Religion: Again, Bishop Jones

In 1917 the U. S. was at war with Germany. So were the U. S. Churches. Paul Jones, socialist, pacifist, Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Utah, did not believe in war and said so. A commission of the House of Bishops found him guilty of “promulgating unpatriotic doctrines,” of being affiliated with questionably loyal organizations. They asked for his resignation and got it. Came the Armistice. The U. S. and its churches were no longer at war with Germany. But Bishop Paul Jones was still a bishop without a diocese. He became one of the secretaries of the pacifist, interdenominational Fellowship of Reconciliation in Manhattan.

Seditious in wartime, pacifism is not so un-Christian in times of peace. Last month, when the Episcopal diocese of Southern Ohio found itself without a Bishop because of the resignation of Bishop Boyd Vincent, 84, and the serious illness of Bishop Coadjutor Theodore Irving. Reese, Bishop Paul Jones was called to be acting Bishop. Last week he took his post. Few Ohioans felt that the Episcopal Church and the safety of the nation were thus endangered.

But in New England, the Boston Transcript was alert. Bishop Jones had just made a speech there in which he said the U. S. flag should not be displayed in schoolrooms because of ”dangerous fetish worship which promotes thoughts of war among school children.” Bishop Jones further said that no man could worship at two altars, nationalist and Christian. Cried the Transcript to all patriots: “We are still old-fashioned enough to believe that the clergyman who advocates abandonment of the American flag and what it stands for has no place in American society, whatever his pretensions as a leader in his church. Neither do we believe that he represents his church, or that such doctrine . . . will not be repudiated. . . .”