Habitually shunned by economists, the press, and the majority of Congress, shielded by a bureaucracy in the Department of Agriculture that long ago became its prisoner, the food industry is a domain ruled by a few giant corporations remote from public accountability. Decisions that can save or condemn to death vast numbers of people are dependent on an esoteric dated market mechanism geared to profit and oblivious to human need. And the most urgent problems facing die conscience and resourcefulness of American foreign policy for the next decade remain hostage to an economic system out of the nineteenth century. That is the argument.

In the wake of what many see as an overwhelming American defeat in Indochina, East Asia is ihe scene of dramatic changes. There is unfolding a new geopolitical configuration that looks very much like an abdication to, and accommodation with, communism. There is, moreover, a pervasive consensus that the U.S. is suffering from a paralysis of power that will cause it to abandon its Asian allies in future crises. This consensus has grown in spite of the concerted efforts of the Ford Administration to convince the international community, including Communist powers, that America still has the will to abide by its obligations.

Was U.S. policy, and the withdrawal of American forces from Southeast Asia, responsible for the sudden collapse of the pro-Western governments of Indochina and the subsequent wave of reassessments and realignments that has swept over the area?

In the reprisals following Idi Amin's 1971 coup in Uganda the mayor of Masaka, a town in West Buganda, was dragged from his house by Nubians paid by the General. A crowd gathered. The mayor asked to speak to the new chief of state by telephone. Amin's killers—“soldiers” is too good a word for them—stripped him, bound his hands, and tied a rope around his neck. The chief killer drew a knife, cut off the mayor's penis, and, holding it in front of the screaming man, told him he could call Kampala through the severed organ.

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.

With scarcely a ripple of protest a popular magazine recently carried a cover picture retouched to portray President Ford as a circus clown stepping off the Presidential airplane. The two “best sellers” on the Presidency are scathing indictments of President Nixon's staff and, by inference, of Nixon himself. In The Imperial Presidency Arthur Schlesinger, who sets the pace for many intellectuals, argues that the powers of the office must be curtailed. President Ford found his veto power quite ineffective in the closing days of the 1974 Congress. And the Democratic leadership of the $4th Congress is disussing a legislative program without reference to the President. The Presidency obviously isn't what it used to be.

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.

At the present moment there seems to be a worldwide agreement that conflicts between multinationals and host countries do exist, that they are bound to increase in intensity in the near future, and that something must be done about it. Speaking on U.S.-Latin American relations earlier this year the U.S. Secretary of State singled out multinational enterprises as one of the key hemispheric problems. A senior economist from the Brookings Institution said last fall that the likelihood of international conflict on the issue of multinational corporations is growing sharply, and the clash of the national interests involved could become in the near future a central problem of world economics and politics. In Latin America and elsewhere in the developing world similar preoccupations are expressed by an increasing number of policy-makers, policy advisors, and public opinion-molders.

I will attempt here to invent a future role for the transnational corporation in the development process of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. I will move away therefore from the nearby neighborhood of time and geographic space, as well as from fashionable and conventional forecasts that, precisely because they tend to reinforce each other, are least likely to materialize.

In the nonconventional prospective field of view there arises a reciprocal dependency between those who produce and those who consume strategic resources. In my "scenario" interdependency requires cooperation in the shape of concerted planning, research, and development between otherwise competitive forces, whether governments or corporations.

Shed a tear, fellow backsliders! What promised to be a good old raucous theological scopes tnai has already fizzled into a nonevent. The great Hartford heresy hunt has labored mightily and brought forth nothing more than a limp list of thirteen “themes” no sane theologian would want to defend, plus an equal number of refutations, which (except for the closing quotation from St. Paul) sound nearly as flaccid as the themes themselves. The latter-day defenders of the Faith have succeeded where Torquemada failed; they have made even polemics dull. In the halcyon days of old the guardians of orthodoxy at least stuck live villains in the stocks and consigned real books to the Index.

My comments are based on the assumption that there is a global food crisis and that it will be with us for some time. In discussing it here my scope is quite limited. I wish to focus on the unique relationship which the United States has to the global problem and the consequent special responsibility which the Christian community in the United States has for the problem.

The presentation will involve three steps: first, an analysis of the factual dimensions of the food crisis and the basic moral issues it poses; second, a description of why and how the United States bears a unique responsibility for the food question; third, a proposal regarding the potential of the Church in the United States to address the question of global and domestic hunger.

In a time when idiocies such as the domino theory comprise a substantial part of American foreign policy one has to look hard for evidence that authentic national interest is anywhere being invoked as a rationale for external relations. That the Republic of South Africa seems to be a world power demonstrating innovation in diplomacy and putting shibboleths in their rightful place says something about the genera] bankruptcy of Western statecraft. While Ford and Kissinger flail about seeking justifications for American failures and misalliances, a moldy, outcast regime in Pretoria has embarked upon a path of diplomatic initiative which has effectively breached the wall of isolation that has surrounded it for two decades. The motives of the regime of John Vorster may be sinister and base, but there appears to be a far more sophisticated perception of long-term interests in Pretoria than in Washington.

Holy Thursday in Assisi. In front of the Church of Santa Chiara the buses from Vienna, Munich, Milano keep unloading droves of Holy Week pilgrims. Their cameras start clicking the moment they have stretched their legs. Inside Santa Chiara the nuns limpid Gregorian chant wafts around the miraculous cross that one day, long ago, conversed with Saint Francis. Flashbulbs are popping.

Saint Clara, Francis's saintly girl friend, lies entombed in the crypt below. From her grave a sexy little voice lisps: “Francays? Ingleesh? Doitsch?” Reassuringly it originates from behind the heavy veil hiding a nun whose task it is to show the relics: “Ecco Santa Chiara's embroidered slippers … voila la chemise she sewed with her own hands for Saint- Francois … In diesem Bokal sehen Sie∼it is a jar filled with platinum-blond curls—Sankt Clara's Haare. … Sie ivur sher shim… Elle etait tres belle … bellissima…”

Speaking before the U.N. General Assembly in September, 1973, Chancellor Willy Brandt said: “Where hunger prevails, there can be no peace in the long run. Where bitter poverty prevails, there can be no justice.” He called upon the Assembly members to adopt a position on the moral aspects of international coexistence. And he said something else, that there is a limit to the expansion of power—“a limit where power becomes transformed into impotence.”

His words had direct relevance to the relationship between the United States and the Third World. In the postwar period, in pursuit of its power aims, the United States concerned itself with ex-colonial countries primarily with the view of “saving” them, as political entities, from a dreaded “Communist conquest.”

The World Council of Churches was bom in the cold war era. That's important for present understanding. At its beginning John Foster Dulles warned against Christian obeisance to the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” And Josef L. Hromádka, the eminent Czech theologian, spoke of the future bliss of socialist “material trust, free responsibility and service.” The WCC has been repeatedly accused— notably but not exclusively by Western conservatives— of damning the evils of the West while closing its eyes to injustices in Communist lands. At the same time, doctrinaire Marxists dismiss the Council as a product of the West and therefore unable to understand or act upon socialism's criticism of capitalism.