The United States took a drubbing from two liberal, mostly Roman Catholic organizations at their conventions in Milwaukee and Los Angeles late last month.
At the four-day National Liturgical Conference at the Milwaukee Arena, the United States was characterized as an imperialistic power willing to subsidize war contractors but not the poor and as a nation capable of beginning war in Latin America when the fighting in Viet Nam ends.
Making the charges were former U. S. Senator Wayne Morse (D.-Ore.), the Rev. Andrew J. Young, executive vice-president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Dr. Benjamin Spock of baby and peace fame.
The trio appeared before 3,200 persons and were joined by two officers of the Milwaukee Black Panther party. The Panthers were dressed in camouflage fatigues which they said signified they were “members of the people’s liberation army.” The opening service was a melange of the kind of psychedelic experiences that have become a trademark for the 30-year-old organization, originally designed to consider the meaning and revision of traditional liturgy.
The service, produced by Methodist minister Roger Ortmayer of the National Council of Churches, included an eight-piece band and a seventy-five-voice chorus. Slim girls in brightly colored leotards pranced through the congregation as words flashed on screens called on the audience to “shake,” “vibrate,” “jump,” and “em brace.” Finally, the order was given to “lie down” (many did) and the breaking of bread began.
Keynoter Robert McAfee Brown, United Presbyterian professor of religion at Stanford University, told the crowd it was a time for tearing down. Targets of the uprooting should include “racist mentalities … notions of white supremacy … exploitative economic systems … business as usual … and antiquated ecclesiastical structures.”
An on-the-spot collection raised $1,500 for ailing Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers Organizing Committee.
A few days earlier at Loyola University in Los Angeles, the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice put together a convention on the theme, “The Stewardship of Power in the Church: A Piece of the Action.”
A bevy of noted social and civil-rights activists were lined up as speakers, but second- and third-string subordinates had to fill in for Chavez (laid up with a bad back) and the Rev. Jesse Jackson of Operation Breadbasket (confined to Chicago on a Court order).
The convention began on the 138th anniversary of Nat Turner’s slave revolt, and reparations was a major topic. About 500 delegates, 40 per cent of them non-Catholic, heard several speakers voice concern that laymen are running out of steam for church renewal. They contended that an index of attrition of liberal laymen is the recent decline of vitality in Catholic interracial and human-relations councils.
