Caution on Civil Rights

Like many other priests, nuns and ministers, Sister Mary Angelica, 41, a second-grade teacher at Sacred Heart School in Melrose Park, last month joined Martin Luther King's march for integrated housing through the streets of Chicago. In the heavily Catholic Gage Park neighborhood, an angry youth in a jeering mob yelled, "This is for you, nun!" and threw a brick at her. The missile struck Sister Angelica on the back of her head, opened a cut that soaked her black veil and white collar with blood. Unashamed, the crowd cheered.

Sister Angelica may well be the first U.S. clerical figure to suffer physical injury from her coreligionists in the service of civil rights, but as one Methodist minister from Los Angeles puts it, "there are subtler kinds of stoning." To day, as the Negroes' just claim to equality has become all but submerged in the demand for black power, an increasing number of Christian laymen are turning cool toward unqualified stands for civil rights by their ministers and priests. Even congregations that applauded when their clergy marched off last year to Selma have sometimes turned deaf and hostile ears as the main battle over integration has shifted closer to home.

Hangman's Noose. Opposition to clerical involvement takes many forms --some of them crude. When Methodist Pastor Eugene Lowry of Kansas City's College Heights Methodist Church urged his congregation to hire a Negro organist, his car was burned and he found a hangman's noose on his mail box. More frequently, though, opposition takes a financial form. Outspoken preachers on civil rights have seen their collection-plate income drop as much as 50% after a sermon on integration; last month All Souls Church in Washington, D.C., drastically cut its annual contribution to the city's Episcopal Diocese as a protest against Suffragan Bishop Paul Moore Jr.'s advocacy of .open housing and fair employment practices.

Some churches make no secret of their desire to get rid of a civil-righteous pastor--and when congregational policy allows it, they sometimes do so. In the Boston suburb of Newton, the Rev. Frank Weiskel of the First Congregational Church was dismissed soon after he and a visiting Negro minister sang We Shall Overcome from the pulpit. Last February, the Rev. William Youngdahl of Omaha's Augustana Lutheran Church was forced to resign his charge after congregants protested his involvement in local civil rights work. And in Evanston, Ill., the Rev. Emory G. Davis this month left his church, after being repeatedly urged by parishioners to stick to the work of the parish and leave civil rights to God. Ironically, Davis and the 400 parishioners of the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church are Negroes.

Parish pressure has forced some ministers to be less open in their advocacy of the Negro cause. In California, virtually every church leader spoke out in 1964 against a referendum to repeal the state's "fair housing" act. The clergymen's advice was overwhelmingly rejected by the voters. Today, even though California's Supreme Court has declared the referendum decision unconstitutional, the law is once again being challenged --but far fewer ministers and priests are defending it.

Taking It Easy. Typical of ministers who have decided to express their convictions more cautiously is the Rev. Noah Inbody of Emmanuel Lutheran Church in Skokie, Ill. A Selma marcher, he returned home full of zeal for open housing, lost several wealthy parishioners as a result of strong sermons on the subject, faced the threat of losing touch completely with his middle-class suburban congregation. Although his opinions have not changed, Inbody no longer takes an active part in civil rights work. "I've had to take it easy," he admits. "I don't go out and pound people on the head any more."

Many clerics, unshaken in their belief that racial justice is a spiritual as well as a social problem, have taken a new and softer tack. In the face of congregational hostility, they have come to recognize that white fears about black power are as legitimate as Negro yearnings for a place in the sun. Changing a congregation's mind, says the Rev. Herbert Davis, a United Church of Christ minister from Chicago, "is not like a Texas roundup, where you beat hell out of the cattle." Recognizing that no word is better than a wrong word, many have abandoned pulpit-thumping sermons and turned to the long-range task of convincing their parishioners by indirection and example--a harder strategy, perhaps, but one that in the long run may prove more successful.

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