Again, Brown

Most people recall “bad” Bishop Brown; how he wrote a book Communism and Christianism; how for his unorthodox, “heretical,” unregenerative ideas the Episcopal Church in General Convention in New Orleans last October (TIME, Oct. 5 et seq.) ejected him. But this 70-year-old retired bishop fooled them. He, William Montgomery Brown, has been secretly, since the previous June, a bishop in the Old Catholic Church.

Last week the synod of the Old Catholic Church sat in Manhattan and to it Bishop Brown introduced an encyclical letter, as did Pope Pius XI to his Church some days before (TIME, Jan. 4). Bishop Brown’s letter was adopted; it amazed people, for it stated:

“The true Catholic Church . . . must include everyone through concentrating upon the inclusion not of the exclusive but of the excluded; and it must still be as it was in the beginning, the church of the underworld. . . . “

We greet the criminals of America, the convicts toward whom we as a society have dealt in anger instead of in a spirit of fraternal love; the ex-convicts hounded by the police and generally denied employment; also the so-called murderers, thieves, gunmen, crooks, harlots and other men and women of the underworld who may still be at large and following the arts of hate and fear because we, their brothers and sisters, failed to warm their lives with the fires of fraternity and love.”

This sect is headed in the U.S. by Archbishop W. H. Francis, with headquarters in Chicago. It traces its episcopal lineage to the Ancient Church of the Netherlands, founded in the Seventh Century by a Briton, Saint Willibrord. Its modern strength dates from 1870, when there acceded to it many Roman Catholic bishops who could not agree to the doctrine of papal infallibility promulgated and accepted by the Vatican Council just interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War. Old Catholics insist on the peerage of the bishops, and further object to the stringently monarchial system of the Roman Catholic Church.