Clergymen in Forum Avoid Direct Debate

A brilliant, agile Protestant and a clear, methodical Catholic packed an audience of 1,500 into Rindge Tech auditorium last night as they discussed the problem "Christianity and Communism: Are They Compatible?" in the year's fourth Law Forum.

After nearly two hours, Reinhold Niebuhr, of the Union Theological Seminary, and The Reverend John A. O'Brien, S. J., head of the Boston College Department of Philosophy, had not locked horns on any significant issue, although the two of them had approached the problem from nearly every angle.

Lumping Socialism with Communism and calling it "Communism in swaddling clothes," Father O'Brien declared that there were four essentials in Marxian thought that made it impossible for a Communist to be a Christian, or vice versa.

Marxism Negates Spirit

He said that Marxist materialism negated Christian insistence on the importance of the spirit, that the mechanistic and materialistic conception of history denied the reality of Providence, and that Communism emphasized unduly the material urges of man and the importance of the class struggle.

Avoiding a direct controversy, Niebuhr implied that numerous ambiguous areas in both Christianity and Communism were not mutually exclusive. He consistently took the historical slant on Communism, declaring that essentialy it was a protest against a Christian ethic which had made property the instrument of virtue.