Herbert Montague Waddams

Nationality

United Kingdom

Date of Birth

1911

Date of Death

1972

Political
Preference

Herbert Montague Waddams was an Anglican priest and theologian. Waddams was secretary to the World Council of Churches’ (WWC) sub-committee on Soviet domestic and foreign policy chaired by J.H. Oldham. He was chosen to be part of this group because he had worked in the Religions Division of the British Ministry of Information (MOI) during World War II and had been partial to the discussions of the Peace Aims Group. After the War, he became secretary of the Church of England Council on Foreign Relations. Waddams presented a paper to the World Council of Churches (WCC) in 1947 regarding the Soviet Union’s relation on religion. This included an analysis of secularism, communism and the history of the Russian Church and state, and centered around the Christian attitude towards Soviet communism. His draft sparked a discussion among leading ecumenists about the religious and political relations between the Soviet Union and the West when the paper was discussed at a meeting of Commission IV for the Amsterdam Assembly of 1948, the study group which dealt with ‘The Church and the International Disorder’.