Caring for Their Own

Church and state are separate powers in the Mennonite credo, but the brethren prefer to give the state as wide a berth as possible. Their tightly knit, theocratic little communities assiduously care for their own--and just as assiduously administer their own brand of law. Last week Mennonite law clashed resoundingly with the harsher realities of the law of the land.

Udder Trouble. It all began when sandy-haired Adin Hege, 52, a farmer in the Mennonite community at Maugansville, Md. bought a new cow. Adin discovered that the cow had an inflammation of the udder. He stopped payment on his check. Sued for the amount ($347), Adin went to court to explain his case. But Mennonite law forbids the brethren to settle disputes in court. Mennonite Bishop Mose's Horst announced that Adin had been excommunicated.

Adin was forthwith "shunned" by the whole sect. Friends stopped talking to him. Neighbors came to visit his wife when he was in the fields, left as soon as he returned. Irritated by his lonely existence, Adin finally lit on a group of neighbors and told them to stay away altogether. About this time a nephew decided Adin was showing signs of insanity. He had a talk with Psychologist Jacob Goering at Brook Lane, a Mennonite hospital for mental care. On the basis of the nephew's description, bolstered by talks with Adin's wife, Goering decided that Adin was dangerously unbalanced.

Flat on the Floor. At 6 o'clock one morning Farmer Hege was getting ready to milk his cows when a group of neighbors approached him for the first time since his excommunication. Before he knew what was happening, four of them had laid him flat on the stone floor before the milk shed. A woman shoved a hypodermic into his left arm. Adin soon lost consciousness, and was driven across the state line to Philhaven, another Mennonite mental hospital in Lebanon, Pa. No outsider might have known anything about it if a passerby had not chanced to see Adin's brethren loading his limp body into the station wagon. Several days later, he got around to telling the district attorney. Authorities established that Adin was missing, and ran him to earth at Philhaven.The hospital agreed to release Adin. Two non-Mennonite doctors examined him and found no reason for his confinement.

Last week Psychologist Goering. the nurse who had wielded the needle, and nine of Adin's neighbors, Mennonites all, were fined a total of $6,000 for assault in a Hagerstown, Md. court. "We have a democracy, and you should subscribe to it," scolded the judge. But the law of the Mennonite community was still the one Farmer Hege had to deal with, and there he still stood condemned. All Hege need do to return to the fold, said Bishop Horst, was to "confess his error." Said Adin: "I think I'll leave it lay right now."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.