I write this just after the completion of the fourth general congregation in this second session of Vatican Council II. In four days, the conciliar Fathers and the attached experts have listened to 59 speeches by cardinals and bishops. It is already possible to give some idea of what is happening here.

The record of the Kennedy Administration in the field of military human relations is the opposite of its generally good record in the field of civilian human relations. However pleasant he may be in his personal dealings, Secretary of Defense McNamara has transmitted a public "image" of coolness, aloofness and, sometimes, eyen of disdain.

This impression seemed to have been confirmed last fall when the Department of Defense announced a one-dollar-per-visit charge for out-patient treatment of military "dependents" in military hospitals.

Out-patient treatment in the average military hospital has all the joys of a city hospital charity clinic.

But up until the dollar-per-visit directive, such treatment was looked upon as a traditional and honorable part of a soldier's pay.

Intentionally or not, the directive said to military men all over the world: "We want you, but we would just as soon get along without the wife and kids."

This interpretation was supported by the fact that the dollar-per-visit charge would not have covered its own bookkeeping costs. Secretary McNamara withdrew the directive after the Army-Navy-Air Force Journal described the charge as "miserly."

But the damage was done.

The brawling, wenching service bum, so fascinating to our novelists, has never been truly characteristic of our military leadership. Within the past decade, there has been an even more decided shift against this type of moral misfit.

At the heart of this transition is the military wife and what were once known as her "Army brats."

Some of her sisters have made themselves and their country obnoxious by an exaggerated rank, class and nation consciousness.

But in the vast majority of cases, the service wife and mother has provided the stabilizing and humanizing force in the military environment.

Her children are better mannered, and far better disciplined than the average in the nation as a whole.

In accompanying her husband to imperiled posts, the service wife has taught us all that there are values in family life more important than safety.

The insurance lobby has stripped her family of low-cost insurance protection. The retail-trade associations lie in wait around every legislative corner to snatch the parcels from her post exchange and commissary basket. Within the past two years. Time and the Saturday Evening Post have printed articles on the military family that were so shallow and inaccurate as to constitute a slander.

The day that any significant number of service wives decide that this sort of thing is not worth the cost in terms of loneliness, separation and, all too often, substandard living conditions will be a day of disaster for the efficiency of our military establishment.

Whether the services continue to attract high-caliber men—and retain them—rests squarely with Secretary McNamara.

The winter business meeting of the Christian Family Movement has neither the excitement of its circus-type annual convention nor the power-charged atmosphere of a smoke-filled room. It is more like a New England town meeting, where there is a noticeable absence of prepared speeches and the presence of people who know each other well enough to speak their minds without fear of offending. This intramural, give-and-take atmosphere offers a fine opportunity to assess the movement after a decade of its existence.

The 1960 meeting at the Fatima Retreat House on the Notre Dame Campus was officially the semiannual meeting of the movement's governing body, the Coordinating Committee. This body is composed of a couple and a priest from each diocese in the United States and Canada in which CFM exists. About fifty couples and fifteen priests were in attendance.

True Strength

At one session each couple gave a short report of the movement in their diocese. These reports were largely a recital of projects of local groups. In Portland, Ore, the main concern was the World Refugee Year. They considered the thirteen families which they had resettled to be only a start. In Omaha, Neb., CFM represented the diocese at hearings of a Congressional subcommittee on indecent literature and in preparation for the White House Conference on Children and Youth. In the Diocese of Saginaw, Mich., they were arranging a God-and-man lecture series and an art exhibit. Richmond, Va., reported on its racial integration efforts and its work on behalf of lay missionaries. The Detroit groups were involved in projects dealing with foreign students, retarded children and a citizens' committee on religious liberties. Chicago's CFM had sponsored a lecture series on politics and lent support to projects dealing with migrant workers, film forums and urban renewal. It is difficult to think of a single facet of American life which did not become the concern of some CFM group across the country.

