( This is the second of three parts. )

THE SPIRITUAL order remembering and reclaiming. From political activism to political office to-ecclesiastical bodies assuming jurisdiction over and deciding civil disputes.

On May 8, 1968, the representative of the Mindick Family Real Estate Interests in Boston's South End, and the representatives of the South End Tenants Council asked the Masachusetts Rabbinical Court of Justice, the Bet Din (House of Judgment) to adjudicate their disagreements, thinking this would be faster than civil litigation. The Ret Din agreed. The Jewish Advocate reported in its August 8, 1968 issue the August 5 signing of the final settlement: "It is the first time in U. S. history that a Rabbinical Court, normally concerned with interpretation of Jewish law, divorce cases, disputes between synagogues, religious functionaries, family counseling, has undertaken to deal with such a profound social issue."

Another recent, unprecedented example of civil mediation by an official ecclesiastical body occurred earlier this year in the work done by the U. S. Catholic Bishops' Ad Hoc Committee on the Farm Labor Dispute between California grape growers and workers. The committee of five bishops brought some growers and union representatives together for the first time and effected the first break in the long deadlock through several contractual agreements.

Rev. Daniel Lyons, editor of the anti-left Catholic weekly, Twin Circle, frowned upon these doings: "That the name of the U. S. Bishops is being used in the campaign to organize the table grape industry is unprecedented. We have also found it bitterly resented."

Nevertheless, political activism to political office to jurisdiction over civil disputes to-large-scale corporate consolidation.

Two momentous church mergers are in the works. One would merge the United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church, the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A., the United Church of Christ, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the AME Zion Church, the Presbyterian Church in the U. S., and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church into a 25-million member Church of Christ Uniting. The other would merge the Episcopal Church with the Roman Catholic Church. Thus, the Episcopal Church stands as the pivot for the possible creation of a single church within Christendom of mind-boggling size and implications.

Plans for the Church of Christ Uniting are being developed by the Consultation on Church Union which dates back to 1962 and is an acrostical COCU just like the subject of its endeavors. The Boston Herald Traveler reported last February 22 that, "The CCCU plan makes very clear that the new 'Church of Christ Uniting' will be socially concerned... It makes equally clear that social action cannot be divorced from 'religious' concerns... Immediately following the plan's assertion that 'mission in the world shall be the primary characteristic of the Church's life at every level,' it is stated: 'Celebration of God's grace shall' (the planners did not say 'should') 'mark every endeavor of this united church.'"

Repairing the damage done by Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn has been the subject of five years of discussions by the Joint Commission on Roman Catholic-Anglican Relations in the United States. On the international level, comparable deliberations are going on between the Vatican and the Anglican Commission. "Full communion and organic union" are the goals declared in a document released by the Episcopal Church Center in New York City last May 4, and Most Rev. Charles H. Helmsing, Catholic bishop of Kansas City St. Joseph, Mo., states emphatically: "We must bring about the union of the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches as quickly as we can."

In October 1969, James F. Cunningham, Paulist priest of St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church in Chicago, announced that careless driving is a "serious sin against society, fellow man and God" and that "traffic safety is a religious and moral problem as well as a physical and educational one." Last April 15 in the Herald Traveler, Rabbi Judea B. Miller of the Massachusetts Board of Rabbis, objected to that paper's picturing grapes as part of Passover Feasts. He said the Massachusetts Board of Rabbis was supporting the California grape boycott, had determined it to be a religious and moral issue, and, basing its decision on "the spirit and letter of Jewish law," had declared California table grapes unfit for use in synagogues and religious Jewish homes.

Catholic theologian Rev. Hans Kung reports that a secret Vatican document recently circulated among selected bishops would use Vatican II "letter" to revert to Vatican I "spirit," leave only the Pope with real power, make "legalisms of dogma and dogmatize law" -this last, the kind of fusion Father Cunningham and Rabbi Miller seem to be approaching with their sinful driving and tref table grapes.

Ecclesiastical powers are reacting to the churches' secularizing trends of recent history not by withdrawing from secular concerns but by expanding those concerns while infusing into them the traditional theology supposedly eschewed or modified through secularization. Secularized spirituality becomes materialized theology. Reclaiming the civil order while going back to that old-time religion.

II

As THE church breaches that hallowed barrier between the forces of salvation and the forces of law and order, hammer blows are heard from the other side. Over there, things are getting very difficult, and it is well-settled that the priest is sometimes more effective than the soldier in holding the fort. And now we have those two new soul brothers, President Richard Nixon and Reverend Billy Graham.

Last summer, Richard Nixon and Billy Graham appeared together at the University of Tennessee, marking the first time a President of the United States had addressed a revival meeting. Last July 4 was transmogrified into Honor America Day with Billy Graham leading the celebration. On New Year's Day, Graham will be the first clergyman to be grand marshal of the Tournament of Roses parade.