MONTH OF SUNDAYS

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

This morning a broadcast from WBZ from UP announced that Governor Furcolo had ordered all official flags in Massachusetts to be flown at half-staff. This noon's broadcast explains that it was not the Governor but the Commissioner of Administration and Finance who ordered all Massachusetts state (not national) flags to be flown at half-staff for 30 days. Through a telephone call to the United Press in Boston I have learned that the Commissioner issued this order to show respect to the late Pope Pius XII.

Everyone, so far as I know, respected the Pope, and many of us recognized him as, in many ways, a great humanitarian. He was, however, primarily the head of a sect; a great one, but still a sect. With good reason, our Constitution requires separation of church and state. I submit, therefore, that the Commissioner's order is wrong and unconstitutional...

The order has put the Commissioner and the Governor in a very bad light and his profoundly offended countless enlightened citizens, including Catholics. Such an order might have seemed right to the party then in power when some Calvinists were burning Unitarians, some Catholics were killing off the Protestant majority in Poland, and some Congregationalists were hounding, flogging, and hanging Quakers.

We in America, however, are supposed to have gotten beyond all that. Our founding fathers knew, and all who read history honestly know, that our freedom from totalitarian systems, political, theological, or both, was won with great courage and cost. It was won for the sake of a better life, at least here and now, for all; a life in which every man could think and worship as he pleases, whether he be right or wrong, and in the majority or a minority, so long as others have the same right. The resulting interplay can create still better views. This principle allows every faith to flourish for whatever it is worth; and no faith ought to swallow or seem to threaten to swallow the public hand that has sheltered it.

Certainly it is right for every religious group to mourn a departed leader, and for every citizen to mourn the passing of a great person no matter how far he agrees with him; but it is wrong and unconstitutional for a state official and the Governor to let a state symbol serve for what could be considered a sectarian gesture.

If the Commissioner's order is unconstitutional, everyone ought to oppose and resist it and hope that the Commissioner, or someone in authority, will countermand the order at once. William S. Taylor,   Department of Psychology,   Smith College.