in Catholic nor evangelical worship is third“raterock or Broadway music democratic. Recently I spoke to a gathering of severalhundred evangelicals. The talk was preceded by a “song fest” in which piano,guitar, and exuberant song leader tried to get people to belt out somethingcalled, “Do You Know Jesus?” Unsuccessfully. The words were even projected on abig screen. All to no avail. Now, if they had tried “The King of Love, MyShepherd Is” or “A Mighty Fortress”
or “O Worship the King,” I expect there would have been someheartfelt singing. That’s democratic.
I thank Mr. Cassidy for his corroborating comments.
Starr Proceedings?
I wish to offer a modest traditionalist response to theobservations of Richard John Neuhaus regarding Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starrand the presidential impeachment of recent years (While We’re At It, October2000). One thing that most of us agree upon in situations like this is theusefulness of the centuries“old adage, “Stick with your principles and let thechips fall where they may.” Some of us old fogies were, and remain, utterlyappalled at the scandalous eighteen“month media riot that ended finally withthe President’s acquittal by the U.S. Senate. We do not find anythinginspirational about this entire string of events. Available evidence will notsustain Mr. Starr’s contention that the mandate of his office compelled him toact as he did. The truth is that he freely chose to migrate from his legitimateWhitewater assignment to the unseemly Paula Jones case.
True, his statutory jurisdiction was very broad, but much ofit was discretionary. Subsequent developments would seem to confirm that Starropted to move away from the Whitewater matter because the Jones affair offeredthe virtual certainty of media“plausible “pay dirt” as compared with theoblivion toward which he seemed to be headed in his initial investigation.
At the outset of this switch to the morals scandal, Starrhad to know that Linda Tripp had committed a felony under Maryland law insurreptitiously taping Monica Lewinsky’s phone conversations about her WhiteHouse liaison with the President. The crass assault against the younger woman’scharacter that accompanied this criminal conduct has to reflect as much uponStarr as it does upon Tripp. Surely one can ask in fairness, Would ArchibaldCox have involved himself and his office in this tawdry kind of lawlessness?
Between the two of them Starr and Tripp were able tointimidate the hapless Monica and her family and attorneys into a slavishcooperation with the prosecution. And from there it took only minimalpartisanship for Starr to appeal to the Republican congressional leadership fortheir cooperation. Once the impeachment process commenced, partisan Republicansand the media, not Starr, were in charge of events. We cannot lay on him thedishonest subterfuge of baiting the presidential perjury in order to have aformal basis for impeachment. For months impeachment
managers and media pundits would episodically provide theviewing public earnest explanations that the President was on trial for lyingunder oath, not for his abominable conduct”and then recommence the extensiveairing of the abominable conduct.
Mercifully for Mr. Starr, history will more likely forgethim than judge him.
Robert E. Newton
Retsil, Washington
