Catholics on Soapboxes

In Chicago last week an attractive young woman named Betty Ryan climbed up on a speaker's stand, crossed herself and said: "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. Good evening, folks, I am glad to see you here tonight because I am going to talk about the Bible. You people love the Bible. You read it every day, I know. Now we Catholics love the Bible, too, and that is what I want to tell you about tonight."

Speaker Ryan was just getting warmed up when questions from the audience began to fly thick & fast: "Why is the Catholic Bible different from the Protestant Bible? Why don't Catholics read the Bible? Why did the Catholic Church chain the Bible in the Middle Ages?" Betty Ryan kept her poise and sense of humor, had her answers pat. Said she, stepping down after 20 minutes: "North Carolina was never like this."

Betty Ryan and her hecklers were only putting on a demonstration, at the National Catholic Evidence Conference. But this summer she was doing the real thing in North Carolina--standing up on street corners to win converts to Catholicism, or at least explain away prejudice against it.

The Catholic Evidence Guild was founded in London in 1918. Its famed British leaders were Frank J. Sheed, Catholic publisher, and his wife, Author Maisie Ward (Gilbert Keith Chesterton, TIME, Oct. 11). First meetings were held in London's catholic Hyde Park, where they continued daily until World War II began. Britain's 500 Guild speakers still average over 100 meetings a week.

In the U.S. the movement has grown slowly. Thus far, only about 20 bishops, mostly in the East, have approved its street-corner evangelism. Most Eastern speakers are laymen; in the West they are mostly priests. The pioneer layman is Boston's David Goldstein, a convert from Judaism. Licensed by the late Cardinal O'Connell, he spoke for the first time on Boston Common in 1917. Since then Goldstein, who calls himself "a convert from Marx to Christ," has gone up & down the land expounding his new faith.

Despite the South's notorious anti-Catholic bias, Evidence speakers say that Southerners are invariably polite. In the North, Evidence speakers meet with much blank indifference.

Unlike British hecklers, who frequently break up meetings, U.S. hecklers normally do no more than stand on the fringe of the crowd, in "hecklers' row," try to confound the speaker by citing Biblical chapter & verse. A standard question when prayers to the Virgin are discussed is "What about I Timothy 2:5?" ("For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ.") Evidence speakers call this verse-&-chapter heckling "playing the numbers game."

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