On August 1, 2001, a new law went into effect in Germany. Two individuals of the same sex, although they cannot yet actually "marry," are now entitled to register as "domestic partners" and to enjoy many of the rights of married couples, particularly those relating to inheritance and insurance. They are not permitted, at present, to adopt children. Three German länder (states of the federal republic) brought suit in the Federal Constitutional Court (FCC), Germany’s highest court, to enjoin the enforcement of this new law on the grounds that it violates the provision in the German constitution that guarantees the protection of marriage. In mid-July, the FCC rejected the complaint, arguing that (heterosexual) marriage is not affected.

The front page of the July 28 issue of Die Kirche (The Church), the newspaper of the Evangelical (i.e. Protestant) Church of Berlin-Brandenburg, carries a lead essay, "Without the Blessing of the Church," appealing to the two largest churches, Roman Catholic and Lutheran, to bless such "partnerships." Directly under this essay was an article praising the recently deceased Berlin theologian Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt and quoting him extensively: "Theology is not needed to speak the Word of God and to let it be heard. There is no need for a high intellect in order to understand God and to speak of Him. On the contrary, whoever wants to do His will, will recognize whether a teaching is from God. The one who does the will of God understands the Word of God, not the one who writes books about the Word of God or deals with it in academic fashion...he understands it better than many theologians."

What ought to have been clear to the attorney for Bavaria and the two "new" states (former East German states) who protested the new domestic partners law is not just that it violates the German constitution, but that it endorses behavior that is plainly condemned in the Bible (see Romans!). Unfortunately, this is one thing that it is increasingly harder to agree on in Germany, as it also is in the United States. The argument of the protesters, like the verdict of the court, reflects the tacit assumption that the highest moral law is something that we humans make, not something written in the heavens or handed down from above.

Similarly, those American attorneys and experts arguing on behalf of Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, that posting the Ten Commandments in his courthouse is not an "establishment of religion," and therefore not unconstitutional, are right, but that is not the main objection to removing them. The main objection is that ordering their removal in effect argues that there is no law, there are no principles higher than the U.S. Constitution, and that is true only if there is no God.

The decision of the United States not to submit to the International Criminal Court is only one of many examples of American unilateralism currently arousing indignation and hostility in other countries. President Bush’s decision is correct, it seems to us, for two reasons. The first is the one usually cited: we cannot subject American military personnel to the possibility of being tried by foreign courts according to foreign concepts of law for actions performed on the orders of the American government.

The second reason has to do with the larger implications of attempts to create an international court of justice: Do they represent an effort to establish something resembling a world government? If so, as Americans, we must be aware of the fact that in such a system we ourselves will be a small minority, subject to rule by a majority which hardly can be counted to share our American concepts of justice, freedom, and democracy.

When a nation with its own cherished notion of liberty and fair play allows its own national rule to be superseded by international agreements, unexpected consequences for individuals may arise. Dr. Marcel Kraft, a young Swiss ear-nose-and-throat surgeon who is about to complete his specialty training and wants to enter private practice, has discovered that one of Switzerland’s new international agreements prohibits hospital staff from initiating private medical practice for the next three years. Until 2000, the Swiss were accustomed to making their own rules and regulations. Now, it is becoming plain that what the European Commission decides will reach down into private lives in Switzerland. Americans fascinated by globalization and multiculturalism should consider what it will mean to allow our own lives to be regulated by organizations with little or no appreciation for many of our most cherished values.

Bad Ischl, Austria. Here, in the summer of 1914, the aged Franz Josef I, Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, ruler of a truly multi-ethnic, multicultural realm, penned his ominous rescript, "To my people," explaining that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the double monarchy, made war with Serbia necessary. It was a deadly mistake, for four years later, with millions of lives lost, the monarchy split into pieces, and both German Kaiser and Russian czar fallen, the magnitude of the mistake was becoming clear. The victory of the Western Allies (Russia had made peace) was followed by the oppressive Versailles Treaty of 1919, setting the stage for World War II and the passing of Britain, France, Germany, and finally Russia as major players from the world stage.

In the summer of 2002, the American President is contemplating the necessity of bringing Iraq to heel, just as the Emperor-King nine decades ago, thought he must do with Serbia. The world learned the price that had to be paid for the Emperor’s mistake. What consequences, what gigantic price to pay, await the decisions of the American President with regard to Iraq, Iran, Israel, or perhaps for the whole world? God knows, we do not, but perhaps we know enough to free ourselves of two dangerous illusions: for the United States, of unilateralism; for the Europeans, of internationalism.

