COMMENTARY: A Moral Voice Returns

c. 2000 Religion News Service (Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin’s Press.) UNDATED _ While the markets that supposedly indicate the nation’s fiscal health have soared in the last three years […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin’s Press.)

UNDATED _ While the markets that supposedly indicate the nation’s fiscal health have soared in the last three years and the headlines bring promises of surpluses beyond any dreaming of them, another set of measurements tells a different story about America.


Call them the Anti-Dow, or the Shadow Nasdaq, for they reflect a different set of values, a variant reading of our national well-being.

The Fordham Institute for Innovation in Social Policy recently distributed its latest Index of Social Health. This survey of 16 social indicators”has dropped significantly since 1970 and began to decline again in the current year, after a three-year trend of improvement.”New lows have been reached, for example, in Health Insurance Coverage and the Gap Between the Rich and the Poor.

There is so much news about new highs in Internet stocks that little has been written about this revelation of the far side of America’s prosperity.

This confluence of news makes A.M. Rosenthal’s return to writing commentary both timely and welcome. If the numbers remind us of truths that have replaced sex and death as subjects not to be mentioned at cocktail parties, Rosenthal stands out as a specialist in examining the hard truths of the day.

Rosenthal, 77, left The New York Times after 56 years with the paper and will begin writing a weekly column for The Times’ archrival, the New York Daily News, beginning Feb. 11.

He has been an anomaly among commentators for many years for a simple reason: He has never lost sight of the moral dimension of human existence and, almost alone, has brought attention to many stories, such as the religious persecution of Christians, that have been barely mentioned in other news media.

If that were not novel enough, he has also analyzed such incidents, showing, for example, how some of them are downplayed in the interests of trade and the other gods of prosperity. He has always infused his commentary with a sadly rare and generally unsung view of the human condition. He believes we cannot see the human person or human history other than whole and that, unless we acknowledge the spiritual and moral dimensions of our world and its people, we cannot really understand them at all.


Last fall, for example, he described the destruction, in April 1999, of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Fuzhou, in the province of Fujian, in the People’s Republic of China. He discussed this against the background of a Shanghai economic forum, as he noted,”sponsored by Fortune and its owner, Time Warner, with the blessing and manipulation of the Politburo, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Mao’s victory, and the decades of despotism by massacre that followed.” Everything, he observed, was on their agenda”except the rights of Chinese. The CEOs and company presidents … either judged these rights to have no value in any balance sheet, were foot-kissing the Politburo, or both.” He would give these executives a cassette of”the murder of St. Joseph’s,”but the”foreign executives know what is going on, how Chinese Catholics and Protestants are arrested and beaten if they do not say the right prayers in government-registered churches. … Even without the cassette, the executives know, they know. They just do not give a damn.” One would search long and hard, even in religious periodicals, for such a direct and clear reading of how easy it is to rationalize silence about religious persecution in order to further the interests of business. Rosenthal has brought the same integrated outlook to a range of other questions, including the disgrace of the office of the presidency by its current occupant. Ignoring the shallow tide of excuses so many other columnists _ and many religious leaders _ entered as if they were healing waters, Rosenthal never allowed his personal and professional standards to be corrupted. He must have offended many people who needed offending by insisting on the moral structure of humankind and its institutions.

He expressed his convictions by noting that”… neither religious nor secular freedoms will flourish where one is denied. Only if religious and secular Americans grasp that will a human rights movement exist in America that can protect them all.” The sagging Index of Social Health reminds us that we are re-enacting the great religious myth of Eden.

We may be reading the stock averages without suspecting that the newspaper comes from that familiar tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The material numbers cascading before our eyes blind us to our spiritual needs. There does not seem to be much sense of shame these days either. Bill Clinton has been made the hero in a new book about his scandalous years.

We may be grateful then that we still have prophets, such as A.M. Rosenthal, to speak out above the noisy crowd on the moral dangers of our unexamined times.

DEA END KENNEDY

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