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Focuses on the Catholic Church in the U.S. Role of the Church in spreading Catholicism; Comparison of the power between the American and European Catholic Church; Comments on the religious activities of the Catholic Church; Claim that there are wide extremes even among intelligent Catholics on the role of clerical authority; View that generally, the Latin countries and Ireland lean heavily toward paternalism in Church affairs.

Discusses how history will view the 1980s and 1990s as this century comes to its final decade. View that a major change in the U.S. ethos is under way; Information on the moral shock sensitive Eastern Europeans,which now experience from their recent exposure to Western media; Revulsion growing against moral emptiness both in the East and the West; Start of immense political and economic turmoil.

The article states that visiting Europe today is like visiting a museum where the tourists are awestruck but where the natives have lost the moral secrets of their ancestors. The most important reason for Europe's sourness is the imminent demise of "the European idea," social democracy--the heavily regulated womb-to-tomb security promised by the welfare state. The Europeans call it democracy, but it is actually a new soft despotism administered by a motherly, smothering political class. Generation by generation, Europeans seem to be losing contact with the classic sources of European culture- with religion, with the highly moral worldview of classical Greece and Rome. Above all, so heavy are mandatory social costs on businesses that millions of Europeans who might have be- come entrepreneurs and created new jobs for others fear certain failure under the current system.

The article focuses on the worst threat to the world's emerging democracies is not inflation or unemployment but Communism. Communism in Central Europe meant isolation from the rapid progress made in Western Europe since World War II; it meant remaining trapped in a primitive technology of daily life. Even clergymen in Central Europe, held by brute force away from contact with the West for over 40 years, need to learn not to denounce success but to praise it. Moral energy should not be focused on repressing material success but on teaching people how to use it wisely. The road to capitalism is moral; it requires a larger moral vision than the sterile envy socialist societies encourage.