In past ages, the individual was, in effect, restricted to one basic moral stance, that of the generally accepted ethical tradition. The practical moral life of an individual might indeed fall short of the generally accepted standard; but one never thought of questioning the principles themselves. The penalty would have been nothing less than social ostracism.

However, the emergence of the philosophical approach, with its systematic search for the ultimate foundations of values, has entailed an ever-increasing differentiation of various approaches to morality within one and the same cultural environment. This, in turn, has often occasioned a tension between individual moral standards. History also shows many instances of head-on encounter between divergent cultures and religions, each having its own ethics and moral code. Depending on the circumstances and the attitude of the outstanding thinkers of the day, this has led to a shattering of the traditional moral ideals, to a syncretistic merger of the divergent views or, on the contrary, to a deepening of moral awareness.

In this respect, our present-day situation is unique. For the first time in history, and thanks to the science of history and to modern mass media and transportation, the human race can compare and contrast the ethical systems of past ages and of the entire present-day world. This analytical encounter is not surely the privilege or the disconcerting duty of a small number of scholars; the spiritual antennae proclaiming the messages of the most divergent moral codes are to be found on almost every home, even in the remotest villages. The open and pluralistic society of our day faces every thinking man with the choice between moral codes and moral priorities which are partly contradictory and partly mutually enriching.

Unquestionably, we are threatened with a blurring of ethical issues or moral vision that could easily culminate in a complete loss of any ethical stance. But we are no less surely offered an altogether unique opportunity for enrichment and deepening of moral insight by the deliberate cultivation of dialogue between the various ethical systems. For those seriously participating in it, the ecumenical dialogue between the various individual Christian confessions has already proven itself to be an enrichment rather than a harbinger of indifferentism. So, too, the various outlooks of our day, with their divergent moral codes and ideals, ought surely to be able to enter into an exchange that will be fruitful for all. In any such exchange, what is of capital importance is a clear awareness on the part of all participants of their respective basic commitments and of the peculiar genius of their fundamental stance. It is this kind of awareness that is implied in speaking of a clarification of the status and hierarchy of moral values.

THE SPECIFIC DIFFERENCE OF THE CHRISTIAN

The distinctive and differentiating feature of the Christian code of moral values is to be found neither in any particular commandment nor even in the priority accorded any particular values. The crucial feature is the angle of vision, the whole approach to moral questions. The exclusive author, inspiration and personification of this approach is Christ Himself.

Every great religious and moral code is animated in large measure by the genius of great leaders whose novel insights have revealed a code of moral priorities. The Christian approach, however, ranks Christ, not simply as a genius in the field of ethics, or as a mere pioneer of a new code of moral priorities, but as nothing less than the prototype of the good. In his own person he shows us man's true nature, origin, destiny, and disposition. It is true that Christ is the perfect image of the heavenly Father who alone is good; but in Christ we also discern the countenance of the "new Adam," the new man. In his person, preaching, and practice, he exposes all self-seeking by showing how a man finds his true self in self-forgetful service of his fellows. In Christ there is rendered palpable a new relationship to God, to one's fellowman, and to the whole of creation.

A juxtaposition of the Christian and the Buddhist approach will make this clearer. In Buddhism, the Christian discovers a number of familiar attitudes and value judgments. Closer inspection, however, reveals a difference that is both all-pervading and radical, because the ultimate fulcrum of the two positions, their notion of God and man, is entirely divergent (at least if one compares the Christian credo with that of classical Buddhism, rather than with that of the later development embodied in Boddhisattva). The Buddhism of the more ancient Hinayana persuasion cultivates ascesis and self-discipline, develops astonishing forms of meditation, and is even-tempered and gentle. But the radical significance of these virtues is far different from that of these same virtues in the case of the Christian. In addressing himself to similar or, in some instances, identical practices, the Christian is motivated by the desire for a purer love of God, fellowman, and all creation. He is motivated by the hope that detachment from secondary realities and struggle against disordered desire will lead to the discovery of God's true purpose for a human being like himself, and thereby to his own true self. Christian and Buddhist alike want to escape a restless and insatiable hunger for possession and enjoyment. But where, in the last analysis, for the Buddhist this means a flight from the hunger for existence itself, for the Christian it means a penetration to an unqualified Yes to life, that is, to life that is real and true.

