Brotherhood

Protestant, Catholic and Jewish leaders from North America and Western Europe assembled more than 200 strong in Paris last week to set up a new international body. The World Organization for Brotherhood will be a kind of global counterpart of the national conferences of Christians and Jews which have grown up in the last 25 years.

Like the national conferences, which are expected eventually to merge with it, the new body enjoins its members not to involve the organization in politics, or engage in common worship or seek a common faith, but to concentrate on cooperation among all those "who believe in a spiritual interpretation of the universe."

A Higher Loyalty. Chairman of the opening meeting was Presbyterian Dr. Arthur Holly Compton, atomic physicist and chancellor of Washington University St. Louis.

"We represent," said Dr. Compton, those who consider it a matter of great significance that in the sight of God it is man, not the state, that counts ... The fact that theism demands a higher loyalty than that to the state means that those who consider the state supreme must fight belief in God. That is why there should be no rivalry between the churches, so that religious groups can form a spearhead in the defense of freedom."

From Roman Catholic Archbishop Maurice Feltin of Paris came a message welcoming the World Organization for Brotherhood as a rallying of the "most authentic spiritual forces."

Said U.S. Industrialist Roger W Straus, a Jewish layman who was one of the original founders of the National Conference of Christians & Jews: "Statesmen ot the Western world must employ all their skill" to establish international good will. "But only spiritual force will gain them the heights of their aspiration because it is only the idealistic man who has the power to give life to progress."

A Holy Task. Dr. Marc Boegner, leading French Protestant and one of the six presidents of the World Council of Churches, pledged the support of the World Council's 156 component bodies. Said Isaiah Schwartz, Chief Rabbi of France: "At the present time, when so many clouds are accumulating on the horizon, there is no task more holy and more necessary than that presented to us."

The founders of the World Organization for Brotherhood also heard a moving plea from Belgium's Socialist Paul-Henri Spaak: "If our aims on earth are truly the same, to organize human happiness in ever-widening social justice, we must find the means to put ourselves in agreement on the means and to end our murderous divisions. It must be possible to get around this historical struggle which threatens to end only in sterile clericalism and anti-clericalism."

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