Tidings

> When fighting between Portuguese colonial troops and Mozambique liberation guerrillas was at its fiercest, Roman Catholic Archbishop Custodio Alvim Pereira of Lourenc,o Marques had little patience with some of the Catholic missionaries who denounced Portuguese atrocities. The denunciations were "Marxist propaganda," he thundered, adding that priests who indulged in such criticism were departing from their role as ministers of the Gospel. When a fellow prelate disagreed, Pereira had him hustled off to Portugal under military escort. Last week the archbishop found himself being hustled away. After a visit from a Vatican cardinal, Pereira abruptly resigned his Mozambique diocese, apparently to take up some vague duties in Rome in preparation for the 1975 Holy Year. In a rather belated effort to shore up church credibility in the soon to be independent Portuguese colonies, the Vatican is moving to rid the territories of churchmen who were too closely tied to the old colonial posture. Whatever credibility remains, of course, will probably be due to the compassion of the very missionaries whom Archbishop Pereira once denounced.

> While the Vatican seeks to rid Catholicism of any colonial taint in Portuguese Africa, the liberal Protestant South African Council of Churches has taken a bold stand against racism in its own country. At a recent national conference, council delegates passed a strong resolution warning that racial tension in South Africa is leading to "violence and war." And if it came to this, the council added, Christians should seriously question whether they could participate in armed battle against liberation forces. The resolution reasoned that both "Catholic and Reformation theology" teach that Christians can only participate in a just war--and the requirements for a just war rule out fighting for "a basically unjust and discriminatory society." That, said the council, is a fair description of South Africa. The resolution noted that South Africa's Dutch-descended Afrikaners themselves cited British repression as the rationale for the Boer War against Britain and argued that "the same applies to the black people in their struggle today." The resolution has been condemned in the South African Parliament and by the Dutch Reformed churches, which do not belong to the council. But the new Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, the Rt. Rev. Bill B. Burnett, last week defended it. Said he: "It faces us with things as they are."

> Father John J. McLaughlin, the Brooks Brothers Jesuit who was one of Richard Nixon's most vocal clerical defenders, will soon be leaving his $30,000-a-year job as a White House speechwriter and maybe even his flat in the Watergate complex. But unlike Rabbi Baruch M. Korff, who has vowed to campaign "for those [anti-Nixon] leftists and liberals to go to hell," McLaughlin seems to bear no grudges. In an interview last week, he admitted to feeling "rage, desolation and the bends" as the former President's case collapsed. But he also welcomed the sense of "excitement and peace" that followed the resignation. Why had he kept his silence during Nixon's last days? Said McLaughlin: "I did not want to say anything by way of a public defense that might inhibit him from recognizing that he should resign." There the maverick Jesuit was in agreement with Rome. Writing on Nixon's demise in L 'Osservatore della Domenica last week, Vatican Press Officer Federico Alessandrini concluded that the Watergate case had raised "a constitutional issue that left no choice open to any U.S. political parties, not even to the Republicans. The resignation was the conclusion of a story that ended with only one victor: liberty."

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