A Roman Catholic priest held prisoner by Red China for six years has left for home in Omaha, Nebraska. The Rev. Fulgence Gross, a Franciscan missionary, sailed from Shanghai yesterday for Hong Kong. Four more Catholic clergymen are among the eight Americans still held by the Chinese communists.
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The Vatican’s secretary of state office has denied remarks of Hungary’s communist Premier Kadar about that nation’s Roman Catholic cardinal. The premier had said Pope Pius had asked Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty to resume his post as primate of Hungary. The Vatican statement declares that Cardinal Mindszenty is still considered the primate of Hungary, even if the government prevents him from exercising his functions. The cardinal has been a refugee in the U.S. legation in Budapest for five months. The Vatican view is that there or any place else, he is still the primate.
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Religion is one reason that the U.S. State Department officials expect heavy movement of U.S. visitors into the Middle East in the next few weeks. The U.S. recently ended its ban on American travel in some Middle Eastern countries. The Christian Easter and the Jewish Passover are the religious magnets. Passover begins one week from Monday, on April 15. The following Sunday is Christian Easter. Religious observances usually cause a great influx of travelers to Jerusalem.
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Russia’s chief rabbi died recently. The end came to Solomon Shleifer in a Moscow synagogue just before the evening service. He had been chosen spiritual leader of the Jews in the Soviet Union 11 years ago when he was 57 years old. The Moscow synagogue, through his backing, recently published a new Hebrew prayer book and Jewish calendar.
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This week some 300 million persons throughout the world began a month-long religious observance. For Moslems it’s the feast of Ramadan (ram’a-dan‘), during which nothing is to be eaten or drunk in daylight hours.
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President David O. McKay says that economic progress has been good to the Church of Latter Day Saints, but he cautions against accepting the benefits of this progress without recognizing the resulting responsibilities. He has also told the church’s 127th Annual General Conference at Salt Lake City that new scientific and engineering developments have increased greatly the standard of living of many, and that this includes Mormon families. But he sees perils threatening because of that progress, declaring that “All depends on whether we can match this flow of new material power with an equal gain in spiritual forces.”
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A new Vatican ruling has produced some significant changes in the worship of the nation’s 32 million Roman Catholics. Parish priests have noted a substantial increase in the number of persons receiving Holy Communion since Pope Pius relaxed church requirements of prolonged fasting before Communion. Catholic officials say this is exactly the result the pope hoped to achieve and expressed confidence the trend toward frequent Communion will continue to grow. Under the new rules laid down by the pope there is no longer any obligation for any Catholic, priest or layman, to fast for more than three hours before taking communion – whether at morning or evening Mass.
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Vatican City: Pope Pius has advocated a social security system for the world’s farm workers. In a letter to Cardinal Rodriguez, of Santiago, Chile, the pope said the material, moral, and social living standards in the rural areas must be raised in order to avert an exodus from the fields to the cities.
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London: The unofficial Church of England newspaper, The Church Times, has called attention to the sharp division of opinion in the Council of Churches over impending British hydrogen bomb tests. The council voted to deplore the test – but by a narrow margin. Says The Times, “This division of opinion in the Council of Churches is a reflection of a genuine bewilderment. All are one in loathing the whole horrible business of these weapons of mass destruction. But it is by no means a simple matter to expect those who are responsible for the safety of these islands to jettison a means of defense.”
The British, like ourselves, are merely talking about treatment for symptoms of the disease, war. Wonder when or if they we will ever getting around to attacking the disease of war itself? There is little room for optimism that we will, or if we do, it will probably be too late.
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Cape Town, South Africa: Compulsory racial segregation in churches has come a step nearer in South Africa. The Parliament has advanced a bill making it an offense for whites and Negroes to worship in the same church. The action came only a few hours after it had been announced that a native pastor would conduct the first service Sunday by an African for a white congregation and the Dutch Reformed Church. Premier J. G. Strydom and all his government are members of the church. When we look at such stupidity as this in the name of government and religion, why is it that some Americans still wish to go on mixing church and state without regard to the basic implications of what they are doing? Of course they do it with the best intentions, but all of us have heard that the road to a reportedly undesirable place is paid with good intentions.
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Washington: Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, of New York, says he is asking all House members to help rebuild Negro churches bombed during recent racial strife in Montgomery, Alabama. Powell suggested that those who might be embarrassed at home by such gifts could send cash in a plain white envelope. He hopes to raise $100,000. The question arises: Why would anyone be embarrassed at home or anywhere else by helping repair damage by hoodlums to innocent people and their property?
