In a document prepared for the workshops of the 1971 Synod of Bishops, a synthesis of the general debate on Justice in the World reads in part:

How is it that after 80 years of modern social teaching and 2000 years of the gospel of love the Church has to admit her inability to make more impact upon the conscience of her people. . . . It was stressed again and again that the faithful, particularly the more wealthy and comfortable among them, simply do not see structural social injustice as sin. They simply feel no personal responsibility for it and feel no obligation to do anything about it. Sunday observance, the Church's rules on sex and marriage tend to enter the Catholic consciousness profoundly as sin; but to live like Dives with Lazarus at the gate is not even perceived as sinful.¹

This frustration, expressed at the level of Christian leadership, confirms what historians, sociologists and others have been observing of the great divorce between religion and public life.

Let us, in the first place, define our use of the terms, religion and public life:

-- Religion: For the purposes of this reflection we shall understand religion as the historical, organized religions and, more specifically, Christianity whose numerical superiority and geographical spread qualify it to typify ideally the other religions.

We need to know know what difference Christianity, as a religion, makes in the public life of its adherents, individually or in groups, and in society as a whole.

-- Public Life: Public life can mean: (a) the public section of an individual's life, that is, one's relation to others especially beyond the level of family; (b) the entire life of the community itself, whether this community is a group, village or country, or the world community; (c) the area of inter-subjective interaction and the locus of decisions on what touches the whole.

Our usage shall include these three levels of meaning while distinguishing them. By public life we shall mean especially the moral quality of that life. We ask whether religion makes or has made any difference in the ability of people to act justly toward one another in building a just and peaceful human society.

At the end we shall see that the Christian religion, on account of constraints imposed on it both by the environment and by its own deliberate choices, has tended to have its highest moral influence on the private lives of its individual adherents, less influence on the public life of these same individuals and the least influence on public life understood as the life of the community or society. By championing a consistently and thoroughly individualistic morality, Christianity has deprived the public stage of the immense benefits of its moral vision. But, as we shall try to demonstrate, a communitarian morality such as obtains in many African cultures seems better equipped to correct the imbalances of the individualistic immorality of modern society.

THE POSITIVE INFLUENCE OF RELIGION IN PUBLIC

LIFE--THE INFLUENCE OF RELIGION

Religion expresses itself in many forms, which include creed, ritual or liturgy, and morality. In a well-articulated theology all these elements can be seen to be interconnected and even integrated, hence an understanding of one element often sheds light on another. However, for the purposes of this essay we may pass over other elements and concentrate on its moral component as the most direct link between religion and society. It is not that the others are less important. For instance, as a belief system, no one will doubt that Christianity has generated and promoted values which today are part of the proud legacy of civilization. This has been made possible because the values so inculcated have been internalized as ideals and models for life.

Through reading the scriptures and spiritual works, sermons, retreats, catechisms, pastoral letters and other forms of catechesis, ideals of behavior have been upheld and models proposed--especially those of Jesus himself, and the various saints--which have had profound effect on people and lasting influence on their private lives. Through such exhortations to virtue and putting of powerful models and ideals before the people, it has contributed indirectly but immensely to setting the moral tone of society.

By setting up institutions like monasteries where these ideals are "realized" it has been possible to put a Christian stamp on the surrounding culture. Religion with its emphasis on the otherworldly dimension contains a decisive spiritual element which accounts for values that are perceived to be lasting and universal. These values often appear in secular garb, such as liberty, equality and fraternity, but often they retain their root meaning and continue to give regenerative energy to the lives of peoples and nations.

Finally, in the last hundred years the Christian church has most noticeably been fulfilling its prophetic role in pleading for social justice in an impressive series of papal encyclicals on the social question, beginning from Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum.

Nevertheless none of these forms of religious influence or intervention in public life would make up, either singly or together, for the lack of an appropriate morality or a Christian ethics of public life. Their collective inadequacy has been made painfully obvious as the tragedies of this century discredit morality and oblige us to look for other solutions.

