Religion: Travelers

Out of an airplane in Moscow last Sunday stepped a benign ecclesiastic in a purple cassock and cap. He was Britain’s No. 2 primate, Dr. Cyril Forster Garbett, Archbishop of York. He came to visit Patriarch Sergius, Metropolitan of All Russia, a fortnight after Joseph Stalin had given his blessing to the Russian Orthodox Church (TIME, Sept. 13), a few days after the 76-year-old Patriarch had been enthroned in his jampacked Cathedral with Ritualistic pomp not seen in Russia since the Bolshevik revolution. Following his enthronement, the Metropolitan blessed the Soviet Government (whose members, like all Communists, are atheists), and invoked the dire penalty of excommunication on Orthodox priests and laity anywhere in the world who by cooperating with the Nazis have been guilty of “Judas treason.” In London, meanwhile, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was “most happy” over the renewed relations between the Church of England and the Russian Church, hoped the Russians would return the visit soon.

> Flying to China, India, Australia was famed writer and preacher Daniel A. Poling. Pastor of Philadelphia’s Baptist Temple, president of the World’s Christian Endeavor Union, a worldwide youth organization, Poling will visit U.S. chaplains and troops, write articles for the Christian Science Monitor and the widely read monthly Christian Herald, of which he is editor in chief.