Every code of moral priorities pivots on the question: What is man? But this question can be definitively answered only in terms of another question: What is the God of man? Christ, true man and true God, by telling His followers what they are in the sight of God, illumines the human significance of everything else.

SALVATION HISTORY AS DYNAMIC FULCRUM

OF THE CHRISTIAN

The Christian code of life cannot and must not be conceived as a ready-made system of rules and prescriptions. The light of Christ shows existence to be essentially an immensely dynamic and dramatic history which levies upon each and every individual two simultaneous demands: that he have the courage to dare and to accept responsibility; but likewise that he have the humility to hearken to the inner meaning of the enormous event. As the life of the individual is subject to the law of growth, of unceasing forward thrust and struggle, no sane judgment of moral responsibility can ever abstract from the level of development of the individual person or society in its evaluation of the particular moral act. At the same time, however, as the life of society and of the entire human race as a solidary whole is no whit less subject to that same law, society, too, belongs within the framework of universal history.

By his very nature, man is simultaneously a historically conditioned and a history-making being. If man attempts to exercise his freedom and autonomy in an a-historical fashion, he inevitably falls short of his own nature and misses the real point of his human freedom and responsibility. Further, it must be borne in mind that the historical evolution of individuals, of peoples, and of mankind as a whole is not unilinear. Not everything is progress. There are temporary lapses from the accepted ideal, periods when moral insight is clouded, and succeeding periods of penance, purification, and enthusiastic forward thrust.

An attentive reading of the Scriptures cannot but reveal this historical dynamic. The Old Testament is the history of God's dealing with his people. Though a tumultuous one, the whole story is permeated with the patience and the sovereign power of a boundless love and manifests a limitless understanding of the heart of man.

The Church herself, as the pilgrim People of God, is subject to the law of historicity with its implied variations. What is distinctive is her clear knowledge of her origin and of her goal, together with an equally clear realization of the need to distinguish between the eternal and the mutable or transient in her life and activity.

Only a proper evaluation of the historical dimension of human existence can ensure a sound intuition of the fruitful, though often painful, tension between the relative status and the relative priority of values. For example, an a-historical approach would develop the law of priority exclusively in function of the law of status: In the event of a conflict of values, the higher value must be preferred in every case and the lower value sacrificed. The historically minded ethician knows better. He realizes that certain higher values may not yet be entirely accessible to the individual and that the application or cultivation of radically lower values may take priority at this particular stage of evolution. Certainly, the historical approach also implies the demand for an unremitting thrust forward and upward toward an ever more perfect actualization of the ideal hierarchy of values, the ideal moral order. Hence, to the extent that he can recognize the ideal hierarchy here and now, man must always be disposed to prefer the higher values to the lower.

Neither health nor daily bread, for instance, are supreme values, though they may become such urgent necessities that the most idealistic man will attend to these basic needs before addressing himself to other higher aims and commitments. But a man who never matures beyond the level of the mere practical concern for health and sustenance is quite simply missing the vital thrust of the historical evolution of the human family.

Nor is the Christian's motivation ever restricted to the mere vital thrust of human evolution. His personal growth and transformation and his participation in the historical process which surrounds him have their ultimate and radical meaning imparted to them from salvation-history. The Christian is not merely faced by impersonal moral imperatives; he lives from the word of God that called him into existence. The Christian is a man personally called by Christ, the Incarnate Word, who provides universal history with its fulcrum, its ultimate meaning and its goal. The Christian sees his own life in the context of the great confrontation between the Prince of Peace and the "powers of darkness of this world", that is, between, on the one hand, the Incarnate love of God who wills to redeem and reconcile all things and, on the other hand, a self-seeking order of being, enslaved to death and judgment, which also embodies itself in historical powers.

