March 30—The president of the Associated Church Press calls to invite me on a Church World Service/Cuban Ecumenical Council-sponsored religion journalists' tour of Cuba. “I've always wanted to go to Cuba,” I tell M. “You've always wanted to go everywhere,” he retorts

Practically everyone who writes about St. Thomas tells the story, but G. K. Chesterton tells it best. When Aquinas broke his habit of solitude to attend a royal banquet at the invitation of Louis XI of France (later St. Louis), he did not break his habit of thinking. “Somehow they steered that reluctant bulk of reflection to a seat in the royal banquet hall, and all we know of Thomas tells us that he was perfectly courteous to those who spoke to him, but spoke little, and was soon forgotten in the most brilliant and noisy clatter in the world: the noise of French talking.”

Milton Freidman is said to have defined economics in its simplest form with the expression, “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” Recent energy price increases have raised the production cost of food, making that lunch even more expensive. In addition, high energy prices have created incentives for several countries to turn directly to agriculture as a source of energy, extracting alcohol from several crops, including sugar cane and corn. Continued political instability in the Middle East intensifies this interest in domestic alternatives to oil. But most countries do not have the agricultural ability to produce a significant portion of liquidfuel needs and still provide adequate food supplies. This raises concern about how agricultural resources should be used. The resulting food/fuel choice depends on a unique set of conditions in each country.

The United States has a key role to play in both energy and food matters. The U.S. consumes almost a third of all petroleum produced in the world, imports almost 50 per cent of its domestic petroleum needs, and is the major exporter of agricultural products. The sheer magnitude of both the U.S.'demand for liquid fuels and its share of world agricultural trade makes U.S. policy choices on the food/fuel interface of critical importance domestically and in other areas as well.

It is not a joking matter, but the state of Middle East politics is nothing if not absurd. Which is to say that, to the Westerner at least, the most recent rearrangement of alliances, conflicts, and rivalries follows no readily apparent pattern of loyalty or consistency—either religious or political. The Iran-Iraq war seems to have crystalized the fragmented Arab world into two opposing blocs, those siding with non-Arab Iran and those backing Saddam Hussein. But Libya and Syria, the two most pro-Soviet countries, have sided with anti-Communist, anti-Soviet Khomeini. On the other hand the Imam is opposed by the two anti-Soviet monarchies of lordan and Saudi Arabia and the non-Communist Gulf states led by pro-Soviet Iraq. The two monarchies might be expected to oppose Iran's revolutionary regime but hardly to ally themselves with a regime no less revolutionary in its own way than Iran. Not to put too fine a point on it, it was the 1958 Iraq revolution that murder ed King Faisal II, ruler of Iraq and cousin to King Hussein. We find Sunni Libya, which has sought to embarrass Alawite president of Syria Assad by stirring up opposition among the Sunni majority of Syria, united with Assad to give aid and comfort to the Shiite leader of Iran. Syria and Iraq, which are hostile to each other, are ruled by the two extant leaders of thp Baath or Renaissance party dedicated to the unity of the Arab peoples. We find Soviet-client Iraq allied with the most proAmerican states, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, against the most anti-American state, Iran. Soviet weaponry provides the security of the Arab axis against American weaponry provided to the shah. Meanwhile, Iran credits the U.S. with starting the war, even though Iran is being attacked with Soviet weaponry.

Since 1958 it has been the stated policy of both the United States and the USSR to achieve a treaty that would ban all nuclear weapons tests. Andrei Sakharov, we now know, played a major, perhaps crucial, role in this matter. And several American scientists, including myself, played a role in establishing and carrying out U.S. policy in this same regard. During the formative period of the late '50s and early '60s we had no idea who Sakharov was or what he was doing. I believe if we had, we would have done a much better job, but the everpresent curtain of Soviet secrecy prevented it.

Granted the great Spanish reactionary thinker Juan Donoso'Cortes was defending the absoluteness of royal decree when he characterized “discussion” as “the universal dissolvent” that “has destroyed your adversaries, and will destroy yourself” and announced, “As to me, I am resolved not to tolerate it.” But since a politics without public deliberation makes the sense of a religion without prayer or a literature deficient in the rhythms of thought, and since he was writing in 1851 (ironically about the same time that Herman Melville was discussing practically everything in Moby Dick), his words have been intruding on my reading the last few weeks. Donoso-Cortes's fame, if he has any, rests in part on Pius IX having borrowed some of his points of view in writing the Syllabus of Errors. Were Vladimir Nabokov, quirky genuis, to compile a syllabus, one error would be the discussion of “general ideas” by literary critics, another the discussion of Big Topics by characters in a novel. Mary McCarthy is resolved not to tolerate the intolerance, pushy mensch that she is, and claims the right “granted to the Jewish novel” and “never conceded to us goys“—that is, “to juggle ideas in full view of the public.”

