Brown Sees Increase Of Interfaith Contacts

Robert McAfee Brown, professor of Religion at Stanford, said last night that he is cautiously optimistic that the increasing confrontations between the Protestant and Catholic Churches will lead to a lessening of the doctrinal differences between them.

In the last of the four William Belden Noble Lectures, Brown explained that the "openness" of the Catholic Church is responsible for many of the new inter-changes between the two faiths. He said that there can now be discussion of past areas of theological concern, such as the two differing concepts of the Virgin Mary.

He said that there will also be more individual confrontations between the adherents of the two faiths. There are more possibilities of common worship, he asserted. Increasing civic participation will also bring members of the two faiths face to face, he said. It is such interchanges, he concluded, that will help remove the barriers between the two Churches.