In 1943, Vice President Henry Wallace made a triumphal goodwill tour of Latin America and received tumultuous acclaim from large audiences everywhere. In 1958, Vice President Richard Nixon made a comparable trip through Latin America and his reception ranged from indifference to indignity.

The marked contrast between the two journeys is a fact of major concern for Americans. The decisive difference does not lie in die respective personal merits of Mr. Wallace and Mr. Nixon, although these personal qualities have some importance. Nor is it that Latin America in the past fifteen years has entered a quickened state of revolutionary change, although that is also true. The fundamental difference is not that Latin America has changed in the past fifteen years but that the world role of the United States has changed.

The question "What does America stand for?" ultimately asks "What is American Civilization?" Americans have usually replied with a confidence and oprimism that did not wholly mask uneasiness. In the American Republic's early days its citizens felt an urgent necessity to identify their new nation in the international community. A later history of uprooting and rapid change kept the sense of newness and the question of identity alive and quick.

In the ancient Good Friday liturgy of the Catholic Church, in the midst of incessant pleadings for all conditions of men, the following prayer is made: "Let us pray for the unbelieving Jews: that our Cod and Lord will remove the veil from their hearts, so that they too may acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ . . . Almighty, eternal God, who does not withhold Thy mercy even from Jewish unbelief, heed the prayers we offer for the blindness of that people, that they may acknowledge the light of Thy truth, which is Christ, and be delivered from »their darkness: through the same Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen."

The triple revolution in the “underdeveloped areas” -the revolution of rising economic expectations, of rising resentment at inequality, and of rising determination to be free and independent—is plain to see in the words and actions of leaders all through Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These deep desires are all, of course, the product of Western example and Western philosophy. The rationalism of Greece, the Christian idea of the dignity of man, the self-confidence of Europe after the Renaissance, the American demonstration that equality and independence can succeed, and the objective success of the scientific method in producing power and prosperity in industrial nations—these elements in our tradition have converted the world. After uncounted centuries of ignorance and apathy, the ancient societies of Asia and Africa want to participate in the good things that seem to result, from these alien ideas.

There are three distinct standpoints from which it is possible to launch a discussion of the problem of war in this strange and perilous age of ours that has yet to find its name. My initial assertion will be that it is a mistake to adopt any one ot them exclusively and to carry the argument on to its logical conclusion. If this is done, the argument will end in serious difficulties.

The President's Reorganization Plan for the Defense Department, so much in the news these past few months, brings before us a fundamental issue that every democracy must face anew in times of threat and crisis. The issue—the role that the military shall play in our society and in the making of our national policy—is familiar. What makes it compelling is the siege the Soviet Union has laid to the United States and the Western world and the peculiarly fearsome dangers of war fought with missiles and thermonuclear warheads.

So long as the nations of the world must rely for their security principally on themselves, they will continue to establish armed forces for their protection against outside threats. But every democratic society faces the danger that these forces of arms and of men trained in their use will be used against the society that created them.

Three contemporary problems in American foreign policy illustrate in graphic terms the moral dilemmas that confront any state in the conduct of foreign relations. Every American President since George Washington has proclaimed the Republic's devotion to democracy both here and abroad. One of our greatest Presidents, Woodrow Wilson, led the country in a crusade to “make the world safe for democracy.” The Eisenhower administration in 1952 rededicated itself to the liberation of subject peoples in eastern Europe from tyranny and oppression. By April 29, 1958, however, Vice President Nixon in replying to a question why the United States supported dictatorships in Latin America observed: “If we openly discriminate between one government and another in Latin America, what would we be charged with? We would be charged with interfering in the internal affairs of other countries and with trying to impose our system of government on them.”

It is of the essence of Biblical religion that no aspect of life, including the areas of national and international affairs, is isolated from the governance of God or exempt from the judgment of moral conscience. To relate international responsibilities to religious concerns means, therefore, to walk in the authentic Biblical tradition, and what is at least equally important, to utilize its insights for meeting the crisis of our times: such an approach would prove more successful than the immoral or amoral procedures which govern international affairs today.

Historical analogies are notoriously misleading, but the Biblical experience affords a striking instance of die relevance of ethical standards for a practical national policy. The Hebrew prophets, who were uncompromising in demanding adherence to the ethical principle everywhere in human life, were far more realistic in their understanding of the international scene in their day than all the practical leaders of their time, the kings, the nobility, the military leaders, the international merchants and the statesmen, let alone the common people.

Americans, for a substantial part of their history, have tried to come to terms with the moral problem by espousing one of two approaches. The first approach seeks to deal with the realities of world affairs with steady realism and tough-mindedness. It has its roots in historical experiences still fresh in the minds of many who were caught unprepared by the events of the period between World War I and II and who carry a sense of guilt for this failure. They alone for this guilt with strident affirmations about the facts of power. For the most part, power is seen as a comparatively simple phenomenon of which the military is overwhelmingly the most important part. Both of the recent American Secretaries of State have viewed power, not as the endlessly complicated relationship of two living organisms with goals and objectives both comparable and fundamentally unique, but as men might approach a problem in physics to be weighed on the simple scales of relative military preparedness and forces potentially in being.

By postulate theology deals with the ultimate in human existence, and therefore a theology of foreign policy is not something irrelevant but rather quite logical. The fact that such a theology has not been developed does not mean that it cannot be developed.

One of the great needs of our time is for a genuine meeting between religion and world affairs. The religious moralist and the political idealist often become so preoccupied with the imperatives of human responsibility, however, that they ignore the conditions of human existence. Ignorance of the limits and possibilities of man and history and ignorance of the more specific political facts of life have sometimes led them to Utopian crusades which have ended in disaster. The long road from Versailles to Pearl Harbor and beyond is cluttered with the whitened bones of crusades that failed—the League of Nations, peace through economic planning, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and peace through the renunciation of war.

It is difficult not to see elements of desperation and despair, in much that is being said about the international situation. This is a time when events seem in the saddle; when attempts to control the technology of destruction seem all but hopeless; when American policies founded largely upon good will seem failing, and a major part of the world turns from us in disillusionment and often in hatred

At a recent conference on "ethics and nuclear weapons" a moral theologian established succinctly and precisely, on the basis of Catholic teachings, that nuclear weapons are immoral. Though he granted that it is often necessary to do evil in order to do good, and though he alluded to the historic teaching. that, in the course of a just- war, it may be necessary incidentally to cause the death of innocent persons, he did not find in these rules sufficient justification for the use of major nuclear weapons;

The far-from-new observation that conferences look remarkably different from the inside and from the outside was strongly reinforced in the minds of delegates to the Fifth World Order Study Conference held in Cleveland, Ohio, November 18-21, under the sponsorship of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. The six hundred delegates, consultants, and observers spent four days arguing a variety of subjects bearing such resounding names as “The Power Struggle and Security in a Nuclear-Space Age,” “Changing Conditions of Human Rights,” and “Overseas Areas of Rapid Social Change.“

Newspapers in the United States recently carried comparatively brief items about a ceremony held in Warsaw on April 19 to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto. For most readers, these items must have caused a brief moment of shock—shock at remembering the details of that struggle and a further uneasy sensation at the realization that they had so nearly completely forgotten the episode in what already begins to seem an ancient war.