Bishops on the Brink

For a man living geographically in what one might call the trenches of the still-free world (I reside in

Austria, which sits between the NATO powers and the Iron Curtain), it is always nerve-racking to visit America, the home front. Some years ago I visited, in turn, Vietnam and the United States: and witnessed, in a state of extreme depression, the folks at the home base losing all interest in the front-line forces. The struggle in Vietnam was lost in Washington.