Exhortations to virtue based on gospel values do not carry the same force as commandments against evil. What seems to be decisive in determining the influence of a religious morality cannot come merely as ideals, models and exhortations to good behavior, essential as these are for personal holiness and for injecting a vague religiosity into a culture. What is needed is rather commandments, prohibitions and the prescription of minimally acceptable behavior backed up with moral sanction, in other words, raising these issues to matters of conscience, sin and punishment. Beliefs, values, ideals, exhortations must be translated into a binding moral code if they are to influence public life from a moral point of view.

Secondly and more importantly, modern society seems to be advancing in the direction of greater helplessness on the part of the individual in effecting any change or having any decisive influence on what happens in society. Even as he thinks himself never so free, the individual finds himself ever so impotent that he can do almost nothing with his freedom. The decisions that matter in public life are taken, most of the time, at the level of corporate and governmental responsibility.

Now, private religious morality has been developed in view of purely individual action. But if such individual action is proving increasingly irrelevant to public life, then religious morality is also that much irrelevant to public life. This seems to indicate that what may be needed is rather a religious morality of public action, a morality of collective action.

Thirdly, it is by now clearly doubtful whether the aggregate of religiously influenced private lives could add up to a religiously influenced public life; whether a morality designed for the individual's private life is transferable and cumulatively effective at the public level; whether the behavior of a society as a whole will become automatically and totally good if every individual obeys the ten commandments.

Yet something like such an atomistic view of society, and also of morality, seems to have inspired the massive optimism by which Christianity historically has concentrated its moral theological/ethical effort on the individual's life in the vain hope that public life thereby would be sufficiently provided for.

But over and above individual actions, in public life there would still remain an important residue of actions for which no one individual alone would be liable or could claim responsibility, no one except the corporate persona as a whole. As is often the case, here also the whole seems to be something more than the sum of its parts.

THE FAILURE OF CHRISTIANITY IN PUBLIC LIFE

That the Christian religion has failed to influence public life significantly in the sense and the direction of the Gospel is an understatement. The confession of failure credited to the 1971 Synod of Bishops mentioned earlier is borne out fully by the following random list of acts that have been perpetrated by Christian peoples in recent history:

(a) The Atlantic Slave Trade which entailed the degradation of fellow human beings of the black race to mere chattel and objects of merchandise, a trade carried on for centuries by Christian peoples and nations with moral impunity and, at times with ecclesiastical blessing.

(b) Colonialism that is the usurpation of the freedom and sovereignty of weaker peoples; the violence, the wars and the ethnocides that made possible colonial occupation; the partition and sharing of whole continents such as Africa like a cake among Christian states.

(c) Machtpolitik, Realpolitik or power politics in the service of pure national interest; war as a tool of foreign policy.

(d) Unjust trade terms which involve the manipulation of prices, debts and currencies and the imposition of barriers to perpetuate the impoverishment of the poor.

(e) Genocides in Christian history notably those against the American Indians, the Australian Aborigines and the Holocaust of six million Jews and others. In this category one must add the reckless and still unrepented destruction by the atom bomb of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

(f) The continued waste of the world's resources in the production of armaments.²

The implied indictment of the Christian religion on its failure as represented by these evils of the public life is not to say that some Christians or even the Christian leadership were in complicity or did not protest evil. Often enough they did, if often belatedly. Rather, that these crimes took place at all in a Christian dispensation, that they were perpetrated by Christians who might pass for saints in their private lives, that is the tragedy. Also, it is bad enough that any one of these crimes took place by way of a strange exception, but that so manyand even morehappened in the very bosom of Christianity must indicate a serious absence of the Christian code at this level of events.