MORALITY IN THE LIGHT OF AN ETHIC OF DISCIPLESHIP

One of the most incomprehensible misunderstandings is that prevailing both among some Christians and among those who call themselves enemies of Christianity, to the effect that Christianity is an ethic of mandatory, extrinsically imposed laws. In reality, Christianity is the religion of love, gratuitously received and spontaneously reciprocated. Consequently, as an ethic, it is one of personal responsibility in love; it is a value-ethic. Primarily, however, Christian life is not an ethic but a joyous faith, trust, hope, love, and fellowship. For this reason, the morality which it implies must evince the same basic features. In his profound and penetrating insight into that which is distinctively Christian, St. Paul never tired of highlighting the essential feature of the Christian ethic as an ethic of love, and hence as a life dominated by a joyous faith in the Lord and by his redemptive and merciful love. Yet the ethic of gratuitous, merciful, and compassionate love is anything but non-committal. Who could possibly be so demanding as that infinite Lover Who reveals Himself in the gift of Himself?

In its innermost essence the Christian ethic can safely be called a personal value-ethic. The values in question are neither plucked out of the blue nor discovered by abstract philosophical speculation. Philosophy can reflect, after the fact, upon the nature of the practical moral process; but the fulcrum of that practical process for the Christian believer is Christ Himself. Christ not only manifests for the redeemed the love of God, but embodies the noblest ethical values, irradiating them all with the glow of his compassionate love.

Moral values are personal values. They are only realized and embodied in the disposition, action, and utterance of the human person. They are the real spiritual capital of the human person. Yet they are attained, not by an act aimed primarily at the enrichment of the self, but rather in the openness for the Thou that is the challenge of the love of God, in a response to the needs of one's neighbor, in joyful gratitude for all that God has created and that appears in one's fellowman, and in anguish at the need of one's neighbor and at all injustice. A moral value can only germinate, we may say with Max Scheler, "in the furrows of action". Thus a moral value becomes a possession of the individual person to the degree that he has opened himself to the rich significance of personal relations, to the language of persons, and to the derivative (or at least derivatively learned) language of things.

Herein lies likewise the secret of the power of attraction emanating from a moral giant. Christ is the great sign of God's openness in love to the race of man. His heart pierced on the cross and his arms flung wide are the prototype of the moral giant who enriches all who follow in his path by his outpouring of Himself in loving kindness, compassion, purity, and righteousness.

In the light of Christ it becomes painfully evident how poor is that person who relates everything else to himself and uses everything and everyone else as a means in his drive for self-enrichment. The more assiduously he casts his net, then the poorer and more meager is his catch. The more ostentatious his "good" deeds, always geared to his own advantage though apparently directed toward others, the more hopelessly vain is his attempt to pile up spiritual wealth.

One is stimulated to follow Christ by the sight of his personal worth as Love Incarnate. This love, which is truly directed to our own person, arouses in us a reciprocal love. This makes us perceptive of personal values and stimulates respect and care for others; it diffuses a warm light which makes all individual values glow. Love likewise guarantees that discipleship will not degenerate into slavish imitation, for in love every human person feels himself being taken seriously and discovers his own best potential.

In discipleship all values are inter-personal; everything is invested with the aura of a dialogue between persons. Christ's own admiration of the lilies of the field is prompted by his vision of them as a message from God, a symbol of his glory and paternal solicitude. The aesthetic value here is no mere sensible delight but rather the joy that derives from really seeing and seizing the beautiful. This joy is the more earnest and serene the more that beauty is integrated into the full symphony of the dialogue between persons.

Daily bread and clothing are, for the Christian, more than mere utilitarian values. Crass utilitarianism shatters the unity of the worlds of values and of persons. But when the useful is recognized as a sign of an all-encompassing universal providential love, it arouses joyful gratitude and serves at the proper moment as a means and expression of love among men.

In this kind of inter-personal value-ethic, the lower values (if we are still to call them so) participate in the dignity and the transfigured splendor of the immediate personal relationships of love, righteousness, wisdom, temperance, and truth. If, on occasion, they are given preference over the higher values because of their special urgency, yet in the way in which they are cultivated there is evident an undeviating assent to the entire integral hierarchy of values.

HOLISTIC MORALITY OR ATOMISTIC ETHICAL CHAOS

An essential feature of the sciences dealing directly with man is that they always keep their eye on the organic whole, even as they rigorously specialize on the part. The reason for this is quite simple: the true wealth of a human life is manifest in the perfect harmony of part and whole. All life strives for holistic organic unity. The loss of the feel for that center or fulcrum guaranteeing such holistic unity is always a symptom of degeneration, of a faltering of the vital thrust.

