In “Morality and Foreign Policy” a distinguished Catholic theologian has raised a series of important issues that trouble him in the writings of political realists. Father John Courtney Murray should realize, however, that those he attacks are deeply troubled by many of the same issues. Unhappily, he falls prey early in his analysis to the very polemics he attributes to authors of “the new morality.“

Thus Father Murray concentrates his attack on what he calls “an intramural argument going on within the Protestant community.” This ignores a rich body of contemporary Catholic writing which is central to the tradition he is criticizing. The editors of The Review of Politics, for example, stand in the forefront of fulltime Catholic writers on international morality and they have their European counterparts.

An unbridgeable gulf separates the demands of Christian ethics from the way man is compelled by his natural aspirations to act. That conflict is foreordained by the nature of Christian ethics and the nature of man. Christian ethics demands love, humility, the abnegation of self; man as a natural creature seeks the aggrandizement of self through pride and power. It is the tragedy of man that he is incapable, by dint of his nature, to do what Christian ethics demands of him.