It is not only a list of failures that is alarming, but the general impression of failure of the Christian religion in public life. Speaking in the case of the United Sates of America Harold J. Laski's verdict, even if biased, is pertinent:

All in all, it is true to say that the influence of Christianity in the United States is everywhere pervasive without being anywhere generally profound. . . . To this, I think, there must be added the important fact that the pervasiveness of the churches, Roman Catholic as well as Protestant, comes in a large degree from the subtle compromise they have made with the world, rather than from a defiant proclamation of their doctrine. They have not been able seriously to compete with the growing secularization of American life.³

Nearly half a century since Laski's assessment and despite increased visibility--religion being everywhere pervasive'the subtle compromise' has assured the effective marginalization of Christianity, not only in the U.S., but worldwide.

THE PRIVATIZATION OF RELIGION

Religion has always understood itself to be a way of life, and whenever it is left free fully to express itself, encompasses the whole of man's life--private and public, individual and communal. To exclude religion from any major area of life would amount to a major, disabling amputation which would reduce drastically its effectiveness and indeed distort its meaning.

To a great extent what explains the failure of Christianity is the phenomenon of the privatization of religion. This is the gradual reduction of the jurisdiction of religion from the whole of life, private and public, to only the private and individual arena. With the privatization of religion Christianity became effectively neutralized, since its competence was limited to the private life and conscience of its adherents, while the public arena, the vast and growing area of social, economic and political affairs that daily touch the lives and shape the destinies of millions remained a prohibited, no-entry area for the Christian conscience. This eclipse of religion from public life created the twilight zone of amorality and set the stage for the compromises and accommodation with the intolerable situations of injustice and inhumanity documented above. Robert N. Bellah aptly remarks: "To the extent that privatization succeeded, religion was in danger of becoming like the family 'a heaven in a heartless world,' but one that did more to reinforce that world, by caring for its casualties, than to challenge its assumptions."⁴

Commentators variously have attributed the privatization of religion--depending on the country--to the Enlightenment and the French revolution, to the disestablishment of the churches, to liberal rationalism and secularization, to persecution by atheistic Communism, to growing pluralism and relativism, to the modern industrial civilization, to the insidious new religion of materialism, to hedonism and to consumerism.

Without denying these links and causalities, one might yet insist that its ancestry must be traced along a route which goes beyond the enlightenment to take in the settlement of the wars of religion: cuius regio eius religio implying a regionalization of religious affiliation; and indeed back to the Pandora's box of the Protestant Reformation: sola scriptura, scriptura sui interpres allowing for a purely personal competence in the interpretation of Scripture and, of course, deciding for oneself what was right or wrong.

Through these events Christianity lost its earlier visibility and the ascendancy it had won, for instance, in a Hildebrand or an Innocent III. The gains of the Constantinian revolution were once again reversed and a retreat to the catacombs left the public square once again naked.

THE PRIVATIZATION OF MORALITY

Deeper and older than the privatization of religion, is the privatization of morality itself. Not only was religion denied the right of citizenship in public and, as it were, put under house arrest in the world of the individual believer, but even there the Christian morality deriving from it seemed fatally designed to have no effect on public life. By its own historic option, all Christian morality has ever been targeted on the individual conscience. Its laws, and, its commandments, are for the individual to obey, its sanctions, rewards and punishments go to the individual. It is conceived to make the individual holy, not to make society just. In the received tradition of Christian morality the group cannot posit a human act, cannot sin, cannot go to heaven or hell; morally, the group simply does not exist. And if the major actors in public life today tend, as we have seen, not to be individuals but rather corporate bodies, governments, cabinets, alliances, cartels or multinationals, it becomes clear that the acts of these bodies, even though carrying enormous consequences for the destinies of millions, may be regarded even as outside morality, perhaps even as acts of God. In that case Christian morality which is at least useful to the individual in his private life, proves doubly irrelevant to the events of public life.

