The present issue of the review of politics is given over to essays by members of the editorial staff. These and the other contributors are members of the faculty in the University of Notre Dame. This action is the only real means the REVIEW has of publicly recognizing a great and wonderful event: the completion of the first hundred years in the life of Notre Dame. Other activities and other writers will celebrate and assess, in their own time and place, other virtues and achievements of the University. The editors of the REVIEW, writing here on various modern spiritual, political and social problems, wish to affirm, among other things, the freshness and diversity of the intellectual interests that are the University's today, although, of course, these are represented here by the words and work of but a few of the many indebted to the University. Yet we hope, by means of these essays, to pay tribute, implicitly, to the strength, at this high moment, of the whole University in the world of the mind of man and in the translation of that world to man's life in society.

Are the Germans really behind the Nazi Government? Despite— or because of?—the steadily rising flood of books dealing with the Third Reich this question is answered in most different ways. There is no agreement concerning the relations between the German people and the National Socialist regime. But one's attitude towards the conduct of the war and the post-war problems is, to a large extent, determined by the opinion that one holds about these relations. Therefore, some remarks about the different answers which are given to the question: What are the sources of Hitler's power in Germany? may be of general interest.

In The Catholic Church in the United States one can detect with differences of proportion, almost all the elements which go to make up this great democracy of ours. There are rich Catholics and poor, educated Catholics and illiterate, native-born and immigrant, urban and rural, and in one sense, there are even practicing Catholics and fallen away. Yet, despite the formlessness of American Catholicism, there is a definite tangible unity among Catholics which has been baffling to many outside her fold. This unity is derived from the special purpose and the nature of the Catholic organization which transcend those accidental relationships.

The Adoption Of “Fight for Freedom” as the battle cry of the United Nations, and the eager assumption, by those schools of thought who have long been advocating social reform among us, that they themselves have a special right to call this battle cry their own raises an interesting question which has all too often been ignored: the question as to whether or not the program of the reformers is permanently compatible with genuine freedom.

When the earliest cooperative units were formed, the members seem to have assumed that the step had relevance only for themselves and only for their economic good. At Fenwick in Scotland eleven men agreed in 1769 “to take what money we have in our Box and buy what victual may be thought Nessassar to sell for the benefit of our society.” The sole end was the economic benefit of the little group. Near the close of the century, “the poor inhabitants” of Hull in England set up a cooperative mill. The harvest had been lean, and the price of flour was very high, so that the people felt “much trouble and sorrow” in their persons and families, and thought they should take every care to preserve themselves “from the invasion of covetous and merciless men in the future.” They also asked the mayor to give something toward “this great enterprise.”

When, At a party in New York, the question was asked: “What does the abbreviation ‘P. R.’ stand for?” a lady — a college graduate, from just across the Hudson River in New Jersey—answered: “A new alphabetic agency.” Harold Phelps Stokes, writing for the New York Times Book Review, thought that the two letters came close to expressing “a term of endearment.” The Baltimore Sun wrote in the same vein by terming it “the darling of the pure idealists of democracy.” The New York Sun was more explicit: “It is the pari-mutuel of politics, a bingo of the ballots, manna for the minorities.” And, to turn to a more serious aspect of the matter, a prominent American political scientist, in a letter to the present writer, called P. R. a “substitute religion,” and just one of the manifestations of that “mechanized dogmatism” for which he—as any true scientist— cared but little.

St. Thomas knew that the voices of human truth must be quiet before the tremendous and wonderful sound of THE WORD. For by THE WORD men can save their own words from vacancy and death, from becoming an affliction to their fellows, a bewilderment and an embarrassment, if not a ruin, to all who heed them or expect to be guided by them. Here I shall devote myself to the necessity of the wisdom of religious knowledge for modern writers and thinkers—to be considered specifically—and to its power especially among those who have clearly submitted their talent and intelligence to the service of The Word, the service of Christ the King.