Not so Clear in Clearwater

For weeks the citizens and officials of Clearwater, Florida, were trying without success to clear up a mystery: Who was behind the $2.3 million purchase in December of the ten-story Fort Harrison Hotel downtown?

The purchaser was announced as Southern Land Development and Leasing Corporation, which in turn rented the facility to a new organization known as the United Churches of Florida (UCF). The UCF proceeded to move more than 200 of its people into the hotel. Guards were posted to keep outsiders out. A nearby bank building was also purchased by Southern Land and turned into an office complex, presumably for UCF use.

Attempts by reporters to obtain information on who was behind Southern Land and UCF were thwarted. Sorrell Allen, identified as UCF’s “membership director,” said the purchase was made by property investors who wished to remain anonymous. UCF, he said, was simply a non-profit lay organization trying to promote church unity. (As a start, UCF offered to sponsor an hour-long broadcast on Sunday mornings by pastors of area churches.)

Clearwater mayor Gabriel Cazares was rebuffed in his demand for full disclosure, and he tangled with Allen during a riproaring broadcast on a local radio station. Meanwhile, rumors were spreading that the Mafia or the Arabs were taking over.

Some of the mystery was suddenly cleared up at the end of last month when a spokesman arrived from Los Angeles and announced that the controversial Church of Scientology had put up 95 per cent of the purchase price and was sponsoring UCF. The spokesman, Scientology minister Arthur J. Maren, said the secrecy was to spare the UCF from being overshadowed by the mention of any “dominant religion.” (Even the Jack Tar hotel chain, which sold the Fort Harrison, was not told the true identity of the buyer, say sources.)

At first Maren denied that the hotel would become a Scientology center; it would be open to all churches for conferences, retreats, and the like, he insisted. But a few days later, under incessant pressure from Cazares and reporters, Maren conceded that the hotel would be available only to Scientologists who are at “advanced levels” of training.

Mayor Cazares expressed outrage. “This confirms what we suspected from the beginning—they did not level with us.… They have misused our ministers, they have misled the public, and they have evaded the truth,” he declared.

Some of the ministers signed up by UCF immediately disavowed the relationship. Then came another bombshell. Shown photos, three pastors who had already taped broadcasts said the chief technician at the taping sessions was none other than L. (for Lafayette) Ron Hubbard himself, the millionaire science-fiction author who founded Scientology. Hubbard, who is about 65, moved to England in the 1960s at a time when the church was under pressure from various government agencies, and he has been seen in America only a few times in the last seven years or so.

Maren confirmed that Hubbard was in the area. Then a telephone tipster sent reporters scurrying to an apartment complex in nearby Dunedin. The voice said they would find Hubbard living there amid a lot of young people, teletype machines, offices, and a cafeteria. Guards, however, barred the reporters from the eighteen-unit building. A young woman who identified herself as Mrs. Laurel Watson, Hubbard’s chief spokesman “when he is not here,” confirmed that the condominium was indeed Hubbard’s residence but that he was out for the moment. She said the teletype machines were used for communication between the apartment and the offices downtown, but she declined to answer most other questions.

Within half an hour Maren and an aide came hurrying to the scene. Maren said Hubbard was actually living in Miami, and he appeared to contradict Mrs. Watson on other points. Eventually, the newspeople were ordered off the property.

The hubbub in the press continued, and Cazares and Maren exchanged bitter charges. At one point Maren suggested that Cazares’s background and real estate holdings ought to be investigated. Cazares had ready answers to Maren’s accusations, but it was evident that the Scientologists had done considerable digging into the mayor’s past.

At mid-month, Maren announced that the Church of Scientology was suing Cazares and the St. Petersburg Times, and Cazares declared he was filing a counter suit.

In its short but stormy history the Church of Scientology has sued a number of individuals and newspapers, plus dozens of government agencies. Many of the suits are dropped, dismissed, or lost, but the effect has been to make critics wary about speaking out. Hubbard has been quoted as saying, “We should be very alert to sue for slander at the slightest chance, so as to discourage the public press from mentioning Scientology [except on the religion page].”

Scientology’s beginnings can be traced to a book Hubbard wrote in 1950, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. It contained principles that, he said, restored him to health after a serious illness. A lot of people latched onto the dianetics idea, essentially a blend of many philosophies and psychological principles into a sort of do-it-yourself method of psychotherapy (see November 7, 1969, issue, page 110).

