teanco, VOL. 36, NO.8.
Friday, February 21, 1992
FALL RIVER, MASS.
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Vatican scoffs at Time claim of papal-US pact to aid Solidarity
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Will they be discriminated against?
U.8. schools: shortchanging girls? By Pat McGowan with CNS reports WASHINGTON (CNS) - An official of the National Catholic Educational Association has urged schools to look at bias against girls in the wake of a national report alleging pervasive one-sidedness in public schools. The official. Holy Name Sister Mary Burke, said the problem "is a cultural phenomenon" that affects non-public as well as public schools. .she called for in-service and teacher-training programs to address it. Course work on gender issues, she said, should include "new research on women and bias in classroom interaction patterns." Sister Burke, associate executive director of NCEA's secondary schools department, commented , after reviewing a Feb. 12 report from the American Association of University Women that said U.S. schools shortchange girls. The report noted the "bias girls face from preschool through 12th grade in their textbooks, testing and teachers." "Gender bias undermines girls' self-esteem and discourages girls from courses of study, such as math and science, needed in the work force today," the report said. Sister Burke said the study puts
on the U.S. agenda the fact that "female students are not equally encouraged in their educational pursuits." She noted the irony that "most teachers in the country are female and that the study measures what's happening now in the classroom." Principals questioned in the Fall River diocese had varying views on the report. Dennis R. Poyant, principal at St. Mary's School, New Bedford, the father of four daughters, three of whom are honor students and "too early to tell" about the fourth, a first grader, noted that his girls' strengths are in science and math and that two who are students at Coyle and Cassidy High in Taunton had been steered toward enrichment programs in those fields. As for St. Mary's, he said that while a larger number of girls are in the school's top math group, he had noted that boys are more interested in math-oriented games than girls.
IS AMERICAN' dream vanishing? see page 4
Poyant was interested in hearing that a television news program reporting on the AA UW study showed a woman teacher whose classroom presentations were taped. She said it was not umil she viewed her tape that she realized that she paid more attention ':0 her boy than to her girl pupils. ". hadn't really thought about that," Poyant commented. Miss Kathleen A. Burt, principal at SS. Peter and Paul S«:hool, Fall River, said her own preference is for boy-girl schools, such as SS. Peter and Paul because "socialization is very important." She said she feels that most school programs treat boys and girls equally but discussed as a possible example of gender bias computer games that were the subjec·t of a study recently conducted at SS. Peter and Paul. "The games were promoled to improve eye-hand coordinati'ln for both boys and girls," she said, "but it was very noticable that tht boys took to them far more than the girls. Finally we realized that the objects used in the game, SlJ ch as spacecraft, were more interllsting to boys than girls." At Bishop Feehan High S(hool, Attleboro, principal Brothe:' Robert J. Wickman, FSC, p(,inted Turn to Page 10
VATICAN CITY (CNS) - The Vatican has dismissed a Time magazine claim that Pope John Paul II and the U.S. government worked in a "secret alliance" to thwart communism in Poland by aiding the trade union Solidarity: Time, in an article 'in its issue dated Feb. 24, said the alleged U.S.-Vatican plan, coordinated in part by the CIA, aimed at destabilizing Poland's communist government during the 1980s. Vatican press spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said Feb. 18 that the reported secret agreement, supposedly worked out in a 1982 meeting betwe,en the pope and then-President Ronald Reagan, was an "imaginative conclusion" of the reporter. He said the Vatican would not respond to specific allegations and "errors" in the article because the list "would never end." The Time article quoted Reagan's first national security adviser, Richard Allen, as saying of the alleged Reagan-pope agreement: "This was one of the great secret alliances of all time." The Vatican spokesman. citing that passage, said with laughter: "Let's be serious." "The whole concept [of the article) seems mistaken to me," Navarro-Valls said.
He noted that the pope had a legitimate interest in his Polish homeland and in his people oppressed by a communist regime. But he said the "imaginative conclusions" drawn in the Time article are strictly "the responsibility of the journalist" who wrote it. "It·s useless for me to deny every point ...." Navarro-Valls said. Proceeding point-by-point, he said, the article would require a "total revision." The article was written by Carl Bernstein, the journalist who helped break the Watergate story in the 1970s with fellow Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. The Time article was reportedly based on interviews with some 75 officials of the former Reagan administration and the Vatican. The article asserted that during a 50-minute pope-Reagan meeting at the Vatican June 7, 1982, the two leaders agreed to undertake a "clandestine campaign to hasten the dissolution of the communist empire," committing their resources to destabilize the Polish government and keep the outlawed Solidarity union alive. The article claimed that a secret network was later established "under the auspices of Reagan and Turn to Page 10
Pope wishes to call attention to Africa VATICAN CITY (CNS) - Pope John Paul II has two trips to Africa planned for 1992, hoping that they will remind the world's rich nations of their obligation to the globe's poor. Visiting three West African countries in February and returning to the continent in June. the pope will stress how the campaign for universal freedom and human rights is threatened by poverty in the developing world. In Senegal. Gambia and Guinea from Feb. 19 through 26. the pope is encouraging the tiny Catholic communities in their faith. will ordain priests and will explain Catholic social doctrine and its ethical implications for international and internal political and economic order. The pope will spend much of his time in the three mostly Muslim countries focusing on building a more peaceful society: from promoting interreligious dialogue to urging a peaceful settlement of demands for independence in the Casamance region of southern Senegal.
Catholic- Muslim relations in the three nations are for the most part amicable. In Senegal, Muslims make up about 92 percent of the population and Catholics about 5.1 percent. In Gambia, about 90 percent of the people are Muslim and 2 percent are Catholic. Guinea's Catholics also make up about 2 percent of the population, while Muslims are 85 percent. The large number of marriages between Muslims and Christians - including that of Senegal's president and first lady - is often cited as contributing to friendly relations as is the familiarity with Catholics many Muslims develop through attending Catholic schools. The pope's usual delight in encountering young people around the globe will take on added importance in the three West African nations, where some 60 percent of the population is under age 20. The economies of the three countries are mostly agricultural, but as family farms are repeatedly divided. many young feel forced to Turn to Page 10