Hillel Leader Warns Against Pitfalls in Ecumenical Approach to Campus Youth

A tri-faith look at the “alienated college student” suggested today that his political and cultural radicalisms are “religiously motivated.” that he is uniquely evolving a “counter-culture” to existing styles which could transform American society, and that he presents “both challenge and opportunity” to the campus ministry. An Episcopal minister, a Roman Catholic priest and a rabbi, participating in a symposium that opened the annual directors’ conference of the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation were agreed that the present-day college element “alienated from adult social concepts and practices” is in many respects “the most spiritually sensitive generation that has appeared on the campus in a long, long time.”

The Rev. Martin E. Bloy, Jr., executive director of the Church Society for College Work in Cambridge, Mass.; Father Thomas Phelan, Catholic chaplain at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., and Dr. Norman Frimer, Hillel’s national coordinator for Metropoliticam New York, also agreed on the need for active involvement by campus chaplains and their respective student constituencies in “the social revolution” gripping the college community.

But Rabbi Frimer, responding to a call by the Christian clergymen for a broadly ecumenical effort on the campus, warned against any approaches “in which the ecumenical effort becomes a pitfall to the particularistic identity of Jewish participants.”

“Jews and Judaism have an essential stake in the social change,” Rabbi Frimer declared. “But their contribution must be made not in universalistic terms but within the clearly defined context of the Jewish tradition.” He emphasized that his primary responsibility on the campus was “to keep Jewish students Jews” and that he did not engage in social action “for its own sake” but as an expression of “Jewish tradition, history and experience.”

Father Phelan, critical of the failure of the university to “gather in its community.” said this task evolved on its chaplaincy but “it is impossible to create a community of service on the campus without shared responsibilities and an ecumenical spirit.” Defining campus ecumenism in terms that would not “impose on any faith’s theological doctrines” he urged a greater responsiveness among Hillel directors to such cooperative action.

All three symposium speakers identified the campus minister as having a marginal status not unlike that of alienated students. “The college chaplain,” said Rev, Bloy, “is professionally anomalous to the academic community on the one side and his established church or synagogue on the other.” Urging the chaplaincy to relate closely to the alienated student group. Rev. Bloy said that “their being outside the establishment enables the Christian campus minister and Hillel director to be constructive theologians with a group whose alienation has become a force for sweeping change that “can do the most good or the most harm.”