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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Monday, November 18, 1968
Conscience crisis
"I drink to the Pope—but I drink to the Conscience first.
John Cardinal Newman, the great Catholic theologian and philosopher of the 19th century, gave this interpretation to the dilemma of spiritual authority of the Roman Catholic Church once when asked to toast the Pope.
Today the Church again is facing this dilemma in the aftermath of Pope Paul VI's encyclical, Humanae Vitae, which reaffirmed the Church's traditional stand on birth control.
Pope Paul deemed all contraceptives "evil" and against nature and told the faithful to accept the hardships of large families willingly.
In doing so, he completely disregarded the recommendation of a committee of cardinals first set up by Pope John XXIII and then enlarged by Paul himself to study the problem of contraception and population in the modern world.
Immediately following the Pope's announcement of July 30, a group of about 200 American theologians and clergy answered the encyclical by publishing a retort to the Pope's ideas on birth control and, in effect, to the Pope's authority to decide the spiritual conscience of the Church's members.
"... the encyclical betrays a narrow and positivistic notion of papal authority, as illustrated by the rejection of the majority view presented by the commission established to consider the question as well as by the rejection of the conclusion of a large part of the international Catholic theological community. . ."
Most of the European Catholic authorities are managing to sidestep the encyclical by relying on the doctrinal fact that such statements are only guidelines for the faithful and therefore not part of infallible teachings of the Church.
But in the United States, where there is an outstanding mixture of conservatism and liberalism in the Catholic Church there is also the greatest danger of outright division in the Church over Humanae Vitae.
Last week, despite conservative bishops such as Patrick Cardinal Boyle of Washington, D.C., who has suspended more than 17 priests for dissenting from the Pope's encyclical, the American Council of Bishops voted in a liberal viewpoint. Although they affirmed the Pope's teaching, their official announcement was that Catholic couples who choose by conscience to practice birth control would not be cut off from the Church and the sacraments.
The American Catholic Church is on one side taking the encyclical more seriously and on the other using it to argue for the rights of individual conscience over doctrinal authority.
Humanae Vitae, therefore, could have set off reactions in the United States which will encompass much more than population problems and determine the future trend of the Catholic Church.
Alison Steimel Editorial Editor
Student affairs
Bad teachers
By WILLIAM BALFOUR Dean of Student Affairs
Question: What can I do about a teacher who is unfair in my grading? What can I do about a bad teacher?
Answer: If it is your grade that you feel is unfair, you should discuss it first with the teacher. The great majority of teachers at KU are willing to discuss the reasons for a particular grade. If you still feel that the reasons for the grade are unfair, the next step will differ in various schools. Some departments are setting up grievance committees to which you might appeal. Generally, the department chairman is willing to discuss the matter. It is also possible to talk with a Dean of the particular school.
The determination of poor teaching is difficult. It has been frequently shown that the same professor may be considered an excellent teacher by part of the class and a poor one by others of the same class. However, there are occasionally men whose teaching is thought to be poor by the majority of his students, even several years after their graduation. (Surveys after graduation frequently show changes in opinions about a teacher's ability.)
If the majority of a class agrees that the teacher is not doing a good job, it is sometimes possible to suggest changes in teaching techniques directly to the professor. This of course is not easy for students nor for a professor to accept. Perhaps a better approach is through the department's chairman, who is generally receptive to a reasoned, objective discussion of the problem.
The course and teacher evaluations that are used on many campuses is a good method of improving the quality of teaching. I hope that such evaluations by students will become a reality on this campus.
John Marshall
Loyalty's a funny thing
Johnny's Bar sits out on the east side of Highway 40 on the other side of the tracks. The bar is in that part of North Lawrence which used to be more prosperous until the turnpike came and made 6th Street and 59 Highway better streets for business. The people who sit in Johnny's Bar are older than most college students, and they like the songs that are on the Wurlitzer near the partition that divides the pool room and the bar room.
They sit and drink after work, listening to Johnny Cash or Ernest Tubb or Eddy Arnold. They talk about things that have happened or are going to happen.
Old men are there, with the dust around the edges of their eyes where their safety goggles habe been for eight hours. A woman who probably works on Sunday and has Monday off sits in a corner booth with potato chips and half a glass of beer. She puffs on a cigarette butt that has lipstick on it. And the younger men come in every now and then to talk about football or politics or wages or a new pickup truck.
