News Briefs from August 18, 1969

Swede Heads Booth’s Army

A Swede is the newly elected general of a gunless army and the first in its 104-year history native to a non-English-speaking land. Salvation Army commissioner Erik Wickberg succeeds Frederick Coutts, retiring next month after commanding the 2.2 million-member Army in seventy-one countries since 1962.

Wickberg, 65, has been second in command and is the son of a well-known Army officer. He is fluent in four languages and is a good organizer, a fine chess player, and a student of the Greek New Testament. Eager not to lose touch with the masses and the young, he said after announcement of his election: “We believe this is only possible through our own clean-living young people.”

General Wickberg—married and the father of four—will receive $2,640 a year. He has an advisory council, but his rule is absolute.

Personalia

The Rev. Robert West, 40, pastor of the First Unitarian Church in Rochester, New York, was elected president of the Unitarian Universalist Association in Boston last month, succeeding Dr. Dana McLean Greeley, president since 1961.

Controversial former radio priest Charles E. Coughlin quit his broadcasts in 1940 because of political intrigue by President Franklin Roosevelt and direct intervention by Pope Pius XII, religion writer Hiley Ward reports in the Detroit Free Press. Ward said the 78-year-old retired cleric intimated the information in an interview and in his newly published book, The Bishops Versus the Pope.

The Rev. A. D. Williams King, whose civil-rights activities were overshadowed by those of his older brother, Martin, was found dead in his swimming pool July 21. A blood sample showed a level of alcohol three times that needed for a drunken-driving conviction under Georgia law. King, 38, apparently drowned during a late-night swim.

As accusations and defenses continued to swirl around disclosure that Bishop Matthias Defregger, auxiliary bishop of Munich, was involved in the World War II execution of seventeen unarmed Italian villagers by German troops, the town council of L’Aquila, Italy, voted at the end of July to have the prelate returned to Italy to stand trial.

There is a deserter in the Pope’s elite army of Swiss bodyguards. Kaspar Holzgang, probably the first man to go AWOL in the 464-year history of the guards, has been missing since February, a Vatican official belatedly announced.

The Rev. Donald H. Gill, publications manager of World Vision for the past five years and a former executive of the National Association of Evangelicals, has been named executive director of the Evangelistic Association of New England, effective September 1.

At A. C. Flora High School in Columbia, South Carolina, they call him Deacon Grady Patterson III. The 16-year-old son of the state treasurer was elected a deacon of Shandon Presbyterian (U.S.) Church.

Dr. Eugene Wiegman, a Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod layman, became president this month of Pacific Lutheran University at Tacoma, Washington, an American Lutheran school … William H. Schechter, president of Tarkio (Missouri) College, has been named president of Beirut (Lebanon) College for Women.

A Texas grand jury returned a twelve-count indictment against Southern Baptist evangelist Paul Carlin and his association, charging fraud in the sale of church mortgage bonds … A request for retail liquor licenses for a suburban Louisville store by Roman Catholic priest and high-school teacher Theodore Sans has been rejected by the Kentucky Alcoholic Beverage Control Board … In Los Angeles, the Rev. Robert Daniel Nikliborc, accused of leading a double life as a Catholic-orphanage director and a free-spending businessman, drew a year’s probation on an income-tax-evasion conviction.

Earl E. Allen of Houston has succeeded Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum as president of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (see News, August 1 issue).

Mrs. J. Clyde Shenk, 57, a Mennonite missionary stationed at Migori, Kenya, was killed last month in the crash of a Missionary Aviation Fellowship-owned plane near Nairobi. Four of her children are missionaries.

The body of Derek Watts, 82, an old man of the sea—an Anglican minister who worked alone bringing the Gospel to remote Pacific Islanders—was found in his wrecked boat on a reef east of Queensland, Australia.

Robert M. Balkam, executive director of the interfaith Gustave Weigel Society in Washington, D. C., will lead establishment of an ecumenical and international community called the Effingham Park International Center, outside London … Bishop Paul F. Liebold of Evansville, Indiana, has been named archbishop of the 508,500 Catholics in Cincinnati.

Wallace Henley, religious news editor of the Birmingham (Alabama) News, received this year’s R. S. Reynolds Award for Excellence for religious news coverage in dailies.

