Religion: Undesirable Aliens

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The unblinking eye of the Cook County (Chicago) Council of the American Legion scanned the roster of 450 Protestant leaders from abroad who have been invited to the World Council of Churches

Assembly in Evanston, Ill. this summer. Four of them struck the Legion council as so "antagonistic to capitalism and to America" that the Legionnaires urged the State Department not to admit them: Dr. W. A. Visser 't Hooft of The Netherlands, General Secretary of the World Council, Methodist Bishop Theodor Arvidson of Sweden and two of the eleven delegates scheduled to come from behind the Iron Curtain—Dr. Joseph L. Hromadka of Czechoslovakia and Bishop Albert Bereczky. president of the General Synod of Hungarian Reformed Churches.

Dr. Franklin Clark Fry, president of the United Lutheran Church in America and vice chairman of the executive committee of the World Council, was "shocked and full of regret." It was difficult, he said, "to understand the psychology of any American who is so uncertain of the correctness of the American position" that he fears a few men "can corrupt the entire American nation."