Doktorska disertacija Jugoslovenska politika prema zemljama narodne demokratije u susedstvu 1953 – 1958. godine zasnovana je na jugoslovenskim arhivskim izvorima iz Arhiva Srbije i Crne Gore, Diplomatskog arhiva Ministarstva spoljnih poslova Republike Srbije i Vojnog arhiva kao i na relevantnoj domaćoj i stranoj literaturi. Disertacija se bavi jugoslovenskom politikom prema Albaniji, Bugarskoj, Rumuniji i Mađarskoj u periodu normalizacije odnosa Jugoslavije sa ovim zemljama posle Staljinove smrti tj. posle petogodišnjeg perioda tokom koga su njihovi odnosi bili u gotovo potpunom prekidu. Ona predstavlja pokušaj da se sagleda odnos Jugoslavije prema neposrednom susedstvu u uslovima hladnog rata i sadejstva jugoslovenskih interesa sa jedne i spoljnih faktora poput uloge Sovjetskog Saveza u procesu normalizacije odnosa Jugoslavije sa pomenutim zemljama ili uloge vodećih zapadnih zemalja i njihovih interesa u Jugoslaviji i susednim zemljama "narodne demokratije" sa druge strane. U nekoliko faza kroz koje su od marta 1953. do aprila 1958. godine prošli odnosi Jugoslavije sa Albanijom, Bugarskom, Rumunijom i Mađarskom (od Staljinove smrti do potpisivanja Beogradske deklaracije, od potpisivanja Beogradske deklaracije do XX kongresa KPSS-a, od XX kongresa KPSS-a do izbijanja događaja u Mađarskoj 1956. godine i od događaja u Mađarskoj do kritike novog Programa SKJ) jugoslovenska politika se menjala u skladu sa okolnostima zadržavajući kao konstante izražen interes za normalizaciju odnosa i insistiranje na tome da sve susedne zemlje "narodne demokratije" javno osude svoju raniju politiku prema Jugoslaviji i rehabilituju sve koji su na montiranim sudskim procesima osuđeni zbog špijunske delatnost u korist Jugoslavije. Osnovni cilj rada na ovoj dioktorskoj disertaciji je bio da pruži nova znanja o ovoj temi, nove poglede na jugoslovensku spoljnu politiku i ponudi novi ugao gledanja na odnose Jugoslavije sa SSSR-om i Varšavskim paktom u celini. U vezi sa tim definisan je i drugi cilj ovog rada koji se odnosi na rekonstrukciju jugoslovenske politike prema ovim zemljama i na pokušaj da se uoče specifičnosti, metode i ciljevi te politike koji su se razlikovali u odnosu na jugoslovensku politiku prema ostalim istočnoevropskim zemljama. Treći cilj na temu jugoslovenske politike prema susednim zemljama "narodne demokratije" od 1953. do 1958. godine bio je i sistematizacija postojećih znanja o ovoj temi i njihova evaluacija s obzirom na veći stepen dostupnosti izvora nego što je to bio slučaj pre više decenija kada su nastali najznačajniji radovi koji su se delimično bavili pojedinim segmentima ove teme. Četvrti cilj istraživanja bio je utvrđivanje hronološki jasno određenih faza kroz koje su prolazili odnosi Jugoslavije sa Mađarskom, Rumunijom, Bugarskom i Albanijom u posmatranom periodu i identifikacija faktora koji su na to uticali. U trenutku Staljinove smrti, susedne zemlje "narodne demokratije" bile su daleko od centra pažnje jugoslovenske spoljne politike jer je , između ostalog, i njihov značaj za nju u uslovima prekida međudržavnih odnosa bio mali. Međutim, promene koje su ubrzo posle Staljinove smrti usledile u Sovjetskom Savezu omogućile su početak normalizacije odnosa Jugoslavije i "prve zemlje socijalizma" što je za sobom povuklo i mogućnost da Jugoslavija normalizuje svoje odnose i sa susednim zemljama "narodne demokratije". Kada su u pitanju bile te zemlje, primarni jugoslovenski interes nije se nalazio u sferi politike i ekonomije kao u slučaju Sovjetskog Saveza već u sferi praktičnih međudržavnih pitanja koja su teško opterećivala Jugoslaviju. Na prvom mestu to je bio interes da se što pre otkloni vojna pretnja na granicama i stanje na zajedničkoj "liniji razgraničenja" koje je u godinama posle 1948. iziskivalo velika materijalna i kadrovska ulaganja. Osim toga, Jugoslavija je jasan interes imala i po pitanju poboljšanja položaja pripadnika jugoslovenskih manjina u susednim zemljama "narodne demokratije" kao i po pitanju normalizacije saobraćaja. Razlog što Jugoslavija nije pokazivala izražen interes za političku i ekonomsku saradnju sa ovim zemljama ležao je u činjenici da je ona u međuvremenu, u vreme godina sukoba, uspela da pronađe alternativu kako u sferi spoljne politike tako i u sferi ekonomije i na taj način obesmisli blokadu kojoj je bila izložena sa Istoka. Međutim, cena iznalaženja te alternative bila je visoka i pretila je da ugrozi monopol vlasti Saveza komunista Jugoslavije što je za Tita i njegovo najbliže okruženje bilo neprihvatljivo. Iz tog razloga, mogućnost da se nađe zajednički jezik sa Moskvom predstavljao je za Tita priliku da uspostavi ravnotežu kada je u pitanju bio jugoslovenski položaj prema suprotstavljenim blokovima u zaoštrenoj hladnoratovskoj atmosferi. Odnos Jugoslavije prema SSSR-u, i obrnuto, može se smatrati jednim od najznačajnijih faktora koji su uticali na oblikovanje jugoslovenske politike prema susednim zemljama "narodne demokratije" sa jedne i na kreiranje politike koje su sve istočnoevropske zemlje vodile prema Jugoslaviji sa druge strane. Drugi značajan faktor koji je uticao na jugoslovensku politiku prema zemljama "narodne demokratije" u susedstvu od 1953. do 1958. godine bio je u tesnoj vezi sa jugoslovensko-sovjetskim odnosima a ticao se prevashodno ideologije i s tim u vezi destaljinizacije. Kreirajući u godinama sukoba sa Informbiroom sopstveni model "samoupravnog" socijalizma, Jugoslavija tokom procesa normalizacije odnosa nije pristajala na "jedinstvo lagera" i povratak u njega što je bio glavni kamen spoticanja u njenim odnosima kakao sa SSSR-om tako i sa drugim istočnoevropskim zemljama pa i susednim kao što su bile Albanija, Bugarska, Mađarska i Rumunija. S tim u vezi je i destaljinizacija, odnosno njen napredak i dubina u susednim "zemljama" narodne demokratije kao i njihova spremnost da se distanciraju od staljinističke ideologije, predstavljala jedan od glavnih faktora koji su uticali na oblikovanje jugoslovenske politike prema tim zemljama. Najzad, važan činilac koji je uticao na jugoslovensku spoljnu politiku uopšte pa i na njenu politiku prema delu ili celini Istočnog bloka bili su i njeni odnosi sa Zapadom, koji su iz pragmatičnih razloga tokom godina sukoba sa Informbiroom bili poboljšani do te mere da su Jugoslaviju, iako nevoljno, doveli na rub uključenja u zapadni vojni savez. Zapad je bio taj kome se nije dopadalo jugoslovensko približavanje SSSR-u i istočnoevropskim zemljama i u periodu normalizacije njihovih odnosa svaki korak koji je vodio približavanju dveju do tada suprotstavljenih strana izazivao je na Zapadu sumnje u iskrenost Jugoslavije i zebnju kada je u pitanju bila budućnost odnosa Zapada i Jugoslavije. Kao rezultat sadejstva nekoliko najvažnijih spoljnih faktora i jugoslovenskih interesa u neposrednom susedstvu iz okvira socijalističkog "lagera" nastajala je jugoslovenska politika prema Istoku uopšte pa i prema Albaniji, Bugarskoj, Rumuniji i Mađarskoj ponaosob, onakva kakva je bila. U periodu od 1953. do 1958. godine ta politika je bila aktivna i pozitivna ali ne i bez ograda. Tih godina, Jugoslavija je bez sumnje pokazivala interes da normalizuje svoje odnose sa susedima sa kojima je osim granice delila i ideologiju ali najčešće nije želela da ona bude ta koja će dati inicijativu za konkretne korake u tom procesu. Smatrajući da su međusobni odnosi narušeni ne njenom već krivicom suseda, ona je strogo poštovala načelo (koje je inače zastupala i kada je u pitanju bila njena politika prema SSSR-u) da prvi korak treba da učini onaj koji je odgovoran za prekid normalnih dobrosusedskih odnosa. Imajući u vidu sve interese, želje i aspiracije koje je Jugoslavija imala kada je u pitanju bio prostor neposredno uz njene granice kao i faktore koji su neminovno uticali na njenu politiku, može se reći da je Jugoslavija prema zemljama "narodne demokratije" u susedstvu u periodu normalizacije međusobnih odnosa od 1953. do 1958. godine vodila politiku mogućeg. Ta politika, međutim, iako osmišljena na isti način, nije uvek bila ista prema svakoj pojedinačnoj zemlji u susedstvu iz prostog razloga što u njima nije nailazila na istovetne uslove i mogućnosti. Tamo gde su mogućnosti bile veće, Jugoslavija je postizala više. Međutim, kako je vreme odmicalo i kako je Jugoslavija bivala sve uspešnija u pronalaženju svog sopstvenog "trećeg puta", čini se da joj je sve manje i manje bilo stalo do sadržajnije saradnje sa većinom suseda od kojih je (budući da su sve bile deo Istočnog bloka), u skladu sa svojom novom spoljnopolitičkom strategijom koja je ekvidistancu prema blokovima predviđala kao imperativ, trebalo da napravi određeni otklon. ; The Ph.D. thesis Yugoslav Policy Towards the Neighboring Countries of People's Democracy 1953-1958 is based on Yugoslav archival sources from the Archives of Yugoslavia, the Diplomatic Archives of the Foreign Ministry of the Republic of Serbia and the Military Archives, as well as on the relevant domestic and foreign literature. The thesis deals with Yugoslav policy towards Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary during the period of normalization of relations between these countries and Yugoslavia after Stalin's death, i.e. after a five years' period of almost complete interruption in bilateral relations. It is an attempt at a study of the interplay of Yugoslavia's relations with immediate neighborhood during the Cold War and Yugoslav interests on the one hand, and interests of foreign factors, such as the Soviet Union and the leading Western nations in Yugoslavia and in the neighboring countries within the framework of the normalization of Yugoslavia's relations with the above mentioned countries. During the several phases the Yugoslav relations with Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary went through between March 1953 and April 1958 (from Stalin's death until the signing of the Belgrade Declaration, from then to the 20th congress of the CP of the USSSR, from then until the beginning of the events in Hungary in 1956 and from then until the critique of the new Program of the CP of Yugoslavia), the Yugoslav policy changed in accordance with the situation, preserving the interest in normalizing relations and insisting that all neighboring countries of "people's democracy" should condemn their former policy towards Yugoslavia and rehabilitate all those who had been sentenced as Yugoslav spies at show trials. The main goal of this Ph.D. thesis was to provide new knowledge of the topic, new views on Yugoslav foreign policy and to propose a new vantage point on the Yugoslav relations with the Soviet Union, and on relations with the Warsaw Pact as a whole. Connected with this was another goal of the thesis that concrens the reconstruction of Yugoslav policy toward these countries and the attempt to pinpoint the characteristics, methods and goals of that policy that were different from those of Yugoslav policy toward other east European countries. The third goal of the topic of Yugoslav policy toward the neighboring countries of "people's democracy" between 1953 and 1958 was also to systematize the existing knowledge on the subject in view of better accessability of sources as compared with the situation of several decades ago when the most important works touching upon some aspects of this topic were written. The fourth goal of the research was to determin chronologically clearly defined phases that the Yugoslav relations with Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania had gone through during the researched period and to identify the factors that influenced the process. At the time of Stalin's death the countries of "people's democracy" were far from the focus of the Yugoslav foreign policy, because, among other things, their importance was small due to the severed inter-state relations. However, the changes that set in the Soviet Union soon after Stalin's death made the beginning of normalization of relations with the "first country of socialism" possible. This entailed the possibility that Yugoslavia also normalizes its relations with neighboring countries of "people's democracy". When these countries were in question, Yugoslavia's primary interest didn't lie in political or economic spheres as in the case of the Soviet Union, but rather in the sphere of practical inter-state matters weighting heavily on Yugoslavia. Supreme was the interest to do away as soon as possible with the military threat on the borders and to change the situation on the "line of demarcation" that had required much material and human resources in the years after 1948. Furthermore, Yugoslavia had a clear interest in improving the situation of members of Yugoslav minorities in the neighboring countries of "people's democracy", as well as in normalization of trafic. The reason why Yugoslavia showed no great interest in political or economic cooperation with these countries lay in the fact that she had in the meantime, during the years of conflict, found alternative solutions in the spheres of foreign policy and economy, reducing thus to insignifficance the blocade imposed on her from the East. However, the price of that alternative solution was high and it threatened to endanger the power monopoly of the Union of the Communists of Yugoslavia, which was unacceptable for Tito and his innermost circle of collaborators. For that reason, the possibility of finding common grounds with Moscow was for Tito an oportunity to balance Yugoslavia's position between the two competing blocs in a worsened Cold War atmosphere. Yugoslavia's relation to the USSSR and vice versa, can be seen as one of the most important factors influencing Yugoslav policy toward the neighboring countries of "people's democracy" on the one hand, and on the other, one that was decisively shaping their policy towards Yugoslavia. Another important factor influencing Yugoslav policy toward the countries of "people's democracy" in the vicinity between 1953 and 1958 was closely connected with the Yugoslav-Soviet relations and it concerned primarily ideology and, in that context, destalinization. Having created her own model of "self-managing" socialism during the years of conflict with the Cominform, during the process of normalization Yugoslavia didn't accept the unity of the Eastern Bloc and the matter of her return to it was one of the main stumbling blocks both in her relations with the USSR and with the neighbors such as Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. In that context, destalinisation, i.e. its progress and depth in the neighboring countries of "people's democracy" and their willingnes to distance themselves from the Stalinist ideology was one of the major factors influencing Yugoslavia's policy toward those countries. Finally, the important factor influencing Yugoslav foreign policy in general, including part of the Eastern Block or it as a whole, were Yugoslavia's relations with the West that had been so improved during the years of conflict with the Cominform, that they led Yugoslavia, although unwillingly, to the brink of joining the western military alliance. The West was unhappy with Yugoslav rapprochement with the USSR and eastern European countries and every step that brought closer the two once confonted parties during the process of normalization of their relations, caused the West to doubt Yugoslavia's sincerety and cause fears for the future relations between the West and Yugoslavia. As a result of interplay of several major foreign political factors and Yugoslav interests in the imediate socialist block neighborhood, the Yugoslav policy toward the East in general and toward Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary individually, emerged in the given form. Between 1953 and 1958 that policy was active and positive, but not without restrains. During those years Yugoslavia clearly showed interest in normalizing her relations with the neighboring countries with whom she shared not only borders, but ideology too, but in most cases she was not willing to be the one to initiate concrete steps in that process. Deeming that it had not been her fault but that of her neighbors that the bilateral relations had been spoiled, she observed strictly the principle (that she also championed in her relations with the USSR) that the side that had been responsible for the interruption of normal good neighborly relations should also make the first move. Having in mind all the interests, wishes and aspirations that Yugoslavia had concerning the space imediatly bordering on her territory as well as the factors necessarily infuencing her policy, it can be said that Yugoslavia led the policy of what was possible toward the neighboring countries of "people's democracy" during tthe period of normalization of bilateral relations 1953-1958. However, that policy wasn't always the same toward all these neighboring countries, for simple reason that it didn't meet with the same conditions and possibilities in them. Where possibilities were greater, Yugoslavia acheived more. However, as the time went by and as Yugoslavia became increasingly more successful in finding her own "third way", it seems she was increasingly less interested in substantial cooperation with most of the neighbors from whom (since they were all members of the Eastern Block) certain distance should be kept – in keeping with the new foreign political strategy that foresaw equidistance towards both blocs as a must.
El mundo con los ojos puestos en Barack Obama Varios medios informan al respecto: "The Economist": "Challenges facing Barack Obama: Obama's world. How will a 21st-century president fare in a 19th-century world?": http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12551938 "The economic crisis: Wolves at the door. Financial mess and gathering recession dominate Barack Obama's economic agenda": http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12551926 "The presidency: Signed, sealed, delivered. 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transnacional: Mandatarios fortalecerán cooperación en lucha antidrogas, seguridad y justicia.": http://diario.elmercurio.com/2008/11/11/internacional/_portada/noticias/C828EDE7-B5C1-4892-BA3F-958EA29AEAF1.htm?id={C828EDE7-B5C1-4892-BA3F-958EA29AEAF1}"CNN" informa: "FARC rebels to exchange letters on hostages": http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/10/28/colombia.farc/index.html"El Universal" de Méjico plantea: " Preparó las FARC a jóvenes para infiltrarlos en universidades: La escuela de formación hacía parte de los frentes de las FARC y durante la instrucción a los jóvenes les designaban la universidad a la que debían ingresar": http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/554657.html"El Mercurio" de Chile informa: "Jorge Enrique Botero, periodista que escribe sobre la guerrilla colombiana: "Las FARC han recibido este año los golpes más grandes de toda su historia"": http://diario.elmercurio.com/2008/11/11/internacional/internacional/noticias/BA1A228F-15B7-4C7C-8AC2-558AC883539D.htm?id={BA1A228F-15B7-4C7C-8AC2-558AC883539D}"El Tiempo" de Colombia anuncia: "Hugo Chávez ordena tomar militarmente aeropuerto de estado gobernado por disidente": http://www.eltiempo.com/mundo/latinoamerica/home/hugo-chavez-ordena-tomar-militarmente-aeropuerto-de-estado-gobernado-por-disidente_4655811-1"La Nación" publica: "Militariza Chávez un aeropuerto regional : Ofensiva del mandatario contra el gobernador de Sucre": http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=1068724"El Universal" de Méjico publica: "Muestran a Lugo documentos sobre víctimas de dictadura": http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/554636.html"La Nación" informa: "Uruguay: el Senado aprobó la despenalización del aborto: Con 17 votos a favor dio luz verde a la polémica ley; Tabaré Vázquez, férreo opositor, podría vetarla":http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=1068827"El País" de Madrid plantea: "China busca tener peso político y comercial en Latinoamérica: Pekín fija como prioridades la energía y los minerales": http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/China/busca/tener/peso/politico/comercial/Latinoamerica/elpepuint/20081110elpepiint_6/Tes ESTADOS UNIDOS / CANADA"La Nación" publica: " Palin dijo que espera la ayuda de Dios para llegar a la Casa Blanca: La ex candidata republicana a vicepresidenta no descartó ser electa en 2012; "si hay una puerta abierta para mí, entonces entraré por esa puerta", expresó":http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=1068801"El País" de Madrid informa: ""Bush cuela una ayuda de 108.000 millones a los bancos. El presidente saliente aprobó sin publicitar una rebaja de impuestos que alivia la situación de las entidades": http://www.elpais.com/articulo/economia/Bush/cuela/ayuda/108000/millones/bancos/elpepueco/20081110elpepueco_6/Tes"El Tiempo" de Colombia anuncia: "Comandos de E.U. pueden atacar a Al Qaeda en cualquier país del mundo": http://www.eltiempo.com/mundo/euycanada/home/comandos-de-eu-pueden-atacar-a-al-qaeda-en-cualquier-pais-del-mundo_4656193-1EUROPA"El País" de Madrid plantea: ""Alerta máxima" en la frontera de Melilla tras el nuevo intento de saltar la valla: Unos 150 inmigrantes han tratado de entrar en suelo español.- Es la quinta vez que sucede en el último mes": http://www.elpais.com/articulo/espana/Alerta/maxima/frontera/Melilla/nuevo/intento/saltar/valla/elpepuesp/20081110elpepunac_2/Tes"CNN" anuncia: "Police, migrants clash at border of Spanish enclave": http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/11/10/migrants.spain.melilla.ap/index.html"El País" de Madrid informa: "Turquía reafirma su diplomacia en una región conflictiva: Quiere demostrar que sus relaciones de buena vecindad y su vocación de potencia regional no merman ni su alianza con Washington ni su anhelo de ingresar en el club europeo": http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Turquia/reafirma/diplomacia/region/conflictiva/elpepuint/20081110elpepuint_11/Tes"El País" de Madrid publica: "La UE retomará las negociaciones para un acuerdo estratégico con Rusia": http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Turquia/reafirma/diplomacia/region/conflictiva/elpepuint/20081110elpepuint_11/Tes"MSNBC" informa: "Report: Russian accident sub intended for India: Navy was allegedly to lease brand-new nuclear ship that suffered 20 deaths": http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27642888/"BBC" plantea: "Medvedev bid to extend presidency: Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has sent to parliament a bill that extends the presidential term to six years from the current four, the Kremlin says.":http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7722460.stm"MSNBC" anuncia: "Brown to call for new global financial system: U.K. leader to push for update to Bretton Woods agreement at G20 summit":http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27640252/"Times": "Girl of 13 becomes youngest suicide bomber in day of carnage":http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article5126873.ece"Los Angeles Times" publica: "Britain's prime minister urges nations to tackle economy together: Gordon Brown calls for countries to boost the global economy, orchestrating stimulus packages and forging an international trade deal.": http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-brown12-2008nov12,0,3095277.story"El Universal" de México informa: "Recuerda Europa 90 aniversario de fin de la Primera Guerra Mundial: El presidente francés Nicolás Sarkozy y el príncipe Carlos de Gran Bretaña asistieron a la ceremonia en la ciudad nororiental de Douaumont, cerca del sitio de la Batalla de Verdún donde murieron 300 mil soldados": http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/554443.html Asia – Pacífico /Medio Oriente"El País" de Madrid plantea: "Al menos 28 muertos en un triple atentado en Bagdad: Cerca de 70 personas han resultado heridas a causa de dos coche bomba y un terrorista suicida": http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/28/muertos/triple/atentado/Bagdad/elpepuint/20081110elpepuint_6/Tes"Time" informa: "Iraqi Soldier Kills 2 US Troops After Dispute":http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1858492,00.html"MSNBC" publica: "Netanyahu: Peace talks will continue if elected: Israel's opposition leader backs away from hints he would abandon talks": http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27644796/"MSNBC" informa: "China says no progress made at Tibet talks: Dalai Lama accused of using demands for autonomy to split the country": http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27637812/"BBC" anuncia: "Detained Chen in Taiwan hospital: A court proceeding against Taiwan's former President Chen Shui-bian has been suspended after he asked to be taken to hospital.": http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7721468.stm"Time" informa: "Taiwan Arrests Former President":http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1858363,00.html"MSNBC" plantea: "Indonesia executes Bali bombers, fears revenge: 2002 attack left 202 dead, many of them foreign tourists":http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27623145/"Time" analiza: "The Key to Afghanistan: India-Pakistan Peace":http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1857953,00.html AFRICA "CNN" publica: "Cholera spreads in Congo amid standoff": http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/africa/11/10/congo.fighting.cholera.ap/index.html"MSNBC" anuncia: "In Congo, drunken gunfire ruptures tense calm: Soldiers, rebels brawl as aid workers battle cholera among the displaced": http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27637840/ "The Economist" analiza: "Congo: Murder, muddle and panic. As chaos and massacres overwhelm north-eastern Congo, diplomats and peacekeepers are struggling to get a grip": http://www.economist.com/world/mideast-africa/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12573363"CNN" plantea: "Singer, anti-apartheid icon Miriam Makeba dies": http://edition.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/Music/11/10/makeba.obit/index.html"BBC" anuncia: "UN cuts food rations in Zimbabwe: The UN food agency says it has had to start cutting rations to 4m people in Zimbabwe because of a lack of funds.": http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7722631.stm"El País" de Madrid informa: "La UE aprueba la fuerza militar contra la piratería en Somalia: Entre ocho y diez barcos vigilarán el golfo de Adén con capacidad para utilizar la fuerza contra la piratería. -España contribuirá con dos barcos y un avión": http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/UE/aprueba/fuerza/militar/pirateria/Somalia/elpepuint/20081110elpepuint_8/Tes ECONOMÍA"The Economist" presenta el informe semanal: "Business this week":http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12573661"Le Monde" plantes: "AIG et Fannie Mae enregistrent des pertes colosales": http://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2008/11/10/aig-et-fannie-mae-enregistrent-des-pertes-colossales_1117093_3234.html#ens_id=863164"MSNBC" informa: "Wall Street ends lower after rally fizzles out: Traders turn pessimistic about China's stimulus plan aiding America": http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3683270/"MSNBC" anuncia: "Oil settles near $62 on shaky stock markets: Weakening greenback could be luring investors to purchase crude": http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12400801/"BBC" publica: "Shares fall on more economy fears: Global shares have fallen sharply on renewed concerns that the world economy faces an extended downturn.": http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7723127.stm "China Daily" informa: "Europe markets follow Asia down on economic fears": http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2008-11/11/content_7195230.htm OTRAS NOTICIAS"El País" de Madrid anuncia: "Brasil e Italia analizan su posición ante el G20: Lula apuesta por recurrir "a menos analistas de mercado y a más analistas sociales" para crear un nuevo sistema económico": internacional http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Brasil/Italia/analizan/posicion/G20/elpepuint/20081110elpepuint_14/Tes"MSNBC" publica: "G20 urge government spending in face of crisis: They also say developing countries should have voice in decisions": http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27630946/"MSNBC" informa: "Blueprints for Auschwitz camp uncovered: Plans, found in Berlin apartment, include drawing of gas chamber": http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27648309/"BBC" analiza: "World recalls end of World War I": http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7721396.stm"La Nación" informa: "El mundo conmemora el fin de la Primera Guerra Mundial: Se cumplen 90 años del cese de fuego del gran conflicto bélico que tuvo alrededor de 20 millones de muertos; sentidos actos de Sarkozy, Bush y Obama":http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=1068936"Los Angeles Times" anuncia: "NASA ends Phoenix mission on Mars: After not hearing from the power-drained spacecraft in a week, officials believe it has gone to sleep -- permanently -- after lasting nearly three months longer than expected": http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-phoenix11-2008nov11,0,3821977.story
