Month: February 1958

Washington: Some 1,200 Methodist leaders met yesterday in the nation’s capital to discuss what churches are doing, and failing to do, in the downtown areas of big cities. Their reaction: Methodists and other Protestant denominations are concentrating too much of their attention on the relatively prosperous suburbs, and too little on the blighted city areas. The surveys and reports given to the conference indicated that years ago the city areas were being occupied by European immigrants, chiefly with Roman Catholic backgrounds. But they said the newcomers today are predominantly white and Negro southern families with Protestant ties. One survey of 50 churches in such areas showed that more than half had lost membership or barely held their own while their neighborhood populations were on the increase. The conference decided that the first step would be for church members everywhere to recognize that they share the responsibility for offering a vigorous Protestant ministry to such city sections.

_______

New York: A federal judge is seeking an internal settlement in the dispute over the merger of two church bodies. The merger of the General Council of the Congregational Christian Churches and the Evangelical Reform Church was arranged in 1949. Two congregations are trying to upset the merger. Federal Judge Archie Dawson suggested formation of a laymen’s committee to settle the dispute to avoid long litigation in the courts.

_______

Vatican City: Pope Pius told 1,000 parish priests that Rome is threatening to turn into a “mediocre, inglorious, nearly pagan” city. He cited suicide, scandal spreading, abuses of Sunday, and careless driving among the sins of the city. In his words, “This is the time for action, most urgent action.”

_______

Again Vatican City: Roman Catholics throughout the world began the annual observance of Lent on Ash Wednesday. Priests touched the foreheads of their parishioners with ashes to mark the opening of the period of penitence and fasting. The ashes, made from burnt palms, signify for Roman Catholics the fleeting quality of human things.

_______

Chicago: A National Council of Churches executive criticized the Eisenhower administration proposals to curtail federal welfare programs. Dr. William J. Villaume, executive director of the council’s social welfare department, said the administration’s 1958-59 budget amounts to a cutback in national support for human welfare. Dr. Villaume characterized this as dangerous contentment with inadequacy. He spoke to a group at the annual meeting of the National Association of Methodist Hospitals and Homes.

Methodist Bishop Richard C. Raines of Indianapolis, another speaker, called on Methodist hospitals to take the lead in extending privileges to patients and nurses without racial discrimination. He said Methodist institutions should be among the first to adjust their practices to the principles of Christian fellowship and democracy. And speaking as a Methodist, this reporter can wholeheartedly agree with that.

_______

A St. Paul clergyman was elected bishop of two different episcopal dioceses on the same day. He is the Rev. Daniel Corrigan, rector of St. Paul’s Church-On-the-Hill. At its annual convention the Diocese of Quincy, Illinois, elected Mr. Corrigan its new bishop. Simultaneously, the convention of the Colorado Diocese also elected Mr. Corrigan to its vacant post of suffragan bishop. The St. Paul clergyman said he was overwhelmed and promised he would make his decision soon on which election to accept.

_______

Atlantic City, New Jersey: A leading rabbi urged a conference of Christian, Jewish, and Moslem leaders to seek a lessening of religious tension in the Holy Land. The proposal was made by Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, Chairman of the International Affairs Committee of the Rabbinical Assembly of America. Rabbi Hertzberg spoke at the annual national conference of the American Christian Palestine Committee. He said an understanding among the three major religions is important now because of a communist threat in the Middle East. Unless the major religions make peace with one another, he said, there may soon be a red flag flying all over the holy places and there will be nothing left to differ about. The good rabbi could well have said that in that case there would be no freedom to differ about anything. Certainly the churches have a continuing obligation in this respect, but they have a more-than-usual heavy one at this time in our history when we have no clear-cut, coherent, and consistent policy with respect to the Middle East in the place where there should be one: namely in our own Department of State.

_______

The House of Representatives is now opening its session every day with a brief reading from Scripture – the Protestant, Christian scripture, of course. Dr. Bernard Braskamp, chaplain of the House, prefaces his opening prayer with a short reading, usually just one verse, from the Bible. Reaction from members of Congress has been so favorable that Dr. Braskamp intends to continue the practice. In doing this, he had reinstated an old custom followed by one of his predecessors, the Rev. Edward Everett Hale, who is better known today as the author of “The Man without a Country,” but he served as chaplain of the House for many years. I wonder if he will ever get around to reading that verse containing the last words of the Master, namely, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

And while on the subject of Congress, it might be observed that the House Ways and Means Committee has approved a bill to allow duty-free importation of religious works of art by churches, religious orders, and church-controlled institutions. Among the items that would be allowed in duty-free are altars, pulpits, communion tables, baptismal fonts, shrines, mosaics, and statuary.

