Religion: Trials

If for any urgent reason a Rector or Minister … or the Parish committed to his charge, its Vestry or Trustees, shall desire a separation and dissolution of the pastoral, relation, and the parties be not agreed . . . notice in writing may be given by either party to the Ecclesiastical Authority of the Diocese or Missionary District. The Bishop, in case the difference be not settled by his godly judgment, . . may ask the advice and consent of the Standing Committee of the Diocese. . . . —Canon 42 of the Protestant Episcopal Church.

In Seattle last week Superior Court Judge Howard M. Finley soberly heard churchmen expound the quality of a bishop’s “godly judgment.” Since the Episcopal Church drew up its constitution in 1789, its Canon 42 had been brought into civil court only once before—in New Jersey in 1893. Tortuous and hedged with ambiguities was the question Judge Finley was to decide: had Bishop Simeon Arthur Huston the right to oust Rev. Charles Stanley Mook from Trinity Church without taking counsel with the Standing Committee of his diocese?

A husky, goateed churchman who once was a high-school football coach in North Dakota, 62-year-old Rector Mook had for ten years been at old Trinity Church in Seattle’s run-down “First Hill” district. A vigorous social worker, he offended some of his parishioners by encouraging theatrical folk to come to the church. More vexing to the Trinity vestry were financial troubles which had beset the church for four years. Last spring Rector Mook declined to let his salary be cut from $4,000 to $2,400 or to cancel $1,000 the church owed him in arrears. The vestry asked him to resign. When he declined, a vestry committee went to the bishop. Three weeks ago Bishop Huston, whose son Wilber was the first ”prodigy” given a Thomas A. Edison college scholarship (TIME, Aug. 14, 1929), removed Rector Mook and appointed a successor.

Rector Mook obtained a court order temporarily restraining Bishop Huston from ousting him. Last week he was in court seeking to have the order made permanent. Witnesses for the bishop testified that the rector knew that church money had been embezzled; that he refused to prosecute. Furthermore it appeared that Rector Mook had discharged six choir singers, dissolved the Women’s Auxiliary and the Daughters of the King—all because the women opposed him. But of most concern to the court and the Episcopal Church were the opinions of five of Bishop Huston’s clergy. Unanimously they agreed that he had exceeded his canonical authority. Said Very Rev. John D. McLauchlan, dean of the Seattle Cathedral: “A bishop can’t do anything without the consent of his Standing Committee. Personally I feel that bishops should have much more power than they do—but they don’t.” Dean McLauchlan and his colleagues agreed that a bishop’s right to exercise his “godly judgment” means his right to offer advice—not to assume independent judicial functions. They also felt that Canon 42 is ambiguous and should be revised at the triennial General Convention of the Church in Atlantic City next week.

Bishop Huston stoutly defended his position. If he had called in the Standing Committee, he said, he would have been obliged to disqualify four of its eight members, including Rector Mook himself, as interested parties. Uncertain whether his court had jurisdiction, Judge Finley took the case under advisement.

Decade ago the Episcopal Church was vastly excited when its House of Bishops tried and ousted William Montgomery (“Bad Bishop”) Brown as a heretic. Six times has Heretic Brown sought reinstatement. Last week in Galion, Ohio the voluble 79-year-old pamphleteer, who described Communism as synonymous with “morality, religion and Christianity;” announced he would try it again. Said he: “There will never be another trial in the Church on account of heresy. . . . Everyone is a heretic. They would have to try everybody if they tried anybody.”

Early one morning last week in Milwaukee Rev. E. Reginald Williams, onetime rector of swank St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, smashed up his automobile on the courthouse steps. He was fined $100 in absentia by a judge who announced the defendant was “too drunk to stand trial.”

Last week the Presbytery of New Brunswick, N. J. started ouster proceedings against peppery Dr. John Gresham Machen, bellwether and chief name-caller of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions. Having declined to resign from the Board in accordance with the resolution his church passed against it (TIME, June 4, et seq.), Dr. Machen will presumably be brought to trial by the Presbytery, which last week appointed a committee to study the case. In the same situation was Dr. James Oliver Buswell Jr. of the Chicago Presbytery. He was asked to resign or undergo a trial which “would involve many tedious and practically useless formalities.”