Thus, these events seem both to lack their own specific morality and also to lie beyond good and evil. From this position it is but one step to bracketing out from morality even the public aspects and consequences of our private life. For instance the authors of Ethics in a Business Society, commenting on the behavior of businessmen could say:

The part religion plays in decisions taken in business is precious little at least at the conscious level. . . . It was not that they were irreligious. Many of them were churchgoers. It was simply that their religious experience did not seem to be relevant to the problems confronting them in making their living. Religion is something to one side, a social experience that is sometimes consoling and pleasant, but one that does not strike very deep.⁵

The privatization of morality itself is a more serious problem than the privatization of religion. The latter is something to which religion has been subjected by historical circumstances and seems capable of being reversed if those circumstances are reversed or significantly modified. But the privatization of Christian morality has been embedded in the pedagogy that transmits this morality from one generation to the next. Aristotle's Ethics and Politics which has contributed immeasurably in shaping the moral thought of Christendom keeps ethics within the realm of personal individual behavior and virtue while politics becomes a discourse on the various forms of constitution for civil government. On the merits or demerits of the acts of collectivities, whether those acts can be moral or immoral, or even whether these categories have any meaning at that level, Aristotle leaves no clue, and no one seems to have bothered.

The very existence of communal or corporate personality or self-hood that could be the subject of responsible acts was barely even articulated in this tradition, except in legal fiction through the concept of moral personality. Now and again popular notions like the guilt of the Jews or that of the Germans or that of the Americans gained some currency, and in fact the Germans have followed this up with reparations to Israel, but the ethics of corporate action and responsibility as such has never been developed.⁶

The result has been a lopsided development of the Christian moral conscience--a sensitive and often guilt-ridden individual conscience existing side by side with a collective conscience that is more or less amoral and insensitive. It was especially in this atmosphere that the national sovereign states of the Christian West developed, defining their goals as the pursuit of national self-interest and their sovereignty as non-accountability to any power beyond themselves. Within these states raison d'état made them infallible, while interstate relations were marked by rivalry and the spirit of Realpolitik. Machiavelli was perhaps more the faithful, if cynical, chronicler of the spirit of the actual events of his age than the ruthless strategist coldly prescribing immoral principles for the successful future prince, as he has been presented to posterity.

Inevitably, war became the means of settling right and wrong, and might came to be identified with right. It is this morality or the lack of it that explains most of the negative events that mark the history of Christendom and of its culture.

Against this background I wish to present a different approach to the problem from the point of view of African religion and suggest that if Christianity could graft this element of corporate responsibility into what is a very impressive heritage, it could exert greater influence for good in the public life of the world community.

Unfortunately, the history of Christianity in Africa has been only a one-sided history of giving and a disdain of receiving. But as John Taylor has well observed:

There are many who feel that the spiritual sickness of the West which reveals itself in the divorce of the sacred from the secular, of the cerebral from the instinctive, and in the loneliness and homeless-ness of individualism, may be healed through a recovery of the wisdom which Africa has not yet thrown away. The world church awaits something new out of Africa.⁷

If Christianity can learn from other religions and cultures it will see elements from other religions that can not only widen its appeal but also help it to improve its ability to meet the problems of relevance to public life. In Africa religion contains such an element.

CHRISTIANITY IN AFRICA

The currently surviving Christianity came into sub-Saharan Africa in the 19th century. The historic circumstance was the drive for colonies which occasioned the scramble for Africa by European powers in search of raw materials and markets in the wake of their industrial revolution and following the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. After agreeing on a peaceful partition of the continent in Berlin in 1884 the colonial powers dispatched to their respective colonies their soldiers and administrators, their traders and their missionaries. French, British or German missionaries, even of the same religious Congregations, followed their own national flags: cuius regio eius religio came into operation once more. The missionaries themselves came simultaneously with, or immediately followed, the brutal military expeditions which frequently were necessary to subjugate a recalcitrant tribe. This compromising association, in addition to the missionaries' conceptual baggage of the reigning evolutionary philosophy and sense of civilizing mission among savages, weighed heavy on their work.

Nonetheless, Christianity generally got a sympathetic hearing and made significant impact among the people, if I may use the example of the Igbo of Nigeria. This success it owes especially to the para-missionary strategies it adopted, such as investment in men and resources in the educational and medical fields. This was a veritable revolution. Education gave literacy which gave the power of book knowledge, of new jobs, of new status. Modern medicine was also dramatic in its short-term results of restoring good health and checking epidemics, and even more effective in the long-term result of surreptitiously undermining the religious theory of disease by the introduction of the germ theory.