The loss of equilibrium and of the feel for the fulcrum emerges in the realm of art as the slogan: Art for art's sake. Obviously art must not be demeaned to the status of a mere handmaid. It is more than an instrument for the mirroring of a nation's pride in itself, and more than the expression of the self-awareness of a cultural elite; nor can art be justly confined even to the assignment of stimulating religious feeling. In order to be genuinely true to itself, art must plunge into the mainstream of life; it must be sustained by that cosmic, all-encompassing thrust that is the hallmark of full-fledged living; and it must, in its themes and techniques, proclaim an unqualified affirmation of all values, their hierarchy, and their multiplicity.

Capitalistic liberalism embodied the loss of equilibrium in the realm of economics. Mankind is still suffering from an economic approach that has no clear picture of the whole man or even goes so far as to refuse consciously to put the economy at the service of the whole man. Certainly, the would-be humanitarian economist must have more than piety and good will. But the basic scheme of any sound economics must accord economic man a higher status than mere material values. It must take cognizance of the fact that even economic man has obligations as a social being, a member of a family and of various other societies, and ultimately as a member of the all-encompassing human family. Nor can economic and social man claim to be a good Christian if he is simply a decent Sunday Christian on the side as a one-day in seven holiday from his business concerns. As it is the same man who prays on Sunday and trades on Monday, his praying and his trading alike will be an adequate expression of his full humanity only if both praying and trading, each in its own way, stem from, and serve to strengthen, the whole man.

Now the holistic spirit can be embodied in quite divergent styles of life. The Benedictines with their motto: Ora et labora, aim quite deliberately at witnessing to the transcendent value-status of divine worship, and simultaneously to the organic unity between work and prayer. Quite different is the way of life of a businessman who makes a cool and meticulous calculation of present capabilities and aims at serving in each successive situation the best interests of investor, customer and, above all, employees and partners. He must be quite determined to forego a quick success if this can be achieved only at the expense of shareholder, customer, or plant personnel. If his honest and undeviating concern to serve all human values connected with his particular business is sustained by faith in God, the Father of all men, and if he is ready to preserve his ideal even at the cost of palpable sacrifices if necessary, in the spirit of Christ, the Redeemer of all, then he is just as much a witness to the holistic spirit as is the Benedictine monk. But the businessman who looks only to profits, indifferent as to whether they are to the advantage or detriment of worker or customer, betrays a chaotic view of the world of values, even if he goes to Church every Sunday on the side and finances research with his

excess profits.

It was an utterly chaotic world that spawned the political policy that subjected everything to a national thrust for power. Not only did that policy overlook the fact that every individual people can have a really honored place only as a member of the family of peoples. Often enough that policy even sacrificed the real temporal good of its own people.

Equally opposed to the holistic spirit is that moralism that has been prompted by an interest in the austere "purity" of the ethical imperative to misread the values of the beautiful, the primordial value of joy, the thrust of enthusiasm or to sacrifice these values to no purpose and even to the detriment of moral energies. So, too, those champions of religiosity are operating on the basis of a chaotic ethic who cultivate in unintegrated juxtaposition a vapid moral imperative and a religious sentimentality.

Nowhere is the holistic spirit more immediately indispensable than at the supreme level of religion itself. And this spirit is here equally foreign to a spineless secularist piety and to a haughty managing of the secular by religious imperatives. The holistic spirit hearkens to the voices of all things: it recognizes every individual value and the autonomy of the various realms precisely because it reverences in all things the Word of God, Creator of all, and cultivates everything in the service of the whole man, with all his manifold capacities and genuine potentials.

DIVINE VOCATION IN THE CHALLENGE OF THE MOMENT

Holism implies a hierarchy of values. In a mere agglomeration, each individual unit has a merely numerical status, its true destiny being frustrated by its lack of any proper integration. It is not enough to cultivate or accept a mere agglomeration of values. Each individual value can display its true beauty and deploy its compelling power only in an orchestrated symphony of values in which its own note can sound forth as a telling organic unit of a greater chord.

