Religion: Words & Works

¶ The Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church, the Rt. Rev. Henry Knox Sherrill, wondered publicly whether the U.S. is not getting too glib in talking about a "religious revival." The term is being "used too often, and too much is expected of it," he said to a church gathering in Omaha, Neb. "Too many of us have such great feelings about such little things. As in apostolic times, we will have to outlive, outthink and outdie the pagan world.

¶Church membership figures released by the National Council of Churches for the period 1929-52 show a membership growth for the Roman Catholic Church of 50.7%, and for 18 large Protestant denominations of 42.7%.

¶ Dr. Adolfo Munoz Alonso, Spanish theologian and philosophy professor at the University of Madrid, found some Protestant leaflets in his morning's mail and went off like a cobalt bomb. Such literature, he wrote in the Falangist daily Arriba, is "simply an insult. This is not a social and political outrage but something even more repulsive—a lack of consideration." Nowadays, he wrote, Protestantism is not even a faith, "not a positive doctrine but a negative one. It is not an attempt at moral, spiritual or religious reform, nor an individualist explanation of the Gospel. Today Protestantism has lost all doctrinal basis and has argued itself into radical irrationalism . . ."