At no time before has there been such a need to clarify the purposes and meanings of American diplomacy. The survival of our nation, and of the broader civilization of which it is a part, depends in large measure upon the skills and arts of diplomacy— upon constant negotiation and communication both with the totalitarian world and with the rest of the free world. For a long time to come we must reassess the adequacy of the took of our foreign policy, measuring them against the complex tasks which they must perform, and the great goals toward which they should be directed.

John Courtney Murray's writing cannot fail to be profound and instructive, and I have profited greatly from it in the course of the past decade. But I must confess that his article, "Morality and Foreign Policy" (Worldview, May), leaves me in a strange confusion of mixed feelings. On the one hand, I can sympathize with what I might call the historical intention of the natural law philosophy he espouses, which I take to be the effort to establish enduring structures of meaning and value to serve as fixed points of moral decision in the complexities of the actual situation. On the other hand, I am rather put off by the calm assurance he exhibits when he deals with these matters, as though everything were at bottom unequivocally rational and unequivocally accessible to the rational mind. And I am really distressed at what seems to 3ie to be his woefully inadequate appreciation of the position of the "ambiguists," among whom I cannot deny I count myself.

Fadier John Courtney Murray, in die May issue of Worldview, defined the real issue of "Morality and Foreign Policy" as die nature of morality itself. He defined die debate between die "old" and "new" moralities as an intramural one within Protestantism, and Protestant moralists are by definition unable to use the resources of natural law.