"Intolerant Mutterings"

Last week the Greater New York Fund--community chest for 380 Catholic, Protestant, Jewish health and welfare bodies--held a dinner to rally workers. Its 1939 campaign goal: $10,000,000. Speech of the evening was made by that most coherent of speechmaking bankers, Thomas William Lament. Banker Lament did not speak of sweet charity alone. On his mind was something currently bothering many a man of good will. Said he:

"In this campaign of ours we have a strong, practical demonstration of neighborliness and tolerance. How vastly different, by way of contrast, is our situation from that in certain countries overseas where we have been witnessing a racial and religious persecution so cruel as to render life almost intolerable. Is there danger of such racial or religious antipathies crossing the ocean and finding foothold here? I cannot believe it. Yet, from time to time, even in this country, we hear vague, intolerant mutterings. . . .

"We all know that America for generations has prided itself upon its increasingly high standards of living. But we know too that the standard of living has a significance more profound than any mere material term would imply. ... A standard of living, based on a high level because of its spiritual as well as its material wellbeing, can never exist in a nation oppressed with fear, prejudice, racial superstition or religious persecution. . . ."

> Up to last week most U. S. Catholic weeklies had ignored an official statement of U. S. bishops deploring "all forms of racial bigotry." This pronouncement, made in Washington by members of the administrative board of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, was released last April 22. It was of a policy-making kind which the Catholic press would ordinarily frontpage. Among the few papers which featured it: the Michigan Catholic, St. Paul Wanderer, Buffalo Catholic Union and Times, Pittsburgh Catholic Observer, New York Catholic News.

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