When the dianetics fad faded, Hubbard introduced a battery-operated device dubbed the E-meter. With it, one’s “engrams” (hangups) could be detected and worked on with the help of a counselor until cleared up, according to Hubbard. Thus, for a price, one could move from “pre-clear” to “clear” status and thence to advanced stages. The process can cost an adherent thousands of dollars in a single year.

Hubbard chartered his idea and movement as the Church of Scientology in Washington, D. C., in 1952, and it has been in and out of trouble with a host of government agencies ever since. Its main centers are located in suburban London and Los Angeles.

The Rise And Fall Of Billy James

Thanksgiving Day, 1974, was a sad occasion for evangelist Billy James Hargis and his family. At the dinner table Hargis asked his son, Billy James II, to say the prayer—something he’d never done before. Minutes later, Hargis bolted from the table and ran to his room. His wife Betty Jane and Brenda, the youngest of four daughters, followed. Billy James II waited a minute or so, then went to see if he could help. He recalled the scene for readers of Hargis’s Christian Crusade Weekly, a tabloid of 200,000 circulation:

“My father slumped crying in a chair. [Brenda was crying] also, her arms wrapped tight around his neck doing all she could to comfort him. My mother [who was recuperating from a serious operation] stood over them both with tear-stained cheeks repeating again and again words of love and devotion.… It is not an easy memory to discard.”

A month earlier, Hargis had abruptly ended a world tour and returned home to Tulsa broken in health, the evangelist’s organization would later explain. But at the time, said his son, “there was doubt within our own minds as to whether he would ever again be physically able to be used of God.”

Hargis announced publicly that on doctor’s orders he had resigned from the presidency of his six-year-old American Christian College in Tulsa, was cutting back on other activities, and would retire for health reasons to his farm in Missouri. Aides were named to head the various entities related to the Christian Crusade, founded in 1950 by Hargis to push right-wing politics and conservative religious causes.

Less than a year later, however, Hargis came bounding back to Tulsa and resumed command of all of his old operations except the college. He said he had experienced physical and spiritual renewal at the farm.

Throughout this entire period rumors about Hargis’s troubles were spreading all over Tulsa and in fundamentalist circles across the land. The stories linked Hargis’s departure from the college to alleged homosexual acts with students.

The rumors began with a student couple whom Hargis had married in September, 1974. They returned from their honeymoon and told David Noebel, then vice-president of the college, that they had compared notes and made a shocking discovery: Hargis had had a sexual relationship with each of them. (Their marriage is now “on the rocks,” states a source close to the couple. Both are undergoing counseling. The boy has psychological hangups involving images of Hargis, says the source.)

In an interview, Noebel said three more male students told him of affairs they’d had with Hargis. The evangelist justified his acts by pointing to the friendship between David and Jonathan in the Bible, Noebel says he was told. The youths also alleged they were threatened with blacklisting if they talked.

In October, 1974, Noebel and other college officials summoned Hargis from Korea, where he was touring, and confronted him with the allegations. According to Noebel and another who was present, Hargis, 50, acknowledged his guilt and blamed it all on “genes and chromosomes.” Hargis agreed to resign as president and sever ties with the school. Noebel said the health reasons Hargis announced were a “cover.”

At one point Noebel asked twelve prominent evangelical leaders to come to Tulsa and offer counsel on how to deal with the situation. Only one came, he said.

In the succeeding weeks and months there were personnel shakeups and hassles between Hargis and the college over financial arrangements (Hargis persuaded the board to give him an annual stipend of $24,000 as part of the settlement). When Hargis handed over the college to the new board, with it went a $700,000 mortgage (and $3.5 million in assets), but the evangelist declined to permit the college any further access to the all-important mailing list of contributors.

When Hargis announced his comeback last year, Noebel claimed it was a “royal double cross.” The idea originally was for all the leaders “to stick together and try to save the Hargis ministries,” explained Noebel. Saving the ministries, he implied, meant keeping Hargis out. Most of the leaders, however, handed the reins back to their former boss. Sagging finances were blamed.

Things remained unsettled on campus. Two dozen angry parents, having heard the reports of Hargis’s alleged sexual involvement with students, arrived to remove their offspring. Noebel was able to convince most of them that as a result of the housecleaning all was now well. Enrollment nevertheless dropped from 204 to 174.