Issue 24.3 of the Review for Religious, 1965. ; Counseling and Religious Life by Vincent S. Conigliaro, M.D. 337 Mortification by William J. Rewak, S.J. 363 Mary and the Protestant Mind by Elsie Gibson 383 The Mass and Religious Life by Jean Galot, S.J. 399 Devotion to the Sacred Heart by Anton Morgenroth, C.S.Sp. 418 Priest as Mediator ~ by Andrew Weigert, S.J. 429 Religious Life by Sister Elaine Marie, S.L. 436 Election: Choice of Faith .by Carl F. Starkloff, S.J. 444 Our Old Testament Fathers by John Navone, S.J. 455 Poems 461 Survey of Roman Documents 463 Views, News, Previews 467 Questiom and Auswers 473 Book Reviews 478 VINCENT S. CONIGLIARO, M.D. Counseling and Other Psychological Aspects of Religious Counseling,* a technique and a philosophy of treat-ment and human relatedness, is a topic of importance to both psychoanalysts and religious persons, both in a general and in a specific context: in a general context, because both psychoanalysts and religious persons work with human beings and are committed to a profession of service; and in a specific context, because religious sisters may be affected by mental problems as often as other individuals. Thus, in reflecting on counseling in the religious life one cannot help reflecting also on the problems making counseling necessary, the problems, in other words, about which one administers counseling; and on the factors behind these problems, that is, why these problems occur in the first place. Members of religious orders have been the victims of diverse, benevolent and malevolent, prejudices for cen-turies. One problem with prejudice is that sooner or later its victim comes to believe the prejudice himself and begins to think, feel, and act along the prejudiced stereotypes culture and/or society set up for him; this is why prejudice is always detrimental. As an example, one may think of just one of the many prejudices that have been formulated against the American negro: the prejudice whereby the negro is "good-natured," "basi-cally lazy," "clownish," a. jocular Amos or Andy. Even- # This paper was derived from a talk given by the writer on No-vember 9, 1964, at the Maryknoll Mother House; Ossining, New York; the paper was sent to the REvmw in December, 1964. 4- Vincent Conigli-aro, M.D., a prac-tising psychoana-lyst and member of the faculty of Ford-ham University, ihas offices at 104 East 40th Street; New York 17, New York. VOLUME 24, 1965 337 + ÷ ÷ Vincent $. Conigliaro, M.D. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 338 tually, some negroes began to believe the stereotype themselves and behaved as if they could only be an ineffectual nice-guy Amos or a scheming, shrewd Andy-- or the other way around--I could never tell the two apart. Among the many prejudices formed about Catholic religious orders, there is one that proclaims that "mem-bers of Catholic religious orders are, by the very fact of being that, singularly immune from mental disorders"; or the opposite one, announcing that "members of Catholic religious orders are, by the very fact of being that, singularly prone to become mentally sick." Both prejudices of course are just that, pre-judgments, based on little factual evidence and substantiated by super-ficial experimentations. The facts actually suggest that (a) members of Catholic religious orders do not become mentally ill significantly more often or significantly less often than members of other religious orders; when they do become ill more often, this relates more to circumstantial problems (that is, poor screening of applicants) than to essential fea-tures of religious life; (b) members of religious orders do not become mentally ill significantly more often or less often than members of other tightly organized, rigidly structured organizations, for instance the Army; (c) neither the essential nor the accidental characteristics of religious life make, per se, a significant difference in the incidence of mental disease among the members of Catholic religious orders; (d) the occasional severity in degree of mental illness encountered among members of Catholic religious orders is not related to the essential or accidental characteristics of religious life, but to socio-cultural characteristics at large (for instance the socio-cultural concept that "to have a mental illness is dis-graceful"; treatment, thus, is sought too late, when the illness has been given the time to become severe); and (e) that the intrinsic and extrinsic features of religious life will be, psychologically, an asset or a liability ac-cording to the way each individual reacts to them in terms of life history, heredity, and childhood experi-ences. It may be of interest to examine both prejudices more closely. The first view holds that Catholic religious life is the best guarantee against emotional upsets and claims that members of Catholic religious orders rarely become affected by mental disease. This view is mostly held by members of religious orders; it was frequently expressed to me by the superiors of sisters I have treated or by the priest-counselors I have trained and supervised. The basis of this prejudice is wishful thinking and con-fusion between the natural and supernatural aspects of religious life. This view equates the symptoms of mental illness with the illness itself: ."There are no visible signs of illness; ergo, there is no illness . " I am reminded of an article recently published in a religious journal implying that religious life may actually "cure" neurotic symptoms. The writer of the article first listed some of the traits that may be symptomatic of a neurotic per-sonality, that is, self-centeredness, hypersensitivity, im-maturity; then observed, rightly enough, that religious life is essentially antithetical to such traits: and then concluded that religious life will thus automatically dis-pose of these neurotic traits: religious life, being theo-centered, will dispose of self-centeredness; being giving-hess, will dispose of selfishness; requiring spiritual ma-turity, will dispose of immaturity. One rather suspects that all theocenteredness, givingness, and spiritual ma-turity will do is to veil, temporarily, those neurotic traits they were supposed to have cured. This prejudice, actually, is quite unfair to the re-ligious sister. It suggests that the supernatural aspects of the sister's vocation will sustain not only her soul, which it does, but also her mind, even when natural causes, going all the way back to her childhood, act as a constant irritant; it holds that since she is isolated from the anxieties of the "real world outside," she should have no anxieties from the convent world (which happens to be equally real); and that since she is surrounded by the silence of the cloister, she will not hear the loud clatter of human problems: as if silence, at times, could not be many times louder than the loudest noise. This prejudice also engenders unrealistic attitudes; the religious sister feels supernaturally protected against the frailties of the human mind, and is led to believe that, by sheer virtue of the spiritual direction of her life, whatever factors there were that started operating, years before, toward the development of a psychosis or a neurosis will magically cease to operate. When she ex-periences signs of a mental illness, she feels disillusioned and as if God Himself did not live up to His part in a bargain He had never made; and she feels like a freakish rarity, the only one cursed by an illness that was not supposed to occur, the exception to the rule, thus adding to the anxiety and anguish of a neurosis the painful feeling of being an oddity. In a sister I treated, the latter feeling constituted a very intense symptom that, while mainly determined by a complicated intrapsychic proc-ess, was supported by the prejudiced belief that "reli-gious sisters are not supposed to become mentally ill . " This prejudice creates a problem also in treatment: the sister may be unwilling to unveil her problem to a superior who could take remedial steps; or, once treat- 4- 4- 4- Counseling VOLUME 24, 1965 339 ÷ + ÷ Vincent S. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 340 ment has started, may be little cooperative and may rationalize her resistance to change by believing that "she can only get better through prayer . " In a case I recently worked with, it was the patient's superior who felt sister should not receive psychotherapy and should only help herself with prayers: "Good sisters do not be-come mentally ill . " On the other side of the coin is the prejudice holding, equally erroneously, that members of Catholic religious orders become mentally ill significantly more often than other persons. This view is mostly held by persons who are not in the religious life, are not Catholics, and, fre-quently, not religious. I believe this prejudice is mainly based on hostility; or on a lack of understanding of what is entailed in the religious life. The danger of this view is that already unbalanced members of religious orders lead a life of trepidation based on the neurotic fear that they will become overtly mentally ill (psychotic, "insane") because "everyone says so . " Here, too, this fear is overdetermined and related to an unconscious intra-psychic process; here, too, however, these patients "latch on" to the prejudice to express unconscious needs. In a priest I treated, the idea that he was going to become insane---because everyone he knew believed that "all priests, sooner or later, become insane"--had become a true obsessional idea; it expressed, among other things, his unconscious desire "to become insane" (more exactly, his unconscious drive to lose all controls and inhibitions) and his need to impute the responsibility of his insanity to those who believed that "all priests, sooner or later, become insane . " At the basis of this prejudice is also the fact that the religious life does have features which, in borderline personalities, may tip the balance in the direction of mental illness. A better understanding of these features will help to understand how religious life may contribute to t,he development of a mental illness. I want to make sure that I am well understood on this point. I am not suggesting that religious life may be the cause of mental disorders; I am saying that some features of religious life, when operating on a personality that has been af-fected by specific childhood occurrences, may precipitate, or "trigger," mental illness. This "trigger effect," evi-dently, may be set up just as effectively by college life, army life, marriage, as it can by religious life: once the keg is filled with dynamite, the explosion may be set up just as well by a spark of electricity, a match, or a gradual increase in room temperature. Which features of religious life act as a trigger on what kind of personality-- this is what may be quite important to reflect on. One might start by reflecting on the spiritual essence of religious life. Considering that this journal is widely read among members of religious orders, there is a bit of "carrying coals to Newcastle" in reflecting on this sub-ject at all. It must be remembered, however, that the specialist, knowledgeable as he is on the most minute detail of his specialty, often misses what may be too basic for him to remember. Basic psychiatric and psy-choanalytic concepts have been pointed out to me by friends who were neither psychiatrists nor psychoanalysts; and I myself have been able to point out basic points on music or art to musicians or artist friends of mine. As a lay person, as a "non-specialist" on religious life, I understand religious life as a life of greater growth in greater union with God~ All of us are born with the potentials for greater and greater participation to a transcendental existence in God; but those in the reli-gious life have the greatest chance of achieving the greatest participation. This spiritual participation, how-ever, can only be realized if the personality is sound; and a healthy supernatural life cannot exist without a sound, well-integrated psychic life. The old Latin saying mens sana in corpore sano can indeed be complemented with religio, sana in mente sana. It must be realized that the accidental properties of religious life may appeal to different personalities for different reasons. Just as one may become a psychiatrist or a surgeon for a combination of healthy, unhealthy, conscious, and unconscious reasons--and a good psy-chiatrist is usually one who, finally, is in his profession more for healthy and conscious reasons than for un-healthy and unconscious ones--it is also possible to enter the religious life with a combination of healthy, un-healthy, conscious, and unconscious motivations. Un-balanced personalities, the individuals with the "keg of dynamite" beneath the placid exterior, may enter the religious life attracted not by its spiritual features but by what these persons unconsciously consider useful for their neurotic needs. When the latent neurotic individual has been attracted to the religious life, religious life will indeed have the "trigger effect" mentioned before. Some examples at this point may be helpful. Religious life, through its essence, offers, to the healthy, opportunities for spiritual and existential richness and for the fullest expression of one's personality; to the unhealthy, opportunities for an impoverished, restricted existence (again spiritually and existentially) and for the fullest expression of one's neuroses. Such features of religious life as the vows of chastity, obedience, and poverty, may attract the latent neurotic personality not 4- 4- 4. Counseling VOLUME 24, 1965 ÷ 4. + Vincen£ $. Conigllaro, M.D. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS because of their essential spirituality but because of the opportunities they offer for neurotic defenses and neu-rotic acting-out. The healthy religious sister has a greater chance of experiencing the transcendental union with God, not in spite of, but because of her vows; the unhealthy sister uses the vows to express instinctual drives and neurotic defenses. In the latent neurotic, the vow of chastity may be appealing for reasons having little to do with spir-ituality, that is, emotional frigidity, fear of love, fear of sex, homosexual tendencies. The all-female environment may be chosen not in order to be chaste to better serve God but because of fear of closeness to anyone. This sister will be fearful of any and all emotional involve-ments, will stand aloof, and will withdraw from every-one, God included. Similar situations have been found with regard to the vow of obedience. As it was once ex-plained to me by a sister student of mine, this vow is "a listening to the will of God as it is expressed through one's community, environment and, ultimately, supe-rior"; a "dialogue in charity," with the superior as the "master listener" fashioning the dialogue between the sisters and God and evaluating what has been heard as the will of God. The sister who enters the convent with healthy motivations can afford to be obedient: she can see God's will beyond the superior's will; the sister with unresolved authority problems cannot be obedient with-out hostility (and the superior affected by the same problem will tend to abuse her authority and provoke rightful resentments). In the obsessive-compulsive per-sonality, which, under a meekly submissive and ingra-tiatingly passive surface, much anger and rebelliousness are concealed, vows of obedience will have a strong neu-rotic appeal to begin with (unconscious wishes to placate authority~ neurotic resolutions of total passivity and total submission) and will trigger, later, serious conflicts. Sister may role-play complete obedience and submission to the point of making no contributions whatsoever to the community life; she may be passive and overdependent; have no intiative; obey automatically, making no repre-sentations even when representations are called for; and create a mockery of authority and a caricature of obedi-ence by indulging in what has been called "whole obedi-ence" as contrasted to "holy obedience." The vow of poverty, too, essentially beautiful (with no material possessions one can better pursue the knowl-edge of God) may be appealing not for spiritual.reasons but because of unconscious feelings about money, love, and possessions. A sister may enter the religious life because of insecurity and the semi-conscious realization that although in the convent she may not have personal possessions, her basic needs will be adequately met. A sister I treated equated having money and possessions with having evidence of being loved. She created a prob-lem in the community by hoarding things, demanding expensive clothes and privileges, requiring costly medical treatments (and feeling intensely guilty when her demands were acceded to). When she did initiate psy-chiatric treatment, the matter of payments was a monthly crisis. She reacted to the fact that the com-munity was disbursing funds for her health not with realistic gratitude--or realistic concern--but with intense guilt (at the fact that a neurotic fantasy about which she had much ambivalence was being satisfied). If the neurotic needs of the religious are actually met by some of the accidental features of religious life, why, then, is there a conflict? I[ a sister with neurotic feelings about authority enters the religious life to find a better disguise--or a better expression--for these feelings and, in some o~ the accidental features of religious life does meet this opportunity, then, again, why is there a con-flict? One way to understand this is by realizing that human drives are arranged by "polarities": we love and hate, like and dislike, are active and passive, assertive and sub-missive, dependent and independent. In the healthy personality these polar extremes are harmoniously inte-grated and blended in the overall economy of personality, and there is no conflict. In the neurotic personality each polarity, as it were, is treated separately by the executive agency of personality, the ego; and each holds separately and simultaneously prospects of security and insecurity, pleasure and pain. Thus, by being overdependent, one is taken care of, but one's needs for prestige and successful competition are frustrated; and by being over-assertive one fulfills one's needs ~or power and status, but one's need to be loved, cuddled, mothered are frustrated. As an example, a sister with unresolved authority problems enters the convent to placate her superego by total sub-missiveness; this will fulfill the polarity of dependency, passivity, submission; but the opposite polarity, which energizes rebelliousness and independence, will have to be vigorously repressed and will remain frustrated. This will result in a worsening of the authority problem; symptomatologically, there will be dissatisfaction (frustra-tion of one polarity); chronic fatigue (because of the need to divert psychic energy to the task of repressing the polarities of rebelliousness and independence); periodic explosions (during which the polarities energizing sub-mission and passivity are frustrated); feelings of guilt; and so forth . One is reminded of what is found in the neurotic marriage, in which the partners marry one + ÷ ÷ 343 4. Vincent S. Conigllaro, M.D. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 344 another because each offers the other the opportunity for the disguise and the release of unconscious drives. The man with latent homosexual problems marries a frigid, cold woman; the outwardly efficient, "strong" male (the type who exaggerates the outward signs of masculinity because of deep seated feelings of inadequacy) marries a woman who under a calm and restrained exterior is assertive and domineering; a woman with unconscious sexual anxieties marries an impotent male; and so forth . In these cases too, the neurotic bargain is fulfilled and the unconscious expectations which have led to the marriage in the first place are being satisfied: this is why the marriage fails or is beset by severe incompati-bility. I am reminded of a patient in my recent experience, a bright and attractive woman with severely disturbed ideas on sex and much anxiety and guilt about any type of sexual involvement; these feelings were unconsciously rationalized by the conception that sex is "always degrad-ing" and "inherently dirty." She did not marry until the age of thirty-two: the healthy, eligible males who had appeared on the scene up to that time had not been "attractive" enough to her neurotic expectations. She finally met the "right" man: an extremely puritanic, neurotically judgmental individual who consciously visu-alized sex as dirty and degrading; he would subtly "seduce" her into giving in to rather innocent exchanges of affection and would then reject her by sternly lecturing her on the basic depravity of all women. After sixteen months of formal engagement, she married him primarily because she had found in him the external counterpart of her own rigid, punitive superego. It can be easily antic-ipated that this couple's marriage was extremely un-satisfactory. They found each other unbearable; he felt she was shamelessly passionate and "se.xy"; she felt he was sadistically judgmental and critical; and they both acted as though neither had had any idea (in sixteen months of engagementl) of what the other was "really like." The neurotic polarities of each of these individuals were being fulfilled through the neurotic marriage at the expense of intense anxiety, rage, and guilt. In the latent neurotic personality, religious life may trigger neurotic symptoms through some of its accidental features. While the essence of religious life is immutable, its accidental elements, the ways this essence expresses itself, are necessarily mutable and in a state of constant transition and adjustment to changing socio-cultural conditions. The transition itself may be disturbing to the rigid, obsessive personality. A sister I once treated could have functioned satisfactorily only if the Church had gone back to medieval times. A priest once told a colleague of mine, with much anxiety and bitterness: "They are changing my Church, Doctor; they are chang-ing my Church" (in reference to the Ecumenical Council). Some sisters' neurotic structure is such that they only accept meditation and contemplation, to the total exclu-sion of action; and they do this more for neurotic than spiritual reasons. It is also important to realize that religious orders are a world of their own, a society with its own culture (some religious orders even call themselves "societies"). The fact that there are to be rules is inherent in any society; but the religious societies are particularly bound by rules (the etymology of the Word "religious" is "rule-bound"). Some religious societies are very rigidly set up; there may be a rigid ordering of time (the "horarium," the setting down of every hour and activity of one's day from rising to retiring) or a rigid ordering of authority, community rank, behavior (the book of cus-toms). This system of rules may indeed appeal to a rigid personality or to persons with problems about routines, schedules, and time tables. These persons, again, will be attracted not by the spirit behind the rules but by the rules themselves, the scheduling for its own sake, the opportunities thus offered for neurotic defenses or neu-rotic acting out. Religious life indeed may, with its essential or transi-tional features, trigger neurotic symptoms in the latent neurotic personality. It may seem that this point is being belabored. Yet, in reading the religious journals read by most sisters, one finds cause for concern over the explana-tions prevalently given as to the causes o~ mental dis-orders among the religious. While the situation has im-proved considerably in the last fifteen years, there still prevails a lack of awareness of what really should be remedied; and why; and how. Often, we still bark up the wrong tree or beg the issue or believe that sister is neu-rotic simply because she has a difficult superior or because her order is a very rigid one, completely overlooking the fact that most probably these sisters had a neurotic prob-lem to begin with and the environment to which they are now overreacting has only brought the neurotic con-flict to light. I am reminded of a question asked by a group of sisters (and recently published in a religious journal) on the subject of the measures suggested by the Church to reduce tensions among the religious. The answer, as given by a well known and justly respected priest, gives cause to ponder; it suggests that, while the Church has recognized the importance of childhood in the causation of mental disorders, and, at least by implication, the importance of counseling and psychotherapy--these factors (childhood) ÷ ÷ ÷ Counseling VOLUME 24, 1965 345 ÷ ÷ ÷ Vincent S. Conigliaro, M~. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 346 and these measures (counseling and psychotherapy) are, too often, seen as the least important. According to the above source, among the remedies suggested by the Church are, mainly, such remedies as avoidance of a disordered and restless life, a minimum of calm and peace, avoidance of overwork, enactment of the rule of silence (thus the availability of cloisters), vacations and weekly days off, and so forth . All these measures, I suggest, are far from meaningless; but also far from sufficient. All these measures are important; without them there will be anxiety and tension, but there will be anxieties and tensions in spite of them. A restless and disordered life most often is not a cause of mental illness but a symptom, just as the ability to live a joyful and pleasurable life is a manifestation of good mental health, not a cause. I remember a sister I once treated for a severe compulsive character neurosis, with symptoms of depression, scrupulosity, perfectionism, and chronic fatigue. She had been told (innumerable times) to take some days off and have a good vacation; for at least two years her rigid, grandiose, self-punitive personality had prevented her from doing so: there was too much to do and no one could do it as well as she. Sister was not tense because of overwork: she was tense and overworked because of a deeper common cause. When she was finally ordered to take a vacation and have fun, she worked strenuously and grimly at having fun with no benefit whatsoever from either vacation or recreation. Committed Catholics and psychoanalysts will grow equally concerned over the fact that we still too often believe that emotional illness among the religious is caused by such spiritual reasons as spiritual frustration or the feeling of not having attained the vocational ideal of apostolic sanctity. Spiritual frustrations, again, are more often symptoms than causes of mental illness; and to relate them to incomplete spiritual formation, poor spiritual training, and so forth, is often inaccurate. The psychotic sister will not feel better mentally by leading a better spiritual life; she will lead a better spiritual life when she feels better mentally. The sister with an authority problem will not become more obedient solely by forcing herself to become more obedient; and the sister obsessed with impure thoughts will not be able to solve her problem only with prayer. All this does not question the supernatural power of prayer; it simply questions whether the neurotic or psychotic sister can truly pray, or, better, how receptive one is to grace while in a state of severe neurosis or psychosis. The point, at any rate, is that if these sisters were able to be spiritually obedient, religiously fulfilled, prayerful, and so forth, they would not have these mental problems to begin with. Thus it is often a mistake, for a spiritual director or superior, to simply demand of the neurotic sister to pray more, implying that if she does, this will resolve all problems. When sister finds herself unable to do so, she will feel guilty and become more anxious and depressed; or an emotional problem which could have been cleared in a relatively short time (had counseling or psycho-therapy been administered immediately) is treated psy-chiatrically after months of attempts at treating it by supernatural means, and it may be too late. Evidently, the total answer to the mental problems of the religious does not lie only in counseling and psycho-therapy; but the latter should play a larger role than it played up to five or ten years ago and even larger than the role played now, a time in which the Catholic Church has already made so many strides in pastoral counseling,x The mental problem of the religious, I believe, can only be approached through a holistic concept in which supe-riors, sisters, social workers or psychologists, spiritual directors, pastoral counselors, and psychotherapists make available to the disturbed sister all available means to 1 The history and development of the Iona Institute of Pastoral Counseling well exemplifies these strides and the Church's positive attitudes on mental health. In 1959, Dr. Alfred Joyce, a New York psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, offered his services for a program of talks and seminars on pastoral counseling at the St. Francis of Assisi Church and Monastery in New York City. The Franciscan Provincial, Father Celsus Wheeler, O.F.M., and a Franciscan psychologist, Father George Fianagan, O.F.M., Ph.D., supported the program enthusiasti-cally and the following year Dr. Joyce, this writer, Dr. L. Moreault, Mr. F. Peropat and Dr. J. Vaccaro, under the leadership of Dr. Joyce, founded the St. Francis Institute for Pastora! Counseling, a pioneer-ing institute offering a two-year curriculum on the theory and practice of pastoral counseling. With greater and greater support be-ing received from the New York Archdiocese and Francis Cardinal Spellman, and through the dynamic encouragement of Monsignor George Kelley, Director of the Family Life Bureau of the New York Archdiocese, in 1962 the five founders of the St. Francis Institute transferred to Iona College (New Rochelle, New York) and associ-ated themselves to Brother John Egan, Chairman of the Department of Psychology of the College, to form the Iona Institute for Pastoral Counseling, the only institute of its kind in the Eastern United States. Since 1962 the institute, under the leadership of Dr. Joyce, has offered to larger and larger groups of Catholic priests (total enrollment for 1964-1965 was just under one hundred students) a unique, com-prehensive, three-year curriculum of courses and clinical supervision leading to a Master's Degree in Pastoral Counseling. The Institute's program is designed to develop in its students greater awareness of the psychological dimensions of the problems encountered in pas-toral activity; to foster understanding of the conscious and uncon-scious processes operating in a counseling relationship; and, in general, to increase the effectiveness of the Catholic priest's pastoral work. The Institute's program, therefore, is quite consistent with recent directives of the Holy See, that is, directives which have emphasized the need for the development and refinement of the special competencies required for the pastoral ministry in the twentieth century. + + Counseling VOLUME 24, 1965 ÷ ÷ Fin~en~ $. Conigliaro~ M.D. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS help herself, including prayer and spiritual self-improve-ment but also including counseling and psychological self-improvement. In a truly holistic approach one would also include preventative concepts and work toward the improvement of the existing screening procedures for the applicants to the religious life, the improvement and modernization of training programs for the religious, and the inclusion in these training programs of psychological considerations (mental hygiene concepts of education, group dynamics of training, and so forth). The latter, I believe, can be done very successfully without com-promising in the least the spiritual and religious con-siderations of training. One can think of counseling and the religious sister in many different ways. One may think of counseling admin-istered by a sister who has been trained in the theory and technique of counseling and who gives counseling to the sisters in her own house; the sister counselor may be the superior or another sister. One may think of counsel-ing administered by a trained sister who practices counseling as part of her own missionary, teaching, nurs-ing, or social work, in which case the counselee may be another sister or a lay person, male or female, adult, adolescent, or child. One may think of counseling in terms of "diagnostic counseling," "motivational counseling" and "therapeutic counseling." Finally, one may think of counseling as a philosophy of life, an existential commit-ment, a philosophy of deeper understanding of human psychology and human motivations, by which the trained sister becomes, in the house where she lives or at her place of work, a very valuable trouble shooter and "sig-nificant figure." One may think in terms of the superior of a house who has had enough training in counseling or psychology to do counseling with the sisters of her own house as soon as a problem arises and before it becomes too serious. This may be a "diagnostic counseling," in which the superior, after two, three, or four interviews, is able to recognize the "danger signals" of mental illness, can differentiate them from the symptoms of a strictly reli-gious or moral problem, and is therefore in the position of advising remedial steps. It may be a "motivational counseling," in which the superior has a number of sessions with the disturbed sister for the purpose of help-ing the sister to recognize the psychogenic nature of the difficulty and preparing her for therapeutic counseling or psychotherapy. It may finally be "therapeutic counseling" in which the superior, by using the technique of counsel-ing, helps the sister to help herself. I am convinced that it is administratively unfeasible for the superior of a community to do counseling with her own sisters; and, it administratively feasible, I am still convinced it would not be advisable therapeutically be-cause of the very nature o[ the superior's status in the community: the fact that she is, by virtue and necessity, identified with "authority" and because of the psycho-dynamic dimensions of being the "mother" superior. Better, then, for another sister to be the "house-counselor"; even in this case, however, it will be helpful it the superior is sympathetic to, and understanding of, the philosophy and the techniques of counseling; it will avoid friction between superior and house counselor and the unbalancing of the group dynamics of a religious community. Incidentally, should there be a "house counselor"? Should counseling be at all administered in the house, within the community, b~ an "insider"? I am convinced there are important advantages to doing so-- at least initially. This is in keeping with modem mental hygiene concepts, that is, the concept of "emotional first aid stations." Industrial psychiatrists have found that optimal results were often obtained by treating situa-tionally triggered emotional crises "on the job." In research on this subject I published a few years ago, I felt that the system of having a full time mental hygiene team on the premises is very advantageous. By having a house counselor, emotional emergencies can be handled on a truly emergency basis; situational and reactive crises can be approached more insightfully and with more perma-nent results. To conduct diagnostic and motivational counseling within the community appears advantageous also from a practical and financial standpoint. Finally, disturbed sisters may flatly refuse to see an outsider (especially lay) counselor or psychotherapist or may co-operate with the outsider only superficially. The presence of a house counselor on the premises and the fact that counseling is being practiced within the house may indeed have a disturbing effect on the group dynamics of a community, at least in some houses. This, however, is more an indication for, than against, the presence of a house counselor. If the community group dynamics can be unbalanced by her presence, then there already are neurotic processes operating under the sur-face. The processes would be triggered anyway by other "irritants"; they might as well be triggered by the house counselor, who can understand and treat group anxieties and individual anxieties. Some of the problems that may be triggered by the house counselor are: anxiety about the sister who is undergoing counseling ("There, but for the grace of God, go I"); resentments about the time she spends with the counselor or the superior (a form of sibling rivalry); anger (and envy) at the apparent fact that she is given ÷ Counseling VOLUME 24~ 1965 ÷ ÷ ÷ Vincent S. Conigliaro, M.D. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 350 special privileges and dispensations (a sister I once treated said about another sister also in treatment: "They are letting her get away with murder . "); and so forth. Some of these problems might perhaps be prevented by utilizing a house counselor from a different house. A Maryknoll superior I recently spoke with suggested that two trained sisters from the same order but from two dit~erent houses could be exchanged between the two houses and be "on call." Parenthetically, I do not believe that one needs to be alarmed at the thought of a nonmedical sister counselor practicing "diagnostic" counseling. Although the formal diagnosis of any dis-order, whether "physical" or "mental," remains within the province of the medical doctor (psychiatrist or medical psychoanalyst), a well trained counselor is quali-fied to evaluate the severity of a mental disorder, formu-late hypotheses as to its course and prognosis, and differ-entiate it from solely moral or religious problems. What one should fear, rather, are the "snap diagnoses" made by untrained individuals in any walk of life: in the case of the religious sister, the diagnosis, "spiritual problem," with the prescription, "prayer, three times a day," for a problem that is mainly emotional in nature and needs counseling (or psychotherapy) as well. I referred above to the "understanding superior." I wonder how many sisters, troubled emotionally and mentally, did not feel, at some point, that it was-"all mother superior's fault., if she only had more under-standing . " I also wonder how many superiors, whose sisters were in the throes of a severe mental problem, did not feel, at some point: ". It's all my fault., if I had only had more understanding . " (I also wonder if some psychiatrists, in treating sisters with emotional problems, have not at times felt that it was ". all mother superior's fault., if she had only had more understanding . "). I believe there is something significant here and worth-while looking into. At times, undoubtedly, the superior is largely respon-sible for a sister's emotional problem as a "trigger factor," as precipitating element. More often, however, the superior is blamed because of the need for scapegoats, be-cause of the psychological tendency to explain difficulties in simple black and white, "good guy, bad guy" terms, and, finally, because of a specific psychological function called "transference." The truth of the matter is that to blame it all on the superior is incorrect; and if it is incorrect, it is also unfair: unfair to the sister, who likes to believe that changing houses will solve all her problems (she will go through one, two transfers to realize, after several cycles of heightened hope and frustrating letdown, that nothing has really changed in her mental status); and unfair to the superior, who will unrealistically blame her-self for her sisters' emotional problems and use this self-condemnation as a nucleus for her own neurosis. The interpersonal relationship of sister--superior is necessarily a very complex one; here, too, we find that in both its essential and accidental characteristics it offers opportunities for spiritual and psychological enrichment to the healthy and for neurotic expressions to the neu-rotic. The superior has full and unquestioned authority, because she represents, supernaturally, the will of God; the healthy sister willfully chooses to submit and defer because she can see the transcendental aspects of her submission and deference; the neurotic sister or superior sees, rather, a symbolic relationship between an omnipo-tent mother-figure and an infantile daughter-figure. Once the relationship has been unconsciously visualized in these symbolic terms, the development of "transferential" reactions is highly likely, because the relationship is already a "transferential" one. "Transference," I believe, explains why the disturbed sister is too ready to put all the blame on the superior or why the superior is ready to put all the blame on herself (or, in opposite cases, on her "insubordinate daughters"). It also explains why everything the superior does, the rewards she administers, the punishments she metes out, the assignments she makes, the time she take to reply to the sisters' mail, even her very traits of personality, become, at times, a matter of life or death for some sisters. ~Vhat is "transference?" Transference is an unrealistic emotional posture which supposedly occurs only in psy-choanalytic psychotherapy but which also develops, in varying degrees of unreality, in other intimate emotional relationships (husband and wife, soldier and N.C.O. on the battle line, pastor and priest, superior and sister, and so forth). In transference, one feels about a contemporary figure not the feelings it deserves because of what this figure realistically is, but the feelings one felt about significant figures from one's childhood, whom the con-temporary figure symbolically represents. In transference, the patient sees his analyst not as what he is but as he saw his own father and/or mother; and feels about his analyst the quality and quantity of feelings appropriate not to the analyst but to his own father and/or mother. Similarly, in transference the sister sees the superior not as the superior objectively is, but as she saw, as a child, her own parents; and her feelings about the superior are not proportionately related to what the superior, objectively, is, does, stands for, but to the feelings the sister had, as a child, about her parents. Transference motivates behavior as well as feelings and thoughts; in transference, the sister will behave, toward 4- 4- 4- ÷ ÷ + Vincent S. Coniglia~o, M.D. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS the superior, not realistically but "transferentially," not as sister-to-superior but as daughter-to-mother. Transfer-ence is "remembering through actions and feelings." In psychoanalytic psychotherapy, the development of transference is facilitated by some of the essential and accidental features of the treatment itself and may be fostered by the therapist (a skillful therapist encourages the appropriate quantity and quality of transference and uses it for his patient's benefit). The accidental features of religious life will also encourage transferential relationships and painful, neurotic transferential reac-tions. But, again, not per se, but in direct proportion to the mental health of superior and sister. Such features as the fact that sisters are referred to as "daughters" and superiors are addressed as "mothers". the psycho-logica. 1 message that may be contained in the very word "superior". the reality of the superior's unquestioned authority over the sisters., the vow of obedience., and other accidental features of religious life will not by themselves "infantil-ize" the sister or "mother-ize" the superior; but the sisters will be infantilized (and the superior motherized) who, from the depth of their un-conscious and latent neuroses, had already looked go these features as opportunities for the release of latent neurotic drives. The very fact that there are so many obedient, submissive, and deferent religious sisters who are, at the same time, joyful, vibrant, productive creatures, with attractive, vital, and no less feminine personalities is a living admonishment against believing that the poten-tially infantilizing (to the neurotic) features of religious life must necessarily (that is, also in the healthy) cause transferential relationships and reactions. Whether the superior is a trained counselor or not and whether her qualities of "understanding" will be rightly perceived by sisters wearing or not wearing transference-colored glasses, there can be little doubt that the "understanding" superior will contribute to the pre-vention of emotional crises in her community. Too often one thinks of an understanding superior as someone who smiles, agrees, and gets emotionally involved with her sisters or who is gentle and unassertive and goes around giving realistic or unrealistic reassurances or who shows total approval of whatever neurotic behavior is exhibited on the part of her sisters. This actually is more the stereotype for a neurotic superior than for an under-standing one. I remember a priest counselor whom I once supervised. He was counseling a hostile, resentful, rebellious adoles-cent whose father was rigidly authoritarian and coldly punitive. The counselee acted out his hostility in the counseling situation itself by being.consistently late for his sessions or breaking appointments without previously canceling them. The counselor was extremely "under-standing," remarked about the patient's lateness only casually and gave him a full-session time by cutting into his own rest periods, feebly joked about the cancelations and, to his own great inconvenience, rescheduled make-up appointments, and made sure not to appear in the least annoyed at his patient's erratic behavior. The counselor's conscious rationale for his "understanding" was: "I want him to see that there are understanding people in this world . 1 don't want him to think that everybody is as bad as his father . " In reality his "understanding" covered his own neurotic feelings about hostility and assertion; he neurotically equated justifiable annoyance (at having his schedule continuously disrupted) with irrational rage and rigidly controlled the former to avoid the risk of expressing the latter. Another counselor I supervised managed to convey to his patient his tacit approval of the patient's practically delinquent behavior; in this case the "understanding" dis-guised the counselor's own neurotic rebelliousness and hostility against authority. The giving of unrealistic reassurances (also often seen as a sign of "understanding") may actually be a symptom of neurosis. I remember the case of a sister with a paranoid char-acter neurosis, very intelligent but extremely disagreeable because of her mistrusting, hostile personality. Sister believed the other sisters disliked and resented her be-cause of her scholastic accomplishments; and her superior usually reacted to these complaints by "reassuringly" telling her that when one is very bright one may be resented by those who are less bright, and telling her not to worry, the other sisters really liked her. The con-scious rationale of this "understanding" was: "Sister is too sick to be told that the other sisters do dislike her. and for her arrogance and imperiousness, rather than for her brilliance . " In reality, this "understanding" covered the superior's unconscious fear of the paranoid sister and only resulted in the consolidation and strengthening of sister's hostility and disagreeableness. Real understanding--whether in the knowledgeable superior or in the trained counselor--basically cor-responds to the ability to understand human psychology and, especially, the complexity of human motivations. This understanding, which the counselor obtains from training, the superior can only derive through her own studies, readings, and observation, since in the great majority of cases we are not born endowed with it. "Intui-tive understanding," "horse sense," the "knack of under-standing people," are either an altogether di~erent quality of understanding (the superficial understanding of ÷ ÷ ÷ Counseling VOLUME 24, 1965 353 ÷ ÷ ÷ Vincent S. Coniglidro, M.D. REV|EW FOR RELIG|OUS few, superficial situations) or the major ingredient of often catastrophic "snap diagnoses" (the simplified con-clusions on "what really bothers" our fellow human beings). If this is fully realized, the superior who has little understanding should not blame her constitution, heredity, luck, or intelligence~in most cases she only needs to study, read, and observe. I am not implying that every superior should go to medical school and eventually specialize in psychiatry. I am suggesting, however, that any investment she will make in courses and lectures on human psychology will pay huge dividends in terms of house morale, a smoothly growing community, and her own peace of mind. Actually, it is a wonder that so many superiors, in spite of very little training in human psy-chology, do such a creditable job as leaders of a com-munity. Industry or government would not expect such a performance from untrained leaders of theirs who were to operate under conditions as difficult as most superiors (unisexual environment, closeness of quarters, the ever present possibility of transferential developments and transferential reactions; and so forth). If real understanding is to work--for the house as a whole, for the sisters, and for the superior herself---it must be mature and loving. It must be loving, or there will r~ot be the concern, care, interest motivating one human being to want to understand another (or, at least, to want to apply this u. nderstanding for healing purposes); and it must be mature, or it may be a neurotically motivated understanding in ~which the superior distorts the sister's demands because of unconscious needs to do so or understands these demands rightly but out of proportion to the total picture and more for her own needs than sister's. The positive features and attributes of real understand-ing can best be discussed in reference to counseling and religious counselors. Some of these features will be of great interest also to the superior: the superior who, without being a counselor or without intending to be-come one, wants to achieve, through her own efforts, personal interest, and dedication, real understanding of her sisters. This superior, however, would not be fair to herself if she expected to attain the quality of under-standing of the trained counselor just by following "a few simple rules," listening to the house counselors' "talk-ing shop," or reading a few articles, like this, at best just glossing over a few aspects of counseling theory. Both in real life and in the understanding of human psy-chology, there are no short cuts; and there are no instant substitutes for the understanding that can be derived only from years of studies, readings, and observation. The trained counselor attains a specialized quality of understanding of human psychology. A house counselor, through the time and effort invested in a comprehensive curriculum on theory and technique of counseling, can recognize, diagnose (in the connotation given before), and prognostically evaluate the signs and symptoms of healthy and unhealthy mental functioning. She can determine which patients are an indication for therapeutic counsel-ing and which patients, an indication for motivational counseling, should be referred to a psychotherapist, psy-chiatrist, or psychoanalyst. With the patients with whom she practices therapeutic counseling she knows, after evaluating the patient,s ego strength, environmental conditions within which the patient functions, and the overall circumstances surrounding the counseling rela-tionship, what techniques of counseling to follow and for how long. The counselor knows that human behavior and the symptoms of emotional disturbances are always over-determined (related to multiple causes and factors) and that the more disturbed is behavior, the more distressing a symptom, the more critical a crisis, the less likely it is that just one or two factors are responsible. Consequently, she will not "jump to conclusions," oversimplify, dispense quick, superficial "diagnoses" ("What really bothers you, Sister, is this and that"). She also knows that presenting symptoms and initial complaints are often a disguise for more distressing and intimate problems. Thus she waits beyond the first few sessions before concluding that sister has told her the "whole story" or even the "real story." She knows the inherently devious and implicitly mimetic nature of defense mechanisms; within herself, therefore, in the process of privately evaluating and understanding her counselee's problems, she will not take "no" (or "yes") for an answer, will not accept every-thing at its face value, will try to read between the lines of the counselee's manifest verbalization, will obtain clues from nonverbal communication, and will, in fewer words, constantly try to understand the dynamic motiva-tions, the "why," the "latent,'.' of her counselee's com-munication. (The really understanding superior may well try to remember this. Sister may come to see her to discuss problem "A"; whether sister knows it or not, she may actually be in the superior's office to discuss problems "B" or "C." The patient, knowledgeable, and, especially, un-hurried superior, will help sister to come to the real problem by prolonging the first interview, by non-direc-tive prodding--"is anything else on your mind, Sister?" is much better than "Is this (or that) what is really on your mind, Sisterl" and, especially, by asking sister to come in again "to talk more about problem A or any-thing else that might be on your mind, Sister . ") 4- 4- 4- Counseling + ÷ Vineent S. Conlgliaro, M.D. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 356 The counselor knows that even truly distressing symp-toms may only be a first line of defense the personality uses against even more distressing problems and con-flicts. The counselee of a priest I supervised was literally torn apart by persistent masturbatory behavior con-sistently accompanied by vivid heterosexual fantasies; yet this behavior was only a cover-up for very frighten-ing, still unconscious, homosexual problems. A sister I treated was painfully convinced (and so was her superior) that she had a severe sexual problem as she was mainly obsessed with obscene fantasies and per-secuted by sexual compulsions; after several months (and a dream in which she discovered a knife hidden by stacks of pornographic literature) it became apparent that she was using obscene fantasies also to punish herself for unconscious fantasies of a sadistic nature against the superior (and her mother). Thus the counselor knows better than to prematurely remove symptoms or defenses, lest the problems so disguised come to the fore, thus causing disintegration of the whole personality and psychosis. The counselor knows that the best way to counsel is, often, by the "non-directive, minimal activity" technique. Within this technique the counselor, after having ascertained (with a minimum of activity and direction) the quality and severity of the counselee's problem, assumes an "actively passive" posture. She patiently listens; benevolently and calmly waits out pauses of silence; asks few or no questions; stimulates the counselee's continuity of communication by nonverbal means (nodding, assenting, saying "Uhm-uhm") or, verbally, by repeating the counselee's terminal sentence; echoes and reflects back, in simpler, clearer, more concise phraseology the counselee's utterances, and so forth. With the mildest counseling problems this approach is therapeutic in itself and is both means and end. The counselor becomes the counselee's oral vehicle; and the counselee, just by listening to the counselor's clearer re-formulations of the problem, can see solutions or the roads towards them. With most counseling problems this approach is very valuable as a means to an end, as it provides the counselor with material through which she will be able to help the sister to help herself. (A little tip for the superior: "true" listening, with minimal ac-tivity and direction, will cause the "true" problem to shape itself in its clearest outlines under her very eyes.) An important point, made just in passing before, is the one to the effect that light attempts at premature removal of symptoms can be catastrophic. Freud spoke of "wild psychoanalysis"; in a sense, one can talk of "wild counseling." In "wild counseling," the counselor tells the patient what to do; advises; judges; prescribes courses of action; removes symptoms or eliminates defenses; prods too actively, eliciting too much too soon, all this without knowing enough of his counselee's personality structure and whether the patient can safely ~ollow the prescription or in ignorance of the adaptive and defensive meaning of normal and abnormal be-havior. One of the most important discoveries of psychoanalysis was that psychic disorders have a meaning and represent partly successful attempts at defensive adaptation. Even the most distressing symptoms are a partly successful defense---without the distressing symptom of hysterical mutism, the hysteric would be hced with the more distressing problem of wishing to verbalize highly ex-ceptionable sexual desires; without the embarrassing symptom of "trigger-finger paralysis" (a hysteric condition of soldiers on the battle line), the patient would be ~aced with the more serious problem of wanting to press the trigger of a rifle aimed at his own sergeant; without the torturing symptom of persecutory thinking, the schizophrenic would be faced with the much more painful problem of having homosexual desires. The dis-comfort of hysterical mutism, trigger-finger paralysis, and persecutory ideation are a psychic bargain compared with the discomfort the psychic apparatus would experi-ence were it to face, in raw state, the sexual desires, the murderous aggression, and the homosexuality that mutism, paralysis, and persecutory delusions stand for. Thus, if we remove one line of defense, a more drastic defense will be set up and, with it, a more severe mental illness. I remember the patient who came to the emer-gency room of a city hospital in a wheelchair because of hysterical paralysis of both her legs. A brash and eager young psychiatric interne decided he would omnipotently remove the paralysis by hypnotic suggestion. The patient did walk out of the hospital on her own legs; once home, however, she became severely depressed and attempted suicide. The hysterical paralysis was, to her personality structure, an indispensable prop; deprived of that prop prematurely (that is, without any preliminary work on her ego), her personality could only cave in; the process could only be arrested by the setting up of more primitive defenses (more drastic "props"), for instance, the defense of depression. Counseling can be powerful medicine. Words and advice are to the counselor what scalpel and clamps are to the surgeon. Wrong counsel and ill-timed advice can have disastrous effects. I remember a patient "counseled" into borderline psychosis by her own G.P. A twenty-eight year old girl, beautiful and quite feminine, she had never been 4- ~,ounseling VOLUME 357 ÷ 4. ÷ Vincent $. Conigliaro, M~. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS engaged, married, or romantically involved, She had consulted her physician because of ill-defined heart and stomach symptoms, fatigue, sleeplessness, and choking sensations; the physician correctly diagnosed hysteria. In discussing her social life, he was struck by the fact that she never went out with men; he took the explanations she gave (shyness, moral reasons) about her sexual isola-tion at their face value and proceeded to persuade her into going out. After several sessions of "counseling" she reluctantly agreed to go out on a date. Shortly after the first date (and having given in to a very minor physical exchange of affection) she became depressed and with-drawn. Again, the physician accepted the explanations she gave for her depression (moral guilt) at their face value and counseled her to be "more broadminded." She became more depressed and withdrawn and eventually attempted suicide. Several weeks after she had finally en-tered psychotherapy, it was found that at the ages of five and nine she had been sexually molested by a psycho-pathic father. Unconsciously, she had come to associate adult sexuality with the incestuous sexuality experienced at five and nine; and the guilt, horror, and remorse at-tached to the latter had become associated to the former; thus sexuality had to be shunned in all its forms and manifestations. Deprived of her defenses of shyness, ti-midity, and sexual isolation, the patient could only ex-perience severe anxiety, depression, and guilt. The above examples refer to situations in which "wild counseling" was both erroneous from a psychoanalytic point of view and faulty from an ethical and moral standpoint. Yet examples can be given of morally un-exceptionable counseling that is equally "wild" from a psychodynamic point of view. A judgmental and psycho-dynamically imprudent pastoral counselor once strongly advised a young man to give up compulsive masturbation at all costs; the counselee did, at the cost of severe homo-sexual panic and suicidal behavior. A couple was once treated in marital counseling; he was a drug addict, moody, manipulative, exploitative, sadistic, occasionally violent; she, the unnervingly patient and "holy" type of woman who goes through life proudly protesting her humility and vigorously proclaiming her martyrlike good-ness in the face of unbearable male provocations. The counselor did not see that this was a neurotic marriage and that this woman (fully aware of her husband's long record of addiction at the time she had married him) had done so to fulfill her masochistic needs and express her controlling and manipulative polarities in the least obtrusive way. The counselor also failed to realize that this woman had a need to foster her husband's addiction (for example, she used to express astonishment at the fact that her husband always managed to steal the groceries money to buy drugs; in actuality, it was she who would unconsciously "forget" some money [always just the right amount for "a fix"] on her dresser for her husband to steal) and that his addiction was an essential '"prop" to her personality. When the counselor finally persuaded her to separate from her husband, she became severely depressed and became an alcoholic. As indicated before, the counselor should be both mature and loving; without these qualities, the most sophisticated psychological understanding will be basi-cally vitiated; and counseling will remain ineffectual. The psychoanalyst's personal maturity can be assured, in most cases, by the fact that he is demanded to undergo inten-sive personal psychoanalysis before he is o~cially per-mitted to psychoanalyze others; the counselor's maturity can only be assured by rigorous screening procedures at the time he applies for training; constant supervision during training gives the additional opportunity to certify as counselors only those who have demonstrated the needed maturity. Why should the counselor be mature (the quality of "loving," I would like to suggest, is an inevitable by-phenomenon of maturity) is self-evident. The mature and loving counselor practices counseling in terms of his counselee's needs--not his own. He is actively passive and non-directive because he believes in the rationale of this technique--not because he is uninterested or because he wishes to work as little as possible. When he gives active counsel, he does so because he honestly believes that it is right to do s~not because, by so doing, the counselee will love, admire, and respect him or "get off his back.~' The mature counselor responds to his patients realisti-cally and not in terms of neurotic reactions set up in him by the counselee's attitudes, symptoms, or values. He can be acceptant of his counselee's behavior, without condon-ing or approving it. He does not "judge" the counselee's actions; rather, he helps him to understand why he acts this or that way and what results can be anticipated from these actions. In being loving, the mature counselor is also capable o~ the adequate measure of self-love and self-respect, without which, I might suggest, there may be no genuine and consistent love and respect of others. A few examples may be given which will clearly in-dicate the maturity or the immaturity of the counselor. A lay counselor I supervised always managed to ask his counselees very personal questions of a sexual nature not to clarify his views on relevant aspects of his patients' personality but to fulfill, vicariously, neurotic sexual needs of his own. Examples given before (while we were 4- Counseling VOLUME 24, 1965 359 ÷ ÷ + Vincent S. Conlgliaro, M~. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS on the subject of the "understanding superior" and "understanding coun.selor") indicated how the counselor (or the superior) responded in terms of their own neurotic needs rather than their patients'. One pastoral counselor's sternly judgmental reaction to the rage exhibited by one of his counselees was less related to the patient's prob-lems with sadism than it was to the counselor's fear of his own hostility. Sometimes the counselor's immaturity first creates problems to the counselor himself which will then be transmitted to the counseling relationship and the counselee. A counselor I once supervised, incapable of mature self-love and self-respect, became very anxious because of his inability to resist his counselees' manipula-tions and dependency. He allowed counselees to contact him at home, at all hours of the day or night; the more dependent they became on him (and the more they in-convenienced and disrupted his family life), the more he resented them and the more he felt he had to "make up" for his hostility by giving in to their manipulations and dependency, thus getting involved in a self-perpetuat-ing vicious circle. Immature~or insufficiently trained--counselors may want to terminate a counseling relationship for a com-bination of '"right," conscious reasons (that is, the pa-tient is too sick and needs psychotherapy) and uncon-scious, "wrong" reasons (that is, hostility set up by the patient's values, attitudes, habits, and so forth). These counselors may feel so guilty, unconsciously, for the "wrong" reasons that they may be unable to recommend termination on the basis of the conscious, "right" reasons. They may present the "right" reasons to their counselees in such ambivalent, confusing fashion that the counselees sense the existence of hidden hostility, perceive the recommendation to terminate as '"rejection," and neu-rotically cling to the relationship: "interminable counsel-ing." On the other hand, an untrained pastor I know (truly and genuinely loving--of others; not enough, per-haps, of himself) often feels he does not have the right to refuse or deny anyone and gets involved in intermi-nable counseling in a different way: the parishioner keeps on coming, once, twice a week, to the rectory, refuses to be referred to a psychiatrist, and clings to the unhappy and helpless priest for years. Sometimes it is a superior who makes herself un-realistically available to her sisters. She is "willing" to practice informal counseling at any time during office hours (and beyond) and is unable to turn down any sister's request for "a few minutes of time." This superior may be taking too literally the Christian, ethical, or professional obligation to make oneself available to those who suffer, forgetting the equally ethical and Christian obligation to be good to oneself. One superior I knew refused no one coming in to see her, no matter how busy she was, how many deadlines she had to meet, and how many unfinished tasks were before her. She made her-self available "so that sister won't feel rejected."; her inner discomfort and tension, however, inevitably diffused to the counseling relationship. She would listen superficially and be exposed to the risk of making super-ficial, premature comments; or, while she "listened," her eyes would dart to the typewriter or steal a glance at the wristwatch; or her hands would tap impatiently by the telephone or tug at the crucifix ("Dear God, help me be patient."). The sisters she "listened" to inevitably received the message and felt just as rejected as if they had been asked to return later. A more self-loving superior will do better (by herself and by the sister) by recognizing her right (and her duty, perhaps, to herself) to tell sister warmly but firmly that she will take just a few minutes right away to discusse the matter of an appointment: which will be given within the day if sister feels the matter is that important, later, if sister feels her problem is not that urgent. I am suggesting, then, that when counselor, superior, pastor have sufficient mature self-love and self-respect (at least enough of it to resist the temptation of making themselves unrealistically, or masochistically, available to others) they will, at the same time, be capable of mature, joyful, and genuine love of others. (Could it be that "love thy neighbor as thyself" really means that one has as much obligation to love oneself as to love one's neighbor? And that this beautiful maxim, read between the lines, suggests that without mature self-Jove there cannot be mature other-love?) ! On the subject of "mature and loving understanding," it may be very appropriate to conclude by briefly reflect-ing on the question of values and counseling. While the counselee's values should have little relevance to the counselor's effectiveness, the same cannot be said of the counselor's values. ("Values" here is meant on a broad ethical and philosophical plane, not only on a religious or moral plane.) At the risk of being considered an incorrigible idealist, I should like to suggest that the effective counselor (like the effective psychotherapist) must be, above all, a decent, good human being. If he is not to be, at best a sterile and antiseptic technician, at worst a manipulator and a hidden persuader, he must be committed to a philosophy of integrity, love and respect of others, self-love and self-respect. The attributes of maturity, loving-ness, and understanding will ulti-mately be inherent and intrinsic in the man's existential ÷ ÷ ÷ Counseling VOLUME 24, 1965 36] integrity and ethical commitment. He cannot be auto-cratic, manipulative, devious outside of office hours, and genuinely permissive, truthful (to himself and his work), and sincere in his office; by the same token, he cannot be weak, manipulable, neurotically self-effacing outside of his office and reasonably assertive, reliable, and helpful during office hours. He need not be "perfect" (whatever this word may connote in his personal weltanschauung), but honest. He need not feel that he must make no mis, takes; all he needs is mental alertness to the mistakes he makes and the emotional courage to recognize them and try to do his best to rectify them. He need not be a self-righteous crusader for love, freedom, and a democratic philosophy of life, but someone who does his best to love, be free, and set others free. I began by noting that "counseling, as a technique and a philosophy of human relatedness., is important to both psychoanalysts and religious persons. (who) both work with human beings and are both committed to a profession of service . " In closing, I should like to suggest that both psychoanalysts (or psychotherapists, counselors, and so forth) and religious persons (or pastoral counselors, house counselors, and so forth), be-cause of the specific quality of their relatedness to the human beings they work with, are alike also in this respect: the measure of their success in their work is, to a large extent, a measure of their existential richness and integrity. ,4" 4. + Vincent $. onigliaro, M.D. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS WILLIAM J. REWAK, S.J. Mortification: An Entry inta the Christ-Mystery I. Aversion of Modern Man In the spirit of the Church's aggiornamento, there is a great demand today for authenticity in moral and ascetical theology, a demand for new and valid expres-sions for the old values. A value is a value, after all, not because it is traditional but because it is an authentic expression of my personal relationship to God and to other people. We are aware of, and fear, the crystalliza-tion of the primary Christian experiences. It has often happened that the Church---or more exactly, institutions and individuals within the Church---have bequeathed to succeeding generations rites, methods, and customs with-out any inner ideal and spirit. Such a stagnation of the original value can occur in any human experience: mysticism can degenerate into magic and ritualism; prophecy is always in danger of crumbling into moral-lsm. So the original value, idea, must forever be reex-pressed; it must grow within the historical context and be reinterpreted in the light of changing modes of thought. At the same time, it must keep a strong hold on the primitive experience. It is for this reason we will investigate the New Testament doctrine on mortifica-tion. A theology of mortification is badly needed. The pres-ent doctrine is inadequate, for it has not kept pace with the advancements in Sci'ipture and other branches of theology. At the present, we are reacting against a moral theology that has emphasized sin and progressing towards a positive program of Christian life: doing good in the service of a generous charity. The idea of morti-fication, then, which according to many manuals is practiced either as a punishment for past sins or as a deterrent against future sins must be reappraised,x What ~$ee P. J. Meyer, s.J., Science o] the Saints (~t. Louis: Herder, ÷ ÷ ÷ William J. Re-wak, s.J., is a mem-ber of Regis Col-lege; 3425 Ba~.view Avenue; Wallow-dale, Ontario; Can-ada. VOLUME 24, 1965 4, 4, 4, William ~. Rewak, 5.1. REVIEW FOR REL]G~OUS 564 is objected to is not that sinful man needs mortification, but that theories of mortification seem to bypass Christ and have for their starting point, their raison d'etre, the fact of sin. Every natural philosophy tried to elimi-nate "sin"; the Stoics were concerned with perfection, but only natural perfection. A Christian existential view of sin cannot fall into this trap. Many wish to find their mortification in the daily struggle involved in working for their neighbor, in the apostolate. The absolute value itself of mortification is not always questioned; a blank rejection would be an act of infidelity to the Word of God. What is vehe-mently questioned is selpchosen mortification: corporal punishments, voluntary acts of abnegation of the intel-lect and will, all those acts, freely chosen, which hurt our pride or human respect. Their necessity is question-able in the light of the very real difficulties confronting the apostle in today's pluralistic society, in a world where the general breakdown of morality requires a new and more refined, more soul-searching response in his communication with his neighbor. There is no doubt about it: mortification is the daily fare for the dedi-cated apostle. Why opt for additional, self-chosen acts of mortification? Mortification has too often been identified with ex-traordinary corporal austerities. The ordinary apostle, not given to sackcloth and ashes, hairshirts, dank caves, and bloody lacerations, is sincerely seeking an "ordi-nary" saint. He wants as an example someone who must stay strong and healthy in order to perform manfully, joyfully, and effectively the tasks of a university pro-fessor, a retreat master, or a Catholic businessman. Besides, corporal austerities are currently out of favor as a result of the renewed "theology of matter." We have, it is hoped, at least theoretically banished all traces of Platonism and Jansenism from our books and lectures on spirituality. There is today an emphasis on the sacramentality of matter, an emphasis fostered by the late Teilhard de Chardin. The body, the world of the material and concrete, are all good and will con-tribute in their own specialized way to the glory of the kingdom to be revealed in us. If corporal austerities are to be retained, they must be based on a more solid foundation than the Jansenistic distrust of the ma-terial. 2 1902), pp. 88-91. Father Meyer's primary reason for practicing morti-fication is "as an atonement for past sins"; and it is "still more neces-sary as a preservative from future sins." This obviously needs quali-fication and completion. i We use the terms "Jansenistic" and "Jansenism" because they are readily intelligible to the modem reader. It must be admitted, how-ever, that the use of such terms is more for convenience than for Older spiritual books, books which influenced the ascetical teachers of the first half of this century, are notoriously negative in tone: If we were to count all the miseries of human life, we should never have done. Holy Job says, "The life of man is a per- Detual warfare upon earth, and his days are like the days of a hired servant that labours from sun-rising to sun-set" (Job vii. 1, 2). Several of the old philosophers had such a lively sense of this truth, that some of them said, they could not tell whether to call nature a mother or a step-mother, because she has sub-jected us to so many miseries. Others again used to say, it were better never to be born, or at least to die as soon as we were strict and complete historical accuracy. An explanation is therefore in order. We urge the reader to consult Louis Bouyer, The Spiritual-ity o] the New Testament and the Fathers, trans. Mary P. Ryan (London: Burns and Oates, 196~) for an excellent account of the problem of gnosis in the early Church. Contrary to modern popular belief, Father states, there was a legitimate gnosis sought by St. Paul and by the early fathers; one has only to think of the formulation of the First Epistle to the Corinthians on knowing God even as we are known (1 Cor 13:12; see also Eph 3:19 and Phil 3:7-11). And this is a knowledge which is really an experience of God, in the love of the Spirit. St. Ignatius of Antioch says: "Why do we not all become wise in receiving the gnosis of God, Jesus Christ?" (p. 246). Gnosis for primitive Christianity was an experiential knowledge of the mysteries of the Father's plan for salvation. But at the same time the natural Greek philosophers themselves were seeking ~alvation through a gnosis of their own. These influences came in turn to form Christian gnosis. "Eons or angels descended in endless cascades from a pleroma in which everything is divine, towards a foreign matter in which everything is mired and becomes degenerate. To this fall, which is one with creation itself, is opposed the mission of the Logos, more or less strictly identified with the man Jesus. But since salvation is nothing but the recovery of an con fallen into mat-ter, the incarnation could be only apparent. It must lead, in fact, to a salvation which is not a redemption of the whole of man, but a disengagement in man of what has never ceased to be immortal 'spirit,' that is to say, an escape from the bonds of the body and the world . The cross of the Saviour only frees our soul along with his from the chains of the body" (p. 223). It is immediately apparent that the grandfather of the heretical positions of the Jansenists, Puritans, Albigensians, Manicheans, is Greek Gnosticism--a corrod-ing rationalism which understood nothing of the true Gnosis, the Word of God. It is not the Logos of Hellenistic syncretism that we, as Christians, come to know, but the Word made flesh. This is why so many spiritual writers of the last few centuries have misfired with their ascetical doctrine; they were influenced by the same rationalism that has threatened Christianity from the beginning and is too often the error of Christian "humanism": the adoption of ascetical prac-tices for the purification and reintegration of the purely natural man, with no consideration for the priority of the interpersonal relation-ship between man and God. The early Greek Gnostic sought an apatheia: the calming of all disordered tendencies, rendering him insensible to outside influence. The Christian Gnosdc also sought apatheia, but it was attained through perfect submission to charity. This in no way meant an extinction of the human, "but rather its unification in which everything is taken up and transfigured which is worthy of being so" (p. 274). Christian asceticism must begin from faith, from the Word of God; it must proceed from the Spirit of love speaking within us. + + .I-Mortification VOLUME 24, 1965 365 4. 4. 4. William J. Rewak, SJ. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 366 born; nay, some of them have gone so far as to say, there are but few persons, that would accept of life after having made an experiment of it, that is, if it were possible to make a trial of it beforehand,s If one were to take this seriously, he would have to regret that God ever uttered a fiat. Having disposed of the object, the author turns to the subject: Cast your eyes on yourself, and you will find there motives enough of humility. Do but consider what you were before you were born, what you are since you have been born and what you are like to be after your death. Before your birth, you were a filthy matter unworthy to be named, at present you are a dunghill covered with snow, and in a short time you will be meat for worms.~ An adequate understanding of the Incarnation can surely dispel such gross misconceptions of God's creation. But it is precisely upon such misconceptions that the author--and other authors--have based their arguments for mortification. Little wonder modern man is repelled. An unhappy refrain running through most spiritual manuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is A bstine et sustine! Refrain and endure,s Cast unwillingly into a flaming abyss of sin where even the apostolate is fraught with unimaginable dangers, mortification alone will lead us to "perfection." And this is perhaps the worst aberration of rationalistic moralism: the use of ascetical practices not for establishing and maintaining a dialogue with God but for the stoical perfection of all the virtues. Most spiritual books of the last century offered detailed instructions on how to develop the virtues of fortitude, for example, or temperance, chastity. And the first means was always mortification--as they understood it. "We must possess more virtues; through them only can we reach our end. Here comes in the aid of self-denial and self-discip-line." 0 Another section of the book explained the ob-stacles to the acquiring of these virtues;7 and a third sec-tion enticed the reader with such titles as "Of the Spiritual and Temporal Advantages Promised to Virtue in this Life, s Rev. F. Lewis, O.P., The Sinner's Guide (Dublin: Richard Coyne, 1825), p. 162. ~ Ibid., p. 271. ~ See, for example, Alphonsus Rodriguez, S.J., Practice o! Perfec-tion and Christian Virtues, trans. Joseph Rickaby, S.J. (London: Manresa Press, 1929), p. 567; and Meyer, Science of the Saints, p. 97. °Moritz Meschler, s.J., Three Fundamental Principles of the Spiritual Life (Westminster: Newman, 1945), p. 80. The author seri-ously calls his book "Christian Asceticism in a Waist-Coat Pocket" (p. v). 7See John Baptist Scaramelli, S.J., The Directorium Asceticum, trans, at St. Bueno's College, North Wales (4 vols.; London: R. and T. Washbourne, 1902), v. 2. This second of four volumes is devoted en-tirely to the manifold obstacles to Christian "virtue" and the means for overcoming them--penance and mortification. and particularly of Twelve Extraordinary Privileges be-longing to it" s or "Some Easy Kinds of Mortification." 9 Such pragmatic spirituality, which is nothing but the victory of reason over animality, lacks a real Christian motive based on Christ's entry into our life through baptism and the sacraments. Fortunately, we have recovered the notion that per-fection is not the piling up of virtues, computer-fashion; it is more fundamental, it is Chrigt-centered. We see Christ as the focal point of all our religious activity, of all our apostolic activity, of all human relations; and when an author bids us go forth from our father's house because "in the shelter of the religious life, separated from the world, from all that might .have occupied your thoughts and your hearts, you live for God alone," 10 we cannot believe him. Or if someone counsels us: "If the religious vocation demands the abandonment of the parental roof, sons and daughters must sacrifice their affections for parents and relatives that they may gain thereby Christ's promise of eternal life," or asserts that friendships are dangerous because "friendship between proper parties that has for object their mutual spiritual advancement is rare and found only among saints," 11 we can hardly take him seriously. The author is too much like those of whom P~guy wrote that "they think they love God because they don't love anyone." Mortification and sacrifice have often been put in opposition to joy. Come, my children, when pain, sacrifice, and duty press heavily upon you, when you experience dryness and disgust, endeavour to make, if you will, a dry and bitter act of love of God . Fervour and sensible devotion is good for small minds; shake off these feminine ways, aspire to something more noble, more vigorous. As for ourselves, we have had not one quarter of an hour's consolation in forty years.~ Hard saying for a generation that is experiencing the ascetical consequences of St. Paul's theology of the Res-urrection. Surely sacrifice and consolation, as authentic expressions of God's Good News, must somehow be re-lated. But most authors of moral guidebooks struggled with this "problem" of pleasure, happiness, consolation, and could not easily reconcile it with Christ's example of suffering. There exists in fact the problem of pleasure. Readily enough ~ Lewis, Sinner's Guide, p. 85. ~ Meyer, Science oJ the Saints, p. 101. 10 P~re de Ravignan, S.J., ConIerences on the Spiritual LiIe, trans. Mrs. Abel Ram (London: Washbourne, 1877), p. 185. Italics mine. ~aMonsignor P. J. Stockman, Manual o] Christian Per]ection (Hollywood, Calif.), p. 611. ~ De Ravignan, ConJerences, p. 191. Mortification VOLUME 24, 196S 367 4. 4. William ]. Rewak, 8.1. