(See Cover) The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, when it was yet dark, unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from the sepulchre.
Then she runneth, and cometh to Simon Peter, and to the other disciple, whom Jesus loved, and saith unto them, They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid Him.
The timing was dramatic. Last week, for the Christian world, was Holy Week —the seven most holy of Lent's 40 days in which are solemnized Christ's temptation in the wilderness, His agony before and during the Crucifixion, culminating in the promise of the Resurrection. Last week the agony of Holy Week was shared by the human race. There was scarcely a man, woman or child anywhere who, in the degree to which the war directly touched him, or the degree to which he was capable of compassion, did not suffer a personal Golgotha, did not share the hope, paradoxical by all rational processes, that out of the war's crucifying evil some great good must be resurrected.
Passion and Resurrection. When, under cover of wartime secrecy, the Most Reverend and Right Honorable Cyril Forster Garbett, Archbishop of York, Primate of England and Metropolitan, slipped across the Atlantic Ocean into the U.S. (it was his first visit), there was no Protestant churchman who could have impressed Americans more. For the Archbishop was a symbol of one great Protestant church which, under the impact of war, had suffered a passion and predicated a resurrection.
The Archbishop arrived in response to a year-and-a-half-old invitation of the Federal Council of Churches, and an invitation by the Protestant Episcopal Church. He had come on a flurry of ecclesiastical errands, to:
¶ Foster the practice of international visits between dignitaries of U.S. churches and the Church of England.
¶ Assist in the laying on of hands when Boston's Very Rev. Angus Dun is consecrated Bishop of Washington at the Cathedral of SS. Peter and Paul (April 19).
¶ Discuss closer cooperation between the Episcopal and Anglican Churches, especially in missionary work (the Archbishop is a vice chairman of the International Missionary Council) and plans for the postwar world.
¶ Meet with clergy of all denominations at Manhattan's Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church.
¶ Visit the Most Rev. Derwyn T. Owen, Primate of the Church of England in Canada, at Toronto, where the Archbishop will discuss with Canadian church leaders postwar missionary and rehabilitation problems.
War's Desperate Surgery. These program notes might be important to churchmen. But most laymen did not know who the Archbishop was. They might remember vaguely that Dr. Garbett was jointly responsible (with the Archbishop of Canterbury) for proclaiming the necessity of a New World Order embodied in the revolutionary Malvern Resolutions (TIME, Jan. 20, 1941). They might also remember that last September Dr. Garbett had taken a long trip in the opposite direction—to Moscow, to give the hand of traditional ecumenical brotherhood to Russia's newly reinstated Patriarch. (Last week Patriarch Sergei gave the back of his hand to Pius XII, declared, in the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, that the Pope is not Christ's Vicar on earth.)