Tidings

P: The Vatican has been severely criticized in recent years for failing to speak out during the Hitler era against the persecution of Jews. But what if a Pope had issued a stinging encyclical in the late 1930s that did speak out on this issue? According to a copyrighted story last week in the National Catholic Reporter, such an encyclical was actually drafted for Pope Pius XI in 1938 by the late American Jesuit scholar John LaFarge and two fellow Jesuits. But the document was never promulgated by Pius, who died in 1939. The LaFarge draft, found among the priest's papers, assailed excessive nationalism as "a perversion of the spirit" and decried totalitarianism as a contradiction of the natural law. It charged that the Nazi quest for racial purity ended as a "struggle against the Jews" and warned Catholics that racism ignores "decisive doctrines of Catholic faith and morals." No one knows why the encyclical, which presumably was known to Pius XI's successor, Pius XII, was not promulgated. Historians can only guess what it might have accomplished; Sociologist Gordon Zahn argued in N.C.R. that "Nazi anti-Semitic practices might not have escalated to the stage of planned extermination; more important, Catholics in countries soon to be occupied might have been less ready to cooperate when the time came."

P: Protestant denominations, according to current conventional wisdom, are steadily losing membership. But the truth of the matter depends on the denomination. Year-end statistics show yet another notable decline in the membership of the mainstream United Methodist Church, but a remarkable gain for the evangelical Southern Baptist Convention. The United Methodists reported a drop of 175,000 during the past year, bringing their membership total down to 10,335,000. Methodist Church schools dropped more startlingly, losing 255,000 enrollees. The Southern Baptists prospered all across the board. Preliminary membership projections for 1972 indicate that the denomination passed the 12 million mark this year, becoming the first U.S. Protestant denomination to do so. Some 453,000 adult and teen-age baptisms brought the denomination's membership to 12,051,000. Sunday schools picked up 43,000 enrollees, reaching a record total of 7,184,000. Receipts were up more than 10%, soaring past the billion-dollar mark, to $1,078,652,000.

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