Heckled Priests

"How can evil like cancer exist if all that God created was good?" challenged a heckler. "Cancer is not an evil," retorted Roman Catholic Father David I. Dorsch of Baltimore. "Sin alone is evil, because sin alone keeps man from his final end, God."

"Why must an omnipotent God be cajoled by prayer?" someone else shouted. "Prayer is the duty owed by creature to Creator," came the answer. The priests had to stand up and answer atheistic, Mohammedan, Presbyterian, and Jehovah's Witness heckling.

It was all a pious exercise. Hecklers and speakers alike were delegates to the ninth annual National Catholic Evidence Conference, which met last week at Manhattan's Hotel Commodore. In arguing over confession, extreme unction, miracles, indulgences, purgatory, the Pope, they were demonstrating tactics for open-air meetings from Boston Common to Los Angeles' Pershing Square.

Looking on and loving it were: plump, pleasant Archbishop Francis Joseph Spellman of New York; bland, swart Archbishop Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, Pius XII's Apostolic Delegate to the U. S. They were glad to see priests adept at quick comebacks. Said Delegate Cicognani: "The apostles preached in this way. . . . It was in the streets that Our Lord met those who were in bad need."

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