Of course, Christianity also relied on its own intrinsic appeal as a new message of hope to humanity, but the people were not persuaded by argument that it was a better account of the meaning of life or a better way of relating to God and their ancestors, or a better technique for coping with life, than their traditional religion. The adult male population remained on the whole faithful to their old religion, while conversions were more numerous among women and children. The schools which were popular as the key to a place in the new dispensation became also the missionaries' paramount instrument of evangelization as they looked forward to Christianizing the future, having despaired of converting the present adults. By and large, the Igbo mission became numerically at least perhaps the most spectacular success story of the African missions in the 20th century.

The mutual suspicion between the missionaries and the adult population assured that there was no dialogical encounter between the two religions. Rather the missionaries finally took refuge in the massive condemnation and rejection of the traditional religion with all that this implied for the culture with which that religion had lived and interacted in a millenary symbiosis.

The religion to religion encounter that never was might have shown that African traditional religion was not all witchcraft and sorcery, or the work of the devil.

AFRICAN TRADITIONAL RELIGION (IGBO)

It is part of the lot of Africa that even its traditional religion, which is the fruit of ages of complex development, is often passed over in silence like another empty leaf in the book of world religions. But that oblivion, caused mainly by prejudice and ignorance, does not take away its reality or validity.

African traditional religion is the home-grown religion of the black man in Africa. Since it lacks a scripture, it has developed many variant local features, but the basics seem to be the same. A monotheism in the sense of belief in the one supreme God supported by an array of created spiritsGod's powerful agents, the ancestors or the spirits of dead forbearsforms the core of the belief system. Furthermore, there is belief in God's authorship of life and belief in his providence and guidance of human destiny. There is a theory of reincarnation and a moral code which punishes bad behavior and rewards the good here in this life.

In Igbo traditional religion God himself is remote but frequently uses the spirits to intervene in human affairs; He is particularly present in every individual by the indwelling of the chi, God's double or man's guardian spirit and personal spirit of destiny.

A priesthood takes care of worship, sacrifice and festivals. A divination system interprets the wishes of the spirits when they intervene; this is perfected in the oracles that pronounce hidden knowledge and adjudicate justice among litigants where the oath-swearing system proves inconclusive.

Morality, which almost invariably has a social dimension, is in the control of the earth goddessalawho is also the goddess of the major social groupthe village. She provides the sanctions of the moral code presiding over the peace and punishing offenders. Certain special offenses are offenses against ala.

MORALITY

The moral code consists of a limited number of prohibitions: murder, incest, marriage within any traceable degree of consanguinity, adultery, theft, sorcery or witchcraft.

Positively it is enunciated in the well known and oft-quoted Igbo equivalent of the Biblical Golden Rule:

Egbe bere ugo bere nke si ibe ya ebela nku kwaayaLet the kite as well as the eagle have the right to perch (on the branch), and a curse (a broken wing) on whomever denies that right to the other!

The code is protected by the earth goddess and serious infringements are regarded as abominations requiring ritual cleansing and involving the community whose well-being is thus threatened. Sin and guilt are not seen as the concern of the individual alone: he or she may be the really guilty one, but is also the one in whom all have sinned (in quo omnes peccaverunt).

THE DIALECTIC OF INDIVIDUAL AND COMMUNITY

The rugged individualism that seems to characterize the present cultures of the West has given rise to a fresh interest in societies that have a different dynamic. It is a fact that Western society was not always so, given the facts that we know for instance about Germanic societies as described by Tacitus in his Germania or ancient documents such as Beowulf or The Battle of Maldon. It is probable that Christian influence with its emphasis on individual sin, guilt and salvation, along with later liberal philosophies, have helped to shape the present.

