Religion: For Tolerance

“How Far Must We Tolerate Intolerance?” demanded Rev. Wilbur Larremore Caswell last week in the liberal Episcopal Churchman. Mr. Caswell thus stated a dilemma which bothers many a religious liberal. It was posed for him last month by a Nazi Bund rally on Washington’s Birthday in Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden. That rally loudly cheered Adolf Hitler and Rev. Charles Edward (“Silo Charlie”) Coughlin, loudly booed President Roosevelt (“Rosenfeld” to Bund speakers). Ejected from the meeting was Pundit Dorothy Thompson, who laughed shrilly at a speaker’s citation of the Golden Rule. The rally was perfectly legal, and Bund-sters’ freedom of speech was protected by police. All this moved Liberal Caswell to write: “It could well be that a rather severe limitation of liberty and even a censorship might not be too high a price to pay to save democracy from complete destruction.” To a liberal group which met last week in a West Philadelphia Y. M. C. A., intolerance of intolerance seemed a contradiction in terms. It acted on its convictions. This Committee for Racial and Religious Tolerance—an organization headed by such men as Quaker Rufus Matthew Jones, Baptist Daniel Alfred Poling, Congressman Francis J. Myers—was in session when 30 hecklers burst into its meeting. The Committee tolerantly let them heckle. The invaders shouted denunciations of Jews and praise of Hitler, tossed around anti-Semitic pamphlets and stickers.

Detectives of Philadelphia’s radical squad were not so tolerant. They arrested eleven hecklers, including the chairman of a “Philadelphia Committee for the Defense of Constitutional Rights,” which pickets Station WDAS for not broadcasting Radiorator Coughlin’s speeches. The eleven, charged with inciting to riot, were each held in $1,000 bond, the dangers of intolerance have been Father Coughlin’s efforts to link Jews with Communism. This charge was lately riddled (in a Commonweal article) by an outstanding Catholic, Washington’s Monsignor John Augustine Ryan. Last week brought more rebukes, tacit and otherwise, for the radio priest.

> Rev. Dr. Maurice Stephen Sheehy, able young Catholic University executive (TIME, Feb. 13), went on the radio with a scholarly speech detailing the pro-Jewish policies of the Popes, from the earliest (the first Pope, St. Peter, and several of his immediate successors were born Jews) to the late Pius XL Father Sheehy’s talk was made under the auspices of a new, interfaith Council Against Intolerance in America.

> Father Coughlin’s weekly Social Justice (price 10¢) ceased to print the statement that it was published “By permission of His Superior.” Reason: the Detroit archdiocese now considers it a secular, not a Catholic, organ.

>Chief radio critic of Orator Coughlin is Father William Charles Kernan (pronounced Kernan), a Yale-trained (’23) high church Episcopalian, rector of Bayonne, N. J.’s Trinity Episcopal Church. Last fortnight, in the fourth of a series of anti-Coughlin blasts on Manhattan Station

WEVD, Father Kernan said of Father Coughlin’s “American Christian Program”:

“This attempt to line up Christianity with the denial of rights to men who are not Christians is the most dangerous threat to true Christianity that we who are Christians have ever faced. . . . This attempt to associate the name of Jesus Christ with the rowdyism and Jew-baiting mouthings of uncouth picket lines … is … the most un-Christian act this country has ever seen.”

Last week, examining the denunciatory mail he had received (much of it anti-Semitic), Father Kernan called Coughlinism “Nazi-minded propaganda … the faithful following of the Nazi line of action. . . . And always the demagogue lurking in the background eager to spring, eager to destroy American democracy.”