During the excitement of expansion, members of the European Economic Community may be forgiven if their comments on Community policy are often more rhetorical than rational. In sober moments European leaders display an awareness of the dilemmas they face in achieving that ambiguous state of grace known as unity. What is less fully recognized is the dilemma the Community presents to outsiders, particularly those who are and wish to remain its friends.

How are we to deal with, how are we to accommodate, how are we to make provisions for this creation which, because it is in the process of shaping itself, does not know what it is going to be? Do we accept it for what it seems to be at this moment, a loose association of sovereign powers which already can exercise some authority in internal matters but is not acting in external matters like the unit it seems to want to be? Or do we make our calculations on the basis of the rhetoric?

EEC spokesmen at times stress the freedom of its sovereign parts.

Unpredictable and potentially inflammable, the Middle East is currently experiencing an unusual degree of tranquillity and stability. For the United States this is a moment for satisfaction, if not yet of optimism or rejoicing.

The U.S. has played a major role in producing a climate of greater realism in which some Arab states are prepared to recognize Israel, if certain conditions are met, and in which the desire to resort to armed force to obtain a solution has been significantly reduced. It was the chief force in achieving in August, 1970, a cease-fire, now over thirty months old, between Egypt and Israel. It has reached an understanding with the Soviet Union on the need to prevent acts of hostility in the area and to localize any conflicts that occur. It has maintained the balance of power in the area by its supply of arms and aid to Israel without forfeiting all relationships with Arab states.

Ours is a far less brutal world than that of the last century, for which blessing we are indebted to the determined dreamers of last century who were spokesmen for working people. Today nobody knows what working people think or feel, except that they made clear in the last election that they prefer to be ruled by an exploitive business community rather than by an Upper-Class Left which has, for a decade, made plain its contempt for them. Of course it is a rough form of self-expression to choose between two arrogant upper-class minorities, but this land of thing does not give us the benefit of workingclass morality. Today that is expressed nowhere, for working people have no party, no access to the press and certainly no dreamers. Thus in comparing the futpre-books of last century and those of this one we are really comparing die dreams of two different classes.

Take or leave a few lives, about 865 people have been killed by political violence in Northern Ireland since the troubles broke out afresh in 1969. It is not improbable that the toll will reach a thousand by March, 1974. The outsider is inclined to view March, 1974, as a kind of moment of truth for Northern Ireland, for that is the date by which, according to the British “White Paper“ of March, 1973, the people of Northern Ireland are to get themselves together around an elected Assembly. What happens if they don't get themselves together by then is unclear, but the alternatives now under discussion are not pleasant to contemplate. An outsider, such as I, might view March, 1974, as the fast approaching moment of truth, but as one Protestant leader there remarked: “Ireland has been undergoing ‘moments of truth,’ ‘definitive crises’ and 'once-and-for-all decisions’ for several hundred years now.

The year 1972 seemed fateful to those who cherish the commitment of American democracy to the tradition of checks and balances. Indeed, as the year ended, the realization was beginning to dawn that the nation was on the edge of a full-scale constitutional crisis.

Nineteen seventy-two was the year when President Nixon reopened the door to China, then mined Haiphong harbor and bombed the city of Hanoi; when he visited Moscow, concluded a treaty limiting strategic arms and directed Henry Kissinger to announce that peace was "at hand," then suddenly renewed and intensified the bombing, suspended it for thirtysix hours at Christmas, renewed it, then stopped it again—all without explanation to the people on whose behalf he was acting.

In the early days of April, 1968, ten months after the Six-Day War, in a district some fifteen miles north of Cairo there occurred an event that for several months became the focus of attention not only for thousands of Egyptians of different religions and social backgrounds but also hundreds of foreigners, members of the international press, resident scholars and diplomats, representatives of Western Christianity and the perennial tourists. This event, known locally as the Apparition of Zeitoun, involves the alleged multiple appearances of the Virgin Mary on the dome of a Coptic Christian church in the district of Zeitoun. The Copts are an Egyptian Christian minority who are descendants of the original Egyptian population at the time of the Arab conquest in the seventh century and who were never converted to Islam.

The foreign policy of any democratic nation today must be directed toward neutralizing or demolishing threats to its liberties. These are twofold. Totalitarian governments must be countered for their expansive external policies. So-called revolutionary organizations must be met and overcome because their activities are the thin end of the wedge opening the door to total anarchy.