Yet such a radical (and radically accurate) view of the hierarchy of values is not adequate for a proper understanding of earthly life, precisely because our life is not sheerly static but always dynamic. The synthesis is to be found in the combination of an unswerving fix on the ideal hierarchy of values with an unfailing sensitivity to the shifting priority of individual values. Both attitudes emerge sharply in Scriptural ethics and religion. Christ's own words remind us of the hierarchy of values: "What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" (Lk. 9, 25). "Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" (Mk. 8, 37). But the other element, sometimes well-nigh smothered in a legalistic misunderstanding of Christianity, is just as important: the call to constant vigilance, to a seizing of the hour of grace before it is past beyond recall,

to an attention to the signs of the times. Even the Old Testament preacher in his day insistently reminds us that each thing has its proper hour: "There is a time to tear down and a time to build . . . a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing. A time to keep silent and a time to speak." (Eccles. 3, 1-8). When his kinsmen urge him to the Temple pilgrimage enjoined by the Law, Christ tells them: "My hour is not yet come" (J. 7, 6-8). His whole life is a scrupulous attention to the hour appointed by the Father. Thus does he fulfill Isaias' prophecy concerning the Servant of the Lord: "Morning by morning he wakens me, he wakens my ear to hear as those who are taught. The Lord has opened my ear" (Is. 50, 4f).

The ethic of the discipleship of Christ is neither a mindless copying of an external behavior, nor yet a slavish obedience to the dead letter of laws. It is rather a willing attention to the priority of the moment, a self-limitation to what is possible and feasible in any given situation. It is an ethic of vigilance, a sifting of the signs of the times, a discernment of spirits in the concrete challenge here and now.

This is true not only for individual morality. It holds in equal measure for community and society.

In this spirit Schema 13 of "The Church in the Modern World" of Vatican II enquires concerning the priority tasks of Christians in this exciting new world, in which many entirely new problems emerge and many more problems are posed in an unexpectedly new form.

In the face of the threat of modern atomic weapons, to a mankind split into ideological blocs, anyone repeating an eighteenth-century casuistic ethic on just war is simply not taking the present hour seriously, and thus has no chance of himself being taken seriously. Indeed, it would be bad for him and for the world if he were taken seriously. Today a more comprehensive and decisive contribution to world peace is demanded than ever before in the history of the world. Any Christian today who does not enlist in the service of peace with courageous willingness to make great sacrifices if necessary, and with dogged commitment to learning the art of reconciliation, simply loses his right to talk of salvation and peace in Christ. No one, for instance, should neglect the decisive importance for peace of the systematic, tenacious and confident consolidation of a peace-loving public opinion, calculated to promote mutual understanding. This public opinion must be fostered both by the proper use of the modern opinion-molding media and in man-to-man conversation.

For the first time in the history of the world, mankind disposes of all the technical means needed to solve the problem of world hunger. For the first time, the rich nations can form a graphic picture of the extent of

the hunger, misery and impotence of whole classes and peoples, even as the hungry peoples, starving for food for body and mind alike, can for their part look right into the succulent sumptuous dishes of the rich. In

such a context, the big powers are showing both a lack of appreciation of the hierarchy of values and a lack of sensitivity to the priority of values when they expend astronomical sums of money on their dangerous arms race without making any convincing exertions to arrive at a treaty-ensured disarmament; when they launch billions of dollars along the trajectory to Mars or to Venus; when they elaborate costly "culture programs" for lavish edifices while foisting in the first instance upon the peoples hungry for development and education nothing better than propaganda for birth control, sterilization and abortion; and when they compound these iniquities by pumping in no more development aid than can be sucked out again by manipulation of world market prices.

The human family has today drawn more closely together, at least to the extent that any thinking man can see and feel that the fate of all men is much more closely integrally inter-connected than ever before in human history. At this moment of history, racism and discriminatory racial segregation is simultaneously a failure to recognize the hierarchy of values, specifically a failure to recognize the value of human dignity, and a blindness to the storm signals of the day.