_______

New York: Three American chaplains and the chief of chaplains of the Belgian Armed Forces were presented with the Four Chaplains Award. This award is given annually for service in the cause of intercredal good will. The citations were conferred by the Chaplain Alexander D. Goode Lodge of B’nai B’rith. The winner of the international award was General Fernand Cammaert of Brussels, the Chief Belgian Chaplain, who is a Catholic and was honored for his contribution in the formation of the first NATO chaplain’s conference held at The Hague in 1956. The three Americans honored were Lieutenant Colonel Meir Engel, a rabbi who is assistant post chaplain at Fort Dix, New Jersey; 1st Lt. Eugene Z. Szabo, a Hungarian Reformed Church minister on duty at Lake Charles Air Force Base in Louisiana; and Lt. John C. Condit, a Catholic priest stationed at the Pre-Flight Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. The Four Chaplain’s Award commemorates the sacrifice of four U.S. army chaplains who went down with the transport Dorchester when it was torpedoed off Greenland in World War II. The four – two Protestants, a Catholic, and a Jew – were awarded the Silver Star for Gallantry after their deaths. A bill has been introduced into Congress to confer the Congressional Medal of Honor on them.

_______

Washington: If present trends continue, nearly 7 million students will be enrolled in church-related and other private and elementary secondary schools by 1965. This prediction comes from a long report on the state and non-public schools published by the U.S. Office of Education. The report says the estimated enrollment in non-public schools will be 6,845,000 by 1965. At that point, it says, one in six American grade and high school students will be in religious or other private schools. At present the ratio is one in seven. In 1900 it was one in 11.

_______

London: The World Council of Churches’ executive committee took an initial step this week toward establishing relations between the World Council and the Russian Orthodox Church. The committee agreed to a suggestion from Russian churchmen that World Council officials meet in August with representatives of the Moscow Patriarchate. No arrangements were announced as to where the meeting would take place. The conversation would be informal.

_______

In Covington, Kentucky, a Baptist pastor is building what he calls a “Garden of Hope.” It is the project of the Rev. Morris Coers, pastor of Covington Immanuel Baptist Church. A replica of Christ’s tomb has been completed on a three-acre site. In the planning stage is a carpenter’s workshop of the time of Christ, a Spanish-type mission, a so-called Chapel of Dreams, and a Wall of Memory. The wall will contain a 500-pound stone from the Wailing Wall of Jerusalem. Mr. Coers said items for the Brotherhood Garden have been contributed from 22 nations.

_______

Omaha, Nebraska: A speaker at the session in Omaha of the National Council of Churches’ division of Christian education offered a warning about the possible establishment of denominational schools to avoid court decisions calling for integration in public schools. Dr. Rolfe L. Hunt, executive director of the council’s department of religion and public education, said denominational schools can do more damage to American unity than has been done by racial segregation in public schools.

Dr. Minor C. Miller, a Virginia Council of Churches official, declared that weekday religious classes give children a better solid religious education than do Sunday schools. In his state, he said, less than half the children are enrolled in Sunday schools. But, he said, 95 percent of pupils who get an opportunity to participate in weekday religious classes have enrolled in them.

Such practices are curiously out of line with American traditions of separation of church and state. Virginians, and some others, are quick to resort to the portions of the Bill of Rights, with which they agree, regarding states’ rights and the matter of school segregation, especially the 10th Amendment. But they are prone to overlook the First Amendment and almost innumerable court decisions interpreting it that make it clear there should be no action on the part of government to aid or prohibit the practice of any religion. Public schools should be neither religious nor irreligious, they should be simply non-religions, do-gooders to the contrary notwithstanding.