The American Illusion

The American illusion has two parts: the first part is that we can "go it alone." All the world now recognizes that the United States possess unrivaled superiority in military technology. Why, then, is it an illusion to imagine that we can go it alone? The answer is simple. We have the military potential–or so we think, and most of the world agrees–to devastate any who oppose us, singly or all at once. What we lack is the necessary strength of will to finish things that in our illusion of power–dare we say, of omnipotence–we begin. The greatest example is the Vietnam War. If it was justified–and one may argue that it was–it was lost because we dreaded the possibility of Chinese and Soviet reaction if we had waged it with all the means necessary to produce victory. The more recent example is the Gulf War, in which the victory won by our preponderance of force has melted away because of our decision not to carry it through to a decisive end, so that we must now contemplate aggressive action against our undeterred enemy, Iraq.

The second part of our illusion is that we can deal with symptoms while ignoring causes. The World Trade Towers may seem hardly a symptom for the thousands who lost husbands, wives, parents, children, or friends. For a nation of more than one-quarter billion, however, it is like a little subcutaneous hemorrhage, hardly life threatening. If the hemorrhage is a symptom of dangerously high blood pressure, it should not be treated as though it were the problem. The Al-Qaeda pricked us painfully, and we have swatted the insect, but we have not dealt with the fever swamps where it bred.

Why has the Arab-Muslim world produced terrorists, haters of the United States and Israel, and perhaps of the whole of what used to be Christendom? The great majority of Muslims are not terrorists, it is true. One should not blame Islam as a whole for the acts of a few, just as one should not blame Christianity as a whole for the violence of a few anti-abortion extremists. There is, however, an important difference: the vast majority of Christians, liberal and conservative, blame these extremists, whereas it is impossible to overlook the widespread sympathy of Muslims for Islam’s terrorist "martyrs." We laugh when ayatollahs refer to America as "the great Satan." We do not think of ourselves that way. Why do some, many if by no means most, Muslims agree? It is an illusion to think, as Mr. Bush would have us do, that it is because of our "virtues," our freedom, our democracy. Is it not rather because of our personality, our self-indulgence, our greed, and our indifference to the plight of the poor? We once-Christian peoples of the West have forgotten what our Bible says about such things, for we have all but forgotten the Bible itself. The Muslims have by no means forgotten their Koran. Against outbreaks of hatred such as September 11, we can react with air strikes and military insertions. We cannot deal with our own views that way. It is an illusion to think that we can make ourselves secure from all foreign dangers while at the same time pursuing the attractive and profitable vices that are gnawing away at our national substance.

European Illusions

The Europeans of A.D. 2002, or at least very many of them, those who write in Le Monde, Figaro, Die Welt, Der Standard, La Reppublica, those whom one meets in cafés and pubs, suffer from two dangerous illusions. Of course, not everyone shares them; some have their eyes open to see what is coming over the horizon. Even a short visit in the land of the Euro will reveal that many Europeans, like many Americans, are in an intellectual Never-Never Land, so bemused by the pleasures and comforts of life as it is today that they cannot imagine what may well await them tomorrow, not to mention in eternity.

The first illusion is that power does not corrupt, or that if it does, it corrupts only Americans. Europe is in the midst of a breaking down of national boundaries, cultures, languages, and convictions. The establishment of an international currency, the Euro, has been greeted with annoyance by those who loved their marks, francs, and schillings, but everyone agrees that it facilitates trade and boosts tourism. What, for the moment, is hardly noticed is that with the growth of pan-European centralization comes the decline of the national, regional, and local institutions that prevent the amalgamation of individuals into mass man. One points in vain to the way in which centralization is transforming the United States into the United State. "That will never happen here; our traditions, our heritage are too strong," people will tell one another, even as their newspapers report that the European Commission has prescribed the shape a cucumber must be in order to be sold.

The second illusion may be a consequence of several decades of peace in Europe. French and Germans no longer quarrel over the Alsace or the Saarland; Germans allow Königsberg to be Kaliningrad. Why are the Israelis so stubborn about letting the Palestinians have the borders of 1967, pre-Six Days’ War? Can they not see that the Palestinians, like everyone else, want peace and will surely leave Israel in peace if only they get the land they want? The Palestinians wish to throw Israel into the sea? Surely that is only rhetoric.

