Religion: Unholy Holy Land

Tourist traffic in Palestine once consisted mainly of pious pilgrims, Sunday school teachers and lantern-slide lecturers. Today, what with Zionism and Palestine’s private little surge of prosperity (TIME, Dec. 10), tourism is also on the upgrade. But if intelligent exploitation has brought a golf course to Galilee and good cocktails to the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, it has not yet produced any change in the conduct of the Holy Land’s traditional attractions, Biblical sites. This fact profoundly depressed Editor Charles Clayton Morrison of The Christian Century, visiting Palestine on a cruise last month. Last week his weekly published his views on the “organized exploitation . . . the charlatanry of the organized exhibition of sacred things and places” in “The Unholy Holy Land.”

Many a Palestine site is shared among two or more religious sects. The most cherished one, the Holy Sepulchre (of Christ) is tended by Franciscan monks but, by old tradition, has Mohammedan doorkeepers, who used calmly to lock in the meek monks every night. What dismayed Editor Morrison and other members of his cruise was that the worst charlatanry was exhibited not by dragoman guides but by Greek and Roman priests, in charge of holy spots whence their Churches derive substantial revenue. It was bad enough, wrote Dr. Morrison, that after 20 centuries and repeated destructive battles in Palestine a tourist should be expected to believe in the continued, known existence of Christ’s tomb, the manger in which he was laid at Bethlehem and the very hillside on which the shepherds slept that night. But it was downright “fantastic” to be told by a Franciscan in “Mary’s house” that “the Virgin stood at this pillar, and Gabriel at that pillar when he announced to her that she would be mother of the Savior!”

To be sure, wrote Editor Morrison, a guide occasionally “throws in the qualifying clause, ‘Tradition says—,’ but this interpolation is never emphasized. . . . Consequently the uncritical tourist comes out of Palestine with his mind cluttered with pious superstition.” Furthermore: “To have Christianity presented to these tens of thousands of casual sightseers every year in an incredible and repugnant form will have consequences in our own country.” Dr. Morrison’s suggested remedy: let the Jerusalem Y. M. C. A. which is less Fundamentalist than other Protestant institutions in Palestine, take the lead in “guiding travelers . . . without provoking them to a mood if not to the language of profanity.”