It is not an easy charge to make. But the facts are there for all to see. They have been there for quite some time, however few may be disposed even now to acknowledge them, and they lend themselves to a sad conclusion: that the Christian churches of America—and this applies with special force to my own Roman Catholic communion—have permitted themselves to become fully responsible accomplices to war crimes and atrocities that have been committed by our nation and her allies in Vietnam.

Past ignorance and timidity masquerading as prudence may explain but can no longer justify a posture of Olympian detachment.

What follows is an attempt to explore the nature of moral discourse as at applies to nation-states and to relate this discussion to some of the policies and purposes of, the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance. It should be noted that I have not introduced the "moral element" into the NATO debate; moral claims have been made for and by the organization itself during the course of its development.

A first assumption about moral discourse, as the term is used here, is that the assessment of the moral element in a policy or an institution is a critical task, not an apologetic one. A second assumption follows from the practice of "public diplomacy": It is morally dubious to engage in the deception of oneself or of one's constituents where goals are concerned.

I was at -St. Peter's on a beautiful Sunday morning in mid-May, and happily tall enough to see Paul VI as he walked down the main aisle in a small procession a bit after ten o'clock and perhaps a bit behind schedule. Everyone applauded him warmly. He responded with his usual shy, yet appreciative smile.

The Mass was beautiful and simple. In his brief homily, the pope said it was a commemorative ceremony to recall the eightieth anniversary of the publication of Leo XIII's famous social encyclical Rerum Novarum. Fr. Schall divides his teaching year between the Istituto Sociale of the Gregorian University in Rome and the University of San Francisco.

I arrived at Santiago's Pudahuel Airport carrying two large 16 mm. film cans. A customs officer, who seemed both surprised and relieved that I, although obviously a North American, spoke Spanish comfortably, informed me that films could not be brought into the country. Fresh from a month in Mexico, my immediate reaction was to offer what the Mexicans call a "bite." But Chile is not Mexico, and bribing an official in Chile would be taken as the greatest of insults. It was fortunate I remembered that, and I asked instead to see the Chief Officer. The Chief Officer greeted me and welcomed me to Chile, repeating the other officer's statement that foreign films cannot be brought into the country without a special license.

There is a dimension of Catholic thought rooted in the Vatican Council that extends beyond it in a way that could have significant implications for the Church's role in the political order. The basis for a political theology lies in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modem World; the purpose of this document was to reformulate the perspective in which the Church understood and evaluated contemporary culture and defined her rote in it. Many observers have singled out this document as the one with the greatest potential for shaping the long-range development of the Catholic Church.

My Lai and Vietnam spell the end of an era for the United States Army. The old order is as dead as the horse cavalry, as dated as the prewar military of James Jones's From Here to Eternity. Visible things may not have changed much, but the meaning and spirit of military life have already been altered beyond repair, We will never look at the uniform in the same way, and soldiers will never again feel the same things about themselves.

Only a yesterday or two ago most of us were resigned to apparent permanence of the seamless web of a China policy first fashioned by a Democratic Administration in 1950 and then made holy by two Republican administrations. Condemned by the United Nations in 1951, and charged ever since with monstrous abuse of China's great traditions, the People's Republic of China has been Washington's justification for heavy commitments of U.S. resources to extensive diplomatic and economic strategies.

The problem of violence in American culture has been a subject of increasing concern during the past two decades. In the fifties, there was rampant the school of “consensus” history writing, which tended to deny the existence of conflicts about basic issues in American history. More recently, the past has been portrayed in an entirely different light: Conflict, and particularly violent conflict, are seen as having been virtually endemic. Against the background of violent crime and civil disturbance, several presidential commissions have investigated violence, and they usually emerge with the conclusion that Americans are a peculiarly violent people. The atrocities of the Vietnam war, and police and ghetto violence, have led many to wonder at the same time whether the alleged merits of the American political system are as great as its defenders have insisted.

