Canterbury Red

His title is "Very Reverend," but he has an early Christian knack of getting on other people's nerves. Perhaps no English ecclesiastic of modern times has frayed the .ends of so many nerves within his own Church as the "Red Dean," the Very Rev. Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury. Last week the rawboned, bald-pated cleric, whose high dome, big nose and frizzed-out hair give him a look a little like a Stuart portrait of General Washington, arrived in the U.S. by plane. Many a conservative nerve-end quivered.

The Red Dean, now 71, an ex-hydraulic engineer, once worked as a machinist in the same shop with Charlie Chaplin. In 1904, he entered the Church because he wanted to convert Africa. He once shocked a group of missionaries by his slant on cannibalism. If children were starving, he said, he would be perfectly willing to have his friends "make soup out of one of my hands so that the children could be preserved." For some years, the Dean's chief passion has been Communism, in praise of which he has made speeches and written books (The Secret of Soviet Strength] The Soviet Power). During Spain's Civil War, he sided with the Loyalists and declared: "There is more Christianity in Soviet Russia and Red Spain than ... in Eng land." He practically asked for his nick name: he has always met his critics with the bland admission, "You can call me a Red." When Finland was invaded, his ardor for Russia cooled briefly: "I ... wish the Soviet Union had not done it." But his Red corpuscles soon revived.

V-E day found the Dean in Moscow. He capped his Russian tour with a so-minute interview with Stalin, whom he quoted as saying tolerantly: "Religion cannot be stopped. . . . Religion is a matter of the conscience and the conscience is free."

Last week in Manhattan, the Red Dean spoke at a rally to celebrate the 28th anniversary of the founding of the Soviet State. He pleaded that the U.S. share the atomic bomb secret with Russia.

The Red Dean's utterances, as usual, got on some people's nerves. The irreverent New York Daily News gave him the business, in a full-column editorial, ending; "Nobody curbs these whizbangs in the United States or England, where they are free to be as nutty as their capacities will permit. [It is] different in Communist Russia. Capitalist fellow travelers cease to exist over there as soon as Stalin's secret police catch up with them."

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