Christians in South Korea—like most of the population—reacted with shock but no fear to two Communist-planned hammer blows last month. The first provocation was infiltration of thirty-one guerrillas bent on assassinating President Chung Hee Park. Two days later, North Korea seized the U. S. surveillance ship “Pueblo.”
The United States said the ship was cruising in international waters, and the world waited anxiously to see whether a second front would open in the Asian war.
In the guerrilla attack, nighttime gunfire and grenades broke the silence on the streets of South Korea’s capital, Seoul. The first hero of the incident was Police Chief Choi, a Roman Catholic, who halted the raiders a half-mile from the president’s house. As he gave a warning, he was shot fatally in the stomach. He was later given a huge Catholic funeral in the municipal auditorium with a public procession of government officials.
Police swarmed through the Mormon mission headquarters near the capitol in pursuit of the fleeing Communist commandos. Tension mounted as the Army joined the chase, and the watchman at the Presbyterian seminary on the outskirts of Seoul took the precaution of arming himself with a shotgun. Eventually five of the infiltrators were killed and one was taken alive.
The subsequent seizure of the “Pueblo” added to the shock, but there was no panic in Korea. The 750 Protestant missionaries prudently planned what to include in their sixty pounds of standard evacuation baggage—just in case—but continued their normal routine.
As public confidence and calm returned, the South Koreans asked, “Why is the world so surprised? We know the Communists; this is how they act.”
A surge of hope arose that the new incidents would break the paralyzing deadlock that has cut Korea in half for twenty-two years. Pulpit prayers on the day of the “Pueblo” capture and the following Sunday included pleas for reunification of the country and for freedom. But the pastors also agonized over a possible new war and the suffering it would bring, and hoped for peace with honor.
Objective considerations after the first blush of emotion in the crisis included pride in the South Korean response and confusion about what America would—or should—do.
The Communists seriously miscalculated their popular support in the South. They theorized that the common people would protect the lives of the infiltrators as the sea protects fish. But the facts are otherwise. Four impoverished wood-cutters risked their lives to give the first alarm that foiled the Communist maneuver.
The Communists theorize that the new, young generation will be pro-Communist, but thousands of high schoolers—including refugees from Soongsil High School, a Christian institution in North Korea—demonstrated against the North’s aggression.
The Communists also theorize that capitalist South Korea is an exploited, underdeveloped, unhappy land. But captured guerrillas were shocked by Seoul’s bright lights, quality suits, leather shoes, and smiling faces.
Korea’S Christians
South Korea has the strongest Protestant community among the Asian nations, with nearly half a million members. About 1.9 million in a population of 27 million have some church connection. There are eighteen theological schools. The Korean denominations have 3,200 ordained nationals, plus several thousand other staff workers. Some 750 missionaries from overseas work in the twenty-five churches and mission groups listed in the 1968 World Christian Handbook. The majority of Korea’s Protestants belong to the several Presbyterian groups.
The Roman Catholic community numbers 638,546, with 671 priests, more than half of them native Koreans.
The Catholics estimate 40,000 members in North Korea, but there are no definite figures available on Protestant strength under the Communist regime there.
Most South Koreans felt some retaliatory action was necessary to halt terrorism and piracy, but there was no unity of advice.
North Korea is training a thousand combat units for infiltration similar to that aimed at assassinating Park. These Communist troops are superbly trained from two years of walking with ten-pound weights on their legs, sleeping bare on cold concrete, and hiking with heavy loads over rugged terrain twenty-three miles per day. Many wondered if the free world has self-discipline to match.
There was no cry for withdrawal of South Korean troops fighting with the United States in Viet Nam. The Church is proud that the chief of Korea’s troops in Viet Nam is a Christian. There is no peace movement in the Korean church to parallel that in the United States. Pacifism is greeted with polite incredulity, or laughter, in a nation that daily faces the threat of Communist arms.
OTHER CHURCH REACTIONS
Worldwide church response to the Korean crisis (story above) was moderate in tone. The Vatican newspaper feared that the Asian war situation might be complicated “beyond all control.” The paper blamed neither side and called for peaceful settlement through “honorable negotiations.”
In New York, the chief executives of four Protestant denominations sent a message to President Johnson praising his “restraint and patience” in handling the “Pueblo” crisis and his referral of the situation to the United Nations. They said they “believe this great nation should not and need not be provoked into the hasty use of armed force in response to brazen and immoral aggression, short of war, by her enemies.”
The four, representing the Methodist Church, United Presbyterian Church, United Church of Christ, and Christian Churches, said they did not question the “wisdom” of “Pueblo”-type spy missions, since Americans “should expect and receive the protection of their government …”
Later, officials of the National Council of Churches and a dozen other Protestant, Jewish, and secular groups sent a telegram to the President saying his mobilization of Reserve troops “is an alarming reaction encouraging further escalation and war hysteria,” and saying Americans “deserve public disclosure of full information” on the “Pueblo” location off Korea. Similar wires went to all members of the Senate and some U. S. Representatives.
