# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1947_S653
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS 658

under the direction of Mr. Christian Schmidt, director of the
reorganized publishing house of the Free Church in Frankfurt.
‘fen thousand copies of Dr. Pieper’s Dogmatics have arrived in
* Europe for distribution. Besides these books, ten thousand copies
°° of Dr. Walther’s Law and Gospel, one of the monumental literary
productions in the Lutheran Church, have been sent to pastors
abroad. In Bavaria one hundred and forty thousand Small Cate-
chisms were printed by the Emergency Planning Council. Not so
long ago a shipment of ten thousand copies of Luther's Catechism
- (Schwan Edition) arrived in Berlin and was distributed on. the
* Basis of one catechism to every ten pupils. This average is high,
since other figures submitted from metropolitan areas, such as
Bremen, Hamburg, and Leipzig, indicate that there are hundreds
of thousands of children running about that have never heard of
or seen a catechism. Also 8,000 copies of our American Lutheraner
(the last four of the sixteen pages are edited especially for
Europe) are sent every two weeks via a large mailing list to in-
dividuals. In addition to the above books and magazines, also
200,000 tracts have been offered for distribution. Within the near
future, 100,000 German copies of the evangelistic pamphlet Go and
‘Tell will be made available.

Considering the fact that many ministers have no library what-
soever at their disposal and many private libraries are lost, burned,
or destroyed, all this religious literature from the Council has been
heralded in many hundreds of thank-you letters as a boon towards
rebuilding the spiritual ramparts of Europe.

Food Packages

To live on a rationing of 1,300 to 1,700 calories per day is
scarcely enough food to keep any human being alive. And yet
millions throughout Europe are forced somehow to sustain them-
selves with such provisions.

It is impossible to write on paper or express by word of mouth
how much our thousands of food packages have meant to people
who face uncertainty of life, whose families are separated, who
fight for garbage, who have lost faith in God and man, who have
only one thought for the day — food!

At the outset of this program the Emergency Planning Council
issued two food packages — $4.50 and $6.00. The response of our
people towards these packages for starving people was most whole-
hearted. To date approximately 125,000 eleven-pound boxes, filled
with food and vitamins, were sent from the St. Louis office. Every-
one of these 1,375,000 pounds of food was bought with funds pro-
vided by Christians in America. In the first four months of 1947