Inside
NCR Filling the blank pages: things yet worth saying
I write this in desperation, having no idea where the next
sentence will come from. But its the night before press day and I
cant put it off any longer.
Sometimes its easy -- ideas and causes come tripping one
another. On such easy days, I am readily convinced that my version of reality
throbs with significance spiced with wit and that the world is lucky to have
me.
Other days, I have no trouble being more humble. When the world is
halfway to chaos, why should anyone care from which angle I see it? When every
loud-mouth on earth is shouting advice and warnings, why should anyone listen
to self-appointed me? I am, Im afraid, like much of NCRs staff and
most of the world, seesawing between enthusiasm and despair, panic and
aspiration, hoping against hope, climbing, like Sisyphus, up that mythic hill
with a load that is clearly too heavy for me.
At NCR, we start with blank pages every week, and everyone knows
the doubts a blank page can sow in the human head. Is there anything worth
saying? Even if there is, what do you know about it? Cant you for once
write it elegantly and with clarity? You may be a different drummer but that
doesnt make you a better one. How dare you be a writer?
You are, you realize on one of your less secure days, a fairly
thin, timid voice in the wilderness. Paltry compared to the big boys. And
girls. Sadly lacking the endless capacity of the Times or Post or the worldwide
clout of ABC et cetera.
What to do, then, with your few meager pages? If the Times and ABC
et cetera have not saved the world, or even brought it to their particular
point of view, then alas for poor NCR.
So we hold meetings and chew the fat and hustle and scramble and
when things are going badly we debate some more and someone might even bring
donuts and when the sugar gets into our veins, we are ready to go to work, and
life briefly seems more benign. Perhaps something can be done.
We decide to give yet another page or two to the stout Catholics
who want to put TVs Nothing Sacred, one of our favorite
programs, off the air. Why? For one thing, it will be two less blank pages to
worry about. But we have higher aims. We might make a small difference here --
occasionally agitation like ours ignites the shame that then persuades people
to do the right thing. Something like that. Though its a long shot.
Well give Pam Schaeffer another page to tease out the
profound skirmish over who owns Catholic property, if property can be said to
be Catholic. Considering all the property in this category, there is obviously
a lot at stake. Its not that we have an ax to grind here -- people would
be surprised at how frequently we have no ax to grind -- but for Christians
everywhere, there is a lot of moola at stake.
We realize that A Critical Mass is unfinished business
and agree to give it another airing. We had planned not to do another piece on
the occasion of Dorothy Days centenary, but the Catholic Workers are hard
to resist.
We decide to give Gary MacEoin two pages to issue what amounts to
a warning about where the November Synod for America seems to be headed.
Garys not excited about where he thinks its headed, and neither are
we, and while the folks at the Vatican might think theyre in the best
position to know, we respectfully disagree. Heck, well disagree with
gusto if we have to because its our lives too, and our church, and not to
speak out would be to cave in and at least metaphorically lie down and die, and
were not there yet.
Theres more. More than we have room for. A sad story by Pat
Marrin about tragic Kenya. Yet another essay on the future of the papacy -- an
eye-opener. Arthur Jones on ecology. Jeannette Batz on the subtle distinctions
between the saintly and the nutty. And more, including letters from you the
readers. NCR would be worthwhile if it did nothing more than offer you pages
for talking to each other.
Yet, with all due respect, your letters wont fix the cracked
world any more than our haphazard articles do. But by writing them, you show
you did not yet lie down and die either.
Maybe we should have arranged a different mix for this issue, any
issue. More of your favorite writer. Who may well be yourself. Maybe. Maybe we
should have been more secular or sacred, more aggressive or conciliatory. Yet
we know that no two readers would agree on how we should be. One could go crazy
trying to figure out how to make a perfect independent Catholic newsweekly.
Sometimes we say to each other that, even if we dont redeem
the world all by ourselves, NCR will at least have sent out that legendary
message in a bottle, to drift, metaphorically, ashore in an unknown country in
maybe a thousand years, testifying that this is how a few of us thought back
then, however muddy and through a glass darkly.
Were not so rash as to think this will transform the future
any more than the present. But it might nudge someone, if its true that
miracles do, indeed, happen. In the meantime, we are putting out NCR for
ourselves and for you, all of us sort of holding hands and standing on what we
think is a stretch of high, dry ground and saying to the world that were
here, actually alive, at this time, and that we count.
National Catholic Reporter, October 31,
1997
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