WILLEM Adolf Visser 't Hooft is to the World Council of Churches about what Dag Hammarskjold was to the U.N. As the Council's General Secretary, he builds church unity by accenting common beliefs, by deprecating differences, by shunning extravagant or unripe measures. Yet a quiet faith that all Christians, including Roman Catholics, must eventually unite gives his life a clear direction. It is a just barely permissible joke among his closest friends to call Visser 't Hooft "the Protestant Pope." He replies with a wintry "I'm not infallible"—which is a rueful recognition that his job is touchy and hard, but also a proud admission that he has succeeded in shaping the World Council into an important organization.
If this is the Ecumenical Century, it is fitting that the leading ecumenist was born in the first year of it. His father was a lawyer in the Dutch city of Haarlem; the family name (pronounced fisser toaft) means "fisher at the head''—the chief fisherman. Willem—then called muis (mouse) for his thin, sharp face, but now nicknamed Wim—was the gayest of three brothers, excelling at hockey and tennis, and good, though not brilliant, in school. His father was shocked when Wim said he was thinking of becoming a pastor. "You will have a hard life, and I doubt if you'll like the salary you'll get," he said. Wim and his father made a deal: he was to study law and theology in alternate years. He found the law so dull and the theology so interesting that his father relented and let him go ahead with it.
A Polyglot Family. He took his doctorate at the State University of Leiden with a dissertation on the background of the social gospel in the U.S. But he was not ordained because the Remonstrant Church, to which he belonged, stipulated that all ministers must be pastors, and young Yisser 't Hooft had been tapped by the late great U.S. ecumenist John R. Mott to become secretary of the Y.M.C.A. World's Alliance in Geneva. The Swiss city has been his headquarters ever since, and having since been ordained in the Swiss Reformed Church, he preaches every now and then. He married fragile-looking Netherlander Henriette Philippine Jacoba Boddaert, with whom he has three children, all now grown and scattered throughout Europe. "The problem of an international family is language," grins Wim. "When we get together, if the conversation begins in French someone will switch it to Dutch or German, someone else to English."
From the Y.M.C.A., Visser 't Hooft moved to the World's Student Christian Federation, and ten years later became General Secretary of the Provisional Committee that became the World Council of Churches at Amsterdam in 1948.