This report was filed as delegates gathered for the Fifth Assembly of the World Council of Churches. Complete coverage of the deliberations is scheduled for the January 2 issue.

Church workers meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, for the Fifth Assembly of the World Council of Churches faced a rash of reports of difficulty in supporting the council’s varied programs. The pile of documents reaching most delegates before they started their trips to Africa contained enough discouraging data to keep them at home. Those getting to the assembly found still more reports of problems they were expected to solve.

While money matters loomed large, they were not the only concerns that surfaced at the opening of the eighteen-day meeting. The assembly, in a sense, fell heir to the compounded problems of fifty years of organized ecumenicity. In his report, General Secretary Phillip Potter reminded the assembly that although the council was not formally organized until 1948, the first international ecumenical conference of officially appointed representatives of Protestant, Orthodox, and Anglican communions was held in 1925. The Stockholm Life and Work Conference was the first in a series of meetings that culminated in formation of the WCC.

Several of the documents received by delegates reminded them that the dream of the Stockholm meeting’s chief architect, Archbishop Nathan Soderblom, has not been realized. His vision was of a council of churches that could speak for the whole of Christendom. While the number of communions belonging to the WCC has continued to grow, reports showed that membership is still far short of the total envisioned by the Swedish archbishop. Implied in other documents was the understanding that communicants of many of the member denominations do not consider the council their spokesman.

Notably missing from the list of 271 denominations eligible to send delegates to Nairobi was the Roman Catholic Church. After the Fourth WCC Assembly, in Uppsala, Sweden, in 1968, hopes were high that the Vatican would join before the Fifth Assembly. The application was never sent to WCC headquarters in Geneva even though Pope Paul VI paid a visit there in 1969.

Collaboration between Geneva and Rome has increased during the past seven years despite the non-member status of the Catholic Church, the council’s Central Committee reported. “Nevertheless,” said the committee, “it must be recognized that the present pattern of relationship does not meet the Uppsala Assembly’s ‘conviction that the guiding principle of future effort should be to bring’ the one ecumenical movement ‘towards complete manifestation.’ ” A Vatican delegation of sixteen representatives was appointed to the Nairobi meeting. Eleven Roman Catholics are council executives, and a number serve on policy-making subsidiary bodies.

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Delegates also got a brief reminder in the Central Committee report that many of the world’s evangelical Christians are not represented in the membership. Less than a page of the report was devoted to the question of evangelical membership, however, while about three pages were devoted to the absence of the Catholics. The document did concede that “a large part of the constituency” of member denominations “is of evangelical persuasion.”

Differences within the communions over a variety of questions, including social and political matters, are reflections of the divisions within the wider human community, a preparatory document suggested. The report admitted that “the powerlessness of this fellowship is starkly revealed” in the expression of these conflicts.

Readers of the Central Committee report were told that “there are growing indications that the World Council is accepted outside its own constituency,” but the site of the assembly itself raised questions about this. Nairobi was second choice. The meeting was originally scheduled for Jakarta, Indonesia, and some preliminary documents were printed listing Jakarta as the site. The change became necessary in mid-1974 when the South Pacific Island nation sent word that it would rather have the WCC meet elsewhere.

There was also evidence in the report that the council is not accepted wholeheartedly in its headquarters nation, Switzerland. The WCC’s newest subsidiary, the Ecumenical Development Cooperative Society, was incorporated in the Netherlands in November. Its offices were located there because of the difficulty of getting new council personnel into Switzerland. An executive hired in 1974 to fill a vacancy in another WCC department was delayed at the border nearly three months before he was allowed to go to his Geneva desk. The finance committee reported to the Assembly that some consideration has been given to leaving Switzerland because of the difficulty of getting work permits for foreigners as well as because of high operating costs there.

Primarily because of financial pressures, the council is continuing to make drastic cuts in its work force. In 1970, the Central Committee directed that no new positions would be created and that most vacant posts would be left unfilled. The committee’s chairman, M. M. Thomas of India, reported that there were only 295 on the payroll this October.

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General Secretary Potter, in his report, suggested that the financial crisis might make the council “a fellowship of penury.” The Central Committee’s preparatory document said the funding problem was due to two main causes, the international monetary situation and money problems within certain member churches.

