His Eminence Cardenal Alejandro Marín, Primate of the Almarian Church, yesterday issued from the Primatial See a second pastoral letter within the week, addressed to the faithful and, in the phrasing he has lately preferred, 'to all people of good will.' The letter renews the plea the Cardinal first voiced at the Cordoba reception earlier in the week: that humanitarian corridors be preserved through the waters where the refinery fire still burns, and that the charity of Almarians be not diminished by the anxieties of the pump.

'Let no household,' the Cardinal writes, 'hoard against its neighbour what Providence has given for the common table.' The passage has been read at vespers in the parishes of the Bloc del Puerto and at Sant Joan, where the parish priest appended his own modest gloss on the virtue of temperance.

The Cardinal's intervention, though pastoral in form, carries a political weight which neither he nor his audience affects to misunderstand. That the Prime Minister and the Primate share a surname is an accident of the kingdom's small bench; that they share a vocabulary of prudence is not. Observers at the Chamber expect the Cardinal's formulation to recur, in paraphrase, in Tuesday's address.