THE CHIEF FISHERMAN

WILLEM Adolf Visser 't Hooft is to the World Council of Churches about what Dag Hammarskjold was to the U.N. As the Council's General Secretary, he builds church unity by accenting common beliefs, by deprecating differences, by shunning extravagant or unripe measures. Yet a quiet faith that all Christians, including Roman Catholics, must eventually unite gives his life a clear direction. It is a just barely permissible joke among his closest friends to call Visser 't Hooft "the Protestant Pope." He replies with a wintry "I'm not infallible"--which is a rueful recognition that his job is touchy and hard, but also a proud admission that he has succeeded in shaping the World Council into an important organization.

If this is the Ecumenical Century, it is fitting that the leading ecumenist was born in the first year of it. His father was a lawyer in the Dutch city of Haarlem; the family name (pronounced fisser toaft) means "fisher at the head''--the chief fisherman. Willem--then called muis (mouse) for his thin, sharp face, but now nicknamed Wim--was the gayest of three brothers, excelling at hockey and tennis, and good, though not brilliant, in school. His father was shocked when Wim said he was thinking of becoming a pastor. "You will have a hard life, and I doubt if you'll like the salary you'll get," he said. Wim and his father made a deal: he was to study law and theology in alternate years. He found the law so dull and the theology so interesting that his father relented and let him go ahead with it.

A Polyglot Family. He took his doctorate at the State University of Leiden with a dissertation on the background of the social gospel in the U.S. But he was not ordained because the Remonstrant Church, to which he belonged, stipulated that all ministers must be pastors, and young Yisser 't Hooft had been tapped by the late great U.S. ecumenist John R. Mott to become secretary of the Y.M.C.A. World's Alliance in Geneva. The Swiss city has been his headquarters ever since, and having since been ordained in the Swiss Reformed Church, he preaches every now and then. He married fragile-looking Netherlander Henriette Philippine Jacoba Boddaert, with whom he has three children, all now grown and scattered throughout Europe. "The problem of an international family is language," grins Wim. "When we get together, if the conversation begins in French someone will switch it to Dutch or German, someone else to English."

From the Y.M.C.A., Visser 't Hooft moved to the World's Student Christian Federation, and ten years later became General Secretary of the Provisional Committee that became the World Council of Churches at Amsterdam in 1948.

Swiss Theologian Karl Barth has had a vast influence on Visser 't Hooft. "Barth felt that the church had almost lost its soul in making adjustments to historical trends," he says. "He called the church again to be itself." He remembers that the "unofficial slogan" of the men who met at Edinburgh and Oxford in 1937 to launch the ecumenical movement was "Let the Church be the Church." And this, he says, "did not mean that the church should run away from the world. It did mean that the church was not merely an echo of trends in the world." The ecumenical impulse is not "to collect churches as you collect stamps, but a movement of all faiths to put the church on a higher level. The biggest part of the ecumenical movement is to get all the churches involved in a great common task, and then they are forced together."

World War II had the unexpected effect of casting Visser 't Hooft in a new role--underground leader. Even before the war began, rescuing Jews and others from Hitler's Germany was one of his prime concerns. Karl Barth once told him of an imprisoned pastor Barth was especially worried about, and Wim remembered a beer-drinking session he had had in 1933 with a blackshirted Nazi who turned out to be Heinrich Himmler. So Churchman Visser 't Hooft wrote Nazi Himmler. recalling the incident, and succeeded in having the pastor released.

When the war started, Visser 't Hooft discovered that the smuggling of refugees to freedom combined naturally with the smuggling of information in and out of Holland for the Dutch government-in-exile in London. The apparatus' agents were equipped with microfilm in pens and with clandestine short-wave radio. His two sons remember with displeasure the furtive characters who were constantly turning up at the house, in Geneva; when one arrived, the children were always sent out of the living room--which during the war was the only heated room in the house. In those days the embryo World Council of Churches maintained an office of expert forgers to make false documents and identity papers.

One of Visser 't Hooft's pet projects after the war was the creation of an Ecumenical Institute in Switzerland for the training of leaders in the church unity movement. In the U.S. one evening, at dinner with Financiers Thomas W. Lamont and John D. Rockefeller Jr., he described the plan to Rockefeller, who replied: "You must ask for more money." Rockefeller later contributed about $1,000,000 to set up the Ecumenical Institute at Boissy, which last year graduated 36 students of 23 nationalities from its 20-week course.

A Taut Ship. In Geneva, Visser 't Hooft runs a staff of about 179, housed in a rambling cluster of chalets and barracks (until 1963. when the Council's new headquarters will be finished). Here he chain smokes his way efficiently through the day in a combination of informality (staffers phone or barge in on him directly, without going through his secretary) and protocol (he is acutely aware of any breach of seniority in seating at a conference or dinner table).

Visser 't Hooft's stern Dutch face reflects warmth and good fellowship over a drink or at the staff's daily 15-minute tea party, but the ship he runs at Geneva is taut. He is capable of festive foolery: at an office party each St. Nicholaas Eve (Dec. 5), he sings a song consisting of good-natured personal gibes at the staff. He travels plenty. "If I hold any kind of a record," he says, "it is for attending international conferences. I wonder if it isn't 1,000 by now."

Visser 't Hooft's chief hobby is Rembrandt. He first grew interested simply because Rembrandt, a fellow countryman, was one of history's greatest painters and had contributed so much to the world of art. But as he learned more about him, he realized that Rembrandt had done an extraordinary number of Biblical paintings. "He had a certain conception of the Bible," says Wim. "I became interested in what he was trying to say." But he found no books that told him, so the World Council's Visser 't Hooft wrote one himself: Rembrandt and the Gospel.

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