Last fall one of Hargis’s youthful accusers took his story to the district attorney’s office. An assistant prosecutor suggested that because he was of age and had consented to the acts it was useless to file charges.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY learned that the youth then went to the Tulsa World and told religion editor Beth Macklin “everything.” Ms. Macklin conferred with other editors. But World policy prohibited them from doing anything with such a story unless it was a matter of court record.

Time magazine eventually got wind of the story and published a full-page account in its February 16 issue. Asked by Time about the charges, Hargis through his lawyer replied simply: “I have made more than my share of mistakes. I’m not proud of them.” He went on to say that he had made his peace with God.

After Time’s story appeared, other reporters from across the nation pressed for information, and Hargis appeared to change his position. Through a spokesman he denied “emphatically” the charges leveled at him, and he attributed them in part to a power struggle not unlike a church fight “where one group wants to take over from another group.” He warned against “a new anti-hero wave sweeping across our country that could ruin America.” It is, he said, “a wave of destruction of people’s reputations to serve any purpose that the liberals and the Communists have in mind.” There are always people around, he asserted, who are “willing to cooperate with these extremist elements to satisfy their own jealousies and vendettas.”

As for himself, declared Hargis, “I know that my conscience is clear.”

At mid-month his lawyers said they were considering the possibility of filing legal charges against Time and therefore would have no further immediate comment.

Among Christian Crusade’s related ministries that Hargis heads are the David Livingstone Missionary Foundation (Jess Pedigo is its chief officer), a daily broadcast, the weekly paper (edited by newcomer Dan Lyons, an ex-Jesuit priest—an identification Hargis has never disclosed to his readers), the Billy Hargis Evangelistic Association, a Tulsa church (Charles Secrest is pastor), a foundation known as Evangelism in Action (purpose: publish tracts, build retirement homes, establish institutional ministries), a tour agency, and a direct-mail firm. To house all this activity, the evangelist recently leased with a purchase-option a large new six-story building in Tulsa.

In the January 25 issue of Christian Crusade Weekly, Billy James Hargis II remarked: “my father has been given strength to be placed once again at the helm of this mighty movement; but for how long?”

It is a question that many in and out of the Hargis camp are pondering.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

AVOIDING SHIPWRECK

Rosamond Lilly Swan, a 75-year-old widow, wanted to be remembered not as a “poor old shipwreck” but as an “active, vital person.” She had cancer, however, and she was wasting away, unable to convince her doctor and loved ones to let her go in peace—without all the drugs and gadgetry. In an appeal published in her church’s newsletter, she asked for the right to die. Her fellow members of the First Church (Unitarian) of Dedham, Massachusetts, then unanimously passed at the church’s annual meeting a resolution in which they pledged to work for right-to-die legislation. That very night they informed the suffering woman of their action. She seemed pleased.

On the next day she died.

Vatican Views: Quo Vadit?

What’s a loyal Catholic to believe—and do—these days?

More and more, the Roman Catholic faithful are unsettled by actions of the Vatican, its worldwide hierarchy, and Catholic scholars. Positions accepted throughout the church are now being questioned on all sides. The resulting confusion shows up in a variety of ways, including a decline in attendance at mass and widespread disobedience of the prohibition against contraceptives.

A new Vatican document on sex had hardly left the hands of the bishops last month before Catholic editors and professors started raising questions about it.

Unlike the 1968 pronouncement on birth control, which was a papal encyclical, the new document is from one of the Vatican’s administrative sections, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. However, it was issued with the Pope’s approval, and within a week of its distribution he defended it at a weekly audience.

“Why this unlikely and deplorable demonstration by screaming people?” he asked after hearing of an invasion of the Milan cathedral by a group of feminists. The protest had been staged in the see where he once had presided as archbishop.

He said the document showed the “wise and beneficial love of the church, really mother and teacher.” It was generally seen as a reaffirmation of traditional Catholic teaching against any sex outside of marriage. It condemns premarital sex, homosexual acts, and masturbation.

Criticism came not only from Italian women fighting for an abortion referendum but also from official Catholic sources. The Tablet, a Brooklyn diocesan weekly, described the statement as a “difficult document with serious flaws.” Said a Tablet editorial: “We are deeply committed to the right and duty of ecclesiastical authority to teach the truth, but not to the presumption that ecclesiastical authority can create the truth.”

