New Haven, Connecticut: The general secretary of the World Council of Churches has attacked what he called the “misrepresentation of the council’s attitude and policy” as shown in many parts of the world. The council resettled 27,000 refugees in 1956 with the aid of about $700,000 contributed by churches around the world. The secretary, Dr. Visser T. Hooft, of Geneva, Switzerland, was referring to reports … which were published in East Germany and China about the council’s action in Hungary.
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Again, New Haven: Two members of the World Council of Churches called for a middle-of-the-road policy in commenting on world affairs. The archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, and Dr. Hanns Lilje, of Hanover, West Germany, both called for moderation at the New Haven meeting, which is the 10th annual meeting of the Central Committee of the council.
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Rome, Italy: Samuel Cardinal Stritch of Chicago left Rome last week for Paris after a two-week visit in the Italian capital. In Rome, he was twice received in private audience by the pope. The cardinal also visited the pontifical North American College, where he studied many years ago. He paid a visit to U.S. Ambassador James Zellerbach and visited Italian children camps.
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Cairo, Egypt: Egyptian astronomers and Moslem religious leaders failed this past week to agree on when the new Moslem year started. Scientists said the new years day was last Sunday, while the mufti of Egypt said it was Monday. Because of the dispute, government employees benefited, for they received two days off instead of one.
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Jerusalem, Israeli sector: An Israeli archaeologist says a study of the Dead Sea Scrolls shows St. Paul’s epistle to the Hebrews was addressed to the sect which wrote the scrolls. He said Paul wrote the epistle in the first part of the second century. He added that the Dead Sea Jewish sect had become Christian by that time but had not accepted Pauline Christianity.
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In Northfield, Minnesota, Bishop Hanns Lilje of Germany has answered charges that Iron Curtain delegates to the Lutheran World Federation Assembly are secret appointees of communist governments. The bishop said, “We will not be fooled.” He is president of the world organization and will preside over its session when the assembly meets in Minneapolis from August 15-25.
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Eastern Orthodox churchmen have charged the Christianity movement would be disrupted if a Protestant-run missionary group were brought into the World Council of Churches. A prominent Orthodox theologian, the Rev. Dr. Georges Florovsky, has also declared it would be a move in the direction of one-sided Protestantism. The clash has come over a proposal to make the International Missionary Council a part of the World Council, which is meeting at Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut. The Missionary Council itself is a federation of national and regional Protestant groups, includes 165 Protestant and Orthodox denominations in 50 countries, and thus embraces most of Protestantism and Eastern “Orthodoxy.
The ecumenical patriarchate in Istanbul, Turkey, has instructed its delegates at the meeting to oppose the new plan.
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A controversial religious group in Boston has brought a large colonial residence and 20 acres of land in Worcester County, Massachusetts. The group is St. Benedict’s Center, an organization in Cambridge founded seven years ago by an excommunicated Roman Catholic priest, Leonard Feeney. The black-garmented members are now said to total about 170 men and women. Feeney was excommunicated after a controversy with the Vatican over church doctrine. As a priest, he had insisted that only Roman Catholics could be saved, where the church holds that nonbelievers can also achieve salvation.
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Hungary’s communist government has accused a group of Roman Catholic priests of aiding the rebels in last autumn’s tragic revolt. All are under arrest are to be brought to trial soon. The statement of charges against the group also accuses Josef Cardinal Mindszenty in one instance. This relates to what the Hungarian government says was looting of its religious affairs office by armed persons led by the cardinal’s secretary. Cardinal Mindszenty is still in asylum in the United States Embassy in Budapest.
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City Judge Frank J. Stich of New Orleans has issued a temporary injunction that forbids men and women to sit together in an Orthodox Jewish synagogue. The Chevra Thilim Synagogue had started a policy of allowing them to sit together last January. But several of the congregation went to court to force a return to the former policy of separate seating. Judge Stich has ruled that family or mix seating in the synagogue is contrary to and inconsistent with the Orthodox Jewish ritual. All Orthodox synagogues traditionally have separate sections for men and women. But temples of Reform congregations, a more recent branch of Judaism, permit them to sit together. What bothers this reporter is this question: What business is it of the city judge, or any other officer of the state how seating arrangements are carried out in any church?
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When queried by newspapermen this week about a possible conflict of interest in his accepting gifts while in office, the chief executive replied that since he had was an elected official the law did not apply to such gifts as a $4,000 tractor with a cigarette lighter, a prize bull with $1,000, and numerous other gifts. The president may be technically correct, but is likely that the American people, if they know the facts, think otherwise. Remember a few years ago about the row over deep freezes and mink coats that were alleged to be gifts to officeholders? Anyway, a few years ago an employee of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, an underling at that, was fired for accepting a 12-pound ham as a gift. In our scheme of things, not even the president is above the law, and if he uses technicalities and complying with its letter, he may – and probably will be – rightly held responsible for violating its spirit.
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It is a safe assumption that the mass of people everywhere desire peace and fear war. FDR once said that “90 percent of the wars are caused by 10 percent of the people,” and few serious, honest students of world affairs would challenge that. If this is true, then, the problem of war or peace revolves around 90 percent of us devising a way under international law to control the rash and selfish actions of the 10 percent. This week in London, Sir Winston Churchill, addressing the Bar Association, urged that the U.N. charter be revised in such a way that the small countries in the General Assembly not have equal representation with the larger ones, that Costa Rica, for example, not have the voting strength of the United States.