Unless one has had experience with CFM at the local level, the detailing of reports can be quite deceptive. Actually, the strength of the movement is not in its projects, in spite of their impressiveness. CFM is basically a couple-centered form of Christian witness. Through its concern with every facet of life that even remotely touches the family, it helps members to live an integrated Christian life.

CFM specializes in producing good neighbors. Its best work is done in the apartment building, the block or the rural community in which the couple lives. Nevertheless, it is hard to conceive of a San Francisco layman boarding a plane for South Bend on Friday morning to tell the national committee that families who hardly spoke to each other are warm and friendly, that parishioners are more cooperative, or, that 28 people in one parish attended their first city council session after a meeting on political life. These are pedestrian things that every Christian should be doing, so on the plane he searches his mind for sensational projects to report—adopting Korean babies, for instance.

Is true Christian friendship or love pedestrian? Can it be taken for granted in the enchanting land of suburbia, where the "cult of togetherness" finds its midday, ritualistic expression in coffee-klatches? And where does friendliness gush forth more than in our own living rooms, when the unctuous and toothy ad man tells us about his soap? Or is there a compulsiveness about our "togetherness" which betrays our deep-seated insecurity and consequent distrust, loneliness and neurotic clamors for constant support and approval? Maybe this explains the high incidence of alcoholism among both men and women in upper income suburbs.

Erich Fromm writes trenchantly in The Sane Society: "There is not much love or hate to be found in human relations of our day. There is, rather, a superficial friendliness, and a more than superficial fairness, but behind that surface is distance and indifference."

In all human relationships, whether in an apartment building or an office, Fromm's distinction between superficial friendship and Christian love can be recognized. It is something sensed rather than defined. It is this inability to assess and verbalize the quality of Christian friendship that makes it difficult to spell out the goals of CFM in terms of brotherly love.

In the 'thirties Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin dramatized the need we had of Houses of Hospitality for the hungry, the thirsty, the homeless and the naked. Unfortunately, these love centers expanded and contracted with the business cycle, as though love and friendship were subject to market fluctuations. In an affluent society there is little drama in, or patience for, the storefront Christianity of the 'thirties.

We would like to think that every time a couple stand before a priest and pronounce their marriage vows, another family-style House of Hospitality has been established in some neighborhood. Because the couple standing at the altar is so enmeshed in our secular culture, there is little hope that they will rise above their surroundings and create an oasis which will bring peace, light and refreshment to all who come in contact with its members. It is to this task that CFM addresses itself. CFM is a school for teaching the art of loving through the present-day realities of family life. With every couple joining CFM there is the prayer and hope that, given two or three years under the discipline of the movement, love will find a trysting place in another neighborhood.

CFM Procedure

Probably the greatest thing the storefronts did was to teach the meaning of love to the staff and volunteers. It helped close the gap in communications between the "haves" and the "have-nots." Somehow the affluent must come to a firsthand knowledge of the people in our pockets of poverty and our racial islands. A graph or a table plotting incomes and places is not enough. Ordinarily there must be some emotional experience supporting the knowledge if love is to flame. This CVM attempts to provide by its discussion-action method. Slowly and haltingly it leads people through a feet-wetting process to discovering Christ in others.

CFM is aware that if its concept of love is genuine, it must reach beyond the patio and the barbecue pit. Without divorcing themselves from the challenge of love in their own backyard, each couple must see a neighborhood in the context of the entire metropolitan area and widen their vision to a concern for the blacks in the Union of South Africa. With our residential areas stratified according to incomes, the eliciting of this emotional experience of the needs of other categories of peoples demands creative programming and discerning local leadership.

CFM usually starts in a parish unostentatiously. Following the outlines suggested for beginners, the couples begin to explore a new way of life. It is an exciting adventure for a couple who, after years of married life, have tended to take each other, the children, the home and all they have in common, for granted. Conversation has a tendency to descend to