I concur in one of Mr. Beckett's points unqualifiedly and in the other with reservations. We at Sycamore have stressed from the start that the Monologues, deplorable as they are, are but a symptom of the University's weakening of Catholic identity, and that the root cause of that weakening has been the severe attenuation of a Catholic presence on the faculty. That is true also of all of the other outcroppings of secularization that we have identified and will continue to mark, e.g., the Queer Film Festival, the promotion by a women's faculty organization of a host of pro-abortion organizations and their call for more homosexual and lesbian professors, the resistance of the faculty to according any priority to hiring Catholics, abortifacient advertising in the student newspaper, and the like. It is quite true that, if all of these symptoms were wiped out, the fundamental problem would remain, for the same teachers would be teaching the same courses in the same way. Still, to highlight the Monologues serves the important purpose of alerting those outside the university, alumni, parents present and prospective, and Catholics in general, that there is something amiss at the University. This notion is so foreign, so alien to the public image of the University and the memories of its alumni, that it takes something as repellant, as startling, as The Vagiona Monologues to sound the alarm. As Father Burthchaell reports in his magisterial study of the secularization of universities, the pattern is invariably that, when alumni wake up to the fact that there is a risk to the religious identity of their school, it is already too late. The single virtue of The Vagina Monologues is that it may play a role in averting that sort of ambush here. Moreover, as this article and other major articles in Our Sunday Observer and The National Catholic Register show, the school has suffered and will continue to suffer unless the play is closed down through its having become the Vagina Monologues poster school among Catholic institutions, as Professor Lawrence Cunningham, the former Chair of the Theology Department, has observed with dismay. I have heard personally of a number of instances in which Catholic parents now will not send their children to Notre Dame because of the reputation it is gaining by sponsoring this sort of moral trash. And these are just the sort of students Notre Dame should be attracting. As to the cover, as we took care to note, it was the editors' choice, not Dr. Hibbs's (and of course not ours). We also took care to note what we presume was the editors' reason -- the disjuncture noted by Dr. Cavadini and Dr. Hibbs between the University and the corporal body of the Church -- lest it be thought that they were just slapping some label smacking of heresy on the cover with no anchor at all in the article. For our purposes the cover is relevant because it shows how the the editors of a significant and reputable Catholic publication view Notre Dame. Of course they did not mean to characterize the entire university in all its people and all its acts, nor did they mean to invoke the fullness of the Gnostic heresy. They surely assumed their audience would regard the label as an exaggeration meant to make a point. There might be a difference of view as to whether there are sufficient grounds for the point, I suppose; but the episode involving the 50 bishops and the breach between the University and its bishop on this issue, together with all other evidences of secularization, at least arguably constitute a sufficient basis for this sort of dramatic license. At any rate, as I say, our purpose was not to endorse the cover but, as with many of the other commentaries we have displayed, to show how the reputation of Notre Dame is being affected by what has been happening there. Whether or not, for example, Naomi Riley was correct in writing in the Wall Street Journal that it has gotten to the point that the most Catholic element remaining at Notre Dame is the student body, it is significant that she said it, and in the Wall Street Journal. All of this is by way of peripheral comment. I am grateful for Mr. Beckett's thoughtful observations.