_______

The thoughtful person will want to know whether his philosophy of life is well founded. He will want to know whether the statements of belief handed down to him from the past are in harmony with the facts of the universe as we know it today, or whether they were based on false concepts conceived in ignorance. The great obstacles to peace and progress today are fear, prejudice, and selfishness. Are these fears and prejudices founded on truth? Few bother even to ask, much less to investigate. The masses take for truth whatever they read, hear from the radio or pulpit, or see in the movies or on TV. The thinking person is one who wishes to know not what the masses accept as truth, not what is comforting or pleasing, but what is so. It is ofttimes difficult to know this, but the only way to do it is to question, to doubt what seems unreasonable, to investigate. It is not the easy way or the comfortable way, but it is the only way to progress, and there should be progress in religion the same as in anything else. This is the way by which the keys are discovered which unlock doors to new visions of the grandeur, the beauty, and the mystery of existence. “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” are no idle, academic words. For without knowledge of the truth, one’s existence is in a dream-world quagmire of ignorance, and one in ignorance is also in intellectual slavery.

 

Rarely has a subject evoked such wide religious comment as the furor triggered by the Soviet Sputniks and emphasized even more boldly by the recent launching of America’s first earth satellite. Man-made flight through the heavens has definitely struck a sensitive chord in the churches, a reaction some clergymen prefer to describe as the “handwriting in the sky.” Many ministers argue that the spiritual consequences of these advances in nuclear space engineering can obviously be either helpful or detrimental. They contend that the peoples’ eyes can either be opened to fuller truth or blinded to anything but dazzling technology. One Roman Catholic clergyman put it like this: “He who lives by the Sputnik shall perish by the Sputnik.”

Just how the nation’s spiritual resources can be mobilized in the light of current and future space achievements was the subject of serious discussion this week by a group of pastors and Midwestern business leaders. The University of Chicago sponsored their conference, which had as its general topic “Religion Faces the Atomic Age.” Significantly, these church leaders are concerned over the possible effects of the new technological developments on faith. A noted Lutheran theologian of Philadelphia, the Rev. Dr. O. Frederick Nolde, sees the danger of falling into the trap of professed atheistic materialists if science is exalted over all other forms of power. It would be vain indeed, he says, to try to outdo a system by becoming like it. A Presbyterian pastor of St. Cloud, Florida, the Rev. Handel Brown, notes that the Bible relates of man’s first attempt to reach into the stratosphere. That was when people, duplicating Adam’s effort to become equal to God, began building the Tower of Babel. They said, “Let us build a tower whose top reaches into the very heavens.” The results were confusion and dismay. (Rather far-fetched analogy, one cannot but reflect.)

In olden times, some clergymen fought new scientific feats as devilish tampering with God’s order. Today’s religious leaders, however, welcome such achievements as gifts, but leaving it to man alone to decide whether they are to be used for good or evil.

When the Russian Sputniks reached outer space, the Communist Youth League promptly boasted that their satellites refuted religion. The league triumphantly chortled, “This proves how wrong were all religious organizations in speaking of heaven. We materialists create our own heaven and fill it with our own moon and stars.”

An Episcopal weekly, The Living Church, commented, “If there is a religious message to Sputnik, it would seem to be one more in a long series of historical events that reach back into Old Testament times when God has used irreligious forces to advance his purposes. If nothing else, Sputnik has humbled America.” Well, most of us would agree with the last sentence, but the idea as to what God’s purposes are and their relationship of these to Sputnik is simply one man’s speculation and wild guess. This sort of emphatic pronouncement is rather presumptuous, to say the least.

A little more realistically, the Catholic auxiliary bishop of Chicago, the Most Rev. Bernard Sheil, offers the comment that man, the alleged master of his destiny, now stands in terror before his own creation. While the United Student Christian Council sees it all as “a real threat that education may become dominated by narrow technological objectives.” And with that, many of us can emphatically agree.

_______

In New York, the Very Rev. James Pike, dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, agreed to accept the post of Protestant Episcopal Bishop of California. He said he decided to accept his election, keeping in mind the fact he now holds “a post I dearly love.” As dean of the New York Cathedral, Dean Pike has held one of his church’s most important posts.

_______

Moscow: Radio Moscow broadcast a special program commemorating the 40th anniversary of the separation of state and church in Russia. The Red broadcast said what it called “cruel and despotic power of the clergy over the life of the people” has been ended in Russia. The communists said belief in God would not die elsewhere without a struggle.

