Atlanta Daily World

Send Bread, Not Sputniks, Church Leader Pleads

ST. LOUIS - (INS)- The new president of the National Council of Churches Friday called for massive reconciliation instead of massive retaliation as an international watchword.

Dr. Edwin T. Dahlberg, of St. Louis, asserted:

"It is not half so important that we send Sputniks circling around the globe as that we would send more loaves of bread around the world."

The Rev. Dr. Dahlberg, the first Baptist to head the Council, spoke at a luncheon in his honor as the closing event on the Council's Triennial General Assembly. He said:

"It is the hunger and misery of the vast populations of the earth, the unrestrained birth rates, the production of military hardware, the fanatical ignorance and illiteracy of oppressed peoples, that make for war."

Dr. Dahlberg said:

"If we would concentrate on economic aid, the reduction of armaments, the honest exchange of news as well as the exchange of visiting delegations across all international lines, regardless of either iron curtains or star-spangled curtains, we would go far toward the reduction of those fears and tensions which now goad whole nations into a suicidal race."

He said the task of the Christian Church is to lead a massive reconciliation movement and forget the "feverish philosophy of bomb for bomb, rocket for rocket, Sputnik for Sputnik."