Religion: As to War

ALL CHRISTIANS, PARTICULARLY IN AMERICA, MUST FACE QUESTION WILL WE LET ALL POSSIBILITY CHRISTIAN PUBLIC MINISTRY AND ACTION GO UNDER IN LARGE PART WORLD. WILL WE LET ECUMENICAL MOVEMENT BE DESTROYED?

WHERE IS AMERICA? WE NEED YOUR HELP AND PRAYERS MORE THAN EVER.

MANY PARISHES INVADED CHURCHES BOMBED OR BURNT. . . . PASTORAL FAMILIES RUINED. BEG HELP AMERICAN CHRISTIANS.

These cables, two from Geneva, the last from Paris, arrived last week in the Manhattan office of the World Council of Churches. They had been sent by a Dutch, a Swiss, a French leader of the Council, to which belong 63 churches of every variety except the Roman Catholic. Replied the Council’s U. S. committee: WE EXPRESS OUR HORROR AND INDIGNATION. . . . WE ARE CALLING UPON OUR FELLOW CHRISTIANS IN AMERICAN CHURCHES TO LEND ALL HELP AND SUPPORT IN THEIR POWER TO OUR BRETHREN IN ALL CHURCHES OF EUROPE SUFFERING FROM WAR.

The World Council, the hope of non-Roman Catholic Christians intent on church unity, has yet to hold a meeting, elect a president. Last week there seemed a possibility that this organization might never hold a world meeting. In a Europe dominated by Naziism it would have no place. This sad fact was mulled over in a pamphlet called Can Christianity Survive?, published by a group of churchmen including brisk, baldish Dr. Henry Smith Leiper, U. S. secretary of the Council. Edited by Religio-Political Journalist Stanley High, the pamphlet said nothing new about Naziism’s enmity toward Christianity. But with its naked quotations from Hitler, Nazideologist Alfred Rosenberg and others, its German anti-religious cartoons, its cover drawing of a Cross being wrenched into a swastika, Can Christianity Survive? gave pointed ammunition to U. S. interventionists.

Pioneer interventionists among churchmen have been the group led by Union Theological Seminary’s Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr and Dr. Henry Pitney Van Dusen. Last week Dr. Niebuhr & friends renewed their pleas, this time for immediate (“not a day can be spared”) moral and material aid for the Allies. Publication of their statement, with 27 signatures of bishops, preachers, educators, garnered 63 more signers, among them six bishops.

But officially the big U. S. churches are not yet so sure of their ground. Baptists and Unitarians got through their spring assemblies without perceptibly committing themselves. Last week the Presbyterians, holding general assembly in Rochester, N. Y., condemned aggressors, but declined to throw their church’s “moral and economic weight” against Europe’s present aggressors, spoke up for the rights of Presbyterian conscientious objectors.