April 4, 2014

What was in the news on April 3, 1964?

The president asks for civil rights support from churches, and a debate over televising the Mass

Criterion logo from the 1960sBy Brandon A. Evans

This week, we continue to examine what was going on in the Church and the world 50 years ago as seen through the pages of The Criterion.

Here are some of the items found in the April 3, 1964, issue of The Criterion:

  • Turn to the Risen Christ, pope tells troubled world
  • Too many colleges, NCEA told
  • Dialogue need within Church seen
  • Rabbi Maurice Davis to be DCCM speaker
  • President asks church support of rights bill
    • “WASHINGTON—President Johnson has called upon the nation’s churches for increased support of the civil rights bill pending in the Senate. The chief executive, in an informal speech that turned into a major pronouncement on civil rights and churches, told a delegation of Southern Baptists their help is badly needed. ‘No group of Christians has more responsibility in civil rights than the Southern Baptists,’ Mr. Johnson told the group whose 10 million-member denomination is the South’s largest.”
  • Plan retreat experiment
  • Dr. Paul Muller named ND’s ‘Man of the Year’
  • Poverty in Indianapolis: A helping hand for the needy
  • Gary will be host to province parley
  • $39,000 bequest is announced
  • Laymen and the council: What does laity want?
  • Play is scheduled on Jewish rescue work in Germany
  • At first Archdiocesan Progress Fair
  • CYO camp reservations total 700
  • New book on Pope Paul VI wins praise
  • Sisters’ choir at Woods waxes its first recording
  • Patron saint for unity?
  • Spanish archbishop: Appeals for ‘charity’ toward non-Catholics
  • Clergy-lay body on unity formed
  • Orthodox leader plans U.S. visit
  • Family counseling service is established
  • Liturgical telecasts defended by Jesuits
    • “NEW ORLEANS, La.—It is better ‘to reach missions imperfectly than not at all,’ said Farther C.J. McNaspy, S.J., in defending the showing of Mass and other services via television. Father McNaspy, an associate editor of America, national Catholic weekly magazine, … took issue with the stand of the noted theologian, Father Karl Rahner of Innsbruck, Austria. Father Rahner, said Father McNaspy, in a chapter on ‘The Mass and Television’ in his book, The Christian Commitment [Sheed and Ward], maintains that ‘televising the Mass offends against the commandment that our most intimate personal acts, and that which is holy, are to be made accessible to another only in the measure to which he is able and willing to participate in them with a personal response.’ [Father McNaspy] pointed to the advantages of televising services for shut-ins who might otherwise have no opportunity of seeing them, and of the ceremonies around Pope Paul’s election and visit to the Holy Land. ‘True, some of the sacred “distance” may have been lost,’ he said, ‘ but the gain seems altogether out of proportion to the loss.’ ”
  • ‘Queens Work’ stops publication
  • Council addresses now in paperback

(Read all of these stories from our April 3, 1964, issue by logging on to our special archives.) †

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