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It was announced in Jackson, Tennessee, this week that the Tennessee Supreme Court had ruled that a property owner in a neighborhood may sell this property to a Negro without being liable to a lawsuit for doing so. Does this sound silly? Well, it happened. It all arose over the sale of a home in Shelby County by a white owner in an all-white neighborhood to a Negro purchaser. Suit was brought alleging that the remaining white owners sustained loss through the sale because it was “an unusually nice, quiet, all-white residential section” and that the sale did “undermine and destroy the value of plaintiff’s home” by the sale to a Negro. The bill of particulars went on to allege that the property in question was in “the heart of a most desirable, inviting and valuable white neighborhood, and the sale created a great disturbance, … upsetting the entire community and destroying both the value and desirability of the plaintiff’s home as well as that of the neighbors…”
The Supreme Court, quite properly, rejected the claim for damages. As long as we deny to a minority the right to educational opportunity, public services generally, to live where they choose and can afford, and, in short, to go about the process of living just like other Americans, we are that long failing to live up to the precepts that we often so righteously give lip-service to but by our actions deny any real belief in them. There are both undesirable and desirable characters in almost any neighborhood, but it is hardly likely that such differences are based upon race, nationality, or religion alone. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, you have done it unto me,” and that can be applied to denial of the right to a desirable location as well any other aspect of living. No race, religion, or nationality has a monopoly on either vices or virtues.
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Nobody is more aware than this reporter of the hazards of commenting upon a book, movie or other materials which he has not seen. This, however, is based entirely on the fact that, so far, nobody has found anything good to say about the book just published by John Robinson Beal, entitled “John Foster Dulles, a Biography.” Truly amazing is the fact that analysts, commentators, reporters, reviewers, and politicians are unanimous in pointing to what must be numerous flaws, either in the writing or the behavior of the subject about which Mr. Beal wrote. I can hardly wait to read it, but from accounts of this reporting, it bids fair to rate, sooner or later, at the top of the bestseller fiction list.
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One of the remarkable features of man’s religious behavior is the unquestioning attitude he takes toward anything that is coated with a religious flavor. Thousands would willingly die to defend the Bible but have never read it. If all Bibles were suddenly destroyed, man would still be a religious animal. Strictly speaking, we Protestants have no canon. They used to print 14 books of the Apocrypha between the Old and New Testaments. Then the printers left them out and Protestants lost one-third of their Bible and never missed it. It is nothing new to rearrange the Bible. It has been going on since about 850 B.C. God is not in the bookbinding business. He didn’t hand the King James Bible to us – text, hasp, clasp, and binder. But in recent years the furor over the Revised Standard Version has been of huge proportions. Those creating it are either ignorant of the history of the Bible, or, more likely, have their minds closed to any questioning about the book which they have never read thoroughly and critically but which they believe in implicitly. Incidentally, this reporter prefers the King James Version for individual use, but he can see nothing profane of sacrilegious about the Revised Standard Version. In science, to refuse to examine ideas old or new is heresy; in religion, to refuse to examine ideas old or new is orthodoxy. And the ridiculous thing about it is that those of us who fumble around trying to examine religious ideas are classed by the orthodox as being iconoclasts.
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This week the National Education Association is observing what it calls its 100th anniversary – actually its 87th. This may be a minor point, but in education the first regard should be for meticulous accuracy, historical and otherwise. Anyway, it is a proper time for realistic appraisal of the organization, since so much has appeared in the press and over radio and television about it that is either unfounded or misleading. It has been hailed as a professional organization representing the rank and file of the classroom teachers of the nation. Actually, it is nothing of the kind, except indirectly. The association is what is rightly termed, in blunt parlance, a “company union,’ in the sense that it is dominated from the national to the local level by administrative bureaucracy. Pick up, for example, any state affiliate organ and run through the list of names on its governing board, and there will be found few if any teachers. Virtually all the names will be city or county school superintendents, principals, supervisors, or other non-classroom personnel. It is these who direct the policy of the organization: namely, that whatever is good for the administration of a school unit is good for the teachers, which may or may not be true.
I have no personal knowledge of but one instance (during the long period that I have been associated with the organization in any way) that it took a forthright stand on the principle of defense of the classroom teacher where both academic freedom and separation of church and state were involved. In that case it permitted (perhaps “bungled” is the word) the matter to become so involved that no … decision was forthcoming that clarified the issues and protected the teacher.
So, most of us go on, affiliating with it, either from pressure from above or because it is the only existing organization through which the cause of education can be pressed before public bodies, like legislatures, for example. But many of us who are in the vulnerable position of classroom teachers and who would like to feel we had a professional organization that truly represented the rank and file of the teaching occupation, find the National Education Association and its smaller affiliates sadly lacking as such an agent.