PRAYER IN THE WHITE HOUSE
A week after the “Pueblo” crisis began, President Johnson and other national leaders assembled for International Christian Leadership’s annual prayer breakfast. “Man was given by his Creator the saving strength of faith,” the President said. “This is a season when America needs to draw upon the strength of our many faiths.”
He said it was not his privilege to tell people what, when, or where to worship, but “in these long nights, your President prays.”
He then quoted FDR’s 1942 prayer, asking “the God of the free” to grant men “a common faith,” and added, “America never stands taller than when her people go to their knees.”
Main speaker at the breakfast was General Harold K. Johnson, U.S. Army Chief of Staff. He said the nation is “troubled and uneasy.” But “there is a solution to the problems of individuals … of nations … of our cities and our streets … of our young—turn to God!”
The general said that “in the eyes of God all of us are brothers. We dare not be indifferent to our brother’s needs.” Then referring to God’s prior love as explained in John 15—which had been read earlier by Vice President Hubert Humphrey—the general said, “We can never hope to match his matchless love, but we grow in grace and glory every time we try.”
Breakfast emcee Senator Frank Carlson, who is retiring this year after forty years of public service, had this advice: “Do not take the God of your fathers lightly, or allow him to be squeezed out of our lives by our own selfish attitudes.”
In the invocation, Massachusetts Governor John Volpe said, “Make us aware of how helpless we are … without the God of men and nations.” The closing prayer was by ex-Texas Governor Price Daniel, director of the Office of Emergency Planning.
Greetings from the Senate weekly prayer group were brought by Mississippi’s John Stennis. The House group was represented by Ben Reifel of South Dakota.
HOW ARE THINGS IN LAMBARENE?
Two and one-half years after Albert Schweitzer’s death, the hospital mission work in Lambaréné, Gabon, still goes on. It suddenly got some publicity during new director Dr. Walter Munz’s recent fund-raising tours in Britain and the United States.
“Without massive and rapid support,” London’s Sunday Times reported, the hospital “may soon close to become the dusty shrine to one man’s ego.” The paper said budget problems forced postponement of plans to purify the water supply and offer pre-natal care and vaccinations. The story of financial trouble was later called an exaggeration.
Schweitzer’s famous “reverence for life” extended to animals, including vermin; but under the regime of Munz, a 34-year-old Swiss bachelor, they are kept away from the wards. Bedbug-ridden grass mats have been replaced with plastic-covered foam mattresses; paraffin lamps have given way to fluorescent lights.
Last year the hospital conducted 1,200 major operations. Its 500 beds are always full, while the European-style government hospital nearby is half-empty.
British leprosy expert Stanley Brown has charged that the famous leper colony built with Schweitzer’s 1954 Nobel Peace Prize money is “a mere nesting place for burnt-out cases.” But he plans to survey the work on behalf of the British Leprosy Mission this year to improve preventive techniques.
The Times said that at the hospital “Schweitzer’s spirit lies perpetually in state.” In fact, rumors have it that some natives actually expect a second coming of the mustachioed doctor.
One Schweitzer tradition remains intact: relatives of the patients cook free food over individual pots.
THE PLOTTING PADRES
“We began teaching the Indians that no one will defend their rights if they do not defend them themselves,” said Maryknoll priest Thomas R. Melville. “If the government and oligarchy are using arms to maintain them in their position of misery, then they have the obligation to take up arms and defend their God-given right to be men.”
The 37-year-old Melville and his brother, 35, along with another Maryknoll priest and a nun, have publicly identified themselves with leftist guerrillas in Guatemala. In December, superiors ordered them to return to New York. When the Melville brothers did not do so, they were suspended. The other priest returned home and was reassigned to Hawaii.
Witness At The Winter Olympics
The tenth Winter Olympics, now under way in Grenoble, France, pay homage to the world’s fastest-growing sport: skiing. In a broader sense, many Olympic participants worship implicitly at the shrine of athletic prowess, recalling the early Greek games, when a priestess was on hand (the only woman present). The Greek events began only after sacrifices of grain, wine, and lambs had been offered to the god Zeus.
Nonetheless, the modern Olympics have seen pagan influences yield somewhat to Christian enterprise. During recent games, evangelistic teams have worked quietly among the Olympic participants. Several top winners have been young people of firm Christian conviction.
For the current winter games in Grenoble, local churches asked the Commonwealth and Continental Church Society in London to help to set up an international Christian witness. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in Europe gave prompt, enthusiastic support. At the 1966 World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin, a number of organizations got together on the project and eventually set up an agency called Action Chrétienne Olympique (Christian Olympic Action).