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS $68 does the concept of pleasure evoke the idea of something which, morally, has little to recommend it, or at the most, something which is to be tolerated. Living in the memory of Christ, the Christian soul with difficulty separates sanctity from suffering. Is it not by the cross that Christ redeemed and sanctified us? How can pleasure, then, be integrated into the moral life? Does this life not seem, on the contrary, to exclude it? Is there a place for pleasure in the context of a life of selbcontrol?18 And the author solves this conundrum by consoling his readers with the distinction that the essence of an act is what determines it and not the pleasure that may sur-round or follow upon it. Pleasure is outside the moral law: if the act is good, the pleasure is good; if the act is bad, the pleasure is bad. It is, he states, permitted to renounce this pleasure for a superior motive; but it is sometimes better to accept it, especially if it leads to virtue; and it may not always be possible to exclude it.14 Such a treatment of pleasure and consolation strikes the modern reader as negative, moralistic, and exces-sively rationalistic. It has not embodied the spirit of St. Paul: "They will forbid marriage, and will enjoin ab-stinence from foods, which God has created to be par-taken of with thanksgiving by the faithful and by those who know the truth. For every creature of God is good and nothing is to be rejected that is accepted with thanksgiving. For it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer:' (1 Tim 4:3-5). One last remark, and this first part will have per-formed its function. Mortification has been strongly identified with the devotions centering around the idea of reparation. We supposedly mortify our flesh to al-leviate the pain of the lash as it struck Christ during His passion; we kneel for hours to repair for the sins which are causing Him pain and sorrow. Sentimentality has conjured up the image of a Sacred Heart, sitting on the banks of the Loire, weeping and bewailing the sins which men are committing. Such misguided devotions can readily develop into dolorism, a perverted anguish which plays on false feelings of guilt; and for the modern psychology-oriented intellectual, this" is territory to be shunned. Mortification, if it is to be Christian, must turn one away from the self and towards Christ and ="I1 existe de fait un probl~me du plaisir. Assez ais~ment le con-cept de plaisir ~voque l'id~e d'une chose moralement peu recom-mandable, d'une tolerance tout au plus. Vivant du souvenir du Christ, l'fime chr~tienne dissocie malais~raent la saintet~ de la soul-france: n'est-ce point par la croix que le Christ vous a rachet~s et sanctifi~s? Peut-on donc integrer le plaisir clans la vie morale? Ne convient-il au contraire de l'en exclure? Peut-on lui assigner une place clans le gouvernement de soi-m~me?" Dora Odon Lottin, Aux sources de notre grandeur morale (Editions de l'Abbaye du Mont Cesar, 1946), p. 32. a~ Ibid., pp. 33-4. man. Sentimentality has no place in the authentic Chris-tian experience of reparation. It is the sum of all these inaccuracies, these exaggera-tions, these inauthentic expressions of Christian asceti-cism, which are causing the current questioning, if not the rejection, of mortification. If we are to retain morti-fication and sacrifice as indispensable e|ements of Chris-tian life, they must be integrated into the scheme of the "Christ-life" of which St. Paul is the outstanding interpreter. We have to make what we mean intelligible to modern Christians so that, as Karl Rahner says, "they will not think that 'sacrifice' is an expression for that misanthropy and secret hatred of life felt by failures who are incapable of courageously enjoying life and this world and the glory of human existence." a~ H. New Testament Doctrine on Mortification We have been using the term "mortification" in its popular sense, meaning all those acts of abnegation, of sacrifice, which are commonly understood as "mortify-ing." It is time now, however, to clarify the meaning of the three words ordinarily used interchangeably as synonyms: abnegation, renouncement, and mortification; and we will present, in the main, Fr. Iren~e Hausherr's distinctions,a6 This analysis will lead us into a further study of the Pauline texts on mortification. The Synoptics have all preserved the saying: "If any-one wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me." a7 Fr. Hausherr has pointed out that in the Scriptures, when abnegate, "to deny," concerns a duty, there is always the same direct object: oneself. We cannot, strictly speaking, deny ourselves; that is, negate ourselves. We cannot deny what we really are. The abnegation demanded by Christ consists in denying, or not attributing to myself, that which I am not. The great truth about myself is that I am a creature ---or better, a son---of God; negatively speaking, I am not God. This elementary negation constitutes the es-sence of abnegate, of the "denial" of oneself. It is, to be sure, an intellectual judgment on my condition as a creature, a fully free human commitment to adore and praise the God Who has entered my life. But to stop here would enclose us in the same narrow straits of rationalism that hemmed in former ascetical writers. This basic abnegation--the adoration of God---demands that I act as a creature; but it demands primarily that ~ Karl Rahner, S.J., The Christian Commitment, trans. Cecily Hastings (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963), p. 167. l~Iren~e Hausherr, S.J., "Abnegation, renouncement, mortifica-tion," Christus, v. 22 (1959), pp. 182-95. a7 Mt 16:24. See also Mk 8:34; Lk 9:23. Mortification VOLUME 24, a965 William ]. Rewak, $.1. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 370 my filial relationship to God, which is discerned by faith, take precedence over and therefore exclude the primacy of every purely natural reference to self, and this in consequence of the existential character of the supernatural order of redemption I am now living. Transposed into life, this principle demands acts of mortification. The commandment "to renounce" appears in only one text: "He who does not renounce all that he pos-sesses cannot be my disciple" (Lk 14:33). Christ is here again referring to all men, to whoever wishes to follow Him; it is therefore not a counsel but a command, a Christian duty. Obviously, the degree of embodiment of this renunciation will vary for every person and every state in life. Renunciation for a religious is not the same as renunciation for a layman. Although the specific command, "to renounce," does not appear elsewhere, there are related texts: "If your right eye is an occasion of sin to you, pluck it out . " (Mr 5:29); "If you wish to be perfect, sell all that you possess, give it to the poor, and come, follow me" (Mt 19:21); "And anyone who has left house, or brothers, or sisters, or father, or moth.er, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name's sake, shall receive a hundred-fold and shall possess life everlasting" (Mt 19:29). The first Matthaean text is hypothetical but is uni-versal in its application. The remaining two texts refer to those who have decided to follow the counsels, since "to leave" is not commanded, it is optional. Luke has seemed to use the same logion, but the tone is harsh: anyone comes to me and he does not hate his mother and his son and his brother and his sisters, and himself, he cannot be my disciple" (Lk 14:26). In this context, "to hate" someone is to love him less than God, or better, to discern by faith that love of the Father grounds our love for other men. "To leave" is not a duty (except in the hypothetical case of an occasion of sin); but "to hate" and "to re-nounce" are obligations which fall on every Christian, as they indicate the relation that should exist between a son and a Father. Abnegation, then, refers to the subject: my self-love will be characterized and determined by my love for the Father. Renouncement refers to the persons or things outside the subject: all created things will be loved in the Father and through the Spirit because they are ex-pressions of God's love for me. "The charity of God is poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us" (Rom 5:5). Transposed into life, both of these principles demand acts of mortification. It is St. Paul who uses the word "mortification," and the first text we wish to examine is Col 3:5: "Therefore, mortify your members which are on earth." Some have understood this text literally to refer to punishment of the physical body. The Greek word for mortify, nekro-sate, does mean "to cause to die"; but St. Paul is not asking for the physical amputation of our members, he has too great a respect for the body: "Learn how to possess your vessel [body] in holiness and honor" (1 Th 4:4). But neither should the word be weakened to merely mean "suffer," for this, too, would have no precedent in Pauline doctrine. The word "members," then, can-not refer to our physical members; and in the context of the passage, there is an interpretation given to the word. Appearing in apposition to "members" are: "im-morality, uncleanness, lust, evil desire, and covetousness (which is a form of idol worship)" (Col 3:5). What we must put to death, what we must "mortify," are the dis-ordered affections which proceed from blunted self-love, a self-love not grounded in the Father's love, in Paul's terminology, the "flesh," sarx. Now the works of the flesh [sarx] are manifest, which are immorality, uncleanness, licentiousness, idolatry, witchcrafts, enmities, contentions, jealousies, angers, quarrels, factions, par-ties, envies, murders, drunkenness, carouslngs and such like . And they who belong to Christ have crucified their flesh with its passions and desires (Gal 5:19-21,24). The effects of selfish egoism destroy the beauty and the harmony of the Christian person. All these sins which Paul enumerates set a man against his neighbor, against God, even against himself. We must "crucify" the source of this disorder, our "flesh," in order that we may "walk in the Spirit" (Gal 5:16). Mortifying the flesh will produce the "fruit of the Spirit: charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, modesty, continency" (Gal 5: 22-3). The primacy of the spirit of charity in our lives is evidence that we have "risen with Christ": If you have risen with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Mind the things that are above, not the things that are on earth. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, your life, shall appear, then you too will appear with him in glory. ThereIore, mortify your members . " (Col 3:1-5). Paul is inviting us to the state of mortification, in the interests of our resurrected life. "If by the spirit you put to death the deeds of the flesh, you will live" (Rom 8:13). Egdism must be mortified and sensuality curbed; then we live in the full supernatural sense. And here we begin to touch upon a basic Pauline theme. For Paul, the fundamental law of the spiritual life is a dying and a living with Christ. This occurs sacra-÷ ÷ ÷ Mortifwatlon VOLUME 24, 1965 371 4, SJ. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 372 mentally in baptism and it is of this he speaks to the Colossians. Perhaps his most explicit statement is in the epistle to the Romans: Do you not know that all we who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death? For we were buried with him by means 6f baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ has arisen from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we also may walk in newness of life" (Rom 6:3-4). The spiritual life is union with Christ; but this is a fellowship with His death and life. We die and rise again sacramentally in baptism, an invisible action which must be fully manifested and made effective in our daily lives. The sacramental, ontological change we undergo in baptism must have a corresponding effect on our moral and ascetical conduct,is Only in this way, by uniting ourselves sacramentally and ascetically to Christ's earthly activity of suffering, can we obtain a freedom from sin and our final resurrection: For his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things, and I count them as dung that I may gain Christ and be found in him not having a justice of my own which is from the Law, but that which is from faith in Christ, the justice from God based upon faith; so that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his suffering: become like to him in death, in the hope that somehow I may attain to the resurrection from the dead (Phil 3:8-11). Fr. F. X. Durrwell states: These texts do not say that the remission of sin is gained in virtue of the merit acquired in the past by that death---one must not water down the reality of a single word of Scripture on the ground of reason being unable to cope with it; they say that it is gained in a communion in that immolationTM. Only by entering completely into the mystery of Christ, by uniting our sufferings to His in such a way that they are no longer our sufferings but Christ's--"l bear the marks of the Lord Jesus Christ in my body" (Gal 6:lT)-~can we truly become a "new creation" (Gal fi:lS) and enter upon the glorious life awaiting us. And so a radical transformation has already taken place at baptism: "As many of you as have been baptized in Christ have put on Christ" (Gal 3:27); "You were heretofore darkness but now light" (Eph 5:8); "The law of the spirit of life, in Christ Jesus, hath delivered me from the law of sin and death" (Rom 8:2). In the Chris-tian life, however, there is a vast difference between establishing a beachhead and the full experience of ~ Concerning this Pauline theme, see Alfred Wikenhauser, Pauline Mysticism (New York: Herder and Herder, 1960), pp. 149-56; and F. X. Dun'well, In the Redeeming Christ (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964), pp. 84-90. ~ Durrwell, In the Redeeming Christ, p. 85. victory--the pleroma. In principle, Christ's death and resurrection and our sacramental participation in it have destroyed the inevitable domination of "the lusts of the flesh" (Gal 5:16); but the possibility of sin remains. The Christian life is a life of struggle, as Paul knew so well from his own personal experience and fa'om his ex-periences with the imperfections of the early Christian communities. But Christian suffering, the appropriation in our own person of the passion and death of Christ, must reflect the same motive that inspired the exinanitio: the redemp-tion of man and of the universe. "For we the living are constantly being handed over to death for Jesus' sake, that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our mortal flesh. Thus death is at work in us, but life in you" (2 Cor 4:11-2). Only to the extent that what is exclusively natural in us dies can the life of Christ become manifest in us in the form of apostolic activity. The death of the apostle is the necessary condition for the life of the Church and her members. And every Christian is an apostle. Only to the extent that we "bear about in our body the dying of Jesus" (2 Cot 4:I0) can we effectively continue the redemption by applying its saving activity to men. And here we reach the basic reason for all mortification: it is an entry into the mystery of Christ, a communion in His suffering, for the purpose of prolonging His re-demption in the world through the Church. His activity in Jerusalem two thousand years ago was not ineffica-cious for the present age; He effected the transforma-tion at that point in time, but He continues it in His glorified state through the members of His Church who recapitulate in their lives His redeeming experience. "Therefore I pray you not to be disheartened at my tribulations for you, for they are your glory" (Eph 3:13). The most important statement of this theme appears in Col 1:24: "I rejoice now in the sufferings I bear for your sake, and what is lacking of the sufferings of Christ I fill up in my flesh for his body which is the Church." Paul does not mean, of course, that he must supply by his sacrifices the defects in the sufferings of the historical Christ. Interpreting "the sufferings of Christ," Fr. Benoit says they are, in general, the tribula-tions of the apostolic life;2° while Fr. Wikenhauser ap-plies them more personally, stating they are Paul's own sufferings.21 These interpretations do not do injustice to Paul's thought; as he says elsewhere, "the sufferings ~o Pierre Benoit, "L'Epitre aux Colossiens," Bible de Jdrusalem (Paris: Cerf, 1959), p. 60, footnote (b). m Wikenhauser, Pauline Mysticism, p. 161. ÷ ÷ Mortification VOLUME 37~ of Christ abound in us" (2 Cor 1:5), meaning his own sufferings. At any rate, all reputable scholars agree with the general tenor of the text: Paul, and all Christians, must express in their lives Christ's passion and death for the salvation of the members of the Mystical Body, the Church. Quite simply, "they live no longer for them-selves" (2 Cot 5:15). And this salvation of the Body of Christ is a source of great joy for Paul, a joy that is a participation in the Resurrection: "For our present light affliction, which is for the moment, prepares for us an etei-nal weight of glory that is beyond all measure" (2 Cot 4:17). Com-munion with Christ in His death necessarily means com-munion in His Resurrection, for this too is the moral and ascetical prolongation of baptism. The Resurrection should be lived, as mortification and suffering are lived. The apostle is a man of joy: "For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so also through Christ does our comfort abound" (2 Cor 1:15). It is in the letter to the Philippians, written during a harsh and humiliating im-prisonment, that Paul overflows with joy--a word that appears in this epistle eleven times because of the fellowship he experiences with his converts who them-selves have endured suffering for the sake of the gospel: "I have you in my heart, all of you, alike in my chains, and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel, as sharers in my joy" (Phil 1:7). In summary, Paul puts great emphasis on the mystical and sacramental fellowship in Christ that is effected at baptism; but he is equally insistent that Christians must foster in their lives a personal relationship founded on imitation--and this can only be done by re-experienc-ing Christ's life, performing the same redeeming activity He performed. To be one with Him in glory, we must be one with Him in suffering. This is the only way we know, the only way given to us by which we can be saved: "If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny him-self, take up his cross and follow me" (Mr 16:24). III. Some Conclusions ÷ ÷ + William I. Rewak, Sd. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS And what then is mortification? Most basically, it is a state of having died with Christ so that we may live with him, We must make more explicit, however, a dis-tinction which until now has only been implied: St. Paul is speaking primarily about absolute mortification, the state we all must enter as a result of our communion in baptism with Christ. Every Christian is called to this state; and the requirements are the same: the "putting to death" of the disordered inclinations and affections that are ours as a result of original sin.2~ We do not "mortify" the body, properly speaking; we mortify our flesh, sarx, the urge we possess to disassociate our in-terests from God's interests. And we do this that through us the Body of Christ, the Church, may live the Res-urrection more fully. But a problem remains. For this absolute principle of the spiritual life must be appropriated by each Chris-tian and embodied in his daily life. The acts of mortifi-cation, therefore, by which we make St. Paul's principle our constant concern, we term relative mortification. For these acts are always relative, to our state in life, to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and to the force of the disordered affections which remain in us. It is this we are concerned with now and it is under this heading we discuss selpchosen, freely imposed mortifica-tion. We live as members of a Church; all our Christian acts are ecclesiological--through, with, and in the struc-ture Christ set up for our sanctification. The existence of sin in any one of its members stops the flow of grace in a particular area and impedes there the growth of the Christ-life. Mortification does serve, then, as punishment for sin and as a deterrent against future sin, as the manuals have pointed out; but sin must be seen in the context of the Mystical Body, of charity: "For you have been called to liberty, brethren; only do not use liberty as an occasion for sensuality, but by charity serve one another" (Gal 5:13). We mortify our disordered affec-tions so that nothing will hinder us from entering into a meaningful dialogue with God and with our neighbor. We must make of our lives a dynamic redemption--a redemption that is continued through our Christian acts of prayer and mortification, in the Church, for mankind. It is in the light of this Christian experience, for example, that we seek the meaning of reparation. Acts directed to reparation are performed principally to further the penetration of the Christ-life in the members of the Church: the Church suffering and the Church militant. They are intended to "repair" the damage done by sin, to heal the wounds which Christ--in His members m St. Ignatius of Loyola insists that a "disordered affection" is an affection which does not take into account the action of God in our life. To mortify this affection, (I) w~ starve it by not allowing it to exercise its influence and (2) we pray that God may change this af-fection. It is obvious how important Ignatius considered both the initiative and the decisive influence of God's action in us; for this reason he puts great emphasis on the necessity of prayer when troubled by "inordinate attachments." See Spiritual Exercises, Nos. 16, 157. ÷ ÷ ÷ Mortit~ation VOLUME Z4, 1965 375 ÷ ÷ William J. Rewak, Sd. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS --has suffered, to open the channels of sanctification that we all may live healthy, grace-filled lives. Christ does not suffer, but His members do: the loss of grace, caused by the power of sin. The dialogue must be re-established, and our acts of mortification do effect, in ourselves and in our neighbor, through the mercy of God, the resurgence of the Christ-life. For within the mystery of the Mystical Body, there is room for mutual help--and this in the sphere of grace alone. This re-vealed fact in itself attests to the mysterious character of the organic union of this Body: "For we the living are constantly being handed over to death for Jesus' sake, that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our mortal bodies. Thus death is at work in us, but li[e in you" (2 Cor 4:11-2). But many Christians, agreeing with the general nec-essity of mortification, point to the apostolate, as we have indicated, as source enough of that "dying" Paul insists we must undergo for ourselves and our brothers in Christ. Failure in the apostolate, the limitations of our personality in dealing with others, the rejection of love, the inability to be effective--these are real crosses to be borne by every apostle. They point also to the one great abiding mortifica-tion, the acceptance of personal death. Karl Rahner has said: We have only to recall that death, as an act of man, is pre-cisely that event which gathers up the whole of the personal human life of the individual into one consummation. We have only, too, to recall, as Eutychius (A.D. 582) said, that there oc-curs "pragmatically" in death what had occurred mystically at the sacramental heights of Christian experience, in Baptism and in the Eucharist, namely our assimilation to the death of the Lord.~ And the death of the Lord was not an easy one. But self-chosen mortification, we affirm, performs ex-actly the same function, and that is one of the reasons it is so necessary. Just as personal death demands activity on the part of the Christian, so should our mortification, for mortification prepares us for and establishes a begin-ning and an acceptance of our final assimilation to the death of the Lord. Acceptance of suffering, of the crosses meted out to us in our apostolate, has great value; but it does not reach the depths of the personality as our self-chosen acts do. It is easier to accept .the loss of something we hold dear than to throw it away of ourselves. The blame can al-ways be put on circumstance, on someone else, even on God; and this is a consoling thought, for it is hard to ~a Karl Rahner, S.J., On the Theology of Death (New York: Herder and Herder, 1964), p. 77. blame ourselves, to freely commit ourselves to a dying in Christ. Penances imposed from without are .not free from the nonchalance and superficiality of routine. What may pass for a religious act may often be unthinking obedience. As Fr. Rahner says: One has only to have heard something, however little, about depth psychology, repression, substitution, self-deception, etc., to have to agree that thousands of "religious" and "moral" acts can take place in man which are induced by training, imitation, suggestion, mere instruction from without and a "good will" which does not reach to the real kernel of the person; acts which are not really religious acts because they do not stem from that level of personality, supernaturally elevated and ab-solutely individual, whose free fulfillment they must be if they are to signify, before God, the creation of an eternally valid life?' To maturely and effectively create a situation in which I turn back upon myself the hand of penance and deal a death-blow to self-love, is a fearful thing. Self-love is frightened of it; but self-love, inasmuch as it opposes God's interests and plans for me, must be hammered, molded, that a "new man" might appear whose affections are ordered to one end: that the Lord may appear in us. This creation of an act of mortification, then, reaches profound depths; it engages the whole personality, calls for a personal commitment that acceptance of suffering alone cannot command. What St. Paul calIs sarx--"im-morality, uncleanness, lust, evil desire and covetousness" (Col 3:5)---is rooted out only with dogged and ruthless persistence. "This kind can be cast out only by prayer and fasting" (Mk 9:18). Those who would reject all forms of mortification are, unwittingly, Platonists--any of the forms of false Gnosticism--for they make of us angels who do not need to be on the offensive against attacks of the "flesh"; they would not subscribe to a real Incarnation. Freely-chosen acts of mortification do prepare us for death because they anticipate it; but they also prepare us for the moral and physical suffering which we have admitted will be ours in the apostolate. There is no question of will power here: performing ten acts of morti-fication will not make my will ten times stronger than it was. It does increase our faith, our insight into the suffering Christ as He appears in mankind. We cannot make quick improvisations when Christ approaches in the sufferings we have not chosen. If we have begged for the grace of faith--for that is what we do when we "practice" mortification--it will not be lacking when the crosses He has prepared for us appear. To recognize Christ, where He is and who He is, is the fruit of a life of faith; this does not come full-blown from our hearts; it is the result of much hard labor. The Christian Commitment, p. 88. + + Mortification VOLUME 24, 1965 William ~. Rewak, SJ. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS Besides, Christ has given us an example. It is surely not a coincidence that before His public life He fasted and prayed in the desert for forty days. This unique and signal attention to the Father for the good of men is our invitation to imitate Christ at this salvific moment of His life. We need not retire to the desert, conceived of as a geographical place. But the inner quiet, the fast-ing, doing battle with each one's personal "devil" re-stores an equilibrium that leaves us docile to the inspira-tions of the Spirit. Some type of solitude is necessary for every Christian, be he a contemplative, a diocesan priest, a lay apostle, or the busy parent of a large family. This solitude will take different forms, dictated by the person's own. spiritual potential, the age he lives in, the labors he must perform as a citizen in a highly complex social and economic structure. But some type of inner quiet seems mandatory for true growth in the Christian spirit: Solitude is a terrible trial, for it serves to crack open and burst apart the shell of our superficial securities. It opens out to us the unknown abyss that we all carry within us. And. soli-tude discloses the fact that these abysses are haunted: it is not only the depths of our own soul, unknown to us, that we dis-cover, but the obscure powers that are as it were lurking there, whose slaves we must inevitably remain as long as we are not aware of them. In truth, this awareness would destroy us, if it were not illuminated by the light of faith. Only Christ,, can open out to us with impunity "the mystery of iniquity, be-cause he alone, in us today as ]or us in the past, can confront it successfully.~ ~Bouyer, Spirituality, p. 313. Apropos of the "flight into the desert," Father Bouyer is at pains to dispel the misconceived notions surrounding the early Christian hermits. They were not inspired by net-Platonic spirituality; on the contrary, he states, there was nothing more evangelical than their primary motivation. Speaking of St. Antony, he says, "Anchoritism did not make Antony a con-templative unconcerned with the fate of his brothers; it made him a spiritual father beyond all others" (p. 315). He quotes the beautiful passage ~rom the Vita of St. Antony where, after twenty years, friends break down the hermit's door in their enthusiasm to be with him and to imitate him. This is what they find: "Antony came out, as one initiated into the mysteries in the secret of the temple and inspired by a divine breath. Thus, for the first time, those who had come saw him. They were lost in wonder: his aspect had remained the same; he was neither fat from lack of physical exercise nor emaciated by his fastings and struggle against the demons, but just as they had known him before his withdrawal. Spiritually pure, he was neither shrunken with regret nor swollen with pleasure; in him neither laughter nor sadness; the multitude did not trouble him, having so many people greeting him gave him no excessive joy: always equal to himself, governed by reason, natural" (p. 314). Antony recognized that solitude allowed him to discover the obscure forces he had within himself and to discover the means to cast these forces out. Solitude was not an end in itself: it was a victory of one Spirit over the others that made him seek it. "Men can no longer tempt him, separate him from God. On the contrary, it is he who now finds himself in a position to guide them, to lead them to God. Here Mortification in the form of a retreat, in the form of fasting, became a part of Christ's plan of the redemp-tion; we can do no better than to make it a part of the role we play in the redemption¯ And this is surely the key: by mortification we enter into the Christ-mystery. We become His Body, resuming in our lives His redemptive acts, pleading with the Father for the salvation of man; for mortification is a language, not a sign. It is a response to a Person who has initiated a dialogue with me through baptism and the sacraments and through His reve~led Word. God's action in history is a word to me now; I can only trespond by placing myself before Him as His son, by per~forming acts which indicate my willingness to accept His love, to treat Him as Father¯ I accept Him as the bes.t part of my life, the whole of my life. This is prayer, of course; and mortification, as a language, is an essent, al part of my prayer life. All of my acts as a Christian. are a prayer, and they all contribute to the consolation I should experience--as a Christian--in formal~ prayer. The formal prayer itself fills the reservoirs of f~ith and love, just as formal, self-chosen acts of moruficatlon do, so that my effectiveness in the Mystical Body, through Christ in me, is increased a hundredfold. My formal mortification will result in lived mortification. I The af-fections become ordered, their false security uhmasked by a judicious use of corporal and spiritual p.enances, and the inmost person is calmly and confidently la~d open to receive God's Word. I It must not be forgotten, however, that theseI acts are relative to my present insertion into the mystery of Christ; and so all must be ruled by an expertl discern-ment of spirits. To codify too carefully pemtentlal prac-tices in the novitiate, for example, destroys the'ir mean-ing and their effectiveness; it stultifies ~nventlveness and I often just creates matter for humorous stones. Young religious, no less than young lay people, must be edu-cated in the reality of sin in their lives, in the part they must play in salvation history; and only in this way, I ¯ through the direction of a wise spiritual father, ,will they discover the path of mortification which is suitable to them. result Uniformity of ascetical practices is often the~ of pragmatic spirituality. If everybody performs an act of mortification at a certain time in a predetermaned way, there is an implied assurance that all are r~ortifying themselves. This is hardly the case. St. Ignatius, la mystic who was keenly aware of the value of acts of Oortifica-anchoritism reveals how httle it is a way of escaping from charity. On the contrary, ~t ~s simply the means of effectively ga~m.ng integral charity" (p. 315). ÷ ÷ Mortification VOLUME 24, 1965 379 ÷ William ]. Rewak~ sd. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 380 tion, refused to set down any rules governing their performance: ¯. it does not seem good that in those things which regard ~Pgnsr,a ywear,t cmheindigtast iaonnd a ondth setru dayu,s oter rciotirepso,r aaln eyx reurclies essh souuclhd abse f alasti-d down for them except that which a discreet charity will dictate to each: provided, nevertheless, that their confessor is always consulted . ~ It is for this reason some countries and dioceses have cur-tailed or abolished the fasting rules. This action does not indicate the depreciation of the value of penance; it has been made obvious that the Christian obligation of penance now devolves upon the individual who, guided by the Holy Spirit and insured against error by the advice of his confessor, will perform more spontaneously and therefore more effectively the penitential practices suitable for him.27 It is not necessary that mortification be identified with corporal austerities, though these will ordinarily be useful to some extent. The best way 0f seeking mortifica-tion is in the sphere of human relations. There is much need here for broadening the scope of our penitential practices: seeking the solutions to others' problems, standing up for others' rights in the face of ridicule, intelligent obedience to legitimate authority--being a Christian individual, in other words, in a world where conformity is a despotic fashion. Father David Stanley says this was the real mistake of the Judaizers: they could not be Christian individuals in a society which con-sidered the cross of Christ a folly and a stumbling-block.~ s "As many as wish to please in the flesh compel you to be circumcised simply that they may not suffer persecution for the cross of Christ" (Gal 6:12). The state of mortification is a state of love; for love is the source of the dialogue that takes place between ~".non videtur in iis quae ad orationem, meditationem et studium pertinent, ut nec in corporali exercitatione ieiuniorum, vigiliarum aut aliarum return ad austeritatem vel corporis casti-gationem spectantium, ulla regula eis praescribenda, nisi quam discreta caritas unicuique dictaverit; dum tamen semper Confessarius consulatur . " Constitutions o! the Society of Jesus, P. VI, c. 3, n. 1 08~). ~ See Paul J. Bernadicou, $.J., "Penance and Freedom," R~vmw FOR Ra~LIOIOUS, v. 23 (1964), pp. 418-9, Father Bernadicou writes with conviction and persuasiveness of the need for expert spiritual guid-ance in the sphere of mortification. Karl Rahner applies this same principle of each one's unique entrance into and expression of the mystery of Christ to the problem of the relation between the indi-vidual and the Church, and here also insists upon the application of the discernment of spirits. See "The Individual and the Church," Nature and Grace, trans. Dinah Wharton (London: Sheed and Ward, 1963). ~ David Stanley, s.J., Christ's Resurrection in Pauline Soteriology (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1961)0 p. 78. man and God and results in man's response of faith, prayer, and acts of mortification. Love is forgetfulness of self because of the neighbor who is loved with the charity of Christ, and what else but this is an act of true penance? Kenunciation, then, cannot but be an exer-cise in joy, for where there is love, there is joy. Our self-chosen acts of mortification, performed at times in great spiritual unrest, are tokens of confidence: Man implicitly recognizes that he does not know where his true happiness lies and that it is hidden from him, but God knows it ~or him. He perceives it through the signs which reveal it to him: the escape from Egypt, the land of slavery, the crossing of the desert under God's guidance, the hope which dwelt in the heart of the wandering host making its way to the Promised Land. The desert is the apprenticeship of an austere joy which is like the dawn on the horizon of conscience.~ We do share in Christ's resurrection, having shared in his death; and consolation will ever be the keynote of authentic Christian experience. But the fullness of joy is not yet ours for we live in the eschatological age, an age of tension between time and eternity, hope and fulfillment. Acts of mortification take on, in this con-text, the character of witness. Asceticism is the eschato-logical attitude of the Church, an attitude that is most acute in religiou
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Donald Trump and Kamala Harris not only proved last night that they have no fleshed out foreign policy visions of their own, but that they feel most comfortable pantomiming like they do, using bafflingly cartoonish language about each other, playing so fast and loose with history, facts, and figures so as to make the entire debate over what to do in Ukraine and Gaza absolutely incoherent.So much for "America First."An "America First" answer to the question posed to Harris about what she would do about the more than 40,000 Palestinian deaths in Gaza — which the moderator pointed out Harris was "concerned" about nine months ago — would be to say that continuing to fund it directly would ultimately hurt America, put our troops in the region at risk, and doom our integrity as nation of laws and a beacon of moral clarity forever. At the very least, she could point out that Benjamin Netanyahu is a bad faith actor who represents his people but not the American people, and we cannot aid or assist him if he continues to flout the Geneva Conventions in a desperate bid to stay in power. Full stop.Instead she says: "What we know is that this war must end it and immediately, and the way it will end is we need a ceasefire deal, and we need the hostages out, and so we will continue to work around the clock on that, also understanding that we must chart a course for a two state solution, and in that solution, there must be security for the Israeli people and Israel, and an equal measure for the Palestinians. But the one thing I will assure you always, I will always give Israel the ability to defend itself, in particular, as it relates to as it relates to Iran, and any threat that Iran and its proxies pose to Israel."Trump for his part, decided to lay napalm down, but unlike the Trump of 2016 who emphasized that it was not in the best interest of the United States to be sucked into other countries' wars and conflicts, that we should not be the world's police, he chose to accuse Kamala of "hating Israel." When asked how he would negotiate with Netanyahu and Hamas to get the hostages out and to stop civilian suffering — a layup question for the man who loves "to talk" really — he said this:"(Harris) she hates Israel. She wouldn't even meet with Netanyahu when he went to Congress to make a very important speech. She refused to be there because she was at a sorority party of hers. She went to go to the sorority party. She hates Israel. If she's president, I believe that Israel will not exist within two years from now, and I've been pretty good at predictions, and I hope I'm wrong about that one. She hates Israel at the same time, in her own way, she hates the Arab population because the whole place is going to get blown up, Arabs, Jewish people, Israel will be gone. It would have never happened. Iran was broke under Donald Trump." Onto Ukraine. Trump had one of his brighter moments in an otherwise dim evening of missed opportunities (like saying nothing when Harris boasted endorsements from Iraq War architect Dick Cheney and daughter Liz) when he said he wanted to end the war in Ukraine and would do so by bringing Ukrainian President Zelensky and Russian President Putin together in a room to resolve it in order to avoid more death and "World War III." He then repeated unexplained assertions about "millions" dead (without clarifying who, by whom, or where) and ticked off a few points in his usual jag about NATO members not paying enough into the system. But his grasp of why that war happened and how it would suddenly "end" began and ended with his concept that Biden was "weak," and that Harris is "weak." It was, frankly, weak.Harris, for her part, acted as though it was still 2022 and would be forever as long as the U.S. kept funding the war. Again, no real explanation as to why this was in anyone's best interest, even Ukraine's, to continue on this course, other than, you know, Russian domination of the rest of Europe."If Donald Trump were president, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now and understand what that would mean, because Putin's agenda is not just about Ukraine. Understand why the European allies and our NATO allies are thankful that you are no longer president, and that we understand the importance of the greatest military alliance the world has ever known, which is NATO, and what we have done to preserve the ability of Zelensky and the Ukrainians to fight for their independence. Otherwise, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe, starting with Poland."On Afghanistan, oh my. It was a good idea to get out, agreed by both. But why? Doesn't matter. What matters is that according to Harris, Trump, "negotiated directly with a terrorist organization called the Taliban. The negotiation involved the Taliban getting 5000 terrorists, Taliban terrorists, released. And get this. No, get this. And the president at the time, invited the Taliban to Camp David, a place of storied significance for us as Americans, a place where we honor the importance of American diplomacy, where we invite and receive respected world leaders." She also pulled the "as of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone," which is a lie and everyone knows it. Just ask our troops getting droned in Iraq and Syria. And the U.S. Navy might have something to say about what they have been doing stationed in the Red Sea for the last 10 months.Instead of owning that his negotiations helped to end one of the biggest U.S. foreign policy failures of the last century, Trump boasted that he threatened to blow up the Taliban leader's house and that is how he got the Taliban to stop shooting our soldiers. He briefly mentioned the negotiations with the Taliban, and how it was right to get out of the war, but then went straight into blaming the Biden administration for the catastrophic withdrawal of August 2021. "And by the way, that's why Russia attacked Ukraine, because they saw how incompetent she and her boss are." China, where's China? The only mention of Asia in the debate last night was over Trump's proposed new tariffs and Harris avoiding the question as to why Biden never lifted the ones he imposed during Trump's presidency. Oh yeah, and Harris accusing Trump of saying nice things about Xi Jinping during COVID. The rest of the foreign policy discussion went like this: Harris: "It is well known he exchanged love letters with Kim Jong Un and it is absolutely well known that these dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again because they're so clear, they can manipulate you with flattery and favors, and that is why so many military leaders who you have worked with have told me you are a disgrace."Trump: "(Hungary's president) Victor Orban said you need Trump back as president. They were afraid of him. China was afraid. And I don't like to use the word afraid, but I'm just quoting him. North Korea was afraid of him. Look at what's going on with North Korea. By the way, he said Russia was afraid of him. … He said the most respected, most feared person is Donald Trump. We had no problems when Trump was president."After this debate, the American voter, the American people, should be afraid. To be sure, they will be voting on a whole host of issues and opinions that likely have nothing to do with Gaza, Ukraine, NATO, or the whims of the world's strongmen. But to call any of this "America first" is pure gaslighting. On foreign policy, we come in dead last.
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FÜRTH, GERMANY — There are tragic ironies in life. And then there is the life of Henry Kissinger.In 1938, as a teenager, he was forced to flee his hometown in Fürth, southeastern Germany. It was his mother, Paula Kissinger, who foresaw that the Nazi Party's antisemitic measures would only grow more dangerous and organized the family's escape to the United States. At least 13 close relatives would die in the Holocaust. Expelled from the world he had always known simply because he was Jewish, Henry Kissinger started a new life in the U.S. that would lead him to the highest echelons of power.In his role as U.S. national security adviser (1969-1975) and secretary of state (1973-1977), Kissinger played a decisive role in the expansion of the Vietnam War to Cambodia and Laos and the overthrow of democratically elected leaders such as Salvador Allende in Chile. This, however, did not preclude Kissinger from receiving honorary citizenship on his return to Fürth in 1998. The man who had been the victim of a deadly hatred that would probably have ended his life had he stayed in Germany was now, six decades later, and despite his responsibility for war crimes, a role model in Fürth.During his last visit to Fürth in May 2023 to celebrate his 100th birthday, Kissinger was feted by Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany's president, and Markus Söder, the minister president of Bavaria, the federal state where Fürth is located. In a video message, Steinmeier addressed Kissinger to tell him that, "this very special mixture of scholarship and political reason, which you embody in person, is unparalleled."In his visit to Fürth, Kissinger inaugurated the exhibition "Henry – World Influencer No. 1: The History of the Family Kissinger from Fürth." The exhibition is located in the Ludwig Erhard Zentrum, dedicated to the man who was chancellor of West Germany from 1963 to 1966 and, like Kissinger, a native of Fürth.It would have been unreasonable to expect an exhibition inaugurated by Kissinger himself to shed much light on the darkest chapters of the statesman's life. Moreover, the biggest part of the exhibition is dedicated to the Kissinger family history, not to Henry Kissinger's political trajectory.Still, the approach to Kissinger's years in power can only be defined as hagiographic. In one of the panels, for instance, we read that, in his role as Nixon's national security advisor, Kissinger "aimed to end the Vietnam War and free America from foreign policy isolation. While the war seemed to be escalating with the bombardment of Cambodia, Kissinger was conducting top secret peace negotiations."The expansion of the war to Cambodia is presented in a passive voice as if it had nothing to do with Kissinger. Facts, however, are stubborn. A Pentagon report released in 1973 confirmed that the close to 4,000 bombing raids against Cambodia in 1969 and 1970 were directly approved by the National Security Council headed by Kissinger. Between 1969 and 1973, the U.S. dropped thrice as many munitions over Cambodia — despite not being at war with the country — as it did in Japan during World War II. Leaving aside the bombardment of Laos and Vietnam, the air campaign over Cambodia resulted in the deaths of 50,000 civilians according to Kissinger's own estimates, and over 150,000 according to independent studies.As for Kissinger's role in ending official U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War by negotiating the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, he won a Nobel Peace Prize for it. It was another tragic irony in Kissinger's life, considering that he helped future president Richard Nixon in his sabotage of Lyndon B. Johnson's 1968 peace initiative to end the war in Vietnam. Nixon was worried that successful peace talks would lead to his defeat in the 1968 presidential race against Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic candidate and Johnson's vice president. Therefore, and as documented by hand-written notes, Nixon ordered H. R. Haldeman, his closest aide (later to become Nixon's White House chief of staff), to "monkey wrench" the peace talks. Kissinger proved instrumental in achieving this.In his 2001 book "The Trial Against Henry Kissinger," Christopher Hitchens shed light on Kissinger's role. Kissinger, an unofficial consultant to the American delegation negotiating an end to the Vietnam War in Paris in 1968, became "a source of hints and tips and early warnings of official intentions" for the Nixon campaign, according to Hitchens. Kissinger informed Nixon that Johnson was considering suspending the bombing of North Vietnam to facilitate the negotiations in Paris. Armed with these secret details, the Nixon campaign contacted the South Vietnamese government through intermediaries and promised it a better deal if Nixon won the election. Once Johnson actually suspended the bombing, South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu pulled out of the peace talks.The exhibition dedicated to Kissinger in his hometown of Fürth, as well as the guided tour of the exhibition, stress the image of the statesman as the paradigmatic practitioner of Realpolitik. Thus, we read that Kissinger knew more than anyone else that "all states have interests, but they are rarely identical." Kissinger's role in the opening of diplomatic relations with Communist China has weighed heavily in the arguments of those who see Kissinger as mainly concerned with national interests. Similarly, Kissinger's scholarship, such as his 1994 book "Diplomacy," displays a very clear interest in the balance of power. But there are reasons to believe that Kissinger, who has often been presented to us as the paradigmatic realist, was equally influenced by ideological considerations in many of his actions. Take, for instance, the overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973. This is the only slightly critical reference to Kissinger's political trajectory that can be found in the exhibition in Fürth. In a picture, Kissinger is seen smiling while shaking hands with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who took power after Allende killed himself during the army's assault against the presidential palace.Five days after the coup, in a conversation with Nixon, Kissinger said, "We didn't do it. I mean we helped them." This modesty was not justified. In October 1970, when Allende had already won the presidential elections but had still not been confirmed as president by the Chilean Congress, Kissinger met with the CIA's deputy director of plans, who subsequently transmitted to the CIA station in Chile that "it is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup."Chile has the largest copper reserves in the world. After they were nationalized in 1971, the Allende government decided not to pay compensation to the U.S. companies that owned them. This enraged the Nixon administration but was hardly a threat to U.S. national security. The U.S. policy to overthrow Allende had little to do with Realpolitik. Ideology helps explain it far better.Jorge Heine, a Research Professor at Boston University, writes that "what made Kissinger take such deadly aim at Allende was his new political model, a "peaceful road to socialism." If the Chilean model was replicated elsewhere, the U.S. narrative of political freedom being possible only in a free-market system would have been in trouble.After Kissinger's death, political analysts all over the world sought to understand why the statesman generated such great fascination in both admirers and detractors. Part of the explanation is that, through Kissinger's biography, one can understand many of the key events that shaped the last 100 years.He was there when fascism rose in Europe, fought Nazi Germany in the Second World War, and held power during the height of the Cold War. He remained a sought-after author, consultant, and commentator in the following decades, exerting influence on current discussions, such as the rise of China. If one had to reach an assessment of Kissinger's political life based only on the exhibition devoted to him in Fürth, one could be forgiven to think that his trajectory was exemplary. This, to put it gently, would be a very mistaken assumption.
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"I want to put readers in the shoes of these people. Imagine their lives," Elejla said. "They are people who have the same dreams as you, the same hopes.""I did not feel like we are in a new year. Nothing has changed," Palestinian journalist Ruwaida Amer wrote via direct Twitter message. "I would be lying if I told you that I understand what is happening around me. Everything is changing for the worse quickly, and we do not know what will happen to us the next day."A viral photo of Al-Jazeera Bureau Chief Wael al Dahdouh touching a press helmet placed on his son's grave rung in the new year in the Gaza Strip. His son, Al-Jazeera cameraman Hamzah al Dahdouh, and freelance videographer Mustafa Thuraya were killed in an Israeli airstrike on January 9 while driving to an assignment close to Rafah, near the Gaza-Egypt border. Wael al Dahdouh is representative to many not only of the tragedy faced by thousands of Gazan families but the perseverance of Palestinian journalists. Following his son's funeral, Wael al Dahdouh told an NBC news crew in Gaza that, despite his pain, he would continue his work "as long as we are alive and breathing."This sentiment is echoed by other journalists in Gaza who were forced to face the question of whether to continue risking their lives by reporting."I feel that I will be killed at any moment. But what motivates me the most to keep working is my feeling of duty as a journalist," journalist Aseel Mousa said. "I feel that this is my responsibility."Mousa is one of the many Palestinian journalists living in the Gaza Strip. The 26-year-old writes articles on Palestinian deaths and profiles of those still living in the region, despite the increasingly dire living conditions in central Gaza.Mousa and her family were displaced from their home in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza on October 15, joining the over 100,000 Palestinians living in the Maghazi refugee camp. She has since lost nine of her relatives, including seven children, in an Israeli air raid on her granduncle's home. The deadliest conflict for journalists The Israel-Hamas War is the deadliest conflict for journalists in modern history—with more journalists killed in the first ten weeks of the conflict, more than in any single country over an entire year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Seventy-nine journalists have been killed since the onset of the Israel-Gaza War on October 7: fifty-four of which were Palestinian, four Israeli, and three Lebanese located on Lebanon's southern border with Israel. "Anytime you have the killing of a journalist, you're killing people whose job it is to tell what other people don't want to be told," Daniel Kubiske, co-chair of the International Community of the Society of Professional Journalists, said. "Any intimidation of a journalist is a threat to general freedom."After Mahmoud al-Nouq was killed by an Israeli airstrike on October 22, Mousa recognized the painful responsibility, as a journalist, that comes with surviving and feeling the need to tell the stories of those who do not. Mousa hopes that the world will not view her colleague as merely a statistic. "I actually found it so difficult to write the story of my colleague who was killed in the Occupation in Gaza," Mousa said. "I thought it was my duty to let the world know he was so ambitious, so hardworking, such a dreamer. I did not want the world to forget him."Reporting challenges in Gaza Though the Reporters Without Borders and the International Center for Journalists accused Israel of targeting journalists and called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate journalist deaths, Israel's military continues to deny the accusations. Israel also argues that the ICC does not have the jurisdiction to intervene in their state, as Israel is not one of the 122 ICC members. This leaves many Palestinian journalists out of reach of international aid."We face many difficulties. There is no protection for us," Palestinian journalist and video reporter, Amer wrote. "There are many institutions that care about journalists in the world but cannot protect them." The tensions surrounding the international community's claims that Israel is targeting journalists are heightened in the context of Israel limiting access of international journalists to the region. Israel's Supreme Court upheld the ruling that international journalists could not be allowed anywhere without a military escort."Nobody in the military wants journalists there," Kubiske said. "So, I'm not surprised that the IDF is trying to keep journalists out. But it's important for journalists to be there to tell the truth, to tell what is really happening, to tell the human story of the devastation of war, and of the destruction that comes with it."Sherif Mansour, coordinator for the CPJ's Middle East program, told NPR that barring foreign journalists from entering the region further enables communication blackouts in Gaza, where electricity and internet links are already down. Consequently, there is little accountability for IDF operations during these periods.Mousa explained that writing articles without timely information from the rest of the world is extremely challenging. She has to navigate multiple barriers and resort to unconventional methods to get her stories published."Accurately reporting with the blackout is very dangerous and very hard," Mousa said. "I send my phone and my laptop to someone who has a generator in their house and can charge it for me, and, sometimes, I use pen and paper to write the articles. I write, and when I have internet connection, I send it to the media outlets."Journalists' resilience Amer explains that she continues to report from Gaza despite these difficulties because she wants to highlight the importance of each victim's life and ensure the rest of the world does not ignore the attacks on Palestinians in Gaza."The victims who were killed in this war all have beautiful life stories, and they are creative. In various fields, it is not just numbers mentioned on the media," Amer wrote. "What is worse is that the Western media forced Gaza to mention the names and identity numbers of each victim in order to believe that there was a complete extermination of people in Gaza."Sewar Elejla, a Palestinian medical researcher, left Gaza three weeks before the October 7 attacks and now writes articles on the Israel-Gaza conflict from Canada. Reflecting on her time living in the region, she explained that many Palestinians do not have access to internet or news, so journalists are their only connection with the global community."Before I wasn't exposed to news. I lived in many wars before. Sometimes there is no electricity during the whole war, no internet," Elejla said. "But now, I feel I have a duty to them, to showcase their cause, showcase their suffering."Elejla said that the main goal of her writing, though from afar, is to highlight the humanity of Palestinians."I want to put readers in the shoes of these people. Imagine their lives," Elejla said. "They are people who have the same dreams as you, the same hopes. So just feel them and change your mind about them."Though journalists continue to be killed at unprecedented rates—and for some journalists simply surviving has become all they can hope for—for many the fight to report news from Gaza continues. A group of Palestinian journalists sat gathered inside Naseer Hospital during a night of heavy air raids by Israeli forces in Southern Gaza, according to a December 4 video. Together, in an act of solidarity, they sang the Arabic song "We Will Stay Here."The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not express the official position of the Wilson Center.
Eine dauerhafte Verfügbarkeit ist nicht garantiert und liegt vollumfänglich in den Händen der Herausgeber:innen. Bitte erstellen Sie sich selbständig eine Kopie falls Sie diese Quelle zitieren möchten.
