Editorials

...Whereas the U.S...

...government spent $47 billion to insure the "free" flow of Persian Gulf oil-$26 per barrel shipped through the Strait of Hormuz...

...In his speech, the president failed to call for the development of nonpolluting, renewable energy resources...

...Tax credits for energy conservation initiated under President Carter were killed by President Reagan...

...According to projections by the Worldwatch Institute, global temperatures may rise more than 10 times as rapidly as they have in the past century ("Slowing Global Warming: A Worldwide Strategy," Worldwatch Paper 91...

...by 2005), and the bill died in the Senate two weeks later...

...It was there long before Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and should he be forced from the scene, it will remain to be exploited again...

...Curran's exclusion from teaching Catholic theology in any Catholic institution is, in the words of McCormick and McBrien, "unintelligible and inexcusable...

...He exemplified it by calling for greater off-shore drilling...

...Souter's eloquence and sheer intellectual prowess are surely some comfort to those opposed to his putative legal conservatism...

...Not only has oil been used more efficiently, but worldwide reserves have been found to be larger than anticipated: rising from 700 billion barrels five years ago to over 1 trillion today...

...How the Court will look once David Souter is seated is largely a matter of conjecture...

...Nor did he attack this nation's apathy and short-term thinking...

...Souter even offered gracious praise for his predecessor, Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., the man right-wingers hold responsible for legislating the collapse of public morals from the bench...

...Anticipatory censorship and institutional cowardice posing as ecclesiastical necessity have a long and rich history in the Catholic church-a history we had thought was over...

...Most civil-rights groups found little objectionable in Souter's praise of the Court's rulings protecting individual rights, redressing racial discrimination, and even implementing integration...

...imported 28 percent of its oil in 1982, we now import nearly 50 percent, almost 8 million barrels a day...

...With oil now at the $40-a-barrel level, and with the World Bank predicting (conservatively) that it could rise to $65 if fighting breaks out in the Persian Gulf, he's right-the story is oil...

...And because our reliance on imported oil is so extreme, we have been willing to pay dearly for it, without always admitting the fact...

...Heading off such a catastrophe requires the phasing out of our reliance on fossil fuels, fuels which today provide 78 percent of the world's energy...

...It is a crisis of our own making, anchored in our bottomless dependency...

...Since McBrien is chairman of Notre Dame's theology department and McCormick was at Georgetown before moving to Notre Dame, they undoubtedly know whereof they speak...

...Solemnly taunted by abortion-rights groups as an enemy of privacy, reproductive rights, and civil liberties, Souter left his critics groping for solid ground as he claimed the high road on civil liberty questions and turned demure as a Miss America contestant when questioned directly about Roe v. Wade...

...If there is some value to what Saddam Hussein has wrought, it is to be found not in simply analyzing the antecedents to the present crisis, nor even in restraining him from impeding the flow of oil...

...remain the world's largest producers, production is falling in both countries and will continue to do so...

...failed to call for assistance to mass transit, or to wind, wave, and solar energy projects...

...That would be to misread an essential aspect of this crisis, and to fail to understand the full extent of the challenge...

...Indeed, in every case where efforts have been made at departmental levels to settle Father Curran in a Catholic institution, he has been positively excluded by upper administration...

...The Gulf crisis is the result of the lack of such leadership...

...economy...

...They now have a perfect opportunity to put these principles into practice...

...But these improvements have had a lulling effect...

...Our friends at America magazine (September 15, 1990) have published a thoughtful account tracing the course of Curran's unjust treatment-first by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then by Cardinal James Hickey and the president and board of trustees at Catholic University, and now, it would appear, by the presidents and academic officials of the major American Catholic colleges and universities...

...It's like a final exam.t's like a final exam...

...Souter's deft feints left (mostly) and right shattered the remnants of the liberal-moderate coalition that rejected the nomination of Robert Bork in 1987...

...But the real hidden cost of oil dependency is not written in balance-of-payments sheets or the government's financial ledgers...

...In the last thirty years, carbon dioxide (the chief ingredient contributing to the greenhouse effect) increased more than it had in the previous two centuries...

...Confident of Republican votes, he went on to put the ghost of Bork to rest by unapologetically defending the notion of "unenumerated" constitutional rights such as privacy...

...SECOND THE MOTION Why has Charles Curran been teaching in the religion departments y of secular institutions since his departure from The Catholic University of America...

...The Middle East, while producing 22 percent of the world's supply, now boasts at least 57 percent of known reserves...

...Later in the same week, however, Bush threatened to veto the Bryan bill which would have mandated greater energy efficiency for U.S...

...The Gulf crisis was a crisis waiting to happen...

