Tidings

> A Roman Catholic laymen's group, after a year of trying to find out more about church finances, charged in a report last week that there was not enough information to find out. The National Association of Laity graded the financial reporting of each U.S. diocese on a scale from A to F. Only two of the nation's eight largest --Chicago and Detroit--got as much as a D. New York and Los Angeles rated F for being "misleading." Brooklyn, Newark and Philadelphia (home of John Cardinal Krol, president of the U.S. bishops' conference) have never even issued a financial statement. Boston was not graded because it will soon issue a report. The N.A.L. analysis argued that with diocesan books so incompletely documented, it was highly inappropriate for U.S. bishops to spend an alleged $6,000,000 a year lobbying for public tax support of Catholic schools (see EDUCATION).

> Manhattan's Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine "should be reclassified as taxable property," an Episcopal magazine maintains. The Living Church, an independent, conservative-leaning weekly, bases its argument on last month's antiwar rally of the People's Coalition for Peace and Justice, held in the cathedral with the permission of New York's Episcopal Bishop Coadjutor, the Rt. Rev. Paul Moore Jr. A church should not be used for "partisan political gatherings," remonstrates the magazine in an editorial, citing the availability of "Dump Nixon" pamphlets at the rally. What is more, the magazine complains, the crowds smoked, left beer cans in the pews, and even included a man with slit pants who was "free to parade in the church with his bare bottom exposed."

> Herder & Herder of New York, the largest publisher of Catholic books in the U.S., has been sold to McGraw-Hill Book Co. by its parent firm, Germany's Verlag Herder, for an "undisclosed amount of cash." Publisher of the popular "Dutch Catechism" (400,000 copies) and more recently The Sex Book (125,000 copies), Herder & Herder has also given the U.S. top international theologians and philosophers, including Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan and Marxist Ernst Bloch. As a separate unit of McGraw-Hill, Herder & Herder will keep its colophon, expand its religious publishing and enlarge its editorial staff. Though some religious publishers have fallen on bad days, McGraw-Hill did not get a loser: Herder & Herder has been in the black for the past ten years.

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