Gideon Withdrawn

The government of Prime Minister Johannes Strydom, devout member of the Dutch Reformed Church, preaches apartheid in the name of Christianity, but South Africa's Anglican and Roman Catholic clergy have taken a firm stand against government policy. More than anyone else, one man symbolized this opposition. He went into the slums to comfort black Africans hounded by the police. He threatened to close down his mission school for Africans rather than let the government impose a second-class curriculum. He became apartheid's most formidable adversary. Last week the Rev. Trevor Huddleston, provincial of the Anglican Community of the Resurrection in South Africa, was under orders to return to England in January to become novice master at his community's house in Yorkshire.

DON'T LEAVE us, FATHER, streamered the Golden City Post, the Union's biggest newspaper for blacks. Groups of blacks petitioned Anglican authorities to have the transfer rescinded. Huddleston's withdrawal, said Anglican Bishop Richard Ambrose Reeves of Johannesburg, was one of the heaviest blows yet suffered by South Africa's nonwhites. Said the London Daily Mirror: "It is as if Gideon, about to overthrow the altars of Baal, had suddenly been withdrawn to grow watermelons."

The natural conclusion: Father Huddleston was being recalled because his superiors thought he had gone too far in his opposition to Baal. After the Archbishop of Canterbury visited South Africa last spring and spoke out against too rapid desegregation, Father Huddleston condemned his view as "a false impression . . . that will lull Christians into apathy." Last .week Huddleston's superiors denied that he was being transferred under pressure. Father Huddleston merely said: "I am very sad, but in a religious community, one is under a vow of obedience."

Delighted to be rid of him at last, the Nationalist government permitted Trevor Huddleston to preach his last major sermon over a national broadcasting hookup, but warned him not to discuss politics. He delivered a strong indictment of the government, and called apartheid "blasphemy" and "refusal of God's plan and purpose." That was not politics, he later told angry government officials, but simple Christianity.

Anglicans in South Africa who hope to maintain a united front on moral issues such as apartheid had another problem last week: a squabble between the Union's two Anglican church bodies. When the Church of the Province of South Africa was established in 1870 as the official Anglican Church, a small group of dissatisfied Anglicans with evangelical leanings continued separately, calling themselves the Church of England in South Africa. For more than 70 years the smaller church has wanted a bishop of its own, but the regular Anglican Church refused to provide one. Last August the dissidents finally decided to get a bishop on their own initiative, elected George Frederick Bingley Morris, retired Anglican Bishop of North Africa, and installed him in Johannesburg. Faced with schism, the Archbishop of Canterbury warned Morris to withdraw or be considered excommunicated. Morris's answer did not sound as if he intended to give up his bishopric. He threatened to sue the Archbishop of Canterbury for libel and appeal the whole case to the Crown.

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