First, a potpourri of religion in the week’s news as reported by the AP and UP news agencies.
Vatican sources say Pope Pius XII is willing to serve as moral mediator between East and West in hopes of preventing an atomic war. These sources say the pope will make no formal offer, but that he’s ready to do what he can to solve outstanding differences in atomic control, if asked to do so.
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New York: A department of the Episcopal Diocese of New York has adopted a resolution deploring “the present reign of terror in the state of Mississippi.” The Department of Christian Social Relations says four persons were killed and another wounded in the past year. It says, “To permit such crimes to go unpunished is to invite lawlessness throughout the South.” It quotes Mississippi Senator Eastland as saying of the Supreme Court desegregation ruling “You are not required to obey a court which passes out such a ruling.” The statement says “This is subversion just as real, and, because it comes from a United States senator, far more dangerous than any perpetrated by the Communist Party.
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Hong Kong: Francis Cardinal Spellman arrived in Hong Kong yesterday in his fifth annual Christmas tour of American bases in the Far East. He will go to Vietnam Monday. During the week, the Cardinal has visited Formosa, Okinawa, the Yokosuka naval base, and Camp McGill, Japan, headquarters of the United States Third Marine Division.
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Chicago: The Methodist Church has conducted a poll among 1,700 of its 9 million members to learn their convictions on various subjects. The poll shows most are opposed to drinking, but 50 percent see no harm in bingo.
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Philadelphia: The Rev. Joseph Fichter of Loyola University in New Orleans has received the Annual Award of the American Catholic Sociological Society. He was honored for writing Social Relationships in the Catholic Parish, which the society considered the year’s best book in the field.
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Cleveland: One thousand delegates to the Fifth United Synagogue Youth Organization wound up their meeting this past week. They elected 17-year-old Arthur Pestcoe of Trenton, New Jersey, their president for the coming year.
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Athens, Ohio: Three thousand college students from 75 nations are holding a six-day ecumenical conference on the Christian World Mission. It is the seventh such meeting, which is held every four years by the Student Volunteer Movement, a unit of the National Council of Churches. About half the delegates are from the United States and the rest are from abroad.
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Rio de Janeiro: Father Pius Barth, Franciscan provincial for the Middle West, has announced increased U.S. Catholic missionary work in the Brazilian jungle state of Para. Barth says church authorities in Brazil are in general agreement with his plan to send an unspecified number of teachers and medical missionaries to join the 26 American Franciscans now stationed there.
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London: (And this is an item that should give us pause.) Soviet Premier Bulganin says possession of hydrogen bombs by both East and West is not a 100 percent deterrent against future wars. He also declared another summit conference “can be fruitful” (for whom, Russia again?). Replying yesterday to questions put to him by Charles E. Shutt, head of the Washington bureau of Telenews agency, Bulganin said, “It is wrong to assert that inasmuch as East and West possess hydrogen weapons, the possibility of a thermonuclear was is automatically excluded.” His interview was broadcast by the Moscow radio. Asked about the prospects for peace in 1956, Bulganin said in the interview, “International cooperation and trust are a fully attainable aim in our time.” (He didn’t say how…)
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A religious newscaster has a list of what he terms the ten biggest religious stories of 1955. Richard Sutcliffe, associate director of the press, radio, and television department of the United Lutheran Church in America, lists them as follows, though not necessarily in their order of importance:
1. The illness and recovery of the pope;
2. Red China’s release of Christian missionaries;
3. Billy Graham’s sweep of Western Europe;
4. Dictator Peron’s failure to choke Argentine Roman Catholics;
5. Princess Margaret’s stand for the indissolubility of Christian marriage;
6. The heresy trials of the Northwest Synod of the United Lutheran Church;
7. The collapse of the proposed merger by three U.S. Presbyterian bodies;
8. Indecision of church leadership after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on racial segregation;
9. The running debate on the relative truth or fiction of what had been termed the greatest U.S. religious renaissance;
10. The visits of U.S. churchmen in Russia.
He explains his choices on the basis of their interest and significance to churchman of all faiths and creeds. Sutcliffe goes on to point out a melancholy possibility that border clashes in the Holy Land between Arabs and Jews are on his list for 1956 religious news. He anticipates also that Washington will produce some big news of interest to the churches, such as congressional activity about federal aid to public and parochial schools and legislation attempting to relax immigration restrictions.
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Chicago: This city was the scene the past week of one of the rarest yet oldest ceremonies – an outdoor wedding in the strict Jewish Orthodox tradition. It was performed in Hebrew. Under the “Dome of Heaven” Rabbi Mordecai Goldzweig of Chicago and Miss Helen Saftler of New York City were married. The seven traditional blessings were given by seven rabbis. Another rabbi, the bridegroom’s father, officiated. Members of the two families held a small canopy over the couple, to show that from then on a single roof would cover the loved ones. Bride and groom, in the ceremony in Chicago’s near north side, each took two sips from a small goblet of wine. That signified that henceforth they should share not only each other’s joys but also their sorrows. The groom took one sip from another glass. Then he broke it, to signify that marriage cannot exist in perfect happiness so long as there is sorrow in the world.
