Religion: Churches & Labor

Once the Christian churches, through their moral codes and their theological dialectic, impinged powerfully upon the behavior and thoughts of ordinary men. Today many a nominal Christian is tired of hearing about morals, and his uninformed indifference to theology is such that his pastors burden him with as little of it as possible. .In recent years churchmen have entered the more fruitful fields of economics and sociology, which to a great extent were tilled before the clergy arrived. Twice last week this new sociological trend of religion made news:

¶ The up-&-coming Catholic University of America (Washington, D. C.), only U. S. pontifical university,* announced that its School of Social Work will be enlarged, called the School of Social Science. Significantly, its first dean will be a famed Catholic New Dealer: Rt. Rev. Monsignor Francis Joseph Haas. Monsignor Haas has since 1933 served on the NRA’s Labor Advisory Board, the National Labor Board, the National Committee on Business & Labor Standards, WPA’s Labor Policies Board. He has been surpassed only by Edward McGrady as a mediator in strikes, serving notably in the Minneapolis truckmen’s strike of 1934, the Tampa cigar strike of 1935. Said he: “I can sense the trouble in a labor dispute just like an old family doctor who comes into the sick room, sniffs the air and says. ‘Measles.’ ”

For the past two years Monsignor Haas has spent most of his time in Wisconsin, where he was born 48 years ago, as rector of St. Francis Seminary in Milwaukee and member of the State Labor Board. He returns to Catholic University, where in 1922 he took his Ph.D. with a thesis on “Mediation in the Men’s Garment Industry,” to emphasize the Church’s economic teachings, train priests and laymen in organizing social-minded Catholic groups, apply moral laws to economic life. At the University Monsignor Haas will encounter, among other kindred priests, a newly-appointed philosophy professor, Monsignor George Barry O’Toole, founder of the Catholic Radical Alliance in Pittsburgh (TIME, June 28).

¶ A vigorous unofficial body of U. S. Episcopalians, comparable to the radical Methodist Federation for Social Service, is the Church League for Industrial Democracy. For more than a decade its executive secretary has been an amiable, youngish man named Rev. William Benjamin (”Bill”) Spofford, managing editor of The Witness, who rarely wears clericals and once, between parishes, drove a payroll truck in Chicago to support his wife and child. The C. L. I. D., whose president is Bishop Edward Lambe Parsons of California and whose vice president is Bishop Benjamin Brewster of Maine. hates War, Fascism, deplores Capitalism, is on record for the Spanish Leftists. Next month when the Episcopal Church holds its triennial General Convention in Cincinnati, the C. L. I. D. plans to hold a sideshow series of meetings, with speeches by such people as Socialist Norman Thomas (a Presbyterian minister), the C. I. O.’s Homer Martin (onetime Baptist preacher), Howard (“Buck”) Kester of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (Baptist minister), Negro Lawrence Oxley of the U. S. Department of Labor, Roger Baldwin of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Last week New York’s Bishop William Thomas Manning, who faces a convention fight if his rigid ideas on marriage and divorce are to prevail over those of churchmen who would liberalize Episcopal canons, let loose a blast at the C. L. I. D. program. He wrote to Episcopal journals (one of which, The Churchman, declined to print his words and editorially questioned his ethics in giving his letter simultaneously to the daily press): “The C. L. I. D. is … militantly partisan and radical. … It is evident that these meetings are not for judicial consideration, or for social education, but that they are purely propagandist, with more than a tinge of Communism. Should any organization be allowed to use the General Convention as a means for its economic and political propaganda?”

Retorted “Bill” Spofford: “Whether we are militantly partisan and of a radical character I presume is a matter of opinion. Personally I hope we are. Christian leaders, I am afraid, are not always militantly partisan in presenting the Christian religion, but I believe that even the most conservative of them, in their better moments, know that they should be.”

*Founded some 45 years ago, it is run under supervision of the Pope and the U. S. hierarchy.