Mounting rebellion in the troubled Roman Catholic Church strained the “Bond of Love” theme of last month’s International Eucharistic Congress in Colombia. Here Paul VI made the first papal visit ever to Latin America, which in name at least is overwhelmingly Catholic. His visit to the congress was also the first South American event beamed by satellite to U. S. and European color TV sets.
The Pope got a tumultuous, unparalleled reception in Bogotá as three million pilgrims and citizens waved white handkerchiefs and shouted “Viva El Papa.” They flocked to his seven public appearances and lined the streets as the Pope passed, often standing in an open car.
The Pope called his fifty-six hours on Colombian soil he had knelt to bless and kiss “intense and unforgettable.”
Order generally prevailed, none of the feared incidents materialized, and the crime rate actually dropped as much of the nation enjoyed a virtual three-day holiday. But the excited throngs gave thousands of police and soldiers some bad moments. The worst was in the cathedral, where 3,000 priests awaited the Pope’s arrival. His address could hardly be heard for the noise of the ecstatic clerics, and when he left for the adjoining archbishop’s palace he was mobbed by priests who were shoving, even fighting, to get near him. The Pope looked terrified during the four minutes before guards opened a path. In the Plaza Bolivar outside, the crowd waiting for papal blessing was so thick and emotion so high that 750 persons fainted.
In his nineteen speeches the Pope balanced carrot with stick. As he had wanted, he met with the poor of the city. Quoting his encyclical “Populorum Progressio,” he called for more equal distribution of wealth and gave qualified approval to distribution of church land in agrarian reform.
But he rejected “atheistic Marxism, systematic revolt, blood and anarchy,” and said that “reform must be peaceful and gradual.” Though aware of the torment of the masses, he counseled patience, education, peace, and organization, and reminded the poor of the spiritual value of their state.
The Pope also defended church authority and tradition against both charismatic and intellectual innovations and warned against social change without a spiritual base. He gave a brief defense of his birth-control decree. Observers took the general tone—despite calls for social reform—as a solid blow to the Catholic liberal wing. But to thousands of the faithful, the visit to Bogotá was a dream fulfilled.
New expressways, housing projects, and ambitious clean-up projects in the Colombian capital were part of multimillion dollar preparations. Refurbishing of one cathedral alone cost $1 million. Thousands of beggars were temporarily whisked out of sight to outlying camps, but the city’s reputed 40,000 prostitutes apparently escaped the purging.
Space was provided at the open-air Eucharistic Temple site for 305,000, with room for another 750,000 just outside. But early attendance was so sparse that the National Radio Network called the congress an economic flop and charged that it was no more than ecclesiastical “exhibitionism” that had “very little influence on the life of a true Christian.”
Economics brought the seething social discontent of some Catholics to the surface. In protest against “wasteful spending” on the congress, more than 200 Catholics in Chile seized a cathedral, from which they called for church leadership in radical social reforms. Later some 700 Latin American priests signed a letter urging their bishops to “proclaim the right of the oppressed to resort to violence as a legitimate force for social reform.”
The congress was haunted by the specter of the slain Colombian revolutionary Camilo Torres, a former priest who said he left the church in disillusionment over social issues. Brazil Archbishop Helder Camara observed that the continent “is in a pre-revolutionary climate”; he went on to say that he hoped for peace but nevertheless respected “all those who in conscience feel obliged to take the option for violence.”
Conference frills could not hide other sources of ecclesiastical discomfort. While Catholic rolls claim 90 per cent of Latin America’s 268 million people, churches can count perhaps 10 per cent as practicing members. There is a shortage of priests to face the challenges of increasing secularization. The church itself, on a continent where fewer than 5 per cent of the people hold most of the land and wealth, is caught in a squeeze between old-line conservatives and progressives. Poverty abounds, and the church tends to stick to the status quo. The Pope’s controversial encyclical on birth control earned him no merit with reformers concerned about extremely high birth rates. Colombia’s minister of foreign affairs resigned after publicly denouncing the encyclical.
While clouds of revolution cast an ominous pall on the conference, ecumenical winds were blowing.
