Rev. Reds

When the "locomotive of history" (Lenin's phrase) took its latest "sharp turn" and thundered dizzily onto that marvel of engineering, the Soviet-Nazi trestle, many a U. S. liberal got train-sick, made ready to leap. But not all. Last week some churchmen still sat in the Pullman, even while the locomotive of history rattled past the unlovely view of bombs raining on Finland (see p. 23),

A lean and hungry-looking, magnetic Stalinist (but no party member) is Rev.

William Benjamin ("Bill") Spofford, Episcopalian, longtime editor of The Witness, longtime secretary of the Church League for Industrial Democracy. With three bishops among its executives, the C.L.I.D. is respectable enough, but its critics have found it more complacent toward Communism than toward Fascism. After the Russo-German pact, The Living Church (Episcopal weekly) called upon Secretary Spofford to declare himself anew. He did so in a letter which the magazine published, and answered editorially, last week. Excerpts:

"Russia is a functioning Socialist State and as such is a congenital foe of Fascism. . . . Russia . . . was forced to deal with Hitler in its own way. . . . [The Living Church] calls upon me to 'sever all relations' with those bright enough to understand what is going on, suggesting that I am falling for 'their essentially un-Christian propaganda.' Well, I think I know un-Christian propaganda when I see it and there is rather more of it, in this war as in the last, coming from Christian pulpits and editorial offices of Church papers than from Union Square."

After these pro-Russian sentiments had appeared in print last week, Bill Spofford was irritated by the invasion of Finland. To protect Leningrad, Russia needed Baltic bases, and Finland might have handed them over quietly. Whether the C. L. I. D. (some 3,000 members) would take the same line when it meets in January, he did not know.

Commonly considered a Communist-steered organization is the American League for Peace and Democracy (see p. 16), of which Bill Spofford is vice chairman, and another clergyman chairman: Methodist Dr. Harry Frederick Ward, Union Theological Seminary professor. At its latest meeting (held after the Moscow-Berlin Pact), the League condemned Nazi and Fascist aggression, finessed Russia. Last week, without condemning Russia, the League mousily proposed against it the same sort of U. S. war embargo it had loudly urged against Fascist aggressors.

From the world's highest-placed ecclesiastical friend of Soviet Russia, white-thatched Very Rev. Dr. Hewlett Johnson, "Red Dean" of Canterbury, nothing was heard last week about Finland. Two months ago he was still lolling in the club car behind the locomotive of history. Said the gaitered dean then: ". . . Communism has recovered the essential form ' of the real belief in God, which organized Christianity, as it is now, has so largely lost."

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