at of candids public office I was one   basis of so-called  morality cards  developed by this and groups.
 	We saw Falwell and his alii an increasingly aggressive the presidential race on be Mr. Reagan and in the o sional contests.
 	Several Roman Catholic E led by Archbishop John J. '
From Washington, D.C. to Washington Square by John Brademas, 1986, pp. 238-252. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, New
9. UNDERSTANDING CULTURAL PLURALISM
nor of New York, publicly took to task Geraldine Ferraro, a Roman Catholic and first woman nominated for nationwide office by a majority party, for her position on abortion.
 	The American Jewish community displayed rising apprehension both at the rhetoric of Jesse Jackson and his Muslim supporter Louis Farrakhan, on the one hand, and, on the other, the increasing influence of the Falwellians.
 	Major candidates were pressed to clarify their understanding of the proper relationship between church and state.
 	We heard some thoughtful statements on religion and political life, such as those made here at Notre Dame by Governor Mario Cuomo of New York and Congressman Henry Hyde of Illinois.
 	Most recently, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops issued its Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy; while one year earlier, the Bishops published another such letter on war and peace, with particular focus on the morality of nuclear war.
 	Finally, theologians and other writers, like Harvey Cox, Richard Neuhaus and Michael Novak, have turned scholarly attention to the relationship of faith to political action in today s world.
International Religious Fervor
Beyond all these indications that religion and politics are becoming a potent combination at home, there is ample evidence that they are also a volatile mix abroad:
 	In the unrelenting hostilities between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland;
 	In the uneasy truce between church and state in Poland;
 	In the repression of Jews and Christians in the Soviet Union;
 	In debates over  liberation theology  within the Catholic Church of Latin America;
 	In the ongoing strife in Lebanon among several religious and ethnic groups;
 	In the assassination of Indira Gandhi by militant Sikhs; and
 	In the unremitting hostility toward the West and the United States in particular of the followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran.
Given the range and complexity of the interplay between religion and politics, in our own country and others, I do not presume to address such weighty matters from the perspective of a scholar or theologian. Rather, I should like to offer some observations about the place of faith in public life based on my own experience, especially my service in Congress.
Today, of course, I speak from a different vantage point, as president of a large private, urban university. You may be interested to know that, although secular, New York University has more Roman Catholic and Jewish students than any other university in the United States.
Religious Heritage
Please allow me a few more comments about my own religious roots. Although as I have said, my father was Greek Orthodox and my mother a Disciple, my brothers and sister and I grew up in the First Methodist Church, 333 North Main Street, South Bend, Indiana; and that church was a vital part of our lives. Our ministers and Sunday School teachers were outstanding, and I also spent many Sunday evenings there as president of the Methodist Youth Fellowship.
Important as well were summer months in the small central Indiana farm town of Swayzee in Grant County, where we stayed with my mother s parents. In Swayzee, a kind of Thornton Wilder community of seven hundred, we attended the First Christian Church with my grandparents and also, occasionally, Taylor s Creek Baptist Church, a tiny rural church where my great-uncle, a successful farmer and part-time Primitive Baptist preacher, often filled the pulpit.
I loved going to these several churches, and so you will not be surprised to learn that years later, as a student for a brief time at Notre Dame before joining the navy, I befriended Father Roland Simonitsch, with whom I discussed the basic tenets of Roman Catholicism, or that in a sailor suit at the University of Mississippi, I attended the First Methodist Church in Oxford.
During four years in Cambric Massachusetts my principal exti ricular life was at the Harvard-Ep Methodist Church, where I was dent of the Wesley Foundation thought seriously about going int Methodist ministry. I told my paste I was considering a career as eit Methodist minister or a politiciai that after attending an Annual C< ence of the Methodist Church ' is when all the preachers get togetl knew it would be politics either v
It must be obvious that re] played an important role in my life and, accordingly, in the cai chose and followed for nearly a ter of a century. That the Metl church had a lengthy tradition of mitment to social justice made a pact on me.
Vivid, too, were recollections   father s descriptions of street fig South Bend between Ku Klux Klai and Notre Dame students and he restaurant business was boycotted Klan because he was not a WAS1
And as a grade-schooler at Madison School in South Bend, I re ber the revulsion I felt on h Adolph Hitler s radio broadcasts, tuated by the commentary of H. \ tenbom, and having my first brus censorship when the school princi fused to permit publication of my cal attack on Hitler in the sc mimeographed newspaper. We wc yet at war with Germany, she exp! so that my little essay was not appre
All these memories returned later when as a Member of Con; visited Auschwitz; when in Leni I met surreptiously with Jewish dents and gave them mezuzahs ai brew-Russian dictionaries; and early snowy morning in Ta; Uzbekistan, attended services in thodox synagogue.
