![]() But when monkey business goes on long enough, it eventually becomes public knowledge, and an indignant and outraged public turns with anger on those who for so long kept eyes, ears, and mouth closed. The inscription in its familiar English version reads, “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” This is a respected motto in Washington-not among journalists but among those in high government office. In a beautiful park in Lausanne, Switzerland, there is the original of the familiar statuette of three monkeys, one covering his eyes, one his ears, one his mouth. An intellectual par excellence, he was never embarrassed by the simplicity of the Gospel and never tried to adjust it to the modern world. His tremendous academic and literary attainments never prevented him from testifying to his faith in simple, easy to understand terms. Although loyal to the Roman church as an institution, he seemed primarily concerned for fundamental Christian and evangelical principles, an attitude that gained him more popularity among Protestant evangelicals than among modernizing Catholics. He vigorously opposed the “Catholic pantheism” of Teilhard de Chardin. ![]() But in recent years, as he saw both Rome and Protestantism beginning to make absolutes out of some of the social and intellectual values for which he had sought Christian endorsement-for example, freedom, social justice, and the fine arts-he spoke out against what he considered their idolatrous and world-worshiping tendencies. Although stimulated by the philosophy of Henri Bergson with its “creative evolution” and “élan vital” as an alternative to materialistic naturalism, Maritain remained unsatisfied, and ultimately-together with Raissa, his Russian-Jewish wife-he turned to Roman Catholicism.Īn ardent if imaginative disciple of Thomas Aquinas, because of his open-minded and critical spirit Maritain was for years considered a liberal in Roman Catholic circles. Raised a liberal Protestant in comfortably bourgeois circumstances and at a time when there was very little evangelical fervor among French Protestants, Maritain rebelled against the emptiness of the skeptical, ostensibly scientific humanism of the academic world of his day. When Jacques Maritain died in Toulouse, France, April 28, at the age of ninety, it was the passing of one of our century’s intellectual giants. The article was “The Irrelevance of Relevance” by Kenneth Hamilton (March 31), and the editorial was “The Church’s Distinctive” (May 12). Among ACP magazines of opinion, public affairs, and social concerns, CHRISTIANITY TODAY got top awards for best article and best editorial in 1972. Two at the Top CHRISTIANITY TODAY won two awards in the annual competition sponsored by Associated Church Press. We hope that the sordid affair will be aired thoroughly, the guilty punished, and the administration’s attention turned to solving such problems as inflation, the energy crisis, and the pressing need to rebuild confidence in its own integrity. And we do not think he will be impeached. We do not think he moved fast enough when he did find out. We do not think that Nixon knew what was going on at Watergate at the time it happened. Broder, who just won a Pulitzer Prize, wrote in the Washington Post (May 8): We could well discuss with our readers … why the same papers that have been so outraged by the threat to civil liberties resulting from the bugging of a party headquarters or the break-in at a psychiatrist’s office feel free themselves to print the transcript of secret grand jury testimony, regardless of the risk to the reputations of persons who may be mentioned in that non-adversary proceeding. Both the Watergate and the Ellsberg incidents are exhibitions of law-breaking, and nothing should be allowed to obscure this fact.Ĭolumnist David S. Whatever may have happened subsequently, we need to remind ourselves that Ellsberg admitted stealing and reproducing the Pentagon Papers and delivering them to the news media. What jars us is the selective morality some persons display in regard to the Watergate and Ellsberg cases. If all these doors were opened, the Watergate scandal would no doubt rate only second billing. But Watergate went far beyond this the illegal acts that the term now signifies must be condemned.īilly Graham in another Times piece commented that Watergate is “a symptom of the deeper moral crisis that affects society.” How right he is! Anyone at all familiar with the Washington scene knows there are skeletons stacked high in some congressional closets. ![]() ![]() ![]() Intelligence operations “are commonplace in political campaigns and usually include efforts to collect all published information about an opponent along with occasional efforts to obtain advance copies of speeches, travel schedules and the like,” wrote Seymour M. ![]()
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