Religion: Beachhead

Protestants don't like to be considered mission-fodder for Roman Catholics—and vice versa. Last week in Italy, of all places, in Rome's Holy Year, of all times, some U.S. evangelists were hanging on to an embattled beachhead. They were members of the Churches of Christ (loosely affiliated fundamentalist churches with an estimated U.S. membership of 700,000), most of them from Texas.

Their leader, tall, shock-haired Cline Paden, 30, from Lubbock, Texas, had gone to Italy in 1947 and found the country "sorely in need of material and spiritual help." With his brother Harold and eleven...