ACO recruited 180 Christian young people of various nationalities and gave them a correspondence course in lay evangelism. A Grenoble cinema was hired to show Billy Graham and Moody science films, and a lounge was rented to foster Christian friendships. Campus Crusade for Christ promised to send “The Forerunners” to communicate the Gospel in the folk-music idiom. ACO has also appointed official chaplains with entree to the Olympic Village to hold special services. Special literature has been prepared for distribution.
Ecumenical groups also are on hand in Grenoble with exhibitions and special events at two specially built centers. Among the speakers was Dr. W. A. Visser ’t Hooft, retired general secretary of the World Council of Churches.
The plot thickened still further when a Maryknoll spokesman confirmed reports that Thomas Melville had married the nun, Sister Marian Peter Bradford, 38; both were excommunicated.
At the end of January the Melville brothers were reported to be in Mexico near the border of Guatemala, where presumably they could perpetuate contacts with guerrilla forces. National Catholic Reporter, meanwhile, carried an article by Thomas Melville in which he made a detailed plea for downtrodden Guatemalans besides endorsing arms for the peasants. He denounced landowners and asserted that “misery is perhaps the biggest factor in preventing a true growth of Christianity in Latin America today.”
“I am a communist only if Christ was a communist,” Melville said. “I did what I did and will continue to do so because of the teachings of Christ and not because of Marx or Lenin.… When the fight breaks out more in the open, let the world know that we do it not for Russia, not for China, nor any other country, but for Guatemala. Our response to the present situation is not because we have read either Marx or Lenin, but because we have read the New Testament.”
DISTORTING THE POPE
The Vatican is concerned that Pope Paul, who sees wrong on both sides and is trying to be a neutral mediator on the Viet Nam war, is made by some to seem a foe of the U. S. policy. Religious News Service says “the pontiff is pictured as having already pronounced a moral judgment against the United States and to have called for unconditional cessation of bombing of North Viet Nam.”
An RNS dispatch from Rome noted that after the Pope expressed “keen and sorrowful apprehension” about the war in his talk with President Johnson, this was interpreted as a “moral rebuke.” RNS said the Pope rejects proposals for an unconditional bombing halt as a pre-condition to any negotiations, which puts him at odds with United Nations Secretary General U Thant.
RHODESIA: A WALL RISING?
Segregation in some parts of Southern Rhodesia is worse than in South Africa, Rhodesia’s Anglican Bishop K. J. F. Skelton said in a New York visit last month. He added that pressures are increasing on the Church, which tries to remain one institution where blacks and whites can sit down “together to speak the truth in love with one another.”
Skelton reported on new regulations he said have not been mentioned in the nation’s press: Mixed-blood persons can be evicted from their homes if 50 per cent of their neighbors request it. Some public parks are now designated for whites only. School sports matches that were once multi-racial have been segregated. Skelton also complained that Rhodesia is almost completely cut off from news of the outside world.
PLUS A HORSE FARM
A recent CBS-TV news clip showed Director Ralph Baney of the Holy Land Christian Approach Mission handing out Christmas food baskets to the poor in the Middle East, but the good image was short-lived. Days later the Internal Revenue Service ended a month-long investigation and announced that the mission’s tax-exempt status had been revoked, retroactive to four years ago. Baney, a 55-year-old Baptist minister, hopes for a hearing on his appeal to the district IRS office this month.
As to the reason, an IRS spokesman would refer only to the section of the tax code that says that a tax-exempt organization must operate exclusively for religious or charitable purpose and that no net earnings are to benefit any private individual.
If the ruling stands, the mission’s income ($1 million last year) will be taxed like that of a corporation, and contributors will no longer get tax credit.
The mission, which supports an orphanage and crippled children’s hospital in Bethlehem, is based at a $500,000 Kansas City building that also serves as Baney’s home. The building stands on a 236-acre farm where the mission raises and sells thoroughbred Tennessee walking horses. Baney says the horse farm is no different from the nearby Nazarene printing plant or Unity orchard operation.
ELDEN RAWLINGS
GEORGIA: FIRST AID
The Southern Baptist association in Atlanta reversed traditional policy in January and voted 487 to 370 to permit Atlanta Baptist College, being constructed for September opening, to apply for federal aid for buildings and equipment.
After the vote, the Rev. Dick H. Hall, Jr., former Georgia Baptist president, quit as development chief for the college. Hall, who has been an officer of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said that “to be of further use to the college I would be compelled to compromise very deep convictions. This I cannot do.” Several pastors said their churches might quit the association in protest.
Prominent Atlanta pastor Monroe Swilley, college board chairman, praised the vote but said the trustees “are not anxious to run to the federal treasury. We will scrutinize every program carefully.”
The Georgia convention has refused to let Mercer University in Macon seek federal aid for the last two years.