I think as well of my audie two with Cardinal Wyszynski ii saw; at the first, I found him bre pessimistic, depressed; at the s not long after the election of C Wojtyla as the Holy Father, e? joyous, exuberant.
I recall, too, how years earl 1957, when I was teaching at Mary s College, I had an extrao day with the Benedictine mo Montserrat near Barcelona and 1 to their scathing criticism of thos ops of the church of Spain whe
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to attend to the poor and unemployed but instead made common cause with Franco.
During my later years in Congress, I also visited Cardinal Macharski of Krakow, who succeeded Wojtyla; Cardinal Lekai, Primate of the church of Hungary; in Bucharest and Moldavia, Patriarch Justin of the Rumanian Orthodox church, with whom I served on the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches; with Pimen, the Patriarch of Moscow; and earlier still, in Istanbul, with Athenagoras, Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox church.
Yet I must tell you that I should not have been open to, indeed, eager for, such experiences had it not been for my roots here in South Bend and during my college years. Even as a student for a short time at Notre Dame, in 1945,1 was moved by the encyclicals of Leo XIII and found the understanding in the Roman Catholic tradition of the social fabric of human existence richer in many ways than the often excessively atomistic, individualistic emphasis of much of mainstream Protestantism.
In like fashion, I was impressed as a young man by the thunderous passages of the Hebrew prophets, like Isaiah, whose denunciations of idolatry and corruption and whose call for justice I found in many respects consonant with the social teachings of Leo XIII and, years later, John XXIII, as well as with the writings of some of the Protestant reformers of the 1940s and 1950s.
Indeed, a principal influence on me was a course I took at Harvard nearly thirty-five years ago on the classics of the Christian tradition taught by the great historian of American Puritan thought, Perry Miller. We read Kierkegaard, Pascal, Augustine and Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr was especially important to me, and I heard him preach at the Memorial Church in Harvard Yard, read most of his books and later had the privilege of meeting him a few times. Niebuhr s translation of the insights of Christian faith into the fundamentals of political democracy in his remarkable study The Children of Light ond the Children of Darkness directly affected my decision to go into politics and helped shape my commitments as a legislator.
Now these were not the only encounters with religion that mattered to me, hut I cite them because they illustrate
the kind of experience that ultimately set me on the path of electoral politics.
Although I feel broadly heir to the Judeo-Christian tradition, my principal heritage is clearly Christian, and Protestant. Let me put my point as simply as I can by saying that I would find it difficult to imagine how I would even begin to understand the world and my place in it if I were not a Christian.
The Christian in Politics
Yet what do I mean when I say this? What does it mean to be a Christian? In my view, the central core of the Christian faith is agape, love, self-sacrificing, self-giving, other-regarding love, symbolized by, incarnated by, Christ on the cross.
What, in turn, is the relationship between the Christian faith, looked at in this way, and politics?
When I entered the political arena just thirty years ago, a problem for me was how to justify, from a specifically religious perspective, a political career. For a generation ago, I would remind you, certainly in Protestant circles, there were many, especially of conservative outlook, who argued that agape applied solely to private life and that the individual Christian and the Christian church must stand aside from the hurly-burly of politics.
Obviously, that was not my view, for I believed and still do that our religious faith must touch every dimension of human experience social, economic and political as well as personal.
I find it fascinating that the question that preoccupied me as a novice politician is still very much with us today. What is the link between the Christian law of love and the practice of politics?
Now justice is not the same as 1 Love does not count or reckon, as P; First Letter to the Corinthians, chs 13, reminds us. But justice does. Ju; must be calculating. It is not love, th fore, but justice that must be the im diate objective of political action.
As Arthur Walmsley, an Episc church leader, has written:
The balance of the rights and n sponsibilities of one group again: those of another involves issues c justice. Justice seen in this light i not a crude approximation of lov but the means by which the Chri: tian co-operates with the will < God precisely in the midst of life
Is love then irrelevant to politics tion? No! On the contrary, it is our for our fellow human beings   manded Christians by Christ that erates in us a concern for justice ar men and women.
The late Archbishop of Canter William Temple, put the point this
Associations cannot love one a other; a trade union cannot love employers  federation, nor can o national state love another.... Co sequently, the relevance of Chr tianity in these spheres is qu different from what many Christis suppose it to be. Christian char manifests itself in the temporal < der as a supernatural discernment and adhesion to, justice in relati to the equilibrium of power.
Given what I have said, you wi ter understand, if not agree with, n termination three decades ago to r Congress and understand, too, shaped my choices about where   my energies as a legislator over tl lowing years.
The Role of Justice
If the question remains the same, as I think it does, the answer for me in 1984 is the same as it was in 1954 that the nexus between the law of love and the practice of politics is the concept of justice.
The idea of justice varies in human history, but I suggest that at the very least, justice means assuring every person his or her due, what he or she is entitled to as a human