It is too early to evaluate the full impact of Cardinal Mindszenty's witness upon his native Hungary, upon other captive nations, and upon millions of harassed and persecuted Christians and other believers in Communist countries, or even upon what we Call the free world.

It is not too early, however, to be reminded of the main aspects of Mindszenty's struggle against what he viewed as Communist attempts to destroy religion. The impact of detente on the Vatican's policy toward Communist governments in general and the regime of Hungary in particular is very well illustrated by negotiations between that country and the Vatican over the past ten years. It reveals a growing willingness by the Vatican to accommodate the Hungarian government.

It is one of the perversities of human nature that people have a far greater capacity for enduring disasters than for preventing them, even when the danger is plain and imminent. Winston Churchill, for all his prescience and eloquence, was powerless to prevent the Second World War: He wrote in 1936 of an England “decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.” The question for us today is whether, we can succeed where Churchill failed—a tall order Indeed— by preventing disaster so as not to have to endure it.

Jerusalem. The Old City. The Wailing Wall. Jom Kippur, 1974. The sun is bright, the sky blue, the air clear and crisp as worshippers first straggle and then seem to flow into the large square and toward the Wall, having first passed—as we all must—through the narrow funnel of military inspectors. Neither a Jew nor an Israeli, nor an uncritical admirer of the State of Israel, I nevertheless feel the special quality of this religious observance. It is marked not only by its usual solemnity but by the burden of being the first anniversary of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the war that destroyed. the semieuphoria in which Israel had existed since 1967 and placed in new perspective the shifting relations of the nations of the Middle East.

War may be launched by the Arabs in six, nine, or twelve months’ time,” warned Israel's Defense Minister, Shimon Peres, just nine months after the end bf the October, 1973, war, and only a few weeks after Syrian and Israeli forces disengaged from the Golan Heights cease-fire lines. A couple of days after Peres's statement, commanderin- chief “Motta” Gur was a little more precise: “The Arabs,” he stated, “may start a war at the end of 1974.”

Jewish tradition holds that ever since the destruction of the Second Temple prophecy has become the province of fools and infants. But after four or five Mideast confrontations in under three decades predictions of war have been too often verified to be lightly shrugged off as either childish or stupid.

In the early 1960's, before the military coup, Paulo Freire and his collaborators experimented with a new method of literacy education in the Northeast of Brazil. The basic idea was simple: Teaching literacy was not to be an isolated activity but part of a larger broadening of die intellectual horizons of the previously illiterate. An important aspect was political. The illiterate were to learn reading and writing at the hand of topics (Freire called these “generative themes”) that concerned everyday experience. For the impoverished and rural proletariat of the Northeast this was to a high degree an experience of deprivation, exploitation, and oppression.

The current passion for a “theology of ecology” got its chief start with the appearance in Scietice in March, 1967, of an article titfed- The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.“ Its .author, medieval historian Lynn White, Jr., of UCLA, is an engaging raconteur with a gift for the memorable phrase and the arresting thought. He is professionally adept at rummaging through heaps of historical scraps and making sense of them, frequently rather novel sense. Specializing in the development of technology in the Middle Ages, he links happenings from seemingly different realms, particularly ideas and artifacts, so that once familiar history suddenly looks quite different, rather like the shock one gets when old stories of kings and armies and conquests are retold from the medical point of view.

Recent behavior of working-class Americans, sometimes called “new ethnics,”; has deeply shocked and bewildered many .acute commentators. The supposed return to militant self-identification has led one radical, Pete Hamill, to claim that “the working-class white man is actually in revolt against taxes, joyless work, the double standards and short memories of professional politicians, hypocrisy and what he considers the debasement of the American dream.”

The same display of muscular working-class behavior has led Herbert Hill, an equally radical critic, to assert that “the hard-hat labor unionists, and they are by no means limited to the building trades, have joined with the military elite and their political spokesmen. This suggests the great danger of the rise of a proto-fascdst workers” movement in the United States.