Religion: Words & Works

¶ The General Council of the Congregational Christian Churches wound up its week-long convention in Omaha with resolutions against racial bias, liquor advertising, and persecution of witnesses by investigating committees. Biggest achievement: approval (after an all-night argument) of plans for merger with the Evangelical and Reformed Church under the new name, United Church of Christ.

¶ “We have suffered enough from those Catholics in name who have exploited the field of political service for their own profit and advantage,” says Roman Catholic Bishop John King Mussio of Steubenville, Ohio, in the current issue of the Catholic weekly, The Ave Maria. The corrupt Catholic politician, he continued, “is neither Catholic nor a politician. Speaking bluntly, he is a cheap crook who uses the faith as another gimmick to help get him into the lush field of easy pickings.”

¶ The U.S. Senate passed a bill authorizing payment of $964,199.35 to the Vatican in full settlement of damages suffered by the Pope’s summer residence at Castel Gandolfo when it was accidentally bombed by U.S. planes during World War II.

¶ In London. Ont. Canadian Physicist Austin D. Misener told a U.N. youth seminar: there are two kinds of forces in the modern world−those that divide people and those that unite them. Science, he said, unites: the churches divide. He was not speaking of Christianity, he added “but of the way churches operate, tending to separate nations, people and races.”