...When it eventually acceded to the inevitable, the Times mournfully endorsed Souter as "a plausible addition to the Court...

...That was the view of a senior vice-president of Shearson, Lehman Brothers after the largest single-day jump in oil prices in seven-and-a-half years (September 24), and the subsequent fall of the Dow Jones average to its lowest level in fourteen months...

...That will take leadership...

...OPEN-FIELD RUNNER David H. Souter is either the slickest Trojan Horse since Chief Justice Earl Warren (a staunch Republican) or a man of daunting intellectual dexterity...

...But for all that, the oil crisis represents not a final but a penultimate crisis...

...But with an unerring instinct for the common ground, Souter described such activist judicial solutions as "pragmatic...

...In doing so, he helped prove once again that George Bush is smarter than his syntax would lead us to believe...

...Souter claimed an open mind on the status of abortion under the Constitution, an improbable coyness that left the editorial page of the New York Times demanding he be called back "for some better answers...

...Since the oil shocks of the 1970s and '80s, the world has given some heed to the advice of the International Energy Agency that "Investment in energy conservation at the margin provides better return than investment in energy supply," and has made significant strides in economizing, if not conserving...

...Such a heating up would not only raise the specter of famine, but could destroy whole ecosystems and profoundly alter the world's geography through rising sea levels...

...That left abortion-rights absolutists such as NARAL and NOW without substantial allies and provided the Judiciary Committee's Democratic senators with an opportunity to act statesmanlike in confirming 13-1 Souter's nomination...

...But nothing in the new justice's amiable testimony precludes his solidifying the Court's conservative majority...

...Clearly, no one seemed particularly happy with Judge Souter, although all were obviously impressed, and this seemed the perfect recipe for his confirmation...

...Increasingly, its toll is being listed elsewhere: in the atmosphere that insures life on this planet...

...Coincidentally, the presidents of several Catholic universities have strongly praised the new papal letter on Catholic education-precisely for its recognition of academic freedom and autonomy for institutions of higher education...

...In the end, only Senator Edward Kennedy could not bring himself to vote his hopes, not his fears...

...In his address to Congress on the Gulf, President Bush was right when, referring to the nation's dependency on imported oil, he said: "We've moved in the wrong direction...

...cars (40 m.p.g...

...Conservative columnists called the hearings "a week of kowtowing" and bemoaned Souter's unwillingness to challenge the prevailing intellectual Zeitgeist...

...Under the Bush administration, automobile fuel efficiency has been allowed to actually decline while demand has risen...

...We agree...

...He portrayed himself as neither an ideologue nor a man of limited empathetic reach...

...And if, as a recent report suggests, official Catholic influence helped persuade the administration of Auburn University, a tax-supported school in Montogomery, Alabama, to deny Curran the tenure he had been led to expect-this despite strong faculty support for him-the plot curdles yet more, and the odor gets worse...

...We regard this exclusion as a continuing complicity in the original injustice done to Father Curran and as harmful, not only to him, but also to Catholic higher education in this country and to the church...

...Richard A. McCormick, S.J., and Richard P. McBrien, two distinguished priest-theologians, argue that Curran's teaching appointments at secular institutions "reflect the fact that he is not welcome at Catholic institutions of higher learning...

...had refused to raise federal gas taxes and had the lowest such taxes of any major industrial nation), but those hidden costs helped fuel the federal deficit, further weakening the U.S...

...In 1987, the U.S...

...It has now reached its highest level in 160,000 years and will increase by another 25 percent in the next fifteen years...

...While the USSR and the U.S...

...On the other side of the aisle, Souter's unexpected defense of the high Court's responsibility to uphold rights where a political "vacuum" exists-as in the 1954 Brown Board of Education desegregation decision-left conservative senators sputtering about the evils of "judicial activism...

...By most estimates, Judge Souter danced through his Supreme Court confirmation hearings with the grace and elu-siveness of Gale Sayers shedding tacklers...

...As many have remarked, Souter managed to impress without condescending, which was Judge Bork's seemingly uncontrollable impulse...

...The total costs were not reflected at the gas pump (until the recent budget accord, the U.S...

...Japan has doubled its gross national product without increasing its energy consumption, and in the U.S., automobile efficiency improved from an average 14 miles per gallon to 27 m.p.g., saving 420,000 barrels of oil a day...

...Thanks to such single-minded opponents, Souter appeared to be the very incarnation of "mainstream...

...Certainly no ordinary New Hampshire recluse could get the National Abortion Rights Action League's Kate Michelman to join the Conservative Caucus's bombastic Howard Phillips in tremulous denunciation...

...At the same time, oil has become increasingly more concentrated in fewer hands...