When Chicago Bureau Chief Sam Welles got word that the TIME cover story this week would be on the Archbishop of Canterbury and the meeting of the World Council of Churches at Evanston, Ill., his first job was to locate His Grace and make arrangements for the extensive interviews that would be necessary.
Correspondent Welles* found the archbishop in a sunken garden near Deering Library, waiting with other council officials to receive President Eisenhower. Leaning over the garden wall, Welles hailed Bishop Oxnam, whom he had met several years before, and said that he wanted to explain to the archbishop that TIME was planning to do a cover story on him. The archbishop came to the wall and invited Welles into the garden. Replied Welles: "The Secret Service won't let me come down there, but if Your Grace will play Romeo to my Juliet, perhaps we can discuss an interview date." The archbishop agreed (see cut).
"Later, when I arrived at his apartment for my initial interview," reported Welles, "the first thing His Grace did was to take off his shoes. Padding into his bedroom in stocking feet, he soon returned wearing loose patent-leather slippers and said, 'If this is going on for a good while, I might as well be comfortable.' "
The interview did go on for a good while, and for the next ten days Reporter Welles, an old hand at covering religious news, worked around the clock to pull research together for this week's cover story.
The Evanston meeting was important news: the story of organized Christianity coping with a troubled world. Some 3,000 reporters applied for accreditation to the meeting. Reluctantly, the council cut the list of accredited correspondents and photographers down to 600, representing 36 countries. Warned by the flood of applications for press passes, the council was prepared to give more than casual help to reporters.
There was not one but three press rooms, with special telephones, typewriters and reams of copy paper on hand. On the convention floor a bal cony and press tables were ready for reporters. An ample supply of headsets was available to pick up translations of speeches in the three official languages — English, German and French. There was also a full-time staff of 54 public-relations experts to see that the press got its share of the 6½ tons of speeches, reports and papers distributed to the delegates. Besides briefing sessions and press conferences, each afternoon Charles Taft, brother of the late Senator and only layman ever to hold the Federal Council of Churches presidency, held a conference in which he invited news worthy delegates to appear.
In a broad sense, the meeting might be said to signal the arrival of a time in which the U.S. press in general recognizes that religious news has become news in the accepted city-room sense of the word. Scores of reporters who had never before written a religion story were on the job for wire services and major dailies around the world.
The meeting, in fact, marks the first major attempt of organized religion and the secular press to get together on a working basis. Treatment of religion as regular news is not new to TIME — but it was new to have so much company at Evanston.
* Who is himself grandson of an Episcopal bishop, brother of another and the first male in three generations of his family who did not become a minister.