Words & Works

P:Pius XII, who has been seen by more people than any Pope in history, registered three firsts: for the first time in his reign he granted a delegation of Jews (from the American Jewish Committee) a formal pontifical address. For the first time since the Russian revolution a group of Russian tourists visited St. Peter's Basilica while the Pope was carried through the aisles in his shoulder-borne chair (they disappeared before the apostolic benediction). And for the first time women's fashions received smiles rather than censure from the Vatican. In receiving some 200 designers, models, salesgirls and seamstresses of Rome's top high-fashion house, Fontana, Pius XII talked a language understood from Rome's Via Condotti to Manhattan's Fifth Avenue in commenting on one of Fontana's sidelines (making austere black dresses for foreigners to wear at papal audiences). "We are glad," said the Pope, "that we, too, bring you some work."

P:In The Christian Century, Theology Professor and Baptist Walter Marshall Horton of Oberlin Graduate School of Theology warned a little snappishly that Protestant unity can not and should not be had just for the wishing. "Luncheon clubs, convinced that 'the more we get together the happier we are,' and Hindu philosophers, convinced that all religions are routes to the same destination, can logically support this vague, diffuse type of unity, but Christians cannot. One perennial cause of misunderstanding about the ecumenical movement is that the lay public innocently supposes that this is the 'nature of the unity we seek,' and then cannot comprehend why we waste so much time 'negotiating' when we ought at once to fall on each other's necks and burst out together into Schiller's Hymn to Joy."

P:Nathan H. Knorr, president of the Watchtower Bible & Tract Society, announced that Jehovah's Witnesses now have 700,000 members in 162 countries. "Our numbers have tripled in Poland in the last seven years," he said, "although we are banned and persecuted in all Iron Curtain countries." Witness growth he attributed to the sense of being faced by a "deadline"--the Battle of Armageddon, which Witnesses calculate will take place some time before 1984.

P:A committee of French winegrowers is currently distributing reprints of a sermon delivered in Vannes Cathedral by the Rev. M. H. Lelong. The Bible, says Roman Catholic Father Lelong, is full of wine--there are 443 Biblical references to it, in fact. "Along with bread," he writes, "it is wine that Jesus chose to perpetuate his presence among us. Wine is not an invention of the devil but a gift of our Father, who knows us and loves us."

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