PHILOMENA
At last Ecclesian has its patron saint. A niche will be rushed to completion in the revolving altar at the All-Faiths Chapel in Deepwell Heights. The saint is a former Catholic named St. Philomena.
News dispatches recently described the embarrassment she caused the Archbishop of Boston, Richard Cardinal Cushing, when he was about to name a church in her honor. The new red brick colonial-style church was already Philomena’s in the minds of loyal parishioners. Members of the Philomena guild had received 800 small statues of Philomena from the Cardinal.
Then, just as he was leaving for the dedication service, the Cardinal learned the truth about St. Philomena. She wasn’t a saint any longer. The Sacred Congregation of Rites at the Vatican had dropped her name from the rolls. In fact, Vatican sources went so far as to question whether she had ever existed.
The Cardinal had to face all those assembled people and tell them that St. Philomena’s couldn’t be St. Philomena’s. “It was a difficult job,” he said. “It was like telling the Irish there was no St. Patrick.”
Will someone tell the Cardinal that Philomena need not be forgotten? Ecclesian-speaking Protestants have long venerated any number of events which never happened, as they see it. It is no trick at all for them to preach on Abraham with the sure conviction that he never lived. Come home, Philomena. Ecclesian can demythologize your past and make you a contemporary event.
We shall also need some enterprising dealers in church goods to buy (at a sharp discount) surplus statues of Philomena. The ground swell for the new patron saint can be expected to spread to every contemporary chapel in exurbia. It may become a Philomenical movement.
EUTYCHUS
EDUCATION AND RELIGION
In your editorial of April 10, 1961, you again question the principle of federal aid to education. However, you fail to point out the values of such a program. One of the values seldom heard is federal control over public schools which will accompany or follow financial aid. Perhaps the control is more needed than are the funds. Our nation needs a public educated to national values rather than values modified by provincial interests. Federal control will maintain proper educational standards. Through proper regulation and control our schools can eliminate racial, religious and ethnic favoritism.…
ROLAND J. BROWN
Minister of Education
First Baptist
Oak Park, Ill.
Federal aid to any school is unconstitutional and there is no way to make it otherwise except by amending the constitution. The constitution does not mention the word “education” and therefore by its own provisions this matter remains under the exclusive jurisdiction of the States.…
JOHN B. COOLEY
Mountville, S. C.
When sectarian groups, whether ecclesiastical or lay, establish institutions of which the sole purpose is to render the kinds of services which in any event must be rendered, such as education and the care of the ill, aged, disabled, orphaned, etc., it would seem no violation of the principle of the separation of Church and State to allow these institutions to share with public institutions in certain kinds of public assistance.…
Now the only alternative to sectarian schools is public educational institutions all of which must be strictly secular.… But where, pray, has strict secularism proved to be a more desirable alternative for the life of a nation than Roman Catholic faith and morality, and where has strict secularism proved more congenial than Rome to Protestantism?… A nation containing a multiplicity of sectarian groups, each possessing equal rights and privileges, may yet proclaim itself to be a Christian nation and may yet possess a citizenry guided in its public and private affairs by a basically Christian morality. But a wholly secularized nation is worse than a paganized nation.…
JOHN H. STEK
Raymond Christian Reformed Church
Raymond, Minn.
I hate to think of what might happen if our public schools were abolished and we parents put the education of our children into the Tom, Dick and Harry hands of the 250 religious sects in our country many of which are mainly interested in educating our children in ignorance so they will hold certain traditional opinions about the Bible that have been handed down from the days of medieval ignorance and superstition.
A. M. WATTS
Chester, Vt.
Instead of asking if it is too late to remove the wedge of church participation in federal funds, I believe you should be pleading for Protestant Christians to take advantage of this God-permitted potential opportunity, which would remove the chief material obstacle to starting Christian day schools in individual localities.… We already have religion in the public schools, supported by public funds, and it is the religion of the humanists—deification of man.… And by pervading the education of the young and conditioning their impressionable minds, it not only unfairly advantages itself but insures its self-perpetuation logarithmically in succeeding generations.
MRS. TOM DODSON
Fairfax, Va.
Education is always given in a religious perspective: it is governed by a certain concept of man and his relationship to God and the world about him. No man can educate except in terms of some unifying perspective. This is as true of religious schools as of “a-religious” schools.
If this be true, then religious pluralism calls for educational pluralism. But pluralism in a free society implies equality of privilege. If the religious school, whether Roman Catholic, Jewish, or Protestant, is to have no public support, then neither should the a-religious.…
If Roman Catholicism is a menace, then let us do all we can to make Protestantism flourish. Instead of allowing millions of Protestant children to grow up and be trained in an atmosphere of religious neutrality, let us build virile Protestant schools. And let us demand equal support for these schools.…
If there cannot be an Established Church in a free society, how is it … that there can be an Established School? Certainly, the intrinsic connection between religion and education is more important … than the present “historical” connection between government and education.
JOHN VRIEND
Simcoe, Ont.
Where the Roman Catholic, or parochial schools, have become very strong, the public schools have become proportionately weak.…
The Roman Catholic schools exist to teach Roman Catholic doctrines. Why should three-quarters of the people be taxed to pay for the teaching of doctrines they oppose?
JOHN L. MCCREIGHT
United Presbyterian Church
Walton, N. Y.
