Task for a teacher

...Lehman is an enthusiastic defender of the Defense De-partment's "defense modernization program...

...But it is a task for teachers, all the teachers of the church and the world...

...His convocation was called to inform, educate, and stimulate discussion among parish leaders, educators, catechists, and interested Catholics on the moral dimensions of nuclear weapons and the arms race...

...It was not impractical...

...People so taught will ask the right questions of their leaders and demand the right reasons for decisions...

...His arguments and one-liners had been used before with success and were equally successful with the already convinced supporters of the freeze in the audience...

...Archbishop James A. Hickey A Call to Peacemaking WASHINGTON Catholics had come to -the convocation in unprecedented numbers, and the "Special Forum - Offered Once" had attracted many of them...

...The people are not going to be led by fiat on the issue of peace, no matter how well-framed, no matter how definitive the letter of the American bishops, which is now under reconsideration, finally turns out to be...

...Each of us, he said in his call, must be peacemakers...

...The differences began right there...

...Past negotiations, including SALT, had all been failures...

...It was held in the typical hall of many uses, the auditorium-cum-gymnasium of a girls' Catholic high school...

...It was also designed to prepare parish leaders to help convene and conduct parish discussions on these issues, and to assist educators and catechists to deal with the issues in classrooms and religious education programs...

...Asymmetries in arms do exist, but the potential for overkill on either side makes the discrepancies meaningless...

...It was a call for negotiation...

...The current proposals were based on reality - the balance of terror with which we must live...

...And both, we learned soon, Catholic...

...Joseph, deprecating his temporary defection to an institution of "secular humanism,'' and affirming his "return to the fold" at Georgetown University...

...They will have to be carefully and effectively led out of frozen stances into giving, as Archbishop Hickey has asked all his people to do,' 'careful attention to the arms race, nuclear war, and disarmament...

...The obligations of the present administration, like that of all recent administrations, he instructed the audience, was to defend the security of the United States and to prevent war by designing forces which are a real deterrent...

...Lehman in response was a bit lofty...

...They need not lapse into apathy and despair...

...He summarized the history of the nuclear age...

...The rapid spread of the nuclear freeze proposal - the approval by city councils, town meetings, legislatures, one hundred and thirty-five bishops and the loss of approval by only one vote in the House of Representatives - that, and that more than anything, had brought the president to the bargaining table...

...Above all, people so taught may take hope that they can do something about the most crucial of questions - the survival of the planet and the human race...

...Both men, then, of Catholic education and on opposing sides of the issue...

...They are the unthinking, they are the concerned...

...Congressman Markey was fresh from the hustings of Massachusetts...

...On the sketchy stage two young men sat surveying the audience crowded together on folding chairs and overflowing into the side aisles, doorways, and stairwells...

...He defended the nuclear freeze with practiced ease...

...His avoidance of rhetoric slipped a bit along the way and he ended up calling the nuclear freeze proposal the "laetrile" of the effort to cure the cancer of the nuclear threat...

...There were subtle differences in the backgrounds with which they claimed kinship with their listeners...

...The Democrats came up with such "snake oil" cures, he asserted, out of ignorance and desperation...

...Far from being driven to negotiation, the president, he claimed, had from the beginning of his term given clear directives to his arms control agency and energized the thinking about these complexities...

...First there was Congressman Edward J. Markey, Democrat of the 7th District of Massachusetts, cheerfully listing the credentials which must often have won acceptance from similar groups - Maiden Catholic, Boston College, Boston College Law School...

...If nothing else the exchange made clear the fundamental wisdom of Archbishop Hickey's approach to the bishop's obligation to teach his flock and to lead them in their confrontation with moral issues and conscience...

...The people are divided still...

...Congressman Markey is the author of the nuclear freeze proposal in the House of Representatives...

...This is not an optional commitment...

...They are the liberals, they are the conservatives...

...And then there was the administration spokesman, Joseph Lehman, Public Affairs Advisor to the arms control agency - brother to the Secretary of the Navy, cousin to the Kel-lys - offering his years with the Sisters of St...

...His demeanor, as befit a young conservative, was a cross between the unsmiling, unrelenting seriousness of a George Will, and the supercilious assurance of a William Buckley...

...It was not unilateral...

...Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy TASK FOR A TEACHER THE PEOPLE WONT BE LED BY HAT "As American Catholics living in the Washington area we need to consider the arms race and nuclear weapons in light of faith...

...Their subject was the nuclear freeze, pro and con...

...His style was disarming, cool, with the occasional passion and hard edge of the Boston area politico in the Kennedy mold...

...He would avoid the rhetoric, he said, and attempt to subject the question to real analysis...

...The speakers were superficially alike: both young and handsome, both well-dressed (one perhaps more tailored than the other), both young men of achievement in their own terms...

...Their approaches to their subject bore out John Cogley's contention of old - that there is just no explaining it, people seem to be born liberal or conservative...

...The "Reagan plan" - no polite dissimulation, the responsibility kept pinned to the president - would obligate us to huge expenditures for more first-strike weapons, surely threatening behavior and bound to be so perceived by the Soviets...

...I ask you to reflect on what legitimate defense and national security mean in a nuclear age...