October 19, 1972

Belgian ecumenist, educator and diplomat Professor Andrew Felix Morlion O.P., president of the International University of Social Studies in Rome, lectured on “Human Relations for Peace.” The founder in 1932 of the International Movement for Promotion of Democracy under God (Pro Deo), Morlion served as intermediary between Pope John XXIII and President John Kennedy in their dealings with Nikita Kruschev in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Speaking of this to his Vassar audience, he pointed to “how peace was made in the past,” Ricki Ryland ’75 wrote in The Miscellany News, “and how it will be made in the future. The peace of the past has been ‘peace by politics of power—the peace of obedience, the peace of fear…. The peace of power was finished in 1943, for peace cannot be made by an uneasy balance of terror.’”

“Fr. Morlion,” Ryland concluded, “is a charming man. Perhaps there is no other way that he could have delivered as vulnerably optimistic a message and still held such a captivated audience…. The Aula emptied slowly after the lecture…. Morlion had offered his listeners the age-old dream: ‘Bombs and power politics can be gone by 2070—start now so the children of your children may see it.’ Outside waited nothing but the cold night.”

The Miscellany News