From Mary Jo Leddy I learned another term besides “alternativity†for thinking about the uniqueness of the Church. In a conference lecture she reported that the playwright-president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, was asked why the “Velvet Revolution†against the communists in the former Czechoslovakia was successfully nonviolent—and we might add, why it remains effective when so many other satellites of the former USSR are presently in turmoil. Havel answered somewhat like this: “We had our parallel society. And in that parallel society we wrote our plays and sang our songs and read our poems until we knew the truth so well {141} that we could go out to the streets of Prague and say, ‘We don’t believe your lies anymore’—and communism had to fall.†--For the exact quotation, see Mary Jo Leddy’s closing plenary address in the volume from the conference Confident Witness—Changing World, ed. Craig Van Gelder (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999).