CHURCH ATTACKED

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue 253, 25 October 1943, Page 4

CHURCH ATTACKED

CARDS AND RAFFLES MAYOR'S UNUSUAL WELCOME (0.C.) SYDNEY, October 22. The Mayor of Newcastle (Alderman Dunkley) welcomed church dignitaries to Newcastle with a speech attacking churches as "nurseries of crime," because they encouraged "housie-housie" and raffle tickets He also criticised community leaders, including representatives ot the churches. . This unusual "welcome" was part of an Inter-denominational Religion and Life Week Conference . Canon H. N. Baker, of Sydney, said the idea that "the State was made for the citizen, not the citizen for. the State," was a "pestiferous doctrine, because it tended to destroy realisation of their responsibilities in the ! minds of the people. He added: "Nazism is State Satanism. By controlling Press, radio, school and every avenue of information and education, it seeks to hypnotise the mass mind from individual freedom to State slavery. "The Bishop of Lewes discovered that of the Nazi airmen brought down in England, 50 per cent worshipped Hitler, and 40 per cent nature, while 10 per cent were atheists —not one Christian to know the difference between right and wrong. Their philosophy is a Mephistophelian megalomania of Satanism." Mr. Brian Doyle, a Catholic delegate, suggested that the churches should be represented at the Peace Conference after the war.

The Rev. Alan Walker (Methodist) said the Beveridge Plan merely made the dole more respectable by renaming it. It was impossible yet to estimate what the emergence of the Soviet Union had done to the world. "The Soviet stands to-day as a successful revolution in the eyes of the masses and the lodestar of their idealism. This has already transformed the world situation, and rendered no society safe from attempts at similar successful revolutions, particularly should economic distress become acute," said Mr. Walker.

Mr. Colin Clark, Queensland Government Statistician, said that before this war 11,800,000 people in Britain received £125 a year or less, and 75 per cent of British children were undernourished. In 1938, 11 per cent of Britain's people were in acute poverty, and another 21 per cent in want.