In April, 1952, I traveled to Lambarene, then in French Equatorial Africa, to try to enlist the leadership of Albert Schweitzer for the cause of world peace. I was disappointed to find him basically unconcerned about world politics, skeptical of the United Nations, indifferent to disarmament, and unwilling even to lend his name to peace efforts. A decade later, in June, 1962, I saw Schweitzer for the last time. He was then a world leader in nuclear disarmament, and my task this time, also unsuccessful, was to discourage his indiscriminate endorsements of some peace efforts which I believed misguided.

The anomaly in present U.S.-Japanese relations is that, while both countries warmly approve each other's professed foreign policies, neither country has mastered the new styles of doing business with each other necessitated by domestic trends, imperfectly perceived, which affect how each country looks upon itself and expects the other to understand it.

The United States recognizes, at last, limits on its resources, power and capabilities. At home, the U.S. Government must devote a larger part of its budget to urgent social and economic needs of its own people. Looking outward, the Government rations sparingly the wealth it shares with others and insists that others, able to do so, take a larger part of real responsibility for preservation of world order. The American people are weary of ideological overtones in power confrontations abroad and are beginning to accept, with all of the risks and confusion of new perspectives, the reality of a pluralistic world.

These are hard days for men and women who believe in the moral judgments of history and cling, for all our doubts, to the Christmas ideal of world unity and brotherhood.

For there is no unity in the world at the end of 1971, and far from supporting the religious mission of peace and goodwill on earth, the saddest and bitterest quarrels of contemporary history are between Moslem and Hindu on the subcontinent of South Asia, between Jew and Arab in the Middle East and between Protestant and Roman Catholic in Ireland.

I should be glad to believe with Mr. James Reston that God is not mocked and that the crimes of statesmen and of peoples obtain their just due at the hands of history. But I find it difficult to divorce myself from the thought that, at any rate in the long run, it is the conquerors and the big battalions that determine the verdicts (despite some shining exceptions) of historians. Over a century and a half ago, Immanuel Kant wrote, "If those revolts which gave Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Great Britain their constitutions, and which are now praised as so felicitous, had failed, historians would see-in the execution of their originators the deserved punishment of major criminals" (from an essay entitled "That may be all right in theory, but it does not work in practice," 1793).

My first reaction to James Reston's remarks is to marvel at their naiveté Here is an exceedingly sophisticated working journalist, the author of that extraordinary series on Mao's China who conducted a brilliant interview with Chou, indulging himself in a banal sadness. So I would respond initially by saying "of course."

Of course history is and has been immoral. It has always been the scene of self-interested conflicts between classes and nations. Of course people of religious faith kill one another, usually reserving the greatest enthusiasm for a slaughter conducted in the name of different interpretations of the same God, as in Ulster, but also avenging one deity against another, as in West Pakistan's genocidal attack on the Hindu minority of Bangladesh. I would add only that these theologically inspired enormities are usually based upon a substratum of class or national interest too.

It is not easy for a European to take a dispassionate stance toward the USA. The waves of idiotic anti-Americanism and the (smaller) waves of undiscriminating glorification have distorted the face of the America seen by many Europeans. My remarks are those of a. European, more particularly of an Austrian from Vienna, a city that decisively stamped the character of a Sigmund Freud and of an Adolf Hitler. Mine is a stance rooted in the experience of critical love which feels itself co-responsible for both the super-strength and the super-weakness of this American dinosaur, this giant baby that, in its relatively brief history, has contributed notably and bloodily to the world's genocide and ecocide; first and foremost in exterminating the Indians and the buffalo. A look into Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (New York, 1970) brings into view abysses, abysses in man, in the beast man (the animal is never bestial). America has added its contribution to the genocidal destruction of peoples and to the desolation of landscapes, just as practiced in Europe for over 2,500 years, ever since the days of the Roman Empire.

Of all evils in American society, racial oppression is the most intolerable. Of all priorities for American society, the attainment of racial justice is the most urgent. This is so because the issue of race touches on the very heart of the moral values by which the society lives. Martin Luther King understood this, and the same understanding illuminates his idea of an integrated American society.

The ideal is not only the integration of black Americans in terms of all the rights and privileges promised by the society's political creed; and it is not at all integration that deprives blacks of their cultural identity, as King's detractors (including the posthumous ones) have falsely claimed.

It is generally recognized that Pope Paul VI has played a significant role in the development of initiatives for peace in Vietnam, and his efforts and attitudes have frequently been contrasted with those of the Catholic bishops of the United States. Since the publication of John XXIII's Pacem in Terris in 1963, and especially since Paul VI's visit to the United Nations in October, 1965, the papacy has attempted to create and fill a new role for itself as an agency of peace and reconciliation in the modern world. A close examination of the role of the Pope in initiatives for peace in Vietnam, however, reveals both the difficulties of the role and the extent to which the scarcely acknowledged political commitments of the Vatican profoundly affect the efficacy of these initiatives.

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.

After twelve years of teaching in a theological school, I had heard more than I wanted to hear about how bad things are. There was, both colleagues and students insisted, no sense of community anvmore, either in the corporate life of the school or in America at large. The sense of common existence had lost its conjuring touch over space and had been severelv contracted in time. Americans, they said, had neither a sense of continuity and tradition nor a vision of the future. Abandoning the larger dimensions of social and political life, there is nothing left but to fall back upon tiny redoubts of private affiliations.

Modern theologians no longer explain strange Revelations about the ordinary world but tend to seek strange realms in which those Revelations will be ordinary truths.” Thus Ernest Gellner in a parenthetical aside from his controversial attack on recent “linguistic philosophy” in Worth and Things. While his judgment mav apply to much that goes on in- Protestant theology today, there are other contemporary Christians, those who think of themselves as “evangelicals” or traditional “confessionalists.” Insisting—to toy with William of Occam's well-known dictum—that worlds are not to be created beyond necessity, evangelicals refuse to accept the “strange realms” proposed by many contemporary theologians.

That extraordinarily valuable citizen Michael Harrington is, among his many other public activities, Chairman of the Socialist Part), USA. So quiet a life do socialists now lead that one is nearly tempted to list this post as a harmless private avocation. Yet in the days of Eugene Debs, American socialism was a serious political movement. Michael Harrington would have it so again.

As Harrington recalls in Socialism (Saturday Review Press; 436 pp.; $12.50), his impressive analysis of the Socialist past and less impressive account of the Socialist present, Debs in 1912 actually collected 6 per cent of the Presidential votes. In 340 cities, 1,200 Socialists held office, among them 79 mayors. Even two decades later, in the 1932 Presidential campaign, Norman Thomas attracted nearly a million .votes and the Party boasted 1,600 local affiliates.