Creighton Ordained

The Rev. Frank Wittington Creighton had grown so famed for his personality and his clean-cut rectorship of the Protestant Episcopal church of St. Ann’s in Brooklyn that last October the General Convention of his Church (the Convention that deposed, in absentia, Bishop William Montgomery Brown for his heresies) elected him bishop, and last week, as he knelt before his own altar, seven bishops laid hands on him, consecrated him the 150th living bishop of that Church. At the end of the month he will leave with his family for his new duties as Protestant Episcopal Missionary Bishop of Mexico, with exhortations from his fellow bishops to represent not only his Church but his country, and to be an “ambassador from Christ.”

When the Creighton family get to Mexico City they will find a civilization quite other than that they knew in Brooklyn. They will find, it is true, a superficial resemblance in the clattering street cars and the well-paved streets. But they will find far wider distinctions between the social classes. Among the “foreigners,” with whom they will associate they will find a ready, kindly, courteous welcome, a welcome tempered nevertheless at first by a quiet scrutiny, for the foreign colony of the city, perforce thrown into rather close communion, always wonders how affably the newcomer will mix. In the colony lines of nationality blur; personality is more important.

The foreign colony lives in the southwest section of the city, a newly constructed quarter with fine homes of practically U. S. conveniences and comforts. Mexicans of the wealthy and of the ruling classes live in solidly built, fortress-like homes, of two stories for the most part. Until one has finally been admitted to the intimacies of such a home, one is apt to consider its life as morose, monotonous. But later one learns of the gayety and kindliness and sanity that pass through the richly furnished rooms.

The Creightons probably will be startled at the first interviews with prospective servants, because the half-breeds who will apply will try to show their attainments by talking English or French or German, languages they picked up from former masters. They will cross themselves wildly, swear they are criollos (creoles), but they will be mestizos, sambos, and even mulattoes, distinctions the Creightons will soon learn. These servitors, and people even more wretched, such as the native Indians, live in the southeast section of the city, down towards Lake Texcoco, in huddles of squalid cabins and terraces. Their mortality is terrible in spite of the high altitude (7,415 ft. above sea level) and the fine climate (temperate and dry).

One thing will stir first the Creightons’ pity and then contempt Constitution) and near the Cathedral. In fact one sees them at the very doors of the Cathedral whining for alms, and shrewdly searching through their rheumy eyes the charitable potentialities of the stranger. At the Cathedral, too, the stranger from the U.S. will note the peculiar fashion in which the natives, who are mostly Roman Catholics, cross themselves. They make the regular gestures of the cross, then tap the nape of the neck.