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...letter to St. Augustine of Canterbury* in 601, Pope Gregory the Great laid down a general principle of conversion that overzealous missionaries have often forgotten. Its gist: adapt much, change little. Speaking of the pagan Anglo-Saxons, Gregory sagely observed: "If they can go to their old temples . . . they will feel more at home in the worship of the true God. . . . We must act as those climbing a high hill, proceeding by small steps rather than by long leaps...
...even if we did it, it didn't amount to much; and even if it amounted to a lot, Canada showed bad manners in talking about it; come to think about it, it was a downright, premeditated attack on us. So ran the gist of the official Russian reply to the Canadian disclosure that some Canadians had supplied atomic-bomb secrets to the Russian military attaché's office...
Southern leftists too were throwing their weight around. A Communist-inspired "Battle Front Formation Convention" met in Seoul to denounce U.S. occupation measures. One speaker brought the house down with a report on World War II. Gist of the report: when Germany was near collapse in 1944, the U.S. jumped into the European war for spoils. After ineffectual skirmishes by U.S. troops on minor South Pacific islands, Russia staggered Japan with tremendous blows by the mighty Red Army...
...American Heresy. U.S. Catholics were deeply hurt when Leo XIII, in an Apostolic Letter to Baltimore's Cardinal Gibbons in 1899, at last felt it necessary to condemn heretical "Americanism." Gist of the alleged errors: "Spiritual direction . . . was less necessary since in an era of liberty, the Holy Ghost would guide the individual soul. . . ." U.S. bishops loudly denied that such heresy had ever tainted U.S. Catholicism...
Composers, athletes, billiard champions, authors, male cinema stars, philosophers, explorers, painters, scientists all achieve their top performances in their early thirties. This discouraging news for ambitious oldsters of 40 was reported by Psycholo gist Harvey C. Lehman of Ohio University in the current Scientific Monthly...