In Atlantic City, New Jersey, the Central Conference of American Rabbis has called for a summit conference (How those phrases do go around!) on religion among Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish groups. Purpose of the conference would be to work out a guide for clerics and laymen on the issue of segregation. At their convention, the rabbis elected Rabbis Israel Bettan, of Cincinnati, president of the Central Conference, succeeding Rabbi Barnett R. Brickner, of Cleveland.
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St. Paul, Minnesota: The Convention of the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church is considering a resolution against intermarriage between Lutherans and Roman Catholics. The resolution objects that in such a marriage, the non-Catholic must agree to rear any child born of the marriage as a Catholic. This prenuptial agreement, says the resolution, is an infringement on the Christian conscience.
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Vatican City: Pope Pius made a five-minute appearance Friday before 50,000 pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square. It was the Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul. Thousands of the pilgrims had attended pontifical Mass in the basilica. The pope made his appearance at his bedroom window, four floors above the square, and blessed the assembled pilgrims. To mark the feast day, which is a national holiday in Italy, the Vatican State was bedecked with gold and white flags.
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Atlantic City, New Jersey: Abraham Shefferman of Washington, D.C. has been elected to a second two-year term as president of the National Association of Synagogue Administrators of the United Synagogue of America. Shefferman was reelected during the group’s fifth annual convention in Atlantic City.
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Omaha, Nebraska: The General Council of Congregational Christian Churches has ended its 13th Biennial Conference without acting on a racial incident involving one of its members. Instead, the council ended eight days of hot debate over the matter with a quiet prayer for guidance. The incident involved a Congregational Negro pastor who allegedly was refused a room at an American Legion post club because of his color.
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Kingston, New Jersey: Seventh Day Adventists in New Jersey are holding their annual 10-day conference at Kingston. The convention is being attended by an estimated 2,000 persons, many of them putting up in family tents. It is believed to be the largest old-fashioned camp meeting of its kind ever held in Kingston.
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New Orleans: The president of the World Methodist Conference says the Methodist and Protestant Episcopal churches are taking definitive steps toward a merger. Bishop Ivan Lee Holt, says such a merger would be a stride toward the beginning of the United Protestant Church of America.
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Out in Salt Lake City, Utah, a controversy has been brewing now for some two months that is of definite religious significance. On May 31, The Salt Lake Tribune announced a proposal to give public school credit for sectarian education. In other words, children in the schools would be released during school hours to attend classes in religion, and for such attendance would be granted credit toward graduation. Arguments of both protagonists and antagonists have been flying somewhat thick and fast. The former insists that no doctrine is taught, since, as they state it, the King James Bible is the text used: that this is the only true Bible. To which antagonists point out that some of the most important manuscript finds have been since the appearance of the King James Bible in 1611, and they go on to insist that, anyway, this is sectarian teaching. They say further that even if teaching on released time is confined to the Old and New Testaments that teaching cannot help but be sectarian, since passages are in dispute regarding the nature of Jesus, the virgin birth, the resurrection of the dead, and so on. The president of the local school board insists that under the circumstances, no constitutional issue is at stake in the matter.
As a matter of historical statement, it might be pointed out here that the makers of our Bill of Rights intended to erect a wall of separation between church and state. The federal amendment as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court has preempted the field of separation of church and state and no legislative or administrative unit can legally change it. The First Amendment reads, in part: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” It is apparent that this amendment would have to be repealed to make public school credits for sectarian education legal.
In the case of Illinois, McCollum v. Board of Education, in 1948, the heart of the U.S. Supreme Court decision was as follows: “The state also affords sectarian groups an invaluable aid in that it helps to provide pupils for their religious classes through the use of the state’s compulsory public school machinery. This is not separation of church and state.” Four years later, in the New York case, Justice Black wrote as follows on the matter of released time for religious classes, “In the New York program, as in that of Illinois, the school authorities released some of the children on the condition that they attend the religious classes, get reports on whether they attend, and hold other children in the school building until the religious hour is over … the state thus makes religious sects beneficiaries of its power to compel children to attend secular schools. And use of such coercive power by the state to help or hinder some religious sects or to prefer all religious sects over non-believers or vice versa is just what the First Amendment forbids.”
Well, there is the court’s decision. That would appear to have settled the matter, but zealots, sincere or otherwise, keep on trying to secure their own special advantage regardless of court decree.