One has to be careful however not to exaggerate the opposition between individualist societies and communitarian societies. In the final analysis it is a matter of degree for, even in the most individualistic of societies, the existence of armies and patriotic forces ready to risk or sacrifice their lives for the common good shows clearly that there will always be limits to individualism. In the same way, the fact that in most communitarian societies the individual could choose freedom and autonomy, even in ostracism and asylum, means also that the individual always will have his say as a person. It is therefore in the main, a matter of degree, although there is a better balance between the individual and community in the so-called communitarian setup.

Here, the individual is always and in the first place a member of his community, first of the extended family, then of kindred, the village, the town, enlarging conceptually to clan, tribe and nation. Though the Igbo is an extremely republican society having no feudal-type rulers, and though direct democracy reigned in Igbo hamlets for centuries before white colonial rule, the Igbo is a man defined by his community. He understands his identity in and through his community and finds therein his fulfillment. Reciprocally, the community regards the individual as its own; it does not leave him alone: his successes and failures are its.

John Daly has justly pointed out the relatively recent origin of the exaggerated individualist-personalist thinking which ever more and more seems to characterize Western and Christian philosophy and theology. By contrast, he writes:

The great majority of the peoples of the world think in collectivist, rather than in personalist, terms. It is characteristic of people in collectivist societies to regard the individual as a differentiated part of society, while the West sees society as a plurality of individuals. "If the foot were to say 'I am not the hand, and so I do not belong to the body' would that mean it stopped belonging to the body?"

Up to the 16th century, even in Europe, writers on society looked upon itand not metaphoricallyas a body. In Asia and Africa today, man as an individual finds his meaning and identity rather as a member of a group than as an individual. In collectivist societies the life of the individual is so inseparably bound up with that of society as a whole that it has little claim to independent validity. Thought and conduct are to a large extent determined by the community, by its laws and customs. A man tends to be guided by the collective conscience of his group. He is not as conscious of personal guilt as he is of shame. He is less dependent on personal moral decisions and more on the laws and sanctions of the community.⁸

Without derogating from the uniqueness or the personality of the individual, it is fair to say that the community is part of his essence. But it would be as untrue to conclude that the individual thereby loses his identity as to think that the community has no identity at all. The individual is inserted in community. His individualism is thereby qualified, bounded and limited, but by the same token it is supported, enriched, given a direction and bearing. In Igbo society, the Chi principle, recognized as the principle of individuality, achievement and destiny, counteracts or rather interacts correctively with the We of society or community. Thus in the subtle dialectic between individual and community, there is independence of the individual, there is dependence on the community, and there is interdependence of each on the other. None is perceived as less important or more dispensable; each is regarded as an integral part of the human condition.

It is in the light of this dialectic between individual and community that Daly reports that in contrast with the practice of secret, auricular confession which the missionaries introduced into the Igbo community, there are traditional public shaming rituals designed to expiate for sins of incest, theft, adultery, etc. with public admission of guilt followed by a sacrifice of reconciliation.⁹

A "modernized" version of this shaming ritual was used in the late 50s in Owerri Division when sins of theft, robbery, poisoning and homicide which had been committed in secret even several decades earlier were voluntarily and openly confessed. This would take place under oath to the Ofo, the symbol of truth believed to instantly kill any perjurers and before the entire community numbering several hundreds. This was how the ritual acquired the curious name of ime votevoting someone: a crowd gathered as for someone's election to office but really to be witnesses of his disgrace. At the end, however, the culprit/penitent would pay a fine to become finally reconciled to his community. But, government saw fit to order a stop to this most effective and purifying law and order institution.

Guilt is therefore not only an individual personal affair, but it is shared. The proverb says that if one finger gets dipped into palm oil, all the other fingers are inescapably involved. A community would quite possibly expiate with sacrifice some guilt, incurred long ago by a dead ancestor. The Igbo would have no particular problem with the idea of original sin. Furthermore, group communal punishment was meted to communities that have either collectively offended or condoned serious crimes or were incorrigibly crime-ridden. Ostracism of such a community or village by the larger community or town is not unknown; indeed it is such group excommunications that forced a number of communities to migrate and seek new homes well away from their ancestral homeland.