One of the factors facing council decision-makers as they considered budgeting was the large proportion of income from the United States and Germany. Each furnished 38 per cent of the 1974 WCC income. Most of the American funds are given by member denominations and their agencies from voluntary offerings, while most of the German contributions have come from the federal tax that supports religion. Member denominations in a number of other nations give little or nothing to the council budgets. For example, twelve of sixteen member communions in Indonesia gave nothing to the 1974 general budget, the audit revealed. There were similar reports from other countries.

Preparatory materials showed that the financial problem also was tied to the structure problem. Neither the assembly (held every seven years) nor the Central Committee (which meets annually) controls all seven council budgets. Related agencies in the member denominations, by their cash allocations, often determine council priorities. The Central Committee asked in its report, “How can the WCC secure the funds necessary for its work, and should it be ready to refuse certain funds in order to preserve the integrity of the fellowship?”

Indications were that delegates would be asking many questions about integrity of program, financial structure, and fellowship before finishing their task.

ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS

Catholic Bishops: Abortion The Issue

The more than 200 Roman Catholic bishops who gathered in Washington, D.C., for the annual bishops’ conference in mid-November declared an all-out war against permissive abortion. Under the Supreme Court ruling of January, 1973—known to anti-abortionists as the “Black Monday” decision—women, in consultation with their doctors, have the right to have an abortion during the first three months of pregnancy. Abortions have been averaging 900,000 a year.

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The churchmen said the Catholic Church would not be getting into the grass-roots political fight for a right-to-life amendment to the Constitution directly so much as it will be encouraging local groups of Catholics, along with others of similar views, to organize “citizens’ lobbies.”

People in these lobbies would “infiltrate” political units at various levels and from there monitor the stance of political aspirants. The anti-abortionists’ aim would be pressed home to the aspirants, clearly with the objective of making them think twice before they advocated anything that went too far afield of a right-to-life amendment.

There was no clear-cut answer about how much the church would back the grass-roots efforts financially, but New York’s Cardinal Terence Cooke, who is spearheading the drive, doesn’t deny that some funds are forthcoming. Most of the money, however, is to be raised by the citizens’ lobbies.

The church got into trouble last year when the Women’s Lobby sued it for not registering as a lobby under the Federal Lobbying Act. Subpoenaed records showed that the bishops poured $4 million into the anti-abortion fight in 1973 alone, not counting what was spent in local situations. The church finally registered with Congress as the National Committee for a Human Life Amendment.

Cooke said the anti-abortion efforts are made necessary because “those who favor permissive abortion laws have been very aggressive and forceful … and have made it very difficult.… We find ourselves in the position of being forced to say, ‘Hold on; wait a minute!’ ” The effort, he said, arises in large part out of the fear of a “rejection of moral imperatives based on belief in God and his plan for creation.”

The bishops’ objectives drew immediate praise from the Christian Action Council, a Washington-based organization trying to mobilize evangelical Protestants in the fight against abortion and headed by former CHRISTIANITY TODAY associate editor Harold O. J. Brown. But the CAC cautioned that the effort should be ecumenical in nature, not solely Catholic.

Opposition to the bishops’ plan appeared just as quickly. The National Abortion Rights Action League charged that “the attempted imposition of Catholic beliefs upon our society is clearly a violation of [separation of church and state] and leaves no room for our constitutional right to freedom of religious beliefs. Not only is the church hoping to impose its moral beliefs on non-Catholics, but also on the thousands of Catholics who support abortion rights.”

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“Trying to make this a Catholic issue—that’s a big hoax.… That’s just ridiculous. It isn’t just a Catholic issue,” Cooke retorted. “Our surveys show that the vast majority of American people are unhappy with permissive abortion on request, and also are unhappy with the pressure that is being used, going beyond the Supreme Court decision … threatening the very rights of an individual to serve his own conscience.”

Whatever pro-abortion forces feel about the Catholic action, Cooke served warning that politicians will have their work cut out for them if they don’t take a proper stance in favor of some kind of right-to-life amendment. “We’ll stick with this if it takes three, four, five, six—even ten years.”

In other actions the bishops commended the progress of Jewish-Catholic relations ten years after promulgation of Nostra Aetate by Vatican Council II. The document paved the way for Catholic-Jewish dialogue. At the insistence of Philadelphia’s Cardinal John Krol, however, the bishops’ resolution reminded Jews that the bishops do not take lightly tactics of some Jews against aid to parochial schools. Some Jews have been “hateful” in their attitudes, Krol said.

Resolutions also passed calling for “a decent home for every American” and a job for everyone who wants one.

WILLIAM F. WILLOUGHBY

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