The search for virtue in the Western world had its origins in ancient Greece and Rome, where-lhe terms arete and virtu embodied valor, courage, chivalry, manliness, fortitude, loyalty, rectitude and excellence. Perhaps our word magnanimity comes closer than any other to these connotations. Virtue was, for the most part, secular, not religious; its implications were public rather than private. It applied to those who, in the words of Pericles’ Funeral Oration, “knew that the secret of happiness was freedom, and the secret of freedom a brave heart, and who did not stand aside from the onset of the enemy.”

Easter, 1982, marked the nineteenth anniversary of Pope John XXIII's greatest encyclical, Pacem in Terris (“Peace on Earth“), a document whose impact, rather than diminishing, shows every indication of growing in the years to come. The encyclical, I should explain, has had a special meaning for me. As one of a ridiculously small band of self-styled Catholic “pacificists,” who had experienced during World War II the unwillingness of our fellow communicants to accept us as anything more than a “lunatic fringe,” u was always necessary for us to scratch for whatever support might be found in respectable sources—a reference to Scripture here, an episcopal or papal utterence there. Imagine my joy, then, when suddenly we had a whole encyclical we could call our own!

Often ignored in the flurry of contradictory facts and figures, charges and countercharges about the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the USSR and the conventional arms race between NATO and the Warsaw Pact is the degree to which Third World nations have been building large and increasingly potent armed forces. During the 1970s, Third World nations—some 130 of the world's 161 nations—spent more than $800 billion on military forces and munitions.