It isn’t easy to bring Christian compassion to Viet Nam. The war—which causes most of the need for compassion—is not the only problem. A sad case in point is the six-month battle in which refugees in Bien Hoa, led by a Catholic priest, have stopped World Vision’s attempts to build an orphanage for 2,000 children on government-granted land. A violent scene at the site shortly before Easter was filmed for national broadcast in the United States by NBC television.
In the melee, World Vision staffer John Weliczko had his arm fractured. One member of the knife-wielding mob crowded World Vision President Bob Pierce against a wall and said, “If you come back I’ll kill you.” Two NBC cameras were smashed, and cameramen were roughed up.
Pierce says “our problem at Children’s City really is a big Vietnamese problem in microcosm”—how to “overcome the bitterness, tensions, and friction built up during thirty years of war.” He said his evangelical Protestant welfare group had never before had such trouble with Roman Catholics.
At latest count, more than 1.6 million are homeless in South Viet Nam. Despite great interest, Protestant aid efforts budgeted for all of 1967 pale before the cost of even a single B-52. World Vision plans to spend $750,000; Viet Nam Christian Service, $481,750; and the National Association of Evangelicals World Relief Commission, $38,000.
The victims of Viet Nam are so important in the policy debate that they often seem to be publicity pawns rather than human beings. Anti-war propaganda makes much of civilians killed by U. S. soldiers. On the other hand, U. S. officials pointed out the week before Easter that so far this year the Communist Viet Cong have murdered thirty-three village chiefs, thirty-one government aid workers, twenty-seven national policemen, and 376 other civilians.
Reliable information on U. S.-inflicted suffering is difficult to get. In the January Ladies’ Home Journal, Martha Gellhorn contended that “civilian casualties far outweigh military casualties.” In the same month’s Redbook, Dr. Richard E. Perry said that between 1962 and 1966 the United States lost 1,500 men in Viet Nam, while the civilian population often has “this many casualties in a single week.”
Both Gellhorn and Perry made much of the disfigurement of children by napalm burns. Despite this and other publicity, New York Times medical writer Howard Rusk reported last month he could not find a single case of napalm burning in twenty hospitals he surveyed.
Of all the efforts by American Christians to counteract the ravages of war, none has gotten more publicity recently than an attempt by a group of Quakers to get a boatful of medical supplies into North Viet Nam. During a stopover in Hong Kong in mid-March, boat captain Earle Reynolds, an anthropologist, said he and crew members have been threatened with up to ten years in prison and $10,000 in fines under America’s Trading with the Enemy Act. White House pickets protested this threat.
Barring use of force by the U. S. Seventh Fleet, Reynolds said he intended to deliver his eighty-two boxes full of medical kits, purchased for $10,000 by the ad hoc Quaker Action Group. Meanwhile, the U.S. Treasury Department put a ban on sending money to Canada for aid to North Viet Nam. Because of this, the Action Group’s bank assets have been frozen, setting the stage for an important civil-liberties lawsuit.
While Quakers aim to help both North and South, most of the Protestant aid in the South is administered by another peace group, the Mennonite Central Committee. It acts for Viet Nam Christian Service, an aid mission that also includes Church World Service, related to the National Council of Churches, and Lutheran World Relief.
The Mennonites began their work in Viet Nam in 1954, the same year the Geneva Conference set the terms for “temporary” partition of the nation and President Diem took over as ruler of the South. Enlarging with the war, Viet Nam Christian Service now includes sixty-four staffers from Western nations (fifty-five are Americans), and it hopes to make this eighty by the end of 1967. Projects include widespread distribution of U. S. surplus food, two medical clinics, six community-aid teams, and refugee aid.
An important Roman Catholic agency is Catholic Relief Services, which handles food for nearly one million people. Although most of this goes to dependents of Vietnamese soldiers, some refugees are aided also. Ten staffers from Western nations work with CRS.
The World Relief Commission of the National Association of Evangelicals is emphasizing self-help at its major new project, the Lay Leadership Training Center at Hue. Working with the National Evangelical Church of Viet Nam, which is affiliated with the Christian and Missionary Alliance, NAE plans to provide vocational and farm training and to help Vietnamese set up small industries. The program also includes literacy training and the distribution of clothing, medicine, and 1.7 million pounds of food this year. Similar education centers are planned in Da Nang and Khe Sanh.
Last month, when U. S. planes accidentally bombed out a village and killed more than 100 persons and injured 250, NAE responded to a U. S. Special Forces request and brought in six planeloads of food and clothing.
The direct relief activities of U. S. soldiers, usually administered by chaplains, are difficult to measure. At a recent Pentagon press conference, returning Navy chaplain Francis Garrett said soldiers hand out thousands of tons of food and clothing, as well as such things as building materials.
In late March, World Vision announced it would join the Evangelical Church in sponsoring child-care centers to accommodate 2,000 children. And despite the setback, Pierce said World Vision would continue its “desperately needed” Bien Hoa orphanage project, because of urgent appeals from “the South Vietnamese government, responsible citizens, and the Vietnamese military command.”
Sight-Saving In Cuba
Emory University eye specialist William Hagler, with State Department approval, made a secret trip to Cuba last month for surgery to save the sight of captive Baptist missionary Herbert Caudill.
Hagler said the retinal detachment apparently was successful. He had operated on Caudill in Atlanta in 1964 in an unsuccessful attempt to save the sight in his other eye.
Caudill, a 63-year-old Virginian and veteran missionary, directed Baptist work in Cuba until his arrest by the Castro government two years ago last week. His missionary son-in-law David Fite and forty Cuban pastors were arrested then also. Caudill and Fite were imprisoned on charges of illegal exchange of currency. Four months ago, Caudill got a conditional release from jail to seek eye treatment in Havana, and Fite recently was transferred to outdoor quarry work. Baptist Press reports that Fite’s parents left the United States for Cuba February 25 to visit their son and try to get him released. Hagler said the Fites have been treated politely and have seen both their son and Cuban officials. It was not known immediately when they would return to the U.S.
Canada: Evangelical Pallor
Last month’s second annual convention of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada drew a sparse 150 registrants, mostly from the Toronto area. Indifference among evangelical ministers was blamed for the poor turnout. The organization’s recent drive to enlist 5,000 members brought in only 600 and put the EFC heavily into debt.
Under the presidency of neo-Pentecostal J. Harry Faught, the EFC aims at setting up branches in every Canadian province as part of a national evangelical thrust. Faught called on members to “confess our fragmentation; our suspicions of one another and our quarreling with one another.…”
The two-day meeting stressed the need not only for a united voice for evangelicals and cooperation in national and foreign evangelism but also for a fully accredited, interdenominational seminary of evangelical persuasion.
In a fiery speech, the Rev. Hugh MacDonald of Knox United Church, Regina, criticized the heretical liberalism permeating his own United Church of Canada. But he also rapped evangelicals—for crude presentation of the Gospel, nauseating radio programs, sickening music and revolting financial appeals, and for hinging salvation on some isolated dogma. “In our zeal for Christ, we must not be guilty along with the liberals of making the Gospel unintelligible,” he said.
J. BERKLEY REYNOLDS
