Church & State

A considerable number of Protestants are suffering from an acute case of papal jitters. Last week 1,600 of them, including many prominent churchmen, issued a 450-word statement urging the Big Three to make no "deals" whatsoever with the Vatican. Said the statement : "Establishments of religion, however widely representative, however exalted, have no place at the council tables of the state. ... As a political power . . . the papacy has thrown its weight into the scales of the present human struggle on the side of the enemies of democracy. . . . We insist that a church which would link its destiny to that of the state must be kept at arm's length by the state." The statement was made public by Kenneth Leslie, left-wing editor of The Protestant. Among its signers: Dr. John A. Mackay (Presbyterian), of Princeton Theological Seminary; Bishop Francis J. McConnell (Methodist); Dr. Edwin Mc-Neill Poteat (Baptist), of Colgate-Rochester Divinity School.

Next day in Manhattan's St. Patrick's Cathedral, Archbishop Francis J. Spellman departed from the text of his sermon to denounce the statement as an i"insult to 25,000,000 fellow-Americans" He called the signers "selfstyled superpatriots [who] do disservice to their country and violate the Golden Rule."

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