A Scots' Roman Holiday

Among the highest walls in Christendom is the one that stands between Roman Catholicism and the Church of Scotland.

Last week, with deft help from Pope John XXIII, it was scaled. Dr. Archibald Craig, Moderator of the Scottish Kirk, stepped over the Pope's threshold and visited him within the Vatican's walls.

Auld Kirk. Since its beginnings with the Scottish Reformation in 1560, the Kirk has held fast to a Calvinism that in one sense is more rigid than John Calvin's. Calvin's influence on John Knox, the great Scottish reformer, made him an architect of the Kirk's bulwark against the papacy. In 1647, Scottish delegates to the Westminster Assembly wed their church to a Confession of Faith that described the Pope as "AntiChrist, man of sin, son of perdition." The Archbishop of Canterbury's 1960 visit to Pope John tested the ground for all Protestantism, and last May a resolution was put before the Kirk's General Assembly that the Moderator--"when in Rome"--should call on the Pope.

"Shame!" cried conservative delegates in the camp of Glasgow's Rev. John Gray ("I'm Auld Kirk to the back teeth"), who insisted that the Kirk honor the Westminster Confession. "What fellowship can there be between light and darkness?" a minister shouted. When the resolution passed and the Kirk ruled that its Moderator could visit the Pope if invited, the conservative Free Church's journal thundered: "Instead of waiting cap in hand for an invitation from the Pope, we should be storming that bastion of AntiChrist with positive truths of the Gospel of Jesus Christ." The "if invited" clause that the Auld Kirk faction had demanded seemed likely to scotch the visit, since by Vatican protocol the Pope invites no one. But the Pope MODERATOR CRAIG AT ST. PETER'S Over the Wall.

gracefully arranged things by extending an invitation through Augustin Cardinal Bea, head of the Vatican's ecumenical Secretariat for Christian Unity. To mollify the fundamentalists, Dr. Craig insisted that he was going to Rome mainly for centenary celebrations at Rome's Scots Kirk of St. Andrews--a churchman's Roman holiday that, incidentally, would include a visit to the Pope. In a final effort to block the visit, Britain's National Union of Protestants dispatched the Rev.

Arnold Perkins to follow Dr. Craig to Rome and try to dissuade him.

Exchange of Gifts. Instead, one day last week the Moderator arrived a half-hour early at the Vatican, dressed in the lace-ruffed robe of his office. Pope John greeted him warmly and the two religious leaders talked for 38 minutes, agreed that "truth and liberty" must exist among all the world's Christians. After the meeting, Pope John presented Dr. Craig and his delegation with books and medals, and in return was given a silver bookmark and a stone from Lake Tiberius in the Holy Land. L'Osservatore Romano pronounced the Vatican "grateful" for the visit; the Vatican added--lest anyone forget--that the visit had been merely a "courtesy call." The visit leaves relations among all the churches of Christianity more genial than at any time since Luther. But within the Kirk there are hard feelings. The honorary treasurer of the Kirk of St. Andrews resigned his post in protest. When Dr. Craig turned up at St. Andrews to preach the centenary service, he felt it necessary to soothe the fundamentalists of his clan.

The Kirk, he said, "adheres to the 16th century Reformation and to the theological and ethical tradition deriving from Calvin and Knox." From the back of the church came the voice of Presbyterianism.

It was the Rev. Mr. Perkins. "Amen," said he.

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