The Syria of Hafez alAssad comes steadily closer to the society of contradictions portrayed by George Orwell in 1984. The official slogan of the ruling Ba'ath party is “unity, freedom, and socialism.” Yet as one Western diplomat stationed in Damascus recently pointed out, the salient characteristics of Syrian life are the antithesis of these high ideals.

Power is concentrated in the hands of a clan of Alawites, a Shi'ite offshoot considered heretical by the Suu ni Muslim majority. The most overt opposition is that of the fanatical, fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, which has attempted to assassinate Assad and has succeeded in killing hundreds of officials and supporters of the regime. The government has unleashed the special Defense Brigades, under the command of Assad's brother Rifaat, and allowed the Mukhabarat, the secret police, to conduct a reign of terror and intimidation, including searches without warrant, detention without trial, torture, and summary execution. The result has been increased resentment against the regime among the majority of the population.

A dozen peasant women have gathered on a sultry morning in downtown San Salvador for the Mothers' weekly committee meeting. There is no coffee, no lighthearted conversation in the bare room. A palpable anxiety grips the assembly: It is becoming increasingly dangerous to oppose the government they believe is holding their missing children.

Since 1977 the Committee of Mothers of Political Prisoners and Missing Persons has fought for their children's freedom. The fact that they are known as “the Mothers” hampers the Salvadoran Government's normally brutal style of putting down opposition. The women wield a formidable weapon – their own motherhood–and the government doesn't want to risk national and international censure by attacking them.

One could argue that at the dawn of the 1980s Japan had reached a higher level of civilization than any mass society on earth. Most Japanese could aspire to higher education and a well-paying job, obtain medical, welfare, and pension benefits, live in comfort and safety, and still expect the freedom to write and talk more or less as they pleased. Inbred social constraints, the perpetual search for a near-mythical “consensus,” not to mention the legendary “homogeneity” of Japanese society— all no doubt placed inhibitions on the Japanese. But these were hardly comparable to the political terror, abject poverty, and economic and social inequities prevalent in one form or another* jn many other industrial nations.

The Japanese themselves, though bitterly critical of their own shortcomings and failures wherever they perceive them, continue to believe they can do no better than retain the system and set of rulers under which they have lived for the past generation. The voters on June 22 gave the deeply conservative Liberal-Democratic party (LDP) its greatest leverage in a decade. In elections for all members of the powerful lower house and half the upper house, the LDP increased its slim majorities so that it now controls every key committee and can all but ignore the pro forma objections raised by the distant second-ranking Japanese Socialist party, which barely managed to hold its own.

John Chancellor did it again last night. On NBC's “Nightly News” he referred to the presidency of the United States as “the most powerful political office in the world.” The key word there is ”political.” I recall that until a couple of years ago secular commentators routinely referred to the presidency as the most power ful office in the world, period. Until John Paul II came along. If with Hannah Arendt we distinguish power from force, asserting that power is force combined with moral authority, then it seems reasonable to view John Paul II as the most powerful person in the world today. Reagan and, presumably, Brezhnev can unleash more lethal force. But no leader can compare with the pope's power to direct the loyalties of hundreds of millions of people around the globe.

Late last year the British Government emerged with its principles intact from a contest of wills with a Provisional IRA hunger-striker who sought changes in the prison treatment of those claiming political motivations for their acts of violence. When the hunger-striker broke his fast, it appeared that the British policy was vindicated. But as usual in Northern Ireland, the ascendency of British law and order did not go untested for long. In the spring of 1981 the Ulster situation erupted again when another IRA hunger-striker induced his own death after failing to produce any modification of prison rules. Although the Thatcher government had held firm once again, the tradition of Irish self-sacrifice was reborn. Bobby Sands, M.P., became the thirteenth Republican prisoner since 1920 to die on a hunger strike in jail, the first in the Republic itself.