It sounds fine when Christians today write sharp essays against the cruelties and slavery of past centuries. But the real question is whether the Christians of those days were at their posts when the challenge of the hour was to render the slave trade impossible and suppress it as quickly as possible; and the still more important question will be whether they squarely face up here and now to all instances of a threat or injury to the dignity of the weaker portion of mankind and demonstrate a capacity for courageous words and convincing deeds, even at the cost of personal advantage. A genuine Christian value-ethic is anything but a cowardly flight from harsh reality into an idle contemplation of an ideal empyrean of values. A genuine awareness of the immutable hierarchy of values and a vigilant sensitivity to the challenge of the moment lead to an effective moral answer in terms of the value which at the moment holds top priority.

A hungry homeless man may make a present of a Bible to his neighbor who is as hungry as he, and may credibly interpret the Gospel to that neighbor. But if the rich well-fed neighbor does exactly the same thing, under the pretext that he wishes to give the more estimable gift in the hierarchy of values, he will not get through to the heart of his brother, whose spiritual distress he has recognized as little as his crying physical need. Only when he has shown compassion for his neighbor, and thus shared his own bread with him, may he and should he likewise interpret to that neighbor, as best he can, the word of eternal life. This is not to act as though man lives by bread alone. The appropriate response to the chal

lenge of the moment, to the needs of one's neighbor, is an affirmation of the value holding top priority at the moment and therewith likewise a fundamental and apposite affirmation of the whole hierarchy of values.

MARITAL PROBLEMS: A DYNAMIC HIERARCHY OF VALUES

In the discussion of Schema 13 at Vatican II it was repeatedly stressed that the burning questions of marital ethics must be considered systematically in the light of the dynamic hierarchy of values. This was certainly not meant to be a magic key to provide ready-made solutions for all individual cases. But it was a courageous beginning at blazing a trail which can fruitfully be followed by men of good will deploying reason and intuition alike. If all marriages were contracted with a clear eye to the radical priority of the value of the human person and in a spirit of mutual respect, if the child were seen and loved as the infinitely precious person he is, then other values of lower priority would appear in their true light and acquire their proper compelling power.

No mother who adverts to the value of the human person as the image of God will imagine she has the right to sacrifice the life of the unborn child simply to protect herself against restrictions of her living standard. Even health hazards will yield unequivocally to the higher value of true motherhood and to the inviolable value and dignity of a child already brought into existence. However, the exalted value of marital love together with the value of justice will combine to persuade a responsible married person of the impermissibility of any surrender to blind instinct when a new maternity would endanger the future normal healthy growth of the family, the mental or physical health of the mother or the mandatory minimum outlay for the education of the children already born.

An ethic soundly based on the bulwarks of the hierarchy and priority of values demands a responsible choice of partner and responsible parenthood, which includes the willingness to make sacrifices in the interests of a proper education of one's children. And this implies an undeviating renunciation of less important values, unless these acquire such an urgency of priority as to threaten the very continued existence of the marriage as a love-union or other absolute marital values. First-rate living quarters, for instance, are not a supreme value in a marriage founded on genuine love. Yet the duty of looking urgently for better living quarters may acquire such a priority, in terms of family harmony and pedagogical considerations, as to override temporarily the noble desire for more children. Here again it becomes evident that an appropriate positive response to the priority value is entirely consonant with a thoroughgoing affirmation of the hierarchy of values.

Progress

Human progress, in a drastically dynamic, forward-thrusting society, is today rendering especially urgent the problem of an operative synthesis between value-status and value-priority. It sometimes seems as if technological progress were the highest ideal, or at least the highest-priority value. Great nations are pouring millions and billions of dollars into the race for technological progress. Whose rockets will first reach a certain planet? The billions being spent on these breathtaking inventions and daring projects certainly do give evidence of more idealism than do the still greater sums squandered on alcohol and nicotine. But these two values or non-values, these two ways of spending money, are not the only entries in the competition. There is always a multitude of circumstances and intentions to be taken into account in any just judgment of a project of an individual nation or of mankind as a whole. A great number of claims and demands must be weighed against one another, always with an eye to the varying degrees of feasibility and urgency.

