Word: sheed
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Writing in the New American Review, Wilfrid Sheed offers the intriguing, if overly pat explanation that McCarthy is a "Commonweal Catholic." This is Sheed's term for those members of the generation of U.S. Catholics, now aged 35 to 60, who combine "oldfashioned religious training" with progressive politics shaped by unionism and papal encyclicals on the worth of labor. This kind of Catholic clings to "an abstract, quasi-scholastic style" marked by witty references to arcane books and thinkers. The type is "congenitally mistrustful of ambition and scornful of those who push themselves beyond their merits." When such...
Crazed Frivolity. McCarthy's training as a seminarian and a professor fits him neatly into Sheed's category. "Anyone who has ever sat around a rectory, or even an Irish living room, will have heard many duplicates of McCarthy's wit," Sheed writes. But for a presidential candidate, the McCarthy humor was a handicap, Sheed says, since it made him sound like "a 13th century eccentric, a man of crazed frivolity." Too often, his bookish metaphors made "a man of rather direct and earthy intellect seem vague and woolly." He appeared to be "a lofty bumbler, sacrificing...
...Commonweal Catholic, as Sheed sees it, cannot believe that his personal feelings are relevant to the issues. He has only contempt for "weeping politicians," who either confess their political sins or flaunt their virtues. "McCarthy could not, if life depended on it, act out his compassion for the poor," says Sheed. "Politically, this subject demands a certain amount of Mammy-singing. You can denounce the war calmly, and the emotion will take care of itself. But when you come to poverty, you must perform. McCarthy spoke precisely as strongly about both subjects; yet he was felt to be passionate about...
...last century; now many Catholic thinkers are also challenging the doctrine. One of the latest broad sides is the work of the Rev. Herbert Haag, a Catholic Biblical scholar at the University of Tübingen in Germany. In his new book, called Is Original Sin in Scripture? (Sheed & Ward; $3.95), Haag argues that there is no Biblical basis for the doctrine...
...BLACKING FACTORY and PENNSYLVANIA GOTHIC, by Wilfrid Sheed. A polished novella and a long story-both about adolescence-emphasize the consequences of failing to let go of the past...