Power moves, warms and threatens all of us, and it is disturbing that power has become visibly problemmaJic and unpredictable. It expands with a relentless logic as men wrestle nature into strange shapes, vault into space and race to create new forms of wealth, persuasion and terror. It destroys the earth, menacing air arid water; even when it seems benign, as in medicine, it helps conjure the possibility of an over-populated planet. Yet it also seems curiously ineffective; ragged guerrillas defy great powers, students show contempt for wealth and for the state, black militants face force with defiance.

We are faced, I think, in spite of all hopes to the contrary, with a very long haul. From a moral point of view, good men are being required to grow the organs and resources needed to survive in the wilderness of the world.

I am convinced, in fact, that things are going to worsen unutterably before they grow perceptibly better. So the political import, in the deepest spiritual sense, of a thing like Catonsville, it seems to me, remains very much a matter of continuing debate, a debate which, I suppose and hope, would bo one of love and fraternity rather than one of suspicion or enmity.

One side effect of the mobilization of the Nazi-Fascist regimes for their war against Western civilization was the coup de grace it gave to American intellectual isolation. The “intellectual migration” of the pre-war years brought to our shores a host of men and women who have transformed the American academic, scientific and aesthetic landscapes. Nowhere has this effect been more evident than in the field of political philosophy. Men and women such as, to name but a few, Hannah Arendt, Carl Friedrich, Arnold Brecht, Leo Strauss and Waldemar Gurian brought new historical and metaphysical depth to what had largely become a genteel, bland and decaying field of study. Among these figures Hans Morgenthau stands out because of the breadth of his interests, because of the extent of his impact on thinking outside the narrowly academic milieu, and because of his recent improbable role as intellectual fellow-traveler of the young, the disaffected and the idealistic in their struggle against the war in Vietnam. The latter role has brought him both public notoriety and journalistic excoriation and is regarded by many as being in direct conflict with the basic positions he has espoused throughout the rest of his intellectual life.

The Latin American Church has succeeded in formulating valid theological perceptions and pastoral initiatives based upon its reality. It has also forged terms which accurately express newly formulated concepts of Latin America's self-understanding, self-identity and world role within the context of man's salvific quest. These terms adequately describe the Latin American reality and are clearly understood in the milieu to which they pertain. However, they have not gained currency in the glossary of inter-American dialogue and sometimes create confusion rather than clarity in the minds of North Americans who are unfamiliar with their true meaning.

The Latin American Church speaks to us of the legitimate aspirations of its people for liberation and the term conjures up threatening images of rebellion, anarchy and chaos in the North American subconscious. The Latin American Church speaks of communitarianism and North Americans subconsciously envision some menacing form of welfare state which threatens our national deification of the work-and prosper Protestant ethic. The Latin American Church speaks of educational philosophy or Conscientization and North Americans subconsciously equate this with some devious form of brain-washing.

A recent letter to the editor of one of the newspapers I read suggested that our present era should go down as the Age of Apprehension rather than the Age of Aquarius. The writer went on to list thirty "crises"—ranging from Russia to a higher rate of V.D.—that depress the minds of the citizenry. He then concluded: "And just in case any reader refuses to get drowned by these, there's always the H-bomb hanging over our heads." The news, to be sure, is rarely good these days. But it is more than a question of bad news. A letter of this sort rather vividly and even pathetically expresses the widespread sense of malaise that characterizes these times. We seem indisputably to be living through one of those periods of cultural collapse that periodically overtakes history, a time when the human estate is at low ebb, only tenuously connected to the sources of its replenishment.

Dean Acheson, President Truman's Secretary of State from 1949-1953, is generally considered to have been one of the ablest men to have held that position in the twentieth century. His memoirs recall the qualities of mind and the at times testy temperament which, together with the role he played in great events, made him also a very controversial Secretary. He did not suffer fools gladly, and was at times impatient and tactless with lesser mortals who failed to grasp what he considered to be elementary truths of world affairs. Although he has mellowed somewhat, he still believes that he was correct on all the great decisions in which he had his way, and the memoirs do not include a single significant case in which he acknowledges having been wrong.

We have been reading for some time that the Nixon Administration has abandoned its "low profile" approach in favor of harsh rhetoric that divides us into "polarized" camps, with Attorney General Mitchell and Vice-President Agnew singled out as the principal culprits. As this is written, it is too early to tell if the President's, attempt to overcome the reaction to his Cambodian decision is the beginning of a long-term restoration of a "cooler" approach or is merely an interlude between Agnewisms. In any case, the President's original words about the necessity to listen to each other struck a happy note, and it is equally the case that productive exchanges of views seem most difficult to achieve in this society. Why?

