CASUALTIES: Organized Paganism?

The plan to exhume hundreds of thousands of American war dead from foreign fields for reburial in the U.S. (TIME, Dec. 17) has met no evident opposition. Last week a challenge came.

At St. George’s Episcopal Church on Manhattan’s East Side, the Rev. Elmore M. McKee assailed the plan as “an example of organized paganism. . . . These men died not for things material but for indestructible values of the spirit. . . . We cannot afford to get bogged down by a misguided, obsolete and patriarchal patriotism which demands American soil for American bodies. Let the dead rather finish the work they set out to do. …

“Whence comes the driving force behind this plan? Is it from interests which will make money from the transaction?”