Student Efforts Supported

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31763, 21 August 1968, Page 8

Student Efforts Supported

Did students demonstrate because they could not find a sufficiently large body of adults who would be vocal on idealistic issues? the president of the Methodist Church in New Zealand (the Rev. J. D. Grocott) asked in his opening address to the annual synod of the North Canterbury district of the Methodist Church yesterday.

“We have deputations for higher wages or better prices, wider markets and freer trade, but how many are willing to spend time, nervous energy and public repute for an idealism in which at least some issues are unclear. “The students have reminded our older generation that there are Issues of considerable importance on which reputations and financial rewards can be jeopardised, which are reflections of moral principles, and that there are decisions to be made not because they are expedient, or because they add to our material welfare, but because they are believed to be right “Our present society naeds spokesmen of undoubted conviction and integrity who say ‘no’ or ‘yes’ not because they belong to a political party or have a sectional point of view, but because they believe profoundly in the truth of their reply." Mr Grocott said he must express amazement that various people were critical of the reawakened concern of students in world affairs. Some even scolded the students like outraged conservative parents and deprecated the students' arguments by ridiculing current fashions in clothes.

Other people were encouraged by the concern of students who had been strangely silent about international affairs and had seemed more interested in securing adequate material rewards than in expressing their idealism. In the Omega demonstrations the students had nothing to gain and risked losing a great deal, said Mr Grocott They deserved encouragement rather than rebuke.

“Who has more right to

ask for the full facts behind political decisions more than those who in a decade or two will be called to implement the derisions now made.” The questions raised by the students had not yet been fully answered, for the real issue was not about scientific facts concerning an Omega station, but political intentions in such installations, said Mr Grocott “The Christian Church must reflect or rebuke the conscience of society. The reason why the church is persecuted in some countries is because it looks at political decisions with moral presuppositions.

“There are people who ask the Western Church to do just what the Church in

China has done—silence its voice on great questions of justice, dignity and righteousness for the sake of identifying itself with its cultural society. That just cannot be.” The most disturbing feature of the whole Omega debate was the assumption by people in authority that a nuclear war was a realistic possibility in the future, said Mr Grocott. Such an assumption was an added agony to the 20th century Christian Church.

Mr Grocott asked if anyone in the Church would doubt that the cost of one Omega station invested in a realistic refuge programme would safeguard the future of our children better than any number of missile-directing sites.