Protestants at Pittsburgh

Should Easter fall on the same day every year, instead of shifting with the moon? Last week at the biennial meeting of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, 300 delegates representing 26,000,000 Protestants of 25 denominations addressed themselves to the problem. Their recommendation: it should fall on the second Sunday in April, as nearest the historic date of the Resurrection."*

The delegates also:

P: Admitted to Council membership the Russian Orthodox Church of America (300,000 members), rejected the Universalist Church of America because its members, like Unitarians, do not believe Christ uniquely divine.*

P: Recommended that Congress wait until war's end to legislate on peacetime conscription.

P: Gave qualified approval to the Dumbarton Oaks proposals, frowning on "a military alliance of a few great powers."

P: Viewed with alarm the possibility of permanent diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the Vatican.

P: Elected the Council's first Negro vice president (to serve with Manhattan's Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, outstanding Methodist liberal [TIME, June 26], who was elected president, to succeed Episcopal Bishop Henry St. George Tucker). He is quiet, earnest Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays, 49, Baptist minister and president of Atlanta's Morehouse College. A firm believer in education and patience as cures for racial discrimination, Baptist Mays is himself so tolerant that he has never once tried to proselytize his Methodist wife.

* The Council of Nicea (325 A.D.) decreed that Easter shall fall on the Sunday following the first full moon on or next after March 21. Best Biblical scholarship holds that the Crucifixion occurred on Friday, April 7, 30 A.D. *Universalists and Unitarians consider Jesus the Son of God only in the sense that all men are the sons of God.

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