The document was welcomed as “very good and very needed” by Editor Joseph O’Hare of the Jesuit weekly America, but he expressed disappointment that it did not deal with a positive “theology of sex.” A Maryknoll priest-psychologist, Eugene Kennedy of Loyola University, criticized it as “out of date.”

More predictable reaction to the ban on extramarital liaisons came from vocal homosexual-rights groups in Italy and the United States. Their opposition to the document’s section on homosexuality simply spotlighted parts of the pqper that defenders were having difficulty explaining. A distinction was made in the paper between those whose tendencies toward homosexuality are “incurable” and those whose tendencies are “transitory or at least not incurable.” While it said that homosexual acts “can in no case be approved of,” it suggested that some individuals are not personally responsible for their behavior.

In its editorial, the Brooklyn Tablet said that for the Vatican to direct pastors to sustain the incurables in “the hope of overcoming their personal difficulties” is to “counsel the impossible.” “It is precisely because of the frustration of such a situation that moral theologians are exploring other pastoral solutions,” the diocesan weekly declared.

In the United States, comment on the Vatican document was overshadowed by the larger controversy over abortion. While many Protestants joined with Catholics to seek a constitutional amendment banning abortions, both Protestant and Catholic figures criticized the hierarchy for its anti-abortion emphasis. Three top United Church of Christ officials, for instance, issued a statement blasting the bishops and urging resistance to attempts “to erode or negate the Supreme Court decision on abortion.” Within the pro-amendment ranks, there was division over the question of whether to seek a constitutional revision involving the principle of states’ rights or one that would prohibit abortion nationwide.

It is not only in the realm of sex that loyal Catholics are wondering about official teaching these days. Perhaps a more important issue is the papacy itself. Pope Paul last fall dashed the hopes of many of the faithful when he issued a new constitution on papal elections. There had been hope that he might accept a suggestion to widen the group that will vote for his successor; he had gone on record in 1973 saying he hoped to make the body that elects popes “more representative.” There was wide speculation that more conservative members of the curia pressured him to back off from the position, however. His new rules provide that only cardinals may vote. He did specify that none over 80 could participate. (He has asked many members of the hierarchy to give up their posts when they reach 75. He himself is 78.)

Another jolting development for Catholics was the Pope’s unprecedented gesture in December of kneeling to kiss the foot of Metropolitan Meliton of Chalcedon, a leading figure in Eastern Orthodoxy. The metropolitan had come to the Vatican after the Nairobi World Council of Churches assembly to greet the Pope on the tenth anniversary of the new era of Rome-Constantinople fellowship. (In 1965 the Pope and the patriarch of Eastern Orthodoxy lifted the mutual excommunications that had been in effect since 1054.) The Pope’s anniversary statement said he looked forward to the overcoming of difficulties “which still exist and which prevent us from celebrating the eucharist of the Lord together.”

The Pope left many of the faithful wondering what to believe and do on another important topic when he issued his “apostolic exhortation” on evangelization in December. In it, he turned down a number of the proposals from the 1974 Synod of Bishops, including calls for more political involvement and flexibility in evangelism. The pontiff’s statement did call for “more just structures” and non-violent methods to liberate the oppressed.

The response to the bishops’ synod, as well as the new procedures for papal elections, raised new questions about the relation between the Pope and the bishops and how much decision-making power he would share with them.

Much of the attention in the political area has been focused on the Vatican’s attitude toward Communism. The threat of a Communist takeover of Rome or of all of Italy has prompted new anti-Communist activity by the hierarchy in recent weeks. While the pontiff has taken a personal role in warning the Italians against electing Marxists, he has left the faithful wondering about his position on Communism elsewhere. He has been sending Vatican diplomats to work out new accommodations with some Eastern European governments while he has retired or silenced some of the leading Catholic anti-Communist clerics in several lands.

One Italian priest decided he could not live with the ambiguity. After reading the Italian bishops’ statement that said it was impossible to be a Christian and a Marxist simultaneously, Mario Campli promptly quit the priesthood to join the Party. He announced at a mass that he was going to join “the struggle of the proletariat.”