In the last twenty years, both national policies and public opinion here are increasingly turning against Israel, and against the United States, to the extent that Washington supports Israel and refuses to clip Jewish wings. The combination of sympathy for Palestinian Arabs, and for Muslims generally (not all Palestinians are Muslims), along with a growing hostility to Israel and to Jews generally, is not perceived as in any way a growth of anti-Semitism. How could it be? That is in our past. Unfortunately, the conduct of some Jews, particularly Americans, in extorting money as restitution or reparations for the Holocaust, and in blaming living Swiss, Frenchman, Austrians, and others for the crimes of dead Nazis, is permitting a whiff of self-righteous self-approval to those increasingly inclined to anti-Semitism and hostility to embattled Israel.1

Europeans have largely forgotten the Bible, part of which is the common heritage of Gentiles and Jews. Churches are emptying even as bishops and theologians–Anglicans, Lutherans, Reformed, and even a few Roman Catholics and Baptists–can think of no more pressing mission than to protect abortion "rights," facilitate homosexual marriage, and urge homosexual admission to the clergy. Most European "Christians," not to mention the increasing numbers of atheists and agnostics, can no more think of defending the Cross or the Church than of defending IBM or the Deutsche Bank–probably less.

In September of 1683, 28,000 Poles and Lithuanians rode to Austria to defend Vienna from the Turks. Today, NATO defends the Muslims from the Serbs. Will NATO, with or without its newly recruited Polish, Czech, and Hungarian elements, ride to defend Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, or any part of Israel from the Palestinians? Will a society to which religion means less and less do anything to defend the Jewish State from people for whom a jihad is a noble task, justifying terrorism, murder, and suicide? Because most Europeans have forgotten or outgrown religion, which the Muslims have not, they cannot imagine that Israel’s Palestinians want anything more than pre-1967 borders, or that their own Muslim immigrants cherish anything more than liberté, egalité, and fraternité.

After the atrocities of September 11, Samuel Huntington’s book, The Clash of Civilizations, enjoyed a suddenly renewed popularity. However one wishes to define it, it is now evident that what used to be called Western civilization, or perhaps Christendom as a whole, is under assault. The continual chain of suicide assaults on the civilian population of Israel is a constant reminder that, for some Muslims, a murderous suicide attack on non-Muslim civilians is a way to gain eternal glory. Others, including sovereigns in major, supposedly moderate Muslim nations, while not prepared to kill themselves, give substantial financial compensation (rewards?) to families whose members successfully kill Israelis at the cost of their own lives.

The persistent refusal of Western leaders and media to explore this aspect of the clash of civilizations reveals a very serious weakness: a failure, or worse still, a refusal to come to terms with reality. It is far from our intention to minimize the seriousness of this weakness. Nevertheless, it may be that it is a by-product of the more serious weakness that threatens to topple the proud towers of Western civilization just as thoroughly as September 11 destroyed the World Trade Center.

The Muslim states and Muslim population in non-Muslim areas may be militarily weak, but they are spiritually strong. The nominally–or historically–Christian states of the West may be militarily unchallengeable–indeed, they are–but they are spiritually weak; in many places, virtually moribund. What spiritual vigor can accomplish against seemingly overwhelming military and economic strength becomes very evident when one compares the little town of Wittenberg (renamed Lutherstadt Wittenberg by the now- vanished German Democratic Republic) with Rome, or the military strength of Luther’s protector, Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony, with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, ruler of half the world.

In Wittenberg, Martin Luther preached in both the Castle Church, where he posted the Ninety-Five Theses, and the Town Church. At Christmas, AD 1520, Luther himself was hiding from papal and imperial pursuit in the Wartburg Castle. His university colleague, Andreas Bodenstein von Carlstadt, decided to take matters into his own hands and, at a communion service in the Town Church, offered both bread and wine to the congregation, with two thousand in attendance. At that time, Wittenberg had perhaps five thousand people. Today, its population numbers fifty thousand. On July 28, 2002, there may have been 150 in attendance.

While Luther and his allies and successors were spreading the Reformation in Germany and Scandinavia, and Calvin was doing likewise in Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, and elsewhere, the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation was taking hold in the Hapsburg heartlands of Lower and Upper Austria. Monasteries were established, churches built in little towns such as Käfermarkt and Kremsmunster, magnificently designed and decorated and affording room for hundreds, even thousands of worshippers. Today a Catholic Mass in these churches does well to gather one hundred timid souls.

And North America?

