Religion: The Witnesses

Do not argue with Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roman Catholics were warned last week in the Jesuit weekly America. “Unprepared Catholics,” wrote Albert Muller of the Catholic Evidence Guild, would accomplish little and might endanger their own faith: ”While the Witnesses’ view of the Bible is a distorted one, the deplorable lack of knowledge that a Catholic is likely to have of the Holy Scriptures puts him at a serious disadvantage.”

With this backhanded tribute to prepare the way, 70,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses descended on Manhattan last week. That was 184,000 fewer than came to the International Assembly in 1958, but it was no sign of decline; there are now so many Witnesses (916,332) that not even New York could hold another International Assembly, and last week’s gathering was one of 13 district assemblies that will meet during the next two months in Houston, Vancouver, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Turin, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Oklahoma City, Omaha, Milwaukee and San Francisco.

In drenching rain and sweltering sunshine, they jammed Yankee Stadium. They were as plain-faced average as any baseball crowd, but to Witnesses the show was a kind of preview of the Kingdom they expect momentarily, when 144,000 of them will run heaven and the rest will inherit a purged earth to enjoy the everlasting life. At second base a speaker’s platform slowly revolved, surrounded by banks of flowers and five umbrella-shaded clusters of chairs for notables. For six days, Witness leaders expounded the faith over 192 loudspeakers, drenching every cranny of the stadium with inspirational sound. Most often at the microphone was Nathan Homer Knorr, 56, of Brooklyn, who is third president of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, official title of this 77-year-old made-in-America sect. With sweeping gestures and stabbing voice, he gave familiar Witness Biblicism some new amplification.

Blood transfusion, he warned, is not only specifically forbidden in the Bible but is unhealthful as well. “Dr. Americo Valeric, a Brazilian doctor and surgeon for over 40 years, agrees: ‘Moral insanity, sexual perversions, repression, inferiority complexes, petty crimes—these often follow in the wake of blood transfusion.’ ” And when Knorr noted that doctors were experimenting with the transfusion of blood from cadavers (TIME, May 26), a horrified groan filled the stadium.