AIRPORT

One of the most eloquent witnesses at a U. S. government hearing on the supersonic Concorde airliner was British bishop Hugh Montifore of Kingston-upon-Thames. The bishop, who lives near London’s Heathrow airport (where the Concorde has landed frequently), advised American transportation officials not to grant landing rights to the Concorde. Concorde’s noise, he said, “can be. unbearable, above the threshold of pain.… It is not hell, because hell goes on forever. It is more like a secular form of purgatory.” He expressed hope that the U. S. would ban the Concorde out of a “sense of obligation to your oldest allies.”

Religion In Transit

A St. Louis judge ordered a four-year-old Missouri scholarship program for needy students to be stopped June 30 because some of the students enroll at religiously affiliated schools. The $3.8 million program offers up to $900 to students enrolled in thirty-one private and twenty-six public colleges in the state. The suit was spearheaded by Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Suits aimed at halting federally financed classes on Transcendental Meditation in New Jersey schools have been filed against the U. S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and against the state school authorities.

Thirty-three Protestant and Catholic bodies have filed stockholder resolutions with ten major U. S. companies demanding disclosures of overseas political contributions. The groups also filed resolutions with thirteen other corporations concerning policies in southern Africa and in Chile. In all, the groups—affiliated with the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility of the National Council of Churches—hold more than $25 million worth of stock in the twenty-three companies.

Organizers of an ambitious film endeavor known as The Genesis Project plan to produce a series of film segments of every event of the Bible, using the King James Version without extra-biblical commentary. The project is expected to take more than thirty years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Already $5 million has been spent; films of parts of Genesis and Luke may be released by September. Michael Manuel, former general manager of the Metropolitan Opera Company, conceived the idea.

The Manitoba (Canada) Court of Appeals overturned the ruling of the Labor Board and a lower court in declaring that Henry Funk had the right not to join a Winnipeg labor union local because of his religious beliefs. He had been fired from a bakery in June, 1974, for refusing to join the union. The court said the Labor Board should have tried to determine Funk’s own beliefs rather than form a judgment on the basis of what his denomination, the Mennonite Brethren Church, stands for.

New publications:The Catholic Charismatic, a quarterly to be issued by the Paulist Press of Paramus, New Jersey, beginning in March; and Religious Media Today, a quarterly to be launched in April as an evaluation service of what’s current in the religious media, from books to films.

Silenced:New Life, the monthly magazine about renewal in the Episcopal Church. Published since 1973 by the Anchor Society of Denver, it succumbed to rising costs and a low circulation base.

President Ford reaffirmed at a press conference in New Hampshire his position favoring a constitutional amendment that would restore voluntary non-sectarian prayers in public schools. His comments came two days after a federal judge struck down as unconstitutional New Hampshire’s law that permits voluntary recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.

Chairperson Evelyn Underwood of the history department at Mars Hill College in Mars Hill, North Carolina, was elected to chair the board of deacons at the Mars Hill Baptist Church, one of the few women ever to hold such a position in a Southern Baptist church.

Paul Trulin, an Assemblies of God minister who directs crusades for evangelist Morris Cerullo, was appointed chaplain of the California state senate. He is the first fundamentalist or Pentecostal to hold the post in the seventeen years that Senator Albert Rodda has been selecting the chaplains. He succeeds a Buddhist, Shoko Masunaga, whose appointment last year raised a furor in evangelical circles.

A New York City Council committee approved changing the name of a park across the street from the United Nations headquarters to Zion Square. The name change is to protest the recent U. N. resolution against Zionism.

At next month’s biennial meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council at Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, the main topics will include the Anglican role in the ecumenical movement, the ordination of women to the priesthood, social justice and the place of violence, and evangelism. The sixty-member council represents churches in the worldwide Anglican Communion (including the Episcopal Church) with an aggregate membership of more than 60 million.

DEATH

LOUIS T. TALBOT, 87, chancellor and former president of Biola College (formerly Bible Institute of Los Angeles), well-known pastor and Bible teacher; in Los Angeles.

Personalia

United Presbyterian clergyman Sherwood E. Wirt, 64, editor of Decision since its launching in 1960 as the magazine of the Billy Graham organization, will retire April 1. Associate editor Roger C. Palms, formerly an American Baptist campus pastor, will succeed him.

For forty-two years blind singer Bob Findley of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Baptist preacher Paul Levin of Normal, Illinois, traveled the land together as an evangelistic team (“Paul and Bob”). Last month Findley announced his retirement. Levin will go on preaching and directing a tract ministry.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.