Easter comes in Russia later than in the West. The Russian Orthodox Church, conservative to its depths in so many respects, has never relinquished its ancient loyalty to the Julian calendar—and, indeed, twice in this century it has forcefully resisted efforts to abolish the embarrassment of the thirteen-day lag in that out-of-date schema. Easter of 1972, for peculiar reasons connected with the lunar cycle, came only a week after the Western churches had celebrated the feast, but if 1972 is to be signaled out for any particular note when the histories of our times are written, it will not be for this. Instead, a single letter, circulated from hand to hand and reaching the West in April, 1972, will mark this particular Lenten season as worth remembering.

In 1964, when race relations in America were under the sway of Martin Luther King's dream of future amity, and before President Johnson's war policy had destroyed the moral cohesion of the country, Paul C. Nagel published his impressive study, One and Indivisible: The Union in American Thought, 1776-1860. Now his second massively researched volume, This Sacred Trust: American Nationality, 1798-1898 (Oxford University Press; 376 pp.; $9.50), brings his account down, with some shift of emphasis, to the debates over imperialism occasioned by the War with Spain. Though the book ends almost seventy-five years ago, it has an obvious timeliness—not only because American imperialism is again a subject of worldwide debate but because American commitment to a sacred trust is seriously weakening. The traditional grounds of American loyalty are rapidly dissolving.

A Reuters dispatch datelined Hong Kong, May 24, 1972, relayed the following communique from the Pathet Lao News Agency:

The bomb tonnage released on the liberated zone in Laos in the first three years under the Nixon Administration is equal in energy to 150 Hiroshima type atomic bombs. On a per capita basis the bomb tonnage dumped on the liberated zone in Nixon's time is the highest in history and Laos is the most heavily bombed country in the world.

Both reason and passion combine in making policy. When he considers his means, a strong man may threaten, take acts of reprisal, break relations and attack. A weak man may beg and cajole, appeal to sentiments, ask friends to mediate and eventually accept less than he wanted. But passion can make the weak man act as if he were strong, or the justice of his cause may lead him to feel that only a strong line is right. That, by and large, is what has happened over apartheid in South Africa. Since the 1950's, speech has followed speech, resolution followed resolution and threat followed threat. Indeed, there was too often an escalation of rhetoric that left action far behind.

Bernard Häring is one of the foremost theologians of the Catholic Church. His theological skirmishes and battles over the last several years are a record not only of a personal journey but of the contemporary vicissitudes and transformation of the oldest continuous institution in the Western world.

Häring's difficulties with the Holy Office, the Vatican's once-powerful heresy-hunting tribunal, began during the first sessions of the ante-preparatory commissions for Vatican Council II. Employed as a professional theologian by the German bjshops, he ran into immediate difficulty with Cardinal Ottaviani and Archbishop Pietro Parente, the two top men at the Holy Office, and with the violent-tempered Franciscan, Ennenegildo Lio, Defender of the Bond, whose persistent efforts to smother any suggestion of progress in the documents to be debated at the Council were constantly and successfully challenged by Häring.

Mohandas Gandhi's moral personality is a richly faceted gem, showing up quite differently, depending on the placement of the observer. I have for many years been entangled in a study of South Asian and, in particular, Indian problems of underdevelopment, development and planning for development. My value premises in Asian Drama were the rationalistic modernization ideals emanating from the Enlightenment and pervasive in liberal thought everywhere (the assertions about Gandhi's opinions expressed below are documented in various places in that book). Together with Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi walks through Asian Drama as a spiritual leader upholding these ideals in a quite optimistic liberal or post-Victorian English variety, though molded by the Indian tradition. Of course this characterization does not exhaust what can be said about Gandhi's worldview, but I believe it is important to a full view of the father of the Indian nation.

The 1971 war between India and Pakistan, and the subsequent establishment of Bangladesh, has forced a general rethinking of world politics. The war is too recent to judge any long-range consequences, but the resulting new atmosphere in India itself has raised fundamental issues of theory and practice to which non-Indians should be alerted.

The moral conception that India had of herself— the heritage of nonalignment, Gandhism and neutralism—has been transformed radically by India's newly discovered power and military achievements. In light of Goa, the earlier Pakistan conflicts and the China invasion, her ambiguous tradition has made India seem hypocritical, preaching one thing and readily practicing another.

It is widely believed that in the recent India-Pakistan conflict the United States backed the wrong, that is, the losing, side. Not enough attention has been paid the possibility that the United States backed the wrong, that is, the immoral, side. This is an effort to look at that possibility within the framework of the traditional “just war theory,” a theory that may turn out to be a great deal more serviceable than its contemporary critics suggest.

The principles governing a just war were first spelled out by Saint Augustine and are an integral part of scholastic moral theology even today when the whole theory has been subjected to a new and rigorous scrutiny.

Throughout the final week of April, a group of over 400 Christians, mostly Catholic priests, met in Santiago, Chile, for the First Latin American Meeting of Christians for Socialism. Convened by the Chilean Secretariat of this movement, which has grown rapidly in the last year, the meeting drew participants from every Left Christian group and from virtually every country in Latin America. Observer-participants from North America and Europe were also welcomed.

President Nixon's decision to mine the harbors of North Vietnam, while stepping up the bombing at the same time, launched another wave of partial hysteria. The president of Amherst College made certain he was arrested for joining a peace demonstration which invaded a nearby military base, a convenient device which enabled him to transfer the problem of campus unrest to a new location. Theodore Sorensen made another of his frequent appearances on the “Op-Ed” page of the New York Times to remind us how skillfully John Kennedy, by comparison, had handled foreign policy, especially during the Cuban missile crisis.