Churches Assail Committee Methods

Early in March, the Churches stepped into the academic freedom picture. During the first week of the month, Representative Harold C. Velde (R.--III.) said he would like to see an investigation of the nation's churches, in order to ferret out any subversive influences.

On March 11, the powerful National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States assailed "certain methods" of Congressional committees investigating communism in American education. The group said its statement had been drawn up before Velde's proposed investigation.

The National Council, representing 30 Protestant and Eastern Orthodox communions and some 35,000,000 people, passed the statement by a vote of 69 to 2.

The Council conceded Congress the right to investigate, but protested the "abuse" of the investigate function, and the destruction of confidence in educational institutions "thorough unsubstantiated charges and blanket indictments." According to the statement, witnesses should be allowed to make "uninterrupted" initial statements of "reasonable length."

Among those supporting the Council's position were Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, president of the World Council of Churches, Bishop Henry Knox Sherrill, presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church.

The following day, the 1,050,00-member American Council of Christian Churches circulated a petition among clergymen asking for an investigation of the Churches to combat the infiltration of Communists. "The preservation of both civil and religious liberty," said the Council, "calls for such an investigation." The group, organized in 1941, sought to "offset the modernist, Socialist influence of the National Council of Churches."

The National Council authorized a committee to safeguard American freedom from both Communist infiltration and "wrong methods of meeting that infiltration." It would be called the "Committee on the Maintenance of American Freedom," with "instructions to watch developments which threaten the freedom of any of our people or their institutions..."