Finding of Heresy

Claude C. Williams' middle name is Clossee, but it might as well have been Trouble. The son of a Tennessee dirt farmer who was half Cherokee Indian, he made up his mind to get an education and become a minister. At first his favorite theme was "Eternity--where will you spend it?" But the Depression got him interested in other themes, and in the mid '30s he was fired from his pulpit in Paris, Ark. (pop. 3,731) as too radical.

Energetic Claude Williams looked good to Detroit Presbyterians when their city was writhing in the throes of war industry expansion. They appointed him the presbytery's "industrial chaplain." But trouble was waiting for Williams in Detroit, too. Fired again by the middle of 1945, he went to work on his own organization, the Peoples' Institute of Applied Religion.

Last week the Rev. Claude C. Williams, 58, was an unfrocked minister labeled a "heretic." A presbytery commission of five clergymen and three elders had tried him and found him guilty of: 1) heresy, 2) preaching doctrines not in conformity with the faith, and 3) failing to report his activities and make annual accountings. The commission dismissed a fourth charge of following the Communist Party line because it felt itself judicially incompetent to reach a verdict in such a civil matter.

Claude Williams promptly announced that he would appeal "the whole thing to the highest courts of the church." In his appeal, he said, he "will insist that it is the moral responsibility of the presbytery to find me innocent or guilty of their charge that I am a Communist or have followed the party line." Williams' prosecutors wanted the issue settled too; if he did not take the Communist charge to higher authority, the prosecutors might.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.