Words & Works

P:Plans were announced for a new Cincinnati church building that reverses the long trend away from the business districts and into the suburbs. At a cost of more than $1,100,000, raised by parishioners without the help of any big philanthropist's contribution, 119 year-old Episcopal Christ Church will be razed and rebuilt on its present site (in an architectureal mixture of modern and Gothic), despite the presence of Cincinnati's nearby Skid Row. "This is a city parish," said Senior Warden Charles P. Taft (brother of the late Senator), "and it's going to stay where it belongs-downtown." * In 1953, membership in the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. (Northern) boomed to a record 2,581,580, the denomination's headquarters announced. Sunday-school enrollment rose by 90,834-the largest gain in the church's history-to 1,684,415. An upsurge in U.S. church life was also noted by the 45 bishops of the Methodist Church in a statement issued at their annual meeting: "Our people are attending public worship in larger numbers than we have ever known. New churches are being enterprised in every area in America and overseas . . . Giving has reached an alltime high ... A new spirit has fallen upon our people."

P:The Rockefeller Foundation made a grant of $525,000 to Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary to set up a Program of Advanced Religious Studies under which 20 to 25 young religious leaders from all over the world will spend a year studying and getting to know each other. CJ In a new encyclical titled Sacra Vir-ginitas Pope Pius XII emphasized the superiority of virginity to marriage for clergy and religious orders and for those of the laity who would consecrate themselves entirely to God. "Sacred virginity and perfect chastity consecrated to the service of God," the encyclical said, "certainly is for the Church one of the most precious treasures that its Author has left to it as an inheritance."

P:Use of the hydrogen bomb, said Dr. George K. A. Bell, Bishop of Chichester, England, "clearly . . . cannot be regarded in any other light than as a sin against God. The duty of a man to his Creator, respect for nature, and respect for fundamental human rights alike cry out for the complete prohibition of atomic weapons, together with whatever steps are necessary for its effective enforcement."

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