Most of the men who regularly sit at the bar are veterans of some war or another that the United States has had to fight. They long ago traded fatigues for jackets with WYNN'S FRICTION PROOFING or STAN'S TEXACO or CITY OF LAWRENCE on the back.
There were two rumpled, unfolded copies of the Topeka Daily Capital on the bar and two men with the jackets were talking over the papers about the Marine General who came to Lawrence Monday and the protest march that followed.
"You've got to be kidding." the man said.
The man was wearing a red-and-white polkadot cap. It was tipped back far enough so that you could see the red rings that the safety helmet had made on his forehead.
“These students,” he says, slapping an inside page of the paper, “are getting paid by their parents who are probably World War II veterans to protest against something that must be done.”
The man with the red-and-white polkadots believes that the war in Vietnam is necessary. "Why not stop Communism before it spreads?" he says. "Why the hell not stop people who want to destroy the concept of freedom?"
Johnny told the man he owed him twenty cents for the last beer.
Johnny, the bartender, is a World War II veteran, and if you don't ask him about politics or sports or pheasant hunting in western Kansas, he will tell you how he and a friend of his—when they were harvesting wheat from Texas to Canada in the late 40's—introduced tomato-beer to "this part of the country."
The man who was sitting beside the man with the polkadot cap says the students protested against the American system—"the only system in the world that would allow them to protest in the first place."
He was putting salt in his beer, and told me that his name was Sam—but not really, because he did not want to be quoted with his name. Sam does not like protesters.
"Look at it this way," he says, puffing out his cheeks with foam from the top of the glass. "We had a helluva war . . . 17 years ago. It was a war against facism and imperialism, and the veterans of that war marched yesterday in Lawrence. The radical students at KU protested.
"They protested that their fathers and the people in their fathers' generation fought against a system which wanted to destroy the concept of human freedom. They are dead wrong."
The man who told me to call him Sam does not like protesters because he is a veteran and was shot in the stomach by the Japanese on Bataan. "I know what it is like to fight in the jungle," he says. "But sometimes we have to. I do not like this war because I have fought against people who hide in caves and trees and behind the big leaves in the jungle."
Sam almost died with a .30-caliber slug in his stomach, and nobody likes war. But sometimes it’s necessary, he will say. He doesn't like it when people protest—his country has been good to him, he says.
The man with the safety helmet rings on his forehead ordered another beer. The edges of his rimless glasses did not hide the folds of skin under his eyes. The frayed cuffs on his jacket could not quite conceal wrinkles and scratches and dirty cuts on his hands where the gloves had not quite protected them. His jacket was dusty from the dirt that had floated up from the jackhammer all day. You could tell he had worked hard for that beer.
Johnny, the bartender, said that when the students protested after the veterans' march in Lawrence Monday they were protesting against what some of his customer-friends had done in another war. They were protesting against falling on the grenade, the bullet in the stomach and the others who did similar things because they "thought their country was a good one to live in."
Sixteen years ago he had pulled the pin on a hand grenade and it fell out of his hands inside the foxhole in Northern France. He fell on it. And nothing happened. "My country had been a good one to live in," he had believed. He doesn't like people who protest either.
The old shoulders that had felt the gun stocks in jungles and in Europe, and the stomach that held salt and beer which had once been ripped by a big piece of lead, the strong hands that had washed glasses in the Lawrence bar for 15 years.
They do not like war. They do not advocate war. But the protesters had angered them because of what they had once done.
Loyalty is a funny thing.
'Spiro who?'
THE SPIRIT OF THE CLASSICAL WORLD, edited by Wade C. Stephens; THE BIRTH OF LEARNING, edited by William Bryar and George Steneng; THE ENLIGHTENMENT, edited by Nicholas Capaldi; ROMANTICISM AND EVOLUTION, edited by Bruce Wilshire (Capricorn Books, $2.25 each)—Four volumes in the series called "The Spirit of Western Civilization." The books are attractive, quality paperbacks, and combine philosophical thought with poetry and drama. The first includes Homer, the great names of Grecian drama, Plato and Aristotle, Cicero, Caesar, the great Romans. "The Rebirth of Learning" treats Christian, Judaic and Islamic traditions in the first 1,200 years of the Christian era. The third is actually Volume 5 in the set, this being a treatment of Locke, Voltaire, Hume, Condorcet, Malthus, Kant and others. And the fourth, dealing with the 19th century and its fireshadowings, considers Rousseau, Wordsworth, Goethe, Emerson, Hegel, Marx. Mill, Darwin, Nietzsche and many more.
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