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This week saw in Memphis what has been termed final plans for unity of anti-integration forces, an attempt to weld together the various pro-segregation forces of the South into one big political force. Curiously enough, it calls itself the “Federation for Constitutional Government.” The meeting itself consisted of some 45 representatives from 12 southern states. Approved during the session was the proposed strategy of Virginia which will be presented to the legislature this month. This strategy would aim at a constitutional amendment through securing ratification from three-fourths of the states to prohibit the states from operating racially separate public facilities. The apparent theory behind this move is that if the requisite number of states fails to ratify, the court decision on segregation is void. To the layman who has some interest and less information on the matter, it seems a bit weird as to constitutional procedure and interpretation, but that is what the news report says.
At any rate, the Federation For Constitutional Government elected an executive committee and empowered it to organize a campaign for its objective. Senator Eastland of Mississippi said that all attending the meeting, which was closed to the public, were sworn to secrecy.
Another dispatch quotes a member of the federal Department of Justice as saying that in his opinion states who hope to get around the decision by abolishing public school and subsidizing private ones would be violating the law, and that the courts, he was sure, would so hold. So, it would appear that in the next few months, certainly sometime during this year, the issue in question may be resolved one way or another.
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Something of a contradictory twist occurred when The New York Times, that confesses to being “America’s greatest newspaper,” notified its employees recently that any one of them who supported American liberties by invoking the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination would be fired.
The contradiction comes in the fact that it is the newspaper itself that puts up an aggressive defense as to its own rights to a free press under the First Amendment, but it denies its own employees to invoke the Fifth Amendment to defend their own liberty. How mixed up can you get? As an aside, it might be observed that there is a union of employees called Newspaper Guild, but there is no evidence as yet that it has taken any action in behalf of its members. Thus it seems to be only another of those odious company unions.
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And this brings to mind a parable that I came across recently that went like this:
Once upon a time there was a pastor who thought the object of religion was to protect and promote the happiness of the people both today and for the generations to come. So he studied all proposals he could that had to do with human welfare. Of course that involved the study of legislative proposals and politics. But many of his good people wished he wouldn’t preach politics. So he moved on and another pastor was called who was deaf, blind, and dumb to politics. The people liked that. They called it being spiritual. And from this reporter: No comment.
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Instead of comment of my own, I should like to insert at this point a quotation taken from Paul Blanshard’s The Right to Read. He says, “Probably the present American taboo against what is called ‘religious controversy’ is as bad for religion as it is for atheism. It means that the great concepts of religion are rarely discussed frankly in public by serious, independent thinkers. Religious literature suffers from too much tenderness; it lacks vitality and vigor. It is wrapped in the sterilized cotton wool of hypocritical respect.” Well, that is what he said. I merely pass it on as a thought worthy of reflection.
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A California teacher writes, “I attended political rallies. I listened to Fourth of July orators. I was attentive to the speakers at school assemblies. Later I read some newspaper editorials. All claimed that it was my patriotic duty to take an interest in politics and be sure to cast a careful vote each election. Now that I am a teacher I find myself out of a job because I did all this and taught my pupils they should do the same. Politics are controversial. In these days the controversial is called subversive.” Well, having lived several years in that state and kept up somewhat with developments in it since leaving, I can attest that in portions of it, that teacher’s comments could well be a realistic description of what can and sometimes does happen. In Los Angeles, for example, the Dilworth Act gave the Board of Education the right to inquire into the private opinions and beliefs of public school teachers in Los Angeles schools and to fire without recourse those whose opinions the board did not like. And we still send missionaries to other countries. It is a rather queer way to keep communists from destroying our free institutions by destroying them ourselves.
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And to end this first-of-the-year broadcast, I should like to quote a paragraph from Dr. Harold Scott, pastor of the First Unitarian Society of Salt Lake City, a man highly respected in this country and elsewhere. You may or may not agree with his point of view, but it does do something to shock us, perhaps out of our smug complacency. He says, “One trouble with orthodox Christianity is that it pretends to explain too much. It pretends to explain the origin of matter, the beginnings of man, his nature, interest, duty, and the state of the dead. This is all woven into a fantastic salvation scheme involving gods good and bad, angels fallen and unfallen…. So far as modest but inquiring science is able to see, these easy answers simply are not true. The immature personality demands simple, complete, and absolute answers. Truth is relative and live and all phenomena are complex. Our answers must be tentative, incomplete, and subject to revision.”