Spadework for Peace

The delegates of 90 Protestant and Orthodox church groups from 32 nations, winding up their momentous meeting in Geneva (TIME, March 4), were uneasy because they felt that the nations of the world now seem "impotent to deal with the crucial problems of international order."

To give their aid and counsel, they finished the spadework for the first full-dress assembly of the World Council of Churches to be held in 1948. Probable site: Holland or Denmark. Purpose: to mobilize the influence of the world's Protestant and Orthodox churches as a prime mover in international affairs.

To its 15-man commission on international relations the Geneva delegates named four U.S. members:

P: John Foster Dulles, Manhattan lawyer, Republican internationalist, chairman of the Federal Council of Churches Commission on a Just & Durable Peace, Tom Dewey's foreign affairs adviser in 1944, U.S. delegate to UNO.

P: Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, of Union Theological Seminary, standard bearer of U.S. Protestantism's intellectuals, militant interventionist before Pearl Harbor.

P: Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam of New York, liberal, plain-spoken president of the U.S. Federal Council of Churches.

P: Episcopal Bishop G. Ashton Oldham of Albany, N.Y., longtime internationalist, who in 1940 damned neutrality as an "abhorrent thing."

Robbed of Glory. Though the Geneva meeting was as important to Protestantism as was Rome's consistory to Catholicism, it received small notice in the world's press. Reason: newsmen--except a few reporters from church publications--were barred from most sessions.

Last week Stanley I. Stuber, press-relations man for the Northern Baptist Convention, echoing widespread U.S. Protestant irritation, asked why. Wrote he, to the New York Times:

"What is so secret about the World Council of Churches? What has it to hide? Millions of Protestants want to know, in detail, just what is taking place. . . . This is certainly the wrong way to begin a world fellowship.

"The Roman Catholic Church has been receiving pages of copy in the secular press. It rightly deserves this coverage. ... It not only made news; it invited the press to be firsthand observers of it.

"Protestants have a long way to go before they can present such a united front. . . . Nothing will so rob Protestantism of its glory as will closed doors and closed minds."

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