Thus, for instance, the dynamic economics of our technological age imperiously demands a constant striving for expansion, for ever greater technological progress, for continuing modernization of the economic institutions, for more and more new markets. But it cannot be denied that the danger does exist that this process may involve a neglect of the real possibilities of a much more comprehensive human progress in genuine culture, world-wide solidarity, international friendship and peaceful endeavor. Immense drives for progress in technology considered as the complex of means employed to provide objects necessary for human sustenance and comfort will entail a human catastrophe if they are not subordinated to and integrated with a sincere and unremitting drive for "anthropotechnology" considered as the integral development of man as a person.

Our age is dominated by the ideal of progress and to a certain extent by the ideal and the imperious necessity of international development aid. At this moment of world history, everything depends on mankind and especially the elite of the entire world acquiring a clear understanding of the real meaning and significance of integral, full-fledged human progress and the sort of development aid calculated to assure such progress. Obviously the problem of the status and priority of values is posed in ever new forms precisely in these areas.

Religious

In exactly the same way as a just judgment of what really constitutes progress, so too the many-layered problem of freedom of conscience (religious freedom) demands an overview of the whole man, and pre-eminently of his evolutionary dimension. An abstract value-system could certainly lead to the following "logical" conclusion: Since the supreme good for the human community is the full-fledged recognition of God Who is Perfect Truth, therefore Church and State must collaborate wherever possible in the interests of man, not only to demand unqualified submission to God's revelation and commandments but even, where necessary, to compel such submission. Unquestionably, holiness of life in full accord with the Will of Revealed Love is, for us, the supreme value. But holiness in free man can only consist in a free positive response to God's gift and call. Accordingly, reverence for faith and for man in his empirical reality demands the greatest possible freedom for the individual to make his own moral decisions in this area, to pursue the unremitting quest for a fuller understanding of truth, and to live always in accord with the stage of understanding of truth to which he has attained.

Every aberration is an evil. The possible dishonest abuse of religious freedom from base motives is indeed one of the very greatest evils of the world. Nonetheless the common good and the dignity of each and every human individual demand that general atmosphere of freedom in which alone can flourish joyous faith, or at least a sincere quest for the truth. This does, of course, require that no one shall lay claim to religious freedom for himself and fail, at the same time, to respect the true freedom of others.

The demand for universal religious freedom presumes that man's conscience and his striving after veracity and truth are taken seriously. Such a demand for religious freedom would be senseless in the event of a denial of the value of truth as such, or of the unique dignity of a conscience oriented to truth and a hierarchy of values, a moral order.

Historically, many an unjust restriction of freedom of conscience can be explained by the fact that the men responsible were firmly convinced that malice alone could preclude a full awareness of truth and of the moral order. Freedom of conscience presumes both a belief in a mandatory truth and moral order and an awareness of the historical contingency and evolutionary character of the human individual and of human communities.

Here, once again, in the matter of freedom of conscience, varying historical circumstances inevitably entail variations in value-priorities. In the vicissitudes of human history, there may be ages or moments when the top priority will be the effective protection of those who are still naive or uneducated against the malicious seduction and exploitation of their ignorance by those who levy a dishonest claim to freedom of conscience to mask their own evil machinations. In such a situation, the measures required for this protection may be the lesser evil, even though they seem to obscure, for a brief historical moment, the principle of complete freedom-of-conscience. But if such measures were to be protracted any longer than absolutely necessary, or were they to be promulgated in such a way as to obscure the fact that they had been undertaken from honest motives of conscience, and in a spirit of profound respect for a well-formed conscience, then we would be faced not with a simple affirmation of a temporary value-priority but rather with a treason to the whole hierarchy of values, the entire moral order: Slavish obedience would be being exalted above the joyous obedience of faith and the sincere quest for truth.

Whoever believes sincerely and passionately in the true and the good, and serves the universal moral order to the best of his abilities, will reject all coercion of conscience, trusting in the radiant power of the good and of sincere convictions, without of course playing into the hands of evil by naivete or idle inaction.

Only a great love for humankind and for truth can unite an endorsement of the value holding temporary priority with a thorough affirmation of the hierarchy of values. For love alone is truly sensitive to moral values. "Love is patient and kind . . . It is not arrogant or rude. . . . It is not irritable or resentful" (I Cor. 13, 4f).

Academia Alfonsiana

Rome, Italy