Churchmen & the Pact

Protestant churchmen busied themselves last week in the statesmen's world. In the silver ballroom of the Hotel Cleveland, 460 bishops, preachers, missionaries and other delegates to the National Study Conference on the Churches and World Order wrestled with a troublous subject: U.S. leadership in world affairs. They had an expert and conscientious coach. From the moment U.N. Delegate John Foster Dulles ended his opening address (TIME, March 14), most of the delegates looked to him for guidance on the question for which he had done his best to prepare them: the North Atlantic Security Pact (see INTERNATIONAL).

In the discussion from the floor, it appeared that about half the churchmen were dead set against it. Cried Lutheran Pastor Ernest Edwin Ryden of Rock Island, Ill.: "[It] would divide the world into two armed camps. It would sign the death warrant of the United Nations!" Said the Rev. Ernest Fremont Tittle, famed pacifist pastor of the Evanston (Ill.) First Methodist Church: "It is aggressive to Russia--just as a similar alliance between Russia and Latin America would appear aggressive to the American people."

Nothing Aggressive. At first, it seemed that no understanding or agreement would be possible. But after four hard days of Chairman Dulles' painstaking diplomacy, in which he was assisted by New York's Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, Southern Ohio's Episcopal Bishop Henry W. Hobson and others, a recommendation came forth. It bore none of the ringing affirmations that distinguished the conference's meetings of 1942, when it called for a postwar world organization, or of 1945, when it called for the Christian concepts of justice, law and human rights in the U.N. charter. The delegates sidestepped the issue, called upon the Senate to postpone final action on it until the nation has had an opportunity for full discussion of all its provisions and implications.

Hot Potato. On the final day, there was a minor to-do over a proposed report on religious liberties. Protesting against "the insidious pattern by which Communist and other totalitarian regimes are seeking to force the church into a position of subservience," the report also contained a surprise package. This was a call "for Protestants and Roman Catholics at the highest level of leadership" to join forces against the anti-church methods used by Communists.

The proposal seemed to sit well with the delegates. Then up jumped thin-lipped Rev. Joseph M. Dawson of Washington, D.C., public relations executive for 14 million U.S. Baptists. In a crackling voice he read an amendment: "The practices of freedom in non-Communist countries are imperiled by pressures exerted ... by the Roman Catholic hierarchy . . . The ecclesiastical organization and policies of the Roman Catholic Church do not accord with the preservation and extension of religious freedom."

The delegates shouted down Dawson's amendment, but by then it was too late. The potato was too hot to handle in the closing minutes of the conference, and the whole report was referred to the Federal Council of Churches' executive committee for further consideration. Then the delegates hurried home, able to report to their churches that, at least among themselves, they had kept the peace.

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