To the Editors

As a design person I want to extend belated congratulations to you for the attractive and distinctive covers you have produced in recent months. My favorite journal of opinion has gone through many stages in my years as a subscriber and sometime contributer, pretty bland when I started back in the early '60s, but now--wow!

Keep up the good work. The content has always been excellent, but now you have covers that rival those of the big-budget guys on the magazine racks!

RUSSELL W. GIBBONS
Pittsburgh, Pa.

Where there's smoke...

Your editorial on teenage sexual behavior ("Abstinence, Anyone?" January 26, 2001) treats constant sexual activity as something that's invariably necessary to normal human functioning.

There's another model, however, one well understood in days when clerical celibacy was more universally honored and when, indeed, many lay persons of both sexes chose to remain unmarried. Today, such a model sounds weird, or impossible, or out of touch with the TV-engineered collective consciousness we call "reality." But we should give it a try.

Most of my friends used to smoke constantly and enthusiastically. Then came a change in national consciousness. All have now given up smoking, though if you'd asked them thirty years ago, most would have said they considered it a necessity of life.

I know the objections to the analogy: Sex is an instinctual drive, while smoking is not....Yet the crucial thing is that when it comes to smoking, there has been a remarkable alteration of social attitude. Today, smoking is a choice that is made, if at all, only after long and mature consideration of its possible consequences. This is the perspective, it seems to me, that needs to be brought back into discussions of sexuality. It's a consumerist ideology in which sexual activity seems as "necessary" to existence as eating or breathing.

For the record, Luke Timothy Johnson's article ("A Disembodied 'Theology of the Body,'" same issue) seemed to me an almost pure expression of the "ideology of sex," which has brainwashed most Americans. In terms of my analogy, it makes the pope into something like a nonsmoker in a room filled with people who are happily lighting up. It's all right if the man doesn't want to smoke, but why does he keep bothering us about it?

WILLIAM C. DOWLING
Princeton, N.J.

Untrue & unjust

I wasn't in the audience at the Interfaith Center of New York, but a tape of the discussion of Constantine's Sword was broadcast on C-Span 2, making clear how badly Paul Baumann mischaracterizes the event in his column ("Catholicism & Anti-Semitism," Feruary 9, 2001).

Baumann calls the discussion "a smug, liberal caterwauling." Untrue and unjust.

He accuses James Carroll of writing "too often" in "upscale magazines and newspapers like the New Yorker," playing "to the worst suspicions of those who are either wholly ignorant of Catholicism or passionately disaffected from the church." Untrue and unjust.

Mary Gordon was shaking with nerves and speaking in a low hesitant voice, but Baumann claims she "goaded" the audience into "an orgy of anti-Catholic speechifying."

Baumann misquotes Mary Gordon and distorts her comments throughout the article. His rage at her is without "any sense of proportion," and he owes her an apology.

Baumann derides and attempts to discredit efforts to understand the church's long and shameful history of anti-Semitism. His article will surely earn him invitations to more congenial discussions, that is, if Mother Angelica reads Commonweal.

G. H. WEIL
Chesterfield, Mo.

The author replies:

G.H. Weil makes serious accusations but presents no evidence to support them. It is possible that I misheard a word or two of Mary Gordon's talk, but I have no doubt that I accurately conveyed the substance and tenor of her remarks. Whatever Weil saw on TV, the audience in the room responded to Gordon's attack on the pope with questions steeped in anti-Catholic stereotypes. As for Carroll's appearance in upscale publications, does Weil think the New Yorker would have published Carroll's essay "The Silence" (April 7, 1997) if it had praised John Paul II's steps toward Catholic-Jewish reconciliation? I have no interest in discrediting efforts to expose the church's history of anti-Semitism. But what is shameful about that history surely does not include John Paul II's recent apology to the Jews and his visit to Israel. Finally, does Weil mean to suggest that the only choice Catholics now have is between Mary Gordon and Mother Angelica?

PAUL BAUMANN

Mary Gordon's ax

Regarding Mother Church and Holy Father, we could, just for the fun of it, summarize Paul Baumann's report on Mary Gordon:

   Mary Gordon took an ax And gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what
   she had done She gave her father forty-one.
HENRY FEHREN
New York, N.Y.

Carroll's eye-opener

If James Carroll is "behind the curve" of Catholic revisionism vis-a-vis the Jews, as Robert Wilken claims in his review of Constantine's Sword (January 26, 2001), then Wilken is too far ahead of that curve. Carroll has written a remarkable work; for many intelligent Catholics it is a needed eye-opener. Commonweal does these intelligent Catholics no service to warn them away from Carroll's book on the grounds that John Paul II has already done so much to lay aside "the theological idea that Christianity has replaced Judaism."