I have always believed that there are times when diplomacy can fairly use the balance of power as an aid to peace. Equally, it is important to know where to draw the moral line; one must sometimes sup with the devil, but not fatten him

He was," Professor Donald Williams of Harvard once said, "the most gentle philosopher I ever met." Professor Williams had no great use for theism. We may be certain it was not the theories of Jacques Maritain, rather his person, that touched him. Maritain would have understood such praise. Theories are not the only carriers of truth. Persons carry truth too.

The omnia opera of St Thomas Aquinas Maritain almost uniquely understood convey a nonrationahstic view of human intelligence For Aquinas intelligence operates in many modes with unfitting suppleness adaptability and wordlessness Intelligence exceeds logic Intelligence exceeds words Yet intelligence does not despise its own weak instruments—its poor words, its structures of logic, its painstaking formulation of reasons.

The colonels’ coup in Greece on April 21, 1967, caught everyone by ṡurprise - the Right, the Center and the Left. Mikis Theodorakis, Greece's most gifted popular composer and maverick political “revolutionary,” was tipped off by a right-wing journalist who telephoned him in the early morning hours of the coup. He went immediately into hiding and started organizing the Patriotic Front, a left-wing resistance movement based on the Lambrakis Youth Movement, of which he was the founder and president.

It's almost obligatory these days to interpret our national temper in 1973, particularly the alleged malaise of the young, as a resurrection of something called “the fifties.” Erstwhile radicals point to a new “silent generation” to justify a change of strategy and often a change of heart. Proponents of stability, eager to dismiss “the sixties” as one of those extremist binges which sometimes interrupt our cycles of “pragmatic” reform and retrenchment, cite the restoration of tranquility to affirm the genius of American politics. Nostalgia merchants and rock musicians find that the splendid sounds of yesteryear can be even more lucrative on eight-track stereo than they were at 45 rpm. Yet for all its commercial potential and ideological convenience, this currently fashionable historical parallel distorts both “the seventies” and “the fifties.”

Shortly after Oliver Franks was appointed British Ambassador to the United States by the Attlee government, he was treated to a short lecture by Winston Churchill on the United Kingdom's proper role in the world. After drawing three separate circles labeled Europe, the Commonwealth and the United States, Churchill drew a fourth circle labeled Britain, which partially overlapped each of the others. He went on to emphasize that the central task of British foreign policy was to carry on its relations with each area in a manner that contributed to a harmonious whole. This conceptual framework had considerable validity for that time, although the particular policies adopted ultimately proved too ambitious for a nation of Britain's size, her declining sense of imperial mission and lack of economic dynamism.

The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 met much resistance. In the intervening twenty-five years the Israeli experience has been subjected to much criticism. Some of this resistance and much of the criticism have come from Jews who feared that the political organization of the state and the concomitant functions of controlling and managing power are antithetical to Jewish cultural and ethical orientations. If, to many Jews, a Jewish soldier or a Jewish policeman were symbols of liberation from the threat of massacres and pogroms and the humiliation of defenselessness against anti-Semitic assaults, to others these figures have represented a setback for the moral purity of the Jew, who exemplifies a higher ethical existence, a retreat from the vision of a transpolitical society. That vision did not include such demands of collective physical and material existence as the delineation of territorial boundaries, the organization and the employment of military power and the assumption of collective responsibility for economic viability.

In his Enemies of Promise Cyril Connolly said of Proust: "His hatred and contempt for the life of action suited the war-weary and disillusioned generation he wrote for, his own snobbery offered him both a philosophy and a remunerative career, he believed also in art for art's sake." Had I Proust's genius, this judgment would fit what I have become in the past two or three years very well, and certainly, like Proust's, mine is a war-weary and disillusioned generation.

Until rather recently I was Major Josiah Bunting, United States Army. I ran very hard on the bureaucratic and careerist treadmill that the officer corps of the Army has very largely become. After five or six years I found that I had come to dešpise it and what it was doing to me and what it had helped to do to this country, and jumped off.

My comments on ethnic Americans stem from a particular and specific frame of reference. First, I am a Catholic priest. Indeed, as another sociologist remarked (not intending a compliment): "He's nothing but a loudmouthed Irish priest." (May it be etched on my tombstonel) Still, these are my views, not the or even a "Catholic position." I very much doubt that there is a Catholic position on anything at this stage of the disorganization of the Roman Church. Secondly, I assay a tentative model, subject to empirical testing sometime in the future, about the "civil religion" of the Catholic ethnic. (I take it, by the way, that "ethnic" is merely a euphemism for "Catholic" when most people use it. Such does seem to me unfair to Scandinavians, German Protestants and even Anglo-Saxons, who, if The Christian Century is to be believed, are now ethnics too.)