_______

Washington: A top staff official of the group called Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State has resigned in protest against what he calls the organization’s “current course.” Stanley Lichtenstein was head of the group’s research and press relations for nine years. He said its recent action “actually tends to undermine the constitutional principle which the organization professes to uphold.” The protest was directed especially against a recent statement urging voters to ask any Roman Catholic candidate for the presidency a series of questions on church-state relations.

_______

New York: The Presbyterian Church in the USA and the United Presbyterian Church of North America have approved consolidation of their mission boards in the U.S., Canada, and the West Indies. The two denominations plan full consolidation in May.

_______

Washington: Thousands of Protestant churches will join today in prayers for a peaceful solution of America’s racial problems. The occasion is the observance of “Race Relations Sunday” sponsored by the National Council of Churches. Without in any way disparaging the sincerity and good intentions of such prayers, it is only pertinent to observe that so far there is no evidence that God has done or is going to do anything to inject violence into such a solution. They would probably be more realistic if they spent the time, effort, and interest in working on some of those human beings who project strife into the race problems picture. The problem will be solved by promoting improvement in human relations, not by any metaphysical appeal to the supernatural.

_______

Washington: The leader of the world’s oldest Protestant sect is now visiting the United States. Dr. Achille Deodato, moderator of the Waldensian Church of Italy, plans to speak before several groups which have given financial support to his church, which was founded in the 12th century. Deodato says recent court decisions are beginning to give Italian Protestants the religious freedom promised to them under the Italian Constitution.

_______

Paris: France is preparing for a huge number of Catholic pilgrims expected to begin arriving this week for the centenary celebration of the famous Lourdes Shrine. The celebration marks the time 100 years ago when the peasant girl Bernadette said she had seen visions of the Virgin Mary. The celebration opens February 11 and will run through December 8. Officials expect from 6 – 8 million pilgrims to make the journey to the little shrine in the Pyrenees.

_______

Beginning one week from today, February 16, and extending through February 23, is National Brotherhood Week, the annual observance sponsored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews, from whose weekly publication, Religious News Service, much of the materials for these broadcasts is taken. The National Conference is a civic organization engaged in a nationwide program of inter-group education. It enlists Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, who, without compromise of conscience or of their distinctive and important religious differences, do work together to build better relationships among men of all religions, races, and nationalities. Its operation is civic and social, although obviously the roots of brotherhood which it seeks to build are in the moral law and in religious faith.

The National Conference was founded in 1928 by Charles Evans Hughes, Newton D. Baker, and the Rev. S. Parkes Cadman. Roger W. Straus, Carlton J.H. Hayes, and other distinguished Americans participated in its foundation and its early years of operation. This year’s observance will be carried on in the Tri-Cities under the sponsorship of local service organizations. Watch for announcements and programs in the local papers and over local radio and television outlets.

It will do any of us good, not only to find out what other religious groups believe, but also to compare those beliefs honestly with our own. Otherwise, we are likely to fall into the pit of egotism where, like the Pharisee, we thank God that we are not like other people, but assume that we are better than they. It might do us good to distinguish honestly for ourselves who is Pharisee and who is publican.

_______

The Christian Amendment Movement, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has announced a concentrated effort to obtain a hearing on the “Christian Amendment Bill,” which provides for recognition in the U.S. Constitution of “the authority of Jesus Christ, savior and ruler of nations.” The bill was introduced by Senator Frank Carlson of Kansas. Well, if the Senate passes such amendment, it will be proof positive that it needs a psychiatrist much more than it does a chaplain.

 

A rather curious approach to the matter of church attendance was taken this week by Dr. R. Dean Goodwin, a prominent Baptist clergyman of New York, who has concluded that it does not work to tell folks they should go to church because they ought to, or to please the pastor. He favors a joint study by all churches of the new art known as motivational research. It is his view that the churches should do what advertisers recently learned to do – namely, reach into the subconscious with their hidden persuaders to motivate those tiny springs that make people do things without realizing why.

Dr. Goodwin is a former Nebraskan who directs communications for the American Baptist Convention, and he explains the new art as one which studies people’s hidden needs and desires so they can be appealed to without knowing it. He puts it like this, and I quote, for I have no desire to place myself on such a petard as this: “If you put the same kind of coffee in three bags of difference color, women will select the brown package and swear it is the best coffee, even though it is the same coffee.”

