Over the past eight years the World Council of Churches has given $2,640,000 to groups that oppose "racism." More than half went to black organizations in southern Africa that have used guerrilla violence in trying to overthrow white minority regimes. The revolutionary grants program began when the W.C.C. general secretary was Eugene Carson Blake, a liberal U.S. Presbyterian with a flair for politics. It was controversial from the start, but the W.C.C. easily lined up enough backing from its 293 Protestant and Orthodox member denominations to fend off critics.
Now the Program to Combat Racism is in hot water again. Reason: a recent grant of $85,000 to the radical Patriotic Front, which is seeking to bring down Rhodesia's tottering biracial government and has been involved in ugly killings of unarmed civilians. The W.C.C. has been hit with a fierce wave of church protest.
Last week the council's Executive Committee conferred at the Hanasaari Conference Center near Helsinki. After closed-door sessions, the jittery officials issued a terse endorsement of the grant. However, TIME learned that there was intense debate over a further statement to be issued this week, and about a bold plan to grant another $85,000 to the Patriotic Front.
That would inflame an already tense ecumenical situation. The Salvation Army has quit the W.C.C., at least temporarily, to protest the grant. There has been an "enormous disturbance" in British churches, says one Executive Committee member. As for West Germany—which now provides 42% of the budget for the financially pressed W.C.C.—official protests are muted, but one top churchman reports "bitter reaction in our churches." At the recent meeting of the world's Anglican bishops, a routine W.C.C. support motion got through only with an antiviolence rider attached. In the U.S., important elements in such W.C.C. member groups as the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ and the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese are upset.
A standard, but erroneous, defense of the grant is that it was meant not to offer a "political judgment," as London's Sunday Times put it, but merely to help the refugees—there are up to 100,000—who are cared for just beyond Rhodesia's borders by the revolutionary Patriotic Front. Opponents of the guerrillas argue that many of the refugees were forced to flee Rhodesia by Patriotic Front troops. Even if that is true, there is no doubt that many women and children in the camps are in a pitiable state and that their need for Christian charity is overwhelming.
Traditional W.C.C. refugee assistance, though, is provided by the council's nonpartisan and respected relief commission. Funds are given through the antiracism program to make a political statement. In an explanatory document, the World Council attacked Rhodesia's so-called internal settlement between blacks and whites, arguing that it "leaves the illegal white minority regime in effective control and gives it a veto over real change for the next decade." As it happens, two of the four leaders of the Rhodesian regime are W.C.C.-related black clergymen, Bishop Abel Muzorewa and Ndabaningi Sithole, themselves recipients of past grants.