The congress marked ten years of relative peace and liberty after the violence of two decades ago in which Colombian Protestants suffered the loss of churches and schools, and some even lost their lives. A political agreement ended the violence, but some Protestants credited Vatican II for the changing climate of freedom. “What we are seeing,” said one evangelical pastor, “is the protestantization of the Catholic Church.” A missionary commented that there had been “a leveling off; both Catholics and Protestants are less fanatical.”
Congress officials invited still-wary Protestant and Jewish groups to participate, but with limited success. Organizers had trouble gathering enough non-Catholics to stage Ecumenical Day at the meeting. A Baptist choir withdrew under pressure at the last minute. The confederation of evangelical churches, which represents most of the 300,000-member Protestant community, officially declined. Presbyterian Moderator Aristobulo Porras, in rejecting the invitation, said that if the hierarchy of the church would make it certain that Protestants could enjoy their constitutional rights, this would be “the most effective and greatest act she could perform to better relations between the two confessions.”
Some Protestants who accepted the invitation embarrassed the Catholic conservatives. An Episcopal priest who addressed the assembly called for granting of full legal rights to non-Catholics, who are discriminated against under an eighty-one-year-old concordat between the Vatican and the national government. A missionary panelist brought silence when he suggested that the Pope should apologize for the persecution of non-Catholic missionaries in Colombia.
“It is difficult for those who have been through the heat of the violence to believe the Catholic Church is changing,” explained one missionary.
But the changes are real and include an emphasis on Bible study and on ecumenism. These changes have brought a new day for evangelicals in Colombia, who are growing five times faster than the population. The Pentecostalists are the fastest-growing group in Latin America. A Congress of Evangelism will convene in Bogotá in November, 1969.
SWINGING REVOLUTION
While the Pope sought to cool revolutionary fervor in Latin America (see story above), brushfires of Roman Catholic rebellion flared in Washington, D. C.
Orthodoxy was jettisoned at the National Liturgical Conference, which Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle refused to endorse. Fifty-two priests withstood O’Boyle’s demands that they recant from anti-establishment birth-control views. Catholic University theologians enlisted worldwide opposition to the Pope’s encylical Humanae Vitae.
Nearly 1,000 of the 4,500 liturgical conferees cabled the Pope in Bogotá to demand that he: end the Vatican concordat with Colombia; stop building new churches and step up anti-poverty work; give up the Vatican superstructure and its wealth; refuse to celebrate mass with the special $15,000 chalice and ornaments; suppress rich nunciatures (papal embassies).
The demands were suggested by speaker François Houtart, Belgian Catholic scholar, who said:
“Perhaps the time has come to organize an international Christian movement of really committed people, ready to identify themselves with the revolutionary cause of the oppressed in the whole world, across the boundaries of all the churches, without abandoning our belonging to these Churches. This will be the church of Jesus Christ.”
Other speakers included such well-worn types as community-organizer Saul Alinsky, Floyd McKissick of CORE, and even Communist theoretician Herbert Aptheker, who denied that Communists were infiltrating churches and that churches were marked for Marxist destruction. (Aptheker went on to condemn Soviet “atrocities,” including the invasion of Czechoslovakia.)
Nuns, priests, and laymen locked arms and danced at a reconciliation “happening” during the conference. It featured a rock band called “The Mind Garage,” a psychedelic light show, film clips on war and poverty, and clowns passing out peanuts. Self-styled Baptist “fundamentalist” Will Campbell dropped a four-letter word and blasphemies during a homily on Acts 2, which repelled many participants. Afterward, hundreds—some of them sporting McCarthy buttons—swarmed to the Russian embassy to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
On another night a number of delegates clandestinely took part in an inter-faith charismatic meeting at a Pentecostalist church. A Benedictine monk who attended said that most members of his order in Wisconsin practice glossolalia.
A jazz mass directed by musician Edward Bonnemere concluded the sessions. Its components: a Harlem choir, a jazz combo, interpretative dancers clad in black tights, Scripture reading by a teen-age girl, handclapping and embracing of one another by those in the congregation, de facto open communion, and blasts at the hierarchy by Catholic editor Robert Hovda.
