Americans are giving an ever-increasing proportion of their philanthropic gifts to church-sponsored drives. Federal figures for 1954, the last year available, show that 53 cents of every dollar given to philanthropy goes to churches and church-sponsored enterprises and drives. The total given to religious charities that year was $2.85 billion out of a grand total of $5.4 billion. In 1952, by contrast, churches and church-sponsored charities got only 47 cents out of the philanthropic dollar. In spite of the present era of high taxes, the total of American gifts to philanthropy have increase from $1.189 billion back in 1930 to the present $5.5 billion mark.
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Meadville, Pennsylvania: One-hundred-tweny young people, a number of them newly-married couples, are attending a summer training school for foreign missionary work at Allegheny College. They represent ten Protestant communities. About half are clergymen. The others are medical or technical missionaries. At Allegheny, they are being briefed on rapid methods of learning native languages, how to teach reading and writing simply and rapidly, simple farming, how to endure a tropical climate, and how to cope with the new problems for missionaries raised by surging nationalism in many lands.
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One of the largest laymen’s religious conventions ever held in the U.S. will open in Cleveland, Ohio, on September 14. It will be for men only and will be under the auspices of the United Church Men. Billy Graham, the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, Congressman Walter Judd of Minnesota, and Mayor Roe Bartle of Kansas City will be among the speakers.
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Out in Chicago, 26 prominent laymen have formed a national committee to launch drives to raise money for 475 colleges that are church-affiliated. Executive editor Milburn Akers of the Chicago Sun-Times is chairman; J. Irwin Miller of the Cummins Engine Company of Columbus, Indiana, is vice chairman; and the secretary-treasurer is Hal Lainson of the Dutton & Sons Company of Hastings, Nebraska.
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Berea, Kentucky: Berea College and the National Council of Churches have commissioned composer Norman Lockwood to write an oratorio. It will be an hour and a half in length, and for orchestra, chorus, and soloists. The libretto, by Mrs. Clara Chassell Cooper of the Berea faculty, is from biblical themes. Lockwood has written a number of major choral works.
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Washington: The Apostolic Delegation in Washington announces Pope Pius has appointed Bishop Raymond Millinger of Rockford, Illinois, to be the new auxiliary to Samuel Cardinal Stritch, archbishop of Chicago. Monsignor Donald Carroll will succeed Bishop Millinger as bishop of Rockford. He is now secretary of the Apostolic Delegation in Washington.
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The two U.S. Roman Catholic priests newly returned to freedom from Red Chinese jails say they had a three-year nightmare of questioning and threats. The Rev. John W. Clifford and the Rev. Thomas L. Phillips add that their only crime was in being priests. Fathers Clifford and Phillips, both from San Francisco, returned to Hong Kong from Shanghai yesterday aboard a German freighter. They had been released last month after imprisonment on the usual communist charge of espionage and counter-revolutionary activities. Father Clifford, 39 years old, says he was questioned almost daily for five weeks. He adds his worst days in four Shanghai prisons were in a cell next to a raving maniac. Father Phillips, 52, says he and Father Phillips were seized the same night – June 15, 1953. He adds that he was subjected to at least 150 interrogations. One charge against him was that he had told Chinese Catholics not to register with the Red police as members of the Legion of Mary, which the priest describes as a purely religious order. The release of the two priests leaves 11 Americans, mostly missionaries, still in Red Chinese jails.
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A Vatican branch for spreading the faith, Propaganda Fide, says only 44.5 million of Africa’s 210 million persons are Christians. Catholics claim 22 million; the Protestant Africans are said to number 11.5 million. The remaining belong to Eastern rite churches. Islam is the religion of most Africans – about 85 million of them. The Vatican agency says the 80 African non-Christians are decreasing rapidly.
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The American Jewish Committee European headquarters in Paris says anti-Semitism has become a key issue in the Polish communists’ internal struggle. The agency reports attacks against synagogues, desecration of Jewish cemeteries, and discrimination against Jews in schools and other institutions.
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In Moscow this week, American Jewish rabbis told Soviet Union leaders that they are disturbed by the lack of Russian religious facilities. An Orthodox rabbi from Lawrence, New York, told Premier Bulganin and Communist Party Chief Khrushchev that he looked forward to seeing more synagogues established in Russia for Jews. Through an interpreter, Bulganin told the U.S. Jewish leader, Gilbert Klapperman, that that was up to the Jews themselves.
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A Los Angeles physician has criticized persons who eat too much or who eat not enough of the right things and then expect their religion to perform miracles. Dr. Wayne McFarland also told the New Jersey convention of Seventh Day Adventists, at Kingston, New Jersey, that such persons expect their prayers to keep them physically fit. Dr. McFarland is a former medical official of the General Conference of Adventists.
