Pastor jailed for aiding unemployed steelworkers

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On Nov. 13, the Rev. Douglas Roth, pastor of the Trinity Lutheran Church in Clairton, Pa., was arrested and sentenced to a 90-day jail term and fined $1200 for refusing to obey a judge's order to vacate his church. Roth is being ousted by Bishop Kenneth May because of the militant actions of Roth and other ministers on behalf of the unemployed in the Monongahela Valley.

Roth is a member of the Denominational Ministry Strategy (DMS), a militant grouping of primarily Lutheran and Episcopal ministers in the Pittsburgh area, organized to fight against unemployment and plant closings.

Becky Fosbrink, treasurer of the Trinity Lutheran Church, explained what was behind the confrontation to Socialist Action reporters Paul Le Blanc and Tom Twiss.

Fosbrink said that the church council had been ordered to turn over the deed, keys, and records of the church to the bishop, who would appoint a new pastor. But the council refused because many unemployed steel-worker parishioners need the support that the Rev. Roth and the church have been giving them. "We are going to keep the church open even if the council has to go to jail, Fosbrink said.

The background to the confrontation is the deep depression that has settled in this steel-making valley in Pennsylvania. U.S. Steel has laid off 3000 workers, and other plants have shut down, leaving a 25 percent unemployment rate in the valley.

This is as bad as the Great Depression. Layoffs at the steel mills hit the workers particularily hard. Fosbrink pointed out that steel workers who generally made as much as $13 an hour must now subsist on unemployment compensation or jobs that pay as little as $3.50 an hour.

"The church has always been a place U.S. Steel mill in Homestead, Pa., in the After some of Roth's parishioners filed a protest to Bishop May, the fighting clergyman was fired and proceedings begun to defrock him as a Lutheran minister. "They have stolen our church and made a union hall out of it,' said one of Roth's parishioners.

Roth has resisted and held onto his church with the support of the majority of his parishioners. Forty percent, however, mostly older retired workers, do not approve of their young activist pastor. "He was bucking a brick wall at the very beginning because the old people were afraid of change, Fosbrink said.

The Network, the unemployed, and the working people of Clairton and the Valley support the Rev. Roth and the cause he stands for. "In the community itself there is more support. At first people were a little leary, but now they think it is great," Fosbrink noted.

Fosbrink said that Roth and his supMITT Socialist Action/Joe Ryan Changes/Jim West porters have gotten solidarity letters from all over the world. She also noted that the struggles of working people in Poland, Britain, and other countries were having an effect on the Clairton movement. "You read in the newspapers and see on the news that workers in other countries are having these problems. You say, 'Gee, that's too bad, but it would never happen here! Well now it is here. It's hit home and people are very much more aware."

Central American and Caribbean peo-

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