Is there a “peace movement”? It would appear so, if for no other reason than that a great many people count themselves part of “the movement,” as it is customarily called. Yet the independent researcher will be hard pressed to find any single unifying factor besides opposition to the Vietnam war. Even opposition to war generally or to similar forms of violence is not uniformly shared. Many have no objection to “just” wars or to the use of violence, e.g., revolution, to gain desired social reform. As the Vietnam war winds down, the movement is slowly being faced with the inevitable problem of maintaining some semblance of cohesion and unity.

The well-informed, frequently puzzled by foreign affairs, are sometimes even mystified by problems of the Middle East, an area of unusual volatility, controversy, and seeming unpredictability. Yet that area need not be less knowable than other regions. Actually, the Middle East may well prove to be more intelligible and predictable than most regions.

There are, I admit, some genuinely puzzling s pects to the Middle East—one is the military ascendancy of a small and reputedly unmarital people over vast masses of war like people. But after several decades of unremitting hostility to Jewish political assertiveness in the Middle East, it is surely a suspension of rationality to suppose—as most of us seem to—that the atmosphere can be cleared by some semantic formulation.

Guatemala, the largest Central American country, is suffering today under a system of terror. The government of Colonel Carlos Arana Osorio has decided to eliminate the opposition by annihilating it. Mere suspicion of being an active "Communist," "Castroist" or "Leftist" can lead to imprisonment and death. And under the facade of institutional government, and in the name of pacification, "institutional terror" rules this agricultural country in which 2.2 per cent of the population possesses 70 per cent of the cultivatable land.

Barbara Tuchman's good book on General Stilwell and America's wartime China policy provides an illuminating introduction to that elaborate record of America's Vietnam involvement which the Pentagon, thanks to the New York Times, provided for us recently. The really interesting thing is not the way in which these two accounts of American adventure in Asia are alike but the way in which they are different.

The Calley case has laid bare a neglected fact: Of all the major nations and their armies, the United States and its army have been, in moral terms, the least able to deal with the type of situation Vietnam has presented.

The American style of war has always been the engineer's style—for West Point is, traditionally, a school for engineers. We apply technology to grossly defined problems. We seek our military solutions in logistics, sheer manpower and firepower, thus over- powering all discrimination and subtlety. We have no military caste; since the permanent expansion of our standing army in the 1940's, the influence of the old American military families and schools has been submerged, and with it the last vestige of the aristocratic military ethos.

The decade of the sixties saw more than the normal quota of paradox and contradiction, and attitudes toward the economic development of the poor nations and the relationship between rich and poor nations were no exception. In. the realization that economic development was one of the world's critical problems, the United Nations titled the sixties the "decade of development" and set a goal of a five per cent annual increase in gross national product (G.N.P.) for the poor countries. This growth was to be achieved primarily by greater effort on their part, but was to be significantly aided by rich countries which would provide one per cent of their G.N.P. as assistance.

On November 27th, F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover charged a group called The East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives, which he alleged to be led by Philip and Daniel Berrigan, with a conspiracy to blow up heating units in Federal buildings and kidnap presidential advisor Henry Kissinger. From the beginning these charges evoked incredulity from those even faintly acquainted with the persons involved. It was apparent, for example, that Mr. Hoover did not know cither the number or the composition of the group which he named and was using it as an omnibus term for anyone related to the Catholic Resistance. Then, in mid-January, the indictments on this charge were handed down by a grand jury meeting in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Almost unnoticed by the policy-makers of the rest of the world, a new South Africa has emerged. Despite the attempts to ostracize and isolate South Africa, this country of twenty million blacks Riled by four million whites has industrialized its economy, consolidated its control over African rebellion at home, and launched an expansionist program in Africa that may well be the primary source of conflict on the African continent in the next decade.

Given the nature of the decision-making process in modern institutions, those concerned with normative questions must sharpen these questions. And they must learn to express them in terms which will be meaningful to those concerned with the technical aspects of the policy and planning process and also to the experienced concerns of the polity. This translation of ethical questions into political form requires that ethics take its place in the dialogue which already is going on in the disciplines of the social sciences. The task for ethics in this conversation is to be able to maintain its own integrity—its own agenda—without falling victim to the illusion that integrity means autonomy.