The Evening Star (March 11, 1946)
ON THE RECORD —
Heed those who speak for our conscience
By Dorothy Thompson
From both great branches of the Christian Church, Catholic and Protestant, have come in these last days exhortations to seek peace, between and within human societies, through the application of Christian principles of justice, mercy and stewardship.
On Wednesday, March 6, Cardinal Spellman, addressing a vast gathering of the Catholic community in the Metropolitan Opera, asserted:
“Faith alone can survive and surmount the ruthless, mutinous passions of pretenders to peace who presume the power to define and impose it. Peace is the work of justice, and justice cannot yield her ripe fruit of wisdom while freedom is still shackled by the conceits of men … who … bar peoples and nations from the mutual understanding upon which true peace must be based.”
And on March 8, the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, representative of the great majority of the Protestant communities of America, issued a sober, thoughtful and detailed report on “The Churches and World Order.”
Thus a great Christian criticism of secular policy is forming within the frames of reference which are the basis of our culture – a criticism the more powerful and influential because it appeals beyond national or group interest to principle and consideration of the long-range welfare of humanity.
The Christian churches of America embrace a larger body of our citizenship than any other organizations whatsoever. There are, for instance, nearly twice as many Catholics as there are members of both great trade union bodies. There are more than five times as many Christian communicants, counted altogether.
There are, in the churches, thousands of simple pastors and priests, and hundreds of distinguished intellects, and whatever their shortcomings, as human individuals may have, there is no other such body of moral and intellectual leadership devoted to the maintenance and improvement of standards and working at many points, for the same end, with the only considerable American non-Christian religious leaders: the Jewish rabbinates.
It is in the American tradition, also, that the churches should exercise their influence and voice their criticism of secular affairs. The earliest American communities grew up around four institutions: The town hall – the earliest seat of democratic government, the court, the school, the church.
This nation was founded by God-fearing men who attempted to translate into the basic concepts of the republic, principles of justice deriving from the Bible. No country more often invoices the Creator in its great documents. Even Jefferson, who upset the theologians of his day by his skeptical and nonconformist deism, declared Christianity to embody ‘‘a system of morals, the most perfect and sublime that has ever been taught by man,” and, in the declaration justified the rights of man as an inalienable endowment by the Creator.
Our national hymn calls God our king. We print on our coins “In God we trust.” The greatest American battle song – Julia Ward Howe’s – is also a Christian hymn. And in the early days of our country scholars and divines exercised an authority and influence over the mind of the nation comparable to that of businessmen or their public relations counsels, and union leaders today – and one may question whether the change has been for the better.
The Christian churches are, furthermore, supranational bodies, tied in a fellowship with tens of millions throughout the world, in Axis and Allied countries, from which have come both the counsel of restraints on earthly political masters, and some of the strongest resistance to the murderous indignities of Fascism, creating martyrs for Christ in our own age.
A study of the lives and faiths of the few hundred Germans who died on the gallows for active resistance to Nazism, and who must be regarded as the truly representative spirits of the fully conscious German rejection of Nazism, leads one to the inescapable conclusion that German redemption can only come through the union of Socialism and Christian principle, for it was these two movements which the German martyrs fused.
The specific criticisms and recommendations regarding peace made by the Federal Council’s report on world order are beyond the scope of this editorial. We shall return to them and on more than one occasion – but they are the counsels of men who have laid aside passion in the quest for valid principle, who speak for the American conscience, who have malice toward none, and who, by reason of this, should be heard.