Religion: Words & Works

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¶ The National Council of Churches announced some glowing statistics from its forthcoming 1953 Yearbook of American Churches. U.S. church membership has reached an alltime high of 92,277,129, a gain of 4.1% over last year, and 2½ times the nation's population gains. Protestants gained 3.9%, Roman Catholics 3.5%. Protestants now represent 34.7% of the population, Catholics 19.3%.

¶ Nineteen-year-old Quintuplet Marie Dionne, for whom half the world prayed when her life flickered for days after her birth, announced that she would become a nun. She will enter the convent of the Sisters of the Holy Sacrament in Quebec City this fall, a cloistered order devoted to perpetual adoration of the Holy Sacrament. "From now on," she said, "I will have an opportunity to repay those people who remembered me when I was in need."

¶ On the leafy campus of Phillips Academy at Andover, Mass., some 800 delegates of the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America (combined membership: 152,395) voted for federal union of the two sects. The delegates also chose a name for the council which will govern the new federation: Council of Liberal Churches (Universalist-Unitarian).