Loosened Loyalties

For Richard Nixon, it was not a particularly comforting week. Two powerful groups long on generally friendly terms with him turned on his policies--in one case with deliberate rudeness, in the other with homiletic eloquence. Organized labor has been as cordial to Nixon as to any Republican President in memory, backing him particularly on the war and on law-and-order. But Nixon took the calculated risk of appearing before the biennial convention of the AFL-CIO in Bal Harbour, Fla., a day after it had instructed the labor members of the Pay Board not to cooperate in forming Phase II wage guidelines (see THE ECONOMY). President George Meany even refused a White House request to have Hail to the Chief accompany Nixon's entrance. During the speech, some of Nixon's pleas for labor support in carrying out Phase II were greeted with snide laughter.

The U.S. Roman Catholic Church has been sympathetic to the President in the past. While a vocal minority of priests and laymen has strongly opposed the war, the Catholic hierarchy had always refused to take a stand against it. But at a Washington convocation last week, the church's American bishops approved a resolution calling for an end to the war "with no further delay." "At this point in history," the bishops' statement read, "it seems clear to us that whatever good we hope to achieve through continued involvement in this war is not outweighed by the destruction of human life and of moral values which it inflicts." One bishop, the Most Rev. Thomas J. Gumbleton of Detroit, went so far as to say that anyone who reaches that moral judgment "may not participate in the war."

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