CONCLUSION

The example of the Igbo has been taken to give some hint on the working of a non-individualist religious morality. What is important is not the details, but the idea of collective sin and collective guilt committed and incurred by a collectivity, a community that has a selfhood transcending that of its component individuals. Because it alone, and not the individual, performs certain acts in the public arena, it must be equipped with a conscience to be able to take responsibility for those acts.

Christianity has not exerted the good influence it might have had on public life essentially because as a religion it has been absent from public life. This absence has been due partly to the increasing privatization to which it was condemned by a series of historical events and its subsequent devaluation as a factor in society. But it was also due to a self-imposed silence in-built in its moral code regarding the public zone whereas morality was precisely the one single Archimedean point whence it could most effectively have gotten a hold on public life. The basic flaw of Christian morality has been the absence of the public sector. By its one-sided preoccupation with personal, individual holiness and salvation--owing to its individualist conception of man--and by its own individualistic morality Christianity already abdicated its responsibility to public life long before it was chased out of it by the agents of privatization.

However, reflection since Vatican II has brought to the fore the concept of structured social sin. This is designed to help morality to include those institutions, structures and systems of social organization whose very functioning works to the detriment of some elements in society. Still it remains to locate the responsibility for such social sin and to articulate the type of selfhood that is able to carry the weight of this moral responsibility.¹⁰ After the recognition of structural sin, it is time also to recognize collective sin as more than just a metaphor--sins in politics and economics, sins committed by governments and companies in the name of peoples and shareholders. It is time to acknowledge collective guilt for past crimes and then to build up a collective conscience that would inhibit the future reoccurrence of these crimes.

The concept of corporate responsibility or conscience can help Christian morality offset the extreme moral individualism which leaves the most heinous crimes on earth today--most of them corporate crimes--with no acknowledged authors.

1. J. A. Coleman, ed., One Hundred Years of Catholic Social Thought: Celebration and Change (New York: Orbis Books, 1991), p. 306.

2. To mention only some of the weapons systems used in the gulf war, a tomahawk missile cost $1,116,000; the Patriot anti-ballistic missile, $892,800; the F-14 Tomcat fighter plane, $44,640,000; a Tornado fighter plane $52,080,000; an AWACS radar plane, $90,024,000; the radar-evading F-117 Stealth fighter plane, $96,720,000; an Apache helicopter, $8,928,000; an Abnrams M-1 tank, $3,720,000; and a Challenger tank, $7,440,000. It is a question of wasting immense wealth that couldand shouldbe used to eliminate the poverty of the millions of people dying of hunger. Culled from Modern War and Christian Conscience: La Civilta Catolica in Moral Issues and Christian Response, edited by P. T. Jersild and D. A. Johnson (New York: Holt Rinehard & Winston, Inc., 1993).

3. Harold J. Laski, The American Democracy (New York: Viking, 1948), p. 296.

4. R. N. Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), p. 224.

5. M.W. Childs and D. Cater, Ethics in a Business Society (New York: Harper, 1954), p. 94.

6. One notable exception is the new thinking represented by the book by Larry May, The Morality of Groups, Collective Responsibility, Group-based Harm, and Corporate Rights (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987). The author's avowed aim is to try to fill the gap in ethics caused by the exclusive concern with individual, personal acts. However, such efforts continue to remain a purely speculative exercise, more interesting to professional philosophers than relevant in public policy and behavior.

7. John Taylor, Primal Vision (London: SCM Press, 1963), p. 108.

8. J. Daly, C.S.Sp., "Caught between Cultures," African Ecclesiastical Review, 17 (No.2; 1975), p. 94.

9. J. Daly, "Incarnation of Christianity in a Local Culture," African Ecclesiastical Review, 17 (No. 6; 1975), 328-329.

10. Karen J. Torjesen, "Public Ethics and Public Selfhood, The Hidden Problems" in Ethics, Religion and the Good Society, edited by Joseph Runzo (Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), p. 110.