Religion: The Morals of Integration

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No churchman in the U.S. South has fought more consistently for integrating whites and Negroes in the churches and eventually in the schools than New Orleans' 80-year-old Archbishop Joseph F. Rummel (TIME. Oct. 24, 1955 et seq.), onetime pastor of a Roman Catholic parish in New York's Harlem. Last week some of his own segregation-minded flock went over his head to the Pope to protest against Rummel's "strange new doctrine." In a letter to Pius XII, the Association of Catholic Laymen of New Orleans asked the Pope to stop Rummel from taking "further steps" to integrate white and Negro Catholics and to decree that racial segregation is not "morally wrong and sinful." Concluded the letter: "For the good of souls something must be done."

Archbishop Rummel declined to comment. But in Rome a Vatican spokesman quickly slapped down the letter as "a grave error." Apart from the fact that the New Orleans group committed a breach of discipline in making public an appeal over the authority of their archbishop, they should have known that the Holy See is unalterably opposed to all forms of racial discrimination and that it has interpreted segregation as discrimination. "It is utterly disquieting," said a member of the Holy Office, "that there should be Catholics so ignorant of Christian doctrine and fundamentals. The only charitable view one can place on the request is that those who uttered it have some difficulty in mentally understanding the doctrine of the Church —or else ignore it altogether."