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It is somewhat refreshing, to this reporter at least, to turn from dealing with such a subject as just treated to another that indicates that we as a people are becoming more tolerant of religions different from our own. The American Institute of Public Opinion has recently released the results of a poll taken and has compared these results with one made 16 years ago, in 1940. In that year the Institute found a majority of 62 percent of the voters questioned voiced no objection to voting for a generally well-qualified nominee of their party for president if he were a Roman Catholic. Today, the number who would have no objection to such religious affiliation has jumped to 73 percent, or virtually three out of four voters.
It is a well known fact of history that a great American, Alfred E. Smith of New York, was defeated for president in 1928 partly because of his Catholic faith, and many of us who believe in both political and religious liberalism have continued to resent this fact, regardless of which political side we were on. Since that time, many students of American politics have concluded that a Catholic could not be elected president. This question may be of some pertinence, even this year, for Ohio’s favorite son presidential candidate, Governor Frank J. Lausche, is a Catholic. There is also some speculation that the Democratic Convention this year might conceivably turn to either Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts or Mayor Robert Wagner of New York City, both of whom are Catholics, for the party’s vice presidential nominee.
In the institute’s recent poll, it is interesting to note the effect of education upon the results obtained: 79 percent of those with a college education would pay no attention to religious beliefs; 77 percent with high school training would not; while only 63 percent of those having only a grade school education would vote for a Catholic of their party.
Age was reported to be a factor also. Of those in the 21-29 years age group, 83 percent would disregard religious membership; those from 30-49 said that 79 percent would disregard it; while those 50 years of age and older showed only 62 percent.
Of interest too is the showing of the various regions. The East was the most liberal with 81 percent having no objection to a Catholic candidate; the far West was next with 75 percent; the Midwest came next with 74 percent; while the South was last with only 59 percent.
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In numerous ways and areas we seem within very recent years to be getting back to the American principle of fair play and due process, in others the progress is not so apparent. What brought this observation on was an item that came to my desk this week from a federal circuit court decision way back in 1887, which reads as follows, “A general, roving, offensive, inquisitorial, compulsory investigation, conducted by a commission without any allegations, upon no fixed principles; and governed by no rules of law or evidence, and no restrictions except its own will or caprice, is unknown to our Constitution and laws; and such an inquisition would be destructive to the rights of the citizen and an intolerable tyranny. Sen. Eastland and Rep. Walter, please note.
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During recent months, considerable conversation, even controversy, has been aroused over the nature and meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Writing in the April issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Duncan Howlett, Unitarian minister of the First Church of Boston, writes of these scrolls, “The desire to know what the scrolls contain and what these writings mean rises, I believe, from a deep-seated yearning on the part of people everywhere to learn more about the enigmatic figure known to men as Jesus Christ, a figure who is the center of the religion of most Americans and perhaps half the population of the earth. Most men know what is to be found in the Bible. But what we know is not enough. We are not satisfied with a Christ of faith. We want to know everything we can about the Jesus of history. It is … Christ who lived and taught in Galilee about whom we want to know, and about whom we can never know enough to be satisfied.”
Mr. Howlett goes on, “The finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls will increase our knowledge of Christian origins. On this all are agreed. And in the end, we find that the discovery does not affect our theology at all. But the discovery has also served to remind man once again that he cannot successfully divorce his theology from the world of fact.”
What the Rev. Howlett says bespeaks not only a universal wish to believe but also a desire to be able to find a factual basis for that belief.
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Sociologist Carson McGuire of the University of Texas, speaking at the Southern Regional Conference on Human Relations Education at the University of Oklahoma asserts that school children in this country are, as he puts it, much more religious than their parents. He draws this conclusion from the fact that among the children, something like 85 percent of them have some sort of religious affiliation, while only 59.9 percent of adults in this country claim church membership.
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At its recent convention in Minneapolis, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, with a membership at approximately 1 million voted to join the World Council of Churches, thus removing about the only barrier to merger with two other Lutheran bodies, namely, the American Lutheran Church and the United Evangelical Lutheran Church. The resulting new denomination will be called the American Lutheran Church and will come into existence, probably in 1960. Combined membership will be nearly 2 million, and will make it the third largest branch of that denomination in the United States.
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A final item comes from the cartoon “The Country Parson,” but it seems good enough to share with you. It reads as follows. “You have to be practical. It is hard to interest a man in being saved in the next world while doing nothing to relieve his suffering in the present one.”