Church-state separation as embodied in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was not, however, so thorough as we may tend to think. National religious and church establishment was thereby prohibited but state churches and state religious existed at that time. From the cited Laubach: "As Professor Wilbur Katz has pointed out, 'It seems undeniable that the First Amendment operated and was intended to operate, to protect from Congressional interference the varying state policies of church establishment.' The Amendment forbade Congress to disestablish as well as to establish religion."

In 1836, Massachusetts became the last state to disestablish a religion. In the 1840s, a New Orleans priest named Permoldi, convicted for conducting a burial according to his religious convictions but in contravention of Louisiana's burial laws, argued protection of religious liberty under the federal Constitution, and was told by the Supreme Court that the federal Constitution offered no such protection since it announced no "inhibition" of state religious policy.

The Fourteenth Amendment, conceived as the vehicle for changing slaves into citizens and keeping states from interfering with this transformation, only by fitful and contradictory interpretation and application, finally came to impose all First Amendment guarantees on the individual states.

In 1940, the State of Connecticut arrested a man named Cantwell for soliciting funds for a religious cause without a license. The U.S. Supreme Court declared for Cantwell: 'The First Amendment declares that Congress shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The Fourteenth Amendment has rendered the legislatures of the states as incompetent as Congress to enact such laws."

This decision was the last legal brick in the "wall of separation" between church and state urged by Jefferson. History may record that, sixteen years later, the first cracks began to appear in that wall, the first major blow being struck not by the state but by he church.

THE ISSUE of black citizenship occasioned in the Fourteenth Amendment the instrument through which government completed its self-disqualification from competence in religion. The issue of first-class black citizenship possibly occasioned, through the instrumentality of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the beginning of the church's move to reclaim the civil order. When Martin Luther King took to the streets in 1956 to challenge laws of the land, and when masses followed him, and when clergy followed the masses, the new "activist church" entered the headlines and the separated civil and religious orders in America moved from a substantially stable to a nervously uncertain coexistence.

I think it no mere coincidence that the school prayer controversy erupted at the height of the civil rights movement. Viewed as a kind of metaphysical drama, the Supreme Court rulings against prayer in public schools can be seen as a retaliatory strike by government against the new civil pretensions of religion in the civil rights movement. The media convinced us that the 1964 school desegregation decision was the Court's most intimate and dynamic relationship to the Kingled movement, failing to see any connection between that movement and the school prayer decisions. The media had so conditioned me to think of King as a "civil rights leader" that I was several times surprised to remember that he was also a minister of the gospel.

THE CHUROH remembering and reclaiming. From political activism to political candidacy.

Episcopal minister S. Lester Ralph, recently elected mayor of Somerville, told me that he felt that clergymen politicians were an untapped source for relatively "dispassionate" political service. He felt that the public would find the nationally emerging new breed acceptable because there is no danger of a church takeover of the civil order, the church being "so clearly in retreat" in society.

Boston Jesuit priest Robert Drinan, in also declaring the issue a non-issue, gives a curious reason. In his race for the Third Congressional District seat, he cited the federal Constitution: "No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any office of public Trust under the United States." But were ecclesiastical officials in the minds of the drafters of that language?

The confusion engendered by this citation of Drinan in support of his candidacy recalls an 1899 Supreme Court case, Bradfield v. Roberts . Bradfield, in the cause of church-state separation, tried to prevent Roberts, the U.S. Treasurer, from granting funds to Providence Hospital in Washington,. D.C., because the hospital was run by Roman Catholic nuns under the auspices of their church. Bradfield lost. The Court held that the hospital's incorporation papers made no mention of the religion of the incorporators and that, legally speaking, five women who happened to be Roman Catholic nuns but who were acting solely and simply as private citizens, had incorporated themselves as "The Directors of Providence Hospital."

In other words, we are to see it as legally the same thing if the directors of General Motors all happen to be Quakers or if all the directors of General Motors were bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church. Legally, there is no difference between being simply a member of a religious body and being under holy orders and/or in ecclesiastical officialdom. There shall be no religious test for privileges of civil (or pseudo-civil) incorporation, just as there shall be no religious test for public office. So the Bradfield decision and Drinan would have us reason.

But, perhaps, this analysis is needlessly and uselessly fastidious in the face of Drinan's assertion that, "It takes people maybe 24 to 48 hours to get used to a priest running for Congress. A friend told me that if they're real old fashioned, it takes 72 hours."

( To be continued. )

Copyright 1970