The Wall Street Journal recently put under its Dow-Jones thermometer one of America’s most interesting vices—Vulgarity.

The Journal thinks it is increasing faster than kudzu and so do many other people. As the old comedian used to say, “include me in!”

Good taste is honest. Vulgarity is a snare and a fraud.

It takes effort to be well behaved. It takes none to be vulgar. (Did you ever notice that the craziest drivers have the crudest signs on their cars?)

What about brains? They help the mannered man but don’t we all know slow-witted people with charm and a good sense of values? And what about money? Vulgarity is hardly the preserve of the poor. There are too many double-martinied parents who deep freeze their children in pre-kindergarten, pre-pre-kindergarten and summer camps. They are vulgar in dictionary dimensions: ignorant, crude, unrefined.

How about family prestige? Good behavior goes with bread and butter, discipline and love. It has little to do with a prestige-address, a family-name or an exorbitant wedding.

The Conspicuous Ones

Recall the airline hostess of ten years ago? Not always pretty, not especially chic. But her good smile and her pleasant smile made you forget the accidentals. She liked to help people enjoy their flight. A few still remain.

But the airline executives themselves were pretty vulgar as they described the new stewardess of 1967. They want the weird hairdos and the vacant stare, the glamour types and the heavy eyelash bit. They are as wholesome as the packaged filet mignon and the plastic peas. Sick babies and frightened old couples come in a poor second to the small-fry executives who dispense blue-chips and charm with the same bland smile. Is this image of the new nightingale of the airways unfair? Have you traveled lately by plane? Has the editor of the Wall Street Journal?

Skip the hippies. In a year they will be as significant as the flappers of the 1920’s are today.

Do you survive commercials? Even if you want to watch the news, a good movie or a rare documentary, the commercials are there: -stupid, raucous and vulgar. Some day our nation’s traffic will come to a total halt. Under the millions of hard-tops, all civilization will stop. Then, a few eons later, a new civilization will appear.

In our time capsules, what will the commercials tell about us? We, the generation that produced John F. Kennedy, John XXIII, Martin Luther King and the Yankee soldier in Vietnam, the commercials will reveal as a fear-ridden people with bad breath, greasy hair, perspiring feet and underarm odors.

Maybe someone will invent a device to black-out the commercials. So what is left? An endless assembly line of soap operas, situation comedies and quiz shows. And at the end of a vulgar day comes the minuet of the morons. Neurotic pitchmen (who used to sell neckties at carnivals) hold spell-bound millions of happy martyrs with gallons of canned laughter by trotting our some very sick people like a deranged ring master at a dying circus.

The Vulgar Pretenders

The Journal titillated its readers with a litany of vulgarians: - the pop, op, and psychedelic painters, the pornographers, the dress designers who have made dresses sexless, the glass-boy architects, the gain-grabbing civil rights’ leaders and the political parasites. A worthy list.

But vulgarity has causes, and litany could be intoned of these; - the cynical merchant who sells the dresses, the bankers who put up the money for the bleak office-buildings, the stubborn establishment that turns civil rights’ people from applicants for equity into fighters for freedom.

Women buy the odd dresses, kids buy the dirty books, addicts buy the coarse paintings. The politics of our nation is woven, not by the politicians, but by citizens who don’t vote, those who cheat on income tax, those who get tickets fixed.

Vulgarity In The Church?

Even when our Lord used coarse expressions in the gospel, they rang true. They were not vulgar. His daily speech and actions were honest. The Church must always show that same pure, unashamed face. That is her task today- to restore the beauty of his image.

It is Christians who are vulgar, not the Church. Wasn’t it vulgar to pile up pious sentimentalities and smother the holy Mass with them? Were not the titles and extravagant regalia of her pomp the evidences not of the Church of the poor, but the court of the vulgar?

Catholics too often, like men of many other faiths, like the comforts of their private club—exclusive, complacent, closed. Was it vulgar? Certainly it was pretentious. That is why the open windows of today’s Church are not welcome by some Catholics. They say they don’t like change; they want the old ways of tradition. To the four marks of the Church-one, holy, Catholic and apostolic,-they have added their own-immutable. But Our Lord did not say that. A living body must grow and develop.

Perhaps the reason that the little band of Catholic resistance still fight on is that the open windows have let in clear light as well as fresh air. We see ourselves in the clear, cold light of our own pretentious and our own vulgarities.

It can be quite disturbing.

Paul J. Hallinan

Archbishop Of Atlanta