Religion: Talent

Patrick Cardinal Hayes, Prince of the Roman Catholic Church, cast about recently for some august legal authority to draw up an indictment of the anti-Roman Catholic Calles Administration in Mexico (TIME, Feb. 22 et seq.). Roman Catholic William Dameron Guthrie, San Francisco-born attorney in the famed oleomargarine case before the U. S. Supreme Court, is now President of the Association of the Bar of New York City. With Paul D. Cravath (see p. 22) he is one of Manhattan’s greatest corporation lawyers. Obedient to the request of Patrick Cardinal Hayes he sat down recently and wrote and wrote and wrote. Last week the New York Times published in twelve and one half full newspaper columns an abbreviated version of Lawyer Guthrie’s scathing opinion of the Mexican Constitution and President Calles. Soon this will be distributed with a pastoral from Cardinal Hayes and four other prelates to every Catholic priest in the U. S., all of whom will read it to their flocks. Wrote Mr. Guthrie: “There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church.”