SELEC FIVE indignation and the double standard are among the fashionable vices of our times. Thus, those who quite rightly express anger at, say. the inhumanity of racial laws in South Africa, will not necessarily be equally articulate about the agony of Afghanistan. Those who demonstrated in the streets against the American military presence in Vietnam may possibly not have done the same thing to express their loathing of the political and social conditions that later turned so many Vietnamese into that new, sad, wandering tribe. the Boat People.
Christians may be expected to nourish in their hearts and minds, and express in their words and acts, a more universal justice and charity. Unhappily, the Catholic Herald. this week and finmany weeks, has had to record injustice and inhumanity in plenty to exercise our consciences and our compassion. The griandmothers from Argentina. the children they so sadly seek, show us a new aspect of what is in fact an old story. East Timor is also a horror that has existed for some years; and it seems that perhaps we should have been told more about it earlier on.
There are also the recurring items in the grim catalogue — the immense, half shrouded and guessed at miseries of the huge Communist world; the tyrannies of parts of Africa, Latin America and the Far East; the victims of wars that never quite die down in the Middle East; the fanaticism and intolerance that sends streams of victims to the firing squads in Iran; the terror in Northern Ireland and in our own streets. Our prayers and our other healing endeavours must be universal for a universal malady.