Nobody is more sensitive to the rights of little people or little countries than this reporter, but he has been one of those who have pointed out the ridiculousness of this situation from the inception of the United Nations. However, Sir Winston’s recommendations are only one tangent of a comprehensive problem that must be solved if we are to have peace. The U.N. charter provided that at the end of 10 years, i.e., in 1955, there would automatically be held the convention to consider needed charter revisions. This reporter watch carefully, at once even hopefully, for some sign that the great powers, including ourselves, were willing to learn anything from experience. He even wrote the State Department asking specific questions about what we were or were not ready to recommend regarding charter changes. The replies received told him neither yes nor no, neither perhaps nor maybe. They answered none of the questions; they ignored most of them entirely. Instead, the letters were filled up with double talk, the kind to which we have had to become accustomed in recent years.
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For some weeks now a mis-called “disarmament conference” is going on in London. Only the most naïve expected anything concrete to emerge from these talks, concrete that is, unless you can call a still further crystallization of nationalistic maneuvering for individual advantage “concrete.” It took our own special representative weeks to unfold the so-called American plan, and many of us were made to wonder if we had any plan or simply improvised as we went along.
We spend billions of dollars in foreign aid each year, much of it going for military purposes to put guns in the hands of natives around the world who neither know nor care what the shooting is likely to be about but are willing to go along for the ride in order to get a steady income and clothing and shelter while they are in the military.
Veritably the gentleman cry peace, peace, but there is no peace. Nor will there be any until and unless we, and that includes at least all the so-called free peoples of the world, are willing to recognize that we can have peace only under law; the law cannot come into existence without a duly constituted law-making body; and that this will not happen until a world organization, having its roots in democratic expression of free people everywhere, is brought into existence to provide such a legislature. It is more than amazing – it is alarming – that the so-called leaders of the free nations will go so far out of their way to avoid seeing and meeting a problem whose base is a relatively simple one. In the meantime, national armaments become more terrible in their potential destructiveness; do-good-ism organizations are born, flourish, and die almost aborning; and international anarchy goes on. Truly it is a wonderful world we live in, its wonders never cease; all civilized people are threatening war; and savage nations are at peace.
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Some of you listeners have indicated that at times I have belabored too much the billboard problem on the soon-to-be-started 41,000 miles of federal highways. Reports this week indicate that even a mild bill seeking to secure some federal inducement to get the states to restrict highway billboard advertising is lost for this session of Congress, which means the billboard lobby has one. Even some labor unions fought the bills because they wanted employment defacing our highways with ugly signs. The best satire, even sarcasm, this reporter has seen on the subject appeared in the local paper this week by the noted cartoonist Herblock. It depicts a huge sign along the projected highways which reads: “The eyesores along this highway come to you through the courtesy of the following Congressmen, devoted servants of the billboard lobby. Local billboard Congressman is J. $. Crawlwell.” Do you know how your representatives in Congress voted on this issue? It might be illuminating find out. It will reveal whether they represent the public that values the beauties of nature in this country that God gave us, or the crass, commercialized billboard lobby.
A forest draping slope and stream are more than timber for the mill. A river winding through the hills is more than power for industry. And as a mountain pushing its snowy peaks into the clouds is more than ore for the smelting furnace, an orchard in blossom in springtime is more than fruit for the canner in autumn. Or as a field of ripening wheat waving and billowing in the breeze is more than grain for the oven, so this land with its “rocks and rills,” it’s “woods and templed hills” is more than a source of our livelihood. It is our home, our dwelling place forever – the place where we live and love, work and play, grow old and die. It was a beautiful place as it came from the hand of nature, beautiful in the grandeur and majesty of its great distances and proportions, in the contours and settings of its brooks and rivers, it’s ponds, lakes and seas, in the lines of its valleys, hills and mountains, in the rhythms of its calms and storms, of its days and seasons.
We are fortunate to possess it. Our major duty now is to try to repair the scars that have already been left by greedy exploitation for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many. It is not too much to wish that the millions who drive the highways now planned can do so without having their view of this beauty obstructed by unsightly, trashy billboards the represent hucksterism at its most disgusting extreme.
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A headline in today’s local newspaper reflects the final fruits of hypocrisy and double talk, both of which are anathema to religious morals and ethics. It reads: “Washington County faces critical teacher shortage,” and the article goes on to point out that many key teachers in the county are leaving for other states where there is greater economic rewards for their efforts. It is highly likely that this is not only happening here, but also in the other 94 counties in the state.
This is a classic case of politicians’ chickens coming home to roost. [Governor] Clement and Company, including Washington County’s own representative, boasted while the legislature was in session of their victory over the teacher demands for a modest annual increase in salary. They now are finding that it was a pyrrhic victory. Political demagogues are fond of stating, for campaign purposes, that our children are our greatest resource, then when in office, proceed to give more attention to roads, migratory birds, and similar items than to the schools of those same children. There is an old East Tennessee-ism that, while slang, is colorful and expressive. It goes like this: “Put your money where your mouth is.” Maybe sometimes Tennessee politicians will learn to do just that and make their practice square with their preaching.
Teachers are not crass materialists. They have to possess a great deal of idealism to remain in an occupation that is comparatively poorly paid, respond to job demands that are infinite, accept the fact that their community prestige is low. Far too many times their just requests have been met with such silly twaddle as “dedication,” “opportunity for service.” Too often they have worked under a grossly unfair, so-called merit system salary schedule. They are at long last realizing that such soft soap does not pay the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker who, inconsiderately, insist that teachers pay their bills like anyone else. It is hardly likely that many teachers will shed crocodile tears over the shortages that now exist. Politicians, both of the legislative and educational variety, will have to accept the idea that if they want to get and keep good teachers they will have to pay for them. Then, and only then, will they demonstrate that they really mean what they have been saying about the importance of our children.