Catholic Professors Attack Dr. Wise’s Charge That Largest Christian Church “is for War”

A statement by Rabbi Stephen 3. Wise, wateran Jewish leader and Rabbi of the Free Synagogue that “the largest of Christian churches is unequivocally for war,” was denounced here today as “false and malicious by 10 professors at the Catholic University of America. In a statement issued through the university’s public relations bureau, the professors called the “attention of all Americans, Jewish, Christian and others…to the false and malicious character of the statement of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise upon the Catholic Church and war.”

Dr. Wise made his statement in a sermon from his pulpit last Friday night. The subject of his sermon, a protest over the censorship executed over spiritual leaders by lay boards of directors, dealt specificially with the ouster of two Protestant clergymen from the Holy Trinity Church of Brooklyn for the fact that one was connected with the Council for American-Soviet Friendship. Dr. Wise stated that the two clergyman see what “I clearly and sorrowfully see–that the largest of Christian churches is unequivocally for war; that it is using its great influence to war upon the atheism–I do not say godleseness,–of the Soviet regime.”