This article explores the federal judiciary's use of eighteenth–century social contract theory in United States v. Verdugo–Urquidez (494 US 259) to interpret the constitutional rhetoric of “the people” for our time. The principal version of social contract theory at play in Verdugo recalls a republican ideology which forms an old and volatile current in American political thought, an ideology which supports a far more exclusionary standard of membership in the nation than has obtained for most of this century, and which has important implications for the construction of political authority it is enlisted to support.

The presentation of what the author calls a “grave danger” which confronts the Church in the United States in my judgment is not comprehensive. All through our history, we Catholics in the United States have had to face this same attack upon the Church from non-Catholics. The point of the attack has been the same all through the years: namely, that Catholics cannot be loyal to the Constitution of the United States and at the same time loyal to their Church. The notion of religious freedom in the non-Catholic mind in the Englishspeaking world derives from the Protestant doctrine upholding the right of the individual to interpret for himself the Sacred Scriptures.

Transitions from dictatorship to democracy often raise the perplexing question of whether a new government may punish actions which, although reprehensible, were considered legal under the old regime. In these instances, the desire for condign punishment of evil acts confronts the principle that forbids retroactive criminal prosecutions. After German unification, problems of this type arose in trials of East German border guards for the use of deadly force at the Berlin Wall, along with prosecutions of military and civilian officials higher in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) chain of command. In this article, the author discusses these prosecutions and analyzes the response of the German courts to the difficult problems of retroactivity that the cases raise. In its concluding section, the article suggests that these cases may evoke issues concerning the legitimacy of the GDR that were the subject of bitter debates during Germany's divided past.

The author seems to have no regard for the supernatural life and vigor of the Catholic Church. He proposes as the most necessary means of protecting the Church from grave harm in the United States something natural—the “adaptation” of a traditional Catholic doctrine to a naturalistic concept of the State. The truth is that the most effective means toward preserving the Church from harm and promoting its apostolic activity will be found in a more ardent zeal on the part of bishops and priests and in a more faithful observance of God's law by Catholics. It should not be forgotten that Christ has promised to abide with His Church and to sustain it, so that the gates of hell shall never prevail against it. The author does not take this promise into consideration.

More than a century after Nietzsche's proclamation of the “death of God,” some recent books speak alarmingly of “the revenge of God” and the prospect of a “new cold war”—a conflict pitting religious “fundamentalists” against agnostic secularists on a worldwide scale. Remembering the cultural struggles of nineteenthcentury Europe, one might say that today Kulturkampfhas been globalized. At this juncture it seems timely to reexamine the meaning of secularism and secularization and their relation to religious faith.