.3111r FROM PAGE ONE can stand against the rising tide of Godlessness without and within.
This feeling is more obvious, more vocal and better appreciated abroad, in France, Belgium, Holland and Germany. A priest but lately returned from Berlin told me cooperation in face of the threat of anti-God Communism is already real.
In the matter of schools and many other departments, all Christians act together. In one almost wholly Protestant Brandenburg, now full of Catholic refugees from the East ond Baltic countries, over 700 Protestant churches are shared by Catholics and Protestants.
" Following the lead given in Rome with the full knowledge and approval of the Pope by the Associzione Internationale per L' Unite Spirituale del popoli groups of Christians study and exchange ideas in order to create the intellectual and spiritual conditions in which a movement to formal unity may flourish and achieve its end."
This latter movement, known more widely by the name of its quarterly publication Unitas, is directed by the Prefect of Studies of the Papal Gregorian University, Fr. Charles
Boyer. S.J. Unitas fosters study groups in many countries and is now pliblished in Rome, Paris, Brussels and Washington.
In Washington and New York the Octave is advertised in papers and on buses. The need for the re-establishment of the contemplative life and a hidden life of prayer is becoming more widely recognised as is evidenced by the reception given to Merton's books. Their popularity arises from the fact that they meet an existing need and make articulate a deep informulated stirring of revolt against the slick and mechanical.