There is more to the good doctor’s statement, but enough of it has been included to indicate the general nature of his view. Even a simple analysis of this view reflects that such a procedure would be trying to put something over on the people without their knowing what was happening to them. Furthermore, it presumes that there are not enough intrinsic merits in the religious viewpoint itself to hold the allegiance of people; we have to add a new magic ingredient of some kind, like blue cheer or headache medicine, or some of the other nostrums of soaps paraded through radio speakers and on television screens these days ad infinitum and ad nauseam. Is it not going a bit too far to adopt Madison Avenue techniques of hucksterism to something that is so fundamental, so intrinsic within itself that it is a universal phenomenon even among people who never heard of present-day psychology and subliminal advertising? How crude and asinine can we get in the name of religion? I personally don’t want to be sold a bill of goods, even in religion, where the salesman swears it is good for me. Did you ever know a salesman who told his customer that his article was bad? Then, if we could and do use it in the Protestant world, what about the Catholic, the Hebrew, the Mohammedan, and all the other religious worlds? Each insists that his brand is the best. Frankly, religion of any kind will appeal to humanity and endure only insofar as they are aware of the need for it, see sense in it, and get satisfaction from it. Let’s leave it that way.

_______

Several church groups warned during the week against the use of church facilities aimed at maintaining segregated schools. The Methodist Church’s General Board of Education issued such a warning at its annual meeting in Cincinnati. The board noted that some states have passed laws permitting abolition of the public schools if courts force integration upon them. Efforts may be made, the Methodist agency said, to use church facilities to maintain a segregated system. Some persons have advocated segregated parochial schools as an alternative to non-segregated public schools. The Methodist leaders said such proposals endanger our democratic way of life and threaten the integrity of our churches.

A similar view was expressed by 14 Protestant leaders in an article published in Presbyterian Outlook, a publication of the Southern Presbyterian Church. The church magazine asked leading churchmen whether the churches should let their facilities be used to run segregated schools if public schools were closed down.

The churchmen, from both North and South, agreed the churches never should permit such segregated parochial schools. The opinion was voiced by such prominent religious leaders as Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, stated clerk of the U.S.A. Presbyterian Church; Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr of New York’s Union Theological Seminary; Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, President of Morehouse College in Atlanta, and others.

The same view was offered in a resolution adopted by the North American Area Council of the World Presbyterian Alliance, holding its annual meeting at Mt. Pocono, Pennsylvania. The resolution said a church is in error when it commits itself to a program to deny the right of any person to be treated as a child of God.… The measure said segregated church schools would strike a mortal blow at the public school system at a time when the maintenance of that system at a high level of efficiency is even more vital than ever. In a separate statement, the 100 Presbyterian and Reformed leaders attending the Mt. Pocono meeting called integration in American education the crucial race relations issue today.

_______

A consultation and information center on Judaism has been set up in New York by the New York Board of Rabbis. Rabbi Harold H. Gordon, executive vice president of the board said the center will consult, advise, and give information on Judaism. A commission headed by Rabbi Robert Gordis of Belle Harbor, New York, will operate the center.

_______

In Washington, a special committee was named to conduct a two-year nationwide study of Baptist attitudes toward spiritual, moral, and religious instruction in the public schools. This committee will represent six major Baptist conventions affiliated with the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs. The study group will sponsor seminars, workshops, and conferences in various parts of the country. These various studies will culminate in a national conference to be sponsored by the Baptist Joint Committee in 1960, at which time the Baptist leaders will try to state more clearly Baptist positions on controversial issues relating to the public schools.

_______

So much appears in the press, on the radio, and through all communication media about round-the-clock prayer sessions; about asking for this, praying for that, until at times one cannot help but wonder whether the deity takes the trouble to listen to so much piffle, various parts of which are often contradictory. We have seen such a spasmodic series of supplications going on in our own midst these last few days, apparently in preparation for the forthcoming experiences of renewing Protestant prejudices by sharing them with each other and to the exclusion of any consideration of any kind to those other great religious systems, many of which are older and affect far more people than our own. But we go on holding our missions here and sending missionaries to other countries, when it is more than a sound bet that we would not welcome their missionaries into our own midst. Anyway, out of it all, there comes a wholesome illustration of a realistic prayer that is even more pertinent now than when it was uttered.