Unlike the churches of Germany and France, Scandinavia and England, Italy and Spain, the churches of the United States, Protestant and Catholic, liberal and conservative, are filled on Sunday–sometimes on Saturday evening as well. Unlike Germany and France, American leaders profess Christian faith: often credibly like George W. Bush, sometimes ostentatiously, like Bill Clinton emerging from Sunday worship with a large, clearly labeled Bible under his arm. However, those same professing Christians, and even the occasional observant Jew, seem committed to perpetuating evils that are rotting the demographic core of the nation. Bill Clinton, who displayed the Bible so prominently, and Joseph Lieberman, who markedly kept the Sabbath, supported even the most plainly homicidal form of abortion, partial birth abortion. Patrick Leahey, a practicing Roman Catholic, is determined to ban from the federal judiciary any judge who might conceivably look on the developing unborn child as a human being deserving of protection. President George W. Bush, who in his campaign for the presidency made his anti-abortion sentiments known, goes on in pursuit of homeland security, rattling his high-tech saber against Iraq, and silently passes over the loss of four thousand lives in America’s abortion facilities every day.

America’s churches are filled, indeed–although on Sunday mornings, the parking lots of the great merchandisers and malls may be fuller. "Liberal" clergy demonstrate their "liberalism" by endorsing abortion, approving of the homosexual practices so sharply condemned in the Bible, and at the same time show their modernity or postmodernity by supporting the suffering Palestinians against arrogant Israel. Our schools no longer know the word Christmas, to say nothing of Easter. Despite the words of our Declaration of Independence, "created equal and endowed by their Creator," the concept of divine creation, even as an idea, is banned there as well. On the other hand, the most egregious pornography enjoys the protection of the law, and children cannot be denied access to it.

Deuteronomy 28 is the most explicit collection of blessings and curses in the Bible. In the context of the looming clash of civilizations, rich, smug, self-indulgent Americans should look at verses 47 and 48a: "Because you did not serve the LORD your God with joy and a glad heart, for the abundance of all things, therefore you shall serve your enemies whom the LORD shall send against you…."

In a remarkable little book, just published, Jean Madiran uses the familiar Newspeak word homophobia to introduce a far more serious problem. Homophobia, which might logically mean "fear of the same," after the pattern of claustrophobia and agoraphobia, has come to be a catch-word used to charge anyone who questions the appropriateness of homosexual acts with hatred, i.e. hatred of those who perform the acts. In Une civilisation blessée au coeur (Le Barroux: Editions Ste. Madeleine, 2002), he points out that the problem of our day is not homophobia, but aphobia, a word that he traces back to classical Greek, meaning a lack of fear, of awareness of danger. It is aphobia which is the danger in Christendom, which is why Madiran speaks of our civilization as "wounded in the heart." We do not fear that which should be feared, or Him whom we ought to fear, namely the Lord, the fear of whom is the beginning of wisdom (Prov. 1:7). We do not fear Islam, which from the perspective of both Western civilization and Christianity is a very significant threat, which, if we do not fear, may soon displace us. And even in the case of homosexuality, while there are doubtless some among us who are "homophobic" in the pejorative sense in which it is used by gays and their advocates, most of society is aphobic with respect to homosexuality, failing to see in it something that has the potential to disorient society, to menace the more traditional institution of marriage, and incidentally to spread dangerous diseases, including AIDS. Unreasonable fears are harmful, but aphobia, if it keeps us from understanding God, man, and society, is far more so.

In mid-August, African-American activists gathered in Washington to repeat their demands for reparations for African slavery. It is a curious and unreasonable thing to expect people who have not injured to pay compensation to people who have not themselves been injured. Some black Americans have pointed out that they are much better off today as descendants of former slaves in the United States than they would be in de-colonized Africa. Before de-colonization was under way in Africa, at Christmas 1955, Pope Pius XII addressed the Africans aspiring to independence with these words: "A just and progressive freedom should not be refused," but went on to urge that they recognize the degree to which Europe had contributed to their advancement, saying, "Without the influence of Europe extending into all areas, a blind nationalism could cause them to throw themselves into chaos or servitude." The current travails of Zimbabwe offer the most glaring current example of what he had in mind. When the white minority government of Ian Smith agreed to black majority rule, it originally drew up a constitution providing for a permanent representation of the white minority in government. Under the influence of British Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington and American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Southern Rhodesia, as it was then called, was forced to abandon the principle of special voting privileges for the white minority and hold new elections on the principle of "one man, one vote." The original black president, a Methodist bishop, was rejected, and Robert Mugabe was elected. In effect, it can be seen that "one man, one vote" really means "one man, one vote, once." Mugabe is still president, thanks to his ability to manipulate elections. Most recently he has begun the expropriation of the white farmers who are the only real producers of food in Zimbabwe, guaranteeing that millions of his people will face starvation as the once productive white-owned farms fall into chaos. Henry Kissinger, meanwhile, far from suggesting compensation for the plundered white farmers or acknowledging any responsibility for the current situation, goes on offering his clever counsels to our American President and to anyone else who will listen. He certainly has not shown any sense of guilt for the awful results of his influence in Southern Rhodesia/Zimbabwe.