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Without knowing whom the speaker had in mind, but having one or two in mind myself, I could not refrain from passing along the words of Roman Catholic Bishop John King Mussio of Steubenville, Ohio, in a recent issue of The Catholic Weekly entitled “The Ave Maria.” “We have,” he says, “suffered enough from those Catholics in name who have exploited the field of political service for their own profit and advantage.” The corrupt Catholic politician – and I might add that the same could be said of any corrupt politician, Catholic, Protestant, Jew, or atheist – is neither Catholic nor a politician. Speaking bluntly, he is a cheap crook who uses the faith as another gimmick to help him into the lush field of easy pickings.”
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Something that gives new food for thought, or food for new thought, is contained in a statement made recently by a Canadian physicist in London, Ontario, Dr. Austin D. Misener, who told a United Nations youth seminar that there are two kinds of forces in the modern world – those that divide people and those that unite them. Science, he said, unites; the churches divide. He was not speaking of Christianity but of the way the churches operate, tending to separate nations, peoples, and races.
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This week saw something of a ridiculous performance by the U.S. House of Representatives in its action over the proposed federal aid to education bill. This bill, which, if passed, would have provided some $1.6 billion to help meet the constantly increasing crisis of classroom needs, was at first passed by the House. Later, it was effectively killed by a vote of 224 to 194. Spokesmen for both parties had all along declared that it was a must piece of legislation, but when Adam Clayton Powell, Democrat of New York, succeeded in getting tacked onto the original bill an amendment which would have denied aid to schools that permit segregation, it was obvious that even if it passed the House in that form it would have been filibustered to death by the Dixie Democrats in the Senate. As it was, a number of Republicans, mainly from the Middle West welcomed a chance to vote for the Powell Amendment in the hopes that it would be killed, and that the blame would be placed on the Democrats. Now, both sides are claiming credit for trying to pass the measure and each is blaming the other for its failure. To the simple man in the street, like this reporter, both sides are to blame for making a political issue out of something that has obviously been needed for years. When the roll call came, 146 Republicans and only 77 Democrats voted for the Powell Amendment, and when it came to final passage, only 75 Republicans and 119 Democrats were for it. It should be clear that since the Congress is Democrat organized and presumably has the votes to carry party measures, that the blame this year must be laid at the feet of the Democrats, just as it has been laid in previous years to the Republicans. So, while Congress hastily passes more legislation in the next few weeks, which the rank-and-file member has not even had time to read, and prepares to adjourn in order to get out into the districts to campaign for re-election in November, children in September will be going back to overcrowded classrooms, and underpaid, and in many cases not fully-certified teachers. But the politicians will each, regardless of party, try to convince us that they were all out for better schools. Their action this week in Congress does not show that. There was a fundamental principle involved in this issue: namely, whether Congress should provide federal funds for states that violate the Constitution. But it was also one of those rare occasions when principle had to be measured against urgency and necessity, again, namely, the shouting need for better education for children. Interestingly enough, the three Negro members of the House – all Democrats – divided on the issue: both the others voting against the Powell Amendment. Obviously, the ones who are going to lose most by House politicking on the issue are the children who will not stop growing until cheap political tricks are disposed of and constructive legislation, with or without the Powell Amendment, is passed.
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And while on the subject of legislation, one more item of House business this week involved a matter discussed some weeks ago in detail on this program, and a matter that involved a moral principle also. The Post Office Department has from the beginning been considered a service rather than a profit-making government agency. The present Postmaster General Summerfield, prodded considerably by Treasury Secretary Humphrey, has been trying to get Congress to hike postal rates in order to reduce the annual deficit of the Post Office Department. This week the House passed and sent to the Senate a bill which would increase such rates by about $430 million a year. Among other things, it would boost first-class mail rates from 3 to 4 cents. As pointed out here before, this is the only class of mail that does pay its way, and it is the kind of mail that benefits everybody, including the little fellow, and that is just about all of us in these days of corporate giants. In other words, the House voted to require the mass of citizens to pay more than the service costs for their first-class mail in order to help out on a deficit brought about by the large publishing companies of books, magazines, and other types of mailing matter. You might ask your congressman how he voted on that bill when he asks you to vote for him next November. Fortunately, it is being privately predicted that the Senate will send the measure to its own dead letter office.
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Within the past few days the world has seen an uprising among Polish workers in Poznan and other cities in the country in the now dubbed the “Bread and Freedom” revolt. Just what it means is anybody’s guess. Even our own “Secretary of Statements” [John Foster Dulles] has not come out with his usual bundle of contradictions on the subject. However, the U.S. promptly seized the initiative, for once at least, and offered to make huge quantities of bread available from our own surplus stockpile. Some have sneered that this was a political trick only, but it does not seem to this reporter that such a charge is important, if it is true. Doubtless most Americans would gladly donate the offered goods to other human beings who are hungry. The cynical and brutal refusal on the part of the Kremlin’s hired boys in Poland to accept this gift is a revealing indication of the ruthlessness with which the Communists work, and it should be a warning to anybody who might be tempted to fall for the party line. How can you reconcile this refusal with party line propaganda? You cannot. The people asked for bread, but their government gave them nothing but stones.