Archbishop Paul J. Hallinan told students at Morris Brown College Tuesday that “the world does not wait for us to plunge into a crisis, it pushes us in both as children and as adults.” He said that crisis is made by men, about men, around men and that man was made for crisis.

“I have spoken to you (and will continue to do so) without regard to color. White or black, this generation must identify itself not just with headline crises of the day in Viet Nam or Manila or Pekin, in Harlem or Cleveland’s Hough Avenue, in the national capital in Washington or the governor’s chair in Atlanta. It must recognize and help to solve the central pressing human crisis.”

“But I do suggest to you several sectors of society where you and I, white and Negro, young or middle-aged can begin.” “One is the technological phase through which we are passing. Man was not meant to destroy his tools, not was he meant to be a tool. He must use them.”

“Let us look at another point of the crisis - a loss of the concept of dedicated service to God and our fellowman, a shortage of theological students. This seems to have affected especially the failure of Negro youths to fill the ranks of clergymen. (Personal preoccupation because I am a bishop.) No, nor just a normal concern that the 130 Negro graduates of seminaries can never fill the 26,000 of the National Baptist Convention (1 of 5). Rather, it is not a signal of a decline in the whole concept of service from a church ministry. There is little money in it, not much advancement nor security, and a prestige that would be even more diminished were it not for the Negro ministers who are carrying God’s prophetic voice into the slums and streets, the conventions and media of communication, the halls of legislature. Thank God for them!” “There are not many Negro Catholics in Atlanta - (in fact not many Catholics at all - about 3 percent). This may explain why we have only one ordained Negro priest serving the white and Negro Catholic people of the community. I wish we had 20 more - to teach and counsel superbly, at one of our integrated high schools, to live and serve at Masses, the sacraments, the preaching at Sacred Heart, one of our most esteemed parishes where Negro and white worship together and Father Calhoun with three white priests ministers to them all.”

“Can we not get to know each other better? Stress things, share not differ? Can we not read together, sing-pray? Work together on the great cancers of our day - poverty, racial injustice, war?”

“When we integrated our schools five years ago, not token, but across the board, we were not doing this only for Catholic children. We hoped to give Atlanta an example of total integration. When our hospitals in 1963, admitted patients, (white, black) at random, not on basis of race or creed, but of medical need - we hoped, and we thought that every hospital in Atlanta would do the same.”

“As a Catholic archbishop, I invite you to our churches, as I often have been invited to your own. The ecumenical movement in religion is like civil rights in government, or free tuition in education, concern for hungry, deprived, despairing in everyday life. It is a step in the solving of today’s crisis.”

“But first we must identify the crisis itself. Only when real crisis stands up, human crisis, can we work at its solutions.”

“By education, by good judgment, by willingness to work for what is worthwhile, by honesty and courage, by the human dignity of personal VOCATION and the religious commitment that only man or woman of FAITH can have - thus we move not from crisis to crisis, but from hope to hope until we reach the God for whom we instinctively long. Saint Augustine- ‘You have made us for yourself, Lord-hearts will never be content until they rest in you.’”