Religion: Fighting Protestant

He looks like a Roman Catholic priest after Hollywood’s heart—from the man-to-man no-nonsense of his manner to the gentle, Celtic cadence of his speech. But South-Ireland-born Chaplain A. Hamilton Nesbitt of New York City’s Police Department is a solid Methodist. Like many another Protestant churchman, Chaplain Nesbitt had long looked with Christian envy upon the way the Catholics get their people together. Why shouldn’t Protestants use the same methods?

With his 4,000-odd Protestant minority on the police force, perennially suspicious ,that their 13,500 Catholic colleagues were getting the breaks in salaries and promotions, Chaplain Nesbitt had something to work with. For his model he took the Catholics’ 130-year-old Holy Name Society, which maintains a chapter in every U.S. parish and has enrolled most of New York’s Catholic cops. In 1937 Chaplain Nesbitt gathered a nucleus of 500 Protestant policemen in the line-up room and put it up to them. That evening the St. George Association was born.

Since then, fighting Irishman Nesbitt has proved that Protestant schisms are no insuperable barrier to united Protestant action. He has pushed St. George’s original 500 police membership to more than 3,000. Like their Holy Name colleagues, St. George members are required to attend church each Sunday, receive Holy Communion regularly, refrain from swearing and indecent language, be “polite, courteous and gentlemanly” at all times.

Expansion & Collaboration. The St. George Association now numbers 23 chapters (all in New York) and 20,000-odd members—firemen, post office, utility and transit workers, Treasury and hospital employes. Last week, the Association’s National Committee decided the time had come for national expansion; requests for information were coming in from potential chapters in other U.S. cities. This summer 61-year-old Chaplain Nesbitt plans to start things moving in Washington, D.C., Wilmington and Cape Cod while on “vacation” from his trim, tree-shaded St. Luke’s Church in The Bronx. Alive to the perils of bigotry, Irish-Methodist Nesbitt unfailingly invites Catholics to St. George organization meetings, works in close collaboration with the Catholic police chaplain. Nevertheless, he earnestly says: “The way to win a man or a woman—or a church—is to fight.” Last week, looking more like a Catholic priest than ever behind his gold pectoral cross, he added: “The other day I converted my 95th Catholic.”