Hidden Guilt

Anyone who looks at Africa today–not only sub-Saharan Africa, but also at states such as Algeria, once part of metropolitan France–ought to recognize that the rapid pace of de-colonization, enthusiastically encouraged by our own government, has resulted in immense suffering across the continent. The state where white minority rule lasted longest, South Africa, is for the moment the healthiest and most stable sub-Saharan state, with the possible exception of Senegal, but there too there are signs that the "one man, one vote" principle is hardly the cure for all woes.

It is now far too late to attempt to undo the consequences of de-colonization. We should beware of letting the self-righteous sense of knowing what is best for everyone else in the world delude us into making similarly severe mistakes elsewhere. Our new President, who has quite a different sense of personal morality from that of his predecessor, may be falling into the same illusion that seems to have affected Mr. Clinton, that of thinking that he knows best for everyone in the world.

All across Europe, the news media are preoccupied with Mr. Bush’s war talk. "Bush on Fire" was a headline in Le canard enchainé, the satirical French political journal, August 15. In the United States, we seem relatively ready to accept the idea that if Mr. Bush and his advisers come to the conviction that Iraq represents a clear and present danger, we may justly attack. War plans of various kinds are constantly being outlined in our media. Does no one remember that the main charge against the German military leaders condemned in the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials was plotting aggressive war? Unless and until Iraq attacks us, to plot ways of attacking Iraq without a casus belli seem to be to plot aggressive war. There are differences, of course, but there is a certain similarity, and it should not be brushed aside.

According to the United States Constitution, Congress, not the President, has the authority to declare war. Recently, however, particularly but not only in the Kosovo conflict with Yugoslavia, it has become apparent that an American President, be he named Clinton or Bush, can more or less do as he pleases, or, more kindly put, thinks wise and necessary, with our powerful military forces without benefit of a declaration of war. To the extent that Congressional critics of Mr. Bush’s plans seem to be saying that we need the "cover" of United Nations approval for any military action, they are surrendering one of the fundamental principles of national sovereignty, the right to wage war, to that relatively unpredictable international body. It seems that in this debate, to the extent that there actually is a debate, it is procedures rather than principles that we are debating: how are we best to attack Iraq, and possibly other malicious powers as well, not whether it is morally just or constitutionally permissible to do so whenever it strikes our leaders as necessary.

"Promises of healing versus human dignity": Heiligungsversprechen versus Menschenwürde is the subject of a major essay in the winter 2001 issue of the German quarterly for medical ethics, Zeitschrift für Medizinische Ethik. Dr. Santiago Ewig, an instructor at the medical school of the University of Bonn, approaches the questions of stem cell research and cloning from a more fundamental perspective than that currently used in the United States. What is the nature of the human embryo? At what point does it come to possess the dignity that would protect it from arbitrary exploitation and destruction? Prof. Ewig is aided in his quest to consider the problem on the basis of fundamental principles rather than of supposed medical utility because of the difference between the German Federal Constitution and our own. In the aftermath of World War II and the experience of Nazism, the postwar German constitution explicitly guaranteed the human dignity and the duty of government to protect human life (articles I and II). Consequently, abortion is still defined as an evil in Germany, an evil that must be tolerated and left unpunished in certain circumstances, but never a right, as it is in the United States.

In arguing against the use of embryonic tissue for research, Dr. Ewig argues that we know perfectly well that the embryo is both fully human and a being from the point of fertilization, hence a human being, and therefore possessing human dignity and worthy of legal protection. He makes it plain that this principle, of which every physician ought to be aware, is often disregarded for utilitarian purposes. In the English-speaking world, both Britain and the United States, considerable propaganda for stem-cell research and cloning is made by exploiting individuals suffering from various potentially treatable conditions, the raising up of "pressure groups" of pathetic sufferers to plead for research that they are led to expect could promise them a cure. Ewig states what should be a self-evident truth: hard cases make bad law. We should not let the anguish of suffering people blind us to the reality that what we are being asked to tolerate may in effect be a kind of "cannibal society," in which some very tiny humans are sacrificed in an effort to bring relief, not even to present sufferers, but to future sufferers with similar afflictions. This is nothing less than an exploitation of human misery to permit inhuman activity.

