Words & Works

P: The U.S. State Department presented the Russian Foreign Ministry with a sharply worded rejection of a Soviet proposal that would give Archbishop Boris of the Russian Orthodox Church permission to live permanently in the U.S. as administrative head of Russian Orthodoxy in North and South America. In return, the Russians had offered to permit Father Louis F. Dion, Assumptionist priest of Worcester, Mass., to replace Father Georges Bissonnette, expelled last March (TIME, March 14), who ministered to the American Roman Catholics in Moscow. There is no similarity, the U.S. note held, between Father Dion's "modest" functions and the powers sought for Boris.

P: Before the sixth annual meeting of the National Council of Churches Division of Home Missions, the Rev. Willard M. Wickizer of Indianapolis predicted that if the ratio of church membership to population in the U.S. remains constant until 1975, Protestants will have to lay out some $8 billion for the construction of 105,000 new church buildings. This will mean, said Dr. Wickizer, that for every new recruit to the ministry today there will have to be four in the near future. U.S. Protestants will also have to develop a new kind of pastor, geared to a greater proportion of older citizens and working wives. But this should not mean a tamer type of preaching, he warned: "It worries me that so many of our younger ministers feel that they must preach in a quiet and solemn voice with never a gesture, never a smile, never a change in cadence. It would be a relief if they would hit the pulpit just once ..."

P: A ten-member Commission on Marriage and Family Life appointed by the United Lutheran Church in America (largest U.S. Lutheran body, with some 2,225,000 of the 7,000,000 Lutherans in the U.S. and Canada) called for relaxation of the Lutheran attitude to divorce. The commission's report would supersede the code adopted in 1930, under which only "innocent" parties to divorce granted for adultery or desertion could be remarried--and not within a year of the divorce. "Our new stand," said the Rev. William C. Zimmann, chairman of the commission, "recognizes a more realistic view ... It doesn't mean that a person will be permitted to marry the day after he obtains a divorce, but it will be easier for the church to look at the whole matter." The new position is "an attempt to reflect the Biblical teaching of marriage as a sexual union, and to put remarriage of divorced persons on a less legalistic basis and a different basis than guilt or innocence."

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