Religion: Fellowship of Faiths

A notable side attraction at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 was the Parliament of Religions, gotten up by the Rev. John Henry Barrows of Chicago. Opened with a prayer by the late great James Cardinal Gibbons, the Parliament brought to the U. S. for the first time such exotic foreign religionists as the Swami Vivekananda. To the U. S. popular mind it gave the first smatterings of an esoteric subject, Comparative Religions, and the first inklings that Oriental faiths, after all, had their points.

For the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago there was some talk of duplicating the original Parliament. Nothing came of it. Piety at the Fair is represented by Christian Scientist and Roman Catholic exhibits, and a long, L-shaped Hall of Religions with a Gothic tower, containing such churchly wares as Protestants have cared to show (notably the silver Chalice of Antioch which may have been the Holy Grail, and Col. Henry Stanley Todd’s virile portrait of Christ—TIME, April 17). Nearest thing to a Parliament is a corollary to the Fair which opened last week at the Hotel Morrison-the World Fellowship of Faiths.

Fathered by a bushy-haired, oldtime social worker named Charles Frederick Weller and a chubby little Hindu named Kedernath Das Gupta, the World Fellowship has for chairman famed Methodist Bishop Francis John McConnell, for honorary presidents Jane Addams and Herbert Hoover (who let his name be used “if anyone thought it would be of any help”).

Last week in the Cameo Ballroom of the Hotel Morrison, speakers of all creeds and colors, many of them world-famed, arose one by one. Before the sessions ended there were to have been 263 of them.

A distinguished visitor was “the seventh richest man in the world,” the temporal and spiritual head of nearly 2,500,000 Hindus and Moslems—His Highness Sir Sayaji Rao III, the Maharaja Gaekwar of Baroda. In his Who’s Who paragraph the bulky, 70-year-old Gaekwar notes that he “receives a salute of 21 guns.” When he visited the World’s Fair last week, to his and its immense delight he got his salute. Fair President Rufus Dawes had soldiers drawn up along Michigan Avenue and marched with the Gaekwar in pomp befitting the Fair’s first visiting chief-of-state.

Reputed the most progressive of Indian potentates, first (40 years ago) to make universal education compulsory, and lately to permit divorces, the Gaekwar has amazed his Hindus by building a mosque for Mohammedans, amazed both sects by sitting down with Untouchables. Last week in Chicago, having told the World Fellowship that any religion needs first ”decoding—that the modern man may understand it, and then ‘debunking’ that the modern man may respect it,” the Gaekwar received the Press in his bungalow atop the Hotel Morrison.

“There is not much difference between the religions,” said he. “It is what results in service that counts. I am trying to bring my priests to this idea, to get them away from forms. At home I wear a little red mark on my forehead and the proper turbans and costumes. … I might apply it here by saying that a man’s dress and the color and form of his caste marks would show from what city and what church he came. A New York Presbyterian would wear a certain sign. A Chicago Methodist would have another mark. I am a very rich man. and so people approach me with special marks of reverence.” And the Gaekwar demonstrated by placing folded hands on his forehead. Invited to attend the Chicago meetings, Mahatma Gandhi cabled Bishop McConnell last May: CAN REPLY ONLY AFTER BREAK FAST. Last week he added: FELLOWSHIP FAITHS ATTAINABLE ONLY BY MUTUAL RESPECT IN ACTION FOR FAITHS SORRY VISIT OCTOBER UNLIKELY.

At the opening session last week a message was read from England’s Laborite Arthur Henderson, who a few days later got back into Parliament after a two-year absence (see p. 18). Of the comatose World Disarmament Conference of which he is president, he wrote: “I have steadfastly refused to contemplate the possibility of failure. . . . But we shall reach our goal only if the efforts of the world’s governments are strengthened and guided by the firm purpose and steady pressure of their peoples.”

Cinema propaganda for peace was urged by Professor Francis J. Onderdonk of the University of Michigan. More exciting was young Yoshiaki Fukuda, head of Japan’s Konkokyo (Shinto) sect (not to be confused with the Tenrikyo sect, whose Patriarch Shozen Nakayama, also at the Parliament, talked about the sect’s foundress, his great-grandmother—TIME, Aug. 28). Shintoist Fukuda flayed as “sentimental” any pacifism which ignores “hindrances”—such as Japan’s need for territory. Shintoist Fukuda, like Publisher William Randolph Hearst (see p. 21) and members of last fortnight’s Banff conference, admitted war between Japan and the U. S. is not impossible.