"I want to put readers in the shoes of these people. Imagine their lives," Elejla said. "They are people who have the same dreams as you, the same hopes.""I did not feel like we are in a new year. Nothing has changed," Palestinian journalist Ruwaida Amer wrote via direct Twitter message. "I would be lying if I told you that I understand what is happening around me. Everything is changing for the worse quickly, and we do not know what will happen to us the next day."A viral photo of Al-Jazeera Bureau Chief Wael al Dahdouh touching a press helmet placed on his son's grave rung in the new year in the Gaza Strip. His son, Al-Jazeera cameraman Hamzah al Dahdouh, and freelance videographer Mustafa Thuraya were killed in an Israeli airstrike on January 9 while driving to an assignment close to Rafah, near the Gaza-Egypt border. Wael al Dahdouh is representative to many not only of the tragedy faced by thousands of Gazan families but the perseverance of Palestinian journalists. Following his son's funeral, Wael al Dahdouh told an NBC news crew in Gaza that, despite his pain, he would continue his work "as long as we are alive and breathing."This sentiment is echoed by other journalists in Gaza who were forced to face the question of whether to continue risking their lives by reporting."I feel that I will be killed at any moment. But what motivates me the most to keep working is my feeling of duty as a journalist," journalist Aseel Mousa said. "I feel that this is my responsibility."Mousa is one of the many Palestinian journalists living in the Gaza Strip. The 26-year-old writes articles on Palestinian deaths and profiles of those still living in the region, despite the increasingly dire living conditions in central Gaza.Mousa and her family were displaced from their home in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza on October 15, joining the over 100,000 Palestinians living in the Maghazi refugee camp. She has since lost nine of her relatives, including seven children, in an Israeli air raid on her granduncle's home. The deadliest conflict for journalists The Israel-Hamas War is the deadliest conflict for journalists in modern history—with more journalists killed in the first ten weeks of the conflict, more than in any single country over an entire year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Seventy-nine journalists have been killed since the onset of the Israel-Gaza War on October 7: fifty-four of which were Palestinian, four Israeli, and three Lebanese located on Lebanon's southern border with Israel. "Anytime you have the killing of a journalist, you're killing people whose job it is to tell what other people don't want to be told," Daniel Kubiske, co-chair of the International Community of the Society of Professional Journalists, said. "Any intimidation of a journalist is a threat to general freedom."After Mahmoud al-Nouq was killed by an Israeli airstrike on October 22, Mousa recognized the painful responsibility, as a journalist, that comes with surviving and feeling the need to tell the stories of those who do not. Mousa hopes that the world will not view her colleague as merely a statistic. "I actually found it so difficult to write the story of my colleague who was killed in the Occupation in Gaza," Mousa said. "I thought it was my duty to let the world know he was so ambitious, so hardworking, such a dreamer. I did not want the world to forget him."Reporting challenges in Gaza Though the Reporters Without Borders and the International Center for Journalists accused Israel of targeting journalists and called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate journalist deaths, Israel's military continues to deny the accusations. Israel also argues that the ICC does not have the jurisdiction to intervene in their state, as Israel is not one of the 122 ICC members. This leaves many Palestinian journalists out of reach of international aid."We face many difficulties. There is no protection for us," Palestinian journalist and video reporter, Amer wrote. "There are many institutions that care about journalists in the world but cannot protect them." The tensions surrounding the international community's claims that Israel is targeting journalists are heightened in the context of Israel limiting access of international journalists to the region. Israel's Supreme Court upheld the ruling that international journalists could not be allowed anywhere without a military escort."Nobody in the military wants journalists there," Kubiske said. "So, I'm not surprised that the IDF is trying to keep journalists out. But it's important for journalists to be there to tell the truth, to tell what is really happening, to tell the human story of the devastation of war, and of the destruction that comes with it."Sherif Mansour, coordinator for the CPJ's Middle East program, told NPR that barring foreign journalists from entering the region further enables communication blackouts in Gaza, where electricity and internet links are already down. Consequently, there is little accountability for IDF operations during these periods.Mousa explained that writing articles without timely information from the rest of the world is extremely challenging. She has to navigate multiple barriers and resort to unconventional methods to get her stories published."Accurately reporting with the blackout is very dangerous and very hard," Mousa said. "I send my phone and my laptop to someone who has a generator in their house and can charge it for me, and, sometimes, I use pen and paper to write the articles. I write, and when I have internet connection, I send it to the media outlets."Journalists' resilience Amer explains that she continues to report from Gaza despite these difficulties because she wants to highlight the importance of each victim's life and ensure the rest of the world does not ignore the attacks on Palestinians in Gaza."The victims who were killed in this war all have beautiful life stories, and they are creative. In various fields, it is not just numbers mentioned on the media," Amer wrote. "What is worse is that the Western media forced Gaza to mention the names and identity numbers of each victim in order to believe that there was a complete extermination of people in Gaza."Sewar Elejla, a Palestinian medical researcher, left Gaza three weeks before the October 7 attacks and now writes articles on the Israel-Gaza conflict from Canada. Reflecting on her time living in the region, she explained that many Palestinians do not have access to internet or news, so journalists are their only connection with the global community."Before I wasn't exposed to news. I lived in many wars before. Sometimes there is no electricity during the whole war, no internet," Elejla said. "But now, I feel I have a duty to them, to showcase their cause, showcase their suffering."Elejla said that the main goal of her writing, though from afar, is to highlight the humanity of Palestinians."I want to put readers in the shoes of these people. Imagine their lives," Elejla said. "They are people who have the same dreams as you, the same hopes. So just feel them and change your mind about them."Though journalists continue to be killed at unprecedented rates—and for some journalists simply surviving has become all they can hope for—for many the fight to report news from Gaza continues. A group of Palestinian journalists sat gathered inside Naseer Hospital during a night of heavy air raids by Israeli forces in Southern Gaza, according to a December 4 video. Together, in an act of solidarity, they sang the Arabic song "We Will Stay Here."The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not express the official position of the Wilson Center.
Die Inhalte der verlinkten Blogs und Blog Beiträge unterliegen in vielen Fällen keiner redaktionellen Kontrolle.
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United States policy toward Israel's war in Gaza was neatly summarized by Secretary of State Antony Blinken on November 30: "Israel has one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world. It is capable of neutralizing the threat posed by Hamas while minimizing harm to innocent civilians. And it has an obligation to do so." This posture — destroy Hamas but do so in observance of the laws of war — is not that of the administration alone. It has been widely embraced by official Washington. A key defense of what would emerge as the hallmark of the Biden administration's Gaza outlook came from Jo-Ann Mort and Michael Walzer in the New Republic on October 18. "A just war requires the defeat of Hamas," they wrote. "It is a maxim of just war theory that the rules of war cannot make it impossible to fight a just war. There has to be a way to fight."In their view, the best way was "to fight with restraint, to reject indiscriminate bombing and shelling, to respect enemy civilians (many, many Gazans are opposed to Hamas), and take necessary risks to reduce their risks, and finally to maintain a clear goal: defeat for Hamas. Nothing more."Walzer is the author of Just and Unjust Wars, a hugely influential treatise on morality in war that has gone through successive editions since its publication in 1977. Walzer's meditation on the just war was especially impressive for taking on a wide range of historical examples, but it was written under the shadow of the war in Vietnam. Walzer condemned that war not only as an unjustified intervention but also as one that was "carried on in so brutal a manner that even had it initially been defensible, it would have to be condemned, not in this or that aspect but generally." In his treatise, Walzer closely considered both jus ad bellum (the right of going to war) and jus in bello (the law governing its conduct). As Walzer noted, "considerations of jus ad bellum and jus in bello are logically independent, and the judgments we make in terms of one and the other are not necessarily the same." But in the case of Vietnam, he argued, they came together. "The war cannot be won, and it should not be won. It cannot be won, because the only available strategy involves a war against civilians; and it should not be won, because the degree of civilian support that rules out alternative strategies also makes the guerillas the legitimate rulers of the country." Do not these strictures apply to Israel's war in Gaza? Hamas hides behind civilians, or is rather closely intermingled with them, as the Viet Cong once were. It has enjoyed an equal or greater amount of support from the local population. Its acts of assassination and terrorism fall far short, numerically, of those committed by the VC. Walzer was rightly shocked by the civilian toll in Vietnam, which saw a civilian-combatant fatality ratio of approximately two to one. In Gaza, the proportion of civilian-to-combatant deaths is at least five to one and probably much greater. Israeli leaders have made clear that their war is on the whole population. Their criteria for when to bomb, aided by AI, has blown past previous restraints. Another case taken up by Walzer in Just and Unjust Wars was America's atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The decision was justified at the time as the only way to avert the far larger casualties likely to ensue were the United States to have attempted an invasion of Japan. Walzer rejected this argument. "It does not have the form: if we don't do x (bomb cities), they will do y (win the war, establish tyrannical rule, slaughter their opponents)." Instead, the U.S. government in effect argued that "if we don't do x, we will do y." The real problem, Walzer argued, was the policy of unconditional surrender — that is, it had to do with U.S. war aims. Walzer approved the policy of unconditional surrender when applied to Germany — Hitler's regime represented a "supreme emergency" — but not when applied to Japan. "Japan's rulers were engaged in a more ordinary sort of military expansion, and all that was morally required was that they be defeated, not that they be conquered and totally overthrown," he wrote. Walzer's treatment of Vietnam and Hiroshima suggests that there are imperative reasons to stop short of total victory as a war aim, if the result of pursuing it is a moral enormity. If you have to commit wickedness on a titanic scale in order to achieve total victory, you should accept limited war and seek the containment of the enemy, not his obliteration. This is especially so, one might add, if the enemy one aims to annihilate elicits widespread sympathies elsewhere, making probable some kind of over-the-top retribution in the future. There are 2.2 million Gazans. There are 1.8 billion Muslims. Germany and Japan were friendless in 1945. It is obvious that Israel's war in Gaza bears no relationship to the war that Mort and Walzer recommended on October 18. Israel has not fought with restraint, has not rejected indiscriminate bombing and shelling, has not respected enemy civilians. Operation Swords of Iron has been instead the most elaborate and twisted application yet of the Dahiya Doctrine, Israel's longstanding war plan that makes a virtue out of wildly disproportionate retributions. That Israel intended to do this was apparent from the outset — 6,000 bombs were dropped in the war's first six days — but went strangely unnoticed by Mort and Walzer when their piece appeared. The authors stressed the need to get humanitarian aid into Gaza but didn't mention the Israeli blockade on all things requisite to life, a radical policy totally opposed to laws of war and imposed by Israel on the war's first day. In a subsequent interview on October 30, Walzer conceded that there was no justification for Israel's blockades of Gaza's electricity, water, and food supply, but also questioned the idea that a humanitarian pause would be justified before Hamas was defeated. "Acts that shock the moral conscience of mankind" was one of Walzer's most resonant phrases in Just and Unjust Wars. He meant by that "old-fashioned phrase" not the solipsistic prevarications of political leaders, but "the moral convictions of ordinary men and women, acquired in the course of their everyday activities." Clearly, Israel's war in Gaza has entailed a profound shock to these sensibilities. It is this revulsion, not sympathy for Hamas, that explains world-wide public opposition to what Israel is doing. From the beginning of the crisis, the Biden administration's approach to the war ran closely in parallel with the course recommended by Mort and Walzer. Eliminate Hamas. Do so while sparing civilians as much as possible. Then be sweet to the Palestinians and give them an independent state. Israel was happy to take the first part of this formula and to contemptuously reject the rest. Meanwhile, alongside these homilies to humane war, the United States has undertaken a vast effort to resupply Israel's stock of bombs. Confronting the escalating death toll, U.S. policymakers are dazed and confused. They're still on autopilot in support of Israel's war aim, while ineffectually shrieking in horror at the cost to Gaza's civilians. The truth is that there is no way to destroy Hamas without destroying Gaza. Contrary to Secretary Blinken's words (and Walzer's advice), Israel does not know how to destroy Hamas while minimizing harm to innocent civilians. Monumental harm to civilians follows from Israel's war aim of destroying Hamas, which the Biden administration and Walzer continue to endorse. That war aim stands in urgent need of reconsideration.Dear RS readers: It has been an extraordinary year and our editing team has been working overtime to make sure that we are covering the current conflicts with quality, fresh analysis that doesn't cleave to the mainstream orthodoxy or take official Washington and the commentariat at face value. Our staff reporters, experts, and outside writers offer top-notch, independent work, daily. Please consider making a tax-exempt, year-end contribution to Responsible Statecraft so that we can continue this quality coverage — which you will find nowhere else — into 2024. Happy Holidays!
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Every adaptation mining the vast troves of memory that we recall as our lives as readers of books and comics and watchers of film and television, but is known by its owners simply as intellectual property, always runs up against the singularity of the memory in adapting the generic nature of the property. Much of the politics of culture hinge on the conflict over the singular and generic nature of the memory. At times this politics takes the form as an attempt to retain some singular experience, a memory or attachment, against the commodification of culture and at other times it takes the form of an attempt to insist on this singular memory or experience as the only correct one. We are constantly trying to retain what is singular against what is interchangeable, which is, to some extent, a doomed project under capitalism. All of this is a set up of sorts to a very particular memory. I was not a huge fan of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, and to be honest I am not sure if I ever read the whole run, but I do have a very particular memory from a collected volume. In the story Dream, or Morpheus, tracks the Corinthian, the fugitive nightmare to Serial Killers convention, or as they call it, in a thinly veiled disguise a "Cereal Convention." After dispensing with the Corinthian Morpheus turns his attention to the audience of serial killers, or collectors, and offers the speech detailed in the following panels. I am not sure why this particular bit of pop culture stuck with for so many years. Maybe there is no real reason, it is baggage without inventory as Gramsci would say. However, I can offer two reasons, one old and one new. For the old I have never really found serial killers interesting. The serial killer who taunts the police through a series of clues has to be one of the most tired cliches of popular culture. Beyond the cliches I was always disgusted by the way in which actual serial killers, from Jack the Ripper to Jeffrey Dalmer, became pop culture figures in the there own right, even to the point of having their own trading cards. I just find that stuff to be distasteful to the point of offensive. In the Sandman the killers are frightening, but as the dialogue makes clear, they are nothing to look up to or emulate, just damaged people with delusions of grandeur. That is why I first liked the panel.As I have occasionally thought about this scene from time to time the way one does with the odd and accumulated bits of popular culture that make up our "tertiary retentions" (to use Stiegler's phrase) it has taken on a different meaning, one that hinges on the line "fantasies in which you are the maltreated heroes of your own stories." This formulation of a kind of day dream or, dreaming with one's eyes open, appears in Spinoza. For Spinoza the formulation is reserved specifically for those who believe that the mind controls the body. As he writes "Those...who believe that they either speak or are silent, or do anything from a free decision of the mind, dream with open eyes." One could argue that in general this formulation in which one is caught in a kind of dream in which one is at the center describes what Spinoza calls superstition, and what Althusser calls after him ideology. On this reading, and if one wanted to simplify things considerably, one could say that ideology is a matter of what the "kids today" on Tik Tok call main character syndrome, the belief that one is at the center of their own little universe, a cause and never an effect. The idea of all of us walking around in our own little daydreams is not only an interesting way to think of a kind of spontaneous ideology, but Dream's removal of that Dream suggests ideology critique as a kind of superpower. Although to be honest, after watching the series I am a little unclear on what Dream's powers are and how they work, but as the panels above indicate I have pulled my collection out of the closet to reread it. I am not going to offer a full consideration of The Sandman series here, or talk about how it differs from the comic. I am confident it has been analyzed to death elsewhere. I will say briefly that I think that one of its strengths is that it borrows the pacing of the comic, following the arc of the first dozen or so issues. It always seems strange to me that comic books have had better success with movies when their serial form lends itself to television or streaming. Stranger still that the turn to streaming of recent MCU shows has tended to write them more like long movies than episodes of in an ongoing story. The Sandman has more of the structure of the comic in which there is an ongoing story, but there are also stories that are contained more or less within an episode. When it comes to adapting the panels in question. The dialogue is retained, albeit extended, and to some extent, as the clip below demonstrates, the scene is as well. We get to see the effects of Morpheus intervention as the collectors wrestle with their newfound conscience and consciousness of their situation. In that sense the scene is well adapted from the page to the screen. However, one cannot be struck with a certain flatness to the initial shot. In the place of the graphic play of color and line we just get a man standing in front of a curtain. I do not love the art, and there are many panels in comics that would stand out more, but the panels work better than the moving image. One of the things that I find striking in the sheer number of comic book films and television shows is not just how they fail to function as movies, that point has been made again and again, but they often fail to live up to the comics, there are striking visuals in so many different comics, and over the years there have been talented artists working on all of the different superheroes that have made it to the screen, and while these visuals are sometimes gestured to in individual scenes in the various films there is still a kind of translation problem in which the color and composition of the panel is lost when it is put into motion. In fact these visuals become one more easter egg, one more thing for fans to pick up on such as Martha Wayne's pearl necklace from The Dark Knight Returns returning again and again in nearly every filmed version of Batman's parent's death. This is an aside, but I would argue that one of the reasons that Spider-Man: Into The Spiderverse stands out as a film is that its animation captures the visual sense and sensibility of comics better than CGI. I have more thoughts on The Sandman, about the representation of dreams in popular culture, but my focus here has been just on how an image from popular culture can linger like the remnant of a dream, and how that image might make it possible to think about how one's memory is shaped and formative, and what an adaptation misses.
Dai Jitao 戴季陶 (1891-1949) was a journalist and politician of the first half of the twentieth century, the leading theoretician of the Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang 國民黨. Since his death in 1949, he has been a very controversial figure in China. His thought will have long been either left out or sharply criticized in mainland China, during the Maoist era, through the term "Dai Jitao-ism" (戴季陶 主義Dai Jitao zhuyi) to refer to his misinterpretation of Sun Yat-sen's thought and the "Three Principles of the People". This Master thesis focuses primarily on Dai Jitao's experience, on analyzing his experiences as a Chinese student who returned from Japan and became a journalist and a revolutionary political theorist, in order to provide a possible interpretation of modernity from the perspective of China from the early 1910s to the late 1920s. This work takes the form of a biographical and intellectual study of Dai Jitao's character, in which we reconstruct the gradual evolution of his thought between 1910, when he began his career as a journalist, and 1928, the year marked by the publication of his famous work of Riben Lun 日本論(Essay on Japan). This thesis presents a selection of passages, translated and analyzed, from articles and essays published by Dai Jitao between 1910 and 1928, mainly extracted from the compilation work of Dai Jitao Ji (Tang Wenquan and Sang Bing of 1990), then from the Foundations of Sun-yatsenism published in 1925 by Dai himself, devoted to the theorization of Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary project, erected as an heir to Confucius, and from the 2014 edition of the Riben Lun about the theorization of Japanese morals, thought and politics. This thesis is organized into three chronological chapters. The first chapter, titled "Contextual Introduction : the Formation of Dai Jitao's Thought before the Xinhai Revolution (1905-1914)", is dedicated to introducing the figure and contextualizing the formation of his thought in his youth. The second chapter, entitled "Dai Jitao's thought and his adherence to the revolutionary project of the Kuomintang during the civil war (1913-1925)", is meant to re-establish a chronology of Dai Jitao's different ideological positions starting from his meeting with Sun Yat-sen in 1913. In the final chapter, "Dai Jitao's Evolution of Thought in the Face of Fascist Nationalism and Japanese Expansionism (1913-1928)", we explore the factors that led to his episode of "disillusionment" when Japan went on the offensive, as well as how Dai Jitao recovered from the death of Sun Yat-sen, the end of his dream of pan-Asianism, in order to respond to the threats of the Western colonial powers and the Japanese imperialists. By attempting to clarify Dai Jitao's ideological development from the beginning of his career as a journalist chronicler in 1910, to his culmination as the Kuomintang's leading theoretician and politician, when he published his most notable work Riben Lun in 1928, we identify his political positions and actions. We also try to identify the strong moments of his life that caused him several political reversals. Dai Jitao, admiring the spirit of resistance of the Japanese political and intellectual sphere of Meiji, seeks to recreate a similar essence to stimulate the Chinese people and provoke in them a feeling of unity and belonging to the same Chinese nation. This is the guocui 國粹, the national essence that Dai Jitao takes from the Japanese essence (known as kokusui), to carry out the mission of the Kuomintang, which he had recognized in the modernist Confucian thought of Sun Yat-sen and whose analysis we begin in this thesis. ; Dai Jitao 戴季陶 (1891-1949), journaliste et homme politique de la première moitié du XXe siècle, est le principal théoricien du Parti nationaliste, le Guomindang 國民黨. Dès sa mort en 1949, il est un personnage très controversé en Chine. Sa pensée aura longtemps été soit laissée de côté, soit vivement critiquée en Chine continentale, pendant l'ère maoïste, à travers le terme de « Dai Jitao-isme » (戴季 陶主義 Dai Jitao zhuyi) pour désigner son interprétation erronée de la pensée de Sun Yat-sen et des «Trois principes du peuple ». Ce mémoire se focalise surtout sur l'expérience de Dai Jitao, sur l'analyse de son vécu en tant qu'étudiant chinois revenu du Japon, devenu journaliste et théoricien politique révolutionnaire, afin de fournir une interprétation possible de la modernité du point de vue de la Chine, du début des années 1910 à la fin des années 1920. Ce travail se présente sous la forme d'une étude biographique et intellectuelle du personnage de Dai Jitao, dans laquelle nous restituons l'évolution progressive de sa pensée entre 1910, lorsqu'il commence sa carrière de journaliste, et 1928, année marquée par la publication de son célèbre ouvrage du Riben Lun 日本論 (Essai sur le Japon). Ce mémoire présente une sélection de passages, traduits et analysés, d'articles et d'essais publiés par Dai Jitao entre 1910 et1928, principalement extraites du travail de compilation du Dai Jitao Ji (Tang Wenquan et Sang Bing de 1990), puis des Fondements du Sun-yatsenisme publié en 1925 par Dai lui-même, consacré à la théorisation du projet révolutionnaire de Sun Yat-sen, érigé comme héritier de Confucius, et de l'édition de 2014 du Riben Lun à propos de la théorisation des mœurs, de la pensée et de la politique du Japon. Nous avons réparti ce mémoire en trois volets chronologiques. Le premier chapitre, intitulé « introduction contextuelle : la formation de la pensée de Dai Jitao avant la révolution Xinhai (1905-1914) », est dédié à la présentation du personnage et à une mise en contexte de la formation de sa pensée dans sa jeunesse. Dans le deuxième chapitre, intitulé, « la pensée de Dai Jitao et son adhésion au projet révolutionnaire du Guomindang pendant la guerre civile (1913-1925) », nous rétablissons une chronologie des différentes positions idéologiques de Dai Jitao à partir de sa rencontre de Sun Yat-sen en 1913. Dans le dernier chapitre, « évolution de la pensée de Dai Jitao face au nationalisme fascisant et l'expansionnisme du Japon (1913-1928) », nous explorons les facteurs ayant provoqué son épisode de « désillusions », lorsque le Japon passe à l'offensive, ainsi que la façon dont Dai Jitao se remet de la mort de Sun Yat-sen, de la fin de son rêve de pan-asiatisme, pour réagir face aux menaces des puissances coloniales occidentales et des impérialistes japonais. En tentant de clarifier le développement idéologique de Dai Jitao du début de sa carrière de journaliste chroniqueur en 1910, à son point culminant en tant que principal théoricien et politicien du Guomindang, lorsqu'il publie son ouvrage le plus notable du Riben Lun en 1928, nous cernons ses positions politiques et ses actes. Nous tentons aussi de cerner les moments forts de sa vie ayant provoqué en lui plusieurs revirements politiques. Dai Jitao, admiratif de l'esprit de résistance de la sphère politique et intellectuelle japonaise de Meiji, cherche à recréer une essence similaire pour stimuler le peuple chinois et provoquer en lui un sentiment d'unité et d'appartenance à une même nation chinoise. Il s'agit du guocui 國粹, l'essence nationale que Dai Jitao reprend à l'essence japonaise (dite kokusui), pour mener à bien la mission du Guomindang, qu'il avait reconnu dans la pensée confucéenne moderniste de Sun Yat-sen et dont nous amorçons l'analyse dans ce mémoire.
