In its quest for peace and justice, the Holy See of the Roman Catholic Church is involved with many international organizations. That network of relations is worth examining.

After World War I, the war to end all wars, a workable peacekeeping machinery seemed to have been set up. It was hailed by the greater public and by many statesmen with great enthusiasm. There was established in 1919 both the League of Nations and the International Labor Organization. The Vatican was reserved toward the first and highly sympathetic to the second.

In 1970 I was told by a ranking SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland) party member: “If you think Walter Ulbricht has been a severe taskmaster, wait until he steps down and his crown prince, Erich Honecker, takes the party leadership. Ulbricht at first tried to imitate the Soviet Union slavishly, but he finally came to see that Germany is not the Soviet Union, that the DDR would have to develop its own brand of socialism. Honecker is much more subservient to Moscow than Ulbricht and much more blind to the social and political importance of the Christian Church.” In the mid-fifties, Ulbricht learned that persecuting the Church did not pay political, social or economic dividends.

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.

The current concern about the liberation of the oppressed, about the social revolution which is to transform the present order, about the counterviolence opposed to the violence which the existing order produces—and with which it defends itself—have all led many Christians to ask themselves about the attitude of Jesus regarding the political situation of his time. The question may surprise us. If so, it is because we take it for granted that Jesus was not interested in political life: his mission was purely religious.