Besides passing resolutions on Viet Nam and selective conscientious objection, many delegates voted to bypass the Pope on birth-control matters and to seek directly the guidance “of the Holy Spirit.”
Earlier, O’Boyle and fellow archbishops Cody of Chicago, Krol of Philadelphia, and McIntyre of Los Angeles secretly visited the Pope in Rome. The widespread opposition to the papal encyclical was probably a key discussion topic.
To date, more than 700 Catholic theologians, many of them in the United States, have signed a statement that says contraception is a private matter that should be left to “individual conscience.” But, criticized Archbishop John J. Carberry of St. Louis, leaving guidance to personal conscience is “a grave error.” And the directors of the National Council of Catholic Men declared that the Pope’s authority in the matter “cannot be rejected.”
O’Boyle, meanwhile, was pondering what to do about the fifty-two of his priests who are holding out for the right of couples to “responsibly decide according to their consciences on the use of contraceptives.”
Elsewhere, a rift opened along racial lines. More than 150 Negro nuns launched the National Black Sisters Conference in Pittsburgh. And a Black Catholics in Action group was formed in Detroit to put pressure on the church’s “white power structure.”
EDWARD E. PLOWMAN
TRAMPLING OUT THE VINTAGE
A massive boycott, supported by churches, unions, and political figures, put the squeeze on California table grapes in every major city in the nation and several in Canada just as the 480,000-ton harvest reached a critical peak.
The boycott is engineered by Cesar Chavez’s crusading AFL-CIO United Farm Workers Organizing Committee as part of its three-year vintage effort to wring recognition as bargaining agent with grape-growers in central California’s lush agricultural valley.
Churches have been in the forefront of the lobbying against the state’s $16 billion agribusiness. Politicians ranging from mayors of half a dozen cities to Vice-president Hubert Humphrey and Senator Eugene McCarthy also backed the boycott, which officials call the most serious crisis to the state’s agriculture ever. Losses in excess of $100 million are forecast.
Locally, the California Council of Churches favored the boycott, but scores of valley churches attacked it. The California Roman Catholic bishops supported the organizing efforts of the farm workers but did not endorse the boycott. To complicate the scene, growers filed a $25 million suit against the union, charging “an illegal secondary boycott,” while the union retaliated by asking $150 million in damages.
Although pressure halted the sale of California grapes in most New York supermarkets, by mid-harvest Los Angelinos had not curbed their grape appetites. But a cluster of interfaith leaders1Heading the group were the Rev. James E. Jones, president of the Los Angeles City School Board and national president of the Presbyterian Interracial Council; Sister Mary Corita, Immaculate Heart College’s ebullient pop-art nun; and Rabbi Albert Lewis, social-action chairman of the Southern California Board of Rabbis. was mobilized to do something about that. In New England, priests and nuns helped stage a Boston Grape Party by throwing grapes they bought into the water.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal warned editorially: “Those who resort to this form of pressure … need to be aware that boycotts can backfire with painful economic consequences for everybody.” In retaliation against organized labor’s ban on grapes, farmers were urged not to buy American-made vehicles and equipment. And already, church newspapers are lamenting severe revenue losses from counter-boycotts by advertisers.
RUSSELL CHANDLER
CHICAGO AS ARMED CAMP
The chaplains in the armed camp that Chicago became for the August Democratic National Convention weren’t happy about the city’s atmosphere.
After a night of rioting August 27 in a lakefront park during which a number of seminary students were hurt or threatened, about fifty clergymen and students joined a march to the convention hall to protest police conduct. The march started at downtown St. James’ Episcopal Cathedral. More churchmen were hurt in the larger protest crushed by police the next night.
Individually, many Chicago clergymen were dismayed at extensive security precautions. Collectively, a significant number protested Mayor Richard Daley’s refusal to let demonstrators demonstrate. Officers of the Church Federation of Greater Chicago and Jewish and Quaker groups charged that by manipulating procedures for granting meeting and parade permits, Daley was interfering with the right to peaceful assembly. Daley heatedly denied he had placed any unusual restraints on the right to dissent.