Background There is considerable variability in COVID-19 outcomes amongst younger adults—and some of this variation may be due to genetic predisposition. We characterized the clinical implications of the major genetic risk factor for COVID-19 severity, and its age-dependent effect, using individual-level data in a large international multi-centre consortium. Method The major common COVID-19 genetic risk factor is a chromosome 3 locus, tagged by the marker rs10490770. We combined individual level data for 13,424 COVID-19 positive patients (N=6,689 hospitalized) from 17 cohorts in nine countries to assess the association of this genetic marker with mortality, COVID-19-related complications and laboratory values. We next examined if the magnitude of these associations varied by age and were independent from known clinical COVID-19 risk factors. Findings We found that rs10490770 risk allele carriers experienced an increased risk of all-cause mortality (hazard ratio [HR] 1·4, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1·2–1·6) and COVID-19 related mortality (HR 1·5, 95%CI 1·3–1·8). Risk allele carriers had increased odds of several COVID-19 complications: severe respiratory failure (odds ratio [OR] 2·0, 95%CI 1·6-2·6), venous thromboembolism (OR 1·7, 95%CI 1·2-2·4), and hepatic injury (OR 1·6, 95%CI 1·2-2·0). Risk allele carriers ≤ 60 years had higher odds of death or severe respiratory failure (OR 2·6, 95%CI 1·8-3·9) compared to those > 60 years OR 1·5 (95%CI 1·3-1·9, interaction p-value=0·04). Amongst individuals ≤ 60 years who died or experienced severe respiratory COVID-19 outcome, we found that 31·8% (95%CI 27·6-36·2) were risk variant carriers, compared to 13·9% (95%CI 12·6-15·2%) of those not experiencing these outcomes. Prediction of death or severe respiratory failure among those ≤ 60 years improved when including the risk allele (AUC 0·82 vs 0·84, p=0·016) and the prediction ability of rs10490770 risk allele was similar to, or better than, most established clinical risk factors. Interpretation The major common COVID-19 risk locus on chromosome 3 is associated with increased risks of morbidity and mortality—and these are more pronounced amongst individuals ≤ 60 years. The effect on COVID-19 severity was similar to, or larger than most established risk factors, suggesting potential implications for clinical risk management. ; AG has received support by NordForsk Nordic Trial Alliance (NTA) grant, by Academy of Finland Fellow grant N. 323116 and the Academy of Finland for PREDICT consortium N. 340541. The Richards research group is supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) (365825 and 409511), the Lady Davis Institute of the Jewish General Hospital, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI), the NIH Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Genome Quebec, the Public Health Agency of Canada, the McGill Interdisciplinary Initiative in Infection and Immunity and the Fonds de Recherche Quebec Sante (FRQS). TN is supported by a research fellowship of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for Young Scientists. GBL is supported by a CIHR scholarship and a joint FRQS and Quebec Ministry of Health and Social Services scholarship. JBR is supported by an FRQS Clinical Research Scholarship. Support from Calcul Quebec and Compute Canada is acknowledged. TwinsUK is funded by the Welcome Trust, the Medical Research Council, the European Union, the National Institute for Health Research-funded BioResource and the Clinical Research Facility and Biomedical Research Centre based at Guy's and St. Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust in partnership with King's College London. The Biobanque Quebec COVID19 is funded by FRQS, Genome Quebec and the Public Health Agency of Canada, the McGill Interdisciplinary Initiative in Infection and Immunity and the Fonds de Recherche Quebec Sante. These funding agencies had no role in the design, implementation or interpretation of this study. The COVID19-Host(a)ge study received infrastructure support from the DFG Cluster of Excellence 2167 Precision Medicine in Chronic Inflammation (PMI) (DFG Grant: EXC2167). The COVID19-Host(a)ge study was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) within the framework of the Computational Life Sciences funding concept (CompLS grant 031L0165). Genotyping in COVID19-Host(a)ge was supported by a philantropic donation from Stein Erik Hagen. The COVID GWAs, Premed COVID-19 study (COVID19-Host(a)ge_3) was supported by Grupo de Trabajo en Medicina Personalizada contra el COVID-19 de Andalucia and also by the Instituto de Salud Carlos III (CIBERehd and CIBERER). Funding comes from COVID-19-GWAS, COVID-PREMED initiatives. Both of them are supported by Consejeria de Salud y Familias of the Andalusian Government. DMM is currently funded by the the Andalussian government (Proyectos Estrategicos-Fondos Feder PE-0451-2018). The Columbia University Biobank was supported by Columbia University and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, NIH, through Grant Number UL1TR001873. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH or Columbia University. The SPGRX study was supported by the Consejeria de Economia, Conocimiento, Empresas y Universidad #CV20-10150. The GEN-COVID study was funded by: the MIUR grant Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2018-2020 to the Department of Medical Biotechnologies University of Siena, Italy; the Intesa San Paolo 2020 charity fund dedicated to the project NB/2020/0119; and philanthropic donations to the Department of Medical Biotechnologies, University of Siena for the COVID-19 host genetics research project (D.L n.18 of March 17, 2020). Part of this research project is also funded by Tuscany Region Bando Ricerca COVID-19 Toscana grant to the Azienda Ospedaliero Universitaria Senese (CUP I49C20000280002). Authors are grateful to: the CINECA consortium for providing computational resources; the Network for Italian Genomes (NIG) (http://www.nig.cineca.it) for its support; the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative (https://www.covid19hg.org/); the Genetic Biobank of Siena, member of BBMRI-IT, Telethon Network of Genetic Biobanks (project no. GTB18001), EuroBioBank, and RD-Connect, for managing specimens. Genetics against coronavirus (GENIUS), Humanitas University (COVID19-Host(a)ge_4) was supported by Ricerca Corrente (Italian Ministry of Health), intramural funding (Fondazione Humanitas per la Ricerca). The generous contribution of Banca Intesa San Paolo and of the Dolce&Gabbana Fashion Firm is gratefully acknowledged. Data acquisition and sample processing was supported by COVID-19 Biobank, Fondazione IRCCS Ca Granda Milano; LV group was supported by MyFirst Grant AIRC n.16888, Ricerca Finalizzata Ministero della Salute RF-2016-02364358, Ricerca corrente Fondazione IRCCS Ca' Granda Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico, the European Union (EU) Programme Horizon 2020 (under grant agreement No. 777377) for the project LITMUS- Liver Investigation: Testing Marker Utility in Steatohepatitis, Programme Photonics under grant agreement 101016726 for the project REVEAL: Neuronal microscopy for cell behavioural examination and manipulation, Fondazione Patrimonio Ca' Granda Liver Bible PR-0361. DP was supported by Ricerca corrente Fondazione IRCCS Ca' Granda Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico, CV PREVITAL Strategie di prevenzione primaria nella popolazione Italiana Ministero della Salute, and Associazione Italiana per la Prevenzione dell'Epatite Virale (COPEV). Genetic modifiers for COVID-19 related illness (BeLCovid_1) was supported by the Fonds Erasme. The Host genetics and immune response in SARS-Cov-2 infection (BelCovid_2) study was supported by grants from Fondation Leon Fredericq and from Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS). The INMUNGEN-CoV2 study was funded by the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas. KUL is supported by the German Research Foundation (LU 1944/3-1) SweCovid is funded by the SciLifeLab/KAW national COVID-19 research program project grant to Michael Hultstrom (KAW 2020.0182) and the Swedish Research Council to Robert Frithiof (2014-02569 and 2014-07606). HZ is supported by Jeansson Stiftelser, Magnus Bergvalls Stiftelse. The COMRI cohort is funded by Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany. Genotyping for the COMRI cohort was performed and funded by the Genotyping Laboratory of Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland FIMM Technology Centre, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland. ; No
Dai Jitao 戴季陶 (1891-1949) was a journalist and politician of the first half of the twentieth century, the leading theoretician of the Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang 國民黨. Since his death in 1949, he has been a very controversial figure in China. His thought will have long been either left out or sharply criticized in mainland China, during the Maoist era, through the term "Dai Jitao-ism" (戴季陶 主義Dai Jitao zhuyi) to refer to his misinterpretation of Sun Yat-sen's thought and the "Three Principles of the People". This Master thesis focuses primarily on Dai Jitao's experience, on analyzing his experiences as a Chinese student who returned from Japan and became a journalist and a revolutionary political theorist, in order to provide a possible interpretation of modernity from the perspective of China from the early 1910s to the late 1920s. This work takes the form of a biographical and intellectual study of Dai Jitao's character, in which we reconstruct the gradual evolution of his thought between 1910, when he began his career as a journalist, and 1928, the year marked by the publication of his famous work of Riben Lun 日本論(Essay on Japan). This thesis presents a selection of passages, translated and analyzed, from articles and essays published by Dai Jitao between 1910 and 1928, mainly extracted from the compilation work of Dai Jitao Ji (Tang Wenquan and Sang Bing of 1990), then from the Foundations of Sun-yatsenism published in 1925 by Dai himself, devoted to the theorization of Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary project, erected as an heir to Confucius, and from the 2014 edition of the Riben Lun about the theorization of Japanese morals, thought and politics. This thesis is organized into three chronological chapters. The first chapter, titled "Contextual Introduction : the Formation of Dai Jitao's Thought before the Xinhai Revolution (1905-1914)", is dedicated to introducing the figure and contextualizing the formation of his thought in his youth. The second chapter, entitled "Dai Jitao's thought and his adherence to the revolutionary project of the Kuomintang during the civil war (1913-1925)", is meant to re-establish a chronology of Dai Jitao's different ideological positions starting from his meeting with Sun Yat-sen in 1913. In the final chapter, "Dai Jitao's Evolution of Thought in the Face of Fascist Nationalism and Japanese Expansionism (1913-1928)", we explore the factors that led to his episode of "disillusionment" when Japan went on the offensive, as well as how Dai Jitao recovered from the death of Sun Yat-sen, the end of his dream of pan-Asianism, in order to respond to the threats of the Western colonial powers and the Japanese imperialists. By attempting to clarify Dai Jitao's ideological development from the beginning of his career as a journalist chronicler in 1910, to his culmination as the Kuomintang's leading theoretician and politician, when he published his most notable work Riben Lun in 1928, we identify his political positions and actions. We also try to identify the strong moments of his life that caused him several political reversals. Dai Jitao, admiring the spirit of resistance of the Japanese political and intellectual sphere of Meiji, seeks to recreate a similar essence to stimulate the Chinese people and provoke in them a feeling of unity and belonging to the same Chinese nation. This is the guocui 國粹, the national essence that Dai Jitao takes from the Japanese essence (known as kokusui), to carry out the mission of the Kuomintang, which he had recognized in the modernist Confucian thought of Sun Yat-sen and whose analysis we begin in this thesis. ; Dai Jitao 戴季陶 (1891-1949), journaliste et homme politique de la première moitié du XXe siècle, est le principal théoricien du Parti nationaliste, le Guomindang 國民黨. Dès sa mort en 1949, il est un personnage très controversé en Chine. Sa pensée aura longtemps été soit laissée de côté, soit vivement critiquée en Chine continentale, pendant l'ère maoïste, à travers le terme de « Dai Jitao-isme » (戴季 陶主義 Dai Jitao zhuyi) pour désigner son interprétation erronée de la pensée de Sun Yat-sen et des «Trois principes du peuple ». Ce mémoire se focalise surtout sur l'expérience de Dai Jitao, sur l'analyse de son vécu en tant qu'étudiant chinois revenu du Japon, devenu journaliste et théoricien politique révolutionnaire, afin de fournir une interprétation possible de la modernité du point de vue de la Chine, du début des années 1910 à la fin des années 1920. Ce travail se présente sous la forme d'une étude biographique et intellectuelle du personnage de Dai Jitao, dans laquelle nous restituons l'évolution progressive de sa pensée entre 1910, lorsqu'il commence sa carrière de journaliste, et 1928, année marquée par la publication de son célèbre ouvrage du Riben Lun 日本論 (Essai sur le Japon). Ce mémoire présente une sélection de passages, traduits et analysés, d'articles et d'essais publiés par Dai Jitao entre 1910 et1928, principalement extraites du travail de compilation du Dai Jitao Ji (Tang Wenquan et Sang Bing de 1990), puis des Fondements du Sun-yatsenisme publié en 1925 par Dai lui-même, consacré à la théorisation du projet révolutionnaire de Sun Yat-sen, érigé comme héritier de Confucius, et de l'édition de 2014 du Riben Lun à propos de la théorisation des mœurs, de la pensée et de la politique du Japon. Nous avons réparti ce mémoire en trois volets chronologiques. Le premier chapitre, intitulé « introduction contextuelle : la formation de la pensée de Dai Jitao avant la révolution Xinhai (1905-1914) », est dédié à la présentation du personnage et à une mise en contexte de la formation de sa pensée dans sa jeunesse. Dans le deuxième chapitre, intitulé, « la pensée de Dai Jitao et son adhésion au projet révolutionnaire du Guomindang pendant la guerre civile (1913-1925) », nous rétablissons une chronologie des différentes positions idéologiques de Dai Jitao à partir de sa rencontre de Sun Yat-sen en 1913. Dans le dernier chapitre, « évolution de la pensée de Dai Jitao face au nationalisme fascisant et l'expansionnisme du Japon (1913-1928) », nous explorons les facteurs ayant provoqué son épisode de « désillusions », lorsque le Japon passe à l'offensive, ainsi que la façon dont Dai Jitao se remet de la mort de Sun Yat-sen, de la fin de son rêve de pan-asiatisme, pour réagir face aux menaces des puissances coloniales occidentales et des impérialistes japonais. En tentant de clarifier le développement idéologique de Dai Jitao du début de sa carrière de journaliste chroniqueur en 1910, à son point culminant en tant que principal théoricien et politicien du Guomindang, lorsqu'il publie son ouvrage le plus notable du Riben Lun en 1928, nous cernons ses positions politiques et ses actes. Nous tentons aussi de cerner les moments forts de sa vie ayant provoqué en lui plusieurs revirements politiques. Dai Jitao, admiratif de l'esprit de résistance de la sphère politique et intellectuelle japonaise de Meiji, cherche à recréer une essence similaire pour stimuler le peuple chinois et provoquer en lui un sentiment d'unité et d'appartenance à une même nation chinoise. Il s'agit du guocui 國粹, l'essence nationale que Dai Jitao reprend à l'essence japonaise (dite kokusui), pour mener à bien la mission du Guomindang, qu'il avait reconnu dans la pensée confucéenne moderniste de Sun Yat-sen et dont nous amorçons l'analyse dans ce mémoire.
Background: Universal access to safe drinking water and sanitation facilities is an essential human right, recognised in the Sustainable Development Goals as crucial for preventing disease and improving human wellbeing. Comprehensive, high-resolution estimates are important to inform progress towards achieving this goal. We aimed to produce highresolution geospatial estimates of access to drinking water and sanitation facilities. Methods: We used a Bayesian geostatistical model and data from 600 sources across more than 88 low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) to estimate access to drinking water and sanitation facilities on continuous continent-wide surfaces from 2000 to 2017, and aggregated results to policy-relevant administrative units. We estimated mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subcategories of facilities for drinking water (piped water on or off premises, other improved facilities, unimproved, and surface water) and sanitation facilities (septic or sewer sanitation, other improved, unimproved, and open defecation) with use of ordinal regression. We also estimated the number of diarrhoeal deaths in children younger than 5 years attributed to unsafe facilities and estimated deaths that were averted by increased access to safe facilities in 2017, and analysed geographical inequality in access within LMICs. Findings: Across LMICs, access to both piped water and improved water overall increased between 2000 and 2017, with progress varying spatially. For piped water, the safest water facility type, access increased from 40·0% (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 39·4–40·7) to 50·3% (50·0–50·5), but was lowest in sub-Saharan Africa, where access to piped water was mostly concentrated in urban centres. Access to both sewer or septic sanitation and improved sanitation overall also increased across all LMICs during the study period. For sewer or septic sanitation, access was 46·3% (95% UI 46·1–46·5) in 2017, compared with 28·7% (28·5–29·0) in 2000. Although some units improved access to the safest drinking water or sanitation facilities since 2000, a large absolute number of people continued to not have access in several units with high access to such facilities (>80%) in 2017. More than 253 000 people did not have access to sewer or septic sanitation facilities in the city of Harare, Zimbabwe, despite 88·6% (95% UI 87·2–89·7) access overall. Many units were able to transition from the least safe facilities in 2000 to safe facilities by 2017; for units in which populations primarily practised open defecation in 2000, 686 (95% UI 664–711) of the 1830 (1797–1863) units transitioned to the use of improved sanitation. Geographical disparities in access to improved water across units decreased in 76·1% (95% UI 71·6–80·7) of countries from 2000 to 2017, and in 53·9% (50·6–59·6) of countries for access to improved sanitation, but remained evident subnationally in most countries in 2017. Interpretation: Our estimates, combined with geospatial trends in diarrhoeal burden, identify where efforts to increase access to safe drinking water and sanitation facilities are most needed. By highlighting areas with successful approaches or in need of targeted interventions, our estimates can enable precision public health to effectively progress towards universal access to safe water and sanitation. ; This work was primarily supported by a grant from the Gates Foundation (OPP1132415). LGA has received support from Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (Finance Code 001), Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico and Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais. OOA acknowledges the Department of Science and Innovation, National Research Foundation, and DSI/NRF Centre of Excellence for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis, Stellenbosch, South Africa. SMAl acknowledges the Department of Health Policy and Management, Faculty of Public Health, Kuwait University and International Centre for Casemix and Clinical Coding, Faculty of Medicine, National University of Malaysia for the approval and support to participate in this research project. HTA acknowledges Aksum University. MAu and CH are partly supported by a grant from the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research and Innovation, CNDS-UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P4-ID-PCCF-2016-0084. AAz acknowledges funding from the Gates Foundation (OPP1171700). ABad is supported by the Public Health Agency of Canada. TWB was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation through the Alexander von Humboldt Professor award, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research; the EU; the Wellcome Trust; and from National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of National Institutes of Health (NIH; R01-HD084233), National Institute on Aging of NIH (P01AG041710), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of NIH (R01-AI124389 and R01-AI112339), as well as Fogarty International Center of NIH (D43-TW009775). DABen was supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Oxford Biomedical Research Centre. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the National Health Service, the NIHR, or the UK Department of Health and Social Care. GBB is supported by Sistema Nacional de Investigación (SNI) de la Secretaría Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (SENACYT) of Panamá. FCar acknowledges UID/ MULTI/04378/2019 and UID/QUI/50006/2019 support with funding from FCT/Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Ensino Superior through national funds. VMC acknowledges her grant (SFRH/BHD/110001/2015), received by Portuguese national funds through Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), IP, under the Norma Transitória DL57/2016/CP1334/CT0006. JDN acknowledges support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. DBD acknowledges support from the Gates Foundation. KD is supported by a Wellcome Trust grant (number 201900/Z/16/Z) as part of his International Intermediate Fellowship. AGo acknowledges Sistema Nacional de Investigadores de Panamá (SNI), Secretaría Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (SENACYT). CH is partly supported by a grant co-funded by European Fund for Regional Development through the Operational Program for Competitiveness (project ID P_40_382). SMSI is funded by a Fellowship from National Heart Foundation of Australia and Deakin University. MJ and the Serbian part of this GBD contribution was co-funded through grant OI175014 of the Ministry of Education Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia. JK is a recipient of the 2020 Benjamin V Cohen Peace Fellowship from Ball State University Center for Peace and Conflict Studies. YJK's work was supported by the Research Management Centre, Xiamen University Malaysia, grants number XMUMRF/2018-C2/ ITCM/0001. KKr is supported by a DST PURSE grant and UGC Center of Advanced Study awarded to the Department of Anthropology, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. BL acknowledges support from the NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre and the British Heart Foundation Centre of Research Excellence, Oxford. PTNM acknowledges the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa. ANA acknowledges Debre Markos University for its support in-terms of office and internet access while reviewing this paper. AMSam received a fellowship from the Egyptian Fulbright Mission programme. MMS-M acknowledges the support of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia (contract number 175087). AShi acknowledges the support of Health Data Research UK. MRS acknowledges the Clinical Research Development Center of Imam Reza Hospital, Kermanshah university of Medical sciences for their wise advice. JBS is part of Centro de Investigación en Red de Enfermedades Respiratorias (CIBERES), Instituto de Salud Carlos III (ISCIII), Madrid, Spain. RT-S was supported in part by grant PI17/00719 from Instituto de Salud Carlos III–FEDER. BU acknowledges Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal. TWij acknowledges the Migraine Foundation Australia and the Department of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Rajarata, Saliyapura, Anuradhapuraya, Sri Lanka. CSW was supported by the South African Medical Research Council. SBZ received a scholarship from the Australian Government research training program in support of his academic career. ; publishedVersion
Texas has produced and nurtured a great number of colorful characters, but none more colorful than the prismatic Judge Roy Bean. He squeezed many showy lives into one lifetime. In fact, he didn't become the Judge Roy Bean that Paul Newman immortalized on film until he was almost 60 years old. This proves my favorite maxim: "The greatest mistake in life is thinking it's too late." In his earlier years, he was living in a poor area of San Antonio named for him. It was called Beanville. He tried and failed at many things, mostly for, ironically, running afoul of the law. He failed at selling firewood because he cut down trees that didn't belong to him. He failed as a butcher because butchering other people's maverick cows before you've bought them is frowned upon. He failed at selling milk because he watered it down. One customer complained that he found a minnow in his milk. Bean defended himself by saying, "That's the last time I let that cow drink out of the creek before I milk her." He eventually had some success when he opened a saloon in Beanville, but he sold out when he heard that there were rare opportunities out in west Texas where they were building the railroad. It was in the lawless railroad camps that Bean's vast knowledge of people, his bilingual fluency in Spanish and English, and his unique persuasion skills became prized. The Texas Rangers liked his style and recruited him to become Justice of the Peace in those parts. And he took to the role like he was sent there from central casting. Bean made it known that he was the "Law West of the Pecos." He was actually playing on an older saying that went like this: "West of the Pecos there is no law; west of El Paso, there is no God." So at least, now, there was law west of the Pecos. He hung out a sign saying so. Bean was also famous for saying, "Hang 'em first and try 'em later." Though it certainly worked as a deterrent, the truth is he never actually hung anybody. It's true. There was no jail in Langtry, so Judge Bean would often keep accused criminals chained to a mesquite tree outside until he could have a trial. On a few occasions he would sentence a young man to hang for some generally unhangable offense. The night before the hanging, Bean would leave the lock open, allowing him to escape. The young criminal would never be seen in those parts again. In time, Bean opened his famous saloon there in Langtry on the right of way of the railroad. He was actually just squatting there, but the railroad, because they liked him, eventually created a legal arrangement so he could stay. He named his bar the Jersey Lilly in honor of Lillie Langtry, of England, one of the world's most beautiful women at the time. Bean wrote to her and asked her to visit Langtry, Texas, which he claimed was named for her (it wasn't). She did come to see him, too, but she had to visit him in his grave. She was ten months too late. But that's another story. The trains would stop at the Langtry depot for water and all the passengers would get down to have a drink at the Jersey Lilly. When Judge Roy Bean served customers in his saloon, he never had change. So if a customer paid for a 25 cent beer with a dollar, he wouldn't get back the 75 cents. If he complained, the judge would fine him 75 cents for disturbing the peace. Stories about the abusive Judge Roy Bean got out in the world, and rather than drive people away, everyone on the trains wanted to stop and get harassed by the irascible Bean. You could say Bean's Jersey Lilly was a precursor to Dick's Last Resort in today's world. He had a law book called the "1879 Revised Statutes of Texas0." He liked that one. Even though the legislature sent him new books every two years, reflecting new laws, he burned them. He said he liked the old book better and he like those laws better, too. As a justice of the peace, he could marry people. He had no legal right to divorce people, but he did that anyway. He believed that if he made the mistake of marrying them he should be able to correct the mistake by setting them free. Bean also officially pronounced people "dead." He merged his duties on occasion. He would use his official pronouncement of death as the last thing he said at a wedding: "I pronounce you man and wife. May God have mercy on your souls." The Jersey Lilly was also where Judge Bean held court. And so, naturally, you couldn't be on a jury if you didn't drink. Right in the middle of happy hour, you might say, he would assemble a jury and swear them in. The case would be presented, verdicts arrived at, and sentencing pronounced, all within an hour or two. Often the sentence for misdemeanors was to buy a round of drinks for the jury. He was very patriotic about Texas, too. He often preceded sentencing with words like: "You have offended the great state of Texas by committing this crime on her sacred soil… " One of his most famous cases had to do with a dead man who fell off a bridge there in Langtry. Bean found $40 on him and a pistol. He fined him $40 for carrying a concealed weapon. That was enough to get him buried. Bean rose to international prominence when he promoted the World Heavyweight Championship prizefight between Fitzsimmons and Maher. Believe it or not, prizefighting, back then, was illegal in Texas. It was considered uncivilized. At first, the fight looked like it might be held on the sly in El Paso, so the Texas governor sent 25 Texas rangers over there to make sure it didn't happen. Then, it seemed like it might be held in Juarez, but such fighting was illegal there, too, though only a misdemeanor. Nonetheless, the governor of Chihuahua sent troops to Juarez to make sure the fight didn't happen there, either. Finally, in steps Judge Roy Bean. He sent a telegram to the promoter saying they could have it in Langtry, right across the river on a Rio Grande sand bar. Technically, Mexico, yes, but miles from any authority that would be able to stop it. So the whole menagerie of unlikely associates, boxers, gamblers, Texas Rangers, high-rollers from the East, and spectators of all stripes, boarded a train bound for parts unknown because the destination was kept a secret. Bean met them at his rail-side saloon, sold everybody beer at the exorbitant price of a dollar each, and then escorted them across a pontoon bridge to the Mexican side of the river. The Texas Rangers watched from the Texas side, satisfied that they had no jurisdiction in the matter. The fight ensued, and before the spectators could get settled in for a good, long match, it was over. Fitzsimmons knocked out Maher in the first round. The fight lasted 95 seconds. But the big winner was Judge Roy Bean. He sold a lot of beer and his name went out over the wires worldwide as the clever man who made the fight possible. Judge Roy Bean lived his life in ascendancy, saving the best for last. Had he died twenty years earlier, you never would have heard of him. I wouldn't be talking about him. His fame is still bringing some 40,000 visitors a year to Langtry, over a century after his death. Not bad numbers for a dead man. As a lifelong showman, you can be sure he's grinning in his grave.
