Religion: God and Watergate

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Every Sunday in Los Angeles' First Unitarian Church, the Rev. Peter Christiansen passes petitions among his congregation calling for the impeachment of President Nixon. In Kansas City, the United Prayer Movement calls a day of prayer to ask God's help for the country. On Long Island, the Jewish journal Sh 'ma cites Talmudic teaching that "the executive is not above the law."

Thus, like many laymen, a number of churchmen have reacted with prayer and indignation to Watergate (now an entry, along with words like Adiaphora and Suttee, in the new Baker's Dictionary of Christian Ethics). Yet moral outrage from the pulpit is not as widespread as it might be; Sam Ervin has quoted the Bible on the issue ("God is not mocked") more often and more effectively than many a preacher. Items:

> When U.S. Roman Catholic bishops met in Washington last month, Philadelphia's John Cardinal Krol, their conference president, assailed the Supreme Court for its decisions on abortion and federal aid to parochial schools.

But Krol skirted any specific mention of Watergate, lumping it with other evils as part of "a serious departure from ethical and moral principles."

>U.S. Episcopalians, gathered for their triennial General Convention in Louisville in October, failed to go on record about Watergate.

> The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) held its general assembly in Cincinnati after the "Saturday Night Massacre" in which Archibald Cox was fired, but a motion calling for Nixon's impeachment was defeated.

> The Union of American Hebrew Congregations, meeting in New York City last month (TIME, Nov. 26), was expected to issue a strong statement on Watergate. The union's retiring president, Maurice Eisendrath, who died suddenly as the meeting began, had planned to scold Jews for their silence in the face of "the heinously immoral cesspool" of the Nixon Administration. But some delegates, nervous about U.S. aid to Israel, decided, as one of them put it, that it was "the height of folly to bite the hand that feeds us." Though the convention deplored Watergate as "a dangerous assault on constitutional liberties," it defeated resolutions calling for Nixon's impeachment or resignation.