Log of a Clerical Junket

Last week the log of a clerical junket was completed. It ran:

July 16--The Christian Century's Editor Paul Hutchinson wrote: "There seem to be a lot of invitations to free trips overseas floating about these days. . . . [One] was on the Washington embassy stationery of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. . . . Reports from such trips ' aren't worth the paper they are printed on. . . ." Dr. Hutchinson declined.

July 26--Seven Protestant clergymen and a physician left New York's La-Guardia airport. They were: William Howard Melish, associate rector of Brooklyn's Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, chairman of the American-Soviet Friendship Council and longtime friend of the Communist Party; Dr. Guy Emery Shipler, anti-Roman Catholic editor of The Churchman, a gulliberal who says he is not a Communist fellow traveler; the Rev. Claude C. Williams of Birmingham, Ala., director of the Peoples' Institute of Applied Religion; George Walker Buckner Jr., editor of the World Call of the Disciples of Christ; Phillips P. Elliott, a Brooklyn Presbyterian pastor; Dr. Emory Stevens Bucke, editor of Methodism's Zions Herald; and septuagenarian Lutheran leader Dr. Samuel Geiss Trexler. Dr. Trexler demanded the company of his personal physician.

Aug. 3--Marshal Tito told the clergymen that relations between his Moscow-run dictatorship and the Vatican were bad, but, for the present, there would be no break "because I have patience."

Aug. 5--The U.S. delegation visited Roman Catholic Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac in prison (TIME, Oct. 21, 1946), said: "We assert emphatically that reports of mistreatment of Stepinac were false and provocative. ... He is in good health and there are no restrictions on his religious liberty. ... He says Mass daily in a chapel next to his cell."

Aug. 9--New York's Communist Daily Worker quoted Dr. Shipler as saying: "The Stepinac case is one of the main reasons for our coming to Yugoslavia. We are certain Stepinac should be imprisoned."

Aug. 14--Dr. Bucke returned to his Boston desk. Said he: "I absolutely cannot subscribe to statements by Shipler and others on the justification of Stepinac's jail sentence."

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