Knowing the Enemy

For a fortnight, U.S. Methodists have been studying the state of the world and the dangers it holds for religion. Behind closed doors in a Manhattan hotel, 36 bishops of the Methodist Church spent three days trying to analyze the strengths and weaknesses, the failures and successes of Communism. Last week, at Buck Hill Falls, Pa., Methodists assembled for the tenth annual meeting of their Board of Missions and Church Extension. Some of what they heard was cheering: Chinese Communists were treating missionaries better than had been expected and the church in the U.S. was growing fast enough to put up a new church building every day.

But New York's Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, allowing the Methodists no chance to feel too complacent, told them that two important threats are facing the church: Communism and Roman Catholicism.

"I regret to record these matters," Bishop Oxnam said. "But ... we confront a crisis, now worldwide, in which freedom itself is at stake. The Roman Catholic Church does not believe in religious liberty as we understand it. The Communist Party does not believe in civil liberty as we understand it. When either the Roman Catholic Church or the Communist Party, acting upon its belief in these matters, seeks to deny to us either religious or civil liberty, our own freedom is involved, and it is not a part of tolerance to submit to such denials until at last our freedom passes . . .

"In this connection, the current issue involving the use of public funds for the support of parochial education ... is part of a carefully calculated plan to break down the American doctrine of the separation of church and state . . ."

In Boston, Roman Catholic Archbishop Richard J. Gushing also saw a menace--in Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State, an organization which Bishop Oxnam helped found two years ago (TIME, Jan. 19, 1948).

Such groups, Archbishop Gushing told the Archdiocesan Union of Holy Name Societies, were a "refined form of the Ku Klux Klan." Cautioning Catholics against being "dazzled" by slogans about separation of church and state, and similar "glittering generalities," he said: "Our people are in a very precarious position thanks to the extremely hard, though evil work, which contemporary anti-Catholics have done . . . The damage they are accomplishing in creating prejudice on the one hand and uneasiness on the other is very considerable indeed."

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