It was the ease with which Daley increased security measures and blanketed the city with troops that bothered many churchmen. Observant Chicagoans recognize that within his fiefdom Daley is a benevolent despot, but never before had his power been so visible.
Already uneasy from camp discipline and uncomfortable from high temperatures and humidity, church activists were not mollified by treatment of the Viet Nam problem. Platform-writers had gotten testimony from the National Council of Churches and several denominations. Presbyterians John Coventry Smith and ex-Representative Leroy Anderson told the panel “there can be no ‘victory’ in Viet Nam.” Doves were disheartened by obvious lack of delegate enthusiasm for Senators Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern, and for platform planks they favored.
The Platform Committee decided a halt to all bombing of North Viet Nam should be determined by response from Hanoi. A minority report, like the World Council of Churches assembly in July, sought an unconditional halt, and was defeated after a long debate.
McGovern, son of a Methodist minister, evoked warm response as a delegate to the WCC assembly when he asserted that “every political question is a moral question, which challenges politicians to seek the guidance of the Church.” His Viet Nam proposal suggested he had studied the assembly’s stand on the war.
The Rev. Channing E. Phillips, United Church of Christ minister who led the District of Columbia delegation, became the first Negro nominated for president. He got 67½ votes on the first ballot, which nominated Vice-president Humphrey.
The Church might have had some impact at a pre-convention birthday celebration for delegates marking the 512th anniversary of Gutenberg’s first printed Bible. But Chicago Alderman Ralph Metcalfe, the delegate who was to have cut the birthday cake, was unable to attend. He was tied up in credentials hearing, a Chicago Bible Society spokesman said. “Tied up” was a phrase heard frequently in Chicago the last week of August.
RICHARD PHILBRICK
NEW WORK IN NEWARK
Evangelicals did a turn-about this summer and hit the streets of several inner-city ghettos across the nation. College students led the way.
Most notable was a united campaign in Newark, New Jersey, a city ripped by riots last year and rated the country’s most explosive by the President’s Commission on Civil Disorders.
Newark participants included: Nearly 100 collegians, most of whom responded to a last-minute appeal by Campus Crusade for Christ and its staff leader, Phil Needles, 29; evangelist Tom Skinner, one-time Harlem gang leader, and his crusade team; Rhodesian pastor Joshua Dubé, 34, who manned a youth center for the Newark Evangelistic Committee; tenors Jerome Hines and Derek DeCambra, whose Christian Arts organization staged outdoor concerts; and the Rev. Bill Iverson, 40, operator of a luncheonette ministry called Cross Counter (where Hines sometimes helps dish up hot dogs and the Gospel) and the city’s best-known man in the street.
Most of the collegians, including a $15-an-hour water-ski instructor, gave up lucrative summer jobs for the $25-a-week “new work in Newark” project. (Only $2,000 of the needed $15,000 was raised the first two months, however, and some youths witnessed on empty stomachs; they were housed and fed breakfast by a rescue mission and the Salvation Army.)
In addition to militant evangelizing door-to-door, on street corners, and in juvenile detention centers, they cleaned streets and organized neighborhood block parties, each attended by 200 to 800 persons. The outdoor parties featured food prepared and served by both black local residents and suburban white Christians, concerts by local rock groups and CCC folk singers, and gospel messages.
Iverson, DeCambra, and CCC’ers were bombarded with eggs and bottles when they marched troubadour-fashion into the fearsome Central Ward. Iverson caught one youthful attacker and—as angry faces appeared in doorways—shouted, “We have come in love; why do you try to hurt us?” The neighborhood’s hostility melted into the summer’s best block party, attracting newspaper attention.
Leading clergy and civic officials credited the evangelical efforts for Newark’s “cool” summer.
By summer’s end, CCC’ers had reported over 1,000 decisions and had set up indigenous Bible-study and action groups. Needles hopes he can return next year with a team of 500.
Skinner’s Symphony Hall crusade registered hundreds of other decisions but did not draw many ghetto residents. He will try again next month.
EDWARD E. PLOWMAN
