Words & Works

P:The Chinese Communists cracked down on some of the last remaining Roman Catholic missions. News reaching Hong Kong indicated that the Reds had arrested at least eleven priests in Shanghai, ten in Tientsin and an unknown number in Canton. Familiar charge: the priests were "well-known spies."

P:The Central Conference of American Rabbis (Reform), meeting in Estes Park, Coio.. heard its president rebuke "legislators who would seal the lips of prophetic clergymen." Said Rabbi Joseph L. Fink of Buffalo, in a reference to congressional criticism of Methodist Bishop G. Bromiey Oxnam (TIME, March 30): "For any Congressman, in furious self-rectitude, to intimidate clergymen with the threat of besmirching public investigation ... is an unprecedented violation of a Congressman's trust."

P:In Houston, the Missouri Synod Lutherans closed their triennial convention with a resolution condemning marriages with Roman Catholics as "diametrically opposed to the eternal truths of God." Such marriages, said the resolution, involve a sinful promise or oath, violate the Christian conscience, and condemn "unborn children to the soul-destroying religion of the antichrist."

P:In Little Rock, Ark., Evangelist Bob Jones Sr. lamented that while "there is a great spiritual hunger because everybody is scared to death . . . there is no revival, no rebirth of religion, such as there was in the days just before and after World War I. There are many conversions today, but the impact is not as strong as it used to be." Title of Evangelist Jones's sermon: "Shoving Jesus Christ Around."

P:In Gadsden, Ala., the General Assembly of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church (membership: 83,000, mostly in the South) voted 2 to i to admit Negroes to the church's graduate school of theology at McKenzie, Tenn.

P:Ten carloads of Government-surplus powdered milk for the needy abroad, part of a project sponsored by a group of U.S. church and welfare organizations, left Milwaukee last week bound for Europe and Asia. In all, 90 million Ibs. of milk will be shipped under the program.

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