The leaders of this church are really saying that the public schools, though the finest in the world, are not good enough for the children of Catholic parenthood.… The public school has been, by far, the greatest factor that has made America free, strong, and progressive. This “better than thou” philosophy is wholly un-American and selfish.
AUGUST H. WESSELS
The First Presbyterian Church
Watsontown, Pa.
You are to be commended for the fine editorials which have appeared recently concerning the grants of Federal funds to parochial and private schools. If only a vast number of people could read these to stiffen their spines against an invasion of our basic constitutional tenets.… One inroad softens the blow for the next one and it is this piecemeal invasion of basic democratic principles which could eventually destroy those very principles and our American democratic way of life.
PHYLLIS K. INGRAM
Massena, N. Y.
It is not correct that the Citizens for Educational Freedom is “campaigning for federal funds” (News, March 17 issue). The CEF has taken no stand for or against the idea of federal subsidy to education. Its position is limited to promoting the idea that, should federal funds be forthcoming, those funds should be distributed equitably for the benefit of all children whether they are in public or non-public schools. As a means to this end it supports the idea of channeling the funds through parents.…
The National Union of Christian Schools has taken no official stand on the question of federal aid to private schools.
G. A. ANDREAS
Pella, Iowa
PAUL AND MORONI
My thanks to Mr. C. S. Logan (Eutychus, March 27 issue) for “quoting” me in such fantastic terms that no rebuttal is necessary. How Paul could have “plagiarized” from a book written in the New World and the fifth century A.D. I am at a loss to explain. Incidentally I am not and never have been head of the Department of Religion at the Brigham Young University. But I do remember trying to explain to Mr. Logan that Paul sometimes uses expressions that were not original to him. In particular, his “Hymn to Charity,” as Harnack, J. Weiss, and Reitzenstein each discovered independently and with considerable reluctance, comes from an older source.… Mr. Logan has yet to show that Paul and Moroni could not have been drawing on a common source.
HUGH NIBLEY
Brigham Young University
Provo, Utah
When Mr. Thomas Stuart Ferguson states that the discovery of ancient cities in Central America is proving the truth of the Book of Mormon, he is contradicting the anthropologists of his own church.
Dr. M. Wells Jakeman, Mormon anthropologist at Brigham Young University, has said, “It must be confessed that some members of the ‘Mormon’ or Latter-day Saint Church are prone, in their enthusiasm for the Book of Mormon, to make claims for it that cannot he supported … not enough is yet known of the actual period of that [Book of Mormon] record in ancient America, or of the origin of the American Indians, for a final judgment at this time, scientifically speaking” (University Archaeological Society Newsletter, No. 57, March 25, 1959, p. 4).
Dr. Ross Christensen, also of B.Y.U., stated as recently as January of 1960, “As for the notion that the Book of Mormon has already been proved by archaeology, I must say with Shakespeare, ‘Lay not that flattering unction to your soul!’ ” (Ibid., No. 64, January 30, 1960, p. 3).
HAROLD H. HOUGEY
Church of Christ
Martinez, Calif.
ROLE FOR FAULKNER
Dr. Hazelton in no way denies that “the Christian view of man is specially anchored in God’s revelation in Christ and the Scripture,” to quote Dr. Henry’s review (Feb. 27 issue). He rather, I believe, comments on the sad fashion in which much of our contemporary preaching, for all its sanctified setting, fails to proclaim the Gospel. Simetimes a Faulkner or a Camus actually comes closer to basic religious truth, with or without Christ, than some of our preachers who piddle around Sunday after Sunday with pious moralisms and hackneyed, soporific platitudes.…
Let us also remember that the Holy Spirit can and often does work independently of the Bible whenever it suits His purposes. Read Romans 2:14–16 for amplification. Even admitting John 14:6, we cannot narrow the Spirit’s workings down to our favorite channels by saying that He gets through to us only via the Scriptures or any other authoritative medium. The works of men such as Faulkner or Camus are a praeparatio evangelica, a “preparation for the Gospel,” serving to call to mind certain religious truths for men who would never come near either Bible or church.
I leave to others to decide which is the greater heresy: what I have said or Dean Hazelton has said, or the fallacy of thinking that the Holy Spirit can only work through the literally interpreted Word, “conversion experiences,” certain creedal statements, or other channels which, after all, are merely human channels designed to lead men to Christ who is the only Way and the Truth and the Life.
EDWARD A. JOHNSON
Director of Alumni Relations
Carthage College
Carthage, Ill.
WHAT MUST I DO?
May I suggest that Dr. Ward [made] … one glaring omission in his sermon (Mar. 13 issue), which to me is so very important. It is an error found in much of today’s preaching, namely, what should the reader do about it? “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” is still the question so many preachers leave unanswered.
STANLEY H. WRIGHT
Kearney, N. J.
GETTING THEM RIGHT
Congressman J. Edward Roush is a member of the College Park Church of the United Brethren in Christ, in Huntington, Indiana, not the Brethren in Christ as reported in your Jan. 2 issue (News).
ROBERT H. MILLER
Smithfield Church of the United Brethren in Christ
Smithville, Ohio
• An earlier report on religious affiliations of Senators (Dec. 5 issue) also erroneously identified Clark of Pennsylvania (he is a Unitarian) and Long of Louisiana (he is a Methodist).
—ED.