There is an implicit promise of universal or all but universal healing in some of these projects. Ewig, himself a specialist in lung disease, points to a hope expressed in the publication of the American Thoracic Society that we shall someday have "a world free of lung disease." Implicit in the various "wars" that we wage today is the promise of Utopia, something that, as all human experience as well as biblical doctrine should warn us, is impossible, from the wars on cancer and heart disease through the wars on human mistakes such as cigarette smoking, the war on drugs, and not least, the war on terrorism. Human beings are not perfect and cannot perfect themselves. Christians attribute this to original sin, but in any case, it is a self-evident fact that we are born with defects, defects that gradually manifest themselves as we go on in life and that ultimately end in death.

If the potential supposedly contained in the Human Genome Project and germ-line therapy can be attained, the result will be beings that are no longer human in the present sense. As the philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote in 1959, "This final plan, the ultimate medical wish-fulfillment, is nothing less than the abolition of death."

Ewig points to the experience of every practicing physician, that the successes of medical science, leading to the extension of life, is followed by increasing physical and mental suffering in advanced age. "The dialectic of genetic research and medicine will probably be an unexpected consequence. As genetic research makes the transparency of the human genome clearer and clearer, it will not lead to increased health for man, but to an increasing awareness of pathology. It will become evident that phenotypical health is an absolutely improbable exception in an ocean of genetic predispositions to sickness…. The attempt to avoid death by ‘looking at the cards’ that life holds will reveal that life exists in the context of death and is never without it. Thus the most modern research will lead us to the same fundamental insight into the nature of life that religion has always known: ‘In the midst of life, we are surrounded by death.’"

These paragraphs are only a brief foretaste of the incredible depth of the thoughts that Dr. Ewig has exposed; the next issue of our Report will examine them more thoroughly.

• Vienna, Austria. Although gays, i.e. male homosexuals, seldom exceed two percent of the male population, they apparently include many well-to-do and free-spending travelers. The Vienna Gay Guide is a free city map for "gay tourists," indicating, it says, all of the city’s gayest spots, under the slogan, "Vienna waits for you." One spot advertises itself as "the hottest American gay bar in Vienna." Before President Bush again proclaims that Muslim terrorists hate us for our freedom and democracy, he would do well to consider what they think of our eagerness to wallow in degeneracy and corruption, provided that it brings in money.

• Does the Pope read The Religion and Society Report? In his August 18 sermon in his native Cracow, Poland, he accused the world, especially the West, of trying to live etui Deus non daretur, as though there were no God. Readers may recall that this same expression, etui Deus non daretur, was the subject of an essay in an earlier issue of this Report. Rather than accuse the Pope of borrowing from us, we prefer to say that both he and this editor have put a finger on the principal source of the ethical, moral, and spiritual problems of our day: forgetting God.

• Jean Madiran, the author of A Civilization Wounded in the Heart, mentioned earlier, has written of the impending collapse of Europe: Europe is undergoing an invasion towards which the public powers either remain impotent or in fact declare that they are in agreement. In the preceding centuries, Europe invaded and colonized the greater part of the other continents. Now she is invaded in turn, demographically. She asks herself (when she actually asks) how far she is going to be colonized by peoples, morals, religions, music, and dreams from outside, imposing themselves without having been chosen, oppressing or destroying her historic nature.

While this is going on, Madiran asserts, we are witnessing the spectacle of the African countries that were once colonized degenerating into blind nationalism, chaos, and slavery. This is not something that the West can do much about, he argues, having forfeited all power and authority to influence Africa by withdrawing from its former colonies. Today the former colonial powers are faced with a different challenge: to repent not of the admitted evils of colonization but of the evils caused by the abrupt and irresponsible end of colonialism. He contends that the hope expressed by Pope Pius XII, that the Africans would continue to respect and learn from the countries that, as he put it, advanced them, has been totally dashed. This is a very touchy topic, and worthy of fuller treatment, which we propose to give it in a future issue.

Footnotes

1 Can we be permitted to point out that the quest of certain Jews for the gold of the Swiss, and of others, is dangerous without being ourselves called anti-Semitic?