According to unofficial reports received by Religious News Service, Dr. Erika Kadlecova, director of the Czechoslovakian government’s Office for Religious Affairs, has been removed from her post in an apparent Moscow-backed crackdown on churches.

Religion In Transit

Asheville (North Carolina) Presbytery denounced James Forman’s Black Manifesto as “patently subversive” and expressed “no confidence” in three Southern Presbyterian agencies for having anything to do with it. The presbytery recommended that its churches refuse to send funds to the Board of National Ministries, the Council on Church and Society, and the Board of Christian Education. The latter board meanwhile announced major cuts in its services and personnel to the tune of $350,000. Over 40 per cent of the board’s personnel will be laid off by January, another 10 per cent by 1971.

First talks in another attempt to reunite the United and Southern branches of the Presbyterian Church will be held next month in Atlanta. The newly named UP committee will work with a like number of Southern brethren. A three-way merger attempt including the then United Presbyterian Church of North America failed in 1955.

The editorial chief of the nation’s largest Roman Catholic newspaper, Our Sunday Visitor, resigned this month after a reported “drastic loss of circulation.” Monsignor Vincent A. Yzermans, 42, who moved the paper from moderate conservatism to moderate liberalism, was quoted as saying he was tired of “the old liberal-conservative battle” … Ed Richter, former editor of Approach, a onetime United Presbyterian weekly, will publish an independent interdenominational newspaper to be called New Approach, the Religion Newsweekly.

Dr. Theodore Gill, past-president of United Presbyterian San Francisco Theological Seminary, has been named dean of the Detroit Center for Christian Studies, an ecumenical seminary “started from scratch” for laymen, clergy, and seminary candidates. Gill was an editor of the Christian Century, and most recently, director of the Commission on Education of the World Council of Churches.

Union Theological Seminary and the School of Christian Education, both in Richmond, Virginia, and Southern Presbyterian-related, will form a theological center with the American Baptist-related School of Theology at Virginia Union University, one of the nation’s few black seminaries.

The Mormons will erect a $31 million, twenty-five-story building in Salt Lake City to replace thirteen offices now scattered throughout the city … About 10,000 persons were expected at the Mormon Genealogical Society’s world conference on records this month. The body is in the forefront of archives preservation and study.

The California legislature has approved a bill that reduces the residence requirement for divorce from one year to six months and cuts the grounds for marriage dissolution to two—one a catchall that “irreconcilable differences have caused irremediable breakdown.…”

The Christian Service Corps in Washington, D.C., has opened a national employment agency for Christians seeking salaried positions in churches and Christian institutions where the applicant’s commitment is an integral part of the job.

The first Christian Social Action Congress was held in Sioux Center, Iowa, last month. Members from ten states of the sponsoring Christian Action Foundation stressed the biblical basis for Christian social action.

Credit cards may solve the money crunch for churches. At a national meeting of church business administrators last month, church affiliation with credit-card companies was considered as an answer to dwindling offerings.

DEATHS

WILLIAM BARCLAY, 86, author of popular religious books, former president of the Canadian Council of Churches; in London, Ontario.

LEONARD HODGSON, 79, former Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University, England.

A. D. WILLIAMS KING, 38, brother of the late Martin Luther King, Jr., and co-pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church; in Atlanta.

World Parish

A new church was born when the state-related Evangelical Protestant Church merged this summer with the Belgian Methodist Church to form the Protestant Church of Belgium. The Evangelical Church had some congregations dating to the Reformation; the Methodist unit originated in connection with relief work after World War I by the Methodist Episcopal Church, U.S.A., South.

A leading Communist magazine in India is now publishing gospel messages regularly, according to the American Mission to Greeks, which pays for the space in this and many other magazines at advertising rates.

Occupation of churches is an increasingly widespread form of protest in the Dominican Republic. The labor movement, lacking any real power in the country, has used this technique to attract attention and involve the Church in its problems. According to Religious News Service, in the most recent episode discharged industrial workers left the Santo Domingo Cathedral damaged after occupying it for more than a month.

The Protestant Council of Churches in the Fiji Islands has elected an Irish Catholic priest, Martin Dobey, vice-president. He is a member of the St. Columban Missionary Society.

The entire length of the “Wailing Wall” (often called the Western Wall), Judaism’s most sacred shrine, will be excavated and made visible for the first time in 2,000 years, according to Jerusalem archaeologists.

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