In the late 1880's new sounds reverberated throughout the Catholic Church in America. Rapid urban growth and the rising tides of immigration required new perspectives on religion in the social order: science and historical criticism involved philosophy and theology, and rumblings of internal as well as external controversy were heard in the Church. The layman was achieving status in business and politics and, as he became more vocal on civic and cultural issues, he played a larger role in representing Catholicism before the American people. Self-critical voices sounded forth in the Catholic press, and churchmen were calling upon the laity. When the conjunction of several major centennial celebrations occurred in 1889, laymen leaped into the breach and started a trend in Catholic thought and action that has much to say to our generation, especially in the light of the Second Vatican Council.

There are two principal elements in Christian faith which underwrite and require the attention of Christian ethics to problems of foreign policy. First, the Christian is convinced that God is sovereign over all the world and therefore over all the areas of the common life—not the least of which is political society. On these terms no political engagement is ever a mere power struggle and no Christian in politics is ever merely or even primarily political man, for the engagement is understood through faith to be a locus of divine activity and the politically-involved Christian is above all a man seeking to make his action correspond faithfully to the action of God. Divine sovereignty imposes a qualification on political sovereignty and thereby requires the recognition of limits to the exercise of political power and to the exaltation of national existence. But it also strengthens legitimate political authority by means of the explicit declaration that the powers that be are ordained of God. Second, the vocation of the Christian in the world is to serve the neighbor in love.

The First World War is sometimes credited with the dissolution of the well-ordered universe of the nineteenth century. In fact, by 1914 there was very little left to destroy, for most of the essential work had already been accomplished. The aftermath of the war merely helped to make the collapse of order and stability more visible. But the post-1918 atmosphere of gloom, later crystallized in the “Lost Generation” and in the escapist movements of the twenties, gave the impression that the war had been responsible for the moral and intellectual Zusammenbruch of the period. The feeling of decay was everywhere; the old values, the former certainties and criteria had vanished, leaving an impression of emptiness behind. The old order had crumbled, without dignity, “not with a bang but with a whimper,” as T. S. Eliot put it.

How shall men know honor in the bureaucratic life? If not at all, we may largely lose sight of a virtue respected in the West, though not unquestioned, at least since Homer. A substantial and evidently increasing proportion of the members of a modem society, including many persons not “clerks” or “administrators” by vocation, works within bureaucracy. Though large organizations differ in the degree of their bureaucratization, for example, in the tightness of routine and control, they have common features which influence their members. These are: the anonymity of each participant, the joint nature of every action, the force of precedent and rules, and hierarchy in relations among members. These features work against honor.

The aim of this essay is to describe the nature of the relationships between two worlds, the Roman-Hellenistic and the Oriental; and speaking more precisely of the traditional and geographic division of mankind, we may say, Europe and the Far East. The relations go back to the age of the great nomadic migrations through the vast sea of the steppes, stretching from Mongolia through Central Asia to Asia Minor and the Black Sea.

Acheson served in the Department of State under both Roosevelt and Truman, and the contrasts were striking as each President approached foreign affairs in strikingly different ways. FDR was keenly sensitive to the difficulties that foreign affairs can create in partisan politics. Having served in the Wilson administration, he was aware of the obstacles a president can face in achieving his foreign policy goals because of congressional opposition, an experience he meditated upon and took to heart. In appointing Cordell Hull as his Secretary of State, Roosevelt tried to neutralize and conciliate possible opposition in Congress. He was careful throughout his term of office to handle the Senate with tact and political prudence.