Pope Pius has called the Roman Catholic world to a vast missionary action. He has appealed for a special effort in Africa, where, he adds, the people face the dangers of communism. The pontiff urges the world’s more than 450 million Catholics to aid in bringing faith to others by prayer, financial help, and in the case of some, by dedication of their lives. The appeal is in an Easter encyclical letter to bishops of the church, and was made public Friday of this week. He points out the church’s recent expansion in Africa is a motive for hope. The approximate 23 million Roman Catholics in Africa include almost 10 million new members in the last seven years.
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A Jesuit educator says too many Catholic students do not want the scholastic life. The Rev. Edward Clark of Fordham University adds that instead the students use their college education to advance in industry and the professions. Father Clark has suggested greater use of scholarships and fellowships to make teaching and academic research more attractive. The comments of Father Clark were made at the annual meeting, in Milwaukee, of the Jesuit Educational Association.
The impulse to comment upon this statement is irresistible. Father Clark’s comment upon the resistance of Catholic students could as well be applied to all too many non-Catholic. Most of them want a diploma but are not beset by an urge to acquire an education in the process. But if by “scholastic life” he means teaching or the ministry, he displays how naive we school teachers are. When are we going to learn that young people in schools today are realistic without being unduly mercenary? They recognize that they live in a world where money not only talks but is indispensable in order to live. Hence, they look over industry, the professions, and teaching. What they see leads them to go into industry or some occupation other than teaching. We talk about free enterprise and the beauties of competition, but when are we going to recognize and do something about the fact that teaching must compete with other occupations? Until inducements equal to those offered by other occupations are offered to young people who want to teach, young people are not going into teaching. No amount of exhortation will substitute for the possibility offered by a job of getting ahead, not only financially but in other ways. We in Tennessee say to a college graduate who enters teaching that “If you be a good boy, work hard, watch you behavior and associations, you can hope to earn $3,000 after 15 years.” That in a society where plumbers, truck drivers, and other occupational jobs offer far more without the time and money investment of a college education. But often, young people are met only with the idea that teaching is a dedicated career. Most of us are getting rather tired of such prating. There is no apparent reason why a teacher should be dedicated or teach for dedication purposes any more than a personnel manager in industry, or newspaper editor, or a radio station owner should be dedicated. Until we stop talking such nonsense and start talking realistic sense to young people, they’re going to continue to enter industry by preference over scholastic careers, and the bewailings of the good Father Clark and others will not change that.
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The Board of Home Missions of the Congregational Christian Church has voted the largest budget in its history. For the year starting June 1, it will spend $3 million on new and needy Congregational churches in the U.S. The budget has tripled over the past 14 years.
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Commissioners of the Southern Presbyterians to that denomination’s General Assembly have approved a program for developing and training lay workers in the church. They say they need 700 lay workers right away, and about 256 new ones must be trained every year for work in Christian education. Tomorrow, the Southern Presbyterians will consider two controversial proposals about relations with other denominations. One is a request for exploring the possibilities of a merger with the Reformed Church of America, which is mostly in New England, and the other proposal is for withdrawal from the National and World Councils of the Churches of Christ. Already resolutions opposing merger have been introduced.
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President Eisenhower has urged the American Council of Judaism to bring the power of its faith to bear on the problems of our day. His message helps mark the 13th Annual Conference of the council, in New York City. The chief executive has also stated that as a religion of universal values, Judaism contributes to our national culture and the world’s spiritual resources. Well, those are safe statements and commits nobody to anything. Everybody is against sin – at least, nobody openly and earnestly advocates it.
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The Israeli government has officially recognized the Druze sect as a separate religious community. Thus Israel’s 20,000 Druze will have their own religious courts for such matters as family affairs and religious funds. Until now, the Druze were included in Israel’s Moslem community. Recently they won special rights for their members serving in the Israeli army. They had refused to obey the army call-up in protests of their status. The Druze is a mystic sect that broke away from Islam almost 1,000 years ago.
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In Vatican City last Wednesday, in St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Pius received in general audience of some 20,000 Italian and foreign pilgrims who had flocked to Rome for Easter. The pilgrims included French, Belgian, British, Austrian, Dutch, Spanish, and one from the United States. Also included was a group of 2,000 nuns participating in a congress of hospital religious orders.
