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.

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.

"Free enterprise has destroyed itself," Pope Pius XI said in 1931, and has been replaced by an "international imperialism whose country is where profit is." No wild-eyed radical or flaming liberal, Plus XI was one more in a long line of conservative Roman churchmen raised to the papal office. His elaborations about the world's economic systems, delivered in his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, have particular relevance this year, since the whole network of international trade and finance has come under severe attack by the actions of President Nixon in August, and the subsequent reactions of other nations.

Religion, long dead, is now coming back to life, moving at a steady pace to the center of our cultural interests. Times of crisis are propitious for religious rebirth. When, the idols of human aspiration have fallen and the old gods have died, the stage is set for new beginnings, a new upsurge of religious creativity.

To trace all the steps by which the rebirth of religion has come about would require a volume or two. One would have to mention first the great renewal in biblical studies that has been going on since the nineteenth century.