It took place like this: When the U.S opened its nuclear detonation season the test began with a short prayer, intoned over the intercom by the warship’s chaplain and it went, “Unto us who are privileged to draw aside the curtain into the secrets of thy universe, teach us that our whole duty is to love thee, our God, and to keep they commandments.”

Sydney J. Harris, columnist for the Chicago Daily News, suggested that a more realistic prayer would have been, “Unto us who have the pride and the presumption to release the most devastating forces of nature, O Lord, be merciful: Protect us from cardiac contusion; preserve us from cerebral or coronary air embolism; guard us from the dreadful consequences of respiratory tract hemorrhage; allow us not to suffer from pulmonary edema; save us from the trauma of distended viscera; withhold from us the horrors of hemorrhages in the central nervous system; visit these catastrophes upon our enemies, not upon us, and we promise to love thee and keep thy commandments – all except one, O Lord, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”

This, at least, would have been an honest and meaningful prayer. No nonsense, no hypocrisy, no solemn theological jargon to disguise and sanctify the purpose and power of the bomb. It is highly probable that the deity would not have granted this prayer, but at any rate, it would not have been an insult to his intelligence and an affront to his benevolence. One wonders, sometimes, if God may not be more discouraged by the blindness of his shepherds than by the folly of his sheep.

_______

And while on the matter of hypocrisy, further reflection on the matter comes from the public forum of a recent edition of The Salt Lake Tribune, a newspaper of wide circulation and influence in the inter-mountain area. The writer points out that “We Americans are a peculiar people and surely like to kid ourselves…. We shout lustily in favor of free enterprise; whereas, in very truth, we are in the … clutches of monopolistic enterprise. If you do not admit this, ask any small businessman…. We brag about our educational system and then immediately proceed to ridicule our teachers, making it tough as possible to get adequate appropriations for the schools…. We believe in Christianity, but spend our time scheming how we can carve each other up ‘as a dish fit for the Gods’…. Our private electric power utilities proclaim loudly against government subsidy of any kind but they are strangely silent when good old Uncle Sam spends millions of dollars regulating the waters of the Ohio River for their benefit…. We howl against any subsidy to the poor man, but say nothing of the giant subsidies that our leading magazines receive from the post office department…. We seriously classify ourselves into the genus, homo sapiens, man the wise; whereas, in very truth, we belong to genus, homo the sap…we are indeed, a peculiar people.”

The only comment this reporter feels like making is to ask, “Is not more than consistency involved here? Is it not also a matter of morality?”

_______

And now for the foreign news as time will permit:

In Sydney, Australia, a prominent Evangelist after two years abroad conducting missions in the United States, Canada, Europe, and the Middle East, told his congregation that churches in communist-run East Germany are crowded. He said 90 percent of the East German youth belong to church groups despite the fact that this bars them from higher education.

_______

In Toronto, Canada, the Canadian Council of Churches reported on the success of the biggest Protestant stewardship campaign ever undertaken in that country. Last year, said the council, the annual budgets of 435 churches totaled $8.85 million. This year the budgets of the same churches increased to nearly $11.5 million.

The big increase is the result of a program under which thousands of laymen canvassed the membership of participating churches. The house-to-house canvas was based on the so-called sector plan, an idea first developed by the American Baptist Convention. Participating in the drive were churches of eight denominations.

_______

In Rome the first copy of the 1958 Vatican Directory was presented to Pope Pius. The new yearbook’s statistics indicate a strengthening of the Catholic hierarchy and an expansion of the church in missionary territories. The number of resident episcopal sees increased the past year by 35. The number or resident archbishops increased by one to 308. Apostolic vicariates increased by seven to a total of 213.

_______

This last item is of domestic origin, and reports that when the First Lutheran Church of Worthington, Minnesota, held its recent annual meeting, the congregation elected deacons, trustees, a Sunday school superintendent – and a termite committee. Termites have been a problem in the church for several years. This last reflection of my own is made self-consciously, but when I read that statement, I could not but realize that many churches have been plagued by termites for a long time and they are not always confined to isopteran genus.