In that short sentence Hans Morgenthau describes one role of the intellectual who relates himself to the political world. It is clear, from the way he states it, that he admires this vocation. It is also clear, from his own career, that he has often exercised that vocation.

Morgenthau's eminence is such that he needs no praise from me. As an analyst of international affairs he is a brilliant scholar, a shrewd observer of the actions behind the headlines, a puncturer of pomposities, and an irritant to sluggish minds. These qualities are sufficiently well known that I shall not elaborate them.

I have never been convinced of the Marxian belief that thought is the outcome of social conditions, particularly the modes of production and exchange. It seems to me that the opposite is more nearly true, that the social substance in any given age is primarily defined by its climate of ideas, its philosophical worldview, if you will. The structures of society derive their being as well as their significance from the prevailing philosophy; truth is always a function of a state of consciousness, of the way we view things.

Democracy, like God, is often said to be dying because its followers are too heartless to believe in it, and perhaps that is partly true. More likely, however, the adherents of democracy have failed to realize, as have the adherents of other ideologies, that static ideologies are as short-sighted as idolatrous concepts of Deity localized in time and space. The democratic principles of the European Enlightenment have, to date, remained local rather than global and have thereby, in an increasingly global age, become idolatrous travesties of their originals. To remain moral, then, one must rethink the application of dynamic democratic principles to the changed consciousness of global concerns.

I returned only recently from an eight-month round the-world trip which took me to large parts of Africa, some islands in the Indian Ocean, Australia and New Zealand, all of Southeast Asia, and the Far East. One can observe these parts of the world with an inexhausted curiosity, the more so if one has seen them several times in the past. While at first it is amply noticeable that many of these lands are still below the threshold of economic development, a second Or third visit also reveals hitherto unsuspected signs of social stability—acting, to be sure, as a brake on rapid progress, but also helping to maintain a kind of steadiness in people's attitudes and worldviews.

That power ultimately comes from the barrel of a gun is not the hypothesis of Chairman Mao alone; it is a conviction common to Richard Nixon, Eldridge Cleaver, Hubert Humphrey, Andre Kosygin, Georges Pompidou, Jerry Rubin, Edward Heath, the editor of the New York Times, Al Capp, and more than several archbishops. To name a few! In fact, across generational and cultural, political and economic frontiers, a belief in the final efficacy of violence seems, ironically, to be one of the few ties that bind us. Century upon century, at least as far back as Cain, violence has been the principal means to public power and vies with sex as a source of stimulation and satisfaction.

The reckless attack on United States foreign policy by the more extreme American critics during the past few years has far exceeded in shrillness and volume the irresponsible outhurst of the Joe McCarthy era. There has been an alarming deterioration in the quality of dialogue and debate on the vital issues of war and peace. This disquieting development cannot be explained, much less justified, as a plausible response to the occasional imprudent official statements that sectors of the press delight in exploiting. The virulent critics who attack the motives of the President and other high officials without substantiating evidence subvert civility and fair play and appear to reflect a profound and perhaps unconscious alienation from the mainstream of Western morality.

Writing in 1765 in the full swing ot the Enlightenment, an Oxford Don and Bachelor of Divinity Thomas Warton, began the Preface to his famous History of English Poetry (from the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries) with the following lines:

Eight years ago an obscure algebra teacher, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, was introduced to the Soviet public by the publication of his gripping story of life in a Stalinist labor camp, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in Novy Mir (New World), a distinguished liberal literary journal then edited by the poet, Aleksander Tvardovsky. The release of this sensational work was personally approved by both the Party Central Committee and former Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev. It followed Khrushchev's famous "Secret Speech" which denounced the evils of the Stalinist regime and blamed them on "the cult of personality."

Five years ago West German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard and Foreign Minister Gerhard Schroeder launched a tentative “Opening to the East” which marked a break with Konrad Adenauer's relatively rigid approach to, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The “Grand Conbtion” of the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats continued the experiment from 1966-1969. The Hallstein Doctrine—no diplomatic relations with any country which had such relations with East Germany (the Soviet Union being the sole exception)—was abandoned. West Germany established diplomatic relations with the maverick Rumanian regime, and re-established relations with Tito's Yugoslavia. Several trade and cultural exchange agreements were entered into with East European Communist nations.

While in Florence recently, I came across an essay, “'Spiritucl'—'Spiritualité'” (Chriatus, October, 1969) by my colleague, the French Jesuit Charles Bernard. These terms have a long and intricate history, yet, as Bernard suggested, there are many types of spirituality in the Christian world that are present by right and by necessity within the overarching structure of the same faith. On my return to Rome, 1 remarked to Bernard, a propos his essay, that I had the impression that spirituality was becoming an ever more important subject in the contemporary world. That is correct, he told me. for our current problems are at bottom spiritual ones out of which our public difficulties arise.