The 1940s: Religion: People in the News

THE 1940s: RELIGION: PEOPLE IN THE NEWS

On 8 October 1947 Herbert W. Armstrong, founder of the Worldwide Church of God, established Ambassador College in Pasadena, California.

Archbishop Athenagoras I was enthroned as patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church on 22 January 1949.

On 7 July 1946 Pope Pius XII canonized Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini of Chicago as the first American saint for having established convents and orphanages in several cities around the world. She died in 1917.

Under the Espionage Act of 1917, the U.S. government on 14 April 1942 banned the anti-Semitic weekly Social Justice, published by Father Charles E. Coughlin of Detroit.

On 8 November 1944 the Most Reverend Richard J. Cushing was installed as archbishop of Boston, making him, at forty-nine, the world's youngest archbishop. On 13 October 1947 Cushing opened the ninth annual convention of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) by noting that members of the Catholic hierarchy in the United States are, without exception, sons of workingmen.

Dr. Louis Finkelstein, a Jew; Dr. William Adams Brown, a Protestant; and Rev. Elliot Ross, a Catholic, collaborated on a 1941 book, Religions of Democracy, published by the National Conference of Christians and Jews.

The Reverend Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, dean of liberal Protestant ministers, on 26 May 1946 preached his last sermon in Riverside Church, New York, before his retirement.

On 8 October 1942 the Reverend Dr. Frederick Brown Harris was elected chaplain of the U.S. Senate.

On 26 May 1949 Thomas Merton was ordained a Trappist monk at Our Lady of Gethsemani Monastery near Bardstown, Kentucky.

On 13 November 1949 the American Jewish Congress elected Rabbi Irving Miller to succeed the late Rabbi Stephen S. Wise as president.

William Cardinal O'Connell, archbishop of Boston, said on 21 October 1942 that "unequivocally and absolutely the Catholic Church condemns and denounces birth control."

The Reverend Dr. G. Bromley Oxnam, Methodist bishop of the New York area, was elected president of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America on 29 November 1944. He served until 1946, when he was elected president of the World Council of Churches, a position he held until 1952.

On 6 January 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt outlined for Congress the "Four Freedoms," including "the freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world."

In April 1943 Francis J. Spellman, Archbishop of New York, led thousands in a Good Friday procession along the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem and celebrated mass in the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher.

Margaret Woodrow Wilson, daughter of the former president, announced on 28 January 1943 that she had been a follower of Sri Aurobindo, India's most prominent mystic, for the past four years.

Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, president of the American Jewish Congress, urged American Jews to abandon all ideas of isolationism on 16 May 1942.