By Harry Murphy

“It is not without affection and deep respect that he is sometimes referred to in this country as Johnny Unitas.”

Speaking was W.C. Fields, president of the Associated Church Press. As he stated in Atlanta last week, the purpose of the first joint convention of his organization and the Catholic Press Association.

He was referring to the last Pope John XXIII, but his comments were typical of the convention’s tone: ecumenism, levity and searching for truth.

“We have begun to shift from diatribe to dialogue,” Fields said of Catholics and Protestants.

“This spirit, like a sea wind, is moving with surprising force across the earth. It breathes upon us here today. One such an occasion we are reminded afresh of the impact on the world of that remarkable man, Guisueppe Roncalli, by the grace of God Pope John III.”

Fields, now searching, expressed fear for the role of churches in men’s lives. “Now when people are in trouble,” he said, “they turn to the government, not the churches.

“The role of the state is expanding while that of the church is becoming more and more marginal. The man of the moment, especially in the South, is the politician. He is the adjuster, the arbiter, the broker of the many conflicting and competitive interests of our time.

“He and his colleagues are the movers and shakers of our society. With business and industrial leaders, the politicians are remodeling southern life.”

Atlanta Archbishop Thomas A. Donnellan extended a welcome to the 500 delegates.

Archbishop Philip M. Hannan of New Orleans, chairman of the Department of Communications for the U.S. Catholic Conference, said in the keynote luncheon address that “Man must communicate because God created him to communicate.”

In the Christian profession of the press, he added, “We are not content only to record what happens, but what ought to happen; we are content not only to record what we think and are but what we ought to be.

“We are committed not only to record the events of the people of God but to help to form them. For this task we need prophetic vision, the vision of God.”

“The Crisis of Authority” was hashed out by Father Walter J. Burkhardt of Woodstock (Md.) Seminary, and Dr. Albert Outler, of Southern Methodist University.

Burkhardt said that within Catholicism today “the traditional vertical relationship of command-obedience needs to be supplemented by the horizontal relationship of dialogue between authority and the free Christian community.”

He cautioned, however, that “The exclusively horizontal would be as destructive of the Catholic community as the exclusively vertical.”

He said, “Authority in the church will never again be what it was before Vatican II. Man is different; his world is different; and we have grown to a more profound understanding of what Christian responsibility, Christian freedom, demands in our time.”

Looking the future, the theologian predicted a significant broadening of personal responsibility for the average Catholic.

He also foresaw a deep division in the Catholic community on major issues because these issues are so intimately linked to a conception of authority and its uses.

Burkardt proposed a set of criteria if co-responsibility is to be more than another big word in the Church.

1. As much freedom as possible, only as much restriction as necessary.
2. A willingness to undergo the risk of losing such things as the support of the moneyed and the protection of the powerful.
3. The freedom to be wrong as a condition for an authentic search.
4. Dialogue with all concerned parties before decision.
5. Respect for law without enslavement to law.
6. Openness to new solutions.

Dr. Outler said there is little old-fashioned authority left that cannot be defied with relative impunity, provided that it is done in the name of “conscience and humanity.”

“What authority is left is tribal, lodged in peer groups or ethnic groups or power groups,” he said. “The Roman Catholic Church, as everybody knows, is in vehement confusion.”

The speaker lauded Pope Paul VI as the pontiff most “deeply aware of the complexities of the current revolution” and most “dogged in his own pattern of reform without ruin.”

And he said in defense of the Catholic leader, “That Paul VI should, therefore, be crucified by both diehards and arsonists, and pilloried by his perfectionist critics, will one day stand as a sin against truth and charity.”

The professor said the danger in Roman reform is that too many reformers will turn rebel.

He questioned whether the critics of the Christian church would “really like to see her go down?”

Authority in the church tomorrow, he envisioned, will accrue to those with the willingness to lead by persuasion and not force.”

In this church he added, the laity will be the “church in the world” and the clergy will be their “priestly and pastoral agents” but the combined witness of all these will constitute the church’s real power.

Clarence Jordan, head of the interracial Koinonia Farm near Americus, Ga., took the church, the “mother,” to task for picking the friends of the “father,” Christ, on the basis of her standards.

A church voting on whether or not to admit Negroes is voting on an unvotable issue, he said, “because it is not for the church to select the friends of her husband, Jesus Christ.”

The church, he added, should be like the Virgin Mary and “not try to boss God around,” but should “bear children to him.”

He said the church’s attitude in many instances, however, is “Please Lord, pass the pill,” The job of the church is not “soul winning,” but “child bearing,” he added.

Jordan said Christ could have gotten “filthy rich” by being either a preacher, teacher or healer none of them noted for their poverty but chose the course of poverty.

Koinonia is now trying to put into practice some of Christ’s teaching by providing housing for the poor in rural areas so they’ll stay there, the speaker said.

This “Fund for Humanity, he added, ‘lets farmers use land free of charge, makes them interest free loans and sells them modest housing at cost.

“I would like to see the churches of American invest in housing an amount equal to that spent on their buildings,” he pleaded. “We would spend at least as much to put a roof over the head of brethren we have seen as we do over Him whom we have not seen..”

Mrs. Martin Luther King Jr. said that financial reparation to black people by the nation’s churches—even a large sum of money—“is too little to demand of churches.”

“Their help,” she said, concluding dinner, “can be more effective if the enormous influence of their 80 million members were mobilized behind demands upon Congress.”

“If programs which would end poverty and abolish discrimination were enacted, all society would benefit. And all society would pay the cost rather than one part of it,” she said.

Mrs. King, however, did not criticize the demand for $500 million recently made of all the United States churches by James Forman, spokesman for the National Black Economic Development Congress.

“It was encouraging to note,” she said, “that some church groups resisted the impulse to evade the issue by concentrating on the provocative method of introducing the subject.”

Forman introduced his demands by taking over the pulpit of the riverside church in New York City.

“I hope this (trend among church) will continue, for all of us can this day view reparations as equitable symbolism,” Mrs. King said.

But she noted that “if reparations were seriously to be discussed a century of wages which accumulated interest for another century would total a sum so staggering that no single groups or nation could pay it in full.”

Mrs. King told the religious newsmen that “institutionalized racism and individual bigotry are dismembering the body of the nation; militarism is deforming our national character; the generation gap is no transitory phenomenon, it is a moral war between young and old affecting family education and ultimately the economic destiny and stability of the society.”

The question facing church people in such a situation, she said, is: “Have we, devoted church people, become peripheral and secondary? In a moral crisis of unbounded dimensions, the church with its responsibility for moral leadership is faced with more than embarrassment. It is faced with the deeper issue of the centrality of its influence.”

“Somehow,” she said “immorality has grown at a pace equal to or exceeding the bewildering pace of our technology. We have wealth and the capacity to reproduce it continually, and social misery, in varied forms, keeping stubbornly abreast of material progress.

“If these things are true, then the institution of the church on which we depended for moral balance and purity has failed.”