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Tonight in Woburn, Massachusetts, a Negro minister with two all-white congregations will be ordained at the First Baptist Church. He once served the church as associate minister. The Rev. Joseph R Washington, Jr. will be ordained, and faculty members from Andover Newton Theological School where he studied will take part in the ceremony.
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In London, England, the cornerstone of the first Mormon temple to be built in that country will be laid on May 11. The temple will be known as the London District Temple and is being built at Newchapel. Elder Richard L. Evans, of the Council of Twelve of the Church of Latter Day Saints, has been appointed to attend and officiate at the services in connection with the cornerstone laying ceremonies.
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For some five years now there has been a battle in the Illinois courts against the Chicago police censor board’s ban on the Italian film “The Miracle.” Recently, Judge Hugo M. Friend of Chicago’s appellate court reversed a lower court and ruled that the movie was not obscene. The picture, which tells the story of a simple-minded peasant woman who is seduced by man she believes is St. Joseph, has never been shown in Chicago, despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1952 decision against New York’s ban on the film. It is not only remarkable, but a cause for concern, that so many people in so many places wish to appoint themselves keepers of the morals as to what people shall read, see, and hear. So, the Hitlerite do-gooders in communities all over the country are wringing their hands and shedding crocodile tears because someone is reading a book or seeing a movie which they, the would-be sensors, don’t like, or, more likely, never read or saw, but which they have “heard about.” There is a problem involved in the matter of the steady diet flowing across newsstands, through radio amplifiers, across TV screens. Much of it all is, in my judgment, merest piffle and occasionally trash. But many of you listening will call my own reading and listening diet trash. So who am I to be my brother’s keeper in the matter of literature or entertainment? We have laws against obscenity, and if a publisher or producer violates those laws, the proper way to punish him is in a court of law through due process, not by means of setting up a censorship board policeman on the beat, laymen in the community, etc. The fathers at Salem, Massachusetts, burned witches: censors of today are burning books and trying to eradicate ideas they don’t like. How conceited can we get, or who was it said, “Be not wise in your own conceit”? Censors haven’t read that one either.
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Along the same line of censorship in the written word and visual presentation is the fact that recently student organizations in two New York City municipal colleges were thwarted when they tried to provide a platform for John Gates, editor of the Communist Party’s Daily Worker, during academic freedom week. Gates, who served a prison term under the Smith Act, spoke without incident before two meetings sponsored by student groups at Columbia University. First, a Queens College organization invited Gates to address it. When the Queens College Provost Bart Gates, a student forum at City College asked him to speak. This led the heads of five New York municipal colleges to vote unanimously to ban Gates from their campuses. An effort was then made to provide a suitable place for him to speak to college students at the Martinique Hotel, the protests from other groups using the hotel caused it to cancel arrangements for this meeting. Unable to find another suitable hall, the interested would-be sponsors abandoned efforts.
Well, some of us teachers at times rate student mentality and industry fairly low. But not often so low that we are afraid to subject them to presentation of views in conflict with our democratic freedoms. Anyone who knows anything about communism, communists, and the Daily Worker, if he can add two and two, can soon realize the basic dishonesty and lack of sincerity in the Party line. Communism is an idea around which all sorts of semantic gibberish has been grouped. You cannot kill an idea by burying it, but you can kill it by subjecting it to the crucible of analysis. Apparently the fathers of the New York City colleges fear that their students may learn something about the real nature of communism and have taken the position that ignorance is better than knowledge, which is a highly untenable viewpoint. Apparently they cannot distinguish between teaching about and indoctrination. Which reminds me of the University of Colorado professor who was asked by a member of the community if it were true that they were teaching communism up at the university. His reply was classic: “Yes, he said. And we also teach venereal disease, but we don’t advocate either.”
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A recent militant attack on war by the membership of the Ohio Pastor’s Association says, in formal resolutions, “We will never again sanction or participate in any war.” But won’t they? These resolutions bring to mind Mark Twain’s disquisition on the same subject.
“There has never been a just one, never an honorable one – on the part of the instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances.
The loud little handful – as usual –will shout for the war. The pulpit will, warily and cautiously, object –at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there ‘ should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, “It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.”
Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the antiwar audiences will thin out and lose popularity.
Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers – as earlier – but do not dare to say so.
And now the whole nation – pulpit and all – will take up the war cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.
Twain wrote before World War I, but there, unfortunately, is not any evidence to indicate that he was wrong then or now.