It has been said that the ‘political prisoner’ is the symbol of this second half of the twentieth century. In a sense this is correct, but it is probably truer to say that political imprisonment is the most important social evil which civilization has as yet failed to tackle. In the thirties the predominant social evil was that of unemployment, in the forties it was hunger and in the fifties the immense problem of the homeless refugee. In each case public opinion coalesced to oblige governments to work together for a solution. It is now a recognized part of the obligations of a government to provide employment for its citizens. Through the United Nations and other inter-governmental agencies the world has assumed the obligation to provide food for the hungry. More recently, through the organization of World Refugee Year, a great effort was made to find homes for the human jetsam left over from the last war. Although the problem of the refugee remains, it has now become generally accepted that each country should feel it a moral obligation to provide shelter and work for those without any country of their own.

The figures of course are formidable. And the European enquirer can be mesmerized by the catalogue of Catholic achievement in the United States: a population now of forty-five million, with 55,000 priests, 170,000 religious sisters (of whom nearly 100,000 teach in schools), 267 universities and colleges with more than 300,000 students, 10,000 elementary schools with over four million pupils, 850 hospitals of every sort in which more than fourteen million patients were treated in 1960. In the same year nearly 132,000 converts were received into the Church.

The statistics matter, if only because they are the staring facts that declare the vitality of the Church in the only way it can be externally measured. They indicate something too, of the astounding generosity of American Catholics, who, with no help from public funds, have built up a system of churches and schools unparalleled in the Church’s history. But the Church is not merely a corporation to be surveyed in terms of its efficiency or of the successful image it presents to the world. It is easy for the visitor from an older and more casual society to wonder a little at the signs of a high-powered organization—the discreet hum of the electric typewriters in the carpeted rooms of the chancery offices, the multitude of monsignori bearing their hide brief-cases, the jet black Chryslers—and to see in it all the ecclesiastical equivalent of the sort of business set-up commended by Fortune magazine.